Moving, just keep moving.

Hello all,

I have totally 'punked out', as I hope the kids don't really say, to wordpress. A free wordpress blog, no less.

thinkplusdoequalswhat.wordpress.com

It will also be in English. Crazy, I know.

A bunch of stuff over the week.

A lot has happened this week, and I’ve been busy, but I was committed to write something on my blog today!!

So, a bit of everything.

Barack Obama’s extremely commendable refusal to turn his back on a man who has supported him since he was a child really inspired me this week. His pastor has said some fairly mad things, but that in no way makes Obama complicit in these statements. In fact, though it is of course heresy to even suggest it, the gentleman’s comments have in some cases been overly effusive (and offensive) statements of very plausible truths.

Events in Tibet are very scary. The outside world has no way of knowing who the Chinese government is rounding up, or how they are doing it, unless we take the CCP’s own reports at face value. Now, I am not saying straight out that we cannot do it, but accountability is a supposed strength in the democratic system. Forgive me if I’m not happy to take a politician’s word for it. Regardless of which government that politician represents.

George W. Bush’s speech commemorating the ‘victory’ in Iraq isn’t even worth a stir at this stage, in my opinion. You’re on your way out George. Please just go and play golf and leave everyone alone.

And finally, something very important is happening this Sunday. I am a sucker for tradition, and this weekend I’ll be allowing that most primal of emotions to just wash over me. Hate. Liverpool play Man U. I can’t wait.

I suppose I’ll celebrate Easter, too.

This would have been a cool post, but...

Well, I’m back to work.

Or should be!! Another day battling my own idleness. The plan is to have the minimum work and a bit of tidying done by the time I head out for St. Paddy’s night. Another low-key year, hopefully. I can’t stand ‘oirish’ vibes, especially this time of year.

A really, really short post as usual because I’m exhausted. I also put together a little movie on SXSW I was hoping to post but iMovie freaked out for some reason.

SXSW 2008, you are over too soon, too soon.

Well, my SXSW 2008 is over. I'm missing today for the wedding of a friend, but what a time I packed into the three days I had.

First of all, don't hesitate to get a wristband. For one thing, it gets you in the mindset to get your behind out the door. And then, when you're sitting in the sun at five o'clock after several free beers and several free gigs (that don't need a wristband) wondering "why did I get this wristband thing again?" you head out to more shows for the rest of the night.

It was really fantastic, and well worth taking a couple of days off work for; downtown Austin turns into a wonderful rock music inspired Disneyland, except almost everyone has paid way too much attention to what they're wearing.

For people reading this, I suggest you go to poshdeluxe to check out the upcoming stuff from Sarah and the gang. They set up this very cool thing where we could call in comments about the festival on the phone and it turns up on the blog. We had a lot of fun.

Notable highlights included:

• Seeing a band battle dodgy acoustics but still sound pretty cool in a Presbyterian Church
  
• An afternoon at Mohawk's with free bar and great music that really taught me what SXSW is all about
  
• Seeing Yo La Tengo in the Austin Music Hall, a weird genuine gig amongst all the SXSW compilations
  
• Being at two Jens Lekman concerts in less than 24 hours through accident more than by design
  
• Sneaking in to a day party to basically skip a queue of fifteen people, as we then had to get friends who paid to get in to get us the 'free' beer
  
• The Hot Topic party. There about eight people outside watching a guy play metal solo guitar with a laptop providing the beat and five inside playing rockband on a HDTV. It was all so... Hot Topic
  
• Really enjoying Santogold despite not liking rap music very much
  

SXSW, I love you. I'm sorry I'm missing the last day. I want to see you again, I need to be near you. I love your short sets. I love your swarms of hipsters: they make me laugh. Please be my girlfriend.

Stubbs outside was the best venue. Say Hi were easily the best band I saw. Absolutely fantastic. Now I'm taking advantage of the one positive of missing the last day: I'm going to bed.

Friday at SXSW

I'm at Volume nightclub on 6th and it's HOT here. Like, crazy hot. I wasn't designed for this. Kaki King is playing, which s pretty cool, and they have these laptps and things set up around the place, for blogging or something I guess.

So, I'm blogging. A little bit.

I'll be glad when I can do this in my house with pictures and things.

So, SXSW is awesome.

I am writing this short blog in the library at UT because I had to haul my tired and hungover butt out of bed to come in for an interview for a position I might not get because I'm not American. So, waiting around for Sarah to be ready to hit another party, I'm writing this out really quick.

My first night of SXSW was fantastic. I thought I'd miss out a bit by having completely lost track of the music world in the last two years (how do you guys do it? How did I do it?) but the opposite is true!! The whole fun is in roaming around and seeing various bands. Last night I saw Ghost Hustler, who looked extremely European despite being from Dallas, Zookeeper, who looked very Texan and played inside a Presbyterian Church, and The Guillotines, who just looked and sounded awesome.

