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“By daily dying I have come to be.” - Theodore Roethke

If there were an ancient Aboriginal word for Heather Graham, it would be pronounced “hottie” with some clicks and whirs. I’m a little pissed at the incompetence of the MPAA to allow her and Bridget Moynahan to not only co-exist in a single film (Gray Matters… just rented on the PPV), but to engage is panty-clad passionate kiss with mutually consenting tongues for the world to visually digest on the wide screen. There should at least be some sort of warning label for lonely, single guys like me to spare the delightful agony of such fancies. It did get me thinking about how much I dig La Perla (definitely my fav) or Catriona MacKechnie… or even some of the Agent Provocateur stuff. Anyhoo, I digress.

So, I am not blind. This is a good thing.

I had LASIK surgery performed this previous Thursday and all went well. I was in and out in an hour and most of that was waiting around and not being subjected to the steps of the procedure itself. There are two basic steps… the creation of the corneal flap and the actual lens correction. The most unnerving of the two is definitely the creation of the flap. I went into the surgical suite and laid upon a small, but comfortable table adjacent to the Intralase machine. As previously mentioned, this is the machine that replaced the barbaric blade scraping a slice of tissue off the top of your eye with a more human, bladeless approach. In order for the laser to create an evenly distributed burn of uniform depth, your eye must be motionless, so they secure it with a small plastic device I like to call the “worst fucking part of the surgery”. It is a pseudo-flat piece of plastic that is inserted below your eyelids on the surface of the eye. Once your eye is pointed in the appropriate direction, they apply suction to this mechanism and your eyeball is forcefully arrested into the device with great force. There is no pain, but there is a lot of pressure and psychological discomfort. The instant the suction is applied, the effected eye is blinded temporarily. Blackness. The laser slowly scans the eye, creating millions of tiny vapor bubbles below the surface of the cornea along the way. There is no sound or sensation during this 30 second or so procedure. Once complete, they remove the gizmo and you can see again, but it looks like you are looking through a sheet of bubble wrap. This is repeated for the other eye in the same fashion. I think I almost passed out from anxiety during this step. I wasn’t scared and I understood what was going on, but I was having an involuntary pulmonary response from this procedure that was difficult to wrestle into submission. The next step was the correction itself. This requires going to a different table and getting poked and prodded a bit. The surgeon skillfully uses specialized tools to severe the edges of the cornea representing the perimeter of the gas layer just created by the Intralase system. When this is done, the top layer of the cornea can be manually pushed aside or pulled back (ala “flap") to reveal the innards ready to be zapped. The surface of the eye freshly exposed are dried and aligned with the VISX system’s eximer laser (as opposed to the femtosecond laser used by Intralase). The eye measurements and advanced scans performed during pre-op (like the Wavefront scanner) are uploaded into your custom profile residing on the computer handling the laser guidance. The instant the procedure starts, the laser targeting system performs an iris recognition routine on your eye, plotting several unique points around the iris and acquiring a target lock on each point. During the 30 seconds or so it takes to do the corrective burn, as long as the targeting system maintains iris lock, you have a 97% chance of 20/20 or better. If, at any point, target lock on your iris is lost, the laser is instantly powered down until lock is reacquired. That is some Buck Rogers shit right there, my friends. About 25 seconds into the corrective cycle on my right eye, I smelled burning flesh. My friend, Georgia, told me that when her LASIK was done years ago, her parents were there watching from the other side of a glass wall. They told her that her eyeball was smoking during the burn cycle. Freaky. Anyhoo, I sat up from the table and instantly could see without corrective lenses… the very moment the procedure was complete. I went in the next day for a checkup and everything looked good with the exception of some small scratches on the surface of my right cornea that managed to happen during the flap manipulation stage of the surgery. The analgesic drops used to deaden the eye surface during the procedure have a side effect of softening the corneal tissue thus making it more susceptible to damage. The largest of these abrasions is in the center of my pupil, so I’m effectively looking through the scratch. This blurs my vision slightly and am assured that, once healed, my right eye will be on par with my left. I’ve been doing the timed drops in my eyes (antibiotics and anti-inflammatory) which has urned me into a little clock watcher. I’m ready to get past that stage of the recovery for sure. I also must wear plastic shields over my eyes at night for a week or so to protect them from nighttime bumps and jiggles. I don’t mind that at all except for the residue left by the medical tape. It is difficult to remove and I don’t like being dirty. I was ordered to avoid computers and reading of any sort for the initial recovery… hence the delayed post. Well, that and I’m generally lazy.

