truth against the world

this blog is closed

2007-06-07T09:32:00.001-07:00

i moved to livejournal.

see iseethefnords for all that is tim.

wow

2007-06-06T11:06:00.001-07:00

just.... wow.

starting them off right

2007-06-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

a friend of mine just had a kid, and he says that he's playing the little one lullaby versions of radiohead, tool, nine inch nails, led zeppelin, bjork, etc.
that is too rad for words.

take that, gravity!

2007-05-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

wow...that was my first time biking home. if you can't see the picture above (click it to embiggen), it's 5.2 miles, of which a little less than a mile contains a roughly 350 foot climb. big big hill. i only had to stop four times.

tim: 1, gravity: 0.

24 hours of tim

2007-05-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

midnight saturday night thru midnight sunday night, presented in bulleted form.

* went to see sound lounge with chloe and seth to see chloe play
* left see sound lounge (after getting our picture taken) after waiting for chloe to get her turn to play and finally giving up
* got drunk-dialed by "decepticon girl" (more on that later) at 2 am, talked to her for an hour and a half
* woke up with my alarm at 10 am, promptly fell back asleep
* spacecats utterly failed to wake me up at any reasonable hour
* woke up again at 1 pm, showered and breakfasted
* talked to noel for something like 2 hours
* cleaned my entire house
* talked to molly for an hour or so
* talked to my mom for a bit
* left decepticon girl a voicemail
* finally installed a new coat rack by my front door
* exchanged various and sundry text messages with noel
* paid my bills for the next several weeks
* updated my car insurance policy

not bad for sleeping until after noon.

pale blue dot

2007-05-16T16:24:00.001-07:00

spotted on richard dawkins' blog, and reposted here:

8/11/33 - 5/15/07

2007-05-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

i'd like to join in with most of the rest of the blogosphere and celebrate the disappearance of reverend jerry falwell from this plane of existence today.

this is the guy who blamed 9/11 on this:

But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'

we are better off now that he's dead.

edit 5/16/07: this quote from larry flynt reminds me why it's important to have evil fuckers like this guy around, at least for a while:

The most important result of our relationship was the landmark decision from the Supreme Court that made parody protected speech, and the fact that much of what we see on television and hear on the radio today is a direct result of my having won that now famous case which Falwell played such an important role in.

shiny!

2007-05-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

i rode this new (used) beast in to work today. 9.4 miles round trip (not including the bus that takes me up the big-ass hill between work & home). so so so much easier than doing the same trip last week on my dad's old mountain bike.

she needs a name. any suggestions?

conference on world affairs, day...something

2007-04-12T07:54:00.001-07:00

Zoom
Originally uploaded by andyi.

Also, Tuesday night's jazz concert was awesome.

Um....yeah, that's all I got. Today -- Joe Wilson! Tomorrow -- Joe Biden! Snow! A Molly Ivins tribute! More snow!

conference on world affairs, day 1

2007-04-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

yesterday was the first day of the 59th conference on world affairs, being held in boulder at the university of colorado. and it's off to a great start.

our keynote speaker this year was judith kipper, a middle east expert from the council on foreign relations. the talk, "the middle east in an era of transnational threats," was remarkably upbeat (maybe that's not the right word exactly -- perhaps "not entirely depressing" is more apt) for the topic at hand. ms. kipper's conclusions, as i heard them, were basically a) the administration needs to follow the recommendations of the iraq study group; b) the administration needs to "take israel and palestine by the scruff of the neck" to the negotiation table and continue those negotiations in the manner of kissinger's work with egypt & israel during the yom kippur war; and c) the citizens of this country need to confront & interact with our politicians far more than we are doing now, especially in the upcoming presidential elections.

but my favorite panel of the day was simply titled "evil." my friend the philosopher achim kodderman started off the panel by summarizing, in about 20 minutes, nearly the entirety of western philosophical thinking about evil, ranging from plato & aristotle to leibniz, hegel, and kant, and covering everything in between. evolutionary psychologist tom macnamara next presented that profession's view of evil as a sociological construct, and then iranian polymath mohammad mahallati continued on achim's philosophical discussion by presenting the muslim and sufi ideas of evil. the final speaker on the panel was terri jentz who discussed an event that happened while she was a college student -- a psychopath attempted to kill her and her friend while they were camping in oregon -- and then her subsequent investigation of the attempted murder, 20 years later (which is documented in her book, strange piece of paradise). it was a fascinating discussion that can't be adequately summed up here.

and today... we shall see what panels i make it to -- and then there's the amazing (free!) jazz concert tonight.

pogonotrophy

2007-03-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

yes, there is a word for it:
pogonotrophy, n. the growing of a beard. from greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).

thank you, a-word-a-day email.

new bjork album!

2007-03-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

...and of course pitchfork is drooling all over it already.

my favorite quote from bjork from this interview:

I mean, the human race, we are a tribe, let's face it, and let's stop all this religious bullshit. I think everybody, or at least a lot of my friends, are just so exhausted with this whole self-importance of religious people. Just drop it. We're all fucking animals, so let's just make some universal tribal beat. We're pagan. Let's just march.

great galloping guestrooms

2007-03-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

in this here month of march, i will be having a total of seven houseguests.

to summarize:

march 1-3 -- my uncle stays at my house on his way to new zealand
march 8-10 -- andy & kelly stay here while attending my recently ex-roommate's wedding
march 11-13 -- juniper crashes here while interviewing at andrews space, then heads to portland for 2 days to visit friends, stopping off briefly on the 15th to borrow my car, grab her snowboard, and drive to whistler, briefly stopping by again on the 18th on her way out of town
march 15-18 -- morgan & friend stay here while attending training in tukwila (and celebrating st patty's day with me)
march 21-26 -- meagan here for part of her spring break

whew. the spacekitties are getting lots and lots of attention this month. maybe i will figure out a way to not have a roommate from now on; it's nice to be able to offer friends a place to stay.

RETURN TO THE MOON, AND DON'T FORGET THE CHICKS THIS TIME

2007-02-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

sometimes, dinosaur comics are awesome.

r.i.p. molly ivins

2007-02-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

this country has lost a true patriot and hellraiser.

molly ivins, 1944-2007

spacecats!

2007-01-28T13:03:00.000-08:00

meet yuri and valentina:

i just got them yesterday, and they're awesome.

yuri (lying down) is a big fucker - he weighs 22 lb, 12 of which was gained in the 6 months he was at the shelter.

more photos from their first day in their new home

2007-01-16T00:24:00.000-08:00

martin luther king jr day

watch it.

a list for today

2006-12-18T12:59:00.000-08:00

some of the names in the "from" field in my spam collection:

Dickon X. Lewis
Shoemaker X. Odette
Envisages H. Buckshot
Garland S. Pius
Owen T. Odom
Pullmans I. Lofty
Inequality H. Lieu
Jibbed G. Communicative
Duked D. Insureds
Ebony G. Thunderstorms
Acropolis I. Lederberg

these would make awesome christmas presents

2006-11-29T18:41:00.000-08:00

this tshirt:

or this tshirt:

available from the xkcd webcomic store

yet another victory in the War on Pies

2006-11-17T19:53:00.000-08:00

from this stunning report on thanksgiving travel:

Jams and jellies should be packed in checked luggage; pies should be carried on.

mustacherrific progress!

2006-10-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

week one:

week two:

mustache update!

2006-10-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

just in case you were wondering, no, i am not growing a "mustache for the majority," which is some sort of solidary thing put together by the democratic congressional campaign committee.

raising money for 826 seattle is a far better use of my upper lip, in my opinion. i can only hope that by teaching kids how to be more literate, they can help shape a country that's driven by the democratic ideals that this country was founded upon, rather than this two-party crazyworld that we're living in now.

sponsor my mustache!

2006-10-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

As some of you might have noticed, I shaved off my luxuriant beard this past week. This was not because I lost a bet, or because I miss getting carded at bars and liquor stores. Rather, I have just entered myself (or, more specifically, my upper lip) in the first annual Mustache-A-Thon for 826 Seattle.

What, you may ask, is 826 Seattle, and what is a Mustache-A-Thon, and most importantly, how may you contribute to this noble cause? Read on, and all will be explained.

First, 826 Seattle. Cleverly hidden behind the teleporter at the back of the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Store, 826 Seattle is a non-profit writing center dedicated to helping students aged 6-18 develop their creative and expository writing skills. They offer writing workshops, publishing projects, drop-in tutoring, and help with English language learning. All of their programs are structured around the belief that "great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to a young person's success." Or, as one of the 826 students puts it, "On a scale of 1 to 10, it's like infinity. It's like a library, but all personal and stuff."

Since all of 826 Seattle's programs are free, they seek financial help from many sources, including, but not limited to, mustaches. So from October 12 through November 16, I will be growing a mustache in order to help them raise money. 826 Seattle has a goal of raising $10,000 through the sponsorship of mustache growing, which will finance writing field trips, workshops, and the publication of an anthology of stories written by 826 Seattle students.

