what is this crap?

i quite frankly don't care if blogger is out of beta, i have no desire to switch to the new layout and especially i have no desire to tie it to my google account (i know, i know, they're tracking the cookies anyway. shut up ;)

but mostly, i refuse to put up with this web two-point-fucking-o semantic bullshit crap. it's bad enough i have to think of a title for each post (because otherwise the archive looks messy), but now, now they want labels, otherwise known as "tags," on each post. fuck off, google. fuck off all of you and your stupid semantic tagging bullshit. it won't work. HTML barely works, for fuck's sake, or why do we have to test webpages in multiple browsers? now you expect random people making up random words to come up with something usable? ha.

end of rant from a bitter geek with critical thinking skills who lived through the dot-coms. hmf. tag that.

aaaaaaand...christmas.

holiday, holiday, holiday. why so many this time of year? because we need excuses to eat lots of carbs and fat so we can hide from the impending winter? mmm...fat. if only we could hibernate.

it just doesn't seem there are as many crowded together in any other 6 weeks or so of the year. at least, i can't think of any. very odd.

well, i hope everyone is having a good time building up a layer of fat for winter protection and exchanging presents :) me, i'm just gonna try to remember to spend my "christmas cash" before august this year.

happy winter.

except it's sort of warm, and raining. el nino does weird things.

all presents are bought! gragh.

happy hannukah.

yes, i know it's a little late. it's been a weird weekend. but not too weird to celebrate the festival of lights!

arms race.

well, maybe we won't switch to verizon's fios after all (whenever they get it installed). just got our bill from comcast and hey, they've silently upgraded our service to 16mbps/1mbps (that's 2 megabytes a second).

neato.

seasonal pleasures.

i am maintaining the illusion that it is stilll autumn. the equinox isn't until the 21st. nevermind that tomorrow's high is going to be 32F/0C.

one of the things i like indulging in when autumn rolls around is buying some real, preservative-free apple cider and then forgetting about it in the fridge until it starts to ferment. i found my half-gallon the other morning, and ooo, it's all sparkly with natural carbonation and mildly alcoholic.

num.

chocolate addictions.

dark chocolate covered peppermint altoids are shockingly addicting. i shall tell myself that i bought the tin in celebration of winning nano again.

now i just gotta find me some of the ginger ones. as in, chocolate covered ginger altoids, not the regular ones. *slaver, etc*

i must be crazy.

third year in a row. and hey, it's finished this time. i actually finished a story o.O

happy thanksgiving.

more colonial-centric blogging.

it is cold and wet and grey here. bleah. but tomorrow's supposed to be nice! and i think the pumpkin ice cream is a success.

15,000 words to go in the nano. will i finish?

further impressions.

so now i've had a bit more of a chance to play wii games besides just losing tennis. wii golf is actually pretty cool (by which i mean i'm better at it than i am at wii tennis :) and it also adequately demonstrates the ability to play the wii like a toolbox.

he's really enjoying excite truck, except for the music. it apparently restricts him to a half hour of playing.

we also did manage to get it online, updated, and also redeemed 500 wii points to buy the original legend of zelda. apparently, we actually ended up lucky in this, because some people are reporting problems with nintendo's online service. i'm wondering if we didn't have any problems because we didn't get around to actually getting the thing online until later in the evening. we have 1500 points left waiting for further purchases, because currently, there aren't any other virtual console games we're interested in. there were reportedly supposed to be 30 titles at launch, but we did not see that many last night. i am also engaging in baseless speculation by pondering the idea that nintendo had to scale back their offerings a little because of network problems.

zelda is...pretty cool. frustrating at times: there are a lot of things to remember...like, if you're holding your lantern, you can still swing the sword just by waving the wiimote. for some reason, the sword isn't accessed by the B-trigger like other items. but then, i'm not much of a console gamer either. the much vaunted fishing takes forever, but i'm actually doing better at the puzzle solving in twilight princess than i was in wind waker. graphically, it's not the most impressive, but no launch title for any console is going to fully be able to take advantage of it, and twilight princess was always intended to be a gamecube game.

oh. he just downloaded a whole lot of music onto an SD card and is now playing excite truck to that.

anyway. for some reason, everyone was sold out of their nunchaku (and this time we're not alone). and i mean everyone: toys'r'us, gamestop, target, and circuit city. we didn't get a chance to check out best buy or the gamestop and eb games in the mall. maybe wal*mart would have nunchaku. except i'm boycotting wal*mart, in a passive-aggressive way. really though, the lack of a second nunchuck isn't in any way a disaster. i'm not interested in wii boxing, and zelda is the only other game we have that uses the nunchuck and that's sincle-player only.

the sensor bar, btw, is tiny. it's way smaller than it looks in the pictures. also, i believe only employees of nintendo call the main controller the "wii remote." i would like to know why they made the two buttons on the wiimote "1" and "2" instead of "X" and "Y" like they are on the gamecube controller and on the DS. it seems silly, since they kept "A", "B", "C", and "Z".

getting the wii itself was shockingly simple. we woke up at 10am, which was when toys'r'us was opening. we had coffee, read the newspaper, took showers, and then drove down (maybe if we'd managed to get there on time, we could have gotten the extra nunchuck, but i don't know how they would have handled line priority between campers and those who had secured pre-orders). got to toys'r'us, walked up to the videogames desk and proffered our pre-order tickets for the console and zelda. grabbed an extra wiimote off the racks. walked out.

whee! or wii! as you prefer.

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

in the end, the crazystupidness paid off, and we have acquired our wii. and an extra wiimote, excite truck, and, of course zelda.

i have already had my ass kicked at tennis.

it's actually remarkably easy to use, and i can join the ranks of people who have reported that the wiimotes work like a dream. no lag, very exact. pretty much identical to using my wireless mouse here. also, the sensor bar is remarkably tiny. and it has sticky feet to keep it from falling off your tv.

we didn't get a chance to set up the second wireless router before we got home, so i can say nothing about retro gaming yet, but we did buy 2000 wii points waiting in readiness for downloadable gaming.

now i am 4000 words behind in my nano, so i am giving up next-gen gaming for the moment, in order to try and scrape this thing into a semblance of readability. since i hate it so much and think it's dumb and uninteresting, it will probably turn out to be my best shot for being published of three so far ;) wish me luck.

democracy in action.

so, tuesday was election day. did you all vote? i hope you did.

i had my first experience with an electronic voting machine, because bucks county hadn't gotten them for the primary last spring. i'm not sure if it was thanks to some protesters or not, but bucks county did not have the fabled diebold machines. we had some other kind that i've never heard of, but were kind of weird. it wasn't a touch screen; it looked more like a touch-sensitive screen that had a big piece of paper on top with the candidates' names and offices. there were red LEDs under the paper, and you had to push a little square to, i assume, complete the circuit and make the red LED light up next to the candidate or ballot issue you voted for. it was interesting.

