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Ten random photos

I take a lot of pictures that don’t end up in galleries in flickr.  Here’s a few of them.

A lunch at Fresh Choice, probably after a Weight Watchers meeting in San Bruno.  I liked to celebrate weigh-in by eating a ton of starch and calories.  This was after I made my weight goal and was just maintaining, so I went back and forth on actually counting points, and went through a brief phase where I thought I’d just take pictures of everything I ate and figure it out later.  This morphed into this brief idea that I’d write a program to do image recognition on the pictures and calculate points, and that went to not doing anything.

I struggled for a long time with the organization of my second book, experimenting with a lot of outlining software and different schemes to keep track of a nonlinear story.  At some point in 2000 or 2001, I had this idea to reorganize all of Rumored to Exist by printing the text onto index cards, then rearranging them all over the place until it made sense, like I was writing a screenplay or some shit.  It didn’t work, and I had bunches of these cards lying around every room of the house for months.

After that book got published, I bought forty acres of land in Colorado.  I then had this stupid idea in that I would start gardening in my apartment in Astoria, despite the fact that I only had windows on one side of the place and there was too much shade to get any sunlight to grow anything except for those stupid cactuses that could live underground for twenty years. I think the grand scheme was that I’d learn enough about gardening that I’d eventually be able to live off my land in Colorado.  The whole thing lasted about a month until the bugs took over.

Go-kart racing in Fremont with Samsung. They took us there right before everyone had to take some survey on employee satisfaction, to make sure everyone thought it was a great place to work. The firesuit hood thing makes me look like I’m about to go to some renaissance fair to drink a bunch of mead and go jousting.  The worst part of this was getting knocked around for 200 laps and then having to drive 40 miles home that night, the whole time wanting to trade paint with other cars on 880.

All the fixins needed to make BBQ.  I’m surprised I was able to find Crystal sauce here on the west coast, but they sell it in the Oakland Safeway.  This is the really sour sort of BBQ, with the vinegar taste to it, which is pretty decent, although I realize there is this Pepsi/Coke religious argument about what school of thought you follow on BBQ.  Here’s the sacrilege: I used this to make a fake pork pulled pork, using some kind of engineered shredded soy fake meat product.  But the pork (or lack thereof) is just the vehicle for the sauce transmission, so it didn’t matter too much.  It is a mandatory requirement to make corn on the cob with this meal, though.

This was on my whiteboard when I came back from a trip to Vegas in maybe 2001.  I think it’s the work of my old coworker John Andonov, who had a habit of leaving his works of art on various cube walls when people were in meetings, which was pretty much constantly at Juno.  It’s amazing how many pictures of whiteboards I have in my photo library.  Most of them are insane system diagrams, where at the end of the meeting, someone says “make sure to take a picture of this” and then you never use it again.

I awoke one morning in my Astoria apartment to the sound of a waterfall, and saw the place above me leaking a river of water through my ceiling.  The piece of shit landlord never fixed it, and it looked like this for the next four or five years.  This was the same landlord that threw a fit when everyone organized a rent strike because he didn’t see the problem with not having a boiler for hot water or heat during what was one of the coldest Novembers in the last hundred years.  Nice tile color, too.

My car somewhere in Utah I think, during the first Denver to LA trip.  I drove this one solo, and don’t advise taking a tiny car with a 67-HP engine through the mountain passes of the Rockies during the winter, especially if the car is packed with a few hundred pounds of housewares and laundry.  A good chunk of the trip was spent fighting the transmission on the baby engine, which constantly insisted on downshifting as I struggled through the hills.  That pretty much cleared up when I got to central Utah, but I was certain I was going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, since there’s a hundreds-mile stretch with absolutely no gas stations or civilization in general.  It’s also amazing how filthy the car got by the time I got to California.

The perils of ownership of a long-haired cat: every time I brush Loca, I come up with about this much hair.  Seriously, I brushed her for 20 minutes yesterday, and if I brushed her right now, I would produce at least this much hair.  And if I didn’t brush her constantly, the entire apartment would pretty much look like this on every single surface, except for the surfaces covered with cat puke where she ingested this much hair and then vomited it back up.  I should buy a loom and start quilting blankets and sweaters from it.  The big problem is that if I knitted a sweater out of her hair, the other cat would climb on it and lick it all the time.

The golden gate.  I took this one on Thanksgiving 2008 when me, Sarah, and A went to Sarah’s friend’s place in Sonoma for dinner.  Not bad for being shot through a dirty windshield.

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Computer inventory, fall ’10 edition

Okay, so I mentioned my computer count had grown over on my Facebook page, and Bill asked me a bunch of questions about what’s what, so here’s a quick rundown, in reverse order of age:

  1. Lenovo ThinkPad T410 – the new work machine, running Windows 7.  Maybe this doesn’t count because it’s not mine, but it’s here 100% of the time now.  The hardware is pretty nice, with a lot of extras: 3G modem, DVD burner, 4 GB memory, a million ports I’ll never use.  But man, Windows 7 sucks.  I’ve spent far more time trying to figure out why the hell some 32-bit software won’t work, or why you can’t install 64-bit Visio and 32-bit Office at the same time, and why they insist on you installing 32-bit office on a 64-bit machine, and so on.
  2. MacBook Pro – My main machine, a 17″ 2010 Unibody with the fastest i7 CPU, 8 GB memory, and a half-terabyte of disk.  I absolutely love this machine, and it’s an example of how to move from 32 to 64 bit without turning your entire life sideways.  Other than reinstalling all of my MacPorts stuff, it Just Worked.  This machine is home to my iTunes library, my pictures, my writing, and pretty much everything else.
  3. MacBook Pro – Sarah has the 2009 17″ model.  Not sure of the processor, but it’s not the fastest one, and it has 4GB.
  4. Samsung NC10 – A tiny netbook, with a tiny screen and almost no memory, still running XP.  It’s next to the bed, and I mostly use it when I’m sitting in bed reading.  It’s also a nice travel machine, because it’s so light, gets incredible battery life, and if it gets stolen, the bag it’s in is probably worth more.
  5. MacBook – My old 15″ white 2007 model.  I don’t use this much anymore, but maybe every few weeks, I find something that I need on it or that won’t work in Snow Leopard.  For example, I still use it to import video, because I’m too cheap to go buy a different FireWire cable.  And until a week ago, I couldn’t get our scanner to work with the new Macs.  (Turns out if you swear at it enough, you can get Preview to scan stuff.)
  6. Toshiba Portege Tablet – This is a 2005 model that has convinced me that as long as it runs Windows, Microsoft will never get a tablet to work.  (A Windows Phone tablet?  Maybe that would work.)  It’s no longer running XP Tablet, because it needed an XP reinstall, and the included media won’t work.  It’s sitting next to my couch downstairs, and it’s a dedicated IMDB and baseball score machine.

