A bit delayed, I’m taking on Db0’s summer reading meme.

I ended up pretty much ignoring my reading project, but here’s what I’ve been up to:

Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko
This book inspired the movie by the same title, first in a series of horror books.  I had seen the movie first and liked it, then the book the sheer depth of the characters and setting, and the REAL storyline.  It turns out the movie is barely more than “inspired by” the books.  I am very glad I saw the movie before reading, as I would have absolutely hated the movie if I had gone into it expecting anything remotely similar to the book.  This is a situation where you may as well disconnect the two as separate worlds so that you can enjoy them both.  Anyway, I liked it a lot (which is impressive considering vampires are a key component to the storyline) and read it in a very short period of time even though its a very large book.

The Great Expectation School: a Rookie Year in the New Blackground Jungle by Dan Brown
No, not the Dan Brown who wrote the Da Vinci Code.  A DIFFERENT Dan Brown who went to school for filmmaking and somehow wound up teaching in a low-income public school in New York City.  I read the entire book in under 24 hours, staying up all night on a work night because I couldn’t stop.  I’ve passed it around to a couple people, who have all had the same sort of experience, and now my mom is going to make it her next book club pick, haha!  While a lot of the information was not very new, and the story was really not all that unique (despite it being non-fiction), it was written in a very engaging style that made it worth reading.

Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner
Technically I started this during school but since I finished it over the summer I’d say it counts.  Excellent book that goes over feedback loops, biases, the example rule, and a number of other fascinating reasons we humans are paranoid, irrational, and terrified while in the safest period of history.  This book should be read by pretty much everyone and was easily one of the best books I read this summer.

The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot
I started this book, but did not finish it.  It began fairly easy to read but I didn’t get most of the mathematics it started to delve into, and even though it claimed to have little brackets to show the “lay” reader what he or she could skip, I sometimes found it hard to find where the brackets REALLY began and ended, and found some of the information in brackets important, so I didn’t want to skip them.  It was good, but I hit a point where I didn’t want to read a technical book and just haven’t picked it up again.  Pretty pictures though.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine
I read Age of Reason first, and had started Common Sense a few years ago.  I’m not sure why I stopped, but I finally picked it up again and finished it.  Excellent.  Thomas Paine is probably one of my favorite thinkers.

Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler
Haven’t finished this one either.  I had misplaced it for a few weeks.  Good though.

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters by Ronald R. Prothero
I’ve been using this book as a reference for art as it has a lot of neat diagrams.  Also skimming it a bit, but its a lot of stuff I already know, spending several chapters debunking creationist fallacies.  Good reference though.

The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski
I think this is my favorite book out of all the books I read this summer.  I found it in Raven’s at random and picked it up on a whim, and I’m so glad I did.  It explains the history of everyday objects such as zippers and forks and paperclips, and its written by an engineer who uses these common items to forge a much more interesting tale of how invention and engineering really work and shape our lives, starting by debunking the idiom “form follows function”.  I’m a big fan of the show How it’s Made and I’m interested in industrial design, so of course I loved this book.  If you’re not into the subject matter though, you’d probably find it absolutely boring.

Source of Twentieth Century Europe Textbook
This is one of the required books for my Modern European History class next semester.  Since I will most likely NOT have time to read much of the required weekly reading during the semester, I opted to read it now and save myself the stress and trouble.  It’s a very interesting text, as it is a compilation of short essays with some very interesting perspectives.  I’m going to start my other texts next week.

I feel like I forgot one or two so I may edit this list later with additions.

Really.  I promise.

I actually wanted to increase my frequency of posting over the summer, but that did not happen either.  So here’s a quick update on things and I’ll try to get back in the habit.  It’s a good habit, I think venting throughout the summer may have made it easier, I’m not sure why I didn’t write anything.

