I think I need to go out and buy a sound card for my work computer. Too many Flash movies (like American iPod) that I can't watch on my Linux iBook.
Geez, those Liberians have some really blah names. First there was Samuel "Doe". The only thing there is to say about that is, too bad his first name wasn't John. Now we have Charles Taylor. That's not even characteristically blah the way a Doe or a John Smith is; it's blah in a blah way. But I just learned that the name of the current Vice President of the country is ... Moses Blah. Damn, I need to move to that country. They've turned mundanity into an art form. Plus they'd just go apeshit over my last name.
Today I remembered why I don't like to let Koreans know I can speak Korean. I went in to the Lunch Basket, with its new Korean ownership, for breakfast (which I've never done before). I met them last week, specifically the young friendly woman who appears to be the manager -- and the only one who speaks English well. So now we sort of know each other, and she speaks Korean to me generally when it's something very basic that she knows a baby like me will understand (that's actually the real reason I don't speak Korean in America: if their English is fine, they're kind of condescending and treat the Korean-speaking more as a form of entertainment, but I digress). So she asked me how my weekend was. I told her it was nice, and that I went to a party. Then she asked me if I went to church. WTF?!!
OK, I have to admit I wasn't totally taken by surprise, the way I was the first time I heard a Korean employee in the service sector ask a customer out of the blue if he was a churchgoer. That was back in Monterey. The customer under interrogation was a half-Korean, and he thought it was OK for the waitress to ask that. I guess the reason it kind of shocked me this time was that I think this was the first time I had been asked about my religious habits in the U.S. (in this manner), and, more definitely and more importantly, this was the first time I was asked that as an avowed non-believer.
She made a sad face when I told her I don't go to church. I actually said afterward in Korean that only Koreans ask that kind of question. Was that rude? Maybe :)
The thing is, once, Koreans know you can speak Korean, they to some extent consider you Korean, and immediately throw on all the usual social obligations that are part of being a member of Korean society; expecting you to call men "hyung" if they have a year or two on you, telling you you should go to church (maybe they let you off the hook if you say you're Jewish; wonder if I should try that some time), and, of course, asking you how old you are, how much money you make, and why you aren't married. There's just a huge amount of expectations and pressure that Koreans place on each other.
Ah, those rare little pleasures of life. Those few precious moments when people treat you as a human being, of real human value. It's especially good if there are chicks. And there were actually a fair number, too, all of them pretty decent. Well, "all" if we count the two who came in after the party was essentially over, who were not really there for the party. Wait a minute, no, there were three (seemingly) single chicks at the party. So we can say "all".
I still think Linda's pretty hot, though. But it was one of those small parties where everyone sits around a table and eats/drinks/plays games, so not much chance to break up into groups and get to know people one-on-one. I thought this might be my big chance to start hitting it off with Linda, but it didn't exactly happen. But at least I have a sort of "in".
As if to confirm what the Whole Lotta Nothing guy said yesterday, some poor soul in the Netherlands did a Google search for gnome2+nextstep+theme, and found this useless page on my blog. Said page turned up at number seven on the first results page for said search, but all it says on the subject is, "I couldn't find [blah] theme". It's a perfectly cromulent search (not like searching for agreeance+cromulence), one which others may well make in the future.
This A Whole Lotta Nothing article is pretty interesting. This guy tosses up a new blog about personal video recorders (TiVo and the like), and within 4 days, Google shows him as being the world's foremost authority on PVR's[1]. Geez. Any day now, I expect my blog to pop up as the dominating site on the first page of Google results for something -- perhaps the failures of online dating. Hmmm... I should set myself up some more dates just for material.
Of course, first I need some people to read my blog.
[1]I can never decide whether to put an apostrophe for the plural after those acronyms. I swear I was taught that they do belong there for acronyms, words as words (there are too many "the's" in this sentence), and... I don't know if there's really a third thing -- it really feels like there should be a third thing, because it's nice to iterate over at least three things, but maybe this digression will serve as the third thing, or at least distract the reader from that sense of incompleteness, although that will probably be hard since I'm sort of hammering away at the issue right now. Anyway, John said the rule is never use an apostrophe for the plural, even if it means saying "As are a good thing to see on a report card"; indeed, I seem to see "CDs" more than I see "CD's" in respectable writing. So I sort of flip-flop between the two ideals.
It looks like if I ever want to go to graduate school, the issue of papers is already taken care of. Maybe one of these days I'll try to actually read one of the papers it generates. Unfortunately, if I did, I couldn't be sure whether my failure to understand would be because I lack the intellectual power to handle these types of concepts, or because the papers are totally meaningless. Though I suppose the same could be said about real graduate-level writing.
After doing an emerge -u gnome-session control-center gnome-games...
