Midaregami

Things are going well.

To wit:

• A discussion with Jake about note-taking led me to set up a locally-hosted Wiki to organize and cross-reference notes. It was supposed to be hard, but setting up MySQL and MediaWiki was almost trivial. I’ve set up categories for class notes, authors, primary sources, secondary sources, themes, and faculty. Those are just guesses at how I might need to organize it, but I’m hoping that the ability to hyperlink everything together quickly and easily will make the knowledge more accessible and studying more efficient. Ultimately, it should be barely more effort than taking notes in a text file.

• I got a box to ship my bike in, and a great honking case to pack my keyboard in. It’s huge.

• Accelerando is everything I hoped it would be. Oh, didn’t I mention Accelerando? I’m sorry, I was busy daydreaming about hyperintelligent lobsters. The daydream also included interstellar ships the size of a deck of cards crewed by the uploaded intelligences of posthuman revolutionaries. You can download the whole novel from Amazon for free. For free.

• The fourth volume of Samurai Champloo is excellent.

But nevertheless, this is the coolest keyboard ever.

Yes, I got it from Slashdot. I know, lame.

Appropriate to nothing outside of a romance whose failure will end in firearm-related felony convictions, here’s a Cocco song. Cocco’s one of a very few Japanese women who are as weird as Shena Ringo—you know, I think Cocco might actually be weirder.

• Cocco, “Countdown”

I don’t know why, precisely, I feel the need to explain myself, but I do. It’s not as though I’ve been hassled by my friends or harassed by my family regarding my choice to marry. Nay, I’ve had nearly universal encouragement over the course of this four-year exercise in separation, sacrifice, and angst. Without that encouragement, the largely happy events of the past couple of weeks would not have happened.

Nonetheless, I’ve caught a vague vibe that places reactions to my recent marriage somewhere between head-shaking resignation and straight-up alarm.

Which is weird.

Yesterday I installed the Crank Brothers “Eggbeater” pedals, retrued the rear wheel, and completed the bike project. I put in a few miles on it today, and my lordy it is sweet—not sweet like ninjas, but sweet like homemade chocolate, delicious sweet.

Of course, I was nearly killed by a clueless left-turner while appreciating the sweetness, thus driving home the point that I am even less visible on a bicycle than on a motorcycle. My traffic instincts will require further honing.

Also, my legs are pretty tired. Lance Armstrong, I ain’t.

From one of the all-time great navel-gazing bands, here’s one of the all-time great navel-gazing songs.

• Too Much Joy, Pirate

Looks like an old friend has been busy.

What I want to know is who wrote the blurb.

It is finished—as smoothly as a major life event can be, I imagine. Given the fact that it was, at its core, a traditional wedding, we kept things very simple—and reminders of this fact were abundant, especially when I dared to show signs of stress or aggravation. “You’re really getting off easy, you know,” they’d say. I’d smile and say, “Yeah, I know.”