Take me to New York

Posted on 20th January 2011 in Something Daily

I started this morning, my last day in Downingtown for the winter, by attempting to install WordPress (where? I don’t know), because I’d read that that was the requirement for installing plugins. Only about three hours later did I discover that without a 3rd party web host, this is impossible. I banged my head against the wall for quite a while only to realize that what I was attempting was impossible. Great job! I did buy a new domain name, though – through WordPress, not a 3rd party. It’s a lot more expensive to get one from an outside source. You’ll notice, though, that it’s no longer “threestegosaurusmoon.wordpress.com” – it’s just “threestegosaurusmoon.com”. For only 17 bucks a year. Sweet. The longer URL still redirects here, obviously, but it’s less to remember now.

I’m now on a bus to New York after winter break slightly overstayed its welcome, listening to Funcrusher Plus and imagining all the Chrono Trigger I’ll be able to play in the next few days. Seriously, it’s such a good game. The only other RPG I’ve ever played is Pokemon, and I feel like a big part of the reason I’m so into Chrono Trigger is that I’m so unfamiliar with the genre. Since I haven’t become desensitized to the idiosyncrasies of RPGs yet, everything that it throws at me seems fresh. I don’t really understand yet why it’s known as such an incredible game – I mean, I’m sure it is, I just haven’t found out the reason yet. So far, I’m just enjoying the ride of leveling everybody up and meeting the enemies. Chrono Trigger does make me feel a bit dorkier than the average game does, probably because to talk about it requires one to at least mention the levels that the characters can go through; it’s pretty likely that I also end up naming a bunch of different weapons they carry (“Yeah, I thought about it, but I decided to switch the red katana to the iron rod – way more HP, dude”). It’s just got a pretty high dork potential. Funny, I don’t think twice about how I talk about the shooters or nintendo games I play.

I’m also looking forward to having my Steam games back again – I made the egregious error of putting the game files on an external drive and then leaving that drive in my apartment over break, so I got home and found myself Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Portal-less. I have a lot of catching up to do, and a lot of new things to start learning and accomplishing. I’m going to skateboard more; skating over break ended up being mostly a fantasy, as it snowed constantly when I was home. I’m going to catch up on some much-needed gaming time, chill with my roomdogs, and get ready for some sweet classes in the coming semester. Data Structures is going to be rad, as is Recording Tech. I can’t wait.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job! is mostly an absurd parody of public access television. It’s really, really funny if you like non sequitur and absurdism (and you have a strong stomach). But seriously, it’s a sweet awesome show. Also, xkcd is quite clever, and Dinosaur Comics…isn’t. But they’re both rad, and I’ve read all of them. Also Amazing Superpowers and Dr. McNinja are sweet. If you were looking for some webcomics to waste your evening on, there you go. You can thank me now or later, whenever is good for you.

Alright, this is it: time to start having some more hilarious and interesting thoughts! I can already feel my creativity returning! Yeah ok…we’ll see about that.

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An Incomplete List of Movies and Music that have Made Me Cry

Posted on 19th January 2011 in Something Daily

I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of listening to Enema of the State. I don’t listen to Blink-182 for the middle-school nostalgia, despite the fact that that would be a great excuse. I actually got into them just before coming to school. Pop-punk is sweet, don’t worry about it. I like how shiny and ‘produced’ Blink sound on that album, like that one Sum 41 album that has “Fat Lip” on it, and Dookie by Green Day. Those have the sound that I love, and the whiny teenage lyrics that I don’t really care about pretending not to love. I mention this because, as i sit here in my parents’ dining room, my laptop, trackball, and external drives spread out around me, typing whatever pops into my head, I am blasting the previously mentioned Blink-182 album in my earbuds and mentally adding a major 3rd harmony to every single vocal line, because even if it’s not ‘there’, it’s still there – and if it’s not, it should be. It’s not like I have any big memories attached to Enema, I guess it’s just the feeling. – I just noticed that at the beginning of “The Party Song”, you can hear Mark saying “here we go, motherfuckers”. As I mentioned, this album will never get old to me.

Also, the Green Day American Idiot broadway show was fairly rad. I don’t know if it’s still running, but I liked it when I saw it back in September. I cried a little bit during the title song.

