so, my retarded crackhead neighbour is now apparently complaining about the fresh air.

the oxygen is cutting off my carbon monoxide supply and sobering me up. this is a travesty.

hey. it's working. let's hope she's gone, soon.

i've been clear enough about this.

i'm cusp.

but, gen y, to me, is gen yawn - the kids are fucking boring.

mid 30s, right now, is that demographic dip. we kind of don't exist. so, i need to make that choice. and, you're more likely to find me at a 40+ event than at a 20-something one - even if i'm more likely to blend in at the latter.

so, i haven't been going out and doing much.

it's been cold and dreary. i don't want to go out anywhere until it warms up.

but, there's also not anything of interest happening around town.

it'll be a snap decision, but i'm probably going to skip gybe! next week. they haven't done anything i care about in almost 20 years. i'm holding out for another mt. zion disc...

it might be april before i head out again.

but, i said this last year: last summer was probably my last summer spent partying. i'm 37 years old. it's not even about my age, exactly, it's more about my interests. i haven't been shy in pointing out that i'm not exactly fond of the younger generation, and it's to the point that they've taken over all of the spaces - there's not a lot of places left for somebody my age to go, and not be bored.

i hate folk music. gen y rock culture is lame. and, even their techno is boring.

so, getting out to things is going to rely on recognizing an older band, or on identifying something going on at the dso, or finding a jazz band, or catching an aging dj. it's going to happen, periodically. but, less and less...

last winter, i skipped a few things due to the cold.

this winter, i'm just not interested.

we'll see if that opens up or not.

chopin ended up on the cutting room floor.

just didn't feel right.

so, i'm listening to glass this afternoon, instead.

it's the 1998 cd with the full version of the grid.

i remember picking up the cd up in high school, and everybody in my family thinking i'd lost my mind. but, it's great for reading....

https://archive.org/details/Koyaanisqatsi

for this occasion only, i'd be ok in letting some yanks play, too.

if they can make the team.

this is what we need to do.

we'll line up at baffin ellesmere island. they can line up at franz josef.

best five out of seven; winner gets the north pole.

you have to remember that, in canada, the cold war was so frigid that we fought it on ice.

and, i'm not even that young, but that's all i really remember.

lemieux.
to gretzky.
and back to lemieux....

that franco-polish connection.

so, maybe i'll listen to chopin this afternoon.

yeah, i know gretzky is polish.

but, it's going to take more than a symphony of sorrowful songs to get me to shoot the puck in my own net, here.

don't change the topic.

if you want chopin, listen to chopin. it's a free country. i don't give a fuck.

but, don't take away my rach, dammit.

this is why we can't go to war with russia...

i will not accept cheap, second-rate, polish renditions of rachmaninov.

ever.

sorry.

we're going with some classic rach, this morning.

but, i'm not going to insult you by posting some masturbatory, bourgeois americanized version of either of these.

you gotta let the russians do rach. they do it best. it's no comparison. unfortunately, the closest you'll find to somebody doing this right, online, is some polish tart using it as an outlet for teenage angst.

hope it paid off well, at least.

we're not even at war yet, and i have to link to amazon. fuck...

i've done a lot of sleeping, recently. hopefully, i last the day.

https://www.amazon.ca/Rachmaninoff-Piano-Concerto-No/dp/B000025LJW

i'm slow to get started again today, but here i am.

i'm waiting for the guy to come to finish the last little bit of painting...

i really don't enjoy the smoke coming up from downstairs, or living life in a fog. again: i can't understand how anybody enjoys this on a daily basis. it's maybe making me understand why so many drug addicts kill themselves.

i feel like shit.

but, i have to wait until i can get things out of here before i can finish taping the walls over.

i finished august last night, and, again, it took some time, but it was the heaviest month, so far. hopefully, september is a little faster....

i want to address a silly point, just so it's written somewhere.

when i copied all of my comments off of the internet, i wasn't able to get exact dates and times for many of them, and didn't make the effort to be careful about it for others. so, as i'm reconstructing the comments, i'm making approximations as to the exact dates and exact times.

i assure you that i'm not making up new comments. i frankly have better things to do. and, i'll remind you that the point of this is actually to build the liner notes for my aleph-discs: this is a music project. but, a very keen individual could no doubt point out that certain things are not in the right order...

sure.

first - get a life.

second - i'm doing this as best as i can.