the other interesting thing i noticed is that while nationally, the area seemed to vote democrat, locally, people voted republican. where rendell and casey took bucks county 60/40 against their republican opponents, the republican state senators and representatives won by about the same margin. and the federal representative was running 50/50 with his democratic challenger until he conceded a loss by about 1000 votes and gave bucks its democrat representative in washington. with all the speculation about what appears to be a wide-open race for the whole country in 2008, it might be worth examining national verses state elections and see where people voted. there were reports that republicans were hitting the local issues hard, so it may be that there's this disconnect in people's minds, and they somehow see the state parties as separated ideologically and politically from the parties at the national level. on the other hand, pennsylvania has always been a staunchly purple state.

and again.

apparently, i haven't learned anything because i am attempting NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row. i'm not feeling terribly confident about this year either, but i still think it's worth trying. everyone has to have a year when they fail, right? ;) or not. hat trick, anyone? :)

anticipation

he's crazystupid and sat outside Toys 'R' Us in the cold wind starting at 3 this morning (we were coming home from a party anyway), but he has secured a pre-order for a Nintendo Wii on launch day.

communicate.

so, a few months after getting his new Palm Treo 650 and a gps receiver for it, he gave in and ordered an internet and SMS package for it as well. which means that i got an SMS package on my phone too.

i feel so...advanced. the SMS also includes IM, so if you allow yourself to polluted by AIM, feel free to add etcmobile to your list and message me.

also speaking of communcation, the cat is feeling threatened. there's this big, ugly, stray tabby cat who comes by occasionally and sits on our patio and yowls at our cat, who growls and gets fluffy and tries to dig through the glass patio doors. i'm pretty sure the tabby is feral, or i might consider trying to chase it off. also, did i mention that it's huge? it reminds me of road rage, sort of. my cat's certainly not going to walk away and ignore this interloper in his territory, just like a road-rage-prone driver isn't going to ignore the person who just pulled out on them. grr, and so forth.

except i've never seen a driver with a tail that looks like a bottle brush.

merde. il pleut.

i never did buy that umbrella.

if i had, possibly, i wouldn't have been preparing to walk home in the rain this afternoon. i forgot my hat this morning and wasn't at all pleased with the idea of walking home with my ipod exposed to the elements. so as i was disassembling it from the headphones and its belt clip, one of my co-workers also exited the office. when i explained i was just about to lock the door behind us, he not only locked it for me, but offered me a ride home.

for some reason, i'm always surprised when someone is willing to inconvenience themselves to help me. i'm not sure what that says about me.

happy birthday to me.

or something.

yesterday evening, only a day late for my own birthday, i managed to successfully make an apple pie. i am quite impressed with this. i keep saying i'm not much of a baker, but between that and the quiche in the fridge, it's becoming increasingly apparent that i am at least competent with the pie genre. whee, culinary accomplishment.

current reading.

Beauty
A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

by Robin McKinley

i really like this one. her first retelling of the fairy tale is definitely different than her second (Rose Daughter). in the foreword to the second, she says she was never intending to come back to the tale. Rose Daughter is much more, well, fairy tale in nature. more fanciful, more flowy. Beauty is told first-person and is much more down-to-earth in style. i may have to buy this one as well. assuming it's still in print anymore.

breaking rules.

circumstances have conspired to make my birthday really inconvenient for everyone this year. it's depressing. i try to keep this refreshingly angst free, but just in case someone decides to talk to me in the next couple of days, i might not be feeling so hot.

happy new year!

it is 5767. well. for some of us :)

it is also the first day of autumn. funny how sometimes the lunar calendar and the solar calendar have these little meetings.

pain and recovery.

he had all four of his wisdom teeth out on thursday. there was quite a lot of blood. for a few hours, even the whole bedroom smelled like it. but now he is recovering pretty well, actually. he says the sutures are already dissolving. insisting on going to work today, although as of right this moment, he's still asleep under the influence of the lovely, lovely hydrocodone. he's also got penicillin and some kind of anti-inflammatory, to try and keep the swelling down.

the weirdest thing about all these prescriptions is that the vicodin was the cheapest. $9.99 for 16 500mg tablets. no wonder people abuse this stuff. it's ridiculously cheap! my sister even says it's cheaper for her to just pay for the pills rather than bother with the insurance co-pay. i can't help but think that at these prices, no one is really concerned about "prescription drug abuse." cheap narcotics! whee! and no, you can't have any ;)

previous reading.

Angels and Demons

by Dan Brown

my mom gave me Angels and Demons to read while on the plane to california. so i did, because i've honestly been curious about the whole dan brown phenomenon.

i have to say, i don't understand it.

about 150 pages into the book, i looked up and said to no one in particular in the airport gate area, "this is a horrible book." and it is, really. the writing is about on the level of a 12-year-old who just took his first creative writing class, with boring, barely developed characters, plot points that rely on ignorance, and horriby overwrought foreshadowing. the language is cheesy and stereotypical (the italian heroine glowers. well, who would have thought?). it's just a horribly written, stupid book.

they tell me The Da Vinci Code is better, and quite frankly, i can't see how it could be worse.

marketing schemes.

so, two months after we acquired our DS lites, nintendo announces they are, in fact, releasing DS lits in the u.s. in different colors. knew he should have waited. i could have a black DS. *sniffle* i might have to look into selling my white one. aww.

arrival.

my tshirt has arrived! whee!

in an unexpected twist, the mailman shoved it in our pigeonhole mailbox. it was a good thing i checked the shipping status this evening, or it might have remained there all week (we don't check mail often).

protection.

i have run into the software copy protection conundrum. having come back from vacation, i had an urge to play warcraft 2 again. i have a bought and paid for copy. i even still have the manual.

what i don't have any more is the CD case. this is because it was run over while we were moving. i have discovered that the CD case was the only place the serial number is stored. so now i am in the awkward position of having to scrape the net to find an illegal serial and/or crack for a game which i legally own.

this is irritating.

happy birthday.

this blog was two years old yesterday. awwwww.

i'm suprised i kept it going this long. i must be somewhere weird on the bellcurve by now.

hello.

i have returned.

a selection of pictures (~200/650) are currently online. more will probably be coming. eventually.

because of flickr peculiarities, they are in reverse chronological order. going to the bottom of the page and clicking on the last one should get you to the beginning of the set. also please note, reverse chronological order includes the fact that the earliest photos are helpfully at the bottom of each page.

bye-bye.

goin' on vacation ^_^ leaving PHL in almost exactly 12 hours. various hotels have internet, but i'm not bringing my laptop, so i probably won't be posting ;) it should be fun. will be back, functionally, next wednesday. see you then.

unhappy conclusions.

i, over the last few days, been doing some schedule math, and i have discovered that in order to safely allow the government to go through their ridiculous security charade, i must arrive at the airport no later than 6:50AM next tuesday morning. this will involve leaving my house at approxomately 5:45AM. and never has the expression "ack emma" seemed more appropriate. luckily, mom has volunteered to drive us.

also, is it just me, or are we hitting an odd convergence here? first, you have this piece of advice:

