Fast Fiction

First, let’s start with I have feelings of bitchiness, I have taken no bitchy action, made no bitchy comments.

I live on a quaint street and have nice neighbors. They’re damn neighborly. Of late, the neighbors seems to be breeding and many have toddlers. (They also have dogs and cats, but that’s for another post, I guess.)

Folks like to walk their kids around the street (it’s a circle) and the kids will walk or be carried or sometimes ride little bikes of scooters. One family likes to come to the front of our house and either play in our yard (which is all pebbles) or ride their little scooters up and down our front walk.

Our house is like this: we’re pretty close to the street, about ten feet from the sidewalk. The whole front of our house is low windows. We keep our blinds open, anyone can look in and see us watching TV or chatting in the living room. It’s obvious when we’re home, we’re sitting right there. The house has a little walk down to the front door, and a walk that goes the length of the house (under the windows).

One of our little neighbors likes to ride up our front walk on his razor scooter and back and forth in front of our windows. If the windows weren’t there, he’d be five feet away from me. (Okay, he’s maybe three years old, I don’t hold him personally responsible for this behavior.)

This irritates me. It irritates the dog too, and that probably is part of my problem. But I don’t think that my front yard is everyone else’s playground. It’s not like the kid came by and did it once. The kid has come by on three occasions that I’ve noticed (because the dog will tell me if I’m not in the room) and with two different parents. I understand folk’s dog wandering into my yard. I removed the lawn because I understood that too well and replaced it with lovely pea gravel (which just thrills the kiddies, it seems - and the dogs seem to be fine with it as well, I’m not sure the kids know they’re playing with urine glazed pebbles).

I’ve not said anything to anyone other than The Man (who thinks, likely rightly that I should get over it). But I wonder how this family would feel if I took a book and went and sat on their front stoop and read for a while. I’m not sure they’d get my point, and I’m sure I wouldn’t feel any better for it.

I don’t want to put up a fence. The fence in the back yard is fine, we all have dogs and it keeps the peace. But I don’t want to be walled in.

Maybe those motion sensor sprinklers would do the trick? Please advise, gentle readers.

We’ve been ordering from Rambutan Thai since they opened last year, since they’re just down the street.

I love their food, love their presentation and they deliver quickly. The dishes are a nice balance of spice, flavor, quality ingredients and portion. They’re packaging is pretty good too, served in reusable plastic containers that are sturdy enough to eat off of, instead of re-plating for eating at home.

Last night we took a walk down the hill in the waning heat to grab some dinner inside for the first time.

Rambutan is on Sunset Blvd. just past the Silverlake Blvd. underpass in an unassuming stripmall, next to the ultra-packed super-trendy Pho (which can cause parking problems). The interior is lovely. Maroon silk upholstered walls, bar in the back, comfy seating that’s not too close together.

We started with Soju drinks. I had a white dragon which is Soju and white cranberry juice. I think it needs a little lime. The Man and Amy got a Mosquito Bite, which is a mojito made with Soju with a little sugar cane garnish. Robin had water.

Our appetizers (‘cuz I was hungry!) were the spring roll (basil, carrots, cucumbers, tofu in a rice wrapper - my favorite), crab rolls (a little salty and tough) and garlic shrimp (yum!).

Everyone ordered a salad. It was hot and no one wanted hot/spicy food at the moment. But I’ve tried lots of other stuff there. At the moment my favorite is the Ba Mee - angel hair with grilled chicken. It’s very light and the chicken is always done to perfection.

The oddest part though was when we ordered the drinks, mine and Amy’s were brought right away. The Man had to wait for his Mosquito Bite. Everyone else seemed to get their drinks in the room but him. It might have been a full eight minutes before he got his. I’m not sure why. Then when our food came, the server brought out the first two salads. Then mine. The Man sat there salad-less - another full five minutes before they brought his out. It’s not like we came in and were bitchy or anything. Heaven knows during our kitchen upgrade we were ordering once a week, they should be grateful for our support for five months straight.

Other than that, the food was great and the ambiance relaxing. The music seemed to be taken straight from my iPod (Portishead, Massive Attack, Air, Hooverphonic & Moby), the lights were very low (making it hard to read the menus ... I’m getting old). When we finished and left, we found that it must have cooled off a full 20 degrees, which was a relief, considering the hike of five flights of stairs up the hill back to the house.

