electric relaxation

Method Man brings it for real on Blackout. Yeah, this track is nine years old, whatever, it’s still hot.

Yo’, all you gonna be, wanna bes, when will you learn?
Wanna be Doc and Meth? Gotta wait ya turn
I spit a .41 Revolver on New Year’s Eve
With the mic in my hand I mutilate m.c.’s
The most slept on since Rip Van Wink
My shit stink with every element from A to Zinc
So what you think? I’m a blackout on just one drink?
You must be crazy! A little off the wall maybe
Go get a shrink…

This is the kind of thing that I like to read after a day of struggling with GCC C++ ABI compatibility and trying to parse Mozilla’s MDC developer documentation. From a recent Slashdot thread on RMS versus Linus:

Re:Damn hippies

(Score:5, Interesting)

by happyemoticon (543015) on Wednesday September 12, @11:41AM (#20573661)
(http://www.wavenger.com/)

A friend of mine went on a trip to Ecador recently. The idea was to make water collection tanks for the natives out in the jungle. He’s an engineering graduate student, everyone else was in sociology, and they were hippies to the man. Tons of pot. Dirty. White people with dreadlocks. You name a stereotype, they had it.The trip fell apart because my friend had the perverted idea that he, as an engineer, should tell them how to engineer things. They wanted to decide things like structural soundness democratically. They had a poor work ethic as well: while he’d be trying to teach them how to do something, they’d start massage circles or play frisbee in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle.Perhaps you could add other stereotypes in there, such as “Lazy, idealistic college kids,” or “sheltered American youth” but it is very tempting for me to say, given my experiences, that a sizable segment of the hippie population is too inept, anti-authority, lazy and anti-knowledge to change anything, up to and including their own underwear.

Yeah bitch.

T-Mobile USA released an OS update for the Pearl recently, which includes version 4.2.1.107 of the OS. I attempted to upgrade my phone, which was running some random release from Telstra, and the upgrade went horribly wrong. The Desktop Manager successfully backed up my existing phone data, but during the re-installation process, it threw some kind of exception and left the phone in a pretty b0rked state. The phone could boot, but there was no theme (it was purely black and white) and half the apps were missing.

I eventually managed to fix everything. First, I used the bizarre but useful JL_Cmder utility to wipe the phone and get it to the ‘507 error’ stage. I then tried and failed several times to complete the upgrade. Eventually I decided to try connecting the BlackBerry directly to my laptop instead of through the two (!) hubs and the docking station which were in between the phone and the PC (and without the five other USB devices I had connected at the same time). Once I did that, the upgrade went fine.

I’m continually amazed at the subtlety and general weirdness of these types of USB issues. I mean I know this stuff is complicated, but still.

I finally went through and fixed up my photo gallery, which has been broken and empty since I switched to DreamHost. I’m not very happy with the performance (or the management UI for that matter), but whatever.

On a positive note, I finally snagged Greg’s Thailand photos off of his website and added them to my collection.

I figured the union of <people with MySpace pages> and <people I respect> was an empty set, but I was amused by this rando’s page when searching for the phrase “Brrr… stick em, hah hah hah, stick em”. The latter is a famous hip-hop quotable that I couldn’t place (yeah, I’m losing my touch).

From Fresher Than Thou’s Music section under Interests:

I hate underground hiphop. it ruined my life. Now i love that mindless radio rap. No IQ required to enjoy it. It is the corruption of our youth. So i support it in hopes of population control. (jk)

I wanted to preserve for posterity a lively exchange between my sister and I that took place this past weekend at the Dharan Family residence in Albany:

Vanita:
“Romi, Mom and Dad have been up for like 20 hours because of the pooja and you’re still making them cook and pack food for you to take home?”

Me (with no hesitation):
“Vanita, Mom and Dad have been working for like forty years and you’re still making them keep their jobs so they can send you money?”

That’s how I does it.

I finally finished a book that I started back in Alaska: The Prince of the Marshes, by Rory Stewart. It’s an account of the year that Stewart spent serving as deputy governor of two different provinces in Iraq. It was not nearly as entertaining or fulfilling as The Places in Between, though it was clearly not intended to be. At any rate, with this second book the author pretty much confirmed his spot at the top of my personal list of consummate badasses of our time.

I had about an hour left on my flight home from Albany when I finished Prince, so I moved on to Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. I finally read Fortress of Solitude a while ago and though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped (it’s far more abstruse than the keyword summary - superheroes, comics, rap, Brooklyn - would seem to suggest), I remain a huge fan of Lethem’s writing in all its varied forms. It looks like Gun’s most important function was simply to provide a drawing board for later, more successful pieces such as Motherless Brooklyn, but it’s a quick read and I’m pretty sure that I can enjoy any hard-boiled detective story no matter how bizarre or contrived the premise.

My friend Brian has accused me of a lot of things, one of which is that I’ve become a snob since coming to the Bay Area. I can’t really find fault with his diagnosis; I prefer to believe that I simply hate a wider range of people than before without accepting his scarlet letter. I honestly don’t have much of a problem with it; my cynicism and lack of faith in my fellow man is pretty much the foundation of my current belief system. It’s true that I probably talk about money too much (and I think about it even more). I’m more set in my ways and certain of the judgments which I am all too happy to pass upon others.

However the twist to all of this is that my tastes and values, rather than simply elevating unilaterally, have instead undergone a bifurcation for which I refuse to apologize. In everything from career to cuisine, I hold increasingly diminished regard for the middle ground. That is to say, I rank crack dealers below particle physicists but ahead of optometrists. And I’d take Popeye’s Chicken over The Cheesecake Factory, any day of the week. Indulging my penchant for introspective psychoanalysis, I’d guess that my visceral reaction to the many faces of moderation has a lot to do with an acute awareness of being trapped within its confines.

But seriously. Fuck PF Chang’s. I’ve never eaten there, I never will, and it’s highly likely that I want to slap anyone who thinks it’s just the thing after a day of shopping in Santana Row, and rolls through in a black, silver-trimmed 1.8T Audi A4 before heading home to a shitty 2BR townhouse in Santa Clara.