Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in hédonisme libertaire's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, June 25th, 2009
11:42 pm	About that distance thing... So, I've been a "free subscriber" to compatiblepartners.net (i.e. the site that eHarmony was required to open as part of their discrimination-law settlement) for a couple of months now. And they did manage to connect me to a guy who's absolutely what I've been looking for, except for one thing: He's in Singapore. So, we've been talking on Skype for a month or so, but it's pretty clear that neither of us is likely to be moving closer than 10k miles in the foreseeable future; so we're still talking, but it's pretty clear that we're pretty much going to stay "just friends" at this point. What it amounts to is that I'm back on the market. And I'm in that "awkward phase" -- I'm 28, so I'm no longer desirable on the gay scene due to twinkiness (and have the love handles to prove my lack of eligibility), and I'm not yet eligible for daddiness due to broke-college-student-ism (and that won't change for another 6-7 years, and while at that point I'll be quite capable of playing the "I have money, therefore I'm dateable" card, I don't particularly want to wait that long (and wouldn't like the type of men that attracts anyway)). The net result? I'm officially reactivating the Knights of the Order of M. Y'all know who you are. For the non-members: probationary members have all been given the same quest: find M a boyfriend, preferably long-term. All knight-initiates have, up to this point, failed miserably. Anyone fulfilling the probationary quest will, of course, be accorded honors as first full Knight of the Order of M. Consider this an open application phase. Candidates may be located anywhere in the multiverse, but the proffered man-meat should be in California, no further north than the Bay Area. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
7:20 am	About those summer classes... The class that I needed this summer has been cancelled. In other words, the three remaing lower-division classes needed for my major will all have to be this fall -- and the prof who will be teaching multivariable calculus in the fall is the same aggressively homophobic (not to mention disinclined to do anything that might help out a student with attention-deficit issues) guy I thought I was done with after this semester. I do not want to have to stick around here for any longer than is absolutely necessary, so I'll be heading in to have some words with the math/science dean tomorrow. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
10:47 pm	I was wrong about the technology. The people I'm doing the sorta-pre-internship for don't use a robot to shoot particle beams at people. It's x-rays, not particle beams. Either way, it looks like I might be able to arrange an internship for next summer -- and it looks like a particularly interesting branch of physics which has the advantage of being able to see the effects of one's work (in the form of, y'know, people living instead of dying, or at least major reductions in suffering) on a daily basis. (Most high-energy physics stuff, on the other hand, is pretty abstract in applications -- even fusion power, as unbelievably game-changing as it may be in terms of the potential benefits to humans and to the biosphere as a whole, has its applications at c. 100 years from not). Given how easily I tend to get stuck in the theoretical ether, something with real human consequences might help keep me more aware and more grounded. (Saw the radiosurgery equipment and the first half of a treatment yesterday. It's brilliant stuff, but I can already see directions where improvement can be made, and where research is already being done. It also doesn't hurt that, as the intersection between biophysics and high-energy physics, it's pretty intellectually intense stuff -- some of the math involved is officially left until grad-school for anyone but the hardcore math majors. I've started familiarizing myself with the basic principles already. This is also one of the more far-out applications of electrical engineering, even if the physics side may be more academically accessible to me than the engineering side.) In related news, I have a few new directions to take the sci-fi. (Oh, and btw -- for those who have read at least the beginning of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand -- radiosurgery, if approached with insufficient ethical grounding, has the potential to enable things like the RAT procedure. People with a background in ethics and philosophy will be badly needed in medical physics within the next couple of decades. People with a background in ethics, critical theory, and science fiction are probably some of the only people who can begin to imagine some of the potential applications and the ethical considerations thereof.) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
9:47 am	Finals week...ugh. So, I'm moving again. This time, though, I'm only moving about 30 yards; someone's interested in renting the 2-bedroom place where I'm staying now, so the landlord offered to just give me the one-bedroom apartment on the same lot for reduced rent. It won't be as nice as having this place to myself, but that was never going to last -- and a junior 1-bedroom means I won't have to share the kitchen or bathroom. There's also a good bit of built-in shelving for all my books. It would have been a bit easier, though, if I weren't trying to move all my stuff during finals week. So anyway, next week I have a walk-along/mini-pre-possible-internship with people who use robots with particle accelerators to shoot beams at people. Adding to the wondrous sci-fi geekery is that these are the "destroying your tumors" sort of particle beams rather than the "reduce people into piles of ash" sort of particle beams. Yeah, I could see medical physics being a quite acceptable way of making a living. (Dude! Robots...with particle accelerators on them.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
10:53 am	R.I.P. equal protection As of today, it's official -- "equal protection" under California law can be removed from any group, at any time, by a simple majority vote. I hope all those fuckers like it when it comes back to bite them. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
