oipom.com

Yes, I went to the midnight release!

Me and a group of friends met at the coffeeshop beforehand and then drove down to the theater. We were there two and a half hours early, which went by REALLY REALLY SLOWLY. We talked about people’s outfits (there were a couple great Dumbledores in attendance), some people went back out for food, we shared book recommendations and twitter handles.

Finally, it was time for the movie! Here’s what I thought:

Massive spoilers ahead if any of you haven’t seen it yet… (more…)

The lovely Nikki from SnailBird has organized a Design + Music + Inspiration Project, and I’ve agreed to participate! She’s trying to get a feel for what designers listen to and what their combined playlists would sound like. If you’d like to participate also, check out the Design Music!Inspiration entry and comment to sign up.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should preface this with the note that I am a web developer by trade and only an occasional web designer. The majority of design work I do is only for this site (and my portfolio site, I guess) because even if I take on freelance projects, it’s usually for someone who already has a design and needs it built out. That said, I still think this applies and I’m excited to participate.

What’s your favorite genre of music?

Metal. That said, I listen to everything from alternative indie pop stuff to scary things in other languages, so I am pretty open. I listen to a fair amount of black metal (Borknagar, Opeth), industrial (Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein), folky Nordic metal (Storm, Otyg), goth/doom metal (Type O Negative, Sisters of Mercy), alternative (They Might Be Giants), indie (The Decemberists, Neutral Milk Hotel), and pop (Lily Allen). I tend to have favorite bands rather than favorite generes, because I listen to so many different kinds of stuff.

Do you listen to that genre while designing or does it change?

Not generally. If I have a particular song stuck in my head, I will listen to that, but I think most stuff I listen to is too abrasive for thoughtful work.

Do you tend to listen to any artist in particular while designing?

Sigur Rós! Their stuff is so amazingly perfect for design or development work. It’s symphonic enough to be calming, but has either a beat or is loud enough that you get a rhythm going in your work. Plus, depending on the album, the lyrics are either in Icelandic or a nonsense language that mimics Icelandic, so you don’t get too caught up in what the vocalist is saying and can focus on your work. Phenomenal and totally recommended. (If you’ve seen The Life Aquatic, Starálfur is the song that comes on when Zissou & co. are in the sub and they see the leopard shark. LOVE IT.)

Do you find that different song styles or beats influence the style of your designing? Vice versa?

Hm. I’ll say that if I really get on a roll, I want some pumping music behind me. That’s more for development, I guess, but Rammstein or NIN are great for that. When I’m thinking, or working on fiddly designy things, I prefer something more mellow like The Decemberists or Neutral Milk Hotel so it doesn’t get in my way. I think my designs and my development needs influence my listening rather than the other way around.

What program/site do you use to listen to music?

iTunes. I don’t use Pandora since we’re not allowed to stream music at work, and then I forget to use it once I’m home. I usually prefer to listen to a whole album at once rather than a party shuffle or something, so I like iTunes for that because I can play things by album easily.

And finally, could you live without music? Design?

No, and no! ALL THE BEAUTY WOULD BE GONE FROM THE WORLD. I just rediscovered this article on A List Apart called “In Defense of Eye Candy” and realized it’s more or less what I wrote my thesis on in college. People perceive attractive things to work better and to be more trustworthy, and it’s the function of the designer to facilitate this experience. I’d be so sad without that!

What song best sums up your design style and/or the music you listen to while designing?

Since I mentioned it before, let’s say Starálfur by Sigur Rós. I think it best sums up the music I listen to when I do either design or development. I’d definitely recommend that entire album though; it’s called Ágætis Byrjun. (And since I was thinking about all this, I had to grab my iPod to listen to this album!)

Thanks, Nikki! This was fun and I hope you get some great responses.

If you ever have the chance to see Nine Inch Nails play live, you should TOTALLY GO. The chance to see the screen they use during the show is worth the price of the ticket. Seriously. I have one of their live DVDs so I knew what to expect, but it was so much more amazing and beautiful in person. Read that Wired article to get an idea of what it’s all about – it’s insane.

All I have to show for it is some crap cameraphone photos, most of which are from Daniel’s phone since mine decided to die right when I wanted photographic evidence of my having attended.

More photos are up on Flickr if you’re interested. I’d like to say more about the show itself, but it’d be kind of incoherent at this point and mostly consist of the words “AWESOME!!1!!1″ and “That was so amazing!!1!!!1!” and… I am not sure you want to hear it. Hee.

