Two sites 4 u 2day:
1. good-ear.com
Requires some crap like java and quicktime. Oh well. Basically, this site consists of several multiple-choice quizzes: a musical structure of some kind (chord, cadence, interval, scale) is played, and you are asked to name it. Granted this requires some theory knowledge, but give it a try.
And...
2. delosis.com
This doesn't require any knowledge at all -- it just plays a series of tone-sequences in pairs. Then, you have to decide if the pair matches or not. This one is really long, and (some think) rather boring. I enjoyed it, though, partly because I got what I think are fairly high scores: 28/30 on both parts. But maybe they're not as high as I think they are.
I'm currently attempting to make it through the movie "armageddon". In two days and numerous uses of the "pause" button, I think I'm eventually going to succeed. But it's been an arduous journey. As far as I'm concerned, it is a candidate for "worst movie ever made". I looked it up on rottentomatoes.com, and I don't understand how it received even a 41% rating, while "pathfinder" received a 13%.
It was another "america saves the world" movie -- the working-class american hero is summoned from his righteously-violent hard day's work to come and save the world, because the intellectuals, elitists, and academics can't do it, and then the space shuttles "freedom" and "independence" are flown up to a planet-threatening asteroid to destroy it with nuke-you-ler weapons. "armageddon" panders to flag-waving jingoists in the bible belt, as they clutch their movie tickets and wait for 2 cinematic hours designed to masturbate their tiny world views. Watching this movie makes me want to join al quaeda.
Bruce willis even solemnly mentions "god" in the movie something like 3 or 4 times. This is what the people pay to see: a romanticized, tough-guy, god-fearing, working-class america saving the planet with its technological and military muscle. Movie scripts, just like political rhetoric and campaigning, are very carefully engineered to earn as much money as possible by appealing to the largest audience they can. Even though they probably personally have no problem with gay marriage, candidates like cheney, clinton, obama, and mccaine claim not to support it, because it's such a controversial issue, and is not supported by the beetle-browed tribe of obese, jerry springer-watching, jesus-freak middle-americans, who are for some reason allowed to vote in elections despite their consistently-demonstrated delusional, narrow-minded stupidity.
I used to have some sympathy for conservatism, and tried to understand and appreciate it, until I read this article, describing neurological studies that indicate that "political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information". Some people are simply born closed-off to new ideas, and are thereby conservative. I suppose one should be sympathetic towards people suffering from this condition, as we're sympathetic towards the schizophrenic or diabetic, but struggling to present conservatism as an intelligent, thought-out world-view is pointless -- it's little more than a pipe dream for the intellectually immature and the downright deficient.
Intelligent people who call themselves "conservative" are not conservative in quite the same way. Oftentimes, they're simply very rich and successful, and do not want their moneys taxed away, which is reasonable (a republican who earns $25k a year as a walmart manager in dubuque, iowa, is rapidly running out of excuses). But it's important to remember that conservatism and liberalism are being taken to be, in terms of this study, something apart from socio-economic positions -- they're personality types, and in fact brain types that correlate with students who self-identified as "very liberal" or "very conservative".
Support for or decrying a particular policy isn't necessarily linked to a particular world-view; there might be lots of reasons someone supported the war in iraq, from disinformation to revenge to mental illness. "conservatives", as they're being defined in this study, might very well support (or benefit from) the welfare state. Likewise, "liberals" might not want to fund public schools.
Maybe I'm not a blogger anymore, eh? Well, I never really was -- I just sat here and wrote. But am I no longer interested in doing that? This is a BORING blog. Do not read it. Only pain will it bring you. It's just me, writing for the hell of it, and happening to post it on the web, because I can, and for my own complex psychological reasons. Don't like it? Don't read it! But the great part is that googlers are sometimes directed here, and then they are forced to read it, as they look for information that most certainly is not here.
I had my first day of class today, I picked my mom up from the metro station tonight (she took it from the airport), and then tomorrow I am going to a friend's son's 1st birthday party, and getting free all-you-can eat korean food.
