|
|
blog / about / archive | |
|
|
|
|||||
|
01.30.03 i'm miserable, insufferably miserable. my head is pounding, my sinuses feel as if they are about to explode. it's the headcold from hell and this time, it's taken me down. i think i'm calling in sick tomorrow. when did the drug company's get together and decide that 12 hour medicine would only last 6? because i can't do anything when i'm congested like this. i can't sleep, i have no appetite, i don't want to read or even sit down. i just pace the room, waiting for the pressure to clear up. # happy birthday brent! # 01.28.03 nearly blind from a birthday-gift gone wrong, i find myself staring at adrien brody on the cover of paper and thinking, gee, isn't he awfully hot for a concentration camp survivor? which gets me to thinking, if you could have sex with any three people, living or dead, who wouldn't it be? i'm then of course driven to wonder, why hasn't anyone opened a club that serves really good falafel alongside chill, ambient beats? and would go-go boys be totally inappropriate, music withstanding? because, lest you forget, tax-time is just around the corner. # 01.27.03 without sports, it'd just be rioting. # 01.25.03 the ordinary telephone is a limited space-eradicator. whenever you use one you erupt violently and immediately into the dimensionless presence of your callee. --taken from a really fascinating, if not unessesarily complicated and irrationally despondent article on the effects of mobile telephony on our senses of space and priority. discovered via jessie, via melissa. # no wonder i was having so much trouble getting onto # 01.24.03 what can i say? today was rough, draining, and tonight didn't feel like much of a getting-together night. but we did anyway, meeting up with richard for the first and second time (respectively). at the end of the night, i'm glad that we did manage to meet up, rather than putting it off for another time. so sweet, so funny, san francisco really lucked out when she got this one back. and to make it up to myself, at the end of such a nasty, nasty tough week, i'm going tomorrow afternoon to see a man about the stress of it all. hopefully he can take this week right out of my shoulders, where i've been putting it. # 01.23.03 who knew there were so many sites on the internet devoted to plot generators? granted, half of them are sci-fi, 2/3 of those being star trek related. still, that's a lot of plots ready to be generated. like the law & order plot generator. or the jerry brukheimer plot generator. not to mention the gambling movie plot generator. # i like manic street preachers. remember everything must go, the first album they released after richey james went missing? so nice. why can't we have fun, politically charged pop music like that anymore? # NOTES i think the city conspires against me, with emergency vehicles and loud, banging garbage trucks, to keep me from have a pleasant, snooze-button morning. and i'm worried about my neighbor, because i haven't seen or heard from her in weeks. being partially disabled, i imagine she went to stay with someone during our 2 week elevator outage (7 flights of stairs? no doubt she left..). still, i'm starting to get worried. not as worried, i suppose, as i am by the newly-fixed elevator's tendency to stop on the 3rd floor, regardless of command or destination. at work now, jackhammer sounds, shades drawn, window open, clouds dark, good morning san francisco. # 01.22.03 hunky dante woo proves that i'm not the only person who's taken notice of the recently resurrected phrase: the times seems to be addicted to the phrase "sea change" lately. --1/20/03 this was a popular topic of conversation between david and i some time ago, however it seems neither of us were interested enough to actually post about it. feels a bit like those decade-revivals that have become so popular in fashion within recent memory. will sea change also come to pass? # 01.21.03 i wanted to write richard to tell him that his blog reminds me of pbs and to thank him for the insightful dreamhost/mt advice and to inquire when i might again count myself among the delighted who bask in his glow and his effervescence. but alas, the email bounced and the blog has no comments and thus i'm stuck here scratching his name on this bathroom stall, a most bat-signal of communications methodologies. oh panchesco, wherefore art thou? # best new tv discoveries? frontline/world on pbs and fire within (reality-tv take on those hot-hot-hottie cirque du soleil performers) on bravo. thanks tivo! # in a rather nasty turn of events, the RIAA has won a court battle with internet provider Verizon. the telco has been ordered to turn in the superuser, an internet subscriber who is being pursued by the recording industry for massive kazaa uploading. this civil rights stretch is made possible by none other than the 1998 dmca, everyone's favorite copyright-extending, rights-crushing, media monster enabling and completely unethical act of congress. sidebar: the latest issue of wired has a very interesting article on hillary rosen, chief bulldog of the riaa. it's really a rather