nature

how arrogant do we have to be to pretend humans are the only part of the world? and to underestimate ourselves through intentional ignorance?

lost

where am i today? sometimes you know you're in regression--needed regression, for a few days. it's sort of the mental equivalent of sleep. intense creative energy comes and goes and in between you take in the energy of others' creativity. i spent the afternoon finding new and old music that i have never owned to turn sideways what i hear to change (in a small but significant way) what is around me to find somewhere new to start. and i watched two great films i once dismissed.

ironically, this last spurt of creativity on my part will come, at best, to very little. it might bring something from its two-year existence on a hard drive (actually 4) to the consciousness of an obscure corner of an obscure corner of graphicsfolk (already an obscure corner in itself). is it great? no. it's limited by what it is. but i don't see it going any further. which i can't say about much i've made.

sony

i bought a cd yesterday. i double checked to see which record company had produced it. i did this last week too. i guess some matter of trust has disappeared, regardless of who claims what.

the bear would be extremely disappointed.

np: bjork, "bath", _drawing restraint 9_

romulans

apparently, if you live in toronto and actually watch tv, i can be seen in a commercial for _star trek nemesis_, airing sunday on citytv. i'm pretending to wait to buy coffee along with another dgp grad student, a romulan, some starfleet woman, and a couple other random folken.

in reality i had already bought the coffee. it's sitting on the counter just out of view. i was discussing the film _chicken little_ with the other grad student while they videotaped.

np: elephant talk, tony levin band.

you own "march of the pigs." we recommend blondie.

more itunes curiosities:
if you say "i own it" to the offspring, the recommendation list quickly seems to assume all you listen to is punk.
if you own one obscure nin single, they recommend every other obscure nin single.

np: peter gabriel "diy" (from _plays live_)

browser title bars

attention browser-designing folk...

so this address bar thingee...it's broken! for some inexplicable reason, i still like to type out the full name of websites i want to visit. i use bookmarks as reminders of things to look at later, if i'm sufficiently bored (aka never), rather than as a list of commonly visited places. it's sort of a filter. if i can't remember the adddress, i probably don't care.

so why is it that whenever i start typing a website address for a site that i only explicitly visit once in a great while (e.g. "www.goo )" it wants to autocomplete it with something like "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=address+bars+are+broken&btnG=Google+Search?" maybe because i've accessed the website many times via the search box and so on. at any rate, it's fairly difficult for me to get to a site's front page. at least difficult enough to trigger my "computers are so $@%@#ing stupid" response. granted, it's only pressesing the delete key, but still...

ok, enough of that ranting for now.

now

it's never too early to get started on your midlife crisis.

beside contentment

on this bright and sunny day in fashionable e-town, i find me myself and i awake and away from rest inside, considering the whys and whats of where we are.

some pieces of our lives fit mesh and mend well into who we are.

some tear scream break and dismantle every last shard of our own being, leaving us with but a thought. me myself and i, what is this?

why what when and how? where is it going? how is it?

back to arbeiten

after two days back to work at some graphics company, it feels a lot more comfortable than in the past. a lot of friends have said hi faster than i would have imagined. fortunately, it took me all of a couple hours to find something to keep myself busy with. an added plus, the humidity of toronto is not hear.

the month off was more needed than i ever imagined. the first few weeks of completely relaxing in a couple years.

published again: http://www.cs.ucr.edu/rgl/sca/program.html

push pull push pull abduct adduct bulge grow shape scult.

radioactivity is in the air for you and me. meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep.

empty brain

i am having one of those days where my capacity for thought is hovering somewhere between zero and empty. i think i read 10 versions of the same news story. and scanned my email about 19 times. i walked around town for an hour or so, and drank a lot of coffee. i'm suuposed to be working on yet another paper submission (i'm 1 for 7 in the grand scheme of things, a pretty bad record).

i think i am just overworked. at least there's a garbage concert tonight.

i had something more to say but am drawing a blank.

irs cra ftb

why is the process of sending in tax paperwork so far from sane?

multiply line 22 by line 34, raise pi to that power, and integrate that squared tangent of that value from its negative square root to its positive fifth root. enter that on line 31. carry the result to 4 1/2 decimal places.

now, you can deduct line 31 from line 83 or you can take a credit. see schedule tl-200 7/8 for more details. if you take the credit, attach form 99 3/sqrt(epsilon_0 [that physics constant]). unless you take the accrued option. then use form 4454-0fg.

put your right foot in, do the hokey-pokey, and spin it all around. that's what it's all about.

round two.

add deduction for your federal return line 88.8. never mind if that line doesn't exist, just FIND IT. see instructions on page 76. wait, you say this manual only has 53 pages? well that's to bad! if this process made sense, all those people who spent years in school learning how to do it would lose a lot of business.

you owe us $2789. wait, another country wants that too? well, take this deduction. or take the deduction there. point is, you get to fill out everything TWICE to see which one lets you pay less taxes! hahahaha!!!!

starbucks mild: the verdict

so 'twas about last tuesday or so when i happened upon my coffee grinder while unpacking. the long set-aside vacuum-sealed thingeemajig (what do you call those coffee vacuum packs anyway?), having long been set aside, started screaming "your mother is a fragging aardvark!" so i gave in and made some. steve's randomizing software decided to play kmfdm's waste, better known as the song the columbine kids had lyrics from on their website. that did not bode well. and as it started brewing, the batman theme came on, casting a further darkening pallor unto the beverage supposedly enjoyed by 6,199,999,999 of the world's residents.

nevertheless (that's such a fun word), a week later, and after figuring out a sufficient watering-down and milking-down ratio, it's started to taste pretty decent. even sans fructose. i wouldn't choose to buy it over their competitors' products (which taste far better, and as eugene pointed out, don't cost half a month's rent), but it's pretty good for cheap coffee to keep around home for psychological reasons alone.

control

a few weeks back i picked up a book a friend had on "guitar technique." i spent maybe 3 minutes flipping through it but noticed the author went on a minor tirade about slowing down to practice control. so i tried incorporating it into how i play a variety of things, and it really gives you a different perspective (nonlinear, of course) on what you're focusing on while you play. the biggest thing i noticed is that it helps get timing & rhythm down better, but it also lets you attend to stress that shows up where it doesn't belong.

space

a tv station came to school to film today. the canadian version of the scifi channel for an interstitial they want to do on the distorted projections we came up with for ryan. it was a strange being interviewed for tv.

u of t bulletin

one of the school newspapers, the "bulletin" (the more conservative), interviewed both my advisor and myself because of our involvement in a particular film. interviewing was weird; i've never done anything of the sort.

but the author made one mistake (all forgiven though as i'm impossible to read). i was not joking when i said what's printed in the last sentence. that particular show is actually, in my opinion, the most entertaining of the various awards shows, but still, the three or four hours or whatever it is of celebrity gawking usually just puts me to sleep.

here's the link to a pdf edition:
http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bulletin/02-07-05/02-07-05.pdf
beware, BIG file.

fire people in cages and the fifth element

there was this performance art show downtown tonight. a variety of people were dressed in clothing that from far away looked like it belonged in a 90s nin video, but closer looks revealed more glitter and sparkle. throwing fire around, walking on stilts, and pulling cages through the crowd. a fair amount of flame antics, and in part to the score of the fifth element. pretty cool, despite the cold.