Tvindy

Bakerina's Music Meme 2

Remember Bakerina's Music Meme? Well, she's got a new one. (Technically it came from someone else, but no matter.) Just as I participated in the last one, I'll give this one a go:

What is the total amount of music files on your computer?

Looking at the properties for my my My Music folder, I see that I have 1118 files. Not all of them are music, but most are.

The CD you bought last?

That would be Thimble Corner.

What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Hmmm. . . Well, I can't remember. Usually I try to avoid music.

Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

• Twenty Fingers, "No Short Dick Man"
• South Park, "The Circle of Poo"
• Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Walk through the Fire"
• Raffi, "Baby Baluga"

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

I suppose I'm passing it to the first three people who read this and decide to take part.

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On a completely unrelated not, if you need a text-based heart for your Valentine's Day posts and e-mails and don't feel like messing with the Windows character map, feel free to copy and paste these:

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Roger Ebert: What was he thinking?

I just found out that a director's cut to Donnie Darko. That went right into my Netflix queue. I was curious to find out more about it, so I checked out Roger Ebert's review which was more than a little puzzling to me, especially the last paragraph:

"Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut" is alive, original and intriguing. It's about a character who has no explanation for what is happening in his life, and is set in a world that cannot account for prescient rabbits named Frank. I think, after all, I am happier that the movie doesn't have closure. What kind of closure could there be? Frank takes off the insect head and reveals Drew Barrymore, who in a classroom flashback, explains the plot and brings in Grandma Death as a resource person?

Either the director's cut is radically different from the original, or Roger Ebert had some seriously tainted butter on his popcorn that day. Pretty much everything in that paragraph after the first sentence is fallacious. I understand that the movie can be a bit confusing the first couple of times around, particularly if you haven't read the relevant passages in Roberta Sparrow's book, but Ebert just doesn't seem to have been paying attention. I could go on and on picking apart what he wrote, but I think it's enough to just point out that the person in the bunny suit is definitely not Drew Barrymore. Even with my horribly debilitating prosopagnosia, I knew that wasn't Barrymore. Besides, there were plenty of clues, such as the fact that he says his name is Frank and has bleeding eye sockets, and then we meet a fellow named Frank later in the movie wearing an identical freakazoid bunny suit and then getting shot in the face.

Is this Drew Barrymore? Or is it Frank?

Green Envelopes

Remember that time Netflix sent out green envelopes instead of the usual red ones? That was cool, wasn't it?

Romanian Presentation

As most of you probably already know by now, I study Romanian at the U of O through the Yamada Language Center. The curriculum requires that every class put on some sort of presentation for the other classes at the end of each term. Last quarter, I put together my own presentation. (There were only two students in the class.) It was the first time I used my iPod photo to do an in-class presentation. I made up some slides and then showed them on the TV. My teacher liked what I did and said I should make a permanent written version of it, so that's what I've done here. Please bear in mind when reading it that I know my scholarship is kind of sloppy (no footnotes, gross generalizations, a few sprinkles of BS), but most of the other classes just put on skits. The other student in my class taught the audience to do the Hokey Pokey in Romanian.

Blurbs

People have been asking me about how to format their blurbs. There really aren't any specific rules. In general, they should be in the third person and relatively short. I've reproduced the four I've received thus far below, being careful to strip out real names when they were used. (They'll still be included in the book, of course.) I'm pretty sure Orionoir's blurb was written in jest, since he has spoken of contributing something else. But really, how he can possibly top that?

[Bakerina] is a writer, baker, office worker and underachiever.  She is a graduate of Chatham College and Peter Kump's New York Cooking School, and was the 2004 American Egg Board Fellow at the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  She lives in New York City with her husband and too many books.

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[Author] (aka Bloody Morty Vane) is a 30-something business analyst by day and a 20-something minded guitar addict, gadget junkie, Mac freak, amateur chef, leftist political pundit, scooter fiend, and personal shopper by night.  While he spends his days training military executives in program and knowledge management, he spends every other moment researching guitars, gadgetry, recipes and reeling in the many foibles of our so called leaders.

[author] was turned on to Blogging in 1999 and has been in love, and obsessed, ever since.
Over time his blogs have evolved from typical Blogger rantiness to a bizarre peak into his daily life via his Word Press powered Bossa Nova blog at Circa1973.net

Blogging has afforded him the opportunity to connect with a like minded community of, truthfully, some of the best dorks (and now friends) on the planet.

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Youngest of One currently attends Regis High School in Manhattan, where he is often intimidated by the teeming masses and immense buildings. He resides in Queens, New York, where things get pretty dull, with the exception of his crazy neighborhood friends. He has written for to two consecutive weblogs, both entitled “Youngest of One,” since late September 2003. His family would appreciate it if you didn't hunt him down.

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i know in only a very superficial and tangential way mr wally lamb, who is both a local celeb and the ultimate patron saint of hopeful writers the world over. before he was discovered on oprah (well, not literally on her, he was on her show) he was a high school teacher by day and a persistently undistinguished writer of short fiction by day. lots of his stuff was printed for nothing in local newspapers, i doubt anyone could have seen the fame and fortune coming, but boy did it come.

anyhow, my conclusion is that fame is random. with lamb i think his first book had a magic title (she's come undone) (it didn't even matter that it was borrowed) and equally intoxicating cover art. the book itself imho was a not too well pasted together assemblage of stuff alternately new and stale, i don't think anyone burned the midnight oil stitching it together. still, it was such a cool object with wh to walk around, i must have given away five copies trying to get sex, makes you wonder re the kind of sex oprah gets.

