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keaton’s gonna want to go to college


Hey, Monday’s down… spent a good bit of time this evening searching fruitlessly for decent-priced flights back to Florida for Christmas. If I let my memories get all shimmery and hear chimes, I can cast my thoughts back to years gone by when Sharaun and I both flew home for a grand total of nothing more than ~$500. Now, that’s a one-person fare. I’m not sure, but I suspect Osama may be to blame. Anyway, I gave up in a fit of wailing and gnashing of teeth as I stared bleary-eyed at the screen through my uncontrollable tears. And I haven’t even started pricing Thanksgiving, and I’m sure Keaton’s gonna want to go to college sooome day…

I’m sorry if I seem to be stuck on the politics gig recently, but there’s just so much awesomeness going on. We’ve got Woodward’s new book (which I’d really like to read) and republican representatives getting bused trawling for hot nubile gay sex then subsequently retreating to the inner sanctums of Tomcruiseology to clear themselves of those young gay thetans. There’s all sorts of awesome stuff going on in the keerazy world of politics lately; for instance, here’s a good one about our favorite Latin American Bush-basher:

This article tickled me yesterday. The opening line alone was enough to get my head wagging:

The recent military build-up in Venezuela by U.S. nemesis President Hugo Chavez has other countries in the region worried that the weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday.

U.S. nemesis?
…in the hand of terrorists?

Oh man, the message here is pretty clear: speak ill of this administration and they will, somehow-someway, associate you with their fix-all that is terrorism. I’m so fucking sick and tired of hearing things trotted as terrorism before a rapt crowd of fraidycats; grow a damn spine people. Terrorists are here, they’re gonna be here, they’re gonna kill people and blow stuff up. Let’s be reasonable, let’s not invite them in or anything, but let’s at least be rational about the whole thing. One of our original statesmen said it best when he said:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
– Ben Franklin

Sorry for the vitriol, I got a little worked up there.

Time to download some tunes, I’ve heard the new Hold Steady is good and the new Shins is purportedly leaking as I type this. Oh, and I’d like to make a prediction: The new hotness in illicit filetrading? Not members-only torrent sites, not the newsies, not any P2P app… nope. It’s anonymous upload/download “dumps” like yousendit, megaupload, rapidshare, and sendspace. I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, since it might jinx it, but if you want the new-new stuff and you’re not a member… these sites are the way to go.

Goodnight.

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weekdays are torture


Sunday night and it’s back to work tomorrow (“boooo!” jeers the crowd). This weekend turned out to be an exercise in laziness, both purposeful and unplanned. Wanted to mow the lawn: didn’t happen. Wanted to go to Wal Mart and invest in some of those “energy saving” lightbulbs: didn’t happen. Wanted to say home and do nothing both Friday and Saturday night: did indeed happen. Overall though, I’m happy with it. Found some time Sunday to work on this year’s “late breaking” Halloween prop with Ben, even managed to take some quick footage and assemble it into this year’s first “teaser” video. I’ve added it to the Halloween Teasers gallery, so go check it out. Found even more time after doing the teaser to upload some new images to Keaton’s Gallery, so go check those out too. And then, read this:

Downloaded the new iTunes and let it update my iPod to firmware 1.2. Had some issues with the actual update process, as iTunes just stalled out on “updating iPod” indefinitely. I let it go for half an hour thinking it really might be taking that long, but soon noticed the iPod’s screen was showing the “do no disconnect” message. I unplugged the whole mess and Ctl+Alt+Del’d the iTunes process. Went through this twice before the iPod actually got updated, and iTunes never did stop showing the “updating the iPod” message… I just had to hard-reset the iPod and kill the iTunes task again. Then iTunes took approximately 300hrs to analyze all my MP3s for “gapless playback.” I hope gapless playback is rad enough to warrant that. Stupid Apple software.

Friday night I stayed at home alone while Sharaun went to some pyramid-scheme party. While the party isn’t the point of what I’m writing here, I think I’ll go ahead and mention how it seems to me like these kind of things are really on the rise. Maybe it’s just that Sharaun’s now at the prefect age to be invited to them as a target buying-audience, but it seems like there are pyramid-scheme parties for just about everything these days: makeup, children’s toys, housewares, baskets, food, candles, etc. Oh, and I know the term “pyramid scheme” isn’t PC anymore and that I should call them multi-level marketing… give me a break. (Note to my friends who are gettin’ their multi-level on, I still love you… no pyramid could keep us apart.)

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I was home alone… and I took the quiet time after I fed Keaton and put her down as a chance to catch up on some of the week’s news I’d missed (work being fairly consuming of late, hence the spotty blogging last week as well). The major outlets were primarily consumed with the sex-toy highschool MySpace killer, but the indie guys were almost completely focused on the Military Commissions Act. Oh sure, I’d heard a lot about the “torture bill” over the course of the week, but the more I read the more inflamed I became. I decided I should probably read the thing for myself before I got too hot and bothered by potentially biased summaries of the legislation. So, I headed over to Thomas and grabbed a PDF of the final passed version of the text.

