Gibdon Moon

Reflections on 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:16:00 +0000

I've had this draft sitting around for nearly a month and January for 2012 closes down today. If the Mayans didn't simply run out of paper, and doom awaits in December, then perhaps it was the last one. Let's go back a year and a month, though; what were you doing, what have you learned and where are you going?

The best place to start would be at the beginning, but let me tell you the end: my resolutions for 2012. Don't worry, I'll keep it short: visit 7 countries, write a story, and minimize my virtual possessions. On the middle item, the working title is "StarGrazer" and I have a bit of a chapter written which means I barely scraped by on my monthly goal to produce something that others can read. It isn't great, or maybe even good, but Resistance can kiss my fucking ass.

I've found that one can have a social life without social networking and without being an entirely anti-Facebook ascetic. A roommate helps balance the rent, but sometimes you just want to be alone. Acute loneliness might pass but it's a painful process, the emotional equivalent of a kidney stone after which the relief is amazing.

My Verizon RAZR got replaced by a TracFone LG420 and Google Voice, severing yet another contract and taking my monthly phone bill from 60 to about 15 (hard to say with prepay). I went from a Nano to a classic iPod to an iPod Touch to a Samsung Galaxy Player, an impressive little device that is easily mistaken as a phone. I kept on with the EEE 901 netbook, whose keyboard recently went kaput, and a Sprint MiFi for internet which got lowered to 40 a month from 60 after I called to quit.

I saw the Oregon coast, Seattle Underground, PAX, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, July fireworks over Lake Union, and Soundgarden at The Gorge. I started listening to Phantogram, Xylos, Geographer, Phoenix, Halogen, Foster the People, H.U.V.A. Network, Young the Giant, and The Naked and Famous, not to mention the scores The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Atticus), Solaris, Moon, Drive, Contagion (3 of these are by Cliff Martinez), and Hanna. I watched the final Harry Potter movie and the first half of the last Twilight installment, but neither could best even the trailer of The Dark Knight Rises nor be more disappointing than the Conan remake. And of new addictions there must be a mention of Making Fiends and Skyrim (the habit I hope to kick by ditching my TV and Xbox!).

I filled three (four?) pocket journals with my scrawl, wrote a video game in a month, and edited out maybe a half dozen videos but failed to finish one I started in July coincidentally called "Start Again". I read among numerous others, The Prophet, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Way of Zen, In The Buddha's Words (anthology of the Buddha's suttas), I Ching, Tao Te Ching, A Book of Five Rings, Tao of Pooh, Te of Piglet, and Bang.

I didn't visit my family nearly enough, nor write enough letters to satisfy, but there are certainly enough pictures out there and I did get to see my grandma on her 93rd birthday after not seeing her, or my Uncle Jim who was there, for over a dozen years.

And finally, I accomplished a year of full-time employment at Microsoft. I haven't worked a 9-5 job since September 2007 so that's kind of a big deal. Ciao!

Night Shots

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:53:00 +0000

The camera on my spiffy, new Samsung Galaxy Player may not compare to a dedicated pocket-shooter, but it's incredible compared to the iPod Touch's! Here are some photos I captured using the nightshot scene mode.

Happy Halloween

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Hugh Jackman, meet Gingerine Dream.

Occupy Seattle

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:47:00 +0000

I saw demonstrators with tents setup near Westlake Center holding signs saying, "Occupy Seattle" [1]. This morning I saw "Occupy Wall Street" spray-painted on a pillar by the river trail under 85th Street in Redmond. Tomorrow maybe we'll see something besides our own occupations.

I have to give these people some credit for at least recognizing what it takes to change systems: you don't work within them. Sometimes, though, you don't fix them either ... you just let them fall apart and build something else from the wreckage. I don't know that I've heard of any major system, governments or economics, that has evolved into something better. Things grow, they age, and they die. This is a tide law that everything obeys; "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." [2] That can be depressing or encouraging depending on what side of the system you're on. These people demonstrating; they're probably scared to lose the system they want to reform.

