Am I Blog Enough For You?

I’m turning off comments due to all the bitch ass fuck got ham blog spam I’ve been getting for the past several months. I need to roll up my sleeves and upgrade this bitch, but not now.

I forgot to mention…

8. Locks of love.

S. donated her long flowing hair to Locks of Love a few weeks ago. A neighbor across the street donated her hair, and S. wanted to do it too. Now she has short hair, and our family suddenly has 20 free hours a week where we don’t have to wash, condition, comb, braid, de-tangle, etc. We spend it watching more TV.

Before:

From Locks of Love

After:

From Locks of Love

There are a few more pictures other pictures in that album, too.

I’m working from work today and cleaning my desk (physical and desktop). A few things I need to clean out before I throw away…

1. Random pictures from myspace.com profiles

Three pictures that made me laugh and then right click->Save Image As…

I had to convert them to jpgs to upload them to my blog. That sucks. The wrist one was animated as a .gif, which made it even more appalling.

I was told by a 19-year-old that, “Myspace is dead. Everyone is on Facebook.” She’s not even in college, though. Don’t you have to be in college to get on Facebook? I think I may end my journey through Socialnetworkingland at Myspace and not go on to Facebook. I’ve done Friendster, Orkut, Myspace, Classmates.com, and probably others I can’t remember. They are all kind of pointless and not in a good way.

2. My (new) hatred of Sony

I still totally want a Sony Reader, but I really hate Sony right now.

Short version: Our computer has been dead for almost a month now. I’ve spend at least $200 and countless hours unsuccessfully trying to revive it. It turns out I have no access to the fucking license that I fucking bought with the computer.

Slightly less short version: The computer (Vaio PCV-RZ50CG) ships with a 250GB hard drive which is partitioned into a hidden recovery partition, a very small (12G) NTFS partition for C:, and the rest in a roomy partition for D:. I needed to enlarge C: or else the computer couldn’t run any more, so I bought some partition moving software to do this. It worked great, so I decided to defrag C: since I finally had enough free space for the first time in over a year to defrag it. After that it would no longer reboot. It didn’t recognize the drive. The C: partition was gone. Since I’m an idiot I didn’t make recovery CDs when I first booted it up. (Apparently PCs no longer come with recovery disks. You have to burn them yourselves.) At this point I tried everything I could think of — FreeDOS, XP recovery floppies, more partition software, Ubuntu Live CD, Bootable floppy from another PC… Nothing worked, so I had to buy the recovery disks on-line for $50 as recommended by Sony support. After assuring me that these were the right kind, it turns out that they aren’t the right kind and the right kind aren’t available. I considered buying an OEM version of Windows XP MCE (it’s not available retail) to install, but I read on the forums that the Sony-specific drivers won’t install with it. At this point I have two options: (1) Take it to a Sony service center and pay $280 to have them reimage the drive or (2) Install Ubuntu on the Vaio and buy a new PC. I’d rather buy a Mac, but we have a lot of software that is currently Windows-only.

What makes this even more painful is that Santa brought me a 24″ Dell monitor, and I want to set it up in my office. Right now it would only be able to show “NTLDR not found.”

The part that kills me about this is that I fucking paid for the fucking Windows license and I have no access to it. Even if I made the recovery disks right when I got the computer, it still wouldn’t have an actual installable copy of XP MCE. If the support guy is right (50/50 chance — same as a monkey) and I have the right version, I would still be right where I am anyway.

Good things about the experience: I know a lot more about partitions, the Linux NTFS project, Microsoft’s OEM licensing model, and Sony’s generally shameful history with DRM schemes (like this and this).

I still want a Sony Reader, though.

3. S. to me: I hate you daddy.

I got another cute card from Stephanie that says “I hate you, Dad.” It’s complete with a picture of a heart with an X through it. I normally would scan it in and post it, but my bitch ass Sony Vaio is down. What caused her to slide this under her door? I was helping her practice piano, and she wasn’t paying attention. Finally she wound up a music box/teddy bear and put it on the piano next to me. I sent her to her room. There should be a law against anyone trying to teach their own child how to play an instrument.

Good things about the experience: 1. I feel I have more insight into both Beethoven’s and Mozart’s relationships with their father. 2. It’s healthy that S. channeled her aggressions into making some art rather than drawing all over the wall and then peeing on it like a certain other child of mine did. 3. We made up in the morning.

