coffeefog

sorry

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 18:25:55 GMT

So, I remember this one time in college when I was convinced that everyone was too worried about internet security, and having your identity stolen and all that. I was going to put my social security number at the top of my web page, because, really, what do you use your social security number for? Well, it turns out a lot. You need your social security number a whole lot. And I'm glad I didn't do that, because my credit would be irreversibly fucked, and I'd be on a no-fly list or two, and I bet it's a lot of lot of paperwork to get a new social security number.

My point being, coffeefog isn't going anywhere, I'm just taking a little breaky-poo. You know? And moving over to wordpress. Coffeefog probably would have seen regular updates for the past 2 months if my first attempt to transition to WordPress had gone smoothly. Alas, it did not, and I've walked away from the internet in disgust. So, you know, see you later.

wifeswap? of course!

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:03:47 GMT

Emily has an extended family member who will be appearing on TV's illustrious WifeSwap next month. If you're unfamiliar with the show, it's sufficient to say that it consists largely of two families who swap wives/mothers for a month. Oh, and also they adopt a camera crew. Why on earth would anyone do that? 20 grand. That's why.

the upside

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 13:26:54 GMT

Finally, finally, finally, I've bought a new digital camera. It's a Canon SD200, and although I loathe Canon after they screwed me with that S400 Memory Card Error, I still like their cameras. Sad. It's even a step-down in pixels, from a 4 megapixel to a 3.2 megapixel. But it was pretty cheap at $179.99 on amazon it came in cheap enough for me to be able to buy it without too much regret over my S400, which I've had to write-off as a loss. I'm thinking I'll sell the old broken S400 on ebay, with all its accessories, with big disclaimers about the Memory Card Error thing.

time well spent

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 21:21:53 GMT

It's hot here in San Francisco. Like surprisingly hot, and I'm not one to regularly be surprised by the weather here - it tends to be so erratic that you have to dress for everything - cold, frigid, rainy, misty, or even "ok out." But sunny. And hot. I'd say it's been a beautiful day out, but I was inside slaving over a hot stove all day. I made cookies. Chocolate, super fudgeie cookies. And now I'm halfway through a beef stew, but I just had to stop and take a break. This beef stew thing is a little elaborate - it involves 3 separates pots, 3 different colors of bell pepper, a "clarification" stage, and like two 30 minute resting periods for the beef. So I was just like "fuck that. I'm going to see if there's a new Matlock on tivo."

Emily and I spent the morning together discussing what I'd be cooking today. And then she went shopping at the new H&M in San Francisco. This H&M was long awaited both by Emily and the general populace. If you don't know what H&M is, think Gap but for people who look European. That's about all it is. It's nice though - I look forward to shopping there soon as well, once the crowds die down. When Emily took me to an H&M in New York last month, I got a solid maroon t-shirt for $6. Come on. $6. Need we imagine the sweatshop conditions necessary to sell a t-shirt in the mall for $6?

gameshow ideas

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:25:31 GMT

Here are some ideas I had for games. The first one is for a new gameshow, and the second one is a game you can play with your friends when you're out and about.

The gameshow is sort of a supermarket sweep rip-off, where you have 6 minutes to run around the store and put as much stuff in your shopping cart. EXCEPT, the twist is you have to have everything you picked up on checkout lane conveyor belt (it is a special 18 foot long checkout belt) sorted in alphabetical order by the name of the corporate giant who makes each product. For instance, a Morningstar Farms veggie burger would be alphabetized under K for Kellogg. If you had Chef Boyardee spaghetti-o's, a Healthy Choice TV dinner, Peter Pan peanut butter, or Wesson vegetable oil, you would sort that to "C" for ConAgra. I guess it's kinda easy if you stick to food products. It might get complicated if you had to shop for dry goods, because as far as I know there aren't as many big time conglomerates. The winner is the newlywed team with the closest to actual alphabetical order. Teams may alternatively be composed of retirees. But that's it - only newlyweds or retirees.
This is a game for when you and your buddies are walking down the street, or through a busy parking lot. One person yells out "mileage check!" and points to a car, from a distance. At this point everyone in the group has to guess what the odometer reads. Then you go check, through the driver's side window, with your nose pressed up against the glass, what the mileage on the odometer is. Price Is Right rules apply - closest without going over wins. Obviously several factors like model year, general wear and tear, and number of national park bumper stickers can be used to gauge possible mileage.

