Monthly Archives: October 2003

BT Is Coming To Town

My wish has come true, and Billy Talent is play­ing here next month. I already bought four tick­ets, and Jono is buy­ing his own set. All I need now is some ear plugs. Since I’m the only one out of my group who does­n’t mosh, I’m hop­ing that Jono or one his friends does­n’t either so that I’ll have some­one to stand with at least. It’s always eas­i­er to find every­one after­wards as long as no one is alone.

The One Who Can Turn You Off Food

Pat is a very easy going guy. It’s rare for him to be angry or annoyed with some­one, as aggra­vat­ing as they can be. He has his four basic rules of get­ting along with peo­ple, which are a part of his per­son­al­i­ty. To me, they per­fect­ly explain how I can’t walk ten min­utes with him on cam­pus with­out some­one walk­ing by and greet­ing him. He’s one of the most pop­u­lar, friend­ly, out­go­ing peo­ple I know.

So I was sur­prised to hear him tell me about some­one he met whom he could­n’t stand. After all, this is Patty, the guy who loves and is loved by every­one. I did­n’t believe him until he explained how this per­son stood for every­thing he was against. Pat holds respect for oth­ers as one of the most impor­tant things in life, and this per­son had none.

It was odd to think that Pat has a nat­ur­al “ene­my”, some­one who con­tra­dicts him in almost every way, until I real­ized that I have one as well. I’ve met a per­son who is every­thing I try not to be. He’s obnox­ious, untrust­wor­thy, crude, over­bear­ing, pussy-whipped, jeal­ous, and closed-mind­ed. He has a decent set of man­ners, is gen­er­al­ly friend­ly to most peo­ple, and does have a rea­son­able intel­li­gence as far as I can tell, but none of this can real­ly make up for what he’s like.

I can feel myself being slight­ly, uncon­trol­lably biased against him, which I can’t stand in myself. One of Pat’s rules is that every­one should be giv­en a fair chance, and even though I feel like I’ve giv­en more than enough time for this per­son to change my opin­ion, I’m nev­er sure if it’s enough. I hate being biased.

I gen­er­al­ly can’t stand most peo­ple, but that’s my fault because of my intol­er­ance. This per­son, how­ev­er, is one of the only peo­ple I don’t blame myself for. Perhaps I dis­like him so much because he reminds me a lot of what I used to be. Of course, Aaron thinks that this is a good thing, a reminder of how far I’ve been able to come as a per­son.

Sometimes that’s just hard to see.

Metallic Sobriety

After a more than one year hia­tus, and gen­er­ous rib­bing by Jonathan, I’ve made a new 1280x1024 desk­top back­ground in jpg for­mat. I want­ed some­thing very clean and sim­ple, and spent almost four hours toy­ing around in Photoshop yes­ter­day, start­ing from scratch. I was lucky enough to man­age the rib­bon effect, which hap­pened com­plete­ly by chance with the right oscil­la­tion, the right can­vas size, and the right gra­di­ent effect. I used my orig­i­nal gen­er­a­tion, because I haven’t been able to pro­duce quite the same results, and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to again.

My ado­ra­tion of the Dali font is pret­ty obvi­ous in most of the graph­ic design I do, and in this case I use it to bal­ance out the dual cir­cle graph­ic on the screen. Both pic­tures in the dual cir­cle graph­ic were old stock pho­tos I had tak­en a few years ago. I had for­got­ten about the start menu when try­ing to cen­tre the entire area, so every­thing is shift­ed up about 15 pix­els.

I’ll prob­a­bly make ver­sions for oth­er res­o­lu­tions. A prob­lem I often have with back­ground design is that I’m usu­al­ly too much of a web design­er, and end up with very com­plex, clut­tered back­grounds that some­times look like page lay­outs. I enjoy the fil­ter effect, and how every­thing is almost white washed. The entire piece is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the most neu­tral of my emo­tions late­ly, a kind of supine view of the world that makes every­thing lev­el out. I think this one is my best back­grounds to date, and I’m rather proud of it.

Laptop Excitement

There’s been a lap­top craze going around late­ly, with Tom’s pur­chase of a used Powerbook, Nick’s job financed Travelmate 800, and Wheaties’s gift financed iBook. All the recent lap­top pur­chas­es has made every­one else zeal­ous. Both Aaron and Trolley are think­ing about the pur­chase of one now, and I’ve already been sucked in.

Next week I’ll be order­ing a Sager 5680 note­book, which I’ll be replac­ing my cur­rent desk­top with. It has great specs, the only down­falls being a short bat­tery life (which I can live with) and a rather large size/weight (which I’m will­ing to deal with). I’ll be get­ting the P4 3.0 GHz HT proces­sor (woooo!), the 15″ UXGA TFT screen, the wire­less LAN, and 60GB hard dri­ve options. The best thing is that it comes with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro (Pro!) which has­n’t quite start­ed it’s prod­uct cycle in North America yet. I’ll be look­ing for­ward to dual head dis­play, being able to attend LANs with­out need­ing a ride, and pos­si­ble dig­i­tal speak­er out­put (which I have yet to take advan­tage of).