Suffice to say, I’d go again in a heartbeat. I could sit and watch that video screen all day. NIN picked a wonderful array of songs to play live, including some things off of Ghosts I-IV that featured a banjo and a marimba (vibraphone?). The digital effects on the screen were mezmerizing; I hope their light tech gets paid a lot because he deserves it. It’s one of the few shows I’ve been to where I wanted it to go for another hour at least.

Edited to add: Here are some more photos of the show from OnPortland. They’re a heck of a lot better than the ones I took.

This article by George Saunders had me in hysterics at work:

“Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.”

The cadence and the stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences and political commentary just kill me.

This is my second installment of Why I Find the Republican Ticket Terrifying and Why I Think the Democratic Ticket Is Awesome. If you missed Part I, I recommend reading that first.

Onward!
(more…)

If you are currently undecided who you are voting for in this year’s US Presidential election, or if you are planning on voting for the McCain/Palin ticket, I implore you to read this post. I am going to try to be as respectful as I can while outlining why I find the McCain/Palin ticket objectionable and why I think you should vote for Obama/Biden.

Part I will discuss the McCain/Palin issues, and Part II will discuss the Obama/Biden issues.

(more…)

I technically have two computers – I have my faithful old desktop, a Dell Dimension 8300 that was purchased in 2003 and includes a floppy disk drive AND a ZIP disk drive (woo! Old-school!), and I have my work laptop which is a Sony VAIO thingybob that seems nice. It even has the fancy fingerprint scanner that you can use instead of a password.

Problem is, my desktop has been getting progressively slower and sadder as the years pass. Just recently, it has had some kind of awful spyware-malware-bad thing happen and my Google search results started being redirected and I haven’t been able to access DasBecca which makes me sad (it redirects to an XAMPP splash page for no discernable reason – my hosts file looks normal), and it’s been paralyzingly slow. I ran some spyware controls which got rid of some stuff but it’s still super slow and just… ugh. Nevermind the fact that Firefox 3 never manages to successfully close – I keep trying to open it and it’ll pop up and say “Firefox is already running. Please close down that process or blah blah blah” and I have to open the task manager and shut down the process so I can start it up again. BLEH.

It’s old enough that I’m seriously thinking about replacing it with something shinier and fancier just so I don’t have to deal with it, but I can’t quite convince myself to do it because it would be a pretty hefty investment. I could afford a new computer, I am just not sure if I want to give up on this one yet.

I haven’t reformatted in a while, so as long as I made sure to back up my programs and files I could probably wipe my windows partition, reinstall, and be okay, but is it worth it to try to resurrect a 5 year old computer? Should I give in and get something nicer (like a refurbished Macbook Pro)?

Edited to add: Whoops – by “Dell Inspiron” I actually meant “Dell Dimension” (fixed now) and it turns out that DasBecca is fine in Safari (for PC), so it is just Firefox that is tweaking out on it. Also, my site is back to looking crap on my computer because of some spyware thing – it spaces my comments out by about 600px vertically for no good reason. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Also – I have been instructed to reformat and reinstall Windows. This is probably fine; I have done it a few times in the past. However, I have also been told that I should put the Service Pack updates on CD so when I reinstall Windows I can update it first thing off a CD, not the Internet, because my computer will go down in a fiery mess of malware if I wait for the computer to do its automatic update thing. I find it difficult to believe that my computer would be compromised if the very first thing I did was do all the automatic updates and installed an antivirus program, but please correct me if I’m wrong. Do I need to back up SP2 onto disc? If so, um, how do I do that?

After four years of living here in Oregon, I finally got a Portland-based phone number. I know! I am not very hip and did not get an iPhone or anything, but I am still coming to terms with my new phone that I am not sure I like very much. I will get used to it eventually, I’m sure.

If you are the sort of person that has my old number already, I will email and/or text you to tell you what my new number is. Or you can ask me. (Option two would make me feel more popular, since nobody really calls me anyway. Not even my own mother.)

Since I switched from Verizon to AT&T (Daniel convinced me, plus it was cheaper), this means that I must manually transfer over every niblet of information I had on my old phone over to the new phone as Verizon does not employ the use of SIM cards. I am realizing this is a huge travesty. It is probably a gigantic plot on their part to get people to never ever switch because it is a huge pain in the ass and I sort of hate everything right now.

My one saving grace is that I managed to re-make my fabulously wonderful Harry Potter theme song ringtone so I do not have to live with those awful default ones. I am losing The Safety Dance, the Mai-Ah-Hee song, and Birdhouse In Your Soul, since those were ones I purchased instead, but I guess it’s okay since I have used the HP one for years anyway.

