12:13 pm - Back from Britain
Sarah and I are back from Britain. Sarah has already posted many pictures to her photo gallery.
Current Location: home
Current Music: The Vinyl Cafe, CBC Radio 1
Sarah and I are back from Britain. Sarah has already posted many pictures to her photo gallery.
Thank you, Magda, for inviting me out to Club Abstract.
Despite feeling lethargic and awkward and off this entire week, I really needed the ability to lose myself in Tool followed by Underworld followed by and entire last call's worth of old-school industrial like Nitzer Ebb and Front 242.
I could go to bed, but I've issued an impromptu call for a waffle party to be started at ten am tomorrow. Anyone who reads this is invited, apologies for the late hour. Please bring batter material for the iron.
--
I bought a garlic press today. Life has never been more delicious.
Dreamt of someone, someone from a long time ago. Dreamt of sex at a party. Not mine. Not my party, either.
Woke up. Got dressed. 6:46
Lay in bed, fell asleep. Dreamed of cats. Cats owned by wizards. Conquered wizards, collected cats.
--
Fire alarm. Sean's breakfast. Sean, Christie, Evan, Randee, St. Jacob's Farmer's Market. Returned with a bag leaking blood.
Backpack now smells of meat.
--
Watched 'Alien' with entire house. Clubbing now, maybe.
I bought Assassin's Creed for myself with the money people gave me for Christmas, and I finally got around to playing it recently. It's by Ubisoft, specifically Ubisoft Montreal, which is the same studio that made Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. As any competent review will tell you, most of the game is spent diddling around in an ancient city such as Damascus picking up information about your mark and gathering allies that will help you in the inevitable high-speed chase you will be involved in after you kill whoever you're after. While this can be a lot of fun, unfortunately it means that it moves a lot slower than the Prince of Persia titles, and I figured that meant it wasn't as much of a spectator sport. My roommate sat and watched me play for a while, though, and it turns out you just have to find your entertainment in different places.
Occasionally there are guys standing on wide, low wooden platforms evangelizing to a small crowd. Usually these platforms are in the middle of a medium-sized open space. I was walking through one of these spaces and there was a guy on the platform ranting, and my rommate said "Man, he's annoying. You should kill that guy."
I had just completed a checkpoint, which I would return to if I got killed, so I said "Sure, why not." Doing my Socially Acceptable slow walk, I meandered around the back of the platform, noting that according to my stealth-o-meter I was in full view of everybody, which is kind of the point of these things. I stepped up onto the platform, walked up behind the guy, grabbed his shoulder, casually stuck three inches of my wrist knife into his left kidney in the middle of a sentence, turned around and casually walked off the back of the platform. He dropped like a stone. The assembled crowd dispersed without so much as a peep, and the guards seemed almost thankful that someone had finally murdered that guy. We laughed. "What a great game," I said.
When I was in high school my parents decided to purchase a home-theatre system. I was very excited. I researched what we would need to I went with them to some fancy home-audio store as we researched the amplifier, the DVD-player. Speakers were never a question; out of South-asian pride and good marketing, the answer was clearly Bose.
I spent a week helping my dad wire the basement, routing speakers through our finished drywall and covering the cables with plastic covers. When it was done, we waited on on mother to pick a TV she thought would go with the decor.
"A TV? Why would we need a TV? I just wanted a 5.1 system for CDs." We argued with her for days; the most she would budge was having a TV hidden away in some unobtrusive corner of the roome, completely orthogonal to our wiring scheme.
--
All of my dreams, ruined. I saved up enough money to buy myself some 5.1 computer speakers (one without a digital bypass) and watched DVDs in the insecurity of the basement computer-room I shared with my brother. I wasn't allowed to wall-mount them so the rear speakers sat on the floor.
