• 24 October 2008 05:27pm: The sun is still up by the time I get home from work and I am listening to happy music. Must mean something. :)
• Today at 07:02am: Flies are out in force today. Everyone is flapping their hands about like they are trying to take off.

twitter.com/plicease

Anyone have any ideas what I should queue up in iTunes next? I listen to everything except for country and rap.

Haha just kidding, everyone says that.

In four years in Tucson, I remember it snowing exactly once. Actually I don’t even remember the snow itself, but reading about it the next Monday morning in the Wildcat, because I had slept through the snowing (and immediate melting) and it having snowed was newsworthy enough to be on the front page. Not that the front page had to be terribly newsworthy when it came to the Wildcat. Although I think the Wildcat probably had more content and journalistic integrity than mX does, and I always pick up a copy of mX if I am going through Town Hall station at the right time of day. The price is right.

I have been rewriting bits of my website in PHP in order to improve my PHP coding skills. It’s painful because Perl (on which most of my website is already written) is about a million times more powerful in almost every regard. It’s sticky to configure I guess, and is horrible to maintain if written by someone who is unskilled in the ways of the Perl. This is why companies that do OpenSource web development tend to stick with PHP, which bundles itself with everything and dumps everything (including kitchen_sink_faucet_on()) into the same global namespace. Hence the need to brush up on PHP and the loathing of said PHP.

I have also been introducing Tristan 賢 to some of my music. Some of it seems to be taking. I have this dream that he won’t be as conventional in his approach to things artistic as my dad is. He has to figure out what he likes on his own though, and he will do that, but it is fun to show him things that he might not otherwise see or hear :)

Feeling overly dramatic and totally energyless tonight. sendmail should die; remind me again why we can't just use postfix instead?

I have an urge to write another computer demo. Will need two things:

1. to review OpenGL
2. inspiration

I was in a bookstore this afternoon after work and I picked up an OpenGL book. The hard bit will be the inspiration. My last demo was inspired by the number e^[1].

Who wants to be in charge of sound effects and music?

The other thing I thought about buying in the bookstore was a Mandarin/English dictionary. I decided to wait for now. I've obviously become interested in 中文^[2], but I have a few 中文 resources that I should finish with before buying new stuff. It could be a passing interest after all.

---

1. I'm a dork.
2. Chinese language

These were taken at Bradstock 2005. See also:

• Bradstock 2004
• Bradstock 2003
• MikeFest 2003

So, speaking of music. I had the ol' iPod on random today, and it picked something I had ripped from Digitally Imported's chillout station that I liked. My collection is quite eclectic. I have industrial, video game (music), classical, rock, folk, stuff in Russian, techno, chillout, trance, and something I think is called noise that Theresa gave me^[1], all taking up 39 of 40GBs on my iPod. I often find something previously undiscovered on my iPod, where it turns out that I like it a lot.

Anyway, this song I liked was in some Asian language and the artist was listed as Ayumi Hamasaki. Since Wikipedia is the best source of information for all things trivial (and some things not so trivial), I checked out her entry, and sure enough she is a Japanese pop singer-songwriter. Knowing that Tyler is into Japanese culture, and music, I sent him an e-mail asking if he had ever heard of her. To which he replied that he was aware of her existence and that she was Japans answer to Britney Spears! "Oh yuck!" I thoughts to myself, "I can't like her music now!" And it is possible that I wouldn't. Often the non-chillout versions of music that I like so much on Digitally Imported sucks a lot in it's vanilla unmixed revision. It's hard to say.

My friend Melly taught me that it isn't all right to have your own opinion on music. Especially if you aren't a musician, then if you liked, say Cake, it's because you are naïve. I don't get along with Melly so well anymore; it saddens me.

My other friend Theresa, on the other hand, taught me that music majors are people too (and as in Theresa's case, they can even be nice people), and that it's okay to have an opinion on music, even if you are, for example, a computer programmer with zero musical talent who just happens to like Cake (among other artists).

---

[1] but wait, there's more!

Finally saw Water (have been talking about going to see it for months). It was awesome. The cinematography was fun and the music is brilliant (I'd like to get the soundtrack if I can find it). The story is powerful. I love there is a theater at Circular Quay I can go to for indy flicks. I haven't seen anything there that I didn't like on some level, but I think I enjoyed Water the most.

