Wednesday, November 01, 2006
I lost my camera this weekend, at the Hive-Mind party. This is understandably quite disappointing. I don't shoot a lot, but I have been enjoying it.
Perhaps this will be the impetus I "need" to step up a quality notch. My previous camera was a
Canon Powershot S2 IS -- mid-range between point-and-shoot devices and DSLRs -- and I've been entertaining the idea of moving up to a
Rebel XTi or similar.
Regardless, bummer ensues. Feel free to ignore my flickr stream for the time being.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
no, not the snow kind.
i've been very busy with work the last few weeks. finally! after a long dry spell, i am currently working on a two week (or so) project building an integrated login layer on top of several existing systems -- most ASP.NET, but some written in classic ASP. it's nice to have that tickle in the back of my brain again.
one fun/interesting aspect of the project has been the opportunity to implement a wrapper around an ASP.NET object so that it can be called from the classic ASP application(s). as it turns out, it is not really as difficult as i feared -- and it's a far simpler and more elegant approach than the various other options i tried. it feels good to have the experience under my belt, so i'm more likely to consider this approach in the future.
(wow, i am such a geek. i just wrote that implementing a com-callable wrapper is "fun".)
i have several other projects on the horizon as well -- a few small sites (some for friends, others for a recent and hopefully recurring client). and sometime soon i intend to revamp my personal site, so that i can point clients there.
it feels good to be working again.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
[see previous post for backstory]
update: if any of you out there are comic readers and want to know what this crazy nextwave thing is all about, you can read the first issue online, in a ridiculous Flash interface. if you like what you read, you can buy the collected first six issues. if only more people had bought the singles instead of the collection, perhaps there would be more on the horizon. damn, now i'm going to pout again...
Warren Ellis just posted that Nextwave is coming to an end. This sucks, Nextwave is one of the silliest, most goofytastic comics I've read in years. Marvel wanted to go another year (it was planned as an ongoing, but with Warren / Stuart Immonen on for the first year) but sales of the singles were too low for it to be practical.
I shall now commence with the pouting. :(
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
This is ridiculous: Calif. sues carmakers over global warming
California filed suit against the world's largest carmakers on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.
State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California was the first of its kind to seek to hold manufacturers liable for the damages caused by their vehicles' emissions. [...]
The lawsuit names Ford, General Motors, Toyota and the North American units of DaimlerChrysler, Honda and Nissan.
So, then: it's the auto manufacturers' fault that the great state of California built a massive highway infrastructure, and has continued to invest heavily in it for decades, instead of increasing investment in and incentives for more environmentally-friendly transportation options?
I realize that this lawsuit is likely election-year politicking, and doomed to failure, but it bugged me enough to say something.
Oh, yes. Hi there. I realize I haven't written in quite a long while. I'm hoping that changes real soon like.
Monday, May 29, 2006
i'm on my way home from Marin, earlier than expected, and with a bullet.
see, my grandfather passed away on Saturday morning. it wasn't unexpected, as he'd suffered a major heart attack a week earlier and had been in intensive care ever since.
so, i'm racing home in order to turn around and fly to NC in time for his funeral.
he had a good life, and was doing something he loves at the time of his heart attack -- he, my grandmother and aunt had driven to Colorado for a Marine Corps reunion. he always loved driving across the country -- i think he'd done so somewhere around 40 times -- and the reunions seemed very important to him, particularly in his later years, as the numbers of his surviving servicemates dwindled.
for these reasons, it's hard for me to feel bad about this.
we weren't particularly close for most of my adult life, but i was very close to him when i was growing up. despite the space between us in recent years, i know he loved me. i'm pretty sure he knew i loved him too.
'bye, grandaddy. i'll miss you.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
for those of you what are following my uw employment misdeeds -- it seems to be on hold(ish) at the moment, though they seem interested in me. the recruiter wants me to let her know if i start considering other options. so, i've got that going for me, which is nice.
i'm currently in a small crappy motel room in coos bay, oregon, on day two of a whirlwind motorcycle trip. i'm aiming to be in marin county by early afternoon on friday, for a long weekend gathering organized by my friend carla.
it has thus far been an exceedingly wet trip. i got a good soaking near olympia, and then again from longview almost all the way in to portland (i stopped there to visit keri and adam). when i got there, i immediately took a hot shower and had adam fix me a cup of tea to warm up. i had to wring water out of my gloves. lots of water.
this morning i got a late start, after helping keri out with a little
tech problem she was having at work. and, joy of joy, it started
raining again almost as soon as i got on my bike -- more of the hard
rain.
disclaimer: if you don't want to read about scary things on my moto trip, skip the rest of this paragraph. i ended up on I-205 for a few miles, and had the completely terrifying experience of being hit in the face by a sheet of water thrown up by the car in the next lane, for what seemed hours but was probably only ten seconds or so. i immediately released the throttle but didn't brake (i couldn't see anything, so wasn't aware whether there was someone close behind me), and as soon as that car was past i drifted as far right in my lane as possible, nearly onto the shoulder, as there were several more cars zooming past me.
by the time i got off the freeway, i was drenched. wet golden retriever.
next time i stopped, i decided to try another layer -- i put on my cheap raingear underneath my riding armor. of course, this worked like a charm. the rain stopped almost immediately! i kept the raingear on, however, until i hit the coast. it was totally blue-sky sunny as i pulled in to lincoln city, where i stopped for chai and chocolate and shed the raingear before continuing south.
it's been a really long time since i've been on the southern oregon coast. i'm not entirely sure i've been on the whole stretch until now, honestly -- i thought i had, but don't remember travelling the stretch from florence to coos bay before. there were several cool bridges along the way, which i feel i would have remembered. i like bridges, see. but they freak me out a bit. i'm finally learning to like crossing big tall bridges on my bike. i think...
even with all the rain thus far, i'm really pleased i decided to ride instead of flying to SF. i like the way that everything falls aside for a while when i'm riding. and, while it would be great to have company, i've come to realize that i enjoy these solo motorcycle trips. wonder where my next will take me?
it is lovely to be on 101 on a motorcycle -- there's an enjoyable inconstancy to the weave of the road across the landscape that is incredibly appealing on a motorcycle. in other words, lots of fun twisties! climbing up and down the hills jutting out into the ocean is fun. definitely moreso with proper caffeine levels.
tired now, must sleep. more later, probably. hopefully with photographs.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
i think i managed to avoid getting sick. this is a Good Thing.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
I love reading Mark Morford -- he's got bits of Molly Ivins and Hunter S. Thompson and a sense of palpable wonder/excitement/outrage depending on the subject at hand. I'd forgotten about him for a while, until Julie was laughing over his column one day. There and then, I added his rss feed to my reader.
His latest column is, to me, a great read:
Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas
It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?
No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?
Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium. [...]
What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.
Go, read it. Be entertained. Think about reading him regularly, for brilliant beautiful hyperbolic rants on the crazy state of our country.