maniacal rage

We are in Japan. Actually, we have been for several days now, and I've taken lots of pictures, but the internet access in the hotel here in Tokyo is about $20 a day (which is insane), so I won't upload all that good stuff until we move to Osaka in a few days.

Until then, we're here in an internet cafe checking our mail and feeling slightly uncomfortable about the tiny little room we're in.

Quick notes about Tokyo before I run out of access:

1. The subway is great.
2. Finding food is the hardest part, because of the language barrier, but when we find it it's very good.
3. It's a busy but nice town.

More soon.

And finally, today, the fog lifted for a few hours and we got to see the city. I stress the for a few hours part—we had a short time to take in the buildings and streets before the clouds came back and everything was gray again, the tops of the buildings hidden from view. But in the short time I managed to take several pictures and we got a good view of Seattle.

We started at the Pike Place Market and, after riding the pig for a picture, we walked all over down town. Up to the new library, down to Pioneer Square and everywhere in between, and spent the last few minutes of sunlight walking down by the water back toward the market.

After picking up Erin's boyfriend Matt, we headed up to Capitol Hill where we had a nice lunch, then headed over to Gasworks Park (which I used to love as a kid—now I can't remember why) and then, after the sun went down, over to the Ballard Locks to kill a little time (and see two lonely salmon in the fish ladder).

We stopped back at my Great Aunt's place to deliver her a new phone with bigger numbers and pick up a few things she wanted to mail to my mom and then met Erin and Matt at The Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner. The food didn't taste as good as I remember it being when I was a kid, but it was still fun to be there again. We hung around talking well after they closed and then parted, them home and us back here to the hotel.

Tomorrow we head to Japan. Keep checking my Flickr Seattle set.

It's 8:46PM and I'm about to go to sleep—that's how tired I am. And it's not like I even did all that much, really. Well, at least not much other than driving.

Yesterday we got up early and walked down town and picked up our rental car. It was supposed to be a mid-size but all they had was a big Ford Freestar van (with DVD player!), so we've been cruising in that chick mobile the last two days. It's actually kind of fun to drive the big automatic-transmission van after driving the little manual Saturn the last year.

We picked up Erin and headed drove around all the old spots—the house we lived in before we moved to NJ, the high school I (and Erin) went to, all that good stuff. The place hasn't changed much. Then we stopped for food at Red Robin (always a classic) and dropped in on Steve's parents to say hi. We eventually headed back to Seattle and then drove over to Ballard where we walked around a bit and had some cupcakes.

Ended the day with a late showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (good, not great, story felt too compacted) and got back the hotel at about 2AM.

This morning we had to be up at 7AM to go to a photo shoot Katia had to manage for work (the good thing about combining a little work with your vacation is that you get some of it compensated). In the afternoon we headed over to visit with my Great Aunt who I haven't seen a really long time and spent a few hours there.

Now, at 8:52PM, I'm ready to hit the sack. Hopefully tomorrow the fog will finally lift and I'll be able to get some pictures of the city. One more full day and then we're off to Japan on Tuesday morning.

I've been adding photos and you can find them slowly piling up in my Seattle set. Unfortunately, I forgot to install iPhoto on this PowerBook before we left so I've had to upload files with the Flickr Uploadr, which means it's too much work to tag, title and describe them. Hopefully I'll have more time later.

We've successfully arrived in Seattle. We got in on time and Erin picked us up from the airport. Things already feel familiar and it was nice to see Erin again (it's been about six years).

Now we're rested and about to go pick up our rental car. The weather is exactly how it should be in Seattle in the morning this time of year—gray and foggy.

And so we depart, in about an hour, for Seattle. Leg one of our 15-day trip. This is the first time I've flown JetBlue and so far, so good. The check-in was painless (we did it online), we simply handed our bags to the JetBlue rep at the curb and we were done.

I plan to blog our whole trip (I'm writing this from the JetBlue terminal's "Food Hall"), since I brought my PowerBook (and you'd better like it, because this thing feels heavy).

Prior to this trip I picked up two new lenses for my D70: a Nikon 50mm 1.8f fixed-distance lens with fantastic depth of field, and a Sigma 70-300mm 4/5.6f telephoto which should allow me to get some good shots of things we can't get close to in Japan.

The plan is to dump photos to the PowerBook at the end of each day and then upload to Flickr, so you'll be able to see what I've seen that day.

I'm very excited—next time I update I'll be in my old home town. See you later, suckers!

Recently I had the delightful pleasure of learning that all FedEx ground deliveries (non-express) are handled by independent contractors. This means FedEx can't directly contact the delivery person when they, say, miss-deliver my package to some random person in Manhattan. It also means it takes about four or five days before they finally find the driver and then, most likely, your package is long gone.