--
Fast-forward to university. I'm getting tired of lugging these satellites around from St. Paul's United College to Home to co-op and back, I've finally realized that I neither game nor watch action movies enough to justify carting them around. I go with my girlfriend to pick up my latest fancy ... the Harman-Kardon/JBL Creature IIs. They were sleek, they were brand-name, they were fucking weird. They were curved, one could rub one's face against the smooth biorganic subwoofer. They were expensive, $150.![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jen_the_great thought this was the stupidest thing ever. Who would spend money on speakers because of how they looked? She spotted some Logitechs going for $30 and strongarmed me into buying them. I left the store deferring to frugal wisdom but otherwise surly and childish.
Turns out that that accidental purchase turned out to be the most well-regarded 2.1 speakers out on the market. I'd get compliments of surprise left-right and centre when someone realized how well these unassuming things could belt. I guess I owe her.
--
We needed new living-room speakers since smably reclaimed his, so I used the excuse to turf the old faithfuls upstairs while picking up a new set for myself. I tried justifying some $500 Digital 5.1s because they were complete digital outputs but couldn't get over the knowledge that I neither have the room for them nor the inclination to watch DVDs in my room. I settled for the highest-end 2.1s I could find, Logitech Z-somethings with the biggest fucking computer subwoofer I have ever seen. For the first time in my life I contemplated settling down so I could have a proper home theatre system. But not now, not for a long time.
I guess the point of this story is that I have new computer speakers. They aren't amazing, they aren't even Logitech's best, but they're pretty punch. I'll just keep marking my economic status by the kind of audio-equipment I can afford.
--Gaelan
mood better. Chilling with Sebastian. Will terrorize luridly.
I am the emperorbokassa to g4c9z's hatredheals. It's a great way to beat up and be beaten, but it's a good thing for signal-to-noise ratios that we don't encounter each other on forums.
Writing for FASS becomes more enjoyable as time goes on; the embryonic plot is something I could be proud of. Let's hope I don't fuck things up when writing the script. Beeep beep bloop bloop bloop bloop, DnD crew. :(
After having yelled at Nathan for an hour regarding his CKMS radio scheme, went to their organizational meeting involving Internetization. A sharp-eared dude pointed out that my language always implied a divorce, a disinterest, a division between me and them, an implied an noncommittal advisory position. I had to admit that I don't really give a fuck about anything. They seem okay with that for now.
I haven't been posting much, but in that I am part of an esteemed fellowship. The only person who posts much anymore is Gaelan, and that's only because he's lost his goddamn mind. My standard excuse for a dearth of posting is 'Happiness writes white', but this time it's not nothing to do with being happy. I'm not unhappy, per se. There's just nothing going on worth writing down. I stumble out of bed at 9:30, go to work, get home late enough that there's usually no sense even making myself a respectable dinner, go to bed at eleven and force myself back out of bed the next morning and do it again. On the weekends I accidentally stay up late and sleep in on Saturday, because on Sunday I usually play D&D with a group I would feel guilty about abandoning. The nearest bus stop is twenty minutes' walk away, and the nearest form of entertainment is a close tie between the internet and my gaming consoles, both of which are conveniently to be found within the walls of my apartment. I pride myself on my ability to take practically any story and make it interesting, and even I think that it's all uninteresting drek. My journal was never really all that worth reading to anyone who wasn't intensely interested in my life in the first place, but at least there was wacky shit going on at school, or at least classes I could bitch about. I've got nothing to bitch about now, and my well of wacky shit has run dry. Never fear, though, people who haven't abandoned LJ entirely: I've sent out teams in search of whole new veins of wacky shit. One of them is bound to strike the motherlode eventually.
My birthday is coming up, and as a birthday present to myself I am first going to call an insurance company to find out if insurance will bankrupt me, and then buy a car. I have lived the pedestrian life for entirely long enough. I am tired of scamming people for rides to places, and tired of walking twenty minutes in order to wait fifteen minutes in order to sit on a bus for half an hour (one way!) to go to a damn movie. Get this: I needed new pants a couple of months ago, but I put off actually buying new pants because I knew that it was going to be easier for me to do it while in Canada, because in Canada I would be able to drive places. I flew from Seattle to Toronto to buy pants. That is the point where a person needs to look at their life and say "Okay, it's time to buy a car."
