Less than a month until my graduate recital. I'm starting to feel the pressure. Doing my best to take care of my body and brain until then. Two weeks until my final counselling appointment to get referred to an endocrinologist for HRT. It'll be nice to see progress on that front. Still haven't heard back from CIM about the performance diploma, which I take as sort of a positive. Planning ahead to after my recital when I will work up some material to apply for another program in Ottawa. Going with a friend to pick up tickets for Beethoven 7 in cleveland this weekend. If you're not super familiar, Odds are you've heard this, one of the most memorable movements in classical music:
I'm still going through HoC S3. I agree I am having trouble understanding how I could have found the first 2 seasons so addicting if they were much like this one. however, I am absolutely gobsmacked to realize that Claire is also Buttercup from that famous film, Princess Bride.
I laugh in your general youthful direction for not recognizing the ex Mrs. Penn. I remain stuck 3 episodes into Season 1 of Mad Men and 5 episodes into S1 of HoC but fuckin' Broadchurch is the shit and so is The Killing. We're currently splitting time between Archer and The Unflappable Erin from The Office.
Yay Archer! Yay Erin! I dunno if I've told this story, but I'll tell it anyways because I do what I want. I remember a buddy of mine's dad walked into the room and Mad Men was on TV. No one was watching it, it was just on. He looked at us and was like "why do you have that shit on?" We explained it was just white noise to us, and he looked at the screen and scoffed. Then he explained how Mad Men doesn't mean shit to him. He talked about how, when he was alive during the Mad Men era, when people in skyscrapers were debating cigerette ads, he was on the streets, neck-deep in the civil rights movement. "I couldn't use the same sink as everyone else at the time," he said. "So Mad Men doesn't say much for me." Couldn't get into the show ever since. Felt like it'd be a betrayal. Edit: in retrospect, that 'white noise' pun was not intended.
Fuckin' white noise tho It does have a real "remember back before we let women into the workplace and blacks into the country clubs? Wasn't that shit great?" kinda vibe. I think the only thing that attracts me to it is that it reminds me of Swingtown, which granted started six months later but was actually about "oh shit the women they be working and this birth control thing is makin' shit awkward." It also had Molly Parker in it and I've always been a sucker for her. .jpg)
you gotta finish.... but I dunno - I'm probably being overly critical. No spoilers here... but even in the first episodes of season 3 - I just kept waiting for SOMETHING to happen. oh well. I'm not upset that I watched it. Just a little more "meh" than I was hoping for.
I mean, its raison d'etre in the first two seasons was Frank getting to the Presidency, which was a super engaging motivation. We had to expect at least somewhat of a decline once that goal was accomplished; and that's exactly what we got. I recognize that my hope for a third season as good as the first two was unreasonable; it's just a shame that they couldn't leave well enough alone.House of Cards has gone down hill.
Agreed, not even finishing this season. Loved the first two though.House of Cards has gone down hill.
The Good Killing it academically right now, I've been in a great zone all semester and have gotten an "A" on nearly every assignment in every class. That doesn't normally happen, we'll see how long that continues. Motivation is fading fast with graduation coming. An unexpected friendship has been developing and I realized it's filled a hole, that being having someone to talk to everyday that isn't one of my roommates and is also an interesting person. Very much out of the blue, but I feel more relaxed since all this started because I can just send a message and say "let's hang out" and then later we will. feelsgoodman.jpg. The Neutral Planning planning planning planning planning planning planning planning. Also have a big presentation on Monday that I'm nowhere near ready for. The Bad More car problems, can't wait to get rid of this car. Stupid old cars that have been though too many winters. Everything is starting to rust out, I only need 3 more months out of it though. Still not back at the gym, but that should change next week. The Future Big things happening next week, can't wait to share it with y'all.
Preach. I'm rocking a solid 3.5 so far in pretty much everything, because I can count the number of graded assignments I've had this semester on 2 hands, so small mistakes haven't had a chance to get corrected.Motivation is fading fast with graduation coming.
The struggle is real. Especially when you already have a job lined up. Capstone and work intensive classes are not a good way to get people to stay fresh and motivated at the end of their undergraduate education. Pretty much have a countdown going at this point.
I am slowly consolidating and reorganizing all of my music files on my computer. It's from 6 different core libraries from 4 different hard drives and 2 users ranging back to 2002. And I used 7 different programs to rip my music with varying degrees of success. Getting everything into one main library. Merging folder groups. Fixing tags. Getting rid of dupes. Dumping bad or low quality rips. It's a process. I could probably automate at least some of it but what is the fun in that? Of course when I do this I have to listen to a bunch of music that I haven't heard in years. I also treat myself to a dram or twelve. Oh and fuck iTunes.
