I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot…
Anyway, I still haven’t collected my pay from school for March and we’re halfway through April. Needless to say we’re broke and that’s how important it is that I teach as a second job.
I teach in a sort of post-highschool course, which isn’t college, but isn’t that bad either… I really couldn’t say what kind of degree you get there, but I suppose you get out of there ready for action. It’s an art and design school and I’m teaching computers to the first two years of the graphic design course. Basically I have to tell them about PhotoShop, FreeHand, Illustrator and Quark Xpress. We use iMacs at the school which sucks because I absolutely loathe the damned little ugly things.
The computers do look nice when you first set eyes on them… after two months they just look “different”, and now they just bloody look ugly and I realized: “yes! that’s why computers are usually either beige or black”… It’s a low profile thing I don’t suppose fashion victims who actually bought iMacs will ever understand.
Anyway… I still gotta come up with an exercise for the students to do tomorrow, plus I gotta teach them how to start using Xpress which is something I basically can’t do because I don’t use the damn thing and I hate DTP anyway. (DTP means Desktop Publishing, it’s a severly cocky expression for putting stuff on a page and printing it out).
I’m also noticing that it’s only 1:26 am, although I supposedly started this entry at 1:29, which means I either misread the time in the first place or there has been a major space-time warp and I’m about to meet myself in three minutes. Interesting as my life is, I’m ready to bet on the first choice.
I think the worst thing about being a teacher is that you have to get along with a large number of young people. Young people are fighting to establish their identities and personalities and what-have-you. So when I walk in the class room and propose: “everyone draw me a rock band logo containing an illustration of a skull done in FreeHand”, there’ll be a guy yelling out: “cool!”, another guy will say: “this is pathetic!” and a third one (could be a girl this time) will say they’d prefer to do it using PhotoShop… What do I do?
I’m the teacher! I act like a mature adult, of course! I reach in my bag for my trusty double barreled, easy loading Quake shotgun and start distributing hellish punishment. Heck… I’d do it if it was a perfect world. Like my wife’s brother said the other day: “we should have several lives so we could just do that kind of stuff (he was referring to driving off a steep cliff)… then we’d just load…”
And he’s right, you know.
I just know that in a few hours, when I’m driving down to the boat station I’ll start feeling that Carmageddon sensation creeping up on me, I’ll start looking wickedly at pedestrians and sleepy slow drivers… unfortunately, I’ll just be a good boy and prevent a lot of deaths.
Life just isn’t fun enough. Neither is death, apparently.
…I don’t think anyone reads this, isn’t that pathetic? I double dare anyone reading this to e-mail me (not you, you nearly-successful lawyer with the highly intelligent 2-year-old who will inevitably take over the world)… but anyone else, I triple dare you! e-mail me now! Yeah right…
8:56 am GMT
Hello? am I awake?
I went to bed about four hours ago, now it sort of feels like I have thin long acupuncture needles in my eyes. I hate not sleeping.
On top of everything my e-mail program insists on downloading messages from the server that I already have… it’s now downloading the sixth version of every message in a 33 message batch, isn’t that nice?
Oh well, I gotta go to work…
20:05 GMT
Home… home at last.
Got my March paycheck, so it wasn’t all bad. Actually it wasn’t bad at all, except I was unbelievably tired… and I’m staring to suspect that my students think I’m some kind of junkie by the way I drop my head on the cafeteria table and gulp down coffee, like I’m trying to recover from some terrible hangover. So now I’m gulping down my 9th coffee of the day and reading my e-mail… all seven copies of each message… I long for Linux.
23:42 GMT – now playing: David Bowie – I’m Deranged
Coffee number 10.
I’ve just watched a pretty cool movie my wife rented. I was called “Dark City”. Nifty. It’s about this sort of alien race which uses a whole city as an experimentation lab and they exchange people’s memories around every night turning them into someone else altogether. Very good story, nice sets. The alien characters looked a bit like a cross from Fremen from “Dune” and the guy from “Hellraiser”, but ok.
Blast! My coffee’s over… I can’t get online the damned phone operator is messing up again! No, not the ISP, it’s the telecom company, the damned monopolist bastards…
Here’s a little of what it all means: Tritão is obviously a nickname for my partner Nelson. A Tritão, or perhaps Triton, is a small amphibious lizard commonly known as Salamander. A Triton is black with yellow spots. This is not, however, where the name derives from, it derives from a homonymous cartoon character created by Nelson back in college which is nothing short of a laughter riot. Unfortunately these adventures are not yet online due to character registration and trade marks which are still not taken care of. When this is done (probably around 3652 give or take a year), there will be literally dozens of new comic strips we can publish online.
