Random Grab Bag

read over my old blog. It was a lot better than I gave it credit for being. I used to think all those links and images I included were stupid, but it turns out it really made it nice to look at. I actually covered some good stuff. I’ll have to work on doing more stuff like that.

Also, I need to separate my posts. Right now I just sorta pile everything into one giant post. I need to have a “cool stuff on the net post” and then save my “introspective post” for later in the week. I can even write it when I want to write and then submit it a few days later. Write loads of posts in advance so I can just keep publishing even if I’m too busy to write. That, my friends, is brilliant.

Also, shorter paragraphs. Newspapers and other print media does it, I should too. One huge block of text can be daunting for a reader. Basically what I’m saying is I hate my style. Good job me.

hilarious: http://www.brandonoana.com/2007/08/further-faster-goatsier.html

I saw this a while ago, it epitomizes my feelings about most things men do

in my conversations I’ve stopped going above and beyond when people ask me a question. I don’t answer the next question I know they will ask. I want them to ask it so we get a nice back and forth. And if they don’t want to know more, they can move on. I leave a little hook so they have something to ask next time. I think this is particularly important when talking online. Even if you have no more questions you can think of to ask you can leave a few hooks so they have something to ask when they’re done reading what you have written. I am refining my conversational skills. Sometimes you can say more by what you don’t say.

this is new york, there are no rules

insults in another language

Yep, overall random post. Figured I’d throw this stuff out here before they became too dusty.

Clearly I don’t have enough work

I have lots of free time at work. Enough to read just about anything I want to read. I can chat on AIM and chat with my co-workers. I can even write blog posts, like this one. Reading other people’s blogs inspires me to reflect about my life, and usually some surprising things come out of that reflection. One is that I feel bad reading back through their archives. Like I shouldn’t be reading these personal things they put on the internet for everyone to read. These things they probably wanted read, at least at the time. I personally forget all the things I used to blog about, and if someone were to go back and dredge all those forgotten things to the forefront I might be a little shocked by what I found. I was a different person back then, but the lone reader doesn’t know that. Provided they’ve never met me, or I’ve never met them. Maybe thats why I feel bad. I feel like a stranger riffling through another person’s things. You need to be invited in, offered those things, and then it is okay. So my apologies to Janet. You’ve kept me entertained at work today. Her new stuff is good too, but I read that already.

Sometimes when I’m walking by myself through New York City the song The Only Living Boy in New York pops into my head. I first heard it on the Garden State soundtrack and its been with me ever since. It reminds me of the scene at the opening of Vanilla Sky where Tom Cruise drives into Times Square and he is the only person there. It’s a haunting scene. I feel like I’m the only feeling person in the city. Or at least the only feeling boy. Is that loneliness natural when you’re standing in a crowd? Anyone else ever feel that?

I also feel like I’m from that class of people who are desperately trying to escape what they are and where they came from. It’s not that I don’t like where I came from, I just want to be different. I’m part of that Great Gatsby American Dream. Those people who set out with great expectations and want to someday achieve greatness. It’s a shame. I was having a conversation with a friend. It went something like this:

nick: I suppose if [female] talked about working at camp and called the kids crazy brats and said there was a male camp counselor she was always making eyes with that would be more exciting
friend: did you just make that up in your head?
nick: she does work at a day camp. and after camp if she went to a coffee shop or other place like that and had haughty conversations with the staff, or read a self-important novel and acted like everyone should wish they were her and were getting as much out of this novel as she was. then I’d really want to be there and wish I was reading the same novel and getting the same goodness out of it.
friend: but i would say that a person like that needs to get over themselves
nick: but by the time I get around to [reading] it she has moved onto the latest new thing and can’t be bothered to talk about that novel because it is old hat.
friend: so if you meet her, and shes not like that, is she immediately not interesting? could you give her a chance to be interesting in another way that maybe you don’t realize that you like?
nick: she is interesting in other ways, and I think a different guy would really appreciate those things, but I find that I fake interest in those areas. like the [interests of the female]. they aren’t me. but I [really] should give her more of a shot.
nick: I think I project the things I want to be onto the people I’d like to date. so if I want to be well read, they should be well read; if I want to be an artist, they should be an artist;
friend: i cant disagree with that
nick: if I want to be exciting and be part of the upper crust, they should already be those things. I want to envy their lifestyle so much that I become it.
friend: i think youre right about that.
nick: I’m right? that’s nice.

I’m not entirely sure what this says about me, but I’m working on finding out.

I’ve been watching a lot of CSI, phrases like occipital lobe keep popping into my head. Ever wonder where your mind goes when you aren’t watching it? I was walking in the rain on Sunday and as I drew near my dorm the phrase “Pirates of Penzance” popped into my head. I don’t know where from or why. It wasn’t until I had ridden up the elevator and gone into my room that I realized how odd that was. Where do these things come from?

