1.
The Fag-Hating? Militia is notably absent from the steps of Polk today. So I guess defending the sanctity of marriage is most important issue facing our nation today… y’know, unless it screws up your weekend.

2.
At some point in the last 5 years, apparently pedestrians turned into mindless lemmings, apt to wander into traffic at any moment, wholly oblivious to existence of the automobile. So even when you’re at an unregulated intersection, or, hell–just the middle of the goddamn block, drivers should be slamming on the brakes if they see someone on foot standing on the sidewalk. Because hey—that kid prolly don’t know from traffic…

I got a message at my ‘junk’ gmail address today. This struck me as a bit humorous as I scrolled down looking for the “unsubscribe” link:

I think maybe I will…

I finally saw The Departed yesterday. While it has not taken the status of “best Scorsese movie ever,” for me or anything, it is the first one of his flicks I actually feel inclined to talk about afterward since Goodfellas. So, if you’re into that, look at ‘Gliders and Tanks’ over in forums.

That is all for now…

I will grant that I have a very loose, extremely pliable system for deciding whether or not I am “on time” for all sorts of activities, most notably, work. I use this system to justify my internal argument that “oh, I’m still on time,” knowing full well that if the facts were presented to any other reasonable person, I would most likely not be judged so.

Let’s begin by using today as an example:
I have a meeting at 1 o’clock, so I decided I would go to lunch at 11:30, giving myself a little time back at my desk before said meeting. An Outlook reminder went off and told me to go to lunch right at 11:30.

I was finishing an email and this took me until 11:32. Since it was past 11:30, the “time I left,” automatically gets rounded up to the next 5-minute mark (similarly, “leaving at 11:30” would constitute any time between 11:26 and 11:30).

Now the beautiful part here is that by leaving 2 minutes later, I actually bought myself an extra 8 minutes. Because, in addition to the 5-Minute Round Up, under this system a person is always on time if they arrive within 5 minutes of the scheduled time. Therefore, I could get back to work at 12:40 and still be “on time.” This also allows me to make it in to work by about 7:50 each morning and yes, still completely “on time.”

The inherent fallacy of our timekeeping instruments can also be a benefit under this system. You see, the big clock on the wall in our office, by which I will always measure my punctuality, is about 3 minutes behind my computer clock, phone, etc. So, at 11:40 on my watch, it will only be 11:37 on the wall. You’d think this would just help me to be a little “early” on my return, but that’s not the case. A determination of 11:40 means 11:40 by whichever clock will give you the most favorable measurement. So, if I don’t have to be back until 12:40 on the wall clock, that means 12:43 by my watch. And, since :43 is past :40, you guessed it—the 5-Minute Rule. I “left” at 11:45, and back in 60 minutes-plus.

So I walked out the door at 11:33, and through some very simple and illogical reasoning, I bought myself an extra 12 minutes for my 60-minute lunch. And, 12 minutes just happens to be the same amount of time it takes me to walk home. Please feel free to exploit this system whenever you need to, and if necessary, even brand it as your own. It’s highly effective in an environment where no “clock punching” actually happens. It has been my experience, though, that a timeclock is not as forgiving as a confused supervisor.

Damn, I ate a lot of cookies last night.

Michelle and I made two batches of cookies on Sunday night—some peanut butter, and some oatmeal raisin. They are GOOD. But, then I run into the problem where I have all sorts of cookies all over the house. I have a really hard time keeping myself from eating certain foods that I really really enjoy, and peanut butter cookies happen to be one of those things. I end up just wolfin ’em down until they’re gone or I feel guilty or (wait for it, Lorch…) I puke.

I think I’ll bring the rest of them into work.

But we had a good time making those cookies. She laughed at me when I scraped out all the peanut butter jars in the cabinet before digging in to the new jar. She says it wasn’t so much laughing at the scraping and not wasting any peanut butter, but more that I had 5 jars camped out in the cabinet just waiting for the one occasion when I would make peanut butter cookies. This becomes funnier when you realize that I’ve never once made peanut butter cookies at my house before.