I got a postcard about my high school reunion. I had half-hoped that we were just a bunch of slackers (as our generation is sometimes defined) and that we would flake on having a reunion at all. (Note: I’m not even sure if I am a GenX - I feel more like something called a Late Boomer, which makes more sense since my parent’s weren’t boomers).

Here’s the conflict. I haven’t kept in touch with a single person from high school, let alone anyone from my class. My interaction with my high school friends is limited to an afternoon with my best friend at the time (who was two years behind me) two years ago when she came to town. A Christmas card from her last year and silence from me (I’m so bad about that stuff). In my early high school years I didn’t have many friends, I kept busy with an after-school job and swim team and the various drama groups (competition drama and school plays). I hung with a few kids, but no one particularly close. I dated in high school, but had no serious boyfriends until my senior year and even that didn’t last very long. I did not go to the prom. I chose, instead, to go to the Wallops Island Marine Consortium biology class field trip that weekend.

I went to my ten year reunion. I stayed for all of an hour and saw a few people there I knew but I was generally uncomfortable because it seemed that these people remembered their teen years and each other far better than I did. But ten years isn’t a very long time after high school anyway. I was only two years out of grad school so the whole school scene wasn’t that far behind me and I didn’t have much of a career yet and there were some people there who had kids in grade school already. Our lives were so vastly different. I lived on the West Coast and it seemed that most everyone else stayed in the area.

So, do I go and feel more like an outsider than I did when I went to school? I have nothing to prove to these people, no one thought I was a loser (a little weird, but it’s not like I left school with that “I’ll show them!” attitude). I was teased and harassed horribly in junior high by a pack of girls and another pack of viscous guys, but that all pretty much disappeared in high school when I went on to the honors and advanced placement classes and they ended up dropping out or going to VoTech.

Will I remember any of these people? Will they remember me? What would I say to them and would I care about anything they had to say to me? I’m curious what happened to some of them.

It’s in October, which isn’t a bad time for me to go back to Pennsylvania. My sister just bought a new house and it’d be nice to see it. October in Pennsylvania is very pretty - the leaves changing and wonderful apples. The reunion isn’t even in Mechanicsburg, it’s in Allenberry (Boiling Springs) - it seems odd that there’s no place in our actual town to have a reunion.

A recently released report says that poets die young. James Kaufman of the Learning Research Institute at California State University at San Bernardino compiled this report for the Journal of Death Studies (didja know there was such a thing?), Kaufman studied 1,987 dead writers from various centuries from the United States, China, Turkey and Eastern Europe and came up with the following breakdown:

Poets: 62 years
Playwrights: 63 years
Novelists: 66 years
Non-Fiction Writers: 68 years

What I find curious about this study (and I haven’t read it, because my issue of the Journal of Death Studies seems to be lost in the mail) is that it covers hundreds of years of data ... let’s face it, poets are not what they used to be. It also seems that the study sampled known or possibly well-known professionals (maybe folks that biographers would have bothered to follow for their whole lives). Poets do tend to get well known earlier, because building a body of work does not take as long as novelists or playwrights (this is just guessing on my part). I can name five poets off the top of my head that died in WW I and not one playwright.

I don’t know, I think a bit more work could have been done on this sample to adjust for longevity during the writer’s lifetime. If you’re gonna count someone like Emily Dickinson then I think you need to take into account the average lifespan in 1886 would have been about 68-70 and she died at 56. Robert Frost lived to 89 and died at a time the average lifespan in North America was about 73.

And cause of death ... serving in the armed forces, epidemics, suicide, auto accidents, natural causes ... I need more info. Are poets more prone to drowning or suicide? These are the interesting stats I need to see broken out. Especially since it seems that playwrights fare little better than poets. Maybe I’ll become a journalist.

When we last left our brilliant typing monkey community, they could scarcely put two letters together. Now they’re boldly stringing words together.

Yes, I just checked back with the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator (infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters will eventually create the complete works of Shakespeare) and we’re up to 15 characters.

Here’s where it stands: 15 letters from “Pericles” after 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 monkey-years.

The text the monkeys produced: “[Enter GOWER.] ?2IDzPN9sq6V ;e’?nGI3&?3 La”“0 ...”

matched “[Enter GOWER.] [Before the palace of Antioch.] To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come; Assuming man’s infirmities, To glad your ear, and please your eyes.”