Try to avoid wearing anything with metal, clothing, jewelry or other accessories that contain metal such as, heavy jewelry, clothing with metal buttons or snaps, belt buckles or under-wire bras.

and then this anecdote:

"I've put up with public inspection for the underwire in my bra, and when I protested, being told to wear a bulky sweater and go braless in the future.

hmm. a bulky sweater. or maybe a burqa? ;)

dear global intelligence community,

i see you done caught yerselves some terrists.

couldn't have waited until after my vacation, could you? *sigh*

current reading.

theology, mostly. just in case anyone was wondering, science fiction and fantasy is easier. i recommend Lord of the Rings and Neuromancer for a little light reading over postmodern theology.

on the other hand, i have a vacation coming up that will include 2 6-hour plane rides and 2 5-hour car rides, so a little theology might actually tide me over for the whole week ;) especially if domestic flights are going to go the way of the UK and start banning laptops/mp3 players/game systems from carryons.

a second woozle has joined the first.

er. heron. i saw a second great blue heron this morning. which is pretty cool. i tried to take a picture of it with my phone, but a) my phone's camera isn't very good, b) the heron was rather the same colour as the rocks around it and c) i can't get the picture off the phone anyway because i have neither the usb cable for it nor bluetooth. oh well.

i know there are two, because after seeing one standing in the creek in the park, i saw the second one in the other creek by the walnut st. bridge.

er. sorry, weather.

wow. severe thunderstorm. and here i've been claiming for years that i'm not a weather sprite.

AT 853 PM EDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING PENNY SIZE HAIL...AND DAMAGING WINDS IN EXCESS OF 60 MPH. THIS STORM WAS LOCATED NEAR PERKASIE...OR ABOUT 19 MILES SOUTHEAST OF ALLENTOWN...AND MOVING SOUTHEAST AT 20 MPH.

THIS IS A DANGEROUS STORM. IF YOU ARE IN ITS PATH...PREPARE IMMEDIATELY FOR DAMAGING WINDS...DESTRUCTIVE HAIL...AND DEADLY CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING. PEOPLE OUTSIDE SHOULD MOVE TO A SHELTER... PREFERABLY INSIDE A STRONG BUILDING BUT AWAY FROM WINDOWS.

we had the hail, the lightning, and the wind. as well as a heck of a lot of rain. this is pretty impressive.

sorry about the caps. the NWS doesn't believe in anything else.

stupid weather.

i wanted a thunderstorm, dammit.

power.

a battery backup has been purchased. whee! now watch it not be used.

this is my 301st post, according to blogspot. i'm surprised it lasted this long.

[update 3:37pm] i am surprised at how simple it actually was to install, including the friendly monitoring software. although i am now out of usb ports o.O

misunderstandings.

thanks to his research for school and youtube, i have finally seen the jon stewart clip where alaskan senator ted stevens now-infamously mixed metaphors regarding an attempt to describe what net neutrality is all about. everyone has jumped on his "the interent isn't a truck that you just dump stuff on...it's a series of tubes." i can understand why. it really is a wonderful sound bite.

but it's also not the most disturbing thing about that clip. the man is obviously elderly, obviously confused, and obviously misinformed. but i can understand why you'd attempt to describe the internet as tubes, mostly because a more common metaphor is to talk about pipes (all sexual innuendo aside).

the real horrifying quote, the one where he really displays his complete and utter ignorance and why we should be afraid of him is later on. growing, apparently, increasingly more frustrated with his inabilty to make his point, he says, "why...why just last friday one of my staffers sent...sent me interent. and i didn't get it until today!"

one of his staffers...sent him internet. the whole internet? that might explain why he's so flustered.

maybe he should be training his brain. no internet or tubes involved. oh. and believe people when they say sudoku is addictive. believe them.

counting down.

4 weeks until vacation! woo!

recovery.

my computer is back. i guess it just needed a little rest. when we tried it again in his office about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, it happily powered up, and has been behaving ever since.

i may try to convince him that we need to drive back to compusa today and get me a battery backup all the same. i am not sure luck can be counted a friend any more than lightning can.

in other news, i think i may need a new laptop. i have discovered that a P-II 300 and 64MB RAM are not enough to browse any reasonably demanding website anymore *cough*. hmm. maybe an ibook? o:)

lightning is not your friend.

we had to run to compusa last night because he needed some parts for work. they're currently having a "warehouse sale" which includes things like old non-hd plasma tvs and all of their remaining ppc macs.

one of the displays was of battery backups with a sign on it that said, "lightning is not your friend!" we laughed and thought it was a cute gimmick and said, wow, it must suck for everyone who lost power in those storms earlier this week.

so we get the stuff we need, which doesn't include a battery backup, and we go home. on the way home, it starts to rain heavily and there's thunder and lightning. it was pretty spectacular. but we get home safe and turn on the computers and start doing all of the time-wasting crap you do on computers, blissfully ignoring the storm outside. our power company seems to be a lot better, or at least, have a lot more redundancy built into its network than the one that services the philadelphia area, and we almost never lose power. at most, we have a few brownouts in storms like these, and everything is on surge protectors anyway.

well, we actually did lose power for a few seconds around 10:30pm or so, i guess. naturally, my computer shuts off. oh well, i think to myself, it was time i went to bed anyway. so i played a little brain training...er...brain age. i don't know why i always think of it with its japanese name o.O and i go to bed.

the computer doesn't turn on this morning.

i am currently typing this on my 7-year-old laptop left over from college and trying not to kick myself for not buying that UPS last night, or at least actually turning off and unplugging my machine when the lightning got close. it's just one of those things, i guess. whenever you play it safe, it turns out to have been totally unnecessary, but then the moment you get lulled into a sense of security, wham. hmf. we're hoping it's just the power supply, but to be honest, i wouldn't mind a new motherboard. the northbridge fan on mine is dying and either abit or paypal or both need to both suffer sever injuries with something preferably blunt and rusty for charging my credit card but not shipping the replacement fan. sigh.

so remember, kids: lightning is not your friend. and it's not you computer's friend either.

plumbing.

mmm. first home repairs. he sort of broke the faucet in the kitchen sink, so we went out and bought a new one. it's really quite daunting to be standing in front of a wall of kitchen sink faucets, especially when you have no idea if you have a one, three, or four hole sink installation. the price range is also quite ridiculous, ranging from about $35 all the way up to close to $500. and does brand really matter? what do you get for a $450 faucet that you don't get for a $45 faucet?

in the end, we settled on a swoopy kohler model (to coordinate with all the other moen faucets in the house ;) with a hand spray thing, since we had determined before hand that there was a hole and a pipe for one. his dad came over to install it. the last time my dad tried his hand at plumbing, he put everything back together backwards. one thing i did learn is that our old faucet had copper pipes connecting it to the water supply, while this new (more expensive) one had nice braided flexible stainless steel ones. the latter are apparently preferable, as we have them on our washing machine as well, and everyone said they were.

