Darlin', Christmas is Coming

So there's this Christmas album by Over the Rhine. It's full of death, nostalgia, hardship, and loneliness. It's perhaps the greatest Christmas album of all time.

Congealed Time

I kinda just lazed around all day today. My friend Chloe came over to use my wall adapter and while she was working on her paper, I set out to making a physical manifestation of our list of simple things to do before the year is over.

Now that it's all official and everything, we should probably get started.

• Spelunking in the tunnels below the Student Center.
• Venturing to the top of both the 5/3 bank building and Patterson office tower.
• Dropping in on our micro-lab friends at Western Baptist in Paducah.
• Playing Spades. Lots and lots of Spades.
• Taking a trip to Joseph Beth.
• Perusing the eccentric aisles of YuYu's Asian Market.
• Eating at Bangkok House, the mysterious Thai place in the basement of Subway.
• Swinging by Red's doughnut shop and Chong's in Paducah.
• Ordering Take-out from Jinjin's.
• Grabbing coffee at Common Grounds.
• Making a stop at Atomic Café (whatever that is).
• And enjoying a meal at Panera Bread

By no means the final copy, the picture above was my experimentation with making the list look even more intense than it already was.

So then Chloe got an email about a movie night flyer that she had to make. I already had the gimp fired up, and thirty minutes later:
Voila!

I don't get much opportunity to mess with graphics work anymore. It was refreshing to get to spend some time messing with it today.

Trying Something New

I know in the past, I've been something of a downer, what with my discouraged conversation of changing majors and transferring back to Murray, but I think I'm passed that. Maybe it's the fact that I'm taking a class that I absolutely love. Maybe it's because I've got excellent friends. Maybe it's my distance from Haggin Hall. Whatever the case, I'm genuinely happy with my present situation.

That's not just some advantageous my-life-is-sunshine-and-butterflies statement either. I mean, I'm still sucking pretty hard at physics and I still face my fair share of conflict now and then, but for whatever reason, I seem to have finally adjusted to life here at UK. I guess that's as good an explanation as any as to the recent dearth of posts on this site.

I think much of my problem with college has been that I spent my first year concerned with proving everyone wrong and maintaining old relationships as though nothing had changed. This, as you may have guessed, was, is, and forever shall be a mistake. This isn't to say that I don't attribute value to everyone I've been friends with over the years, but rather that I'm willing to let some of those interactions be what they were rather than turning them into funerals by keeping their corpses around. I've still got people I talk to frequently but seldom see, and that kind of relationship is a blessing. There are others, though, that I've recognized a need to let go of. I still care about these people, but at the same time, preserving meaningless connection is just going to make us hate each other, and I'd like our recollections to be fond. I'd sooner reminisce with someone in Wal-Mart than avoid them.

And I guess that's all I have to say. I'm where and when I need to be. This site has always been a sort of emotional shunt, and at present the excess is happiness.

Mid-Conversation

. . .
[Mitch]: also: she steals the mail from all the mailboxes
[Caitlin]: that's just crazy
[Mitch]: follows the mailman and just takes it right after he puts it in
[Caitlin]: that's what she said
[Mitch]: lol!

On the Road Again

So this weekend, I drove to meet Brittany in Flemingsburg and go with a buncha people to King's Island. I understand this all sounds nice and simple. Let me give a graphical demonstration to the contrary:

Perhaps this doesn't quite drive the point home. . . Here's a scale model with a bowl of olives.

I might have done that wrong. . . but anywho: worth every mile.

An Impressive Display

The Dairy Fairy Strikes!

So my job description is as follows:

1. Pick up box.
2. Find part number.
3. Fill box with associated part.
4. Repeat for 8 hours.

I assure you, it sounds worse than it is. But at any rate, I was pulling a cart full of parts from another department into the stock room today and noticed this yellow square screwed to the cart. I thought to myself, "This is a strange way to store this. Must be some kind of adhesive. . ."

But then it hit me that it was a piece of cheese.

Someone, for whatever reason, was possessed to take a screwdriver and a wood screw and append this single, wrapped slice of cheese to the casement cart. I don't know what would ever drive someone to this, but suffice it to say: it made my day.

Much as I appreciated their offering, I didn't get to this cart till after lunch. I left them a note; it was the polite thing to do.

