livingtech

Aside from the rain, I have no idea how plastic umbrellas relate to last weekend. I didn’t even use an umbrella. I did go to unicycling yesterday, and watch The Transporter (crappy action movie), went to Balls on sat, before that watched Two Weeks Notice, and before that went to a Ballet performance, and before that had dinner with KR and S, and before that went to a HS graduation party for someone who is, by many people’s estimation, the best unicyclist in the world.

KR wants me to come up with a short story or something for me to read while she dances at Balls next week. She wants something about beauty. I’m not sure how much beauty I see these days, but I’m going to do my best.

I’ve finally figured out what the number that appears on my alarm clock immediately after I hit the snooze button means. I always look to see what time it is, and there’s always this one digit number there instead. It never hit me until just this morning that the number actually means anything. It’s the number of consecutive times I’ve hit snooze.

This morning’s total was 7.

I was remarkably unproductive today, but I almost feel like I accomplished more than I did yesterday. Yesterday, I played a game of Go, and a game of Chess, and lost both misserably. Today I played two games of chess and one of go, winning all three, then played another game of chess just now, and lost. (I could have probably won if I had been paying closer attention, but don’t tell J that, it was her first win here at work.)

I played a game last night on Yahoo and took most of my opponent’s pieces before he mated me unexpectedly. I was up by so many points that I had assumed it was a foregone conclusion.. but I was wrong.

I think I’m starting to get obsessive. I’ve been fantasizing about years down the road… being ranked and playing in tournaments.

I sent out what I hoped would be a humorous message this morning when I knew I was going to be late to work:

I didn’t roll over and notice the time until just now. (alarms have more “accidental turnoffs” in direct proportion to their complexity. Ours is moving daily toward the singularity.)

Then a co-worker (Dave) responded with this:

OK, I’m not Stephen Hawking or anything, but if your alarm clock is becoming a singularity, then I think your problem waking up late might have to do with the time dilation as you approach the event horizon. As you stumble over to the alarm clock to hit snooze, you appear slower and more redshifted to the outside observer, and to their eyes it takes you an infinite amount of time to actually touch the alarm clock (although for you it’s mere moments), to say nothing about the tidal forces exerted on your index finger! This is why I’m never in on time, my alarm clock’s Schwarzschild radius encompasses my entire room!

-Dave

I thought that was really funny, and responded with more attempted mid-morning wit;

Wow… what a coincidence that your alarm clock is a singularity as the term relates to physics, and mine is a singularity as it relates to artificial intelligence!!! (http://www.singinst.org/what-singularity.html)

I guess our alarm clocks are singularly unique. HA!

Who said geeks can’t be funny?

I have an unhealthy addiction to puzzle games. This applies to all puzzle games, but there are subcategories of puzzle games for which I have particularly strong affections, and which cause me the sharpest pains of longing. Paings especially pointy-feeling when I look up at 4:00AM and realize that I’ve spent most of the time I was suppose to spend sleeping in a near catatonic state of nonetheless genius-level puzzle-busting.

Recently, I started revisiting yahoo games (games.yahoo.com) because I am addled constantly by thoughts of chess and go. Yahoo allows you to play both of these games against opponents who are supposedly “ranked”, but who are somehow always better than you regardless of statistical winnings. I spent a lot of time on yahoo games back when I first discovered it, and thought it was a really cool place to hang out and waste time.

Boy has that not changed.

I found in my recent forrays that yahoo decided to host popcap games‘ genius creation: bookworm. Bookworm is somewhere between boggle and tetris. Thus bridging two of my favorite puzzle game categories: tetris varriations, and word games.

(This post was inspired by irish-girl’s mention of boggle in her recent post.)

Not only does yahoo have some other neat puzzle games, but they actually have a whole sub-game-category of word games… some of which are puzzle-like in nature. I can’t help but be envious of the folks at yahoo games who get to sit around and think of new puzzle games.

Now playing in my iTunes: the CD included in the latest issue of Adbusters. If you don’t have a subscription, go to the store NOW and pick up your copy. Damn this CD is good. It’s all mixed by DJ Spooky, who I have heard of, but never actually heard. I’m going to have to pick up some of his stuff now.

The songs included are a really great selection, but the parts where DJ Spooky shines are mostly shorter in-between tracks that sample weird little political/environmental soundbites and quotes. The first track is sort of the epitome of this, where Spooky mixes on top of a spoken word piece by Saul Williams. There are two of those, actually.

The whole thing is amazing, really.

