Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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this bitchin’ secret cave

I pledge alligiance, to whatever I like.
This morning I woke up thinking it was Wednesday. I even checked my calendar to see what I had going on. I don’t know why, I guess I’m just thinking ahead or something. Looking forward to the weekend perhaps. I kinda wish it was Wednesday.

Man, last night was a crazy dream night. I woke up with so many dreams still lingering in my head. The main one I can remember involves being naked in public places. I found that strange. I mean, I’ve heard of the classic “at school naked” dreams, but I’ve never actually had one. I this dream, I was about to take a shower – so I stripped off my boxers and started walking to the shower. Only thing was, I was at work. To make matters worse, the bathroom at work with the shower was on a different floor than I was, and I hadn’t realized it. Funny since there are no showers at work. In my dream I realized about halfway to where the shower-equipped bathroom should be that I was on the wrong floor. At that point I was stuck. At first I started looking for another bathroom to duck into, but there were none on whatever floor I was on. So I had to walk back to wherever I had come from, stark naked. I remember trying to act like it was all normal as hell, ignoring the stares from strangers. At one point I think the scene changed from work to a shopping mall – just for added humiliation I think. You know how dreams are. Anyway, I remember being all self-conscious and terrified. Strange dream.

The other dream I remember is, I think, somewhat of a revisit to a dream that’s slowly becoming a recurring one. In the only other two recurring dreams I have, the scenery is what makes them “recurring.” However, in this dream – it’s the events that happen the same, not necessarily the surroundings. I think I wrote about it before, but it involves swimming or diving underwater and discovering a hidden cave. Often I’m trying to escape from someone, or hiding from something underwater. Then I always find this bitchin’ secret cave, which in my head is kinda similar to One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship cave from the Goonies. One element of the story that never fails – there’s always a ladder leading down a small rock-chimney into the cave proper. I think the ladder and underwater/secret cave must signify something, but I dunno what.

There was even another dream, where I was living or at least staying in a trailer park. I was the friend of a woman who was in the middle of a failing marriage. I recall lying down in the room where I was staying, hearing them fight, and feeling sad. I remember seeing her in her all-black underwear, crying on a bed in the room across the hall after the fight was over. I think that’s when I left to take a shower… and it turned into the naked-at-work thing from above. Such crazy dreams, I never remember them like that. Wonder if the dream-gods are trying to communicate with me or something.

Well, off dreams and onto reality. I saw the governor on TV this morning before work, talking about the two propositions he’s got on the March ballot. Since I have no idea what either is, I wanted to check it out. On the commercial, if I understood the Austrian accent right, Arnold describes the two propositions as: One to balance the budget and stop the overspending, and one to “tear up the credit card for good.” I liked the credit card analogy at least. Anyway, from what he said in the thirty-second spot, both items sounded reasonable to me. However, being a child of the ever-mistrusting Gen X, I wanted to do a bit o’ research for myself. I found this site which summarizes the current propositions, as well as this one. I found this “yes” site for 56, as well as this “no” site. I found this “yes” site for 57 and 58, and couldn’t seem to find a “no” site. So, I started reading.

After some research, I think I figured out the following: Prop 56 eases the quorum by which a budget is passed – requiring only a 55% vote versus the current 2/3. It also sets aside money for “certain circumstances.” I’m assuming that is the equivalent of me putting extra dough into savings for “what if’s.” Also, and I like this part, if the budget isn’t balanced, the governor and legislature don’t get paid. The opposition to this one say that it also makes it too easy for the legislature to approve tax hikes without enough constituent representation. Prop 57 is getting us some near-term savings by getting what’s essentially a debt refi bond, giving us lower payments over more time (the whole time-vs.-money thing again). Prop 58 makes a balanced state budget a constitutional requirement, and limits the taking out of new bonds to solve the problem (this must be “tearing up the credit card for good”). To me, 56 and 58 sound logical, while Prop 57 sounds kinda iffy. Then again, 56 could be dangerous in that a slim majority (55%) could potentially pass bad stuff. Seems like 57 and 58 enjoy some bipartisan support (1st Google link), which is interesting.

