found_drama

A. starts her first class as a professor today. Good luck baby! (Not that you need it…)

I’m very proud of you and I know that your students are going to get some great education.

Beck and Larry David have both been called in to compete on a guest-written episode of West Wing. The studio is all a-buzz about it and is mobbed with the press (somehow, word has gotten out). Beck keeps telling the show’s producers that he’s not sure why they’ve asked him to write an episode. “I’m a musician,” he keeps explaining but they want him anyway. Larry David keeps putting pressure on him, basically making an ass of himself in an effort to force Beck to make an ass of himself. Beck wants to do an episode that focuses on a young black Congresswoman from a Southern state. Larry David wants to focus it on the president but to have it cameo the president from Command-In-Chief like it’s all some kind of dream. Larry David’s antics eventually cause Beck to simply leave, saying that he doesn’t want to put up with the bullshit and that he’d rather just get sampling privileges from the show for his songs rather than put up with Larry’s crap. So Larry gets to write the show.

QUICK CUT to the episode, which does wind up focusing on the young black Congresswoman from a Southern state but he places her in the show as late for the congressional session, further delayed at Burger King when (at 10:59 am) they claim that they can’t (won’t?) prepare another bacon and egg sandwich (which they allege to be out of) but that she can’t just have a burger instead because those don’t come out until after 11:00. And of course, she leaves the scene in a rage right as someone from the back of the Burger King puts out a tray of about 200 burgers.

• Seriously, why aren’t we using [tag]secure email[/tag]?
• Interesting /. slug on getting an African-language [tag]Wikipedia[/tag](s) up and running. “What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language’s speakers approach zero?”
• [tag]Flickr[/tag] appears to have streamlined [tag]geo-tagging[/tag]. w00t!
• Also: [tag]Croque-monsier[/tag]? Look delicious!
  

currently playing: Blonde Redhead “Elephant Woman”

Urgency.  Family is waiting downstairs and outside.  Trying to keep away.  “Retire to my room for a bit” is a way of hiding.  The room is long but not wide.  It’s very cluttered.  It’s on the second floor.  It’s night outside but the back yard and oversized driveway are lit up by the headlights on cars.  There’s some loud talking (not shouting) but no car horns honking.  The room feels like the kind of one room efficiency that you would rent above a convenience store in a semi-rural town.  Things are oddly scattered around the room; there’s no sense of order to anything.  Everything is oddly out of date.  I ignore the urgent voices below and work instead on trying to organize the room.

chernobyl artwork
celebrate his catalog
zombie phobia

The Fuck Off Method
(Last Played is in the last 7 days, Limit to 10 songs selected by random.)

1. Sister Machine Gun “Vibrator”
2. Depeche Mode “I Feel Loved”
3. Josh Wink “Young Again”
4. PJ Harvey “The Slow Drug”
5. Underworld “Bruce Lee”
6. Bang! “Break Of Dawn”
7. Butthole Surfers “Cough Syrup”
8. BPT “Moody”
9. Morrissey “We’ll Let You Know”
10. Headrillaz “Trepanning”

The “Your Son Is An Underachiever” Method
(Last Played is in the last 7 days, Play Count is less than 15, Limit to 10 songs selected by most often played.)

1. The Beastie Boys “Gratitude”
2. Blur “Sing”
3. Portishead “Western Eyes”
4. Pro-Tech “Recalcitrant”
5. Sublime “Waiting For My Ruca”
6. Underworld “Jumbo”
7. Adam F “Circles (Album Edit)”
8. Ashtrax “Helsinki (Blacklight Dub)”
9. Front Line Assembly “Mutate”
10. Metro Area “Miura”

The “That Was So Last Week” Method
(Last Played is in the last 7 days, Play Count is greater than 10, limit to 10 songs selected by least recently played.)

