Uh… I don’t remember going through a Monday this week.

Avant les régionales, j’avais hésité à lancer un appel à voter à droite. D’abord parce que, même si le PS avait bien besoin de reprendre confiance, ce ne serait pas forcément une bonne chose que ça arrive maintenant, alors qu’ils n’ont toujours personne de valable à mettre en avant. Ensuite (et surtout) parce que, si on donnait un avertissement trop clair à la droite, elle risquait de corriger le tir et réussir à faire remonter sa cote de popularité d’ici aux prochaines élections nationales.

Le premier point reste en suspens. Mais, pour le second, j’avais peut-être surestimé la droite. Plus que trois ans à tenir et on devrait repasser à gauche (on peut raisonnablement espérer, quand même, que Sarkozy, à lui tout seul, ne suffira pas à sauver Raffarin et l’UMP sur les trois prochaines années).

Est-ce qu’on va pouvoir tenir trois ans, ou est-ce que je vais déménager en Belgique avec armes, bagages et serveur web ?

It’s never quite good when your computer reboots without warning or reason. At least, this time, it’s not the CPU overheating. Maybe it’s worse.

J’ai rêvé que j’étais le Bachelor et j’ai Garou en boucle dans la tête. La journée promet.

Update: the Philips USB key is covered with LEDs and beeps several times when you take a picture. Kind of removes the advantage of holding a small white gizmo that looks more like a keyholder.

Not to say that all I want to do is photograph boys in the subway without their consent or knowledge (I don’t want to do only that), but in general I’m annoyed and embarrassed when everyone around me can see I’m taking a picture.

I guess I’ll have to find something else. Good for you: the picture quality will be better.

So, what shall it be? The Sony Clié with integrated wifi and camera, or a $60 webcam USB key?

With the USB key, the picture quality would really say “moblog”. But maybe the Clié isn’t even better. Why don’t I steal Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s, it’ll be cheaper.

P.S.: I forgot. I’d look real dumb with a wifi PDA if I end up stranded in western Normandy after July. USB key it will be. That’s so small an investment, I won’t regret it. (But it’s not like I really hesitated, earlier.)

Good news: the composite port of my old capture card isn’t fried, I had just inverted the cables (everything must be connected to a proprietary cable that be mistakenly plugged into the S-Video port — that’s stupid).

Bad news: I finally found a Scart to S-Video kit, so I could use the new card again, but… the picture is displayed in black and white.

Funny how self-storage ads in subway trains always make me think of that old X-Files episode where Mulder discovers a facility full of… uh, aliens, hybrids or whatever Chris Carter would say his original, coherent vision included. But a storage facility is something so unoriginal. Or is it original? It must still be new and not quite widespread in France, or they wouldn’t need to do so much advertising.

I’m not sure, however, it’s quite efficient. People in subway trains are either so poor they can’t live inside Paris, or so rich they live in individual houses. Either way, what use do they have for a facility that’s as expensive as a room in the middle of Paris?

Another possibility for spending the money I had so much difficulty earning (have you ever noticed money is always harder to earn than to spend? what’s up with that?): I’d love to have a small Palm (or, better, a Psion, as I like to have a keyboard) with a wifi card and, optionally, a digital camera extension if there are good enough ones. This way I could blog from anywhere, move with my ICQ and my e-mail, the whole geek stuff. But there are two problems: first, I hate the idea of walking around with tiny, fragile, expensive objects; second, how useful would it be? I don’t know how widespread free wifi hotspots are in Paris, but the Orange wifi network^@ is atrociously expensive.

Or I could go the simpler, cheaper way: just buy a small, cheap camera. Well, when I say cheap… it’s amazing how the definition of what’s expensive and what isn’t changes quickly depending on what’s on your bank account (excuse me for discovering the obvious, but I don’t often have money, and I don’t often have the luxury of thinking a $150 camera is cheap). A minature camera, something that would fit in my pocket, and that I wouldn’t be afraid to carry everywhere, so I could maintain a proper photolog. I’ll have to look into the picture quality these things offer.

I could also spend it all on bags and pens. I’m not one to spend fortunes on clothes, or collect shoes, and I’m even rather reasonable when it comes to tech gear (despite what I’ve written over the last couple of days) but I can’t resist bags and pens. Well, now you’re on to my great secret: I’m really a girl! And maybe someday I’ll tell you about when I was little and I… uh… no. Anyway, the part where I’m lucky about not being a girl although I am is that I won’t go broke over couture bags: these days I’m collecting DDP and H&M bags. Over the last two days, I bought three — two of which I’ll probably never use because they haven’t got enough pockets. In fact, I’ve been looking for the ideal bag for ten years (but, since fashion changes over time, even if I had found it, I’d have to go searching again). What I’m looking for now is something small, that stays close to the body, but has lots of pockets. Cell phone, checkbook, big wallet, big set of keys, subway pass, notebook and pen, a bunch of cond… uh… so there I have lots of things I want to carry and organise (and what I listed is only the bare minimum: there are lots of things I’d like to add, including a small camera or a PDA). Oh, and several Kleenex packs, too. Tough luck getting all of this to fit in something small and fashionable.

