Recently in General Life Category

I don't really get into the whole "January 1" renewal thing. I don't get why people make resolutions still, or why any of those traditions still hold. In general, when "New Year" traditions were started, the individual person was less important, and people actually kept their resolutions. I personally do not really celebrate the New Year the way others do. I typically spend the New Year's week working on GITI and her components, but that has nothing to do with anything, except all of the real holidays are over and it is my last chance to work on GITI during her "down time". Typically that work goes on during the first week of January and the last week of July, when the academic module is least likely to be corrupted.

My personal new year happens on my birthday, March 4th, each year. I take that week to look over 'my' previous year and see what has occurred. In some ways I suppose I treat January 1 as a warning signal to begin making progress towards goals and things, and to wrap up anything goaled for that year. Also, it gives me a chance while everyone else if scrambling to get their own goals together to be meticulous in assembling my ideals for the coming year of 'me'.

Just my personal rant, if I look back to last January, I'm sure I will find a similar entry.

To all of my friends, local and afar, Happy New Year!

Why must microwaves beep so much? It is nearly impossible to make one's self a microwave chicken pot pie without disturbing an entire household at 0-00h. The buttons beep, the sensors beep, and most importantly, the annoying end beeps. 

It would seem that I forgot to blog during the last half of November… oops? I guess with being busy academically and trying to step away from my technology for a while, I lost track of the blog. So many times I meant to blog, but never got around to it. Well… here is an update.

• Class Registration – I am registered for Spring and most of my apprehensions are gone, except for the concept of taking a chemistry course “for fun”? Seems like it may be a stretch, even for me to attempt that type of course for fun.
• Class Registration (cont’d) – On the bright side of the registrar’s office, I have requested and been permitted for a new studio course at Gaston. Digital Photography Studio. ART-288-DH will be offered for the first time in Spring 2009. It is being offered as a special section of the course (70) for up to four students. I will post the CRN once the registrar updates the records.
• Thanksgiving – Thanksgiving was great, I cooked… mostly. My father decided to get a catered turkey and a few sides. I made my own dressing (first time ever, without even a recipe). I also prepared a silk pie for the first time. This is my first Thanksgiving since discovering the miracle of yeast. My yeasty creations were well received. Usually Thanksgiving leftovers last a while, but both the turkey and ham were eaten almost to oblivion before dinner was over.
• AeroGarden – My tomatoes never did die by themselves, I had to pull them up by their roots to make them go away before Thanksgiving. I now have a starter tray in the garden. It contains strawberries, hollyhocks, coriander, redwoods, cherry trees, and cabbage. I intend to grow some pomegranates for my aunt if I ever remember to get them ordered.
• Academics – things are busy as usual. I’ve gotten a little behind, but not badly. I am keeping up my usual speed for this time of the semester. I will finish everything by the final deadlines if it kills me (perhaps the origin of the term “deadline”?)

I really need to learn how to let some people in my life just fade into the past. I have had too many days of hurt feelings because I let people back into my life because I briefly miss them and forget why it was that they were no longer part of my life to begin with. Some people are persistent and make it very hard to remove them. For the good of my own emotional state I have to learn to move on. I can’t let these few people hold me back. I also can not let myself get attached to people who are not local to me. I have some online friends that are great, but I am getting too close to many of them that are so physically distant from me. I want to have local friends that I can actually touch and interact with in some way other than just idle chat. I get jealous very easily, and sometimes I don’t think it is unjustified. 

What I did today was nothing out of the ordinary, I spent some time looking over academic stuff, trying to prepare for the following semester, only to realize that to this point I have done everything I can. I can't go any further unless my advisor replies to me or returns my call and gives me a registration PIN.

Upon realizing the fruitlessness of my attempts and my staring at my record in Banner, I opened up GITI's code and started playing with some things. I didn't do anything revolutionary, but I did add a few cool features, such as the ability to treat classes that only prospective differently from classes that are registered. Months ago I created a distinction in the storage of the courses, "planned" or "anticipated" courses are 0.1 and courses that are registered are 0.2. Nothing too complicated. Today I added the ability to store and retrieve the registration code information for the classes (the number that lets you register quickly and not have to dive in the schedule to register), and optionally move the classes to "registered" (0.2) while viewing the information. Additionally, I did something I should have done YEARS ago, I can now add all of the classes for a semester from a single institution in one form (only saves me about 2 or 3 forms, but my furry buddy with only one school will only have to enter data one time). In general I am working towards making GITI's Education management functions a little more user friendly since I am no longer the only user. I will eventually get around to being able to add multiple assignments at the same time, but I'm not quite ready to perform that type of magic just yet. On the class side, I'm also considering create a page that is basically a "syllabus input form", where a student may go once starting the class to convert the mess on the syllabus to a useful set of data (grade weights, assignments, special considerations, perhaps even special grading policies if I get bored). If I truly get bored I can create a mechanism for planning in-person courses... perhaps a little Java or something and I can drag and drop courses on to a calendar to see how they fit.

