A Whole Lotta Nothing

The Culture War on Halloween

The culture war on Halloween, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Halloween is a time-honored holiday steeped in the traditions of sharing with your neighbor, celebrating childhood with candy and decorations, and generally having a fun time as the days begin to grow shorter.

There is also a culture war that seeks to end this traditional holiday.

Like the above photograph shows, several local churches near me are throwing parties aimed at avoiding this holiday of giving and sharing with thy neighbors, going by the euphemistic term "Fall Family Festival." They offer treats, fun, and games, but they just so happen to throw them on October 31st, during the prime evening trick or treating hours.

Make no mistake, no matter how many years (Norman Rockwell anyone?) Halloween has existed, no matter how harmless toddlers dressed as ghosts and princesses are, no matter, there is spiritual conspiracy behind this new found war on Halloween and it needs to stop. I fear the day is coming when we won't be able to display our Jack O'Lanterns in the town square, when we will be called names for trying to share real American treats like Crackerjack and carmel-covered apples, and when our sons and daughters will ask us why we can't go out and share candy with our beloved neighbors anymore.

We can't let this happen. Heroes, join me in opposing these PC-thugs and their so-called "Fall Family Festivals." This is a nation with a sweet tooth, our founding fathers ate candy (why else would they have wooden teeth?), and your children and grandchildren should too. Keep candy in Halloween!

TLFT*: Michael Phelps

Watching some recent olympic track and field events still sitting on TiVo, I'm finally starting to understand how amazing it was for Michael Phelps to swim 17 races and win 8 medals and break multiple records over the span of just a few short days. For some reason I wasn't really that impressed by the announcers constantly repeating it. It's just swimming in water right? You don't even sweat while doing it!

Watching the track events and seeing the people that do multiple events have to go through heats (like Phelps did in the water), I'm completely and totally amazed by some track stars doing three different events over the span of a couple days. I guess it's because I ran cross-country and longer track events at one time in my life, and that I can see they are totally exhausted at the end of each heat, but I am amazed at the insanity of running full bore several times a day over the course of a couple days.

Then I realize Phelps did about three times as many heats/races in a similar timespan, and that the few times I've been in an olympic-sized pool exhausted me almost instantly, and I have a new appreciation for the insane amount of sheer exertion that kid put himself through.

* too long for twitter

Becoming an old (blogging) man

Today I realized that I'm part of the "old guard" of blogging because I remember a time when blogging was so new that very few sites had comments (it seems like MetaFilter was one of the first few?) and after a few years when they started to become commonplace, people were generally decent to each other because it was very literally turning a blog into a face-to-face conversation.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we've achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

I have a feeling that if you've only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+% of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It's not an intimate conversation, it's just another content management feature available to you on the web.

This has a de-humanizing effect that I'm seeing play out more and more often in the weirdest places. People will post about their idle curiosities on their personal blog ("Why does x happen when I do y?") and instead of seeing friendly answers I would expect many years ago, I'll often see someone early on read into the question and assume all sorts of accusations ("well, maybe it's because you are a, b, and c, and everyone knows it!") and watch most followup comments start from there and go into darker directions.

It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Also, know that I mean "new generation" in a way where age of person in it is irrelevant. You could be 50 years old and started reading blogs last summer and I'd put you in that group.

Of course, I could just be talking out of my ass, old people tend to do that...

Eleven

After upgrading my first mac (powerbook) to another powerbook, then to an iMac and finally to a Mac Pro, I realized five years of using the Migration Assistant had finally run its course. Various basic parts (mostly Keychain Access) of Leopard stopped functioning properly and since everything ran great on my new Macbook Air, I decided it was time to backup, format, and reinstall fresh on my main Mac Pro.

A few hours after upgrading I installed Firefox and my most often used apps like Transmit and Textmate. Every few days I realized I needed one more app so I'd download and install it. After a week or so, I was pretty much done reinstalling.

Last year I wrote about doing as much as possible using online apps and how I found it really handy, so today I looked at my Applications folder to see how many things I've installed aside from the default Mac apps. I counted 11 applications total outside of iLife and iWork. It includes a couple proprietary things I need for installed hardware (like the wonderful ScanSnap) but it's mostly the basics (Firefox, Transmit, etc) for doing my everyday work tending MetaFilter.

The thing that surprises me is that I reformatted my computer about six weeks ago, and I haven't felt like anything is missing since. Thanks to a combination of almost all my work being done online and the great set of built-in functionality of OSX, I can get by on an almost completely clean system.

