Beefy.
Another post of point-formish random thoughts. Partly because everything's a bit scattered as of yet, and partly because I don't have very much that is substantial to say.

- I've starting almost training again, (sort of) in preparation for my trip in April. I decided last night that I should at least try and maintain some skill with my fists and feet. No pattern work (an experiment in memory) but most of the rest. Also, exercising in one's home in one's underwear is oddly comfortable. Pulling a muscle in your arm shadow-boxing is not.

- I helped an older lady pull a carton of soy milk from the shelf at Loblaws yesterday. She assured me that "with my kind of sensitivity, [I'll] go far in life." That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

- I am coming to the realization that I am in the grip of a media addiction, and I'm following current events more and more. Other than the headache induced by certain letters to the editors by profoundly over-sensitive people and those with nothing better to do than criticize trivial things, I feel fine.

- Perhaps as a direct result of the above, I am starting to harbour a rather deep resentment of our government and in fact, all bureaucracy period. Some of this has to do with Sheila Fraser's latest report about the 9-11 security bungling, but more in a "straw that broke the peon's back" kind of way. Most has to do with experience in the public service. No news yet on whether I'm going to snap and start blowing things up, but I'll probably bring this up again sometime.

- Perhaps as a direct result of the above (which is a result of the one above that!), I'm agreeing more and more with socialist libertarian ideals. Kicker is that "socialist libertarianism" (or libertarian socialism!) is probably better known as anarchism. Not the "CAUSE CHAOS!", Sid Vicious type, but the happy, utopian type. Still no word on if I'm going to start playing with dynamite, but again, I'll probably write more about this sometime later.

- Despite what you may have read two points ago, there is the occasional speck of gold for all the crap that the river rushes along.

- I need more movies. Zip has decided to completely ignore me now, so I'm giving them exactly one chance to get things working. If they don't do something by the end of the week I'm going to switch to another system. Still not giving up on the Internet movies, but this is discourageing to say the least.

- I've now learned that Alton Brown's book won some award for being a "reference" cookbook, which makes me want it all the more. Why can't the paperback edition just come out already? In a related note, I had a couple of burgers tonight and tried them Good Eats style, one of which at AB's recommendation of bun + meat + mayo + pepper. That's it. It was surprisingly good, but I feel like a culinary criminal for eating ground beef that wasn't cooked to the point of grey sterility and am now typing under the impending doom of food poisoning.

- Turns out that in addition to the retirement luncheon for the retiree in my office, it is increasingly likely that Friday afternoon will be spent drinking as well. This also gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, but probably for different reasons.

- Henry Rollins is a surprisingly deep person. Seems he does spoken word concerts, acts, writes and publishes poetry. Also doesn't drink, smoke, do drugs or any of the other destructive (but fun!) habits of other rock stars.

End of the pointiness!
My link queue is massively long, so I'm doing a bit of an expungatory purge here. Unleash the net!

Stopping internet pedophiles - a two-part story over on Wired. I for one am in full support of these guys, mainly because I think the ends justify the means. At least in some of these cases. It all depends on context, you know.

More Wired goodness, and really cool beans at that. There's a reason I did my coop paper on telecom, and it's because of really cool things like this.

I seem to have a fixation with Wired today*. Yet another neat piece about wireless, this time about blogging from your phone. While I'm not the hugest fan of having phones that think they're music players (or game systems, or cameras, for that matter), it would be awfully nice to be able to see something cool, take a picture of it and post it, all right then and there.

*Strange coincidence is that I also decided not to buy the magazine ever again today. All the articles are available on the net, so my money is going elsewhere.

Another article on online music. Seems that Apple and Napster (and Wal-mart and Puretracks and on and on) have some overseas competitors. I haven't checked out some of these sites (I hope they're still around!) but they just might be worth investing in.

Buy a CD recently and find out there's a whole bunch of extra content for your computer on it? This isn't new stuff. The whole concept of recording staticy screeches to a tape that goes in your computer sounds both totally insane, and yet oddly compelling.

Synaesthesia is the concept of blurring senses. Things like smelling the color blue, seeing Beethoven's 9th (the music, not the notation/sheets), etc. This project is basically the visualizations you have in Winamp, WMP9, etc, only done to the n-tillionth degree, and at DVD quality. For best results, I should think a heavy drug trip would be in order.

If I were a depressed, gothic, death-obsessed, Poe-like artist, the last thing I would want around me would be a talking balloon that repeats what I say in a high-pitched voice. Poor Strindberg. Sucks to be him, strangely amusing for us.

YAPC, otherwise written as Yet Another Photoship Contest. This one is a bit better than most, and works on some more subtle tricks.

Last one, a list of very strange band names. My favorites are Alcoholocaust, Jesus Chrysler Supercar, UFOFU and Zulu Leprechauns. If I were a superhero, i would go by the moniker Zulu Leprechaun.

Yawn. Time to relax. G'Night!  ¶ 5:32 p.m.