Gecko Bloggle

Had this conversation with a server at work today:

Who is it?
I’m your husband, Bob, a human being that lives here.
Never heard of you.
Uh, but I live here. See? These are my keys. They don’t work though.
Nope, you don’t exist. There’s a class of things called humans, but not the group that lives here. No Bobs.
Okay, can I eat the ham and swiss sandwich you have on the 2nd shelf in the fridge?
SURE!
Can I walk back out the front door with it?
I SAID… NEVER HEARD OF YOU!

For an hour today, our users were EITHER stuck on the front porch unable to get in, or in the kitchens and bedrooms of the house.

NO FOYER, though.

Hi.  Been eleven months.  Any of you still out there? I occasionally post on Twitter now, and maybe post a little more often on Facebook, but mostly I just.

I just what? I work. I cycle. I sleep. I surf. I make stupid jokes at my lovely wife, the doula/writer/teacher/mom, and watch my kids get huge.  17combined years of childhood combine in the house to create one hell of a mess sometimes.  Also, we have rats now. Rats are odd.

I occasionally drive around in other people’s cars. People keep giving me cars, or asking me to drive their car, or park it somewhere. I sound like a mule, but I’m totally not. Just near the airport, and the sort of person not likely to destroy your vehicular baby. Though there was that one time I went WAY too fast through the tunnel, but I was young and foolish, as opposed to now. I’m older.

Holy crap you guys, I’m almost 42 now. I’m not going to ask where the time went, ’cause I know where it went. Away.

There’s some sort of format radio button that’s called Aside, and I suspect if I played with it even once, I would probably want to use it all the time, and wonder why Thunderbird/Facebook/Twitter don’t also all have this wonderous feature.

So I’d better just leave it the heck alone.

Instead, I’ll play you a little of what I’ve been hearing in my head while cycling the 10k to/from work every day this Summer up until, the uh, the third day of Bike-To-Work-Week.  To be fair (to me, not to you) there’s been some reasonably good excuses for driving my dad’s car to work for the last two days, but they’re more about reason (I’m getting a cold? I have to get home faster than 30+ minutes?) and less about anything approaching what I’d normally do.

Ramble bramble scramble, get on with the music.  Alt-J album An Awesome Wave simply blew my mind, and continues to do so, a full two months of heavy rotation later.  I’ll let it speak for itself, but I wanted to say that I’m pretty sure this the most beautiful control and playfulness I’ve ever heard in what is, at best, a very weird voice.

And I’m a big fan of weird vocalists.

Thanks for stopping in and feel free to say hi.

As the years go on, I’m sad to say that I think Bono is looking more and more like Robin Williams.

Had my Dr’s appointment today, and we talked about the Xray, and while they didn’t say “there’s nothing” they DID say “the not-nothing is probably nothing,” so I’m thinking that there’s nothing to worry about, but I’ll either be optimistically correct or willfully ignorant.  At least until I get concrete proof that there’s something to worry about.  My Dr didn’t want to renew my blood thinners, so that’s a good sign, I think.

Gotta head off to bed, but if you’ve been reading over this past month, thanks for dropping by, and I’ll try to post more than once every six months.

Be good to yourself, and if you can’t, be good to someone else.

Just watched Betty White’s interview on The Daily Show and I think I’m probably not the first to come up with this, but I think Phoebe from Friends is a direct scriptwriting descendant from Betty White’s Rose from Golden Girls, who was, I suspect, based on Georgette from Mary Tyler Moore.  I wonder if that makes Kenzie from Lost Girl Georgette’s great granddaughter?

Intense conversations in the evening lead to silliness in the witching hour.

Who else are proto-characters out there that we can draw lines (and sure, stretch the boundaries of characters to the point where we end up with only eight characters for the eight stories in the world)?  I wonder if you grid out the stories vs the characters into the 64 possibilities, will you end up with at least one season of watchable TV?  Probably a question for XKCD, and people who don’t need to be AT work at 830 tomorrow.

Dropped the ball last night.  Wasn’t even that I didn’t have anything to say.  I got into bed around 11:45, and was reading my book (the new Stephen King – pretty good, but it’s making me tense with the timeline stuff in a way that Connie Willis has repeatedly NOT done) and did a facepalm because I’d forgotten to post.  Even after sleeping in until NOON-THIRTY, I was still spacey when going back to bed a mere twelve hours later.

