Blog Master G

When I walked into the Saratoga Steeplechasers meeting last night, I was greeted by Elisa and Matt with enthusiastic cheers and praise that I had finally blogged again after having that stupid gabeanderson wannabe Google logo on my blog for nearly two weeks. Just a few days before, Jen and Sarah had both told me the same thing — “When the hell are you going to blog again?? I’m tired of that damn logo!”

So first of all, I apologize, dear readers, for my terrible dry period. For the four of you who gave me a hard time for slacking and such a great welcome back to blogging, there are probably others of you who feel that way but didn’t say anything. I will try my best not to let you down again. Seriously, though, it is a really good feeling to know I have so many wonderful friends who care enough about what I write and post to check my blog so eagerly. That gives me the warm fuzzies.

And speaking of warm fuzzies, fall is suddenly here! The treemometer has dipped to the high 30s and low 40s in the mornings lately, and the transition to winter mode has begun. (I’m fighting off a sore throat with regular intake of Vitamin C and Echinacea, the immunity-boosting herb that Nana swore by.) Last night we hauled the upstairs bedroom air conditioners down to the basement. On October 6, just before I left for SF, we turned on the heater for the first time of the season (annual cleaning/service scheduled for Thursday). This morning I brought up from the basement two storage bins of winter/ski stuff. And I wore a scarf (and gloves) to walk the dogs this morning.

The beautiful leaves are changing colors and falling. When I got home from SF last week, I was shocked to see the huge snowbank-like piles of leaves lining our street. Here are some pictures from outside my house on October 4:

He blogs! Once one falls out of the blogging routine, it’s hard to get back into it. As has been the theme of my blog lately, there’s much to say and much to catch up on (and I know my fans have been wanting a post, so you got it!). I’ve been to San Francisco and back since I last blogged — more on that later — but for now, I want to bid my Dad a safe journey back to California.

After an extended 15-month visit here in Saratoga Springs, my Dad decided that the Northeast just wasn’t for him. And I can understand that. The winters are damn cold and just aren’t for everyone. He did enjoy his time here — Jen and I will never forget all the dinners and movies and Scrabble nights — and he was a rock star at work, where his friends and coworkers appreciated and admired him. He met people with a California or Bay Area connection nearly every night, and had the most unusual run-ins that he never could have predicted (“Oh, you know former California Governor George Deukmejian, too? Let me get him on the phone so you can say hi”).

My Dad hit the road yesterday to begin the 3,000-mile journey west. We went out to brunch and had a send-off full of smiles and laughs. My mother-in-law came to the goodbye gathering, as did Hugh and Jami. My Dad touched a lot of lives during his time here, and although it wasn’t always easy, I think it brought us closer together. My Dad has always been a good friend, but the past year has made that more true than ever. And man, does time fly.

I’m really glad my Dad decided to embark on his Saratoga adventure, but I know being in the Bay Area is what makes him happy. Even more deeply than me, my Dad is a Californian at heart — he was the first baby to be born in Greenbrae, Marin County, California in 1947 — and the Bay Area is his home.

Now I just have one more reason to visit the Bay Area, my home away from home.

Oh look! My own Google search.

You can get your own here right here.

(Thanks, NYT!)

Friday night we had a full crew for the Bill Maher show at the Palace in Albany. We loaded up the party van and rolled 7-deep to the Palace. The party posse included me, Jen, Hugh, Jami, Justin, Amy, and Carla. And Bill Maher was simply awesome.

Maher talked for nearly 2 hours non-stop, touching on everything from his idea for a “Fly at Your Own Risk Airline” (“arrive 5 minutes before take-off, pay cash, bring guns and whatever else you want on board – your boarding pass says ‘Shit Happens'”) to the Christian Right (he read selections from Rick Warren‘s Purpose-Driven Life — “Your goal in life is to make God smile”) to addressing his critics’ charge for hating America first thing in the morning (“No, first I have my coffee, then I burn a flag and perform 5 abortions, then by 2:30 or so I’m ready to hate America”) to the second in command at the FDA (who says that women should pray their PMS away — “How’s that working out for you, ladies of the greater Albany area?”) to how people unquestioningly say that the Lord works in mysterious ways (“just like the microwave”).

