I really like going to the store in the morning when it is pretty empty. I really hate the walk home where every few steps I realize I forgot to buy something that I needed. At least I have enough stuff to eat for the week anyway.

I often don't mind my Mac. It's small and cute, and it runs pretty well considering that it is nearly 7 years old. But sometimes when I really want to write and work on it, I wish it was a bit faster. Although I do have it doing several things at once (compressing and burning a DVD, some BOINC stuff, streaming music, IM) I just wish it were a hair faster. So I'm wondering if it is worth it to take it in for upgrading or not. This is of course on my mind since I can't type as fast as I would like on Pages. So I'm posting this instead, because for some reason Adium (the IM application I use) is the bomb. It accesses LJ Talk as well as Google Talk and allows for outside of facebook-facebook messaging, which cuts down on the annoyance factor when I want to IM on that service. Perhaps I'll just take a break and wait for the DVD to burn; that should increase my system speed. Although there is something to be said for slowness - especially in writing - mostly because it makes me think a bit differently and play with the words a bit more. Oh well, after I finish this project I will assess the future of my little Powerbook - which I affectionately call grandpa since he goes to sleep in the middle of conversations, is slow to start and shut down, and has pretty much lost all his teeth (it's a metaphor, especially true when it takes over 7 hours to compress a dv file to divyx). Thank you for reading my procrastination/frustration post.

I have wasted the past 2 days on Monster Hunter Freedom Unite for PSP and it is so awesome. One of those games that gives you faith in video games again. The load times are the worst part but!! if you give 580MB of your memory stick to it as a blood sacrifice it will load like a normal game. That's a lot of MB but who cares when you have 2 8GB mem sticks.

No plans for 4th here. Kel will go horse riding and I will sit here and type. This is practice. I hope that perhaps by Monday I will have even more of the finished thing done further. This is slow cooking.

Just got back from about 3 1/2 weeks in Japan but never could find the giant Gundam everyone was talking about. No worries as I had a blast anyway. My other blog details the trip.

Getting tired/bored wtih having a mobile phone. I'm thinking about dispensing with it entirely. Also, the library is the most awesome place ever, but you knew that already.

Wow some log in troubles today, probably sparked by everyone trying to hear my great phone post yesterday. Check out this great post from today about an awesome place that I must visit in Jacksonville, FL

www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/05/27/the-chamblin-bookmine-a-bibliophiles-fevre-dream/


Most excellent, who would like to go with me?


Today: Finishing a lecture (I hope), going to the library - went to B&N already and bought another book weight (these things are life savers if you do a lot of research-based writing and have post its in a number of books for passages you want to use) - mine is missing and I have no idea where it could have gone. Welcome to the new book weight!

Tomorrow should be the last day in the office for me I hope. It depends on whether I can get everything done or not. I think tinkering at home is more productive, although all my books are here for the hard quotes and research. Maybe I should spend the next two hours farming quotes and put the "connective tissue" in when I get home.

Japan is again on the immediate horizon, and I hope to have at least as good a time going as I did last August.

Yes it is the first day of good weather we've had since oh, the end of summer or start of fall last October. So everyone was out today including me - I went to our downtown campus to see a presentation on Jack Kerouac, which was pretty good. There were about three or four of us there who do more than just passing research or fan-based interest on the guy so that led to a pretty good discussion of some of the more recent points of controversy in Kerouac studies.

After which I sold a big bag of books I don't use anymore and got twenty bucks. Unheard of! I feel very lucky but I also feel sort of bad that I treat the used bookstore these days like an ATM. I have decided I have too many books and don't reference half (or more than)half of them so I am thinning the collection.

While wandering Manhattan I noticed that everyone on every street corner was speaking German. I thought this was odd, but no more odd than any other day in Manhattan.  It took me longer than I thought it would to get back to queens. I have no idea why this seems to always be the case.

Now with the windows open and a nice breeze coming through I think I will spend the rest of the day studying. I do need to write my lecture for a talk at a nearby college on Monday and also prepare for the end of the term which I think is this week.

Forgot to bring my corrected drafts to work so I'm scanning stuff and updating gradebook materials, organizing digital video and the like. Thinking about going to the honor's lunch in a little bit just to hang out and chat with students on the team.

The sun is finally out for the first time in about a week and the temperature is above 50 so here's to the possibility of the arrival of spring.