Ten years ago I had literally hundreds of apps on my Windows box, and I feel like I was constantly needing more.

Egg McMuffin inventor dies at 89

Oh shit: Egg McMuffin inventor dies at 89. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm the biggest fan of this man's invention.

I can't think of a more fitting tribute than imagining Father Guido Sarducci/Lazlo Toth is spreading jam on a McMuffin, just for you, inventor guy.

A used car scam I once almost fell for

I saw someone I know selling their old car on craigslist and it reminded me of the time I sold my last car using similar means. I almost fell for a couple guys that showed up, test drove the car, then tried to buy it at a vastly discounted price. They were quite persistent and almost wore me down after a couple hours but dropped a few clues that they had done it before. It really felt like I was being conned, and I've been meaning to write it up since it happened years and years ago, so I might as well now.

I listed my car at $3,000, about 10-20% below what bluebook was telling me, but I knew the car had a ton of miles on it (120k) and I just wanted the thing sold (I probably would have taken anything $2500 and over). The first person to respond to the ad went like this:

1. A guy called within an hour of posting the for sale notice.
2. He had a sob story about his sister that needed a car very badly to get to school, and how he's ready to buy one for his sister asap.
3. He showed up with a friend who he said knew a lot about cars. They both rode along for the test drive.
4. We stopped at a supermarket parking lot after driving a bit, and the mechanic friend gave the car a once over, looking under the hood and looking around the entire car
5. Mechanic friend comes up from the tailpipe with oil all over his fingers, says the engine block must be cracked, sending oil through the system.
6. Guy sounds kind of bummed about the "cracked engine block" and we drive back to my place where I drop them off.
7. Before he leaves, guy offers $1,000 for the car, since his sister still really needs to get to school and his mechanic friend promises to fix the engine at a later date for a higher price.
8. I refuse, saying it's a ridiculous price. He offers $1200. I say no thanks, and leave.
9. The guys hang out in front of my building, calling 15 minutes later with an offer of $1300, and waits another 15 minutes to call again with an offer of $1400. I say no both times.
10. Three days later I sell the car for the list price, from someone paying cash and looking to refurbish the car top to bottom.
11. Original guy calls after one week from the same number, using a different name, asking if the car is still for sale.

I remember feeling weird about this guy and with enough red flags going off I walked away from it as soon as I could, but looking back on it, it was pretty obvious this was a common con-man style approach. I bet you could run a pretty decent business lowballing people and reselling their cars immediately after for market prices.

• He called soon after listing, trying to nab underpriced cars before anyone else has a chance to consider them
• The sob story was supposed to prey on my emotions, to help out another person in need
• Even though I don't work on cars, I now know that if there really was oil being sent through the exhaust, the car would spew blue smoke when driven, which it didn't. The oil was smeared on his fingers from another part of the car, for this bit of theater. At the time I didn't call them on this move but I did say it sounded highly unlikely to me.
• Friend said he could fix the engine himself for $1200 so the guy could offer less and say "well this car will do for now for my sister, but it'll cost me so much more to fix, can you discount your price a bit more?" This is also a bit of theater.
• The lowball offer and slightly higher offers backfired on the guy, pissing me off. I knew the car was already discounted about $500 what it should have listed for, why on earth would I take 1/2 of that still?
• Calling me back a week later under a new name was hilarious. I don't know if that was a mistake but it made me think he called a lot of people selling cars.

What if cupcakes could somehow become more awesome? HOWTO

I'm a big fan of cupcakes, huge fan. 30lbs overweight fan.

Anyway, a couple months ago, my wife gave her students some cupcakes and someone BLEW MY MIND with a simple hack that solved one of cupcakes' few failings: sometimes there's just too much frosting, they're too tall for your mouth, and/or the frosting/cake mix is all wrong in your mouth.

Behold my illustrated guide to How to eat cupcakes

Impassioned plea

I open my email this morning and there's a long message from a vaguely familiar name. It's dozen paragraphs long but I start to read it.

The first couple paragraphs explain that I've connected with this person in the past either through some hipster activities in the DC area or through blogging, and the author was going through their gmail address book and writing to everyone. It sounds extremely important; they sound honest and this sounds urgent, so I read on.

They apologize for the mass mail, but explain further that even though the author knows not everyone is politically involved, there's a bit of a crisis in Washington that they felt was important to share at this tumultuous time. The anxiety in the author's voice is palpable and I'm right there with him. "What is it he needs us to do? How can we help?" I ask myself as I continue reading.

