Dan's Blog

Blockage

2008-07-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

At this point, I've been a professional writer for over four years. I've written hundreds of articles ranging from 50 words up to 3,500+, many of them on short deadlines, and I've never really had a problem. But for some reason, this seemingly insignificant story has me completely blocked up. I've been staring at it for a week and a half, pushed the deadline back as far as it can possibly go, and I'm still having a hell of a time making it happen.

I'm probably overthinking this. I mean, I had no trouble writing several angry, yet civil emails to Nancy Pelosi's office regarding her active impeding of imeachment proceedings against a clearly criminal president (which in my mind makes her an accomplice, basically his getaway driver). I have no trouble articulating my outrage at Barack Obama's vote in favor of the FISA bill. (Yes, I know he voted for an amendment to remove the telcom immunity garbage, but isn't that a lot like threatening that if they don't remove the part he doesn't like he'll vote for it anyway? What exactly was the incentive to remove it? Incidentally, all the money I was going to donate to Obama's campaign is now going to the ACLU to help them in undoing the damage he's helped to cause.) I'm not having any trouble writing this blog right now. So what the hell?

Luddite attack!

2008-06-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Bubba: new version of iPhone coming out in a few weeks
Me: Dur?
Bubba: well I don't follow this shit, asshole
Me: You should really set your status message to "under a rock."
Me: That way, next time you miss the biggest piece of technology news of the past six months, no one will be surprised.

Domestication

2008-06-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

As my former boss so helpfully points out, I have a negligent blogger once again. I'd like to think it's because I've been extremely busy at work this past month, but honestly, I waste an incredible amount of time that could, in theory, be spent blogging. So, yet again, I shall attempt to harness all of that energy that I expend on procrastination - a perpetually renewable energy source - and write something down. Here goes:

I suppose I've got plenty to blog 'bout, this being my final week as a swinging single bachelor and all. No, not getting married or anything, but I am about to start living in sweet, sweet sin. (No, not sloth - the other good one.) She hasn't even moved in yet, and she's already redecorated my bathroom and hung up the first of many classy pictures involving cats in some way. You see, she's a doctor/crazy cat lady in training, so I've had to put my foot down and establish a strict KP ratio (kitty picture to non-kitty picture) of at most 1.25 to 1. I'm no interior decorator, but it does seem a little creepy if everywhere you look you see pictures of cats - unless they're LoLcats, in which case they're still pretty funny (when properly done) even about a year after that meme burnt out. I've also installed nearly 9 gigs of Sims 2 expansions (which, in addition to the Spore Creature Creator, is the only game I've managed to get her to play) on my computer in preparation for her arrival. Am I an awsome boyfriend or what?

But that's this weekend. In the meantime, I've kicked out my roommate by getting him into an east coast business school (by which I mean "by having nothing to do with him getting into an east coast business school") and have been going through the process of untangling the belongings that intermingled over the past three years. For example, tonight we cleaned out the refrigerator, which involved him reaching elbow-deep in there, retrieving an item, and then we'd each say "I thought that was yours! Wait, what exactly is (or was?) that?" And then we'd try to figure out the expiration date. The record was some tofu (indisputably his - I have never, even while drunk, purchased tofu. Or received it as a gift, for that matter) from 2006. But that was relatively intact. The winner of the horror show was easily a Tupperware container that held something that I sincerely hope used to be beef stew.

Also, as my roomie prepared to migrate eastward and shed his worldly posessions, I purchased (among other things - couch, wardrobe, blender, etc) his ironing board for $5 - which, in retrospect, is an excellent way to welcome a girlfriend moving in with you. "Hey babe, I'm so glad you're moving in. There's a ton of ironing to be done!" I'm lucky she's a crazy cat lady instead of a militant feminist, or she'd probably beat me to death with that thing.

Anyway, I intend to live it up a little this week, by which I mean staying up late watching Venture Brothers, playing computer games, and having frozen pizza and beer for dinner. Good times.

See, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Catching Wind

2008-05-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

With the recent sale of my 5-year-old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop (which I used to like to affectionately refer to as "this fucking heavy piece of crap" because it weighed more than 7lbs) to a ~~sucker~~ friend of mine, I've committed myself to buying a new one. For a while I was thinking of blowing about $1600-$2000 on a shiny new M1330, complete with GeForce 8400, but then I realized that that would be a fantastically stupid thing to do. Considering that I was generally happy with the performance of an old P4 2.4GHz during the 15 minutes per week I'm more than three feet away from my quad-core gaming desktop, it makes little sense to blow that kind of money for a mobile powerhouse.