All I have been doing is writing and such. I have the following things coming up:
1. Lecture at Queens College on debate and rhetoric
2. Finals, Grading and reporting
3. More dissertation corrections and edits
4. Writing of lectures for trip to Japan
5. General cleaning out of all the crap I have in my house that I don't want anymore.

A lot of number 5 might interest you for it includes a huge array of D&D sourcebooks, campaign settings, miniatures and Dragon magazines.

I am also considering trashing my old desk I've had since I was 8 and replacing it with a simple large flat piece of wood supported by two smaller bookshelves.

I'm getting more into functionality as I am getting older apparently.

Oh yea I found a ton of Bob Ross shows to download. I used to watch this show every day after school but I've never painted anything.

Anyway, now that it's back in my life, I need to figure out a way to incorporate his teaching methods into mine.

This is what I will work on later. For now I have to get back to doing more pressing matters.

However in the background I am playing the .avi files.

Hey folks -

Since Vermont my life has been non-stop action. But now I have a few minutes here on the last day of my "holiday" (cue laughter) to give you some insight into life.

Been hosting international debate coaches for the past week, that has been fun. Also downloads have been great. About to burn the new 3 part Red Dwarf special which was just on along with a Dr Who easter special. All of this is very exciting.

Went to CT yesterday for the day and enjoyed it, the weather was nice but strangely cold. Ate a lot of good food there.

I'm thinking of starting my own online association for all the local (meaning city) debaters that we have around here.

And Vagabond is an awesome, awesome manga. Perhaps better than Blade of the Immortal in some aspects.

Up way too early considering how late I went to bed.  And now my videocamera wont work and I have a meeting in 20 minutes.

Also my horrible allergy attack is turning into a cold - great timing, great timing. So time to swing by a pharmacy for some drugs to keep me sane and alive.

Ahh tournaments too bad this is the last one this year!! I cant wait for a sustained break.

Here I am in Burlington VT enjoying the perfect weather and waiting for the debate tournament to start. Soon my students will arrive and then we will seek foods, most likely downtown.

I really dig Burlington and feel great anytime that I am here. Except this time, I`m having some allergy problems that stem from my cats deciding to shed a huge amount of hair. So I`m dealing with the remnants of that but it seems to be clearing up.

Tonight some meetings but mostly fun. I'm excited to get everyone here and get things rolling at this tournament. I set up a hash for twitter and I hope people use it!

Right now talking on gchat about internet debating ideas, but really wanting to go for a snack.

Well the time for departure is nearly here - I leave on Thursday afternoon so I have today, and tomorrow I have an advisory meeting with my group of freshman I look out for, and then off to shop. I need a lot of supplies for the upcoming tournament and hope to get them tomorrow. I also really need a haircut.

Today I am just grading and biding time - I have to go to the bank and while I'm down there I might as well eat.  It's a short walk from my office to the bank, but if I'm going to do it I might as well take advantage of it.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was how I spent all day yesterday assembling a portfolio of documents and filling out a form that we call the Annual Faculty Report.

It is for you to account for what you did all year, and how you spent your "academic time."  

Well one of the things I did was spend 8 hours trying to get the documents formatted the way they wanted them. I mean, it shouldn't really come as a shock how ironic institutional accounting for "time" is, but I was still baffled by it.

I turned it in for a look, and I hope there are not many corrections that need to be made. I'd rather be doing other things, like posting to my blog(s), drinking coffee, and looking at the beautiful day we have here in Queens.

In other news: Kelly has been looking into getting an art table at AnimeNext this summer, and it's very exciting!  Unfortunately it looks like I'll be in Japan during those dates. Oh well, so much for interacting with traces of Japanese pop culture with awkward suburban teenagers. Looks like I'll just have to interact with Japanese culture directly. This sucks.

Speaking of which, I am writing a lot of notes about my potential lecture topics for the trip. The organizers have told me to prepare 5 half hour talks. So I'm working on one tentatively titled "What being a debate coach means in the 21st century" or something like that. I'm also doing one about debate training in the US and how that works, as well as something about disembodied debating - or how to debate on the internet.

So one more, any suggestions? 

Thought I might jump on here and make a quick post before running to work.

Looks like a busy week. Today I'm trying to finish up the first part of my dissertation corrections and getting that off and in the mail. It seems like the first half corrections are the most intense, and the second half won't be nearly as bad. Of course I'm going to regret saying this later.

