Gecko Bloggle

So, today the phone rang, and it was my mom, sounding a little shaky, and she said “I’m homeless.”  I had visions of the roof of the house in Chilliwack collapsing or something.  We had a conversation like this once years ago when the University building she was staying in caught fire and she (while still not really awake yet) figured she needed to buy a computer, now, this instant.  I could hear the sirens in the background.  So when a conversation with my mom starts with “I’m homeless,” you take notice.

Turns out she was just between hotel stays with a checkout at Noon and the next checkin at 5 or somehing (geez, don’t DO that), and was looking for a place to kill a few hours, so we all got a free random visit, and a slideshow of elephants, giraffes, and South Sudanese folks in combat fatigues.  Yeah, really.

My mom’s become this total globetrotter, and she’s not doing the jetsetting “what a lovely hotel” thing, at least, she’s not setting out to do that during any of her trips.  Instead, she’s going to places like the South Sudan (Juba) and Bangladesh.  Who’da thunk it?  This teacher from Chilliwack zooming around the world.  Parents can be pretty surprising, given the chance, I guess.  I wonder if my kids’ll ever find me that surprising.  I sure hope so.

Her job now also means that instead of teaching some of BC’s natives to be teachers (so kids stop getting squeezed out before grade 12 because nobody understands why the spirit dancers get a little jumpy at certain times of the year), or teaching basic life skills to guys in prison (she had to convince herself they were all there for cheque fraud) she’s out teaching guys who have been soldiers for most of their adult lives.

That’s using the term “adult” loosely, as many of these guys were in their mid-teens when they were handed a gun (or had to get one because destabilizing forces were terrorizing their villages).  The stories she brings back home are beautiful and sad and uplifting and near-painful when you realize how much more work there is to do there, and that you can’t just throw money at the problems there, ’cause it’ll just be taken away from them.

You can’t take an education away from people, though, so that’s what she’s trying to help them do.  Educate themselves, and rebuild.  Civil war is totally alien to us here in a place like Canada.  Like North America.  Like a decent education and health system.

Like not being shot at, or threatened with death of your entire village.  Like not losing siblings and parents to violence before you’re old enough to go to a school, even if there was one to go to.

On a lighter note…

Nope.  Not so much with the lighter notes tonight.

“Seek the Yay. Avoid the Woo. Be Brave. Don’t Burn Yourself.” – The We Trip (1995 I think?)

Some of you are joining our program already in progress, while coming in from NaBloPoMo or Movember, so I thought I’d cop out on plot today and go for a little character development instead.

I work in IT for a film special effects company on Pender near Bute (after seven years of working for gaming companies), and generally try not to use any business-speak in anything I do, but it’s a proactive (not “reactive”) engagement of my skillsets going forward.

*FUCK*

I’m married (6 yrs?) to Arwen (you might know her: she used to hang at the Passion from time to time when she wasn’t working graveyards at Blenz on Robson or Blenz on Davie.  We’ve got two kids (boys: Ripley is 7 and Tate is 4) and Arwen’s working on her 2nd novel (no, not a NaNoWriMo, but she’s editing her latest, so she calling it NaNoEdMo).  We moved this summer form Mole Hil (right behind St. Paul’s) to Marpole (waaaaaaaay out at 67th & Oak), and I’ve been ramping up to cycling to/from work (25km, round trip) since we moved.

Right now, I just finished reading a moderately terrible young-adult book about a young girl whose parents work in a museum but don’t know she can *see* curses writhing on objects.  I’m a long way from being 13/14 any more, but I’m pretty sure I would have still snickered at this book.  To cleanse my palette, I’m reading a collection of short stories by Stephen King while trying to ramp up for either Anansi Boys or Anathem, probably the former first.  I started listening to the audiobook of the latter on my iPod during commuting, but the chapter/track order was hooped, so I have a slightly shuffled version of the story in my head.  I sort of enjoy that I have no idea WHEN anything happened in the timeline of the book, or indeed who half of the characters are, but know only THAT it happened.

I suspect my iPod was playing it in the order I’m most-likely to remember in a year.

My last two vacations were accidental, in that they were due to layoffs.  In 2008, laid off by Electronic Arts, which seems to be doing another round as as we speak, gentle reader.  A good friend who worked right next to me for a year died two weeks later.  2009 brought the very sad closing of Nexon/Humanature Studio in Yaletown, which is possibly the shortest job I’ve ever loved.

Scotch seems to have become the drink I enjoy if I want to nurse something for an hour, and wine if I want to share with friends.  Sambucca sometimes because it reminds me of my grandmother, but also because of the weird things it does if you put ice in it (blasphemy, I know).

I don’t use “Zen Render” in person any more, unless I’m meeting up with old BBS/IRC folks from waaaaaaay back in the day – an old friend of mine from my IRC days found my blog based on my pseudo, and I was glad for it.  (Hi Nemo!)

