posted 2004/10/29 at 01:12
Just as a reminder to everyone, the opportunity to ask me questions for the .org's four-year anniversary is winding down fast. You have until Sunday night EST to send me questions, and given that I've only received three of them so far, this may be a really short column unless some of you get your thinkers going.
posted 2004/10/27 at 03:12
New on Backwash (now that I have time to write there again): "Something Before the Election", or my rather incoherent thoughts at three in the morning on next week's election. Can it all just be over soon, please?
posted 2004/10/25 at 21:45
maloneysbaloney.org :: debunking Brainwashing 101 and other right-wing assaults on academia (if that link doesn't work, try the Sean shouldn't register domain names on three hours sleep link)
Thank you, good night.
posted 2004/10/24 at 19:39
There's nothing quite like getting to the end of your super-long project and then realizing that a month ago you put in a typo when you registered the domain name. Fuck and double fuck. I've got the right one registered now, but I'm beginning to realize that trying to tackle huge projects like this while also handling the start of grad school was not a smart decision on my part. Let me go fix however many typos I have in this thing, and finish it up, and with any luck I can go to bed tonight in peace having gotten everything done. I'll still feel like a real jackass for my goof, but that can't be helped.
posted at 02:27
Cripes. Three and a half hours ago I concluded all my TV watching and other activities so I could get to work on my project. I still haven't done a damn thing with it tonight, and I really should get it done this weekend so I can get back to really slaving over my schoolwork, as opposed to the semi-slaving I've been doing these past few weeks. I think there was supposed to be a joke in there, but I lost it.
posted 2004/10/22 at 16:59
"The folks in Toledo have endured more [presidential campaign] TV ads--14,000, an average of nearly 60 a day since March--than any city in the nation." (from Chicago Tribune article on Yahoo! News)
And here I was thinking I wasn't watching that much TV lately because I had so much work to do and there wasn't anything good on.
posted 2004/10/21 at 22:35
Why do I keep watching MXC when it keeps offending me? Seriously, who in the hell thought that Takeshi's Castle needed to be "improved upon" by overdubbing everything with the most purile humour imaginable? Can you imagine what Spike TV would have done if they'd gotten their hands on Iron Chef? Will I ever finish a sentence in this entry that isn't a question?
posted 2004/10/19 at 20:31
Normally when I have a really shitty day, I'll just post some emo thing up here about how much my life sucks and all of that and spare all of you the boring details. This was not one of those shitty days.
So I've got this group presentation for one of my classes coming up this week, right? And the group needed to meet to hammer out how we were going to run things, and decided to meet today at 1230. This sounds all fine and Belldandy, but given how late my classes are this semester, 1230 is usually when I'm rolling out of bed. But I can just set my alarm early and handle things from there, right?
Well, not exactly. I went to bed late the previous night, so I set my alarm to wake me up at the latest possible moment for me to get up, do what I needed to do, and get out of here. Of course the alarm goes off and I take too long to get out of bed and lose some serious time. No problem, I just didn't get online before leaving the house -- which makes me feel a bit off about the day but isn't all that dehabilitating -- and I got out of the door with enough time to get to my appointment.
Of course, then the bad stuff just fed on itself. My car's already out of commission due to battery problems, and I've been driving around the family's backup van. I get out to the van, and it won't start; despite showing a quarter-full gas gauge, it was out of gas. I'm really pressed for time here, so father gives me the keys to the main van, meaning that if something goes wrong at the house the folks have no transportation. Now, not only have I not driven the good van before, but I'm not entirely sure I'm insured on it. Still, I have to get to the meeting, so I start the van up. Lesson one about the van that father never told me about: the drive gauge is off. So if I want to drive, I have to shift the van into neutral, and so on. Lesson two: Those brakes are fucking touchy. Seriously, if I depressed the brake pedal just a quarter of an inch, the van screeched to a total halt.
Anyway, I speed a bit to get to campus with enough time to park and get to the meeting just on time ... and there's no fucking empty parking spaces. I literally drove around for ten minutes just waiting for a spot to open up, by which point I was super-late.
I get to the space where we all agreed to meet, and no one is there. After wandering the hallways for a couple of minutes, another student in the class (not in the group) tells me that they're all meeting in an office I didn't even know about, so I show up there and I have to catch up on what they've been talking about, and keep in mind I didn't get enough sleep the previous night so I'm groggy enough to start with. I'm supposed to have something ready tomorrow, but I can't even remember the details of it right now. I've got the details written down in my binder, but I don't even know if I'll be able to read my own handwriting tomorrow.
