Day 10,219

I know I don't look it, but tomorrow I turn 10,220 days old. My but time does fly when you're failing to regularly update your blog, doesn't it?

I've already received a couple of slightly early gifts:

From my girlfriend, a cocktail shaker with drink recipes on it - something I'll actually use.

Google has given me a shiny new browser. I know I already had one, but this one is pretty damn neat, and I'll at least play with it until I miss my old extensions and find a bunch of quirks I don't like.

From work, I've received a business trip on my birthday, which is an excellent opportunity to test out the gift I bought myself a couple of weeks ago.

From the city of San Francisco, I received a parking ticket because I forgot that I'd parked in a Tuesday-Thursday street cleaning zone instead of a Monday-Friday zone. Goddammit.

Finally, as I was getting snazzed up for a wedding double-header (back-to-back, not the efficient cult kind where they do them all at once) this past weekend, I found my long-lost camera, which I'd given up for dead months ago. It couldn't have returned at a better time - I can now take higher-resolution pictures of my pwecious widdle kittens, and eventually transform this blog into a LOLcats page in their honor. Observe:

The proud and noble Monkey:

The best photo I will ever take - Ninja!



What Monkey did to my couch:

New arrivals

I totally have an excuse for not posting in the past month: I was on vacation for a week of it (and I'd have pictures if I hadn't lost my main camera and my backup weren't apparently on the fritz. Always carry a double-redundancy!). The other three weeks? A winning combination of business and laziness.

Plenty can happen in three weeks, though. My promotion became official at work, and, for the first time in about 15 years, I have pets! Because of the aforementioned lack of functional cameras, I had to outsource the obligatory kitten photography to Veronica and her iPhone:

Their names are Monkey (left) and Ninja (below). Why not Pirate and Ninja, you might ask? Because Monkey and Ninja are my two absolute favorite words to say, and because they don't often come up in conversation outside of a zoo or when discussing Batman, I needed to give myself a reason to say them more often. The real shocker was that my girlfirend went along with it, and even claims that she suggested the name Monkey before I did (lies!).

We're still getting used to the joys of cat ownership, like having them walk on our faces while we're trying to sleep and attempting to partake of any beverage we happen to be trying to enjoy. They're also very persistent about jumping up onto the dinner table - no matter how many times you put them on the floor, they'll just jump right back up there.

Also, apparently one of them has a tapeworm. We found one of these things in our bed the other day:

So today it was off to get them shot full of vaccines and gooped up with topical anti-tapeworm goo. Surprisingly, Monkey is sleeping contently on my lap right now (which is suprising, since he usually likes to actually walk on the keyboard while I'm trying to play games), so he's apparently already forgiven us...though we're taking him and his sister to the vet in an hour for a checkup, so we'll see how that works out. I'm also learning to cope with paying vet bills...it's totally coming out of their allowance.

Blockage

At this point, I've been a professional writer for over four years. I've written hundreds of articles ranging from 50 words up to 3,500+, many of them on short deadlines, and I've never really had a problem. But for some reason, this seemingly insignificant story has me completely blocked up. I've been staring at it for a week and a half, pushed the deadline back as far as it can possibly go, and I'm still having a hell of a time making it happen.

I'm probably overthinking this. I mean, I had no trouble writing several angry, yet civil emails to Nancy Pelosi's office regarding her active impeding of imeachment proceedings against a clearly criminal president (which in my mind makes her an accomplice, basically his getaway driver). I have no trouble articulating my outrage at Barack Obama's vote in favor of the FISA bill. (Yes, I know he voted for an amendment to remove the telcom immunity garbage, but isn't that a lot like threatening that if they don't remove the part he doesn't like he'll vote for it anyway? What exactly was the incentive to remove it? Incidentally, all the money I was going to donate to Obama's campaign is now going to the ACLU to help them in undoing the damage he's helped to cause.) I'm not having any trouble writing this blog right now. So what the hell?

Luddite attack!

Bubba: new version of iPhone coming out in a few weeks
Me: Dur?
Bubba: well I don't follow this shit, asshole
Me: You should really set your status message to "under a rock."
Me: That way, next time you miss the biggest piece of technology news of the past six months, no one will be surprised.

