fine whine

So I had this brilliant idea for how I could solve not one, but two problems that aren’t important issues at all. First of all, I like to listen to music at work, but my computer’s CD drive clicks and makes a lot of noise. So listening to my CDs and mp3CDs is right out. I tried out internet radio, settled on a playlist of about ten shoutcast streams, and still wasn’t happy. I was spending too much time switching channels, as it were. That’s “problem” number one. “Problem” number two—warranting quotes because neither is life-threatening—is a backlog of music I haven’t heard, primarily in mp3 form. Can you believe that it took me a week to realize the solution?

I made a private shoutcast server. I culled some other tools, namely Oddcast, and mistakenly set the bitrate to 160kbps. Which is very close to CD quality, but also huge. Each song necessitates streaming around five megabytes, so you can imagine the stats I’d be running up for downloads. I want to get the attention of the I.T. department, but not that way. Oh, and the bitrate’s too high—it skips.

Everybody at one time or another discovers a common turn of phrase that really gets one’s goat. Right now “Is that your final answer?” is tantamount to public flatulence on a bus to most people. My buddy Drew hated “You’ll have that”. And so forth. Today I realized that I cannot stand statements ending with “…like it’s my job.” As in, “I eat Oreos like it’s my job” or “I watch American Idol like it’s my job”. Now I am neither an American Idol fan nor do I use this phrase, though I do enjoy an occasional Oreo. So why should what somebody else says bother me so? Is it because generally the sort of person who says exactly that seems to slack a little more on the job? One guy I knew said that constantly about anything from playing video games to using ketchup also prided himself on getting away with half hour potty breaks, IMing on his cell phone. Not your average workaholic, I’d venture.

So the real question remains—do I take my own job too seriously? Or am I just not eating enough Oreos?

By the way, trucker hats are big. Get yours at Barney’s New York (when their site reopens) or wait till winter and get ‘em from the Gap.

I kid you not. Trucker hats, i.e. the ones with the stiff front and the mesh in the back. As in the ones that say John Deere or the name of a ship on them. Like the ones that rednecks and Tom Clancy wear. Incidentally, on those ship and other military ones, the laurels on the bill are commonly called “scrambled eggs”. I kid you not.

I was in a presentation today, and heard about a group of people who were “positioned and goaled” to do something or other. Now ‘position’ has for a long time been an acceptable verb, but ‘goal’? I assume from context that the people had been given a goal or a goal had been set for them, but I am at a loss to come up with another such usage. A goal just isn’t something that can be given like a slap or a kiss. Someone can be given a present or be presented something, but they cannot be goaled. It just sounds stupid.

I suppose I just don’t understand the need for certain people (generally higher up in bureaucracies) to verb nouns. I mean, is it harder to say “they have a set goal” than “they are goaled”? It saves, what, one second to say? That second is lost then if the listener has to figure out what it means. Then again, in bureaucracies, lower-downs merely are expected to nod to higher-ups, not comprehend what they’re saying.

Someday I think I want a sign atop my bed that says “Mike Lietz slept here”. I think that would be cool, in some over-the-top wacky, zany way. I’m of course inspired by a scene in
The Emperor’s New Clothes, a little film starring Ian Holm, Iben Hjejle (seen earlier in
High Fidelity and equally good here), and Ian Holm. To give away no more than the DVD case, Ian plays Napoleon and a suitable duplicate, joined in a daring escape from his island exile. Once off the island, the little emperor journeys back to Paris by way of Waterloo, stopping to take a nap in a tourist trap house honoring him, despite his never being there. He awakens to see a sign above the headboard proclaiming “Emperor Napoleon Slept Here” and realizes that it is now true. A mere throwaway moment in an otherwise more serious film, it inspired me to have a sign of my own. I’m not going to buy the DVD of the movie, though, since it lacks any sort of extras at all, and I’d really like to have heard some filmmakers’ commentary on this one. It was a good movie, full of whimsy and wonder and other things that start with ‘w’. Well worth watching.

