I’ve been reading chapters in my psych book all day. I think it’s time to boot into Windows and do my cinema extra credit, then it’s back to OSX to lay out one of my biology notebook pages.
I need a vacation.
Categories: Ennui
> Tomcraft – On Screen [an incredible song!]
> M.I.A. – Amazon
> Client – It’s Rock and Roll
> Massive Attack – Butterfly Caught
Today wasn’t so bad. I did, however, forget my earbuds at home so I was pretty bored during my wait for my cinema class to start. I’m dictating this in iListen, and I’m getting maybe 20% recognition. I hate this software, but I’m too lazy to reboot into Windows. Also, this program has no help files. How wonderful.
I think I’ll train it a bit more. You speak these stories that it shows you in order to train it. I only did one story, so I guess I shouldn’t expect amazing accuracy. Then I’ll have it analyze my writing style from some blog entries. I’m hoping that will help. It just crashed in the middle of a training session. Great. This software was written by monkeys.
I have so much damn homework to do. And I’m so tired. And tomorrow Josh is supposed to come down from Oregon or something. I wish I could cancel that.
It’s totally finals week and all this car shit is really fucking with me. I need to get home immediately after work tomorrow and get started on this Psych stuff. I’m like three chapters behind in the reading.
Well I just read two more stories in the speech-rec program, I hope that will help something. Right now I’m making the program learn my writing style from about two weeks of blog entries. Mouhahaha. I don’t know why I get evil laughs from making programs analyze vast amounts of information…hmm.
I think my recognition is better now. Anyway, I managed to postpone that thing with Josh. I definitely cannot fit that in between those three chapters of reading.
Man, I’m tired. And this voice-rec is back to sucking. I need a whole bunch more memory to get this system blazing.
I did do a graphic today at work. That was sort of fun. And I made a bit of cash. Speaking of cash, I logged on to my online banking Sunday to find that I was $30 in the hole. Thankfully, my mom bailed me out.
Shit, I need to get to sleep. I have so much homework for tomorrow.
I’ve been trying out this new RSS (blog feed) reader called Vienna. It loads much faster and has a cleaner user interface than the ever-popular NetNewsWire, and the best part is that it’s free!
PS: The blogroll is gone because WordPress (my blogging software) is stupid. It won’t import my new subscription list. I hope it will be fixed in a later version.
Categories: Ennui
For my Cinema class, we had to write about this terrible Jon Travolta film called White Man’s Burden.
“In your opinion, how well does this film deal with prejudice and role-reversal?”
My answer:
The film “White Man’s Burden” advanced a puerile view of race in America. It reveled in stereotypes of opulently wealthy white people while watering down the plight of the poor . It was possible to see where they were going — to show a mostly white audience how life would be as a black man or woman (as in the scene where there were only blacks on the TV), but it seemed like the writer made too many economic concessions so we could identify with Louis (John Travolta’s character) to have the whole race switcheroo actually mean anything.
When I picture “the ghetto,” I don’t picture the house that Louis lived in. There are houses in Crescent City that put that place to shame. It seemed like they were trying to much to attack the injustices of class and race at the same time, while failing on both counts. The only thing I really got out of the movie was “rich people have no idea how the real world works,” and that’s true no matter what skin color the rich happen to be.
It was insulting that the events in this movie were supposed to somehow capture the plight of blacks in America. If anything, it reinforced a stereotype of whites as rich bigots and blacks as helpless pawns doomed in a white-dominated world. This film seemed to be an apology for racism from someone who had never been a victim of prejudice and who had obviously never been poor. I think the right way to approach a script like this would have been to put two characters of the same social class but different race into a situation where they would be forced to discover their prejudice, but that would have required nuance, subtlety and most importantly… no guns. Kind of hard to sell to Hollywood. But as soon as you mix in some hollow apologist pathos, a kidnapping, and some memorable gun fights, you’ve got a “hit.”
