Beckism.com

Although it’s kind of ridiculous, I actually have too much to write here right now. Normally of course, that wouldn’t stop me, but for one thing I absolutely have to get to bed (been getting less than six hours of sleep a night thanks to having to get up early for my work orientation but still having my college sleep cycles) and I’ve actually done a surprising amount in the past week or so.

However, since there are time restraints, I’ll give the brief run-down:

I have a new job (not sure if I posted about it before) working with developmentally disabled adults in their homes to help them in day-to-day tasks, ideally helping them live more independently. Orientation: long and boring. Job: looking to be both incredibly challenging/frightening, and likely very rewarding, or at least good for me in the long run.

Valerie is back across the state. We had a fun five days (although I only saw her in the evenings and mornings, thanks to the dang orientation going on), but sadly she had to go try to join the rat race.

I have a new bike, which is enabling me to get around Walla Walla much more easily than before. I like it a lot, although I still need to take it to the bike shop and have the handlebars adjusted (they just feel a little weird as close to my body as they are).

Windows is finally installed on my computer, although still with minor problems (sound doesn’t work quite right thanks to faulty drivers). I have been playing Half-Life (the original, to be followed by Half-Life 2, and then all the non-Valve designed Half-Life things) and Heroes of Might and Magic V quite a bit. Half-Life is of course an amazing game, and Heroes V is beautiful, although the campaign has been somewhat slow (read: not at all challenging) so far. It is phenomenally satisfying to know that I can run virtually any software that I want to, although every experience that I have with Windows merely reinforces my knowledge that Mac OS X is the way for me.

I finally had an idea for a plot that I’d like to turn into a novel for my Sociology thesis. The problem is that it’s a fantasy novel, and I’m not sure if I can get that to fly. I get the feeling that there aren’t many lovers of fantasy in the Soc department, and to date fantasy is a pretty un-analytical genre in the extreme (escapism, anyone?).

On the topic of fantasy, my visit to home resulted in my buying a whole lot more books. I hadn’t been planning to do so, but it reminded me that I’m addicted to books, even if Whitman served as rehab of a sorts (if only by not allowing me time to read for pleasure). My job, though, has shifts that are usually 10-16 hours long, though, and look to have a fair amount of time that might be best used reading (since I’m not a big fan of TV). End result is that having tasted book buying once again (ah, for the days of Scholastic) and looking forward to a future with a need for reading and money to fund it, I’m in a book buying mood. I was up too late last night making an Amazon order. Not healthy.

I recently finished the Bartimeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, and it was phenomenal. The ending was a total surprise, and both satisfying and disappointing because it flew in the face of standard fantasy practice. I think I’ll need to emulate Stroud in my own writing. He did just about everything right.

Wow. For what I intended to be something akin to a bullet list, this has turned huge. I better just cut myself off and go to bed. At least I can get seven hours of sleep, even if I’d been hoping for eight.

Well, I had an unexpectedly good day today. I had thought I was going to have to work on websites all day, but instead I got an email from Valerie, who was pining away from boredom at home, and after a couple emails and a phone call she and Vanessa both came to Mom’s house and we went to see Nacho Libre with Jack Black. It was pretty hilarious. Then again, I have a soft spot in my heart for utter losers. What was extra special good was that before that all happened Mom and I went to Borders and I got a couple of books. So today was a day of buying books and seeing Valerie, which is a five-star day in my opinion.

I also did a bit of IMG work, updated the Whitman OP Scrambles page, and mostly got done what was most pressingly needing to be done.

And here I thought today was going to be a fiasco after my terrible showering experience (got in, found out there was no soap; rinsed off, found I’d forgotten to put the shampoo in the shower; rinsed off the hair, got out, dried off, discovered I didn’t have any clothes…grah!). What a pleasant surprise.

Tomorrow I’m off to Seattle with Kristin to participate in whatever crazy Father’s Day shenanigans Dad has dreamt up. A couple of years ago, he decided that the only thing he wanted on Father’s Day was for his children to do something with him without complaining too much, and generally putting a happy face on things.

As long as we don’t end up paddling madly across the Seattle shipping lanes again, I think that it will probably be fun.

Man, I am not at all happy with my domain name registrar for Beckism.net. My websites have all been down for the last few days (or longer, my memory is fuzzy) thanks to the fact that the damn host didn’t give me any way to update my custom DNS entry (for those of you who might understand that). Since Beckism.net is the host for all of my other websites it meant they were all down. Granted, Beckism.com is the only one that I’ve set up properly since the last outage, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

Since I wasn’t able to post this before (stupid freaking website outages!) I am currently on the West side of the state, at the moment of this entry sitting in my mom’s house. Thanks to the terribly spotty wireless internet (and the fact that I got wrapped up in a book) I’ve not been doing much computer work the past few days; a fact that is very, very bad, since I’m woefully behind on a couple things. Looks like I’ll be spending tomorrow working on website stuff.

