Too much stuff to list in a title, methinks.

September 27, 2003

Tonight’s the big night. Well, big dinner, at least. Everyone’s coming over here to my Mom’s house and we’re going to grill up some steaks, maybe have some corn, that sort of thing. In other words, one last summer BBQ. I’m still not entirely clear on the process of getting charcoal ready to cook with, but I think I can wing it. I get so intimidated by BBQing with charcoal since I know that many people consider it to be more art than science that I always get flustered and forget what I should do. I guess it’s kind of like cooking any other meal–if you follow the recipe, it’ll come out the same each time. Good chefs wing it, whether they follow a recipe or not. 1/4 teaspoon of oregano? Just pour and estimate. Maybe I can do the aame thing with grilling. I’ve spent so much time with my electric grill that I got at school that I’ve been spoiled on the easy stuff.

I’ve been playing through a few games recently on my computer to pass the time. I own dozens of games, of course, but I’ve been playing through some ones I pirated…er, downloaded off the Internet. Let’s face it: I don’t play games nearly as much as I used to, and I’m typically only interested in single player (as in, not interested in playing against other people online). I don’t really think that spending $50 on a new game (or in the case of the sum value of the ones I just downloaded, $160+) that I play through once and not again for another six or twelve months can be justified with my current financial condition. One game that I’ve been playing I liked the demo of, but the full game is not terribly good. Just more of the same stuff all the way through the game. It should really be an expansion pack to a game I already own, but they rushed it out the door to make some cash. Would I have been happy if I bought it? No.

Another game I just finished I really liked. It was a lot of fun, and I’ll have no qualms to playing it through again in the future when I’m comfortable going back and playing it without feeling like I’ve JUST played it. Will I buy it? Sure, if I find it for a price that I can afford, and that way I’ve supported the developers, even if I DID get some gameplay in beforehand. And the music industry in particular says that what I’m doing is wrong. Well, not the downloading of games, but the download a full version first to look/feel/play. Technically, it is, but I think that being exposed to something and then buying it later is better than no sales at all. I buy maybe two or three CDs a year, same with games, but it’s not because I’m pirating everything else. It’s because I don’t WANT anything else. Nothing else appeals to me. Pretty simple.

And speaking of the record industry and downloading, I’m told that the iTunes music store could be available to Windows users in the next month or so. Apple runs a downloadable music store that lets people download from a huge library of songs, put the songs on your iPod, burn them to CDs, listen to the on your computer, whatever you want. They’ve made it nearly impossible to transfer from person to person, but it carries an unlimited use for the person who buys it. The price for each song? $0.99! That’s exactly how much I’d pay for a single if I could find it on the iTunes store instead of scouring the Internet for a downloadable copy. The recording industry keeps trying different kinds of downloadable songs that are just junk–they expire so you can’t play them anymore, you can’t burn them to CDs, all sorts of tricky things. What a bunch of money-grubbing idiots.

I read someone’s blog last night that I came across on a forum that I regularly read and post to, and I was really surprised by the content. This guy is *so* bitter about everything that happens to him I don’t think that he’s ever happy about anything. He’s made a consistent jackass of himself on the forum that I mentioned because he thinks that no one listens to him, but in reality I finally discovered that it’s because he’s so self-centered that he always has to be right. If someone disagrees with him, it’s because they’re stupid and unintelligent and not because they genuinely disagree with him. His perspective is the RIGHT perspective ALL THE TIME. He’s gotten consistently banned from the forums for what he thinks if because he’s being hushed up and censored, but he’s too self-centered to realize that he’s detracting from the overall quality through his constant floods of posts. He crossed the line from annoying to disruptive, and he was bid a fond adieu, but he just can’t comprehend that.

My point is, I hope I don’t ever get that way. I know that I go off on some rants and raves once in awhile and due to the format of my blog no one can stop me and say “Whoa, you’re being an idiot!” until afterwards, so I try and keep the emotions to a minimum. I’ve always been a pretty reserved person emotionally anyhow, so there’s not too much on my site regarding how I feel at the moment unless it’s outwardly obvious to anyone who comes into contact with me. People have said that I should start a LiveJournal and post all my inner feelings there, but frankly, I don’t want to write in two places. I wouldn’t mind certain people being able to read how I feel about things other than what I write about here, but it would just be a hassle to do it twice. I have enough trouble keeping THIS site updated enough as it is.