Everyone has some basic panacea to solve our "problems", but these are fantastically superficial; bits of fantasy left-over from Disney (a giant corporation) instilling values we don't live by in cartoon movies we watched as children. Take from the rich and give to the poor! Down with those rich, greedy CEO's! By the way, you're the mountain on which they stand so let's all take a bit of blame and throw some salt over our shoulders. Perhaps we're angry that someone is abusing our own lottery dreams, but they surfed the big waves of our own cultural decadence into tropical shores of avarice.

Why do we need more jobs? Why do we need to earn a living? Are we now entitled to other things besides life itself? The nominal count of jobs is a poor metric. What we need are food, shelter, and love ... not to mention a place to take a shit. What we want is the ability to provide for our families. What we crave is all the new trinkets from the very companies we're vying for employment at. This is a vicious circle. What is the 40 hour workweek or a steady job except consistency, safety, insurance? Freedom as the idealistic American dream is the opposition; our beloved stories trumpet one path and we operate by another. Patriotism may be about getting in line and complaining about cutters.

We're overgrown and clinging to overblown problems of our own design. Every cure heralds a new poison, every progress destroys some previous foundation, and every convenience leads to further atrophy, apathy, and acclimation to a non-existent reality.

Obama Mob

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:26:00 +0000

There are a couple of desperate housewives standing outside the Redmond Post Office holding poster-boards of Obama with a Charlie Chaplain mustache ... or is that supposed to be Hitler? One might be funny and one of them was laughing about some story, but the other and most likely scenario is just sad and stupid. Here let me think, what's the point of any sharply slanted demonstration? You're either going to incite a riotous rabble bent on revolution or piss people off. Granted these are extreme ends of the spectrum, but this is reaction to hateful extremists; doubtless most people (myself included) avoid eye contact, mumble something incoherent, and shamble past. Maybe, maybe one in a thousand people on the proverbial fence fall on your side, but how many apples end up over the fence after you've crashed into the fruit tree?

Picking My Nose in Demand

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:04:00 +0000

regnardrofkcalb has sent you a message:

Blow me
To:flamingweenie

I liked the "Blow Me" video and the nose picking was awesome! I'd pay $10 per minute for short 1 or 1 minute video clips of you picking your nose. If interested, please let me know. If not, it's cool and keep up the great channel! Thanks.

You can reply to this message by visiting your inbox.

Happy Birthday

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:21:00 +0000

Shameless post to myself wishing me many happy returns. Marcel and Frank walked into my office, slapped a funny cake hat on me, threw glitter confetti on me, and sang "¡Feliz cumpleaños a tí!"

Thanks guys!

Adele @ Paramount Seattle

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 04:00:00 +0000

Sandra and I attended the Adele concert at Paramount in Seattle on August 12th. She reminded me of a cute cross of Boomhower and Bridget Jones, babbling energetically between songs in almost incoherent British English about both the origin of each one and events of the day.

The next day I rented a car so I could take her home and on the way we stopped by dad's place to take him to lunch.

Soundgarden Gorge 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:12:00 +0000

Nearly a week ago I experienced Soundgarden at the Gorge, the final stop on a tour picking up after twelve years of dissolution. Besides the crappy cell phone photos shown here, I recorded some audio clips but they turned out all garbled. At one point Chris Cornell knelt down and asked someone up front, "Does that record video?" When they yelled in the affirmative he told them to start it up, then grabbed it, and paraded around stage introducing the band members to the device. I'm still hoping to find the result on YouTube.

The show ended with a really strange, and quite annoying actually, loud feedback loop that went on for at least ten minutes before the stage lights simply came up and everyone stampeded away. However the performance was quite satisfying, they played a really long set (nearly every track off Superunknown -- even Black Hole Sun), and Cornell's vocals were as powerful as ever.

