Okay, I need to write something. Work is boring so far, as usual. Actually I spend most of my time surfing the web. I've been teaching myself a little of Visual Studio .NET (about which I'm not terribly enthusiastic, needless to say) but it's so large that it's hard to know what skills from it they might want me to make use of at the DMV. My new camera arrived; I didn't realize that Dell would ship it to me first and then have me return the other one. Anyway, I've been taking some quite nice pictures with it. I don't have an incredibly amount of time right now, but let's see if I can figure out how to post at least a few pictures...
Oh, and just a minor warning: I've put in previews, but the images that are linked to are large. At the highest quality setting (which is what I use), my camera takes pictures which are 1600x1200 and roughly a meg each.
Here's the first one, before I figured out how to take non-blurry
pictures:
Here's the first one after I figured out how to take
non-blurry pictures:
This one is my current desktop background on Robert Jr.:
One more of my cats. They're so cute >'.'<:
I spent a lot of today practicing parallel parking with my mom. It was kind of stressful, and I got angry with her a few times, but overall it doesn't really seem quite so hard. I'm still not confident in my ability to pass the driver's test, though. I guess if I do it enough times then I'll eventually pass it. I don't think that I'm a bad driver, though, it just seemed like the guy last time was very critical - although of course that's his job. If I don't get my license soon then my permit will expire, so I'd better do that.
Oh, and apparently the State has installed 802.11b in some parts of the Concourse. I've yet to have a chance to try it out, though (nor do I even know if they have a network name or not). I'm also impatiently waiting for next year's financial aid award to arrive so that I can hopefully order a bunch more computer hardware. I got my two new batteries for Robert Jr. (I'm making use of one of them right now), but I think everything else needs to wait, or rather my father does, and I'm not in that much of a rush.
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I must admit that while I do think having a digital camera will have some serious impact on me in the long run, it also is a seriously awesome toy. I take probably a third of the pictures I do just to see what they'll look like, without even a vague intention of keeping them around. It's managing to make life significantly less boring.
One would think that as I get acclimated to each gadget, its marginal effect as far as being like "ooh, that's a neat gadget!" would decrease. That doesn't seem to have happened, though - at least not much. I still think that having a laptop is incredibly cool, that having a burner and a DVD drive rocks, that my optical mouse is awesome. Hell, I still think that owning my own computer is amazing. I mean, think of all the stuff I can do... I'm not even going to try to name it all.
The world around me almost seems to be moving in slow motion. I haven't had a chance to interact much with friends in person recently, although I finally talked with Charlie again via the magic of the telephone. Incidentally, our telephone line is a piece of shit. I called the repair guy, he came last week and did something, and it is still a piece of shit. They're supposed to come again tomorrow, and I really hope they fix it, because it is quite irritating with the very loud buzzing sound which it currently constantly makes.
I've been reading websites at a rate bordering on "excessive". I've vaguely considered adding people I barely know to my LiveJournal list just so that I have more to read. They might be confused as to why I befriended them, though, and I wouldn't really be sure who to add. Besides, things might pick up at any point, and if there's one thing I've learned from Usenet, it's that when you read enough every day to take a significant portion of your time, it takes a really significant portion of your time to, say, catch up from a missed weekend.
I realized that I need a much more systematic way to file my photos before they become large and very unruly. I expect to have to write the software for this myself, since I don't think anything I can find will quite fulfill my goals. Then again, maybe I'm looking for an excuse to write software. :-) In any case, I will post more pictures, but don't expect too much more until I figure out how to organize them.
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Warning: this entry may be a bit long, mainly because I have a long chunk of time to kill at the moment.
I'm currently sitting in Crossgates Mall. There are several reasons why I'm sitting in Crossgates on a Sunday evening writing an update, two of which I would like to mention. One is the newly instituted policy, loudly proclaimed on numoerous signs, that backpacks (and other large carryable objects) aren't allowed into the movie theater any more. In a possibly self-defeating surge of self-righteous anger, I decided when my father dropped me off that if they were going to treat me like a criminal, they wouldn't have my money. I can't say for sure whether this will hold; likely if I'd had a car in the lot in which to put my backpack then I would have just accepted it. But at the same time, I don't see how there's any reasonable chance that this policy actually will improve security. My guess: the theater saw a golden opportunity in 9/11 to stop people from bringing in food and not having to buy their soda, popcorn and candy at exorbitant prices. Of course, I can't prove it, but I'm starting to become quite cynical about the actions of large corporations.
