30.4.09

slam poetry

Gedichte des Donnerstags! Here's "Amet", the second poem I did at the last slam. Enjoy. If you have questions about references, feel free to ask.

Creativity
Is not the same as creation.

Man
Is not the same as existence.

Every second I form new life
As the skin on my hands is shuffled
By cards to table
As I shuffle card
To card to hand
To play,
To make my own luck.
I can make my own skin.

I can build houses with muscles and sweat
I can build muscles with weights
And with words I can turn sweat
Into a panting exhilarating
Experience.

But I am not a poet
No, I am a creator

I write poems by leaving bit-wise impressions
Between the pores on my skin
So that you can run your hand up my arm
And feel the truth of existence underneath your fingertips
In binary.
I let the feeling of goosebumps like braille
Dictate the form
And the meter is as long as the page itself:
Sleeves of prose poetry,
Interrupted by the non sequiturs of veins and armhair
There's a six and a half foot poem burned the length
Of my body that contains the necessary
Rules to live this God,
And I scrawled the word truth
In Hebrew on my forehead
So that I could bring myself to life.

On my thigh,
Tattooed in magnet so that you can only read it
With a laser shining light,
Is 17 lines of iambic pentameter.
When you trace them around it spins and skips
like an old Sony walkman cd player,
Because ever since they were spoken in act 2 scene 2 it has been true:
Yo boy Hamlet had it right when he said

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

And yet and then act 5.

You see,
The A side gets all the good tracks
And this one lasted for seven days.
And the B side of every album is
Always shorter.

These hands that built buildings
Can just as easily tear them down.
Cards can be undealt and reshuffled and luck can be lost
On purpose

And I will beat bricks with hammers
I will call out in prayer to Gallow's God
And let faith guide my slander,
I will let the Declaration be the rag to my match and bottle
And I will drown the first folio under dirt.
I will stumble through sand looking for mirages in grottos
And when I finally find that something that never existed
I will demand of the Earth
What is this quintescence of dust?

And when everything I've had
is unhad
When everything I've valued
is dereferenced
When everything I preached
is forgotten
Then I will raise a smile well met
And a muddied hand
Will dust away the aleph.

would it be so bad, to know weightlessness, carelessness this time?

Oh, gtk. If only you could locate your own header files, or your own dependencies, or ... I don't know, work. I can't make any headway on this, and I'm still putting quite a bit of time into trying to get it to work. This is starting to get very frustrating. I've tried everything I've thought of, except for hacky object oriented code bypassing, which my professor suggested I shouldn't do, since this should work. Hypothetically. I'm less sure every day.

In case anybody was wondering, the power level of the teapot at Tea Garden is over 9000.

As slow going as I feel all my projects are at the moment, I'd say Poetry is actually accruing rather nicely, and Digital Electronics is going the slowest. I only have one more lab of structured time to complete it, and I have a LOT to do. I have a lot of other time though, as long as I can find somebody to open the door to the lab. Also, microcoding can be done outside of the lab. Said microcoding would be much easier (and much more done, I'm guessing), if I knew how to do it... I have pseudocode done, it's really easy pseudocode, I just don't know how to represent it in microcode anymore. I may have known at one time, but I took the class containing that information over 2 years ago. My book is...somewhere? Who knows?

I found Khayembii Communique, finally. Turns out the second page of google results are always more useful. This time it led me to a hardcore/screamo blog with m***afire links, and reviews. If you're into that kind of thing, check it out, it's current and updates pretty often. As for Khayembii Communique, it turns out that they broke up shortly after forming and recording. All they really got done was make some awesome hardcore/emo and record it on a self-titled 10" and a split 7" with The Vida Blue, also/later known as Ten Grand. "AM1200" by KC is still one of the most interesting/contradictory hardcore songs I've ever heard. That actually seems to be their general style.

Anyways, to quote, "musics been good". Speaking of good music, hello blacksmith should be doing stuff this summer, like recording a third demo take (you don't want to hear the first two. well, they're funny so maybe you do), and trying to get an actual gig, hopefully at Eclipse Records. But don't worry, fans of free basement shows, we will still be playing those. We're also thinking of taking a new approach to them which I'll talk about later, most likely. We're still discussing amongst ourselves, so we'll see.

Lastly, the guys on my desktop in the picture on the last post? Totally MGMT. KITTIES. That is all.