Early in the summer, I brought back a little canister of pill bugs from Ohio and we set them up in a mini container to make sure they were OK to put into the millipede cage before we actually went and DID it.  They bred so quickly, I’m glad we didn’t put them in to start.  Somehow one or two made it into the main terrarium though, but there hasn’t been a population explosion from what I can tell.  Unfortunately, I disobeyed one of the biggest rules of keeping non-local pets and put a couple dead leaves into the pill bug container without boiling them.  Within weeks there was a small mold infestation, and we cleaned it out, sorting the pinhead-sized baby pill bugs carefully.  We didn’t do it well enough, however, and there was a serious relapse.  We really didn’t anticipate just how serious this problem actually was, and how deep the infestation went until we decided to completely sanitize the container and found one pill bug survivor.  ONE.  There was no trace that anything lived in that cage except for the single pill bug survivor and the tiny local millipede that obviously had an immunity to the mold.

Other than that, the millipedes are doing just fine.  Turns out that Promethea loves zucchini.  That was the first thing we put in her cage that she actually ate!  Giger has grown another half inch or so, it will be more as his new segments fill out, and he’s getting to be quite robust.  I also can’t get a good photo as he runs around on my hands so fast that its ALWAYS blurry…

We also found room mates, which has been a constant stressor this summer, and I got my student loan in order just in time.  I never did find a second job, which caused me a bit of stress through the first half, but fortunately due to being overly-frugal this summer and receiving the student loan, I will be in the exact same financial situation entering this year as I was last year, so I feel much better.  I could be in a better position, but that’s my own fault.

School starts in about a week.  I have mixed feelings about it now… I probably will be doing overtime in the labs as we struggle to get all the machines online in time.  The people who did construction ensured that we couldn’t even start on such things until this week, and we’re waiting on Maya licensing before we can image all the shiny new g5’s… and there may be an issue with all the old g5’s slotted to be put in the downshoot room, but we’ll find out next week after I tinker with them a bit more and the boss gets a chance to look.

I am excited to be taking on school-related problems instead of the nonsense from this summer, but I’ve entered one of my nihilistic art-slump type phases RIGHT as I need to be thinking of how I’m going to shape my projects this semester.  Almost all my classes will have almost pure freedom of subject matter, so if I can’t whip myself in shape in about a week or two, to put it mildly… I’m fucked.

I can deal with a lot of irrationality.  I have to, after all, most humans are driven by some form of irrationality. But I can’t deal with techophobes.

I mean, if you want to never use your shiney new gadget to its maximum potential because you’re afraid of “breaking it”, or if you never want to get shiney new gadgets due to some irrational belief that they are “too complicated”, or that you “just can’t figure them out”, go ahead.  Be irrational.  You’re only hurting yourself by not realizing the potential in what is available for you today, and technically you CAN get along just fine without them.

But don’t tell someone who has done something before, knows how it works, what it is capable of, and can explain it to you, that they can’t/shouldn’t do it.  ITS A FUCKING WIRE.  Plugging in a new wire to interface a new device is not going to hurt ANYTHING.  I know everything about setting up this interface because I have done it with a lot of different types of computers to a lot of different secondary projection / video sources.  Its actually part of my job.

But no, here’s a better idea.  Lets wait for the equally technophobic man-of-the-house to do it for you, little girl.  You couldn’t possibly know anything about electronics and you’ll break it, since you’re just a kid and you don’t have a penis.  Oh lets overlook the fact that he’s NEVER done it before, doesn’t know what your ultimate goal is, and wouldn’t know what wire goes in what port ANYWAY.  And we’ll overlook the fact that since he has no stake in the result and is also afraid of breaking the device, he’s not going to want to do it.

It really hasn’t been much of a summer so far, I’ve been very busy doing research studies, work, and unsuccessfully searching for a second job.

I’ve done a little artwork which has been nice, and some post-worthy things have happened such as going home, I’m going to try to write a little more often as the stress of DO THIS DO THAT FIND JOB WORK DO THIS has kind of been getting to me.

Giger has officially doubled in size to 2″.  It only took him about 3.5 months to do this, and some of the segments from his last molt have not yet filled out.   I wonder if he will double in size every 3.5 months or if he will grow an inch every 3.5 months?  I guess we’ll find out.  If he doubled every 3.5 months he’d be full grown in a little over  a year, and one inch every 3.5 months would give him about 3 years.  My guess is that it will only be an inch or so rather than doubling.

They’ve also increased their food intake significantly.  Euler pretty much stays under the log all the time, and runs around a lot more.  New favorite food is celery leaves–not the harder stalk, just the leaves.

