Gecko Bloggle

Drove out to Chilliwack to put on the snow tires and have lunch/dinner with my mom. Was good. One of what I’ve come to think of as a “Rock Star” visit. Swoop in, drink coffee, talk too much and too fast, and then go home again. They’re fun, but I have also tried to make sure I’m giving everyone ELSE a chance to talk about stuff, and I think I fall down more often than I’d like.

After I got home tonight, Arwen and I watched an episode of Portlandia, followed by the film Another Earth, which was good, but left the ending open. Felt like someone telling a story and then going “and then, I…” and then held their hands out at you to fill in what’s next. Enjoyed the film though, don’t get me wrong.

Also, a second Earth would really screw up the tides, and at the rate the Earth was inbound, I was interested in what’d happen another two months after the end of the film.

Listened to the CBC interview with Kermit the Frog and Jian Gilmeshie so the kids could hear it. I probably spelled Jian’s last name wrong, but can’t look up right now because I’m on my iPhone, which would mess things up for this post.

and now the Muppets are co-hostening Saturday Night Live, so I’m a go watch that.

Got a little snow here tonight. Made the ride home chewy. Not too bad yet. Glad for the bandana under my helmet.

Was talking about stories with my buddy in Malibu again today. Sorta like old times. I look forward to maybe one day having lunches with him again while he’s hip-deep in story writing mode, and asking me inexplicable questions again. I miss that part of working at EA back in the day.

I love a good puzzle, but more than that, I love the story of a good puzzle.

Can’t write now, Prime Suspect is on, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t suddenly way better than it has any right to be, y’know?

Facebook (and it’s long-forgotten predecessor, Classmates.com) are great for finding out what happened to the people you knew in high school. Over the years, there’s been some great surprises, some scary losses, and some puzzling disappearances. Mostly though, people are usually not completely unlike you thought they might turn out to be.

Wait, let me amend that a bit. It’s not that people are like you always thought they were going to be. More like you meet people in your life and think “Huh, I wonder if this is what so-and-so turned out to be like.” Over the years you meet different sorts of folks and they in turn remind you of all sorts of people you knew when you were in your teens.

But sometimes, it’s different. So, let’s say you were friends with a kid when you were ten, up until the end of school, and then you bump into them on social networks again in the early 2000s, you have some catching up to do, but you mostly know who that person is.

Here’s where the question changes: When you knew each other in that oddly diaphanous way that kids do when they’re only ten or so, but then lose touch entirely, and then stumble across them again THIRTY years later.

Where do you even start? The question isn’t “what have you been up to for the last X years?” but more “Who are you? Who have you been?”

It’s that difference between what you DO and who you ARE. The former can change during the course of your career, but the latter can’t even really be answered easily in an email thread, can it?

It’s tempting to answer that question using something like the business-class social networks have: references. I think Friendster had a “Write something about your friend” feature or maybe it was something about “Tell us how you know each other.” I remember those write-ups and miss them. My fave was from Sam, and he’d included something along the lines of “…and a +10 to detect bullshit” along with some other stuff that are either true, or I sure wish they were.

That’s it: It’s not that I don’t know who I am, it’s that I want to be able to say that I am the person my friends would say I was. Their idealization of me. The avatar of self, in a illuminated version on first page of the story of my life.

Or maybe I just want to be blurbed.

Was told recently that when I was ten I’d said that I thought George Lucas was going to do another trilogy of Star Wars that took place BEFORE Star Wars. I suspect I was noticing that SW was Chapter IV: A New Hope, so I assumed there were three chapters before that. Didn’t expect JarJar though. NOBODY EXPECTED JARJAR.

But yeah, who am I to myself vs. who I am to other people is interesting, to me at least. I can’t say that I honestly know a full and complete answer to either question that I could hand to someone else, other than to say “I’m the sort of person who’d wonder what I could possibly respond with when I ask myself questions about who I am.”

Meta, I know.

I love a good puzzle – not necessarily the solving of it, but the cracking of the shell. That first moment when you realize it’s not entirely impossible to to solve, and even brief glimpses of how it could be solved, or what it should look like once complete. Sometimes it all just looks like hard work, and I wanna just shortcut the whole thing because I should be able to do that. Maybe that’s pride talking. Maybe it’s pressure.

