who says we don’t have fun at work…

i’ve been playing with python and tkinter lately and decided to start up a little project to give me something solid to work on as i learn.

drachen is a little GUI playlist editor designed to handle extremely large music collections. the interface is a little unusual and makes use of the sets instead of trees approach i mentioned recently in the bookmarks. from using drachen for the last couple of days though, i can say that i find it orders of magnitudes easier to work with than other playlist managers i’ve used.

had a conference call today with don hopkins and a couple of my coworkers about an upcoming project that we’re working with him on. interesting guy.

saw a sign in a restaurant tonight handwritten and taped up to the wall that said ‘dry paint’.

<p>brilliant. </p>

<p>i need to start leaving signs like that all over to warn people. maybe even &#8216;no paint&#8217; signs where appropriate. a road sign or two warning commuters of &#8216;no construction ahead&#8217; would be nice too.</p>

<p>hmm&#8230; &#8216;beware of no dog&#8217;, &#8216;not slippery when wet&#8217;, &#8216;no baby on board&#8217;&#8230;</p> 

we moved to our new office today. in the same building just down a floor. it’s a little smaller than our old one but the furniture is nicer and arranged better. we also have a conference room that is walled off so the noise of meetings can be contained a bit.

<p>i was sad though because to complete the move we had to unplug the servers and move them. my linux server had been up for over a year:</p>

11:25am  up 373 days, 18:08,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

<p>we&#8217;re planning on moving to new rackmounted machines at the end of the month though so i would have been retiring it around then anyway.</p> 

i made saint today on perlmonks. saint is the highest level at perlmonks. i hope i don’t lose interest in it just because i “beat” it. oh well, i guess i still have other people’s high scores to try to beat.

<p>technically, to be canonized, you&#8217;re supposed to be dead and have performed at least two verifiable miracles. i&#8217;m hoping nobody comes around to enforce the &#8216;dead&#8217; part. i wonder what the miracles i performed were&#8230;</p> 

lani and i managed to keep from going totally insane with boredom in dexter. i think that had something to do with all the allergy medication that lani had to take to deal with my parents cats; they made her basically sleep through most of the boring spells.

<p>on saturday we went down to wiscasset for Jesse and Alene&#8217;s wedding. nice little ceremony by the ocean. reception afterwards with about a billion batesies and an open bar. it was good to see people and catch up with them.</p>

<p>kamden dropped the real bombshell though. he informed us that he&#8217;s decided to leave the johns hopkins program in nanjing that he was doing to go to harvard this fall and take <em>pre-med</em> classes. yes, kamden has now decided to become a doctor. i guess this is probably only shocking to those of us who have known him for a while. he specifically mentioned that he might want to be a urologist &#8212; or, &#8220;peepee doctor&#8221; as kamden calls it. </p>

<p>the part-time job he&#8217;s applying for to help pay for school and get some experience sounds interesting though. he wants to work harvesting corneas, pancreases, and kidney&#8217;s from accident victims. i guess <em>somebody</em> has to do it.</p> 

every now and again, it’s good to come across the existance of a complete and utter asshole, not really to get one all worked up, but just as a reality check. I find the circles I move in contain a severe minimum of the twisted conservatives (such as exhibit A here), and they’ve become an out of sight out of mind majority to me.

<p>no wonder I can&#8217;t ever figure out why Bush is in office.</p> 

this is on file over at my site, but given the lack of posts lately, I thought it might be good as a discussion sparker. rant:

<p>first, I should say that I&#8217;m really enjoying my time in Japan. alot. so much so, in fact, that I&#8217;m finding myself jealous in a really irrational way of any other gaijin that has any reason to be here longer than the three month <span class="caps">VISA</span>&#8217;s I keep having to get. part of it stems from the fact that Japan is inherently for the Japanese, so postions for a foreign fella such as myself are few and far between (you can&#8217;t even work the convience stores here without significant lingual skills and knowledge of the more polite forms of speech, unlike the US of A). therefore, any gaijin being here represents one less chance for me to visit an extended stay on this place. but moreover, I think the fact is that I&#8217;m really making a huge effort to get deep into the language, the life, and the culture to figure out what being 24 in Japan is all about. and while I&#8217;m doing this in the <span class="caps">EXTREMELY</span> limited windows of time I&#8217;m afforded here, I get to watch any old dink from america, who&#8217;s usually too much of a twit back home to be bearable or has some sick asian/pedophile/both fetish going on come over here to ride the wave of good fortune that one gets by being an american dude. </p>

<p>so my angst is thus: given the chance, I&#8217;d love to explore the culture deeper, and further my understanding of what modern Japan is about. I&#8217;d hate being an english teacher, and I&#8217;d be bad at it, so till then I&#8217;m stuck biding my time waiting for a post-doc, job, etc to come along and whisk me off to mochiland. but in the mean time, since all american men are stereotyped together, I have to sit by and watch a bunch of directionless, indifferent dolts march through this place, sleeping with their students, &#8220;teaching&#8221; english whatever way they please (since who&#8217;s to say if  they&#8217;re a bad teacher?), tainting the reputation I&#8217;m going to eventually carry and basically using this place as a playground, to eventually leave, as americans leave all things, littered with the detritus of their time spent. </p>

<p>it&#8217;s pretty clear, in some respects, why the US has such bad global relations politically &#8211; just look at our minor emmisaries. any US national almost always stands out abroad, save the few that try to blend and merge rather than conform the space around them to their wishes.</p> 

lani is in dexter visiting me on vacation. i feel kind of bad because there really isn’t much of anything to do here. took her on a short tour of town: “there’s the abandoned shoe factory… and there’s a tractor driving through town… and those are some trees… “

<p>on saturday we&#8217;re supposed to go to a friend&#8217;s wedding in wiscasset. i have no idea what we&#8217;ll do until then.</p>