It's swell to be...

It's swell to be... at the DMV.

Untitled

i'm now 24 and i have a splitting headache.

hipster foods in my fair city

on saturday i saw julia and we went to shake shack. i had fries, which were very good, and chocolate frozen custard which was totally awesome. i went back on monday for the burger (which i had actually been planning to do since the previous week) and i can say only this: holy flirking shnit. that was one of the best burgers i have ever had. it's up there w/ donovan's and corner bistro, except they are making super thick broiled burgers and this was of the thinner, fried on a griddle persuasion. burger joint in the parker meridian can pretty much go fuck themselves this was so good. the line there is so long now anyhow and the burger is good but not even in the same league as shake shack. the big draw to burger joint these days is the "secret" location. shake shack peanut butter ripple custard was also excellent, by the by, though i wish it had been chocolate base instead of vanilla.

inspired by reading some stuff about flushing, tonight i stopped by a place on 41st ave off of main st. in flushing. if it has a name, it's not in english. there's pretty much no english signage in this place period, which is not really strange for that neighborhood. what brought me there however was the promise of good dumplings at the super cheap price of 4 for a dollar. (interjection: yes, dumpling man is a ripoff). i only knew i was in the right place cause the first thing on the menu, which i believe was also completely devoid of english, was labeled as "4/$1.00". the dumplings this place makes were obviously quite excellent... about an hour before i had them. it wasn't busy at all when i got there, and the dumplings i was given were just not remotely fresh, or even more than lukewarm. which was a shame, because the filling was delicious and the price was ridiculously right.

just watched new york noise. the point in the bloc party helicopter video where there are pig/lizards is also the moment it gets to be a little bit much. we are scientists' video of "nobody move nobody get hurt" however is brilliant, without quite being a ripoff of bear city. oh man i love me some bear city.

meanwhile, apparently birthday w/ the family is going to be sunday brunch. anyone know a good place for that, preferably in queens or possibly downtown manhattan?

extremely blog-like blog entry

playing with the new google-reader, mostly because i like rss readers in theory but they all seem to suck. in fact they're almost like mail clients (see the slogan for mutt). currently i use liferea, which seems to suck the least of the graphical unix ones. it does miss some things, like changing the titles of feeds (for example, i've just discovered that laura renamed her lj, but i have no idea when she did that). I've tried some command-line ones and they suck. the least-sucky of all of the one's i've tried so far has been sage, but that one is a firefox extension, and there are enough things about firefox that bother me. actually, most of them are probably fixable by extensions, but i just can't be bothered, and so will stick w/ galeon.

while on the subject of blog-related software, i wish there was a way for drivel to save drafts to blogger instead of to a local file on my computer.

i have to go to school for 4 days this week! shock and horror. tomorrow however will also be the annual interactive arts performance series concert which sounds pretty cool. last year it sucked (albeit it was a work in progress). in fact it sucked so much i sent an email to jeff complaining about how i had to sit through people standing on stage doing nothing while there were just wind sounds going on for 10 minutes. ugh.

come again some other day

the levels at which i do not want to travel an hour and a half each way in the rain for an hour and 15 minute class is so, so great. oh good i'm already late.

ok, that was some inadvertent bad poetry. i didn't mean to rhyme, honest.

i should not be eating sugary cereals at this time of night

i really like to read old sent-mail files. i have all of mine going back at least through college. i was looking at some from that period tonight. i think i was happiest during my sophomore year. interestingly, that's also when i had my highest GPA.

interesting question i am now asking myself: why did i need a soldering iron in september of my junior year?

i forgot that once upon a time i had www.knightbg.com. i think that was from a company that gave away free domain names if you allowed them to send you spam. i rarely use the knightbg nickname anymore.

i just got to september 11, 2001. didn't even see it coming, despite the fact that i had manually called up september 2001 (they are separated by month). this being my email, it seems to reflect how a lot of people tried to just keep moving forward with work and the like. i was stuck out in queens that morning having gone to vote in the canceled mayoral primary. i seemed to think it important to email my boss to tell her i was stuck in queens and wouldn't be in... seems silly now.

i think part of what keeps me reading these is that some threads are begun in one month and left unfinished... i need to read the next month's to see if the story was resolved!

man i used to email people a lot about what homework was assigned in class. there were just a few classes i pretty much never went to i guess.

i read things that i wrote about classes i remember taking. i have no idea what some of them mean. did i really once understand that much about hobbes? even data structures.

i'm finally tired.

random musical ideas

some random ideas for crazy covers. don't go stealing them now.

