Category: lil’ chino

the coming spawn

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major player in the cowboy scene


Summer’s here, and our social calendar is filling up appropriately. The weather here has taken a turn for the hot, as it always does ’bout this time of year. Air conditioning has to be one of humankind’s greatest achievements – right up there with flush toilets, beer, and the space shuttle. This entry started out as a “one liners” entry, but a few of them developed into more complete thoughts. So, here are some mostly one, and occasionally many more than one, liners for your enjoyment.

Saw a terrible car accident Thursday morning right in front of work. I arrived on the scene just after it’d happened and no rescue vehicles had yet arrived, but it was clear to me that the driver of one of the vehicles had either been badly injured or killed. Seeing something like that makes me immediately think of my family, and makes my stomach all queasy. Eerily enough, just as I eased through the intersection the song on the Sunset Rubdown LP said, “There are things that have to die, so other things can stay alive.” Creepy.

Why do you think humans, males in particular, get so excited over more exotic methods of cooking meat? You know what I mean? How males love a good pig-burying, or are willing to wake up at 5am to put a pork shoulder on the smoker. Must be some kind of distant connection we feel with our kill-to-survive ancestors.

I keep getting all these spam mails urging me to join a site called BlackSingles.com. Do I pull off blackness that convincingly?

Driving to work the other day and watching the sprinklers water public, or city-maintained, grass. Were you the pilfering type, you’d never have to buy a lawnmower-ruined sprinklerhead at home depot. Just head to the public park and fill your pockets.

I wonder a lot about, should there be a world-altering event that left only a few alive, what modern technologies and items I could recreate from my working understanding of them. Which of humankind’s greatest inventions and innovations do I have a good enough grasp on that I could actually re-invent or re-innovate them? Even with the help of other survivors, if the population was vastly depleted – I’m willing to bet that some technologies and items would be lost forever.

Remember when I talked about reading that article about how men get dumber as fathers, while women get smarter? I think this is based on the same research, but it’s a lot less negative to us dads.

My first Father’s Day was nice, not a lot of fanfare, but nice. In celebration, I uploaded week fifteen’s pictures to the ongoing set in Keaton’s gallery. Check them out and try not to smile to yourself at how dang cute she is.

I love my iPod, can’t hardly think how I used to get along without it. But, some things it does do piss me off:

  • Sometimes it gets freaked out when 1st powered on and playing the initial tune, inserting music-less gaps in playback during what sounds like hard drive spinup or processing time.
  • Sometimes it refuses to turn off via holding down the play/pause button, instead only responds to a hard reset.
  • Sometimes it indicates it’s playing a song, yet the progress indicator does not move and no song is actually played. Pressing play/pause, switching songs, or even jogging to the middle of the track all fail to “revive” this “false playback,” and only a hard reset remedies the issue.
  • Sometimes it takes up to ~20sec to display artwork once a song is played, especially if the thing has just powered on and it’s the first song you’re listening to.
  • Occasionally it skips tracks altogether when in “shuffle songs” mode. A track will flash up as the next shuffled song to be played, and then quickly give way to the next track in the shuffle without ever playing. Maybe there’s an algorithm that enforces a minimum gap between shuffled tracks, and if a song takes too long to seek on the physical disk – it’s skipped and the shuffle marches on? Maybe, but it’s still annoying. Particularly when the song that you’re teased with is a good one.
  • Pressing play/pause after the thing’s been idle only “wakes” it up – you have to press it twice to actually get a song to play.

I found this photo-narrative of a trip into North Korea to be really interesting, maybe you will too.

Setup a TiVo season pass to record the recent VH1 documentary series, “The Drug Years.” Chronicling the history of drugs and their use in the US, the series is extremely interesting. After watching the segment on the cocaine heyday of the late ’70s, I told Sharaun how it almost made me want to run a couple bumps. Turns out that was a mistake, and I spent the next ten minutes explaining how I didn’t really want to try coke.

Drugs have always been enticing to me. Ever since my middle school years, when I adopted musicians three generations my senior as my idols, I became bound and determined to emulate them and try marijuana. Later in life, after I’d satisfied my curiosity and given up recreational toking, I became interested in the more academic aspects of drug use: How drugs have impacted human cultural and spiritual development, how they were used by people throughout history, etc. Reading about shamans using entheogens to experience spiritual nirvana, and the ability to experience concepts like “ego death” almost make me want go out and have my own psychedelic personality-melting experience.

