South campus is gone. Really really gone. Like “big-hole-full-of-rubble” kind of gone. Its so strange to see so many buildings I saw everyday when I lived on campus just gone. I guess it’s been gone for a few weeks now, but it didn’t really strike me until tonight when I was driving down Chittenden and realized I could see all the way down High street to 9th where previously there had been blocks of closed down bars and stores. Score one for Campus Partners. I don’t really know how I feel about that. I certainly don’t miss the old bars and buildings. They were ugly and run down, even before Campus Partners bought them out and shut them down. Still, they were the ugly and run down buildings that made up the OSU campus that I knew. I’m not really too thrilled with the idea of them being replaced by a Barnes & Noble and 17 more Starbucks. What I’d like to see is a bunch of cool, unique, distinctive local businesses, but I’ve got a feeling that the kind of money being spent on the renovation will make the cost of renting too prohibitive. Whatever. As long as there’s an Abercrombie & Fitch. Or two.
Monthly Archive for May, 2002
Answer these using the lyrics of just ONE band/artist (from Kimmee)
Band/artist: Modest Mouse
****************************************
1. Are you male or female?
“Got a phone call from the Lord sayin’ ‘Hey boy get a sweater. Right now!’”
2. Describe yourself?
“I’ve said what I said and you know what I mean
But I can’t still focus on anything”
3. How do they feel about you?
“Well, you were the dull sound of sharp math”
4. How do you feel about yourself?
“And I claim I’m not excited with my life any more
So I blame this town, this job, these friends
The truth is it’s myself
And I’m trying to understand myself
and pinpoint where I am
By the time I get things figured out
I’ve changed the whole damn plan
I’ve changed my mind so much I cant even trust it
My mind changed me so much I cant even trust myself”
5. Describe your (ex-) girlfriend/boyfriend?
“I wanna remember to remember to forget you forgot me”
“Broke up, and I’m relieved somehow
It’s the end of the discussions that just go round and round”
6. What would you rather be doing?
“Gonna hit you on the face gonna punch you in your glasses. Oh no!”
7. Describe where you live?
“There’s a lot going on underneath
There’s roots there’s pipes, there’s drainage leaks
You’re on, you’re wrong, Ohio”
8. Describe how you love?
“just the smell of the summer can make me fall in love”
9. Share a few words of wisdom?
“Everyone’s afraid of their own life
If you could be anything you want
I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?”
Pitchfork hit the nail on the head with their review of Maladroit today by pointing out the eerie similarites between the new Star Wars movies and the new Weezer albums, both plagued by unrealistic expectations of slavish fans and both failing to live up to those expectations. Granted, I haven’t heard the album yet so I might not agree entirely with their assessment, but I just thought the Star Wars/Weezer comparison was pretty interesting. You know, for geeks and stuff.
I finally bought Mirah’s “Advisory Committee” today, and it turned out to be as good as I expected. Really, really good. This is definitely going to be one of my favorite albums of the year.
Robocode (and for that matter, the entire Alphaworks site) is just incredibly cool. It doesn’t get any better than coding the brains for super death robots and then setting them loose on each other in an arena. Programming contests involving battling robots have been around forever, but this raises the bar by adding a nice GUI and built in compiler to make basic robot creation as straightforward as possible. Oh yeah, and its in Java too, another bonus. I don’t know if I should admit this, but last night I kept dreaming about targeting algorithms that I could use. I woke up trying to figure out the necessary trig. That’s pretty bad, I know but this is just so much fun. Tobin and I have formed Team w00t and are issuing a challenge to anyone who wants to try to take us on. Come on, it’ll be fun.
