I guess it’s not technically a relaunch if the quiz was never down, but it’s a good opportunity to, as they say, “take it again for the first time.” The images represent the fulfillment of the original vision I had for them over five years ago when the quiz launched, which was to be state-shaped cutouts of the state flag, rather than outlines that featured the flag in awkward partial locations.

An example, with my current state (one of the better images, if I do say so), is here:


You’re New Jersey!
You don’t just live in the suburbs, you define the culture of all Surburbia. You drive everywhere you go, love to eat at diners, and pretend to have a garden. While everyone knows that your house was built on a toxic waste dump, you do your best to hide this information and keep referring to those mythical gardens. Driving on a road without paying for it was a revolutionary experience you once had that you still think about all the time. You owe the Mafia so many favors that you’re thinking of renaming yourself Sicily.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve also added the full complement of merchandise available on the now-prodigious Cafe Press site, just in time for the holidays. So if there was ever an old design or description you were looking for on a shirt or a mug, now’s your chance.

And while you’re out and about looking at links and holiday cheer, there are some of you who might not know about my Mom’s latest sock doll project, Buttons and Socks. There’s some pretty neat stuff available there too, all hand-sewn by my very own mother. I mean, can you turn down a face like this?:

I thought not.

Now if I can only get the pumpkins down from this page and start writing again, I’ll really be in good shape!

Windows XP… it’s fine. But it’s got nothing on those older systems and is demonstrably worse in all ways not relating to processor speed or some underlying aspect of the hardware running it (which, frankly, has nothing to do with operating system). But you can’t run Windows 3.1 or DOS on a modern machine and expect it to run today’s software. Because instead of making sure Windows 3.1 was compatible with web browsing, they just replaced it with lousier versions of the system, so-called “upgrades”, culminating in the colossal disaster known as Vista.

I have often railed against CD’s, which are infinitely inferior to tapes. While CD’s are pretty much falling by the wayside in the face of pocket-sized infinite MP3 players, I maintain that the loss of sides of an album is one of the great failings of our modern musical world. It’s hard to argue with the infinite-players, I guess, but it certainly seems like a mix loses even more luster than it did when it became sideless by being marginalized to a “playlist”. It just doesn’t reflect the same craftsmanship.

Microsoft Works was always better than Microsoft Word – the view of the screen made infinitely more sense and a work one was writing could actually fill the whole screen. The toolbar was more intuitive. And I could go on and on. (Don’t even get me started on cell phones vs. landlines and the collapse of the telephone conversation – that’s a whole dissertation topic in itself and of course something with which I do not play ball.) The larger point is that in feeling a need to “upgrade” things, people most often screw them up. Whether they are too beholden to overpaid consultants or just feel like something isn’t fresh enough unless they keep tweaking it, they just futz with things until the charm that made them enjoyable in the first place is wholly eradicated.

If you’re wondering what all this is really about, I “upgraded” my WordPress account today. While the needling little exhortation to upgrade had been gracing my screen from about the third week after my initial installation (October 2007, as you may recall – hard to believe it’s only been two years in this format), I had found nothing compelling about the request until I read a nasty little article about worms today. WP basically tried to make the case that my blog would be overrun with malware and garbage if I failed to upgrade, then drew all these weird analogies to vitamins and surgery. It being almost 3 in the morning and me not having yet settled into my writing groove (I have a streak of over a week going, but tonight may break it), I was particularly susceptible to the idea of not having to mortgage days of my writing life salvaging 800 days worth of posts. I gave in.

I was an idiot. I should have known how much I would hate the new WP “upgrade” system, because I’ve already seen it at The Mep Report, the other place I blog from time to time. The look and feel of the interface is all wrong, too antiseptic, too institutional. It’s like blogging on a hospital wall. And now it’s what I’m doing. Right now. Blech.

I mean, it’s not like the old WP system was the greatest thing ever, but it at least had some color and contrast and an intuitive layout. This looks like an unending billboard for the random people who design add-ons to WordPress. In a hospital. A poorly designed hospital.

And there’s a running word count. Not a fan. I make a point of only checking my word counts on fiction after I’ve wrapped up for the night. The running count is like being forced to look at one’s watch every second of a passing class. It’s just too much awareness of exactly what’s going on. It breeds self-consciousness and competitiveness and even potentially bad writing because one is focused on the number and not the content. Yargh.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually, all of it, even the stupid word counter. But it’s a bad sign when all I want to do with the rest of my waking overnight hours is figure out how to find a theme editor for the freaking blog-posting format of the blog. That’s not only a bad sign, it’s a meta-bad-sign. In a poorly designed hospital with billboards.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go back to manually editing my blog in Notepad. Almost.

The rains have been sweeping through, often hightailing it on the back of even stronger winds. Today is the first really chilly seeming day and I can already envision the crispness of my breath emerging as the barracks become even more depressing and the walls seem even thinner. Already I’m starting to wonder when we should start moving stuff away from the heater so we can be prepared.

And yet there’s the anticipation of October that seems even more exciting on the East Coast, what with the promise of leaves changing and falling and eventual snow. This is what I’ve missed so dearly, the real seasonal change that is present in most of the world but sorely lacking in the Bay Area. A change in the surroundings that matches the internal perceptual change of the time. People do better with external confirmations of their internal understanding.

