The email list seems to have dramatically slowed down, as has just about everything else. Ed's back from Germany, so we've exchanged a number of emails since then. (But Kenn, zero's a number!) I've formulated a plan to teach him philosophy this fall; time will tell how well it works.
The DA Abstract program at the DMV is just about ready to go - it, well, generates abstracts now. That's a good thing since my boss is getting back from his 2-week vacation on Monday.
I rented and watched Not Another Teen Movie since writing my last entry. It was amazingly funny, but it along with the first track of Project Majestic Mix pointed something out which I have a particular distaste for - the good free-riding off of the great. In the case of Project Majestic Mix it was what I thought was a reasonably nice version of the Prelude (although it was all over the place stylistically) which, for me, is almost unlistenable and which I usually skip because it excerpts the Final Fantasy Theme and does so in a way which is not suitably reverent. For Not Another Teen Movie it was the parody of American Beauty (since when is that a teen movie, anyway?). At first I thought it was amusing, but it became less so, and in a scene near the end when Jake punches the bag floating next to the character who's a parody of Rickey from American Beauty's head and declares "I don't know what that was for", my inner voice says "I do. Jealousy, because you know you could never make a movie as good as American Beauty."
I desparately wanted a wallscroll of the promo picture of Yuna from Final Fantasy X but wasn't sure if I should hold off until I knew whether or not I liked the character. I compromised and asked Charlie whether he thought that I would like her or not (or at least that I wouldn't hate her). When he said that he thought she was a reasonably strong female lead, I immediately ordered it, and have been obsessively tracking its progress from Hawaii via UPS's website. I think it will fit very nicely into my room this coming year.
I'm really excited to have a single. This will be the first time in my life when I've been so sovereign over my own territory - honestly, I feel more free in that regard at home than I've ever felt at school with a roommate. I have big plans for organizing my furniture and so on. :-)
I went over to Charlie's house again Tuesday night and played Project Majestic Mix for him, played Chrono Cross some more, and had a taurine-based drink for the second night in a row (thus breaking my rule to not consume them in too close succession). I'm going to go without them for a fair while now, not only to make sure they don't start to lose their effect but also because I've needed to make up some sleep that I lost due to them (not hour-for-hour, of course, but still more than I'd like). We also talked about aesthetics a little bit, but didn't come to many definitive conclusions. I found a book on Amazon in the same series as my book on epistemology which I'm rereading, an intro to aesthetics, and I'm thinking that I should order it to get some concept of the field.
On Wednesday I went with my aunt Susan, Brian, Natasha and James (who was visiting from Connecticut) to the drive-in. We saw Austin Powers in Goldmember and Mr. Deeds. The first was good, if a little predictable; I'm afraid that the Austin Powers formula is becoming slightly worn, but it was still pretty enjoyable, the opening scene especially so. I was not at all expecting a romantic comedy out of Adam Sandler, but he pulled it off fairly credibly in Mr. Deeds. Looking back on the movie, there were many things that probably should have seemed unbelievable, but I seem to have automatically invoked my suspension-of-disbelief module (of course, a lot of that is required for Austin Powers as well).
So, overall I've watched quite a few movies recently. I'm hoping to make this something of a trend - it would probably be worth it to be able to rent movies at CMU, if only I had a car! As is I don't know if it's worth the trouble.
I guess that's about all I have to write for now. I have a lot of thoughts about what I need to accomplish over the next year or two, but they're somewhat fuzzy, and I have a feeling they'll get a lot clearer once I'm back at CMU actually doing some of them.
I shouldn't have let this go for so long. Now it will be difficult to even remember what I've done since my last entry. I do know that I've watched several movies, though. On Monday evening I went over to Charlie's and watched both Clerks and Chasing Amy. I was "back in my old movie-watching mood", in which I pretty much unquestioningly accept the message that the maker of a film is trying to give to me. Clerks was very funny at times, but it also had some more serious moments, and was definitely very impressive for a movie which as Charlie said was made on six credit cards. Chasing Amy wasn't really a comedy at all, but I liked the characters in it probably more than they deserved. Anyway, I have now seen all the previous movies and can see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back when I get the chance.
Other than that Charlie and I just watched Futurama and Family Guy. I ordered my copy of Squaredance (technically the first A should be red, but I don't know any way to do that that isn't profoundly ugly or in violation of the HTML spec or both) within the first minute or so after it was available. I thought it might be difficult to get one, but as it turns out they've only sold about 650 of their 900 sets even now. They're not going to number them, unfortunately, since I managed to get order number 7 (on a brand new ordering system which hadn't been reset since doing a test run, so it was actually the 6th order :-).
Speaking of numbers, I registered my computers for network access at CMU. I used Robert's wired ethernet card as a probe (since I'm probably not going to be using it much what with wireless available and another ethernet card in his docking station) to find out what addresses I could get. The probe got 128.2.164.99, so I gave Laura 128.2.164.100, Ragnar 128.2.164.101, and Robert's docking station 128.2.164.102. This means that I now have about 1 billionth of the world's IPv4 space, or 6 times my allotment as a citizen of Earth, but I don't anticipate that even the Mudge subnet will run out due to me. I'm thinking of just making robert.nilmop.com a CNAME for robert.wv.cc.cmu.edu (whose registration was never purged, incidentally). It's kind of ugly, but I can't really think of any other way to make it useful.
