coffeefog

picnic!

we just had a picnic. we all skipped work and drove to berkeley (and for some of us this involved a cross-country flight, also), since it's emily's birthday. daisie provided the "go to the redwood grove" advice, and that was great advice. The redwood grove at the uc berkeley botanical gardens is fucking SWANK. I took some pictures, but later we fed by digital camera to a lion, so no pictures! or maybe it's in emily's purse. And I cooked all the food - that was a new experience for me, cause I started thinking about it with more than 12 hours left and I had time to get all the ingredients and prepare everything right. there were tomatos, mozzarella, seedless mandarin oranges, a wide array of berries, and other food items.

then we went to rasputin and, for the first time ever, when I bought a CD the person behind the counter was like "oh my god I LOVE THIS CD! Nobody ever buys this cd! IT IS SO GOOD!" I bet if it was customary for you to tip people in retail establishments, you would get that all the time when you bought CDs.

so now i'm tired, and if I get off my ass now I can start my laundry and get it done before the laundromat closes at 11. we'll see.
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psst - john. I finally bought the joggers CD. it was $6. but i should note that it wasn't the joggers CD that the girl at rasputin loved. it was devendra banhart that won me the approval of my more music-aware peers. go figure. also, they validated our parking there. that was awesome too.

dogs

I should point out how silent I've been here about the dogs. You have been spared my daily dog ramblings. Emily has not been spared, and for that I ask that you pray quietly for her. The dog walking volunteer work starts in a mere 2 days. I've been keeping a daily countdown for the past 4 weeks. I am so psyched.

eek

Well, it has certainly been an eventful couple of weeks. A stranger on the internet found the pair of shoes I was looking for, but they weren't in the right size. And a couple of people signed on for the skip work and see movies program I had scheduled for today. Technically taking 2 people to see movies on a school day qualifies as a national "keep kids off drugs" program, which makes us eligible for $8,000 of government funding. But that just felt a little dirty, so we never sent in our application for funding.

I bought advanced tickets for the 3 of us on Tuesday night at the Kabuki. And I seem to have gotten the last tickets to each show (unless the ticket girl was fucking with me, which she might have been because she seemed a little overworked, and here I come with this vaguely complicated order). And they only had 2 tickets left to the first showing, so somebody's going to have to sit outside for a couple of hours during God Is Brazilian. Something about showing up at the theater 2 days before the movies and getting the last advanced tickets is very strange. I don't understand my luck.

readin'

come into work monday morning, start reading your blogs:

• merritt threw a birthday party for her 3 year old, had a duck duck goose disaster.
  
• d spends over an hour getting dressed every morning, and is seeing a new experimental acupuncturist
  
• christon fucked himself up real bad on a borrowed bike. he's missing 2 teeth, has a broken clavicle, road rash all over his face, and one of his ear studs embedded in his neck.

this picture is called "the 2 driveways of the apocalypse"

and on thursday it might rain

When I picked up my car from an oil change today, the helpful sticker reminding me of my next oil change suggested that I bring the car back in approximately 1,500 miles. For me and my ridiculous commute, that would be sometime next Thursday afternoon.

I did my taxes last month, explicitly so that tonight would be free to keep reading Gig.

thugbot took some pictures of some great San Francisco garages here and here about halfway down his front page right now.

In computery news, I recently stopped meditating on the 3 big projects that I've been seeking my chi on, and have now begun writing code. Thus ends 6 months of thinking and begins 4 weeks of implementation.

And, above all else, I went to Costco for the first time yesterday, and am now the proud owner of 4 dozen frozen chile rellenos. Vive la entree!

hello there

are you an expert at buying shoes over the internet?

Can you help me find some Puma Ontarios in a dark brown (I believe the color is actually called "retro brown") in a size 11?

I am prepared to reward you handsomely for your efforts. Specifically, with $8. I would paypal $8 to someone who could find a new pair of these shoes for me online.

porchlight tonight.

porchlight tonight.

film fest

who wants to skip work with me to watch movies all day? The 2004 SF Intl film fest starts April 15 and runs for 2 weeks. Your mission, if you choose to blow off work for a day, is to join me in the city to watch 4 movies back to back, from noon until 11pm or whenever the last movie ends. The movies are primarily playing at the Castro theater (Castro and Market) and the Kabuki (Geary and Fillmore). We just need to find a weekday with the best 4 movies playing in a row at either theater (or maybe we could do a mid-day theater switch), and buy tickets for those movies. After that we will wait a number of days as determined by calendar, and then attend the movies.

taxes rock

windows xp mega porn problem

Over the weekend I fixed a hideous "popup spam" problem on emily's parents' computer. Whenever they were online (dialed up to AOL) they would get "popup spam" advertising porn every 30 seconds or so. But these aren't web browser pop-ups, these were OS level pure text messages in a gray system alert-style box.

I googled for an answer and came up with this Microsoft page advising everyone to Disable Messenger Service in Windows XP. Basically, by default, any remote machine can put a system message up on your screen that completely steals keyboard focus and disrupts your workflow. And Emily's parents were getting spammed by this non-stop, like twice a minute whenever dialed up. So ridiculous.

But what's really ridiculous is that MS would ship a feature like this (intended for network administrators in corporate environments) ON by default to all users. For such an easily exploitable hole like this to be open is INSANE.

For the record her parents were running Windows XP SP1, and since they dial up over a modem and probably don't understand the concept of service packs, I'm assuming that this system came with XP+SP1 installed when they bought it from Dell 6 months ago.

dogs

This is Rocky. Rocky lives in Miami, and thus will never meet Sharkey, but they might get along on a pure "we are violent little dogs" level.

read:

• great kurt cobain piece from Monday with 10 year looks back by some great writers.
  
• Pullitzer prize winning LA Times piece on Wal Mart's low price tactics empire. free registration required.
  

i am not a millionaire

i came so close to winning $915,810.00 dollars via an international lottery today, but apparently it is spam. Snail-mail spam postmarked from europe. With euros. I guess they're trying to harvest my bank account & bank routing number. I so badly wanted to believe it was real. Emily and google talked me out of it.

So I've been out

So I've been out of town for a week. I visited Berson and collins for a brief 3 hours, and I paid a dude with a beat-up white nissan with DARE bumper stickers $47 to drive me from the airport to my sister's apartment, but only because I thought he was really a taxi driver at first. It turned out he was not a taxi driver, just a nice guy trying to make a tax-free income and not get arrested by the JFK airport police too often.

And I went ice-skating with Brent for his birthday. Brent is far too nice of a person.

Today, back in the pacific standard timezone, walking down the street talking on my cell phone, somebody yelled at me and called me a yuppie. That upset me, but I came home and tinkered with my 401k for 20 minutes and that made me feel better.

I'm exhausted. Apparently I cleaned up the apartment before I left last week. That's awesome.