Cheese, Chalk, and a Beard

A primer on health reform

2009-08-07T15:54:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to blog about health reform forever, since that's what I do with my days. But the issue is so big, it's been hard to know where to start. But someone recently asked me for a primer on the issues, so the rest of this post is lifted verbatim from the email I sent him.

One of the challenges in the health reform debate is that the system is such a mess, nearly everyone who works in health policy agrees that we should do SOMETHING, no matter how imperfect. So nearly every reputable source I'm going to give you is going to be in favor of any legislation that comes out of a Democratic Congress.

The other challenge is that until the past few weeks, the proposals for how to make all this happen have been vague, and everyone favors reform but doesn't necessarily care that much about the details. Also, legislative analysis apparently bores audiences, so there's not a lot of specifics on the different legislation for a non-policy audience.

With those provisos, here's my best attempt at a list:

Eight Myths About Health Care Reform - From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a good primer on the disinformation

In Search of Health Reform - An interactive feature that gives a good overview of the problem and the proposed solutions.

The Experts vs. The Public on Health Reform - The CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit health policy foundation, takes on how health policy experts view the issues, versus how the public views the issues.

This is the point where I take a break to say that I am a health policy wonk, and that the information I added below might take you into minutiae that you really just don't care about.

Not Enough Audacity - Paul Krugman makes the case for a public plan.

Fiscal Suicide Ahead - And David Brooks argues why we need cost containment, and why we're unlikely to get it.

The Cost Conundrum - A really influential article about the structural problems that Brooks is talking about above.

The Risk Pool - This is an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2006. It's not really central to the issues being debated right now, but I think it provides a compelling framework for how we think about risk and insurance. Anything risky is best spread out among as many people as possible. This means that buying health insurance is harder and harder the fewer people are in your "risk pool". It's why we have Medicare (old people are terrible risks) and why people want a mandate that everyone have health insurance (more people spreading the risk), and so this issue is what underlies a lot of the fundamentals of health reform.

Finally, I tag bookmarks on Delicious with healthreform when I remember.

Pandora Whining

2009-07-31T10:54:00.001-04:00

I listen to Pandora a LOT. Several hours a day, every day. In July they added a limit to their ad supported service limiting "free" listening to 40 hours a month. I got an email saying "although this change affects only 10% of our listeners, you are one of them!"

Once you reach the 40 hour limit, you have two options. You can pay $1 to continue to use the ad supported service for the rest of the month, or you can pay $36 for the year to upgrade to the premium, non-ad supported service. I actually think this is a fairly nice way to deal with generating more revenue while keeping the service affordable. BUT I'm annoyed with two things about this arrangement.

First, Pandora has made the interface for the $1 a month option cumbersome. You have to wait until you actually run out of time for the month and then enter your credit card number. It enters it as a one time payment, which means you need to type in your credit card number every month. This is obviously intended to steer you to the $36/year premium service.

Which brings me to my second gripe. I feel like I am absolutely paying enough for my ad-supported Pandora already. Somehow from my music taste, Pandora's ads can divine my needs and desires more readily than even I can. So far, I have purchased Dove deodorant with matching body spray, renewed my passport, and purchased Venus Spa razor blades, pretty much all based off Pandora advertising. They know about my secret shame, enjoying Bud Light with Lime, and are trying to get me to buy some of that too.

As it turns out, I ran out of Pandora credit yesterday, so I'll be using other free services for another day until it starts over. It's probably worth it for me to just upgrade to the paid service, but it will take me a bit to feel like it's not being imposed on me.

Quinoa, Black Bean, and Corn Salad

2009-07-23T00:02:00.006-04:00

Quinoa is a South American grain that holds its shape nicely in salads. It's nutty and full of protein. I made this recipe up pretty spontaneously, because I knew I had quinoa and black beans in the pantry and limes in the fridge. I love bean and grain salads, especially in the summer.

I think next time I'd adjust the proportions a bit (more quinoa!) and add some chopped cilantro. I also don't think the roasted corn makes that big a difference. Also, the dressing proportions are made up. I don't measure.

1/2 c. dry quinoa, rinsed
1 c. water
1.5 c. canned black beans, rinsed
1.5 c. frozen corn kernels, thawed (I used Trader Joes roasted corn)
1/2 c. chopped red bell pepper
1 serrano pepper, seeded and chopped
juice of one lime
2 T. (?) olive oil
dash of hot sauce
1/2 tsp. oregano (Mexican if you have it)
1/2 tsp. cumin
salt and pepper to taste

Add the quinoa and water to a pan, bring to a boil, turn down to low and let simmer until water is absorbed, 10-15 minutes. Transfer quinoa to a bowl and let cool. Add beans, corn, and peppers. In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients. Add dressing to salad, stir, and put in the fridge to chill. Enjoy!

Web Browser ABC Meme

2009-07-11T16:49:00.006-04:00

I just discovered the "Page Info" stuff in Firefox 3.5. I'm not sure if this is new or not, but it allowed me the opportunity to see how many times I've visited certain domains. Apparently I reload Facebook an average of 57 times a day.1 Oops!

And with that in mind, I now bring you the ABCs of my AwesomeBar.

(Instructions: type the letter ‘a’ in your browser location bar and choose the first match from the dropdown. Repeat for each letter of the alphabet.)

A: http://asitebyanyother.name/
B: Blind Pig Music
C: Chalk, Cheese, and a Beard
D: Delicious
E: Etherpad
F: ubiquity-firefox | Google Groups
G: Troubleshooting Ubiquity Interface Problems
H: ubiquity-firefox: log
I: isoHunt - the BitTorrent and P2P search engine
J: Jonathan Coulton
K: Pulling it Together: 19.7 - Kaiser Family Foundation
L: Mozilla Labs » Ubiquity
M: Ann Arbor, MI to Monson, Massachusetts
N: NYTimes
O: Orbitz Travel: Airline Tickets, Cheap Airfare, Hotels, Vacations, Car Rentals & Cruises
P: planet ubiquity
Q: Twitter / Search - ubiquity
R: Recovery.gov
S: Songza
T: The Ride - Ann Arbor Transportation Authority
U: ubiquity-firefox | Google Groups
V: How We're Releasing Ubiquity 0.5 on Vimeo
W: Wowhead: You'll be back.
X: xkcd - A Webcomic - Form
Y: YouTube - Hey Paul Krugman (A song, A plea)
Z: Shoes, Clothing, Handbags, Sunglasses | Zappos.com Free Shipping

Only surprise is that Pandora didn't show up, although the URL of planet ubiquity is filled with Ps. Other than that, it looks just like my life. Music, ubiquity, nerding. I guess I feel like I read a lot more health news and a lot more wikipedia than this list would indicate.

1: Is it wrong that I want to put a methodological note here? I've had this Firefox profile for 305 days, which I guessed with terrifying accuracy and then actually checked with a date calc.

Del.icio.us

2009-06-15T10:21:00.004-04:00

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Delicious. I have resisted this for some time, because I hated the URL for the most part, but also didn't grasp the value of saving my bookmarks on the web. I even blogged about how much I hated it.

Fast forward to today - I signed up three weeks ago and I LOVE it. Not only is it a great way to make my bookmarks searchable, but I also can share things I like with friends. The Firefox addon means it's integrated into my existing browsing habits almost seamlessly, and the tagging feature is actually fairly useable.

I'll admit part of the appeal is that I read so much on the Internet these days, I kind of want a way to catalog that. So when someone is like "how do you know this?" I can actually just be like "go read what I have read".

Here's my regular bookmark feed: http://delicious.com/heatherpedia

I've been tagging things "eggnog" for sharing with family and friends that are about the stuff I'm interested in, but for a more general audience. You can find those things here: http://delicious.com/heatherpedia/eggnog

Silence of the Lamps

2009-05-27T13:14:00.005-04:00

This is the first "web comic" I ever went crazy for, back in 1997.

Weekday Banana Walnut Oatmeal

2009-05-22T23:00:00.006-04:00

I saw a post on Summer Tomato for Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal labeled a "weekend breakfast", since cooking regular rolled oats takes a little while. Like Darya, I prefer real oatmeal to instant or quick, and I also am not really a bright sunshiney person in the morning. If it's more complicated than turning on the coffeemaker, I will probably not do it on a weekday morning.

This oatmeal recipe is that easy. And cheap! And tasty! I use Trader Joe's unsweetened soymilk, so the honey makes it tastier. It can certainly be remixed with any combo of toppings based on your whims and what's in the fridge.

Banana-Walnut Oatmeal

1/2 c. rolled oats
3/4 to 1 c. milk or soymilk
sliced banana
walnuts
1 tbsp. honey

The night before you want to eat this, put the oats and soymilk into a bowl and put it in the refrigerator.

In the morning, take it out and stir, then pop it in the microwave for 2 minutes. Remove, stir, and microwave another 1-2 minutes. Top with banana, walnuts, and honey. Yum!

Wayback Machine

2009-05-21T04:32:00.003-04:00

While trying to update a broken link on Wikipedia, I came upon some adorably outdated articles I wrote for The Dartmouth my freshman year in college. The first is a meditation on how overpowered iMacs are as public BlitzMail machines. Check out those system specs! (These same iMacs would later spawn the great pink eye epidemic of 2001-2002.)

The second was an article about some of my favorite websites at the time. Oddly, some of those sites are still around, and are hilarious!

Poorly Drawn Lamp Page
The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project
The Infamous Exploding Whale (Ha! This is what things were like before YouTube, kids!)

The remaining sites have vanished into the tubes, never to be seen again.

And finally, I don't want to forget my 1998 interview with Archimedies Plutonium. The article is nothing special, but you really should read about the man himself, or you may live out the rest of your life without understanding that the whole universe is actually one giant plutonium atom. He is also apparently a usenet celebrity, and has quite the Wikipedia user page. For anyone out there still wondering, he actually did scrub pots at Dartmouth, until he was replaced by an automatic dishwasher, attempted to sue the school, and subsequently left Hanover because the people there were too backward to handle his science.

Must Listens on the Web

2009-05-14T12:15:00.006-04:00

I started my summer internship at the Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation on Tuesday. One of the perks is I get to listen to music. One of the drawbacks is that music has to mostly come from the web. There is of course Pandora and Last.fm, but sometimes you want a whole album, or a specific artist, or a playlist that exactly matches the way researching the ROI on high quality preschool programs makes you feel. And for those things, my friends, I have compiled a list for you.

Exclusive First Listen on NPR Music – I am listening to John Vanderslice’s new album on here right now, which is fantastic.
Wilco (The Album) – this is a one off rather than a constant resource, but Wilco’s new album is streamed in its entirety.
Songza.com – basically an aggregator of streaming content from YouTube and iMeem, among others, you can make playlists on here. My own stream has whatever playlist I’m into right now, and the blog has featured playlists each day.
YouTube – sometimes it’s easier to just use the YouTube interface to save more than one playlist. Two of mine are songs I loved at 13 and one of Irish folk singer Lisa Hannigan.
Twitter music Monday – this one takes a bit of work. On Mondays, people on Twitter post songs they like. Those songs may rock, or they may suck. It’s part of what makes it awesome.
Hype Machine Radio – this is one of the cooler music aggregator ideas going on out there. Basically they aggregate music blogs, see what is trending, and make those songs available. The last three songs were T.I., Jordin Sparks, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Our collective consciousness has spotty but intriguing taste in music.
Music for Busy People – by invite only. If you know me, you should ask me for an invite. Makes me feel cool in a totally lazy way.
South By Southwest Music Player - songs from this years SXSW artists (it's a link in the right hand column)

tofu and self-nurturing

2009-02-11T19:19:00.004-05:00

The past month has been 100% crazytown for me. Sarah came home to Massachusetts, so I took the week of Martin Luther King day to fly back there to visit for a week. Not content just to see my sister after a year and a half, I also managed to dart down to New Haven to see Grace, and from there we went to NYC to see Ted and meet up with Chris and Zach too. I returned to Ann Arbor for five days, only to leave again the following Saturday for the National Health Policy Conference in Washington DC.

