Blog Master G

If you missed the first two titillating episodes of The Simple Life on Fox, allow me to share with you a quick recap, starting with a quote from a review that best sums up the entire show:

“Shouldn’t you have access to great education if you’re rich?” –Chronicle review of The Simple Life

“What are wells for?” -Paris Hilton

“What does generic mean?” -Paris Hilton

“What’s Wal-Mart? Do they sell walls there?” -Paris Hilton

“I feel bad.” -Paris Hilton answering the question: “What do you think about your friends who have had jobs?”

“What’s a trough?” -Nicole Richie

The Chocolate Thing: Gooey dark chocolate chips baked into a soft roll. Scone of the Day: Today’s was a mouth-watering pear and blueberry. Sourdough pizza: Roasted red bell peppers, red onions, goat cheese, rosemary oil. Savory and alive-with-flavor provolone-olive bread. These are but a few of my favorite treats at one of my local bakeries, the Arizmendi Bakery Cooperative, which I will really, really miss when we move east. There’s simply nothing like this place.

SF Weekly named Arizmendi the Best Bakery in 2003. SF Bay Guardian readers named it the best in 2002. And for good reason. The worker-owned co-op not only produces some of the most amazing baked goods I’ve ever tasted, but it does so consistently. Arizmendi is employee owned, so the people behind the magic of this bakery are more committed to excellence than the employees of say, Noah’s Bagels, probably are.

I think worker-owned cooperatives are wonderful and much more in line with how a society should function. Everyone wins. No one is at the bottom. Every person takes out what he or she puts in. Imagine what a better world (or at least country) we’d live in if corporate America didn’t allow for the richest one percent to profiteer off the backs of the lower and middle classes. Perhaps that’s a bit of idealism and bordering on socialism. But why not have more cooperatives? They wouldn’t have to interfere with the American dream of building wealth through one’s own hard work and perseverance. There could exist a balance. Then maybe we wouldn’t have any more Enron or MCI Worldcom or Tyco scandals. And the people who work for thirty years to build their 401(k)s wouldn’t get screwed by the greediness of a few individuals at the top.

“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” -Donald Rumsfeld

(Thanks, Dad, for the link.)

[ Yahoo! News – Rumsfeld Ramble Wins ‘Foot in Mouth’ Award ]

As Jen has mentioned over on Dan’s blog, we saw Love Actually on Saturday. She sums it up best: It was “so sweet it’ll give you a cavity.”

Perhaps it had something to do with my having had a mere four hours of sleep the night before prior to driving home from partying in Sacramento, but I was simply inundated with emotions during this film, even on the verge of tears. It has got to be the most feel good movie of all time — without being sappy or overly cheesy (though, admittedly, that is debatable). The film tells stories of love lost and love found, each story depicting its own version of love unique to each character, through at least half a dozen vignettes. Set in England in the weeks leading up to Christmas, the characters are charming and the actors all do an excellent job of conveying emotions.

My favorite story (and Jen’s) was that of the Prime Minister and Natalie, one of his house servants, played by Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon, respectively. Though less believable, I also liked the story of Juliet and Mark, but that may be because I like Keira Knightley, who was also in Bend it Like Beckham and whose career really appears to be taking off, busy making three movies for 2004 release. I also enjoyed the story of Mark, who heads to America to find a uniquely American kind of love.

IMDB has some good memorable quotes from the film, including these:

“When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge — they were all messages of love.”

And it truly is a movie about discovering love, even if it’s “on Shag Highway heading West!” So head to the theater and see this movie today. You won’t be sorry. It’s rare in this time of action and shoot ’em up movies to find one that’s not about any of that. It will leave a smile on your face for days.

As I mentioned last week, Jen and I are in the market for a new digital camera. We just purchased the Canon PowerShot S50, a compact 5 megapixel point-and-shoot that also offers a wealth of manual controls. This camera is ideal for our situation since we love taking pictures at parties, on vacation, and the like, and I’m also interested in learning more about photography. From what I’ve read, this is a great camera for just that since it will allow us to use it both as an automatic and as a manual focus camera. All this in a compact body. I’ve read that it’s actually like the higher-end Canon G5 in terms of electronics, but compressed into a smaller casing.

It should arrive by Wednesday. I’m psyched.

(Thanks to Jentle and Mat for the recommendations and input.)

[ Onecall | Amazon ]

Few things get me fired up enough to write a letter. Tonight I did just that to the president of my high school alma mater:

Gabe
(Address Withheld)

Rev. (Name Withheld), S.J.
Jesuit High School
P.O. Box 254647
Sacramento, CA 95865-4647

November 26, 2003

Dear Father (Name Withheld),

Today I received your “Building for the Future” mailer outlining the plans for Jesuit’s new capital campaign. For the most part, I think this is a fine and worthy endeavor, but one fact about the details really disgusts me: That the single largest line item in the plan is nearly $3 million for “Locker Room Renovation & Remodeling.”

Somehow I’m not surprised; I know what a big part sports play at Jesuit. But it’s disturbing that this amount is larger than the $2 million goal for endowments, the scholarship portion of which I believe should be the most important aspect of fundraising for any private educational institution.

