Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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over the hills

Stinky.
Hey hey, my first day biking to work and back… no problems at all. I mean, other than being winded and coming home with legs made of jelly… oh, and the sweat, the commute went swimmingly. The ride in in the morning is somewhat hampered by thick fog… which at speeds forms a nice damp mist over my arms and legs. It’s not wet enough that the tires kick up road-muck onto my back, so I’m OK with it. My urticaria seems to be well-controlled, at least with respect to bring brought about by cooler ambient-temperatures; I think the multi-antihistamine cocktail the doc’s got me on is just the panacea I needed, even if it’s not protection from cold-water swimming, at least I’m not itching something furious when the temperature is sub-50°. If my legs aren’t too sore, tomorrow will be day #2. Wish me luck.

I saw this link on fazed the other day, and absolutely loved it. One day I’m gonna have a full-on “study,” filled with leather-bound books, comfortable chairs, and – the piece de resistance – a pipestand (y’know, the old-type floor ashtrays?). Anyway, I downloaded several illuminated manuscripts and paintings to use as wallpapers… and some freeware wallpaper flipper to change ’em every so often. What a nerd. I have some fascination with Renaissance art and thought, and the more I read about humanity’s obsession with doubt and reason during that time, the more interesting it gets. Guess I shoulda paid more attention in World History or something.

I hate when I pull a shirt or sweater out of the closet in the morning, only to pull it over my head and realize it reeks of the restaurant I ate at several days passed. Mexican food is the worst offender, but Indian food runs a close race. Sometimes, even after being allowed to “air out” in the closet for over several days, jeans or shirts retain a surprisingly potent food-funk. Occasionally it’s so bad I have to toss ’em in the hamper and move onto choice B. It’s almost as stinkified as the dreaded I-cut-onions-a-friggin’-week-ago-and-my-hand-still-stinks phenomenon.

That’s really all I have… I know it’s slim. I was tired last night, and wasn’t in the writing mindset – and work kept me too focused all day to dream up good material.

See ya.

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i’m a consumer

Right-o, chap.
I dunno if you noticed, but the entry is “late.” Usually I automate these things to post at midnight the day I want them up, which means I have them written beforehand. Not this time. I got home last night and decided I didn’t even feel like sitting in front of the PC. I debated even writing… but I have some kinda built-in thing now that makes me.

Saturday I did it. I bought a bike. Remember, I wanted to… to see if I could make it my >50% time method of transportation to work? It’s Sunday now, so I can’t really report on how that worked out yet. Although I do plan to bike the commute tomorrow, despite the cold and damp mornings we’ve been having. Later today I’m going to do a time trial, to get an idea of when I need to leave. In the end, I settled for a cheaper bike… since I’m no cycling enthusiast or anything. I guess anything with two wheels would’ve served me well… but I couldn’t stand the thought of cruising to work on a Sam Walton special. So I settled for something the hovers slightly above the department store generics and below the bike store name brands. Either way, it rolls when peddled… so I think I’m OK. If you never hear me talk about it here again, the shame of buying it and not using it as I’d hoped has become too great – and I’d advise not bringing it up.

It’s Monday now as I write… I got to work early to finish today’s entry. And, because I took off early from the house to give myself plenty of time on the ride in. Yup, I totally did it. Biked the commute for the first time, beat yesterday’s time-trial by 5min this morning. Riding through the cold fog-mist was kinda nice. I put the new Early Day Miners record on the flash player and peddled away. It felt good… I maintained a good pace, didn’t get too tired. I’m so self-conscious when it comes to exercise; I know it’s stupid. Everyone knows me as the guy who “doesn’t care.” So when I do things that are contrary to that, it’s a fair assumption that I’ll give them up shortly or that it’s a fad. I mean, the precedent is definitely there. So I ride to work and hope I don’t pull up next to a car with someone I know in it, for fear of feeling “dumb.” Oh, no doubt it’s psychosomatic… but it’s a real thing nonetheless. I’m just glad I’m doing it. If I can stick to it, there’s a potential 8.2mi per day… ~1hr more exercise than the zero I was getting previously.

