Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Pseydtonne's LiveJournal:

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Monday, June 22nd, 2009
2:12 am	Step one of 120 I ran into metahacker at a party on Saturday. He mentioned that it's a good idea to do something.. shit, I'm going to get this wrong -- fun and concrete? I'd better ask him to clarify it -- while I'm between jobs. This way I'd have something specific I could point to as output during this time. I got the idea to translate something from French into English. lightcastle mentioned that it's always a much better idea to translate from the language you are learning and into the language you know better, since you'll miss a lot doing it the other way around. I chose something I'd wanted to show other anglophones, something that could be popular in English if I could make it available. Graphic novels are huge in France. They get published in hardcover and make lots of money. They catch my eye and my dough in ways that American comic books never have. The art is fresh, the stories are in a variety of genres and the chance to improve my pedestrian French is immense. The fan translations of Japanese manga have become immensely popular in America and Europe, and I haven't found a reason the French equivalent (complete with nudity and violence) couldn't be popular as well. One in particular that I've wanted to show people is 120 Station Street, a bédé (a word made from the pronunciation of the initials B.D., bande desinée, the term for comic strip) by one of my favorite artists, Tardi. Tardi's renderings are the only ones ever authorized by crime novelist Leo Malet, author of the Nestor Burma series. Tardi is known for his hang-up with Paris in the time from the Belle Epoque to the mid-1950s, although occasionally he will draw modern material. I did a test run when I got home. I grabbed a new spiral notebook and a pen, since I wanted to be able to translate while I'm on the subway or in coffee shops. Then I started translating as many pages as I could before bed. After an hour, I had only progressed a couple pages. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I could no longer skip sections that I had inferred from the art. I had to look up lots of words that I already knew separately but made no sense in context. "L'avant-veille", for example, is the day before yesterday. While 'avant' is before, 'la veille' is a night watch or an all-nighter, coming from a Latin word for insomnia. I had to think out some extra meanings and really poke at some sentence structure. Nevertheless, that hour flew by. I was working hard and getting a far better understanding of the story than I'd had before. I have a better idea of the scope of my work, but I also have an even stronger desire to do the work. I can't wait to get the smaller details I had missed in my previous attempts to read this. I can't wait to learn more vocabulary. I can't wait to feel the ending hit me harder now that the story has more meat. I paid $23 Canadian for this book when I bought it in Montreal back in 1999. Add taxes and the sad rate for the Loonie at the time and I paid $16 American. Had I bought it at the foreign-language bookstore in Harvard Square, it would've been $42. I didn't just get a bargain then -- I got an infection. Current Mood: artistic Current Music: "Fun Times in Cleveland Again" (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
2:54 pm	"Twinkle, Twinkle... blah, blah, blah." It's been nearly a month since I posted anything. I've been in a weird sort. The short version: I haven't had any chocolate in a few days and my body is happier for it. I don't get it yet, but at least I can guess some of my problems and addictions again. Rather than tell you the whole story of "Why I Didn't Write", which is kinda boring, I'll just offer what I wrote to my mom in a letter I sent today. She was mentioning using fairy tales to brush up on her German. I have a book of fairy tales from Quebec that I work through sometimes. They can actually be harder for me than the books on the history and development of the French language that I usually read in French because they require concrete and un-English words. A word that looks like a Latin word in a linguistic context is probably the word one thinks it is; the word "if", standing by itself in a children's tale, means nothing. I can swirl around a couple paragraphs and notice a character walking around "un if", and I can eventually conclude "this must be some kind of tree." I can stay brave by looking in my French-only dictionary, my big computerized one. I then learn that it's a tree from Ireland and that it's sacred among the Celts, that the word itself comes from ancient Gaulish spoken by the people Julius Caesar conquered in 52 BC. Okay, groovy. I was right about the tree -- but is that a fir? Maybe it's deciduous. Oh wait, it does say it's a conifer and that it bears a red fruit. Great, red-fruited tree -- is it an apple tree? Are they berries? Even though I now know a lot about this one word and that process has been enjoyable, I still have to look up the word in a French-English dictionary. An "if" is a yew tree. Oh great, the answer! But I still have no mental image of a yew tree. I've never called anything a yew tree in my life. It sounds like a name from China, not Ireland. Now I have to look for a picture of a yew tree in Google Images. I finally see the small, raspberry-like berries. I also see the girth of the older versions of the trees -- they don't grow up so much as they grow out. They become their own bouncers. They look gnarled and knotted, especially with their propensity for exposed roots. I can see the religious angle, the Yggdrasil vibe. They remind me of the live oaks I saw in Wimberly, Texas, but they are much stouter. I find all sorts of details about the soil around yew trees yielding fascinating drugs, let alone their sap or cuttings. This is a tree of life -- and probably also an easy tree for a short climb. Now I understand why the Grand Robert (the French version of the OED) mentioned this tree with cemeteries. The GR had also mentioned this was a beloved tree for cabinet-making (ébénisterie, from the word "ebony") and that the word for finish woodworking is "menuiserie". That word looks like it comes from outer space but it's just related to "miniscule". I go through all of this to learn a word that was a breeze-by word for a four-year-old drifting off to sleep in Trois-Rivières. "Oh yeah, the trees in the graveyard. G'night." I love the process, but it means I have to save these simple texts for when I'm at home and near by references. When I'm reading French on the subway, I stick to texts with lots of Greco-Roman words because I can parse those. Current Mood: awake Current Music: Minutemen - whichever track the subject line came from (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
