| Status update --- |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|10:13 pm] |
I believe one of the two cats I posted about was rescued. Not sure which one. The cute one.
School goes on. Seven classes down, five to go. On track to finish in December.
Work slowly grinds down to rote routine and tedium. Telling myself that I'm looking for my escape hatch. Am not, however, actually looking for my escape hatch so much as telling myself that I'm looking for my escape hatch. Should probably start looking for my escape hatch.
Social life v. constrained, not likely to broaden much over the next six months. Had a lovely time w/ friends Friday and Saturday.
Molly: Still cute, beggin me to feed her. Better go and do that. |
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| Look, kittens! |
[Mar. 7th, 2008|05:25 pm] |
Yo, through torturous twists and turns, a co-worker passed along two pictures of a couple of kittens that need rescuing pronto.
If interested in either, ding me via email and I'll supply the hook-up. |
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| Poking my head out of the ... something ... |
[Sep. 13th, 2007|05:44 pm] |
I'm sure that 97% of the folks who read this, and might care to know, already know, but it feels nice to announce it all ufficial-like and so forth.
I'm now living in Hyde Park, and am a student in the Computer Science Program for Professionals at the University of Chicago. Barring some strange catastrophe, I'll be taking two courses in the fall, Algorithms, and Java Programming.
I am the proud caretaker of the friendliest cat in the world, Molly, while her owner is world travelin' for a bit.
I am still, for the moment, working like a mad fool at the University of Chicago Press. It's a job.
I've got some free time here before the Autumn quarter begins. Not sure what I'll try to get done with that. There's a massive gathering of people I love dearly happening this weekend on Sunday; the odds of me being there are pretty good, I'm thinking.
I don't have internet service set up in my apartment at the moment. I've been perfectly happy being connected to the internet every second of every day at work, and using the computer lab after work hours to get homework done, etc. But I don't know if that can go on indefinitely (Yes, there are some wireless LANs in the apartment building I live in, but they're closed most of the time, and it seems like a shitty long-term solution, frankly.) It's a measure of my distaste for Comcast, I suppose, that I'm so reluctant to dip my toes back into that end of the pool.
After a long summer, and a lot of work, I think I've got the next 6-9 months of my life figured out, and the risk of posting something two weeks later along the lines of "Everything I told you last has gone up in flames!" is at a blessedly low ebb.
Cheers to all. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 6th, 2006|06:50 pm] |
Much thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) hal2814jordan for keeping us in extremely delicious meat during the Superbowl on Sunday. I partook of bbq-grilled hamburgers, bbq-grilled brats, and bbq-grilled chicken sandwiches, over the course of six hours of pregame chit-chat, football game-watching, and boardgame-playing.
If you have the chance, I highly recommend the experience.
Mmmm.
The game was pretty damn sloppy. Steelers had more poise and energy, so they won. Seahawks haven't played in many meaningful games, and it showed. Sometimes it doesn't matter, talent overwhelms, or at least rises to the level of the occasion, but not yesterday. I wasn't expecting to see how lost Holmgren seemed at the end of the first half, and the end of the game.
Favorite commercial, pick of a thin crop, was the MacGyver Mastercard spot. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 1st, 2006|09:38 pm] |
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Started, didn't finish. Should.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Hmm. I'm not seeing too many in my Haven't Read pile that are jumping out as Gotta Read. Aunt Judy sent me Saturday by Ian McEwan ... errr. If I mention Gene Wolfe again, don't everyone throw their hats at me. I'm waiting on copies of Latro in the Mist, and There are Doors. Mmmm. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2006|07:12 pm] |
Update: Fuck. This is a hoax. False alarm.
"Brilliant Screen" is front for a series of email harvesting sites. Don't fill out the "survey", if you haven't done so. The contact information is completely bogus.
I apologize profusely for letting hope run ahead of me.
*gnash*
...
Seriously:
Registrant:
UP.BSE
110 Universal City
Universal City, CA 91608
US
818-777-1000
Domain Name: FIREFLYSEASON2.COM
Administrative Contact:
Development, Project info@brilliantscreen.com
110 Universal City
Universal City, CA 91608
US
818-777-1000
Technical Contact:
Development, Project info@brilliantscreen.com
110 Universal City
Universal City, CA 91608
US
818-777-1000
Record expires on 01-15-2007
Record created on 01-15-2006
Domain servers in listed order:
DNS1.NEWMILLENNIUMHOLDINGS.COM 64.69.65.198
DNS2.NEWMILLENNIUMHOLDINGS.COM 64.69.65.197
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 16th, 2006|01:02 am] |
It has been a while since I've poked my head above the waters. Some things have happened, mostly good.
