Fill me with this moment of Zen, but not Zen.

Britney is an overpaid stripper.

There, I said it too. Happy now?

Grind me into the nothingness from whence I came. That which words cannot express.

When does this dream end?

This afternoon, I got into the Waking Life special features. Drool at the 20 minute demo by the guy who wrote the animation software. I watched the text commentary track, in which supplementary bits of stuff, suggested reading, info about many of the people/characters, and additional notes on the philosophy were scattered throughout the film in a subtitle layer. Total brain overload.

As planned, I watched the 2 hour X Files finale. Extra sappy. Extra crispy. (The latter, referring, of course, to our long beloved chain-smoking friend. Oops, did I pull a lone gunmen there? Sorry. The pizza I was eating was crispy. Yeah, that's it.) The former, referring, in case it wasn't ridiculously obvious, to the lovesick couple known as Mulder and Scully. Awwwww.

In some ways, it reminded me a lot of the Seinfeld series finale, especially during the first hour.

Ahem, did I say the X Files was "sappy"? They ain't got nothin in that dept compared the shit I'm listening to now.

Yeah, you just keep on "trying" there, Brit. We pervs will keep on watching. lol.

Shit. Ever get to the point where you just don't give a fuck about anything at all anymore? Or even if you do care, you want to make as if you don't? In a feel-good way, as opposed to a feel-like-shit way (both are possible). Life is such a goddamn joke, that sometimes you just have to laugh at it. Hilariously.

I find myself in one of those almost-holy moments right now.

Your entire life is a fabrication. Ponder that for a moment.

...

Well, well, well... So Rage has finally been pronounced semi-officially dead. Assuming this is the case, it is indeed the end of an era, and all that.

About the bandwidth/hardware bill for the possibility of keeping rage alive. Well, I did say I would be willing to pay something to keep it going. It's nice to have around. It's a convenience, as well as providing a central "location" for our virtual community to gravitate around, and that's worth paying for. Exactly how much I would be willing (or able) to pay is something I haven't deeply considered. How much, in hard dollars, is it worth to have around? Where is the limit? Similar to the cable tv issue, I'm not totally certain. Nor is it clear at this point how much it would cost to keep it going.

Assuming the bill is too much, I could envision adapting to a world where former festing.org content is distributed among the various hosts. A change? Certainly. It could also be an opportunity to expand our knowledge and experience, developing, learning, and furthering the technologies of distributed content sharing amidst dispersed hosts. It might even be fun. (That is, after all, what this whole "content" thing is about in the first place, right?)

There is another possibility that comes to mind, although I am not terribly eager to pursue it. I have access to bandwidth (and maybe even a bit of spare hardware) at work. Should the need arise, I could possibly pull a few strings to get a server up on the company's T1.

The reason that I am not eager to go this route, prefering alternatives if any are available, is that I am generally a strong believer in the separation of powers principle. Work is work. Personal shit is personal shit. Best not to blur the two together too much. There are a plethora of reasons for this; some obvious, some not so obvious.

The most immediately apparent reason for getting paychecks, and internet access / hosting from separate sources is that in the unfortunate event that one disappears, the other is not put in immediate jeopardy. That's just common sense.

Also, the treacherous legal landscape of ambiguities in modern intellectual property law is not a place I want to venture near. The code and content I write for this website are done on my own time, using my own hardware (or that of friends, ala rage), and are copyrighted by me. Mine. To publish and license as I see fit. No question.

But if I start using company hardware / bandwidth, the picture is no longer quite as clear. Even if I continue to only work on the site after-hours, does the fact that it is put on a company server (or is served through company lines) make it a company project, hence no longer mine? IANAL. I don't know. Though I have generally come to trust and hold in high regard the people I work with and for, the same might not be said a year from now if some ungodly merger were to occur (or who knows what else). Best to stay away from the possibility of such questions.

Plus, there's the whole bag of worms about offending the easily offended. If I write something that somebody doesn't like, for whatever reason -- political, sexual, religous, you name it, then any number of possible Bad Things could happen. If wind gets around that all this non-politically correct garbage is being broadcast from company property, it then becomes a company problem, which then becomes a problem for my work life, etc etc. So, let's not go there.

Yes, I may be a bit paranoid. Sometimes, that's healthy.

Well, I didn't mean for this to turn into a night-long dissertation on the importance of keeping work and play separate. We were talking about rage, or the lack thereof.

I guess for the near future plans, I ought to get the Content Collective up and running on Argo (probably won't happen tonight, since that's a bit more involved than the Lounge.) Also, I'd like to switch to using the Content Solutions Chatter archive database for the right column. Maybe merge it Argo's little mini-chatter clone. Not certain how we're going to coordinate it across multiple web site hosts for the future. Maybe that would be something to discuss in mass irc tomorrow night.

Well, it's getting to be my bedtime. Despite all the naps I've been taking throughout the day, I need some sleep for tomorrow. So that will conclude my thought for the night.

P.S. Correction: Paragraph 2. Delete the word "overpaid" from the sentence (and correct the preceding article as grammatically necessary). She be hot as hell, worth a million bucks, and ya'll know it, admit it or no. That's that. Over and out.