Hedging positive

I stumbled on this fairly depressing article* that was basically about energy policy and food costs, but rather than dwelling on that (posting, writing, commenting), here's something funny I stumbled on (poking around at surfing videos, of all things):

Gnooze.com ("the G is silent")

Comments on the days news. Humorous, but informed. And she does funny voices! (It's a schtick, but I still find it funny; she kinda reminds me of a couple of peeps I know.)

I guess I'm feeling a little better today. (I did go into work, but that managed to not mess it up.)

* If you're really curious, the article is: "Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008"

Four Things

Still sick. But I got this meme through email from some friends and I figured I'd post it here, since I saw it floating around the interwebs/blogosphere a few months ago.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. The fry-guy at Carl's Jr restaurant. That job lasted all of two weeks -- couldn't get the smell of grease off my skin for days.
2. accounting department at an insurance company
3. convenience store lackey -- manned the register, restocked the shelves and coolers and made sandwiches. Regret selling beer to the dick/jock with the real, but not his, ID (I recognized him from the paper -- he was a sophomore on the football team) and not selling to the cute girls with the obvious fake ID
4. school computer room PTOP. (Part-time operator) Not particularly technical -- we just checked people in and out for the most part. But it did get you the chance to stay there after hours to get your homework/projects done when everyone else got booted.

Four places I have lived:

1. Sherman Oaks, CA
2. Ithaca, NY
3. Acton, MA
4. Newton, MA

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. London
2. Shanghai
3. Ambergris Caye, Belize
4. Hawaii

Four favorite foods:

1. Noodle Soups (Spicy Beef Noodle Soup, Jambong -- a spicy Chinese/Korean seafood noodle soup, Pho -- vietnamese beef noodle soup, ramen, saimin...)
2. Clearly fried Shrimp
3. Mac 'n Franks (powdered mac 'n cheese variety)
4. Ice Cream (generally in a banana split with hot fudge configuration)

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Hawaii, surfing
2. Hawaii, hiking
3. Hawaii, snorkeling
4. Hawaii, not being sick.

Kinda got Hawaii on the brain right now. Can you tell?

Four friends or relatives I think will respond first:

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...

...which where we end, since I'm not particularly bloggily-connected and those that I do know have probably already played this game.

Back to bed, I think. Or maybe to the kitchen for some more chicken soup.

Baby, You're a Star

Poop Star
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Well, we're back.

And while it's been a great start to the new year (it's hard to imagine how a month off from work wouldn't be), I can't get too rah-rah about it at the moment because I've managed to get sick after returning to the same sleep difficulties that I was experiencing before I left for California and points west.

Eh, let me try anyway.

First off -- no sleeping troubles at all while I was away. (Going to have to let that one sink in -- I hope it doesn't have to do with the mojo of the new house. "New" being relative since we bought the house over a year ago and have lived in it for almost a year now.)

Anyway, a good visit with family and some friends (unfortunately, never enough time to see everyone), a good couple of hikes in the Mojave. And then about 2-1/2 weeks in Hawaii: 7 days on Kauai, 9 days on the big island and a little over 24 hours on Oahu.

Hawaii was awesome.

The picture at top is of this crazy plant/fungus that we found along the side of the trail on the hike we did on Kauai. (If you're interested, another view of it can be found here.) It was supposed to be one of at least two hikes, but it seems that our trip to the Islands was very much about learning how to not worry about making plans or figuring out what to do and just relaxing and having a good time. So we never did get around to hiking the Kalalau trail on the Napali coast (we ended up spending the day surfing and hitting the beaches on the eastern coast... FWIW, prioritizing the second day of surfing over the hike was the SOOTTAD's idea, not that I had any objections), but that just means that we need to figure out when we can plan our next trip back. We did do the one hike in Koke'e state Park (which was fantastic), and take the planned helicopter tour and get our spam musubi, saimin at Hamura's Saimin and burgers at Duane's Ono Charburger. Plus, lots of snorkeling, a luau and a few massages. (Oh, and surfing both days we were on Oahu -- so much for that trip to the north shore.) But a lot more chilling-on-the-beach time than I've done in innumerable years. The SOOTTAD is even sporting a savage tan, relatively speaking.

Anyway, good times. We'll hopefully have a chance to go back in the not too distant future to get that hike in and get some more surfing time. I'll try to dwell on that while I recover from this cold.

Look at the time...

Just noticed the posting date, there... so, Merry Christmas to all for whom it is denominationally appropriate and good tidings and best wishes to all!

