Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
I just realized one of my friends is touring Thailand this month, and I’m not sure whether he’s back yet or, if not, what part of the country he would have been in on Sunday.
Somehow he’s managed to be in New York during 9/11, Madrid during the train bombing, and now (maybe) Thailand during the tsunami.
I havenāt done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actorās Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams sheās in the play that doesnāt quite make sense, I sat up and said, āIāve had that dream!ā)
Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or childrenās theater production of Disneyās Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.
The canonical actorās nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmareāthe final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you donāt know your lines, youāre not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what theyāre doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadnāt just missed rehearsals, there hadnāt been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadnāt even blocked, never mind actually practiced.
So itās opening night, itās a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. Weāre all ābackstageā (i.e. in the next room), Iām running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason Iāve been cast as Gaston (it didnāt make sense in the dream, either), and Iām running through the song, when I realize… whoās playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesnāt know.
Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?
So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we donāt have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we donāt even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! Iām trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and Iām not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…
…and then I woke up with āGoing Through the Motionsā running through my head.
OK, if I ever try to tell anyone that caffeine doesn’t affect me… remind me that it does.
Fortunately, my cubicle walls aren’t very solid, or bouncing off of them would probably hurt more.
Stay up ridiculously late, collapse in bed, drop off to sleep. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Not spend another hour-plus tossing & turning.
I “woke up” his morning unsure of just how long it took me to fall asleep last night, but somehow convinced that all I had to do was look at the modification time on the most recently changed files in… something. My brain, probably.
Then I went back to sleep.
Eventually I woke up and realized that the file timestamp thing was just plain silly. Kind of like the time a few years back that I half-woke up, convinced (probably from an interrupted dream) that I could manipulate reality by altering its HTML code.
Anyway, I know there are people on my friends list who have serious insomnia, and I just want to say: I salute you. I don’t know how you put up with it on a regular basis.
If you have a wireless network, you might want to go easy on the tinsel [archive.org] this Christmas. Otherwise you might not have a wireless network for the next few weeks!
From Dave Phelan’s “Insuffucient Time” blog regarding a Pier To Pier network outage:
“Window” was the codename for strips of foil dropped by Lancasters on D-Day to fool German Radar into believing there was an attack on Calais. Radar bounces off the foil sending the radar waves in random directions.
Nowadays we don’t call it Window, we call it “Tinsel”. Lots of small reflective strips. Tinsel is an effective blocker of microwaves as Window ever was. Yesterday’s network outage was caused primarily by the addition of some, very tasteful, Christmas decorations to the antenna of node 4!
Note: Added the quote as part of the archiving project.
Hmm, so Isuzu has a new car called the Axiom.
It seems to me that āDesigned from basic principlesā would be a perfect slogan.
Well, weāve hit a milestone. The last few holiday seasons, thereās always been something preventing me and alenxa from putting up a Christmas tree. At long last, weāve managed to accomplish this difficult feat.
You see, the way our furniture is arranged, we only have one spot in the apartment suitable for a tree. The broken desk that blocked it one year has long since been repaired. The boxes that blocked it another year have been unpacked. This year looked grim as well, but for once everything fell into place. Since we hosted a āRefugee Thanksgivingā for our friends, we had to clean the corner out. And the apartment management owed us a free carpet cleaning, so we waited a week before looking for a tree. And when we visited my grandparents that following weekend, they asked if we wanted a tree, since theyād been putting up a small one instead of a large one the last few years.
So we set it up last night, and went hunting for ornaments today. First it was storage, then my parentsā house (to pick up a collection Iād been making since childhood), then shopping. And so, I present to you: our first Christmas tree!
The Hollywood blockbuster formula:
The end result: tons of substandard movies that nobody really likes, but that make plenty of money. More to the point, there’s not much incentive to make anything better
I had an idea on how to deal with the problem, based partly on mine and alenxaās viewing habits: Unless you’re reasonably certain the movie will be worth seeing, wait until the second week it’s out. Aside from saving you from ghastly lines, it gives you a chance to pick up the word-of-mouth. If it turns out to be lousy, you save yourself 2 hours (more like three when you throw in parking) and 10 bucks. More importantly, if enough people wait for week 2, films will need to keep second-week ticket sales, which should encourage studios to make films that will have first-weekend people saying, “I loved it! It was better than Cats!” and recommend it to all their second-weekend friends.
