Kyle Smith

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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I’m home for break. Went to Eli’s defense on Wednesday, Matt’s and Todd’s on Friday.

Had a cool last night in Potsdam with Allison, Jim, and Eli. Saw Ocean’s 12. Watched Underworld and went to bed at 4 am. Took photos that day.

Today I picked up another 160 GB hard drive to put all my music on. Also got my iPod syncing from Windows so I no longer need Mac OS X on my laptop or to use my external FireWire drive to store music. I also picked up some new rounded cables to help clean up my case (it was worse than a rat’s nest in there). Picked up a couple of new CDs as well [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

This evening I went through the better part of a Magic Hat 12 pack, which makes me think of Chinese food fortunes.

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Had a wonderful little get-together last night at Maxfield’s with a few individuals from the CS department and then went to dinner in Canton at the Glass Onion, which turned out to be excellent (if you don’t mind the price).

Additionally, as of Tuesday morning 4 of 6 graduate school applications had been submitted. The remaining two will be completed by the end of this coming week, hopefully.

Classes are now over and I have no finals. Just a philosophy essay that I’m seriously considering throwing out and starting over on, and an end of semester project for Professional Communications I have yet to start.

The only thing remaining on my agenda this week is to finish up those two things and to attend a multitude of defenses [1, 2, 3]. Potential opportunties for fun in the coming week include the final Cinema 10 of the fall and Flip Night (need to get that average up!).

Saturday I’ll be heading home for break — hopefully the time off from school will give me enough time to catch up on IBM work and finish the project I’ve been working on by the end of the year.

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Nothing much to report for the last two weeks. Last week I was distracted for most of the week by the midterm for Tino’s grad algorithms course. Spent a few hours chilling at Maxfield’s with fellow victims afterwards [1]. Then I realized I had a group presentation for another class and spent most of Saturday and Sunday preparing that.

The weekend before my parents were visiting so I took them, Allison, and Eli out to dinner at Maxfield’s on Friday and on Saturday we drove to Montreal to hang out for the day [2].

This weekend should be interesting because Cloudchaser (ne Brendan) will be visiting. There’s an open house on Saturday, but I’ll be across town taking the computer science GRE subject test — something I’m not looking forward to, having gone through the practice book and seen some of the questions. Hopefully most of the schools won’t hold it against me, since taking the subject test is optional for 5 of the 6 schools I’m applying to.

Hmm. That reminds me that I need to finish my statement of porpoise, as Eli likes to call it. *sigh*

Picked up Halo 2 Tuesday morning from EB in Massena and have been playing it quite a bit the last two days. Definitely better than the original. Still need to get a real multiplayer game going though.

Also decided yesterday to investigate whether anyone had written a quotes plugin for WordPress. Found some guy had written a had to display a random quote, which I then hacked up to display them all and to support quote categories. The result can be experienced here.

Update: Also, if you get the opportunities you should see the following movies: Seducing Doctor Lewis (hilarious), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Incredibles (awesome). Don’t bother watching Story of the Weeping Camel.

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