Jimmy

You might’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. The reasons are many, but there are two main ones:

1. I just haven’t had any stunning flashes of insight that I felt like blogging. There have been one or two, but those came at a time when I wasn’t able to blog and by the time I had time, the muse had passed.
2. Any small musings that in the past I might’ve flushed out into a blog post I’ve recently been squeezing into the 140-char limit of Twitter as I’ve found that to be easier and quicker.

I’m still planning on trying to work up some longer posts (hopefully things will slow down enough in my life for that to happen soon, but I’m not counting on it) but in the meantime I would love it if you’d click on over to my Twitter page and even “follow” me if you have a Twitter account.

Cheers!

-jbh

It’s 2am and sleep is not really in sight. Well, sort of, but iTunes e-mailed me and told me that my pre-order of Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown was available for download and I just started listening to it and damn it’s good and who stops listening to such a good album in the middle? You’ve got to hear it through all at once to fully take it in, and so I’m left with needing to find something to do for the next 1.2 hours. (OK, since doing the math tells me that that takes me ’til 3:30am maybe I will have to cut it short mid-album. But we’ll decide that later.)

Anyway. Final exams are over and I’m pretty sure I failed at least two of them, and quite possibly both the classes that said finals were in. But I don’t really care. I got a much better grade than I was expecting in another class, so that’s awesome.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my summer. Because sleeping 12 hours well into the afternoon is awesome for only one or two days. So that was today, and now it’s time to move on to bigger and better things (hopefully things that don’t entail sleeping quite so much of the day away). I’ve been feeling for a while that I’d like to focus more on teaching myself more about filmmaking, from actual camera-work and stuff to editing (I loooove editing, but I don’t feel like I know Premiere Pro nearly as well as I could) and post-production stuff (After Effects, anyone?), so that’s something to do with the summer, but then the question becomes what kind of structure to put it in? E.g. what kind of raw video footage do I use for my editing adventures? old family vacation footage, or shoot new footage? If so, what?

Those are the questions.

Enter the awesome web video series that I found yesterday called The Guild created by the awesome Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, anyone? She was in that). While watching all 24 6-8 minutes episodes of this little web video that won three awards at the Streamy Awards, I got to thinking: what about spending the summer creating little web video episodes? Obviously this brings up as many (or more) question than it answers, but at least we’re going in the direction of making progress on the question of what the shrack to do this summer. And to help answer some of those questions, we find that not only does Felicia have a blog, she’s currently posting on how to do a web series and make it work. One begins to wonder if this is some sort of sign.

(Click “read more” to read more of my middle-of-the-night rambles.)
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I’ll admit that I find the new “I’m a PC” ads from Microsoft annoying and all that, but what I find most annoying is the reactions that they’ve been inciting from people. Everyone from the people declaring that little “Kylie” was gonna make PC sales skyrocket (OK, don’t flame me: I know he didn’t actually say that in his post, but it felt like the subtext) (because everyone likes the idea of a 4-year-old being able to use a computer so well. [/sarcastic] I don’t know about anybody else, but I kinda find the prospect of a 4-year-old being that good with a digital camera and laptop to be quite scary) to the people who got so bent of of shape about the newest ad in the series featuring “Lauren” who says she’s “just not cool enough to be a Mac person” (reaction in my living room when that ad first came on: “huh?” from every direction) all the way to the people yelling about the people doing the yelling. (Isn’t the blogosphere grand?)

I should say that I am a Mac user (in case that wasn’t clear already). Having used Windows at home for nearly 12 years I finally went Mac last fall when it was time to upgrade my laptop (I’d been using Macs at school for digital media work for 2 years) and since then I’ve brought three more MacBooks into my house, as well as Time Capsule and several iPod Touches. I am very happy with my 13.3-inch MacBook and wouldn’t give it up for a PC if you paid me (OK, if you paid me a LOT of money I probably would, but I digress). My point is: I know computers, I’ve used and enjoyed Windows computers (although I will never remember fondly the 4.5 years I used Windows ME) and I’ve used and enjoyed Mac computers. I obviously prefer Mac as my primary computing environment right now, but I still use Windows XP on a daily basis at school and on my old laptop at home. I’ve only had the BSOD twice on my little Dell Inspiron 6000 and I’ve never had a major failure in the 3.5 years I’ve owned the machine. I’ve abused it so much I’m very surprised it is still running, so I don’t actually have a lot of bad to say about XP. I think it’s a wonderful (if not a little dated) OS.