I haven't done a lot else in terms of actual stuff, but I have contemplated more fixes in GITI as well as my desire to start bonsai. I might have to write a "horticultural logging" module for GITI to fill in the time while I'm waiting for the bonsai to grow.

Life often seems desperate, and a bit hopeless. Sometimes life seems like it has no point and all paths lead to a bleak existence on the road to non-existence. Humans seem to have no understanding of anything but “this moment” or “this emotion”, which creates sensations that may be a bit irrational. Things in life almost always turn around and humans have no way of knowing what is coming in the future. Tomorrow may bring happiness and resolution, we must hold out hope in the most desperate of times if we are going to survive. 

Looking at the number of states that have some sort of Gay-Marriage Ban on their ballots for November, I am shocked. Isn’t this a step backward for a society? Should we be seeking to limit the rights of citizens like this?

I am personally against homosexuals being married. Marriage has become more about a contractual obligation than an institution to protect love between individuals. The straights have managed to destroy the institution of marriage by being more concerned about whether or not gays could be married than policing the validity of the heterosexual marriages occurring. I believe the rights that are being granted with marriage should be able to be conferred in other ways. If there were two straight men, best friends, who had no family remaining, and one of them became ill, chances are, a hospital would not allow the friend to be present or involved at all. Its a rather disgusting thought. Why is there no legally recognizable institution for situations like that?

The fun part of the whole thing becomes, do we care about love? do we care about family? or do we care about reproduction? The conservative view seems to be one of reproduction. Marriage is a very cold institution when you look at it from a legal view.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/automobiles/07auto.html

I love Ford’s newest “enhancement” to its vehicles. A special key for teens to use when driving that restricts their speed and stereo use. What a piece of shit! Ford claims the device is to help teach kids how to drive more safely. I must question what the awkward year to 18 months in most states where teens are to drive with a parent before getting their license is supposed to be for. It sure as hell isn’t chauffer training.

I am personally against any device that restricts speed in a vehicle. I don’t know how many times I have been driving and had to speed up… usually above what is considered safe, to avoid a road danger (I think they are called truckers in most states). A brief burst of acceleration isn’t always a bad thing.

I really think that parents should be more responsible in their own driving to encourage responsibility in young drivers. Letting children know the expectations that parents have for them is often a very effective way of getting them to drive responsibly.

I am starting to hate this whole “digital” thing that is happening. Digital being just digital is fine, but unfortunately, digital often means compression. Compression often means loss of quality, therefore, digital often means loss of quality. Theatres in the United States will soon be upgraded to using digital projectors and receiving movies digitally. No specific clues have been given as to what this means, but it is probably safe to assume this means they will be delivered by Internet. This thought suddenly makes me think of blocky, bad YouTube videos, and seeing those on a massive screen. Not a pretty thought. If a film canister is damaged during transit, it is possible for a few frames to be damaged, but the rest lest completely intact. In a digital delivery form, it would require the use of a good verification algorithm (better than a CRC) to validate the files, or else they could be unwatchable. I’m sure they have considered that though, and there will likely be a cute little Windows app, or maybe a custom Linux distribution made to handle that sort of thing to take the burden off of the theatres. They can probably automate the whole thing, like when you order digital prints online to pick them up at the store, no user intervention at all, so you can walk into the theatre and at the scheduled movie start time, watch “File Not Found” appear on the screen when some part of the system fails to do its job properly.

Digital television is a little different. It is possible for the cable company to give you a great stream, or a really suckily compressed stream, on really crappy equipment/software. My digital cable box has developed a habit of restarting itself lately,  this wasn’t a problem on analog (although, funny enough, a lot of channels are still analog and I still have to put up with this bullshit).

Digital mediums coming at this stage in human understanding of “art” is a very bad thing. Digital formats loose so much from traditional arts because the formats are badly used. The focus now is on “media delivery” methods and how to make the most profit from it, not on how to bring art to the common person and letting them experience it to its fullest.

DVD is a great technology, the compression is relatively low, and there is a lot of room for the full artistic experience. The same is true of CD. These technologies freed us from lousy analog formats that were badly made. There is a huge difference between DVDs and streamed movies however. DVD uses the digital format to its fullest, not taking short cuts. This is because a DVD is physical. CDs are analog creations, MP3s are digital reinterpretations of that. When played on good equipment, there is a difference between a “ripped” song at under 320 kbps, and a song being played from a real CD. A lot of MP3 stores don’t sell the best possible quality of songs, therefore, cheating the consumer out of the experience, and to make things worse, MP3s take songs out of context. MP3s encourage a move to a single style of music creation, no longer focusing on a cohesive creation. It is like developing a culture where books are purchased a chapter at a time, it might make sense, but the full experience is lost.

Digital is the demise of most forms of art.