blogwaffe

Naked

Volleyball

.com

A gynormous pet peeve of mine: links on web pages whose text changes size when hovered over. When they’re in some sort of menu, the effects are often only aesthetically vomitous. But when they are inside a section of text, they can change the layout around far too much to be able to not piss the ever living daylights out of me. And when I piss everliving daylights, I get angry.

I put web designers who commit such crimes somewhere between the 6th and 7th circles of hell.

I’m wearing a sweater today. My Mr. Rogers Sweater. It is no where near cool enough to warrant such attire, but It’s been a long time since I’ve opened up my warm clothes/electronics trunk for any anything but cables and adapters, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

It’s comfortable. It’s also funny. I lived in Rochester.ny for four years where it was always a celebration when tshirts could be worn all day long outside during the school year. Different people drew the line in different places, so some people celbrated more often than others. But it was still a source of common ground for everyone: tshirts = happiness.

Now that I’m in .ca, where I wear short sleeves and shorts essentially every day, it’s sort of nice to have an excuse to put on the old Mr. Rogers Sweater. Not that it’s a good excuse: It’s currently 67°F outside. Were I still in Rochester, this would be a day of celebration.

Here in .ca, it sort of still is.

Do not let the unbelievers tell you otherwise. I am a keeper of secret knowledge, a gnostic. I will find deliverance before all others. I will see glory in this world others will not have noticed even until their deaths.

I was enlightened in the beginning, many ages past, but have only now found it my calling to raise up any that will follow after me. And my people will follow. Just as I have learned from my mentors, my shepherds, my counselors, so too will those that heed me, those that listen now, find beauty and hope in this bleak world our home.

I have signed up to receive instant SMS notification of the publication date of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince as soon as that knowledge is available.

And, verily, all too may do likewise.

I pick myself off the floor of the living room deciding to try and do the last problem from the set I’m working on in the morning before class. I hadn’t eaten any sweets in O(weeks), and the one milkshake I drank really destroyed my ability to concentrate (note to self: maintain daily sugar intake at the one dozen Krispy Kreme equivalent level from now on). I poke around on the internet a bit and fastidiously avoid updating the ‘waffe. Calling it an early night (1am), I go to my bedroom, shut the door, undress and get in bed next to the pile of clothes I still haven’t put away after doing laundry a few days ago. I bless my Queen Size bed.

The window by my ear is open, and I hear the rain lashing the pane and sounding off the roofs, the wall of the next door parking garage, the balconies, the trees. I think of forests, of parks, mud puddles, and grey skies. Of wet days on wet beaches, tin roofs and wrinkled papers. Flower petals in a stream. Overwrought descriptions.

I close the window but for a crack and dream the rain.

I deal with people Everyday. Multiple times a day, really. And, as a consequence of this people dealing, I have found there are several people in this world whom I find terribly annoying. That set of people happens to overlap (albeit lightly) with the set of people with whom I deal regularly.

I suppose that since that intersection of sets is non-null, you might as well be an element therein.

But, not necessarily a believer in fate, but rather a believer that something can be learned from every situation into which one gets tossed, I’d like to take this (contrived) opportunity to thank you for being so completely antiposed (to conflate a few apropos words) to my idea of a one hundred percent not-at-all annoying individual. You see, in reflecting upon just why I find every action of yours to grate so on the very sinews of my body and to jar so truly the synapses of my nervous system, I have discovered that I’m really being very bigoted.

Read more…

Brought to my attention by uber.

A comic.

And a big nuts-to-you-and-your-empire, George Lucas.

A few weeks ago, Marc Broussard’s “Come Around” was featured as iTunes’ free download of the week. It’s pretty kickin’. A good back-beat funk sound to it. I’ve listened to it a bit these past few days, so I decided it was finally time to check out some of his other stuff.

Crap.

I don’t know what he’s trying to pull with these smooth R&B/Southern/White Boy College Rock tracks. His single is some pappy crap in the vein of John Mayer, and the rest of his songs are even worse. Worse except for “Home”: a decent Blues Rythm piece with a hint of anger-release-Rock (no – I did not say fusion – get that fleeting thought out of your head right now).

Now, iTunes did not have his debut album (Momentary Setback), which was apparently good enough to tour with some pretty big names (DMB, Willie Nelson, Tori Amos, Robert Randolph, O.A.R., Martin Sexton, moe., Bob Schneider, Maroon5, to name a few referenced by his website). Perhaps it’s better than his follow-up album. But going on what I’ve heard, it’s hard to understand. The style that seems to be more or less his bread and butter is pulled off with such… is there a better word than “blah” for the boredom and distain I feel when listening to his songs?… that it’s sort of shocking these couple of other songs are as good as they are.

And man, does he ever look like douche-bag.

My laptop is really heating up now, and I think its fans have gone into second gear trying to calculate a very nice looking integral. I’m sure if I were clever, it’d be fairly easy to do by hand. But I’m not, so it isn’t.

In ~Mathematica Lingo:
Integral[Exp[[ImaginaryI] k.u] Exp[-m Abs[u]]/Abs[u], {u, all space}] (u, k 3-vectors)

(a 3D Fourier transform of Exp[-m Abs[u]]/Abs[u])

It’s for my Relativistic Quantum problem set. The problem set is late. Late because I’ve been spending all my time TAing Ph3.

I hate Ph3. It’s a huge pain in my ass; it eats away all my time and most of my will to live. I have to meet at least six times a week for this class. Six. And it’s a mechanics/circuits lab; I don’t even have access to any liquid nitrogen to cool down my currently-in-the-blackbody-domain laptop.

I wonder, is stress induced brain hemorrhaging grounds for collecting worker’s comp?