Two posts in a row about Republicans. I am turning into Rick.

I like jam. What about you guys?

My life is exciting. There is no way around it.

Today I was cruising the website for the U.S. Government's Office of Management and Budget. This picture is on the front page, and for some reason it made me laugh.




LOL WUT

Sometimes I don't post a lot.




Sarah Palin makes some odd choices, I'll tell you that. The turkey snuff film section is around the 2'00 mark.

It seems like just when my faith in humanity can't sink any lower, it does.

For me, replace "Megaman 9" with "Castle Crashers."

Are there any games recently that have made you feel this way?

For the record, I think this strip is likely one of the best pieces of video game literature I have ever seen. (Porn and Pong excluded, of course!)

It was a busy weekend. Last night I went to go see Two Hours Traffic, who out on a really good show. They put on a good show last time I saw them too. They are consistent in putting on a good show, across a sample of two shows.

Tonight I saw Black Mountain, due to a co-worker kindly giving me her ticket because she couldn't go. To be honest, they fucking destroyed. They were loud and noisy and distorted with lots of fuzz. All the things that make me feel warm and happy on the inside.

Tomorrow, going to do the usual Sunday stuff and then get back to work. There might be some interesting things happening in the next week or so, but I'm not holding my breath just yet. Don't you, either.

Sasha Frere-Jones posted a link to this a couple of days ago, but I only just got around to reading my Bloglines yesterday.

Lazer Sword is the soundtrack to my weekend. AND THAT WEEKEND STARTS IMMEDIATELY.

Hey everybody--

Sorry I haven't been updating much recently. I guess I'm just not feeling it at the moment. I'm sure I will get back into it at some  point.

On top of that, I am feeling like I should probably change my username at some point. While I have been using this one for probably close to 20 years,and am pretty emotionally attached to it, but it is based on a fictional character that is not mine. And googling it, it doesn't seem that the Internet associates this name that strongly with me, so I am just as happy to drop it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

The ever-excellent Bill Harris has an article up that highlights the reason I am no longer very interested in Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

As someone with extremely limited amounts of musical talent, Guitar Hero represented a way for me to at least capture a shadow of the feeling of playing actual music at a proficient level. Seriously, I cannot progress past the 'Medium' difficulty level while playing guitar, and I cannot even get to that level on the drums. I am OK with this. But what this means is that GH/RB lives or dies for me as a simulation of an actual activity that is doable at a level that I am comfortable with.

Unfortunately, once you get to the point where you are learning to play the drums for real (Rock Band) or composing music (Guitar Hero), you have pretty much lost me. I understand the need for these companies to sell more copies of the games (and hardware!) but the direction they have taken with their innovation does not work for me. Sure, I could continue to buy the games and play on Medium, but that sort of feels like missing the boat; at that point, the user experience I am looking for will no longer be the focus of the developers or the community.

I don't know what the answer is for gamers like me, who are bottlenecked by skill rather than enthusiasm. Maybe an Audiosurf-style mechanism to import your own tracks? Or maybe I should just be happy with the memories of those halcyon days, sitting on the footstool in our living room and trying to pass 'Psychobilly Freakout' until I could no longer feel my butt. It sure seems a waste, though.

Rogers Cable, my Internet provider, has begun redirecting non-existent DNS requests to a shitty custom search page.

This is reminiscent of the stunt that Verisign pulled several years ago, where they would shunt you over to a page where you could register a domain you had attempted to access, if it didn't really exist. The methods Rogers is using are different, but the effect is the same.

The above article overstates the problem a bit (I highly doubt users will be as OMG CONFUSED as the author seems to think) but it is really annoying that Rogers seems to think it's OK to essentially change the way the Internet works for their users, in the name of getting ad impressions.

I got a spam from Amazon today, touting a book that I initially thought I might be interested in. Interested, that is, until I started to read the blurb:

From Booklist
Stating that many library sites are still created in HTML, an outdated program, the author endeavors to provide librarians the means to update their sites using XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) and CSS....


....wait a second. HTML. An outdated program.