  • Also at the end of the Peter Jackson King Kong movie, when the planes keep shooting him and his girlfriend is freaking out;
  • also during the Extras finale when Ricky Gervais looks right at the camera and apologizes to Maggie;
  • also at about six different points throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy, including “You shall not pass!” and Theoden’s pep talk before the battle of Pelennor Fields where he hits everybody’s spears with his sword;
  • also the first section of “Echoes” from Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii;
  • also when Largeman and Sam kiss in the rain to Simon and Garfunkel in Garden State;
  • also at the part in the live version of “And You and I” where the build ends and they go to the “I listened hard but could not see” section;
  • also the second verse of Yes’ “Sound Chaser” from Relayer

That’s enough for now; seriously, I could go on.

I have this bad habit of getting totally obsessed with a project until it’s finished. It happened a few weeks back when I reworked my automatic data backups, and when I thought I was going to get totally into drawing, both to varying degrees. Something similar happened this morning when I got it in my head that today was the day I would finally draw the new header for this website. I worked from about 11 AM to 6 PM without stopping or eating, scanning each section of this new monstrosity separately, eventually creating this…thing right here.

I think it looks wonderfully homebrewed. We’ve got a stegosaurus, a Gameboy, an LED, a capacitor, and a little pink guy all hanging out and playing some classic video games. They’re having fun. I wish I had a sentient Gameboy to chill with. Break would have been significantly more fun, at least. I realize that there’s only one stegosaurus on it, and no moon to be seen. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, I hope you like it, but that’s where my involvement with your opinion on the matter ends. If you don’t like it…..GTFO. Or wait a few months for the day when I get bored with it and make a new one.

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A Big Picture of the Desert

Posted on 18th January 2011 in Something Daily

I got back from Las Vegas today after a delayed flight and I’m very tired. I did spend a few minutes hacking together one of the panoramas I took of the mountains in Nevada/Arizona. Check it out.

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I’m going back to NYC the day after tomorrow, and until then, I plan to be sleeping quite a bit to make up for my jet lag. Blue Man Group was nuts, by the way.

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Military Spiders

Posted on 16th January 2011 in Something Daily

Driving around the Mojave and sightseeing with my family today, I keep noticing when I walk past some strangers lining up a photo of their friends against the scenery: there’s a single moment as I walk behind the photographer at which I can see the photo framed exactly as it’s being taken. It’s funny moving around in the three-dimensional world and quickly an clearly being able to see a recognizable two-dimensional moment existing temporarily from a camera’s point of view. At the Hoover Dam today, I walked behind a guy photographing his friend with the big bridge and the sun as a backdrop; as I crossed the axis of the camera’s vision, I saw the sun and the bridge framed nicely behind the subject. Interesting to see a photo opportunity unfold from the viewpoint of the camera.

Speaking of, I used my camera slideshow to preview the two amateur, tripodless panoramas I attempted in the desert, and they appear to have turned out much better than I could have hoped. Assembling them in Gimp will be a new experience, but the raw materials are there. I don’t especially want to post trip photos here, but those will definitely go up if they turn out as planned.

I am holding out for some In-n-Out Burger tonight; I want to order from the secret menu. I don’t even know what’s on it, I really just want to be able to say that I did it. I did a little bit of freehand programming today. Oh, also, I took a tour of a haunted gold mine. That’s right…….haunted.

There are only three full days between now and my most triumphant return to New York City, Room 9050, and the man club. Get excited, because it means less suck and more awesome.

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Pancakes in the Age of Enlightenment

Posted on 15th January 2011 in Something Daily

I spent the bulk of this morning and afternoon hiking around the Red Rock area of the mountains surrounding Las Vegas. It’s my mom’s birthday, which means that today, more than any other of my break days, she is in control of my activities (a fact that I admit but don’t care to endure for long periods of time). Not that hiking around today wasn’t enjoyable – the mountains out here are beautiful, and I was able to attempt a few tripodless 360 degree panoramas. I can’t wait to patch them together and see if my hands are as steady as I think they are. We’re seeing Penn & Teller tonight, and I’m certainly looking forward to it. I saw them on TV once and I remember it being funny.

I’m in the middle of a book I recieved for Christmas that comprises a collection of essays on video games, written from a philosophical/media studies perspective by an NYU professor. Right now, the book is discussing the orgins of the first person shooter genre by examining films that have utilized the subjective camera perspective that typifies FPS. The author mentions Robocop and Terminator as examples of the first-person perspective being used to indicate an inhuman or computerized consciousness. It’s not a very difficult connection to make, but it’s very interesting to read it in such a deliberate style. It’s also making me think about the games that I play (due in part to the plentiful citations and examples the author uses) in a new way. It’s great that someone is taking the time and effort to consider video games with the same mindset we see applied to film and literature. But what in the world do I know about philosophy? A little. But not too much.