The call to action comes in the last paragraph. The culmination of the email is that we friends of the author should check out a few youtube videos that will explain everything. I'm dying to know what they are about.

Genital Mutilation story from Africa?

Doctors Without Borders plea?!

Environmental disasters in China?!

I push play on the first video.

Ron Paul campaign ad. It's fucking Ron Paul. 12 paragraphs to spam every single person the author knows, all for a fucking Ron Paul ad. I look up at the To: line and see about 100 names, all starting with M, like mine. This douchebag sat here and did this by hand all day with his stupid Gmail address book. I've heard Ron Paul fans described as "crazies" and now I know why.

Snigglets 2.0

Sometimes I like to make up words to match situations. Here's today's made up word/phrase:

All-You-Can-Amnesia (n)

Common form of memory loss often found in food service industry waitstaff. Especially prevalent in restaurants that don't write anything down when you order, often resulting in the wrong dressing, wrong drinks, and an entirely missed entrée.

Seriously, when did trying to memorize a table's entire order become a new parlor trick worthy of higher tips? I can see when it makes sense in a high-end tiny restaurant where you only have 5 options and there are 6 tables in the whole place, but when the local bar and grill starts doing it on busy nights, bad things happen.

Word of the day (that I made up)

Clothundrum (n)

When a person that orders witty, nerdy, and humorous t-shirts on the internet, enough to make them the "funny t-shirt guy" in their hometown, needs to travel to a function that will include other people that order witty, nerdy, and humorous t-shirts on the internet and is having trouble packing. See also: conundrum, clothing.

Words to live by

I would suggest that all of you find your "accordion" -- that thing that makes you try out life's little detours -- and use it to practice your own random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. The rewards are astonishing.

-- Joey DeVilla

National Writers Workshop in Wichita

I'm in Kansas for the National Writers Workshop put on by the Poynter people. They asked me last summer if I wanted to come talk about online stuff and I said yes, but to give you an idea of how much of a lightweight I am at this conference, I bumped into another speaker on the hotel shuttle and he modestly said he had to give a talk as well, so I looked it up (a keynote!) and this is him:

As a journalist for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis and the Baltimore Afro-American newspapers, Moses Newson covered almost every major event of the civil rights era. His stories included the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial in Mississippi; school desegregations in Hoxie, Ark. (1955), Clinton, Tenn. (1956) and at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. (1957); and the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Newson was one of only two reporters aboard the CORE Freedom Ride bus that was fire bombed in Anniston, Ala., on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961.

And I'm a guy with a blog that has comments. Can't wait for my session!

Digg revolt

Pretty interesting community story taking place on Digg today (as much as I can gather, after Andre showed me):

• user makes a post on digg linking to the encryption key that is used to crack HD DVD protection


• story is pulled, user is banned, then story goes up about banning user (people speculate it's because HD DVD was an advertiser) update: Ed Felten has a good post about general efforts to take all references to the key off the web


• Two to three thousand people get annoyed/pissed, and start posting and digging all sorts of stories that mention the encryption key in seemingly innocuous ways.


• This continues for the rest of the day, with the entire front page of the site filled with stories leaking the crack

It's always fascinating when a community (or a country, or a religion, or a group of any size) decides to spontaneously revolt, and it's even more interesting when it happens in such a short period of time in a distributed medium like the internet. There are loads of stories like this on other sites and in multiplayer online games but I've never seen it happen on digg before. I'm curious how many people it took to come up with a reaction and the idea to post the key in other ways -- I can see a general mob voting mentality would be easy to gather steam once the posts were up since many people wanted a way to vent their frustration -- but I wonder if it was just a dozen or two users that started creating the posts that quickly got to the front page. And finally, what was their method of communication? In-site messaging? IM?

Anyway, I'm certainly a late comer to this story but I'd love to see a wrap-up of it several days from now, when all the details can be figured out.

Thoughts going through my mind while at the dentist, listening to my iPod and on nitrous for the first time

Oh my god I love this song. Love it. The part in the chorus with the drums? Awesome! I totally need to see these guys live, I bet they're so good. God this song rocks. Man, it sounds like someone really far away is getting a gnarly scraping, but all I hear is this awesome song. I'm gonna turn it up. It's sooo good! I'm going to twirl now, just sit here and twirl in place. Such a great fucking song!

