and I can't hold out forever / even walls fall down

This title took a little while to come up with; little did I realize how many wall-related songs I've foolishly squandered.

So yeah, uh, walls. Pretty awesome. I could use a few more, but that's not really the point right now. The point is to talk about what I hang on my walls. Not much at the moment, because I'm bad about remembering to decorate, but I've been kicking around a few ideas:

1) maps. so many maps.
1a) I got a cold war era silk escape map of France and Spain that is pretty sweet and just dying to be hung up somewhere.
1b) Color maps of the local mass transit. For some reason I have this overpowering urge to print them onto transparencies and hang them on a clothesline.
1c) Also I would not totally turn up my nose at a big old Star Control hyperspace map. Have I subjected you to my Star Control rant yet, blog? Its time will come.
1ci) Wait, er, this is no longer a wall thing, but this talk of stars and maps and such reminded me of this doodad, which is pretty badass.

2) There is a utility with a not entirely polite name that will blow up and rasterize an image which you can then print out onto several sheets of paper and do up all poster-style. Check out the samples, some of them are pretty sweet. I was thinking I'd do one of a structural MRI of the brain. A purple one. Come to think of it I guess this is also a map of sorts. Well gosh. I'm just Mister Maps On My Walls, aren't I?

3) Oh yeah well I guess some comic-related art and this one Earle painting I got. Man whatever I dunno. I'm still a little bit hung up on this whole map thing. I'll uh, talk to you later I guess.

(oh but P.S. I did just order a few new games that look fairly ultraradtacular. Consider yourselves warned.)

I love to work at nothing all day

Wow, I was really getting into posting at a regular clip, but now I guess I've gone and lapsed a bit. With good reason, though; things have been absurdly busy around here. I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Berkeley, rallying against the UC's ongoing fee increases (and, much like the Regents, expending bunches of money in questionable ways...in my case at the amoeba, game store, bookstore, goodwill, etc.), then it was back down here, grabbing my newly repaired computer and car and racing up to Santa Ana for Phaedra's birthday and notification of my impending unclehood (which some of you have appropriately acknowledged as just a massive freaking deal, and others of you have not), then back to San Diego in time for another birthday, this time Amanda's, celebrated with karaoke and complications, and Sunday is spent on homework and preparing a lesson plan, just now got back from school, and then tomorrow it's back up to LA for Deerhoof and the start of Thanksgiving weekend, which, as I was telling Shannon, is a whole big thing in itself. For some reason, my family has been accumulating Thanksgiving traditions like mad, so I have to get ready for the traditional cornbread and beans pre-dinner, the Black Friday sushi-fest, the now-celebrated-on-a-Saturday Thanksgiving itself, etc.
Man...if one of my students had written a paragraph like that, there would be punishments

oh and hey. I think this was my first entirely autobiographical post, not counting the meta crap of my earlier entries. Wheee. I probably won't do a lot of these, but I wanted to stay in the posting groove, and this seemed like an appropriate way of letting people know what all I've been up to.

Fame, what's your name what's your name

I've been thinking about ways to improve my Spanish listening comprehension. I got some Harry Potter in Spanish, and have also been looking into this whole podcast phenomenon, but have thusfar only found three. I'll see if any of them are worth listening to. There is also BBC Mundo, which is very good, but requires actual work to record and download.

Speaking of which, my iPod's battery seems to be wearing down, so I'm open to suggestions for what to replace it with. Charles has mentioned this monster of a dual-processor Linux platform. Judging from the input thingies, it was obviously designed for games (and can run anything you can emulate), but there's nothing stopping one from using it for mp3s or divx movies or what have you. I will admit, I'm seriously tempted.

Oh also look at this chart, which tracks the frequency of baby names by decade. Evan, for instance, was the 259th most popular boys name in the 70s, and by last year had climbed to 39th place. Hey jerks, stop giving your babies my name. Get your own.

How do you make this thing slow down?

And the dizzying blogpace continues...

Responding to Matt's, uh, "observation," I have tidied up my links. Of course, there's a whole bunch more that I'm missing and couldn't think of off the top of my head, but they'll come to me next time I'm browsing, and hopefully I'll think to add them then.

Aw crap, I just thought of two more right now.

Anyways, here are a few things I found: one of the nicer articles on Intelligent Design out there, and, for you fans of the latest Lemony Snicket in the audience, it turns out that there actually is a hotel based on the Dewey Decimal System

Here I go, oh wo wo, like a loco mosquito

The uncannily entertaining Back Dorm Boys.
(from Jann, whose blog I am thinking I should just mirror rather than going to the trouble of providing content of my own. In fact, I am feeling like my output quality has declined precipitously with my recent efforts to post regularly. Do you agree? In any case, this is not a pace I expect to be able to maintain indefinitely, bad content or no)

In other music news (and I was so certain I had mentioned this one a long time ago, but it must've been somewhere else), one can produce surprisingly good jazz improvisations with an algorithm modeled after the behavior of insect swarms. (More samples here)

Look into your glovebox heart

So, the other day Eve (who, in addition to being the best damn Starfox I've ever seen, may also be turning into the feline-owner equivalent of a show business mother) sent me a link to Dybbuk's performance in kitten war, which I guess is part of the millionth or so generation of Hot or Not-styled sites. Man. The one I really liked was the now-defunct What's Better, which ranked all sorts of unrelated and incommensurable things by asking people to vote on, e.g. whether Mr. T is better than the sine function, etc.
Oh, sorry, got sidetracked there. The thing I was going to mention is that Kittenwar also has lists of the most and least cute kittens. What amazed me was how much they had in common. The losingest kittens are similarly thin and lurchy with long ears, whereas the winningest ones have huge round heads with pointy ears and round little dilated eyes. I have no idea what to make of this, except that I bet Paul Churchland could come up with a vector composite of the world's cutest kitten.