the diary of antoine roquentin

> Autolux – Turnstyle Blues

It’s around two, and I still haven’t started on my homework. I did manage to clean up the area around my computer table (a peninsula of technology-related debris was threatening to engulf all the floor space in my room). I also organized all my CD’s (data, not music, those are so obsolete) and threw away a whole bunch of ones that I didn’t need. It’s amazing what you will do while stalking the computer. The ostensible reason for the cleaning, though, was to find the remote control for my computer. I totally found it and played around with Front Row again. My goal this weekend is to do at least one psychology paper and to do my cinema extra credit assignment. I booted into windows, and I’m not going to allow myself to reboot into OS X until I have finished my homework.

Currently, I’m trying to get iTunes to use the same music library in both Wndows and OS X. I’ve heard it’s pretty simple, and iTunes is currently in the process of importing the gigantic library from OS X. Yay! It just finished! And it totally worked! All my playlists and music are all here. I was thinking that this was the main reason that I was kind of blase about doing work in Windows (separation anxiety from my playlists). I’m on this strange cleaning binge though… I only clean when I’m avoiding doing homework. What am I going to do when I’m not in college anymore? The useless CDs of ancient software will pile up until I have to shovel them out the window.

Lol. I think I’m going to start my clothes washing and then work on this retarded cinema thing.

Categories: Ennui

> Felix Da Housecat – Happy Hour

It’ll really be a happy hour when I get the last field notebook done. Until then, here’s day four.

I sent my teacher an email asking him if the topic I’d been researching for a week or so was a good idea for a paper. I hope he gets back to me soon.

Categories: Ennui

> Scissor Sisters – It Can’t Come Quickly Enough
> Hooverphonic – Plus Profond

Well, I guess I got something done today.

Biology Notebook – Day 2

Biology Notebook – Day 3

I hope staying up until 2 a.m. was worth it. I never fucking get anything done when I have to waste half the day in town waiting for my dad to give me a ride home. Man, I need a laptop. Or a car.

I’ve been playing around this application called Quicksilver. It’s a very esoteric program, to say the least. Well, you hit CTRL+Space, and this little window comes up. You can type in the first few letters of any program and it will launch it, or do a bunch of more specific actions which seem to be out of my league. It is supposed to be one of those things that increase your productivity tenfold, but I can’t seem to figure it out (except for the super-simple program launching and such).

I also installed this cool app called YouControl Tunes, which enables control of iTunes from your menu bar and makes it so this translucent overlay appears for a few seconds when the next song starts playing that shows you the title, artist, and album art. I included a screenshot.

Sorry for all the screenshots instead of real pictures…I lost my rechargeable battery charger for two weeks (I just found it today).

Instead of doing my homework as soon as I got home, I needed some release so I started painting. I am in LOVE with how it turned out! I’ll take pics as soon as my batteries are charged. I should have started from the center outwards, but I felt like I couldn’t understand how the icon was going to exist before I had created its environment.

Categories: Ennui

Kevin: “What was I talking about?”
Me: “We were talking about semen.”

Categories: Ennui

> Madonna – Hung Up
> LCD Soundsystem – Tribulations
> Daft Punk – Teachers
> Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch

This is going to be really short. I want to talk more, and I want to do a podcast, but those are so time-consuming and you can’t skim them. Anyway, I *almost* have Dragon NaturallySpeaking running in the virtual machine. They finally added USB support to the beta, so I can hook up my external drive to the virtual system running XP. However, it can’t seem to “see” the files on the drive (i.e. it doesn’t show up in My Computer, although it does say that it detected a USB Mass Storage device).

I’m hoping it’s just an incompatibility that will be ironed out in beta 6 (I started at beta 2, I just installed beta 5 today). There’s this thing called “shared folders” that looks pretty cool. Apparently you can just “share” directories (i.e. the folder with my Dragon files) by just adding them to the VM. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work. I’m hoping for that to be fixed in the next beta too. God I hate betas…they get you thinking about all the features you want and get you hooked on a program that doesn’t actually fully work.

So no reliable voice-rec in OSX for a while. I am feeling like shit today, mostly because until 10 p.m. all I had eaten was an apple and two ice cream sandwiches out of the college’s vending machine. I need to order those parts for my car tomorrow..and get started on my psych shit. That’s going to be the easiest to do, so I should get it done first. Actually, the cinema stuff is the easiest, but it’s that kind of mind-numbing easy where I don’t even have to try. Psych is my least odious task now, and I have allotted tomorrow to finish my observational activity. I’m going to pull it out of my ass, but I think I totally can.

I hung out at Kevin’s house today and we watched that glorious Gregg Araki movie Totally F***ed Up. I had used this sweet Mac program called Handbrake to copy my DVD of the movie to iPod compatible format in about three clicks, and we watched it off my pod. The movie has James Duval being all cute and in love…but the ending is so sad. I want to just crawl into Gregg Araki’s movies and never return. His characters do the exact same things that me and Kelly and the gang do…driving aimlessly around the city, going to Denny’s and Tower Records in the middle of the night and having meaningful conversations…his movies remind me that there are good people in the world.

Why can’t I meet my very own James Duval archetype? He’s so cute in his Ministry shirts…

If I lived in the 90s I think I would want a James Duval, but this is the 21st Century. I want someone totally different than that. Hm, let’s outline my perfect guy:

Obsessed with technology.
(preferably a Mac user, but that’s not necessary)
Someone who has extensive computer knowledge (i.e. enough to build their own PC from parts and do general troubleshooting)
Someone who has similar musical tastes: NIN, electropop, etc.
Someone who is creative (music, photography, painting, etc.)
Someone who is intelligent, well-read, and has strong political and philosophical views.
And last, but not least, someone who is healthy (i.e. not fat, i.e. doesn’t eat at McDonald’s)

Well, I guess I’m going to be alone for a long while. Am I being unrealistic?

In my psychology class tonight my teacher told me that I’m going to get an A if I do well on my last two papers! I’m very excited about that, but I haven’t done the papers yet so I shouldn’t be so excited.

So many days go by and I don’t seem to get anything done. I should have ordered those car parts yesterday. Oh well. I don’t want to deal with my dad. I’m going to be lucky if I can pay the insurance on the car that I’m not driving. Does that qualify as irony?

Peter Griffin voice: “I am not an iron!”

It’s midnight. I know if I sign on to my instant messenger, I’m going to be on for another hour. Can I deal with that?

Man, My computer obsession has reached weird hights. I was doodling in my psych class and the only things I was doodling was flat panel monitors, iMacs, sketches of the OSX dock, outlines of the Skype window…it was strange, but cool. Computers are what I do. I’m now sort of halfway using iListen… but it’s very hit or miss. Either it will understand a sentence or be total gibberish. Most of my sentences are following into the latter category, but at least it types half of what I need to say.

Shit. I have so much homework to do, but I keep putting it off. Well, I was in town all day today and couldn’t work. And Tuesday I read psych all freaking day long. I feel guilty…tomorrow I must do a bunch of work. I think it’s time to go to sleep. Of course, by “go to sleep” I mean watch DiggNation.

Update: OMG! That Diggnation episode was SO FUCKING FUNNY!!! Everyone needs to immediately watch it. I think I love that podcast so much because a) Kevin and Alex remind me of the drunken conversations me and Joe would have b) beacuse Kevin is SO rediculously hot, and c) it’s a link to the kind of technology fashionistas that I want to associate with when I move to a city.

Categories: Ennui