I hate advertising. With few exceptions, it is intrusive, ugly, and annoying, and I go out of my way to avoid it. I gleefully block online ads using the old Mozilla usercontent trick and the handy Firefox Adblock extension; I take a seam ripper to any visible branding on my clothes (to the exasperation of my sister who simply cannot understand why her weird brother does such things); and, like almost everyone, I easily tune out TV commercials.
However, even with my aversion to advertising in general, I enjoy finding old magazine ads for things that I own or already enjoy. Last year, for instance, I mentioned buying two 1990 Celica GT-S ads on Ebay. More recently, I came across my old collection of gaming magazines while cleaning my bookshelf over break. They dated from around 1993 to 1995 when the Super Nintendo was in its heyday and the Nintendo 64 was barely a prototype called the Nintendo Ultra 64. Inside I found a two-page Super Metroid ad, a unique Street Fighter II Turbo ad with my name printed on it, one of the then-ubiquitous "Mortal Monday" Mortal Kombat ads, and a handful of other interesting articles and ads.
Inspired, I then leafed through some of my newer, non-gaming magazines from right around the peak of the internet bubble. In them I found an IBM ad for Linux consisting of a screaming '60s girl with the caption "Linux is so totally dreamy"; an Olympus ad hawking the early predecessor to my camera; and an ad for a show called "Weird Science" which was about two computer geeks who created a beautiful woman genie from their PC— the dream of every male computer science student. I cut out each of the ads and brought them back to campus to decorate the wall next to my desk.
Michael doesn't understand it, but I think the ads have a certain irony to them. Their reason for being was to convince people to buy something, but now that their subject matter is outdated, they have no "power" whatsoever. Even back when they were current they had little to no effect on my purchases because I just glossed over those pages like I do now with TV commercials. My interest in the ads came only after I already owned the product they were trying to sell. The product made me interested in the ad rather than vice-versa.
So much for posting more often than once a week. We'll just set that resolution to the side for now, shall we?
Anyway, I'm reaching the end of spring break. It was great to relax, but not to the extent that boredom set in (which it did, quite often). The only real event took place on Wednesday when I went with Eric, Mel, and two former classmates named Elise and Damon to $BIG_DOWNTOWN_MALL. We did the high schooler thing and wandered around, not really shopping, but enjoying each others' company. We went to $EXPENSIVE_BUT_DELICIOUS_FOOD_RESTAURANT for dinner.
Aside from that lone event, I've divided my spring break between surfing, reading, and watching TV, in that order. Reading, I've burned through all the Bloom County books, an entertaining Star Wars comic book, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and William Gibson's beautifully-written Pattern Recognition. Some notes about each:
- The Bloom County books were even funnier than I remember. This is no surprise seeing as I was but a wee toddler when they first came out. The strips got progressively more political, but even so, they remained amazingly timely despite being almost 20 years old. Replace "Reagan" with "Bush" (or "Bush" with "Bush") and "communist" with "terrorist" and they could have been printed yesterday. The only thing that dated the books was the plastic record in Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. Because I'm a bit short on record players, I had to uncover some MP3s of the tracks. Very cool stuff. I'm tempted to burn the MP3s off to a CD and stick it in the book alongside the record for some future reader.
- Yes it's true, I read Star Wars comics. It's my one truly geeky vice... aside from being a Computer Science major... and keeping a website... and having a fanatical devotion to the Super Nintendo... and reading science fiction constantly... aw screw it; it's one of my many geeky vices. I first read a Star Wars comic when I came across the comic adaptation of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy which I had read not long before. Since then, I've picked up a small handful of additional books, with Mara Jade: By the Emperor's Hand being the latest. It's entertaining in that goofy Star Wars way, though I don't like how the artist drew Jade's nose and forehead. Nitpicky, nitpicky.
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom had some cool ideas (ad-hockracy, whuffie) and a decent story, but it was still a bit disappointing in some intangible way. I think it was mostly because the book made it hard to like the main character. He goes off on all sorts of irrational tangents that made me, the reader, feel like smacking him around a bit. The narrative also seemed a bit stretched even though it's a short book. I thought Doctorow's short story collection was far better.
