Blog Master G

Saudi Arabia: Number 1 oil exporter to the U.S. Iraq: Number 2 oil exporter to the U.S. Nigeria: Number 5 oil exporter to the U.S. What do all these places have in common? Blood spill.

When the Earth bleeds oil, why do humans spill blood?
…
Why is “black gold” a common link in many of the worst conflicts of our time — the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and mass violence spanning the globe from Colombia to Nigeria?

UC Berkeley professor Michael Watts is going to spend the next year researching these questions with his new Guggenheim research grant:

Guggenheim for UC professor / Fellowship to continue studies on the correlation between oil and violence

Too bad I’ve never seen The Amazing Race. I just learned that the winners of the most recent one are fellow Vassar alums Flo Pesenti and Zach Behr, both Class of 2001. Flo certainly looks familiar and Zach’s name is familiar, though I don’t think I knew either of them personally, even though our time at VC would’ve overlapped a couple years.

Here’s their “we won” site:

flozach.com :: Winners of The Amazing Race 3!

What’s up with Vassar alums winning the 3rd season of performance-based reality shows? Remember Ethan Zohn? Vassar alum who won Survivor 3. Vassar certainly doesn’t have the reputation for being a sports-oriented school (we don’t even have a football team), but apparently our alums are the kings and queens of reality TV.

Maybe I should focus my energies on becoming a reality TV contestant. Based on the track record of other VC alums, my chances of winning look good.

I recently launched a new services section of my site. In it, I describe the Web consulting and Web hosting services that I now offer. I’m a reseller for TotalChoice Hosting, so if you need your site hosted but need some hand-holding for getting your domain name registered and your site set up, then Gabe Consulting can show you the way. Place your order today.

If you’re a fairly regular reader of my blog, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much lately as I normally tend to do. I guess it’s basically because I’ve been feeling pretty run down as of late. I’m not exactly sure why, other than I just have all these thoughts and ideas lately and always feel like there’s so much I want to do, but then when it comes time to do those things, I don’t really feel like it. But I am actually writing this post now, so that’s a start.

Yesterday Jen and I, along with her coworkers Anne and Andrea — and 100+ other people — painted the hallways and newly-constructed shelves for Malcom X Academy in Hunter’s Point (a very economically-depressed part of San Francisco, for anyone who’s not familiar with the city, which is putting it rather lightly). The elementary school falls between gang lines, so apparently there are often shootings and other sketchy happenings. So sad. The project was part of Rebuilding Together, formerly known as Christmas in April, for which I last volunteered during my junior year of high school in 1994. I still have the green shirt. I think. Wait. Maybe I finally got rid of it.

It was an exhausting all-day project. And inhaling paint all day didn’t help. It felt really good to contribute to something wherein you could see immediate return. We painted the hallways periwinkle on the bottom and a cream color on the top. We painted the shelves, which were being cranked out by the woodworkers who volunteered their time and 9.5 tons of wood, an Ikea-like green. Some people thought it was baby diaper or puke green. But I liked it. The hardest part was taking the hand brushes, sticking your head into the small compartments of each shelf, and getting into the corners. Woo-wee. Nothing like getting high from paint fumes. I swear I was still smelling the paint several hours after getting home and having showered. And today, Jen and I both have headaches, surely from all the fumes yesterday. If you look at the rest of the photos, you’ll notice little particles — probably the paint fumes and sawdust. The last time I saw that happen with my camera was in December 2001 when Jen and I visited Ground Zero.

It was so exhausting that Jen and I came home and did nothing besides watch Bill Maher and last week’s episode of Six Feet Under, which was probably the best one so far this season (with Keith’s paintball revenge, the polygamist Daddy and his many wives and children, Ruth’s escalating crush, and Keith and David’s threesome with the Sergeant from paintball). James was going to come to town, but decided not to since it was getting late. Enoch and Ben and Jess were all down for getting together, but I was too beat, so we didn’t.

Tonight we’re going to a dinner party at Jeanine’s place, which should be cool. Jen is at the store getting some stuff to make some vegetarian dishes to bring.

View all Rebuilding Together photos

Very cool: The makers of Movable Type have announced a new product and funding. The new service will be hosted and will surely offer lots more features than MT currently does — I’d bet to include better support for photo blogs and upload of multiple files.

It’ll be exciting to test out the beta in the coming weeks. Here’s a great analysis of the maturing blogging industry.

Every dog owner has photos of her dog wearing an anti-chew cone at one point in the dog’s life. This is Stella’s time to wear the dog cone (a simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious device):

As I mentioned on March 31, I got my first speeding ticket in 5 years (a CVC 22350). Since then, I’ve been researching ways to fight it. Turns out that yesterday I didn’t even have to go to “court,” which actually turned out to be some guy at a window who tried to convince me to show up in person for a hearing rather than fronting the bail money required to file a Trial by Written Declaration (under CVC 40902). Here are some great resources:

• Ticket Assassin
• Radar Speed Trap Defense — Step by Step

I’ve learned that cops are incented by overtime pay ($200-300) to show up in court in cases of contest. By mail, there’s no overtime pay for cops. So in my trial by mail, if the cop doesn’t submit his evidence or account, then I win by default. The Ticket Assassin is really right in saying that California scares people into paying the fines. When I showed up yesterday, the window clerk tried to convince me that it would be easier to “just go in person in June” so that I wouldn’t “have to pay the bail.” Well, buddy, luckily, I can afford to front the bail and get it all back when I win my trial by declaration. Yet another example of the poor getting screwed. I’m sure many people can’t afford to front the bail. Many others surely don’t know their rights to fight by mail. (I didn’t even have to go yesterday, I’ve learned; I could’ve done the whole process by mail.)

The new definition of ignorant:

All I’ve got to say is wow:

ABCNEWS.com : Dog Survives Car Crash, Gunshot, Freezer

Poor dog. Dosha is amazing. Talk about will to live.

[via Mefi]

One of the cool benefits of blogging is sharing knowledge with other bloggers. Of course, there are community blogs like LazyWeb and Metafilter, wherein the community creates the content. On the other hand, bloggers often share knowledge with their own readers and directly with one another via comments and individual posts.

I’ve had two recent experiences with this: First, when I was curious about how Erik Barzeski displayed the random quotes in his sidebar (since I do the same thing and wanted to see how others do it); second, when Martin Grider wanted to know how I created my Master Comments template (so I told him — and shared the knowledge with anyone else who may stumble this way). In the latter case, Martin also put forth some cool suggestions for sorting the list by entry or commenter. Future blog feature, perhaps.

Knowledge is power, after all. And, from my quotes page:

“Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”
– John Milton
Areopagitica