So what I'm asking for is your sponsorship of my mustache. Any and all contributions are welcome, but to make things more interesting (as if mustache growing needed to be made more interesting), the person who has contributed the most by November 16 will get to choose the style of my mustache. Should I grow it in the style of Langston Hughes? Or Kurt Vonnegut? Perhaps the Arthur Conan Doyle style? Or the Frederick Nietzsche? Only you and your checkbook can decide.

All donations are tax-deductible, and can be made right here via PayPal or at the official Mustache-A-Thon web site. More information on 826 Seattle can be found at their web site or by stopping by the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Store at 8414 Greenwood Ave N in Seattle.

I thank you, my mustache thanks you, and most importantly, the kids of Seattle thank you.

fun with an electric razor

2006-10-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

this evening's entertainment: preparation for the mustache-a-thon.

details to follow.

you see, it's funny because i have a beard.

2006-09-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

(click the image 'cause it's too darn big to fit in this blog format)

anousheh ansari blogs from space

2006-09-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

this is an amazing description of ansari's flight to the international space station on a soyuz.
here's a snippet:

Finally the moment arrived and the countdown started. LA, Misha and I put our hands together and said “Ready… here we go.” I thanked God for helping me realize my dream and for everything it has given me. I asked it to fill the heart of all its beings with its love and to bring peace to this beautiful creation we call Earth.

5… 4… 3… I’m really going…2…I love you Hamid…1… and a smooth lift off.

Watching Soyuz TMA 8 launch, I never thought it would be this smooth inside the capsule… It was like an airplane takeoff — then the G’s started but very mild. I think we hit about 2 or 2.5 Gs max… then the separation and the Nose Fairing ejected. Still very smooth. A ray of light filled the capsule and warmed my heart. I think I was laughing out loud. The joy in my heart was indescribable…

The separation of final stage was the most noticeable to me and then Weightlessness…

This wonderful feeling of freedom that puts a smile on everyone’s face. I slowly lifted off my seat and continued giggling. I just couldn’t believe it… to be honest with you, the whole thing is still like a dream to me… I was strapped in so tight that I couldn’t look outside. Finally when we were safe in the orbit, we were able to open our visors and to loosen our belts…

L.A. took his glove off and it started floating in the cabin. I could not stop giggling the whole time… I was finally able to take a look outside and saw the Earth for the first time… Tears started rolling down my face. I could not catch my breath… Even thinking about it now still brings tears to my eyes. Here it was this beautiful planet turning graciously about itself, under the warm rays of the Sun… so peaceful…so full of life… no signs of war, no signs of borders, no signs of trouble, just pure beauty…

How I wished everyone could experience this feeling in their heart, specially those who are at the head of the governments in the world. may be this experience would give them a new perspective and help bring peace to the world.

yarrrrrrrrrrrr

2006-09-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

here be some pirate riddles for sophisticates from mcsweeney's.

and thanks be to molly fer this scallywag of a tshirt:

all hail discordia!

2006-09-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

Following near-unanimous acceptance by both the Committee on Small-Body Nomenclature and the Working Group on Planetary-System Nomenclature (in consultation with the discovery team), the IAU Executive Committee has now approved the names Eris for (136199) and Dysnomia for its satellite (136199) Eris I [formerly S/2005 (2003 UB313) 1; cf. IAUC 8610].

"eris" is a much better name for a minor planet than "xena."

gee, it must suck to be the first female space tourist

2006-08-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

space.com has a somewhat interesting article on the preparations of anousheh ansari to fly aboard the soyuz as "the first female space tourist."

the editors at space.com have done an interesting job of translating this article from what i can only assume was russian, but what i find more interesting is the last paragraph of the article:

However, just like passengers of US-bound flights, Ansari won't be able to carry any make-up on board. "I believe she is ready to sacrifice more than that for the sake of fulfilling of her dream," the unidentified IMBP official told Interfax when commenting on the cosmetics ban.

so, in other words, the poor woman has to go without makeup for TEN WHOLE DAYS in order to fly into space, and isn't that sad. great reporting there from mr. simon saradzhyan. but i can't help thinking that the quote from the "unidentified imbp official" is pretty snarky. the soviet union has been launching women into space (without their makeup, if you can believe that) since valentina tereshkova flew in vostok 6 in 1963.

nice work from space.com. the bbc article on ms. ansari's flight actually covers the important topics: she's an iranian-american businesswoman, she funded the x-prize, and now she's working with space adventures to bring space tourism to a wider group of people -- in short, a perfect person to be a space tourist.

but oh, how do those female astronauts deal with not having any makeup in orbit?

finally, someone tells it like it is

2006-08-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

ryanair threatens government over airport security

file under "awesome people who speak truth to power" -- ryanair ceo michael o'leary.

he calls the new security measures in britain's airports "farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don't add anything except to block up airports." which, of course, they are.

this is why the internet was invented

2006-07-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

...so that people can watch old recordings of william shatner's interpretation of "rocket man".

three things, now one

2006-07-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

the three greatest things to happen to me in the past five years:
1) my unbelievable job
2) being together with molly
3) being togeter with malora

i lost #2 late last year.

i lost #3 some time last week.

i still have #1, and it's still unbelievable.

be careful what you ask for

2006-07-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

you might just get it.

edit: ...but then again, you might not.

weekend in vegas

2006-06-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

i spent the weekend in las vegas with my dad and sister for my dad's 57th birthday.

i should write more about that, but until then, here's some photos of las vegas and the flight and drive home

writing!

2006-06-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

i set up a livejournal account some time ago so that i could comment on some of my friends' journals, but i never bother to blog there since i blog here.

but now i think i'm going to use livejournal for various writings and poetry, and keep this blog for bloggy things.

here's the first entry.

another travelin' song

2006-06-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

writing can only get better with practice. so here's some practice. thanks to malora for the inspiration to start writing again.

it's 8 pm and i'm leaving work. i should be staying later, should be going out to get dinner and then coming back, but i'll just procrastinate more and then get more annoyed about being so far behind. so i take one last sweep around the building to check out the coolness that is my office and head out the door. i take a shortcut through the tall grass as i walk to my car, and wait for all of my anxiety about work to slowly ebb away and be replaced by this other funk that's been lingering in my head. maybe the funk has musical roots, i think as i wait for my car to warm up, listening to the mournful anger of maynard keenan singing a eulogy for his mother. i eject the tool album that has seen little besides the inside of my car's cd player since i bought it, and replace it with the mix of americana that molly gave me some time during the wild ride that was the latest reconnection and disconnection in our ten-year history. the comforting twang of john prine should be exerting at least some pull on the old heart-strings, but as he drawls through the tune that we danced to so many times on that last night in her apartment, somehow my funk gets packaged away, sent off somewhere to stew and regroup while i instead start to self-analyze.

as i pull out into traffic and speed away, my mind picks up the polyrhythm of my rundown little car, and fires away in random directions. maybe listening to tool for days and weeks on end has slowly shifted me into a worldview that is darker and more cynical than i should be. maybe i need to get my car fixed so that it passes emissions and i can get it registered and avoid another $200 ticket like the one i got yesterday for expired tabs. maybe over half a year is plenty of time to get over molly and everything that i thought we had. maybe i should finally work on my yard tonight. maybe not having an emotional response to this album means that i am finally getting over this. maybe i should be working on my truck tonight. maybe i should get drunk. maybe i'm just not satisified with

dammit. there's a cop tailing me. just like yesterday morning, when the blue car pulled up right behind me and i could just feel him checking out my car with its broken taillight and its expired tabs before he flicked on his lights. i slow down a little and change lanes, hoping that i'm not speeding and wishing that my car has a working speedometer. the car changes lanes. can they give me two tickets for the same thing within less than a week? i take a turn early. and there it is behind me again. crap crap crap okay the car is turning somewhere else.

i put the speed back on because i have to get home and write down this trip, this simple vignette that plays every day with a rotating cast and a variety of voice-overs and soundtracks. i have to write because i need to write because creating words and sentences and stories is what gets these thoughts out of my mind and in to some semblance of structure, of order, and when that happens, well, when that happens then just maybe it's easier for me to see. and i would like to see.

once more, with feeling

2006-06-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

one of the most useful experiences that i had in college occurred in my "acting 101" class, some time around my sophomore or junior year.

i had been working on a monologue (i forget exactly what it was; probably a favorite of mine where a guy is telling an old girlfriend of his how everyone he's dated since her has involved settling for something insufficient and how he doesn't want to settle anymore and would rather be with her), and had gone through one or two practice presentations, but the instructor was unsatisfied with the level of emotion that i was presenting. emoting has always been one of my biggest difficulties with acting, and i wasn't doing much better with this monologue than i'd done in the past.

the solution that the instructor used was to have about 8 of my classmates hold me down on the ground. he then told me to deliver my lines while trying as hard as possible to get up off of the ground. my first couple of tries weren't all that impressive, probably due to my usual inability to take physical threats seriously. but after about the third time through the monologue, with the instructor repeating "get up! get off the ground! try harder! get up!" and my adrenaline finally getting going, i delivered a good, solid, pissed-off, railing at the world monologue.

the instructor said "great," then had my classmates release me so i could stand up, and said "now, do it again, only with just a little bit less." i did just that, and delivered the monologue with just the right intensity and emotion. having gone through that exercise, experiencing that high level of intensity, enabled me to see the entire range of expression available to me and choose the right level for the presentation at hand.

what an excellent lesson.

the coolest thing i've found on the internets today

2006-06-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

the legal implications of the word "fuck".

