Tonight, for dinner, I made spaghetti. Normally, this is no reason to pause. This time, however, the entire dinner was "organic." I didn't set out to have an organic dinner when I went grocery shopping this morning, but I found that the organic food was of similar cost and so decided to experiment. I found that the spaghetti itself was of higher quality than what I was used to, but the sauce that I purchased was just average.
This post may include spoilers about the newest season of Doctor Who. If you don't want to read these spoilers, I suggest skipping this part.
I've been trying to keep up with the current season of Doctor Who which is being shown in Britain. So far, every episode has been impressive. I am rather irritated, however, that the last episode aired (the one aired yesterday) ended on a cliffhanger for the second week in a row.
Spoilers End Here.
In watching science fiction of late, I have come to notice an odd feature common to many different settings--Psionics. Psychic powers in sci-fi seem generally to represent the magic of the future. This, I find sort of odd considering that one could just as easilly attribute such things to highly advanced technology. Often times, it seems that psionics are introduced to add a person or group who is just slightly ahead of the curve compared to most of society (you see this in Babylon 5 and Star Trek). But in other settings, it seems like there is little reason to introduce the idea of psychic powers due to the already high-tech setting (this is most notable in Doctor Who). In the latter of these kinds of settings, psionics become the catch-all excuse for lazy writers who don't want to explain plot devices.
Don't take my being harsh on Doctor Who as my thinking that psionics are a good thing to include in sci-fi. I think that psionics are a cop-out for what is essentially the "magic of the future." Unfortunately, I doubt that psionics in sci-fi are going to go anywhere as they represent too easy an explaination for writers. Maybe those writers should go back to fantasy writing where magic is a conceit of the universe rather than grafting it onto sci-fi as psionics. Writers could also take the very reasonable stance of just allowing for straight up magic and calling it as such. Some sci-fi universes allow for a techno-magical future to considerable success (Shadowrun comes to mind here, though there are undoubtably others).
So, I was flipping through the channels on my TV in my hotel and one channel was showing the end of Return of the Jedi. I like RotJ well enough, so I decided to watch it. The thing about it was though, that the music was all screwy and off. I believe this is due to the station using products to subtlely speed up movies using various time-compression techniques. Unfortunately, this resulted in music that warbled worse than anything I've heard in recent time. It was simply awful. You can hear a recording I made with my laptop here in case you doubt it. I suggest trying it just to see how awful it is. None of the awfulness was added by me or my sound card. In fact it sounds slightly better than usual since some of the highest frequency stuff wasn't captured.
So about an hour ago, I ended my apartment hunt by signing a lease for a little upstairs apartment in Altadena. I'm going to be paying $1100 a month for it. The best part about it is that it is within walking/biking distance of JPL. It is probably faster to get to JPL by biking/walking because then I can take a path down a hill rather than driving around it. Unfortunately, since my things are still in Indiana, I probably won't be able to move in until some time next week at the earliest.
I've started playing around with Code::Blocks to get familiar with C++/wxWidgets. I haven't done much yet as wxWidgets seems to involve a bit of voodoo to get started.
At 6pm tonight, I have another session of the pickup D&D game that I played on Monday. This session will be to finish up the rest of the plot, supposedly. We'll see how that goes later.
Today, I emailed my boss about finding housing and he shot me back an email with some of the listings from the JPL secret housing list and I'm going to go visit one place tomorrow morning.
So this afternoon, I went looking for a gaming store using the Yellow Pages as my guide. It turned out that there were two listed on the same street (Colorado Blvd), so I decided to start there. It turns out that the street my hotel is on turns into Colorado Blvd once you go about two miles. One of them I was never able to find. I even parked my car and walked to the exact address (as near as I could tell). It seems like the one I was not able to find had been bulldozed to make way for some sort of eatery.
The other gaming store (Game Empire) was a decent little shop. I bought a used copy of GURPS: Mage: The Ascension for $5.00 and came back later that night for an open D&D game that ran until 10.
