Category Archives: Personal Life

Twitch, Twitch, New Phone

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No, not an iPhone. They’re pretty awesome (swung by the Apple Store and played with one), but I ended up making use of the “new every two” feature of my current contract to pick up a Motorola K1m instead. It’s a sexy little phone, and I like it a lot… physically. The interface, however, leaves a LOT to be desired. This is not Motorola’s fault, mind you: Moto’s standard interface is pretty kickass. It’s Verizon. They made their own UI, and it’s ugly as sin, and literally SATURATED with Verizon and V Cast branding, all the way down to advertising V Cast both when turning the phone ON and when turning it OFF, and when talking on the phone, the outside screen has a giant Verizon Wireless logo glowing, making you a walking advertisement. This is patently ridiculous, with added insult in that they turned off core functionality of the phone to make room for their branded materials. The ever so handy shortcut keys? The only things useful that aren’t just links to V Cast or Get It Now services are the alarm clock, calculator, and calendar. I really wasn’t expecting this level of stupidity, since they didn’t do nearly as much of this with the 710 I was using before.

So, I’ve had the phone for a day, and I’m already poring over sites online about how to change the firmware. It looks like I’ll need to do it in my Windows partition, as there are several tools that are currently still PC only (though ports are being worked on), but otherwise the materials necessary to re-flash the phone are readily available. I really hate that I feel like this is a necessary step to enjoy my phone, but it really, really is. If any VZW reps happen to read this (the chances of which are increased by my including brand names and such), PLEASE stop dumbing down your phones! Leave them as is! Motorola has better UI designers than you, let them do their job! It would do a lot to assuage the perception of you as an “evil corporation” if you stopped fucking over your customers like this. You’re Verizon, we’re not going to forget your fucking name, you reeeeally don’t need to inundate us with your branding when we already have your service.

No Song Today

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Nor tomorrow, methinks. There are a few other things I need to work on, so the music reviews will go on a brief hiatus, and will restart on Monday the 2nd. That’s just four days (well, essentially 3), so not too big a deal (especially since two of those days I wouldn’t have been writing a music post anyway), but I wanted to let it be known that I’m still committed to it.

In the meantime:

Creepy-Sexy: The Doll (YouTube Video, Dialup Beware)

Just-Plain-Odd: The Algorithm March (YouTube Video, Dialup Beware)

Writing in the Evening

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There will be a music post that will go up sometime later tonight (you know, after I write it), but for now, other things:

I’ve been writing a lot lately. Every morning, I get up early, and drive in to work, usually get there by 7:15 for an 8 o’clock shift. This is mostly because if I wait, the traffic gets far heavier and far more variable: hard to nail a time closer to 8 without going over consistently. So, I go upstairs, into the breakroom, grab a cup of coffee (of mediocre quality at best… dunno if the machine needs to be filled, or the coffee they’re using has “expired” or what, but yeah, not good), and then go sit by the window and write for 20, 30, 40 minutes. Most of it is just personal journaling, a sort of abridged morning pages, but I’ve found it immensely useful and meditative, a good way to start my day. In fact, I felt so good that I sat down this morning and punched out arguably my best cover letter to date, discussing a community manager position at Blizzard… which was promptly eaten by Outlook Webmail, and is gone, unrecoverable and sorely missed. I haven’t been able to recreate it, and get that flow going again. Very frustrating. I’ll give it another shot later, as there are FOUR positions listed at Blizzard that I’d be good at and would like to do, so it’d be foolish to give up because of that.

I went home this evening, and sat in my apartment, stuffy from the day’s heat, and decided I really really didn’t want to be there right now, so I grabbed my laptop, and went out for ice cream. I discovered that Ben&Jerry’s has a new flavor (or at least, it’s the first time I’ve seen it), which is a take on the chocolate chip cookie dough using gooey oatmeal cookies instead. Quite tasty. It was totally eating a good oatmeal cookie in ice cream form. Big thumbs up to that.

