I feel I would be remiss if I didn't pass this link along to the few people who check this site. How to disable autorun. It's a pretty significant security measure, and if you scroll to the bottom, you can download a little applet that will do it for you. Disabling autorun will also defeat the current spyware and anti-copy crap that comes on some new CDs.

As of this writing, I’m reclining on a hotel bed at IUPUI blogging in Word in the hope that I might encounter a wi-fi hotspot at some point tomorrow.

Today I visited BSU to get my schedule straightened out. I’ve been paranoid about missing deadlines, but apparently I’m okay in that regard. It’s kind of nice that I can get into any class in my course of study with no problem. I also paid a brief visit to Gerry, who was in the middle of something of immense importance when I wandered in. Things are looking good for this Fall, very good indeed.

I had dinner at Maggiano’s Italian restaurant. The interior design is really nice, I dare say nicer than the eating establishments featured in the Godfather movies and on the Sopranos. The cheese ravioli was amazing, as was the tiramisu.

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Back home now. I meant to write more last night, but I was pretty tired. As a matter of fact, I'm still tired, so if my prose has the rhythm of a squirrel eating a coconut, there's a reason. I got maybe four hours of sleep due to the three glasses of tea I had with dinner. It turns out that when a restaurant bothers to actually brew tea from scratch (instead of mixing tea-flavored koolaid with tap water) it retains a hefty measure of caffeine. I never learn. All of this was supposed to be blogged and posted from somewhere with Internet access, but that wasn't an option.

I managed to pick up a few useful items for the coming fall. The reason I mention this is that I feel like making a bulleted list.

• iTrip: The iTrip is an FM transmitter for the iPod. It sits atop the iPod and a little red light glows to assure you that it is properly draining the battery power of the iPod like a little plastic lamprey. Once I got it working, though, it actually did broadcast to the radio. The added value of this is that Orrin Hatch hates this sort of gadget with a venom he usually reserves for mixed-race marriages.

• Bathrobe and two pairs of pajama pants: It ought to be glaringly obvious what this is. The bathrobe is a thick black material similar to Emperor Palpatine's robes. Perfect for contemplating stuff, or watching movies. The pajama pants are a lighter material with plaid checks. I doubt the proud clans of old Scotland meant for their fabric heritage to adorn my Ent-like legs.

• 32MB USB drive key chain: My computer won't be on the university network next year, so I need some way of moving data to other machines. For big things, like large .tif sequences, I have my 10GB iPod. For anything smaller, like papers and medium-res images, 32MB is plenty. And it has a little clip on it, the international symbol of usefulness.

In a scant two months, I'll be up to my eyeballs (6' above sea level) in cool tech and like-minded people at BSU. I'm very excited about starting school and a new job. I haven't really felt like this in a long while, this anticipation of something good and meaningful. There isn't a whole lot of that to be found in this town.

One bonus to this is that I get a new mascot. You see, for four years I grit my teeth under the yoke of being a "Cougar." Other Catholic universities get cool mascots, like the "Fighting Irish", or the "Saints." They get thematic monikers, we get an endangered species of cat that preys on weak livestock and gets caught in traps set by dairy farmers. I did my best to avoid any merchandise with the mascot logo on it, as it looked like something a high school would put on a gym floor to hide water damage. I bought a Franciscan cross in Asisi so that I would have an appropriate symbol of my alma mater and not an athletic logo. Besides, the actual school seal has two hands with stigmata. That would look pretty hard-core on a football uniform, don't you think? Imagine this on a field:

Visitor: "We're the Bulldogs! See this logo? We're the Bulldogs! What's that on your logo?"

USF: "We're USF- our logo has the divine blood of the saints flowing from hands crossed over an old Roman execution device that became the religious icon that our school is founded on."

Visitor: "You guys are messed up. We're gonna get killed."

No, alas, "Cougars" won out. But how is a Cardinal any better? Well, to it's credit, it is the state bird. It isn't particularly frightening, unless directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but it's loads better than some of the alternatives.

I haven't focused on this blog too much recently, as I've been kind of boring. I haven't been lazy, but working at the library and housecleaning aren't all that exciting. I'm planning a trip to BSU in the sorta-near future and a much longer stay this fall that ought to make for more blogfodder. In the interim I'll probably just make little posts with links shamelessly stolen from Fark, Slashdot, and Boingboing.

Speaking of which, here's a link to a story that made me mad. I've been boycotting RIAA releases for over a year now, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. I still happily buy music from non-RIAA labels and artists, such as Epitaph. You'll also notice the RIAA radar link in the right-hand column of this site.