Other computers-that-aren’t would include two iPhone 3Gs, a PlayStation 3, a Kindle, and maybe you could count the NAS I have in the closet.  (It takes up an IP address, anyway.)

The tablet is on its last legs, and the MacBook will eventually get fully retired.  I sometimes wonder if I just used an iPad for casual web browsing and travel, if I could get rid of everything but the MBP and work laptop.  But as I become more convinced an iPad would be an okay purchase, I get more in the hole with this move.

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Mandatory gym class

I was talking to Tom yesterday about something – I think how my body is physically falling apart as I reach the 40 year mark, and I somehow started thinking about how I was forced to take a gym class in my freshman year of high school to meet some bogus Indiana PE requirement.  I obviously was not the jock type in high school, didn’t play sports, and begrudgingly took this gym class and suffered through it.  I mean, I had to also take physical education periods in all of K-6, but you don’t shower in those, and they are unisex, and instead of doing hardcore calisthenics, you play four-square or play some stupid game with a kickball on a giant surplus parachute that everyone holds and flips up and down.  (Note to people born after 1990: four-square was a game you played on a playground with a 2×2 grid drawn on a pavement and an inflatable rubber ball, long before it was a stupid web site where you reported to your friends list every location in the city where you stopped to take a dump or buy a bottle of water.)

The demographics of my PE class in 9th grade also made the situation difficult.  There was me, Jia, and these other two geeky guys.  Then the rest of the class was evenly divided between multi-letter varsity sport athletes, and every drug-fueled shop class major that would soon be a convicted felon.  My worst fear on any given day was that we’d do some activity where we’d get divided into teams, because I was one of the absolute last people that would get picked in any situation like this.  It wasn’t just that I was unpopular; I mean, in 1985 I was pretty much my current height but weighed something like 120 pounds, and I know I could not bench even half of that back then.  And I had absolutely no hand-eye coordination, couldn’t swim, hated running, and forget anything that involved hitting a ball, like tennis or baseball.  My best hope was that we’d play something like soccer, where I could just sort of stand off to the side of the field and run back and forth with the pack and not do anything.

One saving grace: our gym teacher was also the basketball coach.  And at that time, Shawn Kemp was a sophomore, but he was a starting varsity player and was scoring an average of about 96 points a game and appearing in Sports Illustrated every other week.  So for months on end, Coach Hahn would need to spend his days reviewing scouting footage or conducting press conferences with ESPN or finding Kemp a college program that would pay him well under the table but not require him to know how to read.  And on those days, he’d dump us all in the gym with a bunch of basketballs and have us divide up and play unsupervised.  This was good, because nine times out of ten, I could get on a lopsided team with one of my computer buddies and talk about the Apple II on the sidelines while the rest of our team practiced for their future college athletic and/or department of correction basketball careers.

Anyway, the reason I remember all of this is the Presidential fitness test, or whatever the hell it was called.  It was some neo-fascist Reagan Youth attempt at getting the country into shape, and I think Ahnold had something to do with it, and I’m sure it was a stepping stone toward reinstating the draft and having a huge mass of young recruits ready to run obstacle courses at top speed.  The challenge consisted of a dozen or two different exercises, and to get an A on the semester, you had to do a certain number of repetitions, or do exercises in a certain amount of time.  And of course, if you at least tried to do these things, you’d get a C, but giving a competition based on how fast you can do a shuttle run to all of the type A personality disorder jocks in the class made this probably the worst possible outcome, short of having everyone line up the cars their parents gave them and hand out grades based on which ones were newest or cost the most.

When they came up with this test, they basically said, “let’s find thirty things Jon Konrath can’t do, and then invent some ridiculous numbers for each one and hope he gets publicly humiliated thirty times in a row.”  For example, there was the aforementioned shuttle run; I don’t remember how fast you had to run it, but I would get shin splints from running any more than thirty feet, and had the aerobic capability of a high-level World of Warcraft junkie that typically needed a Rascal wheelchair to get from their SUV to the grocery store for another case of ring-dings, so it took me roughly double the required time.  Chin-ups?  I think I did one.  Push-ups in a minute?  I’m sure I could do at least a couple, but it probably required 30 or 60 or something well outside of the reach of someone who could only do curls if you took all of the weights off the bar first.

Probably the worst one was the rope climb.  I don’t remember how high the rope was, and I’m sure if I saw it now, it would be shorter than the ceiling in our apartment, and I’m also sure some crazed helicopter parents got the thing removed years ago because they were afraid their precious spawn would fall.  But we had to climb the damn thing, and do it in a certain speed to meet the challenge.  And two things went through my head as I sat on the ringworm-infested wrestling mats and looked up at this thing tethered to the ceiling.  One, there’s no way I can pull my weight up this damn thing if I can barely achieve a single chin-up.  And two, if I did manage to climb up to the top, how the hell do you get back down?  I had vivid visions of sailing thirty feet down, balls-first against this coarse rope that had splinters of whatever the hell ropes were made of back then scraping against my sac.  So I managed to get maybe two arm-grasps up the thing, froze, and dropped back to earth.

