Blog Master G

The kick-ass animal of the day is the Kinkajou. How cool is this thing? I want one.

I just read on Flo Kim’s blog about some guy at Vassar who does have a Kinkajou. He was kickin’ it with his Kinkajou on Founder’s Day, attracting hot chicks and fucking with all the stoned, tripping, drunk people. How funny is that? I wish there had been a Kinkajou on Founder’s Day when I was at Vassar.

Hats off to the almighty Kinkajou!

George Bush’s resume by Kelly Kramer

A sampling:

Accomplishments as President:
• Attacked and took over two countries.
• Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
• First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
• In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
• My presidency is the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history.
• Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history. (the ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice has an Chevron oil tanker named after her).
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.
• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
• In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the civil war.
  Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.

Geez, why wouldn’t we want to re-elect someone with such an impressive list of accomplishments?

If you haven’t already, be sure to read about your friends and mine, the 40oz Crew. And neglect thee not the fine women known fondly as the 40oz Bitches (don’t miss page 2).

In 40s We Trust. Word.

One year ago today I wrote my first post in this blog, which has become an almost-daily obsession in my life, as well as a great outlet for writing, ranting, photo sharing, and heated discourse.

That day marked the day I started blogging regularly. Since 05.14.2002, I decided to merge the entries from my formerly private blog, Think, into this one. So, I’ve technically been blogging since 10.31.2000, although today is the official 1-year anniversary of the blog now known as life.

It’s funny to read in that entry about what was happening in my life a year ago this day:

• The Bay Area’s last big earthquake hit (5.2)
• I was freaking out after I banged up one of the wheels on the Scoob for the first time (living in the city, though, I’m a bit more used to it by now)
• I was getting ready to donate the Saturn
• I had just purchased Jen’s engagement ring
• Jen had just bought us a brand spankin’ new bed

It’s also amazing to think about how much has happened in the past year:

• Jen and I moved from Treasure Island to Larkspur
• We then moved from Larkspur to San Francisco after getting fed up with suburban life in Marin
• We adopted our second dog, Happy
• We planned a huge wedding for this summer (though the work continues)
• We lost 3 family members (Patty and Granny in the past year, and Nana just more than a year ago)
• I won a workers’ comp case against my former employer

It’s been quite the year, to say the least. Life is good. Jen and I both hold solid jobs, have a comfortable place to call home, care for a couple loving and crazy dogs, and have great friends and a supportive family.

Here’s to the next year of blogging, marriage, home ownership, health, and happiness. Cheers, and thanks for reading.

The official results from Jane and Sarah’s Sauvignon Blanc wine tasting party are in:

RANK SCORE WINE/YEAR/PRICE
1 247 Firestone 2001 $8
2 229 St. Suprey 2001 $9
3 224 Lindemans Bin 95 ? $10
4 222 Chance Creek 2001 $??
5 215 Girgich 1999 $15
6 204 Charles Shaw $1.99
7 203 Fetzer ’02 $8 & Simi ’01 $15
9 201 Clos Du Boise 2001 $10
10 196 Gallo Twin Valley $5
11 189 Sancerre 2000 $17
12 184 Amaca Springs 2002 $12
13 152 BV Coastal 2000 $8
14 151 BV Coastal 2000 $8

Jen and I tied for 7th with the ’02 Fetzer. It wasn’t what we had initially intended to bring, but we ran out of time on Saturday before the party. We were planning on bringing a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Sauvignon Blanc, which is a great wine and with which we are very familiar. A couple years ago on TI we went to a warehouse sale at KJ and came home with five cases of wine, three of which were the sauvignon blanc. I don’t recall the year, but it was some kick-ass Sauvignon Blanc.

I logged into my Web server via SSH this morning, as I do every day, to be greeted by a new prompt:

jailshell-2.05$

I was also thrown into the top-level directory, rather than my usual home directory. I began to notice some other differences — new directories, inability to view my live Web logs, as I often do via the following command:

tail -f /usr/local/apache/domlogs/gabeanderson.com

The biggest frustration I would soon encounter, however, was that my ability to send via Pine had been stripped away:

[>Pipe can’t access “/usr/sbin/sendmail”: No such file or directoryTCH to find out what was up with this change in shell.

It turns out that, in an effort to reduce SSH security risk on its servers, TCH has locked down all users with SSH access under what’s called a jail shell, a “UNIX-inside-of-UNIX environment — a kind of ‘jail’ where a process can be restricted to an arbitrary portion of the filesystem.”

As long as TCH restores my sendmail ability in Pine, I’m happy. But until then, this is pretty annoying, though I do understand the need to restrict users with shell access.

This rules: There’s been so much snow this year that Kirkwood is reopening two lifts over Memorial Day weekend. Skiing at the end of May! Who knew? Since Jen will be in New York that weekend, I just may hit the slopes.

Kirkwood Mountain Resort Winter 2002-2003: News

Jen, Jess, Ben, and I arrived in Washington Square Park in North Beach at about quarter past 12 on Saturday. We headed for the southwest corner of the park where we spied the table covered in 1980s lunch pails — He-Man, Spider-Man, Rambo, and the like. With the photo of the giant cell phone leaning against the table, we knew were in the right place. We were the first team to arrive. We would soon learn, however, that our Vassar team would be more than just the four of us — since so many people had signed up for this Ivy League/Seven Sisters edition of The Go Game, we would be on a combined team with Dartmouth. “Isn’t Dartmouth the opposite of Vassar?” we quipped, laughing at the unlikely pairing of schools.

