Category: general

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

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one night in a hurricane

Give up, dreamer.
Wow guys, I wrote tonight. I actually wrote. I also watered the parched trees in the backyard. Last year, I finished the sprinklers in the backyard specifically so I wouldn’t have to hand-water the trees. Problem is, in finishing the pavers I had to break some of them… and I never fixed them. So now I’m back to hand-watering. One tree’s dead, one definitely hurting. The smell the water makes when it hits the sun-baked dirt just reminds me how hot it is here during the day… I don’t know where the weeds get their water…

The other day I caught a story on digg (the new version of which, looks excellent, by the way) about the Flaming Lips releasing a new album in on online-only format. The article was interesting enough, then in the comments someone said, simply, “Best modern band.” To which the next poster replied, “Actually the best band this instant is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.” Which I found hilarious enough in itself – that someone is willing to make a blanket statement that not only acts like you should already know (the “Actually…” bit), but unequivocally tells everyone who the best band is “at this instant.” At that precise moment in time, should every hearing-enabled organism in the universe attend a band-off comprised of every band in the universe, CYHSY would be the hands-down winner. Not to mention the fact that PF had barely finished penning it’s glowing review of the group, no doubt where said enlightened reader had learned of them five minutes before posting (as I did). Some of you may say this is my bitterness at people digging “my” music, hopping on that train. But no, I’m trying to make fun of this guy. Anyway, it got me thinking…

“Right now, the best band in the entire world is a band you will never hear.” That’s what I thought. Indie-elitists would be crippled by intense multiple orgasms if they heard of a brand new band that was not only completely amazing, but was also the definition of underground or little-known. That got me thinking: How could I combine both these qualities and craft the perfect indie band? Then it came to me: Create a great band, an excellent, stupendous, sublime band – that no one, aside from gushing critics, will ever hear. If you get really creative about it, you don’t even have to have a real band – since no one will ever hear them anyway. You just invent a band and start raving about them… their varied influences and emotional lyrics, their powerful musicianship and defiance of convention, and their notoriously elusive import EPs. I can almost hear the indie kids popping hard ons in their corduroys now. Eventually, someone would say they’d heard them, at a friend’s roommate’s place, on a crackly podcast of a French radio show that played the EP one night in a hurricane – something huge and mythic. People all around would know someone who heard they were about to sign, or were playing a secret gig under and assumed name down in Deep Ellum next week. Then you could say, much to the chagrin of rare 7″ seekers everywhere, that: “Right now, the best band in the entire world is a band you will never hear.” It’s genius.

Yesterday, Sharaun was watching some show on the MTV, and there was a plumply young lady running on the beach. She was talking about how she’s going to school and “studying marine biology” so she can “hopefully swim with and train dolphins one day.” I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but I think there are a lot less dolphin-training jobs out there than there are people who want to train dolphins for a living. My brother wanted to be a dolphin-trainer once… or maybe it was Shamu. Either way, I remember we used to make fun of him for having a new passion each week. For a while, he had a hand-drawn picture on notebook paper, tacked to his bedroom door, that said something like “Shamu Riders Only” on it. The next week, it was Bigfoot flying through the air, complete with a debris trail in classic sfumato, its huge knobby tires inches from coming down on a crudely illustrated burning schoolbus and it read “Monster Truck Drivers Only.” Monster trucks gave way to fireworks-making, which waned right as Civil War Reenactor waxed. Man did we give him a hard time about that. But it’s good though, shows he had interests, shows he had goals – even if they were ever-changing.

Really though, at some point in life, who didn’t think it would be cool to be a professional Shamu rider? There’s a difference though, between that and majoring in marine biology with hopes of riding dolphins. I’m not sure, but I just don’t think there is a big market for dolphin-riders. Just like majoring in hospitality in hopes of scoring one of those Travel Channel gigs where you fly around the world and review posh hotels… I can’t say for sure, but it’s probably not going to happen. And kids, I’m not telling you not to chase your dreams – maybe just make them a bit more attainable, eh? If there’s only one guy in the world who’s job it is to test the satisfaction-index of different condoms with different women – there’s likely a large line of prospective replacement candidates. Just count the Shamus in the world, then count the number of people who ride those Shamus on a weekly basis, and figure in the Shamu-rider turnover. Yeah… not lookin’ as real as it was before right? On the other hand, there must be hundreds of Bigfoots… and I’m pretty sure those guys don’t really need degrees…

Mmmm… finished early tonight, 9pm. Calling it good and putting it on autopilot. ‘Night.

