Halloween Memo?

It seems someone didn't get the memo. Did the entire CU population not get the memo that it is Halloween, or did I miss the memo that nobody was going to dress up for it? My costume isn't very creative/original/interesting, but I like it anyway. I found doctor scrubs at Savers for $4.50, and I bought a crappy creepy stethoscope for $2.68. I wasn't even planning to get a costume because I didn't think I would have anywhere to wear it, but then I got invited to a costume party last night, so I decided I would probably need a costume. Maybe I'll get a picture of it... and then again maybe I won't.

Anyway, here are some funny dogs.

Learn By Doing

I went to Veloswap today which is a huge gathering of cyclists buying and selling all kinds of bikes, bike parts, and bike paraphernalia. I went last year too, but since I didn't have any money and wasn't really looking for anything specific anyway, I just ended up wandering around wishing I had more money.

This year I actually bought a few things though. After waiting in a long line to get into the place (held at the National Western Stock Show building), I then had to wait in another long line to use the one ATM in the whole place because I was stupid and didn't go to the bank before I came. I had to pay a fee to use the ATM, but it figured I was still ahead of the game because I told the parking attendant to take her $6 parking fee and shove it while I went and found equally good parking for free elsewhere (I didn't really say that to her, but I wasn't very polite either).

So, after finally getting in and getting my money, I was off to the races. Unlike last year where I wandered around aimlessly, this year I had a bit more focus. I was looking for a new seat, a new front brake, a new front brake lever (if one should strike my fancy), and possibly a new handlebar (bull-horn style, specifically). As I snaked my way through the slow-walking crowd I quickly scanned the items being offered at each table. My first find was a seat. I was looking for something with a cut-out down the middle so that it wouldn't make my crotch go numb after only 30 minutes riding it. This seat I found had this crotch-saving cutout, a sleek low-profile design, titanium rails, and because it had been in a crash and got scuffed, it was only $5. For some people a scuffed seat just won't do, but I don't really care about scuffs. It is really just cosmetic, and actually having a damaged seat will probably reduce the likelihood of it getting stolen on campus. Anyway, I'll have to take it on a little bit longer ride some day to see how much better it is than my old seat.

Then I found a brake caliper that looked nice. It was black, and it was only $10. I probably could have bargained it down, but I don't really enjoy bargaining. Not long after that I found a brake lever that I thought would do the trick for only $5. I wandered around a bit longer, saw the type of handlebars that I thought I might want to get, but I ended up not liking them and so I didn't buy them. I also saw an old frame quite similar to the one I have now (same make, close year, different model, cooler colors; black and red) for $48. I was about to buy it and maybe build it into a second fixed gear, but luckily it was too big for me and so I didn't buy it. That's when I realized that I should leave before I spent the $45 I had left on something that I didn't really need.

So then I came home to put my new parts on my bike. The seat went on without any problems, but after a few hours of tinkering and a trip to a bike shop, I have realized that the brake caliper I bought is the wrong size. Before I left this morning to go to Veloswap in the back of my mind I was thinking, "Dustin, you should probably measure that thing so you can be sure to get a new one that fits," but alas, I didn't. I thought they were probably all the same and so I thought I would probably be okay without measuring. Well, I was wrong... luckily I'm not out too much money and I guess that's how you learn these kinds of things...

To remedy the situation I have bought another brake caliper on ebay that I am quite confident will fit. I didn't get the same bargain for it, but I think I'm at least not overpaying (too much). Hopefully it will arrive quickly and I can install it, but in the mean time my bike doesn't have a front brake and I don't think I'm "brave" enough to ride it anywhere without a brake.

So today I got on my mountain bike for the first time since I got the fixed gear and it felt really weird. After exclusively riding the fixed gear since September, getting back on the mountain bike felt kind of like driving a big, slow, lumbering, excessive Ford Expedition for the first time after months of driving a light, simplistic, lithe, Lotus Elise. So, in other words, I hope my brake arrives quickly so I don't have to ride my mountain bike for too long.

Speaking of the Lotus Elise, today's video is a video clip from the BBC TV show Top Gear testing a Lotus Exige which is just like the Elise only faster and better. I like this car a lot, and for most of the same reasons why I like the VTEC Mini. Because it does more with less. This car has a 1.8 liter Toyota 4-cylinder engine, and in this clip they race it against a Ford Mustang with a 5.4 liter V8 with quite a bit more horsepower. However, because the Lotus is so small and light, and just all around better, it beats the Mustang. I love it. It is at the same time both extreme and minimalist.

