I’m gonna fawn about my D all day today, I can just sense it. She’s started her blog for the wedding (which I’ll contribute to as well over time). Check it out. We’ll be moving it to its own domain as part of the bigger site once everything is built. In the meantime, this is the link to watch.
Fun fun fun.
After three years, I finally accomplished something I had given up hope on: I taught Danielle HTML. She’s a remarkably quick study. I had her building table structures in three hours. After she’s built a couple of basic pages and gotten a feel for things, I’ll take her to the next step: Stylesheets.
We’re doing this as a special couples project. We’re building our wedding website. Lots of big plans for it, like a sign-up sheet for volunteers, an interactive calendar, a web log with updates from both of us and, because we’re whores for money, a tip jar.
I’m actually really excited about it. It’s not often that Dani takes an interest in the things I dig, and when she does it’s often fleeting. But she’s been going on about this all week and spent much of last night trying to get an idea on how to design it. I told her that, if she did a lot of the leg work for the design and such, I’d do much of the coding. While coding, though, I’ll show her what I did and try to help her learn even more so that she start doing a lot of this stuff on her own as well. But anything that requires actual programming – PHP, JavaScript, etc. – I’ll do myself. She’s expressed no interest in programming and, from the surface of how it looks to the uninitiated, I don’t blame her.
All in all, it’s just nice to have her be excited about something I’m excited about. It gives her a bit of insight into how I spend my days, gives her a better understanding of what I’m doing on the computer all the time and, hopefully, gives us a starting point from which we can work toward the future. It’s been a dream of mine for some time to run my own web-based business, but I’d like to have her involved in a big way. Teaching her HTML and CSS and such is one step toward that. Very exciting.
I believe the single greatest invention in the last century or so is not the Internet, nor the personal computer nor any of the associated software. It’s not a thing, it’s a concept: the network. The idea of decentralization is absolutely revolutionary, and advances like P2P further prove this point.
But networking and decentralization are not limited only to communications. Salon is carrying a story about fuel cells and the decentralization of energy production. This is nothing short of revolutionary in my eyes, and if this really takes off we could see some amazing growth in practically every industry. Well, except for the oil industry.
Plus, it would finally get the foreign oil monkey off our backs. It’s all good.
Grey Davis recently signed a $9.5 billion bond measure to fund a high-speed railroad line in California. The next day, Rod Diridon, a commissioner on the High-Speed Rail Commission, planned to hold a $50,000 fund-raiser for Davis at his private home in a suburban subdivision in the South Bay. Davis’ handlers, after receiving many complaints about the apparent impropriety of the event (on the surface, it appears as though Davis did favors for Diridon and his buddies in exchange for campaign contributions, whether that’s true or not) cancelled it at the last second, so suddenly, in fact, that many supporters had to be turned away at Diridon’s front door.
This sounds shady, but nothing has been proven, and with Davis’ questionable fundraising practices, you can bet this is under investigation. But, in my opinion, this isn’t the scummy part.
Bill Simon, the GOP candidate for governor, gathered a couple dozen supporters and held a press conference on the sidewalk in front of Diridon’s private residence. He knew that the event had been cancelled, but showed up anyway. I read about the story in the SF Chronicle, which also showed a picture of Simon standing before Diridon’s Santa Clara Ranch house located in a neighborhood clustered with larger family-style homes. The press conference was not held at the Governor’s Mansion or in some tony neighborhood like Pacific Heights. We’re talking about the kind of suburban development where you expect to see kids playing on the streets just before dark. A quiet little neighborhood.
If Diridon want’s to invite several people over for a fundraiser – it was only about 25 people, as he asked each to give about $2,000 to the campaign – that doesn’t cause too much of a disturbance in such a neighborhood. But having a politician, one who has been charged himself with financial impropriety, disturb the peace of a neighborhood in which he has no ties for the sake of nothing more than media attention absolutely sickens me. As much as I question Davis’ shady fundraising practices, I feel reasonably assured that he has enough integrity to not set up shop on the front lawns of average, private citizens.
Simon is in his right to question Davis and the whole fundraising affair, but, in my opinion, his message got lost in the shameful way in which he announced it. Do we really want scummy, self-serving bastards like this to represent us in public office?
