It's a bleah day.

I seem to be having one of those days, when I'm looking at my to-do list and thinking, "Ah, to Hell with it all." Part of it is the looming tasks ahead of me: I've got the hardware needed to create a DMZ within my home network, a unit I can expose to the outside world, but the necessity of actually installing it has me daunted: take down the network and install ethernet card 3, clean up all the cables back there, find *room* for the damn box (a 3/4 high office tower) in mine and Omaha's exceptionally crowded office, get the firewall re-installed with the DMZ properly port-forwarded over the new ethernet card, install a server-only flavor of Unix on the DMZ, then start mirroring all of my content onto the DMZ box... and that's just to get up and running!

After that, I have to undertake the task of learning how to do XML to PDF (with some side-learning to figure out how to use Garamond True Type with the PDF engine) so I can start to cover my bases by providing all of my stories in RTF, PDF, PDB & Plucker.

Then I have to put up both an HTTP-accessed archive as well as a torrent tracker for the "all at once" ZIP files for all of these.

This is an outquote sidebar, in case you're curious.

Then I have to revise the interface-- in a language I don't know because I want to learn it (namely, Ruby), to support this endeavor. Right now it's written in an unholy conglomeration of Python and C. Oh, and while I'm at it, I want to start putting in nifty tidbits like outquote sidebars and cross-references to a Media Wiki so that you guys can, if you care, create a database of characters and situations and the like, and maybe some forum discussions.

Then, once I get all that done, I'm tempted to try my hand at putting together a podcast of Bloody Beth, as a first draft.

It all looks like so much stuff that I despair of ever getting any of it done.

More whining...

McSweeny's brings us a new list: Klingon Fairy Tales such as "Old Mother Hubbard, Lacking the Means to Support Herself With Honor, Sets Her Disruptor on Self-Destruct and Waits for the Inevitable."

My bleah day isn't made any better by the knowledge that the power block for my laptop now has a bad short in it, and if I don't wiggle it in just the right way my battery goes off-line. Needless to say, this is hard on the battery. New power blocks go for $80, but I see I can buy one on Ebay for about $30. On top of that, I brought the wrong battery with me, the old one. It lasts about 15 minutes. No writing for me today. Frack.

On the other hand, I got through about ten ancient emails (and I mean, like, from four years ago) thanking people for their bugfixes to Bloody Beth, and went through and confirmed that every one of them is in. I'm knocking them down one by one.

BitPass

Does anyone out there have any experience with BitPass, the micropayment system? I'm less than pleased with PayPal these days and would like to use BitPass for donations and the like, since I'm thinking about hosting a fundraiser for my story site sometime soon (yes, that will involve new stories).

Specifically, how well does BitPass work with languages other than Perl? It seems to be Perl- and PHP-oriented, and I'm a Python/Ruby kind of guy.