Other than freakin’ laser beams being shot into my head, not much else has been going on. I went to see Damon Wayans at the Improv last night… very funny dude. I cracked open a bottle of La Crema pinot noir and am feeling wino-ish. I’m lonely. 

note to self: sign up for guitar lessons. soon.

Define for me “aggressive mediocrity”.

I am one of those technopacifists. I take it as it comes and when it’s needed. I don’t have to try the latest hot shit on the street or attempt to hack, circumvent, or otherwise upgrade through undue initiative the gizmos and gadgets with various sundry (slightly redundant, I know, but I’m on a rant) wires, cords, and battery suppositories. I had the same 19” brick television for 16 years before adopting a flat panel LCD HDTV. I am probably the last person you know to get an iPod (barring new births subsequent to this post). I didn’t even have a cell phone until I was 28. Who the fuck possibly needed to reach me that badly? That being said, when I do chose to accept a new addition to my collection of our modern age, I expect the product to at least remotely work as advertised. Working in the technology field myself, I understand there are occasional speed bumps along the road to marketechture’s promised functionality and that is why God invented tech support. Intent on not diverging onto a topic about how God invented everything, let’s just say Comcast sucks and stay on track. I’ve been through a bushel of cell phone providers and home internet/cable providers over the last decade. In rare instances, it was the same logo on a common invoice. Since I moved to suburbia, my broadband access and cable content delivery has been via Time Warner Cable. They had their moments over the years with this and that, but by and large, they provided a solid service for my residential best effort SLA. One sunny day, the folks at TWC broke bread with the folks at Comcast and they dropped the deuce that has become the Houston/Dallas Kansas City Shuffle. TWC relinquished the Houston market to Comcast in exchange for Comcast’s Dallas market. From that fine day to this very moment, I’ve had problems with service(s) (not-)rendered by henceforth-to-be-known-as Crapcast. There have been many hiccups, but the one beef that I just can’t seem to choke down is the irrefutable fact that my VoD service (video on demand), which worked flawlessly under the reign of TWC, has not worked since the migration to Crapcast. Here comes the boring timeline.

I can access the VoD service.
I can access all the menus for schtuff you can order (rent).
I can watch all the free content.
I can watch all the previews for the pay content.
As soon as I try to order anything that has a dollar value next to it for rental, the system errors out.
I call and weed through the automated system to send a reset pulse to my DVR.
That didn’t work. I wait a couple of days.

I call and gain access to a live human being. I give them the run down on how we got here and what the symptoms are before hearing “I can’t find anything wrong. Let me send (another) reset to your system.”
That didn’t work. I wait a couple of days.

I call and gain access to a different live human being. I give them the run down on how we got here and what the symptoms are before hearing “I can’t find anything wrong. Contort your fingers into a funky gang sign and press all the buttons on the front of your DVR at the same time to low level boot it.”
That didn’t work. I wait a couple of days.

I call and gain access to yet a different live human being. I give them the run down on how we got here and what the symptoms are before hearing “I can’t find anything wrong. Let me transfer you to sales.” Sales says, “We can’t do shit but sell you more service(s) that we may or may not be able to deliver. Let me transfer you back to tech support.” Tech support says, “I can’t find anything wrong. Let me send (another) reset to your system.” I feel like a trend is developing.
That didn’t work. I wait a couple of days.