I left the 5th grade 10 days before the last day of school, because my family was up and moving to Florida. Our classroom had a party that day which served the double-purpose of a “graduation from 5th grade” party and a sendoff for me. When we got to Florida, dad’s work put us up in a condo until we could find a house. A condo that was right on the beach. I remember that summer like one long vacation. Frank and I would roll out of bed and onto the beach. Move from the beach to the pool, pool to running around the complex ringing doorbells. It was great. I remember listening to “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and “Nightmare on My Street.” I guess there was a period where I was listening to some top40… but I did have Speak and Spell in the cassette deck.

The other night Sharaun was watching this reality show where these fat people are competing to lose the most weight (yes, I know the name of the show, but chose not to use it as if I didn’t to demonstrate my disdain for such programs). Anyway, they had a competition where there was a insanely huge mountain of food on stage. All kinds of food, cheese, pastries, breads, anything you could think of and all stacked to the stagelights. The group was split into teams, and the goal was to move as much food from the huge pile over to a little podium – the catch being that they had to use only their mouths to transport and stack the grub. Imagine the scene – ten overweight people grabbing hunks of food in their mouths, shuffling across stage, and pressing it drool-covered onto a growing mound of similarly disgusting stuff. Food was dropped in transit, stepped on, mashed, squished, and gummed and toothed – but not consumed.

I watched it, and transformed from the mindless, wasteful American consumer I am – to that ever-popular American alter-ego of the caring (but just a tad less than being moved to act), world-conscious good Samaritan. How appalling would this video be if we took it on a tour of Somalia or something? It really was disgusting, it made Double Dare’s milk-battles pale in comparison. America’s food supply is so abundant that we have to find alternate uses for our stores – like playing games or building things with it. I remember a Sharaun telling me about an exchange student who was helping the homecoming committee clean up after the dance, and who broke down in tears as she watched the pounds and pounds of uneaten food go right into the trash. We truly are the land of plenty.

Random, but done.

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man this entry blows

Vote Shiite, Sunni sucks.
Good evening blog, glad to see you in good health. What’s that? You’ve been plagued lately by online poker and Viagra spam? Well, not to worry blog, although you may get ~20 “holdem” and “bigger member” spams per hour, I’ve installed some nice anti-spam features that prevent all but the craftiest spammers from getting a comment through. I know, I also wish that your usage stats were once again meaningful, rather than a record of spambots trying to post comments. It’s the nature of the internet, blog, that’s just the way it goes.

Argh… why does the “war on terrorism” have to look so much like a war on Islam? Word around the web is that we’re posturing against the next member of the “axis of evil,” Iran. It was interesting that the rumour of covert US forces in Iran was this morning’s story, and this afternoon the “Americans evenly split on how they feel about the Iraq invasion” story was the lead headline. But have no fear, the orderly and completely representative democratic election this month will set Iraq squarely on the road to non-barbarianism.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I’ve lost all faith that this vote is anything more than a sham, a parade by the administration for the sake of perceived progress. The news is rife with stories of polling places kept secret out of fear of violence; 60% of voters think they’re voting in a new Iraqi president (they’re not); candidates can’t campaign for fear of death; and more than one million absentee voters are registering from over fourteen countries. This election is nothing more than a dog and pony show, I don’t understand how it will accomplish anything at all. Not everyone can vote, people who are voting don’t know what they’re voting for, and the candidates can’t get their message out even if they did. I guess I’m pessimistic.

Enough about it already, I realize there’s nothing for complaining.

Having my entire music collection here at work with me is awesome. I can listen to such a wide variety of stuff during the day. I’ve got about 80% of my CDs ripped to MP3, so I have almost my entire collection on-hand. I need to get around to ripping that final 20% (which consists mostly of Beatles’ bootlegs), so I can be done with it. After I’ve got everything ripped, there’ll be a period of “cleaning” up the tags and directory structure. But for now, it’s awesome to be able to pick from the same selection I’ve got at home while at work. Just tonight, for example, I got the complete Miles Davis Montreux recordings (a 20CD boxset clocking in at almost 2GB when digitized)… how cool is that to have on-hand when I feel like rad jazz? (Ugh, after downloading this beast it seems like it’s all from the 80s and is with Miles’ electronic band… I dunno if I can get into this…)