As I sat on a bench eating my ice cream cone, I realized that it was pretty symbolic of where my life is right now: doing what is generally considered a social activity (going for ice cream) alone. And that is likely where my life will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve met some people, such as those at work, that are good people, and are friendly, but I can’t seem to bring myself to pick up the damned phone and call and make the effort to hang out. It’s not that I don’t like them: far from it. I’m just not clicking in, and it’s purely on my side of things. When I’m in roles where I feel like I have to put on a “public” face, putting the energy into establishing and maintaining contact and communicating with people, I’ve found myself feeling like I’m constantly out of breath (regardless of how I’m actually breathing). I’ve had so few socially energizing experiences since coming out here (ie, moments where I can “let my hair down” so to speak and simply BE with someone without any sort of holding each other at arms length) that I feel like I’m running on fumes.

Which is sort of a tangent from the point: I had an overwhelmingly vivid image of me eating alone, watching socialization from the outside. I didn’t feel upset or happy about it, I simply accepted it. This is the way of things right now: I’m single, I’m solo, and until something changes and I click in somewhere with someone, that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ve been told by two different people that you never know when things will change, and you never know when someone is going to show up and click. This may be true, but for right now, I’d say I have a better chance at winning the lottery. Similar philosophy, too: if it happens, awesome, but I’m not holding my breath. (Not trying to be pessimistic or bitter, just aware of where I am and what’s going on around me.)

No Friday

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Apologies for the lack of a music post on Friday. I debated writing one and back-posting it over the weekend, but ended up opting not to. No good reason, it just didn’t happen. In fact, not much happened all weekend — felt a little anti-social and worn out, and spent most of the weekend playing World of Warcraft as a result. That said, I did spend a few hours today trying to clean/reorganize my apartment so the stack of books that were occupying half my desk now actually have shelf space (much juggling, and a little haphazard in terms of organization towards the end of it), and other random assorted foo. Sometimes you need the down time, I guess.

I’ve been working for the past few weeks doing functional testing for some video games. It’s enjoyable, and I like my coworkers well enough, though I will admit, you do get a little sick of playing the same game over and over and over again. All in all, it’s pretty laid back: we each have our station, and we’re pretty self-driven. I don’t think it’s what I’d want to do forever (even if it paid better), but it’s a nice gig for now, and hopefully will provide a leg up to other positions I’m interested in. It’s kind of ironic that I set out to do this “daily music” thing right around the same time I started working again, and thus suddenly didn’t have as much time to rummage around for neat music, but by and large I think I’ve managed to get by. Any thoughts or comments on the format or music you’d like me to review, let me know.

I’m at a point in this whole “single and isolated” thing where I’m really sick of putting in the effort for essentially no reward. Just feeling kind of disillusioned with the social and dating “game”, which frankly I was never a fan of anyway. I’m sure it’s just a passing thing and sooner or later I’ll give it another shot, but for now… meh. I’ll happily talk to anyone who puts in the effort to show enough interest to say hi, but I’m done trying to initiate.

Several Short Items

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I’ve been working this week — huzzah! As ever, I can’t talk about it much, but I will say that I’d really love to pick up a Wii sometime. I’d heard my fair share of people who were gamers having trouble adapting to the new controller — I’ve found it to be incredibly intuitive, now that I’ve actually had a chance to sit with one and actually play with it. I wish I could tell you more, but “I’m testing a a game for the Wii” is I think about as far as I can reasonably go. Looks like this project will be wrapping on Friday (I’m basically just filling in for the week because they needed an extra person, and with the other gig continuing to be delayed, they knew I could use the cash).

In other news, Apple released Safari 3 (Beta) for Mac and Windows. It’s fast, it’s shiny, it’s still a little buggy (it IS a beta), but so far I’ve been liking it. I did have to go in and turn off the visual editor in WordPress, though, because Safari 3 supports TinyMCE, and frankly I don’t like what it does when editing existing posts in visual mode. I do like the automatic spellcheck in text fields (I generally don’t need it, but it’s handy for catching typos and similar).