I have a friend who I talked to a lot this last summer. I mean, every day until late nights a lot. I thought we were getting along very well, and then they came back to Portland and they sort of disappeared from the radar. I’ve spoken with them maybe five times in the last month, which is quite a change from every night. They actually IMed me a couple weeks ago to know why I didn’t talk to them anymore, to which I responded because they never responded to any of my IMs. Friendship is a two-way street, and I can’t be expected to just wait around and keep IMing someone forever until they decide to talk with me if that’s what they really want. If someone ignores me for awhile, then they obviously don’t care. Last night, however, they IMed me at 11:45 and told me that I should come over and bring liquor.

I’ve been known to buy liquor for people in the past, mind you. My sophomore year of college when I turned 21, I did it a lot. Not for random people, though, but my friends who wanted to drink some beer or hard liquor knew that I would be willing to help them out. I didn’t like the idea of being there for some random person I didn’t know, because that would just be both legally wrong and make me very uncomfortable. That sort of tapered off as I got older and more people turned 21, bbut my friends knew the offer stood. The idea of this person not talking to me for a month–not just not IMing me, but not even responding to my IMs or responding once and then not again as I sit there typing “Hello? Helloooooo?”–and then wanting me to bring them liquor seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Talk about balls. They must really have been scraping at the bottom of the barrel for help buying liquor if they IMed me and didn’t even try and work up to it. Not a “Hey, how’s it been,” not even a “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk lately,” and then work your way up to your ultimate goal, but just a straight “come over and bring liquor.” I mean, if you’re going to try and use me for something, at least go through the motions of trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Or something like that. My friends at school who never used me unless they had no other choice would talk to me on a Friday afternoon or evening and start chatting me up even though we both knew what I was going to have to do. Or maybe I’m just mad that they haven’t made an effort in general to even repair the rift before exploiting my services.

Still nothing on the job front. I got word of a nice site that’s local to Portland (well one of the sub-sites is, at least) and has all sorts of community stuff like job listings, resume posting, personals, want ads, etc. Since it’s a small site it gets a decent amount of readership but it’s all local, and any job listings that go up there won’t have the mountains of responses the paper or a major job listing site would. I’ll be keeping an eye on that, for sure. An old friend of my Mom’s from Hawaai and his son stopped by yesterday morning, and the son (he’s my age, just a year older) gave me his card to get in touch with him about his part-time job that he’s sure I could probably work. The pay is $15 an hour, which is a nice salary. The bad news is that it’s hyping and trying to sell Hewlett-Packard prouducts in places like Best Buy and CompUSA. I’d be sort of an on-site technical rep who of course pushes the HP products over other brands, even if I personally know that they make really shitty stuff. I have some reservations about working a job such as that which makes me uncomfortable to my core, so I’ll have to think about whether or not I want to do it.

I can’t remember if I mentioned it in my last post, but I emailed out a few copies of my resume to several Portland compaines that sounded interesting, not applying for any specific positions but just seeing if they needed an office cut-up, gofer, coffee wench, intern, whatever you want to call it. That was Tuesday or Wednesday night, but I haven’t heard anything back from them. Stupid job market. The guy I met yesterday said that he was basically living on contract work that he’s picked up since he was laid off more than a year ago, but it’s a tight for him. Heck, I can’t even do that since I have no programming skills. The marvelous website you see before you is a careful illusion of templates and preformatted pages, which is one reason I’ve been putting off the pages which have pictures on them. If I want them to look consistent with the rest of the site, I have to actually learn some stuff first. That or pay someone else to do it, which I KNOW I can’t afford.

Well, I keep losing my train of thought for some reason, so I think I’m going to go back to whatever I was doing before I started this. I think that my post actually took on a life of its own, anyhow, as it got longer and longer. It’s too warm out right now to do much thinking, in any case. It’s a nice toasty…92 degrees! How the hell did it get so hot all of a sudden! I’ll leave you with a quote that I came across the other day I wanted to share with everyone. I’ve though about compiling a good list of quotes from leaders past to shed some light on our current political climate, so here’s #1:

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” –Benjamin Franklin.

Have a good day all.

Now…where was I?

Posted in Geekery, General