slated in
mused at 1:57 am
I can argue it both ways.. I probably have. Well, right now I’m inclined to accept that I just really have never really been alone. Not for very long.
I don’t mean being left alone in my house for a few weeks, or travelling and living alone somewhere for several months.. I mean..there’s always been someone else in my life.. someone particular and constant to turn to, to be relied upon by, to compromise for, to depend on, to drain and be drained by, to trust, to love, to be loved by.
I’ve also mostly never been in a ‘real’ / ‘official’ / ‘committed’ relationship.. but that becomes more and more technical and argumentative as time passes, and it’s cleanly not true anymore and….
It’s not been the same person for all my years, either.. And many were brief. ..but I’ve never..
this is all coming out very choppy… that’s partially because I haven’t thought through any of this yet, and mostly because I’ve tired myself out from trying to fix the CSS on this site towards a rework of the current design. It’s late. I forgot to eat dinner. I’m not sure what I started to write here.. I know that it’s not really new thoughts for me.. I also know that it’s not coherent to me right now… I think my general point was/is that, for better or for worse, simply, I have never really really been alone for very long. That’s arguably partly my fault, and arguably unavoidable as a consequence of myself. I doubt anyone would accuse me of being a clingy person; I’m not going to assert that I am not insecure; I am certain that much of my comfort and self-assurance has been drawn from those particular people who landmarked my life.. All of this irregardless (EDIT: ‘ir-’ specifically fit my mood at the time of writing. but i concede this time. notice appreciated.) regardless of what impact I must have had on them. That whole ‘space’ thing was never popular with anyone I knew.. though it has come to pass that individuals have become very very sore with me and leave me be for a while.. that’s scarcer than the toes of most birds, and usually doesn’t last unbearably long.. usually.
But I have felt alone.
...
I cope. It’s kinda pretty much what I do.
‘Wonder who this writing is for. It’s not written descriptively enough to be particularly informative. It’s not speaking to any one of few people who could possibly have any inkling as to what I am talking about. And it’s .. well, it actually is rather written in my general journal style, I suppose..what with the context being clear only to me and the nuances of mention specific to my understanding and future memory..—just that rather than written in notebook, in English or personal language, or typed in passworded hundred-page document (which I have not opened or appended in a year or more..how sad) it is posted online in a collective of my other rambles.. the other rambles, btw… all these entries, both on this Textpatterned site and the MovableTyped one back at rasasayang.net, are all what I would consider ‘pre-launch’.. in journal terms: they’re all scattered notes, written unfinishedly in sub-treasurable notebooks—waiting for the real journal with the real entries when I really write. But that’s not how it all works. Not one bit.
I used to read over my works consistently, when I was younger. In the past several years, not so much. I write it, I hand it in to the teacher, or close the book and read it next year. So if any of this could have been made more sensical or proper or thorough or discrete or whatever else I might have liked it to be, then.. it simply will be as it has been written and I’ll give it a read tomorrow and say, “uhhuhm” to myself, and that will be that.
I’m hungry. And rambling. And goodness knows what my point is right now, let alone what I could possibly have been writing about for the past 20 minutes.
My mouse has been dropped (falls off of the desk/the side of the seat of my chair/my thigh) so many times, I think it’s finally breaking. *shrug*
Those chedder Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers really are rather addicting.. I’m reminded of the West Wing episode when the nice White House reporter guy (Alan? or something? Danny) goes to woo CJ with a goldfish swimming in a bowl—because he’d caught a tip that CJ couldn’t get enough of Goldfish.. he’d misunderstood. She laughed a whole lot at him.. he looked embarrassed.. she kept the fish—and laughed some more. What a good show. Apparently, the fish came to be named Gail.
I’m at work right now.. yesterday’s weather was beautiful.. the little bit of rain midday didn’t ruin it a bit, although i’m told it was just enough to make conditions terrible for rock-climbing. —There’s something to get addicted to. I would like to get addicted to exercise. It’s something I’ve never really needed to do before, and, to tell the truth, I never really thought I’d have to. My metabolism was such a happy thing; it kept me thin unproportionally to what/how much I ate, and quite absent of exercise. But apparently it really DOES catch up with you. I haven’t changed clothing size quite yet.. and #@$&*! if I’ll let things myself get to that point. It’s the laziness that I really really must throw out the window, and hammer down the discipline.
slated in
stuff at 2:14 pm
I’ve got a few those of gmail invites. (They are free.)
EDIT: 1:15pm~ wow..they do go fast.. but still a couple more left.
EDIT: all gone… i’ll post back here if i come upon more, though they’re certainly becoming less scarce.
Okay.. really.. Should I just move all of rasasayang—including the site name—to Textdrive, and leave ferrydust aside? (That other, current rasasayang site will die in June.) I’d be renaming everything currently ‘ferrydust’ to ‘rasasayang’ and then discarding ‘ferrydust’, for now… *very undecided*
9:50am update:
Okay. I think I’m going to let the rasasayang design go. I can’t quite figure how to make the whole thing liquid/dynamic with pure css, and ferrydust had been hinting at a new design with a different approach in the first place.. Maybe … hopefully … I’ll reincarnate that design as a fluid stylesheet in the future. For now, I’m just very glad that it got as far as it did.
