Preference Personnelle
Thursday, December 27
 
wow, blogger's temperamental today.
 
 
i just got back from pennsylvania. much news i plan to write about later but likely won't, including tiresome rants about my racist family and inexplicable ecstacy at my car's now-correctly-functional thermostat. also, i went to the thrift store, where i saw an ex-girlfriend, sarah, who i've been wanting to speak to for years. i really want to befriend her, but that would seem unlikely even if we exchanged phone numbers or something, which we didn't.

hmm. now i need to find the number one calls to get one's street salted/plowed. like, desperately, because i doubt i'll be able to leave the house by car until i do. ooh, it's 375-2814.
 
Saturday, December 22
 
bozo skidmore worker: do you like carrot top?
second bsw: yeah, he's funny.
 
Friday, December 21
 
aretha and i went to this 'power of the word' exhibit at the tang. it was, like, not thrilling. i think the exhibit sort of traded on the unfamiliarity of western people with non-western characters. i wanted the exhibit to include a chinese typewriter, mainly because i just think they're cool.
 
Wednesday, December 19
 
we definitely just watched groove, which is, basically, unspeakably vile. digweed, you jackass.
 
 
i watched 'blood simple' with aretha and andrew last night. i'd totally forgotten how good it is, and how frequently funny. it would seem that a movie can only be considered a comedy these days if it has, like, adam sandler or eddie murphy or somebody, and lots of, like, bathroom humor or people in fat suits or something.
 
Friday, December 14
 
stone: my father wanted me to be a doctor. i went so far as to study organic chemistry.
schiff: what happened?
stone: i grew up.
 
Thursday, December 13
 
i got my grade in organization of information. i got an 'a,' which would be more exciting if, like, damn near the whole class hadn't also gotten a's. the lowest grade in the class was a 'b.' now, perhaps i'm from the old school, but my feeling is that, if there's ten people in the class, there ought to be, roughly, one a, one f, two b's, two d's and four c's. a bell-shaped curve. in fact, i used to think that was what 'curve,' in relation to grades, meant.
 
 
"change your search without using the back button--another way expedia makes it easy." are people complaining that it's too difficult to use the 'back' button when they want to go back?
 
Wednesday, December 12
 
this mtv unplugged with jay-z is pretty good. jay doesn't have his pals like memph bleek and beans, but... ooh, wait. in kara's words: "... mary?" wow. helen and autumn thought it was terrible though, being bothered by jay's use of a teleprompter. though i didn't mention this at the time, it seems like he might've had to do so in order to have mtv-ready versions of the lyrics.
 
 
wow, i just finished my two exams. woowoo.

this vh=1 thing just claimed that the success of enrique igleseas' (sp?) song 'hero' signals a return to more meaningful music.
 
 
slightly-dubious livejournal advantage: it'll grab the music one's listening to from one's mp3 player. it's only a dubious advantage because of the amount of time i spend listening to mp3s versus other formats; well, and the extra level of complexity, code, etc. i'm not really sure why i'm so into the livejournal/blogger comparisons lately. it's not like i'd switch now.
 
Tuesday, December 11
 
wow, i'm having a little discussion with my boss about samba and linking my windoze and linux comps as we speak. ooh yeah.
 
 
have i been having some livejournal-vs-blogger conversations with people lately, or is that just my imagination? at any rate, i think it might be one of those aim-vs-icq arguments where it's basically features against perceived-easiness (though, like, livejournal, blogger, aim and icq are all incredibly easy). but blogger also offers posting from blogbuddy and aim, while livejournal, as far as i know, does not. so much easier to post to.

update: rachel tells me that livejournal has a program you can download to post with. she didn't know if it's windows-only, though, as she's never used it. i figured it would be, but, in fact, they offer versions for Win32, OS 6-X, gtk+, BeOS, QNX, PalmOS and other surprising platforms (java, mirc, emacs...) it's even GPL. i had no idea.
 
 
"i am tired of people's consciousness getting elevated to where mine was at... what? three? four?"--julia phillips
 
Monday, December 10
 
from some random slashdot poster: The internet is something like the world's largest library where anyone can insert a book and random organizers may (if they wish!) go through and make lists, hashes and indexes of the information for their own card catalogs. Right now, each search service maintains its own separate list! The crawler is like a super-fast librarian who can puruse the book. The coming paradigm will be fewer, more accurate and useful catalogs along with books that "insert themselves" into these schemes intelligently and discretely after a validation of informational content.

huh?
 
 
wow, this duckman episode contains elements of a 'who's afraid of virginia woolf?' parody.
 
