blog.mojotooth.com (Supercilious Pap)

The PAX Experience, top to bottom

2008-09-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX for short. Briefly described, PAX is now the most important convention in North America that is dedicated to gaming. This title used to be held by E3, but E3 is no longer really relevant and was always a trade show anyway. PAX is not a trade show, PAX is a gaming convention. This means the primary control of the event is given to the gamers and not the vendors and corporates. And when I say "gamers" I don't just mean electronic gamers, although that was probably the majority portion. I mean board games, card games, tabletop role-playing games, console games, handheld games, and computer games. Alongside this primary focus of gaming, there was a secondary focus on all things geek. So naturally, there were some side references to anime and comics, music, and other stuff like that.

The event was huge. I haven't seen attendance numbers yet, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if there were fifty thousand people there at its peak. PAX consumed most of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle. This massive facility is right in the heart of downtown and was a nice place. PAX has been held there a couple times.

My friend Joe and two of his poker buddies, Matt and Jeff, were a group of four headed up I-5 to the convention. We timed our arrival on Sunday such that we had the option of checking into our hotel (the Sheraton right next door) and then waiting in line to get into the exhibition hall at 2pm, when the convention officially opened.

This was the first PAX for any of us, and we probably made some rookie mistakes. The first and foremost learning we gained over the first couple days is that it is almost never worth waiting in line for anything at PAX. If you have good enough timing, you can negate the need to stand in line completely either by cheating the line (which we didn't do but certainly saw lots of assholes doing) or by just filtering in after the line had already entered the venue. It meant your seat wasn't the best but the events rarely gave a worthy premium to be near the front.

If you wonder about the nature of the lines we were waiting in, feast upon a picture I took shortly after our arrival on Friday. There was a dedicated "Lineup Room" (which we called the Queuing Hall) and it was impressive to behold.

This is the Lineup Hall. The "line" snakes back and forth across the whole vast football-field-sized hall many times. I'm not sure I really have much of a frame of reference to estimate the number of people in the room, but I would take a rough swag at 10,000.

The idea was that you show up and wait in this line and then you get into the exhibition hall as soon as it opens. Or at least, as soon as it opens and you drain all the way through the lineup room, around the whole convention center and into the exhibition hall. This is one facet of the trip we would definitely bypass if we were to go again.

The exhibition hall itself was pretty cool. There were booths from all the major electronic gaming houses, plus some of the non-electronic ones. Intel of course had a major presence. But the coolest part in my opinion was the PAX10 booth. The PAX10 are ten indie games that were selected to be featured at PAX. The idea was to boost the visibility for these ten games. The PAX10 booth was prime real estate, very near the front entrance and with great traffic right by both sides of the area. And it was always packed with people playing cool games like Audiosurf and Strange Attractors 2 (my two favorites).

Major game releases were being teased as well. Fallout 3, Spore, Rock Band 2, and Guitar Hero World Tour were the ones that I noticed the most. For the music games in particular there was a lot of interest. There were several stages set up throughout the venue, not just in the exhibition hall, that allowed you to get your rock on while dozens of people watched and cheered.

On Friday and Saturday night there were concerts. Unfortunately the concert hall was a gigantic rectangular chamber with horrid acoustics that made for a very noisy experience. I'm not sure I've been to very many louder concerts, in fact, than the MC Frontalot concert on Saturday night. But with earplugs and the proper distance from the stacks, a good time could be had. It was quite bizarre to see pockets of people at the concert actually sitting or laying on the floor playing various handheld video games with each other.

Which brings up one startling facet of PAX. A huge percentage of the attendees had Nintendo DS's and some had PSPs. There was always some really bizarre pictochat threads happening, usually with some pictures of wangs involved. And always someone either delivering or consuming the Nintendo Download Play content. So there was literally always someone to play with, and not just in the "Handheld Lounges" that were sprinkled around the convention center. These lounges were places where lounging quite literally happened. Apparently sponsored by Sumo bean bags, there were big bags scattered around and people just laying about playing games and hooting and hollering. And some folks sleeping. Knowing the hygenic habits of the nerd populous, I tried to minimize the amount of time I spent in these communal beanbags, but there are points when your feet and butt are so tired from either waiting in line or sitting in a chair that you have to stretch out a bit. During those times the Sumos were nice to have lying around.

There were also conference rooms dedicated to checked-out console gaming. You could take a number ticket (a strikingly low-tech mechanism considering the clientele), watch any of several video screens to see when your number was coming up, and go to a "check out room" to get assigned any of the current-gen consoles, any controllers needed, and a game. My compadres and I navigated this process to play some rocking Mario Cart Wii in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

I attended several panels and presentations, all worthwhile if not completely exciting. The PA guys, Gabe and Tycho, did a "live" comic creation presentation where they had a rough idea for a comic, presented it to the audience of 10-15k or so, then proceeded to make the whole comic while taking questions from the audience. These guys are so talented that they just worked the room with great wit and aplomb. Unfortunately the main artist's (Gabe, aka Mike Krahulik) computer was physically broken during transit and the comic he made will have to be re-made before it can be published on the Penny Arcade website.

Another presentation I went to was the guys from Telltale Games doing something similar with their new "Strongbad's Awesome Game for Attractive People." This game is downloadable on the Wii and comes in an episodic format, with one episode about every month. They let the audience decide on characters from the Homestar Runner millieu, a rough plot, and even audition to do the voiceovers for the characters. It was fantastic fun.

I also went to the PAX10 panel, wherein the developers of the aforementioned indie games talked about the development process and what it takes to make a successful indie game.

And my group also spent several hours in the gaming annex, where Joe and I learned how to play Munchkin and Settlers of Catan, which I'm told is the current most popular board game on the planet. While we were fighting our way through the first few turns of Munchkin, some executive nerds from Steve Jackson Games actually descended upon our little nook of the gaming annex and started to rain some very cool Munchkin-related swag down upon us, as well as trying to handicap Joe, who was at the time winning the game, by decreeing that he would lose one point. Not sure what led this dude, who claimed he was the COO of SJG, to believe that we would obey his decree, but whatever. The sad thing was that Munchkin didn't really need people walking around pumping it up. It needed people coming around to players and getting some really honest and brutal feedback on the game rules. Munchkin is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. I won the game but I felt like a loser after it was said and done, just because of all the uncertainty and arguing over the rules. Apparently if you don't have online access to their rule FAQs while playing, you are guaranteed to be mired in endless arguments over interpretations of rules. Settlers, of course, was elegant and easy to understand, at least for the basic version. Therein probably lies the difference in popularity, although Munchkin seemed to be unfathomably popular at PAX.

To demonstrate the camaraderie, the zeitgeist of PAX, the whole gaming Woodstock feel, consume the following anecdote. While we were setting up to play Munchkin, a stranger walked up to us and asked us if he could sit down and play with us. He was a nice guy and a sharp thinker named Geoff, and he fell right into our group and meshed. After the game was over, I thanked him for joining us and he wandered off. I'm quite sure I wouldn't normally feel comfortable playing a board or card game with a set of complete strangers, especially a game I was learning for the first time. But that's the nature of PAX. We also had a nerdy gentleman sit at our table and do sort of a running color analysis on our Settlers game. For his own amusement and the benefit of the newbies (Joe and me). He also was nice enough to take a picture of us playing.

But the best part of the whole weekend was getting to catch up with two old friends, Becky and James Hicks. I met them both at the Governor's Scholar Program summer camp in 1989, which was the summer before our senior year in high school. Although we kept in touch for a while, I did lose track of them some time in the last ten years or so, after they got married and headed off to San Diego. I was delighted to get back in touch with them recently via Facebook. It was also through Facebook that they found out I would be at PAX, and they already had plans to attend. So I spent the better part of an afternoon with them. We figured out that we hadn't actually seen each other in about 19 years, which is a longer time period than we had experienced on earth prior to that. In other words, more than half our lives had passed since our last face-to-face meeting. But it didn't really matter much. We picked up where we left off. It was great to see them.

The PAX experience was amazing, perhaps even overwhelming at times. There is so much to do that you can't possibly leave without some regret about not having done some particular thing. For me it was getting up with a group of people that I knew and doing some Rock Band 2 stuff. Although I did get to try out Guitar Hero World Tour and practice my DLR chops singing Hot for Teacher, it would have been much more meaningful to do it with some friends. Perhaps next time. If I go next year. Next year there will be TWO PAXes (paces?) with one occurring in Boston and one in Seattle again. So maybe that will lighten up the crowd a bit, since Wil Wheaton can't possibly be at both. We'll see.

More pictures in my picasaweb gallery here.

The view from PAX

2008-08-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

PAX is awesome. I'm not nearly geeky enough to have the gadgets required to upload pics from the convention floor, but they will be uploaded soon. Stay tuned. It is an awesome experience.

Pics from Haifa

2008-06-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

Pictures from my Haifa trip are available here.

It was a very busy week. 31 hours of meetings in 5 days, plus trying not to fall too far behind with my regular work.

Have you ever been in a foreign country with no form of currency or credit cards? It's a somewhat stressful experience, please take my word for it and don't try it yourself. How did this happen? Easy. I outsmarted myself.

I figured since I was going overseas it would be a useful thing to have scans of the backs of my credit cards, so that if I lost some or had them stolen, it would be very easy for Tracy to call and cancel them before they got run up. So in the waning minutes of preparation, shortly before jumping in the shuttle bus for the airport, I slapped all four cards on my scanner and scanned them. This included my sparkling-new corporate Amex card.

Then I left. And left the cards on the scanner bed. I realized this when we got to the airport and I went into my wallet to get a card to pay the shuttle bus driver. Of course I didn't have adequate time to get back to the house or have Tracy deliver them to the airport. So it was onward ho.

When you realize something like this has happened, it's very much like a physical shock. When I looked in my wallet, I felt like someone had just hit me full on in the face with a heavy pillow.

After some brief discussion with my co-workers who were going to be my companions on the trip, we decided this was not really a showstopper issue. They could spot me some cash if necessary and could definitely cover meals and such, since we were probably going to just rotate taking turns paying for meals anyway. But it meant I had no buying power of my own, and I was in a foreign country.

I attempted to get a replacement Amex card delivered to Israel. Emergency card replacement is supposed to be a perk of corporate credit cards like the one I have. So I called up the card replacement folks during our 3-hour layover in Atlanta. I got hold of a very nice lady who obviously specialized in corporate customer service. She agonized with me that if our flights had been a little earlier that day, I could probably have ventured out from the Atlanta airport and picked up a replacement card right then. But instead our layover was in the evening hours right when their office was closing.

Unfortunately there is no Amex office capable of printing or receiving the card in Haifa, the nearest one is in Tel Aviv, which is a 90-minute drive from Haifa on a good day. This meant that not only would I have no money of my own, I would have to drive at least three hours on foreign freeways by myself in order to pick up a replacement. But it seemed far easier than paying for the expense of having Tracy overnight the card directly to the hotel, especially since there was no guarantee it would really be "overnight" and might take several days. So I agreed to the Tel Aviv plan.

Despite my fears, this probably would have worked out roughly okay except that they then bungled the plan and sent my replacement card to my home address. I didn't realize this until several very confused conversations with the folks in the Tel Aviv office. Believe it or not, their "solution" to this problem they created was to have Tracy receive the card at home and overnight it across the Atlantic. But by this time it was far too late and the card would have arrived after I had checked out of the hotel.

My nickname for the trip was The Vagabond, and my co-workers were my lifeline. The trip went great despite my temporary bankruptcy. In fact if I had known how good it would go, I wouldn't have stressed so much about the credit card. The folks hosting us at the Israel site were great too, offering to spot me cash if necessary and giving me the time off required to make the drive to Tel Aviv in the afternoon. The drive never occurred and fortunately we were able to use that time wisely.

I did conquer my fear of driving in a European country. Fortunately Israel has left-drive cars and right-side roads, so the mechanics of driving were obviously familiar. However the strategy and tactics of driving were quite a shock to behold, even given my expectations. Quick lane-changes, tailgating, and cutting people off by inches were the order of the day. So was laying on the horn for the briefest of hesitations, even when pedestrians or bicycles were involved. Even the public bus drivers were maniacs. But by the time the week was over I could practically have been given an Israeli license.

Arrival in Tel Aviv, now in Haifa

2008-06-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

I'm currently located at the Dan Panorama hotel in Haifa, Israel. Getting ready to head out on a guided tour of the area, during which I will take copious photos and post them. Stay tuned to this space for pics and trip report. I've been in the country 15 hours and it has already been somewhat of an adventure already...

Give it to Sykora!

2008-06-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

Take the Mark Messier award back from Mats Sundin! Give it to Petr Sykora!

I watched Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals tonight. The Pittsburgh Penguins were against the proverbial wall, trying to fend off the Detroit Red Wings and prevent them from clinching the Cup and extend the series to six games.

The Pens, after leading by two goals early, had to rally late in the game with their goalie pulled in order to force overtime. Then, during the first OT, apparently Petr Sykora, who is one of three former Cup winners on the Pens squad, told rinkside reporter Pierre Maguire in no uncertain terms that he was going to score the game-winner.

It looked like a humorous gaffe at first, because Sykora promptly landed in the penalty box for a lazy penalty. If the Wings had scored, Sykora looks like an ass, the Wings lift the hardware, and everybody goes home.

As the game went halfway into the third OT, the Wings creepiest looking player, Jiri Hudler, was imprisoned for a high-sticking double-minor. Although overtime hockey generally bores me, I sat up straight at that point because this was Sykora's chance to make good on his prediction.

Sure enough, he wired a big slapper from the point that was deflected wide to Evgeni Malkin, who dropped the puck right back to Sykora as he crept down from the point. Sykora's wrister was true and he ended the game.

With that particular feat, Sykora joins the likes of the great sport shot-callers of all time. Mark Messier did it in 1994, Babe Ruth famously did it, and Jordan and Byrd were both notorious for telling opponents what they were getting ready to do to them right before embarrassing them.

But seriously, Petr Sykora? If Crosby, Malkin or even Gary Roberts does that, we give them instant cred. But the last time Sykora won a Stanley Cup (2000), he was laying in a hospital bed after being freight-trained by Derian Hatcher. To be fair, he had been a huge force in the playoffs up until that point, on the famed "A" line.

Good job, Sykora. You may make a believer out of the Pens.

Touch

2008-05-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

Along with researching new mp3 players, I was also researching MIDs (mobile internet devices) as well. I believe as Wifi get more ubiquitous, we'll all be headed generally in that direction. I'm probably not as internet-addicted as some, but I love a quick Wikipedia search as much as anybody, so this was something that interested me.

I have tinkered around with the iPhone and had concluded that it was "close but not quite." I certainly wasn't ready to be locked into a phone contract with a huge data plan, and the device was cool but a little hefty. Plus, as I mentioned in the previous post, I don't trust Apple from a software perspective. The emergence of jailbreaking the iPhones was a step in the right direction, much like RockBox on earlier devices but for different reasons, so I started kinda keeping my eye on developments in that area.

When I saw the iPod Touch come out, I decided that if I were to get an iPod, that would definitely be the one I considered. It was mainly the combination of the mp3 player and strong interface with a MID-like set of functionality that enticed me. The price is steep, but I take care of my devices so I'm only mildly paranoid about the dough-ray-mee.

Well, they had the iPod Touch at Costco this weekend. And it was about $20 than any price I could get online for the 16-gig version, so that spurred me into the purchase. I had narrowed my search down to the Samsung YP-P2 and the Touch and one other that escapes me at the moment because I don't have my notes, so there you go.

I am pretty happy with the device. Apple does an interface right, generally speaking, and all the stuff that should be simple with the Touch managed to be pretty simple. Picking out a wireless network, for instance. I had the Touch out of the box and registered for literally less than a minute before I was surfing my wifi network on the Touch. That impressed me, and so did the fact that it could deduce my location on google maps based on what wifi networks were around it.

To repeat myself a bit: I am still extremely unhappy with iTunes. I don't plan on buying any music through it (unless someone gives me a gift card or something) and I certainly don't plan to use it to sync my device. Right now I'm using MediaMonkey, which is a great program that I use to do all things mp3/ogg related right now. It handles iPods fairly well, with the notable exception that it doesn't know how to sync photos, contacts, calendars etc with the Touch. That's not that big a deal to me. I can use iTunes one time to sync photos and contacts, and then Mediamonkey from then on. Not 100% satisfying but better than iTunes.

I still wouldn't call myself an Apple fan yet, but I do appreciate the qualities of the Touch hardware. I'm just looking for a better way to talk to it right now.

A huge step in the right direction: Karma

2008-05-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

In 2004 I got the device that was probably the iPod killer, or at least the earliest serious iPod competitor, if it hadn't been for huge problems in marketing and corporate issues: the Rio Karma. The Karma had a good interface, very good audio hardware, supported formats that iPod did not (FLAC, Ogg) and had very good "smart" playlist functionality (called the Rio DJ).