Categories: Ennui
> Client – Radio
I did a bunch of lingering projects today:
1) Imported in all my old email from the program I was using on my PC. I had successfully imported my inbox from the get-go, but Mail (the OSX email program) had problems grabbing these folders of old messages (mostly old stuff from my mom, Kelly, and some other old friends that I treasure). I had run into some weird error doing it when I first got my Mac, so I had put it off until today. To fix it, I circumvented the whole import process by uploading the mail into an IMAP account in Thunderbird and downloading it from the IMAP mailbox in Mail.
2) Imported my address book from the PC into Address Book, the handy OSX app that keeps all your contact info in a central place. I cleaned up the entries, deleting irrelevant ones (like Taggart’s phone number), and annotated it with all the new numbers I had in my phone (it was pretty tedious, but it had to be done).
Now I actually have to work on homework. The program I was using to make my Biology field notebook (InDesign) finished downloading yesterday, so I get to start on that again. I think I’m going to boot into Windows to type up all the entries in Dragon, then come back to OSX to lay it all out and grab all the pictures. Check out the first field notebook entry I did. It’s pretty cool…I’m hoping the quality of it will offset the fact that I only have shown up to five out of the eight or nine classes. I also need to work on my research paper for that class…it’s due May 15. The research paper is actually more important, I should focus on that.
Today my dad complained about me not cleaning the house and my bathroom. He’s kicking me out in a month and he expects me to vacuum? Fuck him. Now that I think about it, I’m not cleaning my bathroom. I’m going to do my homework.
On the bright side (if there is such a thing on a Sunday), we fixed the wheel on my car and took it out for a drive to see if it still worked and amazingly, it did! I just need airbags, a fender, a headlight, a mirror, and a windshield…although i think I’m just going to drive it with the broken one, I can’t afford a new one. It only has cracks on the passenger side, so I guess I can drive it…
Anyway, I must get to work on my homework. My mom said she’d pay for my memory upgrade if I finished my classes with decent grades. It’s an extrinsic reward (not really a motivator), but I deserve it. With the probable exception of my Biology class, I’m getting straight As.
PS: Everyone must download the album City by Client. It’s incredibly good, I’ve been listening to it all day. Here’s an iTunes link to the album. I recommend “Radio,” “In It For The Money,” and “Pornography.”
Categories: Ennui
I knew even before I woke up that today would suck royally. I must say that today has fulfilled my prophecy with flying colors.
Fell asleep during a slideshow in Biology.
Walked back to town from Lake Earl, was exhausted,waited for four hours for my dad to pick me up.
He never showed or called.
What a motherfucker.
But what did I expect.
I’m so fucking tired, but I can’t go home.
He’s not there. I wonder if he died on his horse or something. I read his will a long time ago and it said I get enough money to finish my college. I was surprised. He won’t pay a cent for me to finish my studies while he’s alive. I don’t get it.
I’m hanging out at Kevin’s house, trying to stay awake. The battery on my iPod is nearly dead, I left the charging cable at home, not thinking I would be in town for long enough to run down my battery. Everybody is leaving the house. Maybe I should go too. I should call my dad. I’m sure a bunch of my downloads are complete. I love having my super-quiet computer, I never have to turn it off. I’m definitely getting my $50 a month worth with the sheer volume of data I upload and download each month.
Will is strange…he has told me and Kevin so many conflicting stories about this random crap. I don’t know what to think. Weird.
Categories: Ennui
> Orgy – Pantomime
> Assemblage 23 – Awake
> Robots in Disguise – Turn It Up
> Depeche Mode – I Want It All
Today was one of those days where you question why you even exist.
I was very tired this morning and got into it with my dad on the drive to work. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about what he was talking about with fixing my car (I’m never very enthusiastic at 11 a.m.), and he spouted out with this thing about “I’m only giving you a ride to work to help you out. What do think, I owe you something?”
