Things that might be decidedly odd…

Vancouver Trip

Just posting from my phone. Got the first speeding ticket of my life in Bellingham for $175. Got stopped for secondary inspection at the border. We’re here though and ready to ring in the new year.

Ice Skating

So I went ice skating for the first time in my life today up in Shoreline with Marc, Sage, Doug and some of their friends. I was pretty nervous about going at first, but it turned out to not be so difficult. I didn’t even fall That said, my ankles are still a little bit sore from using muscles I don’t normally use. Overall, it was a fun time.

As Seen on Slashdot

Today on the front page of slashdot, I ran across this ad:

If you understand the irony of this, I think it’s safe to say you’re geeky enough.

The ad links to Microsoft’s View<myWorld> site, which appears to be targeted squarely at your average slightly anti-Microsoft, techie slashdot reader. Interesting.

Post-Christmas Update

It’s been a while since I last posted. I guess the business of the holidays lead me to forget about writing here.

Anyhow, this year’s trip to southern California for Christmas was probably the shortest one I’ve done in a long time. I flew out on Sunday afternoon from Seatac and came back Tuesday night. On my way in, I was able to get a $50 upgrade to first class which I took. It’s nice to have the extra space, a lower chance of screaming children and faster security.

While I originally planned to drive to the airport and park my car there, I instead decided to take the bus in and taxi it back. The bus ride there was relatively uneventful although the traffic between I-5 and the airport was pretty bad. It took at least 20 minutes to travel that short distance in the stop-and-go traffic. Strangely, once inside the airport the security line near the B gates was the shortest I had ever seen. I think there were 2 or 3 people in front of me in line for the checkpoint, which meant there was virtually no wait at all. As always seems to be the case with Alaska, the plane ran over an hour late. Still, I made it to Orange County safe and sound the drove out to my brother’s house in Ontario before it was too late. My brother, his fiance, my other brother, my parents and I all grabbed dinner at the Marie Callendar’s near my brother’s house. Afterwards, we hung out for a bit before I decided to head back to my hotel in Placentia.

I was awoken the next morning by the maid pounding on my door at 7:55am. I’m sorry, but that’s just too early. I hadn’t seen a do not disturb sign to put on the door, but later discovered there were refrigerator like magnets for that purpose that could be affixed to the door. I shouted out to come back later and of course the maid came back at 9am. More shouting and she came back at 10am (!) at which point I yelled out that I didn’t need anything. By then, there was no way I was going to get back to sleep to finish my night’s sleep so I got up, wrapped my gifts and headed to my grandpa’s house where we did the usual family stuff.

That night, my friend Chris (lives in San Francisco but visits family in Orange County every year too) and I went to a gay bar in Garden Grove called Frathouse. Despite the website’s claim, it would be a stretch to call the place a “club”. It was basically a divey bar with some regulars and a pool table. For the most part, it was low key. Chris and I grabbed a drink and caught up after not having seen in each other in quite a while. The highlight of the evening was when some drunk dude who only had like 3 teeth hit on me by telling Chris something like “How lucky are you to have such a hot man!”. Uh, ya. Compliments are always nice even if they come from strange, toothless drunk I suppose.

After finishing our drinks and game of pool, we headed over to The Brit on Broadway in Long Beach. The place was pretty quiet being Christmas Eve and all, but I liked the environment and the crowd. It wasn’t quite Chris’s crowd, but I think I’m more into the whole low key, scruffy 20-something crowd and less into the plastic WeHo crowd than him. On our way out, we walked by the Mine Shaft and the Falcon. I didn’t realize there were sections of Long Beach with clusters of gay bars as I was always under the impression that everything was pretty spread out. Granted, I know very little about Long Beach so I’m not sure where I got that idea anyways. I definitely liked what little I saw of the bar scene there in comparison to West Hollywood with its plastic people and $8 bottles of beer. We didn’t stay out terribly late. In fact, I think we left around 12:30.

The next day started early for me since I left to drive down to San Clemente at about 8:45am. I visited Beth for a couple hours at her house where I also chatted a little with her mom. We then drove down to the pier to walk around and chat some more, before I headed back to Kevin’s house in Ontario for present opening and playing Wii with my family. After that, we went back to my grandpa’s house for an afternoon Christmas dinner after which I quickly headed to the airport to catch my flight home. Partly because I was in a rush and partly because taking the 55 freeway south to the airport exits you directly into the airport, I forgot to fuel up my rental car. When the guy informed me that it was going to be $6.99/gallon, I drove around looking for cheaper gas. Still, I got to my gate in plenty of time. The flight was even on time too.