That pseudo used IRL is attached to a pretty sad and painful time in my life, actually.  Didn’t really have much that I enjoyed as “John,” so I let Zen drive for a while.  Hurt less, I think, to be someone else while my scars healed.  The “Zen” of me wasn’t afraid to say and do things that were that half-step past my normal comfort zone.  Wasn’t afraid to call people on their shit, or worry a little less about what others were thinking, and say what *I* was thinking.  Wasn’t afraid to tell off a heartless ex-girlfriend on the phone instead of thinking how to get ex back all the time.  Just wasn’t (as) afraid of life.  Not a dark side, just a slightly less wounded side.

I still have fear from time to time, of course, but it’s rarely for *me* now, it’s usually for those around me.  My wife, my kids, my family, my friends, my Tribe.

Mostly, I go by Burton (or, as some have remixed it, “Burtoin.”)  I think only Briana calls me Zen consistently, but that’s the only name she ever knew for me, and we’re friends on the ‘net only, anyway, and I hardly ever talk to her, so maybe it’s okay that Zen kept at least one friend out of the separation.

Oh, and for those of you following my Movember progress, lord help us, here’s what’s going on at Chez Moustache.

Up close and personal.

Sometimes the day is pretty straight-forward.  I’m not complaining.  Just saying.  Sometimes our job is just to do our jobs.  Was up late last night, but not too late.  Slept until a reasonable time, and then slept until an unreasonable time, which was nice but left that guilty hangover “I missed half the day” feeling. 

There was lots to do today, but since I’d decided some time in the middle of the week that this was how I was going to spend my Sunday, it felt good to be a homebody.  I spend so much time in transit and at work, or running around doing the stuff that requires a car and driver that I enjoy a day at home doing the stuff that needs doing.  I was also happy that Arwen was able to just relax and let me do stuff while she relaxed a bit before heading out for a dinner with her writerly friends.

I spent a good hour just helping Tate and Ripley clean Tate’s room, and then the kids were more interested in dancing to the music of stuff I’d made on what we used to call an “Audio Cassette Recorder” than cleaning, so I bailed out instead of fighting them against having fun.  Remember when mixtapes were things people did, instead of the audio resume of an up and coming DJ?  Remember getting those things as birthday or xmas presents?  Or maybe a gift from a secret admirer in highschool?  (Okay, I don’t think I ever did that last one while in school, nor did I receive one).  I did some weird shit when I was a young teen, but not that.

Oh hey, fixed my back tire today.  With a patch kit and everything.  Took about fifteen minutes, total.  I took the kevlar tubing thing out ’cause it didn’t seem to help last time, and where the hole was might have actually been caused by the pinching of the wrapped kevlar, so… I pulled out my itty bitty patch kit that I have strapped under my seat and was good to go after walking over to the gas station to get some decent pressure.  I have a pump, but the flip clip on it leaks now, ’cause the pin goes on a little angle which then leaks air back out once I get to about… oh, maybe 1/2 pressure.  Need a new pump, it seems.

Have to lay out my cycling clothes for tomorrow after Saving Private Ryan is over, to avoid that “stumbling around in the fog” feeling I get when I try to prep for work and I’m not quite awake.  Leads to me leaving the house three times because I forgot my water/keys/helmet and have to come back in for a minute to find it.

Also need to re-ziptie my “big” light (one of those flashlights the size of a roll of quarters with about a dozen LEDs in it) to my helmet, ’cause that’s my headlight when the sun’s not up yet (or down already).  Hope tomorrow doesn’t rain.

Let’s see if my legs have totally atrophied during my week of bikelessness.

Went out for dinner tonight with Arwen’s mom & faux pa, and since Fridays are kinda special for us, we chose sushi at Downtown Sushi in our old stomping grounds.  They’ve got a little upscale on some of the fancier rolls, bucking the standard Vancouver “sushi places almost outnumber Starbucks” pricing of $3-$4 for your normal California roll, and maybe $5-$6 for the “fancy” rolls.

Well these guys have gotten all fancy and done some really interesting and tasty rolls, but um… $12?  Srsly?  Ripley (who’s seven, and yet can do some serious damage in an all-you-can-eat sushi place) got a fancy “Ocean” roll, and an order of gyoza, and I think his portion of the bill was probably around $18.

Woof.

But thankfully, Arwen’s mom was picking up the bill tonight, so Ripley didn’t have to make good on his offer to pay for himself (I think, if he’s lucky, he’s got about $4 in the whole world.)

It was interesting for me though, ’cause Ripley often offers to pay for something if he thinks he’s not going to get it otherwise, but tonight, I think he was honestly noticing that $12 was a lot for a single roll of sushi, and wanted to help out.  It was kinda nice to see that he isn’t entirely psychotic when it comes to sushi.  I think maybe part of it is that we don’t have as many restaurants, dollar stores, and drug stores (like Shoppers) near our house, so he’s not constantly bombarded with the need to spend money on a “thing.”

