rodney's weblog

"Someday, I'm gonna have an office like this. To clean."

I noticed a small dent in my car door this morning. No idea who the perpetrator was, but the giant SUV that parks next to me is always positioned at an angle that makes it difficult for me to get out. I'm going to leave a note on their windshield and let some parking space drama unfold. Regardless of whether or not they caused the dent, it's really annoying how I always have to squeeze in and out of my car like a circus performer.

This is a pretty interesting article. It discusses how people often become too preoccupied with finding a job that they love, and argues that finding a job you simply like can be more than sufficient towards personal well-being. I don't agree with all of its points (I think having high expectations, even if they're not always met, is generally a good thing), but I like how it presents a logical, balanced take on happiness and how a career doesn't have to be the focal point for achieving that. I often get asked the question, "do you see yourself staying at Blizzard?" My response can be likened to that of a politician - I'll go on some roundabout discourse about how much I like and respect the company and its products without actually answering yes or no to the question itself. The truth is that I don't really know. There are days where I feel like I have the best job ever, and there are days where I spend a lot of my time staring at spreadsheets. Ultimately, I do know that I like my job a lot (the pros far outweigh the cons), but I think I stop short of answering "yes" to that question due to some fear of "locking myself in" and eliminating any mystery or ambiguity from my future. Some of the best things in my life have occurred as a result of a sort of carefree spontaneity and I think I get scared of a life without the potential for that.

Do you remember your first ever exposure to music? Mine is a tossup between either 1) my mom playing on an old electone we had at home or 2) The Carpenters. I've always had this strange vision of my mom playing the electric organ in a smoky tavern nestled deep in the mountains. I could've sworn that she told me a story of how she once did that, but I think this is probably one of those childhood memories that could just as likely have been a dream. I guess I'll never know; I could ask her, but I think I prefer to keep it a mystery.

30 Rock is my newest TV addiction. Find me something funnier, I dare you.

Listening to: The Carpenters - Superstar
Reading: A Tragic Legacy

there's nothing more annoying than

doing laundry and ending up with an odd # of socks.

I've been messing around with some of Typepad's pre-made themes; most of them are either butt-ugly or too flowery for me. This one is a little questionable, I'll probably end up changing it. I've also spent the last half-hour trying to figure out how I can (in the most painless way possible) add "Listening to: " and "Books I'm Reading" sections to my sidebar, with no success. I know it's possible, I just don't want to spend too much time tweaking a blog layout. For now, I guess I'll just list it in my posts.

Whoever thinks western movies are a dying genre needs to watch 3:10 to Yuma. Gladiator versus Batman, does it get any better?

This dropped into my inbox today and totally made my day. It's my little cousin Trevor singing along with Marie Digby's cover of "Umbrella" by Rihanna. As of the time of this writing, it already has 671 views, and Marie Digby herself added it to her favorites. What's most interesting is that he's singing ahead for most of the song, showing that he has already developed a pretty strong sense of musical memory. Budding musician, but watch the tempo :)

Listening to: Juno Soundtrack
Reading: Watchmen

garsh grandpaw

I know I joke a lot about getting old, but man, sometimes I just want to snap my back with a sledgehammer.

the moldy peaches - anyone else but you

Is the "Year's" in "New Year's" supposed to have an apostrophe? New Year's? New Years? The apostrophe doesn't mark a contraction, nor does it seem possessive (happy New Year's? Year's what?), but most Google results use the apostrophe. Omitting the apostrophe seems incorrect as well, since there's nothing plural here - there's only one new year. Is the "s" even necessary in either case? Maybe this is one of those adages of the English language that people kind of collectively use incorrectly ("I could/couldn't care less"). Anyway I've thought about this way too much and I remember this bugging me last year as well, but I guess I didn't care enough to follow up on it. Answers please.

I read back on some of the older entries in this blog (2005-2006) and the reaction was a whole lot of cringing and brow-furrowing. I've deleted most of it. I find it a bit alarming how most of my blog entries seem to have such a short shelf life - will I be reading back on this entry 2 years from now and be deciding to delete this as well? That doesn't speak very highly for the integrity of my posts, but then again, our biggest critics are usually ourselves and I might be overreacting.

In high school I used to love having a really thick wallet, bursting at the seams with all sorts of cards, papers, receipts, and other worthless oddities. I (foolishly) thought that the sheer amount of junk in my wallet was a representation of how sophisticated and diverse I was. Nowadays, I prefer compactness and simplicity, and store only what I know I'm going to use. Money clips work even better for this, but the problem with money clips is that you can't take out any cash without showing all of the bills that you're carrying. This obviously becomes a problem when you're carrying more than you'd like others to know. There is a workaround for this, which would be folding and stacking each bill individually on top of each other, but that's just neurotic. I've tried it.

