At Pobox, I met this guy Thomas Thurman. One day Dieter gave me a link to a funny little page on his site, where I saw a Gnusto link in his sidebar. Gnusto is a few things. First and foremost, it’s a spell in the Zork universe; it makes things glow. Beyond that, it’s a Mozilla extension that lets you play Infocom (Z-Machine) games in your browser. I never really used Gnusto; I’d tried the first few releases, which were very, very experimental, and went back to Frotz. Still, it was neat.

I meant to write this yesterday, and to write something more interesting today. Maybe I’ll catch up tomorrow.

I’m setting up a little cross-program data validation. Program A does a little validation of some data which it will pass to Program B, which wants to be very strict. Since I don’t really care about the data, even once it’s in Program B, I’m trying to make Program B relax a little bit.

This entry has nothing to do with the fact that the button on my boxers is too small for the buttonhole and should be replaced.

Tonight, at the fireworks, a kid sat next to me on the wall by Town Hall. He was about nine, and his mother was with him. Shortly before the fireworks began, he asked, “Why do we celebrate the fourth of July?”

On Saturday Gloria, Phil, Walt, Geoff, and I met up at Waffle House around eight o’clock and had some breakfast. Afterward, the men headed up toward Canada, and Gloria headed back to keep the home fires burning.

Gloria, John C., and I just saw Land of the Dead. It was good.

yellow bulldozer
hides behind the toolshed
like a smiling child

My office has been a big mess, especially since all my things from my IQE office invaded it. I kept meaning to clean it, and finally I put it on my To Do list. I put it off for a few days, but the shame of writing the same thing over and over on my daily list finally caught up with me and I started cleaning up. So far, in cleaning out some Really Old boxes from the shelf in the office closet, I have found the following things:

TorgoX has a great RSS feed for Arts and Letters Daily. Not too long ago, they posted an interesting article on the fate of formalism in English poetry. So many current poets are rushing into free verse without learning the received forms that they never master the techniques that formalism tries to perfect.