Does anybody else have what I call "Stretching Tourettes"?

When I stretch I find that it feels much better if I curse vulgarly while doing so, and involves little aforethought. It just comes out. So after watching a movie on the couch I might stand and stretch shouting out "fuck a duck with a cum swizzler" (often things don't make much sense).

If I stretch without it it just isn't as satisfying.

It also carries with it the joy of uttering a sentence that may never before have been uttered in human history (yes, that bit of Garden State was stolen from me).

Oh, I forgot to mention in all the excitement of my last post.

I took one more tiny step towards being old this morning.

Getting out of the shower I fell. Fortunately I'm not yet so decrepit that I broke a hip but I did bang myself pretty good and seem to have tweaked my neck. My left forearm slammed down into the guiding railing for the shower door and did something interesting.

It didn't cut the skin, but did squish things up sufficiently that blood is essentially oozing out through the still otherwise intact skin (only about 3/4 inch long so we aren't talking significant blood loss_. Never had that happen before.

Anyway. First I get trapped in the bathroom by a malfunctioning doorknob (fortunately the screws were on the outside so Lani could remove the knob, new knob has the screws on the inside so when next the apartment attacks I'm screwed). Now that bathroom tries to kill me. It is sad to be so hated by the inanimate. Also, I now need to those high-friction pansy petal stickers for the bottom of the bathtub.

Went to the Alameda County Fair over the weekend. Mostly because it is only a couple miles away and feels like the local community thing to do.

I was only halfway in the mood for it though and teetered on the edge of falling into a funk. Fortunately attendance seems to still be down -- so no masses of humanity -- and it wasn't that hot so I never received the fatal push into an outright bad mood.

En Vogue was the concert. We never go for the concerts but usually will take a peak from the back row at whoever is performing when we're there. En Vogue (pronounced by me as "ahn voh-jhay" to only my own amusement) is the first complete "sell out" that we've experienced. So, in the end it was an opportunity to relive the '90s. I didn't experience them then and I didn't experience them now.

Tony Danza's (NOT, as I mistakenly said on Saturday, Ted Danson) song and dance show remains our personal pinnacle of Alameda County Fair entertainment.

One baby goat tried to eat my shorts. Another tried to eat my leg hair. One of these experiences was more painful than the other.

Deep fried Nutter Butters weren't anything special but did serve as confirmation of what I've learned camping when I use Nutter Butters instead of graham crackers for smores. Namely that warm Nutter Butters are good. Battering them is unnecessary.

Yesterday we did some spring cleaning. Because inside our apartment it is April. Place looks better but it wasn't a very deep scrub and I never did make it into the kitchen. We did go to Home Depot for a flood light, though, making it my second trip to Home Depot in a week and my second Home Depot trip in the last two years (had to buy a new knob for the bathroom for those who missed the exciteming Twitter-tale of me being trapped in my own bathroom).

Also. I saw Public Enemies last night. It was ok. Michael Mann should be forever constrained, however, to using ditigal cameras and filming night scenes. He has an eye for it (as seen in Collateral Damage, Miami Vice, and this) that is a thing of mastery. Unfortunately while I felt like there was an intention to impart some message of significance it eluded me and just came of as a slightly slow biopic.

Finally. Life ain't all that exciting right now so posts like this are what you get. I tried to become interesting by watching four straight stages (or parts thereof) of the Tour last week. It didn't take. I admire the athleticism of the sport but its spread out nature and technical strategy just don't make for very interesting TV. I know there's variety but all four stages I watched (including the uphill on Friday) were essentially the same in form and conclusion.

By the way, I've actually bored myself into a coma writing this. What's your excuse for still reading?

My last name isn't particularly common (though it isn't unique either) so it is really weird to me that a character in tonight's Law & Order: Criminal Intent shares it and they keep saying it over and over and over again.

By far the most times I've heard the word said when it isn't in reference to me or a member of my family.

I'm amused much by this since I see it happen at work all of the time in various ways (though almost always while still in house -- though the first time "lorem ipsum" placeholder text made it to production was a lot of fun) but while templates are good they also screw people up.

When we got home today stuck into our door was a nice glossy full color postcard for a new church that has opened (apparently in a Sheraton which seems odd, but what do I know; they seem unaware of the deal god and I have reached wherein I mock and disregard him and he fumes impotently) in the neighborhood.