the new faucet is the perfect height to fill my watering can.

vacation and acquisitions.

we spent last weekend up in rochester with my sister again, just like we did last year. this time, the rest of the family came up too. except for having to sleep on an air mattress, it was actually pretty relaxaing. mom and dad bought us lots of food. monday after they left, we all went out and spent 6 hours on the boat. we only caught one fish this year, another king salmon at something like 22 pounds. we also didn't get nearly as many pictures, partly because the camera battery died while we were still out in the middle of lake ontario, but also because with my parents and little brother up, we didn't have a free day to go visit wineries this year (he's not old enough to drink yet. legally, at least).

however, due to this vacation, the two of us are now proud owners of Nintendo's DS Lite handheld game thingy. last wednesday was his birthday, and we didn't really get to celebrate it, and on top of that, he had to stay in my sister's apartment sunday doing homework while my brother was out on the boat, mom and my sister were shopping for clothes, and dad and i were shopping for wine. so when we got back, he decided he'd had enough of homework, and he wanted to go shopping too. at an EB store in a mall, he got to play a demo of metroid prime hunters and decided right there and then that was what he was going to spend his birthday money on.

so how did we end up with two of them? i'm still not sure. he's been in a funny mood recently, where apparently i need to acquire things that i'm ambivalent about. when we found the deal on the lcd screens, he insisted i had to get one if he was getting one. when i wanted to return mine, i was not, apparently, allowed to go back to using my CRT. no, we had to run out to compusa and get me a new one.

monday morning after breakfast, he left with my brother, and returned with two DS lites. so now i have one. whee! i've barely even had a chance to play it yet, but it looks pretty fun. it's going to be really interesting, i think, when we get the new console from nintendo (i still haven't resigned myself to the new name), and we'll both be able to hook our DS lites up independently and download content or use them for multiplayer games (i have also been informed, by the way, that we will be getting the new console. this is not an option).

it is, i have to admit, a very pretty little device. i would have been willing to wait around for the console launch to get one, or until nintendo decided to ship other colors over here. it's going to take me some to get used to it, but i am glad the time was taken to make sure left-handers can play some of these games ^_^ otherwise, that would have been a pretty big waste of money. i wonder if the wiimote will also allow hand switching. hmm. even though i haven't had much chance to play, i do like the idea of "pick up and play" games. and everyone else seemed to be having fun with it (while they played brain age or tetris on my ds lite, i read through my sister's copy of harry potter 6).

i think i will go play some tetris now, in fact.

i give up.

third year in a row. i buy cilantro, transplant it, and then it bolts and dies. supermarket for me from now on.

in other news, the basil, rosemary, sage, and tomatoes are doing nicely. i'm still nursing my parsley back to health after it was attacked by a vicious caterpillar.

hope everyone had a good fourth. everyone who had it as a holiday, that is ;)

more photos.

more photos shrunk and uploaded. the "set" (as flickr likes to call them) begins here.

pix.

so i only got 6 photos uploaded and flickr told me i had used 58% of my monthly upload capacity. whoops. gotta get photoshop installed so i can shrink the rest of them down.

but anyway, here's a link to the first few. also, i always forget flickr reverses the order in which you uploaded them, so scroll down partway to start at the beginning of the sequence. it starts at "high water line." more pictures coming, i promise! enjoy :)

flooded out.

i am home from work today because the east branch of the perkiomen creek has flooded out most of perkasie, and they have blocked the bridges i need to get over to get to the office. i've been hearing sirens and helicopters all morning. there's another one overhead right now. according to my office when i called, they're effecting an evacuation of the apartment complex across the street, which backs right up against the creek.

the sun has finally come out however, and i think i'll to try to walk down that way in a few hours and hopefully get some pictures of the destruction *grin* unfortunately by that time the water will have gone down probably (ooo...future perfect!), but i'm not a good enough photographer to snap pictures while firemen are waving at me to go away.

happy summer.

it has come to my attention that i forgot to wish everyone a happy summer on the solstice last week. so. happy summer.

if you can find any in all this rain.

packet loss.

i have nothing to say. but at least we are no longer losing 40% of our packets so i can inform everyone of this.

liquid crystals.

ever since he bought his powerbook, he's been wanting an external widescreen LCD for it. so when a friend pointed me to a deal on 19" widescreens, we figured, hey, why not?

i found out why not. Viewsonic 1912wb LCDs do not scale. at all. if you want to display any resolution other than the native, you're pretty much screwed. this is a problem for me, because as far as i'm concerned, the purpose of having a nice monitor is to play games on it. and i don't want to play games that are all stretched and smudgy because viewsonic has decided to not even allow the monitor to process the signal from the video card.

it has been RMAed and replaced with an Acer AL1917, which can scale, but isn't widescreen. i'm not used to widescreen anyway, and i don't really need it. and this monitor has a more normal resolution, and it scales DOSbox perfectly. no more stretchy badness.

only one problem remains: i can't balance my monitor dragon on top of an LCD.

[edit 11:43PM: no, the dragon is not my zodiac animal. i just thought it looked cool. also. there appear to be no dead pixels! ^_^ ]

also, it's been three weeks since we quit smoking. yay!

cat!

will you please stop chewing on plastic shit??

oh argh.

we are quitting smoking.

this.

is.

not.

easy.

high-definition maundering.

so, there's this whole "hi def" thing going on. a "format war." toshiba has come out with the first volley, the HD-DVD player. last week, at the fabled E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo, sony debuted their playstation3, complete with promised blu-ray in both models.

from the technology side, i believe i understand the various lines that have been drawn. HD-DVD is cheaper. it's high definition. blu-ray is the (slightly) better technical standard. its algorithm allows more data to be stored on the discs. where things get confusing is when the numbers start getting involved. i think 1080p is the best, but is 720p better than 1080i? and what is "standard definition" anyway?

the political (if you will) lines are a little harder to draw. microsoft, toshiba, and intel are the flag-wavers for HD-DVD. sony is the main voice for blu-ray. because of this, a lot of people want to draw comparisons to sony's previous format failures: betamax, minidisk, memory stick, and UMD. but they're missing a main point there. the reason these technologies failed in the market is because they were developed by sony and kept exclusive to sony. sony refused to license the technology, or at least, to license it at a reasonably price. but a quick glance at the blu-ray homepage shows very quickly that this isn't just another sony vs everyone else fight. this time, sony is leading a veritable consortium of developers and collaborators.

now, i don't have an HDTV, and i'm certainly not planning on dropping $600 for a PS3. i'm also not going to drop $400 on an xbox360, which is the whole reason this format war exists in the first place. yes. i'm actually blaming this whole mess on the xbox *grin* sony and microsoft are rivals in the console industry. they're certainly not rivals anywhere else; sony's computers run microsoft windows, and windows talks happily to the myriad of sony devices available. if ms hadn't jumped into the console fray, i don't believe we'd be seeing this battle. but because it did, and because sony is trying to use the PS3 to lever blu-ray into people's homes the way it banked on people buying the PS2 to be a cheap DVD player, micorsoft has to fight them.