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The Real Caesars Palace

Posted on 14th January 2011 in Something Daily

Today’s the first full day of my family’s trip to Las Vegas. There’s no free wifi in the hotel, so I’m forced to type this on my dad’s iPhone. Having come from the east coast, I’m extremely jet-lagged; I’d be exhausted anyway, as today and yesterday were quite busy. Yesterday afternoon was filled with the plane ride, and this morning involved a helicopter trip from Vegas to the Grand Canyon. I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I was a little nervous, but it was, of course, totally rad (also because the pilot played the Top Gun theme as we took off and swooped around over the city, and “Ride of the Valkyries” as we entered he canyon. I felt like I was in Apocalypse Now).

Apart from this, it occurred to me today that it’s very plausible that the movie “The Hangover” is nothing more than a very funny advertisement for this city. Actually, I think it seems likely. My family walked back and forth through Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio today until we were totally toasted. We did manage to see the fountain show (which of course I remember from the opening credits of The Hangover), and we walked around the strip a bit as well.

I can’t make any promises about how often I’ll be able or willing to update on this trip, especially because typing on an iPhone is stinky. And I feel strange writing about a vacation. Hopefully I’ll be able to find enough awesome stuff going on to keep it rad.

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Jake the Dog and Finn the Human

Posted on 13th January 2011 in Something Daily

I remember seeing a funny youtube cartoon way back in about 11th grade called Adventure Time where Jake the Dog and Finn the Human battled the Ice King to save Princess Rainicorn and also met Abraham Lincoln on Mars. If you’ve never seen it, I’m sure you can just tell from the description that it’s awesome; and if you still don’t, the fact that Finn’s exclamations are stuff like “mathematical!” and “rhombus!” should help you out. The point is that I saw this little eight-or-so minute video back in high school and thought it was awesome, and then recently learned that it was the pilot for a Cartoon Network show, and that the ensuing show is my new favorite cartoon (with the possible exception of Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Adventure Time has this crazy sensibility that allows it to do stuff like having Finn’s voice be autotuned whenever he sings, or giving the two a pet computer that loves to dance. I don’t know if those are great examples, but you get the idea. There is, however, a fair chance that the actual reason I like Adventure Time is that everything is so cute. They all have little mouths and little eyes and little legs and that makes them adorable. I mean, Adventure Time is great for other reasons. The guy who voices Bender on Futurama also voices Jake the Dog. It’s just pretty unpredictable in everything it does – voices, characters, animation, et cetera. Watch Adventure Time. Or don’t.

I’ve been reacquainted with the apparently inexhaustible power of Mastodon’s Leviathan to make me totally wired. I’ve also been reacquainted with the difficulty of Diddy Kong Racing for N64. For someone used to playing (and pretty good at) Mario Kart 64, getting back into Diddy Kong Racing is a challenge indeed. A big issue is that the game requires you to place first before advancing. Another big issue is those horrible silver coin challenges.

Better charge my iPod battery – I’ve got a long plane ride coming up tonight. I wish I had remembered to put “A Space Oddity” back on my iPod – I always loved to listen to that song as my plane was taking off and try to time it so that the drop after the big ascending bit (some would call it the ‘second half’) would time up exactly with the wheels leaving the runway. I did that a lot on Rock School trips when I was pretty scared of flying – David Bowie helped me out. I’m pretty sure there was only one time when I actually managed to get the song to sync up correctly. I’d usually just keep restarting it over and over and then be right at the beginning when we took off. This kind of thing is fun for me, apparently. Wish me luck on my Bowie-less flight.

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Here We Go

Posted on 12th January 2011 in Something Daily

The resting part of my break is now over. I’m leaving with my family for Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon, and I’m only partially looking forward to it. I got home this evening to a house full of the frantic, stressed-out family trip dynamic, and I’m doing everything I can not to be pulled into that mindset. It happened on both of the other trips that we went on this break, and I’m sure this one will be no different. So as long as I’m able to avoid being affected too much by that aspect of the trip, the rest of it should actually be pretty fun. We’re going to see the Blue Man Group (hopefully I see Tobias) and Penn & Teller, as well as taking some jeep trips to various destinations. I don’t know, I really hope it’s fun. I’m worried. I get worried about stuff. However enjoyable or otherwise this experience ends up being, I do have only eight days until I go back to school…such a long break! I’m looking forward to a nice, long time at school – like, a lot. This has been going on for too long. Time to end it.

I finally managed to catch up with a highschool friend today, who I’d been missing quite a lot, as she goes to school in California. We had a fire and hot chocolate. I also picked up my SNES games today. The end is near.

