About Me

Changes to Da Blog that also affect Da Web Site (and other musings)

Very few people who visit Da Blog appear to be going from there to my web site. In a related story, my sidebar has become rather cluttered.

Therefore, I’ve added a link to the web site to the right side and booted Da Counter to the bottom, since it’s the element of Da Blog you’re probably least interested in.

Have you noticed that I have a lot of rather short posts? And that I tend to talk a lot about Da Blog and my web site, and not about actual, substantial things? Seriously, Technorati says my most common tags are “blog news” and “web site news” followed by “my comments on the news”. Just shows how much I need you to help give Da Blog direction.

Of course, in a sense you could say I need direction.

This summer, for me, has become dominated by the Greatest Movies Project. I’ve been writing 1-2 entries a day and goofing off the rest of the day. I’ve gotten a bit better at writing entries on movies I haven’t seen as I’ve gone along. As I write this I have about 28 entries written, two more written in incomplete form, and some ideas on entries I haven’t written. Six or seven of the entries are, in my opinion, rather great – up to about one-fourth from about one-eighth a few days ago. Most of the entries are from 1953 and earlier; the rest pretty much is composed of films at the very beginning of the list. At a rate of two a day, I could finish in 36 days by myself. That would get me a ways into September, and I could probably start posting entries before I’d completely finished. I’d probably rather get them done a little quicker, though. I have one person lined up to help write entries but I’m still open to any other movie fans who want to lend their expertise. I may post a list of off-limits films later this week.

In early September I’ll be taking a trip to Los Angeles to visit my dad. At the pace I’m on, I would hit 50 entries right as the trip started. I’m hoping to hit 50 before then and 100 by the end of the trip. Then when I came back, most of the work would involve formatting it for the site.

I’ll have more on things I’m looking for when I post on the Project again later this week.

Some recent events – and what they mean for YOU

I recently had a minor adventure to get a cell phone and get it working.

Yesterday I went to an AT&T store and got a cell phone. It worked fine in the store and when I got home I was quick to try out all the features.

Well, the problem was, when I tried to make a call, it told me I could make “emergency calls only”. I had done nothing to wreck it and nothing I tried fixed it. So today it was back to the AT&T store (I went to one fairly near where I live but got referred to the one I originally went to), got a part changed, and now my phone is making calls.

And the end result is… my web site is now up.

The URL is morganwick.freehostia.com, for those who want to look at it. Yes, I did end up picking FreeHostia over other options including ZendURL.

The hosting poll is over; the project poll is ongoing, though it probably won’t be for long. As you can see, there’s not much on the site right now. Tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight, I’ll try to get something more substantial on there. A while back, in the late 90’s, I fiddled around a lot with HTML and I think I got fairly good at it, but you know what they say about how fast technology knowledge obsoletes, and now I’m completely lost with this newfangled CSS stuff. (I could create web pages with Microsoft Word, but I’d like to get some hot CSS action in to give all or most of my web pages a consistent look. Word would become nearly irrelevant at that point because it probably wouldn’t be able to figure out that I’m going to be shoehorning some prefab CSS in there.)

Also, I still need your input to help build The Best Web Site On The Internet. The generic topic poll will be going up soon. I may decide to stick with Bravenet for it, or I may decide to go someplace else. The 100 Greatest Movies project will probably be one of the first things put up, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be the first. Also, expect some various football-related things to go up over the course of the next month, mostly focused on Da Blog.

As always, if you have suggestions, vote or reply to this post!

I’m sickened by the incessant coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting story…

…but not because of the story itself.

Why is it that every time we have a story like this, we have to have non-stop 24/7 coverage of it? Why is it that news sources that have nothing to do with general news are covering it (and not even with a related angle)? Does it really matter, at least the way most news sources are covering it, to anyone outside the general Blacksburg area? Does it really deserve more than a single news story on a standard newscast and then move on? Could it be that, on some level, despite all we say about how “sickening” and “tragic” the story is, we actually enjoy listening to stories about it, that we take some sort of perverse pleasure in letting it distract us from our lives? Could it be that, on some level, we actually want to hear about tragedy? The ancient Greeks did spend much of their free time watching tragedies played out on the stage, and we do seem to value tragic plays and movies more than comedies!

On the other hand, we’re already getting plenty of people moaning about not being able to comprehend “what could drive someone to do something like this.” Would someone do me a favor and try to find out what would drive someone to do something like this? Because I have a feeling it would lead to some disconcerting conclusions about society, ourselves, American culture, the assumptions we make about people, and even the core of human nature.