I would stay home and work today since it's windy and it looks like there might be more rain in the forecast for us, but I have a visiting debater from overseas and I want to make sure she gets to see all the classes she wants to visit and meets a good number of people. Also we have a club meeting tonight, so I should get ready for that.

The most interesting part of my Tuesday is my seminar, which started as an independent study then grew as people heard about it. There are 4 total students so it's not that easy to teach. It's much easier when you have 20. Otherwise on Tuesday I teach public speaking and that's pretty easy - basically runs itself.

Thursday we leave for the national tournament in Burlington VT and I'm very excited about it. I'm not excited about how terrible my allergies are making me feel these days though. I hope it doesn't interrupt the fun I have planned for this weekend.

I am going to try to vlog some of the tournament experience on my other blog if you care to check it out.

Right now I'm finishing off a pot of coffee and putting the latest State of Trance on my PSP for the journey to work.

Before the trip I need to do the following things: Dry cleaning, laundry, new headphones, and pick up a charger and new batteries for my video camera. My video camera is pretty sweet (it's 1080p and runs on SD cards) but the batteries are not very long lived. So If I pick up 2 extra I should have enough for a whole day of shooting. One battery generally lasts an hour, give or take, which isn't great.

now time to find my umbrella and hit the road.

So I've been sort of annoyed about all the memes and their takeover of my facebook feed. I got a letter yesterday from the government of New York (it did not say they were suckers suprisingly!) warning me about the takeover of the asian longhorned beetle. I think that there should be a warning like that mailed out for facebook memes.

Anyway I was searching for my top games, thought I would fill that one out and no game changed my life more than Starflight. That game was the most amazing way to spend Saturday night when I was in high school and not at a tournament. It was so incredible how open ended the game was and how you could pretty much do anything you wanted to do. The number of planets seemed limitless and the things to do were endless. All on a 286 processor. No game, in my opinion, has come close, not even spore.

So i figured I would google it - turns out that a huge fan base exists for Starflight, including people who have written mods to slow your processor speed and cripple your graphics card so that you can play it on a modern computer. Unreal. After I give it a go I will post the results. It won't be until after this weekend probably, but I am excited! I'm sure though that the end result will be "Why did I find this entertaining?"

And yes, the program ran in DOS. I kid you not.

For a while, just because it was a laptop, I've been carrying my university issued laptop back and forth with me to school. Then I realized "hey, I'm a dumbass! I have like 4 computers at home! Why do I do this?" So I have started using my flash drive to get all the files I need and bring them home to work on.

Well this morning I've been trying to do that - I got out my old mac laptop, fired it up, did some cleaning and fixing of the HDD and getting the file tree in order, and now it hums quite nice. I didn't need much of what was on it, and a lot of the old programs were just slowing it down. So I find a version of open office that works with this PPC chip and fire it up. Not perfect, but tolerable. Much faster and more responsive than Word - I can actually run other programs while writing.

So I did about 10 minutes of that and then started reading newsgroups and blogs. I am worried that the Pirate Bay might get shut down, so now I'm downloading a few rare torrents that I figure i won't have access to after that happens - there are a suprisingly large amount of academic-interest ebooks available on the torrents.

So my plan to be productive and not carry heavy computers around became just half of that plan.

So my productive Saturday is somewhat shot already - Kelly is out riding now at a stable and enjoying herself - she comes back at 2 then we are going to help a friend move. So I better ramp up my productivity.

In other news, yesterday was a good day in the office because as I was walking by the dumpster near my office, I saw a file cabinet with an awesome poster of Napoleon on the side of it. I took it off and quickly put it in my office. So now I have a sweet free Napoleon poster.

This mac isn't so bad after all. I think I just stopped using it because I got the new fast hot PC laptop from school. But anything beats carrying around a dumb computer. That's why I have the microtop. That one is easy to carry; most of my books weigh more than that thing does. And Ubuntu works better than OSX or Windows, and it's legally free.

Well time to try to do something productive instead of writing LJ posts. . .

I don't know why but today my scanner decided to be a real ass. On the day when I planned to do all my scanning too. Now I'm just getting into the middle of it and it's nearly time to go home.

