I went to bed at 8:30pm last night, and woke up at 3:30am. There's a lot I want to say this morning, but the lack of fluency caused by my ipod's tiny touchscreen keyboard is cutting off the proper flow of my creativity.
Basically I wanted to talk about how ther were and are people in my life who, if they don't expressly want me to fail, certainly don't wish me to be more successful than or even as successful as them. This realization makes me want to seek success just to spite those people. I've always been at least as much of a fighter as I am a lover.
It just seems like so much of what people do is about comparing themselves to others, and building themselves up while tearing otgers down. Maybe this is an american problem or a relic of a society that idolizes and makes conscious efforts at capitalism: the notion that my success = your failure.
Time to start making secret plans.
Xmas is coming. I finally got a good night's sleep last night, from 9pm to 4am. If I can stay early-shifted until next Tuesday my re-adjustment to EST won't be as unpleasant. What will be will be, though.
Apple is screwing over the ipod and focusing its development efforts on the ipad and iphone. Ios 5 is too much for my ipod; I noticed a significant slow-down after upgrading. Now I have to keep track of how many apps are concurrently running, and limit this number.
Also, my klipsch earbud music controls no longer work. I tested them with my mom's ipad and they worked perfectly, so I know it's an issue with my ipod (my guess is with ios 5). I just have to pray apple fixes these problems, although a vendor (especially one "like apple"?) making new changes to software so old hardware will work better is perhaps unlikely. My ipod isn't really old though (1.5 years?), even by the crazy, profit-driven, accelerated standards of "what constitutes obsolescence" created by the consumer tech industry.
Apple is bitter that ipod customers pay $300 less per unit than iphone customers, and so discourages the s/iphone/ipod game (they actually said something like that -- about how ipods are not that profitable), which I specifically set myself up to play. It would be nice to have constant connectivity, like in restaurants and movie theatres, but scenarios like these are not so frequent as to justify the upfront cost, and more importantly the $65/m carrier fee; I have a virulent allergy to periodic payments. Usually, I'm ipodding in a host's house, airport, starbucks, university, or some other place with wifi and don't need 3g, or whatever cell phone connectivity is called. Suck it, apple!
I don't know why I'm so hostile to apple. Probably some of my dislike is really my dislike of steve jobs; maybe the company can improve now that he's gone.
It was an unfortunate blow to apple PR that steve jobs was so meticulously and explicitly revealed to be a dickhead; some of his character flaws are now mapped onto the company and products. This happened with steve ballmer and microsoft -- he was bad for business. People like google's eric schmidt, who are not narcissists like jobs and ballmer and who don't encourage the creation of a celebrity culture around themselves, are Doing It Right (tm).
I don't really have objections to apple software being "locked down" -- untweakable and limited in how it can be used. Washing machines, air conditioners, and cars are similarly "locked down" and they do what they're supposed to do. Apple computers work the same way, and most users find that they are effective and efficient and fun-to-use tools. Suck it, richard stallman!
I ordered a christmas present for someone but didn't notice or wasn't informed that it's being delivered from the UK, and now I be stressin' that it won't arrive in time for christmas. Just goes to show: something. Don't ever trust anything to turn out right? Maybe that's the lesson.
It's around 5am, and I'm still unadjusted to the 3 hour time change. This might end up being sort of a long vacation. "vacation"...vacation from what? Maybe "holiday" works better, except then I sound like a redcoat.
I think I might be starting to despise laziness, although I want to avoid being puritanical or even taking any moral position whatsoever. My moral comvictions tend to spring from self-loathing, I think. For example, I hate both artists and geeks, and guess what i...resemble? My misanthropy comes from my feelings about myself, I think, at least in part. Well also, people just annoy me. But self-other conflation happens all the time.
This raises a question: is disliking anything inherently a moral position? I say "sometimes." if I don't like mustard then that's not implying there's something evil or harmful or universally objectionable to mustard. But if I don't like sloth or greed or envy then that sounds more moral. If I dislike france or swaziland that might be a moral position depending on the root of the dislike: disliking the weather vs. Disliking the culture. Morality mostly seems to amount to the proposition that people should behave in some particular way. Another question is: can one take a moral position without emotional involvement?