If Jesuit truly wants to live up to its mission as it “seeks, educates, and nurtures young men from a wide variety of ethnic (and) socio-economic…backgrounds,” then it should get its priorities straight and focus more on creating scholarship funds for students not from wealthy families than on providing a $3 million locker room for its jocks.

Does the “development of the whole person” really occur on the sports team? Or does it occur in the classroom, hopefully filled with students of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and socio-economic statuses who adequately reflect what the world is really like?

I, for one, credit the academic side of my Jesuit education for having been prepared for college and my life to follow—and not that I happened to earn a varsity letter.

Sincerely,

Gabe
Jesuit 1995
Vassar 1999

I’ve named this photo Stella’s Sun. It was taken on March 21, 2003 at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. It was part of the photo shoot Jen and I did that day.

I share it with you now since I just entered it into the Steve’s DigiCams Digital Photo of the Day contest. Who knows if I’ll win, but I still love the photo.

I’m back on Steve’s site after a couple years because Jen and I are back in the market for a new digital camera. We’ve outgrown our two-year-old Canon PowerShot S110 and want something that will produce better quality prints and will allow us to do more with photography than simply point-and-shoot. So we’re considering the Canon PowerShot S400, S50, A80, and G3.

Initially I was thinking we’d get the S400 since we’ve been fairly pleased with the 110 over the past two years, but we wouldn’t get much in terms of manual controls. So I’m currently leaning toward the 5 megapixel S50, even though it’s visually not as sexy as the S400. It does seem to be quite a bit more camera, though, for a similar price.

Input is, as always, appreciated on any of these models or others.

Leo and Moopheus star in the funny and agriculturally significant The Meatrix, a Flash animation produced by Free Range Graphics, which has also created hilarious animations for Dean and Huffington’s campaigns for office.

The Meatrix reveals “the true nature of irresponsible factory farm mega-corporations,” and it’s all true. The animation covers the horrible, overcrowded conditions of animal farms, the resulting waste that pollutes rivers and the air, and more. Much of the content echos that described in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

So check out The Meatrix for some timely humor. Take the message to heart. And think about it next time you’re craving fast food.

(Thanks to Denise via Jen for the link.)

.elgooG

This is the coolest thing ever. For those of you who may not be too technical, there’s a concept in the Web world called mirroring. This is a way that popular sites spread out their bandwidth demands across other sites, usually hosted by folks who are willing to help with the bandwidth burden. There is typically an exact copy of the site hosted somewhere besides the original location.

elgooG gives a whole new meaning to mirroring. It makes the concept quite literal. Someone took Google and literally created a mirror image of it. Everything is backwards — the text, the input, the results. It’s super-impressive. And it works.

For example, a search for Gabe yields only 3 results, as if I had typed in my name backwards in the real Google. And the results are accurate: The first result is a site that lists names and their mirrored spellings. But a correctly mirrored search for nosredna ebag yields my site at the top of the results.

Stare at this mirror too long and you may find yourself going a bit nutty. Even the browser scrollbar jumps to the left-hand side of your screen.

[ as seen on tonypierce.com ]

Back in July and about 111 entries ago, I put up this post based on an observation from Dave. Last week following my 777th post, Dave mused again that “The devil knows many ways to fool mere mortals…”

Is there meaning to all these numbers? One may never know…but it does get me thinking about the number of blog entries here. I wonder what a graph of my blogging would look like if I were to plot the number of entries by month on the Y axis and the time on the X axis. Or I could do an incremental graph to show the increase in entries to date. I wonder how accurate such a chart would be in predicting future growth of this blog’s volume. Of course, that doesn’t take into account that some entries are really short and others are really long. So perhaps a better method would be to calculate and graph the number of words I’ve written to date, showing variations in number of words with and without non-original text that I’ve quoted from other sources. Now that’s a daunting prospect. And probably a manual process. Any programmers or mathematicians out there want to take a stab at writing a program or formula that would do this? I suppose the easiest way would be simply to export all my entries to date, copy into Word, and do a word count. As you may notice, each entry on my home page does display a word count. The other thing to factor in is that not all of my entries are published on the site. That is, I have a number of entries in draft mode (for one reason or another) that don’t appear publicly on my site. I wonder if those entries would be factored into an export.

The other problem with the MT export for purposes of word count is that it includes for each post metadata, HTML tags, and the like. So keeping that in mind, I went ahead with an export and copy ‘n paste into Word.

Here are my current blog stats:

Published Entries: 782 (including this one)
Total Entries: 811
Comments: 637
Exported Pages in a Word Doc: 902 (Courier New size 10 font)
Words: 226, 585
Characters (no spaces): 1,396,051
Characters (with spaces): 1,599,735
Paragraphs: 26,179
Lines: 51,254
Word Doc File Size: 3,859 kb

See what you’ve done, Dave? Now you have me analyzing the text of my blog so much I’ll have its physical representation mapped out in 3D before long.

Of course, that leads to more philosophical discussions about words and text. Do words exist outside text and speech? What is their physical existence? What does text look like in its physical form? Is it possible to create a real-world model of a word based on characteristics such as sound or shape of letter or intonation? But we’ll save that discussion for another day.