Month: May 2009

My email to President Obama (a series)

lettertoObama

Since the president acknowledged in his town hall meeting in New Mexico on 5/14/2009 that single-payer is the insurance option that makes the most sense (takes advantage of economies of scale that only the government can provide; ensures that health care is available to everyone, not just those with jobs), why not, y’know, just push for a single-payer medical insurance system?

I may be one of those “little single-payer” advocates the president so breezily dismissed, and I may not be able to buy and sell politicians like the insurance industry that comprises a giant one-sixth of our economy, but I am someone who supported Barack Obama in his campaign for the presidency on the basis of, among other things, the hope that he would in fact ensure that all Americans have access to health care that does not simply further enrich the rich.

But all I have on my side is a voice, a vote, and the support of the majority of Americans and the backing of the political party that controls both houses of Congress, in name at least if not in actions. I don’t have the billions of dollars that the insurance industry that represents one-sixth of America’s economy has. Which one is more important, I wonder rhetorically?

Consequences

General

After hearing Amber Case give a presentation on Twitter and social media to my co-workers, we took a break.

A senior manager who shall remain nameless walked by while I was talking to a friend. The manager is friendly and appears honest and direct; in the short time he’s worked for our department, I’ve decided I like him.

I joked with him about how he had been unsure how to get to the conference center, had asked me for directions, and yet still beat me here from our office.

My friend, following up on Amber’s talk, asked the manager, “So, is it OK for us to check out Twitter?”

The manager’s friendly smile froze in place as he processed the question. “You… you mean… at work?“

My friend nodded. “Well, yeah. We just had a presentation on it, Chair Wheeler is talking about it… can we use it to keep up on things?”

There followed a long pause as the implications of the county’s restrictive policies on internet use collided with the open, broadcast nature of social media inside the manager’s head. “I… I’m not… I’ll have to check to see what gets logged.”

My friend nodded.

I would call the grin on her face a “gotcha” grin.

The manager retreated back to his seat. Break was over.

A roundup of season (series) finales

General

Sorry for no post yesterday. I posted three on Monday, though, so that should make up for it. Right? Damn, you people are so demanding.

Since it’s May, that means that many TV shows are having their season finales. Here’s what I’ve been paying attention to on the teevee:

  • Better Off Ted is my favorite new show. Portia de Rossi’s character has taken a while to grow on me, but now I see the funny in her mannered, stylized speech and body language. But, seriously, the two geeks in the lab are the best part of the show.
  • I’ve written about Dollhouse before, but last Friday they aired the season finale. I have to admit, Dollhouse took some time to get where it was going. I admit I only watched out of some kind of loyalty to Joss Whedon, and a hope that it would become less dark and creepy. I’m glad that my hope was misplaced, because once I caught on to the central thesis – Devilstower at Daily Kos explained that it was meta-commentary on television shows as a whole – it became far more interesting to me beyond the eye candy of star Eliza Dushku in lacy white thigh-highs. And as the show slowly revealed that there were many more Dolls than were first revealed. “Are you a Doll?” should have been the tagline for the show (I stole that from the internet). With such poor ratings, and with the season finale being overshadowed by the movie release of “Star Trek”, there’s little hope that the show will be renewed… although the star, Ms. Dushku, is hinting that Fox is talking to the producers even as I type this.
  • Tonight, of course, is the season finale of LOST. The producers and writers have done such an amazing job of telling their tale of a group of people bound together by a tragic plane crash, and the bizarre island on which they were once lost and are now returning to. I’m sad that this is the end of the next-to-last season. But then, I’ve been known to not finish a book because I didn’t want it to end. I’m bad at goodbyes. And I’m upset that my favorite new character, Daniel Faraday, appears to be dead dead, like Charlie Pace, instead of kinda dead, like, say, John Locke or Christian Sheppard. And what’s the deal with Richard Alpert? Is man-mascara the key to eternal youth or what?
  • On How I Met Your Mother, I love Barney (played by the awesome Neil Patrick Harris) and his as-yet unrequited love for the Canadian news anchor chick whose name I can never recall, but Ted’s pursuit of the titular mother is less interesting to me than how the writers managed to make Lily (Alyson Hannigan) disappear for several weeks with just a simple scene.
  • The Office, with its mini-arc of the Michael Scott Paper Company, and 30 Rock and its amazing ensemble cast, has been very very funny this season. Feel free to catch up during the summer; they’re both worth it.

