Kyle Smith

A few pictures from the Vanderbilt estate this evening as the sun was setting. Ended up going to Rhinebeck to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, which was pretty frickin’ funny, given the subject matter. Definitely recommend going to see it. Useless trivia: turns out the director was born only 50 miles from my home in Vermont. Also finished reading Fight Club today. Always interesting to see how screenwriters morph the story from the original.

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If you happen to know where my original copies of Hero or Jin-Roh are, please let me know.

That is all.

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Note: The following has been sitting as a draft for several days now. Since it’s unlikely I’ll bother to go back and finish what I was thinking, I’ve decided to just post it as is.

I’ve been joking with people for several years now that in ten years I’ll be no where near the field of computer science, but rather in the last field I would ever expect to be in. The field that always popped into my mind was writing, because I typically don’t enjoy it when boundaries are imposed on me (hence the reason I hate writing papers for classes). I definitely don’t enjoy computer science as much as I used to. For the most part the rate of learning CS material has slowed considerably from when I first got interested in it. Most of the classes I’ve taken here at Clarkson have been a waste of my time. Rather than waste away in class for fifteen weeks I could have obtained the same knowledge simply by picking up the appropriate book and saved myself a lot of time and money.

Occasionally I wonder if I’m not really joking. I certainly don’t enjoy straight computer programming. There needs to be more freedom in it for me to get interested, the ability to do what I want. That’s probably why I’ve always enjoyed the first month or two of any IBM project I’ve worked on, because that’s typically the point where I need to get up to speed on a new topic quickly and then design the solution. But how many jobs are really like that? How many employers let you wander off for 3 months as long as you promise to throw a nicely bundled solution into their laps upon returning?

The other joke I usually tell to people is that it would be nice to just open my own business. Unfortunately, I have so many ideas it’s difficult to narrow it down — a cozy bookstore / coffee shop, a tavern or pub (not a bar), or a homey movie theater (with an old-style marquee). Perhaps I could start with one and gradually add the others. None of those sound like cash cows, so making a living would always be difficult, but perhaps I’m actually okay with that.

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I’m really bad at managing my addictions. Last week I was browsing Barsuk Records (Death Cab For Cutie’s label) and saw they had the new DCFC EP available (The John Byrd EP), as well as You Can Play These Songs With Chords at pretty good prices, so I ordered them. They were waiting in my mailbox when I arrived back on campus today. The John Byrd EP definitely kicks ass.

And when I was finishing up some birthday shopping for my mom the other day I came across Ladder 49 and The Incredibles, which were probably two of the best movies I’ve seen in the last year, so of course I was obligated to buy them. But now that I’m back in Potsdam, I think the spree has officially concluded.

Didn’t do a whole lot today. Skipped both of my classes and ended up wrestling with Prof. Fulton’s laptop for a few hours this afternoon trying to get the wireless to work in Linux or Windows.

This evening I went to Cinema 10, even though I wasn’t all that interested in the movie showing tonight, Big Animal, a black and white film from Poland. There have been plenty of Cinema 10 movies I haven’t been interested by, but I usually go anyway because it’s a good way to unwind before coming back to campus and doing work. It’s also nice because more often than not the movie selections force me to look at something I wouldn’t normally look at or to think about an old issue in a new way.

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I’m not really sure where the week has gone. I have yet to start Tino’s latest compilers assignment (that was originally due almost two weeks ago) as well as a paper for my Cold War class, and no stunning progress has been made on Bender, although I have been putting in time each day.

Having been home for seven days now I finally decided to go through the pile of mail my parents have been saving for me. I’m thoroughly disgusted with the number of credit card offers, the useless crap from organizations regarding my educational loans, and the hardcopy billing statements from various companies who I supposedly arranged to receive electronic statements from.

I used to care greatly where my money was going and what companies I dealt with were doing, but honestly, I don’t give a shit anymore. Electronic payments direct from my checking account take care of my monthly bills, and I know the average amounts. I also can usually keep track of any expenses I’ve had over the course of the month and know what the bills should be, so really seeing the damn statements just wastes my time (I won’t go so far as to say that I will never need some kind of statement to resolve a mistake, but e-statements will likely suffice).

Also in the kipple taking over my room were two newspaper articles my parents clipped — they’re very good about saving articles about people I know and things that interest me. It turns out that a former highschool classmate is now teaching teenage Peruvian girls how to play sports (apparently they aren’t typically exposed to sports as part of their primary education) which, from the article, sounds pretty neat. Also in the pile was an announcement that a girl I went to high school with is now engaged to a guy I went to elementary school with (in a completely different town). Small world.

All in all, it was an okay break. Normally I don’t want more than a few days off, but honestly, there is a metric fuckload of stuff I should probably sit down and do and it definitely won’t happen this month. Tomorrow I may end up helping out at a church dinner (long story) so I doubt much else will get done then and Sunday I’ll need to pack up my stuff and head back to campus.

I will close with a quote that Cheesefry uttered to me yesterday:
(17:49:12) Matt: i masturbate with $100.00 bills motherfucker.

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Upgraded to WordPress 1.5 (“Strayhorn”). The upgrade was mostly painless, although I need to tweak the admin interface for the quotes plugin to work again, as well as to finish updating non-index pages to use the correct theme.

