Month: April 2002

April 12, 2002

geeky monkey

So exhausted. Computer coming back together. Homework not done. Stunning video shot down on Park Point today. Calving glaciers and ice cliffs. Bergs being tossed around in the surf.

New Art Attack.

2:23 PM

This has felt like the longest week of my life. Aside from the details I’ve posted in Cromlech and a few stray thoughts that tug gently at the corners of my brain, my hours have been so convoluted with activity that I hardly remember specifics of what I’ve done.

But the day is too beautiful to spend notching on the Bedposts of Productiveness. I’m exhausted, and it’s the good exhaustion that comes after you’ve actualized your spirit in a glorious infinity of projects.

Gotta set up my Geek Prom outfit. The King Geek gets to appear on the Tonight Show. The week feeds directly into the weekend. There is no end. There is meaningful work, and it is good. The homework monkey has been tossed to the dirt.

Gorgeous, gorgeous day. The weather completely changes the social dynamic of Duluth. People are chilling in front yards on sofas, tossing back brews, watching firefighters help a house burn down…

April 10, 2002

refinement thru zionitry

Currently in Editing class, and I just got hit by the Shakes of Exhaustion. Went to bed last night around 1:00, and my roommate’s alarm clock went off at 5:15 and continued to blare morning radio at 10 minute intervals until 7:00. I left the apartment feeling light and springy, but something was wrong. A burden was missing. I spun around at the mailbox to run back for my laptop. Atlas’ sentence has been served, and I am next in line to take his place.

The rest of my morning has been fine, but the burdensome walk to editing class was too much for my frail body. I can’t keep my hands still enough to take notes, so now I cling desperately to the laptop for support.

Battery is at 78% charge and dropping quickly.

The ever changing Dane: Ryan brought a newspaper to the Wooch! lounge today, and read it for about five seconds before we dismembered it to make hats. With help from rubber cement and a cross of red construction paper I made a Pope hat, and pinned a name tag to my chest that said, “Hello, my name is Pope.” As luck would have it I was also wearing “Jon’s” International Harvester Racing Team shirt to authenticate my identity.

Thus armed I went out into the UMD Commons and chatted with representatives from Kai Alpha, everyone’s favorite religious organization on campus. We talked about many things, including the Lord Jesus, the Word and the far-reaching consequences of misspelling the word ‘kool’. Soon a few people from the Habitat for Humanity display came over and requested I pound a nail into a 2×4 to show my appreciation of their efforts. I blessed their cause, and signed the board Pope. Class soon beckoned, and I wore the hat for the next two hours until I stepped outside in the rain/sleet/snow/hail, which made short work of the hat’s absorbent fibers.

This pope soluble in water.

Talked over our philosophical video with our prof today, and it seems we’ll have a very nice start if I can get my computer up again. She was particularly pleased with the video of lights flashing by in the Silver Creek tunnel and our underwater footage from Tettegouche. I’m having a lot of fun with this project and I hope to maintain the interest in video long after the class ends. As the future director of Twin Peaks II, I need to start somewhere.

This afternoon I slid on my stomach like a penguin through an inch of slush across the Stadium front yard. Repeatedly. Until completely soaked and caked in mud and grass. Then we did it again so the RA could get some shots for his photography class.

Then Matt broke a bass string during this evening’s Sunny Wicked concert, and I saved the day by telling a bad bass joke. People laughed out of pity. I left for Wooch!.

My Zion article ran in this week’s Ripsaw, and everyone should read it now, now, now because it’s so good! I almost wept in joy when I saw what a wonderful job they did with the two-page spread layout (and that they spelled my name right). It made a beautiful complement to my arrangement of letters and words, all of which gleamed with genius.

It’s more than finally getting published in a legitimate newspaper. To me it is the culmination of my writing to date. The Zion article echoes with my college essays, journalism exercises and (perhaps most importantly) Cromlech. I’ve been at this profession little more than a year and I already sense a greatness condensing out of the air. I’m at a point where I can reach beyond familiarity and actually carry the undisclosed reader to a new place. Zion is progress and accomplishment; two wonderful things that college only allows me to glimpse indirectly. Here I am beyond college, interacting with a real and full world of character and possibilities.

My thoughts and perceptions have been refined to the point where I can pour them over the masses, and with any luck they will eagerly lap them up and beg for more. Soon the entire Duluth proper may cry foul when I miss a day at Cromlech. I really won’t mind such responsibility if it means I can justify shirking things that don’t interest me so much.

I am chopping wood.

