Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Sick and Home

    I’ve got an airline cold… one of those horrible colds you get from breathing recycled air for hours on end. So, no pics yet, but they’re coming. Not only is my hosting provider having database availability problems, iPhoto decided to truncate my photo library again. Why does this happen, Steve Jobs, why? I didn’t do anything to it, half my pictures just disappeared. The files are still there, but they don’t show up in the application. And don’t even think about importing them. That’ll never work. It just sits there with no status messages and churns.

    I don’t think I want to go on any more trips for a while.

  • Ramblin’ And Waitin’

    I’m awake, showered, fed and ready to go. My sole disappointment this morning was the fact that the little Mexican place across the street isn’t open for breakfast. I’ve had a craving for a good breakfast burrito or authentic huevos rancheros since we landed, and I’ve still not satisfied it. I went downstairs and had breakfast in the little hotel restaurant. It wasn’t bad, but was nothing to waste anymore thought on. I did finish a couple articles in the Smithsonian magazine, which is always a good read.

    Today is tourist day!! Tim’s coming to get me in about an hour, and we’re off to do stupid touristy things. Not sure what yet, but we’ll find out. I’m finally taking the camera out and will hopefully have a ton of pictures to show you on Monday (unless Tim has broadband at home… then I’ll get them done sooner). Hopefully, we’ll be able to hook up with Daws and Annie for dinner. Not sure where yet.

    It’s been a good trip, but I hope I’m done travelling for a while. I miss Jen and Max and can’t wait to get home. Today and tomorrow will be fun, and it’ll be great to see Tim and Monica, Daws and Annie, but I really want to see my wife and son. It’s weird. I didn’t feel like this either of the times they went to Arizona to visit Jen’s parents. Plus, I don’t handle jet lag well. This is day three, and I’m still a wreck. I’m relying on frequent Cokes to get me through the day, which is bad. Until this week, I hadn’t had a soda in over six months other than the root beer at Sweetwater. Now, I’m downing them whenever I get the chance (and thanks to Google’s stocked and free breakroom – that was many). I hope my little addiction doesn’t come back and I can kick this as soon as I get home.

    I really want to tell you about the meetings yesterday. They were really cool, and I met some really great (and brilliant) folks. I made some great jokes, and think I may have contributed a little bit to the discussion. Not much, I’m sure, but maybe something.

    In completely unrelated news, I’ve been using Hydra to take notes in meetings. I’ve created a little meeting template html file, and then keep my stream-of-consciousness notes during the meeting. It looks good enough to send out to people afterwards and it bloggable if I need it to be. Plus, Hydra has a really nice HTML preview window that uses Safari’s WebCore to render the page. It refreshes automatically every second or so, does so very smoothly without slowing my already slow machine down, and doesn’t require me to save. Hydra is shaping up to be a great editor – all it needs now is tag completion and I’ll swtich from jEdit.

    I think I’m done not telling you what I’ve been up to the past couple days. There’s nothing secret about the next two, so keep your eyes peeled for new stuff.

  • Long Walks in Tiny Glasses

    I’m not going to talk about my full day of meetings until later, when/if other folks start talking about it. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.

    I do want to talk about the other stuff that happened today. We split up today to tackle different stuff, so some of went to the day-long meetings, and some of us went and did something else. I had fish tacos for lunch, and that made me happy. Tonight, I’m all alone. Everyone’s either in the city staying at a different hotel, or they’re going home tonight. So, I’m here tonight all alone with no car until tomorrow morning when my brother comes and picks me up.

    I walked down the street to Satsuma Sushi and had a lovely scallops and mushroom appetizer,and then a combo with teriyaki salmon and nigiri (tuna and yellowtail). I sat there by myself reading the copy of The Smithsonian Magazine I brought with me on the trip and longed for some form of conversation. After dinner, I went off looking for a movie theater. I walked about a mile down El Camino Real, aaaa-aaall the way to Sunnyvale and no luck. So I walked through an audio/video store, and then walked the mile back to the hotel. Here I am, mail checked, blogs read, sitemeter glanced at and listening to CNN in the background. I am officially bored.

    To display the depths of my boredom, I bring you a pet peeve. Why are hotel glasses so freaking small? It’s only slightly bigger than a shot glass, and is a pretty crappy way to try to rehydrate. I might as well drink from the sink or from the ice bucket (now there’s an idea…). Listen up, hotels of America, we demand bigger drinking glasses! 12 ounces or nothing!

  • A Shout Out

    A big shout out to the whole Faggots Family. I swear they’re not kidding. You could also become a Faggot Fanatic!!