Well, there’s an ignorant voter’s take on what these things mean. At least I feel better for looking into it, now I can vote with some knowledge. I still don’t know if I trust the websites I read… it’s times like these when I need my politico friend Kristi to walk me through the stuff, so I can get a better handle on it. Owell.

Wanna see what Anthony’s gay ass did? He made a color-coded spreadsheet to figure out who owes who what for our recent concertgoing. You can tell he made it, because I ended up owing everyone everything. Peace out y’allz. On the real.

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grooming our replacements

Lazy is good.
This week went by really fast. Guess it could have something to do with the holiday, but it was also a really busy week at work for me. I’m glad it’s over. My pre-planned weekend activities amount to nothing save mowing the lawn and doing some housecleaning, which is good – I like unplanned time better than planned. I like to be able to choose nothing as something to do, and not be tied to anything. If I’m not committed to anything, the prospect of spending a Saturday working around the house or tinkering with a web page is almost too great a temptation to resist. Also, I kinda think it’s more fun to plan things at the last minute. I like when people call up and spur-of-the-moment plans are made to meet and do something. When you look back on things, spontaneous fun events always seem to be remembered as “funner” than planned ones. I think because there’s that extra bit of “good luck” in the fact that something last-minute worked out so well. Also, I’m lazy and always like to have the “do nothing” option.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on webpages lately. If I’m not working on the t-shirt site, I’m working on the Pac Man Project pages. I’ve been concentrating on both really. I really need to update the Pac Man pages and get them on “auto pilot” so I don’t have to mess with them anymore. I guess now it’s down to a minimal amount of content that I still need to write, but the major work is in re-arrangement and making it look pretty. So, I’ve been fixing the layout and flow and making the whole site easier to navigate and read. I don’t really know why, since there’s no reason really… I guess I just like the project. For the t-shirt site, my motivation is profit. I think Shaine and I (partners in this enterprise) stand a really good chance at making some dough from that project.

I read a really interesting article in Wired magazine on the plane over to Taiwan. It was about the current state of “outsourcing” software jobs to India. While I’m not a software person, being in the high tech industry I am well aware of the outsourcing craze. While the software jobs are going to India, hardware jobs are going to China. Right now we’re on an “accelerated hiring ramp” in Shanghai, and we have yearly percentages of headcount we need to acquire there. The company line is that they’re not actually moving jobs from here to there, but “growing the workforce” to help with some global economy or something. My direct boss-man says he doesn’t buy it, and thinks they are grooming our replacements. I’m not sure how I feel, but I definitely got a whole new perspective on the issue from the Wired article.

I mean, I suppose the whole outsourcing cycle has been going on, on a more basic level, for a long time. In human history, strong people move in and exploit weak people. Eventually, the weaker people learn to be stronger, and at that point the original strong people move on to yet another weaker people and exploit them. I’m no economist, but it seems like: move in to a place, exploit a weaker economy and workforce, drop that place as soon as the weaker economy and workforce strengthen as a result of being exploited, find a new place and repeat. My job seems safe for the time being, but I can foresee a time when I may have to alter the way I think and do things to make myself more valuable than some alien dude who can do exactly what I do at a 6th of the cost. For now, I’ll just keep getting fat and living my American dream-life while they starve. What?

Well, I guess that’s it for me. Dave out.

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freezeweeding

Where my grass at?
This morning before work I was staring out of my sliding glass door into my backyard of dirt and rocks, and I got a bug in me. I mean, I was looking at the bumper crop of weeds that all the rain has brought me, and started getting really antsy to get back to work on the backyard again. I was feeling all bummed about the progress in the last few months, which amounts to nil because the weather has been against me. I think these feelings were compounded by the fact that it was a beautiful sunny morning. The kind of morning that makes me want to skip work and get some “real” work done around the house.

