Hard Drive Failure

It happened again last week. Like a horror movie, sometimes you know it's coming, the shadow of a claw reaching around the corner, a haunting melody repeated through a chorus of children's voices, Linda Blair spitting pea soup at the camera. One of my coworkers reported a blue screen on his computer last week. It was all over by the time I got to his office. The hard drive had begun to fail sometime over the weekend. I wasn't even around to back it up before it died. When I tried to restart the computer, hoping against hope that some crucial system hive file had been damaged at an inopportune moment, the worst was confirmed: error, no hard drive present. The hard drive had died.

It happens. It's happened to me more than once, and it's never pretty. System administrators - a group that technically includes me - always tell you to back up your data. I've even set up a fairly elaborate system of backups for the computers at my workplace, with shared folders written to a RAID 5 hard drive (three or more hard drives slaved together to think they're one, with one drive acting to check against the data against the others and if necessary restore or correct missing or corrupt data), backed up onto tape. Eventually, I wouldn't mind off-site backups. Point is, all these elaborate preparations still count on people dragging their data to the drive. I could automate it - and have, somewhat inconsistently - but it slows up the shutdown, not to mention the network. And the human element had not backed up his hard drive since May. He had lost work on his data sets, documents and particularly his dissertation. What's five months measured against eight years' school? Potentially a lifetime, especially when the degree is needed for a job, and the job is needed to pay off all those student loans from the previous lifetime. Still, if the loss is enormous, the cost to recoup it is appropriately capitalistic, meaning the companies that will recover your data, probably, will bleed you dry to do so. Fees go anywhere between $50 (unlikely) to $1,000 or more (how bad do you want your data?). My heart breaks when a hard drive dies. Even if the user backed up a minute before, something went down, and it's probably important.

Sometime before the turn of the millennium was my first hard drive failure. Unlike my coworker, I can almost certainly trace its death to my hands. At the time, I had a Mac clone, a Power Computing machine with something less than a gigabyte of hard disk and a processor that would be more at home in my Treo than in something attached to a monitor. How did we do it back then? The unit was a pizza box that I had set on its side to clear up desk space. One night, in an explosive fit of ire, I hit the box. Nothing happened, of course, and certainly whatever had gone wrong on screen or in system had not gone right because I was boxing the packaging. I hulked out a little, pounding the bottom of the box. Suddenly, the monitor went blank. I had killed my computer. Whatever my problem was at the time, it wouldn't bother me again. Then again... I brought out the toolbox, unscrewed the top of the machine looking for... What? A circuit breaker, now set to "off"? A tiny vial of kryptonite accidentally broken open next to a miniaturized Superman on a hamster wheel? A component sit-in?

As it turns out, that's kind of what I found, as I found the processor lying loose, popped off the motherboard. Apparently, I'd hit it in just the right direction to send it flying. I re-seated it, turned on the computer and crossed my fingers. It worked!

A few weeks later, the computer started making grinding noises. Naturally, having dealt with the innards of the machine, I ignored them until the computer would not start up. Then I called tech support. They sent out a guy who told me, nope, there's no fixing that; the delicate arm that reads the platters on your hard drive and hovers, mere atoms above it, has crashed into the platter, scratching the data it's trying to read. It's like trying to read a book by the light of the page you've just set on fire. Had anything happened to the computer recently, any sudden impact?

I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. Strictly for the warrantly, mind you, not my pride. Not my pride.

So the data was lost forever, although the fact that the technician who replaced the drive had a CD of illicitly copied programs to replace or update those consigned to binary paradise did soften the blow. I managed to recover a small portion of the data a few years later when I stumbled across a small cache of 3.5" disks I had forgotten to wipe clean. Still, it's strange when a part of your life develops amnesia, and exactly like the intersection of real life and the movies, hitting yourself on the head again will not bring it all back.

World's Best / World's Worst

World's Worst Veterinarian:
"Bad news, I'm afraid. I killed your pet rock."

World's Best Veterinarian:
"The good news is, I fixed your dog... and your transmission... with the same set of tools!"

Sunday Feast!

I made chicken parmesan yesterday, six chicken breasts pounded flat as papyrus, slathered in egg whites, powdered with Italian seasoning bread crumbs, gently placed on a thin bed of Ragu sauce in Pyrex dishes, then covered with shredded cheese, more Ragu with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fresh diced onion and home grown sliced tomatoes ripened on the windowsill. The dinner took somewhere between three hours and six months, depending on your "go" time - the pounding of the chicken or the planting of the seeds - and was quite a lot better or at least more to our taste than restaurant chicken parmesan. We accompanied the meal with sparkling white zinfandel repurposed from the Kleinerts' thirtieth anniversary celebration, and afterwards I felt very, very tired but too awake to nap. I think I read, but it's all a little hazy. For desert, Brandi made a nifty Cherios-Krispie treat. Basically, you substitute Cheerios for Rice Krispies, melt marshmallows and butter and glom the mass into a pan. I hinted strongly that the aluminum heart pan would symbolize our love. I further hinted that frosting our treat would be a great symbol of the sweet cement that binds us, but that may have been a bridge too far, since the treat was a little too Krispie and needed a little warming up to more easily parse with my elderly mid-thirties teeth. Brandi liked it as-is, but she is very kind.

I enjoy this kind of hard work on days when I don't have too many projects going on. I also appreciate the patience all my relatives, friends, ex-roommates and ex-girlfriends had with my food experiments, sometimes layering starch-on-starch in bewildering ways that tested the patience as well as the palate. Thank goodness I passed out of my ramen phase ages ago. Or did I? We still have some in the cabinet, in case I feel like making mom's broccoli slaw, but the urge to chomp on it raw is strong, even in the face of a feast.

Sunday Feast!

I made chicken parmesan yesterday, six chicken breasts pounded flat as papyrus, slathered in egg whites, powdered with Italian seasoning bread crumbs, gently placed on a thin bed of Ragu sauce in Pyrex dishes, then covered with shredded cheese, more Ragu with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fresh diced onion and home grown sliced tomatoes ripened on the windowsill. The dinner took somewhere between three hours and six months, depending on your "go" time - the pounding of the chicken or the planting of the seeds - and was quite a lot better or at least more to our taste than restaurant chicken parmesan. We accompanied the meal with sparkling white zinfandel repurposed from the Kleinerts' thirtieth anniversary celebration, and afterwards I felt very, very tired but too awake to nap. I think I read, but it's all a little hazy. For desert, Brandi made a nifty Cherios-Krispie treat. Basically, you substitute Cheerios for Rice Krispies, melt marshmallows and butter and glom
the mass into a pan. I hinted strongly that the aluminum heart pan would symbolize our love. I further hinted that frosting our treat would be a great symbol of the sweet cement that binds us, but that may have been a bridge too far, since the treat was a little too Krispie and needed a little warming up to more easily parse with my elderly mid-thirties teeth. Brandi liked it as-is, but she is very kind.

I enjoy this kind of hard work on days when I don't have too many projects going on. I also appreciate the patience all my relatives, friends, ex-roommates and ex-girlfriends had with my food experiments, sometimes layering starch-on-starch in bewildering ways that tested the patience as well as the palate. Thank goodness I passed out of my ramen phase ages ago. Or did I? We still have some in the cabinet, in case I feel like making mom's broccoli slaw, but the urge to chomp on it raw is strong, even in the face of a feast.

World's Worst / World's Best

World's Worst Painter:
"You'll find this portrait really brings you to life with just one shade of gray."

World's Best Painter:
"You'll find this portrait really brings you to life, Mr. Dorian Gray."

Thirty cents over and two dimes shy

On the way home tonight, I had an experience with a vending machine I want to relate.

I left work late tonight. Chicagoland was dark as it ever gets. Downtown looked like a Milky Way of square starry windows. I was thirsty and stopped by the vending room of the Student Center where I spend half of my time. I had a one, a five and a twenty, but 20 oz. Diet Pepsis cost a buck and a quarter. I would have to pass. Wait, though, the change machine accepts ones and fives. I tried it. It was broken. In fact it was so broken that the light that indicated it was broken was broken. It didn't even blink at me and when I shoved my five in its bill slot, it just stared at me like a one-eyed toddler offered creamed spinach for the first time. I would have to move on.

I had another chance at the Blue Line station. I realized that I had a tiny amount of change at the bottom of my mesh pocket in my backpack, enough for the $1.25 Diet Coke. I'm brand-agnostic. I put my dollar in. It whirred at me. A little background may help: Chicago Transit Authority builds its stations in such a way so that they're never entirely weatherproof. Great steel and glass structures wrap pierced by multiple tracks always have, by some curious law of CTA contractors, at least one face ripped away so that bitter winter winds may howl through the station, mitigated only partly by heating lamps they have installed in 0.10% of the station. Anyone who wants to remain warm must get in early and not mind getting squeezed to the back while several hundred people try to cram themselves into the same 10' x 10' area. It sounds like a frat joke, but it's the Chicago way. In the midst of this, the CTA has installed two vending machines, one advertising Diet Coke and the other Dasani, a flavor of Diet Coke without caffeine, sugar, artificial colors or sweeteners, flavor, or effervescence, although, through clever processing the Coca-Cola corporation did manage to add a cancer-causing agent to mitigate any possible health benefits one might glean from drinking the water.

