some kind of vu

Last night I had a dream. For most people this is insignifigant. For me this is extraordinary. I have dreams (that I remember) maybe two or three times a year. The last time I had a dream I won 153 million dollars (after taxes, of course) in the lottery. I then bought all of my friends badass cars and built a mansion in New Mexico (cause it's cheaper) and built my own IMAX theater. That was a good dream. I bought lottery tickets for the next three weeks after that dream.

A few months before that was the first time I had a dream in over a year. It was especially astounding because I dreamt three times over the course of three days. Unfortunately I died in all of them. In more gruesome ways as the days went on. It slowly drove me insane. I didn't even want to go to sleep on the fourth night.

But last nights dream was especially odd. In the dream for some reason I was riding a bike around my old neighborhood. I was riding up a hill, and I started to get heavier. I tried to push forward but I couldn't. I thought to myself "damn I am out of shape if I can't make it up the hill". But the problem wasn't me, it was the Earth.

I moved off the bike and fell to the ground. Gravity had increased. I tried walking, with the bike but it was too much. Eventually someone came by in a truck and offered me a ride. It took three people get out and put the bike in the truck.

Eventually I wound somewhere, and inside gravity was normal. The problem only occurred when outside of buildings, and no one could figure it out. It was like a scene from a bad disaster movie when everyone is sitting around trying to figure out what happened.

So moral of the story, when you wake up and weigh 750 pounds and can't walk anywhere, remember, I warned you.

I told you not to wait up

Allright, let's start this off with what I did this weekend to get warmed up.

Friday night, after failed attempts to get someone to go see Children of Men (more on that later) with me, I fell asleep. I woke up around 11:00 when my phone started vibrating. My friend's Holly and Becca were watching an apartment on the west side and having some tasty beverages and wanted me to come down. I was inclined to agree. I went down there and had a good time, but it started to snow again and I had to leave early because my Prelude, though I love it, is not agreeable with terrible weather. I went home and slept until noon.

Saturday was good because I only had two things to do. Get a haircut and clean up for the party. I would have liked to play some basketball but the weather kinda fucked that up. After a visit to Sam & Son's, the most quality of barbershops I've ever been too, I came back home and cleaned.

The party was our friend Cera's birthday. She's a cool girl and needed a place and we told her she could use ours. We have parties at our place pretty often, but this one kind of had us a little wigged at first. Between last weekends drama and the fact we actually hadn't gotten a lot of concrete details before the party we weren't too sure what to expect. But it actually turned out to be pretty awesome. There was a good turnout of people, nobody was a jerk or belligerent, everyone made sure everyone else was taken care of. It was pretty nice, no drama at all, good times to be had. And I didn't have to pay for everything and everyone cleaned the house up afterwards so I really didn't have to do anything. It was pretty awesome actually.

Sunday I slept in, said goodbye to everyone who crashed, took a shower and headed to my parents for football and laundry. (I left out watching Romo fuck the Cowboys over on Saturday. Comedy at it's finest). It was a good time and I convinced my parents to go with to see Children of Men since all of my friends proved too lame for cinematic awesomeness.

Children of Men is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, and I've seen some pretty good ones lately. The director chose to use long shots for most of the movie (not cutting), but on a few occasions in the movie he did unbelievably complex and lengthy ones. There's one shot that I didn't even realize was happening because I was so involved in what was happening on screen. While driving down this country road, the camera is placed directly in the center of a tiny car with 5 passengers. Without cutting a single time for what must have been 5 minutes, they show an angry mob attacking this tiny vehicle, moltov cocktails, gunshots, being chased by a motorcycle, windshields breaking, people inside and outside the vehicle getting shot and injured, and the camera never cut once, only rotating on it's axis to show what was happening. It was amazing. There was a few other shots like that in the movie but that was by far my favorite, I have no idea how they did that at all. If you get an opportunity go see this at a movie theater, the big screen really helped pull me into what was happening.

