Southpaw Blog

Day 5: My supplies are holding, and I have found some of the local vegetation that seems palatable. With the discovery of fresh water, I believe I will be able to hold out here for some time. After a bout with illness that had me bedridden my first day, I have recovered much of my strength and have been gradually exploring farther and farther away from the safety of my little shelter.

Today I hope to make it back to the shore where I first arrived to scrounge for tools and useful items. If others survived as well, they may not have ventured as far as I did in my feverish dement.

Let me sum up the last 1.3 years as briefly as possible: Marathon no marathon job no job.

My last day is June 30th. It’s been a good run, but it’s time.

Whew, blogging is exhausting. See you in August 2009!

Here is the list you probably aren’t expecting.

Igloo Beach Football Ultimate Frisbee Poker Night Large Mediterranean God of War Devil’s Punchbowl Rattlesnake Bear That Third Animal Chili’s To Go ASP Training Josephine Judy Biking In Corvallis Biking To Albany Spelling Bee Starcraft Cranium The Devil Went Down To Georgia The S.S. Taffy Sir Doculot Grocery Run Wonderfalls Bald Hill Spacetalk Can You Hear Me Now Parking Space love_your_job.gif YAY Strindberg and Helium

After a week of anger and confusion, it’s not the list I was expecting either.

Let’s see what Cranky Old Blogger has been up to lately.

Why do you bother me with questions all the time? Fine, what do I have to say to get rid of you? These days, I don’t just tear through a good book the way I used to. It’s not because of lack of attention span, or because I can’t find the time. I’ve just learned to appreciate the anticipation a bit more, and make the good ones last a while.

That’s very interesting, Cranky Old Blogger. What have you been reading?

Confound it, who really cares? Fine, I’m finishing up Stephen Baxter’s Xelee Sequence, which tells the story of the human race from the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of the Universe. We meet one enemy we can’t beat, and as it turns out, they have been silently working for billions of years to save us from an even worse enemy. Satisfied?

Not really. What else is new? Did you buy a house yet?

Criminy, I don’t see that it’s any of your business, but no, I haven’t bought a house thank-you-very-much. Real estate prices are expected to keep falling, and there’s no sense in buying a place you don’t want. Plus I seem to be a picky sort – don’t so much want a house, as I want a place to play catch, a place to play pig, and a place to put a tablesaw. Yeah that’s right, a garage and a yard.

No house? What are you doing with yourself?

Well I did buy one heck of a breadknife, and I’ve taken to buying unsliced bagels, because frankly it’s just no fair to have a knife this sharp and get all your bread pre-sliced. There has been some collateral damage, and a few injuries, but a knife’s gotta cut, you know?

That’s great, Cranky Old Blogger. Thank you for your time.

I don’t feel like I have to write something every day. It would be a good habit, but I try to sit down only when I’m feeling inspired. Even so, sometimes an entry in this blog just plain fails. Here are some of my recent favorite stinkers.

Sometimes I’m only a little bit inspired, and by that I mean I think of a catchy title with no content to back it up. Here’s a little bit from the failed Illiterature:

Most of his works are science fiction set in “The Xelee Sequence,” which so far covers a range of time from the Big Bang until the stars in our universe are artificially extinguished by the innumerable creatures of dark matter a few million years in the future.

The thing is, nobody wants to read a book report. Well, some people do, but seriously, they should be reading something better. I really like the title (so-named because the original intent was to discuss my tendency to read a lot more schlocky science fiction than history, classic literature, or current events), but dang if I just didn’t sound like a huge Stephen Baxter fanboy. Which I suppose I am, but into the bitbucket goes Illiterature.

Sometimes I’ve felt like I had a great message to convey. One day I was really feeling like nobody bothers to learn anything useful anymore – it’s all yoga and biographies of people who aren’t great and haven’t died. I had this great big diatribe in my head about education and taking a more active role in society, but this is the kind of crap How To Make Toast quickly turned into:

There are detailed rules of succession should tragedy befall any of our leaders, and vast numbers of federal bureaus and agencies to deal with our owls, aliens, terrorists, and perverts.

It’s not just the opinion pieces that can fail. On my “work blog,” I did a whole bunch of database benchmarking, wrote up some stuff on using the Tidy php4 extension to filter user input, and completely failed in an attempt to make Unix file permissions make sense.

What have I learned from this? Either to expect a 50% success rate, or stop trying to make a point, I’m not sure which. Or maybe I am and I just don’t want to say.

I got hoodwinked into running 5 kilometers today (by hoodwinked, I mean agreed to do it, and by kilometers, I mean 0.62 miles). I had plenty of good notice (a week), and I actually did a fine job of getting off my ass and training a little for it (and I do mean a little). For crying out loud it feels good to not be such a bum. I’m bored with the parenthesis (so this is the last one for a while).

