textures | tones

Boy I’m tired. This whole being on a normal schedule thing’s kind of a pain in the ass. I get up real early (around 5AM or so…whenever the sun’s up) and an appropriate amount of time later (16 to 18 hours) I get exhausted and kinda just have to fall asleep. Yesterday, I tried to stay up a bit later, waiting for my Maria to come online but she was busy and out, and just nodded off every few minutes, etc. The point though is that I’m just…tired heh!

Today’s song is “With a Little Help From My Friends” by the Beatles again. I’m kinda just randomly flipping through Beatles songs online finding ones that I like and can play. I’m finding lots that I’d forgotten about, especially the song coming tomorrow. Though I’m not sure this is a Beatles song…hmmm…it’s on the Sgt. Pepper’s Longly Heart’s Club Band album but is sang but some other random guy whose name I forget with the Beatles singing backup. Either way. Um…tired…already blogged and updated…going to sleep now :)

I haven’t done proper non-project specific updates in a while, so I thought I’d go into it a bit.

1) I repaired my bike today. I hadn’t ridden it for close to a month, and it’s been raining, then hot, then humid, so it was in very, very poor condition. I had to get one of the tires replaced, the inner-tube-y thingie replaced, and the chain replaced. This ran another 80RMB. So far, on top of all the other repairs done to the bike, I’m at 320RMB so far invested in this bike. You know what’s interesting though, it’s really much easier to ride now that I’ve had it fixed up a bit! I had noticed the last couple of times I’d ridden in it a month or so ago that it was exceedingly difficult to ride, get up to speed, or keep speed up. It’ll just grind. It’s so easy now though!

2) Once repaired, I rode it around, quite exhilarating actually because the weather’s gotten a little better. I overheard some people talking who said it felt like Fall all of a sudden, and I’d have to agree. It’s still hot out, but far less humid, to the point where it’s actually reasonable to be out despite the heat! I guess it really is because of humidity that it’s so miserable in this country. I knew it had something to do with it because I’d never minded the weather in the States when it would get just as if not hotter in LA, but it was always a dry heat, a good kind of bearable heat, not like this crappy humid heat where you work up a sweat just walking down the block. Bah!

3) Ah I also biked by BICD where Connections is to pick up some mail. There weren’t any, my father had picked it up apparently. The point though…the restaurant’s open again!? I spent a long time thinking to myself as I stood in line buying a chicken roll “I don’t know how I feel about it.” But then I realized, I feel bad about it, angry, betrayed. I can’t believe they opened the restaurant again!? These people are insane, and I think I really don’t like them. They cheated us, out of money, out of time, out of effort. They shouldn’t have re-opened the restaurant without telling us, and if they were going to, I’d like to think we’d have some say in them. They owe us money! Hmmmmmm…

4) That’s all that’s really going on now, though I bought upgrades for my laptop HD and RAM, and Starcraft II should be coming soon! :) I also had a REALLY good talk with Maria and that made me REALLY happy!

There’s something surprisingly difficult about trying to play a song originally meant for the piano on the guitar. It’s just easier to have grace and hanging notes on the piano and those, when translated to the guitar, only come through in a sort of mush. Of course, no expert guitar player I. But this isn’t the only meant for piano song that I’d like to record for Maria on the guitar. I used to, when I had access to a piano that is, record the piano songs on the piano. Now that’s not an option anymore, and besides, a different instrument would sort of break up the theme of the overall project I think. Either way, today’s song is “Let It Be” by the Beatles. And, as Maria pointed out to me, the Verve song is called “The Freshmen” with an “E” not an “A” and a “the.” Whatever. Band names and songs that begin with “the” are weird. I mean…am I supposed to call them “the” Beatles when I’m talking about the “the” Beatles song? [shrugs]

I also spent a good bit of time today working on Maria’s surprise, as well as looking at apartments. Since she’s not here and I can’t just talk her through everything that I saw as I go through the photos of all the apartments one by one, I decided the best and most comprehensible way of presenting all the information was through a website. So I made a quick little one for this particular apartment search effort. And being the total dork that I am, it’s all decked out in PHP and everything though I could have just as easily done it in straight HTML…Apartment Search – August 5th, 2010. This process will also continue, so expect more random one off websites to spring up in the future :)