Basketball half bakery ideas

I thought of these during March Madness games, but neglected to post it until now, so here goes, my wishlist for technology additions to the sport of basketball:

1. Put RFID tags inside the soles of players' shoes as well as embedded in the floor. Take the "3 seconds in the key" call away from the refs and let technology automatically measure your time in the paint. There is no disputing the call when you trip the clock, and refs can focus on other more important stuff.

2. Accelerometers in shoes communicating with one inside the ball could probably do a better job calling Traveling than the ref.

3. Accelerometers in shoes of players could give the referees more data to judge charging vs. personal foul calls. You could have actual data for who planted their feet first and deserves a charge call or who wasn't stationary in time and deserves a foul.

Decursivication (new word)

[di-kur-siv-fi-key-shuhn] noun. The process of losing one's penmanship, thanks to automatic billing and an increasingly electronic world. Bob attributed his chicken scratch-like note writing to the process of decursivication.

Not quite so modern after all

What is most amazing about Room & Board and Design Within Reach is not that they offer unique modern furnishings for your home, it's that they're based on a business model from the early 1900s. They're catalog stores, plain and simple. You go in, check out the comfy sofas and interesting tables and you order stuff, exactly as you would at home using the web, only you're dictating your address to someone in the store using a computer.

For all that seems fresh and modern about these businesses, trying to buy something on the spot that you could walk out holding reminded me of the past. I guess in the age of the internet, we still need to try things on, sit on them, and see if that orange paint is too orangey, but it seems like weird to base a business on such an old school idea. I guess what they offer is such a niche kind of product they can't be undercut by a million websites offering copies.

Quote from the Hodge that I just found while ego searching...

John Hodgman: No, I do not take requests. I'm sorry. I learned my lesson after the I AM NOT MATT HAUGHEY incident of Portland (look it up).

-- Books: The Areas of My Expertise - washingtonpost.com

It's good to know I've had an impact.

flickr, always innovating

ho ho ho hat/beard is the best wacky easter egg feature ever. Try adding it as a note to your photos.

Do you realize Digital Cameras used to suck?

I was looking through some old photos I took from 1998-2002, some using a 1 megapixel camera while the rest were from a 3 megapixel camera. I had seen these images dozens of times before, and remembered them as well-composed, sharp photos. I was really getting into photography back then and I recalled the photos as my best work. Taking a fresh look at them today, the first thing that hit me was whoa, the photo quality is terrible! There is clearly a lot of low resolution blur going on. What happened to my mind's beautiful memories of these images?

Here's one I shot at SF's MoMA. I remember thinking it was so arty and geometric and I recall it not being blurry but looking really sharp. If you look at it now, the screen over the window is a completely pixelated blur. I recall the same feeling when looking at Jason's photos from Web98. I remember when the photos were new and I thought they were great back then but looking at them now, the quality is worse than my first cameraphone. Another old photo of bloggers got this reaction from me today. Back when I first saw it 6 years ago, it was a great photo. Today, it looks awful, severely limited by the technology of the day.

With the advent of better sensors and digital SLRs, it's pretty astounding what comes out of a digital camera today. In an instant, I realized how fast and far the technology progressed in less than ten years. Could you imagine if traditional photography progressed from gelatin silver prints to medium format in less than a decade?

BBQ 2.0

Let it be known from this day forward:

barbecues (BBQ) shall henceforth be known as meat-up meet-ups. The abbreviation MUMU will also suffice.

testing...

Just testing out MT 3.3...

Hacks! Snakes! Tim Tams!

WorkFriendly is one of the most clever and amusing hacks for the underemployed I've seen, and the Samuel L. Jackson phone campaign is a brilliant hack that you can use to prank your friends who will turn around and prank everyone else they know resulting in everyone in the country getting 20 calls a day promoting the movie.

On top of those two brilliant web hacks found today, I find out that Tim Tams are available in the US at Cost Plus. Holy mother of god, I'm so there.

Two things

- Never wake a man when he is having his A-Team dream. I had my face man, I had some muscle. I had just souped up the van and got it all ready when boom! my brilliant plan was out the window because I had to get up and make breakfast for the baby.

- Don't order a plain cake donut at the donut shop. It's like going all the way to Vegas to play some chess.

Where do I live? Where are you from?

Ever since Floyd Landis won the Tour de France yesterday, I've been happy to see all the mentions of his current hometown of Murrieta, California in the press. During my senior year of high school in Orange County, CA, my parents bought a house in Murrieta and moved there back when there wasn't a single traffic signal for miles. I eventually moved in and joined them for my first few years of college, spending most of my time working 2 jobs trying to pay for tuition.