4. Dream

I had a strange dream the other night. Sparkle’s younger sister and I were doing a special Christmas radio show together at KFJC. We were mixing Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas with random Throbbing Gristle tracks, and we called it A Throbbing Guaraldi Christmas. I remember this very clearly down to seeing the album covers next to the turntables. Very strange, but not a bad idea. What does it all mean?

5. CDs for Xmas.

I gotted a lot of CDs for Xmas, so I will list them here:
-Tom Waits: Orphans
-Christopher O’Riley: True Love Waits (Radiohead songs done on solo piano. Knives Out is my current favorite.)
-Southern Funkin’: Louisiana Funk & Soul 1967 - 1979 (From when I was born until when I was 12.)
-DJ Nu Mark: Hands On (One of the DJs in Jurassic 5.)
-Easy Star All-Stars: Radiodread (A reggae version of OK Computer, similar to their reggae version of Dark Side Of The Moon.)

6. Why can’t I name them all Tyler?

I used to live in Noe Valley pre-kids and I know people with kids named Tyler. But this made me laugh out loud. Between D. and me, “Why can’t I name them all Tyler?” is our secret code for pointing out obnoxious parents.

7. Christmas song

Does anyone remember “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses? That’s the only Christmas song that I really like. We had the god-awful Sirius Christmas channel on in our house in the weeks running up to the holiday. One night after D. went to bed S. begged me to turn it off. “I want music with drums and guitar,” she told me. I was so proud. I also like “Merry Muthafuckin’ Xmas” by Easy-E. (”Come over here and sit on Santa’s face…”)

Testing out Picasaweb with some pictures of Matthew after the San Jose Grand Prix cracking up with his friend, Nicholas.

From Phone - Photos

From Phone - Photos

From Phone - Photos

From Phone - Photos

From Phone - Photos

From Phone - Photos

That worked pretty well. Much more intuitive for posting photos than the WordPress plug in that I’m using. It’s still a pain to get pictures from my phone into Picasaweb, though. I have to copy them to my flash card, delete them from my Treo 650, put the flash card in a little USB adapter thingie, import them with iPhoto, and then export them to Picasaweb using the Google plugin.

Fig 1. Steph and Michelle at the first grade breakfast.

tic tac toe
that’s the way uh-huh uh-huh
I like it uh-huh uh-huh
you got yours
I got mine
peace
punch
Captain Crunch
break the wall
waterfall
do you think you got it all?
you don’t
I do
so poof with the attitude
bang bang
choo choo choo
gladieaux freeze

Damn I’m getting a lot of comment spam on my blog lately. It’s not like I’ve been posting or anything, so I don’t really deserve it. I norel the links anyway, so it’s not like they do anything but remind me that I’m running low on porn.

I’m in bed trying to figure out how to vote in Tuesday’s election. Apparently the Democrats are going to win everything. It figures that now that I’m rich again they are going to raise taxes. I have an absentee ballot, so my vote won’t get there until after the winner has already been declared. But I’ll feel bad if I don’t do something.

Republicans are already shipping in homosexual male prostitutes to console them for when they lose control of the House. What’s up with that? Haggart and Foley — these guys have the same basic psychology as serial killers, it just manifests itself a little differently.

In election-related news, we changed our cat’s name from G.G. to G.G. Bustamante. I think it has a nice ring to it. Today G.G. Bustamante peed on a laundry basket filled with freshly washed and folded laundry. Diana is psychoanalyzing her in hopes of finding out why.

Matthew keeps asking where Halloween went. It’s strange, and I don’t like it. He might be referring to the candy, which is somewhere that he cannot reach it. Or he might be referring to his costume (fireman again), which is packed away. I continue to explain that Halloween is one night a year, and it will be back again next year. I also explain that Halloween is like Christmas for gay people, which is like Republicans and evangelicals enjoy it so much.

Now I must do my civic duty and cancel out some reasonable person’s vote…

A few nights ago I had a dream where I was talking to Billy Barty. The week before that I had a dream where I was shaving. The latter dream freaked me out more because it was so boring. My life is deliberately boring, but that doesn’t mean I want boring dreams.