Soon enough, JJ from Dartmouth and her friend Jacquelyn from Yale arrived. Then Farouk from Dartmouth showed up and rounded off our team. We all hit it off. Jess was assigned phone operator and Ben the photographer and videographer in this high-tech game that led us through the streets and hills of San Francisco to solve puzzles, riddles, and exercise our creative juices.

The concept is simple and very cool: Cell phone as guide and data input device. Each mission is timed and worth a certain number of points. The data are fed to a central database, which tracks the running tally of scores. Throughout the game, each team can monitor how it’s faring against the others. Most of the game, we were in 2nd or 3rd place, and ended up finishing 5th of 10 overall.

I had a lot more fun in this version of a city treasure hunt than I did in the last one we did on the soaking-wet Chinese New Year’s a few months back.

Unlike the last hunt, which was more about random trivia, knowledge of the city, and finding specific places, this game was much more intense, guiding us to certain destinations to answer multiple choice or text-based questions, and to input into our phone the photo or video number on our camera corresponding to the particular objective or skit we were acting out — all the while racing against the clock, keeping our goldfish Goldie from losing more water, and avoiding the man with the shaved head who was after us with silly string.

From painting the number 4 in chocolate sauce (our own creative twist) on the northwest corner of a city block to acting out our own rendition of the famous scene from Reservoir Dogs using the mascot of a competing school (MIT’s beaver in our case), the game was tremendous fun. We quickly bonded with our teammates as we ran from mission to mission. In an attempt to discover to whom the statue at Coit Tower is dedicated (Christopher Columbus), I sprinted up the super-steep hill in Telegraph Hill leading to the San Francisco landmark. I felt sick afterward, but I did it for the team. When charged with acting out in six still frames a compulsion or phobia, our team elected Ben to have hydra-urination-obsession (or something like that), wherein he developed a fondness early in life for pissing on fire hydrants. Later on during the judging at the bar, our photos received some great applause (as did our Reservoir Beavers video, wherein Jess’ tree chomping booty shakin’ scored us some big bonus points).

When the city-based missions were over, all the teams headed to The Field, a bar on Union Street, where we received 5 betting chips each (per team) and engaged in various challenges against other teams. Jen was the reigning arm-wrestling champion, faring 3-0 against other women and earning a handful of chips for our team. While engaged in the 4-person (2 guys and 2 girls per team) chugging relay, Jen, Ben, Jacquelyn, and I tore up the competition, even though Ben’s initial false start caused us to begin with more beer on our side. It was great fun.

During the judging portion, one of the most hilarious and daring photos was of two guys on another team who got buck naked for a full frontal in the rightly-titled “Boldest” mission of the competition. By comparison, team VD (Vassar Dartmouth (Yale)) had a pretty lame entry: We had JJ lie down in front of a moving truck as Jen and I stood at the front and acted as if we were stopping the truck.

It was an exhausting day that I would definitely do again. Go Game rocks.

We had a pleasant end to the evening at Jane and Sarah’s wine tasting dinner party. The Fetzer sauvignon blanc that Jen and I brought tied for 7th, and the cheapest wine wasn’t our favorite this time, so all in all, I’d say it was a successful evening. Jane cooked some mean chicken. She and Sarah throw the coolest wine tasting events. It will be great once Jen and I have a big enough house again to throw fun parties.

Update: Official Go Game Imagery & Scores

At 26.1 years of age, I am officially an adult, according to a new report from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. I have completed my (undergraduate) education (22.3 years), am on track to be married this year (25.7 years), and will be fit to support a child in .1 more years or (26.2 years). No kids are on the way within the next month or two, so I guess I’m running behind on that front. But that’s fine by me.

Studies like this are interesting because they tend to reflect Middle America and not cities like San Francisco. These studies also make me feel old (married by 25, kids by 26), whereas living in a city I feel young. Most people in San Francisco are not married and do not have kids. It’s a place where people come to have a good time and to defy the American norm. We party. We stay out late. We take public transportation. We see independent films and go to museums. We don’t hang out in shopping malls. That’s why I like it here.

[via NextDraft]

I was diagnosed with keratoconus in 2000. Keratoconus is a disease that causes the degenerative thinning of the cornea and usually starts with astigmatism. Many people don’t even realize they have the disease. One in five people with keratoconus will need to have a corneal transplant at some point in their lives. Fortunately, I am one of those who will not.

I’ve worn glasses regularly since 2000 and switched to a new eye doctor a year ago. The doctor who initially diagnosed me with keratoconus gave me a prescription that was way too strong — about twice the prescription I currently have. I learned today that my eyes are actually getting better — and I’m going to be able to further reduce the strength of the prescription in my left eye (the really bad one) by an additional 25%. (So I’ll get brand spankin’ new glasses just in time for the wedding.)

Of about 10,000 keratoconus patients, my doctor told me, I’m one of two whose eyes are actaully improving, rather than getting worse. And on a keratoconus scale of 1-20, where 20 is the worst, my eyes are in the 2-4 range. Not too shabby, eh?

I decided 3 years ago when I was diagnosed with the disease that I never wanted to go through a corneal transplant surgery — even later in life. My doctor told me today that I will not have to. That’s the power of positive thinking.