Anyway, so I go up to my office, and I've got all this time to kill before classes, but I'm too groggy to work on school stuff effectively. The professor I wanted to talk to about my big project was finally up in her office, but I had to go to the bathroom (damn diet makes me pee twenty times a day), and when I got back she was gone. I go to class, but again, I'm feeling so out of it that I'm not able to contribute that well, and I hate it when that happens. Marge Piercy (a really cool feminist poet) was giving a recitation after my last class, but of course I had to get home to make sure the folks had transportation in case of an emergency.
So I get out to the van to learn lesson number three: the backlight on the instrument panel doesn't work. I had to spend five minutes fumbling about in the dark (UT's parking lots aren't lit all that well) to finally find out that there's this thing I have to plug into the cigarette lighter to front-light the display, and on top of everything else it's dark and rainy and I have a hard time seeing the road in those conditions, unless I've got my ass close to the ground like in my Camry. By some miracle I got home in one piece, though.
Of course, because I got up so early, I was starving by the time I got back here, so I had to have dinner as soon as possible. Now I've got a choice between doing DDR tonight or watching SVU, and with as shitty as I feel right now, I've got to tell you, SVU is winning out ...
posted 2004/10/17 at 16:21
Last night as I was working on my project, I felt like there was a reason I was being compelled to keep working well past daybreak into the not-so-wee small hours of the morning. I now realize that the universe was doing what it could to make sure I'd sleep through the Bengals game and wouldn't have to see them lose handily to the Browns. At this rate I might not even watch the Monday night game ...
posted at 01:08
Okay, okay, okay, let's do this.
.org.4: the four-year anniversary of seanshannon.org is coming up next month, and as I've done the past couple of years I'll be doing a Q&A where I answer your questions. First, however, the ground rules:
- Questions must be sent to anniversary AT seanshannon DOT org. Questions submitted in other venues will not be answered.
- All questions will be posted anonymously to protect peoples' identities.
- All topics are valid for discussion. Yes, including the big nasty stinking w-word.
- While I have yet to refuse to answer a question, I still reserve the right to turn down any question that I feel I can't answer for personal reasons. (Due to the events of the past couple of years, I've become worried that people may ask questions that could compromise the safety of my friends and loved ones. My gender identity and sexuality are all open to discussion, so that should tell you how serious this is.)
- Questions must be in my inbox by 2004.11.01 at 0001 Eastern Standard Time. I'll be posting the column on or near 11.04, so I need time to answer everything.
So that's it. Get those questions in. And if someone could give me an idea for the theme of this year's mailbag (like I ripped of "Urd de PoN!" from The Adventures of Mini-Goddess two years ago and the Viewer Mail from The Late Show with David Letterman last year), I'd appreciate it since I can't think of anything else.
Finally, a thanks to Don Becker for the GMail invite. Once I get invitations of my own to give out, I'll be sure to post here in case any of you reading this need one.
posted 2004/10/16 at 21:53
As much as I should be working on my project, I couldn't help but go get Street Figher Anniversary Collection while I was out tonight. You all can take your Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter and Tekken and Soul Calibur and Guilty Gear and all that garbage, give me good ol' SF2 every day. I swear, once I get my own place I'm going to get one of the Championship Edition machines (I've seen 'em online for only $300). As for now, I'll probably have to get an arcade stick from GameStop because I can't pull moves off on the PS2 controller for shit.
Oh, and I will be picking up an XBox sometime in the next few weeks. (What I won't do for my DDR habit ...) Can anyone recommend any good XBox games for me? Keep in mind, Halo isn't exactly my style, and Fable doesn't look like it'd appeal to me all that much.
posted 2004/10/13 at 01:41
Between one of my professors going off on a conference at the end of last week and fall break this week, I just had six days off in a row here. As usual, though, I've gotten to the end of my time off wishing I'd done more.
I do wonder what's been behind my recent lack of productivity. It's not that I haven't wanted to work; far from it. I could attribute it to the diet, but I haven't been that lacking for energy lately. (Although those last few days I was off the diet I was really downing the energy drinks, let me tell you.) I could blame it on the personal problems I've been having, but I tend to blame too much of my stuff on that. I could blame it on schoolwork, but really I haven't had too much of that so far. (The last couple of weeks of this semester look like they'll be exceptionally hellish, though.) Sigh, maybe I am just a lazy turd.
