dcm‘s post about top 2002 albums
got me thinking about my favorite albums of the year.

Unfortunately, off hand not much comes to mind. I seem to
have bought very few albums that actually came out in
2002.

I got the new Trans Am, but didn’t really like it. The couple
of new bands I saw live that I liked had old cd’s (Volta Del
Mar, Shadow of A Great Name, Golden, Milemarker, Masserati,
Need New Body, etc) or no album at all (Dynamite Brothers,
All Astronauts, Baamph,

The new Lake Trout is pretty good, but I’ve been slack and haven’t
actually bought it yet. King Crimson’s “Be Happy with what you
have to be happy with” isnt bad, but not really an album either.

Ugh. I don’t appear to have really liked a new album I bought
this year.

That does it. I’m officially old. And out of touch.

Hmm, not even one comment on the last post? Oh well.

Uneventful weekend. And for that matter, christmas break.
Picked up a handful of books and a couple cd’s. ie,

The Story of Writing, Godel, Escher, Bach, Introducing Semiotics, and
another random escher book. I suspect I will never make it more than
a few pages, or a few chapters at most into “Godel, Escher, Bach” but
what the heck.

Perhaps I’ll actually remember to take home some of the books I’ve been
meaning to clear off my desk for about a year or so. Afterall, my copy
of Basic Computer Games hasn’t proven very useful
at work.

Did many things on New Years that I typically don’t do. Woke up
late and sat around for my birthday. Finished the below doodle.

Big one. Thumbnail isn’t so hot, so follow the link.

Idea for a logo/graphic/whatever for Japan Air
thats been in my brain for a while. Finally sat down and got it on paper.

The outline is “borrowed”, the rest is mine.

Home from visiting relatives at christmas.

Got a Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer for christmas. Seems to work
rather well, even under linux. Somewhat of a pain under 7.3 though,
as it requires CUPS, which isn’t installed/configured by default. Two
bad test pages and 30 minutes later it was printing out nice photos
though. I seem to actually have a working printer and scanner under
linux at the moment (scanner is a epson perfection 1650, which
seems to just work under 7.3 and 8.0). who would of thought?

Apprently my amazon wishlist confused the inlaws. Created after
hearing from about 6 people that I’m the hardest person they
know to buy for. Either that means I’m weird, or I’m boring. My
bet is on both. The James Randi and Edward Tufte books
seemed to have been the main culprit. I ended up with
a Mystery Men dvd (hey, at least it was on the list…)

In the midst of shopping for others, I managed to pick up
two M.C. Escher oriented books. The first being
Designing
Tessellations. Not a book about Escher, but includes many many
references to. In some ways, it’s a quilting[1] book as much as
any thing else. Also “Impossible Worlds” a collection of 4 books
on Escher and similar artists by Bruno Ernst. Guess I’m just in
kind of a artsy mood recently.

[1] Of all the folky/crafty/americana/etc forms out there, the
weirder end of the quiliting folks are always the ones that
impress me the most.