I was down at Circular Quay yesterday with Torbin and Judy (friends of my mother's) and I heard someone playing the Super Mario Bros. theme on a tuba. It reminded me of my friend Tyler who is a sound designer for EA. On our sojourn through the botanical gardens, we ran into a guy who works for Condi Rice, who was apparently down here at the time.



There were helicopters buzzing about like mad all day. Torbin and Judy opined that they were there to offer protection to the sec-state. After her time in Sydney, she went down to Melbourne to watch the commonwealth games. I watched a little of the games on the TV. England and Scotland compete separately for these games, and Australia dominates the swimming and the bicycling.

I took a number of pictures of the opera house when I wasn't being rudely shooed away by foreign tourists with their own, apparently more important, cameras:

(...many pictures behind this cut)

People you love, will turn their backs on you
you'll loose your hair, your teeth,
your knife will fall out of its sheath

but you still don't like to leave before the end of the movie

People you hate, will get their hooks into you
they'll pull you down, you'll frown
they'll tar you and drag you through town

but you still don't like to leave before the end of the movie
no you still don't like to leave before the end of the show

Cake, "End of the Movie" from Pressure Chief

I've never had someone tell me, "Wow me too!" when I told them that my favoritest band in the world is Cake. Maybe it is just the way that I interpret their songs though, but I feel like I relate to what John McCrea is singing about, and of course I interpret "the end of the movie" in this song to be when the credits end, not when they start. I'm mostly in the minority on that one too.

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless [1] asked recently, "Do we have the tape?"

...and I was like, "you guys got VHS?"

...and she was like, "oh I meant DVD, it's just easier to say 'tape' ... fewer syllables."

...and I'm of course like, "how about 'disc'?"

I realize I am splitting the most irrelevant of hairs for the majority of the population out there, but I know Tyler would never confuse or abuse terminology, and I miss that about him and his appreciation and understanding of quality in media. Of all my friends he is probably the most likely to understand why I wanted to get this silly G5 with excessive memory to manipulate photographs (and dude, why getting a dell wouldn't cut it), in part because he has his own silly G5 which he uses to manipulate sound effects (and he does it very well).

Tyler is also one of the few people who will wait and watch the credits with me when we go see movies.

---

[1] Because she is a good friend, and it sounds like I am splitting hairs - and I am - but only for the purpose of dissecting the weird way that I look at the world, not to exercise critical thinking on my friend. My friends are awesome.

No, I didn't win the war in Iraq, but I did achieve my objective for today. In unrelated news:

1. I was talking to e's friend at the lake today and she the subject of talking cars came up (when doesn't it?) and apparently she was too young or too Russian to have ever heard of Knight Rider. Now I want to watch Michael Knight ride into action with KITT and fight crime. It's weird because the last crime fighter that I wanted to watch was the corrupt and brutal Vic Mackey.
2. According to Wikipedia the air foils used in KITT's Super Pursuit Mode were actually unnecessary to make a Trans Am drive 300 MPH. And I was about to super glue some wings to my hybrid!!! Also: apparently KITT is also a Cylon.
3. The spaces in Word are all messed up today. I hope it rights itself soon, because it is annoying.
4. For some reason I was thinking about nin as I was driving back from the lake today. This is weird because I was listening to my "happy mix" which doesn't have any Trent on it all. Anyway, sometime back Brian claimed that some cover of hurt was way better than Trent could ever do. I know it's lame to like nin now [1], but my favorite version of hurt was the duet version Trent and Bowie sung on Bowie's Outside tour.
5. Tyler mentioned a "the pig" totally unrelated to the "the pig" in his LJ entry today, which also contained clues as to how to defeat dodongo. Damn it. Now I have to go massacre some Moblins (which, incidentally, I love the smell of in the morning) because I am too cheap to shell out twenty rupees on bombs (everyone who is not Tyler, please forgive the densely packed series of in-jokes).
6. I installed PPC version of Fedora Core Linux on my iMac last night, and I was feeling pretty good about it. Unfortunately when I tried to install it on my PowerMac it used the wrong monitor sync rate when it went into X11. Configuring X11 in Linux makes me irate, and is more or less the reason I refuse to use Linux as a workstation anymore. Fuck you RedHat.
7. According to the UNIX-HATERS Handbook chapter on X11, a "server is the remote machine that runs the application." While I agree with him that X11 is an example of very poor design, he clearly knows nothing about the terminology. A Server is a "computer software applicationthat carries out some task (i.e. provides a service) on behalf of yet another piece of software called a client" [2]. Hence it is perfectly reasonable to call an X11 server a server because it provides a service for the client, and it is totally irrelevant where either of the processes actually run. The "remote machine" after all is a relative concept.

