la musique gratuite.

i just discovered the most amazing site. pandora radio, 'the music genome project,' is a site where you can type in the name of a favorite band or song and the site will create a streaming radio station of that and similar artists. and it's totally free. all you have to do is register and you can maintain up to 100 different stations based on different artists. now i need to get back to to loads of work i have while listening to my nifty arcade fire station.

la technologie.

this picture showing the fanatic devotion of tween girls in new york to the band tokio hotel appeared in the new york times a couple of days ago. while the sheer joy expressed on their faces is hilarious if not slightly painful, i am more intrigued by all the cameras.

am i the only one who finds it bizarre that after the proliferation of small, affordable digital cameras and cell phones with cameras that everyone now takes pictures with the camera at arm's length? i would venture to say that even just 10 years ago people were still holding the viewfinder of analog cameras up to their eyes in order to take a picture. if not you were either severely intoxicated, doing something 'avant-garde' or just plain weird.

now i can appreciate the affordability (after the camera is bought there aren't really any costs, unless you want to print the pictures) and perfectionism inducing (why take one shot and pray it comes out after developing the film when you can take 53 shots and delete most of them on the spot?) that has come from digital photography, but i still find it very odd looking when people are taking pictures with the camera or (even odder) cell phone held feet away from their eyes.

i know there are high quality digital cameras that still have the traditional viewfinder but for all those novices and tween girls, shots at arm's length is apparently where it's at.

les élections.

un boulot.

i was just wandering around msn and found a list of the top 15 states in which one is most likely to find work. with a useless degree of art and foreign languages about to fall into my lap in several months the prospect of finding a job is looming and i can't tell you how much i want to live and work in south dakota, idaho, wyoming, nebraska or utah, and that's just the top five. maybe there's hope for me yet.

une aventure à vélo.

yesterday was one of the sunniest days i've ever seen in portland. it felt more like a fall day in tahoe with that really intense, golden afternoon sun and a very crisp, strong breeze in the air that swirls up all the dead leaves. so i thought what better way to celebrate after completely a busy monday of classes than to go for a bike ride.

i departed from my house and went up a street i rarely venture to, for what i was about to find out, good reason. i was humming along on a sometimes steep but always uphill street when i started to get into suburb hell. you know the kind with all the houses that look similar and are perfectly groomed but there are no people in sight. i had my basic directional instincts to head north and then circle back to my house. the only thing is that so many of the streets in this part of town are dead ends. i picked one that seemed to go for a long while. this long while ended up being a series of three large dips with rather steep uphills.

then i ended up circling around on tiny little streets on top of the hill. i'm sure there are great views of portland and since it was so clear, mt. hood and mt. st. helens, but there are just too many gosh darn trees up there (disclaimer: i like trees and would never harm them, unless i needed firewood). so i eventually got back to a more main street that i thought i recognized the name of, but all the names are similar up there: ridgecrest, maplecrest, laurelcrest, etc. and the grid system totally breaks down. i would pass 32nd street then somehow be around 14th. i almost thought i was in the twilight zone.

luckily one of the crest streets headed downhill in what seemed to be a never ending spiral of speed, when i ended up back at the street where i had began. all in all in was a nice ride and i was only gone for about a half hour. it's funny how slowly time passes when you don't know where you're going. i decided to illustrate my adventure below.