i'm probably just going to wait until my relatively new tv dies, and hope by that time dual-format drives have been on the market long enough to be cheap.

enfranchised.

i just voted in pennsylvania's primary election. i have to say, i have possibly never been more disappointed in our government. there was absolutely no publication of offices, candidates, or issues anywhere. lawn signs barely count. who was running? what offices were up for election? hell, who are the incumbents? if you didn't go to the state website and jump through a labyrinthine series of hoops and search functions, you wouldn't even know who was already representing you in congress, or in the state legislature.

cynically, i know it's completely in the incumbents' interests to not publicize this stuff, because if you don't know anything, either you won't vote, or you'll just vote for the first name on the ballot. i left half the ballot blank because i wasn't even sure what function some of the offices performed. this is both a failing of our educational system and a failing of our government, at all levels. why vote for someone if you don't know what they stand for? which is worse, not voting at all, or voting blind and ignorant? sometimes, i don't know. you're disenfranchised both ways.

a democracy relies on an educated and informed electorate. this is apparently fast becoming the government's worst nightmare.

people around the world are threatened, beaten, and killed for trying to exercise the right that we take for granted. it's a money game, sure, but at least there aren't armed guards standing at our polling stations. i'd encourage anyone who's reading this who is also registered to vote in PA to run out right now and vote, as the polls close at 8pm. assuming you did the same thing and took the time to wade through the horrible, confusing mess of candidates, offices, and issues at stake.

switcher.

alright, here's what i don't get about this whole "intel inna mac" thing. why would suddenly changing to the least efficient processor architecture suddenly make a macintosh such a compelling product?

ok, i can understand it for the laptops. ibm basically said, "fuck you" to apple over the whole mobile G5 thing. they were too busy making the new processors for all the new game consoles to worry about the tiny sliver of the market that was apple laptops. compared with a G4, the intel core duo is actually pretty compelling.

but the desktops? i mean, if you really wanted a mac that badly, what was holding you back from the $500 mac mini? why don't people switch to mac? "there are no applications." well, guess what. that hasn't changed. ooo, yes, now you can boot into windows, but doesn't booting into windows on the mac pretty much destroy the point of buying a mac? same goes for games.

so maybe you wanted OSX. it's a pretty operating system. it really is. and it's stable, and doesn't yet have the marketshare to make it attractive to viruses and spyware. but, come on. if you had the $2000+ laying around for a macbookpro, why didn't you just buy dual G5 tower, which is still faster than the core duo?

maybe it's that the x86 intel architecture is comfortable and soothing and somehow makes the process of switching to apple less traumatic. i dunno. maybe i'm just biased, we have 2 G4s both running OS10.4, so i don't see the big deal about the intel macs. it's not like they made any other part of the hardware easy to upgrade, similar to the normal x86 boxes. a mac is still a mac. it still comes with a one-button mouse, people ;) you're still using MacOS. whatever this new compelling crack is, apple is certainly laughing all the way to the bank over it.

more evidence of spring.

the great blue heron is back. i saw him wednesday afternoon walking home from work. at least, i assume it's a him. one would expect the females to be sitting on eggs this time of year, not standing nonchalantly in a creek maybe a hundred feet from traffic.

and i saw a bluebird this year! apparently, they're coming back to the area. it's odd, development hasn't slowed a bit, but we're getting birds back. not only bluebirds and herons, but raptors as well. i've seen more hawks in the past year or so than i ever saw when i was a kid. my dad and i figure that now all the farms are being turned into developments, farmers aren't killing them anymore. funny how that works, isn't it? you'd expect the destruction of open space to result in the destruction of the wildlife, not cause it to thrive. i suppose the alternative explanation is that as human growth encroaches on what used to be the animals' habitat, human-animal interaction will increase, cf. mountain lions in california. i'm not entirely sure that works around here, though, because it's not wild open space that's being built on, but rather space that was already human-occupied. not that i'm an ecologist or an environmental scientist either. perhaps some research is in order. i have heard from other sources already that the eastern bluebird, at least, is actually experiencing a resurgence in this area.

also, all of my tomatoes have now sprouted. would anyone like some tomato plants? :)

i have created life.

my tomatoes have sprouted!

well. some of them.

happy easter.

another spring holiday.

i'm sick. "late flu season" indeed.

good friday service.

one good thing about helping to organize communion at the church this time of year is that i am never faced with the (admittedly somewhat unique) question: is the communion bread kosher for passover?

happy passover.

i ate too much last night ^_^ i shall have to make more matzo balls. i believe it is impossible to have too much matzo ball soup. mmmm....

too far?

last friday we went to see Thank You For Smoking (which, btw, i recommend. it's very funny). it is an R-rated film. attached to the film was a trailer for a new movie called United 93, about the flight of that number which crashed into a field in western pennsylvania on september 11, 2001.

yes, that flight.

from what i understand, the hour-and-a-half long movie is more or less supposed to be in real-time, showing what happened on that flight, bolstered mostly by the phone calls the passengers made before it went down. i can understand that. it seems the movie was made under consultation with the families of the victims, and they feel it's a respectful treatment of the topic. it's slated to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival in lower manhattan.

the issue i had with the trailer is that they cut to the news footage clip of the first tower at the world trade center on fire and the second plane coming in and hitting the south tower.

what. the. fuck.

it's a freaking movie trailer! they don't warn you, they don't have a note that it's attached to the film. you're in there for entertainment, and you see that shot, and it's not a movie, it's not special effects. everyone knows that image. you're watching real people dying on screen. i mean, you have a choice not to go see the movie. i personally won't, i don't think. but you can go see it, if you want. people can make responsible choices. but i'm sorry, i don't expect to see that shot, probably one of the most iconic shots of that day, up on a movie screen for entertainment. they had to stop screening the trailer in a manhattan theatre because people were getting so upset, and quite frankly, i'm with them. sure, make the film. tell people it's out there. but don't use fucking news footage like that in a movie trailer, especially one for a comedy. i don't care if it's an R-rated comedy, and the audience is supposed to be adults prepared to encounter adult themes. it may not be too early to make a movie about sept 11, but it is definitely too early to use that kind of footage in a trailer for it.

of time, and other things.

alright, let's see if blogspot will eat this post. nothing strikes confidence in the heart of a blogger like clicking "Publish Post" and getting the message, "This blog cannot be found."

passover starts wednesday night. so why have i just put a loaf of banana bread in the oven? banana-cherry bread, no less. i'm having a love affair with dried cherries, at the moment. probably because i don't like the taste of ripe bananas, but i also don't want to throw them out. i guess i'll be eating a lot of banana bread over the next 3 days.

post-eating aside, this blog is suffering again, i've noticed. i come up with all these cool ideas while i'm at work, but i can't blog from the office anymore, and equally, since i don't even have my own office anymore, typing them out and mailing them to myself at home is equally fraught with potentially unhappy consequences. the problem is, once i get home, i'm so tired. all i want to do is veg.

