Category: General

In Twitter, people have invented a way to tag individual tweets so that they are part of a larger, tagged, group. That method is called “hashtags” because the tag includes a hash mark.

So all the tweets about the Twitter meetup (or “tweetup”) at the KGW Studio on the Square yesterday evening are tagged “#squareup”.

If one searches Twitter for #squareup, one would see all the tweets about the event.

Isn’t that cool?

KGW has converted the old Powell’s Travel Books location, a bunker under Portland’s living room (a.k.a., Pioneer Courthouse Square), into a remote studio. And Wednesday night, the people behind their Live at 7 show, Stephanie Stricklen and Aaron Weiss, invited all their Twitter followers to come see the new space.

There were a lot of people there, more than I expected. The little studio was full of people I’ve interacted with, but have not met in person.

There were three exceptions: Neva, whose birthday party I went to a couple of weeks ago, and who seemed to see me as a familiar face in a sea of new faces.

Second was Aaron, who works for the county in the same building as I do. Aaron and I have been in the same meetings, and interacted on blogs in the past, but never formally introduced ourselves to each other until last night. (I expected Aaron to sound like Seth Rogen but he doesn’t; he sounds like Aaron).

And, of course, Christopher Frankonis, The One True B!x, a Portland blogging star, whom I have seen in public previously; I finally shook his hand and introduced myself.

I got a hug from Stephanie Stricklen, and I got to tell the Director of Programming for KGW that I’d like them to do more local politics and reporting. I got to chat with a producer for the show about getting local musicians into the studio for concerts and shows. We, as a group, gave advice to the talent for the station on how to best make use of Twitter for their reporters – the basic idea being, let each individual reporter do what they want with their Twitter accounts, and just collect them all on the main KGW web page. Don’t restrict them in what they talk about. If they want to just talk about the stories they work on, let them. If they want to talk about their pregnancy and where they had dinner, (like Steph), let them.

The whole point of Twitter (OK, one of the points of Twitter) is that you can follow or not follow people for whatever reason you want. Me, the bulk of people I follow are interesting in one way or another, and the bulk of those people are local. But other people might have different ideas on what makes others interesting or worth following. It’s about finding an individual voice.

So far, the best part of Twitter, for me, is that it’s led to meeting great people in person.

I took a few pictures of the event, and you can find more and better pictures of the event here.

The remote studio is small but packed with tech. The cameras are all robotic monsters that are controlled remotely from SW 15th and Jefferson, and directed into place via a rail marked with barcodes (which I tripped over and knocked out of place – sorry, Aaron!) There’s a raised desk that, I believe, Steph said she would never use. There’s a big green screen for doing weather in front of, a technical skill that is difficult for me to imagine doing gracefully. And nearly everyone commented that it would not be long before people, regular people in the Square, would be flashing and mugging for the cameras in front of the windows.

Which, I believe, is the real-world outcome of what D.J., KGW General Manager, described as “being connected with the community.” Right on!

Kevin and I were out and about, and driving around the Hawthorne area looking for a parking spot. Destination: Powell’s on Hawthorne.

He pulled onto a side street, and while I was looking at him and saying something, I interrupted myself and pointed out his side window. “She’s a stripper.” He turned, looked, and saw a tall, dark beauty with a crimson swatch in her hair crossing in the middle of the street.

I told Kevin her stage name, and mentioned that she’s on my MySpace friends list. Kevin was interested (though not beyond the bounds of basic curiosity), so after he parked, I pulled out my iPhone and showed him some of her pictures and related what little I know about her. “She’s… well, she’s probably not calling herself a ‘Republican’ anymore, ’cause the Republican Party is in steep decline. But she’s anti-Obama, and pro-gun, and all the other generic Republican talking points. But, damn, she’s got an amazing pair of (as far as I know) natural breasts.”

I joke that spotting strippers in their street clothes is fairly common because Portland is reputed to have a very high ratio of strip club per capita (which urban legend has been examined and found wanting). That means, to me, that any random attractive woman I see is likely to have been, is currently, or will be in the future, a stripper.

