Category: Uncategorized

It’s the new year, time to reflect on the old year.

I express myself best in lists, so here are some of my favorite things of 2003 (in alphabetical–ie, no particular–order), followed by some other statistically interesting tidbits.

best music of 2003:
* Cloud Cult, They Live on the Sun
* Fluke, Puppy
* Her Space Holliday, Young Machines (although it mostly just renewed my vigor for their old album, Manic Expressive.)
* Junior Senior, d-d-don’t don’t stop the beat
* Radiohead, Hail to the Thief
* Ulrich Schnauss, A Strangely Isolated Place
* Tosca, Dehli9

Favorite books I read in 2003:
* Blood Music, Greg Bear
* Jennifer Government, Max Berry
* Robota, Doug Chiang & Orson Scott Card

Number of books I read (completely) in 2003: 18

Greatest accomplishment in 2003: Finished NaNoWriMo. (50,000 words in one month)

Thing that upsets me the most that I didn’t do in 2003: Finish the novel I started for NaNoWriMo.

Number of pictures I took on my cameraphone in 2003: (approximately) 100

Number of days in 2003 I owned my cameraphone: 4

OK, so this wasn’t quite as all-inclusive as I’d originally planned. Happy New Year everyone!!!

Textamerica has taken its sweet time updating my page… and the pictures are hideously out of order, but otherwise I am quite pleased. The pics look damn good shrunken slightly from their natural 640×480, and I know this will be great incentive for me to take pictures galore.

I have plans to upload an ebook reader, putty (ssh client), and opera (web browser) to my phone in the near future, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to any of those today. I have video games calling to me from downstairs.

After discovering all these funny rants over at the ferret’s domain this morning, I started thinking about how not-funny I am, and I felt pretty lowly all day. I don’t know why, but I just felt depressed and glum. (But you should read his stuff, it’s very funny.)

In the last hour, I have managed to get a little excited about starting up my very own moblog on textamerica. I finally decided to do it after finding that Jeremy worked some at setting up his own, and decided to go with textamerica instead. (I just wasn’t sure how much effort I wanted to put into it, and decided that if someone else has already tried, I’m just gonna take the easy route for now.) I also found out some more about how it works, and they have some pretty cool features.

(btw, I just sent my first pics in, so we’ll see how long it takes for them to actually arrive.)

I got to work this morning and listened to a four minute long voicemail from someone’s pocket. Nobody was speaking directly into the phone, but there was definitely an animated conversation happening on the other end. I kept hearing bits and snippets from cleches… “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was said at least once, followed by a few others. Of course, everything was muffled behind a constant fabric-friction sound. The caller must have been moving or something. The weird question for me is, who has my work number programmed into their phone?

I spent about twenty minutes copying numbers from Nate’s phone to my new phone yesterday. Thanks to those of you who have already sent me your #s!

Apparently irish-girl and Jeremy also have new nokia3650s! It’s some kind of camera phone revolution!

I still haven’t decided whether I want to sign up for textamerica.com yet or not. If you look at their fine print (terms and conditions) they own everything you upload to their server. Your images are their property. Yes, I know, what’re they going to do with them other than display them like they’re saying, but it’s the principal of the thing.

I’m starting to think a better solution will be for me to just upload a few select photos to my own site via my laptop once or twice a week. I know it’s not all automated then… and certainly not “instant”, but I might be able to write (or steal) some kind of script that grabs them from an email account instead. Anyway, bandwidth is still extremely pricy from AT&T, so an option that doesn’t use it is probably more practical.

Now I want to try out all the web browsers my phone can handle… but for that I have to have some kind of computer with Bluetooth, so I think a trip to best buy CompUSA may be in order over my lunch break today. There are these little USB Bluetooth adapters you can get for $40 or $50 bucks.

Hmmmm… my trip to compUSA may be getting expensive. A post over at mobilewhack has me really wanting one of the palm IR keyboards. Screw my laptop, this is the future, baby!

My phone is completely and totally dead. I shouldn’t have waited this long to get the nokia 3650 that I’ve been wanting. My plan for this afternoon is to run around to a AT&T store trying to find one that has it so I can switch.

What does this mean to you?

I’ve lost your number. Almost 100% for sure. Some of you I’ll be able to get your numbers from Nate or Laura, but I fear there are many of you I’ve lost touch with forever. So if you know me, head on over to my email page and send me your digits, yo.

Thanks!

I finished up Ratchet & Clank yesterday, in order to start the sequel, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. It’s been sitting on our coffee table for two days now, taunting me, because Nate got it for x-mas.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the ending cinema or anything, but all in all, the first Ratchet & Clank is a damn fine game. After you beat it the first time through, there are new options and things that open up, so if I didn’t have the sequel sitting here to play, I probably would still be at it, trying to collect all the gold bolts and gold weapons and stuff.

So about 11pm I started the new one, and I went to bed when my eyes just couldn’t stay open anymore. I literally can’t remember the last time I was that engrossed in a game. The sequel is basically more of the same, but it looks cooler, and everything is just a little bit better. Essentially, it’s just an extremely well done sequel. The cinemas are if anything actually funnier than the first one, and gameplay is–wonderfully–exactly the same as the first one.

The thing that has most impressed so far me was this level where you’re running around a satellite trying to destroy these towers. The satellite is a sphere, and when you go to your map view, the game actually just zooms out and you can pan around the whole sphere, zooming in and out and stuff. It was fucking amazing. I kinda wish the whole game were done that way. I hope there are more levels like it.

