Now, inline images have always been a problem. What if the link doesn’t exist anymore? Well, I must maintain them in a proper place, then! I suspect that will be on the server itself. IE, the link will have to be local. Yessiree. So, let’s give it a whirl.

Now! Isn’t that lovely? I’ll find out the answer to that question in a few moments.

The simplest solution has now been implemented. Now I am off to gnash my teeth during my dreams.

Christian, in his infinite wisdom and silliness, typed the following to me on some sort of chat mechanism. The mechanism itself involves a type of grease-stained rodent not found in these parts any longer. In fact, all of the rodents are gone. One day, no one could find one. I’m surprised the mechanism survives and is still in working condition this evening. I mourn the loss of the rodentia.

BUT … Christian, in his infinite wisdom and silliness, typed the following to me:

My trust issues stem from my childhood, when my mother, or perhaps father, would suspend me for hours upside down with goggles in an aquarium filled with mildly carnivorous fish. One nostril was closed, while the other was “sealed” around a straw through which I breathed. The straw was just short enough so that if I relaxed my entire body it would become submerged. Then my mother/father/community would take turns flashing cards though the glass, with various words and phrases upon them, such as “mother”, “state”, “girlfriend”, “tuna”, and so on and so forth…

I’ll treat this as some sort of adolescent allegory. These happenings begin long before adolescence, however. They did for me, anyway. I suspect they did for Christian, as well. Brainwashing … I never heard that term until much later. I sat on a pew at church for many years. That church was the sort of aquarium that Christian is writing about.

The semi-carniverous fish are the thoughts vomited violently from the pulpit onto the congregation. Keeping stiff is my concentration. The congregation must not be left to their own thoughts. Were they to relax, the straw would dip beneath the surface. A nasty shock awaits when one’s breathing apparatus is occluded. I may have let the straw slip below a number of times. I probably received that nasty shock. My attention surely snapped back to the pulpit. Lapping up the vomit and chewing on its chunks was the only proper way.

The aquarium became more complex in high school. The impenetrable walls were the authority figures. Teachers were translucent enough to flash words and phrases at me. I had to mirror them. Otherwise, the fish were told to feast on my face. I had pock marks galore. Blood did not clot easily in the warm water, but flowed freely and further obscured the translucence of the maestras. My mistakes trebled. The feeding began once again. Finally, I was nothing but a fleshless skull.

That is me today.

I have just rewritten the script which slurps up new blog entries. This time, instead of whatever the first pattern was I used (lack of pattern at all - ie, haphazard?) or the prototype pattern, I have opted for the elegance of the module pattern.

Have I tested it?

No.

Is this entry part of the test?

Yes.

So, thirty or so minutes later, I have completed this so-called module pattern. The code can be seen here.

(here)

It is high time to begin translating the radiotracking software from Ruby on Rails to Sails (node.js). The funnel of the evening is sucking me towards sleep, though it is still early. Perhaps instead of spending my remaining waking hours peering around sagging eyelids and attempting to code, I’ll scoop out the innards of my sinuses, cartilage and all, puree it with olive oil, avocado and cashews, and attempt to feed it intravenously to the neighbourhood calico.

Pink kolmteist

A knife has sliced that blue dome and I watch the rift slowly heal.

Were I Shambal, which greatfully I am not, I’d sit in a bare room thinking. I’ve just started writing and I’ve already lied. The room is not completely bare. A low table sits off-center. A rumpled, stained, blue-white blanket is draped over one corner, splaying also about the floor. A dirty cushin or two or three lie about. Perhaps more are under the blanket.

I’ve always been amazed at the lengths he goes to to prove his asceticism. One would think that such a lifestyle properly taken on denied the possibilty of proving any appearances. The dim fire of ego still burns, I suppose.

The letter I received yesterday morning contained the quoted words above. I call it a letter because part of me pines for correspondence. I am definitely no ascetic. It was a mere note. Two scribbled lines. The break was between blue and dome. It was no surprise. Shambal has been babbling on for weeks about the sky cracking and letting in what he calls fumes from what he calls the mantle. I’m not convinced at his ravings. No one is.

