Invader from an Alternate Dimension

I got tired of shaving my whole face this week, so the evil look is
starting to take shape.

Funny thing is, I carved out the shape of the Van Dyke (goatees are
chin only; no mustache) Tuesday. Thursday morning, as Brandi and I got
ready for work, she turned to me and said, "When did you start growing
THAT?" We'd been hanging out for a day and a half already. I think my
baby needs new glasses.

New Term Friday

It's Friday, and, not necessarily apropros to the day, I would like to coin a new term I'm finding a lot more in my job: a Vystery. This is the error that happens in Windows Vista that happens once, or perhaps over and over, and which has no obvious or search-friendly reason or solution. It just happens. It's happening to me, now, on a new tablet, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this particular Fujitsu freaked out on me when I went into tablet mode, then refused to give me the Task Manager when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.

"Logon process has failed to create the security options dialog," is about as friendly as it got, which wasn't very.

Yet after restarting the little beast, everything was nearly hunky-dory, as though, in the locked room Agatha Christie mystery, the lights went out and the body just disappeared. Still, as your faithful computer Poirot, it's my job to see where that body went and who did it. And I'm looking at you, Captain Fellswarth. Your sordid history with Windows DLLs means it's entirely likely you kidnapped C:\Windows\system32\dbgeng.dll and stashed her in your secret cove, only to have her washed away with the reboot tide. Your days are numbered, Fellswarth.

Get Curious!

The weekend before last, Brandi and I gleefully took a few days off and headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to see Bob and Stacey. A bit of backstory on those two: Bob and I started working together years ago... a number perhaps measuring as high as a decade... when we both took classes at the Annoyance Theatre. Bob later joined the cast of my children's show, "Kid Mystery," which alarmed director Fred Mowery and I due to the fact that after we had cast him as the insatiable eater Tad Huff, he revealed he was a diabetic and shot up insulin three times a day. He also said it was okay, and that he wouldn't eat before a show, which in retrospect should have shown me just how dedicated Bob was to the art of performance.

Later on, I would have the pleasure of performing with Bob on iO's longform improv team, "Space Mountain," in ComedySportz, and forcing him to both sing and dance in my other children's show, "The Paper Spaceship," during which time he took his first tentative steps towards a relationship with his now-fiancée, Stacey.

Much to my regret, I would not have a chance to hang out with Stacey much until the formation of the movie making group, Monday Pictures. Time wasted! Stacey has a rich history in theatre, improvisation, animation, film making, production, and, oddly, credit history. She gave me good advice on everything. Stacey also performed with Bob's Playground improv group, International Stinger, and with the all-ladies group Firecracker. A woman of talent, Stacey had an extraordinary dream:

TO BUILD A THEATRE

So when Brandi and I went off to Portland, we felt a bit of trepidation as to what we would find. Would we have to "ooh" and "ah" after some two-bit shopfront operation, knowing that our amazing friends would some day turn it into a viable operation? Or would it be some seedy establishment, the burned out husk of a former porno theatre, abandoned after a developer's halfhearted stab at condo renovation? Or would there be nothing at all, an abandoned hobo's hat on the ground next to a cloth where seven wannabes performed their interpretation of Julius Caesar via an hour-long game of Freeze Tag?

I'm happy to say we saw none of those things. Curious Productions is going to be amazing.

The theatre space is enormous, as you cannot tell from this picture of Brandi with Bob, exposed steel studs behind them forming what will eventually be the coat room and part of the bar. With seating for 120 people, perhaps more with the balcony, the buildout has so far taken months and the time and efforts of many talented volunteers, all coordinated by Bob and Stacey, and all of which you can watch from the safety of the web, here. When we saw it, everything was wood studs and exposed drywall, but Stacey, who somehow holds all of this more or less in her head, hauled the architectural renderings out for us to show us how the footprint of the finished product would look. At the time when we first looked at it, we hadn't seen the space, so the stage looked a bit small to us, so we just nodded and smiled. Then we saw the space. The stage is normal sized, with a few steps up and a foldout handicapped ramp to accomodate wheeled humans and heavy sets. There's a classroom on the second story, a restaurant space, Men's and Women's handicapped bathrooms, a coat room, and additional bathrooms and showers in the back to accomodate bicyclists, of which there are many in Portland. In front, a water flows across a peaceful rock garden. It's THAT classy.

