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Posted on

off the top turnbuckle

Work, you're goin' down.
Forgive the randomness of the post, I actually had a full entry written last night and just got too lazy to search for an accompanying image and post the dang thing. So there is a mixture of two days’ writings. It’s OK though, because I’ve learned I essentially write about the same crap over and over and over…

I’ll be honest, nothing happened today. I went to work and for eight hours I clenched my teeth and things sped by without me getting a chance to think. I don’t think I’ll have much to write, but I felt like sitting down to at least and knock something out.

You know when you have a wad of silly putty, pinch a thumbful in each hand, and pull them apart slowly, creating a long droopy thread connecting the two? That’s how I’ve been feeling after work lately. Just plain stretched. I don’t know what I was thinking, but a couple weeks ago I agreed to “cover” for a couple of my co-workers while they are out of the office. Turns out I’m covering for two guys this week as well as handling my own stuff, and it’s just about my limit. I’m doing it, and it’s working, and I’m not dying… but just barely. If the person who’s pulling my silly putty decides to do a fast yank instead of leisurely pull – the whole thing may snap clean in two at the center. I usually look forward to my Taiwan trips as small respites from the day-to-day grind, but I’ve got a sinking feeling that this trip will be anything but a lull. The way I see it, I’ve got to maintain what I’m currently doing on top of doing the normal Taiwan stuff… great.

Don’t you hate it when, you’re about to leave for two-and-a-half weeks in Taiwan and, you don’t even have any new tunes to carry you through your stay? Really, because I totally hate that. So tonight, I went a’scourin’ the usual suspects for something kind on the cans. I mean, I’ve got this NIN album, but I’ve been listening to it non-stop now for days. I suppose it might last through the trip, but it sure would be nice to have something else to kick off the trip with. But I got some stuff y’all! I got it. The Cribs, who are a less-afraid-of-pop Strokes (gee, I wonder if this sound is hot right now or something?); and The National, who are more subdued and lusher (is that a word?). Anyway, I think I like ’em both – so I’m happy. I mean, honestly – look at the current Phoenix that is rock ‘n’ roll rising from the ashes – then tell me this little tune wouldn’t eat its way right up to the front of the TRL line to share the laurels with the Killeraveryjetstrokes. Man… I want to make music.

I used to trade CDs online. I posted a wantlist, along with the list of things I could offer in trade, and I’d arrange trades with people who had things I wanted and wanted things I had. It all started out as a way to amass the completist’s Beatles collection, but soon blossomed into a full time addiction. Once I acquired every single Beatles item, I moved on to simply trading for things I needed. In college, and for my first couple “career” years, I was trading at insane volumes. Burning and mailing up to 50 CDs in a single week. I was shipping all over the world, and even spent several days on the job at my college internship writing a custom CD trading database to automate and track the trading process: printing shipping labels, sending confirmation mails, even updating the lists on my website. I can actually remember telling people I couldn’t do something with them because I had to stay home and “burn CDs.”

Soon enough though, the whole thing became more trouble than it was worth. In the beginning, I’d listen to everything coming in. I’d print out all the artwork from the “scans” disc which was requisite with each trade, and lovingly cut them out with scissors to fit them in jewel cases. In the last year though, I got buried. I began shelving discs in the little plastic or paper sleeves they were mailed to me in, without ever listening to them. I wanted less and less to spend my time burning, packaging, and mailing CDs. So, sometime a couple years ago – I quit. I left the pages up, but told the world I was done. And, up until a year or so ago I still had my last few trades in unopened mailing envelopes. I mention this now because I’m thoroughly wrapped up in my migration project as I type this… and tonight I “found” my huge pile of un-listened-t0 and un-cataloged CDs. And, it seemed like the perfect time to me to do some house cleaning. I’m ripping through it now, and simply tossing the discs as I archive them. Feels good, like I’m finally “catching up” on something I’ve let stagnate for several years.

