A good overview of Mac OS X intended to dispel certain misconceptions. The author assumes you have a good grounding in various operating systems, particularly UNIX or UNIX-like OSes.

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Jan 10

plodding onward

This entry was, for better or worse, inspired by today's entry on Incidental Findings (scroll down or browse the archives, as there are no permalinks.)

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Jan 10

more personality tests

How disturbing. This only further corroborates the notion that I am doomed. (It doesn't help than an ex-girlfriend once compared me to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights)

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Jan 10

compiling gaim with ssl

in order for gaim to connect to MSN, you need to have some form of SSL compiled in. I hear that mozilla's headers contain what you need, but the instructions to compile gaim with ssl by mike styne (as recommended by the gaim maintainers) describe compiling it on OS X with gnutls. good luck, and may the source be with you. (sorry, I couldn't resist.)

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Jan 11

grease the wheels

"gotta grease the wheels of the economy to keep it running"
my communist sister declaimed sarcastically as she bought
that new outfit with money that she didn't have
earned from the job that she hadn't been offerred
the paycheck that she wasn't given for the 4 hours of work she did each day
putting it on in full view of the banner of che guevarra
hanging on her bedroom wall

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Jan 14

the otso-otso revisited

this meme just won't die, will it? as Ernie first pointed out, it seems to have been inspired by Beyonce Knowlés. there is a description by Manuel (as well as a stick-figure instructional animation), and political commentary on last days of the republic. and, incidentally, Angie unwittingly provides more evidence that the otso-otso was created by Beyoncé (watch the white guy carefully, and listen to Steve Harvey's commentary) and that the anti-copyright infringement ads they have on TFC are therefore ironic and a tad hypocritical. (P.S. copyright infringement is not stealing! Exaggerating only makes you lose credibility. I'm pretty sure no Filipino recording artist is living in a nipa hut or in a shanty on top of Smoky Mountain, or in Olongapo next to the toxic waste the U.S. left there.)

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Jan 14

quizilla, quizilla, quizilla

You are Dylan Thomas - a poet who lives to spite
the banal continuity of modern life. You are
the new word, the new voice. You will trample
on tradition, and breed a new school of poetry.

Which Dead Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

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Jan 14

names (why i probably shouldn't be a father)

i can't help myself. whenever i get bored, my mind wanders. very far. so sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic (is there any other kind in SoCal?) where the 91 and the 5 intersect (before i had to dodge some rocks some punk kids were hurling from a pedestrian bridge before the imperial hwy exit), i looked up at the freeway signage and, unbidden, i thought that "artesia" would make a pretty name. while perhaps a little bizarre and unwieldy, it could easily be shortened to "tesia" (pronounced "tisha," i supposed.)

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Jan 15

you betta recognize

because I'm such a depressive motherfucker, I really need to keep track of these rare moments. let it be known, at this particular, specific moment, I am happy. (surely this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.)

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Jan 19

reflection — forwards and backwards

true to form, I have procrastinated thinking about the past year. I have also procrastinated thinking about the upcoming year. in short, I am, once again, ill-prepared for life.

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Jan 20

words like fallen leaves

now is the depth of winter
when the heart mourns for warmer days
when the sun hides behind the swirling clouds
and light plays games with the fog and the shadows
teasing with the bone-chilling brightness
and the darkness comes before you expect it
gaping like the black abyss
and the neverending fall

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Jan 20

unrelenting massive cock destroys innocent pussies

while postmodern literary critics (like critics of all media, genre, and timeperiod) can be full of shit, I really dig the creation of postmodern art (or is this post-post modern art? hey, art critics, I'm sorry for saying you're full of shit! can you please think of a proper name for this time period?)

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Jan 20

letting go

interestingly, though in various shapes and forms, some of the bloggers that I read almost daily have been discussing letting go. so whether it is material objects, relationships and situations in general, or specific self-destructive behaviors, well, I generally do the opposite.

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Jan 22

spirit

ever burning flame
searing rays of light
eastern sky afire
I turn and turn and turn
only the sun tells me where I stand
casting my shadow hither and thither

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Jan 24

wInter-im

I have been telling people how soft I'm getting with respect to the weather. Given that it has been roughly 70-75°F in L.A. for the past couple of weeks or so, I woke up Friday morning at the crack of dawn. Going outside, I felt the "cold" seep into me, and I was abashed when I discovered that the ambient temperature was actually 50°.

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Jan 24

to grok

clearly, I have too much time on my hands. or, more tragically, instead of doing things I need to do, I sit her mentally masturbating as usual. (notice the word mental.)

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Jan 27

fire and ice

flat lands, icy waste
curling smoke, steam rising
the city breathes in, breathes out
like a sleeping dragon

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Jan 28

wtf

I have no idea what I'm doing. The world just swirls and loops all around me, and I stand mesmerized, mouth agape, drool oozing from the corner of my mouth, all sense gone.