That's a whole lot of awesome life experience packed into one month, especially if that month also happens to be the first month of a new semester. And while I value those experiences, all that activity left me feeling very drained and like my head was just spinning all the time.

Last semester I often stayed on campus until 7, 8, or 9 pm to study or work. I am definitely more productive when I just keep plugging away on campus, but a certain level of stress brings on rapidly diminishing returns in the form of me needing to sit around and do nothing for a while (an evening, a weekend, the whole of winter break) to recover. So I've settled on a gentler approach. When I'm done with classes/committments most days, I come home. I continue to work here, but I feel much more relaxed in my own home, changed into loungey clothes, in a comfy chair.

With all of this lounging, it's tempting to pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave and keep reading. But as I mentioned in my last post, I've been cooking dinner. Real food. It's glorious. Tonight I made a Garam Masala Tofu Scramble from 101 Cookbooks, and it has reminded me the extent to which simple vegetarian food is my comfort food. I've been out of the cooking swing of things for so long, the concept of weeknight meals had begun to elude me. Now that I'm doing it again, I remember how much cooking relaxes me. Chopping vegetables is meditative, sauteeing is magical, and relaxing with the result is deeply satisfying. Mmmmmmm, tofu.

warm chickpea and broccoli salad

2009-02-09T23:53:00.004-05:00

I've been craving vegetables for several days now. Not just like "I could use a salad". Elaborate fantasies about roasted beets and fennel salads.

I've really enjoyed reading the New York Times series recipes for health. This past week was broccoli, and although broccoli isn't something I really need a recipe for, new ideas are always good. I made the warm chickpea and broccoli salad. It came out nicely, although I would caution you that shaking the covered bowl to distribute the dressing might make the broccoli crumble a bit. I'd probably add a little more broccoli next time, although I have no idea if I used the amount called for in the recipe.

I've decided to make time in my day for cooking dinner. It helps me to feel less rushed, and more in touch with what I need to be balanced and healthy and calm. After dinner tonight (and last night) I took the time to get coffee ready to go for the morning and throw smoothie ingredients together too.

Sleeeeeepy! Night!

24 minutes of blogging

2009-01-08T13:51:00.003-05:00

I started my second semester yesterday, and I'm sitting here in my health services survey class with 24 minutes of time left on my battery. So here's 24 minutes of my thoughts!

My first semester ended on a really positive note. My grades were good, but most importantly, I really saw my ability to focus and get shit done. Honestly, when I started, that was my biggest worry. As a recalcitrant procrastinator when I was an undergraduate and even when I was taking grad classes in Arizona, I became pretty convinced getting anything done was always going to be a struggle. But in the middle of the semester, something changed. I realized I wanted to be here, and that this work was important to me. I also realized that the sky wasn't going to fall if my work wasn't perfect. Yup, that's right, I'm a perfectionist who procrastinates, imagine that.

This semester is looking okay so far. I'm excited for my regression class and for econ, and less so for the health services survey class. My politics seminar has a lot of potential, and I'm oddly excited for a presentation-based class. I'm going to make the world's most awesome PowerPoints. I'm also trying to get into a class on decision-making and risk simulation stuff, in my ongoing attempt to be 70% as cool as Nate Silver. I want to learn Monte Carlo simulation!

Kitties!

2008-11-13T22:07:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you just need something to take you to your happy place:

Ah, Internets

2008-11-02T14:22:00.003-05:00

Here is what has been distracting me today:

For those of you not familiar with (fluff)friends, it's like a tamagotchi for your Facebook profile. You can pet it and feed it and it can race with other people's fluffs. I'm sort of in love with my pet radish, who in turn has a pet tofu. I can almost understand the pain of the 7th grader in my gym class senior year (I was a teachers assistant in gym my senior year for reasons still not fully understood by me) who had her tamagotchi thrown over the fence by a very mean boy. The background picture and speech bubble are new as of today. Yup, I can have a politcal virtual radish if I want it.

I need to dig myself out of the long tail of the Internet and back into the stuff I have to do for tomorrow.

Great Obama Video

2008-11-02T01:04:00.000-04:00

100th post!

2008-10-23T23:55:00.002-04:00

I'm going to use this opportunity to let all you googlers know that I have no idea if Zach Braff has a beard or not, but this picture seems to indicate he does.

A glimpse into my wikibrain

2008-10-22T01:33:00.003-04:00

The last seven wikipedia pages I have visited:

Why 7? Because it's the most illustratively biased sample!

blogging from my iPod

2008-10-07T08:45:00.003-04:00

is less than ideal. Does anyone know how to copy/paste on the iPod touch or iPhone? Is it possible to save images off the web? At least I'm getting better at the keyboard.

Yes we can!

2008-10-06T01:02:00.001-04:00

I love the song in this video, "Fake Empire" by The National, but the video's pretty sweet too.

Wikipalin

2008-10-04T03:20:00.002-04:00

This entry from Sarah Palin's Wikipedia talk page is just too funny not to share. Some dude watches a YouTube video where he decides Sarah Palin looks cross-eyed. He then creates an account on Wikipedia called "Esotropic Flautist" (she's playing the flute in the video) to discuss why her vision issues haven't been discussed in the mainstream media. The internet sure is changing the discourse...by making it stupid!

Oh no they didn't!

2008-10-01T01:14:00.003-04:00

Oh, yes they did. The New York Times has an article posted comparing the mechanics of the current financial crisis to those that caused the Great Depression.

Just in case this post doesn't clarify what I've been doing lately, I've been reading a lot of the New York Times in between studying and watching episodes of Scrubs. I'm studying econ for a midterm on Thursday. Drawing pictures of demand curves seems especially quaint in the midst of what apparently may be the dawn of the new depression, but I suppose an understanding of microecon will help me with my macroecon?

As a side note, when I was home this summer, my mom kept telling me that I was "really intense." I never quite figured out what that meant, but it had something to do with always discussing really serious topics. Today as I rambled on the phone about the likely voter models used in polling, I couldn't help but giggle at the fact that I'm also the person she comes to when she has a serious question.

This election has me on the edge of my seat. Watching what the polls do in the next week and a half...it really could go either way! (Although I think Obama will outperform the polls due to on the ground organizing. It's an official prediction!)

Rich people discover buses

2008-09-28T13:38:00.003-04:00

Apparently rich people have discovered buses, reports the New York Times in their hard hitting look at what happens when rich people stop taking planes and start taking buses. Did you know that sometimes buses don't run on time? But that while you are on them you can do other things? Also, they cost less than airplanes! And you can use your laptop THE WHOLE TIME!!!

Hi rich people, glad you've discovered something normal people have known forever. My name is Heather, and I took the bus before it was cool.

Haircut, and a comment on the lighting in cuban restaurants

2008-09-23T17:52:00.002-04:00

The combination of lighting in a restaurant and using your computer's LCD as a flash leads to not a great picture, but here it is nonetheless:

Abbreviated blogging:

2008-09-21T02:09:00.002-04:00

So here's what's going on, in digest format:

this was a tough week. the newness of grad school gave way to the realization that this crap is hard, and there's a lot of it. my study buddies are a great help.
i need to focus on sleep. when i get anxious, i sleep less, and when i haven't slept enough, it makes me get more anxious.
i ran this week! god, it feels so so good while i'm doing it, and so achey afterwards.
i've committed to working for the obama campaign until election day in any way i can, and am working on a cogent statement of why i want him to be our president.
more than obama winning, i just want there to be an HONEST political discourse. so keep talking to each other, or start the conversation if you haven't yet.
tomorrow i have a picnic and econ study group!
i REALLY need to find the good bike light.

That's all for now, I really need to sleep. On the agenda for this week: research calls, Obama campaigning, plenty of studying, and even a first time RL meeting with a WoW friend!

grad school and ical

2008-09-08T01:08:00.002-04:00

My first week (really, more like three and a half days) of grad school was crazy amazing and overwhelming at the same time. Today I actually sat down and made a chart of deadlines in iCal. The good news: I know when everything is due. The bad news: I have a TON of work to get done.

Coming back to school was a difficult decision for me. In all honesty, I wasn't the world's best student as an undergrad. I pulled off decent grades, but it always involved a lot of gnashing of teeth, a few all nighters, and occasionally getting trapped in a construction site and wiggling through an 8 inch gap in a fence. This time around, I am a lot more focused, but there's still a certain amount of self-doubt lingering about my ability to really hunker down and get work done. Never mind the self-doubt about my ability to consistently show up for an 8 am class two days a week. (Biostats, no less!)

All that said, I'm pretty excited about my classes. And the most reading intense classes are also the two areas I'm most interested in - policy and program evaluation. My research also looks like it's going to be challenging and fun. I'm still waiting to find out if I get an office or not, but in the meantime, the HMP student lounge appears to be sorely under-utilized, possibly because it doesn't have a coffee maker.

Anyway, I'm headed to bed now, although staying on a reasonable sleep schedule is already a challenging area. *sigh*

bicyclist = whore

2008-09-04T23:50:00.002-04:00

So today I was riding my bike from the School of Public Health to downtown Ann Arbor. Stupidly, I used Google Maps to plot out my route, without consulting the Ann Arbor bicycle map. I chose to ride on Huron St., which as it turns out is the only east/west street that is NOT a recommended bike route, and is also under construction.

I am riding in the traffic lane, which I am very much allowed to do as a cyclist. I am following the "as close as is practicable" to the curb standard, and as far as I can tell, there is enough room for a car to safely pass me. In fact, at least two cars passed me in the construction zone. Then a car pulls up behind me, and I hear yelling. They repeatedly curse at me and call me a whore, yell at me that there is no bike lane and scream that I should be riding on the sidewalk. I figure there's no way someone is intimidating me off the road, but they keep at it for six or seven blocks. Finally, when I see a safe curb cut at an intersection, I ride up onto the sidewalk. They call me a whore again and speed past.

It bears noting that I am a VERY experienced bicyclist, and not easily intimidated. I have ridden thousands of miles, been cat called, been buzzed by trucks and SUVs at high speed, ridden on the FREEWAY, and had things thrown at me. None of them have ever left me as rattled as this encounter did. I was honestly afraid they might try to harm me if I didn't get off the road.

As it turns out, Michigan doesn't actually have a safe passing law for a car overtaking a bicyclist. Arizona's three foot law and the high visibility of cycling seems to have created an atmosphere where everyone implicitly knows that bicycles belong on the road. Here in Ann Arbor, the city actually occasionally reroutes bicycle traffic onto sidewalks. I think sidewalk riding is SO dangerous for both pedestrians and cyclists, that I have entirely ignored those signs. The sidewalks they are routed onto are cracked, have dangerous grades, and apparently are not maintained in winter. This is what passes for a bike path here?

First Day of School!

2008-09-03T00:23:00.003-04:00

Today was my official first day of school. It began with me waking up at 6:20 am when it was still dark out. Apparently it gets light late when you live on the western edge of your time zone. I had, I kid you not, programmed my coffeemaker the night before and laid out my clothes before bed. So I woke up this morning, put on my clothes, drank some coffee while I threw breakfast together, and put some coffee in my thermos for later. At this point, I am running about a minute late. It's 7:11. My bus comes at 7:14 and is about two blocks away. So I grab my bike and hop on, ride to the bus, and make it with time to spare.

I load my bike up on to the front rack, get on the bus, and happily settle into listening to NPR. I get off the bus and go into class, only to discover that apparently in Michigan, classes start 10 minutes after the actual starting time to allow people time to get to class. It is at this point I open my bag and notice there is a bike lock in there. "Hmmm...that's curious...OH CRAP!"

Yes, I left my bike on the front rack on the bus. Luckily I have AATA's phone number programmed into my phone. I give them a call, describe the bike and the bus I was on, and they confirm it's at the Blake Transit Center. I tell them I can come by later in the day to pick it up.

I dash back into Biostats before anything has really happened. Biostats is uneventful. I'm taking the slightly more advanced class, which hopefully will keep me interested in the material. It looks like the first third or so will be review, which I need badly. SPSS is the statistical software package. Not my favorite, but probably won't kill me.