It was an hour from everything, which made it the center of nothing. No one had ever heard of it. I had this set of rules in my head for answering the question of where I lived:

Where do you live?

- if the asker was from outside of California and beyond, I'd say "near San Diego" which usually did the trick. Even vacationing Germans have heard of San Diego.

- if the asker was from California, I'd say "near Riverside" since it was a major Inland Empire city that was about 25 miles north and was slightly more precise.

- if the asker was from Southern California, I'd say "Temecula" since that was the next town over and featured a big wine growing industry that people were familiar with and probably went tasting at.

- if the asker was from Riverside County, I'd say "Murrieta, near Temecula" and most would require further explanation and I'd have to say "Murrieta Hot Springs" which was an ancient resort there.

It gives me a little thrill every time I hear "Murrieta" on TV or in a major news story since it's clear from my experiences that no one aside from nearby residents has ever heard of it. The funny thing is I currently live about an hour from Portland, an hour from the Pacific Ocean, in a small suburb town no one has ever heard of and I have to go through the same process to answer the question.

Not dead yet

Normally, I can easily track people talking about or mentioning me by tracking my last name, but lately these ego searches are useless, since the corrupt former Irish PM Charles Haughey finally died (and people are dancing on his grave from the blog posts I've read but it sounds like he was an awful man). It was like a big DOS on my RSS reader, as my normally 3-5 hit ego searches are coming back with hundreds of items every few hours.

I should go back to tin cans on a string

Greg is kind enough to let me shack up on his server and today he sent a bit of info he noticed when checking the logs:

[root@eod log]# grep 'Jun 7' maillog | grep haughey\.com | \ grep 'User unknown' | wc -l 5678

[root@eod log]# grep 'Jun 7' maillog | grep metafilter\.com | \ grep 'User unknown' | wc -l 12976

That's the total number of messages (in one day) going to anything@my domains that I previously told him to ignore and send to /dev/null.

That's 18,654 spams going to non-existent email addresses. Greg says about 700 come in each day to my real matt@ accounts, and of those 700 only about 40 are legit. Gmail does a fairly good job screening the remaining, but it's far from perfect. I probably wade through 100 spams a day to see my real mail.

It's nice having the same email address for the past 9 years, but jeez, filtering 19k emails a day down to 40 is pretty messed up.

Happy Slayer Day

National Day of Slayer: June 6, 2006 (6/6/6)

TURN IT UP!!!

macbook man

Over the weekend, a new app called macsaber came out. The moment I realized that geeks everywhere would be swinging their new laptops around, my first thought was how stupid that must look and how that could easily become another Star Wars Kid parody.

My new macbook showed up today and I downloaded macsaber. The rest is internet history:

I went for accuracy, combing my hair down, putting on tight khakis and a striped tight shirt, and following his first set of movements.

Link to the youtube video

For the songwriters

random thought while listening to music: the words "acetylene" and "unsettling" sound so similar that you probably shouldn't write love songs about welders.

That's not American

I bought a you-bake-it-at-home apple pie today and the instructions said to bake at 375 for 1 and 1/2 hours then for optimum flavor, let cool for 4 to 6 hours.

hours.

four to six hours? Who in their right mind lets a perfectly good warm apple pie get cold before they try a slice?

TurboText Adventure

I realized when I was finishing up my taxes last week that TurboTax is basically boiled down complicated tax forms into a text adventure. They ask you hundreds of questions, you fill in some numbers, and you're done.

I've been using TurboTax online for six years now and I typically work on my taxes in fits and starts. I'll kick it off in January by importing last year's info. In February I'll feed in all my 1099s and W2s to see how awful my tax hit could be. March is mostly totalling up expenses and tracking down receipts. By April, I'm scraping together all the money I owe.

Since I revisit my return a lot, I'm having to jump around in the application and there often isn't a direct easy way to get to precisely the form you want. I've started to almost memorize the game paths.

Thoughts that crossed my mind when I finished my return recently:

I have a home office deduction to total up -- I need to enter the Schedule C castle and answer 8 questions correctly to get to the part where I can save money.

Remember: to get past the Big Boss near the end, you have to answer 'no' to every audit alert you see. Yes, even the big red flashing ones.

When you first buy a house in the game, they send you into this level that goes on and on, with one brutal question after another, but don't fret, because at the end you get a bunch of bonus money.