I get that wanting to buy things, too.  I’m like that.  If I don’t have a couple of bucks in my pocket for a few days, I start to feel meager, and that makes me do weird things in my head.  I start going into some odd form of hunter/gatherer, I think, and I start trying to figure out what I could do/sell/make that I could sell on Craigslist for $50 or something.

But if I find out I have a $10 in my wallet, I’m good.  I’m fine.  I don’t need to spend it, I just have it.  Weird.

Nanny 911 is on, and it’s the blonde lady who says “famleh” instead of family, and it makes me giggle and cringe at the same time.  I think Nanny911 and Canada’s Worst Driver should both be on a new cable channel called the “You’re Fine Dear, It’s Your Husband Who Should Be Voted Off the Island.”

Seriously?  I just.  These guys are… I mean…  Screw YOU, dude.  What the hell?  I guess that probably comes from growing up in a family of strong-willed people, and strong women in specific.  When my mom was 23, her dad died, and her mom became a widow with six (yikes – SIX!) kids ranging from 25 to 13 (I think), and so the entire family grew up watching a woman as the head of a house…

…so I’m always sorta flabberghasted when I see any of these shows that have a base premise (the kids are running the house, or people have been nominated as bad drivers), that invariably becomes (at least partially) a study in “Why the hell are these two people together?”

Of course, I’ve wondered that about a lot of people I’ve known over the years, and I’m sure there’s some friends who’ve wondered what the hell Arwen sees in me, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be editable by a television producer to make me look like such a… a… such a butthead about dealing with other people, especially your partner.

But what the hell do I know?  I’m just a person, too.  I’m sure everyone on those shows that was chosen because they “made for good TV” didn’t think there was anything odd about their own activities.  America’s Next Top Model has this down to a science – you can usually pick out the person who has no chance of winning, but is destined for a trainwreck of booze, crying, or just good ol’ batshit insanity before they are sent packing.

…and then I think of that sign – something about “There’s a {something} in every crowd.  Look around.  If you can’t find them, it’s you.” and I start looking around my circle of people to figure out who I can’t find – which role is missing, where’s the gap in the grill?

Whatever that gap is, whatever archetype is missing, I guess maybe that’s my line.  That’s the part I’m supposed to play.

Huh.

…and so it begins, pictures of my attempt to grow a moustache in order to make people ask me what the hell I’m growing on my face more aware of cancers of the groinular region, there.  There’s a link above that says Mo’09 or something, so you can keep checking there to see how silly I end up lookin’ by the end of the month.

I also would like to point out that all of my blog posts, because I imported them from blogspot (or was it Blogger.com? or are they the same place?) and so the first couple of posts had numbers that were the unique numbers in ALL OF BLOGGERDOM (Dom dom dom) and ever since them, my blogging engine has been dutifully attempting to maintain some form of composure, while not having anything approaching a reasonable number in the PostID field.

So no, I have not written up 87 million posts and only posted 700 or so, just in case you were wondering where my Neal Stephenson-like ubertome of unpublished blog posts went.

Today I wadded up some obtainium and got ahold of yet another freakin’ digital DJ application, this one’s called Deckadance, and it looks pretty slick.  I played with it for about ten minutes in between playing with kids, and being co-host to Gen & Ryan and their kids, and I gotta say, considering I was totally not paying attention, and hadn’t read any documentation, I was able to beatmatch two tracks that were 15bpm apart.  Considering I have a grand total of about two hours on dual cd decks under the kind tutelage of DJ Jesse Proudfoot, and maaaaaybe a half-hour of fiddling around with a timecoded record on my real, actual, honest-to-goodness TURNTABLE to see if I could make a free turntable controller (I can, go Intertubes)… considering that total lack of experience, I could make two songs that play together at the same time without sounding like someone put some sneakers in the dryer.

Looks like I’ll finally get to do the mix I’ve been rolling around in my head for the last six months or so.  Something that I might actually put up there on the podcast site, or something, as a “Housecleaning Mix.”  I’m looking forward to doing the slightly more glossy version of ye olde Mixed fTappe.

Speaking of mix tapes, there’s one in the stereo (for the kids at home, a stereo is an iPod-less non-mobile audio entertainment center, as used by old people and young hipsters) here in the living room, and the four adults in the room spent a couple moments here and there trying to figure out when the tape was made, based on the most-recent song we could find.  Our guess was that it was some time in 93/94, and I’m pretty sure I made it from My Uncle Bill’s collection, but don’t quote me on that.

On the ride home today (on the bus as my bike’s still in a state of hoopage, because I haven’t taken the time to put in one of my TWO backup inner tubes), I listened to CBC’s “As It Happens” from the previous day, and realized that I’ve been missing having a radio, like an actual thing (not an “app”) that can play “over the air” audio, with zero lag and no usage fees or coverage issues.

