Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space

Somehow this Spiritualized album title seemed appropriate as this post's title.

A frankly positive day of work yesterday lead to a somewhat disgraceful evening. Now (slightly) paying interest on last night's (slight) lack of control. Need to get to work, but feel like procrastinating instead. Which, alas, is not an option. Looking to put in some good hours today, make some real progress work-wise, and check out at around 6pm.

I'm not too keen on the turn my personal life is taking, but before I discourse about it, I need to collect my thoughts a little bit more. Feel like I'm on a limbo between really good and really bad and that's too stressful right now.

Work

Didn't sleep too well. Woke up at 7.30am feeling somewhat awake, so decided to get up not to risk waking up in a much worse shape an hour later. It's happened before. Calmly got dressed and ready to go out, no stress. Walked to the city centre, had breakfast at one of my favorite spots and arrived at work minutes before 9am.

Went through a work report with Miguel, something I was already expecting to do, and it went really smooth. Kinda surprised. Will spend the entire day fixing issues with the B2B, hopefully will make some real headway.

Back still hurts, no signs of improvements. Resigned to call and schedule an appointment for tomorrow.

Wormrotten

Just got back from the Wormrot gig. It was worth every penny and every mile, for all the right reasons. Really dug every band that played and it was one of those evenings where each band rocks even more than the one preceding it. Atentado are really competent crust punk, Utopium were a really good surprise, Maruta devastated the stage and then Wormrot were just insane. Those kids surely don't play with the whole deck but they do destroy.

Back still aches and will have to visit the osteopath sooner rather than later. Saturday at the latest. Have to hit bed real soon, tomorrow need to be at the office at around 9am and have a really long day ahead. Two days actually. But if these turn out well, I'm looking into a relaxing weekend. Let's hope I can take October's last two weeks off. That would be goddamn sweet.

Oh, started playing CM (!) again. Hadn't done it in a few years now, just decided to pop CM 01/02 on a whim and had loads of fun managing Hartlepool in England's Division Three. I must really be going nuts.

And by the way, RIP Steve Jobs. Just got the news from Daniela when I arrived. One less really interesting human being on this Earth.

Pain

My back is killing me. Again. I need an osteopath appointment so badly.

All geared up to go the Wormrot gig anyway. Pisses me off so much that my back gets worse precisely the only day I have plans to go out and have fun. Let's hope it doesn't get even worse, and I'll surely take a pill before going out. What has my world come down to.

I feel like I'm reaching some sort of saturation point with my whole situation, a point where I become numb and don't really care much anymore. And it saddens me.

Numbing Pressure

Aching all over, overwhelmingly tired, body and mind. I suppose the worst thing is not really having a definite "good" scenario to look forward to after the storm passes. Feeling directionless has always been a problem with me. Remaining (somewhat) calm, nevertheless. Or at least pretending to, with all the anger brooding deep down inside.

Feel like saddling my bike and just get off. Certain to be a mistake as a) it's damn hot outside and b) I've been drained of nearly all my body strength, and bike has pedals and stuff. On the other hand, it's probably not too hot for too long now and the sheer fact of breathing fresh air invigorates me already. Might try to get away from the office at 5pm tops and see how this goes.

Daniela has the SHE board meeting tonight and I don't know what I want to do. I'll probably still be drained by then and don't even feel like play poker - don't have much balance to anyway. Reading or watching a film are options, but will probably just drift off to sleep either way. Drinking myself to sleep is also an option, albeit a tragic one which must and will be avoided.

Speaking of books, I wonder if there will ever come a time when I make good on the promise of reading my entire backlog of 100 or so new books. It's certain to take some 2 or 3 years for sure, but I'm positive I'd feel so good about it. I obviously no longer know what it feels like going out to buy books because there's nothing else left to read anew.

Really hoping to make it to the Wormrot/Maruta gig tomorrow night at Side B in Benavente. Atentado are playing too, and I've been meaning to see them for ages now. Hugo, RSA, JCS and JMR will probably all be there too and it's guaranteed to be a hell of a good time too. I'm also longing for the lone road trip, which despite being a little short side is definitely longer than anything I've done in a damn long time.

Lost?

Brilliant ad.

I Kern, You Kern...

Waiting It Out

Ink Stamps

Recently I had an idea for a sort of critical blog post (which you can see here, in Portuguese) and to achieve the desired effect, I wanted that kind of approval ink stamp to mark approval or rejection in a retro way. Googling for a bit, all I could find was a paid Photoshop brush set and obviously I wasn't about to shell out for something this small even if the brushes would probably be useful in the future.

So I decided to roll my own, with a few tips from here and there. As it may be useful for someone else, here they are for download. Use and abuse at will.

RSS Feed Tracking in Blogger

I've been puzzled over and over again as to how I could go about monitoring the visitors I receive in my blogs coming through RSS feeds. I've been using Google Analytics for a long time, but the only thing I was tracking was the default: visits directly to the websites. Today I decided to give it another shot, this time with my eyes open... and having all my blogging ventures on Blogger helps tremendously. That and Google buying every company in sight.

After understand that I what I was looking for was obviously FeedBurner, I had to find a way to somehow redirect my current RSS feed to the new FeedBurner one, so current subscribers wouldn't have to manually update their feeds. That's where Google's buying spree comes into play: Blogger and FeedBurner are both under Google these days, so not only I can use the same account for everything - including Analytics - but there's also perfect and simple integration between each service.

So all I had to do was burn my original feed into FeedBurner, and then access my blog settings and put the new feed URL in the Post Feed Redirect URL field. Brilliant. Now FeedBurner is munching on data (see last post) and I'm eagerly awaiting to see some stats. Rock on.

Great User Feedback

While setting up RSS feed redirection to FeedBurner for 24Hz (my pop culture blog, in Portuguese), I've come across this fantastic piece of feedback from feedburner app:


It's good to use a service that actually understands they're dealing with people. Way to go, feedburner.

50 Great Examples of Infographics

Huge list of beautiful and inspiring infographics over at Design You Trust.