Next I go fill out my employment paperwork and find out where exactly my financial aid money is (answer: no one knows). I grab another coffee and head back into class.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the unfortunate schedule of 11:30 to 2:30 straight. First Econ, which terrifies me. We talk about indifference curves. I felt pretty indifferent. Then my Health Services System class. It's the class that collects tiny details about health services! I'm SO excited.

Once that was over, I went and picked up my bike. I got thai at "No Thai", whose incomprehensible naming story can be found here, and did some shopping at the food co-op in Kerrytown. Headed home on the bus, watching my new secret shame, "The Hills".

Overall, a good first day. I am still totally wiped out every day by 3:30 or so, but I think it will get better. I'm just trying to balance getting stuff done with getting enough rest to stay calm and relaxed. Time will tell how well I'm doing.

Olympics for Insomniacs

2008-08-22T05:11:00.002-04:00

Due to a four hour mid-day nap today, I am sitting here wide awake at 4:30 am, watching coverage of the mens 50k racewalk on USA. It is hilarious. First, I have learned that racewalking is a "highly technical sport" and therefore we should expect China to excel at it, much like gymnastics and diving. Second, for those of you who don't readily convert kilometers to miles in your head, that's 31 miles of racewaking, which as far as I can tell, consists of getting as close to running as possible without getting disqualified. Finally, racewalking is considered a track and field event, so the D list commentators had the opportunity to comment AGAIN on how both the mens and womens 4x100 relay teams dropped the baton. As if we hadn't heard about that yet.

On an unrelated note, apparently 5 am is not the best time to deal with Bank of America customer service about them repeatedly fucking up your credit card billing for six months in a row. By the end, I was given another phone number I can call at 8 am to "help me understand my products and services better." Riiiiight. Me not understanding is the problem.

Ann Arbor!

2008-08-17T00:00:00.002-04:00

I'm finally here AND in my new place AND have internet access. This morning I picked up all my stuff from the post office. I walked up to the counter and said "I'm picking up A LOT of general delivery" and the woman at the counter said "Oh, are you the one with ALL those parcels?" Apparently my stuff is well known among the fine folks at the main Ann Arbor post office. I had hired a guy with a truck, Eric, to actually move my stuff from post office to my second floor bedroom, so all I had to do was watch and direct and try to stay out of the way.

Then Dave and I went for a gourmet lunch of McNuggets, then to Target for the usual move in stuff (hangers, a floor lamp, pillows, a fan that immediately broke when I plugged it in) and Trader Joes for my food basics. All that is good, because I am a little overwhelmed by settling in, and having food and some basic stuff is making it easier.

My biggest thing about Ann Arbor so far is that I have to figure out transportation. And get furniture. Those two things are loosely related, due to me not having a way to actually pick up any furniture. And until I have at least a little furniture, there's not much point in unpacking, other than to laugh at how poorly I packed.

Oh, and I need a coffee maker. Someone should try to talk me out of buying one of these.

So much to say!

2008-08-15T02:19:00.002-04:00

I have a ton from the trip I want to write about, but I am SO exhausted. I fly to Ann Arbor tomorrow (well today according to the date stamp on this post), get my stuff on Saturday (dear God, I hope my stuff is at the A2 post office), and should have a "real" computer set up by Sunday or Monday.

Overall, the road trip was a TON of fun. Carolyn and I pretty much laughed the whole way across the country, although I'm going to guess the majority of our stories are going to be of the "had to be there" variety. I coined the phrase "giggle spiral" to describe the phenomenon of uncontrollable contagious giggling that seemed to afflict us for a good portion of Iowa all the way west.

Sometime yesterday the reality of everything I have to get done before school starts began to set in, but it's a bit of a "one day at a time" thing right now. Next step: actually get to Ann Arbor.

George

2008-08-15T01:57:00.003-04:00

We met George at a produce stand in Iowa, and he was so dynamic, we decided to take him with us.

Homeless

2008-08-14T00:09:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the hotel check in dude asked me for my address. After opening and closing my mouth several times but no words coming out, I gave him my parents' address. Then he asked me for my phone number. My response: "You mean MY phone number?"

It's time to have a home again. Two days until Michigan!

Road trip!

2008-08-12T11:18:00.002-04:00

Carolyn and I are driving from Massachusetts to New Mexico right now. Well, right now I'm in a Motel 6 in Iowa, but you get the point. Summary:

1. I have not yet eaten corn in Iowa, which is a crime against humanity.
2. I have a ton to blog about, but I've only been able to muster checking my email and falling asleep once I get to internet each day.
3. Today, I am going to Carhenge.

I'll be in New Mexico on Thursday! And Ann Arbor on Friday night!

Where bad ideas go to be liquidated

2008-08-06T23:04:00.001-04:00

Christmas Tree Shops!

@home

2008-07-30T23:08:00.002-04:00

It feels weird at the age of 28 to refer to the house I grew up in as "home", but it's the closest I have right now, and it really feels nice to come home to Monson. Mom is still on summer vacation and I have no plans, so I'm just hanging out, reading, watching tv, and sleeping a lot.

Today mom and I went swimming at a little pond in the woods with her friend and her friend's daughter. It was tiny and a little mucky, but just for us. I loved it, even though I was a little muddy when I got out. Apparently I prefer solitude over cleanliness. There were hawks near the pond, which were pretty much amazing to watch.

I came home and went to sleep at 7:45 or so, and I'm up for a few minutes before I go back to bed. I've been exhausted, but I can't decide if it's from the traveling or the stress or what.

It's 4 am, I must be quoting Matchbox 20 incorrectly.

2008-07-25T03:57:00.003-04:00

I'm at Grace's beach house, up hours after everyone else. It all started innocently with trying to get the Marketplace podcasts onto my iPod an devolved into a full on music refresh. So I'm blogging while I download a BitTorrent client. /sigh. And here I thought the beach would get me to bed early.

I've had a pretty awesome week, with Dave, Grace, and Marc lending hefty amounts of moral support in what was a harder than expected transition out of Tucson. Once all my stuff was packed and shipped and I made it to my flight, the reality of leaving a place I've lived for four years and that I feel really connected to started to sink in. I don't want to wax overly nostalgic about a place I've always had mixed feelings about, but at the very least, the last four years have been an important time in my life, and Tucson will always be a part of that. Plus I'll miss the sun, my awesome apartment at Sirena's, the year round cycling, Bicas, and the mexican food. Especially the mexican food.

Yesterday, via bus and ferry, I arrived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Today was a much needed lounge on the beach day, complete with ocean swimming and falling asleep in the sun and turning a bit pink. Tomorrow Grace and I drive to West Virginia for Chris' wedding via an airport pickup at Dulles for Ted, who is flying in from Japan.

In the midst of my iPod refresh, I downloaded several relaxation and "self-improvement" podcasts. Sirena and I had a brief but interesting conversation the other day about the constant desire to improve your life and accomplish things versus the ability to slow down and just be with yourself. We both felt a bit like it was impossible to escape our "should" voice: I should be doing this or I should be doing that. Even relaxation to some extent feels like a should. I guess I've always found it hard to find balance between the two...I seem to either be "off" or "on". Something to think about.

going to sleep now

2008-07-20T02:21:00.002-04:00

Marc and I just played a rousing game of "Life". In this particular case, he wins at life, and I lose. I'm going to go to sleep now, more tomorrow!

What a Week!

2008-07-20T01:54:00.002-04:00

Monday: Pack. Go to the doctor. Tell him I'm 8 weeks post op when I'm really almost 12, resulting in him being confused by how well I am healed. Boobs are all good, don't need a follow up.

Tuesday: Pack more. Don't sleep enough, start to freak out about how not packed I am. Still think I can get everything done. Have chicken escape while feeding them, followed by a 20 minutes session of trying to reason with a chicken. Give up, chase chicken around like an idiot, catch it and put it back in its cage.

Wednesday: Supposed to be the big move day. Sick to my stomach. REALLY sick to my stomach. About 1 pm realize that even if I get everything packed, I still am in no shape to fly. Call Orbitz. Try to rebook ticket. Have the following conversation:
Orbitz woman: So with the $119 credit minus the $150 change fee plus the $208 ticket and the $25 booking fee, your total is $264.
Me: Isn't it just cheaper for me to book a new ticket?
Orbitz woman: Maybe.
Me: I'm fairly certain "Is $264 more or less than $208?" cannot be answered with "maybe"
Rebook new ticket on the 15 minute internet computer at the public library. Return library books. Ship my bike. Go to the bank. Try not to lose mind. Get plenty of sleep that night, thank God.

Thursday: Finish packing. Mail a huge number of boxes parcel post and media mail to General Delivery in Ann Arbor. Special shout out to Mark, THE nicest postal employee I have ever met, at the Silverbell post office. Run errands: food bank, goodwill, Target and Performance for returns of stuff I didn't use yet and didn't want to pack. Drive to the airport in the rental car, realizing that screaming down Alvernon at 55 mph is going to be my last memory of Tucson. Return rental car, check in 44 minutes before my flight leaves. Befuddled when it tells me there are no seats available on my flight. Clear up issue with US Airways, pay them $15 to check my bag. Enter security. Get secondary screened. Since it takes them 20 minutes to go through my stuff (they opened up my packs of gum! seriously!) I get interrogated (albeit a very friendly interrogation) for 20 minutes. It was hilarious enough to warrant its own post, actually. Board flight for Vegas. Delayed in Vegas but don't care. Get on red eye for Philly, sleep like a champ for the 4.5 hour flight.

Friday: Wait, it's Friday? That clock on the train platform says it is, so it must be. Boy do red eyes get me confused. Purchase world's largest iced coffee. Enjoy how cheap Dunkin' Donuts is on the east coast. Take train to Philly Greyhound station. Take NJ Transit bus to Vineland to visit Marc. Manage to stay awake until 3 pm, at which point I crash for a nap.

Friday and beyond: Hang out with Marc and sleep a lot. It's been good fun, and VERY relaxing now that all that moving crap is behind me.

Snazzy new features!

2008-07-13T10:51:00.003-04:00

<----- Over here is some cool new stuff! I used Twitter to make the "what i'm doing right now" link and added a slideshow of my latest flickr additions. For the record, Darren is the master of self portraits.

I'm still packing, and I'll be running some errands by bike and the bicas bike trailer today. I also managed to post some stuff on craigslist, and hopefully it will sell before I leave on Wednesday. In one of those stubborn ridiculousness moments, I'm not renting a car until Tuesday afternoon, so I'll have 24 hours to mail, donate, and otherwise get rid of EVERYTHING. Then I'm only one red eye and four hours on public transportation away from one VERY long nap.

My Trip

2008-07-11T17:51:00.004-04:00

I've only included those things that are confirmed right now. The last week of July and the first week of August isn't planned yet, but here's my East Coast trip calendar, along with the answer to the most frequently asked question, "When will you be in Michigan?" (A: August 15th)

Blog by email

2008-07-11T06:33:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure why I would be more likely to do this than just sign on
to blogger, since gmail and blogger are a single sign in, but look, I
can blog by email! I also got a nice twitter feed set up on the side
for those who just can't get enough of my mundane life.

Blog Reborn

2008-07-11T05:59:00.003-04:00

I've totally let this blog fall into disrepair, but I think I'm going to start it up again. At the very least my friends and family need a way to keep track of where I am at any given time. Who knows, I may even set up some geeky SMS feature or something.

Right now packing has taken over my whole apartment, including my bed. Luckily I can sleep in the recliner, because I am FAR too tired to move everything off the bed.

Call for Spanglish T9

2007-10-10T17:56:00.000-04:00

So I have a cell phone that I use sometimes. I even have entered the 21st century and text on it sometimes. Here's my pet peeve: it makes you choose Spanish or English for the autocomplete function. Now I am an English speaker. In fact, what I speak in Latin America and Tucson's south side could barely be called Spanish. But even so, I find myself putting Spanish words into text messages far more often than one might think, and I have to spell them out. Considering most Spanish speakers I know, especially teenagers, tend to use a mix of the two languages liberally, I doubt I'm the first person who has wanted this technology.

