The centre of a soundless field.

so long to the circus

2008-02-24T20:56:31Z

Closing this down now.

You know where to find me.

Jenny Kissed Me | Leigh Hunt

2008-02-02T07:57:16Z

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

morning/evening

2008-01-25T06:43:00Z

MOVIES!

2008-01-24T19:36:44Z

OK, wait a minute.

The next Futurama movie will be released in March.
The new James Bond flick comes out in May.
There’s no way The Incredible Hulk will be as shitty as 2003’s Hulk, and it comes out in June.
Along with Pixar’s “robot love story” Wall-E.
The Dark Knight comes out in July.
As does the new X-Files movie. Yes, the new X-Files movie.
The latest Harry Potter movie opens in November.
I’m wary of getting my hopes too high for the Star Trek quasi-reboot, but I’ve got until Christmas to get used to it.

2008: Best/nerdiest year for movies EVER?

(This post made possible by HumaneText. See original.)

TOO BORING FOR TWITTER

2008-01-09T23:42:33Z

It's really best to keep Pepto-Bismol on hand. When you need it, getting on a bus to go get some is the last damn thing you want to do.

(My gut has been giving me trouble for the past few days. It's either stress or the stomach flu. I'm hoping it's stress. I'm sipping mint tea that we've had in the cupboard for I don't even know how long.)

The Mountain Goats are playing in Vancouver on 22 February. I keep logging on to greyhound.ca and dreaming big dreams. Not that I'd really want to go without Kim, who's 500 km in the wrong direction and can't book that weekend off anyway.

I'm hungry, but I know if I eat, I'll end up regretting it. More tea, maybe.

here, have some poetry

2008-01-05T07:33:54Z

the miracle is the shortest time | bukowski

you know
it was very good
it was
better than
anything

it was like
something
we could
pick up
hold
look at
and then laugh
about.

we were on the
moon
we were in the
god damned moon,
we had it

we were in the garden
we were in the
endless pit

never such a place
as that

it was deep
and
it was light
and
it was high

it got so near
to insanity
we laughed so
hard

your laughter
and
mine

I remember when
your eyes
said love
loudly

now
as these walls
so quietly
shift.

My life, the comedy of errors

2008-01-04T18:26:24Z

I ordered new RAM for my laptop from OWC on Wednesday. Living up in the outposts as I do, I’m used to variable shipping times, especially coming from the States, especially with electronics. The website promised expediency, but really, who believes that shit?

Well. Pessimism has a lot to offer as a lifestyle, but my doorbell did ring at around 11 a.m. on Thursday; I was expecting Girl Scout cookies or something, not an unshaven guy my age in a FedEx cap bearing sweet, sweet RAM.

Of course, I also wasn’t expecting it to be C.O.D., and it’s not like I carry cash. It’s the year 2008, yo. So I had to ask Scruffy McDeliveryGuy to come back Friday, when I’d have the $12 or so on hand.

He came back this morning (still hadn’t shaved, lol), I signed like fourteen things, paid the damn ransom—and then discovered that, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to manage those wee little screws with the screwdrivers I had on hand. A twenty-minute round trip to Canadian Tire, eight dollars’ worth of tiny tools, and maybe forty-five seconds of fiddling later, the job was done. I am hella speedy now.

Yesterday afternoon I headed out to meet Miriam for a matinee showing of Juno. Google said there’d be a matinee. Last week’s See said there’d be a matinee. The actual theatre marquee said that matinees were a weekend thing, and a weekend thing alone. Whoops.

But the weather was mild, so Mim and I ended up wandering Whyte Ave. while we waited for the proper evening show. I bought Dead Children Playing, finally, at a steep discount, and we had lunch and tea and other fine times.

Yes. Juno. I liked it. It made my heart feel squishy. It’s so self-consciously “hip”; it suffers from Whedon’s Syndrome (nobody talks like that!); the soundtrack is too precious by half. And yet it’s funny and sweet, and Ellen Page and Michael Cera are cuter than an entire dump truck of squirming puppies.

Miscellany:

Even with 4 GB of RAM, Firefox is still prone to spinning out and driving me fucking insane.
OMG NEW MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUM GAHHHH SO GOOOOOOOOOD.
The new Verbose album is also pretty sweet.
xkcd takes on your mom. (I am part of the problem.)

Twitter stats

2008-01-02T05:05:23Z

Some stats on my Twitter usage, collected and formatted by Damon Cortesi’s Perl script.