I particularly like the Negitivland track, called “why is this commercial?”. By an interesting coincidence, I was at a wedding reception on Friday where a friend of mine was wearing a T-shirt I particularly admired. The front read simply: “Christianity is stupid.” I asked him where he got it, and he said it was a negativland shirt. More music to add to my mental wishlist.

So� yesterday I had left my laptop in my car. I guess there is a longish untold story about how the upgrade to 10.2.5 killed my laptop, but I�ll just leave it at that. Point is, bringing it to the apple store is on my list of things to do, and that�s why it was in the car. Over the course of the day, I thought a couple of times about how I shouldn�t have left it in the car.

I didn�t end up finding time to go to the apple store, and came right home after work to hang out with a friend and go to unicycle practice. The friend was already here, and I came inside, bringing my laptop with me, leaving, as I always do, my mp3 playing diskman in the car, where it�s lived since Laura bought it for me about six months ago.

In the 45-minute interval that I was inside, someone smashed in my passenger side window and took the diskman. Fortunately, they didn�t take any of the (count them) THREE CD carrying case thingies that were strewn randomly around the car. (There is usually only one, but everyone who went on the trip to Chicago this last weekend brought their own, and nobody took them from the car.)

I wish I knew what CD was in the diskman. I�m afraid that it was Radiohead�s Kid-A, which is one of my all-time favorite albums, and I only just recently found in Laura�s CD carrying case thingy after thinking it was lost for ages. Obviously, the window is going to cost more to replace than the diskman. (I only have liability. I�m going to call today about it, but I have the suspicion that it doesn�t cover glass or theft.)

After the discovery, I called the police, who showed up fairly promptly, and filed a �statistical� report of the theft. (She was straightforward about how little they could do in a case like this.) I didn�t end up going to unicycling, and instead we watched Spirited Away, which Nate recently purchased on DVD.

I guess the whole point about the laptop is obvious enough. I sure am glad I brought it in with me when I got home. (Despite the fact that currently it�s a fifteen-hundred dollar paperweight.)

This morning, just before I woke up, I dreamt I was teaching someone to play chess.

I am just reprinting (reblogging?) my comment over on meghan’s post about love and sneezing which evolved into a discussion about what emotions make the best art.

There were pieces snipped from the beginning and end of the comment that were only relevent to the discussion at the time. Art is, obviously, something I’ve given a lot of thought to. It’s interesting, because earlier in the discussion, when it was still about love, the point was made that there are really a lot of different kinds of love, and that it feels like it’s different for everybody. (Even though there may only be six kinds, according to one link in the thread!) Art is probably the same way. It’s so different for different people that it feels totally subjective. Maybe it is, or maybe… maybe there are only six kinds!

[click below to read my comment if you haven’t already read it]
Continue reading “art and pain”

Last night I won a round of Baroque Chess against a guy in the office who used to play it in college. It definitely makes for an interesting game, and is WAY different than chess, that’s for sure.

A bunch of the guys here at work (and a couple of the ladies, on occasion) and I have taken to playing chess, go, and Tic-Tac-Check every day at lunch. (I’ve been getting way better at Go, which I’d only ever played once or twice before.)

Anyway, after work I went home and had “family night” with my dad and siblings. (The usual Thursday night activity.) I taught my dad tic-tac-check as I had been meaning to do for the last few weeks, and beat him soundly. (He was watching Much Ado About Nothing at the time, and was kinda distracted.) After the movie was over, and toward the end of the night, I challenged my dad to a game of regular chess…

Let me step back for a moment and give you some history. My dad taught me to play chess. Despite playing it fairly regularly (like once every couple of weeks for at least a year or two) I was never able to beat him unless he spotted me at least a couple of pieces. Usually he would spot me his queen, and still waste my ass.

So last night, about 9:30 (which is normally his bedtime), I beat my dad at chess in a fair match for what was, I think, the first time ever.

Christopher says this means I’m finally a man now. I don’t know how I feel about it, but I definitely find myself making excuses for him. (It was late, he wasn’t really focused, he hasn’t played in years…) It’s not that big a deal, really, I mean, it is just chess, after all.

I was reading Gabe Anderson’s blog, and saw that he has a page that he calls his Master Comments Archive. I would like a movable type plugin that would create said archive, but have it sortable by date/entry/commenter’s name. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Of course, I could always create an MT template that just has an entry tag with only the comments in it, but that page wouldn’t necessarily get updated when there are new comments, so this would have to use MT’s dynamic serving functionality… which I have no idea how to do. Still, I may tackle this myself, if I suddenly have too much free time.

Since I also happened to discover lazyweb.org today, I will post this thought there as well. I know I had other lazyweb posts over the past few months… maybe if I remember them I’ll post them there too.