I stole a tractor
Monday, October 25, 2004 »
Just look at that list. It's like a multivitamin, except the opposite. And for your morals!
Doomed to a life of mono
Sunday, October 24, 2004 »
A couple days ago, my right earbud inexplicably stopped working. Actually, I shouldn't say "inexplicably," since I'm pretty sure that what caused the malfunction is the earbuds being the $2 Coby variety from Fry's. (That's like a dollar per bud!) They were pretty good during the couple months they lasted, though.
This incident just adds to the evidence that something out there is trying to keep me from getting that right channel. Last spring, a faulty connector caused my right speaker to go out intermittently. When I went home over the summer, the old stereo receiver there decided it was going to cut out its right channel as well. (Fun fact: Did you know that if you only listen to the left half of "Yellow Submarine," you get an easy instrumental version?) And now that I'm back at school and fixed the connector problem, my earbud goes out, which, among other things, strips most of the guitar melody from "Desolation Row." Fortunately, after tomorrow, I don't expect to have to spend as much time in the paint studio for a while.
In the meantime, I'm back in the market for some headphones. I'm considering the Apple earbuds—wait, did Apple stop selling those variable-size earbuds? I can't find them anywhere in the store. Way to lose a sale, guys! (Update: The "in-ear headphones" have resurfaced at the brand new Apple iPod Store.)
Anyway, recommendations are welcome.
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Mmm, this IS a tasty burger!
Saturday, October 23, 2004 »
MIA WALLACEDon't you hate that?
VINCENT VEGAWhat?
MIA WALLACEUncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
VINCENT VEGAI don't know.
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YES
Friday, October 22, 2004 »
I just checked next quarter's schedule on GOLD (UCSB's exciting online registration service) and here are my findings:
- There is a 10 AM Chinese 5 section. It's not quite 11, but it's not 9 either. YES.
- The crazy art history professor I had sophomore year is teaching a class I need at Embarcadero Hall, the off-campus lecture hall which is 5 minutes from my apartment. YES.
- Larry Rickels is teaching the Superhuman class. This is the class that uses comic books as texts, taught by the guy who shows clips from bad horror films instead of lecturing. YES.
The only downside is I'm not sure what art class I should take up. I end up doing more painting than I expected, but that's not a huge problem.
Usually winter quarter is the worst, but it looks like there's hope this year. YES COMIC BOOKS
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Hsageirny fnyeh sneinnrghn kgjuirrrnn
Friday, October 22, 2004 »
Went to the Bob Dylan concert earlier this evening. When I went to see him mere weeks after arriving at UCSB as a freshman, I barely expected to see him in concert ever again, let alone at the same venue three years later. I was horrified to see, the day after I discovered he was coming here again, that tickets had already gone on sale a week earlier. Luckily, the tickets didn't go as quickly as they did back in 2001 and I managed to procure a few.
The set list this time around wasn't as impressive as the last, unfortunately. Previously he pulled out a lot of his old classic songs, while tonight he played a lot of his newer stuff. I enjoyed hearing some of my favorites from Time out of Mind, but I think he played the exact same songs from Love and Theft as he did several years ago. (You can actually see the setlists for both concerts online already. The Internet is crazy!)
He also never played guitar during the show, sticking instead to his keyboard and harmonica. I don't know if that's a new trend or what, but it was a bit disappointing. To his credit, he did drop the "All Along the Watchtower"-bomb to wrap up the encore, which was a great surprise.
I don't want the concert to sound like a downer, of course. Any opportunity to see a performer like Bob Dylan live is a real privilege. It's kind of funny, but leaning over his keyboard in his hat and dress coat, he looked like some kind of naval captain looking over his crew on the bridge of a ship. That, and all the waves that kept crashing up onto the stage LOL.
p.s. Another question going through my head during the concert was: What happened to CHARLIE SEXTON? His "Honest with Me" guitar sliding was ferocious. Also he was so HOT.
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What a tasty article
Wednesday, October 20, 2004 »
Why is it that whenever I'm on my three-hour end-of-the-day shift at work, after having been on campus since 9 in the morning without eating anything, all of the Websites I look at use FOOD ANALOGIES?
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DIANNAO DE GZROKNK BZZRNK
Tuesday, October 19, 2004 »
Apparently I now have this reputation as this crazy computer user with my painting professor. Factors that contributed to this probably include the combined painting-digital media class I took with him last quarter, my job working at Kerr Hall, and how most of the studies I've done for this class have been digital. (But come on, it's so much easier than using actual paint. How archaic.)
Anyway, I'm sitting in the middle of the studio writing out Chinese characters while I'm waiting for my canvas to dry and he walks over. He takes a look, goes "Whaat?" and leans closer. "It's just Chinese homework," I tell him. "Oh!" he says. "I thought it was computer code!"
Where did my benefit of the doubt go?
Also, my carrot-vanilla juice was a bust.
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Updating muh LiveJournal
Sunday, October 17, 2004 »
This weekend we finally had the first rain of the season. (That sounds so rustic.) It happened mostly without any warning, save for the extremely overcast sky, but the sky's been like that off and on for the last few weeks. Morgan and I were sitting outside of Costco enjoying a $1.50 hotdog and drink (or at least I was), and then the next moment it was pouring. There were audible cries of dismay from all the other patrons, hahaha. I'm fine with rain any day, though, so I was pleased when it continued to rain an incredible amount through the night.