I’m watching The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave DVD right now. I’m listening to a 18-year-old Paul Weller and watching Joan Jett in a Peaches Records & Tapes T-shirt. I had that same T-shirt. I want one right now.

Bill Graham is talking now. I was flipping channels on the way to work, and I heard Greg Kihn and Eddie Money talking about him. It was strange.

It is clear to me that Mr. Weller is the smartest one on camera.

Hey, this DVD is put out by Shout! Nice work, Goldwax! Send me some DVDs. I still owe you an email.

At college, I made friends at the rate of one per year. When I graduated in 1989 I had made five friends. Last month my family and I went to Purdue for a mini-reunion with these lucky people, hand picked out of the approximately 35,000 other people at Purdue during this time.

I haven’t been back to Purdue since graduation, so I wanted to see how it felt to be there. I do this thing where I stand somewhere I have been a long time ago and try to conjure up memories and feelings about the place. I learned this from observing humans. I forget what they call it. I also do this thing at various locations around the Bay Area too — especially Berkeley — but I’ve noticed that I can’t reproduce any feelings any more. It’s probably just as well.

On the drive down (we flew into Detroit, stopped by Toledo, then drove to West Lafayette), I made a list of things to do and people that I wanted to check up on. Here is the list with my comments:

1. Hear Lady In Red on the radio

I fucking hate this song. It seemed like any time I would turn on the radio this song would be on. Every time my clock radio would turn on in the morning, it would be playing this song. I did hear some song with lyrics like “she loves me for my tractor.” Matt dug this song a lot.

Status: Failed to hear Lady In Red on the radio

2. Buy Indiana University souvenir for Susan M. at work

A woman at work went to IU, and boy wouldn’t you know it. Her AIM icon is the IU logo, and her dog has an IU collar. She also has a pennant in her cube. I tried to find something saying IU on it, but it was generally followed by an expletive. There is some sort of rivalry between Purdue and IU. Interesting. I also saw a T-shirt that read, “Ann Arbor is a whore.” I was going to buy this because there is a DJ at KFJC with the air name Ann Arbor, and I thought she might like it. But I ultimately didn’t buy it.

Status: Failed to buy an IU souvenir

3. Buy Purdue sweatshirt made by Champion

When I first arrived at Purdue I really wanted a fancy Champion sweatshirt that said “PURDUE” in big letters. It didn’t fit in my $15/week budget, so I never bought one. Even when I was working at Magnavox at a co-op and blowing obscene amounts of money on guitars, guitar pedal effects, guitar magazines, and various guitar accessories, I felt that these Champion sweatshirts were too expensive. So whenever I saw a well-adjusted, corn-fed student wearing one of these sweatshirts my bile would rise just a little. I’d see the symmetrical block letters from far away and then the little “c” on the end of the sleeve as I passed. I would suffer this humiliation several times a day. I couldn’t wait for my classes to be over, so that I could go back inside and wait for the darkness. Anyway, I bought one. You can see the relief in the children’s faces as a terrible darkness was lifted from my soul. I haven’t worn it yet. I may just hang it up like a trophy.

Status: Success!

4. Visit EE building

I visited the EE building. I explained to my family that it’s like a sifter that weeds out the unworthy and sends them to a satellite campus or to a lesser major like EET (Electrical Engineering Tech). Check out the freshman engineering lecture hall in the EE building. I put Stephanie at the lecture podium, turned on the overhead projector, gave her a pen, and told her to teach us something. She wrote “I LOVE YOU KLAS!” in big letters. We all learned a lesson that day.

Status: Success!

5. Visit Von’s bookstore

The bookstore has grown. Diana bought a sudoku book and a kid sudoku book. I couldn’t find a book I wanted, so we left.

Status: Success!

6. Walk around campus

I walked all around campus several times. It was smaller than I remembered it, though I’m the same height as when I attended and the campus has actually grown. Notable changes: The smokestack is gone; the fountains have been replaced by much cooler fountains; there is a clock tower, which frightened Matthew; Cary Quad (my freshman year dorm) is the same except I don’t think they serve meals there.

Status: Success!