You can do it, you know. There are several highly-potent natural and laboratory-synthesized psychedelic substances sold online by legitimate purveyors. You can hitup so-called “research chemical” shops and purchase any number of yet-to-be strictly controlled designer drugs. At your fingertips are powerful psychedelics like the multitude of phenethylamine variants or 5-meO-AMT/DMT. All of which, and much more, can shipped to your doorstep with nothing but a web browser and a credit card. If you’re not into synthetics, you can go with something natural that has a long history of human use by surfing on to any decent online headshop to purchase a vial of salvia extract or other entheogenic plant-derivative. Point is, there are a number of ways one could experiment with psychedelic mind-altering substances and stay within the law.

Well… the letter of the law, at least… if you don’t count that pesky Federal Analog Act. Actually, I better stop writing about this before I start placing orders and soliciting “sitters.”

Lotta content, if you skipped some – go back, it’s all gold. Goodnight.

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just us


I really don’t have much to write tonight. Spent a good bit of time today working on a more “artsy” blog entry which’ll likely show up sometime next week (as it’s code-complex). Problem is, I blew most of my inspiration working on that, and not I’m not much in the mood to hammer something out for Monday. But, I shall press on… for you, dear friends; for you.

Saturday it was just Keaton and me, just us. I put her in her my favorite dress (not my favorite dress, mind you, but my favorite dress of hers), slid a yellow bow around her head, and we set out on a daddy-daughter trip to the local chili cookoff. I’m not going to lie, I “cruised” up and down the street, past the same chili booths over and over, just so new passers-by could peek into her stroller and stop me to fawn over her. I stood with glee, smile beaming broad across my face, as a man from whom I’d just taken a sample cup of chili told me, repeatedly, “You have a beautiful daughter.” I act shy, pretending to shuffle my feet and direct my eyes to the ground as a woman tells me, “She looks like a Hawaiian princess,” but I’m not shy – I’m eating it up, loving every compliment. And Keaton, she’s hamming it up like she knows she has a captive audience. Smiling, trying to fit her entire fist into her mouth, and making cute baby sounds for her patrons. Having a day alone with her, taking her out and spending time together… I had the best time.

Sunday I did a repeat performance, manning the mommy helm while Robin and Sharaun did a wine tour in Napa Valley. Although she wasn’t as sunshine-and-roses as Saturday, she did manage to enjoy some time at a World Cup party at Ben and Suzy’s place. After that, we headed home and fell asleep together on the couch while the iPod shuffled away. It was a good weekend for daddy-daughter bonding. And, in keeping with my Sunday night schedule, I did manage to post some pictures to Keaton’s gallery – it’s not much, but they’re there. Check them out here.

I’m getting one of those “underground” zits on my nose, those really painful kind that never even turn into a real zit – I hate those. Goodnight.

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elephant’s memory


Hooray for Monday… Back from a weekend of camping with friends and family. My brother’s time in town ends today as he heads north to see my folks for a while, was good having him here and I’m glad he got to meet Keaton. We took camping-with-baby to the next level this weekend by pulling off a two-day trip. Keaton took to it fine, but then she is an infant and is relatively easygoing regardless of her surroundings. I was happy, however, that we were still able to enjoy some commune with nature and campfire and tent – despite now being laden with child. For those of you who like pictures, I’ve added two new galleries to the media page: check out the camping trip here, then wash those down with my week twelve update to Keaton’s gallery.

The other night I had the strangest dream. It was now, and by that I mean Sharaun and I were married and had a little baby girl named Keaton who we fawned over incessantly. In the dream, I was going through my normal daily motions: holding the baby, changing the baby, staring at the baby, talking about the baby… y’know, all things baby. Then, out of the blue, I had a realization: Sharaun and I had another child, prior to Keaton, a little boy – and we’d forgotten all about him. I rushed back to the bedroom and there he was, sitting there all alone, unloved and forgotten. My heart broke as I instantly remembered loving that boy as much as I had been loving Keaton just minutes ago, I remembered Sharaun and I showering him with attention and staring at him, transfixed by his every expression. But we’d forgotten all about him, I hadn’t even remembered we had him – and I felt awful. What a dream, eh? Wonder what the heck that means…

Goodnight friends, the pictures will make up for the rest.

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or write poetry


Thursday night mofos! Tomorrow I’m attempting to head out of work a bit early to head for the hills and begin our two-day camping trip. Keaton’s 1st multiple-day outdoor experience, I’m pumped. Sitting here watching the TiVo’d finale of the National Spelling Bee, which I’ve been hooked on ever since the year I caught the possessed Rebecca Sealfon on take the crown on ESPN. Now it’s moved to prime-time on ABC and it’s all glitz and glamour, and I love it to death.

