This was a crazy week for my commute. Among the events:
Congratulations to Emily for getting a feature story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian this morning!
Congratulations to Shelby for getting into UC Davis med school. We know you could do it!
Well, I thought about it for a couple of hours and bought the 23" display. It should be here by Friday or Saturday.
I went to a great beach bonfire on saturday night. Thanks to raj for putting the pictures online. I actually took the pictures, but Raj beat me to making a web page of them.
Check out Apple's brand new dispays. I should point out that the 23" display isn't new, but today its price dropped from $3499 to $1999. Apple loves doing that - milking the early adopters for every penny their rich asses have, and then dropping the price dramatically for everybody else. Well, I'm ready to buy one of these puppies. I haven't bought a computer for 3 years since I get top of the line loaners from work, so I can kind of justify spending $2k on a monitor. Not really, but kind of.
The sad part is that once I buy it, I'm just going to put it on my desktop at work since that's where I do 90% of my computing. It makes sense - it's an investment in my eyes. But still, I DO end up doing a lot of tweaking to my machines at work out of my own pocket - extra RAM, cables, etc. I've got 6 modern computers in my office right now (courtesy of my employer), but I always end up buying generic RAM for them at Fry's. It's simpler than going through corporate channels :)
I'm not proud of this (actually I am proud of it), but this is the first "missed connection" I've posted on craigslist. Emily says it's too vague, and the person I'm talking to won't be able to tell it's her. I say whatever. Does this make me creepy?
http://www.craigslist.org/sfo/sfc/mis/8236623.html
Hey everybody-
It's Ethan. It's 4AM, and I couldn't sleep tonight so I finished configuring this website. I'm using a very beautiful and clean package called Moveable Type that makes the page your looking out so smooth and pretty.
But now that I've spent the past 3 hours getting it working, I am satisfied. I am getting very very sleepy, and am going to call it a night.
So I've got about 100 phone numbers in my cell phone. I add pretty much every phone number I get to my cell phone (friends, friends of friends, pizza places, hotels), and cull the numbers when they're no longer relevant. But sometimes there are stray entries that I don't have a clue about. Like right now, entry 69 (seriously, it's 69) is for "Gravbgeo". What the fuck is that? Was I drunk? And the phone number is in the 202 area code. T9 text encoding is both a blessing and a curse. T9 tries to match the word that you're typing up with a real dictionary word, but sometimes it just gives up and mutters something like "kweejibo" or "gravbgeo."
If you're running Mac OS X and you use iTunes 3.0, I have to recommend X-Tunes 1.2. It's some truly useful freeware that lets you access iTunes functionality from system-wide keyboard shortcuts. It pops up this totally high-tech looking translucent window (just like the volume up/down watermark) when you hold cmd+space, and lets you click play/pause/next/prev buttons on it. Very useful if you listen to music at your computer.
I just got home from seeing a great movie called chain camera that was sort of a documentary. The filmmakers gave 10 digital video cameras to 10 high school students at a school in east LA for a week, and then those 10 passed the cameras on to other high school students. This went on for a year, and they edited it all down to a 90 minute movie focusing on 16 students. It made me nostalgic for a high school I never experienced, but not for the high school I actually lived through. But then again, I didn't have nearly as interesting a story as anybody in the movie...
But that wasn't the high part of the evening. The best part was when I had just gotten to the movie theater, and I was waiting outside for my friend Lydia. These two hippy-looking dudes came up to me and gave me some muffins:
hippies: dude! do you want a muffin?
ethan thinks: gut reaction == don't take food from strangers
ethan: no thanks, I'm good.
ethan thinks: wait, I'm not a kid anymore, I can take whatever I want from strangers! also I am hungry! hooray!
ethan: wait, are they free?
hippies: yeah man, free!
Hippie #2 offers me my choice of about 30 muffins in a huge plastic bag. It looks like they came straight from a bakery. He later explains that they were extras from the "resource center" down the street.
ethan: cool. this one looks good.
hippies: Take some more!
ethan: uhhh... i'm going into the movie in a sec - I don't know how they feel about baked goods.
hippies: that's cool... have a good night!
Yep - another sick day from work. Sometimes I think I'm taking too many, but really I'm just sick a lot. I've got this nasty cough, but I feel better after my mid-afternoon nap. I woke up and had grape juice and goldfish crackers. The day has apparently taken on a very "preschool" slant.
Well, MacWorld was fun. I only spent 2 hours there, but I could have spent all day. I still managed to walk away with a new mouse and a sweet new laptop bag. Actually, I just ordered the bag (at 40% off) and they're going to send me my "crisp suit" in 2 weeks.