On the way out of work today, I caught myself giving myself a virtual pat on the back for a good day’s work. In my time at Company X, I’ve come to realize that I’m very bipolar when it comes to the “how was your day” question. Some days, I leave that building feeling like I gave work a flying cross body chop off the top turnbuckle – like a damn champ. Other days, I leave the building with my tail between my leg because I F’d up. Something I did was dumb, or worse yet, something I didn’t do/know made me look stupid. I guess, then, that it kinda goes without explanation that I feel best on the days when I feel like I gave work the business. Those are the days I go home feeling like a star. The other days are the days I go home and am already counting the hours until 8am as I’m driving out of the parking lot.

For a random link, did you know Billboard magazine now charts ringtones? Of all things. Crazy.

Goodnight.

Posted on

second guessin’

Rippin'
It’s 11pm now on Sunday and I wrote most of this entry throughout the weekend while I was sitting at the computer. The more I listen to this new Nine Inch Nails album, the more I really, really like it. I mean really. For real. No foolin’. You should get it and check it out, it grows on you something fierce. You should check it out; no, I’m serious.

Since I last wrote about it, my disdain for retrieving and sorting the mail has grown. I have come to dread sorting through the piles of paper that I get every week. My frustrations are compounded by the fact that near 90% of what I get goes straight into the dustbin (What? “Dustbin?” I’m practicing should the Queen Mother mount an offensive to take back her colonies). It’s got the to the point where the things I used to save, the stock statements, the medical insurance statements, whatever – I now just toss them directly. I used to keep them for some reason, and I still don’t know what that reason is. When I can, I’ve switched my billing options to “paperless” statements – keeping only online records. I’ve switched all my bills to auto-debit, and keep track of all my finances online. I really only need the mail for one-off ordered items and very critical stuff. Man how I wish there was some way to restrict the incoming flow to that stuff only… and get rid of the ~5lbs of paper I just waste each week.

I’ve been back at my ripping project lately, finally having the guts to tackle my Beatles and related discs. I purposely left them for last, for a few reasons. First, there are so dang many of ’em. Second, the majority are bootlegs or rare releases, and their information tends not to be in the automatic FreeDB database. See, when you put most commercially available CDs into a ripping program, the program goes and queries the huge FreeDB database and automatically names the disc and songs. Then, when you rip the disc all the files are named and tagged correctly. If a disc isn’t in the FreeDB database – you get a bunch of songs called “AudioTrack01,” and so on. You then have to go in and somehow rename these, which is an extra and laborious step in the whole conversion process. Anyway, I started ripping through the solo and group Beatles material a couple weeks ago, and at my estimate I’m about 20% through the task. Considering I’m already at about 9GB of MP3 – I estimate I’ll end up with somewhere between 50GB-75GB of just Beatles and related. Impressive when you consider that my everything-but-Beatles tally was only ~120GB.

In other news, I waffled once more on the ripper I’m using for the project. I know it seems sorta silly to switch mid-project, because it’s like admitting any pre-switch rips are inferior – but I couldn’t help myself. Partway into the Beatles ripping, I started noticing CDex throwing a few “jitter errors” on some of my discs. Not CD-Rs, not discs in bad condition either. So, for the millionth time in the span of this project, I went online to search for information about jitter errors and ripping. And, also for the millionth-and-oneth time, I decided to re-download EAC and try using it. Turns out, EAC is much better suited to high-quality ripping than CDex is. It auto-detected the features of my CD-ROM drives and actually recommended the drive I haven’t been using as the better drive for ripping audio. It then pre-configured my LAME codec with some research-proven “best” settings for MP3 quality (which, to my surprise, was using variable bitrate encoding – I’ve been using a constant bitrate of 192Kbps up until now). So, midway through my project my MP3s have become variable bitrate and ripped with a different drive and program. Being incredibly anal, you’d think this would grate on me until I finally submit and re-rip the entire pre-EAC library. But no, I’m not doing it. I’m happy with the rips I’ve done so far, and if I ever find a rotten one – I’ll just re-rip with EAC (providing I haven’t yet sold the source CD, in which case I’ll just download it).