29.4.09

let's see where we land

Progress on gtk, by which I mean I've discovered even more header file problems. My compile statement is getting out of hand:

gcc launchapp.c -Wall -I /usr/include/gtk-2.0/ -o songlaunch `gnome-config --cflags --libs gnomeui` `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 --libs gtk+-2.0`

If I continue to have problems, I'm going to start removing parts of the statement in hopes that redundancy is my problem.

I've come into contact recently with something almost none of you would appreciate: Shook Ones. They have a song titled Ebb and Flow that I can't get out of my head. It's wonderful. Nothing like guitar-voice duets.

My body is being eaten by ... well, my body, due to the lack of food around my apartment and the lack of exercise I've been getting on account of the rain, the lack of air in my bike tires and the lack of time with which to go to the Leonard Center. I'm gonna be pasty as fuck when I go to the beach in a couple of weeks, and have absolutely no muscle to boot. Maybe I'll take out my finals stress on my body by exercising. This works well, but only if you have a lot of tests, and very few projects.

As you all know, I have projects in spades.

To finish, my current desktop: cluttered, but bedecked in love nonetheless.

28.4.09

This is madness! No, this is GNOME!

Thanks to Shilad, my gtk/gdk issue has been resolved, and I can move on to the actually important part of the project: making it pretty!. To give you an idea of the hackiness required, here's a short sample of C code:

GdkWindow *songwin = ((struct _GtkWidget *)songapp)->window;


Bear in mind that there are supposedly functions to do this, but we either couldn't find them or could find them and found they didn't work anyways, depending on our microversion of Gtk+. Also, my "short sample" might give you the impression that the program is long, however, that is not the case. It's actually only 14 lines, including the main statement and separate lines for braces, once you take out the comments full of false starts and errors. That number also includes debugging print statements. =P

I have another super busy day today, but it will also be productive, hopefully. I no longer have any food in my apartment except Cheerios, and even then, no milk. I also have no time to go grocery shopping. My choice this morning was grocery shopping or eating lunch. Lunch was delicious, but I am questioning my choice in terms of future value.

Busy body

I didn't really have time to post this weekend, much less see everyone that wanted to see me, much less when they wanted to see me. I had a really busy time, considering that there was a slam on Friday, Martin, Jacob and Tessa were all in town and I had a fair bit of work to get done. I still do, for that matter.

But, enough of the weekend, although it was full of win. On to finals!

I'm not really that motivated, but it's late and I'm trying to convince myself.

I now have a list of things I have to do. I feel more managerial, and in control.

I have quite a few blog posts to make, but still very little time. Maybe in the future?

I took 4th in the Slam last Friday. Good job poets! and thank you for coming and showing us your work. Daniel Picus, my old roommate, took 1st, Neil Hilborn 2nd and Dylan Garity 3rd. Good times were had by all. I preformed two pieces, one titled Elizabeth, half of which is going in my portfolio (probably? maybe?), and one titled Amet. Since I've missed a couple Thursday poetry updates, but had the intention to do every one of them, here's Elizabeth.

Elizabeth
is a name that sings
of silhouettes
and sunlight
and her skin shone
beloved
for many years.
now

her eyes are lake-bilge filmy
like the already fading photograph
of us grandchildren
in cat masks on her lakeside staircase,
like her husband's black & white
memorials that hang on every wall
of every house
that houses her progeny.
her hands

don't shake anymore.
they sit still on the padded black arms of her wheelchair
as she stares through their wayzata apartment amidst family,
and these hands that shaped
driftwood into androgyny,
shuffled bookchildren from minnesota farmland,
they no longer cup our faces like clay
as she smiles with her eyes
and tells us prophetic little poem-truths,
and that they're the only real kind of promise.

i will always remember the first time she forgot my name and called me
Russel.

i will always remember the first time that i remember seeing her, watching her playing
with my
six or seven or eight year old
cousin Charlie,
no,
talking to him evenly,
because the men and women in my family
are older than their experiences,
their souls
seem to come like
crows and doves,
like flocks of sparrows.

there are always three things i will remember from my grandmother:
her smile,
because it stuck to you,
like clay left to dry on the wheel,
it left you spinning
two,
her gifts,
because i can think of no one more gifted.
her hands worked pen worked ink worked bronze softer
than the clay she formed her forms from,
than the clarity she wrote her poems out of,
the way in which she couldn't cook a meal to save her life
but somehow raised six children on poetry
and three
the pictures of her
that my grandfather took
that now hang in his bedroom
to remind him of the wife that lives
out of her mind.
Elizabeth in the garden,
private purple passions
displayed proudly behind her
troweled hand
and sweaty smile.
a picture with her daughters
who all have different colored hair.
a picture with her sons
who all look the same.

