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Monthly archives for December, 2005

Merry Christmas!

Dec25
2005 Written by Andrew

Or Happy Holidays, whichever you feel is more appropriate. I think the so-called “War on Christmas” is a bunch of hooey, personally, particularly since most of the evidence I’ve seen tossed around was either taken out of context or a fabrication to begin with.

Regardless of what you believe, who you believe in, or how you believe it, this time of year has a lot to celebrate. Today being Christmas is the biggest of them, and I plan on spending the latter half of the day with my family. We’re doing presents opening and then dinner, so it’ll be a holly-jolly Christmas later today. For now, I’m sitting in my dinner attire without shoes on, watching The Empire Strikes Back and admiring my uneven vacuuming skills on the living room carpet.

I’d like to do a longer update long to talk about the last two weeks, but for now, I’m going to finish getting ready and go pick up Erika so we can exchange gifts before heading over to my Dad’s to be with the rest of the family.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas or whatever you celebrate. Now’s the time of year to spend with family and friends, and I hope that the meaning of the holiday you celebrate isn’t lost on you.

Happy Christmakwaaznanukah, everyone!

Posted in Erika, Family, General

A bit of minor math

Dec13
2005 Written by Andrew

True or False?

The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line.

True or False?

The shortest traversable distance between two points is always a straight line.

As I played with Google’s new service Google Transit that overlays public transportation routes and schedules on top of Google’s already-amazing Google Maps service, I discovered this was not always the case. While I think that their new service (which for the moment is Portland, OR only since we have the best transit system around) is quite good, when I entered a search query for a transit route from my apartment to my Dad’s house on a weekend, Google’s results told me that I’d be walking across Lake Oswego.

Since the bus that goes to my Dad’s house doesn’t run on weekends and I’d have to take a bus that doesn’t go quite as close if I wanted to get there sans automobile, I didn’t have a problem with that assessment. But since Google meant the the lake and not the town, that created a sticky bit of transportation. Or wet, rather. Did I have to walk across the lake? Or could I merely go around and not have to dry off my clothes later?

It still has some bugs to work out, but it’s by far the neatest thing Google’s come out with in awhile.

I sit here at my desk with my first box of Christmas presents that arrived today, and another box should be here by the end of the week. I’ll just need to pick up a couple of things locally and I’ll be done. Of course, finding the motivation to buy those last gifts is going to be difficult. I find that the further I get in a project/task, the harder it is to get started again and the more slowly I go once I do if I stop for any reason. It’s sort of an odd reverse diminishing returns type of thing with me, probably because I’m mentally thinking “Oh I don’t have much more to do, I can wait a bit longer.” Soon it’ll be a few nights before Christmas and I’ll be sweating what to get the people who haven’t had their gifts purchased yet.

Saturday night Erika and I went to a cocktail party that we’d been invited to, but despite the promises of specialty lemon drops and an impressive array of cold cuts, we found ourselves a bit bored. Firstly, we didn’t know anyone there. She had been invited by a credit union member that she sees on a semi-regular basis, so while she knew the people hosting it only through casual conversation, I was a step removed even from that. Neither of us are particularly good at mingling, but we can get along with people we find things in common with. This didn’t exactly happen, because secondly, everyone was about ten years or more older than us. I never thought that I’d find myself having more in common with the teenage son of the party hosts than the host themselves, but I’d imagine that was so. How do I chime in on conversations when people are talking about redecorating their houses and other grown-up talk?

We had a decent time, but we each grabbed a drink (Erika a White Russian worth of “The Dude,” myself a can of Diet Coke) and planted ourselves on the sofa, half for getting out of the dining room and kitchen that were swarming with people, half so Erika could sit down. We ended up leaving after only about an hour or so, but not entirely because we felt out of place.

My friend Michiko’s plane was arriving at the airport at 11:00 PM, so I wanted to be awake and on time to pick her up. I had to circle about five times or so because I couldn’t find a good place to pull in and wait, but we eventually met up and I took her home so everyone could go to sleep. Michiko had been on East Coast time, so it was pretty late for her by the time she crahsed on my futon.

