Are my eyes really blue?

July 14, 2004:

Arrived safe in Los Altos a couple hours ago. Already have been plied with Coldstone cake, guacamole and chips, and Imperial Cane Sugar Dr Pepper. And company coming over to welcome the Prodigal Daughter home and also that hick she had in the trunk.

I REALLY don’t want to unpack the car, but I guess I better.



Five years. I can’t believe it’s been five years. I’ve been here longer than i was in Nashville, longer than I was an undergrad, as long as I’d been in greater DC when I made the visit to Silly Con Valley and realized I really wanted to try to make it here.

I guess I was right to get a 415 number for Google Voice. However, those of you who can figure out what 3329 spells will remember that the password is still victory or die.

Let’s face it – if you’re not on a cellphone I don’t want to talk to you. It’s 2009 for crying out loud. But from Y2K on, it seems like every phone is no roaming, no long distance. So area codes are suddenly less important from a practical standpoint – you can have your number completely dissociated from geography with no significant inconvenience incurred. Which makes things more difficult when it’s time to pick out a new number,

The thing with Google Voice is that you can set your number anywhere in the US. No geographical obligations. Your phone number can now be purely a matter of identity, vanity, whatever. Which puts me in a bit of a spot – after all, the aim of GV is to be your one number for everything, rings as many physical phones as you like, follows you anywhere and everywhere. So that number becomes a significant personal identifier.

Which means you have to think long and hard. Your home area code – hell, your old hometown? The area code where you lived for years back East? Or the more famous major-city code adjacent to it? If in the Valley, do you want a San Francisco 415 or something else around the bay? And do you want a vanity number that reflects your high school, or your old workgroup, or your callsign and nickname from the old days, or makes references to the radio culture of the greater Washington DC area, or…

You can see where one can get hung up on this and spin wheels quite a bit. Which I am.

…but nowhere does it say that it has to be taken seriously. If X is claiming that the earth is flat, the headline is not “Opinions On Shape Of Earth Differ,” the headline should rightly be “X Is Fucking Retarded”.

Consequently, if a Senator claims that his conversation with another Senator is privileged under “doctor/patient confidentiality,” both Senators are male, and the doctor Senator in question is an OB/GYN, the correct headline is not “Coburn Claims Constitutional Shield on Advice to Ensign,” but rather “Coburn Is Stupid As A Bag Of Snot.”

At what point can we just start saying that if you’re an utter fucking moron, you’re not allowed to play anymore? I realize this would basically shut down NBC completely, but you can’t make an omelette…

Ride a black swan…This camera is smarter than us…Phenomenon (da daaaaaaa, da da da)…!!!! the Seminoles, Seminoles !!!! Animoles….Mama don’t ride no bike…them’s good eatin’…I”M KING OF THE WORLD!!…your wife left you…George Takei’s going to sing a gay love song!…Amateur Sketch…I hear you got Arshavin…”and you know something? they’re assholes”…I would like to marry this drink…we’re gonna have to detail the car…”Pimento cheese is a 16 seed.” “Please. Pimento cheese wears a helmet.”…”Y’all live in one of them snowball houses?”…”Maybe you have cadmium poisoning!”…like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the gun…”Wicked is what Revenge of the Sith should have been”…Crak-Dixie…chicken fries…baked beans…Mr. Okra…you’re gonna give me an older, better version of the same wine, with a different label, for half off? What’s wrong with it?…there’s enough coffee for one cup, better give it to her…”I don’t want to leave!” “OK, don’t.” “OK, but the checks’ll stop coming in a couple of months…”

Y’all hurry back, y’hear?