Things are work right now are so “maybe, maybe not” that I find my strictly logical mind floundering amidst all the ambiguity. I’m OK at making contingency plans, any good engineer knows that’s key – but making a multi-headed hydra of contingencies and outcomes, each relying on each other to form some twisted, writhing, tangled knot of possibilities is something I don’t enjoy doing. When each action relies on three other actions which all may or may not happen, each with their own “likelihood probability”, my brain immediately tells me, “This is stupid! Something bigger is wrong here if you have to ‘plan’ like this! Stop now and go back to stone-one, figure out where the grand eff-up was and fix it.” Thing is, I think my brain is right. If your “plans” start to sound like the horoscopes in a women’s magazine, where you can interpret them however you want and they say nothing of substance, you’ve got more fundamental problems than just too many variables. In that case the basis of your plans, or your planners, or maybe even your motivations and goals are faulty.

The 411 on your project today…
Embrace the program you’re working on, honesty sparks even more happiness. You’ll have to guard against saying too much today, especially if you get into a conflict with a friend, your guy, or someone you have to work with one-on-one. Avoid the urge to be like Donald Trump. Swallow any tendencies toward pomposity or ambition. Instead, sit around eating ice cream and talking to your friends, invent a new project – or write poetry. This program is full of turbo-charged energy and sweetness, so just ignore any trash-talk you may hear in homeroom. Relax! Remain open to the possibility that a combination of self-sufficiency and outside assistance could work for you.

It’s been far too long since I reviewed some of the better search engine phrases that’ve led folks to this blog. Let’s check some out and try to respond to them where appropriate, shall we?

  • how to keep a mantis prawn as pet
    Easy: Don’t.

  • rebel flag bathing suits
    … look great at Klan rallies?

  • nobody like stevie ray vaughn
    I disagree.

  • origin of the phrase “dry hump”
    Actually, I invented it. It, and all kinds of humping.

  • home remedies for singed hair
    “Remedies?”

  • I think my girlfriend is scamming me
    And the internet is definitely the right place to confirm it.

  • i deserve a beer
    Yes; yes I do.

  • i hate itunes
    Yes; yes I do.

  • forgot moms birthday
    Shamefully, so have I.

Before I go, chew on this: I took the 4,000 spams screenshot on yesterday’s blog at 8:30am on May 31st (according to the file creation time). At that time Akismet had trapped 35,471 comment spams during the time it’d been installed on my blog. Tonight, at 9:12pm on June 1st, a mere ~36hrs later, Akismet has blocked a total of 42,373 comment spams. That means that over span of not even two days, my site was hit with 7,000 spams. At this pace, it’s looking like the 5,000 spams a day record might be less of a “high water mark” and more of the new normal. Praise to Akismet for blocking all but one or two pieces which I’ve had to manually filter.

Goodnight and good-weekend to you, biatches.

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how not to ride a bike


Welcome to my Tuesday night folks. Wanted to get a haircut on the way home from work, but the place looked packed to the gills on a driveby so I opted out. Figured I’d mow the lawn instead, but Sharaun had dinner ready nearly as soon as I got home. Boo-hoo, I had to instead sit on the couch and spend my time uploading pictures to the internet for your viewing pleasure. For those of you who are picture-whores, I’ve uploaded the latest batch of pictures to Keaton’s gallery. And then, as an added bonus, once you’re done marveling at the cuteness of our daughter – I’ve finally completed (or, made current, rather) the huge gallery dedicated to the three-year long project that is our backyard. From breaking ground to yesterday, all in photos – waste some time and watch it change at the backyard gallery.

When I was a kid, I had a book called The Bike Lesson, featuring the Berenstain Bears. The story followed Junior Bear getting a new bicycle, and Papa Bear attempting to teach him all the important lessons he’d need in order to safely enjoy it. Only thing was, Papa Bear made for an awful example. He ran over big rocks, rode off a cliff, even ended up in a tree. Because he was so terrible, he ended up turning most of his lessons for Junior into “how not tos” instead of his intended “how tos.” That’s what I feel like my program at work is like right now: How not to run a program. Everything that could possibly go wrong on a program has gone wrong, and the morale of the larger support team is suffering as a consequence. I’m not talking random, act-of-God, type things going wrong – I’m talking about shortsighted people making stupid decisions and classic planning and execution missteps. It’s so frustrating to be at the helm of a floundering ship, to have to stand there and proclaim “all is well” while you’re secretly wishing the whole damn thing would just go under.