What a concept, huh?

In other news, Canada’s “On Notice” according to Stephen Colbert.  Sorry, Canadian Iceholes.  Obviously Amercanian people are going to be utterly baffled when NBC gets up here and there’s no igloos (remember to explain to our friends to the South – we pronounce it EYE-GLEW), and your Starbucks coffee cup doesn’t freeze solid (and then fricken’ EXPLODE) the second they step off the plane.  Remember, ‘mercans: 15 here isn’t like 15 there.  Normal room temp (at least in offices) is about 21 or so.  ZERO is freezing here.  30 is freaky hot for Vancouver.

annnnnnnd my brain’s done.

If you’re actually at my blog, below should be a YouTube video of a slow loris being tickled.  Sure they’re poisonous, but holy GEEZ they’re cute. If you can’t see it for some reason, go look it up at YouTube, ’cause everyone should see what really REALLY happy looks like from time to time.

I’m not going to put up photos for another day or two, but I’m taking shots daily, so maybe by tomorrow or Friday.  In the meantime, if you got a few bucks kicking around, and can’t think of anything better to do with them than give ’em to some sorta good cause, like maybe Movember?

Of course, a bucket of icecream’s good too, if you wanna go that way.  Costs about the same these days.

So what sorts of things have I been reading about lately?  It’s always fun to do a linkdump, right?  Right?  No?  Tough.  Buckle up, ’cause Kansas is going the way of the Feces Ape.

• The long unanswered question of the four Doc Browns.
• Use the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool with custom ISOs
• The XBox Media Center Minus the XBox

• The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

• Change Product Key On Windows Server 2008

• Run Windows 7 on two different computers from only one install

• David Lynch and his people are running around the States interviewing random strangers
• The cutest owl in the world that you keep thinking is gonna eat your head
  

• Sysinternals Disk2vhd helps migrate physical desktops to virtual machines

• Know-Em: Check Usernames on a whole bunch of social networks at once
• Hard-to-Place Accounts (Insurance People have a forum for the “Yeah but what if…” accounts)
• Boing Boing Video remix of documentary about Synesthesia

Anyone still here after all that?  You haven’t wandered off into space yet?

I’m on the emergency call number for this and next week for work, and I’ve been woken around 2am three times now, and I’m starting to get used to it, ’cause it’s the same overnight wrangler calling me from an out-of-town studio to help with things that so far have been either “Okay, let’s see what happens in an hour” or “Phone the guy (yep, at 2:10am) who knows the site best and have him figure it out.”

I feel bad about it, but when you’re baaarely awake, and you can’t think your way out of a sketch of a paper bag, just about anything sounds like a pretty good idea.  I bet one of these days I’m going to either suggest she put the spaghetti back into the frog swatch before the king of the potato people harvests the sunjuice OR I’m going to tell her she should just go get a pillow and a blanket and wait until the sun comes up before watching TV.

The only problem so far is that I have a little trouble getting back to sleep after having to suddenly be awake and play calm support person while the person on the other end, while not at all panicking (awesome), is WIDE awake, and has been at work for a couple hours.  Gotta be a weird job for them.

Arwen’s worked the graveyard shift for a coffee place (if you lived in Vancouver’s West End  during the mid 90s, you probably bought coffee from her), and she used to talk about heading homeward for dinner and sleep when the rest of the world was waking up and heading, blearily, to work.  Working graveyard at a coffee place is one thing (you get the club kids and the folks who can’t sleep and the crazies), but when it’s a hightech job at 3am… how’s the… who d’ya… I mean.

Yeah, I don’t know if I could do that job.  Maybe for a little while.

I’d need to go somewhere for coffee though.  Coffee from a nightowl who’s used to it.

BREAKING NEWS:

Just saw the ad for the HTC “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you.” which was quite good, except for the fact that a number of the snippets of reasoning they showed looked more like heartbroken stalker footage than actual “here’s why you need one.”  The other problem was all these shots of people going places and using transit and trains and planes and stuff, but the music riff they’re playing the whole time is Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”  All these “isn’t it cool that people have GPS and cameras” clips and all I kept hearing in my head was “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

I think that’s why I’m somewhat grey hat about my use of security technologies.  There’s the part of my jobs that have always meant I had to know about viruses and security systems of some sort, but then I’d turn around a corner and I was being asked to defeat those same systems in order to determine whether or not someone was up to no good with something.  I’m certainly no forensics expert, nor would I even consider myself a script kiddie, much less an actual hacker at all.  I’m hackish though, in that any time I’m presented with something that claims to be secure, I’m trying to figure it out.  It’s a new puzzle for me to play with.  A new game.