I succumbed the best I could without skipping work, I went outside and did some weeding. It was freezing out there pulling weeds at 7am, but it made me feel like I’d at least accomplished something regarding the house. While I was out there I came up with a little experiment too. Noticing I had some grass growing where I don’t want it, and knowing I have no grass growing in spots I do want it – I attempted my first grass-transplant. Instead of throwing out the rogue tufts of grass growing in my mulch, I deftly “planted” them in the bare areas of my sideyard (the forklift that brought the retaining wall stones ruined the grass there). We’ll see if my front-yard-Frankensteinery works or not.

Tonight I finally pushed “submit” on my taxes. I was spurred to action when I overheard one of my coworkers mention he’d already got his refund back. Hopefully with the electronic submission, the refund will get here fairly fast. And, after some more research into the whole “supplemental tax” thing from yesterday – things don’t seem quite so bad. I’ll have to pay a fraction of the amount, but not now – so that’s great news. Hopefully we can use some of the tax money to help finish the backyard. Ahh… so many things to spend money on, so little money to spend.

So then, that’s it. I have nothing else to write and I’m tired. Late entry, barely made it on Thursday at all. Until tomorrow.

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the hunter-gatherer part of my brain

...or you'll freeze to death!
Not much to report today, first day back at work after a week abroad. They recarpeted the entire floor I work on, so before I left for Taiwan I had to box up everything in my cube. Had to empty all drawers and shelves, take down all wall-hangings, pack and box and label everything in site. It was a pain. And then this morning it took me an hour to setup the thing before I could get any work done. Not exactly what I wanted to do on my first day back, but whatever. The boss man said we need new carpet, and I do what the boss man says. It is nice and springy though, but my chair doesn’t roll around as well as it used to. Owell.

I’ve been working on the website I’m doing with my old friend Shaine. We’re gonna try our hand at hawking t-shirts and other assorted gizmos online. We registered a domain and I’ve been working on the inventory database and shopping cart system. Right now I’m cautiously optimistic about the whole thing, not really sure that we’ll make money. But to put it together costs nothing, and we’ve got the merchandise, plus I love making webpages – so for me it’s a win-win. And hey, if we start to turn a profit – all the better! I think there are some good margins in t-shirts, so we’ll see what happens. I plan to have the site live by next weekend. It’d be great if I could finally turn my web-tinkering into a profit-generating enterprise. Only time will tell.

Tonight I think we’re gonna watch movie “Thirteen,” which is kind of a documentary I think. A documentary about rebellion in teenage girls, and I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story. I wanted to see it when it was at the Crest downtown, but missed it. I’m kind of bracing for a depressing reality-type look at modern teen depravity – but hoping it’s not quite as bad as Kids. I figured it’d fit well with the growing-pains-of-American-youth documentary streak I’ve been on. Speaking of visual entertainment, I was ecstatic to learn that PBS is doing another period-type “reality” series. This one’s called Pioneer Quest, and it sounds similar to their previous efforts on Frontier House. I happened upon the original season of Frontier House one day and was hooked right off. It’s speaks right to the hunter-gatherer primal fantasy part of my brain. After that I got engrossed in their England-based 1940 House series, and I apparently missed two whole other installments. I’ve got big hopes for the new series, and my TiVo is on the ready.

The Notwist show was great last night. It was my first time going to Slims, which turned out to be a rather large place – with really good acoustics. The opening band was some crazy group called Themselves that combined some very beatsy alt-rap with a kind of performance art. The rapping/vocals were completely annoying to me, mainly because they were too fast and too shrill and too nasally to comprehend, but the beats and musical accompaniment was superb. In other concert news, we recently added to our upcoming show stable with an indie thoroughbred and a scrappy up-and-comer in the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and the Stars/Dears combo. I’m really excited about both. It’ll be the third or fourth time I’ve seen Death Cab, a second for the Stars, and a highly-anticipated first for the Dears. Good times. Oh, and in further music news – Modest Mouse’s new album leaked this morning… and it is superb… just superb.

