(no subject)

Got all my classes finally - I'm exhausted, and I'm already behind. This weekend is Minicon, so the mob's coming south. I suspect I'll take the time during minicon to rest a bit... or perhaps do some of the homework I'm behind on. I dunno. It's second week of the month - worst as usual, so I'm grumpy as hell. I hope I'm better by the end of the week.

Made a quick playlist just off of the random association method, found it reflects my mood closely:
Static-X - Cold
Static-X - December
Radiohead - Life in a Glass House
Radiohead - Like Spinning Plates
Korn - Hollow Life
Korn - Somebody Someone.

Watched Boondock Saints, and I find the opening lines to be quite salient to what I honestly consider to be a very, very sick political maneuver on our dear fucking president's part:

To paraphrase: "Yes, we must fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil that we must fear the most, and that is the indifference of good men."

It is my earnest desire that somewhere along the line someone more intelligent than the pathetic idiots having 'peace rallies' around SLO notices that this is stupid and ill-favored. The people around here can barely string a coherent sentence together. Their spokesperson could be killed with a pair of spiked shoulderpads, or a 'like'-activated cruise missile.

Like Spinning Plates - Radiohead
While you make pretty speeches,
I'm being cut to shreds.
You feed me to the lions,
a delicate balance

When this just feels like spinning plates.
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land.
And this just feels like spinning plates
Our bodies floating down the muddy river.

T.S. Elliot

Excerpted from The Hollow Men, T.S. Elliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Not really specifically relevant to my current situation, but a very powerful piece which tugs at me on occasion. T.S. Elliot is one of my favorite poets (anyone who's seen my .sig anytime recently will understand - I use part of Prufrock: 'No! I am not Prince Hamlet...') and despite his modern-poetry style tends to make a lot of sense on occasion.

Had I wanted to never make money I probably could have turned myself to English and spent my years teaching high schoolers how not to drool on the pages... but I would be more well-read than I am now. It's funny - I love my science fiction and fantasy, and I find the comics I read an endless source of delight, but I begin to tend towards more esoteric entertainments, like modern poetry and dramatic novels of various sorts; I don't know what part of me is the prime mover in this shift, but it's something new, and I'm always in need of that...

(no subject)

I love jumpstarting Netras. Netras are these cute little 1U high (about 2.5 inches) machines which fit in a rack (so about a cubit wide). They generally don't have a CD-drive, so you have to install the OS over the network. Now, unlike the rest of our systems, somehow a netra can get 1.5GB of install image transferred over a 100Mb network cable in under 10 minutes. Way cool. Talk about low downtime; I may have this machine back up and running on a new OS by the end of the day. Crazy.

I suppose there's something appealing about a 400Mhz sparc system with a gig of memory which you can slip under your arm with no problems. I'd love to misappropriate one; work's lucky I've got professional ethics up to here.

I love new tech. I'm taking a class this quarter, largely just for the heck of it, which is an English Great Books class taught almost entirely online. We meet once a week at a godawful early hour, and other than that, we use the Blackboard system.

I used to preach that I wasn't a bleeding-edge techie, but I find it's interesting to see what the New Thing is; maybe it's because I'm constantly seeing things which don't deserve it being broken in horrible ways. For instance, the Sonny Bono act was upheld in the Supreme Court as of this morning. For those of you that aren't aware, the upshot of the Sonny Bono Act was that from its inception, no copyrights would expire for 20 years, and they'd bring the act up for renewal at that time; presuming the RIAA, MPAA, and other interests hold their sway that long, the end result is that all copyrights will be extended indefinitely.

The result is that corporations are letting things go out of circulation which don't make them money, but suing anyone who tries to keep the information in existence. In the end, it's control over information, and, to get all post-modern and stuff, information controls thought, so it's control over thought. Not cool. Not to mention the more mundane but equally friggin annoying fact that some Great Things drift out of circulation, and eventually are irrecoverably lost because the manuscript, or negative, or whatever prime media exists, rots. We have all these semi-imperishable media, and we're prevented from maintaining information and old culture because some bigwigs are obsessing over sphincter control.

In other news, I got a DVD+R for christmas, and my fiancee now owns a professional quality A/V input/capture card. Heh. Welcome to the twenty-first century.