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Jan 29

cradle to grave

now I know I promised to stop being so pessimistic, but this sig I stole from someone made me laugh:

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Jan 29

the unix-haters handbook

I am reminded of something that Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote in his epilogue to The Scarlet Letter. To paraphrase: love and hate are not very different emotions. (A more diametric opposite to love would be apathy and indifference.) Both require intimate knowledge of one's object of desire/derision. Both seem to exhibit characteristics that our modern age has deemed to name co-dependent behavior. Just as it is seemly to care about what one's beloved thinks of them when one is in love, in parallel, one who exhibits hatred often does so because they care too much about what the other person thinks of him/her. To rephrase it in pseudo-psychiatric lingo, the other person starts becoming an obsession, an idee fixee, that impinges upon one's own personal identity (as much as I think Freud was a quack, I will use his term ego.)

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Jan 29

iBook logic board repair extension program

for all you unfortunate folk who purchased an iBook between May 2002 and April 2003, this program is for you.

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Feb

Feb 2

lily white

spill your secret to me
creeping shadows, and the evil that lurks in the night
that makes the dogs bark in fear
with their tails between their legs
the hooded man without a face
stealing innocence

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Feb 4

oh the places you will go

because I am obsessed with maps, I find this really amusing.

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Feb 5

i spy

so I spent part of my weekend in nyc screwing around with b's computer, which was completely infested by spyware and viruses and all sorts of irritating, memory-consuming, surreptitiously installed programs. the computer is on the verge of complete unuseability. my advice was simply to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows xp. this is, after all, the favorite piece of advice given by anyone who does win xp tech support. but this would require backing up the hard drive, which would inquire purchasing a hard drive, and in the freezing temperature at this time, this wasn't a palatable option.

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Feb 7

URLs

I know I have way too much free time on my hands. but I am again contemplating switching blogging engines.

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Feb 8

ebotula

I'm not much of an IRC'er, so I don't even really know what bots are supposed to do, other than auto-replying. but this project on freshmeat.net caught my eye just with its name: Ebotula. it sounds like some novel bioweapon, a combination of Ebola and botulism. scary.

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Feb 9

lost (en las calles de los angeles)

what follows is an unmanageable, undecipherable piece of mind-blather that fails to encapsulate the inexplicable sense of alienation I experienced today, wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city of my birth

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Feb 10

personality disorders and levels of hell

I found these tests through R's site, and this is what I got:

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Feb 15

adventures with QT/Mac and KDE

I have embarked on a quest to compile KDE against QT/Mac so that I can run KDE apps natively instead of running them with X.

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Feb 15

QT/Mac and arts

in the ongoing saga of getting KDE to build against QT/Mac, I have been following Ranger Rick's instructions on how to build KDE against QT/Mac yourself. the first hurdle was arts. after some kludgery, I came up with this configure command:

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Feb 15

QT/Mac and kdelibs

in trying to configure kdelibs, I ran across this problem with net/if.h (which is, again, present in other applications being ported to OSX)

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Feb 15

QT/Mac and kdelibs (Part 2)

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Feb 15

forgot something (QT/Mac and KDE cont.)

of course, to save much pain and misery, you can use the scripts provided by Ranger Rick for building KDE, which includes configure-kde, which will figure out the proper flags and library locations for you. He also included some patches, but I haven't gotten them to apply cleanly to the CVS versions of the kde modules.

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Feb 17

(don't) shake it like a polaroid picture (memetic backdiffusion)

A song lyric from Outkast becomes a FAQ

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Feb 20

the flying song

and here I thought that I've actually stopped being pessimistic.

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Feb 21

haunted house

I've dreamt about this before. I think it's just a manifestation of all the adventure games I used to play on my computer as a kid.

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Feb 23

what am I doing with my life?

I should've been asleep almost two hours ago. Instead I've been tap-tap-tapping aimlessly on this computer of mine, searching. Ah, if Google could only solve all my problems.

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Mar

Mar 1

quirkyalone: why fight it?

When this meme came out, I tried to resist it for the longest time. For one thing, I automatically resist things that I perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be trendy. For another thing, I didn't quite want to give up. I wanted to believe that, deep down inside, I was just like other people, I just needed to figure a whole bunch of shit out, I just needed to break out of my shell, get over past betrayals, stop wishing for impossible things. That someday, I too would join the great chain of being, get a decent job, get married, have 2.5 kids, have grandkids, and on-and-on. What a lot of people like to call "normalcy," whatever that's supposed to mean.

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Mar 2

peanuts

More Quizilla madness:

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Mar 2

calvin and hobbes extensive strip search

Awesome. I wonder if Bill Watterson authorized this, though?

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Mar 2

greek gods and the sandman

Sweet! I'm one of the Endless!

