Kablammo!

In the past week, I’ve more-or-less randomly bumped into a few friends acquaintances, including two whom I’ve known since elementary school (kindergarten, in one case). Apparently I’ve changed a lot in the five-and-a-half years since I’ve seen them, or so they told me. Though they told me that outright, there was really no need since it was quite explicit in the total lack of recognition in their eyes before I told them my name and gave them a few moments to process it.

I guess most people don’t grow another two or three inches after high school. What this might mean is that if I keep my fool mouth shut, I can walk around my hometown completely incognito.

Sadly there’s other recent news involving people I’ve known since kindergarten, in this case the kid I sat next to in Mrs West’s art class. Britton was one of the nicest people I ever met, and for what it’s worth he recognized me immediately, different though I may look, when I ran into him just before Christmas.

I’m glad that at least I ended up seeing him one last time, though it’s certainly terribly depressing that he apparently won’t end up finishing pharmacy school after all.

I thought I was too young for this, but then I thought he was too young for his part in this too. Rest in peace.

The best part is definitely the muted orange glow that envelops the world in its snug embrace.

And the worst, without a doubt, is the local news coverage. As always.

Song of the Moment: «One of These Days» — Doves

Reuters: Cheney authorized aid (sic) to leak in CIA case – report

OK, it’s another article claiming (or at least insinuating) that high-level Administration officialdom is, or has been known to be, up to no good. With an Administration like the present one, that’s no big shocker.

Know what else isn’t a shocker? This, but also the following:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to comment.

“Our policy is we’re not going to discuss this while there’s an ongoing legal proceeding,” McClellan told reporters.

I’m sure the staff writers at Reuters (or any other wire service or newspaper that ever discusses American politics) have the above-quoted passage saved as a keyboard macro.
Every one of Scott McClellan’s graceless and sweaty attempts to stonewall just makes me nostalgic for the good old days, when Ari Fleischer brought some dignity and artistry to the position of spokesweasel. Fleischer and his grab-bag of Aes-Sedai-style not-actually-lying tricks were always entertaining to see in action.

McClellan, on the other hand, is only worth watching if you enjoy trainwrecks, and seems even unhappier than the host of Supermarket Sweep.

Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of those famous books that every good nerd is supposed to read. (Just look at those 926 glowing Amazon reviews, for Chrissakes.) So when I saw it on the shelf of the library’s self-service Book Swap, I decided to pick it up and leave my similarly-serendipitously obtained (and recently read) copy of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in its place.

After all, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed other such nerd-staple series as Foundation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Lord of the Rings. Hell, I’ve even slogged through over 10,000 pages’ worth of The Wheel of Time and I’m still looking forward to reading Book 11 for some reason.

When I started reading Dune, then, I was expecting to enjoy it because I’m a faceless drone who usually enjoys whatever nerds enjoy, even if I don’t come right out and admit it. But I was a bit put off by all the bullshit two-word phrases and made-up jargon like “Bene Gesserit”, “Padishah Emperor”, “suspensor lamp”, and “Kwisatz Haderach”: the kind of terminology that’s completely fucking pandemic in sci-fi and fantasy, and is also responsible for the giant glossary (complete with pronunciation guide) in the back of each volume of WoT. After reading all of the above-quoted phrases on page 1 of Dune, I decided to keep reading. How much worse could it get?

Proceeding to page 2 I came across this doozy of a paragraph:

Thufir Hawat, his father’s Master of Assassins, had explained it: their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, had been on Arrakis eighty years, holding the planet in quasi-fief under a CHOAM Company contract to mine the geriatric spice, melange. Now the Harkonnens were leaving to be replaced by the House of Atreides in fief-complete—an apparent victory for the Duke Leto. Yet, Hawat had said, this appearance contained the deadliest peril, for the Duke Leto was popular among the Great Houses of the Landsraad.

At this point, I tossed the book irritably aside, since so far it had been doing nothing but drowning me in a morass of gibberish, and even the recognizable English words in between everything else weren’t particularly engaging. I took a little break and came back later and started reading against my better judgment.

But nobody talks like this, not even fictional characters.

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: “There it is, Piter—the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?”

I think I’m not going to bother reading the rest of this book.

I can’t believe it took me this long to finally realize/notice that Jack Feeny and Mark Prindle are not, in fact, the same person.

So a week after I spend all that time and vitriol complaining about an automatic-transmission van, a squirrel decided to gnaw through random wires that connected the battery to such inconsequential things as the ignition. Getting a car towed to the garage and having your mother give you a ride to school is, as it turns out, much more bothersome than having to drive a car you don’t like driving.

Which will teach me to be ungrateful, I suppose.

It’s funny: the last time I was in Carnegie Hall, I was one of the performers.

How the mighty have fallen.

I’ve had my Averatec 3150 laptop for about 18 months now, and it’s served me well the whole time. It’s tiny enough that I had a hell of a time finding a bag small enough to carry it in comfortably, and I’ve been able to leave it running for weeks at a time with no problems. After a while, my habit of leaving Firefox running for a week with a few dozen tabs open made me want more RAM, so I added 384 megs’ worth. The touchpad started failing on me after a year of heavy use, but with a little help from eBay I was able to swap in a replacement part. I wished I had a DVD burner in the thing, so I replaced the original optical drive. (The hardest part was cutting a corner off the new drive‘s faceplate so it would fit in the provided opening.)