Just got out of the TRB meeting. Lots of DR's were discussed, but none of them involved the test procedure I conducted today. I'm just feeling so proud. You gotta feel proud of yourself now and then. I just wish I knew what all these acronyms stood for.
Sorta doesn't look like I'll get to any more piano concerts for this competition thing that's going on right now. Oh, well.
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Called Chinese friend, to confirm our mutual(?) attendance of this afternoon's piano competition. He mentioned, as friends often do, that we might go to dinner or something afterwards. I said that I might call my lady friend (the one who dumped me) since she might be ushering for it. Why did I even mention that? She's lower priority than, well, Linda, which she'll happily admit. But Peter thinks I'm still dating her, I guess. So he said, "well, if you've got a date, you better do whatever she wants." I DON'T HAVE A DATE! GOT THAT?!! Didn't seem like a good time to figure out a way to tell him I got dumped, so I think I just mumbled something.
OK, gotta call the Nerve girl (maybe call her "Nerve I" in case I get some more where that came from, heh), just to find out whether she's there so things don't get awkward.
I record here the results of my experiment, because the result may change once that entry gets archived.
On the "Main" page, only the "Entry Body" (here, the first part) appears on the front page; then you get a link saying "Continue reading <title of post>". Will have to remember that.
The purpose of this entry is solely to test, and provide an example for, the "extended entry" feature of Movable Type. This sentence was entered in the primary, "Entry Body" text field.
As I said in the "Entry Body" field in Movable Type, the purpose of this entry is to test, and to provide an example for, the "Extended Entry" feature. This sentence and the previous one were entered into the "Extended Entry" text field. As well as this one, and probably all that follow.
I just don't know whether both entries will appear together, or whether it's an either-or proposition. That's what I mean to find out.
I found a pretty cool blog last night called A Whole Lotta Nothing. What makes it special is the author's endorsement of Mozilla, in this feature called A Whole Lotta Features. I can't even remember how I found it; might have been searching for the word agreeance, which I am prone to do from time to time.
My laptop crashed last night. I had mounted my old-HFS partition, and was copying stuff over to it, and all of a sudden I got these two, squashed-down, side-by-side windows that mirrored each other, at the tippy-top of the screen. X itself was apparently shot, so these were not windows in that sense; more like what you see when you get a major system exception on Solaris, with an area of text output just overwriting whatever is on the screen. The text was for the most part too squashed down for me to read it, but I appeared to be at some special prompt, not a shell prompt. But as I couldn't read it, I had no idea what was going on. So I rebooted (with Ctrl-Option-power), and it seemed fine after that.
Went to a DCLUG meeting. As these things go, this one really wasn't worth it; I got there more than half an hour late, the topic wasn't interesting, and, it turned out, there were no good conversations going on around me when we all went out for dinner/drinks. But, even though I left work really late (due to my inability to take charge of the situation -- particularly, my inexplicable reluctance to appear as if I had somewhere to go so badly that I needed to leave work by a certain time[1]), I decided to go anyway, just to keep up appearances, really, and remind myself how to get there (once again failed to find the proper way). Anyway, it was pleasant, but not all that interesting, and it cost me a total of $25, including $7 for parking (I always end up parking at that same lot, even though there's allegedly free parking somewhere around there, I've just never been able to find it), and $18 for dinner, including an unnecessary and not particularly enjoyed beer, unnecessary (but fairly well enjoyed) latte, and unavoidable tip.
My blog gripe is with the reverse-order, most-recent-first concept. I'm used to it when reading Slashdot (so I always make sure at the beginning of each day to go to the bottom of the Slashdot page and start reading up), but on this blog, Movable Type puts all the entries for a day in a common box, and for some reason that, to me, makes it look as if that whole block should be read from top to bottom. This is why I felt I had to write about the car noises (which entry is immediately beneath this one), before writing about the event that happened chronologically before that.
I suppose that format is perfect for people who are totally obsessed with a given blog, reading it every hour or so, and are therefore always up-to-date on whatever the author (or organization, for things like Slashdot and Plastic) has posted and have no need to see anything but the most recent entry. But for more general usage, well, it just bothers me. Anyone have comments on this?
[1] All right, maybe it's guilt, from getting in to work at 11 this morning, hardly doing anything all day, and not keeping people apprised of what little I was doing during the day.
Remember how I was thinking about getting a new car? Well... I'm thinking some more. As I was pulling into Old Greenbelt on my way back from the DCLUG meeting, I heard some new noises coming from somewhere in my car (didn't sound like the engine, maybe the transmission) when the car reached its lowest idle.
