The Donkey Cavern

Paparazzikitty

2008-01-27T12:45:00.000-08:00

This is Peanut (aka Nutty).

She loves to explore the neighborhood and I've often wondered where the heck she goes. My wife would often say, "We need a kitty cam so she can take pictures!" So one day I Googled "kitty cam" and, after being frightened by this site, I stumbled upon a German site called Mr. Lee about a German cat whose owner came up with a kit to modify a keychain digital camera so it takes pictures at regular intervals. For $30 I figured it was worth a shot.

The kit requires some soldering and assembly, but was available sooner and cheaper than a finished camera. Also, the geek in me just couldn't resist tearing apart a camera and doing some surface-mount soldering to get this to work. It was a bit harder than I expected, but after a couple of hours I had it working. It hangs off the cat's collar and while it's not very heavy, I can't imagine it's something a cat would want to walk around with all day. I figured we'd give Nutty a few hours off "break-in" time with it before sending her out on her first big adventure.

Look out Annie Leibovitz!

The wife's lap. Obviously there should be a kitty there instead of a computer.

Glamour shot of me eating Fritos. Sorry ladies, I'm taken.

Just another Perry Stone wannabe

2007-04-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

I like pop culture.

I have an rss feed to Yahoo!'s entertainment news on my home page.

I pay attention to plenty of things that just don't matter.

But between Dom Imus and Anna Nicole Smith I'm about to lose my fucking mind. How is this news? Really, how? Can you tell me that there aren't more important things for Americans to be thinking about?

I found a couple of great articles from Michelle Malkin on this topic. In particular, 10 things more newsworthy than Don Imus. I don't really know much about her, somebody tagged her on del.icio.us as "politics blog conservative Blogs news opinion daily christian independent writer." Not exactly someone who is likely to share my general views.

Here's the thing though, she really gets it on this issue. Is it terrible that Don Imus said those things? Absolutely, but let's remember that Don Imus has been a prick for 30 years. If you had asked me last week who I thought was the most likely radio personality to make such comments, I would have answered, "Don Imus" without thinking about it for more than 2 seconds. I know whereof I speak having been a regular listener of his show for about 3 years when I was in my early 20's. Then one day I realized that he wasn't saying anything new. He was being the same asshole every day and just changing his target based on current events.

The whole Anna Nicole Smith thing is similar. I just can't fathom how this can be considered important enough to rank in Reuters "Top Stories." Sure it's sad and she was a tragic, mixed up person. But the only reason this is "news" is because she was a celebrity. How many tragic souls die every day feeling hopeless and unloved and either overdose or over-medicate themselves to death? I'm guessing the number is closer to 100 or 1000 than it is to 1. If we have to make a spectacle of her tragedy can we at least raise awareness of bipolar disorder or drug abuse or something?

It's times like this that I understand how this country managed to elect Dubya twice.

Getting Things Done - Part 2: Projects, Contexts and Actions

2007-04-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

Now that my Inbox is empty, I'm moving on to setting up my Projects, Contexts and Actions. First a quick note on tools:

Instead of using Kinkless for my base GTD app I'm starting with iGTD. So far it seems pretty good. There's nice iCal integration for Tasks and a Quicksilver plugin to add Tasks on the fly. You can't add a project dynamically this way, but otherwise it's a really useful little app.

iGTD uses the syntax "Task Title [Project]" to organize Tasks. When Groupcal sees this it stores the Task with the [Project] in the actual title with every sync. Eventually you get "Task Title [Project] [Project] [Project] [Project] [Project] ..." I'll be looking for a fix to this as syncing to Exchange is important to me for data retention and mobile use (Blackberry).

I have abandoned the Address Book plugin for Thunderbird. The 3.0a codebase was too unstable for me. Not a really big deal and the truly necessary plugin, Quickfile, still works in 2.0pre builds.

I have decided to use 2 simple contexts to start: @Home and @Work. My Project list is only 12 items long at the moment but I'm sure I'll be adding more as I go. iGTD lacks a few things that I think I'll have to implement via iCal or another app that uses the iCal database:

Daily action list

Reminders for current and "waiting on" actions

Overall I'm pretty impressed with iGTD though. I like the usage of the standard iCal fields for notes and links. I have embedded wiki and helpdesk ticket links on several tasks so I can easily refer to the supporting docs and requirements. I'm using the notes field as a place to store the path to any supporting files for a given task. I don't think I'd want to attach a file directly even if it was possible as it would probably not be encrypted.

