Upon the Souls of Sparrows

those crows sick their starving wings on choking out the sun full sinking pinks

2009-09-02T23:21:00.002-05:00

I had great questions to ask you all, polls and open thoughts. They're gone now, as these things go.

I'm fixing to have a great time.

I didn't mean to do a short post like this, but I'm not sure of what to say. I've had a good while (along the same lines as a good night, or a good weekend), I'm happy, and excited, and nervous, and worried, but flowing, and laughing my way through the day (and I'd laugh through hurricanes and fire, to be sure). I'm rereading favorite books, and exploring new ones, I'm revisiting old pleasures and giving credence to new ones, I'm delighting in noise and in color and wordplay, and along with that I owe someone an apology, for hypocrisy. Sorry.

Dreadnought is such a word... it's used to describe a certain shape of guitar, usually strung with steel strings, with the 14th fret at the body. The word is very ... acute at the moment? Maybe not the right word, but it has that pointed, somewhat painful feeling that I'm trying to convey.

Check up

2009-09-01T13:37:00.004-05:00

I was really busy in August, I apologize. I only got, what, 4 blog posts up in the entire month? Pitiful. Or something like that. Anyways, having gone to Morris, MN, and stood on the lawn in the center of UMM's campus, and listened to Cloud Cult perform for an hour and a half or so, I have decided to sit here and plug them shamelessly. Which is too bad, since they aren't going to be playing another show for a bit.

Last year, Cloud Cult, which is a homegrown Minnesota rock band that has been around for about 12 years, released an album titled Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) with the intention of releasing it, doing perhaps a small tour, and then retiring to a life of hobby farming in northern Minnesota. Or maybe that was just the lead singer, Craig Minowa. Regardless, that's not what happened, thank goodness. The album brought them heaps of critical praise and general popularity - they even had a song on a commercial spot. So they kept touring. As I finally got around to seeing them, and hearing them for the first time (which makes me sort of a terrible person, I know), in Summer 2009, I am quite pleased with this turn of events. I'm hoping they are too.

Anyways, they're a rock band in the sense that there are drums, a guitar and a bass; the full instrumentation is as follows: violin, cello, drums, electric guitar, and electric bass. The guitarist sings main vocals and also plays the keyboard and manipulates artificial noise (loops, sound bites, and such), the cellist also sometimes plays keyboard, the bassist also sometimes plays trombone and a children's xylophone, and everybody already mentioned but the drummer sings vocals. BUT there are also two full-time painters that tour with the band and paint during shows (the paintings are auctioned off for charity at the end of the show; UMM bought one for $500); one of the painters also sometimes plays the keyboard, and sings, and the other sings and sometimes plays the trumpet.

So "rock" isn't a very good description, but the point is, they're amazingly talented, and make amazing music. It sounds as if they're going on a small hiatus (one of the painters is married to Craig, the lead singer, and they're expecting in about a month), and almost everyone in the band is married, and not necessarily to each other, so families and lives beckon. So even though you may not be able to see them live anytime soon (unless you live in River Falls, Wisconsin, in which case go see them on 9/11 at the U of W there), you can check out their music and buy their 7 or 8 albums at cloudcult.com.

Have heart.

2009-08-23T20:38:00.007-05:00

I watched a lot of movies while I was on vacation with my parents. The full list is this: Iron Man, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Last Chance Harvey, and Good night, and good luck. Iron Man is a great movie, BB was also good, but long and troubling, Harvey was mostly adorable, but what I really want to talk about is GN,AGL.

Good night, and good luck. is a movie about Edward R. Murrow and his conflicts with Junior Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. The history lesson is short: McCarthy founded the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and unconstitutionally tried people for Communist ties. Murrow, perceiving the illegality and immorality of the Senator's actions, did a series of specials covering the hearings on his show, See It Now. The Senator responded by attacking Murrow without refuting any of Murrow's allegations. An investigation into McCarthy and his actions occurred shortly thereafter.

The message I took away from this concerned a topic that is very prevalent today: what is good journalism? Part of this question revolves around the idea of the "purpose" of journalism. A friend ponders it here, and Andrew Sullivan often does it here. For my own part, I view the purpose of journalism as I view many things, as a spectrum, no pun intended.

On one end is objective journalism: news delivered with as little bias as possible and as accurately as possible. Most news sources attempt to deliver this type of news. The idea is that the news should be one step removed from the event, and that the reporter is a collator, or a curator, if you will. In this case, a reporter is analogous to a mapmaker - the best map is the land itself, but that doesn't fit in your pocket, on your doorstep, on your television, in your browser, so a map is made, a news story written.

On the other end is subjective journalism. I don't have a ready definition for this, so I'll give examples. Socialist newsletters are subjective journalism. Hannity is subjective journalism. Andrew Sullivan is subjective journalism. Perhaps a good word for all this is simply, Editorial. It's the word used in GN,AGL by Murrow to describe his show and his department at CBS.

Is one of these "better" than the other? Arguably, yes. If I want to find out what happened in Ghana today, I would turn to objective news. If I wanted to know how well the American economy is doing, I would turn to objective news. But say I want to know what the American far right thinks about the War on Terror: I would turn to WaPo editorials.

The assumption in answering affirmatively to that question is that news without bias, news written for as wide an audience as possible, is better news. News can still be accurate and biased. Look at John Stewart: the Daily Show is a nightly program that does a very good job of covering the daily news, but it does so with a leftist bias. MSNBC does much the same thing, albeit a lot less entertaining. Sean Hannity also does a daily program that covers the news, with a far right bias. I'm not sure entertaining is the right word, but there's my opinion showing. It's affirming. I don't hold the same beliefs, but I can sense that.

See It Now was an editorial program. The nature of the program was subjective. But it's segments on the McCarthy hearings were revolutionary. For really the first time, the media directly affected politics. Murrow's journalism was solid. It was deep. It was thought provoking. It was accurate. Was it objective? Possibly. His intentions were objective: he was trying to tell the truth.

And that's the rub. Truth is subjective. Watch the interviewhere. Both of these people believe fully that they are right. They are argueing their positions with a passion that cannot be denied. Yet the text agrees with only one of them.

Where does this put journalists? I think you can safely say that journalists should tell the news as accurately as possible. What they tell will be based on their bias. How they tell it should not be. Ideally, people should seek to consume news from multiple sources: good journalists will give out accurate news that they care about, and each news consumer will receive news from a variety of biases. That is a news world I think we could have.

There's a mural up on east 14th, it said, "Hallelujah, RIP"

2009-08-20T01:21:00.003-05:00

I have resolved to try and face more of my fears, and to try to work past them as best I can. In some cases, this means steeling up and doing things that I want to do, but am afraid to do, in other cases it means telling people how I feel and trying to get them to work with me, and in still others it means doing things that I don't want to do at the moment, but should. Some of these cases overlap, in ... some cases.

Or something like that.

I would really like to stop being afraid of things, afraid of people; or, really, I want this gutfeeling of apprehension to go away. Living is no fun when your insides strangle you.

The blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind

2009-08-18T21:46:00.004-05:00

A checklist of sorts, or maybe, a really, really long mastercard commercial, from my vacation:

Hours of guitar played: 3-4

Number of times I played Love In Vain Blues: 3-4

Number of mochas drunk: 2

Number of poems written: 2

Number of beers had: about 5

Glasses of Syrah: about ... 5

Glasses of Chardonnay: ... about five

Nights spent: 4

Fears faced: many

Fears defeated: maybe not that many

Books ~~read~~ finished: 3, working on a 4th

Friends missed: a lot of them

S'mores eaten: 0

Mountains circled: 1

Chocolate Mouse-es ate: 2

Trips to the swimming pool: 3

Scrapes from the swimming pool: 1

Mild Sunburn: check

Things jonesed for: 4

Trips yearned for: 3

Days I wanted to come home: all of them

Days I wanted to see someone special: all of them

Days I didn't want to leave: all of them

What could be the last vacation with I take with my family in a long time: absolutely wonderful, and, yes, priceless

More starting later this week. Real journalism, not being a theater person, things like that.

Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand, I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis

2009-08-06T15:33:00.004-05:00

I seem to always be saying this, but, "it's been a while." Summer is bad for blogging. I spend too much time hanging out with friends, and as those friends are mostly the people that read this blog, it's hard to be motivated to write. That, and when I'm hanging out with friends, I'm not doing anything interesting that can't be tracked in another manner. Like, a month or so ago, a friend was housesitting for some folks with a chicken coop, so some friends and I went over to see the chickens. I took some pictures of them playing with chickens, and then put them up on facebook. That was the end of that; it felt like there wasn't any need to write about how fun it was playing with chickens, when the folks in those pictures are the people who read this the most. :-\

In addition to summer not being good for blogging, I've been in a different sort of mood since school ended. I've had a lot less desire to share generally (as opposed to individually), and a desire to be quieter. I've been listening to a lot more indie and folk music this summer, which is quite different from the punk and hardcore binge I went on at the end of the schoolyear, or the hip hop binge I went on last year. I've spent a lot more time thinking about my problems, and a lot less time writing about them, which means less poetry. The same is true for events in my life, which means fewer blog posts.

Spring semester was very intense for me, academically and emotionally. Academically, I was very busy, doing homework, planning for the coming year, planning for the future, writing papers, writing code, writing poetry. But I also made new friends, forged stronger friendships, missed some people more than is usually healthy, forgot how to breathe, and remembered just in time to fly away.

This year I lost some independence, and gained some self-esteem, and realized both of those things are important to me. I realized that what I want isn't always compatible with current situations - something that is completely contrary to the lessons I learned as an only child in a supportive household. I was taught, all through my life, you can be anything you want, you can do anything you wish to. I never thought that I wouldn't know what I wanted. I also never learned that sometimes what you want involves others - it takes more than one egg to make an omelette; some things cannot be accomplished alone, and sometimes others don't want the same things you do. And... in that case, you *can't* do whatever you want. Sometimes people won't be there to support your endeavors.