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

sasquatch 2006 concert report

2006-05-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

sitting in quarter-sized hail for a half hour = not my idea of a good time.

watching crazy fuckers belly-slide down a hail-covered hill 10 minutes later (one in a furry shark costume) = totally my idea of a good time.

oh yeah, and the bands were hella, too. although i missed the flaming lips (but i'll see 'em at lollapalooza).

let's see here...
clap your hands say yeah - wicked awesome.
queens of the stone age - fuck yeah.
the decemberists - always a good time.
the shins - pretty good show.
mercir - hella.
ben harper - fuck you for deciding that you had to play before the flaming lips due to "schedule issues from the inclement weather," and then playing an HOUR LONG ENCORE. fuck you very much.

this would be so awesome

2006-05-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

proposed light rail link extension from seatac airport to des moines.

there might (key word "might") be a vote on expansion of the light rail this november.

but then, this is the seattle area, and nobody around here has any goddamn clue how to put together a public transit system.

just like, or better than

2006-05-08T11:38:00.000-07:00

rusty schweickart on space tourism:

"I realized that space tourism is a little bit like sex: it’s exciting, it’s a little bit dangerous, or risky, perhaps, and when it’s well done it’s tremendously satisfying. But there’s more to it than that because, at a deeper level, it’s also the basis for reproduction, which is the foundation of survival."

i have a neighborhood bar.

2006-04-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

last night kattina and i checked out the one bar in my neighborhood that i can actually walk to from my house -- jj's bar and grill.

it's all of 0.7 miles (uphill) from my house, which is well within stumbling distance. other benefits of jj's:

a full kitchen (we didn't try any of their food last night as we'd just eaten)
$3.00 pints of fat tire
karaoke five nights a week (monday thru thursday plus friday)
a shit-ton of pool tables
an electronic dart board
pull tabs

i shall be making many trips to jj's in the future, i believe. it's nice to have a neighborhood bar.

i knew there was something interesting about this town

2006-03-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

it turns out that the claim to fame of des moines, washington, where i'm living these days, is that it was the location of the famous teacher-sleeping-with-her-student-then-eventually-marrying-him story of mary kay letorneau.

at least, this is where letorneau lived when this all happened.

this report has been brought to you by the fair and balanced report "lust-filled women on sex rampage with your kids" from worldnetdaily.com.

recipe for a good time

2006-03-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

holidays and things

2006-01-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

i'm not entirely sure that it's actually winter. the inch or whatever of snow from a while ago is but a dim, frosty memory. and all the snow i had to deal with during my business trip to ohio was, well, in ohio. so it doesn't count. but i'm not really complaining. i took a nice little walk up to the gas station up the hill from my house yesterday, in search of some coca-cola to help me deal with going to bed at 7 am on new years day. on the way back, i took some random shortcuts through my neighborhood and ended up at some tiny little park with a basketball hoop and some grass and the ingenious name of "parkside park." and a couple of empty 40's. but whatever. there are all these little weird greenbelts running through this town. very odd.

christmas was a good time. my dad and uncle and sister came out to visit. it didn't rain too much while they were here, i don't think. christmas dinner was pretty excellent - my dad baked a huge turkey in my oven, and my sister made some excellent apple pie. and i got to take my sister out drinking, now that she's 21. so we rocked it at club element downtown.

new years was pretty awesome. i'd been planning to either drive up to vancouver to see my friend chloe dj some kind of party, or to see tipper play here in seattle, but my friend kevin had a last-minute plan to throw a party at his house. the house party sounded much more my speed, especially given last year's craziness at the w hotel, with upwards of 20-minute waits at the bar and waaaay too many people. so i took the bottle of cachaça that my dad brought me from rio and a bunch of limes over to kevin's house, and didn't make it past the kitchen for a good hour or two. this was due to two reasons: 1) i was mixing caipirinhas for anyone who wanted one, and that turned out to be a rather involved process to slice up a bunch of limes and mash 'em up with some sugar before pouring in the cachaça; and 2) i got into a conversation with my friend andy and this girl, katina, about some movie involving people at concerts all freaking out about the bands they were seeing, and katina and i both had the same reaction, namely, to say that reminded us of the tmbg documentary, "gigantic." a couple of caipirinhas and many hours later found us taking a nice little walk through the marshland in the seattle arboretum.

today we had the day off of work, but i managed to get some work done from home, only after having lunch with my friend katie at pike place market, getting a tour of her coast guard boat where she lives, and making plans for the weekend with katina (and learning that she's teaching cryptography to 7th graders!).

oh, and here's another zen parable, of sorts, from this neat little book i'm reading called buddhism plain and simple: (click "view full post" below to see it)

The situation we always live in is like that of the wise Chinese farmer whose horse ran off. When his neighbor came to console him the farmer said, "Who know's what's good or bad?"
When his horse returned the next day with a herd of horses following her, the foolish neighbor came to congratulate him on his good fortune. "Who knows what's good or bad?" said the farmer.
Then, when the farmer's son broke his leg trying to ride one of the new horses, the foolish neighbor came to console him again. "Who knows what's good or bad?" said the farmer.
When the army passed through, conscripting men for war, they passed over the farmer's son because of his broken leg. When the foolish man came to congratulate the farmer that his son would be spared, again the farmer said, "Who knows what's good or bad?"
When do we expect the story to end?

dear itunes,

2006-01-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

don't try to tell me what to do with my music.

now please fuck off and let me finish making copies of my annual "cool music tim discovered this year" new years mix.

happy holidays

2005-12-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

pictures from the vault

2005-12-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

i finally got around to hanging up pictures and paintings in my bedroom this evening. that's pretty much the last room in the house that didn't have anything hanging on the walls, unless you count the laundry room. which i guess i should, although that's also the kitty's bathroom, so anything that gets hung on those walls will eventually end up smelling like kitty litter.

anyway, i decided to revisit my old practice of hanging a bunch of pictures of my friends in the corner of my bedroom, as seen here:

(note: all photo thumbnails in this post are clickable for supersizing goodness).
only this time i figure i should use framed photos instead of just taping them to my wall, since i'm a grownup or something. plus, i have this nifty frame that holds a bunch of photos that i've been meaning to use since i took all the pictures of cindy and i together out of it many a year ago.

i dug through all of the hard-copy photos that i have (yes, once upon a time, photographs existed in physical form only, and my digital camera was just a twinkle in my eye), and learned two things:
1) digging through old photos is a lot of fun
2) i need more picture frames.
oh, i suppose also
3) i have a lot of photos of people who may have ingested recreational pharmaceuticals, and are thoroughly enjoying themselves as a result.

so, here's a fun little trip down memory lane.

my old roommate cameron:

no comment, other than see (3) above.

a good chunk of one of my groups of friends from boulder. although this pic is from halloween one year, it's not all that different from how we looked going out on any other night.

a bunch of my friends from the dorms gathered at the house i lived at in 2000:

my good friend kari:

my friends darren and angie camping in 2001:

ryan and happy brian on halloween 2001:

molly outside the donut stop in omaha:

my punk rocker friend kelly when she came to visit me in boulder around 2000:

that about does it for photos i have in both photo and digital form. now it's time for bed.

snow!

2005-12-02T00:22:00.000-08:00

i just took a nice little walk around my neighborhood in the snow.

sweeeeet

2005-11-26T00:27:00.000-08:00

you say it's your birthday?