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Mar 2

the rain

As a coda to my rant and rave about my love life (or, more accurately, the lack thereof), I have these bits and pieces of lyrics to pop music floating through my head:

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Mar 3

circa 1981

By some bizarre quirk of Fate, iTunes decided to take me to the very early '80's, playing "Super Trooper" by Abba [lyrics][iTMS], "I Won't Hold You Back Down" by Toto [lyrics][iTMS], and "Genius of Love" by Tom Tom Club [lyrics][iTMS] back-to-back-to-back. It's weird how iTunes just goes about picking random songs and all of the sudden my mind picks up some unintended pattern.

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Mar 4

the roots "quills"

I first came across this song as I drove across New Mexico. I had originally ripped Phrenology without having listened to the entire CD, and so had missed this song for more than half a year, but I was pleasantly surprised when I heard the sample of Swing Out Sister's "Breakout" [iTMS][from the album It's Better to Travel], so much so that I thought I was hallucinating.

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Mar 4

the road to CHLA

On the way to work in the morning, I've opted to take a street that has four names, maybe five depending on which way you believe it goes. Maybe even six.

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Mar 4

priorities

I wish I wouldn't be so heavy handed, melodramatic, and dead-serious philosophical about all this, but, well, one problem at a time, I suppose….

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Mar 5

driven by fate

Which Member of the Endless Are You?

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Mar 6

aragorn

Viggo Mortensen seems like a pretty cool guy. (link from deconstruct life.) I had only previously known him from films such as "A Perfect Murder" (which was apparently a remake of an Alfred Hitchcock movie—"Dial M for Murder" which is something that I apparently need to watch) and "The Prophecy" (where he plays, of all people, Lucifer and where Christopher Walken plays the angel Gabriel turned evil—the movie was pretty cheesy but watching Christopher Walken was pretty entertaining.)

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Mar 6

chicago fire

Heh, those damned comets. Apparently there is a theory that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was caused by a comet (link from Slashdot), and not Mrs. O'Leary's kick-happy cow. Which incidentally jives very well with the explanation Matt Groening gives in "Simpsons Tall Tales", where Paul Bunyan saves the earth from a meteor, but finds it too hot to hold onto, and ends up throwing the meteor onto Chicago.

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Mar 6

subways

This site compares the extent of the subway networks of various cities. I wonder how L.A.'s MTA light-rail system and the San Francisco BART would compare? Time to do some mailing, I guess.

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Mar 7

rebuilding l.a.'s public transit

Some dreams about what L.A.'s subway and light rail system could look like if most Southern Californians weren't so short-sighted: Concept Expansion Maps.

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Mar 7

the hill

I've been walking around the neighborhood I grew up in lately, now that I have the time, and it's always interesting the things you find when you slow down your pace (i.e., from driving to hoofing it.) For example, I finally figured why the hell Round Top Drive is divided into two, each part flanking the Glendale Freeway just before it intersects the Ventura Fwy. The western segment has houses with addresses beginning with 4500, while the eastern segment has houses with addresses beginning with 4600 and beyond. When glancing at the relationship of the two segments from a distance (from an adjacent hill that is divided between Glendale and L.A.) I realized that before the Glendale Freeway was built (requiring a huge trench dug through the hill), the two segments were actually a continuous street, and once the freeway was built, they had to build a road to allow people to get off the hill. I'm trying to find an old map of L.A. to confirm this.

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Mar 8

fear

Again, I will be completely non-specific. It's this canker upon my soul, this ulcer gnawing away at my mind, the kind of malady that doesn't kill you, just weakens you bit by bit, wasting you away, until one day, you just don't feel like getting out of bed.

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Mar 9

dogs can feel ghosts

Every so often, at a particular time in the evening, all the dogs in the neighborhood bark. I always thought it was just their set time to meet, you know, like they'd hold some grand council remotely, just by barking. Because I can hear my dogs bark, and then wait for some other dog to answer.

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Mar 9

fear continued

How do you dispel fear? By confronting it.

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Mar 9

bludgeoned by an iPod

Holy crap, does this mean that we won't be able to bring iPods onto airplanes anymore? (As if TSA actually worked…)

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Mar 9

rivermaya "a love to share"

This song is absolutely perfect.

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Mar 11

software wants to be free

From the Financial Times:

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Mar 12

not quite right

The problem with me is that I always try to find something wrong.

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Mar 16

the beauty of being in between

I think I've too deeply internalized Zeno's Paradox. I am all about trying (and failing) to cover an infinite amount of distance in a finite amount of time—in less arcane terms, I have developed a perverse taste for the feeling of going nowhere fast.

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Mar 19

tossing salad with oprah winfrey

Sorry for the scatalogical post, but I thought this was hilarious: tossing salad and rainbow parties explained to Oprah. But there is a more serious component to it: the fact that the 1st amendment is being abridged.

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Mar 21

soul lag

William Gibson mentions it in Pattern Recognition. A metaphysical explanation for why you experience jet lag is because souls can only travel at a finite speed (akin to how light can't travel faster than 186,000 km/hr.) Jet lag is supposedly the sensation of the astral cord (connecting body and soul) being pulled apart, and it doesn't resolve until the soul finally catches up to the body.