Alumni Bob!

2007-05-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

Alumni Bob was Chrisaboo's alumni interviewer from Dartmouth. Displaced New York Jews, he and his wife live in Charleston, West Virginia, where Bob works for the Charleston Gazette.

He also apparently eats poison ivy, as documented in this video:

Watch it, favorite it, give it five stars. We want to make Bob an internet sensation!

YubNub

2007-03-21T18:11:00.000-04:00

Okay, I apparently have been missing something for a while. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows how much I prefer the keyboard over my mouse. I just found this:

http://yubnub.org/

It is important to note that the reason this is viable for me is because by default it searches Google, which is what my Firefox search box already does. But then it gives me a million gazillion (no really, like 10,000) command line options for search, and allows me to add my own. The only requirement is that the search engine uses a get request to pass the parameter, just like with addons like DictionarySearch. And it has a Firefox search bar plug-in that can take the place of my Google box (and the entire drop down menu for searching Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, eBay, OED, and Merriam-Webster, among others).

If anyone wants to give me a job searching the Internet, you can rest assured that I would be really, really good at it. Pre-YubNub (seriously, I will now refer to this era as PYN, commit that to memory) I was pretty good, now I am a search savant.

I am a marathoner!

2007-03-07T11:28:00.000-05:00

So three and a half weeks ago I started training for the San Diego marathon. I haven't run consistantly in the last 7 or 8 years, and the last year has probably been my least active year ever. A normal person would be like "I'm going to start exercising three times a week for 30 minutes." But using my usual form of problem solving, I decide to train for a marathon.

It all started with a plan to run the half marathon that will be held in Tucson on March 17th. But then I made plans to go to Seattle for that weekend. My friend Jenne has been planning on San Diego for a while now, and she asked me if I wanted to do it. I asked if they have a half, but they don't. She said "think about it."

So a few weeks later I realize we are closing in on 16 weeks away, and I start to think about it. Mostly I think it is a completely crazy idea. But then I think about El Tour, and how that was a completely crazy idea too, but I still did it. So I start looking for marathon training books, and I find A Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer. The running schedule looks reasonable. But what hooked me was the first chapter, which focused on developing an internal locus of control, or in non-psychobabble, developing the belief that you can do anything you set your mind to.

That is an issue I struggle with a fair amount, and for some reason, it seemed like the marathon was what I had been looking for. I have reasonable expectations. I don't think running one marathon is going to fix all my problems or cause me to never doubt myself again. But I think on many levels, it is what I need. I need to prove to myself that I *can* do this, that despite all the reasons I think I will fail at this, I can complete a marathon.

So this week's mental assignment is to start thinking of yourself and referring to yourself as a marathoner. Honestly, I have my doubts. I missed some training runs due to illness, and some others when Jackie and Mason visited. I was tempted to quit, feeling like I had missed too much training. And then I calmed down, I refocused, I read this week's chapter. And now I am hesitantly committing to "I am a marathoner." I don't believe it yet, but I'm going to say it anyway. I am a marathoner!

A trip down memory futon

2007-02-21T19:07:00.000-05:00

I just got back from visiting Jackie and Mason in San Diego. Peep trips tend to trigger a walk down memory lane for me, and so I went back and looked through a bunch of pictures that Jackie posted for us a while ago. Never before have two people connected by a common piece of furniture stood out so obviously from a set of pictures for me. And so I bring you Darren, Heather, and The Futon.

We'll start out with a relatively normal one, of us sitting on the futon apparently talking.

The futon was frequently the end destination of our evenings, where Jackie would force us all to drink an entire Britta of water.

Look carefully, we're actually wearing different clothes than in the first picture, which means they were taken different days. Jackie calls this one "Heather and Darren Fall in Love."

The next one is maybe the worst picture ever taken of me, but I'm illustrating a point, so go with it. Where are we sitting? Oh, that's right, the futon!

And finally yet another futon picture. I still have those boxers.

Holy crap!

2007-01-31T14:55:00.001-05:00

I have blog comments. I HAVE BLOG COMMENTS!

That is all. More later.

Traffic and the unexpected

2007-01-26T11:54:00.000-05:00

I ride my bike to and from work, for a sum total of 13-25 minutes every day, which gives me lots of time to think about how not to get hit by cars.

Our neighborhood subscribes to some sort of newfangled school of traffic flow design. It seems that rather than the relatively predictable "you are on a side street, you must stop at a stop sign at every cross street" design, they chose a design that minimized how many times you had to stop on each street. So if you are driving up Treat from 6th to Speedway, you stop at 5th, but not at 4th, then again at 3rd, then again at 1st. So you only have to stop at every other cross street.

This is great when you are driving around the neighborhood in your car. Having to stop at every cross street is annoying and maddeningly slow. But here's the problem: people are creatures of habit. The either want to stop at every cross street or at none of them.

So yesterday I make my usual turn down Treat, and the people on fourth have a stop sign and I don't, so I proceed to ride my bike through the intersection. But for some reason the person making a rolling stop at the 4th St. stop sign doesn't seem to think they need to actually stop. I'm not sure what they were assuming - that it was a 4 way stop, that bikes don't actually have the same status on the road as cars, that they just aren't subject to traffic laws - but what was certain was NOT that they were thinking "Hey, that's a stop sign, that means I come to a full stop and look before proceeding". Similar things happened twice on the way in this morning too.

Stuff like this happens all the time. The rather hysterical converse happens as well - I'll be stopped in my car at the Treat stop sign, and the person on 5th with NO STOP SIGN will yield to me. WTF?

I don't have a solution, other than to say that humans are creatures of habit, and maybe we should try to make things predictable for them rather than more efficient. Efficiency doesn't seem to be working that well, and I personally am of the opinion that getting hit by a car would be pretty inefficient.

Exahustion

2007-01-23T20:31:00.000-05:00

I'm writing this post at the end of my work day, 6:30 here, meaning I worked for 9.5 hours. I realize plenty of people work long hours, but I'm simply not used to putting in extra hours at my job. There was stuff that needed to be done, Will was here almost all night last night due to a server explosion. At least when I'm busy I'm not clock watching.

I'm listening to Sarah McLachlan's Christmas album. My dad burned me copies of some CDs and mailed them to me, and I've been trying to listen to them when I'm alone and uninterrupted at work. Christmas music in January, especially since I've been so resolute about not celebrating Christmas and probably heard more kwanzza music this year than Christmas music, is a little weird. But at the same time, with my first true "I don't celebrate Christmas" year behind me, it's nice to reflect a bit on why the season is so meaningful for my family and pretty much the rest of the Christian and quasi-Christian world. I'd reflect publicly, but my thoughts are pretty nascent and difficult to articulate at this point.

/geek

2007-01-12T15:04:00.000-05:00

Isn't the desire to customize every system in your life to make it perfect for you part of the geek ethos? I'm surprised that places like thinkgeek and jinx can ever sell t-shirts, because while some of them are funny, none of them are quite right enough for me. I'm not a level 12 paladin, I'm a level 60 mage. And even though I love to /dance, my main is a gnome. And it seems to me that whenever they make a shirt in women's sizes, the emphasis is on "hey, girl geeks are sexy, check me out". What if I'm a girl geek who's just a geek?

Enter Zazzle.com. You can design your own t-shirts. They come out costing a bit more than the premade ones, but you can make them yourself. I'm definitely making one with a picture of my toon when I'm around level 63 (60 is too round a number for a shirt) to copy the "I am not a geek!" shirt. I actually did this at lvl 46 too but never actually ordered it. And I also really want to make one that says "Real women roll gnomes". I'm not really sure what that even means, but I think it sounds good on a t-shirt.

The only problem I have with them is that I'm really sort of devoted to American Apparel's women's tees, and it appears that's not what Zazzle offers. So if someone can point me to a similar service on AA, that'd be teh awesomezorz.

/yawn

2007-01-12T12:12:00.000-05:00

I was at work at 7am this morning. Miracle of miracles! Getting into the office early is actually good for my productivity, once I get over the fact that I'm still waking up. The problem is convincing myself the night before that I really want to be in bed early enough to get to the office early. Our office coffee maker has made the proposition slightly more likely, although I'm still working on making coffee that doesn't kill the people who drink it.

I am making a good faith effort to keep this blog up to date, which makes me realize just how mundane my life really is.

Some random thoughts from this morning

2007-01-11T12:35:00.001-05:00

1. If I want inspiration, I'll buy a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. If I want leave-in conditioner, I'll buy leave in conditioner.
Apparently the fine folks at Herbal Essences just can't get enough of their own cleverness. These are the literal instructions for my conditioner:
use me: massage a quarter size into wet or dry hair. yield to my powers. take on the world.
Uh, yeah, sure. Or I could just use it to smooth out my split ends. By the way, a shout out to Bearolyn for pointing out to me that people with long hair need conditioner. Sometimes the obvious just escapes me.

2. If you want a sure fire way to ruin my day, pee on my clothes.
Thanks, Megatron. Megatron (aka TinyCat) is our new foster-to-adopt kitten. She's five months old, and seemed to be doing fine with the litter box, until this morning when I discovered she had peed on a pile of my clean clothes. I'm still inspecting this shirt, not entirely convinced she hasn't peed on everything I own. And god knows where else in the apartment.

3. I am just not excited about doing my taxes this year.
Maybe it's because it's the first year I have to deal with self-employment income, or because I strongly suspect we will owe money, or because we're no longer poor enough for the awesome retirement savings credits or free file, or perhaps I have recently begun to resemble a "normal person" who doesn't like doing their taxes. Last year I was so damn proud of myself for finding a bug in TaxCut online (if you chose one education credit over another, it incorrectly calculated the credit - if you follow that through to its logical conclusion, yes, I was using software to do my taxes but actually checked all the rules/math/etc.), the year before I was psyched about maneuvering to get us a giant rebate instead of owing several hundred dollars. This year there is nothing exciting. Seriously, being middle class is totally boring, tax-wise.

Ouch, and some thoughts on osteopaths

2007-01-10T13:45:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning with my trapezius in total spasms. Not in the usual spot - higher and involving my neck. I've been bad about the stretches and exercises I'm supposed to do, and I have a feeling this is the punishment.

Possibly the best thing that happened when we moved to Tucson is that I found the best osteopath EVER. In addition to the skeleton cracking high-velocity manipulations I was used to from my old osteopath, he uses passive techniques to gently make everything happy and back to how it is supposed to be. He even taught James how to do the passive technique on my constantly spazzing trapezius, and it's probably saved me 10 or so trips to the doctor now.

Anyway, James was already gone this morning - I popped some pills but am still in constant pain. As I rode in to work today, I couldn't help but wonder if some of the marked improvement in my mood when we moved here was due to a reprieve from the pain. Not only did I feel better physically, but some of the functional limitations of chronic back pain can make life pretty crappy - not being able to drive any sort of distance, avoiding bending over the counter to cook and chop things, not being able to turn in any weird direction for fear of making things worse.

Honestly I'm so happy to have a relatively permanent solution for the problem, I'm not even upset that it took me more than three years to find a doctor who could undo my pain. It makes me wonder how many people who have failed to find pain relief from the allopathic medical community just need a really good osteopath.

This is how people end up with children

2007-01-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

I know, I'm a year late. Last year everyone was blogging about the NY Times article The Cute Factor and cuteoverload.com. I am SO 2006. But in case anyone was doubting that cuteness actually serves an evolutionary purpose, I give you this:

Some boring stuff about sleep and coffee

2006-11-14T15:00:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning in a panic, because I was awake but didn't hear an alarm going off. That almost always means I have slept through my alarm, and that was in fact true this morning. I had planned on being at work at 8 or 8:30, and I didn't wake up until 9:15. Hopped in the shower, left for work without brushing my hair, only to discover upon my arrival that I don't seem to still have a hairbrush at work. But Will made me coffee, which pretty much made my morning. The idea was I got coffee because I was coming in to work early (well, technically on time), but I got coffee anyway. I think we may have just officially broken the reward system for arriving at work on time.