Rio DJ was an awesome advance. With a few clicks of the click-wheel and click-stick that were part of the Karma, you could select shuffled playlists of varying lengths, or shuffle the entire contents of the player. You could also have it create a varying-length playlist of your "most played" songs, which was kinda-sorta nice but had some issues. My main issue with the most played mechanism is that I almost constantly ran the Rio DJ in "shuffle all songs" mode. In that mode, in theory you play every song on the device once before you play any twice. Well, in reality I do skip tunes (based on mood) and I do eventually turn off the player before the playlist completes (20 gigs of music is a long time).

Why didn't I go iPod? Well, the main issue was iTunes. First of all, during this time iTunes was big on DRM. I was also hearing about lots of problems moving iTunes-purchased tunes around and other nightmares. Plus iTunes did pretty horribly with a network-available SMB share as its library. The final strike against it was that I just didn't trust Apple with application software in the media domain. I knew that they were trying to build their little empire and they were going to kowtow to the RIAA whenever they had to in order to build. I'm glad I held to those guns at that time.

I loved the Karma, and it lasted wonderfully. It was a nice shape, fit in a pocket well, was solid but not heavy. It had a nifty little dock with some cool features like ethernet connectivity as well as USB 2. The software that came with it wasn't fantastic but it did the job okay. It had some crash issues, especially when using the ethernet port. But it had RCA outputs which was handy for connecting to stereo systems and stuff.

One problem with the Karma was not one of its own making: there were almost no accessories for it. Despite the fact that the Karma had a port on the bottom of it which was similar to iPod's in functionality, no "dock" accessories ever appeared on the scene for the Karma. I think we can firmly place the blame for this in the marketing and licensing departments of Rio. I realize that iPod had already had a head start, but the Karma was a superior product to what Apple had to offer at that time, so going cheap to get vendors to make accessories would have been huge. It's also possible that Rio was in its death throes at that time, which renders any particular hindsight moot.

There was also some limited third-party software available for the Karma, but even after purchasing some of it I never really used it. It was no less buggy than the Rio's own.

I have two buddies who also had Rio Karmas and theirs died within the last couple years. One of them went on to the Karma's spiritual descendent, the Trekstor Vibez, but the other switched over to iPod. My Karma was still kicking it so I was watching from a distance and enjoying the heck out of it while I still could. I knew eventually it would die off, being based on a hard drive.

I did purchase a Samsung flash-based mp3 player for my wife, and an additional Cowon 1-gig flash-based player for myself. The idea was to be able to leave the Karma in its dock or in the car or wherever and still have a player to use while walking to/from work. The Cowon is very battery-efficient but its playlisting functionality is non-existent. It has a shuffle-play mode but the shuffle is very stupid.

Unfortunately the end finally came last week, when I apparently misplaced it. It's possible that it might resurface, but I don't know where it is and I can't wait around for it to pop up. This triggered the hunt for a new player. I did plenty of research on the matter, like I did before buying the Karma. My next post will address why I went over to the evil side...

Prelude to Touch

2008-05-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

I'm going to briefly summarize my experience with mp3 players.

I remember vividly when mp3 players first emerged to market. At that time I was just starting to appreciate the format and what it could bring to the table in terms of "portable awesomeness."

The first player I saw was the Rio PMP300. Apparently this Rio was actually the second portable mp3 player ever, which surprises me a bit because I thought at the time that I was late to the scene. The RIAA lawsuit against Diamond was also when I first started to hate the RIAA for the scumsucking thugs that they are, and I was altogether pleased that Diamond prevailed. However I did wait a while to see how things shook out a bit before getting my first mp3 player of my own.

The first one I bought was the Archos Jukebox 20. This would have been early 2002. It was basically a very rudimentary audio interface wrapped around a 20-gig laptop hard drive. It was the first device I had that was a USB "mass storage device" as well, which I thought was cool. The audio hardware was pretty crappy and the interface was rudimentary at best. The device was, however, supported by RockBox which is an open-source alternative firmware for lots of different devices. It also sucked down batteries at a high rate, and you had to provide your own AAs. Even though I had rechargables, it was pretty aggravating at times. Plus, at that time I had trouble filling the device because I had not yet ripped my entire CD collection.

So my first experience with mp3-related hardware was mediocre at best. I still have the Archos, and I assume if I plopped four more AAs in there it would boot up and do its... thing.

Cricket in the US?

2008-05-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

I've been to two different countries (the UK and the Bahamas) where cricket is a major sport. I also work with a fair number of Indian and Pakistani ex-pats, who are also fans of cricket to varying degrees. I have also played the sport, or at least a "yankified" version of the sport played with a tennis ball and no pads. I can tell you I vastly enjoyed the game. There are few things I have experienced in sports that are as satisfying as wailing on a ball with that big hefty cricket bat. Behold!

A picture of me, having just wailed on said ball with said bat. In American terms I have just "gone yard."

Cricket and baseball are basically analogous sports. For most of the features in one, you can find a corresponding feature in the other. Consider:

pitcher = bowler
catcher = wicketkeeper
batsman = batter
homerun = six
ground rule double = four
caught out = fly out
run out = tag/force out
inning (in baseball) = two innings (in cricket)
Batsman being bowled = batter being struck out
Cricket has no "foul" balls per se, but you can strike the ball legally in such a way that nothing really happens, so that's much like a foul.

So why haven't we Americans caught on to the sport? There's some indication that we might actually be starting to. Here is an NPR article talking about how New York City has sanctioned a high-school varsity program in cricket. Also, I have watched ESPN's Sportscenter twice in the last week and on both occasions, the "Top Ten Plays" featured one cricket play each. Absolutely unheard of. I can hear NASCAR fans in the Bible Belt screaming from here.

So then, why haven't Americans caught on to the sport sooner? Well, in my estimation it's not a matter of how the mechanics of the game work. The basic game is simple to understand even without a baseball background. It's more a matter of the logistics surrounding the game. In other words, the match structure. This has worked to keep cricket out of the limelight of the American consciousness.

International cricket "tests," which you might further compare with a "series" in baseball, last five days and the game is played for up to 8 hours each day. I'm sorry but I don't think it's a biased opinion to say that most people who aren't brought up indoctrinated in the ways of cricket will find this to be ridiculous.

The cricket world is finding ways to change this. The Twenty20 match format, for instance, is designed to last roughly as long as a baseball or American football game at around three hours. While I was in the UK last fall I got to watch (on TV) the "World Twenty20s" final match between India and Pakistan. You don't have to be from Europe or Asia to understand the national pride that would be riding on this match. The match was extremely compelling even aside from the tension in the game. I enjoyed watching it.

In summary, considering that cricket is an enjoyable game mechanically speaking (as long as you don't have to wear all white) and can be played in enjoyable formats, I think it will become a fast-growing sport in the US. Particularly in those areas of the country with high European and Asian immigrant populations.

I love it: data that proves that music DOES suck more now than it used to when we were young

2008-05-21T22:47:00.001-07:00

It sounds so cliché, but you know you've heard it. Someone says "Man, music nowadays sucks. Back when I was younger, we had so much more talented/varied/intelligent/whatever music than you guys hear nowadays. I feel sorry for you." I'm sure I heard this a million times when I was a teenager, and I'm pretty sure I've said it to teenagers in the last few years.

Well, although this article isn't making this exact point, it is good that people are taking some time to actually analyze music industry data in ways that could potentially support the above statement. The author does use statistical analysis to make claims similar to the following:

Songs that make the Billboard Top 50 tend to stay there much longer now than they did in decades past. (My take on this is that the industry is coming up with fewer "hits" than before and the "long tail" is taking over.)
Related to 1. above, there are far fewer total songs that chart in a given year nowadays than there were in decades past.
Although we tend to associate earlier decades, particularly the 60s, 70s and 80s, with one-hit wonders, in fact the opposite is true and the charts are more dominated now by one-hit wonders.
The music you like sucks.

That last one didn't actually appear in the article. I only added it for effect.

Also: linked within that article is another very cool blog post where someone generated a tag cloud of pop music song title vocabulary. Turns out that in 37,000 documented song titles, less than 9,000 different words appear. As you would imagine, "love" is the dominant force. Followed by "baby," "heart" and the multi-talented "blue." My new project is to write a song called "Baby Blue Heart Love" or something similar.

Brighton's Beach Memories

2008-05-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

(this post refers to Sept 23-25, 2007)

The least favorite part of our trip, quite frankly, was our trip to Brighton. Most of this stemmed from poor timing. We were nearing the end of our trip, the weather was finally starting to get rotten, we were tired. But there were plenty of nice surprises as well, and I certainly wouldn't say we had a bad time, just that it was the part we were least ecstatic about. And probably the part we're least likely to repeat.

Our last two nights in England were spent on the coast in Brighton. We stayed at the Hotel Seattle which is in the Marina district. In fact the hotel itself is nestled between two huge breakwaters that protect the marina and all it's multi-million dollar yachts from unfortunate surf. The picture album for this portion of the trip is here. The first several pictures are all taken from the porch of our hotel room. Our room was located in a fantastic spot, one floor up from ground level and looking out over the marina and the shopping district.

There were several good (and very expensive) restaurants attached to the hotel. There was an upscale pizza place, a chinese place, and a couple miscellaneous others. Across the street there was another shopping area with some more restaurants, including what could best be described as an English version of Applebees.

The whole district, known as The Strand, was only about 1.5 miles down the beach from Brighton Pier. Although we did a fair amount of walking on the beach, the Pier was still far enough away to warrant a short cab ride. There is apparently some sort of a "light rail," and I use that term facetiously, that runs from the beach near the Marina on down to the Pier. It's really more of a little kid's train, the kind you would find at an amusment park or some such. We would have ridden that, except that it had already shut down for the season.

"Shut down for the season" was actually sort of a theme for our visit to Brighton, and one of the reasons we didn't enjoy it as much as we could have. A lot of the Pier, including most of the rides, were shut down or running at a reduced capacity because of the season. This was despite the fact that the weather on the day we arrived was spectacular, if a bit windy. We knew bad weather was on the way so we wanted to get the "must see" activities out of the way early. The Pier and a good walk down around St. James's street were those activities.

The St. James's Street area seemed like an English version of San Francisco's more hippy areas. We wandered into some card shops that had some very "alternative" media, there were lots of multi-pierced teens running around, that kind of thing. It was fun for people watching, but again lots of the more touristy stuff was closed down for the winter.

That evening we tried the pizza shop and other than having to wait entirely too long to wrap up the check and get out of there, we enjoyed it. This was also disregarding the huge price, but we had come to expect this, not only because of the weak dollar but because this was a very schmancy area.

At night the storms set in, and although they were impressive to behold, they did put somewhat of a damper on our activities.

One thing we did thoroughly enjoy, despite the weather, was the Brighton Sea Life Center. When we went in we were expecting a kind of run-down aquarium, and in fact some plaques in and around the place indicated it was the oldest continuously functional aquarium in the world, or something like that. But the place, despite being old, was fun and we both had fun there.

The hotel was very nice. It had a very modern feel but was comfortable and our views were great. We got a very good deal on it through lastminute.com as well, although it was one of those deals where they wouldn't actually tell me the name of the hotel we had booked with until after I had paid for it. I did manage to sleuth out what hotel it was before actually paying for it, but they didn't make it easy for me. But it was nice to be able to read some reviews of the place before booking. The reviews were positive, and our experience was also.

Our last night in the UK before we left, Tracy and I at at the Applebees-ish place across the street from the hotel. It was somewhere between a pub and a proper restaurant, and there was a salad bar (the only one we saw on our trip). I had a decent steak and Tracy had good fish and chips. But best of all, we finally got to have a "real" English treacle sponge pudding thing. It was excellent, and even the waiter commented on what an authentic "honest English pud" it was.

In retrospect, I know that I made a mistake with the timing of the Brighton leg of our trip. I probably should have just avoided it and spent the time in London instead, or perhaps a shorter day trip around London. The main issue was that we were going from Brighton directly to Heathrow to head back for home. This meant we had to get up at the ass-crack of dawn on Tuesday in Brighton in order to catch a 2:30pm flight at Heathrow. The train back to London was packed, the tube from Victoria to Heathrow was packed, and of course Heathrow itself was a complete zoo. This was entirely too stressful a way to handle the end of our trip. But despite the stress, things went very smoothly and we got to the airport with some time to spare in the duty-free shopping area. I am proud to say I resisted the temptation to buy any Scotch, although I did peek to see if they had my new favorite, the Arran malt.

All in all, our trip to the UK was fantastic. I would love to go some other time during a bit more reliable weather, although the weather was really only an issue for one day when we were in Glasgow and for most of the couple days in Brighton.

Big thanks to Ian and Caroline, without whose hospitality we definitely would have had a more "typical" (meaning boring) experience in London. We really enjoyed having a real home base instead of a London hotel, and not just because of the cost savings.

So now I'm done retro-blogging our trip to the UK. Hopefully now more current issues will be the norm.

Saturday in London and a bit of footy

2008-05-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

(this blog post actually refers to Sept 22, 2007)

We realized on Saturday morning as we were cleaning up that we were really low on clean clothing. Although Ian and Caro had a washing machine (cutely tucked under the counter right next to the dishwasher in the kitchen, something that would be very odd in the States but apparently is very common in England), they didn't have a dryer and that meant a lot of waiting and probably mildly damp clothing in Brighton. That didn't sound like a great idea, so I got the brilliant idea of hitting up google maps to look for laundromats. This idea excited me because it was going to be the very first "real" thing we were doing in the UK in the sense that it's something that someone who was a native might do. The day was beautiful, sunny and in the 70s, so walking to wherever the nearest laundromat was would hopefully pose no challenge, especially since I had thoroughly covered my Glaswegian blisters with "blister plasters."

There was a challenge finding an appropriate place, however. When I googled up "laundry" or "laundromat" near South Woodford, I was getting professional ironing services, which I assumed was like a dry cleaners. I couldn't find a genuine coin-op laundromat. I thrashed around on the Internet and fretted until I finally discovered that the vernacular term for these places was "laundrette" and searching on this immediately returned an excellent candidate, called Martyn's on High Street. High Street in South-Woody was sort of on the back side of George Lane, so in other words it was in the area that we had already explored quite well. So we packed up our clothing into bags, some of it we had already washed and just needed drying, and some of it needed the whole treatment, and trundled along the same mile-long hike that we had already made several times over the Viaduct to George Lane.

Martyn was apparently the owner of the establishment, which was basically a room that had about five washers and four dryers in it. It was cramped and dingy and hot. Martyn himself was a very funny guy whose accent was the thickest we had encountered in England. I'm not sure if the accent could be described as "cockney" but it was the first thing that came to mind.

Martyn caught on very quickly to the fact that we were obviously very uncomfortable foreigners who lacked even the proper coinage to use the laundrette, and he went out of his way to try to make us smile. Tracy didn't really understand anything he said but I traded some friendly one-liners with him, some of them at the expense of other (all grumpy) patrons, which I thought was hysterical. The experience as a whole was very fulfilling.

While the laundry was going we nabbed a quick bite at a Gregg's, which I could best describe to an American as a "fast food bakery." You could get lots of different pastries and donuts, as well as sandwiches and meat-stuffed pies. On this particular day, however, the big payoff at Gregg's was drinks. It was hot in the laundrette and we had been walking a fair amount, so we downed several bottles of water and other beverages to keep hydrated.

We got all of our laundry done with fairly little time to spare before we had to walk right back out the door and head for Charlton.

Before we went to England I had been doing furious planning as to what soccer (hereafter referred to as "football") match we were going to attend while there. I had become somewhat of a closet English Premier League fan over the past few years, but unfortunately the team that I had followed was mainly Everton, which was located in Liverpool. The timing of the trip didn't allow us to go anywhere near Liverpool, so that was out, even considering away matches. Getting tickets to Arsenal or Chelsea would of course be very difficult seeing as their popularity could be roughly compared to that of the Yankees and Red Sox. West Ham and Spurs were not playing home matches on the particular weekend, so that left one main choice as far as the top-level EPL teams were concerned, and that was Fulham. Fulham had the main disadvantage of being very far into Western London, and I knew we would be located in Northeastern London. It would have been a very long travelling day.

Second league (called Championship) teams included Crystal Palace, Charlton Athletic and Queen's Park Rangers. I also looked at third-league teams like Dagenham and Redbrige ("Daggers"), which would have been very close indeed.

In the end I settled on Charlton Athletic, which is a team that hasn't made an appearance in the EPL for a few years, but whose club I had watched from time to time and I knew that they had a very nice grounds in Eastern London a short trip from where we were. I also thought they had the coolest home uniforms ("kit") of the various teams I was considering.