Abuse and Enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:17:00 +0000

The following is one of the 108 stories in Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? by Ajahn Brahm.

EXPERIENCED MEDITATION TEACHERS often have to deal with disciples who claim to be enlightened. One of the time-honored ways to test if their claims are true is to abuse the disciple so grossly that they end up getting angry. As all Buddhist monks and nuns know, the Buddha clearly stated that one who gets angry is certainly not enlightened.

A young Japanese monk, strenuously intent on reaching nirvana in this very life, was meditating in solitude in a secluded lake-island hermitage near a famous monastery. He wanted to get enlightenment out of the way early on in his life, so he could then attend to other things.

When the monastery attendant arrived in his small rowboat on his weekly visit to deliver supplies, the young monk left a note requesting some expensive parchment, a quill, and some fine-quality ink. He was soon to complete his third year in solitude and wanted to let his abbot know how well he had done.

The parchment, quill, and ink arrived the following week. In the next few days, after much meditating and pondering, the young monk wrote on the fine parchment in the most exquisite of calligraphy the following short poem:

The conscientious young monk
meditating three years alone
can no longer be moved
by the four worldly winds.

Surely, he thought, his wise old abbot would see in these words, and in the care by which they were written, that his disciple was now enlightened. He gently rolled up the parchment, carefully tied it with a ribbon, and then waited for the attendant to deliver it to his teacher. In the days that followed, he imagined his abbot’s pleasure at reading the brilliant poem so meticulously inscribed. He could see it being hung in a costly frame in the monastery’s main hall. No doubt they would press him to be an abbot now, maybe of a famous city monastery. How nice he felt to have made it at last!

When the attendant next rowed the small boat to the island to deliver the weekly supplies, the young monk was waiting for him. The attendant soon handed the monk a parchment similar to the one he had sent, but tied with a different colored ribbon. “From the abbot,” said the attendant tersely.

The monk excitedly tore off the ribbon and unfurled the scroll. As his eyes settled on the parchment, they grew as wide as the moon, and his face went just as white. It was his own parchment, but next to the first line of exquisite calligraphy, the abbot had carelessly scribbled in a red ballpoint pen a single word: “Fart!” To the right of the second line was another ugly smudge of red ink saying, “Fart!” The third line had another irreverent “Fart!” scrawled over it, and so did the fourth line of verse.

This was too much! Not only was the decrepit old abbot so stupid that he couldn’t recognize enlightenment when it was in front of his fat nose, but he was so uncouth and uncivilized that he had vandalized a work of art with indecent graffiti. The abbot was behaving like a punk, not a monk. It was an insult to art, to tradition and to truth.

The young monk’s eyes narrowed with indignation, his face flushed red with righteous anger, and he snorted as he insisted of the attendant, “Take me to the abbot! Immediately!”

It was the first time in three years that the young monk had left his island hermitage. In a rage, he stormed into the abbot’s office, slammed the parchment on the table, and demanded an explanation.

The experienced abbot slowly picked up the parchment, cleared his throat, and read out the poem:

The conscientious young monk
meditating three years alone
can no longer be moved
by the four worldly winds.

The he put down the parchment, stared at the young monk, and continued. “Hmm! So, young monk, you are no longer moved by the four worldly winds. Yet four little farts have blown you right across the lake!”

Found the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:01:00 +0000

Surprised? I found it within a tent at an on-campus "Product Fair" at Microsoft. It's smaller in person (or I am imaginably gigantic), filled with candy, and has a hole in the back. I'm sure the reasons for hiding had something to do with being prodded in the rear by greedy fingers looking for sticky sweets.

As anyone and everyone in Washington can attest, this has been a dismal year. The previous July must have been hotter, because this one and the leading Spring have been quite gray. It's now especially impossible to tell the difference between people who always complain about the weather and those just justified by reasons referring to recent temporal evidence. Oh yes, it rains here -- didn't you know? Somehow the rain hasn't dampened my immediate mood so, for all I care, the clouds can go fuck their muggy breath and ashy faces; this is Summer's silver lining.

