Ahab had his whale.
Quixote had his windmills.
I have a content management system.
But I will finish mine. 

A year ago, this was a quixotic task; something to be talked about in the realm of what-if with Jeff on a trip to Birmingham.  A movie—one or another—after all, we see many.

"What if," he said, after listening to me go on for quite some time, "you wrote something yourself?  Have you given that any thought?"

We all have holes in our psyche to fill, you see. Holes that sometimes we talk about, and holes that sometimes announce their presence because we can't (or won't) bear to mention them. Sometimes, given the fortuitous combination of personality and circumstance, another person comes along. Another person with holes in their life. Given the right time of day and phase of the moon (or kindly guiding force, depending on how your world works) their emptiness lines up with yours.Sometimes the holes of one cancel out the holes of another, forming a stronger fabric.

Given that mySQL and I have decided that we are each equally stupid (link), maybe I should stop both coding and talking about coding and do something else for a change.

Self, to Brad: Oh yeah, massive ugly brain death today. I can't even get stuff that WORKS on the command line to work in PHP. So much for my soaring glorious code-fu of yesterday.

Brad, to self: My troubleshooting suggestion: go read a book or watch a movie. Or pet your cats. :)

Must you all be so obnoxiously right all the time? It's really annoying…

I had two code-related goals today: get the database-backup page working properly and set up the edit-yourself page so that when you change your own password, an email is automatically fired out to the address on record.

"It is—absurd—I know—but what other—explanation—is there?"
        —Dr. Daniel Schreber, Dark City

A man wakes up in a bathtub. Gingerly, he touches his face; there is blood on it. His? Or someone else's? The phone rings, and a stranger's voice crackles through the line: "You are confused. You have lost your memory." The line is suddenly disconnected…and there is a body of a dead woman in the living room. A body whose death appears to be of his causing, and whose murder he has no remembrance of.

If you've ever had any doubts about the varied and magnificent species that is Homo sapiens, might I suggest you head to your nearest movie theater? There, even the most casual of viewer can meet many of our species' most colorful and interesting specimens…

…and want to kill them all.Some anthropological notes from our previous expeditions follow. Some of these breeds are flighty, rarely seen, and must be observed with the greatest of care.

Captain and Mrs. Obvious

Ingredients:

1 Star Trek:TNG apéritif
2 fingers Oban
1 (each) chaser Buffy and Notting Hill

Result: one very amusing evening. Day Three of vacation for the worn-out engineer, in fact. By 9:30, Jeff was laughing at all of my jokes, not just the funny ones.We've gotten a little spoiled in the past few weeks; our exposure to TV commercials is fairly limited now that we have a TiVo to speed through them. Tonight we picked up on the tail end of Notting Hill, and had no buffer to zap through commercials.

So he (see Oban) and I (see mental tiredness from finishing new cat.net skin) watched commercials, and made fun of them with the best middle-of-the-evening gusto we could muster.

Until we got to the inexplicable commercial, that is. Seemingly unconnected images flashed by. It took us a few seconds before we both realized that every shot was zeroing in on the hindquarters of the people we were watching.

"What is this, a butt commercial?"

"No idea."