You know sometimes I need to be reminded how absolutely, breathtakingingly, heartbreakingly beautiful the world can be. I spend so much time sitting at a desk, both at work and at home, that when I finally get out of my seat I tend to treat the world as a means to an end. I go out into it to get the basics and return to my cave. That’s why every once in a while, when on my journey to the outerworld interstices, I stumble upon… the world. I looked up just a half hour ago and saw a perfectly clear night sky. It made me want to go drive out into the deep woods where no artificial light pollutes the sky and just stare at the stars. Even here, in this oversaturated suburban night I stood there agape for a few moments, unable to look away, my vision transfixed on the unending void. Of course, after a short while reliving my former years as a quixotic romantic I politely shelve it away, remember that I must let that part of me out more often and return to my life as it was. Then I blog about it. Sigh…

First off, that theme song fucking rocks. It’s “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros and I’ve become infatuated by the song. I’ve been listening to it incessantly since I found out what it was. I’ve never been a huge fan of The Clash but damn if this song isn’t rocketing up the ranks on my favourites list.

Now onto the show. This is a show that I shouldn’t like. I really truly hate the Jack Johnsons of the world: the people who just let everything wash over them and don’t seem to care about anything except killer waves. That being said, this so-called “surf noir” show is drawing me in. HBO seems to have a particular skill about it when introducing people to disparate genres. When I started watching Deadwood, I hated westerns. I probably never would’ve watched Deadwood if I hadn’t been vacationing in Florida and the house my family had rented had HBO. I had never seen HBO and I’m a TV junkie so I sat there and watched as much as I could. So I sat down and I watched the very first episode of Deadwood and just like John From Cincinnati it drew me in. David Milch has a great skill to take a known genre and turn it on its head. And this show is pure Milch: the dialogue, though separated by over a century, is pitch perfect to that of Deadwood. This is most noticable during the monologues but the touch is sprinlked throughout the series.

I’ll be honest and say that when I first went to watch JFC I wasn’t that enthralled. In fact the first time I went to watch it I turned it off in less than ten minutes. Luckily those first ten minutes had something that made me want to go back: the opening credits. While not as rich and representative of what the show is — as far as I can see, but the show is still young — as Deadwood’s or Carnivàle’s, they are HBO credits through and through. So few shows take the time to create truly memorable credit sequences, that it’s refreshing to see a network sticking with it.

I can’t say I’ll be going surfing any time soon, but for the time being I’ll enjoy the waves. (Oh God, sorry for that really bad pun…)

Master of None. That’s what I feel like recently. I’ve been spreading myself so thin that I haven’t been finishing any of my projects. I have over ten prospective blog posts in various stages of progress. Some are an opening sentence leading into a further discussion and some are virtually fully written but I’m so burned out that I don’t even know if I agree with their point of view anymore.

Obviously, I’m taking the time to write this post but it’s considerably less thought out than most and I’ve been slacking on my blog and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to sustain the momentum of this blog so I need to write about something even if it’s about my lack of perspicacity. I am currently trying to maintain my courseload (already heavier than a typicaly heavy courseload), keep up with the changing world of JavaScript and jQuery in particular, learn Flash and c++, obtain some level of proficiency with the Adobe Creative Suite, attempting self-taught graphic design, reading up on neural networks, continually trying to learn new aspects of computer science, and in the back of my mind floating amid the maelstrom my future 41x design project which seems more daunting with each passing week.

I sometimes feel like I need to put certain things aside during the school semester so I can focus on what matters, but then I wonder if I do these things to distract myself from the kind of things I that don’t interest me in school. The only dwindling hope is that at some point in the not too distant future, I’ll have a real job and my free time will be my own and not the school’s.

So, I just got the Wacom Intuos3 tablet I asked for for Christmas. After a weekend of playing with it on a four year old laptop in MS Paint, I was excited to finally get a chance to “turn on Photoshop’s power” as the box promises. To begin, I should say that when I was dabbling in Paint, it was already fun simply because of the direct control; that being said, Photoshop was a whole other world. The pressure sensitivity, the tilt detection, plus the eraser nub actually working like an eraser. It’s fantastic and I suspect that fairly soon I will actually enjoy drawing things on my computer. Who knows, I might eventually get good at drawing things.

I watched the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” and while they do not list in details all of the security vulnerabilities they discovered the one they listed in detail is really stupid. The deal is the if you prepare the voting memory card with -5 votes in one slot and 5 votes in the other slot then it will appear as zero votes while skewing the ultimate results without any visible proof in the end. I only have one question for the person who coded that vote counting system: have you ever heard of unsigned integers?