SimpleWeblog

Priorities

How do you know when you devote too much effort to work?

Stuffed goodness

This is pretty darned great, although it isn't a stuffed robot. Why can't you find a nice stuffed robot anywhere? I don't mean a plush robot as in a robot made to look like a stuffed animal, but a stuffed animal made to look like a silly 1950's robot.

Sigh.

Ordinary Men

I watched episode 9 of Band of Brothers, where the American soldiers had their first encounter with a prisoner camp. It is horrifying to think that such evil can exist, that so many people can go along with it. But how many governments are involved in killing innocent people? The USA is doing it right now while bombing Afghanistan. And the american people are going along with it. Is this how it starts? I wish I could see how historians of the future view what is going on now.

Soccer Game: Pick-up

Apparently, the new fields aren't ready yet, so we were back to pick-up games. I played for about 2 hours, but the weather was so nice that it wasn't too bad. I played stopper for most of the time, which went pretty well. Broke up a lot of plays. I had a few really terrible plays, though. One was a mis-kick where I tried to clear but deflected it back towards the goal. The other team brought it down a little more and scored. Blah. I also lost a ball in the middle of the field a couple of times trying to turn around goal kicks. Blah. Defense I can handle, bringing the ball up the field is too hard. For the last 30 minutes we played co-ed, which was kind of neat until I kicked the ball really hard into a woman's stomach and she had the wind knocked out of her. It seemed like the women were not used to the "kick the ball as hard as you can away from the goal" strategy of defense. Shrug.

Clear-Cut

If only signals were always this obvious.

Halloween Party

I love dressing up for Halloween. A friend from work totally hooked me up this year by dressing me up as a geisha. Hee hee (with hands covering mouth, of course). It was fun. The costume quality was better this year, although the party wasn't much different. It was a little strange to have so many people comment on how I made a pretty girl, or that they would ask me out if I were a woman. I mean, it is nice to be thought of as pretty, but why can't this kind of thing happen to me when I am dressed as a boy? Sigh. Maybe if I dressed nicely and hung out with lots of single women it could happen. Shrug.

Anyways, I'll try to post some pictures if I get them.

Daylight Savings

Another time where I am up to see my computer make the time change. I wonder if greymatter handles the time change properly?

Empty Walls

I am looking for something good to hang on my walls. It is more difficult than I expected.

Comic Review: Jinx (Bendis)

This was a fantastic comic. Interesting characters, good dialog, interesting overall style and feel to it. Yeah! It tells the story of three main characters, two male criminals and a female bounty hunter. One of the criminals and the bounty hunter start to become romantically involved in one of the best scenes I have ever encountered in media. Maybe it just resonated really well with where I am in trying to start relationships these days. The book did that a couple more times - really good sequences that just felt genuine. Some of the plot aspects didn't mean much to me, since they seemed like a little gratuitous action. The book felt along the same lines as Pulp Fiction and a Kevin Smith movie, I think. But with a little more heart to it, somehow. The art style, combining xeroxes and lots of dark black and white art (it's "noir" that way, right?) wasn't terribly exciting to me (or maybe I am easily distracted with words) but it did a good job of conveying mood for the story. I really liked the sequence of Jinx as a girl, told with what look like xeroxes of pictures. Nice change of feel in the art to mirror the change in the story. I'm not sure that the style change makes sense - do childhood memories carry more realism? I'd think it would be the opposite. But I still liked it.

Overall, a very good book, and I definitely want to try more of Bendis's early stuff. I'd be more interested in his recent stuff if it weren't all super-hero stuff. Not that I'm becoming an indie comic snob.

Clever Thought

Believe it or not, I had a clever thought today that I wanted to put up here, but have forgotten it.

Argh!

Hello

In case anyone does read this, and wonders if I am a little crazy with the posts about whether or not people are reading this, here's the brief story:

I've been updating this for months now, but haven't told anyone where it is, because I keep feeling like it isn't quite ready.

Well, it still isn't, but oh well.

Weblogs.com and greymatter, together at last

Go here for the most recent version of this info. The instructions below are for historical purposes only!

No, really, go there!

Here's how I did it:

Open up gm.cgi for editing. You will need to make two changes. At the top of the file, you will see two lines like this near the very top of the file:

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

require "gm-library.cgi";

Add the following two lines:

use LWP::UserAgent;

use URI::Escape;

between the two lines above.

OK, now it is ready for the main change.

Search for the line that looks like this (but without the weird spacing issues I'm having here):

$statusnote = qq(< B> < FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Your new entry has been added.< /FONT>< /B>);

It should be around line 3410, according to my version of emacs, but I'm not sure how much you can trust line numbers these days. It is at the end of the gm_savenewentry method, if that helps.