Friday morning at work, my little Gmail notifier popped up saying I’d got a new mail. I only needed to see the little hovering summary box to know what it was – Sharaun and I had won the World Cup 2006 ticket lottery. Out of the three individual matches we put in for, we won tickets to only a single match – #7 in Nuremberg. Since a group of friends had also cast their lot in for tickets, I fired off a message proclaiming my success. Almost right after, Ben replied that luck had also been on his side – and he’d scored a pair of tickets, amazingly, to the very same match in Nuremberg. Out of the others who applied, I think only one other couple managed to get a match – and a different one at that. Seconds later Ben was over at the desk delivering a high-five for victory and talking about World Cup Fever. Too bad the thing is a year and half away. Anyway, it has the makings of an awesome vacation… and Pat later sent out an e-mail where we could see what our odds of winning really were, I was even more pumped.

Goodnight.

Posted on

exit strategy

GIS for frantic?
Too tired last night to write. Didn’t feel like it either. This month looks pretty sorry in that little calendar over on the right, so many non-blue days… nothing written. But look below, I’m proud of it again. That means that I was happy with every entry I wrote this week – nothing too crappy. That’s good, because that means I’m getting back into the swing of things. I hope this upcoming Taiwan trip doesn’t wreck me. Charge!

Got a brief e-mail from my mom today, saying simply that my brother had finally got his orders to Iraq. They told him he’ll leave for the sands December 15th, and will probably be deployed for about 18 months. To me, it seems awfully early to be informing troops they’ll be leaving in December. Not because of logistics, I can certainly understand a military deployment being planned 6 months in advance. I just guess it seems like a lot can happen within 6 months, but I understand that the military minds most likely have this planned long-term. I mean, we’re talking pretty long-term I guess, if my brother ends up going he won’t be coming home until sometime in 2007 – which tells me we’re planning to maintain a presence there at least that long. I guess only a simpleton would believe that we could realistically get out of the country much sooner. I read the other day that Rumsfeld said we’d be cutting our troops throughout 2006 – which tells me that it’s likely that my bro’s unit will be replacing more soldiers than they themselves number… kind of an unsettling thought. I think the whole thing really gets to my mom. For my part, I actually don’t worry that much. Perhaps it’s naive, but if I were in my brother’s position I’d be more pissed about having to go into the desert for more than a year without my wife than I’d be worried about being blown up by insurgents. Then again, it’s easy to say that from my comfortable couch in my comfortable house.

I can remember when I was younger, this would probably somewhere around 5th or 6th grade, I would do a lot of thinking before I dozed off to sleep. Mostly I thought of strange stuff… like trying to figure out how to pronounce words if they were read backwards. Yeah I really can remember doing that. I’d also imagine all sorts of things. That my bunkbed was a cave I was stranded in. Sometimes, for whatever reason, I’d try and see if I could force myself to genuinely cry. Not fake tears, which can be conjured up quite easily, but real tears for real sadness. I don’t know why. It will sound morbid and perhaps a bit askew, but I had this “exercise” I’d go through to make it happen. I’d clear my mind, and try my best to imagine the real emotions I’d feel if someone had told me one or both of my parents had died. Sure, your brain knows it’s not real, so it doesn’t have much effect. But if you give into the thoughts, and really try and put yourself in that place… the tears will come. And so, just to see if I could cry, I’d imagine what it would be like to learn of my parents’ demise. Now, as a semi-adult (am I one yet?), I know one day I’ll really have to deal with that emotion. Hey moms and pops, stick around a while, will ya? I’ve got stuff yet to show you.