Mid-Term Update

So, by my shabby calculations it looks like this semester is halfway through. This is a good time to ponder and reflect. Here are my thoughts on my classes so far in the order that I have them during the week:

• Semantics - This class is kind of a mixed bag for me. I am doing well in it, I am learning a lot, and it is interesting, but I don't think I really care for semantics very much. Semantics is a field of linguistics which deals with the meanings of words. I think the reason I don't like it so much is because it is a little too philosophical for my tastes. Indeed, there seems to be a lot of overlap between philosophy and semantics. It's too much of "well that depends on what the meaning of IS is," kinda stuff. Certainly part of the reason I might not like this class so much might have something to do with the fact that Comment-Blurting-Hair-Eating guy is in it, constantly blurting out annoying commentary. But at least I'm doing well in it. We got our midterms back the other day and I aced it! I thought I had probably done at least well enough for a B, but I never thought I would have aced it. That's always a great feeling.


• Portuguese - This class is also sort of a mixed bag. It's not really living up to my admittedly high expectations. I noticed today in class that although we are halfway through the semester, we are probably only about a quarter of the way through the skinny text book. I was hoping that the teacher would take full advantage of the fact that we all speak Spanish already and therefore already understand a lot of the grammar points, but she hasn't. In fact, she spends kind of a lot of time in class talking about concepts that are exactly the same in Spanish. Yet somehow some of the students still don't seem to grasp it and I'm sitting there shouting in my head, "IT'S JUST LIKE SPANISH!" At this point in the semester we should be able to say way more things than we do, and we should be moving a whole lot faster... On the good side though, it is a cake class and it might be the easiest A I've ever had.


• Morphology - This is by far my favorite class of the semester, and possibly my favorite linguistics class ever. Morphology is essentially the study of grammar cross-linguistically. The professor, who I'm pretty sure was a big hippie when he was an undergrad at Berkeley in the 60's (wasn't everyone at Berkeley in the 60's a hippie though?), has done a lot of research on Native American languages like Wichita and Lakota. In this class we learn about all kinds of different and interesting grammatical systems in languages around the world. The homework involves us looking at datasets of different obscure languages and figuring out what all the bits and pieces are doing in the dataset. I actually enjoy doing this homework! And the lectures are always so interesting. It makes you want to just go out and learn every language you can (as if I didn't already want to do that!). If I come back to school for graduate-level linguistics ever, I would love to take another morphology class.


• Spanish Phonetics and Phonology - This class is basically the study of sounds and how sounds fit together in Spanish. I thought I would really love this class because it is a combination of Spanish and Linguistics, but it turns out it's only so-so. I like that it's taught in Spanish, so I get some Spanish exposure, but really I am learning almost all the same things that I learned in my regular Phonetics and Phonology class last semester, except that I'm learning all the Spanish terminology for it. I guess it's helpful to go over it all again in another language and from another teacher though to really solidify it. Also, it makes for a pretty easy class because I've essentially already learned everything. At least there are a few new things that are more Spanish-specific though, so I am still learning a few new things...


• Russian - I am enjoying this class. The teacher is great! She's passionate, funny, and good at explaining things. Actually, now that I think about it, she reminds me a lot of my favorite Chinese teacher in China... I still can't say a whole lot, but I can already see that Russian is a pretty interesting language. It has a some pretty interesting phonetic and phonological things going on, as well as a pretty rich and detailed grammar system. Really it all seems pretty logical though. There is a lot of agreement and inflection going on which means that until everything is memorized to the point that it becomes natural, there is a lot of stuff going on in your brain when you are trying to create grammatically correct sentences. My only problem with this class is that I am not putting in as much effort as I would like to be. I am keeping up fine, but I could be learning it much better if I were putting in more time and effort.


• International Affairs Senior Seminar - This is the class that I predicted I would hate, and I was right. It's dreadful. What a horrible way to finish up a major which I never really grew to love anyway (although I was starting to finally grow more fond of it last semester). This is supposed to be the class that ties everything together, but instead it is an economics class about the European Union. If it had a better teacher I could maybe get interested in it, but not with this teacher. The only good thing about this class is that it only meets once a week and she usually lets us out after 1-1.5 hours even though it is scheduled to go 2.5 hours.