Okay, they’ve got a ways to go, but what do you expect for only 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 monkey-years of work?

This morning I posted my 11th entry for Blogging.la. I thought more about this entry, more about what the point was, trying to achieve more of an essay than just the random musings that I usually do.

I know there’s some talk on some blogs about bloggers being the new reporters, but I’m not prepared to go there. I might make a good critic though. But I’m never going to be an expert at anything, so I’ll always be just giving my own opinion.

In other news, Bloggger asked me to sign up for GMail today. So I did. I have no idea if I want to have such a service that inserts context sensitive advertising, but you know me, I can’t refuse a new email address. Really, I’ve got gobs of them.

UPDATE: I sent myself an email from GMail to my regular DSL address and it’s been 10 minutes and I still haven’t gotten it. This does not sound like something that would cause me to endorse the service.

I don’t know how to get out of this hell I’m in.

The phone number I have at the office used to belong to the Travel Department here on the lot. That was years ago but someone out there still prints it out on call sheets or contact lists. So at least once a day someone will call and ask me questions about restaurants in Chicago or red-eyes to NY or to complain about their seating assignment.

I can actually handle that. The number of calls over the past two years has gone down, so I feel like it might actually end someday. (It’s especially sad when someone calls to talk to Laurie and says they’re her friend and I wonder how good a friend can they be if they didn’t know she changed her number or maybe changed jobs more than two years ago.)

Right now I’m getting calls for Warren. Lots of calls for Warren. Five calls a day. From collection agencies.

Now, if you’ve ever gotten a call from a collection agency, you know how this goes, they don’t believe you. They just keep trying back at other times, hoping to trick Warren into answering the phone. It ain’t gonna happen. Warren don’t live here. (Well, if he does he might be sleeping on my yoga mat under the desk and eating my pretzels I keep in the bottom drawer.)

If the calls from real people aren’t bad enough, I get calls from computers telling me to call because of some “very serious business matter.” If I’m at my desk and I get this call, I hang up. No one wants to listen to a computer. If someone wants to talk to me, call me, don’t send a call computer to do your dirty work, lazy bastard.

I’ve tried to get my number off these lists. I’ve tried being mean and fierce. I’ve tried explaining that I just got the number, that this is a large company and I don’t know who Warren is, if he ever worked here at all. None of this seems to work, of course. I’ll just have to wait until someone gets bored chasing Warren.

It also makes me wonder if Warren isn’t out there just putting down any old made up number. Or maybe Warren is Laurie’s ex and this is his cruel joke on her only I’m caught in the middle of their vicious break-up.

Hell, maybe Warren has something against me. Maybe Warren is my enemy.

Right now, I’m giving Warren the benefit of the doubt and figure it’s the collection agencies that are the enemies. Don’t worry, Warren, I’ve got your back. They’re not getting any info out of me. Make good use of your head start.

I don’t know who is writing the filler text for spam these days, but I applaud their ability to combine words. It’s quite inventive and I thoroughly enjoyed this writer’s passage included with a promotion for debt consolidation:

“Any tabloid can share a shower with turkey for, but it takes a real movie theater to of bodice ripper.defendant behind bowling ball, pocket beyond, and hand for satellite are what made America great!”

So, writer, I solute you.

Mr. Syndromes is challenging other bloggers to ask him three questions. Anything and he promises to answer.

I am in on this as well. So feel free; post three questions.

This’ll be a novelty on my site ... possible revelations of personal info!

Bored because your favorite blogs haven’t been updated recently? Just look at them through this excellent pornolizing filter. Any site with text.

Yes, any site. (Probably not a safe link at work.)

The New York Times
The White House
The Onion (though it’s hard to tell)
Sean Bonner
The New Republic
FOX News
iTunes
Microsoft

Each time you enable the filter, it remakes the site, so you can use it over and over again, on the exact same material but get different results. Brilliant. (link via Mark at The Elegant Variation)

Well, not really the lawyers. I believe the idea would actually be to kill all the aggressive asswipes.

I was reading a fascinating article today in the NY Times (sorry, reg required) called No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture by Natalie Angier. It details observations of a tribe of baboons that lost its most aggressive members to hepatitis. It found that over subsequent generations, without the warring and snarly influence of the formerly dominant males, the culture of the tribe became more calm. The naturalists even took blood samples and showed that the tribe was generally less stressed.