If, for some reason, you do decide to call me in the future using my old number, chances are you will reach my dad. (Since I was on my parents’ plan and Dad doesn’t have a phone yet, they are just booting me off and giving my number to my dad.) He is very nice but also very shy and I cannot guarantee he will volunteer my new number. You may have to ask him for it. Hee.

Yesterday, Daniel and I witnessed a very rude specimen of humanity. We were in CD Game Exchange, a used CD/DVD/Game store in Portland’s Hawthorne district, and we were standing in front of the glass case of gaming consoles, staring at a Wii.

Wiis are still very hard to come by here – you never see them for sale in stores because they are gone as soon as shipments arrive. And here we were, standing in front of one, on sale because it was pre-opened. We were nail-biting and pointing at it and debating pros and cons of buying it right there on the spot, when a dark-haired lady walked in and headed straight for the counter.

“Wii?” she demanded.

“Uh, sure, over here in this case…” the employee replied, and walked over to open the case we were staring at. Moving aside, we watched as he unlocked the case, took the Wii we were contemplating buying, and brought it over to the lady.

The next ten minutes were spent attempting to browse DVDs while listening to her snark about whether or not it works, does it comes with controllers, or what controllers she would need, what about batteries, what about this and what about that. She seemed so ungrateful and put-out about finding a used Wii for sale and was being a huge pain in the ass, and we had to listen to it all, wishing the Wii could be ours, hoping she’d decide not to buy it.

All I could come up with was maybe she lost a bet with her kids and had to buy them a Wii as the prize. It still didn’t excuse her snarky behavior, and we are still without a Wii because she snatched it out from under our noses.

Somebody stop me – I seem incapable of avoiding clicking on news articles or videos cheering on Barack Obama. My left-leaning politics are well-documented on this website (much to the chagrin of my parents, I assume) but man does Obama inspire me. I want to print downloaded PDFs as posters and hang them in my windows and use the thoughtfully provided buddy icons on my gTalk chat thingy. I want to see this man become our next president.

This morning I spent a good amount of time perusing YouTube for Obama videos after watching something somebody posted on Digg. It was of Obama giving a speech (full text) about religion in America, and it sounds so sappy and awful but I teared up about halfway through when he says this:

In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.

BIG HEART. He admits you do not have to be religious to be moral or ethical, and would, in fact, prefer someone non-religious with those qualities than someone religious who lacked them, and then goes to say that we shouldn’t have to pretend we are something we are not. How can I not support this man? For pete’s sake, a former president once said this:

No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.
– George Bush, to American Atheists’ reporter Robert Sherman in 1987, while serving as vice-president

Awesome, thank you. I live in this country, I pay my taxes, I go to work, I am an upstanding member of my community, but I should not be considered a citizen or a patriot because I don’t believe in the same god as you. So infuriating.

I know not all of you agree with me or my beliefs, but I beg you, if you are in the US and are eligible to vote, please register and do so when it comes time. I would encourage you to vote for Obama because I feel like he would be the best person for the job (Hillary is just too divisive for me – if she gets the nomination you KNOW a zillion people will turn up to vote for John McCain primarily because they can’t stand the thought of her winning the presidency) but really, as long as you do your research and vote for who you truly believe in, that makes me happy.

Last Thursday, Daniel and I took a bus out to Beaverton to see Laurie Perry (Crazy Aunt Purl) at Powell’s. She read the introduction and first chapter of her new book, “Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair” and had a Q&A session afterward.

She was just wonderful! I was a bit surprised at her accent (she’s from the south, but currently lives outside of L.A.) and laughed when she said, “Y’all can understand how I talk, right?”

The Q&A session was my favorite, because it was so much more casual and you got to hear her talk about her life and her experiences. I really admire her on so many levels – her basic story is that she was a traditional Southern girl, married, contemplating children, when one day her husband informs her he is leaving her to “get back his creativity.” She struggles with him leaving, the loneliness, the drinking of many bottles of wine, and the owning of four (now down to three, sadly) cats. She takes up knitting at the request of a friend, and finds it helpful because it gives her something to do with her hands that does not involve drunk-dialing her ex-husband.

The book is prone to hyperbole and often sounds just as she does on her website, which I found comforting. Crazy Aunt Purl never fails to crack me up, and Daniel even said he really enjoyed seeing her talk.

I stood in line to get my book signed, and I even got the courage to ask her for a photo:

(Doesn’t she look like she could be some long-lost relative of mine? Strange.)

