• 08:06 today = New Ben Folds album release. First music I've paid good money for in 18 months. #
• 08:14 Isn't it time America? The next big holiday deserves a full-on, 24-hour marathon of nothing but the works of Nell Carter. #
• 10:54 currently have 6 PCs (2 laptops, 4 desktops, 3 LCD monitors) running w/in 5 ft of me. I shall be radioactive by noon. #

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Being a packrat sometimes has an upside. Beyond the clutter and papercuts there's a lot of memories on paper. I probably have every letter or note written to me between 1983 and 1999 (plus a few hundred emails I printed out) in boxes. Lots of cards, but 90% of them are notes I got from friends and especially a couple of girlfriends (lots of proclamations of true love and G-rated innuendo). Mostly, it's fascinating to see where people's heads where at before and after big changes in life (aka, excrement hitting the wind-displacement device).

Highlights so far:

The note I got from my high-school girlfriend in return to one I sent her after she dumped me -- my attempt to "stay friends" (and it must have worked, she wrote to me for years, which I had not remembered). I must have mentioned in my first note that I was taking a class about the Bible, which was her favorite thing; you know the type. She was happy to hear it, but told me to "stay away from mysticism -- that's what Hindus do!" Sigh.

I even have notes I wrote back and forth with her and others in classes in high school. It was truly the IMs with chat logs of its time. Downside: deciphering the handwriting, trying to remember the in-jokes, and worst, no date stamps! I have no idea if some of those things are from 1986 or 1988.

Finding multi-page letters from my best friends calling me out for being a judgmental douche-nozzle was fun. Good times. (They did not use the term 'douche-nozzle,' but had it been the parlance of the day, I'm sure they would have. And been fully justified.)

A note from my friend Brett, telling me about his decision not to become a ceramic engineer, and adding a bit about how he and a mutual friend of ours went to a Bill Joel concert (this would be August '88) and how thrilled they were about the two hot girls gyrating in front of them the whole time. Four years later, our friend came out of the closet, so I'm betting the gyrating wasn't doing much for him.

Lots of dot-matrix printers back in the day...

Found a prescription for my glasses of January 1989. Knowing what I know now about glasses from buying mine online, my old prescription, pre-Lasik, would now cost about $956 dollars to buy. From cheap-ass China. Seriously, the lenses were that thick.

I found lots of reply notes from people post-college, usually starting with "thanks for your... creative letter." I'm not sure that's a compliment.

All in all... so much better than Facebook.

• 21:38 Just back from seeing Bill Maher do standup. Not as funny as Jon Stewart, but I got to go for free. #

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• 22:51 Darth Vader is on Twitter. Need to find a fictional character to tweet as. I'm thinking Santa's Little Helper from Simpsons. #

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• 22:19 did Mccain just imply that Kim Jong Il has made everyone in North Korea... shorter? #

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• 10:22 You love Gmail, but wish it were a desktop app like Outlook? That's easy to do if you've got a modern Web browser. ping.fm/Lmrzh #
• 11:00 Listen to me on the radio! (You'll have to use the Interweb) They edited me to sound coherent, which is nice. ping.fm/CcYK9 #
• 11:19 wow, ya know, they posted the entire, ya know, interview! Its about my telecommute toolbox story, btw, ya know. ping.fm/rN9yv #

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• 07:09 Amazed at how many email and blog posts are made in the world between 1am and 7am. Get a life, Interwubs. #
• 08:57 know who's made of awesome? Abe Vigoda. ping.fm/4BsQS #
• 15:26 i sent a letter today with one single stamp on it for the first time in probably four years. and I still have one-cent stamps around.. #
• 16:04 point/counterpoint: tinyurl.com/3u22pb #

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Okay, so, really, I do want you to go read my story, Chrono-Girl vs. Kid Vampire. Right now if you haven't already. And if you have, click this link anyway so the page loads again.

(Little known fact... in seven years of blogging, I've used the word "vampire" in 23 posts. Huh.)

A little more detail about the story, for those who may not remember the deets from when I wrote about it last year...

...while at Viable Paradise [the work shop I attended in October 2007], we had to a writing exercise (or multiples) to do. The more stuff you could fit into the same exercise, the better...

...I had to use a person, place, and problem that was randomly assigned to me, and put them all in the same story. I got "Kid Dracula or Vampire" as person, the Inferno as a place, and "lost" as a problem. That set it all off. It also had to include "non-mammalian reproduction" and include several bits taken from the Evil Overlord list of no-nos... you know, the stuff Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor never learn. 

My thanks to [VP instructor] Jim McDonald for liking it so much. I hope he'll be saying "Perdition's Bitch" for a long time to come.

To understand what "Perdition's Bitch" is, you gotta go read it. Seriously. It's got monkeys and snake sex! What are you waiting for?

• 11:29 It's not enough that you read my short story (Chrono-Girl vs. Kid Vampire, available now!) You should also DIGG it! ping.fm/n6Fu5 #

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• 22:51 DaiKaijuZine 4.0 is OUT. It features a story by ME. Read it. I will just keep mentioning it until you do. ping.fm/XJmEo #

• 08:34 the full extent of my contribution to Talk Like a Pirate Day is this: "arrr." Thank you. #
• 08:56 there's a giant turkey outside the basement window. I thought it was a fat kid in a feather boa peaking in at me. #
• 10:41 I can honestly say that I will never, ever ride a train around Los Angeles. #

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Some of my friends from VPXI are going through the current blog/LJ meme
of posting a picture of themselves RIGHT NOW, no editing or primping.
Not that they can't see me at 12seconds.tv, but I figured what the hell,
I've got this new camera, might as well. So, for the world, this is me
at 8:35 on Talk Like a Pirate Day, eyes darting suspiciously. If I had
one, I'd have worn an eye patch.

