By
tuck
19 Jan 2002
chinese coke tastes like the coke from my high school. too much syrup, not enough carbonation. causes disgruntled emotional states.
<p>damn. i am so <span class="caps">SICK</span> and <span class="caps">TIRED</span> of being the worst one in a group playing pool. how is everyone so good at this stupid game? i come up with a good plan, eyeball the hole, aim up the victim ball with the ammo ball and fire it off. but the thing just seems to like <span class="caps">HATE</span> me or something. it never obeys. ill try to convey a particular idea to its little ol self, a good one too- but alas, usually it has an idea of its own. doesnt the ball want to go in? seems to for everyone but me. humiliation is commonplace for me in the poolhall or bar. i need to become a good player. it has latterly emerged as one of those essential manly skills that i missed aquiring somehow. i simply cant be the “cool foreigner in the chinese bar” without being able to woop ass on the green. so until i become the jedi-zen-pool-magician, im just a half-man and theres no way around it. </p>
<p>tips are welcome. this is serious.</p>
By
anders pearson
18 Jan 2002
overheard on the way to work this morning. some guy on the street talking into his cellphone. very calmly, no hint of anger in his voice:
<p>“…so, i want to do something to badly disgrace you. and i’m going to do it.” </p>
By
anders pearson
17 Jan 2002
finally met up with my friend julintip for a drink tonight.
<p>we live a mere 6 blocks apart but haven’t seen each other in over a year (she claims she was “busy” with work and stuff. excuses, excuses…). weird seeing someone you used to hang out with on a regular basis after a year apart. too much happens over a year to remember and regurgitate into conversation. i feel like i must have missed a lot of important stuff.</p>
<p>anyway, the big victory for the evening is that i got my acoustic guitar that i had lent her back. as much as i love my electric, there’s something about sitting back on the couch strumming an acoustic that comforts and relaxes unlike anything else. most guys (make that <em>all</em> guys) start playing guitar because they think it will get them chicks. eventually it becomes a close friend and confidant. you can tell your guitar things that you would never tell a living person; you can tell it the things that you don’t even understand well enough to express in words yet. a little part of me dies everytime i see a rock star smash a guitar at the end of a concert.</p>
By
jerfunfin
17 Jan 2002
Which I guess is a good thing since I have been kind of busy between work, side projects and socializing.
Dating has been interesting lately since it involves friends making that leap of faith beyond the boundry.
I am still shell shocked from my last long term thing, so maybe I am just alittle wierded out on multiple
levels. I guess I’ll take it slow and keep my options open.
By
lani
17 Jan 2002
my attempts to quit smoking have been futile. i think i was only trying to quit because i was only becoming more paranoid and sketched out from potential confrontation from the bosses and demi-bosses whilst smoking. and that someday the inevitable confrontation about smoking and not maintaining a “professional image” would come up.
<p>***************************</p>
<p>blessed were the days when conversations went as such:</p>
<p>“you know smoking will kill you…”</p>
<p>“yeah, i know. i think of it as casual suicide.”</p>
<p>***************************</p>
<p>also, had an indie rock relapse. i don’t think listening to emo at work is good for my health though. got the get up kids and <a href="http://www.thestrokes.com/">the strokes</a> single.</p>
<p>my roommate is going to wire the basement over the weekend so we network our computers down there…so hopefully i will be online more often soon. we still have order the service though. one of my favorite roommate moments thus far has been: washing dishes concentrating very hard on the exact curvature of a stainless steel pot and its interaction with the nylon fiber scrubber to look up and see…chris dressed in his usual nebraskan (all acid washed and flannel) through the cut out in the wall who then sings part of a van halen song, yehaws and points the power drill in air and gives it a twirl for accentuation in hearty “excited cowboy stance”.</p>
<p>************************</p>
<p>as josef says: <span class="caps">XOXOUT</span></p>
By
anders pearson
14 Jan 2002
last night i was flipping through the channels and stumbled across an interview with jaron lanier on TechTV. he’s the guy who coined the term “virtual reality” and made a stir recently with his “one half a manifesto”. pretty smart guy even if i happen to think that “virtual reality” is largely a crock of shite.
<p>he was talking about the functioning of our society and how he was afraid to admit that it bore a strong resemblence to a biological organism at least in terms of the potential threat of a small malignant agent in its midst (viruses, cancer, terrorism, etc). he said that he was afraid of the analogy because the sociological equivalent of an immune system to deal with these threats is not a very pleasant thought since it would tend to encourage racism, intolerance and fascism.</p>
<p>then, just when he was starting to make some sense, he proposed an alternate solution. i have to give him some credit for actually proposing <em>some</em> kind of solution; that’s more than most of us can do. his solution was a rethinking of privacy in our society. he argues that there are two kinds of privacies: the right to be left alone, and the right to not be seen. both are relatively new concepts in society and he wonders if, particularly the latter one, is a very good idea. his solution would eliminate the right to not be seen; everyone’s business would be public, making it much more difficult to coordinate an assault on society large enough to damage it as a whole.</p>
<p>i’m always suspicious of anything i see/hear/read that has been filtered through the media because i know how badly things have been distorted so i apologize if that wasn’t a very accurate representation of what jaron was trying to advocate; it was just the impression i got from seeing the interview. anyway, that impression was of a very naive argument. </p>
<p>i would love to live in a society where privacy wasn’t necessary; that would imply that there was no stratification of power and all other freedoms were respected absolutely. unfortunately as long as somewhere, some person has authority over some other person, privacy is necessary to prevent abuse of power. Orwell’s <i>1984</i> does a much better job of explaining why this is the case than i could do. if we were ever able to reach the utopia necessary to allow us to do away with privacy, terrorism wouldn’t be a problem anyway.</p>
<p>i’m pretty sure that jaron’s a smart enough guy to not actually be advocating the elimination of privacy as a practical solution to our problems. if only for the simple fact that cryptography exists and can’t be made to just disappear as much as certain government agencies would like it to.</p>
By
anders pearson
14 Jan 2002
went down to DC this weekend to visit lani and see the house she moved into with a few of her coworkers.