I’ve never organized a run before, but apparently it’s quite complex, because they wouldn’t let chenb or me sign up for the race 30 minutes beforehand. And by sign up, I mean give them $13 for their charity and write our names on a 3×5″ index card. So congratulations, idiotic bureaucracy, you cost the children $26. Explain that on Christmas. We ran anyway.

Community is a seriously abused word in this day and age of MySpace and astroturfing, but I’d like to talk about it as it relates to sports. I have read John Irving’s description of the wrestling community, where fans, parents, and athletes of all walks of life and abilities come to together to simultaneously beat the snot out of and support each other. He paints a great picture of a group of people with a common interest who strive for improvement, not at each other’s expense, but by building the community as a whole.

I have heard similar things about boxing; for a sport when two people are basically trying to kill each other, there is a healthy element of mutual support and appreciation.

Saturday was my first real experience with a running community. I was a little uneasy to begin with, as the folks I went with disappeared very early in the race, and I was running despite not being registered (conspicuously missing a number on my shirt). But there were people cheering all over the course; cheering as I passed their friends and relatives, cheering at the same time they directed runners and auto traffic, cheering each other while running. I’d spent a fair amount of the race looking for my friends and so I ran a ridiculously fast last mile, and other runners were spending their breath on congratulating my strong kick and good finish as I passed them.

It was a humbling experience, and at the same time there was a joy there that I hadn’t ever felt running in high school, or in any of the runs I’ve done in Corvallis since. My usual stance on something like running, or biking, or just about any sport is to just do it, avoid the groups and avoid the resulting pissing match. But maybe it’s just a matter of finding the right group.

I don’t do this very often, but here it is: People++

OSCON 2006 was fun. The ruby on rails jokers kept to themselves. I’m not ignoring python anymore. Next year, we own the show.

Frisbee is more fun 7 days a week with the same 5 people than 1 day a week with 10 strangers.

Not reading makes me dumb, it’s provable.

Sitting by a lake makes it all better.

Not running makes me dumb, also provable.

If you don’t yell at people and tell them they are dumb, they won’t figure it out on their own.

If croissants and apples were a healthy diet, that’s all I would eat. Might do that anyway.

Leading by example isn’t enough. You’re going to have to be an asshole some of the time.

People change, and then they regret it.

Stephen Baxter should keep writing until they put the last nail in his coffin. Or until he’s done. I’ll respect his wishes.

You, too, can learn to love a Mac. And DOS, Linux, and Windows on a Mac.

All bike distances over 2 miles are equivalent. You’re either going somewhere, or you’re not.

You can drink too much water. Nothing is safe.

For Dad:

And I think that brings me up to the present. Ketchup.

Chainblogging, because I’m already enough of a jackass without fucking up the rotation.

Three jobs I’ve had in my life:

1. lawnmower boy
2. shoveler of unprocessed grass seed
3. CAD modeler of ecologically damaging industrial sites

Three movies I can watch over and over:

1. Fight Club
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Aliens

Three places I have lived:

1. Imbler, OR – Wherein I constituted approximately 0.3% of the population
2. La Grande, OR – “town” to its neighbors
3. Corvallis, OR – Full of college kids 75% of the year, and people who wish they were smart the other 25%

Three shows I love to watch: (I think love is too strong a word)

1. Mythbusters
2. Seinfeld
3. The Daily Show

Three places I’ve been on vacation:

1. Northern California (blech)
2. Eagle Cap Wilderness (best place ever)
3. Washington DC (of all the time spent at the Smithsonian, 80% was the Air and Space Museum, and they had already sold the Tyrannosaurus)

Three web sites I visit daily:

1. cnn.com – I like my Nick Lachey headlines mixed in with my Crisis in Other Country headlines
2. thedailywtf.com – as much to reinforce my habits as to laugh at other people’s bad ones
3. google.com – even in this day and age, no better way to impress people than a quick google search

Three places I would rather be right now:

1. Ice Lake, in Eastern Oregon
2. Milan, Italy
3. Alaska

My made-up shit:

Three skills I wish I had

1. Fluency in 4 spoken languages
2. Rocking the piano
3. Patience

Three types of people I have a soft spot for:

1. Runners
2. Readers
3. Singers/Musicians

Three things I never should have taken a bite of:

1. An empty soda can
2. A spoonful of wasabi
3. My kid brother’s thumb

Three things I wish I could say

1. Let’s start over
2. How do you like me now?
3. I don’t give a shit.

Three country songs I’d write

1. Get Out Of My Damn Way
2. There’s A Sea Full of Fish (and I’m Way Under My Limit)
3. I Ain’t Lucky, I Just Paid Attention

Three reason why I’m not passing this on

1. Everyone I know has done it already
2. One more of these lists and I will have to start soothing breath exercises
3. Tubes are filling up fast

I finally got most of my photos for the last couple of years posted in a gallery.

Looking over them, I can tell I’ve learned a fair amount about taking pictures – I really wish I had do-overs on some. There’s still a lot to learn, but I haven’t surpassed my old camera’s abilities.