Blog Master G

My switch to Movable Type has had an interesting effect on how I think about my blog entries. Because there is a now a title and category associated with each entry, I’ve found that I am becoming forward-thinking in terms of what I write and how I categorize each entry (what happens if I want to find an entry by relevant title or see a listing of all entries in a particular category?). Due to these constraints, my entries are becoming more regimented — and not as free-flowing as they previously were in Blogger. I’m even considering going back through all my archives and breaking up each entry into separate topical blocks with relevant titles (whereas now the title only applies to the first thought in any given entry).

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is actually forcing me to think of how I dive into my writing similar to how content is architected in the world of elearning: as reusable learning objects (RLOs).

But alas, am I creating an electronic journal of my life, or am I publishing reusable training content to be tagged with metadata and dumped into a learning content management system (LCMS)?

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Speaking of which, Friday night I met up with my old Headlight compadres — Glenn, John, and Scott — to talk about some elearning business ideas that Glenn and John are brewing up. And to imbibe a couple fermented content objects.
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Jen is talking to a friend this afternoon about salary negotiation, which is one of the trickiest and anxiety-inducing things any of us surely goes through — at least in our professional lives. Jen asked if I had any input or advice for the friend, who received a low-ball offer. My advice was basically to determine a lowest acceptable salary and stick to that. Ideally, if you’re early enough in the negotiating game, you don’t have to be the first to say a number. But if a number is already out there — or if you have to name a number — then you should always name a number that is at least 10 to 20 percent higher than your lowest acceptable salary.

Turns out that my advice is pretty much in line with a proven method: The Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method.

Easy in theory, but a bit more difficult in practice.

On Saturday following a morning hike and an afternoon movie, Jen and I headed to Montclair for an evening of wine tasting at the woodsy home of Jen’s coworker Jane and her partner Sarah.

The concept of the evening was great: Each couple brings two identical bottles of favorite Cabernet Sauvignon (less than $20), everyone does a blind tasting, scores each wine, then the winner takes home all the second bottles. I’m glad that the winner was Heather, the only non-coupled attendee of the party. She seemed really cool.

Jen and I cheated a bit, thinking it would help us win: We went to our local Mollie Stone’s (quite the snobbish establishment in the world of grocers) and asked the resident wine expert (yes, there’s a guy whose sole job it is to work in the liquor aisle and give advice) which under-$20 Cabernet would bring us victory. Of course, being his job to get people to spend lots of money, without hesitation he pointed us right to a $19.99 bottle of Martin Ray 1999 “Mariage” Cabernet Sauvignon.

Forty dollars and several tipsy hours later, our highest-priced wine ranked only 4th out of 10 overall.

Sadly, the wine Jen and I ranked as our favorite (I scored it 21 out of a possible 25 in the blind tasting) was the $3.33 bottle of Forestville. Perhaps our college days of drinking jugs of Carlo Rossi aren’t as long gone as we’d like to think.

A harmonium dumped in the street by a taxi van that flips down the road at extreme velocity. Glass-handled plungers filled with dice. Mountains of Healthy Choice pudding. These are just a few of the highlights from Adam Sandler’s latest flick, his first that’s not your average ha-ha comedy.

Saturday afternoon Jen and I saw Punch-Drunk Love, which also stars Emily Watson. It’s one of those movies where you’re asking yourself, “What the fuck?” from Scene One. It’s a movie that you won’t immediately understand and one that’s not easy to watch. And that’s exactly why I enjoyed it so much.

Most movies today don’t really affect people — or make them feel any particular way. Punch-Drunk Love is not your average movie. Watching it makes you uncomfortable.

In a nutshell, the flim is about an average guy (Barry Egan) who owns a business and is depressed, maybe even bi-polar. He has 7 sisters who treat him like shit, which surely impacts his psychology. In the beginning, he doesn’t really care about much or even like himself. Then the harmonium shows up (symbolic of a forthcoming change in the music of his life). Shortly thereafter, he meets a woman named Lana Leonard (Watson) who understands him (she turns out to be a friend of one his sisters).

In his loneliness, Barry decides one night to call a phone-sex service. This is the beginning of a series of events that involve his being pursued by brothers from Utah who beat him up. At first, he doesn’t care. Then he begins to fall in love with Lana. He begins to care about himself and decides he doesn’t want to be pushed around anymore.

When the thugs from Utah smash into Barry’s car and hurt Lena, he kicks their asses because they hurt her — and he has a reason to care. After a nerve-wracking phone call (scarier than most scenes in The Ring), Barry flies to Utah to tell the sex-phone boss that the attacks must stop. He tells the guy that he has love in his life, which makes him stronger than he’s ever been.

Toward the end of the movie, Barry carries the harmonium to Lana’s apartment, as if inviting her into his life. In the final scene, the harmonium is back in Barry’s warehouse and he is learning to play it. He now has music in his life.

The test site has been moved into production, so to speak! The blog is now live in its new and improved Movable Type format. Everything looks mostly OK, with a few small kinks to work out. It took a long time to get here, but I’m glad it’s finally (almost) done.

Happy Halloween 2002!

