[ Monday, August 26, 2002 ]
Armenian doesn't seem to have a very interesting alphabet.
That is all.
Carter [1:25 AM]
[ Monday, August 19, 2002 ]
All right, so I'm watching the weekly Korean music video show on the international channel, and they have some video with a girl I don't recognize, who is in the hospital and possibly trying to kill herself (I wasn't paying as much attention as I could have) and there's this guy visiting her and she keeps poking her IV bag a lot and it's just really strange.
But the really strange part is the song, which was "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". In english, at that.
It was really quite well done, too. The girl obviously speaks english quite well, and can sing most talentedly. It was, in fact, the best version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" I've ever heard, though I admit that's not saying much.
Seriously, though. WHAT THE FUCK?!?!!
This once again proves my theory that Korean music videos are the strangest in the world.
Carter [10:33 PM]
[ Sunday, August 18, 2002 ]
And now, I present:
Tales From Cairo #2
I don't clearly remember the flight from Logan to JFK, I just have a fuzzy recollection of reading a very small part of House of Leaves and spending a lot of time worrying about being able to make my connection in JFK. As soon as I arrived at JFK I ran off the plane as fast as the crowd would allow, and though I was tempted to run through the terminal as well, but I conceded a brief bathroom stop (the line for the facilities on the plane had been hopeless). Then I ran out of the terminal and into the airport at large. I was beginning to seriously doubt my odds of making this flight. By the time I got out to of the terminal I only had about 40 minutes before my flight LEFT. And I had to go through international-level security this time. Now, for those of you not familiar with the layout of JFK I offer this map.Observe. I was arriving at terminal 9, and I had to leave at terminal 3. Also observe that the buildings are not physically connected, so you do have to run outside to get anywhere. And you can't just walk from terminal to terminal, no, no pedestrians allowed. You need to take a bus. Which means you have to wait for your bus.
Joy.
So naturally I got to the bus stop just in time to watch my bus leave. As I sat there, staring at my watch and waiting for my bus I alternated between affirming to myself that I will in fact make my flight, no problem, and planning out what will happen when I miss it. I was thinking to myself, call home, tell dad, try to negotiate onto a later flight. Not so bad. I tried not to think about the fact that Aeroflot didn't seem to have any later flights for at least a day. And then I was back to trying to believe that I will easily make this flight. No problem. The bus I need arrived in about ten minutes. Half an hour to get there, get through security, and get onto the plane.
Great. Just great.
I realized that the bus I'm on was going around the airport counterclockwise, which was good. Incidentally I was looking at the same map I just gave you. I thought to myself, this is good, I'll get there much sooner. But it will suck when I'm on the way back. Of course, that's weeks from now so who cares? The man I wound up sitting next to on the bus looked a bit panicked when he got onboard, and a moment later he pulled out his mobile phone and made a very panicked call.
"Yes, it's me!" he shouted, a bit louder than he really needed to. "I'm really late, I don't think I'll make this flight. I want you to call the airline and ask them to wait for me! Tell them I'm on my way!"
"Yeah right." I thought. "Like that's ever going to work."
"No!" he shouted. "I don't have the number, just look up 'Aeroflot'!"
"Well, fuck." I thought. "That had better work."
I glanced over at this strange little notebook type thing he was holding against his briefcase, in an effort to figure out what it was that he was going to Russia for. It was really a huge mess of doodles that seemed massively wrong attached to this executive-type person next to me. The only thing I could make out was the phrase "Boris and Natasha" which didn't give me a lot of information. After he got off the phone, I leaned over and conversationally asked "Going to Russia, huh?"
"Yep." he said, somewhat distractedly.
"Me too!" I replied. He turned to actually LOOK at me at this point.
"Oh?" he asked. "You on the Aeroflot flight?"
"Yep." I said.
"Right on!" he shouted, further betraying his executive image. "At least now I have someone to drink with if we don't make it."
"Yeah," I thought to myself. "That's one point of view..."
It was around that point that the bus arrived at the appropriate terminal. At this point I became REALLY grateful for this odd guy who was also on my flight. Because I had no idea where I was going, and he seemed to. My strategy was to look for a sign that said "Departures" or "Aeroflot" or something like that. But there were no signs. Well, none like that anyway. But this guy seemed to instinctively know where he was going, so I applied the Dirk Gently school of navigation and followed him blindly. Thank god, he did actually lead me to the appropriate place. The bad news is that the appropriate place was a huge line leading into the international security checkpoint. HUGE line. I glanced quickly at my watch in despair. No time for huge lines. Fortunately, the man I was following saved me yet again. He waved his arms frantically and yelled to a security-type person "I'm on a flight that leaves in fifteen minutes!"
