Woooh! Woooh!

Six mysterious cylinders. What could they be? This was the mysterious package that arrived earlier this week. Thankfully I caught some of the office staff leaving unawares and got one to open up the mail room and give me the package containing these 6 enigmas.


Woooh! Woooh! Peanut butter! Six jars of the rare and elusive Natural Chunky Smuckers Peanut Butter sent to me by the lovely and amazing Corrie! I love you, Corrie, and you rock the free world! Talk about squeaky wheels! This really picked me up after a series of discouraging days. Thanks!

Also awesome and wheel-related: both ways on the commute today, I passed a well-mustachioed man riding a penny-farthing bicycle. Now that's dedication.

PS - And happy birthday to Russell! You better be eating some hand-shaved Shanghai Garden noodles in celebration!

Wingardium Leviosa!

And if any of you needed reminding, it's only one month to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! Woot! Do you trust Snape?

Harpies and Jackasses: A Midsummer Night's Dream Interrupted

Is it wrong to pray for someone to be filled with shame? Say, such shame that they will never, ever return to a place and will change their lives to be better people? I'm wondering because this is what I was praying last night from about 1:50-2:15. The screaming and fighting drunks in the parking lot below my apartment seemed to be relishing their antagonism. There were a few male voices of jackasses in the mix, but the main fight was between 2 or 3 women. Well, females, maybe, but certainly not women, ladies, or girls. Harpies is a better term, or if we want to go a slightly archaic route, harridans. Man, they were screeching and yammering to make a seabird rookery blush. So, trying to be a good Christian, I prayed that they would be filled with such overwhelming shame and remorse that they would never return to the club and would change their lives to never be so obnoxious or embarrassing again. Hey, it beats praying for them to be ground into sausage and fed to stray animals. That was my other thought.

I wonder if I can pre-order police involvement? "Excuse me, officer. Could you come behind this club between 1:45 and 2:15 next Tuesday night? There'll be a fight or at least disturbing of the peace for sure. Bring tear gas and billy clubs."

Parking and Delusions of Adequacy

Ever since I got my oil changed and tires rotated by the yo-yos out at Mazda of Lakewood (yeah, I'm talking about you, dingus!) I've been getting a noise that turned into a vibration coming from the front left tire. It had been getting progressively worse, so I took a look at it and found that on that wheel, three of the lugnuts were so loose I could spin them effortlessly with my fingers. There was one loose nut on each of the rear tires too. I whipped out my tire iron and magically made the noise go away. Idiots.

Then again, I've been feeling like one of those idiots recently. I've been struggling with a part of the XVG project at work that if I was doing in AS2 would have taken me about a half hour. Instead, between Java, Flex, and Eclipse all crapping out on me and my own mental struggle with the confounding new way AS3 treats XML, I haven't been able to finish it in several days. Finally, Spivey got tired of waiting for it and said he'd do it himself, which made me feel about 3 inches tall and dumb as rocks. I don't know why I can't get this or why all these technical problems have been assailing me. I don't want to be that guy who can't get the new technology, especially when it is so close already to a language I know. I want to be good at my job. Instead, today Eclipse (or Flex Builder 3, I can't tell which yet) totally broke on me and I couldn't open any files, even after a Flex 3 reinstall. Our timeclock software wouldn't work for me for most of the morning, and when I finally said "Screw it!" to Flex, I worked on skins for the RoboHelp project, and even there I was confounded by trying to use JavaScript to get one frame to print another. I got it working in the frameset that was laid out in the skin XML, but when I tried to use that same JavaScript in a live example, I found that Adobe changes the ids and names they had laid out in the XML to something else. Even once I got that figured out, their frameset structure (stupid frames!) is such that it screwed up the way JavaScript can reference the frame I need to get to. They don't put an id on a frame that holds a frameset so I can't just reference it by id. Arrrrrrrrgh! GoshdangstupidpieceofcrapRARRRR! Why are things that should be so simple taking me forever while other people are whizzing along in their appointed tasks? So. Incredibly. Frustrating. If there was an emoticon for glowering, I would be using it now.

Anyway, aside from that whining, I have an interesting dilemma. I've been offered a parking spot in my building's parking garage. It is $95 a month, which is steep, but parking is at a premium downtown ... except of course that currently I am parking for free on the street. Of course, by continuing to park outdoors, I can save a lot of money. Because I don't drive to work, parking is less of an issue for me than for others. I only drive around 2-3 times a week. However, it would be nice not to have to drive around in anger trying to find a parking spot on a Friday night or to have to walk three blocks with 20 pounds of groceries. It would mean no more parallel parking. That's a nice thought. It would also protect my car from the sun, snow, drunk drivers, bird poo, sap, and hail (which battered my old Trooper into a dented mess). But then again, $95 times 12 is $1,140 a year. Also, taking a parking spot would hamstring my motivation for the parking map project. Well, I need to make a decision soon. My deadline is the 29th, this Friday. What do you guys think?

And in postal news, I got a package today, but I can't get to it, because it is locked in the mail room and I have to get someone from the office to retrieve it for me. That means, most likely, waiting until the weekend when I'm here at the same time as the office staff. The anticipation builds...

Bronze Sky

I guess I'm in a photographic mood. I've posted some more pictures in my gallery. This time they are shots of the sunset tonight. Amazing. I don't think I've seen colors like this in the sky for a long time, if ever.

Why work on projects when you can take pretty pictures?