And of course I got endless shit from all of the jocks in the class, along the lines of “yeah, your fuckin’ computer’s not going to help you now.”  And all I could think of, which was little consolation at the time, was that in twenty years, all of these fuckers would be stuck on an assembly line, five minutes away from where they were born and where they would die, their good looks faded, their physique gone, their trophy cheerleader wives worn and uglied by a half-dozen kids, and I would be long gone, riding whatever technology I could find or invent to riches and happiness.  Okay, I’m not rich, and the jury is still out on whether or not I’m happy, but from the looks of the reunion pictures, I was right on all other counts.  But that didn’t comfort me much when I was sixteen and had to shower with these fuckers after failing their stupid tests repeatedly.

But here’s the one thing I did good at: sit-ups.  We had to do something like 56 full sit-ups in a minute, and I thought there’s no fucking way I’ll do 30, given my progress on the rest of this nightmare.  But I slugged it out, and ended up doing seventy-two.  I have no idea how I did this; maybe it’s something about weighing next to nothing, and having absolutely no gut at the time.  But I did that.  And now, I don’t know if I could do ten sit-ups without throwing out my back, so it’s a good metric about how far from being in shape I am now that I close out my fourth decade here.

The other thing about that stupid class was that by the end of the year, I had played so much damn basketball, I was pretty much an idiot savant for shooting from anywhere within the three point range.  I mean, I couldn’t defend, or do lay-ups or any of that shit.  But if you wanted to play Horse or something, I would completely kick your ass.  All of this quickly faded after I got this stupid requirement out of the way and never thought of basketball again in my life, but for a brief period in the spring of 1986, you could give me a ball and place me on any random point, and I knew the exact physics and the exact angle to get it from here to there.

By the way, I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will be in Vegas this year for my 40th.  If you have the means and you’re free the weekend of the 20th, drop a line.

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Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!

Here’s an interesting way to make yourself lose any faith you had in ever winning the lottery by playing the same numbers every week: Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!. It lets you select five numbers, then plays them against a random drawing, simulating two tickets a week for ten years.  I just tried it and it cost me $1040 to win $116, which is better than the average rate of return on most peoples’ 401K these days, but still pretty disappointing.

As a Midwesterner from a lower-middle-class family, I’m all too familiar with the lottery.  When I was a kid, we didn’t have the lottery in Indiana, but you could drive across the border to Michigan and buy scratch-off tickets.  (Indiana offset the trade imbalance by not having a ten-cent per can deposit, so people from Michigan would drive down to buy their beer and save $2.40 a case.)  I think they may have had a pick-three or pick-five drawing then; they didn’t have the actual Lotto until the mid-eighties.  But scratch-off tickets were part of the whole Sunday routine: reluctantly attending CCD in the morning, sitting through the 11:15 mass and wondering how much of the liturgy got cribbed by George Lucas in the Star Wars movies (“may the force be with you/and also with you”), then getting a box of donuts and some scratch-off tickets at the Harding’s grocery store and then going to my grandma’s.  I recall hitting the occasional free ticket or $1 prize, but mostly remember getting silver dust underneath my fingernails.  I was also logically perplexed about those games where you scratch off one thing in each column to match three numbers.  Like, say there were nine numbers and you scratched three and did not win, what if you then scratched off all nine and found out you just uncovered the wrong three things, and a winning combination actually existed on the card?  And what if I scratched off three and won a million dollars and then my little sister got ahold of the card and blindly scratched off the whole damn thing?  Also, couldn’t Superman use his x-ray vision to look through the silver scrapeaway paint material and cash in?  I mean, I guess Superman had a lot of other fallback income opportunities that would utilize his superpowers (safecracking, dentistry, express package delivery, etc.) but that’s one that seemed to always come to mind when faced with a new stack of scratch-off tickets.

Indiana finally got a lottery when I was a senior in high school; it was a referendum in the 1988 election (I think), which I was not old enough to vote in.  (Probably for the best – I would have most likely voted for Dukakis, and that didn’t work out for anyone, unless you consider drinking rubbing alcohol ala Kitty Dukakis’s alcoholic bottoming-out a good outcome.)  I remember at the time I thought a lottery was a no-brainer; if you were dumb enough to invest the money every week in a long shot that never paid out, you essentially gave free money to the schools and roads and whatever else the program would allegedly pay for.  But I remember, at least in Elkhart, a ton of conservative backlash that I didn’t fully understand.  The moral majority types thought of the lotto as legalized gambling, and this was before the days of an Indian casino every dozen and a half miles across the Midwest, so Vegas and AC were pretty much the only games alive at that point.  I thought the whole thing was ludicrous, but I also hated how the median age in Elkhart was something like 87 and pretty much every old, cranky bastard that wrote letters to the editor and put giant stupid signs in their yard about how scratch-off tickets were the devil also ended up at my cash register every weekend at Montgomery Ward’s, yelling at me about how they wanted to talk to my manager because I wouldn’t sell them a distributor cap for their 1927 tractor and it was all my damn fault we didn’t stock parts for every single machine made by every manufacturer from the civil war to present.

If you really want to find yourself some lottery enthusiasts, go visit a factory.  The summers I spent working in factories during college, pretty much every coworker I had played the lottery like a fiend.  These were people with 19 DUIs and three child support payments to three different women who couldn’t add seven to six without counting on their (remaining, not severed in punch press) fingers, but give them a new scratch-off game and they were Albert Fucking Einstein with their theories on odds and probabilities.  If I could have bought a food truck in 1989 and sold cigarettes and lotto tickets in a mobile route that covered all of the major factories in Elkhart’s industrial park, I’d be typing this from my own god damned island right now.

