One Day in the Life of Brian Richardovich

I'm very glad to see this revival - Elliot, your last two posts in particular have been great to read, I really miss having daily conversations with you and reading about your fish and research brought me back to good ol' Stadium days. I get told that I reminisce about Stadium too much, and I probably do, but I also reminisce about Hill House and other things, so I don't think it's unhealthy. I also just really miss the element that you boys brought to the swim team that has been blatantly missing for the last year. Ted, your sampling site find is excellent, I've already used it a lot to find samples in songs that I love and will definitely continue using it. A quick deviation into the sampling vein: for you Girl Talk fans (practically all of Stadium), you need to get the new album if you don't have it and if you do, check out this website. It has the entire new album on it and shows which songs are being sampled together, which is very helpful for getting into a GT album.

So, I probably need to get over this but for some reason, when it's late, I can never get to bed, but during the day all I want to do is nap. I'm sure this is a common problem, and it is certainly helping me write this post, but I need to figure out how to go to bed early and not rely on naps, especially when they occur in Intro CS. I guess this is gonna be a stream of consciousness post, just like Elliot's, because now I've just decided to write about my winter class schedule. Intro CS is definitely on the docket, and I'm really enjoying the low amounts of work and relatively easy concepts, but the fact that I had to write IR programs in the fall probably gave me a head start. Actually, a considerable head start, considering the simplicity of Python versus the somewhat convoluted language of NetLogo. By the way, my IR comps is based on a program I wrote that simulates how countries interact and become frustrated to the point of war. It utilizes role theory, which says that countries visualize themselves and other countries playing roles in the international arena, and my contribution to the theory postulates that when countries see themselves playing roles that other countries don't see them playing, they get frustrated. So in the end, I have a program that shows a bunch of states running around and bumping into each other, comparing their worldviews and either agreeing and being happy or disagreeing and getting angry. It actual does a good job at predicting which countries caused crises in 1966, and my comps goal is to plug in current data. So yeah, that was another ramble. I have a Java applet that will run the program, but you need to install a Netlogo interpreter, so I won't post the program.

My other class this term is Politics and Film, which I've enjoyed so far and I'm looking forward to the movies we're watching. Unfortunately, the bulk of my time this term has been taken up by Russian comps, which is very interesting, but super time consuming. We're translating a story by a guy named Demidov, who has never been translated into English and there isn't much about him in English anywhere. He was an inmate in the Gulag for most of his life, and his writings were confiscated by the KGB until the fall of the Soviet Union. His stories are all about life in the Gulag, similar to those of Solzhenitsyn, except darker and more sarcastic. Everything about it is great, except for the fact that it's a 62 page story and each page takes about 45 minutes to translate (so well over 40 hours of translating, and that's just the first draft!).

Another activity that's taken up a lot of time is the David Bowie cover band that I'm singing for. They call us the Diamond Dogs. We had our first show in the basement of 40 house (John Knapp's old place) a little over a week ago, and according to our spectators it went quite well, so we're planning on playing more shows in the near future. Equestrian is also going really well. At the end of last term, I got to canter for the first time (canter is the 3rd gait, it goes walk, trot, canter, gallop), and I jumped for the first time last week. I'm still a little surprised at how tired my legs are after riding, because right now I feel that my legs are as good as they've ever been in the water (broke 1:10 in the 100 kick!). I also got kicked by a horse for the first time last week, but it was my fault and it barely bruised. It just hurt for awhile.

Well, I was gonna write my predictions for the Oscars because my main unofficial hobby is film, but I feel like this post is already too long, so I'll save it for the end of this week. I'd say that I've seen 6 of the 10 films that are going to be nominated, as well as 8 of the 10 films that should be nominated.

I guess my parting word is that I really want to stop using Facebook. I just use it to put links to The Onion on other people's walls and chat, but Skype is more reliable anyway. I just don't feel like Facebook is how I want to communicate with people. One of the wisest things I've heard said about it was in an interview on the Colbert Report with the guy who wrote the screenplay for The Social Network, who described Facebook as a real life version of reality TV, everything is completely scripted and there's almost no human substance to it. However, quitting Facebook puts me in a small group of people that are our age these days, most of whom aren't on Facebook just to be indie or some other bullshit, which I also want no part of. I kind of wish it would just fade away like MySpace did, but I don't think that's very likely to happen. And with that, I'll bid you goodnight and ask your opinions in one sentence.