Category: Uncategorized

And this seems like a great way to do it.  Conveniently, it also lets me test out some other webhosting foo.  Once more into the breach, good friends.

We had a good first weekend in SF. My work obligations were actually pretty well taken care of when I left town. Friday we finished watching the second SciFi dune mini series disk before crashing. (it had been our primary in flight entertainment). Saturday was board games, and we started off with shadow hunters with its expansion (a reasonable length 8 player game), then we tried out dead_platypus‘s birthday gift to me, Vasco da Gama. and handed our butts to us. Then it was 5 player Mu. I kept bidding aggressively (as always). Until someone who actually knows how to play trick taking games () started bidding aggressively. He won. We followed this with an annoying struggle to get in to our apartment rental, and then vegetarian restaurant tastiness with nearby.

Sunday we hiked on the peninsula, watched simpsons & law and order with , and then had dinner with , , and , followed up by ticket to ride. Pliny decided he’d lost in the first couple of turns, and made it his life mission to block everyone else from scoring. He did so very effectively with me. With two routes that did him absolutely no good, he knocked me from 57 points to -17 points.

Monday is our most unplanned day out here. I’m currently thinking a bike rental and riding the three bears, followed by dinner of some sort, but that’s about all I have planned. Rest of the week pretty booked with fun things.

I just found out that a new MMORPG is supposed to come out this year: final fantasy XIV. I liked FFXI, and Seth, Pliny’s old friend and our host in Seattle (Redmond) this week, told me they fixed many of the problems: now it has solo play, level matching capabilities (totally absent in WoW, present in CoH), and more instance options. I want to play it. But, I also want to make sure as many friends of mine as possible are on the same damn server. Pliny has said he wants to try playing it casually. I fear for his tenure under these circumstances, but understand.

So, who out there would be likely to try Final Fantasy XIV, and interested in being on the same server as me? =)

Things that are running through my head right now:

“I am Vindicated.
I am Selfish.
I am Wrong.
I am Right.
I swear I’m Right
I swear I knew it all along.

And I am flawed, but I am cleaning up so well.
I am seeing in me now the things you swore you saw yourself.”
– Vindicated by Dashboard Confessional

A scene from a near final, if not actually final, west wing episode that I haven’t seen in full yet:
Toby: “You didn’t pick him up in a bar last Thursday, you’ve been close for eight years.”

CJ: “That doesn’t mean it magically falls into place once we take the leap…. What? I’m not resisting.”

Toby: “You’re not?”

CJ: “I’m not one of those women who can’t handle a good thing when it’s standing in front of them.”

Toby: “Good.”

CJ: “Why don’t you sound convinced?”

Toby: “You spend your whole life working for powerful, demanding men 24/7, that’s a lot of testosterone in your world.”

CJ: “Which has what to do with anything?”

Toby: “Well, maybe you didn’t need to date – you had Josh and Sam and me… and 180 reporters flirting with you day in and day out.”

CJ: “Come on.”

Toby: “It’s a lot of positive male attention. Now you’re slotting in Matt Santos, maybe Frank Hollis.”

CJ: “So, what, you think this all some sort of Freudian temper tantrum?”

Toby: “You showed up here at eight o’clock at night with a bottle of wine asking me about a pardon we both know is out of the question, telling me about a man who’s crowding you. I think a lot of things.”

CJ: “You think I came here to take advantage of you before they cart you off to the big house?”

Toby: “I think you don’t know why you came here. You’re a woman with a lot of options. You’re acting like the world’s backing you into a corner, bouncing from one thing to the next – from Bartlet to Santos, to Danny, to me. Maybe you should stop bouncing, pick something. What do you want?”

CJ: “I don’t know…. I’d like to learn how to make a chicken like that.”

Toby: “Stick a lemon up it and throw on some rosemary.”

CJ: “Yeah?”

Toby: “Yeah, a little salt.”

CJ: “I’d like to learn how to ski. I think would be soothing. Be a ski bum. Operate the ski chair for 6 months, clear my head.”

Toby: “It’s a chair lift.”

CJ: “Well, first I’d learn the lingo, take it from there.”

Toby: “I missed you.”

CJ: “Yeah. We had it good there for a while.”

Toby: “Yeah, we did… You should go.”

CJ: “You kicking me out?”

Toby: “Yeah.”

CJ: “Okay.”

I am so very CJ, but not as good at the job thing. =)

Hmmm, good things.

I’m almost done with this annoying project at work. Just another month or two. (It’s been over a year. All did not go according to plan. Anyone’s plan, at any point in time.) (does that count as positive? Probably not).

I love my friends.

Sleep will make me happier.

Exercise might help too.

I could get a gym membership.

Meh.

Dearest CTA,

We all know you’re a little worn down, and, well slow. We’re kind of used to it, actually. But could you at least pretend to not actively hate your customers?

Imagine for a moment train A arrives a second or two before train B on opposing platforms. Imagine further that trains A and B carry passengers who may well want to transfer to the other line. What is the appropriate response? Hint, the correct answer is not “drop your passengers as quickly as possible and pull away from the station seconds before a reasonably athletic passenger, optimally placed, can sprint between the two lines so you can proceed to wait 3 minutes with your final car still overlapping the platform (doors closed, of course) so no passenger can board and no train can pull in behind you.

Fuck you very much.

Hugs & kisses

-scu

Jane: Hey stephen how was the trip to Ca
Me: Yo
Me: CA was very nice.
Jane: 🙂
Jane: What all did you do that was fun?
Me: Out to dinner with tom and pliny and saw halfblood prince on wed, biked over the oakland hills and saw a play about hookers and drug dealers on thu, crepes with pliny before work and lunch with simon, lili, tom and pliny on friday before hitting a desserty bake shop, saturday was boardgame day, sunday we went to the dore alley street fair (not suitable for minors!) a house party, then dinner with josh followed by: drinks with josh and pliny
Jane: Nice sounds like quite an event
Me: Monday, we had lunch with nathaniel at google (I want to work there for the lunch alone, and the tube slide between floors) then we went hiking in berkeley (shoulders still burned), and dinner with simon, lili, tom, nathaniel and krista at a neat cambodian place. Tuesday we flew back and tried to play a board game together on our laptops, which sorta worked.

(Partial photo documentation available on facebook)

So, when asked very recently about raising kids in the burbs v the city, I talked about my experience growing up in the burbs (hated it, especially the dependency for transportation.)

And then I proceeded to make a series of almost totally unsupported, kneejerk, anti-suburban statements, peppered with admissions of ignorance.

Is there any research on this? What about you parents, rural, suburban and urban? What do you think?

Paul Krugman’s Monday column claimed that climate change denial struck him as a form of treason against the planet. I mostly agree with what he has to say in the column, but something about that strikes me as not quite right.

The planet is a giant chunk of rock which developed the atmosphere and oceans that spawned life as we know it. This life has gone through an evolutionary process which has produced our species among many others. Our species through arguably comparable processes produced civilization. All on this one speck in the universe which is so hospitable to life, and human life in particular, in comparison to every other planet we know anything about.

But it’s not the giant chunk of rock we’re betraying. We’re betraying one another, ourselves and our children. We’re betraying our fellow life forms. Whether it’s our fellow species we’re eradicating, our fellow civilization’s farm lands we’re desertifying, our own coastal cities we’re submerging, or our own water supply that we’re all but eliminating, we’re committing treason against [ETA: the future of] life, humanity, civilization and ourselves. But the planet simply is. It’ll be here whether we destroy ourselves or not.