• International Economics - This doesn't really count as a class because I take it online. I started it last December and I have until graduation to finish it. The whole class consists of 6 multiple choice online assignments, each of which takes about 2 hours to complete. I only have two assignments left, and so far I probably have about an A- average... so that's good I guess.

So, overall I would say that classes are going well. I wish I could drop that stupid International Affairs class, make my Portuguese teacher a better teacher, spend more time on Russian, and take the philosophy and the comment-blurting guy out of Semantics. I also wish that instead of re-learning Phonetics and Phonology that I could instead take some sort of psycho-linguistics class, or a language development class, basically a more hard-science kind of linguistics class. Another more advanced morphology class would be cool too. Maybe that's what grad school is for though.

An now for today's video. Do you like Avril Lavigne? Do you like British people? Do you like MIA? If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, then you might like Lady Sovereign. I wouldn't say that I actually "like" her, but she is strangely and mysteriously infectious...

Everything I Know About Baltimore...

...I learned from Wikipedia.

In less than two weeks I will be flying to Baltimore for my uncle's wedding. I think this will be the first wedding I have been to since my other uncle got married in, um, was that 1996? Yes, I think this will be my first wedding in ten years. So I am excited about it. I am also excited about flying to Baltimore, not necessarily because it is Baltimore, but more because I like flying and airports (probably only because I don't spend a lot of time in them).

Anyway, as the event nears I am realizing that I don't really know much about Baltimore except that it is somewhere on the east coast. Baltimore and Boston could be neighbors for all I know (or knew, rather). So I did what any internet-savvy nerd would do, and I looked it up on the by-the-people-for-the-people internet knowledge database that is Wikipedia. Sure, people berate Wikipedia all the time for not being a real source of factual information, but I use it anyway. Most of the information I find on there seems accurate enough for my needs anyway.

Here are some interesting things about Balitmore which I didn't know before I learned about them on Wikipedia:

• Baltimore is in Maryland - Haha, no, just kidding. I actually knew that Baltimore was in Maryland. No really, I did.
• Baltimore has around 650,000 inhabitants - That is roughly 100,000 more than Denver, but is still kind of a cowtown compared to Nanjing, China which has about ten times that many people, or Beijing which has over TWENTY times that many people, but it isn't really fair to compare Chinese and American city populations. In 1950, however, the city had almost 1 million denizens, but the population has been shrinking since then (until recently in 2000 when it began to climb again).
  
• Baltimore is an independent city - it doesn't belong to any county government.
• In the War of 1812, the British declared Baltimore a "nest of Pirates."
• Baltimore is home to the world's tallest equilateral five-sided building (not to be confused with it's close cousin, the non-equliateral five-sided bilding). I wonder how many people walk by the Baltimore World Trade Center and say in awe, "wow, would you look at the lateral equality on that tall five-sided building!"
• Baltimore has a 311 non-emergency telephone hotline so people don't call 911 when they don't have emergencies. I should call it while I'm there just to see what it's all about.
• Baltimore has a lot of crime - It ranks second only to Detroit among the most dangerous large American cities. It has seven times the national murder rate, six times the rate in NYC, and three times the rate of LA.
• Baltimore's local culinary delicacies include blue crab and beer, where the crab is eaten with a mallet, a knife, and bare hands. Apparently the "chicken box" is popular too, consisting of fried chicken and starch (wait, wan't this invented in Kentucky, hence KFC?).
• The preferred beer is National Bohemian, a.k.a. "Natty Boh," or "National."
• Some scenes for the movie 12 Monkeys were filmed in Baltimore.

I also went to the Speech Accent Archive to listen to what a Baltimore accent sounds like. From the two samples they have of people from Baltimore, it sounds pretty standard, but it seems like there is some deletion of word-medial stops like 't' in "into" or in "plastic."

Today's video has nothing to do with Baltimore (I tried, but I couldn't find any Baltimore-related music videos that I liked). So it is Calle 13 instead. The last Calle 13 video I put up was Atrevete-te-te back in April, which is still an awesome song by the way (I think it means something like 'live a little!'). This one is called Jirafa which means 'giraffe.' I was going to put up a different Calle 13 song, Suave, but it was a little too risqué. In fact, I think this is the only song I've heard by Calle 13 that isn't even a little bit dirty; this one is more sweet and romantic.