Well, the PS2 dropped to $179. Not the great discount I was hoping for, but I’ve still got a couple more weeks to make up my mind. I have to say I like a couple of the games. I finally earned my ‘b’ license in Gran Turismo 3 A-spec after at least an hour of trying. I like the racing parts, just not the license tests, so far. After all, it tells me I’m a whopping 0.7% finished.

I also picked up Devil May Cry, highly recommended by Ryan and for only ten bucks. I think that I like it, though I have a long way to go before I’m as proficient in killing the marionettes as I am at killing soldiers in Dynasty Warriors 3.

Not so long ago I wrote a little ditty about coincidences and chance, specifically the chance that I’d be watching a movie (Requiem for a dream) written by the favorite author of Andy Kaufman (Hubert Selby, Jr.), a pseudo-biography (Was this man a genius? by Julie Hecht) I’d read and returned to the library to pick up the closest Selby book to Andy’s favorite (The demon). Well, at the time it seemed pretty interesting a coincidence.

And now I discover that all the time this was going on I had been seeking a track sampled from/remixed from Requiem’s soundtrack! By sheer chance, I was trying to track down “Zoo York” by Paul Oakenfold, off of his studio and collaboration album Bunkka. You see, I’d come across another album track, “Nixon’s Spirit”, featuring a rant by the one and only Hunter S. Thompson, whilst looking for the audiobook edition of Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Further, but limited, research into the album revealed the possibility that “Zoo York” also featured H.S.T. and this was enough to pique my interest.

Anyway, to make an already long story longer, I’ve now sat through “Zoo York”. It’s pretty cool. The whole album is, for that matter, despite some missteps in the collaborators department and occasionally too much trancing, quite cool. My disappointment in the lack of H.S.T. in “Zoo York” was to be replaced with first curiousity and then the current state in which I began this post. As though there were no offbeat lyrics, there was something else, a symphonic riff at first I could not place except from recent memory. Then I realized it to be a theme from Requiem, and that was just too cool.

So here I gush like some ecstasy-crazed dj fan. Whatever. I like finding these sorts of convergences. And for the curious, the track’s actually a remix of the Requiem track “Lux Aeterna”, part of a dance remix project that never materialized otherwise. And to take it all one step further, evidently Oakenfold sampled Clint Mansell, who in turn had sampled from a song “Quarbani Quarbani” with Bollywood connections I’m still tracking down.

I caught the beginning episode of The AniMatrix, and I have to admit it was quite cool. I’m the first to admit that I was let down by The Matrix the first time I saw it. For that matter, subsequent viewings didn’t make me like it too much more. I’m not sure it was the over-the-top wire-fu or bad writing interludes, but something really overshadowed the great visuals and incredible premise for me. Keanu Reeves was more than passable for the role and Lawrence Fishburne was fantastic, but some of the lines they had to deliver (and their co-stars) went beyond cheesy, past camp, and well into the other side.

But the ani-Matrix shows much promise. The deeper ideas are more in evidence, and the visual style is even cooler than the original movie’s. Though it resembles in no small way the film Metropolis, itself no paragon of originality. Not to say it’s a bad movie, in fact it’s quite good. Don’t say that to an anime fan, though, as they seem to find it lacking somehow and will look at you the same way opera fans view “Jackass” watchers. Derision doesn’t start to describe it.

So I’m working on my website at the same time, and it too is showing some promise. The whole XHTML/CSS layout process is mildly arduous to adapt from my old, convoluted style of HTML, but ultimately I think it’ll be worth it.

Check this out: last year 700 people wrote 50,000 word novels. Nothing remarkable about that, per se, other than the fact that they did it all, start to finish, in the month of November. You see, it was ‘National Novel Writing Month’, and as members of the Na No Wri Mo challenge, they ultimately emerged exhausted but victorious. I found the link surfing through old college acquaintances (read one’s novel at his site), and I have decided to do it this year. Of course, now I just have to put off thinking about novel writing until around October.

… that John Malkovich has never seen Con Air? He says he’s not among his greatest fans. Not to say he’s averse to seeing his own work, but he much prefers to be doing it, not watching it.

I’d agree with him, except that I seem to enjoy reading what I’ve read here on this site, and especially old school papers I wrote. They’re hilarious.