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.