my favorite picture of her
is from when she was in her twenties,
lying naked on her side.
you can feel the love of my grandfather
showing through the photograph,
in the way the light hits her chest
and shadow covers her peacefully closed eyes.
now closed.
my grandfather and I both
refused to look
her blank stare in the face
because she felt
lost in there.
lost, out of time, out of her mind, gone
and she's gone, and yet .... and still
her soul
seems to come to me like
the brushing of a sparrow's wings,
a murder of crows in the sunlight,
like turtledoves upon the dewgrass.

24.4.09

"he's just another...."

Here are my capstone reviews from this year:

Robot Localization Techniques by Stella Stamenova

The main ideas found in Stella’s CS topic included several techniques for determining the location of a robot in Olin Rice. She conducted this honor’s project with Susan Fox, attempting to get Professor Fox’s robot to deliver mail through the building. She used sampling and probability functions to determine location through sonar, and comparison functions for comparing outlines taken from photos. The whole project was written in Java, so she used a lot of computer science problem solving techniques. The talk was very effective, because she knew her topic well, and also knew her audience would understand the content. She also did a good job identifying further research that could be done.

Planning the Perfect Party by Stella Stamenova

The main ideas found here in Stella’s math talk were graph theory and ramsey numbers. The idea was that when a graph was put through this function, it could be 2-colored in only certain ways, and that’s where I lost her talk. I haven’t taken any abstract algebra, so the talk was very difficult to understand. She realized that she was going to lose people, which was the smart way to present, but it made it difficult to understand. Since she was less sure of her audience’s ability to understand, the presentation Stella gave wasn’t as quality as her CS capstone.

23.4.09

my idea

Maybe in the next two weeks, if it's nice out. Stay out with a guitar and just play until the sun rises.

i found your pale-faced blue-lipped god beneath the kitchen table, starving and eating paper

There's a poetry slam Friday at 8:
It's on the upper floor of Old Main.
If you're in town, then great!
You can come hear me raising Cain.
Burma shave.


No, in all seriousness, a real plug: MacSlams is holding another poetry slam Friday April 24th at 8, and many people will be competing! We'll be doing two rounds, you'll be out by ten. Come hear and support Mac slam poets. Julia/Julie (of the Mac theater department) will be doing the sacrifice poem, and Inky (sp?) of Minnesota Microphone will be our special guest. Fellow poets Wonder Dave and Sam Cooke will be probably be there again, they seem to enjoy hanging out on our campus during poetry slams. If you're in town, you have no excuse not to come. Noah and the Whale? Not important. =P

I have so much work to do in the next two weeks. Let me correct that. By looking at it like I am right now, like a plane flying over Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945, it looks like a lot. I need to make a good list, and then it won't be as bad. I'm sort of putting that off though, which is... probably not a good idea. I really just want it all to go away and call me when I'm in Virginia. That would be best.

Summer's going to be fun. I can feel it. I'm really excited for all parts of it. Now I just need to focus down on the next two weeks, and then it's over.

22.4.09

and he and he and he

Heh, just saw Pat Donahue. :P

Today is Capstone Day at the MathCS department, which means no Math or CS classes are scheduled. Instead, seniors present their varied capstone projects, some of which are solely capstones, some of which are Honor's projects. I got up for my friend Stella's at 9 am, which was on localization techniques for a robot moving around our building (and an Honor's project), and also saw one on reaching an economic equilibrium when marooned on a desert island, as well as Stella's math capstone, which was something about graph theory that went way over my head. I'm going to Emery's talk at 1:40, but I forget what it's on. All in all a fun day.

I need to get home and eat lunch after Emery's talk, and let the dog out. She made a mess on the floor last night, because she's used to being active in the evening, and I wasn't home from 10-6 and 7-12. Hopefully I will not find similar surprises today.... ::knock on wood:: I'm also quite hungry. :(

In other news, I now have a good idea of how analog to digital conversion works, and I may have discovered something that would help me with my gtk issues. If not, I'll have to concede and ask either my professor or the Ubuntu forums. You can always find an answer if you put Ubuntu in front of your query.

Busy, busy all the time. Such is my life.