But now I do understand the people who want to have a blog, but do not want to actually "blog", per se. So, they have to force themselves to blog every few days. The problem is, most people just don't like to write. I think I like to because it's an exercise in narcissistic egomania -- just sitting there talking to yourself for hours on end. And, since you're your only audience, you're going to be impressed. That is, unless you're unhappy with what you've written, which happens from time to time, as in the case of this exact entry here :/
I don't think I've ever used a :/ face in a blog entry before. Oh, my new policy in terms of posting a new page is: when the scrollbar block-thing becomes square. I think after this entry, or the next, depending on how long they are, it'll be time to change. I do this thing now where the entire header and footer of the html code in a blog-page is contained in a single line. Here, I can show you, if I open up dreamweaver:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title>blog</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><meta http-equiv="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"><link rel=StyleSheet href="blogstyle.css" type="text/css"></head><body><table align="center" class="outermost"><tr><td align="center"><a class="home" href="index.html">home</a><table align="center" class="light_orange"><tr><td>
See? That's all one line of text. Same thing goes for the footer:
</td></tr></table><a class="home" href="#">top</a></td></tr></table></body></html>
Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass that would have been to type out in a text editor? To give you some idea, let me open up dreamweaver again.
This is what the code you are looking at looks like to me, in a text editor:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title>blog</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><meta http-equiv="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"><link rel=StyleSheet href="blogstyle.css" type="text/css"></head><body><table align="center" class="outermost"><tr><td align="center"><a class="home" href="index.html">home</a><table align="center" class="light_orange"><tr><td>
Html special characters -- fear them.
Anyway, that's beside the point. Right on top of the point is that the single line of code I'm using for header and footer, along with an external style sheet, makes it extremely easy to make bulk changes in a great many files. This was always a problem I ran into before: I'd find that all 100 or however many blog pages existed at that time needed to be edited. Most of the time I was able to create a macro and just click through 100 pages, executing the macro by keyboard on each one. Not too bad. And a lot of times it's just as easy as search/replacing a particular string in all open documents (a command that's available in crimson editor).
With crimson editor, vim, pico, and notepad, my text-editing needs are fully achieved. Sort of funny that I need four text editors to do everything I want, but that's the way it works. Maybe it's time to write my own text editor. Yeah, right. I can't even write a functioning function in python.
School seems as though it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass. The class is 5.5 hours long, with 30 minutes for lunch. The prof is young and cocky, and he seems to have a bit of an attitude. I think for the most part I'm just very critical of teachers. Also, ever since "art school" I tend to think of them very much as peers, and might even go out of my way to challenge them, in an "art school" sort of way. But let's be clear in one thing: when I say "art school", I mean only "art major at a state college". An actual "art school" would be SCAD, RISD or parsons.
We'll be modeling things in the maya program, and possibly animating them. I don't really know yet. My assignment for next Saturday is to do some sketches. God, life is retarded. It's 3am, but I slept from about 4pm - 9:30pm, so I don't think I'll have too much of an issue being awake at the time I'll have to leave to reach the korean restaurant.
I wanted to get a furious start, but I missed a day already. Not like it matters, like I have an audience or anything. Anyway.
I went to the doctor today, and he wants to do an MRI to see if I have a pituitary tumor, in which case I'd have to go to johns hopkins university hospital for neurosurgery. All this because I asked a new internist for a cholesterol test. Then, on that bloodtest, they found a hormone imbalance, so I go to an endocrynologist. More tests. Etc. A tumor is quite unlikely, but it has to be checked for, because if a pituitary tumor is allowed to grow it can squeeze your optic nerves and cause blindness (apparently).
I'm a little annoyed at the culture of over-treating in which consumer medicine is immersed in the united states. It's largely a problem of professionals: if someone earns their livelihood through the solving of certain problems, the existence of these problems is going to be encouraged, created, and if necessary fabricated. Soldiers in wartime are paid more and earn more promotions. The job of a soldier is war, so he cannot be professionally content -- he cannot Be All That He Can Be (tm) -- during peacetime.
