My room is now cleaner than it has been in over 4 years. The massive amount of crap that has been slowly pushing me out of my own abode has been defeated, for a time, until by my fatal neglect allows its inevitable return.

Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.

Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.

I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.

My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.

I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.

Did I get what I was going to get done done? No, but in not doing that I got something else done. I keep trying to cultivate something like artistic merit but the stop and go method that employ means I don't improve all that much. So for the last 24 hours or so I've been in go mode and drawing bad pictures in the hope that they will lead to better pictures.

I also found some interesting things on the internet.

A book on (unintentional) innuendo in Christian imagery. Good for an irreverent chuckle.

A video of many nerds recreating a scene of A New Hope. I hope the full film becomes available.

Today I resolved to do four things: mail a package, get some car soap, check my work schedule for next week, and use up a gift card for Rita's Ice.

The post office at the store was closed when I got there, the store sold no car soap, I have 0 hours scheduled for the second week in a row, but at least I had enough money on my card for a custard.

So far my day is 1 for 4.

I'm going to go wash my car with soapless water to at least get the bird turds and tree leavings off, and then do some research for a project that I'm hoping will occupy me during the jobless week.

Cool Link of the moment: http://s.xdg.us/ An online music radio run by a bunch of people with very eclectic tastes. I'm on the DJ list, actually, though only for the duration of my hourless unemployment.

What a weekend.

Friday I had planned to go north to Lunacon for the day. To force myself to actually go when the time came I had preregistered, and told my dad to pick me up for the 7AM train into NYC. The week before I had destroyed my sleep schedule with an all night LAN and a 7AM shift almost back to back, and did not get to sleep until 3 or 4 AM. That gave me three hours of sleep before my dad was at the front door. I had planned to bring a number of things with me on my trip. Camera, a few copies of my resume, a snack for lunch to save some money, and a birthday card for my friend, who I would be meeting the next day. I realized before we had even made it to the train station that I had forgotten all of these things, and on top of that I had forgotten my belt and my voucher indicating that I had pre-registered. I was confident that the voucher would not be a problem, but I did end up spending the whole day hiking up my pants like a high school nerd.

The trip from home to Port Chester took about 6 hours. I loitered in NYC for a bit to get an offpeak ticket, and decided on the 30 minute walk to the convention from the train station, since I was so early.

At that point I was under the impression that the convention would start some time around noon. When I arrived I immediately realized that something was off, because it was around 11:30 and there was no convention to speak of. Sure, there were enough people that looked like they belonged to the convention to assure me that at least I had gotten the date and the place right, but obviously I had gotten something horribly wrong with the time.

Turned out that the convention didn't actually start until 6PM. I was 6 hours early. So I spend most of my convention time helping people set up. Everyone there was nice, I picked up a number of books by independent presses (more on that later), talked to some people, hung up some art, played a game of Fluxx, and then left at around 7PM.

The question now was if I was going to make my way all the way home, or stay in NYC overnight so I didn't have to come back the next day for my friend's birthday. I ended up staying at a cousin's apartment in the Village. The noise from nearby bars is constant, and was like a lullaby to my ears. There is something about the dull murmur of a city seeping through the walls that puts me in a state of utter peace similar to the sort of feeling people attribute to the wilderness.

The next day was much more sensible than the 7 hour, 80 dollar trip to hang up art that I went through on Friday. I realized that morning that I had agreed to go to a barbecue restaurant during Lent, when I don't eat meat, but there was enough veggies and fish to sustain me. We did a good amount of walking, stepped into the library, Forbidden Planet, and the Strand, had a pizza supper at Joe's Pizza, which is run like the pizza version of the soup nazi's place, and then went home. I managed to get back just as my phone died, and passed out immediately once I got home.

Fun, but a rather expensive way to spend my weekend. Certainly not something I can afford doing often.

Cool link of the moment: The Owl Box. It's just a webcam in an owl box, but if, like me, you are a fan of birds, it's neat to see an owl up close as she chills out and fusses over her chicks.

I have mentioned before to my mother that the headlines on the BBC RSS are their own special sort of crazy, and today a perfect example came up. "Missing woman police target clubs." That is a noun pile, and has been covered by linguists who know much more about this sort of stuff than I do, but I wanted to point it out because I know you read this mom, and here is what I was talking about. Now here's the question: What would an article with that headline be about?

My second attempt at a permanent break from WoW has been successful so far, but I am still struggling in the resulting time vacuum. I installed Ubuntu on the laptop and have not been able to find anything scratch my gaming itch so far. Civ IV steam edition doesn't work. My Sims 2 ISOs (don't judge me) were lost, since apparently I did not back them up. While I have been reading more, I still lack the proper attention span to read at length. I've starting writing more, but again, I've noticed that my ability to concentrate is nothing like it used to be.

Here's an interesting book tidbit from another excellent Book Blog. The author of Bambi also wrote a well known German book of erotica. The world is wonderful and multifaceted.

This site is an oldie but goody, and with my ample free time I've been feeding in random lines and enjoying the results of the translation. Movie and book quotes are perfect fodder.

Dollars and Sense

The hardest thing about the book selling business appears to be in gathering the will to sell a book that I have not yet read. I pick up all this books and think to myself, "I'll put them up for sale... after I've gone through them." Never going to be a bookseller if I do that.

My old domain, the one that I had been using before I was a fool and let it expire, was scooped up by domain squatters some years ago. Occasionally I go back to see if they've given up on it, but there is still a large 'for sale' button where my site once was. Today I did a little snooping around to see how much they were 'selling' the domain for. The price I turned up? 4,000 dollars. Considering it costs about 10 bucks a year to register a domain, and I am one hundred percent certain that my domain gets 0 visitors besides myself when I check it once ever few months, that asking price is retarded. IMO, that sort of domain squatting is up there with telemarketing in terms of 'business ideas that will be sure to land -someone- in hell'. It's the fishing for easy profit without producing anything of value whatsoever that enrages me so much.

And at the same time the domain, who's name I liked quite a bit, has been locked out of any use and if I ever do decide to purchase server space again, I am going to have to come up with something else.

Bits and Pieces

Sometimes headlines are just too stupid not to enjoy:

"European Union foreign ministers condemn the use of forged passports in the assassination of a top Palestinian militant."

Hey guys, way not cool that you used our passports there, but good job on killing a guy, well done.

Fun fact, there are, according to the autobiographies in circulation, at least three 'last men who knew everything'. Athanasius Kircher, Thomas Young, and Joseph Leidy. There may be more, but I can cay with certainty that there hasn't been any men who know everything in quite some time, and until the internet explodes and we are thrust back into an informational dark age we won't be having one again.

This video of a 1940s printing press is sexy as hell.