I took this picture with it.
It is disappointing that I can’t come up with any jokes to make about the photo.
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Supreme embarrassment time
Here’s the talk in all its nervousness. Please be gentle with me.
I do like that O’Reilly had my actual talk proposal up on its site here. I hope people don’t start believing that my friend Mark is mean to animals just because his name and “drown” and “cat” exist in the same sentence in various web pages. He’s a true cat person. Though I could tell you about a developer I work with who upsets me with stories about what he did to cats on the farm growing up. So mean!
Wuthering, wuthering, wuthering heights
I’ve never actually read Wuthering Heights. I think I tried to back in high school but found the characters a bit too melodramatic. Also Catherine seemed like a real bitch, at least in the movies, which I never saw the point of. From what I gather, the story has these two kids who grow up and fall in love and then for some reason they’re suddenly hating each other and at the very end they’re loving each other again when it’s too late and one of them’s nearly dead. I probably missed out some stuff, but if I don’t see the point in a movie I don’t tend to pay full attention to it.
So I don’t really think about that book much but somehow it ended up in my head today because when I got to work I had a sudden desire to listen to Kate Bush.
I don’t tend to get this urge much as her voice lives in that ethereal realm of being both beautiful and really fucking annoying sometimes, so I prefer to avoid listening to her in case I can only hear the annoying bits that day. Although I will admit that this doesn’t apply to Running Up That Hill, which I can listen to on repeat (but not the inferior Placebo version they seem to like playing in vampire movie trailers), and often do.
Later in the day I brought up semaphore flags in conversation for some reason I’ve since forgotten, and the other person thought I was talking about those found in operating systems and I had to correct him that I actually meant real flags. Monty Python fans might realize where I then went with this: to demonstrate the concept, I sent him this educational Youtube video (please ignore the subtitles):
So I’ve now spent more time today thinking about that book than I really ever wanted to in my life, but there you go. Mind you, it was really wuthering today in Kelowna, enough to riggwelt a sheep. Or something.
A reason to live to be 33 years and 1 day old
You’ve seen the new Tron Legacy trailer, right?
I know I’m a week and a half late on mentioning it, but it’s been giving me multiple nerdgasms and it took this long to calm down enough to type. I saw this trailer in Imax 3D when I went to see Alice in Wonderland Friday before last, and honestly don’t remember much about the movie but damn, that trailer was AWESOME.
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Tron happens to be my favourite Disney movie ever and one of the most awe-inspiring from my childhood. Youtube isn’t helping me but my memory has it that the Wonderful World of Disney TV show’s intro had a clip from Tron in it at some point in the 80s, so every Sunday night I would be reminded of its utter coolness and be saddened when instead I’d be watching some educational film about bears or something.
I loved the computer graphics and the humans-as-programs-in-glowing-outfits, and thought that Bruce Boxleitner was hotter than Jeff Bridges because I didn’t have hormones yet. The Recognizer vehicles were scary and ominous, the way they’d hover in the air and wait for the chance to stomp on you. God, I love what the new Recognizers look like (the monstrous glowing horseshoe in the image above). Nice to see they added a bit of detail to the original wire frame version.
When I first heard about this movie I thought, “damn you, Disney, for screwing with my childhood!” but I’m okay with it now, because it looks so sweet and it’s got Jeff Bridges AND a computer-generated young Jeff Bridges (as Clu, who I thought was “killed” in the original movie, but Spock was reincarnated so let’s not judge). Plus, it comes out on the day after my birthday, so I consider it a gift to me from the universe (or perhaps from the MCP?). I may even take the day off and fly into Vancouver (where it was filmed!) to get to see it all Imax’d and 3D’d because Kelowna’s movie theatres are from the stone age and are therefore NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
I already posted this on Facebook, but here’s perhaps the best piece of trivia from the original movie, via IMDB:
Jeff Bridges produced too much of a bulge in the crotch area in his computer outfit, so he was forced to wear a dance belt to conceal it.
See, it made him horny too!
Same song, awesomer video
So OK GO put out a second video for their single “This Too Shall Pass”, this time of a Rube Goldberg machine running for the duration of the song, synced with the music, and filmed in one take:
(I blogged about their first video to the song two weeks ago).
Between this sort of stuff and Mythbusters I keep wishing I’d become an engineer instead of a computer scientist. Not that I’d be good at it, I come from a long line of crap engineers (so a great-uncle once told me).
I like, and agree with one of the comments on this video posted at BoingBoing: “shit like this restores my faith in humanity.”
I keep thinking music videos are a dying art
But then OK Go releases a new album and another fun choreographed video, this time with marching band:
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.
If you can recall, these guys got internet famous in 2006 with music videos of them dancing in a backyard, and again on treadmills. Their new album, entitled “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”, is out now (for once I mention an album that’s already released). I’m really digging the lo-fi videos from the indie music scene, another one being the semi-deconstructed Cousins by Vampire Weekend.
Many of you don’t know this, but I got into music via marching band. My first instrument was the glockenspiel. Believe me, it’s hard to aim for the right key when you’re stomping around. Also when you have bad aim to begin with. The clarinet was easier, it stayed still.
Beat the night
I pulled an all-nighter last night, for work. It’s pretty rare for me these days, since as I get older, the more it really fucking sucks to recover from it. I think it’s been years since I stopped working when it got light outside.
Disregarding eating, going to the bathroom, and commuting, I was working 23 out of 24 hours. Someone should give me a medal. And a pillow.
Back in high school, when I first did all-nighters (unlike many people, my later high school courses were university-level, except I had to take 7 academic classes at a time instead of university’s 5, which was fine since I wasn’t having any sex yet anyways) I would spend the day in a daze, drinking herbal tea. Don’t know why; that barely has any caffeine. But somehow I managed it.
In university, specifically near the end when I was finishing my computer science degree, I started having strange sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations. These were often spiders or insects (either one large one, or a flying swarm of something) but strangely also severed heads. I don’t know about the severed heads, but the insect stuff is supposedly documented as being common. It’s trippy once you realize you’re just imagining it.
Last night’s work resulted in my afternoon nap including a really detailed lesbian dream. So now sleep deprivation is making me gay, great. The other chick in the dream was really hot, but I didn’t really know what to do, since she didn’t have a penis. It was a real cock-tease of a dream, especially since it didn’t contain any cock whatsoever.
The local radio station that wakes me up every morning (well, except this morning when I was just putting my head down when it went off) seems to be playing a lot of my Grade 5 soundtrack this week, to remind me of a time when I got my 8-9 hours every night:
(Interesting to Dad, the guy above is from Sheffield.)
(Songs about Americans always seem to be written or sung by Canadians.)