| strange weekend |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|12:08 am] |
It was a weird weekend with lots of ups and downs and I can't believe it's already over. My roommate ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) warlockjanus left for Japan on Wednesday, so I've been alone here since then. On Friday night clawglip and schnei came over and we played some video games, which was fun. Schnei stayed until 3am because he played through the first 10 worlds of Adventure mode in Peggle on XBLA. It was amazing.
I woke up on Saturday feeling ready to be productive. I stayed in Highland because Gretchen was going up to her family's lake cottage and I needed to be somewhere where there was an internet connection because I'm on call for most of our team's stuff until Thursday (we're trying something new where we rotate on-call duty for everything instead of being individually responsible, since our team currently has more products to support than we have team members), and with Joe gone, it was just me in the apartment all weekend! On Saturday I did a TON of cleaning and laundry, got my whole room completely organized, and cleaned up the kitchen a little bit. Then I went out to Meijer and bought a bunch of miscellaneous small housing things: two cheapo 8x10 frames to hold the Nedroid prints that the Australians sent to me after they visited (yes, they had just been sitting in an envelope for that long because I'm a terrible friend), CLOTHES HANGERS for my closet (how have I lived here for 6 months without clothes hangers?), and a couple other necessities. By Saturday night I had totally cleaned everything as well as emptying out my Instapaper queue, Gmail inbox, Google Reader account, and GTD Inbox.
So after devoting Saturday to cleaning, organizing, and decompressing, I decided I would dedicate Sunday to learning and creating. I didn't get much sleep because of the whole work paging situation (have I mentioned that the stuff that our team inherited from the people who left breaks a lot more often than the stuff I previously maintained? It does and it sucks and so much of it is unavoidable) but I got up early and watched three lectures of the Stanford iPhone Programming course, then did the first two assignments. I made an iPhone application that changes a number on the screen when you press a button! And a MacOS application that demonstrates a bunch of internal stuff to you as you make it. So that was encouraging! I started to work on the creative side of things just before dinner, but then when I got back from dinner I started messing around with Javascript, trying to combine the old Google Reader -> Instapaper Greasemonkey script with the new Instapaper bookmarklet, but ran into a bunch of complicated Javascript security crap and before I knew it I was in way over my head and it was 10pm. Which meant it was too late to call my dad! I did just talk to him on Thursday, and I ordered a present to be delivered to Jan to give to him, but I feel bad for not calling him as well. I guess I'll do that tomorrow.
I talked to Marco, the Instapaper guy, via email and he suggested I just start from scratch and use the official Instapaper API instead of doing the hackiness I was trying to do, which kind of embarrassed me because I forgot that there WAS an official Instapaper API. So I might try to tackle that this week along with continuing iPhone development and hopefully doing the creative stuff that got thrown by the wayside when I got distracted by more programming.
I should be really happy that I got so much done this weekend. My room is so organized and I identified things that were contributing to me feeling unsettled here in NW Indiana like not having clothes hangers and fixed those things and I learned a whole bunch about the iPhone and Objective C! But I also lost total track of time, wasted a lot of time tonight, and have nothing to show for it except a basic understanding of what protections are put in place in the world of Javascript to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. So nothing useful.
I'm going to listen to John Hodgman and Merlin Mann's talks from MaxFunCon and hope that they cheer me up. Apparently Merlin's talk is inspiring to people who let their insecurities hold them back or something, so hopefully there'll be something useful to hear in there after what happened to me this evening. |
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| "TODO: update Livejournal with goings-on" has been on my list for a week or two now |
[Jun. 7th, 2009|03:42 am] |
Wow it's June! It hasn't gotten grossly hot every day yet so I have been finding some enjoyment in the fact that the days are so long. I did my usual commute down from Highland to Indianapolis on Friday and it was still light out after 8pm! That was really great and made it feel like it wasn't all that late when I rolled into town for the first full weekend at home with Gretchen and with no real plans in a loooooong time.
