if this isn't nice, i don't know what is

Glow Worms, from Rainforest Explorer

I had an "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is" moment this afternoon. I went to the gym and had a pretty decent workout after a week off of lifting. It was in the high 90s here today, so it was too hot to sit in the apartment. This, combined with the battery on my laptop being virtually juseless, was an excellent excuse not to do any work and instead sit on the step outside my apartment and read. I'm reading River Town by Peter Hessler right now, which is like relaxing with a smarter, worldly, interesting friend at this point (I read Oracle Bones also by Hessler a couple months ago). I listened to "It's Frightening" by White Rabbits on a loop on my iqob, which I have heard enough times by now to be used to it, and really it was just there in the background to detach me slightly more from the world. There was a nice breeze, and it was the absolute perfect temperature for sitting in my post-workout soccer shorts and sports bra. Occasionally I would lie back on the sidewalk, which was nice and cool. And it was just so relaxing. After a little while, my favorite stray kitty came for a visit and curled up at my feet so that I would pet her. I have decided to name her Bellybellysunshine, as she shares a personality with my previous favorite stray kitty Mrs. Bellywhomper, who disappeared over Christmas. Bellybellysunshine wandered off after a while to chase bugs, and I continued reading the late chapters of my comfortable book. It was a nice afternoon. I hope I can remember it.

P.S. I just watched Life in the Undergrowth Ep. 3: The Silk Spinners, which starts out showing glow worm strands. They are beautiful! More pics can be found here.

pretty plots

I've been generating lots of plots. More than I know what to do with. Here is my favorite. I'm not going to describe what it is, cuz that would be boring. But, look at the pretty colors!

hipster albums

To go along with my last post, here are some albums I may or may not think I like. In any case, I listened to them today. I can say that for sure.


Far by Regina Spektor [NPR]


Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective [imeem]
(I am pretty sure I think op-art is awesome.)


It's Frightening by White Rabbits [imeem]


A Mad and Faithful Telling by Devotchka [imeem]

way to breathe, no-breath

"Small Talk", by Shane Vorhaben

On my run today, I started thinking about how I was breathing. This is a common mistake I make cuz, no matter what, breathing then feels wrong. I'm wondering if an analogy can be made to to thinking about my life and choices. Do I really like the things I say I like? Do I really want to do the things I say I want to do? Or do I just think I should like/want to do these things? Or, even worse, do I just think that someone else wants me to like/want these things? What is the disconnect between saying and thinking and doing? Maybe if I just don't think about anything, everything will turn out okay. Then again, maybe life decisions are something one should think about, unlike breathing. In any case, I am marginally certain that I am feeling uncertain and out-of-step with life in general. There's my deep thought for the day.

helpless

Molting Cicada, Wikipedia

I am pretty sure the world sucks, and I am feeling very helpless about that this week. I am feeling helpless about the protesters in Iran, and what Khamenei and his government have given the militias the okay to do. I watched maybe 15 minutes of "This Week with George S." this morning, and heard the retarded, shallow argument between Lindsey Graham and Chris Dodd about how the U.S. should respond to the situation. Should we condemn the Iranian government or strongly condemn them? It doesn't matter, (a) because everyone knows which side the U.S. is on and (b) no intelligent person is going to believe that the U.S. engineered the revolt. Plus, I was annoyed that the segment should be on the U.S. 's response to the situation, not the situation itself.

I am feeling helpless that Obama's "sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system" sounds like a whole lotta nothing, and that the government is still primarily concerned with the interests of the banking industry. Same with his promise of transparent government, as his administration has followed the Bush administration in keeping logs of who visits the White House secret.

Also, the new report on global warming makes the future sound more hopeless than ever. Maybe I should stop reading the news ...

Well, at least bugs are cool. I've been watching "Life in the Undergrowth", which has some absolutely amazing footage of absolutely amazing bugs. There are some clips from the show here. So, like I said, at least we have bugs to be happy about.

Latex for Inkscape

For some reason the default renderer for Latex equations in Inkscape stopped working for me (I think it used to work ...). In any case, I just installed the textext extension. I thought I'd post the steps that worked for me. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

1. Install pdf2svg. I don't know if this was necessary. I already had pstoedit installed, but I was first trying to fix eqtexsvg which I believe ships with Inkscape. I followed the instructions provided at http://www.cityinthesky.co.uk/pdf2svg.html verbatim.
2. Download the textext tar ball from http://www.elisanet.fi/ptvirtan/software/textext/.
3. Unarchive, and copy textext.inx and textext.py to /usr/share/inkscape/extensions . Note that the installation instructions claimed that you could put this in $HOME/.inkscape/extensions, but the extensions subdirectory did not exist for me and creating one and placing the relevant files inside did nothing. This was the only confusing part of the installation.
   

This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes

I am hoping that automated phone systems that use voice recognition are actually recording users' responses. Cuz I know that at least K. can sound very irate and/or silly when repeating himself to these machines. If there are such recordings, it would be great (and probably highly illegal) if someone could to make some kind of collage of all the weird things people say when talking to voice recognition machines. Assuming that people other than K. say weird things. That is all I have to say about that.