Blog Master G

This morning at precisely 6am and 32 seconds my watch battery died for the first time. That was right around the time I was waking up for work. Well, my alarm went off at 6am and I snoozed for 15 more minutes. Now the second hand of the watch is pathetically ticking between 32 and 33, like a dying insect whose head has been severed from its body yet its legs continue to twitch.

Last night Jen and I took Shannon and Bobby out to eat at Green’s in Fort Mason, overlooking the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. A vegetarian joint, it was a bit on the expensive side, but delicious nonetheless. Opened and operated by the Zen Center, all the veggies are grown in Marin.

The dinner was a thank you to Shannon and Bobby for hosting the engagement party for me and Jen. The party eventually led to Bobby’s being served a “get out” email two days later after his insane landlady flipped out at the last minute. Despite having actively participating in the planning of the party, this deranged woman left emails and voicemails for Bobby at 11pm the night before the party to tell him that he deceived her and that he couldn’t have the party at his place after all. By that point, it was, of course, too late to reschedule a party at which 30+ people were expected. The crazy lady, Tori, wasn’t even home at any point during the party. She arrived as we were finishing loading up my car at the end of the night.

This week has been one strange episode after the next for poor Bobby, with Tori leaving voicemail after voicemail for him and sending him inane emails (like this one) about broken hula girls and how he was trying to impress Shannon by throwing a party that resulted in his being evicted (clearly).

Bobby is certainly better off not renting from this crazy lady. Of course, she’s even offered to let him stay after all this insanity.

I’m diggin’ the new design for my Blog. I also forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry that with my switch to DreamHost I figured it was also time for a change to the design of this page. And now I’m wondering if this may be the template I use for the rest of my site. We’ll see…

Thinking about this design led me to think about who designed this template. So I looked at the Blogger credit for the template and headed on over to the site of Heather Mannion, a 19-year-old chick who just finished her freshman year of college. Geez…kids these days. Their Web design skills are so much better than mine ever were. Makes me feel old. It’s hard to believe that I created my first Web page way back in 1995, when I was a freshman in college. Ahh…the good ol’ days — when things were simpler and so much more carefree.

We had quite the weekend. Bobby and Shannon threw a really great engagement party for me and Jen on Saturday. About 30-40 people showed up. It was quite heartwarming to see so many good friends and family come together. Here’s the thank you email that we just sent out to everyone (with link to photos from party).

Sunday Jen and I took a bunch of folks out to brunch at the Connecticut Yankee. The rest of the day we just chilled and took it easy, recovering from the exhausting day-and-a-half of entertaining.

Yesterday I worked from home to get a quote from Delancey Street School of Moving for our August 17 move to Larkspur. The quote was quite outrageous: nearly $1,000 for four men and 7.5 hours of moving time. I think the quote is bloated, since they’re not allowed to charge us more than they quote, but they can charge us less — depending on how long it actually takes. I sincerely doubt that (A) we’ll have 100 boxes worth of stuff (as they estimated) and (B) it will take four ex-cons three hours to load (and three more to unload) all our stuff. I also forgot to mention that we’d be taking over some stuff on our own, too, which I’m sure will help cut down on actual time to move.

Last night Jen and I headed over to Emeryville for the latest installment of the Austin Powers films: Goldmember. It was a fun movie, but, of course, more of the same from the first two flicks — including some recycled jokes.

I have successfully migrated my Web hosting service from Pair Networks, which served me reliably for four years, to DreamHost, which offers many more features (for the same price) that I’m excited to begin using: Web Admin Panel, PHP, MySQL, cron, SpamAssassin (woohoo! already it’s cut down my SPAM intake to about zero! (yesterday evening through current moment)), really knowledgeable/friendly/responsive staff, and more!

This is my first day posting to my Blog with my site hosted by DreamHost.

Success! This morning I finally got my first Unix script to run successfully. It’s a great little script called mb2md that converts standard Unix mbox files (the mail format for IMAP email) to the improved Maildir format (supported by my new Web hosting provider DreamHost). Here’s a post I added to DreamHost’s KBase about running the script (bottom of page).

Today has been a good day. I spoke with our nice leasing agent Kelly (of Larkspur Shores) earlier today. After watching (on craigslist) the price of a comparable place to the one Jen and I are getting Aug. 14 (2-bedroom/2-bath townhouse) drop to less than 200 bucks below what we were slated to pay, I decided I’d better do something about it. Good thing. Rather than having to pay $1799, Kelly agreed to drop our rent down to $1699 (and we still have the place with a great view overlooking the park). Woohoo! Moral of this story? If you want something, sometimes all you have to do is ask.

Later this evening Jen and I will be going to purchase our first very own TV. We’re getting it for just 400 bucks, which I think is a great deal for a year-old flat-screen Sony still under warranty for another year. Woohoo!