I cut my head really badly last time I shaved. When you shave your head, you learn pretty quickly that it's a good idea to let your hair grow out a bit and let it heal completely rather than try to shave around a wound. I gave it some extra time just to be sure. That was almost two months ago, and I still haven't shaved, face or head. Someone at work asked me if I was growing my hair out, and I told him I wasn't really growing my hair out so much as not bothering to shave. I talked with my mom via webcam yesterday and told her beforehand that she was going to freak out a little when she saw me and to try not to scream. She screamed anyway, but I think it was only to indulge me. I haven't felt the wind blow my hair since the beard growing contest, and it still weirds me out every time. I'm going to need shampoo soon. I hope I remember how to use it.
I was going to a concert next Tuesday, and I had people I was going with, but they've dropped out one by one. I still want to go, but I'd feel a little silly going on my own, especially since the doors open at like 7:00 and the headliner probably won't come on until at least 10:00. That's a long time to stand awkwardly by yourself doing nothing. I can't even bring a book, because I don't want to hold it for six hours and bringing a bag into a concert these days is some sort of warning sign, sure to provoke terrible wrath from every burly man wearing a shirt that says STAFF on it. It's practically instinct.
I have no plans for my birthday. It's a long weekend, though, and I've been invited to parties on the Saturday and Sunday. Maybe I'll spend my birthday in my underwear and bathrobe not talking to anybody.
I don't talk enough about music post 1990, let alone that of this decade. It's not that my collection is lacking, it's that I don't know how to insert my own influences into the volk as compared to drawing out that which already rides the collective unconsciousness.
Here is what I have to say:
Fans of post-rock are almost always ignorable pricks with little charisma and even less capability for adaptation. Never trust anyone who name-drops 'Saxon Shore.'
--
The Student Life Centre just isn't fun anymore. I sit in the middle of the great hall, one chair sparsed by big empty. I'm trying to ignore the uninhibited violence that leaks from behind any Mogwai CD, their calculated synthesizers only masking the sound and the fury. I'm trying very, very hard to keep my eyes from slipping off my punkish non-fiction and assuming its natural people-watching state; at any moment one of two people may emerge from their nichey hideouts. My fingers are already digging into my temples to keep me from ripping my headphones, I don't need to tear out my eyes and throw them at people. Ah, there's one ... now gone, how disappointing.
I can do word snapshots too; my mystery comes not from the lack of information between sparse bohemian peeps, it comes from my ability to remain ill-defined despite never shutting up., flooding one's-self with information that quickly turns to piss.
I took a break from computer science for a year; maybe I need to do the same with the university campus as a whole.
--
On the other hand, Linux is balls no longer. In very specific configurations. Don't get me wrong, nothing works! but ... I fell asleep in a Haskell interpreter last night, computer on my belly while I half-randomly pressed magical chords which danced my windows wherever they needed to be. There are technical reasons for this, but are they really interesting?
Typing violently as I cluck--my eyes passing over the entire room in staccato beats--"Borkity-bork-bork-Borkity-bork!"
Rinzai coding.
So, I have a paper due on Thursday by midnight. Not just a paper but THE paper. Today is Tuesday and it's 7:20 and I'm at Foothill trying trying trying to stave off a panic attack but I am really starting to panic and my head hurts.
So, anyone who wants to pray for me has my sincerest most utmost appreciation.
Last week, Dr. Anthropology attempted to convince the class that his slide shows could run on a Mac. This week, I have approached him about them being .exe files, to which he has replied that his slide shows aren't actually compatible with my beloved computer.
This makes me an unhappy guy. I guess I'll either be spending some time at the public terminals on campus, or buying a windows compatible machine sometime in the near future. Is this the excuse I need?
I finally started wearing my SR60 headphones to campus, again. They are truly an amazing time. The new Hot Chip album sounds fabulous. This makes me a happy guy.
![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/blah.gif){kind=small}
okayhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stucki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_interv
Two articles that make me really wish I was somewhere in the art world. I don't have a strong opinion either way, but the idea of this being a battleground between two camps is the most hilariously awesome thing ever.