And I’m not just dropping a “poor people are stupid – stop fucking your sister and go learn to read” and leaving it at that, because I realize the situation’s a lot more complicated than it appears.  For one thing, these are people with no way out, at least compared to the non-flyover state elite.  I mean, they aren’t going to land a book deal or sell their web site to Time-Warner or get rich from a startup that’s on the forefront of some new technology.  They’re not getting stock tips from college buddies, and they’re not getting tuition for law school from a trust fund that’s passed through generations going back to the Mayflower.  They’d be damn lucky to get a job unloading trucks for Mayflower for ten bucks an hour.  The only option was to keep working until they dropped dead, and maybe there was the off-chance that they could turn a dollar into a million dollars.  And money can’t buy happiness, but when you have no money, it’s not like you’re infinitely happy.  When you’re broke,  you constantly think that money magically fallen from the sky that would finally shut up the collection agencies and keep the power from going dark at the end of the money would be a great thing.

There’s also the issue that there’s compulsion and addiction behind gambling, even if the gambling is in the form of a lottery.  I used to work with a dude at Monkey Wards who managed us unloading trucks of furniture and electronics at 6 AM every day.  He won the Illinois state lottery, some massive prize of something like a couple million, and he took the option where they paid it out every year for 25 years or whatever it was.  And he bought a house on a golf course even though he didn’t play golf, and had a bunch of sports cars and trucks and other fun toys.  And of course he wasn’t happy.  And he would go nuts just sitting at home, so he worked as a receiving manager for $8.25 an hour or whatever the hell we made back in 1993, and drove a Lotus to work every day.  And even though he had money coming in, and he had money in the bank from this cleaning company he started and then sold, he was a lottery junkie.  He’d play a hundred pick-six tickets at a time, with insane conspiracy theory systems for numbers, and that shit worked for him once, so of course he was a damn expert at it.  And he’d go to a 7-Eleven and buy the entire roll of scratch-off tickets in one clip, several times a week.  I’d come in at 5:45 and he’d be sitting at the desk back by the loading dock, quarter in hand, scraping away at a giant line of 150 perforated cardboard rectangles, mountains of silver dust shavings everywhere.  “Hey man, look – I won $50 on this one!”  Yeah, but you spent $300.  And you need to spend $30,000 on a good stretch of in-patient therapy at an addiction center.  I’m sure he hit some big cash in small streaks and spurts, and every time probably seemed like a half-step closer to some kind of mental happiness, and of course it wasn’t, just like a little bump of coke or a line of speed is going to make your problems go away… for just a second.

So yeah, I don’t really play the lottery.  I think I bought one Indiana ticket in my freshman year of college, just to say I did, and it was about as rewarding as burning a dollar bill (I mean, if you’re not a pyro that doesn’t enjoy burning stuff.)  But I do find myself in front of the occasional slot machine on a vacation, so color me stupid there.

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Sunburn oracle

Here’s the latest time machine for me: I got this stupid sunburn on Sunday, which isn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s an annoyance, mostly because I’ll be sitting here during the day, staring at a FrameMaker window, and then suddenly realize I’m scratching my arm like a crank addict trying to break out of a straitjacket, and it takes so much effort to stop, I could probably channel the same amount of energy into levitating small cars.  So I dug through the medicine cabinet, which I should probably be packing into cardboard boxes for the move, and found this Tropicana sunburn gel crap, which is a bright artificial aqua-blue, and smells like some kind of synthetic fruit punch they only sell in inner-city liquor stores for 89 cents per three liter bottle.  I hate putting the stuff on, because it’s got this horrible stickiness to it, like a bad hair product you’d use if you had one of those faux-hawk things and read a lot of Details magazine.  But it has lidocaine or benzocaine or one of the -caines, and it anesthetizes the demon itching, at least for about five minutes.

I got this stuff on my honeymoon in 07, which is why it’s such a strong memory for me.  (It’s also probably why it doesn’t work well – I’m sure it has an expiration date of 08 or 09.)  We spent a week in the Bahamas, at Atlantis, and I spent about 80% of the days on their inner tube ride, where you sit in a circular rubber inflatable oval, your ass in the water and your arms and legs sort of half-sticking in the air, as a gentle current carries you through this artificial winding rapids constructed out of cement and fake scenery.  I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for this kind of ride, especially when it’s hot out and you’re surrounded by ocean and palm trees and a small army of natives all furiously working for their share of the tourist dollar in a place where the annual per capita GNP would otherwise be about the cost of a McDonald’s Value Meal.  I guess the fact that upon egress from the ride, there was an endless number of people all willing to hand you a towel or a fruity drink or a room service-priced hamburger had little to do with why I enjoyed looping around a chlorinated whitewater rapids, but it made the experience that much better than riding the same attraction at Knott’s Berry Farm.

We spent a lot of time trying to go off the beaten path on this vacation, but the whole battle plan of the Atlantis resort is they want to contain you within their economic sphere, and they will be god damned if they want you to pay any less than five dollars for a bottle of Coke.  This worked to our great disadvantage because Sarah’s luggage got lost, and she spent the majority of the honeymoon wearing $39 t-shirts from the gift shop, with no other real options.  We did talk to the bellhops and staff about where else we could go, and everyone was insanely friendly to us.  I found it somewhat disconcerting that most of the people who brought towels to the pool had gone to the US for college, and probably got full rides on scholarships to obscure places in Oklahoma or Wyoming, but then came back to the island to work for tips, which was probably more per day than you could make in a week pulling hard labor on a construction crew.  Everyone we met had five kids to feed, and every women we met spent entire conversations telling us how they were done with men, how the Bahamian male was only interested in one thing and then quickly moved on.  We got that conversation on the first cab ride we took, a 40-minute drive across the length of the island in a right-hand-drive minivan.