Thing is, I'm hankering to move to D.C., so the smart thing would probably be to keep the heap going until I actually move, and then either get a new car or dump the whole car thing. Not sure how feasible being carless would be, working where I work. Should I try to get a job in the city first? Crap, does getting a new job mean no free time outside work? For me, it probably does. Oh, bother.
I just hope we're all in agreeance that men and women singing in octaves is an abomination, particularly in so-called "popular music" (a certain style of this is an immediate giveaway that what you are hearing is Contemporary Christian music), and should almost never be used in any other type of music, "unless," as my music theory teacher used to say, "you really know what you're doing."
Henry is eating dried shredded squid. He can't understand why Americans don't all eat dried shredded squid. Now he's going to force me into conversation. Oh wait, he's dialing... oh, never mind, here we go... "How's your life?" <pause> Luckily my answer was so long and boring that he's fallen asleep, so I can go running now. l8r.
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Thought I'd throw that in while it is still the jour de gloire. Which, by the way, is the hardest French phrase to pronounce for me.
Especially in ghetto neigborhoods, which I guess my apartment building qualifies as, in some sense. I just lost six quarters in the only "working" dryer on my floor. That meant I had to:
I used to keep a bookmark to the homepage of a girl I sort of met on the internet. She had some pictures of herself, including one with her wearing a sweater or something with fluorescent stripes across her chest. I definitely remember that she called that picture "laserboobs". Alas, a Google -- nay, a DOGPILE search of "laserboobs" turns up absolutely nothing. You'd think that would be such a popular word. Well, I'm putting it on the web now, so soon you'll be able to simply search for, um, that word (don't want to say it too many times and increase the relevance of that word -- or do I?) and you'll get my lovely blog as the sole result.
I searched for the word because that was the only way I could think of to find this chick -- that plus her name, which I won't divulge here, because it's largely pointless.
Or, the "let's just be friends" email. Our interaction had kind of stagnated, so maybe that's part of why I'm not crushed. The timing could have been a little better, though. I mean, geez, wait until Friday to tell a guy he's going to have some more lonely weekends ahead of him? At least she could have let me keep the illusion through the weekend that I had something going on. This weekend is looking to be like, "Woe is me, I have no life, nobody loves me", rather than "Who cares if I spend all day Saturday on my computer, I have a DATE next week!"
And I never called Tom Lassman. I'll probably never reach him, anyway, but I should try. There seem to be quite a few people who don't use the internet during the weekend, though.
Today, while getting all kinds of lost trying to get on the beltway going in the right direction, coming from a different direction, I was stopped at a light on an off-ramp. An over-the-hill couple pulled up beside me and asked where I got my Linux bumper sticker. That was kind of nice, in a slightly pathetic way.
It happened again. Weird thing is, I was prepared for it, yet it still affected me a little bit.
I'd discovered a number of months ago that my roommate's lawyer was a girl who I went to middle school with. She was pretty, but never got a lot of attention, that I can remember. I badgered him to call her and verify that she was who I thought she was. Well, he finally called her today, and got her number. And at the same time he told me what he had known for a year -- that she had just gotten married. I wonder if the fact that she had "just" gotten married was what was getting to me (theoretically, in my fantasy world, if I had known of her whereabouts earlier, things could have been different), or whether it was just the fact of another door closing. With her being the same age as me, I fully expected she would be married, yet somehow the news got to me enough that I didn't have the courage to call her the same day. I figured I'd feel better after I wrote a letter to my Nerve girl and reminded myself that I still have a chance.
Anyway, now that I know I have no chance with this girl, and more particularly, that she's married and I'm not, and I'm not so good with chicks really, just what do I say to her when I call her? Since we didn't particularly know each other.
It hasn't been long, but I don't think I've seen that awful Armani Exchange ad all day on my Yahoo mail account. I really hope they've stopped it.
Don't you just hate when you're about to shave the back of your neck, and you're bringing the razor around your head, but the head of the razor accidentally brushes your head and slices out a chunk of hair?
Last Saturday when I got my hair cut, the stylist told me I have thick hair. It's definitely thinner than it was, but I guess it's still thick; I think that's supposed to be a plus in the looks department, especially for someone my age.
I was so hoping for George Will to make an ass of himself by saying why states should be allowed to decide what sexual orientations are legal. Instead, the Newsweek I got today has him giving an apparently essentially non-partisan account of what's going on in Calif., and what might happen if some Republican named Issa gets enough petition signatures to recall current Governor Gray Davis. Meanwhile, this pro-gay ruling has got to be the biggest blow to conservatives since Dubya took office, yet he passes on it? Hmm. Must have figured that, with a Republican president and congress (if that makes any difference), and only two dissenters, he really wasn't in a position to second-guess the court. But his hero Scalia dissented; where was the praise for him? I'd been looking forward to that almost since the day I heard the ruling.