Later that evening, the daily 9AM classes finally caught up with me, because I got my first cold of the quarter. Usually it shows up the first weekend, and considering how little sleep I've been getting this quarter I'm surprised it took so long. So, today turned out to be pretty unproductive, mostly consisting of Unreal Tournament and staring at my blank Chinese worksheets. I made some pasta for dinner, which, if memory serves me right, isn't the greatest thing to eat with a cold. There are few things better than a large bowl of pasta, though, and I wasn't about to turn that down just because of some lame cold.
Current music: Benny Hill theme
Current mood: LOLlivejournal
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The Ketchup Conundrum
Sunday, October 17, 2004 »
Here's a lengthy article on ketchup by my good friend, Malcolm Gladwell. (OK, I don't actually know him.) It's a pretty informative look at the process of developing a condiment. Also it helps justify (only a little bit) why there are approximately 30,000 variations of Prego. Who knew the food industry was so crazy???
(It still doesn't explain the toothpaste thing, though.)
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Eyetrack III
Thursday, October 14, 2004 »
More data 4u: heatmaps of how people look at news sites. Be sure to look at the legend first.
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Katamari Damacy in the news
Wednesday, October 13, 2004 »
The now seemingly-ubiquitous Katamari Damacy gained a little more visibility today (or actually, tomorrow), thanks to the New York Times' article (free registration required) on wackiness and innovation in Japanese games. The article features the game prominently, although if you've seen or been following the game at all, there's not too much new information. Still, it's good to spread the word.
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Do you realize??
Wednesday, October 13, 2004 »
Courtesy of McSweeney's: A pretty poignant short essay on my second-favorite Flaming Lips song. (It would have been my first if they hadn't used it in that car commercial.)
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Delicious Library
Tuesday, October 12, 2004 »
Delicious Monster's upcoming Delicious Library promises to take my iTunes-catalyzed obsessive-compulsive cataloguing tendencies to a whole new level. It actually adds stuff automatically after you scan the barcode with a webcam. It's too bad I don't have a webcam, though. I'll probably have to enter everything in manually, which is just what I need. God knows how long I've already spent pointlessly filling out my Gamespot collection.
(Well, OK, it was only two or three hours, which is nothing compared to how long I've devoted to iTunes, but I could have watched a movie or fed some homeless children or something. And no, I'm not linking to it, because it's shameful.)
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Chinese the Fourth
Wednesday, October 6, 2004 »
Since you may not know this, many Chinese characters come in two flavors, traditional and simplified, the latter taking significantly less time to write. While taking Chinese 1 through 3, the class would frequently come across references to the simplified forms, and everyone would be very disappointed when instructed to stick with writing out the traditional characters. "Once you get to Chinese 4, you can use simplified characters," they said.
Well, Chinese 4 is here, and we didn't spend the first week relearning slimmed-down versions of characters en masse, we've been getting maybe one or two simplified versions per day.
So yesterday we're going over how to ask and give directions. This, of course, involved resurrecting a bunch of old prepositions from Chinese 2, most of which use the character biān, which is this bad boy:
邊
Just imagine having to write that out every time you want to say where something is. The classic "describe your room" assignment from Every Single Language Class Ever became a deadly ordeal.
Anyway, yesterday the professor is explaining how to say north, west, east, etc.: "So to write these, you need to use biān. Oh, and we have a simplified version of biān." Then he writes this up on the board:
边
WHAT. They couldn't have just been a little generous and tossed that out back in January? Just think of all the ink we could have saved.
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Veep veep :D
Tuesday, October 5, 2004 »
In any case, the part I found most interesting was when Edwards was telling his story about how he was in Israel a few years ago, and he mentioned how on the day he left it turned out that a suicide bomber blew up a Sbarro in Jerusalem. My first thought was: Israel has Sbarros?
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Bodyslammin'
Tuesday, October 5, 2004 »
Ahoo this promises to be a surreal throwback to freshman year. Maybe I should meet up with Tobin afterward to try to steal some cable.
Maybe I should SLEEP.
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Now with less Phantom Burnout
Friday, October 1, 2004 »
This just turned up in my email:
Dear PlayStation.com Consumer,We recently had a technical error on our site that caused the prices of several games to be significantly marked down. Our records indicate that you have placed an order for one or more of these titles. Unfortunately we've had to cancel the erroneous orders, yours included, and we sincerely apologize for this error and any inconvenience this may cause.
The titles in question, at least in my case, were Phantom Brave and Burnout 3, both recent releases which the site had listed for $30 off the retail price. My entrepreneurial side finally convinced my likes-to-eat-and-pay-rent side that I had enough money saved up and I ordered several copies of each, hoping to turn a quick profit on the 'Bay. I was pretty confident it would be a successful operation. My greatest fear was I might receive an email like this, so go figure. (Actually, my true greatest fear was that Sony would correct their mistake and not send me an email, and a month later send me a bill for hundreds of dollars worth of games.)
However, there is a bright side:
We'd like to give you a $10 coupon as a way of saying thanks for understanding. While we're not required to do this under our site's terms of use we value our customers and we want you to be happy.
I guess that's pretty cool, although I'm worried how I immediately started scheming ways to stretch this coupon code farther than Sony would like. When will I ever learn?