I half-listened to the patter of the cab driver while looking out of the window like Captain Willard watching the river unwind in Apocalypse Now, complete devastation on either side of us.  The night was completely black, no streetlights, no house lights, just the glare of the headlights carving through darkness and revealing this winding road that was almost as poorly-kept as an Indiana county road.  We’d pass by someone riding on the wrong side of the road (well, everything was the wrong side of the road here), riding some beat-up mess of bicycles mashed together into some kind of cart/pickup truck hauling a bunch of loose pieces of junk lumber and driftwood.  We drove by this big open area where they held a fish fry, a bunch of blazing fires in the darkness, people huddled around this strange carnival setting, a bunch of single-story houses built by the old British colonists, looking like some of the guard buildings from the movie Papillion.  I’d left the country a few times before this, but it was always to places like Canada, the Netherlands, Germany – I’d never gone somewhere that still featured artesian wells instead of indoor plumbing.

Anyway, I got a horrible sunburn from this stupid inner tube ride, and it wasn’t just a uniform shade of red; I ended up with this bizarre farmer’s tan in the inverse of where you’d sit in an inner tube, pure red broken up with a band of white.  And I went to the gift store and bought this 26-dollar bottle of ointment, and spent each evening coating my arms and legs with the junk.  We did a lot of stuff on the trip, but the smell of this bright blue medication reminds me vividly of the evenings we spent in the living room of the suite, waiting for this blue gel to dry, eating giant room service meals and going through every snack and drink in the mini-bar, because the crap was just as expensive in the store downstairs, and you only get married once.  We tuned the big screen (one of the big screens – this room had two giant TVs) to the ALCS games, watching the Indians slug it out against the Red Sox amidst a sea of bugs. The Rockies already finished the NLCS right before we left, and I wanted to know who we’d be playing in the World Series.

(Weird trivia I just found out while cruising through the wikipedia article about the 2007 ALCS: Joe Buck went to Indiana University at the same time I did.)

We did a lot of other stuff on our trip – nice dinners, a couple of trips into town, some decent walks at night, looking at the ocean under the moon and peering into the giant shark tanks scattered across the resort, looking at giant manta rays bigger than my car.  And as I wait for the lidocaine to kick in, and smell this distinctive fake-fruity smell, I remember all of this again, and it seems like it was five lifetimes ago and on a different planet than the Oakland I see outside my window.

Okay, time to get to work…

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Pantone is not a shampoo

I think this sunburn is fucking with my head. I went to the Rangers-A’s game yesterday and it was hotter than hell out for the end of September. I think part of it is the Oakland Coliseum is such a horrible place, all concrete and built by the same architects that turned out prisons in former Soviet republics in the mid-1960s. After a couple of innings, I retreated back to the concourse and walked a loop around to see the sights. There’s a huge void where center field is, a concrete tunnel of nothingness where they shut down all of the concession stands and restrooms, and it looks like some secret tunnel system under a major city, a place where mole-men would live, only it’s a handful of people who are looking for shade or maybe cell phone reception.

I thought I escaped with no sunburn, and my arms still looked white, but then like three hours later, almost like clockwork, I looked and everything was the color of a Coke can. Is that like how you cook a steak for a certain amount of time, and then you let it rest for a certain amount of time, and it still cooks on the inside or whatever? I never fully understood the whole resting thing. It’s sort of like how you have to rinse pasta in cold water to stop it from cooking. Why not cook it for less time and not rinse it? I can’t imagine people in 1827 cooking at a covered wagon, saying “you need to let that shit rest for two minutes!” as Indians shot flaming arrows dipped in shit at their wagon trains.

Wikipedia has this new feature (maybe it’s not that new) where you can mark a bunch of articles and then make a print book out of them. I’m tempted to find a thousand cool articles and make a nice bound book out of them, because it seems like I keep going back to the same articles and reading them over and over. Like, for example, every 17 months I feel a need to dig up as much information as possible about The Day the Clown Cried.  I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I think if I eventually google enough, I’ll find a copy of it on YouTube.  Anyway, finding a hundred or a thousand articles would be great, except I’d spent forever doing it, and never finish, because I’d always think the next cool article would be only two more clicks away.  And then I’d get into a huge thing about how to organize and order the articles.  Like, should there be a chapter on cult conspiracies, or should each cult leader be in alphabetical order in a “people” chapter?

It’s time to start work, and it’s now twilight at six AM.  I think pretty soon it will be pitch black, which means I will soon spend an hour a day googling to find the best full-spectrum light bulbs.

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Moving (again)

We are moving again.  This will be the sixth time I move in five years.  But, as I said last time, this will be the last time I move for a long time.

Let me first preface this by saying I am not moving back to New York.  I work in New York, but I AM NOT moving back to New York.  For some reason, everyone thinks I am moving back to New York. I AM NOT.  I have a feeling I will repeat that eight thousand times in the next six months.  I am actually moving four doors down in the same building, which is possibly even more absurd.

Here’s the deal: we are out of space in our ~800 square foot loft, and I work from home, and I have no office, and I don’t even really have a desk.  And all of our stuff is crammed together.  And as much as I dreamed about finding a bunch of dual-purpose, European-crafted high-end boathouse furniture that would magically transform my TV center into a kitchen island or whatever the hell would give me a few extra feet, we needed more space.

First we looked into buying the place next to ours, which was in contract for a long time but then went back on the market.  It’s a near-clone of our current layout, and we thought we could just buy it, knock a hole in the wall, and double our square footage.  But this plane was full of huge issues.  One problem is that the left wall of our place can’t be cut open because it goes into the stairs and closet of the next unit, meaning you’d have to do some major surgery in moving a set of stairs or something, which would probably involve tens of thousands of dollars in engineering studies and permits and grief.  There’s also the issue that we’d just barely be able to afford two mortgages, and two HOA payments would total us.  And getting a second mortgage effectively removes all of that first time/primary residence goodness; a second mortgage would not be an FHA home loan, but would be some crazy investment property thing that would involve putting down a third of the money up front.  So no place next door.

