Things that might be decidedly odd…

I never realized this was the entrance to the bus tunnel

I never realized this was the entrance to the bus tunnel

Originally uploaded by decidedlyodd

Stevenson

Last weekend, some friends and I went to Stevenson (about an hour east of Portland on the Columbia River) for an escape from Seattle. We didn’t do much of anything besides eat, lay around and watch lots of Queer as Folk, Sex and the City and plenty of other random movies. It was very relaxing and really just what all of us needed.

Unfortunately, on Sunday morning I woke up not feeling so well. My nose was all congested and my throat was sore from post-nasal drip. After getting home from my trip last night, I went bed fairly early. The Benadryl I took seemed to help my symptoms but it made me feel really loopy when I was trying to fall asleep. At one point, I got up in the middle of the night and felt very confused. I didn’t sleep particularly well. I’m still suffering today and didn’t go to work because of the tiredness and overall feeling cruddy. Instead I slept most of the day at home, but did manage to get a little bit of work done.

I hope it’s just bad allergies. I am sensitive to some sort of tree pollen which tends to be highest in early spring. The past few days were pretty warm, so it’s possible the trees have been releasing a lot of pollen for the first time this year. The house we stayed at often has a cat living there, which might be the cause since I’m sometimes allergic to some cats. It could also be a cold. Of the four of us, three of us had similar symptoms. So either we all have a cold or allergies :/

Holiday

I keep forgetting that today is a government holiday to annoying consequences. I’m at work, but doctors offices, stock exchanges, etc. are all closed. Doh.

Everybody on my team was here at work and judging by the parking lots I walked through on the way over, so was everybody else at Microsoft. Yet it’s 5pm and the traffic maps indicate there’s no traffic at all on 520. Proof that in fact Microsoft employees coming from the west side do not cause that nightmare. Well, at least not entirely.

Saarbrooklyn

Searching for Saarbrücken on youtube…

The most famous thing to ever happen in Saarbrücken in modern times?

This one’s charming too. The images of the downtown make me a little nostalgic

Trips to the Apple Store and Fry’s

This afternoon I got a wild hair to hook my old 17″ LCD monitor up as a second monitor on my iMac. Unfortunately, there’s no VGA socket on the newer iMacs, so I had to run off to the Apple store in U Village to buy a mini-DVI to DVI adapter. The hope was then to use the DVI to VGA adapter that came with my G4 Powerbook to hook up the monitor. Sadly, this didn’t work at all and the hour it took me with traffic left me even more annoyed. The new adapter is mini-DVI to DVI-D while the old one is DVI-I to VGA. The difference between DVI-D and DVI-I is that the latter has pins for both digital and analog signals. Consequently, you can’t convert from DVI-D to VGA because there’s no analog signal. Moreover, the connectors will not go together.

Skulking around from my discovery, I started browsing online for monitors and was surprised by how much they’ve dropped in price. The last time I bought an LCD monitor was in 2000, so it’s been a while since I’ve shopped for them. In the end I decided to run over to Fry’s to pick up a 20″ or 22″ monitor for about $300. I went for the Samsung SyncMaster 226BW and it seems to be working out well. So much desk space! I’ve been enjoying dual headed monitors at work for a while, so it’s nice to have it at home. I’m probably going to bring the old 17″ LCD in to work to use instead of the crappy 17″ CRT that’s hooked up as my second monitor there.

While there, I also picked up a 1G RAM chip for my iMac as well. I wanted to max out the memory since lately things have been a bit sluggish when I have a lot of apps plus VMWare Fusion (running a full Windows XP) open. Beforehand, I had 1.5GB in there–1 GB chip I added and a 512MB chip that came with the machine. I replaced the 512 MB with the 1G, which means I now have an extra 512MB chip laying around. Still, the price was pretty low for that too (only $30 and I saw it for as low as $23 online but didn’t want to deal with the shipping hassles).

Weird Dreamweaver Bug

Over the years, I’ve seen some weird bugs in products I’ve worked on and products I’ve used. However, I’ve been experiencing one in Dreamweaver over the past two days which has to take the cake (at least for now). When I press Shift-I (for example when I want to type the word ‘Igloo’) into the code editor, the paste operation is performed.

Now, this is quite annoying although oddly I can work around it by turning on caps lock to create the upper case I. It all started when I began experimenting with ways to get Emacs editing keys (in general or even just a few basic ones like Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E) working. You see, on OS X all the Emacs keyboarding I learned back in college and grad school tend to work in text boxes. To go to the beginning of the line you type Ctrl-A or for the end of the line Ctrl-E. In Windows, you hit the home or end key respectively. The annoying thing is that Dreamweaver uses Windows-style shortcuts only, which is inconsistent compared to other apps on the system. Anyhow, it turned out that you can’t set Ctrl-based shortcut keys in Dreamweaver, which means there’s no easy way to do what I want. In the end, I didn’t change one keyboard shortcut, especially anything having to do with paste. That didn’t stop this problem from appearing out of nowhere though.