It's clear the autumn has been unkind to the Diet Coke machine. After rejecting my dollar, the machine continued to whir as though to say, "No chance, sucker, move on." Not so easily daunted, I considered a cool drink of water. Water is for wimps. I put my dollar in the Dasani machine, not to give up my quest, but because I'd had a better idea. Some vending machines give you the paper back when you hit the "Coin Return" button; others dispense coins. Assuming the latter, I might bypass the whirring Black Knight of the Diet Coke money input and score myself the Holy Grail of my soda experience. I hit "Coin Return".

Perhaps the Coca-Cola Corporation had got wind of my plan, or, in the relative drought - forgive the pun - of Dasani vending machine purveyors of late, did not have good change to give, but the machine gave back not four quarters but, for reasons of its own, one quarter, one nickel and seven dimes. Yes, it adds up to a dollar, or so I hoped. Something sat uneasy in me about the non-quarter change, though the biggest problem I could think of at the time was that machines sometimes reject it.

I dropped the quarter in. The red LED lit up: $0.25. Not a bad start. Dimes followed. A few slipped through without tripping the LED, but I assumed they went to the change return slot and could be fed through again. I was wrong. The counter sat at $1.05 and I had put in all my change, including the extra quarter and dime I had found in my backpack. Some demonic entity unknown to me had rendered three of my dimes entirely moot.

At this point, I could have just pressed the "Coin Return" button and considered myself suitably chastised. After all, thirty cents is not too much to pay for wisdom. But I would have done so thirstily. I went into a frenzy. I started pressing buttons. I searched through my backpack. Could I maybe have missed one quarter? Four nickels? We knew what had happened with the dimes but I was willing to chance it if at the end of the day I might hold a Diet Coke in my hands. Maybe if I hit the machine at just the right angle, whatever supermagnetic force (a combination of science and the supernatural?) might release its hold on my dimes. I looked at it crossly. It just whirred at me. Sometimes, as though to taunt me, it would change the direction of the whir, sucking instead of rejecting. If I still had my dollar bill... I stopped short of kicking the beast. Also, I had seen enough violent pictograms representing hapless stick figures trapped under vending machines to know that only evil could come of my rocking it.

In the end, the train came and I had to give up the entire enterprise. I had to console myself with happy memories of vending machines gone wrong in the past. Like the one in college that kept rejecting my change but adding it to the tally. Or the one at the other end of the platform that dispensed two Diet Cokes in quick succession where I'd only put in the cash for one. Instant karma, indeed.

This Halloween, I will go as the human I most despise...

..all of them.

Wait. That's not me. I know times can get tough, but I can't stay bitter. Sure, between the marathon, job, house hunt and caring for a wife and two cats, I never had time to make a costume for Brandi, but there's always next year. That's also what we're telling ourselves about National Novel Writing Month. We want to convince a bunch of our friends to do it in February. If you're reading this, you're a target. I know February is shorter than the traditional November, but one thing it does not have: Thanksgiving. And since most of America north of Louisville is going to experience 35 minutes of sunlight a day for the next couple of months, you have no excuse but to sit down and work on that Programmer's tan in front of a CRT or LCD. That's the kind of tan that browns the skin around the eyes and makes the middle larger.

Don't make me start cold calling.

Lifesource won't leave me alone. When we move to our apartment about a year and a half ago, I put us on the Do Not Call list, which I think telesales folks just made up as a prank. I can't measure the success or failure of it, though. Maybe if I hadn't signed up for it, I would never have gotten off the phone with the telemarketers, instead of having time to brush at least the top half of my teeth between calls. Lifesource calls the most. Technically not a sales call, they're still plenty aggressive about trying to extract my blood. During the nine months of marathon training, I was afraid of the performance hit I would take and I fell far short of my all-time high of four donations in one year. I hope people really do need my blood. It would be a shame to discover it was being used to feed legions of the undead. I wonder how they feel about the citrate used to keep the blood from clotting. On the one hand, it's hardly naturally found in the undead food chain. On the other hand, neither is yoghurt in ours. Whenever Lifesource calls and Brandi answers, she asks who is calling and hands the phone over, saying, "It's the vampires." Shh! I know that and you know that and but they don't know I know, and I'd rather they took a little bit at a time than all at once. Having to wear a crucifix to the donation center would just suck, no pun intended.

World's Worst / World's Best

World's Worst Supervillainess:
"Why, when Mr. Bond tries my new ultraviolet lipstick he'll just think I'm the bee's knees."

World's Best Supervillainess:
"Why, when Mr. Bond tries to escape, he'll find my new ultraviolet lipstick will bring even the bees to their knees."

My name is Matt Larsen and...

...every time my wife sees Sam Waterston on TV, she sighs. "Poor man," she says.

Then I remind her that it was Jerry Orbach who died.

The Marathon

The Chicago Marathon came and went on Sunday and I ran it. It took me four hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. That's a lot slower than I wanted, but, to quote some of our country's current leaders, you don't run the marathon with the legs you want but the legs you have. And so I did.

My dad and stepmom flew out for the experience. Let me amend that: they flew out to watch me run a marathon and buy an Apple computer. I've finally turned my parents into Switchers. Mom, you're next. We bought the Macbook on Saturday and spent a little time installing software and familiarizing them with the little marvel, then went to carbo-load at our favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant. Free bread plus delicious gorgonzola chicken (times seared ahi tuna salad and mujver, or fried zucchini pancakes) divided by the amount of time we had to wait (about thirty minutes, which seemed longer because people were jostling us most of that thirty minutes) equals happy tummy. Dad and Deb appreciated the experience and, tired, went to bed early while Brandi made signs and put temporary red mousse dye in my hair. It was a busy day and a tense night. Both of us had dreams about the marathon. In mine, ten minutes before the start, I was just crossing State Street, shoeless for some reason, and trailed by a lackadaisical family unconcerned about my potential tardiness. Brandi had about the same dream. What would Freud make of that? Dreaming about a marathon before the marathon. Clearly, we're all in love with our mothers.

I should not have worried. I woke up with the alarm, strapped on my sneakers and ChampionChip (to record my race time separate from the start time; crucial when the start horn goes off and you don't even get to the starting line for another twenty minutes), pinned on my number and stretched a bit. I had run a couple miles the night before just to remind my legs what they were there for and had to account for that soreness. We got out of the apartment at about 6:45 AM, plenty of time to cue up for a race that didn't start until 8:00... that is, in an ideal world where the CTA doesn't decide to close tracks for construction, during the weekend when 1.5 million people would line up to show their support for 40,000 runners. We waited on the Brown Line track for about fifteen minutes. It doesn't sound like much now, but I was so full of adrenaline that any delay left me wanting to punch walls or CTA administrators. Neither were handy, so I just sat. You could tell the other runners immediately. Some, like me, dressed in winter gear except for the legs - I wore shorts - while others compensated for the cold snap by wearing what looked like snow camouflage suits, pants and jacket made of plasticized white paper almost entirely like FedEx envelopes, designed to be worn once and then thrown away mid-course if necessary. Boy, did I wish I had thought of that by run's end. As Dad, Deb and Brandi bravely said, the cold wasn't that bad if you dressed right. Truthfully, I was grateful for the chilly weather at first. I had trained in such ungodly hot weather over the summer that I thought any break in it was going to improve my race. I was wrong. We'll get to that in a moment.

The race started in Millennium Park, next to Buckingham Fountain. You may remember this bit of architecture as the chief visual at the start of Fox's long-running hit, "Married... With Children", jets spewing while "Love and Marriage" played over it. The jets were turned off. It's too cold now and the danger of freezing too high. Another clue. Brandi, Dad and Deb walked with me along Columbus Drive until they ran into a line: nobody allowed past without a number. We said our goodbyes. Brandi kissed me... on the lips! I walked forward, trying to find my way to the proper pacing group. New Balance had runners with signs going back to 5:00. I figured I was more of a 4:00 and tried to wade through people but it was a system of diminishing rewards. Eventually, you found yourself people aside, only to realize you were maybe three people in front of them. I make it a point not to honk someone off if they're going to be in kicking distance for the next three miles. I cooled my jets at the 5:00's.

One funny thing about marathons as opposed to 10Ks in my experience is the clothing. Marathon runners (except for me, I guess) tend to be a little bonier than the spectrum of more casual 10Kers. They get cold faster. So, like the FedEx snowsuit folks, they put on disposable clothing to stay warm until they don't need it any more. Relative to the value of the race - for some, a once-in-a-lifetime run - even a nice set of sweats becomes disposable. So you see clothes popping up like popcorn before the horn goes off, more and more afterwards. People would take off sweatshirts, garbage bags, snowsuits and throw them towards the edge of the corral. It didn't matter much whether they made it or not or if anyone was waiting to play catch on the other side. This brings to mind an opportunity for the bargain-inclined, since you could comfortably attire a family of thousands (and use the leftover bags to throw the useless stuff away) from marathon castoffs. But that's neither here nor there.