I relented from my hardline stance of not doing work-work in the evenings (my much cherished off-time) tonight, mainly because I didn’t make full use of my time at work today… and I’m once again pressed for time this week. Finally made my reservations for the first of my two upcoming trips to Taiwan, the initial jaunt commencing in late February and lasting a week. The second trip comes sometime in late March and lasts 2-3 weeks. I got worried at first, because it looked like my favorite swank hotel was completely booked up the week I was going. The thought of not being able to stay in that now familiar environment really bummed me out… I like that hotel, I feel like the king of the castle there. Anyway, I did manage to book a room for the week, and am now looking forward to the trip, and subsequent sky miles. Too bad I couldn’t arrange something where Sharaun could join me…

Man this entry blows. Goodnight.

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poor horatio

Let's go down to Myer's Lake for a picnic.
Dear reader, a varied post lies ahead… written at different times throughout the weekend. I make no claims about its contents being interesting, or even cohesive for that matter. I only offer what I write, and I tend to write a lot of crap. Please bear with us here as we strive for some decent content, but for today – we’ll take what we can get. And now onto the stuff.

If you know me, or have been reading this wordy webpage for a while, you know that The Andy Griffith Show is “pretty much my favorite” television show. As much as I like it for it’s bumpkin humor or Aesopesque underlying messages, I like it more because it’s a glimpse at some kind of utopia… at least, a utopian vision that closely aligns with my own. Simpler times; a close-knit community of friends; a rural existence based firmly on morals, a desire for peaceful clean-living, and a common-sense respect for others. A place where people are still close to the things that make them happy: the land they work, the friends they have, and the beliefs they share. No… the show never really goes into any of that, those are just my extrapolations. That’s my Mayberry, as stupid as it sounds.

In the tradition of last weekend’s “what I’m listening to” sidebar addition, I spent 10min Saturday adding a “random post” link at the bottom of the “archives” sidebar section. Used a nifty little WordPress plugin to get the job done, pretty cool. Even I get a kick out of clicking it sometimes, I write some stupid stuff. So check it out, and remember – if you see some whack formatted posts that got messed up in the WordPress transfer, lemme know so I can fix ’em. Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Sunday, I got what I thought was a great idea. I’ve had this 120GB external hard drive sitting around for a while, not really doing much with it but copying the occasional thing over to it as an extra backup. Double-checking the current size of my digital music library and finding it to be 106GB, I decided to copy the entire thing over to the external drive. Then, I setup a script that can compare the two drives and keep them in sync, always ensuring that the external drive is up-to-date. I plan to take the drive to work with me. Now, instead of having to sift through piles of DVDs to find something to listen to at work, I’ve got it all on-hand. I’ll bring it home every few days to sync it with the master collection on my RAID array. Now… if I could only find a way to plug it into the car stereo and be able to take it on the road…

When technology really gets smart, here’s how I see it going down: I’ll have a central repository for digital media in my house, it will be large capacity, redundant, and fault-tolerant (RAID5). I’ll have a small iPod like device, but based on flash memory, which will also be large-capacity, enough to hold a mirror image of my entire collection. Vehicles will support the standard interface to this portable device, a plug-in interface that supplies power and signal-out and will be as ubiquitous as the 2.5mm headphone jack is today. The portable device will have built-in wireless capability, and will use my sleeping hours to keep in sync with the central collection. Physical size is important, the current iPod form-factor and weight being the largest that’s acceptable. Storage size must always seem to be overkill, 500GB-1TB if it this thing were real right now. As a rule of thumb, it should always be about 30% larger than what’s thought of as “big,” because if you just aim for “big,” it’ll without a doubt be too small within a year. The advantage of flash vs. moving spinning disks is essential, and when unplugged from a power source, the battery on this device will last 24 hours.

In addition, if I’m in a music store with the device, I can “purchase” an album and zap it through the ether onto my drive; same deal at the video rental store. If I’m at a show, I can purchase a board recording of the event at the end and beam it on. The device will support a “friendly” mode, where it will wirelessly seek fellow devices with similar tastes and enable file-sharing between them, integrated GPS will even allow two “friendly” enabled device owners to meet in real life if they wish. DJs at clubs will be able to offer their entire sets to be immediately “beamed” to paying customers. It will interface with PVR devices to take the kids’ favorite TV shows on the road. If you like a song you hear while in a store, you’ll be able to purchase and beam it to the device.