Movable Type rules. Now that my installation and database connection problems are behind me (at least for the moment), I can actually begin to start using it. I have a Test Blog up and running and all seems to be working beautifully. Next up: Importing all Blogger posts to Movable Type. Woohoo!

Sometimes having two dogs isn’t all that much fun. This week having two dogs has been quite the pain in the ass. If it’s not one dog pissing or shitting inside, it’s the other. As smart and as good and as housebroken as she is, apparently Stella had some major poo problems in the night, since Jen and I were greeted this morning by quite the pile by the back door downstairs. Happy was in the kitchen, so he was ruled out. On Treasure Island, Stella would always wake us up in the night if she had an emergency, so we wondered why she didn’t last night. My theory is that on TI the door to our room was always closed at night, and dogs don’t like to stink up small areas in which they’re confined. These days, in our own house, the door to our room is always open at night, so Stella’s free to roam (and poo) about.

Ben’s iProtest.net site is up for beta testing. You won’t be able to access it until the beta is over, but I’m happy to announce that I’m officially the first poster to the site. I posted a link to an article about the new budget deficit created by the Bush administration. This is what I said about it:

“This is an issue overlooked by mainstream media. It’s ridiculous that no one seems to care that the Bush administration is throwing billions into military “defense” spending and using it on the offense to attack Iraq to secure U.S. oil interests and to put money in top officials’ pockets.”

Yesterday I sent an email to President Bush via Act for Change, urging him not to invade Iraq, and reminding him that there are more pressing problems here at home. Of course, he doesn’t even listen to a group of San Francisco protesters 40,000 strong, so he’s surely not going to care about one email. But hey, we’ve got to try.

On Saturday while watching the first several episodes of the first season of Buffy, Jen took a quick break to check her email. Among her new messages was one from our friend Jessie that looked like this:

—————
Can anyone tell me the name of this song and the artist it’s bothering me…
http://www3.quantumlynx.com/barontech/list/sayit.swf
—————

Downstairs, Ben and I heard Jen scream: “Ahhhh! Oh my God!” We both ran upstairs. What we found was Jen standing next to the computer breathing hard and what you’ll find in the above URL on the computer screen. Jess certainly nailed her with that one. Click on the URL at your own risk.

Last night Jen and I watched the 1998 documentary Kurt and Courtney, which told the story behind Kurt Cobain’s life and explored the conspiracy theory that Courtney Love (or someone hired by her) had actually killed her husband of two years and made his death look like suicide. The documentary was interesting, but didn’t leave me feeling convinced either way. It did leave me with a new feeling toward Courtney Love, though: By all accounts, she seems pretty scary and not at all what she appears to be on the surface (at least on the surface of her new wannabe movie-star image).

There was a shooting today on Peter’s school’s campus (U. of A.). I’ve left messages for him on his cell and home phones but have not yet heard back. I’m certain he’s fine, though, since he’s not a nursing student. Still, it’s such a scary thing to think how close such a horrible act of violence can touch my family. I’m glad the bastard who did this killed himself. Now he should rot in Hell.

If only people with death wishes would go away and kill themselves instead of feeling the need to take others with them, the world would be a better place.

The Giants lost a heart-breaking game yesterday when the monkey-lovin’ Angels from Anaheim came from behind to overcome a 5-nothing deficit. Tonight is Game 7 and the Giants will have to give the Angels a serious ass-whoopin’ to make up for yesterday. Dad is coming over again for dinner and to watch the game. I really hope our team can bring home the victory.

Before the game yesterday, Jen and I woke up bright and early to head up to Sonoma with Ben and Jess to hit the warehouse wine sale at Sebastiani. It was a hell of a lot more crowded than the similar event Jen and I attended last fall at Kendall-Jackson. But we had just as much fun. After a couple rounds of tasting in between standing in the long checkout line, we ended up with 3 cases of wine, along with a big ol’ 3-liter magnum bottle of 1998 Merlot. The cases we got were 1997 Sangiovese Dry Creek, 1999 Pinot Noir Carneros, and a 2000 White Maritage/Sonoma Valley Domenici “Old Vines” Mourvedre case we split with Ben and Jess. Before heading home, we had a huge, yummy brunch at Black Bear Diner.

Back at the ranch, we watched a couple hours of season one of Buffy on DVD before doing a beer run and watching the game that started out to be great fun, but certainly didn’t end that way. (Beer run link brought to you by the official Everclear Web site, which greets you with a great animation of a hot chick flipping you off. Rock on. Ahh…Everclear…those were the days: Flaming shots, Hi-C mixers, paint curled off the wall of Jonty’s room in Jewett.)

Today was good timing for Daylight Savings to go into effect. It was nice to sleep until 10, but awake and have it really be 9. We’ve used the extra hour to clean the house and do oodles of laundry today (8 whopping loads).

I just stumbled across an alternative to Blogger called Movable Type, which, from what I can tell so far, seems to be a much more robust version of Blogger for more advanced users. From what I can tell, it would be installed on my own Web server and is integrated with MySQL. And it’s free. Rock on! I’m actually quite excited about this, as I wouldn’t have to rely on Blogger’s site for publishing anymore. This may be just what I need…I know the name sounds familiar, but this is the first that I’ve really taken the time to read what it’s all about.