All of this would be meaningless without productions to put inside of it, which, to Bob and Stacey's credit, are numerous. There will be a sketch show, a musical, improvisation, and much, much more. Bob and Stacey are nearly tearing their hair out getting everything done, and yet they flattered us with not just their presence, but their company and conversation. It was one of those trips where I felt slightly guilty relaxing with (and occasionally without, as when Brandi and I took a short trip to the Portland zoo) my friends because I could tell there was always something MORE to do.

(By the way, the photos above are from a fancy restaurant Stacey took us to that, true to most fancy-schmancy restaurants, served amazing food with portions large enough to please a small cat. Brandi and Stacey had the tortellini with flavored foam. FOAM! I ordered and then gulped down glorified spaghetti with meat sauce, and Bob had the monkfish, which you can recognize because they shave their heads and live in oceanic cloisters. Afterwards, we went out to Ground Kontrol to play video games and try to talk amidst the general chaos of a Rock Band party, then over to Hobos, where we met friends and more or less ate dinner again. It was an amazing time.)

I can't wait to see what Bob and Stacey put together, because if it's half as good as what we saw in the pictures, it will be a million times better than anything we could have anticipated. We look forward to helping with that, as much as we can, stuck in this podunk Chicago neighborhood. It's going to be awesome.

If you would like to donate to the theatre, and I suggest you do, click here.

All-You-Can-Think

It's been my shame over the last four years to have worked for a university and not taken advantage of the free tuition they offer as part of my job benefits. In recent months, as chances of any significant pay raise changed from "slim" to "none," it became a kind of mission for me to squeeze the brain juice out of this State-run behemoth. And, yes, when I'm tired, I use big words. Litigate me.

Being a state-run institution, the University of Illinois runs atop an enormous bureaucracy that, if given the chance, would grind you underneath a mountain of its paperwork wheels. I should know. Two and a half years ago, I switched with a co-worker to the Alumni office, noticing as I did a small pile of equipment to surplus. The University requires us to follow certain procedures before we get rid of computer parts, so it took me a few months to determine the proper forms, their recipients, machine labeling and Babylonian deity and its preferred sacrificial meat. Still, the equipment sat. I stacked everything into a small wall atop the filing cabinets that for some reason took up a wall in the tech office and contacted my bosses in Urbana to let them know that their lackey in Chicago awaited their word on surplus. Nothing. They took away the filing cabinets shortly before we replaced more equipment. I re-stacked the equipment and waited. And waited. To this day: nothing. The air grows close in the confines of this office. Tell my wife I love her...

...at any rate, I had low expectations for any answers I had about taking classes, but it turns out that if you determine you want to do something here that does not involve a lot of heavy lifting and cross-campus coordination, and you go about it like an Agatha Christie inspector unraveling a locked room mystery ("SOMEONE here has the proper forms for a Graduate Student, Non-Degree Seeking, and none of us are leaving until I get it!"), you can shoehorn yourself into classes. Unfortunately, by the time I had lined up all my scholastic ducks, the easy class I wanted to take, Spanish, was irredeemably filled. I settled for something I knew would complement my job: CS 102, Introduction to Programming.

I like the class and writing Java input with things like the Scanner method (import java.util.Scanner; Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); userInput = keyboard.nextInt();) really rocks my world. Seriously, I'm courting obsession here. Studying has become something like a videogame, especially since the intructor uses a homework-tracking and programming site called CodeLab. There, you complete assignments, and if you've done it wrong, it marks it in red and gives you a chance to correct it. Once done properly, you get a little green box and move on. In class, someone asked a question several assignments ahead. I'm about a week behind in the reading and a week ahead in CodeLab because I WANT TO WIN.

It is funny to sit in class with people almost twenty years younger than me and compare our experiences. We took programming in middle school, writing BASIC or LOGO on Commodore 64s. Rich people owned computers with tape drives, or 5.25" floppies. My freshman year of college, my dad bought me a Mac with no hard drive, just two 3.5" floppies, and it was great. Yeah, and I walked six miles to class, uphill, both ways. These people grew up with the Internet. They take Open Source for granted. They think A-ha is retro. (They're wrong. Analogue came out in 2005.)

I also find myself going through all of the same anxieties that going to school used to bring out in me. Can I get to class on time? Will the teacher notice? Am I even in the right classroom? Laugh if you will, but I've already attended the wrong lab for the ENTIRE LAB. I also went to what I thought was the right lecture hall and started to get out my books when I realized that all the students around me HAD THE WRONG BOOK. Lucky me, I figured that one out in time.

