Monthly Archive for February, 2006

Pony!

Published on February 24, 2006 in PostsWithPictures and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments



NPony83

Originally uploaded by un_cola.

Ah. Memories.

I scanned a few photos of me, Kristen, and John as kids a few years ago, posted them to the web, blogged about it and then promptly forgot about them. Until today when I saw this flickr feed called Vintage Kids as Cowpokes.

I guess there’s a whole industry of dude walking around with ponies taking kids pictures? Who knew!

I, of course, had to add this photo of myself in 1983 to the pool.

There are a couple of photos on there that are strangely similar to mine, including one from around the same time period and with the kid in the same pose. I didn’t realize the fist under chin thing was the thing to do in the 80s….

I can’t spell in English, so why do I think I have a chance in French?

Published on February 24, 2006 in DailyGrind, Paris and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

Bah.

We were given a dictation test on Wednesday. The quiz was worth 20 points. Each and every mistake counted as a point off. So forgetting the “e” at the end of a word and completely mishearing a word are both counted against you with exactly the same weight.

I got 3 points out of 20.

What have I learned from this? Well, vowels are hard.

I mix up vowel pairs a lot.

I can’t hear the difference between “blanc” and “blond” because the “d” in blond and the “c” in blanc? Not pronounced.

I’m feeling a bit hopeless at the moment. I have a stack of flash cards from the last 2 weeks that is over 200 cards deep and a lot of the words I missed aren’t in there because they weren’t on my worksheets or used as examples in my notes. They were just…in our book somewhere.

Bah.

web/geek/photo help needed

Published on February 23, 2006 in Photo and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

I’ve got a geeky problem and I’m wondering if any of y’all might have some suggestions. I’ve been looking into different ways to make web photo galleries and I’ve hit a wall.

The details:

I’m looking to create small photo sets that pull from the same directory of photos. Meaning that Gallery A’s photos are in the same directory as Gallery B’s photos. I want to do this so that I can reuse photos from Gallery A in Gallery B without having to have two copies of those photos. So, say, if I wanted to have a gallery of all my Spain photos *and* a gallery of photos from Madrid. I don’t want to have to have two copies of all my Madrid photos since they’re exactly the same photos.

I also want to have a lot of control over what the galleries themselves look like. I need to have control over the size and placement of photos on a page, where the comments are, the colors of the page, and how you can navigate within each gallery.

Oh, and I need to be able to add comments to each photo easily.

Right now I’m using iPhoto to organize and comment my photos. Most of my photo galleries have been created with it and frankly the export function is terrible. You have almost no control over what the galleries end up looking like and it creates a file structure that makes it impossible to reuse photos across galleries. I *had* been using a custom plugin for exporting but the latest round of OS updates seems to have broken it.

So! I’m hoping someone somewhere knows about a decent photo publishing tool. I’m perfectly happy to ditch iPhoto if need be.

I have a rough draft of the sort of gallery I’ve been wanting to create here. It’s not *exactly* what I want but I was fairly happy with it.

*huff*

Published on February 22, 2006 in 6th, DailyGrind, Paris and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

I’ve been trying to ride my bike to and from school a few times a week. It’s only been a week and a half and I’ve managed to do it four times already so I’m off to a good start.

I love biking in Paris. Unlike in the Bay Area where most people on bikes seem to be grudge-y-hip, on something less than 20 years old and with those weird curvy handle bars (whose name I cannot remember right now), the typical Paris bicyclist is fashionable in a would-be-considered-dressed-up-in-CA way and riding some kind of old rusty dutch style cruiser. I ride at about the same speed as most people in Paris, maybe a little faster.

And yet.

And yet I still end up having some middle aged dude breeze by me on a straight away. Who are these guys? I start feeling bad about how out of shape I am because dude 20 years my senior just blew by me like I was standing still. But then I take a look at his bike and realize that it probably weighs about as much and is about as old as my old powerbook form 1999 while I am sitting on top of a rusty old thing that’s probably around the age of your average high-school senior and weighs about as much as a good sized 5 year old. And then I feel slightly better.

But only slightly because I’m about to take the hill that leads to the Pantheon and my audible huffing is going to frighten the pedestrians on the sidewalk next to me and I’m seriously considering just getting off the bike and walking. Because yeah, hills are the reason I won’t bike in SF ever. I freakin’ hate hills.

I haven’t actually stopped the bike and walked it yet. For which I am proud of myself. My great hope is to stop considering it.

I am young and out of shape.

I need to get off the Glarkware mailing list

Published on February 21, 2006 in ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

Because seriously, look at this:

http://www.glarkware.com/securestore/c181844p16753485.2.html

Kill All Humans messenger bags?

There are no words.

And then there’s this:

http://www.glarkware.com/securestore/c181844p16753486.2.html

In Soviet Russia Bag Carries You.

I die.

resume writing

Published on February 20, 2006 in DailyGrind and ResidentHipster. 1 Comment

I’m in the middle of updating my resume, and I just realized that a good half of my work experience involves explaining technical issues/concepts to non-technical people.

Fun.

I hope I’m good at it.

That Old Guy

Published on February 18, 2006 in 11th, Paris and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

So last night I went to a ska show. A friend of a friend is in the band and the venue (called nouveau casino ) was walking distance from our place.

I don’t remember if ska shows are normally full of nothing but punk kids in the US, but that was the crowd at this show. High school aged punks. Ok. That’s cool.

There was were a lot of people out in front of the stage and people were climbing up on stage to dive off it. As one would expect in a room full of punks kids.

After a couple of songs I noticed many of the boys had begun striping down out of their shirts. It was hot. It’s to be expected.