I'm in the last dungeon in Chrono Cross, so I should be able to beat it this weekend unless something goes horribly wrong. Currently I'm trying to figure out in what order to trigger the Elements so as to get the good ending (fortunately I was smart enough to realize that I had to do something). If everything goes according to plan, I'll be able to start Final Fantasy X at most a week or two after I go back to CMU.
I failed my road test again, badly, with 60 points. My sister somehow got an appointment in Catskill on Wednesday to take it again and is going to give it to me (and then I'll cancel it if I decide I don't want to take it). Of course, giving it to me involves cancelling, then rescheduling, so it's not a sure thing that it even worked (she was going to do it last night), and I'm not sure that I want to take it again, but I probably should anyway. I honestly don't know if I will at this point though.
Getting back to movies for a bit, my mom lent me The Shipping News, which she had rented. It had Kevin Spacey in it and he acted well (as always, in my experience so far anyway), but it was hard to really like any of the characters, since they all had serious problems (even if they weren't their faults). It seems that to be great requires a truly special person who can take whatever his circumstances are and mold them into something that doesn't leave him permanenty scarred.
Well, last things first: I'm back at school, and my room is huge. It could really be a double, and it's just so cool to say "I'm reserving this part of the room for empty space" (so there's a good spot to watch TV from). My father took off for home early this morning. We took my grandfather's car, which he just got; it's a white Subaru station wagon.
I drove most of the way, yet we took the "fast" route, which goes mostly through Pennsylvania. How is this possible, you wonder? Well, yes, it's true: I am now a licensed driver. Here's the story:
The week before I was returning to school, my sister logged on to the DMV road test scheduling application. She saw an available appointment for this previous Wednesday at 9:00 in Catskill (which she wouldn't have even seen if my father hadn't told her to check it). She scheduled it, intending to cancel it and let me take it if I wanted to.
Well, I agreed that I would take it and then cancel it myself if I decided I didn't want it, but when she did cancel it, it didn't show up immediately on the application. We tried again in the morning and it still wasn't there. I figured that someone else had already taken the appointment, but my mother wanted to check it one last time, at work, and it did finally show up there. So now I had an appointment scheduled, two days before I was to go back to school.
When I went to take the test, at the end when the instructor told me to pull over to the side of the road, I was sure I had failed the test, because she hadn't even had me do a three-point turn. I was quite surprised when she said that I had passed. I think that she decided the three-point turn could be left out since there was a line of 5 or so cars at the road test starting point and only the one instructor.
Well, that's my story... I'll post a picture of my room once I'm finished moving in.
The first week of classes was good. Continental Philosophy looks to be a bit of a mixed bag as far as the content we're covering, but on the good side, Cavalier is a friendly professor, and it's good for me to cover some of the classic philosophers in a bit more detail. Value, Fact and Policy doesn't look like the greatest class that could ever exist, but it's not too bad, and Covey is a very interesting personality - based on what Mark's said about him and my experience with him on Tuesday (he wasn't in on Thursday since he was coming down with the flu), I think I'll get along with him pretty well. Compilers looks like a really cool class with a lot to offer - and the officially supported languages are SML, O'Caml and Java. :-) Game Programming looks very open-ended, which is exactly what I want it to be - I'll probably end up working with Mark on the final project. Oh, and an overall result of my class selection - I have zero finals this semester. :-)
It's kind of weird to have girls on the floor. In a way it's good - it's more aesthetically pleasing to look at girls than it is to look at other males, at least to me. (God it sounds like I'm making excuses for being a womanizer. ;-) Of course, they took the "good" bathroom, but the "bad" one doesn't really seem all that bad so far this year, and it's much closer to my room anyway. My room is at the far end of the hall - I didn't expect to get this one, but I think it probably ended up being a good thing, as my room is huge. As promised, here are some pictures:
I decided that I didn't feel like playing through Chrono Cross again at the moment, so I started Final Fantasy X. So far, it's amazing, especially the sheer amount of work that must have gone into making some of the graphics which you only see for a couple of seconds (or not at all, if you don't happen to explore that area). The game is a lot of fun too, and the only thing I really have to complain about so far is that it may make it hard to go back and play the earlier Final Fantasies.
I've seen a few more movies since last time. First, I watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Now, I thought that I was just watching the other movies in the "series" before this one because it seemed like the thing to do, but Jay and Silent Bob was actually pretty heavily based on the plots of the earlier movies, in particular Chasing Amy. I kind of wonder where Kevin Smith is going to go from here. I wish him well.
Next was UHF. Mark watched it with me and it was very funny. The fake commercials, in particular, were hilarious. ("Spatula City, we well spatulas - and that's all!") I borrowed it from Ed, but since it's so funny and also so cheap, I may have to buy a copy myself.
Last was Mulholland Drive. I was very sleepy through the second half of it, which didn't help since the movie was already immensely confusing. I'm pretty sure that parts of it mean something, but I had the experience of going to sleep pretty sure that one character's name was one thing, and waking up to hear her being called something totally different. Of course, I've heard that even if one is awake throughout the entire movie, it's still pretty weird, so I'm probably going to watch it again at some point to see if I can make any sense of it.
My discussions with Ed are going well. My room is easily big enough for both of us to hang out in and watch TV or discuss things, and I think he has at least some degree of the basic knack for philosophy, so hopefully we can both make some progress by this experiment - him by figuring out more about the basic nature of the universe, and me by refining my pedagogical technique.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sat Aug 31 15:53:03 2002