My body really seems to be forcing my hand on the sleep issue. I didn't sleep last night until a little before 2, and apparently my body demanded 7+ hours of sleep. Last week was a sleep nightmare, and I made up for it by basically sleeping my whole weekend away. Which of course has already screwed things up for getting back on a regular sleep schedule for this week.

These Hips Don't Lie

2006-10-31T10:57:00.000-05:00

My iPod, using its exquisite discretion as usual, decided to randomize all three versions of "Hips Don't Lie" in a row this morning. It's like it KNEW that my hips don't lie. /dance

Obligatory Blog Post

2006-10-06T19:29:00.000-04:00

I haven't had much I've felt like writing about lately. I've been procrastinating grad school apps, schoolwork and workwork, playing too many video games, and not getting enough sleep. All in all not really anything worth reporting. However, I know how much my faithful blog readers want to hear the intimate details of my life, so here are some of my recent accomplishments:

managed to accrue $64.75 in library fines at TPPL, blowing my previous library fines record out of the water
completely stopped cooking and now can recite the take out menus of about 80% of the restaurants in Tucson
reached level 60 with my gnome mage in WoW
downloaded both of the newer Shakira albums and danced an insane amount to Hips Don't Lie in my living room

God I'm lazy.

Mazzy Star

2006-09-14T18:47:00.000-04:00

I'm currently in love with the Mazzy Star cover of Wild Horses. I've been intermittantly in love with Mazzy Star since I was 13, but for some reason I had totally forgotten about her. Then a few weeks ago I was at Chipotle having a fabulous lunch of chips, guacamole, and a margarita (yeah, it got me some weird looks) and "Rhymes of an Hour" was on their stereo. You probably remember it from the Leonardo DiCaprio / Claire Danes Romeo and Juliet movie. She's so sultry and sweet at the same time. Everything I want in chick music to listen to at work on a Thursday afternoon. Thanks Mazzy Star!

Come to think of it, I think I really need a Shakespeare film festival this weekend. Bring on the Zeffirelli Hamlet!

Ennui

2006-09-06T18:34:00.000-04:00

Back when Dave had a soul crushing job doing software testing, we used to email all day just to make it through the day. There's something about sitting in front of a computer all day, working on projects that have very little personal meaning to you that makes the ennui set in hard.

These days Dave is doing contract work for an employer who actually cares if he works or not. I've needed to develop alternative coping mechanisms.

The first is the music of Jonathan Coulton, who brought the wonderful song "Code Monkey" into my life. Code Monkey is a standout, but I also suggest the "Baby Got Back" remix, "Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance", and the zombie song of the year, "Re Your Brains". You can listen to all of his songs on the web, and if you like them enough, you can buy his songs and albums.

And in case that music isn't geeky enough for you, my other ennui buster has been "The Picard Song" by DarkMateria. My favorite part is the part where he says "There are four lights". That's one of the many ongoing Star Trek jokes in our household. The song has also made me want to use "Engage" in all kinds of inappropriate contexts.

Engage!

Back to School

2006-08-22T15:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was my first day of my grad class for the fall semester. It looks like this semester is going to be "Participatory Action Research and Policy Change". I'm excited about the topic and I couldn't get into the intro policy course, so as usual I'm just diving in to the higher level course and making it up as I go along. Next task: getting the reader for the course. There is no orientation for non-degree students, so a whole bunch of my U of A experience has been figuring things out on my own.

The start of classes also means that I am phenomenally busy at work with all the beginning of semester stuff. So why am I blogging right now? Because I needed something to keep my head from exploding for a minute while I regather my chi.

Today is James' first day as a middle school English and public speaking teacher. I'm excited for him to have this new experience and think he will be a fantastic teacher. It also means there are now two teachers going by Mr. Kittredge out there. Scary!

And now for something completely different, a picture of me from college with two of my awesome 'shmen, Joe and Kumar.

Helvetica

2006-08-10T17:56:00.000-04:00

Apparently there is a documentary coming out in 2007 about the typeface Helvetica. It's the first time (aside from my obvious desire to see Snakes on a Plane) in a while I've been excited about a film enough that I might want to go out of my way to see it.

Much like my idea to read books about single word subjects (Cod, Salt, Coal), the idea of Helvetica intrigues me. Most people think "how could you possibly make a feature length film about a typeface"? I think "Boy, I can't wait to hear all the minutiae of Helvetica". I'm obsessive about details. It is never enough for me to learn about something on a surface level. I want to bore down until I understand the very atoms that make up whatever I am trying to understand. I want to stretch myself to the very edge of my intellect until I can't understand it any better. And then I want to ask more questions.

Small talk about the weather

2006-07-26T13:07:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it's true, I'm posting about the weather. This is our weather forecast for the next few days. Doesn't that just throw all your usual perceptions about living in the desert out the window? Yeah, I thought so.

This is the part of the summer that is genuinely unpleasant, just like the East Coast summer. It's hot, it's humid, everything sticks to you, and it sucks. The difference is now I have central air conditioning. And an umbrella, thankfully.

Zach Braff

2006-07-18T18:57:00.000-04:00

I have an unreasonable hatred of Zach Braff in general and Garden State in particular. I like the soundtrack (more on this later), but the script is just SO BAD I don't have words to describe it. James says I hate the movie because I had some petty complaint about the portrayal of psychiatric medications in it, and he's at least partially right, but Natalie Portman and her cute little helmet? Come on people!

Anyway, in checking links on my blog, I discovered that Zach Braff has a new website. How nice for him. And apparently a new movie. But the truly disturbing discovery was this: Zach Braff, who I consider to be the paradigm for lameness, and I listen to the same music. Seriously, The Last Kiss soundtrack looks like my work playlist (although I have officially washed my hands of Coldplay unless I need a quick auditory benzo to bring me out of a panic attack) and he has a "listening to" plug in on the side and we seriously are listening TO THE SAME SONG. Sia, Breathe Me. I realize me listening to that song might be lame, but the fact that Zach Braff's image staff who put up what are probably fake playlists chose that song too makes me sad.

I've been ranting about innane things an above average amount. I'm in one of those moods where I want to just punch someone - anyone - in the face. I mean, if I really had to choose, I might punch Don Zimmer, just because it would be funny, but I'd probably settle for an innocent small child in a pinch. I need a kickboxing class or smething.

When Wikis are actually Wiki

2006-07-18T18:14:00.000-04:00

I had never actually sat down and thought about why wikis are called wikis, so I consulted Wikipedia on the matter. I love the idea of the WikiWikiWeb. Any of you faithful readers (hah, readers) who are familiar with the wiki wiki machine know why. Apparently wiki wiki means "hurry quick" in Hawaiian, at least according to Wikipedia.

Anyway, in the course of wasting some time today, I came across the Extreme Programming Wiki. Now this wiki is a serious wiki. It has been edited by a million people, everyone keeps making up their own terms and articles and pages and adding to the "concept" or whatever. And you know what? It's a really bad idea. With the exception of a partially well written page on Test Driven Development, there is practically no useful information on it. Just a bunch of opinions and stuff people just made up. I mean, if ever there were a medium I would shine in, it would be something where you can just make everything up as you go along. My life is pretty wiki-like. But that doesn't mean I would want the general public to think that everything I make up is actual fact. Just like I wouldn't want anyone to think the way I use the word ninja (as an adjective, as in "my ninja writing abilities") is "actual English", despite it having caught on a bit in Monson back in the day.

So I'm going to state this for the record: if you just make something up, it is not a fact. If something is your opinion, it is also not a fact. I get quite persnickety about facts, so just don't confuse what is a fact, people. It will make me much happier.

¡Vamos a México!

2006-07-14T15:39:00.000-04:00

Dave came to visit me this past weekend, which rocked. We went to Mexico, it was hot as hell, we ate lots of meat and I discovered the new love of my life, Mexican popsicles, or paletas. I got made fun of for my Spanish, got a little drunk, made a friend, and ate bacon wrapped hot dogs. Thank god Dave pointed out to me that the most obvious way of getting rid of my "friend" was to say "adios amigo". It was like he taught me a new Spanish word. It had never even occurred to me. Hermosillo is a pretty and clean city, with not a ton to do, but it was fun anyway. Dave and I both experienced the hottest weather we've ever been in - 109 with 40% humidity that weather.com said felt like 135. How Dave didn't die of dehydration I don't know, because I drank about 4 times as much water as he did.

Oh, I also forgot within three seconds of entering Mexico that I wasn't supposed to drink the water, and got an agua fresca made with Mexican water. Other things that rocked about Mexico: our hotel was $20, there was a store devoted solely to selling backpacks, we didn't get stung by scorpions, Dave coined the phrase "contemporary ruins" to describe crumbling modern buildings, tacos, how nice people were to us, watching a movie in Russian subtitled in Spanish on the bus TWICE, buying two spanish language cookbooks, the bus driver who was joking with us about marijuana as we went through US customs, and the fact that people kept bringing us bowls of key limes with EVERYTHING we ate.

Overall, the Spanish speaking went better than expected, everyone understood me, and we got everything we needed taken care of. The only thing I couldn't quite handle was getting a straight answer on what to do with our tourist permits, but as it turns out, it seems no one actually cares about the tourist permits. The trip did make me realize just how limited my Spanish language skills are though, and I really want to make an effort to get better.

There's a paleteria down on South 6th Ave. here in Tucson, and they make some rocking popsicles. I'm going to see if I can buy the supplies (plastic bags that are used as molds and sticks) from them to try some at home. They're $1.50 each from the paleteria, so being able to make passable ones at home would be awesome.

Nightmare on error-handling street

2006-07-11T13:20:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning trying to somehow work out in my sleep how I had handled an error on the website involving a person's courses if they don't have an entry in our people section. How weird is it to wake up with an SQL query in your head? Pretty weird. Even weirder, the fact that relief washed over me when I remembered "WHERE course.PID = Main.PID".

As it turns out, I had handled the error semi-correctly by my sheer incompetence, and will be spending today rewriting a whole bunch of website code to actually handle errors gracefully.

Just to make things entertaining, my work computer appears to have some sort of failure going on. It keeps throwing memory-related errors, but each individual stick of memory tests good. It only throws errors with both sticks in a dual channel configuration, but even with both sticks in single channel, the actual problem (programs quitting because memory couldn't be read) continues even if memtest can't pick up an error. ARGH!

Keep it like a secret

2006-07-03T15:44:00.000-04:00

I read an article in yesterday's New York Times about how Americans are increasingly socially isolated and have fewer people who they can talk to about the most important things in their lives. More than the "Bowling Alone" phenomenon - or the weakening of community ties - written about by Robert D. Putnam, this new research asked people who they could talk to about things like serious health issues or who should take care of their children if they die. The study, conducted by sociologists at Duke and here at University of Arizona, found that on average adults had two close confidantes.

Reading this made me feel exceptionally blessed with a strong social circle, even if that circle is scattered all over the country. I have four or five people who I literally talk to about anything, and even my social group beyond that consists mainly of friends who I am extremely close to and could turn to in times of trouble.

I've been wanting to post for a long time about PostSecret, a "community art project" where people write and illustrate in some way a secret on a postcard. What strikes me is that this is the very phenomenon the researchers were investigating. People send their deepest darkest secrets here. Often these secrets are secrets of despair - suicidality, sexual or physical abuse, or paralyzing fear. Sometimes they're the opposite - a desire to live life more fully, or deep love for someone estranged. Usually when I read PostSecret, what strikes me is that most of the secrets there don't need to be secrets. These are things that many people go through, that many people think, that many people survive. They are things that no one wants to talk about, but it is the act of talking about them that will free you.

I'll admit that I'm not perfect in this regard. I have plenty of things I'm afraid to talk about sometimes, and things that I don't express as often as I would like. But I feel like as time passes, I aspire to keep fewer secrets. I want the people I love to know how much I love them. I want them to be able to share their deepest, darkest secrets with me. And I want to be able to do the same with them. A secret only has as much power as you give it. Once it's out in the open, I've found it isn't nearly as dark and scary as you thought it would be.

Idea day!