When the web was young, we didn’t have to worry about viruses, ’cause nothing worked well enough, fast enough, or often enough to actually spread a virus that would work on the fly.  It had to be copied manually.  The virus would have to attach itself to a file that people wanted, and that they’d share around.

Now?  I think it’s something like four minutes that an unprotected Windows machine attached directly to the net (not behind a firewall/router or anything) will be infected with at least on piece of malware, and that first one will usually invite friends over.

I think what’s going to very quickly become the new battlefront isn’t going to be hackers.  It’s going to be friends, family, and staff.  Social hacking, or social engineering will be where the real money is.  Mostly because the money is real.  The money is actually MONEY.  We’re back to the oldest tricks in the book to scam people, but because there’s technology involved, somehow everyone think the magical technology will protect them from giving all their identifying information to some punk who’s going to use it to buy a new pair of sneakers for $300… or a new boat for $30,000.

So everyone needs to THINK a little more about what they give to whom.  Quit freaking out about strangers snooping in your recycling box in the alley for your returnable bottles, and start worrying about Uncle Wally, who blindly forwards whatever thing crosses their inbox without thinking that maybe somehow, someone, somewhere might have started that chain email in order to collect email address that he can sell off to some spammers in Russia so you can have your mailbox stuffed with P4ent3RMINEsez.

Oh, too much babbling, I missed Midnight.

ka-publish!

I was going to write about the guy who cornered me while on my bikeride home, but it’s obviously not totally processed for me, so I’m gonna have to sit on that story for another day.

We’re watching the Grapes of Wrath, and just heard the “I’ll be there” speech.  My brain keeps trying to treat it like some sorta documentary.

“Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

Then I remembered hearing this piece by Mario Savio

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” – December 2, 1964

And I think about activisty types, and I wonder if they were scared.  Were they aware what they were doing was dangerous to the establishment, or were they just trucking along and doing what they figured needed to be done?  I suspect maybe it was a little of column A and a little of column B, and that they may have started out thinking “Okaaaay here we go…” and ended up starting each morning thinking “Okay, what’s left to do?”

I think I started shaking the tree a little when I was at BigCo, because I had a nice long conversation with my manager, during which he kept asking me why I hadn’t applied for the position of Desktop Manager (have I told you guys this story before?) and talking about Military Presence and Royal Jelly and a number of other things that I had never thought would apply to me, and that got me thinking about it.  A few weeks later, when I was transferred from my little outpost at Blackbox to the Mothership, I lead a meeting in which I started out by asking the following question off the top of my head:

“Anyone hate their job?”

That question was literally met with a couple of jaw drops, and a nice long uncomfortable silence.  I thought maybe I’d overdone it.  Maybe I’d gone too far, and maybe I’d outed myself as someone who enjoys a good overdramatic moment.  I knew there’d been a problem at the Mothership with morale, and that the existing Desktop Manager was away (he was on his way out, and he knew it), so I figured this was our moment to find out what was making things difficult for this group of people who were keeping the systems running so the artists and programmers could keep doing their thing.

What slowly happened, once they realized that I wasn’t trying to create a bitch & moan session, was that we started talking about the stuff that was bugging us.  We were being driven by our numbers.  By statistics.  Not actual deadlines for real things.  Nothing that would cause stress and then let up, but just these magical numbers that could be manipulated by those who were willing to fudge a little here and there, and could be ignored by the higher-ups the second something happened that was outside of what they thought should be happening.  It was eye-opening.  It was somehow good for us all, I hope.  It was good for me, even though I didn’t get anything out of it personally.

Eventually, the current Desktop Manager was shuffled off, and a new one was hired.  I got the distinct impression that she’d been told/warned that I was someone who she should talk to, and that I had information about some of the things that were causing friction and problems in the department (and outside of it).  We sat down and had a good long talk, and then she hit me with this:

“Please don’t organize them.”

It turned out that someone, somewhere, high up enough in the system had noticed that maybe I was one of those people who’d unwittingly made the shift from “How do I start?” to “What else needs doing?” when it came to making myself and those around me start taking themselves and their work environment seriously.  They thought I was going to try to unionize EA’s desktop support team.  Even better, they thought that if I tried to do it, it might work.  I was flabbergasted.  I’m not entirely sure I even responded to the request to not do it.  I’d often said that the job was hard enough as it was without also having to deal with outside stuff that had NOTHING to do with our jobs and everything to do with the lifeblood of that place: Politics.

At my next job, there was no politics.  No, that’s not true.  There was politics, but we in IT generally didn’t see it, thanks to a great head of the department.  It meant that I could just dig in and have those “What else needs doing” moments more and more often.

Today, at the new job, I got a little piece of news that something I’d (mostly) penned was getting really positive reviews.  That people liked it, that it was changing the way staff was perceiving IT.  As we all know when you work in an “Overhead” department, perception is reality.  If they THINK you’re doing a bad job, you are.  Simple as that.