oh look. people are over.

enter the n00b.

i spent a fair amount of the time i would normally have been sleeping this evening playing the Guild Wars: Factions preview event with my brother (who is currently at uni in LA, and 3 hours behind me, hence the late nights)and his friend. i had never before stepped into the scary world of MMOGs, so this was an interesting event for me.

on the other hand, guild wars is not, as i understand it, similar to most of the MMOGs out there in that when you form a party with other players and then go out to slay dragons or whatever, the game servers create an "instance" of the world for you, so it's more like just loading up a LAN game and playing with your friends. it actually reminded me a fair amount of the hours i lost to the first dungeon siege game, except it didn't have the intelligence to back the monsters off if you had less than a full party, so your choices were to either pull up a bunch of NPCs and hope the AI is decent, or party with other players and hope they weren't assholes. one thing guild wars does do nicely that i have heard is an issue in world of warcraft is that when an item is dropped, the game decides who gets it, and no one else in the party can pick it up.

i found out very quickly why you turn off emotes and general chat in the common areas. why do parents let their 12-year-olds play these games?

alternatively, given that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, how old can you really be if you think trolling around saying you're 12 is funny?

the other thing about MMOGing is that you have to have pretty fluent party communications, especially when one member (namely, me) is new to the environment and has no idea what's going on. so after a couple false starts, i got ventrilo working. they very kindly walked me through the interface and the distribution of various specialities of my class so that i would be a help, rather than a hindrance, in the whole monster-killing thing.

the preview allowed everyone to start characters at the level cap, which i initially thought was pretty cool, for a number of reasons: i wasn't at a disadvantage because i didn't have time to grind, and it allowed you to pick up any mission because everyone was at the highest level. they pointed out some disadvantages to it though, namely that you're given all these spells and "elite" moves, and not having level-ground your way up, you actually have no idea how they work or how to strategize with them.

it was pretty fun, all-in-all. guild wars does get rid of one of my main reasons not to play a MMOG, that is the monthly fee. once you buy the client, GW is free to play whenever you want. on the other hand, i'm hardly all that social in meatspace; i'm really not about to group with a bunch of grinders or griefers just so i feel i'm getting my money's worth. also, factions appears to be heavy on the PvP (player vs. player), and the whole reason i like RPGs is because i'm not interested in deathmatch. i did also spend a fair amount of time this weekend waiting for my brother to be done eating, or playing raquetball, or doing homework. i'm not sure i'd like to make this a weekly event. so i probably won't end up buying the game. but at least now i'm no longer a complete n00b.

spring.

today is the first day of spring (ok, in the northern hemisphere).

it snowed this morning. promising.

it is also, not coincidentally, the second anniversary of getting our cat. two years ago, the first day of spring fell on a saturday, and i was feeling bored, so i said, "want to go get a cat today? i found this shelter online." and he said, "sure." so we went down, and we looked at all the cats, and we fudged the paperwork, and we got approved to take a cat home.

he seems to be pretty happy with the arrangement.

a discovery.

in an attempt to demonstrate something to my somewhat technically challenged sister, we switched the SIM cards in our cell phones this afternoon. this let to a fascinating and completely unexpected discovery: my phone's firmware appears to be unlocked. while hers complained about being loaded with a cingular SIM, mine happily accepted her t-mobile SIM, signed onto the network, and made calls.

what does this mean? well, nothing really as far as practical considerations. theoretically, it means, should i ever find myself stranded in europe, i could purchase a pre-paid SIM and use my phone on the european networks. which is kind of a cool thought.

impulse purchase.

my old printer finally gave up it's ghost this evening; it must have been at least 10 years old. we got it as an upgrade to the dot-matrix with our first 486 computer, so it was fairly well along in life. having been built for such a computer, however, the thing was nice and fast on modern equipment. ah well.

since i had a pretty much a good experience with a canon printer, we replaced it with another one, the Pixma iP4200 (who comes up with these names?) while pondering printers in staples, we happened to notice that this printer came with a rebate if it was bought simultaneously with a canon digital camera, camcorder, or any desktop or laptop printer.

now, i have read pretty much nothing but good things about canon digital cameras, and i admit to wanting one for a while. a couple years ago, i won a free kodak digital camera, but it was already showing its age then, and is even moreso now, to say nothing of eating batteries like candy (i know, i know, maybe i shouldn't buy such cheap batteries). so, pretty much on a whim, we also purchased a PowerShot SD450

o.O

i look forward to playing around with it once its battery is charged.

fixed.

i couldn't find this information anywhere on pages and pages of google searching, so i'm posting it here. now, everyone link ;)

how to fix the font for cmd.exe in fullscreen mode in windows xp/2k:

1. open up c:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt (c:\winnt in 2k).

2. put "mode con: lines=25" at the bottom of the file.

3. save the file.

and there. no registry hacking, no downloading of extra fonts necessary. just one line of text and you get normal, unsquished console font in fullscreen mode. yay!

stupid brain.

i wish "i had nightmares last night and now i'm having trouble concentrating" was a valid reason to miss a day of work.

cycling.

i'm going through a gaming phase right now. it's kind of weird. i guess it really started back in the fall with Dungeon Siege 2, and interspersed that with a little Legend of Zelda: Windwaker. then, having beaten neither of them, i went on to DOSbox and Darklands. it was somewhere in there that i realized i was using my athlon64 3500+, geforce6800gs, and 1gb ram to play a game that came out in 1992. so instead of going back to the final boss battle in DS2, i bought Morrowind GOTY edition, and now i've purchased Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.

do i like RPGs? maybe.

what's funny is about this time last year was when we actually bought the gamecube and a bunch of games for it, which i haven't beaten either (pikmin, pikmin2...)... i wonder what it is about winter that sends me headlong into the comforting arms of interactive electronic entertainment. the really funny thing is that the downstairs is always cold in winter, so we went and bought the gamecube and then didn't use it for like 6 weeks until the weather warmed up and we could sit in the living room without wrapping up in the blanket.

videogames are, i guess, pretty task-oriented, which makes them different from reading in that the unfolding of the story is incumbent on the player for progression. there's a fair difference between solving a problem or whacking away at enemies and turning a page. maybe there's something about the effort involved that makes videogames more distracting than books.