So now we were slightly late for the kickoff of the Charlton game, having arrived about ten minutes past the start of the game. I did at least know that the home crowd would be decked out in red, so Tracy and I both were appropriately swathed. We crouched in the stair aisle next to our row until a stoppage and then apologized our way across the row and kicked some locals out of our seats, much to their confusion. It worked out to their benefit anyways, because they kicked some other people out of some seats and sat next to some people that they knew.

The Valley, which is the stadium where Charlton plays, is a nice facility. It really is tucked into a nice valley, with lots of trees and suburban sorts of houses peeking around the corners of the buildings into the grounds. The weather was stunningly beautiful and Charlton was in good form against Leicester City. I was fully swept up in the game, trying to decipher team songs by watching people around me, listening to the various heckling and cheering, and watching some solid football. We had pretty good seats, which if they were hockey seats I would describe as "blue line seats" about midway between the center line and the top of the penalty area.

Charlton sprinted to a 2-0 halftime lead. During halftime I came to realize we had displaced the wrong people as I had misunderstood the numbering of the seats. Nobody seemed pissed about it though, so we just decided to leave well enough alone instead of making further asses of ourselves. Although nobody really talked to us while we were there, we were pretty content to just be part of the background for this particular outing.

After the match, which Charlton won, we spent some time elbow-to-elbow with people in the Charlton Athletic store. I ended up getting a very cool hat, and Tracy got a button or something. The busses were delayed going back to the tube stations, so it was a long trip back and we did a fair amount of walking to try to outsmart the public transportation system. I don't think we were successful but we did do some exploring of Charlton. When we got back, we grabbed some grub at Sainsbury's on George Lane and prepared for our upcoming departure for Brighton.

Last day in Glasgow, then a Return to London

2008-05-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

(this blog post actually refers to September 21st, 2007)

A bit more that I have remembered about that Thursday night in Glasgow. After our walking tour for the day, which ended with the failed geocache hunt, we sat in the hotel room and let our heels cool down a bit. Tracy napped while I hunted on google maps to find our dinner destination for the evening. In the end we went Italian, since the Glaswegians apparently knew their Italian cuisine so well. We went to La Fiorentina which was just south of the Clyde on Paisley Road West. The restaurant seemed to be very well-regarded, and indeed we had an excellent Italian meal there.

After the feast we went back to the hotel and Tracy was jonesing for dessert. We had been trying to find an honest treacle sponge cake and had been unsuccessful in the restaurants we had visited to that point. So, Tracy and I decided for some bizarre reason we were going to make our own. We went back to Hillhead because we knew there was a Sainsbury's there right by the train station and our all-day pass was still good. We couldn't find "golden" treacle but we found "black" treacle and some sponge cake, and we skeezed a couple of forks and spoons from the closed deli counter. Little did we know exactly how different black and golden treacle are, in fact. Black treacle could be described as very similar to sorghum molasses, which I love but Tracy despises. So, I ate all the hotel treacle sponge cake that we constructed in the glasses we found in the bathroom of our hotel room. Hey, at least one of us got to have dessert...

On Friday, we had until 4:30pm to be at Glasgow airport, so we actually had a fairly full third day in Glasgow. We mulled over the option of returning to the geocache that I had DNF'd the previous day, especially since I had managed to get email confirmation from the cache owner that we were in the right spot. But in the end, it seemed like a better use of our time not to go over the same ground again. So ironically we went right back to Hillhead and wandered around the University grounds again. This time it was light out, and a beautiful day for pictures so I took a bunch. You can see most of them here. The pics are "geotagged" so you can get a good idea of where we were in Glasgow when the shot was taken. There's no real great purpose for this, other than I'm kind of a map geek.

The main administrative building of the University had a very Hogwarts feel to it. Standing on the SE side of the building there were some fabulous Glaswegian vistas. Classes were just getting ready to start up so there wasn't a whole lot of activity on that Friday. We rummaged around in the student bookstores and pined for college, even though the university experience in Glasgow would have surely been markedly different from that of Louisville.

Our last real touring stop before we headed for the airport was the Glasgow Science Center. This bizarre looking building was located on the banks of the Clyde, right next to the brand new BBC Scotland building. They had a space-needle sort of thing which I was really amped about because of how much fun I was having taking pictures. I imagined the views would be fantastic from the top of that tower, called Glasgow Tower. So we wandered in.

The admission fee seemed steep, especially since as we arrived at the ticket counter we found that "inclement weather" had forced the sky tower thing to close down. Inclement weather turned out to be some mild wind. It didn't seem like the kind of wind that should shut down anything, but we obviously weren't going to convince them of this. We almost left but we had already planned our day around this excursion and really didn't have a suitable backup plan. So, we forked the dough-re-mi and went inside.

I love science museums, even the ones that are geared towards little kids, because I like the hands-on stuff. I like to dissect the exhibits and explain to anybody who will listen (in this case Tracy) about how I think they constructed the experiment and how I would improve on it. I also had a good time thinking and talking about what I would teach Liam about these things if and when I ever managed to drag him into a science museum in the first place. Since I get pretty worked up about science, I'm kinda hoping the wee lad will too, but of course it remains to be seen.

The museum wasn't particularly high-tech, but it was pretty fun and we spent some good hours in there. The shop there was particularly fun as well. I had to almost forcibly restrain Tracy from buying Liam a bunch of sciency stuff, which of course we would have had to pack in our limited suitcase space for our transatlantic return flight in a few days. So instead I think we bought a fridge magnet or some such.

Because we had planned the day so well, there was no stress getting to the airport on time for our flight to London. We arrived at the house just in time for Caro to be leaving for a weekend trip, and with Ian having already left for a separate weekend trip, we were on our own for the weekend. We had a late Indian dinner at Ajanta, which was on George Lane pretty close to the South Woodford tube station. It was pretty good, although not as good as Gaylord on Isle of Dogs. We finished the evening watching some telly.

Along the way, things got lost: Brighton and back home.

2008-05-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

I hadn't thought about my blog for some time. When I decided this week to import my blog posts into my Facebook account, I noticed that my blogging of my last UK trip ended after Day 2 in Glasgow. Well, I had written more than that, and as tempting as it is to blame Blogger over this, the simple fact is that I probably screwed up and either didn't publish it or just plain forgot about it. So that's a bummer, but if I had been blogging since then I would have noticed it long before now.

So my intention is to finish the blog, ex post facto as best as I can. One of the whole points to doing the blogging of the trip was so that I could preserve the memory of the trip better, and now it's been something like 8 months since we returned. So that will make it more difficult. But I'm likely to remember even less the longer I wait.

We leave for Kentucky tomorrow, with Liam in tow. Liam is 17 months old now. I can't say I'm looking forward to travelling with the little booger. His last trip with his mom down to Austin... let's just say it didn't go so hot. He sicked up during the landing in Austin and this trip is longer by a fair amount.

I hope to make two more blog entries about the trip to the UK. The first was the next couple days we spent in London after returning from Glasgow. The last one will be the two nights in Brighton.

Day 2 in Glasgow

2007-10-01T21:58:00.001-07:00

For Day 2 in Glasgow, we decided we would definitely have to do some geocaching. There were several interesting multi-caches in Glasgow, and we narrowed it down to three. Two of them hadn't been successfully found in some time, so we went with one called "Merchant City." Merchant City is an area of Glasgow around George Square, and they happened to be having the Merchant City Festival during the time that we were there. We anticipated taking advantage of the Festival, but we also wanted to explore other areas of the city.

The cache called for visiting several different interesting buildings throughout that area of the city and assembling clues, which would lead to coordinates for another building, etc. The first three or four were fairly straightforward but an error in interpretation led us to wander pretty far off the beaten path. We found ourselves walking well east of Merchant City into a pretty gritty area of Glasgow south of the University of Strathclyde. Of course to compound the problem it starting dumping rain on us. We were prepared in the sense that we had good stout Portland rain jackets on, but we still weren't thrilled to be out in the worst of it. So we ducked into a little nondescript jewelry shop.

Tracy likes to get a single silver charm from each interesting place we visit. Usually the charm's form has some cultural significance. In this case she ended up getting a silver Scottish thistle charm. Scottish thistle being an emblem of Scotland.

While choosing her charm at the store, she struck up a conversation with a youngish lad working behind the counter. He was excited to talk to Americans, and a lady who appeared to probably be his mother popped out from a back room and started piping in her thick Scottish brogue how much she loved to hear Americans talk. We said we had similar thoughts about Scottish people and everybody got a good laugh. The lad wanted to talk about American sports, and in an unlikely coincidence mentioned that his favorite sports were ice and roller hockey. We chatted about the Trailblazers, the Mariners and the Raiders, and I had to adjust a misapprehension on his part that the Raiders were in Portland and not Oakland. And easy mistake to make for someone who hadn't actually set foot in the States. He said he had been as far as Calgary but had never been into the US.

It was a nice way to wait out the worst of the rain.

When we emerged from the shop, we had a new course set in the GPS and headed for it. It was encouraging because we were headed for what was obviously a park, according to my GPS. The rain started getting worse again as we approached Glasgow Green, so although we were anxious to find the next landmark we were also keen to get indoors. We found ourselves standing at the front door to the People's Palace with about ten other soaked tourists. As it was dawning on us that we were again in the wrong place for the cache, we realized that we had stumbled on to quite a nice find regardless. The Palace was very nice inside and had a cafe where we grabbed some hot cocoa and had a snack.

The rain was definitely on the wane when we left the Palace and headed for our again readjusted coordinates. The final stage to the cache took us to a cemetary in Merchant City, where although we were sure of our coordinates and our surroundings, we were unable to find the final cache. The final cache was supposed to be a small container magnetically attached to a gate in the cemetary. But we didn't mind the failed caching attempt because we had seen so much new and interesting stuff. And although my blisters had set in pretty good by then, it still felt good to be out and about in Glasgow.

More from Glasgow

2007-10-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention a couple things about our first day in Glasgow. First, we were there on the night of the first leg of Glasgow Rangers' first Champions League match against Lyon. Obviously it was the talk of the town, and as we walked around the Hillhead region after dinner it was apparent that just about everybody was crammed into a pub of some kind watching the game.

Everybody except for Univ of Glasgow students. They were just starting their fall semester and apparently there was a pirate-themed party going on in one of the nearby dorms. We ran
into quite a number of would-be buccaneers all yelling "Arr" or something equivalently silly as they trooped to or from the party in various states of inebriation.

Glaswegian (that's the descriptive adjective for someone from Glasgow) cabbies are a trip. Our first day in Glasgow we were still unsure about the various public transportation modes so we took a cab back to the hotel. As we got into the cab I asked to be taken to the downtown Hilton. The cabbie grunted and off we went. A couple minutes later he asked us in his thick Scottish brogue, "so you're from the States yes?"

I said that we were and he winked at us in the mirror and said "Ah could tell the moment you got in and said 'doontoon hiltoon.'" His intentionally pronounced vowels in "downtown hilton" were hilarious, and I think he got a kick out of us laughing. We chatted a bit, which is tough to do because Scottish taxis all have this presumably bulletproof glass separating the passengers from the driver. To compensate for the inability to talk directly with the driver, there is an intercom system that at best muffles things considerably, and at worst completely obscures all speech, not like a conversation with a Glaswegian cabbie has much room for obscuring. Anyways, he told us the score of the Rangers game, which I had a passing interest in because DaMarcus Beasley plays for Rangers and he's an American international. Rangers had won 2-nil. Beasley, unfortunately, scored neither goal for Rangers.

A little video I found showing just how difficult it can be to understand a Scottish public transport driver.

Glasgow

2007-09-23T14:08:00.001-07:00

We took off for Glasgow at 8am, which meant we left Caro and Ian's much earlier than that. London Stansted airport, while being much smaller than Heathrow, still manages to be pretty confusing.

We arrived in Glasgow a little after 9am and caught a bus into the city centre, since there were no shuttles or the like operating. Doesn't it seem like most hotels on the same order of renown as the Hilton all have airport shuttles, at least in the States? Anyway.

We checked in early at the Hilton and when we got off the elevators on our 10th floor the first thing we noticed was the smell. The whole hall smelled vaguely of body odor. Of course our room was the same. It wasn't completely repellent, so after a while you get used to that kind of thing. But we were in and out of the hotel a lot and each venture off the elevator was unpleasant because of it.

We did more walking in Glasgow than anyplace else. However I had left my old comfy (and stinky) Salomon hikers in London at Caro's place in our effort to pack ultra-light for the jump to Glasgow and back. In fact Aer Berlin, the budget airline that we used, only allows a total of 20kg in one piece of luggage and 6kg in a single carryon. Given those strict budgets we had to leave some things in London. For most of our walking in Glasgow I was wearing some fairly new and apparently not yet broken-in Keens, and right now I'm paying for it because I have blisters on the back of both heels. So although our first foray into Glasgow was a walking one, it was our last one where we walked directly away from the hotel. For each of the subsequent trips out of the hotel, we utilized either a cab or the train system to get away from the hotel and saved our walking for the meat of the trip.

Once we got over into the more shopping-friendly parts of downtown Glasgow, we noticed one thing first and foremost. For some weird reason, 90% of the restaurants in Glasgow are either proper Scottish pubs, or Italian restaurants. There is an unexplained and very eerie proportion of Italian eateries in Glasgow. Tracy and I chose one close to Glasgow Central Station (after we figured out that we could have taken the train from very near the hotel to Central) and enjoyed some pizza and panini for lunch.

Then we wandered up Buchanan Street, which is sort of like the Glasgow equivalent of Rockefeller Plaza I suppose. Lots of high-end shopping and people everywhere. Buchanan St goes up a slow hill and at the top there is an Opera House or performance hall of some kind.

Along the way we stumbled into a Scottish store that specialized in tartans. I think it was called Tartans and More or something unclever like that. I bought a Clan Ross tartan scarf and a nice navy sweater there. The sweater was because it was rapidly getting cooler in the northerly climes of Scotland and I figured I might need it. Plus it was only nine pounds, which was one of the few good deals we had gotten on the trip thus far.

We considered doing a geocache, but I only had the GPS with me and not the zire, which meant that any information I had about the geocaches nearby were very incomplete. I might not, for instance, know that the cache in question had been deactivated because it had been devoured by a grizzly bear that was still on the loose. So we decided to wait. All the better because we walked an awful lot that day anyway.

After a trip back to the hotel for a nap, we went out in the evening towards Hillhead and the University of Glasgow. Caroline had recommended a restaurant and pub called, respectively, the Ubiquitous Chip and the Wee Pub. The Wee Pub was aptly named, and the website claims it has a capacity of 28. I would have felt very crowded indeed had they reached that lofty height of inhabitance. Tracy had some hard cider and I had a Guiness, and we downed an appetizer of yummy soup and bread before heading into the restaurant proper for dinner.

In the 'Chip we observed something that was a continual problem for our trip to the UK. That is the strange items you'll see on menus there and have no idea what they are talking about. For instance. Tracy fortunately knew what aubergine is (it's eggplant), because if she hadn't and I had ordered something with aubergine in it I would have been rightly incensed. There's also the matter of "neeps and tatties," which as it turns out are turnips and potatoes, blended or pureed and mixed. Unlike aubergine, when I found out what it was I actually became more interested in it, and it was used almost like a gravy on the meal I had.

Other strange little items included "stovies," (stew or hash made from leftovers), "clapshot" (similar to neeps and tatties), "bridie" (like pasties) and of course the infamous haggis. Luckily we didn't actualy come face-to-face with any haggis.

Our meal was exquisite, although we had a hard time getting the check. Obtaining the check at the end of the meal was like a minor dental surgery. This became a theme for eating out in the UK.

London Day 2 postscript

2007-09-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

Oh oh one thing I forgot. (This is the main problem with blogging after the fact; it's hard to remember everything significant.)

We decided the most expedient and fun way to get from Greenwich Park to the London Eye was to take one of the several ferries that shuttle up and down the Thames with regularity. The main disadvantage was that we were heading west down the Thames in the late autumn afternoon in a glass boat, which meant we got a little sunburned, but I got some cool snaps.

Something interesting happened though. Right as we were getting down around the Queen's Walk area, several police boats came rocketing from multiple directions and kinda skidded to a halt (I didn't think you could do that in a boat but I witnessed it so I know you can. It looks like a hockey stop, kinda) right by us. A minute or so later a big fire+rescue barge came rolling in. There were scores of people lined up along the waterfront on the southern side of the Thames, right in front of Tate Modern. After an initial deceleration, our boat skipper eventually tentatively took our boat out of the area and we got no further information about the incident.

UNTIL we ran into the fine Oregon geocachers at the London Eye. They happened to have been trying to cross the Millenium Bridge at roughly the same time as we were coming on the ferry, and they said the bridge had been closed because of a "jumper." Apparently someone was going to commit suicide by jumping off the Millenium Bridge in broad daylight on a Tuesday. Whatever. I can't find any references to that sort of thing on news.google.com, and the Oregonians weren't around long enough to see the resolution, so I only have that second-hand account of the events.