But maybe I just see strippers more often because I go to strip clubs a lot? Maybe it’s me? I’m so tuned in to the talent working at the various clubs I frequent, I recognize them more often than regular people?

Last evening, I was riding home on the bus, tired and a bit overwhelmed by the group I had just left (about which I’ll write later). I was sitting in the seat right in front of the rear door, surfing on my iPhone, zoning out. The bell rang, the driver pulled over, the rear door opened, and a voice called out, “Thank you!”

The voice tickled my memory.

That voice was in a normal everyday tone of voice. But the last time I heard it, it was cooing and giggling in an assumed, but entertaining, tone of voice. In fact, the only times I had ever heard it. Or should I say, “heard her.”

I looked out the window, and, sure enough, saw yet another stripper, dressed in normal street clothes, walking down the sidewalk and away from the bus.

It happens nearly every day. Don’t you wish you lived here?

Wil Wheaton went nuts over some recordings of kids playing arcade games. I haven’t listened to them yet, so Wheaton may be justified in his nuts-going, I don’t know.

What I do know is that Wheaton’s mania for nostalgia is parallel to my own lately. So I found the ending to Wheaton’s post a bit more thought-provoking, and, hopefully, worthy of a small post.

He posed the question of choosing, to own for your very own, any four arcade games, and what would they be? Oh, and a pinball machine.

I never really enjoyed pinball the way I enjoyed arcade games so I immediately modified it to be any five arcade games. Even then, I had trouble picking just five. Here’s the list that first came off the top of my head:

1. Pole Position (sit down version)
2. Battlezone (stand up version)
3. Elevator Action
4. Asteroids Deluxe
5. Tempest

Three of the five are vector-based graphics games. Only one (Elevator Action) features personal violence – the rest are abstracted violence (very much abstracted in the sense of competitive racing for Pole Position). And all of them feature a simple, single goal, rather than complex story-telling. They’re just games where the point is to survive and do as much damage as you can (or race as long as you can go).

And they all date to 1980-1983 – the years I went to high school.

Every single one of those games, at one point, were installed in the local 7-11, and I must have spent hours and hours, and quarter after quarter, playing each and every one of them, oblivious to anything else, mesmerized by the flashing lights. Most times I would be wearing headphones and listening to a mix tape of some sort, songs recorded off the radio, which would explain the lack of any songs not cut from the corporate commercialist cookie-cutter, ugh. It wouldn’t be until later that I discovered that there was a lot of awesome music that did not get played on Portland radio stations…

Blowing up asteroids, or stylized tanks, or shooting enemy spies, all stood in for whatever it was that I was avoiding out in the real world.

If only I had any idea what it was, exactly, I was avoiding?

What would my life, or anyone’s life, be like without video games? It would be irresponsible of me to speculate.

I had about 20 minutes to kill until my bus arrived. I was cold. Wanted something warm. There was a Starbucks nearby, with free wifi and hot coffee.

There’s always a Starbucks nearby.

But I wanted decaffeinated since Dr. Carl has told me to cut back, and the three cups of coffee I had eaten with breakfast were probably my limit.

The last several attempts to order decaf at this specific Starbucks had been marred by a complete lack of decaf, which news was delivered with an apologetic tone of voice but no real explanation. In each previous case, I had been offered a decaf Americano, which I had sometimes accepted with resignation, and sometimes declined along with any other option.

I waited my turn, and when the black and green clad employee asked me what I wanted, I said, “Tall decaf, please, with room.”

The boy barista (baristo?) half-turned towards their brewed coffee, then turned back with a familiar faux-sad expression. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any decaf. We stop brewing it after a certain point.”

Still smiling my I-expected-this-answer-but-it’s-not-OK smile, I sighed and said, “OK, give me a tall decaf Americano, with room” and handed over a couple bucks. As he rang me up, I said, “This is the fourth time I’ve come here and you haven’t had decaf.”

The girl making the espresso drinks piped up. “They told us not to, anymore.”

Baristo handed back my change and kept talking. “I guess they figured that we just don’t sell enough of it.”