11:02 am	I was *supposed* to sleep in today... I was woken up this morning by a rather abrubt sound -- the house shook, as if something rather large had crashed into it, not unlike the times in the past when one of the test pilots out at the Air Force base couldn't resist the urge to push the "emergency extra-super-fast" button and would cause a sonic boom. I think it may have been related to the space shuttle landing...it was at just about the same time. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
12:46 pm	Day of Decision -- Tuesday, May 26 There will be either a celebration or a protest when the California Supreme Court issues their ruling on the "Proposition h8 vs. the Equal Protection Clause" case next Tuesday, May 26, at 10am. I have three classes with required attendance, so I won't be able to make it down to L.A. -- but given the signals sent by the SC during oral arguments, it looks like I'll be preparing a "R.I.P. Equal Protection Clause" memorial for somewhere on campus at AVC. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
9:40 pm	Space-opera rock-opera, part 1 So, the Brass Orchids may currently only consist of two people, but we're already working on two rock operas. One, The Tide Journals, is a bit more abstract (and is based on one of the novels I keep poking at), if also fairly comfortable in the "urban fantasy" category (complete with quasi-time-travel, alterations in the past, etc.). The second, though, is full-on, camp-happy, space-opera rock-opera with a plot which is looking like the unholy spawn of hard-boiled private-detective film noir and cyberpunk. Features include the fedora-and-trench-coat-wearing drag-king private detective (and her drag-queen femme fatale client), aliens with the voice of a saxophone run through a vocoder (who speak in jazz riffs), a malignant artificial intelligence created as a performance-art piece, narration by the guy whose death is being investigated, and a space-station police force consisting entirely of dominatrixes and leather daddies (their theme song? "Hot Space Station Justice".). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, May 4th, 2009
10:36 pm	Those crowded majors... I'm still keeping an eye on what I'll need for my transfer application this fall. A new bump in the road has shown up, but this bump has suggested another route. It seems that engineering (all varieties) falls into the "impacted majors" category at all of the UCs (or at least all of the UCs that will accept second-baccalaureate students). This means that, first, they're extra-picky about taking students who have as much of their lower-division work as possible finished. This isn't so much of a problem, since I'll have all of that done. What is a problem, though, is that when it comes to impacted majors, second-baccalaureate students are very low-priority potential students. So, I started considering majors that would let me do an M.S. in engineering even if my B.S. was in something else. Still at UCR, since my history with them means a somewhat improved chance of second-baccalaureate admission... Yeah, Physics is looking like a serious option. I'm even closer to meeting the requirements than I am for engineering, it's a good start for someone wanting to go into some of the bizarre-ass research-engineering fields, it would mean finishing two or three quarters earlier, and if I'm willing to stick around for one more quarter (still 1-2 quarters less than for engineering) I'll be able to do both the atomic/nuclear physics track and the biophysics track. ...while possibly pursuing comp-lit research at the same time. I'm going to be the Anne Fausto-Sterling of physics! (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
2:26 pm	Back online at the new place...and everywhere else. There's no DSL or cable broadband at the place I'm moving to. This is a problem. To make up for this problem, the landlord is loaning me one of his cellular-broadband modems. Which is now up and running on my laptop. (Unfortunately, the driver on the CD isn't Vista-compatible, so I'll have to download something for my desktop.) Which means that now, unlike almost everyone else, I now have an internet connection while I'm on campus. I may have to start leaving my laptop at home if I ever want to get anything done ever again. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
11:29 pm	Not so many poppies this year... Poppy season this year was much less impressive in terms of visual impact than last year. This time it was scattered clusters of poppies, compared to last year's utterly mind-bending carpets of orange. Still, there's an upside -- the other wildflowers this year were more impressive than last. A few fields that I pass on my commute are as saturated with color as the poppy preserve was last year -- but these are the goldfields, a lighter yellow wildflower, often combining with a sprinkling of poppies to produce a rippling of shades of yellow-gold. Purple lupine shows up as a complementary color to the goldfields -- and the owl's clover is joining in (with tiny yellow flowers surrounded by bigger purple bracts). It seems that despite the well-timed rains, wildflower season has peaked early in the AV. (Comment on this)
11:08 pm	Vermont and Iowa... Well, that's two more states that get it. Of course, the fundies and theocrats are in the process of collectively losing their shit everywhere from talk radio to the Washington Times. For them, I have a message in the words of Lily Allen: ( Cut for NSFW Mockney cheese-pop... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
9:54 pm	Shock! Scandal! It seems I may have become inadvertently involved in a...bromance. I feel dirty. So yeah, I went with Jake (the other half of my band, since the drummer seems to have been swallowed by the earth and will have to be replaced with a computer) to pick out his first new guitar. It was actually kinda interesting -- the dude has no experience with music theory (or even the ability to communicate what he's playing), but he has a good ear and can pull off some pretty crazy fingerstyle lines. Everyone at the music store would stop and listen whenever he started playing -- and there he was shopping for a cheapo acoustic-electric. When I manage to sell my truck I'll be back to pick up a halfway-decent (or at least usable) keyboard -- which I'll be able to afford partly because I don't need something that can produce its own sounds, just something that'll communicate with my computer. I've also found a new place to live. Paid the first month's rent today and got my copy of the key. One room in a cat-friendly two-bedroom house on a film lot where the other real building doubles as the owner's music studio (where I may be able to help out a bit in exchange for reduced rent). I'll be paying slightly more rent, but a) I'll be sharing the bathroom and kitchen with one person instead of 7, b) the room is slightly bigger, c) Snake will be able to have the run of the house (and there are two kittens for her to play with), d) the house has a washer and dryer, and e) most significantly, being closer to campus means I'll be saving about 8-10 hours of driving and a tank and a half of gas per week. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
