May 2005

Really. I mean, I don’t really know much about him. From what I gather, he races cars. What kind? Hell if I know. All I know is that his man-panties are in a wad because there’s a woman (Danica Patrick) racing in the Indy 500 this year. And she’s good. Good enough to qualify for the fourth starting position in the race. Honestly, I don’t know what all that means. Fourth is good, and out of a field of thirty-plus, it’s really good. I have no idea if she’ll win, or what her realistic chances are. I do know that the following quote from CNN/Sports Illustrated makes Robby Gordon the proud recipient of the Whinging Bitch of 2005 award:

Robby Gordon accused Danica Patrick of having an unfair advantage in the Indianapolis 500 and said Saturday he will not compete in the race again unless the field is equalized.

Gordon, a former open-wheel driver now in NASCAR, contends that Patrick is at an advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick’s is lighter on the race track.

“The lighter the car, the faster it goes,” Gordon said. “Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.

“I won’t race against her until the IRL does something to take that advantage away.”

Now really. You’d think that teams would have figured out by now that if weight was such a large part of the equation, that they’d also find lighter guys to drive the cars. Like horse jockeys. If this Danica Patrick is good enough to race with the boys, her weight shouldn’t be an issue. “Take that advantage away?” What?

Race Official: “I’m sorry, you can’t race today.”
Her: “Why?”
Race Official: “You’re not fat enough.”
Her: “I’m sorry, what?”
Race Official: “You are not fat enough. Eat a few buckets of KFC and come back next year.”
Her: “Oh jesus.”

I sort of feel like the perception is that I’m defending her because she’s a woman and I’m a woman and that’s what women should do. But Bryan also agrees that Robby Gordon quite possibly has a gaping vagina due to this whole issue. I think, as a woman, I can say that. Also, my womanly insults are probably a bit ironic here. Danica has cajones. Robby doesn’t.

Oh, and because I can be a bitch…grown-ups don’t go by “Robby.”

Honestly, 90% of the time when I type “spam,” I end up typing “smap.” While SMAP is a popular Japanese boy-band, it is not “spam.” O-HA!

That’s not what this post is about, honestly. I saw someone answer these questions on another blog, and figured I’d participate too.

Last 5 songs I listened to:

• “Spanish Doll” by Poe (on iTunes)
• “Move On” by JET (on the radio coming home from work)
• “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac (on the radio before I changed stations)
• “Skidoos” by Akufen (at the gym on the iPod)
• “Deck the House” by Akufen (also at the gym…up and motivating!)

Last 5 movies I saw:

• Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (see previous entry)
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Garden State on DVD
• Blade: Trinity on DVD
• D.E.B.S.

Last 5 books I read:

• The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski (a gift from Jess ages ago that I’m finally reading and loving)
• A Test Of Will: One Man’s Extraordinary Story of Survival by Warren MacDonald (my autographed copy after he came and spoke at our store)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (fun book, quick read)
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (a re-read on the way to Australia, which I left with Rachie…also a recommendation from Jess ages ago)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (I’m fixated on Yellowstone now…)

Last 5 cultured events attended:

• Prefuse 73/Battles/Beans at the Great American Music Hall. View photos here.
• Our friend Peter Beste’s gallery opening in San Francisco. See his pics in this month’s issue of Spin Magazine too.
• Five? I only have two. And they’re not even “cultured.”
• Going to see Les Misérables on June 14 in San Francisco will be my future event.
• The Mysterious Fifth Unordered List Item (aka TMFULI)

Threadless is having another $10 shirt sale! Whee! Click through and I get street points too. Love me some t-shirts. Wish I could wear them to work. I also lucked out and got to participate in the $7 Diesel Sweeties surprise sale. I will update on what shirt I receive when it arrives! Actually, I should blog about all my fun t-shirts some time. A la Preshrunk.

Also, I found a dead bird in our screened in porch. Not quite sure how it got there in the first place…the door and the windows have been closed as far as I know.

Bryan and I saw Revenge of the Sith tonight. No spoilers or anything, so no need to avert your eyes. Suffice it to say, we weren’t as disappointed as we’d thought we would be. Ewan still rules, and every time he turns his back and puts that Jedi hood up, I think it’s Alec Guinness walking away.

Lots of silly, wooden dialogue. George Lucas at his best, really. I’m not sure how Natalie Portman was even convinced to read them once, much less on film take after take.

Two neutral thumbs. No one in our theater (nearly full on a Wednesday night too, even with all the American Idol crap going on) applauded at the end, which was a relief. I’m relieved. Maybe Lucas will stop butchering my beloved childhood memories. Then again, I’m not much of an optimist…

click through to see the rest of the set

Photo by teh_jinkies.

Bryan and I drove up to the city to see Prefuse 73 perform, along with Beans and Battles. It was a fab show, and Battles rocked the house. No one should be able to drum that hard! =) Somewhat surprisingly, Prefuse mostly covered stuff from One Word Extinguisher, and not Surrounded By Silence. For most of the Prefuse portion of the show, there was one guy on the main drum kit, another guy on a tiny little keyboard, and another who went back and forth between a small drum kit and working with the keyboard player.

Oh, and of course, the obligatory driving-up-to-SF-sunset-from-the-car photo.

I’ve successfully installed a second instance of WordPress on my server. It’s in progress (so no, you don’t get to see it), but I’m just glad I was able to install a second version to play with. Now that I know more about WP in general, it’s gone quite smoothly. Tomorrow I’ll be playing with the design a bit more. My “to do” list for things I need to change is quite long already. Typical.

I’ve discovered that Tiger takes screenshots in PNG form now, rather than PDF. This is welcome news!

WordPress 1.5.1.1 is out, fixing all those things that kept me away from 1.5.1 initially. Everything seems to be working well thus far.

These days I want to blog about politics, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands. ;)

I’ll also be setting up a “sample” WP site for a friend soon. Should be a good exercise for me. That is all.

Today I did a lot of driving. From home to Fremont, Fremont to work, work to Los Altos, then back to work. Probably 50 extra miles from what I normally drive. I think I saw 50 times the weird as well. Driving back from Fremont, traffic had to swerve like crazy to avoid the green port-o-potty that was decorating the middle two lanes of a four-lane road. I was lucky and alert, and was able to safely change lanes and avoid The Road Toilet. About a mile later, there was a flat-bed truck pulled over on the shoulder. The driver was looking at seven Mobile Poop Homes, and probably wondering where the eighth one had gotten off to. “Golly, Merle never goes off on his own…”

Then while driving to Los Altos, someone had lost their pickup truck bed liner. So it was flopping around half on the shoulder, half in the right lane. Just where it should be. Two exits up the road, a guy is pulled over to the shoulder, looking into the bed of his truck. Nobody home! Finally, driving back from Los Altos, traffic was nearly stopped as some old lady in a nearly-new black Mercedes had decided to stop on her on-ramp. Best wait for a huge break in traffic before merging. However, since she’d stopped while sort of in the right lane, we all suffered for her vehicular stop, drop, and do not dare roll.

Winners, all of them.

The biggest sale of the year. Please let it be over. We’d sold 30 bikes by the time I’d left at 6. Love that I’m punched out, saying goodbye, and I still get suckered into ringing up another customer. Feh.

Hopefully I’ll have time to blog afterwards. Working six days in a row through the sale is torture. I’ve been able to go to the gym a few times, at least. Hooray for being less of a sloth. Tomorrow I am skipping the bike ride and going to a pub. Woo!

Now, most folks who read this site (all three of you) would know me more as a Mac geek than anything else. The first thing that dragged me into a lust for technology was my obsession with The X-Files. I had an X-Files Kaleidoscope theme on my Performa 6360 that I used through my entire college career. For a while, I think Scully’s voice announced my email had arrived. I had every episode on VHS, in order, with custom-made labels. I got the bootleg blooper reels on VHS as well, buying them from someone I met on usenet.

I was also involved in alt.tv.x-files and alt.tv.x-files.creative for several years. I met Jess, one of my best friends, through that community. We’ve spent quite a bit of time together, me visiting her (and Tom and the dogs) and them (minus the dogs) visiting me in Japan. Really, what this post is *actually* responding to is that The Gossamer Project is celebrating its tenth birthday today. Amazing.

What also boggles my mind is that the fandom is still running pretty strong, even years after the show finished its fun, and even more years after the show stopped being fantastic. (Watching “Post-Modern Prometheus” on tv last night just made me sad…it was so good!) Many authors have moved on…some have stopped writing, some have switched fandoms…but there’s something about the imagined world of Mulder and Scully that still draws people to it.

For some reason, many people shun the idea of fanfic. I think the poor writing that pretty much encompasses online fandoms would turn off lots of people. In case you were wondering, and I’m sure you weren’t, these are some of my favorites that are still hanging out on the web.

• Ship Building
• Arizona Highways
• Contact High

…Hail Mulder, full of theories, pray for us sinners now and all
through the hiatus…

Despite Mail being…moody, Tiger has gone fairly well. Today was installing fink, then BitchX. fink takes a while to compile, which would be more entertaining if the scrolling text (hooray for verbose) was also ASCII art. And maybe if there were dancing monkeys wearing little pants and playing cymbals. Or is that asking too much?

I still have really weird symbols (not cymbals) in front of all my BX server messages. WTF? Anyone know how to get rid of “ùíù” and replace it with something legible? I have been able to make it several other things…none of which I’m satisfied with. Blah.

I installed Tiger last night. I did a clean install…full nuke and pave, back-up on the external hard drive. It went remarkably well. And I’ve got about 12 extra GB of space now that I don’t have an OS 9 partition (2GB itself) and got rid of all the crap I don’t need. Lots of crap, apparently.

Not too many problems. Mail flipped out on me, not wanting to import a damn thing. It seems to have had a lot to do with me having so many nested folders for organizing. Thus getting Mail to where I needed it to be took…well I installed last night around 10pm and I just finished with the last of my Mail tweaks. Feh. For some reason, Mail wouldn’t import my .mbox files unless I said they weren’t Mail-created files. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Took me quite a while to figure it out, and it’s a lame reason. But I have all my old mail now, going back to 1999. Meep. That’s a lot of email.

Other than that, the whole process has gone rather well. I’ve done most of my application installs and re-installs. Now that Mail is up and running with my old mail, I also have all my registration keys for the software I needed to install. Need to back that up in a second place, methinks. Tomorrow I’ll go through and install everything that requires the command line. BitchX will come first, and maybe I can stop the Join of Death with this new install. Wishful thinking, I’m sure.

Spotlight is neat, but mostly it’s in the way. Have to map it to something else, otherwise I can’t properly switch language input. Though I very rarely do any input in Japanese, it does come in handy. I want to be able to get the damn icon out of my menu bar. Quick, someone hack the fugly!