When she got up to stand next to me, she remarked, “Oh, I like you!” and commented about how most people are just so tall and it makes it hard to stand with them. (She herself is not terribly tall – 5′ 3″, I think, but she had tall boots on when I met her.)

Anyway, even if you are not drunk, divorced, or covered in cat hair, I would still recommend this book. It is not solely a knitting book (though it does have some cute, easy patterns!) and it is not just a memoir – it is filled with heartfelt emotions, charming anecdotes (like having to staple the back of her skirt together to make it through the workday after it split open) and encouragement that even if bad things happen to you, you can still come out okay on the other side.

P.S. Huge thanks to Daniel’s mom Sharon for giving me the book as a belated birthday present! I loved it.

I may have just stumbled across the video equivalent of Cute Overload.

Ready? READY? It is videos of babies laughing on YouTube. Now, I know. Babies make lots of noise and are expensive. BUT! They are also very funny and I dare you to watch these babies laugh and not end up with a smile on your face.

First up: Laughing Baby
Baby laughs so hard at pieces of paper being ripped that he falls over in hysterics. Part of the reason this cracks me up is because the person behind the camera is obviously getting such a kick out of it himself. Eeeking out “Here, have some more…” is perfect.

Next: Baby laughing at the Wii
I mean, really, Wiis are inherently funny, so it’s no surprise that this baby loves it. But that huge belly laugh at 0:26 is just too great for words.

Baby busting a gut laughing
Excuse the awful title – no baby guts are harmed in this video. The baby is laughing at a puppet show involving a rabbit and (possibly) a dragon. The really good laughs start about 25 seconds in, but the whole thing just warms your heart. I am such a sap.

Baby Laugh
This one cracks me up because his whole little body jiggles and then he falls over backwards.

An honorable mention goes to “Hahaha,” but only because I feel like I’ve linked it here before. It still makes me double over laughing. I’m just amazed that the baby can keep it up for that long! My cheeks would cramp!

Okay, wait. One more. Quite possibly the funniest baby I have ever seen in my life. HOW DOES IT MAKE THOSE FACES? I can forsee it becoming a cunning criminal mastermind someday.

What? It’s the weekend. Have some fun.

The decision to attend the They Might Be Giants show at the Roseland Theater was sort of impromptu. I mean, I’d been meaning to buy tickets for weeks but just hadn’t gotten around to it, so the night before the show when we saw that it still hadn’t sold out, Daniel and I agreed that it would be a huge mistake to pass it up.

Turns out we were totally right. They played a bunch of songs off their new album, and they played a bunch of our favorites like “She’s an Angel,” “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” “Alphabet of Nations,” and “The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).” They did a special feature in which they accepted calls from the dead, and Carl Sagan called and asked how he could successfully use his new iPhone since it’s heat-sensitive and his fingers were “bone and ash.” Hee.

I was really impressed with their trumpet player. He hit so many high notes and did them all perfectly. It’s really hard to play high on a trumpet (or it was for me, at least) so I could appreciate the talent. The trombonist and saxophonist were great as well.

The very next night, we went to the Edguy show at Rock N’ Roll Pizza. Tobias Sammet is my favorite metal vocalist EVAR and it was hugely exciting to see Edguy live. The venue was pretty small, I think mostly because there are not nearly as many Edguy fans in the US as there are in Europe. They fill 10,000+ venues over there and last night there were probably 100 people total. Tobias Sammet kept trying to pump the crowd up, and we tried to be loud, but I think he was kind of disappointed that there were so few people.

Tobias had on a sleeveless t-shirt with the words “HELLFIRE TOBI” on it and very, very small black pants. We joked later that we should all have shirts made with our names on them in place of “TOBI.”

The guitarists and bass player would occasionally line up and start swaying their hips in sync with each other and the music and it was cracking me up. Tobias kept turning around to face the drummer and HE DID THE “PISTON” DANCE. Daniel has this outrageously embarrassing dance he does occasionally, and it involves systematically squatting down and raising one fist in the air, and on the second squat, you bring the first fist down and raise the second. It’s awful. AND TOBIAS SAMMET DID THE DANCE. Tom, Brian, Carrie, Daniel and I all burst into hysterics at the same moment as we all realized what he was doing. There is video evidence here (the dance lasts for only about the first second or so before it turns into something a bit more normal), but sadly I do not have Daniel’s dance on video for comparison.

