Separated at birth?
Friday, January 28, 2005 Part Deux
The extremely rare double-post. As per countless requests, I have provided the picture at the right. Draw your own conclusions.
Myself and Gary Sinise
Baby, it's cold outside
Friday, January 28, 2005
First of all, I apologize for the least original headline ever. As some of you surely know, it's been pretty cold here in New York as of late. We also got an actual blizzard last weekend - probably around a foot or so of snow, with drifts much higher. Said drifts get higher still when they are consolidated by snowplows (see fig.1 at right). The other photo is me on my way home last night at 1:30 in the morning, when it was probably about 8 degrees. Luckily I was wearing 20 layers of clothes and my awesome, ridiculous hat.
I'm proud to report that, up until now, my prediction that I would eventually complain about the cold has yet to come true. Sure, I've said things like, "Damn! It's cold out here!!!" and stuff like that, but I can honestly say I have not bitched or moaned about it in the least. My office at work is shockingly cold (the new "editor's suite" is in the back by the fire door), so cold that we had to get a space heater for it, and yet it doesn't really bother me. Apparently the desert has made me impervious to all types of weather that aren't 110+ degree heat. I haven't even bought long underwear or boots. Am I saying I'd like to spend more time than absolutely necessary out in this weather? No. But I still do kind of enjoy it.
The reason that I was standing in front of that giant pile of snow at 1:30 in the morning last night is its own story. I was over at some friends' house in Park Slope, and they were trying to deal with a hideous plumbing problem with nothing but a broken plunger and a pathetic pipe-cleaning tool I created by demolishing a toilet brush with my leatherman. In the end an emergency trip to Lowe's Home Improvement (luckily nearby, 3 stops away on the F train) in order to buy an auger (or "snake") was required, coming in just under the wire as they were closing at midnight. After a short battle, the clog gave way to the tool and freed up the pipes. Sweet success. And I even met a cool cab driver in the process of the whole ordeal. Amateur plumbing doesn't exactly scream "fun thursday night," but I actually had a pretty good time. Even if it did cause me to miss the OC (for the fourth week in a row! I'm seriously behind... I hear Marissa has gone all lesbo an' shit, and I'm missing it!).
Oh, and by the way, having comments is awesome! I only wish I'd done it back in Phoenix... the human interaction (however digital it may be) would have done me good. Also, it would have been funny if anyone who actually liked Phoenix had ever felt a need to chime in.
That's no bus; that's a giant pile of snow!
Luckily the ipod keeps me warm
Whoa... javascript
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Comments! Now you can all tell me what you really think.
Commence Hampshire College domination
Sunday, January 23, 2005
So tomorrow Lauren starts work at my company. We went to college together, and actually were on the same orientation trip (canoeing down the... uh... fuck, I can't remember the name of the river in my college town? Shit! Fuck! Why must I continue to age?). Should be good. I'm working on getting an all-Hampshire editing team together at the AC. That may not sound like the best idea if you know anything about Camp Hamp, but I think it could be good.
Also, yay Patriots. I'm not a big football guy, but Boston is Boston.
I saved Apple. What'd you ever do?
Thursday, January 20, 2005
I saw this posted at another blog. You're supposed to put your ipod/itunes/crappy windows equivalent on "shuffle" for your entire music library and list the first ten songs that pop up. Here's mine:
1) Only the Good Die Young - Billy Joel
2) No One Else - Weezer
3) Dreams to Remember - Otis Redding
4) Incident on 57th Street - Bruce Springsteen (the bootlegged live version that's my favorite song ever)
5) Galveston Bay - Bruce Springsteen
6) One Flight Down - Norah Jones
7) Reason to Believe - Bruce Springsteen
8) This Hard Land - Bruce Springsteen
9) Come as You Are - Nirvana
10) Used Cars - Bruce Springsteen
So by this sample, 50% of my music is courtesy of the Boss. Sounds about right.
I have to admit that lately, though, I've been listening to a playlist of the Shins, the Weakerthans, and Wilco a lot. And if the firewire port on my ipod hadn't partially broken (I can still charge the battery, but not import/export music), I'd be hittin' up "Damn it feels good to be a gansta" on a regular basis. Uh, wait, did I say export music from my ipod? Uh, that's a typo. You can't do that, it doesn't work that way. Forget I said anything.
Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta
Tuesday, January 16, 2005
I killed my laptop today, making it the third computer since Sunday that has succumbed to my touch. On the bright side, I spelled "succumbed" correctly on the first try. Alas, I cannot say the same about "correctly."
How am I writing this, then? I repaired my directory structure, of course. Which took all day and involved 1, 500,000 "steps," as the software vaguely referred to them. But hey, who cares, it worked.
Other than that, my main computer at work is back in the shop, as it refused to turn on when I came in on Sunday. I called AppleCare, and the guy kept starting sentences with things like "Go to the apple menu..." Hey, I'd love to, but THE COMPUTER WON'T TURN ON. The apple menu doesn't exist as a tangible, permanent part of the world; it's merely an abstract graphical representation made up at any given moment of a bunch of pixels on a liquid-crystal screen. Anyway, that machine's in the shop now getting a new power supply. Did the guys at the other shop plant a bug in there to get back at us? You be the judge.
