disoriented
I am back in York with a week to go to my dissertation deadline (technically less - horrors - since I should really make sure I have it ready by Friday so that it can be bound in time for a Monday submission), a list of jobs to apply for, a messy collection of documents I need to apply for a post-study work visa, a huge flock of unpacked boxes, and absolutely no idea at all where I’m going to stay over the coming year.
Oh, sheer terrifying uncertainty… it’s been a long time since our last dalliance.
nine things about linux
I was going to entitle this post “Yay Penguins!”, then decided that perhaps a less cryptic title would be appropriate to something that’s going to be kind of long and rambly and unattractive to read anyway. Actually I don’t really know if anyone would be interested, but I really wanted to document this somewhere for myself at least.
My pet project over the past week has been to finally attain Linux mastery, or at least the ability to use it without stumbling every step of the way; I’ve been very intrigued by the increasing usability and popularity of Ubuntu and I’d been wanting to give it a go for a while.
Having run Linux for a week now, without booting into Windows the entire time (except once when I really wanted to use Photoshop), I am convinced that now is a better time than ever before for the average computer user to make the switch. Screenshots and a VERY long post - you have been warned - after the jump.
(I apologise now, by the way, if anyone reading this via RSS sees the entire post instead of an excerpt. I have no idea how it works.)
stuck in a trough
It just dawned on me that I have precisely two weeks left to my dissertation deadline and I am still writing at a crawl instead of revising this patchworked monster - and writing badly, too! I have slightly over 16K and much of it repeats itself, and I still have a point and the conclusion to go, and I cringe at the thought of having to cull, rearrange, and rewrite large chunks of it.
Qué horror! Where did August go?
the foreign question
This post isn’t what it probably sounds like. I’m not going into a lengthy, thoughtful, well-considered (ha) spiel about being foreign in England/being foreign in Australia/the evils of having foreign talent invade Singapore (which I don’t really believe in anyway). No, I intend to talk about pop music.
I’ve been listening to a great deal of Japanese music lately; in fact I’ve been listening almost exclusively to it, except when I think I should take a break and put on my entire library for a while. In particular, Jpop groups Kanjani8 and NEWS have been dominating my airtime. I think I’ve actually created a playlist that consists exclusively of the songs I have from them (plus one invading Arashi song). And I don’t really have a lot - maybe 30ish - so you can imagine how many bajillion times I’ve heard each individual song by now, but I’m still not tired of them.
It dawned on me yesterday, while watching a NEWS concert DVD with English subtitles (thus being the first time I’ve actually seen what the lyrics mean in English, I have no idea what I’m singing along to in Japanese most of the time), that actually, if these songs were written in English with exactly the same tune and arrangement, I would probably hate the large majority of them - or at least be indifferent towards. This is because most of the lyrics turned out to be pretty inane, and as far as English songs go… even if everything else about it is wonderful, I have a lot of difficulty really loving songs with bad lyrics. I’m talking lines like “show me your secret paradise, baby” and “let’s dance and throw off our clothes” - which admittedly sound better in Japanese, but still!
Yet - I still love my trashy Jpop songs. It’s totally inexplicable. I know the lyrics are ridiculous, but the tunes are brilliant. They absolutely define catchy and the singing is good (surprisingly, Japanese manufactured boybands can indeed sing). Which makes me wonder what it is that makes me like a song, and whether listening to foreign songs is actually a better barometer of what your tastes are in music, pure music, sans words and meaning and inflection. Or are lyrics and music inextricable from each other? Then why is it that I like these songs in Japanese but not if they were in English? I have no idea, honestly.
the shadow of the past
‘I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.’
- Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring
Leave it to my comfort reading to know exactly how I feel. This, right here, is exactly what home is I think; Frodo’s not being sentimental and soppy but he isn’t being cruel either, it’s just plain and honest and absolutely utterly true.
Every time I come home is like going through an alternate reality time warp, when I’m suddenly four, five years younger and have nothing much more to worry about than getting my work done, eating and sleeping, because my parents are here to run the house, my siblings are here for company, and even though everyone’s older now and they interact with each other differently, I’m picking up where we left off long ago. It’s like nothing ever changes, except that my brother gets taller and my father gets more grey hairs.
