And so begins the long, grinding road to Summer, that magical point of spacetime where all our troubles will vanish except for sunburn and inadequate air conditioning in my car. Much of my preparations for the end of this damnable school year are foiled by the constrictions of schedule or my own shortcomings. For instance, I’d like to start getting some sort of exercise. I know I am more or less the prototypical computer geek, but I wouldn’t mind not looking the emaciated poster child for muscle atrophy. That, and my coffee intake has increased somewhat as of late (which will probably dip as the weather warms), so I feel some sort of karmic obligation to my heart to not passively destroy it.
I’ve been trying to write more, and I like some of the ideas that I’m coming out with, but can’t for the life of me make a complete, cogent piece. My university’s literary magazine is accepting submissions until 2/14, and I’d like to have something fabulous and new to enter. Otherwise, I’m thinking about entering lilyWhite and A Multitude of Jesuses, the latter of which I also need to revise and expand for a literature conference in March.
My hopes for learning some PHP and SQL are disappearing as quickly as my days are filling up. I do so much design (Photoshop, HTML, and CSS, mostly) that my ability to learn some backend languages is minimal. Maybe that’ll be something for the summer (but, then, I said that last summer as well).
I find myself so disheartened with politics at the current time that I can barely write about them. I called Bush’s reelection soulcrushing, and it certainly is. For instance, I could at this very point in time be railing against the Bushies for their plan to ask for another $80b to finance their ill-advised crusade in Iraq, but I feel as though that dead horse has been flogged to death(!).
In the computer world, the face of P2P software Bittorrent is changing rapidly. The former owner of the torrent aggregator SuprNova (now defunct because of legal issues) released a public beta of a decentralized client called eXeem. For those of you who haven’t been following the fine distinctions of P2P clients, Bittorrent is a web-based protocol, wherein small files called torrents are hosted on web sites. These torrents contain metadata about the larger file in question (software, game, movie, music, etc), and a bittorrent client will use that torrent to connect to the web site’s tracker, which in turn points the downloader to others who are uploading that particular item. The benefit of this “centralized” system is that moderators weed out all the bullshit, so reputable aggregators (like SuprNova or LokiTorrent) almost assure high quality downloads. eXeem is basically Kazaa, in that it will doubtless be flooded by pisspoor items by the same worthless slobs who plagued Kazaa with the same. Kazaa, right now, is a true story of a bigtime wheeler-dealer falling from grace and becoming a smack addict begging outside of a Methadone clinic. To boot, eXeem is “ad-supported,” meaning it comes bundled with the notorious spyware Cydoor (1, 2). There’s already a lite version, but I have a feeling I’m going to be staying away from this phenomenon altogether.
Lift weights, son! You look like Calista Flockheart with Shaq’s feet! And Gollum’s sensitivity to light! (I can say that now because I’m in some semblance of shape.) Your energy level will increase, you’ll understand dead languages, and gain influence over fur-bearing mammals! No, really!