Category: General

Presented in no particular order.

• Money. Duh.
• Free time. (Obviously I’d need more of the previous item, too)
• Pictures of me with my friends through the years.
• Miles run this year (according to my records, I’ve run 289.93 miles this year so far).
• Megabytes.
• Gigahertz.
• Megabits per second.
• Giggajiggas (only Ken will “get” this).
• Diplomacy.
• Books read.
• Antihistamines, or whatever it is that I’m lacking that makes me allergic to things, like pollen or cats.
• Buttons.
• Fucos
• Memory of amazing conversations that I could turn into blog posts, because obviously I am out of ideas lately.

Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Three day weekend is gone. Let us not remind each other of the glory that was the Memorial Day weekend, shall we?

That means not telling you about my going to a barbecue in West Linn with Tracy and Gina, spending time with Lindsey, or my running hill repeats in the warm weather, or of Lindsey and I going to Manzana for dinner, or of how the gift certificate we had for Manzana, which could have been $15, $25 or even $40, was in fact only $15, or of Lindsey and I watching the series finale to Battlestar Galactica and starting Season 1 of the series Mad Men.

Yes, I shall tell you none of that.

Instead I’ll just tell you of the delicious apple fritter I had for breakfast, and of the silly goings-on at work, and how I’m wearing shorts today because it’s supposed to be warm.

You’ll wonder why I’m having left-over baby back ribs for lunch, because, see, I didn’t tell you I went to Manzana for dinner last night! See? See how clever I am? I’m crafting mysteries here for you to ponder.

How was your weekend?

I’ve got a couple of blog posts in the works, but for some reason I ran out of writing juice, so I’m going to put up this place-holder post just to show that I’m not lying in a ditch somewhere.

Wait, I have an iPhone, so even if I was lying in a ditch, I could probably still post to my blog. Damn, that’s no excuse.

Wait – what if it was a ditch in the middle of the desert?? Not much cell reception out there, huh? Huh? What then?

Him: I want to make a Hackintosh, so I’ll need to copy those disks.

Me: Why not just buy a Mac and get all the support without all the work?

Him: I don’t have $3400!

Me: Then buy a Mac mini. They start at $599.

Him: But I need some horsepower!

Bystander: That sounds like the testosterone talking.

Last week I biked to, and from, work from home twice. Then, on Sunday, I rode my bike downtown (and then put my bike on the #54 bus and rode it over to my girlfriend’s house).

Monday morning, I rode my bike to and from work, again. And this morning, I rode it to work.

I’m just sayin’, I’m doing a lot of bicycling lately. I’ll be riding my bike to and from work again the next couple of days. Mainly because I have to be at work by 5 AM and there are no buses at that hour of the day.

I feel so Portland-esque. But I’m not wearing any Lycra™, I swear.

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday. I didn’t have much to say, I guess.

What have you been up to?

Given the following:

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/sv?cbp=12,242.56,,0,2.26&cbll=45.481579,-122.707746&v=1&panoid=&gl=&hl=en&w=425&h=240]

I arrive at the bus stop at SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and 30th Ave. The shelter is on a blind corner, basically. I check the satellite-updated constantly-refreshed magic transit website on my iPhone and find that the bus is due in 15 minutes. I’m tired, so I sit in the shelter, knowing that if I’m still sitting down when the bus shows up, I might miss it if the driver isn’t careful, or if the driver doesn’t have to stop for the traffic light.

Several minutes early, the bus rolls by while I’m killing time by surfing on my iPhone. I hear it, I look up, and I see the bus driver make eye contact with me, signal to pull over, and slow to a stop.

I grab my bag and run for the bus. I hop on, grateful the driver saw me in time. I fish out my pass and thank the driver for stopping…

And the driver launches into a lecture. “You should be standing out and looking for the bus. I can’t see you on that corner if you’re standing the shelter.”

I cut him off, suddenly irritated. “Uh-huh.. Thank you” I say, loudly, and take my seat.

I’d say the simple conclusion is:

• The driver was early, almost inattentive, but definitely pedantic.
• I was verbally grateful but also snarky.
• But TriMet was definitely wrong to place the shelter on a blind corner. What’s the point of having shelters if bus drivers can’t see riders when they’re inside them?

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.

I hate cancer.

That is all.

Stupid stupid fucking cancer.

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?

There are too few pictures of me with my friends.

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.