It's the same for doctors, accountants, etc -- their job is to solve problems in a particular field, and their livelihood depends on their existence: the doctor needs illness, and accountants need financial inconsistencies and impropriety.
"deformation professionel" is a related concept: it's the tendency to see everything through the lens of one's profession while ignoring other viewpoints. For example, a pizza deliveryman might think it's an inexcusable crime for people to leave their outside lamps off. While laymen might agree if they thought about it, they also feel that it's a trivial issue. For the professional, the solution to every problem in the realm of his profession becomes a dire necessity.
Doctors don't want you to be sick, exactly, but they're going to scour you and name and treat disorders that don't necessarily require treating. And then there are going to be tests, and more tests, and more tests, referral upon referral, and the whole system of over-treating quickly becomes self-supporting and self-perpetuating. And one shouldn't overlook the strong motivator of the possibility of a lawsuit if a doctor overlooks something.
Insurance companies will keep paying up -- patients don't care that much that they have to sit in a waiting room for 20 minutes every so often, and since they're not paying for it, they're going to be fairly indifferent to whether or not superfluous or unnecessary treatment is performed. "why risk it? Better safe than sorry", say people who are prescribed antibiotics for the common cold.
The patient is paying for health insurance -- he and the insurance company are both taking a bet. If the patient doesn't get sick, then the insurance company wins. And oddly, if the patient gets sick, the insurance company loses (and the patient "wins"). So, perhaps unconsciously, there's a need for the patient to "get his money's worth" out of his insurance, and treat/examine/diagnose every last little thing.
It's really no wonder the united states leads the world in healthcare spending.
Heehee, it's 12:02AM, and I can update again. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It's going to take me a little while to get back into the swing of blogging. Maddox's post about bloggers (linked below) sort of hit me hard -- I'd read it before, years ago, when it was published, but I never really paid it much attention 'till now. People liked my blog, maddox! They did! Not because my insights were brilliant. In fact, people thought those posts about politics or philosophy were pretty much stupid. But when I'd go on about how I hated life and all humans and wanted to see civilization consumed in fire, or when I'd report on experiences, my blog was more appreciated.
I pretty much flipped out back in '06, and decided that writing my blog wasn't worth it. I had started to feel restricted, and as though I couldn't write whatever I wanted to write. That should have been obvious -- it's a blog, not a journal. There are certain things that you just can't say, if your audience is practically unlimited. The purpose of putting this blog at gomen.org, and eliminating any connections with my current "personal domain", is merely to keep web-surfers from matching an identity with the awful truth about my depraved and ghoulish nature.
Friends and family might find it, though, become offended, and subsequently disown me. I'm exaggerating that problem; there were only one or two instances of upset, during phase I, which ended in feburary of 2006. Now, it's phase II. Phase II shall be marked with, among other things, no readers whatsoever, except the occasional googler happening upon some text he's fooled into thinking is relevant to his search on bunnyranch prices or "hairy back man attractive". That's what happens when you have many, many english sentences on your website: the googlers come drifting in. However, they don't stay.
My mom is visiting her sister in sacramento, so I have the house to myself for a week. I have spent a good 98% of the time thus far naked. Monday, I took a long walk along the railroad tracks. I was a little bit hesitant to do so, because the last time I walked along the railroad tracks I contracted lyme disease. But this time, I didn't stray from the actual tracks, but kept my footing on gravel, metal and wood the entire time. Two trains passed me on my walk. There's a bridge about a half mile up the tracks, that runs maybe 100 feet above a creek. It's not a single-track bridge, like in the movie "stand by me", but it's barely wider than the space needed to contain two sets of tracks. I'd be more than mildly concerned if I were caught on it along with two trains; I'm not 100% sure there'd be room for me. It's a long fall down to a very shallow creek (I've swam in it).