OK, I’m outta here. Gotta work on some inventory databases and ASP pages. Until tomorrow then.

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spam cometh now

I don't care, I still think it tastes good.
Listening to The Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters while I watch the streetlights snap on one by one, I’m sitting in the only lit room in my dark house. This album is perfect, a great winter album – cold and rainy. I’ve been alternating between this one and The Dears’ No Cities Left, which does OK as a winter album – but has a more “summer” tone at the core if you ask me. Both are well worth checking out, and as always I’m willing to send copies to whomever asks. The Dears are playing with the Stars sometime in the coming months, and I’ve been debating going more and more as the album latches onto my brain. We’re booked with Noise Pop and there have been rumblings about Coachella… so I’m not sure what the future concert landscape looks like right now. In the coming months, we are lucky enough to be taking in the following: The Notwist, The Unicorns, The Decemberists, Vanderslice, Pedro the Lion, The Wrens, Earlimart, and bunch of openers I’ve never heard of.

An era of sorts came to an end sometime last week. Seems like the spammers finally got ahold of my primary e-mail address. Up until now, all my efforts to keep my address off the web and out of the hands of spammers seemed to be working. Before last week I’d enjoyed three spam-free years of e-mail. I’ve always used my hotmail address for any web-related sign-up or registration, reserving my pharaohweb.com address for only direct communication with known people and places. Whenever I published my address on my websites, I always used JavaScript code to assemble the html mailto: string on the fly from substrings, so that any web-scouring robots couldn’t do a “mailto:” grep and extract it.

While my efforts seemed to have worked for a while, sometime last week my e-mail must have been sold and sold again. I’m now averaging about ten to fifteen pieces of spam per day. I’d like to thank all the webscription shops who are willing to sell me cheap herbal viagra, the online universities willing to grant me an MBA in three short weeks, the testimonials from people who lost 80lbs from some secret Egyptian mineral, and last but not least the well-represented penis-enlargement lobby, who by all means are soliciting the wrong well-hung gentleman. I’ve decided that I will send a grainy black and white photograph of my horse-sized-member to each and every one of these misguided marketeers in the hopes they will leave me alone once they realize they’re clearly barking up the wrong tree. Tree indeed.

Anyway, in an effort to combat the twenty-some pieces of spam I’ve been getting daily, I started looking for some blocker software. I’ve never really looked into it before, because I’ve never had a problem with spam. My Pop had mentioned that he just did a $20 trial of some shareware that was working great – but I’m all about freeware whenever possible. After a relatively short search I landed on Spambayes. It’s a freeware plugin for Outlook that uses Bayesian filtering to identify and trash potential spam. It builds a database and gets smarter as it goes, but I found it worked 100% of the time with little or no “training.” Plus, I like that it’s a simple Outlook plugin and not a standalone app, less overhead. So if you’re getting spammed to death, check it out – took care of my problem for sure.

That’s it for now. Remind me to write down the story of how Sharaun locked me out of the house tomorrow. Dave out.

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money and sex are all that matters

What could possibly be more offensive?!
Super Bowl was good, Janet Jackson’s teat was a surprise (link might be NSFW, and I don’t typically like Drudge, but he’s got a good article this time), but leave it up to MTV to come up with the halftime show and you’re bound to get a heaping helping of degenerate bullshit. Sometimes I wonder what the hell my kids will listen to on the radio. I’m sure that this generation’s parents thought the same thing when they heard controversial songs back in their day. But man, songs are so blunt now, just getting right down to the point that money and sex are all that matters – how much more can we debase ourselves? Following the current trend, I would guess that my kids will be listening to tunes with words much like a Penthouse Forum letter. Because really, that’s the only “next level” there is to take it to, right? Instead of clever code words or bleeps, they’ll just sing outright about clits and dicks and all manner of genitalia. I mean, how much does bleeping the word “throat” in a lyric about someone’s deep throat skills really obscure what’s being said? “…how I make a Sprite can disappear in my mouth?.” Yeah, that’s a real song.