Dream Cars: Addendum

I've been on the lookout for good videos of VTEC Mini Coopers on Youtube, but they are all pretty crappy. I did find this video, however, from an old episode of my favorite BBC automotive television program, Top Gear, with host Jeremy Clarkson.

It isn't a VTEC Mini, but it is an old mini with lots of power. My mini would be similar to this one, with a few differences:

• This one has a 1.4 litre original Mini engine which has been modified to make 160 horsepower. Mine would have either a 1.8 or a 2.0 litre Honda engine with over 200 horsepower.
• This one has straight-cut gears, which I hear is difficult to drive. Mine would have a friendly, smooth, Honda transmission.
• This one cost £50,000 (over $100,000), but mine would probably cost less than $30,000.
• This one is green, mine will be black.
  

This car also has some similarities to my Mini though:

• Mine will be just as tiny.
• Mine will probably be just as uncomfortable, and possibly almost as loud.

The Next Adventure?

It finally snowed today, and it's starting to accumulate and bend all the tree branches, but I'm not going to write about that because it's the same thing that happens every year as the earth tilts on it's axis.

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago about how I had no idea what I would be doing after I graduate, but after a few weeks of thinking, pondering, and considering, I have some slightly more solid plans. I still haven't actually lined anything up though, so it is all still just in the pondering stage. But here's what I've got so far:

Now until December 20, 2006 - Somehow manage to keep up with and do well in school and work without dying.

December 20, 2006 - Graduate from CU, move from Grandma's basement in Boulder to Ma's basement in Edwards. Live and work in the Edwards/Beaver Creek/Vail area, possibly driving the Beaver Creek shuttles, or maybe driving the Denver-Vail shuttle vans... It isn't exactly resume-enhancing work, but I love driving and I think I will like it. I might also keep doing part-time work for Infoture, but who knows about that.

April, 2007 - Ski season ends and so will my driving job. Raissa and Dad and I are talking about going on a trip to Europe together, maybe for a month or two.

June, 2007 - Get back from Europe, and probably/maybe go back to work at Chinese Summer Camp again from mid-june to mid/late-july.

July, 2007 - Just as summer camp ends, I might move to Japan for a year to teach English. This little option is totally out of left field, I realize that, so let me explain. Yesterday I was standing in the Humanities building waiting for my semantics class to start when I saw posted on the bulletin board a flyer for an informational meeting about JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program). It is a program funded by the Japanese government to get English teachers to Japan (two different links: one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan, and another from the Consulate General of Japan at Denver). It involves a year-long contract and approximately US$30,000 for the whole year. It sounded interesting, so I went to the meeting. Unfortunately I misread the flyer and I got there an hour after it started, and thus I only caught the last 10 minutes or so. But it still looks pretty interesting. So today in my linguistics class I asked a guy I know who studies Japanese and a Japanese girl what they know about it, and they both seemed to have pretty good impressions of it. Anyway, the application is due December 4, and I think I'm going to go ahead and apply for it. I think I'm totally qualified and they would be dumb not to accept me. I'm thinking that this would be a good way for me to learn some Japanese (which is safely on my list of ten that I want to learn before I'm fifty). It would also be good teaching experience, if only I thought I wanted to be a language teacher... Also, Japan is pretty expensive to just travel to, so this would be a much better way to see the country. And I'm pretty sure that living in a country for an extended period is almost always better than simply visiting anyway. Overall the whole thing looks like a pretty exciting and legitimate opportunity, and I guess I don't really have any other significantly better ideas for what to do. The timing is perfect too because Chinese summer camp should end around July 17th (or thereabouts) and I would leave for this thing on July 29th, I believe. Anyway, I would love to hear any opinions that you might have about this, both good or bad. Why should I do it? Why should I NOT do it?

So if I can actually follow through with this stuff, 2007 could turn out to be another good year for me.

Today's video: I was looking through my computer the other day at some of my own videos that I have taken and I found this short one that I took on the maglev train to the airport in Shanghai. As you can see, it was really fast. I think the top speed was somewhere around 430 kmh, which is almost 270 mph. Yeah, that's pretty fast. It was a neat train ride; totally worth the 50 kuai (that's about $6, or maybe it was 100 kuai which is still only $12... I can't remember)

Dream Cars

Oh my god, I just spent an hour writing a post and then after a series of unfortunate keystroke events, I managed to lose the whole thing! That might be the most frustrating thing in the world.