The definitions of moral and ethical are similar, and reference each other. Looking at the wording of the dictionary.com definitions carefully (look em up if you want - I'm on an ipod and it's hard to reproduce and format them here), we see an emphasis on rules for "ethical," and an emphasis on virtue and what feels like religious overtones for "moral." for me there are connotations of a logically derived right-and-wrong for "ethical," and emotionally and intuitive derivation for "moral." but mostly, "moral" smells like "thou shalt not" while "ethical" makes me think of a humanist set of guidelines. Science maps to ethical, and religion maps to moral.
So, if one is being ethical, one can make a judgement without emotional involvement, but if one is being moral then emotional involvement is an essential part of the process. That's my take on it anyway; I'm a philosopher, not an academic.
The online etymology dictionary says:
ethics, "the science of morals," c.1600, pl. Of M.E. Ethik "study of morals" (see ethic). The word also traces to Ta Ethika, title of Aristotle's work.
So it seems ethics is derived from morals, and is the formal, logical study and textualization of a gut-feeling or pseudo-instinct. That might be crucial: ethics are written down and a matter of record, and morals are in the mind, in god, or in the aether, and are ineffable.
Great, the internet just went down. Maybe it'll come back up shortly. If it doesn't, then I might have to officially go crazy.
It's on again, 90 minutes later. I had to manually restart the router.
Here I am in sacramento. I'm pleased that I can do all manners of bloggy things while I'm on vacation, although I don't know about recording sounds. Perhaps there is an app for that. I would need to make the files with one app and then upload those same files with another, unless some app has ftp and sound recording built in.
Program inter-operability is a weak point of iOS; generally files are available only through the app that's responsible for them. You're totally at the mercy of app developers in terms of what you can do -- the OS itself doesn't have a lot of interface for working with the filesystem. Generally, if you want to do something you'd better hope a given app was written with the ability to do it, or you'll need to find a new app. "app centric" is how I would describe iOS usability; it's a very "buy the right tool for the right job" environment. Apple is either lucky or smart to have built an environment where people are forced to spend money in a locked-down app store to get stuff done.
If I want to do soundblogging on iOS, I'll need a way to record sound and a way to make my ftp app see the sound files. Possible, maybe.
Blogging with ipod from detroit airport. This will be terse, at best. "ftp on the go" is a great app, by the way. It includes a text editor.
My flight should start boarding in 45 minutes or so. On the shuttle I preprogrammed 26 phrases I can trigger with a 3 letter combo. Here are a few of them:
i am speaking in only pre-written phrases, selected by some three-letter input. It's fun, disturbing, AND useful! Wouldn't you agree? Or have rejected the enlightenment llike so many postmodern charlatans?
poooooooooooooooooooooooooop 666 << DEVILSIGN!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHA (penises)
why don't you take a good, long, ~*HARD*~ look at yourself and describe what you see?
i love you. I always have. I want to marry you.
burger king.
i bet you wish you were riding in a mostly-empty airport shuttle, on your way to THE D, where it is so very cold............
canada: a place for losers. LOLOLOL JUST KIDDING
wat country u from? "wat" ain't no country I ever heard of...they speak english in "wat"?
the sky seems especially pretty today. Maybe I'm just paying particular attention, eh? Eh? Eh? Eh? Eh?
i bet you wish you were riding in a mostly-empty airport shuttle, on your way to THE D, where it is so very cold............
how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 1 2 3 4 5 that's enough.
logic sometimes makes monsters - someone
so, I should probably get into programming chat bots. I did it once with some software...it was fun
this is a pretty good way to spend the time on an airport shuttle. Also, it gives me much-needed tiny touchscreen keyboard practice! More artsy nonsense, less essayish prose. That's the ticket
:) :| :/ :( :} :{ :] :[ -- they all have different meanings, depending on your fluency with cartoon faces
($)$($)$($)$($)$($)$($) money MONEY m0n3y
yes. No. Maybe. I refuse to answer. Let's change the subject.
i like sex and love and emotional closeness and co-dependency and buying hot dogs! YEAH BUDDY
llllllllooooovvvveeee ------- mistah lovah man....OOH SHABBA
i like van halen and don't see how anyone doesn't, especiallly pre-haggar. I mean...pshhhh. Americans over-clean.
cars. Trucks. Meatloaf. ?????? HELLONEARTH
this had better be good, or at the very least worth the cognitive expenditure in the form of electrochemical resource use!!!! &&& xxx
houses: sometimes they are in gkkdkkckjsjcjkk I don't know, help, I need help, plz plz lol ok @@@-@@@
windsor: 86 kilometres
last one for now -- this had better be good, had better knock their socks off... :|
That's all of them that don't use tag brackets. Using the ampersand-semicolon encoding system is beyond the call of iphone blogging duty.