Anyway, I have to go back pretty soon here and revisit my top 100 sci-fi video games… to add these puppies in at the top somewhere.

[updated a few minutes later to add this next part]

I wanted to add something about how I’m so glad the developers stuck to the “more of a good thing” approach rather than delving off into some other concept entirely as with that other 3D platform game we all know and used to love. Not only that, but R&C is more puzzle based and doesn’t rely as heavily on the actual platform jumping that gives the whole platformer genre its name. (Despite this lack of love, many of my favorite games are in this genre.)

Anyway, I hate getting stuck on a part of a game where you have to memorize some huge and silly sequence of jumps just to progress to the next point in the game. Nintendo hardly ever resorts to that kind of BS, (and when they do, it’s one of the later levels that you almost never need to complete to beat the game). And of course Nintendo invented the genre with Mario64. Hats off to ’em.

Laura suggested I write a blog entry about how much I hate her. So here it is.

I hate her not at all. Or rather, my hatred for her, if it were expressed numerically, would be a large negative number. In fact, it would probably be one of those numbers that is best expressed in scientific notation, perhaps with multiple levels of superscript.

I hate her so little, that hate is probably too weak a word. I should be talking about how little I loathe her, or how much I don’t abhor her presence.

Laura is my shooting star. She’s the icing on my sexcake.

She’s the whirl in my dervish, and the prop for my biplane.

She pushes my levers, and flips my buttons.

If I were flying higher than an eagle, she’d probably have procured the pot.

She is my muse, both good and bad, and inspiration for many of my “greatest hits”.

She’s the first thing I think of when I get up in the morning (horny) and she’s already gone. She’s the last thing I think of late at night when I’m trying to climb over her inert body and fall asleep without invoking her wrath. (Still horny, I inevitably fail, and can hear her mumble, “Why do you always have to come to bed so late?”)

I hate Laura so little that if hate were matter I would probably blow up the entire universe with the anti-matter in my brain.

Right now I am going home… to be with the one I hate.

Tonight I realized that I’ve been taking things too seriously the last few days. Laura and I have been arguing more, and I’ve been stressed about everything–from work to finances. Even my old mantra, “it’s just money,” hasn’t been doing me any good.

Everybody’s wallets get a little thin this time of year, and this morning I checked my online statement. I found that I was negative by like $150. Of course, I’d been carrying around a check from Laura for like $300 that I hadn’t deposited on account of my being sick and all, so immediately I started stressing about how many late fees I was going to rack up because of this crap.

We had family dinner at my dad’s place at noon; so on the way over, I stopped by the bank and asked them about it. Turns out I wasn’t negative yet, and if I deposited some dough, I’d be all set. So I did; and I am. …All set that is.

This has been movie weekend for me. Yesterday we watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (which made me want to read The Portrait of Dorian Grey), and today it was Terminator 3 and Barbershop. We’ve still got Donnie Darko to watch from the video store, and a stack of like 5 or 6 new ones to watch whenever we get around to it, including Bringin’ Down Da’ House, the Charlie’s Angels sequel, Daddy Daycare, and Eight Crazy Nights.

I thought T3 was pretty decent. Left me wanting more, as was certainly intended. And it didn’t suffer from the usual “sci-fi really means fantasy” problem that I usually have with big budget Hollywood sci-fi. By this I mean that there is usually some plot point, often in the all-important climax of the movie that breaks out of the realm of possible science, and into the land of fantastic speculation. There are more examples of this in Hollywood sci-fi than there are of good solid science fiction, so I’m not going to go into any details here.

I’m going to get back to my reading. I hope to finish up The Catcher in the Rye before I go to bed here any minute.

I think I’m being punished. My whole body shakes, and I go through hot and cold phases about every ten minutes.

I’m warning you now; you do not want to read the rest of this. Graphic depictions of gastric illness follow:
Continue reading “Sick and Feverish”

Well, I caught up on my blog reading. Three and a half hours past midnight, four hours after starting. (OK, I guess I took a brief half-hour break to play some stupid video games with Nate when he got home.) I have been pathetic with my blog reading lately. I think there are several factors. I got behind when I was writing the novel, (no time for anything then), and I just never caught back up. Jason’s took the longest… he’s been writing so much lately that I probably spent a half hour reading the last week’s entries. I promised him I’d be catching up on it all soon… but after the first page of 20, I had to stop reading the comments, and after the second page I started skimming. Finally I found some entries I knew I’d read before, and I felt a sick sense of relief.

I think too that I’ve been appreciating good literature more and more… I hope this doesn’t offend anyone when I say that reading blogs is just often nowhere near as fun for me as reading a good short story or poem. The problem has always been that finding those rare good short stories or poems can take awhile… so the ratio of crap to good may be very close to the same… it’s just that the good is so much better when you find it.

I’m not sure if I have enough left in me to catch up on the other task I was planning for this evening–bringing down the swelling in my email inbox. I owe about 4 or 5 “real” emails to various people. I blame a freak desire I had earlier this week to write to a bunch of people I hadn’t heard from in ages. Of course they all wrote me back yesterday. Maybe I’ll find time to write them tomorrow before we head off to our friend Julie’s birthday dinner. We got her a present earlier tonight that I’m excited to give to her.

and now… sleeeeeeeeeeep.