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the ghost of blogging future

Hehe.
After dinner tonight (Manwiches™, which were freakin’ awesome), I feel asleep hard on the couch. I mean, I fell out. Woke up to my cellphone ringing, but didn’t feel like answering it when the caller ID said it was work. I dunno… lately… there’ve been things going on that I haven’t really been writing about, for one reason or another I just haven’t. Soon though, I can talk about some stuff that’s been going on – work-related and not, and maybe that’ll shake the doldrums of recent entries. I want to write about stuff, but better judgment tells me to keep things under wraps until I feel a little more comfortable. Don’t worry, nothing too earth-shattering… I’ll still be writing for the foreseeable future. Because, I know someone somewhere was worried about that… yeah.

I wanted to try and get to bed early tonight, break the chain of too-late nights and reluctant getting-out-of-beds in the morning. But it’s nearing 11pm now and I still have to logon and send a few last minute mails for early meetings in non-US timezones. Sharaun’s monopolizing the laptop watching the downloaded season one of Lost, so I have to wait until she’s done with the current episode. I haven’t been fixating much on it, but I’m booking my next round of travel tomorrow. Shanghai in two weeks, Taiwan in September. It will be my first time in Shanghai, so I’m excited about that. I try to rattle off the “plus” side of the pro/con worksheet: skymiles, career-beneficial, travel, company-funded, etc… but I still find myself alternating between reluctance and reservation… neither of which is really that desirable. Whatever, at least it’ll give me something to write about – instead of the same old: “I’m traveling again, kinda want to, kinda don’t,” crap.

Dudes… I am just one referral away from a free iPod, so if someone’s feeling charitable – click here, sign up for one of the crazy offers (I chose the ancestry.com one, but now they’ve got a subscription to Maxim one), let the free period almost expire, then call to cancel. If you find it in your heart to do this, I get a free iPod. Not the 200GB one which I need and Apple doesn’t make yet, but at least a stop-gap for the time being. C’mon, help a brother out – it’s legit.

And, I guess it’s been done to death now, but Arturo’s got his pictures up from our Point Reyes hike as well.

Goodnight.

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here and there

It looked so much greener in the store.
Today I’ve got links! Haven’t had them in a while…

Saturday, I woke up early just so I could have more time to do nothing. ‘Round about noon, Sharaun suggested we paint a room. Sounded good to me, we’ve lived here three years now and have barely managed to hang a picture let alone paint. We moved furniture, covered carpet, and along with seemingly 7000 other folks, headed to Home Depot for supplies. After some discussion, we decided on a greenish-yellow, it looked nice on the little paper sample thingy… young, bright, and kinda funky. Happy, we gathered our newly acquired gear and headed home to dive in. Thing is… the more we painted, the more yellow our chosen green-yellow paint started to look. In the sun, it was downright Big Bird eating bananas in a taxi. Of course, Sharaun began to freak out and I started thinking about having to re-paint everything we’d just done. Still afraid, we finished the room and decided to sleep on it. Sunday we called over an artistic/style-minded friend to “validate” the color choice, and we are (thus far) sticking with it…

I caught a bit of the first Harry Potter on TV on Sunday, and it was at my favorite scene – Halloween in the school’s big common/eating room. Y’know, the part where there are hundreds of jack-o-lanterns floating in the air, all with evil smiles and eyes glowing bright orange? Made me think of Halloween, and how it’d be cool to do something similar as decoration in the house this year. I was thinking of getting several of those (not very cheap) foam jack-o-lanterns you can buy at the crafts store and outfitting each of them with one of those orange-tinted stick-up push lights from the dollar store, then I could suspend them from the ceiling with fishing line for that “floaty” look. Speaking of Halloween, I’ve decided on the implementation for this year’s big prop – you can read about it here. The motor-driven version appeals more to me than the many pneumatic variations out there – since I have at least a cursory understanding of small motors. I’ve also decided to remake the graveyard fence into something fancier, ala this guy’s, since mine is really starting to show it’s age and is falling apart.

Somehow, on Sunday, I started thinking about the old cross-country telegraph systems erected in the late 1800s. That’s how I stumbled across this page, showing how to build a dead-simple telegraph sender/sounder combo from everyday parts. For some reason, having this kind of knowledge in my head pleases me. That, and how to build a log-cabin… for some reason these are things I think I should know. Just in case I ever have to build a post nuclear-annihilation log-cabin settlement and want to be able to communicate with my neighbors via telegraph. It could happen.

