Boo

So it’s 2:30 in the morning, and I’m just comming home from work, and
I’m walking down the stairs.  Of course I think of what anyone
would think of walking down a dark stairway at 2 in the morning… I
wonder if there are ghost about.  Then I have some flashes of some
ghastly images (probably from whatever scary movie I saw last). 

This gets me to thinking, maybe ghost don’t actually every manifest as
physical or visual beings.  There’s this idea that ghost are
psychic imprints left by strong emotions.  Well maybe these
imprints just interact with our minds so that we ‘see’ the ghost, even
though there’s really nothing there for us to see.  The reason
sightings are uneven, or even contradictory is that these imprints
affect minds in different ways (not at all for most people). 

Of course this isn’t a more rational explaination of ghost than any
other, since it involves in believing in pyschic imprinting: the idea
that the strength of emotional duress can cause feelings and memories
to be stored in inanimate matter.  It sort of begs the questions:
why is it that only angry or sad emotions get imprinted.  Wouldn’t
we then see very happy or passionate images of ghost as well?  Or
maybe we feel fear, anger and sorrow much more strongly than happieness?

Just a thought.  My mind comes up with weird things at 2am after a long day of rather tedious programming.

G’night everybody!

Pictures!

Finally back home.  It’ll be nice to sleep in a bed again after a
week of sleeping on the floor.  The only bad part is going back to
work, but I guess that’s what allows me to go on these vacations.

Okay, so I’m no Ansel Adams, but serendipity has allowed for a few good
pics to result from my shutter happy finger.  As a tribute to
Ansel, I even have one black and white one in there.  Slowly I’m
learning
the in’s and outs of my camera (btw, if you visit Los Angeles, you MUST
eat at In-and-Out Burger), so a lot of the pictures will not
quite look right.  Enjoy:

Getty Museum, LA (if you’re wondering, the musuem cost $1 billion to build)
Sequoia National Park (really big trees and stuff)
Yosemite National Park (photographer heaven)

EVERYONE must go to Yosemite park at least once in their lives.  And bring a camera.

“No
matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be
denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”
-Ansel Adams

P.S. Pictures to come.  Unfortunately I had my camera on rapid
fire mode, so there are a lot of repeat shots.  But I’m finally
learning a lot about how to use my camera, so some of the shots
actually came out quite nicely .

“You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a
superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up
the line that some of the gnostics took up — a line which I often thought was a
very plausible one — that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made
by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be
said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.”
-Bertrand Russell, from
“Why I am not a Christian.”

So last night I finished reading High Fidelity.  I didn’t
enjoy it as much as the movie (a rare case, indeed) but it’s a pretty
good read.  It’s one of those movies I turn to when I start
feeling sorry for myself, lonely, or worn out (the other one is Kiki’s
Delivery Service).

I relate to the main character (not that I’ve had that many
girlfriends), but in that I don’t really feel like I’ve “grown
up”.  My life feels like I’m in a holding pattern, that I too am
“keeping my options open”.

When I had a girlfriend, I felt very grounded.  That there was a
focus for my life, but now that I’m in the world of the single again
there’s kind of this drift.  After being linked to a person so
deeply for so long, you don’t realize how much of “me” became
“us”.  So you either jump to another person to fill in that “us”
or you take a long time to fill those missing parts of you back
in.  But being in love is sort of like having a disease.  You
never completely recover to the same person.  Some people just
wall off those sections of themselves and never look back, sort of like
cutting off an infected leg.  Some people push themselves in a
completely new direction and run away from the person they were when
they were with the person.  And some people (I’m hoping in this
category) just get suprised by discovering what tries to grow back in
the missing places.

First off you realize that it’s never gonna all grow back.  If you
really loved someone you will always have that part of you that loves
them.  And there’s that feeling you get that you’ve lost someone
you’re completely comfortable with.  You go back to building
little walls again, cause you have to be the right person for everyone,
and not just you.

So that’s my holding pattern, waiting to find all the pieces of myself
I can.  Keeping my options open for the next sign that my life
needs to change (meet the right girl, get laid off, something).

 I guess I have a slighlty different problem than Rob (from the
book), cause he was always keeping his options open, even when in a
relationship.  His lack of commitment in a relationship was
endemic to a whole life of not commting.  I was quite happy to go
on a planned, if uneventful cousre.  But that course was taken
away (or maybe I just gave it waya), and now all my options are opened
up again.  Now I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do next.