• a capella version of that violent femmes song w/ the counting. perfunctory research says that the name of this song is "add it up" and hey the opening, which thematically is substantially different from the rest of the song, is a cappella which i didn't remember. actually i don't know if i've ever heard that opening before. also, there really isn't any counting in the song at all. ok, it's not "add it up" but "kiss off." meh. either one would work for this idea. speaking of counting, how many p's are in capella?
• this idea i've had ever since i found a harmonium on 114th street and half fixed it up. cover of "exit music for a film" with just an acoustic guitar and harmonium. the harmonium kicks in on the "you can laugh" part instead of the whiny noise which is either an electric guitar or a synth but at the moment i don't remember.
• i also have notes somewhere for a synth-heavy version of "what'll i do" (the irving berlin song). fuck, i'm gonna become that taco dude.

also, i really really like politics of dancing which is on my speakers at the moment. fuck you, it is awesome. plus it has a bowie reference. if you haven't seen it, i recommend the video of bowie and arcade fire performing at the fashion rocks show which is floating around the net. i didn't really get arcade fire before, but suddenly i do.

Hello, guy on the bus

Hello, guy on the bus who looks like one of 2 wild and crazy guys, reading a permabound romance novel from the library. I am so going to hell.

musical news

"The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangements in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather than a political event." - Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem which pretty much sums up what i want to do for my master's project.

why i am a horrible person, part i

besides my general lack of a work ethic or ability to clean my room, today i was doing a crossword puzzle which required knowledge of the fact that bambi was male. i didn't know that.

blog blues

i would like to do my own template for the blog, but i SO don't have the energy for that. i am a whiny teenage girl. NYU has only two means of hitting up the space I have to put files, including my web page: plain insecure FTP, and the most painful web interface ever devised. What really frustrates me about the web interface is that I can see enough to realize that it uses webdav under the covers, but i haven't been able to figure out how to get to that myself. this means that i am loathe to update or do ANYTHING interesting to my webpage at all. i should get a colo or something so i can really do some crazy shit. meh. went to the first master's project colloquy today. looking forward to doing something cool and spending a shitload of time on it. i don't know what it will be yet exactly, but rest assured it will involve hitting buttons and making noises.

mac ui pet peeve

i love osx in concept, but in reality, it is just pure horrible pain, both figuratively and literally (these keyboards! my god!). super-annoying: pressing delete does not delete a file. in fact, there are two keys labeled delete, and NEITHER of them deletes the file. this is just about the most obvious thing i can think of.

also, shortcut keys in text editing windows and boxes are woefully inconsistent. sometimes home and end work, sometimes they don't. sometimes i'm pleased to find that emacs-style keys work, but sometimes they don't. i'd be willing to let that slide except that the claim to fame here is supposed to be consistency and ease of use thereof.

CRISIS on multiple earths

i am out of nutella

ithaca is gorges tally: 6

ithaca is gorges tally: 6

tshirts

Probably pointless because the threadless shirt will be sold out very soon but anyhow: UPDATE: laura wins because the threadless shirt is sold out.

What tshirt should I buy?
	Operation Needed
	Movie quote
Free polls from Pollhost.com

New cell phone.kill kill kill.

New cell phone.kill kill kill.

Sometimes i type "with" and

Sometimes i type "with" and then change it to "w/"

on technology

at the large bank where i work i keep hearing people use the word "technologist." "Obviously," said a very senior person in IT today, "you need to be a good technologist."

Thing is, despite my prodigiously large vocabulary, I have no clue what a "technologist" is. Having been ridiculously overly educated in a classical tradition, my first impulse is to tear apart the word into roots and whatnot. -ologist being someone who studies, tech being greek for art or craft. Yes, technologists must be people who study arts and crafts! Guess I would have made a good camp counselor after all, though I never did learn how to start or finish a lanyard. By the way, you can thank the TeX documentation for my knowledge of what tech means.

The other problem with this etymological approach is that i know these people are just taking the word technology and turning it into a profession. That doesn't work so well because we (people with my job) don't actually study technology, we use it in a practical way. in any case, technology is fundamentally different from other -ologies in that it's not defined as a body of knowledge. a biologist for example, works to improve the body of knowledge that is biology. there's a temptation to say that what i do is analogous to a doctor in terms of biology, but that already has a name: engineering. fact of the matter is that the precise area i work in is kind of engineering, but plenty of people who are being called "technologists" are application developers which is just not the same.

as an aside, many companies are actively in the practice of transforming sciences, that is to say, ologies, into industries. scientists no longer produce knowledge, they produce, well, product. of course, at that point it's no longer science but instead technology.

thing is, pretty much everyone uses technology in some form or other in his job. teachers use chalk, salesman have phones, policeman have nightsticks, chefs have knives. and mandolins. and silicone gloves and stand mixers and salamanders and man i need to stop watching food network. point is, i'm not sure why i'm a technologist and mario batali's sous chef isn't.

going back to the root of technology, i would posit that artists would have to be the ultimate users of technology. sculptors have taken the hardest rock and crude metal tools and created that which looks as if it lives and breathes. painters take oil and pigment and create all sorts of images, from sunday in the park to de stijl to happy trees. in other words, artists take technology and bend it to their whim to produce greatness. pretty much the only art i can think of that is pretty much unaltered because of technology is writing. by the way i like it when people leave com... oh.

Ithaca is gorges tally: 5

Ithaca is gorges tally: 5 (+2! One of them was pink!)

A subway car full of

A subway car full of potato chip ads doesn't make you want potato chips, it just makes you thirsty.