Getting Things Done - Part 1: The email purge

2007-03-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

I know, no clever title this time. Well, this is a reasonably serious post and I'm hoping to make this a continuing series.

I'm several days into an implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done(GTD). Various things in my professional and personal life have come together to illustrate that:

I have more commitments than my brain can keep in its "RAM".

I don't have control over all (or frankly any) of the input vectors that bring me information.

The stress from this lack of control piles up quickly and limits my ability to adapt to the more tactical issues in both sides of life.

Having 2948 messages (340 unread) in my Inbox is just wrong.

When someone does something to significantly change their life there is often a triggering event. "I'm quitting smoking because they found a spot on my lung." Or, "My girlfriend dumped me so I'll get in shape." For me there wasn't any one event that kicked this off. Mostly I was just getting fed up with the number of things that I couldn't control in my professional life that were making demands on me and my time. While reading up on the techniques I wanted to use I came to the conclusion that I could derive a lot of benefit from this in my personal life, too.

So, what have I done so far? With the help of many tips from lifehack.org, 43 Folders (specifically the Inbox Zero series) and Hawk Wings I have successfully processed my professional and personal Inboxes to zero messages. lifehack.org and 43 Folders are fairly general sites about productivity and GTD while Hawk Wings in a Mac and Mail.app focused site.

While I attempted to migrate from Thunderbird to Mail.app I have found Mail's IMAP support to be seriously lacking. Therefore my GTD toolkit is as follows:

Thunderbird - Email
Mac Address Book Plugin - integrates Mac OSX Address Book

Quickfile - enables keyboard-based folder navigation and message filing

iCal - Calendar

Groupcal - iCal to MS Exchange synchronization (not a great app but unfortunately it's the only game in town)

Kinkless - GTD lists and actions. Just a set of AppleScript hooks to create basic GTD structures in Omni Outliner Pro

Quicksilver - just the best Mac productivity app ever. If you're a keyboard junkie like I am you have to check this out.

I haven't migrated everything into Kinkless just yet. But I have implemented the email triaging techniques recommended in the Inbox Zero series and have become friends with deleting and archiving. Just look at my email client (left).

That was Men Without Hats with their big hit "Urban Sombrero"

2006-12-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

There's a radio station around here called Max FM. It's some sort of repackaging of the adult contemporary idea. It's generally about my 7th choice of stations to listen to and I rarely get that far down the list. However, today on the way to work everybody else was playing a commercial.

That's right, 6 major stations in the Bay Area all had a commercial on at the same time during the morning commute. Kinda sucky.

So I made my way through my presets and landed on Max FM. The most interesting thing about this station is that there are no DJs. The only talk you hear on the station is by a voiceover actor who seems to be the voice of "Max." What's funny is that the actor is John O'Hurley, aka Mr. Peterman from Seinfeld.

I kept waiting to hear him ask the audience if it knew what happens to a butter-based frosting after sitting 60 years in a poorly ventilated English basement.

Yes Virginia, There is a Tasmanian Devil

2006-11-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

We had a great day today.

We. I'm having a hard time coming up with a blog nickname for the other half of "we." Craig has set the bar too high with "The Scientist." I can't just call her "The Sales Chick." And "J" doesn't work for college-related reasons. I guess for now she'll just have to be, "The Fiancée."

Anyway.

We're in Portland, Oregon on our way to Seattle. For a change, neither of us is going to attend any family-related gatherings this Thanksgiving so we decided to have a little vacation. We took the whole week off and are going to stay at what will hopefully be a really cool spa resort outside of Seattle (more on that later, after we've actually been there). A friend of TF (let's call her N) lives here so we figured it would be nice to visit with her and her husband and get a local to show us around town.

After brunch at Mother's we headed out into "the gorge" to check out a bunch of waterfalls. Unfortunately, between the weather and a landslide or two, we didn't get to see a whole lot:

Next was a trip to the famous Powell's Books. Pretty cool, but overall I was more impressed with the little used bookshop down the street from Mother's. Then we went to check out a very cool, very Portland kinda place. It's called Kennedy School and it's basically a hotel and some restaurants. The cool part is that it used to be an elementary school until 1975.

