Monthly Archive for December, 2001

The cruise is going well enough. I’ve met a few interesting people. We will reach Puerte Vallerte (sp?) in two days. On this Christmas Eve the crewmembers are singing holiday songs in the grand atrium. Its nice. The food, however, isn’t quite so good as I would have expected.

What is better then I expected is the computer situation. There is, as you can tell, internet access! Now my 15 minutes are about to end, and I don’t want to spend any more money, but suffice to say that their NT machines are sufficiently penetratable that I was able to get around their simple security and in a few minutes get to the hard drive. Now to figure out the settings so I can get my iBook on the network…

But no, I don’t want to stir up trouble. Unless I get bored.

A note to Sara or Kelson: let me know what is up with Mock Trial. Its hard to get my email, but next time I’m online in a few days I’ll try to check it, and I’d like to know where we stand with that. Until then, bon voyage all!

I had a dream last night that I wrote something stupid on AgBlog and then wanted to delete it, but didn’t know how. Now, first off, everything I write on AgBlog is stupid, second I try to avoid deleting entries. Third, why the heck was I dreaming about that? :-/

People have this obsession with locking eyes and telling truth. I don’t get it, it doesn’t work for me. When I know that is happening, I can’t look someone in the eyes. I’m pretty sure that that was what really got me kicked off of the Justice – not looking David in the eyes when I told him that I didn’t do anything wrong. Even when police reports cleared me, no charges were filed, I even got what could be considered an apology, he didn’t trust me to come back, because I didn’t look him in the eye at The Boulevard when he asked me that question.

See, I have this inner subconscious thing about societal conventions, expected patterns of behavior, and all that. I knew what I was doing as I looked away, I knew I was dooming myself, but I couldn’t help it. Perhaps I hoped he would judge based on the facts and not some fake emotional exchange. There is a whole rant in here somewhere about the truth of memories, the ability of people to lie, etc., etc. Truth is, I’m a very bad liar, and thus I try to avoid big lies as much as possible. So people get upset sometimes, because I tell the truth, because I’m not as tactful as I could be but, for better or worse, that is who I am.

I should probably write the whole incident with the Justice down, but the conversations and chain of events are fuzzy enough that I don’t really feel confident to do so. People asked me about it for a long while afterwards, and no one is content with the explanation that “really, its not very exciting, in fact its quite boring.” Because, truthfully, it wasn’t a big thing, nothing incredible. Police investigations does not equal murder, intrigue, or whatever. And in America we have this thing about being innocent until proven guilty, and I wasn’t even charged. I was called in as a witness in a very minor act of tampering that I did not actually witness. A few statements were made (not by me) that were misinterpreted, and the police detective’s somewhat overzealous investigation lead to some troubles for a certain assistant editor (me) at a highly-unsympathetic newspaper. Of course, if I had waited until I had been established there, learned the people, and then carried out the investigation, this probably would have turned out very different. Truth is, I was given an opportunity for a job that I didn’t completely want, but I felt that the experience would be worth the work and so I signed on to try my hand at editing. I had some high dreams about getting to the heart of real stories that matter, especially at a newspaper that is not at all influenced by major media concerns like advertising. Too bad it didn’t work out, but maybe next year.

And I’ve used the expression “truth is” twice in one entry, which shows that I must really be out of it and incoherant here at 5:30 in the morning. But I figure, stay awake now, and I can sleep on the plane. So. Must…stay…awake.

(How did this come up? It was a line on 24.)

iTunes uses something like 50% of my CPU to play music – that is A Bad Thing(tm). In contrast, the newly installed command line utility mpg123 plays on my iBook at about 10% utilization, a much nicer number. But MPG123 doesn’t really support any options besides just straight playthrough – no fast forward, rewind, looking at playlists, etc. So I’ll try Audion, the other Mac OS X player, and hope I can get a good compromise. Cause my songs should NOT be monopolizing my CPU. That is just bad programming.

Who needs sleep when you’ve got Jerry Cohen papers to write?

(The title is ™ Willow)