The next morning, we talked for ahwile, I showed her around my apartment, but since I had a Christmas concert to go to I had to take her to Union Station a little early. It was kind of a mentally dicey drive back to my apartment, too–the gas light came on as I left the train station and I didn’t have time to fill up my car anywhere. I only had time to go home, change, and then leave again to catch a bus to the church where the concert was being held. As I write this, my car is sitting in my driveway with the needle on E. I hope it makes it up the street to the Shell station next time I need my car….

Last Friday I had lunch with my Dad and he informed me that he’s going to start looking for a new job for a variety of reasons. Mostly as a safety measure for some things he sees happening. After lunch I stopped by Erika’s credit union to say hello, and she told me the latest news going on in her workplace, including essentially being passed over for promotion. The credit union merge that brought her into this new environment hasn’t been treating a lot of people well, and as a teller Erika bears both the brunt of the customer service issues as well as the poor treatment by management since she’s still the lowest rung on the corporate ladder. In any case, she’s talking about looking for a new job now, too. As I walked back to work, I considered the possibility of looking for a new job msyelf. After all, I have a few ongoing issues with my boss (who doesn’t?), and I reguarly find myself as his whipping boy, deserved or not. Plus the pay isn’t all that great. Actually, it pretty much sucks.

As I mulled this over, the door to the “Employment Guide” periodical case that sits outside Erika’s credit union fell open right as I walked by. I’m normally not one to read into sign and portents on a windy day like Friday, but that seemed too obvious to ignore. In all honesty, I’ve seen a few jobs I wanted to apply for in the last month, but since my desktop computer has been out of commisson and my resume is stored on my desktop computer, well, I’ve just been plain out of luck.

As yes, my desktop computer. No luck there. I got my replacement motherboard from the manufacturer, and now I have a whole new problem–it doesn’t boot when my RAM is inserted in any of the four slots except one. I tested the RAM on another machine to be sure it was OK, and sure enough, it booted. My patience has grown pretty thin by now–it’s been over a month since my computer stopped working, and not only have I been unable to get it working again, I can’t even verify if I lost any data. I may have a computer to use in the interim, but to tell you the truth, I’m just afriad that I might have lost something irreplaceable. Yeah, yeah…”Make backups” and all that, the adage isn’t lost on me. I just have way too much data to back up, and it’s moot now.

Man, I have a completely free weekend for the first time in awhile, and I had hoped once I first found out about it that I could spend it reacquainting myself with a few games, but instead I’ll have to improvise. Erika will be out of town with her Dad, but instead of beating down criminal masterminds and thugs, slaying evil, etc, etc, etc, I’ll be limping along on my laptop. Maybe I’ll pull out one of those old manual websites…what do they call those? “Books” or something?

As a final note, I would like to just say how much Erika means to me. One day last week I was in a grumpy mood. It hadn’t been a great day at work, my replacement motherboard hadn’t worked out, and I was looking forward to going home and trying the suggestions I’d gotten from tech support. Once the day ended, I finally got home, found that I was no better off than I’d been the day before, and that made my bad mood worse. I told Erika that I was grumpy and why, and so when she came over as we’d planned that night, she was carrying a grocery bag with her. She got up to my apartment, pulled out a deli sandwich prepared the way I like it, a bag of Low Fat Hickory BBQ Kettle Chips that I love, and a bottle of Rogue “Brutal Bitter” beer (“It was on sale and that seemed to be how you feel.”), and she said “Here’s dinner.” She knew exactly what my comfort food was and brought me literally everything I needed to feel better. Andrew’s food Prozac. The only other things she could have brought me that would have made me feel as good would have been a pizza and beer, but I would have felt guilty after the pizza given how poorly I’ve been eating lately, so she pretty much hit the nail right on the head.

We ate our deli sandwiches, watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that my TiVo had recorded for me, and I felt so much better than I had before Erika had arrived. Thank you so much for that, Erika.

Posted in Erika, Food, Geekery, General, Work

Windy Wednesday

Dec07
2005 Written by Andrew

I’d explain my title, but I think those of you in the Portland area know exacxtly what I mean by it.