And sometimes, people will be there. The people who love you should inspire and support you, and you should do the same for them, out of love for their dreams.

I'm coming home again.

Open E-mail to Lisa Goodman

2009-07-21T23:00:00.002-05:00

Might do a weekend recap tomorrow or Thursday. For now, an e-mail I sent to Minneapolis Ward 7 Council Member Lisa Goodman regarding 18+ shows.

Dear Council Member Lisa Goodman,

I've become aware of an initiative by your office relating to 18+ music shows and the availability of alcohol at those shows. I read an article in the City Pages (link below), which I recognize is most likely biased, but as a resident of the Twin Cities and a frequent concert-goer, I feel the need to inform you of my concerns, and make a humble suggestion for future action.

Firstly, the main concern of your office seems to be the potential hazards of having underage youth in such close contact with alcohol while at concerts. One of the dangers, in particular, is that of individuals aged 21+ passing alcohol off to minors. I agree that this is a major problem. The issue is that the minors who get drunk and attend concerts aren't getting their alcohol at the show itself. Most of them are actually pre-gaming the show - that is, procuring alcohol through a legal adult before the event, and then going to the event after they're already drunk. This is the logical source of alcohol for the minors - if their alcohol consumption were restricted to the show itself, they would not be able to preform the binge drinking that has been observed, due to the restrictive cost of drinks at venues and the suspiciousness of a patron continually purchasing a large volume of alcohol. I don't know of any venue that wouldn't investigate such behavior.

Secondly, 18+ shows represent a unique niche in the world of bookings. The main issue at hand is a matter of ambiance. All Ages shows have a very particular feel - the average age is much lower, the performances less serious, the crowd more rowdy. 18+ shows on the other hand, allow young adults to attend concerts with people not closer to their physical age, but closer to the age and maturity level that young adults wish to have. This, along with the general increase in maturity, makes for a more intimate atmosphere, less rowdy crowds (particularly at punk and metal shows) and better performances. There have been many times when my friends and I have forgone seeing great bands, simply because the show is All Ages, and we'd rather wait for a better atmosphere in which to appreciate the music.

I'm sure that your office will weigh all the positives and negatives of any restriction, and make a well-thought out decision. Also, if I may, I would like to make a couple small suggestions. The primary problem with this initiative at the moment is that it appears to the public as an instinctual, puritanical strike at underage drinking. To help you learn about the source of the problems, as well as give the public an impression of consideration and deliberation on the part of your office, I would suggest you conduct some research about the source of underage alcohol consumption, the strength of venue underage drinking policies, etc. Along with this, you might also consider other solutions to this problem besides a booking restriction on venues.

Here's the City Pages link: http://www.citypages.com/2009-07-22/news/proposal-to-ban-18-shows-could-kill-minneapolis-s-music-scene/

Thank you for your concern in public health and safety, and thank you for taking the time to read this. I would be willing to discuss this matter further with you, and I trust you will make a well-informed decision.

Sincerely,

Colin Welch

I saw taillights last night in a dream about my whole life

2009-07-17T19:15:00.004-05:00

Weekend! I've got evening plans, but not day plans, which will be nice. I like it that way. I've got a couple of ideas for things to do this weekend, but I'm not sure what it'll end up being. Anyways, here's some:

~~Practicing stuff for open mic on Saturday. This should probably happen...~~
Cruising around MPLS on bike and photographing good graffiti. :D
~~Sitting in a coffeeshop writing. :D :D~~
~~Uploading all the pictures I'll be taking this weekend. I'm taking on the role of historian.~~
~~Grocery shopping. Checking out the Dale/Selby coop. Randolph is closing. :(~~
Rolling down to the central library to get my card renewed and pay my $15.00 fine from senior year of highschool. :p THINK OF THE BOOKS

In other news, I'm 9.5 hours back into Resident Evil 4. I'd forgotten how awesome that game is, and I'm remembering now. I just unlocked the area leading to the second boss, so I'll be done with the Castle soon, and then I can move onto killing zombie commandos. No, I'm not kidding. I sort of wish I was... at least to save myself from their fucking stun batons. -.-

As for night plans, I'm going to Highland Fest for a little bit tonight, mostly just to take pictures of friends, Saturday evening is an open mic and Sunday there's a little get together at a friend's apartment for board games and beers.

I should probably glance at work as well... but I really don't want to. I'll talk about it later in the weekend, but it's just a frustrating bug I have to deal with because no one else will.

EDIT: ~~Things I did~~

here's to the

2009-07-16T18:17:00.003-05:00

Lots of smaller ideas today. :)

First, I finished what I was working on for the last couple of days, specifically, getting references working in conversations. Basically, if you make a post in a conversation on our site, the system will scan your post for possible references and suggest them to you. This is totally up to you, so you can select which ones you want.... which is great, except for one thing: the system can pass the reference (which has more fields than just "text") to the website, but the website can only pass back strings. It passes them back in a standard data communication object called a hash map, which works by specifying every value as a key-value pair; you type in the key, you get the value back. The solution we chose was to put the "text" of the reference (for example, "Timothy Pawelenty") in the value, and make the key into a standard pattern.

Parsing this pattern took several days to code. And now its done. And works. Finally. I spent all day on the test alone. Or rather, I spent all day fixing the bugs that the test helped jiggle out of the framework.

Meat Tape 2 is growing on me. It's most definitely not Meat Tape, but it doesn't really have to be... I'm unsure what to think of it, but individual portions of it are growing on me. It's much less of a local roundup and much more of a "P.O.S Presents" type thing. Still good, just different.

Speaking of growing on me, I'm definitely starting to dig the Bruce feel of The Gaslight Anthem's second LP, The '59 Sound. Worth a listen if you want "if Bruce Springsteen grew up listening to punk." Solid writing, solid guitar lines, solid percussion. I think one of my favorite moment on the album is at 0:48 on the title track -- the 'chuckas' are absolutely wonderful.

Oh hey, it's James, the guy I used to work with at Borders. Nice.

Would anyone be interested in doing a one-shot Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game this summer? I miss dm-ing, and I sort of want an excuse to learn the system. Let me know.

Open mic pressure pops -- 1.99 at your local gas station

2009-07-15T15:31:00.003-05:00

Sounds like it's open mic this weekend. I'd prefer it being somewhere with better acoustics than my apartment (which isn't hard to do at all), and there's a real possibility of a good spot, but... I feel that elements of our group would resent the highly likely parental prescence. I don't really care, personally. The echo in my apartment is a real annoyance, and I feel that we'd be better served in a different environment.

But what open mic does mean is a review of what I can preform this time around. I've got some coversongs I've been idly working on that I could ramp up productivity on, and I could sit down with my own work sometime soon, which is something I've been meaning to do anyways, so this could be a good excuse to get started.

On the poetry end of things, I have some fresh slam poetry I could practice up, or I could do a reading of more traditional page poetry. I could read my sonnet crown (ahahahahahaha) (<-- not a laugh track).

So, in short, I'm not sure. I guess it depends on how many people will be there, and how long we have, and where it is, and ... well, pretty much anything else. That's longhand for "I dunno yet."

Redundant statements are redundant.

like a walnut, in your guts.

2009-07-08T15:57:00.002-05:00

I'm working on another postscript session for the Serenity campaign that was conducted last school year. The majority of the game was played second semester of sophomore year, and the players really bonded over it. Since then, we've revisited the game twice; only twice because one player moved back home, 1000 miles away, and one player moved to a new home, about 60 miles away. Regardless, it's been a while.

The plot of the game was a small crew of morally solid Firefly/Serenity universe denizens attempting to survive on a whole lot of not much. It occurred in the months leading up to the Message featured in the movie Serenity. While the crew of Serenity was on Miranda being scared by dead people, the crew of the Mick was on board an Alliance cruiser, aiding in a mutiny against one of the scariest Admirals in the fleet, who also happened to have bought one of the PCs when she was a small child. The PC, Evie, escaped when she was about 17, but had been haunted by memories of her childhood and her surrogate "father" ever since. The campaign culminated in the captain of the Mick, Ian O'Malley, shooting his childhood rival in the halls of the cruiser, sparking the mutiny, and finally a showdown between Evie and the Admiral which ended with Ian putting a bullet into the Admiral's head.

The additional two "postscript" sessions occurred both before and after the climax of the "first season", so to speak. Due to me losing the character sheets, they were light on combat and heavy on the talking. Now that I've found them, expect more skills tests, ridiculous combat mechanics and blood. I chose to not deal with the direct results of the climax because I felt that I wasn't ready to narrate and resolve the issues that came up in it in the most dramatic, but also mature way possible.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because, in working on a session for this weekend (all the players will again be in town), I've realized quite exactly how much I miss this.

bad posturing

2009-07-08T14:20:00.002-05:00

Do you ever get the feeling that you're too big, or too small, for normal, everyday objects and situations? I often experience this, even with very common things, or things you wouldn't think would be difficult. Many of my common mishaps include:

Sinks and mirrors. They're always too low. I like being able to see what my hair is doing, but sometimes that's not allowed, apparently. Washing your hands should also not hurt your back.
Cups. I've got a big nose, and sometimes cups don't line up right, and I just can't seem to drink out of them. It's too bad.
Small-necked string instruments, like violins and mandos. I've got big fingers, and big callouses. Not as big as mando players, but still. Makes me wonder how Ricky Scaggs manages to play, because, man, does that guy have sausage-fingers.
Urinals. Sometimes it's so bad that "splashback" occurs, and that's not even with the floorlength ones.
Toilets. Believe it or not, sometimes they're too high. I know, right? Turns out my thighs are just huge, both in length and in girth, which means all my height is there and in my abdomen.
Ellipticals. These are the bane of my workout existence. It's not fair. Everyone looks so graceful, loping along, watching TV, listening to Single Ladies; me? Nope, turns out my legs are too long, and I don't bend in the right places. I end up bouncing along, the gait not long enough, the machine trying to bend my knees somewhere around the thick portion of my shin...
Keyboards. this comes back to the whole big fingers problem, and is a big reason I'm waiting on getting a netbook (the other two big reasons being money and impending hardware advances).

