Subterranean Beefworks

Not so quick on the uptake.

My heart jumps when I come home to see that my room phone has a message waiting for me. I dial my voicemail, put in my password, and my asexual pretend secretary tells me about my missed calls. The whole process, though streamlined by repetition, still demands about 30 seconds of standing by my phone hitting buttons.

Then, finally, I get to hear the message. There's the initial airy hiss, distant telecomm equipment sterilizing the sound of my caller drawing their first breath before speaking. This is usually my favorite part of the message, for it is a sacred moment. By the third or fourth ring, the caller has already begun the process of deciding whether or not to leave a message. In these moments preceeding the beep, they weigh alternatives such as the importance of the news, how prepared they are with the information, or whether they should even bother leaving a message because of how silly they think they sound on answering machines.

So much thought crammed into a few short moments. This on-the-fly deliberation has only seconds to transpire before it's time to cross the proverbial Rubicon, and always sooner than expected, the machine delivers it's beep and expectantly awaits your voice. Waiting answering machines are silent the way girlfriends are silent when you're thinking of a way to explain why your pillow doesn't smell like either of you.

This is too much pressure for some people. Once the beep tolls, they abandon all their laborous deliberation and hastily end the call, as if trying to cover up the fact that they wussed out. What I get on my end is a rushed intake of air, a moment of palpable hesitation, and a definitive click that ultimately condemns them. Completely dissatisfied, I delete the message and put down the receiver, nearly angry.

It bears mentioning that up until tonight, I didn't have a very welcoming greeting. It was a cough. The caller would hear "::cough:: -- beep! | silence |." I don't blame them for not honoring me with a message if I don't honor them with a polite greeting.

So now things have changed a bit. I put up a new message that you are all welcome to try out. 610-974-0430.

(Now, I wonder what messages I'll get, having published my phone number on a publicly viewable website. At least make them creative, okay?)

A brief history

This one's fo' da' sho'ties

I seem to mark passing epochs in my life by changing the image on my desktop. Here are some that enjoyed extended play on my desktop (in chronological order, as best my memory can do:

ca. Senior Year, High School

Before hitting college, I somehow got the bright idea to become an insufferable nerd. I couldn't do it right without anime, and I let it permeate me through and through.

Not long after getting to college, I receded into myself, and wouldn't so openly express my frightening degree of nerdiness (though I'll be the first to tell you it wasn't hard to detect). For a long time, I went with the default blue desktop of Windows 2000.

Sometime in college, RIT era.

I was getting into design at this point so digital art like this became a mainstay.

1st half sophomore year, RIT

I liked how the purple splash framed the rest of my screen.

Less into design, but still into things that looked sweet, that one and the following were used for a long time. There was something about having really amazing computer art on my screen. Not sure what.

2nd half sophomore year, RIT

SciArt fetish continues.

The red really got me off for a long time. My computer became a decoration unto itself. I was still pretty insufferable when it came to nerdiness at this point.

Lehigh epoch begins. 1st semester.

Fresh out of RIT, still nerding out, I thought such a background might impress my roommate or something.

Something happened at this point in my life. I feel it had a lot to do with moving back to Pennsylvania and re-identifying with the life I left there a few years back. My aesthetic changed, and I found beauty in different things. A period of realism, during which I turned away from digital art and unrestrained nerdiness in favor of earthly or actual things. I was tired of being identified by my competence at a keyboard.

ca. 2nd semester at Lehigh.

I forget where I found this.

That marks the last of my full screen backgrounds. From there on, the image took up an area in the center of the screen no larger than an index card, often smaller, with black as the color of my desktop.

Later Lehigh

Got a few compliments on this one.

It was a long time before that one left my desktop. Everything I knew about the picture made it perfectly suitable. It's a deserted farm house in Iceland. I found it when I was wasting time during class in high school. I gave it some color so it would go with my Winamp skin. Beyond that though, I just found a lot of dimension in this image.

We now enter a period of flux. I was still into aestheticism and things looking artful, earthly, and sweet, but I was tired of the stark perfection of that farm house.

Later Lehigh, visual maturity setting in.

I trolled DeviantArt for a long time before finding this.

That was by some chick with a Canon EOS named "You don't know love" . I colorized it, cropped it, and kept it up for all of a week. It just didn't work out. She does have some great pictures though.

Later Lehigh, Intro to Astronomy.

False color, Saturn's Titan moon.

One of the labs for astronomy was to observe Jupiter and Saturn through powerful telescopes. It left such an impression that as soon as I got back from the lab, I dug around for more information, and in the process, found this picture. In celebration of my amazement at the sky, I made it into a desktop. It didn't last too long though, it hit me the wrong way after some time.

After taking down Titan, my desktop was plain black. I couldn't find anything worth looking at, and decided to hold out for some special image to come along on its own. I found one tonight that fit the bill.

Current

Lush, Aromatic, Verte

I found this today on a moveabletype photo site. Most of the photographer's stuff was of things encountered in his travels through Japan and Africa. There's some great stuff, with clever captions, but this one just struck me as a proper desktop. It's colorful, compact, green, and those other things I put in the caption.

What does all this say about me? I reckon that I've grown from being a shamelessly nerdy kid, to a guy who recognizes the shame in shameless nerdiness. It is without argument, however, that I am still nerdy enough put thought into using my desktop as a venue for expressing myself.