Apparently so. After all, we have Bush as a president.
From “No Such Thing” by John Mayer:
I just can’t wait ’til my 10-year reunion
I’m gonna bust down the double doors
And when I stand on these tables before you
You will know what all this time was for
All this time, I thought he was saying “You will know what an asylum’s for.” It made sense at the time.
Episode No. 126 of “How Cool is my San Francisco”:
I work right down the street from the four-story Virgin Megastore on Market. If there were a conveniently located Amoeba, and Rasputin’s wasn’t overrun by disaffected, unshowered youth, I’d shop there simply because, hey, support your local businesses. Down with the corporate conglomerates! Smash the system! Yadda, yadda… Fact is, all of those small companies would KILL to reach a level that Virgin has, and Rasputin’s, with at least five stores throughout the Bay Area, is on its way.
So, basically, while I feel the ever-so-slightest twinge of guilt for my support of a corporate giant, the fact that Virgin has a fantastic listening area, an eye-popping variety of music and folks who are good, friendly and treat me with respect alleviates my guilt to a pretty good degree. If you have the better business and provide better service, you should be a winner.
Virgin’s listening area is just friggin’ awesome. I bought my White Stripes album there a few weeks ago because I gave it a good listen and really got into it. Today, I bought The Vines’ debut and John Meyer’s “Room for Squares” CDs using the exact same process. And, if I weren’t trying to save my money a little bit, I would have also picked up Mana’s latest as well as a few others.
My primary reason for going there was to pick up a Dead Kennedy’s album. California Uber Alles and Holiday in Cambodia have been rattling around in my brain for the past few days.
So, after I give a listen to the Meyer and Vines CDs, I’ll give you a little review here. So far, though, the Vines sounds just awesome. There are a lot of garagey, semi-grungy bands gaining in popularity at the moment, and it’s like a whole new sound. It really says something about the current state of popular music when nostalgia becomes revolutionary.
Now, the garagey sound isn’t the only big thing out there. There are some terrific folks who are putting out solid, real-time music with a lot of soul. Pick up a copy of Norah Jones’ CD and you’ll see what I mean. That woman reminds me of Sarah Vaughn and Vince Guaraldi, who never played together but maybe should have.
So, between now and the next time I yap atya, go drop a few bucks at your local music purveyor and let me know what you hear. If you’re looking for something new and exciting, check out EmergentMusic.com. Then, let me know what you find.
Enjoy!
I began a diatribe on the definition of a geek yesterday, but have yet to complete it. I’ll post it on this space when I do. In the mean time, play with the fun art, complete with source code. Fun!
New job, money coming in, big ass weight lifted from my shoulders: time to celebrate. Dani and I are fortunate to have a brother (hers) in the hotel industry. You see, folks in the hotel industry, while often overworked and underpaid, get some nice bennies. One of these perks is the ability to allow family to stay in their hotels at a significantly reduced price. At Zack’s second job at the Mandarin Oriental, San Francisco’s only five-star hotel, Dani and I spent a weekend for our first anniversary.That fifth star makes a WORLD of difference. The picture I took of the Transamerica building was shot from our hotel room at the Mandarin. We stayed in a $500/night suite for only $75/night. One of my best memories.
We took advantage of Zack’s perks again this weekend. He is not working for the group of hotels that runs the Sheratons, Westins and the W hotels. We stayed at the W in SOMA Saturday night in order to get away from life for a weekend. Ironic that we did it about three blocks from where I now work.
The W is a beautiful hotel. The room was sexy as sin, with a hardwood solid head board on the bed, black and white photos on the walls and bold accents everywhere. It was minimalistic in design with a weird sliding bathroom door that sported a full-size rippled window so that folks could peer in and kind of see whether it was occupied. That was a bit weird.
The rest of the hotel, however, was WAY to friggin’ hip for words. The elevators (twice as sexy as the room) was bathed in a pure blue light with mirrors everywhere. The hallways leading to the rooms were also bathed in blue light — nothing else! We were practically using braille to find our room number. Trance music is piped into the lobby area, which is decorated with amorphous sofas and funky pillows. The front desk staff was pretentious as all hell, but not as pretentious as the rest of the folks staying there. We arrived right about the same time they began throwing an open party on the fourth floor ($20 admission for guests of the hotel). We could see the party from our hotel room and it really didn’t look like my kind of deal. First of all, no one had gotten naked. It looked like the kind of affair that the young and hip attend to be seen on the scene.