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Mar 26

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

There is something eerily familiar about this movie. Perhaps it's just my weird fascination with the malleability of the mind. Some of the movies I've been enjoying as of late involve anterograde amnesia (e.g., "Memento","50 First Dates") And of course, there's the whole field of inserting spurious sensory stimuli into people's brains (e.g., "The Matrix","Dark City", or "Vanilla Sky"/"Abre los ojos"—which reminds me, that last one is probably what "Eternal Sunshine" is closest to in many ways.)

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Mar 27

love and misnomers

One of my favorite lines from "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" goes something like "Why do I fall in love with every girl who shows me the least bit of attention?"

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Mar 27

hope

Dum spiro, spero

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Mar 27

the panda's thumb

A website "dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world."

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Mar 27

mt hollywood

God only knows what possessed me to climb Mt. Hollywood today. OK, I'm overstating. I drove up to the Griffith Park Observatory (which is currently closed for renovation) which supposedly has an elevation of 1,135 feet. I then proceeded up the trail to the peak, which I've read has an elevation of 1,640 feet. So I climbed about 500 feet and walked somewhere between 1.25 and 2.5 miles. It had a really good 360° view of Burbank, Glendale, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, Echo Park, Downtown L.A., Koreatown, Mid-Wilshire, Century City, and Westwood, but unfortunately it was one of those inversion-layer days, and the basin and the valleys weren't all that visible beneath the trademark L.A. smog. If it weren't so smoggy, you could probably see Mt. San Antonio (AKA Mt. Baldy), which is, I think, still snow-capped despite it being 85° in the basin today. I could make out Pasadena, Mt. Wilson, and the hills of Palos Verdes, but I couldn't really see the ocean at all. Hopefully the sky will clear up before I have to go back to Chicago, and I'll try to get better pictures.

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Mar 30

century city and civilization iii

Other than the alliteration, there is really nothing that links these two things, but for some reason they are things I am concomitantly (I had to look that up in the dictionary) obsessed with.

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Mar 31

in memory of kurt cobain

It's been almost 10 years since Kurt Cobain offed himself (or if you wear tin foil hats, 10 years since Kurt Cobain was murdered.) Call it synchronicity or apophenia, but R posted a link to a Quizilla quiz that tells you what rock genre you most exemplify.

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Apr

Apr 4

emacs carbon

Don't ask me how I got here, but trying to install GNOME 2.6 on my iBook running Panther is taking me to really strange places.

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Apr 6

slurping

I notice that Blosxom uses a variation of the code that perl.com deems inefficient. I wonder if slurping would really speed it up all that much?

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Apr 9

virtual hosts and cgi

I had this working before, mostly with the help of this script [citation on macosxhints.com][post on patrickgibson.com] Because of my iBook mishaps, all my tweaks were wiped, and I haven't had the time to reinstate the changes.

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Apr 13

sick

(WARNING: this entry promises to be very disjointed and long and possibly boring. Despite the line breaks, this is not a poem

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Apr 16

snip, snip

I could hear the clicking of the shears miles away:

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Apr 16

ghosts

no one here but me and my ghosts recurring nightmares from which there is no waking and the neverending sadness of things that were never meant to be

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Apr 17

planet krikkit

As the Empire is thwarted at the frontier, losing legions by legions in its attempts to subjugate a recalcitrant province, as the Imperial Capitol is in tumult, the line of succession in dispute, as the People wallow in the Reality of their poverty, or float in the Unreality of their mind-altering drugs, I still manage to blog about completely random things.

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Apr 17

fast and furious

I can never think of anything on my own…

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Apr 19

radiohead "scatterbrain" and elton john "someone saved my life tonight"

Over the roar of the A/C and the distorting influence of being in another room, not to mention the screwy acoustics of the apartment's living room, I swear "Scatterbrain" by Radiohead [lyrics][iTMS] sounds a little like "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John [lyrics][iTMS]

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Apr 21

one moment in time

Great. Now that Whitney Houston song is in my head.

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Apr 23

allow initial numbers in category

I just realized that Blosxom won't let me use category names that start with a number (like, for example 3p-omni) and this is for good reason: so that dates don't get confused with category names and vice-versa. Of course, I was dissatisfied with renaming the category to something like thirdpersonomniscient, so I decided to hack on the source (which is probably a bad idea, but I can't do this as a plug-in)

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Apr 24

purgatory

like an island with the sea roiling all around upon a lonely mountaintop with the smoke and the clouds drifting below

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Apr 25

denial is a river in egypt

I sit here, not wanting to sleep, not wanting to pack. My clothes are strewn completely all over my bed, so I can't sleep without packing. How clever my subconscious is. An attempt at negative reinforcement, perhaps. Self-sabotage, more likely. Despite all my soul-searching and impatience, I think there is a large portion of me that actually likes being in limbo.

