So I know I should be posting in movies, but I'm lazy and that section's so ridiculously out of date anyway... This summmer I'll bring it back.

Anyway, tonight I went and saw Y Tu Mama Tambien. It was hilarious. No, I don't speak Spanish, so I did spend the entire movie reading, but I didnt think that distracted from it at all. The camera work was very natural and fluid. Scenes just sort of flowed. At times the camera almost seemed to just wander around a scene. The acting was also really well done. All in all, an enjoyable night. And then there was the hooker on Sunset, but we won't get into that here.

So I just switched rantings over to the #{node "7"}eThreads#{/node}:evolution core (or eTevolution). You really won't notice much of a difference on the front-end, but I assure you there's a lot of cool new stuff going on in the backend that you just can't see. One thing you can see is the archives, which is linked to at the top of this page. I'll post more about the new backend later.

Paraphrasing Drew Pryor:

The number one thing I would tell you is... don't be a COMM major. We already know common sense, we don't need to major in it.

It would make sense that the day before I have to take my COMM final, the USC email server would be borked up and I wouldn't be able to download the study guide... Typical...

I really know more than most people should about cell phones. Everyone else just cares about making and receiving calls, and here I am looking at things like what Voicestream's LA build-out is going to do to Cingular's network saturation and the details of GPRS roaming.

Today I called Cingular and got changed to a newer rate plan (my 350 minute national plan went down $10), activated Wireless Internet Express (GPRS... 1mb included), and asked a lot of roaming questions. Wireless Internet will roam fine in Muskegon on NPI, and when I'm in Grand Rapids or Chicago I should be able to roam onto Voicestream's GPRS network. I've only done the most trivial playing with GPRS so far, but it's definitely faster and a quicker connect time. Now I just need to find a good way to monitor the traffic I put through it to keep from going over the 1mb cap.

Today's target: a COMM 200 paper on the elaboration likelihood theory. Pound for pound, it's a decent theory, but not really something I'm relishing the idea of writing eight pages on. It's due at 9:30. It's going to be a long night. At noon my life is much better.

I just put a new paper in the papers section of verbal intercourse. This one is titled "Moral Obligation to Help," and examines whether we have a moral obligation to help others. I say that we do not, because the instances where help would be obligated are impossible to enumerate.

So I've decided what the project I'm finally going to use to learn C will be. For a little over a month now, I've been logging song names in my whatsplaying database. This includes track information for a lot of SHN files that don't have any track information embedded in them. My project is to write a plugin for xmms that looks the song info up in whatsplaying and puts it in the xmms status bar.

So this weekend I went up to a waterski tournament a little south of Bakersfield. It was an interesting weekend, to say the least. I sucked up the slalom, literally throwing myself at the first buoy after realizing I bombed my approach angle. I did better on trick, however, managing to stick both 180s and a couple of slides before I wiped out. I'm now burned, and a little sore.

Last night I heard dogs barking really late at night. Now, that may not seem unusual to you, but I live in south central LA at the moment, and there are no dogs around here. Dogs in the ghetto puzzle me.

Today I posted my newest paper in verbal intercourse. I've called it Scientology and Free Speech. Basically it's about Scientology's attempts to use copyright law to censor critics. It focuses on the Netcom case from 1995 - 1996, and the Google situation last month.

Tonight I get to write another paper, this one on moral oligation and whether we're obligated to help others. The articles I'm reading for research are pretty interesting, and I think the paper will come out well if I can get a handle on what I want to say.

As you probably know, I put the papers I write online in the papers section of verbal intercourse. I do this because I believe in the free exchange of information. However, the newest entry in verbal, an IM exchange I've titled Cheaters are Losers, shows that sometimes not everyone holds the same ideals.

So tonight I ran a little SQL query to figure out what I've listened to most since whatsplaying started on February 25. There are 72 distinct bands logged so far. The results for most plays were slightly surprising. Click the title to view them...

Continue Reading...

So tonight I hit 1000 songs in my little what's playing database. Song number 1000 was Dave Matthews - Raven from the April 4 show in DC.

As whatsplaying gets more songs in it, the stats it gives start to become more interesting. For instance, I've played Barenaked Ladies - Giant Guitars (04-19-96) three times, and two of them have been at 4:23pm and 4:24pm. Is there something that makes this the right song for that point in the afternoon? Coming soon: stats on what plays most often, and the ability to see what songs were around each play of a song.

This weekend I decided that my favorite show on TV right now is SO Graham Norton on BBC America. I remember him being funny in an older British sitcom I watched on PBS, but I'm too lazy to look up the name right now. In any case, he's hilarious and his guests are too. For those wondering, this replaces Elimidate, which held my favorite show standing for only a few weeks. Previous title holders include The X Show (before the original hosts left and it started sucking), and The Daily Show.

So I spent a bit of tonight trying to make it so that I can post here via my cell phone and WAP. I really don't know if this will be any use to me, but for some reason I really think I'll be unhappy with myself if I lack it. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's a good thing. I guess it would be cool to have a log for stripped-down wireless posts. We'll see what happens. This is all thanks to eThreads 2.0 and the ability to run multiple looks per glomule.

Rodney Branigan is amazing. Rodney Branigan plays two guitars at once. Not holds two, and plays one, but plays two guitars at once. May 1 Rodney will be at The Cat Club on the Sunset Strip. I hope to be there.

So I've been pretty flaky updating lately. Usually this means I'm too lazy to think of stuff to type here. That's pretty pathetic when you think about it. Anyway...

• Red Elvises were great on Friday, as always.
  
  
• Last week my v3682 died, and Tuesday I finally got around to filing the insurance claim, etc. Cingular replaced it with a Motorola v60g, which rocks. Motorola finally made a cool UI. This is the phone to make Motorola competitive with Ericsson and Nokia on the UI front.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate Intershop? I really do. For instance, right now I'm trying to set a currency based on the customer's country in a credit card data template. Simple enough of a request, but Intershop decides to make this hard. First of all, customer country isn't one of the variables they decide to define in this template. And in Intershop's favorite model -- everything's customizable except what you want to change -- these are hard-coded. Ok, no big deal, I'll look up the country based on order number. No. The order number isn't a normal TLE (variable), it's a piece of loop data, which means I have to keep count of loop positions and do a GetTLELoopData. Woo hoo! Stupid Intershop. Intershop must die.