“And if baboons can do it,” said Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, “why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.”

Of course the one notable thing about this tribe that even though some years had passed since those large aggressive males had died, the females still outnumbered the males, which indicates a primal shift of power.

Just something interesting to ponder. You can go ahead and make the connections of this post with anything else you want that’s going on in human culture at the moment.

I was working the front yard, weeding, because people are coming over tomorrow.

I found a moth. It was a huge moth, struggling in the tall alstroemeria. So I pulled it out, and it was huge. About two and a half inches long with a huge plump furry body. Its wingspan was at least 3 and a half inches, maybe four. It didn’t seem to want to leave my hand, but I cajoled it onto the Japanese maple.

Of course once I took its picture, I had to find out what it was. I found this:

It’s a hawkmoth. Probably a white-lined sphinx since its range and preferred food fits, but it could also be banded sphinx  or maybe the spurge hawkmoth. The adults feed on nectar. The can look like hummingbirds when they hover in front of a flower.

click on the photo for a larger version

I saw a link on PriusChat today to this article in The American Spectator’s Political Hay section: Kerry and the 2006 Chevette by Eric Peters.

I don’t even know where to begin. The guy is talking trash. He really doesn’t have any basis for his assertions either, which you know is one of my pet peeves.

It starts like this:
If John Kerry wins the presidency, most of us will be driving Chevettes—or the modern-day equivalent, at any rate. The Massachusetts senator has proposed jacking up federal fuel economy requirements for new cars to as much as 36 miles-per-gallon as part of his plan to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

He goes on to further contend that there are no mid-size cars that would be able to meet that. This is true. There is only one, and that’s the Toyota Prius and there won’t be that many manufactured this year. But the technology exists and is being implemented. Toyota plans a Highlander hybrid, Lexus will make a hybrid version of the RX330 and Ford is preparing a series of SUV hybrids and Honda is moving forward with a hybrid version of the Accord. They won’t be super efficient, but they’ll be loads better than they are now.

Also, the new CAFE standards will be enacted over a period of time. 36 MPG is not the goal for 2006.

Better get your V-8, before it’s too lateÖ

What do regular folks need a V-8 for anyway? Sure, you might wanna tow something occassional, but really, why does anyone need more than 200 hp for commuting?

But the idea of imposing top-down fuel efficiency requirements is not a new one. It has been tried before—during the energy crisis of the 1970s. It didn’t work then. And it won’t work now, either.

Just because it didn’t work then doesn’t mean that it can’t work. And lets face it, government imposed emissions reductions have worked.

Today’s cars and trucks are indeed more efficient than the cars of the 1970s and 1980s. But Americans drive greater distances as a result—burning more fuel each year than they did in pre-CAFE days.

These two statements linked together make no sense to me. The object here is to get more fuel efficiency, because people refuse to curtail their driving. No one, at least I don’t think they are, is saying that increased efficiency leads to increased use.

I think the reason we drive more is because of urban decay and the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, leading to insane commutes because people are afraid to live near where they work. You might also blame it on the collapse of worker/company fidelity. Folks are no longer employed by one company for life, so there is no reasonable way to live near your work. Most of the time it’s pure luck if you do.

CAFE requirements have also had unintended side effects—most notably the boom in SUV and pick-up sales—which now account for about half of all new vehicles sold.

Yeah, well, let’s go ahead and include all consumer vehicles (those that can be driven with an ordinary license) in the CAFE requirements. End of story. They’ll come up with the technology right quick.

Does Kerry have another “plan” to deal with the unforeseen consequences of CAFE II?

Good question, Eric. I’m glad you brought it up and I will try to find out.

One consequence, though, is a sure bet. If the government imposes the draconian new fuel efficiency requirements Kerry is agitating for, the automakers will have to build smaller, lighter—and thus less safe—vehicles, just as they did in the 1970s.

Dude! Don’t get into safety. You can’t advocate these huge SUVs and then bring up safety.

The safety of the Prius, a rather light car, is pretty damn good. The NHTSA posted the results of their crash tests on the Prius just last week. It got a five star rating for the driver side and four for the passenger for head on crashes and four stars each for both the passenger and driver. These test were not done with the side and curtain airbags - an optional feature that well over 50% of Prius buyers opted for. Compare that with something like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which got only three stars for front impact and four for side. Its rollover resistance rating was two.