OK, maybe I’m being Louis XIV here, but he does owe me something. I’m his fucking son and he needs to take some fucking responsibility. Yes, I did get in the car accident, but that’s not the point. The more I read in my developmental psychology book, the more I realize that every critical juncture, my dad did the developmentally inappropriate thing. I have never before met someone so completely inept at being a parent. My God… I feel like I’m the model son and I get nothing. I could be stealing stuff from my dad’s house and using it to buy methamphetamine, but no, I’m getting decent grades at a community college and have almost finished my A.A. I guess I’m just a fuck-up. My dad is brainwashed into all that Ayn Rand bullshit. I agree with her form of individualism, but if you take her philosophy to an extreme, you kick your children out of the house at 18 and tell them “sink or swim, that’s capitalism for ya” *slam*
He is such a bastard. Always telling me that he’s going to kick me out…for fucking years he’s been saying this. You know why? It’s his twisted way of trying to motivate me. This is how people who know nothing about psychology or even basic human decency operate. It’s the remnants of this whole ’50s bullshit of masculinity. No, you can’t tell your son that you’re proud of them, that’s what ladies do. You can only demean and yell at your children… that’s the only way to get them to do anything with their lives. I always delude myself into thinking that he cares a shred about my welfare, but it’s all a lie.
And how the hell am I supposed to concentrate on my schoolwork when he keeps shoving in my face that in two months I’m not going to have anywhere to live? I guess I shouldn’t completely blame him. I could have been determined and taken a whole bunch of units while working…not buying any toys, saving up to leave, like Joe did. I would have failed though. I just don’t really have a drive to do anything non-computer related. My Mac will never tell me that I’m stupid and worthless. My Mac will never kick me out of my house. My Mac will never tell me it doesn’t love me (aside from the occasional kernel panic). I’m safe on my computer. I’ve been hurt so many times I just don’t care to experiment with people any more.
I called my dad after I got off work, but he didn’t pick up. I didn’t think he would give me a ride home after the debacle in the car. I had brought my bike in with me. I put in my earbuds and started riding towards the movie theater, hoping to drown my sorrows in dance revolution. When I got there, the closed sign was glaring from the window. They weren’t going to be open for another hour. The wind was intense, even though it was sunny out. Of course, it was blowing from exactly the direction I wanted to go. It was that bitter, gusting wind that will blow so hard that it will stop your bike from moving. It’s like endlessly pedaling uphill except you are on a flat surface. It took me so long to get to the college. It was the only place I could go. During that ride I felt like everything was over. I realized that if I called, no one would come to pick me up. I was stranded in the freezing windy hell of Crescent City. Peddling endlessly against the wind, I was a Sisyphus with no parents, no home, nowhere to go back to. I was homeless.
I don’t know how to survive in the real world. I hate America. Why can’t I just go to college? I felt hopelessly abandoned, and I couldn’t remember who came up with the trust vs. doubt developmental step, but I got doubt. Everything that has ever happened in my life just seeks to reaffirm the eternal truth that whatever I try to do, I will never succeed without feeling like I’ve sold out another part of myself. I just have to play the game, eat shit, and maybe eat enough shit so that I can make others eat mine. A chapter in my psychology book on high school was particularly ironic. The author was talking about high school being a microcosm of the adult world, and it made me think of this one thing that happened during my time at high school. Del Norte High was considering changing the schedule. So of course, ballots were passed around and we all voted on which type of schedule we wanted (there were three choices). The student Senate voted, all the students voted, and the teachers voted. And after all that, they ignored the students and did what the teachers wanted. The “developmental lesson” of that was that your opinion never matters: the people in power will make decisions regardless of what you want. Don’t vote, don’t get “involved” because the decisions will always be made by someone else.
Another similar instance of my childhood beliefs in justice getting dashed was the day I decided to wear a belt to school made out of spent bullets. This was around the start of the Iraq war, and I felt that I had to say something about it… albeit symbolically. And let’s face it, the belt looked sexy. Those of you who know Ben have probably seen it… he bought it from me for 30 bucks. Anyway, as soon as I went into the door, Mr. Hatfield (one of those ex-military dickwads…think the teacher from The Breakfast Club, minus ten years) accosted me. He started touching it, and upon realizing that there was nothing inside the cartridges made me take it off. “It’s just metal,” I said. He proceeded to quote some made-up rule about the dress code to me.
