9 posts tagged “stupid”

I dunno if I ate something bad yesterday or what, but around bedtime, I got these really bad stomach cramps, and nothing was really helping them, so I just went to bed. Laying down helped them a bit, but not entirely. I still fell asleep without too much trouble...

But then I had House-related dreams all night.  Seriously, it's like I was marathonning the next 4 seasons of House for no apparent reason. It was fucking retarded.

13 joined a band as the singer, just on the side, to relax and kick back, but then they wanted to go pro, but they didn't want to make her choose between medicine and showbiz, and the drummer was talking to House about it.

Taub was taking samples of the inside of a tanker truck of some sort, but then it blew up with him inside, but he escaped out the bottom with just some minor burns and a really dirty face.

Kumar (lawl) was sleeping in the nursery because he had formed a bond with some random woman's baby, and he was obsessing about making sure that the baby would never experience bad things, or mean people, or something.

I DON'T KNOW. INDIGESTION DOES STUPID THINGS TO ME.

Okay seriously what the fuck is up with my dreams.

Me and a friend (possibly from high school, but I don't know which one -- possibly some sort of biphasic amalgam of two or three of them) were out travelling with two others, and we stopped for a night at a campground with cabins, and rented a cabin. They looked a little smallish, so it was decided that me and my biphasic friend would rent one, and the others would rent another nearby one. 

We went into the place and the landlady / cleaning lady was there (it was quite late at night by this point, I think, so it was a little odd). She looked like Andromeda from the horrible Roddenberry series "Andromeda" starring Hercules.  Something was said, and she seemed particularly bitter, and then she left.

There was a small entrance way with either a raised platform or a shelf or something -- seemed like a nice place to toss some pillows and lounge during the day, or toss sleeping bags, etc., when you had extra guests.    There was a kitchen upstairs and then the beds were in the basement. Keep in mind that this was a 'cabin', and seemed reasonably sized, triangular, and cozy from the outside, but was increasingly large and tricked out on the inside.

My biphasic friend and I went down some stairs which then turned into this weird pit with like, uhhhh... the walls were robin's egg blue, and there were two beds at the bottom of it, with lamps and night tables.  there were still stairs, but like, the pit was about the width of two single beds, and angled but not. there were two sets of stairs, one on either side of the pit, and about half the width of a single bed, and super light/springy. I was like "oh god they're going to break and I'm gonna be trapped down here forever, wtf is this place."

We get down, and I undress and climb into bed, and I guess my buddy did too?  The lights went off. In the dream I dreamt something I don't remember while I slept.  I woke up, and my buddy was gone, but instead of being in a tiny narrow pit, now I was in a normal sized room off a very spacious corridor. The door to get out of the room and into the corridor though, was like, stone, or metal, heavy, carved. There was a goat skull on it, and red writing I couldn't read (though it was in English -- I just can't read in dreams usually).

As I wandered the corridor poking my head into various rec rooms, game rooms, media rooms, bedrooms, etc., I was suddenly struck with the need to go to the washroom.  So I start looking for washrooms, and for some reason I was holding out for one with a bidet. I found several nice washrooms, a couple really tiny washrooms, but none had a bidet, and I kept searching even though I was starting to get desperate.  I finally found a room that had like, tubs and basins and three types of toilet with bidet (the Japanese-style all-in-one, the kind that was in that hotel in New York in Crocodile Dundee with the thing being seperate from but attached to the toilet, and then some sort of ass-bath), but it was a big wide open room, but since I was alone, I figured that was fine.

But then, suddenly, I heard the front door open upstairs and lots of voices and heard the footsteps of people coming in. Welp, I had to go for a more private washroom now! It didn't strike me weird at the time that I could hear this even though I was like, a 40 minute walk from the front door, and like 30m underground from it.  Also confusing, in retrospect, is al the natural light there was in this facility.

I exit the weird bidet room, and suddenly run into another friend from high school who wasn't actually on the road trip at the beginning of it. Also somehow along the way I've lost my boxers and they've been replaced with a towel that falls down just then. I get embarassed and re-tie it/hold it up, and he's like "we're late, hurry up, let's go", and I'm like... what?