I spent half of Monday morning running back and forth to the professor's office trying to log in to the University UNIX system, something I had not done because I'd foolishly taken two vacation days after Labor Day (for an awesome trip to Portland and my awesomer friends Bob and Stacey, and another trip-within-a-trip to Seattle to see equally-awesome friends Darrah and Jason; it was so awesome, I'm probably going to need a new adjective soon).

Sweat poured off of me as people approached me in the office, for my job, saying innocent things like, "Can you take a look at something weird that happened to my computer?"

"NO! I mean... can I come back? I've got another issue to attend to at the moment."

In the end, I find I sympathize more with those who juggle education with jobs, family, taxes and all of the 1,001 distractions of modern life. I hope I pass this class and, if not, at least acquit myself with dignity as I debug my dodgy code.

Where am I not? Work.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Washington, on a train ride as easy as Sunday
morning, on Sunday morning. The only sad thing about the trip was
having to temporarily say farewell to friends Bob and Stacey after
they kindly drove us to the train station. But we'll be back, taking
the same train south in two days. Good times ahead.

The Shirt I Did Not Purchase

In Toronto's Kensington Market

Toronto Dispatch: Rainbow Photomontage

You could not beat the weather on the drive up with a stick. The sun came out, dramatic clouds filled the horizon, and we were in Indiana for a blessedly short period of time. It was so nice, I said to Kathy, one of my car mates, "Man, I hope we get some rain on the way back. It would be a shame to have to drive through the SAME weather all the time."

Later, when it rained cats and dogs and we were stuck in a construction-related traffic snarl for forty-five excruciating minutes while we watched lightning play havoc in the sky, arcing horizontally from cloud to cloud over the horizon, Kathy said, "Wish granted."

So, like any city next to a Great Lake, the weather changes on a dime here. Before the start of my my long run yesterday, I made sure to give my teammates a dry t-shirt so I would have something to change into when we got to the theatre. Unfortunately, they forgot it. Later, they realized I could have worn one of Ben's shirts. O fickle fate! At any rate, I was never too uncomfortable, having grown if not accustomed at least resigned to the elements during my marathon training.

On the way to the theatre last night, the skies opened up again with big, fat drops that felt much colder than should be legal during the summer. At the same time, we were treated with golden hour sunset. I told my mates to look around for a rainbow, since low solar angle + heavy rain = rainbow. It turns out that warning was unnecessary. Plastered over the sky, in the direction of the theatre after we parked, was a complete rainbow. It was beautiful, and a good sign for the show to come (zombie infestation at a wedding in the middle of a dramatic love triangle; I was an inadvertantly stoned fifteen year old who knew jujitsu but could only pick up a piece of drywall and say "BAM!" because I'd accidentally eaten a joint). Pity my iPhone has no zoom. Enjoy the crudely-assembled photo montage!

By the way, it's sunny and completely cloud-free right now. Later, though, weather calls for a 20% chance of precipitation. Judging by yesterday's drenching over a 30% chance, I would say there is a 100% chance that is bullshit. Time will of course tell.

Toronto Dispatch: Boozing

Edison, part one of two of my roommates, likes to wake up at six o'clock Chicago time (seven Toronto) and was up for two hours at least before I got up yesterday. We still beat Chris, the final chapter in my roommate saga, by another two hours, so we got up and wandered around the block, settling on a little bar/coffee shop next door called Croissant Tree. This place was super cute, very like a shop back home except for fact that they also served beer. We took note of this, but did not drink, observing the "before noon, and you're an alcoholic" vacation rule that I just made up in my head.

Still, this did not stop us from returning later in the day, when the rest of the group needed a place to go to and I noted that Croissant Tree also had free wifi (with purchase). The gang headed over, laptops in tow, to get lunch, compute, hang out, and, for me, do some random work stuff that always seems to hit me on vacation. At some point, Chris, who had eaten already, wandered in and, pressured by the French Canadian (Quebecois?) coffee house owner, ordered a soda for himself and a beer for me. Oh! How kind! Well, we can hardly allow this beer to go to waste, right? So I drank it while the heavens first threatened us and ultimately poured down their mighty wet wrath upon us. I had omitted bringing a bag for my laptop, so I dallied a little longer, enjoying my teammates' company, eating my soup and a work webpage with the latest applicant PDFs, just like I would have at home, except that I was drinking beer.

