Wobbly Windows

Seth Nickel wrote about some of the 3D-accelerated desktop work that is going on at Red Hat in his blog. He referst to one of the effects as ‘wobbly windows’. There are some videos on his site that will help to get the point across. I compiled all of the necessary packages and was playing around with the wobbly window effect on my desktop. It is freaking awesome. The windows are too wobbly for normal every day use, but that can be scaled down so that the windows just kind of give a little bit when you move them. It’s also neat to have real transparent windows on a linux desktop. I’m going to try and get all of this stuff to work on my laptop so I can show it off at work tomorrow.

I’m going to see Henry Rollins speak at the Zipper Theater tomorrow. He’s going to be there for two weeks and there are plenty of tickets left if you want to try and catch him while he’s in the area. I stronly recommend it.

I’m not sure exactly what happened to me yesterday, but I fell asleep at 7:30pm and woke up at 7:45am. Yeah – I slept for about 12 hours straight. I’m not sure why. I was just going to lay down for a nap at 7:30 and didn’t really wake up until later than I normally get up. It was very weird.

Your Heart Won’t Heal Right If You Keep Tearing Out the Sutures

“This one goes out to the ones that still hold true.” — Heads vs. Breakers – Beneficial Wigs

I’m entirely engrossed in The Postal Service. The album is freaking amazing. “Such Great Heights”, “Sleeping In”, “Nothing Better”, and “Recycled Air” are all just astounding songs. It helps that they’re all right in a row on the album also. I also re-acquired Heads vs. Breakers – Apathy is the New Black. It’s great to have the chance to listen to a good band from my town. For some reason I have something against the north shore of Long Island and Nassau County. Well, maybe it’s not so much that I have something against them, but I think the south shore of Suffolk is so much better. Maybe there will be a North-coast vs. South-coast war. I’ll have to pick up a set of brass knuckles or something.

We had the second Wing Night last night. We went to “The Post Office” in Babylon. It’s a nice place. I had never been there before. They have 4 different levels of wing hot-ness over there. They have mild, regular, hot, and chef’s challenge. We ordered some of the regular, hot and chef’s challenge to start. The chef’s challenge were fairly hot, but not really hot enough. So one of my bosses, Pete, said to the waitress, “Ask the chef if he’s making these wings for girl scouts or for men.” Yeah. The next batch of wings looked, smelled, and burned entirely differently. We were all impressed. After 5 or 6 of these multen wings I tapped out. My face went numb. I’m not kidding. I had pins and needles high up on my cheeks.

There are a bunch of cool tee shirts over at prolitarianthreads.com.

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam on this blog recently. However, there isn’t ever really any spam in the message. I keep getting just blank comments posted to the blog. Could someone explain to me what the point of this is? What good are blank messages? There are no links in it or anything. It’s just blank. I’m blocking the IP block that these posts are coming from now. We’ll see if that helps. I also took some time to fix how this site looks in internet explorer. All of the content should actually appear on the page now without forcing you to scroll side to side. I just want to take this time to reiterate that I hate internet explorer for the hours and hours of pain and suffering it has caused me. Please, if you are still using IE, or any derivate that uses the IE engine, please join the rest of the civilized world and get firefox now. It really is that much better.

In some respects I feel myself returning to a feeling that I haven’t felt in many years. It’s not necessarily any better or worse than how I used to feel. It’s very subtle. It might just be the feeling of the seasons changing and I’m fucking up the time frame. Speaking of the seasons, can I get a “fuck yeah” for Spring? I can’t wait until my first tee shirt only day.

“Again last night I had that strange dream
where everything was exactly how it seemed
no concerns about the world getting warmer
people thought they were just being rewarded
for treating others as they’d like to be treated
for obeying stop signs and curing diseases
for mailing letters with the address of the sender
now we can swim any day in November”

– The Postal Service – Sleeping In

Ground Control to Major Tom

“Each morning she wakes
with a dream to describe
something lovely that bloomed
in her beautiful mind.”
–Bright Eyes – Hit the Switch

So, I had a fairly interesting week. I went to a different intramural volleyball game on Monday. This one is much more competitive than the other one that I had been going to. The bruise on my hip and the burn on my knee are proof of that. I think I held my own despite not having played that kind of volleyball since junior year of high school. Yeah – that was 6 fucking years ago.

I bumped into Jamie for the first time since that fateful day in December. We chat on the phone every few weeks or so. Her birthday just passed a few days ago and I sent her a text message wishing her a happy birthday. On the way home from work that day I was actually right behind her at a red light on sunrise highway. We had both said that we had things of the others that we wanted to exchange. I had the stuff for Jamie in my trunk. So, being just about a mile from her house, I followed her there to exchange our things. We both got out of our cars and we had this strange conversation from about 10 feet away. I can’t really remember what we spoke about because all I was thinking about was how surreal this whole scene was. I went upstairs with her to get the stuff that she had for me. I saw her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother. This was all very weird since I used to see these people every day. I was a little upset that her cat, Arthur, didn’t seem to recognize me. He lurched away when I went to pet him. Things seem to be going well for her and I’m glad. It’s hard to captivate the utter weirdness of the whole event in words. Just think of the weirdest thing that you can and then back off a little bit. That’s the level of weirdness I’m talking about.

There are many people that I want to get in touch with. Some of them I just don’t know how to get in touch with, others I could probably get in touch with, but I’m just not sure that doing so would be well received. You know, after not speaking with someone for 5 years a phone call can seem a little odd. Anyway, I figure that enough people read this thing now (all 10 of you) that it might work out well if I just list some people that I want to speak with and let the grapevine do the rest. In no particular order, and probably leaving a few people out, here is a short list of people that I would like to get in touch with: Jen Sosna, Bryan Sullivan, Rob Kruper. If you are one of these people or you know one of these people, get in touch with me.

Also, if anyone knows where I have to go to find out about local hardcore/punk shows, please drop me a line also. The long island zoo board thing seems to have dried up a few months ago with no real clue as to where to look. Any hints would be greatly appreciated. This post sucked.

Bottles and Baggies

It’s hard for me to write in my blog about really anything when there is a topic that I feel that I have to write about but I can’t get the words right. This is as close as I’ve gotten:

Happiness doesn’t come from bottles and baggies, and if you think it does then fuck you – you’re not worth my time. I don’t give a shit if you don’t understand me.

I guess that’s a little aggressive, but I need to vent this out somewhere. I’m so tired of explaining myself. Yeah, I don’t drink and I do it on purpose. Yeah, I had fun in college without passing out on my bathroom floor. No, I don’t care how fucked up you were that one time. No, I don’t want to deal with your drunk ass, why don’t you take care of yourself? If you want to drink, that’s fine with me, just don’t fucking drool on my shirt or puke in my car. And really, don’t try and convince me to drink, ’cause it’s not gonna happen any time soon. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a thing. Happiness doesn’t come from bottles and baggies, and if you think it does then fuck you – you’re not worth my time. I don’t give a shit if you don’t understand me.

This overdose of anger has been brought to you by Mark Drago®.