Sunday, December 9
 
i have this archos mp3 player, basically a six gig usb hard drive. i'm a huge fan (neo? too big and ugly. nomad? sdmi. ipod? better windows/linux support. and now that my archos' warranty is expired, i can put a 20 or 30-gig drive in it, aww yeah), but its largest flaw, in my view, is the use of an utterly non-standard usb cable. they don't have it at places like best buy and compusa and circuit shitty (though, like, circuit shitty doesn't have jack. i loathe that place. it's way too much of a throwback to the sleazy old-style electronics store of yore, rather than the home-depot-inspired warehouse model that seems to work for everybody from wal-mart to world market--cc's success, such as it is, is an argument against any ideas about 'informed consumers.')

in the hip-hop music of the future, will there ever be a point that prince samples occupy the same place that james brown samples used to? i certainly hope so.
 
 
when i see someone else's computer, and it's a windoze box, as it so often is, and they have, like, hundreds of icons on the desktop, random documents and crap that came with the machine and links to every program they've ever installed, it tears me apart inside.
 
 
kara and i just got back from gabrielle's parents' house, where we had a delightful birthday (g and k's) dinner. miso soup. nice sushi, pork dumplings, delightful tempura carrots, chicken and broccoli, and a cake that rocked my socks. like, ridiculous layers of mocha-ish chocolate and thin white cake layers. and i played chess and checkers with gabrielle's sister sierrah, who's almost eight. ooh, and gabrielle's sister nika made her a powerpoint birthday presentation. exciting conversation about conception and religious undergarments, too.
 
Saturday, December 8
 
malcolm: we didn't do anything wrong.
dewey: then how come we have money?
 
Friday, December 7
 
Kew*****69 (12:30:01 AM): I just told ****** that she is an obnoxious drunk.
Kew*****69 (12:30:16 AM): and she's drunk, so I don't think she took the news so well.
 
Thursday, December 6
 
the mandrake install is working just peachy (though, admittedly, i haven't tried to, say, install my scanner or digicam, burn a cd, play a dvd, get opera and file-sharing programs up and running, et cetera, ad infinitum. also, now i'm reinstalling windoze, which is, like, frustrating enough to remind me why i'm doing this in the first place.
 
Wednesday, December 5
 
woowoo. now i've got three mandrake cds and over 300 pages (!) of documentation. i'm ready to rumble like g.c. thunder.
 
 
ooh, break from class. it's a wonderful thing. we demo'd a chat-esque software for virtual reference. the strangest thing about it, besides that the person on the other end claimed to be able to send files in 'any format' and that the software works with 'any browser' (this despite the relevant page clearly having illustrations, frames and java), is the chat interface. the box to post messages in is at the bottom, but new messages appear at the top, unlike almost any chat environment one could imagine. weird.
 
 
ugh. why the hell am i still awake? it sure isn't because i love 'the jeffersons.' though i suppose i'm still in the midst of burning mandrake cds.
 
 
some moron managed to add that goner worm to one of the lab computers. this person thought that web-based email was somehow totally secure. stupid. thought that the yahoo spam filters would protect them from viruses. stupid. thought the email wasn't a virus because it appeared to be from someone she knew. stupid. saw nothing suspicious in this message:

How are you ?
When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you
I am in a harry, I promise you will love it!

stupid. double-clicked on an attachment that appeared to be a screensaver, despite being in a computer lab and, thus, having no good reason to install a screensaver. stupid. people who frequently listen to me complain about people in my classes might recognize this person as the woman who doesn't know what an html tag is, or as the person who doesn't know what a keyword search is, or even the person who asks questions like "is the field terminator always at the end of the field?" and "are some articles in other languages translated?" sheesh.
 
Tuesday, December 4
 
"the solar plexus is all right"--aretha
 
Monday, December 3
 
someone in the computer lab is definitely using their free printing privileges to make lined paper. and not only are they making lined paper, they're trying to print it on, like, cardstock, and then complaining when the printer jams because they've done the equivalent of, like, trying to take a battleship through the car wash.
 
 
if any opera programmers are listening, there's something i'd really like for them to do. i want to be able to put more than one toolbar on the same level. see, there's a bar with file, edit, view, etc., that you have to have. there's a button bar, an address bar and a window bar, which are likewise pretty compulsory. there are other bars, too, for that matter, that i don't bother with. so we're talking about four horizontal bars at the top of the browser window. where with my despised ie, it's possible to mash up the button bar (i like it minimized to back/forward/reload/homepage anyway) on the same line as file/edit/etc, and cut the ugly-but-necessary clutter down to two bars (see screenshot). this is a big difference in, pardon the cheesy expression, screen real estate. opera's wonderful, but i wish the interface could be just slightly less obtrusive. it seems like that turns off more potential users than the multiple-document interface. and if any m$ ie ui (teehee) programmers are listening, nobody looks at the information at the bottom of the damn window.

greg: there are lots of heroes today. take wilt chamberlain for instance.
this brady bunch is about bobby's hero, jesse james, and censorship, and librarians. bobby has a dream in which the whole bunch is shot. it's totally the best brady bunch ever.
 
Sunday, December 2
 
i just got back from columbus, and now i'm in the lab. but i don't think i'll be, like, writing any of the ipl paper today, unless, i suppose, i perk up quite a bit.
 
A lagniappe of cultural kitsch and B-movie claptrap

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