Gecko Bloggle

I should really learn to play Rainbow Connection on my flying-V ukulele. I can’t generally sing, but I’m told I can imitate Kermit the Frog quite well, and can sorta-kinda remember how to play uke.

I played the uke when I was in elementary school, thanks to a truly gifted, talented, and passionate teacher. I forget her first name, but I’m pretty sure her last name was Paulding. It pleases me greatly to know that there’s a small army of adults in and from Chilliwack that learned to play the ukulele in the 80s, thanks to her.

Much better than the connection between math and being yelled at (not me, another kid, but it was burned into my mind.)

Played with my turntables today, and that was pretty good, but what was more fun was when the kids got home, and I got to listen to a six year old scratching with Fluke’s Tosh and something by Edit (Laundry, I think it was.) Good times.

As the afternoon moved on, the kids and I wanted to watch a movie, and Arwen had mentioned Swiss Family Robinson, so I looked for it on Netflix. Nope. What WAS there though was Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Yep, you read that right.

Un. Watch. Able.

You know it’s bad when a 6yo and 9yo are trading MST3Kisms with the screen: “I don’t know how much food I have left, I’d better, oh, I dunno, OPEN MY FACE MASK AGAIN to look.” Complete with a moment in which the actor’s lips didn’t move, but we heard any oddly-record “fifteen” dubbed into the scene. Just plain weird. Adam West was in the opening scenes, too, including some unsettling moments with a monkey in a spacesuit being manhandled to give the appearance that he was floating around in space.

So we gave up on that, and tried the real Swiss Family Robinson, but Tate wasn’t interested at around the 20 minute mark. Some sorta Shreck Spooky Tales thing filled some more time, and then we had dinner in front of “Captain America.”

Not bad. Not great, but not bad. The kids thought it was over at the half-way point, and frankly, so did I. Not quite sure what happened there. The ending? Again, 6yo and 9yo weren’t so much “Oh wow” as they were “Huh? How does it END though?”

Folded some laundry, made dinner, didn’t shave, really should have. Tomorrow’s gonna have to do. Been some changes at work, and they’ve mostly been really really good, but I think I’m going to have to dig in and focus this week to make sure I’m getting stuff done.

Have lunch with my buddy Nilo, and maybe I’ll ask him for some advice for staying focused. He seems to be able to do it.

Good music is key, I know that much.

Been listening to a whole bunch of music from the early-to-mid 90s over the last couple of days, and I gotta say, I must be getting older, ’cause a lot of it I’ve been feeling like “Oh, ew, no” and skipping to new tracks. Will have to figure out what I’m going to do about that, because there’s a project I have in mind for them, and now I don’t think I can do it without a major retread, and possibly treating that source material as the “first half.”

‘Night all. Hope you remembered to set your clocks back. Might be some folks showing up an hour early at work tomorrow.

S’getting cold out there already.  Really starting to feel like Winter, which is weird, ’cause Vancouver doesn’t really do Winter.  We get maybe two or three days of snow a year, and it usually melts into slush the same day.  Smells like it, though.

Arwen was working today in Point Roberts, and I gotta say “I don’t get it.”

Point Roberts is at the Southern-most tip of this little spit of land that leans into the ocean near the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, and bits of it dip below the 49th parallel, which means that yeah, it’s in the States.  We drove up to the gate (yeah, a gate, literally a seven-foot chain-link gate) and stood there looking through it.  Yep, that’s America right there.  All three square miles of it.

Sidebar: How many times a year does Coldplay need to play SNL?  Seems like they’re averaging three or four, at least.  Shouldn’t the musical booking folks be looking for the next Sugarcubes or something?

So yeah, there’s this itty bitty chunk of land that’s in the US, and there’s an airstrip on it and probably a bunch of boat docks, but here’s the problem, I don’t know about the horses any more.

See, about 20 years ago, someone told me that SCA folks do some sort of weird trick with taking horses down to Point Roberts, and then “going for a run on the beach,” across the border and then people picking them up on the other side and taking them away.

