25.1.05
die mouse!
I've been struggling with my Mouse story. I've been wanting to finish and I did have a story that I wanted to tell, but lately we've been suffering from mice infestation. When the weather changed, they thought it was a great idea to come live with us, eat our rice, biscuits, dried seaweed, and I've been dumped and infuriated with mouse poop since. They've become too smart to eat the poison pellets, they avoid the sticky fly paper like nobody's business, they've been chewing on the bottom of cabinets, leaving their teeth marks all over the place along with their scatological remarks. I've no more sympathy left. We've caught many squeaking mothers and their babies. Beware mice, the war is ON!
24.1.05
in the eye of the storm
First real snow storm of the season, and what do we do? Go out to meet it, that's what! Flurries started around 11 am on Saturday as we cruised along 80 West towards Pennsylvania. We were determined to have one hell of a snowy weekend, damnit! On the radio: "an inch an hour", "steady snowfall until Sunday morning", "snow advisory - stay indoors and don't go out if you have to!" etc. We only hoped we wouldn't have to look for our car under the snow the next day, or worse get stuck on the highway spinning out of control. On the east side of the highway, the snow plough patrol were out in full force; about a dozen trucks with their yellow lights blinking in the darkening afternoon were lined up and ready to clear the roadways.
Welcome to the Poconos
Snowy evening
A glorious Sunday with 2 feet of snow prefect for sleding
Down the hill
Having fun is hard work
Who said only the kids can have fun?
Did you ever have to dig to get INTO your house? Well, two feet of snow greeted us as we got home to a buried driveway and steps
Dig into it man!
21.1.05
Dedicated to my/our, lifelong love for adventure, exploration, and ultimately discomfort, the new pages on
Adventures in Dirt will be a travelogue of sorts of the places that we've come upon and the wonders they behold.
13.1.05
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zisou has the best film soundtrack for 2004! What's better than Seu Jorge singing old school David Bowie in bossa nova style Portugese? I only wish there'd been more of Seu Jorge who played the hero in
City of God. I wish there'd been more of Noah Taylor too but as always, he's relegated to a sense of I've seen that guy before, now, what movie was he in? (it was
Shine primarily, but also the techie guy in
Tombraider, and great in a bunch of other Australian films). I've always liked Angelica Huston and she was more of Etheline Tannenbaum and Morticia Addams in this offbeat film that is far from the usual and uninteresting for 2004.
tracking packages is a whole new job
Online shopping is a wonderful thing. What's better than pressing a SUBMIT button on a site, where your order will appear on the site's database, which will then be forwarded to the fulfillment center where your cool stuff will be put together, packed in a box, weighed and stickered and picked up by the UPS or FedEx guy/girl and you can track all that activity rather than standing in a check out line with some old lady constantly bumping into your back because she thinks it'll make the line go faster if she's on your ass.
Personal space. First in line. I'm ready when you are. Go back and browse. Wish List. No shopping carts, no shopping bags to lug around. Not having to deal with the rheotrical "How are you doing today?" are the ultimate payoffs for shopping on your butt rather than being poked in it. It makes it easier for crowd-o-phobics like me, and of course there's nothing more exciting than tracking your package on UPS or FedEx (well, of course there is, but all of you who've tracked packages must admit it's pretty exciting); it's great to watch where your packages are coming from and think how ridiculous it is that before reaching Las Vegas, a package must first go to Ceritos, CA even though the package is coming from east of Nevada. I love it when interrelational databases comes together and it relates directly to shopping.
12.1.05
A spastic David Byrne in a slim dark suit, as if a man from the 50's; swimming across a white screen, an Indian woman, dancing. The images were dissonant to the music:
Once in a Lifetime. I was thirteen. It was
Top of the Pops, my music edification was in it's second year since
MTV blew my world apart into what it had become: a giant musicfest - eating, drinking, sleeping, waking with music. Have to digest as much as possible. Sleep with the radio on, watch every waking moment of MTV. Let the music seep into my pores by osmosis, if possible, just so that I could hear everything, absorb everything at all times. Martha Quinn was queen; she was dating a Dead Kennedy! Music was my lifeforce, it propelled me forward, it brought me to school if only to borrow other people's records and tapes. It brought me out of the house if only to look inside a record store.