They just announced that it's a full flight. Blech. Oh well...travel is suffering. I upload now. Maybe tomorrow I'll try to do images!
I think I don't really want to do a video blog. I like doing the guitar thing occasionally, I like making comic strips, and I like writing essays on art theory and crap like that. But, things can get overly-complicated fast and with an environment that is too unrestricted, creativity can actually suffer. You need some boundaries to things. Or, at least you need them most of the time, although you should be able to transgress them occasionally.
These pickles taste like some kind of polymer or petrochemical substance. I don't think I'll get them again. I screwed my sleep schedule up again, but it was mostly worth it. I did my laundry, which included my blanket, comforter, pillowcases, and fitted sheet. So, I had a totally fresh clean nice-smelling bed ready, and couldn't resist crawling into it.
God I feel like my writing sucks. That's the problem with a blog like this, I think, where it's a mess of things like the audio, video, images, writing, blah blah: it confuses me, and scatters everything. I need more discipline. Maybe even the rule of "I must have an image" is too much, and I should just write essays like I used to and then, only if the essay calls for it, include an image. Or, I'll make a webcomic relating to the essay. But I can see that things are sort of getting out of hand as they are, and I feel like I need to re-focus.
I'm losing weight. Not only that, but I see a difference as well. It's a very slow process, but I think this is the best way to do it. All I need to do now is take up some kind of exercise, which I will do in early January. Then, I will redouble my job-hunting efforts, and either stay in this city and leave my apartment, or leave this city entirely. But one thing is for sure: I don't like my apartment building and can't be here much longer.
It's just about the worst apartment building you can imagine. The only bad things it doesn't seem to have are violent crime and roaches (although there are a number of earwigs in the summer, which I don't really mind), the absence of which I guess is a big plus (although there are drug dealers and prostitutes ambling around, especially during the summer). But the environment is just awful, from a sensory perspective: for one thing there's no soundproofing whatsoever, and you can hear everything that happens on the street and in the hallways. I don't know if this is a function of the walls or just my happening to have quiet nextdoor neighbors at the moment, but I don't hear anyone directly through the walls.
However, through the window I do hear my neighbors down one floor and to my right, such that the bottom right edge and top left edge of our apartments are touching. They're just loud people, yammering on in Brazilian Portuguese and to their children across the parking lot. The woman, especially, is problmatic; her higher pitch has penetrating power, while the grunts of her hypermasculine, bow-legged companion are too low to register much. In the summer, they sit on their patio and drink and talk talk talk talk until 2am; I think actually that their loudness is a function of Brazilian Portuguese culture, perhaps in part (I don't really know), and this makes my case for complaint considerably weaker: "Could you not talk to each other and enjoy your lives as you are accustomed to doing, because I have this general dislike for humanity that manifests as not wanting to experience people in any way?"
It's noisy here, it doesn't smell too great -- there's always some weird rotten or rancid odor in the elevator when I walk in -- and probably second-to-most-importantly (#1 issue is noise) the temperature regulation is so awful it's like it's been designed to be as bad as possible as part of some kind of Japanese game show or torture chamber. The windows are single-paned, as thin as paper, and rattle about in their frames, and there are only two of them in a solid wall of glass, floor to ceiling. This means that in the summer, this place becomes an unventilated greenhouse, and would be insufferable for anyone, let alone someone very sensitive to heat like myself. I would conservatively estimate that if it's 25c/77f outside and sunny, it's 35c/95f in here. Also, the window of solid glass is south facing, and being in the northern hemisphere the sun travels in a visible arc starting from the bottom-left corner of the all-glass window, moving up to the top-centre, and then down again to the bottom-right corner, shining directly into my apartment the whole day.
