Preference Personnelle
well, it's not the first yet, and now the page seems to be working just fine. i suppose i'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. still, i'd like to know just how much weblog activity equals 250mb/month. it seems like it would be a big assload, but what do i know?
this trouble posting is remarkably frustrating. i wonder if the too-much-in-a-month is indeed the problem, and, if so, how i can avoid these troubles in the future.
also, this ferris bueller is letterboxed, but censored. odd combination.
kara and i are discussing budgets, and 'eating regimens.' scary stuff. "i would like to eat more efficient foods."--kara. i, on the other hand, would like to eat, like, really really well, but slightly healthier. thai food and vegetables and imported and organic cheeses. goddamn. turner classic movies is showing 'ferris beuller's day off.' dan quayle's favorite movie, but classic?
okay, after some reflection my current theory is that my ftp difficulty has to do with this timewarner 250mb/month limit. at bare minimum, this means i won't sweat this problem again for a day or so.
more tests. hmm. did i reach the 250 mb limit, or violate the toc, or is it just the roadrunner servers being down? wsftp doesn't even work.
ooh, the 'family ties' where alex dreams he's in 1776 philadelphia is on nickatnite tonight. i just can't wait.
this law & order episode features a kid who's a big racist nazi murderer. and this kid has a d.o.a. album. i'm not sure what to think of this. d.o.a.? yeah, disco sucks. should i be happy they didn't buy some skin album? but it was probably just bad research, time constraints, lazy teevee standards, etc. should i be sad that d.o.a. is nearly slandered here? it's not like i like them much. puzzling.
i'm really liking that
lauryn hill song 'everything is everything' lately, rather in spite of myself. i've been seeing a lot of the video lately too, for reasons unbeknownst to me.
as much as i've changed my opinions about 'selling out' over the years, it's still remarkably jarring to hear, say, massive attack's 'inertia creeps' in, say, a
victoria's secret ad. it's the exact opposite of how people must have felt when they went into an art gallery and saw a urinal. incidentally, did you know that brian eno supposedly pissed in duchamp's urinal? jackson pollock, however, definitely pissed in that woman's fireplace.
this double feature--'year of the horse' and 'monk - straight no chaser'--that i saw at the wexner center--was just amazingly good. really more for the latter than the former. though it was really entertaining watching a stoned neil young trying to explain setting a bowl of fake flowers on fire. some of the old monk stage footage, though, was just wonderful. i kept thinking about him being bill clinton's favorite jazz musician, though. my pal brad mentioned that clinton claimed his favorite book is 'one hundred years of solitude.' ahahahaha.
i'm back, and at work. my plan was to do an assignment (it involves telnetting oclc--just barely in my skill set) and a little shoe-browsing. alas, i didn't bring the appropriate notebook. five hours is a long time to look for shoes, even for me.
here i go to the
bus station. woowoo.
"when you're rollin' down crenshaw, you want something more upbeat, like dmx or snoop."--gentleman on vh-1's 'fanclub,' describing why he doesn't like dave matthews.
this post is via
blogbuddy. it's gpl and open-source. it's exciting.
i need an uninterrupted power supply. the electricity in our house keeps going on and off. some bozo at the electric company thinks it's trees touching the lines. me: oh, so the power goes out when a tree touches the line? she: yes. me: aren't they, like, wrapped in plastic and mounted on insulators? she: yes. me: then why does the power go out? she: i don't know.
right now, there's a "wind warning" where i live. i didn't even know there was such a thing. nevertheless, the
nws site bears this scary all-caps message: HIGH WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO CONTINUE OVER MUCH OF NORTHERN OHIO AND NORTHWEST PENNSYLVANIA TONIGHT DEEP LOW PRESSURE JUST TO THE EAST OF LAKE SUPERIOR WILL MAINTAIN STRONG AND GUSTY SOUTHWEST WINDS OVER NORTHERN OHIO AND NORTHWEST PENNSYLVANIA THROUGH THE NIGHT TONIGHT. WINDS SHOULD BECOME A LITTLE MORE WESTERLY LATE TONIGHT. LOOSE ITEMS SHOULD BE MOVED INDOORS OR SECURELY FASTENED DOWN TO AVOID THEM BEING DAMAGED OR DAMAGING OTHER PROPERTY. i especially like the part about fastening down loose items.
guest artist on the new john ('johnny cougar' cougar) mellencamp album: chuck d.
bloggerbot is back up. woohoo! and i installed a counter on this page yesterday, which will be useful for verifying that i never get any hits.
and in my other class, the instructor pushed an assignment's due date back a week. the impetus for this: a student claimed to be waiting for articles. now, we've known about this thing since the beginning of the semester. we need five articles on a library-management-related topic. this student, who works and goes to school in a library, couldn't find five articles in the almost two months she's known about the assignment? please. if i ever become a professor, due dates will be written in
stone, rather than in water (like keats' name.) quotation from a different syllabus: "poor time management is never a valid excuse."