Eventually, the airhorn blew. After the wheelchair racers' start, and about ten minutes after the lead runners took off, the pack started to shuffle forward. My jokes, "Well, maybe we're making better time than we think we are..." and "Tag, you're all it," were met with silence, except for one woman in yellow, who said, "I don't get it." Okay, Ms. No-Fun. As we moved inexorably closer to the start, accelerating ever so slowly like a reverse Xeno's Paradox, I was amazed at the piles of clothes along the way. Not everyone had triumphantly cast off their cool weather gear. Some deposited them quietly on the ground, perhaps hoping to sabotage the five-hour runners and guarantee marathon's return to the elite sport it once was, perhaps unacquainted with the Nelly song that kept going through my head as clothing flew like disembodied witches over our heads, "It's getting hot in here... So take off all your clothes." A joke formed in my mind about witches, water and a well-intentioned Kansas girl, but with nobody to tell it to, it kind of died.

Eventually, we reached the starting line. Then we were off, if not like a shot, at least we were off.

Brandi and I had loosely planned a route for her, Dad and Deb. Let me amend that: I had recommended a route based on the marathon info in the Thursday Redeye paper, a route that would amount to non-marathoners taking the train to four different stops around Chicagoland. Brandi took that in and never exactly said "no", but it was clear from the get-go that she wanted more than four stops. The marathon guide listed all of the spectator spots along the way - I think there were twelve - and you could tell by the way her eyes lit up that her ambition was to hit all twelve, turning her, dad and Deb into the scrolling scenery you see in Flintstone's cartoons. So immediately, I felt a friendly paranoia, the inverse of a soldier in enemy territory after a shot rings out. Where did it come from? Anywhere. Could it be around this corner? Or this one? How do I separate the friendly faces from the even-friendlier?

As it turns out, the gang would see me at mile two and seven, miss me at seventeen because my pace had slowed so much and catch back up with me about 200 meters from the Finish line. As it also turns out, while it's hard to pick your loved one out of a crowd of 33,000, it's even harder to do the reverse, especially when team Larsen took off the special red caps I bought to help them stand out. I never saw them until the end. I wound up seeing two improv friends before I saw my family (TJ, in Chinatown, as I run by: "Matt!" Me: "TJ! How *are* you?" TJ: "Fine! How are you?" Matt, now nearly out of earshot: "Running!"). I was kind of bummed, because after mile eleven, all I wanted to do was hang off of my wife and sob. But maybe it's better I didn't. Sometimes the harder thing is for the best.

Brandi explained afterwards that, knowing the CTA's irksome work schedule and the trouble the gang had to go through to zip between miles two and seven, they retired to McDonald's for breakfast to plot their more leisurely route. They did see me at mile seven and thought I saw them. They shouted my name and I turned and waved. Brandi snapped off some photos. I ran on. I didn't see them, though, and it's not that I'm suffering from a hazy recollection. I waved at everyone. Several times along the course, I saw signs for "Free High 5's". I took advantage as much as I could. Ordinarily, I'm comfortable in my technological nest, my poly-cyber-womb, a bevy of computers arrayed around me at each of my three offices, places where I prefer not to be disturbed by social callers. Not Sunday. I wanted to cheer back for everyone cheering me on. I needed them, not least because I had no clear clue what had happened to my family. Several times, I thought, "I hope they're okay."

I ran on. I had a pretty full bladder at the start and was grossed out / envious of the runners who peeled away at the start of Lincoln Park to pee on the trees. One woman running next to me said in a weird accent, "No picnics today," which I thought was apropos. I skipped the Gatorade/water breaks until hunger started to gnaw at me at mile seven. By that time, I was starting to feel it. My knee, which at times in the past gets tricky, was starting to ache. When the wind blew, it went right through my light, artificial fiber shirts and shorts, and about thirty seconds later it felt like each step on my right knee someone was rubbing tacks against the outside. It hurt. All I could do was run forward, though, and count on my legs warming up enough for it to go away. Around mile eleven, I nearly collapsed. My pace, which had been around 9:40, dropped massively. I slowed to a walk, cursing. Had I not run my way up through the pack, past the 4:45 pacers? Had I caught up with the 4:30s and passed them in vain? Did I have a prayer of catching the 4:15s now?

In a word, no. No, I did not. Just walking was painful and I wasn't sure I was going to make it to mile 12, much less 26.2. If Brandi had been around the corner, she would have had a tough time talking me into staying in the race. But Brandi was not around the corner, and the only way I was ever going to meet her was by moving forward, taking advantage of everything the race course offered to get me to that finish line, because I had made a promise not only to myself, but to everyone who RSVP'd to the "Matt's Running the Chicago Marathon" party we'd arranged later in the day. How could I meet their eyes and say I'd run 11/26th of a marathon? How would I feel when they said, "Well, at least you tried. And it's longer than I can run..." That's the bummer of running your second marathon. You know it's not longer than you can run, and some part of you just hates yourself for being so much more petty than you were before.

So, I took Gatorade at every stop, knowing it would make my bladder less comfortable but keep my energy up. I lurched into a jog, using my arms for momentum, quietly thankful for the cross-training I'd done in the pool. I counted the miles down to Taylor Street, where I knew they had PowerBar PowerGel, basically sugar packs with the consistency of shampoo and the flavor of coffee-flavored fruit. At mile 15, I waited in line for the stalls, not so much because I feared an accident on the course but because I knew I would feel an iota better with just one pain to focus on. I was lucky. One man in line said he'd stopped three times during the race. Three! I would hate to have been part of his training runs, no pun intended.

If the mechanics of running were pretty simple, the course was even more so. I was never far enough behind that I didn't have people around me, though after mile 3 the density dropped to slightly less than an average day at the airport. We ran north, turned around 180 degrees almost to our starting point, then west a few miles, turned around, south, west again to the PowerGel break, east (and by this time, every turn I mentally screamed, "Get to the END, already!), south a while, east some more, north, south and north for the final stretch. Having two marathons in two cities to compare, I can say that Chicago's goes through slightly less-sketchy neighborhoods at the end, but not by a lot. I still can't decide whether it's good to be so much more familiar with the expanse of Chicago than I was with Cleveland's course. I guess it will take more marathons to figure it out.

Another unexpected bonus of the course this year was the foliage. Chicago has been lucky this year to have an extended fall. When the leaves started turning almost immediately after Labor Day - they change faster after a hot summer - I thought we were in for a brutal winter right away. I was pleasantly shocked. I had also done a lot of training runs at night, so not having to stop for stop lights and enjoying nature's fireworks along the way really was a boon.

What can I say about the finish line? By now, all of Chicago is talking about the winner of this year's race, who crossed it, keeled over, bled in his brain and went to the hospital. He's recovering now, but there are ominous rumors of someone's misplaced banana peel. I kid. Regardless, by the time I crossed, three hours after the winner, there was no sign of that particular drama, just a big green "Finish" stretched across Columbus Drive. I said to a guy with the name "Billy" written on his shirt (neat trick: then strangers can root for you along the way), "Come on, Billy, let's finish this." He thanked me for the encouraging words and we ran for it, as best we could.

Afterwards, I was more grateful than words can describe, for the support of my friends, my family, the city, the thousands of volunteers, bananas, my wife, my wife for being my wife, and to all the other runners. I was also very, very grateful not to be running. And so I am still.

What the DICKENS?!

I snapped this on the way to work yesterday. Looks like all the weather people were right and summer has to come to an end. Pity that Chicago experiences only two seasons, though. I was looking forward to at least a little fall. Now I'm not just wearing my lined pants because I need to do laundry. I really want to stay warm.

I think it stinks that hot summers here are typically followed by cold winters. You'd think we could come up with some kind of weather karma, but, no, it's air. It obeys its own rules (see: tornados, hurricanes, other violent but non-spinny currents that still hurt people and property). As I've gotten older, I've stopped looking forward to all of the things I can make with snow and started realizing that, hey, that guy digging his car out of the snow in all the towing commercials is going to be me very, very shortly. I wonder if I should invest in snow tires.

The Coffee Controversy

The change in weather surprised me. Summer passed faster than the Indy 500, though with less repetition. I knew intellectually that Chicago's summer more or less dies after Labor Day. I knew that Brandi and I would go to New York City a hair before Labor Day and return a few days after. I somehow could not reconcile that emotionally with the cold weather. I'm no atomic clock, but it feels like we should just be easing into July. Halloween slapping us in the face is kind of a slap. In the face.

