Blog Master G

This quote from new GN’R bassist Tommy Stinson on why the band cancelled its shows over the weekend and tonight is great:

“No one’s ever done this before. No one’s ever…Like, the lead singer’s never taken the name and continued on with an entirely new band successfully in history. So it sounded like, the whole prospect of it sounded like it would be historically awesome to pull it off and, you know, if it didn’t work it was, like, the most interesting thing, you know, I had going at the time. I think it was a calculated risk and it was a good one.”

I miss the old GN’R. My first-ever concert was the 1993 tour — Arco Arena in Sacramento, April 3, 1993, the day after my 16th birthday. Aww yeah.

Before the recap, Happy Birthday to my beautiful fiancee Jen! Today is her birthday. She was born on the same day as John Milton, on whom I wrote my thesis. She also shares her birthday with Stella’s foster mom, who took care of our first dog before we adopted her.

Busy weekends are always the most fun. They remind me of the motivational dog poster I bought for Jen once upon a time (which has yet to be hung). It shows a tired dog sitting on the beach at sunset. Beneath the dog is this quote:

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It is not a day when you lounge around doing nothing. It’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.

Margaret Thatcher
(1925-) English political leader

I really like that quote and think of it often — especially when I live it.

Friday night after picking up Jen and my skis (freshly tuned, mounted with new Look bindings, and ready to tear it up this season!), we headed out for some dinner at a local Chinese food restaurant, where we worked the Marin Express 2-for-1 deal. Then we went to Any Mountain, where I bought a Thule 725 ski rack for 20% off, and to Book Passage, where Jen had a hard time finding a birthday book. The rest of the night was pretty chill.

Saturday I headed to Sacramento to gather up some of mine and Peter’s stuff from Nana’s house, which, after 30 years, has been sold. Although it’s hard to see it go, I know it’s the right thing to do. And it was sold to an artist who knows Eichlers and knew Nana. She liked him. So it’s fitting that he now owns the house. It closes in about a week.

Before heading to the house, though, I met up with James for some brunch. He was good enough to come with me to Nana’s house to help go through everything and load up the Scoob. It would’ve been much harder on my own. The house has felt so empty ever since Nana died. Mandy did an amazing job packing up the mountains of junk in the garage.

After filling my car to the brim with skis, baseball cards, old college papers, and even a binder of all my college acceptance letters, James and I shot back to Elk Grove, where he took me to see this amazing new housing development with 6-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot palatial mansions for at least half a million bucks. Keep in mind this is Elk Grove, a suburb of Sacramento, where half a million is not the norm that it is here in the Bay Area, where half a mill just gets you in the door of a 2-bedroom cottage. I was quite impressed. Of course, in the world of real estate, it’s all about location. And I didn’t like how close together the houses were. If only I could pick up one of those homes and transplant it in San Francisco. Then I’d be set.

Before heading back to the Bay, James took me to this brewery for a pint and some fried pickles. What a concept, eh? They were good.

Saturday night Jen and I hung out in the Haight with Ben, Jess, Karl, James, Enoch, Kat, and a couple friends of Kat (one housemate, Rob the Canadian, and one coworker, Wes the Irishman). We had a really good time — drinking at the Toronado (with at least 50 brews on tap), then playing Taboo at Kat’s place.

On Sunday, the gang (James, Enoch, Ben, Jess) came over for brunch at the Easy Street. Then Ben, Jess, Jen, and I headed to Viansa for some Christmas goodies. Later that night, we watched the Sopranos. My Mom came over, Ben and Jess headed home, then Jen and I had sandwiches, champagne, and chocolate cake that Mom brought over to celebrate Jen’s birthday. And Dad even left a nice birthday surprise for Jen outside the front door (and a winter hat for me — thanks, Dad!).

Phew. And here I am back in the saddle again. Another Monday.

Today’s NY Times has an interesting article (written by David Gallagher) on how Google’s search results are responsible for significant portions of the revenue of some businesses. And it makes sense. I’m sure it’d be impossible to calculate, but if you take the fact that Google’s main site combined with those search engines that license its technology are responsible for 75% of Web searches (which is a huge market domination, to say the least), and add to that the fact that there are surely thousands of small businesses out there dependent upon their Google search results placement for revenue, that probably represents a good portion of the GDP. And that’s just the U.S. I’m sure the international impact is significant, too.

I’ve been working on some cool feature enhancements to my blog the last couple days. Yesterday I finally assigned all my old posts to a category (and created the new television category), and I added the view archives by category listing on the home page (that includes the total number of posts associated with that category). I also began to work on an “Other Posts in This Category” feature that I didn’t get working until today, when I came across the related entries plugin and installed it. It works spendidly.

Now you can look at an individual post (like yesterday’s) and see the last 10 entries in the same category. Cool stuff.