Nirvana

I like Tom Waits.  I know his voice sounds like an old truck struggling to start after a winter of neglect, but whatever.  One of his tracks that I have is of him reciting the poem, Nirvana.  Some further Googling revealed that the poem was written by Charles Bukowski, and it's pretty much my favorite, I think.  It certainly comes close.  Hope you like it.

not much chance,
completely cut loose from
purpose,
he was a young man
riding a bus
through North Carolina
on the way to somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped
at a little cafe
in the hills
and the passengers
entered.
he sat at the counter
with the others,
he ordered and the
food arived.
the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.
the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher.
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.
the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.
he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.
the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.
then the bus driver
told the passengers
that it was time
to board.
the young man
thought, I'll just sit
here, I'll just stay
here.
but then
he rose and followed
the others into the
bus.
he found his seat
and looked at the cafe
through the bus
window.
then the bus moved
off, down a curve,
downward, out of
the hills.
the young man
looked straight
foreward.
he heard the other
passengers
speaking
of other things,
or they were
reading
or
attempting to
sleep.
they had not
noticed
the
magic.
the young man
put his head to
one side,
closed his
eyes,
pretended to
sleep.
there was nothing
else to do-
just to listen to the
sound of the
engine,
the sound of the
tires
in the
snow.

C'est la Vie

I had to register for classes this morning, so I assembled a schedule last night based on the classes that were "available" on UK's course directory.

Nothing much to complain about. Despite PHY 242 and EE 281, it's a fairly consistent schedule.

As it turns out, though, UK lists all of its possible sections as "available" even if the class, for whatever reason, doesn't exist (one of the professors declined to teach it, etc.). Unfortunately, I'd chosen some of these fake sections, so I had to do some shuffling this morning. Here's what I ended up with:

Hardly what I started with. To be honest, it's kind of a mess. But oh well. Maybe it'll work out alright. I've just got mixed feelings about that 6:00 Calculus 3 class. And I'll withhold my rude opinions about the 8:00 logical circuit design lab on Thursdays.

FLAR, huh?

So I've been casually running across these FLAR (Flash Augmented Reality) things for the last few years. Sometimes in YouTube videos, sometimes in the news, but I've never really messed with it myself.

Until I ran across a GE banner ad today.

I held the paper up the camera and out folded wind turbines and the golden gate bridge, followed by a sunrise through the marker image on the paper. Pretty dramatic; I was surprised at how well it worked. So then I started scratching around the internet for other similar novelties.

This one was a New Years promotion by the company that made the game "Katamari Damaci." They don't outright provide the marker, so it took a bit of Googling to make it work.

The car didn't work very well. And it was a little on the ugly side.

These fireworks were pretty cool. You wait for the picture to dim, then click to launch the rockets.


Um. . . yeah.

I saved the best for last. This one projects an interactive globe above the marker image, and a clock on the image itself. Give it a name and a zip code, and it points it out on the globe. Groovy, eh?

LINKZ:

• GE ad
• New Years Promo
• Car
• Fireworks
• Tounge
• Globe
  

If I May

So about this college thing. Not so big a fan. Every day, I cross campus thinking, "Is this really what I want to do with my life? Computer engineering?" And the answer is, "Eh, it's about all I could come up with. Unless the Travel Channel decides they want to pay me to travel the globe, I'm fresh out of ideas for what I want to do."

Up above
Aliens hover
Making home movies
For the folks back home

Of all these weird creatures
Who lock up their spirits
Drill holes in themselves
And live for their secrets
-Radiohead, "Subterranean Homesick Alien"

So I tell myself to learn to love it. Cut my losses. Call it even. Move along. But the grossest part of it all is that it just seems so cold to me. There's just not a whole lot of beauty to writing code and drawing schematics. I mean, maybe for some people, but not for me. I'd change my major, but what to?

I guess I've got a little bit of time to think about it, maybe. Like an hour or so.

But the icing on this cake of depression is the fact that if my GPA drops below a 3.3 at any point, I lose the bulk of my scholarship money. So what then? If I don't ace Calculus, I drive back to Murray and stay there for a few years, facing puzzled stares and responding to the more-question-than-statement, "I thought you went to UK. . . "

That doesn't sound fun at all.

So yeah, that's where I'm at right now. Struggling to maintain a high-enough GPA in something that I halfway-enjoy, halfway-dislike so that I can keep my privilege of doing it again for another semester or six.

Maybe I'm just generally bummed. It is, after all, a Wednesday. Those two things tend to coincide. Good ol' CS lab.