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. Thanks for tuning into another pretty awkward blog post.

full of steel wool, safety glass, and loosed teeth.

2009-07-02T13:01:00.003-05:00

Well. It's now July. I haven't posted since the middle of June. Like, c'mon Colin, what's been keeping you? Well, you know... life.

There's not a whole lot of extra amidst the helterskelter of everyday, between ~~dollar and drumond~~ work and play. !time == being busy. Makes for a lack of energy, any kind, but still...

Ajoyous playing, a feeling of completeness in the singularity of a group, the relentless feeling of outsidership amidst friends, the constant tension of closeness and distance, all in one night, Dancing, always foot tapping and twostepping, we are, in thought, ascending (alabaster), making love, in companionship, In silence after speech I'm losing thought

and creativity is being kept in. This is not the thing that bursts out when the container is full...it is a tide. It follows the pull of some other body, but, like the water of the metahpor, still seeks to fill in all cracks and me, sprawled out in the way of the sun,

sinking or singing.

How now, a rat!

2009-06-17T14:00:00.002-05:00

What have I been up to, eh? Well, not much. Just hanging out with friends and working, mostly. Lots of band practice. Big plans though. I guess this'll be an art post.

Planning a variety of projects for this summer. First, hello blacksmith will be recording and releasing our EP, which will be good, since then we can give those with t-shirts their cds, and sell both at once! Anyways, we played a show last Friday at The Basement, and it was probably the best show we've done so far, and we think we're ready to record. The settings have been difficult to ... set ... but otherwise, we have a rough take of all our songs (minus the one without a drum track). We started writing new material this week, and we're looking to get an opening set at Eclipse sometime this summer.

On the subject of shirts, it's my hope that we can restart the "production shop" to get some more, and new, shirts out there. The gangsta penguin shirt is a fan favorite, but we have some other ideas we'd like to see put out there. Look for the other half of our 'record label' name, for example, and don't be surprised at other animals appearing as well...

As for my personal projects, I'm writing more acoustic music. I'm considering fooling around with recording, we'll see where that goes. I've discovered that I get rather impatient with the recording process -- I'm that guy that just wants to play the guitar. Now. Please. Still, it'd be fun to try. I'm also wary of what I sound like when I'm not singing punk music. I don't have a lot of confidence in that respect.

But life goes on. We've got a can of spray paint that I plan on using in conjunction with some stencils on my new water bottle and my pickguard. Should be cool. Also, poetry. Slam poetry, regular poetry, lyrics, whatever.

I'd like to collaborate with people more this summer, too. I got a few responses, but one of them is in Maine and another is always wary of doing things with me (running, for example). I do have a joint poem to revise though, with this gal. Oh, and apparently I'm getting skyped for some team slam poetry. Although... he's sort of dropped off the flats of Texas, so we'll see.

Hence shall we see, if power change purpose, what our seemers be.

2009-06-12T10:56:00.003-05:00

Big problem:

I can no longer post poetry.

The reason?

Policies like this, which are not uncommon for 'first serial rights' submissions:

"Work that has appeared online is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted."

Facing this realization has caused me not to want to post at all. If I can't post my own poetry for fear that it'll get crawled and archived, and thus be available 'on the internet' for all time, how can I feel free to post anything at all?

How can I share my work with my friends and loved ones if I can't physically give it to them, and cannot post it somewhere?

And further, where does a policy like this stop? "[H]as appeared online" is incredibly vague -- obviously publishing on a serious website would be a problem, but this idea encompasses more than that. This blog has incredibly low traffic (I've been tracking it, it's pitiful), but still counts. If I upload things to dropbox, are they "online"? How about an even more ubiquitous example: can I even use GoogleDocs to type up my work?

Scarce confesses that his blood flows, or that his appetite is more to bread than stone

2009-06-10T23:17:00.003-05:00

More tomorrow. I'm addressing one of the other issues that has caused me to stop doing blog updates.

I'm looking for collaborators on creative projects. If you're interested, send me an e-mail. I do visual art (not very well), poetry (much much better), slam poetry, prose, limited composition and guitar. I also really like reading. :) That's more of an aside though. =P

Thou, nature, are my goddess; to thy law my services are bound.

2009-06-09T01:09:00.002-05:00

I wanted to apologize for the general overshare going on here at the moment. I'm trying to deal with things and this is a pretty good outlet, it seems. I'm reading again, at least. :) Still, bear with me while I figure things out.

2 step

2009-06-08T15:30:00.004-05:00

Another issue that has been occupying me recently is my own lack of motivation. I've been getting tired very easily, and the answer to that is to eat well and exercise. But that takes time and more energy, and so it all just sort of spirals down into not doing anything and being tired. This is similar to my loneliness spiral.

It makes it very difficult to do anything when I'm always tired. It also makes it difficult when I have very little personal time (due to work), and even less time personal creative time (due to hanging out with people). This means that I don't get anything done creatively and get frustrated about it. Hello Blacksmith is currently where I get most of my creative energies out, which is cool, because it's hanging out and creativity at once, but I also do more than play punk music.

I write music, poetry, lyrics, I draw, I sing, I practice spoken word.

All of those? Haven't happened.

Sitting outside enjoying the sun? Nope.

Reading? Hah!

Time only factors into the motivation issues. Time is not the problem. Motivation to use the little time I have for creativity is.

Now I know why people never leave school. It's a completely different structure for your time.

Updates from the sidelines

2009-06-08T11:24:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the lack of updates. I've had a lot on my mind. This may turn into a "thinky" post, so watch your step with the ellipses and mind the gap.

Still working. Life's still ... half working. We're hitting a slow spot at work in terms of the "development life cycle" (not the best picture). We're stuck in design, as this is a large project, and there are still a lot of things we haven't talked about yet.

I mean... we did go through the cycle once, and got our first super-rough test site up. The basics work, but now it's time to move on to a lot of other things. Our basic functionality is there, but all of the other "basic" functionality people seem to want needs to be implemented, but first, designed, and that's where the difficulties are.

All of this just leads up to the fact that I'm not too enthralled by work right now (hence, writing a blog post). And I still have to be here and wake up and be tired and all that big band. People being home means that I spend all my time seeing them, and I'm ... well, I'm still in school mode, specifically school mode without constant companions. I'm used to having and taking personal time whenever I feel like it. And I'm not used to people planning things -- the folks I started hanging out with at the end of the year just called and we did stuff, there was no planing stage.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy hanging out with friends, and seeing people. In fact, I've started getting lonely when I don't see people, and then my "must be independent of all people, ideas and objects" psyche feasts on that and forces me into deeper troughs of loneliness.

Last week was really difficult for me. If you know emotional difficulty, fill in the blank.

This all leads up to a friend telling me to "cheer up, emo wench!" Which makes more sense in context, but it was still sort of not what I thought I needed to hear. It did work though. I felt much better that day, and in subsequent days.

So I guess ... thanks for startling me into trying to fix my life? Turns out you know me better than I do.

It's a pretty good night for a drive, so dry up those eyes, and dry up those eyes

2009-05-26T21:44:00.003-05:00

I got up late today, which was fine, because I was going to go into work early, worked until 5, went home and cooked dinner. Then I watched the news and ate, and then slowly cleaned up over several hours.

...

I don't know that I can do this for the rest of my life. Like, I enjoyed work today, but... seriously? At least I'm spicing up this domestic lifestyle with Risk and friends.

beach beach beach

2009-05-10T16:35:00.001-05:00

I am at the beach. In NC.

Hence, no blog posts.

That is all. :D

a mighty big need to eat sometime this month

2009-05-08T08:06:00.003-05:00

After the next 4 hours, I will have given a presentation, taken a multivariable final, and handed in my poetry portfolio. I will then still have to finish my digital electronics project, pack and do laundry, all for tomorrow. Also, somewhere in there I'm seeing Vinny. Aaaaaah!

the party's over, the cd's skippin'. the same hook repeated grows more grating with each passing second

2009-05-05T23:40:00.005-05:00

Doing a lot of project work this week. Got everything mostly wired up for my analog to digital converter. All that's left is an I/O select using NOR gates and hooking up the d-to-a to the correct range. And well, debugging assembly. :3

Here's a list of influences for my poetry portfolio, just because it's a humorous mix:

"Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Adam Drucker a.k.a. Doseone, Kyle "El Guante" Myrrhe, Mike Mlekoday, Saul Williams, Neil Gaiman, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Patricia Smith, Katie Willingham, Neil Hilborn, Daniel Picus, Sarah Welch, Jeff Shotts."

foreign policy

2009-05-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

I was tricked by your scent
I was lured by your blouse
I was caught by your laugh
Now tear it out.

Your smile fails to procure
The wish we had for you
Your teeth are sunk in us
And I had to tear them out.

How could they pick you, how could you do?
What do we choose now to stay away from you?
What path do we keep now, what savior calls for help?
What savior calls to save us? I want change for myself.

You lead him by his hand, an old pet too near to death
You watch us with shining eyes, I swear I'll tear them out.
We let you rise before us, fake eyes and smiling breath
I swear I won't let you lead us, I swear we'll tear it out.

