ландшафт

Cheesy, but well-meaning. I encourage all youth to “stay alive and free”.

The shelter side of this shelter usually features bizarre fashion advertising. In July, on the flip side of the above poster was this bizarre lady: a white woman seductively holding handcuffs. In addition to promoting “fashion” I guess she was trying to explain that temptations can be crassly grotesque:

To be sure, my neighborhood is dominated by Chinese families. Red is the color you wear on your wedding day.

Meanwhile, over on the BART, I see this strange poster in the distance:

I got up to take a closer look to discover a black man in his underwear, barricading the door against the sodomy we assume accompanies a prostate exam. “If you’re over 50, or an African American over 45, get your prostate exam!”

No comment.

So, yeah, there are some provocative posters, questionable imagery, but look beyond advertising to real folk, and you’ll see some soul.

Done in Thailand. I don’t recall if this was before or after I got sunburned. Pretty colorful for a white guy!

Do you see a sign “Leave your
junk here”? No you don’t see
a sign “Leave your junk here.”
Do you know why? Because this
corner is not a junk yard. Try
putting your crap in a garbage
can.

There is a certain practice in San Francisco of people disposing of unwanted stuff by leaving it on the curb. Alas, for stuff that nobody wants, that means crap piling up on sidewalks. Someone expressed their disapproval in the form of an homage to Quentin Tarantino.

I couldn’t agree more.

“I’m literally serious: I coughed up my lungs.”

Poor girl.

I got started graphing various Linux distributions against each other, XP versus Vista, and trying to figure out the best keyword for OS X. Then, I wondered about FreeBSD. Against Ubuntu, it was a flatline. So, I asked myself: what is the threshold for a dead or dying Operating System?

Amiga vs FreeBSD:

Ouch! Can we get deader?

Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS:

To be fair, the cult of Amiga is still strong . . . BeOS is well and truly dead. But how do the BSDs fare?

Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD:

NetBSD has been sleeping with the BeOS fishes for a while, and OpenBSD is on its way. And that’s a league below Amiga!

In Red Hat land, only Fedora beats “the Amiga Line”. For Unix in general, nothing stops the Ubuntu juggernaut. But there’s a long way to go to catch up with Uncle Bill.

(Yes, it is a rainy night and the girlfriend is out of town.)

Postscript: Ubuntu versus Obama

I acquired a scanner at work, for $25, minus the $1 I still owe a co-worker. Now, I too may dream of being about .01% as awesome as XKCD!

I have this season’s flu, or something. It is rare for me and rather nasty. Hopefully, after two days sleeping in and getting a little work done from home, tomorrow I can make it in to the office.

Late Night? Bored?

Start here. Click “Next” . . . and so on.

Once you feel inspired, get up offa that thing, and do something better.

Love,
-danny

I headed to the bathroom, where there was a short line waiting outside the men’s room. One or two guys turned back, not wanting to stand in line, and thus making it shorter. I was confident that the line would move quickly, and in a moment I was attending to my business at a urinal. I stepped back and to the right as the father next to me shook off his younger son, who he was holding by the shoulders. I glanced to my right to make sure I might not make someone uncomfortable by my distance-from-the-urinal, only to see a middle-aged, balding guy in a suit let loose a poorly-controlled stream of urine that headed mostly straight up. So, I side-stepped back towards the father and son team, who had concluded their shaking. The balding guy looked up at me and apologized sheepishly. I think at this point my subconscious realized it was remarkably deep into taboo territory, and embraced the theme. I was aware that two young boys were beyond the bald man, huge smiles on their faces as they pounded their fists to win a good-natured “jerk off contest” and were quickly spurting their own clotted creams into a shared urinal, as if my dream were being illustrated by a Robert Crumb who had been watching satirical Japanese pornography.

On my way out of the restroom, I encountered a waiter, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to press a wet-but-clean whiskey glass into my hand, as the proprietor wanted to celebrate the men’s room situation with a round of Whiskey on the house. I declined, because that’s not quite my scene, and on the way back to my table, I thought of the Yelp review I could write about this place: but where was I? Apparently, a two-restaurant chain with a location in Indiana and one in Tennessee. Based on the whiskey, I figured my dream was taking place in the Tennessee location.

Thinking of the words I might use to compose my review, I noted that I needed to check up on the exact meaning of “Bacchanalia” to see if that might be an apt description. I had this thought as I opened my eyes to realize that far from dining out with anonymous “coworkers” I was in fact laying in my bed at 3am. I wondered if instead the dream might still be fun to write up online, tried to remember the details and commit them to memory, then figured this was an excellent cue to climb out from beneath the covers for a mid-night visit to my own bathroom, which proved to be a reassuringly private experience. Whilst attending to my business, I considered whether the dream was homo-erotic. I concluded that actually, the dream was not erotic, but arguably sexist, but since the bulk of the dream took place in a men’s room, that the omission of female characters was not problematic.

