Beyond Personality
(23 September - 2 October 2005)
2 October 2005
-Sometimes there just aren't enough walks.
-The
baseball season came to an unceremonious close today, & the M's couldn't even pull down a 70th win. Oh well.
There's always next year. & speaking of "there's always next year", the Red Sox made it in under
the wire. So I guess I can watch a couple playoff games after all.
-It amazes me how much I can still amaze those
who know me best. I feel like I need to start writing everything down, because the things I would expect people to
remember are often things no one even knows.
1 October 2005
-We saw "Corpse Bride" last night, which
was really good & way better than I was expecting, though a mite heavy on the songs. But before that, I got more
than my $10 worth for the Harry Potter 4 preview. Oh. My. Goodness. I think, with about 95%
certainty, that it was the best movie preview I have ever seen in my life. It should be noted that book 4 is my
favorite among the HP series so far, so I was already prone to excitement here, but it beat out all the Star Wars previews,
which previously held sway. You HAVE to see it. (Though if you haven't read the books, this preview sadly gives
a bit much away.) It also makes it look like it will have to be a 3 hour movie, which is just fine with me.
Woo!
-Thanks to Beth, Mesco, & Segal for their postings of the Trains and Railroads Quiz, which Segal argues is
the best yet. Join the club!
30 September 2005
-We're going to Yellowstone in two weeks! I
haven't been in 17 years! Very exciting!
-The Red Sox are literally all I have left to watch in baseball this year,
as I could take or leave (or actively dislike) all other playoff & potential playoff teams. This will be a neat
series here at year's end. Also got to see Dan Wilson's retirement game to a standing ovation in Seattle... that was a
lucky find, but neat. The last of the old guard of position players... good thing Jamie Moyer will be around for about
500 more years!
29 September 2005
-
You're the Nikolaevsky Express!
You know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Lately, however, you've recalled that
this is not always the cheapest or easiest distance between two points. Straight or not, you like to gauge things differently
than most of the rest of the world. You've been known to call most everything "capital". Your favorite saint is
Petersburg.
Take the Trains
and Railroads Quiz at RMI Miniature Railroads.
-Well, it's up,
& while it figures that I got a Russian railroad, it also figures that I got probably the weakest of the 64 graphics in
the thing. Ah well, it's done & I got a railroad that I traveled on the route of, if not the actual named train
itself. Go take it!
-While we're doing new links, you should also go read Em's new work blog, where she tries to convince California not to be
taken in by the evil pharmaceutical companies.
-Also, when I did the Animal Quiz this summer, I was stunned to learn that
a giant squid had never been photographed live in the wild, which is why this image wound up
being used for that answer. Yesterday, I was stunned to learn that a live giant squid has now been
photographed! Exciting. Now if only discoveries like this can convince the world that it's time to stop
trying to empty the oceans before we even have all the species pose for pictures!
28 September 2005
Happy Birthday to Jake
Quicksall
-Made a lot of progress on the Quiz & it's looking almost guaranteed that
it will be out sometime tomorrow. Exciting stuff, having one on a different website & getting to see the impact it
has on their traffic all over again!
-It's so hard to figure out how to travel somewhere really fun in a short period of
time.
-Man. I have played a LOT of poker today.
27 September 2005
Happy Birthday to Emily
Clayton
-Em's 26 & off to a press conference in Sacramento, but should be home early
so we can celebrate this evening. Hooray!
-Google even got dressed up for Em's
birthday! (Yes, I know it's their birthday too.)
-This new Quiz will be out so soon. Just 50 answers left.
I can almost taste it.
26 September 2005
-Had about twelve crazy dreams about 'Deis last
night, ranging from one where I was hosting incoming pre-frosh & telling them all about the place to one where I was
taking a job at the library for the year after graduation. All of them held this strange tension between being my
actual age & somehow being a senior in college. & people kept getting very frustrated with me. I also
remember a lot of concern about how to make my resume look anything other than flaky, which is a real-life issue bleeding
through to dreamland. But if you read the backs of so many books by great authors... Peter Hoeg comes to mind most
prevalently, though there are many others, Douglas Adams too methinks... you'll see 500 professions that have nothing to do
with each other listed before they really broke in to the writing scene. Maybe I'm perfectly on track for a writer's
resume, which is all I really want to be anyway.
-"Flightplan" was a little disappointing, but generally solid.
I think I was expecting a little too much for a variety of reasons. Still worth seeing, but a lot of the loose
ends stay pretty loose.
-Found a vegan chocolate mousse cake at Whole Foods & thus began Em's birthday celebration a
wee bit early. Best to spread these things out.
25 September 2005
-It's a good thing there's a sorting/statistical
side to the grunt work on this website, because otherwise I'd be really frustrated. Instead, I get to do this with the
part of my brain that has the urge to design pseudo-computer games out of pure statistics.
-Speaking of
frustration...
-Fish just kicked me around in Boggle. Not only did he make his typical use of the "er" words that
no one ever would actually use in a sentence (CLANGER, for Christ's sake?!), but he had tremendous long words that I never
tend to look for while I'm spamming my 4- and 5-letter ones. We need to play a lot more Boggle... it makes me so happy,
even when I lose.
-Watched "Don't Look Back", a 60's-era Dylan documentary, which was absolutely tremendous.
Despite Gris' warnings, I think I came away from it liking Dylan even more, seeing his challenging & almost
Socratic approach to others, especially interviewers, in this period. It's a little disappointing to see how he was
very opposed to having a clear message in the sixties, since I feel messages are the only real reason for art, but he does
present his case well. It also reflects a tempered attitude about his fame & influence... as he wrote in a very
relevant song decades later (eerily relevant to the US in this month, in fact), "As great as you are, man, you'll never
be greater than yourself." High water everywhere indeed.
24 September 2005
Happy Birthday to David
Kunkel
-It's something like a working weekend if we're going to get the word out about
the new site. The thing is, there are so many anti-spam measures being taken by e-mail accounts these days, & so
many out-of-date e-mail addresses on our mailing list. If only there were some way of testing e-mail accounts other
than sending an e-mail.
-Spent most of the day & evening babysitting the young ones in Tracy... I think it's safe to
say this was the first actual babysitting I've ever done in my life, though you could argue that I spent two years doing it
in a professional/glorified format. I would argue back with you in that case, though. Anyway, Paul & Natty
were pretty well behaved & we even got to put together a haunted house out of that foamy construction stuff that was
pretty nifty. Both the kids actually liked the glue part of it, though, which just reminded me how much I hated
glue when I was their age (& really, ever since). Em & I concluded what we already knew after the session:
having children is far too exhausting to contemplate. Not that we'd ever contemplate it before 2010 anyway.
But still... sheesh. Fun in very small, aunt-n-uncle type doses.
23 September 2005
-I don't know really what to say about this next
hurricane whose path I predicted, except that I still don't understand why there isn't a more coordinated effort to use mass
forms of transportation to get people out of the places being targeted. The mayor of Houston actually said it would be
better for people to stay if they weren't on their way out by Thursday. Can't some buses be brought in & given
priority lanes to go back & forth to actually get people out? Improvements have been made for the elderly &
those who clearly need help, but it's got to be more efficient to use buses than cars in general, no? Of course I think
this is a larger complaint about the US & even the world in general.
-Will we launch today? We'll find
out!
-Yes, we will. Check it out!
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