I shook my head, smiling faintly, and stepped back so the next customer could order.

The baristo said, faux-sympathetically, “You’re not the only one!” Really? That’s the exact opposite of the excuse you had before, you know, I thought, either no one buys it or lots of people ask for it. Which is it?

“Sure, great,” I said, “but it still disappoints me.” They? I thought, who are they? Is that corporate? “I’ll just have to tell them that.” I tried to project a sense of I-know-it’s-not-your-fault-but-it’s-still-not-OK-but-please-don’t-spit-in-my-drink as I walked over to the espresso-drink waiting area.

The girl ahead of me had ordered lots of drinks for a big group of people, and when she was done collecting them, finally the girl behind the counter called out, “Tall Americano!” and set a drink on the ledge.

I walked over, put my hand on the cup, and said, “You mean ‘tall decaf Americano,’ right?”

She turned the cup around to see what was written on it, her face falling. “Oh! No… I didn’t see it,” as the baristo called from the cash register, “Yeah, that’s supposed to be a decaf!”

Honestly, I wasn’t upset so much as amused. How much more wrong could this transaction go? I now looked like the customer from Hell, even though I thought my requests were well within the bounds of reason. The blockage wasn’t me, and the initial problem was up the corporate ladder somewhere, and this current blip was an honest mistake. Still, everything was conspiring to turn it all into a Really Big Deal. I smiled wanly, then stepped aside so she could make me the right drink.

The baristo, who had some experience in these things, told the girl to keep the Americano because someone would probably order one soon enough. Lucky customer!

She completed my drink and brought it out; she handed me a coupon at the same time, worth one free drink next time. I thanked her, then walked to the condiment area. Yay, a free drink. If I had been really unsatisfied, would a reason to visit again in the future really be the trick to turn me around? Luckily, I’m addicted, and Starbucks are everywhere. I tucked the coupon away for later.

I waited for the clueless elderly Asian couple to finish stirring their coffees and adding their flavorings, then stepped up. Everyone has a routine, a little coffee meditation, a ritual they perform. Mine is: take the lid off, pour in a little half-and-half, tear open and pour in two packets of turbinado sugar, stir thoroughly, replace the lid so the cup seam is on the back.

Only this time, it went like this: take off the lid, reach for the half-and-half… of the two stainless steel pitchers, one was labeled “2%” and one was labeled “Whole milk”. No half-and-half. Oh, this is an easy fix, I thought, and turned to the girl. “There’s no half-and-half,” I said, as gently as I could after the customer catastrophe earlier.

And she gave me the face again, the one that says she’s really really sorry, but… “We ran out of half-and-half, we don’t have any.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Loud. Hard. I hope I didn’t hurt her feelings. It was simply absurd. I turned back to the condiments area and reached for the 2%, while the girl continued to explain that she had used the last of their half-and-half to make someone else’s drink. Now I started to notice more little touches to this comedy: there was no turbinado sugar so I used regular white sugar; in their urge to satisfy me they had not given me a cup with room as I’d originally asked, meaning I had to pour some out to make room (which, if the employees had seen, probably felt like salt in the wound but was simply me being practical); and when I stirred, I got a little hot coffee on my fingers.

I intend to send an email to corporate telling them about my experience and the contradictory “we don’t sell enough decaf so that’s why we often disappoint our customers” reason I was given. I’ve had reasonable responses to complaints to Starbucks previously.

I’ll leave the entire story here, though, for your delight, to live on the internet for as long as the internet lives.

I sat on the edge of the small conference room, along with about twenty of my union brothers and sisters, while we listened to our union president, Becky, and vice president, Michael, discuss what leadership was proposing we do to save our employer money, and therefore save jobs.

Of course, unions being a democracy (the only democratic (small d) institution in the workplace meant that first, the union membership had to vote to approve any plans the union executive board put forth. That vote was early next week. And to our benefit, my union appears to be among the few in the county that are taking pro-active steps to save jobs; others have been taking a “wait and see” line.

