Category: misc

It’s been a while since I’ve plugged a video game on overt, but I just had to mention something about Katamari Damacy. Here’s the premise: the King of the Universe got high and broke all the stars in the sky. You, the 1cm-tall young prince are charged with repairing the damage. How? You get a little sticky ball (“katamari”) which you roll around picking things up with. You start with little things, but as you grow bigger things stick. Thumbtacks, erasers, candies, buckets, welcome mats, sand castles, babies, alligators, cars, airports, thunder gods. When you’re ball is big enough, the king tosses it up into the heavens to replace a missing star or constellation. If it seems silly and trippy, it is. And I love it.

In other news, it looks like overt has fallen victim to its first comment spam. Four new comments were posted at 2:01 last night, and they all had the same indecipherable message to deliver:

Hardcore young viagra samples here (Tons of amateur movies and videos) Monika Livinsky Playing Strip Poker HERE

Maybe I should consider it flattery that a blog spamming bot took it upon itself to befoul overt. Let’s hope it’s an isolated visit.

yes.

Friday night kicked some ass. Leslie and I cooked up artichoke and mushroom lasagna to feed a cadre of teachers who graced us with their presence. Beer from several Asian countries was consumed, as well as tangerine fuzzy navels and plenty of strawberries, angel food cake, and whipped not-cream (though none of the latter by me, thank you). I eventually banished myself upstairs to remove the male element, though no doubt the fun continued.

Saturday night also had its intrigue. We went over to have dinner at Phil’s place. He had mentioned he’d also invited “a friend from UT,” and when we arrived, there was none other than George, arrived back early from his NYC escapades. A pleasant surprise. We enjoyed ginger sesame chicken, then definitely did not spend a couple of hours dance-dance-revolting. After that we caravaned back up to Fremont to get dressed for a traditional Saturday-midnight showing of RHPS in Oakland. It was fun… lots of effort on the part of the actors, with complete costumes, props, scene changes. Miles ahead of what I saw the last time I went in high school. We also met two friends of George from Livermore – Laura and Stefani. Didn’t get to talk much to Laura, but I did have a brief talk with Stefani, who’s an int’l relations and philosophy major at nearby Mills College. We even bought (or, I should say, George bought) little rocky supply bags to throw shit at appropriate moments. Alas, they have apparently phased out rice and now only blow bubbles for the wedding.

And this is officially my last day of vacation. Leslie was up and out of bed and off to school in a frighteningly familiar manner this morning, and tomorrow I go up to Berkeley and they tell me how to be a grad student. We’ll see how that goes.

I have a cell phone. It’s 4.5 years old. It works great. It makes phone calls. Woo-hoo. It’s the same phone number I’ve always had… which means it’s an Austin area code, though (as you may have figured out by now) I live in California. When we move to Fremont, I’ll be in the same area code as Berkeley, and Leslie tells me you can call all around the bay locally anyway, so I’ve been looking into getting a new phone/carrier.

It’s obnoxious to have to pay monthly for something–I despise bills on general principle. But it’s fair: they provide a service month-to-month, and I pay for it. But why on holy earth do I have to sign up for a year with one of these evil companies? And why do I have to buy a phone from them? And why can’t I take my phone with me when I leave one company and go to another? I’ll tell you why: because American cell phone companies are an evil cabal created to milk the people of This Great Nation of their money and their very souls.

I considered going with Virgin’s offering, where you buy a phone and pay by the minute with no contract or bill at all. This would be cool, and seems economical up to maybe 300min/mo. I’m not sure it would work out to be financially advantageous if I had no land line to back it up. Still, no contract and no bills seems awfully nice to me. You don’t even have to give them your name, you can buy the phone with cash and refill it with cash. Cypherpunkness, here I come.

On the whole though… how did we get suckered into the current state of things? Most places try to get you to sign 2-year contracts now. 2 years?!?! In europe, you buy a phone, get a little card, and pop the bad-boy in. Period. You want a new phone, buy it, pop the card in, and all your numbers and settings and everything are there. You can sell your phone. You can get pre-paid cards to go in your phone. You can borrow your friend’s phone for 5 minutes and pop in your card to make the call. Why can’t this sanity make it across the pond? Sigh.

One of the reasons American companies do the lock-in is because they heavily subsidize the cost of the phones. This is because, for some reason, it’s important for your cell phone to browse the internet and take pictures and send email and make coffee and all sorts of other worthless crap. Guess what? I pretty much want to just make phone calls! So you can go ahead and leave out the color screens and the singing songs and the flashing and dancing and spare me the stratospheric price point and all it entails. The geek inside me wants to be interested in fun little features, but the homunculus of reason knocking around my head balks at being cowed into a 2-year contract for some silly little plastic noisemaker that could enable me, theoretically, play tetris while surfing the web while bluetoothing around while driving my car at speeds fatal to any pedestrians who have the misfortune to get in my way. And the ability to do this (from what I’ve seen out on the road recently) is becoming more and more critical to a modern lifestyle. And I’m nothing if not modern.

Cell phone companies are just thing to bring out the Luddite in me.

A while ago, I got a Dell 2001FP 20-inch flat panel display. It’s gorgeous.