That's right, the schoolrooms are hotel rooms, the assembly room is a movie theater, and (the best one) the detention hall is a bar. If we hadn't already found a cool little hotel downtown we would have tried to stay there. N said there's a movement around town called Keep Portland Weird. Very appropriate.
We then tried to buy some local wine but I don't think we were in quite the right place. This place was more Quik Stop than Beltramo's. After a quick tour of the local adult bookstores we headed over to N's house.

There we met a couple of real cuties that we wouldn't have minded taking home with us:

Thurgood. Yes, after the judge he resembles.

And Jinx.

Finally, we hit Papa Haydn's for dinner. Fantastic. Tons of food, great wine, and a dessert menu that kicks the ass of any other dessert menu I've ever seen.

All in all, a great day. Of course, if you can't have fun hanging out all day with 2 hot chicks and meeting a couple of cool four-legged friends then you aren't trying very hard. Oh, D you were cool too.

Gripe

2006-08-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

Wedding planning, fiancee moving in, combining finances. Not to mention typical work stress, home improvement projects and finishing everything before an upcoming vacation.

Yuck.

The term "biting off more than you can chew," has never seemed more appropriate. Most of what's going on right now is good stuff but it doesn't change the fact that there just aren't enough hours in the day anymore.

Case in point:

Usually when my dad calls with a computer problem I can just stay on the phone until we figure it out. He's pretty good about estimating when I'll probably be driving home from work or at least done working and just goofing off in the office.

But today was different. I was on the way home after running a couple of errands (including the grocery store for something to cook for dinner) and he called with what turned out to be a pretty hairy issue. Surprising to him, but without complaint, I had to cut him off at one point and say:

"I'll have to call you back in a little while. I have to start dinner or nobody in the house will be eating tonight."

It used to be that the only one affected by such an event would be me. The fact that the good woman didn't get home from her Napa work boondoggle until 9pm isn't the point. Really. It's not.

Well, maybe just a little.

Look to your right

2006-07-07T17:46:00.000-07:00

Poop, cannibalism, animal cruelty (well, not really).

No need for me to post today, just read the blogs listed to the right.

Wow.

Sunday, Happy Sunday

2006-07-05T20:53:00.000-07:00

I know it's taken me a while but here's the end of the engagement weekend story.

We woke up on Sunday morning and got ourselves ready to go to the Giants game. A quick cab ride and we were in the neighborhood. I now know where to go if I want to buy some scalped tickets to a game: all the scalpers hang out on the last 2 blocks of Second St. as you approach the ballpark.

It was Moises Alou bobblehead day and we managed to get there early enough to get ours. Later on, during the game, an usher told us to take a look at our bobbleheads because she heard that Giants was misspelled on the jerseys. Sure enough, there it was: Ganits. Hi-lar-ious.

The seats we had were fantastic, section 130, front row. Basically just past the Giants bullpen in left field. Unfortunately, Barry Bonds wasn't playing that day otherwise we would have been 20 feet away almost the whole game. It was fairly cool anyway since Moises was playing LF in place of Bonds.

The game was great right up until the Giants put in Tim Worrel who managed to give up a grand slam (as predicted by the guy sitting to my right) to put the Giants behind late in the game. They wound up losing by a couple. Moises made a great diving catch right in front of us and another routine one a few feet away. He also hit a home run (as usual for whoever has their bobblehead day).

After the game we decided to walk back to the hotel since we had left the car there. It was getting around time for dinner so we found a place to wait in the lounge outside the dining room until it opened. The great service at the Ritz continued as we had a wonderful conversation with the middle-aged bartender about all the cool places he has worked in his 30-plus years slinging suds.

Once the dining room opened we headed in and were the only ones in the whole place. It was pretty funny. Our waiter was a former chef and was willing to talk about cooking with me. He was really fantastic. We both like oysters and he brought some on the house. He also told us where to get some good local oysters (Tomales Bay, which we visited the following weekend).

Midway through our meal in walked a "very blonde family," (to quote my fiance). Young-to-teenage kids, young mother and an a slightly older father. They were the only other people in the dining room and the host seated them near enough that we could hear their conversation (apparently they had been out sailing all day). At some point I looked over and realized that the father looked quite a bit like Thomas Haden Church. I mentioned this and about 10 seconds later we heard him say something and there was no doubt, it was him.

