Happy Birthday, Tessa!
Posted 7/30/2002 by Unstable Human
We need a war against terrorists, not a war on Americans at the airport, on the street or on college campuses! This is turning into the war on drugs writ large - a gravy train for bureaucrats and a power grab for the administration. Ugh.
Posted 7/30/2002 by Unstable Human
I had some bike trouble yesterday so on my ride home after work, I stopped by the Denver Spoke bike shop on Evans. The mechanic on staff was nice and helpful, he fixed my bike on the spot, he let me watch and explained what he was doing so I could further my knowledge. So far, my experiences there have been positive. Good service (and a good bike shop) is hard to find, so it deserves a plug.
Posted 7/30/2002 by Unstable Human
Slowly getting the Zen of this PHP thing. Maybe by the end of the week this weblog thingie will be database-driven and everything.
Posted 7/30/2002 by Unstable Human
Glad to see that Hansen agrees with me. They need to be bigger and better, even bigger than the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Maybe we could even build five of them, a giant birdie, pointed right at Saudi Arabia.
Posted 7/29/2002 by Unstable Human
Riding to work, I've seen more single women with rottweilers than any other breed of dog. It's prevalent enough to see fashionable. I love rottweilers, they're great dogs: strong, smart, hard-working and talented, but I get a funny vibe when I ride past a woman jogging with one. Something like: I have this dog because I don't want anything to do with you. Of course, women with rottweilers probably do not get harassed by scary guys and that's surely a benefit of having one.
Posted 7/29/2002 by Unstable Human
One: Scooping dead plecostomus out of fish tank. Two: scaring bird into path of oncoming car. What's number three going to be?
Posted 7/29/2002 by Unstable Human
People would be better off if they followed their own advice.
Nobody does anything when they're drunk that they didn't think about doing when they were sober.
It looks like the start of a hornet's nest by my back porch light. Need to do something about that!
Saw Big Head Todd and the Monsters last night at Red Rocks. One of the best concerts that I've seen in a long time. They played their hearts out - this is a hometown show for them. The sound was spot-on - Red Rocks went through a bad spell when all the concerts there sounded like crap. Glad to see things have picked up. I cannot imagine a better place to see a concert. I love that they have a general admission section at the front of the amphitheater. If you get there early enough you can get right up to the stage (we were in row 16). So you can spend money for reserved seats or you can work hard and get there early. There's some justice in that: good seats aren't just for the rich.
Some songs have lines that that resonate and stick out from the rest. This song by Garbage has some really choice lines. [I knew you were mine for the taking/your eyes light up when I walk in the room.] During the Big Head Todd concert, Again and Again came on during the encore, my favorite line is: It's three a.m., she wraps herself around me. That reminds me of a pleasant moment when my girlfriend came back from girls' night a few weeks ago.
On the Red Rocks website, there was a link to stream music by local artists. There's a track by Pure Drama. They're really good - kind of goth trip-hoppy. Maybe I'll go download some tracks now.
Blogging in 2014. A Max Headroom style cautionary tale.
Posted 7/28/2002 by Unstable Human
I didn't realize how much I missed being able to send my girlfriend little email notes throughout the day.
Posted 7/26/2002 by Unstable Human
Couldn't sleep last night - probably because I ended the evening with a few beers and not enough water. I also just had a lot of thoughts racing through my head that would not go away and I am prone to bouts of insomnia. I have not yet learned to accept myself for who I am. Maybe that's part of being in my 20's and one day I will come to better terms with how I am and be able to take myself a little less seriously.
Late at night, with nothing but the 60hz drone of electricity and the whirring fan to fill the void, I found myself in an unpleasant mental place. Part of me can never be satisfied or happy with myself. Late at night, that voice tells me I don't measure up, I'm not exciting or attractive, I'm not a good worker and that it's a matter of time before the world sees that I am a sham, I neglect my friends and family, I'm not thin enough, muscular enough, man enough. I can't fix things, throw a ball or make anyone's toes tingle when I kiss them.
I know that I'm smart, successful, very skilled at what I do and in an enviable place in life, knock on wood. I'm healthy and in good shape after years of discipline and work, I've got a great job, great house, great car and my fair share of gadgets and no credit card debt. More importantly, I have a lot of good friends that give a damn about me and a girlfriend that can put up with me most of the time. I have a lot of quantifiable reasons to feel good about myself. I'm even a decent-looking guy. But it's easy to forget the positives staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
Fortunately those ghosts, like the morning fog in San Francisco, dispel themselves with the daybreak. Maybe this self-loathing drives me to be an over-acheiver. Maybe I'll grow out of this, maybe this is one of those dualities that makes me who I am.