Of course, this would bite me in the butt later.

After the coffee place, we planned on visiting the Bad Dog Theatre, one of the two places we at which are performing for the Toronto Improv Fest, to pick up whatever they use for passes, check in, and hand out fliers for our second show, Open Court, which relies on audience participation to build instant long form teams, and would kind of miss the point if it was just us, again. Not that I would be sad to perform two festival shows with this group, but we sold ourselves on the fact that we integrate seasoned improvisers with those more new to the fold, and we surely hate to renege on that promise. My Google Maps showed the theatre was only 3.3 km away, which is meaningless to me, since the English system has poisoned my brain, but others assured me was about two miles, an easy run for me. I programmed the route into my phone, handed a clean t-shirt over to the driving crew, and headed out.

A vital note: when getting directions for a trip, make sure the first few streets on the actual route agree with the virtual map. Otherwise, there is a very real chance you're headed in the wrong, and perhaps opposite, direction.

As I was running from urban to suburban Toronto, this exact thought failed to occur to me.

It was not until I saw that I had been running for twenty minutes--plenty of time to reach the place, even at a my slow pace--that I thought to re-map my route. Instantly, or perhaps not, my route changed from two miles-and-change to four miles. I phoned the group, who had also gotten lost en route, and turned around, this time checking and actually finding Bloor Street, which was vital since both theatres were on it, separated by a distance of four miles. After dodging downtown foot traffic for four miles, I made it, noting with dismay that the theatre was dark. Nobody would stir until shortly before the improv fest began and, what was worse, my team had gone AWOL. Ben, ever the gentleman, called me to let me know that they had been waiting patiently but, like Bishop waiting for Ripley at the end of James Cameron's Aliens, had been forced to move the ship/car because emissions from the nuclear meltdown made it too unstable to hover nearby/signs said they couldn't park on the street during rush hour.

Chris and Ben offered me the chance to ride in the car to the other theatre, but, having just run six miles, I only wanted to go back to the hotel and get cleaned up. Also, with five improvisers in their car already, I would not fit and while their plan to displace two teammates to ride the subway to the other destination was clever and very kind, I knew I still had another two miles in me. So I ran back, on the way pausing to snap a couple of shots on the bridge leading out of the city.

All this is to say: at first on the run, the alcohol held me back, made me sluggish and kind of bummed me out. Later, I was grateful for the carbs keeping me going for eight Canadian miles, which is equivalent to a bazillion kilometers, according to my fake English-Metric conversion system.

Toronto Dispatch: Lifesavers

International Stinger is taking the Toronto Improv Fest by storm... or
at least performing there. This is the first of hopefully many posts
describing the experience. And since it's Saturday morning and I'm
grumpy after a restless sleep last night, I've decided my first post
will be a picture of my ears and blue earplugs.

Like safety glass and airbags, these things save lives. I took mine
along to wear in the car, during naptime on the ten hour drive, but
then I drove all the way here. When we got in late, late, late
Thursday, I was not long for consciousness, and, bidding goodnight to
my roommates, stuck them, turned over and slept like the dead. Good
thing, too, since one of my roommates shores like a chainsaw breaking
up with a woodchipper. Without these, I suspect the relative fun of
our trip would have been marred in short order by a murder-suicide.

Time Warp

Addiction is a terrible thing, really. My productivity has suffered massively lately due to Hedgehog Launch, an hilarious game in which you are given a little bit of in-game money, a store, and an infinite supply of hedgehogs, with the goal of launching them heavenward to either earn more money to fund the next launch, or for the ultimate and noble goal of helping them transcend the boundaries of the Earth's atmosphere, and escape this fragile blue ball to the endless frontier that is space. It's addicting as hell. First, it's a very simple action game. You can buy fuel for thrusters that can maneuver you right/left in the air, or upgrade those thrusters to give you more "oomph." You can buy longer poles for your launcher or a stretchier rubber band. With lots of money, you can buy booster rockets, or parachutes, although the latter are a waste of time for the spacebound hedgehog, since the goal is only to reach space, not to fall back to the ground unharmed. The cartoonish graphics do not allow anything grotesque to happen to your furry friend, but you can fill in the gaps with your imagination. In the air, you'll find little dots that represent money, along with platforms which do the same as well as launch your hedgehog avatar upwards. With enough maneuvering fuel, radar and luck, you can exploit these platforms to increase your height. The amount of money you make for any one stage is your found money times your highest altitude, multiplied by the time you managed to stay airborn. For some, I'm sure it's as exciting as tax time, but for me, as with any game with economic differentials, it's a candidate for a new twelve step program.