In gradeschool, we had a trash incinerator near the edge of the playground, at least, that’s what I always thought it was. It was a squat, square brick building with a rusted brown-red roof angled in towards a small metal chimney thing. There was large metal door facing the street, where I guess you put the garbage in and burned it or something. I used to fantasize about taking girls behind it.

Goodnight.

Posted on

el dorado

An industrious people.
It’s 11:50pm and I’m just writing the first words of this entry. This evening was a busy one for me. Dinner with the boss, and then a few post-5pm work-related tasks I had to get done before bedtime. On top of all that, ended up on the phone with a coworker until midnightish, talking more shop. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I feel like writing… don’t really feel like going to bed – although I know I’ll regret the lack of sleep come morning.

A few weeks ago, I think we were at lunch, Wes mentioned something about some “old Chinese mines” around the area. Intrigued, I asked what he was talking about. Seems that he’d been out Geocaching on his lunchbreak one day, and had stumbled across some tailings and trenches left over from the long-gone Northern California gold-mining days. I don’t know if he’d heard about them before, or if he did some research later – but he went on to explain that the area was a series of old Chinese diggings. Back in the gold-rush days of the 1850s, Chinese immigrants came in droves to Northern California to mine gold. They often lived and worked in commune-like camps. And, since I live minutes away from gold-central, California, there are remains of these Chinese camps all around the place I now call home. Turns out that the tailings and trenches that are minutes from my house are actually the 150 year old remains of a Chinese mining effort, and have remained pretty much untouched all this time.

I told Wes we had to go. I love stuff like this. Do you guys remember the movie “The Gold Bug?” I dunno about you, but we saw it in school. It’s an Edgar Allen Poe story that’s since been made into a TV-movie thing, and I can remember seeing it at least twice during my middle school literary education. From what I remember, it’s a story about a boy and a treasure hunt – and has something to do with a golden scarab. From a young age, I’ve been fascinated with treasure hunting and secret, concealed, magic, or otherwise “awesome rad” stuff of that ilk (I blame the Hardy Boys). This is why things like our middle-school Astro adventure were the apex of cool to me, and is still so memorable to me. But, I digress. The image of rotten wooden doors with rusted hinges and primitive locks sprang into my mind. I envisioned a dark crisscross of abandoned shafts, bottomless pools of endless black water, and all other Scooby Doo-esque mine-cliches. Alas, I had to leave for Taiwan and we were out of free days to go exploring. Then, this Monday rolled around and Wes, Ben and I decided to forsake our lunch hour for an adventure.

Wes led the way. There was a chest-level iron fence around the area, but a gate hung open on one side so we didn’t have to climb. You can actually see the piles of round rocks heaped in the grass from the highway, the whole thing is so close to civilization. Inside the fenced in area there are series of man-wide trenches that cut deep into the rocky earth, some as deep as thirty feet. We walked around on the piled-rocks up top, peering into the trenches for a while – then we found a way to get down in them. Just about wide enough to a man to walk through, the floor of the trenches pitched up and down in little hills, and at their deepest point you could look up and see a ribbon of sun and sky above. There were no rotted doors or dank shafts, but it was still a really fun place to explore. While there, we found evidence that the “ancient Chinese mines” may be being unofficially used for some not-so-ancient activities. We saw beer cans, hobo-hovels, spent condoms, and evidence of campfires. Hey, if less people knew about it, you could totally live at the bottom of one of those trenches and effectively disappear from the world of the surface-dwellers. Anyway, here are some pictures of the outing (Wes’ flash card ran out of space near the end of the expedition, so I had to switch to my cellphone for the last of these).




Looking down the longest and deepest of the trenches.


Ben and Wes, in the trenches.



Looking up.


Someone left us a rope to assist in this steep ascent.