We had a really nice weekend, I’d say. On Saturday, Kevin & Amanda’s new daughter, Harper, was baptized. I’m her godfather. It was a really cool honor to be asked. More evidence of the being a grown-up and whatnot, I suppose. Also, allows me to do stuff like this:

OK, that’s probably enough of that. I should do some work.

What I did is I just printed out a list of all the albums I have on the server (which is basically all the music that I have) and went through it, highlighting the ones that I really, really like. I actually marked 33, and had to nix 3 off the list. Maybe if I decide to make a Top 100, you’ll find out what those were.

You will note that these ARE in a particular order, and that order is “alphabetical.” You will also notice that this list has a lot of records on it that came out in the last 3-5 years. I thought this was fine, becuase if you want to know about my “current musical sensibility,” it’s going to be reflected in what I’m listening to the most right now… On with the show, this is it.

21. Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of Bewilderbeast
22. Beta Band – The Three EPs
23. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue
24. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
25. Bruce McCulloch? – Shame-Based? Man
26. Coldplay – Parachutes
27. The Dandy Warhols – 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia
28. Dave Mathews Band – Crash
29. Depeche Mode – Violator
30. John Hermanson – self-titled
31. Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man
32. Johnny Cash – Unchained
33. Jurassic 5 – Quality Control
34. Laika – Good-Looking? Blues
35. Led Zepplin IV
36. Michael Jackson – Thriller
37. Morphine – Like Swimming
38. Paul McCartney? & Wings – Band on the Run
39. Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
40. Pink Floyd – The Wall
41. R.E.M. – Up
42. Radiohead – OK Computer
43. Saint Germain – Tourist
44. Steve Martin – Let’s Get Small
45. Stevie Wonder – Talking Book
46. Storyhill – Miles and Means
47. The Beatles – Abbey Road
48. The Beatles – Let It Be
49. U2 – Achtung Baby
50. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Also posted in the forum. I was gonna put in Amazon links for all of these, but that seems like some unpaid promotion for Amazon. And of course, you are perfectly capable of a copy/paste.

Have a good Friday…

I’m going to be getting a new phone in the early part of December since my contract is up, and since Michelle just shopped for one herself, it got me to thinking about what I want to get.

Michelle found a couple great 3rd-party sites that more or less give phones away for nothing. The only trade-off seems to be that you have to pay activation. I can live with that.

So that really opens up your options, y’know? I was thinking about one of these new-fangled “music player” phones, cuz I admit that I like to listen to the tunes on my walk to work, but don’t really see that I need an iPod for a couple reasons:
– Apple and iTunes can eat my ass
– If I’m going to drop that sort of coin on a portable electronic device, I want more comprehensive control over what sort of data I put on it (i.e., F proprietary file formats)
– I think iTunes sucks
– My walk is only 12 minutes one way

So I really don’t *need* to have an iPod, and those of you that do, hey—enjoy the crap out of ’em, really. I just… I don’t need it. So if I could get a phone with a music player for zero monies, then everybody wins.

Rumor has it that the Motorola SLVR (which is essentially a shitty iTunes player built into a phone) is coming to Verizon in the very near future. I’ve been reading review for it online and they mostly suck. It sounds like Motorola is great at aesthetic design, and totally head-up-ass with features/functionality. So I read like three reviews and decided I will not be getting this phone.

I’m pretty well sold on the same phone that Michelle is getting, an LG VX8300, but I guess the flash card that it takes (MicroSD, not MiniSD) is pretty expensive. Not sure why that is… But it does make me want to keep looking for other options.

Lost in this whole conversation with myself is the fact that I still have a very serviceable PDA that I purchased a couple years back from Dell, and I found a fantastic music player for Windows Mobile that essentially turns this device into an iPod with less memory (which, it’s been established, I barely need anyway).

When all this is said and done, I guess I come back to “just get a phone that’s a phone leave it at that.”

Sometimes I think I’m shopping and trying to think of tweaks for things just for the sake of tweaking. I should be mindful of the mantra on a site I recently unearthed (yes, looking for some computing solution): “Don’t live to geek; geek to live.”

In loosely-related geek news, IE7 was officially released late last night. Way to go, Microsoft. You just caught up to where Firefox was 18 months ago.