Switching back to a morning schedule is a pain. Yesterday, I fell asleep shortly after getting home, woke up long enough to stumble to bed, and then nearly slept through my alarm in the morning… call it 13 hours. Hopefully that’s now past. Tried bringing my bag with me to work, and then going directly to the coffee shop immediately after work, rather than going home first, and that seemed to be a lot more effective in actually getting out and about (it’s really easy to come home, collapse into my one chair, and not go out again despite the best of intentions).

I’ve got a spate of songs I’m on the fence about writing up… Gabriela Robin’s “Green Bird”, Broken Social Scene’s “Major Label Debut”, The Chalet’s “Love Punch”, a few others… the issue is that they don’t have legit free downloads of the songs available, and I’d really rather select songs to review that can be shared, so readers can listen for themselves. Is this a problem for people? Should I write them up anyway, or should I keep with my aim to select songs that everyone can listen to for free?

Rainy Weekends

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Sitting in Zoka, eating a piece of blueberry coffee cake, drinking a split chai (half sweet, half spicy), and watching the rain out the window. Kings of Convenience is playing, and it’s a good way to spend an afternoon. Looking around, I can spot a number of the regulars, and even several of the weekenders (regulars were it not for that pesky 9-5 job), which is a sign that I’ve become something of a regular myself, even without being accepted into the greater social group.

I’ve been thinking, which is ever the deadly activity. Let’s explore them a little bit, though: love continues to be a bone I chew on, turning it around, thinking about it, what it really means, its value and significance, and why it’s so hard to explain or truly define. It’s simply used in so many situations and circumstances that we allow the context to define its meaning. But that’s unfair to the concept, and to those we are involved with: it hinges upon a subjective, personal experience, and all parties essentially guessing right. Sometimes we’re able to broadcast strong, direct clues to meaning, but to assume our intentions even then is begging for trouble. I’ve been accused in the past of using “love” too freely, of devaluing and diluting its meaning — I can’t disagree strongly enough. There is never a moment where I am not saying it conscientiously, with awareness for the power and weight of the word. To dilute the concept would be to say it and not mean it, or to not say it when you so dearly do. It’s a dishonest behavior, which is intrinsically counter to the idea of love. By necessity, honesty, understanding, and love are intertwined and related. To truly understand someone, to grok them, honesty and love must be present.

I’ve been thinking about where I live, and what I’ve been doing with my life, and the flailing around I’m involved in. I feel blurry, diffused across a great many grand ideas and projects and interests, such that no one thing is able to hold my attention for long, and thus, the clarity and acuity necessary to excel in any of them remains scattered. There is nothing wrong with being a generalist (or in a romantic moment, a “Renaissance Man”), but it does require a greater degree of practical skill in these fields to be truly effective. As mentioned before, my theory is strong, but my practicum is weak. It is well beyond time for me to sit and concentrate on the common threads throughout most of my interests — as near as I can tell, that is writing. My essentials are good: my grammar is generally good (though full of my own idiosyncrasies, like opting for commas where I could probably drop them, and too many parenthenticals), my spelling is good (though if I have a doubt, I check via the Dictionary widget on my Dashboard, which I also use to make sure I’m using a word appropriately). Realistically, I simply need to start sitting down and churning work out and submitting it. Everywhere, and all the time. That is by far the most effective way to hone your craft (any craft): fucking do it. I’ve been living in a world of theory and philosophy and intellectualization, and unless I suddenly have the money pop up to go get a grad degree and start teaching this shit, that simply isn’t enough to go on.

I need to stop over-thinking and over-planning. So many grand ideas and dreams and goals… but what good are they if I never actually do them?

Music reviews resume Monday.

Out of the Heat

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It was pretty hot the past few days, and my apartment was something of a sauna, but the heat has largely broken now, and it’s down to a far more comfortable 70 degrees. Definitely digging it. Today has been something of a late start, you might say, since I didn’t really wake up until 1 (I went to bed at 4, woke up at 5:30 long enough to hear the KEXP pledge drive, and then went back to sleep). What, pray tell, was I doing up so late? Excellent question! Mostly I just couldn’t sleep, and even ended up going out and walking around (it was 60 degrees still at 1:30am), and decided it was high time i started exploring this whole “video blogging”/”vlogging” thing. By which I mean making them, as I’ve already been quite familiar with the media from a user perspective for a fair bit of time.