It’s so past my bedtime. Okay, so the site is pretty fumbled right now… witness my learning pains. I’m not feeling totally comfortable about keeping the lavender-rasasayang design for ferrydust.. though I’m also reluctant to discard it before it ever had a real chance. But this whole thing is good for me.. through this transitioning I am becoming acquainted with Textpattern and its tags and wiley ways. I am also being forced to better learn CSS. Two plugins already: ramanan‘s Word Count plugin and greenrift‘s wonderful Calendar plugin (because I miss the old calendar navigation in Xanga, and I’ll miss it from my MovableType rasasayang (for a little while still) site.
There are some pretty massive issues with the site as it is right now… contrast definitely needs some adjustment; I have to learn the CSS to make those lines do what they’re going to have to do; I’m missing a footer and a navigation menu; etc. etc. etc. With a bit of faith and quite a few more (nonconsecutively..meaning maybe I’ll finish this year) late nights (12am is late for me these days. I’m not the youngun with the rep for never sleeping, as I once was. I start work at 6:30am, furthermore..), I think it’ll all work out.
Further note: so far, no tables. That doesn’t mean the coding is clean, though.. I’m still trying to learn what I’m doing. I’m going to be so tired at work tomorrow. goodnight..
slated in
as so at 10:48 am
That guy in Dilbert can think he fixed the Internet (I often hold similar sentiment in my house), but who would be ridiculously cool enough to be able to say (honestly), “I invented the Internet.”
Apparently, that would be Tim Berners-Lee. Mr. Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, is finally being awarded for his thoroughly world-changing contribution. His prize is apparently $1 million. Of course it’s not just about the money. I’m glad he’s being recognized. I’m pleased he was awarded knighthood. About that money, though… $1 million dollars? He, and those who (like Robert Cailliau) contributed to the founding, growth, and maintenance of a free, worldwide internet, deserve $100 million and then some! People owe their billionaireness to the Internet. We owe useful Wikipedias and door-opening CMSs and looking up homework answers with keyword searches and accessible TV reviews to the Internet. If Mr. Berners-Lee is responsible for the invention of the Internet/the decision to keep it free, ….then thank goodness gracious for him.
In the New York Times article, he spoke about the ‘out of control’ patenting on software these days:
“What’s at stake here is the whole spirit in which software has been developed to date, “ he said. “If you can imagine a computer doing it, then you can write a computer program to do it. That spirit has been behind so many wonderful developments. And when you connect that to the spirit of the Internet, the spirit of openness and sharing, it’s terribly stifling to creativity. It’s stifling to the academic side of doing research and thinking up new ideas, it’s stifling to the new industry and the new enterprises that come out of that.”
What a lovely lovely man.
The wonderful ramanan informed me as to how to instantly turn on all comments within a textpattern database. It seems he additionally wrote a small script for those without admin access to their mySQL databases.
I love that people know how to do this stuff. And even more importantly, that they do. Gives me a little extra faith in humanity, I think.
Good gracious. I seem to have successfully imported all of my rasasayang.net Movabletype entries into this Textpatterned site, all thanks to this fabulous thread in the Textpattern Forum. thank you ramanan, thank you. Now it will be a matter of importing the design.. I’m inclined to make a whole new one, though.. but my rasasayang.net weblog/site never really had a public opening, so I don’t think it’s fair to discard that design. It’s hardly had a chance at life. We’ll see though.. I already have the smoky wisps of a new design theme whispering at me.
Note: everything pre-June 8, 2004 was written either in Movable Type @ rasayang.net, or at Xanga.
Afterthought: 
gonna have to figure how to bring over my smiley faces from rasasayang as well.
Furtherafterthought: ..that’s actually one scary-looking smiley face.
Andfurtherstill: it seems that, as a result of the migration, comments have been closed on all the old posts that came in from Movabletype. Not a big deal. Wonderful that the existing comments seem to have come through okay. I, however, am not a fan of closing comments in general; on several occasions I have encountered an interesting post on someone else’s site that is several months/years old, wherein the comments option has been closed. So then I can’t comment on that particular post, which is just a little bit sad.
I’m still reeling a little that the importation was so easy and flawless (after the searching through the forums to find and decide which technique to attempt.. lucky that the first real attempt worked really well! *happy*).
Current mobile phone plan: Verizon Wireless
I’ve been with Verizon Wireless for almost two years now. America’s Choice plan: $39.99.. 400 minutes per mo., free nights/weekends, 1000 mobile-to-mobile (other verizon cell phones) minutes, free nationwide wandering and calling.
I’ve had a few minor scuffs with them, but they’ve been pretty reasonable and usually offer me a reasonable solution. Their coverage has not been perfect, but better than any other U.S. cell phone I’ve been exposed to. Their website does not always work, but it usually does, and it keeps pretty thorough track of all ones’ information and allows for easy online payment/adjustment of features. And I can easily check my minutes from my phone, etc.