Photos at the Speed of Light

Hey, look at that. I have pictures up from my Hanging Lake trip on the day that I got back. If you like the one on the post below, you can look at more of them in my gallery. Unfortunately a lot of the pics I took were overexposed, so maybe something got set funky on my camera. Anyway, there they are.

I'm working at updating the interface and functionality for the gallery. That's one of my projects I've been working on. I redid the classes I originally wrote for it to make it work better according to the practices I've learned at work. It's coming along, but I just need to carve out time to do it regularly or I forget what the heck I was doing and have to get reoriented every time I work on it.

By the way, still no book or CD, though I did get a new Wired magazine today, which will keep me from whining for a good 6 to 8 minutes.

Excursion

What's a good camping trip without gear? I figure this trip was the first of many, so Friday after work I dropped some money off at REI and they let me leave with a new air mattress, camp pillow, and Nalgene. Sweet.

So off we go to Hanging Lake. Unfortunately the camping party has dwindled down to just three of us: Tirzah, Chrissy, and myself. Well, four if you count Chrissy's dog Bailey. We got to Hanging Lake after some wandering around. You can only get there going east on I-70. Who knew? Tirzah and I did the hike and Chrissy took Bailey along the bike path, since dogs aren't allowed on the trail. The climb was about an hour or so up, and not too hard until the top, but it certainly worked up a sweat. In fact, I sweat through my hat. My thick, leather hat. I should enter a sweating competition.

The lake is astonishingly beautiful; this weird bright blue rimmed with white algae and overlooked by twin waterfalls. Butterflies were all over the edge of the lake, presumably sipping moisture and nutrients from the damp ground by the water's edge. Tirzah and I ate lunch there under the eager eyes of aggressive chipmunks and then headed down the mile and change to the bottom. The hike was quite nice as it went along a rushing cascade blessed with abundant shade. It was very warm out so the cool air along the stream was very welcome. At the base we met up with Chrissy and Bailey and struck out for a campsite.

We ended up going further west to New Castle and drove up towards the White River National Forest to look for a spot. We didn't find any along the stream on the canyon floor where we had hoped to, and we started up a series of switchbacks towards the top of the mesa. Camping spots were nowhere to be found until we turned a bend and found a great spot complete with fire ring tucked between switchbacks.

We set up camp in the heat and then laid low in some shade while snacking on fruit and Chicken in a Bisket. Once it got cooler I started up a fire with the ample dead wood lying around and Chrissy made some apple pie with her hobo pie maker (use fresh hobos for best results) and Tirzah cooked up some foil packs. We sat mesmerized by the fire until late, listening to four-wheelers coming down the hill. The half moon was still shining bright when Tirzah and Chrissy turned into their tents and I stretched out beneath the starry hosts on my new, quite comfortable air mattress. Despite it cooling off as mountain air is wont to do, it was still too warm for the pullover I'd put on before crawling into the sleeping bag, and I slept fitfully in the heat. When a final, very late four-wheeler made their descent from the mesa on an engine sounding like a dying plane, I woke up, shucked off the pullover, and gazed in wonder at the stars above. The moon had set and the Milky Way was revealed, shedding its pale light along with the legions of brighter stars. Eventually my eyes closed of their own accord and dozed and turned and slid off my mattress until the morning.

Now let me tell you about breakfast. Mmmm. Tirzah whipped up some pancake batter and provided bacon and eggs. The stove wouldn't light, but I had resurrected the fire and it made for good cooking. We had the pancakes with some of the apple pie filling from Chrissy's hobo pies. The final round of bacon and pancakes had me as their chef and I slid one of the pancakes deep into the bacon grease until it was crispy and golden. That, served with hot apple pie filling was, in a word, bliss. The texture, the taste, the warmth, oh, everything was perfect. Of course, any food cooked over an open fire tastes better.

After that we packed up and headed down the mountain. We went back east on I-70 and met Jill and Dean in Idaho Springs for some Beau Jo's pizza. We took it out to a park so Bailey wouldn't be stuck in the car. Then it was back to Denver for a well-needed cool shower and some quality sweltering in the apartment.

Bonus Post! Bonus Post!

Bwahaha! I like der funny! This comes courtesy of the soon-to-be-late Table of Malcontents. Also: Happy Birthday to Eric!

Buggy

Many people say that Denver doesn't have a lot of bugs, and if you're comparing it to Orlando, yeah, you're right. But if you want to be disabused of the notion that there aren't a good lot of insects here, just take a bike ride along the Platte and Cherry Creek after dusk on a warm evening in late June. It was like riding through a little hailstorm of bugs, their bodies ricocheting audibly off my shirt and bouncing from my eyeballs. Other than that, the ride home was nice; gliding through shadows and pools of orange light, smelling the sweet fragrances of plants wafting on the warm night air, and coursing along with that relative stillness that evening brings to a city park.

I even saw the night heron standing watch over the creek. I like the night heron. He's a dapper bird in his black cap and cape and better proportioned than his great blue cousin. I've seen him on several occasions lurking by the waters of Cherry Creek both by day and by night. He seems like a dependable fellow, despite those red eyes.

