I just cleaned out the bulk box in my yahoo account, partially to procrastinate, partially to see if anything had accidently gotten directed there.

I remember when we first got the internet at my parent's place, my father was always freaking out, telling us that we were under no circumstances to open an email when we didn't know the sender, or the message was bulk-forwarded. At times I had to call friends to make sure they had in fact sent me the chain letter that would promise upon opening dismemberment, nightmares, eternal happiness, true love, and an endearing if medically unsound puppy if i did/not foward the message to the requisit number of people in 17.5 nanoseconds.

You wouldn't happen to own an HP Pavilion zd8000, zx5000, zv5000, zv6000 or Compaq Presario X6000, R3000, R4000 series Notebook PC, would you? My A/C adapter no longer makes the connection in the computer, so I cannot charge batteries, and it makes life a wee bit difficult. I'm backed up, which is good, but the whole dead computer is not so much the good.

Alternately, do you know how to fix adapters?

The great thing about finals week is it's the perfect time to catch up on the archives of all the different webcomics I've been meaning to read.

It's striking me as rather interesting, actually, how comics transfer from the newspaper to the net. The fact that you *can* read the archives, for one, the sense that there are small segments of a larger work, and the larger work is important enough to merit saving to old pieces. It also makes it a lot easier, I think, for authors to create more complex storylines, because they can assume the audience has read the entire story, or can if they get lost (sometimes there are links off to the side, directing the reader to relevent back story). There are certainly a lot that are still rather disconnected isolated strips by the same person in the same style, but I find longer, more...epic? comics are far more prevelant on the web (and far more interesting & easier to get in to than mary worth & prince valiant).

Is there anyway to access a full list of all the tags that have been used? I'm not finding one, and it would be rather useful. I'm assuming the bigger the tag on the left column, the more often it's been used, but since it seems that the closet thing we've got to be able to search this blog, it would be nice if it were a bit more functional and comprehensive.

This weekend, I ran around with a camera (a contraption I truly despise, both because I don't like people using it on me, and I don't like the way it tends to distrupt social flow). I needed a whole lot of pictures of faces for a final project for a class. Most of the weekend, I was in various parts of LA.

It was really interesting, the different responses I got from people.

As I was checking my bank statement online today, I was struck by how strange it is, that we feel comfortable transacting business and managing finances online, yet there's a hyper-awareness of how hard it is to hide online, a myriad of pseudonyms and the great taboo of the full legal name. It's an interesting little pocket of faith, that a picture of a padlock and https means it's okay to be yourself.

Married to the Sea is a daily webcomic that takes 19th century prints and sometimes merges multiple ones, and always adds modern-esque captions to them. Of late a lot of them have been referencing blogs. This has been my favorite. Today's is what brought it to mind. What's interesting to me, a lot of the blog comments/commentary hark back to the early days of blogging as I perceive it.

The whole web comic thing is kinda interesting to me, the sort of audience it seems to get.

Somewhere between listening to the class' reactions to "The Onyx Project" and realizing I was spending the bulk of the time we watched it trying to decide if he was reading a teleprompter (verdict: at least half the time, but he did a really good job of not making it painfully obvious. Not surprising, though, cuts down on the time they have to pay him for). I actually spent most of the time watching it trying to figure out exactly what sort of equipment and time frame they were working with.

And I started thinking, huh, this is a visual presentation in which nothing really happens. Just a big long interview/confession. Why is it that this can't hold my interest while other works about nothing can.

Reading "Walking Mornings," the thing that struck me the most was the sort of aimlessness it projected. Not that the essay was aimless, but the story it told. Kind of.

I think what I found most interesting in his essay was--Alright. So. Take a man whose work is fiction, creating a disconnected digital something out of nothing. He gets tired of this and feels disconnected himself. He has his sabbatical, goes off, wanders around bits of Europe, does a little research up in Germany, which he deems rather unimportant and leaves unelaborated, but spends most of his time engaged in somewhat casual research and exploration and creation of the self, or of roads to reaccess a self that seems to have gotten somewhat lost or misplaced.

In the quest to find more information on "The Onyx Project," I checked in with the ever-reliable IMDb, which sadly failed me (though yielded an *ahem* interesting list of suggested titles) (And rotten tomatoes' list of titles has even less to do with anything). I find the lack of its presense on traditional movie-reviewing sites interesting. On the project's website, they're forever harping on the fact that it's not a movie and you can't make it one!

My two cents is the reason they kept getting turned down by all the people in Hollywood is that such people forsaw that it would probably not be a successful project. The format of the software is far more condusive to pure documentaries, or "educational programming" than the sort of pseudo-docu-drama they have created that, from the two clips I've seen, has the visual interest of a radio broadcast. I realize they were on a tight budget but...