Posted 7/26/2002 by Unstable Human
Posted 7/24/2002 by Unstable Human
One thing I loved about Amelie was how the narrator described characters in terms of concrete things that they liked and disliked. Amelie's father, for example, liked rearranging his tools and disliked the way his swimming trunks feel getting out of th water. I figured I'd give it a whirl for myself
Likes:
Dislikes:
Posted 7/24/2002 by Unstable Human
True Porn Clerk Stories - Amusing and very well written.
Posted 7/24/2002 by Unstable Human
I think that the world would be a better place if everyone involved with bringing an alarm clock to market had to sleep with it in their house, or better yet, make their parents use it for a month. It's ironic that one of the most important things we own, the alarm clock, is consistently so poorly designed. My old alarm clock had five randomly placed buttons on its face, including one that glowed. When the alarm goes off, I always had the impulse to hit the glowing button - it's usually dark and it's the first button I see. Turns out that button isn't the snooze button, it is the button that turns off the alarm!
So I went in search of a better alarm clock yesterday. I'm a technologically-inclined guy and not a total moron, but I could not figure out how to set the alarm on most of them. They had either too few buttons to figure out how to set the time and alarm, or so many buttons the snooze and sleep buttons (the most important ones to me) were in non-obvious places. Every alarm clock should have a large, textured snooze button on the front of the face.
I thought that a $60 alarm clock would be better-designed than a $10 alarm clock. But it does not get better until you get to the Bang and Olufson or Bose price levels, and the designers think about how the device should work. I don't want to spend $500 on an alarm clock, even though I've spent that much on more frivolous things, like two bottles of wine.
Posted 7/24/2002 by Unstable Human
Ironically, Hollywood could be an even greater threat to civil liberties than John Ashcroft. A bill, to be introduced to congress this week, will allow the entertainment industry to launch electronic attacks against individuals. Sounds pretty close to terrorism to me.
Posted 7/24/2002 by Unstable Human
Saw Amelie last night. In addition to keeping my French skills in practice, it was one of the best movies that I've seen in a while. A well-told tale about a very unique woman who sets out to improve other peoples' lives and finds love for herself in the process. Sometimes she fails, most of the time she wins. A great story about how the best way to improve your life is to improve the lives of others.
Plus, I got to spend some much needed quality time with my girlfriend with a good movie, some Chinese food and a bottle of wine.
Posted 7/23/2002 by Unstable Human
One of my good friends is in the hospital with a kidney infection. Yuck! One good thing about the 'net is that it is really easy to send flowers anywhere.
Posted 7/23/2002 by Unstable Human
I was in Poncho Springs this weekend for a river rafting trip. The water is so low this summer that it was basically a float trip, but our guide, Nate H., was really good - we only got stuck once.
During the evening, we were playing catch with a football, and everyone but me was throwing nice passes that got from point a to point b. Everyone but me caught the ball almost every time. Although my catching is getting better, I still throw like a six year old girl and that makes me pretty self-conscious, especially around my girlfriend's family, who are all very involved in sports. I'm sure that they are not forming character opinions based on my skill with a ball. Maybe it's the disconnect between our society's ideal of a man and the kind of man that I am that makes me feel a little uncomfortable.
Posted 7/20/2002 by Unstable Human
Have you ever noticed how civic buildings and a lot of older cathedrals and churches are built of heavy materials and have pillars and lines that reach for the sky? I walked into the courthouse the other day for jury duty and I just had to look up and when I did, I suddenly felt so small. Perhaps that is intentional, to remind us that there are higher powers than us. I don't mind feeling that when I walk into a church, but I felt somehow oppressed walking into the City and County building.
Posted 7/20/2002 by Unstable Human
Some words I try to live by: It's one thing to pee in the pool; standing on the high-dive while doing it is quite another.
Posted 7/18/2002 by Unstable Human
An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about how the stock market and the economy are diverging. Their claim is that although the market is down, mainly because it was too high to begin with, the economy has largely bounced back. In one way, it doesn't feel like there's been a bone-fied recession. Customer service everywhere is still shit. Nobody knows anything because it is too expensive to hire people in customer service positions who actually know something. In another way, this article feels like another nauseating salvo of wank-wank, feel-good the-economy-is-getting-better-so-get-out-there-and-spend-money propaganda. There may be jobs out there, but they all suck, and I won't believe that the economy is really getting better until my girlfriend has a good job. I don't give a rat's ass what the GDP and the unemployment index say. At least real-estate prices are still climbing!
Posted 7/18/2002 by Unstable Human
I turned on the radio to KTCL and to my astonsishment, they were playing a tune by the White Stripes. After playing the song, in a moment of candor, the DJ said: "That band you just heard, the White Stripes, is officially not cool anymore." I had to laugh.
Oh well. I still like listening to them, though. I imagine that if you took the Violent Femmes and replaced the abject bitterness with seething anger, you'd get something like the White Stripes.