We need to be free, we don't have time for your sordid policy

We need to be free, there's no time for your sordid policy

there's a million more miles to run

2009-05-02T14:38:00.004-05:00

Alright, so gtk recap:

After spending an additional 2 hours on Friday hitting my head against the the Great Dependency Wall, I gave up for the weekend and refused to touch the program. On Monday, I talked to my professor and said I was still having trouble with it, and he said he wasn't surprised. We then went back to his office and he explained what he had done in the meantime, which was actually rather ingenious. First, he set up a really basic makefile without any listed includes or libraries, just a compiling command. Then he used

make 2>&1 | head

to output stderr to stdout for head to recap it into useful dependency errors. Then he used the shell command

locate

to find them and add them to the include list. We ended up using the standard "pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0" libraries, and then ported it to my system with little trouble. After making sure all the needed #includes were present in my program, we made the file with no problem, and it ran fine. Just to double check it though, I uncommented my code that wasn't working due to dependency issues, which was to undecorate the window (take away the traditional "window" portion of it - title bar, menus, etc). Worked! So after about a half an hour more work I now have a working widget! Huzzah!

Now where to put it? There are 4 spots on the screen that a user can always locate, the 4 corners, so these are well used by operating systems and programs. One of the places that doesn't get used on Ubuntu or by most programs is the area directly above the taskbar, so I centered it roughly in the middle and threw it on there. Here are the results, plus MGMT and kitties.

What this looks like is the Songbird miniplayer mode on the bottom of my screen. But what it actually is is a widget containing the miniplayer that I can put anywhere, move anywhere, decorate however I want, etc. The real purpose of all this was to set it to keep_above(), meaning to stay on top of every other window, and to stick(), which means that it can't be moved and is present on every desktop. So no matter where I go, there's music. :)

you tell me it calms your nerves, you just think it looks cool

2009-05-01T17:22:00.004-05:00

Huzzah! Gtk program works! It's pretty. I'll post a big post later tonight. :)

Poetry revision coming along well. Also now have a microcode rough draft. Tomorrow is probably some wiring in the early afternoon, which I should do a diagram for tonight, but there are still a couple pieces I'm not sure about. At least I can take some stuff apart and add some other stuff in. :\

After that it's a ska show at Eclipse, doors at 6, show at 6:30, 3 dollars.

I'm pretty thrilled with progress right now. I talk big, but this is all very manageable. I'm just trying to survive at the same time. :)

Woke up at 6:30 this morning, wide awake. I managed to fall asleep until about 7:30, and then got up and did some homework. I had to re-write a homework assignment for today at noon that I had forgotten about when I went to sleep last night, and it wasn't until I actually asked myself, "why am I awake?" that I remembered. My subconscious was watching out for me, which is pretty cool. Still, it'll be a long day.

My favorite kind.

slam poetry

2009-04-30T15:17:00.005-05:00

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?

2009-04-30T13:30:00.003-05:00

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.

let's see where we land

2009-04-29T17:51:00.003-05:00

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.

This is madness! No, this is GNOME!

2009-04-28T12:04:00.005-05:00

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

2009-04-28T00:29:00.004-05:00

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.

"he's just another...."

2009-04-24T10:11:00.001-05:00

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.

my idea

2009-04-23T16:06:00.002-05:00

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

2009-04-23T15:50:00.003-05:00

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.

and he and he and he

2009-04-22T13:09:00.003-05:00

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.

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

2009-04-21T11:20:00.005-05:00

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.

But not subtle at all.

2009-04-20T23:02:00.004-05:00

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.

oooooooooo ooooo oooo ooo oo oo oooooo

2009-04-18T21:01:00.002-05:00

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

2009-04-18T14:46:00.003-05:00

"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.

:(

2009-04-17T10:21:00.002-05:00

bbc news

Mood &c

2009-04-17T10:11:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-04-16T18:21:00.002-05:00

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:

2009-04-16T15:16:00.002-05:00

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.

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

2009-04-15T23:14:00.006-05:00

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....

2009-04-15T20:46:00.007-05:00

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

2009-04-15T09:57:00.003-05:00

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.

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

2009-04-13T22:51:00.005-05:00

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

2009-04-13T10:01:00.002-05:00

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.

hello all

2009-04-12T18:06:00.004-05:00

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.

who's in a bunker?

2009-04-11T12:44:00.003-05:00

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.

i'd stand up strong, and muscle on

2009-04-10T15:06:00.004-05:00

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. :)

if only jesus could wash my feet

2009-04-09T10:31:00.005-05:00

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.

we can never let go.

2009-04-08T16:25:00.003-05:00

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!

cancel-eyed

2009-04-07T10:49:00.002-05:00

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.

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

2009-04-06T09:53:00.003-05:00

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.

Classes

2009-04-03T12:27:00.003-05:00

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

sort of

2009-04-02T16:19:00.002-05:00

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.

B&N

2009-04-01T21:16:00.003-05:00

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.

This is geurilla poetry! (or, Make Me Proud, Trolls)

2009-03-31T11:30:00.003-05:00

Putting off doing lab prep for today. I have a bit of extra time right now because one of my professors didn't post a reading assignment, so ... I don't really have to do it? What it does mean is that I have to take the book on the plane with me and do it then.

So here's my schedule for today: at 1:20, lab begins. At 4:30 lab is scheduled to end. At 5:20 my plane to Charlotte takes off. So...I'm trying to work ahead on the digital electronics lab today so that I can leave quickly. My plan is to prepare everything so that all I'm really doing when I get in there is wiring it up. I'm almost done, and have done, I'm pretty sure, all of the prep, I'm just double checking my work from last night.

My brain is in a muddle. I'm too full of poetry, and of emotion and anxiousness, and of circuits; it's just too much at once? See, that's even a question...

Being caught between intention and natural process is all well and good when you're trying to capture that moment, but it's a difficult place to exist in at normal times.

And I see a new horizon or at least, I hope I do.

2009-03-30T10:34:00.004-05:00

At 12:30 last night I went to go to bed, changed, flossed, and then got an idea for a poem. So... I was up until 2:30. XD But I like the poem...

Slam went pretty well on Saturday, I didn't place in the top 3, partly because I dropped my second poem (so sad...) and mostly because people just didn't like me as much, and I went second when people still grade harshly. Neil told them to "rate how much they liked the poem" which removes presentation from the score, which I think hurt me much more than other people with 2 page long chunks of text that they read straight from the paper. Meh. Same time next month. :P I'm ready.

Cookies!

I don't know. I'm lost in mine(d). Vacation! :) Quite a bit ahead of me. Oh, well.

2009-03-29T21:36:00.001-05:00

i'm going to keep running until you say stop
and then i'm going to laugh
and fly away

i'll sleep when i'm dead.

Spring Break

2009-03-29T21:05:00.003-05:00

This week is spring break round 2. I'm flying out at 5:20 Tuesday to visit my girlfriend in Virginia, and I'll be back Sunday at about 4-5:30. Enjoy your time alone. =P

I'll try and still update, but I don't know how likely that is to happen, you know? We'll see how I do.

My sonnet crown is eating my mind. I'm being enveloped in this sticky substance, closing around me like a honeycomb made of yesterday's toast until I
can't
breathe

Ok, maybe not that bad. But still. Gaaggh. I wrote like 2 sonnets today and 2 other poems, and my brain is fried. So I'm going to shoot people in Halo. ::thumbs up::

Had Thistle today, and it was a short meeting, so I hung around talking to two people, Neil and Katie, for about an hour, which made me super late to office hours...but nobody was there when I got there, so... we'll see if I get any angry e-mails. Still, I got digits from the both of them, so... friends? :)

In dire news, my free internet disappeared, so I'm at a crossroads as to what to do. I can come to Mac and coffee shops whenever I need internet, which is going to be a problem if my computer is actually dying, or I can buy it. I really don't want to pay for internet. I shouldn't have to. St. Paul should have city-wide 802.11n. That's what I think.

I'll laugh until my head falls off...

2009-03-28T13:16:00.004-05:00

Went to Vinny's birthday party last night. It was a fun time: I fixed his youtube issue, met a bunch of his friends, realized one of his friends Dustin's boyfriend was my neighbor last year in the dorms, and played Halo for like 2 hours with Vinny, Holly and Julia. It was fun. :)

From what we covered in my Digital Electronics class yesterday, the lab on Tuesday should be plenty interesting. We're getting into sequential logic, so latches and flip flops abound. I just hope it isn't too long...if it lasts the entire lab time, I'll be running to catch that plane, lol. Also, he pushed back the homework assignment that he was going to make due next Friday, which helps me immensely. I can get started on it the first part of this week, do some while in Virginia, and then finish it when I get back.

I injured myself working out on Wednesday, pushed my right bicep too hard. It wasn't my fault, I didn't realize that my left arm was stronger than my right, so I tried to do them equally, and was surprised to find out that didn't work... it was weird. The arm has been sore for a couple of days, so if you see me, and I'm bending my arm straight out really slowly, that's why. :P It was a wonderful workout at the time though. :3

I'm very happy about many things right now. :) I feel very grateful for the chance to lead a life like this.

epic FAIL

2009-03-27T17:50:00.003-05:00

Ok, so if any of you have been around Vinny recently, you've probably heard him complain about the Linux aids on his computer. The basis for almost all of these rants was his youtube surfing not working right. For several months, youtube hasn't played with sound. We finally managed to be in the same place at the same time, and I successfully diagnosed the problem.

He had muted the video in the youtube player, and it saved it in his cookies, and he didn't think to try unmuting it.

Let it be known to all, that Vinny has failed to use a service that everyone else knows how to use. FAIL.

=P

There are two colors in my head

2009-03-27T15:56:00.003-05:00

It's half-way Spring, and my porch door is completely open. I like the fresh air, and it's only, like 32, so no biggie. It's warmer than when I was biking around last night, for sure. I biked from the Tea Garden (tea with Danny the last night before he went back to C-town) to David's house at about 10:30 at night, and it was really, really cold; biking doesn't help either. I ended up standing outside his house for about 5 minutes waiting for him to get there, and I actually warmed up standing there on the sidewalk.

The neighborhood was quiet, and there was almost no wind to speak of on that block. You could see the snow shyly falling near the streetlights.