6:05 pm	The Western Canon (tm) is not so polite dimers had a fascinating comment to my last post: "Most classics are about hate". This is a strong assertion, so I tested it on the first Canon texts I could recall. These are presented in chronological order thanks to cut and paste technology: Thebean Cycle (King Oedipus through Antigone): Guy wants to see the truth. Then it turns out he's been schtupping his mother after he killed his father. People that didn't know the truth had good lives; people that knew had lousier ones. Ultra-MILF hangs herself, king gouges out his eyes for seeing truth. Later he teaches his youngest daughter-sister what was up, then he dies (it's a middle book, so it's boring -- the unlearned lesson for writers is not to write a three-parter). Incestuous king's uncle is now the king and is a total prick. New king decides old king is dirty so he cannot be buried in town. Previously mentioned daughter of old king disobeys, buries him in town, gets executed. Town overrun, possibly by Jehovah's Witnesses. We need a satyr play after that. 1 The Bacchae: Guy tries to fight off the god of liquor, who has the Ladies' Auxiliary in a frenzy. A slave breaks to everyone who killed whom. Author hopes the guilt will lead to a proto-Christian morality. Socrates smiles, women's rights get slaughtered. 1 Ovid's Metamorphoses: Gods like to schtup humans, sometimes in bestial play. Humans get knocked up and give birth to daimoi (half-human, half-god). Daimoi get annoyed that they don't have godlike powers but can't frickin' die, so they trash themselves and others around them. Lots of hate. 1 The Gospels: Jesus shows up. He does fascinating things, but that increasingly pisses off the puppet council running Judea for the Romans. They get everyone into a Hate Week frenzy and Jesus gets a slow lynching. Everyone feels guilty and realizes they've killed the walking wine shop. Yup, that's hate -- and it seems strangely familiar. 1 Romeo and Juliet: Two families hate each other. A whole West Side Story kinda thing happens, without the annoying music and choreography. Lots of stabbings. It's a recipe for hate. 1 Candide: Naive aristocrat thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, since that's what his bookish teacher said. They go on adventures, score a bunch of gold and then lose it all about as fast. Aristocrat comes home broke but decides to pick up with the girl he found hot way back. She's not hot anymore; he's not as naive anymore. Aristocrat tends to his garden, realizing that's all there is to life if you own property. Somehow he's not bitter. -1 Moby Dick: Patrick Stewart has to go chase his whale. The survivor tells a mind-blowing story. I knew this would be my kind of book from page one, when the narrator says he knew it was time to get hard labor on a ship because he felt like "deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off" -- that's like a line from the Damaged album. 1 Walden: Andy Rooney builds a house out in Concord. He's a curmudgeon but he definitely has his Thucydidean skills when he itemizes his hardware store purchases. Some people revere this book, usually until they move to Vermont and find out the locals hate flatlanders. Let's call this one a draw. 1984: Hate Week. Enough said. 1 Six out of nine. Okay, your point has been proven albeit loosely. Let's look at non-canonical works -- erotica: Person turned on by another person. They schtup. Usually they get dinner first. -1 NASA For Dummies: America gets Werner von Braun from the Nazis and the Soviets get all of his underlings. A space race ensues. That's some serious frickin' hate. Then America goes to the moon six times out of seven. The Soviets build space stations. We give them lifts home. The Cold War ends. No one knows why we need space stations anymore. Hatred wanes. I'd call this a draw. Peter Bagge's Hate Comics: Loser people in Seattle, some of whom wind up in New Jersey. Lead female doesn't like that she can't steer her life but doesn't really do much about it. Lead male character gets more control of his life mostly because he hates the people around him. The word "Hate" is in the title but most of the hatred is the reader disliking the characters. Then again, hatred on some level is everyone's fuel. 1 Hmm... That's zero out of three. Maybe we are working out these issues -- or maybe I'm being too selective about which texts get in the chart. After all, I'm just looking around my room. -rock this city, Dante Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Weird Al Yankovic - "Hardware Store" (7 Comments |Comment on this)
4:36 am	I don't have anything brilliant to report. Just start here and watch as many of these Five-Second Films as you can. ...no relation to the five-second movies. Much funnier. P.S.: A Separate Peace is about preppies hating non-boring people. Thus, anyone caught feeling for the narrator should be beaten. Discuss. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
4:39 pm	Organizing resumes: foodstuffs Yesterday I got back to organizing physical objects instead of digital files. I sorted my pantry. My apartment has a very strange pantry. The kitchen is small and the pantry is actually a series of cupboard shelves in the hallway between the kitchen and the Scary Room. There are four sets of matched cupboards, two on top and two to the floor. Each has four shelves that run through both sets of upper or lower shelves. These are very wide shelves: from the inside corner of the left cupboard to the far inside of the right cupboard is 64 inches, all of which is one shelf (divided on the outside by the doors but not on the inside). Each shelf is between nine and thirteen inches high -- but only eight inches deep. This means you can fit canned foods about two deep and usually two high but many along. Unfortunately it also means most spare cooking equipment cannot be stored here (most of my cookware starts around ten inches in diameter). Since my roommate is half a foot taller than I am, he gracefully chose the top two cabinets so that I could use the bottom two. He has a step stool for the very highest stuff, which I use to sit when I need to contemplate cooking ideas. I got tired of barely being able to shove things into these cabinets. I decided to empty almost everything out and start fresh. Liquor bottles stayed on the lowest level, since the risk of shattering and the need for the tallest shelves (which are on the bottom) determines their fates. Thus my cooking wine, drinking wine and two-liter of cane sugar Coke from before Pesach remained where they were. Then I came up with a good idea: put the protein-based foods on one shelf (going from beans to fish to sausages, in order of meaty-ness) and the vegetables on another. Then I put the spicy foundations and sauces (coconut milk, jars of Thai goo) on the top level with room to spare for cooking oil (a high-use item) as well as tea and coffee. All of the above took up one of the cupboards. In the other cabinet I placed the grains and cereals and the few cooking devices I could fit. Suddenly I had room for expansion on each side and could see what I had. I could view at a glance which proteins were available and which veggies and sauces would go with them. Then I could find a suitable grain (rice, noodles, even oatmeal) and get going. This worked well that evening. I grabbed some potted meat (which is the American version of paté), some wheat bread, a whole carrot and a mandarin orange and ate. Then I realized I hadn't had much dairy that day, so I put some bran cereal in a big cup and snarfed a little. It all worked fine. -something completely work-safe, Dante Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Richard Séguin - "Journée d'Amerique" (Comment on this)