It seems pretty trivial given what an important weekend this was for us, but this was just the absolute capper to the whole thing. I really wanted to yell out, "No, if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!" but I refrained.

Life Is Good

2006-06-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to document the fact that at 8:02PM PST on June 17, 2006 nobody was screwing up my life. And in fact, there was someone making it a whole lot better.

A Night at the Opera

2006-06-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

After lunch at Cafe DeLucchi (fantastic food by the way) we headed back to the hotel. Since it was only about 15 blocks we just walked back. This took us through Chinatown and being a Saturday afternoon it was very busy around all the fruit stands and little stalls & bodegas.

Once back at the hotel we relaxed for a while until it was time to get ready for the opera. Our room had 2 LCD flatscreen TVs and the Ritz actually had HD programming for them. It was pretty cool to watch hockey in HD. I want one. We watched some of When Harry Met Sally on Fri night on the DVD player in the room. When I went to use it I noticed that they hadn't connected the component video outputs (just the composite) so I couldn't use the progressive scan feature. Fortunately there was a DVD player under each TV so I stole the AV cable from the other one and hooked into the component outs on the DVD player. Whoever gets that room next is gonna be a bit confused when they try to use the other player. Heehee.

But I digress.

We got ready for the opera fairly early and headed down to the club lounge for some drinks. Apparently the original formulation of grenadine includes pomegranate juice. Since pomegranates are the new hot thing for trendy people true grenadine is becoming more popular. Why am I telling you this? Because it's what my fiance (wow, kinda can't believe I wrote that word) was telling me before we went for our drinks in the lounge and I assume it's why she ordered a Bacardi cocktail. Although I think she asked for gin and rum which doesn't seem to be the usual method.

We sat down and had our drinks and some hours d'ouvres (boy, does that look pretentious in writing). A roving waiter came by with this big caviar cart. I was sort of excited because I don't think I had ever had caviar before. I wasn't particularly impressed but that's probably more of a statement about the quality of the caviar that was being served than anything else. It just didn't seem all that special.

We headed downstairs to grab a taxi to the opera house. For no apparent reason, the doorman had the hotel's car service take us there for free in a pretty nice Cadillac Escalade. We were fairly early so we took a walk around the opera house and checked out what was on sale in their little gift shop. The War Memorial Opera House is a wonderful building and it's fun to just walk around and check it out.

The opera we saw was (appropriately) The Marriage of Figaro. Just fantastic. The woman playing the role of the Countess was a fairly famous diva, Ruth Ann Swenson. She was unbelievable. Often those roles seem to be played by high-pitched, too much vibrato sopranos but she was mellow and powerful and a real delight.

We arranged reservations at Le Jardinere, a little cafe behind the opera house, for a late supper. The food was amazing, topped off by an incredible chocolate concoction they called Venezuelan Chocolate Cake. I don't know how Venezuelan it was, but man it was good. Basically the richest, gooiest, densest underdone brownie ever. Yum.

Next up: bobbleheads and brushes with fame.

A Modest Proposal

2006-06-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

It's been an eventful couple of weeks.

I wanted to do something special when proposing to my girlfriend and since we had already planned a weekend at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco I figured that would be a perfect time. For my birthday she got me tickets to the Giants game on Sunday and we already had tickets to the SF Opera for Saturday night.

We arrived on Friday night around 6pm and I had arranged to have some champagne and strawberries in the room upon our arrival. Our arrival time was a bit in flux because of traffic so the roses that I had asked for didn't show up, but that didn't really matter.

I didn't want to wait very long to propose after our arrival so that we would be able to call all of our east coast relatives and tell them the news. As soon as we walked in to the room and put our stuff down I did it. She said yes (obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this) and we celebrated with room service and the pre-arranged champagne. We spent most of the next 2 hours calling relatives and staring at the ring.

On Saturday we ordered in room service for breakfast then hit the town. We walked down to Union Square and visited Grant's Tobacco. I purchased a couple of cigars that I read about in the issue of Cigar Aficionado that was in our room. I lit up one of them on the spot and smoked it as we perused the shops in the area.

