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Re-watched Fight Club. I honestly don’t understand what I saw in that movie. It’s clever, and somewhat anarchic, but like Che it has more traction as a T-shirt than it does for its ideas. Ironically appropriate given the proclivities of Tyler Durden. The film reminds me of just about every frat boy I met at uni.

Re-watching Ghostbusters. The effects are cheesy, but ahh... makes me all nostalgic for New York. Good times. This remains one of my favourite films.

New TV is a good excuse to revisit my DVD library.

Also watched my second demo (e) for the first time on my new TV, and also for the first time with my new amp. Looks and sounds really good :) I decided to skip watching my first demo Final Intensity on account of it being tainted by Kari’s contribution to the project.

Playing through Super Mario Galaxy. I am less than 15 stars short of the final showdown, assuming there isn’t an encore, which there probably is. Running both the Wii and the Mac Mini through the TV has got me to thinking that if the Wiimote worked as a pointing device for the Mac Mini it would be really cool. I still think about interface design issues, even though I am destined to work on server side stuff it seems. It’s a pity that nothing works with anything else. Yay for capitalism and free markets.

Finally got started on my spring cleaning. Did the kitchen today. It looks real pretty.

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Also did part of the living room.

and this is one of the turkeys that we didn't eat yesterday. What do you think I should name him?

I am in a college dorm room. My college dorm room. Not the one that I remember. None of the ones from the U of A. I am on the northeast somewhere. I am watching TV. With my roommate. One thing that distinguishes it from my life is that I am getting along with my roommate. There are three TV sets. First the small one is on. Then the respectable 32” one. Then the giant one. I want to ask my roommate how he convinced me to allow so many large TVs in our room, but I think he might think the question odd. I want him to tell me about my life. To tell me about me. About my life in this world. I don’t ask though. It might lead to awkward questions from him. I might accidentally tell him that this is all a dream and then where would I be? I do ask him where we are “this is Philadelphia right?” He doesn’t seem surprised. He doesn’t answer either, as though it was obvious. I have never lived in Philadelphia, but somehow I know this is my life. I’m living in Philadelphia with a roommate that I get along with. I am an undergraduate.

I am awake. Writing this down, but it is already fading from my memory. What was that life like? Me. Not me. Me on the east coast. Me getting along with my college roommate. What was that like? What would it have been like? It is gone. All of it. The only thing that remains is the words that I’ve written down. Not even written; pixels. Ones and zeroes in the computer’s RAM. I was having a instant messaging conversation in that world with someone. I wanted as I fought to wake up to remember; to look in my computer to find out what we were talking about. It was all in my head though, and not stored in my computer’s log file after all. Faded. Gone.

One of the automated tasks at work sends an e-mail with “hello” in a randomly selected language whenever it runs. Today it picked “annyong” (Korean), which reminded me of Arrested Development (RIP). Yesterday it had Klingon version of hello, which literally translates into “what do you want?” (Klingon’s don’t see the point in being friendly, I guess). Anyway, it is a nice touch, but why does this stuff always remind me of TV? I don’t even watch TV anymore!

I have a recording of an old radio show wherein they referred to the Prime Minister as the Prime Monster. Would that make a regular minister a Monster of Lesser Degree?

(people are dumb)

The education minister was on TV last night ranting that (some) students were being taught to analyse Big Brother rather than the “classics” like Shakespeare and shit. Now, I don’t watch “reality” television because I think it’s trashy, and I’ve never seen Big Brother, but based on my analysis of other “reality” television it must be trashy, and I actually like Shakespeare. However, I have to say that I disagree with the esteemed Lesser Monster of Education. I think it is probably more important for our next generation to be able to dissect modern culture and hopefully help them see through the marketing and the hype.

Advertising is lame.

Two lame things about LiveJournal that vaguely annoy me, but not enough to make me stop using the service:

1. When I click onto a bookmark to a friend group filter when I’m not logged in, I get this annoying VERBOTEN! kind of message and then a link to where I can log in. First of all this is poor design, the message should just ask for my username and password, second the text for the link is simply “here”. It’s really bad form to tell your users to click “here” as apposed to saying “visit my photography website” or what have you. Also, once I have actually logged on it doesn’t automatically take me to where I wanted to be in the first place! I have to click on my bookmark again!
2. Before selling out to SixApart, “Brad” and the LJ team “promised” never to have advertising. Since the sale, they have added free accounts with extra features that include advertising. Not surprisingly, the web page that proves them to be liars has been removed from the LJ website. I don’t think it’s lame that they did this^[1], I think it is lame that they quietly removed the statement that they would never do this without any explanation. Maybe they are worried about a lawsuit.

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1. you can still sign up for a no advertising free account, although I think this is no longer the default

I had a lucid dream last night. I wanted to wake up so that I could record it. I'm not sure why I always have this reaction when I realize I am dreaming, mostly my dreams are pretty incoherent and confusing. Except for the one where I was involved in a (friendly) dog fright with Santa Claus^[1], that was awesome. Ronin was in the dream, so it is probably just as well that I can't remember most of it. I haven't thought about her in what seems like forever!