Alison at Blue Bell.

last friday, we went to Alison at Blue Bell for my dad's birthday. we went there last year too, but last year i had a fever topping 101F, so i'd have to say that was probably a less-than-representative experience at the little BYO. why did we go? i don't remember. it seemed like a good idea at the time. this year we were back in the same table, the big round one in the corner of the tiny blue-and-gold dining room, the only table set up to take more than 4 people at once. alison barshak herself came over to introduce herself at about the end of our meal and was very gratified to learn that my father is also an acquarius (her birthday had been the previous sunday).

the menu is very seafood-heavy, perhaps recalling her intial big splash in the philadelphia restaurant scene at the now-scandal-ridden Striped Bass. previously-scandal-ridden, perhaps i should say. neil stein is heading to prison, and stephen starr's new chef, christopher lee, has launched the restaurant into inquirer food reviewer craig laban's coveted four bell rating.

i had smoked salmon with potato pancakes and sour cream for my appetizer, a cute little take on jewish deli food. the salmon was delicious, and paired perfectly with the smooth sour cream and the warm crunchiness of the pan-fried potato pancakes. this also went really well with the blanc de noirs my father had brought to celebrate his birthday, although uncharacteristically for him, he had also brought a 1996 Ridge cabernet sauvignon, which meant that he and my mom and anyone else who wanted to drink the wine really only had a choice of two dinners on the menu.

i had the crispy monkfish, which i think was crusted with potato starch and pan-fried. then the steaks were balanced over possibly braised frisee and new potatoes. as soon as i handed my menu to the waitress, i instantly managed to forget how it was described, so even when it came out from the kitchen, i wasn't sure what i was eating. monkfish doesn't go with cabernet. mom and dad both had rack of lamb with minted yoghurt sauce, reflecting alison's recent trip to turkey. arcade had a greek salad for his appetizer which came with a deep-fried tube of phyllo dough wrapped around creamy feta, which i split with dad and so at least got to taste the wine.

the kitchen is also extremely flexible. when my sister mentioned her discomfort with truffled cream as a garnish for her crab cakes, the waitress instantly and kindly suggested they be made with ordinary cocktail sauce instead.

we weren't originally planning on dessert, but then we saw the dessert menu. so mom had a goat cheese, fig, and walnut tart, dad and his mom both had sorbets, i had a chocolate-espress-chile pot de creme. yes, chile. wow, that left a zing in your mouth. being my family, everyone had to have a mouthful, and everyone said, "where's the chile?" and then i would say, "just swallow." and then you could see eyes widen, and, "whoa." i don't remember what everyone else had. dad and i traded off desserts about halfway. hehe

much better than last year's experience. i'm sure the lack of flu had a lot to do with it. i'd like to go back, actually, and try the duck taco again, because i remember it being disappointingly dry, but i'm not sure it was the duck, not me. she does only take cash or cheque, which can be a bit awkward when everyone has unplanned desserts. i'd still say it was worth it for that pot de creme. zowie.

regression.

i didn't make the ginger cake in the end. i downloaded DOSBox and spent 2 1/2 hours playing Darklands. how pitiful a gamer do you have to be to get yourself re-addicted to a game that was already being given out for free in 1995?

i am lost forever to its pixilated glory. "Endless replayability" is something of an understatement. viva open-ended RPGs.

cabin fever.

there is over a foot of snow on the ground. i have not been out of the house all day. having made inauthentic cornish pasties for dinner, i am now tempted to make gingercake (it's caffeinated!!!) oh dear *grin*

philosophy clash.

i've been following this case of the danish newspaper cartoons with some interest (if you haven't, there's a nice timeline about halfway down that page). what's become interesting to me is not the actual events, including the violence which i think we all deplore, but the language between the governments.

basically what happened was a danish newspaper commissioned and printed a series of cartoons which mocked extreme islamists, including one of the prophet muhammed wearing a turban which looked like a bomb. apparently, islam does not allow the prophet to be depicted. so the muslims naturally were upset about this. the newspaper issued an apology, and the danish government issued a statement which was not exactly an apology, but which effectively said the newspaper was being irresponsible. so far, this is all fairly normal with how these kinds of things are handled.

then it gets interesting. the governments of various muslim countries, including pakistan, libya, and saudi arabia, started demanding that the danish government take some kind of action against the newspaper. the danish prime minister responded by saying he can't; denmark has free speech and free press laws which do not allow him to do anything other than what he's already done. then the protests and the violence started.

essentially, what i see is that these countries simply have no concept of a "free press." when the danish prime minister says he can't do anything about the newspaper, the answer seems to be, "oh, come on. you're the government. now that you've paid lip service to your 'free press,' it's time to take some action." there really appears to be no conception of a government that does not control its media. i would bet if you asked your ordinary palestinian or lebanese protester if the danish government controls its press, the answer would probably be something like, "of course they do. oh, they say they don't, but everyone knows the government controls what's printed." because there they do. the idea that a government can't is more than alien to them; it's entirely unknown. and so the problem becomes that they see the publication of these cartoons as tacitly approved of by the governments, and therefore an admission of an anti-islamic bias. because everything the press does has to be controlled by the government, right?

this dispute goes well beyond any religious questions into the more fundamental philosophies of government and power. this, i think, is what the islamic governments are really upset about: that the governments of the west are really not like them, they do not wield power in the same way, and they actually do respect the freedom of expression. it is this that is so upsetting and incomprehensible, in the end. how can they sit down and work with someone who they can't even understand? if the danish government would only take the same kind of action they would take, the diplomatic outrage would be much less. but now they are faced with apparently maintaining ties with an ally who is much more opaque than they ever imagined.

timing.

having realized i was in danger of updating on a regular schedule, my body appears to have decided that obtaining a virus would be a less drastic course of action. i have been sick for a week now.

i'm exhausted. and this isn't even flu, just a nasty head cold. ugh.

bad buzz.

do not buy a PNY "Attache'" usb flash drive. they are cheap. they are very cheap. not only do the cases come apart and are occasionally on upside down, but merely dropping a device meant to be portable causes the internal electronics to become unattached from its protective case. this causes the flash chip and its attached usb jack to be pushed inside, rendering the stick and any data on it useless unless you have a fair amount of patience, luck, and a pair of needlenose pliers. and some very strong epoxy. or you can find someone else who does.

yes, that happened to me today. you'd think they'd have built it a little more robustly, since the whole purpose of the thing is to be transported around (and before you ask, no, it wasn't my purchasing decision. the office bought half a dozen of them because they're cheap).

i shall now go into hiding from the pny lawyers ;)

a review.

The Brothers Grimm.