The twenty people in this room, this one “brown bag” session, represented such a tiny fraction of the total membership, so I was unable to gauge the mood of the entire voting block from the mood of this handful of people. But the people in this room felt overwhelmingly pro-job-saving.

Except for one, outspoken, angry, defensive woman, who kept chastising Becky for not doing “more”, trying to get “more” out of management in this severe economic downturn. Like what? She mentioned more vacation time, more sick time, a promise to get the money lost back next year if things turn around…

I found her greed a bit overwhelming, and after the meeting, my friend Ken summed it up best by saying, “She sees it as the union vs. management, when in reality it’s the union and management vs. the recession.”

Quite so.

While doing some light cleaning around the house this weekend, I noticed that my vacuum cleaner wasn’t the best. I bought it on the cheap, and it doesn’t always pick up dirt and paper shreds and whatnot from my new carpet.

And I thought, “my vacuum cleaner sucks.”

And I laughed.

Because sucking is pretty much what a vacuum cleaner is supposed to do.

I spent a few minutes working on how someone could express that their cleaning instrument wasn’t very good at what it was designed to do, and it made me laugh.

“My vacuum cleaner sucks” and “my vacuum cleaner doesn’t suck” have both the same meaning, and the opposite meaning. At the same time.

I thought of “flammable” and “inflammable” and how, even though the prefix “in-” usually reverses the meaning of the word to which it is affixed, in this one case, it does not. But it’s not entirely the same because the two words just seem like they should mean the opposite. They don’t.

Not like the “vacuum/suck” conundrum.

I wonder if the Language Log folk have ever talked about this?

I was thinking about how rude some people can be, when I stopped to consider where they would fall on the canonical 1 to 10 scale.

Of course, when assigning a level of rudeness on the 1 to 10 scale, you have to think about what the extreme ends of the scale represent. In this case, the 1 would represent “polite”, which is the least rude one can be.

But then I tried to figure out what the high end of the scale would be. What would 10 on the rude scale be? Would it be the rudest person ever, like, say, Andrew Dice Clay’s public persona, or even Rush Limbaugh? Someone who is barely socialized and whose every utterance is designed to shock and dismay?

The problem is, I kept thinking of more and more examples of people who were even ruder than that… like, say, Osama bin Laden, or Dick Cheney. But then we’re getting into a definitional gray area: are they rude or are they simply evil?

And I decided that there was no way to assign a top end to the 1 to 10 scale of rudeness. Rudeness, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle on some other scale, a moral scale.

It’s kinda funny like that.

On Friday, I had a stoopid headache that may or may not have been a migraine. It was painful, and I felt like throwing up, and I was light sensitive. Also grumpy; I chose not to inflict my presence on my friends for the normal Friday night Battlestar Galactica showing at the Bagdad.

But some say that since I was still conscious and was able to watch TV (albeit in the dark, curled up on the couch like I was re-inventing the fetal position), that it was not an actual migraine.

So I updated my status on Facebook (and MySpace, too, but as you’ll see, all the fun was over on Facebook) to read:

“Brian is starting his weekend with a migraine.”

This turned out to be the most popular status update I’ve even posted. I got seven responses to it from six different friends. I got expressions of sympathy (“Your pain. I feels it.”), denial (“It’s not a migraine. It’s all in your head!”), enthusiasm (“Fantastic! You know how to par-tay!”)

All of which were more than welcome. Still, I have to give the random award of Best Response to a Complaint of Pain to Nicole’s “Maybe it’s a tumor…”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgAWK06SXvY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

I’m here to tell all y’all… It’s not a tumor!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

My iPhone vibrated and chimed to let me know a text had come in.

I was sitting at my desk at work, so I dug the silver brick out of my pocket and looked to see who had texted me.

The screen just showed a phone number, which meant that the person wasn’t in my address book. The text mentioned a birthday party for the sender, tomorrow night, at a bowling alley. It had the look of something sent to a bunch of people, a blast group text, rounding up a posse.

I had, just a week or two ago, done some cleaning up of my address book. Had I mistakenly deleted someone who still texted me? I couldn’t think of anyone – the list of texts I had received in the last few weeks had names and pictures attached to numbers; it looked complete.

