Finally was able to upgrade away from the loathed keyboard without a B. Now I can Belch and Blubber without the awkward discomfort of dipping in to touch the little white plastic thing that connects a keyboard letter to the computing device. It’s a gift from my sister. Wow, using this one for just a few minutes makes me see what a piece of crap that last one was. This is a Plugable brand foldable keyboard. I do not remember the brand of the previous one but its selling point for me was that it was backlit, a feature which made little difference. None, actually.
I survived another trip into the Rockefeller Center midtown holiday hell hole, this time sans panic attack. The post office there has installed lockers, presumably for rent to paying customers who need such things. They are small, and probably as secure as hiding something in plain sight in the style of a geocache, but it’s something I might think about for no good reason save for the intrigue of leaving something there for someone else to find centuries from now.
I have nothing much to say, neither to myself or anyone else. It has been a lousy year and I wish it done with. Next year seems to have some promise, as far as I can see at this point. I’ve made fundamental and deliberate changes to making new friends and reconnecting with some of those I left behind.
Been thinking about the words to describe an activity in which I indulge of late. It essentially amounts to looking for something that is not there. Some thing, some person, some idea. Knowing of its absence does not stop the search. Except that the absence is not complete. There is a glimmer of hope that the discovery will be made, the passage, the incidental passing contact that could lead to happiness or at least substance. Closure. It involves my occasional pursuit of following strangers and trying to glean whatever information I can about them through residual information they give off without even realizing it. I can tell where she lives, so find as much as I can about the history of the building. That seldom reveals anything, as renters leave little trace of their residence in the public record. I think back to my WHOIS server, which searches against those smarmy WHOIS data harvesters, collecting name and addresses and phone numbers of web site owners in ways which almost certainly violate the terms of service of the domain name registrars from which the data are gathered. I type in “21 11106” and a list of web sites registered on 21st street in the 11106 zip code is produced. “79 10075” produces a list of domain names owned by individuals and businesses on 79th Street in the 10075 zip code. It is a strange reversal of typical WHOIS lookups, which are delivered on demand and not expected to be saved or indexed. I think it is a useful tool for discovering who owned a domain name before you did, or before someone else. When I registered torturechamber.com I was surprised to be in receipt of emails intended for the domain’s previous owner, which appeared to have been an S&M/BDSM portal. I never found trace of that web site at archive.org. Today I use it mostly for a poetry piece but lately have used it as a dumping ground for my project of contributing to the Sea Of Shit that the Internet has become.
The WHOIS thing, though, has been like a scavenger hunt for garbage. Most of the data is outdated, which is fine with me on principle for reasons mentioned above, among others. But in the interest of revealing who owns what work-at-home domain name-related businesses and art projects it’s a nearly hopeless crapshoot. This pursuit, among other similarly spirited searches for some kind of low-hanging fruit, is escaping my wordsmithing for a succinct title or designation. Compare it to the cemetery searches where I photograph a row of tombstones and look for information about the individuals there on ancestry.com or similar genealogical resources. That’s fishing for souls among the dead, but the quest is not as easy as one would expect when made against the living. I know of ways to get a name and personal information on virtually anyone connected to the Internet. I have not explored those resources in a long time, though, and I wonder if it’s any more difficult than it used to be to find something like the old “finger” command on steroids, as was demonstrated to me years ago by a friendly, ethical techie with hacker instincts. You run a command or two and an IP address is turned into a virtual dossier of whoever is connected to that address at that moment.
At the ghetto coffee shop. Don’t think I’ve been here in a while. Some people here are nice, others seem to look away from me and anyone else who walks in here. Someone just got into a screaming match with another worker here about his shift and extra hours, or something. Kinda hard to hear people when they scream real loud. Hah. It’s like this time years ago when I happened across a picture of a woman performing fellatio. She looked so much like a friend/acquaintance of mine that it was creepy. I forwarded it to a friend who also knew her. I called him to ask what he thought. We both looked at the photo in silence for a few seconds until he said “Idunno she’s kinda hard to recognize …” he paused for a second and at the same moment we both said “… with a cock in her mouth!” completing the sentence. It was funny as hell. We never knew and never will know if that was her but for as well as we knew her she seemed like someone who would do a porn shoot just for gits and shiggles.
I guess that’s a strange comparison: It is hard to understand what a person is saying when they are screaming in the same way it is hard to recognize someone with a cock in their mouth.
