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11-17-03 // 10.43 am happiness is an option NP: Pet Shop Boys - "Nightlife" I read an interview with Neil Tennant when this record came out where he was talking about how they were trying to put a modern spin on those old sorts of torch song albums crooners made, like "Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonley" and what have you. Of course, this being the PSB, their torch song album is much more danceable than Sinatra, but its emotional center achieves its goal. It does contain some of their best ballads ever, as well. Perhaps at some point I'll do a full on review/analysis of it all. No time at the moment, sadly. Saturday night was a blast. Jon ended up not being able to come down, but Ryan H and Jared and I had a great time anyway. Started out the night by prepping our stomachs with a Chinese dinner, and then stopped by the grocery store for some post-bar drinks and supplies. Went to the pub by the river (one of my favorite places to drink and socialize ever, really -- it needs to be airlifted to my neighborhood in St. Louis) and had many a pint of their new house ale. I remember them renovating the upstairs space into a restaurant and brewery, but I hadn't been back since it was finished. In any case, there were like six house beers on draught. I settled on the English style ale. So yeah, we stayed there for several hours, goofing around, playing tunes on the jukebox, and talking with Ryan's friend Nick, who apparently works in the upstairs restaurant's kitchen. He just got off work so he joined us for a beer before going on his way. We eventually left the pub and walked through the floodwall gate to the river banks to smoke cigars. I very rarely smoke cigars, as (a) even the better ones I've had taste like crap, and (b) I'm allergic to excessive smoke. So of course, I don't inhale the smoke, and I usually only make it halfway through one of 'em. To be honest, I really only indulge out of respect to tradition, as opposed to any pleasure I get out of the act. In any case, it was a perfect cigar on the riverfront night, all cold and foggy. A barge even floated by. So then we were done there -- I offered to pay for a taxi back but Jared just drove us in my car, as he hadn't consumed much booze at all. Got back to the apartment, drank some more, played a few card games, and then tried to hook up the N64 I brought along for a few games of Goldeneye. Of course, it wouldn't work. Even a trip to Wal-Mart for an RF converter didn't do the trick, it was baffling. But it didn't matter, we just stayed up for a while past that, drinking a bit more and talking. It was a simple night, but it was brilliant. I actually prefer simple, to be honest. Of course, I paid the price for drinking about 8 beers and forgetting to rehydrate myself before I went to sleep. Woke up with the worst headache I have ever had, it felt like my skull was getting ready to crack open. I could feel the blood vessels in my temples throbbing. Oh, it was not a good morning. I eventually recovered, though, but I felt fairly ragged most of the rest of the day. Aside from Saturday night's festivities, I'm sticking rather well to my "no booze, way more exercise, less and better eating" plan. I think I lost a pound or two last week. Even if I didn't, I feel a bit better in general, and I plan to keep on with all of this. I'm writing a computer program for Ryan H. He does cut up poetry (taking words -- excerpts from essays or novels, song lyrics, news stories, etc -- randomizing them, and then reassembling them), and asked me if it'd be possible for me to write something that would input a piece of writing and output the words completely jumbled up. That way, he explained, he wouldn't have to painstakingly cut up by hand the original paper before creating new poems. This way, the program can just spit out a text file of the original words in a totally random order, and he can go about his business of writing the new poems without all of the tedious cutting and shuffling and such. In any case, writing the program is turning out to be a good exercise for me. For one thing, I write almost exclusively in SQL at work, so I haven't programmed in C++ for several years at least. It's been good to refresh my memory, for one thing, and to reaffirm my sense that I deserve that degree that hangs on the wall. In any case, it's been perversely fun, in a way, not to mention a bit embarrassing. I had to look up how to declare an array of strings, for Zarquon's sake. (it's char variable_name [number of array elements][max length of each string element], incidentally) I look terrible this morning. I traded having enough time to shave for sleeping an extra hour, though that didn't even help much as for some reason it took me a while to fall alseep last night. Ugh. But it's alright, it's alright. There's a string of meetings coming up here soon. Lovely. Plus, I actually have some work to get to today. Hopefully soon I'll stop being such a bum and take care of it.
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