Or maybe I'm just good at procrastinating. Case in point: at the start of the month I was supposed to post a link so you all could ask questions to me for the upcoming four-year anniversary of the .org. But now I'm not so sure I even want to do that. I guess the problem comes from the fact that if I do anything to mark the .org's anniversary this year, I'll have to do a tribute to Chad Dupree, and the only way I really have of paying tribute to Chad would involve me doing something that I don't think I should do. So tell me: do you want me to keep up the anniversary celebrations for the .org, or should I just let them slide? (Answer in the .forum, thank you very much.)
posted 2004/10/11 at 23:47
Well, I was supposed to launch the new project today, but, well, I was kind of up for ten hours yesterday and then I slept for fourteen. I've been getting a decent amount of sleep lately, so I'm guessing this was either stress from the project, or psychosomatic stuff being caused by my personal problems. Le sigh.
Anyway, I will try to get the project done by the end of the week. As much as I talk about it, though, I'm trying not to raise everyone's expectations about it too much. I'm not terribly sure that any of you will really be that interested in it. Like I keep saying, though, this does mean a lot to me.
posted 2004/10/09 at 23:50
While I was out shopping tonight I finally found a used copy of Dance Dance Revolution Konamix for PS1 and picked it up. You'll remember I picked up the original DDR a few months ago but I've never mentioned playing it before. That's because I had a couple of real problems with it: one, it doesn't have changeable timing settings to deal with variances in how quickly pads register hits. Since my Cobalt Flux (and all hard pads) register hits late as a general rule, that means that in order to play the original DDR I'd need to play on my original Mad Catz pad, and I'm not even sure it'll work anymore.
More importantly, though, whereas the PS2 DDR games all animate at 60 FPS, all the PS1 games play at just 30 FPS. When I got home I started looking at some of the songs (just playing them in training mode to get a feel for the stepcharts), and now my eyes are blurry and I'm getting a pretty bad headache. For some reason the choppier animation just plays havoc with me. So yeah, I've got the game, but I'll probably never play it. Cute, huh?
posted 2004/10/08 at 23:05
I think I know why Rowan ran away a couple of months ago.
A couple of weeks ago we started spotting a black cat that looks a lot like Spyder (only slightly bigger and with neck fur like Rowan's) started hanging around here. At first we tried to put her off, but she stuck around and now we're trying to keep good care of her (without bringing her inside because we don't know if she's got anything wrong with her) until we can give her to a couple of Jeff's friends.
So why do I think this had something to do with Rowan leaving? Well, it wasn't that long after Spyder showed up on our doorstep that Alex had to be put to sleep. Maybe Rowan saw this other cat (my Mom's named her "Skooter") while she was out, and thought that maybe it was her time to go.
I just wish we could keep Skooter, because she is so adorable. I really should get photos of all the cats and put them up here; with Rowan getting closer to her nineteenth birthday, I really don't know how much longer she's going to be with us. :(
posted 2004/10/06 at 23:35
Check the Diet Log out for my tale of how I fixed the biggest problem with DDR Extreme US on my own equipment with a little handiwork. Hey, I'm proud of it.
And yes, it's that time of year again when my family seems to forget about everything except the Yankees' playoff run. At least I should be busy enough these next few days that I won't notice it so much. The tentative launch date for the new project is the 11th, but I may push that back later depending on how things go. And like I cautioned you all previously, this is highly political in nature and may not be of much interest to any of you. But, believe me, it will be to me.
posted 2004/10/03 at 23:13
We actually hit freezing here last night. For the beginning of October, that's almost scary. Too bad my hay fever seemed to disappear weeks ago, huh? Anyway, we're finally getting into my kind of weather here: light coat temperatures, gloomy skies, the occasional drizzle. You know, weather that matches my personality. It's just too bad we barely got a trace of rain last month, because I don't think the leaves this autumn are going to be all that picturesque.
And gee, talk about a bad sports day: I get out of the shower to see the Tigers lose the last game of the season, then flip over to watch Carson Palmer throw a game-ending interception. Well, at least the Red Wing ... crap. Well, at least Hockeytown will stay true to their team because the Pistons aren't doing ... aw fuck it.
posted 2004/10/02 at 16:46
Uh ... hi. *brushing dust off* This thing still working?
Sorry about the lack of updating recently, but with this project I'm working on (which will hopefully be done by next weekend) and all the personal shit I've had going on, there hasn't been much to say, or at least much I could say without getting either the cops or the doctors at my door.
Just so everyone knows, the diet is off for right now, for the simple reason that I've been subsisting mainly on Red Bull these past few days, and that looks to continue for the foreseeable future. I have to get this project done, I just have to, even if I don't think it'll wind up being that important for many of you. It'll be important for me, okay?
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