Last night Jen and I attended a sustainable-growth wine tasting and lecure at the Commonwealth Club of California (in San Francisco). We sampled quite a few wines (labeled A through M, exclusive of D, which seemed to have grown legs (this is a thinly disguised wine pun), and H or I — I can’t remember which) in a blind tasting and scored each wine on a scale of -3 to +3. As we progressed toward the end of the list of wines, the scores we gave the wines got better, as one might expect. We grew restless before the panel lecture came to a close, so we headed out for a spontaneous date at a great osteria-like establishment on 3rd Street: Piazzia. It took us back to Italy, with Italian-speaking waiters, tables in close proximity, and, of course, delicious food. Even the decor reminded us of an osteria in Venice where we ate back in April.

Becoming a “We”
It’s one of those subconscious things that members of a couple do after they’ve been together awhile. It’s usually a sure-sign that you, a member of a couple — a “we” — usually operate as a couple, as a “we.” Sentences begin with “we” without any reference to a second, third, or fourth person. Jen and I have been together for quite some time now — we just passed our third anniversary as a “we,” yet I still, to this day, make a conscious effort to begin all sentences that involve the “we” with “Jen and I” (or “my fiancee and I” when speaking to folks who don’t know Jen). I am quite aware of this speech pattern. In fact, it really bothers me when I’m speaking to someone who begins a sentence with “we” and I haven’t even met nor do I know the name of the other member of the “we.” Of course, I know the person is referring to the other member of the “we,” but it’s still annoying when I haven’t met the other “we.”

I’m thinking about this this morning because without even realizing it, my roommate Shannon became a “we” last night. She won’t admit it, but she began a sentence with “we” — without referring to the other member of her “we.” In her case, it’s fine that she began her sentence that way since I know the other party in question.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing bad about becoming a “we” (I’m one myself), but it’s just an interesting part of our speech patterns. I wonder if it’s something unique to this language or if it’s found in others, too.

Last night Jen and I saw the independent film Cherish, starring the very talented, wry, funny Robin Tunney as Zoe Adler, who is accused of killing a bike cop while driving drunk (though it’s a bit more complicated than that). She is subsequently put on house arrest and the remainder of the movie — filmed in San Francisco with one scene shot from Treasure Island! — is an intense, hilarious roller-coaster not unlike Run Lola Run. I love seeing independent films that consistently put so much of the crap that comes out of Hollywood to shame. This is one movie certainly worth seeing. (Though Jen and I, at the very back of the theater, seemed to be the only folks in the audience with any sense of humor. No one else was laughing nearly as much as were we.)

The South African version of Sesame Street will soon be introducing a female character who is HIV-positive for its “Takalini Sesame” show. I think that is great. For a disease that’s so wide-spread and such a serious problem in our world, it’s about time we begin educating our children early about the realities of the world. I’m glad also that a similar character will also be introduced in the U.S. version of the show — though not without much protest from the right wing and close-minded idiots like Jerry Falwell, I’m sure.

This article in Wired is pretty cool. It’s also kind of scary to think about what a Brave New World we’re beginning to create. Is this the beginning of the Six-Million-Dollar Man with corporate backing? In this case, Nike has created a house in sea-level Portland, Oregon to simulate an elevation of 12,000 feet. Why? So that marathon runners can live and breathe and train there. And plug in to a laptop with 35 grand worth of software that will tell them when and how to work out. With Nike shoes strapped on their feet, of course.

This morning I awoke bright and early at 5:30am for a 6am conference call with a customer with offices in Germany and the UK. Of course, there are inevitably network and technology problems whenever something important like that is scheduled to occur. I wasn’t the one who was leading the meeting, but still, it doesn’t look good in the eyes of the customer when a big meeting has to be rescheduled due to technical difficulties.

Yesterday while embarking on a walk on the Treasure Island perimeter path with Jen, Stella, and Shannon, there was a stressful dog altercation. Stella’s friend Beppo was running around off-leash and came up to greet Stella. No worries. Stella was on leash, but she and Beppo get along great. Upon approaching the path, we saw some guy and an off-leash dog. All too many times, Stella (usually on leash) is jumped by other off-leash dogs. So my new policy is to take her off leash whenever an off-leash dog she doesn’t know approaches (which is only fair). So I took her off leash and she and Beppo began to run toward the other dog. Right when this happened, the guy puts his dog on a choke collar. Stella and Beppo charge the other dog, and the dumbass owner begins to lift his dog up in the air by the neck with the choke chain, kicking at Beppo and Stella. Stella mostly circled and Beppo was doing the attacking, but this idiot guy who claimed to “train dogs for a living” was literally choking his dog, making the situation a great deal worse than it had to be. If people would just let go of dogs and let them work it out, it wouldn’t be so bad. Of course, if I had known this asshole was going to put his dog back on leash, I wouldn’t have let Stella go, either.

The humans are always more traumatized and upset by dog altercations than are the canines. Stella was over it just minutes after it happened.