12:17 am	From a more innocent time... (warning: no explicit words but not really safe for work) ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. ) Current Mood: amused Current Music: Aqme - "Pornographie" (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
4:13 am	First impressions of the Big Bob I've only looked up a couple things in the 2005 digital edition of Le Grand Robert, the French equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary's full edition. There is also a Petit Robert and a Robert Micro, but neither has quite the overwhelming power of the GR. The book defines one hundred thousand words, which near twice the Petit Robert (60k words) and two and a half times the used Larousse Pratique I picked up in Paris. It's digital and it comes with its own software. I can double-click on any word and get its definition, complete with an OED-like source quotation and etymology. ( Dirty words in two languages below this cut. ) It's not all roses in this dico, however. I had to spin around a few times before I figured out that a chaudronnier is a coppersmith. It used circular definitions: a chaudronnier was one that worked in chaudronnerie, and a chaudronnerie is the place of business for a chaudronnier. Finally I found another word, dinanderie (brass utensils), which led to the more common word 'cuivre' (copper, brass). At least I learned some interesting stuff during the process, such as "cuivre rouge" is copper while "cuivre jaune" is brass. Okay, more later. Ask questions if you'd like cuz I'd like it. Current Mood: enthralled Current Music: Felix Leclerc - "Bozo" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
5:19 pm	Next they'll try to bring back hats The "You Kids Get Off My Lawn" movement has been digging up ancient hatreds. I guess this is their version of victory gardening. They've been ranting about video games being a worse corruption than the horrid comic books of the 1950s. (Yes, really.) Now they've gone back to what they see as the root of the problem: dungarees. Yes, as in the blue jeans people have been wearing to office jobs for at least a decade now. George Will's opinion piece is fascinating fuddy-duddery. Blue jeans mean we're too loose and we should instead dress like Fred Astaire. Does anyone trust fashion advice from a man in a bow tie, someone that may have been born middle-aged? I usually wear blue jeans or khakis outside. I have a hard time imagining anything else being comfortable unless I carried an electric fan in my trousers. I wonder whether he is annoyed that many of us have trousers with crotch space. How dare we not need to pick up our pant legs before we sit down? Are we aliens from a Heinlein story? What led the baseball fetishist to this new level of inanity? This guy's opinion from the Wall Street Journal. I love the juxtaposition of the Hudson Valley cracker's anti-jeans rant with a photograph of Levi Strauss. If you miss the caption, you could easily think it's just the author in his salad days. Why did these opinion pieces get published in 2009? There was already a WKRP episode that handled this in 1980. Who are these people that think jeans are stiff? Have they never bought washed jeans? Now for the more important question: who got stuck transcribing their typed and mailed letters? I imagine an intern at the Journal got handed a letter to feed into the scanner. He asks his boss, "why didn't this guy email us the file instead of printing a copy?" The boss replies: "I hate to break it to you, but that is the original." The stunned intern replies, "Huh?" "He typed it on a typewriter. You see those smears and crooked bits on certain letters? That means he used a ribbon-based strike bar." "Typewriter? You mean, like... in the movies on Turner Classic?" "Absolutely. I bet he even used carbon paper to make an old-fashioned carbon copy." "Carbon paper?" One of the comments to George Will's piece made a great point. Suits require dry cleaning, which is expensive. Any expansion of the average American's dry cleaning needs would be horrendous for the environment. Mr Will fails to posit enough reasons to switch. Thus he fails and shall be sentenced to a year in Zubas. -smartest thing I could come up with today, Ps/d Current Mood: amused Current Music: Ladytron - "Blue Jean" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 10th, 2009
3:50 am	La fin de la chaise I finally own a relatively awesome office chair. This isn't quite the $700 chair I had assumed I would get in another year, after I'd gone back to work and purchased slightly more important stuff (translation: I want a bigger iPod). This isn't the result of the month of research I'd done and talked about in the past. It's just a very dang decent chair. It's got five wheels, two long arm rests, a head rest and a mesh back. It's got decent lumbar support, an adjustable seat height and recline controls that aren't just "rock or sit up straight". It also wasn't fished out of the garbage, as was the chair I just put back out on the street. I had hoped to stave off this purchase, just like I've postponed many others. Most things only take me a few seconds to a minute before I say "I don't neeeed that now, I have enough stuff that I haven't unwrapped that would suit me, I have toys, I'm fine, I'm just in the shopping plaza to take a walk and stare at the humans." A few days ago I was leaning back in my scrounged office chair when it made a loud click. My first thought was to get out of the chair before it collapsed. It didn't fall apart and I wasn't injured. Instead I could lean back slightly more than before and it wiggled more. I spend enough time in that chair to know that this was a final warning. Oh sure, it still worked -- but for how long? Would I suddenly flip over? Worse yet, would I get a hydraulic piston up my ass without a safe word? My roommate wanted to buy a desk at Ikea, so we went there on Wednesday. I wasn't certain I'd buy anything that day. Then I tried as many of the chairs as I could, got as comfy as I could and recovered from a possible lingonberry overdose. I found a couple that I liked. Then my roommate pointed out that one chair I'd liked had concave arm rests and that I'd wind up with a stress point on my arm. I brought home a chair and put it together while we watched a couple episodes of Freaky Eaters. This is a BBC show about people that will only eat a very limited diet. A nutritionist and a therapist try to swirl the person away from a life of potato chips. One episode we saw was very moving. A guy would only eat basic Cheddar cheese. He couldn't even eat heated foods. He was otherwise an active dude and loved riding his Seadoo or otherwise driving fast objects. He totally wanted to change, but would spit up almost anything other than his cheese. Most of these victims have control issues going