two disastrous meals

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:48:30 GMT

Yesterday was a flagship day for bad meal outcomes. At lunch at a Thai place yesterday, I ordered the spicy fried rice with chicken. And it was good. But my friend Nik was sitting across from me, and he has a cold, and he was coughing a lot. And now, today, I have a sore throat. And then at dinner with Emily, at our customary "burgers on laundry night" event, (how boring and ritualistic our adult lives have become...) through a fluke of ordering I got two milkshakes for the price of one. One pumpkin, one chocolate. But not milkshakes. MILKSHAKES. Real ice cream (Mitchell's ice cream from SF). They filled up those tall malt shop milkshake glasses and there was just as much leftover in the metal mixing cup. Times two. We're talking so thick you have to really work to get the straw in there. And to say nothing of the sucking power required to drink the milkshake!

It was delicious. So delicious. But so, so filling. And to say nothing of the calories present in a giant cheeseburger, fries, and full shake. It is my long-standing fear that one day I will put my laundry in the dryer, go have a meal like I had last night, come back to fold my laundry, and throw up into the dryer, all over my clothes, because the effort it takes to lift my arms is too much for the gluttonous aftermath of The Burgermeister.

I did once spill a cup of coffee over a set of sheets as I pulled them out of the washer. That one just required an immediate re-wash. No real harm, you know?

caltrain?

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 23:25:59 GMT

Did I mention that I stopped riding the caltrain to work? Oh, no, probably not, since I rarely blog any more. And you know why that is? This is the reason for both not riding caltrain and for not blogging, actually: apathy. Commuting on caltrain down the peninsula is a big time pain in the ass. Big time. Two hours. Pain in the ass.

And to be honest, one of the worst parts about the caltrain is that it turned into a social endeavor in the second half of my year long commute experiment. I mean, I'm a social creature and all, not too far down the software engineer side of Steve's take on the autism spectrum. But I just couldn't take all the socializing at 8AM. Caltrain time was supposed to be my quiet newspaper, coffee, and iPod time. But since my employer has a rather large caltrain riding population - twice they've had to increase the size of the shuttle that takes us to work from the train station in the past year - I always run into people on the train, and then I have to put my mind into that "people place," and we sit and we chat and we share the newspaper. Honestly that's not the bad part - the bad part for me was the shuttle from the train station to work. For some reason I hate talking when I can be overheard. But everybody wants to talk, and I don't want to talk, cause there's 15 people on the shuttle and a lot of awkward silence. So if you ask me how my weekend was, I probably don't want to tell you out loud, cause I don't want everybody to know how my weekend was. My weekend was probably lame. And it got impossible to avoid people. So that's part of why I drive now.

I just went to a show by myself. I saw Thee More Shallows for like the 9th time. They're one of my favorite bands ever, and luckily they live here in SF and play at least once a month. Going to shows by myself is fun. Maybe 1 in 10 times I chit chat with somebody while we're standing around waiting for the music, but usually I don't. I guess usually I choose to silently seethe in anger at all the people who will talk during the music. I'm working on finding a zen place about those things. But, in the spirit of apathy, this is the first show I've gone to at all in at least 2 months. Let us all praise apathy.

Listen. we all know one thing here - my posting frequency hasn't exactly been exemplary. On a scale of 1 to exemplary, it would be a 1. So that's why I'm copying and pasting this next bit out of an email I just wrote. Because I can reuse content, because I haven't copyrighted anything here or there. Have I? Shit. Don't I get a freebie copyright somewhere? I guess I haven't even said "copyright ethan 2005" over in the side bar there like I need to. meh. I digress.

How's the music scene over your way? I was thinking of getting a harmonium for a while, but then I realized I don't know what one was. All I knew was that one day I wanted to see this in the liner note credits of a CD: "On track 4, ethan b on harmonium." It would be handrwritten, and kind of sloping downward. And on the opposite page there'd be a badly lit picture of an above ground swimming pool in somebody's backyard.