Monday after work I watched the BCS championship. I figured since both teams hadn't played for about 6 weeks that the whole game was going to be close and about who made the fewest mistakes. I was wrong. Florida absolutely beat the hell out of Ohio State. It must have been maddening for everyone in Ohio. It was a mauling. And look at that, the end of the season and Boise State is the only undefeated team. If this doesn't prove there should be a playoff I don't know what will, but the BCS is a waste.

I've been thinking a lot lately about online identity. How everyone knows who everyone is, how many sign ons and emails and just how terrible things are organized. I think that's one of the reasons I like Google and Blogger, I get access to so much via a single sign on, it's always me. How much easier would it be to provide a single credential everywhere than to create new credentials everywhere. We have a drivers license, and you can show it to everyone and they believe it because they trust the issuer. We don't have anything like that online and I think we do. Someone, like the W3C needs to come up with a standard, and a way of handing this standard out so that all sites, big and small alike are capable of using it. People talk about privacy issues with this but I don't really see any to be honest. Reading information could be kept completely anonymous, but every time a user wants to sign up to participate, to play a game or to write a blog, to buy something, their identity can be verified. Maybe I need to think this thru more, but it's been going thru my head the past week.

Apple announced the iPhone today and I am jealous. The device looks amazing. I was going to pick a blackberry up in the spring but now it already looks antiquated and it hasn't even been released yet. Everything about the iPhone is everything devices should strive for. There is just an amazing level of convergence and I have no doubt on my mind that Apple has changed the game, again.

sushi is raw fish.

Yesterday I went to dinner with some friends I don't get to hang out with very often. Britney, in town from Texas, proposed meeting for Sushi. Sushi is delicious. But, I live in the middle of the desert. We completely lack large bodies of water, which means we don't really have a lot of fish. This immediately makes me apprehensive for any sort seafood, let alone uncooked seafood. That said, I totally learned my lesson because Sushi Gen on San Mateo is fuckin quality.

We had the all you can eat thing, which sounds pretty good at first but is also a bit of a gamble. You see, in order to keep people from ordering a ridiculous amount of very expensive food, they have a "no waste" rule. That is, any uneaten food is priced regularly on your tab. Ranging from 3-8 bucks depending on what that is that can be a little daunting. Also, the fact that I didn't realize that many of what we ordered came in 5-8 pieces and we had a metric fuckton (not to be confused with an imperial fuckton) of food.

It also gave me a prime-time position to show how I earned the nickname sloth, I am the slowest eater ever, especially in that quantity.

This is three updates over three days. I haven't written in any blog more than three times in a year. There's a reason for this. This last year I took Media Arts 210, otherwise known as Intro to Film. I love movies, I can never get enough, I watch good movies and bad movies and experimental movies. Foreign movies, animated movies, you name the kind of movie, their just awesome. And over the last few years I've begun to understand them from the technical side. I know what a panning shot is and a tracking shot and I notice things like cinematography and editing and all that noise. That's not really impressive, lots of people do, but for a certain point I actually thought about some kind of major in media arts just to work on films. That's why I enrolled in the class. I learned two things, one is that while I notice all of that kind of stuff, I really don't have an eye for anything. I'm just not an artistic guy despite my best efforts. I'm ok with that. But the other thing I noticed in the class, is that my writing skills were holding me back from the A I thought I deserved, (I got a B in the end).

Now, in skool they teach you about sentences needing to make sense and what should be in a structured essay and all that shit. But, there really isn't a lot to help (at least for me) express what I really mean. I can't really explain it, I ran into the problem at least five times just writing this damn blog entry. That's why I'm writing. So I can figure out how to more clearly state what I mean as opposed to that stream of consciousness running in that space behind my face. Also, I once heard that if you do anything everyday for three weeks it will just become habit at that point. And for the most part that's held up for me. Don't take that as a promise (especially on weekends) but I'm going to try to write pretty regularly.