Sigh… this never ends

99% of the time, I’m a – well, not nice guy, but certainly not an absolutely terrible one. 99% of the time, I go on with life just fine, doing work and my own things, and don’t really cross other people the way they sometimes cross me.

The remaining 1% of the time, though, seems to completely overwhelm the remaining 99%.

What is going on here? If college expects everyone to act absolutely perfect all the time, how is it even possible for anyone to leave high school not perfect? If high school and lower levels aren’t to make people perfect, and can easily shepherd imperfect people along past it, shouldn’t college recognize that and not assume that everyone is going to act perfect all the time?

Not as though either level should be in the business of teaching social mores, but if there are going to be people who are coming in without the requisite social mores then, at some level, there needs to be a class in social mores. If school is going to teach those things instead of academic topics, they should at least be upfront about it.

And if Asperger’s syndrome numbers are really on the rise, not just a result of better diagnoses (and maybe even if it is, since that would mean millions of people have been treated inappropiately to their reality), you need to be ready. Everyone needs to be ready.

What were my parents thinking when they didn’t indoctrinate me? Or brainwash me as the case may be? Never assume anyone is going to take the burden off your shoulders, or that anything is going to happen “naturally”.

Sometimes I’ll act out how I feel about certain people’s idiocy. But if it’s that extreme you’ve embarrassed yourself already. The chances aren’t any worse than it otherwise would, it just might have a little more punch.

I’m done ranting, but believe me, you haven’t heard the last of me…

Update on the below "Update"

I never did get around to writing up any sort of defense. I’m going to be leaving the Seattle University residence halls over the weekend and will likely not really bother much with Da Blog until the summer, because of restrictions on my Internet access.

About the only thing I’m certain to take on for Da Blog is a project that I’ll provide more details on before too long.

Update on my current situation

I’ve gotten into big trouble, which could be an understatement. I may be forced to move out of on-campus housing soon. I intend to write up an impassioned defense over the weekend and intend to post it on Da Blog after presenting it on Monday.

If I do get kicked out, it may hamper my ability to work on Da Blog at all.

Although the poll got more responses in one week than comments have produced over the entire time I’ve solicited for them to pick a blog topic or project to post, it still seemed pretty pathetic. In any event, right now I’m not really in the mood for trying to focus on Da Blog, so I won’t be putting up a more serious poll or really paying close attention to what people are saying until this blows over, whatever outcome it may have.

The random, venting, irrelevant to anything post you have to read

There are a lot of things I don’t take well. Imperfection is one of them. Brain-dead idiocy is another.

I don’t always react to such things, but if I’m already in a bad mood, I might. Generally speaking, if I lash out about it, it’s usually with a bunch of random finger gestures thrown vigorously in your direction.

If you feel threatened, don’t be. No matter how vigorous it gets, it almost never gets more extreme than that, and you’re in no danger if no one takes it to some really dumb extreme. Also, the mere act of doing that is a form of calming me down in many circumstances.

If it isn’t, though, and I don’t storm out of the room, shut up and don’t say anything that might make you look stupid. And don’t dare try and suggest you have a problem with it, that’ll just make me madder.

Because you shouldn’t have a problem with it. You shouldn’t have a problem with anything anyone does. I don’t believe there should be any one definition of “normal”, and I think people should be open-minded enough to accept anything that doesn’t kill them.

The original topic poll I refer to in various posts below is now closed with no resolution, so if the results of the new poll in the post immediately below raise too many problems with me, I’ll reopen it. Also, I’m modifying Da Blog to show 10 posts per page instead of 7, and I should be hitting 100 page views any minute now.

Alone, alone, alone…

You might think someone as abrasive as me wouldn’t last ten seconds with a roommate, and certainly I tried to get a room to myself when I signed up. But Seattle University has a bit of a crunch for space throughout the campus, and no matter how strong a case I might have had, I didn’t stand a chance. So I’ve had a roommate for the course of this year.

It’s gone fairly well, but the roommate just left Saturday. I don’t think I drove him away; I think there’s a lot of reassignment going on. For now, though, I have a room to myself.

Perhaps not all that interesting, but I do intend to add the latest updates in my own life to Da Blog when events warrant…

18 years of experience described in, what, an hour?