Domestication

As my former boss so helpfully points out, I have a negligent blogger once again. I'd like to think it's because I've been extremely busy at work this past month, but honestly, I waste an incredible amount of time that could, in theory, be spent blogging. So, yet again, I shall attempt to harness all of that energy that I expend on procrastination - a perpetually renewable energy source - and write something down. Here goes:

I suppose I've got plenty to blog 'bout, this being my final week as a swinging single bachelor and all. No, not getting married or anything, but I am about to start living in sweet, sweet sin. (No, not sloth - the other good one.) She hasn't even moved in yet, and she's already redecorated my bathroom and hung up the first of many classy pictures involving cats in some way. You see, she's a doctor/crazy cat lady in training, so I've had to put my foot down and establish a strict KP ratio (kitty picture to non-kitty picture) of at most 1.25 to 1. I'm no interior decorator, but it does seem a little creepy if everywhere you look you see pictures of cats - unless they're LoLcats, in which case they're still pretty funny (when properly done) even about a year after that meme burnt out. I've also installed nearly 9 gigs of Sims 2 expansions (which, in addition to the Spore Creature Creator, is the only game I've managed to get her to play) on my computer in preparation for her arrival. Am I an awsome boyfriend or what?

But that's this weekend. In the meantime, I've kicked out my roommate by getting him into an east coast business school (by which I mean "by having nothing to do with him getting into an east coast business school") and have been going through the process of untangling the belongings that intermingled over the past three years. For example, tonight we cleaned out the refrigerator, which involved him reaching elbow-deep in there, retrieving an item, and then we'd each say "I thought that was yours! Wait, what exactly is (or was?) that?" And then we'd try to figure out the expiration date. The record was some tofu (indisputably his - I have never, even while drunk, purchased tofu. Or received it as a gift, for that matter) from 2006. But that was relatively intact. The winner of the horror show was easily a Tupperware container that held something that I sincerely hope used to be beef stew.

Also, as my roomie prepared to migrate eastward and shed his worldly posessions, I purchased (among other things - couch, wardrobe, blender, etc) his ironing board for $5 - which, in retrospect, is an excellent way to welcome a girlfriend moving in with you. "Hey babe, I'm so glad you're moving in. There's a ton of ironing to be done!" I'm lucky she's a crazy cat lady instead of a militant feminist, or she'd probably beat me to death with that thing.

Anyway, I intend to live it up a little this week, by which I mean staying up late watching Venture Brothers, playing computer games, and having frozen pizza and beer for dinner. Good times.

See, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Catching Wind

With the recent sale of my 5-year-old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop (which I used to like to affectionately refer to as "this fucking heavy piece of crap" because it weighed more than 7lbs) to a sucker friend of mine, I've committed myself to buying a new one. For a while I was thinking of blowing about $1600-$2000 on a shiny new M1330, complete with GeForce 8400, but then I realized that that would be a fantastically stupid thing to do. Considering that I was generally happy with the performance of an old P4 2.4GHz during the 15 minutes per week I'm more than three feet away from my quad-core gaming desktop, it makes little sense to blow that kind of money for a mobile powerhouse.

Instead, I've decided to jump on the newly trendy (and affordable) sub-notebook bandwagon. I was eyeing the Asus EeePC for a bit, but I've heard too many things about the keyboard on an 8.9" laptop being too small for stubby fingers like mine, the screen being too low-resolution, and then there were the battery life issues. I also looked at the HP 2133, which has more CPU power than the Eee and better resolution, but shares the small keyboard issue and is more a'spensive. But then, along came MSI with the Wind, and I think we have a winner" $550 gets me a 10" 1024x600 screen (and with it a slightly wider keyboard), a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, bluetooth, 1.3MP camera, and 5.5 hours of battery life running Windows XP. Not bad, not bad at all. Those specs should have no trouble handling the stuff I used my FHPoC for, and weigh less than half as much doing it.
The catch is that it's not yet available, and I'm going to be flying cross-country on June 8. All indications have it going on sale in two weeks (on June 3), so that gives me a five-day window to procure one. C'mon Costco, Wikipedia says you'll have it. Help me out here!

Note: seeing Indiana Jones tomorrow night. I'm cautiously optimistic that I won't hate it.

Failure

"Last post: May 5, 2008"

Holy crap, I fail at blogging.

The delay game

I'm about to leave for the airport to fly across the country on a United Airlines flight. Anyone care to place bets on how much of a delay there will be? With UA, I've found that it's not a question of if the flight will be delayed, but how long. (At T-3 hours, they claim the flight will be on time.)

I'm going to be optimistic and say that it's going to be between 15 and 30 minutes late. However, I predict that the trip back is going to be delayed at least an hour.

Edit:
Scorecard:
Departing flight left on time. Shocker. It was, however, compensated for by extreme proximity to the flight's standard-issue screaming baby, and a comically inept car rental employee who wasted a bunch of our time when we got there.

Returning flight sat on the runway for about an hour. On the bright side, I slept through the entire ordeal.