Now that one type of insanity ends, another begins.   Finals are over, crit is done, but now I have to find a good way to make money this summer, and lots of it.  I’ll be taking out some pretty hefty student loans come August…

______

Strange things have been happening in the terrarium this past week.  I’ve been trying out some new sources of food for Giger to try and vary his diet from more than just cucumbers, so I left in a grape chopped in halfs, some lettuce, and a little cucumber in case he didnt’ like either.  Now Euler, the big brown one, has never been interested in the food we leave on the surface, and neither has Promethea (who was in my Allston terrrium at the time), but the morning after we left the grapes and lettuce, both grape halves were completely gone, and the lettuce had been half-dragged into a GIGANTIC hole, and partially mangled.  We removed the lettuce from the hole but shortly after, we discovered it had been dragged back in.

I left a bunch of grape halves and a little cucumber that night but they weren’t touched so we removed them later the next day, then I left for school.  That night, Adam discovered a bit of white “webbing” coming out of the hole, and dug it up, uncovering the lettuce AGAIN and a grape half!  Apparently Euler had developed an interest in food… but not eating it, just burying it?!?  This continues to happen–I leave a variety of food underneath their log, and the next morning half of it has been either covered in dirt or dragged into holes. I brought Promethea out Thursday and even she is joining in the game!  I don’t get it… and this has only been happening within the past week.  I do have to wonder if its indicative of some issue that I have just not come across yet.

___

I also got to go to Paganfest USA a few weeks ago, I’m working on a write up from that but I haven’t really had time to sit down and do it since I’ve been trying to regain my sanity and get some other things done.  I’m still digesting my critique, and there’s been a lot going on with some of my currently running debates.  Soon I’ll have a new “ID Smackdown on Amazon” article. : )

Several things have been going on recently… aside from the usual school insanity.  My semester is over in a few weeks, and that will be a major relief.  I think i mentioned before… 6 studio classes is a BAD idea?

I’ll ramble about my millipedes first because it is more interesting than my school schedule.

So they’ve grown!  Giger has molted at LEAST one more time, and has grown at least 1/4 inch, which for a millipede that was a little under an inch out of the box, is a major change.  I dug him up on Saturday and he’s a lot more round too.  His new segments are still white and will need to fill out.  My guess is that after he grows into this molt he will be about 1.5 inches.  I’m going to try and document his growth so that by the time he’s a big fat hot-dog size monster we’ll have a record of the change and maybe a bit of data on the growth rate, since I have no idea whether he’ll continue to grow regularly at this rate or plateau in a few weeks/months, going through “spurts” like humans do.

Promethea appears to have grown a little as well, a little less than 1/2 inch I think, but it’s noticable.  I cleaned out her cage today and um, its obvious she’s eating well.  To think I was worried about her not eating before!  She just likes the substrate, sphagnum moss, and now the cork bark I put in.  You can tell where she’s eaten the cork bark, that was a VERY good purchase.  It was just a silly hermit crab decoration thing too.  It’s decaying a lot faster than the natural wood we gathered outside, which she didn’t touch.  I’ve got to gather some leaves too.  Giger slowed down on the cucumber consumption when he disappeared to molt (presumably) a week or two ago, and now he burrows a lot more instead of simply sitting under the moss.  I think he’s gotten over being stressed.  I haven’t seen Euler at all, outside of the few times we’ve dug her out.  Frequently I see Promethea when I lift up the cork bark but NEVER Euler…

Tomorrow I’m going to go try and find Pill Bugs in Fenway Park to help clean the cage so that I don’t have to often.  Rumor is they love millipede poops.  I may also take advantage of my fertilizer-machines and try to actually grow a plant, maybe a vegetable.  Maybe its bad luck, or a black thumb, or something, but I’ve never raised a plant successfully except my immortal cactus, which still miraculously lives after about 3-4 years…

So on another totally unrelated note, I got to register today, pretty much everything lined up just like I wanted, next semester will look like:

Monday:
9-11:45 : The Art and Culture of Japan (one of my friends signed up for this class too so it should be alright)
630-915: Relief Printmaking

Tuesday
8:30-1145: Digital Trio (blah)
230-310: Modern European History at Lesley (with my old philosophy professor!  Story about this already, maybe for later)

