Work: The Next Generation

I hurt in ways that are not unusual by themeselves, but the combination of aches, near muscle pulls, bruises and other abrasions have me seeking an odd combination of comfort food bedfellows: beer and tapioca pudding. I'm sure it'll be just like bubble tea. Honest.

Hooray Beer! Hooray Weekend!

Employment

Today was my third day of training at a national shipping company so that I may become a package handler. My legs look like I owe someone money. Not enough debt to break bones, just enough to slap a rubber hose across them repeatedly. My right forearm looks roughly the same. In short, ow.

The job kind of sucks. The pay definately sucks. The hours don't suck, but only because I don't have any sort of social life, and as I'm not getting paid enough to have one, this works out rather well. The bright side of this: I get to work in a field (manual labor) that I've not yet worked, and I get to drop my gym membership and not baloon up like a Sally Struthers.

eMusic!

I have an intense dislike for DRM. It's a pointlessly restrictive method of copy protection that's as functional as a 20 year old Yugo. It's also why I'll never purchase any music from iTunes. To me, limiting myself to a single type of portable music player (or doing so on this side of the DMCA, anyway), and to a small amount of transfers is more cumbersome than buying a CD and then ripping the tracks.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to only buying physical copies of music, so I was pleasantly surprised by a post on BoingBoing about eMusic, a site that has legal downloads (and not quasi-legal Russian based servers) with no DRM, no restricions on transfers between storage devices, and a high bitrate.

Their selection, for me, is really quite good. Last night I downloaded the Old 97's album Wreck Your Life and a couple of songs from The Weakerthans. Today I used up the rest of my free trial (25 songs) on a few songs from Spain, Vox Vermillion, Petra Haden (from that dog. and The Rentals), Eletric Frankenstein, Future Bible Heroes (an alternate outlet for Stephin Merritt), and The Decemberists.

In the light of day, I'll probably activate the billed portion of my subscription. $10/month for 40 downloads means about $3 a cd, and still room in the budget to, you know, eat. I'm in favor of eating, especially to good, new music.

A man who should wear tweed

From the Village Voice, via Boing Boing

He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts.

This is not the context you're looking for

Pulled from Open Thread 68 at Making Light we have quite the painful imagery:

fanwanking the lemons of bad writing and worse acting into an only slightly palatable lemonade

Edited to add another bit of geeky behaviour:

"I've got to go polish Boba Fett."
This is not what it sounds like either.

Oh, my poor procopius!

Last night I felt adventurous, so I planned out my activities for today: wake up, shower, ride a bike to COD to return Death Comes for the Archbishop and A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, neither of which I read, ride back into Wheaton, get on a train, end up in the city, wander around, take a few pictures, maybe tie up a loose end from my last apartment, go back to Wheaton, get back on the bike and come home.

I actually managed to do most of these things. I also checked out two more books from COD, one on Pompeii that I doubt I'll finish and a copy of Procopius' Secret History which I enjoyed what little I read of it on the train ride back in. I didn't get the loose end tied up, and while I realize that I probably ought to actually call the old landlord instead of my old roommate to do this, she's a lot more fun to talk to than he is.

My camera's battery crapped out on me before I was really done taking pictures. So, in retaliation, I walked into the library and read Nick Sagan's Idlewild. I'd already read Edenborn and Everfree, so there really wasn't anything in the story itself that was surprising. The placement of story events and the singular perspective in which it was told did surprise me. Not to give away any spoilers, but I was definately used to the multiple perspectives that Sagan used in both the other novels in the series, so to have only Hal's narration was a bit of a shock. I had been looking foward to having some new voices. It was a good read though, and when I get some more disposable income again, I'll have to pick up a copy of it and do a decent review of the entire story.

Sunday Photo Blogging

Yesterday I spent some time wandering around a small portion of Blackwell Forest Preserve. Being a responsible blogger, I took pictures and put them up on flickr. They're here: Blackwell 7/29/06

Gofl Joke Analysis

Courtesy of Lore Sjöberg's Table of Malcontents: What's so funny? Not golf.

The best analysis is this one. A breif excerpt:

C. Daddy just realized the awful futility of his suburban life and loveless marriage, plans on buying a hotrod, smoking pot, and perving on teenage girls.

2 pounds

Watch me turn the blue of Athens' Olympic tennis court as I eat 2 delicous, delicous pounds of blueberries that I bought at Trader Joe's yesterday. Mmm, blueberry pancakes. Mmm blueberry oatmeal. Mmm blueberries.

Yarr, shoot 'em across the earpiece

Michael Russel, a QA Manager for Ritual Entertainment, has a different take on the effect of warez.

From the post:

For the last five weeks, support requests for the pirated version of the game outnumbered support requests from legitimate purchasers. Last week, the pirates outnumbered the true customers by almost five to one.

There's a longer form post about the Entitlement Generation, of which by definition I'm a part, but from me at the moment.