Like @gruber and @rands, I seem to make a lot of early-afternoon posts.

clearing the decks

2008-01-01T00:47:40Z

the last straw

2007-12-31T05:53:43Z

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

[…] “If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you’re stealing. You’re breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages.” (src, via)

I’m not paying for music from the major labels anymore. Not for physical CDs, not for digital downloads. It’s BitTorrent all the way from here on out—maybe even a little shoplifting, if I’m feeling frisky.

If those amoral, money-grubbing fuckers are going to treat me like a criminal regardless, I’m going to bloody well make sure I deserve it.

(Well. Except for the shoplifting part.)

Internet mixtape: Happy New Year

2007-12-30T23:02:23Z

SuperDisappointing!

2007-12-30T05:36:50Z

Mac OS X Leopard has been out for two months now, and backup software SuperDuper! has yet to receive a compatibility update.

I bought an SD! license in October. At the time, they acknowledged that the current version was incompatible with Leopard, but that they were testing the forthcoming version against developer builds, and it would be ready soon.

As it turned out, the final developer preview of Leopard was slightly different from the version that shipped at the end of October, so a lot of devs had to rush out to the store before they could make final compatibility changes to their software.

Those final tweaks have taken the makers of SD! months, months during which I’ve been unable to use software I paid for, paid for with the expectation that it would adapt to an OS change it had over a year’s notice of.

The company blog is all kinds of defensive, and surely, the changes in Leopard were many and complex. But this is lousy planning and bad business, and a shitty way to treat loyal, paying customers.

SuperDuper! under Tiger was a great piece of software, and I’m sure if the Leopard version ever sees the light of day, it’ll be terrific. But the weeks of excuses (with no end in sight) have made me regret my purchase, and I won’t be dealing with this company again.

inventory

2007-12-26T05:03:00Z

Selected gifts this year:

Socks and underwear. Yes.
2008 The Office wall calendar.
A shirt that looks much better when I’m not wearing it.
A handheld vacuum for cleaning out computer keyboards. Desperately needed.
Gift certificates to the bookstore, the Apple store, the iTunes store, and my favourite nice-men’s-clothes store. Boxing Day, here I come.

Selected food I ate:

ALL OF IT.

Things I am pondering at Christmas

2007-12-25T00:02:36Z

For the first time since my infancy, my dad has longer hair than I do.
My mom telling us about kids who came to high school “blasted” c. 1975.
Deciding what to say in a card to my sister’s boyfriend. “Good job not being a douchebag like those other guys; keep up the good work”?
Insisting on “Merry Christmas” over “Happy holidays” = “I’m not obligated to be considerate of anyone else; everyone else is obligated to be considerate of me.”
The cultural implications of N.W.A. and Nirvana, as discussed while walking the dog with my brother.
Family Christmas traditions; Omnia mutantur vs. nihil interit.
Hoping Sam’s okay.

you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon

2007-12-24T08:13:04Z

I checked my marks for this past semester today. You know the semester I’m talking about. Murphy’s Semester. Everything that could go wrong did so, spectacularly. I barely had time to process one crisis before another one came barrelling down at me. It was gross and difficult, and my schoolwork suffered accordingly.

The marks have been up for a while now, probably since the middle of last week, but I’ve been nervous and avoiding them. Today I sucked it up, and was pleased to see I did better than I expected to right across the board, and especially in the two classes I was most worried about. Nothing outstanding by a long shot, but not the catastrophe it could have been, either.

Which is a nice positive way to send me into Xmas 2007.

cleversimon @ 2007-12-23T01:05:00

2007-12-23T08:05:03Z

Started and finished my meagre holiday shopping at West Ed today. That place is a misanthropy factory in the off-season; three days before Christmas it’s plain horrific. It was productive, at least: got gifts, some new underwear (I’ve lost—just plain lost—three pairs of boxers in a month. WTF), and a new cell phone charger to replace the one Charlie chewed through. He’s too cute to kick, but sometimes it’s a near thing.

Wading through the dregs of humanity aside, it was a good day: Michele and I had lunch at Original Joe’s, where I massacred a delicious burger the size of my head, and shopping together was the closest thing to a date we’ve been on in months. We were going to see Sweeney Todd to really top it off, but decided it would be more prudent to watch movies at home, where they’re free.