Now that I’m going to be rich again, what do I do with it?

I could buy two LCD screens to spare my eyes when I’m on the web. But it’s a lot of money for not much (what? my sight? it’s already screwed). I could buy, instead, three new 17" monitors, so that I’d have three homogenous screens (considering my first one is getting old, my second one is getting blurry, and I haven’t got a third one yet). Three for the price of one LCD, that’s a budget. I could also buy a giant Wacom tablet, which is the minimum to control a triple-screen desktop (not to mention that the one I have isn’t quite young either, not even USB, and I suppose a USB tablet is faster, hence better for the hypothetic hypothesis of drawing). I don’t remember how much it costs, but I guess I could afford the tablet plus the three monitors, and still have some spare change. (Except that I haven’t got enough room for that on my desk.)

Or I could save my money, be reasonable, so that I wouldn’t have to work again too soon. Because, even though this time it’s been quickly earned money, it’s still not my thing. It figures that I only slept for seven hours last night.

So, like I said, I’ve been working for two hours. In emergency, between the two turns of our regional elections. On a local South Park clone. (I hesitated to cut the faces at the mouth and make them speak like they do with Saddam Hussein, but I decided it would be too much plagiarism.) See how well I can draw? One wonders wy I haven’t launched my webcomic yet. (If, by the time you view the animation, there’s a soundtrack, note that I didn’t hear it yet and I’m not responsible for it in any way.)

I had been wanting to try and make something like this in Flash for a long time, to see if I could manage. Well, there it is: I tried.

Parce que, sinon, ça sera pas la peine de vous plaindre que le résultat des élections est choquant et pas représentatif et pas ce que vous vouliez. C’est vrai que les régionales et les cantonales, tout le monde s’en fiche, mais ça la foutrait quand même mal si le FN faisait des scores énormes un peu partout (surtout dans le sud de la France, là, vous m’entendez ?).

Et votez pour des candidats sérieux. Le premier tour des élections, c’est aussi important que le second, c’est pas Loft Story. Vous n’avez pas envie que votre région soit dirigée par un facteur ou une employée de banque, alors c’est pas la peine de voter pour eux.

Faut tout leur expliquer…

I tried plugging my digital camera’s video-out to my capture card (which, considering how lucky I seem to be with those things today, was a bit suicidal, but I think I’ve already killed the camera’s external flash hotshoe, so why stop there?) and it’s confirmed: both of my capture cards’ composite video in-ports seem to be fried. (The tuner works alright, but I always had poor reception.) At some point I’ll have to get the cards out again and check whether something looks burnt, but from what I read these things happen all the time.

I had two capture cards, one of which brand new, and now I’ve got nothing. I’m depressed.

Encense poop fascinates me.

Since medicines aren’t allowed to advertise in France, someone has to do it for them.

So just go to your doctor’s and get a prescription for something that really works, and that allows me to make self-portraits without makeup (I guess “Eryacné” is the French name, though, so just ask for erythromicin).

I don’t like the thought of taking antibiotics, especially for a long time, for something that’s not life-threatening, but at least it works. And maybe it is actually life-threatening.

There you go, I managed to write the regexp to manage <a href=""> without breaking the automatic conversion of URLs into links. It was a tiny detail I had missed. I’m learning regexps one small step at a time.

Yes, I too would like my blog to be about something more interesting than my TV capture card adventures. I’d like it.

Spent a couple of hours trying to make the capture card work on the Linux server, finally reverting to the original setup, and now nothing works anywhere, I can’t make still captures anymore.

I’ll wait and see if it’s automagically fixed tomorrow after the computer has had a good night of sleep.

If it isn’t, well… computing sucks.

New gadget on the blog: a live comment preview (via Binary Bonsai).

I’m out of time to finish the script because I must go to the supermarket, but it works. Ah, regexps…

Besides, it makes me want to edit my code so that simple HTML tags are accepted in comments. Well, it’ll keep me busy for an hour or two.

