metamonkey

It has been slowly dawning on me — as important, obvious things frequently do — that I have become disillusioned and bitter about much of what is hip and trendy on the Interwebs. Well, let me back up. I already KNEW that. I have shunned things that have become essentially standard, such as MySpace and Facebook, and I shun most new trends such as Twitter out of hand, without any serious consideration. What has just dawned on me is that I have accidentally become the Indie Rock Pete of the Internet.

Well, shit.

In an effort to break myself of this terrible holier-than-thou curse of an attitude, I’m going to ease myself Twitter. I don’t have any idea what it’s for, how it’s really supposed to be used, or what the big fucking deal is in general, but Goddammit I am going to try.

For my next trick, I’ll need a member from the audience to come on stage and try to help me get over my fear of managing social networks via “friending” in sites like Facebook. As a warning, those of you in the first three rows may get wet.

I’ve been playing around with Wesabe, one of the new “Web 2.0″ financial sites that have been popping up around the Internets lately. It’s possible that I’ve simply become senile at an early age, but I can’t seem to get myself worked up abut the privacy concerns. I’ve become pretty enamored with services that live in the cloud and don’t depend on a location or need to be backed up during system formats, and I don’t particularly care that they collect notes on how many people bought beer in my postal code in return. The risk of theft and fraud remains, I suppose, but the app makes it easier for me to notice if anything is amiss. Stay tuned for tales of woe and hysteria, I suppose.

At any rate, it’s pretty interesting. Their tagging system is a lot more flexible than previous money management apps I’ve used, and their integration of community features seems really smart. It also seems to be a pretty good learner when it comes to learning about your bank puke — the raw, nearly incomprehensible data your bank’s online services send you — and that shit is important to me.

Well, crap.

I had such nice plans. Plans about writing, and about this, and about that, and wakka wakka wakka. But like any such plans they are subject to the absence of my crippling tendency towards procrastination, and so they were thusly rent asunder. A tragedy, to be sure.

But like any other stubborn simian with a potential learning disorder, I have decided that if at first one does not succeed, then one should try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again. That last ‘try’ feels roughly about where I am right now.

I am repurposing the Rulezero site for a podcast project I am undertaking with those curs Paul and Lee. Our first real podcast should go up Wednesday sometime, but if you happen to visit sometime before then, you can catch a glimpse of our soon-to-be-secret abortive first actual attempt. (Update: Or, not.)

As some of you may know but probably don’t, I’ve always had a soft spot for radio and related items, so this all pleases me. Following sinking into that, a few more projects should follow, potentially even including ones that involve my hands on a keyboard of the non-musical variety.

If I haven’t spoken to you in awhile: I am here. I am well. And I hope the same is true for you.

Writing, at least for me, is subject to the forces of inertia. That is to say simply that bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, and I for one have been resting for far too long. I wish I had something more poetic to say, or at least something that might lessen the internal need I feel for apology, but nothing immediate springs to mind. Suffice to say that I am long overdue to start rolling this ball down the hill again.

Ironically, the writing here is just practice for the upcoming closure of this blog, though I assure you it’s to a constructive end. I originally split off metamonkey (or rather its predecessor, Fate & Entropy) so that I could keep personal affairs separate from what was to be my primary blog, twistedmonkey.net. As most of you know, the end result was two blogs that don’t get updated instead of one. There’s a number of different mental deficiencies on my part to blame for this, but the division in attention certainly didn’t help. Also, going forward I have some new projects I’d like to work on, and I worried the end result would be three or four blogs that didn’t get updated. It made more sense to me to have a single, sub-divided site, and so I’m going to be giving that a shot. Sometime in the coming weeks I’ll be archiving all the content on both this site and twistedmokey.net, and starting over with tabula rasa.

That’s the idea, anyway. I have a lot of ideas.

Anyway.

With relatively little fanfare, I have betrayed a lifetime of stubborn persistence and joined the Cult of Mac. Yes, it’s true: I’ve purchased a MacBook Pro. I had expected a slightly louder cacophony of “Ah ha!” cries from those whom I have spent so many years deriding, but in standard Mac snob fashion they were all merely politely thrilled to have me aboard. Their casual acceptance has only increased my loathing of their ilk.