So it’s this background that I’m coming from in saying: chill out, everyone. Seriously. Arguing about Mac vs. PC pricing might be fun (I’ve had the debate many a time) but it’s just stupid. When deciding between Mac and PC price is a consideration, yes, it may even be the primary consideration for most computer buyers (especially during a recession) but comparing Mac vs. PC on a price level or a spec-for-spec level or any kind of level is futile. It’s like comparing apples and oranges (hey! An unintended pun! Yay!): they’re both fruits (computers) and have a lot of the same properties (hardware components), but they taste different, act different, cost different, have different amounts of varieties and have different fan clubs. So Lauren has a very specific set of goals she wants in a computer. She doesn’t seem to care what OS she uses and she couldn’t find a 17-inch computer under $1000 from Apple. She found one at Best Buy with Windows on it so she bought it. So what? There’s no way to argue it around that she could have or should have gotten a Mac. She didn’t seem to need or want one. People who want a really powerful 17-inch laptop with screaming graphics and all the bells and whistles might very well end up with a MacBook or MacBook Pro but that doesn’t mean that just because Lauren wanted a 17-inch computer that she needed to buy a MacBook. She didn’t. People are yelling about how amazing the ad was because it showed somebody who “should” be a Mac Person buying a PC. Well, color me surprised that someone doesn’t fit into a random stereotype. News flash folks: PCs are still used by 88% of computer users, so I’ll bet you can find a LOT of people in that 88% of the population who “should” be using a Mac based on some arbitrary definition of “Mac users”. Do I think that some of those people might end up using Macs in the future as Mac OS gains market share? You bet! But that decision will be theirs personally based on price, hardware specs, the “coolness factor” and a host of other things. That doesn’t mean computer and OS makers shouldn’t advertise their stuff using whatever tactics they think necessary. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t continue to debate what computer they like and why, but I do think that people should cool it with the holier-than-thou “ye gads they used the PRICE argument” outrage. Face it folks: Windows computers, on average, are cheaper than Mac computers, and Microsoft is going to milk that for all its worth. Calm down Mac Loyalists: our OS is still gaining market share, despite the recession and the “I’m a PC” ads.

OK, climbing down from my high horse on top of my soap box now.

Cheers.

-j

Walking home from campus (half mile through a suburban area) at midnight I was suddenly worried for a split second that I was being chased by monsters from World of Warcraft. I wonder, does this make me an addict after only a week of playing the game?

Or maybe it’s just my rather active imagination on 4 hours of sleep after having been working on a 3D animation in Maya for 90 minutes….

OR MAYBE IT’S BOTH.

‘K, time to do my math homework (I wonder if my math grades would be higher if I did the homework sometime other than 1am…).

Hm.

Cheers.

-j

I need Steve’s t-shirt in today’s Questionable Content. Seriously. I NEED IT.

Time for bed now. (I hate DST, it’s 3am but only feels like 2am. 6 hours of sleep suddenly becomes 5 because from the perspective of my body my entire Monday class schedule has been moved up by an hour. Because it kind of has.)

Cheers.

-j

P.S. Annnnd for some reason the time stamp says it’s 2am, though it is, in fact, 3am Eastern Daylight Time. No time to figure that out tonight, though. Wordpress I both love and hate you. Why can’t you figure out DST automatically??

So, I actually do kinda want to study for the two exams I have this afternoon. I mean, both subjects are interesting and I obviously don’t want to fail the exams, but there’s always things that are so much more interesting at the exact moment that I sit down and say “alright, time to study”. Last night it was WoW (installing, patch downloading and then playing from level 3 to level 6) and registering my disappointment in Joss Whedon and today it’s CNN.com articles and the Monopoly app on my iPod Touch.