Wow, April was a while ago.

It’s 3 AM so I have to keep this short. I’ve recently been inspired by some bloggers who blog and talk about each other and write stuff all the time. I never thought I could do it. They seem to find the time, however, and since all I’m doing this summer is working I figure I might give it another shot (as I always do).

Tonight I saw Live Free or Die Hard. It was an amazing movie with explosions, hacking, and lots of John McClane. I would have to order the films 1, 4, 3, 2. Its damn near impossible to beat the original (since all subsequent films are compared to the original based on its original merits) but this movie comes really close. In fact, if I was not nostalgic about the original I might put Live Free or Die Hard at the top of my list. It is my favorite movie so far this summer.

I’m sure I’ll talk about this in more detail after some sleep. Work in the morning dictates that I get an adequate amount of sleep prior to waking up at 8 AM. Usually that’s 8 hours or so, but I’ll let it slide on account of the fact that the movie was VERY much worth seeing. Goodnight, and yippee-ki-yay mother f—er!

Case of the “Mondays”

I always thought that was a dumb saying, but it describes how I feel today. I’m watching Dirt, that new show on FX. I’m surprised at how sexually charged it is. If it was HBO then we’d actually see something, but since its FX it just feels like watching a dirty show with your parents in the other room, and trying not to get caught. I don’t see it lasting very long. It’s interesting, it just doesn’t have that hook that the other new great shows have.

I thought this photo was cute. ETTF.net has a bunch of weird photos, ads, and videos that are sometimes interesting. Kittens are cute, but I’m getting a little tired of all the “I’m in your <blank> <blanking> your <blank>.” It was cute, but now its just irritating.

I can’t wait to see Heroes tonight. It’s building up to something great. I’m lucky I don’t have a lot of homework to do for tomorrow or it might cut into my viewing time. I’ll also end up watching The Class and How I Met Your Mother, but Heroes is the main dish.

I’ll probably edit this later and add more crap. Later.

Lazy Saturday

I seem to be making a habit of doing blog posts. I get into this cycle where I all of a sudden feel that for anyone reading this, I am the sole source of information they will look to, and if I don’t make mention of something, they’ll miss out. So for about a week I try to make a comment on everything I think is cool online, and post about it, and link to it, and then 3 months later its old and blase and I didn’t really make a difference in the big scheme of things.

To be a successful blogger, you need to be ahead of the curve. Or at least be so with the curve that you are making pointed commentary that influences other people. I don’t have either of those. Just recently I started reading personal blogs, rather then getting all my links from aggregators like digg, reddit, or slashdot. It puts me a little closer to the edge, but I still get all my information after someone else decides whats worth noting.

Do I really want that kind of influence? I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t feel that I’m educated enough in the fields where it matters, and I’m too young for my cultural references to carry any weight. Of course, now that I’ve realized this, I can stop trying to be a marketer, and finally post about things I like. Or in the case of this next point, things I don’t like.

I tried to watch Flyboys last night. I say tried because I didn’t make it all the way through. I got distracted, lost interest, and after that there was really nothing for it except to turn it off. I was really expecting something action packed. I wanted edge of your seat dogfights for the whole film. Give me Black Hawk Down with WWI airplanes and I’m set. But instead it felt like a Disney romance that was an hour too long, with way too little violence. I don’t know who their target audience was, but I certainly wasn’t it. If I had checked the reviews, I probably would have seen it coming.

As a Python fan, I’ve been reading a lot about other high level languages that make development easy. So far Python is still my favored language, but I am always tempted to get my hands dirty and see what all the buzz about Ruby and Haskell are about. I just recently found a great tool for Python that makes testing within the interpreter even easier. IPython. It adds support for shell commands from within interpreter, it has tab auto-completion, and the interface feels more informative and powerful. I am looking forward to my next development project so I can try it out.

I would also like to recommend that everyone get a Useless Account. Yes, its useless. No, it doesn’t have even the slightest bit of purpose. I got a good laugh out of it, and I just wanted to give everyone else the opportunity as well.

Performancing is a pretty cool Firefox Extention

If you don’t necessarily like to blog in a webpage, such as blogger, wordpress, or basically any other web based blogging service, then Performancing might be for you. It’s a Firefox extension (and you really ought to be using Firefox) so its part of your browser.

What I like most about it is that you have a webpage in half of the window, and the editor in the other half. This allows you to browse to pages you might be blogging about without having to switch windows and cover up what you said. Also, this allows you to drag text, images, and links into your post, so you don’t have to copy/paste all that stuff.

The editor has more features than Flock’s built in editor (at least since I last used it) and if you don’t need all the pizazz that Flock offers, then you’re better off with this. And if you’re using Firefox 2 you have built in spell checking, so you’re pretty golden. Check it out, it won’t let you down.