21.4.09

all of you didn't think the pirouettes would lift your skirt

Arghh...this gtk+ project is driving me up the wall. I made good progress today though. The basic idea is to launch Songbird in miniplayer mode, get its X.11 xid and then wrap it in a window that I have access to manipulate. The possible extensions available once I get that accomplished are a sort of combo widget/devilspie utility, or not. If I choose to pursue that I do, if I don't, I don't.

Today I managed to figure out how to navigate the libraries better, and I've got everything good to go except one important thing: gtk+ is based on gdk, which handles the interactions between gtk+ and the windowing manager, in this case X.11. I can get an xid with xwininfo, a bash command I found randomly, and I can pass it to my program, and then lookup the window with gdk_window_lookup(Xid xid), but... I can't figure out how to get the GdkWindow into the GtkWidget. I've tried a lot of stuff. I'm going to give up for now on that and come back to it later today or tomorrow.

Hopefully I'll be finishing the lab computer today. The "lab computer" as it's been called, is an 8-bit computer: processor, sram, address and data bus, the works. I coded it with a no-op yesterday that didn't work quite as desired, and may have fried my microprocessor? We'll see... after that is a quick lab on Digital to Analog conversion, and then my project. I've decided on Analog to Digital conversion, which requires both hardware additions and some microcoding. If I have time, I may see if I can hook up an electric guitar to it and convert the analog guitar signal to a digital out. I'm not sure if we have the hardware for that, and I may need a preamp, which I don't have, and thus might have to build.......which would also be fun, but maybe too much work.

I've discovered with projects that I need a small push in the right direction, a general topic, and then I manage to do something cool with it. But it's that small idea that is needed first, and that professors are not always willing to provide.

Tomorrow is capstone day. That means that we sit and listen to capstone presentations by graduating seniors instead of having Math and CS classes. I only have to attend two, which means I only need to stick around for about an hour of class before going on my way. I'll probably take advantage of this to go back to the digi lab to do more circuitry work, and/or remember how to do microcode....it's been so long since fall of my freshman year.

In one year I will be presenting on capstone day instead of listening to them. That's a scary thought.

20.4.09

But not subtle at all.

I can't believe there was a time when I didn't know the first 10 seconds of Kid A. I was in Tea Garden earlier and some guy was watching old TNG episodes on his computer without headphones. I didn't mind too much, since it's a loud place to begin with, but I was mentally searching for good study music. I was thinking Menomena, but it's too engaging, so then I jumped to Kid A. I decided to wait a bit before putting it on, since I was busy commenting on someone's poem, and BAM! Kid A comes on the speakers. It was sublime.

Rocking out to Idioteque. Post delayed due to awesome.

This is coverable. I'm thinking slide lap and a drum machine, plus a bass instrument: electric, upright or bassoon. And falsetto. Probably the most doable part at the moment.

Grasping the breadth (and depth) of my projects (although breadth-first is so much better). I'm going to be looking at analog to digital conversion for digital electronics, an extension of the lab computer and digital to analog we're working on now. For OS I'm still trying to figure out how to start a program with a given X window id, or wrap a given id with a window. It's confusing. I'm going to work on both those things more tomorrow, hopefully I'll have more to report.

The internet is so slow here, it took several minutes to load this post page. I miss my girlfriend.

Sent my sonnet crown in earlier. Hope it goes well with Jeff. I'm sure he'll treat it right. There are some changes I want to make that I already know about, but I'll deal with that later. Just little things like some fixed meter in non-metered portions of text for added effect. We'll see what recommendations he gives.

Speaking of which, I need to get going on assembling my portfolio as a whole. I have a good number of poems, but I still have some gaps to fill. It's starting to take shape in my mind, however...

I love you all.

18.4.09

oooooooooo ooooo oooo ooo oo oo oooooo

Internet updates will be .... less frequent, and less high quality this week. The internet at my parent's house is depressingly slow, shamefully even. I want to put up pictures that I've taken that don't belong on facebook, such as pictures of my apartment to show what it's like, pictures of Vinny's cats and Shadowrun sessions, that sort of thing. However, because the internet is so slow, that's definitely not happening.

However, on a side note: I like making new friends. It's almost as much fun as spending time with old ones. :)

Catch up

"Did you
dig through
its death
unflinchingly?"

-Subtle


And...the end of the semester hits like a brick. I have a test on Monday, a test next Monday, a test the Monday after that... and then another test that Friday. I have a project that I'm just starting in OS that won't take long once I figure out how to do it, but that's the hard part. I have a project that I'm supposed to be starting in Digital Electronics that I don't even have a topic for yet. I have a portfolio to revise and finish, I have more poetry to write, I have a poet's statement to form.