back to their childhoods. They go through some change (a horrid illness, for example) and find the only way they can rebel and take any control is to refuse food. Then they get older, can't remember the original event but remain in a state from it. The guy in that episode made a slow but real turnaround. It was also weird seeing him try to sort things out with his estranged wife and realizing she wasn't worth the time. When they revisit him a few months later, he has progressed way beyond his original goals and can even eat with his children out in public. He found he liked vegetables, especially since they didn't need to be cooked. Regaining control has been an issue for me. I have been letting the time I spent working third shift fade away from memory. It kept me from my friends, my hobbies, my health and my sanity. When I went away to France, I realized I couldn't lie to myself anymore about working horrible hours and surviving it. I needed sunlight and the people that also awaken during it. Now I am ready to reassert myself, as I have hibernated long enough. I shed many possessions, but the next step is to shed the fear that I'm not qualified to do stuff. I also suspect that the only real jobs out there are on Craig's List, which is weird. In the meantime, I've been eating a lot better and I'm sorting out my hard drive files the way I've been sorting out my physical files. Each time I free up another hard drive, an angel gets its wings -- and then winds up another dang Linux box. I have a clean throne from which to seek a new kingdom. I can control my tiny empire, most of which involves connecting other people's empires so that they can help each other grow. -and then we serve cake, Dante P.S.: I really need to start posting in French. I've been working so much on my French that I don't just go to Le Monde or the Montréal Press and hope I can read an article: I actually get my news that way (it turns out there is a continent with a ton of nations on it but it rarely gets covered in the anglophone press -- Africa). I can parse random stuff without lyric sheets (not all of it, but a lot). I am getting French puns. They don't groan at puns as much as we do. Then again, the one about the priest and the car mechanic is pretty nasty in either language. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Arthur H. - "La tour Eiffel sidérale" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
3:21 pm	About the anti-NATO violence in Strasbourg If you've been in Europe, you've stayed at an Ibis hotel. They're the Holiday Inn Express of Europe. Are you ready to shoot yourself after a long day of travel and rejection? They have a room for 70 or 80 frickin' euros. I stayed at one in Lannion (a small city in Brittany) for 52 euros and felt I got a bargain compared to other Ibis spots. I still had to find parking on the street but I got a king-sized bed, my own shower and CNN in English. More about the horror of French showers another time... Protesters torched an Ibis in Strasbourg yesterday. They also torched an abandoned customs checkpoint (Strasbourg is on the Rhine, which forms part the Franco-German border) and smashed a bus shelter (the graffito says "Free Transit") By the way, I love the semi-autonomen trying to read the map that's now under their feet -- we can identify them, but they can't yet identify themselves after a day of being anonymous. "Which bus did we take to get here?" "I dunno... I came from Bayonne." If you'd like to see all of the colorful photos, the Twenty Minutes site has the best ones -- pretty cheeky and thoughtful research a for newspaper handed out in the subway. Let's get back to the Ibis. When I first saw the pictures of the burning and later gutted hotel, I felt a little freaked out. All those flames destroying a Mansard roof? Nooooo! Then I remembered how a lot of Ibis hotels look on the inside. Someone puts fresh drywall in an old hotel. There are stairs in weird places. The building usually has serious problems, such as lack of insulation and crap for hot water. But hey, they'll charge ya! If you've been to Europe, you too have wanted to torch an Ibis hotel. I'm sure the owners will be pleased as punch to take the insurance money and rebuild their Phoenix to codes. ...unless a black bloc counts as an Act of God. Current Mood: it's suddenly raining hard Current Music: Gang of Four - "At home he feels like a tourist" (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
6:43 pm	No really... I'm going to relax eventually I grabbed one box today. That was enough. Yesterday I went to a pot luck birthday party at ceelove's place and had a very good time. I socialized, I hugged, I felt connected. I also got to hear directly from our local organizing professional, anotherjen, how useful it has been for her to read these posts about my cleanup. This bouyed me immensely. If you're interested in starting own organizing festival but could use a specialist's care, talk with anotherjen. She knows how to get a person into the mindset necessary and feel comfortable with beginning one's own process. She mentioned Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? by Peter Walsh, a book that deals with the emotional process of self-improvement. After the party, I went home and played some Halo 3 with my roommate. He was thinking I should take a break from the box-dumping process. I could tell I was getting to that point as well -- it's a convenient busy activity when I'm scared to hunt for jobs. This morning I dropped off my DVR at Comcast, which will save me $62 each month (DVR plus digital plus analog cable, none of which I've used in nearly a year). Then I came home and noticed one more box I could sort. I figured it'd be no big deal to plough through one more box. I should have put it back when I needed to leave the room and come around to the other door so that I could get the box out of the room. It's big and cumbersome, although it has handles. I dropped it onto my bed because my bedroom was closer than the dining room. Then I opened it and saw about four different piles of stuff inside one box. The items aren't messy, although a couple books have been wedged too long and need to be flattened. It's still annoying to see items, know where they belong and realize I don't have the energy to schlep them. I'm tired of sorting my stuff. I need to finish this box before I go to bed because it's taking up so much of my bed. I also need to get the stuff in the dining room reorganized and on the rack in the mud room. After that I'm ready to take a break for a week or so. I've done a lot. I have more to do, and I can see the end of the First Phase. However I feel uninspired -- is this all there is to my life right now? How many times must I do penance for my sins of clutter? If I clean enough, will a job magically appear in the bottom of the pile? Will it cover psychiatric? Organizing will not solve my biggest problem, even though it has solved some important issues. I have to moderate myself and accept that I need a respite from self-improvement. I need to reflect, read, build a computer or two, develop some fresh assignments to make my job hunt more