Blog of Billy

The Yellowcard/Mae show was kind of disappointing. Between the substandard acoustics of the McCasland Field House and the banshee-like shrieks of the wild pack of sorostitutes next to me, there wasn't too much a chance to enjoy myself. Mae sounds better in the studio anyway. Thank goodness I found something to do to get me through the boring parts.

The world as we know it is spinning into oblivion. Chris Brodt is now 21 years young and making cute, albeit crazy friends.

And if Sam Jackson thinks he's doing a movie called SNAKES ON A PLANE...you're doing a movie called SNAKES ON A PLANE.

I've decided that meatlessness is not going to be a long term thing. My normal diet apparently doesn't include enough leafy green iron, and I'm tired of being tired all the time. Post Lent (and the obligatory Good Friday fast), this business is out.

Snakes on a plane!

At 4:30am, there are but few things that can actually pull a tear from my stoic eyes. The West Wing is still one of them. This week's episode actually got me excited about a pretend election where I had known the outcome since September. This is what several years of falling in love with characters, then watching them grow and live and be and die will do to a person. Yeah, and Donna is somehow even hotter than she ever has been before.

OMG!!! Josh + Donna = 4ever!!! Ponies!!!

It's a beautiful day.

Procrastination is a word that has more meaning the farther into the school year I get. The difference between this one and a poorly remembered spring of yesteryear is that I'm actually attending class post-Spring Break. Ideally this will offset my lack of turning things in on time. The other (so far less effective but far more enjoyable) strategy involves the gentle nagging of certain red-haired femmes fatale to actually get my work done.

Is Heather learning taste in automobiles? I can only hope it's gray and has a hard time finding traction in icy Denny's parking lots.

Oh, I'm going to the special hell.

I need to quit being so very sexy all the time. It's starting to get me in trouble.

I realized that for the last however-many time changes that I can remember, I've been at Denny's. I find this fact to be inordinately soothing.

Fedora Core 5 is out, and I'm running it. The process of updating my system was made all the more exciting by a hard drive failure about halfway through the "yum upgrade" process that left a couple hundred duplicate packages just kind of sitting there. The good news is that I was able to whip up a little perl script to find them all and destroy their elder forms. All told, without the cleanup from the hardware failure, the process took two commands, a number of which the developers can be pretty proud. FC5 is pretty nice thus far. It's made KMail a bit more stable on startup and the new libnotify version makes desktop file creation actually work like I want it to. The only downside is that for some reason amaroK's analyzer isn't wanting to take data from gStreamer. It'll work fine with the Helix engine, but Helix annoys me in other ways.

I'm not too terribly concerned. It'll be made to wear its little hat and dance its little jig, just as all things in Linux can be convinced to do.

So I told you that I was happy for you
and given the chance I'd lie again.

I'm a browncoat now.

Yes, while the fleet is in-between seasons, I've let Joss Whedon's little foray into sci-fi catch my attention. In the last week I've watched all 14 episodes and the Serenity movie, all of which make me of the opinion that Fox hates good television. I really got the feeling that the characters were developing nicely, and I started to get pretty attached to them. Further, I ended up learning something about myself.

For background, I have four basic criteria for finding girls attractive.

1. Not grotesque to behold
   (I'm trying not to be shallow, but I need to draw the line somewhere.)
2. Shoulder-length straight brown hair
   (The darker the better, though even light brown will do)
3. Liberal values
   (Anti-capitalist, feminist, whatever. Basically don't hate poor people or homosexuals.)
4. Exceptional grammar
   (It hurts my ears to hear poor sentence structure. An expansive vocabulary is helpful too.)

Note that these alone are only sufficient for attraction, not to actually make me want to date her. There are several other rules, both unspoken and as-yet-unknown, that have to be met before my skittish nature is overcome. Things like "can't be crazy" and "can't be an ex of Mike Stroud" are big ones. What Kaylee (and, as it turns out, Cally) have let me know is that there is a whole 'nother category of "innocent, borderline obsessive, and smart" that circumvents all of my carefully described laws, and goes directly for the heartstrings. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that they still meet all the shallow requirements.

I finally understand why Amy named her cat as such.

Last note: if anyone else has a PVC^H^H^Hthousand-year-old Irish flute, head on down to Mobile, Alabama. "To me, it looks like a leprechaun to me."

You have never been in love
until you've seen the stars
reflect in the reservoirs.