That situation is perhaps unlikely, because while there's a blind curve on one end of the tracks, you can see probably two miles down the other side. So, if while standing on the bridge you see a train coming way down the track, you would have plenty of time to get off the bridge.
But I frankly wouldn't want to be caught in the middle of the bridge with even one train on one set of tracks. And I really doubt you could run from the middle of the bridge back to the end before a train coming around the blind curve reached you. Furthermore, there's always the possibility that you wouldn't see or hear another train coming down the straight-away, and then by the time you did notice, you'd be trapped. And then, the other train comes around the curve and you get battered off the tracks like a whiffle ball, mangled in the wheels, or knocked from the bridge to fall 100 feet into a 4-foot deep creek.
I'm somewhat sure that a person could lie down on the edge of the bridge and a passing train wouldn't touch him, but it'd be a close call. Come by my house some time and I'll show you the situation. Well actually, what I should really do is post pictures. But the odd thing is that it had never freaked me out before -- I've been hanging around that bridge for 15 years, and I never even considered the possibility of two trains passing each other over it. I'm not even sure that I've been on the bridge while one train passed over it, even though that seems unlikely. If that happened, I'd get severely honked at, and maybe even have the cops called on me.
Engineers are pretty nervous about people standing anywhere near their oncoming train, even if its on the other lane of tracks. They just want you as far away as possible, in case you're drunk, clumsy, or an idiot. I remember one time I was trying to get a picture of an oncoming train (idiot), and I stayed on the tracks for perhaps longer than I should have as a train approached. Boy, was that engineer pissed; it's amazing how much expression one can put into a horn.
I've lived around trains my entire life. Well, basically. From 1980 - 1985, and then again from 1987 - present, barring semesters at college or brief living experiments elsewhere. What's more, the trains were about the same distance from me in those two places -- I'd say about half a mile away. My ex-girlfriend's house in West Virginia was built about ten feet (or less) from a railway line, and trains would crawl by, not much faster than a person could walk. My ex told me that the train always honked its horn very softly four times, and that if there were some other number she would wake up immediately. But otherwise, she would sleep through the gentle thunder of a freight train passing by at 10pmh, 10 feet from her bendroom window, and softly blowing its horn.
Yesterday's was a test-post. I built an external style sheet, and was trying out my tags.
I don't know if I'm speaking to anyone when I write this. But I suppose that was sort of the point: isolate my blog a little bit, and then re-commence it. My concern isn't so much that people I know are going to read it and get offended (i don't plan on writing anything mean), but only that potential employers are going to see it and, based, on the fact that I come across as an angry, psychotic narcissist (check out some entries in the 0050's), are going to pass over my resume. This might be fantasy; maybe people who are sifting through resumes aren't googling the submitters, and as long as you don't confess to a crime, being eccentric doesn't preclude being allowed to "join the team".
But I'm not so sure -- I've written at some length about the problems blog-writers share when seeking employment, or I suppose an exclusive membership or title of any kind (admission to school comes to mind). My contention is generally that having a blog where you express yourself and say things that probably everyone feels (wage slavery is oppression, and having a "problem with authority" should be universal and is morally necessary) but doesn't want to say out loud, is not going to be taken well by employers. There's also the problem of "what's he going to say next? Will he say something that's going to get the institution in trouble?"
Journalists are often troublesome. A lot of people snicker when bloggers are called "journalists", but it's just a technicality, and a matter of semantics. They publish in a mass-accessible way, and if they're describing events or commenting on them (as opposed to writing "i picked a clover this morning and thought about god"), then I might call them all journalists. But probably not -- instead I'd call them bloggers. Bloggers are often troublesome.
Since I'm writing about blogging and work, I'm going to link to a post in another blog I just found. Actually, I suddenly got it in my head to google "fired for being evil", and this was a result that seemed interesting from the google snippet. It's the answer to a 15 year old's written in question, "how can I keep from getting fired?"
I'll re-print her suggestions here, since I linked to her ("Evil HR Lady").
