Greetings, true believers! Well, sorry I wasn't able to get an entry up yesterday; I have, in fact, been quite sick for the last couple of days, and unfortunately seem to still be getting worse instead of better. (I think it's some sort of chest/bronchial-infection thing; or at least, that's where I'm experiencing the most pain.) Anyway, I did want to get an entry up today, because of an important update I needed to get out; but I think I'll just make today's entry full of random notes, and maybe even make it shorter than it usually is, so I can get back quickly to my usual routine, of laying on my bed and staring at the ceiling and wishing I was dead. Enjoy!

--Okay, so the important update first - I have a big correction to make about that Kama Sutra: The Musical cabaret-style preview I saw the other night, that I was telling you about on Monday. As a matter of fact, their run at Davenport's isn't free at all, and apparently the thing I saw at Dollop Coffeehouse (which was free) was just an experiment, not how they're going to regularly do the cabaret version of their upcoming full musical. Which, yeah, isn't nearly as impressive a thing as what I originally thought they were doing - that is, mounting a small-scale production of the larger show, then performing it for free in various cafes and clubs around the city, merely as a way to generate buzz about the full show before it officially opens. Anyway, the poor producers have apparently had to deal with half a dozen confused and angry customers already because of my entry on the subject on Monday; so I just wanted to make it clear that I was the one who was wrong, and that you shouldn't be getting pissed at them for charging money to attend the show at Davenport's! Which, yeah, I agree with you, is ultimately a shame, because the idea as I originally (wrongly) believed it was such a cool one, and one worth definitely talking about; I mean, that's why I mentioned it on Monday in the first place, because I thought it was just such an innovative way to market and promote a stage play, but without this innovative idea they just merely become yet another of dozens of cabaret shows running in this city (albeit a very funny, very bawdy one, don't get me wrong). Anyway, I hope that both you and the producers of the show will forgive me for my mistake; and please, will you stop leaving angry messages on their voicemail now?

--Oh, and speaking of things I've gotten wrong here at the journal.... A guy named Tripp Hammer wrote in yesterday to let me know that I posted wrong information about GPS receivers back at Christmas. See, over the holidays I got to play with a piece of mapping software for the first time, because of my dad recently getting a GPS receiver for his Windows computer, and we ended up driving to this holiday party in downtown St. Louis while I had the computer on my lap, marveling at how amazing such software works. But it was weird as well, because I noticed that the blip for our car wasn't showing up right on the map's streets themselves, but rather about 30 feet to the side of them. And my dad was explaining that that was because the military purposely degrades the GPS signal before releasing it to the general public, so that (for example) terrorists can't use commercial software to plan precise airborn strikes. And the reason my dad knew this, of course, is because for 30 years before being a professor (which is what he does now), he worked for a pretty major military contractor in the St. Louis area, and knowing such things was part of his job.

So anyway, Mr. Hammer wrote yesterday to tell me that my dad is wrong; that through an Executive Order by Bill Clinton in 2000, the military is no longer allowed to add such degradation to GPS signals, and therefore commercial mapping software works pretty much as well now as military-grade software. And Tripp even sent me links to articles in the mainstream media about it as well, definitively proving that what he was saying is true - so thanks, Tripp, for pointing out the error and bringing it to my attention. But this still leaves an intriguing question, that maybe one of you out there has the answer for - why was the blip for our car showing up 30 feet away from the streets in the first place? Is it that the technology simply isn't perfect? Does my dad accidentally own a shitty piece of mapping software? Enquiring minds want to know! Oh, and by the way, "Tripp Hammer" is that guy's real name, believe it or not, which just immediately made me think of that line from The Simpsons:

BART: When I grow up, I'm legally changing my name to Joe Kickass.

HOMER: That is so cool!