Maybe it’s just me, being me, about me?

Pretty random tonight, so hope I don’t leave you all wondering what I’ve been drinking (Tim Hortons Double-Double).

“Being president is a real non-stop headstuff twirl-fest.”
The Daily Show – Nov 15, 2011

Watched Our Idiot Brother tonight, and enjoyed it quite a bit. We were both reminded of Peter Sellers’ Being There.

Been reading Stephen King’s new book, and so far it’s as solid as his previous stuff. Been reading it on my iPhone using the ebook reader application, and the one thing that I find odd is that there’s no page numbering. Actually, there IS page numbering, but it’s on a per-screen basis, so I’m currently on “page” 113 of 1,578. Maybe I’ll try reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver/Baroque cycle again, ’cause when I’m on page 113 of 6,000 (first book of three), maybe it won’t seem so bad.

Heard that Community is being “benched” for a while mid-season, and I found it interesting that most of the buzz on twitter seemed to be calling for Whitney to be pulled instead of Community. Seems sorta random. As long as they don’t pull Two Broke Girls (which is funny, but largely because my wife makes fun of me for getting stars in my eyes whenever Kat Dennings is on screen.)

Thanks to the webcam and some smart software, I got to be really paranoid for about ten minutes this afternoon. I was in Chinatown having some lunch. I don’t know what the food was called, nor do I know the name of the restaurant, because there’s no English whatsoever on anything in the place. Like, not even an anglicized “House of Foodness” sign to help us EOL (English as an Only Language) folks figure out there’s food in there. Love their… whatever the stuff at the top left of the poster with the pictures on it is. Tate and I should go down there for lunch some time and order off the pictures instead of either of us trying to read anything.

Oh right, yeah, so the webcam is pointed out the window and sends me a single frame of the video clip whenever it spots a person. Not cats or cars or trees, just people. Kinda neat, actually. But I’m sitting at lunch eating my uh… lunch, and get a single frame of a guy in a black shirt and black pants in the back yard.

Then another one. This guy had a badge on his shoulder. Oh crap.

Got back to the office and remoted home to grab the clips and see what was going on. Turns out it was all the same person, and it was all a cop. Not sure what he was looking for, but he was certainly looking around for it pretty desperately. We checked some local crime maps when I got home, and the week before last had at least three break-ins in our area. So, all good right now, but there’s SOMETHING going on in the area.

I blame the raccoons.

Getting colder during the ride home, so I’m going to need some better, thicker gloves and start wearing more than a teeshirt under my cycling jacket.

Still haven’t seen my xray from last week, so stay tuned about whether or not I’m doomly doom doomed.

Looks like OWS is boiling over tonight with a security/police rush, so I’m sure we’ll start seeing video and stuff tomorrow, but in lighter news, here’s part of what I spent today at work doing.

Me: Hi, I just brought you back from being in a drawer to get some old tape archives running.
OS: Oh, hello, I’m uh. What? I’m where?
Me: You’re in a new box, and I’ve attached the old tape drive.
OS: Oh, you probably wanna reconfigure the agent for the backup software.
Me: Yeah, for sure, let’s go do that.
OS: Okay, lemme just talk to the backup server.
Me: Oh, but you are the server.
OS: Okay, I’m the server, so I just need to reconfigure the server agent by talking to the… uh… the… hmm…
Me: Yeah, you ARE the server, the agent you’re looking for is localhost, it’s you.
OS: Okay, cool, I can just check in with the server agent over at… uhm…
Me: Yeah, no, it’s you, see? I’m restarting the server agent. See?
OS: Yeah, the agent’s restarted, so I can talk to the, uh, server, which is…
Me: YOU.
OS: I have all these backup tapes I know about, and they’re on the big Quantum backup jukebox that’s attached to my… oh, that’s weird, I could’ve sworn there was a-
Me: No, right, you don’t have that tape deck, you have this other tape drive, see? I’m refreshing the hardware list.
OS: Refreshing the hardware? Sure, I’ll just tell the agent on the serv-
Me: But, YOU are the SERVER, it’s you.
OS: I am? Okay, I’ll just tell the agent, which says the server is… uh… uhm…
Me: …
OS: Hey, I can’t find the server.
Me: …

So that’s what I day felt like, at least part of it.

