About Me

I need to remind myself that I *CAN* save long TV Tropes pages for reading at home.

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Welp, I have once again had a disappointingly unproductive day.

But I have updated the lineal titles on the website. You may not have paid much attention to the Iron Bowl or the Florida-Florida State game, but it had two lineal title implications: first, the SEC Title Game will unify the 2004 Auburn-Utah and 2008 BCS titles (finally, the two SEC titles actually get unified!), and second, there will be no need for a 2009 BCS title because the unified Auburn-Utah title will be at stake in the National Title Game.

More stating the obvious: if Oklahoma wins the Big 12 Title Game and goes on to play for the national title, it’ll merge Auburn-Utah with Princeton-Yale, and we’ll be left with all of two lineal titles. Which is nowhere near as fun, especially when one is the safely-ignorable 2007 Boise State title (unless Utah loses their bowl). Our last hope may be for Boise and Ball States to continue undefeated…

I’ve always had a problem with this sort of thing. It used to be computer games, not that you’d know from reading Sandsday.

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So what have I been doing today?

Working on my college football schedule or rankings? Working on tomorrow’s webcomic post? Even taking some time out to plug in the scores and generate the rankings?

Working on one of the very few assignments I actually have to do for my microeconomics class that’s overdue anyway?

Checking on the status on my USB drive that I haven’t heard about for almost two months? Actually working on getting a real paying job?

None of the above. In fact I haven’t done a single productive thing today.

TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life indeed.

One-seventh of an important notice

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At least for next week, and possibly thereafter, I will make every effort to post the Sunday strip by 10 PM PT Saturday.

With how wild the entire neighborhood can get and my current state of mind, it’s either that or wait until late in the night, and I can’t bring myself to sit through my rowdy neighbors’ partying for several hours.

If the prospect of getting away from this neighborhood isn’t motivation enough for me to get some sort of real job by the end of the MONTH, it’s a sign there may not BE a job for me.

Update: Okay, apparently I somehow didin’t update tnew database for yesyerday’s steitag[ pdfgbdl; km;gkcknvmvjkfxcfgnvmkmvcjfm4w,v.mkfjcmx gr jm .blvugr.,b/m sodnsav

To say this has not been a good year for me is an understatement…

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If I were offered the chance to relive the past month over again, with the knowledge that the platform examinations I would work on would take up eight 5,000-word parts per party, and it would take me a day to complete a 5,000-word part after sacrificing most other priorities and with a nagging feeling I could complete two, three, or even more without the distractions and by giving up even more priorities, but I never would… I think I’d take the offer.

Even going back three weeks, when my first attempt at writing Part I of the Democratic examination hit a snag in the form of the belated discovery that Blogger’s post editor “in draft” can still lock up after several successive successful uses of the clipboard, if I had then the foresight not to let the frustration of that stop me from starting over somewhat immediately, or even had the foresight to follow my own motto of “never assume” and had taken the simple step of composing the examination in Notepad in the first place, that would remain a very tempting target to go back to and revive the plans I had in mind all along.

(Or maybe I could have worked on most of my plans in advance like I always thought about in the back of my mind.)

Honestly, the platform examinations were only supposed to be the beginning. Against the backdrop of the ongoing series in Sandsday, I would start out largely as I did start out – proclaiming the urgent importance of global warming and the role of mass transit as being the solution – but would continue into an examination of several large cities’ mass transit plans, any expansion plans, and anything on the ballot today. I would cut into the platform examinations but would spin from that into a deconstruction of every level, big and small, of our political system, including an investigation into what sort of plan we really need to get away from the Bush years and a deconstruction of the positions of those who place themselves outside the two-party political system. Hopefully I could clarify some of my own political positions in the process. (No, my almost-constant agreeing with the Democrats does not mean my positions were fully clarified. That was nothing new.)

If you still need to read up on the platforms before voting (assuming you haven’t voted already), you can read the last two parts of each platform from here and here. I’ve considered pressing on with my platform examinations and trying to salvage something out of my original plans, but it’s kind of pointless after the election, and it might result in a situation where some of you are telling me “Oh, now you tell me about some of these positions!” On the other hand, some of the things I had in mind might still be extant after the election, but it might be considered a bit jarring to launch into them without the structure provided by the platform examinations. (By which I mean the examinations being completed in full.)

So I’m starting a new Da Blog Poll. If you still find the platform examinations useful and want me to complete them, even after you’ve already voted, let me know and I might launch back into them, and try and salvage the rest of my plans as well. If you don’t find them useful anymore, we’ll… move on, I guess.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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I’ve had several occasions to watch “The Elegant Universe” and found it fascinating as much for its means of presentation as for its subject matter. But I’ve never seen the third part; pledge-break-filled versions, the only ones I’ve actually seen on my PBS stations, always omit the third part to get you to buy the DVD, and while I watched it on DVD in my high school physics class the teacher never got to the third part there either, and I’m not sure he even finished the second part. If I hadn’t wasted most of my morning and wasn’t on a time crunch regardless I might take this as an opportunity to finally see it. Maybe tomorrow.

Should I point out the new label or are you smart enough to figure it out on your own?

It doesn’t help that the closest non-university supplier of USB drives that I know of has such a limited selection.