Today I heard that there was one thing that was clearly being seen as being done right.  Something that was shining a positive light on the department.  Difficult to do, when your department is generally invisible unless something is going wrong.

So yeah.  Today was good.  Now I just need to work on whatever’s next to make that keep happening about once a week, and we’ll start getting more and more of those good moments, I hope.  It helps, when so much of the studio requires hardware and software to “just work,” if the IT department are seen more as some crazed pit crew instead of the punching bag of the company.

No Movember photos yet, but once they start, you’ll see what’s happening on my face.  It’ll either be subtle, or I’ll end up looking like some weird cross between Billy Idol and a motorcycle cop from 1982.  Are you scared?  As Yoda would say “You will be.”

Hi,

Greetings everybody, all twelve of you that still check this feed.

Yep, check it.  I’m doing one of those NabloPoMo things.  Sorry Karla.

You’re excited, I can tell.

So, last year, I did the NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month) which went pretty well.  I *think* I did a post every day, and certainly grew a moustache, though it was a fairly odd one due to my silver hair not quite translating into anything more than salt & pepper and some cayenne in my ‘stache.

So yeah, the moustache part is for Movember, which started in Australia, it seems, and is all about “changing the face of men’s health,” whatever the hell that means.  I’m guessing/hoping that it means we’re looking like cheesy 70s actors in order to remind ourselves to NOT ignore our aches and pains, and to get checkups, and to see doctors when weird shit is going on, physically speaking.  Do not tough it out, I guess, is the message.  What do I know?  I haven’t even read any deeper than the posters and pre-scripted bumpf that comes with registration.  Maybe it’s a month of excessive chest bumping and high-fiving, but I somehow doubt it, even if it DOES come from Australia.  “High-Five” doesn’t seem very Australian to me, unless it’s the kids’ TV show, which is better than the Doodlbebops, but nowhere NEAR as good as the Upside-Down Show.

Uh, yeah, here’s my pre-scripted thing to ask for donations so I can shave raise awareness.  Of stuff.  Or something.

Hi,

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to prostate cancer.  I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation.  The funds raised go directly to Prostate Cancer Canada.

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.

Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved.

To make a donation, you can either:

•    Click this link http://ca.movember.com/mospace/273776/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
•    Write a cheque payable to ‘Prostate Cancer Canada’, referencing my Registration Number 273776 and mailing it to: Prostate Cancer Canada, 145 Front Street East, Ste. 306, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3, Canada.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Prostate Cancer Canada will use the money raised by Movember for the development of programs related to awareness, public education, advocacy, support of those affected, and research into the prevention, detection, treatment and cure of prostate cancer.

For more details on how the funds raised from previous campaigns have been used and the impact Movember is having please click [HERE].

Thank you

Yeah, no.  Seriously.  Don’t die at 40, like my friend Jan did.  Or at 43, like my grandfather did.  I was two when he went, so I never got to have a grandfather I could remember, (aside from Ace*, maybe.)  Get things checked out.  Mmkay?  Not that any of them had prostate cancer, that I’m aware of, but still.  Early this year, I had this harsh pain in my right calf muscle, and went to the clinic just to make sure I wasn’t hurting it more by walking around after some sorta pull, and the doctor there decided that she couldn’t let me go without scaring warning me that it could be a deep-vein thrombosis, and sent me to the hospital.  It wasn’t.  I was fine, but still.  I was okay just kinda limping around.  Women?  Women get stuff checked out.  Props to Arwen for getting me to the clinic in the first place.  I guess she didn’t want me dying of a blood clot from my leg.  A good sign she isn’t going to kill me in my sleep any time soon.

Or is that just what she wants me to think?  Sneaky.

So now that you read a little about me, and I have nothing more interesting to say than last night was fun with the 4yo and the 7yo running around Marpole and getting candy from maaaaaaybe every seventh or eighth house (c’mon people, don’t let the malls run Halloween.)  I bet the DND and collectible figurines place at Metrotown would be fun once they started having the odd drink under the counter, though.  Weird to think I used to work in that mall, way back in the day.

Wait, what?  Oh, yeah.  Now that you see I have nothing to say, maybe you can go visit a few of my friends (actual, live, in person, PEOPLE who I’ve MET) at their blogs, even though they’re not all involved in NaBloPoMo.

Arwen, Bubbledom, Claire, Barb, Monkeypants, MoxieSnacks, NoPantsIsland, Ramdon Ranblings, The (Mighty Mighty) Cheeseblog, St. Aardvark, Skonen Blades, Unknown Origins Podcast, and even Johnny Bliss from way over in Vienna.

And now, I shall stop procrastinating, and go fold some laundry, ’cause that’s what hardcore gangsta techie dads DO.

First pics of Movember will start later this week.  Stay tuned for that.  No point right now, ’cause it’s just day one, and that’d result in a picture of ME, not my stache.