Really, we have no one to complain and no one to blame but ourselves. Seeing as blaming yourself is only worth an immediate punishment per motivational purposes, I suggest we quit flogging the fluffy inverse geography bearing down as our cirrus ceiling. That said, I'm only feeling quite right now so I reserve the right to bitch about the shitty shiftiness tomorrow ... or in an hour. I thought, heck I'd better write something while the lightness remains else my blog will be nothing be pain to endure in a reading.

There isn't anything in particular that's given me such a boost. Nothing has changed in my life, work mostly sucked today, and my activities are almost explicitly boring at the moment from an external point of view. Yet somehow I don't care at the moment and I really see how little it matters. This clarity will pass (this too shall pass) but its brief presence testifies to a subtle healing process from within. The idea that such stretches will get longer is altogether more encouraging than any amount of attention from a random floozy in a tipsy night out. The internalization of loneliness affecting without hurting and the sensation that I can be worth something to myself, even just breath to breath; those are things that matter. These are markers on my path, totems in my sky ... just somewhat concealed by clouds ...

Long to Time Lose

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 05:04:00 +0000

"It takes a long time to lose it," sings The Wooden Birds on their album Two Matchsticks. Cheers to whoever recommended the song to me, I think it was Scott "Meat Shovel" Happel. It also takes a long time for my poor netbook to render 15 minutes of deshaked, uncompressed 640x480 video. I had the brilliant idea of just appending a bunch of clips together and letting Deshaker hog VirtualDub while I left to go tend tasks. I was gone for nearly three hours and it took about that long for full pixel processing to finish, now it's pumping the results into a 23 gigabyte AVI with an estimated time of an hour and a half. Afterwards I still have to reverse, chop, and filter (for levels, brightness/contrast, and possibly smoothing). Well, then I'll have steel instead of bronze to work with ...

"Hope is a drug (that uses you)," sings Gavin Castleton (thanks sis). On a pedantic note it gets you to see Transformers latest pile of stinking, twisted metal of a movie under the seducing idea it might actually be entertaining rather than garishly boring. Here is every possible theme, scene, and gleam of cinema blockbusters clobbered together into a buffet of deafening badness. I imagine the writer to be an retro-adolescent, MTV-gen adult whose idea of greatness is stringing together every cool YouTube video they ever saw. Gah, and did anyone notice that even the music hopped schizophrenically between Brave Heart and The Dark Knight? This film had no fucking clue what the hell kind of thing it wanted to be. "I want to be everything!" it screams as Shia Labouf screams and the girl screams and the metal against metal screams and the bits of stereotype fall off the lips of bits of characters and my mind screams in defiance of the impossibly explicitness of it all. Now I know what "non-stop action" is (everyone constantly talking, explaining, shooting, screaming, or running) and by golly it is grating to go through. "Retirement is wack," says black guy ... are they stealing lines from Movie Movies? Probably not the best idea. Anyway, I could nitpick practically every scene of this because it doesn't even realize it's a parody (P.S. -- I apologize on behalf of the filmmakers to President Kennedy for giving you "Tron face", you didn't deserve that) ...

"Don't get shy, don't get caught, with the world and its thoughts," sings Peter Murphy. I think it's important to listen to your own internal wisdom. Chances are you've been ignoring it so as to conform to something more amiable to your particular social group. Off of that vein I must protest the typical podcast: a couple of guys with a microphone talking about pop/nerd culture. What are you to find in these banal subjects, some witty criticism you can use in favor for or against the latest trend to raise in the next water-cooler conversation? I've been hearing these "through the wall" from my roommate and they boggle my mind. Who cares what these guys think of anything, what do you think? Neither might matter, given the topics, but at least you're not cloning someone else's silly opinion.

