We’re all just fumbling in the dark — for a heart of hearts
January 2009
The Archives
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01.29.09silver and blue
I have exactly 30 minutes to finish this post.
I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to try and regiment my time so that I have more time for writing, but it seems like it’s the only way it’s going to get done. I need a more healthy nighttime routine than surfing Reddit until I go bleary-eyed.
I made a pot of red tea and I’m sipping it cup by cup.
The website for my company is growing in complexity by leaps and bounds, which seems to be a good thing. I’m sure Google has algorithms to detect changes to pages, and we keep adding things all the time. One of my coworkers will have an idea for a refinement or a useful page, I’ll prototype it, run it by my boss, then go live all in the span of a few hours.
And even with this rapid development, I’m still leagues behind where I want to be. This is the point where I almost need an assistant to do the more tedious data entry stuff. I almost want to start a dev blog, but I don’t think it’s a good idea yet.
The unending saga about Kathleen and the checks continues…my dad is accusing her of stealing another $4,000. The number just gets bigger and bigger. I’m meeting her for lunch tomorrow.
Things continue to be pretty insane here. The refrigerator looks like someone took out all the contents and put them back in alphabetically. There’s broccoli in the butter part, bacon in the crisper…it’s just insane. I found two packages of muffins in the microwave this afternoon too. Well, at least she isn’t putting that poison powder everywhere.
My mom and my grandma Jean are heading home early Sunday morning. It’s going to suck to not see my mom, but it will be great not to go back to Burlingame any time soon. I’m going to accompany them to the airport, and after that I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll pick up a scum bag fag mag, go down to Ocean Beach and watch the sunset.
Meh. San Francisco isn’t the same without Sam.
I bought two things this month with my windfall check.
1) a 500GB drive for my MacBook
2) a 1TB external drive.
I’m going to get rid of all my other various hard drives, so I’ll have 1TB mobile (MacBook + WD Passport drive) and 1TB at home as a backup (the new external).
It’ll be nice to only have two drives instead of this hodgepodge of backups and kinda-working drives that click and groan.
This is sort of a wasted week, since tomorrow I head back to Burlingame. Someday I won’t feel tired. Someday I’ll be able to get all of my projects done. Someday I’ll be able to paint again without them getting stolen.
Bitch stole my IKEA pillow. It’s gone. Nowhere in the guest rooms. I’m going to have to sneak into her room and try to get it back next week.
Kevin wants me to design a website for his DJ projects. That should be a fun one. Well, I exceeded my allotment of time by a half-hour, which always happens. I’m going to hit the hay. Next post should be from the train.
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01.28.09nonstop action!
I’m so exhausted. I just wasted most of my time tonight writing an e-mail to a relative who seems to care 10 times more about converting me to young-earth creationism than anything else.
Got back from Burlingame today at about three o’clock in the afternoon. I was so unprepared for the last trip that I ended up having to leave my computer home. However, that will not happen again. I got a duffel bag at Target to put my clothes in while I ride my Vespa. My other suitcase is completely impossible to transport on my Vespa.
I had a bunch of stuff to catch up on at work, but it was a good kind of work… unexpected and challenging. I designed this house ad that just fucking rocked. have you ever made something really awesome for work and you just want to go up to the boss and go “Look at this! This is the kind of attention to detail that I get paid the big bucks for!”
Well, that was short-lived… I went to my work site and the ads aren’t loading at all. Hrm. I find it inconceivable that things can be working when I leave and then break all by themselves. I guess I’m just used to writing static webpages instead of using Web applications.
I have read so much of Future Shock. I know people talk about books that you are a different person after reading… this one definitely falls under that category. Let the quotes begin!
If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity.
In the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture that most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience.
It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, limiting cultural variety, etc. etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization—away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art, mass-produced education and “mass” culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting or an eventuality, will multiply her choices—and our freedom—exponentially.
Tonight I hung out with Christen, we had dinner with her dad and his wife. We talked about learning, art for the people, and blaxploitation movies. And then we took super-fucking-cute pictures of Sota!
Oh, also, my mom got me a cake for graduating:
It’s late and I need to get to sleep, as always.
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01.21.09far away trains passing by
I’m on the train coming back from Burlingame…I had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch the 6:30 a.m. BART train to get to the 8 a.m. Amtrak train to get to the 10 a.m. RT train to get to work before eleven. The Amtrak train is packed…they are one car short or something…I had to look all over before I could find a seat.
I hate that public transit moment when everyone has their own seat except for you.