For now, I seem to have found a solution. There are different sets of shortcuts you can choose from in the keyboard shortcuts dialog. To create your own custom setting, you have to duplicate an existing set then modify the duplicate. If I just create an unmodified duplicate, the problem seems to go away. Weird.

Caucus

At the beginning, the caucus was total mayhem. I arrived at Seattle Central Community College where several precincts on Capitol Hill were having their caucuses. There were many hundreds of people waiting in all sorts of lines and there was nobody directing people on where to go or what to do. Afterwards, one caucus worker told us there had been about 1600 people there for one caucus or another, the largest site in the city.

The caucus itself was pretty interesting. My precinct was small (only about 3 small city blocks) but there were 92 of my neighbors there crammed into a small classroom at the college. It became apparent immediately that this precinct was overwhelmingly young, white, hip and iPhone possessing (I swear I saw close to 10 of them in the 2 hours I was there). In fact, somebody from the Stranger was even there blogging about our precinct meeting. The comments on that blog post are particularly funny because my roommate was the guy running our caucus. Here’s a random picture of when we were counting the first vote:

In the end, our precinct (WA 43-2547) elected 6 delegates for Obama and 2 for Clinton, which seems to be in sync with Obama blowing Clinton out of the water across Washington state today. The final vote was something like 68 for Obama, 15 for Clinton, 1 for Gravel and 3 uncommitted. Afterwards, Ben, Jeff and I went over to a post-caucus party where there were basically a bunch of guys from the Orca swim team. It was fun to talk about our caucus experiences and politics in general. One thing that seemed to stand out for all of us was the number of so-called A-list gays caucusing for Hillary Clinton. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of attractive, well preened gay men and several middle aged people on the Hillary side, while more D-list gays (and I include myself in this list) and dirty, young hipsters (and I mean that in the best way possible) were caucusing for Obama. At the party a friend commented that this was perhaps the effect of establishment political gays (such as those affiliated with Human Rights Campaign, aka HRC) siding with the more establishment candidate–Hillary Clinton (or the other HRC).

Anyhow, the whole process was really interesting. It was quite fascinating to meet your neighbors and discuss the choice of a presidential candidate with them. I admit it’s much more exciting and thoughtful than coming in for a primary (which is what I’ve always done in past presidential elections), although it’s somewhat disappointing that those who can’t make it to the specific caucus location at the specific time are excluded from the process. Still, I’d say I consider myself a fan of the caucus process now. At least my caucus was much more personal and interactive, both of which seem to be lacking in politics today.

Slashdot

Every once in a while, a slashdot comment comes along that just makes my day. Here’s part of one I just ran across:

Someone over there has finally woken up. I have been teaching Office 2007 and for god’s sake it’s a great product. 90% of the things that have made want to skull fuck the assholes in the Office department to death are gone. The menu system is great. The Page layout break controls are great. The automatic formating is now controllable. Best of fucking all you can now set the default action for paste to be text only.

Washington State Presidential Caucus

Washington is a caucus state and our caucuses are today at 1pm. I don’t feel particularly strong about any candidate, but I’m curious to see how this whole process plays out. Turnout in other states has been extremely high, so I expect there to be pandemonium over at my caucus site. My precinct is quite small–just three small city blocks, but it should be neat to meet my neighbors in such a setting I guess.

It’s been interesting seeing candidates actually campaign here since for every other presidential election I was living in either a very blue (CA) or red (NC) state with a late primary. Because the Democratic nomination is still up in the air and because only three states have a contest today (WA, LA and NE), Clinton, Obama, McCain and Huckabee’s wife have all been here in the past couple days. If I actually watched TV, I assume I’d even be seeing ads from various candidates.

Car News

Two things happened this morning:

1. After getting my title from the bank yesterday, I went over to the licensing office in the U District to have the lien holder removed from my car. It costs $10 more (for a grand total of $19) to do this anywhere besides the county building downtown, but it was worth it because I walked right in without having to wait in any sort of a line and I didn’t have to deal with the limited hours (this place was open on Saturdays). I was in and out within 5 minutes, but it’ll take a few weeks for them to mail my new title to me.

2. On the way over, the check engine light came on again on my car. Ugh, hopefully it’s just something like a bad sensor again. I’ll have to call to make an appointment with the dealer for service.