Networking Exodus

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:47:00 +0000

Blogging templates are getting better, I may switch away from my custom one, because I want to write and not mess with HTML. These phases come and go, as with everything; everything passes then returns (Tao and whatnot). I go from tinkering to closing the hood and taking the shell for a ride.

My journal has been getting much love from my own internal pain, supposedly this helps things. Sometimes I want to write in a way that shows up for other people even if no one is listening. How is it that broadcasting ourselves, even to a deaf audience, is such a powerful urge. I think it's less vanity than external confirmation of existence and effect. None the less, I have quit Twitter about a year after quitting Facebook and now I wonder if my email or phone isn't next.

Sometimes you have to really stub the toe for a hangnail to be loosened up enough to pull out. Or rather, blistered up enough. Over a year ago I aggravated two of my piggies enough with blisters beneath the nail that eventually one and then the other spit it out to make room for new growth. There's a metaphor in there, and there's also a lot of gross: puss in boots (e.g. not a kitty cat -- now try reading the title as intended, ever again).

Yesterday I nearly stepped on a tiny rabbit while walking home on the trail. Harrying flies popped on and off, dancing, shimmering chocolate chunks of filth to the beats of Kid Loco's The Graffiti Artist. I grabbed a short piece of wood and squatted down to carefully push him over. While in the process of this, earbuds in and oblivious to my surroundings, I heard a sudden squeak and sharp intake of breath as a girl coming from the opposite direction spotted my focus. "Is that a bunny?" It was, I said, and I was just trying to see how injured it was before moving it off the trail. She continued before I finished, what else could be done?

I prodded him gently with my fingers, soft fur gave way but the flesh pushed back and quivered yet its overlarge eyes stared at me intently. I picked him up slowly and moved him off into the bushes nearby, laying out a simple mantra and hoping my touch had not forever discouraged its mother (if it was that young) from returning. "Good lucky, little guy." This morning he was gone. I've seen plenty of rabbits, deer and once a young buck, raccoons, and even once a fox. So while he may have recovered his constitution and left by himself, I think rather he became a meal. Those big eyes in a tiny body looking into mine, that memory may be all that truly exists of him anymore.

Somehow, yesterday a level of peace furnished itself in my soul as had not happened in quite some time. Even with everything going on inside and out, within and without, I drank deeply of equilibrium draught, sipped a spirit of spaciousness, and inhaled self-forgiveness without personal identification. Troubles seemed far away, disconnected from my twisted net of emotions in this body and mind. The feeling has left, but the memory remains, staring at me from yesterday with big vulnerable sightless eyes.

I left my phone at home, walked to Marymoor Park, watched Dodgeball into the dark, and laughed unto spilling tears; a waterway so recently reserved only for sadness produced a sprinkle of liquid sunshine. On the walk home, my own figures gathered warmly around and I wrote in my moleskine: "Street lights cast an army of shadows, but they all stand at my feet."

How to Cook Brown Rice

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:05:00 +0000

Here’s how I cook my brown rice; I’m using Lundberg Short Grain Brown Rice from Costco.

Presoak the rice: put it the pot you’ll cook it in with a lot of water (measurement is unnecessary here) and let it sit for about thirty minutes to get rid of excess starch or whatnot.
Drain that water and then add 1.5 cups of water for every 1 cup of rice you had; e.g. ratio of 1.5:1 water to rice.
Put the uncovered pot on the stove and set heat to high; wait for it to boil.
Turn heat to low, cover pot with lid, and wait twenty minutes while it simmers.
Turn off the heat, keep the pot covered, and wait thirty minutes for the rice to soften up.

My rule for remember this is 10,20,30: about ten minutes to boil, twenty to simmer, and then thirty to soften. I still always forget the water/rice ratio though, which is the original impetus for this post.