Arriving in Seattle, I called Yellow Cab to send a taxi to pick me up since I didn’t feel like waiting to take the 174 bus at night back home. I’m still avoiding the wasteful, greedy, bullshit STITA taxi monopoly. See, there’s a taxi stand at the airport but only that one cab company is allowed to use it. Other taxis aren’t generally allowed to pick passengers up at the airport. Moreover, STITA doesn’t seem to drive anybody *to* the airport because they’re not a general purpose taxi company. At the same time, all the other taxi companies in Seattle are driving passengers to the airport, only to return back to the city without passengers. There is fortunately a loophole though where another company can pick you up if you call and explicitly ask for a pick up. Even then, they can only pick you up in the departure drop off area. The driver I’d got seemed to have just dropped a passenger off when he picked me up. When I told him I was going to Capitol Hill he got really excited probably since that puts him right back into a busy area with lots of potential fares.

Caterwauling and Drumming

I’m sure somebody is getting rich off the caterwauling and drumming that’s all the rage this holiday season, but I’m thankful I have internet radio and speakers that get loud enough to drown it out. There’s something odd about incessant drumming and out of key falsetto crooning coming through your office walls in the middle of the work day. I suppose I should just take it as a sign of the occasionally whimsical, playful nature of my workplace.

Cliff’s Birthday at the Shooting Range

On Saturday afternoon, Cliff put together a trip to Sam’s Gun Shop and Range in Everett for his birthday. That definitely wins most original birthday idea of the year. He hired some officially certified trainers from the Boeing Gun Club to teach us basic gun safety and do some coaching. The guys put together a nice setup for us and did an overall great job. We rented three types of handguns–40 caliber and 9mm pistols, a 22 revolver–and rotated through 4 positions with about a dozen people. Hence, there was lots of time to take great pictures and try to chat through the hearing protection.

Some photo highlights:

All the pictures are here.

Dina Martina

On Thursday night, a group of us went to see Dina Martina’s Christmas show at Re-bar. I had never seen one of her shows before, so it was quite the experience. I’m pretty sure I laughed almost the entire show. What goes on in the mind of this performer is decidedly odd for sure but wildly entertaining. Highly recommended if you happen to be in Seattle (or somewhere else she’ll be performing in the future). The show runs through the end of the month and she mentioned they still have tickets available for many of the weeknight shows.

Transition

Lately I feel like my life is once again in transition, although this time it’s a different kind of transition. I’m not particularly feeling the urge to run away to some new city or start a career or even figure big personal issues out. Part of it comes from spending a decent amount of time in the same city, in the same job, around some of the same people and having certain parts of my personal life much more figured out. In fact, it has more to do with this settling in both cause and effect.

Looking back on my life, I can break it down into several major chunks:

• birth through first year of school (1979-1985), after which I changed schools and really started having social difficulties with other kids
• first through sixth grade (1985-1991), after which my family moved from Anaheim to San Clemente
• junior high and high school (1991-1997), after which I moved away to college
• college (1997-2002), after which I graduated and moved to Germany
• post-college flailing/turbulence/exploration (2002-2007?)

I find it interesting that the milestone events that separate these chunks from one another have all been educational, geographical or in most cases both. I feel like that last chunk has come to an end. In some ways, it’s already happened with the educational leaving of grad school and geographical of moving to Seattle nearly two years ago. At the same time, there’s more to this transition than just the educational and geographical, in particular everything relating to my coming out and subsequent exploration of sexuality and dating. Perhaps I could break the period into 2002-2005 and 2006-2007, but the entire 5 year stretch has really been composed of turbulence and exploration of various kinds. Since this summer, things have stabilized quite a lot. I don’t go out as much, being more picky about what I do and with whom. I’ve become jaded towards dating and casual sex and general friendship, but at the same time become more aware of what I actually want in each of those. I don’t travel as much. I’ve been more focused on work, have been working more hours and enjoying work more. Somehow I feel headed in a direction reminiscent of my times in Berkeley, but I’m not sure why I feel that way.

All of this is what makes me feel like it may have ended this last summer, bleeding about 1.5 years past the traditional dividing criteria. Although I’ve been feeling it for a while, it just seems to have hit me more in the very recent past with dating (and subsequent break up with) Marc and my status with work. Dating Marc rekindled my belief that there are quality guys out there, although I’m more acutely aware than ever of how hard it is to find them (which is to say you can’t look). As for work, I find that I’m happiest when I work a lot in a productive way (which is to say writing code). Often I feel like my personality is the ‘hacker’/'maker’ as talked about in numerous Paul Graham essays, although obviously I don’t fit his descriptions and characterizations exactly. I’ve been neglecting (relatively) that part of myself since graduating college with the notable exception of the teaching work I did in 2004, but I find myself pushing more towards that aspect once again now.

Figure Skating

This evening I went with Marc, Doug, Jeff and Derek to Sage’s figure skating performance up in Shoreline.

I don’t think I’d ever even been to an ice rink before and I’ve certainly never skated before. So on that front, there was definitely some novelty. Marc asked me if it was what I expected and I said the place looked about like I imagined a skating rink on Aurora might look. Which is to say it looked kind run down but got the job done.