The reason I was out late was Code Camp. Every Thursday (have I mentioned this?) we're staying late at work to learn Flex and help each other out, like a study group. Flex certainly was not my friend today. I've started working with Spivey on my first project where I'm not doing all the coding. After time wasted on confusion and consternation over miscommunication about the differences between a model and a value object, it became apparent that this will take some getting used to. I think we moved the Flex project and the repo version (don't ask) at least 5 times, and it broke each time we moved it. By the time Code Camp rolled around, the project was still broken, but I could work on my small part and get a little more acquainted with Flex. I'm still trying to get everything right the first time, and subsequently I spend a lot of time dithering over whether something is best practice or company practice or if I should do it some other way. I don't want to bother the people who know what they're doing, so I try to get it down on my own, which means a lot more dithering. Dither, dither, dither. Despite this, I did get some coding done, but called it quits when the debugging was causing the rage-ometer in my stomach to get perilously close to the red line.

Still no book or CD today. Corrie, have you got your CD yet? Sigh. But I'm going camping this weekend, which is a good excuse to explore the sale they're having at REI tomorrow. I'll also be bringing home a new lamp and vacuum cleaner tomorrow. Amanda gave me the vacuum and Paula gave me the lamp, which is one of those torch lamps everyone and their grandma has. I need the light over my easy chair for reading if the library ever fills the holds I have or, maybe, just maybe, if my book I ordered ever gets here.

Seethe and Boil

Isn't it wonderful that we have the Internet here as a receptacle for self-pity, whining, and the venting of spleens? It is truly wonderful. Allow me to avail myself of that function of the dear old Web.

1. Crunchy Peanut Butter. Where the hell is my crunchy peanut butter? After years of consuming mass quantities of hydrogenated oils along with my beloved peanut butter, I decided to be slightly more healthy and switch to natural peanut butter, which is nothing but mashed up peanuts and sometimes a bit o' salt. I found the Smucker's natural peanut butter to be the apex of natural peanut butters in that it could be stirred up and then refrigerated and still maintain spreadability and have a pleasing texture. I blissfully ate this, sometimes mixing it up by trying the Smucker's natural peanut butter with honey in it. Good times. Now my beloved Smucker's au natural has disappeared from shelves. Except for the creamy variety. It's still there. So I was left with either Adams (which is grainy and solidifies with refrigeration) or Target's generic natural (not so hot after refrigeration, but better than Adams). Now, even the Market Pantry generic brand has disappeared (except for creamy), leaving me with naught but the pale, runny Adams. What the heck?! Why are the crunchy natural peanut butters being offed? Gosh dang it!
2. Quaker Granola. Continuing the theme of good food disappearing, I looked today for my beloved Quaker Granola, and it was nowhere to be found. The stuff is delectable, like eating oatmeal cookies for breakfast, and is my favorite cereal. Now it has been disappeared by the good food gestapo. The same thing happened to my favorite Snapple flavors from the Elements line of drinks. Moon (green tea like no other) and Air (peach), where have you gone my friends? Too soon, too soon your brands have been laid to rest. Your tasty nectar vanished like the morning mist. All that remains are the banal flavors of common beverages, tasting like fruit punch and kool aid. Alas, the wisdom of your unique tastes has been wasted upon the masses who seek naught but sugar and folly!
3. Table of Malcontents. Even the blogs I like are being whisked away. It was announced this week that the odd, but sometimes excellent Table of Malcontents blog from Wired is being discontinued. Sure, sometimes it was wrong and disturbing, but it was a unique slice of all that is bizarre and tentacled in this world. I liked it better when it was Lore Sjoberg's domain, but even the twisted John Brownlee found terrific things out there in the Web. If it wasn't for Geekologie to support me, I might break down and cry. Well, maybe not.
4. Mail That Doesn't Come. Is there any feeling so empty to be anticipating wondrous, magnificent things in the mail only to be greeted by vapid junkmail? Probably, yes there are, but I'm not experiencing them right now. Right now, my heart is heavy when I open my mailbox hoping to find the new Cake CD or the Order of the Stick book and get nothing but fliers and credit card offers. Truly, Wilmington, Delaware is the root of all kinds of mailed evil. I feel like a kid whose ice cream cone has been swatted to the ground by a grubby man who then tries to sell me tanning salon memberships and gutter cleaning. Screw you, junk mailers of the world! Screw you! And hey, Postal Service. We're paying enough for postage now. Gimme my book and CD!
   

Urban Living

I better watch out. This urban living is growing on me. Not only was I able to commute to work on my bike (which admittedly, I also did in Gold Beach) today, but I also received my tickets for the Fountains of Wayne show and the Cake show. I can be pretty sure they won't be doing a show in Gold Beach, or heck, even Orlando. Tonight I also rode my bike to the Mayan to watch Paprika, something you can't do in either Gold Beach or Orlando for several different reasons. The ride back in the warm dusk was blissful.

The movie was interesting, like watching a story set in a Dali painting. It was beautiful, very strange, and really didn't make much sense; like Spirited Away, but without the coherence. It certainly drives home the fact that dolls are creepy as all get out. I had been hoping it'd come here to Denver, but it hung out in only LA and NYC for the longest time. Fortunately, Denver is a good city for anime. I still can't get past the fact that Orlando has something like 4 anime conventions a year, and yet never gets anime movies in the theaters. Maybe the Mouse's mafia keeps competing animation out of town. Totoro comes to town and Goofy breaks out the brass knuckles.

Flashy

Look at that. Three posts in one day. Clearly I have too much time on my hands. No, no. That's not it. I just have to share what I'm doing with ya'll.