Afterwards I generally throw the entire pot in the refrigerator and dole out portions over the next couple days when I want to make a meal. One particular favorite of mine is to throw a frozen Morning Star sausage patty on a bowl of rice, top that with cheese, cover the entire thing with a paper towel, and microwave for 2.5 minutes. Quickly remove when done and use a fork to mix it up while turning the bowl in your hands -- don't burn your fingers! The one thing others tend to change in this when I serve it to them is to add soy sauce as well. Yum!

I encourage you to add stuff to the rice/water mixture at the beginning (after presoaking though!) for various flavors. Something that works well is about a teaspoon of diced garlic, cayenne pepper, and a generous squirt of soy sauce or fish sauce. It’s easy to toss in other things, however, and it up with different and interesting tastes. For example, I’ve added teriyaki sauce that I had leftover in one of those tiny plastic cups you get from take-out or olive oil (probably better at the end) or different kinds of hot sauce / spice. My one recommendation would just be to keep it simple and not overload it with two many variants; I’ve made that mistake in the past.

Special thanks to Steve Pavlina’s blog entry How to Cook Brown Rice and Melissa Paul’s pre-soak suggestion.

Seattle Sunset

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Sat, 14 May 2011 14:44:00 +0000

The urge to blog has come and gone on multiple occasions, leaving the last post to be made over a month old. I've been writing, of a sort, but I have not, of this sort, been doing it here.

I made the bus trip to Seattle yesterday evening, Friday the 13^th, after a long long work week. It seemed to me that I have neither a night life nor the mental and social muscles to set one about except through a few failures, then being the first. Mood, mind, and meandering did not mix to create any sort of fun only depressing reflection of self-repression.

At any rate I made it to Contour before 8, but for the day they had extended Happy Hour to 9 so it didn't matter. I ate and drank, no alcohol due to a determined drying out after last Saturday's Black Raven Brewery anniversary; thus perhaps any of this could be blamed on withdrawal. I mostly enjoyed the simple atmosphere of people. I left an hour before any DJ would be on and wandered down to the harbor where I watched the sun go down.

And then I left and went to bed.

Modern March

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

I'm reading Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections and came upon a striking passage this morning:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at least bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est--all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist (though that's only the label of his profession, I'd say he goes far beyond that) wrote this at 81 in 1957. This is by no means an isolated view of the so-called improvement of lifestyle given to us by technology and the clawed conveniences hidden therein. Buddhism and Taoism speak of a person's "root" as well and it is no surprise he brings it up here after having researched those and Chinese and Indian philosophies.

Another book I raced through yesterday, e.g. in a single day, brought the same sort of thing to light:

We live in a world of entertainment. We are always looking for ways to distract ourselves. We try to save time and make everything easier and more productive. Now, we are bored. Work is boring. Home is boring. People are boring. What do we do?

... and ...

I turn around in my lazy, cushioned, roll chair in the place where one reads books (library), and I see four people typing away, working hard. They could be writing books or finishing homework. So much production is being pumped out of the four I witness. I glance at the monitors and see them all on the same web page. It looks like a famous social network. How wasteful are we?

He defines "Social Networks" in his Mini Dictionary section as a way to keep in touch with people you don't care about, except to make sure they're not more successful than you.

That is all from How to Talk to Famous People: and make your grandma laugh which I purchased due to its low price, pleasing easy-to-read style, and the motivation of overcoming my own shyness. Perhaps the parallels I draw between two separate authors and potentially disparate subject matter (Jung may refer more to the military machine, having gone through two world wars) is tenuous but there is a truism and a seriousness to it that I hold to be worth pursuing.

I would like a stronger root, focused attention, and deeper meaning. How about you?

Ode to Buu

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:23:00 +0000

Buu is a big, dumpy, greasy, extremely affectionate kitty cat. I noticed an inordinate amount of pics on my TracFone of our Buu-da belly, as I sought to clear it off (it's cheap and has very little storage), and decided to make him a wee post in lieu of Donkey getting his own video.

STP Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:11:00 +0000

This is probably inspired by my last visit to Palmer's with my first couch surfer ...