I have a poetry slam this Friday, where I'm going to present 2-3 poems, one of them maybe about poetry presentation, one of them definitely about creation and destruction and one of them possibly about my grandmother.

My parents are out of town, they just left on 'vacation' to Nashville. Most of my good friends are out of town, and the rest are busy. My girlfriend is still in Virginia, and I feel afraid to ask my other friends over. I don't even have an "over" to ask them to, because I'm housesitting this week, stuck straddling two homes and the things they contain.

I'm dissecting my nighttime, I'm dissecting my life, my depression, my ascension (alabaster), my meaning, my ainsel, my feel (often too rough), my smile, my muscles, my skin and bone.

Every day I am strewn open upon the rock for the Eagles, in some sort of penance.

17.4.09

:(

bbc news

Mood &c

I didn't even notice. It took forever to finally hit me. A hole in the world. Living unliving. Whoops.

I'm sorry for my lack of interest, my lack of interesting, for the last month.

Depression crept up on me, quiet like a thief.

I'm following him through the halls of my head, nightingale floors squeaking.
All that's left is to smother this manifestation in the night.

16.4.09

This afternoon, evening I suppose, I rode my bicycle from Dunn Brothers to my apartment.
I rode slowly, and I did not pause at the ends of the alley.
I rode, and I thought of everything and nothing,
Of the duality of everything, the triality, the quatrality, the quintality
The infinality of all things. But also
The nothing of all things,
The everything of nothing. The nothing in everything.

How often do you pause and feel the walls around you?
Run your fingers over plaster and find the places they have been patched.
I discovered the sweet satin feel of the plastic covering
On the clock display of my microwave.

I rode home, but once I left the alley I did not need to pedal.
I let my left foot drop and my right foot rise,
And I put my right hand on the leather seat between my legs.
My left was at my side,
And I did not stop as I approached the intersection:
I looked both ways, but somehow
Suspected I would not have to.

I continued across both lanes of this split street,
And down the block, finally slowing down and pedaling,
Because it would not do to die on asphalt
After finding so much peace.

We experience so much every day.
Today I have been gripped with the shivering
Fever of fear and remorse,
And I have felt the flush of success.
I have twitched my sniffling nose at inaction
And I have sat still for hours
While becoming the world.

I have frowned. I have cried. I have smiled.
What more can I ask of the day than that?

Here's a good one:


a man and a woman
go to the isles

she stands in the water and imagines seabass nibbling the callouses from her toes
he sits on the beach and rubs white stones as big as his thighs, thinking of acryllics and ink

she dances through clorox bleached graveyards as big as her hometown, strewn like dirty whites
and he meditates on what it means to be respectful

she visits stonehenge and meditates on the natures that brought her here to see this
he leaves stonehenge
hand in hand with her weathered, smiling palm
and smiles back
at SACKBOY
tattooed
in wildstyle
on the rock.

15.4.09

The rest is silence? Hah, this is only the beginning.

Alright. I'm going to be honest.

I've tried really hard to keep politics out of this blog.

It's true. I do it so that you don't have to hear me ranting all the time about things that are terrible, or wrong.

For example, Coleman. He's an idiot and a douchebag. That should be perfectly clear after the three judges assigned to the election trial unanimously declared Franken the winner. I'm not a big fan of Al Franken, and he may not be true to the Democratic Farmer-Labor label, but he is DFL-endorsed. And, being not the greatest fan of Franken, I can say in complete honesty, that this needs to stop. The only reason this is still happening is because Norm knows that if he leaves, he won't ever come back.

Also, SPPD/MPD. The SPPD and MPD are full of EPIC FAIL. There are several things that St. Paul and Minneapolis have to learn, and learn quickly:

1) shoot to wound. Whenever there's an altercation involving firearms, or supposed firearms in the case of the Fong Lee shooting, these guys bring down the hearse...er, house. You see, apparently "he does not have to be pointing that gun for [the shooting] to be justified". The evidence in this case is all over the place, but this article illustrates, along with the recent "suicide by a cop" of Robert Jeske, that these guys need training in how to shoot to disable.

2) people are innocent until proven guilty. Let's look at any of the above examples, and the RNC 8. Or how about the actions of SPPD officers during the RNC itself. Hell, I'll cite the experiences of Daniel Balogh.