enjoyable. I need rarefaction to handle my recent compression. "Dude," I tell myself, "it's okay to take a break. It's good to do something else. Yes, this process has given you a lot to write about and it's been great for finding lost stuff. But you can burn yourself out when you need your energy for the single most important task you have right now: finding a job. Headhunters are in the way more often than not. Don't just clean because you'll be able to say you did something productive today." Usually I also tell myself to go for a walk. I need to listen to that voice more often, because I usually come back happier. Right now I'm eating chicken and spinach dumplings that I just steamed. The mustard and hot pepper sauce and grated cheese are working together to raise my spirits. I need to run some other errands, such as buying groceries. Then I'll come home and assess what can be stowed for future sessions. I think this big box is getting collapsed and stored once it's empty. It says "electronics" on it, as it was meant to carry one home theater device with lots of packing peanuts. Heck, it could probably fit a car tire. Instead it held what must have been my bedroom floor when I finished housesitting in Lexington. I will keep up with you as I find my next source of inspiration. I don't want to lose your interest even though I'm losing my own. It'll make sense in a few days. Writing about it helps me make sense of it. -"been a long time since he's flown", Ps/d Current Mood: listless Current Music: Rasputina - "Howard Hughes" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
4:29 pm	Take that, you piles of... oh hey, another Luc Sante book! I felt ready to tackle more scary papers. I only wound up with one box of papers, but it was a big box. It was big enough to hold several books, several newsweeklies I'd picked up when I was in Montréal in November of 2005 (to see Nine Inch Nails with fangirl715, so it accidentally ties in with yesterday's post), and a butt load of old receipts. I need to do something different with my ancient receipts. I used to keep my old receipts because I would enter them into my checkbook and compare the results with my bank statement. I'd usually do the checkbook figures in my head, which was fine when I was a hundredaire. Actually, even that isn't true. I once found myself nearly two hundred dollars above reality because I didn't carry correctly on two occasions. This would've been fine if I weren't in university, where I wasn't earning a paycheck. Suddenly I had nine bucks in my account. I sorted everything out, but I started using a calculator at least once a month to check myself. I stopped keeping tabulations a few years ago. It was driving me nuts trying to find where I'd miscounted a dollar or had a check pending. I could get an accurate reading from my online bank statement, which was daily instead of monthly, and then sort through the last few receipts. I still wound up with fistsful of receipts at the end of the quarter. Even now that I'm spending significantly less than I was while I was working, I still have to sort the buggers. I'm not in the correct head space to handle that problem. Since I don't itemize my deductions, I don't need the receipts after the return periods expire. Perhaps a shredder would be useful. I dealt with three other boxes before calling it quits: two contained nothing but computer books, so I just placed them in the mud room. One more box had glassware, which is going into the basement. I don't have enough kitchen shelving to store a bunch of drinking glasses. Anybody want some? The rack I set up in the basement yesterday only contains empty boxes (including the milk crates I use to move vinyl records), but it's already proving to be very useful. I have space upstairs, which really means my roommate will soon have space upstairs. Once I've finished clearing my stuff out of the scary room early next week, the First Round of Organizing will be complete. Then I can tackle the residual questions, such as: What happens to the data CDs? How do I organize the sprawling book collection? Do dial-up modem cards make decent rifle targets? (Hypothesis: too much flying metal) Will I ever see a 5.25" floppy disk again or should I just toss that dual-floppy drive? I have lots of cool toys. Anybody wanna come over to play? Today was reassuring. I'm near the end of seeing any more boxes of paid bills from years ago. I could almost count the boxes that remain to be sorted (it's hard to see around the columns of stuff) and only one had stubs sticking out from it. I still need to clear off the dining room table again, but I could simply use my straight arm and a wiping motion if it came to that. It's afternoon on April Fool's Day, so the pranks should have finished. I'm going to take a walk, cook something for a pot luck and head out. Current Music: Van Halen - "Everybody Wants Some" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
5:08 pm	Annnnnnnnd relax. I can tell I am reaching the oldest of my packed materials because I keep finding shopping bags from Tower Records. I can also tell that I'm pushing myself and may need to change tracks after I sort what's on the dining room table right now. I'm realizing all at once how many things I've avoided over the years. I found an uncashed $100 check my mom sent me for my 28th birthday. How did I miss money? Am I nuts? (No, I'm not going to cash after six years.) I found the invitation to ceelove and starphire's wedding, still in the envelope, RSVP ignored. I was about to freak out that I didn't go to this event and how that compounded my feelings of isolation over the years. Then I found the material that explained why I hadn't gone to the wedding: airline tickets to Florida during the same week. This is how I greeted memories of October 2003. My emotions are overwhelmed. My body's reaction was the trots, which I am not certain were psychosomatic. Then my body forced me to take a short nap. I didn't even turn off my iPod -- I just slowly passed out in my chair and woke up a little later. The last two boxes I found have only contained computer parts and a book on the history of timepieces. These are much easier objects to handle. Oh, and I think I have enough modem cards that I could start a decent-sized ISP in 1993. If anyone has a time machine, I have a no-brainer business plan and the assets to make it work. Oh sure, there are plenty of easier ways to make money if you already have a time machine, but this one would let us chill through the Nineties and know which banks will be solvent when we get back. No bookies, no guilt! I still think I'm going to call it an early day for this organizing session. I will finish the boxes that are already on the table, gather the empty boxes from yesterday and today and bring them to the basement. Then I'll set up the low rack and put some stuff on it. That will be constructive and useful. I'll tidy up the living room and then do some computer geekery. Besides, the last two boxes in the aisle seem to be my roommate's, so I've achieved a lot just in 30 hours. Meanwhile, here is the Facebook Haggadah. That's a much easier read than the Lolcat Bible. And hey, I've never even been as bad as the folks in these photos. Now I feel like a neat freak, since most of my desk is useful and clear space. Some of these desks don't scare me as much as others if they still have leg space under the desk and the keyboard is unobstructed. By the way, I just answered a Gallop poll over the phone! The dude in Omaha had questions about phone books versus Internet searches. I wonder why they still publish those things... -slow, slow, quick-quick slow... ride, Ps/d Current Music: Husker Du - "From The Gut" (6 Comments |Comment on this)
