It’s the 29th. Leap Day is a strange day that was thrown together by a need to Make Things Fit.

The leap day was introduced as part of the Julian reform. The day following the Terminalia (23 February) was doubled, forming the so-called “bis sextum”. The first day of the bis sextum (February 24) came to be regarded as the intercalated or “bissextile” day. February 29 came to be regarded as the leap day when the Roman system of numbering days was replaced by sequential numbering in the late Middle Ages. — Wikipedia.

Wikipedia (“We’re Usually Pretty Close to Being Fact!”) also says that today is the one day that Women are allowed to propose to a Man. Seeing that I’m headed to a wedding tomorrow and one of my best friends in the world is having two more kids today, I’m going to try to lay as low as possible so that doesn’t happen to me. But then again:

Another component of this tradition was that if the man rejects the proposal, he should soften the blow by providing a kiss, one pound currency, and a pair of gloves (some later sources say a silk gown). There were similar notions in France and Switzerland.

I’m currently low on my supply of silk gowns.

I have a friend that is turning 8 in Leap Years, today. Being born on February 29th, he is officially known as a “leapling”, which is really awesome and I’m jealous — kind of sounds like a race of puppet from The Dark Crystal. Happy birthday, Rob!

One more really boring post, and then I?m done, I promise. I?ll include a photo of a cat named Citrus.

Today I?m trying MacJournal, which I thought would be awesome, because you can set it to type in a glorious full screen using black background and green text, like an old school dos computer or something. It reminds me of me dear ol? departed Pa who, after eventually having to junk his Zenith-branded MS-DOS clone, bought a two thousand dollar Dell with CD/DVD burner, fifty USB ports, candy dispenser and telekinetic powers and refused to run any version of Windows on it, 3.0, 9x, XP, or anything, just so he could run a word processing program without any Microsoft-branded distractions. He wanted that green-on black vibe, and I have to admit, it is really nice to look at.

MacJournal has allowed connections to your blog for a while, and I?ve been a fan of it as a writing software for a while, but as a blogging software it?s still not as user-friendly as some others. I think that it might be my choice, though. I mean come on. Dad would have loved this one.

OK, OK. The picture:

Things I’ll Miss.

Originally uploaded by macnab.

Today I’m trying out Red Sweater Software’s MarsEdit. Feels a little clunkier than ecto, to me. I can’t put my finger on it. I’m not even really testing out these blogging programs for myself; I’m trying to find a good one for my Mac-using bosses at a real estate company that find working with computers to be a daily, if not hourly, challenge.

The nice thing about MarsEdit is the ability to drag and drop a photo from anywhere and upload it; the easier the better. But it leaves a lot of code lying around (great for me, terrible for them… I’ve noticed that to the unsuspecting, raw HTML code looks like typographic vomit, and elicits a response similar to seeing the real thing).

So I grabbed this neat photo from flickr and [amidst a yearning for a decent camera in which to take awesome arty photographs of my own collection of odd little wooden men] I threw it online using this program. Not bad. But the winner still of the three programs I’ve tried so far, is Windows Live Writer. Yeah. I know: BlaSpHemeR! But it’s actually pretty great. And lookee all those cute drop shadows!

Seems like my life these days is spent less on learning how to do great new things with technology and more on spending lots of time finding the easiest ways to allow people that have seen other people do great new things with technology do OK new things with technology.

I just got my new computer in the mail. I’ve started this post about three times, but fell asleep each time, while talking about how excited I am about it, how it’s a worthy upgrade to a great computer, how there was nothing wrong with my old computer but I had some friends in need that… uh…. zzzzzzzz… hrmfh…

WHa?? …whoops! Did it again. OK. I’m going to try again. Here are some great things about my new computer:

1. It is definitely not portable. I can’t keep myself awake all night by watching downloaded TV shows or DVDs or youtube videos featuring Monchichis anymore, which might make me a little bit more boring as a person but is completely fantastic for my sleep cycle.
2. It’s enormous. The upgrade to my old desktop, Kathryn, adds 4 inches to the screen, and it’s kind of freaking me out. (Insert tried-and-true cliche about how “size matters”… zzzz… snort. Oh! What?)
3. It’s bright. It’s so bright that when I went to take my nightly [unapologetically] narcissistic photo of myself using Apple’s Photobooth, I actually had to turn off the fake flash the program uses because the screen is so freaking bright.
4. I love the new keyboard. I have never been a fan of the rinky-dink white keyboards Apple has been using for the past several years, difficult to type on and so easy to besmirch, but these new-fangled jobbies are sleek, sexy, and typing on it is like slipping down a candy-colored waterslide at Carowinds, circa 1989.
5. It matches my iPhone, which means that everything in my office that isn’t made of brushed aluminum and glass has to go. Sorry, sofa, rug, and toilet!

Whew, made it! That’s all I can take right now. Thanks for hanging on that long, yourself!

…Hello? Are you asleep?

Damn.

I’ve been playing around with upgrades and templates and blogging software all day for a re-make of the Terpsicorps website, and chose to use my own site as a guinea pig. I hate reading posts in blogs that say something like “check out the new look of the site” because people that find this forty years in the future won’t be able to read and so I think that kind of grandstanding is just plain rude.

To the geeks that are interested I am trying out ecto first. If I like it, I might buy it, but there are others to try. And blogging is so…2005-08, you know?

I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, Matt. Please put the keyboard away and show us more pictures of dogs.”

Kurt Nihilist

Originally uploaded by macnab.

Cabaret Kiki performance for Art Magazine, Valentine’s Day 2008.