Before I go, don’t know if you guys read that this killer/kidnapper guy who murdered an entire family an abducted two kids, one of which he later killed and one who is now safe, kept a blog online for several years. I’ve read some of it, and found it more interesting than I probably would have were there not the context. You can read some of the older entries on the wayback machine, the blogspot archive links on these pages work through late 2004. For the most recent entries, the last being a mere two days before the events described above, you can look at the blogspot archives here.

Also, Pat’s got his pictures from the Point Reyes hike up, and they are decidedly better than Ben’s because they show not only the solemn beauty of the trip but also the full level of debauchery achieved. My theory? Pat has balls, where Ben has none. Enjoy them, if you’re into that kinda thing.

Until whenever.

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skipping lunch

From the lofty loft.
Sitting here squirming around because I have to pee, but I’m not getting up. It’s lunchtime now, but I decided to eat a rather hearty breakfast this morning and don’t feel like eating. So I’ll write instead. It’s one of those days where I feel like I can’t get to anything on my “list” because new things keep coming out of the woodwork. I’m trying hard to get to Smaug’s mountain, but I keep having to deal with spiders and trolls and goblins that pop up unannounced. It’s one of those situations where I end up just staring at the monitor, not sure which e-mail to answer, which phone call to make, what should come first. When I get stuck like that, I do one of two things: Get really serious and start hacking wherever it’s easiest, or bail for a while to clear my head. I think this “lunch break” is my head-clearing bailout.

Went outside to take out the trash tonight and discovered it was plenty cool to open up and let the breeze in. One thing I like about Northern CA’s treacherous 100+ days is the fact that it (usually) cools off enough at night to open the windows and get some fresh air. Right now the cat’s perched on the sill watching what cat’s watch through open windows. Being closer to the outside, perhaps… that fabled place beyond her daily walls. Kind of like me at work, choosing to have meetings in the “breezeway,” where you can see the sun and watch the leaves move in the wind. Not the sanitized wind of air conditioning blowing through the aisles of cubicles, but real, honest-to-goodness fresh air – the kind our ancestor’s ancestors once breathed when they worked the land. You can make good money being a mechanic, right?

Gaw… sometimes I look back over crap I wrote and wanna just delete it all. What’s that BS above about cats and walls and stuff? Was I high? Did I really think I could pull that crap off? One thing’s for sure, I have absolutely nothing to write about. I’d actually rather just call it a night and be happy with what little I’ve managed to get down.

But before I go – you can check out some snaps of the past weekend’s activities over at Ben’s place, so do it.

‘Night.

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gettin’ out of town

I dunno... somehow I got from minestrone to this... go figure.
Half-day at work tomorrow, haven’t really told anyone – just gonna sneak out. Hope to be putting road behind us by noon, speeding along the nine-ish hour journey from the kiln-hot weather of Northern California to the will-it-or-won’t-it rain toady clouded uncertainty of Northern Oregon. Already tonight I feel better for getting off my ass and finally beginning to tackle some of the domestic duties that my laziness has been roadblocking. I got the dishes done, and am only typing now as a “pause” between vacuuming and sweeping then mopping the kitchen. Still need to pack up and stow the camping gear, that’s to-be-done, oh and unpack the suitcase from NYC – just shy of a week from returning. The goal is to return to something that’s not an insurmountable disaster but a maintainable tidiness. And I’m only writing now in between tasks, to let the sweat settle.

I’m always late paying my bill to the city, y’know, the one for water, sewer, and trash service. It’s forever one month in arrears. The way I figure it, it’s not my fault. They only accept the most outmoded form of payment: the once viable now laughably analog personal check sent through the stone-age holdover that is the US Postal Service. I can’t be held responsible if I’m expected to collect my mail in a timely manner, open it, comprehend it, and then reply with some scrap of paper that I have to write on with my hand. C’mon folks, gimme something I can log-on to, something I can click through, whatever verb I use to pay this bill I want to it to have an ‘e’ and a hyphen preceding it. For God’s sake I learned to write a check in the mandatory “Family Life” class they made us take in 9th grade, and they were already out of style then. Get with the times, get hip, save yourself the processing costs. You are the sole bill I can’t auto-pay online. So anyway, tonight I paid it… some $200 of back-owed fees. It’s a wonder the nice garbage men still collect at our curb and we get fresh water when we turn the tap.