Anyways, right before that line, insert the following lines:

# update weblogs.com to let them know we changed

$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;

$ua->agent("GM/0.1 " . $ua->agent);

#enter weblog info on the next two lines

$myweblogname = 'MyWeblog';

$myweblogurl = 'http://';

$myweblogname = uri_escape($myweblogname, "^A-Za-z");

$myweblogurl = uri_escape($myweblogurl, "^A-Za-z");

my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => "http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?na\

me=$myweblogname&url=$myweblogurl");

$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');

my $res = $ua->request($req);

Except, change the lines with $myweblogname and $myweblogurl to point to your weblog.

You are all set - every time you add an entry via greymatter, it will automatically ping Weblogs.com via the HTML form interface.

If you have suggestions for improving these instructions, or have trouble getting it to work, let me know.

If any real perl hackers want to improve upon this, please let me know.

An important note:

You need to have the LWP and URI Perl modules installed for this to work, otherwise your gm.cgi will be broken. I thought those were "standard" perl modules, but apparently not everyone has them. Remember, make a back-up copy of your gm.cgi file before trying this!

It should all be hooked up

GreyMatter, meet Weblogs.com. Weblogs.com, meet GreyMatter.

One more time

Just to double check, right?

Uh oh

Time to hack up some perl and try something.

Sorry for these lame entries.

Readers

Again, I have the conversation about people reading this. For the first time in a while, I feel close to letting people read it.

It will be terribly disappointing after all this time to eventually realize that, even if I am ready, no one else will really be interested in reading it.

Heh.

Maybe I shall just wait until after Nanowrimo. Go procrastination!

Lack of Feedback

I am an introverted person. I can deal with the people thing when I need to, but it takes effort. I have lots of internal filters that try to prevent me from making a fool of myself, pestering other people, or doing other things that probably shouldn't be worth such effort. So, I'm not good at communicating if I don't get some kind of positive feedback occasionally to let me know that my communication is acceptable, or perhaps even desirable.

I'll file this away for when I need to write the Dave User's Guide.

Halloween Costume

I think Halloween is a neat holiday. Social encouragement to wear something goofy, pretend to be someone else, try something new for a day. No real rules, encouragement to push boundaries, no awkward family situations or forced gift giving. Good stuff.

And I may have finally figured out what I am going to be this year! Not sure it will work for work, but still very cool. Hee hee!

Concert Report: Smog, Will Oldham, Winfred E. Eye, Jim Yoshii Pile-Up

I missed going to see Smog last time, and felt a little silly afterwards, so I decided I needed to go to this show. I convinced a friend from work to go and was looking forward to a decent show. Unfortunately, this show was on a Thursday after a long work week and not much sleep for several days. We got up to the city right before show time, and both of us were tired. I had seen The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up at the Mountain Goats show last year, and didn't really care for them, so we went in the back and sat and chatted and watched people play pool for a while. Next up was Winfred E. Eye, which we couldn't really hear from the back. We went out front for their last few songs, and it was OK. The singer's voice was an excessively gravelly blues-style thing, which wasn't entirely convincing to me. It sort of sounded like a dying frog. It started to grow on me a little bit, but as I said, I wasn't entirely convinced. One guy in the band played a strange wind instrument metal rectangular box with a slide on one side that was pretty cool. Not sure what it was.

Next up was Will Oldham, filling in for Neil Michael Hagerty, who couldn't make the show due to a "family tragedy". He was a goofy looking old guy, doing his set with just his guitar. Not sure why that took so long to set up for, but that might have been the tiredness making it seem like so long. The coolest thing during his set to me was the acapella intro to a song he sang as a tribute to Mr. Hagerty. The song was an appropriately sad-sounding piece, but the back of the bar was laughing and talking and clinking their glasses as it went on, which seemed really innappropriate. But by the end of that part of the song, the whole bar had become quiet, letting the somber tone of the song spread all around. I was impressed, both by the crowd and the performer getting this to happen. Overall, though, I think I would have enjoyed his performance a lot more if I hadn't been so tired. I'd like to hear some of his recorded stuff - his songs seemed interesting.

Finally, around 12:30 or so, Smog came on. It was Bill, another guitar player, a drummer, and a violin player. He played a bunch of songs I knew, especially off of "Knock, Knock" but they sounded very different because of the instrumentation. It was cool! The mix was actually decent so his voice came through really well on most of the songs. The violin player was impressive, going all out for several of the songs - I hope she is somehow carpal-tunnel-syndrome-proof.