But the big news isn't macworld - it's that the girl at the bakery is in love with me. Or at least that's how I interpreted it, you can choose to interpret it however you please. If you were my girlfriend, you would probably choose to interpret it as "the girl does not love ethan." But I digress.
So I was riding the muni home from macworld when this really raspy voice started coming from the seat behind me. The voice asked someone if they minded that he smoked. I didn't hear the answer, but whatever it was launched Mr. Raspy Voice onto a 20 minute schizophrenic tirade that touched on such issues as: cell phones, homosexuals, the X-box, gonorrhea, herpes, gays, fags, schizophrenia, smoking in bars and on busses, yuppies, etc. He lit up a cigarette as he began the tirade. We were in the back train of 2 cars, so the driver got no say in the smoking matter.
While entertaining at first, mr. raspy quickly began to depress me. He forced me off the train seven blocks early. I chose to walk those seven blocks in the rain rather than sit through his non-stop monologue for another 4 minutes. But this detour lead to a quick stop-in at the bakery for a slice of their gourmet pizza. Here's where the "girl at the bakery is in love with me" part comes in. I ordered a slice to go, and she was all "that'll be 5 minutes." So I sat down and chilled out for 5 minutes, and I tried to stump one of the other employees with questions from yesterday's jeopardy. She got them all wrong, but she's not the one who's in love with me so it doesn't matter. You know what? I don't really know where I'm going with this. Basically, the checkout girl smiled at me a lot and gave me two slices for the price of one. I THINK that means she liked me, but maybe it means that they were closing in 5 minutes and had a ton of extra food. Whatever - like I said, interpret it however you want to. It was good pizza though. Today's flavor was "marinated mushrooms, red onions, thyme oil, and P&P." If anyone knows what P&P is, please tell me AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
I'm skipping work today to attend macworld, in seedy downtown San Francisco. It's the one time of year when the mac faithful gather to hear Steve's mighty pronouncements. Actually, that happened on Tuesday, and it costs like $1500 to be in the room when Steve Jobs announces all the new products at his keynote. So I'm just going to go roam the product hall today (costs $25, or free if you borrow somebody else's pass) to see if a 17" PowerBook would REALLY fit on my lap.
I'm really useless in a blogging capacity right now. All I can think about is mac news, and I'm keenly aware that nobody out there gives a shit what I think about Apple's take on 802.11g. When I first "switched" from PC to mac about 3 years ago, I was taken aback by how oblivious many mac fanatics are. They don't realize that the rest of the world doesn't know what the fuck OS 8, 9 or X is. I'm struggling to remember such things, and thus spare friends and family from my goings ons.
Last year I was sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my friend Laura. Like many of my roommates, we didn't always get along very well. I have a long history of bad roommate relationships. The fact is that I'm lazy and inconsiderate, and I'm not much of a "team player" with cleaning, or respecting other peoples' belongings. Now that I live by myself, things are much better.
The truly bad roommate situations were with Hamilton (junior year high school), Adam (sophomore year of college), and John (california year one). There was lots of shouting, some silent treatment here and there, a couple of "this is my TV and you're not allowed to use it, since I can't use your computer" type arguments, and the all too frequent "ETHAN YOU NEVER DO THE DISHES." And once I got a "take your feet off the remote control right now. That is so wrong." Hopefully that gives you a rough idea of the nature of our disputes. Only once did such a relationship devolve into violence, and it was over a C programming question. Adam thoroughly insisted that 2-d arrays should really be called 1-d arrays, since they were long and flat, and had nothing 2-dimensional about them. I disagreed, and since he wouldn't listen to my stressed-out nonsense version of reason, I shoved him. He came back by pushing harder and knocking me to the floor. (I can't clearly remember Adam's side of the argument, but it was something along those lines. Feel free to clarify, B.)
All 3 are dear friends of mine today - somehow we've become closer than ever after moving out.
But anyway - I'm telling you all this for a reason (actually not really). Laura, my 13th roommate ("roommate" is someone I shared a room or apartment with for at least 2 months). Laura regularly drank 2-3 gallons of skim milk per week. So one night Laura and I were watching television (usually Simpsons, Aqua Teens, Family Guy) when a Milk commercial came on. It was just this close-up of milk being poured into a glass, brought to us by the Milk council. At that, Laura got up, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a tall glass of milk to drink. I was all "did you get that because of the commercial?" And she was all "what commercial?" I thought it was pretty cool how she never consciously thought "milk looks good...", or even noticed the commercial. It was just the commercial doing all the thinking for her.
That's all - Laura and I had some rough spots, but we were never as bad as me and some of my other roommates. We were both happy to go our separate ways at the end of our lease, though. Although neither of us changed jobs, we now live about 80 miles from each other. Think about it...