I know he made it up. I went onto the school district’s web site the night before in this didn’t fit into any of the categories of prohibited items. He “confiscated” it. Later, I talked to the principal about it. Jan Moorehouse. She was a new principal, an import from Southern California, but around this time she was beginning to realize that there were no gangs at Del Norte High. We were talking about it, and eventually she surrendered the reason that she wouldn’t let me wear it. Parents dropping their kids off would see me and she would have to deal with talking to them.
Life lesson: there is no such thing as free speech. Those who have power use it as an illusion to pacify you. Once you attempt to use any of your rights, they are immediately taken away. (In my lifetime I’ve seen the end of habeus corpus.) That conversation with her was one of the turning points in my life. That moment when I realized that she was not going to defend what I felt was my right to free speech simply because she didn’t want to deal with angry parents. She stripped me of my rights out of convenience. Malice I can wholeheartedly understand. That Mr. Hatfield guy had been screwing with me for ages. But convenience? That was just shitty. So I wrote an article for the school paper about discrimination. I was only going to school part-time at that point, so when I showed up during lunch on the day it was published one of my friends told me that I needed to leave. The hicks had vowed to beat the shit out of me. Maybe it was because I was only at the high school for one period a day, but they never hunted me down. However, the people that I most respected in the school but had never talked to (like David Lynch [not the director, a cool guy who later became an acquaintance of mine]) came up to me and told me how much they loved the article. Those kudos were all I had ever wanted. That was the main reason I got into journalism later in college.
But I soon realized that all of my happiness for being able to speak my mind to the masses was ephemeral. The school newspaper was shut down the next semester. Years later, the newspaper at my college was shut down.
Life lesson number three: the powerful always get their way.
And tonight I can’t help but feel like all of these events are the opening act for the climax where my dad kicks me out and fucks up all my chances of being college-bound. Why now? I only have $50 in the bank. That’s not even enough for the gas to leave this town (if by some miracle my car was fixed). I was so angry today as I struggled on my bike against the wind gusting in my face. I wanted to kill that snide fucker. He thinks he’s doing me this grand favor by fucking up my education. Go out there and get a job, son. Be a man.
Fuck, this isn’t 1952. All our manufacturing jobs are going to China. The only way to survive is to be a skilled worker. But there’s no point in trying to explain this to a man who crawled inside Atlas Shrugged and disappeared long before I was born.
Categories: Ennui
Today was such a clusterfuck. I hate my dad. This is going to turn into such a murderous rant that I’m going to watch a movie to diffuse my anger before I start writing.
The movie is called Storytelling, and it’s by the guy who did Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse (both amazing films), so this should be no different.
I must say that I’m reaching the end of my album art obsession–almost all of my songs now have high-resolution album art that displays beautifully in Front Row. Anyway, I can’t wait to watch this film…it’s about this…well, I might as well copy and paste the blurb, it says it better than I can:
Storytelling — it’s how we turn fact into fiction, lies into truth. Writer-director Todd Solondz (Happiness, Welcome to the Dollhouse) presents two stories — “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction” — focusing on the racial and sexual tension bubbling in a college writing class and the hidden fractures in a suburban household. Raw, chilling and wrenching, Storytelling is a modern fable for people who don’t need happy endings.
Categories: Ennui
More bitching when I get home.
Categories: Ennui
> Ladytron – Discotraxx
> Metro Area – Orange Alert
I’m writing this at the Del Norte County Library on one of those Microsoft Natural Keyboards. I must admit, it’s mighty comfortable…as far as keyboards go.
I am loathing not having a car, but I think it will be fixed soon. It was the wierdest thing…my dad went online and found a bunch of parts places.
My dad. Using the Internet.
It was so darn strange. He was all excited about how cheap things are on the ‘Net and how easy it is to find information.
This computer actually isn’t too bad…it’s a beige box, but it’s packing a 2.8GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. I was feeling lonely for my computer, so I opened the high-res version of that screenshot I took last night and made it go fullscreen. If only I could just plug a little USB drive or something into this machine and boot OSX. Unfortunately, that’s not a reality yet.