<p>my train got in on friday night around 10. we met up with lani’s friend amy, and a bunch of random people from richmond and went out to club chaos to watch a drag show and dance (don’t worry, i didn’t dance; it’s not in my contract). </p>
<p>on saturday we slept late then went out for coffee together. the folks from richmond left and lani, amy and i went to the Asylum for 25 cent pints. it’s a little dive bar that happens to be cool enough to have skinny puppy and minor threat on the jukebox and did i mention that there were 25 <em>cent</em> pints?</p>
<p>then we met up with lani’s housemates for kebabs and wine before returning home and opening up the bottle of Absinthe that yura had smuggled back from the Czech republic. i didn’t know that absinthe was 140 proof. i do now. pretty tasty though. we weren’t doing much after that besides sitting on the porch listening to music and talking.</p>
<p>for breakfast on sunday, lani made us her family’s traditional recipe of eggs, grits and soy sauce. then we wandered over to georgetown for coffee and snacks. my nice long black coat that i’ve worn more or less continually since i bought it in hong kong in 1997 for $20 was finally starting to fall apart so lani, kim (lani’s british housemate) and i started a hunt for a replacement. unfortunately, long coats don’t seem to be trendy this year so almost no one had anything suitable for sale. we went through about 6 shops in 20 minutes without any luck. finally, just as we were about to give up and leave, we found a nice one. i think we set a new record for efficient shopping.</p>
By
anders pearson
09 Jan 2002
the root of all evil? or lots of fun?
<p>in an effort to speed up thraxil, it now caches most of the data in static files and updates them only when it has to. so no more 50+ database hits everytime someone loads the main page. </p>
<p>i can’t really see an appreciable difference from here (postgres is so damn fast that hitting it 50 times in a row isn’t that inefficient. the main bottleneck now is probably just in the time it takes to establish a connection, fork apache and load the perl interpreter.) but in theory it should now be much more robust in the face of a heavy load (like 500 people hitting the site all at once) and even allows thraxil to maintain limited (read-only) functionality if the database gets shut down.</p>
<p>still on my todo list are a decent interface to the archives and the return of markov. once i get those taken care of, i’ll open the source code up for everyone to pick through and start writing some alternate themes.</p>
By
anders pearson
08 Jan 2002
i’ve been pretty good so far. a few more trips to the grocery store and my kitchen is actually starting to fill up. my fridge actually has more in it than just a six-pack and butter.
<p>i’ve actually even been cooking stuff for dinner. on saturday i made Mapo tofu from a recipe on the back of a flavor packet that i bought at an asian food store. Mapo tofu was my favorite dish in china and, happily, the version i cooked myself was probably the closest to authentic that i’ve had yet in the US (except for the time that my friend Cho-nan cooked it for me); every time i order it in restaurants they refuse to make it as hot as they do in Sichuan.</p>
<p>the biggest problem with cooking i’ve found so far is figuring out what to make every night. i think most of the menu determination process is driven by the question “what do i have in my fridge that might go bad if i don’t eat it really soon?”. so for the last two nights i’ve had sandwiches and salad because i have bread and lettuce that might not last too long.</p>
By
lani
07 Jan 2002
that must be an acronym for some kind of military roaming device…
<p>so i’m moving. this time i signed a lease for an entire year! i figured it out and if you count the hotel i stayed in for two weeks and when i was semi-nomadic, i’ve moved 5 times since july.</p>
<p>friday, i:</p>
<p><ul></p>
<p><li>took the wrong train home</li></p>
<p><li>found myself in Lorton, Virginia</li></p>
<p><li>flagged down a cop and got dropped off in seven eleven where i had 2 cops of coffee, 10 oz. of carrot sticks, and 3 cigarettes while i waited for my mom and my sister to come pick me up and also pissed off all the regulars with by incessantly asking for directions and relaying them over the cell phone.</li></p>
<p><li>decided in the car to help my family drive the moving caravan (yes, they’re moving too…)to Atlanta as soon as possible</li></p>
<p><li>bought energy drinks, luna bars, metabolife, and gum.</li></p>
<p><li>left at midnight after a family pill-popping session and embarked on what turned out to be a seventeen hour trip including stops for more stimulants and stops for our bodies to randomly pass out from the abuse.</li></p>
<p></ul></p>
<p>but i got back to dc on sunday and moved some of my stuff from virginia to dc, but there’s oh so much more moving to do. woe woe woe is me.</p>