i prefer pi

I’m updating during the last 10 minutes of my only Leap Day during college!

Listening to: Finale - West Side Story
Current mood: amused

Unfortunately, I accidentally discovered StreamingSoundtracks.com a few minutes ago. I say “unfortunately” because I ought to be working on my OS project report rather than searching for streaming radio stations, but this one is too cool to pass up. I mean, where else will I get Secret Weapons Over Normandy followed by Nicholas Nickleby followed by Edward Scissorhands followed by Laputa, Castle in the Sky (!!!) followed by Iron Giant? I just found out that it’s all listener requests. I think I’m in love.

Some rather unique things happened today, so I’m posting for posterity’s sake. Get it? Post-erity? Ha ha ha… heh… oh man…

So I got a phone call today from a University higher-up, thanking me for something that I posted on Hobbes. I guess it was unusual for two reasons…

First, I’ve never had anyone unrelated to Hobbes comment on anything that’s gone on there. One time I got an e-mail from someone saying that CIS couldn’t solve her problem but sent her to us because “those guys know a lot about networking,” but I played no part in it at all; credit for supreme networking skill goes to Mike and Bill and others. It wasn’t entirely out-of-the-blue because I’ve had other interactions with this person, but it was still quite unexpected.

The other reason (which happens to be somewhat related to the first) is that I forget that the general perception of Hobbes is somewhat different from my own. The forums had been running for a year when I started at A&M and there was already a community built up around them, so I think that I viewed it as this big, important thing when I was a freshman. As I got more involved and started actually meeting these people, I realized that they were relatively normal folks, just like myself (most of them, anyway :)) and that it was a pretty cool forum, but it was just a forum. In my mind, it’s just where I go to talk to most of the same people on a regular basis to talk about most of the same topics that everyone else does. I guess I forget that the registered user base is probably somewhere around 1500 unique persons and that I recognize most of the top 150 people as “regulars”… these are pretty significant numbers when I consider that the other student organizations that I’m a part of are ecstatic when we have 20 people show up to a meeting and that 1500 students is about 3% of the student body. Heck, we got thirteen and a half thousand page views on the forums in the last two days. I forget what a significant community there is surrounding Hobbes, what a unique opportunity it is to participate in something that involves so many people of so many backgrounds, and how fortunate I am to be a (however small) part of the behind-the-scenes of it all. I don’t know who reads this, but you’re all awesome; To Mike, David, Tim, the MOD squad, all of the regular and not-so-regular posters, especially the ones who take so much abuse, all of you lurkers out there (including you_dont_know_me), I appreciate how much you contribute to what goes on.

My Hall Director told me some things today that I haven’t heard in a while. I think I just realized how much I miss the discipling influence of men older and wiser than me that I haven’t really received since I came to college. Matt, thanks for the positive influence that you’ve had on me. To the rest of the Hall Staff, I’ve lived under five different groups of RAs and you all are the best of them by quite a large amount. Thanks.

Went and saw Robot Stories at the Texas Film Festival this afternoon. It was mentioned and discussed on Slashdot a few days ago and sounded pretty interesting. Plus I felt like I was getting some kind of “culture” by seeing an independent and unreleased film at a film festival:) I really enjoyed it… it’s a series of four short films that explore the overlap of machine with man. It felt a lot like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories, except that the focus was always on humanity’s reaction to the inhumane, rather than vice versa. My favorite of the shorts were the second (”The Robot Fixer,” which is only tangentially about automata but tells a really compelling story about reactions to loss) and the fourth (”Clay,” the story of a terminally ill sculptor who lives in a world where brains can be scanned, making digital immortality a reality). The first was also pretty interesting (”My Robot Baby,” about a couple who must take care of a robot “child” before they’re qualified to adopt a real one) but it felt a bit more heavy-handed (and more like Phillip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury than Asimov) than the others, and the third (”Machine Love,” about a synthetic office worker who is treated like an appliance by his dysfunctional office-mates) was just a bit silly. The most thought-provoking line for me was in “Clay” when the sculptor’s son confronts his father after learning about his illness and his refusal of the scanning process: “You can’t do this Dad. It’s immoral… it’s illegal. You can’t just throw your life away.” I think that the notions that consciousness is purely tied to the physical matter of our brains and that consciousness can be separated from our wet-ware are a bit off-base (never mind the physical and chemical impossibilities of perfectly capturing electrical states), but assuming that such a thing were possible, what rights would we retain to die when our bodies expire? I wonder at the connection between the fact that I was most affected by the shorts dealing with death and the fact that someone here at school committed suicide a few days ago.