Read on for my rambles about the trials of being a genius in college. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, and if you don’t want to read it, don’t read it. *grin*
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I need the last panel of today’s Schlock Mercenary on a t-shirt. SERIOUSLY. My life will not be complete without it.

I love Petey so much.

That is all.

-j

Do you ever have it where you’re in such a rotten mood that your mood actually improves because it’s such a wonderfully deliciously terrible mood that you’re in? Maybe it’s just my rather dark and sarcastic personality, but I get such a thrill out of not feeling much remorse about making the entire world aware of it when I’m in a particularly wonderfully horrible mood. It’s not like I go out and kick kittens or anything (I’m not that awful a person), but I do enjoy scaring people in the hallways of the university by giving them my death stare.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a really bad person at heart. I kind of doubt it though.

Anyway….

Cheers!

-jimmy

So, I wonder how my Operating Systems professor is going to react to my slightly irreverent style of doing the homework in his class this semester (example: in answer to a chapter review question that asks “what are data structures” [a topic I spent an entire 4-hour-a-week class on last semester], instead of doing the incredibly boring answer I might have given in the past, I instead chose to answer thusly: “data structures are awesome. But more specifically, data structures are ways of organizing or storing data.” [In case it's not obvious: up to this point in my college career I've never seen it possible to use words such as "awesome" in an assignment. This is a small example of the larger style that I've begun to adapt.] Perhaps not the fullest answer [and certainly not the least cheeky answer] one could give to such a question, but who cares?), in fact I’m trying to kinda push things in a lot of my classes this semester, partly to see how my professors will react (although I know and/or have had a bunch of them in class before so I know how they think…um, yeah, if any of you read this blog I mean that in the best possible way) and partly just because I don’t have the time and/or energy to not be somewhat funner in my style of writing (except perhaps in Academic Writing class where I believe my grade rides directly on how willing I am to show that I am a good formal writer, which I’m pretty sure does not include the type of run-on and parentheses studded sentences that I’m so fond of using), anyone who has read this blog knows how I like to write, but it might not be a surprise to learn that in the oh so serious environment of University I’ve been one to [at least try to] make my writing a bit more formal and serious and academic and “good.”

But I’m getting tired of that. I am really very good at writing, be it blogging, e-mailing or school papers, and I’ve always been annoyed at having to be so much more “serious” (read: BORING) when I’m doing school work, so I’ve decided this semester that since it takes me longer to figure out how to BS my way through “good” writing that in the places where I reasonably assess that it’s OK to not be as formal (read: less myself) I’m just not going to [be as formal].

Now that I’ve said all that I’ll probably get burned on my style of doing the OS homework, but we’ll cross that bridge when (and if) we come to it.

Come to think of it, I’m trying to loosen up in a lot of ways (not just in being so concerned about “formal” vs. “less formal” writing in assignments) in relation to school this semester (this might help explain my sudden propensity to turn in assignments way late, a practice that I’ve always done now and again but that I’ve taken to an entirely new level this semester), realizing that I don’t need to be solely focused on grades and assignments and that there are other things in life just as important to my assignments and grades (and in some cases more important, sorry professors) like friends, family life/relations and following God’s will for my life.

This is the semester when I’ve been least tied to my guilt and feeling controlled by my assignments, and being less serious about deadlines and [to some degree] assignment content has really helped me be less of an uptight person, which has helped me gain more friends because I think I’m being a more open and friendly person (less “I will kill you if you disturb me” and more “hey who cares if I turn this in on time or a tiny bit late or a little underdone? Talking with friends is good”). And given the choice between a GPA that’s .1 or .2 points higher or being more friendly with my classmates, I’ll choose my classmates hands down.

With all that said, it is now 11pm on a Sunday evening and I have two overdue assignments and at least one assignment due tomorrow to work on, so I should probably go tackle some of those things.

Cheers.

-j

So far today I have consumed: 2/3 of a piece of toast with cheese on it, a mug of black tea, a 20 oz. cup of Dr. Pepper and half of a ham and cheese sub.

How do YOU spell hyper?

-j