Maybe that's what the OSS moment should do, have the cowards come out from under their forum nicknames and actually piss on each other in real life for a change. Maybe then we'll reach a consensus on why Emacs is better.
--The bin stripped bare in by her debuggers, even.--
Days consist of being adrift in a C of assembly code. Once in a while I paddle towards the fuzziest of island mirages but otherwise I am drunk on rum and brine.
Sea monkey like Fritos - Sea monkey like tab and mountain dew...
Bryan Ferry, god bless his plastic soul, has given me the perfect opening for the Road Warrior or Fallout musical I shall in ten years write. He has also given me the atomic crescendo that caps my remake and remodel of Dr. Strangelove. Bulldozing Dylan's intentions with the bleaker armageddon of pop, Ferry forces his way through the song with Shatnerian gusto. The difference? Ferry knows what he's doing and how terrible a thing he has done. He doesn't care either; it's his album and he'll sing if he wants to.
--
Magda invited me, out of the blue, to an open mic night in the bomber. The place was empty, a bunch of enthusiastic bards soon discovered that they were the only volunteers. Having to play twenty songs instead of one, they gleefully screamed their way over broken rhythms and forgotten lyrics. It was a million times better than the aberrage hopeful who thinks they can somehow reinvent John Mayer.
I hung out with a bunch of people who I had never seen before. I sat quiet and unimportant as these strange people laughed and discussed their daily trials. The only times I opened my mouth were to be unintentionally wrong or unimpressive. What a wonderful change from the buffoon I've celebrated over the last year, the cunning language and cut-throat humour. That idiot savant saved my life, but he is no more me than the narcissist scrawling in the margins of this journal. These are all decisions made on the moment and as such they all exhaust even without the terrors of everyday people.
Magda and I talked all the way to Erb street before hugging and parting ways. I listened, but I think I would have liked to have talked less. I talk too much nowadays. Is it charming that you can get me to rant on language or on Brian Eno, that I skip on the side-walk to make my point or that it takes me a breathless sentence of 300 words to agree with what you just said? Maybe it does, maybe it's my particular kind of everyman tendency to childishly clasp hands at one of these foolish things that enamour us.
--
Tomorrow I have a coffee date, hopefully. This is exciting! I still get a thrill from this most basic of art-student conversational units; what is merely the starting point of acquaintanceship for you is the golden snitch that only a minority of math/cs students even let slip from their sweated grasp.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
I performed felliniatio upon our intrepid kousu in the dark hours of the morning. As the feast concluded he stared at the scene, eyes wide and popped like cherries, stating with a small o that "this is totally fucked up."
invited to teKnival, some raver week north of Toronto. What is it worth? Is it worth going?
--
Turned out my impromptu hookah party went off. titi_g... showed up and PowerMac brought a bunch of people and we sat on the porch and talked and smoked tobacco. A cat showed up and it was upset and affection-wanting but otherwise snippy.
It was fun. It felt like I belonged, one hundred percent, to this little-pond static world. I'm glad it ended, but for a few hours it was great. I was an old man, I was brown and moustached with speckled white, I wore a fez and I played cribbage/baccarat and I beat young children with a cane as they ran by.
--
I smell of blueberry molasses. Watching Before Sunrise, one of my favourite movies. Housemates and random hobos are just sitting around doing work. It's the high points of the fall all over again.
juljulijuljuljujujuljulidelpyjuljuljulde
I am trying to do more biking, and have been tuning up and adding to my vehicle to make it useful in more situations. One recent addition is lights (front and back) for night time safety.
I hadn't done much biking at night in the past - usually only a few blocks on familiar low traffic residential streets - so I hadn't been prepared for tonight's ride home along the bike path where every few tens of meters, another cyclist would emmerge from the shadows without helmet, without light and in a few cases, without visible reflectors. What? How? Why?
Bike paths aren't very wide, and in the few cases where I was trying to pass one of these reflectorless, lightless, helmetless dark clothing wearing idiots pedalling with their knees out, I could only hope that there weren't invisible bikes in the oncoming lane.