I started craving a cappuccino so we decided to head down to North Beach. Amazingly enough, in almost 30 years of living in the Bay Area I cannot remember ever having ridden a cable car. We hopped on the Powell to Fisherman's Wharf car and rode it down to the end of the line. We were greeted by a rather amusing conductor on the car who regaled the passengers with stories including one about what it was like to be on a cable car during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

The end of the line for the cable car was a bit past where we were headed in North Beach so we set off back towards Columbus Ave. and strolled into the heart of the Italian neighborhood. Once there, we found what looked like a nice little cafe and headed inside for a bite.

Up next, a night at the opera.

Watch this! On second thought, don't bother...

2006-04-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

I like wine. If you know me (and if you're reading this there's a 99.9% chance that you do) then you know I have a bit of a predilection for the Central Coast region of California. Maybe it's because I went to Cal Poly, maybe it's because I'm becoming a really big Zinfandel fan, but whatever the reason, it's what I like.

In the past year I have gone wine tasting in Paso Robles twice and once in the Livermore Valley (not really Central Coast, but definitely non-Napa). I'm certainly starting to develop a well-defined impression of what I like about certain wineries/varietals/vintages and I can even talk intelligibly to the "experts" at various tasting rooms.

I have been buying more wine lately, both when tasting and just in general when I find something I like. Plus, I'm a member of the wine club at Tobin James (my favorite winery in Paso) which means I get 8 bottles sent to me twice a year. Since I'm getting all this extra wine, I figure I might want to invest in one of those wine refrigerator thingys. Mostly because I can't imagine it's a good idea to just keep all my bottles stacked up in a cubbard.

So what's my point? That would be that Wine Spectator sucks.

I wanted to do some research on wine fridges and since WS seems to be a fairly authoritative source I thought I'd go to their website. Well, they suckered me for $7.95, that's for sure:

Anything worth looking at or reading on the site requires registration which means $$$. There isn't even a way to get free general ratings about a given winery. It's pretty much "click here, pay me." Lame.

Like I said above, I really like Zin and am becoming pretty knowledgable about the Central Coast Zins that are good. When I searched the ratings for 2003 Zins I got a list of wineries I hadn't ever heard of. It's widely recognized that Tobin James and Opulo make some of the best Zin in the region. There weren't any ratings for TJ after 1997. 1997? What the fuck? I'm pretty sure they've made some good wines since then. LameLame.

This one is a major irritation when dealing with a site that asks me for money: YOU CAN'T CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION ONLINE!!!!!!! What the hell? There isn't even an 800 number posted for me to call and cancel. As far as I can tell I'm on the hook for $7.95 each month for the rest of my life. Now, I know that's not true but it's really irritating that I'm going to have to spend time looking around to figure out how to cancel. The first rule of taking people's money on a website should be: Make it just as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.

Wine Spectator? More like Ass Spectator. Fuck them.

"PC Load Letter"? What the fuck does that mean?

2006-01-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

I recently went back to work full time. After 7 months away from the joys of sitting in a cubicle surrounded by people who don't always have a clue, it's taking me a while to get used to the little annoyances I've been missing.

So, here are a few rules I'd like to propose. Nothing earth-shattering, just stuff that would make me a lot happier. I don't do this shit to you so please don't do it to me (sorta like the golden rule if it had been written by Jim Caviezel [link shamelessly stolen from Dave, we still need those WW Jim Caviezel Do? t-shirts] ).

If you want to use your speakerphone, close your office door. Only the truly privileged have offices around here so make use of your fourth wall.

If you absolutely cannot put your cellphone on vibrate (which I'd argue about but I've given up on this one), make sure you take the damn thing with you when you leave your desk. None of us wants to hear your obnoxious ringtone every 3 minutes because your wife, husband, kid, mother, or dog's cousin's chiropodist has some emergency question about the color of your new drapes.

Turn down your system sounds or turn off everything but system errors and new mail alerts. I don't need to be able to tell you got a new AIM message from 40 feet away.

If I have my headphones on in my cube, treat it as you would if I had an office and the door were closed. I don't understand why this one is hard.

If you need stress relief get a hand exerciser, don't punish your keyboard. You answering your email should not sound like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

Uma Thurmann has ugly feet

2006-01-13T18:50:00.000-08:00

I just watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 and I can’t decide whether Uma Thurman is hot or not. I’ve had this discussion with myself before when I saw her in other movies.