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Apr 27

transience

Of course I'll start with a random tangent: I initially mispelled "transience" as "transcience," which is kind of interesting to those sufferring from logophilia. Transcience—that which is beyond knowledge, officially in the zone defined by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as that which is true but cannot be expressed as a mathematical truth using the rules of the particular system we are working in.

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Apr 28

when you see a fork in the road

When I was in 8th grade, our English teacher would give us a prompt every day, and at least 15 minutes to write about it. This is probably the first time I thought about becoming a writer. Sadly, despite the various signs that the universe has given me, and because of my faith in the inevitable heat death of the universe and the odds that favored the outcome that I would become a mediocre writer at best, my path has turned quite bizarrely astray. But sometimes I still dream.

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Apr 28

off the matrix

Now I realize that most people find it extremely boring to read blog entries that discuss the blogger's profoundly mundane personal life, but, well, (1) I am clearly not doing this for my vast throngs of readers and (2) I find this situation sufficiently absurd as to warrant comment.

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May

May 2

blogging on my feet

this is surely not good for my joints. i currently don't have a seat, so i'm just blogging on the fly, trying to sort some things out.

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May 4

lorem ipsum dolor

Do those of you eminently familiar with desktop publishing tools, especially fonts, recognize this? Or am I hopelessly alone in this piece of mindless trivia, acquainted only because of my brief affair with Quark XPress and Adobe Indesign (nee Pagemaker) and the subsequent hunt for Truetype fonts that looked good when printed on a press coupled with my serendipitous bout with Latin in high school? Man, I have problems.

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May 4

self evident truth

I recognize full well that desperation is not attractive.

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May 8

prince of persia — the sands of time

I don't know how this popped into my head today…I have this weird recurring vision of a character riding a comet into the raging fires of the sun (the way that guy rides an atomic bomb in "Dr. Strangelove) and I'm trying to turn it into a story somehow.

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May 11

a wrinkle in time

I haven't thought about this book in a long time, despite the number of ideas it spawned within my addled brain, and despite the bizarre synchronicity swirling around this particular point in spacetime.

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May 19

thermodynamics and relationships

Contrary to the claims of my friends, disconnecting my Internet connection at home has failed to improve my social life. In fact, since I also don't have a T.V. anymore, or a phone line, and I'm not really sure that I'm still receiving mail at my erstwhile place of residence, I'm rapidly losing touch with any semblance of "reality" (whatever that may be) and I don't know when anything is supposed to happen anymore. Since I don't have my computer on almost 24-7 anymore, I'm not even sure what day of the month it is half the time.

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May 19

time traveling

(Some random scrawlings that I can't seem to make coherent)

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May 21

wind in the door

I have decided to speed through Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet (which starts off with A Wrinkle in Time[Amazon][previous blog entry]) The first three books were written in the '60's and '70's (pretty much before I was born) and the level of biological knowledge in A Wind in the Door is kind of intriguing. For one thing, it gives me some insight on my own uninformed assumptions about the history of molecular biology. Considering that Rosalind Franklin just discovered the structure of DNA in the '50's by X-ray crystallography, I imagine that the electron microscope was pretty damn new in the '60's. While mitochondria are visible by light microscopy, for some reason, I imagine that molecular biochemistry was not advanced enough to figure out the precise mechanism by which ATP is created by these little symbiotes.

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May 25

last days in this city (cont.)

The brief sojourn in the City by the Bay left me exhausted. I've taken two red-eyes now ever since I vowed never again to take a red-eye. Nothing beats rolling in at 5:30am, to the drear of false dawn creeping behind the Sears Tower, above the lake.

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May 30

suicide by chatroom

Wow. This is extraordinarily bizarre. A 14-year old kid tricks a 17-year old into trying to stab him to death. How fucked up is that?

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May 30

like a thief in the night

So the end of the month approaches, and I need to evacuate my apartment. Which is a problem since I haven't dispensed of various unwieldy pieces of furniture.

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May 30

hope (or the lack thereof)

"Hope!?" X spluttered, anger and confusion mingled. "Don't tell me about hope!"

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May 31

hypochondria and hoarding behavior

I woke up quite anxious at 5am today, with what felt like a hot flame searing the inside of my stomach. This is rather unexpected since I have been taking Zantac 150 milligrams twice a day religiously.

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May 31

crap, crap, crap!

The question for today is: How the fuck am I going to get rid of all this shit?

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Jun

Jun 7

rootless

Strange this. I came back to Southern California this past December utterly sick of the Midwest, exhausted and hurting with loneliness, feeling defeated by the darkness and the bitter cold.

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Jun 7

momentary lapse

It doesn't ever end, does it?

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Jun 8

panic

I am beginning to think that aspartame makes me depressed. Either that or caffeine. Time for a science experiment, I suppose.

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Jun 9

LAX to ORD

So I wait at this airport for the last time for a long time, listening to the Muzak being pumped over head. (Goddamn, that shit is loud.) I swear, with all this back and forth, there ain't no way that my soul is gonna catch up to me.