Dude. I started this process in January. It took me 3 days to get through "Compilations." Fortunately, all of my shit was on one computer and I needed to move it to another but even iTunes fucks with its own files. And then I let TuneUp rape it a few months ago thinking it would save me time (NOT). But yeah. Getting it so that only classical has composers, that there are only the 23 genres I believe in, that only multi-disc albums list multiple discs, and that all albums have ALL THE SONGS ON THEM legitimately took until February 28. I bought a $2300 NAS simply for backup. And I bought it because while all of my media is available elsewhere, I recognized that I spent a shit-ton of time getting my 1TB sample library to have my metadata on it. In an era where you can torrent just about anybody's stuff, having it beat to fit and painted to match your library counts for a lot. God speed.
Is that your Synology hub, or whatever they are called? That is the dream. Rigfht now I am running regular old, unraid-configured WD HDs with some cheapo Seagate external drives as backup. In the future I shall refer to these times as my Years of Living Dangerously. I only have 6 terabytes, I really should bite the bullet and get on that Synology train before the inevitable occurs. I think you and I are about the same age, do you remember this song? I completely forgot about it until I started doing this project. Been having that feeling a lot lately.I bought a $2300 NAS simply for backup.
A few years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a script that used MusicBrainz' tagger to add uniform tags and sort my mp3 collection. I am still finding things mislabeled. I just went looking for this and found it tagged as this today. I advise against doing that.I could probably automate at least some of it but what is the fun in that?
Yeah that's part of the reason I'm going through and doing it all manually. I let one of the not iTunes programs rake one of my libraries once. I had a similar experience to yours. It's good to kinow I'm not wasting my time.
I'm writing a JavaScript tutorial for that Coderdojo thing I mentioned. Last 3 weeks I have been 'teaching' there, all were CSS. The plan is to use JavaScript as a bridge to get them into the less boring parts of programming, C etc. There are a good few Minecraft players there so Java might be better. This 'tutorial' wil be on a projector while I explain how it works, and for people that come in 30 minutes late will be handed a printed version so they don't hold everyone up. Problem is, everyone there is either a good bit younger(9-12) or a good bit older than me. All of my friends are in another building literally accross the road at exactly the same time, so it's pretty lonely. Project wise, still working on that engine. I'm making a abstract model loading thingy where it uses Reflection to read a text file with a bunch of method calls in it, so I should be able to make complex model formats really easily.
It's that time again! I got another poetry acceptance (what the FUCK, people, my life is never like this) and this week has been crazy at work and in life which is why I haven't been around. I've been surviving off junk food. I love the Bob Dylan thread, thanks poobs, because of it I've been kicking on Johnny Cash all morning. DONT HATE. RAP BE STRAIGHT
Hell yeah. my most beloved vinyl is a pristine copy of "harvest" complete with lyrics insert. I own a bracelet that is inscribed "heart of gold" on the inside. Neil Young mah boi. Hits a certain chord no one else can hit. My bartender tried to laugh at me for my Neil Young love once, and even he couldn't.
Then years later his kids grow up and post on the internet with the smartphones they'll use to bag their next tinder date who as per their profile request "better not swipe right if you think rappity rhymes are tight". The cycle continues. Hey thundara I got the 49 track Hotline Miami 2 soundtrack and it's aces. I played it a bit too, not enough to have any concluding thoughts on it, though. Not much else for the pub, I don't think. Life goes on. I'll have some fries to go. Edit: also I'm buying a car in like a few weeks. Edit 2: flagamuffin this game called Shadow of Mordor came out a few months ago and I just played it. You play as a ranger that gets "possessed" by a Wraith that turns out to be Celebrimbor, the creator of the original rings of power. They team up to defeat the Black Hand by building an army of Orcs in Núrn and Mordor. Gollumn shows up too, of fuckin course. The game ends with said Ranger deciding to help Celebrimbor forge a new Ring of Power so they can use it to beat Sauron. Point being, on a scale from "rolling over in his grave multiple times" to "not even Christopher would have a problem with it", how accurate do these events sound, do they even make sense in the timeline?He raises his kids on Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and maybe Rush if its the weekend. When a rap song comes on the radio, he puts on that classic douche dad smirk and looks in the mirror through his oakleys and says, "remember kids rap is crap". he chuckles to himself as his wife looks over at him, eyes full of long lasting love and the memory of when they met at a Grateful Dead show. His kids in the back laugh, and say "oh dad, you musta forgot to switch the station to 97.9 The Loop" He looks back and says "Ill do ya one better" as he puts in his well worn cassette of The Song Remains The Same.
Spinning around furiously! Elves can't be wraiths (what's a wraith? like a ringwraith? nope), and Celebrimbor is one of the most underrated characters in the legendarium. The last of the line of Feanor. Wonder what this game thinks the Black Hand is. And when it's set. Because none of that really makes any sense. Oh and rangers never go that far south, but maybe if he was possessed. Gollum goes to Mordor once, but -- you know what, this is hopeless. Rolling over. Grave. Lots.a Wraith that turns out to be Celebrimbor, the creator of the original rings of power.