Also, XKCD rocks my world.  I need a wall-sized poster of this.

* I’ll tell you folks about Ace some time this month.  He keeps pestering me from the back of my head to write him into a a book I haven’t done more than start the first chapter of.  He deserves space on a page somewhere, so maybe I’ll finally get to him online somehow.  He would have liked that, I think.

Warning: This (freakishly long) post is about me, my bike, an omelet, and my mom.  If you’re looking for geekery and music stuff, skip this post.

Middle of last week, I had a terrible ride home.  I had driven a CAN car back to Rupert station, which is outta my way by quite a bit, but I was sorta looking forward to getting to see a different part of Vancouver, and riding North/South across Burnaby instead of East/West that I’d done for a year while at EA.  Somewhere at the 1/2 way point of my ride, my back sprocket sorta freaked out, my rear derailer wouldn’t hop the chain into any higher gears, and my back tire started rubbing against the fender.  Were I a richer person, I would have thrown my bike into the nearest dumpster, and cabbed home.  I didn’t.  I managed to limp myself home while stuck in 3:1 (3rd on the front gear, 1st in the back), and locked up the bike.  Took way too long.  I’d gotten cold.  I’d gotten hungry.  I felt wobbly and somewhat pukey after having my legs pumping around so fast for so little mechanical return.  Worst time ever.  55mins or something.  Longer than my very FIRST trip to our new home, some two months ago.

I’d also accidentally learned that Mary-Anne Hobbes Dubstep show on BBC Radio is a terrible thing to listen to when you’re just trying to get your late-30s beleaguered self home on a broken bike.  It’s the inherent bleak sadness in so much of the genre, which is attention-grabbing when you’re feeling good, but bad when you’re ACTUALLY having a crappy time.

After a frustrating evening of having my hybrid (which sounds cooler than it is) bike upside-down in the middle of the living room floor (my understanding and long-suffering wife is truly a Saint), and trying to convince my rear tire that it didn’t really *need* to have a little “play” at the axle, and reaching some sort of position that would mean my:

1. brakes don’t rub against the rim of the wheel,
2. …or the wheel itself, for that matter,
3. new treads don’t rub against the fenders,

Much like the holy triangle of IT (cheap, good, fast: pick any two), I could get EITHER the brake to grab, but not to let go, or to grab AND let go BUT rub against the fenders, OR I could end up with the gears go psycho again.

I thought I was done. Everything seemed to be spinning smoothly, and I had some halfway decent grip on the back brake that would be capable of stopping me suddenly if I needed to. Excellent. Only 1am. My hands are all greasy (I’m not sure why, but we have a verbal tic in our house of having to follow the word “greasy” with an overly enunciated “grrreezee” instead of what everybody actually says, which should be spelled “greecey,” but I digress), and I’m only slightly worried about not having enough sleep before my ride tomorrow, so I crash out after reading a few pages of The Wee Free Men.

Next morning, I wake up at not-much-past the break of dawn and get dressed, mumble morning things at Arwen and the kids, mutter to myself, pack my stuff, get some water together, grab a granola bar, find my various nefarious keys and security fobs and thumbdrives (I’m carrying two these days, and I have no idea why), and scoot out the door.  Okay, feelin’ good.  Here we go.

I can see my breath – s’gonna be a chilly one this morning.  No ice yet, so I can still go for it on the way down the big hills.

Wrestle my bike out of the garage, check that I still have my brakes and everything in the right places, hop on, kick my pedal back and…

BRRRRRRRNNNNNNNN….

The tread is rubbing against the fender, and the brakes aren’t squarely hitting the rim any more.  What the hell?  I don’t have rear shocks or anything, so there’s no way there should be that much change in placement on the wheel between me working on it last night, and me sitting down on the bike this morning.  I know I’m a solid “240lbs of grunt” on top of this thing, but c’mon, the bike’s been fine since I bought it.  Some, uh… let’s see.  Three years ago?  Four?  I think we bought it right after I found out I was going to be working at EAC (the “MotherShip”) as opposed to EAX (“Blackbox”).

ANYHOO, the bike’s not gonna get me to work this morning, and I don’t have the time to fix it now.

So a bunch of mental leg-hold traps snap shut at once.  I go from “Whoo, chilly this morning,” to the following crappy ways to start your day:

• I’m fat, and broke my bike because of it.
• I’m an idiot for not testing the bike out last night before going to bed.
• I’m an idiot for not knowing how to tune a bicycle’s brakes without screwing it up.
• I’m going to be late for work (cycling takes about 35mins, transit takes 45-50).
• There goes $5 we don’t really have (transit is $2.50 each way).
• What am I going to do tomorrow?

So I (literally) dropped my bike into the garage, burst back into the house, did a quickchange, found some change, and flurried myself back out the door.  I pouted for a bit.  I read Twitter feeds on the way into work, and once I got there, tried to do something useful with my brain.  That part went well.