I spent a good bit of my weekend freetime reading Beside Still Waters, a book Pat loaned me thinking I’d be interested, mostly based on my writing from the other day. It’s a good book, if a little wordy. In fact, it’s a great book… seemingly targeted to what I’ve been thinking about lately. I wanted to write more about it, but I’ve not finished it yet – and wanted to reserve judgment until I was done. If you’re at all curious about that kinda stuff, I’d recommend checking out the book. And, I’m sure I’ll have more uninteresting stuff to say about it when I’ve finished reading it.

Goodnight.

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turfwar

Take that, unrecognized papal authority!
Remember the six extra paragraphs I mentioned on Tuesday? They were mostly a boring narrative about the history of the Catholic church, and where other major world religions came into the picture. Don’t ask me, some overreaching effort to aggrandize mankind’s role in defining the divinity of popular faiths. Problem is, it was boring and soap-boxy… and I’m hardly educated enough to point out the mortal makings of supposed God-breathed dogma. But, I couldn’t bear to get rid of so much writing, so I condensed them into a one-paragraph analogy to rap feuds. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Religion is full of interesting history. For instance, did you know that the whole “eastsiiiide” vs. “westsiiiide” thing started with Christianity? That’s right, the Pope was throwin’ up the westsiiide ‘W’ with his fingers, and the Emperor in Constantinople was flippin’ it sideways to show he was down with the east like four flat tires. The result was much like the divisive rift that developed between Biggie and Pac, ‘cept instead of simply polarizing rap fans by the US coastlines, it effectively polarized world religion into two major camps. I guess you could say that Leo IX was the 2-Pac of the Great Schism… spittin’ vicious rhymes dissing Michael Cerularius (the Schism’s Notorious BIG, or Big Poppa, or Biggie Smalls). Pac was only emulating history when he dropped the notorious east-coast dis “Hit ‘Em Up.” A history established when the pre-Schism westsiders penned a fiery dis-track called the filioque clause, to which the east responded to by refusing to unleaven their bread. It was a confrontation, y’all, be sure of it. Too bad the rap-world equivalent of excommunication is to have several caps popped in thine ass. Dirt nappin’…

Ahem… well then, now that that’s over.

I get criticized a lot (mostly by Sharaun) because I say I wanna do something to get in better shape (eat less, exercise more, etc.), but I don’t actually ever do anything. I think the disparity in what I say I care about and what my actions show bothers her more than the fact that I’m not really doing anything at all to get fitter. I’ve always been like that I guess. Motivated, but not quite to the point of action… if that’s possible. Anyway, sometimes I’ll get frustrated and make a statement like, “I’m gonna eat less from now on,” and then renege on it moments later because I just really don’t care. I hate exercise that’s forced for some reason, maybe it hearkens back to my awkward uncoordinated days in middle school gym. I really enjoy things like hiking and… OK, mostly hiking. Any activity that’s a sort of exercise in disguise thing.

I get carried away sometimes. I sat down to write one paragraph about considering biking to work, and the intro sentence for that one paragraph morphed into the entire preceding paragraph. I guess that’s OK, since it makes my entries look more substantial. But back to the point: I was thinking today about buying a bike and using it as my primary mode of transportation to and from work. I live ridiculously close to work, a 5-10min drive. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that’d be something like a 15-20min ride by bike. It’s not much of a time adder, and with some headphones on it would even enable me to get a few more tunes in along the way. Plus, I think I’d like having the time to think… or not think, either is just as well.

I haven’t mentioned my idea to Sharaun, since I know she’ll just write it off as another one of my un-acted-upon “get fit” whims. I can’t blame her, really; and that’s why I kinda just want to go do it, y’know? Go out and buy a bike and just bite the bullet. I suppose winter in Northern California isn’t the best time to decide you want to start biking to work, with the rain and all… I’m also worried I’ll invest in a bike and then never use it, the danger of knowing yourself too well I suppose. But, I almost feel like I could get into it… maybe not from the “healthy alternative” angle, but I figure more likely from the “non-polluting, hippie, holier-than-thou” angle. Maybe if I keep writing, I’ll end up convincing myself. We got a little bonus at work recently, and it would go nicely towards the purchase of a serviceable bike. Yeah… that’s the ticket.