The short of it: I could do a Ze Frank-esque show relatively easily with the tools I have now, though I’m not entirely happy with the audio at the moment: the video from the built in iSight on the iMac is quite excellent, however, using Quicktime Broadcaster to record directly to a 640×480 H.264 MP4. The audio was simply a little “fuzzy”, and could be markedly improved using an external microphone, I’m quite sure. I could clean it up and edit it using iMovie, and publish it either hosting on my own site (not feasible for a long project or if it became popular), or find one of the numerous places out there are are hosting user videoblogs (not the least of which being YouTube). A minute of footage is running around 1.2MB… reducing the resolution to 320×240 cuts it down decently (not in half, of course: the audio is still what it is), if space became an issue, and as long as it’s in that proportion, it’ll scale on iPods easily.

So, the technicals are largely out of the way: just keep an eye out for an in-expensive Mic on Craigslist (don’t need something insane, just decent, and less than the Mic they had at the Apple Store for $50) for the audio portion, and otherwise i’m good for some basic stuff. The question, then, is what the hell do I want to be recording? I’d like to put myself out there, but for what? What’s the project I should be doing with myself? I’ve thought about talking about and reviewing music and games and movies and books. I’ve thought about doing brief readings of poems and stories. The “witty newsshow” has sort of been done, and isn’t really my thing anyway. I have several ideas I’d LOVE to do, but they involve an actual video camera — until my financial situation significantly changes, it has to be something I can do from a stationary location. One idea is to write something every day, and then do a reading of what I wrote each day. Thoughts?

Selling Kidneys Averted

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With much thanks to the lovely Mickey, I now have money to pay my bills this month and hopefully still have some float for while work gets into gear. She bought my G5… it’s MARKEDLY faster than her current machine, and has half a terabyte of storage to help house her pictures, and helps me out of a really tight spot in the process. I also reactivated CS2 on it before handing it over, so until she picks up her copy of CS3, she has a more up to date copy of Photoshop in the process. In the meantime, no CS2 on my laptop, but I like doing Photoshop on the desktop more anyway, so no biggie. Just need to remember to migrate the activation to the laptop when I fly east for a week in July.

I haven’t forgotten my plan to start reviewing songs on here, I just got a little delayed in working to make sure I have food on the table. I’ll aim to actually start it Monday (tomorrow).

There’s a lot else to talk about. I hit a really low spot the other day, quite possibly the lowest I’ve been, even through the anti-depressants I’ve been prescribed. I was a mess, and sort of let my apartment become a mess (been working today on correcting that), and… well, it was rough. It wasn’t any one thing, just everything caught up to me at once, the job issues, the lack of money, the speeding ticket, the loneliness, the girl troubles. I ended up talking with my friend Lorna, recently back from Japan, and Chris out in Norway even gave a much needed and appreciated phone call. We talked a fair bit about what I need to do to get out of this hole, and that on some level, hitting bottom is a good thing (though it sucks). Talked about taking any shit job that’ll pay the bills, and when you get off work, spend the rest of the evening working on what you’re passionate about. Getting out of my own way and experiencing the muck and the shit that life has to offer. It would help give me more humanity in my writing — while I’m technically a good writer (while I occasionally make slips, my grammar, spelling, and vocabulary are good), and my theory on a number of things is good, I lack that pathos in my writing that gives it passion and humanity. And y’know, it’s true. My writing, while perhaps not sterile, isn’t exactly full of the human element, either. It’s something I’ve been aware of for a while, and it’s something I need to work on.

I’ve managed to convince a friend to come up for the week at Squam in July, which should be great, as it’s been a while since I’ve seen them. Of course, “convince” might bit a strong term… being able to relax by the lake and catch up on reading and chatting idly is pretty enticing on its own. It does mean that I’ve gone from “eagerly anticipating” to full on “excited” about coming back in July.

Well, Frak.

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I was supposed to start this full time project at work on Tuesday, but it got delayed a week, so I was supposed to start it this Monday. It just got delayed again.

Well, fuck. Who wants a Kidney?