Hot Property brought the rock to Columbus last night, and I finally was able to experience the magic of their live performance. They certainly know how to put on a good show, and the choreographed dance numbers didn’t hurt either. I think you’d be hard pressed to find any other presidential candidates that can shake it like that (though I’ve heard that Ralph Nader can get his freak on like you wouldn’t believe). There was a brief tense moment when Chet hugged The Arm, but I guess The Arm must have been feeling mellow that night because no one got hurt. I finally got a copy of their excellent new cd, “On the Other Side of the River of Excess“, which is every bit as good as the live show, but just without the dancing. Rancid Yak Butter Tea Party (featuring Mike from frantic.org and Brian from debugged.org) followed Hot Property, playing a special live set since their bass player had recently broken his hand. Instead of their regular songs they played a selection of classic Megaman tunes. Megaman + horns + theremin + rock – tinny 8 bit sound = Aw, yeah! I think I’ll definitely have to plan on seeing one of their regular shows as well.
My job search still hasn’t come up with anything promising yet, which is getting pretty discouraging. No matter what I do, I just can’t seem to get anyone interested in me. I don’t get it. I state very clearly up front that I’d be willing to kill for money if the job requires it, and yet no one ever gets back to me after I send them my resume. Its starting to look like I won’t find a job before the Student Computer Centers kick me out. How soon is that? Let’s take a look. Hmmm, it just seems to keep going down. That’s no good. I’m not out of hope yet, even though it seems I’ve checked just about everywhere I can think of. I’ve just recently applied with TekSystems and Manpower, which might end up placing me with some temporary contract work. It would certainly be better than not having a job and I would still be getting experience, even if it might not be necessarily in the areas I’m interested in.
I ended up seeing Star Wars episode 2 twice this weekend, one more time than I told myself I would. The second viewing wasn’t brought on by a fit of fanboy giddiness, but more out of hope that I would like it more than the first time I saw it. As a disclaimer, I probably should mention that I fall into the camp that thinks that even if a Star Wars film is bad, hey its still Star Wars. Even so, my first viewing left me a little unconvinced. I wasn’t overwhelmed, I wasn’t underwhelmed, I would say I was just adequately whelmed. My biggest problem was the lack of memorable dialog. Bad dialog is forgivable, and a good thing too since there’s enough of that to go around but there weren’t really any of the moments that stood out like in the first movies. Of course, I’m willing to allow that those movies are so memorable because geeks everywhere have had over 20 years to memorize all the dialog. Aside from that, I enjoyed it much more the second time. No matter how critical and cynical I might have tried to be, I couldn’t deny that the action scenes and effects were really great. I’ve decided that I’m not going to ask for too much from Star Wars, and I think I got what I asked for and thats good enough for me.
*Ahem* Alright, now that I’ve had some time to calm myself down and to test out the Nomad 3 I think I’m a little better shape to write about it. Lets just say it lived up to its expectations and then some. I would highly recommend this little beauty to anyone who has a decently sized cd collection. The sheer joy of just knowing that I can listen to any of my albums anywhere is great enough, but then I’m kind of a dork that way so it may not apply for everyone. The device is even smaller than I was expecting, in fact its smaller than my old cd player. Sure, it may not be as sexy as the iPod but the extra space is worth it for me. The firewire connection is so amazingly fast, I was able to get all of my albums transferred over in minutes. I don’t even want to think about how long that would have taken over USB. The interface on the device is fairly smart and definitely easy to use, and it automatically organizes files in a very convenient way. All I’ve had to do is just copy my files over, I haven’t had to do any kind of arranging or cleaning up which is a very very good thing with about 3500 files.
Nomad 3 mp3 player… finally here… guh… buh…. *gurgle* must stop drooling on keyboard, or it’ll br.,aksdalidll….dia
I’ve realized that I just don’t take enough pictures. Case in point: the above pictures, just now developed, are from an incredibly rokken Havalina Rail Co. show… almost 2 years ago. Whoops. I’d completely forgotten about them until I finished off that roll of film at the AIDSwalk last week. I’d really like to take more pictures in general, and I’m leaning toward picking up one of these super compact digital cameras. Maybe not high end quality, but with something that easy to carry around I think I’d be more likely to have it on me when I want to take pictures. More Havalina shots (1, 2, 3, 4) and a few Joy Electric (1, 2) ones from the same show for those that are interested.
Elsewhere