Obnoxious aunt joan, eh?
I take issue with #5 (work even when there's nothing to do), and to a lesser extent #10, the last one (have fun working). When there's nothing to do, I'm being paid to be on call. I'm not going to hang up my uniform and go home -- it should be enough that I'm there and ready to work. "looking busy" is an insult; if there's down-time, accept it. In some jobs the adage "there's always something to do" applies more than others, but usually it doesn't apply as much as people think. Taking a break when there's a lull in activity is going to help employee moral, and encourage people to come to the workplace and to stop thinking of it as a slave-labor camp. Of course this doesn't apply so much to the fast food and landscaping groundsman jobs mentioned in Evil HR Lady's blog. But the best employers (google) allow and encourage play in the workplace.
"have fun working". Who the fuck do you think you are, that you can tell me how to think, and even worse: how to feel? I'll do as I'm told, but that's all anyone can expect from an employee. Don't tell me to "have fun". You can tell me to "try and look on the bright side", but enforcing a culture of fun is preposterous. "have fun working" amounts to "adjust your attitude", something that really isn't possible. You either have the proper attitude or you don't.
Early on, my problems at a given job stem mainly from incompetence, and a few personality issues. After a few months, the problems stem from mainly personality issues, and a few from incompetence. The longer I'm exposed to a task, the better I'll learn it, and the longer I'm exposed to another human being, the more abrasive I find it (and the more abraisive it finds me). Not getting along with others in the workplace is disastrously harmful to my productivity.
A friend once gave me the unsolicited reassurance "it's only important that you take a given job and do it to the absolute best of your ability", implying that it might be natural for a person to be ashamed of the sorts of jobs I can get. So yeah, it's quite obvious that to work in pizza delivery, landscaping grounds-keeping, or even office temp work is something that's shameful. A stranger once laughed at me when I told her that I delivered pizza. Granted, I think it was more of a "it's ridiculous that someone as smart/qualified/whatever is only delivering pizza", but it still hurt.
At 32 you're supposed to have your career developed and on its way. In my case, there are extenuating circumstances of mental illness, not to mention the aforementioned bad attitude and other personality defects. Well, let's put it this way: personality inclinations that do not jive with the goals and culture of the contemporary work-force. The personality-issues are resolvable, and the mental illness issues might even be resolvable too, to an extent, through some sort of cognitive behavior training, and of course medication (which I'm already on, so nevermind). I get confused in an almost seizure-like trance-state if I'm put under pressure, yelled at, etc. Things in the workplace have for me a tendency to become emotionally unbearable. And although I've never hit a wall or a co-worker, I feel that these are possibilities.
My values,world-view, and mental state are not aligned with the world of work. I am going to have problems unless I learn to control my emotions and take some shit from people without wanting to cut their throats. Generally, I'd have to grow up a bit, and knuckle under.
When I eat kiwi fruits, I eat the whole thing, biting into the fruit like one would an apple, without peeling away their furry rinds. I figure that if I'm going to eat their furry rinds, that there really isn't any point in removing the stickers from the outside of the kiwi; you know the ones. They're just paper, right?
I just took a big crap that consisted exclusively of un-digested kiwi-matter (that's all I had yesterday night, plus the kiwi-matter looked like kiwi matter, being greenish and having little black seeds in it). Preserved in the mass of kiwi-matter there was a perfectly-formed sticker -- one of those that I neglect to peel off. So now, I'm going to start peeling them off, because obviously they aren't digesting. And I don't want a fruit sticker stuck to the inside of my colon for all eternity, causing cancer or ulcerative colonitis or whatever. They're plasticized paper, I realize, which can't be good.
I bet all those kiwi rinds are good for me. Fibrous -- very much like eating away at an asparagus stem. No colon cancer here! Well, none except for that which the fruit stickers are going to bring about. But I'm proud of my digestive system -- it's quite efficient, fast, copious, and pleasant, which is actually sort of unfortunate in that it can accept truly volumnious portions of food before complaining in the slightest, via heartburn, nauseau, uncomfortable fullness, diarrhea, constipation, etc -- unfortunate because it doesn't discourage me from overeating.