With all the gold-related stuff going on in this entry, I got some more. Today I had lunch over at Pat’s place, where we discussed a new enzyme-filter (or some kinda filter at least) implementation for his large saltwater fish tank. All the talk of siphons and filtering and pumping reminded me that I have my grandfather‘s old (but working) gold sluicing equipment. It’s a little gas-powered dredge/pump attached to a fire hose, that sucks water and sediment from the river and spits it back out down a long sluice box. The constant flow of water and sand/gravel over the sluice box riffles pushes the heavy sediment to the bottom, where it collects on the textured black rubber mats. In gold-miner talk, these contraptions are often called “High Bankers” or motorized/powered sluices. Talking to Pat about the equipment, I think we both got a little bit of the gold fever. When I mentioned that I also had three of my grandpa’s old gold pans, we started talking about actually going out and using the stuff. The little gas pump worked like a charm as recently as last year, and I think I only need to make some minor repairs to the sluice box and motor mount to have a fully functioning highbanker. On top of all this, the very-close-to-me Auburn State Recreation Area allows panning and highbanking year-round without permit and several people in online gold forums mention pulling decent nuggets from the American River there.

Armed with this information, I really want to try and get a recreational highbanking/panning trip together with some friends. This would involve beer and a picnic lunch of course. Sadly, a lot of the places my grandfather used to go for public prospecting are now closed. Convict Flat, Ramshorm, Indian River, China Flat… all closed to the public as of 1996. I think it would have been cool to use his stuff in some of the very same places he used it. Owell.

2am on the nose. Goodnight.

Posted on

D is for dreamer, A is for actor…

Down the rabbit hole.
Welcome to 11:30pm on my Monday night. ‘Twas a busy Monday at work, where I win my bread. It seemed I was no sooner in the office than I was on the phone or on the computer or on the tiles, meeting and working and walking and talking and thinking. I have to go do it all again tomorrow, and I wish I didn’t… have to, I mean. Enough with the exposition though; shall we?

I’ve been listening to the new NIN album the past couple days, and I really like it. In particular, there’s a part in the song “Right Where It Belongs” that’s really rad. From the beginning of the song, the vocals have a muted, in-the-background presence which is slightly off-center to the right in the stereo image. Then, about 3/4 of the way through, they totally morph, taking on a much warmer, foreground presence that’s dead-center in the image. At the same time, a crowd noise sound effect is ramped up in the background, and the “wetness” that’s added to the vocals also gets layered on the instrumentation… along with the addition of a little bassy synthesizer. Very cool effect, almost like the song “comes alive” just then. You can listen to it if you want. Just take the URL of this page, and change the root by: adding 18, subtracting 8, subtracting 2, adding 9, and finally appending ’12.mp3’. Neato.

When I was in high school, I used to like to write things down without actually writing them out. Meaning, I liked to write little cryptic things. I think my inspiration came from the back pages of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, where Carroll closed the book with a poem, which, when read every-first-letter acrostic style, spelled out Alice’s real name: Alice Pleasance Liddell. I adopted this, and variations of it, to write down secret things in my journal. So, what seemed like a semi-poignant limerick about some thoughts or feelings was, to me, really an admission of infidelity or something more exciting. My favorite, and most challenging, was to write a small poem where the lines’ first letters read forward spelled half of what was really being said, and the lines’ last letters read backward finished the hidden message. Care had to be taken: to manipulate the shrouded thought to contain an even number of letters, to split it in half and write the opening and closing letters of each line, and finally to fill in the gaps with a cohesive thought. I masked things like that all the time, but only the most super-secret – the stuff that should only be thought, not recorded. When reading back over my journal, I can spot these instantly. In fact, they stand out to me as only the intended text, the contrived filler only there to protect what shouldn’t be put down on paper. Useful, if you’re into that kinda stuff.

