The Long Road

Archives: July 2006

Thursday, July 27, 2006

There are two great battles in life. The first is to keep up with life; to be good at your job, stay fit, eat at least 3 square meals a day, maintain your relationships with friends and family, and have some fun. But as life gets more complicated and we accumulate a ever increasing number of distractions, just keeping on top of everything becomes impossible.

There’s almost nothing I hate more than an unproductive day. I love the feeling of having done something, earning my pay, having something to show for the last x hours. The trouble though is getting into that “today, I’m going to get something done” mentality.

One thing I’ve found that works for me is simply to just start DOING something, anything. Work begets work. Comparing weekdays and weekends, for example. Weekends can sometimes go by in pajamas, poor meals, and general inactivity while I often find myself going to the gym, cooking something, doing the dishes, and generally being productive after a day at the office. I think this is the secret of morning joggers; when they get into the office, their minds and bodies are already in a “lets get work done” mood.

The reverse is true. The more time you spend in your PJs the less likely it is you’re going to get out of them and get something done that day. And there should always be something to do. I think that there shouldn’t be anyone at our age who can claim to be able to spend 2-3 days straight without having something that needs to be done.

There is nothing like a long string of days spent at home to suck the life out of you; it dulls your mind and your body, makes your irritable and unenthused. Life should not be like that, not even for a day.

Posted by Rayne @ 06:44 PM EST [Link] [6 comments]

Monday, July 24, 2006

I am currently reading through 24Seven, a “sci-fi/noir” comic book anthology written and drawn by some of the darlings of the indy comix scene. So of course it’s very well made with lots of artsy art, offbeat stories and an overall stellar presentation. It generally gets the “noir” tone of its label right, but when it comes to the “sci-fi” aspect, this book fails miserably. All the stories so far (about ½ way through the book) are your run of the mill short stories in what you would expect from a noir book…except all the main characters and their pets are robots. That’s it. That’s all that makes this book “sci-fi”.

None of the stories truly make use of the fact that the characters are robots (there is one scene where a robot gets a tattoo removed…using a grinder), they behave, are built, live, and have social structures identical to ours. If you went and redrew all of these stories to feature humans, you could hardly tell the difference (sort of the same thing as if you went and replaced all the Vampires and Werewolves in Underworld with regular people). This is NOT what sci-fi is about. Seeing male robots trying to pick up female robots at bars using human tricks is not what I enlisted to see. Robot assassins, robot DJs, robot scalpers, robot cops; all human roles filled with robots who do it the exact same way the humans do it. For example, why would a robot need to carry a tape recorder? His internal memory is likely to be complete and infallible. Why would a robot need to carry a cell phone when something like that could be built in? It’s a waste of a concept, a few changes to the way the robots interacted with their environment and each other would have elevated the material to be worthy of its “sci-fi” label.

Sci-fi short stories in particular are at their best when presenting a unique situation or concept only available to the sci-fi setting. People (or robots) doing mundane things in mundane ways does not qualify. This is a general problem with “mainstream sci-fi”. The more we get away from the hardcore stuff, the more it resembles real-life (for the sake of relate-ability and accessibility) and 24Seven is most definitely in the mainstream side of things and pales in imagination and creativity to other sci-fi anthologies I’ve read.

Posted by Rayne @ 11:36 PM EST [Link] [5 comments]

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

I’d been passively looking for a shelf to put my computer speakers on for the last little while. Unfortunately nothing ever fit my criteria for what it should look like (a small shelf with little to no visible support). Also, there’s the fact that a small shelf will run you something like 20$. A ludicrous price, especially since I'd have to buy 2. In the end, I decided to make my own.

I knew the general style of what I wanted to have but not exactly how I would achieve it. What this means is that I spent a good hour browsing through Home Depot’s collection of nuts, bolts, nails, and screws trying to come up with the best hardware combination possible. There are a lot of possibilities! I wanted something simple seeing as I don’t exactly have the power tools needed to make complex cuts. The solution I came up with was nuts, bolts, wall anchors, and brackets; the people at HD cut my wood into 2 squares and I used a power drill to make holes and grooves for my speaker wires. I then sanded and painted said wood.

This is what the shelves look like with all the hardware in, the wall anchor sticking out is supposed to go into the wall. For some reason I got a bolt that was much too long or nuts which were way too small. I’m not sure why I ended up so confused. So after much screwing and drilling (like the frames, it took some work to align things properly), my once very cluttered desktop has now become slightly less cluttered.

Posted by Rayne @ 10:13 PM EST [Link] [5 comments]

Monday, July 17, 2006

So i bought some cool framed fake watercolour-paintings on my last trip to Toronto. Something about the minimal green on white really appealed to me. It's also quite serene looking, plus you could spend 20$ in worse ways. After talking with #2 a little bit, I decided that the ornamental parts of the frames werent really my thing and that I'd get rid of them for a cool, contemporary, floating-nested frame look. Should be easy enough.

Removing the ornamental stuff was relatively easy, some pliers were used to take out the nails and they came right off. Of course, it turned out that one of the outer frames was not cornered evenly and I had to BREAK IT and reglue it back properly aligned. Not TOO big of a deal. Then came the awesome job of trying to hang 8 frames, making sure they all aligned properly with each other and adding the fact that the 4 inner frames dont actually have anything to be hung with. A good 30 minutes of browing Home Depot came up with this set of hardware to aid in the framing.

I decided on taping wires to the back of the frames for the purposes of having them as flush against the wall as possible but also because you cant screw anything into FOAM backs nor the very brittle (plastic?) frames. So with the 4 inner frames wired and 12 screws put into my wall, I hang everything up. Only to have...DISASTER.

The foam backs werent strong enough to support the weight of the inner frames and one of them fell, another's wire slipped, and it was generally uncool. What's the solution to all these problems? Tape. And lots of it.

After many days of work: The final product.

Posted by Rayne @ 03:24 AM EST [Link] [6 comments]

Thursday, July 6, 2006

There is a great injustice committed on a continual basis against us males of the species. It is savage, unrelenting, and unforgiving. It taunts us day and night, summer and winter (but especially summer). It knows we want it but through some arcane rule governing our society we can’t have it. Yes, I am talking about wearing tank tops!

Through some insane and twisted rule of fashion, it has become accepted that it is unacceptable for men to wear tank tops where they please less they commit a murderous fashion faux-pas. But yet!...YET! women of all ages and races can wear these same tank tops and remain fashionable! Lo! What unfair beast this be.

Having consulted the 3 usual suspects, it's 2:1 against tank tops in social settings. They're only okay at 1. Gym, 2. Beach, 3. Parks. Why? I dunno. It's just one of those mystical rules like socks and sandals. Two others, when asked, expressed the same concerns about wearing tank tops in non athletic/outdoor situations. Apparently it CAN be okay if you can "pull it off" or "dont take yourself too seriously". I'm not sure I know what those mean.

Gosh Darnit, there is nothing more comfortable to be wearing in the summer than tank tops! It’s all about having the scorching sun bearing down on your bare skin and the cool breeze winding its way through your hairy armpits!

Posted by Rayne @ 02:22 AM EST [Link] [14 comments]

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