I'm glad it's here, though. Autumn is for me what breakfast is to a lot of people. I can enjoy it any time. I love the look and the smell, the crunch of leaves under my feet, fireplaces burning just enough wood to melt the ice caps another 10 million tons. My new Canon DSLR takes great foliage pictures and I'm blessed to work on a campus with lots of colorful trees. Getting out of work at the golden hour doesn't hurt, either. I caught myself thinking how much I loved the smell of this time of year as I left work when I suddenly realized that it wasn't just rotting leaves and crisp weather, but the velvety fallout from the Blommer Chocolate Factory. I miss living closer to that.

Autumn also takes a lot of pressure off my wardrobe. Summers like our last stink for exercise. When going outside for exercise is like going to a loan shark for credit consolidation, you can kiss your six pack goodbye. In the fall, I can wear long sleeve shirts and pants, and they look good on me. My big legs look best under a bit of fabric. Last year for Christmas, Mom got me lined pants, and three seasons of the year they feel smashing (the fourth feels like a rainforest, sticky, hot and with its own microclimate). In the fall, there's no shame for wanting cool weather. We call it "enjoying nature".

The downside of all this joy is that sometimes I freeze my skin off. Our office manager puts the air conditioning on when temperatures rise above 65 degrees (F). Everyone else has space heaters. I work with computers, and if I had a proper server room, I probably wouldn't complain, but thanks to a spate of hiring, we have a housing crunch at one of my offices. Our backbone computers and network gear are scattered across several cubicles, protected from theft or damage only by luck and ignorance, of which we have a good deal. The waste heat will not keep me warm. I've resorted to drinking hot beverages: tea, broth, and yes, even coffee.

I never used to like the taste of coffee. Tea I found passable, if you steep it overnight and add lots of sweetener, it's like hot gatorade. Coffee is harder to disguise. Like beer, most of the grownups who drank it while I was growing up said I would learn to like it in college. I didn't drink alcohol until two years after I graduated Miami, and I still don't particularly like beer. Coffee eluded me even longer. I get enough pep from soda and a good night's sleep. I am no stranger to the nap. The bitterness turned me off for a long time, until I discovered creamer, or, as it is sometimes called, whitener.

Adding cream, milk or those weird powders that sit next to sugar in pretty much every office in the western world changes everything. Bitter coffee turns into something like coffee ice cream. I can drink it without trying to scrape my tongue out with a fork. My stomach forgives me and all the artificial sweeteners I cram in. I feel more satisfied with something warm inside of me, and I no longer have to wear seven sweaters to work.

Caffeine? What was that? I can't hear you over the sound of my gnawing my nails down to nubbins. Yeah, there's some caffeine in coffee. Once, I saw a chart comparing beverages for caffeine content. Mountain Dew has something like two cups of regular Folgers coffee's worth of caffeine in it. Chocolate has caffeine, but it probably won't keep you up all night. The big surprise comes from Starbucks. They way over-caffeinate. If you've ever stood behind someone in a Starbucks line complaining about the need to get his/her fix, you're not far away from truth. Starbucks decaf has more caffeine than regular coffee. I don't even want to think about their regular. I've heard even visualizing the venti size can cause chest pains.

Funny enough, I only think about this after I've consumed my fifth or sixth cup of decaf and feel like pain cannot affect me. Why even bother calling it "decaf" if you're going to fall that far short? That's like saying, "We're sending the Apollo astronauts to the Moon or Australia, whichever. Heads it's Australia." I get nervous, sleep-phobic, and all of the typical traits of your average overcaffeinated wage earner. Perhaps one of the reasons coffee keeps me warm is the way it ramps up my metabolism.

I don't like the idea of being dependent on a drug for my energy. Vacations past, I have returned to see my folks or other essential familial event, having recently completed some large project. I head to bed early and sleep in late. Withdrawal makes me boring.

What's to do? I'll probably take some good Knorr vegetable bouillon cubes to work for a salty pick-me-up. I may have to lay off the coffee for a while. Every health expert tells you to get more sleep. Perhaps my seasonally affected disorder will fall in line when I move somewhere sunnier. In any case, like many, many people, I will endeavor to drink less coffee, get more exercise, and enjoy life a lot more. Even if it's not too beautiful to ignore doesn't mean it's not beautiful enough to appreciate.

Apple Pick-tures

Here are some pictures of what the Chicago Larsens and the Clairmont-Wilsons did this Saturday. Mainly: pick apples. No, times are not that difficult for either household. We did it for pleasure, mostly, although if apple farms really wanted to please us they would build themselves a bit closer to Chicago. But that's neither here nor there. In the shot above, Shane Wilson, like the apocryphal Newton before him, studies an apple. In a baseball cap.

In the picture below, Brandi and I are posing like a modern "American Gothic", with Brandi in her M*A*S*H t-shirt playing the role of "wife" and me in the "Just be glad I'm not your kid" t-shirt playing the role of "twit with pitchfork". Though we bear little resemblance to the models of the original painting, we are clearly dressed in the colors the artist intended.


Ah, the joy of apples! Brandi shows off her latest pick with a girly grin while fashionista Clair
shows she's got what it takes to triumph on "America's Next Top Corn Model". Other pictures I should probably include but did not include: Brandi with Bunny, the Great Corn Relay, Pumpkins!, and my personal favorite, Creepy Dried Gords on the Ceiling of a Barn for No Reason I Can Understand.

Sunset, UIC Campus, Friday

I shot these on the way to meet Brandi for dinner. Golden hour + autumn + manicured university field = heavenly.

Of course, Brandi and I crossed signals as to which restaurant we were meeting. I wound up making her drive an extra twenty minutes, effectively cutting down our together time to about nine minutes. So the mood didn't last. But that's why we have cameras.

World's Worst / World's Best

I'm two days late for my second posting of this, so I'll try to snazz it up some.

World's Worst Hairdresser:
"I find I do all my best work with sheep shears and Nair."

World's Best Hairdresser:
"I styled your beehive tall enough to plug the hole in the ozone layer I made creating it."

- and another -

World's Worst Online Poker Player:
"I really love the feeling of having four aces and no pants. Fold."

World's Best Online Poker Player:
"I can tell you're sweating, ncc1701_4eva. Your IP just blinked."

- and -

A shout out to my Columbus connection, Dave and Karen Maxwell, who have contributed marvelous comments to my first "World's Worst / World's Best" post, and who are just awesome in general. Good luck with Maxwell 1.4!

Here is my favorite of Dave's comments:

World's Best Pirate:
"Arr, me harties!"

World's Worst Pirate:
"Me heart! Me arteries!" *thunk*

Also, because I think I made this exceptionally unclear in my first "World's Worst / World's Best" entry, please do not feel that you *have* to submit a full entry to join in the fun. I would love it if you would send me even careers you would like to see spoofed, which I will turn around and add whatever spin I can dig up in a week or less. Thanks for your comments so far (Maxwells, I'm looking at you) and I look forward to hearing from you again.

Hello, my name is Matt, and...

...my cats either love me or want to eat me. Either way, they lick me.

Rainy Night Impressionism

These are a series of pictures I took on my way home from work, after dropping Brandi off at Glamorama. I know it probably looks like I dared death itself, snapping photo after gorgeous photo as sheets of water cascaded off the windshield. My only answer to that is, yes, I am a daredevil, and a sexy beast, and also water looks a lot larger when you stick the camera right up to the glass and manually focus on raindrops the size of pumpkin seeds.

The Problem with Radio Shack

I walked home from work yesterday. For my father, for a period of about ten years, this would have been a feat of profound ease, since he lived directly above his business by six floors. I'm about seven miles away. Luckily, I wore my iPod Shuffle mom got me for my birthday, my distance running shoes, and a good attitude. The miles went quickly. I took some shots of the UIC campus at golden hour - the magical time just before sunset when the refraction of the Earth's atmosphere brings the reds, oranges and deeper colors (green flashes just before the sun disappears) normally bounced into space back to the planet. Combine that lighting with just a little slow motion, body armor and Viggo Mortensen and you've every third shot from "The Lord of the Rings". They reminded me of the three years Brandi and I shared in our old apartment. Sure, it was small, but every cloudless sunset we watched downtown turn into a pumpkin-hued faeryland. Then the sodium lights of the parking garage came on and night turned into a permanent sunset from the south. It wasn't our favorite direction anyway.

I walked through some prospective neighborhoods. Chicago has changed so much since I moved here. I remember my friend Dave advising me to live anywhere but Cabrini Green. Now there are condos going up opposite the mall there. Yeah, you can still see the shattered hulks of the low income skyscrapers dominating the view there, and, yeah, only the brave or the foolhardy really live there just yet, but you have to admit it's a step up.

Not that all change is positive. ComedySportz lost its lease on the space it occupied for five and a half years, the former Steppenwolf space, soaked in history and the screams of the victims of David Mamet's early stabs at dialogue, because the owner sold the building out from under them to build condos. The Annoyance Theatre got it worse: they turned it into a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell refused to comment.) Sometimes you work so hard to improve an area that your reward is your failure to afford anything there.

Still, Chicago looks nice. We're in for a good time this Saturday when we go out to look at condominiums. Bucktown, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and other spots along the Blue Line elevated train may be on the slate. I like to know a place with my feet. My feet give thumbs up. This is painful, and I won't ask them again for their opinion.