See, I spent the first two weekends in May in Highland, first because Gretchen came to visit and see our friends up there, then because she went to Fort Wayne for Mother's Day and I decided to stay in Highland and rest. Then the following weekend I spent some time in Highland but left on Sunday morning to fly to Connecticut for a week! The week was interesting-- there was a lot of work to be done in terms of reorganizing our group and I sat in meetings all week, but I did manage to finish adding a cool feature to my pet project before I presented it to people on Thursday. They seemed pleased and I got a lot of great feedback so at least I felt good about that to counteract the mind-numbing pain of all of the meetings and the sobering reality that we were meeting because we were going to have to spread more work across fewer people due to some people leaving/transferring. It was an exhausting week, in part because of the work stuff and in part because I rarely sleep well in hotels, but it was nice to see a lot of my friends again. I went to a nerd party (video games, board games, and people taking turns playing TF2) on Tuesday night, a dinner with some friends on Wednesday, and then a team event followed by another dinner with friends and a more traditional party on Thursday night.
On Friday I flew back home but then we got up on Saturday morning and drove up to Columbia City to spend Memorial Day weekend with Gretchen's family. At first I was not handling that well because I had a lot of stress built up and was having trouble with that mentally and emotionally but eventually I decided to just spend the weekend napping and reading and managed to put away the thoughts of needing to be dealing with things and cleaning out my various inboxes. Once I got back to my iMac I spent an evening cleaning out my Gmail inbox, my Instapaper account, and getting caught up on Google Reader as well as other various organizational tasks that were a lot easier with my computer. I was a bit bothered by the fact that I felt so stressed by spending 2 weeks away from my computer, but it's not like those two weeks were spent on a vacation-- during that week I was in Connecticut there were still expectations for me to be in touch and communicating with people, so I don't think it's totally unreasonable that I wasn't happy with just my phone/work computer. Just kind of unreasonable.
Last weekend was the kind of weekend where I didn't feel any need for the computer! Gretchen and I drove up to Pentwater, Michigan for an all-too-brief stay with our friends Suzanna and Nick. Unfortunately they couldn't occupy their lake cottage until Saturday afternoon and Gretchen and I both had to work on Monday so we were only there for ~24 hours from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening, but it was still a really relaxing day. We hung out, acted silly, watched the sunset, ate delicious food, enjoyed beautiful weather, and played Munchkin Quest. I wish we could have stayed longer because it was so relaxing but we're saving our vacation time for the honeymoon cruise in August! It has been hard to wait, though, watching them start their week-long vacation in Michigan and seeing some of our other friends (rojotrece, bloumb, bennet13) leaving for a Hawaiian vacation and my roommate warlockjanus getting ready for a long stay in Japan! Not to mention kupek85 going to India, although that's not really a vacation for him but still an exciting adventure! But this weekend we bought plane tickets to Vancouver, where our trip starts, and now I might just have to start counting down the days until we leave. (76?)
This weekend is finally a weekend where I got to come down to Indianapolis on Friday night and I will stay until Monday night, working from here on Monday via the magic of the internet. Saturday I didn't do anything for most of the day, spending it getting caught up on some reading online and just decompressing while relaxing with Gretchen while she plays tons of Animal Crossing. On Sunday we're going to see Up with one of her friends from school and then we'll get some sushi and I may play some video games or work on some of the writing I've been wanting to do but have just been too tired to do during the week. Next weekend I get to spend the whole thing here again as well! All of the traveling was nice but I hope that getting back into a routine with a little less traveling (besides my normal weekly commute, which I just think of as dedicated podcast listening time) will be kinder to my energy level and I may actually be able to be creative and also play some video games and watch some movies. I want to make something of the summer before August, when I turn 25 and get my second annual review at work and finally go on our honeymoon! |
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| another year, another dollar |
[May. 13th, 2009|11:03 pm] |
This dumb internet website is 9 years old now! That means I've had this thing for over 35% of my life. How crazy is that? The real tipping point will come 7 years from now when I will have been on Livejournal for more days than I have been alive and not on Livejournal. Of course, by then there won't BE Livejournal because we won't be on the internet anymore, we'll just be wandering among the wastelands, picking the rubble clean of any food or scraps of metal we can find, but I'll probably still pretend to make LJ posts about it in which I set my mood to "pensive" and my current music to "Waiting for the End of the World" by Elvis Costello or something like that.
