the eXternal mind

One thing I really dislike is people who message me online and then either don’t say anything or don’t get to the point until like 30 minutes later. I sometimes know what you are trying to get at, but I don’t really feel like trying to guess at what you are going to say during that 30 minute silence. Additionally, I dislike if I respond to something you say right away with a simple question, and it takes you 30 minutes to reply to me. Also, if you want to continue a conversation, don’t end your statements with a period all the time and expect me to pick up the slack since I usually don’t feel like doing so (you’re the one who is messaging me, after all!). I finally felt annoyed enough to post this on my blog.

Sigh, I spent a lot of time yesterday and today writing a file monitoring script in python that was tailored towards my computational (chemistry) simulations on large clusters. Then after I finished the glorious script, I realized that I didn’t really need the monitoring feature if I had a way to copy files from the node in one command. Well, I wrote one line of bash code that allowed me to do the file copying. So I just spend a lot of time coding this elaborate script for nothing.

On the bright side, I did learn a lot more about python.

Folks, I am about to inform you of something indescribably amazing: the pillows, a japanese rock band, will be returning to the US this month for their second ever US tour!

Their delicious label website has more information on the shows, but the awesome news is that they will be visiting LA on March 13th! I discovered this two days ago and was extremely excited (I normally don’t get this excited). All I could do was think about this live show.

Why? Because the pillows are one of my favorite rock bands. Even though they sing mostly in Japanese (I don’t understand a thing), their songs are very fun to listen to and play. Whereas new rock is dying in the US (commercialized punk and emo), the “new” sounds of rock are flourishing in Japan, and the pillows are one of these Japanese rock bands who are experimenting with and creating new rock sounds.

When I became a fan of them in 2006, I narrowly missed their first US tour (I learned about it 1-2 months afterwards) and was sad that I couldn’t see them. I vowed that I would make my best effort to attend their show the next them they tour the US.

My barrier to the show was transportation (need a car to get to LA), and I was wracking my brains trying to figure out some solution. I found a few (like <5) people at Caltech who were also interested in the pillows on facebook so I was going to email them about the show.

As it turns out, a person who I was working with Ch 121 problem sets with is an anime fan and has a car. So I convinced him to go to the show :). So now, for all purposes, I’m going to the pillows’ LA show! Too awesome!