Mis vacaciones Mexicano

As of this past weekend, it can no longer be said that I have never been to Mexico. So suck it, people who would say that! You know who you are.

I've been to San Diego many times over the past few years - I've made a habit of spending my New Year's Eve celebrations down there with a concentration of college buddies - but never bothered to go the extra 20 minutes south to cross the boarder. But now, seeing as Mexico is pretty much the one country left with a favorable exchange rate, and Virgin America was offering some $38 fares to San Diego, I made an exception.

The most shocking thing was crossing the boarder into Mexico without so much as an "¡Hola!" from customs. Why, it's almost as though Mexico doesn't care if you bring things down there. Of course, going the other way is another story all together.

On the strength of a very picky friend's recommendation, we ended up at Hotel La Fonda, which we found despite it not actually having a street address of any kind. I managed to find it on Google Maps, but it couldn't compute directions there even though it's pretty much a straight shot.


View Larger Map

Good thing that whole area is gringo-friendly - we couldn't believe the amount of construction going on, building up affordable condos for white people priced out of San Diego. Fortunately for us, that also meant plenty of English road signs.

Arriving at La Fonda, we found that they offer three levels of accommodations: La Fonda for $100 per night, La Fonda Bungalow for $125 per night, and (not making this up) Kinda La Fonda for $75 per night. We went for the middle of the road, not expecting too much for that money, but damn:

That's not a bad view! Especially when indulging in non-happy-hour $3 margaritas and pina coladas and similarly affordable mountains of nachos. We ended up spending most of our time relaxing at La Fonda, going for walks on the beach, and hanging out at the extremely cheap-but-tasty restaurant. Despite a couple of unidentified smells, La Fonda has definitely made the short list for repeat vacationing in the future.

IM Client Wars

Today a handy Lifehacker post introduced me, and apparently everybody else on the internet, to a new multi-protocol IM client called Digsby. I've been a satisfied Pidgin user since upgrading switching to Vista a year ago, which turned out to be incompatible with my old IM client of choice, AIM 5.2 (with the now-defunct AIMutation installed to remove all of the bloat and add chat window tabs and logging), but I like to be open-minded when it comes to new software options. After playing with it for a day, I'm ready to proclaim it to be full of potential, but not quite ready to supplant Pidgin as my go-to IM app.

What I like:
* Cleaner looking than Pidgin. Pidgin suffers from that open source look that reminds one of Soviet architecture. Even the skins are a bit crap. Digsby, by comparison, has a much more polished look and includes a variety of (mostly ugly) skins and themes.
* Not having to install three separate applications to make it work. Seriously, I get that Pidgin is a community project, but c'mon - Aspell, GTK+, and at least one other program just to make an IM app work?
* Better email management than Pidgin. I can even compose email to be sent through Gmail within Digsby.
* Facebook integration. Not that I'm a huge Facebook fanatic or anything, but it's nice to not have to load the page to see when people post updates or to change my status message.
* Customization - I can customize how the buddy list displays information to an almost ridiculous degree. For example, if I want buddy icons displayed at all, I can have them to the left or right, and any size I want. If I want a status icon, it can be to the left or right, or it can be a "badge" on the icon. Craziness.
* The ability to drag and drop conversation tabs between windows, or out of a window to create a new window. I can't tell you how many times I've wished Pidgin would do this.

What I don't like:
* Most of this can be filed under unfinished features, like wonky text formatting, no hyperlinking in IMs, can't set your own icons for buddies, etc.
* Eats RAM like it's Firefox or something. Why does an IM client need 75MB of RAM? The developers claim to be working on optimization, though, so this could be a temporary issue.
* Can't change what my name shows up as. I don't care what my screen name is, I want it to show up as "Me." For example, I want the conversation window to look like this:
Me: Hello.
[Insert your name here]: Check out this awesome link!
Me: Die in a fire.
* Can't disable emoticons (without a hack). There's no emoticon to express how much I dislike emoticons.
* Log viewer is on par with Pidgin, but not as good as Trillian's. I want to be able to see all the conversations I had on a given date, dammit, not just one contact at a time. Search also needs to be log-wide, not just the currently selected conversation.
* Nowhere to store buddy notes. I need somewhere to jot down notes on PR contacts, or specify which people I hate, and why. Pidgin has this one.
* Lack of individual alerts. This is something I haven't been able to use since AIM 5.2, but I had all kinds of fun assigning different sign-in sounds to each person. I could who was signing in without even looking at the buddy list.
* Can't specify where I want my chat logs stored.
* Ugly logo. If your logo is a fat kid, you're doing something wrong.

However, if Digsby manages to fix even half of these issues, it stands a good chance of winning my heart/mind.