I should write up a complete walkthrough to solve Tax Return 2006 in as few moves as possible.

I lose something every time I travel

Today I noticed that I quit using an email client and I probably won't be going back any time soon. I spent the past week using Gmail directly in a web browser instead of my Apple Mail client, because I've moved to a desktop iMac and I was traveling with my old laptop. Gmail doesn't honor the "read" flag on stuff you've seen online, so it would mean if I open Mail now that I'm home, I'll have about a thousand unread messages, but in my web browser, I'm all caught up. Aside from that, being forced to use browser-based Gmail, I've noticed the search is really good. I can search for the last name of someone I got an email from once and a single word they probably used and I can find that message instantly. I've kvetched about Apple Mail's terrible search before, but the online search was perfect. So I'm sticking with Gmail online from here on out.

Another data point: a few years ago, at SXSW I put on some tight jeans, realized my overstuffed wallet that I've carried for ten years wasn't going to fit, so I grabbed just the essentials: my atm card, my drivers license, and wrapped a few bills around it. When I got back home, I threw my wallet away, and to this day I still walk around with 2 or 3 cards wrapped with a bit of cash.

When I go off for a week somewhere, I am forced to change my daily routines. By the time I get back I realize whatever random change I made is actually better. I should force myself to change my routine more often (there's probably a life lesson in there somewhere).

How do I love thee, let me count the ways

I like Malcolm Gladwell. A lot. But I had no idea he felt the same way I do about Vegas. From the ESPN interview:

Simmons: Second question: Can you explain in one paragraph why you're against Vegas?

Gladwell: Where to start? You get there. You can't get a cab. Last time I waited 30 minutes in line at the airport. You get to your hotel, you wait another 45 minutes to check in. It's 120 degrees outside, and inside it's 45 degrees and all you can think about is there's about to be a epidemic of Legionnaires Disease. The food is terrible. Everyone loses money -- everyone. The amount of plastic surgery is terrifying. There are large packs of enormous, glassy-eyed people in stretch pants, pulling the levers on slot machines. (By the way, greatest and most under-appreciated gambling story ever: William Bennett, he of one best seller after another lecturing Americans on moral values and virtue and the bankruptcy of our culture, turns out not only to be a degenerate gambler, but a gambler who only played the slots. The slots! Had he been a great poker player -- even a decent poker player -- I'm in his corner. But the slots?) I digress. Back to Vegas: Why would I want to see Celine Dion, ever (and I'm Canadian)? Or white mutant tigers? Or the Village People? Or Tony Orlando and Dawn? I have more fun walking to the laundromat from my apartment in New York than I do in Vegas.

Olympics, Schmolympics

Two days into the Olympics and I can barely stand NBC's entertainment-as-news style of reporting. NBC seems to approach the games like it's a snapshot of Hollywood, elevating a few people to superstar status and covering their every move (Kwan, Bode Miller, etc). It quickly reaches a saturation point while at the same time piling on the pressure for these select athletes to win. It seems like NBC engineers its coverage to bring people up and then tear them down. Does it make for interesting TV when the stars don't get gold, because it seems to be the kiss of death. Or is NBC just so used to reporting on broken Hollywood marriages and crazy pop music stars that they don't know of any other way? Or do they do it so they can have their big cinderella story when someone they cover in exhausting detail actually wins?

I wish you could just get raw satellite feeds of each event online, or even buy them at the iTunes Music Store. I would pay for unedited coverage sans NBC announcers.

bubble 2.0

I hate to sound cynical, because it is a cool app but....

2000: Make a really kickass powerpoint deck, get the Stevester down in marketing to shop it along Sand Hill Rd, make $15 million in the first seed round before you reach the end of the street.

2006: Create an ajaxy alpha app, sell to Google before you even get to slap a BETA sticker on it.

Four things about one thing

It's been interesting to watch the "four things" meme spread. It took several days between the first time I saw it and the time someone actually threw me into it, and it sort of came from LiveJournal and seemed to move from less trafficked blogs to more trafficked ones.

Anyway, I looked over the stuff and realized I could do the four things for friends of mine before I even read their responses. I'm sure any astute reader here could answer my four things for most every category. So instead, I just want to focus on the one section I've talked least about, and expand a bit.