Pulp Fiction: Exotic and cool, but not really hot
Be Cool: Sexy, possibly fuckable, not quite hot
Batman & Robin: Not hot
Dangerous Liaisons: Sorta hot in a Marie Antoinette kinda way

Obviously, she pales in comparison to a local woman I met in a coffee shop recently (had to throw that in there in case she reads this, although that doesn’t make it any less true). But I digress.

I’m a huge Quentin Tarantino fan but I just couldn’t really get into the Bills. I’m guessing that if I were a kung-fu movie fan I would have been able to appreciate them on another level. Mostly it just seemed like a fantastical story that I just never completely bought into. That said, I did really enjoy Uma’s character (The Bride).

Part of my disappointment was because of how far out the storyline was. One of the things I really liked about Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and (most especially) Jackie Brown is how plausible those stories are. Granted, they each have their moments of unreality but overall you don’t have to completely suspend belief to get into the movie in general. In the case of Jackie Brown it’s almost a straight-up caper movie given the Tarantino twist.

Now if I could only decide about Drew Barrymore and Sarah Jessica Parker.

A shot to the gut

2005-10-07T15:41:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the Wheaties ad with Vin Scully's voiceover put to a softball game?

Great idea, but did they have to use Kirk Gibson's homer for the Dodgers in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series? I was a big A's fan at the time (I prefer the Giants these days, my baseball palate has been refined to prefer NL to AL ball) but I hated the Dodgers like any good Bay Area baseball fan. This was the first "stomach punch" moment of my sports-rooting life.

As a kid of the 80's whose family had 49er tickets, I was pretty spoiled when it came to championships. In 1988, the 49ers had won 2 Super Bowls and were about to win the next 2 in a row. The A's were rounding into form and looked like they'd be a force to be reckoned with. After attending Game 3 of the ALCS vs. Boston (A's won 10-6, coming back from a 5-0 deficit with some big homers) I was psyched to see my favorite team finally win it all.

Back to Game 1. Eck is in. 1 run lead. Game over. Right? Wrong. Since that moment I've been able to understand sports-agony tales from Red Sox, Cubs, and Bills fans & writers. Gibby hobbles to the plate. How can a guy who can't even move briskly from the dugout to the batter's box even make contact against the dominant closer of the era? This would be over quickly, just not in the way I imagined.

I remember the gimpy swing, ass hanging out, almost a lunge. I remember seeing the ball fly through the air and thought, "No way, that's not getting out of here." Then I remember thinking that it can't be easy to recover from a moment like this. I was right. The A's managed only 1 win, Game 3, and lost in 5.

I was lucky again to be able to attend game 5 of the World Series that year. I figured I'd be seeing my guys taking a 3-2 series lead at the very worst. Instead I was treated to watching the Dodgers win their sixth championship. I still haven't gotten the taste out of my mouth.

So please, Wheaties, while I applaud your efforts and recognize you've made a clever ad, couldn't you pick some other heroic baseball moment? It doesn't need to be Bobby Thompson in 1951 ("The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" - beating the Dodgers I might add), I'd settle for Mazeroski's homer in 1960. At least that one beat the Yankees. Who doesn’t like a moment like that?

Tax panic

2005-08-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

In the mail today was an envelope from the IRS. Not an unusual occurrence as they send me estimated payment vouchers and other unnecessary forms a couple times a year.

Then I opened it.

Leave it to the IRS to find a way to generate all the anxiety of an audit without actually using the word “audit.” After reading through the documents it appears that they are a bit confused by something. Apparently they think I have unreported income from 2003 to the tune of about twice what I make in any given year. They call this an “examination by mail.” What you or I would call an audit is an “examination in person.” Your government at work ladies and gentlemen.

At first glance this utterly terrified me. Mainly because I figured if they were sending me this then there really was something wrong. How did I screw this up? Did I leave out a 1099 or W-2? The worst part was the section at the end that explained I’d owe $5000 or 20% of the new tax amount as a penalty. Yikes.

I dragged out all my information from 2003 and couldn’t find a problem. What appears to have happened is that the IRS doesn’t understand their own rules for reporting stock option income. The income they said I didn’t report was on the FIRST LINE OF MY RETURN!!!!!! Fortunately I have copious documentation of all of this and bundled it up with a nice summary of the situation and mailed it off to them.