Seems like this article made a much bigger splash in the international media than it did here. A Google news search today finds it running lead on several overseas media sites: the BBC, Turkish Press, Lebanon Daily Star, etc. To me it seems like a big deal, being that we voted for war based on the premise. If they were wrong, why not say so? People have been wrong before… it wouldn’t be the first time, although the stakes me a be a tad higher. I know we have to stay the course now… but isn’t this just a little bit more than simply an excuse for liberals to say “I told ya so?” I wonder sometimes what the history books of my grandchildren will say about this war. Will time uncover an alternate justification that was kept under wraps as a matter of national security? Or will time conclude that a nation voted to go to war based on bad intelligence, or worse, something that amounts to nothing more than utter fabrication and chest-pounding? Ahhh… time… you cloistered little bitch… you keep your secrets well.

Lets see now… we got religion and politics… maybe a paragraph about abortion next, or capitol punishment? Social Security solvency, Medicare? Welfare reform, gay marriage, NAFTA? Shit, who’m I kidding? I could care less about Medicare, I’m no geezer. Alas, I once again feel I’ve bitten off more than I can truly chew… and mayhap overburdened you, dear reader, with ramblings too thick with uncomfortable topics. I call for a return to levity (a bit of brevity wouldn’t hurt either, my good man)! Egad my writing hands are in a strange mood… schisms and rap, liberal huff-n-puff, exercise!!!

Great, now Sharaun’s gonna be mad I swore on the internet again. I can’t win.

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i know because i know

Creation of man.
Working from home, always an iffy premise… the “working” part, at least. Today though, I’m trying to do my best, as there is a lot of “working” to be done. One thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do while “working from home” is use my desktop PC to remote desktop into my laptop. That way, I can access all my work stuff while sitting in my comfy chair, using my big monitor, a regular keyboard and mouse, and tucked away in a quiet room away from the TV. It’s much easier to do work while sitting at a “real” PC rather than being hunched over a 15″ screen on the couch. For some reason though, every time I tried to use XP’s remote desktop from desktop-to-laptop, I’d manage to connect and then the laptop would immediately drop the wireless connection, which in turn dropped the remote desktop connection. I tried tweaking all kinds of settings, but I got the same behavior every time. Out of frustration, I decided to try good ol’ VNC, and lo and behold it works like a charm. It seems to be a little “laggier” than XP’s native remote desktop, but it’s permissible simply because it works. Now the laptop can sit in the living room while I work in the comfort and isolation of the “data center.” Dang I’m a nerd.

I’m sorry… I’m gonna talk God.

Saw a report on the national news tonight that sparked a question in me, but I’ll frame it with a story… to set the backstory, if you will. Back in high school I started regularly attending church with Sharaun. I’ve long been fascinated by religion. History mingled with faith, unquestioning love mingled with elitism; something about the mystery and power of religion has always been attractive to me. I would attend with an open ear and open mind, taking in every lecture, every sermon, every study, trying at all times to learn for myself. On one occasion, I guest preacher was visiting from out of state. Known for giving very passionate (remember, this is a non-denominational congregation of the Protestant, back-to-the-Bible ilk), and engaging sermons. His sermon on that day was about Jesus’ time in the desert after being baptized by John the Baptist.

For those of you who were absent that day in Sunday school, after being baptized, Jesus was called by God to wander the desert for forty days… all the while being tempted by the devil. The Gospel of Luke recounts one moment of Jesus’ temptation: And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” For some reason, this statement struck me. I thought about it for the rest of the lecture, and afterward found the preacher to ask the question I’d formed: “By what authority does Satan offer Jesus this? Who gave it all to him? How can he offer it?” The preacher responded that Satan must be lying; he is, after all, the devil. Still, I always wondered why Jesus just didn’t call him on it: “You have not the authority to offer this Satan! Only my Father owns all, and only He can do with it as he sees fit.” But he didn’t, and the explanation would have to stand.