I'm working for the University of Chicago Press, as a production controller for their Web Peer Review system. There's an opening on our team. There are actual several openings in different places all over the building, so, worth poking around, if the spirit moves you. I have nothing but good things to report from my, probably limited and eccentric, vantage.
Must thank my parents and duck2ducks for connecting me with the DVD sets that are available for the first two seasons of David Simon and Ed Burn's The Wire. It doesn't step wrong, ever. There are no wasted characters, nothing is incidental. The Sopranos gets the attention, but The Wire truly delivers a long form, 9-10 hour story. The former certainly has storylines that build over many episodes, but there's usually a main plot, which dominates the action of a given episode, and provides regular narrative payoffs. The Wire isn't devoid of such beasts, but they aren't bracketed with great flashing neon signs. They arrive, not in the metronomic tick of 47-50 minute intervals that correspond with last ten minutes of a given episode, but are presented to the viewer as something akin to found objects. Its verisimilitude and realism isn't a mere aesthetic; it's grounded in a point of view, decades in the shaping, about the culture of law-enforcement, and the street corporations (hard to think of a different word for them) that run the drug economies in Baltimore (season one), people and neighborhoods navigating the transformed (black, grey, other) economies wrought by globalization (season two), and communities living in the shadow of the Drug War (season three).
A brief glimpse might suggest the trappings of Cop Show, in the vein of the innumerable Law & Order/CSI knockoffs. What it is, its revealed heart, is a jeremiad, an angry, half-swallowed, scream of rage at the waste, corruption, and decay wrought by the powerful, over the weak, how those entrusted with protecting and serving our interests have betrayed, in ways large and small, us. Don't worry, it's very funny, too.
Apropos of nothing, I've been seeing previews for a movie called Freedomland. I wouldn't have given it another thought, but the title dinged me. I just realized why; it's a Richard Price novel, and Price is credited by Simon and Burns as being an inspiration for the kind of stories they wanted to tell in Homicide: Life on the Streets for NBC, The Corner, and The Wire. Freedomland, by virtue of being a movie, and not a long-form teevee series, can't be many of the things I love about The Wire, but where the previews utterly failed to interest me, I'll probably seek it out, on the strength of being written by Price, adapted from his novel.
Been watching Battlestar Galactica, and Veronica Mars, both of which are very worthy, and challenging. I love that Commander Adama, played by Edward James Olomos, is outranked by two women, and this just is, and we are mercifully spared the tiresome handwringing that crops up from idiots about how unrealistic, or groundbreaking such a thing "would be." I have to think it's the remarkably sheltered and impervious human being that's not been hired, or supervised, or lead by a woman, and it's nice to see shows taking up the torch from BtVS so matter-of-factly and with the grace and verve of actresses like Kirsten Bell, Mary McDonnell (and the chilling and thrilling charisma of Michelle Forbes, for that matter). Haven't yet watched the episode that aired this Friday. Ahhh, Tivo ... |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 11th, 2005|06:22 pm] |
List ten songs that you are currently digging... it doesn't matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they're no good but they must be songs you're really enjoying right now. Post these instructions, the artists, and the ten songs in your blog. Then tag five other people to see what they're listening to:
samadore tagged me; I haven't bought a new CD in *cough*awhile*cough*, so for shits and giggles here are the ten songs in XMMS that popped up when I opened it just now. I own the albums for all of these, of course. I see you rolling your eyes! I suppose this is the answer to a different meme altogether, but honestly, I couldn't name five songs off the top of my head, let alone rank ten songs I'm "currently digging." Sob.
- buckcherry - lite up Yes, I love the cocaine.
- buffy the vampire slayer musical - wish i could stay
- foo fighters - cold day in the sun
- michelle branch - you get me
- robbie williams & joss stone - angels
- foo fighters - in your honor
- foo fighters - doa
- will smith - getting jiggy with it
- beastie boys - sabatoge
- buffy the vampire slayer musical - life's a show
Dear god. That was frightening. Everyone I would tag has already been contaminated by this foul contagion, so. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 8th, 2005|07:03 pm] |
Some co-workers of mine have found, and are taking care of for the moment, a stray cat. Seems nice, affectionate, needs neutering, I think there's a coupon for having that done at PAWS in it for the folks that end up taking him.
Interested parties are welcome to drop me an email/comment and I'll hook you up. |
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