2005-11-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

these are things i have done since i turned 25, one year ago today. they're more or less in chronological order, with the help of my brand new treo 650.

i flew to new zealand on my birthday last year. i took lots of photos and had an excellent time running around with my uncle and nate and emma.

in december, i bought a car. it's a 1984 honda prelude with a crapload of miles on it. and it still works today. it's a good little car.

i spent christmas in boulder with my dad and stepmom and sister. we had christmas dinner at our friends the hurd's. a good time was had by all.

new year's was celebrated at the w hotel in downtown seattle with a bunch of my new friends and my girlfriend at the time. more photos were taken. it was quite excellent.

i got to meet all sorts of awesome people through work. i could tell you about that, but then i'd have to kill you.

i helped put together the plan for laying out our new building at work. it's going to be a great place to work.

i saw my former professor david grinspoon give a lecture here in seattle about life on titan. then i took him out for drinks.

i saw flogging molly in concert in february, and met my new friend ben. he's an odd duck. he wore a kilt to the show, which was an excellent choice.

i helped build something really cool that our company put together. then i watched it do something awesome.

i took a road trip to portland in february with my friends kevin and margaret, where we partied until the wee hours with our portland friends chris and jill.

my friend meridee moved out here with her boyfriend michael.

i got to introduce several of my friends to the excellent movie the american astronaut at a screening/concert in march. kevin was so impressed that he bought one of everything at the merch booth.

i saw a kid i knew from high school play drums for the band beep beep in an opening set for fellow omaha band the faint. i got a kick out of saying hi to him at the merch booth and talking about high school.

i started a book club with my now-roommate jana. it's called the maple street gang, after the omaha gang of the same name that appeared on some mid-90's mtv special on "gangs in the heartland" or some such thing.

my sister came to visit in march. we wandered around seattle a bit and had breakfast with the mom of her old friend gemma.

i spent my first conference on world affairs week as an audience member instead of an organizer. it was very different. okay, well, i wasn't an entirely passive audience member; i helped out quite a bit during the week. i took a bunch of photos and had an awesome time, not least because of lindsey. alas, my time with lindsey came to an end far sooner than i had hoped, but such is life. i also got snowed in on my way back home and had to buy a plane ticket to spokane and drive from there to avoid waiting an extra 2 days for the queue of snowed-in people trying to get back to seattle to dissipate.

i bought a house. that was pretty cool.

then i spent a bunch of time painting it. and painting it. and having my friend gwyn help me paint it.

my friend gwyn moved here, and had the dubious honor of being my roommate for a while. then our friend savannah moved here as well. i'm glad they moved out here; they're both pretty awesome people.

my friend juniper interned at my company over the summer. good times were had by all. especially when we took some of the other interns out to a gay club in vancouver. and especially when we got to fly on the zero-g airplane.

i attended the bachelorette party of my friend alicia, who i used to date sometimes back in boulder. that was pretty wild.

i removed, had serviced, and replaced the head on my 1954 chevy pickup. i still haven't finished putting everything back together.

i spent a weekend in portland with my dad. we went to a huge beer festival and hung out with my friend katie.

my other friend katie moved to seattle after joining the coast guard.

i flew to santa rosa in august to get my uncle's piano and a 1954 chevy panel truck, then drove them back to seattle with my dad in a big u-haul.

i spent an unbelievably awesome extended weekend with molly in august. we then spent a good couple of months figuring out just what that meant, but unfortunately what i had hoped would happen just didn't. so it goes. (there's a whole heck of a lot more i could write about that, but i'm not going to write it here, and if you're reading this and you know me very well, you've probably heard it already.)

i saw sigur ros in concert. holy shit that was incredible. easily in the top 5 concerts i've ever seen. i nearly wet myself.

i attended the excellent bumbershoot music & art festival in september. i got to see the decemberists, sarah vowell, mike doughty, death cab for cutie, devotchka, iggy & the stooges, elvis costello, and a whole crapload of other shows, plus i got to hang out with gwyn and jana and my friend keelie from colorado.

i finally watched two of the movies in the cremaster series, by matthew barney (who, among many other things, has the distinction of being married to bjork). i'm still trying to figure out just what the crap they were about.

i went to the ikea store for the first time. that place scares me.

and then this weekend, about 11 of my friends came out to dinner to celebrate my birthday and get me drunk. and drunk i got. phwew.

and now with all of 12 minutes left in my birthday, i'm off to bed.

quote of the day

2005-11-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

"if you want to work on your art, work on your life."
--anton chekhov

whoa

2005-11-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

if i carried a camera with me in my car, i'd be getting into all sorts of accidents.

the view of the snow-covered olympic mountain range towering over puget sound was just awesome on my drive into work this morning.

this is the part of the drive that's awesome.

wild like children

2005-10-30T17:41:00.000-08:00

first of all, here's a nifty sunset as seen from my front porch.

my house is awesome.

i've been listening a lot to the album "wild like children" by tilly & the wall. it's pretty awesome, in no small part because they have a tap dancer in their rhythm section. i really like how this album is put together. it starts off fairly jubilant with a style molly refers to as almost partridge-family-like, then by song two they're rocking out to the chorus of "i want to fuck it up! i want to fuck it up!" and all the while there's tap dancing.

friday night was about as wild and crazy as any night's been in quite a while. it started off with a burlesque show by the suicide girls, which was pretty good. i guess i expected something a little crazier than seeing some tattooed girls in their undies and pasties, but it was fairly entertaining. they did a couple of more risque sets involving a little b&d, most notably a recreation of the scene from reservoir dogs where michael madsen cuts off the cop's ear to the tune of "stuck in the middle with you." all in all, it was worth the price of admission, especially considering the excellent opening band, tsu shi ma mi re, a japanese girl punk band that spoke very little english but rocked everybody's socks off. i'm going to have to order their cd, if i can make sense out of the engrish on their ordering web page. hopefully one of the songs on there is the ska piece with a death metal chorus that they played at the show. a good time was had by most, plus it was fun to hang out with willow and david and pablos and other folks.

then i drove from capitol hill all the way to chloe's house in kirkland to join the halloween party that was already in progress, stopping to change from my rocketship bowling shirt into my candy-raver costume:

incidentally, it was harder than i expected to find candy necklaces for my candy-raver costume. after two different grocery stores, i hit up the dollar store near my house. jackpot! not only did they have candy necklaces, but also candy bracelets, candy watches, and ring pops. i'm not entirely sure what all happened, but it involved some excellent scotch brought by chris aka killsquad, some pumpkin ale, some pizza, and some falling out of chairs from laughter. and at one point we played an hour-long game of phone tag with sophie and nick, who were having their own halloween party in denver. i was there until about 4:30 am, i think. then i drove the hour back home and fell soundly asleep.

only to be awakened at about 9:30 am by a call from the guy who bought my dad's jeep. my dad had left me his jeep while he was out of the country, and i've been trying to sell it ever since he left. i finally found a guy to buy it, and he was so excited to get it that he had to call me at 9:30 in the morning on a saturday to tell me that he finally got the check from his bank and was on his way over to pick up the jeep. so i managed to carry out a transaction of several thousand dollars for a nice jeep in my state of semi-awakeness, and then i went back to bed.

when next light passed between my eyelids, it was not the bright light of the afternoon that i was expecting, or even the cloud-filtered light of a typical seattle fall or winter day. no, this was quite unmistakably twilight, a realization that caused me to a) roll over and squint at my clock, which read 6:something pm, and b) mutter something to the effect of "you've got to be fucking kidding me." this utterance was repeated upon checking my phone, which informed me that i had slept through two phone calls and several text messages. i never sleep through my phone going off. so that pretty much ruined my saturday, as i was unable to wake up entirely, and so spent the rest of the day on the sofa watching television, rather than going to the zombie walk that afternoon as i had planned. fortunately i didn't disappoint willow, who was also going to be at the zombie walk, as she had called whilst i was dead to the world (rather than undead as planned) and informed me that she was too bogged down by schoolwork to rise from the grave.

hm. crap. i still need to come up with a costume to wear to work tomorrow. the raver costume just isn't going to cut it. maybe i can find some zombie makeup at the drug store on my way to gwyn and savannah's for west wing night.

a muddy road

2005-10-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

two monks, tanzan and ekido, were once traveling together down a muddy road. a heavy rain was still falling.
coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
"come on, girl," said tanzan at once. lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. then he no longer could restrain himself.
"we monks don't go near females," he told tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. it is dangerous. why did you do that?"
"i left the girl there," said tanzan. "are you still carrying her?"

music music music

2005-10-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

the past week or so here has been filled with all kinds of awesome music. all kinds.

first, my friend david was playing with the hope 2 thursdays ago. i didn't really hear much of their set, to be honest, as a bunch of my friends who i hadn't seen in a while were also out that night, so we sat outside the bar, drinking and telling stories and whatnot. after the show, i wandered over to the first night of the decibel festival to see proem play some excellent techy glitchy music.

the next night, friday, was the nine inch nails concert with queens of the stone age. i'd regretted not getting a general-admission ticket during the queens of the stone age set -- they were rocking out like there was no tomorrow, but just about everybody in the stands was willing to take it sitting down. and sitting down is no way to rock out to queens of the stone age. but once nine inch nails came on, everybody was up on their feet and properly headbanging or whatever the kids are doing these days. although the kids down in the pit right in front of me were busy doing their little goth dances, which are kind of like hippie dances (no particular rhythm, limbs flailing about wherever the music takes them) only they're dead fucking serious. trent reznor and whoever he's got in his band these days did bring the rock, but i'd have to say that they didn't bring as much rock as the queens brought. i've seen a few nin shows, and this one was hardly at the top of the list. i think that only one piece of musical equipment was damaged by the end of the show. c'mon, guys, what happened to dumping an entire bottle of water on the keyboard while it's being played, and then smashing it through an amp? seriously. although the highlight of the show was when they lowered a scrim across the front of the stage and projected a rather powerful videomontage of suburban living, upper-class people dancing, homeless people on the street, and mangled bodies from what i can only assume was the iraq war, while playing "right where it belongs," my favorite song from their new album. i had planned on seeing more decibel festival music after the show, but i wasn't feeling too well, so i just went home.

