Thanks For Nothing.

You may have read over on my dear fiancee’s blog about her mother reminding Jen that it’s not too late to back out of this little wedding thing we’re planning. While I’m thankful that she’s so concerned for her daughter’s well-being, I’m still trying to recall the reasons we decided against eloping. Jesus Fucking Christ. Maybe we can get on the plane to Italy tonight…?

Last night I copied some code from somebody else’s site and added the Google search down there on the left, so if you’re so inclined, you can plug in funny words and see if they show up on bill dugan dot com. (Much handier than leafing through months of log entries to look for that one link…)

Random Fun Links. For all those folks who are too scared to actually live in the city. (via the morning news) Fix your Pismo. (via slashdot)

Aichmophobia.

I went to have some bloodwork done this morning for a diagnosis (as well as a checkup—what is my cholesterol level, anyhow?) after, uh, avoiding it for a few days. I have what phlebotomists call a “dream arm”: thin and full of juicy veins close to the surface. I also have an inordinate fear of needles. Spiders, rats, bugs, gunk, blood (other people’s, mostly)—no problem. Show me a needle, and I get squirrelly. Heights above three stories and anything to do with the eye round out my trio of personal fears, but anything involving cold steel poking into my veins completely freaks me out. (Which is kind of funny, because I’ll work the whole day with a splinter sticking out of my hand, or a bloody gash, but I don’t get with the needles.) Which begs the question: What’s your worst fear? Add a comment below.

Anyhow, I left a warm caffeinated cup of pee and got blood drawn for the docs to run their tests on without passing out (about three years ago an older doctor took about a gallon of blood out of me, and I went down like a drunken prizefighter) and ran out of the building clutching my arm, happy to have it over with. We’ll see what the results say in a few days.

This is interesting news from California. Guess what other state currently uses Deibold voting machines? That’s right. Think it’s going to have any effect on voting in Maryland? I doubt it.

Housekeeping. Last night I added a list of links to the upper right there for the iTunes music store with a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to buy but don’t have the money for. I figure I’ll leave them there where they can’t get away.

High Technology.

Today I looked at a free comment service called HaloScan and signed up for a membership. It seems to be pretty easy to use; the code is clean and doesn’t muck anything up on the page, so I’m going to test it out over the next few weeks to see how I like it. So let me hear what you think, people! If I write something stupid on here, tell me about it. If I write something good, let me know. You’ll see a small ‘Comment’ link at the end of a post if I’m interested in hearing feedback—but I probably won’t be adding one for each.

Fambly. This Christmas my Mom asked me if I could scan and retouch a picture for her; in a story involving a Coach purse, some guilt, a picture frame, and an anniversary, she’s hoping I can take a beat-up Polaroid of my late grandfather and clean it up to the point where we get some new prints made. I scanned the picture in at 400dpi, cleaned and sharpened it, and looked at the results. The resolution was not up to snuff, so I rescanned at 800dpi and enlarged by 200%, hoping the extra information would be enough to extrapolate good pixels from bad. This time I got better results, and I’m almost done cleaning to the point of cropping. (Mom, I’m going with the one you don’t favor, because your father is actually smiling in this one.) Once I’m done, I’m going to import it into iPhoto and send out for prints, probably tonight.

I don’t have a whole lot of information about my biological grandfather, only short anecdotal stories; I know that he was a stonemason his whole life, supporting his family at a very early age, and he built his own house. He had big hands, and played the piano. He didn’t like having his picture taken, which is why this is a big deal. He died a month before I was born. Maybe my Mom will write me with some more information about him that I can share here.

Oh, Well. The ice storm that was supposed to shut the mid-atlantic area down never materialized; it’s raining outside but of course they shut every school system down within a 100-mile radius. I’m considering home schooling for our future children, because it seems that the local public school systems will cancel classes for a strong breeze. Jen and I were hunkered down last night rubbing our rabbits’ feet, hoping we could make some inclement weather happen; she was hoping for a day to catch up on sleep and I was looking forward to a solid day to concentrate upstairs. As it was, she was asleep by 10:15 and I got a bunch of drywall installed in the Blue room. It’s going to be a long slog to repair the plaster, because it’s been beaten on enough that it’s brittle, but I think the Pink room will go a lot quicker—the plaster in there came off a lot cleaner.

I have not seen one bottle of Pepsi in this area featuring this promotion. I’d drink yer damn Pepsi if I could just find a bottle.