Anyways, the show was nice, and I managed to stand up the whole time despite being ready for sleep. And now I've seen almost all of my favorite bands in concert. Yay.

Soccer: Loss, 3-0

The game felt a lot closer than the score - we had lots of shots, just none that went in. I played sweeper again, and felt a little more comfortable, which is good. I blocked a couple of shots and broke up some plays, which was nice. Lots of looong runs back to the goal to get between someone and the goal just before they take a shot that missed. One of their goals came on play right after we had just switched the defense around since Andrej had to sit out, so they wound up with two open people on one side. The team did ok passing the ball, but we just couldn't finish. It is a better problem than we had over the summer, but it is still frustrating to lose. Oh well.

And yes, I did get smacked in the head and bled a little. And yes, I really do need to get those safety glasses soon.

Movie Review: Victory

Sylvester Stallone as a POW soccer player during WW2. Heh. The soccer scenes were interesting, I couldn't tell if they looked silly because they were for a movie or because soccer looked silly during the 40s. Maybe some of both? Pele is pretty freaking amazing, though, and pretty much saved the movie for me. Lots of Stallone silliness, and some weird plot things going on that didn't seem to make sense. But it was kind of interesting, although I didn't enjoy it anywhere even close to as much as I did when I was a little kid and saw it.

Music Establishment

I've said it before and I will say it again: If I ever own a club or other place where shows are put on, they will start on time. Not that I mind tonight's show being 1.5 hours late - being sleepy tomorrow may make things less painful. But the strategy for the weekend is to sleep, I think.

Today's Potentially Random Thoughts

Am I going to have a complex about people leaving my life?

Also, a dream from last night:

I was at a store, they had some glowire. I was excited, because it was much cheaper than the web. Then it was time for dinner, with lots of people from work around. During dinner, I saw an old friend from school. I got up and ran over, and we started hugging. Then we snuck away from the eating area and hugged some more, which eventually led to some kissing. This caused the work people and her friends (including her japanese friend?) to show up and warn us that it wasn't a good idea and we needed to be more careful. We agreed, started to walk away, then began running to get away. Lots of weird staircases and other people later, we got separated and I could only find the people looking for us and not her.

Here's what I take away from this: I should do a better job staying in touch with people.

Team Dinner

Another nice Drive team dinner, and I even got to eat my first home-cooked dosa. Mmmmm. Quite tasty.

It is nice to have coworkers that are interesting people that I can enjoy time away from work with.

Blame

I'm blaming the lack of posting on Sunday and yesterday to technical difficulties. Apparently I needed to restart my silly little windows box one more time than I did for the networking to work again. But the review of Rhapsody in August will follow soon.

Soccer: Loss, 2-0

It is October, it should not be this hot out anymore. I guess I will miss these days come December, right? The game actually went OK, we barely had enough people on either side and it was really hot, but we struggled through. I think the heat helped keep anyone from being too quick. I played sweeper (or really just center fullback) the whole game, trying to keep things organized on defense. I think I did ok - I broke up a lot of plays, most of the shots they got weren't too dangerous. Unfortunately, their first goal was a one on one involving me and a guy who put on a move that made me look pretty silly right before he shot and scored. Oh well. At least I was in position for it. Their other goal came in the second half on a corner that hooked straight in. Yikes. What can you do about that? The guy we had playing goalie called for it, but it was a great shot and he couldn't get to it. Oh well. We had pretty decent pressure throughout the game but couldn't put anything away, which is our usual problem. And, at the end, I took a ball to the face and got a bloody nose and a cut on the outside of my nose. Sigh. Not a real game unless I bleed, eh? I really should get the safety glasses.

Movie Review: Iron Monkey

A straightforward Hong Kong martial arts movie. Lots of entertaining fight scenes, a reasonable story line, and pretty consistent fight scenes. What else is there to say? I didn't realize the kid was actually played by a woman until I read that afterwards. And I thought they only did that on The Simpsons. Eventually I will probably try out the "Once Upon a Time In China" series, which tells the kid's story when he grows up. It would also be interesting to have some more historical background on Wong Fei-hung, although I'm sure that not having it doesn't exactly ruin your ability to enjoy the movies.

Pledge Drive

I added the KQED link to the sidebar since it is pledge drive time again. I finally renewed my membership, after letting it lapse because I thought I would be moving. Oops. I wonder if I should give to a charity that has a more direct impact on improving people's lives instead of those that support these more abstract things that I support. I've started getting all the charity mail at my new address finally, so it isn't like I don't have a lot of options coming in. I'll figure something out.

