5!/3+2

• Don’t run away.
• Grow up.  We’re not kids anymore.
• Get better.  Tell someone else.
• See.  Listen.
• Learn.  Live.  (Love?)

Linguistics is funny

Linguistics joke of the indeterminate time period:  the words ‘pander’ and ‘banter’ differ only by the placement of one voicing feature.

7(6)

Show me that you still exist.  I need to know I’m not alone.

Winter things

So it’s winter break now.  That means I get a much needed respite from class and work in general and get a good chunk of time to relax and enjoy doing nothing at home.  As it seems is always the case whenever I end up writing something in here, it’s been a long time since my last entry (of real significance).  We’ll go through a basic rundown of the things that have happened recently that are of note and then get on to some more current stuff.

Finals came and went.  I thought I did surprisingly well, considering the level of work I put in.  I was especially proud of my final CS grade, as I was pretty sure I’d be barely squeaking by.  I’d only really managed to get about half of the homework assignments to work according to the specifications and had been turning in a lot of assignments late, thus getting point deductions and whatnot.  I guess that the final project was worth two homework grades and I pretty much rocked its socks off was really beneficial for my grade.

I finally finished Mass Effect.  That was a fun game.  I enjoyed it greatly.  I played a vanguard with shotguns as my primary weapon.  As the game progressed, it got to the point that pretty much every common enemy would die in one shot from my shotgun.  And eventually, I didn’t even really have to get very close to be accurate and could hit targets from pretty far away.  Combined with Wrex, who I also built towards heavy shotgun usage, even the big geth units would die in two or three shots.  Add to that Tali and he Overload abilities, and nothing stood a chance.

When fighting Saren on Virmire, I dropped him inside of a minute.  Tali overloaded his shields, and then Wrex and I both simultaneously fired our Master Carnage blasts at him, killing him instantly.  It was actually sort of anticlimactic, as I had expected to get a good work-around by his biotic abilities.  The final fight in the Citadel was similar.  I managed to Charm him out of the first fight so we went straight to the final fight where he burns off all his skin and starts jumping all over the place.  That battle was a little more difficult mainly because it was hard to get him in my sights long enough fire Carnage at him.  Also, he kept dodging Tali’s tech mines, so I had to whittle his shields down the old fashioned way.

I’ve been buying up all the new D&D expansions.  I’m really loving the Manual of Planes that was released this month.  The information on planar vehicles like the spelljammer is exactly what I needed for planning my planar campaign.  Also, Sigil and Hestavar are perfect for my conception of the Nexus Plane, which I think will turn out to be something like a combination of those two with Sigil inspiring the Lower City and Hestavar inspiring the Upper City.

I recently got back into LiveJournal and opened up a new journal over there.  Regrettably, I totally forgot the password to my old LJ and the email I used for it has since gone inactive so I’ll probably never be able to retrieve it.  I’m fine with that, though.  LJ has made a lot of improvements since I left so many years ago.  They have a lot of new journal themes and the Scrapbook functionality is pretty nice too.

I was looking through the LJ help files trying to learn how to write themes using their S2 engine, which is actually rather complex.  S2 is a programming language unto itself which is compiled into Perl code that’s used to generate the pages, an idea that I think is pretty awesome, if a little daunting to new theme designers.  The engine isn’t very well documented and I didn’t find any tutorials readily available for how to write new templates and stuff.  It all looks very interesting to me, though.

I finally found a Safari-clone theme for Firefox that reduces the chrome to the same size as Safari.  This is awesome.  The one thing I liked about Safari was that it’s chrome was relatively small and gave me a pretty big viewing area even with the bookmarks bar enabled.  I also really liked the square buttons.  I’ve been searching for a theme for Firefox that matches the Safari chrome in both design and size, but hadn’t been able to find one.  Until now.  It’s called GrApple Yummy, in case you want to check it out.  Apart from the home button, it looks pretty much exactly like Safari.  And with the Fission extension, you even get the loading bar in the location bar!

I tried setting up AirTunes in the house the other day.  We have this big 5.1 speaker system that we don’t even use anymore since we got the new cable box and new HDTV, which is a shame ’cause the speakers are really nice.  I’d been toying with the idea of trying to configure AirTunes to stream music to them through our home network and finally got around to trying it out last week.  I picked up an Airport Express and a RCA splitter and proceeded to try to find the right inputs on the back of the receiver to plug into.  I eventually found the set that would take digital input through RCA jacks, but was disappointed to find that the receiver didn’t come with an amp.  What that meant was that the signal being streamed through the ports had to be strong enough to drive the speakers itself.  Of course, the Airport Express is nowhere near strong enough to do that, being made to be paired with powered speakers.  So, while I could just barely hear the music being streamed through AirTunes if I turned the receiver all the way up, I declared the experiment a failure.

Now I’ve been looking around at different 2.1 speaker sets that I could potentially use instead.  I’m trying to find one for under $100, but it’s hard to tell if the speakers are really any good.  Reading reviews isn’t really helpful.  Oh well.  Maybe one day when I have my own house I’ll return to this idea.

I think that’s just about all that’s happened recently.  I keep trying to blog more regularly, but life’s been really boring.

These armadillos dance so laboriously

I could have sworn that I’d written before about this; but a quick search of my entries doesn’t turn up anything.  So, here’s the story behind TADSL, once again.