“The West is the best. Get here; we’ll do the rest.”
-Jim Morrison

The first Transformers was damn near the worst movie I ever saw. It was surpassed only by The Thin Red Line, because if your war movie doesn’t have a shot fired for 45 minutes and looks like a NatGeo nature documentary in the meantime, your war movie sucks. But I digress…
The thing that just killed me about Transformers was how utterly and unapologetically stupid it was. I mean, we go to great lengths to make sure the robots all match up with the right size and shape so that all the parts are visible and the resulting robot is the same mass and parts and whatnot as the car or truck or whatever…and then we also have a gigantic cube the size of a house, but it can magically reduce to the size of a basketball. Oh, okay. The fights were loud and noisy and everything, not to mention damn near impossible to follow, and then everything just stops, because oh shit, the magic beam shot out of said tiny cube but nobody thought to do that beforehand? Note that I’m sticking purely with the robots here, leaving aside stuff like the ghetto computer whiz and the underwear-model-as-super-scientist – we have robots talking in jive, we have robots that pee on government agents (especially ones just crammed in at random because somebody mistook plot elements for actual plot), we have robots that apparently are capable of crouching behind a house in the middle of a residential neighborhood COMPLETELY SILENTLY.
This isn’t a movie, it’s fanfic. Written by a 10 year old boy. Who lives on a steady diet of Ritalin, Sunny D and paint chips.
And the new one, to all accounts, is even worse, and is exactly what you expect as that boy hits 12. Now the underwear model turns into a killer robot, and there are jive-talking robots with gold teeth, and one robot has balls! heheheheheheheheheh! Balls rule! Shut up Beavis. No way!
I realize that there are enough screamy kids, paste-eating fanboys, mental defectives, and people who just don’t give a shit to make this kind of thing a going concern. I didn’t realize there were $200 million worth of them. And now I’m seriously waiting to hear that NBC just greenlit 13 episodes of Ow! My Balls! for the fall season. You have to look awfully hard for it, but there is a line between dumb fun and just plain dumb…and Michael Bay’s basically wondering what that dot behind him is.

Plainly no longer what he was, but when he was younger, there was nothing like him. I wonder if this is how my parents felt when Elvis passed.

…let me sum up.

* So Himself apparently did get a liver transplant in Tennessee. My only regret out of all this is that it was in Memphis rather than at VUMC, but then, we can’t have everything. I think the results of the last six months speak for themselves, though – while having Himself at the controls is nice, it’s not necessary for AAPL to continue to operate successfully – and if they’re not bring back El Steve-o for the release of new MacBook Pros and iPhones, don’t expect to see him running keynotes routinely ever again.

* Seriously? 12% of the country thinks Obama is a secret Muslim? Can we have these people rounded up and shot? Do you know how much better off we’d be economically, intellectually and psychologically? (And yes, I am sure there are as many liberal whackadoos out there, and I would be as happy to bundle them off to the stockyard, except I would rather first take out the ones who are more likely to shoot me. What’s some hayseed hippie from Boulder or Austin or Eugene gonna do, pot-smoke me to death?)

* I must say that so far, I seem to be coping with work foolishness a lot better than I have at previous places. I think part of that comes from having 12 years of experience with the merry-go-round of “oh look, we’re out of money, fire all the contractors who were doing mission-critical work because we wouldn’t hire permanent staff in an attempt to save money.” I don’t care how badly screwed up these people think they are, I did seven years in Tech Support Vietnam with the greatest second-level support team that ever lived, and I fear no user…or VP.

* Much as I’d like the new iPhone 3Gs, I don’t think I could justify laying out that kind of loot. I haven’t had a chance to evaluate the real speed improvement or battery changes, so it comes down to “is it worth resetting the contract and laying out $200 or $300 for video capability and voice control?” And since I rarely drive, the latter is a scratch. At this point I’m better off waiting for the 2010 model. (To be honest, I would probably have still rocked my original, and be eligible for an upgrade by October, if I hadn’t screwed it up last year with lint packed in the dock connector. I still want to get that back from my brother-in-law at some point, just because, dammit, it was free from Apple and was the single greatest trophy of working there.)

* I am reluctantly realizing that there’s not one single computer in the house that we actually own. Everything has been through the good offices of current or former employers, and it’s all loaned with the understanding that it *could* get called back in. Consequently, I’m having some trouble sorting out the best methodology for backing up my personal info and keeping it separate – and secure – from the work content. (Not to mention finding some way to run Snow Leopard preview on my good work laptop.) At least my streak of not paying for a computer since 2000 is intact (come to think of it, I need to get that iBook back too – lot of history in that little gray toilet seat).

