Blog Master G

We all know about the problem of comment spam that faces bloggers. Lately, though, I’ve been faced with a rare breed of commenters. Let’s call them “Asshole Commenters.” These are the people who have nothing good to say. These are the people who manage to find the time to insult me, my tastes, my writing. There have been a number of Asshole Commenters visiting my blog lately, most recently this morning. These are the folks who use derogatory words whose meaning they probably don’t even know. They are the people who probably live miserable lives, so unhappy with themselves that they get off by visiting blogs and putting down the authors.

To you, Asshole Commenters, I say: Go away. You’re not wanted here. Your comments are deleted and I do not shed light on them. Thanks to you, I’ve added the following disclaimer to my comment forms:

Note: Comment spam will be deleted, as will any other comments deemed by the author of this blog as being inappropriate, defaming, or obnoxious. The author of this blog maintains sole discretion in these decisions and may delete at will.

For those of you who are not Asshole Commenters (and this is all of you who read my blog regularly and/or contribute to it in meaningful ways), please do not let this post discourage you. I welcome comments with open arms. I think comments really add to my blog. I even invite you to disagree with me, to challenge me.

Also note that I’ve now made name and email address required to post, but your email address will not be displayed anywhere on my site. This is to protect the innocent (and your address from spammers).

So I haven’t written here in a few days. Longer than I usually like to go without writing something. Mostly, I suppose I just haven’t been in the mood or haven’t had anything compelling to say. Also, I was pretty sick most of the week. I really only started to feel better on Friday. I’m still coughing here and there, but not nearly as much as I was.

Thursday I finished writing 10-plus pages on my reflections on learning and technology, which I worked on most of the previous week. Monday I took the test for my traffic school and got 100%. I’m glad to have that out of the way and the speeding ticket off my record. Wednesday we had our final (of four) moving company estimate and decided which company we’re going to use. Tuesday I got an email from a company recruiting me for a position that sounded great; if only we were moving to Bellevue.

Friday night Ben joined Jen and me for The Matrix: Revolutions at the Coronet. All the bad press and word of mouth it’s been getting is undue. It was really good. Much better than Reloaded even. Very different than the original, of course. Pretty violent. Seeing a movie that’s not supposed to be good, of course, usually has the effect of its being better than you expect it to be. I really like Neo’s line toward the end of the film when he’s fighting Agent Smith: “Because I choose to.” This after Smith has dissed all human emotions like love in his questioning of why Neo continues to try to defeat him. Choice. It’s one of the most defining human qualities. It’s what caused the Fall of Man. It’s what Paradise Lost (the topic of my senior thesis in college) is all about. Free will.

Yesterday we spent the first half of the day diving hardcore into packing (and selling some more furniture). It felt good. We spent the second half of the day hanging out with Enoch and Taylor. After some Naan ‘n Curry, we watched Comedy Central into the night.

This evening we head to Juan’s for dinner with some friends.

I’ve been feeling under the weather this week. I caught whatever Jen had last week. I’ve felt really lethargic, congested, sniffly. Night before last I had a really hard time sleeping since my throat was so sore; I kept waking up in the night and couldn’t fall back asleep. So last night I wasn’t taking any chances: I hit the Nyquil before hitting the sack. I wanted to be knocked out. And wow, was I ever. I slept very deeply and didn’t get out of bed until close to 10 this morning.

I hardly ever take Nyquil (I can’t remember the last time I did) and I’m hardly ever sick — maybe once a year or so. But when I am, it gets me pretty hard for a few days.

Coincidentally (or not?), I was sick (probably the last time that I was) a year ago today.

Dan writes about the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition and asks which of the designs is most striking. For the most part, I agree with him that all of the designs seem too similar to Vietnam memorials. But if I had to pick the most striking design, it would be Passages of Light: Memorial Cloud:

“Through the Memorial Cloud we hope to elicit two more responses, one highly physical, the other imaginative, both of awe. One recovers a sensation associated with the World Trade Center Towers when we recall standing in their presence: the urge to look skywards, a vertical gesture associated with hope. With the second gesture we seek to give expression to a relation between those we mourn and those who live on affected by the tragedy and repercussions of the attacks. This is a relation between the finite and the sublime. The cloud’s design as a bundle of 10,000 vertical conduits for light which support each other structurally, distributing forces of tension and compression, figuratively represents our shared responsiveness to crisis and our cumulative strength.”

