Small Cold-Blooded Creatures Express Interest in Your Insurance Premiums

By what path 'online auto insurance sales' became such a prominent genre of TV advertisement I'm not sure, but there's some kind of shared wavelength effect going on -- something like the force that makes 'someone wants to steal the cereal' the almost universal children's cereal ad -- that drives the four or five competitors in this niche field toward very similar campaigns and marketing approaches.

Dear lovely one,

This turned up in the message box of my account at the Cracked.com, which provenance makes me wonder whether it's really a genuine scam, or someone faking a scam, which would presumably in some way be different. Follow the link for spam!

Welcome to Wherever You Are

Humor me for a moment and envision something: in darkened surroundings, a woman looks downward to something in her hands, something which emits a soft blue radiance, illuminating her features dramatically from below.

Not an entirely unfamiliar image, is it? You've probably seen some variation of the concept on any number of fantasy paperback covers and movie posters -- it's got to be at least as common as 'guy holding sword over head'.

Tonight I sat in the lowering evening on the porch behind a local coffee shop, and looked up at one point to see exactly this scene: soft blue radiance, dramatic underlighting, expression of slightly amused concentration. Of course, the woman I was sitting with wasn't doing anything really magical -- just using her phone to communicate with a friend across a great distance. Nothing to think twice about.

Walking home, rather toward the bus stop toward home, I passed a well-lit soccer field and saw a bunch of Mexicans playing cricket, a game I don't think I've ever previously ever actually witnessed in person.

Then I found a dime.

I went to a restaurant near home, had some beer, and managed to spend no more than five dollars more than I really should have. I got a dessert for free.

Tonight I turned thirty-six. I don't know how long my current job will last and I'm not entirely sure what's going to become of my current apartment lease. Things, in general, seem to happen almost entirely at random. But tonight has been really good.

Well, I'm Speechless

This is clearly the purpose of film.

Our Top Story Tonight: YAY

Some good, very good, nigh unto miraculously good news: I got a graphic design job! Thanks in large part to my friend Matt, to whom I now owe a big huge lobster, I've been offered a paid internship working on design and web stuff for PetsMD.com.

So for the vast multitudes who've been hanging on this ever so intriguing saga, that means I'm not going to have to leave Austin, or even leave my current apartment. This for me is happy.

For anyone who's interested in The Devil's Virtue, expect to see some positive changes there in the near future -- I need to train myself up to speed on CSS and PHP like immediately, and I might as well practice on my own site, which needs yet another makeover anyway.

So in short: got job, job good, TDV soon more good. Oh, and that thing from before where I had intended to write a Lost article at least weekly is probably out the window, at least for the next few weeks (although heck, it's not like I still have five freakin months before the last season airs).

Hail Jabootu!

Swimming around aimlessly online recently (far too listlessly and without direction to justify calling it 'surfing'), I ran across this collection of Bad Movie reviews, a topic understandably close to my heart -- these folks poke at movies even more deeply and at greater length than I do, as well as a much lower profanity percentage, so if you like that sort of thing, I recommend skidding over there. From that site I was further directed to And You Call Yourself A Scientist, which (just in my taste) is even more entertaining, hooking me in by finally articulating some of the things I loathe about the character of Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park.

So, How's the Site?

Alll righty, things have been getting weird around here. I need to vacate this current apartment very soon; my roommate has plans in motion to head for New York and I have no visible means of support remaining. Whether I'll even be able to stay in Austin depends very heavily on the miracle factor of finding a better than minimum wage job around here, on which the odds are dropping with each passing day of the empty gmail box.

In an effort to impress some potential employers to whom I've sent resumes, I spent most of the last couple weeks sharpening up The Devil's Virtue, which had a fair amount of opening-day blues: after the first draft got posted it became apparent that some of the image links were broken, and the file-structure was fatally flawed as well, so I took the opportunity to streamline it a bit -- tightening the graphics and arranging it so that each page used the same table with only slight modifications, and making the file-structure somewhat more logical.

Of course, immediately after posting the 'corrected' draft I finally started researching CSS and realized that there's a truckload more that can be done to improve the site. Converting the whole thing from tables and big huge clunky HTML assembled by Kompozer over to a smoother CSS setup and tighter code composed by hand ought to cut loading times, make updating and adding pages easier, and make me look a good clip more professional to potential employers.

But I'm afraid that upgrade is going to have to wait until after I move -- to wherever the hell I'm going to end up -- and even then may be considerably delayed by concerns of more basic survival. For the moment, The Devil's Virtue is on a 'good enough for now' status, but I am cooking up the CSS update when I can find the moments. Right now, though, my prime concern is getting this apartment cleaned up and cleaned out, and packing my stuff for a move which might have to happen very quickly in the next couple of weeks. I'm already down to very little more than the things I most want to keep, and if I can't salvage anything else from this situation, at the very least I really don't want to end up losing all my possessions this time.

In the process of packing I've finally gone through my file cabinet and boxes of unsorted notes, and sorted out a fat accordion file of everything pertaining to the projects which already have slots on the Projects section at TDV, so I've got lots of material to add to that section -- once I have time to convert it all over from handwritten notes, and find a scanner for the miscellaneous sketches. Again, though, it may be quite some time before any of that arrives online. In the meantime I hope folks enjoy what's already available on the site, and for that matter, I hope anyone shows up to enjoy it in the first place.