I call and gain access to holy-shit-another live human being. I give them the run down on how we got here and what the symptoms are before hearing “I can’t find anything wrong. Let me recreate all new account codes for you that use the Crapcast Capt. Crunch decoder ring instead of the TWC Capt. Crunch decoder ring, then send another reset pulse while you throw the gang sign at the front of the box and make it low level boot again.”
That didn’t work, so I asked this: “If I want to escalate this to the next tier of tech support, during what hours should I call in during the day?” Doctor Cranium says, “I can send out a technician to check your levels and you may need to replace your DVR. We don’t have any more tech support. I can’t spare a square. I don’t have a square to spare.”

The end.

So basically, in a nutshell, to summarize, wrapping up, to roll up the tortilla, etc. Crapcast is no Time Warner. There was actually some other banter between me and the flowchart card reader on the other end of the line about escalation through to someone that supports the VoD backoffice systems that validated authorization for content delivery and tied into the billing system as this was clearly some sort of flag associated with only the pay content faucet knob in the big ‘ole bucket of bits back at the farm. I think his head exploded at some point because all I got back was some slurred speech about how they don’t have anyone that knows anything about those systems. Right. That’s why Crapcast has a 78 billion dollar market cap and is trading 32 million shares at 25 bucks. Anyhoo, there is this indie film I wanted to rent while I snuggled up with some Henry-time tonight and was (still, after a week) unable to give my money to a clearly undeserving disorganization in exchange for it. All wasn’t lost however, I ended up watching the newest episode of Californication and relegated my frustration with Crapcast to a later moment on the soapbox. Lucky for you, that moment just happened. I’m hittin’ the hay.

Sir Henry prances… bow before him.

First off… if you suffered through this, then you need to watch this. And to think I didn’t think I could like Seth more. Thanks for the link, Sean.

mother, mother
there’s too many of you crying
brother, brother, brother
there’s far too many of you dying
you know we’ve got to find a way
to bring some lovin’ here today - ya

father, father
we don’t need to escalate
you see, war is not the answer
for only love can conquer hate
you know we’ve got to find a way
to bring some lovin’ here today

picket lines and picket signs
don’t punish me with brutality
talk to me, so you can see
oh, what’s going on
what’s going on
ya, what’s going on
ah, what’s going on

in the mean time
right on, baby
right on
right on

father, father, everybody thinks we’re wrong
oh, but who are they to judge us
simply because our hair is long
oh, you know we’ve got to find a way
to bring some understanding here today
oh

picket lines and picket signs
don’t punish me with brutality
talk to me
so you can see
what’s going on
ya, what’s going on
tell me what’s going on
i’ll tell you what’s going on - uh
right on baby
right on baby - M.G.

I went to see Shoot ‘Em Up tonight. Paul Giamatti was cast well and the whole movie watched like a cartoonish first-person shooter. If you can put yourself in the mindset that it’s possible a movie is made for a given effect that perhaps doesn’t fit a mainstream mold, then you can probably enjoy this kitchy 86 minutes of bullets and one liners worth the price of admission alone. I met JD, Ted, Carl, and Ryan there and I felt like a 5th wheel. Maybe it was my imagination, but with seemingly all my friends headed in different directions these days, I find myself alone more than not. Ted and I used to be so close and now he just seems indifferent. It stings a little, but I guess that’s life. Sooooooo, what the hell is new with me, you ask? I flew to Atlanta on Friday afternoon to meet up with Wade and Beth for nothing more than killing some time in the ATL. We spent entirely too much money on taxi fair. Those cabbies are master thieves. Drinks and pub fair at The Rusty Nail let to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant where the owner obviously needed glasses as he was convinced I looked like “Mr. Smith”. This of course prompted my partners in crime introducing me as “the Lebanese Brad Pitt” to everyone we met subsequently. The meal was very tasty though, so being mistaken for Tyler Durden was taken as complimentary. At Beth’s request, we almost closed the Pink Pony. I can’t exactly say it was misery… even when drenched in champagne. We met the appropriately pierced queen of booty poppin’ ATL style, a petite seductress with a fake British accent, and a Canadian gypsy endocrinologist that we gingerly wrote about in a coffeehouse journal the next day before I hopped on a plane back to H-Town less than 24 hours later with little sleep. ”Give me your tears, Gypsy, or I will take them from you.” Actually, getting back to the hotel at five aye emm on Saturday after witnessing amateur rapper/producer negotiations in the waiting line at I-Hop would have been fine if it weren’t for the construction crew drilling in the wall next to our room and indifference of the hotel manager. We went to the Lush outlet store and I learned more than I ever needed to know about fresh, handmade cosmetics. It would have been a much better visit if I’d checked a bag, but it’s hard to get squishy, gooey, organic bath and body yumm past TSA at the airport. Overall, the trip was a nice diversion from the norm for me and, as an added bonus, I got to meet some new people IRL and that’s invariably nice on some level. Beth and I have known each other for years in blogdom, but this is the first time we’ve ever robbed a liquor store together. She had to have some way to buy that truckload of Lush on Saturday morning. I don’t know how she’s going to explain it to her husband, but there was enough organic cosmetics imported into Alabama this weekend to set off some sort of alarm at Homeland Security, I’m sure.