  • In-N-Out of My Mind

    This switching time zones thing sucks. I woke up at 6:30 local time and was unable to get back to sleep. Thank goodness for in-room (and free) broadband. Good job, Hilton! Ok, it’s not really high-speed, but it’s faster than my modem and that’s good enough for me. It was weird staying in a hotel room all by myself. I had such a hard time getting to sleep, that I got X2 on pay-per-view and fell asleep about the time Logan/Mystique made his way down the causeway (that’s the last thing I remember anyway) about 11pm local time (2pm EST – which means I was awake for almost 20 hours… I’m too old for this). Last night, we went to dinner with a bunch of folks who worked on the Journals product at The Tied House, a local prew pub. I got to mark off one of my goals of the trip – real fresh Pacific King Salmon. If you’re used to the Atlantic stuff… you’re missing out. It was perfect.

    Yesterday also marked the loss of my In-and-Out Burger virginity. Their fries suck, but their burgers are fast-food-greasy-artery-clogging splendor. Now I know what I’m missing, and couldn’t be more upset that we don’t have one in VA. We went to Google yesterday for a meeting I can’t talk about because I signed an NDA, which is pretty cool. When you go to Google and sign in as a visitor on their groovy little setup, you sign an NDA before it prints out your visitors badge. I want one for work! I’d be a different visitor every day.

    Today is a full day of meetings that I might be able to talk about later, but I’m not sure. If I talk about them later, you’ll know.

    Since I was up so early, I couldn’t resist posting a couple Sidekick mirror shots on my mopho album.

  • In CA

    I’m in California, and after a two hour delay waiting for a new plane, we made it here, and we’ve already had two cool meetings. It’s 9pm EST and I’m all airplane-slimey. I need dinner, a shower, a massage and a nap.

    And tomorrow is another day full of meetings. I have a great job!!

  • I’m Flyin’ on a Jet Plane

    I was going to go to bed early, but I decided instead to start packing. Other than things I needed this morning, and will need tomorrow morning, I’m all packed! I have snacks and reading material for the plane, clothes for most contingencies (jeans, shorts, t-shirt, hawaiian shirt, respectable dress shirt) and all in a carry-on and my laptop backpack. Can you tell I’m a little excited about this trip?

  • Preparations

    I’m going to the Bay Area this week, leaving bright and early Wednesday morning, and coming back on the Red Eye Saturday night. I’m stoked to be able to spend some time with my brother and his pregnant wife, hopefully my old pal Daws and do some siteseeing. Oh yeah, I’ll be there for work, but that’s really only Wednesday and Thursday (maybe some of Friday). I started a list of things to make sure I pack:

    • clothes:

      • jeans

      • hawaiian shirts

      • t-shirts

      • underpants

      • socks

      • pj’s

      • shorts

    • batteries for camera and cd player

    • digital camera

    • MP3 CD Player for the plane

    • MP3 CD for the plane

    • The Orange Book

    • Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

    • Sidekick and recharging cord

    • Powerbook

    • Atom docs (if I can find some to print out)

    • Mom’s box o’ stuff for Tim impending daughter

    I think that’s it. I went out this weekend and bought a laptop backpack, because I realized that lugging my bulky old laptop case around NYC was a royal pain in my back. The backpack is light, has lots of cool pockets and should hold all my digital and analog entertainment for the plane-ride.

  • Max Goes FAST!

    Max likes to go fast! Mom took him out in her lovely loaner car, and he had a blast. I guess the love of fast cars runs in the family… oh no. There are some pics I took with the Sidekick over on my Typepad Photo Album

  • Them: Adventures With Extremists

    I finished reading Them: Adventures With Extremists last night. I was about a hundred pages from the end when I went to bed, but I had to finish it. I was too unsettled not to. I have all these unpleasant thoughts running through my head that I want to get down so I can hopefully get some comments on them before I really sit down to write them out, especially if you’ve read the book, or watched The Secret Rulers of the World.

    I was truly disturbed by the people profiled in the book. Here are the unformed thoughts rolling around in my noggin:

    • It feels like everyone’s story is true to a degree. The problem is that each on of the “extremists” projects their own personal prejudices. There’s a group of mostly white, conservative Christian radicals, and the Islamic Fundamentalists who think the world is run by the Jews. The Irish Protestant Extremists think it’s the Catholics. The people actually in the group these folks think is the New World Order really don’t give the extremists a second thought. What if they’re all right? What does that mean for me, sitting here somewhere between the different camps?

    • The extremists are called extremists because they left the mainstream of their (mostly) religions because they became entranced by a cause, or because they felt the World was against them. It feels like they’ve decided that this New World Order is the reason their lives suck and have vowed to fight it. It feels like class warfare to me, with one side (the Bilderbergs of the world) so removed from the battle they don’t even smell the blood.

    • Can these extremists be brought back into the mainstream? Is there some way to extinguish the hate without extinguishing them? Should we try? Do we try because we can’t handle people who don’t fit into a nice little box?

    • The Ruby Ridge / Waco chapter was probably the most discomforting part of the book. Both events were so badly handled by the government. But, was it part of this vast conspiracy, or was it just sheer incompetance?

    I don’t honestly know what I think about everything in the book. It’s too much to take in and try to think about in one sitting. What do you think?