In other news, the UStream feed for OWS went from about 3,000 while Arwen was watching to over 12,000 in the time it took me to type this up.

As overhead on the Human Microphone a minute ago: “This is not about me, this is about us.”

Hope everyone keeps their cool out there as much as possible.

This weekend is over. Good one. Was three days long, and felt like it, y’know? Like, can’t really remember what we ended up doing on Friday, ’cause I don’t think it was much, which meant some relaxing time.

Fired up the turntables today and Riplay/Tate got a chance to beatmatch and play with plugins on virtual turntables using the soundtrack of Jet Grind Radio as their source. Pretty good stuff, frankly.

Played some D&D tonight, too, which was relaxing. Indian food for dinner, but we were giving “white people” hot, so I have to figure out how to say “no, seriously, hot, please” in Hindi.

Also, Granville Island Brewery’s Winter Ale smells like vanilla. Dunno why, but it does. I remember a similar experience with Rickard’s Red after toothpaste, and it tasted almost exactly like those banana candies. Taste buds are weird things, I tell you what.

We finished watching the TV series Jericho a night or two ago, so now there’s just the 6-issue mini-season in print to read through, but I’m not sure I really need to read it. Seems like the show was less about the world falling apart, and more about how government is bad. I prefer something like the UK’s Survivors, where it’s not so much about suddenly getting everything back online and having new governments grasping at whatever power they can manage, and more about the simplicity of interpersonal relationships/civility.

See that series if you ever get a chance, it’s on Netflix in Canada, at least.

Relaxed day. Did a sniper-like run into CostCo today to pick up a thing. It’s alarming how big those places are. Can’t buy less than $8 of anything. TicTacs? Only if you buy a dozen boxes. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. I love me some tacs, I tell you what.

Oh man, we did some cleaning yesterday. Rather, I did some tidying, and Arwen did some cleaning. Stopped short of alphabetizing the bookshelves, but hooboy there’s a lot more room on those Ikeas than there used to be. The office is actually pretty nice when it’s cleared up (and there’s not stuff falling off the bookshelf.)

Took the kids to Mikado on Hastings to look at the cool karate and ninjitsu stuff. Almost bought some of those ninja socks (with the separate big toe) but couldn’t bring myself to do it. OH, and they have slightly warped Bo for free! If you have a way to unwarp a six foot piece of redwood, go for it. Tate got a Bo that’s not visibly messed up, and it’s his height, so hey, free Bo. Woot.

I think Ripley’s feeling kinda ticked, but he’s okay after being promised that he can use Arwen’s Bo and we’re looking into signing him up for some TaiChi, which should be good for him. The boy could use a little serenity, know what I mean? It’s not that he’s angry, but he sure does love to have a good verbal/semantics fight.

Don’t know where he gets that. Ahem.

Today was 11/11/11 11:11 and we watched the Rememberance Day stuff on CBC, like good little Canadians. It was nicely done, gotta say. I don’t know much about my grandparents’ involvement in WWII. Not that they weren’t involved, and not that my mom hasn’t researched this down to the minute, but mostly that I don’t ask. Or I ask and it’s mythology. Arcane information. Historic.

In the course of my work over the years, there’s been a lot of information that I’ve heard and had to immediately forget because it’s a password, or a credit card number, or the names of children of multi-millionaires. Unlike the lyrics of pop songs from the 70s, I hear these pieces of information and my brain drops them, knowing they convey more than their simple fact. They are parts of locks, parts of the social engineering that I’ve learned to spot. Things I detect as Important Data.

This means they’re potentially dangerous for me to know, in that I might at some point forget that this information is not for public consumption, and let something slip. Oddly enough, given how often I’ve seen trust break, and security be broken, my tendency is to trust people implicitly, assuming that they would have no reason to betray me or those I have reason to defend.

Trust can bend. Security can break.

The weight that these myths can convey can cause memory to break. The point at which I sense the gravity of the information I ingest is also, tragically, the point at which the trapdoor in my head drops it.

Either that, or I don’t listen.