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If you use USB drives… and you’re fed up with losing caps and thinking of getting a retractable connector… and you want your USB drives to last a long time… especially if you store your stuff on them…

…then no matter how tempted you may be, do NOT pick up a SanDisk Cruzer Micro, especially the cheap kind. Most of the complaints I’ve read online have to do with the “U3” feature, but I have read a few people who, like me, have had a problem with the drive failing. Before this one, I’ve used four different USB drives, and all either stopped working (due to lost caps and bent connectors, or in one case, a connector that slid in and out) or got lost… but NONE failed anywhere near as fast as this one, which I got in May or June, and which failed in late August. I read one review that said not to press your hands on the part that slides in and out; unfortunately, I kinda have to to slide the drive into my computer, because it’s not a perfect fit.

So I’ve sent that drive in to two different companies promising to fix it right up. Unfortunately, the first told me they couldn’t do it, and the second told me they couldn’t do it without doing an advanced recovery procedure that will set me back $825… if it works. And $150 if it doesn’t.

I was panicking when the drive stopped working. It contained everything I had worked on (and was able to recover from my laptop’s old hard drive) that wasn’t on the web site or my desktop dating back to April of 2007. A list of books I was going to recommend/ask for… a file I was thinking of using for tracking election results… some other things too personal for me to mention and/or that I’ve just plain forgotten about… and perhaps most importantly of all, almost every ounce of work I had done on the 100 Greatest Movies Project… all threatened to be gone. But when I was confronted with that price tag, I was actually considering cutting my losses and walking away. Maybe I could find the previous USB drive and it would have most but not all of the things I was dreading losing.

I can cover it – thanks to a recent influx of cash associated with the start of the school year – but I’m not happy about it and I’m going to attempt to discern every penny I may make in the future from recovering this stuff, just so I can find out if it turns out to be worth it. And I may be about to attempt to make some money back right now. Unfortunately, I have heard bad things about PayPal but I don’t know of any real competitors to it, so if you are willing to give me any sort of donation, e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com and let me know so I know if it would be worth it to establish the account.

I would have written a stronger post, but between my plans for future posts and the tangent it would have gone off to, might as well not. Oh, and I didn’t start as soon as I should have.

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Tonight – last night as you read this – was not a good night for me.

Actually, I take that back. This whole month has not been good for me, and to a lesser extent the last three months plus have not been good to me. I haven’t found any jobs (and it’s become abundantly apparent that I’m not remotely qualified for all that many), I’ve developed a humoungous backlog on Da Blog just as I have to deal with the start of the new school year and all that entails, my USB drive stopped working and just getting my files back will cost me upwards of $800 if it works (more on that later).

I went to a Mariners game last night on what amounted to a last-minute change in plans, which didn’t go well. There were rowdy people behind me and I think I was especially sensitive to everything – my mom thought my nervous system was on overdrive. I did settle down but didn’t get into the flow of the game, since the Mariners stink so bad they essentially threw in the towel before the game even started, and while I generally like to pretend I’m a TV or radio announcer at games I attend live, a string of controversial calls going against the Mariners (and thus not replayed on the big board, preventing me from assessing them for myself) pretty much soured me on the idea.

Things continued not to go well on the way home, which I won’t bore you with. I will mention that when I get mad, I get Hobbesian, and so I can’t help but wonder if civilization is based on a denial of humanity’s basic nature, and on attempting to get everyone to deny it. Civilization can be considered as the ability to be complacent about one’s own safety and tranquility, and for it to be maintained we must ignore the fact that humans have still spent much longer scratching out a tightrope, dog-eat-dog, alliance-for-protection lifestyle than we have employing something called civilization.

(GRR. I HATREkahmi eo;lgn the fact I got the idea for this post on a bus and was in too cramped quarters to start writing it while the ideas were coming.)

(And my mom just lectured me about the direction of my life and my priorities. Remind me to write a post on that topic soon.)

It’s almost 4 AM and I barely feel tired.

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I think I live in the worst possible area for me to live. There are bars and party-hearty young people and other places that are popular at night almost everywhere I look. The nearest real accessible Internet connection is near one such place, at least at 11, and is way too inconsistent for me to post the strip. The nearest place I know of that I could access at 11 PM that isn’t too near a bar is about seven blocks, or probably almost half a mile, away.

Morning update!

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I know there are probably quite a few people who are used to the strip going up in the morning PT, but I’m going to start working my way back to 11 PM PT the previous day, okay?

(Well, except for the part where I was up at 6:30, left shortly after 7, and only now at 8:15 have the strip up, thanks to the free wi-fi the city provides that’s completely useless anywhere except a bus stop, and where the only bus stops along the route that have seats are, it doesn’t work, and it seems to be abandoned anyway.)

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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Well, I have a new battery for my laptop. There still remains the niggling problem of finding a place to use the Internet. I can’t go to the library for reasons that aren’t worth going into here. The main drag right outside the University of Washington Campus used to be a Wi-Fi hotspot, and you can still see its connection if you open up the list of connections, you just can’t, you know, connect. The place I can connect to the Internet without paying three dollars (though I still have to pay in order not to seem creepy) seemingly stopped working the instant I got there, with the normal quick fix not working either, so I’m crouching down beside the place I normally do have to pay three dollars and typing very slowly and deliberately. I should try to be a posting machine for most of tomorrow, and get a backlog going. A good backlog. I still have something I originally wanted to post two and a half weeks ago!

What is it about me that attracts Buddhism-related sites?