Saturday night was a party at Ben’s house, in honor of Ben now having the house where the party was. We went there. It was good. After the crowd dwindled, and all that was left was what partygoers sometimes call the “hardcore crew,” we set a fire in Ben’s backyard. Not on the grass, but in a pre-fab firepit that came in a cardboard box from a warehouse store. Ben had gotten it as a gift, and he and I had spent some time earlier that day assembling it. Anyway, the box of Hot Wood purchased at the grocery store up the street was set alight, and six or seven people huddled in chairs around the fire. It was a chilly night, so the pre-warmth period of the fire was somewhat of an endurance – but the few powered through for the sake of conversation. Something about sitting around a fire brings out the best conversation. Staring into the stuff. Pat said it was because that’s all there was to do at night for ten-thousand years. Maybe. Maybe it’s something primal, pre-conditioned into our consciousness at birth. Although huddling around the sub-$100, assembly-line, terra-cotta and metal firepit, burning our purchased-at-Albertsons, came-in-a-cardboard-box firewood (with kindling) wasn’t exactly recalling caveman days. Anyway, it was one of those moments for me where I was just…. complacent. Good friends were around, and the planets aligned around a little firepit in Ben’s backyard. I’m a sucka for flames.

Did you see that paragraph about the firepit? That’s writing. That’s what I used to do. That’s what was gone. That’s what I feel slowly creeping back into my hands as they click the keys. Keep the faith, it may be back… it just may be back. Also, today at lunch we went on an adventure to the 150 year old abandoned Chinese mines. I’ll write about that tomorrow OK?

Goodnight.

Posted on

still pooping taiwan

Put da needle on da rekkid...
Home is a good place to be. Even though I’m back around the same unfinished things that have been bugging me for months: the perennially unfinished backyard, the shower that needs new grout, the unpainted walls and unfurnished front room. Yes, it’s all here and all still calling to be completed. For the long term projects at least, it looks as if they’ll have to remain unfinished for the next month or so. Talking to Sharaun the other night, I realized that I’ll be away from work-proper for the entire month of May. Two and a half weeks in Taiwan again, then one day at home before leaving for another two days in Oregon, then a week off while my sister-in-law and her husband are in town. And poof! The month of May is gone.

When I was a kid, my cousin Nathan introduced me to U2 and Depeche Mode, funnily enough – he also introduced me to music in “compact disc” form at the same time. Anyway, I became a die hard Depeche Mode fan… collecting all the cassettes I could find at the local mall’s Camelot. Remember that “frequent buyers” card they’d stamp each time you bought a cassette? I think I got my Ah-Ha or Pet Shop Boys or Wang Chung tape that way, y’know, the 10th one is free or something. Yeah, my head was fried on tunes even at that age. Wow, I apologize for getting off track – but there’s something good about that – it’s writing for writing’s sake! It’s feeling free to follow my thoughts as I go. Back to the story. Today I was sitting around hacking up a bunch of MP3s with Audacity so I could import some nifty new ringtones into my phone, and I was browsing the collection for good songs to splice and dice. I fired up Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration and eventually came to the closer, “But Not Tonight.” I tell you, something incredibly meaningful from my youth is associated with this song. I can’t remember specifically what it is, but just the first few strains of the tune are enough to elicit chills and nearly stir up tears.

Ben and I were talking the other day about open source and free software, and how we’re all proud of our legal machines. However, and it sounds stupid now, I had never really thought about a piece of software that I use on all my machines, and the fact that it includes pirated warez. I’m talking about the K-Lite Codec Pack, which contains several key codecs for all sorts of file types. I use it for DivX and Xvid movies, and all sorts of other junk. Come to find out, it ain’t good y’all. So, I promptly uninstalled it and went looking for an open-source alternative. As usual, SourceForge did not disappoint, offering up the Gordian Knot Codec Pack, which contains everything I need. I am writing about codecs, what’s wrong with me?

