posts from 2003.11

Yesterday my dad wasn’t feeling well, so I ended up doing all the cooking and cleaning, and most of the eating. I don’t get what people complain about - it’s not that big a deal :)

Anyway, today he’s feeling better and I’m feeling worse. I think I have a cold or something- hopefully it’s not the flu :/

Here’s this weeks five:

1. Do you like to shop? Why or why not?

I’m ambivalent. I hate picking stuff out (I’m worried about regretting my decisions later), but I like actually buying stuff.

2. What was the last thing you purchased?

I bought an egg-timer yesterday, to aid in turkey-basting timing.

3. Do you prefer shopping online or at an actual store? Why?

Depends what I’m getting, and how quickly I want to get it. When buying presents or t-shirts I prefer to do it online, but when buying computer equipment I prefer to go to a real store (must. install. NOW!).

4. Did you get an allowance as a child? How much was it?

Yes, $5/week until I was 13, $10/week after that until I got a job. When I was in college I got $20/week to buy food and such.

5. What was the last thing you regret purchasing?

That UV-treated floppy cable from Thinkgeek. They screwed up the order and sent me a non-UV cable so I had to send it back, only to have them send me another non-UV cable. I ended up buying something cooler from somewhere else (now I have one too many rounded floppy cables). Hopefully when that comes, it is the right thing :)

I must really be an incredibly huge geek because I heard about this site, which sings words that you enter into a form, and became disappointed when I learned that the voices weren’t digitized. Anyway, it’s still a really cool site, even if about a fifth of the words I enter don’t exist in the database yet.

This is the most interesting phrase I can come up with, given the currently available words:

What interesting “songs” did everyone else create?

My dad is back from the hospital for a while. They gave him lots of painkillers and are having him go back in next week to have the 7mm kidney stone destroyed. This means I probably won’t be able to go up to Ithaca for the week like I originally planeed- but at least I get to have an actual Thanksgiving tomorrow!

In other happy news, my old boss should have listened to me when I told him that concentrating his business on SEO was a Bad Thing:

Of course, this is good. Having met and heard from some people who swear by and/or teach SEO, I think they are about a half step better than spammers and deserve what they get. My old boss tried to get me to do SEO- it was a major factor in my leaving that job (that and the !$).

So I spent most of the night in the emergency room, as my dad was having odd pains and asked me to take him to the hospital. It turns out it’s a kidney stone, and it’s stuck. He has to stay in the hospital for a few days so they can monitor it, and make sure it doesn’t cause an infection. :(

I originally had a rant here about the silliness of people who go to the emergency room for thngs like a broken tailbone, but I don’t have the energy to compile it for readability anymore.

/me wanders off to find some eggnog

I just got spammed via my contact form and via email; by the same person. And it’s an incredibly stupid, random spam as well:

How lame. Well, since he used the form, now I have his IP. If anyone would like to strike back against a spammer (at your own risk), let me know. Maybe we’ll work something out :)

I think I’ll just stop watching the ends of anime series, as they tend to be really depressing. Either everyone dies, or absolutely nothing is resolved and you feel like you’ve wasted X hours(/days(/weeks)) of your life watching the series through to the end.

Ah, who am I kidding? As long as I know there’s more (no matter how bad or disappointing it may be), if I liked the rest of the series I’ll try to watch it through to the end. Even if there is no closure, there’s at least a sense of finality, right?

Here’s this week’s Friday Five…

1. List five things you’d like to accomplish by the end of the year.

1. Move to Ithaca
2. Get a job
3. Start paying off my debt
4. Be able to afford Christmas presents
5. Beat Final Fantasy VI (again) and V (I stopped playing it a looong time ago)

2. List five people you’ve lost contact with that you’d like to hear from again.

1. Jazz
2. Kristin
3. chrisjs
4. Raelyn
5. Camille

3. List five things you’d like to learn how to do.

1. Make video games
2. Hack the Linux kernel
3. Play a musical instrument
4. Speak German
5. Ham radio

4. List five things you’d do if you won the lottery (no limit).

1. Pay off my debts
2. Buy my dad a house on a lake
3. Buy myself a DeLorean; gut it; replace its innards with Corvette pieces [add a Flux Capacitor]
4. Build a file server with SCSI drives in a 1 terabyte (for now) RAID
5. Invest the rest of it so I don’t have to worry about money again, ever.

5. List five things you do that help you relax.

1. Procrastinate
2. Watch anime (see #1)
3. Play video games (see #1)
4. Read (see #1)
5. Sleep (see #1)

I spent the weekend in Ithaca again, this time with Beth and Marty. We did the commons thing, the gorge-hiking thing, and the movie thing. Some of us fought (wooden spoons and heads suffered), and some of us argued on the proper way to speak/construct an acronym. Chris made a turkey, and Mooseheads restaurant doesn’t serve food on Sundays.

It was fun. I’ll go back, and one day I’ll stay.

I’m taking a break from the hard kore futzing hacking to do the Friday Five, before I forget.

1. Using one adjective, describe your current living space.

geeky

2. Using two adjectives, describe your current employer.

hopeful, persistent

3. Using three adjectives, describe your favorite hobby/pasttime.

wonderful // when stuff works
infuriating // when stuff !works
interesting // all the time- well, almost

4. Using four adjectives, describe your typical day.

nocturnal
short
stressful
hopeless

5. Using five adjectives, describe your ideal life.

happy
secure
comfortable
clued
slack

Last night after the SLUG meeting was interesting. After the usual pizza outing (my new favorite color is dnL [caution: link is annoyingly flashy and noisy]), a few of us went back to a friend’s place to increase our Star Wars experience.

First off, we watched a documentary about R2d2; which was pretty good, better than you might think, even, but not really worth talking about. After that, however, we watched the Star Wars Holiday Special, which definitely is worth talking about.

If you are familiar with this “film”, you may have heard it called the worst atrocity every to disgrace the annals of modern cinematography. To be fair, that’s not quite true (I can think of at least one film that was worse). But still, this movie was so heinous, I have no choice but to love it.

I mean come on, it had everything! Witty dialogue (”Stir whip, stir whip, whip whip, stir!”), wholesome family goodness (Albeit all the dialogue was in Wookie), porn (Mind evaporator, my ass!), action (Suddenly, I was attacked by a muppet), musical acts (Is it over yet?), and cartoons (What’s that on his face? Oh, it’s his chin).

It’s hard to say what makes this movie such a failure, with soo much diversity and with so much talent involved. I mean, where else do you get to see an entire race commit mass suicide so that they may all travel to a new planet? Where else can you see main characters from good movies appear out of nowhere, breaking all implied rules of movie physics? Where else can you see a Wookie wearing an apron and a furry version of Gary Coleman? Where? Tell me where! Tell me, for the love of Zod, so that we can destroy all copies of such an abomination! For this, this must be unique! It must live on in infamy to serve as a warning to future generations! It’s that bad.

It’s so bad, that if I ever end up having children, I am going to sit them down and force them to watch this movie every Christmas.