Anyway, back to my story. On the news they were talking about the tsunami and how it has rocked the faith of many living in the regions hardest hit. “How can God allow this to happen?,” they asked. “Why’s it have to be God,” I thought, “Why couldn’t it be the Devil’s doing? Wouldn’t that make it easier to swallow?” Then it hit me, it couldn’t be the Devil’s doing… because… when you get right down to it, just what can the Devil do? The concept of the Devil is kinda flawed, because God is omnipotent. So blaming bad things on the Devil really doesn’t work… because they were first run by the proxy filter that is God’s divine will, right? So, in essence, God let the Devil’s evil happen, right? What real power does the Devil have then? If he can’t affect anything without God letting it happen, he may as well be powerless. In fact, the Devil is only a powerful force if God allows him to be… right?

If you take it one step further, you run into the whole omniscience of God vs. human free will problem. That is, how can God both grant us the free will do make choices between good and evil, yet already know the result of every choice we’ll make. If God already knows how we’re going to live our life, and whether or not we’ll end up in Heaven or Hell, why even make us live? If he knew all along that Adam would accept the apple from Eve, did Adam every really have a choice at all? So, I dunno y’all. The simple explanation is that God is not, in fact, omniscient, or that he has some kind of limited-omniscience. I just dunno. But luckily, I don’t have to figure it out anytime soon… or ever, for that matter. So, keep on believin’ what you believe, ’cause I don’t have the answers.

Whew… that’s it. Did all the heathens come through OK? Good.

Another mystery of the universe that’s always perplexed me, although not quite on as high a level, is why TVs sometimes “buzz” when certain things come on the screen. I know I’m not the only one who’s seen this, right? Something like a telephone number or some words are flashed on the bottom and an audible buzz comes from the speakers? Sometimes, it seems like the reds are “too high” or something, and only red portions of the image get all staticy, and are accompanied by the buzzing. It’s almost like the colors get so bright that they bleed over into the sound. Anyway, I always wondered what makes that happen. Turns out, that’s pretty much what’s happening. The scientific explanation? The “overmodulation of the video carrier (higher video content equals brighter picture) on a television transmitter results in loss of carrier such that the TV demodulation circuits cannot demodulate the sound carrier properly.” Thank you, today’s lesson is over.

Man, what a dismal entry thus far. I gotta pick up the pace or something.

You know what’s interesting to me? Snuff. Not like the modern stuff you put under your lip, but real honest-to-goodness old school snuff. I’m almost interested enough to get some and try it… how exotic would it be to carry around a snuffbox and paisley handkerchief for the brown snots that would result. I could feel so stuffy and British, snorting milled tobacco for the nicotine high. How very Elizabethan I should be! The most foppish dandy, not to mention the dandiest fop, of them all.

I found this site the other day and really dug it. I bet Colin Meloy has consulted it a time or two when writing his songs.

Well, believe it or not… I have like six more paragraphs written. I figure I’ll save them for tomorrow, or next week, or never… because, for now, I’m done. Goodnight.

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cell one

Listen and learn.
Sharaun asked that I stay home from work today, as she’s not quite ready to go it alone. It’s fine with me; really. The weekend was largely uneventful, you can read about it all out-of-order in the paragraphs I wrote below. Saturday was spent being Mr. Domestic… cooking, cleaning, and administering Vicodin at the proper intervals. Sunday we slept in, and in the evening Pat and Cynthia graciously came over and cooked lasagna, while Kristi and Erik chipped with a salad and some homemade toppings for the ice cream. I heard it said once (and I bet I’ve even said it on here before) that, in your twenties, your friends are your family. I couldn’t agree more.

As life goes on, I get more torn about using my weekends to sleep. It used to be that I’d look forward to Saturday and Sunday because I could sleep until 10am, or later. Lately though, I’ve been trying to get up at my normal hour even on weekends – all out of the desire to be awake and use as much of my offtime as possible… even if it’s to sit around doing nothing. It’s easier when the mornings are bright and cool, the kind of mornings that just call you to yardwork. Winter makes it more difficult, and rain makes it near impossible. When I roll over and hear rain, nothing seems more appropriate than another hour of slumber.