We were laughing non-stop and my face hurt after the show.

At the show and elsewhere throughout the night, we kept running into the crew from SheVibe.com, who were wearing their Bill Maher for President t-shirts.

After the show we hit the Pump Station and then McGeary’s for some drinks. It was a rockin’ good night.

View all Bill Maher photos on Flickr

Mark Morford / SFGate: Attention Liberals: Please Breed / Conservatives are outbirthing libs by a wide margin. How soon can you get knocked up?

Let this be your rallying cry. Let it be your new hot-button topic, a raw naked condomless blog-ready wildfire underground grassroots crusade, your juiciest of incentive programs, your inspired call to hot naked impregnable sperm-a-riffic action.

Because the statistics are ugly, getting uglier: Despite all divine hope and prayer to the contrary, it looks like baby-happy conservatives are outbreeding liberals by a margin of some 20 to 40 percent.

It’s a fact. It’s a trend. It’s an onslaught. It’s a dreadful soul-curdling predicament and the reasons for the Republican baby blitz are myriad, having to do with the lethal Christian belief that God really wants big narcotized families and birth control is a sin and, well, what the hell else are social conservatives gonna do with all that oily Halliburton stock and Lockheed Martin profit? Donate to charity? Buy some Implanon? Save the planet? Ha.

…

Not to mention the thing about progressive city dwellers generally possessing higher intelligence, better educations, a more nuanced understanding of the world. Translation: We tend to think that if God wants anything at all, She wants free birth control and fewer warmongering cretins and the wild uncontrolled spread of unconditional nondenominational love of a kind that doesn’t necessarily require a diaper and a burp blanket and a college fund. I’m just saying.

I am willing to go even further. Pending the necessary venture capital, I shall open the Mark Morford Summer Camp for Luminous Toddlers. Here is where kids will learn the fine arts of archery, yoga, organic farming, naughty Spanish slang, frat-boy incapacitation techniques, sake classifications, Fox News Neocon Bull– Detection, how to properly tune a Fender Strat, and how to look at breeding Christian conservatives and laugh and shrug and offer them a drink and a vibrator and a copy of “Jitterbug Perfume” and a polyamorous weekend in Sonoma.

Jesus Camp

Today’s Saratogian has a special pullout section called Saratoga’s Pet Idol. The front cover features Hugh and Jami‘s four dogs (from left): Beagley, Rosco, The Dude, and Mojo. Stella, winner of the 2005 Prettiest Pooch competition at Jen’s office, is a contestant on page 6 of Pet Idol. And Happy Dingo is a contestant on page 8.

Cast your vote before October 4 at 5pm! You can even print out the Official Ballot right here.

Vote today!

Yesterday while heading to the Saratoga Visitors’ Center to scope out some info for Jen, fellow Steeplechaser Alysa cruised by.

Then it was off to my meeting with Mayor Valerie Keehn — to discuss the controversial charter reform that would Move Saratoga Forward from the antiquated commissioner form of government (we’re one of only about 60 cities out of 20,000 or so in America that still use it), which is more like governance by committee and consensus than one of checks and balances, to the more accepted mayor-council form of government, which would be more akin to a president-congress or governor-legislature model.

While leaving City Hall and walking to the parking lot with the mayor, Niki drove by, honking and waving at us.

Later, when Jen got home from work, we were walking the dogs and ran into Dana, who was walking home from work at Skidmore. While waiting to cross an intersection, Alysa drove by again and waved to all of us. Then we walked with Dana back to her house and said hi to (UPH Managing Director) Matt, too.

Living in a small city really brings a smile to my face, especially when I do things like spend an afternoon chatting informally with the mayor and run into friends all around town — within the span of about an hour. An afternoon like yesterday is not at all uncommon here.

