i have the coolest mousepad

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how important parts of your life are. Music has always been very important to me, listening, watching, playing - it all has an effect on me. The soundtrack of my morning has been A Silver Mt. Zion. I’ve been sitting here basically doing nothing since about 7.30am feeling moved, or scared perhaps, because of this music, and it reminded me that music is so important to me. With all the haphazard-stuff that’s swimming around me constantly currently (mainly uni related stuff) i usually only find time for music when i’m driving, and it’s usually just something to sing to OR just to ensure that i’m not driving in silence

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How weird is it when u drive around with no music on ? It’s quite funny to think that the original cars were not designed to play music, but these days the music that’s inside of a car (in many cases not even the quality of the sound is important) is almost as important as the act of driving, or even the car itself. I mean, this is definately how i feel, i think that dad might drive around without music, but i know that most of the people i know wouldn’t drive in silence. I’m guessing it has something to do with putting up another wall around yourself when your encapsulated within your vehicle, i mean you sit down and close the doors - it’s your little world with a steering wheel. Of course this then makes me wonder about all the people without cars (i know there are plenty of you!) - and i suppose this is one of the reasons that the iPod is so successful, even when not in a car people find comfort in an auditory blanket.

I just can’t wait for one-way windows in cars, or some sort of magic that blurs other driver’s faces .. because even though you can have an auditory-shield in your car through loud-music .. there is nothing stopping people from looking at you weirdly when your tapping, singing, seat-dancing away to your tunes.
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I wish i had more time to extend my musicality. Melange have been fairly quiet the past few weeks, both Daev and I suffering end-of-semester woes. I remember days when all i would do would be to drum - all day. I remember listening to an album on repeat, spending active time trying to figure out what was going on where - trying to visualise the drummer most likely. I just worry that the two seperate poles of my life are fighting each other, i mean *is* there time for both? Can i become more in-tune with my creative self and still maintain and strive for some sort of normalcy that i must be seeking through study, through playing the life game, through … .
I used to dream about a life of music, but these days when i think about modern-music it just makes me sad. It seems a good equation for musical success has something to do with your bling-bling quotient multiplied by the apparent-lack-of-musical-taste rating - divide all this by some money ratio, then multiply again by 2 to the power of your popularity network (which itself is defined using some sort of set-theory).

I should try and get my feet moving, i’ve been here for a couple of hours.

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 6 Comments » 27 May 2004

On Wordpress

i’ve been messing around with wordpress the last couple of days, on and off. It’s quite interesting, it’s a completely different blogging paradigm to what i’m used to, and i must admit i’m a bit unsure of whether or not i’ll use it.

I’m one of the few folk who LIKES the MT-rebuild. I like the idea of all my content being static pages. To me, content addition and comment addition happen a lot LESS than a page is viewed. So why have unnecessary load on the system/database? I know i know, quite often the database is local to the webserver so it’s not a traffic thing, and i *am* a bit of a hypocrite by utilising a lot of PHP which makes up for the lack of database calls. But i can’t help it. Every time content is pulled from a database, memory is allocated to a new process, depending on how well the page is written, this might happen many times within a single page (some pages have n many queries took n many seconds)

When i first read about MT i was so impressed, i mean what a great idea. Apart from rebuilding and things to do with rebuilding - which slow it all down a tad yeh? -, we can have a completely dynamic-content site.. that’s served off static-pages! Wundaful. I am aware of their downfall of course. As everyone is. Commenting, trackbacking, pinging, adding, making site-wide-template-changes (eek) can take a damn-long time. But sometimes that’s a small price to pay.

I guess we will have to see what happens.

Personally, the sole reason that i’d leave MT for something like wordpress (quickly off-topic, i tried b2evo briefly but it gave me a bit of trouble) is because with MT 3.0+, some of the features will not be available in the free version. If the free-version were just as capable as the full-version then obviously i’d stay with it, but i hate the feeling that new development-features might take their time getting to the crippled free version. WordPress (WP) has already openly taken the open-source route, which means all new features and additions are almost immediately available to everyone and anyone, combine this with the fact that it looks (feels) like a lot of people are jumping ship from MT -> WP which will in-turn lead to more users, more features, more support and an ironing out of their already slim number of bugs.

People don’t pay to see this website.

The web-browser they (and i) are using is most likely free.

It just seems weird to have to pay for something to publish webpages, which can cost just as much as hosting the website itself (for a year).

I mean all it is is a glorified text parser.