Ultimately, besides wanting to get home, I also targeted Toys R Us (how the hell do you get the dyslexic "R" on a standard keyboard and how are they listed on the stock exchange: "TZRS"? Or is that a company that makes tazers?) and Radio Shack. Toys, etc. had the usual bevy of games, dolls, action figure and - my favorite - shape shifting robots that transform from robots to cars, airplanes, rockets, video cameras, construction equipment, dinosaurs, enormous spheres... and back! Unfortunately, I'm a little too Down-the-Rabbit-Hole to appreciate what's out now. Haunting all the Transformers forums waiting for the next leaked shot of MegaSCF Starscream or the Cybertron Jetfire repaint they're calling Astrotrain has spoiled me during non-virtual toy runs. Of course, I've still got the itch. Just ask Brandi how many times we've gone to Target that I have had to go to the toy aisle to look at Transformers. (Every time.) So, while I pondered the wisdom of dropping $35 on a Millennium Falcon that transforms into roboticized versions of Han Solo and Chewbacca, I ultimately decided against it and just used the free access to the Little Boys' room to relieve seven miles' bladder pressure. Then it was off to Radio Shack where, try as I might, I could not make myself enter.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. I wasn't tired, at least not tired enough to walk two doors down. I had enough time, though we were nearing nine o'clock, I still had at least fifteen minutes to spare. I needed to go; the aforementioned GP2X has a loose spring inside the battery compartment that is just waiting for me to grow some guts and solder it down. I needed solder and possibly a new soldering gun. I like looking. Why did I dread going inside?

It reminds me of a quote from Braveheart. Edward Longshanks, chief villain of the film, proposes the Droit du Seigneur, whereby any bride who marries a Scot must spend her first night at the castle of the English lord, presumably with the English lord, and not necessarily sleeping. "The problem with Scotland," Longshanks says, "is that it's full of Scots. We'll breed them out."

The problem with Radio Shack is that it's full of Radio Shack employees. I'm not sure what part of their training adds that extra sheen of craziness when they ask what they can help you find but I inevitably feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when they get near me. Probably, they know a lot more than me about electronics, but that doesn't help them find what I need, just gives them better segues between RJ-11 phone cord and selling me last year's Cingular clamshell phone and plan. I feel what I think a doe would feel in a sporting goods store: sure the all-cotton shirts feel nice and I can even nibble on some but doesn't that "hunting" section have something to do with harming my relatives and OH MY GOD, I think some of those shoes are actually made out of my Aunt Berenice. The three nicest words in English may be "I love you", but in the hands of an expert, the four creepiest are, "Can I help you?" followed by the nine creepiest, "Can I help you find something at Radio Shack?" No, please, gosh no. I would feel worse about my prejudice, but the chain that foisted both the Tandy brand and the TRS-80 on an unsuspecting America deserves a little pain, I think. If I need a top of the line remote control car, I'll pay the dumb consumer tax at Sharper Image. If I want something more reasonable, I'll hit the eBay, where I'm sure there are thousands just waiting to get out of the homes of kids who grew out of burning through AA batteries chasing squirrels around pavement and now burn rubber chasing the ladies in their beaters. Besides miniature electronics sold for 99 cents in little dime bags, what the hell else does Radio Shack have that other chains do not? It's not customer service or a dedication to quality (Apple) or kitsch (Spencer). When they're not busy lurking in their own stores, what other things do Radio Shack employees do? And who would want to work there?

The secret may lie in those little dime bags after all. I had a disturbing thought: what could explain all that gear, survival in one of the harshest retail environments, a longevity that would put the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers to shame, and why do they bug customers with a metronomic regularity? What if the last human employee of Radio Shack died sometime in the early nineties, having not hired his replacement, but BUILDING him (her/it) in his significant downtime? What if Radio Shack is staffed by robots, inhuman golems driven only by the desire to sell little bits of themselves in lilliputian sandwich bags and sipping freely of the AC wall sockets during lunch? I know we were all worried about Steve Jobs being replaced by a Steve Jobs-bot, but HAS IT ALREADY HAPPENED and IS IT SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MEDIOCRE THAN WE EXPECTED?

I can say no more. That Tickle Me Elmo is watching me with suspicion and malice. I have to distract it, either by tickling or a flamethrower and I'm all out of tickles.

Arty Pics

This is Bob, a great, great guy. Bob stood up for me at my wedding and helped make my Cape Canaveral bachelor party interesting by shooting up insulin at the children's section, just after we saw all of the Mennonites go into the robot exhibit. This story is starting to read like a Palahniuk novel, but, honest to gosh, it's true. Bob also improvises, directs, writes, draws, and teaches his new puppy amazing tricks because he is better to his dog than Shaggy ever was to Scooby, and all of that art in his life breathes a lot of life into a dumb off-the-cuff lunchtime shot like this. I swear, women in bonnets and men with the crazy beards, making a big beeline to the robot exhibit while my bachelor posse stood by and made jokes about making a horse drawn spaceship... but while we laugh now, perhaps we won't be so amused when our robot masters place their Mennonite best friends in the food mines while the rest of us labor away in the solar drilling fields.

This is a picture of a pole on the way to work in the morning. I like it because I think it looks like a modern take on a Jurassic forest, with metal apatosaur heads looming in the distance, while a bestickered tree stands in the foreground, advertising the dominance of the alternative punk band mammals that will dominate the landscape after the great Lawsuit descends on all from the skies. Watch the punk bands swell absurdly large, then give rise to a strange new lifeform in the musical scene: intelligent record execs! Seriously, though, if you're running late, try not to do it in Roscoe Village, because it is impossible to catch a cab there even though there's a gas station on the corner. They just don't come through. Roscoe is one of those middle streets, sitting between the much larger arteries of Belmont to the south and Addison to the north, but Damen, the north-south cross street, is too far west to be lakefront and too far east to be the highway. So you sit and wait for the bus even if you're running really, really late.

What's that sound? Why are you moving your fingers back and forth like that? Oh, damn you, World's Smallest Violin, you always ruin my Pity Parties! Someone fetch me more Pity Punch.


Someday, my kid will ask me, "Where do you work, daddy?" and I'll eventually tell the wee one that I support two offices' networks at a state university. Then I'll pull out these pictures to show that it's really not as bad as it seems. First, though, I'll probably say I'm a super spy with a bunch of documentaries about my adventures called, "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and, embarrasingly, "Octopussy". By that time, I hope to say that I have been played by a number of different actors, including Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalten, Pierce Brosnan, and that guy from "Layer Cake" nobody's quite sure is going to work out. And since I'll have all the usual gadgets one has working on a network - Cat5 Ethernet cable, laptop, palmtop, flash drive, USB hubs, network switches, flat panel monitors, and the kid won't know any better, I can say that they were gifts from Q, my inventor, and that anyone else who has them is just copying, and can't press a button for the keyboard ejector seat. Probably, the only way my kid will see through my ruse is by calling out my lack of British accent, which I can rectify in advance by always having one around my children.

I took this shot of downtown Chicago looking out from I290, which I cross every day to go between both of my offices. I mean, when I'm acting as a double agent between East and West Germany, both of which still somehow exist as political entities. I know it looks like that dark zit in the top half of the photo is a plane about to run into trouble, but you have my word that it is not going to collide with anything and we don't need to pass any more Patriot Acts to assure ourselves that Big Brother is looking out for our best interest. The building to the right of the Sears Tower (center, black, ugly) is nicknamed the cake building, for reasons that have nothing to do with what the food court serves. I know. I asked. I think the footprint somehow resembles a cake, although if I had a cake shaped like that at my wedding, I don't think I would have been able to top it with Transformers, because my weird quotient would already have been filled. The cake building looks orange in this light, but is actually a shade of pink, and very tall, though not as tall as its friend across the street, who cheats by adding all the spires to its official height.



Chicago for the Legally Blind

Finally, these are a few deliberately blurry shots showing off the power of not using autofocus. I guess you can click on them for the larger shot, but as alternative that uses no bandwidth whatsoever, you could also lean closer to your monitor.

Little Gray Pillbox

For some people, it's young, young, young, dead. James Dean famously lived his mantra, "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse," although how you're supposed to judge the aesthetics of your funeral when you're the guest of honor is a little beyond me or anyone else without an advanced degree in metaphysics or witchcraft. Some people live this without actually dying young. Were Keanu Reeves to depart us tomorrow, I think a lot of America would believe he's in his forties. You can hide a lot behind Botox. Just keep a close eye on how far it penetrates into your acting.

Other people are destined to look old forever. Walter Matthau could have done "Grumpy Old Men" in his mid-twenties. Peter Falk is just now catching up to the age he played in "The Princess Bride", but the chorus of "but he's too young to look so old!" never reached my ears. You can watch Steve Martin age on the covers of his old standup albums, hair turning within just a few years from black to jet white.