* Come to think of it, though, I could operate for an awful long time on just an iPhone, battery permitting. I’m still considering getting one of those Mophie JuicePaks or similar, or even just one of the things you can pop four AAs in and recharge, because I’m basically limited to about 5 hours’ usage irrespective of what I do – any combination of location services, Bluetooth, Wi-fi, push, 3G, screen brightness and podcast playback adds up to 300 minutes of live usage. The key thing for me is just keeping it charged up at work during the day (and staffing out podcast playback to a leftover iPod shuffle) – I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I’m out in the city all day with the other half of Team Black Swan next week. Not that I expect to be listening to stuff or talking much on it, but we’re going to need those location services pretty badly, not to mention the MUNI sched.

* I need somebody to build me a nice little steampunk Gentleman’s Compact Aetheric Discharge Concealable Sidearm. No, I’m not planning for Maker Faire, why do you ask?

* It seems the height of sense to be reading William Gibson on an iPhone.

* I’m getting interested in the Giants again. I guess interleague play is justified, because the series against the A’s has me paying attention again – as does the pitching of what seems to be a pretty good staff, evenly split between fireballing young talent and crafty more-guile-than-goods veterans. Lincecum needs to settle down if he’s going to get out of the 7th though.

* My various glees have subsided, it seems. I have no current case of Shoe Glee, Outerwear Glee, Netbook Glee, or even older now-obsolete forms like Car Glee or Phone Glee. Good thing, too, as I don’t need any slow leaks in my checking account. I will be glad when this week is over with, as I have been too far removed from the free coffee in the office that normally sustains me. (I think there’s a half-2-liter of blue Mountain Dew still on my desk from Friday’s cookout.)

* O me of little faith. Lincecum is the bomb, even if he did have to be saved at one point by a terrible call at second.

* I’ve about decided to adopt Fulham as my team in the Premier League. Yes, yes, I know, any team whose most prominent celebrity supporter is Hugh Grant must be the height of embarrassment. But they have been very friendly to Americans – not only is Clint Dempsey a bright star in their lineup, not only did they have Bocanegra and now have Eddie Johnson, but they actually named a bar in their stadium after Brian McBride, he of the crimson mask against Italy in ’06 who captained them to their Great Escape a couple years back. Plus they are the only team in the Premiership with a neutral section, where you can mix freely with supporters of both teams. Plus it’s in London, and a posh and scenic bit of London, so the odds of actually going to see them go up. Plus Craven Cottage is right on the river, just as Pac Bell is right on the bay…plus being owned by the bloke who owns Harrods, you have to think that a) there’s money on the table for transfers and player personnel and b) the catering must be all right.

* Seriously, how do you lose an entire state governor for damn near a week? Hopefully it’s not too serious (TPM is reporting that one witness has Sanford on a plane to Minneapolis, which suggests the possibility of the Mayo Clinic and thus serious health matters, in which case good luck to him) but if it’s not, expect a zillion euphemisms to crop up around “hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

* Spent two days in a Perl class this week, finally developing skills I should have been working on ten years ago. As with so much of my life, though, let’s overlook how long I was getting here and be happy I just showed up at all. =)

* God bless, Persians, keep it green.

No screwing around, no backing down – you can tell that the underlying thought process in the Iranian demonstrators boils down to they can’t shoot all of us. The most telling moment will be when the order finally comes down to open fire en masse. A lot of people forget that the other hero in Beijing was the guy driving that first tank, who tried to go around the iconic protester in front of him but ultimately refused to run him down – and as one blogger recently opined, whatever happened to Tank Man, you have to think Tank Commander was shot in the head at the first opportunity, because once you’ve lost Tank Commander you’ve lost the country.

Anyway, those kids have balls the size of minarets. Good luck out there today. And tomorrow. And however long it goes.