One side has helpful information such as if I go to the church I'll find "New Friends and Neighbors." I'm not sure where these people will have to live if I don't go. What if it is Fremont? Could the karmic weight of that outweigh my disbelief. Also, if I go to the Grand Opening celebration "everyone and everything is new!" Might be worth finding religion just to walk around saying "What are you? New?"

Anyway, making fun of the new church isn't why I'm posting. The other side of the postcard is why I'm posting. It also gives the first paragraph of this post relevance.



I wonder if they never ever caught that, or if they caught it after printing, looked at how much they'd spent and said "pardon my French Jesus, but fuck it."

A usage poll for the word "dissipate"

If I were to say "the fog dissipated around 11 a.m." would you think I meant:

a. Around 11 a.m. the fog almost completely or completely disappeared; or
b. Around 11 a.m. the fog grew lessened by some amount, even if it was minimal.

Just curious since I got myself momentarily involved in a Pit thread and in reading over it again I think much of the disagreement rests on different people viewing the word as meaning only A and others as only B.

I know that in common usage (and ever per dictionaries) both are valid (why shouldn't we use the same word to mean wildly different things? it is what makes the world love us) but I think it is clear that the original use meant A and I'd say that 90% of the time I use the word that is what I mean (unless it is in the phrase "is dissipating" in which case I mean it is on its way to completely disappearing but may not have gone far down that road yet.

I think I have a slight stalker.

I have a 1 mile walk every morning to the BART station to start my commute into work, and then I reverse it at the end of the day. In the morning depending on my schedule for the day I leave at one of three time to catch one of three trains. Coming home at the end of the day is a bit more variable with about six possible trains being the one I end up on.

There's this old grizzled guy who apparently has the opposite commute as me. We walk by each other almost every morning on the road. 11 out of the last 14 by my count, even though the window when I'm out there varies by up to 45 minutes. 7 of the last 13 days I've past him on the walk home, even though my window varies by up to two hours.

Interesting coincidence and in true male fashion even though at this point I see him more often than any of my friends we have never so much as done a minimal nod to each other.

Anyway, because of an early meeting, this morning I headed out a half hour earlier than I have in weeks. And, on a whim I walked a different route. And, you guessed it, I passed him.

I begin to suspect that I'm under surveillance. And since he looks kind of Czechy, it must be the Czech secret police.

"I'm walking the Appalachian Trail" is now going to be my favorite euphemism.

In fact, I might go have an affair just so I have reason to use it.

Woke up and went to work as usual this morning.

Unfortunately, this morning I had jury duty. In a decade of living in the Bay Area I've received a half dozen summonses and not once has my pool number been required to go in.

So I get into the office and run into a coworker who says "I thought you were out today?"

For some reason I remember my pool number from the summons and find the appropriate web site. Of course, for the first time ever, my number has to go in. It is now 8:40, roll call is 9:30 and it will take me at least 90 minutes to get there.

I spend 20 minutes on hold with them. Their hold music really sucks. And is made much suckier by stopping to say that I'm on hold every 15 seconds (literally, I timed it). I finally get through and my punishment for missing my summons is that I'm rescheduled. And not only rescheduled but rescheduled for more than six months from now. And not only that but I get to choose the date I'd like.

Nice.

Blegh.

I have a couple simple screenscrapers I wrote for MousePlanet to help me organize some information sourced from the Disneyland web site. Fortunately, Disney doesn't change code much so they've worked for 3+ years without any effort on my part. At the time, I had to teach myself how to do the pattern recognition and deal with the various arrays using PHP.

Needless to say, a non-trivial amount of that self-education faded over the years.

This weekend they broke. I, of course, immediately assumed Disney had changed code in a way that broke the pattern matching. So that's the first thing I look through. Nope, that's all the same. So really odd that it would break.

Everything else looked good to so I set out to debug line by line (using my faded PHP knowledge) and it is only after nearly an hour of this that I notice that my initial pattern check was flawed.

class=schedDateHeader" >
was changed to
class=schedDateHeader">

Yes, two spaces reduced to one. This reminds me why, whenever I started to pursue programming back in college I quickly got too frustrated to keep it up. Spending hours re-examining your entire logical framework only to find that you've been screwed by a stray comma or white space is a bad spot is too demoralizing.