Then the possibility came up of buying the place four doors down and selling our current place.  I thought this plan would be fraught with disaster, of me trying to work from home and getting kicked out of the house four hours at a time to show the place, having to put half of our crap in storage indefinitely, all of that.  But the new place is new, never lived in and unoccupied.  So we swung a deal where we’d move into the new place, lease it for six months, and then completely patch/paint the old place and put it on the market, and our close of the new place would be contingent on the sale of the old place.

So we’re in escrow on the new place, we’ve entered a sales agreement on the old place, and life has been a huge ball of stress ever since.  We don’t know when we will move, because we’re waiting on them to install the floors on the new place.  When that happens, I’m not sure how we will move.  Moving companies are really big on weeks of advance warning, so calling them up and saying “get over here tomorrow” is not good.  And we don’t need a truck and a fire brigade chain of people from the street to the elevator, it’s literally a few dozen feet over.  But we also can’t just grab three dishes from the sink, walk next door, repeat 32,734 times.  And I’ll be damned if I try to move that stupid mattress myself.  So we need to get some illegal immigrants or something.

Other crap I need to do, in no particular order:

  • Pack everything, but don’t pack anything I might need in the foreseeable future, which is everything, because the second I box up the, say, printer, I will need to print some documents.
  • Buy a shit-ton of new furniture at Ikea and assemble it.
  • Figure out how the hell to switch over Comcast without ending up internet-less for seventeen days.  And I am almost certain they will make me return all of my boxes and modems to some center in Death Valley that’s only open two hours a month and charge me a $79 return fee so they can then show up and give me the same exact equipment.
  • Get drapes installed.
  • Get a sliding glass door installed.  More on that in a second.
  • Fill out roughly 742 pages of documentation for the loan company, including a seventeen-page HUD document asserting that in the event of alien invasion, we are still responsible for timely mortgage payments.
  • Write another thousand dollar check every single day for another fee or deposit I was not aware of.

So the new place: it is about 1400 square feet, or almost double our current space, at about 30% more cost.  It’s the same rough layout as our current place, with the same front windows and the same loft and pillars and all of that.  But it is HUGE compared to our current place, completely cavernous.  Other big changes include a full walk-in closet; a full bath downstairs instead of a half-bath; a more open-concept kitchen; a second bedroom downstairs (office!), and the stairs are metal instead of wood.  Minuses are there’s no closet under the stairs, and we lose our glorious skylight.  But it’s huge, and I get a god damned office.  Oh, the office area is more like a 9×12 alcove by the front entrance, three walls and open, so the first order of business is to install a set of sliding glass room divider doors, which will happen soon.

So I need to move.  And I need to sell this place.  The move could happen in a matter of weeks, depending on how soon that floor goes in.  Like I said, lots and lots of stress until then.

My desk showed up yesterday.  I can’t assemble it until we get into the new place, though.  It’s a 60″ wide Anthro Fit, with the light grey (“fog”) top, and I added one six-inch drawer.  I may add more shelves after we get situated.  If you’re in the mood for a new desk, Anthro is having a deal in September on the Fit line, 30% off.  Their desks are insanely expensive, but are built like goddamn tanks, and over-engineered in a way an engineer would love.  The one I got even came with tools, and I’m not talking those tiny l-shaped Ikea wrenches the size of a car key; I’m talking about an actual full-sized mallet and screwdriver.

Work at the new/old place is going good, too.  I am surprised at how fast the stuff is coming back to me.  Working on the kitchen table can be a bear, and I don’t have a work computer yet.  But finishing work at 3 and being done versus finishing at six and then facing an hour or two of traffic is huge.

Speaking of, gotta get to it.

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Memory

I’ve been working in VMware all week, and constantly swapping virtual memory, even though this computer has four gigs of RAM.  And it’s not like I configured my virtual machine to use four gigs of memory and then wondered why I can’t run that and iTunes and iPhoto and iEverythingElse at the same time.  So I broke down and ordered eight gigs of RAM and hoped it would get here Saturday, but of course it won’t get here today, and possibly later, because our FedEx guy doesn’t understand how our door phone works.

(And all of this is stupid – I later found out that my backup software was configured to run 24/7 when I’m idle or not, and that was eating a ton of memory.  I saw this rogue Java process running, and thought it was… I don’t know what I thought it was.  But I could still use the extra memory.)

Anyway, my last OWC memory upgrade I bought was three gigs for the last laptop, which cost $150.  And when I did that back in 2007, I told a version of the same story:  in 1993, I was building this Linux computer, the first “real” computer I built.  (Prior to that, I built an 8088 with a meg of memory, but building an 8088 in 1991-1992 is a lot like building a Pentium II system today, which would probably involve a lot of shopping for lots of obsolete computer pieces.)  So I got this 486 (DX, not SX!) and I went to CompuSource and bought four one-meg SIMMS for $160.  So in 17 years, I’ve gone from 4MB for $160 to 8 GB for $220 (minus the trade-in of ~$50.)

And looking at my activity monitor, VMware’s little icon it puts in the menu bar uses 4 MB of memory.  It’s amazing to think an entire OS, with X Windows and emacs and multiple users and multiple xterms would run in that same amount of memory a few years ago.  It feels very Andy Rooney to talk about it, because I know when I was sporting the four megs of RAM, there were people talking about the old times in the same way.  I took this C335 assembly language class in 1991 with a teacher that had been hacking hardware for a generation.  We had these Atari ST computers in the lab that I think had either 512K or a meg of memory, and he would talk about the first computer he built with 32K of memory that took up a whole room and cost more than a small house.