In other news, I was delighted to see in the paper this morning that New York City has proposed a ban on trans fat. If you’re not already familiar with trans fat, learn about it and then never eat it again. It’s in a lot of packaged goods, but our bodies cannot digest it. It’s really, really bad for you, and there’s no health benefit. Do your body a favor and avoid it at all costs. Jen and I have started reading the label of everything we buy, looking specifically for this bad fat.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery: No uploading limits, unlimited storage, great prints, fun photo books, public for-fee gallery, but limited online features like commenting and searching.

Flickr: A mere 20 MB per month throughput upload limit for the free account, which already puts me at 75% of my monthly limit for uploading only two events‘ worth of photos last night. But with Flickr comes much better online photo management, community features, tagging, etc. The online organizing and editing is much better than Kodak, as is captioning and tagging each photo. And I can actually link directly to any photo within the context of a photostream or set. What a concept! (This cannot be done with Kodak.) You can even use Flickr as a photo blog, like this. And then there’s that crazy level of metadata for every photo, which I also mentioned last night — everything from type of camera to exposure length to aperture to shuter speed. Pretty awesome how much data is captured with EVERY photo. No such thing on Kodak. (Of course, all that good lovin’ is only captured if you upload the source images vs. resizing before uploading, as I tested last night to see if it would make a difference in bandwidth usage — it doesn’t really, especially if you set the flickr uploader to resize the longest side to 800 pixels.)

But those darn upload limits suck. Even with the pro account, I’d probably only be able to upload new photos, and never be able to go back and upload all my archives.

So as I wrote last night, maybe I just need to use Kodak as my master uploaded archive, and just use Flickr for photos I choose to share here. I’m already paying Kodak $24.95 per year for the Premier account, which really only gives the benefit of a public URL and the ability to download individual high-res photos, both things I could probably live without if chose to redirect that money to Flickr. We already give Kodak plenty of money each year with all the prints and photo books we order. I will have to pay Flickr if I want to continue using them beyond uploading another event or so this month.

I wonder if Flickr has some kind of hidden Super Pro account that would let me go back and upload archives that would exceed the monthly 2 GB upload limit.

On Monday, September 4, 2006, we brought new meaning to the final day of the track. Our party posse that day — Jen, Sue, Josh, Hugh, Jami, Eric, Michele, and I — shut down the track. We were literally the last fans to leave. When we left, the track was dark — the sun had set on the 2006 racing season at Saratoga. Only the cleaning crew remained. Hugh even climbed a tree (I tried, but he apparently has better monkey skills than I do). No one really won anything, but I had plenty of tickets to show for my losses at the end of the day.

View all photos on flickr

Thank you, Saratoga 2006. It was another season we’ll never forget.

As was the case at last year’s event, Sarah and Eric’s Labor Day party yet again rocked the house on Sunday, September 3 (wow, I don’t know that I’ve ever been nearly a month behind on the blogging! In case you missed that last post, here’s why).

View all photos on flickr

flickr’s long been on my radar, but this marks my first forray into uploading and sharing with the site. I must say that I’m impressed. I think I will still use Kodak as my “master” upload location (especially given flickr’s upload limits unless you pay them), but will start to use flickr to start sharing here. It’s just a lot more flexible, captures an insane amount of metadata about every picture, allows tagging, searching, streaming, sharing, commenting, labeling, and more. (I know I’ve probably just scratched the surface here.) I won’t be surprised if I end up paying flickr the 25 bucks per year or whatever to increase my upload limit to the 2gb per month for the pro account.

But I digress.

Oh right, the party. It was tons of fun. It was also to celebrate Sarah’s birthday (happy birthday, Sarah!). It was to dance and to drink beer and to be merry. And Alex and Cati, back from their Tampa wedding that same night, were troopers as they arrived at the party without even stopping at home. They are to be held on a party pedestal — be it Mallorca or Saratoga or Tampa or Queensbury, there’s no stopping that partyin’ duo!

Things actually got crazier after this album comes to an end, so if you want to see the censored photos, let me know!