Observations while traveling

1. I guess we aren't as extravagant with the heat as I thought we were. I was positively baking on the cab ride into Logan this morning (ok, yesterday morning) and waiting around at JFK. I normally wear a fleece around the house, and yet I was overheating in just jeans (unlined), T-shirt and a light button down. I'm pretty sure it wasn't just my body chemistry gone awry from lack of sleep given the number of stocking-less short skirts and be-sandaled feet I saw in the terminal waiting for my connection to Burbank.
2. I not sure I should be grateful or concerned of the apparently more-limited water processing done in New England. All I can say for sure is that there are a lot more chemicals that I can smell (some kind of chlorine, but also seemingly something else) in the water at both JFK and in L.A. I'm thinking I'm a bit dehydrated from all the flying and the general distractedness I've been experiencing in the last few days leading up to today's (yesterday's) travel, but I'm being deterred by the smell and have only been drinking juice and tea in any kind of quantity so far, which is to say, not much at all.

80 degrees and sunny today in L.A. -- nothing to complain about there.

overlooked

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Just documenting the cute; he's been climbing onto my shoulder since we got him as a kitteen. (kitty teen)

Last day of work tomorrow before the holiday and the honeymoon. (w00t!) But still lots to do before getting on the plane early Monday morning.

sick thoughts

I've been pretty much out of commission since Friday with some kind of bug. I thought I was mostly back yesterday, but I guess I got a little cocky (I saw a client in the afternoon), and ended up almost back to square one last night. Anyway, not really feeling up to doing much else, so just a few thoughts and observations:

• It's probably been the longest that I've been sick since I started having regular acupuncture treatments almost two years ago. I'm pleased that I've only had a moderate cold maybe once in the last year, but I guess I'm kind of bummed that I've been laid up for over 3 days now. It makes me wonder whether the new assistant who works at the clinic doesn't have the same skills as the previous one or if maybe I need to reiterate that one of my original treatment goals was to keep my immune system up to snuff.
• Does anyone else find that they can't remember what it's like to feel healthy when they're sick? Over the weekend, I kept noticing myself doing little check-ins: Am I better now? How 'bout now? Is this better? Is this how normal feels? It's like a bunch of kids on a road trip asking "are we there yet?" Answer: no. (Also interesting that the opposite is true.)
• It figures that the nicest weather we had in the last week was yesterday and the day before when it got into the 40s. I was finally starting to ramp up the miles and was looking forward to a longer run on Saturday and I ended up not leaving the house. I barely left the bedroom.
• It also figures that I'm sick over the weekend. Of course, it was probably the stress from preparing for a meeting on Thursday that pushed me over the edge in the first place.
• Started reading the Golden Compass series. I'm enjoying it so far, but it's kind of a bummer when reading makes me tired. Geez, when am I supposed to find time to read if not when I'm home sick? Sucking it up and reading anyway. Probably part of why I'm still sick today.
• Being able to sleep on and off all day -- good.
• Not being able to fall asleep at night after sleeping on and off all day -- not good.

Also, less computing -- good... So I'm signing off now.

Later folks.

late to bed, early to rise

Woke up around 4am this morning, dreaming about some crazy Nerds animal launcher to capture some accumulated in-game collectable item (small nautilus-shaped radio/TV sets?) and thinking about user interfaces and gameplay and then recognizing an underlying rate-matching problem that mapped into a problem I've been trying to solve at work. After lying in bed for an hour trying to figure out a workable algorithm (I hate it when the solution only makes sense in the dream state), I finally realized I wasn't falling back asleep. I think I was also hungry.

All that, after lying in bed awake for at least an hour after going to bed a bit after midnight last night a few hours ago.

So I got up a little after 5, and tried to capture some of what I was trying to work out in my head. (Sadly, not much progress.) And installed some new anti-virus software* while I was at it. And had a cookie and some warm Ovaltine.

I did have this crazy idea that I might try going for a morning run, seeing as I was up and all -- I'm still trying to figure out how to fit the workouts into my schedule these days -- but a quick check of the weather seems to indicate that it went from unpleasant to inhospitable in the hour since I was up, dropping from a balmy 16°F to 10°F between 5 and 6.

*sigh*

Productive, and yet, not so much.

Ok, I think that's it for my gripe this morning.

*And, hey Norton Anti-virus? Since when does "dismiss pop-up window" mean "accept the query as to whether to restart my machine right now?" God I hate it when installation programs to that.

Tuba Christmas

Tuba Christmas
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Thought I'd mention that we went to this thing called "200 tubas" which is apparently an annual event that's held at Faneuil Hall during Thanksgiving weekend. It's basically an all-tuba orchestra that plays a 1-hour concert of Christmas carols. They did a headcount and apparently there were actually only 103 tubas this year, but it was still fun.

Really, really cold. (can't-feel-my-feet-cold) But fun. But cold.

And then we went to Wing's kitchen and had Pork as big as your head.

A good day.

Except for the cold part. Did I mention that it was cold?