Sharaun and I have decided that we are going to have our annual Halloween party this year. Keaton will spend a few hours with a babysitter. We actually debated this quite a bit, as my first tendency was to feel selfish and guilty wanting to be able to have the party as usual – but the more we talked about it the less negative I felt. She’d only be away for a few hours, and in capable hands, and dad would get to show off his new prop (an animatronic scary scarecrow, as I’ve already decided). We’ve also got a family-themed costume idea, although Keaton likely won’t be around to show it off by the time people start arriving. I’ve always wanted to strike a balance between being a protective, involved parent and one who’s not obsessive about never being away from their child and can’t enjoy their adult-time. It’s amazing though, how much you don’t want to be away from them… part of the plan, I suppose.

Goodnight folks, the media makes up for the lack of writing, OK? OK.

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work-shirking


Lots of words, little to say. Random stuff I put together to make an entry.

So what do you think folks? I mean, about the blog, that is. How’s the blog doing these days? Still keeping your interest? Still inserting enough media and humor and current-event stuff to be relevant and entertain you? I dunno, I’m not thinking of giving up or anything – just interested in a blog “physical” of some sorts… wondering what’s working and what’s not. Strange I guess, when, ultimately, I don’t care… I’ll write what keeps me writing in the end. But I try to keep a good pace: funny stuff, pictures, charts, etc. I feel like I post often enough to consider myself a “regular” blogger, not some fly-by-night joker who posts next to never. I think I’m doing a fine job… right?

Does being a dad make you dumber?

I, for one, am beginning to wonder. Before we had Keaton, I prided myself on my ability to multitask, think clearly and logically, and plan with multiple contingencies. I was the “solid” one between Sharaun and I: the one who paid the bills, the one who would’ve been on time had she not held me up, the neat-freak, etc. But now, something seems off… ever since Keaton was born, I feel sometimes like all my cylinders aren’t firing properly.

Take for instance Sunday night, we had been invited to a birthday soiree down at the local pizzeria for a friend of ours, had known about it since early in the week and was actually looking forward to it. Come Sunday though, Sharaun and I both blanked on it. Sitting on the couch, eating some Chinese takeout, and watching TV – we got a call from someone at the fete asking us, “You guys still coming?” Case #2: After missing my 2nd Lasik evaluation last week, I’d rescheduled for Monday morning – even blocked out my work calendar from 8am-1pm so I’d get no meetings scheduled on top of it. Problem is, I didn’t write down what time the actual appointment was. Feeling like a heel, I just headed up guessing 9am (and got lucky). Strange though, those kinda brain-farts never used to plague me so…

Interestingly enough, I picked up a copy of Scientific American while sitting in the waiting room of that Lasik eval and happened on an article about how women’s’ “multitasking and cognitive” abilities actually increase during pregnancy and after childbirth. In addition, the study noted that fatherhood had quite the opposite effect on men, their multitasking and cognitive abilities showing a decrease upon the miracle of childbirth. Almost like a trade, the man seemingly giving up some of his mental-mojo so his mate can better care for the new life they created (my editorializing). Anyway, it was comforting to see that I’m only getting stupider because of science, not because of anything I’ve done (unless you count making a baby). Now… what the heck was I talking about…

Well, despite a series of hiccups with my Lasik schedule – I did manage to bottom out on price and dates and setup an appointment for lasering this Thursday. That means, as you read this, I have only two more days as someone who’s vision-impaired. I managed to do a little wheeling and dealing, bringing the cost down to something I feel is fair – although I still have this feeling I could get a couple hundred more knocked off if I really played hardball. For me though, I have the money – and at some point during the negotiations I began to feel guilty, quoting “fake” prices I’d got from “other” Lasik places… but I did manage to get the original quote reduced by $400 per eye. That’s on the best laser currently available, at least according to my research. I’m now more excited than ever, and literally can’t wait to go under the knife/laser and get it over with. I have high hopes that I won’t be one of the unlucky 1/10,000 folks for whom the surgery actually worsens their vision… keep your fingers crossed for me, k?

Work has been hard for me lately. Not the part where I get up and go to a building every morning at 8am, not the part where I sit at my desk or go to meetings or send mails. No, not even the part where I meet deadlines. The part that’s been hard has been the actual “work.” With some recent shakeups that’ve been going on, I’ve become horrible unmotivated. Oh, I’m still getting things done, sure… but I haven’t cared for more than a week now. I know this will pass, it always does… and then I realize my “not caring” has put me into a little hole that I’ll have to do double-time to dig out. This is fine with me, it’s a known cycle and I’ve accepted it. It’s almost like I have a manic-depressive or bipolar work ethic. For months I’ll be balls-out, 200% burning the candle at both ends and proud as hell of the work I’m doing. Then the lull will take over, and I’ll go into a “maintenance” phase where I’m simply reactive, doing enough to get by and keeping a low profile. Thankfully, the overdrive times seem to outnumber the lulls, leaving me with a solid B+/A average – again something I’m comfortable with. I don’t see an easily identifiable endpoint to this current funk; Thursday’s surgery won’t help, neither will the long weekend or the following weekend’s planned camping trip. The week-and-a-half long trip to FL in July certainly won’t shore up my dedication, and sunny summer days are like the crack to my work-shirking crackhead personality.