In short, I really like this machine—I only wish the battery held more of a charge—and I’m not afraid to open it up and tinker with the insides. Of course, buying it refurbished and thus having the warranty end after 90 days probably helped my courage. You might not be so ready and willing to tear off your stickers marked “Warranty void if removed” if their threats aren’t meaningless.

So when I recently noticed a disconcerting tendency for it to hard crash during heavy CPU usage, I naturally wanted to fix the problem. Whenever I was doing anything very CPU intensive, like compressing a lot of audio (or video for that matter), playing a game, or even running an innocent CPU torture test, my computer would do two things: (a) get very hot and (b) turn itself off. Naturally, I suspected the cooling system.

As it turns out, this was the culprit:

Apparently having a solid wall of dust keeping any air from flowing over your heatsink is a bad thing. Who’da thunk?

Here’s some more pictures of the disassembly/reassembly process for anyone who gives a damn about these things. » » Continue reading . . .

See, the problem is that I know an awful lot more than my professor—about one pretty minor subset of the subject matter. He’s obviously an expert in Protools; that much is obvious from about 5 minutes’ worth of class. And since he’s evidently made his living as a music producer and engineer for quite some time, I’m going to go ahead and assume his knowledge of the empirical, æsthetic, and business aspects of music production dwarfs mine. That’s basically all I could have asked for in an instructor, and I intend to learn a lot from him in the areas of his expertise.

The problem comes with everything pertaining to the physical manifestation of sound, and anything even vaguely resembling mathematics. The professor’s only talked about this stuff very briefly, and he seemed rather uncomfortable about it, and he qualified what he said with the disclaimer that he doesn’t like talking about physics because he doesn’t know squat about physics, or something along those lines. Which is all well and good, and I’m quite happy he admits it up-front when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I don’t want to come off to the class or the professor as some show-off brainiac, but a gay DJ once taught me an awful lot about acoustics, so I had to bite my tongue when my current professor said, for example, that a handclap in a room was an example of a standing wave.

I feel like it would be awful presumptuous to privately ask him if he’d want me to give the class a brief primer on things like v = fλ, but it would be even more presumptuous for me to blurt that shit out in the middle of class one day. So my current plan is to continue holding my tongue and hope that the topic never comes up again.

UPDATE: As it happens, I didn’t hold my tongue after all. Some of the professor’s comments and explanations to other people’s questions were quite helpful and informative, but then he claimed that the speed of sound was not a medium-dependent property. So I had no option but to strenuously object. And later I drew a picture on the board.

We’re on the verge of really diving into Protools, though, so I can’t wait for more of the class.

Song of the Moment: «Run» — Ratatat ft. Ghostface Killah and Jadakiss

I don’t like Microsoft Word very much, in large part because its default behavior is to assume it knows what you’re trying to do and how you want things formatted. (Search Google for “paperclip.mpeg” for some catharsis.) This default behavior, of course, makes it very easy to make numbered lists and indented paragraphs and the like. The problem is that if you actually know beforehand what you want to write and what layout you want, it’s similarly very easy to end up with Not What You Had In Mind. It’s very frustrating to be in the middle of writing something, making steady progress, when suddenly your formatting changes in a way you weren’t anticipating and could frankly do without, and you lose your train of thought after feeling compelled to immediately undo all the changes that were forced upon you. The program works best when it functions as a tool, not as an entity that tries to predict what you’re intending to do next. I’d rather have to specify each bulleted list I want than unspecify a bunch of bulleted lists that are provided as a “favor” or “time-saver” and accomplish less than nothing.

I bring this up, as it happens, in the context of also hating something else, and for the same reason. I learned to drive on a stick-shift, and in fact I had been driving for years before I ever drove an automatic. I’ve gotten a bunch of experience behind the wheel of an automatic since then, and I must say it reminds me a lot of Microsoft Word’s auto-formatting.

That is to say, I don’t like it.

With a manual transmission, you’re (more or less) in control of the car. With the exception of things like spark advance, which you’re legitimately better off letting an automatic system handle, you tell the car what to do. Barring outside forces, the car won’t start moving without you telling it to, and it certainly won’t change gears without your explicit say-so. The steering wheel, pedals, and shifter are present as tools, meant to make your life easier.

In contrast, driving an automatic relegates you to the position of a passenger, or perhaps more precisely a back-seat driver. You can make suggestions, and if you scream loud enough you can generally exercise veto power, but your control over everything but steering is indirect at best—the car often tells you what to do, instead of the other way around.

You control an automatic with the brake pedal, not the gas. Easing off the brake shouldn’t be interpreted as a signal to accelerate, unless you’re freewheeling downhill, which you probably shouldn’t be doing anyway.

I reserve the right to continue this rant in the future. I don’t like automatic transmissions. Working the clutch in stop-and-go traffic, as I’m now firmly convinced, is a small price to pay for a car that doesn’t think it’s smarter than you are. And I’d like to learn how to use a real camera, one that isn’t just a point-and-shoot “good enough” idiot box. (Though I love my idiot box, and it’s [basically] good enough.)