Dan Q
Could I be a happier bunny?
A belated birthday present from Claire arrived in the post this afternoon – a stack of Studio Ghibli movies on R2 DVD:
Damn; I love that girl.
I’ve just discovered that I have an assignment deadline tomorrow for an assessment I didn’t realise I had, in my weakest module. Joy!
On the upside, I’ve just looked at the assessment and it’s got very little to do with the module; in fact, it oughta be comparatively easy: still – 4-8 hours work I didn’t anticipate.
In other news; a stunning article (plain English, both an introduction to the subject and an ongoing summary) about the state of play with digital music, DRM, and all that on Bill Blog today. If you listen to music on CD or watch DVD movies, you oughta read this one.
Watching a Goo Goo Dolls concert on VideoCD.
They’re really quite remarkably good. I suppose you can’t help but respect the artistry that goes into making a song for which you need to re-tune your guitar such that five strings are
tuned to the same note. I mean, can you see the conversation now? “Hey, Robby: tell you what, why don’t we see what this sounds like…” And Gutterflower is a
simply stunning album.
Reading MMURTL v1.0 (Building
Your Own 32 Bit Operating System)
It’s really quite remarkably geeky. I spent Christmas reading quotes from it to my family, Claire, and her dad. Claire understood bits of what I said. Sometimes. It’s great – a 600-page
A4 book which contains at least 200 pages of solid assembly language (the most hardcore programming anybody could ever really justify doing) and another hundred of low-level C. It’s on
a short print run – the attached CD-ROM is on CD-R media.
Missing Claire.
[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]
[this post was partially recovered on 12 October 2018]
Is it actually possible to live a life without regret? It’s such a beautifully noble goal – and no, I’m not thinking here about any particular event – but I’m left wondering, here…
Based upon my experience of life so far – and I am about a third of my way through it, statistically – the things that challenge us, emotionally, don’t ever truly go away: they’re little things, shelved away but no less behind us than they are forgotten. It’s like a little “affective store”, where the things we treasure (or fear) are cast aside. We talk about ‘dealing with’ things. I’m not sure that term does justice to the process.
Perhaps it’s just me, but doesn’t this store get full quick? Maybe I’m just emotionally short-fused. If so, I think I must conceal it well. Nobody seems to notice. Much.
For the last few years, at about this time, I’ve given myself a challenge – part of an ongoing and neverending process of self-perfection (to an ideal I’ve never concretely defined): for the last year, this goal has been Tolerance – to gain an improved understanding of others, and to be less judgemental in my thoughts and actions (I think I’ve done quite well). Perhaps this …