We walk back along the corridor, only now instead of blue it's become tan/beige, and there's rooms, but they're all uhhhh like, in an art gallery or a museum, with statues and paintings and artifacts and then colourful wigs, costumes, etc.  By this time I'm surrounded by nearly everyone I knew in high school, and I still really have to go to the washroom, but now there are no washrooms to be had, bidet-equipped or not.  We get upstairs, and there's like 39432 bedrooms up there with big luxurious beds, which is where my biphasic buddy had gone, and I wished I had noticed them when we had come in because the tiny bed in the pit was weird.  Of course, the first floor had been spacious (more spacious than the outside of the building suggested) when we entered, but nothing like this. It was ridiculous.

I woke up shortly after that. 

WTF does THAT mean?

Here's another V6 video, it's all summery and shit.

Genius? If that's the new term for windowlickers....

So, after confirming with as many sources as I could that iTunes 8 didn't do anything retarded for most users of WinXP SP3, I upgraded, specifically for the Genius feature. 

With 11500 songs in my library, it took 2¼ hours to scan my library, upload it, analyze it, and download again so I could get recommendations and playlist creation.  It took forever, but it's pretty much one-time only, as I understand it, so it's understandable and acceptable.

What isn't acceptable is the way the Genius sidebar acts.  The Genius playlist builder and the Genius sidebar are two aspects of the same thing. The playlist generator uses your play data, the play data of other Genius users, etc etc, to create a playlist based on a song you choose. The sidebar recommends music that's similar to, or may be of interest to fans of, the song you're currently listening to. That's cool, but most of my music doesn't get actual recommendations -- it's too obscure, or it's mainstream, but not in the iTunes store.  That's cool, I thought, I'll just close the sidebar so I don't have to look at it, and retain my playlist making ability.

WRONG.

If you want the playlists, you have to look at the ads for songs to buy on the iTunes store.  You can have both, or neither. You cannot have the playlist generation, but choose not to have the sidebar/ministore-esque thinger open.  And that's bullshit.

It may not be a huge problem though, as the playlist generator doesn't like most of my music either -- not even music I downloaded from the iTunes store.  Of all the Ayumi Hamasaki I've bought from the iTunes store, only one song, not bought from the store, and badly tagged, formed a playlist. What?  Based on random testing, about 10% of my music is actually Geniusable.  And that's bullshit.

I decided to try a mainstream Western song, and see if that got me better results; still, only about 10% of them give me results.  I decided to try "Time after Time" by Cyndi Lauper, as it's one of my favourite songs from the 80s.  The playlist generated:

1. Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time
2. Some Punk Group - Walk Like an Egyptian
3. Madonna - Like a Prayer
4. Eric Clapton - Tears in Heaven (Unplugged)
5. Destiny's Child - Survivor (Victor Calderone Club Mix)
6. Joan Osborne - One of Us
7. *NSYNC - Bye Bye Bye
8. Hilary Duff - Wake Up (DJ Kaya Dance Remix)
9. ABBA - Mamma Mia
10. Blink 182 - What's My Age Again
11. Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
12. Cyndi Lauper - When You Were Mine
13. Barenaked Ladies - Pinch Me
14. Santana - Maria Maria
15. Tori Amos - Silent All These Years
16. Janet Jackson - If
17. Britney Spears - Lucky
18. Belinda Carlisle - Heaven is a Place on Earth
19. Evan and Jaron - Crazy for the Girl
20. Cyndi Lauper - All Through the Night
21. Jewel - Who Will Save Your Sould
22. Celine Dion - That's the Way it Is
23. Simple Plan - Shut Up!
24. No Doubt - Don't Speak
25. Jefferson Starship - Nothin's Gonna Stop Us Now

Now, I'll admit that none of these are particularly horrendously out of character (except maybe the Marilyn Manson, the Blink 182, and the Simple Plan).  I also suppose that the propensity towards shitty songs in this playlist is my fault for having those shitty songs in the first place.  Let's try it again with a Japanese song.

