Things that might be decidedly odd…

Sick or Just Allergies?

This morning I woke up at about 7am feeling fine. However, after a short drive to drop Kade off, my nose started running like crazy and I started sneezing a lot. My nose had been running a little bit the night before, so I was convinced I had a cold. Consequently, because I had no meetings today I decided to work from home today instead of going into the office and sneezing my germs all around.

I took some pseudoephedrine and started feeling A LOT better. Now, usually when I have a head cold and take that drug it helps but never as much as it did today. Later in the day, I walked to the QFC on Broadway to do some grocery shopping for my trip to Scottish Lakes High Camp tomorrow. My eyes started getting all teary and my nose started running again, but after I got home and blew my nose, I felt fine again in a relatively short amount of time.

I’m thinking this might actually be allergies instead of a cold! According to the pollen forecast I found online, alder pollen is extremely high right now here, so perhaps I’m allergic to that? I’ve always had some minor allergies that caused a constantly runny nose when I was growing up. When I lived in Germany and in North Carolina, I never had as much trouble with them though as I did in southern or northern California. In fact, I’d kind of forgotten about the whole thing until I was back in southern California for Christmas last year, when I woke up one morning with a bunch of congestion and the old constantly runny nose. It’s never been this bad before.

My eyes are red and itchy (even with my contacts out) and whenever I go outside my nose and eyes go even crazier. I’ve heard that you can develop allergies late in life, so maybe that’s what’s happening? I know my mother all of the sudden became allergic to cats around when she was 30 or so. I should pick up some Bendryl and see if that helps. Tomorrow I’ll be back in the office though since I’m convinced I’m not contagious, just histaminey.

SHI

There’s an interesting AP article (CNN link here) that’s making the rounds about Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) and its “volunteer vacations”. For those who aren’t familiar with SHI, they do work in central America with sustainable agriculture. Often this involves working with local communities to plant trees, teach organic farming methods and just in general give people the tools they need to avoid destroying or overexerting their land. I’ve gone on two of these volunteer trips with them–once to Belize and once to Nicaragua. If you use the search feature on this blog, you can find entries I’ve written about both trips.

It’s great to see some publicity for a great non-traditional kind of vacation and a great organization that does them. If any of my readers are interested in this, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll probably be able to tell you more than you’ll ever want to know.

Best Buy Acquires Speakeasy

Well, it’s official, Best Buy is acquiring Speakeasy. I found out about this when Speakeasy sent me an email about it, being that I’m one of their customers. I can’t say I’m happy about this at all. I have a bad feeling that Best Buy is going to push Speakeasy as a solution for small businesses at the detriment of customers like myself who are just home users wanting a DSL provider that doesn’t suck.

There’s also the potential for a large increase in Speakeasy customers if Best Buy starts marketing to small businesses heavily in their stores. This is pretty much the fastest way to kill an ISP. Basically, it goes something like this:

1. There’s a great service.
2. Lots of customers start joining it because it’s so great.
3. Unable to keep up with growth, the service starts to become crappier.
4. Users get frustrated, but because the ISP is growing too fast customer service is really, really sucky.
5. Users get even more frustrated and start leaving.
6. Service isn’t so great anymore.

I saw this happen with my previous web hosting company and it was very sad indeed.

Sigh, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Moving

If you’re seeing this post, the website move has worked. Moving the website itself including the database containing all the blog information was fairly painless and quick, but it will probably take some time for all the name resolution to work everywhere. Hopefully, this will fix those connectivity problems many of my readers have been having over the past few months.

Sprint

I just called Sprint to make sure the details of terminating my service have been wrapped up correctly. After the guy informed me that my last bill has been issued and that it will be charged directly to my credit card on the due date, he then asked me if I knew I could add 1000 text messages a month to my account for only $10. Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that this was meaningless since I had terminated my account weeks ago! When I pointed it out to him, he laughed a little. I guess they’re just so used to following certain upsell scripts that they don’t even think about it.

Pictures and Movies from My Last Trip

The only pictures and movies I really got on my trip were at the party on Saturday.

There was Wii

lots of fun

some occasional shoe gazing

plenty of rocking out

and enough lounging to go around

The whole set of pictures can be found here.

Berkeley

While meandering around Berkeley this afternoon, it occured to me that it was about 10 years ago (give or take a month) that I first really visited Berkeley. Sure, once in high school I was here for an hour or so shopping at record stores, but it wasn’t until I was visiting prospective colleges that I came here for any length of time.