The game went pretty well, though eventually there were 11 players. I played a half-elf Wizard. The game was the third in a set of 3 games which were supposed to collectively be an entire adventure. Unfortunately, we didn't get all the way through it because it took a little while due to the 11 players and the general slowness of the game. There was quite a bit of meta-gaming and some rather primitive ideas from the players. I had to twice explain that killing things is not necessarily the best way to get experience. The only reason killings this is worth XP is because you are overcoming an obstacle. I believe my advice fell on deaf ears. C'est la vie.
The GM had a Cool Thing, though--the Critical Hit Deck. I picked up one of these for myself as well. I was slightly disappointed because the deck itself was not very generic and is mostly D&D specific. It was still a good buy, I think.
So today I found out that my stuff won't even be leaving Anderson until Thursday. This is probably fine as I doubt that I'll be getting an apartment too terribly soon.
I'm finding that most of the apartments that I'm interested in learning more about when I search using google's housing search are listed using WestsideRentals.com. Unfortunately, you have to register and pay $50 to be able to see addresses or contact information about what they have listed. I find this unacceptable. The internet is for free, people.
One place that I was interested in that I saw on Craig's List now has an interest/offer from someone else. The nice lady who owns/manages it told me she'd give me a call if the other person decides they don't want it.
I tried taking the path given to me by google maps between my hotel and JPL today. This was a mistake. The directions told me to get on I-210 which is in fact a more or less straight shoot to JPL. Unfortunately, it was wall to wall traffic, and I got off at the next exit. I will have to find a better path before I start next Monday.
Today, I traveled from Anderson to Indianapolis to Denver to LAX. All told, it took about 6 hours for the flights. Another two hours were spent driving to Indy/to my Hotel.
There were several strange things that happened during my trip:
Smiley was on my flight to Denver. Apparently she was going to Microsoft (and flying first class).
There were little TVs in the backs of every chair on my flight, these TVs showed DirectTV programming before takeoff and during the first 25 minutes of the flight. After that, you had to pay $5 in order to watch. (Movies were $8).
There was a man of (probably) Persian descent wearing a headscarf on my first flight. I watched him constantly during my flight, once again making me realize that I may in fact be a racist. To be fair, he was acting funny.
I did not wear a seatbelt during my entire first flight and was not bothered about it once. I also listened to my iPod during landing (dun dun DUUUN). On my second flight, I was told almost immediately to put on my seatbelt (probably because I was in an exit row).
When Hertz asked me what kind of car I wanted to rent, I asked for a Prius. It was awesome because I got one with 3 miles on it.
I took a bunch of random pictures using my phone, but I can't copy any of them off because my bluetooth adapter is in a box somewhere in Anderson.
Well, I've been up since 2pm yesterday (EDT) and I only got a bit of sleep during the second flight, so I'm going to rest now.
Right now, I am packing up my laptop in preparation for my trip to California. I haven't slept yet, so my 3 + 3 hours of flying with the 1 hour layover will be interesting. Hopefully my sleep schedule won't be any more messed up once I arrive there. I have a lead on a rental place in Altadena, but apparently there is some competition for the space. It's time to go, and go I shall.
So, this morning the people from the house moving service came and packed up everything that I had that was still unpacked. It only took them a few hours to finish packing everything, I was sortof impressed. My flight leaves at 7 am on Sunday and then I will be out of Indiana for good (more or less).
I haven't been doing much for the last few days. Just more packing. I have, however, been watching movies that I'd been meaning to watch for quite some time:
Lucky Number Slevin - I expected this movie to be mediocre at best. Strangely enough, though, it is a very good movie. It has Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu and Morgan Freeman, so there is some star power here. It sortof reminds me of the Ocean's (new ones) movies in its presentation style, so if you liked them you'll probably like this one.
Hotel Rwanda - Incredibly depressing, but still worth watching. Personally, I think it is worth watching just to see how bad the massacres were in the mid-90s.
Ocean's 12 - Not quite as good as the original, but still a lot of fun. If you liked the first one, you'll probably enjoy this one. Just don't get your hopes up too much.