Pictures forthcoming, when I get a chance to sit down. Next Monday. After that we went to this Red Bull party on Cesar Chavez, with free booze.

I'm going to say that one more time.

Free booze.

There was also Halo and Guitar Hero, but to be honest it kind of just brought the tone down. The organisers also seemed bummed they only had about a hundred or so people, but I guess that's what happens when you arrange a secret party with admission only by temporary tattoo. Which nobody can find but friends of mine have stockpiled like Soviet nukes pre-SALT.

Oh yeah. I went there. In short, SXSW = awesome.

The future is here.

No, it really is. What is going on?

Today is my first day of SXSW, having spent the last few days trying and failing to work. I’ve been building up to this by doing very little, confident in the knowledge that my considerably more local friends could look after me.

However, I have been invited to join in an experiment, joining in on audio posts on the very excellent poshdeluxe. Basically, I call a phone number, leave a message, and it turns up on a blog. On the Internet. With very little input from any humans.

This is it. The first step of the robots taking over.

Wooooot!!! Music is good.

So I got my wristband for SXSW today. I completely missed the lines by popping down in the morning the day before the music starts rather than do what graduate students should spend spring break doing: sleeping until the afternoon.

I think this calls for a badly taken photograph of my awesome wristband!!



There we go. I also saw Adam Yauch strolling around downtown Austin when I came back out. That was pretty awesome. I saw a bonafide Beastie Boy. Well, he was walking along outside the convention centre.

I need to get all Jedi with the camera I think. Or at least remember to bring it out.

Bring on the music!!

Rolex is not in the dictionary.

So, last night I played Scrabble. For the first time since I was about seven years old. Rather than admit this of course, I pointed out that I speak proper English and therefore was destined to win, and inwardly started planning how to accept victory graciously.

Yeah, well. Scrabble is hard. For me, anyway. Though I could be stupid. A few things:

1. You can get points from more than one word at once. I didn’t know this. So, spelling out ‘sordid’ on one line and rendering ‘malfunction’ plural on the other is really, really good.
   
2. All the words I think of in Scrabble are good words, but worth about ten points.
   
3. Scrabble makes you really, really sleepy.
   

All of this was new to me. For example, I got the words ‘tacit’, ‘tannoy’, and ‘yob’, all of which I considered pretty cool words. The game didn’t agree with me. I got virtually no points at all!! Except for ‘yob’, I suppose. Having sat down and considered this carefully, there’s only one logical conclusion.

The game is flawed. I mean, come on, ‘tacit’ is an excellent word. It sounds nice, and it has an inherently nuanced meaning. You hear me? Nuanced. How could I not dominate my peers at Scrabble? Or at least be competitive.

Something has to give. I can deal with being rubbish at activities that involve running around or having some kind of hand to eye coordination, but this is nerdy stuff. This is my domain, people. If I’m not good at things like this….. I’m getting a bit worried.


scrabble from al.garcia on Vimeo.

No, I don't want any ringtones.

Spam has discovered Facebook.

What am I going to do? I migrated from myspace for a reason, damn it. First, I saw a message on my friend’s wall from someone that was clearly a myspace-esque computer-generated mess. Because it said ‘what up’ and people don’t do that very often anymore, unless they’re being ironic and hilarious. People also don’t contact each other a lot regarding secret methods for getting new ringtones.

To be honest, it didn’t bother me. Until my own profile was stained with this mess.

This sucks. I can deal with the shameless lack of client privacy Facebook engages in, I can deal with the ‘feeds’ so creepy it makes me feel like I’m spying on my own friends, and I can even deal with having to turn down about ten invitations to join some crappy application a day.

But spam? On my wall? What is going to be done about this? Probably nothing. I’ll just stop using Facebook.

And then I’ll have to do work. Oh God.

Meanwhile, I saw Diary of the Dead the other night.

Awesome. That simple.

Romero has made a pretty cool film that almost never betrays the fact that he is really old (but still very cool), apart from a rather wonderful faith in the ‘kids’ and ‘blogs’. It was actually very funny. I often watch zombie movies and have the crap scared out of me and miss the ‘humorous’ bits that critics love to get arch about, but I was laughing out loud a few times in this movie.

I love the commitment to solid B-movie staples (drunken English professor, Texas blonde that knows how to repair motor vehicles), but it got a bit old a little part of the way through. The plot is reliant on one of the protagonists essentially refusing to put his camera down at any point. Twenty minutes in, I really wanted this guy to be eaten by zombies. I settled for encouraging his girlfriend to leave him instead. Yes, I know I have no control over the plot.