Check out this page if you've got some time to kill and you like great photography. Commute NYC.

Here's an update from yesterday's post about the home renovation project. I got the wall anchors out and found that they were made of cardboard. I guess this is the way things were done in the 1970's, before people had been properly warned about Abba. Anyway, I caulked the holes in the wall and my brother and I hung up the shower curtain. Take a look at it to fully appreciate the novelty.

I'm currently in the middle of a project, but I wanted to post this. My brother and I took out the shower doors in our bathroom because they leak beyond repair. The doors are gone, but before I hang up the shower curtain, I need to put caulk in the holes in the wall where the screws were. The thing is, there's some sort of mystery substance in the holes that kept the screws in place. Not regular plastic wall anchors, but something from the "other" category. But the point of this post is that when I was searching for guidance with google, I found this guy. I think he's my id.

Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!

I'm geeked out over this trailer in a big way. I'm not sure how it fits into the Final Fantasy VII story proper, but in this case, I really don't care. This movie completes the trifecta for coolness- Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Star Wars Episode III, and Serenity. If my head explodes next summer you'll know why.

This past weekend I got the very good news that I have been offered an assistantship job at Ball State. I'm not clear on all of the details yet, those are coming in the mail, but I'm positive I'm going to take them up on the offer.

Yarr! Look over tharr! It be a leviathan! If you have time to kill and a desire to learn about Cedar Point, check it out. I wonder what it is about driving through Ohio that makes he and I want to blog about it in great length?

It's been a good day today. I got enough sleep last night, indicating that I may be acclimated to my new schedule. I had been waking up after three hours of sleep no matter how tired I was, and I usually can’t get back to sleep. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done this way, though.

I went to the Mill this morning before work to get a little something to eat. As I stood in line with a smattering of pastel-clad hand wringing southwest matrons, I decided on a large butterscotch chip chocolate chip scone. (They’re real, and they’re spectacular.) The credit card machine broke when I was about to pay, so I got a free piece of bread for waiting. I was still on time for work, so the point of the story is the scone.

Shelving books was everything you might expect, but there was one point of mild excitement. I was shelving a car repair manual when I noticed someone making strange noises on the other side of the shelf. I ignored it, as I often do to pretty much everybody save for co-workers. Then I heard a hissing sound, followed by a quick inhalation, followed by a low grunt and a hand grabbing the shelf. I could smell some kind of gas, too. It was one of the indigenous bums huffing gas, like, four feet away from me. He walks around the corner and looks at me for a second, as I squat down where I was shelving. I don’t look up, as I’m not quite sure what to do here. “D’hew-hur-eer” the now visible noise says. I look up at him, doing my high school drama class best to look like I hadn’t known he was there. He was a stunted little rodent of a man, with old clothes and a blue bandanna, the type of garb that the destitute welcome wagon gives out. “What?” I honestly had no idea what he said, his eyes focused on anything but me. “Do you work here?” he successfully vocalized. I nodded and said yeah, and went back to what I was doing, and he did the same. After a bit of thought, I decided to tell security. This seemed like the kind of thing they ought to know, that the business and technology section was being used as a crack house annex. I snuck away to the desk and told the guard at the front desk what goofball was up to. He said he would send a guard back to check it out. You’d think that this is where things would get cool, right? You’d expect a Cops-style bust where the grey shirted hardass would chase the bum across the whole building before tackling him and hosing him down with pepper spray. I wanted something cool to happen, but he just went and looked at the guy, who went and sat at a table to read. Well, as well as he could, all hopped up on goofenthal. What kind of security guards are these? The guards in Metal Gear Solid investigate if they see anybody, for crying out loud. And don’t let the blue bandanna fool you, this guy wasn’t Snake. His voice was all slurred from his last two brain cells rubbing together, so I kind of wanted to offer him a dollar of he’d say “Hey- the sheriff is a ni___r!” like the crazy old prospector from Blazing Saddles. That would’ve been sweet.

¡Libros para Libre!

Fair warning about tonight's post: It's about work, a subject I usually avoid because it bores even me.

I've completed my first week at the library, where I push carts and shelve books in near silent solitude, which I enjoy. The repetition makes the time pass quickly, and all the squatting and standing is giving me a great workout. It’s like cardio for nerds, where instead of an aerobics instructor chirping instructions at me, I have the Dewey decimal system, so I move to where the book goes according to the number like some kind of alpha numeric DDR game. The library is quiet, too. Not ninja-quiet, per se, more like Calvin Coolidge-quiet. No annoying music, and what few slack-jawed yokels find do their way into the building mostly behave themselves. My new co-workers are all very nice, too. A group of people who choose to eschew sunlight for books are my kind of people indeed.