Went to Lake Placid last Saturday with Jim to grab lunch/dinner at the Lake Placid Pub and Brewery and also to grab some cigars from With Pipe and Book.

Cinema 10 on Monday was pretty interesting (“Primer“). Very confusing, and definitely requires multiple viewings to understand fully (it was so confusing that Tino and I spent 5 or 10 minutes discussing it on Tuesday and were still lost).

Random other pictures from the last few weeks.

Note: I guess I forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago…

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Since everyone else seems to have posted in the last 24 hrs…

Cheesefry mentioned the Guifications Gaim plugin, which I’ve been using for about a month now, although I created a custom theme that’s even smaller and more plain than the Mini theme that ships with it because I don’t like wasting screen real estate.

Additionally, Mike talked about someone introducing him to The Postal Service.* I seem to recall buying the album sometime in the spring, could it have been me? Shortly thereafter I did talk to Buzzco and perhaps Cheesefry who also suggested Death Cab for Cutie and All-Time Quarterback (both of which feature Ben Gibbard).

In other news, don’t go see Assault on Precinct 13, even if it’s available at the low, low price of $3.50. Last night Mike, Randy and I went to see it at the American and it was so terrible Morpheus could not even save it. On a slightly better note, I went to the Roxy tonight and saw The Aviator, which was pretty decent.

Perhaps this weekend I will go see the new Phantom of the Opera movie for the heck of it. I also hope Sideways arrives at the Roxy or American soon (Jamin Gray has an interesting scene transcript from it). If people are interested in going, let me know.

One final observation: it’s interesting just how small even small towns can be sometimes. Over winter break I discovered via The Facebook that someone I knew from high school was going to St. Lawrence so I sent him a message and we agreed to get together sometime. On Friday night when I was having dinner at Maxfield’s, who is sitting there at the next table but this kid. Hopefully we will actually find some time this semester to grab a beer or something and catch up.

*The remix TPS/Dntel did of The Dream of Evan and Chan is cool, btw, as is remix TPS did of The Flaming Lips “Do you realize?”. Check ‘em out if you haven’t already.

Update: the title of this post has changed. I like to pick something that seems relevant at the moment, but the original was just too weird a coincidence.

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Uneventful week. All settled into my class schedule this semester. Still waiting to see what I’ll be doing for my directed study with Jim Lynch. Possibly something with swarm intelligence, but I need to do a little more reading first.

Last night me, Alex, and a plethora of Mikes watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Big Lebowski. For those of us playing drinking games, Walter destroyed us once again by uttering “dude” almost constantly.

This afternoon was spent doing a little consulting work, reading, and doing laundry. This evening McCabe and I hit up the Chinese buffet in town before heading over to Mike’s to watch Anchorman and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle while he was on duty. Tomorrow will likely be spent reading for class and doing assignments for the two Tino classes I’m taking this semester (compilers and crypto).

At some point this coming week I’ll probably go see House of Flying Daggers at the American and Elektra (even if everyone seems to think it’s horrible).

The following was a partial post that’s been sitting as a draft in WordPress for a week or two now, so I figured I might as well post it…

In my neverending quest to integrate and simplify things, I’ve recently begun switching to Mozilla Firefox on all of my machines. As part of this I’ve been merging in bookmarks from both Epiphany and Safari. Someone was cool enough to write an XSL transform to convert the Epiphany bookmarks.rdf file to the HTML format used by Firefox. You can find information on it here and the actual XSLT file here.

Migrating Safari bookmarks was a little harder. At first I couldn’t find an up to date XSLT for doing it but found several helpful resources [1, 2]. Eventually I came across a page from Marc Liyanage with a transform that was close. After making a few tweaks it worked perfectly. The modified file can be found here.

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I’ve done nothing productive for the last 48 hours. I saw two foreign films yesterday. The first was Good Bye Lenin!, which was awesome. The second, Crimson Gold, was interesting but rather tedious, so watch it at your own risk. At some point later this week I’ll watch Dogville and Maria Full of Grace.

Yesterday afternoon I also went and checked out Norwich Wines & Spirits as well as the Norwich Bookstore, neither of which I’d ever been to. Norwich has definitely taken a cue from Hanover and started developing some nice little shops to draw people in. Later on I also checked out the newly-renovated Dartmouth Bookstore which lost most of it’s cozy atmosphere and is now part Starbucks, part Barnes & Noble.

Most of today was spent on the couch watching movies on television. I learned two things from this. Cable TV stations rerun movies way too often. Second, I can only stand crap on TV for so long.

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Spent a portion of the afternoon and most of the evening reading and finishing Tom Bradby’s The White Russian, which Allison recommended at some point and I can see why. It is a fairly interesting read and so if you’ve got some time, I also recommend it.

I found the weather today rather strange. I had to go down the interstate twice this morning to the mechanic’s to drop off and pick up my mother’s car. Both times some bad snow squalls occurred on the way there, but as soon as I turned around the sky was perfectly clear and blue. Oh, and it was fucking cold out. Luckily I have a remote car starter so my car will always be toasty.

In other news, it’s things like this that make me scared of the new products being popularized by the Internet: Mr. T In Your Pocket Keychain from Wonderfully Wacky. I pity the fool that buys one.

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