Category: Personal

Today was such a particular day, a particular mood. We got up to find, nicely enough, that the clocks had gone back an hour, so that extra lay-in wasn’t as long as we thought. Stepped outside onto the patio and was enveloped by the heat and something else: the smell of smoke. Those two, combined with the golden hazy sunshine took me back in a Proustian moment to Japan 1995. I realised only today that a majority of my time in Japan was under a cloud of perpetual smoke.
Then I felt a bit strange, because while I was off in madeline-biscuit land, I was actually inhaling the remains of somebody’s Rancho Cucamonga/Lake Piru house.
Tonight I took part in a press conference for Michael Moore’s visit to Santa Barbara. The man filled the Arlington to the bursting point. He came late to the pre-show green room conf, but was a gracious guest, though the answers he gave to the questions mostly turned up in his lecture, line for line, joke for joke. The only thing he didn’t use was a little sneak preview of his upcoming 2004 film, “Fahrenheit 911”: I asked him about black box voting, and though he did later tell the audience about Diebold–eliciting a huge gasp from them (I guess this story is not mainstream enough yet)–he told the press that in the upcoming film, he visits the house of Diebold’s CEO.
I’m possibly going to write this up as a news feature for the Voice. We’ll see.
Finally, the air is cool and crisp tonight and is making a refreshing atmosphere for late night typing. I’m in the zone, baby! I’m ready to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Well, I ain’t been to London to visit the queen, I tell ya that. Actually, I’ve been busy writing as usual, but also switching providers (then servers). At the end of September, I was furiously trying to get some writing in on a Friday, trying to make deadline, and that’s exactly when my email went down for the fourth time in a month, all due to my former provider, who shall remain nameless.
I need stable email to do my job, and after another visit to their online help service, where the befuddled tech support guy apologized but said “It’s a big problem, lots of people have been complaining.” It was then I called my good friend Jeff and had him remind me of the success with his most recent provider (who shall also remain nameless in this traditional period, just because I don’t want to jinx it.) So I moved.
Moving was a bit of a hassle, primarily because I didn’t have a whole day to devote to it, and so had to do a little bit here and there. Meanwhile, all my blogs backed up. You will probably see a whole bunch of entries soon. I just sorted out Blogger too, so hopefully everything will be ready soon.
Moving providers also hopefully means I can do a bit more complex web design, including putting up all my writing in a searchable and updatable database, and updating and reconstructing the Konishi discography. Stay tuned.

Well, I’ve nearly got all the archives up and running, thanks in part to Blogger themselves, who had to fix their code, which wants to dump all archives outside the folder it needs to be in. This front page may be the last one to be fixed.
I also have added BlogOut comments to all entries. Now you can finally praise or harass me–the choice is yours! I am looking into adding a stats tracker for all pages, but for now, until I can figure out why I can’t sign in to my virtual server, that’s on hold.
Last job: fixing the CSS so blockquotes don’t come in all big ‘n’ funky.

You may have noticed a few things changing around the blogs on this site. If not, I’ll point them out anyway. Each blog will have its appropriate links: Spires will feature political links, Stone Cold Pimpin’ will feature links to other blogs of note, including my friends, Recordshelf will have music links, and so on.
I’m also getting all the archives in place, setting up talkbacks and counters for all, and will be throwing out the links page (for obvious reasons). Lastly, I want to get the “writing” page up and running, getting all my writing up online. If only I made enough money from said writing where I could pay someone else to do it!
Stay tuned for changes and possible news of me investigating the white slavery underground, where I may discover some cheap temp workers.

I experienced a mini-blackout of my own this past weekend, when on Friday evening my email and web page packed up. It was too late to call my provider, so I had to do so Saturday morning. I discovered that I hadn’t renewed www.tedmills.com. But why hadn’t I been informed? Apparently, my provider had been sending me emails, but at my old domain address. Baka. The mistake was rectified, but I had to wait nearly 24 hours to use email again. Difference: I seem to have been dropped from several mailing lists, I guess because the mailbot kept getting bounced back mails. Crapola.

Tonight I hung out with Ari Rosenzweig and his crew at my favorite Japanese restaurant Edomasa. Not only did I write the article on Ari’s company for the News-Press, but I wrote a review of their Thursday night performance for the same paper. It’s exceedingly rare that I get to meet the artists that I review, but Ari had many nice things to say about my writing, all of which I’m too modest to repeat here.

I’m more than happy to feed these hungry people who have been in America for over a week and have yet to find the sushi they crave. Sushi, man? They’re mad for it, ‘as it ‘appens. Tagging along was fellow performer Fernanda, and their lighting guy Michael, who I hadn’t met before as, well, he’d been in a booth working on lights. While eating we talked about…food! And some of my travels in Asia…and more food! I like people who like food, yes indeed. And beer.

Talking about food, and because Ari and co. are from Denmark, I should have mentioned my love of Havarti cheese. Mmmm, Havarti.

On Thursday night, some loonball (rumor has it a disgruntled white-trash ex-tenant) set fire to the clubhouse/swimming pool/billiard room of my mom’s mobile home park. Who knows if the woman wanted to burn down the whole place, or just cause some inconvenience, but she managed to destroy the whole building.

I spent many a day here in my 20s, having a swim, relaxing in the jacuzzi, and sometimes bringing girls over to see what they looked like in bikinis. So yes, happy days there. Who knows how long it will take for the place to be rebuilt. Just in time for summer! I went down on Friday afternoon to have a look and took these snaps. The entire area smelled like Kragen’s Auto Parts.

Phew. After much futzing with the intricacies of Data Rescue X, I was able to pull everything off the damaged drive I needed. I think the corruption of the MDB occurred because of some event back in August 2001, as I had a lot of mysterious ghost files from that time popping up in duplicate or triplicate (my first attempt at rescuing data garnered me 6.6 GB of files from a 3.1GB HD that was only 1.3GB full). I then used Disk Format in OSX, which allowed me to erase the volume and install a OS9 driver. That done, I used a trial version of Prosoft’s Data Backup to shift all the rescued files over.
I punched my fist in the air like a monkey in a too-tight flightsuit when I booted up off the new disk and the happy Mac face came up, then loaded, then Entourage loaded up where I had left off. Nice. A few minor things don’t work–I lost registration codes for some third party software, and some of my aliases don’t go to where they should–but it’s as if nothing happened. Of course, I just lost a day of work, so time did pass. On the other hand, I didn’t have to take it to the shop to get it fixed. Phew.

As you may know if you’ve visited Jon’s site recently, the durned fool has upped and graduated from CalArts. And I was there to videotape it all! The best moment I will share with you. CalArts graduations are unlike any other. Being artists, there are no cap’n’gowns, no Pomp ‘n’ Circumstance. There is, however, a lot of weirdness. Take for example the goings on of this fellow right here. I don’t know him, by the way.

Senator, is that you?
I’ve had some disturbing search queries find my site in the last few days. Here are two:
“Man boy masturbate technique”
“my blog masturbated ass”
I don’t want to know what these Internet users look like.