Anyway, here it goes again. I realize that most of the people that read this blog don't give a hoot about cars, but I do. Sometimes people ask me what is my one dream car. Although I always have an answer to this question, I always wonder, "why just one?" So, if I were to limit myself to ONLY, let's say... five cars, what would they be? They would be these, probably in this order:

1. VTEC Mini Cooper - Take an old Mini Cooper that weighs about 1600 pounds, restore it, give it a 2.0 liter Honda VTEC engine with 200+ horsepower that is fast even in a car weighing almost 3000 pounds, and you have a pretty sweet recipe. At only about $30k, this car is as quick as a Porsche (0-60 in about 4.6 seconds), but gets well over 30 miles per gallon, is easier to park, and is as easy to work on and find parts for as a Honda. Is it possibly the world's most perfect car? I think it might be, and I am pretty sure I'm going to buy one as soon as I can afford it.
   
   
2. Porsche 911 Carerra - Some complain that the 911 has become almost too sterile in recent years, but I love it because it is a precision instrument and an automotive icon. It is more well-rounded than most serious sports cars because it is quite reliable and comfortable to use as a daily driver where as many sports cars are not. The 911 comes in many different flavors. There is the base model, a faster "S" model, and then there's the legendary "turbo." There are all-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-drive variants. And then there's a coupe, a convertible, or a targa top. As tempting as the turbo sounds, I think I would probably go down a notch to the Carerra 4S Targa (fast, but not turbo-fast; all-wheel-drive so I can take it skiing, and targa for the big sunroof). The 355-horsepower 3.8-liter six-cylinder engine will get me from zero to 60 miles per hour in about 4.6 seconds, but it'll cost me about $100k.
   
   
3. Jaguar XKE, E-type - I actually owned one of these for a few years (this is a picture of it), and I still think it is about the sexiest car ever created. The one I had was a 1969 Series 1.5, 2+2 (meaning it had a small back seat), but if I were to get another one some day, I would probably look for a slightly older Series 1, 2-seater coupe with no back seat because they have slightly sexier proportions. With a 240-hp 4.2-liter inline six-cylinder engine, this car was considered pretty fast in it's day, and from my experience they still aren't slow even by today's standards. For a nicely restored example of this automotive icon I'll probably need about $30k.
   
   
4. Audi RS4 - This car can haul some pretty serious ass (5 asses, actually) in luxury and comfort, and with all-wheel-drive it can do it in the snow. With a high-tech 4.2-liter 420-horsepower V8 engine, it sounds pretty sweet doing it too (and it goes 0-60 in about 4.7 seconds). Since all the other cars on this list aren't really designed to haul more than two asses at a time, this car would be a good addition to the stable. But in all actuality, I don't have enough friends to really need a back seat anyway... hahaha. I do kind of have a problem with it being a V8 though because it seems so wasteful. And they aren't cheap, costing about $70k new.
   
   
5. Hmm, I can't really decide on what I would want for this last spot. Would I want a truck even though they are huge and so wasteful? Maybe I would want a Toyota Prius to balance out some of the gas-guzzlers on the list. Perhaps I would want another small, fast, lightweight sports car with a small, economical engine; something like a Lotus Elise or the totally impractical but amazing Ariel Atom? Maybe I would want some other cool old car like a sweet VW van, or a Lincon Continental with suicide doors (the car in The Matrix when they take the bug out of Neo's belly button). Maybe I'll just leave this as a wildcard slot.

So yeah, that would be a pretty sweet collection of cars I think. All of my cars would have to be black, preferably with some sort of dark brown leather interiors, and they would all have manual transmissions. All together it looks like I would need about $230k - $250k for these four listed here. For that kind of money I could buy lots more mediocre cars. Or think of all the bicycles I could buy with that! Well luckily dreaming is free.

For today's video, there is no video. I am not posting one because I still can't get enough of the All American Rejects song I posted last time. I have probably watched that video an average of about a million times per day over the past week. I love everything about it. I love the line, "your hands are mine to hold." I love the video concept of all the different shirts and backgrounds and stuff. I love how emotional the lead singer is. Also, I'm kind of strangely attracted to him in that jealous I-wish-I-were-that-hot sort of way. The girl who he seems to be breaking up with is also pretty gorgeous. I was so enamored with this video that I looked up the director, Marc Webb, and found his website www.marcwebb.com where I found a much higher-quality version of the video along with some other videos that I like but hadn't realized that they were also done by him. I don't think I can post it here, but go there and watch it if you like. As much as I love the video I found on YouTube, this high-quality video is even better because there's just more detail and stuff. Love it!

