On neologisms

Does anyone else find it odd that the spell checker built into Blogger doesn't recognize the word "blog"?

Whole lotta nothing...

So, yeah, I've pretty much dropped off the face of the earth when it comes to keeping this blog updated. This is pretty much an annual occurrence -- I somehow just don't have the energy to blog during the dog days of summer. However, suffice it to say that nothing new and earth shattering has occurred. Here's a quick rundown of the mundane garbage I might have posted had I been in a posting mood:

• I've continued my weekly sojourns to the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, where I've been taking Spanish classes since January. I think I'm approaching the fluency level of a semi-literate two-year-old, but it's been enough to help with...

• ... continuing to plan the trip to Spain. I've never really trusted travel agents, having found that I can almost always find cheaper or more palatable deals on my own. However, after numerous attempts to locate a car somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula that was big enough to hold four people and their luggage and had automatic transmission, I gave up and got the travel agent involved. I ended up having her do the train reservations too -- got tired of trying to understand cryptic price quotes from RailEurope's website.

  I have booked the rest of the trip directly, however, thanks to the wonders of e-mail and intercontinental faxes. I'll try to post an itinerary sometime soon for those who are curious.

• Meanwhile, at work, I've been buried in the usual pile of sludge created by high school sports. Actually worse than usual this year because we were rolling out code we wrote to other branches of the company. Things are more or less stabilized, but it's been an exhausting month.

• Nothing new to report on the getting out of Nashville plan, except that I feel like I'm starting to come down with a mild case of senioritis. It's not that I'm working any less than usual, but now that I've made the decision to split it feels like I'm just prolonging the agony. Oh, well... the paychecks are nice. (Truthfully, I'm toying with the idea of trying to sell myself as a part-time telecommuting consultant after I leave. The downside of this would be that I'd get to take some of my existing stress with me to Boston. The upside would be that I'd have a well-paying consulting gig right off the bat with none of that pesky inteviewing and kissing up to potential employers. Hmmm. We'll see what happens.)

• In family news, brother number 2 is still living in Richmond, and wants out of his job. Brother number 3, after a summer as a camp counselor, is now talking about moving to Richmond and living with brother number 1. Unclear exactly what he'll do when he gets there, but hey, it's a start.

• Fitness plan continues, although I've definitely found that weight loss slows down when I don't log calories. I purchased a program for my Palm phone that makes this fairly easy, but you still have to be pretty disciplined about entering everything you eat. Even with the occasional lapses, I'm still working out 3-4 times per week, and am now about 60 pounds lighter than when I started back in April. So I guess I'm doing something right. Only real problem is that my pants are all in danger of falling down.

• After watching the total cluster that was the New Orleans disaster response, I've been trying to figure out how I can become part of the solution. Today I attended two classes at the local Red Cross chapter, and am now qualified to engage in basic disaster response work. They recommend taking a bunch more classes to truly learn the ropes, so I'll probably try to sign up for some more book learnin' soon. The Nashville-area Red Cross is trying to fast-track volunteers through the process because Middle Tennessee will probably be hosting several thousand evacuees from the New Orleans area (There are already two shelters open, and they will be adding more.) It's unclear exactly what my role might be in all this, since they have a "don't call us, we'll call you" approach to new volunteers. But given the amount of stuff they have on their plate, I expect I'll pull duty sometime in the next few weeks. (They are doling out shelter work in 12-hour shifts, which will be a bit rough with my regular job, but is probably do-able.) Based on what I've learned so far, I think I'm interested enough in the disaster response program to continue training beyond the immediate Katrina-induced crisis.

Red Cross Training

Listening to 'Mile 8'

Mmmmm... Jack's BBQ

Mucho cerveza

Blogging while intoxicated at Nashville Brewer's Festival. Ain't technology grand?

Dell Hell

Turns out I'm not the only person to have frustrating experiences with Dell customer service. Some guy over here compiled a dossier:

# of Dell people I've talked to ... 14
# of times I've heard 'now this will fix the problem' ... 15+
# of new, larger problems created ... 6
# of times any problem was fixed ... 2
# of copies of an email Dell sent me in one day ... 62
# of minutes spent on the phone with Dell ... 320+
# of hard drives my computer now thinks it has ... 3
# of times I've restarted the PC during this process ... 65+
# of Google results for "Dell customer service problem" ... 2.6M
# of hours of paid consulting work I've missed @ $100/hr ... 5
# of times Dell support finally agreed to replace it after it was dead -- then changed their mind and want me rebuild it with them ... 1
# of times Dell sales called to sell me DSL for my dead PC ... 1
# of dollars I spent on Dell's optional high-end warranty ... $280

And that's just the beginning.

