I'll be in Ottawa from now, until the 31st.

I'm probably going to drive down to Waterloo on the 31st, so if there's anyone in town who wants a ride then, I'll be offering.

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I really should post more frequently.

Here's something that happened to me:

Last night, I had a crazy dinner party at my place. Alicia, myself, Alicia's friends Ming and Troy, my sister and her b/f Mike, and housemates Glen and Gilad. It was 2 crazy days of cooking and preparing, and eating a few meals more than once, but in the end, dinner went off without a hitch at 7pm. Kind of a miracle.

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Alicia and I have a place we're going to be moving into in Kitchener! Bread and Roses housing co-op. I told gaelotek and he warns me of the crazy NDPers and gays. I told my parents, (who, back in the early 90s were big into the co-op housing scene) and they "Oh yes, they're quite well known, and activist, in the province wide co-op housing scene. I told Alicia about these exchanges, and she tells me "oh, by the way, didn't I tell you?"

We get the place Feb 1. Tentative plan is to move in on Jan 31st (sunday), hopefully with help from people.

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Should get a job.

Hung out with the housemates yesterday, getting drunk, having fun.

Zoey claimed that seeing it makes her day when I get giddy or loud or excitable about something, because she think's that it's a rare thing to behold. She considers it an achievement, something special, to extract me from occluding half-smiles and ennui.

Work is over for at least a week. I've brought Scooter the cactus home and I only slept two hours last night for unknown reasons. I'm celebrating something, freedom, sunsets, christmas, I don't know, by sitting in the dark with snowdrift music. I'm just cold enough, discomfort registers if I just my concentration just enough.

I'm idly sifting through holdenk's ebooks on how to ... entertain and how to ... learn math. Both subjects are leather-bound.

I am relaxed and without thought, I am comfortable being alone and idle.

Current Music: Slowdive - 40 Days | Powered by Last.fm

Man, the New York Dolls are really good.

I'm on a New York/CBGB's kick at the moment. I want to say that Richard Hell is my favourite because he's all jagged, but the New York Dolls are ....

Like they play this dirty rock and roll that's totally about sexin' and boozin' and dope and being mean manly men, but they do it while wearing dresses and singing about not needing fixes but looking for kisses. They've got a song about regularly enjoying bad girls that's ... actually positive. "Hey bad girl, I know why you're bad / But don't ya know, it just make me glad / When everybodys gonna put you down / Lookin for your friends, I'll be around."
Maybe it wasn't, but it's a really wonderful anthem when you read it the right way.

They also have a song about "We're asking you as a person / Is it a crime, is it a crime / For you to fall in love in with Frankenstein?", i.e. ugly people need love too. That's the last thing I expected out of what I thought was a sex and drugs and rock'n'roll band.

The annoying thing is that they're the fave band of someone (a bad girl, no less) I really dig, and I've already appropriated enough of her hobbies through the development of our friendship. So putting NY Dolls at the top of my list feels ... I don't know, flavoured. I really dislike liking a person's favourite band for reasons that are not their suggestion. It feels encroaching, even though it shouldn't whatsoever.

I mean, I didn't start listening to them until I read this wonderful book about punk rock, which was part of PR's syllabus.

Oh well, at least the Melvins are mine all mine.

Tags: music, new york dolls
Current Music: Justin Timberlake - What Goes Around.../...Comes Around | Powered by Last.fm

Some dude on Last.fm friended me out of the blue.

I think it's because, like me, he has Scooter listed in his top ten artists, surrounded by Queen and the Sex Pistols and the like.

Scooter is, like, a secret-society glyph worn on our rock'n'roll lapels. We recognize it and nod knowingly as we pass each other in the night. We're the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu of music consumption or something, some kind of taste anarchy.

Tags: bullshit, last.fm, music, scooter
Current Music: Lil' Wayne - Mr. Carter (feat. Jay-Z) | Powered by Last.fm

Wrote a Haskell function in which I embedded an anonymous function in an anonymous function. It type-checks at the highest level, but I don't know how to typecheck anonymous functions or let definitions (maybe I can just stick the type syntax in and everything will be okay?)

Is it sane to have anonymous functions embedded within other anonymous functions? I'm impressed in that I constructed the technique on the fly, on one line. Sure, I drew pictures of how I wanted to work my lists (of lists), but I didn't make little named functions first and then collapse them to clean up.
Anonymous functions make way more sense when you stop writing functions recursively ("so many recursive functions are written for you, just use your language's standard library" is what I'm told. Write as high-level as you can in functional programming (in less than five words, what are you basically going to do to that list of objects?), even though no programming language escapes implementation details.) Until then, I never really got the point.
My parameter names are currently a,b,c ... I should probably rename them before I completely forget what the code means. But first I'll go to bed, because my brain hurts.

Oh, I should probably learn HUnit and all that jazz. I have no idea if this function actually works, and I still have to design and write the function which invokes what I worked on today.

Current Music: Elliott Smith - Pictures of Me | Powered by Last.fm

I have an emotional attachment to anything that ever passes through my life. People, events, emails, clutter, books, devices, layouts, dances, songs, etc.