1. Ellegarden - Salamander
2. L'Arc~en~Ciel - DAYBREAK'S BELL
3. Simple Plan - Me Against The World
4. Goldfinger - Superman
5. The 5.6.7.8's - Woo Hoo
6. Blink 182 - Stay Together for the Kids
7. Frou Frou - Let Go
8. Aerosmith - Dude Looks like a Lady
9. Jewel - Your Were Meant for Me
10. Ellegarden - The Autumn Song
11. Sia - Breathe Me (Ulrich Schnauss Remix)
12. No Doubt - Hella Good
13. Goldfinger - 99 Red Balloons
14. Sting - Desert Rose
15. Crazytown - Butterfly
16. Blink 182 - What's My Age Again
17. Eric Clapton - Tears in Heaven (unplugged)
18. Simple Plan - Perfect World
19. Ellegarden - Middle of Nowhere
20. L'Arc~en~Ciel - My Heart Draws a Dream
21. L'Arc~en~Ciel - Seventh Heaven
22. Dir en Grey - -saku-
23. Rammstein - Ich Will
24. Gackt - Cube
25. 絢香 - 三日月

Better, I'd say.  Better songs, and, again, only a few that don't really fit (Jewel? Sia? Sting? Eric Clapton (again??)?)

From what I understand, it should get better over time as more people use Genius and the algorithm has more info to work with, but still... only 10% of my music is Geniusable + I have to look at the shitty sidebar that isn't resizeable and takes up way too much screen real estate?  Not ready for primetime - not on my computron, at any rate.

So, even after all the retarded I put up with today, when I left work it still wasn't over.  I had missed the delivery of my rental cell phone for my Canada trip next week, so I popped over to the post office to pick it up.  First it took 10 minutes to find the package, and then another 5 minutes while she tried to confirm, letter by letter, that my ID and the package matched. ARE YOU STUNNED? YES IT IS FOR ME, YOU STUPID TWAT.

It's the same uhhh phone I had two years ago, only now it has a Vancouver phone number, instead of a Seattle number. (shrug)  Kind of disappointing, but I guess I shouldn't expect much from rental telecom gadgets in North America.

Now, thinking about things I have to do in the next week or so to prepare for my trip and do while there, I get feeling overwhelmed. :/

At any rate, here's a video. UVERworld is awesome.

Felt kinda :/ all day.  Dunno why. Could just be the feeling of uselessness I have at work these days; could be that coupled with a bunch of other things all combining to make me :/.  At any rate, after work, I went shopping for supper stuff. Went to Valore, which I don't usually go to, but I felt like a switch-up. 

Picked up my things, and went to the check-out. Noticed they had point cards, but that I didn't have a point card. Asked for a point card. Woman kept ringing up my stuff as I filled out the form as fast as I could. She told me the total; I paid then returned to the form.

When I finished and gave it to her, I saw that she'd stacked my change (3000 yen in bills, 800-odd yen in change) in the tray with my point card and a paper explaining the point system.  I also noticed that I was holding up the line really badly, and since I hate it when people do that to me, I got really flustered. Grabbed the change and stuff out of the tray, but everything went flying! Money and papers and cards on the floor, my groceries about to fall. I caught them and took them to the bagging table, came back and grabbed some change, and then got out of the way. Noticed I didn't have the point card. A couple people from the line came up with change that I'd dropped, and the card.

It wasn't until I got out to the car that I realized, of the 800-odd yen in coins, I'd only managed to leave the store with 38yen. Here I am, kinda broke, just throwing my fucking money away. Might as well just have a cash bonfire, it'd be more efficient. :(  That really set me off, and I was sad all night.

Or rather, I was sad until I started playing Simcity 4, and then I didn't really notice four hours passing.  "What? How is it 11? How did that happen? I only started playing a little bit ago....."  (shrug)

Anyway, here's a video of my awesome third year students from last year singing at the chorus contest.

courtesy of me and Yahoo! Live.

Today was a pretty big waste.

Earlier this week, someone on a Flickr group about my camera model said that he'd made a print of one of his photos, taken on best quality, at 18"x12", and it looked fantastic, which was a surprise to him.  He'd found that he could make prints that big at Costco for $3, so he figured hey, why not.

The picture I decided on.

I figured, hey, I should try that out, because being able to make prints that big would be awesome.  I got together some photos on a memory card that I wanted to print... 18 that I wanted at small size, and then this one BIG one.  I waffled between two photos for a while trying to decide which one I'd get jumbo sized, and finally decided on a leaf in the water pic.  I kept the other one I'd been debating on the memcard for small-size printing, and headed to the photo place.