Wednesday:
9-230: Advanced Printmaking (yay for another 5-hour class \m/)
320-605: Art since 1945 (With Uncle Steck.  EPIC win)

Thursday:
Repeat of Tuesday

Friday:
9-1145 Woodworking I/II (with my current wood and stone carving professor)

Total credits: 18, out of which only 4 are “studio” classes, if you can somehow count Digital Trio as a studio class, and both Relief and Wood are 1.5 credit courses…

I’m going to get my degree audit tomorrow so I can better tell where I stand.  There was a bit of confusion about my Macroeconomics class, it registered on my unofficial transcript as a Liberal Arts, while my A+P registered as Science Requirement, so I asked about that.  Bad news: I misheard her and apparently I can’t substitute it for my Math Requirement.  Good news: I CAN substitute it for my Social Science elective.  This means the only General Education requirements I have left are liberal arts which will be filled by my 3 remaining history classes (not including next semesters) and another Science class which I’ll try and take at Bunker Hill or something when I qualify for In-state Tution.

Anyway, I’m wiped.  This semester has been a killer.

Near the end of every semester, we have “overnights”, where the building is open 24 hours a day over the weekend.  This includes the various labs and lockups, so computer lab workers can sign up for shifts for what day of the week they want.  I usually enjoy Friday nights because they give me the rest of the weekend to recuperate from forcing myself awake for a 12-8 shift.  I was unfortunate this semester, and signed up just a little bit too late and while I did get my Friday Nights, I was assigned to the main building.  Generally the other building is quieter and I can get more work done, while I’ve had some bad experiences working in the main building during over nights… with angry photo kids, and broken printers, and all kinds of nonsense. But that’s for another day, maybe.

This semester the overnights were HORRIBLY  advertised.  Almost no one knew they were this weekend, so there was only one person in the lab until about 130 AM, then nothing.  Well, almost nothing…
I settled in to work on my watercolor homework at about 2AM when the phone rang.  How unusual!  Maybe there was something wrong at the other building?  I picked up with a standard  “700 Lockup!”, and was met with a “STACY SWANSON?!”  Oh, wrong number, I informed the man, who spoke very choppy English with a thick accent.  But no, it was not a wrong number.  It was a prank caller.  A very, very tenacious prank caller.  I really like prank calls, actually.  They’re like real, live internet trolls, and you know how I feel about trolls.  (mmm… mincemeat.)

I did treat it as a serious call for a while just in case it WAS and there would be any ramifications, running some tests at the same time to check.  Fortunately I did not give him my name or any other information, though I accidentally leaked the word Boston at the beginning, when I wasn’t sure if it was serious, but that couldn’t be helped, its in the name of my school, though he seemed to miss the school part!

At 2:10ish AM, this person called the lock up phone and tried to claim that someone named Stacy Swanson had bought a bunch of donuts from the “donuts to go/Krispy Kreme” he works at on 54th st, and had written a bad check for $8.50, and “this was the number she wrote on the check”. He spoke as though he had a problem with English, and kept demanding the money. At first I did wonder if this was legit and the guy really did have a communication barrier, so I tried to reason through it, explaining that no one named Stacy Swanson worked here. It never really seemed to sink in. Then I asked him to repeat the address and Google maps searched it, turns out there’s no 54th st in Boston, and the only one in all of MA was in a residential district. I gave him this information and he started yelling ” GOOGLE LIES!!!” and repeating his address, “You owe me $8.50 dollar” and the name Stacy Swanson over and over.  After a short time of me trying to take it seriously enough in case it was real (don’t want him calling back, so it had to be resolved whether it was real OR fake), and trying to find evidence it was a prank and not actually serious (“Isn’t a dog against health regulations?” Since there was one barking off and on). He finally got fed up of me trying to divert him to management and yelled “GO HELL”, so I figured the conversation was over, thanked him, and hung up. Then I sat down to write up the story.

