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July 24, 2005
How can I reach infinity
life, poetry
How can I reach infinity
when the sands of time limit me?
I know where I must go,
yet I find it hard to row against the flow.
Pastel shades light the sky;
they form a colorful path leading high.
And yet still I find that my mind denies;
it refuses me the power to fly above the body's lies.
Posted by Trevor Savage at 8:29 PM | Comments (2)
July 20, 2005
Podcasts
geekage, life, thing
Podcasts are quite interesting. They seem the ideal way to spend the trip to and from work, and a deliciously stable way to obtain such obscure (according to the local radio) genres of music as electronic and trance. Their large size is both a blessing and a curse to the 56ker. Without the necessity of streaming, it's possibly with a little patience to grab a podcast or a few and listen to them, while on the other hand any stream above a certain bitrate becomes practically unusable.
iTunes, although it provides a very nice interface, fails in delivering podcasts to 56kers. The downloads are unresumable, limiting your selection to that which you can download in one session, and to make matters worse the downloads have a tendency to time out after about 25% of the file has arrived. I just switched over to downloading the same podcasts with wget and it's worked great, not timing out once. I'll check iPodder out when I have the time to download it, and if it has any support for resuming downloads I imagine I'll become a quick devotee.
I've seen some complain that "Podcast" is just a new name for audio broadcasting over the web. It is, however, different, thanks to the new listening procedure. In addition to the automation that can make it convenient and the portability which can also be handy, podcasts bring to the table the ability to aggregate as many broadcasts as you want. Much as RSS itself makes it possible to keep track of many more news sites and blogs than could be easily done with mere webpages, podcasts make it easy to listen to as many broadcasts as you have the time to hear. In addition, thanks to the easy-to-use software which makes podcasts so nifty, more broadcasts are created than would be without this easy way to reach listeners. Sure, many of these broadcasts may be trash, but logic says that some percent of them will good listening.
Listening to my mp3 player on the commute, however, has one definite downside: it means that I don't get a daily dose of NPR, leaving me rather out of the loop as far as news goes.
And so I'm bearing through 1 hour and 20 minute downloads and eagerly awaiting the morrow, when I might try out some podcasts on my drive north. We can discuss the safety of listening to so called trance music while driving on the highway later.
Posted by Trevor Savage at 8:51 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2005
The Fully Fledged Life: Musings on the Weekend's Gathering
life
Fully fledged real life socialization having been reborn after long absence, I am refreshed. And yet I am also ever the more aware of it's usual absence. The Beatles and AIM call, and I vow to answer their sirens in the following weeks. I must not die this death again.
Loosening society's restraining orders and letting my wings out once more, I feel the wind blow through them and know it to be good. The joys of good people and interaction with them delight me to no end.
I think I've noticed an interesting fact about myself after this weekend's 8 hour long social extravaganza, however. I think I'm rather (happily) out of touch with social undercurrents; I don't or can't divine people's reasons for interacting with X social group or acting like Y towards certain people. Instead, I find that happiness is easier to seek if one ignores such things, looking either deeper or shallower (depending on how one thinks about the matter) and enjoying the people themselves, whatever motives they may hold and whatever complaints they appear to constantly blather. Such things seem of little import, and it seems of little use to become annoyed over them.
And yet there are things that people can do which annoy me; I suppose these things center mainly around people who purposefully (consciously or not) harm others' happiness. People who think they know much more than they do, or who intentionally cause lasting hurt or unhappiness to others for selfish reasons seem predisposed to cause this annoyance in me.
On the other hand, I don't mind if friends are critical of those whose motives they deem unappealing, or of those who seem to spout unhappy thoughts. Whatever they find to make the world a happier place for them I have no quarry with.
In then end, it boils down to this: I lurv the awesome people I hang with, and wouldn't wish ill on any of them for the world. Whatever (reasonable things) they do in the pursuit of happiness, I can only applaud.
Posted by Trevor Savage at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)
July 3, 2005
Media Weekend: Carmageddon and Cyberpunk
geekage, life
My mind tells me it's well past time for another blog entry. An outpouring of information is needed, for the well balanced sanity of my essence. And so I finish up my game of Carmageddon II and happily head for the text editor.
Having discovered OpenGLide, I recently dug up my copy of Carmageddon II to rediscover that it is quite the nifty game. It runs relatively well in classic using OpenGLide, the only problem I've encountered being that the blasted music doesn't want to play, although iTunes can remedy that rather easily. Although I can't find anyone else reporting this problem, I can only assume that it's something simple like OSX hiding the Audio CD portion of the game's disc from Classic somehow. Other than this, though, it's quite the enjoyable game.
It's interesting, however, how quickly it's community has declined. Having been released in 1999, just a year before my G4 came off of the presses, a vast majority of the fan sites centered around it have already either dissapeared outright or sunken into stagnation. And the official website appears to have followed the fansites into the darkness. It's quite strange to compare this to the ongoing popularity of Diablo II or even Starcraft, which, despite it's 7 years of age, still holds gamers in it's delightful claws and is even favored by the great gods with updates.
The stagnation of Carmageddon 2's internet appearance makes it seem markedly older than other games, making it age before it's time while the more favored of it's kin enjoy their player-granted extended youth.
Recently I've been on something of a William Gibson kick, although more by happenstance than any logical decision. He's quite the master storyteller, and I've extremely enjoyed most of his books, although his evidentally more mainstream novel "Pattern Recognization" seems a bit less coherent than the rest of his books. For one, it's a bit trendy; all of the computers in the book are Macs, and although I love Apple, it's a bit strange that everyone is so obviously using Macintosh computers. The main character is also a disciple of Pilates, a fact which seems to have little importance as anything other than a novelty, despite being repeatedly brought up. In general, the story as a whole dosen't seem to fit together quite as well as his others do, looking more like a collection of somewhat interesting aspects taped onto a rather sturdy storyline than his usual streamlined works.
Perhaps part of the reason for this is that, unlike most of his work, "Pattern Recognition" is set more or less in the present. At any rate, it doesn't hold together for me nearly as well as I expect his stories to, and although it did certainly hold my attention to the end, the world which was barely departed from our own somehow seemed less real than those which Gibson usually paints. Perhaps this is more of a flaw – if it can be called that – in my own mind than in the novel, however.
Anyway, it's back to the media pump for me; perhaps a spot of music and a tasting of WarCraft III. The lack of uncanned emotion tugs a bit at my soul, despite my attempts to drown it in media and hope.
Posted by Trevor Savage at 5:54 PM | Comments (0)