19:56 GMT – now playing: Jí¶rn Brackhagen & Don Tano – Jerusalem Boogie
It’s cold and almost raining. Just a few days ago I was going out of my mind with how bloody hot it was in this house…
The music I’m listening to is available only on MP3 format and is part of “Lost in Static 18”, a musical tribute to Mike Oldfield put together by Jí¶rn Brackhagen. It’s made up of several pieces by fans of the Oldfield mailing list “Amarok”.
I was supposed to participate (and I actually did), but my piece never made it. I’m about to re-record it now and put it online on my own and sod everyone else. Anyway the music available at the Static 18 page is pretty nice for amateurs, some of it is very professional actually. Of course you should be at least a little bit into Mike Oldfield if you’re going to download any of this.
So yes, I’m a Mike Oldfield fan… or perhaps used to be…? I have become very sceptic lately… His latest albums are more and more a sort of mid-life crisis, to old to rock and roll, elevator, new age, meditation music. I’m pretty much still into his old stuff, and when I say old I mean from the seventies, like “Tubular Bells”, “Ommadawn”, “Hergest Ridge” or “Incantations”. Actually I run a small mailing list and website of the Amarok Tabbing Society. It’s a group of people that works together to tab Oldfield stuff for guitar and bass, you can find it here:
I’m browsing with Pato (the duck!)… Man, the web sucks! It’s incredible the amount of people that have responsibility, fame and influence in the industry and present themselves through the crappiest websites you’ve ever seen!
There are literally whole pages done as an image. All of it! text, pictures, all a big JPEG! The vast majority uses stolen art, deja vu clipart and invariably badly resized and adapted images.
And what I can’t imagine is why anyone at all in the web today still uses the animated e-mail icon with the word “e-mail” rotating around the planet earth, or the one with the envelope entering the mailbox… These are companies we’re talking about, not personal websites, companies!
It’s also unbelievable that most companies can’t even present their own logo in a decent way! there are distorted logos, bad transparency matting, creepy stuff…
It’s getting pretty funny now! I’m laughing uncontrollably… there are some sites… man! It’s getting out of control, I’m laughing my ass off! It’s just unbelievable how some sites look… completely ruined JPEG images due to maximum compression, webpages with no background colour (welcome to Netscape gray!)… and the worst thing is probably the slogans… I’m getting hysterical!
I truly have nothing at all to say today, isn’t that sad? What do I do now?
Here’s some trivia: I’ve found that my fingers are thicker again, it’s so funny… just a couple of weeks ago, my wedding ring nearly fell off my finger if I wasn’t careful; now I can hardly pull it off past my knuckle. It’s the heat, I guess…
What a boring day! I did go to the gym and workout for one and a half hours, but there’s never much to tell about that. I am moving on to pretty heavy weights in almost every exercise, althgouh I’m fortunantely not getting huge. There’s this new guy, used to be a thin little number, but he’s on steroids now… what a difference… I wonder if he thinks it’s worth it to have huge arms and tiny testicles…
Me, I just enjoy lifting stuff I guess. And I always go with my parents which is nice because otherwise I don’t get to see them much.
Had chinese for dinner and watched “Apollo 13” on TV, just because it was on. It’s not a bad movie, it’s kinda cool, actually, although I never did like the “oh make me cry” sort of ending… I like the space sequences, I can’t help it.
Oh well, I’ll just go surf a bit and then on to play Quake, maybe…
Just watched “Beavis and Butt-Head do America” on TV. Let me clarify that I am a big B&B fan. Anyway, the movie had all the expected ingredients, the chicks, the scoring, the bungholes and Cornholio, of course; however I suppose it’s not as good as I expected. The TV show still seems to be funnier, maybe it’s the comments on the videoclips, and then again, maybe not, maybe it’s just all been done before and so it isn’t all that funny anymore.
Anyway, it’s Monday and I hate that, I just hate that… especially when the week that’s about to start includes teaching… I don’t think I’ll get good at teaching even if I’ve been doing it for 50 years.
11:55 a.m. GMT
I’ve been reading other online diaries again.
I realize how much people like to enhance their text with literary figures, they turn their lives into something really important when they describe how the technician came to fix the washing machine or how they’re looking for a new job.