7. Read Exponent

The Exponent is the college paper. I found a copy and read it. It was easy. It was summer, so there wasn’t much crazy college stuff to read through. I discovered that Purdue has switched off of a 6.0 grade scale (I always had to explain the 5.89/6.0 GPA on my resume) and that they are considering implementing a +/- scale as well, so people could get an A- or a B+ in a class. Considering how many students would battle for extra points after an exam, I think this is bad news for the professors and T.A.s.

Status: Success!

8. Hit various record stores for vinyl

I only got to go to Von’s. They had only one row of vinyl records, and they were expensive. The used CD section was more interesting, but I didn’t pick anything up. I recognized a lot of the vinyl from the station, so they had pretty current stuff. There was another store down in the levee that I didn’t get a chance to visit.

Status: Partial success. 50%

9. Get called a fag

This is unfair of me to lay on Purdue. Actually this happened to a friend of mine (Japanned in Japan): He was walking down the street in Maumee, Ohio when someone driving by yelled, “Fag!” out of his pickup truck. I find this story funny and poignant because JiJ is straight and not to mention the fact that he’s cool and has done a bunch of interesting stuff. Then this ridiculous townie calls him fag for what — walking down the street? It’s a fun exercise to contemplate the motivation behind his action. So anyway in my paranoid, Midwestern hating mind I have decided to transpose this story to Purdue and me. And no one can stop me and no one will know except for people who read my blog which isn’t many. (I know because I have Google Analytics on it.) Despite all these thoughts going on in my head, no one called me a fag.

Status: Failed and was forced to confront a lot of displaced anger that I still have.

10. Get whooped at by a drunk guy

This did happen. We were leaving the EE building, and some people were drinking in front of their apartment building across the street. When they saw us, they started saying, “Woooo! Wooooooooo!” meaning that they are drinking and very excited about it. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t. No one else did either. Eventually, they stopped saying “Wooooo!” and we were out of “Wooooo!” range, which resolved the situation.

Status: Success!

11. Hear John Cougar Mellencamp

When Lady In Red wasn’t on the radio, John Mellencamp was. I didn’t hear him on the radio unless he wrote that song about a tractor. I did see a picture of him on a sign though.

Status: Partial success.

12. Check out college radio at Purdue

There used to be a radio station in the tower of Cary Quad. Way back in 1984 I put my Dead Kennedy’s logo on my long black trenchcoat, summoned up all my courage, and went up to check out the station. I was too nervous to remember much about it, but I figured out that it only broadcast on the closed ircuit cable in the dorm and maybe had a tiny transmitter. I needed to go back and think about that puny coverage, and then I never returned for some reason. I didn’t even return when I learned that my hero at the time, David Letterman, had his own college radio show at Ball State. There was one other radio station at Purdue that played classical and jazz. Not only that, it was really far away. When I arrived to check out the Cary Quad station, there was no access to the tower. I found out later that they have moved to the basement of NW and only broadcast over the Internet. That’s kind of a waste. There are plenty of open radio slots on the dial there, and the radio situation is pretty bleak from a college music point of view. Someone is buying those hip records at Von’s.

Status: Failed

And here is the anonymized list of people that I wanted to check up on, along with their latest status if available. I still need to use the Google brand search engine and my new clues to hunt down a few of these people that I want to contact. Actually, I know that I won’t.

1. Person A — Living in Chicago; working as a corporate attorney; had dinner last month at work

2. Person B — Lived in Denver briefly; once lost her concentration at a gym and was shot off the back of a treadmill (first time I heard this great story)

3. Person C — no information

4. Person D — Confirmed a vague memory that this person had rich parents; no further information

5. Person E (actually we couldn’t remember his name — we referred to him as the “Hurr-de-hurr guy”) — no information other than eventually remembering that his first name is Earl

6. Person F — co-authored an article in some electrical engineering journal

7. Person G — living in Ft. Wayne; possibly divorced

8. Person H — no information

9. Person I — doing SAP consulting in Singapore

10. Person J (I couldn’t remember his name, so I wrote “roommate guy, has a mullet, used lots of toilet paper.”) — still living in Indiana

11. Person K (”Jake’s roommate who handed me a loaded gun in a bar”) — was arrested for drunken speeding and went to jail for a while; lost touch after that

12. Person L (”Secretary that Person D dated”) — no information

13. Person M — living in L.A.; married with kids

14. Person N — still active in SCA; still working in Ft. Wayne; was recently seen in a business meeting by one member of our party but they didn’t speak.