Anyway, here's my first try at rendering my little cyclopean dudes in Flash. This is a test run and has definitely given me some things to think about. First off is the difference between the line quality provided by the brush tool versus the stroke on geometric shapes. Then we can talk about gradients versus flat fills. Trying to mesh these different looks will be a problem I'll have to figure out. Here, well, I guess it's not too bad. It really makes his head pop out. But for the ragged look I want his robe to have, the brush tool was a must.

By the way, this is Ickthiel, Guardian of Decomposition. He's holding a giant microbe named Germy. That's his pet, I guess. Ickthiel is one of Murphy's friends, though they don't always want him around, because man does he stink.

Walk of the Navigator

So today I finished up the area of blocks bound by Lincoln on the west, 11th on the north, Washington on the east, and 6th on the south. I've got the parking mapped out for all the blocks in that area, which would be 30 (5 by 6) or so blocks. Technically that means I'm only a third done with the research for the parking map. A radius of 5 blocks from my apartment technically means a 100 block area (10 by 10). I don't think the math is right there ... hmm. Anyway, I don't intend to do the whole thing. I'm not going south of Speer with the map, and I'm not sure if I'll go all the way up to Colfax. I can't imagine people walking north or south from here more than three blocks. The blocks here have a 3:5 ratio, or thereabouts, so walking north or south 3 blocks is the same distance as walking east or west 5 blocks. Throw in crossing Speer and coming up the hill, and I think you'll be looking for parking elsewhere.

Anyway, I did a good amount of walking today, and it was very warm out. I made a stop back here in peregrinations to rehydrate before heading out again. I seriously need to bring a camera along to take some pictures of the grand homes I'm passing. They include the Akeler Castle and the current governor's mansion. I get enough looks just collecting parking data, though. If I start taking pictures of some of the nicer homes, someone's going to call the cops.

Fonduuuuuuude

Man. That was some tasty fondue. I went over to Isaac and Elsa's place and we had a 3-course fondue dinner with Laura and their neighbor Kelly. Isaac really outdid himself with this one. We started with a traditional cheese sauce and had bread, apples, and broccoli for dipping. Then came the meat. He had strips of beef wrapped around strips of mozzarella in spirals. We had a lemon dill sauce, a peanut sauce, and a fantastic tomato sauce for dipping. Soooooo goooood. That was followed with dessert fondues, one chocolate and one chocolate with amaretto. Bananas, marshmallows, and Rainier cherries were the dippers for that, which were amazing. I also brought the vinegar pie along with some whipped cream, and that was some darn good pie. It had a bit of almost a berry taste and a texture like the rice pudding we have on Christmas eve. The recipe is definitely a keeper. After eating ourselves into a stupor and Elsa took care of the mountain of dishes, we laid out on blankets outside and talked. Fantastic.

Earlier on in the day, I went for another walk and did more mapping for the parking map project. It was a nice trip and I actually found a spot where I ended up parking last night. With everything else I did yesterday, I'm feeling mildly accomplished. If only the drunken, screaming jerks in the parking lot at 1:30 in the morning would just shut up and go home.

Saturday Afternoon Scribble

So, just baking a vinegar pie and listening to Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! Thought I'd do a bit more of sketching for my webcomic. While I was waiting for my car's oil to be changed, I fleshed out the outline for the first story arc for it. I think I might be ready to start making graphical assets in Flash. I can tell you, as does the picture above, that doing gradients in Sketchpad is no easy task.

So, If I May Be Allowed Some Philosophizing...

I've been tossing around this idea for a while. We live in a world in between extremes. Our environment needs to be moderate. It can't be too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too acidic, or too base. Our intake needs to be moderated as well. We can't drink too much water or too little water. We can't eat too much salt or too little salt. We can't breathe in too much oxygen or too little oxygen.

Living in this world, we've come up with the idea that balance is important and that we need to exist in a middle area in the various continua (that's the plural of continuum. I had to look it up). So we extend this to other facets of our lives as well. We seek to strike a balance between being too loud and being too quiet, between chaos and order, between watching no TV and becoming a couch potato, and between ultra-conservativism and ultra-liberalism. The very word extremist is a derogatory term, regardless of which end of the spectrum you are referring to. The whole idea of yin-yang is not only the dichotomy, but also that there is a balance between yin and yang and that there is part of yin in yang and vice versa.

Balance. There's an ideal that people strive after. The news purports to be, strives to be fair and balanced. Food purports to be part of a balanced diet. You don't want to be mentally unbalanced. In all those spectra though of hot-cold, heavy-light, dry-wet, boring-insane, active-relaxed, etc., we also tend to put good-evil on the list. People don't want to be around Adolph Hitler, but they don't want to hang with Ned Flanders either. In Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, an angel and and demon work together to forestall the Apocalypse because a showdown means one side will win and the balance will tilt permanently to one side. Despite their employers' wishes, they like Earth just as it is with its interesting mixture of good and evil. If Satan wins, obviously that's bad because Earth would be cast into eternal torment, but if God wins, things will be ever so boring, orderly, and rigid.

I think this is wrong. Good and evil is not something that should be balanced. Good is by definition good. Too much good is never bad, because it's good. People picture good as boring and rigid, despite being pleasant (think Pleasantville). We seem to desire conflict. A good story has conflict, otherwise it'd just be a boring recounting of another nice day where everything's perfect and nothing goes wrong. A joke can be funnier with an unexpected swear thrown in. I think this is a misconception though. Good doesn't have to be boring. There are plenty of things out there that are interesting without having an element of evil to them: kayaking, football, music, hiking, good food, games, etc. Even conflict itself doesn't have to be based on evil. Conflict can come from challenges and obstacles and doesn't have to be a fight or a battle. People think there can't be fun without sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Well, technically those things aren't evil. Each of those in the right context can be great goods. It is how we use them or corrupt them that is evil. Hmm. This all sounded so much better when I was thinking it...