I bought my first DVD in China! Not much of a milestone since I’ve done it before. I remember one time when I was in China with Kelly’s boyfriend buying an entire suitcase worth of DVDs and CDs. But it’s a first for this trip, and since we’ve been here for close to a YEAR now (yikes…) and this is only the first DVD I’ve bought, I’d say it’s at least a minor milestone. It was Repo Men, which was well, half funny in that dark humor kind of way, half kinda morbid, and half really sad in the end…I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I was hoping for a better selection but this was just the little lady on the side of the street selling them out of a basket. What got me thinking of movies was that I even went to the movie theater intending to watch something, anything in English, but they didn’t have any! Right now, in Beijing, there are no US movies. The closest you’re gonna get is some weird Russian flick dubbed in Chinese of all things…

I also had an interview with Crystal Asia today, and as it’s still in progress, I won’t say much about it except that it’s for a PHP Programmer position, that the company does Western style web design in China (and well no less), and I think the interview went alright but I think all interviews go alright and they said they’ll get back to me.

I also did a little shopping at the Silk Market (秀水街, XiuShuiJie), bought a little surprise for my Maria :) Incidentally…I’ve no idea how that translated into “Silk Market…” I don’t know what the first character means but the last 2 are “water” and “street…”…The first one according to Google mean “show” and together supposedly it means silk but I remain doubtful.

Today’s song is “The Freshmen” by The Verve. I never understood why they were “The” Verve, I’m not even sure what “Verve” means, and they were popular around the same time as “Verve Pipe” which just made things even more confusing…But this is yet another song that I learned to play very early on in my guitar playing days. I think it may have been the first song that I was able to play that involved picking the strings.

I also haven’t yet found a good solution to backing up my WordPress every day. I’ve decided that just the database is good enough as the contents of this WordPress install are large and varied since there’s lots of media and the size of a full site backup would be prohibitive. Plus, I realized when I re-created some of the lost posts that I’d have to re-upload all media anyways and then the reference would change so just the core data in the DB is good enough. I’m going to manually do it for now…

Well…

So says my hosting provider:

“I’m so sorry but file system of the server crashed and we had only one way to solve this situation by restoring all accounts to a different server from the backups.”

That means…I lost the last 5 days worth of posts. SIGH. I dug through all my cache files on my PC, iPad, and Mac and managed to recreate 2 and a half posts…which I’ll re-post soon. And easy way of keeping track is through my Music Project posts. They restored back to Day 31, I should have up to Day 37. I managed to re-create Day 36, 35, and part of 34. Yesterday’s post was short anyways, and it wasn’t that long ago. As far as Day 33 and 32, well, they’re just lost well aren’t they?

I thought my hosting provider had daily backups! WTF man? I guess I’m going to have to start backing up using WordPress everyday now because part of what they also lost was the upgrade to 3.0.1 which means I can’t just backup my DB (which would be easier but need to backup all relevant files as well) because it might be out of sync then with the restored install version. Again…SIGH.

[INCOMPLETE, NO IDEA WHAT THE ORIGINAL POST WAS]

Today’s song is “Girl” by The Beatles.

[COMPLETE, RECREATED FROM BROWSER CACHE]

Today’s song is Michelle, by The Beatles, and today’s position is at the very top. I also just found out two of my friends from high school are heading to medical school, together, starting this year, in Ann Arbor. What school might that be? And a fiasco with trying to get Maria her health certificate for her Chinese student visa application may soon be resolved. I’d decided to use DHL because they guarantee that within a week they’d be able to get my package delivered for me. They’d come and picked it up from my apartment in Beijing even, very good service. They had an envelope, an address label, and I filled everything out and paid and it was sort of out of sight, out of mind at that point. Quite expensive actually, by Chinese standards: 250 RMB or so to mail 3 sheets of paper. But definitely fast, according to the tracking lot it only took 2 days to get there, by way of Hong Kong and Cincinnati. But then the fiasco. Tracking says they tried to deliver it 3 times, they say they left that little delivery attempt slip thingie 3 times, and they said they tried to call Maria when they couldn’t deliver it. None of these things actually happened though as far as we can tell. There were no elivery slips left, there shouldn’t have even been a need for delivery slps since someone was home at the times they said they tried to deliver, and no one had called Maria, no missed calls or anything. so began the long slog to try to figure out what happened. I called them multiple times to confirm that all their information was correct, the address and contact number. I accidentally let slip that I was in China once (big mistake) and the guy patently refused to say anything more to me except to give me the China customer service number, something I really didn’t want because it felt like trying to play telephone with these people, I tell the Chinese something I want to do, they tell the Americans who then try to do it and who knows if they’ll get it right in passing my message because I can’t even tell if they got it right receiving my message their English being so bad. Persistence paid off, I kept calling, clamped up about being in China, and managed to get her package redirected to her work address, a much simpler process when pretending to be calling from the States. Had I used the Chinese approach, I would have had to fax a filled out form and my passport to the Chinese DHL people (who knows if they can read the fax with the new address…), then they’d pass that information to the States who’d then execute the redirect. “IN” the States though it was as simple as just emailing some guy saying I want it redirected, and I got confirmation this New York morning that it’s happening, and the package is out for delivery again so hopefully, everything will be resolved. One long process and hassle and paragraph later eh? :)