Rode to and from work today.  Pretty good rides, but woof, I gotta remember to stretch for a while after riding, ’cause the number of times I literally said “oof” out loud when getting up was bordering on pathetic.  At least I’m still limber enough to stretch when I get into doing it.  My shoulders are pretty blown out (haven’t had a bad dislocation aside from the occasional poing for quite a while, if you don’t count me trying to do a somersault in the pool on the last day of our Disneyland trip.

And boom, just like that, I just bought Endomondo Pro for $3.99  I will now be able to chase my best time in either direction and my headphones will be telling me whether I’m pacing, leading, or trailing.  Oh, maybe

That’s one thing that the folks at the Apple Appstore got right – pricing.  MOST games are $2.99 or less.  Most applications for business are under $10.  Angry birds is less than a Starbucks coffee, and last I heard they had over 500,000 purchases.  Blackberry?  I love you, really I do, but I remember seeing a THEME for $35.00 once.  It’s ICONS and wallpaper, people.  I mean, c’mon.

My only hope for Blackberry now is that Google purchased Motorola, and Motorola makes the Blackberry guts (they, do, right? I’m not just making that up, am I?) so we’ll soon see Blackberry devices running Android.  With LED lights on them that change colours so I can tell from across the room which account that mail was from, or make disco lights if it’s my wife, or go silent when on my hip, and non-vibrate-y when on the table.  PLEASE DO THIS!  BUT!

BUT!

Figure out a way to make central management, control, and policy possible on Blackberry running Android, ’cause it just doesn’t exist on iPhone.  Someone highly-placed in my company calls me and says “omigod, someone just stole my iPhone, and all my data’s on it!” there’s really next to nothing I can do about it.  In my days at EA, I could have immediately locked and erased the device remotely, and left a note on the screen saying where to take the unit for reward.  iPhone?  You better have that “Where’s my iPhone?” application (and a friend with another iPhone to track it with) and be ready to face a desperate thief in a dark alley who thinks they’re holding something that’ll keep them in food/shelter for a week.  You want that fight?  I don’t.

Also, was listening to this thing the other day about “shadow work” and that now everyone with an iPhone has to provide their own technical support for it, because frankly, there’s not a lot an IT person can do to help you get set up with it, because hey, it’s yours, and techies don’t like play “last touchies” with your personal gear.  If I can’t tell you what NOT to do with it, how can it be my problem to fix it if it gets screwed up?  Shadow work is the work that used to be done by someone else, but now, in order to cut costs, you’re being asked to do it yourself.  Y’know, self-checkout and bag-your own groceries, and they were saying that cel phone support is shadow work, because so many people have their OWN phone, but use it for work, so they need to straddle work with home stuff on the same device, and sometimes they collide, and you end up having to fix your gear so it’ll do work stuff again.  Nothing really new, but now the owness (that’s the word, right?) is on you to fix it because it’s YOURS and nobody’s put anything on it, instead of you bringing your laptop in to work because “ever since you guys put that VPN software on my computer, it’s acting weird.”

Also, the Spokelit bike lights I have in my wheels (two in each, for that Tron-esque spinny look)?  They come in colours other than orange now.  SWEET!

Woke up early today.  Maybe early for me, at least.  6:55 and I was snapped out of a dream in which I was trying to get myself on transit to go somewhere, and was being carried by a throng of people in a way that my Aunt once described from when she was at a Bruce Springsteen concert and got caught in a press, and was moved along without her feet on the floor.  Same thing for me in this dream.  Decided to give up trying to get onto transit, and just ride my bike, because I knew where my bike would take me, even if it took me a long time to get there.

I think my legs are trying to tell me something.  Better than back in March, when my left calf tried to kill me.  I’ve got an appointment with my Dr. on the 30th to talk about my Xray, and the blood thinners, and the whole bit. Here’s hoping this NaBloPoMo ends on a high note.

Also, Born on the Fourth of July is on, so hey, let’s watch something happy.  Usually when Arwen’s out for the evening, I end up watching apocalypse movies.  Zombies, killer virus, nukes, etc.  Tonight though, some Saturday Night Live (rerun) some Almost Famous (amazing how much the camera loves Penny Lane in that film).

The kids and I went for a run to this odd store (two of them, actually) that has all the stuff that didn’t sell at Costco.  It’s so deeply weird in there.  It’s like the clearance table you sometimes see in places like Radio Shack, or Home Depot, only it has an entire warehouse-load of stuff.  The kids always look longingly at the video games for $12, and I have to remind them that yes, $12 is a lot less than the usual $39 for games they’d want to play, but look at what these games ARE, and think about why they didn’t sell the first time around.