For now, I probably won’t leave Barnes and Noble. I work with some really great people, some of whom I may even call friends. I get tired of the BS sometimes, like trying to sell the membership cards and working on a cash register for seven hours with no place to sit. Every time I think I might call it quits, though, I have a great conversation about Tom Waits with another bookseller, or I get to listen to Dave the history buff manager discuss American history, or I get to go out after work with a group of people, and the job is worthwhile again. It’s only a few hours a week, but that’s enough.

Two days this week I worked both jobs, which amounts to close to an eleven-hour day, including lunch break. That’s a long day, but I make a pretty good amount of money on those days. This sort of thing is when I just have to keep telling myself “if I can’t do this, I can’t do grad school.” That’s been my mantra since I first started at the bookstore.

Here's something everybody can enjoy: The Robot. My brother got this in a sudden IM, and I got a good laugh out of it.

I found something funny last night when I did a Google image search for "fighting cardinal."

I've been telling Gerry that I would make a fighting cardinal for a while now. Here, at least, is a cardinal picking a fight. I don't have any particular enmity or allegiance for either team, and I somehow doubt that any BSU athletes would ever give me the time of day. The white-trash aesthetic of a pick-up truck decal seemed fitting to Muncie.

Obviously, I Haven't blogged much lately. I haven't blogged because I haven't really had much to say. In the past week I've worked, played Knights of the Old Republic, and read books and magazines. I did get to see Gerry, and we watched all kinds of geek TV and sporadic bits of the Cubs losing on Saturday. It's been a rough season for the Cubs so far, having an injured list comparable to Valley Forge.

So, in the absence of things worth driving to, I've been thinking about the public figures and closer friends I admire, trying to figure out what I should be doing in my life and if I went wrong somewhere. Without getting too self-absorbed, I do feel that at some point in high school or college I was mislead. Not by any person or institution, per se, but by the dot-com-era ideal that I was assured wealth and success directly out of college because I was majoring in something computer related. My unconscious and unerring belief in digital entertainment as the land of milk and honey was my driving reason to get through college. I scoffed at anyone who questioned the validity of computer art, eagerly pointing out that innovation was the key to revitalizing the increasingly irrelevant art field, much like photography had done a century before. In hindsight, though, I've come to realize that the computer art program at USF was a little recruitment sham that the school started when it was facing bankruptcy that, through the nurturing dedication of a communication professor and an animation pro, evolved into a legitimate study program. I ended up with what I think might be a great education, but as the job market evaporated, I never got a real chance to test this.

Thus, my present dilemma. In examining different people whom I admire, I've noticed that there are curious blank spots in each of their biographies. Without using Google, tell me what Matt Groening was doing when he was twenty-four years old. What about Jack Kerouac? Neil Gaiman? Douglas Adams? Tom Waits? What about prestigious people I don't like so much, like John Ashcroft, or most of the cast of Friends? At some point I got old enough that I stopped hearing "when I was your age" stories. This could be because there comes a point in every life when you just sit in the ocean on your little dingy of dreams waiting for something, anything, to happen. Case in point:

Before the Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan spent his early to mid twenties as a chunky, depressed, writers-blocked wanna-be rocker. He spent a little while in Florida with a little Cure knockoff metal band called the Marked. Nothing much came of this back in the era of decadent wuss-rock, and he ended up back in Chicago where things finally started to work out for him.

Conan O'Brien graduated from Harvard with all kinds of high honors and accolades, moved to the west coast, and promptly got a job in a leather jacket store. His first few TV attempts weren't even noticeable, and even when he eventually scored a job as a writer on Saturday Night Live he was still largely invisible.

Try this: think of five people over the age of forty, famous or familiar. Can you determine with certainty what they were doing in their mid-twenties? Was it at all glorious or rewarding beyond the satisfaction of hard work?

So, here I am, full of promise in the quarter-century quagmire. This is my main motivation to go to grad school, to get out of this town and out of this funk. BSU seems far more oriented in the practical application of my knowledge, which is exactly what I want. Perhaps in two years time I'll be able to say with certainty that I really did do something constructive with my young professional life.

Here's a novelty. As you see below, Blogger now supports image hosting. I think it gets re-compressed, though. I saved the image in the same resolution as it is currently displayed, and it looks fine on my end. On the page, though, much clarity is lost. It is a free service, though, so I won't complain too loudly.

What happens to a pre-fab poser model when you export it as a .rib file and render it as-is in BMRT? The same thing as everything else.