Facebook Stalker

Well, remember all that blog post material that I had thought up while I couldn't sleep the other night? Well, after finding the piece of paper I had written it all down on I decided that I don't really want to write about them now. What a waste of time that was! Well, I might still write about one of them in a few weeks, but we'll see...

Anyway, there is a girl in one of my linguistics classes who has kind of caught my eye lately. She was actually in one of my linguistics classes last semester too; she sat across the room from me, but she didn't really strike my fancy until recently. But rather than go talk to her like a normal person would, I decided to take what little I knew about her and try to find out more on the internet. Name? I had no idea, not even a guess. Major? Well, I was guessing she was probably a linguistics major because I knew that this was at least her second linguistics class. That's about all I knew. Unfortunately, I couldn't really conceive of any smooth way that I could sit by her and strike up a witty conversation because it would require me moving pretty far away from my usual seat and it would be totally obvious to almost anyone who sits on that side of the classroom. So what was I to do? Talking to her after class would also be way too forward...

Then I thought, "this is a job for facebook; a.k.a. stalkerbook." It may sound bad to some people to stalk classmates on online networking sites, but really that is almost exactly what they are designed for. Also, if she doesn't want people stalking her on facebook, there are plenty of ways for her to keep people from doing just that. Also, it is really just a time and energy saver because I can find out a lot of important things from facebook without the anxiety of having to strike up a conversation with her; such things as if she is single or not, what things she is interested in, what kinds of friends she has, etc... Of course I would then have to pretend like I didn't already know these things when I actually DID strike up with a conversation with her later...

So I got on Facebook hoping that she would have listed herself as being in that class. That would be best because I didn't even know her name, so it would be hard to find her unless she was on the class roster on facebook. Unfortunately, she wasn't there. After a few different attempts to find her on stalkerbook, I was about to give up. It seemed that she was one of the few college students without a facebook profile, or perhaps she was just really hard to find. It seemed that if I wanted to find out anything about her that I might have to actually talk to her somehow...

But then as my teacher was handing back homework assignments today he called out her name and I took a mental note and after class I got on facebook and found her! Yay! But, her profile is private so I could see nothing but her majors. Turns out she is a linguistics and Spanish major, so that's cool. But really I was hoping that the internet would provide me with more information about her... maybe I'll still have to actually talk to her face to face like a normal human... or maybe I'll just forget about it. haha. She's probably evil anyway...

The video that I was thinking of putting up today got taken off of YouTube for copyright infringement... stupid copyrights. I don't care about copyrights, I just want to watch videos and listen to music for free, damnit! Anyway, hopefully someone else will re-post that video again and I'll put it up. Luckily there are lots of other videos to choose from, and this one is pretty good too. I never really was an All American Rejects fan, but then I found this video, Move Along and I've probably watched this video or listened to this song like 30 times in the past two days because I love it. I wish I could have rock-star hair like the lead singer in this video. But Ding and I were talking about how neither of us would look as good with hair like that as he does. So I guess I'll just stick with the boring buzz cut...

First Anniversary

One year ago today I posted my first entry at this blogspot.com address. Since then I have posted 106 more posts which means that on average I have posted one entry every 3.4 days this year, or almost exactly twice a week! I guess that's a pretty good number; often enough, but not TOO often either... As you can see in this graph below, however, my average number of blog posts per month had, until recently, been in steady decline as I went from 20 posts in the first month, to just one post in July (granted, I was busy at summer camp and didn't have much time to post then). It's also interesting to see that there were two small spikes in December and April which coincidentally coincide with final exams...


