Monochromatic Outlook

I just can’t win over here.

poindex­ter gave me two SCSI CD-ROMs to replace the CD-ROM that died the day I put it in to replace the old dou­ble-speed dri­ve. Open­ing up the case and installing the CD-ROM dri­ve into the exter­nal SCSI case isn’t that involved, but it’s still a pain in the ass to keep on open­ing the case, unscrew­ing all the screws that hold the rails to the dri­ve, reat­tach­ing all the cables and so on.

So first was … Read the rest

I’ve been tak­ing this time off from work to take care of myself. My sleep has been spo­radic, but I’m get­ting back to a lot of the prac­tices that have nour­ished me in the past. I’m spend­ing time in med­i­ta­tion, jour­nal­ing, exer­cis­ing, spend­ing time with oth­er peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in groups.

I still haven’t been draw­ing, but I have been work­ing on posters using a process that’s pret­ty excit­ing to me. It’s frus­trat­ing not to be draw­ing, but that’s got to … Read the rest

I admit I felt a bit ripped off when I first start­ed to read A B C et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alpha­bet. I bought it think­ing it would actu­al­ly be a his­to­ry of the glyphs in the alpha­bet, the ori­gins of the par­tic­u­lar let­ter­forms we use.

Instead, this is a col­lec­tion of ety­mo­log­i­cal triv­ia, more about words than let­ters. The chap­ters begin with e.g. “A is for.…” fol­lowed by the ori­gin of the word, what … Read the rest

9.05 miles in 1:29:55

All I ask these days is to do bet­ter than 10 min­utes per mile, and I (bare­ly) hit that today.

This is a great result for me. I haven’t run more than 5.25 miles in over a year.

More details at http://www.livejournal.com/community/runners/1013710.html… Read the rest

Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca on the Sci-Fi Chan­nel is pret­ty much my only rea­son for hav­ing cable ser­vice. Sure, I occa­sion­al­ly watch OnDe­mand movies, but I real­ly hate watch­ing any­thing good in low-res pan-and-scan. Con­sid­er­ing that I’m dump­ing over $120 each month on some real­ly unsat­is­fac­to­ry ser­vices, I’m con­sid­er­ing downgrading.

Apple’s iTunes has made Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca episodes avail­able less than 24 hours after the ini­tial broad­casts. Each episode costs about two bucks and can be watched over and over again with­out … Read the rest

The $10 SCSI CD-ROM I bought from eBay a few days ago is already dead. Time to look for anoth­er $10 SCSI CD-ROM, I guess.

It may be a while before this SGI box gets running.… Read the rest

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