A day or two later I had a revelation whilst driving in my car that the dream was in fact, very much an homage to Larry Craig. At that moment, far from being slightly disturbed by the bizarrely inappropriate non-sequiturs, I smiled a bit with just a twitch of pride at the sophisticated and insane dream my subconscious had treated me to.

If you feel that this account is lewdly inappropriate, I plead guilty.

. . . just don’t tell anyone, okay?

• $50 gift card for Williams-Sonoma at the Elks Lodge Blood Drive
• My new job, after a tip from a One Brick volunteer coordinator
• This past weekend, a hand-me-down laptop that I can soon re-gift

Or, as Saint Francis put it: “it is in giving that we receive.”

If you are looking for fulfilling ways to spend your free time, I heartily recommend One Brick, which is very simply an organization that organizes volunteer opportunities: just sign up for their e-mail list and every week you’ll be informed of cool opportunities to get out, do some good, and make friends.

I am looking forward to working the Elks Club Card Night next month, so much that I posted the event to Yelp to see about getting more folks over there.

He’s doing pretty well, for a guy who can’t talk and who requires 24-hour nursing assistance, a guy who has several weeks of therapy at the hospital before he gets to return home, and years more of therapy ahead. He can take a walk down the hall with a PT, and peck out words on the computer. He is in better shape than when I saw him last year, when a blood clot had only hit one hemisphere of his brain, rendering him aphasic and depressed. It is like all the progress of the past year has been erased and he is pushed back a bit further, except that this time we know what the game is: less terror. He seems in better spirits this time, but it will be a long, hard road.

Anyway, the drive back caused me to wonder why 50% of Colorado drivers prefer to drive in the left lane of the Interstate. I’m glad I’m not into road rage because with a 75 mph speed limit, I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why the passing lane was cruising along at about 72. “It would kill you to merge back to the slow lane?” But with a plane to catch and with the steering wheel of a nice Rental Car with a Powerful Engine between my hands, the locals made sure I made time to enjoy the beautiful scenery. Fortunately, the Tollway around greater Denver saved me time to the airport. Hertz had a sign about charging $6/gallon if the tank wasn’t full, so I stopped in at the Rental Return Road Rage n Go to fuel up. My, what a large tank you have! And an annoying car alarm that started to beep as I replaced the nozzle and said Yes I want a receipt.

The Hertz return lot was a basket case. Twelve lanes, probably more, full of parked cars. My cohort pulled in to beyond-the-end of the remaining lanes, and as we extracted our luggage and wondered if one of the outnumbered attendants would be able to scan our barcodes and hand us our receipts, we noted that the entrance to the return lot was now choked with a line of cars waiting for spots that no longer existed. “Good thing we made it when we did,” I remarked.

I figured I’d drop ritual in favor of getting home and shuffled over to board the packed shuttle bus. It is a five-minute ride to the terminals, but since I was with Frontier Airlines I got to wait another ten minutes as the bus dropped off passengers on one side of the building, and then drove around the the other side of the building to drop us off with our airline. I wandered around a bit trying to figure out where Frontier Airlines checkin actually is: checkin is upstairs, you see, because they drop you off at baggage claim. I took the escalator upstairs and since I have used this airport before I narrowly avoided the rookie mistake of following the sign at the top of the escalator that points toward “checkin” . . . If you follow that sign you wind up on the other side of the terminal from where your airline is, wondering why your airline is not on the list of airlines even though you followed the arrow with utmost diligence, until you ask an airport employee where your airline is and they show you to turn around and go back to the other side of the building. This time I did an about face and walked to the side of the terminal where Frontier is. They put the self-checkin as far away from the escalator as possible, but I eventually found it.

Now, Denver International Airport is by far the dumbest airport I have ever used. They could drop you off at the checkin level, no? They could just drop you off in one spot since you walk just as far anyway, and the stupid signs will lead you to the far side of the building anyway, right? Perhaps they could put up signs listing all the airlines and tell your dumb ass to walk back over to the other side of the building. But that’s not enough for Denver. No, Denver is special. At Denver, there is no choice: you must go downstairs and wait for the subway, which has a total of four stations and talks a lot. Four stops: one for the big confusing building and one for each of the terminals. My favorite part of the subway is getting off at your terminal and making your way up the narrow flights of stairs trapped behind a herd of luggage-toting human cattle. That’s when I must suppress my urge to low.