QuikTrip gasoline: “Like fine wine—except it tastes nasty.”

Today was low key. My dear mother was watching the grandkids while I was out of town. We grilled out on the patio and had “movie night” last night after I got home from Georgia. We went for mani/pedi’s and lunch this morning then she was off for home. Other than that, I pretty much enjoyed doing nothing. I feel like this week will be spent recovering from the lost sleep that the back to back trips cost me. One detail I left out of last week’s posts was my consultation visit to the Berkeley Eye Center. I’ve told myself for years I was going to buy some corrective surgery for my 40th birthday. Recently, I can’t really find a reason to wait… especially after losing my glasses a couple of weekends ago and resorting to wearing frames that are years and years old. If I go for a new exam, frames, and contacts, I’m already several hundred dollars into the procedure cost anyway. So why not? Long story short: I go in for precise measurements to be taken on dilated eyes on Wednesday after work. Barring unforseen difficulties, I will return on Thursday to have laser beams shot into my eye and either emerge able to see without glasses -or- completely blind without glasses… regardless, without glasses. I have a high degree of anxiety surrounding the part where they make the corneal flap so the eximer laser can shape the lens. In the old days, they used a microkeratome to mechanically cut a flap with an instrument not unlike a carpenter’s plane. Modern procedure often allows the use of something called Intralase where a femtosecond laser vaporizes tiny areas of corneal tissue at precise depths to create gas bubbles that eventually create a flap similar to the microkeratome… ie. bladeless because it’s all done with light. The technology is freakin’ fascinating to me, but the thought of an “oops” turning me into a fingerless Ray Charles is scary as hell. Say a prayer for me… do a little dance, make a little love… get down tonight.

I’m really hungry. It’s almost eleven and I need to try to get into the holy-shit-tomorrow-is-a-work-day mode, but I am not tired (yet)… just hungry. Grrrrrr!

Hey, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not exactly “Jeopardy material”. That’s why, should I ever make it on the game show, I’m going to sell my answer space for corporate advertisement.

“Hemingway selected the title of this novel about about journalist Jake Barnes from a passage in Ecclesiastes.”

“What is… Gatorade, Alex.”

“I’m sorry, Clayton, that is incorrect. You lose.”

...or did I? Muahahahahaha.