Choosing our wireless carrier in the beginning
When we (my family and I) were in the market for a cell phone plan, we found that most cell phones were unable to catch a signal at our house (we seem to be in a pocket of sorts.. wireless signal is strong around it, but not in our house). The only cellular services that worked at our house were AT&T and Verizon.
AT&T or Verizon?
So that made it reasonably easy.. We looked into AT&T and Verizon, and their plans were comparable and their coverage was similar.. but Verizon had a good family share plan going, and a trusted friend explained that Verizon currently had the strongest signal network in the country. So Verizon it was, and it has been well.
Stay with Verizon, or go?
Now it’s time to either renew with Verizon and get new phones and upgrade our plans and sign another one/two-year contract, or switch over to AT&T. We weren’t looking at any of the others, since we know only those two will work for us.
Cingular bought AT&T
Except that AT&T recently put themselves up for sale, and Cingular bit, and now owns AT&T, and all AT&T wireless towers. So.. Cingular and AT&T should be the same now, right?
AT&T will give it up to Cingular
Except that AT&T does not fully merge into Cingular for several more months. (I’m thinking the end of this year at earliest.) At which time, I am told, AT&T wireless customers will all be receiving phone calls suggesting that they turn over their AT&T cell phones to acquire new ones from Cingular to fully integrate them.
The Cingular-AT&T merge has begun
Btw, Cingular is apparently already using AT&T towers in the Washington D.C./Maryland/Virgina area, wherever the one’s signal strength is stronger than the other. This will be exercised on a national scale in the next few months. But this being the case, Cingular’s service should, then, work at my house now. Those currently on AT&T though, and expecting mobile-to-mobile calls to be free, see this.
The GSM difference
Another note.. the main difference betwen Verizon and AT&T right now, by my understanding, is that Verizon does not operate with GSM, while AT&T/Cingular does. (Verizon uses CDMA.) This basically means (to me) that AT&T/Cingular GSM phones use SIM cards/chips.. If you’ve spent some time outside of the United States, you probably know that most of the rest of the world seems to have been using these SIM cards forever. They’re tiny (cardboard?) cards that fit somewhere near your battery, that are easily removable and changeable. They are the identity cards for your phone. If you put a different card in it, you’ll be operating with a different phone number and can be on a different plan. So you can travel the world with one of these phones, buy a local temporary card or borrow your friend’s card, and use your cell phone locally. Apparently the AT&T GSM phones are locked so that the phones will not work with other SIM cards, but if you pay a one time fee ($50?) you can have the phone unlocked; Cingular, it seems, automatically unlocks its phones once you’ve been with them for a period of four months.
A note about T-Mobile
I actually have no experience with T-Mobile. Catherine Zeta-Jones is hot and she does their comercials. That’s about the extent of my knowledge about them. Read this for an interesting brief, though.
Cingular, then?
So… Cingular is looking pretty good right now.. what with their rollover minutes, too.. And you can apparently pay an additional fee (boo!) each month to have your night minutes start at 7pm (yay!) rather than 9pm. And I guess their phone I’m looking at is the Motorola V400 GSM phone, with built-in speakerphone (I’ve become quite accustomed to that feature on my current Kyocera QCP 3035), color-screen, and built-in camera.
In-network calling
And of course, there’s currently unlimited ‘in-network’ calling for all Verizon, AT&T and Cingular customers.. Simply meaning if you’re on a Verizon plan, you have unlimited calling to and from all other Verizon network customers, and AT&T customers have unlimited with AT&T, and Cingular with Cingular. And that’s all really good… but that deal’s not going to last forever, for obvious reasons.
Conclusion?
So at the moment I’m thinking Cingular’s mobile phone service is probably the way to go. —Though I’ll be sorry to leave Verizon behind. They do have the highest growth rate right now of all the wireless carriers in this nation.. that whole “bring your phone number” thing has really made the market interesting. If anyone else has suggestions/ recommendations/ corrections on any of this, I would be glad to hear them. I’ll be making a final decision probably next time next week.
Yesterday wasn’t terribly better than the night before. The sushi with Mom was good, but the mood deterioriated rapidly at the end as the conversation shifted to poignant things of recent event, and the focus was, yet again, irrelevant to my source of unhappiness.
So I came home and basically went to bed around 6:30pm. I woke around 12:45am (my mother was closing the windows in my room.. they’ve decided to turn on the airconditioning) and drank a glass of water, and I managed to fall asleep again sometime around 2am. I woke again around 3:some and again around 5:some.. and got up around 6:30am to go to work. That’s a lot of sleep… but I look like I haven’t slept in a week. It’s not the sleep, it’s the crying.
And I agree that at this point it’s rather dumb and even a little bit silly. Most everything has an expiration date. But that fact alone isn’t going to swing my mood.
![iching: Fêng - Abundance [Fullness]](https://ferrydust.com/images/21.gif){kind=small}
