Pictures from my recent Hawaiian getaway are now up in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

It has now been two weeks since I returned from Burning Man 2007 in Black Rock City, Nevada, and the experience is still reverberating within.

T.S. Eliot etched the phrase "unreal city" into my head a long time ago, but ever since my first trip to the playa, I've used those words pretty much exclusively to describe Black Rock City. They dance in my head when I daydream of being there; they echo unceasingly as I wander the city during the one magical week it arises each year.

Has there ever been a place more deserving of the tag "unreal"? My yearly slideshow only scratches the very surface, really, but perhaps one or two of these images will convince you that Black Rock City is a place like no other...

The Burning Man 2007 gallery is now open in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

Hello, everyone. After a coupla months spent out of gas, I think the engine's fired up once again here at mahnamahna.net. I've been busy with a few things while I've been silent. In fact, check this out: I HAS WRITED A SOFTWARE!!1


Devidify has its own exhibit over in the newly-renovated mahnamahna.net museyroom.

More fun stuff on the way, I think. There's gas again now.

I am following in the footsteps of HairyAlien and Majordojo and committing to NaBloPoMo, which means I'll be posting to this blog every day in November. The idea is kind of an intentional reboot. (And besides, I've always been too chickenshit to try NaNoWriMo.)

Will you join us? Commit in the comments.

As happened last year, it has taken me an embarassingly long time to get my Burning Man pictures up. But here they are, at long last.

The word I've been using to describe my third Burn is "transcendent." I am still feeling the playa's effects; I am still discerning the meaning of all I encountered and experienced; I am still in a state of flux. It is mostly a happy, happy feeling.

Thanks in no small part to a wee bit of Perl coding by Majordojo, I have at long last launched a new comments system here. All old comments have been carried over, and hundreds and hundreds of spam comments have been removed. Let's see how this goes.

It's been a while since this blog last completely stalled, but that's what's happened again of late. (There were zero posts in April.) What's up? Truth be told, I am sick of mahnamahna.net's look, which has largely remained the same since the site's inception in 2002. I am also sick of comment spam, and defeating it means getting my hands dirty with some serious hacking on the comments system I've got in place around here. And lastly, I want to implement modern, whiz-bang templates on my photo galleries, and again, that's going to be somewhat of an undertaking, as the scripts I use to drive those are not very amenable to different looks and feels. So the upshot is this: Posts are likely to remain infrequent until I get this place whipped into shape. And that could take some time.

At long last, I got off my ass and culled through all the pics I took at Burning Man this year, and put the best ones up in a gallery over in the museyroom.

My second Burn was different in many, many ways from my first, but it was nevertheless a fantastic experience. There were highlights I wouldn't dare talk about here, and low points that only make sense if you've been inside my head. There was growth. There were journeys, each and every day. I spent much of the week with a couple of friends whom I rarely see and who are as dear to me as anyone. And I came back to the default world feeling about fifteen degrees out of kilter, like I was looking at everything freshly, from a new angle. And that, in one sense, is what the Burn is all about.

My home-grown, bare-bones comments system here on the mahna mahblog has long remained esoteric enough to be untouched by comment-spam bots.

Sadly, it's no longer true. There's been a shipload of comment spam around here lately. I've cleaned up most of it, and, sadly, destroyed a few legit comments along the way. I've also made some changes to the site code so as to perhaps hide myself from these evil bastards once again. We shall see.

My photos from Burning Man 2004 are now on display in the museyroom. With that done, this blog should start to flow again.

The mahnamahna.net photo gallery is now open over in the museyroom.

First exhibition: Amsterdam, June 2004

Things are quiet around here cuz I'm struggling to get some proper photo gallery functionality up and running. I haven't liked any of the scripts I've tried thus far, and am probably going to have to learn a bit of PHP so I can hack a bit on the one that's closest to what I want. More content — including pics from my recent trip overseas — shall spill forth once this bit of site tinkering is done.

Greetings, readers. I've been absent cuz the machine just plumb ran out of steam at the end of the year, and though it's now running again, it's not quite yet up to full speed.

I have, however, put a fresh coat of paint on the walls. In 2003, green was appropriate: Something was growing. Now, something may be taking flight, so I've wrapped things up in blue.

I'd like to humbly beg my readership's indulgence, for I need to ask a favor. I've got some traffic-reporting software running here on mahnamahna.net, and I'm not sure I can believe what it is telling me. Therefore:

If you are a regular (or semi-regular) reader of this blog, I implore you to take twenty seconds out of your day and add a comment (content not important) to this entry. If you wish to remain an anonymous lurker-type, please consider posting a comment under a pseudonym. This is honor system stuff, obviously: Please post just one comment. But please, play this dumb little game just this once, so I can get a real handle on how many people are reading.

I thank you all in advance. Now let's see that "comments" number climb.

This site is now generated by HTML code that contains no <table> tags whatsoever, but instead lays everything out via CSS positioning. (If you know what that is, you probably understand why I've affected this transition, and why it is a Good Thing. If you don't, you'd likely be bored by the explanation.)

Please email me or attach a comment to this posting if the site now displays funny in your browser. Let me know what browser you're running, what version you've got, and what platform you're on. I want everyone to be able to hear me loud and clear.

Hatchjaw wrote in asking what the hell a "museyroom" is. My non-answer is, the word appears on page 10 of Finnegans Wake. (Say it out loud slowly for one shade of meaning; break it apart into its constituent parts for more. This is part of how you play the game that is Finnegans Wake.)

While we are on the subject, a limited-time exhibit has been added to the museyroom.

I have upgraded to Blosxom 2.0 beta 1 and hacked together a comments system. (And it is truly a hack; what I do to Perl is frightening.) At any rate, if you want to leave a comment about any given post, click the "comments" link.