I feel so tired. I can’t even recall the last day I posted even though I’ve pulled it up and topically reviewed it before starting this entry. It seems like a month has gone by. Before I say anything else, I want to send wonderful birthday wishes to my dear friend, Beth P. I hope today is everything you want it to be. This entry is going to have to be a little like a Tarantino movie where we start at the end and work backwards. I am sore this morning, but not for doing anything special other than just existing. I drove back from Austin last night after an excruciating day with a large account. I had to get up around 5:30-ish yesterday morning to get on the road so I’d make the meeting in time. Most of the trip up, I listened to XM Comedy 150, but on the way home I caught the artist’s confidential bit where the Smashing Pumpkins detail the creation of Zeitgeist. It was really cool. There were a lot of live acoustic performances as well as step by step creative process for how much of the album was developed. I missed the first part of the interview, but if anyone knows them to replay it, please let me know. The entire day was filled with product deep dives on architecture and training on CLI and configurations in a large forum. It was the typical mixed bag of interest, but after not sleeping well the night before (more on that in a moment) and getting up and driving 3 hours to make the meeting, I was beat. At 5:10, a colleague in town from D.C. tells me he needs a ride to make a 6:30 departure from the airport on the other side of town and it’s rush hour in Austin. Holy fuck. He stepped out of my truck at 6:10 and I circled the airport until he called to let me know they were holding the door of the plane at the gate for him. I was hungry and about to fall asleep, so I decided to stay and have a fabulous dinner at Truluck’s with some other of my coworkers attending the meeting. When the restaurant’s mantra is to never serve seafood that has ever been frozen, it make the menu a little pricey-er, but oh so yummy on the tummy. I had the fresh Jonah crab claws, cream of poblano soup, and pan seared flounder. One glass of wine and nothing but coffee after that… it was a loooooong drive back to H-town. The night before, I shot senior portraits for a good friend down the street. Their daughter had a session with a professional and they were presented with proofs, but could only purchase prints from the studio at $75.00 each (as in one print o.O). Since they weren’t growing bills in the back yard, they needed an alternative. I’m glad I could help out. So that segues into my shopping spree on Wednesday afternoon when I finished work. I couldn’t stop myself. I ordered a portable battery pack/inverter for my strobes as well as a 7’ octodome softbox with a full fitted grid and speedring to match my existing units. I ordered a 22” mola-style beauty dish with a diffusion sock and the TC-80N3 timer remote with a 33’ extension cord for the remote triggers. Oh, I almost forgot, I also ordered a 13’ air cushion lighting stand with a counter-weighted boom attachment. All that stuff is probably going to take weeks to get here, but that rounds out the studio nicely. I have to get going if I’m going to change and pack for my flight to Atlanta this afternoon. I got my bail money in my sock, muthafukka! Hopefully, it will not be required. Teehee. Assuming I don’t get stabbed and my plane doesn’t crash, I’ll be back tomorrow night. Toodles.

Television series of yesteryear were genre defined by cliffhanger moments that made you want to see what could happen in the very next instant, but you would have to wait a week for the new episode to air. I despise this form of entertainment. This is why the ratings fell so drastically for the new (and fabulous) Battlestar Gallactica. People were glued, watching the sequential events unfold into the series… then, without warning, RealLife™ gets in the way and they miss an episode or two and never had time or premonition to TiVo/DVR. At this point, enough juicy tidbits of the storyline were lost that it simply wasn’t worth watching the rest of the season when you could buy the DVD box set and catch up right where you left off. It is production cutting its own throat. On demand viewing should be the number one priority for content providers worldwide. People should be able to roll out of bed at 3 in the morning, unable to sleep, and dip into an anycast stream for anything ever made in the history of video entertainment. Sure, charge for it. Who cares? If you want to see it, you’ll pay… and so will I for that matter. Which brings me to the root of this moment on the podium… I’m simply not patient enough to watch a season of a well written series in 30 minute bitesized chunks. It loses it’s appeal and in the end will lose me as a viewer. One bead on the abacus. *click*

In other news, I stopped on the way home and took this IR shot of the Anadarko Petroleum building between The Woodlands’ mall and Interstate 45. After I got home and checked it out, I realized that I severely dislike the lens distortion from a wide angle rectalinear lens on building edges that should be straight. I know it’s just a perspective thing… like paralax… but still, I don’t care for it. I figured out how to fix it in Photoshop, but was just not motivated enough to go back and correct this one. It’s not like it’s ever going to see print or anything. The Waterway water taxi came by in a later shot that I’ll probably post tomorrow and I’m going to try and perspective correct that one. Maybe you can tell a difference, maybe you can’t… whatev.

