I know - with all the obsession I have these days over MovableType (MT) and the Grand Switchover of 2005, there are times when it may seem that there's nothing else going on in my life at all. And...um, well, for the most part that's true, actually, which is what's making it such a good time in my life to actually sit down and get my final education on MT finished (you know, the part where you actually interact with it, instead of reading books). There have been a number of other interesting things, though, that have happened in the last month and a half as well, so I thought today I'd try to get them all mentioned.

Now that I think about it, I realize I actually have three rather big pieces of news to report. First, probably the biggest, is that I finally got a new hearing aid! For those who don't know, I had to have surgery back in 2000 on my left ear, to remove my eardrum (which I dutifully journaled during the process; if the MT archives were up right now, I could point you to all the old entries); plus I have a whole background in punk, college radio, etc., so the hearing in my right ear is not that great to begin with. I actually got a hearing aid right after the surgery, and had it throughout most of 2001; but then my bookbag got stolen at a cafe one day, which my hearing aid was in, plus my original Palm IIIe that I just loved so damn much, which was really heartbreaking at the time. And since hearing aids aren't covered under insurance, I was just pretty much shit out of luck.

So then I went a couple of years just not hearing very well, and having to ask my friends to repeat everything they said, and in general just being a real pain in the ass to others. And then my aunt donated her old hearing aid to me and that helped for a bit, but it wasn't fitted for my ear so always hurt tremendously when I wore it, and of course didn't produce very good sound since it didn't exactly match my particular ear canal. And then that broke anyway, so I was shit out of luck again. But for my birthday this year my parents decided to buy me another one - which was really great of them to do, I think, because they average around US$1,000 (800 euros, 500 pounds), which means I'd never be able to afford one on my own. Anyway, that's a photo of it you're seeing above - it's a Siemens Infiniti CIC (Completely In the ear Canal), for those who are curious. Unlike the last time I had a hearing aid, this one is made by making a cast of my ear canal out of this epoxy-like stuff, then actually scanning it into a computer and having a CAD/CAM laser etch the hearing aid out of a solid block of plastic, making the device a lot more resistant to damage and shattering. Amazing! It has four levels of articulation that can be individually set by my audiologist, to help with my particular type of hearing loss - and the thing even docks with a computer, just like your iPod, so that the audiologist can go back and retweak the settings whenever they want. Ah, technology!

So that's been nice, to actually be able to hear the world around me again, and actually catch something like 8 or 9 out of every 10 words my friends say to me, unlike the 3 or 4 I catch without a hearing aid. So thanks yet again, mom and dad, for the amazing birthday present.

And speaking of gifts, that's probably the other two biggest pieces of news I have - I was recently the recipient of two rather extraordinary gifts from two of my online readers. The irony, of course, is that they both live in London, are both male, are around the same age, and actually both live in a similiar section of the city, but don't know each other even though they're both reading my journal every day. It's a small world, man, let me tell you. The first gift I got was from Steve J., one of the people I was going to stay with during my 2004 UK/Ireland tour that had to be canceled for lack of funds. He sent me a digital camera, man! I guess the story is that he recently bought a new one, and figured that the old one was just going to sit in a drawer and gather dust, so why not spend a few bucks having it shipped over to me, and get the pleasure of me posting photos that finally have a semi-decent quality to them? Hey, why not? I've been putting off getting any cool modern peripherals myself, because there's no real point in me owning them; I'm still on a SCSI-based, pre-USB, System 9 Macintosh at home, which means I can't actually plug any of these modern devices up to it, nor even run the software that would let me control them. But I do have a half-broken Windows laptop in my apartment as well, donated to me by my friend Garth so that I can sync my Treo and retrieve files off it. And that works perfectly with the new digital camera as well (a British brand called Epsilon), which means that it's all chugging along quite nicely.