This weekend, I installed this cool little script that integrates with Winamp (my MP3 player of choice) and uploads data about what you’re listening to. So, when I’ve got Winamp open, it’ll show what I’m hearing real-time. I modified the script a bit to make the artist names clickable to a Google search. The style sheet was being stubborn, so the links are blue… even though I wanted them plain black. It’s a nifty little plugin and I can configure it to work through the proxy at work… enabling the world to see what I’m rockin’ to as I slave away for the man. You can check out the list at the very bottom of the sidebar on the right. I’m all about content… or something.

Being house-bound to look after Sharaun’s post-surgery needs isn’t that bad, or, at least wasn’t that bad today. I managed to get quite a bit done: de-Christmas’d the house, including using the one hour of non-rain all day to climb up on the roof and take down the house lights. Also managed to finally clean out the guest room (which also doubles as the “junk” room when we have no guests). Anyway, I also felt pretty good about managing things with Sharaun… making sure I kept a steady flow of Vicodin in her blood, making her some oatmeal for breakfast, a grilled-cheese for lunch, and some soup for dinner. Now, if that’s not a sickness-tailored menu, I don’t know what is. She seems to be doing well, putting weight on the surgered knee and doing the exercises her doctor recommended. Not much complaining either, which is good.

I’ve talked before about my tendency to let the mail “go.” Since I’m the one that does the finances, I’m usually the one who collects the mail. Lately, I’ve taken to doing this only once a week. I don’t need the mail anymore. For me, it’s gone the way of the print newspaper. I mean, I realize that there’s still a lot we need mail for (like receiving goods bought on Ebay and stuff), but I care less and less about the ceaseless crap we get. Every day, I could choose to refinance my house with any of the five mortgage offers we receive. I also believe I could hold the world record for most credit cards held if I responded to the pile of crap we get daily. Recently, however, I’ve gone beyond just neglecting to check the mail… I’ve started to not even read the dang stuff. I have a huge pile here in front of my monitor… just sitting there. It sucks, because I know there must be at least a couple bills in there that I haven’t even looked at (the damned stone-age holdover ones that still don’t offer online or automated payments). I don’t know what to do with it all. Bank statements for instance… for some reason I feel like I should save these. Why? I dunno. All I do is cram them in a drawer and throw them away eventually. Again, paper mail is dumb… sorry to ramble.

Although it may sound stupid, and uber-Californian, I’ve been thinking lately how I’d like to write a screenplay or book. I did some research online, and found out that there’s a lot of crap that goes into either, but I was more intrigued by the screenplay thing. I downloaded an OpenOffice template to aide in screenplay formatting (these things have formatting rules that are more strict than my 10th grade term papers), and read up on the do’s and don’ts of the whole process. The rigidity of the whole process took a lot of steam of my initial idea, there seem to be so many rules… I think reading a good book on the whole process would be advisable before every putting pen to paper (just a colloquialism people, you know I can barely hold a pen anymore for typing). Anyway, there are several really cool sites out there to help aspiring screenwriters, but one of the coolest I’ve found is johnaugust.com. Mr. August wrote the screenplays for Go and Big Fish, and he actually offers the real things as downloads on his site. He offers the original spec (speculative) scripts, final shooting scripts, and does frequent reader Q&As on his blog. Really cool, although I can’t really tell if I’m serious about trying to write something.

Man, I’ve seen so many “top” lists for 2004’s musical output, and this dang TV On The Radio album shows up high on every one. I remember downloading it when it first came out, and hating it. But, with all these people saying it’s so good, I decided to give it another try. Guess what, I should’ve trusted my instincts… it’s not my bag at all. Toplists are sometimes really good at opening my ears to new tunes, and in some cases re-opening my ears to things too hastily shelved. Some of the albums that scored high across multiple top lists really surprise me. Fiery Furnaces?, that album blew. Bjork?, that album blew. Devandra Banhart?, that album blew. I won’t go so far as to disparage you, dear reader, should you like these albums… after all, you’re certainly not alone… however, you also have no taste.

Good night my friends.