That was the one weak point, though, really. I was pretty happy, I didn’t know what to expect. And if we’re honest, after a good long look in the mirror, Land of the Dead was a bit crap really.

A very short post today

I've been crazy busy with work stuff and now I need to SLEEP for a while. But two things:

First, Gary Gygax died this week. I never played D&D but I have enjoyed plenty of pop culture entertainments that would not exist without it. Rest in peace.

Secondly, vimeo is awesome. Observe:


Driving from Martin Wilson on Vimeo.

That's it, I'm out!

The Aftermath

So, only a few hours before polls closed in Texas I got kind of violently ill. What fun.

In the end it probably enhanced my election experience, as I was too sick to get any work done and so sat there drinking lots of fluids and letting Wolf Blitzer wash all over me. Yes, that’s what I meant to write.

It was all CNN, all the time, and I called Clinton for Texas about two hours before CNN did. I was quite proud of myself as I have no experience in electoral politics and had access to less of the data than the specialists did. Take that, experts!!

I could talk about the potential disaster last night was for the Democrats and the new grounds for optimism for the Republicans, the Clinton campaign’s worrying willingness to keep this as nasty and mean as possible, the fact that McCain’s visit to Bush today means very very little, but….

I want to talk about the CNN coverage. I know this is not exactly new to most people who watch CNN, but I got sick of the being reminded that they had the “best political team on television” every five minutes. All the members of that team were ridiculously partisan, whether they admitted it or not, making the Republican-supporting panellists the most entertaining to watch for most of the evening. This was a new development for me, personally.

Meanwhile Wolf Blitzer spent the entire evening turning to John King every chance he got, who had apparently sent off to Apple for an enormous iPod Touch with a Google Maps application. Wolf seemed to be drooling a bit too close to the screen. He must have been to the Bestbuy website overnight, because today they’ve named their gadget: the multi-touch screen!!

I’m actually refreshed by their utter failure to come up with a flashier title. It’s like they discovered taste by accident.

Now I’m watching the aftermath coverage and feeding myself with the justification that I’m ill, but really, I just can’t kick the election TV habit. Unfortunately, coverage from the day after is kind of crap. Although the more I see of Bush the lame duck president, the more I like him. “I’ll be in Crawford with my feet up!” he claimed loudly in his supposedly folksy manner. It took me a minute to figure out he was talking about life after the next president comes in.

Here are some things that I just want to list as interesting rather than make this WAY too long:

• 
  What’s the difference between urban (Obama) and working class (Clinton)?
  


• 
  Why is Clinton’s campaign team not only mean, but apparently proud of it? Should you really be telling CNN journalists on the record you want to “hit” anyone “hard”?
  


• 
  When will Democrats figure out that Republican voters will vote for McCain even if they don’t like him very much rather than vote for Clinton, for Obama, or abstain?
  


• 
  Someone tell the idiots that booed the mention of Clinton’s name on live national television as Obama gave his speech in San Antonio that they create a bad impression of the campaign in general, in addition to making themselves look stupid.
  


• 
  If Hilary Clinton was a man, with exactly the same policies, would she be getting as many votes? We live in a world where I think it’s clear she’d have a different number, but would it be less or more?
  

We should just elect Bret Favre and be done with it.

Ok, so a couple of things are happening later today. First off, there’s Champions’ League stuff going on. I’m looking forward to the Milan v Arsenal game quite a lot, despite the first leg, and am ignoring years of experience to dare to dream for a Lyon upset of Manchester United. This is occupying the heart of my day.

In other sports news, Brett Favre has retired. I honestly thought he’d never leave. Why would he? He can do no wrong, really, in Green Bay at least. Perhaps he realised that last season was pretty good, and it was tempting fate one time too many to come back. Favre always throws for tons and tons of yards and does crazy things, it’s just the crazy things often involve throwing interceptions. Sometimes it really is better to quit while you’re ahead. I’ll be interested to see how Green Bay do without him though; all the talk last year was of the potential in a young team, but succeeding Favre is one job I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

And now, for stuff that supposedly affects the way we live outside Sundays in winter: it’s voting time in Austin, Texas. And the rest of Texas, for that matter. It’s a weird feeling to start the day, everyone’s talking about voting, or going to vote, and reminding each other to caucus. Personally I think being able to vote twice is a wonderful thing. It’s like Texas is twice as democratic as most places. Take that, France.

I have a lot of work to do, as always, but I think I’ll sit back and take in some good old fashioned election analysis. It’s not as good in the US as it is at home, but it’s a far sight better than ANYTHING else that’s on the news channels. There is something terribly entertaining about well-educated people essentially stalling for time by making guesses and vague statements until the results come in.