Second Day in London

2007-09-22T02:39:00.000-07:00

Our second day in London got off to a much slower start. This was because we knew we would be in the center of London until late that night. We were going to be meeting Ian and Caroline for dinner at a specified tube stop at 7pm, they were going to take us to a pub for drinks, and then we were going to a different pub (a "gastropub" they called it) for food.

Anyways, we rolled out to the Soul Cafe at about 10am for latte and donuts, and then hit the tube for Stratford station. There we changed over to the Docklands Light Rail, or DLR as it's called locally. We were headed for Greenwich Park. Ian's suggestion was that, instead of alighting (that's what they call getting off the train) in Greenwich Station, we take the Island Gardens station which is across the Thames from Greenwich, and walk a pedestrian tunnel under the Thames. The idea is that, in addition to the tunnel being an interesting experience, we could see Greenwich Park unfolding before us instead of just popping up in the middle. It seemed a solid idea.

We arrived at the Island Gardens and took in that side of the Thames a bit. The area to the east of the station is called Isle of Dogs, and other than a school it was basically block after block of what you might call tenements. We were hungry for an early lunch, and we spotted a nice looking Indian restaurant called Gaylord. It was nice inside as well, and the menu looked excellent. The proprietor paid us lots of attention since we were basically the only people in there that early for lunch. The food was excellent. The WC was as close to a proverbial "closet" as we had experienced thus far, but that was okay.

After lunch we started the trek across the pedestrian tunnel. Fairly surreal experience. At the far end was a very old-fashioned lift that took the few pedestrians and cyclists up to ground level.

When we emerged from the tunnel endcap, we would have been standing right in front of the Cutty Sark, which is one of the most famous boats in the world. Unfortunately it was burned down, most probably a result of arson, so it was completely covered up for repairs.

We started walking east along the waterfront towards the Royal Naval College. Along the way we did a small geocache.

The RNC was a fabulous building right at the foot of the hill on which sits the Royal Observatory. The most famous thing about the Observatory is that the Prime Meridian runs through it. Or sort of. Actually my GPS read 0 degrees, 0.89 minutes West. I have been given a puzzle to solve. One of the geocaches in that location requires me to figure out why the prime meridian appears to not be at precisely 0 degrees longitude. Well, actually the wikipedia article I linked has the answer to that. Neato.

After Greenwich, it was time to hit the London Eye. In our capsule on the ride, we actually ran into a family of three from Salem. Coincidentally, they were also geocachers, and told me about a very neat cache in Bath. Too bad we weren't heading there.

From the Eye we took the Tube to Islington to meet up with Caroline and Ian. We had dinner at the Duke of Cambridge gastropub. Their big claim to fame was that all their food (and much of their booze) is organic. They even had organic scotch. Not sure how meaningful that really is, but there you go. The dinner was spendy but wonderful. And because it was a pub, people even had their dogs inside. Try pulling that one off in the States.

In the Duke of Cambridge, I had my new favorite scotch, called Arran. I'll have to see if I can find it Stateside, because getting it back from the UK would be very difficult. We're already packed to the gills.

After dinner, we headed home to crash. It was our last day in London, and we were getting up very early to catch a minicab to Stansted Airport to go to Glasgow.

Two days in London

2007-09-21T15:27:00.001-07:00

Our first day in London got off to a fairly early start. We were up about 8:15 or so, having gotten a much better night's sleep than the night before for obvious reasons. We had some toast at the house and then we were off to George Lane, which is a shopping district very near the South Woodford tube station. We ate at a place called Soul Cafe, which was a nice spot for a latte and a muffin. The 8 hours of recent flight combined with the change in weather had really dried Tracy's sinuses out, so we also stopped by Boots, which is a pharmacy, to get something to help her out.

After a latte and a snort of moisturizer, we hit the tubes. Ian had been kind enough to walk us down to the station the afternoon before so we knew the way quite well.

We got off at Blackfriars Station and headed for the Millenium Bridge. Taking some great snaps along the way, including some that could be stitched together, we arrived at the south end of the bridge and were standing at the entry into the Tate Modern museum. Tate Modern has a really cool feel to it because it was made from an abandoned power station. Unfortunately the "turbine room" was closed because they were putting up the next exhibit in it. But we enjoyed walking around the rest of the museum. I had my first pint of English bitters at this time, snarfing down some Fuller's London Pride.

The art there was obviously of the more modern type. I don't see interest in the really wacky modern art but there were some pieces there that I really loved.

After a couple hours in the Tate Modern including a (very) expensive lunch in the cafe there, we continued down along the Queen's Walk on the south bank of the Thames. The trip was basically a photo bonanza, with highlight being a pretty cool ad-hoc skate park under the opera hall, Darth Vader and several Stormtroopers, and Big Ben.

We walked all the way up the Waterloo bridge and over to Trafalgar Square. We went into the National Gallery, which is more classical art. We didn't really have enough time to do it justice however. As we were getting tired and rush hour was looming, we decided to go ahead and start for home base. Since we were less familiar with the route we were going to take home, the early start was a good idea. As it was, we were still up to our eyeballs in people for a good portion of the Central line. Ian and Caroline made us dinner and we enjoyed talking about our day along the Thames.

More about Arundel

2007-09-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

Arundel was a very quaint town, even more than we were expecting. There are really only a couple touristy spots, one being a local castle and the other being the local cathedral. The rest is pretty natural quaint English town.

We started our day outside the castle walls. There was a local arts and craft festival going on, so we stopped into the art exhibit to look at the work of some local artists. Since we obviously weren't in the mood to buy art, we didn't really see anything that jumped at us. For a £1 donation we got real tea and cakes, so we enjoyed that. We had been in the country only a few hours (only counting the time since we got up that morning, since we were up so late the night before) and had already had tea and cakes. Bully!

Next we went for a walk around the High Street. Turns out a lot of British towns have a "High street" of some kind or another. Roughly equivalent to "Main St" or something. Apparently, sometimes they even refer to a street as a high street when it's not actually called high street. Anyways, High Street in Arundel was charming although there were some tourist trap shops that sold trinkety things. At the top of the hill was the cathedral, which was imposing as you would expect. I think the term "God-fearing" was derived from people being scared to death to enter one of these edifices because they look so terrifying.

A walk up High Street and back was enough to make us start looking for the pub we had been told about, called the Black Rabbit. Well, the 'Rabbit is a little over a mile walk out of town along one of the twisty 1.5-lane roads you hear about in the UK. They exist, and they are made even more incomprehensible when there are pedestrians on one.

The Black Rabbit was a nice pub, decent food and beer for a decent price. At least, it was decent in retrospect. We thought it was a little high at the time, but that's only because we hadn't eaten a meal in London yet.

Coming back into town we took a public footpath along a nature preserve, which was a nicer walk in that we weren't about to be smacked by a freaking Vauxhall on a twisty road, and it had a nicer view. However the path was fairly rough in places. There were some nice snaps to be had, for sure.

Once back in town, we still had a couple hours to kill, so we went on a bit of a real estate survey of Arundel. You can "window shop" at real estate offices in the UK because they put lots of flyers in their windows with properties and prices in them. We could have bought a very nice 4-bedroom townhouse near the Arun riverfront for about £660,000. Remember your exchange rate: as of time of this writing it's almost exactly $2->£1.

We grabbed some ice cream and then it was time to meet up with Ian and Caroline, so we went back over towards the castle. About that time we realized that we hadn't actually entered the castle, so we walked inside to see how much entry fee was. It was about £12 apiece, which was way more than we were willing to pay, so we decided the pictures from the outside were enough.

At this time we met Caroline's dad, who for lack of a better description is a true English gent. An educated elder man who worked in "trade" all his life. He was fun to talk to, and we enjoyed meeting him.

The drive home was very snory. I say that because I kept falling asleep due to jetlag and general exhaustion, and then snoring myself awake every few minutes. Fortunately we had plenty of relaxation time that night so we got to sleep about 9:30.

Next up was London. More later.

A day in Arundel

2007-09-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Late note: Although our flight arrived at Heathrow 20 minutes early at about 10pm, including immigration and customs, we got stuck in a traffic closure in the northeastern part of town, costing us over an hour in the process.

Our hosts, Ian and Caroline, had some personal errands to run near Arundel today. They thought it would be a nice spot to drop us off for the day because it's a quaint town with a castle, a cathedral and other sights. The weather was gorgeous and the sights were fantastic.

I have posted several pictures that we took around the town here. You can get a google maps version of the photo album here.

I will add some captioning to the photos, or possibly another blog post detailing some of the pictures. Enjoy!

Off to UK

2007-09-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

In about 8 hours we depart for Heathrow. We will be spending a total of 10 days in the UK, including 2 nights in Glasgow and 2 nights in Brighton. We have left Liam with his grandparents in Louisville, which is great for everyone involved.

The grans were virtually busting at the seams to get a hold of him, and Tracy and I, as attached as we are to the little guy, wouldn't mind a few days of "us" time. I consider it a blessing that we have the means and the relatives to obtain it.

We'll arrive in London after 10pm local time. We have gracious hosts -- friends-of-friends that we met at the mutual friend's wedding three years ago -- who are putting us up in their house in South Woodford. South Woodford is a suburb in the northeastern portion of London.

Another cross-ocean trip means more blog posts

2007-08-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

Again I will be using this blog as a homebase for our upcoming trip to the UK.

We will be taking Liam to stay with his grandparents for the duration of our trip. They're absolutely stoked of course, and although I'm sure when the moment comes we'll be a little reluctant, I think the wife and I could probably use a little break from the kiddo.

Ten days, nine nights in London. Except perhaps for a side excursion in the middle of the period, we'll be spending the time staying with a friend-of-a-friend in Northeast London. The great thing about this approach (other than saving huge amounts of money on lodging) is that we'll effectively be "living" there. Staying in the 'burbs in a real neighborhood in a real house with real neighbors etc. Should feel eminently more "real" than our touristy trip to Thailand, and more like when we stayed with my brother in Kobe, Japan.

Exciting!

My list of firefox extensions

2007-07-16T12:34:00.001-07:00

I find myself periodically installing Firefox on some computer or another. Between my various computers at home and my work laptop, there are several places that a firefox install might go.

In order to help myself keep track of the extensions that I very frequently install, I am making a list here. It's as good a place as any. :)

Note I'm not trying to endorse any particular extensions, nor do I wish to debate their merits. This is simply for reference.

Add to Netvibes
Auto Copy
Better Gmail
BugMeNot
ColorfulTabs
Del.icio.us Bookmarks
Download Statusbar
Gmail Notifier
Greasemonkey
GTDInbox
IE Tab (when installing in Windows)
PDF Download
Split Browser
Tab Mix Plus
Tiny Menu
URL Link
Wikiseek Search Extension
edit: Email This! Bookmarklet

Maybe at some point if I have time I'll go back and edit this post to add URLs to all the items. That would be a useful thing to do.

Fascinating article on the music industry from an insider

2007-03-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

Charlie Gillingham, a member of the band Counting Crows, has given a fascinating article in response to a couple of emailed interview questions about the music industry. I'm not a big Counting Crows fan although I wouldn't say I dislike them. And I don't entirely like everything he said (I'm not in a position to disagree with it, but I don't like it). But it is insightful.

Here in particular is a great quote:

Luckily for us, we actually have two businesses, a touring organization and recording organization. The touring company has continued to do better and better and we make most of our income from it. The recording business hasn't done as well. We used to tour to promote records -- now we release records to promote tours.

I hate to say "I told you so," but this is what I've been saying artists should do for a while now. Music is now just data, it can be copied and exchanged at will, legal or not. What is not copyable is the experience of music, and the best way to get that is at a live concert. That is the one thing that professional artists can give that cannot be taken away by the thread of the "bedroom studio" or the "bedroom pirate" for that matter.

Truth on, Charlie.

It's about damned time

2007-02-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Gizmodo, which is a large enough blog/website that they can actually start to gather real awareness of this effort, is scheduling March as the "Boycott the RIAA" month.

Excellent. I personally have been on an RIAA boycott for almost two years now. It's not hard to do, you just need to follow two precepts:

- Purchase your CDs used. The RIAA isn't seeing a penny from these. Unfortunately, neither are the artists in question. But it must be argued that artists have enabled the culture conglomerates as much or more than consumers by signing horrid contracts through the ages and not demanding an accounting for it. They're going to get some of this punishment as well, and it's a sad byproduct. The end result must be the death of the labels.

- If you absolutely must have a CD that you can't find used, purchase it directly at a concert or at the artist's website. That helps insure they're getting the best of it and not the label.

- Use indie music sources, such as CDBaby. CDBaby is based here in Portland and they're great. The website is easy to use and it's really surprising how much great music you can find on there.

Go forth and boycott!

Trying out some embedded photos

2007-01-25T20:18:00.001-08:00

2007-01-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

I just registered superciliouspap.com using Google Domain. The price was right at $10, and I figured that, now that Google has borg'd Blogger, the integration of custom domain and blog and email addresses etc was appealing.

I wanted to register mojotooth.com, but there apparently is a video publishing house in the deep south that uses that domain. That isn't a surprise to me, the person who runs that shop actually managed to get "mojotooth" as his MySpace URL. That's only the second time in memory that I haven't been able to get that identity on a Web2.0 service. The first one was Backpackit.com, where I had to settle for mojo2th. How weak.

Anyways... If you're reading this, you other mojotooth, just realize this. My presence on the Intertube as "mojotooth" predates your own by probably a decade or more, and I'll be here long after you're gone.

If you don't believe me: my first bit of evidence is this USENET post from '96, clearly using mojotooth as my userid. I can also point to my identity aggregator on FindMeOn.

I'm not asking for my userids back. I believe I can live in peace with my fellow mojoteeth. I just want there to be no doubt who came first...

2007-01-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

Since Liam has arrived, life has (predictably) changed somewhat. Liam is the most amazing person I've ever met, and he's only six weeks old. All parents talk to their babies of course, even though the child has no hope of comprehending the words being used. The usual justification used by the new parents is that the tone of the voice calms the child (and the parent) and the baby feels more secure and close.

I believe that's probably true, but I also believe there is a further purpose. I have come to realize that sometimes when I'm talking to Liam at 5am after a feeding and burping, that I am talking to him in order to practice talking to him later. I'm acutely aware that eventually he's going to start asking extremely difficult questions, and in my mind I'm preparing answers. It will be tricky to answer questions about the nature of life and the uglier parts therein; specifically things like hate and violence, and the topper of them all, religion.

A new addition

2006-12-21T13:25:00.000-08:00

Well, the baby has arrived. He was born on 12/8 and it's been an adventure so far. Picasaweb folder with pictures of the lil' guy.

A ray of hope

2006-11-09T23:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=axMUIYAhqjNE&refer=home

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, unable to fulfill U.S. goals in Iraq and Afghanistan during his tenure, is stepping down and will be replaced by former CIA Director Robert M. Gates, President George W. Bush said today.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/08/election.why/index.html

After a sweeping Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in Tuesday's midterm election, and with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, exit polls indicated views of President Bush and the war in Iraq were key to the outcome.

..

Most voters cast their ballots on national rather than local issues, with 60 percent saying national issues mattered most to their vote, while 34 percent said local issues mattered most.

I know it's only a midterm election, and that gaining control of the House is only somewhat important in the scheme of things. And that the Dems are every bit as capable of screwing up as the GOP. But for the first time in five years I have a little hope for the future. That maybe some of the damage to our nation can be repaired.

Updates

2006-09-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, quick updates. No reason.

My wife is pregnant with our first child. Due December 6th. I'm sure there will be plenty of updates around that time. And probably some before, discussing the whole process leading up to it.

The Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup. Congrats to them. I would rather have seen an Edmonton/Buffalo finals, but hey.

Go see the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" if you want a touching documentary about how some people actually want to do the right thing for the environment if soulless corporations would just enable them.
I'm finally getting a chance to see Allan Holdsworth in concert. I've been listening to his brand of fusion for 14 years now and never had a chance to see him live. I am making quite a road trip out of it, however, I'm driving from Portland to San Francisco to see him play. The show is the 28th of September in Oakland at Yoshi's. Of course, since my bro lives in the Bay area, there are lots of other good excuses to make it down there for a concert.

More later. w00t!

Holy CRAP I forgot about this thing

2005-12-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

I totally forgot about this blog. Doesn't really matter because I'd be surprised if anybody read it. But I can't really feel geeky unless I maintain this blog. So I will.

A few capsules. Things I've been thinking about lately.

Now that it's been revealed that George Bush the Younger has more contempt for his Constitution and for his own citizens than any President in the last few generations, why does the word "impeach" rarely enter popular media? Bill Clinton was impeached for much, much less.