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 6 Comments » 23 May 2004

..and i did not enjoy troy

the past week has been pretty boring in the christian camp. i’ve been writing, reading, stressing, playing.

writing: a computer-security paper for a unit i’m doing, this paper is involved with a comparison between two seperate clustered, password-cracking utilities. what that means for the less computer-literate amongst you is that when trying to make a really difficult computer task take less time, you just add more computers to do the job, pretty similar to building a house.. it’ll take ages with one person, and less time with 20 people. this paper is either going to be great or completely sucky, the tests have been interesting, but i’m a bit weary of my analysis. - i guess we’ll have to see what happens with that.

reading: papers associated with the above writing. I’ve also re-started reading Quicksilver because i had to give the TV in my room back to my cousin. i was sad initially cos i really did love going to sleep with the tv, but reading is so much more fulfilling, and when sleeping alone it makes going to bed seem a little less bad. (not to say that i *often* go to bed alone, it’s just that Em and I have been SO busy lately with uni)

stressing: .. about uni stuff.. basically. .. and a bit of money worries .. but i’ll survive.. i always do (this month just has been an expensive utility-bill month)

playing: .. well .. as mentioned above, about the cluster thingo.. i’ve been happily setting (help setup) one of those beasties with my supervisor.. which has been quite a thrill. In the corner of the lab we have a small pile of pc’s .. whirring away.. cracking a password list for me.. the lil bastards. To put it into perspective, this cluster made of relatively shit computers (866MHz 256MB RAM) has combined over approximately 10GHz of processing power and somewhere in the realm of 3-4GB’s of ram. Pretty fun stuff.

oh, and about the pictures.. well they are not relative to anything really.

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 4 Comments » 21 May 2004

first heavy rain

it’s the first heavy rain that i can recall recently that’s lasted more than an hour. this minor storm has been pouring down from above for the last 2-3ish hours and it’s making me wish i had brought my clothes in off the line last night.

Last night Em made a delicious risotto for dinner at her parents place, it was great. I love how she’s been on a real cooking splurge lately, she really does have this ability to make delicious meals (considering i think prior to this year her cooking was limited to steaks or something).

We followed up the delicious dinner by going to see Starsky and Hutch .. was great. I laughed my head off and it was good fun to see a movie with not only Em, but her 2 sisters and her parents (even though her parents walked into the cinema a bit late and had to sit by themselves).

Anyway, i’m going to go back to my attempt at work + cleaning of the house chores.

(see the rest of the photos)

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 2 Comments » 9 May 2004

stress depleted, melange inflated

As is always the case, the presentation wasn’t nearly as bad as i was fearing. In fact it went quite quickly and smoothly, and everyone who commented did so in a manner that didn’t leave me in tears.. in faaact all the feedback was quite nice. I hope they weren’t restraining themselves, or maybe my work is so bad they didn’t want to say anything at all.. i’m hoping that their silence and mild comments means that my work so far is good.

Hoping so anyway.

The morning was aweful. There was no bread so i made myself a bowel of Sultana Bran which i had an occasional spoonful, by the time i had to leave for uni i had maybe had 4 mouthfuls .. i gave the rest to the dog. I couldn’t drink my coffee, i couldn’t focus on anything.

I think it helped that everyone in the meeting room were in good moods, i mean, generally the banter is quite light before the meetings start but that morning felt better. .. I can’t believe i was worrying so much about it.

In other news, got a show tomorrow night which will either be packed.. or will be empty (we’ve been lucky and un-lucky at this venue) .. so naturally today whilst rehersing i took a few snaps (i only uploaded a couple) .. they’re the pics above. What will be interesting tomorrow night is the inclusion of a cover into the set. We occasionally do things like that, i suppose to fill in a gap or to try something different, possibly because we’re bored with something.. so tomorrow night it’s us doing a nirvana track.. i’m hoping it goes down okay .. i guess we’ll wait and see.

Oh, and what do you think is more important.. paying an electricity bill, or putting some money down on a new snare drum ?

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 4 Comments » 6 May 2004

brain freeze .. of the hot variety

ahhhh .. tomorrow i have to do a presentation for my honours proposal and yes.. yes i am completely shit-scared. I’m worried that i’ll say “uhm” .. or i’m worried that i’ll say “ahh”, i’m worried that i’ll stutter (since when did i stutter??) i’m worried that it’ll be too short or that it’ll be too long.

It’s not like i’m a bad public-speaker .. it’s just i don’t do it enough to get comfortable doing it. .. apart from the presentation, having to be critiqued by these people as well will also be a giant shock. I’m aware of how constructive criticism in this sort of environment can be, but that doesn’t quench this awful feeling i have in my gut .. how every time i think about tomorrow i just want to go and throw up.

In other news, got my birthday present today :D

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 2 Comments » 4 May 2004

burning the midnight oil

I am burning the midnight oil .. not necessarily related to doing a lot of work, just having troubles with getting to sleep early. I’m not sure where this came from but it is off putting.

Anyway.. the new car has been a treat. It feels like a bit of a *doofdoof* car, but that’s okay, it’s so strange to have air-conditioning .. it’s all so new to me. Unfortunately now, with all of my drum-equipment packed in there i don’t have a spare seat .. I used to be able to take another person with me, but not anymore.

Speaking of equipment, we had a gig on friday night at this real dive (yep, it sure did smell of urine) .. we played a couple of new songs (”Novel, The Limbo Bunny” and “Pig”) .. Novel went down really well, pig .. well .. not as well. But tonight was a first for me, ie: i had to borrow someone elses hardware .. My freakin’ hi-hat stand decided to die in the middle of the show .. god-damn. So apart from me feeling the night was fairly mediocre, daev seemed to enjoy himself a shit-load.

Anyway, enough from me.

Posted by Christian Posted in: General 5 Comments » 2 May 2004