Instead, I've decided to jump on the newly trendy (and affordable) sub-notebook bandwagon. I was eyeing the Asus EeePC for a bit, but I've heard too many things about the keyboard on an 8.9" laptop being too small for stubby fingers like mine, the screen being too low-resolution, and then there were the battery life issues. I also looked at the HP 2133, which has more CPU power than the Eee and better resolution, but shares the small keyboard issue and is more a'spensive. But then, along came MSI with the Wind, and I think we have a winner" $550 gets me a 10" 1024x600 screen (and with it a slightly wider keyboard), a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, bluetooth, 1.3MP camera, and 5.5 hours of battery life running Windows XP. Not bad, not bad at all. Those specs should have no trouble handling the stuff I used my FHPoC for, and weigh less than half as much doing it.
The catch is that it's not yet available, and I'm going to be flying cross-country on June 8. All indications have it going on sale in two weeks (on June 3), so that gives me a five-day window to procure one. C'mon Costco, Wikipedia says you'll have it. Help me out here!

Note: seeing Indiana Jones tomorrow night. I'm cautiously optimistic that I won't hate it.

Failure

2008-05-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

"Last post: May 5, 2008"

Holy crap, I fail at blogging.

The delay game

2008-05-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'm about to leave for the airport to fly across the country on a United Airlines flight. Anyone care to place bets on how much of a delay there will be? With UA, I've found that it's not a question of if the flight will be delayed, but how long. (At T-3 hours, they claim the flight will be on time.)

I'm going to be optimistic and say that it's going to be between 15 and 30 minutes late. However, I predict that the trip back is going to be delayed at least an hour.

Edit:
Scorecard:
Departing flight left on time. Shocker. It was, however, compensated for by extreme proximity to the flight's standard-issue screaming baby, and a comically inept car rental employee who wasted a bunch of our time when we got there.

Returning flight sat on the runway for about an hour. On the bright side, I slept through the entire ordeal.

Mis vacaciones Mexicano

2008-04-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

As of this past weekend, it can no longer be said that I have never been to Mexico. So suck it, people who would say that! You know who you are.

I've been to San Diego many times over the past few years - I've made a habit of spending my New Year's Eve celebrations down there with a concentration of college buddies - but never bothered to go the extra 20 minutes south to cross the boarder. But now, seeing as Mexico is pretty much the one country left with a favorable exchange rate, and Virgin America was offering some $38 fares to San Diego, I made an exception.

The most shocking thing was crossing the boarder into Mexico without so much as an "¡Hola!" from customs. Why, it's almost as though Mexico doesn't care if you bring things down there. Of course, going the other way is another story all together.

On the strength of a very picky friend's recommendation, we ended up at Hotel La Fonda, which we found despite it not actually having a street address of any kind. I managed to find it on Google Maps, but it couldn't compute directions there even though it's pretty much a straight shot.

View Larger Map

Good thing that whole area is gringo-friendly - we couldn't believe the amount of construction going on, building up affordable condos for white people priced out of San Diego. Fortunately for us, that also meant plenty of English road signs.

Arriving at La Fonda, we found that they offer three levels of accommodations: La Fonda for $100 per night, La Fonda Bungalow for $125 per night, and (not making this up) Kinda La Fonda for $75 per night. We went for the middle of the road, not expecting too much for that money, but damn:

That's not a bad view! Especially when indulging in non-happy-hour $3 margaritas and pina coladas and similarly affordable mountains of nachos. We ended up spending most of our time relaxing at La Fonda, going for walks on the beach, and hanging out at the extremely cheap-but-tasty restaurant. Despite a couple of unidentified smells, La Fonda has definitely made the short list for repeat vacationing in the future.

IM Client Wars

2008-04-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

Today a handy Lifehacker post introduced me, and apparently everybody else on the internet, to a new multi-protocol IM client called Digsby. I've been a satisfied Pidgin user since ~~upgrading~~ switching to Vista a year ago, which turned out to be incompatible with my old IM client of choice, AIM 5.2 (with the now-defunct AIMutation installed to remove all of the bloat and add chat window tabs and logging), but I like to be open-minded when it comes to new software options. After playing with it for a day, I'm ready to proclaim it to be full of potential, but not quite ready to supplant Pidgin as my go-to IM app.