The high point of the day, ego-wise, came at HMV, when the pretty cashier rather… effusively complimented me on the CDs I picked out for Dad. I almost never get hit on by strangers (wonder why, ha ha), and never, ever by service staff—except for pretty semi-hipsters at chain music stores. I’ll take what I can get.

I was going to do an end-of-2007 survey, but most of what was notable about this year falls into three categories: 1) You don’t want to know; 2) I don’t want to tell you; 3) Boring as fuck. I’ll spare us all the discomfort and abstain.

Idle curiosity > cleaning the kitchen

2007-12-18T21:43:59Z

View Poll: Operating systems

The rest of my week is going to go like this:

2007-12-11T14:32:40Z

Applied Grammar final later this afternoon. I imagine that’s going to go something like this: OW OW OH GOD STOP PLEASE OW OW OWWWWWW.

I’m going to Tom Jackson’s Christmas concert tonight with Michele and my family, which is going to be my one concession to “the season” this year.

Tomorrow I have to finish converting my Tech Writing manual into an online help file and get that handed in, and also study for my Tech final Thursday morning, which I imagine will be another universe of unspeakable pain.

Thursday evening I’m going to drink myself into a coma at Ashley’s, and when I wake up from that—

Three weeks of essentially no pressing appointments. I can’t even get my head around that right now.

Mine is a special brand of masochism.

2007-12-03T23:01:48Z

cleversimon @ 2007-12-03T14:23:00

2007-12-03T21:23:16Z

Turns out it was something else.

Siggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

Aw, fuck.

2007-12-01T00:13:05Z

Well, my fancy two-CD, two-vinyl, deluxe packaging version of In Rainbows came today.

While I was indisposed and couldn't answer the door.

They'll attempt delivery again on Monday.

ARGH.

RSVP or DIE

2007-11-29T09:15:42Z

So I’m working on this Tech Writing assignment, a users’ guide to Facebook. (Shut up; it’s easy.) Anyway, I needed screenshots of the Events function, so I created a dummy event to take snaps of, then cancelled it.

I, uh, hope none of my dummy invitations went through.

ATTN: Kim and Jesse

2007-11-25T23:25:20Z

What follows is John Darnielle's superlative analysis of Radiohead's Amnesiac. I ~~was going to make~~ made a PDF of it, but it makes rather extensive use of hypertext—is rather inescapably bound to its medium—so here are the links, ~~then~~ too.

(If you’re not Kim or Jesse, but are a fan of Darnielle/The Mountain Goats/Radiohead/music journalism, you should read it anyway.)

Josh Ritter: The Temptation of Adam

2007-11-21T18:45:28Z

“If this was a Cold War, we could keep each other warm,”
I said on the first occasion that I met Marie.
We were crawling through the hatch that was the missile silo door,
and I don’t think that she really thought that much of me.

I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the bomb;
she just came along and started to ignore me.
But as we waited for the big one, I started singing her my songs,
and I think she started feeling something for me.

We passed the time with crosswords that she thought to bring inside.
“What five letters spell ‘apocalypse’?” she asked me.
I won her over singing, “W-W-I-I-I.”
Oh, we smiled and we both knew that she misjudged me.

Oh, Marie, it was so easy to fall in love with you.
You felt almost like a home of sorts or something.
And you would keep the warhead missile silo good as new,
and I watched you with my thumb above the button.

And then one night you found me in my army-issue cot,
and you told me of your flash of inspiration:
You said fusion was the broken heart that’s Lonely’s only thought,
and all night long you drove me wild with your equations.

Oh, Marie, do you remember all the time we used to take?
Makin’ love and then ransack the rations.
But I think about you leaving now in the avalanche cascades,
and my eyes get washed away in chain reactions.

Oh, Marie, if you would stay then we could stick pins in the map
of all the places where you thought that love would be found.
But I would only need one pin to show where my love’s at,
in a top-secret location three hundred feet under the ground.

Oh, we could hold each other close; we’d stay up every night
looking up into the dark like it’s the night sky.
Pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead,
and carve our names in hearts into the warhead.

Oh, Marie, there’s something tells me things just won’t work out above,
that our love would live a half-life on the surface.
So at night while you are sleeping, I hold you closer just because
as our time grows short I get a little nervous.

So I think about the big one, W-W-I-I-I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended?
You could hold me here forever, like you’re holding me tonight.
I think about that great big button, and I’m tempted.

( mp3 )

cleversimon @ 2007-11-20T20:57:00

2007-11-21T03:57:12Z