April 9, 2002

parking lot banditry

Just watched the Ticket Bitch write out a ticket for someone parked at an expired meter. Three seconds after she finished he showed up to his car. A few angry hand gestures were exchanged, and he drove off.

Hmm. What if instead of writing tickets, the Ticket Bitch actually put a quarter into every expired meter? No doubt such a selfless act would unravel the very fabric of parking existence at UMD, as without the immediate threat of a $6 fine people will be reduced to foul barbarianism when looking for parking spots. Everyone will drive around with a stout axes propped up against their shoulders, waiting for a weakling to step out of his steel armor and WHUNK! …wrest the keys from the warm fingers, set the car on fire and pitch it over a cliff. Park your car in the vacant spot.

Without tickets the parking lots will eventually be populated by roving brigades on camels, picking at drivers like vultures on carrion. When the parking desert grows cold at night it will be populated by the tents and cookfires of these nomadic tribes. Gravelly shouts and filthy laughter will echo across the campus as they divvy up the day’s catch: Three rusty Fords for Yuudi, a small child with carseat for Jarein, and a shiny candy wrapper for the bumbling Glarab.

Then the pirates will come, their large clipper ships slicing through the pavement on the strong winds of Duluth.

April 7, 2002

bios checksum error

BIOS CHECKSUM ERROR

No interpretation of that message could ever imply something good. Further research into the matter proves it.

It’s been a wild, wild weekend. Saturday we drove up the North Shore, and got as far as Arrowhead before we turned around to go to an estate sale. I got two pairs of bamboo ski poles and a stack of LPs. Chris got a squeaking backscratcher that is topped with a fine female hand rendered in plastic.

After a stop near Iona’s Parking Lot to watch a juvenile bald eagle we ended up at Tettegouche. We tromped around for a few hours and I shot a whole bunch of excellent footage for my philosophy video project. We got back to Duluth around 6:00 and amidst numerous phone calls that requested my presence at social functions for the evening, I copied video from the camera to my computer and slowly threaded together a music video to a Matt Pond PA song. Right when it was complete I got a message from Jen demanding that I go to the Nerd House, and I accepted her conditions.

This morning I thought it would be a good idea to clean the dust out of my computer, so I took it apart and cleaned all the little nooks and crannies where funk collects. The processor heat sink was surprisingly dirty and took many Q-Tips to relieve it from its prison of filth. When finished I threw everything back together and booted up the computer to finish importing video. Might as well get somtin’ done today, ahyuk!

And was then greeted by the notorious checksum.

What could have caused this problem? Sadly, any number of things. Motherboards and cases are poorly designed such that there is no support under the processor. As you fight to get the heatsink on (whose bracket is made of cheap, flimsy plastic), the board twists and flexes under your burly man strength. Didst I bend something that not want be bended?

Or maybe it was the grain of dust caught under the heatsink, that had actually ground a small corner of the processor away.

I reset the BIOS jumper to restore the factory settings. No luck. Being ever so resourceful I booted up my laptop to download the latest BIOS so I could flash a clean version onto the computer. No luck. To flash the BIOS I need to disable the BIOS Guardian, which can only be disabled by accessing the BIOS. The whole reason I need to flash is because I can’t access the BIOS. Computers are not without a sense of irony.

So this entry is being written on my laptop as the computer sits in the corner and thinks about what he’s done. I even took away his BIOS battery to teach him a lesson.

Later: After lunch I gave back the BIOS battery, booted up the computer and got a chirp and a blank screen. No checksum error, no BIOS, no nothing. Poking around in the computer I saw I forgot to put the heatsink on the processor, but that shouldn’t be a problem because the system had only been on for about 15 seconds and AMD Duron processors naturally run cool. Right? Right?

I touched the processor and burned my finger.

Crap.

April 5, 2002

80 gigs of clutter

80 gig hard drive installed. Started ghosting the 10 gigger over at midnight, and right about the time Doug came home from a party I woke up to finish the job. 7200 RPM is wicked fast: Sunny Wicked fast. This baby cooks right along now, frying like bacon and eggs on a steamy griddle. Purrs like a kitten in the morning, in striking contrast to my old IBM drive that clunked and moaned like an angry old man with a walker. A cavernous piece of work, I now have over 60 gigs at my disposal. This amount of storage is sickening… what on earth could I possibly do with 60 gigs? More computer storage in this little beast than the entire world had in 1960.

Firewire PCI card installed. Getting a DV camera tomorrow so I can try my hand at homemade video editing. After that I wait patiently until Apple makes a PC version of the iPod.

