Kosmokaryote, the life thereof

Velociraptors are so 2006

2012-02-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

Back in 2006, I created a small set of Velociraptor's Day cards this time of year. I've created a new card which lacks the same humour but whatever. Next year there might be robots.

The batties and the velociraptors (warning: gore ahead) can be found here.

Winter Colds

2012-02-13T13:32:00.001-05:00

Cold

Winter colds are slightly nostalgic for me. I haven't had one since last winter. I've already wandered through frigid snow stifling a cough. And I have my flask of hot tea with me. This year, I'm trying to be safer with colds. I've probably been reckless regarding quarantining myself. Last year, I even TA'd with my cold, and I probably got some of my students sick. This year, I'm even postponing delicious cookies for friends, because they're actually going to put those in their MOUTH.

Being a little sick can sometimes be nice, mostly due to connotations. Staying in bed, drinking hot tea, eating soup (I don't have soup, maybe I can get a friend to fetch some :D), and when I was younger, having someone like my mom or dad check in on me. Staying home from school, rescheduling appointments and work, getting stuffy headed and maybe finally watching some anime (video games would be too stressful). Curling up and being warm and cuddling my sheepo.

Sheepo Pistachio, cuddler extraordinaire

Case of the missing Tupperware

Today I finally figured out where my large plastic containers went. I actually had thought someone had take them but then partially in a dream I remembered my last usage! In the summer, I'd frozen a collection of berries (and some other food) to make a pie for a friend's birthday. I ended up not making the pie and quickly forgot about them. Almost 8 months later, I run to my freezer and tada, in the back, there they are. I'm not sure if the raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries are still good. I'm not even sure how well these containers will have survived their hibernation.

Blueberries, pineapple (I think?), strawberries,
chickpeas (pre-pie),and raspberries off screen. Nom.

I wish being sick saved me from the sudden opportunity to clean, too :D

Sick and crazy

2012-02-13T00:29:00.001-05:00

Today I woke up with a cold, ate sushi, sliced rolled tatami mats with a sword, discovered that Planet Bean has vegan cookies, finished my Internet service with Rogers, tried to be a good TA, and made someone laugh a bit.

Samurai wandering in the snow

2012-02-11T19:27:00.004-05:00

I like the arboretum. I like wandering through it, especially after a fresh snowfall. Each time I've planned to go, though, the mild weather stole my freshly fallen snow. The other day, I mentioned going with a couple friends after jodo under the full moon. However, it was almost devoid of snow.

So last night, when I saw a good couple inches of fresh snow fallen after iaido, I struck forth and boldly again. A fellow iaidoka joined me and we tried hard to get lost. Hard, because we're both quite familiar with it, but despite that we still managed to discover an ice covered pond to stand by while we discussed the nature of life. I love the snow. I love icy ground (when I'm not hurting myself on it). My friend is like a monkey, and can easily catch herself as she falls, and bounces and lurks and stalks through trees like a veteran tripper, making the trip all the more enjoyable. It's nice being able to experience the wild with a fellow adventurer, especially when we're both wandering in moderately falling snow, still in our hakame and gi, with sword bags in tow. Winter is a great backdrop to life.

And so it was when we finally made it back to campus and I realised I'd just missed the last bus down town. Honestly, I welcome the cold and find it refreshing, and steadily walked through falling snow that grew so thick I couldn't see straight ahead. It was surprisingly warm, and I'm not sure why. My hands and neck and ankles were bare, my shoes slowly soaked with melt, I had no hat, my beard was frozen stiff and my head became a tray for a snowy dessert. And let I couldn't stop grinning as I tightened my balled fists burying into pockets. When I finally came through the door, and shook, it was like a fresh snow fall in my house. When I saw the mirror, I finally realised just how much snow had fallen, because I'd grown over an inch taller with snow.

I think I look a bit like a hardy hermit
here, with an overly solid cranium

Galaxy Nexus, Andriod 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and Encryption

2012-02-10T08:19:00.000-05:00

I say do not encrypt your Android phone. I think encrypting your devices is a good idea, but at least with Android there's the possibility that you won't be able to decrypt your data once encrypted, at all.

I had a PIN set to unlock my phone. I wanted to encrypt it for a while, and so this morning I did, and afterwards it asked me for a password. I did not have a password set. Neither my PIN nor my Google password would suffice.

After googling for a while, this problem has occurred with others (usually after getting an OTA update) with no good resolution. I just did a factory reset on my phone.