Anyway, some might argue that a little evil is needed, that without evil, good wouldn't exist.; without a little evil, greater evil would arise. First off, good can easily exist without evil. The Garden of Eden was that. But what about the white lie, the kind lie? When the woman asks her husband if she looks fat in an outfit, a white lie forestalls an argument. When a child's pet dies and he asks where Scruffy is now, a white lie ameliorates grief. When a man asks if it was good for her, a white lie spares an ego. Surely, this little mote of evil prevents a greater one. But it is evil that makes the white lie seem necessary. It is our vanity that wants a lover to tell us we looking sexy in those hot pants. It is our self-centeredness that spouts forth rage when someone tells us the unkind truth. If we weren't evil ourselves, it wouldn't be a problem for us to hear the truth. And if we tie death with evil, something I'm not entirely ready to do despite it coming into the world with the Fall, without that evil, there is no death, and no need to lie. I do not think grieving an evil either. Unpleasant, yes, but evil? No.

I guess the point is, don't fall into the trap of thinking that a balance must be struck between good and evil. That is a continuum where we should cleave to the good end of the spectrum. That and, uh, God has no opposite. Satan is the opposite of Michael the archangel. So, uh, there.

Thorn of Plenty

I got my first thorn of the summer yesterday. When I came down to the bike room, my front tire was flat and I had to change it before going to work. Thank goodness RealEyes is open minded about time.

It's disconcerting to get a thorn this early in the summer. Usually thorn season is in the Fall. Still, just to be safe, I went to REI to grab some thorn resistant tubes. I had these back when I was going to DU and they saved me a lot of woe. However, they didn't have those, so I picked up some self-healing tubes. They've got a layer of slime in them that purportedly instantly seals punctures. I'm a bit dubious about them. They are slimy after all, and they weigh about 50 pounds each. Next time I get a puncture I'll swap these in rather than do yet another patch job. Hopefully they will ward off thorn-induced flats.

And while we're talking about cycling, let me whine here for a minute. This morning I crossed paths with another cyclist three times. We were both getting on the Cherry Creek Trail at Broadway, but there are several ways you can do it. Anyway, once we get on the trail, she just fricking blows by me like I'm not even trying. She just shoots off and is out of sight in minutes. And she was on a mountain bike too, so I can't blame gear ratios and skinny tires. Then later on, another girl shoots past me, also on a mountain bike, and doing her hair up in a ponytail at the same time.

What the heck is up? I've got muscle. I ride my bike every weekday. My tires are well inflated. Why can she blow by so effortlessly? Okay, I am carrying about 20 extra pounds just in my panniers, let alone my gut, but I also should have more muscle mass to make the wheels go round and round. It just ain't fair, I tell you. It just ain't fair.

Pie Hole

Okay, some of you may not know this, but I really like making pies. Not only are they delicious, but I have finally come to the point where I can make a decent pie crust from scratch, and that impresses people. I also like making more unusual pies. The standard apple pie or lemon meringue doesn't cut it for me (and meringue is hard anyway). Life's too short to spend on boring pies. That's why I like my pear anise pie and my frosted apple raisin pie. So imagine my delight when I found the Pie of the Month Club. You don't get the pie, you just get the recipes, and there are some beauts. Let's look at some shall we?

• Transparent Pie
• Vinegar Pie
• Amish Sauerkraut Surprise Cream Pie
• Pralined Cicada Pie

And that's just a taste of the oddities on there. Yes, there are more normal ones, but these are Uncommon Pies. I'm glad to find this, because cooking/burning dinner tonight on my crappy gas range shows why I haven't cooked much since moving into the new apartment. This, however, might be something to rejuvenate my desire to get in the kitchen. I also am glad to see what they call "staple pies" which are pies you can make with just the staple ingredients you have around the kitchen so you don't have to go spend a lot on some special ingredient like apricots or rhubarb. In fact, I have all the stuff to make the vinegar pie with. Hmmm. Do I have anything I need to do tonight?

Musical Interlude

I should also note that I came back from Portland with a lot of music in my backpack. Corrie got me the album Band A Parte by Nouvelle Vague, which is a French band that covers punk songs in a bossa nova style. Really. They should get together with Me First and the Gimme Gimme's for a concert. That'd be awesome. She also made a mixed CD for me of great bands from the Pacific Northwest. I do like Boy Eats Drum Machine, by the way. She also restored to me the Motorcade of Generosity album by Cake, which I had lost long ago and pined for like a Norwegian Blue. In addition to that, I finally picked up The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, which is a truly excellent album. It's got murder ballads for the 21st century! Even though Colin Malloy reeeeally likes repeating himself, I will be tracking down their other albums.

So imagine my excitement that two of the aforementioned bands will be playing in concert here in Denver. I've already purchased tickets for Monolith Festival. Cake will be headlining the first day and be preceded by The Decemberists and Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah!, which is pretty darn excellent. And speaking of concerts, I found out that Fountains of Wayne will be playing with Crowded House at the Fillmore the day before my birthday. I'm gonna have to go to that too. I didn't even know Crowded House was still around. It's nice to again be in a city that has a good concert schedule. Oooh, oooh! Fountains of Wayne also has a new album out. Dang. I'm gonna have to get that, too.

