Once again, I’m making the 13 hour migration northward to Pennsylvania tomorrow. I plan to be on the road before 8 AM, which should fix my arrival in good old State College around 9 PM. Joy. Anyway, the drive has gotten a lot better since I’ve figured out how to drive it. Here, I would like to offer a few tricks of the trade for driving from Atlanta to State College:

1. Virginia represents over half of the entire drive. In order to stay sane, I find the most pleasing way to deal with the unending landscape is to set your cruise control for 65 mph and stay involved in your driving only to a degree that can keep you on the road. This way, driving through Virginia becomes what it really should be: sitting in a gorgeous field on a nice day with great music.
2. Pick a game and play it. Sometimes, I like to make up silly rules, like “let’s try to do the drive only stopping three times” or “let’s try and make it on three tanks of gas” (I’m convinced this is possible).
3. Packing bottled water is essential. When I drive the entire trip (down and back up), I usually buy a sixer of water in State College and try to limit my consumption so that I have it finished when I get back to 112 Ridge. This also helps when playing the “stop three times” game, if you know what I mean.
4. In West Virginia, there is a 75 mph speed limit on I-81. Also, the state appears too poor to afford a state police. Set cruise control to 95 and enjoy! (it’s a celebration of no longer being in Virginia).
5. Try coming up with wacky routes and see if you have the wherewithal to follow them. For instance, I’ve noticed that US 220 (which runs by State College) runs all the way to North Carolina (where it connects with I-85). Someday, I will drive this route, just to see if its possible.

Speaking of routes, this may be a very interesting trip, as I’m breaking in a new path. Instead of doing the nightmare trip through Altoona, I’m going to Harrisburg (which might actually be worse). It’s an exciting conclusion to an otherwise mundane trip.

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First, I want to apologize for referencing that godawful Ben Folds Five song in the title. Thankfully, the film I’m about to hyperbolically discuss does not (but it does play “Sister Ray” over the closing credits. Totally awesome).

I just watched Rian Johnson’s 2005 film, “Brick”. Let me just that it is totally awesome (could I make a movie rating scale that works like that? “totally awesome,” “awesome,” “meh,” “not so awesome,” “fucking terrible”. I think this has potential). The film, in case you are not aware of it, is a film noir set in a modern, southern Californian high school. To suggest that the film is set in a high school is not to suggest that the film is something like “Bugsy Malone” (in other words, it isn’t “cute” or “obvious”). The film is also, I would suggest, not a neo-noir (at least, other than in the sense that it wasn’t made in the 1940s (of course, neither were “Touch of Evil” or “Kiss Me Deadly”)). Neo-noir seems to suggest some sort of reevaluation of noir or something of a diminished noir (since “noir” is a mood and not a genre). So, when I say that “Brick” is a noir set in a high school, I don’t mean to suggest that it deploys noir in an ironic fashion or uses it to fulfill some functional nostalgia, the film is noir. Set in a high school.

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I had to send an email to the English Dept. graduate adviser today because I was worried about a change I was going to affect and whether or not it would diminish my prospects re graduating. The MA has a very simple set of requirements:

1. English 501
2. One course in literary theory or rhetoric
3. Two courses in literature in English prior to 1800
4. Two courses in literature in English after 1800

Those are the only class requirements for the degree (there are a few other requirements, but that’s not what we are talking about). Anyway, as someone who studies post-WWII fiction, I would theoretically not have trouble fulfilling the third requirement, right? Wrong, actually.

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I’ve been rabidly watching Project Runway on Wednesday nights. Whenever I mention to people who are “too smart” for reality TV, I find myself making justifications: “I learn a lot about clothes,” “it’s a lot smarter than other shows,” etc. Frankly, I think that may be a bunch of hogwash. I realize that I enjoy watching a bunch of bitchy, weird people backstabbing and bickering as much as the next American. This coming from a man who used to look down his nose at “the unwashed masses” and their reality TV.

I still teach an essay in my composition classes on the relationship between reality TV and the decline of real, democratic dialog in the United States. I still believe that reality TV is a symptom of a dangerous aspect of the American character that has run rampant since the turn of the new century. I still believe that.

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After the aborted “live” experience this morning, I think I have everything working again. I’m still not sure what exactly happened, but it seems to have something to do with locking issues on SQLite databases. That is shit that is beyond my paygrade, I think. Anyway, Dreamhost seems to have cleaned up the way the handle database creation, so MySQL isn’t a problem. Also, I can now run the super sexy mysql_session code for Rails instead of using slow file server based session code.

Of course, the fun part about all of this is I spent a big chunk of today fighting with the stupid software. First, I tried installing Wordpress, but I just keep being reminded about how much I really don’t like that software. After doing battle with that for a while, I deleted it and went back to Mephsito. Having had some rather telling experiences with the new software, I should probably send the author an email. We’ll see if I actually do that.

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I’m once again reminded of why I really hate Ruby on Rails. Everytime I’m programming a web application in the environment, I’m thinking to myself something alongs the lines of “yeah, yeah, yeah! this is totally the greatest thing ever!” Then comes time to deploy the fucking thing. I know, I know: I should be using a Mongrel cluster to serve my Rails apps and Apache running mod_proxy to serve static content. That’s what I should be doing. However, I don’t have the money to drop on the kind of dedicated hosting it would take to do that and, frankly, I don’t have the time to configure everything about the box on which this ideal Ruby on Rails installation would live. I’ve already had to configure an email server once in my life (and that was one time too many).

So, sadly, I’m stuck with Dreamhost and their “we only use Apache” policy. Frankly, I can understand the desire to only use one web application to serve your content. It makes logical sense (something that I find isn’t true about a lot of Ruby (I’m looking at you, Simply RESTful)). Why should I, really, have to support at least two (but sometimes three or four) programs to serve Rails? It’s not that good … or is it?

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I’m currently writing the theme for this blog. It’s going well enough (although my dad’s old-ass Windows 2K box rendered it weirdly). The thing that I’m a little nervous about is running this guy on Mephisto. It seems like the software package towards which the rails communtiy is gravitating. Also, it satisfies most of my blogging requirements (I’d like one that I didn’t have to actually use an administrative interface for (although, Mephisto does have a nice admin system)).

Anyway, it’s nice to finally be able to use a blog package that appears to release software regularly (and doesn’t suck) . Typo, which apparently fragged its webserver, used to be the go-to for blogging using Ruby On Rails, but with the release of Mephisto, that seems to be changing. Case in point: the rails people even moved their (excellent) blog to Mephisto. It’s nice, especially that Typo hasn’t released a non-beta in a very long time and dealing with checking revisions out of an SVN repository is not fun for users.

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The new album by the Red Sparrowes appeared on the internet recently. I don’t plan on listening to it, as I can’t even remember their first album (beyond being pretty sure I listened to it). The band has also had a split release with Grails (whom I can’t stand, either). Anyway, as I said, I wasn’t predisposed to like this album.

However …

… I read that the freaking album is a concept record about The Great Leap Forward. Not even just the Great Leap Forward, itself: the album is a meditation on the mass killing of sparrows that ended up causing a huge famine and nearly lead to an ecological collapse when the locust population expanded out of control. Now, I’m thinking to myself that I really, really need to hear this record.

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