Which was true at this point. As soon as the friendly security woman grabbed him and started dragging him to the front of the line I waved my arms in a similar fashion and yelled out "I'm on that flight too!!" and she gestured for me to follow along too. We got ourselves rushed through security in record time, although he got detained a bit longer than I because he had a laptop with him and that required some more elaborate ritual. Once on the other side of security I jogged down the hallway, lost once again. After a minute I did see a big "Aeroflot" sign, though, and I can't tell you how happy that made me. I raced to what looked like the check-in counter (thank the gods there was no line) and thrust my ticket at an obviously russian woman. Which is interesting as I honestly believe I have no preconceived notions about what russian people look like, but this woman just struck me as being amazingly russian looking. At any rate, she took my ticket and gave me an appraising look.
"How many bags are you checking?" she asked.
"None. Err...no, they're already checked. I checked them in Boston. They should be routed. I think." I said, trying not to think about how good this woman's grasp of the English language might or might not be. She just nodded and casually informed me that if I had no bags to check I would have to check in at the gate. Wonderful. Of course. Why not? I thanked her and ran across the hall to the gate that she pointed to (which was mercifully close by). Here I was greeted by another oddly russian looking woman (although this time I admit my opinion might have been a bit biased by the fact that she was surrounded by other people who were speaking to her in russian) and thrust my ticket at her in a similar fashion.
Loooooong pause.
"No, you have to check in at the check-in counter." she said. I took a deep breath and thought to myself that this was -not funny-.
We both turned and looked back at the check-in counter where russian woman #1 looked up and shouted to russian woman #2 "He has no bags!" which, of course, made things completely different. Grateful again for the proximity of the gate to the check-in counter I tried to catch my breath while russian woman #2 was busy typing. I took a moment to stare down the hallway in search of my former guide. No sign of him.
"There's one more." I said, as she handed me my boarding pass. "Behind me.", feeling this was the least I could do.
"Then he'd better hurry." she said. This struck me as being a little insensitive, but what could you expect from an airport. I then wandered into the gate proper and was shocked to join a crowd of people who were sitting around waiting to board a plane that was (in theory) supposed to be off the ground in less than five minutes. Of course, if I had gotten there so much as thirty seconds late it would have left without me, but so long as I am one moment early it will be delayed for half an hour. This is how the world works.
Actually, it wasn't delayed all that long, and I personally only got to sit down for around a minute before the PA emitted something that sounded enough like a boarding call to warrant some movement.
This was the first time I got to play what would soon become one of my favorite airport games. It has no name, but I imagine it's fairly common. It can be played whenever you hear a boarding call in a language you don't speak, which can easily be english when it's coming out of an airport's PA. It involves discretely looking at the tickets of people standing behind and in front of you, and the goal is to find people who are assigned to rows both before and after yours. I do this to reassure myself that the boarding call did in fact apply to me. It has only failed once.
Somewhere during this fun little diversion, I managed to spot my friend from the bus/security checkpoint as he did a similar little dance between the check-in and the gate. That was a relief. It was also the last I saw of him, as I got onto the plane a moment later and as fate would have it we were seated nowhere near each other.
This flight was the longest single portion of the journey. So long, in fact, I'm not going to talk about it right now.
You know, eventually Tales From Cairo will actually start talking about Cairo.
Or not, if I get bored with it too soon.
Carter [1:37 AM]
[ Thursday, August 08, 2002 ]
Good computer day.
You'd barely recognise Tomato after all this, but she's still Tomato down deep. Replaced that stick of RAM that went weird and attached a brand new hard drive. 120 whole gigs. Can't bear to part with the old one, though, so I thought it'd be simplest to just hook it in through the RAID controller on the mainboard. Then I can keep all four of my existing IDE devices and have my happy new drive.
Well, this might well have worked, except that it evidently never dawned on me that in addition to an IDE hookup, this new drive would also require a power hookup. Which, evidently, is slightly scarce in Tomato's current setup. *sigh* I guess it was time for a new power supply anyway. At the moment I just disconnected a slightly redundant CD drive and put happy hard drive in its place. All seems well, except that Windows is now slightly confused all the time, and my soundcard is a little off its game. Hopefully this condition will not last long.
As a finishing touch I finally got around to attaching a second video card and monitor. This is a happy thing, although evidently none of the games I have will take advantage of it. I'm sure it'll get old, but when it does I'll most likely just hook up a third monitor and revel in a new level of niftyness.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go download everything.
Carter [1:55 AM]
[ Tuesday, August 06, 2002 ]
Want to play a game?