all i can do is acknowledge the defect and carry on...

there's a point a little later on where this shifts, and i make a stronger point to record the time and date as i'm archiving.

i just want to post a short explanation for people that are following the 2015 updates, here, and might be confused about what i mean when i'm talking about a streaming proxy service.

you might think i'm talking about streaming over the internet, and not understansd why that's important in trying to fix the mixer. in fact, the terminology is shared - streaming over the internet is largely the same thing as streaming over your operating system. it's more a question of who the clients are.

without getting into an undergraduate lecture on operating systems (and i'll remind you that i've completed 19.5 credits of a computer science degree at a high gpa), i'll just point out that your operating system streams almost everything, from a conceptual perspective. streaming, itself, refers to a transfer of data. all it means is that it is a continuous flow. so, your operating system will accept data from your sound card - or your video card - as a stream of data, just like your network card will accept data from your router in a stream. as you can set up network proxies, you can also set up local proxies, and the entire audio architecture of your computer almost certainly depends on this. it's the same basic thing over all over the major operating systems, but ksproxy.dll is a windows library that is very specifically audio-oriented.

so, i'm not talking about network streaming, i'm talking about how windows communicates with my sound hardware. but, if you can abstract it well enough, it's kind of the same idea as network streaming, just very, very local.

a hostile agent could absolutely take control of that audio stream and redirect it elsewhere. and, for a time, i felt that this was what was happening.

in the end, i decided that the actual problem had to do with a fluctuating magnetic field in the room and i had no option but to try to work around it rather than actually resolve it.

i'm not sure if most people would have even noticed it.

i was up a little later tonight, and am now done eating and ready to start the day.

i haven't smelled any drugs wafting up here yet tonight, so hopefully the adjustments i made yesterday afternoon are good enough to allow me to focus for the day. i've also left the cabinets open. so long as it's cold out, the cold air flowing down should both clear out the passageways a little bit and keep any smoke down there from rising up.

there are other explanations, but let's hope i've got a handle on this.

so, how am i doing?

those nose bleeds are lingering. they're not active bleeds; it's more bloody boogers. and, it's not entirely unheard of - i'm used to getting a little blood in my snot when it's dry, which it is, right now. cold or hot, what i really hate is dry air. the smoke is no doubt a factor. once i get the holes blocked off in here, that's going to need to be something i'll want to deal with. humidifier, maybe. as it is, my last brita filter died on me the other day, so i'm just drinking coffee.

the guy was supposed to come finish the work yesterday, but didn't. so, i've been stuck in the house all week. i'll be able to get out and grab some things - duct tape, steel wool, brita filter - in the morning.

i'm otherwise relatively alert. the headaches have mostly subsided, and there's only two or three places left to tape, for now.

i want to be clear: i'm feeling better because i've blocked most of the smoke. it didn't go away on it's own, i took steps to counter the problem. and i think i'm not at 100% because it's not done, yet.

i would advise that they spend their time doing something else.

there's clearly multiple people down there smoking.

but, they couldn't fit enough people in the room to overpower the cold air pushing down from 6 wide open bay windows, 24/7. and, they'd choke to death, if they were to try.

if there's any damage done to the floor, it will be from the smoke, not the temperature.

so, it's no surprise that the crackheads downstairs aren't good at physics.

i have enough of the holes patched that i'm clear-headed enough that i'm getting some work done; if i've been a little slow the last few days, it's more that i've been distracted, and partly by the need to patch holes..

so, here's how the physics with this works.

so long as it's relatively cool out, opening the window above a smoker will flush the cold air downwards. further, the smoke will escape out the window.

the end result is that i get fresh air, and they get cold. perhaps very cold. but, i can't care, so long as they're blowing smoke through the electrical fixtures in an obvious attempt to piss me off.

i'm perfectly happy to sit here in a sweater with the windows open for the next month. the air in here is clear enough, right now, and just going to clear out further, as i patch up more and more holes.

and, the more i'm annoyed the colder it will get downstairs.

that said, the maintenance person should be here today to finish sanding the bedroom, at which point i can start smoke-proofing that space and moving things in, which will let me smoke-proof the larger space, next.

i don't feel like my time is being wasted, because i have to work this out, anyways. but, it's unclear to me why they're wasting their time with such obviously childish behaviour.

but, i need to be clear: i'm right about this.

history will uphold this plight.

and, i intend to win, in the long run.