Thanks to the iPhone, I've also been watching a lot of Heroes. I'm incredibly behind the curve on this one, so if you see me, please don't even tell me how it begins, much less ends. I'm still on season one, probably episode thirteen or fourteen by now, and finding the connections and play with powers to be a lot of fun. I'd also recognized the actor who plays Sylar--Zachary Quinto--from the show So NoTORIous, where I found him to be hilarious and not creepy in the slightest. I guess it's how they light you. I am excited to see how he portrays Mr. Spock in the upcoming Star Trek movie, but J.J. Abrams has let me down often enough that I don't exactly have high hopes for it.

As an aside about So NoTORIous, I caught an ad for it last year while I was running on the treadmill and immediately thought, "Wow, that is a great Tori Spelling impersonator. She can sing really well. I'll bet the REAL Tori is pretty pissed that someone is cashing in on her reputation." And it was only later that, also while running, I found out it was her, and that she's funny. Dammit, Hollywood, just when I was ready to cynically dismiss all of your second-generation wannabes as talentless hacks raised up by their producer fathers, they actually show talent, and more-than-average at that. Is nothing sacred?

So, anyway, the above are my excuses for not posting so often, although I reserve my apologies for times when dramatic things are ACTUALLY happening.

Honey Baby

My cousins came up from Cincinnati for the weekend to take a nice post-wedding-anniversary vacation in Chicago and, as a happy byproduct, see Brandi and me. Oh, and they also brought their youngest, Lilly, who as you can see here, is rapidly growing into a beautiful fair-haired chunky monkey. Sigh. I hope when the time comes, Brandi and I make kids as pretty and well-behaved as she is.

Not that life is all roses with her. Around feeding time, she would get very cranky, but in that respect she's exactly like Brandi and me. Also, when we went to Turquoise, our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood we had to give up when we started looking around for a place to buy because it was too expensive, her diaper started leaking onto her outfit, so her mom had to excuse them both to the bathroom to clean what amounted to baby sewage off her daughter while we pretended to be okay with that. But, again, who hasn't been in that position?

We settled on some fun, quick sightseeing, unfortunately skipping the architectural boat tour because Saturday's weather didn't know what the hell it wanted to do, and by the time the rain tucked away, the 60-minute cruise was sold out. We did make it to Navy Pier, though, touring the stained glass museum there while Kristie walked and fed Lilly. That's talent. Brett, who is older than me by two-point-five weeks, but who outranks me in the dad department by one daughter, two boys and a dog, agreed with the rest of us to go up on the Ferris wheel despite a mild fear of heights. His wife made fun of his clammy palms, but I applaud his pluck. Meanwhile, we got some nice shots of the Chicago skyline, and Brandi got to spend a little time with her littlest cousin, a match made in that part of heaven that Ferris wheels touch. (The bottom part.)

Bike the Drive pics I am too cheap to pay for

I get emails from the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation with offers to buy pictures they took of me from Bike the Drive, the Memorial Day event where they close off Lakeshore Drive for five delicious hours and allow bicyclists to turn it into their personal pedal-powered paradise, a description that is almost too illiterative to allow to live but which I am leaving in because it's exactly that annoying to receive these emails. They're a kind of betrayal. First, although they strongly encourage you to sign up for Bike the Drive and pay your $40+ fee for the privilege of not choking on petrol fumes, and even deliver a t-shirt and number to stick on your helmet, they hardly enforce the helmet sticker on the road. (I'm told you need one for rest stops, which I took advantage of when I got to the southern end of the course, at the Museum of Science and Industry at 57th Street, so perhaps they're at least good for two bananas, a fig newton and lemonade, especially if you didn't think ahead and bring water or sustenance.) The sticker is there, I must then surmise, so they can photograph and identify the bicyclists, photos which they then turn around and sell to said cyclists. I apologize for the second round of alliteration. That stuff gets in your blood something fierce. That leads me to second: I didn't ask to be photographed, and it's not like I could have opted out when they had at least four photographers at different ends of the course. Do I look like the poster boy for Chicacoland cycling here, with my wraparound sunglasses, uncool helmet and fold up bike at six o'clock on a Sunday morning? No? Well, safety demands my picture be taken just in case of... well, JUST IN CASE.