The Rest of the Weekend

I apologize to the friends who aren't going to get as high of a word count as my screed against untrustworthy means of transportation, but that was a long post and my verbal reservoir is running dry.

Let's recap. This post picks up where the lovely Corrie picked me up from the airport. We had time to swing by the House of Teriyaki for my most favoritest teriyaki in the whole wide world before going back to Corrie's apartment so we could change for the wedding. Did I mention it was raining? It was. Really it was pouring, though the forecast had called for high overcast and light rain. There was nothing light about it, brother. We got rather damp walking around trying to find exactly where the wedding was, but it was a lovely wedding and it was good to see Scott and Yarmela again. I also got to catch up with Paula, who works at Linfield and helped out with the forensics team there. No one can tell a story like Paula, and it was great to hear about all that she's been up to since I saw her last. Good luck with the production of Nunsense! Oh, and the reception was great, even with the power outage. Yummy, yummy food.

The next morning it was up early for breakfast at the original Original Pancake House. Man, that's good food. John, Jeremy, and Phoebe joined us for expensive, but delectable pancakes and omelets. We then headed over to the Hoyt Arboretum for a hike around the trees. It is one of my favoritest places in Portland, and we had some good conversation. Corrie and I then went back to her place and talked and looked for her cat, who had gotten out. Come home, Luna! Then it was time head to the airport. I was sad to leave, especially since United had so rudely truncated my trip. Jerks.

Experience Counts

I learned two things this weekend. First, I need new dress shoes. Mine have a hole in the sole that lets in water and look like they had a run-in with a angry badger. Second, never trust United when the fate of the world is on the line. It wasn't this weekend, but if it had, we all would have been SCREWED. The airlines are not being good to me. However, the debacle of my Christmas trip did prepare me for this one. Had I not gone through that hell, this one could have been worse.

So I got to the airport about a half hour later than I wanted to be there, but I was able to walk right up to the United ticket counter and check my bags. When I checked in, the kiosk told me that the flight was delayed. "Cool," I thought, "now I don't have to worry about the time so much." Unfortunately, rather than the 15 to 30 minute delay I expected, it was three and a half hours. As inconvenient as this was, I wasn't too upset. This meant that I got plenty of time for dinner and some time to read. Also, it was due to weather back East, so I couldn't really blame the airlines for it.

My flight was originally scheduled for 8:30 in the evening, so a 3.5 hour delay meant I wasn't getting out of there until after midnight. In fact I would have been on the last United flight leaving Denver that day. The airplane pulled up and the poor people inside shuffled off and immediately queued up at the podium to pick up the pieces of their shattered travel plans. And that's when the pilot got on the intercom. He told us that he'd been in the cockpit for more than 7.5 hours. If he flew us to Portland, he'd be in the cockpit for more than 10 hours, which would violate government safety regulations, so the flight was canceled. An angry frisson ran through the crowd and we all surged towards the podium to figure out what the heck United was going to do about this. The real kicker is that the pilot had told United 3 hours previous that he wouldn't be able to fly to Portland. Apparently they didn't think it important enough to tell us the flight was canceled or find a new pilot. So we'd been waiting for more than 4 hours for a flight that was canceled 3 hours ago.

This is where my experience with America's Worst in Las Vegas came in handy. I bolted into the line and immediately got on the phone with United using the only number I had. Thankfully I wasn't on hold like I was in Las Vegas (and the number worked, too!) and the guy on the other end was very helpful. He got me scheduled on a flight at 11 the next day, getting me to Portland at 1. Thankfully the wedding wasn't until 6. This evasive action spared me having to stand in line all night as people took turns screaming at the desk agents.

So I made my way to the main terminal, but under the shadow of a dilemma. All my friends live 45 minutes away from the airport in Littleton and the only one who I would imagine would be up at midnight was out of town. My car was back at the RealEyes office. A cab from the airport would cost around $40-50 and the RTD bus would take about an hour and a half to get downtown with a transfer at the ghetto Stapleton center. Again, past experience came into play as I remembered the Super Shuttle I took when I came to the IUG conference here. I figured I could take it downtown and walk over to the RE office and grab my car. I got to their desk but it was unmanned. Thankfully, a helpful lady at a ground transportation desk told me that they had a van leaving at 12:30 and that I could just pay the driver. It was 12:25. I had no cash. She pointed me to an ATM and I grabbed some cash and ran out to the transportation area. Luckily the shuttle had open spots and the driver took my $20 and I gratefully clambered on board.

This is where things get a bit surreal. Maybe it was my frazzled state and fatigue, but it was comically bizarre. As the people stuffed in the van waited for the driver to finish up business we were listening to his Middle Eastern music playing. The music wasn't odd, but sounded like it had been recorded on wax cylinders, possibly under water. The driver popped in and gave an, "Oh, my bad" and switched it over to ... smooth jazz. Then we were underway.

The disconcerting thing was that the driver was reading paperwork while driving. We sort of drifted in and out of lanes around tour buses and other airport traffic as I mentally assured myself that we were all going to die. Finally he set the paperwork down and drove us into Commerce City. Now, if you're not from Denver that might not mean anything to you. So let me tell you that Commerce City is one of the seedier, nastier, and uglier corners of Denver. The hotel we dropped a passenger off at had two city policemen standing watch outside, as well as a security person. Then as we left the hotel, apparently with no idea as to how to get back onto I-70, "You Give Me Fever" came on the radio. So I'm riding around in the dark in a van packed with strangers past the strip clubs and vacant lots of Commerce City listening to Fever. I can barely keep from cracking up at the utter cinematic bizarrity of the moment.

