Kwirq.com

‘007. Man, for a year with such a kick-ass designation. Well, no, it pretty much did kick the asses of everyone I know. My new year’s party plans fell through and I’m at home defragging my hard drive (for thrills), so here’s some random rambling.

I started making a survey of the months and sounded like Marvin the Robot. The first month, it was the worst. And the second, it was the worst too. The third month I didn’t like at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

Endings and new beginnings. The end of my job at the university, and the beginning of my job at BSoft, which was a huge positive change but a hard transition. The end of my relationship with Erika and the beginning of, well, not much yet aside from a lot of really quiet nights. My grandma’s funeral in June. Lots of friends moved away or otherwise went incommunicado. But I bought a Nintendo DS just before Christmas and have been playing New Super Mario non-stop. Ha. Oh, and Connor and Jen’s Pirate wedding was pretty awesome.

The single living thing was weird. At first it was easy and fun. I had a nice new place, and was cooking pretty decent food, and was seeing movies on my own and going to the library and fun things. That lasted about from September to mid-October.

I keep don’t do things because I don’t feel like I have enough time, but in fact, when I do go out and do things and have fun, I tend to be much more motivated and focused when I do have things to get done, so I should definitely do that more often.

In fact, this is my resolution for the new year: do more things. That’s it. Everything else will follow.

Old and busted: my current music collection (and fark memes). The new hotness: You tell me.

If you’re reading this, I want to know your music suggestions. Can be music you think I’d like or music you don’t care if anyone else likes. What I want:

1. Three-to-five of your favourite artists, of all time or currently or whatever.
2. For each artist, at least one album which is a good place to start with them.
3. If an artist is already mentioned, you can Nth the suggestion but it doesn’t count toward the three-minimum.

In return, for every comment posted I will:

1. listen to the albums several times, and tell you what I think.
2. make you some kind of thank you card + treat
3. consider you my hero

You can also email me, and I’ll update this post with the artists+albums anonymously.

Consider it an early Christmas present. Or don’t, if that would make you less likely to comment. In that case, consider that I will hunt you down and interrogate you in the middle of the night if you don’t comment. I’ve got my four five! lights ready.

Or mini-max, or something. This is how my day went:

12 p.m. — Finally get up, after having spent half the night kept up by a lonely car alarm.

2 p.m. — Go into work to catch up on some stuff for Monday

• Plug my computer back in (this is probably why I couldn’t RDP it earlier)

• Read my email. Start up visual studio.

• Check reddit and proggit. Open two dozen tabs. Check del.icio.us/popular. Open another dozen tabs.

• Having not read any of the first two groups of tabs, visit AskMe and middle-click on every question that looks interesting since I last went through them a week ago. 175 tabs.

• Skim through the askme’s and middle-click on interesting looking external links. One of these is to Wikipedia. Fermi Questions –> Fermi Paradox, and 40 more tabs.

• Start actually reading the AskMe threads. Go with most readable/discardable first and filter the list of tabs down.

• Download the TOS fighting music as a ringtone. This is the highlight of my day, I guess.

• Finish reading the AskMe threads. Bookmark the more interesting proggit threads. Email my new bookmarks file home to myself and clear it out of my work bookmarks.

1:10 a.m. — Head home. Plan to uninstall Firefox tomorrow. Get an elastic band for snapping against my wrist or something.

This is also symptomatic in my collecting a list of hundreds of movies to watch and watching about one full movie a month. And requesting holds on tons of library books, but returning most of them overdue and unread.

I need to get over the compulsion to mark down every potential source of interest. I even have lists of topics to look up lists of items in. (E.g., categories of blogs to search for, mentioned previously.)

What I really should do is delete all those bookmark files sitting around waiting to be processed. Really.

Sigh.

Google is wise.

Oh dear. You see what happens when you people make me stay up to write posts on your internet? Or maybe this is what happens when I eat red meat for dinner. Either way, it’s frightfully late, and tomorrow is going to be brutal. Fortunately, I have an astonishingly large number of teas in my desk drawer at work.

I bought an old 256 MB MP3 player off a friend tonight. Like most knockoff electronics, it’s a funny blend of advanced and moronic. It’s got sound recording, but only in uncompressed WAV, so you won’t get very far in 256 MB. The box says USB 2.0, but I’d say USB 1.3, tops. There’s next/previous track, but no intrasong seeking. And it’s got browsing in the text note display, but not in the song selection (which is slow). So I’m going to have to join a bunch of albums into down-mixed single tracks for convenience.

Anyway, I’m going to use it for two purposes: * relatively infrequent bus rides, wherein I typically listen to the same album each time for a couple days * exercise, where I’ll want podcasts or something that I can load on before starting So it should do quite well in the meanwhile before I get an iPod Atom.

None of that was complaining. Just amusement. This is complaining: K2 (this WordPress theme) sucks. Its superficial flaws hide its fundamental flaws. I will, of course, throw out the baby, the bath water, and the entire bathroom suite and start over with my own theme.

Like probably lots of people (smarter people, who don’t go around telling everyone they’re going to write a post every day), I find public speaking and writing pretty intimidating. Thus I tend to do anything and everything else I have to do rather than work on a post. Add in equal parts lazy and distractible like a magpie on crack and you don’t have a recipe for regular blog updates.

Things I’ve been doing instead:

• Staying at work really far too late, chasing the elusive “done enough”. Not catching it.

• Becoming completely infatuated with the song “Still Alive”, the end credits song for Portal, a game I really wish I could play.

• Sending a drunken email to Randall Munroe pleading for an XKCD book.

• Installing Leopard on my iBook. Liking it. Switching to Safari, for which the pros just barely outweight the cons. Not even close to having everything digitally moved-in yet.

• Octupling the RAM on my parents’ computer, reformatting and reinstalling XP. I know, Ubuntu, but I wasn’t sure I’d have time to iron out the kinks over the weekend. (Heck, I’ve never ironed out the kinks in a linux system when I had unlimited months.)

• Also, spending the weekend visiting with my family. Eating 3x too much food. Good times. Trying to explain gift culture and open source to my grandpa (visiting us from BC).

• Adding to my monstrously snowballing list of movies to watch, TV series to watch, games to start playing, web comics to catch up on, books to read, articles to read, blogs to subscribe to, and categories of blogs to search for, instead of actually doing any of those things. I’m a compulsive hoarder of potential entertainment.

I got up this morning thinking that November 19th seems like a good date for starting things. The Wikipedia entry for November 19 doesn’t actually list any terribly interesting things having happened, so I decided to buck the trend by starting up my website… erm, again.

This will surely be an event that will echo through the furthest reaches of future history.

Since NaNoBloMo/NaBloPoMo didn’t work out that well, I should definitely make things harder and try for an entry for every day for the rest of the year. But not necessarily post once each day. Which makes 42 posts, which sounds pretty cool to me.

This is essentially goodbye to LiveJournal. I’m going to move across all my old posts, though I’ll still read my friends page and comment, of course. I’m going to be making some pretty neat stuff here, so I hope you find it interesting.

Having become the sort of person who buys comics on their lunch break, I picked up 3 issues of Doktor Sleepless today, a fun ditty about getting over your lack of jetpacks and realizing that you’re carrying around the freaking internet in your pocket. In related, at least in my head, news: kablog-j2me is a java app that lets you post to your blog from pretty much anything with java and a data plan.

I am terribly excited about all of this.