Setting: the old Cinebar house I grew up in. It's dim to see but not dark and not night or evening or morning, nor is there bad weather.

I'm supposed to be singing Stone Temple Pilots and am very conscious that I barely know any chords (we're doing it accousticly), but since I'm the lead singer I don't really have to worry about it. There's people wandering about in the yard. Me and another guy move a table and I get Buu out of the way so it doesn't crush him. I pull off one of his bigger clumps of hair and he yowls as it finally tears free. We're already late to do this and someone, I think my sister, makes a comment about the speakers not being setup. There are two big speakers just lying on the ground next to me and I say I'm just supposed to sing and it basically isn't my problem. I say this to another, youngish girl, and my smile feels really fake on my face.

Walking into the house, through the carport. One of my bandmembers, a girl of whom I am obviously long-familiar but who is like family to me, is talking to me about our set which we're supposed to start now. I say that we should stick to songs I know and it's going to be hard without seeing the lyrics anywhere, I'm wondering if I can remember anything. "We should do Vaseline, Lounge Fly, ..." and I name a couple others which I can't remember exactly and nor do I think they exist. "What about Helena?" she asks. "I remember that one." "There's the part where he/you have to be up there and say Helena Helena Helena over and over again for like two minutes." "I'm not worried about that so much as not knowing the words." I wonder how Vaseline will be accoustically since we aren't electric.

I enter the house through the front door and make my way to the kitchen where I deposit Buu's filth in the garbage (by this point it's now actual poop that I was holding) and wash my hands in the sink. My mom is there, doing dishes?, but we don't talk. My other band member is there chatting with someone and eating something. I say something a bit annoyed / urgent that we were supposed to start at 7 and it's 7:17 (seeing the clock on the oven which is obscured by things on the stove and hard to see). He mumbles something of acquiescence and heads outside through the sliding glass door.

Good morning Roland

noreply@blogger.com (NeilO Mobile) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Sundown Walking

noreply@blogger.com (NeilO Mobile) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 02:57:00 +0000

I walked to Crossroads with my tiny backpack full of activities and all I did was buy some pepperjack cheese at QFC and bus back.

Bookshelf

noreply@blogger.com (NeilO Mobile) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 18:57:00 +0000

Can you guess my recent hobby?

Dell XPS-B733r Drivers

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:25:00 +0000

I'm looking to get a Dell XPS-B773r machine, potentially with unknown upgrades in it since I got it from a friend, up and running with Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2). Why that particular operating system? Well, firstly I forgot what OSR2 meant and that was the only Win95 stand-alone setup (e.g. "For Computers Without Windows") that I had and secondly I wanted the last Win9X release which didn't have Internet Explorer integrated with the shell by default.

At any rate, this is still a work in progress and I'm currently trying to make progress at work, but I wanted to make a short post in case someone else happens to be doing the same thing. Hopefully this helps you. The drivers you are looking for are not listed under XPS desktops on Dell's site. No no, you're looking for XPS-B___r which is under Dimension desktops.

(I haven't owned a Dell in a while and I didn't write down the service tag number, because I didn't even know what it was when I was looking at the case. You're probably smarter than me and have already figured that part out, thus going directly to the page you needed.)

Still, you'll likely find the possibilities there lacking since the machine was targeted to Windows 98 or NT4. And you may be wondering where the USB drivers are. Well, it turns out that USB didn't appear in Windows 95 until the tail end, OSR2.1 (yes, point one), and so the version I have installed of course does not have it. My CD burner is still on the way so then I had no way of transferring files between my other computers and this one.

So you'll also want to follow USBMan's Guide to USB Support in Windows 95. I'll keep this post updated with the latest developments when I next toink with the computer.