What really needs to happen is some overall standards for bumper height. No wonder smaller cars (hell, even large sedans) do poorly when they tussle with a high-clearance SUV - their bumpers don’t match up.

While non-engineers such as Kerry like to talk in generalities about “new technologies” that will somehow allow us to drive mid-sized and larger cars that also manage to return the fuel economy of subcompacts, the fact is such technology does not yet exist—and may never exist. The internal combustion engine has already been refined to the nth degree and significant improvements in fuel economy will be hard to come by—or very expensive.

The gas/electric hybrid is now a proven technology. New low sulfur (cleaner burning) diesels can also be adapted for use in hybrids. They are very affordable. The diversity of fuels and technologies will actually help the US become less dependent on foreign fuel sources.

People need to stop for a moment and make positive choices.

Few Americans—excepting perhaps a millionaire such as Kerry—could afford a $60,000 family car, even if it can get 40-mpg.

Okay, I comfortably carry around three passengers (plus me) in my Prius. I’m getting 49 MPG. The car cost $22,000. The LEXUS Hybrid RX 400 will cost $60,000 or more. And you know what, lots of folks who aren’t millionaires buy expensive cars. It’s a mystery to me, but they do. It’s called being an American.

It has been estimated that about 2,000 people are killed every year as a result of the CAFE-induced “downsizing” of the typical passenger cars—which lost about 1,000 lbs. on average between the 1970s and the 1990s. All the air bags and crumple zones in the world won’t prevent a similar body count in the event Kerry’s proposal becomes law.

I’m curious where these figures came from.

But only if Kerry becomes president first.

Yeah, he’s powerless as a Senator to push through CAFE reforms.

I cross posted most of this to blogging.la. I don’t know what possessed me. I’ve been seeing
these billboards for Los Angeles bioterrorism preparedness and it made me wonder what the hell a billboard could do. Well, what a website could do. I thought I would provide a few excerpts from their FAQ.

[abridged for maximum humor]

1. Iíve been noticing billboards and radio ads about bioterrorism. What are they for?
    The billboards and radio ads are a reminder that the Los Angeles County Health Department is working to keep the public safe and healthy.
[they’ve been 100% effective at keeping foreign bioterror threats from Los Angelenos]

13. Should I buy gas masks for my family?
    No. Most gas masks do not protect against biological agents such as anthrax and smallpox.
Gas masks would protect against chemical agents (such as nerve gas) only if worn at the
time the agent is released.
[if you’re interested in chemical weapon terrorism preparedness, that’s a different department]

There you have it, fellow Angelenos ... stock up on aspirin and matches, some clean underwear and it’ll all be okay. The county will protect us.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I did do some photoshop magic to the billboard. You can see the original here. Mine is much better.

Yes, now that we’ve passed the Vernal Equinox, it’s aurora season. Okay, not so much in Los Angeles, but just in case you spot something odd after sunset, it’s because of an M2 Class Coronal Mass Ejection from sunspot 588. Confused? There’s no need for that. Space Weather explains it all.

Never seen the northern lights? Here’s a pretty cool gallery.

Photo by Roman Krochuk, Fairbanks, Alaska.

I blogged a bit on Blogging.la earlier about the trip out to the Red Lion Tavern and Beer Gardens. But what I forgot to include was that we saw a coyote on the way home. Not that it’s unusual in Los Angeles to see a coyote, but it is unusual that I happen to have my camera handy.

I found this via hyperkinetic.org and thought it was a great link.

So, here is where I’ve been in the United States. I didn’t include airline stopovers, as I don’t think that really counts. Any state represented here in red is one that I spent at least a night in. Or maybe drove through. Like Indiana. I’ve driven though that state at least two dozen times. Eaten there ... so that counts, right?

I’m going to do my best to compile the best of April Fools on the ‘net today.

A good compilation of other hoaxes is found at National Geographic and The Museum of Hoaxes lists the top 100 of all time.

My first comes from Actor’s Access - they’re casting for CSI: Middle Earth.

StarTrek.com has changed their homepage content for the day. Be patient, they’re getting gobs of traffic so it may not load on the first try. Stories like Klingon Eye for the Straight Guy, a new Xindi species on Enterprise, the Xindi-Brady (Cindy Brady ... get it?) and an announcement that Paramount will be building new Star Trek theme parks called TrekLand.