It’ll never happen, but it’s at least an idea.
Saturday night: Driving home from a day with parents & grandparents. Two blocks from home, we made a left turn, and someone coming sideways ran the red light. They slowed down, we sped up, and disaster was averted.
This morning: After talking, for whatever reason, about car crashes and why you shouldn’t stop on the side of a bridge if you can help it (the chance of being hit and knocked over the edge, which happened to the younger brother of someone I knew in high school) during the carpool section of the morning commute, I watched an SUV plow into the center divider, hitting its right front wheel and, I’m fairly certain, knocking that wheel off.
This evening: Driving home from work, the right front tire went flat while we drove over a bridge.
Overall damage: I need to buy a new tire, and my shoes are scuffed up. But the level of coincidence is disturbing.
Driving along the toll road and spotting an earth dam that I suspect is the end of a trail I used to hike as a kid.
Sitting in a sandwich shop, watching the rain outside, and seeing a man walk down the street in jeans, denim jacket, a cowboy hat… and sunglasses.
Pulling onto the freeway just in time to see an SUV heading the wrong way, apparently attempting a U-turn despite the presence of a concrete divider. It was almost completely turned around when it hit, and I could swear the front right wheel actually fell off when it struck the barrier. The driver looked okay, and other people were stopping, so I continued on to work. I figured I hadn’t seen enough—like how the truck ended up going the wrong way—to be a useful witness.
Well, the office is closed today for the company Christmas party, which for the first time in several years Iām not attending. (Itās out on an Indian casino/resort, and with our usual Dec. 24 holiday being unnecessary, they moved it around so people could beat the traffic.) But since alenxaās office isnāt, and we only have one car, I had to get up early anyway.
I decided, on a whim, to go exploring a bit. Iāve recently developed an interest in local geography and trying to associate what landforms I can see at a distance with actual locations I can stand on or point to on a map. So I headed toward the mountains, looking for a way past Foothill Ranch. I didnāt make it up into the mountains, but I did find a beautiful drive through what I think was Trabuco Canyon, with twisty, oak-lined back roads, semi-isolated feed stores, random diners in the middle of nowhere, clear views of the mountains—all just a few miles outside my usual haunts.
It made me realize there are actually three Orange Counties: North County (flat and urban), South County (hilly and willfully suburban), and the canyons (willfully rural), which for some reason Iād been including in South County in my mental demographic map.
Weāre definitely going to have to explore this further.
Ever since I found out there was actually an area called “Old Town Irvine,” I’ve found the idea somewhere between funny, pretentious, and oxymoronic. Looking at nearby cities, we have Old Town Orange, a collection of streets with shop buildings dating back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, centered around an actual traffic circle. The place could have been the model for Disneyland’s Main Street. There’s Old Town Tustin, another collection of streets with shops going back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, with contemporary houses nearby for good measure.
Then, there’s Old Town Irvine, a couple of barns that have been converted into restaurants and a motel. Why? Because there effectively is no Old Town Irvine — it sprang whole from a designer’s master plan in the late 1960s. Most people assume UCI is named after the city, but it actually predates the city of Irvine. Both were named after the Irvine Ranch (or possibly the Irvine Company or the Irvine family — all three are tied together) on which they were built. Maybe 50 years from now there really will be an “old town” — and it’ll probably be Northwood or Woodbridge or something. But the name will already have been trademarked by the shopping center, so they won’t be able to use it.
There was a story on NPR today about the evolution of the term blockbuster from simply meaning a movie thatās very successful to meaning a particular type of movie (the overblown summer action flick). It got me thinking about the increased number of movie theaters in the area, and then is it really that big an increase, or is it just in line with population growth?
Then I realized: nearly every movie theater Iāve been to in the past couple of years, I remember being new. And all the ones I remember going to as a kid are gone or, if theyāre lucky, converted into art house cinema.
In fact, the only one I remember going to regularly thatās still first-run is Edwards Hutton Center, and I have a vague feeling it might have been new at the time. At least, I think it was still there the last time I drove past it. With so many other theaters around, Iām not sure Iāve actually been there since high school.