3) your pretty words may trick those who aren't really paying attention, but they are false idols in the eyes of those who look and listen. "National Defense" may save you from laws, but it will not save you from us.

Here's a bad one: what did the Buddhist circuit designer say when meditating? Ohm....

My new projects have me overwhelmed
I don't know what to do.
I'm not sure who has the helm
As I sail the ocean blue.
Burma shave.


Suddenly just have a lot to do in a short amount of time. I really wish my professors were more clear in how they discuss projects and project ideas. Also, having to have this honor's thesis proposal done a week early is hurting me strongly.

I'm rereading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's still a really good book. It's also not conducive to getting things done.

Tonight I had dinner with a friend I haven't seen in a while. It was delicious, and good company. We talked about relationships and love, marriage, wedding dresses, my old roommate, my lack of new roommate, and her mother. Overall, a very "Mac" dinner conversation. She "studied" in Japan last semester, by which I mean she lived in a monastery and meditated, and although it doesn't seem to have reigned in her personality, she's thinking harder and deeper than she used to, or at least more than she used to show us. I like this.

She asked if I could ever be happy alone, and I told her yes. She said her boyfriend was the same way, quite similar to me, actually, and asked how she was supposed to feel about being with someone who can be happy being alone. I told her she should feel wanted, because if someone is self-sufficient and doesn't need you, but wants you to be around, that's something really special.

I am full of silly bits of quiet tonight, blocks of calm floating in a rocking harbor.

Not unlike crates of tea, a sign of rebellion against the stress taking hold of my life.

chipping salt from your lips

Sorry for the missed post yesterday. I had a busy day, and I didn't have internet the entire time.

I woke up fairly early and wrote some poetry before going to Dunn's to read for on of my classes. Dunn's didn't have internet, though, which was a serious problem. Then I went to lab, which I skipped out on early to talk to my professor about the possibility of an honor's project, more on that later. Then I went to Tea Garden and just hung out for a while, as I had nothing useful to do, and then found my friends there, which was nice. I ate dinner at CoffeeNews, a nice treat, and then drove some folks over to downtown mpls for a poetry slam at Kieran's Irish Pub. A Mac student was participating, and got 6th, which means he gets a chance to compete in the MPLS finals later. Sweet. I got back to my apartment at midnight after dropping off the car, and had no internet, so no post.

I'm also aware that I didn't put up a poem last week. I'm sorry. I'm also surprised Tasha didn't say anything.

So, I will be doing an honor's project, and it will be on novel uses of tagging in the system I'll be working on this summer. Sounds pretty cool. Thing is, I have to get the project proposal done early, because my professor's going to be out of town. So this is all of a sudden a busy week.

13.4.09

this is for all the all the people who dealt crack but stopped because they saw firsthand what crack does

I've been moving around so much the past couple weeks, I feel like I'm not even here anymore. There are manifestations of me across the country, and I don't have enough manifesto to stand strong where I am.

I sort of wish I had time and energy and willingness to try to create everything I want to. And if only I produced better results.

I've been up and down these past couple of days, I'm sorry. This particular post is getting rather emo. I should probably go to bed.

I have chicken to throw away, but it smells like shit shortly afterwards, and I'd like to avoid that for as long as possible. Only 2 more days until I'm eating real food again.

Grounding yourself is the best start to any task. I keep touching things to keep myself out of my head.

slip sliding

I'm sleepy this morning. Murrr. Haven't been getting my usual 8 hours, so it's not surprising. I just debated over that "it's" for like 30 seconds before realizing I'm an idiot and just kept writing. Wow. Out of it.

This is sort of an awkward week for me, logistically. I have to do things like laundry which shouldn't really be a problem to negotiate with my homework and class time, but I also have to eat. I have no food in my house, basically, until Wednesday evening, when my chili will be finished. I am literally out of food: no milk, no orange juice, no cheerios, no meat, no bread, no soup, no frozen pizza, no leftovers, no fruit. But, I have to housesit for my folks starting Saturday and going until next Thursday, so I can't really buy a whole bunch of food for my apartment when I just will have to go buy more food for the house. Once I'm living back at home, I'll be fine, but before then I just kind of have to limp along...

I think I may make a quick trip to Kowalski's or the Coop today between classes, just to pick up some perishable essentials: milk, cheerios, cadbury cream eggs, chocolate.

I don't know why this is such a big deal in my head right now. Probably because I'm hungry and didn't eat dinner last night.