My camera is still broken. I'd kinda like to sell it on ebay, but I can't do so in good conscience. My only recourse is to bitch to Canon, but that's, like riding caltrain, a pain in the ass. I'm not a phone bitcher. But Emily has some friends who are AWESOME phone bitchers. It's scary just knowing that that skill exists, the ability to get something for nothing by refusing to let a service representative off the line.

of mice and windows

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 13:37:09 GMT

Whenever I visit my girlfriend's parents in New York, I get to solve a computer problem. And I'm reminded of how very painful of a world it must be for those people who aren't as familiar with computers as I am. For instance, today I spent 2 hours, on and off, trying to get their HP Deskjet 5550 to stop displaying all of its configuration windowns in French. It took 20 minutes to navigate their support site and discover that uninstalling and re-installing the printer driver was all I needed. Then it took an hour and 40 minutes to figure out how to reinstall it. In lieu of "my windows xp installation CD", I google for the one file it wanted, sRGB.icm, downloaded it from dubious sources, and fed that to the installer instead.

That sounds like a great avenue for a virus. If you can find some way to write a maliciously structured sRGB.icm file, and place it online so that google can find it, (google for "srgb.icm filetype:icm"), you could bring down a lot of people's computers. I'm sure I'm not the first to have this problem, nor am I the first to have this solution. Well, let's hope I downloaded an sRGB.icm that will do no harm...

Tomorrow night I'll be celebrating Sukkot with my my gracious Westchester county hosts. Do you know what Sukkot is? Neither did I, but now there's a makeshift shed setup in their backyard, and we just spent an hour hanging pinecones and gourds from it. I hear tomorrow we'll go out there and eat fettucine alfredo. I believe technically you're supposed to eat and sleep in the sukkah in your yard, but most people only eat meals there these days, if they build a sukka at all. This is my introduction to this celebration of the holiday... I guess my observation here, is that after years of dating a Jewish girl, I feel like I'll never really know all the holidays they have. I mean, they just keep on coming.

EMILY GOT A JOB

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:09:20 GMT

Emily got a job. This is great news.

ethan vs. the dogs

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 09:49:43 GMT

I've been spending a lot of time in dog obedience training classes in the past 4 months, volunteering as an assistant to the trainers, down at the SPCA. Here's a few random observations about the people who come in to train their dogs. I'm sure many of these observations apply to parents with young children in early school or play group environments.

Everybody wants their dog to be awesome. What's that? The trainer told you to put your dog in a STAY, and then step back one foot, and then go right back? Why is it that you stepped back 15 feet, hid under a table, then walked back sideways? Because your dog is awesome and it doesn't need to slowly work up to harder tricks? No, it's because you're a dick.
When a dog isn't paying attention, not doing the exercises, why do people so frequently assume their dog is behaving out of malice? It's not that, it's just that your dog doesn't understand English, you haven't put the necessary training time in, and you get frustrated too easily.
Dogs don't respond to manhandling so well.
A lot of people could use a happy voice. If you're grumpy and pissy for a solid hour, your dog has no voice queue that he did a good job, no way to distinguish desired behavior and just hanging out.

working MAN?

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:39:14 GMT

I just watched Working Girl with Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver last night. And all I can say is that now I am *so* fired up to start making things happen. I've got this buzz. I just want to go do some mergers and acquisitions. Things are about to start changing for me.

identity theft?

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:57:15 GMT

Did I mention that I've been grappling with some weak-ass hybrid of identity theft and 4th grade level pranks for the past couple of weeks? Someone's been using my name, address, and phone number, for all sorts of purposes ranging from silly to scary. They don't seem to have my social or my credit cards. Here's what they've done so far:

Applied for a home loan online. WITHOUT MY SOCIAL. That part tends to be important in these matters, the SSN.
Requested more information from Capella University's School of Business MBA program be delivered to my home address. Right. A frickin' MBA program.
Requested more information from American University's MBA program. Here's the part I don't get - how does me learning about a part-time MBA program help ANYONE? It doesn't even help me, let alone someone who would badly like $700.
Bought a $700 pair of shoes online with someone else's credit card but shipped to my address. Funny how their automatic fraud detection picked up on that over at soleas.com.
And a couple of people calling to follow-up on my interest in refinancing my home.

So, it doesn't make any sense at all. Not a bit. I put a fraud alert on my credit report and get this - you don't get solicitations for new credit cards in the mail while you have a fraud alert on! Score!

Every day remains a mystery - who will call at 9am and ask to speak to me, except when they ask for me they'll have my first and last name switched? Incompetence, people. If you're going to fuck with my identity, do it with some style.

note: that last remark was not a challenge to anyone to steal Ethan's identity and, say, open an ice creamery in Los Banos, California. That would be some stylish identity theft.