For some more semi-tech talk, a couple things. First off, I think it’s totally awesome, and pioneering actually, that the Grateful Dead has started to sell their famous Dick’s Picks and From the Vault series of CDs as digital downloads. For years, the Dead allowed tapers to freely record their shows, offering special tickets for the tapers section. Free distribution of these recordings was also encouraged, although everyone knows that exchanging tunes for money is bad karma. Trading of tapes and eventually DATs or MDs was done in large tents at the show, where people were always in search of an upgrade to their favorite shows (because 10th generation tapes sound like ass compared to sweet, sweet binary cloning). Anyway, you can currently buy all the CDs in MP3 or the lossless, and open-source (again, pioneering) FLAC format. To me, this is the future of music: compressed, lossless online sales for reasonable prices. And when I say reasonable, I mean we get to subtract all the costs that go into a physical disc: manufacturing, packaging, transport, storage, etc. We pay for raw music, right off the soundboard or out of Pro Tools.

Soon, I think we’ll start to see more and more bands offer their music this way – at least, if their big corporate contracts have expired and they are free to do with their art what they will. I mean, who needs packaging? A sweet animated Flash experience or interactive online event is way more cool than glossy inserts. If you think about it for more than a little, you can actually visualize a world in which record labels and contracts are not nearly as important as they are now. At least, as a mode of distribution. Conceivably, you could record and “release” your efforts online without any middle-men. No contract, no percentage to someone else’s pocket. I realize that labels are currently still important as PR machines and the deep-pockets behind payola-funded radio play lists. But there is a hint here of a new paradigm in music publishing and distribution. Homogenized radio is dying, and digital music is reaching an adoption rate where Marketing 101 tells us it will begin to drive a secondary wave of goods and services. Perhaps, with good marketing and some initial investors, you could circumvent the majors altogether. Problem is: you gotta be good. The internet, the global audience, is the A&R man of the new century – we decide what’s good. Hey, I think we just cured another symptom of the majors. So, c’mon expired-contract open-minded artists… let’s do this thang.

And, because it fits really well here, considering the context – I’ve been busy listening to the new, and freshly-leaked, Nine Inch Nails album, which comes out in a few weeks. I like it. I like it more than that double album I bought in college and hardly listened to, and consequently can’t remember the name of right now. Anyway, some songs are very good, some are OK. Oh, and the contextually relevant bit of this rambling? Seems that Mr. Reznor has released one of the album’s tracks via the NIN website as a GarageBand2.0 file. What that means, essentially, is that he’s released the source multi-track recordings – just like a producer would get before mixing down a final track. He’s encouraging fans to “… create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there.” What an awesome idea. At least there are some musicians out there who are embracing this age of everything-on-demand, no-secrets digital freedom.

On a completely unrelated note, caught this story via Slashdot over the weekend. The part that really caught my eye was the statement: “They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.” Things like this always intrigue me, and I must admit that it’s not always for the most noble of reasons. Somewhere in me, I have this secret wish that some long-lost Christian writings would come up that really through a wrench into modern Christian dogma. No, I’m not rooting for some discovery that would completely deflate billions of peoples’ believes and values – I’m just talking about something that might force people who are staunchly set in their ways to think outside the box and perhaps view their religion in a different way. And I don’t mean things like the Dead Sea Scrolls or Nag Hammadi texts, which stubborn believers can easily write off as offshoot-group documents which simply aren’t part of the Biblical canon. With the whole process of canonization having effectively relegated any non-canon writings to irrelevance; something like an early version of on of the New Testament gospels, maybe on rife with all sorts of Gnostic ideas, would be an awesome rock in the pond. Some small evil imp in the back of my brain would really love to see some self-important, card-carrying Southern Baptist have to chew on a lost verse of John in which Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, women can speak the word of God as well as a man.”

Holy crap this turned into a long entry… I hope I didn’t blow my week’s wad in one shot. Stay with me, we’ll see what we can come up with. Actually, I haven’t written an entry this easily in a long time, maybe my near week off last week did some good for my writer’s block or something.

Goodnight.

Posted on

war memorial

Cute, and yummy!
Stupid United Express terminal… always smells like hot dogs, and everything’s always delayed. At least I got here today in time for the first flight – so I can actually be the one that starts the domino delay for the poor travelers later today. Anyway, if it wasn’t made clear already – I back. Taiwan was, Taiwan. I had a good time as always, but missed home as always.

