Pacificapocalypse

You know that thing where you technically have a weekend, but you pack so much into it, it flys by and you blink and it’s over?
Yeah me too.
Last Friday night was Spamalot at the Golden Gate Theater which was hilarious; I mean come on JOHN O’HURLEY! Dude’s funny and I forgive him for Seinfeld which I loathe. Not a exactly a straight stage production of ‘The Holy Grail‘ but a good mix of the more popular Python skits and I was grateful that they didn’t try to have actors try and portray any of the actual Python cast.  So yeah, if you’re a fan of MP, you should go. Oh and court got some really cool Killer Rabbit slippers.
Ok so that was Friday night, didn’t get back home until midnight, then have to be up at 0600 Saturday morning because….

River Arts Festival!

In Sacramento no less. We picked up Kelé and hustled up to Sac. Set up the table and then I got to play photographer amongst the various homemade… crap. Hey no offense but most of it was garage sale quality. Court hawked her custom hula-hoops and Kelé had a bunch of knit stuff that was pretty cool, and there were one or two other vendors with neat stuff (Roger the depressed carved wooden spoon man being one) but mostly it was just okay.

Court sold I think eight hoops, which is cool (I think her demoing one in the aisle every once in a while really helped sales; that’s called marketing children) and more than paid for the material to make them, so yeah, this whole custom hoop thing may be a viable money maker… especially when a vendor is charging $60.00 for the exact same thing at…

Makers Faire 2009

Which we got up, again, at 0 dark 30 for. Court and Kelé were volunteering at the Bizarre Bazaar so we got there way early, which turned out to be a very good thing ’cause the place filled up quicky and we were able to score a pretty close parking spot. Too many cool things going on to go into in detail; suffice to say that crew from The Crucible were wicked cool as was Cyclecide.
I have a full photoset that I’ll get up later today. The Crucible had their E.R.V (Educational Response Vehicle) on scene; a converted 1960’s firetruck… no seriously, a real firetruck. Like Bradbury’s Firemen from Fahrenheit 451; a truck that shoots fire. Loud as hell; it set off car alarms for Christ’s sakes. So cool.

Random street art in Cole Valley.

Click for full size.

*sigh* I drank the Kool-Aid.
I had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.

I bought an iPhone.

Here’s the deal. My old phone (a 3 year old Motorola RAZR) that was starting to show it’s age. Not holding a charge very long and problems with SMS and plain old getting calls. Court’s had the iPhone for about six months now and there have been a couple times where she hasn’t been able to reach me and from day one, she cannot get SMS texts I send her - I can receive hers, but when I respond, she never gets them and the “customer service” at AT&T has been, shall we say, less than helpful.
I knew when I upgraded to a new phone, it would be a smart phone of some variety, and after looking at all the models offered by AT&T the iPhone was the front runner.
I’ve always kind of resented Apple product and I wanted to avoid like the plague any sense of buying into the hype (There are currently 246,000 returns for “iphone douchebag” on Google.) oh sure, they look pretty, and obviously they work well, but something about the cult vibe always threw me off - go to an Apple store and… it’s so shiny.  And everyone is so… happy. It’s like Logan’s Run. Just weirds me out. Plus I’m a died in the wool old-skool PC user. But I did it. I slapped down my cash and walked out with a shiny new 12GB iPhone. After some initial dismay (what the fuck? I HAVE to use iTunes? I hate iTunes! Fuck you Apple.) and a few hiccups in configuration (what the hell? What do ya mean it won’t synce with Google Calendar?) and a little frustration on initially synching with iTunes (why the fuck is this taking so LONG!), I think I have it working reasonbly well.

Yeah yeah, the Facebook app is pretty cool, and being able to check your mail and websites on the fly is neat (and there’s even a WordPress app, neat.) but the camera function is pretty clunky and almost impossible to use with one hand.
But I’m going to give it a fair shot. They sell a hell of a lot of these things, so they must be doing something right… I mean, not everyone that bought one is a complete douchenozzle trend whore… right?

Wait… what do you  mean it doesn’t record video?
Seriously?

Fuck you Apple.

photo credit: William Hook

Backing up the database and upgrading to WordPress 2.7.1 this afternoon, may be some downtime.

EDIT: 3:25pm - we’re back up - everything seems to be working. If any one notices any thing broken, please drop me a line.