I did get everything on my list done except for two things, which I am pretty sure I can do at home.  I moved a lot of documents I rely on everyday to Google documents so that I could access them at home and have in-line changes without worrying about word processor compatibility (We are a microsoft campus, and at home I prefer to use Open Office or Pages on my Mac). Plus I like being more and more browser-dependent in my work. I don't like having a lot of programs on the hard drive, but a lot of information.  Now I can just open Docs from whatever computer I am at and begin writing.  And no worries about crashes either (although I have a lot of backups all over the place just in case of that).

As usual Friday is dead up here, which is pretty nice. I don't mind not having to listen to dumb comments by the dumb people who seem to lurk up here constantly doing nothing. I watched two people the other day puzzle over how to remove the black lines from the borders of their copies when copying a book - their solution was to use strips of white paper laid on the glass. It's called zoom people and it's a button right next to the big green one used for copying. Pathetic. It took them hours to make a copy of one chapter.

Well it is now time for me to go as I must get food for kelly, take it to her at work and then head home to do some work of my own at the house. I feel like I accomplished more today but I'm still a pretty far way from being as productive as I'd like to when I'm on campus. Tomorrow I might go help a friend move - which is a real measure of friendship!

I am prepared for lunch today. I didn't think I would be hungry for lunch after eating nearly 15 white castle cheesburgers at about 12:30 this morning.

Now I am ready: I will eat a whopper with cheese and a chicken sandwich.

It will be glory in fast food form.

All shall be amazed.

I tossed my grand plan to spend no money at work this month onto the great ashheap of history today as I bought Taco Bell for lunch. I knew it wouldn't last. BUT TWO DAYS? Honestly what sort of weakling am I?

Now about to go teach. I'm very sad that I spent money at work. I thought it was going to be so much easier!

Inother news, perhaps drinking tonight. It is St. Patrick's day after all.

Also: Every time I come into work I get less done than the day before. I do accomplish more for other people (students, misc. paperwork, prep for teaching, etc). But as far as my own stuff - nothing much happens.


Ok it's go time - gotta get the game face on.

Today was awesome and its' only 4PM!

Here's what happened:

Went into manhattan to catch up with an old friend of mine/former student - had breakfast with her and kelly then went to the Strand. I did not buy any books. Hmm. This is really significant allow me to bold it.

I did not buy any books.

Then we went to Forbidden Planet and saw the tons of super cool things like Doctor Who action figures, graphic novels, etc. and I did not buy anything there either. I did look around for that series that knastymike told me about - about Musashi's life, but they didn't seem to have it.

So we move on and in Times Square there is a branch of the NYC police there, and it's lit up like part of the Square and all that. The tourists behind us saw it and one of them said, "Wow, New York City Police - what's that?" and they all went over toward it.  Kelly and I were resisting the temptation to say something, and near the end of the walk we came up with the best response: "Oh, that's one of the best diners . . . OF JUSTICE!"  Too bad we really didn't say that.

So we went to Toys R Us and downloaded the new rare Pokemon for DS - a sad day as it's most likely the last event for Diamond and Pearl, since platinum comes out next week.  Kelly battled a 5th grader and got her ass haneded to her, but recieved a lot of compliments about her shiny and rare Pokemon. I am totally noob at Pokemon so nobody battles me.

And yes at Toys R Us I bought nothing as well! So I was wondering what I was going to use my money on, as it's impossible to leave Manhattan without buying something.

So we walk past the Virgin Megastore - and realize it's going out of business. Yes the big one at 42nd Street. Done. They are closing this month.  So we go in and start combing through the DS and PSP games, all 40% off.  Then Kelly comes up to me - "SO wanna buy Lich King?"

They had a huge stack of them, all 40% off. So we both bought a copy of the upgrade and it was only fifty dollars total.  DEAL OF THE CENTURY.

However I am sad that the Virgin store will be no more, I loved that place. I never bought any CDs there, and neither did anyone I know - but we all hung out there and looked around! I wonder why it's closing . . .

And the day continues! After Kelly returns from the pet store we are off for dinner and drinks.
 

So last night I went drinking with a friend of mine, his girlfriend a couple of his friends, and one of her's. This girl told the most amazing story that I must share with you. She gets paid for making sure to wake someone up every day at a certain time.

She gets about 30 bucks a week to walk a block, go to this person's apartment and wake them up. It's a 3 minute walk. The time is 8AM.

So:

1) Too much or too little to be paid to do this?
2) Too much or too little to pay for this service?