November

It's almost time for National Novel Writing Month, which has a web site that completely suckered me into the idea. 1 month, 50,000 words. Yeah! So, if I can get someone else to agree to it (peer pressure may work miracles), I may not be doing the blog thing much next month, although I will post the novel when it is done.

Because if I start, I will finish it. Oh yes.

Concert Report: Apples In Stereo, The Minders, The Orange Peels

I should preface this by saying that I was in a pretty good mood to start with - a smooth trip up to the city, a nice dinner beforehand, a little walking around part of the city I hadn't seen much of before all helped put me in the mood for the show. Overall things have seemed a little depressing lately, with some work issues and the stupidity of world events on top of whatever normal issues I'm trying to deal with, so it was nice to go out and enjoy conversation and not worry about the state of the world for a little while. We even got to the venue early, which allowed a little interesting homeless person interaction. One guy, pretending to be blind (maybe he was, but he seemed to act more blind when asking for money than when walking up to the next person, so I am skeptical. Although the person I was with gave him $1 anyways...) attracted the attention of some staff, which led to yelling and eventually another homeless guy helping escort him away from the line. So when that helpful guy came back selling Street Sheets, I bought one. A little bit more waiting, and we were let in and we had our choice of seats. Agreeing that sitting seemed more preferable to standing, we grabbed some nice seats on the right-hand side balcony. Much nicer than last time I was there!

The first band, The Orange Peels (gotta love those tough-to-find urls) started off with a pretty typical sounding indie-pop kinda vibe. The lyrics I could make out seemed like near-cliches a lot of the time, and I wasn't entirely sold. But something happened as they kept going, and they started projecting this really happy vibe. They were enjoying themselves, the crowd was enjoying it, I started enjoying it. It was exactly what I needed at that point - happy, enjoyable music. Yay.

The second band, The Minders, never got into that happy vibe for me, so I don't think I fully appreciated them. But they played some good things, I really liked when the guitar guy switched to the bass and rocked out on one song. They had an interesting sound, which I'm not sure how to describe, although the person I was with described them as "a little like the Beatles", if that helps any. They did get pretty loud by the end, too, which reminded me I should acquire some nice earplugs for those situations.

At this point, I decided to try out an Orange Peels album, but pass on the Minders for now. I already had an Apples album (all the other bands referred to them just as "the apples" so I will, too, ok?) and didn't feel like spending absolutely all of my money in one night.

Eventually, it was time for The Apples in Stereo (3 for 3 on the good urls!). They played most of my favorite songs off the one album I had, which was nice, although they didn't do the background vocals that really make one of those songs. Ah well. The main guy was entertaining, apologizing very sincerely for his mistakes, taking good-natured joking from the bandmates when his string broke in the middle of a song. The drummer seemed to be having the best time throughout the whole set, with a huge grin. It is so nice to see bands that just seem to reallylove playing. They also stuck to mostly the more energetic songs, which kept the crowd pretty in to it. It was a nice set.

So, 3 for 3 on bands. Very nice! It was a very fun show. A good evening, the kind that makes you want to see more shows. Which is good, since I think there are a bunch more shows coming up soon...

Drive Home

Concert report will wait until I am a little more awake, but the drive home was weird... everything looked a little off. Was it the new mountain goats tape? Was it the sleepiness? Was it the ears not functioning properly? Was it the fact I haven't driven that way in the dark in a while? It is strange when familiar things seem somehow unfamiliar.

But the show was quite good.

Book Review; Cryptonomicon (Stephenson)

This is a long book, which explains why it has lots and lots of neat aspects but several lame aspects, and overall was only OK. I guess Mr. Stephenson is popular enough that he can put lots of long asides in his book without fear. So we get lengthy explanations of lots of things, written almost like mini-articles throughout the book. I would have preferred them as appendices in the back, like they did for the Pontifex encryption algorithm. The book followed a handful characters, some during WW2 and some during roughly present-day, and each character's story was very interesting at times. Unfortunately, the switching between the different stories ruined a lot of the book's pacing for me. Just as I was getting really involved with one story they would switch to another and my interest level would drop. Also, despite the 900+ pages, lots of the action happened between chapters. I think that would have been fine except that so much space was devoted to these sidebars that seem like they were there only because Mr. Stephenson found interesting things during his research. I also liked the WW2 stories more than the modern day ones because they were more believable to me, probably since I have less background in WW2 than in modern day electronic currency. I liked a lot of the modern day characters, but the story they were participating in seemed to stretch credibility a little thin, having seen how those concepts have been advanced in real life. I think Mr. Stephenson is in touch with the programming community enough to fall into that trap of how technology will overcome governmental stupidity. See, I don't think the problem is really the governments, it is the people. And people are involved in technological systems, too. Back to the book, though - I also was disappointed by the need for the little physical fight at the end. I think the dramatic hacking sequence in the parking lot was much more in the spirit of the book, and effectively showed the contrasting themes between the WW2 and current threads.

