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.

So I'm restyling my website (not the blogs but the main site itself), and I'm trying to do it in pure CSS. CSS, for the uninitiated, is a standard for laying out web pages. The concept and specifications have been around for years but the major browsers are only now really supporting it well. My IE5's no good at it, but it renders okay under mozilla derivatives. For windows, I heartily suggest using k-meleon. It's fast, free and rather quite standards-compliant.

I know that coincidences happen completely by chance, but that doesn't make them seem less remarkable. I just finished watching the Director's cut DVD of Requiem for a dream, which was written by Hubert Selby, Jr. This may not seem like a big deal to you, and some probably already knew that fact.

The significance is a little more to me, though, since I just checked out The Room, also by said Hubert Selby, Jr., from my local library, based on a 'recommendation' from Andy Kaufman. You see, in the book Is this man a genius? by Julie Hecht, the intrepid author gets Andy to reveal his favorite book, The Demon, again by said Hubert Selby, Jr. The library didn't have The Demon, so I grabbed the first one they had. I haven't read it yet, but after the movie I think I'll read it sooner.

The movie's quite good as well. It's not a light watch, and in fact I had to throw in some Benny Hill just to recover—which is where this entry's title originated, as graffiti on a wall. Somehow it seemed fitting.

Anyway, I wanted to blog the link for Amoeba Proteus, the computer graphics company (director) Darren Aronofsky co-founded for his films' effects. Requiem had a hundred digital shots, and they didn't want to outsource. Their technical prowess in film should speak for itself, since their website certainly doesn't. Effectively three whole pages (including a Quicktime demo reel), the site offers very little in the way of information about their projects and accomplishments, other than their titles and brief mention of an upcoming animated feature. Not quite ketchup fodder, in my opinion. I found more interesting information in this indiewire interview.

So I haven't updated this blog or ketchup for three days. I have prepared a number of excuses to explain this horrible horrible tragedy.

First of all, the keyboard on my laptop (which is my main connection to the internet) has been quitting on me lately after a randomly determined time. All of a sudden I'll just be down to my trackball, since the touchpad gave out long ago, and though I may be relatively proficient in the use of the On-Screen Keyboard, I'm not a fan of typing sentences with it, let alone whole blog entries.

Also, I've been busy. The center stickers on my cheap wheels fell off, and I had to pick up replacement ones. I've got a bigger-than-usual backlog of library books to deal with. My VCR's not working right, and I'm not yet willing to take it apart.

Most recently, though, I've had other things to do. Today and yesterday I was involved in a LAN party, which was quite fun. We mainly played EA's Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod. So basically it was a bunch of geeks playing soldier in the first Gulf conflict.

It was a lot more fun than I had expected. I'm not a big first-person shooter fan, and BF1942 is, at its core, a FPS. Yes, tanks can be driven and planes flown, but there is still an inordinate amount of running and crawling to be done. It's not going to replace GTA3 anytime soon on my system (particularly since I don't have a good enough system to run it) but I'd definitely play it again.

Anyway, part of the fun was coming up with intriguing nicknames. At times the server was filled with sophomoric anatomical taunting, childish name calling, and worse. For my part, I tried to be clever, striking gold with a one-two punch of "BugblatterBeastOfTraal" (which surprisingly few 'got') and its followup "TraalThePrettyHorseshit" (which was timed precisely to when my team was complaining). Another nerdy reference was "Set Me Up The Bomb". Better, and less geeky than those, was my apt description of my gaming skills and a play on words: "an army of one half".

That said, I'm catching myself back up. You have been warned.