By Miguel Diaz 22 Jun 2004
Spent this past weekend at the Clearwater Festival. Cool shit. Great performances by Dar Williams and The Nields. Decent performance by Ani Difranco. Plus a bunch of people I had never heard before that weren’t all that bad :-)
By Miguel Diaz 16 Jun 2004
So…I went to the Dominican Republic last week. It was great fun, but also a lesson in things we take for granted. Like a reliable power supply (so the traffic lights in the city don’t die, along with the rest of the power, for at least a few hours a day), hot water, running water, pavement, the ability to use your credit cards at will, I’m sure there are others. I think it’s pointless to visit a different country and not experience it as the people experience it (as much as possible); otherwise just go to Disney World…the plane tickets are cheaper. Also of note is the fact that I’m engaged now (woohoo!).
<p>We stopped at Meskerem (west 47th b/w 9th and 10th) on the way out of the country. We’ve been there a few times and for those of you in the city who are into Ethiopian food (or haven’t tried it) you might want to check it out. Awash (Amsterdam b/w 106th and 107th) is probably even better; but I’m not gonna complain, any Ethiopian food is good Ethiopian food.</p> By anders pearson 14 Jun 2004
the weather in new york was so beautiful this weekend that i really should be punished for not taking advantage of it.
my excuse is that i had a new toy to play with.
my primary machine at home has been quite flakey for a long time. hardware issues. it’s also big and loud. so a few weeks ago i broke down and ordered a new system. it’s a Shuttle SN41G2 based system. smaller than a breadbox, quiet, reasonably powerful. i ordered it from Los Alamos Computers, who ship it with Debian GNU/Linux pre-installed.
of course, once i’d spent a few hours failing to get mplayer working on Debian, i decided to wipe it and install Gentoo instead, which is the only linux distro that i’ve ever actually managed to get mplayer and all the video codecs properly installed on.
installing gentoo involves a lot of waiting for things to compile though, so i watched a few movies while it chugged away:
now i have a brand new, fast, stable machine running with a fancy 2.6 kernel, every bit of hardware on it working nicely, and mplayer installed.
By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 14 Jun 2004
I’m done with Thompson’s GENERATION OF SWINE. It was good, but has thus left me with the itch, once again, for fiction at its finest. In lou of last weeks comment about crack smokers being better than others, I have picked up Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. This book was given to me years ago, by a fellow admirer of the printed word, but I never read it because I had my head too far up the cracks of VOnnegut’s many works. I think I’m going to like this book, and can definately see why. In case any of you would like something interesting to read, and rich of language, I think this could be a good one. You can wait a couple of days to a week and ask me about the whole, or you can race me to finish it. Here’s something to entice you…
(The first page)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. SHe was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always LOlita.
DId she have a precursor? SHe did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no LOlita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? ABout as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fance prose style.
LAdies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
V. NAbokov, LOLITA (Pg. 1)
THere’s just too much richness to consider this anything but a misfortune that I have not read it sooner. (Forgive the double capitals, this keyboard at work is not very nice.)
By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 11 Jun 2004
It never fails. I knew posting that pic of me with the cigarette would get me into trouble. Diana gave me a little friendly harassment at work today about it. Now I am the druggie burnout. Ha! I told them I was a straight-edge, but of course, no one believed me. I always make these comments and do things that half-bite me in the ass. I once made a comment about smoking crack. In my junior year of college someone in an english class was talking about smoking pot in the dormatories, and getting caught. I asked her why she didn’t put a towel by the door, and then I went off in a tangent. “I don’t understand why crack isn’t more predominant in dormatories and with highschoolers. It’s odorless, tasteless, and about as cheap.” This caught the attention of my professor, but more importantly, a girl I wanted to shag. “Ah well… Better a crack head than a pedefile,” they say.
By tuck 11 Jun 2004
i’ve been looking around, asking questions and getting various suggestions for an application that can help me work more efficiently with my giant collection of documents and articles. i often need to find stuff that i know i have, someplace, but can’t remember the title or what folder i may have put it in. someone in a forum suggested i take a look at Devonthink and, in an absolute rarity, this is exactly what i was looking for. exactly.
<p>incredibly simple, stable and open. you just drag any of the supported file types (just about every common text encoding, including .html, .xml, etc) into the app’s field, and the text is, from that point, rendered entirely searchable by keyword or category. i dropped 8 gigs of data into it (my entire documents folder, mostly .pdfs, .html, .rtfs), and in a flash, my entire library is now keyword searchable— i mean the actual contents of every file, not just names or abstracts, is now searchable. search results come up sorted by hit count. </p>
<p>you can actually drop your entire media collection in too.</p>
<p>…this basically has replaced the Finder for me (<span class="caps">OSX</span>)</p>
<p>i… love this.</p> By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 10 Jun 2004
How do I get it to post to my journal without posting to the main page, so you don’t have to surf through garbage like I wrote today? Or should I just stop writing garbage? Yes… You know… I think I wrote this just because I wanted to say the word garbage in my head… over and over. Garrr-bage. Garbage.
By lani 10 Jun 2004
just looking for some advice. our lab is looking for an archiving system to insure the safety of our data. we were thinking of something that burns a cd every week that can be taken to someone’s home every week or something, but i just wanted to see if anyone on thraxil had any recommendations.
By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 10 Jun 2004
Hmmm? I don’t feel like reading, for some reason. I don’t feel like writing, and there isn’t much to do after seven in the morning, except Re-Q a couple of tapes for a cut-in tease for the noon news, and wait for the 25 and 55 minutes, to go punch something into the teleprompter. When I get there, I feel like I should be snorting coke like it’s free, and after seven in the morning, I feel like I should OD on the stuff, because there’s nothing better to do.
<p>Everyone asks me if I like my job, and I say, I don’t dislike it. It’s like saying you’re dating someone because there’s no one better to date, or something like that. It’s a definate indication that I should be doing something else.</p>
<p>I’m still waiting to hear back from Nova. I’d like to go work in Japan, teaching English for a couple of years and working on a screenplay and a TV show portfolio. I just may become an RA in Limestone for a year, just to get the other side of the coin, and to refresh things in my mind for a story I’d like to write based on the experiences.</p>
<p>My friend moved out to Seattle, and didn’t even call to say goodbye. That sucked. </p>
<p>My sister and Kellee (www.kelleeart.com) are getting along well. I’m glad, and I hope Manda moves to Florida, because I bet the two of them would raise hell together, and I could go visit and the three of us would most likely cause the end of the world. If Kellee were my soul-mate, and Amanda were my twin, then the three of us combined would be f’n Voltron or something.</p>
<p>You know what I love? The thick smell of lilacs as I drive down the Georgia highway.</p> By anders pearson 08 Jun 2004
at the Web Standards Project, we’ve been in the process of reinventing ourselves. originally formed to pressure browser makers into supporting web standards, lately, we’ve been changing our focus to developer education. all the browser support in the world will mean nothing if 99% of the pages on the web use invalid markup. to help shape this new mission, we’ve put up a survey to find out a little more about the web developer community. if you are a web developer, please go fill it out and send us your comments.