2:37 am	Wherein the Author Commences to Kick the Scary Room's Ass I have another post that I was writing about the one-day French immersion class I attended on Saturday. This other idea is ready before that one. When I woke up this morning, my brain was begging me to begin cleaning out boxes from the Scary Room. The room has four aisles of boxes with what ought to be three walkways between each aisle. However the middle aisles have enough stuff between them that there are only two walkways and only one of these has been navigable by fat dudes. I had concluded yesterday that it would be easiest to start with the aisle of boxes along the kitchen wall, which forms one side of the navigable walkway. As I cleared each stack of boxes (usually four boxes to a columnar stack), I could navigate even more easily and see my task shrink. I grabbed a box and emptied its contents onto the dining room table. I had a box full of books. many of which I had forgotten I'd owned. Then I grabbed another sealed box and found even more books. Then I found a third box was full of DVDs and video games. One heuristic I've developed during this organization process is that a box takes an hour to sort. It doesn't matter that a box may take only twenty minutes to handle: if I don't have a full hour to spare, I ought not get started on a box. The contents may take only ten minutes to sort but another forty-five to get into their proper places and clean off the table. Most of these boxes are about the same size, as they tend to be recycled wine bottle crates or similarly sized moving boxes. Some boxes take less time because they have homogeneous content or pre-sorted content. Other boxes take longer than an hour because they contain bags of other stuff. The worst boxes are just stacks of papers, each member of which requires a cursory reading before each can be sorted. The papers must unfortunately be sorted immediately because they take up the most physical and mental space otherwise. ( Emotional diversion below the cut. ) In contrast, books are simple to sort: stack them by size and shelve them in the smallest shelf that fits the stack. DVDs are even easier to shelve since their boxes are all the same size. All the books and DVDs will get sorted in the Second Major Phase, which could start a couple weeks from now. I thought I'd sorted through all of my books already. Instead I was staring at some good ones and some seriously lame ones. Between a lame trivia book about Boston and a stack of old magazines was a book I thought was still at my mother's house: Chambers for a Memory Palace. Two architecture professors write letters back and forth describing the constructs necessary to form memory palaces. Classical orators used these semi-mnemonic devices to remember their speeches, since 3-by-5 cards didn't yet exist and require literacy. I picked up this book when I was in university. Though I never finished reading it, I loved what I had read and loved the line drawings of various settings. I integrated the ideas with my own experiences, which is how I remember what I want to write later. I sorted through a couple more boxes, then headed to fangirl715's place for chocolate cake. We talked and got bummed about the cost of NINJA tickets. It's a dollar shy of a Franklin if one wants to stand in the pit and see 9" Nails and Jane's Addiction at Great Woods this summer. It's a lot cheaper at Jones Beach for mezzanine tickets, but then I'd have to trek out. Either option is still more than I can shell out when I need to live until I get a job. Then I went home and resumed my Scary Room Excavation. I think I went through an impressive ten boxes today, although I ran out of steam just as I finished tossing stuff from the last box. I still had a sprawl of objects in two rooms: it took another hour before I had enough of the mess wrangled that I could excuse myself to the Internet. I didn't actually spend ten hours on the ten boxes, but I definitely spent a working day on the process. I filled one and a half big garbage bags today. I still have another half a dozen boxes to sort before that first aisle is clear, the walkway is immense and the items along the back wall are in my grasp. Soon I will have seen all of my possessions for the first time in half a decade. I already own at least a third fewer objects than I did when I started and I can inventory my possessions far more easily. -investing time to fight entropy, Ps/d Current Mood: listless Current Music: Moxy Fruvous - "Entropy" (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 27th, 2009
3:05 am	Si ta tasse serait en plein... Saturday morning I will be attending seven hours of French immersion. That is my big birthday present to myself, other than getting to hang out with lots of friends each day of that week. There are three levels of the immersion: beginner, intermediate and advanced. I just barely qualified for advanced, but it turned out I'd've been alone. So they moved me to the intermediate class with three other people, each of whom is also at the high end of intermediate. They also said I could bail with a refund if it doesn't suit me after an hour. I'm always up for seeing what I could learn. I'm reviewing my notes from class in Rambouillet. Most of the notes are very clear and in French. However there was one day where I noted in English, "Don't eat Nutella with you fingers in public." This had deeply disgusted a teacher. It took me a little while to realize they want spreads to be on breads and nowhere else. I had to assume I'd looked like someone snorting foie gras. I still haven't written a lot about those amazing three weeks because I was so busy during them. Which would you rather do: write an LJ post or go drinking with metal heads in a cute town? I'd get homesick, so I'd write. Then the wicked intensely cute Kiwi girl and I would talk about random shit and you wouldn't hear from me. I learned there is an accent even more nasal than a Long Islander's, and man it can overwhelm. My roommate and I were watching old episodes of Freaks and Geeks. Oh man, that episode with the Billy Joel music and the three guys liking the new girl before they lose her -- it kinda touched me. I wanted to review the structure of time prepositions, something I still screw up even though I've got great notes about it. For example: Il y a deux ans je suis allé jusqu'à San Francisco pendant huit heures. Two years ago I went up to San Francisco for eight hours. Note that "il y a" refers to a time in the past but "pendant" refers to a specific duration of time. Both are used in