In the winter there are simliar problems: the windows are so thin and poorly-fitted that a draft of freezing air pours in from the winter just outside, right onto the top of my head sticking out of the comforter. I wear a stocking cap at night, like some kind of 19th century pioneer in a log cabin. This would be worse if I weren't a cold-tolerating person; as it is, I don't actually mind so much. In fact, it can be rather cozy. But I sometimes do wish I didn't have to wear a hat at night. It's better than being too hot, though, so I generally don't complain. Being too hot is an altogether different and worse variety of hell. More people die of heat stroke and heat exhaustion in Toronto than die of cold and exposure in the winter: fun fact. Partly these climate problems are endemic to the region: Southern Ontario has approximately the worst weather imaginable. It's hot and humid in the summer, and cold and wet in the winter.
My rent is also inexpensive, and so this building attracts either students or marginally employed adults (and quite often bona fide crazy people living on social services); it's filled with derelicts, basically. Too noisy, smells funny, derelicts running around, too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and just ugly and ramshackle and falling-apart -- the elevator was out of order for something like two weeks, it's all this pukey olive drab or taupe or beige color, and it generally looks like a 1970s whorehouse. I live in an ugly place. I need to leave it.
But honestly all things considered it's not that bad here. It could be a lot worse, at least: I could be living with someone I don't like. Also on the upside, I'm less than a mile away from the grocery store and about 2 miles from a shopping area with almost every retail thing anyone might need -- that's the main good thing about living here. But, that's sort of true no matter where you live in London. I defintely want to move.
The internet sucks. IPhones won't play flash video, Firefox won't play mp4 video, and Premiere won't output in ogg video. It's bad enough having to upload two different versions of my multimedia file when I'm doing sound (ogg and mp3) -- just imagine if the files were 100 megs instead of 10. That's what I'm dealing with in html5 video, and, even if I could export in video ogg with Adobe Premiere, there's no way I would upload two 100 megabyte video files over a residential cable connection at 30 kilobytes per second. I have limits in what I will do for the sake of art and technology.
Ok I did it. I downloaded a converter, converted the mp4 to ogg, and now I will upload yet another 100 meg video file just because I am determined to finish this experiment in html5 video blogging if it kills me. I will let it upload while I sleep, and set up a Paypal donation button to help me with the bandwidth costs.
That said, here is a video, painstakingly converted and uploaded over the course of hours. I hope you're happy. This is the last time I screw around with html5 video, at least at this filesize. If I do it in the future, I'll use 2 minute clips, or 30 second clips. I'll talk really fast.
I am so techy. Man...my blog is fat. I thought I told Premiere to export the video at a blog-friendly size. I guess I didn't do it right. Also, the larger dimensions are surely responsible for a bigger filesize. Next time I'll try to do something about that, if there is a next time; I haven't decided if html5 video is worth it or not. It really might not be. Suffer-you-shall this week the fat blog. BAHAHA
What kind of physical exercise should I do? I've been feeling more energetic and like I want to get outside and run around lately. Unfortunately, this tends to be boring, so I think I need to think of some activity like martial arts to do. Or, maybe I can just go run around like a cretin. I don't really know what will keep me happy in the long term vis-a-vis exercise, but I do know that I tend to get bored with exercise and need some variety. It's a lot like food, maybe. I'd like to take up running, but I'm too heavy for that at the moment, no joke -- I'd be risking injury.
Do I really need an image when I've got video? I say "no." Well, I'll provide some anyway, in the course of doing some resource consumption tests in Chrome and Firefox when playing html5 vs. Flash movies.
In all cases, I ran the movie for about 30 seconds to a minute; the resource usage didn't fluctuate that much as it played on in any of the tests. So, as you can see, the results are a little disturbing: html5 uses significantly more CPU than Flash video, at least on my machine. I don't know what to think of this. Maybe the html5 engines will improve as work continues on them. But in the meantime, it makes me very suspicious of Apple for helping to kill Flash video.
Maybe the best thing is just to keep everything on DVDs and stand-alone monitors. But no -- no one would stand for that. Progress must move forward, and video on the web will stabilize! TALLY HO