But as I discovered on this trip: Terminal A has a “sky bridge” that you can cross while while listening to a recording of soothing native American music. And Frontier flies through Terminal A. The last moving walkway towards the security gate was blocked, even though it was moving. I hustled over to the left side and ended up inadvertently cutting in the security line that overflowed past the end of the moving walkway, which I guess is why they had blocked it: Look at Driver’s License Guy can’t keep up with the moving walkway.

Which is good, because after the line after Look at Driver’s License Guy, X-Ray Man castigated me for leaving my belt in my shoe, and for not laying my items flat enough. “You’re supposed to keep everything separate,” he explained to the ignoramus who smiled back at him vacantly, his aircraft now two minutes from departure.

(Good thing I left my gel deodorant and toothpaste at home.)

He re-ran items that I then collected and hugged around my torso as I ran . . . and ran . . . and ran downhill past a little kid who told his father “no running” and his father said he wasn’t running and then to an escalator down and then past more stuff and then into the terminal proper, and then past a dozen gates, and finally to gate A48, where a few employees were standing around a minute or two past departure, to tell the huffing puffing guy that he had just made it. A moment later a lady poked her head out the causeway door and I got to wait at the very end of the line of passengers who were still getting seated.

I nearly scored the exit row, because the seat right in front of mine was vacant and I was the last guy on the plane . . . except for the flight attendant who got on after me to make his way home. I moved back a row to sit next to a lady who preferred to pay $5 to watch cable TV shows to looking out the window. She pulled the shutters to maximize her viewing pleasure, and as I peered at the flight map and saw that we were in for a beautiful southern approach in over San Jose and up the peninsula, I buried my head instead in my magazine, and barely noticed the soft landing.

This evening I was listening to a podcast on “disqualification” which is a skill you can master if you’re playing “the game” . . . no, I’m not a big player, but I like to listen to new ideas. Anyway, the point of disqualification is to take the nice things that people may say about you, and indicate that you don’t let that stuff go to your head, for one. The other bit is that if you are comfortable with your flaws-comfortable with yourself-well that self-confidence can be really sexy. And then, if you’re talking to a lady and you’re in a position where you’re counting yourself off her list, that . . . well, we all like what we can’t have, and we get that you’re not desperate for approval. Anyway, I really enjoy Dan’s blog because he shares a bunch of “charisma tips” but is also warning guys that the point is not to be the biggest player on the block, but to meet women and have fantastic, sincere relationships with them. I have a friend who seemed to fall in to that player trip, and I’ve kinda faked it myself: whatever you are doing, know why you are doing it.

So, clearly I’m rambling. Always the best time to rewrite a personals ad from scratch, “he said sarcastically.” Here’s what I just posted on Yahoo!:

What’s this all about?

Moi? I grew up in Chicago, attending public schools. I volunteered to serve in the Army but my skinny arms can’t do enough pushups and I tend to daydream which really f_cked with the Drill Sergeant. So, I went to school instead–University of Illinois. I managed to graduate with a degree in Rhetoric and drive out here to California in a blue 1972 Super Beetle to take part in the dot-com boom.

I also did my part in the bust, waiting tables, backpacking around the world, housesitting, driving back to Illinois, working as a barista . . . that is how I met the lady who became my first wife. I was fed up with the “gay marriage will destroy America” crap that I figured marriage-who-needs-it, so when she suggested we could score her a Green Card, I was right there.

But, she grew on me, and I wore on her. Eventually she ran off with a security guard and I moved to San Francisco to focus first on my pain and woe, but then I figured out that I’m really a pretty decent guy, and I have been focusing more on career, family, hobbies . . .

I don’t watch TV. Movies, yes. Netflix . . . I spend a lot of time on the computer but I do get out to exercise (walking on the hills) and socialize, and just tending house: keeping tidy and coaxing my flowers and my moss plant to be all that they can be.

I have a thing for Asian women. That doesn’t mean you have to be Asian, but if you hate those guys don’t gaze at me unless you want to grapple with your misgivings. Really, I’m a sucker for longer, straighter, darker hair, a sparkle in the eye, and some interesting stories.

I want to meet people, get to know them, hopefully develop a mutual desire, and work from there to build a life relationship that gets us into parenthood together. If that’s your deal, let’s talk.

Thank you for reading!

-d

We’re having a lot of fun with “disqualification” this evening, but then we all love David Sedaris. It’s all about running naked.

Yawning baby! (CC: paul goyette)

Vomiting is contagious, and with good reason. Within a household, or a tribe of homo sapiens, if someone vomits, it might be food poisoning. Since the tribe or household probably shared the same meal, then vomiting up the offending meal could save your own bipedal ass. Therefor, sympathetic vomiting confers a strong survival trait.