the past tense. "Pendant" really means "during", but the word "pour" (for) is only used to describe a fixed length of time that will happen in the future (meaning you get to some point X in the future and then another set of time will commence). type past present future start of time il y a depuis dans duration pendant en pour English is the most Romance language of the Germanic languages; French is the most Germanic of the Romance languages. They use constructions we find familiar and we borrow a lot from them as they do from us. However, we have no idea where our syntactical order comes from (Dutch) nor our concepts of verb time (Celtic languages) but like to think we use Latin grammar. We don't: we just yell at our kids for not guessing that. Americans are an Aristotelian people, observing traits and working from loose assumptions. We are in fact more inductive than deductive, willing to let things happen from the new stuff that arrives because they stuff we had before wasn't always so great (America without foreign cuisine would be horrible). French is a Platonic language, spoken by a people that correct each other not to be rude but to get each other toward an ideal of the language. In contrast, we run more on the fear that Lolcats will be the King's English of 2200, rather than the hope that we will formalize a stronger grammar. The French are right to be suspicious of treaties written in English, eh? I miss that feeling of linguistic material being important. I went to a place and had to learn how to function in their language if I wanted to have a good time. Perhaps I'll wind up teaching French some day, after I practice teaching English in France -- after I save enough cash to leave here again. Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: some earwormed Grateful Dead (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
3:59 pm	Blank media through my life Today I've been tackling my CD collection as part of my organizing process. This is one section I had assumes was already in order. I've got three CD racks that each hold 250 jewel cases. Upon these I've put my music CDs in reverse alphabetical order and reverse chronological within a band. ( The geeking about this sorting system lies below. ) That feels very orderly, right? It's all visible and simple to search. Unfortunately, it only works for music CDs that have jewel cases and liner art. Burned music discs wind up in a binder if they don't stay in paper sleeves for a decade. Data CDs that have jewel boxes go in a smaller tower, where they are sorted by operating system and not much else. DVDs and VCDs wind up in reverse alpha by title -- or they should, if I ever get around to sorting them. The other problem is that the ordered section had several members floating around my apartment until last month. I'd gather a few CDs to rip to MP3 and forget to put them away. I also had a couple CD shopping sprees during the past year, where I'd get stuff at CEX downtown or I bought stuff while I was in France, and still had those discs sitting in one giant bag in the bedroom closet. This meant my collection of 600-odd music CDs in jewel boxes on the racks was really a 700-item collection. I spent an hour putting away over 50 music CDs today. I had sorted the CDs last night, but I needed the hour to get enough space in each shelf to add content. I usually leave two or three spaces for growth on each shelf, but this reshelving killed all of those. I wound up rotating two-thirds of a shelf onto an empty shelf and realizing I only have one more empty shelf left. Today I've also discovered how many dang discs I have that don't even have labels. This was tolerable in the days of blank cassettes, because I'd usually been meticulous with putting track listings on the paper liners of the cases and I kept the tapes in their cases. With loose, ripped CDs I have no clue whether I'm looking at data, music, or just a blank. This reminds me of sorting my old floppy discs. I rarely put labels on them because I never had the thin felt-tip pens necessary to update the contents, real pens would press too deeply into the plastic through to the magnetic media, and pencils were illegible on those shiny stickers. Often I'd put a cute name on a disc (such as "The Brain Police", half the name of a Mothers of Invention song, or "Talk Line With Soul", the last line from a 900 number that had a catchy jingle) and have to pop the disc into the computer to find out what was on there. I should come up with an organization system for the data CDs because I have enough of them. Some of them are just frisbees waiting to be tossed, such as installer discs for long gone hardware or out-of-date, bootlegged operating systems. Some discs have no marking at all. They could be blank! Oh man, this is gonna be fun. I've put labels on anything I've made in the last few years, but some of these may be gifts. Now they will be gifts again, eh? Current Music: Five Eight - "Making Friends with the Ape" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
4:18 pm	Ebb & Flow in the Organizing Process Some days you can grind on a physical task for hours. I love those days because they dissolve in work, wash through the mind and build the muscles. Today, in contrast, I got about 45 minutes of organizing done when my lower back started to ache. It was maybe a 2 or 3 on the pain scale, but it was getting worse from hunching over boxes. So I dragged a couple bags of crap into my room and sorted them from my respectably comfy office chair. The dining room table still looks bad, but a third of the stuff that was strewn across it last night is now in an assigned box. I can finally pick up 85% of random objects and say "this is an X, and its box is Y which is here, next...". Getting rid of the opaque shopping bags and seeing the material is a big deal for me. Today I found even more PDA equipment, which meant I had to find another shoe box for the residue. I suspect some of that stuff will not survive the second round of organizing. Oh yes, this is just the first round. It's taken months to gather the stuff, toss the major objects and figure out the groupings for the remainder. After this I'll have to decide whether some stuff will ever get another use: many things won't. I must get going. I'm attending a reception for new members of the Alliance Française (which I joined about a month before I got the axe), so I need to wash up and look less like a geek. Oh, Back Bay... Current Music: 16 Horsepower - "Black Soul Choir" (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 13th, 2009