It's not really a problem, as all my data was backed up to Google's servers, including the apps. (I think I only lost videos, again, for the second time in a week. Oh dear.)

Posse

2012-02-10T03:23:00.000-05:00

Before I went to University, I looked forward to a future where I'd end up with a close group of geeky friends and we'd hang out and play video games, watch anime, and be cool together. That never really happened. There was something a little like that in first year, but most of my friendships were spent with individual interactions.

I just realised that I finally have the posse I sort of dreamed of. Any posse necessarily requires a misfit quality to its members and an innocent sincerity. I've really gotten to see that over the last few weeks as myself and others have gone to silly lengths to be good comrades, remaking plans spontaneously, engaging on silly adventure, being excellent to one another, helping and caring. Today I celebrated the birthday of Z at my place, organising cookie baking, ghetto sushi, Scott Pilgrim, and some Wii play time.

It's a little surreal as I didn't see it coming. The composition isn't well defined. It's just basically a small band of misfits that share a common attitude and capacity for silliness.

I'm quite grateful for it, and still grateful for my many individual friendships at Guelph, like with E and L and M and Ar and Am and the rest of the alphabet that I'm not noting here. Anyway, thank you to y'all for being good friends. I'm working really hard on being more reliable again, and hope to disappoint none of you much more this semester. You all deserve the best I can muster.

Transient Thought

2012-02-09T04:26:00.000-05:00

"His opinion has so many holes I could use it as a strainer."
- Ar, delicately describing another

"How would you like it if a cow tipped you?"
-L

Transient Truth

2012-02-09T03:59:00.001-05:00

I'm beginning to feel comfortable with my patience. I used to be very patient with the world when I didn't have to worry about other people. I realised I'd get paradoxically quite worked up when another's happiness was involved, but I feel like I've learned a lesson in maintaining calm even then. :)

Transient Truth

2012-02-09T03:51:00.001-05:00

I don't sleep. I time jump!

I believe in a thing called love!

2012-02-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled by an advertisement containing the Darkness. I've song them twice in karaoke in the last 6 months. It would be nice if the advertisement was focussed more on how awesome the Note was rather than picking on Apple users. Apparently there was a lot of criticism of the commercial based on "A stylus? What is this? A Palm Pilot?" I think it's a weird criticism, because styli are actually quite popular for smart phones in general. The biggest problem I find is that most apps don't make much use of a stylus, since almost no phones come with one by default. Even the commercial didn't do a great job of illustrating great uses for it (I think they were trying to draw on a Google Map where to meet, but wasn't clear. :D).

Lunar Walks

2012-02-08T02:47:00.000-05:00

I have dreams of wandering through outer space. I love starfields and full moons and cool winter nights and lying down on the hoods of cars. Tonight I asked Maya and Kristabel from Jodo if they'd care to join me for a midnight walk under the full moon through the arboretum. We stalked the nature centre, sought bamboo, tried to find an old wooden walking bridge through a swamp that I can barely remember, and howled like wolves. I briefly confused coyotes into howling back at me. My mountain lions roar wasn't very appropriate. We also found snow. These are things that make me happy.

Transient Thought

2012-02-07T02:37:00.000-05:00

Nicety about the Galaxy Nexus? I've been using it all day with GPS and Wifi and 3G turned on, and played music walking to school, and the battery's still not dead. That sure beats my Nexus One's battery dead at 7PM with just 3G. :D

It's a wonderful life

2012-02-07T01:48:00.003-05:00

Wow, I'm really fortunate. :) Thank you!

Calm in a digital storm

2012-02-06T05:23:00.003-05:00

I think I've mentioned it, but the thing I hate most in computing is avoidable data loss. Almost all data loss is avoidable, too. It's been an interesting week, with two separate friends encountering it, and then me yesterday, when syncing my phone with my media player cleared all the other media I had, including my videos from the day of the Lights concert. Anyway, I'm kind of proud of myself for maintaining perspective during that and not becoming dejected. It's a lot easier to be graceful when I don't let myself get exhausted by stress: I'm a veritable unperturbable ballerina.

Oro?

2012-02-05T22:47:00.001-05:00

I suddenly wonder where my dragon wings have gotten to. Perhaps they could work for Anime North. :D

Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich: Uploading Music

2012-02-04T23:57:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: Using Rhythmbox (which uses libmtp) to sync a playlist of music to my phone incidentally wiped /sdcard/, including photos and videos, etc. I think it was probably an issue with libmtp messing up, actually, though. Be forewarned.