saturday last was a beautiful day, and would have been a great one for bocce ball, had i actually gotten around to playing it. as it was, i picked up my friend gwyn from her apartment in the university district, battling ungodly traffic from the uw vs notre dame football game, and drove to ballard to meet my friend andy, who has a nice bocce set that he's been going on and on about. gwyn and i spent a great deal of time wandering around ballard, waiting for andy to show up, and when we finally found him, he was a bit drunk and wanted to wait for some more people to show up before playing. alas, book club was scheduled for that evening, so i had to miss out on bocce ball. after book club, i spent the evening enjoying some awesome music at the decibel festival into the wee hours. kristina childs played an excellent dj set of electro to start off the night, and between sets at one venue. she's local, so i will have to keep an eye out for her again. but the highlight of the evening was her space holiday, who played a brilliant live set of music that's kind of a mellower, more electronic version of the postal service.

then sunday night's decibel artists leaned more toward the weird, glitchy, idm style, with cepia and my friend gel-sol (the aforementioned bocce player) as the highlights of that genre. tipper also played a brilliant sort of nu-skool breakbeat in the middle of the evening's activities.

which brings me to sigur ros. but i've got to run - i'm off to meet gwyn and savannah for dinner and watching of the west wing - so that story will have to wait for another day.

i have been informed that it's totally wide open

2005-09-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

my calendar is somehow wide open tomorrow. which is excellent in principle, because it means that i could, say, get up at a reasonable hour after 8 hours of sleep, make a nice chorizo and red bell pepper omelete, and then have a productive day at work before heading off to see some live music of both the rock and the electronic varieties. time, of course, will tell if the reality lives up to the possibility.

i nearly left work early today because of an extremely sore right shoulder. too much slouched mousing, perhaps. i did manage to leave at a reasonable hour, and after munching on some chips and ichatting with molly, i offered my hot tub the opportunity to make my shoulder feel better, and it accepted, providing that i bring a book to read and a guinness to drink. general hot tub enjoyment notwithstanding (i should totally invest in some kind of floaty book-holder thing so that i can repeat this experiment on a regular basis), the hot tub failed miserably at making my shoulder feel better.

so i got out, fired off a couple of shots of wasp killer at a triplet of nests i'd spotted in the eaves from the hot tub, and retired indoors to watch tivo'd episodes of "the office" (new season already brilliant) and "my name is earl" (new show by jason lee, also brilliantly funny). upon further reflection upon the increasing pain in my shoulder, either my training in bioastronautics or the voice of my mother in the back of my head reminded me that a painful shoulder is usually due to inflammation, and that cold, not heat, is the answer, i retrieved my ice pack from the freezer. the ice pack accompanied me through continued reading and the consumption of some salad, and thoroughly bested the hot tub in this round of back repair.

the hot tub, of course, is a sore loser, although it's unclear as to whether it's annoyed with its own failure or with me leading it on with my temporary misunderstanding of physiology.

i've got a world that swings

2005-09-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

yet another morning of sleeping in. this time i actually woke up around 10:30 due to something resembling a hangover. far too much fun was had at kevin and margaret's engagement party.

i had a nice talk with molly in the afternoon, followed by a lovely lunch out on my porch whilst reading the economist. i talked to my mom on the phone for a bit, then went out to see "the constant gardener," which is an excellent film. then i bought a few things at the home depot. the sky was filled with some awesome cloud formations when i got out of the store, which only got awesomer as the sun began to set. i swung by my company's new building on my way home, and checked out the progress on construction on the building. it's going to be a great place to work.

then i came home, made myself a pizza, did a few home-repair things, and watched "repo man" on my tivo. this was followed by finishing molly's letter, mailing it, and starting in on a first draft of a mix cd. then i decided to put a bunch of recently-acquired music on my ipod. which brings me to about now, which is past one in the morning. and i think it's past my bedtime.

lazy day of cleaning

2005-09-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

i slept in until about noon-thirty today. i hadn't been out very late last night; i'd just dropped in on my friend kevin's little dj-ing show at this little chinese restaurant in capitol hill around 11:30, and that closed down around one-ish. (i didn't get there until 11:30 because i was watching the premier of a new sci-fi show called "threshold," which is sort of an x-files-ish show about an alien invasion of some sort. the premier was good enough to tell my tivo to keep recording the shows -- decent storytelling, good special effects, good acting by all around including charles dutton and brent spiner, and it's produced by brannon braga, who did a great job producing star trek: deep space nine. plus the lead character is a brunette named molly, so that has promise.) i think i went to bed around two-ish after eating some toast with dalmatia fig preserves (left here by my friend katie, who crashed on my couch for a few days on her way to shipping out with the coast guard) and emailing molly.

molly's friend josh and his fiancee amy, who had been crashing on my living room floor for a few days in the midst of their journey around the country, were packing up while i cooked myself an omelet with chunks of sausage and red bell pepper. i'd previously tried an omelet with chunks of sausage and cheddar cheese, but that turned out to be too greasy. so this time i dropped the cheese, added the pepper and some lawry's seasoning salt, and soaked up the grease from the sausages between cooking them and adding them to the omelet. it turned out much better.

then i watched friday night's episode of battlestar galactica. which was awesome. at that point, i realized that the day was going fast (it was about 2pm), so i took a shower and attempted to clean up a bit around my house. i managed to get the living room relatively clean, and put away all of the painting implements that i no longer need (for a while, anyway) now that i'm done with painting my living room. then i took all of the yard tools and the two bicycles that had been sitting out on the deck and managed to shoehorn them into the already over-filled garage. i once again reminded myself that i need to buy a storage shed for all of that stuff.

and now i'm going to clean up my dishes from breakfast and head over to kevin's house for an engagement party for him and his girlfriend of many years, margaret.

best. weekend. ever.

2005-08-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

spent the weekend exploring seattle. walked along the beach at alki. went hot tubbing. danced our asses off to jimmy van m. hung out with kevin and margaret and chloe and seth and harlyn and billy and people. walked around seattle center and the emp. watched little kids playing in the big fountain at the seattle center. walked around fremont, checked out weird art galleries, ate conveyor-belt sushi. watched boats and fish and people at the ballard locks. walked around the botanical gardens. made gazpacho. threw a party. drove around in the trees with excellent music. held hands. smiled a lot.

brief update!

2005-08-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

update on flying in zero-g: it was awesome! i didn't get any motion sickness. more later, but i'll just say that my job rocks.

update on my house: unpacking is slow. but the dining room, kitchen, and bedrooms are all painted, thanks to lots of help from temporary roommate gwyn and my dad. i just spent last night moving my truck to one side of the garage using only a floor jack, to make room for the 1954 panel truck i'm picking up this weekend. also, my roommate jana's cat arrived yesterday. she is very talkative, and an attention whore.

update on visitors: my friend savannah moves to seattle today. and molly will be here in 15 days!

wheeeeeee

2005-07-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

unscheduled non-powered vehicular movement

2005-07-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

i moved into my new house this weekend. a whole bunch of awesome people showed up on saturday to help me load and unload the massive u-haul that i rented, which made quick work of the move -- all told, it was about 6 hours, including the 45-55 minute drive from my old house to my new house.

what also took 6 hours, on wednesday, was moving my 54 chevy pickup, "peanut," to my new house. peanut isn't currently running (i had to take apart the fuel system, long story), so i borrowed a cargo van and rented a flatbed trailer. now, problem 1 here was that i was doing this alone. problem 2 was that i only had one vehicle with which to both tow peanut and load her onto the trailer.

i began by disconnecting the trailer in front of my neighbor's house, then going to look at the logistics of pulling peanut out of the garage, turning her, and then pushing her onto the trailer. it became quickly apparent that the trailer was in entirely the wrong spot, so i re-connected it, drove around the block, and put it in front of my house, facing the other way. i then backed the van into the driveway, and hooked up a come-along between the two vehicles, and slowly towed peanut out into the street, stopping every few feet to adjust the steering wheel on peanut. this was not a trivial task, because a) peanut was moving backwards, and b) the come-along was between the eyehooks on opposite sides of the tow hitch, inducing a moment (i.e., turning motion) on peanut instead of just a pulling force. but somehow, i managed to get peanut out into the street, pointing more or less toward the trailer.