I completely forgot to note the release of Mozilla Firefox v1.5 with my last post. This is the first new version since its release last year with some additional functionality that builds upon the multiple incremential releases this year (1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc.). The three biggest added features are the ability to drag and drop your tabs into a different order, faster back/forward functionality, and a kick-ass update system. When they come out with a new version, no longer do you have to redownload the entire program, but you can just get a small 400k update instead. That’s extremely handy.

If you’re not using Firefox already, I highly recommend you ditch Internet Explorer and give it a try. Tabbed browsing is an awesome feature and worth switching for on its own. I’ve made plenty of arguments about how Internet Explorer leaves your computer open for malicious users in the past–even with a firewall on your computer–and nothing has changed since then. If you’re already using Firefox, head to the address above and download the new version.

I’ve also been meaning to forget to mention a great charity in its third year now if you’re looking for a good cause to donate a few bucks this holiday season. The two guys who write and draw Penny Arcade, one of the webcomics I read, started a charity two years ago because they were tired of hearing about how violent gamers are and how dangerous video games are to children. Instead of gritting their teeth at every news story that came on the air, they decided to show the world the good that a couple of gamers could do and they started taking donations of both new video game systems and new games (rated E only), cash, and other toys to donate to a local children’s hospital. The end result was . The toy and money drive was so successful, they ran out of the warehouse space they had allotted and had to move their donations to other

All in all, they’ve raised more than $500,000 worth of toys and money to donate to multiple children’s hospitals over the last two years, and they’re shooting for a $350,000 goal this year.

You can specify specific hospitals around the country or world if you so choose, and they’re hoping to top last year’s fundraising amount by a fair amount. I plan on donating a few bucks not only because I enjoy the comic they draw, but also because I respect their mission and I see few charities better than helping sick children have a good time during the time of year when they should be happy, not disappointed that they don’t get to spend Christmas at home with their families. They make donation easy by using PayPal, so if you’ve got your bank account linked to PayPal, think about donating even just $5. Every little bit helps.

In any case, if you have a few bucks to spare, I’m sure that could use the money. The take donations up until Christmas, and they’ve already reached $175,000 this year alone, both in corporate and individual donations. It makes me proud that despite all the negative press that video games get in the press, a couple of hardcore gamers can bring such good to the world. Let’s see Jack Thompson find something to object about with this, eh?

Last Thursday night I met my Dad up at Pioneer Square for the Holiday Ale Festival. This was my second year in a row that I’ve been…or did I go the year before that, too? I really don’t remember. In any case, it’s always a pleasure to drink beer with names such as “Rudolph’s Revenge” (a McMenamins brew, nonetheless), “C-Sons Greetings,” “Blitzen,” “Tannen Bomb,” “Jubelale,” “Doggie Claws,” “Sled Crasher,” and “Blizzard of Ozz.” My personal favorite of the winter seasonal ales–”Wreck the Halls” from Full Sail–didn’t make an appearance. In all honesty, it’s not the best of the winter ales, it just has the best name.

My Dad didn’t stick around for long, though, and he took off after just a couple of samples. I was determind to try a few more, though, so I got another sample or two and daintily sipped my beer as to not drink it too quickly. At the Portland beer festivals, you have to buy a 12 oz. plastic mug, and for $4 they fill it up to the brim, or for $1 you get a 4 oz. sampler. Sometimes a sample is all you need, especially when you get a LOT of samples. I started talking with a guy there who really knew his beer, and it turned out that he had flown in front Atlanta just for the beer festival. That’s dedication. We talked for an hour and a half about different beers we’d had, brewpubs, etc. He’s in town until Monday, so I gave him my number in case he wanted to hit a brewery or two the times he wasn’t at the beerfest. I also told him about John’s Marketplace and its selection of 900 beers as well as the Horse Brass and its 40 tapped beers and cheap Imperial pints.