A lot of folks are up in arms over this legislation, and doubtless we’ll see some legal challenge brought against it in the courts as early as this week – I’m sure there were several groups working over the weekend to get their motions in order. Now, I’ll say right out that I don’t have much in the way of new or insightful information to offer about the bill, but you can go to any number of places to get some brainage on it if you’re inclined – here’s a good start. Anyway, I downloaded the thing and fired up my trusty laserjet printer (which made me realize, I hardly ever print anything these days) and printed off the entire thing. I stapled it together, and plopped the thing in the bathroom for some dumptime reading.

I’ll fill ya in once I’ve got the whole thing sorted, OK? Goodnight.

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conflicting interests


Sometimes, I like to think about how future discoveries in the fields of science, technology, and medicine might cause the brains of certain demographics to explode. Let me explain. We’ve all heard the research that a glass of wine a day or week or whatever can reduce the risk of heart disease or kidney cancer or something. The whole recent debate about the HPV vaccine has focused additional attention on these kind of findings where there exists a group of people for whom the data is at odds with their beliefset. While I ate lunch at my desk the other day, I tried to come up with a fun list of some other hypothetical brain-exploding advancements in human knowledge. Here’s what I got:

  • In 2026, a medical research thinktank develops a complicated “genetic surgery” which can completely and permanently eradicate cancer from a sick person’s cells. However, only people whose brains are wired such that they are attracted to those of like gender have the necessary neuron-wiring and mental capacity to comprehend the procedure and successfully perform the operation. Fundie and homophobe brains explode.

  • In 2014, university boffins reveal indisputable proof that having only one sexual partner in a lifetime puts a person at an 75% greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s in old age. Chaste brains explode

  • In 2057, a team of geologists discover that, as a side-effect of the total abandonment fossil fuels after the fuel-cell conversion, the huge buildup of unused crude oil under the surface of the earth is releasing an undetectable gas which is inexplicably killing all humankind of non middle-eastern descent. Treehugger brains explode.

  • In 2029 medical science isolates a unique antibody which effectively fights and kills the HIV virus, but the only people from which this antibody can be harvested and subsequently mass produced for medical application are women who’ve, at one point in their lives, had an abortion. Pro-life brains explode.

  • By 2061, it becomes clearly evident that humans that are a product of mixed-race relationships are genetically superior to those of single-race procreation. They are more disease resistant, stronger, and are very obviously evolving faster and more successfully. Racist brains explode.

Goodnight lovers.

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i’m lovin’ on ya


Good evening my friends. I skipped another day of blogging last night, and it felt good. Today was insane at work, I was quadruple-booked with meetings and running on six hours sleep from a late-night cram session preparing a presentation I presented at 8am. Honestly though, it was a good day – and despite being so overbooked I found some time here and there to entertain some Halloween project themed non-work thoughts. In fact, I’ve been working hard on a brand new Halloween idea over the past week or so. Brainstorming and doing trigonometry to derive angles and physics to calculate loads. Anyway… let’s get to the junk.

One liners:

I’m sick of the word “diva.” There are like two or three shitty, shitty, shitty shows Sharaun watches on TV that use this word to the point it’s silly.

The new Killers finally leaked, trickling onto the internet only a respectable week or so before its street date – not bad. I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but I’m anxious to hear if it’s really as bad as Rolling Stone says.

Sometimes, I sincerely think I’m “special.” I mean better than you.

Having been camping the past two weekends, I find myself wishing I could get away every weekend. Then, I think about stretching each wilderness-weekend by an additional day, leaving me with a four day workweek. This fantasy snowballs until I’m camping every day and not working at all.

I can’t wait for the day that Keaton can teeter to the door to greet me when she hears me arriving home from work.

I finally got a lead on an Oink invite, both worries and excites me. (If my lead falls through, anyone got one to spare?)

We’re thinking about taking the train to Oregon when we visit my folks for Thanksgiving. It’s a 15hr trip, but I’ve never been on a passenger train before and I think it could be rad.

I wasn’t going to ever mention Lonelygirl15 again, but I figured since Stewart brought her up on the Daily Show – it was an opportune time to mention that I’m totally still following the whole Cassieiswatching alternate reality game thing… though I’m beginning to suspect it’s some elaborate fan fiction…

Goodnight folks, I’m lovin’ on ya.

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back from the wilds


Good evening folks, Sunday nights make me sad because I know I have to go to work tomorrow. I don’t have much tonight, a terse summary of my weekend spent camping and 4x4ing with the guys in honor of Ben’s pending nuptials, and the twenty-eight week update to Keaton’s gallery.

This weekend was pure awesome. In what could’ve been a disaster, we had to scrap our original plan late Friday night due to a wildfire that had shutdown our intended destination. Whereas I had planned to pack Friday night, I ended up sitting over at Anthony’s as we poured over maps and books and websites for a new location. We ended up plotting three trail areas which were relatively close enough to each other that we could get from one to the other if we didn’t like one.