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Jun 13

Null Poem

neither increasing nor decreasing in this stillness lines drawn arbitrarily values assigned out of my control

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Jun 14

neurotic little lists

I never used to do this, but I guess my latent type A personality is coming out in bits and pieces. I write these things out like some kind of incantation to ward off bad luck and evil spirits. You would think it would make me more productive, but I promptly lose them, forcing me to rewrite them over and over again.

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Jun 15

continued transience

So this is what my life is reduced to.

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Jun 15

earthquake

I didn't feel a thing, but the DJs on one of the radio stations commented on it. I wonder if surfers noticed if the waves changed?

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Jun 17

the end of the microsoft desktop era

With the insane delay of Longhorn and the current reality of the web-dominated Internet, many bloggers are trumpeting the end of an age.

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Jun 21

dump IE

Another op-ed about how Internet Explorer is completely insecure, and if you hate spyware, it's time to switch to Mozilla Firefox.

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Jun 23

retrograde consolidation 3

Retrograde consolidation is a clumsy term, but I'm too lazy to think of something better.

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Jun 23

magic eye trick

Ah, the wonders of plaintext. Just focus on the R's at the bottom and cross your eyes so that they fuse into one, like with a normal magic eye puzzle.

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Jun 25

more than this

Is it really that unhealthy to love only what you do? Is it wrong to identify solely with your job, and to not have anything fulfilling outside of it?

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Jun 27

anti-social

What is it about summer that makes me want to avoid human contact?

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Jun 28

i'm not insane!

So I was walking through the IKEA today, and Five for Fighting's "100 Years" was playing, which, for no particular reason, really, put me in an extraordinarily contemplative mood, and I began thinking about my five years out in the Midwest.

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Jul

Jul 1

evil genius

I've just got to give up pretending and surrender to my true personality, I guess.

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Jul 3

ass

What would you make of this if I text-messaged you this:

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Jul 3

bad habits

I'm probably looking at this the wrong way, but I find that there's something emasculating about being considered "safe" by an attractive woman.

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Jul 3

beastie boys "hey fuck you"

Hey! This could be Dick Cheney's new theme song! I think it should play every time he appears on screen. Heh.

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Jul 6

meltdown

thermophilic, i am not dreaming still of sunlight more than heat not the noxious fumes of this gushing geyser this ramble-shamble of chaos and turbulence

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Jul 7

forever

Zeno sings of the infinity in small spaces

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Jul 10

unwieldy

friends say that i spend too much time thinking. you can always catch me staring out the window, oblivious to my surroundings, lost in the arcane, labyrinthine inner working of mind. some might call it an absence seizure, except that it lasts way too long.

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Jul 11

cynical bastard

The appropriate song for this occassion would probably be The Cure's "10:15 on a Saturday Night" [lyrics][iTMS].

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Jul 17

ethical philosophy selector

I thought this was a neat test. It tells you how similar your own ethics (limited by multiple choice questions) compares to a few well-known Western philosophers.

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Jul 20

derangement

Yep. It's 3:15am right now. My sleep cycle is completely out of whack.

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Jul 21

self pity

I am feeling really out of sorts.

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Jul 24

trapped in tetris

You know you've been playing way too much Tetris when you start having nightmares like this. (Found on #!/usr/bin/girl)

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Jul 26

loneliness

There is nothing that focuses my mind upon my solitary state than leaving home and driving down the empty Interstate just before midnight.

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Jul 26

donnie darko

I think I have a soft spot for this movie mostly because a lot of scene were filmed at my high school. Not to mention the whole time-travel, alternate-reality theme. And the psychotic bunny.

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Jul 26

donnie darko addendum

My favorite quote:

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Jul 27

go speed reader, go!

How Many Words-Per-Minute Do You Read?

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Aug

Aug 2

my old friend, fear

I don't know if it is purely psychosomatic, or if there is some quasiobjective reality to my sensation of flux. Like the axis of the earth has shifted ever so slightly, causing the wind to subtly change.

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Aug 3

nine inch nails "closer"

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Aug 7

it all makes sense now

found on eye8infiniti:

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Aug 7

apologia for laziness

I'm not being lazy. I'm just thinking.

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Aug 9

genius and insanity

Found on Gura's blog:

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Aug 9

who gives a flying fuck?

M reminds me of missed opportunities, of not having enough courage to steal a kiss, and of the eternal recrimination that comes thereof.

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Aug 10

market share is bogus

When you enter certain realsm, such as computers, normal measures of profability are completely unreliable. It makes sense to think of market share if you're selling, let's say, Coca-Cola, but as luxury car manufacturers will tell you, who otherwise really cares? After all, the measure of a successful business has never been market share. (Would you really have considered the U.S. Postal Service—prior to privatization—a successful business despite having a market share of nearly 100%?) Success is and always has been measured by profitability, and if your balance sheet has more black ink than red at the end of the year without having to resort to Enron-like tactics, then that's a pretty good success.