A lawyer, an orator, and a monkey

My mom is still in town, and for a change of pace we decided to leave Nashville and head to Dayton, TN to see a reenactment of the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, which pitted famed orator William Jennings Bryan against well-known attorney and ACLU crony Clarence Darrow in an attempt to enforce a Tennessee state law against the teaching of evolution in biology classes. Interestingly, it turns out that the whole trial was more-or-less for show. The defendant volunteered to be the "test case," Bryan had publicly stated that he wanted to defend the bible in court, and the local Chamber of Commerce mainly saw the trial as a way to bring in tourists and attract national media attention. (Not realizing, it seems, that they had for all time condemned their town to become a poster-child for irrational religious fundamentalism.)

Indeed, it seems that the trial was accompanied by the sort of media circus we've come to expect when famous people have their day in court. In a technological coup, WGN radio in Chicago provided a live broadcast from the courtroom during the trial, newspapers wrote about it incessantly, souvenir vendors hawked trial memoribilia, and someone even brought a trained monkey to town and exhibited him playing piano, using a camera, and smoking a pipe.

The reenactment boils days of trial down into a two-hour play, but it gives you a pretty accurate idea of how things went down -- the History Channel has been filming this week's reenactments for an upcoming documentary.

Overall, it was a pretty fascinating experience. I took a ton of pictures, but unfortunately I left my camera cable back in Nashville so you'll have to wait until I get back to see any of them.

Twilight

My mom is visiting town, so I've had an excuse to do all the touristy things I never get around to. A few days ago we visited the Frist Center, the beautiful new art museum carved out of the old art deco main post office. The showpiece exhibition right now is Renaisance to Rococco. But buried in a small gallery at the back is Twilight, an exhibit of stunning photographs taken by artist Gregory Crewdson. The photos are surreal, elaborately staged tableaus depicting a warped version of American suburbia.

This photo doesn't do the exhibition justice -- the actual prints are 6 feet across, making an astonishing level of detail visible to the naked eye.

My favorite piece -- Untitled (Dead Cow Discovery) -- depicts the discovery of a dead cow in the midst of an generic subdivision. Police and ambulances have been sommoned, and emergency workers in yellow slickers have fanned out across the landscape, searching for, umm, I guess the perpertrator. A detective stands near the cow and stares at the sky in a perplexed way -- was the cow dropped from a passing airplane? Another fireman has climbed a ladder to the roof of one of the houses, and stands near a suspicious-looking scorch mark -- or maybe just water stained shingles.

The whole thing is enchanting and disturbing at the same time. While looking for a copy of the photos, I found them being used to illustrate this article by James Howard Kunstler, a champion of New Urbanism and critic of the faceless sprawl endemic in modern American suburbia. I've always been a fan of this school of thought -- and perhaps that's why these photos appeal to me on such a visceral level. In addition to being beautifully executed, they hint at suburbia's strange, disturbing undercurrents.

Bob versus The Hurricane

http://bobversusdennis.blogspot.com/

The Fat Man Walking

I am in awe of this guy. The Washington Post ran a story today about Steve Vaught, a 400-lb man who simply got up one morning and decided he was going to walk across the country. He started near his home in San Diego about 13 weeks ago, and is currently crossing through the Arizona desert, roughly following the old Route 66. His original plan would have put him in Missouri by now, but he continues to make good progress and has already dropped 50 pounds.

Steve and his wife April are chronicling his journey on a website, http://www.thefatmanwalking.com.

Shattered

carwindow
Originally uploaded by D-.

Awoke to find a smashed window on my truck. Turns out the same person apparently hit 9 other cars in the neighborhood early this morning. In my case, as near as I can tell the only thing missing is change from the ashtray. What a pain.

Life before google...

...must have been unbearable, because if you got home and found one of these

sitting on your dining room wall, you might have no way to find out that it is a House Centipede (known aliases Scutigerida Scutigeridiae and "big scary bug with lots of legs) and furthermore that said bugs are supposedly beneficial because they eat other less agreeable bugs like spiders, termites, cockroaches and silverfish. Which is not to say I'm happy to see such a creature on my wall. But thanks to modern technology I at least know what this two-inch bundle of legs and feelers is actually up to.