I'm Back

It was a tough weekend without a computer. What I finally ended up doing is going to the Circuit City in Springfield and buying the cheapest eMachine currently on the market. I had hoped that I might be able to just plunk in my original hard drive and have it boot up (since my original computer was also an eMachine) but no such luck. I had to plug it in as a slave and transfer the files manually, which proved to be impossible until I discovered this. What a headache!

Anyway, I've transferred all of my data and most of my programs. I also yanked out the silly CD-RW drive and crammed in my DVD and DVD RW drives. I was also relieved to discover that my RAM was compatible. I took my original 512 megabytes and added it to the 256 that were included in the new machine, giving me a modest upgrade. I'm also happy to have a new 60 gig hard drive to accompany my 120 gig one. And my five-year-old TV tuner card works better than ever in the new machine. (In the old one, it would always cause a system crash unless I closed down absolutely everything running in the background, including the SETI at Home program.)

I mostly did okay transferring my old programs. The only real problem is with the Adobe software. I don't have the installation disk for Photoshop Elements 2.0 (since it belongs to my father), but I was able to order a copy online for under $20 including postage. The big problem is with Photoshop Album. I purchased it online and downloaded it rather than getting an installation disk. It won't boot from its original location, and I don't want to pay another $50 to buy it again. (Adobe only lets you download once.) All the category tags are saved within the program (rather than as meta data in the actual image files), and I'm wondering if this means that untold hours of work are now lost. I still have the photos, of course, but I've lost all the category tags I used to organize them.

I'm sorry to keep getting sidetracked from the book project, especially since I planned to have it completed in January. I need to catch up on schoolwork over the next couple of days, but I promise I'm not stringing everyone along. It will be completed shortly.

It's not the keyboard

I went to Staples and got myself a new keyboard. No dice. Apparently the problem is the socket on the back of the computer. If I jiggle the connector, I can sometimes get the the lights (Num/Caps/Scroll Lock) to go on, but neither keyboard would work. I took the second keyboard back and exchanged it for a USB one. The cheapest I could find was a wireless one for $79 (as opposed to the $15 one I had to take back). The third keyboard did have a USB connector but it could only be used on laptops. On a desktop, you need to use the adaptor and plug it into the regular socket. Perhaps there simply are no USB keyboards for desktops. I looked inside the case to see about replacing the socket, but it's mounted onto the motherboard. It looks like I may have to buy a whole new computer. The one I have now is only one and a half years old and works just fine. I was expecting to wait another year or two and get myself a nice laptop when I had more money, but now I'll have to get a cheap replacement.

The worst part is that my computer is password protected, meaning I can't even fully boot it, since I can't type in my password. If I could just log in, I could at least watch DVDs and TV, surf the net, check my e-mail, and read blog. I'm quite unhappy right now.

Anyway, I may be offline for a few days until I get this worked out

Keyboard Malfunction

I've had the same keyboard for more than seven years. Tonight it failed, so I may be incommunicado for the next couple of days until I get a new one.

By the way, if anyone needs a Gmail account, I've got 50 invites!

Open Water

I saw Open Water a couple days ago (via my Netflix subscription). My overall reaction is that it's a bit odd, but, since I'm still thinking about it, I guess it must have been a good movie at some level. I have a lot of thoughts about it, and I'll share them here. A word of warning, though. If you haven't seen it yet, reading these comments could ruin it for you.

I've run out of original titles for book update posts

The book still has a bit more work to go before I publish it, but it's shaping up nicely. (Actually, I'm in awe of it.) Yesterday I pasted in all the entries and found myself making a few tentative editorial decisions which I'd like to run by everyone to see if they're okay.

• Snowball definitely needed a third entry, so I chose this one, because it's interesting, thought-provoking, funny, and nicely complements the other two.
• Bill only had one, so I added this one and changed the name of the bank to "Bank of Blech" to protect against being sued.
• I added my recent Mexico post, since it seemed to be popular, and I'm considering adding the Brazilian Soap Operas entry as well, but I would need someone to second it for me to be confident enough to put it in.
• Bakerina already had three entries, but there was one I've been thinking about a lot lately that I felt just had to go in. It's this one, but to add it I had to remove one of the three original entries. I ended up removing this one. I hope that's okay.
• There was one entry that I really agonized over before ultimately removing it, and that was James' ghost story. It definitely is a good read, but when I pasted it into the book and saw just how many pages it took up in relation to the other entries, it seemed to overshadow so much of the other stuff.

What all of these decisions have in common is that, while I feel they are correct and important, I recognize that I don't have the authority to make them, especially the last one, so please feel free to argue any and all of the above points in the comments section. Anything that is not disagreed with will remain as is by default.

Once I get the book assembled, all the contributors will get to see a finalized digital version before it goes into print, so they can check for problems. Don't bother checking the book page for updates on content, since I haven't updated it for some time.

I haven't heard from Deek for a few days, and he never gave a final okay to include his material, so I'm holding off on adding it until he says something definitive. Also, there was talk of getting Owen and Tequila Mockingbird to take part. I never heard anything more about or from them, so I'm working under the assumption that they haven't expressed consent to use their material.

Don't forget to send me your "About the Author" blurb if you haven't already. Also, let me know what name you wish to use.