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Aug 10

leverage and the ipod

John Gruber's essay on Daring Fireball about the mythical Apple vs. Microsoft conflict illuminates the late history of the personal computer. Few probably remember that before the Macintosh and before MS-DOS—in the early history of the personal computer—there were several personal computer vendors such as Commodore, Tandy, Atari, as well as the IBM (with their PC) and Apple (with the Apple II) and they all pretty much had similar market shares. Homogenization was only apparent in the business world, and back in the day, personal computer was more synonymous with home use. From the business perspective, IBM (later supplanted by the combination of Intel and Microsoft) was really just breaking into a market previously dominated by UNIX and CP/M, which, in reality, is a wholly different paradigm compared to what personal computers had been up to that time.

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Aug 11

insomnia - episode iii

I have to wake up in four hours.

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Aug 11

eating your relatives

Dude. This is one seriously fucked up family. As if goosing a woman is a worse offense than eating your cousin.

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Aug 16

elusivity of the muse

There are a million things I want to write about, things I need to put down into words simply to give my thoughts form. If I do not fix them down, pin them to cardboard like wriggling entymological specimens, they'll keep pestering me, flitting this way and that.

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Aug 26

flesh is weak

Given my current work schedule (11 hour days on average with a few 30 hour days) I have lost all sense of time and place. I wake up not knowing what time it is, whether it is late in the evening or early in the morning before the sun is up, whether it is spring, summer, or fall (in this land of no winter.) I wake up not knowing where exactly I am, since I've only been living here for three months now. I have dreams about the cities I have lived in, the separate lives I have led. Everything feels so remote, both in time and place.

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Sep

Sep 6

simple machine

So I ended up being on the road for a good four and a half hours yesterday—as long as it takes to drive to Vegas, as long as it takes to get to Santa Nella on the way to the Bay Area. By the time I realized that I had forgotten my pager, I was already in Oceanside. Fuck.

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Sep 10

peace on earth

This little quiz that I found on R's blog matches rather synchronously with the book I'm reading entitled Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem.

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Sep 16

four humors

A quiz found on infiniti's site:

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Sep 20

a.f. 632—a brave new world

Another quiz sighted on infiniti's site.

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Sep 20

real city - episode I

I am chillin' in NYC, in the royal borough of the Queen, in Astoria, to be precise.

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Sep 22

music

I don't know if it's just the change in environment, the fact that I have so many good memories attached to this city, the fact that I'm not under the crushing oppression of working 12-30 hour days, 6 days a week, or the fact that I'm no longer deathly ill and sneezing out thick, brown snot, but I feel a lot more alive now. And I'm not really doing anything. I'm actually spending a lot of time on the internet, hunting down random mashups and bootlegs, walking around the tourist areas and doing a lot of window shopping, and checking out the Museums. On Saturday I revisited the Met, which I realize makes my head spin after three hours, and yesterday I headed up to the very northern tip of Manhattan to see Tryon Park and The Cloisters. That was nice, but a little disorienting. It's strange to have religious iconography somewhat decontextualized. I don't know if it's the conscious realization that this is a museum and not a sacred place that does this. The other disturbing thing there are the unicorn tapestries, which depict the hunting down and the killing of a unicorn, which can be seen as an allegory for the crucifixion of Christ.

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Sep 25

scrabble and the meaning of life

There is this Flash animation that tells the story of a woman who believes God talks to her through Scrabble, which entirely reminds me of a particular scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilog—or should I say pentology. In that scene, the protagonist of the book, Arthur Dent, who is one of the last living inhabitants of Earth AKA the largest computer in the Universe which was computing the question to the answer of life, the universe, and everything. As is well known, the answer is 42. Unfortunately, the Earth is destroyed right before it figures out the answer, so Arthur decides to see if somehow the answer if encoded in his brain, and he starts blindly picking out Scrabble tiles from a bag. The question that he comes up with is "WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE," leading him to comment that he's always thought that there was something intrinsically wrong with the universe.

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Sep 25

mountains and the city

I want to write something profound in these last ten minutes before I board the plane, but, as has been the case for a disturbingly long time, the words escape me.

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Sep 27

spammers must die

I just spent a ridiculous amount of time cleaning up the spoor of some spambots targetting Blosxom blogs. I have enlisted the help of Doug Alcorn's modified writeback plug-in and his spam killing tools. We'll see if I can stop these dirty bastards.

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Sep 28

k-ci and jo-jo "all my life"

It is interesting how travel to a distance place defines a boundary in time. Less opaquely, my trip to NYC sort of divides things into pre-vacation and post-vacation.