1. Ministry “N.W.O.”
2. Massive Attack “Teardrop”
3. Demon Seed “Exocet”
4. Ascension “Someone (Slacker & Original Vocal mixes)”
5. Blur “Sing”
6. Kats & Styles feat. Craig Mitchell “You’re My Everything (K & S Brooklyn Bass Mix/Nubian Mix)”
7. Underworld “Stagger”
8. BCML “Horowitz”
9. Life On Mars “Life In Minds (Evolution Mix)”
10. Helmet “Crisis King”

No triumphant return of “The Sampo Method” - - that would give us nothing but Blonde Redhead.

currently playing: Broken Social Scene “Pacific Theme”

My whole family is over for dinner.  A., my parents, my youngest brother…  It’s a good number of people considering that I’m accustomed to cooking for two (if I cook at all).  We’re back late from some evening entertainment (a film? the theater?) and I’ve been tasked with getting dinner together for everyone.  We decide on this vegetarian lasagna dish that A. usually makes but since I got the dinner prep nod, it all on me.

So I do my best to prep: chopping vegetables, getting the noodles ready, mashing up the tomatoes for the homemade sauce…  And it’s actually all going well until A. reminds me that the contents need to marinade for a couple hours before I can actually bake the thing.  It’s already 9pm though and everyone is still hungry but keeps insisting that it’s OK, everything can sit overnight, and we’ll just have the lasagna for breakfast.

I’m beta-testing, debugging, and troubleshooting some revolutionary software that’s being published by an Adult Entertainment Industry Consortium (read: Porn Studio).  The premise is pretty simple: you set a couple of variables (i.e., number of actors, general characteristics about the actors, ratio of close-ups to wide-angle shots, duration, etc.) and the software randomly generates a photorealistic video to fit your request.  It seems to work pretty well, too.  Watching the videos, you certainly can’t tell they are computer generated.  The sprites look like real actors (not polygonal computer animated things) and there’s no details lost on the sets either (not that we expect much out of the sets).

But something is wrong just the same.  I put in for two blondes and it gives me a blonde and a red-head.  When I restart it with the same parameters it gives me a blonde, a red-head, and a guy.  So the graphics are just fine but it’s having trouble keeping the variables straight.  So I’m tailing the logs while the videos render (in real-time, I might add) to get an idea of what the hell is going on.

Bear in mind, this is strictly business.  Not pleasure.

Now, the unfortunately complicating factor here is that I work from home.  And for whatever reason, there’s this big family gathering going on today at my house.  This would be OK - - I mean, I would normally just take the rest of the day off and pick up the slack tomorrow - - but our deadline is closing in fast for us to meet the promised ship date and besides, I’m on a roll - - I can nail this, I just know it.  So I have to keep getting interrupted, pausing the playback, ducking out of the little home office, and direct people to where they’re staying in the house (or at least postpone that by directing them to the appetizers).

But when my grandparents arrive, there isn’t much I can do.  They want to go straight to their room which happens to be directly next to my home office.  I pause the playback, hide the application, and direct them to the room.  I know I’m real real real close to finding that critical bug.  But right as I duck back into the room and resume playback, my grandmother follows to grab something from the hallway and catches a glimpse, muttering words of disapproval.  All I can think to say:

“It’s not what you think!”

As I alluded to last weekend, we’re settling in nicely. Takes a while to adjust and really start to get plugged in but we’re nearly there. One thing is for certain right up front: a 20 minute walk to work is a hell of a lot better than a 45-60 minute car ride.

Anyhow, it takes a little willpower not to be slightly bitter about how the details of our move transpired. Feels a little like we lost a couple weekends of kayaking. Lamentable… Fortunately there’s still plenty of summer left and I don’t see why we can’t keep paddling clear into October like every other year. First things first though, new car means a new rack. (We’ll sort out where to store them during the winter later on…) Hopefully it doesn’t also mean new cross-bars and attachments… Six years of year-round use do take their toll on those parts.

All of the above said, feels like we’re starting to get into a decent routine here. And with the busy weeks ahead, that will be a little bit of comfort.

update: Yes, I know the del.icio.us sidebar and page are both broken. No, I didn’t change anything. No, I don’t know what’s wrong. No, apparently is the most current version.