i started pushing peanut toward the trailer using the van, stopping every few feet to adjust the steering wheel, when a lady who was jogging by stopped and offered to steer peanut. despite not having any seats in the cab, she was able to keep peanut aligned in the proper direction while i pushed peanut onto the flatbed trailer with the van. now, at this point, you may be asking, "but tim, if the van was pushing the truck onto the trailer, what was keeping the front of the trailer restrained?" which is a perfectly good question, because, as it happens, nothing was. which means that as peanut's front wheels reached the rear of the trailer, said rear was pushed downward several inches, as the unconstrained front moved up. but i kept pushing peanut forward, and once the front wheels moved across the trailer axles, the trailer front was pushed back down into its normal, flat orientation.

the loading of the trailer having been accomplished, i thanked the kind jogger, strapped down the tires, reattached the van to the trailer, and cautiously drove the 45-55 minute drive to my new house.

upon arriving at my new house, i sized up the task of removing the truck from the trailer, and moving it up the inclined driveway into my garage. the plan for doing so involved pulling the van & trailer a bit into the driveway so as to incline the trailer, using gravity and peanut's brakes to back peanut off of the trailer, and then using the van to push peanut up the driveway into the garage. this all worked fairly well up until the point that i released the last strap holding down peanut's wheels, at which point i realized that the parking brake was not, in fact, set all the way, which was made evident to me by the rate at which the front bumper was moving away from me. peanut rolled across the street at about 5 mph, aiming her rear bumper squarely at my neighbor's living room, with me running after, holding onto the front bumper as if my 160-odd pounds and converse chuck taylor all-stars could provide enough braking force. the truck knocked over a street sign on a wooden post, then miraculously veered off to the right, aiming for (and hitting) a streetlamp on a wooden post, rather than my neighbor's house. the soundtrack to this comedy of errors was approximately thus: "fwang shit crunch smash pow fuck!"

at this point, my neighbor came out of his house, apparently unaware of the damage to his home that he'd just avoided, and helped me push peanut far enough away from the streetlight so that i could push the truck up the driveway and into the garage. my roommate then came out of the house and steered peanut while i pushed with the van, and we uneventfully placed the truck squarely in the center of my garage.

paint paint paint

2005-06-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

i'm painting my new house before i move in. it's very exciting. i enjoy being able to do that - my last house that i owned didn't get painted at all, except for the bathroom. my friend gwyn, who just moved to seattle and is staying with me, is doing a good chunk of the painting. which pretty much rocks.

now i'm going to bed. because i've been painting for almost 6 hours, and i have a full day of work tomorrow. hooray for paint!

and a lovely saturday it was

2005-06-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

today was a good day.

a while back, i bought a nifty piece of art from this guy, jason sho green. he just closed the show where i bought the piece, so i went down to the fremont district to pick it up this morning. this is what i bought:

jason's stuff is awesome. his workshop was in this little boutique/coffee shop right next to the huge lenin statue in fremont. the shop, called "m:pulse," seemed pretty cozy, and it was being visited by a little cat with the softest fur ever, so i decided to have a cup of coffee and a carrot cake muffin for breakfast there. i read an article in the seattle weekly about former seattle chief of police norm stamper, who just published a book called breaking rank: a top cop's expose of the dark side of american policing. the book sounded intriguing, so i've just one-clicked it on amazon, along with amazon's suggestions for freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything and collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed (curse you, amazon suggestions).

after that nice relaxing breakfast, i went back home to work on my truck peanut for most of the day. i took apart the fuel system and got most of the way through building one working carburetor out of parts of two non-working ones, thoroughly soaking myself in gasoline several times along the way.

around 6ish, i put my tools and truck away and cleaned myself up. i went out to buy some more parts for peanut, as well as some groceries. then i went down to capitol hill to meet my friends seth and chloe for excellent thai food at a restaurant called "siam." during dinner i exchanged a few text messages with molly, who i'm excited to say will be visiting seattle very soon. i had a very tasty pad see yew, and afterward we went to chloe's favorite coffee shop in all of seattle, vivace, which is this little hole-in-the-wall place on capitol hill. their coffee was indeed very good.

then i came home to drink my coffee and finish reading angela's ashes. my mom had given me the book some time ago, and i'd only started reading it a few days ago. it's a fantastic book -- mccourt's style of prose carries the voice of a young irish storyteller very well.

and now it's time for bed.

i just bought me a house.

2005-05-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

new person!

2005-05-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

molly has a niece! congratulations to melissa and bryson on their new baby, celena. she's super-cute.

hooray for new people!

expedition

2005-05-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

i've just found out that the discovery channel has a new special called alien planet (link goes to flash video thing) that looks all kinds of awesome. it's based on the book expedition, being an account in words and artwork of the 2358 a.d. voyage to darwin iv, by famed sci-fi painter wayne douglas barlowe.
it was one of my favorite books for years when i was younger. it's more or less the tale of a naturalist who explores an alien planet with strange and interesting life-forms that mostly use sonar instead of vision as their primary sense. the book is filled with sketches and paintings and whatnot depicting these creatures, and it's just fantastic.

the tivo has been programmed.

just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you

2005-05-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

hm. the weekend has been full of exciting news in the field of orwellian surveillance and privacy invasion.

first, i read about how london is being wired for sound, since the cctv cameras everywhere aren't quite enough. fine, i thought, the british are used to not having any privacy rights and submitting to the nanny state. it's all part of being british.

but apparently it's not just the british. this scary article from wired magazine describes the first 30 of a planned 2,250 camera network for the police in chicago:
Funded with $3.5 million from local drug busts, the next wave of pod cameras will have audio sensors that listen for gunshots (and distinguish between them and similar noises, like the pop of a firecracker). Software will scan the video feeds for suspicious behavior.

and on top of that, there's the real id act, which just passed in the house of representatives. it basically creates a national id card, fucks up habeas corpus, and makes it even easier to track down somebody. which will do no good at fighting terrorists, since they have money and knowhow to confound the system -- but it will make it easier to hunt down, say, a victim of spousal abuse who's trying to hide and doesn't have the money and knowhow to get around the system.

i'm writing my senators about the real id act (click below for the letter i wrote). it's dangerous, and it needs to be stopped. as for the cameras, they sound ripe for civil disobedience.

Senators,
I am a 25-year-old aerospace engineer living in Seattle. I have been following the gradual degradation of privacy rights in this country since 9/11, and the "Real ID Act" that you will be voting on this week is the latest in a series of misguided attempts to increase security for the American people.

It has come to my attention that this Act is being attached as a rider to a bill intended to provide support for our brave troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the primary bill is noble in its intent, its rider, the Real ID Act, is dangerous and must not be allowed to pass.

I can understand some of the reasoning behind the Real ID Act. Law enforcement has to deal with the differences between state driver licenses, incompatible databases, and easily forgeable identity cards. But the cards required by this Act will hold permanent home addresses - no PO boxes, not even for undercover cops, judges, or congresspeople - that can be read by any machine that scans them. And the data collected in the required databases, linking home addresses and ID photos to hospital records, purchasing histories, and so forth, will be held in both federal computers and private sector computers. And while the federal government may choose to use the resources of the NSA or other agencies to protect citizens' privacy, the private sector will not be under such restraints. Even the well-known data collection agency, ChoicePoint, recently had a significant amount of personal data on many Americans stolen from its databases by identity thieves.

While it is understandable to want to create a web of information in which terrorists or criminals can be caught, what the author of this Act forgets is that terrorist organizations and experienced criminals can easily circumvent such an ID system, much as the 9/11 terrorists did. The people who will end up being caught in this web will be people who have a legitimate need to hide, and don't have the means to circumvent the system, such as victims of domestic abuse. All that will be required for a battered wife to be found is a husband willing to pay a small fee to access this database.

Please, vote against the Real ID Act. It is dangerous, and it is un-American.

Thank you.

monday funny.