And so we come to my darling head. My friend Melanie plucked my first gray hair out of it at sixteen, in French class. I was kind of excited. Another person - Mike Myers I think - observed that Europe is a funny place, with young people pretending to be old and old people playing at being young. Proof: men utterly unqualified to wear Speedos subjecting everyone around them to the torture of caged cellulite. I always looked forward to growing up. Here, I was already growing old. Bonus!

Fast forward another sixteen years. What do I have to show for all this time? At this point, I expected my eyebrows to be gray, but all I really have to show for it is a set of gray racing stripes and a bunch of gray cowlicks at the crown of my head. Looking at it in the mirror, I observed to the woman shearing my head down to a bearable length tonight, it looked like a gray pillbox hat, or perhaps yarmulke. Happy Jewish New Year to me. Time to party like it's 5999. (It's 5576, I think.) Probably it will be 5576 on the Christian calendar before the last mousy brown hair falls out of my head, but, you know, near-immortality is a nice trade-off.

And anyway, now that I'm older I can start pining for the days when I was younger. I've already started with Transformers, comic books and calling my beautiful wife my "girlfriend" (she's so adorable). What next?

Larsenopolis Goes Interactive: now soliciting comments for World's Worst / World's Best

Hi. I'm not sure if you're out there, especially after my especially long hiatus from web logging, but if you are, I would love your help.

I'm going to start a new entry for this blog called "World's Worst / World's Best". This is a joke. Not the fact that I am starting it; that is no laughing matter. "World's Worst / World's Best" will be like the classic short form game "World's Worst", except there will be only one player and two jokes. The first is what the world's worst BLANK will say in a given situation. The second is what the world's best BLANK would say. You supply the BLANK.

As a particularly lame example not to be confused with comedy, I offer the following:

World's Worst Banker:

"Interest rate? Well, I'd date you but I wouldn't take you home to mom."

World's Best

"I've taken the precaution of securing your money in my chest, next to my beating heart. Mint?"

If you are interested, please add a comment to the blog. I would prefer you add them to World's Worst / World's Best entries, but we're not exactly doing brisk traffic here, so I and my army of Larsenopoli will scour all comments for, say the next week. At least one will be chosen, the the person submitting given credit, especially for humoring me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Weekend Snapshots

The eBay eFfect

I accidentally bought a digital camera off eBay. I say this with the full knowledge that nobody slips and makes a bid. At some point, you're serious. I was looking at DSLRs, digital single lens reflex, cameras that use viewfinders and sensors sharing the same light. Not that it matters as much today with viewfinder-less digital cameras , but the cool thing about SLRs before they went D was that the mirror that sent the image to the viewfinder popped out of the way when you pulled the trigger to take a picture. This made a satisfying potato chip "click". Camera makers now sometimes add "click" sound files to bring back that soul-satisfying virtual celery crunch, but it always suffers from small camera speakers and you can't feel the camera jump in your hand like a startled pet. There's also the issue of interchangeability. SLRs have (expensive, holy cow!) lenses you can pop on and off depending on whether you need to shoot a hummingbird mid-flap or Lindsay Lohan in a bikini on a private beach, 300 meters away and hiding behind a particularly long blade of sawgrass. Finally, in the realm of "what you immediately get with the camera besides promises and a neat sound", we have depth of field. In a nutshell, this means the camera will get a shot of your subject in focus with the background out of focus. It's a way to make the viewer see the final picture in 3D without resorting to headache-inducing polarizing lenses, dorky glasses or intricate modelwork.

I put in a bid at what seemed an absurdly low price for the camera. It was. Another eBayer outbid me in about an hour. I thought, "I'll check back later and see how high this sucker gets." I did. Numbers stayed low for the unit, so I made another bid. And, I think, another. I'm kind of stretching the word "accidentally" here, aren't I? Like a bad gambler, I did not establish an upper limit for myself, and higher prices started to seem quite reasonable. This is why, on the eve of my first foray into the tense world of home buying with my partner, pal and caller-outer Brandi, I found myself trying to explain why our household needed a fifth digital camera (sixth, including the camcorder, although I also count crappy 640 x 480 camera phones). The fact that I needed a piece of tape to hold the battery compartment closed did not help my case.

So I'm hoping that posting some pictures I took this weekend redeems my cause somewhat. Also, bitterly muttering, "silly, silly me".

Sixty Pound Cotton

Thanks to Brandi's brave steps in the direction of laundry by the pound, I took a look around my office / dressing area - I like to multitask? - and decided there was a Solution. I loaded all my dirty duds into two bags and dragged them to a swell place by Diversey and Elston. We dropped them off, picked up poker chips for Brandi's Ladies' Poker Night, saw a bunch of condos (more on that later), came back and loaded everything into the car. Wow! I can see why things have gotten hashish-smokin' easy for the modern housewife and overworked, home-schoolin' college dorm dweller. Even the cost is bearable, considering the cost in quarters and time of dragging sixty pounds of mostly cotton blends to the laundromat's bulk washers. Oh, and I also just bought a DSLR. I can't complain about money, ever... again.

Real Estate Note for the Day: a man urinating on your window is a sign you must not buy that garden apartment, even if you really like how much light it gets.

We were out looking at condos and stopped in at an open house around Lawrence and Kedzie in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was one finished unit and the rest you kind of had to visualize. I like that part. Dad sees the world through the lens of an architect, so to relate to him past childhood, I've learned to appreciate architecture in the raw, and hopefully to fill in the gaps between studs with my imagination. The first floor unit looked nice but a tad small. Brandi pointed out that some places work out great for renting but stink when you know you're going to own them. We wandered across the hall to a condo with two bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and one great room almost as large as a basketball court. The developers had combined the living and dining rooms into a Devastator-esque giant room designed to knock down and steal the candy of lesser rooms. It was nice but just at the edge of what we can afford and, we were informed, headed north by $10,000 in the next week if we didn't snap it up. We finished looking and started back down when we spied the garden-level apartment door open and thought to take a look. One word sprang to mind, "feh." It had decent light for something buried just slightly in the earth, but overall felt like nothing to write home about since it lacked southern exposure and abutted on one side to the building next door. Again, we started out... but, then I spied, just across the back deck, the ground-level version of the light-filled apartment with the uber-room upstairs. The back door was open and, while not explicitly welcome, we weren't forbidden from traipsing across and taking a look.

It looked decent, though varying significantly with the floor plan of the room above. Here, the rooms were more segregated and the overall impression of vast space was dampened by it. I went to the bedroom space forward and realized with a shock why significantly more men live in garden-level apartments than women. A man was urinating, pretty much anywhere he pleased, but certainly on the building and in clear view of the windows and quite possibly on the windows. See, the building on that side went right to the sidewalk, and, to his credit, moments before he had been peeing in front of an empty apartment.

By the way he staggered when he was done, I'm pretty sure he was drunk or ridiculously proud of watering the windows. In hindsight, maybe it's like those movie villains who insist environmental disaster is the earth's immune system trying to shrug off the pestilence of humanity. Maybe the building's immune system was this man, peeing at us from behind the safety of a pane of glass. I don't care. Brandi felt that the neighborhood might need a few more years to turn itself around and I agree, wholeheartedly.

Setting the Chip from Read to Write

June was a busy month. I do not offer this as an excuse for the rarity of my updates, just as a backstory for the even more lame excuse that will shortly follow. My day job was transitioning from one location to another, ComedySportz again offered me a chance at teaching level 202 of the training center as well as a once-a-year gig as one of a bunch of fathers singing Christmas carols about Sears merchandise, and my tertiary career as a graphic designer got some exercise in the form of PowerPoint operator for a chair manufacturer's annual showcase of new products. For a few weekends, I slept more or less where I dropped and cursed the name of that she-devil Work.

Then the money came. One of the things you'll almost never hear Joe American complain about is, "I just think they're paying me too much money. The laws of supply and demand need a rewrite and the first guy who should get the axe is me!" I had such noble plans: throw some of it in our joint account for the upcoming New York trip, make a big car payment, lower the balance on my credit card. Sure, some of these things happened, but another, BAD thing happened whereby I succumbed to temptation and bought another handheld gaming system.

Had I learned nothing from the Game Boy Advance I bought three years ago? I remember my plan to play Metroid on the CTA to shorten my commute boredom turning into an all-consuming passion to race to the end of the game, which I did. Twice. I remember hiding the unit, its charger and cartridges away like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark because, while both contained power enough to touch the face of the infinite, was humanity (or your humble narrator) ready for that? I mean, really?

It turns out, no, I really had learned nothing except how to fool myself into thinking I was learning a useful skill. See, even though I had been ogling the PSP for more than a year and couldn't walk into a toy store without trying the DS touchscreen, I could not justify in my mind the idea of buying a gaming platform. There's no font for contempt, but, boy did I want one for that last sentence. Here, Gizmodo and Engadget had given me just enough knowledge to make me a danger to myself and others. What gaming system played homebrew games, emulated NES and SNES games of yore and could play movies and more, all using as its operating system a special flavor of Linux? Why the GP2X, that's what!