Or both.

Lest we forget.

Today happened, and I’m trying to solve a technical issue at work that’s going to prove to be an issue because someone once made a decision that didn’t include the previous incarnation of the service. Which would be all fine and good BUT there’s backup tapes involved. Backup wouldn’t matter any more after a couple of days or even weeks BUT there’s also ARCHIVE information. Y’know, stuff you move to tape to get it off expensive storage, and then bring back later if necessary.

Well, now it’s necessary, and there’s no way to get the stuff from the old tape system back online without full resurrection of the system. Ugly.

So, yeah. That’s happening.

Went for dinner tonight with the family and some friends we made over the last year, and it’s really great to just go out and have fun with people you like, but don’t know very well yet. Nice to know I’m not so old that I can’t make new friends, y’know? Especially when so many of the people I’ve known over the last 20 years have moved away from Vancouver.

There’s a DJ Shadow remix competition going on right now, and I have the component kit downloaded, but am TERRIFIED to even approach the music-making process again after so long. A few months back, I got some turntable controllers as a gift, and have been trying to learn to beat-juggle and smoothly cross-fade, but mostly it’s just been me trying to get the creative process going again. I’m not sure why I find creating so alarming, but I do.

I’ve been listening to a collection of music that I originally put together as mixtapes, and I gotta say… there’s a lot of dogs on those mixes. Stuff that I can’t stand listening to now (to be fair, it’s 20+ years later, so my tastes have changed as much as the quality of the recordings have). I forgot how annoying certain “catchy” songs are after a few decades.

I read today that Tom Waits and a whole schwack of famously odd actors are going to be in a movie that’s filming right now. I think Christopher Walken is in there, too. Can’t wait. Love seeing Tom Waits act, ’cause he really lets his Vaudeville out when the camera’s are on him.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with this. Go to www.14orso.com and check out the first video on the top left (they’re all interesting for different reasons.) A truly excellent bit of physical comedy. I see silliness like that, and I just want to have a dinner party during which nobody gets a chair, and you have to server yourself from under the table.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like creating things from scratch, I’d rather find what’s already there, and rearrange it like the puzzle I treat most of life to be. If someone says to me “make a puzzle for me,” I wouldn’t know where to start.

Half-day at work today. Good meeting with a guy I helped place. I think there’s a bit of a shift happening, and it’s good. I think he’ll get a chance to do what he does best: balance people skills against technical skills. That’s when good stuff happens. Like they say: Properly executed technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The other half of the day was spent going to the hospital for an x-ray, the lab across the street for some more blood test things, and then over to pick up the car from the tuneup it was getting. According to the numbers I’ve seen on the distribution site, my body doesn’t appear to think there’s anything wrong (so no, Dr. House, it’s NOT Lupus). :)

Caught the beginning and end of an episode of Unforgettable, and I gotta say that the last ten minutes appeared to be the best part. I think there’s way more story in the backstory than the episodic crime-solving. I might watch it again some time, as it seems to be in a bit of a dead spot in the schedule. What’s everybody doing at 10pm on a Tuesday? Seems like they’re not watching TV. Maybe there’s something better on a channel I don’t get.

Arwen just informed me that the banking systems think I had lunch today at “Flaffle King.” MmmMmm I sure do love me some Flaffle.

Oh yeah, and robots calling about elections? Leave them kids alone! A friend of ours came home to a TWENTY-FIVE MINUTE LONG message from Susan Anton. I mean, c’mon. There’s diminishing returns with something like that. Yes, we know your name: you’re the person who annoyed me a few times a week until the elec-

Wait, maybe it’s not her team leaving the messages? Maybe we’re being leafletted in parking lots by the OTHER teams (whomever they may be). I don’t pay enough attention to civics to go either way, even though I did see the husband of an old friend on a billboard recently and it kinda freaked me out. I know people who are in politics, like IN politics, not just inTO.

Riding to work tomorrow again after two days of free rides in the morning. Here’s hoping the x-ray comes up blue skies and I can stop taking these stupid blood thinners that make me bleed for 30 minutes when I scratch my lip with velcro. Weak.

Speaking of velcro, I need new cycling gloves soon. Time for a trip to MEC, I think.