Good job, I say to the District Court that finally put down the insidious cancer that is Intelligent Design. If only every crackpot idiot with his own social agenda weren't similarly smote. See George Bush above.

The NHL is hot hot HOT. Most people dig the shootouts, most people dig the increased flow. I've heard criticisms that the physical game has been taken out of hockey. If you call mindless clutching and pinning against the boards "the physical game" (I'd be more inclined to call it "the monkey-manlove game"), then perhaps they're right. But the number of BIG hits has only gone down slightly, and it's mostly because there's actually room to skate around now and one guy can't hook you to a standstill while another one lines you up for the big whammy. But I've seen plenty of whammy this season, and I'm happy.

For about 2.5 years I've been caught up in the fully full-on "poker boom." I played regularly on PokerStars and I've been running my own no-limit tournament. I have finally come to the conclusion, however, that poker minus social benefits is basically mind-numbingly boring. I will continue to run my tournaments and home games because it's definitely not boring to play with your friends. But I frankly can't stand playing online anymore, particularly holdem. I could probably continue to play some Omaha/8.

A pox on Fox. I'm tired of them cancelling what few shows they have that actually demonstrate some uniqueness. Firefox, for example, and now especially Arrested Development. There is no other show on television that demonstrates a similar smart sense of humor. By the way I'm led to believe that the great lawyer Bob Loblaw now has his own online legal journal: Bob Loblaw's Law Blog.

That will do for now.

NHL Still Can't Decide What's Legal in Front of the Net

2005-10-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

NHL Still Can't Decide What's Legal in Front of the Net: "The NHL's Director of Officiating has all but declared victory in the league's campaign to eliminate hooking, holding, interference and other tactics that slow down the game.

I must say that, so far I heartily approve of "the new Hockey." I have watched significant portions of about four hockey games so far, and they have been generally faster, more frenetic, more skilled and more exciting to watch. Take as two very good examples the opening night game in Dallas against LA, and the second game of the home-and-home series between Detroit and St. Louis.

In the first example, the Stars were down by 3 goals after 5 minutes and down 4-0 at the end of the first. After the second period started, the Stars began an entertaining march back into the game. In 40 minutes they scored 5 goals against a team that had to be wondering what they could do to "protect their lead." The answer, of course, was to "keep playing." The great thing about this answer is that it wasn't the correct answer in the last ten years or so of NHL hockey. If a team like the Devils or the Stars got ahead 2-0 early in the game, you could count on the final score being fairly similar. This is no longer the way of things. That's great for the sport, for the fans, for the media trying to pay the bills covering the sport, for everyone. Except maybe the coach, who will now continue to sprout new grey hairs even when his team gains a bit of a lead.

This should be a great season. I would predict multiple 50+ goal scorers and a handful of 100+ point scoreres. Goalie stats will suffer somewhat, but the good goalies will continue to be good goalies. If they can keep their groins intact, that is.

My take on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD

2005-10-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

I haven't read much of the technical material on these two standards. I did read CNET's FAQ on the subject, and one thing leapt out at me:

Blu-ray's consumer electronics list is longer, with Sony... and entertainment companies Twentieth Century Fox, Vivendi Universal and Walt Disney.

Without having read any of the specifications, I already know which side I would stand on. The answer is, whichever side Disney is not standing on. The presence of 20th Century Fox and Sony just seal the deal.

Disney has demonstrated that it will run over the rights of anyone and everyone in order to control content. That includes the fair use rights of you and me. It will put money in politician's pockets to extend copyrights and obtain legislation like the DMCA and the SSSCA. Wherever they are, I shall be on the other side.

Sweet! Blogspam!

2005-08-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'd like to thank the lovely spammers for comment-spamming my blog's last entry. Not quite sure how they stumbled in here but hey... At least my penis is seventeen inches long now and bovine growth hormones have made me grow udders and horns. I look sorta like Martha Stewart now in fact.

last.fm

2005-08-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

A truly fantastic application of data mining is last.fm. This system, formerly known as Audioscrobbler, utilizes some automated plugins for media players such as Winamp to gather lots and lots of data on what people are listening to. Then they use lots of regression analysis and other statistical spellcasting to try to draw conclusions and present them as recommendations. Someone who listens to a similar set of music as you will be listed as your "neighbor" and once you have neighbors you can recommend music directly to them. And the more music you listen to, the more data it has to draw conclusions from. I don't need to rate music or attempt to "characterize" music (see Moodlogic below).

This could be a very useful way to find out about artists that you have never heard of, or have heard of but didn't really know if what they did would be something that you were interested in. But right now I'm just having fun looking at the data. Cross-referencing between similar bands and my neighbors' listening preferences.

I like this kind of application. Anything that can do intelligent things like recommend new music to me (no, Amazon's "recommendations" aren't worth shit, although I imagine they're trying to do similar things as last.fm but with much less data from me) or create intelligent playlists gets my nerdy juices flowing. I remember getting this excited about Moodlogic until I found out that it basically required so much human intervention as to be useless, and the playlists it created were annoyingly redundant.

So, to take a concrete example here. I'm looking at one of my "neighbors" on last.fm named RadioFreeColo. Looking at his favorite artists I can see Pink Floyd, the Stones, the Beatles, the Doors, the Who, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Supertramp, the Pretenders, U2, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Fleetwood Mac, and Boston. How in the hell do I make a recommendation to this guy? What, do I tell him he should really check out that great unknown band Cream?.... Actually... I don't see Cream on his list of top 50 artists. Maybe that's not a bad idea. But it feels silly making classic rock recommendations since.. well... There aren't exactly any surprises lurking in there. If you like all those bands above but you don't listen to Rush, then that's because you fricking hate them, not because you haven't heard of them.

The last kickass feature of last.fm is that using their little downloadable player you can actually listen to playlists of snippets of songs from various charts and cross-references and stuff. So when I go to some dude's chart page I can listen to a playlist of songs that are representative of his listening habits. Sometimes maybe that way I can catch a gem I never listened to before.

Ah well. I see now that Colo's 54th artist is Cream. So much for my recommendation. Maybe John Mayall and the Blues Breakers?

Yet more spoutage from people of the cloth

2005-08-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

A story in the Kansas City Star shows that even those who are distancing themselves from Pat Robertson are full of crap:

The Rev. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, issued a statement saying that he has always held Robertson in the ?highest esteem? but that the evangelist ?must immediately apologize, retract his statement and clarify what the Bible and Christianity teaches about the permissibility of taking human life outside of law.?

(emphasis added by me)

Taking human life outside of law? The Bible makes no distinction between murder within the law and murder outside the law. The Commandment is simple: Thou Shalt Not Kill. Find me where exactly in the Bible it says that murder is mitigated by governmental permission. The sad thing is, I would imagine if you look hard enough you might actually find statements to that effect in the Old Testament, but it also says in the Old Testament that it's a sin to mix two different crops in the same field or to plow them with an ox and a donkey yoked together (Deuteronomy).

It's completely bunk. If you claim to be a Christian, you must forswear all killing. Period. Wars, death penalties, political assassinations. Rev. Schenk has merely traded one sin for another.

Robertson's Folly

2005-08-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

I?m trying out the Blogger for Word plugin that blogger just made available. I?m not a big Microsoft fan but I have Office installed on my work lappy so I figured I?d try it.

If you ever needed another reason to completely discard Pat Robertson and his ?morally superior? followers, here you have it:

Robertson endorses assassinating Chavez.

Hopefully now we?ll stop seeing so much of this hypocrite and his hypocritical butt-spelunking cronies.

By the way... AWESOME how apostrophes can't even render correctly in this plugin.

I could get used to this at some point

2005-07-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Mostly today I'm just testing Blogger's photo support. But some explanation is in order.

A few weeks back my wife and I spent a lovely week with friends in Pa'ia, Maui, Hawai'i. Here is a link to Google maps indicating sorta where Pa'ia is. It's basically the first stop along the Hana Highway just east of Kahului.

It's a great, funky little town. There are no big tourist attractions, just lots of houses, several excellent beaches, authentic local peeps, and weird little shops and restaurants. Considering the group of people I was with, this was about the perfect fit. We were not particularly interested in much of the "tourist" experience, with minor exceptions.

Here is a picture of Moku Hale, the excellent house in Pa'ia that we rented. It cost us quite a number of limbs to rent it, but it was worth it. There was a private infinity pool, great views out over the bay and beaches and the Western Mountain. See above for the pic.

I have a lot more pictures of the trip available at my online gallery. Feel free to check it out.

Here come the cries to outlaw all stones and rocks

2005-07-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

I just read this article on the BBC.

An 11-year-old girl who threw a stone at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California.
Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter.

I've never been to Fresno, but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that there are worse problems in Fresno than pre-teen children having rock fights.

To clarify, she was defending herself from a gang of kids throwing water balloons. Did she overreact? Maybe a bit, and it's unfortunate that a kid took a gash to the head in the process. But a helicopter? Three squad cars? Five months of house arrest? This is ridiculous.

I was in much the same situation when I was about ten years old. It was the summer before my fifth grade year at Bear Creek Elementary school in Boulder, Colorado. It would have been 1982. I was attending a summer day-camp at the school, and shortly after the camp ended one day, some kids started having a little contest to see how far they could throw rocks on the playground. Well, a friend of mine and I were walking home along a path vaguely in the direction they were throwing. One of their throws was off-target and came kinda close to us, so my buddy picked it up and threw it back at them. It wasn't malicious, it wasn't mean-spirited, and in fact I think he was laughing. I picked up another rock about the diameter of a nickle and heaved it as far as I could, and happened to hit one of the throwers, a sixth-grader named Curtis, right in the temple. It was a throw I could never have duplicated in a thousand more like it. Broke the skin on his temple pretty good.

It sorta degenerated from there, with Curtis chasing me around trying to beat me up, and we all ended up getting a talking-to by the guy adminstering the day camp, a counselor named Seth.

There were no police cars, no helicopters, no detention, no house arrests, no lawyers, no charges filed. I remember Mom was PISSED when Seth called her and that was all the correction I needed in the matter. I'm pretty sure Curtis's parents were pissed too.

How does a nation get this imbalanced and out of whack?

Deferring Maui, and at last... HOCKEY

2005-07-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

Now that Blogger has builtin photo blogging, I'll be adding some primo pics from our Maui vacation that just ended this past weekend. That will come next post. More pressing and timely issues...

As an avid hockey fan I've been looking forward to this day for a long time. From TSN:

The NHL and NHL Players' Association have finally reached an agreement (pending ratification) on a new six-year collective bargaining agreement that - if approved by the NHL board of governors and the rank and file membership of the NHLPA - will officially end the stalemate on July 21.

A lot of opinions are flying around. And as a wise man once said, opinions are like rectal sphincters, in the sense that everyone has several of them, and they tend to conflict violently. Or something like that, hell I was never good at remembering that kind of thing.

In any event, in the vain interests of purposefully seeding the Internet Archive with my posting, thus permitting me to sue them when my own postings are used against me in a future lawsuit, I will publish my opinions here.

The owners were on the right side of this battle from the start. The league, especially during Bettman's watch, made plenty of mistakes, to be fair. It expanded too quickly and probably too much and to the wrong markets. General managers, in addition, made some stupid decisions that paid non-superstar players with superstar money (Lapointe anyone?).

However it is unfair of the players to say "well, the GMs should have been wiser with their money, it's not OUR fault the economy of the NHL is in a shambles." It's true, but completely unfair. Why is it okay for the players to view themselves as a black hole that just greedily absorbs whatever money gets too close with no thought to the wider repercussions? Why is that acceptable? And then to try to block league's attempts to put in place mechanisms to prevent overzealous GMs from having too much impact on league spending patterns! That seems to me to be a group of people who don't mind contributing to the problem but have no interest in being part of the solution. And for that horrible attitude they should be punished. And apparently they have been. They stood for something they called a "principle" and gave up a year of their lucrative careers for it, but here they are, signing on the dotted line something even worse than what was put in front of them months ago when they had their chests puffed up and their bloated asses sitting on fake moral high horses.

Allow me to be perfectly clear. Professional hockey commentator-type people might not want to be so brusque but I can: the players lost this battle. Good thing, I say. Jeremy Roenick wants me to kiss his ass. Why not; I imagine in his arrogant mind he thinks everybody should anyways. As a former fan of his, now alienated by his bizarre attitude, I would think in fact I'll be doing a lot less hypothetical ass-kissing now than I would have before.

Let's look at the damage. Another quote from the same TSN article lists exactly what the CBA is doing to the players' wallets:

a hard team-by-team salary cap with a payroll of range of $21 million to $39 million (in the first year), which excludes all player costs (benefits, insurance etc).

the league's total expenditure on player costs (salaries, bonuses, benefits and insurance) is not permitted to exceed 54 per cent of defined hockey-related revenue and the salary cap and payroll range will move up or down as revenues increase or decrease each year of the deal.

a 24 per-cent salary rollback for any NHL player who has time remaining on an existing contract, keeping in mind that the players will receive none of the monies they were slated to earn in the lost season of 2004-05.

liberalized free agency: age eligibility for unrestricted free agency at age 31 in 2005, 29 in 2006, 28 in 2007. In 2008, it's 27 or seven years of NHL tenure.

a more restrictive entry level system, totally revamped salary arbitration, improved pension benefits and a revenue-sharing plan.

A percentage of salaries put into escrow until the new salary cap can be calculated at the end of each season.

No player can earn more than 20 per cent of the team cap, which for 2005-06 means no player can earn more than $7.8 million.

Revenue-sharing where the top 10 money-making clubs donate to a fund shared by the bottom 10 teams.

The entry-level system will limit those players to $850,000 a year in salary (which it was 10 years ago) with bonuses not as easily reachable as the previous deal.

The ability for teams to buy players out of their contracts at two thirds of their value. This is meant to help teams fit under the cap but the clubs won't be able to re-sign those players.

Participation in the February 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy.

The way I see it, all of the items except for the Olympics, earlier free agency, and the contract buyouts pretty much hammer the players. Salaries finally have a ceiling, which is what was needed all along. They have a floor as well, but I doubt the floor will be relevant to anybody except maybe teams in a completely rebuilding phase.

The contract buyouts will particularly benefit the richest players, because they will get 2/3 of their yearly (rolled-back) salary to get bought out and THEN will get resigned at some lesser salary by a necessarily different team. They may not end up playing for the team they want to play for, but they'll be making a one-time hefty chunk before they arrive wherever they were signed. And it will truly be a "wherever" situation because the low-budget teams are going to be in the hunt for some of these guys. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see, for instance, Billy Guerin ending up back in Edmonton. As a Stars fan I wouldn't like to see him go, but I think I'll just have to get used to the inevitability that a lot of marquee players are changing sweaters in the next couple months as several teams shuffle things around to get under the cap, using the buyout as a tool in doing so.

Anyways... Looking forward to my Center Ice subscription kicking in. Looking forward to TiVo'ing all the Stars games. I've missed the NHL. I'm pretty bitter but I'm sure after the first few glove saves, hip-checks and power plays I'll be okay.

Tribute to Dad

2005-02-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

While cleaning up the house in preparation for an out-of-town guest's arrival today, I stumbled upon a nice black leather portfolio that has a small brass plate on it's lower front corner. I recognized the portfolio as the one I used to write my father's eulogy. I haven't opened it since the funeral. With some amount of trepidation I opened the portfolio and saw that the pages on which the eulogy are written were tucked into the flap inside the cover.

I pulled them out and, for the first time in almost five years, I read them. Eulogizing my father is the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Reading it was hard and brought back some feelings that had faded a bit. I still think of my dad every day, whether it's remembering some specific anecdote or moment in my past, or thinking that if he were around I would ask him for advice on something or another.

There is an audio tape of the eulogy somewhere. I think my sister has it. She sent it to me at one point a few months after the funeral and asked me to make some copies for everyone. I couldn't bear to take it out of the case, let alone listen to it, so I never accomplished that task and eventually sent it back to her. I'll probably send her the actual notes for the eulogy so she can keep it with the tape.

In any event, it occurred to me that these words should be recorded somewhere relatively permanent before I ship them off to my sister. I haven't used this space in a while, this is as good a place as any. So here it is.

April 7, 1999
Eulogy for Roger Frank Ross

What I see before me today strikes me with a touch of irony. You see, under different circumstances, this gathering of friends and family is something my father would have cherished and enjoyed about as much as anything I can imagine, were he here to experience it. My dad was the ultimate family man, as many of you here know well, whether or not you have attended one of the many family reunions that Dad organized. He loved being surrounded by the people he cared about, to him it was the stuff life was made of. And he believe that strength was amplified through the presence of loved ones, in good times and bad.

So now we are here in a very bad time, and he would wish us to find that same strength in this gathering. My father always felt the ups and downs, right down to his essence. Felt them with all his heart, always humbly appreciating the ups and always quick to point out that the downs are shortlived.