Then. Then this kid climbs up on stage in nothing but his boxer shorts and his boots. And then the boxer shorts came off. Which….not surprising. I mean, that’s what happens when you get on stage in nothing but your undies.

The kid kept getting back on stage in his boxers, which would have been fine if it weren’t for the fact that this somehow managed to encourage That Old Guy.

You know The Old Guy, right? The one old dude who is at every show? And you don’t know why he’s at the same shows that the 15 year olds are that because you yourself feel weird being at those shows and you’re not yet old enough to be a 15 year old’s parent but this guy could easily be their granddad? That Old Guy. Right.

So I’d like to have a word with That Old Guy. I just want to say, look, I know your life hasn’t really progressed beyond being 18. And while that’s sorta sad for you, you need to stop going to these things. Or at least stop making a scene at these thing. Because it would be one thing if you were in a band that’s been around forever or owned the club to which you frequent or something else that makes it reasonable that you’re hanging around with 15 year olds. Like say, if you were actually someone’s old punk granddad and you took your grandkid to these shows and hung out by the bar drinking beers as would befit a man of your age, that would be cool. But you’re not. So, no, as good an idea you think it is to get up on stage and drop your pants like that kid, it is not in fact a good idea. And we’d all really, really feel a lot better about the world is you’d refrain from doing so.

Thank you and goodnight.

What’s going on.

Published on February 17, 2006 in DailyGrind, Paris and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

I need to update more often. Most of my posts lately have been a sort of review and it’s tiring.

So. This week.

I started the grammar potion of my French class on Monday. 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. We’ve been getting an average of about 15 new vocab words, one new verb (so far, just present tense), and one or two new grammar rules to practice. A day. Yikes. It’s totally kicking my ass. I’ve been rather exhausted from having to get up so early but I can’t manage to get to bed before around 11:30. Either I’m going to get used to it or I’m going to have to never go out ever. Let’s see which wins!

I also signed up for the phonetics section of the course. That section is every other week, for two hours every day of the week. The course is in a group. I don’t know if it’ll mostly be conversation with other people with horrible accents or what. Has anyone taken a phonetics course? What was it like?

The last portion of my class is the culture lectures, which I signed up for today. Those are twice a week for two hours a day. Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:30-4:30. I weep. I was hoping somehow that I could be done with school everyday by about one. I guess I’ll get to know some cafe around the Sorbonne really, really well?

What else. Oh, so I went to see my dentist again on Wednesday. The hospital that he works at has a lot of medical students, I think. I’m assuming this because except for my dentist every doctor I’ve seen has been really young. And I’ve seen a lot of doctors from my two visits there because there’s a gaggle of them following my dentist around everywhere he goes. I was just there to get my stitches out and I had seven people staring at my mouth. The results of the tests they were supposed to do on my cyst were not back yet so I have yet another appointment on the first of March to talk about the results.

I keep wanting to substitute the French words for the days of the week and the months while writing this post. I think that would just be annoying, however, so I will refrain. The days of the week and the months do not count in the average number of vocab words I’ve been given this week, by the way. They’re just a bonus.

The French for “a fork” is “une fourchette”.

I thought this posted earlier

Published on February 13, 2006 in DailyGrind and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

HAPPY
30th
BIRTHDAY,
‘LES!!!!!

1st Day of Class

Published on February 13, 2006 in DailyGrind, Paris and ResidentHipster. 0 Comments

Today I woke up at 6am so that I could go to my very first French class. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I decided that an 8am class would be ok.

I’ve recently begun to develop a theory about how much I like different cities based on the earliest time you can reliably get coffee and the latest time you can get dinner. I require the most flexible eating hours possible, apparently. In any case, apparently Paris just starts to get going around 8am. Most of the cafes I passed are only beginning to open around the time I leave for school. I kept peeking into places and it appears that while you can probably get a coffee, you’ll be drinking that coffee alone.

Even with the extreme earliness in waking required to get to class, I have to say that being up and done with class by 10 has some major advantages. For one thing, I can be done with all my errands by lunch time. Which means that if I’m really tired I could nap in the afternoon. Which is as god intended. I have trouble really relaxing if I have Stuff To Do, so having an afternoon class would probably stress me out a lot more than an early morning one.

Anyhow, about the class itself. The teacher seems very nice and pretty chill. A little too chill, actually. She didn’t hand out a syllabus so I don’t know what my grade will be based on or how much work she’ll be assigning. She dove right into teaching, though. A lot of people in the class seem to have a little more in the way of French skills than I do. People knew the alphabet, which I had completely forgotten. Hopefully some of my old French classes will come back to me as we hit things that I used to know.

The class is made up of students form all over the place. I only noticed one or two people who had English-as-a-native-language type accents. There are people from South Korea, Mexico, Venezuela, Sweden, Hungry, and Turkey. And those were just the people who were called on to give their nationality. I know this is dumb, but heavily accented French really trips me out. I hadn’t really thought much about the fact that everyone’s accent would be the same no matter what new language they were learning. A Spanish accent is going to be pretty much the same if you’re learning English or French, for instance. And my English accent is going to be the same if I’m learning French or Spanish. It’s pretty obvious and it’s silly to be so taken aback by it, but listening to accents I’m used to hearing in English being used in French is really weird. And funny. And sorta nice in a “hey, look, everyone’s got their own special pronunciation problems” way.

I picked up my text books, a notebook, and a pen today after class. I think I should maybe get some index cards and a big pile of scratch paper. One of my problems last time I took French was that I didn’t know how to study properly for the class. I think it’ll help if I do a lot of writing and re-writing of vocabulary works and whatnot. Hopefully.