(Note that I snagged the above photo from the Wikipedia article. I tried to take my own, but while I was focusing the resident feline batted the bug off the wall and proceeded to chase it around the kitchen. It was last seen heading for sanctuary under the stove.)

Another sign from the gods?

My sleep cycle is all out of whack right now, and I stayed up late working on some stuff for work. I then went to bed to try to get in four hours of sleep before my 8:30 conference call. Unfortunately, though, I had trouble getting to sleep. After tossing and turning for about an hour, I glanced out the window and realized that the sun was coming up. Since I wasn't getting anywhere on the sleeping thing, I decided to go for a walk. I pulled ou sweats, grabbed the iPod, and headed up the street in the general direction of Lockeland Springs. I'd gone about a mile when, all of a sudden, the heavens opened and it began pouring rain. I turned around and started heading back, but by the time I got to the house I was sporting the drowned rat look. (On the bright side, I got to see the sun coming up, which isn't something I do on my normal schedule.) Now I'm trying to decide if I should go back to sleep for a while or just power through the day and go to bed early tonight. Hmm.

Independence Day. Whee.

Usually I take the opportunity to escape Nashville for Independence Day. For the last three years (2004, 2003, and 2002) I've headed home to DC, which of course is a good place to be for patriotic-type activities. The year before that my two brothers came to Nashville for the 4th, and the year before that I went to Boston. In fact, except for when my brothers came, I've only stayed in Nashville for the 4th one time since I got here -- and that was the month after I arrived when I was sleeping on a mattress in an empty apartment due to extreme poverty.

Last week a bunch of my friends decided to meet up in Boston again this year, and I was really hoping to find a cheap flight and make it up there. But the good flights were booked solid, and I would have ended up spending over $500, which seemed silly since I'll be moving there full time in six months. I then considered going to DC again, but even those flights were approaching $300. Plus I was just there a month or so ago and my Mom's coming down here in a week. So given that I'm supposed to be saving for my future life as a starving student, it didn't seem like a good use of funds.

As a result of all this, I was in a pretty "bah humbug" mood about the whole holiday, and spend most of today knocking around the house and telecommuting to get some stuff done for work. Around 9:00, after watching a bit of the riverfront festivities TV, I finally got into the spirit of things. So I grabbed my camera (and new wide-angle lens) and walked down to the river for the fireworks. My original master plan had been to climb up on one of the bridges to watch the show, but the cops had closed them down for the duration. (They had two mounties guarding the entrance to the pedestrian bridge, and based on the accumulation of, er, horse leavings, I'd say they'd had it closed for a while.)

So instead I scrambled around trying to find a place in the coliseum parking lot that still had a photogenic view. But pretty much everywhere I could find was obstructed by a tree or light post. Furthermore, I was too lazy to lug my tripod with me, which I've decided is really a required item for shooting fireworks. So most of the photos were so-so, but the show was still pretty good.

Walked back to the house, dodging homebrew firework displays all the way. Fireworks are supposedly illegal in the city, but you couldn't go 10 feet without a few going off. Growing up in Takoma Park, the cops pretty much had a zero-tolerance policy for fireworks, but I guess the big city police in Nashville have better things to do with their time. While I'm sure people are probably putting their eyes out right and left, it's still pretty fun to walk around amidst the constant noise and sparkle of firecrackers and sparklers.

When I got back home I grabbed a pile of bills and set to work paying them, at which point I discovered the insurance mess described below. So that pretty much got me back to my original state of bah-humbugginess.

In other news this weekend, I went to a wierd Argentine movie by myself on Saturday. (I'm still not really able to keep up when they speak, but at least I recognize a lot of words as they go by.) Then I grabbed groceries at the nice but overpriced Harris Teeter in Hillsboro Village, and ran to the gym for a quick workout.

On Sunday did some stuff for work, and then went out to dinner at Basante's with a friend. After dinner we headed over to the electric whorehouse and saw War of the Worlds. Measured against your typical summer action/sci-fi blockbuster flick, it was pretty good. (Although I hate the idea that I'm helping Tom Cruise maintain the standard of loopiness to which he has become accustomed.)

Tomorrow I have my customary 8:30 AM Tuesday conference call, followed by a day of mindnumbing tedium. Yum.

Fast times

It was bound to happen, I guess. The insurance company apparently noticed the whopper of a speeding ticket I got last summer in Oregon, and my insurance premiums are going up by about $216/year. I'm sure they have facts and figures to back up their assertion that people caught speeding are inherently unsafe. But since I've never had an automobile accident in my life it's still a bit frustrating. The only insurance claim I've ever made came from someone trying to break into the car while it was parked on the street.