Squirrel!

noreply@blogger.com (NeilO Mobile) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 01:16:00 +0000

Eating old bird food:

Dad scared him off:

GW-BASIC Game Programming

noreply@blogger.com (Neil C. Obremski) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:51:00 +0000

My first attempts at programming involved "drawing" a level in ASCII text using WordPerfect, renaming the WPS to EXE, and then trying to run it in DR-DOS. The effects were typically pretty unimpressive with the most satisfying being some garbage printed to the screen and the PC speaker issuing scream-like beep patterns. From there I discovered AUTOEXEC.BAT, soon after my friend Aric Catron introduced me to GW-BASIC, and I quickly became enamored and obsessed with the possibilities. Armed only with our combined knowledge as 7th graders and a handful of example programs, we set out to fulfill every kid programmer's dream of becoming bonafide game programmers.

To and extent we succeeded, since several minor and countless unfinished productions issued forth from our zeal. At some point we dabbled deeply in ZZT before I purchased from him a Tandy 1000 and delved into QBasic. Later in High School, I purchased a 75mhz Packard Bell and switched to Visual Basic then Borland C++ 5 and also JavaScript in Netscape 2, 3, and 4. The more technologies I learned and the greater power I held, the less games I made, the more abstract projects became, and tempting architectural perfection eluded me even further.

These days even the cheapest cheap skate has an arsenal of game development kits to make GW-BASIC a speck of dust on a castle flying through the sky. And yet the exciting and addictive aspect of coding them up cannot be found in any of them. Extreme complexity, possibility, and comparability feed a mental ocean of pressure; am I the only one drowning in it? There are many distractions; a peek in the crowd today is a window to hand-held windows into near infinite virtual space and so-called social chatterings. Copies of copies, remakes, critiques, dissertations, philosophies, competition, and multitudes of jewels in the rough to detract as much as inspire. I would simply seek to enjoy the process and to hell with the result so long as there is one.

My first naive thought, repeating from past echoes of piqued inspiration, was to define a simple project and then create it. However, the trouble is the plan, the goal, the defined outcome. It ignored while purporting to embrace, the distinct pleasure of incremental improvements towards a hazy but ignorable future. Again, a building requires a blue print to be drawn up and whereas spaghetti only needs a pot of water ... boiling optional. The more brainstorming I did the further back I stepped in time, the smaller the capabilities I envisioned, and perhaps it didn't occur to me then that I was working backwards to find a suitable starting point where no preset arrangement was necessary to begin.

At Value Village I purchased a copy of Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus which was written in 1994 and included the original buyer's receipt from that same year in a California bookstore. It is one I never quite made it through but inspired me to see again and I entertained the fantasy of writing my game in Turbo C to be emulated with DOS. That presented an immediate stepping stone on the staircase into the bottom-most cellar of my mental traversal back through time and knowledge. That is to say I pondered DOSBox as a platform for the most ancient of tools in my dusty, under-used game programming tool-belt: GW-BASIC.

And why not, I never quite absorbed all the nutritious commands, having been educated through examples and given no actual reference. Now all that is available for those who dig deeply enough. Emerging technologies are given more coverage than crusty languages of a disdainful variety to puritans. Good luck, I may hear, in forming anything without the benefit of structure, functions, classes, objects, recursion, abstraction, polymorphism, generics, interfaces, garbage collection (although BASIC does have this for string memory), local variables, debuggers, break points, an IDE, find and replace, or even a decent tome on using it for game development (let me know if you can find one!). All this and I must suffer line numbers and the archaic memory restriction of 64k!

Yet last night I wrote a tiny program to test page flipping and it warmed every fuzzy possible in my body when I saw it work. And on top of that, DOSBox's fantastic video capture functionality allowed me to make a 4-second movie of the output!

Today I figured out how to utilize the built-in functionality for keyboard events, e.g. without polling, and it inspired me to write this post and consider drumming up some guides for the world. Maybe no one else is looking but me, it doesn't matter. The presence of satisfaction is the best peer anyway!

Icy Leary Way

noreply@blogger.com (NeilO Mobile) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:40:00 +0000