I'm sorry this story is so long. I didn't have time to make it short."

-- Mark Twain --

Welcome Stranger! This is the page you want if it's your first time here.

Call me Marcus. I've stolen the name of a long dead Roman senator to use as my nom de net. Why? It's a long, but interesting story. You can read it here.

Rather than do the old obligatory intro, why don't I just point you to some articles that will serve the purpose? Sort of the MLD Sampler Pack...

I'd start with Origins of An Iconoclast. Then, try Pyramids, Epitaphs, and Apologies in Amber, which talks about why this site, parts of which started on scraps of paper twenty years ago, came about.

After that, depending on your inclinations, we have politics, religion, and the old standby, sex. No blog is compleat these days without the obilgatory discussion of the Middle East.

I lean toward the geeky side, so there are techy type entries every now and then. There's a bawdy skit I wrote for a party, and even a love poem. Well, it's more of a lust poem. :-) I promise not too much poetry - the web seems to have plenty of poetasters without me tossing my verse onto that malodorous heap. :-)

Of course, there are the typical rants, and personal musings.

There are several entries that are essentially photo-essays, mostly about fun stuff in the Houston area, like concerts, renfairs, and festivals.

Some defy categorization, and are an olio of all of the above.

The single most useful page is the Story Index page that will put you just one click away from all the entries, but you'll notice over there on the right a searchbox, and a calendar, if you'd like to navigate that way. The ten most recently added stories or comments will always be right below the calendar. I've not yet thought of anything to conduct a poll about, but I suppose I will, so the link stays there for now.

One thing that I've not put up is the obligatory link farm with 7,342 other blog sites on it. I suppose if I ever get horny to be famous, I'll have to...

Those folks down there on the right are my friends, alike in that they're all most interesting folk, but as different from each other as pepperoni and vanilla fudge.

There's a link at the bottom of each story for comments. Please use it.

I've tried to make it an eclectic, interesting mix of stuff. I do hope you'll enjoy it. If you do, please tell all your friends, and consider getting on the list to be notified when I add an entry. If you have a blog or journal, please drop me a mail and let me take a gander at yours.

It's only fair, you know. Don't you remember the game you played as a kid? I'll show you mine if you show me yours... :-)

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It's not going to be my normal practice to mention every little thing I do to tweak this site, but today is an exception.

In the last few weeks or so, I've tweaked the search function, and added some links to interesting blogs of my friends.

I also added a news feed from space.com. Dunno yet if I'm gonna keep it, but for now, there it is. I've not written much yet about space exploration, and our need as a species to get up off out lazy asses and out into the galaxy where we belong, but it's on my very long To-Do List, so there you have it.

I'm still struggling with the reeking M$ tool for embedding fonts, WEFT, which shoulda been called Whiff, as it stinks and misses. Hopefully someday I'll get it to work. As of now, it just crashes when I run it, and/or tells me my fonts, which work just fine in every app I use them in, are corrupt.

If anyone has had any luck with getting this steaming pile of code to work, let me know what the magic words are, OK? I've been wandering in the wasteland of the M$ Knowledge Base and the WEFT documentation for weeks now looking for clues, to no avail. You should be seeing this, in my dreams, anyway, with a font called "Graphos". Do me a favor, and go download it from somewhere. A quick google tells me you can get it from several places. I just picked a random one for you.

On a somewhat related note, if you wanna send me a screen shot of how you're seeing this site, that'd be OK with me, particularly if you have a Mac, as I don't have one to test it with. Send it here. I've pretty much coded the site for a 800x600 screen resolution, as it's text-intensive, and if I let the brower resize the table to fit a wider screen, the line lengths are so long as to make reading difficult. The eye loses it's place returning to the beginning of the next line. A truly logical language would alternate left-to-right with right-to-left characters, but it's waaay too late to start a crusade to fix that. I've set the typeface fairly large to increase readability, and tried to pick a fairly high contrast color scheme, but one that still doesn't have the high level of eye fatigue caused by the brightness of plain black text on a white background. I want you wandering around here for hours, dammit!

As you may have noticed, this site isn't about setting trends in design, flash stuff, and eye candy, but about writing. I'm trying to make the site easy to read, easy to navigate, and fast to load. Everything else is tied for last place. I do use pics, when they are part of the story.