Moral of the story: don't ship with FedEx ground. Only their express services are handled by responsible, actual employees of the company.

Over the past few years, the spam messages I receive claiming to be from PayPal have gotten more and more real looking. I'm a smart guy (at least I think) and I know when I see spam, but even I have glanced at some of the emails with skepticism in the past few months, wondering if a few were real. The best way is always to check the URLs of the links the emails contain—they'll always contain something other than paypal.com.

The reason I mention this is that I sometimes think, as I'm flagging one of these messages as spam, about what must be thousands of people who fall for these schemes and click those links, signing away their account information. My heart aches with worry for those people. Every time I see one of these messages I think about how many 65-year-old grandmothers are willfully giving away their passwords, only to have their PayPal accounts cleaned out.

Generally speaking, PayPal almost never emails you (except confirmation emails which ask for no reply or action). And when they do, they always include your full first and last name. They never write, "Dear PayPal User." About 99% of the time, that email you got claiming to be from PayPal isn't. Just think about that.

You can find more information and some examples at the PayPal security center. Be careful.

It's funny to open up the PowerBook and see that Katia was using xPad. Don't get me wrong—it makes sense that she's using it to catalogue different notes related to our upcoming trip to Japan, but something about the fact that she spent nine months when I was writing and testing the first version trying to convince me to leave our small home office and spend some time with her makes it funny that she now uses it somewhat regularly.

Granted, it's not as weird as the time I heard someone talking about xPad on the subway, but I still get a kick out of it.

Our vacation starts next Friday: after a three-day layover in Seattle, we'll be in Japan for nine full days. We're staying in Tokyo for four days, Kyoto for two days, Osaka for a day, and taking two one-day trips to Nikko and Nara.

Since we're still planning a lot of the specific things we'd like to see in each city, we'd love any feedback from experienced travelers. If you have any suggestions, any at all, please send them to me at garrett at maniacalrage dot net. I appreciate any help you can provide.

Last time I asked for suggestions (when we went to London and Dublin) I got some really excellent recommendations, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks!

People need to stop saying "realign" now. We get it—you read the ALA article, you think Cameron Moll is so fucking cool, you want to be hip, yeah, yeah. Seriously, shut up about realigning.

There's nothing worse than when an inbreeding, self-boasting group of people get their hands on a new buzzword. And, quite frequently, it's someone like Cameron Moll who throws it out there. I don't entirely disagree with his article, because it's not really saying much, but I hate this stupid giving-everything-a-bullshit-name thing that this specific circle of webloggers does. You know the people I'm talking about—the people who consider themselves trend setters but haven't really done all that much. The people who act like they created CSS and HTML, like it didn't even fucking exist before they came around.

Look, it's not just Cameron Moll, okay? In fact, I like Moll when he's not laying it on so thick. It's just that, well, frankly, Cameron Moll hasn't really done anything of note. I look at his portfolio and I think, "Wait, here's a guy who hasn't done anything and he's telling me how to do it?" That doesn't make sense. Was it that whole "wicked worn" thing? If so, I've got news for you—another bullshit name given to something not new. Moll didn't invent this style, he just gave it a name and claimed it as his own. Any time someone created something that looked worn from that point on, he claimed it was his influence. He's the Picasso of worn-looking design elements, apparently.

I'm coming off like a jerk now, so I'll embrace it because there's no turning back and I'll just say that I can't stand stuff like this. I hate it when people slap a tag on something and make it seem like they came up with it. I hate it when people write articles about absolutely unnecessary subjects and people talk about it like they just saw God appear from the heavens with a pipe and shoes made of corn. I hate it when people use a buzzword even when that buzzword is stupid (I don't know how many times I've seen people link to new design recently with the words, "[X] realigns"). I hate it—absolutely fucking FUCK hate it—when people use the word creative as a noun. IT IS A FUCKING ADJECTIVE. NO EXCEPTIONS, NO ARGUMENTS, NOTHING. ADJECTIVE. Seriously, stop that shit.

A while back I posted a screenshot on Flickr of what this site looks like in Safari. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's really quite different going from home to work (where I'm on a PC for now). I miss the nice shadows under the text and that smooth OS X anti-aliasing.

Speaking of kind readers, I came across some flattering comments about this site from Jason Morehead at Opus this morning:

I've never met an abstract background image I didn't like, and [Garrett] Murray's choice adds just the right touch of atmosphere to the site without harming readability (and the subtle text shadowing is a nice touch—if you're using Safari, that is). The color choices are simply magnificent, and let's hear it for CSS' ability to control opacity levels. Again, it's all about atmosphere and subtlety, and me likey. Me likey a lot.

