Wed 19 Nov 2008
Someone found an old box of these at work, and were giving them away in the break room. Our T1 is down today, so I’m relaxing!
Wed 19 Nov 2008
Yes, that is a severed pigs head in the background… I had a rather colorful Tuesday night. Cap, Azmodeus, and I headed up Milwaukee to check out a new metal venue. They book a lot of blacker stuff, haha. The venue was extremely dark, so I had to wait for other flashes to go off before quickly snapping pictures. Good times!
Sun 16 Nov 2008
The best German in town. Brauhaus is one of those restaurants that you wish was across from your apartment.
Das boot!
Sat 15 Nov 2008
So this is the kind of stuff that happens a block away from me at Congress? Good Lord.
Fri 14 Nov 2008
I won’t ruin it for you, but you really, really need to turn up your speakers and burn the rope.
http://www.mazapan.se/games/BurnTheRope.php
Thu 6 Nov 2008
After about a year living in Chicago, I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that I take part in every activity that seems even remotely interesting to me here in the city. This has involved several personal sacrifices (most of them financial), but the results have always been satisfactory: I travel out-of-state much more on holiday (hopefully to Alaska this winter for the Iditarod with Adam), and I am tentatively planning a trip to Italy or Germany next summer; I have been able to spend a lot of time with the people I miss in Grand Rapids; I am almost always out of my apartment for various shows, (and I have made new friends as a result); and I am more involved in causes that have become important to me. All this has proven very useful, even as my crummy apartment has become less so.
So now that my first 12 months are up, I was especially happy that thanks to Margaret’s quick e-mail, I was able to get a ticket to the Obama rally in Grant Park last Tuesday night. Like most people I took the bulk of the day off work, and since the city recommended that downtown businesses let their employees out at 3 pm, it wasn’t too difficult to get to the park on time.
It goes without saying that this election was important to me, and what was so amazing about the rally was the outrageous diversity that I miss out on during my commute between Wicker Park and Hyde Park. I have never felt so comfortable with strangers. The weather was perfect, and Obama’s victory speech was articulate and serious. Despite my natural aversion to crowds, I finally let myself relax on Tuesday night; my friends from Michigan kept in touch and were able to celebrate with me, and I finally felt comfortable enough to hope that I was there for the beginning of something good, instead of the simply the end of what was bad.
The New York Times used a 96 point type for Wednesday’s headline, announcing an Obama victory that I was a very small part of. They have done that just three other times in the paper’s history. According to Kottke, they are as follows:
- MEN WALK ON MOON
- NIXON RESIGNS
- U.S. ATTACKED
- OBAMA
It would be fair to say that I am not especially hopeful for simple solutions at this time, but what little faith I have was gently pushed forward on Tuesday night. I was also happy to read about what happened in Michigan and Kent County, as I had voted in favor of both proposals. The only thing that becomes a bit more difficult is that after a year away from my family and friends, the rally seemed to punctuate a part of my life across the lake that I didn’t necessarily want to distance myself from. I suppose I should have seen that coming.
-
- Well outside of Grant Park, the crowds were already enormous. This was taken around 6 pm.
-
- The initial line for ticket holders. We waited for about 30 minutes before the crowd started to move.
-
- The second security checkpoint, which I was happy to be finished with.
-
- Darrin makes it past the final security checkpoint.
-
- This is the first thing you see coming down into the park. Well over 60,000 people in the ticketed area alone.
-
- Another young person in his late 20's.
-
- People were literally dancing in the empty streets as people poured out of the park and headed toward the El.
Thu 6 Nov 2008
I can’t sleep, so I am going to subject you to what insomniacs find on youtube:
Michael Bolton
Eric Adams (Manowar)
This is a tough call. I’m going to have to go with Eric Adams, I think… if only because he is performing in front of a massive crowd in Milan, Italy. I also love the extra “yeeeeeaaaaaaah!” that he can’t help but add at the end. That, my friends, is Metal.
Thu 6 Nov 2008
So I finally found the time to update Wordpress to 2.6.3, which was pretty painless. I also converted my traditional install to a Conversion Checkout, which will make this a lot easier in the future. Fiddling around with Wordpress was a welcome change from Drupal, which has proven fairly frustrating at work. After much deliberation we decided to use Drupal 6 for our new site, despite the fact that many of the critical modules are only available in development snapshots. CCK 6.x-2.0 was just released today, which is a good start, I guess. One of these days I’ll write in detail about our project, which is actually pretty interesting. We’re hoping to pull in content from our ContentDM instance, as well as catalog records directly from Millennium. Stored as nodes and available by faceted search, our users will have the kind of flexibility that most libraries daydream about.
I have thoughts and pictures from the Obama Rally in Grant Park last night that I will try to post tomorrow. Hope everyone is well.
Thu 30 Oct 2008
I went to the Portage Theater last night (I’m going back tonight) to catch back-to-back versions of The Thing. The 50’s version pits the mad scientist - advocating a gushing, scientistic approach to dealing with the alien- against an airforce pilot who immediately recognizes the levity of the situation and deals with it accordingly. Instead of listening to the Nobel prize winner and trying to reason with the creature, he firebombs the shit out of it. An ironic solution for a script that repeatedly associates the scientist with the horrors of the atomic bomb. You can guess who gets the girl in the end, right? Ef you, science.
The blanker (although much more entertaining) Carpenter re-make offers little in way of character development, as the primary conflict is actually between the alien and the humans. On the other hand, it is much more entertaining, and gives us one of the seminal badasses in sci-fi/horror film history: R.J. FUCKING MacReady.
Kurt Russell’s character has absolutely no interest whatsoever in… well… anything, really. Except drinking. It could be argued that his survival in this film is primarily due to the copious amounts of J&D that he consumes, instead of over-thinking every situation and becoming a paranoid psychopath like the rest of his co-workers. The bottom line is that if you haven’t seen either of these movies, now is the time to rent them.
Best scene in the Carpenter re-make is embedded below. Poor pup.
Photos from the trip:
Wed 29 Oct 2008
This is how I feel this holiday season. This clip shows the ups and downs of having a name like “Rusty” and spening long periods of time in a library. If only I could dance like Anthony Michael Hall.
EDIT:
2009 New Year’s Rsolution: Not only learn to dance as well as Anthony Michael Hall, but grow up to look as badass as Anthony Michael Hall.
