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Monthly Archives: October 2007

a parade of lost souls


parade of lost souls, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Happy Halloween! I’m already sugar-sick and out of costume!

In Vancouver, the Saturday before Halloween is the Parade of Lost Souls, a procession of weirdness and costumes and lots of fire. Anything that makes life a little more morbidly surreal is okay by me.

Caribou in Concert


Caribou at Richard’s, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

I’ve been a fan of Caribou for a while, and his/their new album Andorra is one of my two or three favourites of 2007, so I was pretty excited to see Caribou at Richard’s last night (and pretty upset when I thought I lost a ticket, but it turns out it was okay — I’m an idiot and forgot Hendrik had his own). The vintage-and-Converse set was out in force, and Dan Snaith and his band, featuring two drummers, a penny whistle, various guitars and a laptop did not disappoint. As probably befits a guy with a PhD in mathematics, Caribou is much more about delivering a seamless experience of interlocking songs than rock star posing. The show was the band in front of a white sheet, with simple geometric shapes projected on the stage and audience, while they played punched-up live versions of almost all of Andorra, seamlessly integrated with highlights of previous albums, going back to Snaith’s Manitoba years (some of which seem like they might have been Andorra-ized to fit in better with that album’s pop-psychedelica sound, or maybe they always sounded like that, portending the new album). Great show.

My roommate (and fellow Caribou fan) Meghan apparently thought so, too (it’s subtle, but you can read between the lines).

pumpkin carving at the kommune


pumpkin carving at the kommune, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

I love Halloween. It appeals to my perversely morbid sense of fun and love of macabre DIY arts and crafts, including — but not limited to — elaborate zombie makeup. And jack-o-lanterns!

Meghan created a flickr group to which I’ll be adding more pictures soonish.

addendum


Turns out it’s impossible to write a bunch of random unrelated paragraphs with bold key text and not come across like Jackie Harvey.

I’m so, so sorry.

random nuggets of Eric


So, for the past few weeks, I’ve been devoting my hours to work at Worio, a Yaletown start-up I’ve been associated with essentially from its inception (though other people have done much more work than me). I enjoy the work, and it’s a nice break from grad school. Not only is the pay better, but pretty much every day I can go home feeling like I’ve accomplished something. The PhD program is not like that.

The only downside is the schedule. I work 10 to 12 hours a day, and that’s not counting the 45-minute commute each way. I go to the gym two or three nights a week, and out for dinner, movies or concerts a couple of other nights. I typically leave the house at 8 AM and get home at 10 or 11 at night. Saturday is usually spent running errands, and Sunday is my day of rest.

And so, other things have to fall by the wayside a bit. I don’t think I’ve looked at YouTube in a month! A month! And I’m lucky is I see more than one movie a week (though my commute means that I’m reading a ton of books, which is pretty cool, though I have an iPod Touch to watch videos on now). This blog is another victim. I just don’t feel like I have the time or energy for full, thought-out posts. Not that what I write is usually more than “Here’s a cool link. BLANK is cool! (Insert joke here.)” Even so, I do have opinions and I know how much you care about them. But maybe for now, I’ll just do a bit of a random thought dumpage. Let’s try it, shall we?

andorra.jpgThe Gohāna new Caribou album, Andorra, is terrific — kind of a wistful sixties psychedelic pop version of Caribou that perfectly fits walking though downtown Vancouver in the fall. I’ve been listening to the entire album pretty much daily. My roommate even liked it so much she blogged about it, too. Actually, 2007 has been a great year for Canadian indie music. Besides Caribou, I’ve been really enjoying the 2007 releases of The New Pornographers, The Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, Pink Mountaintops, Champion and You Say Party! We Say Die!. And I’m sure there’s plenty of others I haven’t heard yet.

As I mentioned before, buy modafinil online reddit somebody used my credit card to commit several thousand dollars worth of fraud. It’s taken a few calls to the bank, but the damage seems to have been undone — at least the damage against me. I wonder how common this kind of thing is. Somebody is out a lot of money — there’s no way the bank has made anything like the money the lost off my past half-decade of credit-card use.

kyrgzhatsnip.jpgI’m still hugely looking forward to my post-PhD trip across Asia in a couple years, but I haven’t had anything particularly insightful to say lately. The part of the route from India to Turkey will be interesting. I will either have to go through Pakistan and Iran, or through the Central Asian republics and Russia. I’ve been reading a bit about both. On the one hand, Iran has better transportation and I culture I’m very interested in. On the other hand, Central Asia has thrilling headgear. But I think the final decision will depend on the state of the region when I get there, c. 2010.

Can you believe 2010 is now the near future? Like, I’m making plans for that year? The mind boggles. I feel all the time like I live in a William Gibson novel.

facebook-snip.jpgI’m still on Facebook, though all I ever do is update my status message every couple of days, which I see as kind of a creative exercise. I don’t even read the updates of people on my network very often. However, I still find it kind of fascinating — I think its genius is that it’s the first web page on the internet that is explicitly targeted toward the extroverted majority of human beings. The people who (unlike, say, me) honestly want to know what all their friends got up to last weekend, and who (also unlike me) typically do something with their free time that’s more sociable than watching DVDs or reading comics and books about statistics and economics.

Speaking of books about statistics and economics, I recently read and enjoyed Tyler Cowan’s Discover Your Inner Economist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb even more interesting Fooled by Randomness. Each of these looks at how the authors’ fields (economics and financial mathematics) informs their worldview in subtle and unintuitive ways, complete with amusing anecdotes. While I’d recommend these books in general, I think I personally got a lot out of them because while I’m neither an economist nor a statistician (a shocking revelation, I know), my own research owes a lot to these fields, and I increasingly find myself looking at the world through a haze of utilities and variances. Also, Taleb’s book provides some evidence that it is possible to work on interesting problems in finance, be well paid, and not turn into (or start off as) a boring, status-obsessed asshole.

Wednesday night I saw Tokyo Police Club at The Plaza. The band didn’t even come on until midnight (on a Wednesday night!), and then the sound was pretty awful. Tired and bored from standing around waiting for the show, and disappointed by the shitty mix and always too-hot Plaza venue, we left after about five songs. Enough people were bolting that there was already a fairly long queue for the coat check at that point. Nice try, boys. I don’t know whether it’s the Plaza or TPC to blame, so I blame both.