---

[1] I guess. Whatever.

[2] see here

I'm thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, which of course brings up the whole low carb thing. It's a serious inconvenience that pasta is now worse than slathering your blood red cow stake with the thickest bacon grease imaginable, because when cooking for people you have to think up something more complicated to make. So I send Tyler an IM asking: "are you on any of those funky low carb diets?" in hopes that if he comes out to visit me in New York I can make something simple like pasta. But he doesn't answer me right away.

I decided I really needed a paper clip. I riffled through my desk drawer, but come up with nothing. I decide to go buy some and tell Tyler: "i need to go get paper clips. i'll be back in a bit."

To which he responds: "no; they don't work. my dad actually wrote a book which describes why"

I was about to walk out of the room, but I stop with a feeling of dread in my heart. Suddenly I had been thrust into some strange universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee and for some reasons all paper clips have become non functional. I wonder what else is different about this parallel universe? And why did Tyler's father write an entire book on why paper clips don't work? I've been so wrapped up in the future and being an optimist and all that B.S. that I have made myself susceptible to believing it just may be true when somebody tells me something like "paper clips don't work."

"huh? what?" I type.

Then I remember the question before that. "oh. heh. cool. got confused there."

Tyler responds with: "the diets"

"i thought you were saying PAPER CLIPS didn't work."

Relieved that I wouldn't have to double check my Star Trek DVDs to insure that Spock didn't have any extra whiskers (except of course for that one episode that he did), I went off to get some paper clips.

On the way back I'm listening to a CD I burned with just music that I like to listen to and none of the extra chaff which is on those CDs that those musical corporations expect us to buy. It struck me recently that with the exception of the first ("reptile") and last song ("suicide notes") it is all "happy" music, and that I haven't been much interested in listening to the "unhappy" tracks. Guthrie used to imply that the fact that I used to listen to depressing music made me unhappy. I contend (as I did then) that I listened to depressing music because I was depressed, and now that I prefer to listen to "happy" music because I am optimistic.

For a second there it didn't even bother me that I still don't have plans for New Years Eve. It occurs to me that New Years Eve is really Old Years Night... and is so about the past, not The Future.

iTunes just picked Down Under for me to listen to. I am no longer qualified to be in charge of choosing the music that I listen to, because if I did I would listen to Bloody Tears or Leaving Town over and over again. Anyway, my point is actually that I had a nasty headache after coming home from work today. I ate a Vegemite sandwich and had a nap. I am now feeling much better. I know all you Yanks (as Australians incorrectly refer to all Americans, I apologize on behalf of all Australians; especially to the Southerners in the audience) do not have an appreciation for the stuff, but it does wonders for me when I'm not feeling well.

I like Trees.

Breakneck Ridge

This is my favorite tree on the east cost. It is a hardy one. It lives along the razor sharp Breakneck ridge that I climb with and without my friends a lot. It exudes strength in the face of adversity, and is always there to say g'day to me when I come over the ridge right before it. My friend e took this of me and Steve the day that we met. I had longer hair then.

Gosford Backyard

This is my favorite tree anywhere. It a beautiful white ghost gum. It reminds me Albert Namatjira, the native Australian landscape artist, and the raw beauty of the Australian outback. Even though, ironically it is well within sprawl of Sydney (right in my back yard). I would love to one day go back to the Northern Territory and get lost for a few years. Care to join me?

I recommend listening to happy music in the morning. It changes your outlook in life for the better.

There really isn't a better way to reduce tension than playing loud angry music and battling the forces of hell.

Doom Classic