They team up to defeat the Black Hand by building an army of Orcs in Núrn and Mordor.
Gollumn shows up too, of fuckin course.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the relevance. But, it does only give the most popular relationships. I added more to the tag page, and now if you search for a term that has been used as a tag, it'll give you some related ones: https://hubski.com/query?id=mars I'd like to find a clean way to insert this info into the feed for a given tag. But, I am going to work on another update for a bit.
My boyfriend bought me flowers. We're going to the mountains this weekend. I'm finally catching up on the pile of work that I fell behind on while traveling the world. It's looking good.
The Good I found out last night that my union has voted to accept the most recent contract and NOT go on strike, although teaching assistants are still on strike. I'm really glad. I'd been reading email on the union listserv all week with all the arguments for the strike. (thanks to ButterflyEffect for the formatting suggestion)
I did like 9 hours of web training to be a "certified social media strategist." Yes, the certificate is worth roughly the recycling value of the sheet of paper I printed it on. I also spent yesterday establishing 2 gmail accounts, 2 twitter accounts, an Instagram account, a Facebook business page, a Pinterest business page and a half-dozen profiles on SEO tools. You would think that the former would leave me well-prepared for the latter but HOLY FUCK social media is bullshit. Have you ever just like, walked into Facebook going "I'ma make me a new account?" "With the privacy set right'n'shit?" Talk about dark patterns. I cooked off two fuckin' Instagram usernames because their setup is so shit that you really have to work to not associate it with your primary account and oh, by the way, once you delete a username it's gone forever, sorry/notsorry, fuck off we're Facebook eat shit. I'll say this: Pinterest are not dicks. "Oh, you wanted to make a business page instead? Sure, okay. Here do this." "Here are the only five things we care about you not fucking up as a business now run free." If Reddit is for boys and Pinterest is for girls, the girls are fuckin' winning, y'all.
Pinterest is the best. Fuck Facebook and its business settings. Good luck getting ANYONE to see your shit. Pretty sure there was a Hubski post with a video about this very issue, actually. I'm learning SEO for my blog - do you not feel gross using it? I try to fall into the 25% range (Bad) so I don't feel as bad about using it. I just want people to see my writing, not establish a brand.
I haven't done much SEO yet. My social media guy made a couple valuable points that I'm totally taking to heart: 1) Customers will interact with your content and business if it's valuable to them, not to you. Share things that are beneficial to people you want to do business with, not to your metrics. 2) The goal of business participation in social media is to increase BUSINESS, not metrics. 
It was! But I'm now working on it because of the challenge and so I can submit it to the Esri Young Scholars Challenge.
So, I'm on spring break. I don't think I like spring break much. Hence my post in TNG's new words thread. Yesterday was probably the most fun I've had during an undergrad SB, and I went to Grand Rapids and drank Super Exclusive Beer while visiting Michigan's fastest growing, and arguably most successful brewery. For the rest of this exciting week, I'm going to clean, organize my last 2 months of undergrad assignments, play my guitar.
Yep, 100% sure. I should have taken a picture of the tap handle. They had some bottles of it there too, I have no idea how they managed to grab as much of it as they did considering how small this pub is. That would have been a crazy package to send, you need to drink that beer.
KBS is one of the greatest things on this Earth. It's also the hilariously secret-society-esque beer of the beers. To give anyone an idea of how hard it is to get, this is how I got my hands on it last time: -First, you have to be in the circles of people in the know, so basically you're in crowds that are in crowds with people that work at high end beer stores -They will only tell select people, who hopefully, will tell you -I got word from a friend that the shop down the street from my house might have some -I go to said store and ask if they have it. They, of course, say no. -I drop a name of a different, respected person saying they told me it was there -They then say I can have one. -Take me into the back room, open an unmarked box that had exactly two six packs.
All totally worth it.
Jealous. So, so, so very jealous of you and OftenBen. The best "rare" beer I've had lately is the Bourbon County Stout by Goose Island, which isn't quite the spectacle of KBS. Would love to get my hands on that beer sometime.
They make more every year than the year before, but it still sells out. If you want to buy bottles from the brewery you have to buy tickets online. This year they sold out in 6 minutes. They also really like the exclusivity and the obsession people have with it. The beer itself is damn delicious. They take Breakfast Stout, which is an oatmeal stout, tastes like chocolate, coffee, oatmeal, and a little vanilla, and age it for a year in bourbon barrels. (I think Evan Williams, not 100% sure though) This makes it SO DAMN GOOD. And it increases the alcohol content.Why don't they make more if there is such demand?