Last night I added a feature that the stone cold ubergeeks at antville have mentioned implementing some day, but haven't had time for yet - an email alert system for when the site is updated. Join the list, and a bot'll send you an email when there is a significant new entry. This is a feature I love on the blogs I read, as I don't have to wander around seeing who's been writing, and who's been on vacation from the keyboard. I am a laaaaaazy dude.

This service was coded by, and courtesy of, my buddy Captain Napalm, who is, without a doubt, one of the smartest goddam ubergeeks I've ever met, and I've known quite a few in 20+ years of screwing around with these silicon beasties. Read a few of his more technical journal entries, and you'll see what I mean. This maniac wrote his own operating system in college when he got bored sitting around the computer science lab, where he was, of course, maintaining the school networks.

His operating code ethics are to write stuff that is clean, bug-free, fast, secure, and concise. As such, he tends to eschew more modern, resource intensive languages, in favor of old-fashioned stuff like C and assembler. His stuff runs like lightning. He's hosting a dozen or more websites on an old machine than most programmers would give to their nephew, that is, if they didn't really like the nephew.

Since he's already written the code, iffn you like this nifty feature, and you ask him real nice, he might let you have it for a song, I dunno, I haven't asked him. And if anyone out there needs the Ubergeek Code Warrior From Hell for a project, you owe it to yourself to contact him. I ain't lyin'.

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I try soooo hard, truly I do, to keep from returning time and time again to certain topics as a dog does to his vomit, but there seem to be two issues that I simply cannot resist reporting upon, even though I've stated several times that it is not my intent to have a news-oriented blog regurgitating headlines you might have otherwise missed..

The first would be the ramshackle crap that is Microsoft software, the continuing parade of security holes that make it the most dangerous code on the planet to run for the typical enduser, (their target market, of course) and that company's predatory business practices.

The second is the (backs away from keyboard, counts to ten, repeats several times, gives up, takes a long walk, then comes back) actions and character of William Jefferson Clinton, his spouse, lackeys, and apologists.

I am by no means a simple rabid right-wing dittohead. I've very little more respect, or should I say, very little less contempt, for the Republicans than the Democrats. (See A Plague On Both Their Houses for details if you like) but I feel that Clinton will go down in history as one of the sorriest, lying, dishonest, two-faced motherfuckers of a president in the history of the US, and that's saying something.

If/when they do Dante's Inferno as a first-class, modern, Hollywood film, I hope we see old Slick Willie down at the bottom of the pit getting his ass munched on by the Devil himself, that is, if the Devil could stand the taste. I dunno who'd be being punished more in that situation.

In fact, it depresses me a bit that I don't truly believe in hell, as that means he'll escape such a fate.

The inspiration for my diatribe today is this article in the New York Times. Representative snippets follow...

"The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said today that "damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex" in the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys."

What kind of high-school petty bullshit is that?

"The accounting office confirmed that $9,324 had been spent to repair or replace various items and to clean offices. That included $4,850 for 62 keyboards, $2,040 for 26 cellphones and $1,150 for professional cleaning."

This tidbit highlights not only the wonderful efficiency of our lovely federal government, but also the care with which they husband our tax dollars. Let's see, we spent $78.23 each to purchase and install keyboards?

The last time I bought some, it was at an auction, and I got eighteen of them, brand new in the box, Gateway branded surplus, for one freakin' dollar apiece. I don't even bother cleaning them. I spilled a beer on one a few months back, and just tossed the sumbitch and got another one out of the closet.

"In several instances, it appears, Clinton and Bush administration officials simply disagreed about the normal condition of federal offices. Bush officials said they had found offices full of trash, broken furniture and filthy carpets. Clinton administration officials insisted that the dirt and damage reflected normal wear and tear."

Well, what do you expext when the hillbillies are in the White House? I imagine Arkansas standards of cleanliness are a bit more lax than most of us would require. That $1150 for "professional cleaning" was most likely trying to get Buddy's dogshit stains out of the carpet, and scraping the splooge off the ceiling fans left there from the Going Out of Office Intern parties ol' Willie was having when he shoulda been paying attention to snuffing Osama.

I suggest from now on, when we get a new Commander-in-Chief, we make them put down a security deposit. I garan-dam-tee that no Little Rock landlord would be so stupid as not to.

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