Four jobs I've had

1. Bikeshop employee, 1989-90.

Pretty much any hobby that becomes your life's passion ends up costing about $2,000-$3,000 a year to maintain. I've seen the pattern take hold during my own obsessions with hiking/backpacking, computer dorkery, and especially cycling. When you're young, coming up with enough money to keep your bike from constantly being broken is tough to do, so working at a shop is the best way to make ends meet. Most shops are known for giving employees bike parts at cost (about 40-50% off), but the one I worked at only gave 10-20% off which I secretly hated, but I went through parts so fast it was still a good deal. It was the perfect job to have at age 17 and if you spent more than 4 hours a day on a bike, it was the perfect job for a lifetime. I frequently ran across other bikeshop workers that never left, all the way into their 40s.

2. Pizza Delivery Guy 1991-1993.

I worked at three different pizza places during my first two years of college, two of them were small unknown franchises and one was a huge national chain (rhymes with Feeza Butt). It was shit pay and added wear to your car, but you got tons of tax-free tips and it taught me a few life lessons. Avoid eating national chain pizza if you can. National chain food prep aims low -- you have to keep costs down but you can't have every customer getting e. coli, so the economic optimum is just barely above safe for eating. I also learned that smaller franchise pizza shop employees can't be trusted. I was one of three managers of one place and years later I ran into an employee after the place folded and found out I was the only one in the shop that wasn't skimming from the till. I never thought people got away with that stuff but two managers cooked their books and took home enough money to cause the owner to close down a year later. On the flip side, I once worked for a place that required me to wear day-glo t-shirts/hats, answer phones by saying "Hot and Tasty $brandname Pizza!", and the owner was a lying bastard that I would argue with from the moment I entered the store until my shift was over. After six months of working there and not getting a xmas bonus or card (every other shit job I had gave me at least a $20 bill in a card at xmas), I sat down and wrote him a long letter about what a jerk he was for it, and I ended it with a giant "FUCK YOU." The funny part was I showed up to work the next day fully expecting to work and was surprised when he thought I quit, and wouldn't let me work. He closed the store down a few weeks later with some convoluted tales of missing several night's profits by a series of unlikely mishaps.

3. Environmental Engineer 1997.

Having finished my BS and MS degrees, it took me about a month to find an environmental job at a consulting firm. The pay was low and I had a temporary cubicle with a 486. The office environment was close to what you see in Office Space or The Office (US Version) -- mind-numbingly boring and my primary task was preparing environmental impact reports and support packages so Sprint could put up PCS cellphone poles all over Southern California. My day to day work mostly involved making copies of city hall records, faxing stuff, and sometimes delivering documents to city halls around the southland. It was glorified pencil pushing and anyone out of high school could do it. I was so happy to leave this job for my first web design job and I distinctly remember my coworkers saying the internet was just a fad that wouldn't amount to much and I was making the wrong choice.

4. Professional Web Dork 1997-2006.

Still in progress.

droppin' whales

I've been thinking about this and this which was prompted by this, and hearing that modern hiphop diss songs date back to vikings and even inuit people is really amazing. I love the idea of an Inuit diss song. I couldn't get this out of my head, so forgive the following, which flowed forth a few minutes ago.

It's a must that I bust any norwhal tusk you're handing me
dropping beats, dropping whales, it runs in my family
not like that kook, nanook, and his silly northern crew
his harpoons can't hit the broadside of an igloo.

The Year in Cities

My year in cities:

Las Vegas, NV
San Francisco, CA*
Portland, OR*
San Diego, CA
Austin, TX
New York, NY
Toronto, ON

Not as many as most years, due to the baby putting a serious dent in my travel time, but at least one new place in another country got added.

Advice

As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I'm increasingly coming back around to old cliches and sayings -- stuff grandparents and parents and parents of friends' would tell me back when I was 15 and I never believed a word of it. Some of it is profound, life-changing stuff that I ignored all those years ago.

Then it dawned on me: maybe I've already gotten all the great advice I would ever need in a lifetime.

People from all walks of life and every age have at one time or another given me their life lessons that gave them some understanding of how the universe works. It's likely how one generation passes knowledge onto the next generation. The problem is I wasn't mature enough or smart enough at the time to recognize it or understand it. I'm hearing myself say things my grandfater would say, and it gives me pause. It's not the standard worry that I'm turning into my parents, but more a worry that I've let all of life's truths slip through my hands when I was younger and I'm just now starting to catch them and pass them on. I hope my hunch is correct -- maybe life isn't a journey to uncover new truths in far off places, but instead to simply gain enough to experience to understand what is all around you, all the time.

Of course, I've got to remind myself of this when I start handing out sage advice to toddlers. They'll be ignoring me until well after 2035.