But here’s the thing: if you were working on a wire-wrapped board for an Altair to hold 4K of RAM for a thousand bucks, and then five or seven years later, went down to your local Key-Bee toy store and dropped a few hundred bucks for a Commodore-64 with 64K of memory, the whole experience would be markedly different.  I mean, you’d go from toggling switches to enter ones and zeroes to this thing that would do 320×200 graphics in 16 colors and output straight to a TV with no additional boards and hardware, and had a built-in BASIC and a kick-ass sound chip and a real keyboard (sort of).  But if you make the jump from a circa-1993 Linux machine to a circa-2010 Linux machine, the storage and memory grows orders of magnitude, but the basic paradigm is the same.  I mean, our computers would have to read minds and have working replicator technology to make a jump like that.  I sit down at a Windows 7 machine of today, and fire up a Windows 95 machine of 15 years ago, and the underpinnings are vastly more powerful, but you’re still doing the same basic crap in the same explorer window and dragging around crap and staring at the same hourglass.  Moore’s law might be boosting the hardware, but it seems like every time they bump up the horsepower, some idiot says “hey, let’s use all of this magical power to make an animated paperclip that tries to guess that you’re making a bulleted list” or “let’s run a daemon in the background that sends this user’s private information to the mothership every five seconds, and let’s ignore the fact that 4000 other companies are going to do the same exact thing, so when the person’s computer sits idle, almost all of its CPU is going to byzantine licensing and crapware server programs.”

One big minus to the otherwise sweet MacBook Pro is I’ve gotta crack open the case to put in the memory.  Which means, I need to go find my set of jeweler’s screwdrivers for the baby phillips-head…

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HD is the new SD

What happened to the allure of the HDTV?  I was thinking about this the other day, as I tried to shoehorn some more crap in my storage space and realized that the little 15″ analog CRT TV I have in there is probably never going to see service again and is just wasting a couple of cubic feet of precious space.   (Did I throw it out?  Of course not.  The second I do, our main TV will blow up and I’ll be forced to play Call of Duty by sound only.  Besides, I’d probably get sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect for chucking a TV into a dumpster here in the people’s republic.)  I mean, it took something like twenty years from the time the Japanese had (analog) HD in every home from the time they finally shut off the old systems here in the US.  And for all of that time, HD was in this virtual limbo.  It was like space travel – sure, you’ve got some Russians hanging out in a space station, drinking Tang and dissecting mouse livers in zero-G, but the time from the first space shuttle launch to the expected time when anyone can go to a United Airlines terminal, drop a credit card, and take a flight to the moon is somewhere between forever and never.

(Side note: if Virgin or United or whoever starts offering those low earth orbit flights, do you think they would give you mileage?  Because if so, you’re going to rack up something like 400,000-some miles per day.  Fly for a week, and you can turn that shit in for roughly 2500 years’ worth of Sports Illustrated subscriptions.)

I remember the first time I ever saw an HDTV set.  It was at a Magnolia hi-fi shop in Lynnwood, in like 97 or 98 – they had this big-screen, I think a rear projector, since that was about all they had back then.  And one of the local stations – I think KOMO – was broadcasting 24 hours in HD, but they only had like two hours a week of actual programming, so they ran this loop of some crap they filmed, like a news helicopter flying over the mountains, shooting the evergreen trees scrolling by, some clouds or mist in the distance, snow-covered peaks, that sort of thing.  And I was absolutely floored by the quality of the broadcast, the way it looked like much more than just doubling the number of lines or whatever.  The color depth, the richness, was simply amazing.  And then I talked to the sales guy, and of course the set cost as much as my car, and you had to buy a laserdisc player, and none of the cable systems did anything, so you had to get some rabbit ears, and they hoped that in a few years, about ten percent of shows might be in HD, and the whole thing seemed as probable as getting a working jet pack with a completely legal death ray add-on system.

I never thought about making the jump to HDTV for a while – I never had enough room or cash to buy a rear-projector system.  When I moved to Astoria in 1999, I bought the most TV $500 would buy, which was a 27″ Panasonic CRT set that lasted me ten years.  I thought about HDTV only because in New York, all of the networks started broadcasting in the early 2000s, and I couldn’t get shit with my rabbit ears hooked up to my analog set.  The rumor was a good HDTV tuner with an analog output would potentially give me clear pictures, or at least I’d trade the snow in the picture for pixelation compression errors.  But I didn’t want to drop hundreds on a box just to eat up more of my writing time on crappy network shows, so I forgot about it.  (There was also an issue that the highest point in New York City, which was the central point for all HDTV service since 1998, suddenly vanished in September of 2001.)

I did buy a HDTV in 2009, when we moved into this new place, for a few reasons.  First, I could junk that old 27″, and not have to move it or buy a bulky piece of furniture for it to sit on.  The thin-screen LCD revolution happened after the turn of the century, and after a few years of enjoying the fruits of a 20″ LCD monitor on my desktop, I got a nice Samsung TV for the house.  And then less than a year later, Samsung gave all of their employees a bigger LCD TV as a year-end gift (probably to clear out stock for their new LED TVs, which look great but are awesomely expensive right now).

I remember all of the madness about the big switch, when the evil socialist Obama government would pull the plug on the analog TV standard and leave us all without our daily doses of Judge Judy and Matlock reruns.  The whole thing seemed like a joke to me, since I first heard about the changeover something like twenty years before, and if you’ve got cable, it doesn’t even matter anyway.  But people freaked the fuck out, and the government changed the transition date and spent billions (literally!) of money on education, and coupons for converter boxes.  It’s an amazing testament to this country’s priorities that people die in the streets without healthcare, but threaten to shut off people’s TV, and we’ll organize and blow federal money like there’s an asteroid headed straight to the earth and we need to get Bruce Willis on that thing with a nuke and a drilling platform, pronto.