If you've never heard of it, never fear, most of America joins you in ignorance. It comes from Korea and doesn't even have a distributor here in the States. My box comes, like Rod's girlfriend in "Avenue Q", from Canada. It comes in a sexy black cardboard box with a listing of everything it does printed on the front, two AA batteries and a spare USB plug. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with anything else: no headphones, no CD, no free SD card to hold your games, and certainly no instructions on how to get things from your computer to work on this dual processor, 200 MHz Linux workhorse. Start it up and you'll see options for Games, Movies, Utility, Explorer, Music and System, but figuring out the difference between "Explorer", "Utility" and "System" takes a little thinking. Not to mention the fact that regular ol' MPEG movies just didn't play on the GP2X and you've got a somewhat-sexy (like Scarlett Johansen, it's a little thicker than its press shots would have you believe) black box that plays MP3s and is about two and a half times larger than the video iPod which dwarfs it in capacity. It took a lot of good hours at work - hours that I would normally have devoted to updating my blog, surfing the web, writing sketch comedy or even, lord forbid, updating status reports - to figure out how to install homebrew games on it. A few more hours went down the sucking time vortex of the GP2X before I could even figure out which of those games did not suck, and their numbers were not large. Then I found the tutorial on encoding AVIs in DivX-friendly formats and another on NES emulators and everything started to fall apart. The nail in the coffin: the ROM for Super Mario 3.

History repeated itself. Hours vanished from my life. People called, but the message just went to voice mail. I went through batteries like gangbusters. Well, I recharged them like gangbusters. Even if I'm throwing my life away it's no reason to throw the environment into the toilet. Work got put off. I even tempted my darling wife into my corrupt lifestyle, enticing her with a homebrew game within a homebrew game called "The Minigame Project", itself called "Fruity Guy". See, it's fantastically simple: you start out with 60 seconds. You run around a green field until you hit the strawberry that appeared anywhere on the screen. When you do, another stationary strawberry appears, along with a non-stationary ball that moves across the screen either horizontally or vertically on the same axis as the strawberry you "ate". Hit the ball and the game ends. Don't do anything until the sixty seconds are up and the game ends. Keep eating strawberries and more balls appear on the screen, until eventually the game ends... Unless... and I probably shouldn't even be mentioning this, but sometimes a slice of watermelon appears. If you eat that, you become large for five seconds. Don't think of this as a punishment! No! During this five seconds, the tables are turned and, far from the balls destroying you, YOU CAN DESTROY THE BALLS! Even better, for every ball you destroy, another second appears on the game clock. Play the game right and it might never end! Except for one thing (else): balls get faster the higher your score. Eventually, you can't outrun them. What can save you? Blind luck, maybe? Skill? Ha! I laugh at this thing you call "skill".

As well you might laugh at me. Now the GP2X sits in its beautiful box, at the bottom of a drawer, left at work for the first time in a month and a half and I'm writing about how much it's destroyed my life in a plaintive, abused lover kind of way. It's sad. Imagine all of the blogging I might have gotten done if I hadn't felt compelled to get Mario the fireflower so he could beat Bowser in the castle on board five of level one in game three. Imagine how sad it would be if you understood all of that, or even cared.

So it's time to set that chip from "Read Only" back to "Write" and let you know a little more about the real world drama in my life, which I promise is more exciting than warping from level two to four and then on to five. Really.

Clean Lines of the Skyscrapers

We're in New York City right now, both of us blogging in the egregious 45 - 75 minute-long line to head to the top of the Empire State Building. Actually, "line" is a bit of a misnomer. We came in from the front, up an escalator, through lobby one, past the snack stand into the first line, the security line, where employees of the building exhort you to buy the audio tour ($6) plus the General Admission tour ($16). Express Ticket ($40) holders go right up. The ESB (I'm cool enough to use the three letter acronym, or TLA) also offers extended tours of the 102nd floor observatory ($14 plus the base price). Line number one leads to two metal detectors / X-ray machines all-too familiar to air travelers. Like Disney World, the first line goes illusorily fast. About ten minutes after heading up the escalator, you're ready to call their "45 - 75 minute" bluff.

Then comes line number two, the ticket purchase line. For reasons of space which the staff confuse with time, groups are separated into the people paying and all the rest, in much the same way that a wolf will separate the weak from the rest of the herd. In this way, we say that the wolf's victim is "paying tax" to natural selection. Brandi went into the "herd" line, or line number three, which is hopefully the line to the elevator. We're both blogging about our New York experiences; she because she just bought a pair of Versace jeans formerly worn in a fashion show by a Brandi-shaped model (score!). I found this line situation too funny to let go.

Okay, we just rounded the corner to line number four, which I think exists just so they could take us past the popcorn stand. Friends of ours went to an amusement park in Florida - I should clarify: THE amusement park - and found that they were hungry almost constantly because the park pumped the smell of popcorn out of every nook and crevice.

Ahead of us lie the classic public transportation turnstiles either leading to the elevator to the top or the line to separate out the tallest from the shortest, those dressed formally from the casuals, hipsters from emos, Republican apologists from outraged Democrats. Oh, the machine that scans the tickets uses a grocery laser and makes a "wuhp!" sound like a futuristic suction cup pulling off a surprised octopus. We're in line for the elevator. After you've bought your tickets, they don't bother trying to sell you on anything more. Curiously, "crowd control", who also help hawk the vital services such as the audio tour, has vanished as well. Brandi hopes the elevator ride won't take too long. I assured her that modern elevators with all of their safety equipment, actually kill fewer people than fire. True fact, as far as I know.

I think the designers of the ESB Observatory tour must have studies fractals to fit so much line into a two-dimensional space.

Hey, we're here!

Hi, my name is Matt...

..and in the song "Puff the Magic Dragon", at the line, "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys...", I always thought Jackie Paper died.

I always thought it was the big "C" that got him, poor little guy. I feel really bad about killing him off like I did. Probably, it was leukemia. Is there a particular form that does not give you time to put away your toys?

I never, ever thought he burned. Even as a kid, I knew "Paper" was his name, not his function. What, do I look stupid to you?

View from the Top

Right now, I'm writing from the top floor of one of America's ugliest pieces of architecture. No, not Anna Nicole Smith's cleavage. Ha ha ha ha ha. No. Ha ha ha ha. Um, seriously, way no. I'm at University Hall setting up AV equipment for my role as technologist for the University of Illinois. Adding to the mystique and glamor of my job: playing chicken and pressing a button when prompted during this morning's presentation. Time to buy a remote for the office, I think.

Still, check out that view. Even the Sears Tower's weird boxy shape looks good measured against the ribbon of highway. I'm lucky I get to have these kinds of views. Even though I'm usually the guy hidden behind the curtain and today was the only guy in the room wearing less than a two piece suit (I had on khakis and my very newest sneakers), and even though I make about a third as much as these guys in a given year, I can still enjoy the view from the top.

Ha ha ha. I had you going for a minute, though, right? She's the dumb playmate who married the millionaire on his deathbed. Ring a bell? A bell that goes, "ha ha ha ha ha"? Okay, whatever.

Go, view.

Mighty Movie Magic - or - I really did believe a man could fly but then it was boring and after a while I was just hungry

I'm hitting the movie theater opening night to confirm or deny Ebert's two star assessment of the alien in blue and red, Superman Returns. Unluckily, work held me until late, so with a two plus hour running time I'm going to be home with my Earthling darling (and occasional Kryptonite, especially when she melts my heart) Brandi. Luckily, I've got a seat at the rail. It's twenty more minutes until they even start rolling the ads and I'm within striking distance of the skinny comic book kid who thinks he's hilarious because he can quote the entire Superman oevre and blend it seamlessly with his infinite Simpsons wisdom. Even his voice sounds like it has braces. Do other people see me like that? I swear all the reference comedy comes from a less arrogant space. Really?

Oh, now he's telling his date (again, really?) that he can show her all his downloaded, pirated movie clips except that she would have to spend the night in his bedroom. Boy, silk gets jealous that he's so smooth.

"I read enough comic books that I've learned something: my life is a comic book..." ==> direct quote

Good gravy, he's talking about and handing out tips on dating now. Apparently, when he starts seeing women, they can't stick to his plan of keeping things casual and they wind up seeing each other every day. He's looking for a middle ground between friends and marriage. Actually, I think he's looking for middle ground between World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, a mythical paradise that might also include real live girls wearing revealing outfits.

More pearls of wisdom. How can he still be talking such pap? This time it's Miss Manners' guide to the teenage social scene: "I'm sorry, but texting me on the phone is the least-appropriate thing to do." Okay. Somehow, waxing poetic about how awesome he is with women to the woman he's with falls outside of his irony radar.

"I would rather a singer do bad acting than the other way around." Our friend weighing in on the age-old debate of singing versus acting.

"When you talk about puppets, I'm saying to myself, 'You and I miss marionettes...'" I can't even guess at the context.