Totally random: One of my favorite things about European bands is that they pronounce Portland like “portl-and” instead of “port-land.” The “L” noise is very distinct and I think it’s wonderful.

The band was super generous with their band-related paraphernalia like guitar picks and extra drumsticks. We weren’t close to the stage so after their encore was finished and they walked off, we slowly made our way up front hoping to grab something of interest. Everything appeared to be gone, but then we spotted a guitar pick on the stage! I couldn’t reach it, so we hovered close to it for a few minutes until a stage tech came by and I quickly asked him if he could please grab the pick for me.

True to form, they played the song “Avantasia” during the encore. It’s so exciting to hear that song live since it’s so operettic. During the show, they also played “Lavatory Love Machine” (a song about being intimate in an airplane), “Save Me,” “Vain Glory Opera,” “Tears of a Mandrake,” “King of Fools,” and “Fucking With Fire,” which is quite possibly one of the greatest rockin’ metal songs ever written.

Two shows in two days while coming down with a cold (again! I know!) may not have been the greatest idea on paper, but it was so worth it.

Do you ever get the feeling that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket? Or is that just me?

I know it’s a product of reading the news, which is always remarkably sensationalist. JK Rowling talked about the Harry Potter books and said she felt compelled to kill off parents to show how truly evil Lord Voldemort is, and the headline was “Rowling says, ‘I wanted to kill parents.’” Seriously? I mean, I suppose it worked because I clicked on it, but couldn’t it have been something else a bit less… punch you in the face?

Then I see things like pharmacists suing over dispensing the morning-after pill or stories of women fleeing to a hospital directly after being raped only to be told that because of the hospital’s religious affiliation, they would not be receiving emergency contraception. To me, this is a blatant disregard for one of the most important duties of a doctor: CARE FOR THE PATIENT. So what if you don’t like the idea of someone preventing a possible pregnancy as a result of a rape? Why punish the woman? It seems as though these doctors (or pharmacists) value the possible life of an unborn child more than the living, breathing, troubled woman. Why else would they refuse to dispense it, even on religious grounds? What they are saying is “We do not care for your future, or how you intend to cope with this traumatic event, or the possible outcome of a baby and what that will mean for you or your life. We just want that possibility of a baby kept alive.” Or, I guess alternatively they are saying “Even though you and your doctor have chosen what is best for you, I think I know better, and I don’t trust you to make your own decisions regarding your future.” Either way it’s infuriating and demeaning. ETA: Proposed new bill in Ohio requires women to get a man’s permission for an abortion. As though we didn’t have enough of a patriarchy to begin with.

A recent study says religious doctors are no more likely to help the poor or underprivileged than non-religious doctors. Interesting, no?

There also seems to be a rash of news stories like “Two children found dead in trash bags under sink” or that awful story about the lady with four (dead) premature fetuses in her house, of varying ages, who was only discovered because she was admitted to the hospital with heavy bleeding presumably after delivering one of them early.

And then this new thing I don’t really understand about Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones? And something about the Wall Street Journal? Whatever it is, it sounded bad, like he might be gaining control of another media outlet. If that’s true, I think it’s awfully sad since it’s already so hard to get even moderately unbiased information. Monopolies are rarely helpful to society.

Ohio election records from 2004 have mysteriously disappeared. Which is awesome, you know, because they could have proved the election was stolen. Dick Cheney recently claimed he can ignore executive orders because he is not part of the executive branch, but now he does not like to say he is in one branch or the other. He’s also defending Justice Alberto Gonzales throughout his whole scandal. Seriously guys, does it not end? (ETA: Cheney believes Bush will be remembered fondly on his deathbed. Are they all delusional?)

I know a lot of people abstain from reading the news, and I think that’s commendable. I have to ask though, how the heck do you stay on top of everything? I don’t like being uninformed or ignorant about current issues, but I also don’t like to be bombarded with insane, sensationalist crap all the time. I do generally prefer the BBC news website over MSNBC, just because I feel like they’re more objective since they’re not actually within the US, but where else do you go to get news?

And why are there so many political scandals lately? Is anybody on the level anymore? I am feeling disheartened and rant-y about the US lately.

What could be more fun than going to a small-ish show where people bring their 7-year-olds, babies, and grandmothers to listen to two boys dressed in Hogwarts uniforms sing songs about Harry Potter books? Nearly nothing, save for going to the FIFTH HARRY POTTER MOVIE later that night! Woo!

Yes, I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

WARNING: Movie spoilers ahead! Proceed at your own risk! Run away now if you haven’t seen the movie yet!

(more…)