15. Person O (”Optivisor”) — technically speaking, not a person but a magnification device. But, still.

16. Person P — visited a member of our party in Phoenix a few times; lost contact after that

17. Person Q (”Big, red girl”) — no information

18. Person R (”best friend of big, red girl”) — no information

19. Bitter, Bearded Person S — no information

20. Person T — we all suspected he is gay, but no one ever asked him or kept in touch with him so I guess we’ll never know for sure; not sure what we would do with this information anyway; he made me a Led Zeppelin tape once, which was very nice (do gay people listen to Led Zeppelin, even in Indiana?)

21. Person U — no new information, but I heard these stories concerning him: (1) A member of our party smoked in his room despite knowing he had asthma, (2) In one late night confrontation, a member of our party yelled, “Are you going to take a swing at me?” Person U answered, “No,” so the member of our party said, “Then shut the fuck up. I’m going to bed.” This cracks me up.

22. Person V — added by someone else; I don’t remember her

Well, it looks like we weren’t very good at keeping in touch with folks. But we all scattered to New Jersey, Phoenix, Berkeley, Louisville, and Michigan once we graduated. This made it hard to keep in touch, though we still did a pretty bad job. Now there is social technology for finding people from the past, but after reviewing this list there are only about five or six that I’d really like to catch up with anyway.

The thing that struck me the most when I caught up with my friends is that I’m the only EE not doing EE work. Everyone else is somehow working or teaching in this industry. I’m the only one working with computers. One member of our party said, “Hey, do you remember writing code with vi?” He was taken aback when I said that I use it pretty much every day. I was the one who hated computers the most out of our group because (1) I got my first B at Purdue in microprocessor programming, (2) I couldn’t afford a computer, (3) I was interested in the math and physics side of EE and I felt that programming was sort of unclean because the instruction sets on microprocessors were decided by people and therefore inferior to something like Maxwell’s equations, (4) I wasn’t too good at discrete math.

It’s not like I planned to work with computers and the Internet, but after a year of unemployment a job at a software company was the only thing I could find. I had to learn most of what I needed to know about computers as I went along, and it turns out that they weren’t so bad after all. And after reading some technical articles about networking and some crazy magazines like Mondo 2000 I kept drifting further and further in that direction with each job.

There are more EE jobs then Internet-related jobs in the Midwest, so if I had stayed there in 1989 I would probably be doing something like circuit design. I was actually tracked down by Mead Corporation in Dayton, Ohio shortly after graduation. The found my resume from a HKN book, called me at home and basically offered me a job. No, I sniffed, I’m going to UC Berkeley to become a professor. How dare you disturb me. I wonder what EE jobs there are at Mead anyway. I just checked and found an Electrical Project Engineer position in Alabama.

In summary, it was great to see everyone again after 17 years. We’ll probably get together again in less than 17 years. I didn’t mention anything about everyone’s kids, but they were really the best part. You can see some pictures here.

This is most odd, but I found an email that I wrote eight years ago on the web. I actually found it a few months ago but then I lost it, so I had to re-find it. I couldn’t find it with a search engine, so I called up the guy who posted it and said, “Hey! Where’s your blog.” That’s so much easier than using a search engine. I’m going to have to do that more often.

I rather enjoyed rereading my email. Nothing satisfies quite so well as one’s own old writing. Except for poetry, of course. But I have written 0 poems, so I don’t have to worry about that. There are many more emails like that one. They start out as rants, then I go back and meticulously edit it and remove as many obvious influences as possible.

I remember the mood I was in when I wrote it: more amped up than mad but still mad. By 1998 I had acquired the decadent European habit of drinking coffee after lunch and tea in the afternoon, which probably made me easier to set off.

But oh how shitty product managers and product marketers have dogged me throughout my entire career. The worst part is that it’s impossible to tell great marketing people from shitty ones until it’s too late. The only signal with a reasonably high correlation that a marketing person being shitty is an MBA. People with other majors from Stanford seem okay. I don’t know what it is about their MBA program. The signal with the highest correlation of a marketing person being competent is an MBA from Harvard, unless they mention the word “facebook” not referring to facebook.com.