Sometimes I want to shake my brother silly, sometimes it bugs me that my sister keeps missing her morning classes, sometimes I wish that my dad would let me drive and that my mom wouldn’t put my laundry in everyone else’s wardrobes. But ultimately, even if I occasionally think an invasion of dragons wouldn’t be unwelcome, they’re still home, and they’re always going to be here, and wherever I go or whatever I do, they aren’t going to care and they won’t stop being my firm foothold. And maybe that’s what home really is.
15700 words and dying…
15700 words and dying…
i said, babe, you’re not lost
Now and then a particular song among my thousands really jumps out and speaks to me, and today it is this deceptively simple one, which I never realised was so beautiful until I heard Michael Buble sing it with the lights dimmed, video off, and eyes closed in Manchester last year.
*
Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have
Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me, give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied, satisfied
Maybe I didn’t hold you
All those lonely, lonely times
And I guess I never told you
I’m so happy that you’re mine
If I make you feel second best
Girl, I’m sorry I was blind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me, give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied, satisfied
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You are always on my mind
You are always on my mind
sweet child o’ mine
For a long, long time (since Christie implemented it at Avendesora way back when) I’ve been wanting an easy, idiot-proof way of including an avatar in my posts. Having searched high and low for a Wordpress solution a few years back and failed to find anything (other than tedious workarounds that would require me to memorise the filename of each image and type it into the custom field of every post), I kind of gave it up, but it occurred to me today that perhaps advances have been made since 2.2 and I really ought to see what 2.6.1 plugins have to offer. And I wasn’t disappointed! I found a fantastically straightforward plugin that works via dropdown menu - as all such plugins should work - and is so dead simple to configure that I didn’t even have to tweak my layout code beyond sticking a few lines of CSS into the stylesheet. And now I have an avatar on all my posts. I was so unnecessarily excited by this that I wasted a good hour or so uploading a tonne of icons, then going back and selecting one for each of my previous posts. Ah I’m easily pleased.
Here is a song to detract from the eyecandy-geekness of this entry:
It’s “God Knows…” by Hirano Aya, and it’s that song from Suzumiya Haruhi that my sister and I were supposed to sing at Animania last week. Neither of us had heard it before and the chorus gave us a helluva hard time (try it, it’s FAST!), but the song itself is really catchy! If you’re inclined to snag it, right-click on the player and you should see a “Download this song” option.
tech envy
I’ve been deliberately avoiding most of the iPhone/iPod Touch hype, telling myself confidently that I have no need for such devices, staying connected all the time is for people married to their email, and when my old, trusty 4-year-old 3G iPod dies on me (which I don’t think will ever happen, considering how strong it’s going still), I’ll be happy enough to upgrade to an iPod Classic rather than a Touch, because why do I need an MP3 player than does anything other than play music? And perhaps store some videos for me to watch while commuting.
Sadly my resistance has been assailed by the glut of iPhone articles I have been reading on my daily trawl of tech blogs, and by my sister’s recent acquisition of an iPhone, which my parents got for her because my dad was involved in Optus’s iPhone launch in Australia and could get it dirt-cheap. It’s so… shiny. The interface is lovely. There are some really fantastic apps available for it. There is, I have finally succumbed to realise, a wealth of benefits in having internet on the go. You can check out Google Maps if you get lost in the city. You can input appointments directly into Google Calendar instead of storing them on your phone calendar and processing them when you get home. You can watch Youtube. You can listen to internet radio (!!!)… and the list goes on.
I’ve always been thinking of making the switch to Mac when I move on from my Vaio, but I must honestly confess that my Macbook lust has never reached the level of iPhone lust I’m currently entertaining. Frustratingly, it is really incredibly expensive in the UK so I really doubt I’ll be getting it if I’m staying there to work. And I just changed my phone last year so there isn’t really an excuse to get a new one (I feel like this is my penance for impatiently dumping my cranky Motorola last summer - I should just have stuck it out till now huh).
Ah, shiny gadgets… why are they all so outrageously priced?
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