Directed by Terry Gilliam, Produced by the Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

at one point in the late 90s or circa 2000, i realized that i had, through no conscious effort, seen every movie terry gilliam ever directed. so i suppose you could say that i'm something of a fan of his and also somewhat versed in his filmmaking style and preoccupations. this movie will not go down as one of his best.

the basic plot is thus: it is the early nineteenth century, in western germany. the brothers grimm, jakob and wilhelm (or jake and will, played by heath ledger and matt damon respectively) are con artists who employ slow sidekicks to "haunt" towns for a few weeks, at which point the brothers ride up and perform shiny exorcisms. the commander of the invading french forces, played by a misused jonathan pryce, has on his hands a german village with a real haunted forest. he kidnaps the brothers grimm and sends them off to, as he thinks, expose their fellow charlatan.

so far, so good. it has all the hallmarks of a good terry gilliam flick: stories, medievalism, the question of where reality stops and where imagination begins, and jonathan pryce.

but it doesn't work. oh sure, the costumes are marvelous, the scenery and camerawork are breathtaking. but matt damon is way too much of a "movie star" to be in a gritty little flick like this. i'd almost go so far as to say brad pitt and bruce willis are better actors than matt damon. and i don't think at this point there's any question about heath ledger. but matt damon looks like he's acting like wilhelm grimm; the willing suspension of disbelief never really gets there. although i suppose that could be chalked up somewhat to the severe lack of character development anyone gets.

as for jonathan pryce... in any other movie, he'd be at the beginning, sending the brothers off to this remote little village somewhere, and then he'd drop out and you wouldn't see him again. but gilliam keeps returning to him, like a bad penny or a hangnail you just can't stop pulling at. he tries to throw in a whole sub-plot and makes the character an out-and-out sadist. and another seeming obsession of gilliam is torture. but these scenes pale in comparison to some of his others. they lack the creepiness of michael palin in Brazil, nor are they farcical like the sultan's opera in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. they just feel tacked on with minimal relevance to the plot. they don't give any urgency to the quest of the brothers. you just want the movie to get back to the village and its forest.

that liminal space between storyteller and audience, between dream and waking is where gilliam has always shown himself master, and in that respect, this movie is no disappointment. and while he pulls no punches visually and seems to enjoy putting gross stuff on the screen, it's never felt nearly as superfluous as it did in this movie. i actually found myself wanting more of matt damon and less of jonathan pryce (and his really irritating torturer sidekick (peter stormare) and the could both have totally lost the accents, argh).

the village trapper, a young woman whose family were the first to fall victim to the haunted forest, and the mad queen both seriously needed more screen time. the movie could have probably been a whole lot better if all the characters had been given some serious development, and the story of the forest given 90% of the content and time.

i'd probably give this movie two whatevers out of four. how about carrots? does anyone rate anything by carrots? i'll give it two carrots out of four for the main plot, the scenery, the costumes, the camerawork, and everyone's acting but matt damon's, jonathan pryce's, and peter stormare's. it's not a bad film. but it's not a good one either.

snuggle.

nothing to say today, just found something cute: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4627950.stm

although it does raise the question, if hamsters and frozen mice are unacceptable, what is that snake eating?

it must be the drugs.

occasionally, when we are feeling drunk and nostalgic at a party, the whole group of us will devolved into reminscences of the days when we took way too many drugs. for instance, you know you're taking too many drugs if you're watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at 11am, you're already stoned, and you have to turn to each other after the narrator's opening monologue and say, "ok, we don't have a drug problem."

we happened to end up in one of these reminscences about 3am new year's eve, when some friend who hadn't been hanging out with us during that period asked what it was like. then people started telling stories of being on acid, probably because acid and/or mushrooms make the best stories. "the more someone tells you you're going to be ok, the less ok you probably are." but i'm sitting here and listening to stories of bizarre repetition and seeing music appear and watching the dancefloor open up to the pit of hell and demons come out, and i'm thinking to myself, "shit, i have dreams like this anyway. why would i want to do this? at least i can wake up from dreams."

continued.

yesterday's post ended with a topic i think deserves a rant of its own *grin* for a brief moment a couple years ago, it really seemed as if we'd shaken off the last of our puritan roots and really embraced food as something to be enjoyed. there was fusion, there were gastropubs, the american public was becoming interested, and even more importantly educated, in wine and tea and cheese and so forth.

but now, it feels as though everything must be scientifically rationed out, so that we make sure we get the maximum amount of vitamins, minerals, fiber, omega-3s, and polyphenols and the rest of the antioxidants. never mind pleasure in food, now it's all about dividing up everything, weighing it, making decisions on what chemicals will make us live longer. leafy, green vegetables and whole grains and wine and are we allowed to buy bread that has less than three grams of fiber per slice and no flaxseeds? are the carbs slow enough, do they have the right glycemic index? soy protein or chicken? did you get enough lycopene today?

sheesh. whatever happened to balancing carbs and protein and vegetables and then just enjoying the food? or wine or beer for that matter. americans are so weird about alcohol; either we drink to get totally smashed, or we have to work it into this baroque calculation like, well, red wine is good for your heart except red wine has more carbs than white, so if we have a glass of white wine and have less carbs and alcohol, can we make up the tannins if we have a cup of green tea later on? it's amazing people eat at all, the way food is obsessed over. and then there's the slow food movement, and the portion of the population that won't eat anything unless it's convenient, and apparently fresh herbs are scary.

i mean, really. what the fuck? eat to enjoy, don't eat to excess, and don't expect a handful of flaxseeds or a bowl of oatmeal will help you if you're eating taco bell for the rest of the day. if people really sat down and thought about food from a pleasure aspect instead of from a convenience or chemical profile point of view, i think a lot more people would not only start eating healthier and being happier, but they'd realize that food is not, in fact, scary. there's a simple pride in learning to cook a simple meal. forget the french. forget the meat thermometers and the pastry brushes and the lemon zester. grill a steak and bake a potato. steam some broccoli. open a bottle of red wine. a perfect, simple, balanced dinner. wow. who would ever have thought?

a theory.

so there's been a lot of news recently about obesity. and a lot of hysteria about it. so i started thinking, why, all of a sudden, are people getting fat? i mean, from everything i've ever heard, they ate plenty of white bread and other refined carbs in the 50s. and they had desk jobs and cars and labor-saving devices and tv. is it really the portion size creep?

and then i noticed the nutrition facts label on my breakfast cereal. because it claims it's high protein, it needs to include the government's recommended daily allowance for protein on its label, which is something, btw, most products don't need to include. imagine my shock when i see that our government actually recommends that out of 2000 calories a day, 65g of them be fat, but only 50g be protein. now, i'm not into the whole low-carb atkins thing, and neither am i into treating every morsel of food as if it's part of a detailed chemical formula for longer life, but i think at some point, logic ought to take over.

happy new year.

i thought i'd wait a bit and see if it really is a happy new year. one week into it, it certainly is better than some new years have been. it's always struck me as an odd concept to have the year start in the middle (effectively) of winter. i'm not sure it can entirely be a happy new year when we're rather in the darkest part of the year. maybe it's happier in australia or something. now with the holidays over, there's nothing but cold and greyness to look forward to until the middle of march or so.

i don't tend to make new year's resolutions. as if winter isn't depressing enough, you have to start the year stressing yourself out? come on. i think the real reason most new year's diets fail is because it's already cold and dark, and then you decide to deprive yourself of fat or carbs or chocolate or whatever. ha. good luck with that one. it all seems so aribitrary, really. and while i certainly need a new job, nothing about january first is going to make me more eager or motivated to get one. job searches suck. i hope to get one this year, but to make a resolution about it just adds to the stress of the whole process. i also wanted a job by the end of last year. that didn't do me any good. so instead, i will continue my job search, and i will continue my nano, and i will continue to eat chocolate and cut back on refined carbs and trans fat and try to eat more vegetables and drink more green tea, because that's what i've been doing all along anyway.