Got there, used their machine, did my thing, chose my pictures and sizes, went up to pay.  They accepted the 18 small ones but told me that I'd gone about it wrong to print the giant one.  In the past, whenever I've wanted to print a non-standard sized image, I'd just order it seperately, in whatever size, and then ask them to amend the size on the order when I took it to the counter.  That's the way, but not for giant Digital Crystal Prints, apparently.  They sent me back to the other computer I had to order from, and did my thing.  I looked at the image sizes, which of course were in metric.  I did a quick conversion in my head, and decided that the biggest size was closest to 18x12.  Chose the option to have a lab tech look at my pic and fiddle with it to make it print nicer (it doesn't cost any more, so why not), and went up to order.

So, the big print will take a week to be prepared (probably longer than normal because I chose the lab tech option, but even if I had chosen to print as-is, it still would have been 4-5 days to be prepared), and cost me $30.  I decided that I wouldn't be doing it again unless it was as gifts, or some sap wanted to buy a picture I'd taken, which is unlikely.  At this point, there's still about 20 minutes before my small prints will be ready, so I bugger off for a bit.

Congratulatory Bouquet

I had to pick up drinks, so I stopped at the newly opened Lawson Station in town (that's a convenience store) to do so.  I wanted to check the place out, see if I knew anyone who worked there, see if they had a better selection of instant soup, and so on.  Bought my drinks, and a soup, and checked out. The woman then railroaded me into filling out a form (which she re-filled out because my handwriting is atrocious lately) to get a Lawson Point Card. I figured that was fine.  Then, as my free gift for signing up, I received chicken karaage. :/  Way to help me out on the diet, lady.  I figure it's alright though, since it's only one day.   Took this picture of a congratulatory bouquet that was outside the store just as I left.

My other thing I wanted to do while I was out today was pick up a new pen and a small moleskine-like book that I could carry in my pocket. I find myself having ideas lately for stuff to write about, stuff to do, etc etc., but forgetting before I can write it down.  I looked when I was at the convenience store, and they had some bright green ones, plastic cover, elastic band to keep it shut, a place for a pen, but only like, 20 pages.  I figured I'd leave it, and try to find one elsewhere.  If I could find something SO CLOSE to what I want at a convenience store, surely I could find exactly what I wanted at a stationery store, or the stationery section at a department store. No prob!

Prob!  I went to the stationery store I often go to for school related stuff, and uhhh nothing. They had stuff that was retardedly small and in the form of a notepad instead of a booklet (and also looked like it had been sitting on the shelf since 1968), but nothing with a band to keep it shut, etc.  I stopped at Apita and looked, and they had BIG books with bands, but the pages were all like... half filled with fields to fill in about your school trip. -_-  They had books that were the perfect size, but lacked a band.  I asked if they had wide elastic bands in the department, because that wouldn't be bad, if the band was seperate.  No, they didn't have any elastic bands at all, let alone wide ones. Thanks.  So I didn't get anything like that today...

Late Afternoon Rice Field

4 comments

I stopped back at the photo place to pick up my small photos.  I noticed two things: (1) they were brighter than I expected, but not so bad -- just let me know that I hadn't calibrated my video right after updating drivers last week and (2) the picture of leaves that I had planned to get printed big size was here, in my clutch of small pics... which meant that somewhere between home and the store, I'd gotten confused and had the wrong photo (the one at left) printed large... it's not a PROBLEM, because either of them work for the purpose, I guess...  While I was in there, I copied down the sizes of the large prints they did so I could do some proper conversions at home for when I inevitably wrote about it...

The biggest size, that I'd figured was close to 12x18 was 457mmx560mm.  Google tells me that's closer to 18x22inches, which is HELLA BIGGER than I'd wanted. -_-  The next size down was 356x432, which Google says is about 14x17, which would have been closer. So not only did I get the wrong picture printed big, I got it printed at the wrong size.  On the upside, if it turns out looking good, then I'll know that the highest quality prints I can get from my camera are printable at any size up to 18x22, which is good to know. If it doesn't look good, it just means I'll have to do another test some day with the smaller size.

And... that's it.  Still can't check to see if I got tickets to the V6 concerts I wanted to go to... umm... no plans for the weekend at all... umm... (shrug) I guess that's it.