12.4.09

hello all

I'm back from Morris. I had a really really good time. I'm definitely missing it right now, it was that amazing. I played frisbee, ate taco bell, played children's games, cooked burgers, made music, hung out, sat around a bonfire, ate donuts and walked on train tracks. There's a friend I made up there that I have a good chance at never seeing again, since she'll be studying abroad all year and I have no idea what happens when I graduate. That is still making me a little sad. I guess it's sort of a realization that there are people in my life that I will lose to time and distance, against my will.

Thistle and office hours tonight. More people to lose.

11.4.09

who's in a bunker?

Morris is good so far. I'm colored in food dye. It's a long story, but you can probably see some of it on Facebook soon. Oh, facebook. Highlights from yesterday: getting taxes done, hanging out with Tessa and Martin, dyeing eggs, playing guitar in an outdoor amphitheater, and building a bonfire.

Adventures abound. I'm so very ready for summer.

I'm really happy that I'm not at home this weekend. There isn't much going on this weekend in terms of people, and I have absolutely nothing to do for homework; this weekend would have made me very sad and lonely. I'm really ready for summer to come. I've already said that once, but still. I'm ready. I want to do all these projects and take tests and just finish it. I want to do research and hang out and play music and not have to worry about homework and play frisbee and just have it be summer already.

Winter makes summer only that much more desirable.

10.4.09

i'd stand up strong, and muscle on

First off, to answer Jamie's question on the last post, my parents are going to Nashville because my mom is involved in administrative tasks related to "p-cards" at Macalester. Purchase cards replace the traditional "don't lose your receipt" reimbursement strategy by putting the college or company's money directly into your hands. Each card has a limit, and all sorts of checks and controls, etc; the point is, they have a big ol' get-together every year to talk about it, with people coming from across the country. Last year was in San Antonio, so it was a conference. I don't know what they're calling it this year, but I think that since it's in Nashville it should be called a hootenanny.

Regardless, I'm housesitting next weekend, and possibly hosting my Shadowrun group? That would be fun. I really like holding games at my parent's house, due to things like sunlight, the table and having enough chairs, and it'll be really surreal to not be at the head of the table this time. Hm.

I'm up in Morris currently, at the Common Cup, making a blog post, to you, having just finished my taxes. It took me about 15 minutes. Thank you IRS for the EZ form.

I'm happy about life, and excited for my Morris weekend. :)

9.4.09

if only jesus could wash my feet

Shoot! I always forget to not leave my teabag in coffeenews teas. It always steeps waaay too long.

Busy couple week coming up. This weekend is Easter, which means seeing family. It also means going to Morris! It's gonna be sweet. I'm leaving tomorrow at about noon, and I'll be coming back either early Sunday morning or late Saturday. Next weekend I'm housesitting for my folks, because they're going to Nashville, and the weekend after that it's the April Poetry Slam. Yes, yes, this will be a busy month.

EDIT: Also, Minneapolis Slam Poetry semi-finals next Tuesday at Kieran's. Be there.

And there's, you know, school. And stuff.

Here goes rhino stenciling and panoramic line drawings.

8.4.09

we can never let go.

I finished my sonnet crown. Praise be to Jesus. Now comes the even harder part: editing it. What I have ahead of me is a long arduous process, but it will be aided by Thistle and by Jeff Shotts, so that's something. I need to edit it for making sense, thematic consistency, descriptive/imagistic consistency, thematic resolution and narrative resolution. Also, poetic value. As if that part's nothing. Hah. Haha.

....

Alright then, moving on...

After trying twice, I still haven't gotten anything done on my OS homework assignment. I could be done by now, considering I've been at Dunn's for almost 3 hours. I have office hours tonight at 8, but other than that I'm good to go on the weekend. I stayed after Digital Electronics for about a half hour to continue my circuit building. We were in the lab today to keep working on our digital music boxes. Pretty cool stuff. I finished the memory module, and next Monday I'll finish hooking up the music box portion to it so that I can "record" a series of notes. I have the C major scale, middle C, no incidentals.... any suggestions?

For those of you in town, Rocksteady Breakfast will be playing May 2nd at Eclipse for a May Day Ska event. I know a guy in the band, hence the plug.

Enjoy your Easter weekends everyone!