Then I sat down to try to figure out how this happened. I know I’m right so I’m not too worried about having to pay them any more money. Then again, it is the IRS and you just never can tell.

Then it hit me. E-file.

When you e-file you can’t include some of the extra documentation that would normally be helpful in explaining your return. I didn’t figure this would be a problem since 2003 was a comparatively simple tax year for me. Obviously not.

Needless to say, I’ll be mailing in a paper return (like I had to do this year for some reason) from now on.

Want fries with that?

2005-06-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to come up with a reason why I’m writing this story. It’s possible that I’ve been thinking a lot about the ends of relationships lately. It’s also possible that I’ve been spending a lot of time considering my very much confirmed bachelorhood. But I think the reason is simply because it’s a good story.

Her name was Sara. We dated for 2 years (exactly) from junior year of high school until freshman year of college. I say exactly above because we broke up on our 2 year anniversary. However, that’s not what this story is about.

We broke up on March 11th (significant only because it was the first of several relationship misadventures that have occurred on that date). A couple months later I got a phone call from Sara. She was a student at UC Riverside and I was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. It seems I still had some CDs or something that she wanted to get back. She asked if I would be willing to drop them off at her parents house the next I time I went home. I agreed and expected her to say, “OK thanks, goodbye,” but that’s not what happened.

Her next words were, “So, how’s it going?” We wound up talking for several hours. It turned out that she didn’t have a ride back home after finals were over and was going to have to go with someone she didn’t care to spend 8 hours in a car with. So, I offered to come down to get her and she could wait at my place for a few days until I went back home. She agreed and I headed down to see her.

I arrived at about 6am. After a couple days of remembering why we liked being together in the first place, we headed back to SLO. Now, this is at least a 6 hour drive but somehow she managed to only say about 10 words the whole time. I figure that wasn’t a good sign but wasn’t going to mess things up as we seemed to be getting along pretty well. We arrived in SLO where we were going to stay for a couple days as I had to play in the band for graduation the next day. I left the next morning fairly early and told her I’d be back later in the afternoon.

I returned home to find that she hadn’t left my room the entire day. This wouldn’t seem quite so strange if not for the fact that one of my roommates was there half the day and my other roommate’s boyfriend was there all day. I didn’t ask why and figured she had a good reason and that it didn’t really matter. Unfortunately I needed to run back to campus to give something back to a fellow student who was leaving for the summer that night. This was going to take about an hour altogether and I could tell she wasn’t very happy about it but there wasn’t anything I could do.

When I returned from my errand she wasn’t in a good mood. She wanted to have a talk about how I was ignoring her and doing the same old things that used to drive her crazy. I certainly can’t claim to have been the perfect boyfriend (we did break up after all) but I was pretty confused by all this. I was also starving as I hadn’t had time to eat all day. I told her I wanted to start dinner and we could talk while I was cooking. I threw a couple pieces of chicken on the grill and headed back to my room to “talk about us.”

Fairly early in this discussion I realized what a huge mistake I had made and that we never should have tried to get back together. Therefore I just stopped caring what she had to say. I could see the barbeque from my bedroom window and could tell it was time to turn the chicken over. So, I told her to hang on for a minute and took care of dinner. That really pissed her off. She met me in the hallway on the way back into the house and started yelling at me. This is when I pretty much just started ignoring her. That succeeded in pissing her off more than before, and she had been pretty pissed already. She stormed into my bedroom and was heard to be slamming stuff around angrily. I grabbed a plate and sat down to eat.

That story is fairly interesting and would probably stand up on its own. The part that happens next is why I’m writing this down.

Sara emerged from my bedroom several hours later to tell me she wanted to leave that night for home instead of the next day as we had planned. I said, “No problem,” grabbed my bag, called my folks and packed the car. We headed for home around 9pm beginning what would be at least a 3 hour drive.

Within 5 minutes of leaving my house she says to me, “I’m hungry, can we stop so I can get something to eat?” I wanted to say, “Bitch, you should have eaten the dinner I cooked for you,” but I didn’t and we pulled into a fast food joint and she got a burger, fries and a soda.

