You know how sometimes when you’re in a certain mood, songs seem to be written exactly for you, reflecting the way you feel? Separate Ways by Teddy Thompson from the soundtrack for My Best Friend’s Girl is kind of speaking to me right now:
Old Rave Footage
Two thoughts occured to me as I was watching this video:
The first thought was “I wish I was there.”
And right after came “wow… I’m old.”
The Resistance Is The Next Album By Muse
Muse announced that the name of their next (fifth) studio album, expected to be released September this year, will be named “The Resistance.” The album will be “symphonic” and will have a “full collaboration with an orchestra.”
For me, Muse never managed to recreate the masterpiece that was “Origin Of Symmetry”, their second album that I’m more than willing to listen to anytime. That’s not to say that the following two albums were bad. I just got tired of them after a while. I’m hoping for the best with The Resistance.
Anyway, you know it’s a good year for me when each of my three favorite bands releases an album: The Prodigy in March, The Mars Volta in June and Muse in September.
Good times :)
First DreamHost Let Down
Yesterday the blog went offline for about 12 hours. It started with an “Internal Server Error” around 11am Israel time. I was about to comment on one of my posts when it happened, immediately opened a ticket with DreamHost’s ticket system and was happy to see it being treated promptly – it moved from “unverified” to “verified” to “resolved.”
But the issue was not resolved – the website was still down so I opened another ticket, this time telling them that it’s not OK to set the status of a ticket to “resolved” if the website is still down. What I got in return were offers on how to improve the speed of my blog. Considering that it serves 7 readers, I told them this could hardly be the reason. And I haven’t changed the code in a while, so it’s not supposed to break just like that. I still tried what they offered (disabling WordPress plugins) which of course didn’t help.
So I replied to their email and after 12 hours someone at DreamHost’s support (thanks, Jason) decided to actually look into the issue, agreed with me that the problem was on their end and fixed it.
I hope it’s a one time thing and not an indication of things to come. It’s a real hassle to switch hosts and I wouldn’t want to do it again.
End Of My Offline Experiment
A few days ago I stated that I’m going to try and be more offline that usual, and indeed for a couple of days I didn’t connect to any IM service (I use MSN, Google Talk and occasionally Facebook.) Except for one friend at work it appears that no one missed me online (thanks, rom :) I didn’t miss it too much either and it made very little difference on my life.
So I decided to come back online. It’s still useful and fun to talk to friends here and there. Some of my friends I only talk to online. I should remember to do less of that and use more personal communication, like phone and actually meeting people, where possible.
Me And Girls, Past And Present
Lately issues with girls have been troubling me, so I decided to write this post to get some of this off my mind.
In my past relationships with girls I’ve mostly been the best friend. Or, should I say, the “just friends” kind of a best friend. Being a pretty good listener I basically put myself in this position. It was my way of getting close to girls I was interested in and a natural choice, considering that I thought little of myself in terms of looks, sense of humor and general attractiveness in the eyes of members of the opposite sex.
Add to that the fact that, for me, a girl who can express her feelings is very attractive and bang!… years of suffering. I believe it to be at least 10 years. Different girls, of course, but some of those infatuations lasted quite a long time (longest, I believe, was 4 years.)
What does the life of the best friend look like? Full of ups and downs. If the girl has a boyfriend, you listen to how great he is and share the excitement, secretly broken hearted and never revealing (sometimes even denying) your true feelings about it. And if the girl is leaving a boyfriend you offer your empathy, secretly hoping that she will notice how good things are with you and choose you as her next boyfriend. Something which, obviously, never happens.
There’s a lot of ignoring the obvious when you’re the best friend. You think you see hints that the girl likes you but of course there are none. After all, if she really wanted you as a boyfriend she would have told you already – she tells you everything else so it’s not like she’s going to hide it. But you let your mind play tricks on you until some kind of realization hits you, usually with a lot of drama and heart ache.
These days things are a little different – I’m 32 and most girls I meet usually aren’t looking for a listener. And if it so happens that I like someone for more than just friendship but she’s not interested, I cut it off. That’s, basically, what happened with the last girl I wrote about – when she told me she’s not interested I said “that’s fine, but we can’t be friends.” It’s a shame that my way of dealing with it is avoidance, but it’s better than going into the friend zone again.
It’s not easy. I find myself fighting the urge to call her when I want to talk with someone. Knowing where conversations like this may lead, I think I’m making the right choice. I just wish I didn’t think about her as much.
Going (Semi) Offline
I always said that, even though I’m available on my mobile phone and online most of the day, I don’t feel obligated to answer any calls or messages I get. But in effect I’ve always been online and available. Following some of the recent events in my life I’ve decided to be less online. It doesn’t mean that I’ll spend less time on the computer. It just means that I won’t be so available for IMs as much as I used to be.
I will still check my emails and be available on the phone. Considering that my online friends already were well-mannered, I don’t know how much effect this will have on my life. But it’s worth the experiment.
Some Days Are Better Than Others
I tried to write about this last weekend, which was crappy, but gave up on it (basically, I’m tired of hearing myself complain.)
What I do want to write about is that during this weekend it occurred to me that I’m actually looking forward to going back to work and being busy. I realized that this may be one of the reasons I stayed at work so many hours before the trip. I’m determined not to let this happen now and plan fun weekends that will leave me craving for another day off, like a normal person.
I Hate Shopping, Especially For Clothes
I hate shopping. And I specifically dislike shopping for clothes. For an upcoming wedding I had to go shopping both for a new wedding shirt and wedding shoes. It was awful. The shirt I found pretty early on the shopping spree, but shoes are always hard for me to find, let alone shoes for the nice occasions which I don’t even like (I wear sports shoes daily.)
And my mind works in such a mysterious way… when I’m miserable, it really likes to taunt me even more. So of course while I was measuring shoes against my will, I really wanted that girl to be around and I was having conversations in my head with her.
I know. It’s pathetic. I’m sick of it myself.
My Oldest Email Messages
- ISP (from my local mail archive at home):
- Date: February 1, 1998
- Subject: a Vocaltec Internet Phone license I got as a gift from my now-deceased Canadian relative. Using this software we had a lot of enjoyable video conversations over the Internet. I also found a lot of stories he sent me over time.
- Hotmail:
- Date: March 16, 1999
- Subject: registration confirmation from Serials 99. I believe I can still use it :)
- Yahoo!:
- Date: October 2, 2003
- Subject: a message from an old acquaintance who found me online. This is from the short period of time in my life when I tried to switch from Hotmail to Yahoo! Mail. Once I got a Gmail account, I ditched Yahoo! Mail for it.
- Gmail:
- Date: August 11, 2004
- Subject: “welcome to Gmail” message explaining how Gmail is different
I’m an Internet dinosaur.