ThinkGeek has posted a new product! The PC EZ-Bake Oven ... it fits into that unused 5.25 bay in your tower PC! Mmmy, with fuzzy logic ...

Google is posting a job opening for their coming expansion to the Moon.

Travelers can get more information on Molvania, the land untouched by modern dentistry through their brochure. There are pictures too!

The Globe and Mail reviews the hottest new PC game.

More to come ...

I’ve got a lot of stuff on rotation at the office here. About 1,000 songs in my jukebox, mostly trance and electronica stuff.

I just digitized a lot of Air in the past few weeks, as The Man has a special fondness for them and bought a few recently. So I’m digging Walkie Talkie.

A few moments ago I’m listening to “Surfing on a Rocket.” I’m trying to sing along, but I haven’t heard the song enough times to know the lyrics, so I’m guessing.

I’ve got it so wrong. Starting with the title - I think it’s “Serving all the World Cake.”

Let’‘s face it, Googlism isn’t gonna know the whole me, but it knows cybele.

cybele is a goddess
cybele is the anatolian mother goddess
cybele is a professional impersonator
cybele is a joy to have in my home and is the most affectionate and loving dog i’ve ever owned
cybele is associated with thursday
cybele is also represented by a large black meteorite
cybele is otherwise unparalleled
cybele is within easy reach of johannesburg
cybele is the internationally acclaimed author
cybele is perched on a hilltop
cybele is the more abundant of the two species
cybele is the ideal date
cybele is always accompanied by two lions
cybele is located in the heart of the forest on 300 acres of well kept gardens
cybele is out conquering the universe right now
cybele is an odd little person that likes to generally sit around listening to music
cybele is a professional marilyn monroe impersonator
cybele is nutritive
cybele is telling her story
cybele is now being used in a major nasa program; cybele is now available opensource and has been downloaded by 240 persons/organizations
cybele is now being used in a major nasa program
cybele is accompanied by two lions
cybele is designed for total relaxation
cybele is known for its flower filled gardens
cybele is not nearly as notable
cybele is halted and delayed due to heavy earthquakes
cybele is fluent in mandarin and english
cybele is poison ivy
cybele is an unusual choice

[I know, I’m not usually one to post such things, but I was taken with the line that I’m the most affectionate dog ever and thought it was something you should know. Let’s face it, that last post about TMI was a really downer.]

Today is the 25th anniversary of the nuclear mishap at Three Mile Island. In the wee early morning hours of March 28th, 1979 a faulty valve caused a partial meltdown of reactor two and the venting of radioactive water and steam into the area surrounding the island in the middle of the Susquehanna river, within view of the state capitol.

We lived in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. At mile 12 or so on the government’s little map of the area, we were not within the official evacuation zone. But my mother sensed that this little “venting” was a big deal early on and she pulled me and my brother and sister out of school that day and shut us up in the house. She then went out and bought bottled water and canned goods. We sat in the house for two days (drinking soda and eating pudding snack packs which was quite a treat for us) until Mom decided to take us out of state for the duration of the crisis.

For me, TMI always meant, and always will mean Three Mile Island. A period of unease, general distrust of the government and the NRC. TMI has always meant be wary of any possible cancers that can be traced back to that exposure.

By the time I moved to Humboldt County, the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Powerplant was shut down because it was found to lie upon a large and relatively active fault. (And when I say upon, I literally mean it’s right there, cuts right across the facility.) Though the plant was no longer in operation, the spent fuel was still there onsite, still to hot to move for another 20 years.

Seven years and one month or so after TMI, Chernobyl blew up in a far more devastating failure. This accident killed 30 people in the explosion and fire. No one knows for sure how many others will die as a result of the radiation exposures. The city of Chernobyl was abandoned. The radioactive plume drifted around the norther hemisphere. In Humboldt County I for several months after the accident, every evening along with the weather we would get a report as to the number of pico-curies found in that day’s milk at the local dairies.

It’s a sobering thought that today we’re more worried about dirty bombs.

Quick thoughts about last night’s blogger get together. I picked up Will and Susan at his place. My car makes me carpool. We parked on the roof of The Grove parking structure, because it has a kick-ass view.

I got to meet Doug Welch. I read his gardener’s notebook and he promises to help me identify some of the strange things I find in my back yard.

