kampers.net

I took this picture last night around 4am. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to take a walk around campus with my camera. When I passed the church with its solitary lit window, I imagined a lonely priest inside, hunched over his carrel, trying to rub god’s meaning for his life into the sermon he would read in just a few hours.

That’s how I feel right now. Alone, trying to find grand meaning in a string of bouts with love. #

Speaking of which… #

I’ve listened to the new Radiohead album at least 10 times by now, and I like it a lot. It’s different from OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac in that the songs are more discrete, but it’s still good. Clapping in We Suck Young Blood is creepy and cool. Lyrics are pretty good across the board… mostly Orwell stuff.

Getting into more electronica-tinged rock lately, like The Postal Service. Max predicted this months ago, and I told him he was stupid. Haha.

I just had this great idea for KSCR. We should run stats at the end of every week on the listener logs, and give recognition to the best-rated show. Put a sign up, give ‘em a CD, whatever. I think a lot of people run cool shows, but they don’t do anything to promote them (or the station for that matter). This would help encourage that, and in turn increase listenership.

Also, by running stats, we could easily find out the lowest-rated shows, and try to see what’s wrong with them. #

I spent three hours in Leavey today doing research and writing a presentation, and then I went to Doheny and spent a few more hours trying to find old journals in the underground bookstacks. They have books from the mid-1800s in there, it’s pretty crazy. It only took me so long because the records in Homer are, in some cases, completely inaccurate. Why does Homer suck so much?

Well, I guess if I had a million books, my catalogue would be wrong here and there too. But that doesn’t forgive Homer sucking. It’s probably a flat-file database written in C or some crap.

Anyway. I hate stupid school work. I can’t wait for it to end so I can have a life again. #

All live, never on a floppy disk. Well, I had my show tonight, and it was pretty meh I guess. No one was listening, but I recorded it for mom and pop. I’m listening to it now. Realtime CD burner needs more low end on the inputs.

I think the first hour of the show was OK, but then I got kinda bored and tired. I also made a slight miscalculation regarding the length of my playlist, so I was about 10 minutes short. That’s OK, because it gave me an excuse to play the last three songs from Rage’s S/T.

I’m really good at live-editing profanity now. I played the last three Rage songs without even looking up the lyrics, and it was no problem. My hand just hovers over the off/on buttons, I don’t even think about it. I’ll be cueing up songs or logging at the same time, no hassles. It’s funny, because when I’m listening to music elsewhere I’ll find myself muting any profanity with imaginary buttons on my desk or something.

It would be nice to have sweepers. Someone stole the CD.

Who steals a sweepers CD? What, you gonna roll down Sunset in your Navigator with the KSCR drops pumpin’ at full volume? Gimme a break.

Anyway, we have the master of course, so I mixed two of ‘em together before the show. No effects though, just voice… Good for playing over a song, but kinda uninspired as a bumper. Hmm, effects. Effects would be nice.

Weird listening to myself talk… I have a deep voice. The last two minutes of Township Rebellion into the beginning of Freedom is some of the best music recorded in the last 15 years, I think. #

OK, I just reverted the site to one of the default moveable type templates. It will do for now. #

Watchblog: a cool site where the three political poles in America get to say their piece in an organized fashion.

Some goals:

• Get a 4.0 this summer.
• Finish my current tasklist for WiFiLand.
• Finish the Music Database system and, accordingly, fix corruption in music department.
• Win the 2004 Webby award in the radio division for the new KSCR site. Not kidding.
• Redo this site, with a quickness. #

So my room is pretty much together. Very busy… class sucks, but it’s more than half done and I haven’t missed a single lecture yet! WiFiLand is turning rapidly into a full-time job. Sat down tonight and fixed a metric ton of bugs in our internal trouble ticket tool… Cooked myself dinner tonight, awesome thick garlic white sauce yummy pasta.

We got a cool OmniLock thingy at KSCR for studio A. You use a Pocket PC with special software to program it, over infrared. Basically it takes a mag swipe card of any variety, or you can do numeric codes, and you can do a key-bypass. It’s pretty smart — it can assign random codes based on a preset generating function that’s also coded on the server side, so I can produce a report of what somebody’s random PIN will be next week, &c.

Really busy, time to go to bed. Orthodontist appt. tomorrow! #

I am surrounded in dark blue, and I am at peace. Allow me to explain.

Saturday I woke up with an extreme earlyness (on second thought, better make that XTRĒM) to move out of my apartment and into my new closer-to-campus-cheaper-own-room-foosball-tinged paradise. It took me all day to move, and by all day I mean the entire time that the sun was above the horizon and then a few hours after it had plunked into the Pacific.

But, no use complaining, because now all my stuff was here, and it was time to paint. I proceeded to move half my stuff to the hall closet, the rest into the center of the room, and then I started hitting the trim hard with the masking tape. Oh, that was after I took all the hardware off the walls. Regardless. That was Sunday. I also slept a lot, because of said physical hardships on Saturday.

Then Courtney came over, and we turned my room into smurf land. We did a good job. So it’s dark blue (the swatch from home depot says sapphire glow) with white trim. Lovely. Then I had a good vegetarian burrito in Cat Heaven, and life is happy.

I don’t have a bed yet, so I’m sleeping on the couch. I also don’t have a dresser, or shelves, so there’s a suitcase over yonder. Getting a bed is a huge hassle, especially when your car’s trunk is just inches too small to hold former item. I found a lot of ads on craigslist, so maybe I’ll just somehow tie it to the top of the roof and cruise down the 101 in style. I really need to get a bed tomorrow morning before class, but somehow I doubt that’s going to happen.

Anyway, now my computer and stuff is all setup, so I can resume indentured servitude to any number of causes, in order:

• WiFiLand
• KSCR phoenix project

and, making a new appearance

• not-yet-codenamed KSCR music database project

Oh and there’s also school, or something. But my classes are easy. So. Is this what it’s like to be a liberal arts major? Now wonder they have those fraternaties and stuff. Have to keep themselves occupied.

I kid you not. I had my first psychology midterm today, which was after about 15 minutes of studying and a large drip coffee at commons. I didn’t even read the book, just kind of stared at the pictures and such, and then Wopek was there so I talked to her for a minute. I went to take the test, and the professor told us to manage our time well during the exam. I laughed at his pointy irony hat because he was late to class. Anyway, I managed myself into finishing first, in half the alloted time. I know, I know, it’s not a race, but there was happy California sunshine waiting for me outside while I waited for everyone else. I will allow USC’s installation of Blackboard to speak for itself re: my performance.

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