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Sep 28

gold line

I randomly decided to hop on the MTA Gold Line, which runs from Union Station in Downtown L.A. to the eastern edge of Pasadena. I got on at the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park stop and headed north to Lake Avenue in Pasadena, where I hoofed it down to Colorado Ave to visit Vroman's Bookstore (for some reason I can't get the actual site to load up, so I linked Google's cache.) I splurged and bought too many books, but, oh well. I have no excuses. On the way back I hopped on at the Memorial Park Station, which is where you would get off if you were interested in visiting Old Town. The bohemian-like enclave that I sighted off of the Mission St Station in South Pasadena intrigued me, and I had a rather late lunch there. I kind of wonder if it has always been there, or if it literally grew around the station. Of course, it was mostly white people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Sep 29

crash

Jesus Fucking Christ. When "crash" just doesn't mean the computer is going down. Remember that 3 hour delay at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) a couple of weeks ago? It was because a Windows server crashed, leaving 800 planes stranded in mid-air, completely out of touch with the air traffic control system, and leading to at least 5 instances of near-collisions.

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Sep 29

red line to the sea

As I pine for non-asphalt dependent public transit in L.A., the City Council decides to support an expansion of the Red Line [registration required] The Red Line is L.A.'s only existing heavy-rail subway, which currently runs from Downtown L.A. (starting at Union Station) up to North Hollywood (trying to bite off of SoHo in NYC and calling itself NoHo), with a little spur that goes a little ways down Wilshire Blvd. That spur was actually suppose to go all the way to the Westside, but, unfortunately, there were a bunch of explosive methane pockets in the way (undoubtedly inspiring the movie "Volcano") The straw that broke the camel's back was the huge sinkhole that formed in Hollywood, and politics killed any more expansion. The MTA has instead focused on light-rail and improving the bus system.

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Sep 29

messy, not dirty

So I like to claim, at least. So today I gave in to my Virgoness and decided to neaten the tangled web of wires running all through my living room. Power cords, 10-base-T ethernet, USB, audio, cable. Like a sea of tangled snakes. I went down to Target and picked up some 3M cord controllers (or whatever you call 'em) and went to town. I don't know what it is (maybe it's just the realization that I spent 3 hours of my life that I'll never get back) but it does seem a lot neater. Of course, the rest of the apartment is a complete shithole at this juncture. I really don't know where to start. Stupid vacation.

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Sep 29

nyc fall 2004

Everytime I go on a trip, I always end up immersing myself in mind-numbing, artless pop music. These are the times I actually watch MTV (er, MTV2 and VH-1, to be precise) and I actually find out what they're playing on the radio these days. (I have saved myself from Clear Channel-style brainwashing by utilizing my iPod. How about that. Apple protects you from Big Brother, no?)

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Sep 30

fall

It is exquisitely subtle, but there is indeed an autumn in Southern California. Despite the fact that the highs are still in the 70s, the evenings feel pretty chilly. Like sweatshirt or light jacket chilly.

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Oct

Oct 2

fall of the towers

Just finished Samuel Delany's book "Fall of the Towers." The title caught me for obvious reasons, although the book was written well in the '60's, during the social turmoil of that era. Interestingly, despite being written 40 years ago, it is astoundingly relevant to today. The story is about an Empire that has found that it no longer has any space to expand, causing economic turmoil. The tanking economy is making jobs scarce, and unemployment causes an increase in crime. The society depicted takes to locking up their criminals in mines, but even that isn't enough to stem the tide of discontentment and decay, so they decide to go to war, against an enemy that may not really exist. At least, there is no real "other," the political and financial intrigues in the Empire come together that certain events look like attacks by an outside enemy. When they discover that there really is no enemy, they nonetheless keep up the pretense of war, the people in power refusing to admit to themselves the disaster they have wrought. It still isn't enough to control the malcontent by sending them off to war. And in the end, the made-up war gets out of control, and backfires on the Empire, and eventually, the Empire crumbles.

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Oct 13

Knowing That the World Was Right

In the light of day, my despair evaporates. with the sun shining, it's hard to imagine the aching sadness, the weight of 10 years of wandering the desert, alone and forsaken, suddenly coming down upon me in the middle of the night, unannounced and unexpected.

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Oct 14

Everything Is All Wrong

So we enter the realm of darkness. The underworld of the night shift, the hours of the graveyard. My loneliness is a palpable presence, a solid mass. Like rotten meat sitting in my stomach. And I'm too tired to vomit it up.

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Oct 15

Incantations upon the Bit-Ether

This lifestyle is not conducive to my mental health.

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Oct 15

Pathetic

I have completely pissed away an evening roaming through blogs and xangas. The sun is coming out, and man, do I feel pathetic.

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Oct 16

Oh No, Not Again

Why is it that someone can say certain things, and they don't mean anything near the way I think they mean?

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Oct 27

Trapped in the Bowels of a Hospital

it's kind of creepy if i think too hard about it. but what is there really to do when you're trapped in the bowels of a hospital at 3 in the morning, with naught but an internet connection to keep you company?

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Nov

Nov 9

getting the hell out

I had long, reasoned talk with the attending physician I work for after the election. She and I are both liberals in a city overrun by conservatives, and we got to talking about leaving the country.

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Nov 27

post-turkey depression

I now officially hate the holiday season.

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