I understand at last, what makes bullies go nuts around guys like this (me? Less so, now that I work out.) This guy seriously needs to get hit in the face with a dodgeball. Speaking of! ComedySportz held a "Sportz" rehearsal last night where we played, some of us for the first time since middle school humiliation. Yes, people got hit in the face... accidentally, the thrower felt really bad. Yes, I throw ridiculously bad and catch worse. I'm still replaying the movie in my head of the moment when someone in front of me stepped to the left, dodging/revealing a ball too late for me to do anything. Nailed. Someone on my team caught a ball. Back in, I threw a ball. Caught, handily. Out again. Friend, that is the circle of life. The only thing that suxors about it is that I wanted to be so much better at the game. I've spent more than half of my life since training for some sport or another. It should carry over.

Ads have started. Movie ads are looking more like movies, but they still suck. I can see why people want to move the movie back to the living room. It's sort of a reverse Catholic church. (Footnote: in the early days of Christianity, back when it was a flavor of Judaism and a little after, services were held in the home. How much altar do you need to speak to an infinite being who knows your every movement, hears your every thought? It wasn't until the Council of Nicea when St. Nick consolidated power specifically into churches, in the process deciding what exactly was Jesus' mix of god and human. Churches sprang up.) Okay, you probably should punch me in the face now. I deserve it.

AFTERMATH

The move is sawn. Seen. Whatever. It's over.

Funny moments:
1) Between preview and movie, two guys wedge into the two courtesy seats I left between me and the couple next to me. They talk through the entire movie. But that doesn't bother me because...
2) A family sits down in the seats in front of me about two minutes after the movie starts. They obviously have nowhere else to sit. Also important: they're not that into the idea of sitting still and not talking through the movie. I think the youngest slept through the whole thing. I'm not sure the movie is appropriate for the under-six crowd. There probably should be an age cutoff for Kevin Spacey movies. Otherwise I'm worried they're going to change all the packaging to "Se7en": starring THAT GUY from "Superman Returns". No, not the Namibian love child guy. Not the guy with the freckles. Head guy. Now you're talking.

Anyways, they didn't bother me that much because...

3) Some guy next to me wouldn't stop sneezing/coughing and he wouldn't cover his mouth. And any fan of Kevin Spacey movies remembers that moment in "Outbreak" when you follow Ebola-esque germs from cougher to all the other people in the movie theater. Remember? Anyone?

Anyways, that didn't bother me that much either because...

4) The movie deserved two stars, maybe less. Ever have a talented friend take himself way too seriously? He's a good artist but all of a sudden he treats every napkin doodle like the Sistine Chapel? That's this movie. To Brian Singer's credit, I think he faithfully reproduced every iconic Superman comic book moment from 50 years of comics, and that's pretty much every frame, but oh! that dialogue stank. We get that Superman is terse. He's not Spider-Man with a quip for every villain vanquished. He's a little nerdy. But Singer took so many colors away from his word palette that we weren't looking at a barebones black and white so much as just white... like the bread but less filling.

Even worse was the way the powers played out. Perhaps it's five years of Smallville talking, but once you establish limits, even simple ones, like, "Superman can be harmed by and has reduced powers in the proximity of kryptonite" should be abided by. Also, once you have (metaphorically-speaking) fired off a gun in a scene or at least revealed that something is a weapon, leaving it unfired for the remainder of the movie because you want to show the heroism of ordinary people is just hack. Everything becomes a matter of convenience then.

Finally: Kryptonian technology made from crystals? Cool. That it always makes the same crappy seventies chandeliers in small, medium, large and continent-sized? Not so nifty. Also, if water makes it grow, what's it take to make it stop growing? How can Lex chart that? And even if it's growing a new continent on the eastern coast of North America, how does that take away from the coastlines of all the other continents? Is there only so much basalt to go around?

I'd give you the answers, but then I would have to invite you into my bedroom, place of Geek Mystery, and we all know what that can lead to.

Babies? Somehow?

Frankenstein Helps the Plants to Grow

In the foreground: my brandywine tomato plant, raised from seed from a kit bought by my lovely wife, Brandi, and just starting to sprout some serious leaves. I should have tomatoes by, oh, about fall.

But what's this? In the background? Something green and decidedly not leafy! Something with scars at its temple, the strength of many men and the simplicity of a child. Something not alive, but not dead, either, not a Spring but certainly not an Autumn and absolutely out of place with that weird orange and purple jumpsuit. It's... Toy Frankenstein's Monster!

Our downstairs neighbor makes our lawn look like a putting green, but he also gets pretty excited when it comes to garage sales... to the point where he beings home and decorates the yard with creatures like Adam here. Downstairs, we've got robots, gondolas, potted plants, some of which I suspect are weeds that just sprouted in the right place, and of course about forty clocks set to go off every hour, forty-three minutes past the hour.

I'm fine with it all as long as it makes the plants grow. Which, somehow, it does, as evidenced by my amazing, now flowering squash plant:

Switcheroo

It's not funny to me now, but I hope it will be ten years down the line. Work has me switching offices. I work two half time jobs that add up to a full time paycheck. Too bad one of the half time jobs doesn't realize it's half time. I talked to my boss to the problem. I'm being transferred to a new office. Problem solved? Uh, no, because the half my bosses transferred is the easy half. Now I'll be working for an office that I've had the pleasure to support a handful of times over the last couple of years.

This office is trouble.

Put yourself back on the playground. There's a kid sitting on the swings, not swinging, staring at you. You think, "Hey, maybe he thinks I look like someone he knows. He wouldn't want to beat me up. People just don't do that." So you run around with a couple of your friends playing tag. You look up. He's closer. More, the look on his face is one part Freddy Krueger, one part shark maw, frozen mid-bite by the magic of digital video. Someone calls your name. You turn and trip. Was that a leg?

On the way back into class he points you out to his friends. Your velcro wallet goes missing after gym. He drops something nasty and green into your milk at lunchtime. When you complain about it to the teacher, she sits everyone down for a conference and the kid says it was all a big misunderstanding and how a lack of familiarity can turn even friendly faces into scary creatures... in short, all of the crap he's learned to shovel over the years to avoid having to fess up over his bad attitude. At the end of the conference, you shake hands and he smiles just as wide as the teacher wants him to, only you can't: as he shakes your hand he's digging into your wrist with his fingernails.

When you walk home, you realize he lives three doors down from you. His mom and your mom really, really want you to be friends, because then they can send one over to the other's house and halve those pesky babysitting bills.

You don't even know his name and you know it's not going to work. Worse, you feel bad for your mom. Money doesn't grow on trees and you need to get out of the house once in a while.

Yeah, well, it's still not going to work. Can we call it at that?

Not today.

I first found out I would be transferred when my on-site contact told my boss that she didn't like my personality. Sure, sometimes I try to cultivate a hard nosed character on stage, but at work I try to be earnest and interested, if slightly worn out from my extracurriculars. My boss had the answer, and that answer was transfer. I got confused and asked my on-site contact what she meant and she could give me no good answer. When I got upset she said the transfer could happen then (end of February) or now (end of June). I didn't want to leave at all. I picked later.

Well, I thought, maybe I'm not giving them a fair shake. I'll probably like the new office.

No. I did not like the new office. Not at all. I told the outgoing tech support guy about this. He told me why my experience was unusual. See, even though the people I had not liked had behaved badly towards me, misunderstanding me, interrupting when I was trying to explain, sending out emails to complain about the work when I was halfway through and forced to move on because at that point I was supporting three offices while the outgoing tech was on vacation, all of the bad feelings I felt didn't matter because that was them being them. Sure. My point exactly. His advice: don't let it make me act nasty toward them.

I'm a ComedySportz ref. Until you've played target to a houseful of drunken twentysomethings out to prove that they're funnier than the show they paid to see, you don't know the meaning of the word patience.

I know how to take it and smile. It doesn't mean I want to. And just because I can doesn't mean I should, or that anyone should, but since I own my skin, I'm the one who has to look out for it.

I spoke to the on-site contact about establishing parameters of service, things that I can and cannot do. I want to establish to everyone that I am half time and that there will be some times I can't immediately see to their issues because I've got a line of issues as long as my arm on a good day. He said it would undermine my position. I think he's right. I wish it would undermine it. Some offices come to depend on a network admin to the point of addiction, where they stop caring whether they click on an infected file. Who cares when someone else can clean up your mess? Why learn when you've got someone else to do your learning for you? Isn't that what money is FOR?

Bless you, Mr. President.

I've complained a lot lately. It bugs me. Maybe I will like the new job better. Maybe the new kid's not so bad. We both like Spider-Man more than Superman. He stole my super-poseable, but he let me play with his Legos. Sure, it sucks, but patience is its own reward. Besides...

I dragged that Spider-Man through the poison ivy behind the tracks. I hope he puts it in his mouth.

I'm sending out resumes. Today.

Hi, my name is Matt and...

..I once bought a pound of chocolate covered pretzels before seeing a show at Second City. I thought I was going to share.

I ate the entire bag.

..and suddenly knew what it was like to TASTE through TIME.