• 09:28 i'll soon stop watching Office clips on Hulu. Soon. Very soon. #
• 21:02 Smallville? you and me? we're DONE. #
• 21:13 call me elitist, but I want a Big Blue Cheese that WENT TO FRICKIN' COLLEGE at some point. #

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• 11:26 still eating carrots and celery sticks left over from my mom's party. #
• 13:16 Read it with Chris Rock's voice in your head. It works. ping.fm/ALAty #

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I'd have done better if I had wrestled in college or ever fought a rabid grizzly.

I could survive for 44 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

• 17:09 Post Ike-induced windstorm has temperature here at frigid 65 degrees. Forced to resort to hot chocolate made with Ovaltine. #

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Image via Wikipedia

• 12:13 why I loves the wikipedia: reading entry on "mediumship" and two notable psychic mediums listed: Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb. #

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• 10:32 its only 1030 hours on Saturday and I'm already out of distractions. Dammit. #

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• 09:23 To quote myself: "Dogs and cats in the office rock." So sayeth my opus, Telecommuter's Tech Toolbox, now live at PCMag.com. ping. ... #
• 14:11 Apparently my blood type is not needed for the swanky Double-Red donations anymore. So high school! #
• 16:25 12seconds - orange moire 12seconds.tv/channel/egriffith/25813 #

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I just read the news that Gregory McDonald, author of the FLETCH novels (on which the Chevy Chase flick of 22-years-ago was based upon) has died. I think I read the books cause I liked the movie, but they were nothing alike -- that whole shtick of disguises and fake names was just for Chevy. The real Irwin Maurice Fletcher was more like a surfer-dude reporter with a sarcastic streak as wide as a highway.

What was truly great about McDonald was his mastery of dialogue. Entire chapters were told in nothing but dialogue, with barely a bit of attribution of who was speaking, but you always knew, and it moved the scenes and stories along fast. I have a book upstairs on mystery writing with a section he wrote about dialog and, of course, he wrote it entirely in dialogue, to show just what it can do.

He'd written a few newer Fletch novels in recent years, one of which I read and promptly forgot (SON OF FLETCH), but I will always fondly remember FLETCH, and others in the series with great titles like FLETCH AND THE WINDOW BRADLEY and FLETCH AND THE MAN WHO. The FLYNN spin-off books were good too.

The one thing I will never get sympathy on is that I work from home. Seriously, it's not all gumdrops and lollipops, people. But yeah... it's so much better than going into the office.

So, to assist the masses -- the 40% of people out there who have jobs perfectly suited to telework but aren't allowed to do so by their employers -- I wrote The Telecommuter's Tech Toolbox, a look at great software, most of it totally free, that you can point out to your boss and say, "let's use that... and then I can work from home."

There's also eight tips for convincing the boss (tips that don't have anything to do with tech), plus advice on how to stay productive once you are commuting up and down the stairs rather than by ferry, train, or automobile.

• 12:42 Much as I think Golf is more boring than watching icy paint both melt AND dry, I can see the appeal of hitting something repeated w/ a club. #
• 14:07 no matter what people say, it's a great title. I'd kill for a quantum of solace right now. But helps to have license to do so. #

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• 10:52 sign of my fragility: I broke the lanyard on my cheap-ass $15 cellphone, thought day was ruined. Fixed it. Day still meh. #
• 13:14 can not be overstated how much more enjoyable the metal woman who came out of the toilet would have been if the Internet had not spoiled. #

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• 10:23 there's a game show where people jump through holes in foam walls? Finally, a show I'm qualified for. (note: holes must be pineapple shaped) #
• 12:12 when you send a gmail invite, it says there's "over 2,700 MB free storage." It's actually 7GB. Way to set low expectations, Google. #
• 20:19 Dexter? Johnny Drama? Nancy Botwin? Sarah Connor? Vic Mackey? TV, my old friend... welcome back. #

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• 21:42 actually TiVoed the VMA opening to see Britney crash and burn. Instead she did nothing and looked decent. Disappointment level: high. #

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• 23:15 a perfect 1,111 words tonight. Perfect in the sense that those four digits are all the same. The words themselves, not so much. They'll do. #
• 07:22 party day. Not mine, my mom's. She only retires this close to her birthday and 40th wedding anniversary once. We hope. #
• 08:48 Sick of WTF and FTWs? Time to try the new hot response initials: TFW - "The effing WHAT??" #
• 10:55 Driving the back roads to home and in my head I'm plotting a gangster zombie novel. tinyurl.com/56zwkd #
• 10:59 The working title for the book will be, The Zomb Father. tinyurl.com/6j94f9 #
• 16:03 Cake is done, the decorating is done, banners are done, I am not a party decorating kind of guy. tinyurl.com/5ortsd #
• 21:01 The party is over. It went off without a hitch. Everything is good and there is food to split up. tinyurl.com/66wgr7 #

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• 09:49 first album I ever owned: either The Best of the Sylvers www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000006N53 or Popeye soundtrack (with Robin Williams) #
• 09:53 Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (where's 1-8?) looks nice is.gd/2d4Y But still holding out for Apple iPadAir later this month... #
• 14:17 why do I eat from McDonald's EVER? When will my taste buds accept that the rest of of me --specifically my GI tract -- is not 17 anymore? #
• 15:48 just wrote my first story about Google Chrome. betting it's not the last of my life. (that says more about google than my career, tho.) #

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• 15:17 is takin' screen grabs. (that looks like "crabs" when I read it fast. "screen crabs.") #

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• 13:21 I wonder if Don Lafontaine's grave marker will say "In a world..." across the top. #
• 19:40 why does Skype send me a voucher code for 30 free minutes which it then tells me I can not use? Can't is see that BEFORE it sends the email? #

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