The second reason is that almost every store in the mall seems to close at 18:00 on Sundays. Now, if the mall would have to keep 500 people here at $10 an hour (I'm guessing) for 3 extra hours to keep the mall open until 21, then they would have to pay $15,000 extra per day. Maybe they are making a wise business choice by closing, but then again, I can't see how the mall makes that much in 3 hours normally anyway... but still, I strongly dislike non-uniform (i.e. varying from day to day) closing policies. I also slightly less strongly dislike the concept of stores closing at all; I suppose it's a business necessity given the economics, but it still feels wrong. I'm used to being able to do whatever I want when I want to. I suppose this ties into the "always-on" nature of the 'net and my predilection for staying up extremely late at CMU.
It occurs to me just how rare people who carry around laptops as much as I do must be. I was looking for people carrying bags due to the aforementioned "security" policy to see how many people in the mall it might inconvenience, and almost no one was carrying a package big enough to hold a laptop (other than shopping bags). Granted, most people have cars here, and are also slightly less obsessive about the need to always be able to use a computer. (I'm not really sure that carrying Robert as often as I do pays off on the balance, although it certainly does this time.) Also, a lot of people would probably be willing to carry a PDA when a laptop would be unpalatable. Still, it ties into an issue of self-image - for me, not having access to a computer is crippling. Even not being able to access the 'net feels like losing a limb. I mean, sure, I won't be able to post this entry for a while, but above and beyond that, I can't check my email or send it, can't read people's LiveJournals, can't check Slashdot or Newsforge or Linuxtoday... granted, not all critical activities, but all part of what I consider to be my basic routine.
I foolishly neglected to even bring with me the book I started (re)reading this afternoon, Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto. I'm reading it fairly critically and I think I'm getting quite a bit out of it. There were also a number of things I wanted to buy but didn't get the chance due to the stores unexpectedly closing on me - missing chapters of Happy 2b Hardcore, the American Beauty score, possibly some DVDs, and - the kicker - a Playstation 2 and Final Fantasy X. I suppose they will all be here the next time I come, or that I can order them online - still, I was hoping to have a new toy to play with this evening.
I'm finding that I am very impatient with a perceived lack of progress. It seems fundamentally wrong that I should ever be doing nothing. This seems to be a mostly positive psychological side effect of this past semester. The only downside of which I can think is that this feeling can impel me to do something when stopping for a while to reflect on what I should be doing might be more productive. I am trying to teach myself that it matters what I am doing, not just that I am doing something. I suppose that so far one could call that lesson a qualified success. Still, I have much further to go before I hit on the optimal formula for how to spend my days.
There's a sign about 30 feet away from me proclaiming that there's a Panera open now in Crossgates. I wasn't even sure that it was a chain, although it did sort of have the feel of one. I certainly didn't expect it to stretch from Pittsburgh to the Capital District, though. I might have even gone there, but I didn't see it any of the times I walked up and down the mall (including the last couple when I was just trying to see if any good stores were still open). I suppose that I wasn't looking for it.
I suppose that I should be grateful, relatively speaking. If I had been stuck here like this a couple of years ago, I would have sat on a bench with a glazed-over look on my eyes waiting for my father to arrive and pick me up. Now I have Robert Jr., I have some music and headphones (of which I haven't yet made use, since I'm trying to conserve things in which I'm interested slightly), Robert has an extra battery, and I have my camera with me - not that I want to take any pictures at the moment, but it currently has quite a few at which I can look, and it's a great toy.
