Blog Master G

Last night Katie threw a really cool holiday party at her place. It was fun to get out of the house on a weeknight and party like rock stars. We ate Indian food and drank lots, including mai tais that packed a serious punch (I only needed two). Jen and I didn’t get home until after midnight. This morning I uploaded a bunch of really funny photos from the party and just emailed them around to the crew.

Jonty sent me the URL to this Sacramento Bee story about Apple suing a former employee over allegedly posting schematics for a not-then released model of the G4. The guy worked in the Laguna office, which is where James used to work. Apparently the dumbass who released confidential info thought Apple must’ve been joking when he signed the NDA.

Mark Shields has an excellent commentary today on CNN.com that proves just how big an idiot Trent Lott really is.

Speaking of the moron himself, this faux holiday greeting from the Lott family is pretty funny.

While perusing through my company’s classifieds this morning, I came across a posting that made me really mad — a bunch of “free” golden retriever puppies that will be “put to sleep” if they’re not adopted. I took the opportunity to get up on the spay-or-neuter-your-damn-dog high horse.

Wow, I’m really beginning to wonder if some government types are keeping an eye on me. Have I been targeted as a dangerous liberal extremist? Is someone on to my plot not to agree with everything the government tells me? Does the federal government not like it when people think, and are more than just members of a mindless mass of bodies? Am I being paranoid?

Or is it just coincidence that twice this week two federal employees have looked at my Web site? First it was the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday, and today it’s The Federal Judiciary:

uscourts.gov Dec 17 2002 3:43:35 pm 21 15:28

This stat is from my Vassar Blogs Site Meter. That 21 is the number of times my page was viewed, which is the really weird part. Most of my visitors only view the page once, maybe twice. The 15:28 is also unusual — someone spent that many minutes and seconds looking at my page. This could explain it: There are about 30 links on that page to other Vassar blogs, so perhaps this person just clicked on each one, returning to my page 20 times during the course of 15 minutes this afternoon.

I’ll have to keep an eye on this trend. Bored federal employees or part of the IAO‘s initiative to collect every bit of data on every American? If the latter, how about kickin’ down some Web disk space for me, Poindexter? I could use a couple hundred more megs.

My friend, coworker, and former neighbor Megan has officially launched her new site, Steffen Photography. She does some really cool work. I particularly like this one, taken from my former island home. You can order prints of any of the shots. Check it out.

Bush officials have taken a powerful stance once again and have said, quite explicitly, that the President will remain fiercely and “deliberately vague, huh,” according to a White House official. Of course they’re going to remain vague on Sen. Trent Lott’s racist comments. And of course they want the Lott issue to be resolved quickly. He’s stealing headlines. And Bush wants his impending war (which happens to be losing public support) back in the headlines.

I’m bummed that I missed Lott on Black Entertainment Television last night. It would’ve been fun to see him make a fool of himself, trying to make ammends with the brothers and sisters about his recent comments commending the one man who voted against the 1957 Civil Rights movement — none other than the ancient Strom Thurmond, of course, who’s currently 3,154,146,897 seconds old. That’s more than 3 billion seconds — or 36,506.3304 days old. That’s a lot of days on this earth. Way too many. He certainly epitomizes the Stupid White Men who run this country.

On the flip side, Emil Guillermo has an interesting piece in today’s Chronicle in support of Lott. Guillermo argues that Lott’s comments at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party were just honest and have started the country speaking about race again for the first time since the O.J. trial.

I agree that the debate is good. But sorry, Guillermo, the path to good debate is not to keep a racist in power who, of course, acts completely apologetic on the facade and claims that he believes all men are equal, but actions speak louder than words, my friend. Lott’s was the sole vote against Bush’s nomination for a black judge last year. He voted against extending the Voting Rights Act in the ’80s.

Let’s give this asshole the boot on January 6, like someone should have done to Thurmond long ago.

Hmm, interesting: A quick check of my Nedstat stats for my blog shows the following line among my last 10 visitors:

16 December 08:49 US Dept of Justice, Rockville, United States

So who at the United States Department of Justice is interested in my blog and what I have to say? If you read this again, drop me a line and let me know. Oh, and have a nice day.

Back in the day, a Google search for Gabe would yield my online resume within the first few results. That’s when a link to my resume was included in most of the big job search sites. Since pulling my profile off most of the sites, however, a search for my name produced about 68,800 results and no sites related to me were to be found anywhere within the first several pages.

This morning something cool happened: A search for Gabe now puts my new Vassar Blogs site at result #3 (4th on the list, but the first 2 results are from the same site). I guess all it takes is a link or two from a handful of folks, including Paul Miller, who was kind enough to link to the site in the links section on his home page.

This does, of course, remind me of David Gallagher‘s Business 2.0 article on his climb to the top of the Google search results.

A mere 4 months after moving north to Marin, Jen and I continue to long for city life. Marin simply does not have the same omnipresent energy of San Francisco. We miss that. A lot. All our friends are in the city, too.

So today we’re finally taking the first steps toward doing something about it. I put a posting on craigslist that describes our current apartment, in hopes that someone may be willing to take over our lease. And we’re getting ready to head into the city to check out a cool-sounding place in Glen Park — with a huge yard. It’s quite a bit smaller than where we live now (a 1-bedroom in-law versus our 2-story, 2-bedroom apartment), but also a heck of a lot cheaper (since utilities and laundry are included, and there’s no $50 per month pet rent, we’d save $500 per month).

Jen and I can’t wait to move back to the city, so it’s good finally to be doing something about it.