Also have to remind them about what As-Is may or may not mean.  To look closely at what the stickers say.  To be fair though, that R2D2 for $65 looks pretty good when they sell for $199 on Hammacher Schlemmer, despite the “does not respond to voice commands” tag on it.  I figure it’d last a week here before the kids accidentally sent it down the stairs.

Long day, but a good one.  Rode in to work and felt like my legs remembered the hills on the way in.  It’s a bit of a deadhead run from our place on 67th up to the breaking point at somewhere between 41st and 33rd.  Wherever the RCMP offices are, right around there.  From there it’s all downhill.  Not great time, again, ’cause I’m nervous about ice, and haven’t been doing much riding lately, but I felt pretty good when I arrived.  I grabbed a shower at work (love that they have them, it’s really something you get used to when there’s been showers at whatever work for me since 2003.)

Full day at work.  All good stuff.  Not everything I wanted to do, but solved some stuff that clears the path for Monday.

The ride home was bitterly cold when I started out, but nice and warm by the time I’d crossed Chinatown out to Scienceworld.

Remember when AC/DC was a terrifying force of audio destruction?  Well, I just heard Back In Black used for a Walmart ad for Black Friday.  I’m not sure whether I find that funny, sad, or scary.  Maybe it’s all three.

Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade special, and I gotta just say this real quick: I don’t care how many wheels are involved, if a balloon is on the ground, it’s a float.  If it’s got three wheels, or four, it’s NOT a “Balloonicle.”  If the entire vehicle was made OF balloons, then okay, maybe we’ll talk.

Watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes (RotPotA?) tonight, and it was pretty good. Pacing was decent, the animated stuff was pretty smooth, and aside from the occasional “More Brains Also Makes You A Superhero” problems, it held together nicely. Not the best movie I’ve ever seen or anything, but certainly one of the best prequels 20+ years after the fact.

Not like Your Highness. Holy crap. What were they even trying for? I’m not sure I’d even want to see what it was trying to borrow against. I’m pretty sure we got 18 minutes into the movie before we bailed out. As Arwen put it, “This sounds like it was written by a fifteen year-old.”  With some stupid special effects and a Zooey Deschanel that seemed like even she was tired of being in the movie after the first ten minutes.  Usually we’re pretty forgiving of just about any movie, no matter how vapid or silly. Last time we dumped out of a movie that wasn’t aimed at kids under the age of ten was… I think I have to go back to 15 Minutes back in the 90s.

Also heard a couple of tracks by Azealia Banks tonight, and the song “212″ is as catchy as it is profane.  The swearing is so fast, so furious, and so catchy it’s almost subliminal.  Your brain hears that there’s swearing going on, but can barely keep up.  Think Missy Elliot at 20 from Harlem combined with Amanda Palmer also at 20, with crunchier percussion, grittier recording and some PIPES.  Can’t wait to see her break into the scene over the next year or so.  Looks like she’s had a few singles out since last year, but I think 212′s only been out for about two months, and is just getting picked up now, as the video has about 250,000 views and that’s 30,000 more than it was two hours ago.

Also, was having lunch with a friend, and we realized that we both navigate the compass points in Vancouver based on things like the Mountains (North) the Ocean (West) the Airport (South) and Burnaby (East).  Does everyone do that, or is it just us?  I mean, I know everyone SAYS NorthWest corner, but are they all thinking some form of MountainOcean corner?  What do people in cities without humongous horizon-filling landmarks do?

Today happened, and it all went pretty well, I think. Nothing really big happened, it just trundled along. These sorts of days are the worst for me for motivation, because there’s some relaxing time, and it’s possible to get lost doing small tasks. There can be things that distra-

Ooh, shiny!

Was listening to some new music during my commute today, and sometimes I just plow my way through something like an album just to see if maybe there’s some hidden gem in there, but mostly I go through the whole thing without actually listening to it, and that’s fine, because then it’s just wallpaper. The big problem is when I listen to something, don’t much really care for it, and then FORGET that I’ve heard it, and end up listening to it again in a week or so, because the album title is numeric due to it being one of the hojillion albums available for download at www.archive.org

This is especially common when it comes to experimental albums, because I tend to let it be the wallpaper it was intended to be, so I end up ignoring it for the most part, and then listening to it even more.

Wonder if that’ll happen with the new Kate Bush album, ’cause so far? Yeesh. I hope I’ll accidentally hear it enough times that I like it, but right now she sounds very close-range and low. I’m hoping. I really enjoyed some of the tracks from the last album (Pi, in particular, was inspired weirdness, like I like).

But right now, I have to show Arwen what happens when two kids get ahold of a five pound bag of flour.