Until then: Happy anniversary, my Livejournal! |
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| Eye doubt you care |
[Apr. 30th, 2009|10:00 pm] |
Yesterday was weird. I went to the optometrist for the first time in five years, and the funny part was that it was the same optometrist, which is something I would not have expected to happen. Since I'm currently living during the week in the same area as I lived during high school, I decided that rather than find a new optometrist down in Indianapolis, I might as well just stick with the one I used to go to since they already had all of my records and I quite liked them. So I set up an appointment, changing my home address from an Atlanta address to an Indianapolis address and giving them my new phone number with its Connecticut area code just to confuse them a little more.
I arrived yesterday around lunchtime and was led into an examination room by a woman named Iris (which I didn't even realize the amazingness of until, like, 10 minutes after meeting her, no joke). She looked a lot like Mila Kunis. After she dilated my eyes I got a really bad headache because I kept trying to focus on things but couldn't, so whenever she asked me a question I would have her repeat it once or twice or generally respond in a weird way. I think she found it annoying, even though I thought it was pretty charming and vulnerable of me.
Anyway! They actually do the lens work and put them in the frames and everything in-house at that place, so the glasses I picked out would be ready by 5pm that day. I left the optometrist's office, eyes still dilated, head still hurting, and stopped at a Subway across the street to get some lunch.
As I started to step inside, it became apparent that there was some incredibly loud music playing in the shop. I paused in the doorway, trying to assess just how loud it was. It wasn't the kind of loud that people who want to play their music loudly is, it was the kind of loud that signified something was wrong with their PA system. The radio station was blaring some sort of oldies and it was just driving me crazy from the five seconds I was standing in the doorway, so I promptly turned around and left. I couldn't help but wonder if when they dilated my eyes, they had somehow heightened all my other senses.
I got home and tried to work, but it hurt too much to try to read text on a computer screen, since it can take your eyes 2-4 hours to go back to normal after they dilate them. I tried using Twitter and Google Reader, but then remembered that that was pretty much the same thing as working and gave up. I listened to an album and fell asleep. I went and got my new glasses after I woke up. They're not too different from my old ones, but they're thick plastic instead of metal and brown instead of... whatever color my old glasses were (they started off kind of copper but turned almost purplish as they got older?) and slightly more angular. I'm pleased with them.
The only thing is that they don't really slide down my nose like my old glasses. Now I need a new nervous tic to replace grabbing my glasses and reseating them up in front of my eyes properly. Any suggestions? |
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| blogging trifurcation |
[Apr. 23rd, 2009|09:54 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  okay | ] |
I've spent the last month or so getting some thoughts organized and in the process I am trying to get my writing organized. It's now very neatly partitioned into three pieces.
This journal will continue to exist, as it has for almost 9 years. I am going to try to write more about my life, because at some point I forgot that I was doing that for myself and not for any of you jerks. I am trying to write about things that are not just remarkable in that they are life events of some sort, travels etc. but also things that I see that are uniquely my point of view.
I have been using Tumblr for some time and am pleased with the interface. It's very neat. It has a slick iPhone app and it's extremely easy to post things to it. In January I kind of "figured it out", to some extent, and have been using it fairly regularly since then. You can bookmark it or add it to your feed reader or whatever.