2006-06-30T15:15:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I had what I've decided to call an "idea day". It's a day where my creative juices are flowing, and I have a far above average number of crazy ideas, 99.97% will never go anywhere beyond the idea stage.

It seems there are a few factors that go into having an idea day. Based on yesterday's experiences, I've attempted to distill it down into the most basic components:

Low stress levels
Well rested
Inspirational reading material
A feeling of excitement about the future

I wish I could say these things came together for me on a regular basis, but it's a semi-rare occurance these days. I wonder if I had idea days more often if they would be as fast and furious as they are now. Am I actually generating the ideas right then or just releasing the ideas that have been building up in my head?

One of my ideas from idea day was an effective way of capturing the ideas. Even though I know most of them will never come to fruition, I want to know what they are. I have a mini-voice recorder I use for this sometimes, although I hate having to hear my recorded voice when I play them back. Being a nerd, there's going to be a database involved. Boo yeah!

Another idea that came out of idea day is a webmaster group at the University to provide the kind of collegial support I was longing for yesterday. It looks like this one is actually going to happen - I have a meeting next week to get the process started.

Industry Conferences and the Daily Grind

2006-06-29T18:52:00.000-04:00

So when I'm not making mojitos and playing World of Warcraft, I am a web developer for University of Arizona. My boss considers "keeping abreast of industry developments" to be one of my primary duties, so I read lots of industry news, including a decent number of blogs. (I keep meaning to post a blogroll, but I'm sooooo lazy.)

This past weekend was BloggerCon, and the folks over at Monkey Bites were in attendence. Yet another industry conference in I have no chance of going to, because I don't actually work in the industry. (Actually, BloggerCon is actually more of an un-industry un-conference, but the point of this post is conferences.)

Most of the time, I don't mind the differences between the education sector and the private sector. I've learned to swallow the crappy pay, the fact that I'm a single webmaster with a single site rather than part of a team, and the total lack of anything resembling a "development budget". But conferences, especially the big ones like SXSW and Web 2.0, remind me of the divide between people who work "in the industry" and me. They have money for conferences and training, we don't. In industry, there is a constant push for innovation and excellence, in education many times the goal is just getting by.

I am a passionate web designer and developer. I'm opinionated about user interface design, web standards, and accessibility. When I first started working on websites for a living, I soaked up information about how to do the best job possible like a sponge. I could literally tell you every supported and non-supported CSS property in all the major browsers at the time. Now my days are mostly spent doing updates and day-to-day maintenence. I feel like my enthusiasm for web technologies has waned, and I'm burnt out and jaded.

So I guess this is really a post about the daily grind. Conferences are a break from the daily grind. I suppose vacations and the more flexible schedule that I get from working in education are too. Mostly I miss the opportunity to talk to other people who are passionate about the things that I am passionate about - to hear their ideas and bounce my ideas off of them. Surely there must be some way for me to get that here at the University. In the meantime, I'll live vicariously through conference blogging.

The Perfect Mojito

2006-06-23T18:27:00.000-04:00

So a while ago, Dave and I were talking about how fast mint grows, and what one does with all that mint. I said "Mojitos! They're so 2001!". But apparently mojitos are still trendy, because they're featured on Bacardi commercials right now.

My first mojito recipe came from a May 2002 issue of Cooking Light, and is the one I've been using. Ten mint leaves, 2 tsp sugar, 2 oz. light rum, 2 tbsp. fresh lime juice, and 6 oz. club soda. All in all, I'm happy with this version of the mojito. Dave's is slightly sweeter and has less lime juice, and he's happy with his too. We've both working on the mint squishing so that we don't break up the leaves too much.

So I looked online to see if there was a general consensus on mojito making. There isn't. Lots of the recipes I found were much sweeter, some used less lime, some used a sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar. Some recipes have lots less club soda, and it seems that adding more soda has been part of the "Americanization" of the drink. And then to make it more confusing, someone who claimed he knew what he was doing said that you should actually start with lime slices and muddle them in the glass with the mint and sugar to release lime essential oils, and forget about lime juice entirely. Someone else said it's actually better with dark rum instead of light.

Now it pays to bear in mind that neither Dave nor I have ever had a mojito made for us at any bar, or in Cuba, or anywhere else. We're going on our innate gringo mojito instinct, which probably is about as strong in us as say, The Force.

So tonight the mojito experiments begin. I don't know what'll be going down at Dave's house, but I have grand plans to refine my mojito into the perfect (for me) drink.

Just Stuff

2006-06-15T15:39:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to write a new post for a while now, but they always seem to get stalled part way through. I'm not sure why.

Things her have been pretty medium for a while now. James is out of school, I decided not to take a class this summer, I went to DC for Sarah's graduation, Gracie came to visit, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my summer. I think I'm going to to to a yoga class tonight. Also, it's a bazillion degrees in Tucson. I mean, 101.

Milestones

2006-05-03T13:30:00.000-04:00

This blog has devolved a little too much into a "what dorky computer thing I did today" chronicle, so this post will be devoted to non-geeky things.

Yesterday I had my last Principles of Epidemiology class, so all I have left this semester is a take home exam. Overall I'd say the class was a good learning experience, both in teaching me about epi and teaching me about what I want out of a graduate program. I'm still totally conflicted about grad school and if I actually want to do an MPH or enter the public health field at all, but at least now I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm in for.

James graduates next Saturday with his Masters in Theater Studies. He's going to have a graduate degree! This degree was the whole point of our move to Tucson, and I'm really proud of his accomplishment and the great work he's done here. If anyone is looking for an expert on Albee, the American Dream, or any number of other esoteric theater topics, I've got the perfect candidate for you.

In other graduation news, Sarah is getting her BA in International Affairs from George Washington University in a few weeks. I officially feel old now that my little sister is graduating from college. I mean didn't I just start college about 5 minutes ago?

Finally, Jackie and Mason got married April 15th. Their wedding was absolutely beautiful - overlooking the ocean in San Diego. Later that night they had a Pirates vs. Ninjas party, which was fantastically fun. And I got to see all my peeps, which was awesome. We also went to the San Diego zoo, went out for some of the best Indian food I've had in a while, and swung by Chino to visit James' grandparents on the way home. I've attached a picture of me, Gracie and James at the party and a picture of Jackie and Mason looking all marital.

Morning Roundup

2006-04-25T14:30:00.000-04:00

From the Interwebs this morning:

Actually cool - Yahoo Farechase. Now you don't have to search multiple discount airline sites. Yahoo Farchase does it for you. And has all kinds of other useless bells and whistles. I personally like that their "choose a departure time" feature actually works, so I can make sure my flights don't leave before 7 am.

And a hillarious parody of Web 2.0 featuring my all time favorite Internets innovation, the blink tag. Web 2.1 sever side blink tag

And in case you haven't read the hype on Web 2.0, here's a brief introduction. I think it's mostly a load of crap for those of us who still have traditional websites to run instead of chasing venture capital, but I'm willing to beg, borrow or steal any idea that might make my life easier or my site better. Thanks giant XML!

It's official

2006-04-24T18:11:00.000-04:00

I'm obsessed with World of Warcraft. Like all I'm thinking about right now is going home to start some auctions and level up my tailoring. The only thing stopping me from doing it right now is that running WoW via Remote Desktop tanks the connection and generally messes everything up.

Three months or so into playing, I have a lvl 24 mage and a lvl 28 druid. But then I decided I hate my druid and don't enjoy playing the character. So I've started a new mage to be my main. Her name is Pamplemousse and she's way cute. I'll post a screen shot when I get a chance.

Just some stuff

2006-04-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

It's 71 in Tucson right now, and only expected to hit 81 today. That's downright chilly for late April here. I'm going to do something after work to take advantage of the nice weather. Like, you know, play computer games.

I found this Wikipedia entry on "leetspeak". It's maybe the funniest thing I've ever read. Note the totally egregious misuse of the word sociological.

My doctor's office called me this morning at 7:40 to cancel an appointment. In what world is 7:40 a reasonable time to call me? The world where I leave for work at 8? Irrelevant I say! I wasn't planning on getting up until 8:05, so I got back into bed and slept until 9.

I'm an official freak about timezones. I used to not care, because no one who lives in the Eastern time zone needs to care. Everything is calibrated to the East Coast. But now I live in Mountain Standard Time. Always MST, because we don't observe daylight savings time. One of my top ten pet peeves is the misuse of "standard time" when one really means daylight time. Last week Blogger said they were going down at 4 pm PST. Which of course was a lie, because it's Daylight Time right now, and they went down at 4 pm PDT. So I wrote to them, being a timezone freak and all. And today their scheduled outage posting is for 4 pm PDT. I feel so vindicated.

Thoughts on Software

2006-04-12T15:31:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I was signed in on a computer where I am not a local administrator, and I tried to use what I call the "calendar" in Windows that you can access by double clicking on the taskbar clock. I was confronted with the error message "You do not have sufficient privileges to change the system time." Huh? But I want to look at the calendar!

I thought it was kind of funny because it occurs to me that it really is the "control panel" to change the system time, and I doubt when they programmed it that anyone was thinking of it as "the calendar". But I use it that way all the time. So does one of my coworkers. I mean, if the developers were thinking of it this way, they would make it so you can still use the calendar features but not be able to commit any time changes.

This happens to me CONSTANTLY with software. In fact, now that I've realized there are "actual humans" programming these things, I often send in feature requests when I bump up against something in software that drives me crazy. For example, in Microsoft's FrontPage, you can't use their hyperlink tool from code view. Well, maybe I imagined that or am losing my mind, but I swear you used to not be able to, but I just did it a minute ago when I went to confirm it. Thunderbird doesn't have a "send this message at a certain future time" feature, and as far as I can tell, there's no extension that does it either. I can't find a single calendar app that does what I want it to do (easy to create events from email, multiple to-do lists, email reminders/confirmations, indexed search - I hope Google is listening since they have 3 of the 4 already). In fact, off the shelf products can be so infuriating sometimes, I totally understand the impulse to just come up with your own solution. But I'm not really up for writing a calendaring application, so I'll just sit here whining about it instead.

OMGWTFBBQ!

2006-04-08T04:09:00.000-04:00

I'm so pissed off at Thunderbird right now. Its "adaptive spam filter" has been catching my Orbitz deal detector emails. So a week and a half ago, my plane ticket to Sarah's graduation would have been $214 - had I actually gotten the email and booked my flight. This week I bought my ticket for $286. How exactly is it $72 more to book a ticket this week than last week? Sigh. I really shouldn't complain. I'm flying out of Tucson and using a bizarre configuration of airports into and out of DC and don't have to fly in or out of BWI. But still, what exactly prompted my spam filter to catch that of all emails? It hates me, that's why.

A while ago I was talking to Sarah and she told me her New Year's Resolution was to "stop attaching excessive meaning to inanimate objects". I thought that was the funniest thing I've ever heard, but I guess if I'm pissed off at my email software, it wouldn't be a bad resolution for me either. Except I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions - apparently I was so vehement about it when James and I were first dating that he's been afraid to make resolutions and tell me about it ever since for fear of me thinking he is "feeble minded" or something like that.

Windows on Intel Macs

2006-04-06T12:28:00.000-04:00

Ooh, two consecutive Apple posts.

I spend a decent amount of time at work doing Macintosh desktop support. I have this duty based on the fact that in college, I was a Mac user. So even though I used to love my Mac, I currently have a lot of disdain for Macs and their users. Especially since as tech support, I rarely encounter a Mac that is working correctly, leading me to believe that Apple is selling a bunch of permanently broken computers.

But the other day I had a Mac user ask me for a text only HTML editor, and I got to wax rhapsodic about BBEdit, which is hands down the single best piece of software I have ever used. It's SO GOOD, I've been thinking about moving all my web development work over to my Mac. The only thing stopping me is that my Mac is kinda sucky in comparison to my Windows machine and the PITA factor of working on two different operating systems constantly can't be overlooked. Oh, and my boss would mock me mercilessly. And all my database stuff is stranded on Windows, at least for the time being.

