The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught twoArchive for tech
y’know, like the hiphopopotomaus if he was a librarian
I’m poking around looking for good library blogs, as I’ve applied to library school for September, and it seems like a good idea to get in the heads of people in the profession. This looks like the group I was born to be a part of: The Society for Librarians* Who Say Motherfucker. Someday. For now I’ll content myself with being a regular dude who says motherfucker. To my mom’s chagrin.
Unrelated to motherfuckers, I got Excel to do something fun today. A person had a list of 12,000 numbers and was looking for the ones that only occurred on the list once. He was going through the list by hand deselecting everything that recurred, and it made me sad. So I said, “I will help you. Let me muck about in Excel and figure out a way to get that shit sorted, yo.” And I completely did. It wasn’t perfect (I had to check the first and last entry on the list by hand) and it wasn’t elegant (it took like four separate columns in the spreadsheet) but I made Excel do the shit I wanted and it saved a person from (and was faster than) deselecting 10,000 things from a list. Go me.
Also, we had a condo corporation meeting I was dreading all day. But it happened and now I don’t have to think about it for a while. Tomorrow I am going to sleep in and get some real things accomplished. Yes.
tinkering is fun but time consuming
I’ve gone back to trying to get Linux onto my old PowerBook. It is a challenge. A fiddly fiddly challenge. Right now I’m stuck at the point where the PowerBook’s internal CD-Drive doesn’t want to cooperate as a bootable device. It will only boot from an old OSX 10.2 CD, not from my 10.5 nor my newly burnt Linux discs. That drive has given me a lot of grief in the last 5 years so I might go on eBay for a $50 replacement. Eventually. This is just something to do for the sake of trying to do it, so timelines aren’t real important.
putter putter putter
I am half-heartedly going through my PowerBook, preparing it to be Linux-ized. Not because it really needs to be; I just feel like having a project to work on. I’ve never had a computer that both functioned and wasn’t being used regularly. There is nothing Linux will do for it that it can’t do already. Just to see if I can make it work. And it’s helping divert my new phone desire. Now that the GooglePhone is in Canada I’m having to stave off envious thoughts. It has a keyboard, which I find I miss from my old Treo.
happy birthday grandma
There is no simple practical way to split the audio from the video in iMovie. Do you realize how fucking ridiculous that fucking fuckshit is? It wants me to import a clip into my project, then import another version of just the audio, then import the B-Roll footage making sure it’s at the end of the now extended project, then cut precisely the amount of video from the initial clip then move the B-Roll into place, then mute the B-Roll and the initial clip and god fucking help you if there’s the slightest miscue because then your audio gets chopped off the end because it is a fucking goddamn piece of shit-smearing stab stab stab my fucking eyes.
And the video is horrible because I couldn’t get a decent white balance in that room with the mix of light. Everything’s murky orange and grey and this whole thing is just an ugly disgusting mess. Grandma gets her VHS copy but there is no way I’m making DVDs for anyone else of this garbage that looks like it came from 1983.
UPDATE: I now have software that works and am less angry about the whole thing. It will still be ugly as shit but now I won’t have to break my brain getting it all together.
shaking things up a little
Those of you who read this via RSS won’t notice a difference, but I’m thinking of changing the look of thedubiousmonk here. The red and black are getting a bit oppressive to me. I’m thinking I’ll lighten it all up a bit. Maybe a new variation on my monk picture. Anyway, fair warning. If everything looks different in the next couple of days that is why.
so angry
Now I’m not Hassie in the whole professional “The design of this thing is so terrible!” kind of way. But MCC is so screwed up in the way they try to keep you from contacting any real people through the internet. If you don’t already know the person’s email address there’s no way to find it. Not even when the person is the head of a Peace Development division that has its own website (but no way to contact anyone! Gah!).
[UPDATE: I found the email address of someone in the Peace section of MCC, but not the person I'm looking for. So there is a way to contact someone for the stupidly persistent. I've sent an email to MCC Canada to get them to forward it on, but it's still just stupid.]
my bad
Well it seems I jumped the gun on the thedubiousmonk email address. After Sean pointed out he’d sent me a couple of emails I never received I have now learned I was missing some steps in the process, since I pointed the domain name at wordpress. Should be up and running soon now.
like a DIYer but without any ladders
I’m trying to get my blog here to mirror all the things I like about Facebook without having to go into Facebook to do anything. You may notice off to the right there’s a Twittering box with the last three things I’ve been doing. I’ve got that set up to bounce into Facebook as status updates, and I can do that from my phone. Which I’m quite pleased with. You can also click on the Twittering title to go to my page and see other people’s Twitters, most of which are more interesting than the statuses of people on Facebook (other than ones used as text messages of course).
googlebrain
I know some people who are scared of the future. Really. Not just in a “We’re living in the end times and Jesus isn’t going to take me ’cause I’m not good enough” kind of way either. People to whom a story like Your Outboard Brain Knows All is deeply terrifying. I don’t think I’m one of them.
metallic blue
My iPod shuffle finally ran down its battery yesterday after something like two weeks of using it on every trip to work and back. That is a suitable amount of music time. Thanks mom!
Just to be clear about that last post, I’m not mortally depressed about not doing anything cool right now. Just irked. And I realize that most people aren’t doing anything cool but in my head I’m not in competition with “most people,” just some idealized version of myself. Ah the perils of being an only child.