So, with my Nexus One and Gingerbread, I could mount my phone's SD card as a USB mass storage device by just plugging it in to my computer. That was great, just like a USB key, I get a new device and I copy files over. With the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich, you can't do that any more. As always, trying to send files via Bluetooth is failure prone, and using PTP (for photos) doesn't work reliably with other files. (PTP: That's when you plug your phone in and it treats it like a camera.)

The way recommended by Google and the world is using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) which is simple in Windows, relatively simple in Mac OS X, but not supported by default by Linux distros yet. Until recently, nothing really significant that people would run with Linux would use it.

So, to copy files to and from my phone, I'm now using mtpfs, which lets me mount my phone like any other file system when I plug in (just like when it worked as a USB mass storage device!). This required some steps in Fedora 16.

download and compile mtpfs

this required me to install some development file packages:

yum install libmad-devel libid3tag-devel fuse-devel libmtp-devel

then I went to http://www.adebenham.com/mtpfs/ and downloaded the source code
I unpacked it, and did a standard (./configure && make && make install)
(Thanks to PabloTwo at this thread)

and then I followed the instructions here:

~~http://www.androidcentral.com/ics-feature-mtp-what-it-why-use-it-and-how-set-it~~

~~Except I had manually installed mtpfs~~

http://blog.offenders.org/?p=101

These are specific to Fedora, and tell you a udev rule to automatically mount the phone when you plug it in :D

Right now, I managed to mount my phone, but transferring music is going very slowly. Earlier, I had to upload the "Ta Da" notification noise I loved so much on my Nexus One to my own web space, just so I could download it via the Android browser to get it on my phone. Yeesh!

Making good use of what I've got

2012-02-04T22:19:00.000-05:00

I used to use a double-monitor set-up back in GNOME 2 because my laptop's video card could handle it, but it can't handle it with GNOME 3's 3D acceleration. At least not at the final total resolution. So, for the past few months, my monitor has actually sat idle, unused, under-loved, wasting its potential.

Well, today I fixed that by simply having my laptop use this pretty 1920x1080 display, rather than its own 1024x768 display. Facebook has never looked so fine.

Mild Discomfort?

2012-02-04T21:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, while waiting in the mall on an adventure, a fellow approached me and told me his life story. It was one of those moments that usually cause discomfort, and not for a good reason. The gentleman was physically challenged, was bound to a wheel-chair and had difficulty speaking grammatically. My instinct is generally to escape, which I'm ashamed of.

Last month, my friend Ar sent me a link to a video. She has a similar response to mine, and we both found the video very helpful. It's almost 10 minutes, and is a news segment on an autistic girl who eventually was able to express herself with the help of a computer.

The above video helped me a lot. Part of my problem is a fear of becoming responsible for another person, and I don't mean in their being unable to operate in the world, but I guess I mean emotionally. I am very cautious with who I let myself get close to and who I let depend on me. I feel (rationally or not) that someone additionally challenged by their environment might rely extra-much on me, and I'd fail. I've bailed on a friend before, which was stupidly related to my frustration at being unable to help them. And yet I know I've been a burden to others.

Anyway, the video is excellent for helping establish very clearly in my mind how complete a person someone who has difficulty expressing themselves physically and verbally still is. So, I didn't excuse myself while in the mall the other day, but stayed and chatted for an hour, with the perspective that the person was the same as me, but that we had a translation that was imperfect. The whole visual-auditory system humans use to communicate is imperfect, though I dread the future where the "direct" neural communication I generally champion takes hold. Dread.

The conversation was still hard. Thanks to his challenges, he's been seriously abused and defrauded, and treated poorly regularly, and that's beyond having most people avoid him. He had reasonable opinions on war, peace, liberality, religion, politics, and love. I almost wish I could write about them here, but I don't think that would be polite to him. I'm not perfectly happy with my current life, and I hate I can be so melancholic while another has had to adapt to survive in miserable conditions. Not to demean him by describing them as miserable: he himself said he doesn't have any friends, and that that's quite hard.

I almost hate myself for being almost relieved that I didn't runaway. It feels like patting myself on the back. "Congrats, you did something reasonable rather than being a total jerk, GREAT JOB!" Especially because I could have invested myself more, offered to be around or be a friend. I've done that with others, others whose life situations are much more like mine, University children whose concerns are as petty as mine. I'm weak.