And that was Dad's sort of humble wisdom. he wasn't much for Forrest Gump-like proverbs, which isn't to say he wasn't good for a lecture from time to time. He was a father, an advisor, a coach, a sounding board, and a friend. Sometimes he was even a horsey. He was great at all of these roles.

How did he these things so well? It's an easy question. He was so great in these capacities because his desire was not for personal success, but for family success. Giving his loved ones the power to be complete. That might be a confusing way to put it, so let me give you a telling example. At various times in my life, I remember my father running football plays with me in the backyard... teaching me how to have a better tennis backhand... showing me how to program a computer... coaching me on putting... tutoring me in algebra.. lecturing me on defensive driving... advising me in tax matters. He gave all he could to me so that I could be prepared for this day. And maybe I'm not prepared as I would like, but not for lack of my father's efforts.

But far beyond most people's abilities, he had achieved his goals to his satisfaction. He rose from a simple beginning in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. He married a wonderful woman and would stay with her for the rest of his days. He passed through the Marine Corps and eventually was in the electrical engineering Class of 1960 at UK. He worked at IBM for 27 years, and in that time lived in three states, became a friend to many people, an idol to some, and had the wisdom to save a decent retirement for himself and his wife. He had three strong-willed children, all of whom grew up under expectations that they would do things right, and more importantly, that they would do the right thing. He saw these children through to prosperity and saw four granchildren also begin to thrive.

He pitched in on business and financial matters, and would be doing so today if he could. He stayed an active athlete for as long as he was able and ended up enjoying the sunshine in Florida, surrounded by friends and relatives. How many of us could even dream of that success? All of us. Every one of us. Because you see, Dad wasn't a genius. He didn't start out with a lot of resources, or even a lot of ambition, beyond that of a fulfilled and comfortable life for himself and his kin. He achieved his goals to his satisfaction through hard work, flexibility, optimism, and above all, devotion to his duties as a professional and as a patriarch. And he knew he had been successful.

On the day before he became ill last week, he told his wife, "If I were to die tomorrow, I will have had enough happiness for two lives." He said things like that all the time. Not just in these last five months when his health was fragile, but as long as I can remember. He was a humble man who was content with his success. And as I wrote those last words, I came to realize that there is an important lesson hidden there. He took pride in his success, but not his ability to achieve that success. That is the essence of humility and devotion. By a similar token he was a morally sound man but was never of the opinion that he was beyond reproach. He had not an ounce of deception or subterfuge in him. Simple but now shallow, resourceful but not devious, wise but not judgemental, and fulfilled but never complacent.

He was an ideal neighbor, father, husband, brother, cousin, uncle, and papaw. He may have been an engineer by occupation but these other things were his real jobs. He had all these things inside him. And now, it is our job to have more of my Dad in us.

Love you, Dad.

How to create a situation in which it is necessary to sue oneself

2004-11-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

Just a tidbit I saw on The Register today. I thought it was fantastic. Here's a summary of the article in my own words.

King Crimson's contract expires with EMI.
Since their contract was written before digital downloads were an issue, their contract doesn't grant EMI rights to enable digital downloads of KC's content.
During their new contract negotiations, the contract proposed by EMI includes EMI's rights to allow businesses like iTunes to make KC tunes available for download.
The proposed royalty for KC, per download: $0.06.
EMI tells KC that this should be fine with them because digital downloads just aren't important.
KC comes back and tells EMI that okay, if they're not important, we'd just as soon give the digital download rights to a third party that gives us 75% of the revenue instead of your feeble offer.
EMI's reply is that the initial investment to support digital downloading required a gargantuan ($0.69/download) royalty for EMI.

You can't have it both ways, corporate evil slugs. Either it's important or it's not. If it's important, then the artists should be compensated more or they should be free to look for other options. If it's not, then let the artists control those rights themselves and make or break their own pocketbooks.

But here's the great part of it. EMI has started allowing digital downloads of their content regardless. I can't verify this because I've steadfastly refused to subscribe to iTunes, but so says the Register.

So... EMI doesn't have the right to allow downloading of KC content. That sounds like illegal sharing to me. Is EMI going to have the RIAA send a scary letter to themselves?

Gonna try one time to pick it up

2004-10-14T01:14:00.000-07:00

Busy at work, busy at home. Going to give one good attempt to try to be more regular at posting. If it doesn't start to work, I'll just abandon. No point in constantly being in a state of semi-posting.

Poker Table and some DRM ravings

2004-09-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

I certainly would never claim that this is a poker blog. There are plenty of other poker blogs and it's well-covered ground.

However, I enjoy most forms of poker, online and live. Persuing those ends I have just finished my own holdem table. Please go look at the pics and check it out. I will probably post a fairly lengthy description of the building of the table, but you can check Jeff Croft's excellent instructions. My own construction only diverged in minor ways.

Next up for me will probably be a round poker table that will act as a "topper" for a standard square card table. That will be a little more utilitarian, at least for the typical non-tourney game.

I've often struggled against ignorance in the realm of digital content and copyright. When "normal" folks begin to encounter my enthusiastic decrying of DRM and content control, they inevitably ask me "why?" Why is it that I hate the big record companies so much? Why is it that I despite iTunes and DRM?

I have trouble vocalizing an answer to that question without rambling far afield. Here, however, is an excellent, concise paragraph describing why DRM is a Bad Thing(tm).

DRM also poses a serious threat to the notion of a "music collection" as we know it. Microsoft's new Music Store restrictions may seem innocuous and reasonable today if you own a Windows machine or use MSN as your OSP. But what if you switch at some point to a Mac? Or Linux? Or what if you cancel your MSN account? Will you be able to take your music with you? What if Microsoft decided in five years to drop support for its Music Store? Or what if most MP3 player manufacturers decide to drop Microsoft? All of the sudden you could end up with your music locked up and no key to unlock it. And the worst part is you have no control over the situation. You don't own the keys to your own music; Microsoft does.

This paragraph was taken from this Corante article by Jason Schultz. I highly suggest everyone go take a quick look at it. It presents the state of content control and its problems in a very straightforward manner.

It's about time... (VH)

2004-08-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

So, as I mentioned before, one of the things that I did whilst on sabbatical was attend a Van Halen concert in Columbus, Ohio. Seems like an odd and perhaps sad thing to do, I know. Allow me to send us back in time...

During my sophomore high school year, my close group of friends and I were all pretty hardcore Van Halen fans. During that year, 1988, VH went on tour to support their OU812 album. The concert occurred at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. Maybe I'm skipping some fun parts of the story here but suffice to say that we ended up with 10 tickets, second row floor, center. 7 friends of mine and myself (we sold two of the tickets to some friend-of-a-friend) all bought identical concert Ts and stood on the backs of the chairs of the people in front of us the whole time. It was a fantastic concert and an incredible bonding experience.

Well, the bulk of that same crowd was involved this time as well. Actually, there were six of the originals, plus two more friends-of-friends that were also VH fans back in the day. So, through an AOL presale we got 2 groups of four tickets and road-tripped from Lexington (with three of the guys coming from Baltimore) to Columbus and watched the show. After the show there was much poker and titty bar and White Castle to be had.

But my point in this entry is to talk about Van Halen. It's been easy in the last ten years or so to pretty much write them off as a joke, and I have to confess that I did, despite the fact that I owned all their albums and pretty much knew all their songs by heart. (Except, of course, that horrid Van Halen 3 album, which will not be mentioned further here.) I guess I thought of myself as having "outgrown" them. I moved on to heavier, and in some case, lighter things in music. But occasionally I still pull out mp3s from Fair Warning or 5150, my two faves, and rocked them out like I was still in high school.

In case you hadn't noticed, I reserve a Swiss-like neutrality on the whole "Sammy vs. Dave" argument. I am lead-singer-agnostic in a sense, I suppose. I acknowledge that Dave had certain talents that complemented the band very well (although he's evidently quite a jerk) and Sammy likewise. If I do have a mild preference, it would be for the Sammy era simply because of timing; 5150 is when I came of age in music and got old enough to actually consider attending concerts by bands like VH. But as I got into them, I went back and devoured their back-catalog, some bootlegs, etc, and now I don't really distinguish between the two eras much unless there's a good reason to.

Even though I was with buddies at this concert and was looking forward to a really great time, I didn't have very high musical expectations out of the band, to be quite honest. The last time I saw VH live was during the Balance tour in 1995 and boy that show sucked. Eddy was having horrible hip problems and he barely moved, and Sammy seemed unspirited and bored. As for Mike and Alex, well, they were Mike and Alex. A capable rhythm section for any hard rock band, but not exactly the reason that fans flock. In any event, I sensed in 1995 that the band was through, and I was still mostly of that opinion when I found out they were on tour this year. Due to great timing, I was to be on sabbatical and visiting my mom in Kentucky when the tour was hitting the midwest, so I arranged the whole thing with my buds and before you knew it we were there. But I wasn't expecting the best. I mean, the careers of everybody but Sammy has been in the proverbial shitter, and Sammy's last couple of solo albums were okay but nothing to blog about.

The concert wasn't outstanding. It wasn't awesome. But it was pretty darned good, and I think that could be considered a smashing victory for these guys. They looked relatively in shape, Sammy having lost some of his Cabo- and tequila-induced blubber and Eddie was sinewy and mobile. Mike and Alex were again, Mike and Alex, except Mike has been given some new responsibility in the band and was actually given the task of performing the lead vocals on one of the tunes. While Eddy was probably a bit on the inaccurate side, for him at least, and Sammy went out of his way to avoid a couple of the high notes in some of the tunes, they looked like two guys who were very much excited to be back on the road and I suspect they're getting better each show.

One interesting fact about the show was that they did a surprising number of Dave-era songs. If I can think of them all off the top of my head, they did "Jump," "Panama," "Ain't Talkin' "bout Love," "Somebody Get Me a Doctor," "Unchained" (excellent), and "You Really Got Me." I guess since they're touring to support a greatest hits sort of album, they better pick stuff from all over the catalog.

They haven't announced a lot of West Coast dates yet, I'll try to catch them out here as well if I can. Holy crap they're touring aggressively. I count 59 dates announced as of today and only a small handful of them are west of the Mississippi, meaning we can likely expect a whole new leg of dates in the western part of the US.

Anyways. Here's hoping to see you at VH in Portland.

Monthly report. What?

2004-08-01T23:03:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's been over a month since I put in an entry. You would be inclined to think that the problem would be lack of things to say. Rather the contrary, I have so much to say that the thought of sitting down and starting to write it has been daunting. So, to use Intel parlance, I'll have to "ZBB" some of what I want to say (to ZBB means to pare down oversized objectives until something reasonable is attained) and start writing it.

After my return from Thailand, the rest of my sabbatical was not particularly interesting but was pretty busy and worthwhile. Here's a brief summary of "stuff" that happened.

I cleaned out my garage, scoured it and rearranged it

My wife and I had a garage sale in our newly cleaned garage. Made about $100 on it, so aside from the fact that it was back-breaking and tedious work, it was also financially unworthy and therefore almost a complete waste of time.

I traveled to Kentucky to stay with my mom for a bit

I saw Van Halen play in Columbus at the Schottenstein center.

I spent some time on Lake Cumberland with friends

I helped my mom clean out an intimidating old closet, including probably upwards of a thousand pounds of old books

I drove myself and my mom to Brevard, North Carolina to see my nephew off to his freshman orientation (he's going to UNC this fall) and see my sister's fam.

I gambled at the Harrah's at Cherokee, TN.

I bought a new car (pic forthcoming).

So as you can see, that's a lot of crap packed into a month or so. Not all of it is worth expounding upon, but I will begin to do so on a couple of the topics in the near future.

Now I'm back at work. I can honestly say that, in my case at least, going on sabbatical does not make you suddenly motivated to go back to work. Quite the opposite in fact, I have enjoyed several weeks of leisure time and I think I would like to find out what retirement is like. Sooner rather than later. 32 is a bit young to be thinking of retirement but there you go. I have decided that what I really want to be when I grow up is "retired."

One Day in Bangkok

2004-06-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, there is really only one portion of my Asian sabbatical trip that I regret. That would be the three nights we spent in Bangkok.

I suppose it's fair to say that, prior to this trip, I really hadn't been in any truly "Third-World" cities before. I've been to a few coastal towns in Mexico, and seen some of the seedier sides of otherwise opulent towns like Nassau and Madrid. But nothing that I had encountered prepared me for the decrepitude of Bangkok.

We had pretty high hopes for seeing very cool cultural sites. Tracy had her mind set on seeing the Grand Palace, the Royal Barge Museum and at least one other major Buddhist temple. So on the morning of our first full day in Bangkok, fully rested and ready for an adventure, we headed down to the "transportation" desk at the Shangri-La Hotel.

We were interested in travelling by boat, in order to take in the interesting sights along the Chao Praya, which wends its way through the Bangkok like a viper. The transportation concierge told us that there were public boats, which stopped frequently and would be a slow way to get up the river. For a fairly amazing sum of 800 baht (about $20) we could rent the services of a longtail boat for the whole day. The scripted portion of the tour would weave off the beaten path into a canal in the Western part of the city, then back to the Chao Praya heading north, just below Wat Aroon, which was one of the temples we wanted to see.

It sounded great, so we booked it and headed to the docks. We paid the man at the dock and jumped onto the longtail and out we went into the cloudy, humid day.

The longtail boats of Bangkok are pretty interesting. They are, as their name implies, a thin boat with a motor that drives it via a very long crankshaft, sticking out probably ten feet out of the stern. The driver manipulated a pole which the motor is mounted to and has fairly good control over the boat's function that way. They generally are colorful and have a canopy for protection from Bangkok's frequent rains. It felt quaint, cultural, and fun.

The Chao Praya stinks. Let me tell you, it smells BAD. There is free-floating garbage pretty much everywhere and the water is sort of a vague greyish-green when the sun is out. When the sun is behind the clouds it's just grey. As we plowed through the sewer-like river, I started to get some second thoughts about the whole boat idea.

Our driver took us off into a backwater canal. It was a backwater in the literal and figurative sense. The journey on this minor canal lasted about an hour and it was the most depressing hour of my life. We saw a myriad of humbling and sad sights, from ramshackle shantys stacked by the dozen, to a man sitting underneath a bridge huffing gasoline out of a milk jug, to sad little emaciated dogs lying torpid on a concrete levy. I felt truly like the Ugly American, that everything I had in life was more or less unnecessary. I felt like I was in the middle of a Sally Struthers production.

About 3/4 of the way through our backwater diversion, we pulled into a little lagoon of sorts where there were three other rowboats idling. I saw that they were full to the brim with trinkets and wares and as one of them started moving and our driver stopped the engine, I saw what was happening. An old lady rowed up alongside our boat and started waving odds and ends in front of us, little elephant statues and fake jade buddhas and hats. We were basically unprepared for the onslaught, and before we really knew what was happening, Tracy had somehow bought a set of chopsticks, along with a canned Nescafe coffee drink for myself and one for the driver. This cost about 300 Baht, which is less than $10 but is still probably twice what we should have paid. We felt pretty disgusted when we finally started to pull away. Mostly because it was obvious that what had just happened to us for the last while was completely planned and scripted. Our driver (and evidently our hotel, given that they told us about this leg of the trip in advance) was obviously in cahoots with the team of merchants to try to eke some cheap sales out of us.

Still somewhat stunned, we soon therafter pulled up to the dock at Wat Aroon. Wat Aroon translated is "Temple of the Dawn," and it was a fairly nice temple. The main feature of the temple is a tall spire that, at one point, had a set of perilously steep but ascendable stairs on the side that tourists liked to climb and take pictures from. For some reason the stairs were roped off above the first landing. I can't imagine it would be for liability reasons because I really felt like we were in a land with no laws. Maybe the tourists were falling off an dying before the locals could strip every last Baht out of them.

As soon as we stepped onto the dock, we were expected to pay a "landing fee" of a couple dollars. Via broken English we established with our driver that we would be ready to leave in about a half hour. He took the longtail and puttered out into the river to allow other boats to land.

We did see at least one American family at the temple. They were sunburned and miserable and at the verge of civil conflict. Our moods were somber but still positive and I got several pictures there, although I soon came to notice that my camera was accidentally in a monochrome mode during this and one other portion of the trip.

Our driver was waiting for us a short while later, so we ducked onto the boat and trundled up to the Barge Museum. Of course there was another landing fee, followed by a ticket purchase to get into the museum. Then there was a supplemental "camera fee" that I was charged that was about $2.50. In return I got something to wear around my neck that looked like what a press pass would look like if it were made by a second-grader. I got several very cool snaps, and we wandered around in the shade of the covered docks for a while. Again our trustworthy driver was ready when we were through at the museum.