So I’ve had the HDTV hookup for a year and a half now, and I guess sometimes I notice the difference.  But it’s one of those news memes that seemed like the end of the universe in early 2009, but in ten years, nobody’s even going to remember a time when we didn’t have HDTV.  And the real question is, when will the next big switch happen?  NTSC in the US went from 1941 to 2009 with color TV starting in 1951 (and then stopping, and restarting in 1953).  I’m guessing the next big move to make all TVs obsolete won’t take 56 years.  The next big format war is going to be over 3D TV, and of course, every major manufacturer has their own format, and has their own hallucination that their format will prevail and that by next year, all of us will be replacing our TVs with their new crap.  If they had their way, we’d replace our TVs every year, and also buy a new cell phone every year, and a new computer.  I expect Samsung’s home appliance division to get in the game too, and come out with some new planned obsolescence strategy for their clothes washers and refrigerators too.

Now I just need Comcast to get with the digital revolution and give me a new DVR that has an actual HDMI out, so I don’t need to keep hitting the screen format button and try to figure out if a person’s face is really bloated or if I’m supposed to be watching something in 4:3 instead of 16:9.

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The drive

Last week, I drove 40 miles each way to work, which is 400 miles a week, which is about 20,000 miles a year, or maybe a hair less when you count in the various holidays and days I break an arm or wreck a car or get sent to a trade show where, instead of questions about my work, idiots ask me questions about the parent company’s TV sets.  Today, I drove zero miles.  I sat at my kitchen table, with sunlight streaming in from my giant 17 foot tall wall of windows, with a cat sitting on the table next to me, and plugged away at my laptop.  It wasn’t bad.  I mean, I don’t have a work laptop yet, which meant running Windows in a VM on my Mac, and then running a VPN in that to connect back to Palo Alto, then a morning of trying to figure out how to get at servers in New York, but it worked.

I’ve done this drive for two years.  With my tiny car’s awesome mileage, that still comes out to about a thousand gallons of gas.  Add in the lunches and the dry cleaning of shirts and the cost of said shirts and pants, now that I get to sit around in jeans and a t-shirt, and I wonder how much it cost me to work.  Granted, I probably made much more than that, and it would be much worse if I cared about my appearance and spent more time in a Nordstrom’s or at a salon or going to a gym every day to obsess over my muscle tone, but it’s still freaky math the amount of money you pay to make money.  And that’s on top of essentially paying half of what you make to various forms of The Man.  So yeah, it would be cheaper for me to sit around in dirty clothes in some tea party wet dream of a borderline-anarchist land with no laws and no taxes, but it also costs money to stockpile ammunition.

I spent all day reading tech writing stuff that was my bread and butter from 2001 to 2007, and a lot of it’s still me.  Editing old work I haven’t thought about in years is a really strong and effective time machine.  I mean, the product has moved on since I left, and someone else worked on the docs, but it’s the same basic templates I created, and the bulk of the writing’s still mine, or at least a slight variation of mine.  It really pulls me back to 2003 or whatever, when I was hashing this stuff out for the first time.  And it’s somewhat stupid to get nostalgic about an era that’s largely documented on this very site, and that’s got some pretty solid coverage in my paper journals and in saved emails and all of the other crap sitting on my hard drive.

But red-penning my way through hundreds of pages of this stuff brings me back to the times I sat in the back corner of that office, hunched over a Dell, a giant second-generation iPod playing from its whopping twenty-gig hard drive, wondering what kind of fortified compound I’d build out of leftover shipping containers on my land in Colorado, what I’d do on my next big trip to Vegas, how I’d endure another weekend in Astoria, what I’d add to my Amazon shopping cart for my near-daily purchases I’d rapidly consume on the N train every day.  It makes me think of bad first dates and forgotten coworkers and random movies I saw for no reason other than the two hours of free air conditioning, even if it did cost ten bucks a pop plus a long train ride into “the city”.

And I guess I do lament the New York I resisted in that period, the people who were the status quo and how I knew I could never be them, and how I tried hard not to be.  New York is a land of old money, and a place of millions of people who come to this overpopulated ghetto of an island to somehow prove that they are old money, even if they’re tending a bar and running a receptionist desk.  It’s not like LA, where everyone is trying to get rich quick, where being a nobody from a dirt farm in Nebraska is actually a good thing, because you want to prove that you came from nothing and created everything.  I never came to New York because I wanted to be a New Yorker or because I wanted to follow some near-Parisian dream of being a bohemian but with a rich lineage. And there are millions of people who drive cabs or dig ditches or bust suds in a dish sink who have much different dreams.  But when you’re a white, single, early thirtysomething with a college degree and a desk job, it’s pretty hard to look beyond your demographic.

It’s also oddly contradictory, now that I think about it, how so much of being a status quo New Yorker is all about getting out of New York.  You spend every free second slinging shit at the “flyover states”, but almost every big status symbol requirement has to do with where you summer, how you get a share on Fire Island, how you go upstate to see the leaves turn, how you go to Europe or “do” LA or go to Rio or whatever non-New York place is supposed to make you a New Yorker.  I never built in these escapes, and being confined to a little island with no car drove me nuts.  It’s why I would get a last-second flight deal and go to Pittsburgh and absolutely love it.

I still haven’t been back to New York since I left.  I’ll probably end up going back soon, and I’m sure 100% of it has changed.  And I know I could never live there again, but I am curious if I show up at the corner of Broadway and Houston, if the whole thing will feel like I never left, or if I will be overwhelmed, or if it will all seem like a strange dream.

I think I’m buying a new computer desk tomorrow.  The kitchen table is no AnthroCart.  And once the new laptop shows up, there won’t be room for two computers and a cat.