I think I have finally captured the true purpose of "on the go" playlists, and have been using them rather effectively the past couple of days. I had used one to listen to "Summer Babe" (Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted) followed by In Rainbows and the first half of Kid A while biking last night, and I finished up Kid A this morning. I was in sort of a relaxed, Radiohead mood, but I wanted to break out of it to write some poetry, so I threw together a short mix to ease me into something a little faster and more punctuated: some Paper Tiger False Hopes to Kidney Thief and Lifetime...Kid Dynamite by P.O.S to Untrue by Burial. It was a good mix, and I wrote quite a bit. And then the ride back to my apartment was Kidney Thief to Meat Tape punk to W.E.W. and Scarecrow from Meat Tape 2, culminating in Idioteque. Circular, no? :)

The whole reason I can do this is because I got new headphones yesterday. The day before, the headphones I was using (old $10 wrap-arounds I got at Sam Goody) finally bit the dust after about 2-3 years of use. I need music, so I went to Radioshack and splurged on some higher-quality earbuds, which I am happy I did. The sound quality is better than my old iPod earbuds, and much, much better than the headphones I was using. I'm happy with them. :)

Men in dark times

2009-03-26T18:32:00.003-05:00

I've been journeying through a strange land recently. It is a landscape populated by dilapidated old farmhouses and strange monuments reaped from metal. The sculptures creak and whine under their own weight, and as the wind blows through them you get an idea of what it is the creators were trying to accomplish. If you walk by the houses at night, you could swear the creaking of the cracked-plank porches really is the remnants of a simple folk song, meticulously played, but no less natural for it.

You can see the short of it in the listening list on the right. tldr; a lot of indie music.

It's given me a new appreciation for Subtle, why they're doing different things, what they're trying to accomplish. I'm getting an education in experimentalism, in minimalism, in stuffing-the-room-full-of-instruments-ism. It has been interesting.

Anyways, poem. This one's titled Winter Sonnet. It was the last of the 'rebel sonnets' that I wrote about a month ago.

Winter
days
defeat
me.
Too
short
for
true
living.

I published this without a title, but now it has one!

2009-03-25T20:18:00.006-05:00

I have successfully completed my O.S. assignment for the week. It was really easy, actually. The whole process was really straightforward -- I may try doing the extra credit, especially if he gives us an extension. They range from easy to sphincter-rippingly difficult:

" * Allow xinit() to take a number of bytes of that should be initially allocated instead of using a constant value. (level 0)
* Walking through all used blocks to find a free block is slow! Keep separate linked lists for the used and free blocks. (level 1)
* Implement an automatic garbage collection algorithm, and replace your xfree() calls with periodic calls to the garbage collector. You'll need to pass the garbage collector a list of pointers to blocks still in use. (level 2)
* Adapt your garbage collector to work for recursive datastructures. You should only have to specify the "root" node of the datastructure, and it will try to locate pointers contained in the data segments. (level 10)"

Yeah... also, that adverb right before the colon may have been overkill.

I'm preforming poetry on Saturday, at 8:30, 4th floor Old Main. I'm excited, but a little nervous. For those of you who were here for the small open-mic-ish get together we had over Spring Break, I'm reciting both the poems I introduced to you as being for the slam. Thanks for your feedback.

Also thanks for the feedback on the last poem, you made me change the last bit to a much better read. I added the comma Jamie needed in the "penultimate line" (I don't know Spanish, so I had no idea what this meant), and also changed the "bound" at the end of that line to "captive,". Reads better now. Thanks!

In less than a week I will be enjoying the nice sunny weather and beautiful landscapes of Virginia, which makes me really happy. I'm thrilled to go down again, and I'd like to see more of my girlfriend's family, as I didn't get to see them the last time I visited mid-semester.

I have For Emma, Forever Ago stuck in my head. It makes for a very relaxed, pleasant office hour.

Sometimes the internet at dunn's makes me very sad

2009-03-24T11:57:00.003-05:00

The semester is picking up speed; only 5 weeks left, and projects are starting to assign themselves. It looks like I'll have one in every class but calculus, and a test most likely facing me in two of the four, but possibly three. But still, I enjoy this. I am waiting quietly with much excitement.

As an aside, refrain forms are awesome for punk/hardcore lyrics. Just saying. Also, I still plan on putting a sonnet to music sometime, because I can.

Interview went well yesterday, they asked me for current syllabi and source code, which is always a good sign. I'm taking a look around my computer for some good source to send them; I'm thinking my shell, they seemed interested in that, maybe my threaded mergesort function because they're doing a (hopefully opensource) project with posix threads, which sounded awesome. Some OOP stuff might be good too though. We talked for about a half an hour, I told them about me and computer science, they told me about them and computer science, it was just like a first date. :P

I have to reply to an offer from the U by Friday, which means making a decision to go with poliwiki as my for sure backup and reaching for this as hard as I can. I think I may end up doing that but I'm going to wait a bit to decide. I also was put on the waiting list by another program -- another guy at Mac applied and also got waitlisted, and the same thing happened last year when I applied to the program, so we figured that's just how they roll. Or something like that.

This week I'm studying for my second hour-long calc test, shouldn't be too bad, and writing a malloc replacement that can also detect memory leaks, bad frees, etc. I'm hoping to do most of the coding on that tonight, finish it up by the end of tomorrow. What? I like getting started on things early...

Here's a poem! If you would give me some feedback, that'd be great! :) It's tentatively titled Falls. It could use a more original title.

I always wondered why the field down the river from the falls looked so clear,
So bright in the sun,
Like every blade of grass was cut from a perfect canvas,
Like my memories could never have made it more beautiful,
Like the bodies buried beneath it only blessed the vista, the falls, the stream.
The clearing is no longer a burial mound, but when
Purpose is removed from restraint the body is no longer bound,
So watch out Southern Minneapolis.

Adventures

2009-03-23T23:52:00.002-05:00

So I'm going to be trying something new. Specifically, a sonnet crown. That's http://sprawledoutinthewayofthesun.blogspot.com/ for reference.

Yes, I am crazy.

All you can do is dive

2009-03-23T14:26:00.003-05:00

Blogging is like a journal replacement for me. It means that almost everything I put in my journals is a poem, a short piece of writing, a drawing or an idea. I like that it's more concentrated, but I also have trouble remembering things that I want to blog about throughout the day. Maybe I'll start jotting it down, and you'll have really strange blog posts to read; I could also then choose which topic to talk about, and if I had nothing to say one day, I could go back to unused topics. That may work.

Time is creeping up on me, in terms of deciding what to do this summer. I have until Friday to tell the U whether or not I'm joining their program, and I have a telephone interview for another opportunity this week as well. And Shilad is still trying to forcefully recruit me for poliwiki. =P It's too bad I live off-campus, because 10 weeks of free campus housing would be really good for me if I didn't have a place already.

I haven't really written for a while, but I think that it was just because I was on spring break and I don't really write about things like, "i went to my buddy's house and played gears of war, i could have walked home but i slept on the floor". Like, wtf? I was sort of worried this morning that I was blocked a little, but I managed to work around it after class somehow. I really like the poems I wrote, but we'll see if they stand up later.

School's started up again, classes were easy today. I have a late midterm on Friday, just double and triple derivatives and integrals, so no biggie, but other than that not much due this week. Next week I will for sure have an OS homework assignment due, which I'll probably blog about another time, and it's looking like I'll have to finish an entire Digital Electronics assignment this weekend too, as I'm heading to Virginia next week. Also, on the subject of Digi, I got a perfect on that midterm I was worried about. :)

Shadowrun recap tonight or tomorrow morning.

My bad

2009-03-22T20:02:00.004-05:00

Sorry for the missed post yesterday, I had a busy one. Yesterday was the last real day of break, considering everyone that was in town was packing and leaving today, so I ran around doin' stuff.

On Friday, I woke up late, went to Brewberry's, did some stenciling work (more on that later), did a final lookover of the lyrics sheets, and then bussed out to Guitar Center with Martin to get a mic. We got the mic, and even remembered to get a cord, but got the wrong one, which we didn't realize until the next day. Sat around with friends that night, tried to go to a concert with Tessa, which was indeed 21+, as I was afraid it was, so that didn't work out. I'll have to try and see the bands some other time. One of them was a "new" experimental hip hop group called Hyder Ali who do pretty indie hip hop music, and I'd like to check them out.

Saturday I woke up and went to Shadowrun! It was awesome. I'll make another post about that at some point in the next couple of days. After the game I killed some time at Half-price and White Rock until Martin showed up and carted me off to Guitar Center to buy the correct cord. We went back to his house, did a last minute practice, cut two songs from the setlist on the grounds of not being prepared enough, ate half a pizza each and then played.

The concert was much better than our last one, IMHO. We were pretty sloppy last time, but this time we sounded great and played really well, and I only got nervous fingers once. The new mic was a really big upgrade from what we had had, so that was a good reward. We both realized however, that we need to play for people who actually enjoy punk music, not just our friends. I'm glad everybody came, but I don't think anyone there would listen to our brand of punk on their own, which means that their reactions are mostly, "Yay! My friends are making music!", so we don't get much feedback as far as the music goes.

For those shirt owners out there, we are done with the album artwork and design -- we could give you the CD cases pretty much whenever, but the CD that goes inside isn't done yet. =P We've still had some trouble recording drums, so we'll try to resolve that as quickly as we can. We'll see how it goes. On another note, we've found a place to order shirts from, so new and old designs will be forthcoming this summer. As usual, Tan Tan takes requests, so if you want a neat, handmade stencil shirt, drop him a line.

Also, on the subject of recording music, my dad informed me today when I went out to lunch with him and my mom that he has a condenser mic, in our basement. It was apparently a $125 recording mic 20-25 years ago, so... sweet? I'm going to start playing around with that sort of stuff pretty soon.

Drifing

2009-03-20T00:41:00.000-05:00

Car ride,
sustained
on murmurs and half-closed eyes –
half the sustain of a plucked banjo string,
or maybe
Just a stiff feel,
like salt over bread,
but more like Whalebone forming
a wall around your ribs.