Feeling a bit more relaxed, we rolled up the river to the Grand Palace. This stop had a larger loading deck with several Thais standing and sitting on it. After paying the requisite landing fee, we were engaged in conversation by a fatherly looking 50-something Asian man whose English was nearly impeccable. He told us that he was a licensed tour guide (showing us his license, which could have been printed by his Lexmark at a public Internet cafe for all I knew) and giving us some info about the Grand Palace. He told us that it was a five-minute walk through the alley and the marketplace and along the street. Entrance 3 was the entrance we should go into and the other two entrances were closed to tourist traffic. Disconcertingly, he also told us that we would be beset on all sides by scammers and con artists as soon as we hit the marketplace. He said that some people would try to tell us the Palace was closed and that they would take us to another site, which sounded ominous at best to us. He also said that people would try to sell us fake tickets to the Palace and that we shouldn't accept them.

We started feeling some trepidation, but then our new friend told us that for 400 Baht apiece, he would be happy to guide us through the snake nest and through the whole Palace. Three hours, he said it would take, no less, to get a full appreciation of the history and grandeur of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (the temple inside the Palace) and the royal mansion.

Mostly because we didn't think we wanted to stay out that long, but also because we were started to feel pretty creeped out by this time, I refused his services, which appeared to emotionally decapitate the poor man. But despite his rejection, he told us to go through the alley and take a right into another alley and we would emerge into the marketplace next to the Palace.

The alleyway is the single seediest place I think I've ever been. It was like the Blade Runner movie set vomited into a six-foot wide space between two decrepit buildings. There were stalls along the sides where people were invariably cooking strange-looking and stranger-smelling foods in open pits, strewn among the garbage and filth. Tracy said she was starting to get slightly ill from the smell and sight.

We burst into the marketplace and, sure enough, the attack was instant. Most of the tourist predators in Bangkok like to start with a rowdy "hello!" before attempting to cajole the baht right out of our pockets. We did a good job of ignoring them, feeling morally grossed out the whole time, and emerged onto the street to the Palace.

The sun was beginning to emerge, although with the polluted and steamy haze of Bangkok you can't even really tell where the sun is, only that it is, in fact, still up in the sky and that it is leisurely radiating you into oblivion. We greased up with some sunscreen in the shade of a nice tree by the main ticket booth to the Palace.

The Palace itself was very cool, or at least the associated Temple and the landscape immediately surrounding it because that's all we managed to tour. See the aforementioned picture album for some pretty cool snaps. We toured the grounds, and then took our shoes off and entered the main "sanctuary" of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha during a reading being conducted by a Buddhist monk in a powerful and serious voice. I wanted to kneel for a while and take it in with the other worshippers, but Tracy wasn't quite as comfortable as I was, so we exited after a few minutes. Of course there is no photography allowed in the main Temple, but we did get to see the famed Emerald Buddha in his summer outfit.

We rambled back over to the docks at the appointed time, but our driver wasn't there. There were several ladies sitting on the dock lacing necklaces with blooms from flowers. The garlands were pretty and we might actually have bought one had they offered, but I was glad they didn't pursue a transaction.

As the minutes wound on, we realized that our driver wasn't going to come back. We waited for about half an hour and it became even more painfully obvious. As the betrayal set in, the locals asked us if we wanted to pay for another boat. "Get Bent," I said, which probably doesn't translate very well into Thai, and we ambled back out into the marketplace to hail a cab.

A buddy of mine warned me about the cabs in Bangkok. He said usually they would try to quote you a price in advance rather than turn the meter on. The quoted price would probably be several multiples of what the metered price would end up being, and he said I should insist the meter gets turned on as soon as we start moving, or just tell him to pull over and we would exit.

Here in this day of scams and shams, I was actually prepared for this technique to be used against us, and quite ironically the driver dutifully fired up his meter as we pulled away from the curb. We were finally on the way back to the hotel, sweaty and miserable.

The Grand Palace and the Shangri-la are both on the East side of the Chao Praya. As we rolled away from the Palace, one of the first things that our cabbie did was cross the river, which sent Tracy into a mild panic. I guess she was already in a mode of thinking that we were one wrong turn from getting gutted in an alleyway somewhere. First she wanted to see the map that I was carrying in my fannypack. She deduced that the river crossing was strictly unnecessary and that it was proof the cabbie meant to do us ill.

I calmed her down pointing out the cabbie's likely route was to cut directly south and then back east across the river right by our hotel, which would skip a lot of the denser portions of Bangkok along the river. This placated her and we actually managed some nervous laughter about our black day. The cab ride cost us less than $2, but I gave the cabbie the equivalent of $5 because we were so thrilled to be back.

After we got back to the hotel, we showered to get the stink of the Chao Praya off us, then went down to an excellent dinner at the very nice Thai restaurant at the Shangri-la. At least it was a nice ending to a crappy day. On our second full day in Bangkok, we stayed at the hotel, taking a dip in the pool, getting massages and doing some shopping. The morning after that we headed to the Bangkok airport to catch our flight to Koh Samui, very happy to be done with our three nights in Bangkok.

--

I'm not sure exactly why our experience was so awful. My buddy Kenny, who has spent lots of time in Bangkok, recommended the trip to us and he seemed pretty mortified that we had such an awful time. Obviously it wasn't his fault though. Maybe we should have considered getting a paid tourguide for the day. And if we had done that, we would have waited until after the day was done to pay him.

Holy jetlag batman

2004-06-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are suffering under something that might be called the worst jetlag ever imaginable. We aren't showing any symptoms of being infected with some sort of cold or virus. But I in particular am completely unable to sleep more than about three or four hours at night and I completely crash in the middle of the afternoon.

We arrived back home this past Wednesday afternoon at about 5pm, after having been up for more than 24 hours for the whole flight from Bangkok to Tokyo to Vancouver to Portland. I catnapped a bit on the plane, not being the kind of person that can really get good sleep on the plane. We gutted it out until 10pm and thought we were being smart and trying to beat the jetlag. I slept like a rock a good nine or ten hours.

The next afternoon I just crashed. I couldn't stay away and I slept for a couple hours. Thursday night I went to bed at probably 11 and slept until 5, and was wide awake. Thursday afternoon I crashed again. It's happened predictably each day since. During the day I feel compeltely groggy and dazed and I can't sleep properly. My mood has been very irritable, my appetite has been inconsistent. Hell even bowel movements are adventures in themselves.

I've done a bit of research on the topic.

Jetlag is known medically as desynchronosis. The basic problem is that your body responds in certain understood ways to light and darkness, and attempts to regulate your sleeping and eating periods accordingly. These cycles are called circadian rhythms.

When you traverse several timezones, you kinda pull the rug out from under your circadian rhythms and they no longer conform to the local patterns of day and night. This causes all kinds of weird problems, but the first and foremost is difficulty sleeping at night and tendency to sleep during the day.

Evidently the best and least expensive way to cure it is to expose yourself to lots of bright light, i.e. sunshine, during the middle part of the day. This will help your circadian rhythms to realign themselves with the local daylight hours.

One thing that has been said to me that I didn't believe but appears anecdotally to be true: travelling east several timezones is much worse than travelling west. I didn't really experience much jetlag when I arrived in Japan. We were pretty groggy that first night, but we slept and then the next day were out and about without a whole lot of problems. Returning home has been a whole different story.

Here are the sources I used while researching this topic that has been heavily on my mind the last few days. Listed in order of decreasing usefulness:

http://www.sleepdisorderchannel.net/jetlag/ <-Excellent source
http://www.doctor-travel.com/jetlag.html
http://www.flyana.com/jetlag.html
http://www.nojetlag.com/jetlag1.html

Koh Samui and the dangers of being Western

2004-06-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

So, Tracy and I are sitting in an Internet cafe in Chaweng, Ko Samui, Thailand. We've come a long way since Osaka, in more ways than one. I'm disappointed that I haven't had a chance to blog more, but all the stuff I want to say will take hours to enter sufficiently. I'm taking good internal notes and I'll have lots of time around the house to complete my blogging once I've returned home.

Picture logs updated. Good pics at http://gallery.maybe.net/osaka

Other tidbits

2004-06-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

More Osaka/Kobe tidbits that I've learned or laughed at. Keep in mind that these things are specific to my experiences, your mileage may vary. These phenomena might be fairly localized to the Kobe area of Japan.

- "snack" bars. In Kobe the term "snack bar" actually means a place where you can go and pay women to flirt with you. There's no nudity involved, although I would have to imagine that some amount of backroom prostitution occurs. It's often the destination of guys hanging out drinking after a long day at work. And Japanese businessmen work long hours and work hard, so they really blow off steam when they relax.

- Pachinko parlors. These are the closest things to casinos you'll find in Japan (for the moment, anyway). It closely resembles a regular video arcade except with rows of pachinko machines. Pachinko is somewhere between slot machines and pinball.

- Crane games with food in them. You know the classic "crane game" where you try to pick up stuffed animals with a claw? They have these, but some of them have Food in them. Imagine sinking a couple dollars worth of quarters to snag a snack-sized box of Frosted Flakes. I kid you not.

- Interesting video games. Along that topic, I played a couple interesting video games and saw a couple other interesting ones. First was Taiko No Tatsujin, which I'm led to believe I should have known about somehow. Although I haven't yet seen it in a Stateside arcade. There is a PS2 version of this BTW. The premise of the game is basically taiko drumming meets Dance Dance Revolution. I played it and it was a blast. Another game I saw was a game where you attempt to chop sushi. In another, the object is to slide a drink, an actual physical glass with plastic inside it to look like a drink, down a bar surface to a virtual customer.

- Green tea. I never really liked the flavor of japanese green tea much, being much more of an oolong kind of person. However the Japanese are packaging green tea in ways that make it appealing to even my barbaric senses. They have green tea ice cream, green tea smoothies and green tea chewing gum.

- Very few shiba inus. We were led to believe when we got our Shiba Inu, Hachi, that this was a very popular breed in Japan. We saw four, total, and one of them was probably a mix.

More coming later. I'm collecting my various thoughts into a corporeal form.

Well, I'm here. Three long days packed into 24 hours

2004-06-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

It's after 11pm here, the end of our first full day in Osaka. We arrived at about 3pm yesterday afternoon, after a combined total of 11.5 hours of flight travel from Portland to Vancouver to Osaka.

Here's a few stream-of-consciousness items I want to get down before I forget.

Driving ranges. The Japanese love their driving ranges. You can see them from miles away, because they're all these great structures with green netting. They look like great green crab traps just sprinkled all over the city. I counted no less than fifteen just on the bus ride to Kobe.

- Bars. This may be a phenomenon local to my brother's place in Kitano, but each and every building in the cool districts have at least one, likely several "Bars" in them. The bars are quite frequently above ground level and always have some funky name that always includes the word "bar." Some of the names are pretty clever, some just weird and a couple are laughingly funny. Bar names:

Bar 37.2 Degrees. Didn't get it at first; turns out that's human body temperature in Celsius. Cool.

Bar Soap. I shit you not.

Green Alligator Bar: Jazz Live and Restaurant.

more examples later

- Trains. Everything you hear about Japanese trains and subways is true. People will pack these things to the gills and are extremely aggressive about pushing people ahead of them onto the trains to make room. Then, when everyone is literally nuts-to-nuts packed onto the train, they close their eyes, hold on and just pretend they're somewhere else.

- Train stations. Somehow, train stations became centers of commerce and are more like malls than train stations. Some of them are very much districts in and of themselves, stretching for blocks in every direction underground.

- Yodabashi Camera. This is like a multi-story Fry's with a pretty swanky clothing store attached to it. Too bad the prices are actually pretty bad, relative to the same items at a U.S. Best Buy or Fry's. But Yodabashi is crazy with banners and loud colors and insidious jingles being piped constantly over the PA.

- Sky tower. The "Kuchu Teien Tenbodai City" is a pretty large (by Japanese standards) tower in Osaka with a pretty cool observation area at the top. See my pictures.

- Shabu shabu. Shabu shabu is more like an adventure than a meal. It's part of a whole class of Japanese cuisines that involve a boiling, vaguely broth-like water in a pot in front of you, and thin strips of meat and veggies that you kinda "swoosh" in the boiling water to heat it up. It's a fantastic meal, but it's a lot of work. Plus you end up pretty damp and steamy from the boiling pot in front of you the whole time. Awesome.

- Hilarious T-shirts. The best t-shirts in Japan are very poorly translated english. We saw one baby-doll t-shirt on a mannequin with this on it: "I know I woulds never break if you..." It had nothing on the back. We've also seen very grandmotherly ladies walking around with sequined Playboy logos on their t-shirts.

- High heels. This is apparently the biggest trend in Osaka fashion, which may or may not be different from Tokyo fashion. Basically any woman under the age of 40 is probably a 50-50 chance to be wearing spike-heeled shoes no matter where she is or what she's wearing. Quite frequently the woman is miserable and her walk shows it. I even saw one woman with her ankle bandaged up with an ace bandage and tape, wearing spikeys. It's horrible and there's going to be a whole generation of Japanese women with orthopedic problems as a result.

Man. It's been really exciting and cool so far. More later hopefully. Sorry this entry took so long to get out, I've been editing it as a draft ever since I arrived, but I bit off more than I could chew.

Leaving Tomorrow Morning

2004-06-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

The towncar comes to pick us up at 6:30am tomorrow. So this is it. Taking a break from packing and straightening up to type this message in.

While I'm in Osaka I'll have no trouble finding internet access, since my brother's apartment has cable modem. Once we hit Bangkok, I'll have to go out of my way to find an internet cafe, so the updates will be less frequent. Hopefully I'll manage to average about a post every couple days while I'm there. The bonus will be posting some photos as well. More realistically I'll have to link my image gallery and upload the photos ex post facto.

Adios! See you across the ocean.

Going through the motions

2004-05-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the last day of your senior year of high school? It's a truly interesting time and I'm experiencing something similar right now.

On your last day of senior year (and I'm talking about the last day you actually attended classes, in the event that you skipped your last day like most people do), you're living in suspended animation. That is, the rest of the world around you is travelling through time normally; mailmen are delivering the mail, gas station attendants pump gas, your parents go to work, etc. But the lens of time is focused on you, and you are frozen in time for a brief instant. Whatever has come to pass is about to vanish, the near future is wide open, and the distant future is just a blur.

I had a similar experience on the day my father and I packed up a moving truck with all my possessions and began the drive to Austin, Texas, to begin my first job after college.

The last days of work before an extended sabbatical, especially one that is much looked forward to, are very similar. My peers around me are buzzing about their long-term projects and daily tasks, going to meetings, rolling up their status reports. Meanwhile I'm going through the motions. I'm here because someone who is covering for me may need to ask me questions about something and they need to have access to me for this period of time before I go. But I obviously cannot take on new work or start new tasks except those of the most trivial nature and shortest length. The camera of space/time has taken a snapshot of me. I'm going through the motions, showing up and sitting in my cubicle, half-heartedly wandering to meetings. But anybody who doesn't need my immediate assistance is actively avoiding me, almost as if they don't want to put intellectual investment into someone that won't be around for the next two months.

In my case, of course, my future is a round-trip. In nine weeks or so I'll be back here. Things will have changed, possibly significantly. But I will be here, and generally so will my peers. So perhaps the space/time snapshot is a bit more wide-angle than during my last day of high school. But it's an interesting reminder of the taste of things on those special days when everything around you is still swirling downstream, while you perch on a rock in the middle of the rapids.

Let's start debunking the RIAA's lies

2004-05-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Filesharing is Not the Enemy, an article by Joy Lanzendorfer of AlterNet.

It's a worthwhile read. It begins to shed some light on the lies that the recording industry is forcing down our throats in the name of preserving their status quo.

In fact, for the most popular 25 percent of CDs, the study found that downloading boosts sales. For every 150 songs downloaded, sales of that album jumped one copy.

"The only thing we can confidently say is that filesharing makes some people buy more records and some other people buy fewer records," says Fred Von Lohmann, Staff Attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation. "But there's no very clear data on what the ultimate balance of the situation is."

Take a gander at this article and the study it was based on to glimpse the deceit of the RIAA.

Blue Cake

2004-05-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Janitorial Staff,

This afternoon I returned for reclamation the contents of the bottle of Code Red that I drank in my 1:00pm meeting. I was happily urinating in the restroom when I looked over at the urinals and noticed something that left me in dismay.

In the porcelain part of the urinals all I could see was a small amount of water. I didn't see the traditional blue cake of miscellaneous material that usually resides there.

This letter is to humbly request that you commence the installation and maintenance of the aforementioned blue cakes. They are beneficial in numerous ways. First of all, they give a target to shoot at. We all know how one's aim can wander when there's isn't a clearly defined target to shoot at. We all need goals in life. Secondly, they are cute and tasty besides.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

The countdown is nearing.