Love ya peoples, goodnight.

Posted on

back for more


Lazy Saturday spent on the couch trying to catch the iPod repeating a song on random; gray and rainy Sunday with a trip to church in the morning and not much more than a banana and some peanut butter to liven up the afternoon. I didn’t have big plans for the weekend, but it’s not like there was a lack of things I could’ve been doing. There’s so much to do around the house. I could’ve fixed the one sprinkler in the backyard that still doesn’t pop high enough; I could’ve fixed the pocket door in our master bathroom, which has been off its track now for probably a year; could’ve replaced the filter in the air conditioner intake thing; could’ve used the blower to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling of our front porch; maybe pulled the plethora of weeds rooted in my backyard. But no, I did none of those things, instead I sat around surfing the web, holding the baby, and listening to music. I did, however, manage to upload a new series of pictures to Keaton’s gallery, so you should go check those out now.

Speaking of Keaton, I’m happy to say that she’s “officially” sleeping through the nights now. The few long ones she had before were encouraging, but since it wasn’t consistent we weren’t quite ready to say it was real. Now, though, she goes down for between 8 and 9hrs each night – sleeping right through to morning. Now, this isn’t that much of a change for me, being as I wasn’t the one waking every 3hrs to stick my teat in her mouth – but I know Sharaun appreciates it. I keep telling Sharaun that if and when we have another baby, we’re gonna be lucky if he or she is half as good as Keaton is. We’ve had it so “easy” with this little one: she’s not fussy, she’s playful and cute, and she’s sleeping all night before 3mos. Keep it up Keaton, I’m fully expecting a valedictorian cheerleader who shuns sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Fingers crossed…

Tech content ahead, readers beware.

After all my surmising and postulating last week about what the cause of my website slowdown was, I think I’m comfortable now saying that I’ve ID’d it and addressed it. Over the weekend I continued to see solid performance from my blog and gallery pages, and my loadtimes on the backend were vastly improved. So what, you may ask, was the issue after all – and what did I do to fix it? I promise this won’t be another long webmaster entry, just bear with me.

The culprit? The Omni Explorer bot. A nasty, dirty, incredibly aggressive bot which was crawling my webapges with such frequency and voracity that it managed to gobble up gigs upon gigs of my bandwidth. I zero’d in on the Omni bot through my usage statistics, noticing it was the number one requester of my site over the past few months. Keying in a simple Google search brought up several folks ranting about the bot, and it’s unquenchable thirst for data. Eventually, I landed on the webpage of the bot’s company, where a goofy-looking apology about its aggressiveness is posted along with instructions on how to block it from indexing a site. In the end, I went with a stricter method of blocking than the Omni Explorer page recommended, as I’d read elsewhere that the thing had been caught ignoring the file they suggest using as a block.

I changed my .htaccess file, uploaded it, and the results were both immediate and amazing. My site sprang to life, responding to requests in a timely manner and looking spry again. And, so far, things have remained that way. So that’s it, the story of how I resurrected my site by denying the raping, ravaging Omni Explorer crawler/bot.

And, before I leave the topic of blogging, I wanted to mention that I added a live spam-comment counter to the sidebar. It shows how many comments the my Akisment spam blocker has currently shot down since it was installed. Check it now, and refresh the page when you’re done reading this entry to get an idea of frequency. Stuff like this is fun for me…

Nerdy stuff over, for those who skipped it.

Before I go, I wanted to pass along a link to what I thought was a great idea: an invitation for folks to list their most “visceral” song moments, right down to the whens and whys of it. I did something similar once, although I think my theme was more “songs that give me chills;” but, it still fits. And what do you know, Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept shows up on both my list and the one linked above. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that much – I knew there was something magic about that song the 1st time I heard it… still gives me chills to this day. I actually thought it might be fun to go back and revisit that entry, adding additional information along the lines of what’s on the goodhodgkins.com list (along with the actual song). Maybe sometime this week…

Goodnight, I have nothing more for you.