Canvas

1.5 weeks remain until, oy, the beginning of the next semester - an experience most people in my year will no longer share. this past summer has been largely a huge creative block for me, a huge contrast to the summer exactly a year ago. i’ve been working heavily on monstercyb.org these past couple days, particularly my part of the site, as well as a couple other starting projects that i’m not ready to disclose here. i’m missing self-imposed deadlines, although, given that i keep accepting to volunteer on all sorts of projects (i really want to), i think i may have picked up too many at the same time. you know who you are. and i apologize for that.

i had been hoping to see more people in person this summer, especially since it’s uncertain how much longer many of them will remain in the area, but most people seem to be consumed with work, classes, travel, a significant other, or any combination of those four. so it’ll be a fairly chill last week of summer, but i guess after year four, summer isn’t quite “summer” anymore anyway.

Miss Brianna Lee, whatever you’re up to, I can’t say this enough. Happy birthday, dear friend. I whipped this up to hopefully cheer up your work day a bit, but if that didn’t really cut it, that’s okay too. You’re 22! Show me your excited face! *waves at you*

(Yes, those are Galactica Vipers.)

i always celebrate the last remaining hours before my birthdays by thinking, “god, i’m getting old. i think i’ll compose a poem.” here’s to my little tradition:

Drawn.
By Gordon Mei
July 30, 2007, 9pm

I saw that drawing she drew,
The one in dark thick weathered pencil
Strokes porous like pumice,
Smeared graphite blurs from
Blackened erasers
Unable to reverse the deep engraved
Canyons carved by incompletely erased strokes,
Revealing how she almost,
Just almost,
Sketched that curve banking
A hair to the right.

They blend
With the imperfections in the paper surface
Atop the aging sepia
Creeping into every corner of the sheet,
Jostling my head to remind me
That this was an organic piece,
A piece conceived at one time
By a real, breathing person.

A person whose memory
Of ever having glided her hands
In controlled sweeps across this page
Has long withdrawn.

so i discovered a south park character generator , which behaves a lot like the nintendo wii character creator . i came across it as i was searching for sample images to try out hand drawn south park style characters for kicks, but i guess this simplified it that much more.

it makes me wonder whether this same tool was used by the person who edited the “i’m a mac, i’m a pc.” parody ad in the south park style. i’d imagine it could be done frame by frame, given enough time.

edit: and then there’s the simpsons character generator at the simpsons movie site.

during this past week, i visited my friend tommy (we lived in dhahran, saudi arabia during middle school, and during breaks during high school). i hadn’t seen him since the end of my college freshman year, so you can imagine it was surreal to see him when i flew over to his current home in maryland, just outside washington, d.c. (we have visual proof from the digital snaps.) it was a blur of smithsonian taxidermy, c&o canal national park boulders, face masks alongside warcraft and “apex”, trips to bloom, my bursts of sensitive national security flagged keywords within earshot of the monuments, metrorail, and so many other things that passed so much sooner than i expected.

it was also my first purely domestic flight since the late nineties. whoop. and now back to work and the rest of age twenty one.

07.07.07. no real meaning to that, unless you think seven is lucky, or if you’re looking forward to the release of the boeing 787 tomorrow. ratatouille proved surprisingly adorable, and i say ’surprisingly’ because the movie trailers gave me the impression that this film would be dominated by the kind of humor appreciated by six years olds. so thank you, pixar. you’ve restored my faith. (kudos on the amusing short film too.)

i’ve also begun playing tetrinet again, which now exists as a second generation version 2.x. (tetrinet is a multiplayer tetris modification with special block attacks.) the last time i played it was during its version 1.x era in the tenth grade. not much has changed in gameplay in the 2.0 version, but they did include an interface to ease finding and joining a game. but it has been a long time, so i’m not as fast as i used to be.

