General mind-dump of Jonas Wæver
I’ve opened for anonymous posting again, but I reserve the right to screen comments from anybody who aren’t logged in. I want those of my friends (assuming I still have any) without LiveJournal accounts to be able to comment on my posts, but I just can’t abide by spam and anonymous bashing, so there you have it. I hope it works better this time :-/
I got admitted into Copenhagen University yesterday. I can’t say it came as a surprise, but if I say it didn’t, that’ll make me look like an arrogant bastard, so I’ll just not say anything. It’s the universal solution.
Stop. Look at yourself. Evaluate your situation.
Then SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO TO BED, IT’S FUCKING MONDAY MORNING AND SOME OF US GOTTA GET UP FOR WORK YOU SELFISH MORON!
Thank you.
It’s kinda funny how you seem to develop a special brand of resigned fatalism after a few years of working with a major mod team. In theory, we have over 20 people on the team, but I’d estimate only about 8 of them actually do anything. Two of those are composers, one does nothing but quality-approve voice acting right now, and Trestkon mostly just tests the stuff the rest of us churn out and occasionally helps me find BSP errors.
We’ve been at it for a good few months over 4 years, and right from the beginning, people have been vanishing without a trace or explanation. Every time this happens, we just put out a call for somebody to replace them, and generally we’ve been successful thanks to the immensely self-indulgent nature of our mod, and later because we’re so big and experienced. It’s become more difficult for us to recruit new members lately, however, but that’s where the fatalism comes in. We generally try to formulate tentative schedules and deadlines, but we know they’ll never be kept. Without fail, exams, homework, job opportunities, illness, or wives or girlfriends always come in the way and deadlines end up slipping two or three weeks.
But there’s nothing we can do about it. People have lives. Our only option is to shrug and expand the deadline.
What is that with command prompts, anyway? Why are they so much fun?
Because they are, you know they are. At least if you’ve ever tried using one. They’re kinda like playing an adventure game, except even MORE geeky. Well, unless you HAVE to use them to get your work done, then they’re just ‘l33t’. I recently discovered that you can access an FTP server through DOS! How cool is that? Of course you may already have known about this, but I strictly forbid you to make fun of me under pain of… me… being sad?
Anyway. I can’t be bothered installing SmartFTP for some reason, although that would’ve saved me tons of time already, so I just fired up a command prompt (why is there no hotkey for that?) and played around with the FTP function. Unhappily, I have forgotten the address to connect to our root folder, so all I could do was open my personal site, which was not where I wanted to be.
But still: Command prompts are great.
It’s not that I don’t have any more computer issues to whine about, but I generally strive to not sound like a broken record, so I think I’ll just stop complaining until I finally get my wallet out and empty it all over a bunch of hardware stores.
Friday, I believe I discovered Tool. It’s not that I didn’t know of them already, I’d heard one (1) song with them before, namely Eulogy, and while I thought it was nice and interesting and original, it didn’t really speak to me. But then they release this new album, 10,000 Days, from which the songs Vicarious and The Pot were played on the Danmarks Radio’s Modern Rock station. After hearing it a few times, I began to like The Pot, which has a pretty weird and fascinating beginning, and Vicarious stuck straight onto my brain first time I heard it.
Being slightly annoyed with myself for missing them at Roskilde (their concert and Volbeat’s performance are the only reasons I might have gone to the festival), I decided to make up for it by buying 10,000 Days. I must say, that is one impressive album. Their music is pretty weird, but their songs appeal to me with their experimenting instrumentals, their defiantly nonstandard structures, their mildly creepy and psychedelic atmosphere, and their deep, murky lyrics. Especially the lyrics I find very fascinating, some of them seem pretty straight forward, whereas others are much more resistant to interpretation, and they often contain more or less obscure references to religion or psychology.
Rosetta Stoned is probably the most difficult song to interpret, I can’t figure out if it’s about being a misunderstood and ignored prophet or just about being completely stoned. Either way, it creates a lot of strange and disturbing images in my head, and that’s always interesting.
I would have to say my favourite song right now is Right in Two. The meaning of the lyrics isn’t very difficult to understand, but the instrumentation is incredibly atmospheric and melodic and the vocals have this airy, eerie quality to them along with, of course, a really good melody. On top of all that, it’s a very dynamic piece of music that seems to evolve rather than change as it goes on.
And then of course there is the packaging. In, I can only assume, an effort to make people buy their record rather than downloading it from each other, they decided to include a couple of stereoscopic lenses in the cover itself. It works amazingly, I think I’ve already spent an hour just looking at the detailed, mysterious, pseudo-intellectual, symbol-laden images in captivating 3D. Of course the drawback is that the list of songs is hidden away somewhere inside that little cover-book thingy rather than on the back of the cover where it should be, but these lenses are such a cool gimmick, I will forgive the extreme inconvenience.
To summarize, I think this album is great for two purposes: You can either lie down on your bed, put this CD on, and get completely lost in its weird, experimental, psychedelic world, immersing yourself in the music and the images it creates in your head; or you can leave it on while you work or just do something else, and it will serve excellently as background music which occasionally jumps out and grabs your attention for a moment, inspiring you for whatever you’re doing.
And to finish off, a mostly useless rating for my own amusement:
Tool - 10,000 Days
Music: 
Packaging:
I had a few interesting topics prepared for my next blog entry, but as my PC would have it, this will be yet another post about tech problems. I opened my computer at 1400 hours (2 pm), anticipating my weekly NWN game at 3. Immediately upon loading Windows, I noticed a disturbing lack of icons for half the shortcuts on my desktop. After 5 minutes with neither MSN nor my antivirus program opening, I opened My Computer and was faced with a far, far more disturbing lack of drives. Two drives were missing: The ones on my 200 GB SATA disc.
For the second time in recent history, my SATA controller had comitted harakiri for no apparent reason.
Time to panic? I think not. For I am the God of fucking Computers. First on the agenda was praising my luck that my system disc is PATA mounted. I wouldn’t have gotten far without my Windows drive. I opened Firefox (wisely installed on my system drive) and found the necessary RAID drivers on Gigabyte’s Knossos of a website (ie. ancient and labyrinthine). Then I spent almost an hour uninstalling and reinstalling those goddamn drivers in 20 different ways and sequences, during which I could at no point make my original driver install CD recognize that no RAID controller was installed:
Installer: “VIA 8237 Serial ATA Driver ——-> installed”
Me: “WTF!? I JUST UNINSTALLED IT MANUALLY YOU STUPID SETUP PROGRAM!”
Installer: “No no, you don’t understand. It’s installed! It works perfectly.”
Me: “Then why are none of my SATA drives showing up!?”
Installer: “I don’t know what you’re raving about, everything works… perfectly.”
Anyway, in the end, I opened up my PC, removed the SATA cable from the non-existent drive, reconnected the cable and started up the computer again. Then I reinstalled the SATA controller, rebooted the machine, and everything was working. Why? No idea, but I managed to fix it 7 minutes before my game was scheduled.
Then it turned out the game was postponed until next week, but I’m so damn pleased with myself right now that nothing short of a nuclear explosion in my back yard will bring me down today.
So yeah… I’m tech support. I don’t just work with tech support, I fucking am tech support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because when I don’t get paid for it, I have to do it for myself on my own bloody computer.
Time for an upgrade, I reckon.
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