Then the phone rings again, and he’s pissed that I hung up on him. “WHY YOU HANG UP!!??” then “I NEVER SWEAR AT YOU I NEVER SWEAR” At this point I really am not sure what to think of it, why would he call back? Clearly he’ll call back if I hang up again so I decide the best course of action is to make HIM hang up so he doesn’t call back. Unfortunately for him, I’m a regular troll-slayer on internet forums so he had no idea what kind of endurance for circular arguments and nonsense I have. I actually like doing stuff like this. Many times I explain to him that I:
1) Don’t know Stacy Swanson
2) Have no one by that name in the system
3) am not Stacy Swanson
4) do not even like donuts.

I made a mistake in the beginning by mentioning Boston, so I had to cover that by confirming that he did not in fact live in Boston. Simple. I asked him what the weather was like, he hesitated and claimed he was not outside (there was a wind chime…), so I asked him to go and check. He resisted heavily, clearly because he didn’t actually know what the weather was like in Boston, so I convinced him to check by telling him that if he could not tell me such simple information as what the weather was like, then how could I believe any of his other claims. He raced outside of course, really angry. He said it was “nice”, so I asked him if there were any clouds, and he said No it is nice!! Wrong answer. Then after he insisted I was lying, I asked him another simple question: are there any puddles on the ground? “Not in my backyard”. Two errors. There are a lot of puddles around Boston because it rained all day, and why would you have a backyard in your business? Not to mention his other error, first claiming it was “Donuts to go”– a privately owned business, then claiming it was a branch of Krispy Kreme, and changing the street of it from 54 to 58 then to 56 for a while, then dropping numbers on the street address… then claiming that the name was printed on the righthand side of a personal check, and there was no address or bank name printed and that she hand-wrote the check… so amateur. He claimed she wrote “F-f-f-f-fooolin” on the check, which I pretended to take seriously at first, and dropped my voice to a dead-serious tone and informed him of what that could potentially mean (she ripped you off), then when he realized that it could dead-end the conversation he started going on about Def Leppard, and got really offended when I told him I had no clue what he was talking about because I didn’t like the band. There were a couple other amusing bits, where he got confused and thought I was from California, and that there were no Donuts in California… and that even though he managed to drive a JAGUAR, he was concerned enough about his $8.50 to call around at 230 am.

He also pretended to be convinced that I was actually Stacy Swanson and wrote the check, and that I was decieving him.  But what really stumped him was when I deferred to management, saying that I could take his name and number for my manager to call him back as soon as possible. He refused and said he wanted to talk to Stacy Swanson NOW, and couldn’t get past my rationale of “It’s 230 am. I am the only employee. I am not Stacy Swanson, we just proved that (by walking him through physical descriptions of people and getting him to say yes or no). Even if she did work here she could not talk to you.”

Unfortunately for him, his DAD cut the conversation short. The phone went silent for a second, and a very, very different voice came on with a VERY different accent, asking me who I was. I confirmed that he wasn’t another pranker trying to lead me on, and he wasn’t. Apparently this kid was calling from someplace in Texas, and the Stacy Swanson issue happened to his dad before, and that’s how he came up with the story. His dad apologized and we hung up.

That kid is in so much trouble. He’ll probably never prank call anyone again, I just wish that call had been recorded. And to his credit, he did do a really good job keeping up the fake accent and fake language barrier, even if logic and common sense failed him.  It must be the schools.

Best overnight ever. I have reached level 19 Troll Slayer.

Its like for the past few days so many things are going on involving this site… I finally changed some stuff, made a new profile for family-only and removed family from my “normal” page.  My mom freaked, as predicted.

She was so concerned, that something had happened.  That situation is a rant for another day.

Now we had some people lined up for next year since two roommates are leaving, it was pretty solid.  Then their parents got cold feet last minute and bailed, paying their housing deposit for Lesley instead.  The housing deposit is a non-refundable $500.  So much for that.

Its getting late in the semester now, everyone’s paid their housing deposits and generally found the apartment they want by now.  AND… the room that is open is a double room so that means we have to find two people to share a room.  Seems so straightforward… just find a couple or two people looking at the same time!  Yeah, right.  No one looking for an apartment wants to share a room, that’s one reason they get out of the dorms.  No one wants to share a room, instead they go out and find apartments that are more expensive where they can have their own rooms! (true story)

I’ve got some last-ditch ideas up my sleeve, but I put a listing on Facebook as a fallback.  Two random strangers are better than no people at all, and I certainly can’t afford to split the apartment AND utilities between only TWO people.  I’ve also already committed to extending the lease another year.