Anyway, so far, so good. Contrary to what I’d been lead to believe by the scores of Mac switchers who had come before me, the entirety of the OS X experience is not a divine, transcendent experience. Several of the core applications have a few disappointingly feature poor facets, but these are thankfully made up for by a wealth of totally awesome (and free!) third-party apps. Now, I’m not kidding myself: I’m a gamer first and foremost, and I’m always going to have a PC as my primary desktop. That said, I experience physical anguish when I sit down at a box without Quicksilver now.

This is probably my least favorite thing I’ve ever written, but it’s also likely the biggest thing I’ve ever had published in terms of site name and readership (well, unless you count that one Guestspotting thing). Still… baby steps, right?

Hard to believe it’s been over a month since last I updated! But I can at least say it’s been a busy month.

Friday was my last day as a server jockey at the datacenter. Tomorrow morning I’m beginning a new position with Atlas Solutions, the technology arm of an advertising firm that is in the middle of a merger with Microsoft. The team I’ll be working for basically troubleshoots problems with the ad serving and reporting systems (I think). I’m pretty excited about the job, and going back to a 9-to-5 schedule where I can ride the bus again doesn’t suck, either.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about blogging, or rather I’ve been thinking a lot about the various projects I have kicking around in my head and how I can best organize things so that I actually have a chance of getting something done. I already have two blogs that I don’t update and I am interested project-wise in a third, so clearly something is going to have to give. Also of consideration is my dichotomous online identity. Where does Monkey end and Jon begin? When do I want to be one over the other and how do I separate the two?

I know that I am making an awful big deal out of want amounts to little more than a name. I guess I’m just concerned that in a world where employers can and do Google new hires, it’s important to think about the distinction given that the last thing I want to do is have to censor myself.

I hope everyone out there is well. Dear people I haven’t seen or spoken to in awhile: Let’s fix that!

I got this in the mail two weeks ago.

With so many of my friends graduating with multiple BS and masters degrees, there’s a part of me that still sees this as a small achievement. Still, it felt a lot better to hold in my hand than I’d have ever expected.

It’s a tired phrase, but I’ve come to feel as though writing for pleasure is actually very similar to riding a bicycle, indeed. It’s been awhile on both counts and while I may not have forgotten how, exactly, it is scary and accompanied by the feeling that I might break my neck in a crash and die.

I find reading MegaTokyo for any extended period to be an exercise in anger and frustration, but I am a sucker for taking ordinary terms and lacing them with hidden personal meaning, especially if it’s perverse. That is why I will now be referring to pornography as “reference material.” A special folder on my hard drive has already been renamed.

So I was driving down the freeway a few days ago on my way to work, minding my own business, when all of a sudden my rear passenger window violently shattered inward. I wish I could tell you why, but I’ve been unable to find any foreign objects inside my car (other than, you know, shards of glass), so the reason remains a complete mystery to me. I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading regarding the ARG surrounding the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album and so at first I wondered if I had been visited by The Presence, which is of course silly but remains an option I’m unwilling to rule out. Still, all I know right now is that it’s a giant pain in the ass that’s going to cost me $200 to replace. Thanks for nothing, Fate!

Ryan & Mande: I still haven’t gotten around to looking at your blogs, and I apologize. I’ve been working nutty hours… I think I’m at 43 right now and I’m only on my third and a half day of work. Remind me of this shit and I’ll try to get to it on Monday or Tuesday.

The following is a PSA that impacts almost nobody, but I’ll throw it out there update in lieu of a real update about how I am and what’s going on and all that other good stuff. After seven years of relatively faithful service, I’ve finally retired my old webserver and moved the Rulezero web services over to something younger, hotter, and with bigger tits. I have also picked up a tweed driving cap and will soon be purchasing a ridiculously expensive sports vehicle to complete the cycle of overcompensation.

In the meantime, I think everything is working, but it’s hard to be sure. I think I’ve cleared out most of the kinks, but if you see any errors on Rulezero or any of the member blogs, please send me an email.

In unrelated news:

• I graduated with my Associate of Science! Woo-h… you don’t care either, do you?
• I love Patrick Stewart.
• Come to think of it, I love Alannis Morissette, too.
• I’m only a short way into it, but David Allen’s Getting Things Done seems pretty amazing. His insights into how our minds tend to handle “things that have yet to be done” seem pretty spot on. It’s still early, but I can feel myself wanting to shift into these new systems for productivity. Very interesting.