The car cradles us, us newborn babes,
loosed from our closing-eyes bodies,
it rocks in the wind
back and forth.
but no? wasn't that a bridge in South Dakota?

The moon shines down on the orchards,
clothed in a pale sundress
like a farmgirl
in her sunday best,
meeting a young lover beneath the apple
trees at twilight.
And the mist hangs down
over the farmhouses,
like it's sucking the ghosts
from the dirt,
But, no, that's a different night.

The road sings beneath our feet

and the car drifts towards the shoulder

and I feel like we're already gone

Mood

2009-03-19T16:56:00.003-05:00

I remembered what I was going to write about yesterday: sustainable transportation versus independence. I'm not in the mood right now, though, so I'll just throw the poetry update at you guys.

This is called My Mother's Vial, and it's written in the classic ballad form: alternating tetrameter and trimeter, as well as an abcb rhyme scheme.

This vial, in my mother's hand,
Her face turned to the wind.
It blew the dust of corn harvest
Across the hills; the tin

Plant, vile blight that it was, was
Blowing, porous pouring
To the sun. A china company
Used to hold there, blowing

Glass vials for lady's perfumes,
But now it's gone. A gift
From her mother, this small, fine craft
Glimmered among her favorite

Jewels – vials, lace, such things a young
Girl might want. This diamond
Has held perfume, has held her tears;
It held her cardamom,

Oregano, such things to flavor
What is not sweet. A pile
Of books she left me, and this: her
Life, stopped within this vial.

everything, in it's right place

2009-03-18T19:22:00.003-05:00

I've been really interested in the texture of things recently. But not just physical texture, but more the texture of something that we perceive with our other senses. That sounds odd, but consider: you can predict what something will feel like by looking at it, and whether those two things are the same or diverge, both the visual feel and the physical feel of the object in question are pleasurable to experience. The first day of break it was really warm, and I went on a walk, without any particular destination in mind. I ended up walking to Brewberry's, taking in many things I had not had the time to look at recently: the bark on trees, retaining walls, concrete, leaves, chairs, pants, clothes. All sorts of things. The point is, I didn't always touch them, I just appreciated the visual texture of the objects.

This can also be done with music, although differently. Music has an aural texture, something best seen in bands like Radiohead or other such very layered, very well-mixed offerings. Range has something to do with this, where on the landscape of sound (soundscape for lack of a better term -- just so that we're on the same page, I'm envisioning sort of a cartesian grid overlayed on a topographical map indicating aural qualitites) the song or work stretches, but depth does as well, local and global maxima and minima, but also permutations within a small sub-section of the landscape, the dF of the sound. But there are other senses that interact with music - all of them, actually, through everything from incidental associations of smells to embracing the mood inherent in a piece of music, to literally feeling the texture of that landscape.

I find it incredibly difficult to discuss specific examples, because writing itself removes a stimulus from it's native sense and transfer it into something else -- description, words, a prompt for the reader's own sense of imagination to take flight and form. And when describing this ... Synaesthesia, I'm removing something so far from it's original form that it might be impossible to reconstruct.

I think I'm going to struggle with this for a long while.

And...it's gone

2009-03-18T18:58:00.002-05:00

I had something to say when I opened up this tab. I don't anymore. So I'll talk about dry cleaners.

I'm sitting at Dunn's, and there's a Stoltz dry cleaners across the street. I can't read the numbers in "EST ....", but from the name I know that it was probably the first half of the 20th century -- "stolz" is "pride" in German. Every day I walk by it in some fashion, and almost every day I get covered in laundry smell. Laundry smell and I have an off-and-on relationship: sometimes I love it, but sometimes it makes me sick, throws my sinuses into disarray. This makes doing laundry difficult.

Among the list of things that make my sinuses jump: laundry, showers, water, changes in sunlight, kittens, blowing my nose, changes in temperature, summer days. A lot of those are rather nice things that I come across often, which makes me very sad. I think I can trace these issues to my deviated septum, something my mother points out nearly every time I see her. It's not a long or incredibly painful surgery, so I should probably do it. I'm just...human, and resistant to change.

Anyways, I haven't remembered yet what I was going to talk about, so I think that's it. :\ Have a nice day!

Midterms

2009-03-17T12:28:00.003-05:00

I just got my midterms back, and I currently am pulling all A's in my classes. This makes me so very happy, because I've been passively worried that I'm not putting in enough work, despite the fact that I don't do anything but homework. Still, :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D!

Bullseye

2009-03-17T12:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was a good day. Today will also be a good day, hopefully.

Yesterday I played music with Martin, did artwork, and had people over for poker and drinks. It was a really great time. Today I will be playing more music with Martin, and maybe going to a friend's for a St. Patrick's Day party?

I have a variety of errands I need to run, so I'm sorry for the shorter post. I usually get pretty wordy, though, ala very little substance, excessive words, so I guess you get a break from that? And there's no poetry, so you don't have to try and interpret or critique. So all in all this post isn't asking much from you. :P

I had a weird dream last night, where I was working at Target, and had a little boy, and I was playing with him while I was on break, and then I got off of work and went home. Somehow it managed to not be a nightmare, despite the fact that I had a kid and was working at Target. I think I remember it being my secondary source of income though, so that's a little better. I enjoyed my boy though. That was nice. :)

The sound of folding

2009-03-16T12:14:00.003-05:00

I'm out of money for Spring Break. That sounds like a ridiculous statement, I know, but it's true. If I use the same budgeting scheme I use every other month, then, thanks to a couple of particular purchases while my girlfriend was here, and thanks to a surprise trip to a restaurant last night, I now have no money to spend for the rest of break. Whoops. I'll probably end up withdrawing more money, but, really? Am I that bad at holding onto cash?

Today is music and poker, I believe. Martin's picking me up at some point and we're going to take the day practicing music. It should be fun. I'm a little tired right now, but I'm going to take a shower, get dressed, eat lunch and drink some tea. I should be good to go after that.

I just realized that I didn't post a poem last Thursday. I'm sorry for forgetting, I had a lot on my mind. The next day I had to take a test in my digital electronics class. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I think I did pretty well, but I guess we'll find out soon, as midterms were due ... yesterday? Today? Sometime next week they'll get posted, I'm guessing. Mac is really bad at deadlines, because professors are really bad at deadlines. I mean, just look at most research projects. :p

Anyways, I should probably post a poem! ::rummage rummage rummage:: Oh, on a side note, I cut myself opening up my patio door this morning, but I now have fresh air in my apartment!! Alright, this poem is currently titled Winter '09, just because that's when I wrote it and I can't think of another name. I like it, but I'm not quite sure yet what it's missing... the poem is in italics on this page, but the original has italicized portions, so those are the non-italicized portions of text.

The sidewalks are so slippery,
I stumbled and slid
But instead of a scowl I couldn't
Help but smile wide.
I step out onto the street
And the world is so Quiet...
Less than a block away
The details melt into silence, like
An MC Escher sketch where
You have to ask
What was just up ahead?

My ears are covered in it –
The sound of sand sliding in the air is
Like the flush of skirts and shirts
As my mother searches for me,
Hiding in the clothes racks
At the department store.
Spinning in circles,
Head tossed back, soft specks
On my cheeks, like a white gown surrounds me
And I remember that
This is the whole world,
Right here.

100

2009-03-15T23:56:00.002-05:00

My blog is now 100 posts old. Cool. Didn't realize time had gone so quickly. Speaking of old...

My computer is dying a slow painful death. The Windows side now occasionally loses track of the power connection, decides there's no battery, and promptly shuts down. It's really annoying when you're trying to kill a guy in WoW, or chat with Vinny, and then your computer dies, and it takes 15 minutes to start back up again, because Windows sucks. However, my Ubu partition is fine, and it never experiences this problem. I think something changed with the new bios I installed that affects control of the fan and heat dissipation, because the fan is also really loud whenever I've got Windows booted up.

I want to take this computer all the way through college, because I can't really afford to get a computer every two years. If something fails seriously, I may try to take advantage of my extended coverage plan at Best Buy that expires at the end of this coming summer, but I really hope ::knock on wood:: that nothing bad happens. I'm going to have to start backing up stuff, just in case.

Something I've been looking at is the possibility of getting a netbook and trying out using the cloud for everything. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, and my fingers are fairly large, but it would definitely be a change. And I don't play video games on my computer a whole lot anymore either, so that wouldn't be a serious issue. And if I did want to play games, good desktops are pretty cheap now that laptops are the standard.

I dunno, I'd really like to not have to replace my computer. That would be great with me.

Whoops

2009-03-15T10:33:00.003-05:00

Sorry I missed the update yesterday, it was a busy day. I also didn't have much to talk about, so I guess I'll talk about what I did yesterday, since it did take up a lot of time.

I woke up and went out to breakfast with my folks, which was nice. Apparently, my dad's worried that he's going to be laid off. I became aware of this situation one week ago, despite the fact that it's been going on for several months. ::facepalm:: So that's fun. It puts a brand new spin on being a Senior next year, and trying to make money this summer. Breakfast was good though. :) Eggs, hashbrowns and biscuits with gravy. Yum.

After that I sat around for a while and then went to Baker's Square to have pie with some friends who came back to town on Spring Break. I didn't get pie, but we sat around talking for a while anyways, and then went to the liquor store and then called it a day.

I ended up going out for coffee later with one of that group of people, which was a great time. We sat around talking for about 3 hours, and had a very good talk. I then went to a party at another friend's house that was kind of low-key, and sort of ... interesting. There weren't very many people there, and there were one or two pretty bad awkward silences. People had just run out of things to say for a little bit. :\

That was my day. Today I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I don't think that much. I'd like to play it much more low-key. We'll see how successful I am at that.

The path's clear ahead, and hope's not dead.

2009-03-13T17:14:00.003-05:00

Spring break woooooo!