I am also trying to write about video games, since of any topic of conversation that's generally the one I won't shut up about if I think the people I'm around are at all interested (my fallback is music, but I have other friends who are way more qualified to write about it than I am). I'm trying to write from a personal perspective but I haven't figured it out yet. I still spend too much time focusing on the mechanics of a game or something else that ends up reading like a product review or marketing. The writing isn't that great. I want the personal side of the experience to be the focus, not the technical aspects or the plot or the product history. In general I'm going to try to write long(ish, the big entries on there are still only a page or two long) entries, but I will occasionally write short thoughts because they don't fit into a whole post or something like that. I dunno. I'm still experimenting a bit with that format.
So there you go. I'm trying to keep things organized because it makes the video game blogging like a project, one I can organize with goals and todos and notes and ideas and drafts. It's kind of fun, in a demented sort of way. |
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| Train Kid |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|06:46 pm] |
As soon as the conductor passed, having punched both my 25-pass and that of the teenager sitting next to me, the boy leaned over and began groping around the floor. Sitting back up in his seat, he triumphantly held out the punched-out segments of paper from our tickets along with a couple others that he had found on the floor. Reaching into his leather bag, he pulled out a jewel case for a Reel Big Fish CD and lay his ticket flat on it, then began picking through the chads he had picked up to find one that matched the shape of the most recent punch-hole. Once he had selected an appropriate scrap of paper, he set to work with a ballpoint pen trying to fit the piece back into the hole where it had been punched, every once in a while lifting the ticket up and holding it beneath the fluorescent light of the train car to examine his work. He gave up after two rides' worth of punches when he couldn't find a chad to match the now-freshest punch-hole. He slipped the chads into a pocket in the front of his bag, gave the ticket one last glance, then pocketed it back in his wallet. I could see what had been done, but maybe an absent-minded conductor wouldn't notice when taking his ticket the next time.
I drifted off to my usual half-sleep state on the morning train, barely listening for the call for the Van Buren stop and wondering where he learned that trick. I wished I could be there the next time he rode the train to see if it actually worked. |
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| Don't look at me, I'm Hideo |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|06:45 pm] |
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Some people have actually been asking me, so I wanted to let you know: I have been playing video games this year! I will be writing about them but I have some plans! So stay tuned! |
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| Concertgoer |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|06:42 pm] |
I went to a couple of concerts recently in Bloomington. The first one was The Hold Steady. Gretchen and I met up with Davin down at his house down in Franklin and then we drove down, parking near the library. We grabbed food at Esan Thai, which was good, and then walked over to Jake's for the concert. The opener was The War on Drugs, who were good. Once the Hold Steady got started they basically rocked our faces off for the whole show. It was a lot of stuff from Boys and Girls in America, but also a decent amount of stuff from their last album Stay Positive and a few older songs. It seemed like everyone was way into the show and I think all three of us had a good time! I also wore earplugs for the first time ever, which I think was a good decision, because it was a crazy loud show.
On the following Monday, Gretchen and I again drove down to Franklin and met up with Davin and Chris. We went down to Cafe Django and had dinner, then walked over to the venue. The show was the last stop on the Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice tour, and was pretty much the exact opposite of the Hold Steady show-- we sat up in the balcony of a nice theater, and when John Vanderslice invited the crowd on the main floor to come closer, most of them actually got up on the stage and sat cross-legged around him like it was some kind of story time. Both Johns played a good solo show, especially John Darnielle, and at the end of his set he brought John Vanderslice out to play along with a few songs, including most of the tracks off of their forthcoming team-up EP about a guy who works as a top secret organ harvester on the moon, where human clones are being grown in order to have their organs farmed. Which is pretty awesome. Darnielle played a pretty good balance of new and old stuff, including a few songs I didn't even know (the earliest album I've heard is All Hail West Texas-- his catalog is pretty daunting) but enjoyed. He also told a lot of stories about the background behind songs, and strangely tied a lot of it back to Indiana. It was a really cool show and didn't require earplugs.