But now that Apple has announced that their Intel Macs will be natively dual bootable into Mac OS X and Windows, I think it's fair to say I'll be seriously considering a Mac as my next non-work computer. I'm not even sure I'd boot it into Windows that often.

Apple Store Adventure

2006-03-15T11:13:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I decided that I just enjoy the mudane details of everyday life more than your average person. I think everything I do is just so interesting. I'd like to claim it's some sort of Buddhist "in the moment" sort of thing, but I think it really just comes down to me being easily amused and narcissistic.

Yesterday my iPod decided to take a vow of silence, apparently to protest my attempts to use it to transfer data from work to home. It stopped speaking Windows. Despite some gentle reassurances that I would let it go sit next to my iMac for companionship (Apple has made it quite clear that they only sell anthropomorphized electronics that have feelings and make sad faces instead of giving you those cold, impersonal error messages. So I thought some positive reinforcement and spending some time with another happy Mac might do it some good. I also considered trying to feed it some Prozac through the dock connector, but it appears that despite the iPod's tendency toward emotional instability, Apple has not yet added antidepressant capabilities to it.) it still insisted on crashing Windows Explorer and iTunes every time it was connected to the computer. So off to the Apple Store I went.

The Apple Store is not actually in Tucson, because your average resident of Tucson is not classy enough to be a Mac owner. I had to drive up into the foothills and arrived at an open air mall that had VALET PARKING. Do they have a shuttle bus to take you the 15 feet from Talbots to Crate and Barrel too? I don't see how valet parking could possibly be relevant in a mall situation. We're in the middle of a drought, but this place is covered in non-native (and therefore thirsty) plants and had fountains everywhere. Upscale retail is creepy. Anyway, I go to the Apple store and they replace my sick iPod with a new one. Mission accomplished.

Since I was halfway into the Santa Catalinas, I drove home on 1st Ave because it avoids having to drive down a twisty mountain road. On my drive down 1st Ave, I noticed all sorts of new things. I finally drove by the hideous apartments that were recently built and had only ridden past on my bike and now know they are at 1st and Wetmore. One of the pawn shops was bought out by SuperPawn and is proudly advertising that they are "Under New Management". Yeah, I'm sure that will really help clean up the pawn shop's image. I passed one of my favorite Tucson businesses, the House of Hubcaps. Seriously, that never gets old. I laugh every time. The Woods public library has some sort of neon sign I'd never noticed before, confirming my suspicions that 1st has special zoning regulations that require garish, hideous, and preferably glowing signage.

I drove back to work to put some files onto New iPod, and when I left the office my car barely started. I drove home and it died in the parking lot of our apartment complex. This is the third time the Trashmobile has died in the past two weeks, and it's beginning to get a little old. The first time there was something actually wrong with it, but the second and third times are because the DEALERSHIP BROKE MY CAR! Sigh. Hopefully they will fix it today.

An unusually mundane day

2006-02-15T16:44:00.000-05:00

Can something be unusually mundane? By definition, no. So I guess I'm having an ordinarily mundane day. Oh, the mundanity!

The most exciting thing that has happened today is that I found the PHP function I've been looking for to finish writing a form processing script. I'm so excited I could fall asleep. Or maybe I'm just tired.

Now I'm going to go read a book about Javascript. The day is getting more and more exciting by the minute.

End of an era

2006-02-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

Tonight Fox is airing the last four episodes of Arrested Development. I'm going to forgo the excitement that is the Winter Olympics opening ceremony to watch them. I then have an hour and a half blocked out for mourning the loss of my dear offbeat television comedy.

Ever since the beginning I've known it was too good to be true. Anything that I find as funny as Arrested Development can never last on network television. Seriously, I should be a one woman test audience to predict doomed shows. Apparently Showtime is in talks to pick up the show, but it's far from a done deal.

This is going to be a rough TV season end for me. I'm losing Arrested Development, Alias and The West Wing plus Six Feet Under earlier this year. Actually, now that I write that, it doesn't seem nearly as bad. The West Wing should have been cancelled when Aaron Sorkin left the show and has sucked since Season 5. Alias is past its prime, although I think a Spy Daddy spinoff would be fantastic. I miss Six Feet Under a lot, but at least HBO didn't let it drag on like they are with The Sopranos.

Things I hate

2006-02-01T17:25:00.000-05:00

In no particular order, complete with ordinal numbers to confuse the matter:

web apps that don't tab correctly
the turn of the century
my new computer monitor
the overcrowded bike racks at my apartment complex
paranoia
pharmaceutical reformulation patents
websites that require registration
del.icio.us
decorative fruit trees
end-user license agreements
Mondays
IE specific Javascript
people who don't know how to drive safely near cyclists

New Glasses

2006-01-26T17:25:00.000-05:00

I got new glasses yesterday. I'm back to plastic frames and I think they are pretty damn cute. But the part you look through is way smaller than my old glasses, so I'm getting used to that. I've also felt like everything has been about 2 inches closer than it really is, and I'm hoping that is me getting used to new glasses and not some sort of rift in the space-time continuum. I'll attach a picture when I get non-lazy enough to actually take one.

The eye doctor said I should take my glasses off when I'm working at the computer or reading to prevent me from getting more nearsighted. Uh....problem is I can't really see my computer screen that well without my glasses on. And then I forget to put them back on and walk down the hallway and someone says hi to me and I don't know who they are. So I might have to settle for the inevitability of my eyes getting worse. Apparently the human eye wasn't designed to spend 90% of its time focusing on something 18 inches away.

Material Girl

2006-01-25T12:55:00.000-05:00

I used to be a little obsessed with the attainment of material goods, but as I've gotten old and wise, that has faded quite a bit. I still have a few obsessions (yarn, bike stuff, yoga dvds I have no intention of ever doing) but overall I just don't buy that much stuff anymore.

That being said, I occasionally have serious thing-lust. For example, I lust after all varients of iPods even though I already have a perfecty functional iPod. One of my latest lusts is t-shirts. I really want these t-shirts from threadless.com:

Actually, Threadless sells out of designs all the time, so I just ordered "The Communist Party". I'm taking a wild guess on fit, but I think it will probably work. $17 for a t-shirt pretty much blows my clothing budget for the next two months, but I'll probably survive. Too bad though, I also really want the "Hugs Not Drugs" t-shirt I saw at Target. That's the next in my t-shirt collection, although it is of lower priority because I can't wear it to work. I'm still deciding on the work appropriateness of the commies.

Update: She who hesitates is without a cool t-shirt. I put the shirt into my shopping cart and then had a huge debate with myself over ordering a second shirt. As I was falling asleep last night, I remembered I'd never placed the order and thought about getting up to do it. Alas, when I got to work this morning, "The Communist Party" was completely sold out. I requested a reprint, although I'm sure I'll be waiting a while.

Update again: I guess Threadless made some sort of inventory error, because I just checked again and they had it in stock! Hooray!

Hello, readers!

2006-01-19T18:35:00.000-05:00

Well, the word is out. Hi peeps! I apparently have some readers now. I'm a fair-weather blogger, so don't be surprised if I don't update for months at a time. I mean I've only made 20 posts in a year. But I'm a little excited to have people reading. Cool!

Victor Garber

2006-01-19T18:21:00.000-05:00

Victor Garber is the only celebrity who I have ever wanted to write a fan letter to. If I ever wrote that fan letter, it would read something like this:

Dear Victor Garber,
You make me happy to be alive.
Love, Heather

For those of you who don't know, he is best known currently for his role of Spy Daddy Jack Bristow on the television show Alias. The quotes are so mundane that I won't even bother to repeat them - his magic is all in the delivery. Rent the DVDs, especially the Pilot where Sydney's finacee calls Spy Daddy for his blessing. It's classic.

He also recieved an Emmy nomination this past year for his guest appearance on Will and Grace. Just picturing him saying "It's sinfully delicious" almost makes me die laughing.

James got me the best birthday gift ever this past year, which was an autographed Victor Garber Alias trading card. It's shiny and metallic, but more importantly, it has been touched by the One True Garber. I have it in a frame and briefly considered putting it on my desk at work (which is woefully underdecorated, with a Penny Arcade comic, a stolen social norms campaign poster, a poster of an Intel 386 processor with a real 386 processor stuck to it, and a birthday card from my coworkers) but then I decided that I would have a hard time expressing why a television show trading card was such a cherished posession. I mean without sounding creepy and obsessed. Because I am creepy and obsessed.

Things I learned today

2006-01-13T14:18:00.000-05:00

I learned and did some cool things today! I feel smart!

First, I learned how to pass command line parameters to an application in Windows XP from the GUI. You make a shortcut, then go view the shortcut's properties. On the target line, after the actual target to execute (like C:\Heather\whatever.exe) you put a space and then add the parameters. So it looks like this: C:\Heather\whatever.exe -do -this.

When you combine this with the ability to add a keyboard command to a shortcut (also under Properties), you can pretty much conquer the world. Or at the very least launch and minimize your calendar to the system tray with a keyboard command. I already have keyboard commands for all my frequently used folders, which is a huge click saver.

Other computer related stuff: I upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5, which broke all my extensions but seems to be a big step in the right direction, especially the inline spell check and the ability to delete attachments from IMAP messages. I also installed the minimize to tray extension for Firefox and an app that minimizes Sunbird to the tray as well. Sunbird is actually a lot better than the old Thunderbird calendar extension, although I'm looking forward to an actual release of Lightning, an extension that will integrate the two.

A final Mozilla note: a quick check at my webpage stats at work reveal that Firefox is now up to 12.5% of our users. Even my parents are using it. If that's not a bad sign for Internet Explorer, I don't know what is.

Oh God....

2006-01-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

I installed World of Warcraft on my computer. I fired up James' guest account. I created two characters. I played with James and later with Ted. I'm pretty sure life as I used to know it is over. I'm seriously considering buying the full game. I'm seriously considering spending $15 of my money per month to engage in this timesuck of an activity.

The folks at WoW are pretty smart. I know nothing about other MMORPGs, but there is a very big social component to the game. You can group and play with friends. You can chat in game with just your group, or with just your friends. Lately James has been playing with two of MY friends. He talks to my friend Jackie WAY more than I do, and I was beginning to feel left out. To them, the solution was obvious: I needed my own account.

Uh, no. I hate video games, especially 3D ones, because I always run into walls. The utter pointlessness of games is never lost on me, even 12 hours into playing SimCity when I'm fretting over the gravity of my traffic control problems and cursing my Sims for not taking the damn bus. It's just not my cup of tea.

Except that it is. After a few hours of running into cacti, I began to get the hang of it. I begin to like it. I begin to run AROUND things instead of into them. I make plans to upgrade some of my computer components (thanks Ted!). It's all over. I'm hooked.

Insomnia

2005-12-29T02:24:00.000-05:00

I've been having a hell of a time sleeping at appropriate times lately. Being in the wrong time zone is exacerbating matters, meaning that I'm sitting here at 2:24 am typing on my lame blog, hoping the one person I know on Skype will sign on. I should go meditate or just try getting in bed, but lately intertia seems to take over around midnight. Oh well, it's only midnightish Tucson time.

We're in New England for Christmas, or the "holiday closure" as the U of A would say instead of saying they are forcing us to take vacation time this week. We spent most of Saturday travelling, then were at my parents' house in Massachusetts until this morning. Today we drove from their house to James' parents house in Maine. Friday evening we swing by Boston en route to NYC to see Sweeny Todd on Saturday. Saturday night we return to Massachusetts just long enough to turn around and go back to the airport to fly home Sunday morning. It's felt a little whirlwind so far, but it is fanastic to see our families.

While I was at my parents', my childhood friend Becca came to visit with her new baby Arianna. Well, Ari's actually been here for 10 months, but it was the first time I got to meet her. She is of decidedly above average cuteness, and at least for 6 hours yesterday was very well behaved and non-fussy. She's the kind of infant who could totally dupe an unsuspecting individual into thinking parenthood could be a good idea. Photographic cuteness evidence is attached.