I met fellow blogging.la peeps. Jay Bushman, whom I find I have a lot in common with, what with the playwriting and all. Then I finally got to meet Sean, who I find lives in the neighborhood. I complained to him about how he hadn’t posted my bio on blogging.la ... so he’s changed it. There was Spencer (5000!) who gave me the promised robot sticker (yay!).

Joe, a transplanted yinzer (can I call you that, Joe?), lives in Koreatown now.

Susan from 2020Hindsight sparked the conversation about Sandra Tsing Loh and public radio.

Lonewacko sat next to me for a few, but we didn’t get to talk. Michael Bowen (Cobb) who has the best blog cards ever. I’ve gotta have some of those made.

There was karaoke afterwards. Thanks to Jonah for setting it up. I never realized there was such a nightlife at the Farmers Market.

That’s really it. The whole entry is just yay!

It’s a beautiful day. I picked some flowers from the back yard.

Whee!

So I’m cruising around the ‘net, finding new blogs to read and going back through their archives. And wouldn’t you know, I stumble across a bad link. It’s no longer for an article in a once-reputable niche magazine, now it’s some porn loop that I can’t out of. There is no escape, it wants to download things, it shows me things (I have to admit, I actually learned things that I’m afraid to share) and as I’m trying to click out of all of it (trying not to click any dialogue boxes, just right click on the toolbar, I know their dastardly tricks).

Well, it’s no use, suddenly my browser shuts down and reappears with an all new toolbar. The nefarious program has also disabled my ability to disable it ... I go to the folder and take it out of my plug-ins and it just puts itself back.

Grrr. An hour on this I spend.

No matter. I go and download a spyware catcher… that’ll show those bastards. First I downloaded Spybot. It was good. It found lots of things that were hinky, unfortunately, it was not able to sucessfully uninstall that damn toolbar. So I went out and got the other highly recommended free program called Ad-Aware. Bless its little heart, it found the pluker right off the bat and that bugger is outta here. So, I’m so jazzed, I might have to send those pups some money.

The first 45 I ever bought was Blondie’s “The Tide is High.”

I bought it at Woolworth’s. The Woolworth’s in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. It was on the corner of Main Street and Market Street. Catty-corner from the bank, and across the street from the drug store that still had a diner with soda fountain in back. I rode my Schwinn (green, Voyager which I also bought there) downtown to buy it. I parked my bike out front (we didn’t lock our bikes back then). I paid with change. It was that kind of town.

In the summers we got pool passes and spent our time swimming and putting pennies on the railroad tracks and playing ball in the back of the cemetery where they still had acres of extra space. It’s all filled up now.

I had that kind of childhood: spent riding bikes and visits to the library and tubing on the creek, there were popsicles and lemonade stands and water balloon fights. Paper routes and babysitting. Flip-flops and calloused feet and stubbed toes, bug bites and skinned knees. What did we do with ourselves?

Okay, I watch Adult Swim. I like Futurama and Family Guy. I can watch them over and over again. And I do. Well, I haven’t seen all the episodes of Family Guy, so there’s a wonderful sense of anticipation to see if it’s one I’ve missed.

They’ve got these promos. That I admit I watch. Which I don’t usually do. Because I have a DVR. I eschew (read skip) commercials.

The promo they’re running now is “Who would win in a battle between a flying shark and a flying crocodile?”

Now, I’ve looked over the pictures of the shark and crocodile (cartoons, granted). Has it occurred to anyone that a shark is fish? He needs to breathe in the water ... water running over his gills and all that. The croc is gonna kick his ass because the shark is gonna pass out from oxygen deprivation. Jeeze ... it’s so simple people.

It comes up from time to time, what I do for a living. Well, how I make my wages, it’s not really a living because I don’t consider my job a career. It’s just something I do to make money. And I love it for many reasons. It’s not difficult, there’s very little bull involved. The hours are very regular and I have a swell office all to myself with a kick-ass computer set up and all the software my little heart desires.

I’m not sure of my title. Sometimes I’m called Digital Asset Adminstrator and sometimes Webmaster. But I do other stuff that has little to do with file management, like writing biographies and synopses. I create some graphics, but it’s not really in my job description, I just do it sometimes because it’s easier than hiring someone.