5:02 am	Wednesday I Hoovered, today I'm more like FDR Some people vacuum their living spaces frequently. You can guess from the mere existence of the previous statement that I am not a member of that tribe. While I have a decent enough vacuum cleaner, I do not usually rouse it from its slumber more than twice a year. I don't have dust allergies and I kinda like staring at the cobwebs near my ceilings, so I don't get too involved. Last week I was annoyed by the feeling of grit on the TOR (threadbare oriental rug, a term first used by Paul Fussell in his 1983 book Class) in my bedroom as well as the TOR in my living room. So yesterday we had to haul most of the furniture out of the living room, vacuum loudly, and then put stuff back. Tackling the bedroom rug was a little trickier. I only needed to move one piece of furniture, an office chair on caster wheels. However I also had to remove the Modulo Pile from the floor, which left that pile on the bed yet again. The pile was significantly smaller than last time: it only took up three quarters of the bed's surface instead of all of it and it had no stacks of things). I still didn't want any of it back on the rug after the vacuum had done its duty. I decided to put most of the stuff on the bed onto the dining room table, where there is already a clutter. As of today I no longer have any cardboard boxes on my bedroom floor, which is a major achievement. Unfortunately my dining room floor and table are each littered with unresolved objects, even today. It's very important to reward oneself after a couple hours of cleaning labor at home or one will never want to resume the process. Therefore I took drastic action after I vacuumed: I watched old episodes of Dragnet and then played Bioshock. Jack Webb invested a lot of money into the TelePrompTer company and was determined to get every penny's worth. Last night was also garbage night. We had three large bags completely full of garbage (a third on top of the two from earlier) and another bag of normal garbage. It felt good not to see any of it in the morning. I have about a dozen medium-sized shopping bags full of items. Each bag could contain random amounts of anything, from magazines, old bills, PCI cards for desktop machines or even a lollipop hiding inside Jar-Jar's mouth (a vaguely safe toy that really only exists to frighten adults). Today I consolidated a couple bags of crap, freed up a couple boxes for sorting but still had a pile of stuff on my dining room table. I have to sort the bags and boxes of crap into five major types: wires, papers, computer hardware, CDs and tchotchkes. This isn't even the part where I toss stuff, although sometimes that happens along the way. This step makes things obvious, thereby making container selection easier. For example, I found enough PDAs and components to fill a shoe box. The big scored of today was freeing up an entire hard drive. I had moved from one Windows XP Pro desktop machine to a newer one when I bought my first dual-core processor about a year and change ago. The old machine still hadn't been dismantled, but it's a fine box and would make an excellent test bed. It boots from a 200 GB IDE drive, which is the older kind of hard drive. Then it has a 160 GB SATA drive which held my MP3s and some older files. I spent a couple hours confirming that I had already moved all of the SATA drive's files to my dual-core machine, then repartitioned the drive. It feels really good to get an entire hard drive back. That's real progress -- I can save money, I can start new projects, I can learn new things. Once I free up the other drive only has 86 GB of stuff on it, but it's as well charted as the planet Venus. Once I free up the older drive, I'll have made real progress. I can hardly wait to reclaim the name of that machine and give it another life. I name all of my physical computers after cities on the Pacific Ocean (except for my old iBook, which I just call iBis). This old desktop machine is Vladivostok, a city on the east coast of Russia. Vladivostok is also the name of a Camper Van Beethoven instrumental, which was the original inspiration -- no one I knew had named any machine after a place that obscure. Vladivostok has become the Dread Pirate Robert of my life. The first machine with this name was my first PC, which I bought new in 1998. Every time I upgraded machines, that title would move over -- except this time, because I didn't expect this nicer desktop to become so comfortable. My dual-core box is named Oxnard, a word that sounds immensely ugly in English. I want this box to become Vlad and the title Oxnard to vaporize. In case you're wondering: my household media server is named Yokohama, my big laptop is Shanghai, my last Solaris box was named Valparaiso (a beautiful city in Chile, whose name means "gateway to paradise") and one of my other boxes is Astoria (a place in Oregon). I even named a small NAS box Sitka, for a city in Alaska. There are still opportunities for Lima, Iquique, Townsville (that's in nothern Queensland) and Suva (in Fiji). Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Fountains of Wayne - "Fire Island" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
3:33 am	Oh SUNY-B, we cherish thee... ...but I guess our records aren't so key. I just got an update from my old radio station. It seems they've found student financial and personal data going back at least a decade... ...in an unlocked room, with its door latch taped up, in the middle of the Lecture Hall building (a pretty open part of the campus), just barely obscured from normal pedestrians. Yay. I used to walk through buildings all over campus, mostly looking for unused computers that were on the Internet. One night I found an unlocked harpischord, so I taped a friend playing it well. It doesn't shock me that this happened -- it's just annoying to think my own data may be in there. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
3:31 am	Dining Room Redux I mentioned before that my roommate and I had discussed what he needed moved so that he could get started on his own cleaning adventure. His organizing needs are more pressing than mine: he has been using a large night stand as his computer desk since we moved in because he could not fit his desk into his bedroom. This had been fine until now. He needs to test his code on different computers and he just scored a spare monitor and two towers for these tests. Unfortunately he has nowhere to put the monitor, let alone the computers that will go with it, until he can get the boxes out of his bedroom. He desparately needs a space the size of the dining room to dissemble and store. So far today I've moved a small bookcase out of the living room into the mud room. Then I moved a bunch of moving boxes and a disassembled miniature baker's rack (more like a kitchen prep rack) into the basement. This is the first time we've tried using the basement in this house, as we have never ascertained from the landlord whether any of it is off limits. While I was moving the mini-rack, it dawned on me that I could set up just its shelves and use it as another place to put boxes. Then I moved a full baker's rack from the dining room to the mud room. Everything fits with space to spare, thus the room looks civilized instead of crammed. When my roommate saw the dining room, he felt like he was seeing a new room. It feels slightly barren, but that's the point: it has space for the first time in a year. Today's progress has been about other people. I want to make the place work for both of us, not just me. I also want to consolidate a couple more boxes before I put things back onto the rack or use the mini-rack. Current Music: White Stripes - "Doorbell" (1 Comment |Comment on this)