I would be surfing MySpace, but with all those explicit gay sex ads that they plaster all over the place, it would seem like I’m surfing softcore porn. I wish I knew Basque or some random language so I could blog in peace without the threat of others perusing my lame post. Hmm…I am posting it on the ‘Net for everyone to see…but that’s different. It’s anonymous, almost. An afterthought.
Oh! On the way to work we stopped at the site of my accident (I must go there and take some Atrocity Exhibition style pics) and I again found myself in a Ballard-esque situation. I thought of this one amazing quote. Let’s see if I can find it in my blog’s database. Nope, but here is the quote:
“At my feet lay a litter of dead leaves, cigarette cartons and glass crystals. These fragments of broken safety glass, brushed to one side by generations of ambulance attendants, lay in a small drift. I stared down at this dusty necklace, the debris of a thousand automobile accidents. Within fifty years, as more and more cars collided here, the glass fragments would form a sizable bar, within thirty years a beach of sharp crystal.”
–J.G. Ballard, Crash
Lately I have become obsessed with encoding high-resolution album artwork and lyrics into all my music files. I have been doing it for hours. The obsession with the artwork is mostly because of this cool feature of OSX called Front Row. It allows you to view your photos, music, videos, DVDs, etc. in this cool full-screen interface that you control via your Apple Remote. When it plays your music, it shows the album artwork…but when before I had only been viewing it in the little window in iTunes, it is now being blown up all across my screen, making it all pixelated…here’s a good example of what Front Row looks like playing music. So I want my album artwork very high-quality so it shows up all crystal clear, not pixelated. And that means replacing the artwork on like, 3,000 songs. Impossible, you say…but I have found high-res versions of the artwork for most of the stuff I listen to, so at least all the songs on my playlists will have cool artwork. Anyway, I’ve been taking a lot of time doing that.
Well, I guess I should talk about the reason I’m stuck in town. My dad dropped me off and I think he went riding his horse right after. Hm. I guess I could call again, but I missed the Internet, so as soon as he didn’t pick up I made a beeline towards the first source of free Internet I could find.
Today I need to work on my psych final project. That’s my goal. And to get the necessary parts for my car. My dad found them really cheap online (for like $100 a part). So anyway, I guess I should call him *reaches for cell phone*
He’s not there. I think I’m going to go walk towards the beach. I wonder what Kevin is doing, but I don’t want to get into that habit of hanging out with him like every day. Then he gets on my nerves. Maybe I should call Misty, she gets off at three. That’s another two hours though. Hmm…I’m in favor of the beach. It’s actually sunny today, I might as well take advantage of it.
(PS: on this computer at the library, my blog appears with a white background with gigantic text that’s almost impossible to read, and there is no sidebar or graphics. Is that just a fluke? I never use Internet Explorer on Windows, and that’s the browser that everyone is probably using…)
Oops, my time is up. I guess the ‘Net is popular. Gotta go.
Categories: Ennui
> LCD Soundsystem – Too Much Love
> Tricky – Abaddon Fat Track
> Placebo – Sleeping With Ghosts
> Daft Punk – Human After All (Sebastian Remix)
> MC 900ft Jesus – But If You Go
> Ladytron – Startup Chime
> Mylo – Sunworshipper
Today was tiring. Every day is tiring though, so it’s just more of the same. I’m sorry about my infrequent posts, but basically that OSX voice-recognition software sucks and I don’t want to bother to train it. I’m just going to run Windows in a virtual machine and use my old software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. However, there’s one problem. The virtual machine software (Parallels Workstation) that I need is in pre-pre-pre-release and doesn’t support all the functions I need. Basically, it’s in such an early stage that there’s no interaction between OSX and Windows in the virtual machine. You can’t drag files into Windows and vice versa…so I can’t get my Dragon NaturallySpeaking profile into Windows. USB support is nonexistent, so I can’t attach my external drive to the virtual machine either. They are working on these problems, but it’s definitely not going to be tomorrow when they crank out a fully-functioning product. So whenever I want to write something that’s sort of long, I have to reboot into Windows and leave the glorious UI of Mac OS.
