* * * * *

                                 Silent Blog

It's that month.

The one month I wish I could skip entirely. I want to hibernate, to avoid any
conscience moments in a month of forced cheer, out of control spending,
Christmas Carols, and ever increasing traffic levels.

Unfortunately, it's progressing … one … day

at

a

time.

Ugh.

Also, both Spring [1] and I have been rather down lately. I also feel less
inclined to do stuff and would rather just hang out and converse with
friends. The problem with even that though, is getting in the right mood for
conversing; it doesn't help that my sleep schedule is all screwed up to the
point where I'm actually getting up in the morning!

If you know me at all, you know that is not a normal thing for me.

Anyway, some email from readers about previous entries:

> From: Jeff Cuscutis [2]
> To: Sean Conner
> Subject: Mail service [3]
> Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 23:25:50 -0500
>
> Saw the http://boston.conman.org/2002/11/23.1 [4] 3 days entry. My boss had
> the same thing happen this week. He checks his mail once a week. They
> returned his mail. He was not pleased and called them up. After insulting
> them “I'm sorry, but no one who answers a phone is a supervisor,” he told
> them his vacation plans: he will be gone every Monday through Friday for
> the next 3 months so he will only get mail service on Saturdays.
>
> Amazing.
>

I guess I can take solice in that we're not the only ones with this problem.

> From: Kojiro [5]
> To: Sean Conner
> Subject: Hey …
> Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 17:02:22 -0500
>
> Hey, man, I just hit your page with the New Opera 7, Beta 1 [6], and it's
> following some nice little tags that you have in your HTML (HyperText
> Markup Language) … check it out … it's pretty bad ass … Of course, it's
> gotta be on a windows box, cause Opera's development on Linux, and all
> things non-windows is just a bit behind.
>
> I put a screenshot in
>
> http://www.samurai-administrator.com/images/opera7 [7]
>
> Kinda large, cause they're bitmaps, but it's kinda impressive. I haven't
> seen this sort of functionality on any of the other browsers … at least,
> not straight out of the box, so I was a bit impressed with this.
>

Opera finally supports the <LINK> tags it seems, and unlike Mozilla [8] you
don't have to turn it on. I suspect (not having seen Opera in action) that
the navigation bar only comes up on sites that have the <LINK> tags. It's
nice to see that tags I started using some four or five years ago finally
getting use …

> From: Steve Crane [9]
> To: Sean Conner
> Subject: International Money Orders [10]
> Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 22:13:15 +0200
>
> Hi Sean,
>
> I liked your story about the money order. Of course if you were dealing
> with a South African you would have got it right away. We call them POSTAL
> orders. :-)
>
> Cheers.
>

And now I know (for the record, Steve is a friend from South Africa, if your
curious about the time zone in the date).

> From: Mischief [11]
> To: Sean Conner
> Subject: Engineering Porn [12]
> Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 21:21:53 -0500
>
> Where did you hear about pronography being used in that manner? I'm reading
> a cyberpunk book, Synners, right now and it mentions porn in that context.
> It was the first time I've ever heard it used in that manner, so I was
> quite surprised to see it a few days later in your journal.
>

I actually got it from the same book, and I'm sure that's where jwz [13] got
it from as well (I titled that entry the same as his entry by the way). I
read that book, oh, what? Eight years ago or so and it's stuck with me ever
since. The first draft of that entry mentioned Synners but a subsequent edit
removed it (for better flow).

[1] http://www.springdew.com/
[2] http://www.geocities.com/cuscutis/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/23.1
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/23.1
[5] http://www.samurai-administrator.com/
[6] http://www.opera.com/
[7] http://www.samurai-administrator.com/images/opera7/
[8] http://www.mozilla.org/
[9] http://craniac.afraid.org/
[10] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/29.1
[11] http://www.maelstrom.org/mischief/
[12] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/24.1
[13] http://www.jwz.org/

Email author at [email protected]