What I like:
* Cleaner looking than Pidgin. Pidgin suffers from that open source look that reminds one of Soviet architecture. Even the skins are a bit crap. Digsby, by comparison, has a much more polished look and includes a variety of (mostly ugly) skins and themes.
* Not having to install three separate applications to make it work. Seriously, I get that Pidgin is a community project, but c'mon - Aspell, GTK+, and at least one other program just to make an IM app work?
* Better email management than Pidgin. I can even compose email to be sent through Gmail within Digsby.
* Facebook integration. Not that I'm a huge Facebook fanatic or anything, but it's nice to not have to load the page to see when people post updates or to change my status message.
* Customization - I can customize how the buddy list displays information to an almost ridiculous degree. For example, if I want buddy icons displayed at all, I can have them to the left or right, and any size I want. If I want a status icon, it can be to the left or right, or it can be a "badge" on the icon. Craziness.
* The ability to drag and drop conversation tabs between windows, or out of a window to create a new window. I can't tell you how many times I've wished Pidgin would do this.

What I don't like:
* Most of this can be filed under unfinished features, like wonky text formatting, no hyperlinking in IMs, can't set your own icons for buddies, etc.
* Eats RAM like it's Firefox or something. Why does an IM client need 75MB of RAM? The developers claim to be working on optimization, though, so this could be a temporary issue.
* Can't change what my name shows up as. I don't care what my screen name is, I want it to show up as "Me." For example, I want the conversation window to look like this:
Me: Hello.
[Insert your name here]: Check out this awesome link!
Me: Die in a fire.
* Can't disable emoticons (without a hack). There's no emoticon to express how much I dislike emoticons.
* Log viewer is on par with Pidgin, but not as good as Trillian's. I want to be able to see all the conversations I had on a given date, dammit, not just one contact at a time. Search also needs to be log-wide, not just the currently selected conversation.
* Nowhere to store buddy notes. I need somewhere to jot down notes on PR contacts, or specify which people I hate, and why. Pidgin has this one.
* Lack of individual alerts. This is something I haven't been able to use since AIM 5.2, but I had all kinds of fun assigning different sign-in sounds to each person. I could who was signing in without even looking at the buddy list.
* Can't specify where I want my chat logs stored.
* Ugly logo. If your logo is a fat kid, you're doing something wrong.

However, if Digsby manages to fix even half of these issues, it stands a good chance of winning my heart/mind.

Adventures in Public Transportation

2008-03-31T22:11:00.000-07:00

I would like to share with you a conversation I had with a crazy lady at the train stop.

- Exterior, Train Station -
Night

I am clearly enjoying an episode of Lewis Black's Root of All Evil on my Zen. A woman who appears to be in her late 50s approaches, walking her bike, and sits down next to me.

CL@TS: *In unidentifiable accent* Do you know name of god?
Me: *Takes off headphones* Excuse me?
CL@TS: Name of god?
Me: *blinks* Is it...Pedro?
CL@TS: No. Is Yahweh.
Me: Are you sure? I'm pretty sure it's Pedro.
CL@TS: Jesus is his son.
Me: I thought Pedro's son's name was Jose.
CL@TS: Do you have Bible?
Me: I really don't want a bible. *Puts headphones back on, ignores CL@TS until train comes*

And scene.

Trekrospective

2008-03-26T22:48:00.001-07:00

On the topic of decade-old TV shows, and because I'm a huge nerd, I've been re-watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently. The first couple of seasons (before the Dominion War) weren't nearly as dull as I remembered them. Less shooting and explody things, sure, but there also wasn't a single "Oh no, the holodeck is malfunctioning!" episode in there, which is quite a virtue for a Star Trek show. Ignoring the two child actors (which should be illegal) and some irritating Quark-centric comedy relief episodes, there are some complex and dark storylines and characters (like Garak) that set it way apart from the rest of Trek - the other four shows had a nasty habit of cannibalizing everything prior like nerdy vultures. DS9 had the same kind of social commentary with a political skew to it, making it at least tied for my favorite series with TNG. I also can't help but think that it was a good thing the show ended before 2003 - a major character who had been a terrorist resisting a brutal occupying army probably wouldn't have gone over very well.

As a side note, poking around IMDB in a where-are-they-now sort of way (an alarming number of the cast doesn't seem to have worked since,) I stumbled across this:

My god, he's a Monty Python character. There are some who call me... Tim.

The horror

2008-03-17T20:00:00.001-07:00

I just had a conversation with my mother in which she mentioned my lengthy adventures with United Airlines on the Vancouver airport runway last week. What's wrong with that? I had not told my mother about said adventure. Which means that despite my five years actively not mentioning to my parents that I have a blog might have failed to adequately conceal this site. Which means she could be reading this, right now. Which also means she could be reading my stupid "ageaculation" joke from the previous post. The horror. The horror.