I guess it's just been a little confusing since it hit the low 60s on Thanksgiving Day.

Travel Planning

We decided to punt on the deferred New Zealand honeymoon because things never did quite slow down enough for us to actually plan the trip. We're settling for two weeks and change in Hawaii tacked onto some holiday travel in California -- life could be worse.

We scored some frequent flier tickets on American, so we just needed to book the inter-island flights because we're planning on flying into Lihu'e, but out of Honolulu.

My mother pointed me to a travel search engine called Farecast which purports to track the trends in airfare prices in order to help you decide when it's a good time to buy your plane tickets. Seems like a pretty clever tool -- I had been googling for exactly that kind of information for the New Zealand trip. Unfortunately, it only seems to hit the major hubs in the major markets -- so LAX, not Burbank. O'hare, not Midway. (well, sometimes) Honolulu, not Lihue or Hilo or Kona.

But still, it did a pretty good job finding flights for us. And I thought the user interface behaved a lot better than Sidestep, a fare aggregator that the SOOTTAD often uses. The filters responded quickly and didn't make the page jump around. I also liked that it sends you to the airline website (or at least, it did for me), when it figures out that it's cheaper. As an aggregator, Sidestep would often send the SOOTTAD to some discount site like CheapTickets.com (no link because it's N/G) that she vows she will never use again because of all the headaches it created when we had to change a ticket over the summer. When she uses it now, she finds the fare and then manually goes to the airline site.

Anyway, Farecast found some good prices on Mesa Air for our island-hopping and sent me to their reservation site. Which was very considerate, except for the part where Mesa only seemed to operate within the central plains of the continental U.S. I had to poke around before I found Go! Hawaii, one of the subsidiaries of the Mesa Air group. I wandered through the Customer Care page in order to find it because I missed the direct link the first time around.

Anyway, cheap tickets. Couldn't figure out how to sign up for their membership program, but that probably isn't a big loss since I don't think I'll going to be flying there all that much. (nice thought though, huh?) Now we just have to hope that nothing funny happens to this airline or our flights between now and when we get to the islands.

Ketchup 1: Crap we found under the deck

Crap we found under the deck
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

So a few weeks ago we finally found some time to do some yardwork. We were planning on just doing a first pass of leaf raking, but once I got going on the leaves under the deck, I pretty much had to clear out all the other crap that was down there.

Somehow I thought this post was going to be more interesting. Oh well.

For what it's worth, we're keeping the crab.

Ketchup?

Hide
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

I had every intention of doing Art Everyday Month this year, what will all the craziness of the year theoretically behind us -- moving into the new house, finishing school, setting up the new business, selling the old house, getting married. Y'know, stuff. But I guess it wasn't really *every* intention, seeing as I got as far as starting the above drawing on the first and only just got around to "finishing" it this afternoon. (and by that I mean that I've done enough for it to be presentable, even though it doesn't really feel done.)

Life often seems like a never-ending sequence (an infinite series?) of "almost there" moments where things are largely sucking and it seems like you just need to turn a corner and everything will fall into place and it'll just be smooth sailing from then on. (you mean like in Iraq? No, not like that. Well, yes, kinda... in the never-quite-turning-the-corner way as opposed to the unfailingly-optimistic-in-a-delusional-if-not-cynical-way way)

Anyway, things keep feeling like they're going to settle down and get back to "normal." Except that they're not. There's always something coming up on the horizon. Things are good, but invariably there's always something that's a little crazy going on in the background, some crisis we're managing or some crazybomb that's about to go off.

Shit happens.

But, you know, things are good. Always with the step back and the happy sigh. And it still feels like we're making progress. Maybe it *is* fair to think of it like a mathematical infinite series. As in, mathematical convergence.

Anyway, I'm feeling a bit out of it these days, but I haven't been able to put my finger on what the dealio is. The head feels like it's in a funny place. I've felt a bit disconnected. Things seems strangely unfamiliar. Maybe it's just that my routines are gone and I have to develop new systems.

So I went to the well. Although it's really more like I found myself in my well, and I've been trying to find a pause between all the stuff that's been going on to take some time to process things a bit.

The well isn't really a bad place. It's a concept I took from Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" where it's something of a reoccurring theme. It's a place for introspection. A quiet place, hidden away, separated from the systems, the chaos, the crazy of everyday living. Maybe it's its own little crazy, but it's at least in a more manageable form-factor.

So it's the start of the Turkey day long weekend. I figured I'd have some free time while we're at the SOOTTAD's parental homestead, although we've been put to work for a good chunk of the time we've been here already. But I may still have a chance to find that pause. Hopefully I'll at least get a few of the catch-up posts out to let you know what I've been doing and thinking about recently.

And, of course, if not, hopefully this'll do for some of the explaining.