2005-05-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

my friend andy is one funny bastard.

holy crap devo's on tour

2005-05-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

according to the internets, devo will be on tour this summer, and will be playing the bumbershoot festival in seattle on labor day weekend. holy crap holy crap holy crap.

i've been a devo fan since at least freshman year in high school. and yet, i've never been anywhere they've gone to on one of their not-a-reunion tours. and now, they're playing a free show in seattle. and a show in denver on august 23, which i might have to go to. (not that i need another excuse to go to colorado to, say, visit lindsey, but it makes it easier to justify taking a 4-day weekend.)

it might be time to bust out the yellow jump suit. although the undersized energy dome hat met with an untimely demise and needs to be replaced.

of birds and shredders

2005-05-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

i've been awoken the past few days by the sound of something tapping on the big picture window in my living room. it's a little bird that seems determined to either fly inside my house or attack or mate with its reflection in the window. i'm not entirely sure which. but this goes on for a good couple of hours every day. it's kind of entertaining, really, since the bird doesn't seem to be injuring itself, since it never gets too much speed up before hitting the window.

i had intended to work on peanut some more this weekend, specifically to clean out the bolt holes for the head bolts using a tap i borrowed from work and then dry-running the installation of the head to make sure i have all of the supplies i need, but it's about 8:30 on sunday night now and that's not looking too likely. but i did a lot anyway.

friday night i saw hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy with kevin and margaret and a couple of their friends. it was very excellent. not quite as good as it could have been, but well done nonetheless. before the movie, i had dinner with ted from the conference on world affairs, and told him stories from this year's conference. he said that he'd look into finding jobs that our friends savannah and gwyn might apply for when they move to seattle this summer. between dinner and the movie, i had a nice phone call with lindsey, who's in the midst of finals at cu.

saturday i had a short meeting with my realtor, finalizing some of the details of my response to the inspection of the house in des moines. then i read a bunch of shadow of the hegemon by orson scott card and took a nice long nap. the book club that i started with my friend jana had its second meeting on saturday evening at this cool little restaurant/bar in ballard called the people's pub. we discussed the curious incident of the dog in the night-time and ate fried pickles. it was a very good meeting. then i went back to the bar and met up with kevin and andy for some more drinks, after which we went to a bowling alley. the bowling alley was rather crowded, so we just had a drink in the karaoke bar and then went downtown to hear geoff white and lusine at this little club called mantra, which i rather enjoyed. i may have enjoyed it a bit too much, as i left my credit card there. afterward, we hung out at kevin's house for a bit with some drunk people and kevin's girlfriend margaret, who told us about the un-excitement of the bachelorette party she'd been at.

and then today, my feathered kamikaze friend woke me up around 11:30, which is early for a sunday, so i read a bit more of orson scott card and then got to cleaning the house. i've made up a nice pile of clothes and stuff to get rid of, organized my "random stuff" closet, and cleaned up quite a bit of my office. i'm presently shredding a bunch of credit card statements and whatnot, which is taking longer than expected as my little shredder keeps overheating. once i finish that up, i'm going to the grocery store, then i'll probably catch up on my cartoon watching while eating dinner.

beardless

2005-04-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

i've had to shave off my beard for work -- i'm doing some hazardous materials handling which requires a full-face respirator. in order for the respirator to seal all around my face, there can't be any hair in the way. so, off it went. i think i look like i'm 14, but i haven't been carded for liquor yet, so maybe it's just the difference that i'm seeing.

and...productivity!

2005-04-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

well. after yesterday's sleepfest, i managed to get quite a bit of work done on my truck today.

read all about it.

ugh.

2005-04-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

i had an excellent night last night. first was the tori amos concert. just outstanding. it was a solo show, just tori and four keyboards (piano, organ, electric organ, synth). and simply phenomenal. her cover of "magic man" (i guess that was a seattle thing, since heart is from here) was just fantastic. and i almost started to lose it when she closed with "tear in your hand," which was pretty much the biggest emotional response i've had to a concert in quite a while. my seat was pretty great, too. i was up in the 3rd balcony, but in a box seat only as far back as maybe the 4th or 5th row down on the ground. so i had an excellent view. i took some photos, but my mac is down right now, so i can't post them just yet. i also had a spare ticket, since i bought them when i was still with merith back in january, but i sold it on craigslist at almost the last minute to a nice woman who made for some good conversation.

then i went out to the mission, a new-ish bar in west seattle, for a going-away party for my friend jana's roommate dan. that was also a good time. jana is friends with andy, who i went to high school with, and who's now dating molly, through some ben folds fan club thing. and jana's friends are pretty cool. we've started a book club, and our next meeting is coming up on the 30th.

but then for some reason, after awakening at my usual saturday roll-out-of-bed time of 1 pm, making some scrambled eggs & toast, reading some of ender's shadow (spurred by a conversation during cwa about how orson scott card is an evil motherfucker and yet a great writer), and getting a pizza from the domino's next door, i fell asleep on the couch around 3:30 or 4, only to wake up again at 8. i'm slowly waking up again, but i just don't feel like doing anything. i kinda half-assedly cleaned the bathroom throughout the day, and ran the dishwasher, and tried to get my mac working (i blame a recent upgrade to mac os x 10.3.9, combined with the fact that i'm using a pc keyboard running through a kvm switch that doesn't allow the hold-down-"c"-to-boot-from-cdrom option to work...), but i had wanted to get some work done on my truck, peanut, and maybe go for a walk.

oh well. maybe i'll finish reading ender's shadow, and then write to lindsey.

an excellent week (more detail)

2005-04-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

okay, so back to describing my week in boulder at the conference on world affairs.

i've volunteered for the conference for the past 6 years, and this was the first time i'd gone to just help out during the week of the conference, without being involved all year. sure, i'd seen the emails flying around, and suggested a few people to invite, but i wasn't working every week with the science and generation y committees, and i wasn't down there on the floor at planning weekend, defending the panels i'd come up with.

despite all that, i had a fantastic time. i had the privilege of helping out with some of the big plenaries, which meant i got to hear molly ivins bash bush and gianni picco discuss internationalism and amy goodman champion independent media, which were all excellent. i got to discuss new zealand with melanie cordan, an animator from lord of the rings, and talk about how orson scott card can be such an excellent author and yet a complete asshole with melanie and judy dushku, a mormon feminist. i got to see my stepmom thereza show her wedding photos to just about everybody at the conference. (and i got to hear her sing and see my dad dance with her.) and i got to spend all week with my dad and thereza.

and i got to see my friends. i went out both saturday nights i was there to hear my friend nick dj in denver, where i got to see travis and ann and sophie and nick and jason and even juliet! not to mention playing pool and drinking with my conference friends joaquin and megan and savannah and gwyn and maria and elaine and yasin and russell and clare and bryn and christina and maura and jim and jane and donal and everyone else. and it was great to hear that savannah and possibly gwyn are probably moving out here to seattle, and that they can rent rooms from me in the house i'll be out looking to buy tomorrow.

but what beat everything, what topped all of this excellent dancing and intellectual stimulation and being a part of this great cwa thing, what far outstripped spending a week with ambassadors and jazz musicians and astronomers and poets and mtv veejays and environmentalists and storytellers and hostage negotiators and animators and film critics and known conservatives and super-liberals and geeks and everyone, was meeting lindsey.

i think i remember seeing lindsey at some point during cwa last year, as her cousin bryn is on the science committee, and i've spent some time hanging out with bryn and her roommates. so when lindsey showed up at thursday night's afterparty at bryn and maria, etc's, apartment, i felt like i knew her already. or maybe i was just imagining meeting her last year, and that feeling of knowing her already was something else. regardless, when our hosts had finally gone to bed, and lindsey and her roommate offered to either drop me off at home or have me and yasin come out with them for pancakes, it was only my sheer inability to remain awake any longer that made me reluctantly choose sleep.
fortunately, i had less than 24 hours before seeing her again, at the friday night dinner party. i'll spare you the details, dear reader, but there was a sing-a-long involved, and somehow my nearly tone-deaf rendition of "i've got you under my skin" was drowned out by others enough to not scare her away. then it was off to the traditional after-party at the excellent burrito joint illegal pete's, where much dancing was to be had. and dancing was had, indeed.
i was able to spend most of a wonderful saturday and sunday with lindsey, taking a nice nap under a tree on saturday afternoon (until it became apparent that some stickball players wanted to use our tree as third base), and enjoying an excellent breakfast of chai french toast followed by a very romantic walk in the snow on sunday.
but, alas, all good things must come to an end, i suppose, and it was with a very heavy heart that i left for the airport on sunday night. of course, after fighting through the blizzard to the airport, i discovered that my flight had been cancelled, and the next available seat back to seattle wasn't until wednesday. i very seriously considered taking that offer and spending monday and tuesday with lindsey, but eventually rationality forced me to take a different route home so that i could get a full week of work.

what happens next? who knows, really. she has a 2 hour layover in vancouver on her way to tibet early this summer, which is almost long enough for me to go up there to see her briefly, but due to the post-9/11 changes in airport security, i wouldn't be able to meet her at her gate to see her off; she'd have to come all the way out of security to see me and then go back through the security line, and i can't imagine that would leave very much of her 2 hours for her to get to the gate, if at all. and her layover on the way back from tibet is even shorter. but i'll be back in denver for alicia's wedding on july 2nd, so hopefully i will see her then. who knows what the future holds? regardless of what happens, i'll always keep the memory of those four days in boulder.

today in history

2005-04-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

april 12, 1961, a young russian named yuri alekseyvich gagarin was strapped into a tin can known as vostok 1 and launched into orbit. he had this to say about being the first human being to leave the planet:
"Circling the Earth in the orbital spaceship I marvelled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world! Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty - not destroy it!"

a very excellent week

2005-04-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

sigh.

more on that later.

the triumphant return of bill nye the science guy

2005-03-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

woohoo! one of tv's best science show hosts, bill nye the science guy, is returning to television with a new show, "the eyes of nye."