There has been an average of 2.59 comments per blog entry with 6 entries that had significantly more comments than the others:

1. Poll had by far the most comments with a total of 14. This is an anomaly though because I had actually asked for people's input on which language I should start learning next. Arabic got the most votes, but alas I have started learning Portuguese and Russian instead. Go figure...
2. State of the Union? came in second place with a respectable 12 comments. Don't be fooled by the title of this entry, however, because these 12 comments had nothing to do with the State of the Union address, but rather with the Princess Bride character quiz which I had posted also. Just goes to show that The Princess Bride is far more important and interesting than the State of the Union address.
3. I HATE the wind! tied for third place with 10 comments. So it seems that in addition to The Princess Bride, people also like to talk about what the weather was like when they were young.
4. Insomnianiac also got 10 comments. There is no really obvious reason why this post got above-average commentary. I think maybe it's just because there were a few different points to comment on, and also because Ding was quick to point out my technological ineptitude..
5. Thanksgiving Weekend comes in 4th place with 9 comments, most of which were just an inside joke in Chinese with Da, Vina, and Me, and then my dad having fun with online computer translation.
6. And finally, Majorly Linguistic came in 5th place with 7 comments.

Over the past year, I count 8 blog entries that talk about some of my strange dreams, about 15 posts broadly related to linguistics, and 3 posts mentioning my hatred towards wind.

Ok, for today's video we have "Fearless（霍元甲）" by my favorite Chinese (Taiwanese, actually) pop singer, Jay Chou The video has Jet Li in it because it's a song for an upcoming movie (or maybe the movie is already out) with Jet Li in it.

Today...

Some things that happened today:

1. A random person stopped me on the sidewalk today to ask me about my bike and where I got it and such. They said they have been scoping it out the past few days on the bike rack at the UMC and that they really like it. I didn't get the impression that they meant that in a "I was scoping it out to steal it" sort of way, but rather the "I was scoping it out because it's neat" sort of way.
2. Corgie Man was telling some more apparent strangers about his stupid dog while he was taking it out for a dump on the Norlin quad.
3. Hair-eating-comment-blurting-guy was blurting out more unneccesary commentary in my semantics class (as usual, nothing new there) and some people around me started to comment about how annoying he is, thus validating my own feelings towards him. We all wish we could vote him out of the class (and perhaps into law school). I'm pretty sure that our teacher would second that vote.
4. For lunch I had a day-old microwaved Taco Bell Chalupa... possibly (hopefully) the culinary low point of the week...

YouTube is down for maintenance at the moment, so there's no video today...

Substance-Induced Insomnia

Well, I had another sleepless night last night, but this time it was due to neither high winds, nor mini mania (Part I, II), nor fixed-gear fantasies. Nope, this time the culprit was something entirely new: experimentation with pyschoactive substances. After living in a college town like Boulder where practically everyone does it, I figured that I should try it too...

Yup, I've started drinking coffee (haha, did I trick you?). Being the novice coffee drinker I am though, I drank too much coffee too late last night and when I was finished with my work and came home to go to sleep, I was just too hopped-up on caffeine to sleep (that reminds me, cafeí­na - "caffeine" would be an excellent subsitution in the Gasolina o Quesadilla? song...).

Last time I wrote about having a sleepless night my dad commented that when I can't sleep I should just accept and embrace the insomnia and get up and do something while I'm feeling awake. I pondered this, but then I realized that regardless of whether I can get to sleep or not, I still have to wake up at the same time in the morning, so I should just stay in bed and keep trying to fall asleep on the off chance that it works. And actually, even though I failed at that, I still managed to get just as much accomplished laying there in bed pretending to sleep as I would have had I gotten up and tried to do some homework or something. As I was laying there, I thought up at least 5 or 6 blog posts worth of material, which means I have potentially saved myself several hours over the coming days and weeks of agonizing blog-planning time. Actually, that's not true because I will probably keep thinking of new things that I want to write about, so really I am just at a deficit now and I will have to write extra in order to keep the topics from piling up too high. So really I've just made MORE work for myself?!

I think about blog topics fairly often as I'm dozing off, but I often forget about them by the morning because I don't want to get out of bed and write anything down because it might disrupt my train of thought (that and I'm also usually tired and lazy and comfortable in bed). But last night I actually wrote stuff down so I won't forget it...