Now that I've gotten that over with, let's get down to serious business ... ok, yeah, I've got nothing.

My Digital Electronics test this afternoon went really well. It was a good test - not easy, but not difficult either. If you knew it, it took you an hour to do, if you didn't already know it, you probably didn't finish. Good test. Nice and rigorous. I liked it. I also think I did pretty well.

Spring break is full of plans...sort of. Not really? I guess the most I have planned is that there's going to be an open mic, there may be a hello blacksmith show and I'm eating chili tonight. That's about all I have figured out. The best thing? (inb4 sometimes they come from desperation) No homework, no to-do list for an entire week! Doesn't being a student rock?

It's a Friday night, the week is just starting, I've got coffee, drink, food, a guitar and a burning desire to engage in creation. It's a Friday night, and it's above freezing in Minnesota. Fuck yeah.

None of them along the line know what this is worth

2009-03-12T15:14:00.003-05:00

I started exercising again this week. It started off on Thursday when I didn't have lab but went to my professor's research presentation. I had a final the next morning, and felt like maybe exercise would do me some good. I hadn't had time/motivation to exercise for the past several weeks, due to homework, Aeva, and just a lack of nourishing impulses, so I was feeling pretty disgusted with my body. Like, I'm so skinny that you can clearly see when I haven't been exercising or eating well because there's nothing to hide lack of nutrition or lack of muscle. So anyways, in an effort to become stronger, be able to run cross country again and look better, I wanted to start working out again. Also, inb4 zombie apocalypse.

So on Tuesday, even though I really didn't want to, I walked over to the athletic center, known variously as the MARC and the Leonard Center. I changed, filled up my apple-juice bottle come water bottle (I <3 glass containers) and walked into the fitness side of the workout area.

As an aside, this place is practically palatial. There are about 25-30 fitness machines and probably double that in weight machines. The freeweights section looks like a fully stocked bar on a Friday night and, depending on who's there at the time, is nearly as busy. By and large two groups use the fitness center: athletes and women. I have a hard time identifying any man I see in there as not an athlete; most of those I do determine to not be athletes are alumni or professors. I guess staying fit is not important to Mac guys.

This was at about 5:00 on a Tuesday, where class ends for the most part at 4:30, with only a handful of 5-6:30 classes still going. So the place was packed. None of the ellipticals were open, none of the treadmills were free; the only thing available for use was bikes. There are two variety of exercise bikes in popular use: the upright bike, which is traditionally how bikes work, and the horizontal bike, which is like a row machine for your legs. Having never used one of those before, I decided to try it out.

For those who are interested, it's very similar to normal biking. It felt like it was using the same muscles, and I felt the same burn in the same places. It was easier on my crotch but harder on my ass -- in addition to diamonds, I can also cleave my own muscle and skin. It also solved my main problem with upright bike machines: being so far off the ground. Being lower to the ground, like on a proper bike, gave me much more confidence, and also made me feel like I wasn't really exercising, considering my seated position. Anyways, tldr; I biked 6.8 miles in 25 minutes, with the last .8 miles being a 5 minute cooldown.

After that I did an upper body workout, trying to hit all of the big muscles: rowing for upper back, chest press, shoulder press, crunches. Also, smaller muscle groups: bicep curls, tricep extensions, gratuitous amounts of stretching.

Earlier in the semester, I was trying to exercise twice a week and I found I was forgetting the weight levels I used. I've solved that problem now. Not by writing it down, as you would expect, oh no, that would be too easy: I've chosen a much more enjoyable form of memorization. Exercising every day, alternating between upper and lower body workouts after 20 or so minutes of cardio.

This may sound like a lot, but I don't reach my "cardio workout heart rate" or whatever until about 12 minutes into a continuous, strenuous exercise. Vinny said, "I'm glad it's not me." I would have to respond, "Then it's a good thing it's me doing it."

Talkdo

2009-03-11T20:34:00.004-05:00

Spurred by a twitter conversation with Jake, I've decided to try and update this blog at least once a day. We'll try for the next week, and if I'm dying of typing too much, or I just plain have nothing to say, then I'll give it up, but I may just find I have enough to say to fill a blog post every day. There goes that rhyme again. Hm... I wonder if poetry counts? I would say yes. Then again, I write quite a few poems in a week, so it could just become all poems if I'm not careful. I'll have to think on this.

I was invited today to join my professor's research project this summer. It's currently a team of 4, my professor Shilad and three students, and since two of the other students just received notification of funding from the school, he has room on his budget for another researcher, which is pretty awesome. My school doesn't have a lot of opportunities for research, much less small-team research -- most research opportunities are only during the summer and only with you and the professor, and maybe one other student.

Anyways, the project itself is called PoliWiki. The idea is that the only political wiki, or really political knowledge aggregation site at all, is Wikipedia, and due to NPOV, users can't be subjective about a topic, and pages with a lot of debate behind them, particularly political articles, are often locked as a result of slander, rapid editing, "graffiti" and so on. The idea is to give users a wiki-like format in which to create articles adhering to an MPOV style - multiple points of view. The basic idea so far (I saw a talk on it yesterday) is to frame issues, candidates and races in terms of a question, and then a collection of articles representing different viewpoints would follow.

There's a lot of things yet to be decided, but it should suffice to say that the project is quite intriguing. I should also point out that I haven't accepted the offer yet, as I'm waiting to here back from, like, 7 other programs I've applied to that won't get back to me until April. The good thing is that he's not really looking at anyone else, so I don't have to worry about other hypothetical "applicants" stealing my spot.

Notes to self: Stop trying to use Vim commands in every other text editor.~~bbi~~ It doesn't work. :w Also, talk to Susan about Honors projects, as the school has no direct information on them.

Days in, feet out, sheet, not blanket

2009-03-11T16:12:00.003-05:00

Here's my to-do list for this week, abbreviated. The important parts are on there:

To Do

Be Awesome. Always
~~Get HW3 sorting with a limit on the number of threads Sat/Sun~~
~~Read corn~~
~~Read norton Sun~~
~~Fix Vilanelle Mon~~
~~Study for O.S. Mon/Tues~~
~~Digi Problem Set 4 Mon/Tues~~
Study for Digi Wed/Thur
Multi Hw 7 Wed/Thur

This is an average week for me, but that first one is the most important part. :)

On the subject of lists, and music recommendations, here's my listening list for yesterday:

Audition by P.O.S
Kid A by Radiohead
Keep Guessin' by Hockey Night
Meat Tape

Return of the me.

2009-03-09T15:09:00.004-05:00

Hello all, I hope your midterms, finals and miscellaneous projects are going well. I'm back from my week of internet exile, in before blog closed due to gf, and I'm just in time for... hey now, who put my midterms right after my girlfriend's spring break? This is not fair. Oh, well. I've only got two tests, and I've already finished/am finishing most of my homework for the week. It shouldn't be too bad. And then it's my spring break to round off the the little three-week period here, and everybody's coming home! Well, almost everybody. A lot of people. Regardless, it'll be a good time. We may even have enough people for an open mic.

I really like the new picture for my blog, as an aside. It fits well, with the theme, with the original work I yy'd the title from, with who I am and where I live. Thank you, google.

On the subject of art, as once upon a time this was my art update day, I haven't had much time to practice much of anything. I barely have time to keep up on my weekly poetry writing assignments for class, much less practice my acoustic music, practice hello blacksmith, write new music, revise lyrics, prep for spoken word stuff, etc. I'm afraid that if I don't dedicate my life to these things, this is how it will always be. That scares me more than anything right now.

Speaking of things that scare me, such as real life, jobs, applying for internships and where I'm going to be this summer, I applied for a real internship, finally. Like, with a company, as opposed to a research opp at a different college. Like, this one. So...we'll wait and hear about that.

I'm competing in a poetry slam at the end of the month. This makes me happy, and not very worried at all.

Welcome

2009-03-01T09:20:00.002-06:00

I don't know why that post title is there. <.< >.>

Anyways, my girlfriend's going to be here in like 2 hours, so don't expect much updating from me. I'm going to have a hard enough time juggling her and class and schoolwork. Still, thinking of all of you. Have good weeks.

Erfworld has taken an interesting and possibly (probably) tragic turn. They update so slow...I mean, more often than the VGCats guy, but that's not hard to do at all. Good story though.

Bumming around

2009-02-28T11:23:00.003-06:00

Waiting to go to my friend Vinny's house for a Shadowrun game. Should be sweet. Merge sort haunts me; I got it working with threads, yay! Now I have to implement a lock and a global variable to control how many threads are out there. So...only a little bit of coding and a LOT of debugging away. I'm trying to get ahead in homework for this week so that I have to do as little as possible while my girlfriend is here. Still, I think she might just see that my life here is all homework, and very little else. Like, sure I'm going to Vinny's this afternoon, but I'm also bringing along English reading and my Digital Electronics textbook to get my boolean logic homework done. I mean....

Also, although it's cool that when you search for "merge left wikipedia" the first result on google is merge sort @ wikipedia, I kind of wanted to not deal with that today.

Poem? Yeah, let's put a poem up. This is the "rebel sonnet" (see earlier post if you're confused) that I actually turned in. I'm not satisfied with the other other one yet. Perhaps later. Anyway, Blue-Black Bell by That One Famous Poet:

my subject
is Death. it rings blue
in reflection, some object
split into bite-sized pieces for this stew
my sometimes-mine lover is
making. she's alright.
beauty truly is not all there is,
and there is truth in this sweet repose of endless black night...
Death's faceω haunts me. it's true, i'm uninspired
by the women in my life, and fully willing to discuss my own
surely impending death – after all, life is just a journey from placenta to pyre
and who are we to doubt the soft feel of life's nightgown?
can we truly question a life torn from blackened ember?
when the blue-black bell for my last hour tolls, i wish to be thinking of Her.

ωThe concept of Death can be pretty scary, but
Gaiman told me she's quite a babe.