7.4.09

cancel-eyed

I'm loving the short week this week. Also, next week I don't have Digital Electronics on Wednesday or Friday and the following week I don't have OS on Friday. All this in preparation for the end of the semester. =P

My sonnet crown will be completed by next Monday, I've decided, which should be doable. I'm going to (maybe?) turn it in to Thistle for review on Sunday, but I'm for sure turning it in to Jeff, my teacher, on Monday for some critique and review, etc. I definitely appreciate the chance to have an actual editor look over my work. Jeff Shotts is a good teacher, but I also get the impression that he's a very good editor. He works for Gray Wolf Press, which is an indie press here in town that actually has quite a bit of renown. I may just end up having Thistle workshop another poem that I'll be including in my portfolio, I'm not quite sure yet.

I'm starting a project in Digital Electronics in the next couple of weeks, and I'm not sure what I want to do yet. I might do a MIDI sequencer, or a synth machine. I'm really into mixing my interest areas. :) I also found out there's an electronic music class being offered next year at some point in the music department, which is kind of cool.

As an update on classes, I'm thinking of not taking Parallel and Distributed Processing, just because it doesn't interest me as much as Networks does, and try to take some other stuff. I'm looking at Music Theory, or maybe some sort of American Studies or Gender Studies intro class. That could be kind of cool. It would be a shame to graduate from Mac without taking some sort of theory course.

In other news, I'm still immensely pleased with every Subtle album in existence.

6.4.09

Hey! You ain't as dead as you seem!

Sorry about the missed post, and especially the missed poetry post. Virginia was not very nice about giving me free wifi, so that was...sad. But I had a pretty good time, despite my visitee being really, really busy and not very happy about it. Still, it was a pleasure, as always. And Virginia was beautiful. Mmm.

3-day week this week, because of Good Friday and no classes on Thursdays. It's pretty cool. I'm biking over to downtown mpls on Thursday evening with Isaac to go see Snowblind, my professor's jazz band. They have a 4 hour set. I'm really impressed.

So anyways, it's sort of back to a regular week, except for it being really short. I'm thinking of coming up to Morris this weekend, but I'm not sure when, or with whom. I'll let ya'll know.

3.4.09

Classes

Some preliminary schedule work:

MWF 10:50-11:50 Linear Algebra
MWF 2:20-3:20 Networks
TR 9:40-11:10 Parallel and Distributed Processing
and anything oh god anything to fill my social science disto credit.

So that's my rough schedule. The CS classes are staying put, but I have a lot of flexibility with the social science class. I have no idea what I'm going to take. Fucking social science. I can't even take a journalism class like Jamie suggested - News Reporting/Writing is being offered, but isn't a social science credit anymore. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I'll figure it out. I have 2 weeks or so, and I'm one of the first people to register, so hopefully not everyone else put off social science like I did...

...

Yeah, I'll be preparing plenty of classes to try and get into. =P

2.4.09

sort of

Well, I heard back from that internship I was applying to in St. Louis Park. It looks like it's a no-go, which is too bad, but it felt like it was maybe leaning that way. Oh, well. I tried.

Looking at classes for next semester, which depresses me even more; there isn't a whole lot of interesting stuff being offered in-department, and apparently classes that count towards the social science distribution maximum don't give me my social science general credits, which means Economics isn't a social science. I'm kind of curious what it is, then?

Anyways, I'm too frazzled and sort of dissapointed to put anything together at the moment, I'm just generally looking. My advisor is out of town anyway, so it doesn't really matter how quickly I do it, I just need her to get back to me by the 20th to register.

Some good news: my next assignment is implementing a small FAT16 filesystem. We're writing a program to traverse and understand the filesystem, and the file in side of it. "The" file is slightly misleading, but only just so: the contents are Linux 0.1, the very first release by Linus Torvalds.

Awesome? Awesome.

1.4.09

B&N

I was sitting today in a Barnes & Noble coffeeshop in Charlottesville, VA, next to an interesting guy who came in during my stay there. He came in starting a conversation with his father, who seemed marvelously with it from my perspective, considering the man I was sitting next to was about 35ish. He was having a really in-depth conversation about interpreting the Quran and the Hadith as extremely Buddhist in nature: that Muhammed was a Buddha. It was interesting, and way over my head. I've always wanted to read those two works, but I haven't had time.

I reread the first section of the Dead Emcee Scrolls, NGHWHT, by Saul Williams while there, which I still feel is really good, but in a completely different way than the poetry I've been reading lately. I still enjoyed it though, which is a good sign.

Writing poetry, on vacation, very out of it. It's hard to keep a grasp on two very different realities.