Well, how do you select for sympathetic vomiting? You need that behavior encoded in the DNA somewhere: a gene here, a gene there, that culminates in a behavior pattern where if you detect that someone is opening their mouth wide and involuntarily transferring a substantial volume that you feel a reflex to do the same. This encoded behavior could result in both sympathetic vomiting and contagious yawning.

My hypothesis: We have a reflex mechanism that expresses itself as sympathetic vomiting and contagious yawning. Since sympathetic vomiting is a strong survival trait, we get sympathetic yawning for free, perhaps using it as a social cue for when we should all get to sleep.

Come to think of it, yawning can often be such a powerful urge that one can not resist. Sometimes, laughter, too, can be a powerful, overwhelming urge. Laughter is believed to be catching as well: a comedian is funnier when other folks are already laughing. Perhaps . . . perhaps . . . perhaps . . . all three behaviors are the happy byproduct of the survival advantage conferred by behavior that produces sympathetic vomiting.

The act of giving, and the act of depending on the generosity of another person-these are both important activities required to build healthy people. In our society we have successfully taken the “guesswork” out of a lot of the giving-receiving relationships: you work for a specific wage, you pay a specific rent, a specific tax rate, you pay for food at a certain price determined by supply and demand, matters of government, and personal style. You subject yourself to the rule of law which is in turn mediated by your participation in Democracy.

We don’t live with the uncertainty of Kings, we don’t farm with the uncertainty of the weather. For those of us in the comfortable end of the middle class, the stressful uncertainties that mean more to people of lesser means mean a lot less to us: the price of milk, the price of gas, whether we are at war in Iraq . . .

It doesn’t take a lot of faith in the goodness of human nature to successfully live a life like mine. I’m insulated from a lot of the vagaries of the human condition. I’m not alone in this. And some of us, well, we forget about all that hassle: we are free to press our energies in to work, family, community, creative pursuits. I like this freedom, but . . . sometimes I open my eyes and see that the things that are stressing me out and challenging me are pointless, petty, or mundane. Especially in technology, victory becomes software shipped and larger numbers in the bank and retirement accounts.

We never go to bed hungry.

We will not wear body armor, carry M-16s and ride in Humvees through the garbage-filled streets of Baghdad, scared that we may not make it home from the cradle of civilization quite right.

We will eat until we are content, push the plate away half full. We will leave our lights on and run our dishwashers and our washing machines and stare into computer screens, trying to increase the zeros in those bank accounts. We will be constantly on the go, from climate controlled office to comfortable car to ski vacation to flights across the planet where we may dine on new foods, until we are content, and push the plate away again.

There have been a few times when I have been at the supermarket with not enough money. That kind of stress is memorable.

That kind of stress will be a part of anyone’s life. Your parents and grandparents will age and become infirm. Their hospital bills will eat up your savings accounts. You may in time return the favor of those diapers that were changed before you were too young to remember. You will be walking to your home one day and you will fall down and the doctor will explain that you have MS. Your wife will come home one day and tell you she needs to take a break, to go live with her new boyfriend.

The things that you take for granted today could change in an instant.

When I go out to eat, when I take a cab home, I have to make room in my capitalist business transaction for the tip. There are “rules” but the only enforcement is in your own character. When you give service, if you are honest with yourself, you accept that you are in an act of giving. Yeah, its your day job, and yes, chances are that the quality of your diet is a reflection of the quality of the tips you receive.

But, unlike the wage-earner, you are reminded every day that there is no guarantee, no law, nothing that says that your giving must be rewarded with anything beyond the minimum wage. So what do you do? There are no guarantees in life, you will do your best, and you will likely find that, despite some bad tipping and the occasional stiff, depending on the voluntary generosity of others actually works out okay.

You earn your income not merely with your Diligence, but with Trust and with Faith.

In my life, I have found that there are times when you have to depend on the voluntary generosity of other folks. I like that tipping remains a part of our capitalist economy. It is a reminder to those of us who are “comfortable” that we too, are subjects of fate. It is a reminder that our modern enterprise still relies a great deal in faith that the great majority of people can be relied upon to give. Voluntarily.

As I noted on Flickr: I just received my first "payment" for carrying Amazon.com advertising on my web site. Neat! This is hardly “f_ck you” money, but it is greater than zero.

For the record, I have been with Google AdSense for over a year now. That service brings in enough to cover the costs of my home DSL and then a wee bit more. Thanks to the generosity of friends, the hosting costs of my web site are nil, but I could probably cover that with revenue.

Of course, I am operationally “cash flow positive” but no financial incentive for content, just yet. No incentive beyond rhetorical diarrhea. :)

Pie-in-the-sky, my web site receives around 10,000 unique visits per month. I could probably “monetize” that better, but as I like to say, if I had 200 times more traffic, I could cover all of my living expenses.