16 Apr 2000 stephane   » (Master)

Friday...Enjoyed yummy dinner with friends (thanks for the hospitality, guys) and fun with the GIMP and a few digital photos of some cow orkers. Then I was off to another gathering for a bit more fun.

Saturday I was awakened only slightly earlier than planned by the sounds of our houseguest arising. After general computer usage, grooming (I put on a clean Miskatonic University t-shirt), and so forth we stumbled towards lunch at ye olde Pasta Pomodoro. The company and conversation were pleasant. The food was good too. My pasta with seafood included calamari, so I expected little o-shaped chewy white things, but the mixture also included some of the calamari that actually resemble tiny squid (because they are). Normally, I am scared to eat things with still-attached tentacles, but they ended up being tasty, and leaving them on my plate would have alarmed Maciej. I don't think he likes food that resembles Cthulhu. I also got to pick up my new glasses around lunchtime. They're quite snappy looking, much better than my old 80's geek style ones.

After getting home I promptly left again to enjoy coffee and conversation at Farley's with Crackmonkey and Elise, as well as Zach Brown, Master of Origami. Crackmonkey and I also checked out a great new used bookstore in my neighborhood and watched a couple of movies: The Black Hole and Rushmore. I enjoyed both, for entirely different reasons. Rushmore is a truly great flick if you've not seen it. It's impossible to describe, so just trust me and go rent it out.

Oh, and I fed the lizards their ration of crickets. I now own something called a "Cricket Corral (tm)" (Pat. #5630374, according to the side of the thing. Patents are silly.). It's definitely handy for corralling crickets, if you need to do that sort of thing.

cocktail recipe

Into one segmentation fault shot glass pour:

1/2 oz. Godiva chocolate liqueur
1/2 oz. creme de menthe

Stir with chopstick until homogenized. Serves one.

random thought of the day

I've been thinking a lot lately about the varying levels of immersion into a given session at the computer (i.e., what makes for a good 'code trance'). I was especially thinking about things like VRML, graphical internet chat, and the like. Ironically, I think that probably the most immersive computing environment right now would be text-only. There's no distractions, and you can really stay focused on coding, chatting or what have you.

It's sort of like reading a novel as opposed to watching a film of the novel. The book frequently seems better than the movie because we can imagine the characters to be however we want them (within the bounds of the narrative). Someone else's realization of that book, even if it is quite faithful, will always disappoint to a certain extent simply because it can never be as personal as your own imagination of the characters and places.

Having said that, I think I might go upstairs now and read a book until I fall asleep :)

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