I finally got MySpace support working in XPost. It turns out that I probably would have had it working a week ago, but in a big block of text where I was sending information to MySpace I had a small error.
Did you catch it? I was sending the value of "postDay" twice. This meant that when I got it back in their preview page, I was getting a value of "day,day" for the value of "postDay". I have no iead why their server would do such a thing when presented with a second copy of a field during a POST request, but that is in fact what it seemed to do. This caused the hash they gave me to be wrong when I automatically fixed it during the second post and is why the error was showing up as an error with my timezone. There was nothing wrong with my timezone, per se, there was something wrong with the date they were using.
So earlier today, I decided to take a second stab at getting MySpace support to work in XPost. My previous attempts, according to the error message given by MySpace, had invalid dates. Well, I had fiddled around with it to no evail, so I decided to do the most straightfoward thing I could think of to ensure the appropriate date: scrape the one that MySpace puts on by default. For reasons that I cannot understand, I seem to still be getting errors when I post. These errors are still about the date. Perhaps the error's cause is elsewhere.
On a side note, C#'s language semantics make regular expressions just plain ugly. For example, to strip the "hour" field out of the webpage, I use this expression:
\\(\\s*\"postHour\"\\s*,\\s*(?<val>\\d*)\\s*
Now, I understand that Regex strings aren't supposed to be particularly readable or pretty, but it is just irritating to have to include two slashes in order to use some of the most common Regex wildcards. Also, the whole <val> thing just to get a subexpression seems silly. Why would I have a subexpression if I didn't want its value seperately?
Of course, had I not needed to match against quotes ("") I could have cut down on the number of slashes using the @"string" string literal construct in C#, but since I did, I was SOL.
Today, I went to Cingular/ATT to get a new phone and contract. This was a monumental struggle. Since my number had to be moved to a new account (my mother had previously been handling it), I had to call the Cingular Transfer Service (tm) number before I could get a new phone. The people in the store were, for whatever reason, unable to do the transfer themselves. Luckily, I got them to waive all of the fees associated with moving it over and only had to pay to get my new phone--a Motorola RAZR V3xx. It is a decent little phone. Lucky for me, unlike Andrew, my phone doesn't have any bizarre cripplings as far as I can tell.
On my old phone, I had taken a few pictures that I wanted to hold on to. I didn't, however, have the stuff necessary to copy them off my phone onto my computer at the time. Luckily, since both my new phone and old phone have bluetooth, I was able to send them all over in about 15 minutes (no bulk transfers unfortunately, just a phone in each hand pressing the same key combination over and over again).
I get free unlimited Internet on it for the first month, which I have used thus far in a roundabout scheme to put a few mp3s on it to use as ringtones. For now, I'm using the victory theme from Kirby's Dreamland. I haven't come up with another good idea yet, but I'm certainly willing to take suggestions.
In non-phone related news, today marks the longest period of time that I have been in Anderson since I began my Rose career. I leave town in 6 days and will be gone for the forseeable future.
Today, I began in earnest to clean out my room to prepare for my move to California. On Friday, people from the moving company will be coming to box up my things, and on Sunday I will be flying out. There is quite a bit of stuff in my room that has collected over the years and so it takes a while to sort out things I want to keep from things that are simply going to be thrown away for lack of a place to store them.
In going through my things, I came upon a box that I mailed to myself from Rose during my freshman year. I knew what was in this box, and had been avoiding it. This box had only been opened once since I mailed it to myself, and that was to get something out that someone else wanted. At the time, I had hoped to never open it again. This box, of course, contained everything at all relating to Sarah (the first one). Most of what was inside was stuff that seemed sentimental at the time: notes, pictures, the occasional ticket stub. I tossed everything except for a few pictures that I kept for posterity.
Going through this box, however, made me realize something that I had known in the back of my mind, but had never really put together. Of the women that I have been seriously involved with in my life, all of them seem to have cheated on me (except Terra, but that situation was...complicated) (EDIT: apparently I was incorrect in my judgment on this only 2 of 3/4). I am not saying this to stir up any trouble amongst those with whom I have been involved; I am more saying it because perhaps at this point I should wonder if the failures in these relationships were not my own. Although possible, it seems unlikely that this situation is only coincidence.