Overall, though, I enjoyed it, and would recommend it to existing Stephenson fans. Probably not the right book to start with, though.

Bad Guys

The other note for the fiction thing: no bad guys. Antagonists, sure, but no bad guys. It is too easy. People who have similar goals but different ideas about how to get there, fine. But no groups of people that all deserve to die or are pure evil or anything silly like that. Incompatable philosophies and how some type of resolution is reached - that is an interesting story. Forces of good defeating armies of evil? That is a fairy tale.

Soccer: Tie (2-2)

It is starting to get a little chilly at 8:30 in the morning, which did not help me feel better about the extremely wet field. But it turned into a pretty good game, with one of their goals coming on a penalty kick that Thuy might have stopped if he were 6 inches taller. Our team had excellent ball movement the whole game, though, which was so nice to see. We had a lot of shots on goal, but their goalie was pretty decent and stopped most of them. So close to winning! I played stopper the whole game, and felt like I did all right pressuring early on, but I had trouble getting back on the breakaways. I think I managed to stay a little more energetic than some people on the other team towards the end, so I was able to break up a few more passes. Overall, it was fun.

Movie Review: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch)

A modern day samurai, working as a hitman for a low-level mafia boss. Throw in a soundtrack by The RZA, and how can you go wrong? I enjoyed this, it seemed to treat the samurai idea with respect but not making it excessively glamorous. It reminded me a lot of The Professional because of the relationship with the little girl, although that is much less of the story here. All of the mafia people were kind of clowns, which seemed a little goofy. Can you fit in to modern society while holding on to old traditions? We don't really get much insight here, since Ghost Dog is on the very fringes of society. I really appreciated the french-speaking Haitian ice cream vendor and his relationship with Ghost Dog and the fact he was there to add depth, not to advace the plot. The movie seemed to approach the character development with an appropriate amount of distance and respect while still being meaningful to retain the Japanese feel. Well, maybe not a real Japanese feel, I don't really know that yet, but the pseudo-American media style Japanese feel.

Movie Review: High Fidelity

I had already read the book, which I enjoyed quite a bit, although it made me scared about the movie. Expectations can be such a disappointing thing. But the movie held its own! Lots of good stuff. John Cusack was excellent, as he often is. The supporting cast was also quite good, although I didn't really like his main love interest. Maybe that was all right though, since it may have given a better indication of how he felt at this point in their relationship. It was nice to see something about relationships that seemed more real, no fairy tale happy ending. It made me feel better about not working in a record store. I guess I'm not really saying much about the movie here - I should just leave it at this: I thought the movie was quite good, and I think most people would enjoy it.

Comic Review: Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? (Bendis / Oeming)

Not many things fall into the "Crime fiction / Superhero" genre, as the spine labels this book. I haven't been in much of a superhero mood lately, probably due to world events, but I was able to enjoy this. The murder mystery wasn't really deep, since there didn't seem to be any clues to follow, but it seemed to hold true to the police drama side of things. I always appreciate seeing superheroes in a more realistic environment, which this provided. It is a shame that this is such a rarity in superhero stories. The artwork was fine, although not exactly my ideal. Kind of a manga-influenced look, and a little cartoony, with some noir-ish themes thrown in, but settling into its own workable style. It makes me excited to try Bendis's straight-up crime stories, where the characters and setting don't have to struggle through the layers of superhero genre. I guess it is hard to make a realistic, emotional story when the characters and setting are designed to be iconic in some way. Hrmm...

Japanese restaurant

At lunch we went to Seto, a Japanese restaurant. And I could recognize some of the writing since it used hiragana! Yay! That was very neat. Slowly, I am learning to read Japanese writing. A whole system of writing that was always meaningless to me is now gaining meaning after only part of a semester. Heh! So much left to learn though, like the writing system they actually use for most writing. Sigh...

Can't sleep until I write it down

More themes to address

(In the fiction, of course)

• media consolidation and corporate control
• pacifism and its practicality
• are first strikes ever justified?

Metaphor

Fiction based on an underlying metaphor, like the manifestation of good and evil in the world, would do well to not lose sight of that metaphor.

Story Idea

The last human on a ship otherwise populated by robots. Can communicate with other people on other ships, but most interaction is with the robots. Relatively sheltered from greater conflicts going on in the universe.

Weblog User's Group

I'm not sure how a concept can have a User's Group, but I'm curious about this.