29.6.04

After chilling with Brian Y.

Well, it is always great to meet up with an interesting person and spend some time establishing a mutually intelligible frame upon which to base further conversations and joint activities. Brian seems to really want to get more 'hands on' with film/video. Which is great. So do I. It kinda kills me that it has taken years to get to the point that I'm at: just beginning. But at least I'm there, doing it. Finally.

I checked some of the (five hours of) footage that I've shot for the Mobius Project so far. Not terrible. But it is a start. So far, I don't have anything in the way of a 'narrative' sticking out yet. I'm not particularly concerned yet about that, but it would be nice if something lovely and obvious popped its head up and said, "hello colin, i'm your story!"

I'm less concerned about a lot of things, now that my life is beginning to take on a pleasing shape. It would be nice if I could teach myself to keep my condo neater so I don't have to fuss about it all the time. Funny how I seem to constantly be on about re-educating myself. Who am I, Chairman Mao? I guess I am trying to draw a line between discipline and punishment and live on it. That is, I don't want to enforce a bad/good dichotomy upon my actions (which reminds me of a hilarious conversation that I had with Kat C. late last week...) but rather a mindfulness. Aw, that's nice, he's getting all Buddhist now...

Hazy

I'm a little fuzzy around the edges right now, but that could be because I've just spent the past hour watching the pretty incredible keynote given by Steve Jobs at the Apple Developers Conference.

I'm pretty pleased with how Apple is continuing to evolve the desktop into an efficient brain appliance. It's lovely. I think that the release of Tiger will be the time to get a couple iSight cameras for the rest of the family and me. Then we hold corpus familia meetings. Is that even Latin?

Anyway, Tuesday is almost over, and I spent most of it pouring over the roughly 400 GB of storage that my work has got kicking around. There's tonnes of crap that we don't need to archive that sort of hangs around. And until today I'd never sat down and tried to do a 'storage audit.' Now, understand, there's only three of us at the office, and we nominally have our own external HDs that we use, but quite often if we need to move a couple dozen gigs then we'll grab whatever is closest and has the spare drive space. Which is fine, until you start looking for those files three weeks later. We have more than a couple projects scattered across five drives. Not all of them, but I'd like to try to get this in control sooner than later. Anybody have any suggestions?

Tuesday... hmm. Oh crap, I'm supposed to meet Brian Y. in an hour near my place, at Hey Lucy. Brian and I went to school together, although we didn't really know each other very well at all. Now he's working in the same field as I do, so maybe we will have something interesting to talk about. Or maybe not. I'm looking forward to grabbing a coffee with him anyway.

28.6.04

Sunday was heaven

Yesterday I got to hang out with two friends from college and their two-and-a-something-year old. We met around twelve-thirty-ish and wandered around my neighbourhood. It was good. We browsed a couple bookstores (bumped into a former housemate, Sarah L., who works at Chapters), wandered up through Queen (stopped to watch a decent busker) to Spadina then up to Kensington.


On the way we picked up some Vietnamese subs - if you haven't had Banh Mi, then you don't know great cheap sandwiches. Resplendent with flavours and satiating, one cannot find a better dollar-fifty investment into one's own happiness.


We ate the aforementioned Banh Mi at Bellevue Square Park where we caught the beginning of the tail end of wade, which was really a cool idea and I wish I'd known about it earlier. Our mid-afternoon snack was punctuated with ice cream, well for Pete, Cor & Alex, it was. I didn't feel like having any.


Here's a pic of the happy family midway through the day:





It all came to a close with more wandering (this time around College,) looking for a source of batteries for an ancient laptop (these have yet to be sourced,) and finally south again (with stops in Chinatown to pick up some groceries,) to my place where we feasted on the fruits of our labour.

Alex (aka Scoot) is a poster-child for breeding. A perfectly wonderful day, I couldn't have asked for better.

Okay, it's getting late. Off to bed for me.

27.6.04

hello world - Another blog on the internet...

Well, the title says it all.

I'm not sure how long this will be here, or elsewhere. For now it is; later perhaps not. Why would anybody be reading a blog of someone that they don't know, or even someone that they do? I've read blogs from time to time and I think that it has to do with our need to anonymously reassure ourselves that we are not alone. Or maybe that is just me, as I'm prone to casually slip into solipsism. It's a failing that I'm trying to right. It's very overwhelming (in a good way) to realize that each of the world's inhabitants is just as complex as myself, just as prone to fight for personal survival and wreak havoc when that struggle is perceived as being a losing one.

Since my last relationship ended I've often felt like I was drowning. That person, that plan, that future are all being suffocated, because I can't continue down that path with out an 'us,' without her. I'm sure it is a common experience, but knowing that brings no comfort during the immediacy of the breakup, does it?

So, I have tried to treat life like a military campaign: a force, an enemy, an objective, a field. If the proper doctrine can be found, it shall be studied and then applied.

My first attempts met with disaster due to a desire to model the entire system. This is madness, especially when the apparatus of the thought experiment is limited: no physical documents are to be produced, there will be no scale models to aid the scientist. I've been forced to conclude that I am a simple man. I have stripped down my model to a) myself and b) my goal. I can handle that. Everything else will be dealt with strictly on a case by case basis with "everything else" being what ever lays between a) and b). So I'm back to me against the world: solipsism.

Enough time has passed for me to begin to get a grip on what it means to be a) (myself), but b) (my goal) is elusive.