I have my mum hooked on Arrested Development, so we've been watching an episode pretty much every night. This is good because there is nothing on TV. This is not unlike America, where there is also nothing on TV, except Australians manage to have nothing on TV in just five channels, whereas Americans have one billion channels with their cables and their satellite dishes.

It's sad that Fox is canceling AD. Pretty much everyone I have ever talked to about the show likes it, except for Brad's roommate (about whom, Brad once described as being "high maintenance"). So I can only conclude that Fox has failed to market it correctly.

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[1] I was flying my 1988 Toyota Carola, in case you are wondering.

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)

I just heard tonight on the News Hour tonight that Australia won a gold medal in the Olympics.

:)

I wonder if they mentioned that because they know that a number of Australians watch the News Hour. I remember that they commented on air after receiving e-mails from Australians after a careless statement about Australia made once. I also remember when Australia won it's first winter medal. It was a bronze and I found out because some half-wit (American) DJ said something rather rude and disparaging about it on the radio.

I was having trouble with several on-line retailers earlier in this week, but I finally had a break through with buy.com and the fixed the problem I was having with them. They wanted me to fax them my drivers license, which I thought was a bit much. Fortunately they relented. Just now I wrote a strongly worded letter to eBay. My complaint against half.com has apparently been escalated up to the parent company's support staff. I don't expect them to give me what I am asking for (which amounts to an apology at this point, since they failed to fix what I asked them to fix), and to be honest I don't really care that much, but I'm proceeding under the assumption that It's The Principle Of The Thing. The truth, however, is that it is pointless.

Things are quiet at work today, given that it is the Friday before Thanksgiving week. My former manager (the good one, who was promoted into upper management), came over the other day and said something about "Think Fridays" (I guess it must have been a Friday) and I was like ... "Um. What is that." I vaguely recall some discussion about this in a meeting at some point, but I had buried it or ignored it because it seemed pointless.

Thanksgiving week always seems like a good week to take days off, but since management always comes around on Wednesday to let us out early, I think that it is kind of pointless to take that day off, and hence the rest of the short week.

I watched an episode of the Apprentice with some friends last night. That also seemed rather pointless.

Before that we watched Crash, which wasn't pointless... It was actually pretty good, but I didn't like the way that actors would break character randomly and begin essay-like monologues from time to time. I don't really like that style of story telling, but I suppose to bring that up here is pointless.

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.

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[1] I guess. Whatever.

[2] see here

I find it amusing when Gwen Ifill or Ray Suarez says, "Jim Lehrer is off" on the News Hour; as though he was milk they forgot to keep in the fridge.

Last night I am watching the episodes of 24 which Joe recorded for me while I was down under. I find it fascinating to watch Brian watch 24; he always knows what is going to happen, but he can't remember anything that happened in the previous three seasons. It occurs to me that it would be pretty easy to write a computer program which generated an entire season of 24 based on a few seed values. It is such a predictable show. I'm interested in this as I have become interested in the intersection of art and technology, but I am pretty sure that the creators of 24 are already using a computer algorithm to generate their plots, and it is an abuse of otherwise legitimate technology.

It also occurs to me that it is a right winger's wet dream. I mean, they start off by torturing the left wing anti-war hippy for no reasons at all and then they move on to the terrorists and everyone is afraid. Also, the management style at CTU appears to be based on the fantasy world that the most deluded of the managers in my division live in. At first they are torturing this woman and then they're like "we're sorry, we made a mistake; but we really need you back at work" - and then she chirpily goes back to work. Oh, also, all ambitious women are actually evil incarnate. I think that is one of the maxims of the show.

I have discovered that if you want people to hang around then it helps to have an optimistic outlook on life. I learned this by observing people and by reading How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Just now, it occurs to me that the inverse corollary to that theorem is that if you want to avoid somebody you should be negative in all your statements when talking to that person. I don't mean be negative about them, mind you, that will just earn you an enemy.

For example, I can't stand Office Mate IV. This is a long tradition with me which goes back to Room Mate I. The only Room Mate I ever got along with was Eric (featured briefly in my story Arizona Fish Story : A Life Less Serious) and the only Office Mate I ever got along with was a girl I had a crush on named E.

Anyway, Office Mate IV walks in just now and says "Any good news?"

"Is there ever any good news?" I ask.

I was actually thinking specifically of The News as in what you read in the paper, or watch on TV (or read on the Internet). Lets face it. Good News doesn't sell so there is no Good News.

"We get Wednesday off." He pointed out.

This for some reason is a big deal to everyone. I am not quite sure why, because every Wednesday before Thanksgiving your manager comes by in the early morning and tells you that you can leave early. It's supposed to be a surprise, but of course it never is. I had decided to circumvent this stupidity this year by just not showing up at all on Wednesday. This year, they told everyone ahead of time, so they beat me to the chase, as it were.

"I was already going to take Wednesday off." I respond, not in a despondent sort of way, but very matter-o-factly.

"I give up then." OM4 says finally and leaves.

"Victory!" I think to myself.

It then occurred to me that this may be a more effective method of dealing with OM4 than putting my ear phones on and turning the volume way up on iTunes. I can remain chipper and optimistic about the future and at the same time exercise my sarcastic wit on OM4. This truly is The Best Of Both Worlds.