Third, these photographs aren't cheap, and the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation already have my money, which they took from me in order to charge me more money for photographs I didn't ask them for. Sounds like capitalism at work. The only way it could get better is if at rest stops they only sold me bananas with pictures of me on them eating other bananas. On second thought, perhaps it's best not to give them ideas.

I really do like the idea of photographs, even if I think I look like I've been photoshopped onto the bike I'm riding. It would just be so much cooler if they included the photos in the price of the event. Afterwards, instead of them pushing emails out to all participants with offers to sell them photographs, they send out gentle reminders that, hey, we all had fun, didn't we? And, by the by, you can download pictures of yourselves from our website... look for them by your helmet number, which we've handily catalogued using the same OCR that turns your scans into an editable Word document.

Like so many things technological, this is so much easier in my mind than in actual practice. Still worth doing, though.

Bran Sammich

As part of what feels like their neverending kindness to us, my Aunt
Ellen and Uncle Dave offered us their basement to sleep in after the
day's festivities on the Fourth. We like their basement. For one, it's
verboten to the dogs, so we don't have to worry about one of us
getting up to use the bathroom only to find the other smothered under
doggy paws and kisses. For two, it is almost completely dark, which of
course satisfies the part of me that looks for places to hide when the
zombie apocalypse strikes. The undead would never think to look for me
here! Now as long as I train myself never to need food or water, I can
outlast the dead and repopulate the earth with my wife. Taxes? Never
again!*

Dave and Ellen even went so far as to buy a new air mattress when they
pulled their old ones out of storage and found out both of them
leaked. Dave was off walking Charlie and Wylie, the dogs, so Ellen,
Brandi and I dragged everything out of the box to see how it fit
together. The mattress was straightforward, albeit a little tight in
the space. The inflating agent, as Ellen explained, was a little
nonstandard: a vacuum cleaner from the 1950s that reversed flow by
detaching the hose from one end of the fire extinguisher-like cylinder
and attaching it to the other end. This was completely baffling to us,
so we waited for Dave et al to return. The final setup also involved
jamming the hose into a funnel, itself stuck into the valve of the
mattress. It worked surprisingly well. Inflation took just a few
moments.

And then we knew we had a problem.

Dave insisted it happened when he twisted the now-full mattress away
from the entertainment center, gouging a hole in the side. I worried
it was my fault, unfurling it so close to the entertainment center in
the first place. Either would do cause the wave of air we felt washing
over our faces. Thinking quickly, Dave found a roll of duct tape and
slapped a pair of patches over the tear. "Air is like water," he
explained. "It finds places to go." The tape, he hoped, would be
secure enough to hold the mattress until morning. Just to be kind, he
filled the mattress again. We went upstairs to spend some family time
and put the matter out of our minds.

When we came back, the mattress was already partially-deflated. Brandi
sat back on it and bravely decided to sleep on it. A quick test showed
that both of us would probably suffocate if we tried to sleep side by
side; the curvature of the mattress took us both in the center,
leading to collission and probable tragedy. I took the couch.
Surprisingly comfortable, I slept through the night, waking only once
because it was so dark I couldn't figure out where the hell I was. In
the morning, though, Brandi's mattress was flat as a pancake. Somehow,
my wife slept through the whole thing. Nice work, dear!

That day, and without explanation, Dave took the mattress back for a
full refund.

* Except a death tax that would only apply if you were dead, still
working and had a social security number. And in this case, by "tax" I
mean "bullet to the brain pan."

Fourth of Julawesome

Brandi and I drove down to Columbus the morning of July 4th so we
could Represent (and, not coincidentally, Keep It Real) at the family
picnic hosted by my cousin Sandy. This is the branch of the family
that looks the most fractal: my grandmother and her sister each had
boatloads of kids, although Gabby Hefner stopped at six, Patty Eckel
went on to have twice that many. Now, so many years later, not only
have those kids had kids, but those grandkids--my generation,
approximately--are also having kids. Sandy does a great job
controlling what would otherwise be mass chaos. Parking is on the
lawn. Kids play on the driveway with hand-me-downs or toys Sandy buys
from garage sales, and everyone brings a dish, most often homemade. We
punted, preferring to bring two of Jewel Osco's enormous frosting-
covered chocolate chip cookies (actually, three, but it appears there
was some snacking on the drive down), but nobody seemed to mind.