I felt much more “local” on this visit. The “acquaintances” I’d met on my previous trips have started to turn into full-fledge friends, and where I used to need a local intermediary to schedule outings with them – now we just get together directly and do things. I had a good time with the usual crowd from the hotel bar, and managed to spend some time with Eric and Suzy as well, who are staying in Taiweezy for 6mos. Towards the end of the week, I really started burning the candle at both ends tho… wandering the streets of Taipei as the sun came up, and somehow managing to make it into work. It’s OK though, because all I needed to catch up was my flight over here – which I slept through solidly, I might add. I guess 48hrs of waking-time doesn’t match too well with ~4hrs of sleeping-time. And, the MP3 player on my phone (you’ll read about it below) faithfully served up tunes for the entire ~10hr flight, without a single bar reduction in battery – I was impressed.

And, because I’m lazy and I did the work anyway… I wrote the following paragraphs sometime this week, but never posted them… so here’s the dump.

Well, being in Taiwan, I managed to pick up a 1GB MMC card for my new Nokia 6230 phone. I’ve seen on the web that there are 2GB cards available in Europe – but I can’t seem to locate them here. So, I settled for 1GB, and now I can hold a pretty decent amount of tunes on the phone’s built-in MP3 player. I tested the functions a little bit, and it seems pretty neat. The stereo headphones I got off Ebay have an integrated track-advance button and microphone, and will automatically pause the music and allow you to use them for incoming calls when needed. My only gripe would be that it’s kinda hard to setup playlists, and you can’t do any folders on the MMC card – so everything gets all jumbled. I did manage to make playlists and get albums playing in their right order, but it’s a little bothersome. Also, the phone doesn’t support any kind of “in flight” mode like some other phones with MP3 players. This means that the radio/antenna is active at all times, which is technically not allowed during flight… but… I’m going to ignore that. Anyway, it’s kinda cool to have a reasonably sized MP3 player built into my phone, handy for long trips when you get a yen for some good tunage.

Today (Wednesday in Taiwan) turned out to be a pretty busy day. Had a lot of work to do so spent most of the day at the office doing e-mail and meetings. Also managed to book my travel for the next trip out here, as well as get Sharaun’s ticket and make sure we had adjoining seats. I hate booking international travel, and trying to coordinate my booked-through-work tickets/seats with her normally booked tickets/seats didn’t make anything easier. But, I did finally manage to square things away, and we’re both set for the upcoming trip. I’m actually looking forward to being here with Sharaun, but not really looking forward to being away from home again so soon. On the plus side, since I had some previous engagements back home in mid-May, what I thought was going to be a three-week stay turned into only two-weeks and change. The bad news though, is that my “previous engagement” was yet another travel-trip, this one to Oregon. So, I’ll get home from Taiwan, get one day back at work, and then hit the air again. And, since Breck and her husband are coming to visit the last week in May, I’ll effectively be out-of-the-office for an entire month – a first for me.

All the times I’ve been to Taiwan, and I’ve always assumed the “dark” tofu was just some variant of the regular tofu. Y’know, different ingredients, different flavor, whatever. Only today did I come to find out that it’s just gelatinous hunks of coagulated duck’s blood. Mmmmm… duck’s blood. It’s funny how something can become unpalatable just because you find out what they really are. I mean, I had no problem eating it when it was tofu – but when it was duck’s blood, I had to really work at chewing and swallowing. Scenes of strung-up ducks spilling out their life’s blood into inch-deep pans filled my mind, and thoughts of just how they form liquid blood into little jello-like cubes… ugh. Anyway, Taiwan never really disappoints when it comes to food experiences. But don’t let my tales of duck’s blood and fish eyes and chicken heads scare you off, the food here is really good – it’s just different.

Until Monday then, welcome home.