In ordering computer books for the library I was looking forward to the arrival of Chris Seibold’s Big Book of Apple Hacks. I didn’t really find much in there to improve my MacBook – which I already love as is. I usually refer to the lifehacker website once a week for a steady diet of updates and funstuffz on the computer. I had not, however, come across goPod.

In an effort to stave off lawsuits for bleeding ears syndrome due to high volumes of iPods – Apple set the volume to 9. goPod sets it back to 11 – which is good for me when I want to blast it in my car or hook it up to the stereo. So here’s an arbitrary link to the goPod website – where downloading and installation is easy-peasy.

(Amazon affiliate links aren’t very wordpress friendly. Had to redraft this several times to stop it from blowing up the front page – wish there was some php amazon code.)

Second — I’ve been relatively busy of late. Alternating my time between studying and getting the front page in order. I’m pretty sure I can let that sit for a while.

Spent a wonderful 10 hours with family a few days back for my grandmother’s birthday. We went to an all you can eat chinese buffet, topped that off with cake and i scream – and closed out the evening with a couple of rousing games of Scrabble – a much less physical match than Spoons. All the while, in the background, Grandma’s computer was being deloused from the Klez virus and some other variant I can’t remember now. When the machine was finally clean, Grandma bestowed upon me the dignified title of “favorite geek.” Folks, Dreams have now been realized.

Also managed to make it down to Wayne State Wednesday for an interesting seminar on the pointlessness of discriminating between implicit and explicit knowledge. Basically it was an hour long interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Language Games relating to Knowledge Management. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy philosophical discussions.

Other items — watched Four Minutes About Podcasting – then downloaded iPodder, MT-Enclosures, and Blog Torrent. I’ve since watched podcasting get mentioned in just about every form of media — followed closely by the Jeff Gannon story — which hopefully will not be allowed to die. Something fishy ’bout all that.

So now that I have installed all those nifty little techno trinkets above – what does that mean? Well, basically, I’ll be able to post bigger files on the website — or, rather, links to the files — which will still be on my computer. If I’m online – the files will unravel themselves across the internet — and with each successive download — will make themselves more reliable and more efficient. More movies – more music – more big media – less bandwidth usage on the servers. Podcasting? I doubt it. I’m not a big fan of my speaking voice — but there may be a post here or there. (debugging currently going on)

That’s it. Touching base, really. I’m not feeling a great flow in my words — rather choppy moving from head to hands for some reason. I need to work on a coupla mixes for a coupla people that I’ve already written letters to…One’s been sitting on my desk since 1/28. Waiting. Just waiting. I should really get on that.

Tonight, after browsing through my newsreader (Sage), I noticed that peripathetic’s tags show up in their feed. I thought to myself, My tags don’t show up in my feed. Then I had a second thought.

I quickly moved the <$MTTechnoratiTags$> around in the atom feed — until it finally found a home right after:
<$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$> as <$MTTechnoratiTags encode_xml=”1″$> — about 5 lines from the bottom. That did the trick! Technorati got its first horkheimer tag — which may be gone now – as it was simply a throwaway post. We’ll tag this puppy horkheimer as well — just to make sure I ain’t crazy.

At first – I wasn’t sure it had picked up – so I went on and downloaded the perlscript plugin and followed these instructions — taking george’s <$MTTechnoratiTags$> out of the posted div, but leaving it in the feed.

A moment later I checked. Horkheimer. Tag functionality.
Geekdom acheived.

[of course -- I finally upgraded to MT3+ -- though I don't think that was the key...perhaps technorati is just slowly rolling out the recognition - like google and gmail. WHO REALLY KNOWS?]

Typee

• Tenier’s Saints (246) David Tenier the Younger – artist
• Dibdin: “There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft, To look out for the life of poor Jack.” (252)

Omoo

• Urim and Thummim (358): Urim is derived from the Hebrew for “light”, or “to give light”, and Thummim from “completeness”, “perfection”, or “innocence”.
• Clarence in the butt of Malmsey (368) The creature certainly died a luscious death, quite equal to Clarence’s in the butt of Malmsey.
• Rule of Three (389)
• Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to A Lady”
• Rizzio

Mardi

• Whistonian theory concerning the damned and the comets: Whiston fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the tail of another. The heat which remained from its first origin, in his opinion, excited the whole antediluvian population, men and animals, to sin, for which they were all drowned in the deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions were apparently less violent.
• Sesotris
• Thermopylae
• Tartarus: Tartarus is the lowest region of the world, as far below earth as earth is from heaven.
• Epaminondas
• Belshazzar
• Belisarius
• Hafiz
• Paracelsus
• Chimborazo

There have also been several eloquent quotes or passages I’ve jotted down. Those will be up tomorrow.

There are a few points of light that have begun shining this week…Bush is under fire for using the Niger forgeries in his state of the union address…
Cheney’s underhandedness in the energy task force meetings can now be exposed thanks to a 2-1 victory in the Appeals court.
And a beautiful woman emailed me some glossy glam shots…

Unfortunately — the rest of the week hasn’t had very many high points…the problem is like that of those cartoons where people tread around and around in circles burrowing into the earth over and over until they’re suddenly six feet under their own path…

I’m still trying to finish up Hardy’s Tess D’Urbervilles – 100 pages to go — and the next time I get the opportunity to sit down and read – it’ll be to the back cover. I’ve talked about my reading habits before — and how one of my favorite pursuits is to unearth references to other works within the novel themselves…The obsession began with my favorite novel — Melville’s Billy Budd, and continues…

Hardy’s references aren’t nearly as numerous — but they point to several intriguing pursuits…

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.

Searching led me to someone’s site who has a very different perception of the work. They made it quite easy to discover where the quote was coming from – “Atalanta in Calydon”, a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne — who was quite the interesting individual:

His mania for masochism, particularly flagellation, probably began at Eton and was encouraged by his later friendships with Richard Monckton Milnes (one of Tennyson’s fellow Apostles), who introduced him to the works of the Marquis de Sade, and Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and adventurer. Some gamey stories survive from the year or so that he spent living at 16 Cheyne Walk with Rossetti: according to one, Rossetti once had to tell him to keep down the noise–he and a boyfriend had been sliding naked down the bannisters and disturbing Rossetti’s painting. In another, Rossetti gave to Adah Menken, the American circus rider, to introduce Swinburne to heterosexual love. She returned it because, she said, “I can’t make him understand that biting’s no use.” He took a sardonic delight in what the critic and biographer, Cecil Lang, calls “Algernonic exaggeration”: When people began to talk scathingly about his homosexuality and other sexual proclivities, he circulated a story that he had engaged in pederasty and bestiality with a monkey–and then ate it. How many of the stories were true and how many inventive fiction is still unclear. Oscar Wilde, thoroughly capable of inventing his own interesting fictions, called him “a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.”

Rossetti was, of course, the most infamous of the PRB, or Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood…which I studied whilst still a student.

Apparently Hardy enjoyed Swinburne’s work – making a reference to
“Fragoletta” as well:

“The maiden’s mouth is cold…Fold over simple fold Binding her head.”

The PDF file that locked up my computer and lost this original entry was an online study of Robert Browning’s work “Pippa’s Song”:

THE year ‘s at the spring,