Seconds from Now

It's been quite a while since I've logged into Vox, and a lot has changed.  I felt compelled, however, to share a recent discovery of mine.  I was in the mood for some xylophone jazz and unexpectedly found it in an old Solid Steel mix (2005-08-26, DK & J Rocc).  The artist was Archie Whitewater from the Cadet Records label.  You may remember that name if you recall my earlier posts about their jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby.  I took the time to rip the Whitewater song out of the mix because I've found it difficult to get people to skip ahead 64 minutes into a mix to hear a 3 minute track.  Thus I'm proud to present Archie Whitewater's "Cross Country":

Cross Country

5 comments

I think I'm going to start collecting records from the old Cadet label and see where it goes.

I'd like to share with you a song called "The Spiritually Immature Mansion," by Caribou.  I listened to this track quite a lot on my drive back from Arizona.  It repeats gracefully.  It's a great example of what can be achieved when you don't go overboard on the drums.  It would be too easy to go all-out and wreck the subtlety of this break, but Dan Snaith (aka Caribou) exercises the proper restraint.  Enjoy.

02 The Spiritually Immature Mansion

Caribou

It's been over a month since I've written here.  Where have I been?  What have I been up to?  Well, I'm in Tempe, AZ working opening a new location.  It's been fraught with setbacks and peril, loud alarms, smoke-filled floors, and elevators without power.  Coordinating vendors and making sure deliveries get through; the old rack'n'stack; server configuration and client training.  It's been fun and exhausting and thankfully this phase of the build-out is almost complete and I can head back to San Francisco for some much-needed R&R.

Yeah, right.  It's even more hectic there.  But that's for another blog post.  This blog post is about my Japanese study (べんきょう).  Due to my hectic schedule, I've been out of town for the first few classes of the new semester.  This was certainly disheartening, at least until recently.  In the slow moments at work, when I'm blocked or on a terribly boring/useless conference call, I've been stealing moments to play FFXI.  A little history...

My character is named Baudelaire, and he's an old Elvaan.  His main job is as a Samurai.  I've taken the Samurai job to the highest level and gotten some of the best gear in the game for him.  Then I moved on to Thief and did the same, though my Thief gear isn't nearly as good as my Samurai gear.  Now I'm working on leveling Ninja.

Ninja is a tank job.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a "tank job," their main purpose is to keep the focus of the enemy on them while the rest of the group of people you're with kills them.  There are two main tank jobs in FFXI, the Ninja and the Paladin.  The Paladin tanks by taking whatever damage the enemy can dish out and using magic to heal himself.  The Ninja tanks by avoiding attacks by the enemy and using ninja tools to cast enfeebling spells.

Tank jobs are necessary for a group of people to get things done (like gaining experience points, or taking down higher-level monsters).  This means my Ninja is never without a party invitation.  Well, recently I was invited to party by some Japanese gamers whose characters are Tarutaru.  They liked my tanking and broken Japanese so much that they gave me a nickname: じっじ which is a shortened form of one of my vocab words - りょうじん which effectively turns "old man" into "grandpa."  It's just too adorable to be called "Jiiji" by a bunch of tiny Taru's.

So for the past few nights while I've worked late into the night trying to get my outsource partners to do their jobs, I've been hanging out with these Japanese Taru's and practicing my Japanese while they practice their English.  Just last night they described my Japanese skills as すごい, which I had to look up in my handy-dandy Japanese-English dictionary (じしょ):

sugoi すごい ghastly, gruesome, awful, weird, wonderful, amazing

I love that this word exists and I'm glad that it describes my broken language skills.

I want a block of IP addresses that I own to be routed to the serial IP assigned of a circuit I own.  Three years ago, I would pick up the phone and call my upstream provider with the relevent information.  My request was handled within two hours, most times it was sooner.

Today I call the outsource provider assigned to manage my circuit.  This outsourced "service" provider then calls their outsourced project management team to create a "project" for making the request.  The outsourced project management team's first action is querying the outsourced circuit installation team about why this wasn't done when the circuit was installed.

Hilarity ensues from Thanksgiving until mid-December when I get tired of sitting back and watching the issue go around and around through different management teams and outsource partners.  I suggest better uses for the fingers they're all pointing at each other and get in touch with my upstream provider directly.  Will my request be handled within two hours?  Will I be on the receiving end of some unknown corporate recrimination for not following protocol?  Stay tuned...

One of my two favorite scenes from the Red Dwarf series:

Red Dwarf - Future Echoes - Space Crazy

And from later in the episode, this linguistic knot from Rimmer: "It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future."

I've arrived safely in Winnipeg.  My suite is much smaller than the one I enjoyed in Indianapolis, but the quality is much better.  Eggs benedict for breakfast, martinis with dinner.  Winnipeg is deathly cold, but I'm able to stick to the underground tunnels to get from where I'm staying to where I'm working.

I just found out that I'll be in Tempe, AZ late January through early February.  Nice contrast, there.

I've arrived safely in Indianapolis.  Yesterday evening these was a Colts game and the downtown area was painted Blue; people here love their football.  I'm in a hotel suite larger than my apartment.  There are two tv's here, yet I find myself watching streaming Colbert Report from the MacBook while enjoying my continental breakfast.

What's this about silently reducing the maximum audio upload file size to 25mb?  Did I miss a Team Vox post that mentioned this?  I was thinking of using Vox for hour-long podcasts and now I can't?  Hmm...

Oddly enough, the same day Byrne had his accident, I was involved in my very own first automobile accident.  Coming home from work, I was stopped at a stop sign at Hayes and Laguna and I was rear-ended.  There was a loud bang, it felt like I was punched in the middle of the back, and the loose cd's in my dash holder went flying.

I turned my radio off, turned my car off, shook the cobwebs out of my head and got out to assess the damage.  First thing I noticed was the other guy's car.  The front end was dented in, there was steam or smoke coming out of the hood, and his airbags had deployed.  Dammit, why didn't mine deploy?  I went around to the back of my car only to find no visible damage whatsoever.  Amazing.  Go Subaru!

I took pictures but they're not very dramatic.  I called the police but they said they didn't really care about the accident unless someone was hurt.  Morbid fuckers.  We exchanged insurance information and went about our merry ways.  My back was a little stiff yesterday, but today I feel just about right as rain.