That Not So Fresh Feeling

Today I have turned Old -1. But, so far, so good. All body parts still in place. Some really sweet birthday wishes from my friends.

I guess next year, when I turn Old, it’s kind of a bigger deal.

I guess it’s better than getting like a foot of snow, but this miserable 3 day long driving rain storm is starting to annoy me. I don’t really mind the rain, generally, but I’d love it, you know, if the sun came out. And maybe if it got warm enough that I could run outside. That would be fantastic.

The only good thing is that everyone who has today off and was going to enjoy the whole Patriots Day festivities of watching the Sox and the Marathon are going to be stuck inside like the rest of us suckers. Serves them right for taking off a fake holiday.

For whatever reason, I’ve been busyish lately. Work got crazy, then I had jury duty which made work crazier, then I went to Vegas for my boy’s bachelor party. I made it through it alive, and probably only gained like 10 pounds eating burgers and drinking beer. And I would have made some money in Vegas if Kansas didn’t suck.

But, I’m now back a week and I still feel behind. I tend to collect a lot of media — podcasts, stuff on my DVR, Netflix movies, books. I’m usually pretty good about working my way through stuff, but I just haven’t been able to get caught up. I still think I’ve got 5 or 6 unheard podcasts that I’ll probably get through over the next few days of work. I’ve got a couple of Netflix movies that I’ve had since January that I ended up ripping to my Mac just so I could get some new ones (really, I’ll delete them when I watch them!). I’m midway through a couple of web-dev books (Perl and CSS) that I’d hoped to be done with by now.

I’m at least caught up on the DVR, which is good, since most of the shows I like are off for a little while.

Hell … I bought the new Kaiser Chiefs CD on Wednesday and only started listening to it today (I like it so far; not sure why PopMatters and Pitchfork shit all over it).

So, if I can make it through all of this fun media in the next week or so, I’ll probably finally get back in gear and do some of the stuff I’ve been meaning to do (new podcasts, a new website I’ve had mocked up for about a month now, writing more here). Which will be good, because I’m far more energized when I’m doing something productive.

The last week has been extremely hectic. I’d thought I’d kind of caught up on life in general last weekend and early last week: getting a bunch of laundry done, paying bills, getting the brakes in my car fixed, grabbing some cheapish plane tickets out for my friend’s bachelor party.

The looming proverbial monkey wrench, however, was my Tuesday visit to Cambridge for jury duty. I’ve been called once before, ended up sitting in a room in Fitchburg for a few hours before getting sent home. I was hoping that Tuesday would be similar–grab the T over to Kendall, hang out for a few hours, get sent home and have a quiet day.

All pretenses that I might have a quiet day were scuttled when, within an hour of being there, I was in a courtroom being asked if I was fit to serve on a double-murder trial that would last approximately a month (if you’ve been paying any attention to the news, you know which trial it is). I didn’t get impaneled on that jury, but an hour later, I was in another courtroom, and sitting in the jury box for a trial expected to last a week long.

At first, I was a little annoyed, but I sort of realized that if I was all that upset, I was no better than all of the people I scoffed at as they repeated lame excuse after lame excuse to get out of sitting. Somehow their time is more valuable than mine. That’s just generally douchebaggy.

So I don’t mind sitting so much. The only tough part is that I’m working half-days so that I don’t have to burn any vacation time (though that might change this week, since I’m getting run down). Mornings in Cambridge, back on the T, drive to Burlington for work. It makes for long, somewhat stressful days, but it also means I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on some of the projects I’ve wanted to.

I have started playing around with the layout of the blog a bit. If you notice, the right sidebar is reorg’d a little bit, with a little widget that lets you see my shared items from Google Reader. I’ve slowly started formulating the layout for the new and improved ryantoohil.com (I’m playing with CSS as a bit of an experiment). I also revamped my little basketball statistics tool with a nicer layout and look.

The MacBook Pro has come in handy recently, as I can sit comfortably, get inspired, and quickly whip something up, rather than having to overcome the inertia and walk into my somewhat cold office. It’s also going to come in handy for jury duty, should I end up as an alternate, because I’ll have a bunch of time to kill while my fellow jurors deliberate.

Hopefully, I’ll have some more time in the next week or so to play around with some of my ideas (the home page, maybe another podcast, some posts here). The trial is expected to wrap up mid-week, so hopefully I’ve only got a couple more days of back and forth.

There’s some fun news: Ben Folds is playing with the Pops orchestra on May 9th. Tickets go onsale tomorrow, which means I’m going to have find someone to buy me tickets since I’ll be listening to testimony and not near a computer to get a couple of seats. Since I missed on The Arcade Fire (who are playing the next night at the Orpheum), I’d like to get a seat. I’ll have to work my mojo tomorrow.

