Site Down!

The world is in an uproar! Tao of Dowingba is down! Halt the presses! Or something!

This is the first time 1&1 (my new host) has gone down, so I have no idea how long it'll be for. Probably not long. It's not as if anyone reads this "backup site" anyway.

Sigh.

Death and the deathing death that deaths the death on death street after the deathth hour on the deathnd day of the deathst month.

What the bleeding hell?
Wow, this thing is still kicking? Amazing. This is the ultimate test: if Blogger creates a new archive for me, I'll admit it's finally fixed. Otherwise I'll just go on hating it. I might use this page as a "backup" a la Instapundit if it like, doesn't suck anymore. My real site, in case you were wondering, is at www.dowingba.com. It's much better than Blogspot.

Okay, Google. Let's see if you fixed this old sluggish thing...

[Click!]

TAO OF DOWINGBA HAS MOVED!
For the last time ever, Tao of Dowingba has moved. It is now at www.dowingba.com. Since I have my own domain name now, even if I move it in the future, you won't even notice!

Update your bookmarks accordingly!

Gig
Gig. Tonight. Mozeba. Port Carling. Be there. Be square.

Cello
Mozeba is (probably) going to become a trio. Yes, that's right: we're going to totally screw up our tried-and-tested group chemistry by adding 33.3% more people. But we're not going into this lightly.

We are a very serious band and we write very serious music that we're err very serious about. We aren't about to dive into something rashly and risk screwing up the past 2.66 years of our lives. We're being careful about it.

Me and Jackson are going to Toronto on Tuesday to co-purchase a cello. We are going to lend the cello to someone for a month or so, and we'll see what he comes up with. If he sucks, or doesn't fit in well with our already very eccentric style, he's out. We take our cello and find a new test subject and repeat ad infinitum.

It'll be weird having a third member in Mozeba. Nobody has ever even been in the same room with us while we practice/write songs. We're a very secretive band. And over the past 2.66 years we've grown to be like each other. We've inherited (some of) each other's personality traits, it seems, as well as writing traits. Or something. Basically we've grown together as musicians over 2.66 years. Neither of us are a whole musician independently. We're each half a musician. This musician's name is Mozeba, and he is growing 33.3% more weighty.

Diagnosis
My Brainworks diagnosis:

Christian, you show a slight right-hemisphere dominance with a moderate preference for auditory processing, an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics.

You are drawn to a random and sometimes nonchalant synthesis of material. You learn as it seems important to a specific situation, and might even develop a resentment of others who attempt to direct your learning down a specific channel.

Your right-hemispheric dominance provides a structure that is only loosely organized and one which processes entire swatches of reality, overlooking details. You are emotional in your reactions and perceptual more than logical in your approach, although you can impose structure and a language base when necessary.

Your auditory preference, on the other hand, implies that you process information sequentially and unidimensionally. This combination of right-brain and auditory modes creates conflict, as you want to process data more rapidly than your natural processes allow.

Your tendency to be creative and free-flowing is accompanied by sufficient ability to organize and be logical, allowing you a reasonable degree of success in a number of different endeavors. You take in information methodically and systematically which can then be synthesized rapidly. In this manner, you manage to function consistently well, although certainly less efficiently than you desire.

You prefer the abstract and are a theoretician at heart while retaining the ability to be practical. You find the symbolism in a great deal of what you encounter and are something of a "mystic."

With regards to your lifestyle, you have the mentality which would be good as a philosopher, writer, journalist, or instructor, or possibly as a systems designer or social worker. Perhaps most important is your ability to "listen to your inner voice" as a mode of skipping over unnecessary steps to achieve your goals.

Not bad.

Plane lands on highway
Plagiarized from The Bracebridge Weekender (no website to link to):

A polit flying an advanced ultralight airplane was forced to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff from Muskoka Airport in Gravenhurst [this is bullshit: muskoka airport is closer to Bracebridge than Gravenhurst -dowingba] on Tuesday.

Bracebridge OPP said pilot John Morgan, of Toronto, took off for a flight to Haliburton late Tuesday afternoon. He was flying the plane at about 3,500 feet when it lost engine power and began to lose altitude, police said. Unable to regain power, Morgan made a safe emergency landing on Muskoka Road 118, east of Bracebridge near Vankoughnet.

Police said the plane sustained minor damage to its wing after hitting a mailbox during the landing. Morgan was uninjured.

Once in a while a truly bizarre news story shows up in the otherwise bland Bracebridge press.

Colour scheming
It has recently been the subject of a small debate. Grey on grey. The colour scheme from hell?

I absolutely love this colour scheme (the one you are looking at, on this page, right now). This colour of grey, to me, best contrasts the black text. Even better than white. Not only that, it seems to make the text look more "clean" and "professional". I really just love the colour. (It's "#CCCCCC" if you're an HTML geek.)