Basically, there were a whole bunch of skaters who did a 1-3 minute routine to some sort of Christmas music. There were effectively three groups I watched go in sequence and the skill level got higher for each successive group. The last girl to perform was fairly impressive and Sage mentioned she was going to be competing at some sort of national tournament in Minneapolis soon. Overall, it was a neat out of the ordinary thing to do on a Tuesday night.

The main demographic of those performing were girls aged probably about 6 to 16. Sage was one of only a couple guys and the only one who was not a minor. Consequently, there were lots of overbearing parents watching their kids. In particular, there was this one mother with disturbing Lynnwood hair. Her look was like a joke gone horribly wrong, but she was for real. I almost couldn’t stop laughing when I saw her. Rude I know, but I think there were enough self-absorbed parents who didn’t notice the gays in the corner mocking them. Her daughter was a pretty graceful and skilled skater, but egad she was wearing a pound of makeup herself and couldn’t have been more than 10 years old.

OutVentures Website Project

Almost as soon as I became the OutVentures webmaster last year, I started thinking about redoing the website. While the current site gets the job done, it is pushing 4 years old and has many limitations. I decided that this winter, I’d work on redoing the site as a volunteer contribution to the group. Also, it seemed like a good excuse to refresh my knowledge of the web. There are thee main components to it:

1. Club information. Who we are, what we do, etc. This part of the site is generally ok, although it could use some updating in spots. Most of these improvements would just come in the form of new content (pictures and text).
2. The club’s membership system runs entirely through the website. New members can fill out a membership form and follow a link to pay via PayPal. Past that almost everything has to be done manually–adding new members, warning/deleting expiring members, verifying credit card payments from PayPal. I want to automate this more. The killer feature here would be getting a new membership to be completely and automatically activated after we’ve received electronic confirmation from PayPal of membership payment without human intervention.
3. Trip organization is the core of the website and, more notably, the core of the club. Because all trips are volunteer lead, volunteers need to have an easy and effective way of posting and hearing about trips. Currently, there’s a bunch of custom VBScript goo written around a commercial calendar and message board module. Although it’s somewhat customizable, customization is limited because the module itself is only binary (no source code). Moreover, the calendaring and message board module is more powerful and complicated than we actually need. Additionally, we have a custom photo album system which is brittle and limited in functionality. I want to write a new custom, integrating calendaring, message board and photo system that’s based around individual trips. There are two workflows our membership follows: posting a trip (create a new trip, announce to membership, answer questions/coordinate trip, go on trip, write trip report, post photos) and finding a trip (look at calendar, answer questions/coordinate trip, go on trip, post photos). Instead of being periodically purged, photos and trip reports would be archived for perpetuity. Other members could look through these archives to find good trips to repeat in subsequent years.

Anyways, I’ve been tinkering with this for a few weeks now. It’s fun but my knowledge is outdated and rusty. Yesterday, I downloaded a trial copy of Dreamweaver to decide if I might want to use it for this project. For those who don’t know, I last worked in web development during the summer of 2002 on UCWISE and then even only for 3 months. Before that though I worked in web development from about 1995 through 2000, first doing minor contract work (while in high school) then for two years working for Flashpoint (link courtesy of WaybackMachine) which became part of Garg Data International (GDI) after acquisition (high school into the first year of college) then for WISE for two years.

The last time I used Dreamweaver was probably in 1998 when I bought two copies (one for Mac, one for Windows) of the first version of it at the UC Irvine student store. I seem to recall they cost $49 each with the student discount. They’re now basically up to version 9 and a student version is over $200 (not that I could buy one these days anyways–retail is $400). Unsurprisingly, the software seems to be much more complicated and further developed than I last remember. After enduring the horrid HTML generation capabilities of early versions of FrontPage PageMill, we were all very happy to have Dreamweaver which generally didn’t mess the HTML up as badly.

Looking back, I realize I probably broke the licensing agreement by using the student discounted software for work at a private company. GDI (a software company with hundreds of employees) idiotically refused to buy us important software like Photoshop, believing that our designers and developers should buy their own copies since those were the tools of our trade (WTF?). Somehow, I did get reimbursed for Dreamweaver (I think), but it wouldn’t surprised me if it had just been paid by a coworker or my boss out of pocket. It was pretty much the only piece of software we did pay for. Usually we just used illegal copies of everything because we had to get shit done. I really hope somebody blew the whistle on GDI to the SBA. I probably would have when I left had I known such things could be so easily reported. Interestingly, I can’t find their website which makes me wonder if they’re even still in business. Much of the first page of the Google search results for their name shows is for court cases. The number one result is for a 2004 fraud charge by the SEC against the company and its owner. Yeck, what an environment of dubious ethics that place had.