Back at SnowFire, the youth ministry program attached to my middle school, we had a weekly program geared towards the junior high kids called LiCK.  LiCK stood for Life in Christ’s Kingdom.  (We were big fans of inappropriate acronyms.)  Anyway, LiCK’s main focus was to teach morals and values, and also to touch on some common junior high issues such as peer pressure and bullying.  At the last meeting of each school year, we would all get together and make a pledge to each other to uphold the things we learned throughout the year at LiCK through the summer while SnowFire was out of session.  To symbolize this pledge, we had the TADSL beads.  The TADSL beads were basically beads with the letters T, A, D, S, and L on them, strung onto a piece of string, and tied into a necklace, bracelet, or anklet of some kind for you to wear through the summer.  Each of the letters stood for something we were to abstain from: T for tobacco, A for alcohol, D for drugs, S for sex, and L for (bad) language and lying.

I was a part of LiCK for four years: one year as a LiCKster, two years as a regular student leader, and one year as the Director.  As such, I’ve been wearing my TADSL for a while.  I’m not sure why, but for whatever reason, I’ve always taken TADSL very much to heart.  So, when my involvement with LiCK ended, I kept wearing my TADSL, even though I wasn’t technically part of LiCK anymore.  And when the string started to break, I went and got new string to repair it.  And when the beads themselves started cracking and falling apart, I went and got new beads to replace them.  Maybe it’s because the years I was in LiCK were the years when I was really starting to get a firm grip on my morals and my values.  TADSL is like a reminder of those times and the fun I had and the memories I made.  It means more than just LiCK to me; it means QuiCK (the Quest into Christian Kinship, SnowFire’s weekend retreat); it means Core Team (SnowFire’s youth leadership group).  TADSL reminds me of all the things I learned to value and hold close over those years.

As an aside, I’ll say again that I think my moral system is the weirdest thing.  Not really because my morals themselves are weird.  It’s more because my morals are very, very Christian, yet I don’t identify myself as a Christian.  Again, probably a result of my upbringing.

Anyway, back to the main story.  So, I’ve been wearing my TADSL beads for a long time.  Coming on nine years now.  That’s a fucking long time, now that I really consider it.  I like wearing the beads, but they do get a little troublesome every now and then.  Mainly because, as I said, the string breaks sometimes and the beads themselves also get pretty worn down.  So, I’ve been looking for a more permanent way to replace them.  My first consideration was a necklace with an engraved pendant.  But I already wear my jade pendant and I don’t want to have two necklaces.  My second consideration was to get a bracelet of some kind.  This was actually rather attractive to me, but I couldn’t find an engravable bracelet that was sufficiently masculine enough for me, so I ultimately threw this one out too.  And then, recently, I happened across a little thing called the Silver Ring Thing.

In case you’re unaware, the Silver Ring Thing is an evangelical Christian organization whose mission is to promote premarital chastity and abstinence among teens and young adults.  SRT tries to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ by modeling their events after rock concerts (albeit with Christian rock bands).  Their events also include the typical group exercises, speeches, and whatnot.  At the end of each event, everyone there has the opportunity to take a pledge of abstinence, to abstain from sex and remain pure until marriage.  Those who do take the pledge receive silver rings inscribed with I THESS 4:3-4, a reference to a Bible verse.  The rings are worn on the left ring finger, with the intention that they be worn there until they are replaced by a wedding ring.

This all came to my attention as I was digging through personal information on various young celebrities; namely: the Jonas brothers, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, and Nathan Kress.  My digging here was actually spurred by a little silver ring I’d been noticing Nathan wearing in a lot of his press shots.  I did some digging and came up with the conclusion that it was likely a purity ring, given Nathan’s rather strong Christian faith.

So, what’s the relation to TADSL here?  Well, I consider the purity ring to be a subset of TADSL, pretty much.  Purity rings pledge sexual abstinence until marriage.  TADSL pledges that, as well as abstience from the other substances and actions listed.  So, I began to think that maybe a ring would be a cool way to replace my beads.  I could get the inside of the band inscribed with ‘TADSL’ and then wear it around.  It was a cool idea, so I started researching how to go about buying a ring.

I originally wanted a silver ring, but decided early on in my research that a silver ring would be too expensive to get at a good quality.  So, I started looking at alternative materials.  Men’s rings these days tend to be made out of a couple of hard metals: steel, titanium, platinum, or tungsten.  Tungsten is the newest and most ‘modern’ of the bunch because it tends to have a gunmetal color that gives it a very edgy and urban look.  It’s also extremely scratch-resistant.  I found a place that sold tungsten rings on the cheap, so I decided to go with one of those.

Sizing my finger turned out to be a big pain.  Rings are supposed to fit at the base of your finger.  However, they also need to be able to get over your knuckle easily.  This presents a problem, especially for men, as the knuckle is often significantly wider than the base of the finger, especially for the ring finger, whose muscles aren’t very well-developed.  My left ring finger is a size 6 at the base; however, the knuckle on that same finger is more like a size 7.5.  This big size difference means that I had to choose whether I wanted to have a better fit but have to risk bruising my finger whenever I wanted to take the ring off, or have a looser fit but a much easier time putting the ring on and taking it off.  I ended up choosing the looser fit, as I want to be able to take it off when I’m taking a shower or washing my face.

After I got the ring, I found another place that sold slightly higher quality rings at a higher price and that also offered laser engraving.  My plan is to keep the ring I have now until I can get to a real jeweler and get their opinion on how I should size my finger.  I imagine that the jeweler will be able to give me some advice as to what size I should choose to maximize fit and comfort.  Once I get that, I’m planning to order a fancier ring with the laser engraving.

Another forty-two

Sometimes it seems like my happiness is inversely related to that of the people around me.  If something good happens in your life, I feel that much worse about the way my life is going.  It makes it hard for me to be genuinely happy for someone else.

I almost want you to be miserable.  Then I can say to myself, “Well, at least we’re not as bad off as you.”

At the same time, I don’t want anyone else to ever have to feel like this.  It’s horrible that you only resent others for living their lives and being happy.