silly project

While looking for employ in this awful job market, I've taken up something fun to fill the void of time I have. I've been modding a Hori joystick for the Wii with real Sanwa arcade parts I imported from the faraway land of Japan. I bought a Dremel drilling tool with some money I received for Christmas from my new mother-in-law. It's come in handy for this project. It's been so much fun that I'm doing a second one with different colors and parts. Here's an image of the first one I did.

turntable

I was graciously given some cash as gifts by some very generous close family and friends last Christmas, and I decided it was time to indulge in some capitalism. My old turntable, which I had acquired from a thrift store here in Ventura, died in 2004, and I've been without a way to play my records ever since. I remedied this situation last week when I ordered this new turntable off Amazon. I absolutely love getting things in the mail. I would order dish soap and paper towels through the mail every week if they would arrive in mysterious brown boxes with labels plastered all over them as cryptic hails from distant lands.

csuci

I suppose it takes a certain level of hindsight and maturity to see it, but until sitting in on my first few classes last month since graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 2001, I didn't realize how...geared towards nineteen-year-olds undergraduate classes are. The professors even behave differently. They dumb themselves down, seemingly on purpose. I'll admit, it could simply be that CSU Channel Islands is just a shit school - I already feel that they lack some of even the most basic resources that every institute of higher learning needs - for example, a library of reasonable scope and size. Medical coverage for enrolled students. Maybe UCSC was just that good, or the CSU system is just that bad, or perhaps the situation of federal and state funding for public universities is just incredibly dire.

Whatever it is, I don't intend to stay at CSUCI past the current semester.

Today is the first time ever in my life that I have forgotten just precisely how old I am. It's either 32 or 33. Fuck. I don't feel like counting years right now, so I guess the real number remains safely anonymous.

Greencine

I subscribe to GreenCine, a San Francisco-based DVD rental company.

They recently changed their front page layout, and had this ad up on their old layout, which is still up while they work out the rough edges of the new. I had to repost it here because it is awesome.



edit: dammit, I should have known better to direct link to an image. It's gone now.

Tha Police

I thought I'd look up some info on the Police shows coming up.

Here's what I found were the only available tickets and prices on Ticketmaster right now:



And here's a snippet of what's available on ebay right about now:



Dear god. Why did I bother? I knew it was going to be fuck all, but I had no idea. Too bad.

Since the begininng of this year, I have planned on leaving my current assignment with the temp agency I work for and spending some quality time comparing my options for grad school, internships, and more interesting part-time work. I intended to begin this in March. Well, March is now here, and I am beginning to feel some very definite pangs of anxiety at these prospects.

There are three disparate areas of study I have been considering for grad school. One is journalism. The second is public health. And the last is the book-binding arts. All three hold unique appeals and problems for me. The next six months will surely determine the path my life will take for the next decade or more.

Yes. Anxiety.

Monster Planet

I've been reading Monster Planet, a novel that can be read online; it is the third book in a trilogy of post-apocalyptic zombie horror novels penned by fine, upstanding citizen author David Wellington. I am here to say most definitely, and without any doubt, that it fucking rocks. I highly suggest that one check it out if one is so inclined. I'm not really a fan of horror-ish literature, but I appreciate the zombie aesthetic, so to say, and the apocalypse is a favorite time of the year for me as well.

I would venture so far as to call the series intelligent zombie horror, but that would imply I have had some sort of exposure to zombie horror novels which fell on the stupid side of the scale as a basis for comparison, which I have not. That isn't to say poorly written zombie books don't exist, merely that I haven't read any. The series isn't some deep philosophical exploration of the nature of thought and existence (with zombies) or anything, but it does lovingly depict giant zombie-skeleton-spider bone creatures with deadly swinging bladed probosces eviscerating things right and left. Who can deny the vicariousness a zombie bone creature can bring to one's life? I, for one, certainly cannot.

The first two books, Monster Island and Monster Planet, are out in actual bound-paper-book form as well, with the third coming (hopefully) soon, if one prefers reading actual words printed on tree pulp instead of words on a monitor.

This has been a Public Service Announcement...with guitar.

I have somehow assumed the mantle of some sort of novice software technician for a group of older women at this company I am temping for. These women are all around the age of 60 or so - I know this because they often speak in gregarious tones about the pitfalls that come with their age. This group of women, this cabal of the aged, if I may, have somehow anointed me their savior savant. I helped one of them do something at one point a couple of months ago, and the word must have spread or something, because now they ask me daily for assistance in performing various functions in the software we use here. In doing so, they have exposed themselves as being completely inept in their knowledge of Word and Excel and the like, and even in the most basic of Windows desktop manipulation.

I have had to assist them in such mundane tasks as adding columns to a table for them, saving a file not at the default location a program prompts one to save at, but in a different location; I have had to replace accidentally deleted desktop shortcuts for them - the list continues interminably.

I must sound like a complete dick for railing on them for this, but I am genuinely surprised - no, shocked, that high-level veteran workers in this company, people who have been doing their job for more than a decade in most cases, have absolutely no idea how to really use the software they go through the motions of using every single day. I can't understand how they get through their days without knowing how to move a file somewhere, or any number of, to me, very minor and simple tasks. I feel like I need to go talk to the management here and clue them in on this, maybe suggest they have everyone go through some mandatory software training or something.

Oh well. I just wanted to vent.

I started reading Franz Herschel Milhouse Kafka's The Castle back in 2002. I read about two-thirds of the book before I somehow lost track of reading it and, for whatever mundane reason, as my time slipped away, I stopped reading it altogether. I went back to it a year or so later, starting over at the beginning, and again failed to finish reading it. I've done this now four or five times since, each read through failing to complete the novel.

For anyone familiar with the subject of this book, my failure to finish it is a delicious irony. Delicious. With a rich buttery saffron-mushroom sauce.