So that was a crazy but fun weekend. We don't have any more concerts on the horizon at the moment but going to these two seems to have revived my interest in music. Right now I'm really enjoying the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, MF Doom's Born Like This, and Fever Ray's self-titled album. I'm most excited about Amanda Blank's forthcoming album I Love You, Architecture in Helsinki's Vision Revision, and supposedly new albums from Los Campesinos!, Magnolia Electric Co, and The Mountain Goats before the fall. Anything else I should be looking out for? |
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| Don't Look Down |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|05:00 pm] |
There's a conference room on the outside edge of the floor I work on. The outside wall has a large window that runs across the length of the room and starts ~4 feet up. On one of the walls perpendicular to the window there is a large whiteboard which runs all the way up to the corner where it meets the window. Whoever mounted the little marker-and-eraser holder decided to do so right up against the edge, so while I was retrieving a marker today I was standing right next to the window and just happened to be looking down onto the street 62 floors below. When I pulled out the marker that I wanted, I accidentally knocked the eraser out of the little caddy, and I panicked as I saw in my mind the eraser falling down, down, down 62 floors to the street below. Then I remembered that I was still inside a room and leaned over to pick up the eraser, trying to make my heart stop beating wildly as I had imagined my body falling after the eraser.
So yeah, I'm still a little bit afraid of heights.
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| Ladies First |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|09:28 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
Now that I'm working in the fancy big-city business world, I have a commute where I get on a train, I get off a train, I go up some elevators, etc. There are basically lots of instances where large groups of people have to file through a smaller entrance/exit at the same time, which is not something I've really dealt with since college. One thing I've noticed about Chicago that I don't really remember happening at Purdue is that men always pause in front of a doorway/elevator/whatever to let the women go first. I'm not sure if this is weird or not in general, but it generally works out, so whatever.
It gets out of hand, though, and today I almost didn't make it off of an elevator because NO ONE WAS MOVING. See, when you let ladies go first on an elevator, they walk to the back of the elevator in order to let people get through. I had ducked into the elevator just before the doors closed and I was up against the front corner, opposite the buttons. When the doors opened, there was a gap in front of the doors and three or four dudes besides me just standing there. I wasn't sure at first why no one was moving, but then I realized it was because there was a single female and the men were kind of half-assedly trying to move out of the way a little bit so that she could maybe squeeze by them and then get out so that she could be first. But they weren't moving enough, and she wasn't about to press herself up against them just to be first out the elevator, so instead the doors started to close. I finally just pushed the guy in front of me aside and walked out into the lobby, and they STILL stood still while they waited for the woman to exit, who finally did. I could tell that I had obviously just done something VERY WRONG but seriously! What is that? |
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| What's going on |
[Feb. 28th, 2009|11:07 am] |
February's ending already. It was a pretty busy month! First some internet friends visited from foreign lands and we showed them how to be American (put the Super Bowl on but don't really pay attention to it, eat lots of disgusting food that makes your stomach hurt, drink anything with high fructose corn syrup in it, shop at stores that sell food and clothes and electronics, play video games). There are pictures on Flickr!
After that Gretchen and I spent two weekends away from Indianapolis-- first we went to Chicago and saw Los Campesinos! at the Logan Square Auditorium. We walked around in the dark for a little while looking for a restaurant and found a small café that served pretty good Latin American food. The concert was a lot of fun too! We watched from the balcony and the band was really energetic and fun. They played through a lot of the songs from their first two albums. The following weekend was a long weekend in Fort Wayne where we met with the DJ and the photographer to sort out some details about the wedding. We also got our marriage license paperwork at the courthouse, although it involved an extra trip through the courthouse security because we both forgot to bring cash and had to find an ATM to pay for the paperwork processing fees.
I got some pictures from my office-- one from halfway up and one from the 62nd floor, where I work. It's probably a little embarrassing that I still find that whole aspect of it exciting and neat, but whatever.