This room is beyond any help that cleaning could provide. The only solution now would be arson.

Ugg. Me go bed now.

11:32 PM

A splendid day. So many good things to write about, so to avoid trivializing I will write about none of them. Finally saw Ocean’s 11, and it was the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. Smooth criminal stuff that drips with cool and a twist of lime. A guy that even spoke cockney. It thumbed all the right places in my brain.

A new Art Attack. One bad-ass looking pirate. Sketching from someone else’s drawings really gets you intimately acquainted with their style. Steve Purcell has a funny way of using very few lines and still giving his characters a definite mass and thickness. For me it makes it a great lesson, as my drawing has lately gotten too cluttered with thick, overdone lines. I’m afraid to commit to one quick, broad stroke as a boundary (usually I screw up the angle), so I will make a number of shorter sketch marks to make an outline. It’s an effective shortcut in the absence of skill, but I feel it is time to move on. Longer lines, fewer lines, glorious curves that are drawn once and never again. A beginning and end in one passionate gesture.

It feels as though someone is missing this evening. I have a pretty good idea who it is.

April 4, 2002

sock sublimation

My cotton socks are sublimating that sweet smell of decaying garbage. Before I know it they’ll turn into fruit.

I really need to clean this room.

I was reading Cat’s Cradle yesterday, and right as I read the word ‘bartender’ the Yonder Mountain String Band CD I was listening to said ‘bartender’. I’ve never had a coincidence like that happen before, and it was pretty cool.

None of my submissions made it into the April Fool’s Statesmullet. They ran a story that boasted “Construction on Weber music hall halted,” instead of mine that said “Weber music hall actually rec sports building, missile silo and mutant training facility.”

Eh, whatever. I write this crap more for myself than them. I haven’t had anything in the Statesman since before spring break, and it looks like I’ve been doing nothing but spinning my literary (ha! news? as literature?!) wheels for three weeks. Luckily my Ripsaw story next week will make it all justified.

Eugh. Socks have been banned to the hamper. I can still smell them.

It’s now 1:00 in the afternoon. I woke up three hours ago and went to bed eight hours ago. Time for a Sam Adams and some hard-core story editing.

April 3, 2002

freeform education

Wiki, wiki. Gotta eat this morning. Last night I wrote a novel as I slept, and it was one screwed up piece of work; and that’s all I remember about it. I’ve heard people say you can’t read while dreaming, and that obviously ain’t true. Not only can I read, I can compose literary masterpieces with the best of them.

What if college were free-form? What if I had one professor, and when I woke up in the morning I wrote to her,

Dr. Flagenstruden-

I’m gonna spend all of today reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. This evening I plan on sitting in Barnes and Noble for two hours listening to music. Tomorrow we can chat. Have yourself a splendid day.

And then set forth to do my proposed work. I wonder if this would work… I wonder if students (including myself) have enough personal drive to fill their own days with meaning, instead of getting crude hypodermic injections of it class.

Oh my goodness! New, new new! To make sure I follow through with my plan to improve my drawing skills as rapidly as possible, I’m starting a new section on Cromlech called Art Attack. It will showcase the day’s piss-poor sketches, and give you guys something to look at on the ‘net besides pr0n. As always with Cromlech, I promise no quality, and you have no obligation to check these out.

Note: Drawings that actually look good are likely study sketches from my Sam and Max comic book. Drawn, not traced, from actual pen and ink by comic genius Steve Purcell.

March 28, 2002

March 30, 2002

March 31, 2002

April 1, 2002

April 2, 2002

advanced filing system

It was to be a short trip to Miller Hill and Best Buy.

It became a three-hour whirling dervish of composing hip-hop at Schmitt Music, detuning a five-string electric mandolin, playing church hymns with a wonderful organ sample, pawing through dozens of CDs at Barnes and Noble, and listening to them at nifty listening stations. Mark bought CDs and tea, I bought Mark Twain and Vonnegut. Doug wanted a $10,000 synthesizer that wrote music for you, Dani wanted a Slip ‘n’ Slide and Anton wanted a ride home so he could pick up his car at my apartment.

Doug and I pretended we were raptors on the way back to Stadium, and made a racket yowling and pounding our heads against the front door. Eventually the RA came and opened the door with a request. “Keep it sane, guys.”

College. Rocks.

Hmm, my room is a mess again. I apparently have an advanced filing system that takes place on the floor, as all other horizonal surfaces are covered in computer, electronics, notes, mugs, books, incense, notes, bones, pictures, Slinky, duct tape, cigar box, rocks, CDs and various other things whose original purpose I have since forgotten (why the hell do I keep an emergency flare around?).