So lessons learned recently? John Donne’s famous lines have remained on my mind a lot. I’d post the whole thing here because it’s that good, but it would make this already-ponderous posting even longer. This is relevant:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Time to retire. Good night, all.

Listening to: Agua de Beber - Antonio Carlos Jobim
Current mood: contemplative

My favorite part about today was the knowledge that my feet were girded in aquatically-impervious footwear, meaning that I could traipse through puddles with abandon. Thanks for the boots, Mom, even though I said at the time that I didn’t want or need them.

*yawn* Time for bed…

Listening to: Nick Drake - Way to Blue
Current mood: sleepy

Since Dr. Menzel used the word “grok” in our PHIL 342 (Symbolic Logic II) lecture today and because several people expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the word, I felt compelled to provide a link to the Jargon File entry as a public service announcement. It’s apparently wide-spread enough to be in Dictionary.com’s database too, which means that it’s time to get a new word, methinks. You might have known that it’s also the root of the name of the Grokster peer-to-peer network if you’ve ever used it. I thought that they had gone under a long time ago when Sharman Networks cut them off, but apparently I was wrong.

Well, it’s me. Sorry to disappoint.

I read something this morning about which I felt compelled to update. But first, this: Lists are silly. There. I’ve said it. Like most other people though, I take some strange amount of joy from quantifying my existence and setting things into an order that somehow elevates or lowers their actual significance. I tend to reify and measure my performance by how many things on my to-do list I accomplish, or how many of Random Publication/Organization’s top 100 candy bars OF ALL TIME that I’ve eaten, or how my DVD list is alphabetized or a plethora of other, similarly trivial things. It’s really something that I’ve been working on amending. I’m getting better… really.

Now this: GameSpy’s Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games (of All Time, obviously). When I’m feeling snobbish and elitist I’ll say things like “GameSpy’s only contribution to the gaming community has been to give me a list of servers to avoid” or “Oh, look what ridiculous list GameSpy came out with this week” or something. But only when I disagree with them. I really haven’t played that many of the games on this list, but I have to whole-heartedly agree with their choice for #1: Chris Taylor’s monumental Total Annihilation. Total-freaking-Annihilation. The only game with a score that I still listen to and regard as serious music. One of the only two games that ran on our P133 that I still play with frequency, the other being Ack-Ack Attack. There were other great games, Seven Cities of Gold and Sid Meier’s Colonization stand out in my mind, but TA is the only one that I still have a copy of. The only game that I’ve played since that came packaged with 50 excellent maps, right out of the box. The only RTS I’ve ever seen that managed to balance gameplay with over a hundred distinct units. Fully-3D units and terrain, real line-of-sight, the mobile Commander that made Home wherever you wanted it to be. Need to advance your base of operations by a half mile (because the maps ranged from close-quarters to behemoths that made 10-player games feel remote)? No problem. I could go on and on and on, but I have STAT in 5 minutes. And I always feel self-conscious when I use the internet recreationally in the Bright labs when the people around me are SSH-tunnelling and grokking cron jobs and defragging their Z-buffer caching. Yes, those are real CPSC words (and bonus points if you can spot the bogus phrase).

1) The scholastic benefits of going to the Bright or OAL labs rather than back to my room in between classes are shocking. I got done all of the things that I needed to do today with a (wee) bit of time to spare by haunting the CPSC lab.

2) I really don’t enjoy being in class for 7 hours a day. I’m not quite sure what was different about high school (I’m guessing that it was band for an hour and a half in the middle everyday), but my tolerance has dwindled to about 3 MWF classes or 2 TR classes per day.

3) Progresso’s Chicken Pot Pie Soup really isn’t worth the $1.50 I accidentally spent on it. The meat had a flavor and texture somewhere between half-thawed, freezer-burnt chicken and cardboard.

It was a good day today. That’s about it, I think. I was going to recommence my routine tomorrow morning, but I think that it’ll have to wait until Wednesday. Because it’s, you know, four in the morning right now.

Hi Mom
Listening to: Magical Mister Mistoffelees (darn you, Shawna :))
Current mood: cheerful