the diary of antoine roquentin

Robots in Disguise – La Nuit
!!! – Pardon My Freedom
Dopplereffekt – Porno Actress
Muse – Sunburn
Modjo – Music Takes You Back

I’m experiencing math apathy. All of a sudden the problems have gotten twice as large, and they’re not easy anymore (well, they are easy but they take five minutes each). And they’re all algebra. Which I hate. And I have two chapters of that algebra excrement until we move onto the next visual sort of math: graphing (which I sort of enjoyed). But until then it’s 16 sections of inequalities and equations that have absolutely no relevance in the real world. I was flipping ahead in the pages, and for an entire chapter there isn’t one real-world application of any of the problems. Before, there were some interesting things to work out that you might actually need in some sort of situation, but now there’s nothing. Everything is variables. And I am so bored.

It reminds me of this thing my old friend Daniela said one time.

Me: “I don’t really feel like going to Religions of the World today.
Daniela: “Yeah, my apathy level is a 10.”
Me: “On a scale of one to ten?”
Daniela: “On a scale of one to two.”

And that’s how I feel today. I made it through like a few pages, if that… and then the exquisite tedium that is order of operations reared its ugly head. I don’t know how Joe could ever find this interesting. But I guess he was doing trigonometry, not basic algebra.

I wasted so much time today and last night. Today Apple made an announcement that they had updated the PowerBook G4 and Power Mac G5 lines. The new Power Macs are incredible, instead of two single core 2.7GHz G5 processors (which was the top-of-the-line) it’s now two 2.5GHz dual core G5 processors. It’s the equivalent of having four 3.8GHz Pentium 4s in one machine. In short, that level of rapid-fire, blazing fast number crunching is enough to make me wet myself. I guess the irony in the math thing it is that every day I use incredibly complex mathematical operations, ones that I could never even dream of. Right now I’m using the most advanced speech recognition algorithms ever developed. It’s all math. And I’m going to be left behind the technological age if I don’t learn it. I think I need to find more comfortable workspace. Until now I’ve been working on my bed. I think I move out of the kitchen table would be beneficial. Perhaps I can make some tea.

I made the picture of the 20″ Apple Cinema display that I want as the background on my computer. Its $700, but I could save that up in a few months. And with Christmas coming, I just might be able to afford it. What I really want is the 23 in. display, but it’s $1100. The way I see it, this year is the year to save up for a new incredible display, and the next year is the year to save up for an incredible Intel-based Power Mac.

Today I saw an advertisement that the California conservation Corps is looking for workers. I’ve met so many people that have worked for them and had such cool stories, that I was tempted to quit my job and do some good physical work in the forests. But that’s just a dream. I can only live the inauthentic life.

My mom talked me out of moving in with Misty again, and the timely announcement by Apple of those incredible new Power Macs really made me not want to blow all my money on lodging and food when I could be saving up for my very own box of speed metal.

I downloaded a new version of the Linux distro that’s on my dad’s computer in the living room, and from what I’ve seen in the screenshots the interface seems to be cleaned up quite a bit. I really like Ubuntu. It works, has a clean UI, and it’s free. I downloaded the new version because my dad wants to be able to print to my printers in my room. Well, he probably wants to print to them in the living room, but I bought the color cartridge for the inkjet so it’s staying in my room. Maybe I should be magnanimous. I think he’ll get pissed if I install that new distro, because there’s only one hard drive in that machine and there’s nowhere to save his bookmarks and e-mail and stuff.

I guess I could put them on my iPod, but that would involve mounting a flash drive in Linux, and from what I remember, that involves command line. And I don’t do command line. Just like I don’t do algebra. I wonder if my dad is asleep yet, I need to move into the living room and get some work done.

It’s not like I’m totally inept with the command line, I’m actually quite fine with it (I’ve fixed my XP installation using the command line Recovery Console many a time), but I just hate it. I hate having to visualize things. I want them right in front of me and I want to be able to move them around with my hands in liquid crystal 32-bit color. I guess I should get on with my work and stop this stupid procrastination. As of tonight, I am about two chapters behind. I’m just not to make it unless I spend all night working on this crap. Well, at least all evening.

Oh yeah, I was noticing today as I was watching some porn that when I’m watching it, usually the PowerMac tech specs are in my Firefox window behind it. Whether that’s because I get off on blistering computational performance or whether I just happen to be lurking around Apple’s site 24/7 remains to be seen.

And just so you all know, Sean Cody is God. And whoever doesn’t agree, you are gay.