I tell myself that in the future, I'll contribute a lot to helping address inequities. I'll help conquer homelessness, I'll ensure everyone has access to an environment they can feel comfortable in. I wish I could guarantee everyone a friend, too. :)

Ghetto Ikea

2012-02-04T21:10:00.001-05:00

"Ghetto" can be a life motto for how to approach the quality of things in your life. Also, "on a dime" or in my case "on the free". In particular, I've long wanted a night stand on both sides of my bed. One side is closer to an outlet, the other is closer to life itself. So, my solution apparently is to eat a lot of mandarins.

A mountain of crates, delicious.

Spring cleaning

2012-02-04T20:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished some spring cleaning (images on my G+). The apartment is restored to "order". I'm not a huge fan of order any more. When I first moved out on my own, I liked to have everything very orderly and controlled. "Alles in Ordnung", everything in order. I realised the transformation away from that while I was visiting my aunt in Germany and she'd repeat "Alles in Ordnung" and I'd shiver. Manageable chaos is now more the order of my day. Still, some order is useful.

In particular, in my wonderful world of receipts. I've retained almost every receipt I've collected in the last 8 years. Commonly, they get bunched together into a cereal box, and then sealed, with their date written on them. It's for a good cause, though. No, not taxes, but memories! They act as cues for places I've visited and things I've done and possessions I've acquired through the past and friends I've adventured with. It's actually quite fun and nostalgic to go through them, even finding unexpected things like a receipt for the Dunedin Chinese Garden from 2009. I don't want to be reminded of everything right now, though, so it's nice that I can tape a box shut and forget about it for now.

The other day, I helped a friend backup her computer before it had to be reformatted. I had to make some space on my external hard drive, which was itself filled with old files and memories. I hate data loss but going back in computer time can be kind of surreal, and some things are perhaps best forgotten, but then I found it bizarre when another friend went half-way in salvaging her music collection and then sort of just gave up? :) (You know who you are, crazy person you!) I also did some digital house cleaning on my Facebook group that I'd been deferring indefinitely. Though I'm still on it regularly to interact with others, I don't really care to use Facebook any more. Its prime came and is now gone for me, so my profile and albums are now pretty bare.

I've also a good interest in reducing my material foot print. I've become an incredibly light traveller, even impressing my New York host. For the two weeks in which I lacked a phone, I appreciated still more its impact in making me more portable. Often, I can leave the house without my shoulder bag, with just my phone, which does so much for me. Perhaps it does more of my living than I do? I think some concert goer's phones saw more of Lights directly than they did at last night's concert. :) I don't really want to throw away most of my stuff, or give it away. I've mentioned before my intent on renting a room from a friend when I'm done school to stow away my personals, liberating me to adventure lightly, get a bus and cross country and borders.

Almost everything proceeding smoothly. I guess I'm incredibly fortunate. :)

Transient Thought

2012-02-04T16:31:00.001-05:00

Sorting through old receipts, I have found a phone number and a name written on the back of a café one. But I don't know why!

Transient Thought

2012-02-04T14:12:00.000-05:00

After 13 months, I have finally discovered my nearest post box.

Internet and mobile phones

2012-02-01T01:32:00.002-05:00

I didn't see this coming. I already cancelled Rogers for my high-speed Internet. (I'm stuck with them for a couple more weeks.) I hadn't decided on a new provider, but when I was in the WIND store today asking about the imminent Galaxy Nexus, I realised that their mobile internet plans for home routers and laptops were actually Good. In particular, an unlimited one that gives you the first 10GB at full high speed. (You can still have full speed after that, but they reserve the right to slow you down if you're not a fair user.) It costs less than then the Rogers plan I was already on, it's portable, and it's with a company I like, one whose business model is based on pleasing people instead of milking them. I wonder if the unsatisfied Bell/Rogers customers (not all are) know what it feels like to be a dairy cow.

I'll actually at first try the still-cheaper tethering to my phone for Internet. However, my Wii might like to have access to Netflix. But then, I don't watch things alone much. (Oh, would you care to swing by for a movie? Assuming you're a reader who lives remotely near me. :D)

Decadence

2012-01-31T15:32:00.001-05:00

I kind of want these:

But I don't think I can justify buying them for myself right now. Ah, decadence!

Transient Thought

2012-01-31T00:20:00.002-05:00

I discussed my need for a pot lid for my favourite frying pan today with a friend. It's a simple problem, but one I have yet to choose to successfully resolve since acquiring it in New Zealand. It was a great day for an acquisition. I'm just waiting for a great day to follow it up with a lid.