Arctangential

The happy, it is following.

The MP3 player is installed. It was really easy — the guy who set everything up really had the instructions amazingly well laid out, and the actual installation was in fact quite easy. The MP3 player works astonishingly well, considering that it’s hacked to intercept Toyota’s proprietary CD player control signal, demux it with a home-designed chip, and send the controls to the MP3 player via an IR remote mounted in the dash, which emulates the player’s remote control. Totally whacked.

So now it’s off to olde Kentucky. I’m thinking mid-June now. Or maybe not.

Moving continues.

For those keeping score, the MP3 player for my car arrived today. With any luck it’ll be installed by tomorrow evening. And thereupon shall follow the happy.

Classical radio on the weekends continues to suck.

The other station I listen to is a ClearChannel station, of course. The run ads from time to time for a ClearChannel radio recruiting service — which I suppose is just an ad for letting them run employments ads for you on the radio. Seems like a good idea, I guess. Here’s the part that confuses me: They claim that advertising on the radio works better because people tend to listen to the radio while they’re at work — therefore you’ll be advertising to people who are working, not people who are looking for work.

Huh?

I am aware that the machination of those known as “Human Resources” and/or “Hiring” have never really made much sense to me, but I can’t imagine why it would be better to hire somebody who already has a job, rather than somebody who is looking for a job. Now I presume it’s better to hire somebody who is looking to leave their current job rather than somebody who was fired from their previous job, but to put want-ads in a medium simply because people who don’t work will be less likely to hear it — that just seems insane. Presumably people who are employed but looking for work will be looking in the same places as people who are unemployed and looking for works — newspapers, web sites, etc.. So the only people you’re going to have success with that the normal channels would have missed are people who have jobs, aren’t really looking for new work, but decide to work for you based on a radio spot. Not really the kind of person you’d want working for you.

Like I said, the idea of advertising for jobs on the radio seems like a reasonable one to me, but I am thoroughly baffled by the mentality behind basing this sales pitch. It’s either way beyond my meager intellect, or it’s mind-numbingly stupid. You decide.

I tend to identify with movies a lot.

I don’t mean that I watch a movie and say to myself, “That’s me.” I mean that I watch a movie and say to myself, “That would be neat if I could do that.” The interests usually only last a day or two, but I have fun reading up on things, planning my incipient career as an astronaut or a Buddhist monk or a misunderstood mathematical genius, or just daydreaming.

So after seeing The One, I wanted to be an inter-dimensional police officer. After watching Goodfellas, I wanted to join the mafia. After Midnight Express, I wanted to… well, basically, stay as far from Turkey as absolutely possible.

My next movie is November Moon. I’m not sure what I’ll pick up from that one…

Q: What’s better than finding a CD by a band called “Filthboy” at a used CD place for $3?

A: Finding out that Filthboy is actually a pretty damn cool band.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html

Visit this URL. Nothing special, right? Just your average electronics webpage. Pretty well-written, nice diagrams, etc.

Ok.

View the page’s source. You might have to select “view source” from a titlebar menu in order to do it, or as a last resort, you ought to be able to visit this URL:

view-source:http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html

Now, I’m solicing explanations. Why? For god’s sake, why?

So I’m driving home from the movies, and I’m listening to “The X”, which is sort of an alternative rock station… I think it’s national, so many of you may know it, but anyways… it’s the whole “new music” thing going on. I usually listen to the classical music station, but they had opera on, and in my opinion listening to opera on the radio is like reading about a blowjob.

So I’m listening to all of this new music, and they play a song by a band called Gub, or Gup or Glub, or something like that — they’re a Canadian punk band. Yes, Canadian punk. Anyways, it gets weirder. The song wasn’t too bad. It gets even weirder than that. After the song was over, the DJ came on to let us know that Gub or Glupp or whatever will be playing here in Pittsburgh next month — they’ll be opening for Avril Lavinge.

Now I knew punk has been on the ropes lately, but I didn’t know things were that bad. I think we should all say a prayer to the ghost of Iggy Pop tonight.

Hello, police?

I’d like to report a robbery.

Yes, I’m the victim. Somebody just stole an hour from me.

Yes, I know I’ll get it back. But not for six months! What am I supposed to do until then?

Yes officer, I understand, bu–

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, no, please don’t do that.

Goodbye.

My friend Jameel used to write these kind of semi-blog pre-blog kind of entries while he worked the graveyard shift at a local tech company. He called them “Sleepdep Theater” and they were just as you might imagine — long, rambling, mostly incoherent, vacuously gripping and fundamentally surreal.

Well, I am in the depths of the Kingdom of Sleepdep, where pink elephants ride the purple blunderbuss trees and herds of flashing ptarmigan roam the toilet bowl. The world is just that much looser than it usually is, or maybe it’s me who is looser and the world is simply being forgiving of my mental state. Thoughts flow a lot better when I’m like this — I think partially because my judgment is severely clouded and while normally I would be loathe to even conceive of the phrase “purple blunderbuss trees”, at the moment it really seems exceedingly clever.

I finished writing the documentation for my latest project a few hours ago. I gave it a once-over after I finished the last bit, and there was a very clear progression from when I started it and was relatively well-rested, and when I finished it, at which point I was a raving lunatic. While most people can’t really tell the difference, it was apparent to me exactly where I fell over the edge. It was right between the documentation clearly and lucidly explaining how a certain piece of data transfer code works and the line saying “You’ll have to figure the rest of it out, because it’s really ugly and I don’t feel like looking at it any more.”

I’m going to clean up the documentation later, after I’ve rested.

Rest is an interesting thing, actually. When you close your eyes, and you just kind of… go away. Where does your brain *go*? It has to go someplace. It can’t just vanish. You don’t remember it, but something has to happen. There’s this synergistic conflagration of events that happens every microsecond in your brain that cascades to form these… thoughts… and they like… shit.

I had a really good one going there for a second, but I was distracted by a piece of paper on my desk and now it’s gone.

I do have my accountant’s phone number written down, though.

I’m going to bed.

Today was a good post office day.

On December 10th, 2002, I wrote “my lego castle is almost done”. Today, I got the last piece to finish it. I had it shipped to me from Venezuela. When I made that post back in 12/02, I had just ordered the same piece from a fellow in Germany. It never arrived. I spend 3 months waiting and hoping that it would eventually show up, since I forgot to ask him to send it airmail, and it ended up going surface mail. Which, as far as I can tell, means that they strap it onto the back of a dolphin or something. But anyways, it’s finally done now. I have pictures of it here and here. It’s really the height of classic LEGO construction. It’s nearly 100% “basic” pieces, many used in amazingly inventive ways. I could discuss LEGO for pages and pages here, so I’ll stop.

I also got some new art! Not unlike the LEGO, I ordered this a long time ago — back in early Feb of 03. It takes them a while to frame it and everything, so I didn’t expect it to be here immediately, but 2 months is a little extreme. They claim it got lost in Denver or something, but I get the feeling that they just forgot to ship it. Luckily, once I pointed out that they had already charged my credit card over a month ago, and could I at least have a tracking number so I could see where my art was please, they “noticed” it and sent it next-day. Like everything else interesting in my life, I have pictures of it on my webpage. The new one is at the very bottom of that page.