Ohh no wait, I have entertaining merchandise to show you! 

Yoda backpack

Jack Bauer's manpurse from 24 Season 5

I also found this: Jack Bauer's manpurse from season 5 of 24.  You know you want it.  I laughed and laughed for no good reason.

[19:11] [Jack] so, i went out shopping for hard drives, hoping i could pick one up locally and transfer my shit tonight, instead of having to wait 5-10 days for delivery
[19:12] [Jack] all the stores primarily had external drive
[19:12] [Jack] the internal drives they did have were all buffalo or io-data
[19:12] [Jack] aka, off-brand maxtors
[19:12] [Jack] the biggest they had was 320 gigs
[19:12] [Jack] and here's the kicker
[19:13] [Jack] whereas i can buy a 750gig seagate on the internet for like, $270, at these stores i can buy shitty 250gig off-brand maxtors for the same price.
[19:13] [Jack] for the $120 i can buy a 500gig drive on the internet for, I could pick up an off-brand 40gig drive at these local stores
[19:14] [Jack] so, i guess i'm buying online

[00:26] [Jack] there's a chicken on cartoon network, speaking czech
[00:29] [Jack] apparently her rooster keeled over from lack of milk
[00:30] [Jack] so the chicken had to go on a fetch quest
[00:31] [Jack] the cow needed grass, but the grass needed water, so she had to find a dam and break it down, and then the grass grew and she collected that and took it back to the cow and the cow at it and made milk and then she took the milk to the rooster and the rooster woke up and wa sike "oh, i'm better, and soooooooo mellow and czech. here, i have a berry in my mouth, come take it from me baby'
[00:31] [no_name] ..what
[00:32] [Jack] who the fuck knows man
[00:32] [Jack] czech cartoons on cartoon network need to stop
[00:32] [Jack] now there's a girl named eva with very messy hair
[00:33] [Jack] mommy and daddy were perfect together
[00:34] [Jack] then one day she daydreamed about getting it on with a famous scientist, so daddy got angry and mommy left with eva
[00:35] [Jack] then the scientist, many years later, blew something up, and he left, and mommy turned into a redhead and conveniently a helicopter appeared just then to take slutty mommy and eva away
[00:36] [Jack] then after the wedding lightning hit the helicopter and mommy and eva bailed out. they landed in the middle of a busy intersection, and the traffic cop decied to pick up on mommy
[00:36] [Jack] then, during lunch with the traffic cop, mommy took off after a sailor with eva
[00:37] [Jack] mommy's too busy being a dumb slut to brush eva's hair
[00:37] [Jack] while using a telescope, mommy saw a big buff guy at the pool, and left the sailor for him
[00:38] [Jack] soon winter came, and mommy was painting shirts, and suddenly she heard an opera singer upstairs, so she jumped cocks again
[00:39] [Jack] mommy has had like 9 hair colours by now
[00:39] [Jack] now she's just brought a painter home to the flat she shared with the opera singer
[00:39] [Jack] now they've moved in with the painter
[00:40] [Jack] and he's apparently an impressionist painter and she didn't realize that, so she's upset that she has two noses, and 5 titties in his picture
[00:40] [Jack] now she's so distraight she's just jumped off a bridge with eva in tow
[00:40] [Jack] and luckily landed on a diver
[00:40] [Jack] they got married with him in his diving helmet
[00:41] [Jack] haha
[00:41] [Jack] she never saw the diver out of his outfigt. he looked big and buff in the outfit, but was actually a tiny little wor m of a man
[00:41] [Jack] luckily a dance instructor entered just then
[00:41] [Jack] so she left with him
[00:42] [Jack] now they're dancing, and she's fallen for the drummer of the band
[00:42] [Jack] but he drums all the time and she's decided she hates the sound
[00:43] [Jack] now she's callen for the hair dresser that gave her three-coloured hair
[00:43] [Jack] and now they're about to get it on, when he puts eva out on the balcony in the cold so they can do their thing
[00:43] [Jack] and she's like
[00:43] [Jack] i just want someone to brush my hair
[00:43] [Jack] THE END.
[00:47] [tavaryn] :(
[01:06] [h1nch] u can brush my hair
[01:06] [h1nch] undress me everywhere