Yule Log

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//-->

(plucked from the amusing login screen at gmail)

You learn something new everyday

Let's say you take a trip out to your mailbox a few hundred yards away, and you know there are big packages in the box, and it's a downpour. So you grab an umbrella (knowing that true Oregonians never use umbrellas, but you make an exception for the sake of dry christmas presents). When you return to your front door with packages in hand, you place the soaking wet umbrella outside the front door to dry.

The next day, when you go out to a restaurant and it's been raining off an on, you take the umbrella, just in case, because you don't want the baby to get soaked while going to and from the car. The umbrella sits by your side for a couple hours while you eat. Then you head home, and on the way into the house, dump all the jackets and scarves and the umbrella on a chair.

Several hours later, around 11pm, you hear a ridiculously loud and strange noise, coming from the chair which is inside the house. The cats are confused. The sound comes and goes for the next ten minutes. It's natural, but also unnatural. It's not pleasant. It's quite loud, this sound coming from a chair in your house.

So here's the lesson: when you bundle your umbrella back up after it's been drying overnight, you might want to open it up and peek in real quick or you just might be carrying around a live tree frog for most of a day.

It's new to you

I keep stumbling onto my old archives in Google searches and each time I end up spending 30 minutes or more reading everything. Sometimes it feels like I'm reading someone else's journal. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking when I was writing what I did. But for every insightful, introspective journey through my head that I shared here, I find the flip side of living life in public. I found not one, but two consecutive old posts keeping readers updated on my food poisoning and state of my colon.

Sometimes I wonder why I don't write like that anymore, but more often I'm glad I grew out of it. That all said, I love what Meg and Jason are doing right now, it's very year 2000 webloggy goodness to be a spectator in their lives.

Also, for no apparent reason, three images from my April 2001 archives:

MeFi board game by Scott

Vinod the king of all VCs as a desktop wallpaper

Me goofing around with a magazine cover

Things I've learned in Canada

- chinese food takeout comes in standard styrofoam to-go containers. The little paper ones with wire handles we get in the US are only seen in TV shows and movies in Canada. Oh, and milk comes in plastic bags. WHAT THE HELL CANADA?!

- flavors are so tasty and colors are so bright they had to add an extra "u" to them

- either I look Canadian or tourists see people with a big stroller and baby and assume I live here. I've never been asked for directions so many times in a strange town.

- having only been in Vancouver a bunch of times, I thought the jokes about Canadians being obsessed about hockey were overblown. Then I went to a couple bars in Toronto. Those jokes are true.

- Canadians in Toronto fall on the British side of the great top sheet vs. duvet cover debate.

Cassette Jam

I love the Cassette Jam '05 page. So many memories of jammed cassettes in car radios that resulted in many yards of magnetic ribbon all over the inside and outside of my car.

I used about half a dozen of the tapes shown, but two hold special memories. I used these in the late 80s, back when the design and color combos were considered normal. My bread and butter tapes used most often were these TDKs. I recall wearing out one of these tapes thanks to a copy of the Smithereens' Especially for You.

A conversation

me: Hey, it looks like Holly had her baby!
k: Genesis, that's a nice name
me: Is that a girl's name or a boy's name?
k: Girl
me: Genesis? A girl's name?
k: I think they're religious. She'd probably go by Genny
me: Genny?
k: Like Jennifer... but you know... Jenny
me: "I'm Genny from around the Ark"

Shark jumping pirates

It's Talk Like A Pirate Day but I have no enthusiasm for it anymore. After several years, pirates just aren't that funny anymore. I think they ran their course.

Now zombies on the other hand, now you're talking. As of summer 2005, zombies are the new pirates. Someone needs to start a "Eat Brains Like a Zombie Day" to replace this pirate one. A passing of the meme torch, if you will.

If you understand this shirt, you are a nerd

Fast toast

A faster toaster is finally coming out, four years after my pleas for such an object.

It's about damn time.

Since U Been Corporate Slides

(Since U Been Corporate Slides, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Have you seen "songs as outlines?" I couldn't help but notice the funniest ones were the ones that looked like believable corporate slides from a powerpoint deck. I couldn't get this idea out of my head and thought of some outlines for Since U Been Gone. Then I nabbed Alan's slide templates and dropped them in, and Merlin kindly added many funny suggestions to it. I bet an enterprising youngster could code up an automatic way to pull the outlines off that LJ page and into a HTML slide template like this one.

I give you: Since U Been Gone as a corporate presentation