Joe (the Mundschau Joe) helped me out with a tikiwiki programming thing earlier today that will allow me to “merge” the earlier incarnations of my blog into the current blog, making the post-counter 100% accurate, and the blog 100% searchable, en masse.

I don’t know how this sudden influx of entries will/has appeared to those of you in RSS land, but if it was weird, I apologize.

Some of the interesting things you find when you’re looking through a lot of old blogs:
– Found the reference point where I must have decided to register soloshootsfirst (the title was “Interest and Factual Events”)
– I used to be funnier. Seriously. I need to watch less TV, read more, work less, sit around and think more often. I’m a loser.

That’s the biggest thing I have for you right now… I’ve stayed at work pretty late working on that bloggish project. Should probably get home soon so I can eat and get ready for LOST.

Goddammit. I hate TV.

Michelle and I got back to Waukesha about 10pm or so from a very nice weekend in the Twin(ish) Cities…

We got to the theater for the Storyhill show after Aaron Espe had already started playing, but the people in charge over there were very nice to give us a couple extra folding chairs to park at the end of the 4th row, and we had a fine view of the stage.

Chris and John played almost all the songs off their new record, and a bunch of them we already knew, having been to Storyhill Fest on our summer vacation. I definitely like the new tracks. There were a lot of “repeats” or recycles on the ‘Dovetail’ that came out a couple years ago, but this one is all new (with the possible exception of “The Ballad of Joe Snowboard,” but I don’t recall that John ever formally released that one).

For an encore, they played “Boulder River” and then “Steady On.” We wouldn’t stop with the applause and managed to get them to come back again after the lights went up and maybe a quarter of the people left. Encore #2 was “Tremblin Tracks.”

Michelle picked herself up a pink Storyhill t-shirt and had Aaron Espe sign it (kinda funny). She wanted to wait around to see if the boys would come out, but I suggested that it didn’t seem likely, and we left the building about 10pm.

When we got outside, the car wasn’t there anymore. We walked over to where it used to be, and realized we had apparently parked in a taxi stand. I admit that I didn’t pay particular attention to the signs when we parked, but mostly because I expected them to say something similar to what the signs say in a normal town: “No Parking here from 5am to 9pm Monday thru Friday,” or the like. Not so in Saint Cloud, MN.

So have you had your car towed lately? I’d had mine towed never prior to Saturday, so I really didn’t have any idea where to begin finding the car again. Fortunately, there were a number of cabbies parked right there, so we asked one. He gave us a couple leads, and also offered the foreboding prediction that picking up the care that night would prove impossible. Just. What. I need.

We had a name of a likely towing company (“Andy’s”) courtesy the cabbie, but no other info. We next spoke with a couple mohawked bouncers at the nearest bar, who agreed on the Andy’s assessment, but also said that there was not a phone book in the bar. OK. They suggested we run across the street to the Radisson and find a phone book there.

I was fairly upset with myself at this point, but also trying to remain calm. We got the info we needed, made a call, and found out it would cost us 85 bucks to pick up the car, but we could do so right away.

So we did.

It was a little bit of an adventure, and I learned to do a better job reading the signs next time I park in a strange city. We got back to Dave & Dre’s apartment at about 11:30, watched the tail end of Saturday Night Live (didn’t we?) and then went to sleep.

On Sunday, everybody slept in, and a little later Andrea made breakfast. It was tasty. We took a ride downtown to the sculpture garden, which was pretty neat. I’d never been there before. I took some pictures, and they should probably be uploaded pretty soon.

We got back on the road kind of late, because I had to return a flash drive to Best Buy (man– I’ve gotta remember that: no matter how cheap it seems at Best Buy, it is ALWAYS cheaper somewhere else…), and then we did park in Tomah for a while because we needed the Internet. Michelle had to email some PDFs for work to Kinko’s in order to have them printed in time to be picked up in the morning… We both agreed we didn’t know why we didn’t think of it while we were still @ our friends’ apartment. But everything worked out.

Michelle got her new phone, so when you see it, make sure you tell her how cool it is. And if you’re Jen, try not to get so excited that you want one, too, because I am already TOTALLY planning to get the same phone in Dec…

Yeah.

I wonder if the Bears are winning…