What mindless TV entertainment have you been watching lately?

Friends

General

There are too few pictures of me with my friends.

After the race

I also missed an opportunity to get a group picture of everyone I saw “Star Trek” with last Saturday: Me, Lindsey, Kevin, Ken, Tracy and Stan.

We probably won’t all be together again very soon. But we should be.

Ayesha paints a picture

General

I sat in the window booth, warmed by the Friday evening sun outside. Ayesha, the waitress and my friend, sat across from me, telling me about the rude customers she’d had to deal with earlier. My empty plate sat in front of me.

I pulled out my iPhone for a moment while she talked. Realizing I was being a bit rude, I said, “I’m just entering my calories for dinner.”

“Oh?” she asked. “How many do you have left?”

I checked the total. I was over by a couple of hundred. “Not enough.”

“Uh-oh!” she said. “You’re going to have to walk home!” Smiling, she leaned over and put her head on the windowsill.

I chuckled. “Yes, I probably should.”

“It’s so nice out there. You should go for a walk… in the sun…” she said, dragging out the vowel sounds. “Birds will be flying…”

“Man, that does sound nice!” I said. “All the animals will come out from the woods, and sing a song for me…”

By the point, both she and I were laughing out loud, punch drunk from the long week and the warm lazy summer evening.

“Ha, ha, ha! It’ll be like one of those Disney movies!” I said.

“I’m only saying this because that’s what I want to be doing!” she said. Smiling, she whined, “It’s so boring. Go out and have a little ice cream and go for a walk. For me.”

“You’re painting a great picture!”

She pantomimed licking an ice cream cone. “It’s so beautiful out there! I want some ice cream!”

I’d already paid for my meal. I stood up; so did she. Putting my messenger bag over my shoulders, I got ready to leave. Out once-manic laughter slowly died down and silence once again filled the diner.

“Man, I’m going to be so disappointed when that doesn’t happen.” I said.

She retreated towards the bar, chuckling once again. “It will! I promise! I trained all the animals!”

I pushed the door open, stepped outside. “Well, send them the signal! I’m on my way!”

Spoiler-free “Star Trek” review

Movies

I’ve been worried about Captain Kirk.

More specifically, I’ve been worried that Chris Pine, who was cast as a young James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek franchise reboot, just didn’t have the chops to make me believe he was a younger version of William Shatner’s cocky, swaggering, speechifying Captain Kirk. The promotional pictures, and the few million clips and trailers I’ve seen in the last several months, just did not go far enough to convince me.

Still, Zachary Quinto is physically about as close as someone could get to a young Leonard Nimoy, and Quinto’s portrayal of Sylar on NBC’s “Heroes” certainly shows he can play “emotionless”.

And, while I enjoy Simon Pegg’s past performances (particularly “Shaun of the Dead”), he really didn’t look like James “Scotty” Doohan at all. But I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on pure personality alone.

The rest of the canonical bridge crew of the Enterprise everyone remembers was given to a bunch of young kids I’ve paid almost no attention to prior to finding out they were in this movie.

…except for the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy. Wait a minute, what? Eomer is playing Bones? How is that a good move?

I always knew I would see this movie when it came out. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I would buy it or not.