Big Newport has escaped the encroachment of the new, mainly because itās, well, the biggest screen this side of the Rockies (according to legend, anyway). And Iāve probably been to University and South Coast Village more often since they became art houses than I did āback in the day.ā
I already find it disturbing that someone decided it was a good idea to leave a religious tractāreally, an ad for a particular churchāin a public restroom stall. (Imagine the circumstances under which someone will read it. Or better yet, donāt.) I find it more disturbing that the church it advertises is located in Temecula, at least 60 miles away, in another county, on the other side of a small mountain range, and a minimum one-hour drive in good traffic. But most of all, I find it disturbing that itās the second time itās happened.
I suppose if there are people in the building who commute from Riverside, theyād be closer, but still…a bathroom stall? If youāre going to advertise in a public restroom, the least you can do is use a sign, or a one-sided postcardāsomething people wonāt have to touch to get the details.
I dreamed I was working on a Mac version of the Dillo web browser*. But I mixed it with some sort of commercial code, and the resulting program violated the GPL**. The next thing I knew, someone was shooting at me with a machine gun. I kept trying to walk out of a (hotel?) lobby, but every time someone started shooting. At one point they were in a helicopter, at one point they may have just been up in a building across the street, and at one point they were definitely in a hot air balloon. Iād duck back inside, or put up my hands to get them to stop shooting, but every time I walked back out, they started up again.
* An ultra-small, ultra-fast browser thatās low on features, but runs well even on old hardware.
Just what is so āFunā about āFun Size!ā candy? Did they look at the gap between āBite Sizedā and āRegular Sizeā and say, āHey, we need another size in here, should we call it āMini Sizeā or something?ā āNah, that sounds small, we donāt want that! Letās pick something that sounds appealing, something that sounds like fun. Hey, why not just call it āFun Size?āā
(Inspired by the bowl of leftover Halloween candy sitting on the receptionistās desk.)
Last night I dreamed that John Ashcroft was following me around the cereal aisle in the grocery store. After a bit he introduced himself: āHi, Iām John Ashcroft. We met briefly in a shopping mall in Washington, DC ten years ago.ā And since this was a dream, I started remembering the previous meeting. Which was essentially the same as the other one. Just about the point that I started to say āOh, yeah, I remember now!ā he was gone.
Random thought: Does anyone else find the term āCulture Warsā disturbingly similar to āCultural Revolution?ā
Was listening to the White House press conference on the way to work. Someone said āMr. President, you may not have had a chance to hear this, but it appears Yasser Arafat has passed away. What are your thoughts?ā
Now, this turns out to be inaccurate, but at the time my reaction was a mix of āHoly $#!7ā and āMaybe the Israeli/Palestinian peace process can get somewhere now.ā Itās sad, but Iāve come to the conclusion that Arafat is perhaps the Palestiniansā biggest obstacle to peace, and they donāt see it. (Although now that I think about it, an interesting parallel can be made over here: no matter how clear it is that Bush is likely to keep us at war, people still voted for him in droves.) Perhaps Arafat being ill and out of the region will help other Palestinian leaders work towards a peace settlement. At least W has figured out by now that resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is important. If heād caught onto that at the beginning of his first term, instead of virtually abandoning the region, things might be a lot less messy today.
Meanwhile, Bush has again promised to be a āuniter, not a divider,ā (as if that held last time) and is calling for the support of Kerry voters. Peter David put it this way: āI assure you I will give Bush as much of a chance as the GOP gave Clinton.ā Hereās a hint: there are reasons we voted against you. Look into them, attempt to compromise, and maybe youāll get people supporting some of your policies. Ignore them and youāll just see more anger.
Depending on how they are handled, I can get behind things like fighting the AIDS epidemic, reigniting the space program, even simplifying the tax code. But thereās no way Iāll support your overwhelmingly conservative social agenda, thereās no way Iāll support poorly-planned unilateral preemptive strikes based on flawed intelligence, and thereās no way Iāll support financing the nation on the credit card model. People are worried enough about individual Americans living in debt up to their eyeballs, but it goes all the way to the top. (Fiscal responsibility? Sure, Iād like to see some.)