Author: splicer

A young lady came up to me before the race this morn­ing and asked where she knew me from. Yeah, yeah, “do I know you from some­where?” What­ev­er. Actu­al­ly she did sort of look famil­iar, but we could­n’t find any com­mon ref­er­ences. I talked to her about what I like about my run­ning club (the host of the race), which is, for one thing, the diver­si­ty of run­ners. We have six-minute mil­ers and six­teen minute mil­ers. Most of the races … Read the rest

2005 was a year where I bare­ly logged a hun­dred miles, the last two months of which I ran dis­cour­ag­ing­ly over ten minute miles, one run even being over eleven min­utes per mile.

For the last few weeks I took myself off the road and went into the gym to regroup. For the time being I’m set­tling for one actu­al run out­doors per week and the rest of the week spend­ing time indoors on the ellip­ti­cal train­er and push­ing weights around. … Read the rest

ebay is my friend. It looks as though one of the prob­lems that I was encoun­ter­ing is that the exter­nal SCSI CD-ROM that I was using for the instal­la­tion was dying and even­tu­al­ly dead. For $10 I got a 32x SCSI CD-ROM and it took about 90 min­utes to replace. That’s a long time to replace a CD-ROM, but there were a few snags. Noth­ing that stopped me, just sil­ly stuff like hav­ing to remove the exter­nal box’s … Read the rest

The Per­sian Puz­zle: The Con­flict Between Iran and Amer­i­ca, Ken­neth Pol­lack
A Deep­ness in the Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep, Ver­nor Vinge
Jar­head, Antho­ny Swofford

I’d count “One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso­vich” except that 2005 was­n’t the first time I read it.

The worst books were

How I Became Stu­pid, Mar­tin Page
Logan’s Search and Logan’s World, William F. Nolan
An Unfor­tu­nate Woman, Richard Brauti­gan
Tak­en Hostage, David Farber

Here … Read the rest

In the past few days I’ve seen two main­stream films with very explic­it sex scenes. By “main­stream” I don’t mean Hol­ly­wood, they are both def­i­nite­ly art­house films with inde­pen­dent stu­dios and dis­tri­b­u­tion. But both want to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as art and car­ry the NC-17 rat­ing rather than the untrade­marked ‘X’ or ‘XXX’. These films are: “The Brown Bun­ny” and “Nine Songs”. Oth­er than the explic­it sex, the only thing that these films have in com­mon is that they … Read the rest

Such a fan as I am of the Russ­ian authors, it’s sur­pris­ing even to me that I wait­ed so long to be acquaint­ed with Tol­stoy. Anna Karen­i­na was a long and chal­leng­ing read, but in the end very rewarding.

As the open­ing lines indi­cate, this is a book about fam­i­lies. It’s real­ly sev­er­al sto­ries con­nect­ed togeth­er by being about the same set of peo­ple. For most of the way through, Tol­stoy is sly. He drops hints about his cul­ture and … Read the rest

This is a reread. It was the first of Solzhen­it­syn’s work I ever read and it start­ed me on a life­long fan­hood. I don’t know why I get so much out of read­ing about Sovi­et labor camps, but I do seem to have an obses­sion with oppres­sive regimes. Stal­in­ist Rus­sia is par­tic­u­lar­ly heart­break­ing to me for a num­ber of rea­sons, not least of which that Stal­in’s purges seem to have gone unno­ticed by his­to­ry. Per­haps because there was no “hot” … Read the rest

After call­ing SGI and ask­ing what the last sup­port­ed ver­sion of IRIX would be for an Indigo2 work­sta­tion, I spent an exor­bi­tant amount of mon­ey for a sec­ond­hand set of CDs on ebay. OK, not exor­bi­tant com­pared to the $600 retail price of IRIX, but still more than I’ve ever spent on Oper­at­ing Sys­tem soft­ware ever.

I did research and tin­kered and did more research and more tin­ker­ing and final­ly today I get the answer to why my installs … Read the rest

So today at the Inten­sive Out­pa­tient Pro­gram we had Art Ther­a­py. We were sup­posed to draw some­thing rep­re­sent­ing the theme “com­pas­sion.” Well, my art needs some ther­a­py; I’ve been frus­trat­ed over my seem­ing com­plete inabil­i­ty to put pen and paper. I’ve been total­ly blocked and hon­est­ly ter­ri­fied of drawing.

So today I made a pret­ty bad pen­cil draw­ing. After the ses­sion, the art ther­a­pist said that I showed some skill and asked me if I’d ever con­sid­ered work­ing in art. … Read the rest

This was anoth­er short one, but the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry lan­guage was a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to wade through. With over­com­pli­cat­ed com­pound sen­tences, I got a lit­tle of an idea of what a chore it must be to read my writing.

It was not as rel­e­vant a read as I expect­ed. I guess I’d thought this would be a man­i­festo illu­mi­nat­ing the rights of man, and part of Com­mon Sense did in fact fill that bill. I thought, how­ev­er, that this would be … Read the rest