Kablammo!

Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Sherlock Einstein who grew up to hate his parents with every fibre of his being.

Secrets of the mind unwrapping in the freedom of a solitary moment giving hope in the memories of days foregone that might repeat themselves. But now I feel the moment . . . that my thoughts are my own, and to release them without restraint would be . . . like sending away a child, out into the world, without (paha henkkari) guidance to stand up to the storm with only a desperate prayer — let them make it and let what I gave them over the years be enough.

Have the power to bring down a government . . . or to form one. The elephant in the corner seems very small and insignificant, playing songs of glory and misfortune, of life and death, giving and sharing where sharing gives you so much more.

Song of the Moment: «Triumphant» — Röyksopp

So, as usual, I was reading about fifteen Wikipedia pages at once when I stumbled across something rather terrifying: apparently there’s a guy named “Lol“. I tell you, if I ever hear about somebody named “Rofl” I can’t be held accountable for my actions.

In other news, I’ve been spending this week sleeping 5 hours a night or less, waking up bright and early, and bounding out of bed in the morning, full of energy. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m not sure I like it.

But, it’s not so bad being awake when you have days like these:

Song of the Moment: «Hum and Strum» — Doc Cook and His 14 Doctors of Syncopation

I knew the “Db” in IMDb was quite extensive, but I never realized just how extensive it was. (Funny how the trivia, goofs, &c. sections for these movies are all nonexistent, though.)

Also interesting to note that evidently some franchises are evidently able to maintain a high-enough level of quality to warrant literally dozens of sequels. Rocky, in comparison, became simply depressing after, say, the third installment; and George Lucas should probably have had his hands broken and his eyes put out after Jedi was completed.

Oh, and this is by a wide margin the awesomest cloud ever:

Song of the Moment: «The Cemetary» — Architecture in Helsinki

Last night I had a number of very vivid dreams, perhaps as a result of drinking until 4:30, getting the munchies, and preparing (and then eating) over a pound of mashed potatoes from scratch before making my way to bed. I dream pretty frequently, and sometimes I even remember snatches of my dreams for a few minutes after waking up, but last night’s are sticking in my mind pretty tenaciously.

One dream involved a friend of mine getting a job. It was, no doubt, influenced by all his recent talk of interviews and the like, particularly how happy he was with how an interview yesterday went. As it happens, this dream literally came true. (In the sense that what I dreamt actually happened, not in the sense that “my prayers were answered” or “I got something I’d specifically been yearning for”.)

Another involved an academic corporation and was also obviously influenced by recent events and nonevents. It stayed well within the bounds of plausibility, up until the end, when it devolved into some kind of police showdown in a (suddenly and inexplicably) condemned and decaying building. At this point, I woke up, thought “what the fuck?” and went back to sleep.

This is when things got interesting.
» » Continue reading . . .

This, these few things, this and this, this stuff, this sort of thing, and of course this and this.

All are interesting and well written. (What, you wanted commentary? Maybe later.)

Song of the Moment: «Isohaara» — CMX

I’m posting this entry with the “LiveCD” feature of Ubuntu Linux. Why? Because I was bored, because I’ve been meaning to play with Linux for a long time, and because there’s recently been a lot of noise about Ubuntu, calling it a decidedly non-threatening distro.

I’m booting from a CD instead of installing to my hard drive for a variety of reasons. I’m not yet sure, for instance, whether I really feel like risking all of the data on my hard drive by fucking around with partitions and the like. The last time I tried “non-destructively resizing” a partition with a lot of data on it (for the purposes of installing Linux on a Windows box, of course), the program I used decided to instead render the partition completely unintelligible to Windows. I was able to recover most of the data that I really wanted, but only through a rather lengthy and unpleasant process that involved turning a spare computer I happened to have lying around into a [Linux-powered] network file server I could extract files to from the damaged partition.

It was certainly interesting to learn how to get a computer up on a network and writable through Samba, but I the whole experience was kind of souring, what with the whole massive-data-loss aspect. What didn’t help either was the fact that the catastrophe at hand was quite clearly my own damn fault.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t try to repartition your hard drive without a damn good reason
• Don’t try to repartition your hard drive without a damn good backup
• Yes, that means you!

Anyway, even if I felt like tempting the fates again, I couldn’t at the moment, since I only have 1 free gig of room on my laptop, on a drive that’s fragmented to hell. So I’m running a version of Linux that doesn’t require any installation; I just popped in the CD and rebooted, and after making a few selections with regard to language, screen resolution, keyboard layout, and timezone I was up and running.

Well, mostly. I’m quite impressed with the default look, and how it managed to seamlessly detect my internet connection (Ethernet, that is — I haven’t tried out WiFi yet). The default behavior of my touchpad leaves something to be desired, though. While I can move the pointer around the screen, left-click, and right-click, I can’t use any of the other functions like fancy scrolling or special ‘hotkey’ areas or whatever. I’m assured, though, that enabling this stuff is just a matter of modifying some configuration files in my /etc/X11 directory and then restarting the X server. I can live with that. I’m not exactly sure how I go about doing that when I’m running from a ramdrive, so I’ll make do with rudimentary mouse controls for the time being.

This, though, was a little bit weirder:

I can’t for the life of me figure out why the time is being displayed correctly on one screen but three hours early on the taskbar or whatever the hell they’re calling that bar here.

Anyway, I’m off to try mounting my Windows drive so I can listen to some mp3s.

Song of the Moment: «Eye of the Leopard» — Aavikko

Oh look, Kablammo! is alive again, and with yet another blogging-system to boot. Enjoy! If all goes well (or even if it doesn’t) there’s a good chance I’ll update this shit more often.

OK, the 3000+ spam comments I’ve received in the past few weeks have made me decide that this will be the final entry of Kablammo!, at least as it appears in this incarnation.

It’s not like anybody reads this anyway, and it’s not like I’ve been updating it either, so it’s no big loss. I promise that I’ll fully intend to replace this movabletype installation with some kind of functional equivalent, one with less fucking comment spam. I hope you’re happy, “Online Poker” and “Vioxx Prescriptions”.

Anyway, the real reason I started writing this update was to announce that I’m a fucking idiot and an embarrassment to nerdkind. A week ago I had two opportunities to illegally record concerts by CMX, a Finnish band I particularly enjoy the music of. I saw them two nights in a row, and they were kind enough to play the exact same set list both nights, as if they were telling me “Come on! Your bootleg didn’t come out last night, but tonight you have a fresh opportunity!”

Of course, for both attempts I left the Automatic Gain Control of my iRiver h140 set to ‘Off’, resulting in absolutely unlistenable crap. (To give you a better idea of what I consider ‘unlistenable crap’, I enjoy the music of Guitar Wolf.) Just pure noise, and Roland asking me where the bathrooms were during a quiet part.

You’d think that, after one failed attempt, I’d have changed some recording settings at random or (God forbid!) run a couple of tests of recording loud stuff with different settings. I mean, Ring the FM was obviously right out.

It was an awesome weekend anyway, despite the fact that it was terrible and terribly awkward for some other reasons, but you don’t care, because you’re not even reading this, you’re just an automated program employed to send a bunch of junk data and advertisements to my cgi scripts. Asshole.