It's been nice to spend some weekends back in Indianapolis with Gretchen (and Diffie) too. I think once the wedding stuff is over and things have calmed down a bit we will have more nice relaxing weekends at home. Last weekend while I was at home I picked up my custom framing order from Michaels. Custom framing is way too expensive and I don't anticipate paying for it very often but I'm proud of how these turned out. We don't currently have any great place to put them because they don't really match any of the furniture we have, but we'll find something and eventually maybe there will be a place that makes more sense.
This weekend Gretchen is back in Fort Wayne working on more wedding stuff and I was instructed to not come along, so I'm staying here in Lake County. I'm going to try to do some things that I've been putting off in favor of doing simpler things but I also hope to relax today and play some more Prince of Persia, which I haven't played in over a week but was really enjoying when I was playing it. I think tomorrow I'm going to go to Mitsuwa and IKEA with my roommate warlockjanus since he's got his eye on some lighting for the living room.
February had all kinds of good news on the internet. The new MF DOOM album got a release date! A bunch of Wii and DS games got release dates! Blur is reuniting! Andy Richter is going to be on the Tonight Show when Conan O'Brien starts this summer! Yessiree, this spring is really shaping up to be a good time. Oh, and I'm getting married two weeks from today. |
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| catch up |
[Jan. 25th, 2009|02:08 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
I've been "settled" for ~3 weeks now, commuting from Highland to Chicago during the week and driving down to Indianapolis on the weekends. It's tiring but satisfying, being able to see Gretchen more often and see some of my old friends on a fairly regular basis. The commute takes a lot out of me but at the same time it gives me over an hour a day where I'm sitting on the train that I can put to use reading or playing video games or listening to podcasts. The walk from the train station to the office (three quarters of a mile or so each way) can be pretty painful right now but once spring and summer come around it should be pleasant.
I wish I had more time where I felt like I had the energy to undertake real hobbies, though. I had plans for Highly Derivative and I've been meaning to write here for a while and there were some other things that were underway that I just don't have the motivation for when I get home from work and have had dinner and it's after 7pm and I've been up since 7am. Maybe once all of the wedding things and various trips and special events that are going on this winter are over, I will find time to do that during the weekends.
As for media consumption: I recently read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and am now making my way through my second or third readthrough of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I am a few episodes into Season Two of Battlestar Galactica with Gretchen. I am trying to tie up some loose ends with video games that I started this fall but didn't finish like Fable 2, Fallout 3 and Castle Crashers. I am anxiously awaiting new albums from Architecture in Helsinki and MF Doom and am most definitely looking forward to seeing Los Campesinos in concert on February 7.
I'm getting married in 7 weeks (in case you hadn't heard). It's going to be a busy and exciting time and I'm very much looking forward to seeing so many friends gathered in one place in March. The time leading up to it may be stressful but I'm hoping that weekend will be fun for everyone. |
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| 2008 in Music
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[Jan. 6th, 2009|12:26 am] |
My Favorite Albums of 2008
10) Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak
9) Vampire Weekend - S/T
8) Neon Neon - Stainless Style
7) Q-Tip - The Renaissance
6) MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
5) Hold Steady - Stay Positive
4) Crystal Castles - S/T
3) The Mountain Goats - Satanic Messiah/Black Pear EP
2) Robyn - S/T
1) Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster...
I'm cheating on #3 because those aren't albums and there are two of them, but I really like those two EPs better than the album that John Darnielle put out this year (even though Heretic Pride is really good too!) and I usually listen to them one after the other anyway. So bite me!
My Favorite Songs of 2008
All should be streamable below. Only the Kanye West songs aren't available in their entirety, but I'm sure you could find those online pretty easily if you haven't actually heard them.
