The very cool Shawn Scarber emailed a bunch of us something too good to miss: whitney music box takes me back to the days when I studied electronic music. We had a very early synthesizer in the Electronic Music Studio, a room that had gone unmarked for years at the University of Saskatchewan. I swear, the synthesizer looked like something out of Star Trek — you controlled it with cables and pins stuck into various appropriate-sized sockets all over the front. I did nearly nothing with it, though some of the guys in years following mine spent hours in there …
Category: PERSONAL
Fitness and Chicken Soup
So when I attended this party here at work a few days ago, I mentioned how I couldn’t get into the campus fitness center, and it was explained to my just why. They lock up the place, and to get in, you need to borrow a key from the security guard. Nico, who lives upstairs, told me that he went with his son a fair number of times last semester, and that they were almost always alone while there. It’s accessible all week long, apparently, though Nico said it’s locked on the weekend. Showers, lockers, a lot of great gear… …
I Know What I Said But…
Until yesterday, the way I organized my writing was horrible. I had a series of finalized folders up to various dates, each one of them holding writing from different periods, each period organized in a different way. The main categories were Fiction, Poetry/Songs, and Essays & Other. But within each folder was a bewildering bunch of different folders classifying works in various different ways, and all in all, it was a horrible useless mess to track, to dig through, and to manage in general. So I sat down and rearranged most of it in a few hours yesterday afternoon. I …
Cheazoid DVDs and a funny T-shirt and thoughts on an old article and airline security
So while I was in Itaewon picking up shirts — short-sleeved shirts, I’m low on them, really, and it’s still warm enough for me to want some for work — I ended up dropping by the Halal food shop, actually one of them, because there are a few, and picked up some Bollywood DVDs. One of them, “Death Walks At Midnight/Aatma”, is totally worthless: it’s two CD-Rs with about 30 minutes of video on each. Krrish/Na Tum Jaano Na Hum are both cinema-rips and when I tried to play them in Totem, the subtitles were wonky — they started at the middle …
It Feels Silly to Say So…
… but I’m relieved at this quiz result: Which OS are You? I mean, really, I’m Ubuntu, but, whatever. Ubuntu’s made out of Debian, so it all works out to the same.
70%
That’s my guess as to what percent of one of my teeth was drilled out today. The dentist told me it had some “slight decay” a few weeks ago in the second upper left molar. Turned out, once he drilled out the old, crappy amalgam filling, the cavity was very, very deep. He said as much between spurts of drilling which went on for something like half an hour or more. As usual, touching the remaining tooth with my tongue after he’d finished drilling (when I was rinsing my mouth) was a mistake. He drilled the living hell out of …
Feeling Vaguely More Well-Travelled Now
I rarely draw attention to the photo section on this page, since I’m a horridly slow photo-uploader. I have piles of pics to upload to Flickr, and won’t be getting to any of them for a little while yet. (Though I’ll try to upload Charlie’s wedding pictures, and pics from my visit with Ian, first… I have most of the week off next week, so I might even get it done then.) However, I love making little pics to add to the rotating image folder for my site. If you hit reload a few times, you’ll probably see some pics …
Much Better, Thank You… (A General Update)
I’m feeling a LOT better, actually. The problem which seems to have kicked in during my time in Seattle is finally ebbing away… slowly, mind, but I’m finally able to take my prescription only occasionally, instead of continuously. Which is good, since one of the pills included in it was an anti-inflammatory. I know better than to once again start sitting for long periods of time, however. Every time I do that even a little, my system acts up and I pay the price. Daily walks seem to be helping, and I’m thinking of investing in one of those chairs …
Linkage
I’m starting to add links to my homepage again, finally. Yes, I’ve gotten around to it. But here’s the thing, I decided to actually add the links to my site manually, in the hope that it would help me cut from my RSS subscriptions whatever I’m actually not reading. This is a slow process, so some people whom I actually do read, aren’t in the link list yet. Be patient, your name may show up eventually. And if it doesn’t, don’t be offended… life is short, and I only really read blogs that I respond to. You’re free to read …
Rejections…
Is it gauche to track your rejections publicly? Wait, I’m talking about rejections of fiction submissions, here. Tracking other rejections publicly is gauche, but sometimes necessary for healing, I suppose. But is it cool for someone to mention when they’ve had a story rejected from a fiction market? I don’t really know. Maybe it is. I can’t say I ever read such comments too closely. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Well, anyway, this one I will mention publicly, since it’s a biggish deal. I got my first rejection of the year, and only the second one of my …