today in class we had an assignment to compare encyclopedia and dictionary resources. so i looked in the microsoft-owned
encarta online encyclopedia and the open-source
wikipedia project. just to stack the deck a little, i looked at the entry for 'linux.' after i closed the pop-up ad windows, i found that encarta didn't have one at all, though there was a brief mention of it in the unix entry. wikipedia, by contrast, had a lengthy (albeit geeky) entry. funny thing about the encarta entry: they didn't mention that linux is free. in fact, no mention whatsoever of '
free,' '
open source,' '
GPL,' '
GNU,' et cetera. why, you'd almost think that microsoft's business interests influence their encyclopedia-writing.
people on 'the fifth wheel' get drunk in literally every single episode.
"are some articles in other languages translated into english?" "is the field terminator always at the end of the field?" "are the sears and library of congress subject headings identical?" "what does integrated mean?"--very stupid questions, culled from my class notes
"there was no real system to prepare students for college. the colleges themselves were run for the benefit of the professors, who taught whatever they wanted to and declared students to be educated merely because they had signed up for and passed a certain number of courses. even so, most students who entered college didn't graduate. and of the college students who did finish, the very worst went on to become teachers."--nicholas lemann in "
the big test," describing american education circa the 1920s.
wow, this tribute-y version of 'what's goin' on' is indescribably bad. bono, gwen stefani, christina aguilera, ja rule, nelly furtado, puffy, eve... i'm missing a lot of sucky people, too--wow, there's the new sensitive durst, and he's rhyming. i'm going to look for the video for that song, right now.
"After Penny spends $125 on CDs with her five-cent salary, she meets a boy, Mega, who tells her about a napster-like website he made called EZ Jackster. All weekend she was sitting at the computer, downloading music from EZ Jackster. Finally, Dijonay comes over and asks what she was doing over the weekend. Penny asks Dijonay if she can keep a secret, knowing that she can't. Penny tells Dijonay to tell everyone she knows about EZ Jackster. Her telling everybody about EZ Jackster has a ripple-effect all around the world. From India to Africa to Suga Mama! But rap singer, Sir Paid-A-Lot is threatened by this because he got a five-cents salary instead of his million-dollar salary. But suddenly, after wrestling, the news interrupted the next program telling about EZ Jackster. It shows a house of where the EZ Jackster-spreader lives. Oscar comments how ugly the house is, not realizing it was their house. Trudy is mad at Penny for stealing music so she takes away her computer. Later, Penny gets a call from Mega, asking if she is still using EZ Jackster. Will Penny listen to her parents?"--from a
tv tome summary of a disney
cartoon.
http://members.home.net/mnemosyne7/kermit.htm
http://members.home.net/joanbrewer/
and another
each page is crazier than the one before. the last one says that the video game doom was in fact predicting the wtc thing.
"there ought to be a novel by charles dickens--attack of the gold-digging chickens."--kreators
i just woke up, and i must be at work kinda soon. alas, this is another day i won't have time to make it to the damn bank. i really must get a new bank account. the current one, firstmerit, is not a bank i would recommend to anyone, though, to their credit, customer service sprang right into action when i somehow (i.e., it was my fault) didn't get checks i'd ordered. they promptly put another order through and didn't charge me a thing, even though the first set was probably sitting in the mailbox at my old address. aside from that, though, i have nothing good to say about firstmerit.
ooh, i want to start collecting
glass.
i want to learn a lot more about former 'law & order' actor michael moriarty (d.a. ben stone, before the sam waterston character), especially about how he's apparently kind of lost his mind.
kara and i are watching this crappy blind melon 'behind the music.' okay, so that dead guy, shannon "guns'n'roses video" hoon, played a show in vancouver. at one point in the program he was drunk, tripping and pissing on the first few rows. the thing is, blind melon was the
opening act. yeah, follow that, lenny kravitz!
"i'm part of a disturbing trend."--girl in genital warts
psa
"the hardest part is doing nothing."--
method man, on acting
today i was working on an assignment about reference sources. it was just a list of questions, which we're supposed to answer, using a list of sources including
the thomas register and
hoover's. the thing is, librarians aren't supposed to answer things without checking. if someone comes in and says 'who was the first u.s. president?,' you're supposed to say something like 'well, i think it was george washington, but let me make sure...' this is relevant because one of the questions was 'what is iambic pentameter?' i know what iambic pentameter is. as aretha pointed out, it was mentioned in a recent visa commercial. i wrote an answer featuring, like, quoted examples from shakespeare ("shall i compare thee to a summer's day?"), whitman ("i celebrate myself, and sing myself") and frost ("two roads diverged into a yellow wood"), digressions on blank verse and details about the other varieties of metrical foot. _then_ i remembered that i had to find a source of this information from a list of directories, handbooks, yearbooks and almanacs. it should be no surprise where this is going--i couldn't find a freaking thing. i finally gave up for the time being when the computer lab closed--i'll give it another shot tomorrow.