And I'll happily admit, the quality of my new Epsilon is insanely better than my little cellphone camera, which for the last year is the only camera I've had at my disposal, which could get really frustrating at times when I wanted to shoot something indoors or under bad light. As a former photography major who spent years inhaling toxic fumes in darkrooms, this I guarantee is the most amazing thing about these newest digital cameras - the utterly remarkable shots they can capture under low-light conditions, which is something that used to take a lot of effort in film-based days, and still would never quite come out right. So I've been snapping up a bunch of new photos this month with the new camera, and soon I'll actually sit down and get them posted to my Flickr account. I did want to share just one today, though, because I wanted to discuss one of the things that came with the camera - I now have a program that will not only stitch together your individual panoramic-photo elements automatically for you, but will actually smooth the edges of each frame and slightly bend the most outermost parts, to present one seamless photo at the end. And regular readers know, of course, that I'm a nutjob for panoramic photos, but before have had to just post them David-Hockney style, where I just basically patched all the photos together myself in Photoshop but didn't smooth them into one large image. So that's almost as exciting as having the new camera itself, as pathetic as that is to admit. (This picture, by the way, is of the Lake red-line el stop here in the Chicago Loop.)

And secondly, this other London reader I was mentioning (Timothy D.) decided to simply send me some money, which I can always use more of, needless to say. But he sent it in this really interesting way that I wanted to mention, that I had never heard of before - he bought an American Express Gift Card. Have you heard about these? They're just like a gift certificate or a traveler's check, in that you purchase them beforehand for a set amount, and they're guaranteed by American Express in the case of theft. But in this case the money is actually delivered as a hard-plastic card, which can then be used just like a credit card at anyplace that accepts credit cards. Wow! And I've been using it for, like, four days, and it's worked perfectly at each and every place where I've tried it out. So I used to it buy some groceries, and to get some cigarettes, and I went and saw a movie, and then I was out of cash so used it at a coffeehouse, etc.

It's a little freaky to own something that works like a credit card, to tell you the truth, because for the first time in my life I'm beginning to get a taste of what "All Of You People" (the 95 percent of American adults with credit cards, that is) have to deal with on a daily basis. Man, fucking everyone accepts credit cards in our society these days! I've been paying attention to such things for the first time in my life these days, and really waking up to just what an overwhelming problem instant gratification has become in our society. Jesus, no wonder something like 70 percent of all American adults now have at least $10,000 of debt; how could you not, when you're getting bombarded a thousand times a day with opportunities to buy, buy right now, own right now, TAKE THIS HOME WITH YOU THIS FUCKING SECOND AND ONE OF THESE DAYS YOU'LL GET AROUND TO ACTUALLY PAYING FOR IT, BUT FUCK IT, TAKE THIS HOME WITH YOU NOW THIS SECOND! Gah! It's been a bit of a shock to my system, walking around with this gift card and knowing, "I could go into any one of these places I'm passing right now, and buy anything for sale in any of them." And man, if my card was an actual credit-style one, instead of a debit-style (where a prepaid amount has been put on it, and I'm simply dwindling that down), I'm not sure how I'd deal with all the temptation. I mean, this is the biggest reason I don't actually own a credit card - because I know how deeply compulsive I can in fact be, and figure I shouldn't give myself tools that would actually encourage the behavior, especially when it could end up landing me in some debtor's prison in Australia or something. Nonetheless, it's been extremely nice to have this gift card, and especially a little chunk of extra money to actually go out and do a couple of fun things. Thanks once again, Timothy!

Okay, I have other little things I could report, but I'm itching to get back to the MovableType stuff. I'm coming to the realization this week, by the way, that this process is going much faster than I was expecting it to, and that I might be ready for the Grand Switchover in a matter of a few weeks, not a few months like I was expecting. And that's great news, because once the "official" and frozen site design is loaded into its permanent location (at the root of my website, that is - the page where you see it now is simply my private testing area), a number of great things all happen in my life - I'll be able to start posting all my journal entries directly from my Treo, meaning much more regular updates; and I'll be able to start quickly importing tons of old material, from my old literary days and my old Geocities journal, and all the digital photos I've been taking over the last year, and all the MP3s I've been creating through Audioblogger, etc. So it's really going to be just a matter of months from now before every single file I've created for public consumption over the last ten years of my life will finally all be online again, and this time searchable by date and type and subject. And that'll be a nice moment - it'll feel, I think, like I finally put the capper on my old life as a professional artist, with all the material created in that time period now permanently online in a way that's not going to change for a long time, and that I can now move forward with my new life as a business owner. So many changes in my life these days, man. Who knows where it's all going to lead? It's the process that's exciting to me, I guess, and the feeling that everything is moving forward for a reason and with a purpose. And after two years of unemployment and three years of no romantic relationships, that would be a good thing indeed.