This past weekend was pretty nice. Friday night Erika and I went to the Laurelhurst Theater on 28th and Burnside (just a mile or so from my apartment) to go see A History of Violence with Viggo Mortenson and Ed Harris. I’d seen a trailer for it at some point and it piqued my interest, but I never got to see it while it was a first-run movie. Thank goodness for Portland and its plethora of second-run theaters. The Laurelhurst, much like the McMenamins-run Bagdad Theater, is a pizza and beer joint, though it substitutes eight or so very small theaters for the one grand theater the Bagdad sports. But they have a better beer selection at the Laurelhurst, so I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.

A History of Violence is an interesting movie that takes place in middle America and has an interesting “Jekyl and Hyde” mentality. Viggo Mortenson plays a father with two children who works at the town diner, but somehow manages to steal one of the guns of two murderers travelling through town at his diner and kill them both. After gaining national attention for his act, Ed Harris shows up claiming that Mortenson is really a former mobster from Philidelphia who he wants to settle a score with. The answer doesn’t really matter as far as the movie itself goes, but it raises the interesting question: are we who we say we are? Or are we the person we used to be? If we live one life for longer than the other, is that who we “really are”? The movie was based off a graphic novel, and it was apparent in many scenes due to the pacing and framing of shots. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it a alot. Erika wasn’t too sure, mostly because the movie didn’t make any real effort to examine the characters, just their actions. In the context of the movie, though, we didn’t need to really know the backstory of any of the characters except for the one that mattered, and even he only needed a little bit of description. Was he a formerly bad guy? Or has he been a good guy all his life?

Since it’s at a second-run theater, that means it should be out on video soon. I highly recommend it, though there’s a couple of scenes of graphic violence and a bit of nudity/sex. Nothing along the lines of Basic Instinct or Showgirls, but at least as far as the violence goes, I think they explicitly showed more than they needed to to further the background of the main character.

Saturday we drove up to Erika’s rommate’s parents’ new house, which was a very nice house with high ceilings and huge rooms overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. Absolutely stunning view from their living room. That evening, we went with Erika’s roommate to Typhoon!, a great Thai restaurant with a coupel of locations in Portland, and then to Harvey’s Comedy Club. The occasion was Erika’s roommate’s birthday, and though the food and entertainment were good, something wasn’t sitting right with me after dinner and so I was a bit uncomfortable all night.

Sunday night I made another 1950′s meal for Erika: metloaf, mashed potatoes from scratch, and peas.

Last night Erika and her roommate decorated their Christmas tree, and I made wassail to drink while they hung ornaments. Not the old-school wassail that was basicially alcohol and some spices, but the more modern recipe that’s mostly fruit juices and spices. I mixed in some rum, though, which helped to dull the overwhelming sweetness of it.

Finally, today is the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I read something today that bugged me. I’m 100% certain that I’ve ranted about this before, so I’ll keep it brief. The 3000 people who died at Pear Harbor 64 years ago today? They weren’t heroes. They were victims. Don’t ever confuse being a victim with being a hero. Being a hero reqires action on your part.

To quote The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one is.” Please, I beg you to save your hero worship for the people who have actually done something heroic, and not someone who tragically died in the line of duty.

Happy Wednesday. I’m tired. Tonight I’m going to go home, put my computer back together with my motherboard that (finally) arrived today, and hopefully get things relatively back to normal in my apartment.

Posted in Beer, Erika, Food, General, Movies

Happy December

Dec01
2005 Written by Andrew

It’s been awhile, I know. I’ve been busy at work trying desperately to get this project that’s been on my desk for three months done, and at home I’m dogged by a lack of computer. Well, I still have my laptop, but it’s extremely difficult to find motivation to do anything at all with that damn computer sitting in the living room. I can’t wait for my desktop computer to be fixed (the replacement motherboard is in transit as I write) so that I can put that blasted laptop away and get out of my old habits. I spent so much time in my past with both a computer and television in front of me at the same time, and one of the things I was looking forward to at my new apartment was separating the two so that if I get bored with one, I can move on to something else. With both at my disposal in the same room, I never move and I always find something to do. I’ve found myself being exremely lazy in the last few weeks, which has had an impact both on my energy level as well as my weight. I know I’ve gained a little weight–maybe 5-10 pounds–and my laziness hasn’t helped. It’s tough to jog after work because I have to leave immediately after I get home if I want to have any light whatsoever.