wired has all the details on the new show, which will be geared toward adults and cover topics like addiction and sex and climate change.

rock!

the car rental folks have it right

2005-03-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

from this month's national geographic story on the human mind:

The last area of the brain to reach maturity is the prefrontal cortex, where the so-called executive brain resides -- where we make social judgments, weigh alternatives, plan for the future, and hold our behavior in check.
"The executive brain doesn't hit adult levels until the age of 25," says Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the lead scientists on the neuroimaging studies. "At puberty, you have adult passions, sex drive, energy, and emotion, but the reining in doesn't happen until much later." It is no wonder, perhaps, that teenagers seem to lack good judgment or the ability to restrain impulses. "We can vote at 18," says Giedd, "and drive a car. But you can't rent a car until you're 25. In terms of brain anatomy, the only ones who've got it right are the car-rental people."

to mars, in hdtv

2005-03-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

the mars underground looks like a really cool movie about the "mars underground" movement started by people like chris mckay and carol stoker at cu-boulder, and championed by bob zubrin.

useful things on the internet

2005-03-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

some stuff i found today whilst waiting for some analysis to run at work.

diy smart radio station using itunes

an algorithm for cracking masterlock combination padlocks

videos of various mac upgrades including ram/drive upgrades to a mac mini and ipod battery replacement

visitors are an excuse to explore

2005-03-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

my best friend molly just got her temp job upgraded to a full-time position. this is very awesome, as it means that she gets exciting things like benefits and vacation time. vacation time is important because now she can take off some time to visit me in seattle. and so, here is a list of things we should do when she visits.

go to the (relatively) new library downtown
take the pioneer square underground tour
take the ferry to bremerton to get dinner at this excellent restaurant that tola recommended
hike down through carkeek park to the little beach there
eat at blue c sushi
get a non-disclosure agreement for her to sign so i can show her all the cool stuff i'm working on
watch my dvd of the american astronaut

standing on a beach, staring at the sea

2005-02-19T21:28:00.000-08:00

since today was such a nice day, i decided to go to the beach near my house. i got a sandwich from jack in the box and drove to the top of this nifty trail that goes through a bit of a forest, along a creek, across some marshes, and to a little beach.

photos are here.

american astronaut!

2005-02-18T10:41:00.000-08:00

one of my favorite movies EVAR, the american astronaut, is coming out on dvd!

AND...cory mcabee, the writer/director/singer/star, is going on tour with the movie again, accompanied by his band, the billy nayer show.

they're screening the movie at the jewel box theater here on march 15, followed by a live show by the billy nayer show.

what is this movie? its... a musical. a space opera. a western. a black comedy with some of the greatest original humor i've ever seen. it's just awesome.

junk mail

2005-02-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

i hate getting junk mail. so i just filled out this form to opt out of credit card and mortgage offers forever. which is pretty sweet.

accomplishments for this weekend

2005-02-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

went to the flogging molly show on friday night. met a new friend, ben. had a blast.

got a haircut finally on saturday morning. watched the latest episode of battlestar galactica. nursed a stomachache. paid my bills. went to the grocery store. forgot my wallet. went back home to get my wallet. paid for my groceries. watched stanley kubrick's "lolita."

slept in until 1 pm today, expecting a call from molly to wake me up around 10. marveled at the sun shining outside. watched the latest episode of ghost in the shell. debated creationism vs. science and the place of religion in education on a message board. talked to molly briefly on her way to visit her mom in the hospital (she's recovering from back surgery, and should be back home tomorrow). sort of half-watched shakespeare in love, which was one of my favorite movies when it first came out. now, i dunno. it's alright.

so... plans for this weekend:
1) pay bills. check.
2) go for a walk. er...not really. i walked a block to get my hair cut. whoopee.
3) work on my truck. nyet.
4) clean up the house. well, i did the dishes. which needed to be done. the kitchen and bathroom still need to be cleaned.
5) talk to molly. currently awaiting her call after she visits her mom.

two out of five, really. hooray for sitting on the couch all damn weekend.

there's hope for me yet

2005-02-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

from
this yahoo story:
"clearly i'm not going to fly on something that's unsafe. i'm a person who won'ty even get on a roller coaster at an amusement park because they scare me. i've been on one once, and i won't do it again."

that's eileen collins, spaceflight veteran and commander of the upcoming space shuttle mission. it's good to know that being scared of roller coasters doesn't preclude one from going into space.

science!

2005-02-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

dr. david grinspoon, a former professor of mine from cu-boulder, was in town the past 2 days, giving talks about the search for alien life. he talked about some stuff from his latest book, lonely planets, as well as some of the awesome preliminary science findings from saturn's moon titan. in short, we've just discovered that the moon has an active geology and meteorology, and it could support a methane cycle similar to earth's water cycle, as the atmospheric conditions are near the triple-point of methane (earth is near the triple-point of water, meaning that it can exist in liquid, solid, and gas form without much temperature change).

also, this is me as a southpark character:

to make your own, go here.

i have a hankerin' for jambalaya

2005-02-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

happy mardi gras.

weekend.

2005-02-06T21:40:00.000-08:00

for some reason, i feel compelled to end the titles of blog or message board posts with a period. i'm not sure why.

so. i started a book club with this girl i met last weekend, who's a friend of this guy i went to high school with, who in turn is good friends with molly. it should serve as another excuse to go out and drink with interesting people, which is good.

my car broke down earlier this week. it's an 84 honda prelude that i bought for $700. the alternator gave out while i was on my way back to work from lunch on tuesday, so i had to get it towed to a shop to get that replaced. i almost spent as much replacing the alternator as i did on the car originally. this motivated me to get back to work on my truck, peanut, which is documented on peanut's blog. i had planned to spend most of today working on the truck, but all the rain made me want to just stay inside wrapped in a blanket on the couch. i did go out to buy a shop vac and a torque wrench (and groceries), but when i got back, i just wrapped myself up in my wool blanket on the couch and read neil gaiman's neverwhere while the superbowl played in the background. i watched the superbowl commercials, but there was nothing all that interesting. and i talked to my mom a bit -- my sister is back home, and they're going to meet with somebody from birthright israel about how my sister and i could go to israel for a week for free. i was also feeling unmotivated to do much of anything after breaking up with merith, who i'd been dating for about 3 months.

anyway, that's my story.

what earthquake?

2005-02-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

apparently, i slept through my first earthquake:

3.0 earthquake around 6 am on thursday, off whidbey island

which is weird, because i woke up around 6 am this morning all shaky, but that could have just been from all the engine-cleaning chemicals i was using on peanut last night.

i'm tired.

2005-02-03T23:52:00.000-08:00

i just spent several hours working on peanut.

read about it on peanut's blog.

letter.

2005-01-31T23:38:00.000-08:00

i wrote a letter today.

it's been a while since i wrote anyone a letter.

this one is important.

i'm not sure what the outcome of the letter will be.

that's why it's important.

pyramid scheme

2005-01-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

so i signed up for this free mac mini offer thing. yeah, it looks like a pyramid scheme. but all you have to do is sign up for something like a credit card or a free trial of aol or something, and then get 10 people to do the same.

they had a show about the free ipod version of this site on the screen savers show on techtv, and they basically came to the conclusion that it's legit.

so, if you're reading this, and you're bored, click here. it might actually get me a mac mini.

hotel rwanda

2005-01-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

i just saw "hotel rwanda" last night. everyone should see this movie. it's the true story of this guy who was the manager of a big 4-star hotel in kigali during the war between the hutu and the tutsi people in the mid-90's. the guy managed to somehow save the lives of a bunch of people while over a million people, including children, were being slaughtered with machetes and guns throughout rwanda.

it's just stunning. amazing. that such an act of genocide can happen today is so fucked up beyond comprehension already, and then to see that the western world did nothing, because we don't care when brown people die, is too much.

i can't say any more about the movie. so go see it.

enginerd.

2005-01-15T23:09:00.000-08:00

i was just reminded of what was probably the first moment i knew i wanted to be an engineer. well, i didn't really realize that i knew it at the time, but some part of my brain recognized it.

anyway, it was when i was very small. i don't remember how small. my parents had bought a crib; i don't remember if it was mine or my sister's. it was the kind that had one side that you could lift up about an inch, which would cause a little mechanism to unlatch, allowing you to lower the side down to the ground so parents wouldn't have to reach over the side of the crib to pick up the kid. just a simple little mechanism, but i found it extremely fascinating. i seem to remember spending quite a bit of time playing with the crib to figure out how the thing worked.

size matters?

2005-01-14T18:07:00.000-08:00

i somehow managed to shoehorn my big truck into the tiny garage at my rented house.
more photos here

snow?

2005-01-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

snow? in seattle?

the new and improved seti

2005-01-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

my buddy seth shostak writes about what's new with seti (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) over at space.com. pretty damn cool.