[COMPLETE, RECREATED FROM BROWSER CACHE]

Today’s song is “Yesterday” by The Beatles. Whenever I heard this song I mostly think of this musical a friend of mine helped put on in New York. It had been a summer a long time ago, and she was working for this all Asian American troupe and theyw ere doing an all musical, all karaoke version of some Shakespearian comedy involving mistaken identities and twins, I forget the name of the play, but this song was featured in it, as was Mustang Sally, Kung Fu Fighting, With or Without You, Total Eclipse of the Heart, those are all the songs I remember from it. It was great. I wish I could remember what the title of the play was but you know Shakespeare, there must be half a dozen comedy plays involving mistaken identities and twins…

I’m really tird right now, and am only awake by virtue of an alarm I had set. I was planning firstly and obviously to make sure I wrote this post and sent off Maria’s email, but I also wanted to give myself the chance to tell myself that I’m hungry, since I’ve not really eaten in a while, but no, not hungry, just tired, so I’m going to nod on back off to sleep pretty soon I expect, as soon as the email and this post are finished.

I’m moving back and forth between the couch in the living room and the bedroom now, very bachelor living I should say. I’ve set it up so that I’d have access to my desktop computer as well in the living room on the coffee table, so right now I have three bright LCD screens in my face in a pitch black room; my desktop, my laptop, and the iPad. I figured I might try and buy Starcraft II in China, I do love Starcraft, and I’ve really been waiting for the sequel to come out, and it has been close to 10 years for me personally since I’ve been waiting. I did some initial research and it looks like I should be able to buy the Southeast Asian edition, which Blizzard says will give me access to the Southeast Asian AND North American Battle.net servers, though access to the latter will take 60 days from launch of the game. The idea is to be able to play Miguel but it looks like that’ll have to wait another 2 months. Ah well.

Here’s the song, again, “Yesterday” by the Beatles. I’ve been sort of playing around with where to place the actual MP3 player as it doesn’t matter all too much to me. There’s some weird spacing involved due to the Javascript embed so it may actually be most appropriate to put it at the very beginning of a post. I’m gonna see what it looks like at the end (today’s post), beginning, and middle and decide after doing all 3. Granted I’ve probably already done all 3 at some point just randomly, but this control will be a much better experiment of overall post aesthetics.

[INCOMPLETE, RECREATED FROM BROWSER CACHE]

So tired…going back to sleep. I was mostly overtaken by an overwhelming need to go to the bathroom that I woke up at all in the first place, and I figured I’d send today’s song to Maria and post it online. Not much happened today at all, surprisingly. I get very little correspondence on the weekends. The only thing to look forward to at the moment would be the cleaning lady coming tomorrow. I hope everything works out well!

But July’s over! That means there’s only August in the way of my seeing my Maria again :)

Today’s song is “When September Ends,” or rather “Wake Me Up, When September Ends” I think (who comes up with song titles that long?) by Greenday. My pain in the ass bandwidth is really slow right now, because Cina mostly uses DSL, not sure why, and since I live near Gulou and in the old alleyways, the lines are old so they can’t have that much bandwitdh in the first place on top of all the usage from other people it just means it crawls!

[INCOMPLETE, NO IDEA WHAT THE ORIGINAL POST WAS]

Today’s song is “Bottle Up and Explode” by Elliott Smith.