Roflcopter

2009-02-27T00:23:00.002-06:00

So, I'm implementing a merge sort in C for my OS class. The spin is that it has to use threads, specifically the pthreads library. It also has to be able to be limited in the number of threads it can use. I've gotten the first part done, figuring out how to do merge sort with pointers. I had made a text file to be sorted the other day, and just threw a bunch of stuff in there that came to mind: excerpts include "boy", "girl", "ping", "stuff" and "romani". Pretty stream of conscious. One of the things in there was "tux!"

When I went to test the program for the first time, I figured I should take a quick look at the text file. I switched "tux!" to "tux" just in case some weird error happened. My program happily sorted the file. So then I went and switched it back. No problem. Then I got curious. What happens if I give it "tux" and "tux!"? It was ordered just like that. So that got me thinking, "Wow, I wonder what the ASCII ordering for punctuation marks is?" So I typed in "tux," "tux." and "tux?" as well. When ordered, that small section gave me my poem for today's Gedichte des Donnerstags.

tux
tux!
tux,
tux.
tux?
ubuntu

Rebel Sonnet failures (or rather, near misses)

2009-02-24T21:06:00.002-06:00

I'm guessing the next couple of posts will be poems that I tried to write for the "rebel sonnet" assignment, which is a poem that remotely has anything to do with the sonnet form but makes choices to avoid the form in other ways. This means...just about anything. There are a variety of interesting ideas that can come. One of the most famous "rebel sonnets" is Terrance Hayes' Sonnet:

We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.
We cut the watermelon into smiles.

Mine is much worse. This is the rebel sonnet that I like least. We'll probably do 2 or so more of the four or five different poems I wrote, and one of them will be the poem I turned in. This is Hip Hop,:

Hip hop,

Please don't ever stop
Lovin' us as much as we love you,
We keep you alive
You keep us movin on through
To better days, as long as we strive
To beat the breakbread breakbeat
Of 9-5, in every way.
We abuse you, sweet
Woman, use you, and I know there ain't no way
You ain't out grown your birthplace.
We don't wanna, but we gotta unchain the leash, let go the lease
And let you get a taste
Of the freedom in pure release.

Sam Devine

2009-02-23T17:13:00.001-06:00

There’s a man
Who walks this streets
Drinks our blood
As easily
As wine –
Sam Devine.

My mother always told me
“Beware the beaten path:
Beware the friendly strangers
Who watch you from their hats.”
But I have found
The underground
And the lesser marked trail
Hold greater tears
And greater fears
And many more deadly tales.

There’s a man
Who walks this streets
Drinks our blood
As easily
As wine –
Sam Devine.

It was in broken twilight
Down the dark alley I ran.
A bag of groceries in my hand
My source of fear a man.
He followed me,
Relentlessly,
His eyes were full of red.
His skin was pale,
His hands were frail,
He looked as if one dead.

There’s a man
Who walks this streets
Drinks our blood
As easily
As wine –
Sam Devine.

And if he catches you, my friend,
Take a bullet to the head.
‘Cause when his teeth your bloodline prick,
You’d better off be dead.

Scraps

2009-02-22T13:11:00.000-06:00

In progress:

Rather

Rather
Empty my chest cavity than open up,
Rather
Cut wrists – fan blades on low, so slow,
So stop-start – than reach out-connect.
Rather
Leave this in silence: I have plenty to say, I just ...
Can't think in time to your rhythm, syncopated
Against the grain, words cut bare,
I always walk home in silence.
I always climbed trees to get off the earth,
Rather
Like a bird with clipped wings.

Rearmament

2009-02-19T14:43:00.001-06:00

This is the poem I wrote for the blank verse assignment that fell over the weekend I went to Morris.

We wake to leave this town we slept in, two
Days lost to adventure. The war is done,
For now. Vinny sleeps beside me: bright sun
Too much for eyes not used to squinting, and
The plains give no cover from light of day.

Détente is fought on streets that stand empty –
The trenches dug in muddy snow banks, in
The mall with copy printer paper signs
Read “FOR LEASE,” in the coffee shop, at home.

The people of the town hide in their homes
On the days we are there. They fill up Don's
But are gone by the time the students rise.
An Ag-town, these people work their own farms,
Run their own shops, raise their own children, but –
We come and bring chaos, riotous smoke,
The sound of laughter at 4 a. m.

The battle starts quiet: someone runs past
With bottle in hand, a scowl is heard
And the soft curve of a police cruiser
Is seen rounding the block – no lights, not yet,
And as the party waves to the car with
Their ruddy, smiling faces, “Carry on”
Echoes weary across the space.

And, moving away from my personal life...

2009-02-19T11:05:00.002-06:00

I'm currently writing a poem in my head about falling bricks instead of doing my Electronics homework. This poem is about actual falling bricks, not tetris. Although that would be pretty cool.

2009-02-16T22:28:00.002-06:00

My dog has 4 bumps on her abdomen. I have a large spot on my arm.

There are three moments in my life when I lost my innocence. I can remember all of them vividly, and they hurt just as bad now as they did then.

Getting ready for more shell coding.

2009-02-14T21:10:00.002-06:00

Every time time my hair gets long enough to get a haircut, I revisit the question of whether I could grow a pony-tail and have it look good. Meh.

Also, this shell is really complicated. Like, I knew it would be, but holy crap. I'm getting better at using vim, but I feel like this is just something I have to use for years.

Got bookcases today with my folks. We spent the entire day with eachother, it was really nice. Got breakfast at Baker's Square, and then we went to Ikea and looked at bookcases. It took forever, because I had no idea what I wanted when I walked in, so we left at 3:00 in the afternoon. Went back to my apartment, put them together, and cleaned a LOT of stuff. I think you could call me "moved in" at this point. The bookcase looks wonderful, much thanks to my parents for that.

Still looking for something to do this summer. I've got 3 things to apply for in the next month, hopefully Libby either gets back to me at some point or I can talk Shilad into doing it. I tried applying for things this weekend, but my advisor (Libby), failed to provide me with my needed second recommendation, so I couldn't even finish the apps. :(

I've started writing a bit more, went back and revised some hb stuff today; I'm trying to explore the limits of two-man more. I think I'm slowly reaching it, like, the limit as awesome approaches infinite of two guys making punk music.

Hope and the Voice Now Risen

2009-02-13T18:29:00.001-06:00

This is the inauguration poem I wrote for my class assignment.

We have doubts. Let them be laid to rest as
We have laid fathers, mothers, sons and daughters;
We have not buried hate, though he is our Caesar,
We have not struck the knife through the whole
Of prejudice, of inequality.
To reach this day, we have triumphed; the fight
Was long, the war not yet won. Hate is sly:
It is not a villain to be faced head on,
Equality must be lived, justice must be breathed
Deep into our lungs. Breathe deep of the day.

Deep into the night we often sink, let
Others be bygones, grace these ghost sounds with
Silence... but silence does not raise a hand.
Silence does not speak up at hate and fear –
Silence is complicit. Our eyes have seen
Terror, our mouths have cried "Once!"
Our ears have heard "Enough."
One nation, still divided, stands before
A yawning chasm, of gnashing teeth, meat
And shadows. Dark falls on our windowsills,
Dark falls on our hands at work or at play,
And the beast still seeks to swallow us whole,
To drown us in darkness.
We must not falter, fall to old judgments,
Unless we pay the price, lost to a sea
Of doubt. Sly hate. If we do not stand together
We will not stand much longer through this night.

Dawn is breaking red, read upon its lips
Is not our destination. No. We see
The path we have to walk, and hope.

Thru-sdays

2009-02-13T18:07:00.001-06:00

I realize that I forgot to post yesterday; I have a poem ready on my Linux side, I'm currently booted into Windows. I was sick for most of yesterday, so I have a good excuse. I'll get it up by sleepy time tonight.

2009-02-10T11:03:00.001-06:00

Spring is coming, I can feel it in my veins.

A ripe old age, Just doing the best I can.

2009-02-10T09:57:00.002-06:00

It takes me a long time to like new music. That's not true. What I mean is, it takes a long time for me to get used to a band that I like's new music. For example, Float is very different than Flogging Molly's other albums, and, although I enjoy listening to it, I had to get used to it at first, and I still don't always listen to it when I listen to the others. Another good example is Somewhere in the Between by Streetlight Manifesto - it has a very different sound from their other albums, and although I liked the album, I didn't like it with their others, it felt out of place. Listening to the discography on shuffle finally solved that problem, but still.

It comes down to experimentalism. I really really would rather bands not sit on their laurels and pump out the same music they did before over and over again, and almost all bands are actually incapable of doing so; some are, but they're special. I would never be able to not be affected by the growth or lack of growth, or whatever is or isn't going on around me enough to not change my music somehow album to album, much less day to day or show to show. Everytime I play my music, I think, I could do this differently, or, adding a fill here would make this better, or, this song would sound good with multiple tracks.

The best example of a band that experiments would be either: a) Sonic Youth or BBB. The former is notorious for their strangeness and experimentalism, and BBB is a band that goes from being a hardcore band in 2005 to a hardcore band with an "aeriel keyboard" as they put it in 2007, and now they're just fucking weird. I don't always like what they play, but they're trying different stuff, you know?

I've started playing guitar again, I haven't been for a couple weeks, due to the start of school, the vagaries of life, etc. There are certain things I want to get better at before I start writing music again though, just to create a variety in my work. I'd hate to listen to myself for an entire album. Or even 1 song. How do you do it?

Back in the cities! Wooo.

2009-02-08T21:05:00.003-06:00

I'm back to the Cities, in my apartment. I'm very sleepy. It was nice seeing everyone though! :) I had a good time. I'm going to play a little WoW, call my girlfriend, and go to sleep. I may write a poem for homework, or start it at least, before I pass out, but then again, I may not.

I got home and discovered I had left my coffee machine on all weekend. Whoops.