interesting article, going so far as to actually humanize her, although neither the author or hillary herself don't beat around the bush about her attitudes towards her job. it seems as if ms. rosen really does see the distribution revolution that is taking place in the music industry, even tried once to encourage the record labels to jump on it. most interesting was the revelation that rosen's girlfriend (with whom she has two children) is actually elizabeth birch, director of HRC. there's a great quote from birch about the infamous eminem/elton john grammy duet, which rosen attended and from which birch abstained. if you follow at all the legal rumblings of the recording industry's downfall, it's a great read. # if i have coffee too early in the morning, i get worked up, tense, figgity. if i drink it before 10:30, the caffine hits me at the wrong part of the cycle, the wrong side of the wave that carries me through the morning. this is an important item in my daily working life, as my boss' wonderfully affectionate means of keeping track of me is to "go for coffee" together, to shake out the sleep, to chat each other up and to jive on the day ahead. # yeah, it looked like about 150,000 to me, too. # i just noticed that aaron of almost cool has posted his list of the top 20 albums of 2002. normally i'm not much for best of lists, but seeing as almost cool has long held the title of official taste-maker of prosaic*, i'm excited to stumble on this one. his tastes tend towards the electronic side of the fence, (the area where i need the most guidance) but i've yet to be disappointed by a single one of his reviews or suggestions. this will give me a nice starting place when i'm back in the buying spirit. yay for new music! # 01.20.03 i'm so excited - returns on march second! (it is too early to get anxious?) # 01.19.03 in an uncharacteristically social turn of events, the boyfriend and i found ourselves lounging among the college-radio-grows-up set enjoying the aural skills of the dj duo known as matmos in an intimate oakland loft space. things i learned from this experience:
# 01.16.03 that's what i get for saying it'll never happen. (for those with a high tolerance for pain and a short memory, the original paper can be found here. # empty chemical warheads in iraq. # 01.15.03 predictably, the supreme court has ruled to uphold the copyright extention act that came under fire in the case eldred v. ashcroft recently. predictably, but saddly. # apparently some people are upset by a joke graham norton made about the recent death of the Bee Gee's Maurice Gibb. it seems like a rather innocuous joke to me... # 01.13.03 i wanna write like perceptions. and wear a t-shirt that says bobby burgess is my hero. # 01.11.03 announced this week at CES: tivo's digital hub. program your tivo remotely over the web, share recorded tivo content between devices in your home, view pictures and play mp3s from your computer to your tivo. # "The Legislature couldn't reform it, lawmakers won't repeal it, but I will not stand for it ? I must act," [Gov. George Ryan] said in the prepared remarks. "Because our three-year study has found only more questions about the fairness of the sentencing, because of the spectacular failure to reform the system, because we have seen justice delayed for countless death row inmates with potentially meritorious claims, because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious ? and therefore immoral." govenor George Ryan of illinois today commuted the sentences of 167 men and women in what will be remember as one of the most bold moves made in our time against the death penalty. govenor ryan has less than 48 hours remaining in office. # wow, an update to the safari beta is out already - how very un-apple of them. perhaps it's the fault of all those nautilus folks on the safari team. don't they know that there's supposed to be 2-3 months between beta release and subsequent update? # 01.10.03 william gibson has a blog. turns out he was drunk when he wrote neuromancer. the rest of the site is fascinatingly cool, too. {thanks to jessie for pointing this out to me} # hiatus over. now you don't have to rely on me anymore for your jessie-news. # 01.07.03 coolest apple announcement today: automatically adjusting screen brightness and backlit keyboard. simple, cool, useful. most interestingly underplayed announcement: public beta release of an apple-branded release of an integrated x11 window server for os x. now with more whizzy unix flavor! # safari. hmm. must see this. UPDATE: drat. it's such a sweet app, fast, responsive, great interface, very apple, but it doesn't have tabs and it doesn't fix the bookmarklet bug in moz/chimera. also, in the begining i was bewildered at the logic behind apple's decision to build safari on the KHTML engine that is powering KDE's open source konqueror browser on linux; why in the hell do we need another half-finished rendering engine floating around right now?. but it didn't take much exploring though to figure out why - the already impressive safari beta weighs in at a scrawny 7.1 mb's while the most recent chimera builds (isn't it the thin moz-on-mac client?) bulk up to 21 mb. i love tabs, but not for 13+ mb in overhead. # 01.06.03 enjoyed my first all-vegan dinner tonight, courtesy of mark and visiting emissaries of cool. much different than i expected, really. color me impressed. # tablets and flat screens and video players and dvd players and pvr's and pda's and cell phones and bluetooth and wireless and audio apps and networking apps apps-for-pay and usb2 and firewire2 and airport2 and ipod2 and 3d displays and great-big-displays and new powerbooks and small powerbooks and big ipods and colored imacs and what in the hell do you people possibly want out of this company anyway? for god's sake, it's gotten ridiculous. thank god it's tomorrow so we can find out and get on with it. # researchers in australia have redesigned the back button for web browsers. because, uh, it didn't work before? # it's midnight. i wanted to go to the store before midnight. we need to buy milk. nothing left for the morning. but the elevator's broken, so i didn't go. it's stuck in the basement; the basement's full of shit. tomorrow's a work day, the weekend flown by. jeff buckley was an angel. last night was a busy night, my head full of holes, unable to sleep, unable to focus. i'd like to put some of these new fictions out where they can be seen, but i'm afraid they need more time, more fermentation, more ripening. how long do things take to ripen? # 01.05.03 it's a writing night, an evening of patched holes and mended fences. that difficult-to-capture emotion, the writing emotion, the one that plants me right here, solidly in the grasp of the power of the prose. i'm on a roll and soon you'll know it. # 01.04.03 i want a new program for my mac: it should be simple and light, look and act like a spreadsheet (for data-field entry) and should pull and dump right into the shared address book. this would make my life easy and happy. # mark reminds us; i used to think that night-time was like blinking, that my sleep took rule over time. like after i closed my eyes, morning would come only because i opened them again right away. i stopped believing that when i woke up from my first nightmare. i still remember the dream, being attacked by my dog. and the confused mystery when i walked into the kitchen to find my mom baking banana bread. she was awake, she was doing things, at night, here in the kitchen, without me. as i stood there, 3 feet tall in my footie superman pajamas, the beauty of this realization, that things might happen independent of my own consciousness, gracefully overpowered the fears of the nightmare. # i woke this morning from a fascinating, strange dream. in a very 1984 turn, i fled from a large, authoratative police organization, escaping through some kind of long, sterile hospital through a service corridor, hiding myself by day in a nearby public park and by night in the vacant townhouse of a vacationing neighbor. later, reunited with jessie, i discovered a boat, some kind of ship that appeared to be a tanker or cargo ship, but was sized like a sailing ship. together, we swam out to retrieve the abandoned boat, steering it back to shore. having drug the boat onto dry land with an attached (and quite long) rope, we hid ourselves, awaiting the cover of night, in my parent's house. once it appeared safe, we began, with the help of my sister, to pack our belongings aboard the ship. jessie seemed to be over-eager to leave, and many times i had to insist to him that we had not yet finished packing our belongings and could not go until we had our entire apartment aboard the land-locked ship. throughout the dream, i was driven by the same strange, overwhelming fear of some completely unseen threat. it was such an odd, out of place feeling, as if the fear was egg shaped when i was expecting something round. # 01.03.03
for the record, i love it. my new phone is perfectly portable, practically tiny next to the nearly-rotary brick i was using (above!). and bluetooth - wow. i love grabbing all of my contacts, phone numbers and calendar events so simply. thus far, i've found the T68i to be pretty easy to use, although there are a few features i'm not quite sure of yet. and of course, i've only had it for less than a week, so it's hard to make any kind of real judgment on usability and practicality. or performance, since i almost never get phone calls. but it looks cool, and the color screen looks like a tiny 100x80 slice of heaven after years of dialing in monochrome. the biggest looser feature so far has been the wireless internet functions. can anyone tell me what good this can bring me? so far i've only found it difficult to navigate, slow and not terribly useful. i do like the idea of being able to read my email while i'm traveling, but i haven't been able to properly configure it to send outgoing messages yet. if anyone knows of any fancy/fun things i can do with my new mlife, i'd be happy to hear about them. # i got some new toys earlier this week. not a moment too soon, either. more on this soon. # « December 2002 | archive index | February 2003 » built with movabletype |
|
||||||