Got plenty of sleep last night, which is a welcome change from staying up till all hours for no apparent reason. We were in bed by 10pm and it was awesome. It was one of those nights where I woke up a couple times and expected to look over at the clock to discover I only had a few more minutes of sleep, only to be shocked to see it’s only midnight. I love nights like that, where it seems like you’re sleeping for so much longer. I felt rested this morning when I woke up, but that didn’t make me want to come into work any more. I like work enough when I’m here, but it’s hard to leave in the morning, being warm and comfortable at home, imagining a day spent reading or working around the house or just being lazy. I’m tempted each day to use the “telecommuting” cover story to take a day back from the man. I don’t really ever do it, and when I have done it in the past I never make the day as productive as I’d hoped I would when I made the decision to not go in.

I watched a cool show on the Discovery, or one if the other indistinguishable “learning” channels, the other day about the NYC subway system. They went into details about how they service the cars and stuff, it was really interesting. I find the idea of a network of tunnels and trains moving the populous around really interesting. One thing they showed is what happens when a subway car is beyond maintenance and needs to be retired. The things are loaded onto a freight barge and hauled out to somewhere off the eastern coast, then dumped overboard into the ocean to become “artificial reefs.” The whole “artificial reef” concept is kinda fishy to me (ugh, excuse the pun). What I mean is, sounds like some flowery speech to take the place of “dumping trash in the ocean.” Hey, what a great idea. We don’t have to look at it if it’s in the ocean! Pile it in! I dunno, I’m admittedly ignorant on the details… but I bet we dump tons and tons of refuse in the ocean every day. I’m not trying to get all Greenpeace on your ass or anything, it was just interesting to me.

Taiwan in four days. For now, Dave out.

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falling asleep on the couch together

Marianne was waaay hotter than Ginger.
Since I’ll be walking these streets in about a week, I found this article both hilarious and relevant. I hope they get that cleaned up by the time I’m over there. I was just thinking about the amount of human engineering that it must take to get a freakin’ dead whale off the beach and strapped to a flatbed truck. If you’re like me and gave up reading that article before you reached the end, you missed the best part. Seems the Taiwanese, males in particular, are flocking to the dead whale to witness the size of it’s penis. I dunno, that sounds really odd to me. I can’t imagine calling up a buddy and being like, “Hey I’m going downtown to check out this dead whale’s huge dick, you wanna go?” Strange.

Listening the The Dears (disable your popup blocker if you get an empty page), an excellent album that perfectly suits my mood right now. I’ve been bummed this week, don’t really know what for. I feel like I’m stretched a little bit, overcommitted to things. Funny things is, the things I’m overcommitted to aren’t “work,” they’re play. The point is, I haven’t left myself anytime to sit at home and do nothing. Nothing is something which is extremely desirable to me. Usually when I get to feeling weighed down like this, I’ll “escape” to a weekend of camping or a trip to my folks’ place. But for some reason, lately I’ve felt strained.

I honestly just want to run away with my wife and leave everything behind, if only for a few days. I need some time with her. This Taiwan trip looming in the near future doesn’t make me more optimistic about that happening either. We’re both just so busy it’s hard to get any quality time together. I miss just falling asleep on the couch together, with nothing to do. Sometimes a Gilligan’s Island scenario seems awesome to me. I mean, if I had to be stranded on an island I’d sure want it to be one where I can make peddle-power do everything from laundry to mix drinks. Plus, the Globetrotters and cosmonauts would almost balance out the Most Dangerous Game hunters and crazy natives. Face it, Gilligan’s Island was awesome. Yeah, Sharaun and I, Gilligan’s Island style… bring it on.

From my journal, Nov. 13th, 1995: “I wish I had more time to do nothing. If I won the lottery I could retire and spend all my time writing every tiny detail of my incredibly mundane life down in a book or on a computer like this.” Guess I’ve been writing about that for a while now!

Dave out.