This colour scheme isn't as good though. But still, you can't beat grey.

Evolving poem
The Tao of Dowingba poem keeps evolving. Here's a good one:

Tao of hours put into your property
would perfer it
oh well. Yes, Jackson, I know
what? to live
my
life is not the
reason even though boring and are treated.
the dispute is obviously
very fact that my mind, off
the reason he is
ruined
because of
my usual picnic table But now seriously considering
the poem generated from the fading
remnants of course, led to them
that bad for the other towns and
we all around so of
humour. 23:54 | postCount ;
Thursday, August
22, 2003 The government,
is
obviously so being lonely because Big Brother is this site 3
times in Canada
nowadays.So that is, wrong.

The weird thing is, August 22, 2003 is a Friday.

The seven stages of Verve
I'm beginning to accept my Verve situation. I don't really care anymore. I'm going to leave it up to fate. If my money arrives, great. If it doesn't, oh well. I'll just happily sputter along on Blogspot for a while. Well, probably forever, I guess. Clearly it's impossible to leave Blogspot. I just want this little drama to end so I can get back to posting interesting entries. And my posting lax will finally end once I can get my mind off of this.

Advantages of staying on Blogger: I don't have to worry about diskspace and bandwidth usage. Only have to change one or two templates when I make changes. Free.

Advantages of moving to Movable Type: No Google ad. Reliable archiving. Individual entry archives. All around better speed. Better domain name.

Edit: Blogspot does have a bandwidth limit. It's 250mb a month. Which seems pretty crappy until you realise that, basically, I'd need to get about 27,000 visitors a month in order to go over that limit. (I've changed my archiving to "weekly" so that people don't have to suck up 50kb every time they want to see an archive, saving me a bit of bandwidth worrying.)

The perfect society
Here is my idea for the perfect society:

Everyone owns a piece or property and can do whatever the hell they want on that piece of property. They make their own laws as they wish, and are responsible for enforcing those laws as they see fit. If you are on someone else's property and you break their laws: good luck, buddy!

In turn, public places (like streets and such) are owned by the government and are governed accordingly. The government make the laws and are responsible for enforcing and such. In this example the government happens to be a Democracy (exactly like Canada's government nowadays). So being on the street would be no different than being on the street in Canada nowadays.

If, for instance, you are standing on your property and shoot someone who is standing on the street (or on another person's property), it would basically be treated the same way international politics are treated. If the government feels like it (and in this Democracy, they certainly would), they would see fit to prosecute you accordingly. That is, if they have the power to. (If your property is powerful enough to defend against the government, my God you should write a book!) If the dispute is against two property owners, then it's up to them to resolve the issue (most likely an all out war, in which case at least one piece of property would surely become available).

If, for instance, a property owner or the government dislikes something another property owner or the government is doing, they treat it exactly like international politics. It's a very simple idea, really. Basically each property is a country.

Is this not the perfect societal structure? Of course, life would be very savage and violent. But I know I would perfer it this way. (This coming from an average white suburbanite who has never tasted any real violence in his sheltered, pathetic life.)

Take it or leave it. You all know I'll go down in history as the next Karl Marx, though. Or at least Groucho.

Verve fiasco: day 14
My money order if floating in some mysterious void between here and Pontiac, Michigan. I mean, you'd think it'd either have arrived at Verve or been sent back here by now (like if I mispelled the address or something). But it's apparently done neither. It's like an 11 hour drive between the two locations. What, did it fall off the truck or something?

I am now seriously considering the fact that my money may never arrive. I may lose this account and all the hundreds of hours I've put into it. I was so eagerly awaiting the official launch of Tao of Dowingba v3.0, but now that seems nothing but the fading remnants of a dream long forgotten.

I guess fate has a sense of humour.

Story introduction
I just had the perfect idea for an introduction to a novel:

"I'm so lonely. There's no one on this green earth for me," I said into the telephone reciever.

"So move to mars," the distorted voice on the other end mused.

"Yeah right," I retorted. "Republic credits don't just grow on trees. And besides, there's no good work on mars; only crappy construction/oxygen pumping jobs. Only a fool would move there until Project Atmosphere is finished."

Lonely talk
All I want to talk about is being lonely and I don't want to talk about being lonely because being lonely sucks and talking about it is boring but I guess I should talk about it for lack of anything better to talk about even though it's boring and being lonely sucks as I stated before but I guess you probably remember that since it's in this very sentence but who knows these days with televisions and radios draining everyone's brain kind of like the "telescreen" or whatever it's called in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four where there's this screen that has propoganda on it and you can't turn it off but you can turn it down but not completely off and it makes everyone all stupid because Big Brother is watching and he don't want nobody to be smart and uppity for some reason even though it means there's no one exciting to talk to because everyone is stupid and Big Brother is obviously very smart but it's ironic because the very fact that he exists is the reason he is obviously very lonely.