It's called "Carter Is A Dumbass". Here's how you play:
First, go have a look at this map (assuming that link will work). It's a map of an intersection near to where I live that we like to call "Queen Anne's Corner". For a sense of background, this intersection is its very own circle of hell. By my reckoning, it's the eleventh, coming after Dante's traditional nine plus Smerenetyevo airport in Moscow. No matter how you count it, though, this intersection is a DISASTER. It connects, in essence, four distinct roads that are almost certainly operating at around twice their intended capacity. At peak hours, it is not uncommon to spend over half an hour sitting at a dead stop within sight of this intersection, and yet going nowhere. It is also capable of backing traffic up into a solid mass for almost a mile in every direction, which is interesting because it can actually trap people in the parking lots of the nearby shopping centers for extended periods of time. It is also home to one of those traffic lights that has a camera attached to it, so no matter how frustrated you get, making a dash for that "qeustionable" yellow light is never a good idea.
But I digress.
The other day Dan and I set out to go hang out at Dan's father's house. Which is to say, we set out from my house. I won't say exactly where that is, but I will say that it's on Main St. in Hingham, which is just north of Queen Anne's. Dan's father lives in Hanson, which is pretty much directly South of QA's on the other side of Rockland.
For those of you playing along at home, zoom that map out to around level five and this will be immediately obvious.
With me so far? Good.
Now, when we left it was mid-afternoon, bordering on rush hour. Going through QA's at this point would have been roughly equivalent to going to the DMV (or RMV, if you're from Boston) just to make conversation with the clerks. So, instead of this we decided to look for a "shortcut" of some kind.
Anyone who is even passingly familiar with my navigational skills will understand why this was a Bad Idea.
Have another look at that map. Now, our little shortcut took us north, yes north, into the center of Hingham, then into Weymouth, then to Quincy, then to Braintree, at which point it finally dawned on us that a slight tactical error had been made. We then circled back around into Weymouth, and finally turned onto the appropriate road ONE BLOCK from Queen Anne's, which took us through Rockland and finally into Hanson. This little maneuver took around an hour.
Had we gone south instead, we could have made one right turn and accomplished exactly the same thing.
Thank you for playing. Fun wasn't it? Well, it certainly was for me and Dan...
Carter [1:45 AM]
[ Monday, August 05, 2002 ]
So how's this for irony?
New movie, "FearDotCom". About people who are killed by the internet, if the previews are anything to judge by. And not in some slow, starving yourself because you're playing Everquest 75 hours a week kind of way. More the quick and dirty, slashed apart in a hideously gruesome fashion by some unseen eldritch horror summoned from the Jungian collective unconscious of people who don't really know what the internet is or does kind of way. It also seems to have Stephen Dorff in it. And while it seems that it fully intends to suck, I plan to see it anyway. I do that.
Now the amusing part is this: the movie itself is called "FearDotCom" right? And no, I'm not being lazy, the official title contains no spaces. So what is the official web site for this film? www.fear.com? No, that's the communal fear project in which people can submit things that scare them and other people can vote on whether or not it also frightens them.
And yes, George W. Bush outranks death. Not in agreement, just in popularity.
How about www.feardot.com? Nope. There's nothing there right now, but it does seem to be owned by a man in Korea.
No, the movie resides at www.feardotcom.com.
It's stupid, but this will amuse me for some time.
Carter [7:15 PM]
For lack of anything better, I present:
Tales From Cairo #1
Let me begin by talking about the trip TO Cairo. This really was my first mistake. Pretty much anything that went wrong afterwards can be traced back to this decision.