P.S. There you go. Simple tags are accepted (<b>, <i>…) but I failed to configure the regexps right for <a href>, so we’ll see about that later. It’s already something. And it’s nice. I find it so cute to see the little bit of text below the form being updated while I type.

And I did write <b> and <i>, not <em> nor <strong>. I’m not using those because I think they’re absurd (when you want to write in bold, you mean to write in bold, not to write “strong”), so I’m not going to let you use them here when you have no control over stylesheets and the definition of <em> and <strong>.

P.S. By popular request, I added a checkbox to deactivate the preview if it’s too slow on your computer. The option is saved in a cookie.

I should get myself to add titles to my posts. It’s more clear, it separates articles better on the page, and it allows the readers to know at a glance what they’ve already read. Many blogging solutions impose, or heavily recommend, putting in a title (for instance, you can’t publish a post in DotClear without a title) and, even though it goes against the most fundamental liberties, even though the best reason I can imagine for this behavior is that they want to have some text to put in the permalinks and the RSS file, titles still are kind of useful.

On the other hand, I can’t really get down to it, just as if titles were in contradiction of the way I conceive a blog. Thoughts you write down as they come, instants you immortalize and never reconsider: those aren’t works of art nor press articles, they’re not entitled.

Weird.

On my A-list of personal blogs, those I reload every hour (or more) when I’m really bored: 21 blogs, 17 of which in French, 14 of which… written by gay male bloggers.

It starts being weird when you consider that most of them write very rarely about sex, or romance, or Britney or anything gay — some of them never do. I already knew that gays are more intelligent and interesting than straights, but not to the point that all straight French bloggers would be boring and undeserving of my bookmarks. (For the record, there are also many boring gay bloggers. Many are on u-blog.net. Some are elsewhere. Like this site I designed and operate. But I shouldn’t say that.)

Where it gets real weird is that 95% of the English-language blogs I read (those beneath the A-list) are written by people either gay or totally asexual (I read many technical blogs). That one, I can’t figure out at all. What’s wrong with me?

Oh, I weigh eight pounds less than last night. I went to bed being desperate to see I didn’t lose weight despite my diet, and I wake up pretty close to my healthy weight.

Three possibilities: either I should really buy an electronic, uh, weight-measurement appliance, whatever it’s called in English (although I don’t know why I should trust it more because it’s electronic — but it can hardly be worse than the current one), or I managed to convince my body to lose some fat overnight (but I don’t think I look thinner), or tides are pretty strong these days.

No matter which, it’s good news. I know I eat a little bit too much toast, but still — two years ago, I had lost weight even though I ate full boxes of Special K every other night. Now that I eat full-wheat bread, it should be the same.

Now I remember why I had removed the devoticon from my home page. I never get to update it when I change the blog’s layout.

This time it’s bad. It’s pink.

So as to justify, in retrospect, the impulsive purchase of a TV capture card (that failed to help against my nascent depression), I’m adding a “zapping” section to the blog. I’m downloading ImageMagick¹ right now (it’s available under Windows, now we’ll see if it works — in any case, it’s a long download), I’ll code the scripts during the night and, voilà, instant naked gymnasts on the site (that was on Canal+ this afternoon, and I thought it would not be nice to make captures… I hadn’t had the idea yet, apologies to my frustrated readers).

Actually, I’m announcing that though you won’t see much of it: most of the captures are unlikely to be relevant for foreign readers.

¹: The capture program that comes with the card (and that is the only one I can get to work, partially because my video card fails to display video overlay) outputs BMP files. Since I have to process the image anyway in order to convert it (no way I can upload a BMP file for remote conversion, I’m on dialup), I might as well edit it as needed while I’m at it (cropping to remove the black borders, resizing — or not, I don’t know yet — and boosting contrast), with an automatic script so it’s simple and efficient. Otherwise I’m not going to post captures often.

P.S. It works. A .BAT file in the “Send to” menu to resize and move the picture to the desktop, an upload form that automatically generates the thumbnail, I’m ready to post lots of captures.

Oh, shoot, I forgot to improve contrast. But maybe I don’t need to after all.

I found the solution to all my problems.

Step 1: play the new, big European lottery every week.
Step 2: dream of all I’d do with those millions of euros, until they pick the winning numbers.
Step 3 (here is the trick): do not check out the winning numbers, but instead keep on with step 2 until I repeat step 1 at the end of the next week.

Never be disappointed or have your dreams be crushed again with the Garoo Method! Try it for yourself right now, with no upfront fees!

Works with just about anything, not just the lottery.

Ah, the satisfaction of browsing a furniture catalog when you know you’ll soon be able to afford all that and more.