Yeah.

It's not 1995 here, people. HTML is not a program. Hell, it is not even a programming language, although a layperson might be forgiven for failing to make that distinction. A layperson yes, but someone who writes for Booklist, a publication of the ALA? Not so much.

Of course, the blurb may not reflect at all on the quality of the actual text (although, looking at reviews it might) but still.

Sorry I haven't been writing much lately. It has been a busy summer. I'm working full time and taking two classes (which puts me on track to graduate in December, if I want to!) as well as "working on" side projects.

We just got back last week from a trip out to California, where we saw lots of family and friends, and I went to the ALA conference. It was nice to hang out with some people from UCSB, and just generally  get excited about my field again. I have now built up a sort of psychic bubble around myself and I am not letting any negativity inside.

So, things are good, I'm just quiet. I was telling B___ today that when you are so busy, it feels like there's no time to revisit things in writing, and I think that's what's going on here. I'm around though! No one can stop me from obsessively surfing LJ.

It is the first hot weekend of spring/summer here.

Today I took the streetcar down to Queen street to walk around and also because I had errands to run down there.

I bought all our concert tickets for everything we know about for the summer. I got:

2x Calexico, July 6
1x Boris, July 14
2x Tilly and the Wall, August 2
2x Finntroll, August 28
1x Sigh, September 19 (pushing the boundaries of summer, I suppose)

All the shows where I got 2 tickets indicates that B___ is coming too, including Finntroll! I hope this show will be as good as the last one was.

Instead of taking the streetcar back up, I decided to walk, on account of the aforementioned warm weather. I had a nice stroll through Chinatown, where I got to stop in and buy 10 DVDs for $10, including Azumi 1 & 2 and The God of Cookery. I bought a Slurpee at 7-11, and am now sitting in the cool house again. I think that's enough outside time for this week!

Huh.

Google gives up the IP address of a user who posted unflattering pictures of a Hindu saint, and he gets hauled in and beaten, etc. Only....it turns out it wasn't the right guy. Oops!

This is making me happy today.

Let me first get this out of the way: Yes, I haven't posted much of anything about our trip. It was great. I haven't written anything about it because I'm sort of crushed under the weight of my own expectations to write something insightful. So instead, if you want know stuff about it feel free to ask me specific questions. I know it's a cop out, but if I don't get past this point, I may never write again. =) Assorted information will of course be revealed as it relates to things I want to write about, but don't go looking for some big definitive travel post (as if anyone would anyway.)

On to other things! Despite my having been enrolled in kendo class for close on a year now, because of my own schedule flakiness I have lagged behind other students in the class, and yesterday was the first day I got to put on the full armor for practice. Now, U of T kendo club seems to be one of the foremost in the area (country?) so as you might expect, there are a lot of people there who are very serious about kendo. What this translates into in class is an expectation that things are going to be done correctly, and a focus on actual practice rather than hand-holding training of beginners. Please note that these two goals are to some extent mutually exclusive. Not only is putting on the armor really quite complicated (it has its own knots and everything), but because it is a Japanese martial art, you also have to do it the *right* way. Last night was successfully executed, if a bit frustrating, but I am not looking forward to next practice where we're expected to know how to do it already.

And why, of course, would we bother putting on our armor if we weren't going to hit each other? This morning, in addition to my usual post-workout soreness, two out three of my target areas are swollen and/or aching (head and wrist; stomach seems to have survived intact.) We have a special practice on Saturday where there will be testing, and my first attempt at an actual bout. The senior student who was helping me yesterday said, "Don't worry about it, just keep charging at them." Probably sound advice, but I think I will take the Advil before practice tomorrow.

Since we did the part of our trip that involved a train ride through the Pyrenees Mountains, I have been sort of obsessed with the Belle and Sebastian TV show that used to be on Nickelodeon. I have been trying to find a cheap copy of DVDs of the series, but so far my usual anime outlets have struck out. Apparently, people aren't interested in the heartwarming story of a boy looking for his mother and a giant white dog who only wants to be understood.

My partner makes the best cookies.