And I am *terrified* of letting any of it go. To the extent that it causes physical discomfort to realize I have to get rid of something, to realize I forgot to save something, to realize I can't remember someone's name or forgot to get their email address.

I was reading a book I bought (with the intent to re-gift) about getting rid of clutter. (aside: this very sentence makes me feel like my mother. Oh dear) One of the things mentioned was about the crossing point between you owning your belongings and your belongings owning you. To me, it's fairly obvious where I am being owned.

The author also made the comment that, if something is so worth keeping, why is it being hidden away, out of sight (and therefore out of mind)? Anything worth keeping should be honoured and displayed. I agree with this, but at the same time, I am finding it difficult to figure out what that means to me; I want to honour everything. Not only is that not feasible, but it's totally unnecessary. All things were not made equal, and some events and items and people that pass through our lives are not meant to stay longer than the time they were actively there. The Internet encourages this stretch by making it easier for people to stay in touch. But let's be realistic: isn't it more important to spend quality time with those we care about deeply than to spend all day catching up on minute details of people we haven't seen or heard from in years?

Tags: life, rhetoric, thoughts
Current Mood: pensive

First guitar lesson was moks. I learnt a bit about some stuff and some other stuff, but nothing overly concrete. Have some things that I should do a bit more before next Sunday so I can actually hold the strings for a reasonable length of time :P

I had another shopping binge of hoboness. I ordered a bunch of jean patches, so I can keep on fixing up Mr. Bigg's pants, and hopefully get started on turning some of my other pants into raver pants. I still need to find a lens mills equivalent in Seattle.

I paid an old bill I'd thought I'd paid awhile ago for great justice. Its rather unfortunate that I can't update a lot of Canadian companies with my American address, so I have to really on my outstanding memory :p

I ordered some Rubles, some Euros, and some Riyals from my bank. My plan is to make a hidden pocket in my Russian hat and hide the money there for lols. Sadly the euro seems to displacing a lot of traditional "shifty" currencies. Any suggestions on other shifty/suspicious currencies to hide in a Russian hat?

Jerry found out that the late night coffee shop in belltown sells Leninade (A taste worth standing in line for!). I also discovered that there is supposedly a statue of Lenin in Seattle.

Last night was free beer @ the apartment building I live in. It was kind of scary seeing I live with a bunch of adults and stuff. I don't want to grow up yet :(

On the rave note: Infected mushroom is in Seattle in the new year, so that should be fun times.

My side projects are progressing, albeit a bit slower than expected.

Anyways enough for now.

Tags: random, seattle, work

Was playing backgammon online with a dude. At some point I timed out or something, for all intents and purposes cancelling out of the game whie I was about to lose a round in the middle of a ranked competition.

I was a little worried he'd think I was a jerk for disconnecting before I officially lost. He instead sent me an online voice message, apologizing for his XBox freezing. Wasn't that nice of him?

Current Music: Dead Can Dance - Saldek |

Gave blood yesterday.

Read that one can't give blood after doing cocaine.
Immediate thought: "Well, that seals it .... no cocaine for me."
Derived thought: My most immediate and visceral rejection of cocaine winds up being its ability to harm my blood donation abilities.
Lemma: "I should use this reason the next time I'm offered a needle or anal sex, or women from qualifying countries that I'm not particularly fond of."

Current Music: John Cale - Heartbreak Hotel | Powered by Last.fm

I should make a list of things to do before I get around to bearing children.

On this list so far is travel to Europe, which is scheduled to end in conception. (And practical things, like researching pregnancy/birth/etc, which I do lazily already.)

Any suggestions?

Tags: life, lists, plans
Current Mood: pensive

Coded with Jerry-san on Friday night for delicious victory pandas. The frontend is approaching a state that one could claim is "usable" :p

Starting first guitar lesson in ~30 minutes :p

I like tea!

that is all

Tags: random

Haven't touched Haskell for a while since life has become social again (Wednesday, friend/Lexx night. Thursday, Stitch'n'Bitch. Friday, Twin Peaks)


But when I'm noodling with it, despite still not being very good (Struggling to read a file at the moment), I could see myself happily writing up Haskell code every day for a majority of my life. There's a certain ineffable equality that makes functional programming delicious whereas C++ is admirable but uninspiring.

Perhaps it's because Haskell is best written away from a computer.

Current Music: Elliott Smith - Pitseleh | Powered by Last.fm

"Winter is my favourite season because it forces the external world to match my emotional one ... snow brutalizes all shapes, all colour and all meaning from the horizon, visceral rewards only come through efforted digging."

"If I claim to be nihilist, then I cannot believe in myself for that would be hypocritical."

Art as meaning: Literary analysis and criticism substitute for spirituality and value systems."

Current Music: Nine Inch Nails - Eraser | Powered by Last.fm

Have been less likely to contribute to the #csc IRC channel, although it's still scrolling away at work. One of my co-workers, or more appropriately one of one of my co-worker's friends invited me to a random channel that they hang out on, which has a similar feel and snark with a bit less bitterness and a bit less meme culture.

It's nice being the young n00b again, instead of the old fart.

Current Music: Slowdive - Souvlaki Space Station | Powered by Last.fm