Dopamine, my sphincter - the lengths you’ll go to rationalize your actions would amaze even Natascha.

Before I lay down on my wine-soiled mattress last night and closed my eyes and drifted into coma state, I wrote my reply to Shambal. I try to keep my replies cryptic. Sometimes I feel like it is a sort of competition. Who can out-crypt whom?

If you are wondering who Natascha is, I’ll elaborate for a few lines before my morning refill. I always felt deep pain and emptiness when I was around her. The fact that I’ve not had my refill yet may interfere with proper memories, however. Still, there was something. A gap, maybe? No, not in my memory, but in my feelings when she was around. When she was absent - as she always is now - I drew childish cartoons on one of my four tables with the chalks I kept around. I had blue, orange, green and white. They are used up now. Maybe that is why she is never around anymore.

All of my tabletops are bare of any covering. Sure, tins and metallic cups litter them, but most of the bark is exposed. All that remains of my cartoons are strange smudges in combinations of those colours. Now I cannot even concretely recall what it was I drew. Surely they had something to do with her. Maybe a caricature of her face or of one of her breasts or the discolouration on the inside of her right thigh. I fear she will be completely gone when even the smudges become a wash of nothingness.

My memory is poor enough as it is.

The simmering broth in the cauldron exhales the wafting fragrance of your woman’s bones and hide.

I sent my note off by courier in the morning yesterday.

This reply came almost immediately. I say immediately because time becomes transparent when memory has nothing to register. When spots or windows of this sort occur, I just assume nothing of interest happened.

The prototype version of blog_to_mongo is not grabbing topics, arranging them, finding their ids, and scrunching them into the topic_ids array of the entry in MongoDB. We’ll see if it is now and revisit this post shortly.

Excellent! I’ll consider this bug closed. Speaking of which, I need real bug tracking for these projects. I’ll defer to github, I guess.

(github)

My mothers insanity seethes about the house. It crawls and infests every nook and can of jellied cranberry sauce. Pleasant, it is not. She stood in the doorway of this bedroom at nigh nine o’clock this morning fuming.

This is why you have to live in the same place as us, Bob! I need help! He [Dad] can’t remember anything. He’s lost his mind. It is making me crazy.

Well, Mom, you already are crazy.

As I showered, I pondered what she said and her intentions behind it. My conclusion was as it always has been since I was a child. My mother seeks to imprison me. A cage it is, son! It is her unfaltering method. It is also the reason that Ben visits so rarely. Well, besides the fact that this is Seminole. (He once cited the place as a reason for his infrequent visits.) Given my mother’s way, I’d be living in West Texas, bereft of intellectual stimuli, rotting. Of course, she would not take into consideration (the conditional was not needed there) my mental state, but only hers. I once told her she was very selfish. I do not retract that statement.

I don’t blame it on her aging.

I followed up (unknowingly, at the time) on this morning encounter with a conversation with my father. Mom had gone to the doctor. Ostensibly, she has a bladder infection. I must admit it could have contributed to her mood.

Dad is very rational and down to earth when she is not around. Perhaps this is because the seething insanity is kept at bay. Or at least it is diluted, for I feel some remains in the woodwork, in the bricks and in the furniture and carpet even when she is away. It will remain even after she is in her grave. She may well have poisoned this place.

As an aside, I am reminded of what Christian has told me about his mother and subsequently his family. Perhaps it was better for him that she died early on. It may have saved him at least a portion of his sanity.

My mother, according to my father, is, of course, worried about my imminent relocation to Spain. She tends to create hyperboles from simple stories in her head and project them onto her surroundings. The victims are my father and I. If she thinks I am going to stay here and get a menial job (or even a telecommuting development position) in order to save her sanity, she is truly out of her mind.

Don’t throw away your life, Bobbus. Just don’t do it.