Besides that, it was a pretty nice ride, and while I did fall off my bike, it was on a grassy patch, so nothing broke.
Hello everyone,
I am going to be upgrading from my iBook G4 in the near future. iBook and I have had an excellent 4 year run, but I'm getting awfully tired of my PowerPC processor and my 30 GB hard drive. Thanks to assorted funding and a little bit of help from the parents as a graduation present, I will be upgrading to a MacBook.
I do, however, have a few questions to ask readers. First of all, should I upgrade now, or later? My iBook seems to be running just swell, aside from a few things. The case is cracking, there are a few "hot spots" on the screen, the trackpad is occasionally unresponsive and the keyboard is suffering from discoloration and fading letters. It's also too slow to upgrade to Leopard, and thusly lacks all those features, as well as the fun features of a MacBook like dual booting, plenty of video games and other stuff.
That said, it also might be worth just sticking it out with the iBook for a period of time. The battery life is still amazing (thanks to a recall I took advantage of in October,) and it ultimately still does what I need it to do. While it's a nuisance storing all of my media on an external HD, it's not necessary for me to have my music and tv on my laptop at all times. And finally, Apple may or may not release a new MacBook in the next few months.
Ultimately, it comes down to want vs. need. I want a new MacBook, but I currently don't need one. People thus far have been telling me that 4 years is a great run for a laptop, and I should go for the new 'Book. Anybody have any suggestions?
So I went to Food Not Bombs today. I was surprised to see a bunch of people I'd never have tied to the cause, including the UW professor who seemed to be spearheading the thing. Everyone was in suits except me, who was unfortunately dressed in a Google sweatshirt (what? I feel sexy in it for reasons of material and not logo.)
Random People started approaching me because of people I work with or people I have taken class under or so on and so forth. It seems I make excellent connections.
There was a reporter sniffing around. This freaked me out because I'm in an ornery offensive mood and the last thing I need to do is say something stupid on behalf of Food not Bombs. I kept my fool mouth shut until the reporter asked something like: "I notice you're all related to computer science in some way, Why are there so many computer scientists supporting Food Not Bombs? What about computer science brings you to support Food Not Bombs"
I couldn't help it, I blurted out "We're human!" with a sense of indignation I hope she didn't detect.
I'm probably blatantly misrepresenting the conversation, but still. I said that? Did I mean what i say? Did I say what I mean? What did I mean when I said that?
I clearly have some interest in this crazy left-wing hippy bullshit but I don't know how to resolve it with my otherwise healthy cynicism and jaded nihilism. I really just want to piss on hippies for being absolutist idiots while asking if there's something I can do to help while in the area.
Whenever someone says they find my conversations interesting it should please me immensely; it does, but then I start freaking out over whether I'm really interesting or just good at putting on a facade. I never want to be told that I seemed interesting but was really not ever again.
Anyway, go read about Food Not Bombs from some objective news source.
--
I keep accidentally embarrassing Prof. Kaplan because, despite his pleas, I can't bring myself to accept a peer-to-peer relationship with him when we meet on the street. There's something about almost failing his class hard, despite the fact that I'm sure a million other people have done so too, that puts him on a pedestal. I can't justify myself in his eyes and I can't justify not needing to justify myself in his eyes either.
This is lame and I need to get over myself, I guess. Kaplan is exactly the kind of dude you want to meet on the street and say 'what's up, dawg' and give the secret handshake instead of just stammering and having everything come back to computer graphics because you can't stop thinking about the juxtaposition of memory and that this guy still greets you with a smile.
--
Afterwards I crashed Clare Park's birthday dinner and invited random strangers to my house to hookah (none accepted.) I give up, I'm extroverted. No more nerding out for me, it's all about random connections and crazy parties and gossip and casual sex.
I also finished up on reading Haskell's syntax. Monads are fuzzy but the idea seems straightforward. I like how there are as few built-in datatypes and typeclasses as possible (to the point where even lists and integers are conceptually user-defined classes) but it means I have to wrap my head around all the resources available to me.
Time to curl up and code and listen to angry hate-everything Ministry or Lard.
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