After several hours of laying in bed mentally planning out my next several blog entries (I last looked at the clock at 2:30, and I'm sure I was still awake for at least another half an hour or so...), I finally began to arrive at the final laps of the mind-race. I got this strange spacial sensation that I have always gotten from time to time for pretty much as long as I can remember; I wonder if anyone else has ever had this sort of sensation. It happens when I am somewhere around probably 60% consciousness and my body becomes really relaxed. It becomes relaxed to the point where I almost can't even feel it. Then I get this strange feeling that I am just a head, no body, and I have become very small and I am in the corner of a very large room on the floor where it meets the wall. But I can still kind of feel my limbs, and I can also still hear and listen to the real room that I am actually sleeping in, which still sounds like a normal sized room. Theses two conflicting sensations almost seem to combine to where the overall sensation is an illogical feeling of being a tiny, bodiless head that is at once both lost in, and filling up the huge room with my body. It is a really neat sensation. After laying there for a few minutes I start to become aware of how I can't really feel my body and it makes me want to move, twitch my arm, stretch my leg, just to feel that it's still there, but at the same time I want to resist the temptation to move because when I move it immediately interrupts this whole sensation even if only for a moment.

Anyway, today's video is "Risingson" by one of my all-time favorite musical groups, Massive Attack. I haven't been listening to them as much lately though because I have instead been listening almost exclusively to Muse (at least I resisted the temptation to put up another Muse video though...). Their CD Mezzanine was the only thing I listened to all day, everyday for pretty much the entire summer of 2000 while I was working at AGENCY.COM coding HTML. I chose this video because even though it's a pretty boring video, I think the song makes a pretty good soundtrack to insomnia.

A Day Off

It was a pretty pleasantly unproductive weekend for me. I had already got most of the hours I needed for work by Friday evening, so I decided to take a day off on Saturday. I spent the morning riding around Boulder on my bike looking for an El Chapo CD for Raissa's birthday, but apparently Boulder doesn't have a very big El Chapo following because none of the several CD places I went to had any El Chapo. So I got her a NOW: Musica Latina CD and some inappropriate postcards (warning, these postcards all contain humorous usages of the F-word and may be offensive to some people) instead of El Chapo. I also gave her some used video games, at least one of which was actually hers to begin with anyway... Aren't I just a swell brother?

Then I went with Amanda to see Little Miss Sunshine (which was pretty funny), followed by tapas at The Med. Then I went home and played video games and watched TV for the first time in many months. It's amazing how TV just sucks you in. I have pretty much weaned myself completely from television, but I ended up watching a good three hours of it anyway. At least I did find myself enjoying it less than I think I used to...

This got me thinking about vice and guilt. I wonder if addiction, guilt, and shame are exclusively human traits. Are there any other animals that get addictions? Do they feel shame or guilt for these addictions? Does this shame/guilt make them want to rid themselves of their vices? Probably not. I can't picture, let's say a dolphin, thinking to himself or saying to his friends in dolphinese, "man, I can't believe I just sat around all day doing back flips. I didn't do a single productive thing today! I need to work on that!" Or, perhaps, a dog saying to his cat friend, "man, you need to lay off the catnip. I think it is starting to really affect our relationship..." Somehow, I find these scenarios difficult to imagine...

Anyway, then on Sunday I decided to go for a long bike ride up to Dad's house. I was contemplating riding all the way from Boulder to Berthoud, but then I ended up not starting until too late. Also, I've never ridden anywhere near that far before (about 27 miles according to Google Maps), and so I thought that maybe I should try something shorter first. So I took the bus to the north end of Longmont and then rode from there. I thought it might take me an hour, but it only took me a half an hour because I'm awesome (haha). I went up there so he could give me some financial advice because Infoture has offered me participation in their 401(k) program (man, that makes me feel like an old man). So he was helping me figure out how to do that and such. Then I was thinking about maybe riding all the way back to Boulder on my bike, but (naturally) the wind was blowing in exactly the wrong direction and I would have had nothing but headwinds the whole way back. Also, because I still haven't bought a nice seat for my bike and it just has a cheap crappy one still, my boys were already going numb by the time I got to Longmont, so I took the bus back. It was a nice ride though and as soon as I get a better seat I think I would like to try doing a longer ride. I would also like to see the looks on other biker's faces as I pass them on my fixed gear, haha... I hope I make them feel inferior... (of course they will be the ones laughing when they pass me struggling up the steep hills while they glide along in their low gears...).

So overall it was a pretty nice, relaxing weekend with a good dose of some well-earned "mental health time"


Anyway... on to today's video. This video doesn't really have anything to do with what I've written about today, and I know that I already put up a Muse video not long ago, but since they are pretty much all I've been listening to lately, I guess it's okay to put up another one of their videos. This one is called "Bliss" apparently, and just like all of their songs and videos, it is awesome.