Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

Do normal people know about the facebook login change that happened over the summer?  I never thought about it until I sat down to FB to look at something on Casey's account and she used her email address to log in.  When I asked her about it, it was like she'd never heard of the username thing.  Facebook's main (only?) strength is the fact that normal, non-geeky people feel like they can use it, and if we're splitting it now into People Who Follow Nerd News and People Who Don't, FB may have cause to worry.

Also, I like Obama, but he's been a year on the world stage and done nothing, as far as I can tell to end either war we're in.  WTF.

Also, also, I slept through the moon's destruction last night.  I'm sad - I wanted to see that fucker one more time.

Also, also, also, Happy Friday.

So it's October.  Welcome to it.  This is my favorite month.

October should be where August is, but we were just too lazy to rename it when the Gregorians added January and February to the year.  Weird. (Imagine how short Winter is without January and February, too.)  It's Breast Cancer Awareness month, which promises lots of people talking about and showing off boobs and quite a few people offended by talking about and showing off boobs.  Fun times.  October is the month of Octoberfest, the time when you can get fruity beer and no one will care because you're just celebrating your culture, man.  October also houses the birthdays of both my Sylva cousins and my dad and of course, me.  It's got 31 days and ends in Halloween, which is rad, and tends to start warm and end cold with cool inbetween.  I like it.

Now it's time to take care of some administrivia - laundry and the like.  Fun times for all.

UPDATE: Gallery of the first part of the process is now after the break.

It's not 100% accurate to call it a "spree," but considering how little I've done in the past few months, two shelves are a real start.

At the end of last week, I built the Tim Stormer Memorial Shelf for the garage, aiming at getting his stuff into a place where it actually had somewhere to be (rather than on the floor), and that was a roaring success.  Yesterday afternoon, I reinforced the "back" desk and last night I put together a nice little hutch for atop that desk.  It's actually quite a nice piece.  It's still un-stained, but that's what this afternoon is for.

Also for this afternoon, I've been taking things out of my office (an absurdly difficult task, actually) and cleaning the dirtier things as I move them (how the laser printer is still working is beyond me). I'm going to install a ceiling fan this afternoon, too.  If I'm really lucky, I'll get the fan installed, the hutch stained AND the desk moved into place, all before tonight.  We'll see, though.  I don't want to be overzealous. you know.   I need a new rug in here, too.  Maybe.

Fun times. And I swear I have pictures to put up, but I'm in the building zone, man - the ZONE.

Portland was awesome
and New York was long
if you beg to differ
I'll tell you you're wrong.

There. A poem for you.  That's what you come to clapboard for, right?  The poetry?  And the naked chicks.  Sorry about that, by the way - I know you're still waiting, but I'll get around to it eventually.  Probably on a subdomain, but still.

Driving to and from Portland was pretty amazing - the changes in the enviornment were breathtaking.  Even though it took a long time to see those changes occur, my brain works slow, so it's okay.  I'd love to do the drive someday with a time-lapse camera pointed out a side window shooting a picture every minute or so, too.

Anyway, Scott & Sharon's place is awesome - you should probably go visit them to see for yourself.  I'm already looking forward to the chance to go back.  I bought a couple of bottles of Oregon Pinot Noir, which were good, but a little more expensive than their CA counterparts.  Probably to do with the amount of competition and the level of recognition that California wines enjoy.  Regardless of their quality, if you price a wine high, it's going to get a little mindshare as a "good" wine.  At least, that's how I'd do it.

I'll have pics up a little later, now that I'm back in the swing of things.

This video makes me nostalgic for like three months ago.

If you watch till 1:17, you can see me clapping in the weird circle thing we did there.  The cuts are pretty fast, but you definitely get a sense of how much footage they shot and how great a lot of it was.  I wish I'd been around for the green screen stuff in particular - how fun would that have been?

Anyway, check it out.  Video now after the break.

So I've arrived in NYC, and I'm sitting at Starbucks, but I'm not using their WiFi.  I'm using my Pre.  I've failed to get the WiFi tethering to work yet, but the USB tethering works without a hitch on my Ubuntu 9.04 system.  Pretty rad.  I'm sure I'll figure out the WiFi thing sooner or later, but it's good to be online.  I figure that I can use some of my time before the store opens to work on the WiFi, as well as on getting the function keys on this Toshiba working under Ubuntu.  Stupid windows-centric world.

More updates on the trip etc, coming later.  Pictures, too, esp. since I didn't forget my camera as I thought I did.

I just saw this on a sidebar while I was searching for info on how to reformat my add-to-cart area on ShoeHardware, and I agree with it, at least in theory.  Not Facebook, not twitter, and not tumblr, but actual, written blogs.

That's all.

Oh, no it's not.  I'm off to watch the Eagles play in a little while.  Stupid NFL network.  Anyone over on that side of town and wanna meet up?  Rawr.

This is kinda fun, in a giggle-alone-at-your-computer sort of way.

It's a website that translates your phrase from English to Japanese back and forth until the results can't be distilled anymore.  You end up with some pretty hilarious stuff.  For example, "I hate when birds poop on my car" eventually becomes "I have bird droppings on my car."  http://www.translationparty.com/#3465456 I like watching the translation happen, too - it's a weird experience in machine translation.