After some good guesses, our driver gets back on the interstate and we head towards downtown. A good stroke of luck has him drop off another passenger at a hotel even closer to my car than downtown so I bid those hapless travelers farewell and walk over to the office. God graces me with the good sense to pick up my shower supplies from work since my normal toiletries are in my bags back at the airport. Finally I wend my way home and after a hunt for parking and a check to make sure I really am on the flight to Portland, I fall into bed at 2 in the morning.

Up and at 'em! I figure that since I was able on Friday evening to so quickly move through the ticket counter and security that I can show up only an hour and a half early for my flight. After all, I have no bags to check any more. I get to DIA and the check in counters are packed. Thankfully I can go right up to a kiosk and check in and bypass that time suck. Except that the lines for security are ENORMOUS. I'd never seen DIA so packed, though people have since told me that I should have seen things around Christmas. The line went all the way through the zig zag security line, back to the back wall then all the way to the baggage claim. Thankfully it moved fast and I was able to get to my flight on time.

I was happy to see Corrie there at the Portland airport. Unfortunately my baggage had come in on an earlier flight so I had to check in with the baggage office and have them pull it out of the warehouse for me. But I made it!

Now, I'll put the rest of the weekend in another post, but let's skip ahead to the trip back. I was actually taking a commuter shuttle flight to Seattle and then flying from there to Denver. Having learned my lesson, I checked to make sure my flight to Seattle was on time, because I only had a half hour layover in Seattle. Any delays could be fatal. But everything looked shipshape so we went off to the airport and I whizzed through security there and grabbed lunch at the slowest and dirtiest Wendy's I have ever been to. The unfortunate things was that my flight to Denver from Seattle was delayed. Didn't think to check that one! Arrgh. I tried to get on a direct flight from PDX to Denver, but it was full, so I ended up waiting an extra 45 minutes to get home to Denver. Instead of getting in at 8:30, I got in around 9:10 or so. Once I finally found the airport parking shuttle pickup I felt the trouble was over. More or less it was, but the shuttle driver was driving up and down the aisles trying to take this one lady directly to her car rather than just letting her off at a stop. Please. I just want to go home. Finally he let me off at a stop and I trudged into my apartment at 10:30. I prepped for work the next day and went to sleep breathing curses against United. You SUCK!

onKillFocus

Heh. There is no way I'll be focused today. It's Friday, I'm leaving for Portland tonight, I've got a new idea for a personal project, and I just drank a cup of coffee accompanied by a biscotti. Buzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane

I'm pretty stoked to be heading out to Portland this weekend. It'll be a quick weekend trip out for Scott and Yarmela's wedding. Man, I haven't seen them in approximately 7 eons. It'll be good to catch up with those crazy kids. Also, I get to see Jeremy, Phoebe, & John (yay!) as well as Corrie (double yay!). It's not nearly a long enough stay, especially with the list of restaurants I'd like to hit, but it is a visit to my fair state and time to see some good friends.

sIFR makes me sUFR

One of the projects I have been working on at RealEyes is reworking their site template to be happily CSS-ified. Currently it is tables and images. Blech. I've got the site design created with CSS, but I need to bring in the Granjon font. There's no compromising on that, so I turned to sIFR. Now, I had dabbled with this beast before on my own personal site, and the challenge of implementing it, especially across three separate designs was one of the major factors that caused me to scrap everything I had done and start over. Although the implementation is not as easy as it seems, the biggest barrier was the lack of decent documentation. Returning to it now, the documentation is still lacking, but the sIFR 3.0 implementation is a lot more straightforward and the documentation is far better than it was. The only problem was that the sIFR 3.0 documentation was hard to find. It took a lot of hair pulling and cursing, but I finally got one line of text to look almost right. For some reason the sIFR version of the font is much narrower than the Photoshop comp image.

But this brings me to a larger complaint. There is a lot of really cool and useful open source software and technology out there. No, that's not the complaint. My gripe is that for many of the open source "solutions" out there, the learning curve for use and implementation is very steep. Obvious exceptions to this are my beloved Firefox and the competent Open Office suite of software. It's things like sIFR, swfMill, and PHPMyAdmin that are the origins of heartache and heartburn. Even the excellent SEPY ActionScript editor has some rough interface edges around its wonderful functionality (why, oh why, is F12 the Save As hotkey?). If open source software is going to become mainstream in more realms than just web browsers, it is going to need to, well, pander to the masses with some noob-friendly documentation and interface design. Although I do not consider myself a whiz, I am pretty good with programming and software, and yet implementation of things like PHPMyAdmin and XAMPP is an unpleasant challenge. In sIFR's case example usages for function calls and better consolidated (and more easily findable) documentation would have made my life easier and my satisfaction with sIFR better. The main how to that comes up for sIFR is for version 2.0, whereas the current version is 3.0 and the implementation is completely different. It's this sort of frustration that makes me grumpy and will completely deter many others.