9:48 pm	Open Office is being un-fun... So...does anyone know how to (and can explain how to) do polynomial regressions in Open Office Calc? Excel has it automated, but it seems Calc requires a bit of manual fooling around -- and I have zero experience working with spreadsheets. Maybe it's a good thing I can only get one of the two classes I need this summer -- I think I'll be giving myself a crash course in programming and a few of the apps I'll be expected to know. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
9:43 pm	So here's the master chorale program... Thanks to Yoot Oube, you can now find poorly-recorded versions of just about any choral music you'd like! Here are the ones I'm learning this semester... ( Cut for YT embeddings... ) (Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
11:16 pm	Solo! I've been assigned the obligato part towards the end of this piece: ...which means nothing caffeinated or carbonated on Mondays for me any more this semester, because yeah, that's a held high G. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
7:50 pm	Going to take a bit more looking, it seems... So, it looks like just about every school on my list of potential places to transfer to has been eliminated. None of them will take somebody going for a second bachelor's, and none will take someone for a grad program in engineering who doesn't already have an engineering B.S. These aren't even policies that can be appealed; there's no way to even have an application whose rejection can be the subject of an appeal. I've found a couple of exceptions -- like the city college of New York. I just don't see that happening. The couple others I've found all have private-college-level tuition, which I have no way to pay for (and I'm not eligible for financial aid any more). So yeah -- sometime between now and this fall I need to find a Plan C. ETA: It seems there is at least one UC which will take second-baccalaureate students: UCR. At this rate, I'll have to pick up a kilt in the UCR tartan, in a completely out-of-character display of "school spirit". ETA2: UCI's also on the list. UCR may still be easier to get into; looking at their policies, it seems that it's easier to get accepted as a second-baccalaureate student if you already have a relationship with the school. Who knows, I might end up working as a comp-lit research assistant while I'm an engineering student...the oddness of the thought is enough to make me willing to seriously consider moving back to Smogville. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
8:06 pm	Dangers of the eternal-student program: Oh dear. It seems it's official: I have too many undergrad units to qualify for financial aid. This means no Pell grants, no Cal grants, no direct student loans (subsidized or unsubsidized), no work-study. I still qualify for a fee waiver at the community college (due to being le Broke), but that's about it. This doesn't change too much in the immediate future -- but it means that UCSD and SDSU are now near the top of the list of potential transfer destinations. The parents' guest room isn't where I wanted to be staying, but it has the advantage of being free (or at least able to be paid for with the occasional chocolate marble cheesecake or chicken curry pie). Anything private is definitely out of the running, but that's nothing new. I might look into what it would take to snag an emergency teaching credential; I wouldn't be able to stand the job for more than a couple of years, but in the short term I could be a pretty decent (ok, pretty spectacularly mediocre) literature teacher (or at least a sub). (Comment on this)
Monday, March 9th, 2009
11:34 pm	Cultural differences between engineering categories... Hm...it looks like I'll have to make The Big Decision as far as my engineering education goes sometime this summer: Electrical or mechanical? I've done some research (both on my own and talking to professors and the dean) on what would be more appropriate for some of my interests (acoustics or renewable energy) and which is more in demand just now -- which hasn't helped. The answers in the first case were variations on "either one, as long as you do some specialist work, possibly in grad school", because plenty of fields require both mechanical and electrical engineering. The answers in the second case (regarding demand) were similar -- as the baby boomers start to retire, engineer-dependent industries are looking at a severe worker shortage starting now and worsening over the next few years. So, the next question for both my professors and for anyone on my flist who knows the field(s): Is there a difference in work culture between mechanical and electrical engineers? Is there a significant difference in how well a smart-ass multi-field geek with a tendency to queen out on a regular basis would fit in with other electrical vs. mechanical engineers? I know that this is likely to be a regional thing as much as a matter of professional specialty, but I've already pretty much resigned myself to sticking close to the coasts or to big cities in blue states; since I'm much more productive when I can collaborate with people I get along with, knowing the dominant styles of on-the-job interaction will be of major concern. (Also, I would have a very difficult time getting along for more than a few months with a crowd of conservatives. Partly, but not exclusively, due to the above-mentioned regularly-scheduled flaming.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 6th, 2009
5:35 pm	New comm, post-RaceFail2009: fight_derailing. It's the "just say no to changing the topic when racism in fandom comes up" comm. (Comment on this)