Well, cool. Family vacations are not my favorite, this is for sure. I hope it goes well. Goodnight.

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Time to get outside

Posted on 11th January 2011 in Something Daily

First of all, I have a few corrections to make to yesterday’s guide. As it turns out, turning off journaling on an HFS+ partition is not a good idea. There is a (slightly more involved) method of getting read permission from Ubuntu, which is outlined here. Essentially, this tutorial boils down to using a new admin account to change the default Ubuntu UID and GID to those of their OS X counterparts. I could reproduce the instructions here, but I don’t really feel like it. Suffice to say that sudo fdisk -l will get you a list of the volumes on your drive, and adding [os x partition] /mnt/mac hfsplus user,ro 0 0 to /etc/fstab will cause your OS X partition to automount (albeit in read-only mode).

Those small tidbits are the result of a considerable effort today, during which I spent a lot of time attempting to gain the permissions in order to symlink my home directories together. Also, I learned that one of my portable hard drives may be breaking. At one point, I managed to lock myself out of my iTunes Music directory, which was certainly an interesting problem to troubleshoot. The point is that I spent pretty much my whole day doing this, and the payoff is rather tiny. I don’t even have write permission yet….bummer. I also woke up early this morning to drive out to Phoenixville so the allergy doctors could stick stuff up my nose – the uncomfortable feeling in the back of my throat still hasn’t completely cleared up.

I’m leaving with my family soon for our trip to Arizona/Las Vegas, and I don’t think I’ll be bringing my computer with me. As such, I’ll be blogging from my iPod when time and proximity to wifi allow (both of which I assume will be negligible). But going on this trip means that I’m getting very close to my return to NYC! As should be glaringly obvious from my posts, I am quite excited to be back in the city, and to start classes again. Data Structures will be cool. I don’t know how much I’ll get to post in the next few days, but hopefully it’ll be enough to satiate my desire for a feeling of productivity.

Check it out: I found a profile on Shigeru Miyamoto in the New Yorker today. It’s old, but still.

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More Like HFS Minus

Posted on 10th January 2011 in Something Daily

After being thoroughly disappointed by last night’s almost come-from-behind Eagles failure, I once again did what I seem to do best recently: hang out with Eric, watch Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and play Chrono Trigger. Last night was pretty much my last chance to do that, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s great to know that I always have that to come back to – no matter how awkward things may get with any of my friends as time passes, I’m not too worried about Eric. This guy is the man.

So I wanted to get this out of the way early this morning, by letting you know that I made a new computing-related discovery today. I was doing my morning stretches and I wanted to listen to some music. I opened up Rhythmbox on my Ubuntu partition and discovered that every song on The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was ending after about seven seconds. Bummer. I found out that something quite similar was happening to a lot of my other music, and that some songs hadn’t even been copied at all. When I created the Ubuntu partition, I copied all of my music from my HFS+ external HD to the Rhythmbox folder, and had been living with that pretty happily. But certain songs hadn’t been working completely, and others didn’t copy.

Obviously, this is most certainly not ok. At first I tried recopying the files, but the same thing kept happening: a file actions error that said “Error splicing file: input/output error”. I figured that, since all of the music was still on the OS X partition of my computer’s internal HD, that there was probably a way to read the music directly from there. A symbolic link was obviously the way to go, but I had to get over the challenge of writing changes to the read-only HFS+ partition from Ubuntu. As it was, I couldn’t link across filesystems because Rhythmbox doesn’t run with root permissions. I learned from the Ubuntu forums that the solution here is to disable journaling on the HFS+ filesystem – accomplished by determining the ID of the volume with (in the Mac Terminal) diskutil list, then sudo diskutil disablejournal /dev/[ID], replacing [ID] with the ID that you found the in the list. After that, solving my problem was as simple as making a symbolic link connecting my Ubuntu and Mac music folders – ln -s /media/Macintosh HD/Users/[yourMacName]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music /home/[yourUbuntuName]/Music in the Linux terminal. Of course, this only works when the Mac volume is mounted in Ubuntu, but if it is, I’m good to go. Hopefully my findings are helpful.

UPDATE: after a bit more research, I discovered that disabling journaling is probably not the best way to go, as it can be dangerous if your system crashes. Here’s a walkthrough I found that does it another way, which I just got to work for me.

Also today I completed my mission of cracking the passwords of the three major operating systems when I tried the password tool on my newly burned Hiren’s Boot CD. I was a little nervous to try it out, because I don’t know the Windows command prompt or file structure very well at all, but luckily the password tool works without hassle. Now no computer is safe (as long as I’m carrying my CD).

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