The sun is rising and the bay looks pure and crystal blue. My tethered Internet is being flaky and I don’t know why. I didn’t change any of the settings.
I’m watching music videos on the other half of my screen…even though they are no longer culturally relevant, the boys from Justice are fucking hot.
As much as I love spending time with my family, it’s nice to get back to the environs of Sacramento.
I think I have a few gifts to myself waiting at the house. I was going to get my mom an iPod Nano, but apparently she got a new Nokia XpressMusic phone, so I think I’m just going to get her an 8GB card and save $130. If I can’t justify the purchase of a new iPod for myself, I can’t justify it as a gift either.
Apple is going to find itself increasingly irrelevant in the age of music-playing phones, since the iPod has long been such a cash cow.
The fam seems to be dealing with my uncle’s health problems pretty well, my grandma talked a lot about the knot in her stomach was gone when she was able to see Jim talking and moving around and such. He’s still in a wheelchair, but last night he seemed to be better able to move his hand and foot (his left side is basically unusable).
I’ve been reading a ton of Future Shock on BART, I’m about halfway through now. It’s incredible how accurate his predictions are. I’m going to post a ton of quotes once I get home.
I’m really not looking forward to work…settling back into my routine feels like resuming my slow trudge towards the grave. Yelle is so cute, I love her being all dirty in the “Je veux te voir” video.
I’ve been working a lot on the site for Josh’s movie theater, he’s considering doing an e-mail newsletter, something easily accomplished with open-source software. I cannot say enough how fucking amazing open-source is. It wasn’t until I read about book curses that I realized the historical precedents of copyright and how it can take a generation to reverse those entrenched ideas about…well…the “ownership” of ideas.
One of Toffler’s predictions that didn’t come true (yet) was the exploitation of the sea in terms of underwater colonization. I think that one just will never be economically feasable. Even a house on permafrost is cheaper than a house underwater. Possibly this one is waiting until genetic engineering makes possible humans with gills.
He also talks at length about the transition from industrial to super-industrial societies being tied to the end of product-based economies to experience-based economies, with the products being subordinate to the experiences of using them.
While I was on the train, I started reading Molly’s novel The Curse, and I was hooked. I was considering printing out a copy of it on Lulu to be able to read a physical copy, but I’m 40 pages in, just reading it in Word.
I never realized it would be so deliciously semiautobiographical. I’ve never read something by someone I’ve actually known…it’s an interesting window into the person’s mind. I miss writing fiction. I used to think that I had nothing to contribute, but I feel like I’m reaching a point in my life where I can create round characters based in years of experience.
I was liking being back in Sacramento until Grammie showed up. Now I’m counting down the seconds until I can board that train back to Burlingame.
My knee is so fucked up…I have to try to get in at the free clinic tomorrow, I can barely walk and it feels like the ligaments are about to burst free.
I’m looking into getting a new memory card for my N95. I thought this was going to be an easy decision, but it’s complicated as fuck. My 8GB card is class 4 (speeds are 2, 4, and 6, with six being the fastest class), but the new 16GB cards are only coming in Class 2 varieties…which I can’t stand. My phone already hangs enough when it opens the photo gallery, hangs when it refreshes the music player, etc. I’m thinking of giving up on the 16GB card and just getting a super-fast 8GB card.
But here’s the weirdness. If you go on SanDisk’s site, they show a 16GB Class 4 card on there, they have press photos of it and everything, but it just says “not available” in the store. So it must be coming out soon. Add that to the list of things I’m waiting for, like iLife ‘09, Snow Leopard, etc. My computer probably won’t get to take advantage of all the cool new features in Snow Leopard, but maybe by then Apple will add Intel’s quad-core mobile chips (god knows they’ve been out for four months or more).
I’ve been geeking out with my phone, installing version 3 of Share Online to instantly post my pics to Flickr. The new one supports batch upload…who forgets to implement something this crucial until version 3? “Crap, you mean they want to take more than one picture at a time? We’ve got to rewrite this one from scratch!” Nokia is weird.
Well, I should read more on my novels (the stack is getting shorter and shorter!)
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01.19.09Sex on wheelz
I’ve been experimenting with some interesting javascript libraries tonight, including one called MooWheel, with which I’ve created something interesting.
You’ll need Firefox 3 or the latest version of Opera to see it. I haven’t tested IE, but I’d suggest version 8.
Still in Burlingame, been here since Friday. I had a nice visit with Taylor on Thursday, which now seems like the calm before the storm.My uncle Jim is so. fucking. weird.