I met Jean-Paul and Marielena for dinner tonight at Bistro Provence. I haven’t been in years, but the food was a pleasing as I remembered. They had taken my regular dish off the menu (Pavé de Boeuf), but I have the Ravioles de Chèvre, avec Brochette de Fruit de Mer and Salade d’Endive and was far from disappointed. I also was able to try the Assiette de Charcuteries and the rillettes was incredible. I drove home with a full belly to sit through the new episode of Californication with a deep tumbler of SR. Tomorrow is a busy day and I have a ton of work to do, but I just don’t feel sleepy. I hope this isn’t the onset of Insomnia Round Duex.

update: ok, so I can’t sleep and went ahead and fiddled with the other image. It’s the same spot in that my feet didn’t move, but there is a boat in this one (wheee!) and I did some perspective correction on the tower. I’m going to try to sleep (again).

I am not sure really what to say to that… but… umm…
wow.

I accidentally rolled up on Submission>>Transmission tonight on Ethel. Pretty cool playlist and I’d like to check it out on a regular basis… if I can remember. Dig it.

should you expect to see something that you hadn’t seen
in somebody you’d known since you were sixteen;
if love is a bolt from the blue, then what is that bolt but a glorified screw?
and that doesn’t hold nothing together
far from these nonsense bars and their nowhere music it’s making me sick
and i know it’s making you sick
there’s nothing there, it’s like eating air
it’s like drinking gin with nothing else in
that doesn’t hold me together.

and for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
and i sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
i thought i had found my golden september in the middle of that purple june
but one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

now i know you like your boys to take their medicine
from the bowl with a silver spoon
run away with the dish and scare the fish by the silvery light of the moon
who were taught from the womb to believe to the tomb
in as far as their bleeding eyes see
is a pleasure pen, meant for them, built for and rent for them
not for the likes of me
not for the like of you and me

and for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
and i sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
i thought i had found my golden september in the middle of that purple june
but one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

oh but the green-eyed harpy of the songland
she takes into hers my hand
she says, “boy i know you’re lying
oh but then, so am i,”
and to that i said “oh well.”

they put me in a cage full of lions, i learned to speak lion
in fact i know the language well
i picked it up while i was versing myself in the languages they speak in hell
that night, the silence gave birth to a baby
they took it away to her silent dismay
and they raised it to be lady
now she can’t keep her mouth shut

and for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
and i sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
i thought i had found my golden september in the middle of that purple june
but one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

and one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
well i played a few songs for those bumps in the night
in fact i played this very tune
you said, “what is this six-stringed instrument but an adolescent loom?”
and one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin.  - augie march

I had dinner over at Sam’s. He had bar-b-que’d a big ‘ole batch of chicken wings… which I’m usually no terribly fond of… but these were delicious. We had Arturo Fuente’s from Cuba on the patio with some 7 year old Ron Abuelo rum. It is, without question, the finest rum I have ever tasted in my life. It was recently imported via sneakernet by a Swiss friend on a visit to Panama and I’m not even sure you can purchase it in the United States. It is difficult to describe how amazing this stuff is. Yum.

I drove all over Spring and The Woodlands today looking for a kiddy pool. Apparently they are seasonal and if you don’t buy them at the onset of the season, they sell out and you are S.O.L. I looked everywhere I could think might have them to no avail. WalMart, Target, Academy… all gone. I even checked pool supply stores on the off chance they would have some little inflatable something that could pass as a pool large enough for a Yorkie to swim in. It was ridiculous. The worst part was the looks I got from the employees at the stores when I asked if there were any left or if they even carried the product. I may as well have been asking for a pet Martian. Excuse me for not owning a band of screaming banshees that are 3 feet tall and keep me in the kiddy-item loop year round.