who are these people who keep warning the aim bot that i generally use to post to this log (aim name: blogbot and/or bloggerbot, if you're interested)? ridiculous. 'warning' is about the most dubious aim 'feature' imaginable, moreso even than buddy icons and smileys. ;-(
at the record exchange today, kara and i made out like bandits with the cheap cds. she got, among other things, a 2-cd tom jones set, and, like, the only thing weirder than his duets (chaka khan?) are his covers ('spanish harlem'?). i got os mutantes, mad skillz rather poorly-named (just ask
ego trip) 'from where???', speedy j, aretha franklin's 'sweet sweet love' and 'la prochaine fois,' by neotropic. i'm excited about that last one. it's an audio cd and a cd-rom containing "an ambient road movie." one song even features one of my favorite singers, former
swans member
jarboe. and dig this
google translation of a german
review: The category "film music" is sufficiently notorious as stores for non-disturbing, atmospheric music beyond of Ambient, but Maslen really succeeds it to produce tendencies which do not force the pictures. Post office skirt avant-garde -, Singer/Songwriter and new approaches of music blur in their schwerbluetigem Urban Blues to graceful designed Pop without Trip and Hop. nearly too perfectly.
(Andreas's shrubs)
kara and i are watching a dog show. sez she: "i just don't even know. these people live in a whole 'nother world." sez me: "it's like a beauty pageant for dogs."
there's a backstreet boys greatest hits album. as is often the case with these kinds of things, it features one 'otherwise unavailable' (snicker) song. it's no surprise that it's advertised on television with an 800 number. but it's kinda surprising that a greatest hits album is being released into what i've been led to believe will be a long career. looks like someone in the bsb camp is as skeptical as i am. perhaps a.j.'s off the wagon.
"the first exhibit i showed him was a model american store, with all the variety of products and so forth that you can find in such a place. and as i showed it to him i said 'mister chairman,' i said, 'i was particularly interested in showing you this exhibit because when i was a young boy, i used to work in a little grocery store, along with my four brothers, that my father owned.' khruschev replied, 'all shopkeepers are thieves.'"--nixon speech
we're watching millhouse, this wonderful documentary about nixon, with whom i am simply fascinated. it's great--a damning indictment, a jeremiad, a polemic, all those kinds of things.
alger hiss,
helen gahagan douglas, "
respectable republican cloth coat", "one communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many", i could go on all day. it's hard to believe what a sleazy, unethical crook tricky dick comes off as--what a crook he was--especially since this documentary was made in 1971. watergate hadn't even happened yet.
donny hathaway is rather underrated. that's one problem with the
motown sound--non-gordy soul artists all seem to be underappreciated. for that matter, if you're a motown artist and you're not the supremes, the temptations, smokey robinson or marvin gaye, you're probably getting slept on too.
kara and i are about to go to the acme, the cvs, the record exchange and the tobacco store. i don't think there's any way to make this roster sound any more exciting than it is. now playing: fela kuti - shakara/london scene. now reading: barbara ehrenreich,
"nickel and dimed"
womyn, sycophant, film noir, eye-aye!, downy hair, skinny dog, quantum leap, huff'n'stuff, talk to my lawyer, slanguage, nasal wig, battered husband, giant panda, 'i would've bet on goliath. i still think that fight was fixed', geisha waltz, earlobe-otomy, winkle pickers, horrorshow, yuppieville, deflation, mad wok disease, kitsch... typing of the dead is such a wonderful game. incidentally, the saturn nights '3d' controller is mad underrated.
i'm enjoying the hell out of this boomlet in, like, dating shows (elimidate, change of heart, shipmates, the 5th wheel, rendez-view, blind date... there are probably others). these programs are, like, powerfully bad. they often have hosts who seem to be in their own level of showbiz hell (chris hardwick, aisha tyler, poor
greg proops playing a low-rent bill maher). and the contestants on the programs are, like, incredibly busted. they all seem to have bad tattoos, or horrendously poor, like, social skills. the commercials are for herpes medications and ged classes and psychic hotlines and backstreet boys greatest hits albums. and it's remarkably clear that the people who make these programs are on one hand cynical, bitter and ashamed and on the other hand rolling around in vats of money like scrooge mcduck saying 'wheee!'
now playing: steve def - hell up in harlem (put "steve def" in google and all you get is a bunch of hits about that guy from def leppard who drank himself to death.)
