dave | Evil Genius Chronicles

Why Evil Genius?

Before I go too far with this, I should explain this “Evil Genius”
business. Does this mean that I think I’m a genius or that I think I’m
evil? Do I want to be in the axis of evil? Although I’m reasonably
bright, I’m not a genius. I’d even call myself pretty far from
evil. So why the name?

In actuality, it all comes
back to
Wile E. Coyote. Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the
character. Where the Roadrunner is the essence of smug superficiality,
the Coyote is plucky, indefatigable, continuously willing to keep
trying. Defeat doesn’t stop him. I like that. For 20 years, when I needed some name for some sort of business
venture, I would always use some variation on “Evil Genius” in homage
to Wile E. When I
did my radio show, I
referred to it as happening at “The Evil Genius studios” (my house)
and it was outro’d by a computer generated Macintosh voice saying
“This has been an Evil Genius Production.”

Early September of last year, I was considering getting some of those
free VistaPrint business cards for Evil Genius and I wanted a
slogan. I was considering things like “Ruling the world, one reader at
a time” or “Global domination at affordable rates.” Come the eleventh
of September, it didn’t seem so funny anymore. As part of the whole
“returning to normal life” process, I have decided that it remains
funny. So “Evil Genius” it is, remains and will be forever. So mote it
be. Besides, I already have the evilgeniuscorp.com domain name.

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Another modification to the timestamp – I’m having it put in an anchor
tag with the same name as the timestamp, so that you could link to
this entry as 020727.html#20:38. Of course, I’m not sure if a colon is
valid character so I might have to changed that.

TV Topic My wife is watching Trading
Spaces on
TLC right now. I can’t stand that show. I find it more cruel than
Jerry Springer, harder to watch than the surgery shows. Yipes.

I looked at the web (access) logs, and I actually have had a visitor. As of
this afternoon, at least one person has actually read this log! It’s
official, I’m not talking to myself!

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Technology Topic OK, I sort of kind of figured out the timestamping. The above was done
by pressing Ctrl-Alt-t. I put this in my
XEmacs init.el file:

;; Insert time stamp
(defun insert-timestamp ()
  "Insert current timestamp."
  (interactive "*")
  (insert (concat "" (substring (current-time-string) 11 16) "
"))
)
(define-key weblog-mode-map "C-M-t" 'insert-timestamp)

The only problem is that something about this current-time-string
doesn’t get loaded automatically. Until I actually evaluate the buffer
explicitly, none of this works right. I’ve used Emacs almost
exclusively as an editor since grad school (almost 7 years now) and
yet I still feel like I barely know it and am no good at it.

I’m e-mailing to get some permission to quote an SFF Net post. Someone
there posted a week or two ago about the state of current music, which
I’ve been thinking about ever since. I want to refute and rebut part
of what she said, but it would make more sense if I could quote her
post as context.

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Technology Topic Something else this weblog-mode needs is a timestamper. Dear god, I
need to be learning better Lisp like I need a hole in the head! I
looked at Bill St. Clair’s page of other
Blog Max weblogs. About half haven’t touched the template, leaving
it straight out of the box. Maybe I should just have the pages
reference a CSS style sheet, then I can edit that and have changes
happen immediately without having to do a lot of page regeneration.

I’m going to mail Bill. Maybe I can get on that list. I’m really happy
with BlogMax so far. I do think I want it to use scp rather than
ftp. Sigh, another to-do in a life full of them. The upload command
didn’t work for me anway, so I scp’d from the Cygwin bash shell.

Now that this log exists, I might as well link to it and include it in
my
MT-Newswatcher rotating signatures.

Beginnings

Friends and neighbors, citizens of the cybersphere, I too am now a
blogger. I’ve been interested for some time in the phenomena but being
a selectively lazy man, I haven’t done it. Last week I listened to a
piece on
KPBS in San Diego (via their audio stream) about blogging. Mitch
Wagner, who I know from online various places, was a guest and talked
about his blog, 24 hour
drive-thru. I remained curious but yesterday found
Bill St. Clair’s Emacs blog mode
BlogMax and that was all it took. Barrier to entry now leaped.

In these first few days, I’ll tell you a little about me. I have been
doing something similar via my newsgroups on
SFF Net and
Dueling Modems with an itermittent diary. Perhaps once I get
rolling I’ll extend BlogMax to automatically post to those
groups. Wouldn’t that be something? This blog will probably be a
little less personal than those groups just because of the nature of
things. When you know you are addressing a crowd, things are
different.

Quick synopsis, and then we’ll call this entry good. I’m still working
with the key bindings right next to me – I haven’t entered the “Emacs
zen” of this mode yet. I am married to Darlene, a PhD student at
Georgia Tech. I’m a software engineer, working today for a
computer security firm in Atlanta. I got my BS in Chemistry at Georgia Tech and my MS in Computer
Science at The University of Louisiana
at Lafayette (USL when I was there). I did a science fiction
interview program called
Reality Break for many years. I’m currently collecting some of
those interviews into an
ebook series for
Fictionwise. I did a lot of work for
WREK 91.1 FM, the Georgia Tech radio station. I’ll enumerate some
of it later (because it was very cool.) I did that work whilst
looking for a job after getting laid off by the evil bastards at
Intertrust, even though we delivered them a Secure publishing system on time
and under budget. Oh well.

That’s enough for now. Can’t shoot the works with the first
entry. Maybe by the next entry I’ll edit the templates so this looks
not quite so identical to every other BlogMax site. L’chaim!