I have not thought all of this through, so I'm going to try to do it now on this page. Feel free to nod off or TL;DR the rest of this post.
I started dating the first Sarah near the end of my senior year of highschool. I would say that I was more than a little attached to her; I even believed that I loved her. Perhaps I did, anymore it's hard to say. She was bright, pretty and had just enough of a sarcastic edge to interest me. Unfortunately, she was also from a very different background and her Christianity was very important to her. My own disbelief in religion became a serious stumbling block, but I tried not to be too harsh. It is important to remember that I was a much less angry person back then than I have become since that time. Regardless, we dated for perhaps 3.5 or 4 months, maybe a bit longer. It seemed like forever, though, as we spent almost every evening together and worked at the same place. Unfortunately, I believe that this constant companionship likely led to our end. Within months of the beginning of our freshman year (Some time in September to be precise), it ended.
Throughout this relationship, I had difficulty with my mother as she didn't like Sarah for some reason. Perhaps she just didn't like me spending all my time with her. Regardless, this relationship taught be to tell my parents nothing about my dating life (less "drama" that way). It also is at least partially responsible for my becoming a more angry person. I am not trying to blame Sarah at all. I took the end of this relationship very poorly and became bitter. Nearly all of that bitterness is gone now, but such things change a person if they aren't paying enough attention. If I'm angry, so what?
So, I sulked around for a while. Eventually, I did find another girlfriend. I believe Dess was a junior at the time. She and I date for several months, but neither of us really connected with the other. At the same time though, neither of us really wanted to be alone. Thus, the relationship dragged on for months. This relationship, however, ended well and I was more sad to be alone than sad to have lost Odessa.
My relationship with Odessa is one that I think about least, but probably did some of the most to change me. She challenged my conservatism and ultimately is probably responsible for making me change from the simple-minded, Fox News-watching conservative that I was in my youth to the more utilitarian liberal that I am now. I also learned from this relationship that I need to be willing to end a relationship. Unfortunately, this is something that I have yet to get right.
During the summer after my freshman year, I became involved with a Terre Haute local named Terra. Our relationship, such as it was, was complicated. She was a great girl, who I often think back to longingly. I hope that she is doing well, I have not heard from her in far too long. Unfortunately, I was young and stupid and thought that I could "do better" or some such nonsense and thus never really took the idea of being involved with her as seriously as I perhaps should have. I hope that I did bring her a few fleeting moments of happiness during a time of difficulty, rather than making it harder for her. I do not regret that she and I did not become more, but neither am I particularly happy about it.
Its hard to say what I learned from my relationship with Terra. Perhaps it was simply, "people won't keep putting up with your bullshit."
Finally, there is but one woman left--Imani, the second Sarah. I met Imani my freshman year. She was an aquaintence of Hillary, who was a friend of Rob, all of whom were in my Mage game. She and I didn't become involved until I was a sophomore. She and I began dating rather close to the beginning of my sophmore year. Sometime near the end of the year, I realized that, despite having dated her for much of the school year, I was not becoming more attached to her. There was not a particularly good reason, I simply didn't feel toward her the way I had felt before. And thus we broke up...the first time. We got back together and broke up various times before I graduated. I don't know why exactly I kept getting back together with her, though I believe it has something to do with rather being with someone than with no one. There is probably also something to do with the fact that she essentially lived in my room and was friends with all of my friends. There is quite a bit that I could say about my relationship with Imani, but I don't feel like writing three years of my life down in one sitting.
My relationship with Imani ended at the same time as my time at Rose. Now, I get to move to the other end of the country and begin the search for love again. I think it will help to not have any attachments or baggage this time. Who knows, perhaps I will finally find a counterpart...
I don't often feel the need to embed things in my blog posts, but today I feel differently. I first saw this at ACEN and thought of it again today. I encourage everyone, even those not normally interested in such things, to partake in the glory embeded below:
