mike's Journal

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You can take the boy out of Texas...

As y'all may or may not know, I've moved from the East Bay into San Francisco proper. One of the biggest enticements I had moving out of my idyllic zen sinecure in El Cerrito (where other people did the shopping and cleaning and all I had to do was keep my door closed and pay the rent on time, and I could see the entire bay from my deck and my bedroom window) was the opportunity to cook whatever I wanted. And as should completely unsurprising, what I want to cook is barbeque. But there's no place to put a barbeque pit in my new apartment in the Inner Richmond - what to do? The answer? Fireplace. This weekend, I built a smoker into my fireplace, and smoked some pork ribs. It was excellent.

What you're looking at is a frame built of 1/2 inch galvanized pipe which supports a grill and a smoke hood made from the lid of an enameled roasting pan, combined with the body of the roasting pan which is where the coals and the smoking medium (in this case, waterlogged mesquite chips and chopped onions) go. I've wanted a barbeque pit like this for a long time. In this configuration, you have direct access to the coals, can add more charcoal, or smoking medium, at will, can measure the temperature of both the coals and the meat directly, and can look up at the bottom of the meat on the grill without having to take the lid off and stop the smoking process. I've only cooked one thing on it, but I already see huge opportunities for experimentation and progress.

So, anytime anyone is down for an afternoon of beer-drinking and conversation, show up at my house with some meat and we'll fire this thing up.

The fact that we can search for and find anything we've ever written or received is going destroy everything we think we know about communication.

And that's going to be terrifying and awesome.

We're so happy we can hardly count.
Last Saturday I attended Y Combinator's Startup School. There was a ton of useful information, but the best part was when Jeff Bezos told his VP of Product Management to give me an exception to SimpleDBs 100 domain limit. Here's a video. My question is right at the very end.

So now I'm trying to get in touch with Adam Selipsky, the aforementioned VP. Calling Amazon's Corporate switchboard doesn't work, as Selipsky's office doesn't take calls that come in through reception. This is pretty standard internet company strategy to keep the weirdos at bay. I've done a little email address speculation, but I thought I'd see if anyone out there knows anyone who can look up his email in an internal address book.

If you do, feel free to email me at mike at omgwerock.com

Unrequitable crushes are actually the best kind
So there's this lady who works down the block from our office. I think she works for some variety of financial institution. She looks like a cross between 10,000-Maniacs-Unplugged Natalie Merchant and Racheline Maltese; apart from her fondness for black knee-boots she dresses rather conservatively, but over the course of a year I've become certain that her body would leave me speechless if I were to see it all at once. I run into her at Beale Street Bar and Grill, the neighborhood watering hole at the base of my building. We nod occasionally.

I post about this because she's related to no lengthier thread in my life. When I leave California, I'll remember the awesome people I've met here and the good friends I've made, but I doubt that 20, and 30 and 40 years on I'll remember the oh-so-cute-accountant(?) who causes Stockton Gala Days to echo in my head every time I see her, because she'll have no context to the larger flow of my life. And I don't want to forget any of this, so I'm writing it down here.

May you live in interesting times
Just got home from a party with Rupert Murdoch and MC Hammer.

The Longest Day of the Year
Today is June 21st, which most every almanac lists as the summer solstice for 2007. However, I saw/heard a lot of people who pay attention to such things proclaim June 19th as the solstice this year.

Did anyone else notice this? Can anyone enlighten me on what might have been going on?

love is like falling, and falling is like this
I went snowboarding for the first time this weekend. I'm sore, every physical action causes me pain, and I can't wait to go back again.

blanu, G, J, and I left straight from work Friday and drove to South Lake Tahoe, where we had rented an inexpensive but completely servicable condo for the weekend. Saturday morning we drove down to Kirkwood, rented gear and headed out onto the green slopes. Getting going on the first run was a little tricky, and I fell a lot the whole weekend, but my years of surfing translated pretty directly to snowboarding (especially the fact that I can surf equally well regular or goofyfoot), and by the end of the weekend I could carve decently on gentle slopes, and managed to run a long, easy blue without falling down.

I also took three or four major back-popping falls that had me worried about my chiropractic bill, but I seem to be alright in the spinal-alignment arena today.

So, if anyone ever needs an extra person to split the room cost, let me know. I travel light and sleep well on the floor.

New Year's Resolution
This year, I'm going to take my dad down to a fireworks stand, buy one of every firework on the top shelf, and set them off together. He told a story over Christmas about how much he always wanted to get a certain huge firework, but could never bring himself to spent his whole fireworks budget on it, when he could get a ton of firecrackers and bottlerockets instead.

I love my dad, and I really respect him, but I don't have ton of ways to really communicate with him. Popping firecrackers together was one when I was a kid. This year I resolve to take it up a notch.

Looks like Vercingetorix is to be ritually strangled...

Current Mood: seen it all before...

Never let it be said that I refute all memes...
Thusly:

The first five people to respond to this post, will get some form of art, by me, about them. I make no guarantees about quality or type, but I will assure that I will give it good effort and that the art will be individual to you, so if you get a mixed CD or some sort of painting doodle, yours is the only one like it.