Anyway, it turned out to be a good thing that I stayed as late as I did on Friday, because we got all the MTV stuff done, which wouldn't have been if we'd waited until Monday and therefore been without the computer. Now if only I could get the firewire port on my iPod to start working again...
The machines....
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
First of all, here's a picture from New Year's Eve. My mom gave me her old digital camera while I was in Portland, and it has so far served me well. This is only one of the approximately 60 photos I took in that bar, but it's the most comprehensive. We started off the night at what turned out to be a really lame party in a hotel in Manhattan, and after the four of us hid in a closet for a while (true), we decided to leave. Luckily the Black Sheep pub was just around the corner, and fitting, as all four of us are Hampshire grads and Hampshire's nickname is, as I'm sure everyone knows, the Black Sheep. Or the Hampsters. And I think we were called the Hit Men one year on the baseball team. Anyway, you get the idea.
Clockwise from left: Me, Vicky, Emily, and Julia
And here, just because it's easier to put to rows with pictures in them on top of one another, is a picture of my new office at work. More on this below. For my next project, I'm planning on some kind of combination of helping to land aircraft and breaking impossible Russian codes or something. Seriously, there's a lot of computing power in there. Enough that when all the equipment is turned on, the temperature in the room rises by about 10 degrees. I know this becasue the RAID has a built-in thermometer that I can access through an adminstration tool on my computer. This forever answers the ancient question of, "Is it hot in here, or is it just the massive, 2700 gigabyte RAID drive sitting under my desk?"
Now that's some good computin'
As lovely as our new setup may appear as represented in a digital photograph, all was not wine and roses when it was time to set it up. This is a looooooong story, which you can read about (if you really, really want to) here, in one of my postings to a discussion board during my attempts to figure out why I could capture video, but not output it. It took four days of pretty intense research, deduction, and trial-and-error, but my esteemed co-worker Pablo and I managed to finally isolate the problem to the PCI slots in our new G5 1.8GHz dual-processor badass-mothafucka machine. Again, read the post if you're a sucker for details.
The upshot of it all is, I waged an epic 4-day battle with technology and came out of it, if I do say so myself, victorious. We had to return the computer for a slightly different model that would work with our video capture card, and that's when the really weird stuff started happening. Again, long story -- Pablo and I spent around 5 hours yesterday in the store where we bought the computer -- but the jist of it is, they tried to rip us off. They were going to exchange the machines pretty much straight across, but after taking ours into the back, they came out 45 minutes later or so and said they'd have to charge us a $400 re-stocking fee because of the massive scratches all over the computer.
This was weird, as no one had spent more time with that computer over the last couple of days than me and Pablo, and the scratches were news to us. There's no way we could have missed them. Draw your own conclussions.
Luckily, we now have an actual businessman employed at the office, and he pinch-hit for us over the phone. I'm not sure exactly what he told them, but suddenly there was no longer a re-stocking fee. Huh. Weird. Anyway, the only remaining revenge they could take on us was to make us wait around forever, which they did. Finally, at almost 5pm we got our new machine. And at about 9pm last night, at long last, I had the entire system working.
So chalk one up for the humans, and hopefully at some point my fried brain will be capable of actually editing video again.
Back in New York
Friday, December 31, 2004
So long, 2004. I'd like to say that I'm glad to see you go (see Bush, George W), but the combination of moving back to New York and the Red Sox winning the World Series mean that this year's positives can't be discounted as far as I'm concerned.
Don't get me wrong, 2004 was no 2000. 2000 rocked. In 2000 I was finishing up college, I had an awesome girlfriend, I got my first real job... things were good. 2001? Well, there was the terrorism. That's pretty much what it'll be remembered for. 2002 and 2003 are a blur for me, other than the '03 ALCS, which is not the happiest of memories. Although kind of irrelevant now.
So what lies ahead in 2005? Really the only thing I can complain about right now is my lack of girlfriend. The internet has proved sadly inadequate in rectifying this problem, so I'm basically left with no where to turn. I mean, I've gotten used to doing everything on the internet. Internet dating, however, I'm convinced is a joke. But other than that, everything's Jake.
In '04 I lived in 3 different states, I worked as an envelope stuffer, apprentice mechanic, and video editor. I experienced temperatures as hot as 118 F and as cold as 12 F. The only woman I saw naked was Morgan Fairchild, and that came in just under the wire (last night at the traveling production of "The Graduate," staring my friends Nate and Winslow). I survived Phoenix without going crazy (barely), I sold two cars (each for $1500), and I learned to live on one dollar's worth of food per day (thank you, Costco).
I don't do resolutions. So I'm off to a party, if I can stay awake, and hopefully 2005 will get off to a good start. Good luck, everyone.
There is no substitute
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Note to self: buy Porsche.
Also, since when is everyone in Portland on meth? What's this going to do to property values?