Basically, the W is what I see when I think about 80s investor greed and 90s dotcom excess. It was clearly built to attract the younger, hipper crowd who had just come into money. We’re talking about the young MBA grads who fell into something cool in the Internet start-up before driving it into the ground.
And, ultimately, that’s the problem with this place. It looks like it’s already dated. Were I to stay there at the height of the dotcom era, I may have paid the $20 myself to be on the scene even though I knew I didn’t belong. There was a special time and a place for all that happen. Like Hunter S. Thompson said about the 60s, we were riding high on the crest of a big beautiful wave. And now, after the fall of many of these dotcoms and the reality that the laws of economics are almost immutable, you can stand in a hotel room at the W in San Francisco and see the high water mark of that wave where the crest finally broke.
My best friend’s job consists of driving around Orange County, lifting heavy objects, crawling around large objects and generally doing a lot of manual labor. He’d probably disagree that he gets a lot of exercise on his job but, compared to me, he’s a friggin’ marathon runner.
You see, as a computer geek, my job consists of sitting on my ever-swelling ass and typing on the keyboard. The most exercise I get all day on the job is reaching for Print Screen key while holding the shift key. My fingers are stronger than Schwarzenegger’s, but the rest of my body is play-do.
So I’ve taken to getting in exercise whenever I can. I take the stairs instead of the escalator on BART and sort of speed-walk wherever I go. Most recently, I’ve begun spending my lunch breaks wandering around San Francisco at a decent clip. It’s amazing how far I can get in an hour.
San Francisco is just an amazing town. I’m not at all a city guy and would enjoy living in the city about as much as I would living in my toilet. And don’t even get me started on driving around here — I have never driven to SF without getting lost, not once. But BARTing in and walking around is really a cool way to do the city, and I really enjoy it. The problem is, I’m still fascinated by everything I see. How can you not be? The buildings are tall — like, REALLY tall. It’s all I can do to keep myself from just walking around, staring into the sky, mouth agape like some escaped mental patient. I’ve knocked into plenty of poles, walls and other pedestrians. I’m told that such activity in New York could get me mugged, but in San Francisco it’s excused with a smile and a gentle picking of your pocket.
From hearing this you’d think I was born in the sticks. No, worse: Orange County. Sure, I’d visit L.A. occasionally, but L.A. is an armpit of a town. Chewy air, fakey rude people, physical proof that beauty is only skin deep, if that. L.A. lacks the soul of San Francisco, the culture. Sure, there are good pockets here and there — Ortega St. jumps to mind — but in SF you can find such culture around every street corner. And, while the place is not without prejudice, it does seem the one city where you can genuinely be yourself and not worry too much about what other people think. Or, you can be as shallow and superficial as you want and know you’ll still be accepted. Or, you can wander around, mouth agape, hand on your wallet and know that you’ve done little more damage than disappointing a would-be petty thieve.
I expected to get flak for yesterday’s posting — either a “You liberal, unpatriotic waste of space, why doncha go back to Russia with your commie mama!” or a “Yeah, man, tell it like it is! Whooo!” or at least a “Shit, don’t you edit *anything* before you post it?” But, instead, I was greeted with a whimper, not a bang. Reminds me of after the prom…
Well, I see two reasons for this: 1) It looks like the sentiment of questioning the unchecked patriotism that erupted post 9-11 is rather popular at the moment, as columnists, pundits and guys with megaphones on street corners indicated yesterday and 2) only about four people watch this site regularly, and of them only one is opinionated and the chances are he agreed with half of what I was saying but didn’t get very far because, as previously mentioned, I don’t edit.
So hey, y’know, whatever. No big deal. I run a site so I can speak my mind, have a way to practice my web skills and basically try to look cool because, check me, I got a blog!
Seeing as I’m a dried up prune of a man what with the sleep deprivation I’ve been going through lately, I will now list five things that make me happy today in no particular order.