The other day I got an assignment from one of my teachers inviting me to submit a brief one-paragraph autobiography of sorts to introduce myself to the class.

My first thought: Great! A chance to plug Da Blog! For you see, at the time Da Blog still registered as having zero visitors happening by. (That seems to have changed this weekend, though. Congrats to all six of the visitors who have happened by since Friday! What led you here, though?)

As I do with almost everything, though, I procrastinated until this evening, planning on doing something I never got around to doing. As I sat down to write it, though, I realized that in my first post I presented to you a portrait of me frozen in time. I haven’t given the backstory behind my life that would add a palpable, possibly essential, dimension of context to what I say here. I gave you where I was on one day in December 2006, but not where I was in the eighteen and a half years before then.

So, then: a brief version of the story of my life.

I was born in Seattle… well, technically I was born in a suburb of Seattle, but my parents lived in Seattle so I lived in Seattle for my first five or so years of life. During this time we lived in a living space in the basement of another house. (It sounds more dirt-poor than it is. It was actually fully furnished and lit and everything.)

When I was five, my parents moved to Los Angeles and lived in an apartment in the Venice neighborhood (as in Venice Beach) south of Santa Monica. My dad, heretofore an aspiring stand-up comedian, got jobs as extras in TV shows (some episodes of Babylon 5) and movies (Forrest Gump). After a year, the market research firm my mom had worked at became desperate, and she moved back to the Seattle area, taking me with her. We lived with her parents just outside Issaquah, another Seattle suburb.

After another year my dad came back up as well, and we rented a house in the same neighborhood as the house we first lived in when I was born. I would have been about seven, so this would be in 1995. It was during this time that I first got a computer for full-time use (as opposed to mooching off ones in Mom’s office, just in time for Windows 95 to be on it. I quickly became addicted, especially after discovering the Internet.

It was also during this time that I took a stand against a teacher I really didn’t like by basically not doing anything all day at school. I finished up second grade being home-schooled by my dad. That summer our landlords decided to either sell the house or rent it to someone else (I forget which) and we had to move again, this time staying in Seattle but moving across the freeway. After having never lived in any house for more than a year since I was five, I would stay in this house all the way up to college, and my mom still lives there.

I was put in another school, but was taken out again after one or two months. In late November I was put in a special-ed room at yet another school and started riding in those small buses you probably have associated with special-ed at some time or another.

My dad, having had a taste of acting, directed and starred in a super-low budget film that looks like it was shot on a camcorder and not on film around 1998. Filmmaking has been his life’s calling since then, and he plans to move back to LA later this year. After getting rave reviews with his first film, he decided to make another film with a higher budget, planning to shoot some scenes in the high school I would ultimately attend early in my freshman year. That film has yet to move very far beyond the point it was then since then, and in 2006 he ultimately made another incredibly low-budget film. He has taken much ribbing from me about that movie, and it has become our family’s equivalent of the sitcom dad who always stakes fame and fortune on hitting the winning lottery ticket.

After elementary school I went to middle school, in a place right across the street from my preschool home, and at first spent basically all my time in the special ed room again. The effort to “mainstream” (the move to verb every unverbed word strikes again!) me began almost immediately, and by the end of sixth grade instead of having all but one period in the special ed room I was spending all but one period out of it, which would be the pattern throughout middle and high school.

Meanwhile my parents got divorced, which at first seemed like a divorce on paper only, but it eventually led to Dad moving out of the house. Mom got tired of the “Dilbert“-like course of business at the market research firm and started training for network certification. Once she was done with that, she took a job as a technical support worker at Seattle University, which had the added side effect of making tuition for me when it was time for me to go there absoultely free. Which, in turn, made it possible for me to even consider it in the first place. While waiting for the Ever-Absent Movie Contract, Dad took jobs as a cook, working at one area pizza place first as a delivery guy and then a pizzeria cook for many years, until last year, when he left to become a manager at another pizza place. (Why not the place he’d been working for for years? For the same reason Mom left the market research firm.)

After middle school I went to high school, and after high school I went to college, and I’m really skipping over a lot of things that happened along the way. I’m sure some of those things will trickle out over the course of Da Blog. For example, two of the five colleges I applied to were in LA, so I accompanied Dad on a trip down there in late 2005, which he spent trying to grease the movie wheels and I spent rediscovering the place I hadn’t been in for over a decade.

So, that’s my life. On an unrelated, and yet somehow not, note, expect me to have a lot of trouble ending blog posts, but hey…