Ok, I've rambled enough -- time to proceed to the meat of the matter, which is "I HAVE RESUMED BLOGGING". It's difficult. The fluency with which I remember writing in the past is slow in coming. Oh, there's something else that's sort of disturbing: I've been less-creative lately than I used to be. I'm sure of it. Furthermore, I'm almost 100% sure it's related to the medication I'm taking (lamictal and tegretol). It came back a bit when I reduced my med-load by one pill. Thing is, I can't remember which medications I was on at the height of my creativity, if any. I would say the height of it was when I was doing the original blog. Well, I dunno. What's the definition of creativity, anyway? Would you say that my semi-recent flash animations are creative? Those were done under the yolk of medications, but only as much as I'm taking now. That one extra pill of lamictal didn't do good things to me. I hope there wasn't permanent damage.
Here's a way to look at psychoactive medication: the way you are is unacceptable, and you must be changed. The alternative is to look at debilitating psychiatric issues as diseases or disorders, and to believe that there's some fundamental core of "patient" underneath the altered thinking, memory, and emotions the disease produces. Somewhere in between?
Here we come across the problem of my wanting to show off my work on this blog. See, I can't, because I want to show off any socially acceptable creative work I do under my real name. So, that goes on my domain-attached, un-anonymous website, which I may never link to if I want to preserve the anonymity of this here blog. I did some checking around on google, and I don't think it's uncoverable.
It's nice to have this screen of text to which I can return, intermittently, throughout the day. I've missed having a blog, I realize. It's somewhere I can express myself, and it doesn't seem quite as asinine and pointless as a un-networked journal. Which brings us to another issue: is there an "us"? The former resident of this webspace, up until yesterday, in fact, was "ask the box". It received a steady but modest stream of traffic, oweing to the content it provided via answers to questions: quite literally 'information', in a common-vocabulary sense (technically everything on the internet is information, even if it's a picture of a big brown square).
It's doubtful, especially when I produce sprawling diary-like entities like these, that anyone will take an interest or scroll down all the way. Of course, they have to scroll down all the way in order to go back "home" (click their way back to my index page), which is a consequence of my design. Maybe not the most usable interface, but I've chosen to sacrifice comfort for style.
I was reading someone else's blog today, and I was surprised to find that it was mildly interesting. However, I don't think I found it to be such due to the content, per se -- it was just that I knew the person, and had had some contact with him. Also, he linked to a project of mine, which is no small detail. Har.
Blogs allow a chance to stay in touch. But getting in touch to begin with? I think much less so. If you know someone from meat-space, then a blog of theirs is going to be interesting. Or, even, if you know them very well from repeated online contacts, it's going to be interesting. I had a few readers from SDF back when I did my "old blog", from October '03 to February '06, who had never met me in person, but who knew "me" via chatroom and forum interaction.
Eh, ok -- I think that might be enough. Maddox has nothing nice to say about blogs and bloggers, and someone on the lala.com forums told me "everything there is to say has been said already". Granted he was being sorta jocular about it, but it's still true. It would be arrogant of me to think I'm going to come up with a new insight.
But hey -- they're new to me. I've always maintained that my writing is more for myself than it is for an audience. But still -- it's a blog, on the web. It would feel stuffy as a journal. Stuffy, confined, and pointless. Here, even if no one is reading it, it roams free.
Testing. 1...2...3
i would likeTrying to get a buckout out from under is like having a round ball. Or as they say in Turkmenistan, "Eat an egg all day, and you'll be eating that egg for 24 hours". - Mark Twain, Esq.
Thees ees some teeeeeeeeeeeny txt
| orderly | table | crawdad | ||
| george | |
|||
| why | ||||
| not | ||||
| tracheotomy | ||||
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
you are a cretin
you are indeed
nothing can change this
TILL YOU BLEED