I work for an entertainment company, and we distribute TV shows and features and telefilms. I control all of the content for a couple of websites. (Maybe I’m a Content Adminstrator.) Anyway, the first website I run is a business-to-business fullfillment website. Our clients, all over the world buy our products. And then they want to promote them. So I get the high resolution photos from the shows and movies and I name them (in a convention that was set up by a committee so that all files have unique names and somehow relate to whatever they are and aren’t longer than 16 characters - we’ve got about 15,000 so far, so you can see that it is a little struggle sometimes). And I upload them to the website and I associate information with those files (called metadata) so that folks can figure out what they are and what they want. Then, like a store or something, they put them in little shopping carts and download them in huge batches. Some of our files are just documents - biographies, synopses, fact sheets, etc., so they’re not huge. But others are 600 dpi 8x10 photos, so you can imagine that we have a great webhost and stuff like that for this kind of throughput.

The other website I work on is for buyers of our materials and it highlights just what we have in our most recent catalogue. And around this time of year we promote stuff we’re thinking about offering, our pilots. I try not to get too involved in this, because the majority of them never come to fruition, and so I never have to do anything with them. But while they’re still in the planning stages we use the site to disseminate info to our teams around the globe.

The fun part of the job is our archive. We went digital about three years ago and the only time we send out physical slides and printed materials is when we have old inventory. If we’ve run out, then that title goes into the queue for digitizing. Some of the titles are huge shows that were on the air for a dozen years and have hundreds of episodes. Some are movies-of-the-week and others are feature films. Some are completely forgettable and others are little gems that make you want them to put the show back on TV. So, I sit here with my cool slide scanner and plug away at the piles of slides in my inbox. Each one gets a bit of retouching and color correction and then gets uploaded to our site.

I like to think that I’m doing my part to save the planet. By reducing physical press kits we’re eliminating the reproduction costs associated with them (photography makes some nasty waste products) and the shipping. Then I look at the increase in quality ... our clients get stuff on demand and in a format that’s better than the duplicates they would get and already in a form they can use. It’s pretty cool and I’m rather proud of it.

In the rest of my life, there is no such thing as perfection. But databases can be perfect and I take great joy in that; I can do something everyday that can be held up and praised as well done. Face it, we all like a pat on the back every once in a while.

Is anyone else as bugged with audio on the web as I am?

If I’m browsing a newspaper online or maybe IMDB, I do not want something PLAYING AUDIO. I don’t want to hear a trailer going on. I’ve got my streaming radio or my jukebox playing what I want to hear. This is the equivalent of magazines having perfume samples in them. Please only assail one sense at a time. The web is for stuff I can see. Go ahead, have your ads on the page. I understand this is how I enjoy free content. But please do not have the auto-run audio, jeeze it’s as bad as pop-ups. If I wanted to watch a damn trailer for Deadwood, I’d turn on HBO or go to their website or click on the damn ad. I do not want it playing.

The LA Times seems to be the worst of the bunch. They’ve got this damn western themed Eclipse gum ad ... pops up in front with the audio on. It’s got a mute button. Hell, it’s got a close button too. But if you’re a pixel off, you’ve just “clicked” on the ad and it’ll pop something up.

Is there some setting I’m not aware of that will keep my browser from playing audio content? It used to be when you went to a site that had midi audio or something like that, you just hit escape and it’d stop. (Tip, that still works for stopping animated gifs.) I know most of these audio ads are in Flash or something. I can’t very well uninstall Flash.

I still hand-code my blog.

Yes. I do. Whenever I wanna put something new on my list o’ links, I go into my blogger template and hand code it. I don’t use those spiffy things like blogrolling, and if I wanna ping, I have to go manually ping blogrolling.com and for some reason weblogs.com (why doesn’t blogger ping?).

I have no idea what other bloggers do. I’ve never used moveable type, since I don’t have an actual website. It’s odd that someone who makes their living as a “webmaster” has trouble with simple FTP on a regular basis.

But it’s true.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to keep hand-coding my template. It keeps me from changing my mind a lot and I think it keeps things simple.

Sometimes I think I’m an idiot and the people that employ me must be bigger idiots.

But my job is not about coding, it’s about content. And I can generate oodles of high-quality content.

I digress. I know some bloggers look down on Blogger.com. I like them. It’s easy. And everyone’s Blogger.com blog looks the same. My biggest beef with Blogger at the moment ... why isn’t the word BLOG in their dictionary? I spell check (which is a feature I love) and it always flags blog. Sigh.