As an experiment, I’m switching from the Module pattern of the Entry object to the Prototype pattern (and likewise to the prototype git branch). This humble post is a test. Soon, we shall see if it has worked.

And, by fumbling around with the methods (ie, sending the object this to each fucking one), I have made it work. Cute, eh?

I have arrived to my lonely but satisfactory hotel room from the atrium. It’s more of a dining room than atrium, really, but it serves both purposes, so I shall continue to call it atrium. In the atrium were victuals. I took them in my furry paws and ravenously filled my gaping maw. It was, also, satisfactory. I now sip a glass of red wine.

The pain in my chest has receded. I only thought about possibilities briefly before falling asleep last night. Surely, I could have died yesterday. The vehicle slammed into the jersey barrier at approximately 45 mph. My parents tell me again and again that I should thank the Lord for my survival, for my health, for my lack of mangled limbs. I thank the seat belt and air bag, instead. Yes, very mundane and unspiritual of me. Ah well. I am a cunt.

Furthermore, such experiences are what I’ve read as life changing events. I feel very little has changed besides the fact that I cannot propel myself around in a large blunt object. Perhaps the whole life flashing before one’s eyes and such is a media-made spectacle. Or pseudo-spectacle. Or spectacle-to-be. Something of the sort. I am calm. There is no need to panic.

The sense of displacement has also receded. My life is simply within another transition. My whole life is a transition. Well, I am living within a transition between transitions, then. A meta-transition. Soon (I use that term loosely), I’ll be again in Seminole, where I shall resume routines that always entrench me whilst there. I don’t mind. They spawn creativity. It is a phase of narrow transition. I say narrow because the path of the transition is quite one-dimensional. When one has routines, and usually strict ones, then this is the case. Again, I don’t mind. It is, after all, only a transition.

The next transition, one which is more wide and more full of the unknown, comes afterwards.

I chatted with Christian briefly on google+, outlining my experiences over the last two days. The conclusion was this:

(08:11:34 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: I bought two jars of fresh honey in nashville.

(08:11:40 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: They were in the passengers’ seat.

(08:11:46 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: They survived unscathed.

(08:12:18 PM) christián neumann: hahaha

(08:12:28 PM) christián neumann: this will make it into your novel for sure

(08:12:34 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: Yes.

(08:12:48 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: Though I omitted the honey from my journal entry.

(08:12:53 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: I’ll put them in the next ones.

(08:13:02 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: The fraternal twins that survived.

(08:13:03 PM) christián neumann: you should not leave this detail out!

(08:13:15 PM) christián neumann: as it was your only reason for retuning to theusfuckinga

(08:13:23 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: yes!

(08:13:28 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: This moment!

(08:13:32 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: It was the reason.

(08:13:34 PM) inhortte@gmail.com/A802C6D3: I like it.

(08:13:42 PM) christián neumann: of courrrrrrse

(08:15:18 PM) christián neumann: + the event, + the twin honey…

I have arrived to my lonely but satisfactory hotel room from the atrium. It’s more of a dining room than atrium, really, but it serves both purposes, so I shall continue to call it atrium. In the atrium were victuals. I took them in my furry paws and ravenously filled my gaping maw. It was, also, satisfactory. I now sip a glass of red wine.

The pain in my chest has receded. I only thought about possibilities briefly before falling asleep last night. Surely, I could have died yesterday. The vehicle slammed into the jersey barrier at approximately 45 mph. My parents tell me again and again that I should thank the Lord for my survival, for my health, for my lack of mangled limbs. I thank the seat belt and air bag, instead. Yes, very mundane and unspiritual of me. Ah well. I am a cunt.

Furthermore, such experiences are what I’ve read as life changing events. I feel very little has changed besides the fact that I cannot propel myself around in a large blunt object. Perhaps the whole life flashing before one’s eyes and such is a media-made spectacle. Or pseudo-spectacle. Or spectacle-to-be. Something of the sort. I am calm. There is no need to panic.