And once again, the Onion has turned out to be eerily prophetic:

Mom Finds Out About Blog

MINNEAPOLIS, MN-In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.

Premature Ageacjulation

2008-03-14T21:18:00.001-07:00

There is very little that makes you feel old like the realization that a show which, as far as you recollect, started up fairly recently, begins its twelfth fucking season. That's quite simply not cool. I may be preparing to vote in my third presidential election (third time's the charm, I hope) but that doesn't qualify me as old, in the traditional sense, does it? Besides yelling at people to turn off that damn rap music, I'm very young at heart - why, I don't even have a lawn to yell at punk kids to get the hell off of. And the fact that I play video games for a living pretty much qualifies me as a man-child, so I think I'm safe for another year or two at least.

Mad rantings of a delayed air traveller

2008-03-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

I would just like to take a moment to say fuck you, United Airlines. Thank you for turning a two hour flight into a nine-hour experience that involved two airplanes and sitting on the runway with inadequate air conditioning for a good deal longer than the time spent in flight. I got to taxi out to the runway a total of three times for a single takeoff. Attempt #1 was thwarted by a malfunctioning flap. It took them a good half hour to track down a maintenance guy to look at it, and a further hour and a half to decide to let us off the plane and re-book us on a flight that taxied out to the runway, only to turn around and return to the gate because of a paperwork error, wasting another hour. Well done. The bag of mini-pretzels totally made it all better.

That said, I did finally get some reading done - about 400 pages into Michael Crichton's latest (gotta love a book with monkeys in it). And I was sitting next to a guy who looked remarkably like Nathan Fillion with a comically elongated chin.

As a side note, where has this been all my life?

Typical

2008-03-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

In light of tonight's primary election, I'm trying to think back to the last time Texas has failed to disappoint me in some way...nothing springs to mind. To be fair, in this case California made the same error in judgment - though CA's rate of disappointment hovers only in the 75-80% range. Texas owed me one, and completely failed to come through.

The same goes for Ohio - after this and deciding 2004 for Bush, I'm no longer on speaking terms with that state.

At the sound of the tone...

2008-03-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

Google has generously given all of San Francisco's homeless Grand Central voicemail accounts to help them get back on their feet. This is great news, because I have a message for certain homeless people who "reside" a few blocks from my apartment: Please stop dealing crack. Thank you, Google, for making this possible.

And the winner isn't...

2008-02-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

Having now seen all five best picture Oscar nominees, I'm definitely going to have to cast my vote for Juno (you know, like Michigan votes in the Democratic primaries). Michael Clayton was good, for the most part, but not best picture material by a long shot. I can see why George Clooney has said he doesn't expect to win for best actor - he doesn't do anything in that movie. It barely requires any emotions beyond the basics: "annoyed," "angry," and "George Clooney."

That said, I fully expect Atonement to win. Films where people have English accents = automatic win, generally.

There was blood

2008-02-17T14:50:00.001-08:00

I saw There Will Be Blood last night, as part of an effort to see all of the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. (That way, when they invariably declare the incorrect one as the winner, I will be able to say with authority that the whole thing is a sham.) It was a very good movie - Daniel Day Lewis is certifiably insane, but I did love how he came off as the more rational person between him and the slimy priest. Frankly, though, I was expecting considerably more blood. Instead of blood, I got milkshake, which apparently became a major internet meme while I wasn't looking.

I eagerly await the sequel, Partly Cloudy With a Chance of Blood, but for now, Juno still has my meaningless vote for Best Picture.

Back to work

2008-02-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

Good news! Now that the writer's strike has ended, I have called off my sympathetic month-long blogger strike. I'm convinced that it was my steadfast refusal to post about random crap, such as my snowboarding* trip to Bear Valley a couple of weeks ago, that finally broke the stalemate and got the four or five decent shows on TV back into production! Huzzah.

*I use the term loosely - traditional snowboarding is usually done while standing upright. What I was doing was almost exclusively flat on my ass, and occasionally on my face.

Perspective

2008-01-08T22:28:00.000-08:00

When you think you're having a bad day, it helps to have a girlfriend on a urology rotation in med school who can tell you about the kind of day other people had, like the guy who had a prostate biopsy without anesthetic or the guy who, after several severe blows the the junk (probably an America's Funniest Home Videos contestant), had to have once of his testicles popped out. That helps.