As I walked down Telegraph Avenue, I saw most of the same old haunts (Blondie’s Pizza, Amoeba and Rasputin, Shakespeare and Co., that vacant lot on the corner of Haste and Telegraph) and some changes (American Apparel, Walgreen’s, Chipotle, an empty Cody’s). I did some shopping, but only ended up buying two books at Shakespeare and Co.: Demian by Hesse (in German) and E.M. Forster’s Maurice. After more walking, I stopped for dinner at Bongo Burger on Euclid consisting of a Persian burger (grilled ground lamb sandwhich) and fries.

This trip has been different than any of the ones I took here last year. Because it was so last minute, I had little time to plan who I was going to visit and when. Obviously, people make plans in advance, so it comes as no surprise that I haven’t seen as many people for as long as I usually would. I’m fine with that though. It’s been such a relaxing trip where I’ve had a lot of time to just kick back and think.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it was probably a mistake to move away from here back in 2002. That’s not to say I can go back in time to change that decision or ever make things like they used to be. Those are clearly not options. It also doesn’t mean I’ve wasted the past 5 years. Living in different places has been a very valuable life experience that would be hard to give up. However, moving so much has caused me to reinvent myself so many times, that I feel like I’ve lost the richness of life I had when I last lived in one place for a long time (that is to say, here). Right now living in Seattle, I feel like I’ve become too one-dimensional. I feel like most of my friends and I have basically no common interests beyond being gay and enjoying conversation. Not that those are bad things to have in common–they’re just not enough on their own.

This all seems to tie back into my feelings of being in a rut right now too. I’m not sure where anything is going at this time. I generally like my job and where I live, but I hate my commute. I hate doing the same old shit every weekend. It’s all just getting frustrating and boring. I was hoping to make it to 21 months in Seattle. That would then mean it would be the place I’ve lived longest since being in the Bay Area. However, I’m not sure it’s going to happen. I’m getting the itch to move again eventhough I know it’s probably just a flighty desire to run away from my problems.

Ugh, I need real solutions.

Blog Woes

Last night at the party I was talking to Larry about my blog. Apparently, I can add him to the increasingly long list of people who periodically cannot access my blog. Apparently, when some people try to connect the browser simply times out. At the exact same time, others can connect without any problems. My ISP has been a pain in the ass for a while now and this is pretty much the last straw.

I’m going to begin the process of moving everything over to a different provider, which will probably inevitably lead to some down time. For those who have trouble viewing my blog directly, you might want to try reading the version syndicated on LiveJournal. It contains the content of all my posts, but everything is stored on LiveJournal which shouldn’t have the same connectivity problems. Also, if you’re a regular LJ user, you can friend decidedlyoddrss and have my posts appear directly on your friends page.

Exciting Times

I arrived in Oakland on Friday night without too much trouble. Still, the bus driver on AirBART tried to rip me off by claiming I had only paid $2 (in quarters) of the $3 fare. After he realized I wasn’t going to be screwed out of another dollar, he let me on the bus. Friday night, I just kicked it with Kendra around her apartment. Saturday morning, I got up early and took BART into the city to meet up with Chris for swimming with the San Francisco Tsunami Swim Team. The workout was intense (I was breathing hard), but I was swimming in an unfamiliar lane in an unfamiliar pool. Still, it was pretty fun. Afterwards, we grabbed some brunch at Crapevine on Church with some of Chris’ other friends. One guy looked familiar to me and after some conversation we decided we must have seen each other around at Cal.

Last night I went to Kendra’s Donut Cancer Extravaganza in West Oakland. There were donuts, beer, chips, people playing Wii, people playing music and people just kicking it. Both Jenn and Aaron were there–I hadn’t seen either of them in at least 3 years. There were some other random acquaintances who were wondering where I had been for the last several years. There was also some guy who looked vaguely familiar who remembered me from college. It’s odd because that type of thing rarely happens to me in Seattle. It’s interesting though that other people I just saw around or didn’t actually know seem to remember me. Am I that memorable? Are they all just gay boys who remember because they saw me and thought I was cute? Either way, it’s sorta strange, but not unwelcome.

There was some musical entertainment late in the night. I actually got a lot of pictures on my camera, but I didn’t bring the USB cable with me, so their upload will have to wait until I’m back in Seattle. I did manage to snap a picture of Hello, It’s a Lumberjack Again with Aaron as a special guest with my cell phone though:

I also did some more moblogging on BART:

Last Minute Travel

Looks like I’m going to be in the Bay Area this weekend. I just bought a ticket, somewhat on a whim for Friday evening through Monday morning. A friend of mine has cancer and is probably getting surgery in the next couple weeks. I’m sure the surgery will go fine, but I just want to see her beforehand. The whole thing reminds me how important it is to see people while you can, because you never know what might happen. Plus, there’s a pre-surgery party on Saturday, which should be fun.

Man, I need to start planning my trip!