Don't get me wrong. The fact that people are developing these amazing programs and providing them for free is absolutely awesome. However, if they really want to unseat Microsoft and get the masses using open source software, they're going to take a cue from Micr-- uh, let's say Adobe in terms of documentation and interface design. A novice can open up Photoshop and start doing what they want to do with ease. The documentation for Flash is incredible, especially the ActionScript reference. You need to provide good start up guides for beginners and hide scarier and more confusing parts of the interface behind a menu or two. Keep those options available for advanced users, but prompting people to enter in what flavor of Unicode they want to use for their database field is not helping spread the open source love.

Power to the People

Yesterday I went down to the People's Fair with Jason and his friends Jeff and Ted. They mainly went to hear some local musicians play, and they were pretty good, but between sets I wandered among the henna tattoo stands and people campaigning to legalize pot. There were a few good artists, but otherwise nothing to write home (or you) about. One interesting thing was the large amount of religious booths from a variety of faiths. In particular, the Scientologists in their yellow shirts were visible. The sign above their booth read: Church of Scientology. You Can Do Something About It. I resisted the urge to walk up and say, "Ok, I'm game. What can we do about the problem of Scientology?"

Projects and Astounding Feats of Derring-do!

Uh. Sorry. No actual feats of derring-do. That was just to make the title more interesting. I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Don't leave! Please stay! I wasn't lying about the projects. I'll never deceive you again ... at least not any time soon.

So, I worked on projects this weekend and it felt really nice. Yesterday I went out walking through the neighborhood and collected data for my parking map. There are some stunning houses around here, but given that the neighborhood I was in bears the name of Quality Hill, I can imagine that people of quality and their large sums of cash helped build those amazing domiciles. It was a good walk and the perfect weather.

Afterwards I went over to Isaac and Elsa's for Katie's birthday party, and again I left so full of food that I could barely stay awake. This is getting to be a pattern. Every time I go over there I end up packed to capacity with vittles. I also found that large groups of small children make me quite nervous.

Today I went to church, this time at University Church of Christ. They have a good young adult group and are quite friendly, though I'm still not down with the lack of musical instruments. Maybe I'll make up for that at TNL again. Anyhow, once I got home I worked on another of my projects. That's what all these sketches are.

The top one is of three characters playing putt putt golf. The guy on the left is Lapinus, guardian spirit of rabbits. In the middle is Bigvai, who tends cacti. On the end is Sookmuk, the guardian spirit of icicles. He tends to be a bully and a hothead. The three are a group of friends that are sort of rivals with Murphy's group of friends. The sketch immediately above is a collection of different sketches of characters. Murphy's in there, as is Lapinus, and Axaholotl on the upper right.

So what are all these for, you might wonder. Well, ill-advised as it may seem, I want to start a webcomic. I know, I know. It's not like there isn't a surplus of crappy webcomics that never get updated. Why do we need one more? Uh. I don't know, but hopefully it won't be quite that crappy and hopefully I will update it regularly. I'm doing prep work now to make sure that I don't get lazy and not have enough time. Also, I want to do the illustration inside Flash so I can store a library of graphical assets so I don't have to redraw everything each time I make a new panel. Also, I plan on mapping out the storylines well in advance so I don't get stuck with writer's block when I'm looking at a deadline.

The concept for the webcomic, in brief, is that these cyclopean dudes are guardian spirits of different aspects of Creation. They tend and manage their given specialties. However, God made Creation largely self-regulating, so they spend most of their time watching human television, having parties, playing putt-putt golf, and, uh, probably having wacky misadventures. Angels are in there as administrators and law enforcement. There's a couple of them in that middle sketch.

Like I said, it's probably not the best idea, but after reading so many webcomics for so long, I guess I'd like to try my hand at it. I'm always trying to create my own version of things I enjoy, such as games and stories. As a kid, I made lots of choose-your-own-adventure books. Now I have better tools, so we'll see if I can improve upon my Bat Yuppy adventure book. Good grief, I certainly hope so.

Third Rate

I'm just not accustomed to paying $9.75 for a movie. What is this, Manhattan? Why I remember in my day, when a movie cost only ... [unintelligible old man rambling and ranting]. Anyway, I drove down and met up with Tirzah and a few of her friends and saw Shrek 3. Meh. It had some funny bits and the animation was really nice, but otherwise, it was a loose agglomeration of cliches and hackneyed writing. It had the feel of a sitcom with awkward timing and jokes telegraphed so far in advance they ceased to be funny. Eric Idle was great as Merlin though.

More interesting were some of the trailers. Bee Movie looks interesting for nothing else than hearing Jerry Seinfeld's voice come out of something other than Jerry Seinfeld. There were bits that looked too much like that bad allergy medication commercial with the inexplicably Latin-accented bee. Transformers has me excited, though with every trailer I grow more nervous. The surfing penguin movie looks mildly intriguing due to its mockumentary style. The one that I have high hopes for is Ratatouille. My main reason for hope is that it is Brad Bird directing another Pixar movie, and last time he did that, the magnificent The Incredibles was made. However, the premise doesn't look to horribly compelling: a gourmand rat helps a struggling chef. Meh. Where Cars was part of John Lasseter's love affair with cars, this looks like this might be someone's love note to fine cooking. That didn't work out so hot for Cars. I'm just saying. The most exciting trailer, however, was for the Simpsons movie. I think they purposely took so many clips out of context to make it virtually impossible to tell what the heck the movie is actually about ... which means it'll probably be like a long Simpsons episode, where so many topics get covered as to dizzy the mind. It looks entertaining, though.

Then I went home and cleaned my apartment until after 11 at night. I'm a wild man, baby! Ladies, you will never tame me. Ne-VAR!