Rene Amini has compiled a list of Bloggers for Matt (Gonzalez). The Guardian this week has a number of Gonzalez stories and op-ed pieces urging San Francisco voters to put him in office. The Guardian suggests that if those of us who voted on November 4 urge at least one friend who didn’t vote that day to get out and support Gonzalez in the December 9 run-off, then he would win by a landslide.

So let’s do it.

One of the Guardian pieces explains why it’s important for Gonzalez to win — and this is just the tip of the iceberg:

“And while he might not be as phenomenally corrupt as Brown (that would be a hard standard for anyone to meet), Newsom’s vision for the city is, overall, pretty similar to Brown’s. He’s a candidate who thinks developers and big businesses should be allowed fairly free rein to decide how the city’s economy functions. He never opposed any of Brown’s sweetheart deals that let the dot-com developers drive artists, small businesses, and working-class people out of the city. He is willing to allow Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to continue controlling the city’s energy future (he still won’t commit to supporting a real public power plan). He thinks landlords should be able to raise rents and evict tenants with only limited controls. He’s open to repealing district elections. And he wants to criminalize the poor.

“Under Newsom, San Francisco would be essentially what it was under Brown: a city where the rich and powerful call the shots and the rest of us fight to survive.

“Gonzalez offers a very different approach. He was, after all, the sponsor of Proposition L, which raised the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 an hour – perhaps the most significant labor reform in the city in decades. He opposed every major Brown giveaway. And it’s wildly inaccurate to suggest he’s some left-wing loony: he can be more fiscally conservative than Newsom (he defied almost all of his liberal backers last week and opposed Ammiano’s $60 million school-funding plan, saying there’s no money to pay for it; Newsom voted in favor of the plan).”

Happy is getting an early start to Christmas this year. Photos are from November 6, 2003. Doesn’t he look pleased?

4,879 photos: The number of photos in our Ofoto account from December 30, 2001 through today.

(I first started to post this entry a few days ago — on the 14th — but I ran into a problem on my server that was causing the resize functionality in MT not to work, and it’s only now been resolved.)

The Chronicle reports today that Matt Gonzalez has a 49% to 47% lead over Gavin Newsom in the polls: “San Francisco’s race for mayor is too close to call, but Supervisor Matt Gonzalez has a small lead among those most likely to vote Dec. 9, according to a poll released Friday by CBS 5-TV.”

This is great news. The only annoying thing is the Newsom ad at the top of the online version of this story.

Bill Maher: “I’m always rooting for our side, but how come, when we kill them, it’s war, but when they kill us, it’s terrorism? I mean, we’re all shooting at each other over there now, it does seem a little hair-splitting, especially since now it’s soldiers who are mainly under attack. Also, I thought we said terrorism was when people target civilians, like Sherman in the South, or Hiroshima, but aiming at people in uniforms was kosher.”

Without clicking on (or mousing over) the links, can you guess which is real and which is not?

College holding first dance in 143 years: “As many as 1,200 students at Wheaton College will gather in the gym Friday night for the first real dance in the Christian school’s 143-year history. Which explains why students in recent days have been seeking out classmates who know this stuff and looking for places where they can practice. And it explains why on Monday night and Tuesday night, dozens of students packed a room on campus for a quick dance lesson.”

Mom Finds Out About Blog: “‘God, my links alone contain unlimited fodder for Mom’s neuroses,’ Widmar said. ‘She’ll have access to not only my life, but the lives of all my friends who have web sites. She’ll have the names of all the places in Minneapolis where we hang out, which she can—and will—look up. With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious.'”

(Thanks to Jen and Jordan, respectively, for the links.)

I’m trying to get through Web Traffic School to remove from my driving record the speeding ticket I got earlier this year, fought, got the fine reduced, but still lost the challenge. In the freeway driving section is this paragraph, which really cracks me up:

“If you see anyone driving too slow for present conditions, obstructing the left (fast) lane at a slow speed, or simply blocking your way, try to find a reasonable explanation for their behavior. Once you understand why they are behaving the way they are, you’ll feel less angry and frustrated. You’ll feel even better if you refrain from making any gestures or verbally abusing them.”