She didn’t say another word to me for a while as we drove down the highway towards home. She tried to bait me into getting mad with her by rolling down the window but I just turned up the stereo and flipped on the heater. As she finished her food I could tell she was getting more and more angry. She finished her burger and threw the wrapper out the window. Now she had her fries and her soda. As she continued eating her fries she began throwing every other fry out the window. Eat one, throw one out the window. Eat one, throw one out the window. Then she decided that throwing one at me would be a good idea. Eat one, throw one at me, throw one out the window. Eat one, throw one at me, throw one out the window.

As funny as this may seem right now, it was ten times funnier when it was happening. But I knew I shouldn’t laugh at her or she might really flip out. Eventually she ran out of fries and was left with just her soda. She finished that and I could hear her shaking the remaining ice cubes in the cup. I thought to myself, “Don’t you dare.” She obviously realized that throwing ice at me might be a bit too much and chose to simply toss the cup out the window.

A few minutes later she decided she just couldn’t hold her tongue anymore and tried to start arguing with me again. I deflected things as much as I could since we still had a couple more hours left on the drive. Eventually she said something that really made me mad so I said, “You know, I don’t have to drive you home. I could pull over and leave you here on the side of the road.” That shut her up.

Now, I wasn’t entirely serious about this. I would have dropped her at a Greyhound station at the very least. I’m pretty sure I would have anyway.

We reached about the halfway point of the trip when she asked if I would pull over so she could use the bathroom. I stopped and as she got out of the car she asked, “Can I have the keys?” I was a bit puzzled by this request and asked her why. She responded with, “Because I honestly think you are going to drive away and leave me here.” This cracked me up and I finally had to laugh at the whole situation and told her I wasn’t going to leave and she should just go inside. It might have been tempting to leave her there but I like to think I’m not that much of an asshole.

We drove the rest of the way in silence with no food or other items used as projectiles. I dropped Sara and her stuff at her parents’ house and drove away figuring I’d never see her again. I didn’t for about 7 years. We eventually got in touch again (realizing that for a few years after college we lived about a block apart) and are now friends again. She’s successful and happily married so I guess nothing I did messed her up too much. I still like to tell this story because I think it’s pretty unique. None of my breakups since then were anything like it. At least, none of the other girls have thrown fries at me.

I ain't ever rollin' with Ted again.

2005-05-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

"Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating."

I just heard that line from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I liked it.

Some other quotes I'm fond of:

"[P]eople are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome." - Thornton Wilder from Our Town. I first heard this back in high school and it really spoke to me. I have always thought it was an excellent way of describing the drive of all people to find their soulmate.

"Don't confuse motion with progress." - Not sure who said this, but a former co-worker had it on his whiteboard. It was an appropriate sentiment for that company.

"Sex is like a sneeze." - Mr. Castronovo, my 8th grade science teacher. He got sneezed at in the hallway for the rest of the year. I'm pretty sure he was trying to explain the anticipation and release...but I digress.

"If everything's under control you're going too slow." - Mario Andretti. I used this as a team slogan during a big project a few years ago.

"Does that turd hanging out of his ass mean anything to you?" - My buddy Dave. In repsone to my question "Hey turn around and see if Justin looks like he needs to take a shit," related to my cat Justin who was riding in the back seat during a road trip.

"What are we seeing again, Suvivors?" - My dad while standing in line to see the movie Volunteers. This was funny because he must have said this at least 6 times in the 20 minutes we were waiting. This was also during the period when he thought that every blonde actress was Daryl Hannah. I'm not kidding.

"That's a pretty fucking good milkshake. I don't know if it's worth five dollars but it's pretty fucking good." - Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction. Probably my favorite movie quote of all time.

This my shit. This my shit

2005-05-06T00:12:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned that Gwen Stefani's solo album is a steaming pile of crap?

I'm a huge No Doubt fan and I even liked Return of Saturn which many people thought was mediocre at best. So I figured anything by Gwen Stefani ought to have at least a few good songs or some redeeming qualities.

Nope. All crap, all the time.

Now, it's one thing to have lame-ass lyrics and frankly I've never let that deter me from buying a pop album that is otherwise good. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've got Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Amy Grant in my collection. I guess the difference is that these other albums manage to balance the lameness with something interesting or good instrumentals.

But Gwen killed it. Blew it. Sucked out loud. This wasn't just "The Postman" bad this was approaching "Caddyshack 2" levels. Oh well, I guess it'll make a good coaster.