It’s been a busy few weeks. The biggest news is probably my latest purchase: I got my first non-PC in the form of a MacBook Pro. I’d been looking at getting a laptop for a while, mostly because my existing laptop is old, underpowered, has a half-working keyboard, and had been resigned to sitting on my stereo so that I could stream music to it. I couldn’t even bring it anywhere, as the battery life was simply miserable.

Working at a web hosting company, spending a majority of my day ssh’d into a Unix box, I’d gotten very comfortable at the command-line again, much like I was back in my college days. Between the command line and the browser, I didn’t really use any major Windows applications at the office or at home. I use MS Office, occasionally, but I don’t even use that at home (where I use OpenOffice). My PC is still a great box, but it was a glorified game machine.

Taking it one step further, I’d realized how much of my life really is in the browser these days. My mail goes to Gmail; my calendar is Google Calendar; my RSS feed reader is Google Reader. A few years ago I ranted that I couldn’t see ever moving completely to a thin client/browser world. Granted, it was in the middle of a major Comcast outage, where they weren’t sending any traffic to Yahoo!, which is pretty significant. These days, while there are minor outages, it’s rare that I can’t get to my data online. When I can’t, I can get it via my cell phone (and once Google gets Calendar working on a phone, I’ll be pretty much set). Finally, with Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo!) exposing your data in interesting ways (RSS, iCal feeds, private HTML), you can always pull it down into your thick client and access it offline, should you need to.

I’ve also had a desire to get creative again, whether its restarting the podcast (which will happen), blogging more, working on my website, or just generally brainstorming other ideas, I’ve needed a way to get untethered from my PC. It’s cold in my little office during the winter, and I can’t neatly multitask in front of the TV. With most of the creative ideas requiring the authoring of at least a little bit of code, I was looking for a laptop that would let me use my friendly Vim application to hack some HTML, CSS, or Perl.

All that put together lead to me looking at a Mac. Not because they’re trendy, but because it’s the nicest Unix machine you’ll see. OS X is a very pretty, and functional, interface on top of a Unix backend. I can take my laptop to work and scp files from a terminal window to our data center at rates that greatly exdeed anything I can get over FTP. I can pop open a terminal window and quickly turn on apache and mess with some Perl code before I upload it to my website. I can open up GarageBand and pull together a podcast a little more easily than I can in Audacity on the PC. The ability to neatly run Windows in either VMWare or Parallels while inside of OS X is what pushed me over the top. (Actually, it was one of my co-workers showing me IE running in coherence mode inside Paralells, which meant he could have IE next to Firefox next to Safari on his desktop, allowing him to test 3 major browsers at the same time. Very cool.)

So, I pulled the trigger and picked up a MacBook Pro. It took me a little while to get used to the differences between the Mac and Windows, but the learning curve to being productive is really shallow. I’ve nearly replicated all of the functionality of my Windows PC, but with the ability to do it from anywhere in my house. I can listen to music streaming from my iTunes library while I type this up, waiting for Heroes to buffer up enough on the DVR so that I can watch it without commercials. Soon, I’ll probably throw together another episode of my podcast, which I can do significantly more easily now that I don’t have to start up a bunch of different applications (I’m still figuring out how to make the built-in mic work, as it seems to record to quietly).

So, I hope that my new found freedom will allow me to be a bit more prolific. With work and general life stuff, I’ve had to cut back my posting at The House That Dewey Built — I’ve sort of just become the tech guy and will let Jeff and the new folks concentrate on posting (though, I might have to throw something up there when the feeling hits me). I’ve got plans to at least throw something up at ryantoohil.com and let it be my testing ground for learning more CSS and JavaScript. I’m feeling a bit more invigorated, which is nice.

I actually want to build my home page around my little Mii off of my Wii. I haven’t gotten a good screenshot yet, but here’s an approximation. And yes, I’m a huge dork.

Hopefully, this desire to be creative will last. I’m going to try to get something up most days this week. I’m thinking that I’ll finally revisit the “So you want to have a web site” series. I’m planning on getting up a Dear Leader-centric podcast.

If you’re still out there reading, feel free to leave a comment. I’m curious to see how many are actually reading this. Checking my logs, I’ve got at least two readers in Google Reader (1 is me …) and 2 in NewsGator. If I was smart, I’d move to FeedBurner so I could track it, but I’ve got no desire to do that just yet.

That’s all for today. Heroes is starting, and I’m hoping that they’ll recover from their recent doldrums and put together a fun episode that doesn’t smell like fish.

I’ve got lots of stuff percolating around my brain, but I just haven’t had time this week to write any of it down. I’m hoping to get back to a more regular schedule shortly.

In the meantime, I can tell you that I’m very deaf but very giddy after seeing Dear Leader, Taxpayer, and Hallelujah the Hills last night. All three bands were awesome, but Dear Leader stole the show by putting on what may have been their best live show ever … including a ridiculously good cover of “Born to Run”.