It was nice to see the family again. Last December, we lost my
grandfather to pancreatic cancer, and, while that was a sad and trying
time for some--my mom, aunt and grandmother particularly--what they
say about weddings and funerals is nearly as inevitable as death and
taxes. They brought us together. I looked forward to the rematch. Of
course, trying to remember names stretched my limited brain pan to the
limit, as it always has, but my Uncle Dave clued me in to a trick that
part of the family uses to at least pretend familiarity: call everyone
"buddy." It works, too!

At least, nobody felt like calling me out on it.

At the end of the night, all the firefighters (there are four) trudge
off to the middle of Sandy's DEEEEP backyard and light off fireworks
like you would not believe. The kids get glow necklaces to add to
their glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos and everybody "ooh"s and
"ah"s for the next twenty minutes.

Here, Brandi and my nephews Hogan and Nolan look at pictures of the
fireworks on Brandi's phone. The day was simply so fabulous, we could
not possibly cram in more fun.

So the next day we drove back to Chicago. AND finished off the big
cookie.

More Geekery

Today, I:

• Installed the iPhone 2.0 software on my phone, one day early, using the direct download link and following instructions carefully.
• Downloaded and tried out many new, free iPhone applications. Man, when just the freeware for a phone rocks this hard, I cannot even imagine what the applications are going to look like going forward.
• Loaded my fourth OS onto my MacBook. Following the installation of the new hard drive and the extra 160 GB capacity it gave me, I added Ubuntu and, now, Vista to my collection of emulated operating systems. Soon enough, I'll hopefully install software as well. This, more than anything else, is what I think the future will look like.
• Ordered DSL for my mom, hopefully setting in motion a crazy, half-baked plan to free her from the MSN dialup to which she's been chained (at my behest, originally) for the last seven years.
• Had several writing idea I think are worth pursuing. I can't wait to wade through the ideal-muck, as it were, to see what comes up. For now, consider this a teaser for cool things to come.

Today was a good day, a geeky day.

In prase of Torx

Brandi's four-plus-year-old computer bummed her out. It crashed all the time. It ran out of memory: 512 MB RAM might look great in 2004, but in 2008 it feels a little like a corset: quaint and painfully tight. Every time she used Photoshop she would get an error indicating the hard drive was full. The page file (the bit of the hard drive Photoshop uses to store all of your previous versions, so you can go backwards through 20 or more changes) took up all the remaining space. Brandi would get upset; I would get upset that I didn't have time to deal with the crisis, hard words would be exchanged and, inevitably, the feelings of a 6 lb lump of plastic would get hurt.

Well, the week before last, I took matters in my own hands with her iBook, stripping down the machine into its motherboard, plastic casing, aluminum inner casing, and about 50 screws, all of which I carefully labeled and most of which I returned to their proper positions. (There are always parts left over.) Eventually, I replaced the 40 GB hard drive with a much newer 160 GB hard drive that I DARE my wife to fill up before the computer dies. And the one mystery screw? No worries. If the remaining 49 don't hold the machine together, natural laws are meaningless and we all have moments to live anyhow. Luckily for us all, so far they have.

Well, this little daylong project (about 3 hours of screws plus another 2 of hard drive copying), gave me confidence for my Macbook. In the intervening two years between the sale of Brandi's computer and the advent of mine, Apple took it upon itself to reinvent the way users accessed the guts of its machines. So all it took to get to the hard drive of mine was the removal of the battery and a small cover inside the battery slot, about fifteen fewer steps. I had done it before, for fun. (I'm insane.) All I needed to do it yesterday was the proper hard drive.

This was my first great big, "Aha!" in a while. Last Christmas, I got a tiny portable external hard drive from Brandi's father. It looked a lot like a 2.5" hard drive in a plastic enclosure, but how best to tell? Brandi's computer taught me that sometimes equipment manufacturers just use plastic clips to tie everything together, and that the proper torque might pop them open without breaking them. It was a risk, though, so I practiced at work with another version of the drive I'd asked for from my supervisors. (I love these drives. I'm also insane.) I got it open with a minimum of breakage, and, what was more, the guts of the drive were a 2.5" SATA hard drive, exactly the same kind of drive as inside of my laptop.