03:18: I bought a TV capture card^@, and in fact the captures^@ aren’t much better than with the previous one :(
03:20: Computing sucks
03:20: And the end of Buffy wasn’t good
03:20: I’m gonna become president and blow up the planet
03:20: Now that’s a goal in life

Domain Name: GAROO.NET
Registrar: GANDI
Expiration Date: 17-mar-2004

Lucky I did a whois today, by chance and out of boredom. The warning emails had gone to the spam-catching address I never check.

But, still… what fans you are. When I renewed the domain with my registrar, it didn’t ask for my identity at any time, which means that anyone among you could have offered me one year, anonymously, without expecting anything in return, just a random act of kindness. Mwahaha. (This is not an invitation to do it now: it’s too late, I renewed it for March 2005 and it would be pointless to commit to anything longer, as you never know what will become of me, and even less this site.)

Not to mention that nobody even warned me I was going to disappear. You secretly wish me dead, don’t you?

By the way, I hope that you weren’t too many to use the Amazon links on my blog. Looks like they weren’t interested in affiliating me, and they never bothered to let me know.

When I registered (well, I guess I should say “when I asked to register”, then), I found it funny that they invited their future partners not waste a second and start inserting sponsoring links right away, not wasting a second to start sending them customers. I thought it had to be marginally beneficial for them if those they rejected had already begun bringing them their business. Well, you don’t say. What I didn’t expect was that, not only they’d take advantage of it, but they would make sure not to warn the webmasters so it could last as long as possible. Thanks, Amazon, that’s so professional and nice, really.

As a retaliation, out goes the wishlist. (I’m sure they’ll cry over that one.)

And now I have to go over a couple of months of blogging to remove the links.

In progress.

Here’s the design of the day. Should I comment it? Is it worth it?

Oh, yeah, I’m switching to blue: it’s not deliberate, it’s been forced upon me by the picture, but as it happens it’s the exact same hue I used yesterday when I designed the blog that’s not mine (which I won’t officially launch here, just because, that’ll teach you). Looks like it’s my light blue period. Fortunately, Gayattitude’s users are asking for it to remain grey, because I don’t know what could happen otherwise.

As for the image, well… the post where I introduced the Megabloks characters is still on the home page. I made a dozen pictures on a white background (hand-made from a cardboard box and three 6€ desktop lamps, because I didn’t want to empty my flashes’ batteries every time I make macro pictures), and that one was the most suitable for a blog header.

I would show you the other pictures, just for fun, but you never know: I might need them to redesign the site tomorrow, so I must preserve the surprise effect.

I’m trapped in a vicious circle.

It’s been a while since I spent more than a couple of hours in Photoshop to make a new layout, because I know that, no matter how superbly fantastic it is, I’ll change it one or two months later.

But then the layout I make is worthless. Not to mention the time I didn’t spend on it, I’m also lacking motivation to have interesting ideas, to make something beautiful, since I know it’s going to end up in the trashcan real soon. As a result, instead of being used for a month, the new layout becomes unbearable after two days. And I’m even less motivated when it comes to replace it.

On the other hand, yesterday and today, I made a nice layout for a new blog (which should open tomorrow), with a beautiful logo, a simple but pretty image, the likes of which I hadn’t been able to make in a long time.

I have to try and get some motivation back. I have to tell myself that, even though I write crap, even though 99% of my readers don’t deserve me (which leaves six people, maybe you’re one of those), even though it’s useless, it’s still not useless. Uh, when I put it that way, I’m not sure I can convince myself.

I have to completely reprogram Gayattitude and I’m as far from motivated as I can be. I largely prefer to deal with the layout and setup of a new blog, using DotClear. (Which I chose because it looks well designed, and much more pleasant to use than WordPress¹.) The blog isn’t for me, and it will be announced later, if it is.

Creating a blog, making a nice, simple layout, now that’s interesting. Reprogramming a site that’s already open, that’s already working (even though it gets slow by 11pm), in order to change the way it works (I’m going to have to write cron jobs to generate the whole chat in HTML static files, because that ought to be the only way for the server not to explode), whereas I haven’t got any idea for the graphical redesign (which I have to do because the current frames layout generates too much traffic — yes, it’s a bit paradoxical for a frameset, I know) is horribly uninteresting.

I’d love to enroll someone to code for me, in exchange for some toast and pop corn, but I wouldn’t, because I don’t trust anyone to put their dirty hands in my scripts.

So for now I reduced the chat’s auto-reload delay. It’ll let the server survive. Or it won’t. Suspense.

¹ : I mean, come on. In WordPress, if you want a post to be cut on the homepage, you have to type <!–more–> where you want the cut to be. How could it be any less user-friendly?

