Absurd Singularity

I was browsing through this news article about John Irving and Stephen King urging J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame to not kill off Harry in the final book when I found the following quote by King amusing:

"I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved," King said.

And I thought to myself, "What kind of idiot gets that involved in a book???" Followed a split second later by, "Wait a minute, that's me!"

Back in my youth I was quite a voracious reader. Unfortunately, as I got older, I discovered a tendency (which I don't think I had when I was younger) to get a little too invested emotionally in a book. Wasn't every book, depended on the story. The one book that I distinctly remember me realizing that this was happening with was Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Very, very good by the way. But anyway, it was during my second time through it and things that happened in the book just started to bug me. Really, really bug me. Mostly it was when bad things happened to characters I liked. Or when I could sense that something really bad was about to happen. It got to the point where I couldn't continue it bugged me so much.

I had the same problem when re-reading Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince trilogy. It's not that I didn't like the path the author decided to take while telling the story, it was more like I empathized/sympathized way too much with some of the characters. So after awhile, I just stopped reading. Books at least. I still tore through magazines like tissue paper.

After a good number of years I eventually started reading novels again. And as far as I can tell, I'm no longer plagued by that particular problem. Guess it was just a phase. Or maybe I haven't found the right book yet. Although I no longer read as much as I used to, that's due more to lack of time and this silly thing we call the Internet. I just finished re-reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood for the third time and I was, once again, touched. For some reason I keep forgetting the plot of this book even though I know that I like it. So every now and then I re-read it, which isn't a bad thing because even though the coming-of-age lessons in the book can be of the simple run-of-the-mill variety, they're pretty much timeless, and it doesn't hurt to be reminded of them from time to time. My favorite line from this latest read through:

Some questions that I just have to ask after watching way too much anime.

1. You are a mildly crippled widow who lost your one true love in a car accident a few years back and you've been living your life as a shadow of your former self. You now have a coworker who's madly in love with you. This coworker just confessed that he's been reading through ALL your correspondence for who knows how long, and I mean everything: emails, faxes, browser history even. What do you do?

    a. Strangle him with your bare hands.
    b. Get all weepy cause he... really... cares...
    c. Report him to the authorities and slap him with a restraining order.
    d. Sleep with the bastard.

2. Your significant other, someone you've known since you were little, gets into a traffic accident and winds up in a coma. How long do you wait for them to come out of the coma?

    a. A year.
    b. As long as it takes.
    c. Until someone more handsome/beautiful comes along.
    d. 5 years

to all problems.

In this modern day and age where machines, electricity and the Internet rules all, there will arise an occassion every now and again where they must still bow down to the power of brute human strength. Yesterday I had pegged a few hours to take the time to finally wall mount our plasma TV. We had purchased the wall mount kit along with the TV but was too cheap to pay for professional installation (something ridiculous like $2-300). Since wall-mounting is a 2 person job I had my cousin come over to provide the extra muscle during the last step. I figured actually mounting the TV to the wall bracket would be the toughest part of the whole procedure but boy was I wrong.

Anyway, long story short, it took about 7 hours, 4 trips to Home Depot and 1 to Lowes to get the screen up on the wall. A tip for posterity (for people with drywall and wood studs):

Electric drills won't work. Unless you get some huge multi-hundred dollar one. Anything below $200 probably isn't going to cut it. Simply not powerful enough to drive a giant 3/8 inch wide screw with a huge hex head 2 inches into the wall. I started out with a 7.2V battery-driven drill, moved on to a 6.2 amp corded drill and then finished with a 6 amp corded drill with a keyless chuck and none of them could cut it. Either I have some super hard wood studs or people who say it's easy are packing some serious equipment (or knew beforehand that electric wasn't gonna work).

How did we finally get the bolts into the wall? On our last trip to Home Depot, we returned the 2 drills that I had attempted to use (~$150 combined) and settled for a long handled half inch ratchet and a half inch to 3/8 inch adapter so I could fit the Gator Grip Universal Socket on it. New total? $18. Cranked those screws in by arm and lever. Pain in the !@#$&!@$# ass.