And that’s how we ended up four-wheeling around the Sierra butte country, deep-deep-deep in the backwoods and charging down paths unknown with the bold confidence that USGS topo maps and GPS can give you. We covered some 100mi+ of abandoned logging road, forest and fire service access roads, and some things I’m not even sure were ever defined roads as much as they were trails blazed by trucks before us. We didn’t do anything too insane, but we did have a few hairy descents down boulder-laden washouts and some… “accidents.” We ruined a muffler on the Rover, and wrecked the rear differential locker on the Blazer – not to mention both trucks ended up pretty scratched. (Oh, and I learned what automatic “lockers” are, what they’re for, and what they sound like when they’re shot).

We “stumbled” on an amazing campground tucked next to a river off some dirt roads, rebuilt the firepit with some large rocks, and gathered downed wood before we pitched tents and started cooking up a mess of steak and beans. Drank beer and port from my flask, smoked my pipe, and had breakfast burritos for breakfast. Some of the guys attempted to fly fish, but nothing was biting. Next day we pointed the trucks down random trails and ended up having to ford a river before we made it back to paved road. It was flat-out outstanding. I’ll have some pictures up in time to link to in tomorrow’s entry.

And that’s it. I’m beat-down tired and I’m ready to hit the sack. Goodnight.

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off to the woods


Happy Friday friends. I’m extremely happy today because we strike out early tomorrow morning (6am) for Ben’s 4×4/hiking/camping bachelor party weekend. We’re gonna bring GPS-enabled laptops and 12mi walkie-talkies, and we’re gonna drink lots of beer and explore some long-abandoned California gold country mines (despite the many ominous episodes of Lassie you’d think would’ve dissuaded us). I seriously can’t wait, we sent in a skeleton team a couple weekends ago to scout the terrain and the recon they brought back makes the place look astoundingly beautiful. I’m looking forward to dancing drunk around a fire and sleeping under the stars. We’re gonna cook steak on a Coleman stove, eat Ziplock-omlets for breakfast, and maybe even indulge at night in some clove cigarettes. Can’t wait.

Goodnight.

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things like public transportation


1 for 2 tonight, as I was able to get a haircut but lost the daylight before I could get the lawn mowed as I’d planned. Keaton’s officially sick, the doctor says she has an ear infection and she’s gotta take two different prescriptions. I feel bad for her, because her nose is stuffy and her eyes are goop-laden. We even got her that new ear infection inoculation too, because I was plagued with the things as a kid. On the plus side, she doesn’t act sick – she seems as happy as ever and smiles like there’s not snot on her face and boogers in her eyes.

Today I decided, on a whim, to swing by the public library. When Sharaun and I first moved to California, one of the first things I did was get a library card. I went through a period where I used it quite often, requesting books online and picking them up. That was a while ago though, and since then, I’ve let it fester. But, driving back from lunch solo today, I decided to stop in to pay my $2 and bring myself back “current.” I mainly wanted to see if they had a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five available for checkout, as I’ve never read it and Ben’s recommended it to me several times. I figured I could take it along camping this weekend and maybe start reading it. Anyway…

I’d forgotten how much I love the library both as a concept and a brick-and-mortar resource. It has the same kind of socialist appeal for me that things like public transportation and open-source software do. It fits right into that “share for a common good” and “simplify” message that sings to my inner hippie. I mean, why pay for and stockpile books you’ll never read again when you can borrow them for free? The only reason I can think of is that you might not want the Bush administration to flag you for TSA screening because you checked out an annotated Koran. But, other than that – what’s not to love?

What’s more, when I look at my Amazon.com wishlist, the minimalist in me thinks “Why own books?” I mean, if anyone should know the virtues of the public library, it should be me. As far back as I can remember my dad has been a both a voracious reader and consumer of libraries. I recall him bringing home foot-tall stacks of books every week, reading and reading and reading.

Anyway… they didn’t have the Vonnegut book, nor did they have any Vonnegut books, which I’d guess are perpetually hot items. Marx is probably turning over in his grave.

A while back, during what seems like the forever-ago times when Keaton wasn’t here yet, I wrote about how I’d implemented a “baby budget” in the household. Sharaun and I took our spending down to a minimum and socked all her paycheck away as if it were non-existent, kind of a practice run for when Keaton did arrive and we became a single-income family. The experiment was a huge success, showing us not only that we’d be more than comfortable with just my income, but also that we had some great opportunities to adjust some spending areas. Well, Keaton’s now six months old and, as tends to happen with all once regimented things, Sharaun and I have let our budget slide a bit. So, in the interest of reclaiming our money with the least lifestyle impact possible, I’ve been doing some detailed budget analysis with the great freeware app, AceMoney. I consider us to be on the plus-side of avaricious now, and I’d like to center us more around a miserly creed. Hopefully one day we can not only pay off our own college loans, but start a fund so Keaton and her sibling(s) won’t have the same post-education burden.

Less than 300 spams from 100k, goodnight.