Guadelupe molted again this week. This is her sitting on her rather large web.

is a decent try at capturing what I see when I look out from my balcony to the south.

Tagged by lightwalker, I have been instructed to list my six favorite songs. Alrighty then!

1. “Where you end”, by Moby. Not only do the words mean a lot to me and make me happy right now, but the music has this catchy bit that just makes me swoon.
2. “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon”, by The Flaming Lips. I love the entire album, and half the songs have been among my favorites, but at the moment, this one is the one because of its simplicity.
3. “Heaven is a Halfpipe”, by OPM. Thanks upna.
4. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, by Deep Blue Something, though I prefer the acapella version I have, which is (probably incorrectly) attributed to Rockapella.
5. “Electroshock Faders”, by Hooverphonic, which I still cannot pin down why I love it so much. (The whole album of Blue Wonder Power Milk is really good, actually)
6. “Galileo”, by The Indigo Girls. lightwalker and I listened to this early in the morning at Quo Vadis while cooking breakfast and realized that we could actually get along and be friends.

Now, to tag some people. I’d love to see this list from zinniazayda, raijna, lypanov, aplaceofbirches, costmary and whisperchild. I’d also love to see you say why you love those songs.

horseygurl88 needs one of these today:

Dear you, you would think

missing would feel so bad

it does not. Love, me

Your smiling picture,

reminds of happy rainstorms

as it flashes by.

I’ve been working on a specification for replaceable visual styles on a meta-website I’m working on. So far, I’ve realized some things:

• Nearly all websites have a title bar, smattering of “most important” links and copyright line.
• Most have some sort of side-bar navigation.
• Nearly all use the rest for replaceable text.

Therefore, it should be possible to make a drop-in style that works with the facility of something like a Winamp skin. Most websites can be shoehorned into that shape.

What I’m proposing is to mark the replaceable sections with amrita-style attributes: <title template:replace='pagetitle'> Example Text here </title>, and <div template:replace='content'> Body text goes here </div>. It’s not perfect, but allowing some clean separation between templating engine and dropped-in text is a big plus.

In a “themeball”, there would be several elements:

• index.html, the template for the pages in the site. For processability, it will have to be well-formed XML at least, and preferably valid XHTML.
• images/, a directory of images used in the design.
• *.css, the stylesheet files used in the design
• README, text instructions and/or notes
• Manifest, a formatted description of the theme metadata — author, design title, contact information and licensing terms.

All files should use paths relative to the root of the theme directory, unless normal processing says otherwise (CSS in subdirectories that @import other CSS files should use URLs relative to the base file).

One sticking point is path mapping — each engine using pre-built styles will have a variety of URL schemes, and may not be located at the root of the host. The engine will have to be aware of its own URLs, and generate URLs that map to the parts of the theme. As the templates are read through the engine, the internal paths will be remapped to point to the actual URLs of the design components. A trivial example is one of an engine that lets a user select from themes uploaded to /themes, one theme per directory, named according to the title. A theme called “123 Blue” would have a server URL /themes/123%20Blue, and the components relative to that. Themes could also be assigned GUIDs by the engine, so a URL for a style component might look like /{1234-123467-123446-123345}/style.css. Generated pages would transform the source template’s unqualified style.css into /themes/123%20Blue/style.css, and equivalently with images. By re-rooting an entire directory, the conceptual overhead is kept relatively low, and the processing simple for an XML-based parser.

P.S. No, just letting the user switch stylesheets is not enough. Shut up.

I am, in no particular order, stressed, excited, happy, querulous, puzzled, in love, lonely, shakey, weirded out, relieved, and otherwise, not sure.

The world is a terrible, tragic place this morning. I bet it’ll get better after I eat, though.

Jumping, both feet first, for no apparent reason, in stompy high-tops reminds me of anandabrat. I don’t think I’d be who I am without you. Thank you.

Current music: Counting Crows —Recovering the Satellites

Thanks to elliotpp for finding me a picture to study from for some of the shoulder position.

Talking with rising_dawn like today is good for my sanity.

My favorite memory of being alone is waiting for the bus, opposite that dark road, sitting under the streetlight at the bench, with a two-lane road running into the distance on either side, and seeing nobody. The bus won’t come for another thirty minutes — I missed the previous one, but I have nowhere to be, no schedule to keep. I have a song stuck in my head, and I spent ten minutes just dancing on the yellow line. I always associate pavement with busy streets, so the chance to just dance on it makes me laugh, and to dance like nobody’s watching is the best.

Smells are the root of all of my memories. I go to choose tea for tonight, and the smell of each is a thousand memories. Hibiscus makes me think of Robyn, the Lapsang of rainy nights so many times past. Ceylon of Carrie and of Jem. Sour cherry of Noam, and the cheap green tea of speeding over choppy sea with Vruba on the way to go to Seattle.

My best and worst memories all involve rain.