I was in a record store today, and it had a barcode reader hooked up to headphones and a small LCD screen. If you had it read the barcode of a music CD, it would play the first 30 seconds or so of each track for you. If you did the same with a DVD, it would show you the trailer. Can the Heavenly Jukebox, the ability for just about anyone to listen to or watch anything that's been entered into one gigantic media database at any time, be far behind? Yet at the same time I wonder what price we pay for the advances we're making. These things surely are exciting, but I worry that America seems to be dominated more and more by large corporations and a fearful, conformist mindset - spurred on although certainly not begun by 9/11. I worry that our country has responded in exactly the way that those who would destroy it would hope. I pay my dues to EFF, but it still seems that as one of very few who recognizes in what danger we are, I don't do enough to stop it. It's not in my nature to conduct a letter-writing campaign, though - not to mention that I'm not at all sure it would be much more effective than what I'm doing now.
This page is a forum in which I can express myself, but in a way it is also a prison. I say a prison because at times there are thoughts I want to express - like the previous paragraph - that don't really fit into the model of a journal. Obviously this is my journal and I can put whatever I want in it; the problem is that when I want to go back and read my thoughts on America's future (and laugh at how wrong they were, hopefully), there will be no clear way to locate them besides looking through the entire journal. The journal as a form is really only ideally suited for chronicling day-to-day (which is not to say mundane) events, i.e., things which take place at a particular time. I suppose that in time, I will develop the way to organize my thoughts which has been a persistent - if infrequent - desire of mine over the past few years. After all, I have achieved many such things already.
I feel very, very profoundly alone. It's not that I'm lonely - at least, I'm not constantly in the grips of that emotion - but just that I don't have much non-superficial interpersonal interaction. Things will be different at CMU, I suppose, yet I wonder whether I am more alone by myself or among people incapable of really understanding me.
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Alison, thank you for the headset you gave me. Although it was, at the time, a totally selfish gift (which needless to say is no accusation against you, as my gift to you at the time served the same purpose), I still use them. The phones kept falling out of the headband since I carry it around with me so much, but I fixed that the other day with superglue.
You know, the whole concept of using my journal as a way to send messages to people is seeming weirder and weirder to me. Just as a pre-warning, Alison, next time I feel like telling you something, I'm going to just send you an email. I wonder if you're even reading this - it's hard to tell.
I hope the phone at my father's house gets fixed soon...
I've read all but the last chapter of Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifest now. I'm finding that reading it with a critical eye, there are a lot of truths I can extract from it, as well as some things I think she got wrong. (Look at the asymetry in that sentence - things which she and I agree on are "truths", but those on which we disagree I "think she got wrong". Perhaps I'm being too polite, but then again perhaps I should have qualified the first clause as well as the second.) I'm thinking that perhaps I should write down my own thoughts on art - at the very least it would be something to do. (There I go again with that tendency to look really, really hard for something to do and putting not enough thought into what... although there are certainly worse things I could do than write an essay about art.)
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Well, I finally decided to buy a Playstation 2. I did save $100 by waiting for them to drop the price, and I wasn't patient enough to wait for them to drop it again. I also bought Final Fantasy X and a memory card.
I've now started playing Chrono Cross. I was actually putting that off for a few days so that I could play it on the Playstation 2 and have potentially faster loading times and smoother graphics (these are both options of the PS2's Playstation emulation which I have turned on). So far Chrono Cross is a cool game. The music fits much better into the game than it sounded to me when I listened to the MP3s of it alone. The plot has a good "hook", and the gameplay is different than any other RPG I've played if nothing else. I think this is the game I earlier read about as having about 40 playable characters, which is something of which I'm not a huge fan - when you have this many characters, I think that characterization inevitably loses out at least a little, and furthermore, it seems kind of pointless when I can only have 3 characters at a time in my party. But that's not a huge complaint, since I can just ignore the characters I don't want to use. Oh, and the graphics are amazing for a PS1 game. I don't know how they did some of them, such as the battle transition. (The battle graphics are what's most impressive, although the FMV is also good (but not used a whole lot).)
My mom's computer has been having some pretty severe problems. It wouldn't accept the new memory which I tried to install in it, and it's been spontaneously rebooting sometimes when it gets tapped on the side. I think it may have a bad motherboard; she's going to take it to Gateway to see what they think.