Or so I thought. This clip1 totally sold me:

I’ve watched that clip many times prior to seeing the movie. And during the movie, after that scene, I turned to my girlfriend, Lindsey and said, basically, “Squeeee!“2

I saw the movie with a group of friends. Some I’ve known a long time, some I’ve known a shorter time. Some were fans of Star Trek and action movies; some were not. We drove out to the mall in which I spent much of my formative teenage and young adult life, so that we could see it in digital projection with awesome sound.

And we all enjoyed it, I think. The writers were faced with an enormous task; to take the mountains of backstory, some official and much of it unofficial but widely accepted by the fans, and still manage to make a movie that’s watchable, that covers a significant point in the characters’ lives, that doesn’t descend into boring pseudo-scientific Treknobabble that has marked some of the later excursions into the Star Trek universe.

Holy crab, did they succeed.

In fact, without going in to spoilers, they took the most basic tentpole of the Star Trek storytelling technique, a technique that’s been used in good Trek and bad Trek, and used it to refresh the characters and, almost literally, reboot the franchise. Yes, these are in fact James Kirk, Spock, McCoy.

No, you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Congratulations to all involved. You did it. I love this movie.

1 Sorry about the branded video clip. The non-branded one I found earlier has been pulled by Paramount’s sharks in suits lawyers.

2 Luckily, Lindsey is awesome and did not hold my fanboy-ish joy against me at all.

Lake Run 12K Un-Official Results

exercise

Yesterday I ran the longest race I’ve ever run – 12K, or a little over 7.4 miles.

And today I would post my official time – if I had remembered to wear my timing chip.

So even though I ran it, in official eyes, I do not exist.

Un-officially, my time was about 83 minutes. When people told me that that course was hilly, they were right. So very right; so very hilly.

My first 12K Race

General

This morning I am heading off to run my first-ever 12K race: the Lake Run 12K in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

It’s a hilly course, I hear, one that winds around the man-made, privately-owned, cleverly-named Oswego Lake. I’ve run in this event in the past, but in the 5K only; the last year I ran it was in 2006.

My friend Ken will be running in the 5K; Kevin was supposed to run in the 5K as well, and even signed up for it, but has had some oral surgery this week, is on drugs, and didn’t want to risk it, whatever “it” may be.

Having never run a 12K before, I have no idea what to expect. I think I’m well-prepared; I had my 11-mile run last weekend; I’ve been tapering this week, and have been just working out with weights instead of running the past two days. When I got up this morning, I drank some coffee, and had an energy bar; I plan on drinking whatever water is available to me on the course and I’m bringing at least one gel pack.

The weather should be awesome for this race; temperatures in the upper 40° or lower 50° F and clear skies.

Afterward we three are going to eat a giant breakfast, then us and some others (including Tracy and my girlfriend, Lindsey) are going to go see “Star Trek” on a digital projection screen in Clackamas. Because nothing is better after a hard race than consuming lots of greasy food and then sitting down for hours. And by “better” I mean “not really better” but certainly also “more fun”.

If you notice some weirdness

meta

I’m going through every last post on my site, from the oldest to the newest, and adding a title to each one to bring it up to the current standard.

I’m also checking and updating every link, and in some cases adding obvious links to my past posts or external sites.

If there are any pictures in the post, I am moving the pictures from my old gallery to my Flickr photostream. If you happen to be following my Flickr page, and you see old pictures show up there, that’s a result of me adding them.

When I’m done updating, I’m going to be creating a new archive page; one that will include links by month and year, links to the tags I use, and a handy search function. In other words, an archive that will be more useful than the difficult-to-read drop-down menu that I currently have over there on the left.

I also plan on creating a more informative “about me” page, with links to some of my best or most important posts, and links to the various other places on the internet I use, like the above Flickr account, or Twitter page, my Last.fm page, and others.

Then I want to add some small things like navigation links for the archive pages and tweak the CSS and page layout a bit.

In other words, just some background tinkering to make it all work a bit better. Y’all probably don’t care but if so, hope you don’t mind.

If you notice something broken, missing, or just strange, let me know.