On the positive side, my orientation for my new job got pushed back a couple days, so I don’t have to leave as quickly as I thought I did. Mainly this will be nice for Dad, since he was hoping to do something with all of his kids Father’s Day and was sad I was going to be out of town driving across the state.

The reason that I’m over here is all thanks to Valerie, wonderful person that she is, who let me hitch a ride with her and her mom back across the state and is graciously taking me back to Walla Walla when the time comes. Hopefully she will stick around (she has something to do in Walla Walla the next weekend), although I am granted not all that exciting a host. I mostly sit and stare at things all day (be those things books, computers, walls, or whatever else I can find).

I haven’t done much the last few days. I’d been hanging around in Seattle with Dad, and he’s one of those people who needs to be doing something (Mom is much more of the welcome-home-I’m-fine-if-you-sit-on-the-couch-all-day types, although she would probably be happier if I did something with her, too; might have to try and convince her to go to Borders with me, she mentioned she had a gift card). In Seattle I did various fun things like eat fry bread (I don’t know if it was being born in a place with fry bread in the air, or what, but I live for fry bread, and you just can’t get it most places in the Pacific Northwest), watch X-Men 3 (Valerie came and saw it, too!), watch Thank You For Smoking (hilarious, but I’m still not sure what the message was, and if I approve of how light it made of serious issues or not), go to Half-Price Books (where I bought an absolutely fantastic book on a whim–can’t argue with a $6 hardback), and so forth.

So far at Mom’s I’ve set up my eMac for Kristin–which she was very happy about since while it is slow like molasses it’s still faster than the laptop she was using–sneezed a lot (I think I may be allergic to the rabbit in a big way), and read Wizard’s First Rule again. I might need to obtain a copy of the second book in the series and reread it, too. I’d forgotten how good they are. Maybe I’ll try to reach the later books again. I’ve given it a shot once or twice, and given up both times around book four. However, if I remember correctly the first time I gave up it was because I got disgusted with the explicit sex and violence (of which there is sometimes quite a lot; it’s hard for me to get through some portions even in the first book) and while my tolerance for violence is possibly lower than it has been in the past, I’m less put off by sex. I was such an uptight little kid. I probably owe most of my integrity to the damned Disciples of Christ church, but the repressive sexual legacy the church left me royally pisses me off in retrospect. Can’t recall why I stopped the second time through. It might just be that the series gets old by then (the books are huge, 600+ pages). Perchance I will have to try and see.

Then again, I should probably just forget it and work on my way-backed-up web work. Bah. Responsibility is annoying.

Speaking of responsibility, my dad asked me what my plans were after college, and was pretty disapproving when he found out I don’t have any. While I like to think of it as “keeping my options open” he seemed to think it was more like “denial.” Just watch; I’ll graduate, have some percussion gig drop into my lap, and that’ll show him.

And worst case scenario, I can always move in with Mom and start actually writing for a change. That would be nice, too. I just wish that I could find a way to make money with the writing that I do online without selling my soul in advertising to do it. I love Beckism.com and Idol Bat and all, but they just aren’t money-makers.

On the other hand, it is possible that I will be getting a very sizable check from CafePress soon. I’m not holding too much hope for it, because it seems a little too good to be true, but somehow I got over $120 in affiliate earnings. The reason I’m thinking there has to be some sort of mistake and fate is playing a cruel joke on me is because it’s the result of one phenomenally big order (over $600!), the order was placed on my birthday, of all days, and as far as I know I don’t have any affiliate ads out that people would click through, anyway. Plus even if I did, I’m pretty sure that my website was down during that time. I can’t figure it out.

Of course, if CafePress sends me a check that large, I won’t turn it down. It would mean that, against all of my expectations, the shop had paid for itself for the first time since ever. And during the year that I received free. How rich is that?

I just realized that this post is ludicrously long. Many apologies to anyone on LJ whose friend page got cluttered up by it. I would put things behind a cut, but thanks to the cross-posting nature of this thing, I don’t know if I can. So many apologies. Hopefully in future my damned website won’t be down and I will be able to post smaller incremental posts.

Because I do that normally. Right. Oh well; it’s a nice thought.

Ian out.

Just when I think things are up and running perfectly, something else goes wrong. The recent site outages for Beckism.com (and all of my other sites for that matter) were due to an issue that I had trouble resolving with my domain name registrar. Thankfully, I have finally gotten into contact with them, and although there may be a brief outage within the next few days the problem should be fixed.