That will be my Tuesday evening. I’m looking forward to wallowing in democracy. I’ll miss this, you know, when Bush is gone and all is right with the world.

What I won’t miss is Democrats proving they’re just as dirty and underhanded as the supposedly evil Republicans. Here’s a gem from local TV accentuating the positive aspects of the candidate’s campaign rather than just sledge incumbent State Representative Dawnna Dukes:



Thankfully, Ms. Dukes has risen above petty squabbling and focused on her own good work rather than simply retaliate:



Um…. well…. I like the evil dog in Homer Simpson movie effect on Thompson. He’s never voted in a Texas Primary EVER!!!!

Ugh. Maybe it will be nice to get back to taking absolutely no responsibility for anything as a society.

The one year everyone wants to go to China…

The day you realise that you’re supposed to be researching for your dissertation in less than a year, even just a few months, is an odd one. Generally, at this point, you’re tied up in your Qualifying Exams, watching helplessly as the Everest becomes ever higher. Every meeting you have with a Professor clears one issue up and creates two or three more.

You’re never ready for these new issues, either. Sometimes you look back later and smile at how daunting it seemed. Sometimes not. Some of the issues, such as the one I face today, are happily not particularly intellectually mind-bending but rather present logistical challenges. My big problem today is this: how does one get a flight to Beijing at any stage in 2008 that isn’t morbidly expensive? I mean, the Olympics are just running through August, right?

Is everyone just planning to get there before May and hang out until Christmas? Tickets to Beijing are rarely cheap, but this is getting a bit mad. I could always try and get a cheap ticket (ha!) to Los Angeles, fly on to Hong Kong and get the train up. I’ve done that before though…. Not sure it will be fun minus the novelty.

Clicking through various sites is good for one thing though: so far, I’ve been able to completely ignore the most important part of the whole trip. What archives am I going to and what am I researching? Sometimes in graduate school it seems that everyone else knows exactly what they’re writing on from day one while you flounder through a world of endless reading, grading, and complaining. Sometimes it’s just true that they all have their stuff together, I think. I, on the other hand, constitute a different animal.

So here I am, looking for flights and trying to figure out a decent project to float to various funding organisations after the deadlines for most have passed. It’s ok once you learn to deal with the odd waves of panic and despair. I really do prefer this to working in an office.

Oh what a fool I've been.

So I broke down today, and got myself a PS3.

Yup. I am that bad with gadgets. Although I did shed myself of one: the truly useless and disappointing PSP that had been occupying space in my bedroom is gone forever, along with every game I had for it. They wouldn't take my Japanese version of one of the cartoony Megaman games so I just gave it to the guy in the store.

I also traded in a few games for the 360 that I just don't play anymore, and never played longer than a few days anyway. I've always justified buying games outright all the time as a kind of collector's right vibe, but really, I don't 'collect' enough stuff to justify some of these games as anything more than rental material. Test Drive Unlimited, I'm looking at YOU.

Was it worth it? It's an interesting mix of techno-joy elation and serious buyer's remorse. But, I already see myself using it for media stuff that I never use the 360 for. And despite the fact it's a little ridiculous with the size of the hard drive partition, I'm going to install Linux. So I can use it for work when I'm not playing Resistance: Fall of Man, Unreal Tournament, and..... um, yeah.

Speaking of which I tried to write this blog entry on the PS3 but I think the standard web browser has had some kind of awkward social experience with blogger.com and so keeps blanking out on me. But soon!! Soon....

The Calm Before the Storm

The atmosphere in Austin has been pretty political in nature for a few weeks now, although a lot of it has been under the surface. It's difficult to tell when a city that has a fairly political bent anyway gets animated for an election, outside some signs outside the HEB and calls from strangers asking for your 'support'.

My life centres on the UT campus anyway, so I'm never far from a political conversation. Of course, if you want, you can avoid them too. I have a lot of things to do this weekend that involve being a social being: drinking and cavorting being among them. So no, no conversations on Obama's plans for public health this weekend please.

The result is like an eerie personal calm, as I put up a little bubble around myself for a few days before crunch time on Tuesday. It's probably good for me anyway. I may not have a vote but I'm certainly interested and I feel a little short-changed by my environment.

Everything I hear and most that I see is Obama, Obama, Obama. But the polls (and common sense) show that an awful lot of people in this town are going to vote for Hilary Clinton, if they haven't voted for her already. I have seen one Clinton badge but that's it. Otherwise it's all about our man Barack. I like him, but then I fall into the social demographic that does, apparently.

How can we be so cut off from a whole section of society? Is it really just age? There's a palpable feeling in Austin that Obama can win on Tuesday, but what if he doesn't? I'm looking forward to it. I'm just sick of sore losers.