2004-05-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

I leave in approximately 17 days for my sabbatical trip. According to our trip insurance policy, if there is some significant terrorism-related event in either Osaka or Bangkok, we can bail and get our money back. However the event must be 10 days or less from our date of departure.

So basically we would pretty much already have to be beheaded and hanging on a pole in order to get our money back. Handy.

On the other hand, the violence in Thailand appears to be very localized to the most southern provinces. And since the US doesn't have a significant military presence there, they're not likely to try to make an example of two ordinary American citizens.

We're gonna wear iron collars just in case. We'll call it a new American fashion trend for travelling abroad.

Just a warning for the future. I will shortly begin preaching about the evils of content control currently being exercised by monopolistic commercial regimes, in particular the RIAA but to a lesser extend the MPAA as well.

My musical influences

2004-05-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

This entry is about music. I'll avoid annoying you with lots of links to bands that you may or may not know like I did in my introductory post. Mostly because it's a pain in the ass for me to construct those links. Let's just say that if you want to know more about any of the artists I mention, go see the website AllMusic, which is the frontend for the AMG, All Music Guide. It's a fantastic resource that I have burned hour after hour on because of its extensive cross-referencing. It's like a microcosm of the WWW except it's entirely about music. Fabulous.

I've been listening to music for as long as I can remember. Now, that sentence applies to most folks I would imagine but I'm going to change of the terminology therein.

When I say "listen to music," I really mean "devour and consume music." I mean take it in and know it, with an intimate knowledge, until it becomes a part of my being. It's more than just knowing a song by heart, and more like knowing it by soul. I take the song apart, each detail flaking off like layers of baklava. These are not just musical technical details, not just sonic signatures, but also an insight into the emotional state of the artist and indeed of the culture that produced the music. I listen to the way the music was mixed. I listen to the unintentional sounds that languish in the track. The squeak of a kick pedal that was poorly oiled. The collateral rattling of a snare head during a passage when the drums are largely quiet. The wrong notes, the right notes, the amazingly right notes, and the perfect notes.

That's not to say I'm an audiophile. I don't think I am. I have a very good ear I think, but rather than utilizing my ear to be critical of my audio equipment, I just use the ear to ferret out more details. I can enjoy going through this process, even with a recording that might be considered less than perfect. For instance, say, an mp3 encoded with a mediocre codec at 128kbps bitrate. I can get past the acoustic imperfections and get into the meat of the song.

My brother Rog was born in 1960 and is almost exactly 12 years older than me. He is also a music buff. I can't really say whether he's more or less a music buff than I. I think possibly more, but maybe it's just more accurate to say he's as much of a music buff, but in a slightly different way. His favorite band of all times is the Rolling Stones. I don't think the Stones put out a single album that he ever disliked. At least, maybe not until the 80s, but I'll double-check that as well.

I was obviously subjected to his musical influences when I was very young. I remember him pulling vinyl of Sticky Fingers out and I remember looking at the funky artwork with the classic Stones "lips" logo which was on the inner paper sleeve. I remember an old Linda Ronstadt album whose cover features her in short-shorts, tube socks and roller skates. I remember Supertramp, Steely Dan, Billy Joel and Elton John. I also vaguely remember Joan Armatrading, Earl Klugh, Boz Scaggs. Rog's music collection is a classic rock mausoleum that tends a bit towards the jazzy side. When I say mausoleum, I'm not trying to dis it. I'm telling you that it's a lovingly constructed, respectful museum of sounds and art, each record handled with care and intimacy. Rog used to get pretty uptight about his vinyl LPs, as I found out from time to time when I mishandled them as a small child. Similarly I saw minor wrath when I mishandled his turntable needle or his headphones.

I think I picked up a fondness for my brother's music that surprised most people that are my age. For instance, I can honestly say that I don't have a single acquaintance or friend (except for my wife, more about her musical habits later) who likes Steely Dan. I tend to surprise people significantly older than me with my familiarity with that kind of artist. But I cheated; I listened to my brother's music.

The most fascinating musical phenomenon I remember Roger showing me was back-masking. I don't think he owned any of the Beatles albums that supposedly had back-masking in them, and he wasn't a metalhead who listened to Black Sabbath. The example of back-masking that he showed me was in a song by the Electric Light Orchestra. I don't remember the name of the song but I remember the content of the backward lyrics as if I heard it yesterday:

The music is reversible
But time is not
Go back
Go back

I remember how incredible I thought it was. I was simultaneously terrified and joyous. Terrified because of the connotations of occult association, the raw evil dripping from the speakers. Joyous because it was just so damned cool. The backwards prose was so blatant that perhaps it's inaccurate to call it back-masking. It probably should have been called "record some poetry backwards and insert it into this part of the song to make us mysterious or whatever."

In addition to whatever was playing on Rog's stereo, I also got a fair dose of exposure to whatever was getting FM airplay at the time. Radio exposure was mostly through whatever my parents were listening to on the radio in the car, or at home. Their choices tended to be soft pop teetering on the borders of country, oldies and easy listening. Lots of Hall and Oates, America, The Eagles, England Dan and John Ford Coley, Willie Nelson, Burt Bacharach, Chicago.

I also listened to a little bit of classical music. I'm not sure why, except that I started taking piano lessons when I was six and my teachers probably recommended it to me. I remember my very first record was a performance of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata by Philipe Entremont, which I bought at a funky record store in the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. I was probably six or seven. That sonata, and indeed that particular performance, is still my favorite classical music piece, and I guess I sorta always figured I would someday learn how to play it. I haven't yet. At this point it's realistically out of my reach, although it certainly wasn't at some point in the past. Other classical records I got featured Chopin and Mozart, some of which I can honestly say I learned to play during my piano career. Even some of the relatively difficult stuff. But I was much better at listening to the songs than playing them.

Somehow I even got that gawd-awful animal concerto by Camille Saint-Saens. I seem to recall a music teacher in elementary school pushing that on us. At least I can say that our sappy music teachers weren't solely responsible for exposing us to horrid music. I distinctly remember one of my 5th-grade classmates, rather unfortunately named Mike Angelo, brought in a copy of the soundtrack for Chariots of Fire and our teacher happily played it for us. Probably because, being completely without vocals except for a spine-chilling rendition of the British hymn "Jerusalem," the album could hardly be considered to be a negative influence in any way. I fell in love with that album. The carefully crafted synth tunes by Vangelis (disregarding the overplayed opening track to the album) instilled in me a burning desire for synthesizers and was probably solely responsible for my mild penchant for spacey new age music.

When I was eight or nine I discovered Doctor Demento and a whole new side to music. Dr. D made me realize that my goofy spastic tendencies could find some outlet in music. I was introduced to Weird Al Yankovic, Pac Man Fever, and Fish Heads. It was novel to me that wit could find a home in music, even if the wit now seems simple and corny.

I wanna kiss her but(t), she won't let me.
I wanna whisper sweet nothings in her (r)ear.

I used to record the radio show on an absolutely pitiful little tape recorder so I could "listen" to the songs all week until the next show. I would also make it a habit to nab a few minutes before the show and after it for some reason. I will always remember one tape in particular that I don't think I ever erased, that had "Fish Heads" during Dr. Demento and then immediately following it was the song "Kiss on My List" by Hall and Oates. Perhaps during my trip back home this summer I'll dig up some old tapes featuring these old shows. If I get hold of these, I'll try to record them onto my laptop for digital posterity's sake.

I probably didn't listen to straight-up "pop" radio until 5th grade. Around that point there is a dawning awareness that whatever it is that your classmates and friends are doing is somehow much cooler than what you, your brother and your parents are doing. It's not that prior to that you believed what your friends were doing was uncool. It was just more like what they were doing was completely irrelevant. I remember also starting to record Kasey Kasem's Top 40 countdown on the same tapes that I previously reserved for Doctor Demento.

That April, for my tenth birthday, my brother and his girlfriend of the moment, Colleen, bought me two of my own vinyl albums. The distinctive feature of these albums was that they were decidedly rock albums. The discs were Men At Work's Business as Usual and Billy Joel's Nylon Curtain. Possessing these two albums thrust me fully into the world of pop music. My brother even let me play them on his nice turntable occasionally, and I taped the albums using his strange angular Yamaha tape deck. That was probably the moment in time that doomed me to be a music fan for the rest of my life.

As a postlude. The summer after my fifth grade year was rather uprooting because we moved from Boulder to Lexington, where I was born but had no memory of, aside from summer vacations "home" to see family. I suppose there are worse times to uproot your kids and move them. But there are definitely better times than the summer before sixth grade. After the move, uncertainty, loneliness and insecurity made music a powerful fulcrum in my existence. More on that later I suppose.

I promised a note about my wife's musical preferences. I suppose it's simplistic to say she likes whatever I like. Not entirely true, but simplistic. It probably doesn't give her enough credit for having her own tastes, but she was not brought up in a musical environment as I was. She does gain an unlikely familiarity with the music that I favor, the Level 42s and the Steely Dans, that should would never have gained had she not met me. But she also retains some mild musical tastes of her own. She tends toward Gypsy Kings, Jesse Cook, Shakira. Sort of a world music thing I suppose. She also appropriated some of my old spacey new age stuff to use for her yoga activities, in particular Ray Lynch. Some of it has not been seen since, but oh well.

My sabbatical plans

2004-05-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

My sabbatical begins on Memorial Day weekend. The company that employs me has a fairly generous policy of giving employees eight weeks of paid sabbatical time every seven years of employment. My start date was in 1997, so I'm eligible and I'm choosing to take mine over the early part of the summer.

My wife also works at Intel and she will be eligible for hers in September 2006. Intel introduced a new policy that would have allowed me to postpone mine to match up with hers. But there's a whole bunch of reasons that probably didn't make much sense, the biggest of which being that we'll probably have some rugrats running around before Sept 2006 so the idea of sabbatical will take on a whole new meaning. I want to take mine while the taking's good.

The negative part of that is that Tracy can't take nearly as much vacation as 8 weeks, so I'll be spending a good chunk of my sabbatical either at home or elsewhere away from her. Not ideal, but maybe getting away won't be so bad.

On June 5th we'll be travelling to Osaka, Japan. My brother is an attorney for Matsushita and he's living in Kobe for the next couple years. The opportunity seemed pretty great so we're making the most of it. Free lodging and a tour guide in Osaka, plus my two nephews and my niece to visit.

After the first week we're travelling to Bangkok, where we'll be spending two days and three nights. Then on to Koh Samui for some (hopefully) fun in the sun for another three or four days, then flying back home. I say hopefully sun because early June is the transition period to the rainy season in that part of the world, so we might be in for some wet weather. As long as we have one good day of sun when we can walk on the beach, I think I'll be okay with a bit of rain. I also hope to be posting to my blog pretty regularly during my trip. That is, provided some nice Muslim chap doesn't behead me along the way.

Hopefully I'll get some pictures uploaded and get those linked into these posts as well.

So after two weeks in Japan and Thailand, Tracy goes back to work but I still have about six weeks to kill. I'll spend two weeks at home, probably puttering around the house doing fixit stuff and possibly building my own Texas Holdem Table, and probably playing a good chunk of poker as well.

Then it's off to Kentucky for three weeks. I'll be staying with my mom, which if I weren't so secure about my manhood, would be a nightmare of adolescent proportions. But there's a task involved. My mom has been living in our old house, even since Dad passed away back in 1999. The house is a great house but it's way too big for her and her little rat-dog JayJay, so I'm going to see if I can get her to start getting ready to move out. My mom is a creature of inertia but hopefully I can help her on that front by getting the house in order. We'll probably have a pretty big garage sale and clean out various attics and boxes. And I'll probably emerge with a big parcel of tools and books to send back home. Like I have room for it. My house might actually collapse in on itself and become a quantum singularity.

I'll be doing some fun stuff too. I'll be hanging out with some high school buddies there in Lexington. And along the way we're going on a road trip to see Van Halen perform in Columbus. That should be a pretty weird reliving of high school. Hopefully I don't feel too terribly pathetic living at Mom's place for three weeks. I'll be staying in the bedroom downstairs rather than my old bedroom, which is a good thing. Not just because I don't want to think of what colonies of life might be evolving on the mattress I slept on during puberty, but just for general not-feeling-like-a-loser-ness.

Perhaps another side trip with my mom and my uncle to Caesar's casino in New Albany, Indiana. And I'll have to go see the inlaws in Shelbyville and Louisville. Shew, this is starting to sound like a lot of work.

I'll definitely have my laptop with me in Kentucky and I think during the evenings, when my mom is being her usual homebody self and my old friends are trying to have real lives, I'll have lots of time to blog to my heart's content. I would imagine some really strange ramblings might come out of those sessions. Stuff that will probably make me sit back and think twice about hitting the "publish" button.

Heck maybe I'll even start working on the novella I know I have stirring around in me somewhere. It's going to be Philip Dick meets Philip Roth meets Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield. It's really all about the Philips. Y'know?

Introduction. FIRST POST F*CKERS!

2004-05-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

Hello there. My nome de plume or nome de internet or whatever is "Mojo Tooth." This is a name that I took for myself originally in 1995, when I was looking for a permanent persona to use for email addresses, etc. I do have a real name, Stacey Ross. I'm not crazy, I don't call myself "Mojo" in real life and my friends and wife don't call me "Mojo." Unless I'm at a LAN party or something. But I digress. My point is, Mojo Tooth is what I'm called on the Internet, it's a name I like and has specific meaning to me, and I'll stick with it.

My blog here will be used to record my thoughts and to share interesting things that I see around the web. I'll also be preaching some on the topics for which I feel a lot of passion.

Here's the agenda for this post. First I'll put down some stuff about me. Then I'll put down some stuff telling you what I like and don't like. Then I'll wrap up with telling you specifically the things that are going to be happening to me in the near future, which might explain more about why I'm starting this blog in the first place.

I was born at the tender age of zero in Lexington, Kentucky. Although my younger years (ages 2-11) were spent in Boulder, Colorado, I spent the bulk of my formative time in Kentucky. I graduated high school in 1990 at Tates Creek High School in Lexington and
went to college at the University of Louisville. I got my Masters in Electrical Engineering in 1995 and moved to Austin, Texas to work for Advanced Micro Devices. After merely a year working in microprocessor verification, AMD laid off half the team that I was working for, including yours truly.

Three weeks after being laid off I married my wonderful wife, Tracy. She says she never had any doubts about marrying a laid-off engineer, but I'm sure there was a twinge of uncertainty.

In any event, in March of 1997 I went to work in Hillsboro, Oregon at Intel, also in microprocessor validation. My wife and I have been there ever since, happy and healthy, and here I am.

I have a mix of things that I am passionate about. I'd say no particular one is unique, but I have yet to meet someone who has the same mix that I do.

The first is hockey. I am a fan of all forms of roller and ice hockey. I have been playing hockey since I was 20 or so. Obviously I would like to have been playing since I was six, but living in Kentucky (and even 70s Colorado) made that unlikely. I was first turned on to hockey by one of my best highschool friends, Steve Loughrige. After he spent a year of our high school time in St. Louis, he caught the hockey bug and evangelized it to his friends.

To me, hockey is the ideal combination of power and grace, strength and speed, violence and intelligence. I love the overall flow of the game, and I obsess over the details. My friends have called me a "hockey almanac," although I'm sure my hockey knowledge is just mediocre by true fanatic standards. Since I spent a couple years in Texas, the closest thing to a hometown team I have had is the Dallas Stars, so I am basically a Stars fan. The teams that I hate tends to vary from year to year, changing based on what punks are playing on what team. The only invariant is the Detroit Red Wings, whom I tend to hate with more than just a little fire.

Another passion of mine is music. I don't imagine my passion for music, relative to most other people, is that big of a deal. I tinker with writing and recording music, having had twelve years of classical piano training, through to my senior year in high school. I don't consider myself a classical music buff though, although I still fondly remember certain music I learned. Various tunes by Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Debussy in particular.

I wouldn't exactly say I'm a fan of "pop" music. I have liked artists that have been popular. Unlike some music snobs, I would say that the popularity of an artist doesn't factor negatively or positively towards my feelings about that artist. Some examples of artists that I have "devoured" and been very much a fan of:

You'll recognize most of those artists, if you are roughly the same age as me. But you probably won't recognize all of them. If you are familiar with all of these artists, drop me a note. You're the first person I've met who is.

Another passion of mine is poker. I've played poker off and on all my life, starting with the cartridge that came in the box with my Intellivision when I was a kid. I didn't play a whole lot in college, but I am a member of the new poker revolution caused in large part by the World Poker Tour in the last year or so.

The primary motivating factor in me creating this blog is that I'm about to go on my sabbatical from Intel. I hope to provide updates that are interesting, and I'll also have some time to ramble and ramble about whatever floats my boat.

My next post will be focused on my sabbatical, what my plans are and what I hope to accomplish.