So it was with great excitement that I fired up "SuperDuper," a cool program for cloning an Apple machine to another drive, set it running, and, three hours later, performed my second Apple brain transplant. It worked! I'm typing on the new/old computer at this very moment!

Only a few questions remain at this point:

• Does the new drive use more power or less? Will I take a hit on battery life because of it?
• I used to edit video off the external drive, and I assume connecting it more directly to the motherboard will increase throughput, but will access time beat the old drive?
• What to do with all that space? I used to liken hard drive space to that of a warehouse, but with warehouses, you can calculate space at a glance. Empty hard drives are like digital clocks versus analog clocks: harder to quantify. Very likely some of that space will be virtualization software. I've been dying to load Ubuntu on the Macbook for a while, and my job sometimes takes me into Vista territory, so now might be my chance.
• Do I get any geek cred for this? Probably not for hard drive replacement, but for guessing that Western Digital packed a standard SATA inside a plastic enclosure, then ripping everything open? Come on, don't I deserve at least a little?

Oh, and the Torx? A couple of years ago when I wanted to build my picture frame computer, I bought a pair of Torx screwdrivers to disassemble the lid of my old PowerBook. At the time, I thought, "That's $15 wasted. When the hell will I ever need to use these again?"

Now I've used them again, in the last 24 hours, not once but TWICE. Thank you, Torx.

Last night's dinner pic at Being Brandi

Orange at Orange

Fresnel Cyclops

Brandi took this picture of me in Walgreens, waiting in line for the pharmacy. I'm wearing my end-of-the-weekend stubble, which sometimes inexplicably lands on my face in mid-week, depending on how busy I am or how little I care.

I've spent a lot of the last several weeks preparing for a sketch comedy show at Second City, part of the final project for my talented friend Ric Walker, who is completing the director's program. Our show, which may or may not be typographically correct, is currently titled, "Im-polite Company," and will feature a lot of scenes (and two songs) about what happens when people just stop caring about what other people think. I've been absolutely in love with the ridiculously talented cast, Frankie Benavides, Kate Duffy, Sherman Edwards, Elana Elyce, JW Kuebler and myself (I love myself, a little, and hug myself every day just for trying), and that's perhaps a good thing because we've been meeting twice a week or more in order to put the show together. Sketch comedy takes WORK. We go up July 5th, at 10:30 PM, at Donny's Skybox Theatre at Piper's Alley at North and Wells, running six weeks until August 9th. And I'm psyched.

In the meanwhile, Myopic Cowboy nears completion, which is good, because summer is well past here and all the good vibes and great lighting means I'm itching to get a few more videos under my belt. On the other hand, the comic book convention is in town this weekend, and I'm also really excited to spend some time with my awesome friend Zander in and among the nerd giants of comic-dom. Time management should be a course they make you take in college.

The Penguin in the Mann Movie

I've spent a couple of sleepless nights this week playing extra on a
movie shooting in Hollywood. I took notes and will post them later,
but in the meanwhile, please enjoy this very regal pose I struck in
the Extras Holding Area I spent approximately fifteen seconds in
Tuesday and Thursday nights. The majority of the time I spent HURRYING
into wardrobe, HURRYING to get hair done, HURRYING to the set and then
waiting for the shot to get set up, waiting to get assigned a path
through all the other seated extras, and, finally, pretending to wait
tables. The shoes they gave me aspired to an extremely low level of
comfort, and I spent the first night in a great deal of back pain
because, at least for movie extras, waiters don't sit down. Last
night, it was because I would wrinkle my apron, but I found ways
around that, such as taking it off during extended breaks.

More later. Lots of drama ahead.

Brandi's Fantasy Bookcase

Two levels of books. We talked about becoming extremely wealthy,
buying out our upstairs neighbor, then converting the condo into a
duplex. It was just the "becoming extremely wealthy" part we couldn't
figure out without selling an organ or resorting to crime.

We took this at IKEA, which is a fantastic homeowners' fantasy world
for the fact that they build whole rooms and even apartments using
just their furniture, so you know how much it would cost you and just
how much flat pack furniture you can squeeze into a Manhattan-size
studio apartment (answer: quite a lot, actually). It's generally very
frugal, but occasionally they must tell the designers to go nuts,
because this because a library this size legally can only be owned by
an English lord, a mad scientist, or a vampire, depending on regional
laws, local taxes, etc. Because Brandi's reflection is clearly visible
in the mirror, I think we can safely rule out the last.