Anyhoo, I stopped and shot a little park near my office with the IR rig. I did a 5 shot bracketed exposure in single stop increments from -2 to +2 and then did a HDR tonal compression post process on the series. What I found was (and I should have known this)… I need to set the mirror lockup and auto-bracket from the tripod instead of manually adjusting the exposure compensation between shots. The clouds were actually blowing fast enough across the frame that the second or so between shots caused misalignment in the cloud boundaries. I ended up taking the correctly exposed (+/- 0 EC) shot and converting it into 5 TIFFs from a single RAW by shifting the exposure in post during RAW conversion. I did the same HDR conversion on those images that were perfectly aligned and got the shot pictured above. I can tell the dynamic range in the separate image stack is much better, but I’ll know for next time. Live and learn. After I finished my little experiment, I shot the image below handheld of the same scene at a different focal length and orientation. It is not HDR processed at all.

ps. I don’t know how to make Expression Engine dynamically resize the center column when I post an image that hasn’t been resized to fit the fixed middle column width. I know it looks like shit, but I’m just that inept at web manipulation. It doesn’t do it automagically like someone previously suggested. Perhaps other publishing systems do, but this one doesn’t to the best of my knowledge. Of course, in the almost 6 years I’ve been posting here, I’ve been through 4 publishing engines and this is, so far, my favorite… so I guess I shouldn’t bitch too much.

Last night I had dinner with Ed at Mamacitas. The chicken fajita nachos were not quite as good as Armadillo Palace, but close. I’ve been searching for a nacho outlet on the north side of town for some time now. After dinner, Ed took me to the Saint James for a couple of drinks. If I could find it in me to care at all, I’d probably be annoyed at the little flies buzzing around looking for greenbacks. I just drank my Tanq and tonic and kept my mouth shut. The cops rolled in and caused a commotion… that was kinda cool. Other than that, it was just another bar with really strong drinks. After a few, Ed dropped me off at the house and I hit the hay. I’ve been really tired recently… must be getting old.

I went for fondue last night at the little joint up the street in Shenandoah. It isn’t really like traditional Swiss dining where the cheese course can be the main, but more compartmentalized into dining salvos. Grùyere and Emmenthaler, white wine, garlic, nutmeg, lemon and Kirschwasser made up the cheese dish… which is always my favorite. You can’t have enough cheese. There was salad in there somewhere before the critters. We picked the combo of lobster tail, filet mignon medallions, balsamic-marinated sirloin, garlic and herb chicken, citrus pork tenderloin, white shrimp, wild mushroom ravioli, and roasted red pepper rigatoni. The balsamic-marinated sirloin and red pepper rigatoni were my favorite, but it was all pretty tasty except for the herb chicken. It just didn’t jive with anything else on the plate… too lemony? Anyway, when all that was done, there was chocolate. I’m not a big sweets guy, so we ordered the least sweet chocolate they had… hazelnut dark chocolate with rasberry puree. They bring fresh fruit and little pastry chunks to dip in it as well as some cheesecake. Out waitress was this adorable miniature Drew Barrymore from back when she was hanging with ET in the closet. Gemmah? She took the time to bring Spy vs. Spy printouts, explain the “Jazz Dot”, and even snap a photo and frame it. We even were told what “B.A.” meant to the kids now days and how we were “B.A.M.F.’s”. I felt so old, but it was fun. Her 21st birthday is coming up in a week and the reality that I’m old enough to actually be her father is just freaky to me. That has to be a parental milestone to watch your kid order her first legal drink. The fondue joint was pretty good overall, but that restaurant can never compare to Mona Lisa’s. Of course, I’m bias. After dinner we went to The Boulevard in The Woodlands… the sign outside just says BLVD. I couldn’t find a web site for it. It was a lot larger inside that I realized. There is an upstairs lounge area as well as a rooftop outside part. I really don’t like the boomchicka places that much, but it was ok for the area I suppose. It is more downtown than most of the clubs in the piney north. By the time my head hit the pillow, I was so ready for some sleep. I suppose I slept fairly well and am looking forward to a lazy day. Other than fundamentally compromising my principals for the sake of a friend, this weekend has all the potential to be fantastic. I think Ed and I are supposed to go out tonight now that I’ve recovered from whatever that Ebola-esque thing was last week. It’s the first time we’ve really planned anything since the trip where I got sick. Georgia thinks it might have been Giardia lamblia from the spring fed tank we were cleaning the moss in that Saturday. I was the only one of the three of us that submerged completely… I suppose it could happen. My dad is in and out of those tanks all the time though and never gets sick, so I don’t think it’s likely. A lot of the symptoms were more flu-like anyway. I still was kicking around how to get here this year. Not so much for the Fan Faire, but more for the trip to Iceland. EVE is a very cool MMO, but I don’t know how I would do with all the super-geeks attending. Time is short to make a decision. Iceland Air has some great packages, but they are all double occupancy. Oh well.