- Pattern Recognition was simply beautiful. It was like reading science fiction poetry. Engrossing, present-day story. Good stuff. Filled with sentence fragments.
My astronomy teacher loves analogies. Not a single cosmic event escapes his poetic eye for personification and metaphor. The following is his most recent gem:
"Now, when electron pressure isn't strong enough to retain hydrostatic equilibrium, a star starts collapsing again. Pretty soon, the electrons get squished into the atomic nuclei where they combine with the protons to create neutrons. According to the Pauli Exclusion Principle— which is too complicated to go over here— a free neutron's nature is to split back apart into the proton and electron.
"Perhaps I can illustrate this idea with an analogy. Suppose I were to throw you into the deep end of a swimming pool. Your nature tells you to swim to the top. Now say I were to tie your arms and legs together and throw you back in. [At this point a few students chuckle nervously.] Your nature tells you to swim to the surface, but you can't because of the ropes. The ropes are the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
"It is this pressure from the ropes that creates a neutron star.
I can't wait to hear what he has to say about black holes.
I've also seen people get lost in their own analogies when talking about object oriented programming. I learned Python from a book that tried to explain classes by likening them to a pizza-creating robot. The analogy failed miserably, and it wasn't until someone told me in my freshman year Java course that, "Classes are just big blocks of data with functions that allow a program to modify the data," that the idea finally clicked. That's why so many non-programmers are terrified when anyone mentions OOP; they have never gotten a good explanation of this relatively simple concept that doesn't bury them in a pile of abstrations and metaphors.
Last night's post got me thinking. Why, over the past few months, has my weblog output become less and less frequent? The obvious reason is that I haven't had anything particularly spectacular to write about. The less obvious reason is that perhaps I have been looking for the wrong subject matter. Throughout its two and a half years, this weblog has been basically an online journal documenting the various events of my life. That's fine and good, but I think the time is right to change its direction a bit. I want to write less about the minutiae of my life and more about ideas I've had, observations I've made, and perhaps even some opinions that I felt I had to keep offline. I want to get back to a point where I'm excited to post something new and interesting rather than burdened by feeling that I have to write about the weather, the movie I saw the night before, or how I spent my weekend. In other words, I want entries with substance that I am proud to put into this website's small spotlight and archive for posterity. I hope that this change will yield more interesting posts more often than once a week.
Despite my best intentions, this formerly daily weblog has become weekly at best. I'm writing this post to 1) assure my readers (both of you) that I am, indeed, still alive and 2) catch up on some of the small events that for one reason or another I neglected to mention.
At the end of last week it went from beautifully warm to frigidly cold. In the space between these two extremes, it got really, really windy. It was so windy that it became hard to walk or ride a bike against the gusts. Also, a tree out back near the bike racks blew over. That's somewhat interesting. Let's continue, shall we?
Earlier today I got an IM from my father asking me about the string of $3 charges Sue had noticed on my debit account. The answer is I've taken to drinking smoothies. My schedule takes me by the smoothie place right in the middle of the afternoon when the energy low from lunch hits. I've managed to keep myself down to about two a week, but it's certainly a struggle. Icy, puréed fruit is O so good.
I played a handful of poker games recently: a few with the suitemates and a few with various other friends. Those have been the standout activities in otherwise boring weekends for the past month or so. I should note that without exception, I played terribly every time. I don't know happened.
Last Friday I migrated from Mozilla 1.5 to Firefox 0.8. It is truly a work of art. I also donated a couple bucks to the Mozilla Foundation while I was at it.
Way back around the first snow of the season, I found a thumbtack in the front tire of my bike. Perhaps I ran over it; perhaps some mischievous soul stuck it there on purpose. In either case, both the deflated tire and the icy, subfreezing weather forced me to walk to class all winter. Until recently, that is, when unseasonably warm temperatures allowed me to finally repair the bike. On Saturday I drove (with the windows down) to a bicycle shop to buy a patching kit. I fixed the leak without much trouble, which allowed me to ride my bike to class today (without a coat because it was beautiful, sunny, and over 60 degrees) for the first time this semester. I love these spring previews.