Leslie has gotten a bit tired of her little 15 inch computer screen. So, I decided to get one of the fancy new screens from Apple, and give Les my old one. The new one looks like this:

Mmm… Now we’ll both have spoiled ourselves with the excess of 20″ flat-panel monitors. I’ve thought for a long time that there is no computer accessory more important than your monitor. No matter what you’re doing with your computer, or how fast it is, you always have to interact with it through the display. So I think it’s worth it to invest in a nice display. Before my current panel, I had a 19-inch Mitsubishi tube that served me for about 4 years. It’s life was actually cut short… I’m hoping to get as many as 10 years out of these panels (I’d better, anyway. In for some lean times ahead

This will displace Leslie’s wonderful little iMac. We were thinking we could put it downstairs in the new apartment so we can have a living room computer (because walking upstairs is far too much of a hassle). Any other ideas on how to keep the “kitten” in service?

Another gentleman is having the heads cut off in Iraq where the terrors are in such an uproar. Osama Ben Laden captured a South Korean robot fixer and then put him to the tests on the wrong side of a knife. There is defenselessness and the video is released onto the Internets and the sad story is seen by all. This sort of rudos behavior is making the blood boil not just in my hearts but in the hearts of many who see the bold spirit of Korea being attacked by terrors. South Korea declared attacks “not good” and the United Nations of America sent a letter to the terrors base in Saddy Arabia that “this is not the way to do business ladies”. Terrors say that they are making to cut off heads to get America to quit the big Iraq job but then American President Bush says “think again buster”.

For the sake of your sanity, please read today’s SomethingAwful update. It helps put everything in perspective.

This morning I went out climbing with Phil and George. Phil had never been before, but he made a valiant showing. He needs to get some climbing shoes. We intended to go with Jeff and his friend Doantam, but I think that wires got crossed some how, since this week he’s in Texas.

Work has been good since I settled the score on Berkeley. Everything feels much more comfortably finite now, and I’m trying to tie up loose ends and put some sort of reasonable cap on the projects I’m working on. I think my big problem with working in general is that if I work harder, and get more done, that just means that I’ll be given more work to do. In school, if I worked hard, I could actually “finish” early, and relax. I’m sure that after some incomprehensibly long time like a year or so, working hard could pay off and I could move up to better pay or a better position or something. But that’s all abstract to me. Plus, it seems to stretch out interminably 40 years into the future. I just don’t work on those timescales yet.

I picked up “Unreal Tournament 2004” at the store a couple of days ago and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it. Most fun I’ve had with a shooter since Half Life. All of you out there with the inclination should blow the $30 and come play with me online.

Leslie’s about to head out for her week-long trip to Texas. I’m excited for her–she’s getting her eyes lasered! I don’t think either of us has taken a trip that long alone since we moved into this place. Kind of odd, what having a job will do to you.

I’ve been thinking about changing the format of the website to something different, something simpler. I’m planning on using WordPress. What does my readership think? I want to improve the static content (like my resume, things I’ve written, etc), maybe integrate gallery into this site, put up a few new pages. I haven’t worked up the gumption yet to figure out all the CSS to make it pretty, but I’ve a feeling I’ll have a lot of spare time this week to do so should I feel the urge.

http://phish.com/news/index.php?year=2004#story182

We got back last night from a very satisfying trip to Austin.

We got in on Friday night, dumped our stuff at Clare’s, and then I went over to Doug’s house for a bit to say hi to everyone. I headed back to bed pretty soon so I could wake up on Saturday morning to go to yoga with my old teacher, Annick. It was ass-kicking, but good. I spent the rest of the daylight hours around UT, eating at familiar places and walking the drag a bit. I also stopped into the co-op to buy some UT paraphenalia that I finally want after shunning it for the four years I was there. I got a burnt-orange hoody that says, quite clearly, “TEXAS” on the front, as well as an orange tie-dyed t-shirt that says the same. It seemed a pleasing blend of my past and future.

Saturday night we had a fancy dinner compliments of Clare’s parents at a tiny restaurant on Lamar called Wink. I personally had raw bison, skate wing, rabbit cake, chocolate soup, lemon tart pot and a nice glass of muscat.

Sunday I had lunch with Ellen, which was wonderful. We gave in to our greasy urges and got bacon cheesburgers at Players and talked politics and personalities. From there, I had dinner with my parents and viewed some excellent pictures from their recent excursions to Honduras and Portugal.

Sunday night was Patrick’s bachelor party. It was the first bachelor party I’ve been to, which was a bit unnerving. I can only guess at the parade of them I have to look forward to in the next few years. We spent the night downtown in bars, exploring the nations of the world via beer. We ended up at Opal Divine’s at 2am, sitting on the porch smoking cigars. Good times.

Monday we got a big group together and went to Schlitterbahn for the day. It was awesome–the kids were still in school, so it wasn’t too crowded, and the sun managed to come out in the afternoon. We rode rides, but also spent a good amount of time just floating lazily in their interminable rivers. We made several trips to their snack dispensaries for turkey legs, ice cream, and funnel cakes.

After we were home and showered, we went out to the drafthouse to see an appalling documentary called “Stupidity.” I won’t even go there.

Tuesday was a lazy day. We all slept in, then I struck out on foot for a nostalgic tour of campus. I dropped into ECAC to say hi to old folks, and then went 0 for 3 trying to find my old professors. I guess they got the hell out of dodge as soon as finals were over. After that, I rendezvous’d with George at half price books where I picked up Dune Messiah and Farenheit 451 for $.98 each. We rounded out the afternoon with a trip to REI where I managed not to buy anything, with a quick pitstop at Best Buy where I gave in and bought the PC version of KOTOR.

Then Doug shuttled us to the airport, we hopped on a plane and before dark we were standing back in our apartment. What an awesome, perfectly-timed trip. Now back to this grind for a while…