4th of July, and the less pretentious 5th.

Our 4th of July passed rather pleasingly with good company and good food. Burgers, and cake and jell-o et cetera. Can't complain - even the US independence day celebration lifted its eyes from stars and stripes to a wide sampling of national anthems, and kudos to Canadian commercial ad creativity.


John's playing music from Pandora.com in our media center.


A single powerline goes into the dim room to supply them with life support. This is our living room.

Erik and John were dressed in orange for the occation. Hmm.


5th of July breakfast. Healty. Not bad at least. Who knows

Yesterday, to sum up in brief was a nice day, though I didn't manage to get too mcuh done. Today I only partly made up for it. And tomorrow we're invited to John's work to have a little guided tour and possibly talk more about some ideas we had very late last night about socially shaping computer game experiences. I have a very loose grip on my thesis, and even less on this, but it sounds interesting. It's all a post-modernist sub-culture of cyber space for the lost generation. Just to make it perfectly clear. Maybe I'll write more about it later. Maybe not.

Who knows what the other John has thought up, getting high on tomatoes ;) He gave us a bunch of them - so Hanneke (John is probably posting some pictures) made gazpacho. It was a quite summery and good meal on the balcony, made with shiny tomatoes and Hanneke's new blender.

(Tomatoes are part of the Solanaceae family, which also includes apparently very different things like potato, tobacco and petunia. I suppose we use very different parts of the plants. This family ranges widely in toxicity and are partly psychoactive. John claims tomatoes are psychoactive at the dosage he currently consumes them, though I'm not quite sure what the immediate effects are.)

Meanwhile I've been fiddling with the PC speakers I bought. They seemed a little unstable. So I opened it, of course - thinking I could do something. And I saw a wire was loose - but I can't really do anything about that without any equipment, all I have is the knife. So after I messed around with it a little more, some other wires came undone (this is apparently some shoddy cheap labour product), so I figured I'd just reroute the cables, and pair them together without the whole volume and equalized crap, we control that from the source anyway. So I did that but the volume became way too loud. Then I tried to use the varistor from the equalizer to control the input signal strength - I desoldered the card with the grill on the balcony (highly unorthodox). Now, basically all I'm left with are two speakers who are incredibly sensitive to touch and any kind of movement, and Hanneke calls me destructive.



The latter despite the fact that I carefully repaired my slippers today with thread and needle. The thread being dental floss. With mint flavor. Good stuff for that. I'm not destructive. Just sometimes a bit deconstructive... Not the same!