Having a background in electricity, first as an apprentice in Texas for my high school sweetheart’s dad, then as a nuclear electrician in the USN, and now working with computer internetworking on a regular basis… I can relate to cabling challenges. This however, is ridiculous. Cheers!

Due to the seemingly neverending torrential downpours all too commonplace this summer, my yard is completely saturated. You can’t step into my front lawn without sinking slightly as if you’d found the onset of quicksand. The thick black, rich soil below the plush Saint Augustine surges moisture like water from a engorged sponge. Treading off the cement driveway or the pebbled front walk is a mess waiting to happen. My lawn guys came this morning with their oversized mowers and the industrial gear that allows them to finish more lawns per day, improving efficiency and thereby increasing their profit margin for an honest day’s labor. Common sense would dictate waiting for terra firma to actually become firma, but for whatever reason, today was common sense’s day at the spa. This merry band of fellows, who I normally rave about and adore, proceeded to prison rape my lawn in the most horrific way. It looks like a midget in a souped up, motorized Tonka truck went mudding through my lawn with a vengeance. This comes a couple of weeks subsequent to them snapping a sprinkler head off at the base on the other side of the yard. Awesome. If it would stop raining for more than a few hours at a time, I could get out there and do some maintenance.


I fired up the grill last night and burned up some marinated, boneless pork ribs. I grilled cubed sweet potatoes with crushed red pepper and fresh rosemary tossed in E.V.O.O. (except my mom and I were chatting during the prep and we both forgot the rosemary). The recipe is Beth’s and I love it. I have a thriving rosemary bush in my backyard specifically for that recipe… but I love fresh rosemary anyway, so it works out for other schtuff. We enjoyed some nice red wine with dinner and watched DVR’d Californication. Well cast and accurately dysfunctional California. <3 u Sean… hang in there dude. My mom's PC was a lightning strike victim this week, so I had to autopsy the wreckage. At the end of the day, we were able to salvage the HD and transfer the data to an external using another system I have at the house, but she needed to buy a new system for the long term. If you are shopping in the greater than $1000 price range, it is fairly easy to get more bang for the buck building a pieced together hand-built rig. However, when you are pricing sub-$600 systems, one just can't compete with parts bought wholesale by the thousands and put together in third world country sweatshops by 12 year old Malaysian kids out of work from the Nike scandal. So we ordered online. That shit happens sometimes. Seriously.

And the priestess spoke again and said: “Speak to us of Reason and Passion.”

And he answered saying:

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.

But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or our rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing;

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.

Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”

And since you are a breath In God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion. - KG

I need to get away from here… move to another city with no forwarding address. I often wonder how difficult it would be to erase myself… remove every trace of Internetness that isn’t cached, get rid of emails, phone numbers, addresses. Disappear. They say the road to hell is paved with good intention. My new motto is “all apathy, all the time”. You could tell me it’s not a good decision, but ironically, I don’t care. 

This rain is insane! I was testing some more IR settings and found that certain dies and fabrics reflect infrared all funky like green grass and leafy trees. The Fender jacket I have on is dark navy blue… almost black. Neat, eh? If I could just get around the difficulty of eyes and veins close to the skin, infrared would be so much more useful for people photography. I lost power at the house in between booms. It’s difficult to work with no Internet connectivity when you are in the networking business.