In other news, now that I finally have a site up again I will be trying to update the Commentary page (and other parts of the site) more often. There’s a couple things that I’ve been meaning to post, so I will hopefully get those online soon. Check back, or subscribe to the RSS feed (HTML link, may not be formatted correctly depending on your browser) for notification in your favorite RSS client whenever there’s an update.

At long last, I think that I’ve transferred everything from my old eMac onto my new MacBook Pro. I certainly hope that this is indeed the case, since I am currently sitting here twiddling my thumbs while the eMac is initialized and has the operating system reinstalled. I decided that it was just too much work to uninstall all the random crap that I’ve got on there, and figured I may as well just wipe it all and reinstall the few things that I (or my sister, if I can get the computer across the state) might want.

In other news, Valerie is in town, which is a very happy thing. I helped her and her mom move all of her stuff out of our house yesterday, and then left the two of them to the task of unpacking and organizing. I do not envy them; it was a lot of stuff.

I probably should be doing work right now, but the prospect just isn’t very appealing. Maybe I’ll go play Call of Duty 2; I have to review it for IMG, so it’s almost work, even if it’s kind of play at the same time. I’m running out of other ways to procrastinate (been messing around on and off with a lot of various software applications that I need to get tweaked into making the perfect user experience; finally got a registered version of Path Finder up and running, and there’s a new, somewhat buggy, version for TextSoap that I’ve been fighting with for the past day or so).

Lastly, there’s a possibility that I might be over on the West side of the state this next week (starting Monday). It’s not for sure yet, since I have to get back by the 19th and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do so, but if it does work out and anyone wants to hang out, let me know. I’ll be mostly puttering around Seattle and Covington for half a week each if I’m able to get over there, so I’ll have a pretty open schedule (although not necessarily any access to a car).

Look out; this update’s a doozy. I haven’t written anything for a blog in a long while, and surprisingly there’s a fair amount I want to write about. So Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

I watched Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (still not sure why it’s called that instead of Prince Ashitaka, but whatever) last night, and it certainly surprised me. Here I was expecting something along the lines of Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, or perhaps Spirited Away and what I got was a bloody, dark story with complicated characters and a much deeper look at the standard evil vs. good, nature vs. industrialization conflict than is normally portrayed. I was pretty shocked, and mildly disturbed (mainly thanks to my expectations going in; I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of death I was getting myself into).

So since Alan has yet again retreated from the hideous cat-caused stench in his room to Ariel’s, I watched it again tonight with the dubbing instead of the subtitles. Normally I’m really anti-dubbing, but I wanted an excuse to watch it again, and I did some casual computer work while it was running so most of the time I didn’t have to watch their mouths not quite line up with their words. Plus being animated it wasn’t really that much of a problem. Of course some of the voice acting was pretty hilarious, but what was really interesting was that the dubbed version was actually easier to understand than the literal translation of the subtitles (changed things like “Deer God” of the subtitles to “Forest Spirit”, which made much more sense in the context of the story).

But yeah. Very, very pleasantly surprised. Normally Miyazaki films leave me feeling kind of “meh” (although I enjoyed Spirited Away a fair amount). This one had me up stalking around the living room imagining dark fantasy scenes of my own, which is always a good sign that a story has done its work and really gripped me. My only regret is that I gave into temptation (and a desire to see something on the shelf that I hadn’t seen, which makes for slim pickings since a lot of Laurel’s other movies that I haven’t seen are–sorry Laurel–not anything I’d want to see) and watched it without Valerie. I’d been putting it off because I know she likes anime, but since I enjoyed it so much maybe I’ll watch it with her sometime anyway.

In other news, as I mentioned before Alan hasn’t been spending much time here in the evenings, so I’ve pretty much been alone in the house (Ross is at home this week right now). On the one hand, I get to play my music loud-ish over my speakers as late as I want, and I can sing along full voice instead of quietly (I do so love singing along to my music while I work; I went in to work in the office adjoining the Communications office on campus for a while, and it was painful not be able to boot up iTunes and break into song). On the other hand, it’s lonely.

Of course, it looks like I may very well have a few extremely non-lonely nights coming up in the next few months, because I’ve somehow managed to get myself an actual, hourly job that asks for some interesting things. I’ve been hired by a local place in Walla Walla that serves developmentally disabled adults. I’ll be starting a two week orientation on the 19th, and then after that I’ll have a variety of possible duties that apparently could range anywhere from spending a couple of hours with a given person in a day to help them function/learn how to function better to what they call 56 hour shifts, which are basically living with a person for two straight days.