You can read the rest of his entry if you wish. Thanks, Jason!

Kind reader Matt Widmann reminded my last night of a feature in Safari that allows you to specify a global stylesheet which, like my tutorial yesterday, will allow you to override a site's local styles if that site has a body id. In fact, it's even easier to do than in Firefox.

Simply create a new CSS file with a site specific rule. For example:

body#maniacalrage-net {
    font-family: Verdana !important;
}

Again, !important will allow your rules to override local styles.

Then, in Safari's preferences, go to the Advanced tab and drop the Style Sheet menu down and choose Other..., then locate your new sheet. Presto!

Note that if you change this sheet once you have it selected, you'll need to restart Safari to see your changes.

Again, if you're a visual person, I've made a screencast of this tutorial for you.

If you're using Firefox and you want to change the font on this site to something else, it's fairly easy to do with an extension (or two) and a little CSS (if you want to do this with Safari, see this).This isn't limited to my site only—this tutorial will work on nearly any site—but a few people have complained about Arial on Windows (the site uses Gill Sans on the Mac), so I figured this might be useful.

I've assigned this site's body tag the id "maniacalrage-net" but if a site doesn't have a body id set, you can use the URL id extension, which automatically adds an ID to each and every page. Either way, once you have an ID for the body of a page, you can override its local styles by adding rules to your userContent.css file which, by default, is blank. To make this easier, use the Edit Config Files extension, which places a menu-item in the Tools menu and allows for quick access to edit that (and other) files.

After installing, look in the Tools menu and choose the Settings option from the new Edit Config Files menu.

Choose an editor to use by clicking the browse button and picking your favorite editor (or, if you don't have one, use Notepad by entering c:\windows\notepad.exe).

Open the Edit Config Files menu once more and choose the userContent.css item.

Now you can add a rule to the bottom of the page. For example:

body#maniacalrage-net {
    font-family: Times !important;
}

Including !important will force userContent.css to override a site's local styles, so you'll see this site in Times (lovely!).

Save the file, close it, and then restart Firefox (you have to close ALL windows). Open Firefox back up and you should be in business. You can undo these changes by removing the rules from userContent.css and restarting Firefox.

In case you're a visual person, I've made a screencast of this tutorial for you to watch.

I switched the feed for the site from Atom 1.0 back to RSS 2.0 because of a few issues people were having:

1. You have to be running the latest version of NNW for Atom 1.0 support. Seemingly, older versions just don't show the feed at all. This caused a bit of a problem since most of my feed subscribers use NNW and not all use the absolute latest version.
2. 9rules' site is only capable of parsing RSS 2.0, not Atom (yet).
3. It was easy to switch (RoR is great!) so I just went ahead and did it.

Later on I'll push Atom 1.0 support back out but for now this is safer.

Oh, and before I forget—I've gotten a few complaints about the message IE readers receive at the top of every page. I just want to apologize to any of you who get the message when you're on a public or work computer that you can't install a better browser on (there are only two of you who have complained about this), but it's a necessary evil to have the message there. IE must die.

On a related note, two people complained about some issues with this site in Opera and I just want to say, politely, that I don't care. Opera is totally and completely useless as far as I'm concerned and while I value you as a person getting to make up your mind as to what you do and such, I disagree with your choice and hope one day you see the light. I mean, a browser with ads? Ridiculous. Wait, a browser with ads that renders pages differently than the other major standards-compliant browsers? Oh, goodie! Where can I sign up and, until about a month ago, pay money for it? Yuck. Double yuck. I understand that it doesn't have ads anymore and it's free now, but that doesn't make it good. Seriously, it doesn't.

It's not that I hate browsers other than Firefox/Camino and Safari/Omniweb, it's just that I hate browsers that don't render things correctly and require tweaking and patches and crap like that.

I've been taking an improv class at the UCB for the last eight weeks and tonight was our class-ending final show. About five minutes into the event I started getting nervous because I couldn't think of any initiations and I was just watching scenes go by (I was terrified I was having an off day on, of all days, show day). Then I stepped into a scene and from that point on it was like butter.

Forty-five minutes later I was so into it that I was surprised and upset at blackout—I was ready for another hour of work.

What I thought would be an off day turned out to be one of my funniest days in recent history. Lots of laughs and everyone did a really great job. The next-level class starts tomorrow and I'm anxiously waiting to get back to it, tapping my feet and talking too loudly in small rooms, excited and hungry for it.