--Hey, I've been meaning to mention this for awhile, but I just wanted to say how thoroughly charming and entertaining the podcast is for the television show Lost, and especially the second half of each episode where the producers answer viewer email and divulge hints about upcoming episodes of the show. See, the producers in question are the same ones each week, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse - and oh my Lord, you wouldn't even begin to believe what funny motherfuckers those two are when in a room together, literally like a professional comedy team or something. Like, last week's podcast started with a simple statement about how they were going to rehash things from the previous week's show; but then that got one of them saying, "Why do we only 'rehash' past things, anyway? Why doesn't anyone ever 'hash' current events?" And then that got the other one saying, "Well, we do 'hash things over' in society;" and then that got them on this whole running joke for the rest of the podcast, about hashing and rehashing and prehashing and the like.

I also like the fact that they're willing to acknowledge viewer complaints about the show, and in fact sometimes share those same frustrations and will needle each other about them while doing the podcast. (Like in last week's podcast, for example, where they just started bitching about the mid-season episodes where not a lot happens - "Oh, great, another damn hour of everyone running through the woods and getting angry at each other! I sure am glad I tuned in this week!") And finally, of course, how can you not love the pure joy they take in making fun of the login names of the people who send them questions? (CARLTON: "Damon, this next letter comes from someone named 'DamonIsHott9000.' And that's with two 'T's, by the way." DAMON: "Ah yes, of course. I've already instructed the other 8.999 members of the 'Damon Is Hott' fan club to just write to me directly, so as to not clog up this message board anymore; I must've missed number 9000.") Anyway, it's just a hilarious podcast, each and every week, and if you're a fan of Lost, you're doing yourself a big disservice by not listening to it yourself.

--Hey, you remember Christopher Sharpe, right? He's a reader of mine down in Austin, Texas, who I found out last year was in the middle of finishing up a hilarious low-budget sex-and-slasher film called Sex Machine. Well, I got an email from Chris last week, in fact, letting me know that the film is now finished; and he's put together a a greatly expanded version of his website for it too, so I encourage you to check it out as well. And Chris had some pretty interesting other news as well - namely, he's decided this year to put together a couple of short projects before tackling his next full-length movie, and to release those projects online under a Creative Commons license, so that people can download and share them for free...and apparently he wants to adapt one of my books for one of these projects! Specifically he wants to adapt Celibate. my 2001 performance project about sexual addiction; and that's a really intriguing one for him to take an interest in, I think, because that's one of the more autobiographical projects I've ever done, and it'll be interesting I think to see how someone else interprets the work and presents it visually. Anyway, as always, lots more about this as I have more to report.

--Oh, a short question for you computer programmers out there.... I've noticed that a growing amount of websites now have a way to automatically detect whether a person is visiting from a full computer or a mobile device, and to automatically have either the full or mobile version of their website appear in the person's browser, without the person having to remember a special URL. And if a growing amount of websites are now doing this, it makes me assume that it must be becoming an easier thing to actually program. So my question - does anybody know how this is actually done? Is it just a simple piece of Javascript or something, or is there a whole bunch of work involved to get an automatic mobile detector up and running at a website? I'd love a chance to have something like that at work at my own site; for visitors to simply be able to go to the main root URL, and have the mobile version automatically loaded for you if you're on a mobile device, instead of you having to remember the special URL for it. Anyway, just please drop me a line if you know how such automated magic is actually implemented.

Well, okay, I still have more to talk about, but just this amount alone has nearly wiped out the limited amount of energy I have these days. So I think I'll go back to laying on my bed, calling on God to kill me, and of course finally seeing for the very first time the first two seasons of Family Guy, which I recently borrowed from a friend on DVD and have slowly been making my way through the last couple of days. (See, I used to not be a fan of Family Guy, so didn't watch its original two-year run before its first cancellation; my brother, though, convinced me to give the show another shot, and he was of course as right as always.) Pray for me, dear souls, and hopefully tomorrow I'll be feeling well enough to get an actual decent journal entry written. Bye!