You've gotta be Hucking kidding me

2007-12-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

Mike Huckabee cracks me up. In fact, all the major Republican candidates do. You've got Giuliani, the twice-divorced pro-choice pro gun-control New York elitist, Romney, the Mormon Massachusetts elitist from the state that allows gay marriage, and John McCain, who recently descended into madness by allying himself with the Bush administration seemingly moments before people started catching on (and/or gas prices started going way up) and the approval ratings went straight down the crapper. And these are the guys competing for the social conservatives who the Republicans have spent decades pandering to. If I were an anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-evolution, bible-thumping loon, there'd be only one place in the party that for some reason is the only one that can protect us from the ter'ists I could turn to: Mike freakin' Huckabee. And it seems like quite a few of them actually are.

This guy recently said he saw no problem with putting the Ten Commandments up in the Oval Office, because they're the basis of US law. How can someone with such a pitiful understanding of US law take an oath to uphold it? Isn't there some kind of competency test they have to take where you have to understand that only three of the ten commandments has the slightest thing to do with US law, and those are don't kill, don't steal, and don't lie? He's also the guy who thinks all HIV patients should be quarantined.

I almost hope Huckabee gets the nomination - looking past the fact that it would mean there's ginormous segment of the population that has a similar logical impairment, the only way the Republicans could self-destruct in the general election more effectively would be to nominate Dick Cheney. I'm picturing a cartoon elephant repeatedly pushing a giant red button marked "auto-lose" with it's trunk.

The cycle continues

2007-12-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

Returning home from a vacation and spending 45 minutes looking for parking makes me ready for another vacation.

...in which I make excuses for not blogging more

2007-12-14T21:46:00.000-08:00

I may have to resort to one of them crazy New Year's resolutions to get me posting on here more frequently. I used to be so good about it, too. Now I'm lucky to get in a couple of posts a month, it seems. I think the problem is that somewhere along the line I started looking at it as a chore instead of a fun writing exercise. I mean, I didn't even take the opportunity to rip on The Golden Compass when I saw that theatrical-length Coca Cola ad last week.

Must get better. Not this weekend though, 'cause I'm off to Vegas to lose a buncha money!

Titus

2007-12-03T21:14:00.000-08:00

I went and saw Christopher Titus perform standup at Cobb's Comedy Club this weekend, and had a good time despite getting scammed out of an extra $5 for parking. He's pretty damn funny, even though an ongoing 19-month divorce has taken over a big chunk of his routine, and if you've heard one comedian rant about his cheating bitch monster of an ex-wife, you've heard'em all. Also, his closing bit was about the Batman impersonator that climbed the wall of Buckingham Palace three years ago, but at least it was new to me. I really need to go to more standup shows - I'd forgotten how entertaining those can be.

I got TB

2007-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

The good kind of TB: the terrabyte. Hard disk space has gotten so cheap that I could no longer resist pulling the trigger on not one, but two 500GB Western Digital Caviar drives, plus a 150GB 10,000RPM Raptor drive (to run my OS and games off of) from Newegg.

At this point, I can pretty much get rid of the recycle bin on my desktop and just keep everything. I may never uninstall another game. Hell, it may be time to start ripping my DVDs to a hard drive to avoid the hassle of disc swapping (although I think it might take a couple of TB to handle my entire collection).

Enough of this

2007-11-10T17:33:00.001-08:00

Unless something dramatically changes in the next 11 months, I don't see how I can bring myself to vote for a Democrat in the next election. This whole ordeal over the attempt by Dennis Kucinich to bring impeachment hearings against Dick Cheney to a vote has pretty much squashed any hope I had that the Democrats want anything to change besides who's campaign contributors are getting government contracts.

There have been crimes committed at the highest level of government, and everyone knows it. Cheney has lied to our faces every day for the past seven years, and that's simply not acceptable, especially when thousands of people are dying because of it. And then there's the torture, and the wiretapping, and all the other illegal shit that's gone on. Now that they're in a position to enforce the law, which is what they were elected to do, the Democratic leadership in Congress isn't just idly standing by, they are actively preventing justice from being carried out. I don't care if there's political maneuvering involved, and if Cheney went down the Republicans could appoint one of their candidates as VP, this is goddamn ridiculous.

Any chance that I might have voted for Nancy Pelosi in the future is now completely dead. Liberal voters in general need to up their requirements from simply not being a Republican to actually wanting to help the country. Because right now, the only way this impeachment is going to happen is if the Democrats somehow outmaneuver themselves and pass it by mistake. The headlines that day would read "Justice accidentally served."