Some diaries are downright fictional and you don’t have to think or read much to find that out… As I see it there are three types of fake journals, First we have the people who lead great lives, have great jobs and make a lot of money, have great sex and a pile of amazing friends; for the most part, you’ll find that people who describe their amazing sex life in great detail are usually lying. Secondly we have the nearly mortem depressed chicks (not nearly as many blokes, at least I haven’t found many); they are hugely depressed, everything is a bummer, they have been dumped by their latest husband/lover/boyfriend, they cry all the time (*all* the time), they try to kill themselves every other day, everyone hates them, they have no friends and even the dog doesn’t care. Lastly we have the glamorous lives; they’re different from the first ones because the first ones are merely people with terribly successful lives, the glamorous lives are those that are really super models and describe their every day on the catwalk, or they’re actors and keep talking about rehearsals and playing some important theatre, perhaps they’re pornostars or strippers and they’ll go into great detail about photoshoots with dozens of amazing looking silicon girls.
But none of that matters. Is it, or is it not much more interesting reading these people’s lives, or at least what they enjoying writing down and enjoying to imagine it’s their life, rather than going through magazines and reading about princes and princesses, presidents, movie stars and their cocaine addictions?
That’s what I think it’s interesting about these online journals and why, contrary to my predictions, I didn’t give mine up after the first week. I find myself hours online scanning the diaries, just reading plain stuff, or perhaps some more amazing, possibly fictionalized stuff, and realizing the uncanny amount of things that actually go on in the planet. How different people’s lives can be or, better yet… how the same!
But it is Monday. Although it’s a cool and breezy Monday, sunny, but not hot. That doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s actually Monday and I have a bunch of things to get underway, including mostly stuff I don’t want to do.
14:40 GMT – now playing: Camel – The Homecoming
I’ve just been checking out stuff about the new Mac OS X. I must clarify that I mostly hate Macs, their operating system is annoying, lame and it crashes almost as much as Windows.
But the new Mac OS X is a UNIX system based, among other things, on BSD, apparently it’ll even have a command line! A command line on a Mac! It starts to sound to me like Apple decided to no more be an isolated and no-chance competitor to Microsoft and has joined the UNIX world. However, I still cannot understand where the buying of Apple (or part thereof) by Microsoft fits in all this… If MS now owns a part of Apple, shouldn’t they be trying to push Apple into running Windows on their machines?
17:03 GMT – now playing – Camel – Fritha Alone
I finally finished some undone work that had been that way for over a month now… I feel amazingly better now! I had no idea that was hanging so heavily on me, only when it was done I realized I felt much more at ease.
Now I can plunge into the next impossibility. I wonder what it’s like to have a normal job… not to have to come up with anything, invent anything, write down funny stories or suddnely be counted on to draw something you’ve never drawn before.
The wedding was nice, especially because most of the mass I was outside the church (thank heavens!) :) We didn’t stay too long, so I got to come home and ahave a Perl lesson with the expert. Very cool indeed.
I’m completely turned on to Perl.
15:27 GMT
Darn! I had a worm thingie! Yes a worm! happy99… a stupid program which spreads through e-mail, so I got it and started sending it out to people.
Computer viruses and worms are the clearest sign that there are stupid people in this planet. “oh I got nothing to do today… let’s program a computer virus which will destroy some random person’s life and work, that’ll be fun!”. Why don’t you do something productive like hack the hell out of Microsoft? Jam NATO planes on board computers or erase AOL?
18:20 GMT – now playing: Jí¶rn Brackhagen – Taurus IV (from the Mike Oldfield fan tribute project)
I’ve just been preparing classes for this week, since they’re restarting on Thursday. I’m writing notes for using PhotoShop, including a simple description of every menu option (or nearly every one), to serve as a reference to my and future students.
1:29 am GMT I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot… Anyway, […]
14:40 GMT Tritão turns 26 today. Happy birthday. Here’s a little of what it all means: Tritão is obviously a nickname for my partner Nelson. A Tritão, or perhaps Triton, is a small amphibious lizard commonly known as Salamander. A Triton is black with yellow spots. This is not, however, where the name derives from, […]
18:56 GMT I’m bored. 22:11 GMT I truly have nothing at all to say today, isn’t that sad? What do I do now? Here’s some trivia: I’ve found that my fingers are thicker again, it’s so funny… just a couple of weeks ago, my wedding ring nearly fell off my finger if I wasn’t careful; […]
0:09 a.m. GMT Just watched “Beavis and Butt-Head do America” on TV. Let me clarify that I am a big B&B fan. Anyway, the movie had all the expected ingredients, the chicks, the scoring, the bungholes and Cornholio, of course; however I suppose it’s not as good as I expected. The TV show still seems […]
1:02 am GMT The wedding was nice, especially because most of the mass I was outside the church (thank heavens!) :) We didn’t stay too long, so I got to come home and ahave a Perl lesson with the expert. Very cool indeed. I’m completely turned on to Perl. 15:27 GMT Darn! I had a […]