Oh, and one more thought, jotted on my Treo during a recent bus ride:

I heard from one of my readers the other day, who had something interesting to observe about the Grand Switchover of 2005. Basically, she was noting that with the increase in power I now have concerning my archives, with the search capabilities and the categorization and the like, I also seem to be doing the same thing with my personal life there; that is, I now have links to all my social-networking accounts there, when I didn't at Geocities, and of course have the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ now as well, which literally has the capability of updating people about my life on a minute-by-minute basis (if I actually wanted to log updates every minute, that is). She was wondering if perhaps the switchover to all this new software has affected not only my website in a technical way, but me in an emotional way as well? Am I feeling like sharing more ways of getting ahold of me, now that there are more ways of getting ahold of my old entries?

It's an intriguing theory to be sure, which is why I wanted to mention it here, but the answer is actually a lot more pedestrian and is motivated more by real-world factors than idealistic ones. Basically, for the few of you who don't already know, I'm in the process of opening a small business here in Chicago right now, an arts center to be exact, which is why I made the decision last year to no longer pursue a career as a creative writer. I'm still in phase 1 of the process, where the center exists as not much more than an idea and a bound business plan, which I'm in the process of finishing up with the help of the Small Business Administration here in Chicago. But soon, though, I move into phase 2 of the process, which is going out and actually trying to raise the money I need to open the place - US$200,000 altogether, in fact, which is nothing compared to a dot-com but an insane amount of money when it comes to something like a small creative center dedicated to underground artists. And I'm anticipating this being a complex part of the process, much like it was in the mid-1990s when I was a brand-new writer, and looking for opportunities to perform more often and in front of bigger and more impressive audiences. In fact, I see the process in both situations to be remarkably similar, when you stop and think about it; in both cases there is a certain amount of success you can have through your own smarts, and your own willingness to put yourself in the right situations, but ultimately it still boils down to randomly meeting the right person in the right random place at the right random moment. You can put yourself in situations more often where this is likely to happen, and where you have a better shot at meeting this right random person, but ultimate success still relies on a number of factors beyond your control.

Now temper this with the differences between seeking literary opportunities and trying to open a small business; when you're an artist, the only person you're really accountable to professionally is yourself. No one needs to believe in your project in order for you to actually do the project (besides the people giving you new literary opportunities, that is), and there's no real reason why people who support you need to know the absolute latest with what's going on with your newest project. A new business is an entirely different thing, however - as I go through this process of finding an investor, I need to be getting others excited about the whole thing, and following along, and already starting to form the core diehard group of supporters off which the center's eventual customer base is going to be established. Suddenly I'm going to need people to be able to know where I am, to be able to send me last-minute messages about a gallery opening somewhere where a wealthy patron has shown up who I should meet. Once phase 2 of this startup process begins, my entire life is suddenly going to take a radical turn; by the very nature of the process I will suddenly be a much more public person than before, and need to develop a much stronger and more documented network of friends and business associates.

One of the things I seem to have been blessed with in my life is the ability to get others naturally excited about what I'm doing, and in many cases for them to get rather addicted to the projects as well. When it's come to my literary work over the years, this has been a pleasant but ultimately unimportant aspect of my professional life; it's been nice to have people get so intensely obsessed with my writing, but ultimately my job actually consisted of sitting in a dark room by myself, pounding away on a keyboard. As a business owner, though, this all changes - suddenly it's in my best interest that people get addicted to what I'm trying to do with this center, and to get intensely obsessed with how the process is going. So part of all the changes with the new site, I admit, is not just a reflection of all the new power at my disposal, but also a preparation for when I move into phase 2 of the startup process this fall. The creation of the Instant Locator, the links to all my social-network accounts, is not really a response to all the tech things going on at my site right now, but rather an attempt to make the startup process for my business a smoother one, and one that will hopefully yield success in a shorter period of time. (That's the hope, anyway.) Wish I could say it was for something else besides the boring reason of making money, but that's what it is.