Which, I guess, is why I revel in the visualization present on the page. So there you go.

The poem is brief (briefer than I remember), but conveys powerful imagery of the pull of the ocean and its eternal hold on those who sail upon it. I was adorned in a cap not unlike what I’d worn as Oliver Twist (but newer and nicer) and some sort of scarf that the director had determined sufficiently aquatic. Despite these elements of costuming and the placement of a stage beneath my feet, I think this may have been the birth of my understanding of the power of spoken words. Not the magic of theater, in full regalia, which I’d long known and loved, but the actual power and presence of mere strings of syntax, dramatically spoken.

Of course, there was my third grade talent show rendition of the Gettysburg Address, which I remembered made a couple teachers cry. But I’d been disappointed with my performance there, forgetting some words and feeling immense pressure. I had not felt the command over that performance that I did in the practiced rhythms of Masefield’s cadence.

It is somehow fitting to remember that preface on a night back from introducing members of the Rutgers class of 2013 to the basic tenets of parliamentary debate. Just as every word written makes for better writing next time, so every word spoken has led me to this point in my life. And perhaps I can forgive myself for sacrificing tonight’s writing efforts (unless I can start after completing this post) to the twin duties of education and navigation.

This last is the true inspiration for tonight’s title, for a navigation bar has been introduced to The Blue Pyramid for the first time ever. Over the course of the next few weeks, the navigation system will filter out through the rest of the website. The focal points of this bar also come with an acknowledgment that several projects have been archived, most permanently lost at sea.

I would like to say that this move will usher in a new era of updated content at the site, with quizzes and new projects abounding as long planned. I have learned enough over my millions of spoken words, of course, to know that such promises are of no worth. Either I shall make good, which will speak for itself, or I shan’t, which will undermine the promises’ purpose.

So I present what is done and will call it a night. Perhaps to write briefly before sailing for sunrise.

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
and quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Digg It!

Also, the final new (spoof) video we created finally uploaded properly:

Tell your friends!

Before:

After:

Here’s another spoof we didn’t include the new one of:

And a whole bunch of old ones:

Enjoy.

If so, head on over to The Mep Report, for new quick-hitting posts like this one, which I almost cross-posted here.

It’s mostly going to be stuff like obvious news stories and general making fun (basically, the same stuff that I used to say on TMR, now in text format).

Cross-posting (except for big announcements or really important stuff) sort of undermines the idea of writing in two places. By posting different content, you need to follow two blogs just to make sure you aren’t missing anything. And that’s how they getchya. And by “they”, I mean “I”.

Lest you somehow think that I have completely wasted this weekend, I am conflictedly proud to announce the availability of Duck and Cover merchandise!

Here’s an example of the kind of unparalleled quality and homespun handwritten charm you can expect from said products:

Or, if you prefer more overt puns:

This is the completion of a long-ago resolved (but undone) task of mine, at the request of a couple of regular D&C readers who aren’t even personally known to me. Also, it’s fun. Also, it’s just in time for the holidays and remarkably BP Merch sales haven’t slacked year-over-year from last year. Good thing it’s not available in malls.

Also, your money won’t be worth anything this time next year, so would you rather have money or your favorite political cartoon characters on a shirt? I mean, really.

“Established in 2006, Blue Pyramid brings to ABS three core competencies within IT support…” Hm. I wonder where they got the idea for the name “Blue Pyramid”. Or that it would somehow be associated with quality web output. Serves me right for not tying up the .com and .net extensions when I registered bluepyramid.org in July 2001.

Sure, they could’ve come up with it on their own. After all, the Gone Jackals might raise their eyebrows in my direction after their 1998 album by the same name. And of course, it’s not my name anyway. As I freely admit, I stole this concept from Ray Bradbury, who had dibs on it in 1948.

At least Google knows what’s up.

It calls into question a lot of things. Can you own a concept? Where does copyright end and fair use begin? What is the nature of intellectual property? I had a few discussions of this with people this weekend – it seems to be a burgeoning realm of law that does some good in some areas and “keeps the price of AIDS drugs high” in others. My friend Russ recently fought the law and the Russ won, reinstating a video tribute to Major League Baseball after MLB asked him to stop promoting their products. Then, of course, they gobbled up his promotion as soon as he convinced them to reinstate it. People, even (especially?) managers, often have no idea what they’re doing or what’s in their best interests. Too often, like my recent former boss’ boss, they just want to keep their head down, not get in trouble, and not have to think too closely about anything (see also today’s D&C).

It could be argued that I haven’t done much for the BP’s best interests lately, either, given the static nature of the front page, much of the content, and so on. I wouldn’t protest at this point, except to whisper Civilization-like promises of a future rebirth. Like my workplace and my self-perception itself, there’s plenty of limitless potential hot and bubbling underneath the cooled, flaky crust of day-to-day operations. When the volcanoes start popping and the earth starts moving, things are going to get good. Or at least exciting.

In the meantime, we’re plowing toward an October that has made up its mind. I argued that the October season this year really started at the top of last week, but it’ll be firmly entrenched by the end of this one. Still fighting off a coldish thing that I acquired just before traveling to Nuevo and I am desperately trying to keep out of my ears and sinuses. So far, I’m towing the line.

Good luck on same today.