While at Electronics Boutique to buy my PS2, I saw the following item, of which I took a picture which I am compelled by its sheer oddness to show you:
Presumably you've seen American dolls or action figures which come with multiple sets of clothes, accessories, or weapons... but only the Japanese would think to put multiple heads in the same package.
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It's hard to believe that it's been almost an entire week since I've written anything for this page. Quite a bit has happened in that period, and I sort of feel like I've lost touch. The fact that absolutely no one is reading this page except me at the moment, coupled with a brief outage of ragnar.nilmop.com due to his unintentionally being rebooted and needing to acquire a new IP compounds this. (He's all set up again now.)
On Wednesday evening I went over to Charlie's new place. At first I wasn't able to tell his kitten, Nuala, apart from Dan's (his roommate's) kitten Quel. (I may have mangled the spelling there pretty badly; if so, sorry Quel.) It was actually pretty easy, though - Quel has a black patch over one of his eyes, whereas Nuala has black above her eyes, but not around them. They are extremely cute and quite hyperactive. They're about 4 and a half months old, if you've ever had a kitten.
Charlie and I talked quite a bit about philosophy, mostly relating in some way to our attempt to come up with a suitable definition for the term "emotion". We both agree that "thought of sufficient complexity" is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, and we didn't manage to come up with another clause to make the definition complete this time. We did discuss a lot of other interesting issues on the way, which served both to clarify things and to locate some differences in our theories.
I also tried to get Linux onto Charlie's "baby", as he's currently referring to his new desktop, since he says it's too dissimilar to his previous Phil hardware-wise to share the name, but I have to admit that I failed miserable. The CD drive didn't work, and floppies are insanely unreliable. We did eventually get one to boot, but then it wasn't able to use DHCP to get an IP address from Road Runner - probably a problem with Linux's DHCP support (which I belatedly realize I have never actually used - at CMU I have a static address, and Ragnar runs OpenBSD). It could also be something to do with the network card - at this point, there's no way to be sure. I'm sure that I'll be heading over there again at some point, and then I can try again to figure out what it's doing.
I've decided that I must have been having a mild psychotic episode or something in regards to Chrono Cross' music when I first listened to it without having played the game. It is a bit less melodic than I typically like, but it's certainly not bad, and I'm starting to pick out favorite songs (out of the ones I've heard in the game so far); currently I'd have to rank Voyage - Home World quite highly.
Basically I've been playing Chrono Cross and working on my program to help organize my digital pictures at home, and killing time and letting things organize themselves (with some help from me, admittedly) at work for my project. That project will be a new application for distract attorneys to access license abstracts; their old one is badly decomposing. I also installed a new version of Apache on Ragnar today, since it appears that the hole is remotedly exploitable; I'm quite unhappy with this, as it was a huge pain in the ass (due largely to never having installed an OpenBSD patch before, but also to Ragnar's slowness and the need to recompile). Sunday is Tara's graduation party.
I need to write something. I also need to play video games. Sigh, the dilemmas of free time and open-ended goals...
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Appallingly little has happened since my previous update. I went to my cousin Tara's graduation party, which was okay. It involved a long car trip two ways with my Aunt Susan and Uncle Ken's puppy, Bandit, but she mostly just slept and didn't bother anyone. Aunt Edith and Uncle Jim (Tara's parents) seemed interested in my digital camera. They printed a reasonably nice picture from it on their computer. I had a rather irritating conversation with a friend of theirs who apparently works for an insurance company and is incredibly stuck-up about his technical knowledge, despite the fact that he doesn't seem to demonstrate very much of it. I survived, though, and as my father reminded me I said to him the last time I talked with him, "I won't work at a company as fascist as yours".
On the trip home, my Aunt Susan and I had an interesting conversation, largely about video game music (which we also put into the car CD player in the form of the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack, courtesy of my CD collection), but also about DVDs, video games in general, and a variety of other topics.
A word of advice: never, ever take a laptop apart unless
I guess that's about it. I've been doing some thinking about the nature of emotion, but I haven't come up with much. I'm still reading, playing Chrono Cross, and letting time pass. I should get my finances in (better-defined) order so I know how much money I can afford to blow... err spend.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sat Jul 13 21:23:52 2002