Interesting moment during the whole process: when I was trying to use a quarter inch drill to first drill 2 inches into the wall, the drill bit got superheated and smoke started wafting out of the whole. Touching the drill bit itself was a nasty surprise as that sucker was scorching. In retrospect I'm glad I stopped when I did otherwise something in the wall might have flat out burst into flames.

I've been watching anime for what, 12 years now? I've seen pretty much every type possible yet I still keep watching. Much of it is forgettable fluff but every now and then you run into a title that makes the time spent worthwhile. Mushishi is one such title. Every episode is a mystery centered around mushi (a life-form that shares our world but can't be seen by most people) and Ginko, the one-green-eyed wanderer and one of the few who can see them and understands their world. Think ghosts and ghost hunter. One site calls it the X-Files, anime-style.

At first I wasn't too excited about this series but like some of the mushi that you'll encounter along the way, it seems to have a way of creeping into your mind and drawing you in until you reach the end of an episode and find yourself thinking, "Holy shit, this thing is good!" And good would be an understatement. Mushishi is possibly the most interesting and imaginative series that's come down the wire in a quite awhile. It's good to see that the anime industry is still capable of unveiling series such as this instead of just more endless rehashes of Dragonball Z (like Naruto and Bleach). Which aren't bad series at all but that general formula is getting old, old, old. So run, don't walk to your nearest anime BitTorrent site and check it out. ;-)

Spent a few hours at the Jersey Shore today. Ventured out with my 10-22mm w/Circular Polarizer and 70-200IS w/1.4x Extender. There were 3 novice surfers playing around, no comparison to the guys we saw on the North Shore of Oahu. Tough to surf when the waves are miniscule. Click on the pic above for the small picture gallery.

After 2 days of agonizing and debugging I finally figured out why Adobe CS2, well, Photoshop, ImageReady, and Illustrator in particular fails to run on my MacBook. The culprit?

Case-sensitivity.

When I installed my new hard drive, I formatted it using the MacOS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) option. After recently installing CS2, the above 3 apps just refuse to launch. Acrobat Professional works fine after all the updates have been installed. After finally checking out the system log, it appeared that Photoshop was having trouble loading libraries. Luckily it displays the path to the library that it's having problems with so after a bit more digging, I discovered that it was because some of the directory names had different cases. Manually renaming the bad directories to the right case solved that problem but now it's telling me that my user name, organization or serial # is missing or invalid. Which makes no sense since Acrobat works fine. So I'm assuming Photoshop is looking for the file that stores this info in a slightly different case and unfortunately I have no idea what file to look for.

So my only option is to back up everything and reformat, this time without the case-sensitive option. Pain in the @#!$!@#$!!!

Image: THE INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION/MARTIN KORNMESSER

Wow, it's official (at least I think it's official). Our solar system now has three new planets. This is a pretty exciting development. A few days ago they weren't even sure Pluto would be remaining a planet but not only did it remain, it gained a partner as well. This is the first change since 1930. 1930!

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is simply the most fantastically entertaining comedy series in recent history. It can be a bit of a difficult watch because the 14 episodes are not in normal chronological order but it's so vastly comical that it's well worth the effort. The main character, Kyon's internal monologue/narration in a low-key, deadpan style overlays the general absurdity of the events taking place perfectly. And despite the craziness and complexity, at its core, the underlying message in Haruhi boils down to one singular theme. Not exactly earth-shattering but given the entire package it doesn't detract from what's just a fun journey. However, this is just wrong. And for the really obsessive hardcore Haruhi fans, there's always this.

MovableType recently upgraded their version to 3.3 and with it comes the increasingly popular tags support. Finally got around to making use of it so you'll notice there's a new "Tag Cloud" section in the right-hand column. Still putzing around with it trying to figure out what I should and shouldn't tag but it's pretty cool so far.

Ok so it looks like I was premature in my earlier post stating that there's now 12 plants in our solar system. Seems like a lot of astronomers didn't like that plan, and Pluto too. So now we're down to only 8 planets in our solar system. One less for kids to learn I guess. =p