Posted 7/17/2002 by Unstable Human
Any neanderthal with a monkey wrench can mostly fix something. It's easy to make my faucet almost not leak or the derailleurs on my bike work correctly across the range of gears on my bike, give or take one or two. To really fix something, so it's 100% totally fixed, stick a fork in it, good as new fixed - that is damn near impossible.
I haven't gotten to the point in my life where I can accept that. I feel like part of my value as a man is measured in my ability to fix things, to make problems go away, which if it does not have to do with a computer, is mediocre at best. Maybe that ties into a survey I read once that said that over 50 percent of women would rather have a man who could fix things than a man who is a great kisser. When they had that training camp in middle school, I was too busy riding my bike, building little robots, and not getting invited to any of the cool parties. But that's a rant for another day.
Posted 7/17/2002 by Unstable Human
Beauty with men is a strange thing. If a woman spends a lot of time on her looks, we usually feel that is a good thing -- she cares about how she looks and presents herself. With men, the ideal is to look like you just stepped out of the shower, picked up any old thing off the floor and, damn, it looks good.
But that relies heavily on being very careful about how you step out of the shower and exactly what things you leave lying around.
Posted 7/16/2002 by Unstable Human
It seems like videos are now the primary way that artists get promoted. MTV has been around most of my life, so I don't remember the way it was before, but I imagine that a band made it to the top by playing in clubs and selling self-recorded EPs out of the backs of their cars and if they were lucky, they eventually got noticed.
So would Britney Spears survive as a musician in that kind of world?
Britney Spears is a manufactured product, like a Happy Meal - focus tested and refined to appeal to as many people as possible. But it's not about the singing or the music with her, it's about imagining what she looks like naked while the music is playing. I have trouble imagining her surviving the club scene. It seems like being a top musician nowadays relies more on creating an image that is easy to sell. Of course, successful female artists have always been attractive.
But would a talented but less teleginic artist like Aretha Franklin succeed nowadays?
Posted 7/16/2002 by Unstable Human
Call me superficial, but I don't know if I'd want to have my fate decided by somone with a mullet. After all, with that kind of hair judgment...
Posted 7/16/2002 by Unstable Human
I think I can be compulsive sometimes. Earlier, I called eNom's technical support every 5 minutes trying to get a human on the phone, only getting their voice mail. Ugh. I can't concentrate on anything else. The only way I can cope is to tell myself that I can only call every 30 minutes, but still the anxious feeling refuses to go away.
I used to be this way with girls, too. Might help explain why I didn't have many dates...
I also save documents every sentence I write.
I've also been checking the domain I'm trying to fix every hour to make sure nothing is wrong with it
My hands always need something to do. I'd argue my girlfriend benefits from that one.
Need to get some templates and server-side includes set up here. Get dynamic, baby.
Posted 7/12/2002 by Unstable Human
While my girlfriend was out at girls' night until about 12:30 in the morning, we guys got together at Hansen's house in an attempt to make another small step improving the squalor that is his place. Actually it's really starting to shape up. There's tile in the bathroom and the upstairs is slowly getting patched and painted.
Seems to me that a group of girls inviting some other guys to go out with them on girls' night is kind of like a group of guys having strippers at their poker party. :)
The latest photos of Hansen's place are here, which is a huge improvement from before
Posted 7/12/2002 by Unstable Human
I've learned an important lesson becoming part of the on-line lifestyle: always register a domain name yourself; never let your new Web host do it for you. That way you can at least control your domain name if you don't like the service you're getting.
If you're looking for Web hosting, whatever you do, never, never, ever go with a company called SWHU. I promise you will regret it. I was unfortunate enought to recommend them to my girlfriend who is in the process of starting a company. It took them a week to create an account for her, and once that was done, nothing actually worked - it was impossible to set up a mailbox and uptime was nowhere near the 99.9% that they promise and guarantee. And it goes without saying that their e-mail support is a joke.
To make matters worse, when they register domain names, they don't give you the ability to manage and control them and when you ask for a refend, they hijack your domain name, just as a way to say screw you. If you don't believe me, some unhappy customer stories are here. After numerous e-mails to the domain name registrar, I finally convinced them to surreptitiously give us access to the domain name so we could transfer it out of SWHU's account and into another account that she controls. When that is complete, we will be in a position of strength...
So I've been a ball of stress lately. I've been hoping that my girlfriend would make the leap and start her own company, and now that she is, she gets thrown into this quagmire and I feel somewhat responsible for her predicament. It's stressful enough to imagine life without a steady income stream (I've been there) but for the first impressions of getting started to be dealing with incompetant sleezeballs has got to suck. My massage therapist said to me: "I can't believe how messed up you are!". Fortunately life can't suck too much with a masseuse like Celine.
Posted 7/12/2002 by Unstable Human
After a few sleepless nights playing with stylesheets, this site is live. Thanks, Sean! Still some work to do: fix the colors of the visited links and get some of this navigation set up.
Posted 7/12/2002 by Unstable Human