I can’t write about it in much detail because there’s no privacy in this condo for audioblogging, but this guy is whack.
1) He has lived in this condo for four years.
2) there are no pots or pans in the house that weren’t packed away in sealed boxes.
3) there are no kitchen utensils (save for ONE teaspoon)
4) he does have these things such as toasters, fine china, good plates, etc. but it’s all in boxes.
5) all he talks about is how he goes to this classy restaurant down the street and eats the heels of the free bread and the free hors d’oeuvres there.
6) the condo building is run-down in weird ways (there are anti-fire sprinklers in every room, the hallways are dark and dreary, the pool looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in months, the elevator creaks and rattles like crazy)
7) The condo itself is decorated like someone just moved in. There are the tags on all his furniture from when he bought it, the closets are all filled with boxes. His clothes are on the floor…he doesn’t even own a laundry basket.
8) Which brings me to my final point: MY UNCLE IS A SERIAL KILLER. I’m going to make a video tour of the killer’s lair tomorrow. Until then, I give you a random interlude from our visit.
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01.15.09when you find a heart could you let me know
So it’s Thursday.
I’m leaving tonight, and I will be spending the night in San Francisco. I just can’t believe that I’m going to be seeing my mom and my awesome Grandma Jean in less than 24 hours. Okay, maybe it’s a little more than 24 hours… but that’s what it feels like.
My uncle won’t be getting out of physical therapy tomorrow like they had hoped, so we will be making frequent trips to the hospital.
Record of the week is Intercept! by Bent. I’ve been listening to this one on repeat for days. They’re like a cross between chk chk chk, Royksopp, and and the Presets.
I sprained my foot on the stairs at work, so I’ve been hobbling around on one bad knee and one bad foot the last two days, but tonight I think I am actually able to walk normally.
Last night I went over to Christen’s place and we watched this awesomely terrible movie. I was totally in the mood to be depressed by a movie, but that one ended up being really funny for how superficial and terrible it was. I was bored on my lunch break at work so I found out that the woman that wrote the script actually has a blog. I have to say, it was just as haphazard as her direct-to-DVD film.
I woke up in the morning, walked Sota around the block, and went to work. It was there that my most recent awesomeness happened. I signed up for the service that I had wanted for a long time but was unable to justify the cost of. It’s by Jott, that company that does the Twitter by voice thing. If you sign up for their voicemail service ($10 a month) they will transcribe all your voicemails and send them to you as SMSes. Isn’t that fucking awesome? I absolutely despise checking my voicemail, so this is the perfect Christmas present to myself. The only question is whether I will go over my 40 voicemails per month limit. I really doubt that I get more than 40 voicemails a month.
I thought I was going to have all this extra money, but it it turns out I went way over on my T-Mobile bill. Apparently one of my myFaves changes never went through and all of those minutes were billed as overage minutes at $.40 cents a pop. I really despise T-Mobile, but they are really the best. I mean, what’s the alternative? AT&T? *shudder*
I installed the minutes used Firefox extension so that this will never happen again, hopefully. I kept racking my brain all yesterday as to why I never got a minutes overage and I realize it’s because I always had that extension installed. It must have been the Firefox 3 beta that didn’t support it.
Got an e-mail from Andrew tonight… I guess his phone actually did die. When I called last week, it rang five or six times which made me think that it was still active. I guess my habit of never leaving messages doesn’t pay off in the long run.
I’m still loving this application EventBox. It groups all your social networking stuff into one app. Facebook status updates and pictures, Flickr pictures from my contacts, and Twitter updates are all shown in this translucent overlay window every few hours and I can reply at my leisure. I even bought the pro version for $15 or so. I like desktop apps that grab data from online services in novel ways. In this vein, I also am an avid supporter of Mailplane, the desktop gmail client.
I worked a lot on my websites at work, making sure they validate. I had to do quite a bit of work to iron out all the kinks and make the new site work, but it eventually validated.
I’ve been doing a lot of sketching regarding the new portfolio site, and I keep churning out designs at an ever-increasing pace, but I feel like I’m severely limited. Either I create an ultramodern site bathed in javascript which is fugly to people with javascript disabled, or I create a mediocre design that will still render correctly in IE6. I’m hoping to accomplish javascript hackery and an extensible, accessible site.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. I mean, I really only have three sites to show off, and only one I have designed from the ground up. Hm. I’ll work on it more when I’m in the city. I can’t go anywhere without my MacBook and my drawing tablet. I’m going to force myself to decide on a design by the end of the week. I’ve been working on this theme of cubes…it’ll be awesome.