kara and i just got back. she wasn't very happy with her gre performance. afterward, though, we went to the thai place for lunch/dinner, which certainly lifted my spirits. for appetizers, we had crab rangoon, something called 'lotus chicken'--heavy ground-peanut flavor, and prawns in eggroll wrappings. i had a puket shrimp/chicken combo for the, uh, entree, while kara had mandarin duck. everything was very tasty. afterward, we went to the thrift store, where she found me some simpsons sheets (i'm thrilled) and i found a
little people airport, still in the box. it's from somewhere in the '86-90 area, but still exciting.
on campus, looking for videos, ideally exciting documentaries with mtv-style editing. why does the library have a copy of 'strange brew?' on my way into the building, i saw this dreadlocked girl that i totally want to befriend. but, like, i never manage to successfully befriend anyone, especially not people who are so much hipper than i am.
i'm about to give kara a ride to the gre. while she's taking it, i even have a little roster of things to do, some of which i originally planned to do as early as tuesday. it's a little nostalgic, although when i went to take the thing i somehow misunderstood the testing date and showed up a week early--just the sort of confidence-inspiration i needed. now playing: dj paul nice f. ag, babu & gennessee - definition of nice (droppen the bomb comp--
bomb hip-hop records)
ooh, jane kaczmarek's in this 'law & order' episode. she's married to a bradley whitford, not that schmuck from aerosmith but an actor who appears on 'the west wing.' his brother wrote something for
esquire about, like, his actor brother. wow, the bald guy from 'just shoot me' also makes an appearance. besides its other appealing attributes, l&o is a good show for people who watch a lot of teevee.
now playing: common - resurrection;
mat hoffman's pro bmx
kara and i watched this documentary. it was, like, disjointed and crummy, though it had some bodmod content, and even included branding among black greeks. the ending was terrible, though. dane archer, you schmuck. nice
site, too.
why is it that, every time i watch a tattoo documentary, someone makes a big point of saying that they're not just for sailors and criminals any more? tattoos have been around throughout the world for thousands of years. that sailor-and-criminal thing was a pretty limited phenomenon.
the xp 'look', not surprisingly, is kind of a mac os x (pronounced 'ten') ripoff, but in a very via-quicktime-4 sort of way. hmm. biting apple's gui got microsoft where they are today, but the qt4 ui ranks up there with the g4 cube for apple what-were-they-thinking?-ness. nevertheless, it looks like translucent desktop items and giant icons are the way of the future.
i just saw a windows xp tv commercial. awful. for one thing, it featured madonna's 'ray of light,' which i don't think i've heard since that at&t commercial. i haven't heard that song for a while. it reminded me of when emily valentine spiked brandon's drink with 'u4ia' at that 'rave.' i haven't paid much attention to xp--how can i get excited about a windows release when i'd just throw out all the ms applications, replace the
shell and install
opera?
okay, so last night i couldn't sleep, which isn't that uncommon for me. so i just stayed up until 10 am or something, which i haven't done since i worked at the porno theater, figuring that i'd wake up in the early afternoon sometime. this was especially relevant because i'd hoped to: go to the bank, which, absurdly, closes around 3 or 5 or some similar afternoon hour; return some library videos (AV closes at 5 or 6 or so); and go to the grocery store (closes at 9 or 10, depending on
which one i go to). alas, i woke up a little bit ago, around 7 something pm, and i could hardly be more disoriented if i'd been blindfolded and spun around repeatedly. so i've lowered my expectations for the day a little. mainly, i'd like to get to sleep at a more reasonable hour.
that schmuck sinbad, who nonetheless managed to make a movie with phil hartman, acts as a narrator in this 'different world' episode. clearly too much dependence on the big guy. makes me think of that ex-jock putz on 'saved by the bell: the college years.' who was that? bob golic? besides having sinbad in a key role, this episode is also the lamest twilight zone parody/homage/whatever i've ever seen. ooh, but this next episode has patti labelle in it. another 'different world' note: after the first season, aretha franklin sang the theme song. likely coincidentally, her ex-husband, glynn 'dr. war' turman,' joined the cast around the same time. 'different world' ran from '87 to '93. that seems like a ridiculously long time.
now i'm experimenting with posting through aim. how long did 'a different world' run after lisa bonet left? who _are_ these people?
since my roommate and i started keeping her cat out of the basement, she (the cat) hasn't brought us any small dead mammals. this was after a high of three in one day, so i at least am palpably relieved. also from the palpable relief department, one of my midterms had a question that the entire class got wrong. so my professor gave everyone the points for it. i complain a lot about school being too easy. i detest this sort of grade inflation. in theory.
i'm kind of experimenting with disabling activex, scripts and whatnot in my browser. but without these security compromises, nothing works. is the chance of receiving a malicious or privacy-violating script/control/applet/etc. a lot smaller than i've been led to believe? is personally-identifiable data relevant for someone who only goes to gist and gamefaqs.com?