Options in my head:
1) Keeping with the High Fidelity theme, I had this hairbrained scheme
that I could start a Vietnamese Rock label.  Work out deals for
vietnamese rock stars to sell music online in the us, make compilation
cds to sell in stores, market parapanelia, work out deals to get them
on the variety shows, etc.

2) Economist.  There’s something that appeals to me about
economics.  It’s such a complex set of problems.  When done
right, it’s a rigorous science.  It’s a way of looking at the
world the breaks things down into numbers and builds them back up again
into people.

3) Going back to Houston.  Driving down to visit them has become
such a pain and with my mom retired, they kind of need me around more.
And being up here I’m not able to help the around as much.  Did I
mention I hate the drive?

Meh, who knows.  Works keeping my busy, so I’ve got a few more
months to mull things over.  Who knows, maybe I’ll meet
someone.  Maybe my life will change and push me in some
direcction.  Or maybe I’ll just spend less time pondering it and
get one with living it.

That’s all folks, g’nite.

Do you CDs! I CDs CDs!

A
few months ago, I had a horrible hard drive crash and lost most of
the horde of mp3 I had build up over the years.  Then I realized
that this was the perfect opportunity to start from scratch, making
only legitimate mp3s from my hard earned CD collection.  I had
promised myself that I would start paying for music once I had the
money.  Well, now I make money.  I guess I should start
paying for the music I enjoy.

Thus began the arduous process
of ripping every CD I own (all 143 of them).  Then came the
process of fixing the meta data, because I have quite a few CDs that
rip as by “Various Artists”, and I’d like to at least
attempt to give credit where it is due.

The hardest part was
sitting there sorting music into genres.  By far the two largest
groups are classical and alt pop/rock.  Except most of the music
that I put under alt.pop/rock is pretty much what I get from the
radio, so I curious as to what it’s an alternative to? 
Unfortunately, the id3 tag process does not let you include multiple
genres or sub genres, because it would be really cool to have music
that fits in multiple genres to show up in different genre views.

As
I write this, a piece of software that came with my shiny new mp3
player is sorting my music into playlist by analyzing them. 
I’m curious to see what it comes up with. 

Can’t be any
worse than some of the combinations I used to come up with.  I
once made a mix tape that included Boyz2Men, Carmina Burana, Monty
Python’s Spam song, Tori Amos and Disney showtunes. 

I
haven’t been able to do quite a good a job now that I’ve moved into
the digital age.  I think with the ease of drag and drop, you
lose some of the reflection time you get when going through the long
considered process of analog tape creation.

When making an
analog mix tape, you HAVE to listen to each song as you place them
one after the other.  With CD authoring, once can easily just
drag and drop songs after hearing the first few seconds of soundbite,
and you loose the holsitc feel of the mix (the groove) as well as the
beauty of creative transitioning. 

I think it also had
to do with the fact that when I was younger, I didn’t have much in
the way of available music.  So I REALLY had to like a song to
sit and try to record it off the radio, then try to use the graphic
equalizer on my dubbing boom box to simulate fading out the song. 

This translated to tapes chock full of music that I was
really into at the time.  And because I was working under the
constraints of 45 minutes to a side (90 minute tapes), I had to be
creative in my song arrangement to fill up the tapes.  In analog
it’s also much easier to trim down songs if you start running on too
long.

I think I’ve only made three good mix CDs.  One was
with anime music.  One was a joke (I tried to fit on every
version of ‘Fly me to the Moon’ I could find on there, with some
other good music in between).   One was a complete accident
and turned out to be a good driving/chilling cd.  I’ve
unfortunately lost them all, and don’t remember the track list to
recreate them.

So now on to the brave new world of random
songs and playlist arrangement.  Apparently, one of the major
selling points of the ipod, when it first came out was serendipitous
synchronicity. An ipod can hold A LOT of music, and many people
would find that by letting it play on a random shuffle that music
would often match their mood and situation. A soundtrack to their
lives.

So what will I do with my newfound
music library? Since this new music player has the random thing
covered, I’m probably going to try to get back into making mix CDs
again. Experiment with random arrangements like I
used to have, and theme CDs that try to express a theme or idea.
Maybe get smaller CD media, put the pressure of a time limit back on,

Time to get some good
headphones and a new stack of blanks. And if you get a CD in the
mail, you’ll know what I’ve been up to.