I got a message this evening from someone interested!  They looked sane, and seemed reasonable, but I found out they were allergic to cats.  Shot down.  But hey, that’s a good sign if on the first day there’s at least one response. Ideally, I’d like to get this dealt with by finding two people willing to share, and not have to resort to my slightly complex but potentially effective idea.  Occam’s Razor!  Eliminate the complexities!

Anyone with information or leads would be my hero.

I just hope things work out, and soon.  This is stress I do NOT need.  The semester ENDS on the 4th of may, and I’m feeling the pressure already.  Remember folks, 6 studio classes IS A BAD IDEA.  BAD.

Its actually a BAD idea to go for months without buying any books.  Then when you have to… you go nuts.

I went into the store for ONE book on Aristotle for a project and walked out with an armful.  And I’m only at 2/30 on my list…  I was actually hoping to find a book that I stumbled across in my school library today, but didn’t.  I found a bunch more instead… and I’m proabably going to Raven’s on Friday to see if I can find the book I’m looking for… = not such a good idea?

They were all good, cheap, and irresistible:

~The Basic Works of Aristotle.  Almost 1500 pages for $10, hardcover.  A bit bruised but the insides are intact, and that’s all that matters.

~Wolf – Spirit of the Wild by the Nature Company.  Hardover for $10, stuffed with full-color, high quality photographs, illustrations and all kinds of reference material.  I probably would have paid up to $25 for the content, but I got lucky!

~The Pig that Wants to be Eaten – 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher by Julian Baggini.  All of the thought experiments are only a page or two long, which is great for a day that I don’t have much time to read, but lots of time to think, which happens surprisingly frequently.  Paperback, great condition.

~The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed.  No idea what this will be about, but for $5, I can indulge my curiousity sometime during the summer maybe.  It was in reasonable condition, the cover was a bit marked up but that’s it.

~War and Morality by Richard A. Wasserstrom.  The cover for this book is too cool, and I’ve been eyeing the book for a while now.  It’s less than 140 pages so it will be fast whenever I get around to it.

~Mortals and Others- American Essays 1931-1935 by Bertrand Russell.  FINALLY I found a really good Bertrand Russell essay book.  Each essay is about 2 pages long, and brilliant.  I may have to sneak this onto my “started” shelf since I did technically read 3 random essays and I do want to read it all… but that’s cheating. :(

~Muscles and Nerves by Robert Galambos.  A small 150ish page book from the “Introduction to Biophysics” Science Study Series.  It looks kind of old, copyright 1962 but the diagrams looked like what I studied in A+P this summer so we’ll see.  It looks cool, despite the hilarious author photo on the back.

And finally

~Weather on the Planets – What we Know about Their Atmospheres by George Ohring.  Also from the Science Study Series, but this one just says “American Meteorological Society” instead of a mini series.  Adam and I just finished the first season of the Universe documentaries from the History Channel so it sounded very interesting.  I want to know how scientists find some of this stuff out.  And this guy gets a +1 on his author picture for NOT looking like dick.  Cant’ say so much for the other guy.  Both books were $2.50, definitely worth it.  They’ll go on the Short Books Reading List for when I finish the Already Started Reading List.

So when I was considering getting an A. Gigas, I had a hard time finding one.  The only person that had them was Ken the Bug Guy, and he only shipped on certain days a week.  I went through a website called Tarantulas.inc to get Promethea, and asked if they’d have any A. Gigas in anytime soon.  They had great service and I was pleased with the product so I would like to order from them again.  Plus they have Vietnamese Rainbow Millipedes (Warning: dirty picture, but it shows off the coloring nicely) which is definitely a species I would like to get in the future so I was hoping to get both an A. Gigas and one of those at the same time.

A WEEK after I got Giger they updated their inventory with new CB A. Gigas!  These are listed as 2″ so they are about twice as big as Giger… but also $45.  Ouch.  I got Giger for $20.

I’ve also recieved a number of questions about how live bugs are actually shipped.  I took a series of photos of Euler and Giger’s packaging and I’ll make a little write up soon.  I was curious too before I opened Promethea’s box.

As for now, its time to get rest.  There’s more insanity over the horizon.