Ultimate Movie Watching Couch

Theresa and I decided to be lazy Saturday night. So we stayed in and watched Garden State. What a great movie -- cute but enough film noir that you don't feel too guilty As a remedy to our gigantic 19" TV, we started sitting close up on our oh-so-inviting Love Sac. 

A little input for the New Year

Hi all! I spend a lot of time evaluating whether the direction I'm going in is both a career-positive direction as well as one that I want to be going in (read life-positive direction), and with the 2006 upon us, I thought the words below from my dorm's Dean were a good reminder on keeping perspective.

One take-away for me is that whatever direction I'm in, I know it's a good-enough one as long as I get to see the people I love often.

[A little background, each Sunday Dean Loge sends out "Notes and News" about school matters and his general thoughts on life. He's very '-spective' so I made sure that I was kept on the list.]

NOTES

Another term is another beginning, a new time to create life anew and to form a life worth living. I suppose everyone is preparing for shopping period, trying to pick courses that fit and meet their needs. If you are fortunate, they may even fulfill your desires. Making choices is a practical matter, of course, but also each of us, in his or her own way, encounters the opportunity and (yes) the responsibility to consider what is worth doing and what sort of person we want to be. With some nerve and a little pluck, we can keep some questions before us as we make new choices for a new term: What is worth doing? What do I like to do? What needs to be done? And remember these ancient questions: What constitutes a good life? Who am I? And Thoreau’s question: Where am I?

I would be a fool to suggest that the right selection of courses and teachers can provide answers to such questions. It takes a lifetime for that, but only a lifetime that keeps those questions alive and before us. As always, we will do the best we can. Will we make mistakes? You bet we will. Will we learn from them? We hope so. Even in the face of the uncertainties that make a human life, let us think about what we choose, reflect as much as time will allow on how and why we choose to do what we do, on the way we are with ourselves and with others, on our lives as lives of our own. Who tells us who we are? Many may and many more will try to tell us who we are. More difficult is this: I must tell me who I am, and you must tell you who you are. We have tasks, challenges, obligations, and responsibilities. Also, we have hope, friendship, love, joy, dance, and (yes) renewal.

We begin again to do the best we can as we know ourselves now. We will make our choices. We will trust others and, with some reflection, we may even trust ourselves. Choosing our courses and our activities and our friends are new chances to make a life worth having for ourselves and for our neighbors. Pogo said, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities." Well, here we are at the beginning of another term, so let's surmount them. Now that would be an experience and an education worth living! Welcome back, and see you around the courtyard.

Wow, an amazing music discovery tool

It's called Pandora and based on the Music Genome Project. The MGP is an attempt to catalogue as much music as possible according to hundreds of different genes or traits of each song. These might be the particular beats, the instruments, the vocal style, the sort of lyrics of the writer -- anything that could conceivably distinguish one song from another. That way, if you like a particular artist or song, it's possible to identify other songs that could be of interest based on shared genes. And the interface is dazzingly simple: you put in a song or artist which gives Pandora a starting point. It will pick a few songs that are similar to your choice. If you like a song, it will try to pick more like it; if you don't, it will try another direction. It's really quite clever. It's kind of cool seeing some of the music you like dissected -- sometimes you know you like a song, but you don't know why. Pandora will highlight some of the salient features of the song that caused it to choose it for you. Try one of my favorite groups: Gotan Project.

Austrian Delicacy

Lo, I was banging away late at night when I found myself hungry. I'd been picking away at M&M's. Too much sugar and chocolate. I looked at my dried mangos -- not appetizing at the moment. Then it occurred to me that I needed meat. Down to the kitchen I went. Nothing in the fridge. Ah, there's callios from Mom, but alas! it's in the freezer and I simply couldn't wait that long. Then I suddenly recalled the can of barbeque Vienna sausage unassumingly stacked in my cabinet. Here's the neatly packed can right before consumption.