I ate five cookies yesterday

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:34:02 GMT

That's right, I ate five cookies yesterday. When I took the bag of cookies up to the cashier at our work coffeeshop, she said "oh, you get the EXPENSIVE cookies, huh?" Sure, they cost $4 for a bag of 5 cookies, but that's really quite reasonable given the normal cost of $1 per bad cookie. These cookies that come 5 to a bag bag are from an off-site third party bakery, unlike our shitty single-serving $1 cookies, and are AWESOME. Well worth the $0.80 amortized cost. We shall not factor in the long term medical costs associated with eating 5 deliciously buttery cookies in a row.

Also, the closet is organized. And that's it. Life is slow, and quiet, and I'm trying to keep it that way. I gave away a lot of stuff on craigslist and ebay this month. Like our vaccuum. I lied and said it "works OK, but not great." A more accurate thing to say about that vaccuum would have been "makes noise when you push it; has a basic grasp of the concept of electricity." But no. I wanted it gone, so I stretched the truth, and a very sweet girl named Ann came to take it and said "We're so excited we really needed a vaccuum!!!" You should have seen her face light up. So now I'm a bad person again.

Dog stuff now. There's this great show on the channel Animal Planet called Barking Mad, where trainers go to people's homes and show them how to fix their animal's behavior problems. They only shot it for 1 season in 1999, and I think I've seen about every episode, but I'm re-watching them too, because there's a lot of awesome training info in there. Do YOU know how to train a duck and a dog not to fight? I didn't. I still don't, and I've watched that episode twice. But the trainers on the show could. They used this neato variant on clicker training with the duck, and flashing him a blank white playing card meant he was being good, and that he got a treat (instead of with clicker training: loud click, then treat). How could you not like a show with subtitles like "Bored Octopus", "Gun dog afraid of loud noises", "Cat loves plastic." And the whole show is British. All the trainers, and people on the show. It's crazy.

happy baby

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 22:28:55 GMT

So my digital camera is dead. It was the Canon ELPH S400, and I'm suffering from some constant "Memory Card Error" messages. And I appear not to be the only one. There are a lot of people way more angry about it than I am. Well, maybe the same amount of angry. It seems like the problem only starts after 1-2 years of use, but it's very common in that timeframe.

What to do with it? I could sell the camera on ebay for around $200-$250, but that would be screwing somebody over. From reading around, it sounds like Canon offers a $200 upgrade to a refurb'd S500 if you send in your broken S400. Canon is assholes, but I plan to avail myself of this plan. I'm tempted to hate Canon forever because of all my lost photos, but that would be too easy. Too easy.

But that's why there aren't any photos today.

Stephen Elliot, author of the relentlessly depressing juvenile detention coming of age novel told in reverse Happy Baby, has some really good hurricane Katrina pieces in salon right now. I'd link to them, but I suspect you need a registration to read most of them. But you can try anyway - he has at least three stories up, and they're all pretty gritty first hand accounts of New Orleans & the Mississippi coast.

In fact, you can read his blog directly and get short snippets of Katrina coverage that's close to his Salon stories.

phone calls

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 04:07:41 GMT

It's 4AM, and I've been cleaning out the closet for the past 4 hours solid. And for about 4 hours during the day, too, so I'm around the 8 hour mark for closet re-organization this Labor Day Weekend. That is messed up, that I'd spend so much time inside organizing a closet, but now my closet looks AWESOME.

I had some great pictures to post today, but my digital camera memory card ate them. I think I need a new memory card that's not so "corrupty." It was a puppy, that I had a picture of. An adorable, adorable puppy. Swear to god he looked just like this. A soft coated wheaten terrier. Seriously. Named Harpo.

So I was just thinking about phone booths, and I remembered this time while I was at CMU, so around 6 years ago, when I was walking down Forbes Ave at 1AM, down in Oakland and there weren't a whole lot of people around. And I walk past this pay phone that's ringing, so I pick it up. And that's funny, because how often do you pick up a ringing pay phone? I usually ignore them. But it's this guy calling, and he's looking for this girl. Except I look all around and the girl's nowhere to be seen. And he's all "oh, cause she told me she'd be here if I called her back in 20 minutes. Oh well. She was cute."