Well fuck a doodle doo. They’re actually laying people off in the business and advertising section of the once mighty San Francisco Chronicle, right this moment. They’re literally tapping people on the shoulder, telling them and then escorting them from the building.  Is this the way you let people go? So friggin’ archaic. They might as well have a Bugs Bunny cartoon executioner bare-chested in the full face mask with a head lopping axe at the ready. Holy crap. Hey I just had a thought; if they can’t tap you on the shoulder, can they still let you go? I mean if you just dodge them all day, are you cool? Que the Scooby-Doo chase scenes and the Benny Hill music.
Guess who knew first? Not me thank god; the couple that run the little in-house cafe knew it - they were here at 0 dark 30 when the extra security guards showed up.
Extra security?
Well… yeah I suppose that’s just CYA.
More later.

photo credit: ooOJasonOoo

Swings on BART!
Full Flickr set here.

photo credit: neiltron

Random anti Prop 8 street poster on Linden Avenue, San Francisco.

Click for full size.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

J.G Ballard has died.

While not unexpected, it still saddens me greatly.
I discovered Ballard by reading about Burroughs in an old RE/Search pub ‘Industrial Culture Handbook’. Jeez that was in 1983… wow. Anyway I was heavy into science fiction so I started reading ‘High Rise‘ then ‘Terminal Beach‘ and finally ‘Crash‘. From the first couple of chapters into ‘High Rise’ I knew this wasn’t the Sci Fi I was used to. By the time I finished ‘Crash’ I was deeply aware that this, perhaps, wasn’t the standard recommended reading material for ‘young adults’ (If you saw the movie version of ‘Crash‘ I can tell you quite truthfully.. they prettied it up. The book is… explicit.)
Ballard was the master of ‘dystopian fiction’ which after a steady diet of shiny plastic futures in so many previous books, fit nicely into my world view of the mid/late 1980’s. Punk/Industrial/Goth all were hitting their stride; I was ending high school with a big fuck you to ‘normal society’. I had blue hair and a leather jacket. I was mad at the world. What the hell did I know?
Ballard was perfect.

I thought ‘Empire of the Sun‘ was magnificent even before I knew it was an autobiographical account of Ballard as a boy in Japanese occupied China; after wards I sought out the book and was again floored by Ballard’s words.

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” William S. Burroughs.

V.Vale who chronicled both Ballard and Burroughs said “I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83.”

Unreasonable of course, but yeah, I know what he means.

I am Legend
No really *I am*. Find out last Monday morning that the other two people in my department… left the department late Friday. Technically one of them is still with the company, she’s not lost, just doing something completely different. So the first part of this week was hectic getting all that nonsense squared away. All cool now. Think I’ll make myself Manager of my department, or perhaps Vice Admiral. And since I report to… me, I’m anticipating a rather splendid quarterly review. Hurray for me!
That’s called Job Security children.

Pet Sounds
Ok so the Butch Cat is all good to go. He’s healthy and peeing where he’s supposed to all this week, so we feel pretty good about that. It was stressful to say the least, first he’s sick then he’s peeing everywhere except the litter box. But it’s all good now; we’re done with the sub cutaneous fluids and the twice daily meds and he’s back to being a healthy happy pain in the ass. You know, a normal cat.

Wedding stuff.
Court paid off her Fluevog boots that she going to be wearing for the wedding; mine are still in lay-away, but soon baby, soon. She has her first fitting at Dark Garden this afternoon for the dress, which I’m being allowed the honor of attending (what’s the protocol on this? Technically it’s not ‘The Dress’ yet, so…?). We’re meeting the costume maker on Sunday afternoon for my first fitting, which should be pretty cool. We have a tasting with the caterer next weekend, so things are going swimmingly, I think. Oh yeah! And! We received two samples of the wedding invite from the girl on Etsy that Court contacted and they are freaking awesome. Just phenominal. More later.

I saw the saddest thing leaving work yesterday afternoon; stacked up behind the front desk in the lobby were about a half dozen moving boxes marked ‘Hold for xxxxxxx’. All filled with the cleaned out remains of peoples desks. The shoulder taps have started in earnest. On the plus side, the two other people in my department have left… so I am my department. I guess that’s job security of some sort.

photo credit: Brian Daniel Eisenberg