Another idea I’d like to implement is one I saw on someone else’s blog yesterday: Display the entry’s category name next to each title, like this: category | title.

Lastly, the other feature I implemented yesterday is the display of month, category, or post title on the corresponding template, like this: gabeanderson.com: life: XXX (where XXX represents not pornography or Vin Diesel‘s latest movie, of course, but the page you happen to be viewing, whatever it is).

The other thing I realized today is that my MT templates can incorporate PHP code (duh). So I put this to immediate use by stripping out my counters and sidebar into separate PHP files; then I used an include in my main MT template. The sidebar include is especially helpful, since now I’m pointing to the same PHP file used by the rest of my site (whereas previously I was updating the navigation and favorites in two separate places).

Flemming Funch put up this post yesterday with the latest on the IAO. He also provides a link to a great article in SF Weekly by Matt Smith, who encourages Californians to call the home of the criminal who’s running the new federal agency, and to ask him lots of questions about privacy (I think this is a great idea):

John and Linda Poindexter
10 Barrington Fare
Rockville, MD 20850
(301) 424-6613

Smith also questions why the “Regan conspirator” can only afford a $269,700 home with fake siding.

What better way to prove a point to the Republican oppressors, as Smith so aptly puts it, than to bombard the lead oppressor with phone calls to his home?

Any guesses how long it will be until Poindexter gets a new number and/or moves?

(By the way: Thanks, Flemming, for leaving a comment in my posting about Google AdWords.)

Another really interesting point in Smith’s article is a history lesson about the 26 days in 1846 when California was an independent republic (free of Mexican rule), before becoming a state in 1849, of course. As the 5th largest nation in the world (by measure of GDP), why shouldn’t we follow in the footsteps of Stuttering Zeke Merritt and company?

My upgrade to Movable Type 2.51 went quite smoothly. If I had known how easy it was, I probably would have done it sooner. It was simply a matter of downloading the upgrade archive, uploading it to my Web server, then moving the new files into the right directory. And voila! Everything works beautifully and I can now leverage MT to create thumbnail images. Very cool.

I just exported all my blog entries for the first time to create a local backup (since I’m going to attempt to upgrade to Movable Type 2.51, the latest version; right now I’m running 2.5, and apparently the latest version solves the problem I’ve been having with creating thumbnails of uploaded images).

Here’s the cool part: The exported file is in text format. I did a print preview in TextPad. From May 14, 2002 through December 4, 2002, I’ve written 114 pages of content. That rules. Albeit each entry has a number of header attributes (date, title, status, etc.), but the bulk of the file is stuff I’ve written. That’s nearly enough for a book.

That’s actually a thought I’ve had before: Maybe some day my as-of-yet non-existent children will want to read this life-in-progress history of their dad. Woah. That’s crazy. But cool.

Blog on.

My friend Jess emailed a link today to this hilarious Lord of the Rings spoof starring Jack Black and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Apparently it was done at the MTV Movie Awards. It cracks me up.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I bought new bindings: Look Nova 11. They’re at my local ski shop now being mounted on my new skis, which will also be getting a new ski tune-up. This is very cool. Come to think of it, this is a pretty big deal. I’ve only actually bought 1 other pair of skis in my entire 17 or 18 years on the slopes. Wow. This is the first I’ve stopped to think about that.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on that.

OK, moment is over. This is cool. The first pair of skis that I owned were given to me as a gift. They were silver Kastles — 150cm. Next (in high school, I think), I saved and saved to buy my very own skis for the first time: K2 Gyrators (185cm, I believe). They were hot, especially in the early ’90s: Black base with hot pink and neon green graphics. Of course, I later equipped myself with the matching outfit. That jacket and those pants ruled. I wonder where they are now. The top layer of one tip of the Gyrators eventually broke off, so I sent them back to K2. They had stopped making that model, so they sent me a pair of K2 TRCs (or TRComps), which bumped me up to 190cm. I skied on those for a number of years before I got a hand-me-down from my younger (but bigger) brother (as I often did with clothes and other things): his K2 Extremes, like those made famous by Glen Plake. Which brings me to present day. I skied those bad boys until last season, when I demoed the Xscreams that I now own.

So to recap:

• 1985-198?: Kastle
• 199?-199?: K2 Gyrator
• 199?-199?: K2 TRC
• 199?-2002: K2 Extreme
• 2002-      : Salomon Xscream Series

Now I just have to put my brand new setup to use one of these weekends, especially since I have new boots and poles, too. Woah. A whole new setup. This will be cool.

Looking for the ideal way to tie your shoes? Look no further. Using combinatorial mathematics, often used to calculate resource allocation, our Aussie friend Burkard Polster has determined the most efficient way to tie your shoes. This is huge. We’re not just talking about 1 in a million, baby. We’re talking 1 in 400 million.

Congratulations, Mr. Polster! You’ve solved my lifelong dilemma. I will sleep better tonight.