And then there’s the cheese…brie, havarti, cheddar, you name it. What is it with me and cheese in wintertime? I can easily resist it the rest of the year. Maybe it’s all the gatherings this time of year and everyone I know puts out cheese each time. Last year I did the same thing, and I’m sure that Erika is at least partially responsible for this cheese problem of mine.

I trust everyone’s holiday went as smoothly as a holiday that demands multiple course meals and tradition can go? We actually rejected the traditional Thanksgiving meal for the second year in a row and we had lamb at my Dad’s house. Last year was pork. No stuffing, no mashed potatoes, no turkey, no pumpkin pie. But since we had lamb and creme brulee, I’m not sure whether I came out ahead in the end, or not. Two days later I went with Erika to her Mom’s house, and her Mom did a full Thanksgiving dinner so at least I got in on some turkey and mashed potatoes in the end. All’s well that ends well.

I picked up this week’s copy of the Willamette Week yesterday and began browsing it as I usually do Wednesday mornings. Imagine my surprise when I noticed on the Letters to the Editor page that they published my letter to the editor! I’m fairly certain they added a comma or two, though I’d have to compare the actual published version to the one I sent out. I’m well-known among former professors of mine for my liberal usage of commas, but there were a couple in there that seemed egregious even for my distinct style of prose.

For those not living in the Portland area or those who don’t make it a habit to pick up a Willamette Week each week, you can read the letter at http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=6989.

Erika and I finished the first season of “Lost” not long after I posted last, and we both definately enjoyed it, despite what some members of my immediately family misenterpreted as belly-aching on my part regarding the im/plausibility of the show. Thoughtful discourse doesn’t equate dislike, just a desire to understand what I’m seeing onscreen. My comments were equated to my Dad’s famous complaint about the original Star Wars movies that the rest of my family has come to use as a catch-all for my Dad’s nitpicking ways: “There’s no sound in space!” I think of my thoughts about the show more along the lines of “Why is this happening?” and not “This can’t be happening!”

Regardless, I definitely recommend adding it to your NetFlix queue or borrowing a copy of the season from someone who’s willing to lend it to you.

Instead of waiting for the summer reruns to start, once I get my desktop back up and running I’m going to download the episodes I missed, burn them to a DVD, and that way we can sate our need to figure out what the hell is going on in that show. I have a pretty good idea, finally, but I’ll need to see the new episodes from the second season to confirm it. and yes, downloading the episodes is illegal copyright infringement, but frankly I couldn’t care less. In all liklihood, my downloading the episodes might eventually lead to my purchasing the show on DVD, so as far as I’m concerned I’m doing ABC a favor by downloading them.

That, and I’ll do anything I can to fight the draconian measures that media companies take in protecting their copyrights. Not because I want to rip them off, but because I object to how ownership is slipping more from the consumer to the producer. Pretty soon we won’t be able to buy any types of media, we’ll just be renting it because they’ll feel that we as consumers aren’t able to be trusted with something that belongs to us.

So, as my personal middle finger and STFU to media companies, I try before I buy. Sony has been the worst about this lately, and to spare those of you who’s prefer I skipped over such topics, I suggest you Google “Sony rootkit” on Google News if you’d like a particularly chilling tale of how far media companies will go to screw over consumers. Long story short: I now trust Sony as a company about as far as I can throw them, even though I wasn’t affected.

All in all, things are going very well for me with exception of a couple of bad days at work, a sick girlfriend last weekend, and once again having to think about what I’m getting people for Christmas. I hate doing that. I love buying people presents, I hate figuring out what to buy. Oh well, I have 24 days, that’s plenty of time!

Happy December.

Posted in Erika, Family, Geekery, General, Movies, Work

About me

Early 30's, Portlander, professional geek, runner, cook, beer drinker, beer brewer, gamer, occasional blogger.
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