Now, since I was travelling on something of a budget, in order to get the cheapest possible flight I was forced to take a...slightly indirect route. It took between 23 and 24 hours altogether, here to there. It was somewhat longer on the way back. From Boston, I went to New York, in New York I had a ridiculously short stop in which to get to my next flight, which took me to Moscow. After an absurdly LONG stop in Moscow (8 hours) I had one last hop on to Cairo. I got to Logan about two hours before my flight left, which was almost an hour and a half more than I needed. Although it did give me time to wander around the airport and buy some more books. I brought a lot of books with me, as I had been to Egypt before and had already seen way more touristy stuff than I ever wanted to. This time I just brought every book that I had lying around under the pretense that I would read it if I were ever locked in a small room with nothing else to do, since that was basically what I had planned for this trip. Of course, before I could get any more books I had to check in at the big hall o' American Airlines. Since my father had to go park after dropping me, I was left to fend for myself with the three very large, very awkward bags I was carrying. I made a beeline for the big sign that said "AA Check-in" as that seemed like the obvious choice. Once I got into range, I saw the HUGE line spiraling away from the counters. Slightly depressed, I groaned heavily and set my bags down as best I could. A moment later a small european man started wandering parralel to the line, in my direction. As he got close, I could hear him asking where people were headed. "Where you going?" "Houston." "You?" "Seattle" and so on. He finally got to me and I casually told him I was bound for New York at the moment. His face lit up like a christmas tree and he told me that I was at the wrong check-in center. I wanted American Eagle, which was down the corridor and on the left. "Oh." I said, then resumed my wrestling match with my luggage and ambled down the hall. I got to the proper counter, only to find that this counter had NO line. You can't imagine what a relief this was. I literally walked directly up to the counter and checked in immediately. I think that this may be when some of the trouble started. I handed my ticket and passport to a woman who was making it quite clear that she had not yet had enough coffee today and she obviously had much better things to do than her job. I'm sure that she was, in fact, a fully qualified brain surgeon or something and that she only did this as a hobby. Hence she could afford to be rude to people and do things kind of half-assed. I made the mistake of having a somewhat complex itinerary, and when I handed her the rest of my tickets and asked her if there was any chance she could have my bags forwarded on to Cairo so I wouldn't have to, you know, sprint through JFK with them, or lug them around with me in Russia. She sighed, long and hard, fixed with a brief but effective glare, and proceeded to type some sort of five page essay into the airline database. She then informed me they would be forwarded to my final destination and handed me my baggage claim slips. Still, I was a little nervous about the whole thing.
On my way to the airport bookstore I happened to walk past a stray buddhist monk, who was looking a little out of place. I lost sight of him after I rounded the perpetual motion machine (ok, so it's not really a perpetual motion machine, but that's what it's called, in reality it's really just this big cool thing made of golf balls and xylophones) and I was a little concerned about him. One Mercedes Lackey novel later I wandered out towards a more food-oriented wing of the airport and I got to watch the monk wander by a moment later, still looking lost. Quick sandwich and I was off towards the terminal and there's that monk again, only this time he seemed to have met up with his herd. Feeling better, I hopped into the line and prepared to display my passport for anyone who cared to see it.
Evidently I was vibrating "terrorist" that day, becuase I got pulled aside twice for random security checks. The first guy ran a handheld metal detector over me, which seemed a touch redundant as I had just walked through a full-scale metal detector without so much as a beep. He also made me empty out my pockets and take off my shoes. I'm not sure what kind of weapon I could have been concealing in my birkenstoks, but since ours was the airport that wound up dealing with the man who tried to detonate his shoes on a major airliner I can understand how they might get a little paranoid. Then there was a woman who ran some bizarre kind of analyzer over the handles and straps on my bag. I can only assume she was testing for explosive-related residues of some kind.
The disturbing part about all this was that I couldn't help thinking about how it wasn't good enough. See, since I was carrying an absurd amount of american currency with me on behalf of my mother I went out and got one of those pouch things that you wear around your neck. I kept most the money in that, just in case. Now, when I was getting scanned by the security guy, he made empty out my pockets but he totally missed the pouch. I thought it made a rather obvious bump under my shirt, but I guess he just thought I was a lumpy person. Admittedly if I tried to carry a knife or a gun in that thing it would have set the metal detector off, no problem. But it's not like I couldn't make an extremely lethal weapon out of glass. In fact, when you sharpen it properly, glass can actually be sharper than metal. And glass won't set the detectors off.
Creepy, ne?
Now, while it is a dangerous thing, a shard of glass is not exactly a weapon of mass destruction. This is the kind of thing that inspires airlines to equip their pilots with stunguns and the like. Plus in some airports there are these really nift scanning gizmos that CAN see things like big hunks of glass concealed on one's person.
But really the idea I'm trying to get across here is that the concept of anything being completely secure is inherently absurd. People need to understand that. I'm all in favor of paranoia, but I wish that people would realize that the odds of them getting blown up in their day to day lives really are minimal and just fucking calm down.
Anywho, after the security stuffs I wandered into the lounge and sat down to eat a few dried apricots. I was desperately trying to keep my blood sugar adequately high over the course of this trip, as I tend to feel quite badly when I don't. Dried apricots were essentially my last line of defense.
An hour or so later, I managed to breeze through the last security check and hop onto the little shuttle plane they had lined up for us. Small plane, short trip. Rather uneventful, too.
At least this part was simple. I'll talk about the rest later.
Carter [6:16 PM]
Stupid domain name, huh?
Thanks, I thought so too. ^_^
As is said, I be Carter, the short and androgynous. I feel I need space, so I have built this place for me to talk to myself. Endlessly.
So enjoy. And pull up a chair, cause you're in my world now.
Carter [2:20 AM]