So, the filing works as follows. Items near the trash can are to be thrown away, but may still be salvaged if a new purpose is found. This group includes a sleeve of stale saltines, last week’s Duluth News Tribune and a Hawaiian shirt. Items already in the trash can are thrown away permenantly, and the separation between to-be-thrown-away and are-thrown-away keeps my garbage rooting to a minimum. I’m saving that talent for after I graduate.

Near the trash can, and usually not confused with the trash can, are clothes to be hung up in the closet. Today in this group we have a nice pair of pants, today’s sweaty socks, stuff sacks from Zion and a Hawaiian shirt. Clothes too rank to be worn again are immediately tossed in the hamper at the foot of my bed, where they mingle late into the night, listen to poetry and develop philosophical treatises. “That’s some hep funk you got goin’ on there, cat.”

More later. Sleep and/or homework now.

April 1, 2002

pleasantly splintered

A pleasant day. Reporting at 8:00 was cancelled, replaced by 9:00 peer conferences for our stories (including my Zion article for the Ripsaw) due this Friday. I sprung out of bed at 7:30 without electronic means, and puttered around until quarter eight, allowing for my usual one hour fifteen minute daily routine. Showered, got naked, tossed wet shower clothes in hamper to moulder, brushed teeth while carrying on conversation with Tom, cleaned my room and defragged my harddrive while eating breakfast.

I love the term defrag… if you’re a first-person shootin’ junkie it conjures up images of taking the hundreds of opponents’ bodies you’ve accumulated and sweeping them under a carpet somewhere. However, this disposal practice can be quite problematic without the right tools. To hide bodies you need really deep shag carpeting and a vacuum that can handle the fiber jungles, like Mark’s vac that has three settings for low medium and high shag.

If you don’t defrag under the carpet, where then can a routine killer hide the bodies? A corpse is difficult to carry, and the shape makes them awkward to stuff in even the largest backpack. What you need is a corpse grinder. Stick the nozzle in the top of the backpack, stick a corpse in the grinder, and crank the handle for a delightful slurry. Not only does the grinder make very efficient use of the space in a backpack, the end product also eliminates the need for a water bladder, or even food for that matter. Just stick your Platypus in the slurry and dine as you walk.

When in use, the grinder also plays a nice little ditty to entertain nearby monkeys.

For breakfast I had that new Nesquik cereal, which claims it will turn your milk into a bubbling pond of chocolate and give sugar poisoning to any children in a 10 foot radius. In reality it is like Coco Puffs, but with smaller puffs that don’t explode like shrapnel grenades in your mouth. While I prefer Cocoa Krispies for my morning hit of culinary aphrodesia, Nesquik has won my favor until the box runs out.

I love how of those three products, none of them spell their name right.

The entire hour of Editing class was spent trying to get the damn SynchronEyes program working. Sitting on my laptop with 4% battery life I digested McSweeney’s.com, SomethingAwful.com and theOnion.com, and received college credit for doing all of it.

Philosophy was cancelled due to professor illness for about the 100th time this semester, and I’m starting to get quite concerned for my professor. The gifted hour allowed some loafing in the Wooch! lounge, for which I purchased thumb tacks during a lapse in excitement. Afterwards I slumped off to the library to do some last minute studying with Crash Test Dummies and Cake for today’s Media Law quiz. The quiz went fine, I went home, watched the deleted scenes from “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” for the second or third time (I still haven’t seen the movie) and ate a bagel heaped with summer sausage and colby jack. I went to my room to take a nap and saw that 55% more of the floor was showing than I expected. “Where did all my crap go?” I wondered… and slowly remembered that I cleaned my room this morning. All crap accounted for, I dozed off for an hour to They Might Be Giants.

With my evening after jazz I decided to run a bit at the track; my first bout of cardiovascular exercise since the summer. Well, first aside from snowboarding, which not really exercise and more of a refining of one’s ability to bear flesh wounds. I ran, it hurt, I ran some more, it hurt some more, I ran, the endorphins kicked in, and I kept running for an hour. Probably got in four or five miles, I’m not sure. Counting laps is for losers that need proof and bragging rights. The real men (and tough women) run until they get tired, then keep running.

I probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow. Luckily my computer is right next to my bed, so if I can worm across three feet of floor that has been plunged back into an absolute mess, you’ll get to hear about every bit of splintered muscle and grindly tendon.