I've been having an insomnia problem lately. It always manifests itself just when I'm getting ready for bed. I'll be sitting in the living room watching an old episode of Seinfeld or something and just when I get up and go to bed, I completely wake up. All of a sudden I'm fully awake again and I don't really feel tired. It's like if I miss that one opportunity, it never comes back. It's 2:13AM right now. I felt like going to bed 2 hours ago. I got up, felt wide awake again, and I've been sitting here ever since.

The only cure is going to bed, covering my face and trying not to think about anything. 30 minutes or so of that and my body finally gives in, but in 30 minutes it will be 2:45AM so that's not exactly early.

I don't know what triggers the bouts of insomnia, but they usually stick around for a few weeks every few months. I think it must have something to do with work—it's like my body wants to stay awake at night because I want to do stuff I can't do during the day (like watch TV) and it knows that if I go to sleep that's it, it's over.

One of the reasons I wasn't posting a lot of entries on the site before this new RoR version was that the CMS I built wasn't working. Adding a new post required using phpMyAdmin and manually creating tag associations as well as creating a Markdown version of the content as well. It was a pain. I used to have a fully-functional CMS, but it broke when we moved to PHP5 at Segpub and I never bothered to fix it. So for the last year or so, I've been entering posts via the database itself, basically. And it was cumbersome.

Another issue was always having to think of titles. I hate thinking of titles. I don't want to do it anymore. The new site doesn't have them (technically, it does, you just never see them because they're for my reference only—this entry is called "Pooping Out Bananas") and I love it. No pressure. This goes hand-in-hand with the whole one-entry-on-the-index thing I started with the last design, which nearly immediately killed the site. Having only one entry on your index page at any given time is ballsy—it requires that you actually have good content that can last for several days, something that's, well, nearly impossible in this medium. I would find myself looking at an post 20 minutes after I published it and already being pissed off at the stale feeling it gave me. It's one thing for a long piece of fiction, but when it's just some nonsense about nonsense then, well, it's annoying.

And then there's the lack of comments. I must say, I fucking love it. I don't have to worry about saying something so fantastic that you'll feel obligated to respond, and I don't have to worry when you don't. Clearly, you're here—I still get plenty of hits a day—and if you want to say something you can send me an email (there's a link in the info section) and I'll respond.

This new format feels freeing and suddenly I'm writing without worry or responsibility. Stripping away everything but the most basic of content has given me an internet boner for this site which, effectively, is the same thing as a real-world boner except that it's really shiny and keeps beeping. See, no responsibility at all.

Katia writes one sentence, then I write another. And so on. Every other sentence until we produce this masterpiece:

This week, I meant to buy a corkscrew, but I didn't. We need to get rid of that Il Bastardo in the refrigerator too, I just remembered. I suppose it's probably gone bad, since it's been sitting with a hole in the cork for about six months. I don't even remember where we got that bottle. I believe Kris and Gabe brought it over for dinner.

I wish our table fit better in that corner. Having a cold is the most annoying feeling. Complaining about it helps, I'm sure. I used to wear a watch every day and now I don't. Watches pull my arm hair out. I miss my watch, it made me feel like a person who always needed to know what time it is. Like a train conductor or a phone operator.

I feel like there's a troll holding my mouth shut.

Possible alternate titles for our second short film, which we've always called "Glass":

1. Antiques Homeshow
2. Bad Luck Bowl
3. Theives Steal
4. Napoleon's Dead Twin's Bowl
5. Cocksucking Douche From Brooklyn
6. Angels in America II

Things are a bit messy now, after the move. I've got lots of little things to fix and tweak so for a few days things will be in disarray. Such is life. Truth be told, I'm actually sort of enjoying having no content on the site. It feels like a huge weight as been lifted from my shoulders.

The main feed is working but it's Atom 1.0, so some feed readers probably aren't showing it correctly. You should upgrade, not just for me but because Atom 1.0 is now the standard and it's good to have the latest thing, blah, blah, why am I trying to convince you? I'm not sure.

My replacement 5g iPod shipped today, as soon as I get it we'll make iPod video formats of our short films for everyone.

Hold tight, pal.

This is a new version of Maniacal Rage, built in Ruby on Rails. The old stuff is gone (well, technically, it's still available in the graveyard—look there if you want to). Things are about 95% simpler. There is no archives page. There are no monthly archives. You can find things by tag or by permalink, or by searching. Find all those options in the small information area on each page (you can get to it quickly by clicking the site's title up there).

You'll need to update your feed subscriptions, sorry. See below for new addresses (or use the auto-detected link in your browser [most have this now]).

There are no comments yet. They might come back, I don't know. For now, let's do it old school and you use the email link on the page to send me any feedback you have. I'll respond, probably.

Yeah.