Was this from someone I hadn’t talked to in a long time? A girl I had dated once or twice and then fallen out of contact with? Did I get included by mistake? Was this spam?

So many questions. I tried Googling the number, but nothing turned up.

I walked over to my friend Ken’s cube, sat down across from him. “I just got this text and I don’t know who it’s from.” I showed him my phone.

“It could be spam,” he suggested. “Replying might sign you up for something.” He shifted to his Announcer Voice. “Congratulations, by reying to this text you are now the proud recipient of a lifetime subscription to the ringtone of the month club, billed in one lump sum of $999.99!”

“Who, me?” I smiled.

“Did you try Googling it?”

I nodded. “I should just reply like I know who it is. Maybe mess with ’em a bit.”

Ken gave me a blank stare. “Or you could just tell them that your address book is messed up and you don’t know who it is.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” I was smiling, still. “You and your whole ‘be honest and straight-forward’ kick!”

Ken turned back to the computer he was working on, quickly. A bit too quickly; he betrayed a little frustration. “Whatever. Just reply.”

“This could very likely be a wrong number, or someone I removed from my address book for a good reason,” I continued, only half-serious. “It’s entertaining to play around a little.” Meanwhile, I was already keying in a reply – an honest and straight-forward reply, explaining that I had messed up my address book and did not know who had sent me the text.

Ken said, “You’re going to mess something up and piss someone off, just because they invited you to a birthday party! I just do not get you sometimes!” He was a bit rant-y.

“I like things that are entertaining. And if they’re not already, I like making them that way. What can I say?” I was needling him a little, even as I hit send on essentially the text he suggested I send.

“You’re trying to make it a better story. When it’s already a good story to begin with.”

“May-be,” I conceded.

Soon enough, the reply came back: it was a waitress at the Limelight, a restaurant I eat at frequently. I sent a quick “Oh, hi! Happy almost-birthday!” back to acknowledge I’d gotten the text. Nice!

Good thing I hadn’t carried through with my random anarchy plan…

I haven’t been getting out much. Except for my regular Friday nights out with the guys to see Battlestar Galactica’s final episodes at the Bagdad Theater, and my obsession to become a regular customer at the Delta Cafe, and getting to and from work, I haven’t spent a lot of time outside of my apartment.

I’m not sure why that is: a long, cold winter; most (but not all) of my friends living in other counties and me not having a car; the pressure of financial tightening as the economy worsens; or even grumpy-old-man-ism, a preference for being inside and away from strangers.

Perhaps none of these. Perhaps some of them.

I’ve even had invitations from new friends to hang out, spend some time, be social and have fun. Some, like Neva’s birthday party, I accepted. But several I have not. It’s not them; it’s most definitely me.

I lack the energy to dig into my own motivations. I think I’m afraid to find out what they are. At least, I think that, I don’t know for certain. Because… I’m afraid to examine my own motivations. Duh. QED.

I haven’t run in over a week. Last week, after feeling some pain in my groin for several weeks, I finally got up the courage to visit my doctor to figure out what it might be. My fears ran rampant, as you might imagine, considering the sensitive area the pain was in. But it turned out to be a simple ligament sprain, a “sports hernia”, requiring nothing more than some prescription NSAIDs and rest. My doctor, Dr. Carl, once he’d eliminated all other causes, demonstrated definitively for me that that was all it was – he literally put his finger right on the tendon and the spot where the pain originated from, and further demonstrated that rest would relieve the pain.

Running is my anti-depressant, on top of allowing me to eat donuts for breakfast and not gain weight and giving me an excuse to be outside and active. Take away my running and I fall inward.

Luckily the waiting and resting is over. I’ll be able to run again soon. And hopefully my mood and my energy will return.

And hopefully I can lose the several pounds of… um… fuel… I’ve gained in this short time.

I think the lack of energy is contributing to my blogger’s block lately, too. It’s harder for me to come up with a post a day. So excuse this free rambling. I’ll be back on track soon enough.

Spring can’t get here fast enough, for so many reasons.