The sense of displacement has also receded. My life is simply within another transition. My whole life is a transition. Well, I am living within a transition between transitions, then. A meta-transition. Soon (I use that term loosely), I’ll be again in Seminole, where I shall resume routines that always entrench me whilst there. I don’t mind. They spawn creativity. It is a phase of narrow transition. I say narrow because the path of the transition is quite one-dimensional. When one has routines, and usually strict ones, then this is the case. Again, I don’t mind. It is, after all, only a transition.

The next transition, one which is more wide and more full of the unknown, comes afterwards.

I chatted with Christian briefly on google+, outlining my experiences over the last two days. The conclusion was this:

(08:11:34 PM) inhortte: I bought two jars of fresh honey in nashville.

(08:11:40 PM) inhortte: They were in the passengers’ seat.

(08:11:46 PM) inhortte: They survived unscathed.

(08:12:18 PM) christián neumann: hahaha

(08:12:28 PM) christián neumann: this will make it into your novel for sure

(08:12:34 PM) inhortte: Yes.

(08:12:48 PM) inhortte: Though I omitted the honey from my journal entry.

(08:12:53 PM) inhortte: I’ll put them in the next ones.

(08:13:02 PM) inhortte: The fraternal twins that survived.

(08:13:03 PM) christián neumann: you should not leave this detail out!

(08:13:15 PM) christián neumann: as it was your only reason for retuning to theusfuckinga

(08:13:23 PM) inhortte: yes!

(08:13:28 PM) inhortte: This moment!

(08:13:32 PM) inhortte: It was the reason.

(08:13:34 PM) inhortte: I like it.

(08:13:42 PM) christián neumann: of courrrrrrse

(08:15:18 PM) christián neumann: + the event, + the twin honey…

I am displaced into Little Rock, Arkansas. My current place of residence is not unpleasant. The pain in my chest is, however.

I left Lisa’s this morning a little before eight. I was eager to get back on the road. The road has always beckoned, be it by air, land (in this case, my truck) or thought (unfortunately the most common case). I enjoyed the drive. It was freedom. I felt alive. I crossed Tenessee and listened to Amarok. I was momentarily brought back to 2006. It always amazes me how, though I don’t know how the piece of music progresses consciously, my unconscious mind always knows beforehand where the music shall lead. It was impressed there long ago, like how the movements on the neck of a cello are impressed on its player.

A program on NPR talked about similar ideas.

I lost control of my truck on a bridge on I-40 outside of Little Rock. That is why I am in this hotel. The front end of the vehicle is smashed. Tomorrow, I shall discover if it can be repaired. The airbag smashed into my chest with a lesser force than the truck smashing into the concrete barrier separating all things speeding over the ice from the railroad tracks below.

Last night, my lethargy broke at some point after 19.00, birthing a bit of creative thought concerning the martenblog and my problem with promises. At first, I believed the solution would be in the View. This turned out, eventually, as I bitterly experienced, to be incorrect, as I still could not access (much less manipulate) the data that arrived from mongo in the form of a PromiseArray. Ie, I still only got a blank array. Many solutions are proposed on stackoverflow, but none worked. I just installed a (questionably) new version of ember-data, so, initially, I’ll see where that goes.

• Understand promises and promise arrays.
• Manipulate pagelist from the client side (ember).
• Filter by topic.
• Make breakfast (with Lisa’s exceedingly expired eggs).
• Don’t die from above task.

I found a tidbit of very useful information just now: PromiseProxyMixin. The page has informed me that promises (and, I suppose, promise arrays) can be pending, settled, rejected and fulfilled. If the raw promise array is returned from the controller to the view, I can test whether it is pending, etc. Now, I must be able to modify the template dynamically when the promise is fulfilled. Oouh, baby.

(PromiseProxyMixin)

And I need to retrieve my laundry.

I discovered that I did not add soap the previous time I did laundry (yesterday), so I am redoing it. Fine, eh?

So, I have managed to access the promise array and create the pagination links on the client side. The next step is to make sure it refreshes every time the page is actually changed. Yes, sir.

Now for a shower.