Everything is gray and green up here.

I got lost trying to find my aunt’s house and took a scenic detour through Puyallup. Finally I saw a sign that directed me toward a “Volcano Evacuation Route,” decided to follow it, and ended up exactly where I needed to be.

They only have a 56K modem here, so I probably won’t spend too much time online. It’s just as well.

Figures that as soon as I get the new blog working, I leave town for a week.

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to Seattle and Vancouver, where I plan on wandering, taking pictures with my cameraphone, and maybe writing. I imagine I’ll have access to the Internet now and then, so I may be around to post an entry or two while I’m away.

Not that I want to spend my vacation the way I spend every working day — in front of a computer. I’m still trying to decide whether to take my writin’ laptop or just a notebook and a pen.

It’s supposed to be 58 and rainy in Seattle tomorrow. After four and a half years in Tucson, that actually sounds kind of nice…

This never fails to bring a smile to my face…

Eric Idle – “The FCC Song” on MP3

Hi. As you might have guessed from the URL, my name is Mike Barklage: web developer, writer, publisher, legendary lover, and possible exaggerator.

Let me show you around the new place.

Some of you will be very familiar with the basic layout. I ripped it off from… er, I mean, was inspired by the three-column blog layout designed by Jen “Merry” Krieger of hellomerry.com. She used a similar design on Kelly Sue’s site and a few others. Merry is much better at web design than I am and deserves to be paid truckloads of cash.

I added a few quirks of my own to the basic layout, most notably the Random Quote Generator in the top banner. Right now there are only six quotes in it — half are movie/TV dialogue, half are anti-Bush. Hit refresh a few times and you’ll see them all.

On the left is the Futurephone blog. I finally got a cameraphone last Saturday (because I am always two years behind the technological curve) and thanks to MFOP2 I can publish photos directly from my phone to this site without touching a computer. Or, at least, I will once I have it working correctly.

This can be dangerous technology, depending on how much I drink and how often my mom visits the site. (Hi Mom!)

Blueshift Studios is my publishing company that hardly ever publishes anything. In a few weeks, blueshiftstudios.com will redirect to its own page on this site.

Finally, there’s the mostly-empty Fiction page. All that’s there at the moment is an excerpt from the novel I’m working on, Rogue Systems. Over time, I’ll (hopefully) add more excerpts, some unrelated short stories, and eventually the whole novel for free download. I’ve become a convert to the Cory Doctorow web publishing model with Creative Commons copyrights, which seems to work pretty well as long as you have talent and a major publisher behind you.

We’ll have to see how well it works for me…

Attention please.

Feel the tension when someone mentions me.