Only now that I’ve been there, I gotta ask “and then what?”  Where do the horses go?  Get on planes?  Walk onto little boats?  I don’t get it.  So that happened.

While Arwen was doing her thing, I took the kids to Richmond to kill some time, and we ended up going to the Richmond Public Market, which was a nice little culture shock for the kids (and me, frankly).  Bubble tea was had (mine was supposed to be green apple, but was plain chocolate, I think) while we sat on the upstairs seating and looked down at the people shopping below.  Always fun to see vegetables you can’t name.

Oh, but before that, I had to go to the Telus store and get A’s Blackberry figured out, ’cause it’s constantly scrolling up, which is a bit of a problem.  I had time navigating the first five minutes of the store because there were no less than four staffers in a place smaller than your average shoebox, and the one that stopped chatting to help me had fake eyelashes that I think still had the backing card attached to them.  It was intense.  Like, “Hi, {flap} can I {flap} help y{flap}ou?”  Obviously from the Ghost Whisperer school of makeup flapplication.

I explained what was happening, and she said “I can try updating the software on it, and see if that fixes it, can you come back in about a half-hour, forty-five minutes?” I asked her how a software update was going to fix a hardware issue, but okay, fine, maybe it’s got to do with the sensitivity drivers or something.  I remember seeing that with trackpads “drifting” when nothing’s moving, so okay, sure.  I’ll go wander around the mall for a bit.

Orange Julius is a lot of sugar.  Wooftie.

Eddie Bauer is trying to outfit me for the zombie apocalypse, but wants me to be stylish about it.  Seriously: how many kinds of pocket knives do we actually need that are also bottle openers (but the old churchkey type) AND have flashlights AND whistles in them with a loop for attaching to carabiners?

I came back 45 minutes later, and was told the update was “still downloading” (um, shouldn’t you have a little stockpile of the latest updates for each of the devices you sell, to avoid this sort of thing?) and (oh hold up – this is a Telus STORE and you’re having “problems with our Internet.”)  I refrained from asking if they were hitting the Telus speedcap at 160K?

We repeated this little “How ’bout now/come back later” dance for a total of 90 minutes before they did what I’d assumed we were going to do in the first place, replace the device with a loaner while the old one got swapped/repaired.  Seems like maybe everyone in the store had enough coffee and had caught up on their Friday nights, ’cause they were suddenly all in full-on sales mode.

So, yeah.

(In which our hero enjoys a duty-free finger of scotch while watching a scary movie, so SPOILER ALERT)

Okay, so maybe I forgot what I was writing about back in May. Been a long time. Oh wait, was that May of last year, or this year? Maybe it’s been longer than I thought.

I’m watching the beginning of Poltergeist right now, and I honestly don’t remember very much about this movie. I read the book first, (can’t remember who did the adaptation, nor can I recall which way the adaptation went: book to movie, or movie to book,) and I know I remember many things very clearly from the book, but there’s a lot of stuff I have no recollection about. I remember the remote control fight in the book, I remember the bathroom scene (though I think I remember that happening in the kitchen instead). Maybe I think it was in the kitchen because I was at my Oma’s house on 33rd when I read the book (or maybe I just remember it as that place).

Do you have that happen too? Certain books put you in certain houses when you’re reading about a house? Do you ever have more than one book staged in the same house?

(Hah, just saw a poster for Alien on the wall in the kids’ room, nice little hat tip).

Oh man, that’s right: the clown on the chair. I was never stupid enough to have a clown or just about any other doll in a chair in my room at night, but I would often see things in the room when it was dim. Thinking back now, 30-something years later, I think I was probably seeing things in the dim light because I was nearsighted, which was starting to get worse around the time I was ten. Of course, our brains love to make up things when there’s not quite enough information. See movement where there isn’t. Fill in details where they’re missing.

I wonder if other animals get freaked out by stuff that’s not there. Like, do adolescent chimps see things at night that aren’t there? Shadows?

Hey Shaw, are you trying to make TV ads that look like they were converted for playback on a Nintendo DS? Is that intentional, or did something go seriously awry with the encode?