So not so lonely there. I have kind of mixed feelings. I really wanted this job, and am kind of glad that I got it, but it’s going to be quite the experience and I got a lot more web design work than I was expecting.

On the other hand, the web design thing is mostly nebulous and could easily dry up, whereas this job is something that I’ll likely be able to do through the school year as well in a part time evenings and weekends capacity.

On to the happy news of the day: The King of Attolia arrived! I wouldn’t even have known that this book was out, but Valerie gave me a gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, and I stumbled across this book. I read it in a single sitting starting within thirty minutes of its arrival (had to eat breakfast first). It made me very, very happy. For those of you not up on this series, it’s by Megan Whalen Turner and started with The Thief, a book that won a Newberry Honor and was (I believe) meant to be a stand-alone story. I loved The Thief, but wasn’t expecting a sequel until I stumbled across it shortly after it came out in a bookstore while on a vacation with my family. I bought the sequel, The Queen of Attolia, on the spot and devoured it. Then I find this unexpected third book, and while the book wraps itself up well there was obviously a series in Turner’s mind while writing this one. This makes me extremely excited. I think I might actually post a little mini review/rave about King of Attolia and the rest of the series over in Commentary, actually. I really liked this author to start, but now I love her.

Not like I want to have her children or anything, but I’m continually impressed by her decisions. So many fantasy authors fall victim to characters who drift flatly to the extremes of good and evil or just get stuck in a rut of one kind or another and fail to get out. Turner has turned out three very different books with flair, and I’m really looking forward to whatever she does next. She is truly one of those hidden fantasy gems and I don’t understand why her name isn’t as well known as J.K. Rowling. I suppose Queen of Attolia might not be for everyone, but I think it may be my favorite book in the series so far.

In still other news, what also came in the mail today was a splash cymbal from Mom for my birthday. Granted, she didn’t know to buy one part (have the boom stand, don’t have a way to attach it to anything yet), but I’m still ridiculously happy. I don’t play my drumset all that much currently, but I’ve always wanted a splash cymbal; they’re so much fun.

And I think that it might finally be time to end this ridiculously long post and go to bed. Kudos to those who had the persistence to actually read the whole silly thing.

I noticed a surprising and gratifying thing today: in Amazon’s Computer section, the top three sub-categories shown are Desktops, Laptops, and MP3 Players, and every single one of them has an Apple product as the picture (new iMacs, MacBooks, and iPod respectively).

I don’t really have anything acerbic to say about it; more like just a small “Wow.” Apple has of course dominated MP3 players for some time with the iPod, and I’ve occasionally seen an Apple product headlining an Amazon category, but never have I seen it so dominant. The Intel chip and Boot Camp may well have ushered in a new era.

Reassuringly, Windows XP was the pictured item for the Software category. So not all that much has changed.

What was strange about that was that I was tempted to buy it. I’ve had such damned terrible luck installing slipstreamed versions on my sleek new MacBook Pro that you wouldn’t believe. I can only hope that the time that I was in the KWCW production office trying burned CD after burned CD and swearing like a sailor that none of my shouting leeched out the door and made its way on the air. I really would rather not have the FCC come knocking on my door.

At long last, I have relaunched Beckism.com for what I believe is the fifth time. Who would have thought such a thing would happen in this lifetime? Unlike previous relaunches, I haven’t changed the overall look (much; there’s a couple little tweaks that probably aren’t visible outside of Firefox/Safari), but I have entirely overhauled the site’s organization. Gone is the never-updated Link Central (although it had some pretty sweet links, I must admit); gone are the essays of old (though I’ll probably repost a few of the choice ones somewhere); in is a new contact form, more better organization of Dirt Man archives (very easy to read them sequentially now), and tags to allow people who love the concept of “browsing” the web to go hog-wild.

Additionally, I have pulled most (if not all) of my blogging back to the centralized Beckism.com website. I realized that I wasn’t doing much updating of Beckism.com the way I should, and a big part of the problem was that I let myself get too widely spread what with LiveJournal, the Beckist Productions Beck.Update blog that hasn’t been updated in a very long time, and so forth.

Some things that are in the works: RSS feeds that actually work (there is currently something seriously screwy with the feeds being offered automatically by WordPress); possibly more tweaks to get things working exactly the way I want (I’ve got a horde of plugins bending WordPress to my will, but there’s still a number of things that don’t quite work the way I want, or are so buggy as to be unuseable–hopefully you will not be able to see any of these things yet, since I think I hid them all); and quite possibly a reintroduction of forums to the site, just because I like the idea so much (even if I never use it).

If you are a friend or family member interested in reading my personal weblog, please register for an account with the site and email me (through the contact form or otherwise) with the name of the account, and I’ll set you up.

And that’s quite enough for this news post.