Phenom.

The Patriots just lost, ruining what was a pretty good weekend.

Rather than dwell on that, my friend Liz from back at the Reg tagged me with the whole “write 5 things that people don’t know about you” meme. So I gotta give it a shot, which isn’t easy, given that I’ll pretty much share damn near anything with people if they ask me … or in many cases, even if they ask me not to.

Here goes.

Umm …

Hmm …
1)  Ok, maybe this one. I don’t cry easily, but I get watery eyes and throat lumpyness extremely easily. Like, you know, when watching the comeback in Major League. Seriously. In comparison, each time I’ve broken bones (my nose, my thumb, and my pinky), I didn’t even know they were broken for long periods of time (10 minutes, 2 days, and like 1 month, respectively). Not a tear or even a watery eye.

But show me the last 10 minutes of Little Giants and I’ll be all choked up.

Maybe that helps me figure out number 2.
2) I have a pretty high tolerance for pain. I’m not sure if it’s some sort of genetic thing, or physiological, or simply my own insanity.

Going back to movies …

3) I have no problem with violence in movies, except in two cases: against kids or against animals. You can chop off heads in horror movies, or slice people in half, or have them burned alive, and I generally won’t bat an eyelash. Shoot a kid? I’m halfway to shutting off the movie. The last movie I can remember the violated the code was Project X (which I’ve still never seen the end of). Face/Off came close, but they only killed one kid, so somehow that was ok.

4) I pick. I pick everything. If there’s a weird bump, or pimple, or scab on me, I’ll find it (usually without even thinking about it) and scratch it off. Don’t even realize I’m doing it. I’m just predetermined to seek out a bumpless existence. Worse yet, I do it *to other people.* Seriously.

Hmm … number five. Let’s see.

5) I think I’m abnormally patient or maybe understanding of people who work checkout lines or are waitstaff. Even if they’re awful and are ruining my day, I generally can’t bring myself to be confrontational or complain. Even if they deserve to be yelled at and punched in the back of the head, I’ll generally apologize as if it was my fault and leave them thinking they were in the right.

Maybe I can summarize this one: I’m a giant wussy douche.

Now I’m supposed to tag five other people, but I don’t even know five other people with actual blogs, so I’ll tag the two I do know: Mindy and Julie. Oh, and I could actually tag Brett, too.

Wow, I’ve almost completely forgotten about the Patriots losing. Or not. They smell like fish.

I’ve decided that adding “smells like fish” to things is the new way to make a snappy comeback. It works with everything.

• If someone cuts you off while driving, rather than flipping them off or shooting them with a gun (the two most common forms of comebacks), you can simply say “I bet their car smells like fish.”
• If someone disses your mom, as in “Your mom is a poophead”, you can simply say, “oh yeah, well, your mom smells like fish.”
• Should someone bump into you while shopping for Christmas gifts in the very crowded shopping mall, and then that person shoots you the “ohhhhh, if we weren’t in a mall I would so crush your head with a Casio keyboard” look, you can simply tell them “hey, stop staring at me, your eye stare smells like fish.”
• If the Dead Sea Spa people try to harrass you into testing their products in the mall, you can simply say “Sorry, your Dead Sea Spa smells like fish.” (This one, I wish I had thought of a few weeks ago).

I can’t think of a single thing that you can’t use “smells like fish” in response to. I encourage you to start using it in your daily life.

If you do start using it, I encourage you to link to this post using the words “smells like fish” … maybe I can get the top spot on Google!

P.S. Stop reading this, your reading smells like fish.

So a while back, we were having one of those random discussions at work that leads to someone animatedly saying “I got corndogs, yo!” and waving his arms around, even though he did not have a corndog.

I’m sure you’ve all been there. We’ve all had a “corndogs, yo” moment.

This week rolls around and we’re planning our office holiday potluck (which is tomorrow). What do I sign up for? Corndogs.

Yo.

See, I’d seen Alton Brown make them on Good Eats and it looks really easy. And I’m not a complete moron. So I figured I could pull it off.

Well, after 2 hours, I’ve learned I couldn’t. My deep fryer doesn’t get hot enough, nor is it deep enough, nor is it wide enough, to really fit in a corndog on a stick. So I improvised and just kinda dropped them in. Which seemed ok, except they’d stick to the bottom and then I couldn’t really get them out without ripping the nice corny outside.

I’m still bringing them in, and I’m sure I’ll get a couple of people to eat one out of pity, but they don’t look good. Rather than having a nice uniform outside, they look more like “pigs in a blanket.” Except rather than being in a nice, soft blanket of a crescent roll, it’s a ratty old blanket of cornmeal.

I suck at making corndogs, yo.

… for not posting much.

Zelda is awesome. So is The Wire. And Veronica Mars. All have been sucking up my time. More soon.