Year: 2006

Good days and bad days…

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Good days, in brief:

Sixteen years ago, during my Junior year of high school, I managed to screw up the courage to ask a girl out, and wound up with my very first girlfriend, Xebeth. Our relationship was the typical high school romance — drama, breaking up, getting back together, and so on — and at the end of that school year, the military moved her family out of Alaska and we lost touch.

A few weeks ago, a random Google search led Xebeth to my website, and she dropped a line to say hello. We’ve been keeping in touch since then, and as her job has her traveling around the country, she ended up swinging through Seattle on Monday.

So, I was able to spend Monday getting re-acquainted with the first girl I ever dated, after not having seen her in around sixteen years. It was a blast — she’d not been to Seattle before, so we spent some time in the afternoon wandering around Capitol Hill before wandering back to my apartment, getting Prairie, and heading out to dinner, then back here to chat. Xebeth and I still get along great (and flirt outrageously), Prairie likes her a lot, and it was incredible to be able to rekindle the friendship after so many years. She even put up with me lugging my camera around!

Bad days, in brief:

It appears that the hard drive in my computer died last night. A sudden Spinning Beachball of Death had me restart the machine, at which point I got nothing but a grey screen, which eventually brought up a blinking question mark “I can’t find a System Folder” error. Rebooting the machine from the OS installation CD and running Disk Utility tells me that the hard drive is fried…unverifiable, and unrepairable.

And, of course, guess who hasn’t taken the time and DVDs to back up their data recently?

SIGH

So…160 Gb of data may be down the tubes. Google has my important recent e-mail and Flickr has my most important recent photos…but there’s still a lot of other data that I should have backed up ages ago that I’m afraid I’ve lost. Replacing the drive looks like it’ll run me about $80 or $160, depending on the brand I go for (does half the price mean half the reliability?), then I get to see if I can coax the system into mounting the old drive and letting me pull any of the data over.

Gee, isn’t this going to be fun.

So…Monday was great. Tuesday was pretty standard up ’til the end, but so far Wednesday just isn’t looking very promising at all.

I’m just hoping things get better from here.

FBiPod?

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Who knew the government was this in tune with today’s marketplace?

The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

— Pres. George W. Bush, during a speech at Tuskegee University

(via The Cult of Mac and Engadget)

Birthday Wishes

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I’ll be turning 33 in just a couple of weeks, on May 3rd. This year I only really had one thing on my birthday wish list, and that’s already arrived, thanks to my wonderful girl (doubly wonderful, as she’d already spoiled me once!). I’ve even received another early birthday present from Royce, in the form of another year’s membership to Flickr (keeping me at the ‘pro’ level until November of ’07)!

I am incredibly spoiled.

However, I have had the occasional “so, what do you want for your birthday?” inquiry. At this point, I’m pretty much set, so kind wishes will do me just fine. But…if someone’s determined to spend a little money on me (okay, not terribly likely, but you never know), books and music are always appreciated. I’ve got a bunch of each saved in my Amazon Wish List, but there are three CDs that I’d like to call special attention to.

Back in March of 2003, I stumbled across a series of discs from Sony called the ‘Soundtrack for a Century‘, celebrating 100 years of music recordings and releases from the Sony family of record labels. Over time I’ve collected eight out of the eleven pieces of the series, and any (or all) of these last three would be greatly appreciated:

Other than that…(shrug)…as I said, I’m not too greedy. Well-wishes and kind words will work just fine.

iTunes “Atom Bomb” by Fluke from the album Risotto (1997, 5:45).

50 Best Book-to-Film Adaptations

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Another “X greatest Y” list has appeared. This, of course, means it’s meme-time!

Working from the Guardian’s list of the 50 best book-to-film adaptations (discussion as to what films should or should not be on this list is in progress over at kottke.org), I’m tagging each line with a B if I’ve read the book, and an M if I’ve seen the movie.

And with that, we’re off…

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Me and My Shadow: The story of Jason Mewes

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I’ve been watching the pieces of this show up bit by bit (kindly assisted by watching Mike’s del.icio.us feed), and since the last section went live today, here’s a list of links to all the pieces so I can read straight through, beginning to end.

Since the gossip sites have seen fit to print only the portion of the Jason Mewes story I told at UPenn (that portion being what said sites seem to feel is the only interesting aspect of Mewes’ life), I figured why not put the whole tale of Jason’s battle with drug addiction into print here, where folks can get a better idea of who Jason truly is and maybe why he fell victim to heroin abuse in the first place.

[..] At the least, it’s a more comprehensive profile at a guy who’s accomplished a lot more than celebrity bathroom sex; at the most, it’s an ode to a very unlikely hero of mine and a man I love (in a decidedly hetero way).

  1. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 1
  2. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 2
  3. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 3
  4. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 4
  5. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 5
  6. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 6
  7. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 7
  8. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 8
  9. Me and My Shadow, Pt. 9

iTunes “Rise Up (Future)” by Commodores, The from the album In to the Mix Vol. IV: The Classics Remixed (2000, 3:50).