I decided too late that I really liked
Talking Heads. I'm sure I had loads of chances to see them throughout the 80's, but I never worried too much about it. Then the 80's wound up, and a lot of bands wound up breaking up into oblivion. Then one realises too late all the things one missed, like seeing Byrne in giant suits hopping around on stage and the rest of the band, mixing it up with African rhythms and beats, mixing it up with art and pop culture. I guess I like mixes a lot. Dissonant, I like. Talking Heads = dissonant. But justly so. Working wonderfully so. It's pogo music set to pop, rock and soul. Displaced, escaped, relocated, excluded. And so I excluded it from my concerts I had to watch and was satisfied in the listening pleasure, in jumping up and down in my room to
Warning Sign,
Wild Wild Life,
Nothing But Flowers. I reserved the viewing pleasure to videos, to faces on the side of
Burning Down the House, to floating things in
And She Was, to big suits on a well-lit stage of a live performance previously taped. I was too busy, too divergent, spread too thin. There was too much to take in. There was college radio, there was MTV's
120 Minutes, there was Andy Warhol's
15 Minutes, there was the comedy of
The Young Ones. I was everywhere at once, trying to steal into 18 and over clubs just to watch Henry Rollins doing a three-hour straight performance over at The Channel in Boston, failing helplessly to see Sinead O'Conner at Axis playing with Johnny Marr way before that Prince-penned hit. I was just too busy. So I made sure I had my ears plugged with
Little Creatures and
True Stories on the daily commute on the T. I didn't have enough compartments in my brain for all the music coming in. I was too focused on some music, and not enough in others. I overloaded, overheard, and overplayed. By the end of the 80's my aural senses were bust, burned out. So were most of the bands I paid too much attention, and as were the ones I didn't give enough to. Music grunged up. It was about being dirty and and wearing long johns and flannel and digging up old Doc Martins, and I stopped dressing.
I'm almost thankful the 90's are over. Grunge wasn't for me, although that Chris Cornell guy's band was pretty good. Also, thanks to boxed sets, I can re-live. Re-live Talking Heads all over again. Hear them and see the videos that were the only way I knew them visually. A 3 CD compliation of music, some previously unreleased or reworked. A bonus DVD of videos. Then I realize, if you ever like a band, if you feel the need to buy their music consistently, even to this day of the free download and
can I get a copy of that CD?, you should in all honesty, watch at least one live performance, at least
Once In a Lifetime.
August 2004
arrrrrgh! part 1
Notice the minutiae of the difference between browsers: IE will put borders on the
outside of the content area, whereas Firefox includes it
within the content area making designing for browser compatiblity somewhat hellish when you calculate size by the pixel. Not that borders are a big deal, but when it affects how you have to calculate padding and margin sizes according to how a browser is going to read it, I'm just not interested anymore. Math skills I don't possess, so don't make me go around adding padding sizes just so that the website looks normal in IE5+. I don't want to preview it in 2 or 3 different browsers just to make sure it behaves equally, I'm not going to even mention having to resort to workarounds just for IE. I'd rather just do it and go, there, that's how I want it to look, who cares about
x browser's interpretations, if they choose to look at the web world wonkily, that's their affair.
Thanks to dear old Dad, I'm salivating and can't wait to get my new computer in the mail! Flat panel monitor, PCIexpress graphics card, Serial ATA hard drive, and 1 GB of memory, wahoo! It would have been more fun to pick the parts and really customize (hello
Alienware!), but it would have gone way over budget, and Dell's got a good deal going that ends today. Hell, I'm just glad to have my very own computer again that isn't overheating and power supplies blowing up on me and leaving an aroma of burned plastic...
9.1.05
let's be bright
Well, trying on color here. Are you blinded yet?
Also, moving things round, so obviously it's going to look all goofy for a couple of days until the code gets cleaned up.
3.1.05
the seven days of christmas and new year
As always, a week of gluttony and sloth before we wipe the slate clean. Two weeks before my birthday, the family indulges in an avalanche of food, gifts, and sitting around or napping between meals. It's horrendous I tell you, but it seems a last ditch effort to gobble up everything we aren't meant/haven't been able to during the year and catch up on the sleep that we were deprived of. And the result is waking up after the New Year saying I really shouldn't have, but here, let's start over then.
My family flew over from Las Vegas (how I miss you! Vegas, I mean) to spend a chilled out Christmas vacation eastward, facing blasting cold winds and a light snowfall on Christmas Day, blanketing the morning streets, houses and cars in a pristine white (which lasted all of 2 hours before it got mucky gray-brown). The weather got better (well, when it's in the 40s (Farenheit), we call it warm) but my mum's always cold, so she spent the entire week shivering in her long johns and thick down coat while my sister walked around with her gloves on.
a week in pictures
building christmas gifts with Lolo
with Lola and Marley
my sister Lausanne
talking to his great uncle across the table
nothing like sprawling out on a lazy day
sipping lemongrass sencha at Moby's Teany café in Manhattan's lower East Side where the tea was quite good but the service was much worse as we had the waiteress (yes, only one waitress for the entire café, people) admitting that she was, in fact, "the worst waitress in the world"