My Biggest Disappointments of 2008
6) Weezer - S/T (Red) (although I'm not sure why I let myself even have any expectations anymore)
5) Clinic - Do It! (boring)
4) Breeders - Mountain Battles (super boring)
3) The Streets - Everything Is Borrowed (ultra lame)
2) Ratatat - LP3 (snore)
1) Fiery Furnaces - Remember (YOU PUT ON SUCH A GOOD LIVE SHOW WHY DID YOU MESS IT UP LIKE THIS)
Why Didn't You Download These Free Albums By Real Indie Artists And Then Donate If You Like Them You Must Be a Real Jerk
4) Paza - The Slaphappy Bee EP III
3) Capitol Jay - Strangers In My House
2) Brad Sucks - Out of It
1 ) Vir Heroicus - Everyone Is An Artist
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| First day in Chicago (part 1) |
[Jan. 5th, 2009|08:00 am] |
NICTD doesn't take credit or debit, which is a pretty big WTF in and of itself. When I next tried to pay by check the teller asked a bunch of rude questions about my address "'cuz I know you're not commuting from Indianapolis". I told her that this was my legal address and the check would be invalid for me to put any other address on it and she called some sort of supervisor to get permission to accept my check "this time". Guess who's bringing $143 in cash to the train station on Feb 1? |
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| Getting pumped |
[Dec. 9th, 2008|12:36 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Christmas songs | ] |
The prospect of moving in 13 days is extremely stressful right now, especially with all of the car details being up in the air, but getting past that I am so excited about the end of the month. I get to see Gretchen and my family and my high school friends again, I get real vacation time where I can completely relax in Atlanta with no responsibilities, and when 2009 starts I'll be able to spend more time with all the people I moved so far away from! I'm trying to keep all this in mind this week so I don't go crazy. This will be good, it's just going to take a lot of work and a little bit of luck (re: the car and the insurance people) |
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| iTunes party shuffle weighting |
[Dec. 6th, 2008|04:57 pm] |
To add on to my previous nerdy iTunes request, I want to be able to specify multiple sources for Party Shuffle and specify a weighting for each source so that 70% of the selections are made from one list and 30% the other or something like that. Right now I want to hear mostly Christmas music with a healthy selection of regular 5-starred songs and throw a podcast in there every once in a while so I can get caught up with the week's podcasts.
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| The day is beautiful and so are you / My car is ugly but then I'm ugly too |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|09:24 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  stressed | ] |
Did I mention here that my landlord hit my car? I think I did. I forget. Anyway, the appraiser finally came this morning, after a week (albeit one that was interrupted by a holiday). He has yet to do his official calculations and report them to the insurance company, but he said I can basically expect to consider the car totaled. I should be getting an offer from my landlord's insurance company soon, and then I have to figure out what I want to do.
I was hoping to be able to use the car between now and New Year's, since I'm moving on the 21st and I have a lot of driving to do between the 21st and 31st (from CT to Indianapolis, Indianapolis to Atlanta, Atlanta to Munster with stops in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Elkhart in between). I don't want to get a new car in CT because the taxes and registration are going to be so much higher, but now I may have to? Once I get the actual choices from the insurance people then I'll have to think this all over. Sigh. |
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| Bloggin' |
[Nov. 23rd, 2008|01:51 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  mixed up | ] |
Work has been crazy, I haven't even thought about everything else that has been happening. The short version is that my move date is approaching and it is getting really cold here! I was holding out on packing because of guests coming and whatnot but this week I have to really get started in earnest.
The guests I speak of were the esteemed zhaydiddl, graa, and myth. They came in last night and fun was had by hopefully all! We got Chinese food for dinner and played Little Big Planet and Braid and talked about games and design and jobs and stuff. I wish I could have picked their brains more about some things, but the time spent was a lot of fun.
Last night my landlord stopped by to ask me to park my car at the bottom of the hill of my gravel driveway because they were going to move their old van, which is parked back on the back of his property and the only exit from that area is down the gravel. I left it in the right spot and we went to bed at something like 3, so I'm not sure how at 8:30 a knock on my outside door (all the way through the living room, down a flight of stairs, and over to the front door) managed to wake me up. I stumbled downstairs, ready to apologize for whatever I had done wrong, and had a real Arthur Dent moment: as I walked past the big window pointing out to the street, I saw the van lying sloppily across the main driveway and hanging halfway out into the ditch on the other side. I don't remember seeing the police car but I might have seen that too.