Nagelbett, or Welcome back, Cotter.

It's been quite some time.

I'm still not prepared to start writing again; I have simply grown tired of reading my own words. But it's nearly 3am and I have nothing else to do.

Although I haven't made posts in a while, I have somehow aquired a small bunch of new readers who really don't know me that well. I'm still mulling over whether this is a concern or not. On the one hand, there's people out there who don't know me that well, people who will build on their first impressions of me by reading this site, profanity, raunch, fury, inebriation, and mope included. On the other hand, why should I give a shit? For a few reasons, rawness is not a bad thing.

There's a balance, a fine line to walk. I'll just try to trace it as closely as I can.

So like I said, it's nearly 3am. Having digested the evening's offering of pornography, I have nothing else to do. I tried to amplify a burp just now and threw up in my mouth. I think they call that "vom."

My school's network administration makes me want to hurt infants. Their policies and practices exemplify new levels of asinine, to the point where at times, it almost seems like they're trying to suck. For starters, there's the "Penalty Box." This clever little euphamism is their answer to question of network management, an umbrella policy, ostensibly designed to keep traffic at a manageable level and to discourage filesharing.

The way it works is, if traffic through the network jack in your room exceeds 2GB in 72 hours, you are in the Penalty Box; your bandwidth is reduced to that of a faulty 56K modem--faulty in that to achieve such a deplorable level of performance, the modem would have to spend 6 months in a gorilla cage being tossed around, chewed up, and defecated upon.

It's going to take some breath for me to adequately explain the depths to which the stupidity goes. And let me tell you, it is impressive.

The Penalty Box traffic limit is 2 Gigabytes of traffic in and out to the Internet or Internet2 over a 72 hour (3 day) period. This is a lot of traffic. 'Normal' Internet use will never generate this amount of traffic. Most likely you are running one of the file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or Morpheus. These applications are sneaky because sometimes they are actually running in the background and you are not aware of what they are doing. If you don't like being in the Penalty Box, remove such software from your PC's, or carefully monitor its activities. -- Lehigh

As someone who uses the internet for a lot of things, reading this almost feels like persecution. Who are they to tell me what "a lot of traffic" is? Who are these "normal internet users," anyway? Normal apparenly means you have no interest in downloading game demos (which can exceed 500MB); you certainly don't have interest in aquiring live music, distributed as FLAC (normally 700MB or so) through BitTorrent (which also means that 700MB grows to 1GB+ due to upload requirements); and who could possibly be interested in downloading albums worth of music through iTunes?

"Most likely you are running one of the file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or Morpheus." Well, as it turns out, I'm not. I am just one of many who have to wrangle with a short-sighted policy based on complete fallacy.

And it goes further. Recently, I got word that Lehigh dropped it's 50MB FastNet connection for a 100MB PPL Telecom connection. No such news was advertised to the student body, I only found out because I subscribe to a mailing list for the computing consultants. At the bottom, we were kindly reminded that "the Penalty Box limits and restrictions will remain unchanged." They are just so tickled by this revolutionary new approach to network management, aren't they?

What it comes down to is that if someone gets themselves limited by the penalty, they have a nearly unusable network connection. Webpages load a shattered fraction of their interfaces; a sustained connection to anything is unheard of; any legitimate use of the network is completely out of the question. All this, because the network administration insists that short-sightedness and uninventiveness is the best way to run a network at $45K/yr Lehigh University.

That certainly turned into a diatribe. On another day, I'll go into what they could do to not suck, but this entry has been uninteresting enough already.

This is why I don't want to write anymore, I don't have anything interesting to say.

not tired yet

When I convey that I don't feel inspired to write, it usually means there's some outstanding assignment or obligation dominating my thoughts; that is, I'm completely involved in thinking about how much I should be working on the assignment while also finding wonderful things to do instead. It's not a great thing to have, the patience to sit an entire day in mostly the same place concentrating on everything but the one thing I should be concentrating on.

I've got to write this fucking paper. This German paper has me all clotted up. Sorry for letting this place go.

A great deal has transpired since I was sitting in a warm little house in Germany with perpetually productive mucosae. Among other things, I got better! I also missed an international flight, spent a night in a hotel, flew over an ocean while a nice girl next to me got airsick, skirted a catastrophic breakdown of the US Airways luggage system, had a christmas, made a lasagna, bought a set of computer speakers, and confirmed that my future isn't yet completely in doubt. Did you read that? I made a lasagna!

When confronted with all there is to say, I'm overwhelmed. I have every intention of recording it all here for posterity, but it's going to take some time. You know that vague feeling that your body has when it doesn't feel quite ready for something? You shift around, your eyes wander, your thoughts twiddle their thumbs and you begin to figure it's high time to take a shit? Exactly, I'm procrastinating. I don't feel like telling all the stories right now.

It'll be a hoot when I do though. I promise.

In the meantime, a joke c/o a friend:

What's brown and sticky?

. . .

...

A stick

entry

I feel bad about writing nothing in so long, especially since so much has happened. The reason is that I'm growing out of this I think. It feels embarassing and selfish to come back here to tell everybody all the things I've done or bought or saw or ate. I need some time off so I can be reminded of the vague virtues of writing here.

Shucks. I'll write again sometime, but not quite yet.