The next morning I was going into work a little later than usual (10am) so I hauled my bike onto the CanadaLine, which (brilliantly) has bike spots on every train, so I don’t have to try to muscle people out of the way.  This is Canada, so a little plastic sign is all the authority people need to acknoledge that they should maybe move outta the way.  Made it downtown, and limped the bike over to the folks at Bicycle Sports Pacific, where I’d bought the bike in the first place.  The woman who checked it out said that it just needed a tuneup, and that my tires were good, brakes seemed fine (I should hope so: they were both less than three months old), and that everything would cost “about 80 bucks or so.”  Okay.  Fine.  I removed my under-seat toolkit and lock, and I traded my bike for a little slip of paper, and wandered out into the brisk Fall morning.  Now what?

I was feeling like this was $80 I didn’t have, on TOP of the $5 in transit per day I’d be spending, but still, this is okay, we’ll figure it out.  I walked up to some weird mom & pop greasy (everybody now: “greeeezzeeee”) spoon cafe with six wobbly tables and a drinks cooler that made an egregious amount of noise, and bought myself what passes for comfort food at breakfast time.  Too-hot coffee and a ham and cheese omelet.  What better way to celebrate health and fiscal responsibility than buying myself breakfast?

Then I emailed my mom, who’d asked last weekend if I needed a new bike.  “Naaaaah,” I’d told her, “there’s nothing wrong with the one I have.”  Famous last words, I know.  Pretty much asking for trouble from that point on.

I emailed her, asking if maybe I could partially take her up on the offer, and instead of buying me a whole NEW bike, she could maybe pay for a tuneup of the one I have, since I’d managed to make mine worse by trying to do it myself (I used to be pretty good at this, when I was 18).  She immediately responded that she’d be happy to.  We figured out how to push money through the series of tubes and the next day I picked up my bike at the shop.

It was $155.  Thankfully, my mom, the psychic that she is, had sent me $150 instead of the “eighty or so” I’d quoted her.  She knew better, probably due to her many many years as a car owner.  The lady at the bike shop and I had an ever-so-slightly toasty conversation about “estimates” and “parts and labour” and “quotes” but after my initial panic, I finally got down to “so what the hell was wrong with it?”

• Bike chain and gears bathed and lubricated. $15
• Broken.  Rear.  Axle. Replaced.  $15 (Oh, well that would explain it)
• New brake and shifter cables needed (okay…) $15
• 5 minutes of making fun of (or possibly, being in awe of) my “humongous rack – is that from MEC?” $FREE
• Reconstruction and Tune Up $75
• PST, GST, GEST, BCST, $TAXES
• Not stealing my chrome skull air nozzle caps?  Priceless.

They did a really good job.  Totally worth it.  Just wish I’d been asked/told BEFORE I got there that the total was about 95% above the original agreed-upon amount.

Rode home from the shop.  It was like new.  Smooth.  Silent.  Strong.  My thighs actually seemed to enjoy the hills now that I wasn’t fighting against my own brakes any more.  Rode most of the trip in 2:5 (2nd on front, 5th on the rear), which sets my cruising speed at about 22km/h while on flats.  Felt good.  Forgot to get water*, so didn’t really go for it, or I’d end up coughing all night due to sucking wind.

No more Dubstep though.  Maybe back to some nice happy Public Enemy.

Not that I ever listen to music while cycling.  No-no.  Of course not.  That’s almost as stupid as riding on a broken axle for a few weeks.

I packed up my stuff tonight, and even laid out my cycling gear for tomorrow.  Like first day of school or something.

I’ll try not to yell “WHEEEE!” on the way down Heather bike path tomorrow, but if I do, I’ve got my mom to thank for it.

* That’s not true, I was going to buy myself a new bottle with the extra money mom’d given me, but after the little “adjustment” in pricing, not so much with the $5.00 water bottle.  Besides, I prefer the wide-mouth “Sport Drink” bottle types, and most of them fit into my clip.

We had 8 kids here today. Two of them were ours, and while there were a few tears, and lots of screaming, I think most of it was happy screaming.

I may have to steal the Nerf gun Tate got, though, or at least modify it so he can pull the pump on it.

The place is NOT a total shambles, and there’s only a little bit of Oreo cake on the carpet. Pin the tail on the donkey is still fun for the kids under the age of 10. Arwen (on her third trip through being 10) did pretty well, too.

I decorated (not my forte) and generally stayed outta the way when kids played, and tried to not get the same headache I had yesterday.

Mission accomplished.

Best moment: Tate rushing into the house announcing “I hafta poo!” and jumping onto the toilet. Okay, he made it. Great. I stuck my head around the door, and asked if he’d need any help when he’s done, and he said “Nah… Because I’m four now.”

Wish more of life was that obvious.