I asked my landlord if I hadn't parked in the right spot or if he was stuck or something and he explained that I had done everything just right, but he had in fact hit my car with the van. Apparently at some point going down the gravel hill the van's brakes gave out and he slammed into my rear right quarter panel (luckily the gas tank is on the left side), denting the area above the wheel and tearing loose a jagged piece from the frame behind the tire. It looks pretty bad, but it still seems to be solely cosmetic.
I had no idea what to say, so I just kind of stared in shock while I gave the police officer he had called my driver's license and insurance information. After all that was done, I went back into the apartment where my guests were still mostly asleep, got back in my bed, and kind of stared at the ceiling in shock for a while before falling back asleep. It seemed like a weird dream.
It was real, though. I got online and scheduled a call with my USAA agent for Monday and tomorrow morning I'm going to take the car out for a short (and local) drive just to make sure that everything is okay. Then my landlord wants to meet to discuss the situation. I don't really know what that means, but whatever. I now have three pieces of significant cosmetic damage to my car, two of them potentially big enough to cause problems but they apparently aren't.
Since I haven't ever paid a dime on this car and the rear brakes probably need a tune-up sometime soon, I'm tempted to start looking for a different car, but I don't really know what to do about that. Given that my financial situation is in such flux right now I kind of want to just lease something just so that I can have a safe, clean car when I start driving between Highland and Indianapolis every week in January. But whatever I do, I'll wait until I get to Indiana so that I don't have to pay crazy Connecticut registration fees and taxes on whatever I get next.
Despite the accident and the cold, this weekend has been nice-- I have managed to think about work very little since 5pm yesterday and that's been good for me. I got caught up on the TV shows I wanted to watch this week and have been listening to podcasts this evening (The new season of Radiolab has started!) and now I'm going to go read in bed until I fall asleep. |
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| Obama |
[Nov. 5th, 2008|12:59 am] |
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| |  hopeful | ] |
We elected Barack Obama President of the United States of America today. It's historic, obviously, and beyond that and even ignoring that I feel it was the right choice to make and that's why I voted for him. I've already heard so many happy, positive things about the choice and I've felt my own moments of happiness. I'm excited to talk to my parents tomorrow because I know my parents were devastated after the last two elections and I know they are going to be happy about this one. I'm already starting to hear really nice and encouraging things from people outside the US who believe in the choice we made and are congratulating us and excited to welcome us back into the global community already.
The time for excitement and hope is now, surely. But at some point we have to come to grips with and remember that the reason we elected this man and the reason we are seeing change in our legislative branch is because we were unhappy with so many things. Almost none of those things melt away just by virtue of electing these people. They must now prove they will live up to our expectations and we must do our part as well to be a better country. We may not be able to do all that we want or need to do in the time we have but we should do everything we can. We must not forget this next step, even if we don't know just yet what it is that we will need to do.
To everyone who is happy with the way things went: a simple congratulations should suffice, and thank you for whatever you did to help achieve this. To those who are unhappy or worried with the decision that was made, I hope we can figure out how to help you get that which you want in such a way that it does no harm to anyone else. To all my friends in other countries: Thanks for waiting. We've got some stuff to work out but I hope we get things right this time.
On a more somber note, I'm saddened to see that things are not going as I would have hoped in California and Florida. It's not over yet, but I'm going to bed soon and it does not look good in California. I have so many friends who, unfortunately, are going to have to pick where they live in the coming years if they want to have the rights that they deserve. I think it's a shame that the new administration apparently supports a policy of "separate but equal" when it comes to the rights of homosexuals and I hope that we aren't lulled into a state of complacency by this position. It is not a matter of "good enough". It is a matter of really making people not just equal TO "us", but affirming that they ARE "us". Maybe that can be our first mission as a people who, I hope, will hold their government accountable in a strong but positive way.
"We are the change we have been waiting for." It's time to make things better. |
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