The only catch, of course; as with most memes, if you sign up, you have to put this in your own journal as well.

Also, I make no promises about response time. I'll try to do them in a timely fashion, but I can't guarantee inspiration will strike immediately ;)

There are men who hustle pool, there are men who hustle cars...
This picture is about as poignant a rendering of the Total Perspective Vortex as I've ever seen. Enjoy (Click between the the two black specks on the left-hand side of the picture.)

A note from the trenches of pop culture history
Dana Sculley's father's nickname for her was Starbuck.

Carry on.

Got it
So here's what we do. We start a non-profit which buys CSA shares, and uses them to provide low-income kids at after-school programs one nutritious, probably organic meal a day. Free to the after-school programs, great for the kids -- both developmentally and in learning to enjoy the taste of healthy food -- and creates a demand for more CSAs, which is an a priori good thing. (CSA == Community Supported Agriculture, for those of you who aren't foodies/non-profit junkies.)

That's Phase One; Phase Two is getting growing space of our own, both to provide produce, but also to allow the kids to have interaction with the farming process. If they grow green beans, they'll be more likely to eat green beans.

Phase Three is expanding the concept to other cities.

I was reading this article about Bill Strickland and Manchester/Bidwell and thinking about my garden, and suddenly everything went 'click'.

Current Mood: inspired

Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beal...
Actually just from El Cerrito into Berkeley. I left the house in search of wireless so I could get some coffee, maybe some brunch, and then get some work done, knowing that if I stayed at home I'd succumb to the temptation to lay around in my underwear and drink beer. I strode down the hill, and decided to try out Kensington Bistro, which is maybe a mile from my house. The menu was very solid, and now I have another local place to add to my collection. Most things are closed by the time I get home from the city on weeknights, but it's good to have places to go on the weekends. No wireless, though.

I decided to just keep walking, wander around and explore Berkeley. I split off and meandered down Peralta until it dead ended by the community gardens (which I need to remember to go back and check out during visiting hours) and then walked along the Ohlone Greenway into Berkeley. Now I'm at Berkeley Espresso, and will be getting down to work.

Just in case any of y'all were wondering what it was like to be proud of your leader
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win...

-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Rice Stadium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, Earth: September 12, 1962)

Rollercoaster
A lot of things in the last week. On Saturday - Monday, went camping with a lot of new people and had an absolute blast. /me waves. Got in a good mixture of hiking, sitting alone in the woods and sitting with people around the fire.

Tuesday we had our Fourth of July fireworks viewing party - which was roundly considered a success. We read the Declaration of Independence - a very topical little document - aloud with each person taking a stanza. We ran out of people before we ran out of stanzas, so I finished it and then launched into what can only be described as a sermon that I don't remember very much of. This is something that's happened before. I have a tendency to hold forth in public anyway, and sometimes I realize I have no idea what I'm about to say next. When that happens, I reach back and get ahold of something and it just starts flowing. I don't know how to describe it any better than that. But I generally have no idea what I've said when I get done. This time it really well. The people my age generally just shrugged it off with a well-meant 'Nice speech' if they remarked on it at all. It apparently resonated with the Baby Boomers, however, since almost all of them came over to shake my hand, and several of the women were lightly petting my chest and looking at me with what could only be called adulation. I liked that entirely too much. I often joke that the reason I don't become a cult leader is that I'd have to hang out with cult members, but that suddenly doesn't seem like that bad a deal.

Had a long talk with

allea on Wednesday. It's getting easier. I'm slowly making the mental shift from thinking of her as my ex-wife to thinking of her as a really wonderful friend. I can admit now that our getting married was a really dumb idea, so I guess that's progress.

Okay, back to trying to make BitTorrent into something someone will pay us several billion dollars for.

Current Mood: diligent
Current Music: Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Ozone Gala Days
Looks like they have the equivilant of Ozone Action Days out here in the Bay Area, complete with the hacking cough and the free public transport.

The cough is about like the one in Austin, but the free ride is a much bigger deal. In Austin, an OAD would save you a buck, whereas today I saved $7.

Craziness.

home again, home again, jiggidity-jig

moiety_tx and

nescafe: y'all'd better not call off this wedding, because I just bought my tickets.

desika, might I trouble y'all for lodging from Thursday, September 28th through Monday, October 2nd?

New Corporate Slogan
Cotton Enterprises has a new official slogan:

Serendipity On Demand

Damn it.
Every time I just about get myself convinced that I can be happy with building my own life and contributing to the well being of my own people, something comes along to jar me out of it.

This time is was discovering Between the Wars by Billy Bragg, which I'd somehow never heard before, and once again I'm off to crush the jeweled thrones of the world beneath my sandaled tread (as

antiquarian would say.)

Or maybe that's just my reaction to not having had a drink in 21 days. It's easy to drink a six-pack and get offended about something, but it's hard to drink a six-pack and get offended enough to do something about it, which makes everything much easier.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Billy Bragg - Between the Wars