Today when I got into work I started talking to my friend Mark online about websites (well, our websites, cause we're nerds like that). I told him about my decision to just use blogger instead of the normal CMS route. I spent the last week and a half setting up TextPattern before I realized, "hey, I don't want to do this shit anymore".

I had an epiphany. CMS's, and for that matter paid hosting in general, are a waste of time and money. Blogger does everything TextPattern does, and it's free and it links to my Google account which I use all the time for everything. It's convenient as hell, has an easy to use interface, and it's both free in the ad sense and in the monetary sense. Why wouldn't I want to use it to rant? That goes for hosting too. Anyone who isn't running some sort of business site is essentially wasting their money. You can get free hosting for web pages (Google pages, ad free, tripod, yahoo, etc), you can get free file hosting (DivShare being the coolest one I found recently) you can share your music (mp3.com, myspace), photos (picasa and flickr), you can share your videos,(youtube, myspace), pretty much anything you want to do, someone out there has a process enabled to let you do it for free. It's amazing. I just paid 90 dollars for a years worth of hosting for my falsefiction.com website. It was a waste. What am I going to do with it? I'm making a glorified splash page to point to my blogspot and to my claim id and host my resume.

I'm going to find someone to go see Children of Men with me tonight. That movie looks amazing. So expect something about how it met my expectations and I am satisfied or about how it went down in a terrible blaze of mediocrity. Sometimes I can't figure out if I'm an optimist or a pessimist. Realist? Sure.

Book learnin

After careful examination of ancient literature, I have concluded that Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, as alluded to in the Odyssey, is the earliest demonstration in Western culture of 'bros before hoes.'

Ok, ignoring that unbelievably awesome statement I just found in my Google Notebook, I don't really have a lot to talk about today.

I went to the optometrist earlier today, and for the most part my vision is the same, but something always gets me. There are very few things on this planet that can make me feel more mentally handicapped than going into a building and purposefully letting someone make me sensitive to light. For the love of all that is right how the fuck do they come up with shit like that?

I'm currently straddling the line between an engineering major and a business major. I can't decide how that makes me feel. Being an engineer always seemed like what I wanted to do, what I should do. But I just don't care anymore, I just want it done. Why do these institutions, these places I pay for book learnin at go out of there way to make it terrible to go there? Shouldn't they want me there? Shouldn't they want more engineers to come out of them? I don't get it, I just want my piece of paper so I can go home and sleep.

I had a conversation the other day about how Tool has ruined music. Not because they're terrible, because they are SOOOOOO GOOD. There's a few things the capital letter and italics are reserved for, things like Zelda, Halo, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica. Tool is in that group. It's amazing. I listen to something else and it becomes forgettable almost instantly. It doesn't have those progressive riffs or the amazing vocals or the deeper meanings. In a way it's good, I like to know that I've found music that I connect with, but everything else is just amateur in comparison.

Also, putting images up into blogger with Picasa/hello has proven strangely difficult. This is not something I am used to seeing from Google co.

I'm not a hater

...but there are some things I really fucking hate. Case in point, for now at least, UNM's retarded bureaucracy, and drama.

The drama part pretty much explains itself, and pretty much covers new years eve. It was lame. And one Joe ended the night in pieces and another Joe got even creepier than he was before. It wasn't how I envisioned kicking off 2007.

But UNM, what a clusterfuck. First, they take the grade's and registration offline for the last two weeks so I couldn't find my grades out. Now that I finally know how I did (3.0, nothin but B's) I can't register for classes because the school of engineering has placed a hold on my account until I go in for mandatory advisement so I can tell them "I pay tuition I do what I fuckin want". But get this, they won't do "walk-in" advisement for the rest of this week so I have to wait till Monday. So I ask the receptionist how I set up an appointment to get this over with. She informs me that they don't ever schedule appointments.

I made her go over it a second time just to make sure I had it right.

Seriously, what are they using my tuition for? Just remove the damned hold so I can register.