I wonder if The Ring was in any way inspired by Poltergeist? Also, hello, quit falling asleep in front of the TV and leaving it on all night. What’s up with that?

Oh yeah, this is sorta neat – last night I was playing with an app for my phone that listens for tones (can’t think of the word at the moment – hello, scotch) and found out that the TV being on with no signal produced a 15-16Hz tone. It was pretty loud, too, like as loud as people talking in the room, but I couldn’t hear it. There’s all sorts of tones that we can’t hear as we grow up.

Maybe there’s things we can’t see any more once we grow up, too.

The collarless stray sat roadside, watching traffic, tongue loose, big teeth smiling into the darkness.  One of the big robot trucks went by, filled with animal smells.  The stray watched it pass into the darkness, trailing lights behind it as it went.  The moon rode clouds West and the stray could see the motion.

Somewhere not too far away, an insect landed on a piece of tin, chiming it.  An ear lifted, rotated and returns to idle.

There was another machine on the road.  Looked normal, but lacked headlights, and sounded wrong.  The engines were running normally, but the tuning was missing the usually harmonic hum.  Didn’t anticipate the hill until the speed dropped, and then overcompensated by revving suddenly.  Animals acted like that, but vehicles didn’t.  Machines didn’t.  This vehicle had an animal driving it.

The stray stood and looked down the valley at the car as it rounded another corner, and then started loping towards the freeway.  The sprint across the last 75 yards took three strides.  The impact was quiet, but the rooster-tail of sparks from the dragging rear end of the vehicle screamed into the hills and harmonized with the echo.

As per the rules, the stray pulled the animal from the sandy hillside the car had burrowed into.  Checked vitals, and attempted to identify which medical carrier it was affiliated with.  No tracker on ‘fid.  Cauterized the cheekbone cut with the small onboard first aid torch, applied transdermal sleep agent, and then deployed a foil blanket with a red cross symbol at each corner.

After a moment, the moon skated past the clouds once again, and all six hundred pounds of the stray began to purr.

It’s harder to find the middle of the road when the cat’s eyes are being actively jammed. Scrambling them is trivial, and helps keep the disco lights out of your mirrors, but it means you have to actually watch the road, and that your car constantly thinks you’re off-roading, so every time you skip a puddle, the dash pulsates “Terrain Change – Find Nearest Road?” at you. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me awake.

It’s been three days and I still shudder when I catch my reflection in the mirror. I can’t get used to the complete lack of data stream in my eyes. Just me in there. Ghostly, tired, burnt.

Just me.

Heard another voice as I was checking out. Before I bumped the link, I could hear the Other Party. Dead air, but there. Like I could hear them breathing inside their own head, but within mine, too. The sound of earplugs. Noise cancellation turned up too high. Wonder if they could hear me, too?

I’ll have to find out later, when I hit the bunkers. They’d built them to be out of earthquake zones and tsunami range, but when everything went proximity, we didn’t need data bunkers any more. Yay Cloud. All fixed. Perfect. Ubiquity realized. Took us too long to notice that things were being tampered with. No backups that we had control over. If someone wanted it changed, it was changed back to the beginning of the document. Sure, it could hold every piece of data you ever wanted to store in your lifetime, but it’d also go away in a blink. Leave you feeling crazy. Leave you paranoid. Leave you alone.

Lights on the horizon, the cat’s eyes reaching toward me. Autopilot transport truck for a big box. I reached for my modified dashboard to hail the onboard on low band to see what it would ack back to, but remember, barely, that I’m not sure what it would do if it “saw” a vehicle-shaped non-entity on the road. Probably call home and batmobile in front of me. EMP if I got too close. I don’t know about freeway piracy rules, but I’m pretty sure tie goes to the defendant in cases like that.

Might also just call in a Bird, and I can’t outrun a airdrone, no matter what I do to the onboard. Just because my car has no idea where it is, doesn’t mean the satellites can’t watch for my infrared headlights.

Stars sure are pretty, though.