New music, let’s see… what am I listening to? As I mentioned yesterday, this Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! album is great. Funny thing is, I checked their webpage – and their most recent show was with a band called Dirty on Purpose, which I immediately recognized as a name I’d seen before. Turns out Ben’s bro’s band, the also-Brooklyn-based Autodrone, has played with Dirty on Purpose several times in the past. While doing this research, I learned that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! played a show in NYC this past Monday – the very day I was in NYC bumming around with nothing to do. That Knitting Factory must be a popular place, I see Autodrone and Dirty On Purpose have also played together there before, and apparently the ‘drone were set to play there this weekend before the avocado incident. Hindsight is 20-20 y’all. Anyway, back to the Clap (chuckle) – you have to, must, just gotta check out this track (Flash required). In other tunes, I also grabbed the couple new tracks from the post-Unicorns outfit, the Islands, since PF tipped me off. Not bad.

Hey. I just realized I never ate dinner. I mean, I had several handfuls of Wheat Thins around 6pm, but… that’s not really dinner. Man, I love some Wheat Thins. But now I’m sitting here and it’s 11:30 and on TV Barney is talking about mozzarella pizza in Mayberry… and I’m hungry, I want some food. The smart man would ignore this and go to bed – sleep is a sure-fire cure for hunger. But me, I’m rummaging through the pantry… considering a can of Minestrone soup… or maybe some Rice-A-Roni. I think I’ve settled on the Minestrone, Sharaun’s reminding me, “It’s eleven-thirty at night baby,” yeah… I know. I’m hungry.

Independence Day holiday in the USA this weekend, don’t expect posts Monday or Tuesday, if the come they will be unexpected.

Goodnight.

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a place to sleep

Good for the skin.
Man… just woke up from a hardcore nap, it’s about 9:30pm. Fell asleep on the couch watching TV, that damn flickerbox robbed me of another evening of productivity. I had big plans: unpack from New York, because my suitcase is still sitting on the bedroom floor; repack the camping equipment from this weekend, as it’s still piled in the garage from when I aired it out after returning; start picking up around the house, as it’s still littered with debris from the bridal shower and party Sharaun had here more than a week ago; I would’ve even settled for just doing the dishes from this evening’s meal. But man, I’m so out of practice with the regular chores that I’m really letting them slip. I feel like I’m all out of continuity or something. I set my alarm for an hour early on Monday, thinking I’d get up early and do some tidying before work – but of course I snoozed that entire thing away. Anyday now, I’m ready to get back into my routine…

When I was in the second grade, our teacher had a small squarish picture-book dealing with “hobby sports.” It had full-page action shots of people doing different things, with the title of the activity at the bottom of the page. There were pages for skiing, skydiving, surfing, boating, etc. I can remember looking at the book and flipping the pages. One of the pages seemed a little thick, too thick to be one page. Upon closer inspection I discovered that it really wasn’t a single page, but two pages that were somehow stuck together. Being curious, I carefully tried to pry apart the stuck pages. Turns out the were stuck together purposely, by our teacher, because one of the now hidden pictures portrayed the sport of “skin diving.” With the pages torn apart, I could make out the nude forms of a male and female diver. (Is it proper to have my pluralized “forms” be mated with the singular “diver” in that sentence?) At this point, I either began showing this to other kids, or Mrs. Kline spotted me – either way I was found out. I can remember her lecturing me for “ruining” her book. I think that’s kind of unfair. You glue two pages of a book together and expect inquisitive second-graders not to pry them apart in curiosity. How about cutting out the offending page, or not using the book at all – it was probably 15 pages max anyway.

Got a call from my little bro over the weekend. He’s busy making all the preparations for his tour in Iraq come December. His unit finally got their orders the other day, and they will be stationed at Camp Liberty (Camp Al-Tahreer in Arabic, and also formerly known as Camp Victory). Camp Victory is “… one of the largest US overseas posts built since the Vietnam War, [and] … lies northeast of Baghdad International Airport…” It is planned to be able to accommodate 14,000 troops at capacity. For a long time, my brother telling me he was going to Iraq was pretty much just that – nothing too scary. But hearing him tell me where he’d been ordered, and how he’s making preparations to send his wife home to her folks while he’s away made me really think about it. I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of fear for his wellbeing, I feel like he can handle himself and that the odds are with him… but all the same I wish he wasn’t going. I can’t imagine how it’d feel on the eve of leaving all the things I know and love for a year. Bugs me.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to our upcoming high school reunion next month, I’ve been dreading it nearly as much because tickets to FL are running between $500 and $600 per-person right now. Considering we’re only going to be there for a couple days since Sharaun’s scheduling around work, it was just hard for me to justify dropping more than a grand on the trip. So today, out of desperation, I started reviewing my various airline miles. Turns out, that we could fly for about $240 if we’d be willing to each fly a different airline. I called Sharaun, presented the ~$800 savings scenario to her, and she was down. So, I’m on United and she’s on Continental – but at least I was able to score pretty similar flight times so we’re not too disparate. Yeah, it sucks – but we already shelled out a hundred or so just for the reunion festivities… I am really looking forward to it, despite my lamentation. More importantly, it’s another trip to the airport and some more quality time on an airplane!