I’m actually typing this. I’m sure it’s killing my wrists, but right now I’m backing up my files onto the external drive and I can’t exactly pause it while I reboot. I did fix this major hurdle to getting the voice-rec to work in the virtual machine today. That was pretty much the only thing I did. I went over to Kevin’s after work, copied my files to Will’s computer, reformatted the external drive to the correct format (HFS+ partition with a GUID partition scheme), and tried to copy my files back on. In the process (it was harrowing), I lost my entire 37GB (yes, that’s thirty-seven gigabyte) pornography collection. I know that if I had time I could have run apps to extract the data, but it’s not my computer and it doesn’t really matter. All I cared about was my Dragon NaturallySpeaking user files. If those would have been lost, I would have been royally fucked. So now I can boot off of my external drive if I want, and I can also use Carbon Copy Cloner, this app that will make a perfect copy of your system on another disc (i.e. my external drive) that I can boot from in case something goes wrong with my internal hard drive. So I’m excited, I guess.
I did end up missing my psych class, but I needed those files. There was no way in hell that I was going to be able to do my final in that class if my voice-rec files were lost. Come to think of it, I should back these user files up onto discs, even if it will take 4 DVDs (my user files are an unwieldy 15GB).
Me and Kevin hung out pretty much all day. We walked over to RayJen’s to get some coffee, but first ended up at Ray’s getting some IZZEs and then going over to see Will at Tech Town. I must say…I was expecting to see some cool computers at that store. I was so disappointed.
Okay, this is totally obvious, but I like Macs. Their design is pretty damn slick. No matter what your reservations are about the operating system or software, you have to love the design work that goes into these machines. Just take a look at the iMac. Wouldn’t you like to have that sitting on your desk instead of a beige box? Anyway, so we went into the back of the store and all there were was about fifteen computers back there. They were all beige boxes. It was SO disappointing. Anyway, I just realized how much I love Macs. Well, not just Macs, but systems that look good. I mean, Will’s system isn’t a Mac but I can appreciate its design (although I would have gone a totally different way with it). Obviously a lot of thought went into the layout, wire sleeving, lighting, color scheme, and all that stuff to make it look slick (I should post a picture of it, he actually got it working this week). It’s not a beige box, and I appreciate that. I guess I was expecting to go behind the “employees only” door and see a bunch of half-disassembled iMacs or some partially assembled LED-encrusted watercooled gaming systems. But no.
So that was today. I found this CD on the Net of remixes of that Daft Punk song “Human After All.” One of them wasn’t too bad. I’m in the mood to listen to some Mylo. I thought I was like the only person in the world that listened to him, but apparently they play him nonstop on the “Electronica” channel on Kevin’s cable. They played this remix of his song “Destroy Rock & Roll” that I simply must have.
I need a more capacious hard drive for my Mini. And definitely more RAM. That’s pretty much all I can think about right now. Oh yeah! We looked at my car and the damage doesn’t look too bad at all. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Crash (the 1996 movie) where I was running my fingers over the twisted metal of the broken fender. Too bad James Spader wasn’t there to tell me I was going to rip my glove :(. But anyway, once we peeled away the crunched side fender, it didn’t look too bad at all. There was no damage to the engine or frame. So we’ll see. I can’t wait to drive again (even though this should be some sort of wake-up call that death is right around the corner every time I get behind the wheel).
I thought I would add a screenshot to show you what my virtualization software looks like. I think it will be incredibly useful as soon as it gets out of beta. The wonderful thing about it is that they’re building it from the ground up, it’s not based on old code, so it’s going to take advantage of all the new virtualization features Intel is building into their next-gen chips (which happen to be powering my system right now). If you play around with Windows in the virtual machine, it’s actually fast–which is very strange for a system that I’ve only given 140MB of RAM. Well, enjoy. If you click on the pic, it’ll bring you to a page where I labeled all the goodies.
Here’s a link to a few more.
Categories: Ennui