El Tour Wrap Up

2005-11-21T21:01:00.000-05:00

Saturday was my big charity bike ride, El Tour de Tucson. It's 109 miles around the perimeter of Tucson. I've ridden 104 miles before, but it took me something like nine and a half hours and involved things like sitting at picnic tables and eating turkey sandwiches. El Tour is THE big deal bike ride for cyclists in Tucson, and it's kind of the culmination of the season, even though you can pretty much ride year round in Tucson.

The start was seriously intimidating. Being me, I only managed to drag my sorry self to the start line with about 15 minutes to spare. James did some last minute number pinning and unloaded my bike while I kept myself busy by being confused and nervous. I lined up in the silver section and pretty soon we were off. The start went much more smoothly than I anticipated and everyone in my section gave everyone else lots of room.

I joined a paceline with some Team in Training folks from Central California. They were good riders and lots of fun to ride with. We planned to stop at the first rest stop, but somehow I missed it and lost them. The next 25 or so miles was spent looking for people to draft without much success. Finally I met up with a guy from Phoenix whose name I forgot within seconds of him telling me, and we rode together for a while.

The ride is great especially because the intersections are controlled and bikes pretty much get to go no matter what. The flip side is it's a really bad day to be driving in Tucson. James and I were supposed to meet in a parking lot at Oracle and Rancho Vistoso. I arrived within minutes of my planned arrival time and hung around for about 20 minutes. As it turns out, James was stuck in El Tour traffic at that very intersection that whole time. We missed each other, and poor James spent the whole day driving around looking for me and never finding me.

At this point I've totally given up on making it in 7 hours to get a girly gold award thing. I rode solo a while, rode and chatted with some people, and generally had a fun time. I had plenty of energy the whole time and generally was in less pain than I usually am on training rides. I'll chalk it up to adrenaline.

The best part of the ride was definitely the final push up my old nemesis, Silverbell. I stopped at a rest stop just after Rattlesnake pass to fill my bottles and take off my armwarmers. I had a bizarre conversation with a volunteer who tried to tell me that it was "all downhill from here" and that we were currently at a higher elevation than the start. I knew this wasn't true at all, and argued with him for a minute. But then I looked at my watch and realized I had a chance of making it in my original goal time of 7 hours. So I hopped back on my bike and was off. I was still looking for people to draft with me, and I asked this guy who had been with me for the past few miles if he wanted to pull each other in. He said sure, and I mentioned we could probably make it in 7 hours, and he got really excited about helping me meet my goal. So Val and his friend Warren from Durango Colorado hammered all the way up Silverbell letting me draft most of the way. I did a few short pulls, and we were really hustling. It's the fastest I've ever ridden that section of Silverbell. Heather 1, Silverbell 0. Alas, we got stopped at stoplights three times, and finished in 7 hours, 1 minute and 12 seconds. I'm pretty happy with that result. I was shocked that I made it that quickly, and now I'm excited to see how fast I can do it next year.

Jonathan finished in just under 6 hours, so he got gold and won the recumbent division.

Here's a picture of me at Rattlesnake Pass. I still have my armwarmers on, but it's probably 70 degrees.

Soy yogurt

2005-11-16T10:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't eaten soy yogurt in six years. The reason I know this is because it roughly coincides with when I met James. Not that James got me to stop eating soy yogurt, but because I remember that when I met him, I was on a Jackiesque food kick involving soy yogurt, lemon-ginger echinacea juice, and baby carrots.

This morning I ate breakfast, which is notable in itself. But the real surprise of the morning came in how much soy yogurt (or "cultured soy" as it is apparently called) has improved in the past 6 years. Not once did I think I was eating cherry flavored tofu or rotten soymilk. It tasted like a less tangy yogurt. Damn, I might even go buy some more.

Dork Machine

2005-11-15T17:41:00.000-05:00

I've been working on beating my computer into submission so that it does exactly what I want, when I want it. My first attempt was installing ActiveWords, a program that recognizes keywords and uses those keywords to launch programs, open directories or files, or replace the typed text with a prechosen phrase. However, it was having problems recoginizing Firefox as my default browser, pretty much rendering it useless. And it hung in the background, slowing my computer down by logging every keystroke and trying to recognize my special words.

Luckily, I work with some people who are quite good at these things. Apparently, Windows has all kinds of built in functionality that has somehow escaped my knowledge. That's actually not surprising, because despite having used Windows for about 10 years, I've never felt the need to learn much about how anything worked. This has been a very successful defense against accidentally falling into a desktop support role at any of my jobs.

So thanks to my co-worker Will, I now know how to do scheduled tasks and customized keyboard shortcuts. I hit ctrl + alt + W and my five weather websites open up in tabs in Firefox. It rocks my world.

Static cling

2005-10-29T18:39:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to a Halloween party. It was one of those "costumes aren't mandatory but we'll definitely make fun of you for being insufferably lame" sort of parties.

I went as static cling, which was a huge hit. Credit must be given where it is due - to Chris' sister Terra, who came up with the idea. (Terra's other fantastic ideas included my personal favorite "The Grapes of Wrath" - get grapes, throw them at people.) I teased up my hair, pinned socks all over my clothes, and stuck a balloon on my head. Photographic evidence is attached.

I don't usually go to parties. In fact, I don't really have any friends in Tucson, so my social life is limited to bike rides with my coworkers and lots of quality time with James. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I don't usually go to parties.

I had a surprisingly fun time. I knew enough people that it wasn't uncomforatable, and since it was a costume party you always at least had your costumes to talk about. James stayed home, not really liking "costumes" or "parties" or "people he doesn't know". I chatted with some grad students from my department, had a few drinks, and generally had a good time

Bike Madness

2005-10-20T19:21:00.000-04:00

So I've been going on bike rides every weekend, and I'm truly obsessed. I haven't had lots of energy for riding during the week, but I get out every Saturday for a nice long ride with my coworkers.

This past weekend, Jonathan and I rode out to Sonoita, which was my first 100-mile ride. In bike parlance, a 100 mile ride is called a "century" and it is officially a "big deal" when you complete your first one. The ride was actually 104.3 miles. I rode it on my brand new Specialized Jett Gel saddle, which appears to be the answer to my desperate prayers for a saddle that would let me ride until I was tired and not just until I couldn't stand sitting on the damn saddle anymore.

The ride out to Sonoita is beautiful. The first part is the usual trip out to Vail, via the New Old Vail Road. Apparently it is now called "Mary Ann Cleavland Way" since having two Old Vail Roads was even more confusing than your typical Tucson road name confusion. After a stop at Quik Mart in Vail, we rode out AZ highway 83 to Sonoita. It's a climb most of the way, until you reach the top about 10 miles outside of town. And by town, I mean the first gas station with food and water that you come to. I actually have no idea if there's anything else in Sonoita, other than windswept desert grassland and at least one Harley biker club that cleans up their section of adopted highway on Saturday. But the ride is beautiful, and I can see why 83 is designated a scenic drive. It's a sort of "Best of Southern Arizona" embodied in a 30 mile stretch of road.

We stopped at a gas station/deli with some excessively quaint name that was clearly designed for tourist brochures. I got a turkey sandwich and some Propel fitness water and thoroughly enjoyed the break from pedalling. We refilled our water bottles and headed back home. Since it was a climb and I'm relatively slow on the downhills and flats compared to Jonathan, the ride clocked in at an epic 9 hours, with 7 hours and 40 minutes of actual bike-in-motion time.

Now that I've completed a 100+ mile ride, I'm much more confident in my ability to finish El Tour de Tucson. Just four more Saturdays of training rides before the big event.

Silverbell 2, Heather 0

2005-08-09T15:07:00.000-04:00

This weekend's long group ride was West Silverbell, an 84 mile trek out to Silverbell Mine and back. It's actually about as flat a ride as you can get in Tucson, but it kicked my ass. I knew I was in trouble when we were still 30 miles away from home and I was tired.

Ordinarily, I would just strategically avoid Silverbell for the rest of my natural life and not worry about it. Unfortunately, El Tour de Tucson finishes with a ride up Silverbell. On paper, it's not that bad. Just a slight uphill grade. Maybe 1-2%. But it goes on for 10 miles. And there's ALWAYS a headwind and it's always the end of a ride. The whole road just makes me want to curl up on the side of the road and go to sleep.

Mondays are hard

2005-08-08T14:50:00.000-04:00

So it's Monday again. Mondays are easily the toughest day of the week for me. I go to bed too late Sunday night because I don't want the weekend to be over. Then I wake up Monday morning and have to drag myself into work approximately on time. Monday morning is the time that people forget their passwords or have their computers accidentally unplugged by cleaning staff over the weekend or need someone to fix the giant mess they've made trying to upgrade something over the weekend. I usually have one of those to fix on Monday morning, and email to catch up on. And then I have to decide what to do. It's the problem with having a job that is self directed - which project do I work on? And what on earth was I working on Friday when I left?

I hunt around for sticky notes, both real and virtual, and find a few things to do. Not surprisingly, they're all stuff I've been putting off because it is unpleasant. I choose the least unpleasant to do, which means that the really unpleasant stuff will still be waiting for me next Monday. It seems that by the end of each week, I know how to do my job and what I am working on. Then I go home for the weekend and when I come back Monday, my brain has abandoned me completely. I really need to start working on projects from start to finish so that I don't have to keep so many projects in my brain-RAM all the time.

let's go ride bikes

2005-06-16T13:27:00.000-04:00

A few months ago (three months, to the day, to be exact) I got a road bike. It is, in a word, awesome. Considering I upgraded from the cheapest Target mountain bike, the difference is remarkable. I used to go for 15 mile rides and get off the bike with my legs all wobbly and feel like I was going to die. Now I can ride 30 miles with ease, and 50 miles without dying.
Riding bikes has changed my entire veiw of the world. In spring (February here in Tucson) I noticed the wildflowers blooming long before James because I ride past them every day. I notice people's landscaping, and which houses in my neighborhood are occupied by university students, and when the public schools aren't in session, all because I'm traveling by at 15 mph instead of 35. It is wonderful to be able to slow down and not only see what is around you, but also smell and hear and even feel. I feel more connected to the natural world living in the middle of the city riding my bike than I ever did driving near my parents house.
The side benefit of riding my bike and loving it is that bike riding is technically exercise. It's way too fun to actually be exercise, but it is. So I've actually been exercising, and getting more fit. It's a nice side benefit.

Blogging....false start

2005-06-13T13:20:00.000-04:00

As James will tell you, I'm not very good at keeping houseplants alive. They just don't let you know that they are dying. Instead they just sit there in the window, shriveling and dying from too much heat and not enough water. My cat won't shut up if I haven't fed her, and therefore, I haven't starved her to death yet.

It seems blogging falls into the houseplant category, rather than the cat category. The idea of coming up with something to post that isn't just "I continue to exist" on a day-to-day basis is a little overwhelming for me. But, I'm going to try again. Really...

So, the entry will just state the obvious. I continue to exist. If anything more interesting happens, I'll let you know.

Bad Blogger, Bad

2005-03-04T14:01:00.000-05:00

I'm bad at blogging. I mean someone somehow found the blog and left a COMMENT and I didn't even notice. It's not that I don't have time to blog, it's just that I pride myself on how boring my life is, and it just doesn't seem to be worth writing about.

My weeks have been passing really quickly lately. I don't know why. I haven't been busy, haven't been doing anything exciting, just going to work, coming home, making and eating dinner, and watching TV, with the occasional trip to the library thrown in for variety. I totally think it is due to my favorite TV shows debuting for the season in January. Now I have a show every night of the week. Wednesdays are the biggest highlight, when I watch Alias and tape the West Wing because they are on at the same time.

I love TV. I think TV gets a bad rap. I mean, yes, 98% of it is crap, and a full 25% of it is devoted to trying to sell you something, but in between that is some really great escapist entertainment. I love Alias and The West Wing for the same reason - they let me immerse myself in a (fake) world I will never really be a part of. Who doesn't want to walk the halls of the White House, influencing the policy decisions of our country? Who doesn't want to wear skin-tight leather and kick bad guys' asses in hand to hand combat? It doesn't matter that the real CIA spends more time overthrowing democratically elected governments than recovering strange 15th century artifacts. At the end of the episode, I want to be a spy.