Need to make reservations for my trip to Shanghai, apparently I’m needed the 1st week of August. Also wouldn’t hurt to book travel for the (now two-week) September Taiwan trip. I’ve never been to Shanghai, so I’m looking forward to it – since I’ll know some folks in town who can show me around. Taiwan is Taiwan, we don’t need to go into that again until the time comes. I brought some work home tonight, y’know, to work on; never got to it.

Oh, and Wes is right about McD’s, I had already forgotten the whole McRib incident… a textbook example of repression. Goodnight.

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where’s paris?

Greetings from early America.
The Big Apple; I knew I’d arrived when it cost me $45 and took an entire episode of Lost to get from JFK to Manhattan. Getting in under cover of dark last night, I got a decent view of Manhattan skyline while crossing the bridge – but I’m so unfamiliar with the layout of this city that I didn’t know where to look for anything. The hotel, like many hotels it seems, is insanely posh on the outside – the lobby lush with giltwork and marble, brass fixtures and fountains, etc. But the insides are likely the same insides that were built on day-one – chinked and dirty baseboards, funny-smelling behemoths of air conditioning units, and worst of all no in-room broadband aside from the citywide pay-as-you-go access I can pickup in the room (thankfully). In this day and age I don’t understand how a hotel that caters to a business crowd gets away without having high-speed access, it seems unthinkable… Maybe I’m spoiled by the Sherwood, the measuring stick to which I hold all hotels to.

Getting up at 6am here is hard for my I-know-it’s-really-3am sleeping habits, and I found myself snoozing the alarm for forty some-odd minutes, all the while telling myself I’d padded the wake-up time anyway. One interesting thing about this trip – I probably have less of an idea what I’m actually going to be doing here than any other trip I’ve been on in recent times. I mean, I know I’m presenting at some point – but I just received the material last night; and I know I’m standing on the conference floor flogging product. It’s the logistics of it all that’s got me wondering. I don’t know when the thing starts (I did read that 8am today is when we can 1st access the conference area to setup), what the running times are, when I’m presenting, etc. Heck, they didn’t even have my reservation in the system when I arrived last night – I’m lucky I even got a room here. But… in the end, things worked out. I flopped into this ratty old office chair around 11pm last night and promptly ordered a sammich from room service while firing up the wireless radio in search of a signal. Watched a couple more downloaded episodes of Lost (yes, I am hopelessly addicted), and called it a night.

Oh, and I was totally pumped to learn that the San Francisco to JFK United flights have AC outlets in all their seats, even economy. I plugged in mid-flight and was able to run the laptop the entire time (of course, continuing to tear through season one of that damn addictive show). Seeing how impressed I was by the power, the attendant told me that all their planes had also been wired for wireless access – and we’re simply awaiting the FAA’s nod of approval to “flip the switch” and turn it on. How cool is that? I really don’t think it will be long before the internet is as ubiquitous as radio is today, and you’re able to pick up a signal just about anywhere and get online. My kids will laugh when I tell them that we used to have to plug our computers into the wall to get online – how antiquated – like having to get up and “flip” a record or tape to listen to “Side B.”

It’s 8am here now, which is when I wanted to be walking downstairs. I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to set up, in case the show happens to start at 10am or something. I think, I think I remember hearing somewhere along the lines that this thing doesn’t officially “kick off” until tomorrow – and operating under that very sketchy info I opted not to shave this morning, figuring it for a preparation day only. I truly hope this is so. I would like nothing more than to be able to head downstairs now, be setup and configured in a couple hours, and then have the rest of the day to tour the city. Otherwise, I’ll be headed back up to the room for a shave and change of clothes before being thrown into the fire.

And well, now it’s time to head out. Glad I could manage an entry today, the outlook was grim around 1am last night when I was too tired to write. See ya.