I'm wondering if this is like the points on my license, where my rates will go down again after I go without a ticket for a certain period of time.

Showing my age

I'm still not entirely comfortable in a world where everyone has caller ID. From preschool onward, I was taught that one begins a phone call by saying something like "Hi. Is this Jane? Hi, Jane, this is John."

So whenever someone picks up the phone and says, right off the bat, "Hi, John," I have a wierd moment of cognitive dissonance. My brain just can't grok that I should begin the phone conversation without identifying myself. So about half the time I end up identifying myself anyway, which sounds kind of silly, and the other half of the time there's an awkward pause while I mentally regroup. I imagine that kids growing up today will think nothing of being identified solely by caller ID. Personally, though, I long for a simpler time when phone calls still had an aura of mystery about them.

For the good of science

Banal Update # 1456

Another only marginally productive weekend. Mowed lawn. Did laundry, called the parents. Watched The Graduate, cleaned kitchen. Managed to have a wierd dream incorporating NPR content coming from my clock radio. Read most of A Short History of Nearly Everything, slept. Made homemade pasta sauce, had a spontaneous 4-hour,6-way conference call with friends in Syracuse, Boston, Long Island, Rochester, and somewhere on the Mass Pike. Briefly googlestalked someone who messaged me on Match.com. Considered trying to escaped Nashville to Boston or DC for the 4th next weekend -- don't know if it will happen. (Stupid last minute airfares.) Planned to do more, but didn't get around to it. Among things I didn't do: Spanish homework (we're on break, but I have a pile to do before the next class in two weeks, and I haven't started it), returning e-mails to friends and acquantances, pro-bono website work, bills, filing, scanning family photos, Spain planning (although my Mom swears she's going to get interested in this in a few weeks when she comes to visit). No ER visit, so I guess it was a good weekend, all things considered.

During the week I've been doing my usual 10 hours or so of mostly-boring work each day. Now that I know I'm really leaving in 6 months, it's starting to feel a bit like senior year of high school. I'm still as busy as ever, but mentally I'm counting the days until I can move on to the next chapter of my life. I don't want to slack off -- if anything I'm trying harder to make sure I finish what I've started. But sometimes I wish I could just get it over with. I feel like I'm stuck in limbo right now.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping up my gym habit generally 3-4 times a week. Usually around midnight, but it's better than nothing. I'm mainly doing a 45 minute or so stint on the eliptical trainer, and a few sets various weight machines. Nothing killer, but my endurance is improving and I'm losing some weight. So I guess I'm achieving something.

Another weekend, another ER visit

Today's trouble started when I decided to go outside and tackle some of the thornier landscaping issues around my house -- a dead bush with a tree going up through it in the front yard, a massive weed tree growing up through a fence in the side yard, and a tree in need of pruning. I spent several hours this morning digging and cutting. I was almost done when I put my foot into some tall grass and discovered a board with four nails sticking out of it, thoughtfully left by the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none handyman my landlord keeps sending out. And when I say discovered, I mean that one of the nails penetrated my ratty tennis show and embedded itself into my foot.

After saying a few things that probably shouldn't be repeated in public, I removed the board, quickly tidied up my brush piles, and headed inside to ponder when I had last had a tetanus shot. Unfortunately, the last shot appears to have been while I was still riding a yellow bus to school every morning. Given that a booster is recommended every 10 years (more often if you routinely get stabbed by rusty nails), I figured it was probably about time. So I called the Blue Cross nurse, who once againt directed me to head straight to the ER. (One more visit and I'm eligible for the shopper rewards program!)

There wasn't actually that much pain involved initially, so I dawdled a bit before moseying into the familiar ol'B Baptist ER around 3:00. I then spent several an hour or two there, and was eventually sent home with a tetanus shot in my arm and a bottle of 40 pretty little red pills to take over the next 10 days. The moral of this story? Yard work is a bad idea.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot the incident on Thursday wherein my hand got stuck in a malfunctioning elevator door at work! No hospitalization on that one, although it seems like there easily could have been if the elevator had started moving.

I'm not sure I've felt this accident prone since the holiday weekend at a friend's cabin a few years ago when I sliced my scalp open and tore off a toenail in a two-day period. (Amazingly there was no hospitalization then, but only because we had our very own med student along and the nearest hospital was an hour drive.)