Vampires

Corny, but they have a point:

"Some 'Vampires' Prefer Energy Over Blood"
The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year.

Contemporary Criminal Activity

A few weeks ago, my friend JBar thought she had been the victim of the stupidest thief on the planet. Someone had apparently stolen her credit card number online, but all the stuff they had ordered with it had ended up at her house. The connection was made when she started receiving a bunch of random shipments, including a package of "colon flow" supplements, a bunch of Disney DVDs and nine bottles of wine. She was annoyed because she had to deal with getting all the charges reversed (fortunately, she didn't have to actually pay anything -- go AmEx), but we had a laugh about our incompetent constipated and alcoholic pedophile.

My brain clicked briefly with the memory that both the SOOTTAD and I had recently had our credit card numbers changed out from under us because Citibank had apparently discovered that some retailer had had their records compromised. Yeah, changing all my automatic bill-pays was fun. Anyway, I guess I figured it was going around, but other than that I didn't think much else about it.

And then the SOOTTAD got an unsolicited order of multivitamins. No idea where that came from, but she didn't have any time to deal with it, so it sat in her office for several days. And then while she was away on business earlier this week, another package of vitamins showed up. And a book order from Scholastic -- apparently she was added to some Scholastic book club.

So it looks like it wasn't an isolated incident of incompetent crime.

The SOOTTAD spent most of the morning talking to customer service representatives (arguing with some that were exceedingly more incompetent than others), calling up retailers, having charges reversed, dealing with shipping packages. In the process, she even discovered that someone apparently even created a fake gmail account with the standard FirstnameLastnameNumber@gmail format.

Just some annoying, juvenile hackers who are having a laugh? Or maybe they're manipulating the market by increasing sales of particular targeted businesses. (Or driving them to ruin by tying up their customer service or eating the costs of return shipments.) Or maybe it's just theh trial run of some more systemic attack... on the nation at large! Terr'ists!

Bah.

Seems like some crazy movie plot: an underworld organization plotting to undermine the American Way of Life(tm) by disrupting our system of commerce.

But, of course, I'm only kidding. Well, half-kidding.

Meanwhile...

Playing with Twitter. You should be able to see it over on the sidebar, or you can head over directly.

It remains to be seen how much I actually play with it given that I presently only know two people who currently use it. I'm apparently hanging with the wrong demographic, whether it be socially, chronologically, geographically or some combination thereof.

Good and Bad

It's 6:28pm and I'm the last person left in the office.

Reminded...

...why we don't have cable and don't watch network television.

We've been following the Sox game on the radio and internet and there were several plays that we had heard described that we were hoping to see -- Ellsbury's big catch in left field in the 9th (apparently a huge diving catch). Matsusaka throwing Martinez out at first. Some of the errors.

So we turned on the tube and surfed the few local channels we could get. And what do we get? Well, we did get one highlight reel which covered all the hits and the final catch by Coco Crisp to end the game. Ok, anything else?

Well. A lot of coverage of the crowds outside the park. A lot of talking about the crowds. Police presence in riot gear keeping the crowds under control. Ok, now they're showing the players celebrating. Interviews -- those guys love the interviews. Wow, that WBZ correspondent covering the guys on the field is annoying. He just angrily shushed some guy off camera while he was interviewing Terry Francona. More talking. Lots of talking about nothing. More interviews -- players in the dressing room. More talking. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

Oh look, more shots of Kenmore square and the thinning crowds. And they're talking about the police again.

Um, could we maybe get some more highlights?

Apparently not.

UPDATE: ok, WHDH is interviewing Theo and they just showed Matsusaka's throw-out play. Point to channel 7.

UPDATE(23oct2007): It occurred to me that this is largely my own fault for being too cheap to have cable (or to have even bought an antenna) to have been able to watch the game in the first place. So, my bad. Of course, it doesn't make the local sports correspondents any less annoying.

UPDATE(23oct2007-2): Yay, Internets! (And thank you, mlb.com.)

Geek Sox Nation

We're not crazy sports fans, and we don't have cable, so we're "watching" the final Sox game online while listening to the play-by-play on the radio.

Nerds.

Ps -- Go SOX!

F***, yeah!

"Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: research"

F*** a Duck

So it looks like I have to buy F'ing Visio, again. That's another $500 down the Microsoft toilet for the 2007 version, and that doesn't count the $200 I sank into the bad 2003 version just a few months ago when I had to start spec writing for the contract I'm on. Joy, joy. The original website where I bought it is now an empty GoDaddy-parked husk of an apparently fly-by-night storefront.

Sucks for me.

And I'd just like to mention how annoying the Micro$oft Office info page is -- full of stupid, unnecessary, bandwidth-hungry animations and dynamic pull-downs, and apparently ...films? ...on how awesome Office is? WTF?