I don't want to sleep because I want to keep listening to this song.

aural befuddlement

Ok, two times now I swore that I heard our doorbell ring. First time, ding-dong, I get up, open our front door, nothing there.

5 minutes later, I hear multiple ding-dongs, only louder this time, and clearly discernible. Immediately I thought that maybe I was too slow in opening the door the first time around and that the mystery visitor was back for another attempt. I get up again, open the door, and I'm greeted with nothing but an empty porch.

I saw an article a few months back discussing how people were suffering from phantom ringtone disorder. At the time I read it, I thought I so have that. I feel phone vibrations almost daily in my pocket and hear my incoming text message jingle when no one is in fact calling or texting. But doorbells? What's next, voices in my head? A booming voice from the sky?

polaroids

After investing large sums of money throughout the year on professional-grade digital camera equipment, the one camera I end up using the most on holiday break is my Polaroid One600 Classic. There's just something fiercely personal about snapping a Polaroid shot and hearing the haphazardly built mechanism inside the plastic camera shell eject a picture. It's also kind of fun to tell people that you're actually not supposed to shake the picture to "dry" it or help accelerate the development process - according to Polaroid.com, shaking or waving the photo can actually damage the image. Writing on the picture with a sharpie also gives the picture an intimate quality that you can't so easily obtain with digital. I am a little skeptical about the longevity of Polaroid film, but that's a problem that can be easily remedied with a scanner.

h2o

I drink a lot of bottled water, and I have this wasteful tendency to open new bottles of water before finishing off previously-dranken-ones. I seem to open a new bottle every time I become thirsty, and once that thirst is quenched (usually only requiring 2-3 gulps), I sort of unconsciously assume that the remaining water in the bottle is no longer good. I think I also still have that fear of drinking my own backwash, a mostly-false theory perpetuated during high school when people often took huge swigs out of each others sodas because they were too cheap or poor to buy their own. In reality I'm pretty sure the majority of the liquid remaining in the bottle is not backwash, unless you're a slob.

The result: a bunch of opened bottles containing perfectly drinkable water strewn about my floor that I eventually gather up and throw out. Maybe I should switch to those 2-gallon dispensers so I only drink as much as I need at the moment.

Definitely one of the most irritating things about being in a house with 5 people are the varying thresholds of heat that each person can handle. Since my feet are like ice right now, it seems like the solution we've settled on is to just keep the heat off. I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that I'm freezing or that I'm too lazy to walk 3ft to put on a sweater and a pair of socks. I'm reminded of those (frequent) nights where I know I should be going to sleep to avoid fatigue the next day, yet I stay up, accomplish nothing, and pay the piper the next day. I guess it wouldn't be home without a little bit of self-induced torture.

nitpickings

I don't know what it is, but Vladimir Ashkenazy always seems to nail the tempi of classical music exactly to my tastes. I have this problem with feeling as if most recordings are always too fast, as if a lot of modern performers and conductors feel like they just have to rush through everything at blitz-lightning speed to show their technical wizardry. Sometimes fast is great - even fantastic - but there are just some pieces where blasting through the hundred some bars in < xx:xx minutes simply doesn't do the piece the justice it deserves.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is Kajaran's and Ashkenazy's take on Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement. Kajaran charges through the piece with some kind of vendetta; when the listener feels like he needs to take a split second to take a breath, Kajaran doesn't wait. Ashkenazy OTOH takes his time and makes sure that every note is given sufficient attention - as a listener, he somehow lets you take it all in. The rich homophony in this movement is key, and Ashkenazy seems to totally get that. Watching the Kajaran video really bugs me, sometimes the music doesn't even match his cues and his arm movements look more like he's trying to swim breast stroke rather than conduct a symphony. Ugh, atrocious. Comparisons below - first Kajaran (total length 8:15), then Ashkenazy (total length 8:47).

ADD anyone?

A scene at a McDonalds on my drive back to Norcal:

Me: "Hi, can I get a Filet-o-Fish, and that's it."
Him: "Ok, would you like anything else with that?"
Me: *repeating* "No, that's it."

* He reaches over to fumble around with something on the next register over, then comes back *

Him: "Ok, so a Filet-o-Fish and a medium drink?"
Me: "..."

china

I finished posting most of the pictures I took in China over November. Take a look.