Mmh. Why don’t I adopt a guest blogger too, for hype?

A sidebar somewhere, a new blogger, so I could play star search (well, yeah, there’s no point if I give it to someone who already blogs). But do I still know people who aren’t blogging, and who’d be able to write something good? I already contaminated pretty much everybody I know, and I’m not sure I’m social enough to enroll a guest per month.

I have to think, to look through my address book. Or my chatroom contact lists. Or just wait until I forget about the idea.

— Better live with remorse than regrets.

— Not so sure. Better live with dreams than knowing you failed.

In progress…

So I’m a bit unstable lately. Can’t find something satisfactory. I’m short of ideas, so I’m doomed to reusing, week after week, various ideas I had already had before. Call me Sisyphus.

There are still some bugs to be fixed, but the idea is that the minilog goes back to a sidebar, so that the big articles can stay longer on top; but this time the sidebar is on the left, because otherwise people tend not to read it. I’ll eventually add in the usual contents of a sidebar.

The downside is that the whole sidebar must be loaded before the main contents (yes, I know, with CSS, I could, but no), but I’ll just assume that it doesn’t matter because the home page is static, so it’s fast to load. (It is on my modem.)

Besides, if you don’t like it, screw you it’ll change again within a week anyway.

As I’m looking back at the images I posted, I realize it might be quite easier than I first thought.

I thought I’d have to build a complete set, but it may not be necessary: the white background (or optionally another flat color, but that would be more complex to shoot) reminds you it’s a comic, and the imagination can fill in the blanks well enough.

So, instead of a ton of Legos, maybe I could just do with a couple of flat backgrounds (white, black for night time, and one or two colors for some effects). Much simpler.

And, just with those two lab people, I’m sure there would be lots of things to be done.

(Don’t hesitate to scroll down. It’s silly, but the only nice picture in this post is the last one.)

I bought a couple of (actually, I can perfectly count: three) small Lego and Megabloks boxes so I could check whether the bricks I stole from my little brother were compatible (and the answer is no). Megabloks’s human characters don’t look that good, but in the Dragons series they have some good stuff.

I don’t think Lego ever made beasts like this. Megabloks also makes very nice dragons, but they’re more expensive. As far as bricks go, I think they’re taking too much distance from the standards, and making all sorts of shapes that can only be used for one special design, which isn’t good for creativity. But they’ve got character and beast design right (only the eyes are a bit disappointing).

The skeleton comes from a little Lego box that’s cheaper but still totally ridiculous as compared to the Megabloks designs:

Look how nice the specific bricks are: I cant wait to integrate them into something. Wouldn’t that make some nice decoration in a living room?

And, finally, the Alien Agency series. Too bad its humans have a weird face and wear a tie. I went through all the available boxes: there’s absolutely no way to get a normal, plain Lego character. How’s one supposed to do in order to make a story about someone else than Harry Potter or Spider-Man?

I really like the little transparent tank that you can’t quite see in the background.

So there are ways to make some stuff. I don’t know yet whether I forget about the idea (since I haven’t got an existing stock of Lego bricks, and this shit is expensive, and I’m getting to the end of my January fortune — yes, already! it’s frightening) or I keep on with it. We’ll see. For starters, I’d need to have a story idea that would be compatible with the available elements.

Sorry for the unusual heaviness of this page. But I’ve got nothing to say, so I might as well distract you.

I didn’t imagine a popcorn machine would be so big and, more importantly, so noisy. Considering the turbine noise it makes, and how it heats as much (and requires as much power) as my electrical heater, I understand better why it isn’t cheaper.

In the meantime, my first popcorn wasn’t so good. I don’t know if that’s lack of salt (it was just a first test) or because my corn has been waiting too long in my bedroom’s atmosphere. I don’t think it could be because of the machine itself. I just hope not.

Urgent: young man, handsome and intelligent, full of (hidden) talents, motivated and available, seeks interesting, well-paid job, not too annoying and not too early in the morning.

There it is. I won’t make any additional effort (such as, and not limited to, looking for a job, being pleasant and polite, or wearing anything remotely looking like a suit).

Insert text here.

And why don’t I buy a bunch of Legos on ebay? I’m scared of ebay. But since everybody’s using it… (It’s still for that stupid idea of mine of a photographic webcomic.)

March 2004 is brought to you by David Madore.

Don’t hesitate to publicize this calendar. I find the number of incoming links a bit low. What’s the point of putting it on an external site if only my own readers view it? You ungrateful people. (I know you like it when I call you ungrateful. Ah, men. They’re all sluts.)