beyond those, i began my job in san francisco on thursday, and then requested to take day two off to stick with a google field trip several of us had been planning for weeks. we didn’t get to cover as much of the campus as we’d liked because we had to remain under the supervision of our host, but we did munch and crunch on google eats in the main cafeteria (building 43?) and lightly toured some neighboring buildings (treadmill pool?! fitness center?! smoothies?!). *drool* so nice.

oh yes, and i’ve tried the iphone in the apple store, and i’m completely satisfied with it. it’s everything i’ve come to expect of it (and i held it in high regard), and i tested a couple of my websites (they render! but it’s safari, so of course they do), as well as all the pinch and the screen rotation. even if i saved up though, i’m not willing to foot the extra twenty a month for a data plan as an existing at&t customer. boo.

well, a couple of quasi-mundane things, but it fills the space.

first, anyone who has ever called me on my mobile phone while i was in my room is aware of the garbled conversations and buzzing background noise that occur during nearly every incoming and outgoing call from this area. i’m usually told that there are no problems with the towers in my area, so i called tech support when i was sure i had buzzing, and it went something like:

me: hi, i’m calling about bzzzzzzz phones bzzzzzzzzzz garbled bzzzzzzzz background bzzzzzz…
support: i’m sorry, i can’t hear you.
me: bzzzz actually that’s what i’m calling bzzz about.

they couldn’t fix the problem. eh.

secondly, the other day, i randomly e-mailed gordon@gmail to say hi to whoever was on the other side. it bounced with a message saying, “UNKNOWN_USER: No such user”. i’ve tried to grab the name in the past, and the name still wasn’t available this time. so… private user? blocking off of dictionary names? who knows.

also… iphone. which i can’t afford. boo. comes out today. excellent interface though.

edit: xanga, why are you highlighting “iphone” in our entries?

i’ve been back from china for a bit over a week now. my jetlag has worn off, so i can no longer pin the blame on that for my current creative block. everything around here has really slowed down since the end of the semester. it feels like one of those lazy dhahran summers again, but it’ll pick up! unless it doesn’t.

i’m not really sure how to compose this, but the past week sums up to “oh yes, this again.” i’ve been in thailand this last week, this time splitting my time between bangkok and the beach town of krabi (think phuket). bangkok with its attempts at glitz with its brand new airport, whose waves of whites, silvers, and glass are reminiscent of that of hong kong intl. airport and san francisco’s intl’ terminal; as well as grand malls full of the usual suspects from prada to chanel, and even the presence of some of the more surprising multinationals such as sizzlers and toys ‘r us. krabi, which contributed its fair share of mosquito bites, also reddened my skin with sunburns rivaling the most intense asian drunken glows. the same ten to fifteen shops repeated again and again along the beach front - fakes of dvds, north face, diesel, billabong, louis vuitton, chanel, and all the other regulars, among purple and yellow ATMs and italian restaurants also offering thai dishes on their menus - where the tuk tuks honked past for business, lurking men by the palm trees asked “taxi”, local boys kicked soccer balls into goal posts across the sidewalk, and blonde bronze-tanned Europeans in surfing clothes, flip flops, and back packs strolled down the avenue. and days of half-day island hopping tours by speed boat, with the lonely cylindrical islands, the plethora of tsunami warning signs, and the fish hiding among the bleached coral reefs. oh thailand, how i had nearly forgotten how you were. and now to hong kong, china, and beyond (still within china, that is).

i’m done. five finals, one final paper, and 18 weeks’ worth of problem sets, papers, code snippets, and last-minute standardized exam later, i have finally broken out of this mad cycle of academia and record all nighters. although it will be a short breather, this one, because by friday’s end, i’ll be doing my grounded soul a favor and leaving the country for the first time in three years, on a family vacation in east asia. this also means i won’t get to see a number of people walk the last steps of their undergraduate careers. and now with that blindingly huge portrait that is school now out of the way, i can finally grasp the gravity of the what’s about to happen in the greek theatre, and all the other places where they hold the ceremonies. i wish i had planned this all out much better. i’m going to miss my fellow ‘07 crowd. i’ll be in my cap and gown someday, but it won’t be the same without you all.