hello.

since everybody else has been doing this kind of stuff lately, here's my iteration of the 'what states have you visited' thing, except since i've visited all fifty states, i'm doing the country one, particularly since it can serve as a reminder of how much there is left to see.

i may have missed the boat this winter with the really cheap fares to europe, but i'm still thinking of going again. everybody at work thinks i'm nuts for just jetting off to england for a weekend or something, but really, it's way cheaper than pretty much anywhere besides florida or vegas or new york (airfare-wise), and i need to take advantage of the opportunity to go there while i still live on the east coast.

which of course, brings me to other stuff, which is to say, that i think i've set a deadline for myself. i think i need to move to california. which is not to say that i don't like it here, quite the opposite. and i'd miss all my wonderful friends. but the fact remains, pretty much every job i've any interest in is out there. which hasn't stopped me from applying for them, but i've yet to hear a reply from... anyone, due to the fact that i live on the opposite side of the country. so, yeah, i think i have to move to the west coast. so i can camp out on the doorstep of jpl, apple, or boeing/rocketdyne or whatever until they realize that i am the pro/e demigod they're looking for. but what's wrong with my current job? oh, ha ha. that's very funny. yeah. we've laid off more people, more people i worked with. people i've known for nearly 5 years, now, scarily enough. and that's bad enough, but between that, people with forced transfers, and people imminently quitting, to say nothing of the increased workload, the new need to work 11-8 a few nights a week, and the fact that i'm completely fucking sick of it, the job is rapidly becoming untenable. so yeah. i've got to leave at some point. i've set a deadline for myself of the end of september, and then i'm going to leave. i figure that'll be after the pan-mass challenge, and right around the harpoon oktoberfest, etc. i may have to delay it if the sox are going to be in the playoffs. but yeah, after that, westward ho. san francisco, seattle, or 'bob' forbid, l.a. ... so yeah, now i've opened my damn mouth, so now i have to do it, right?

i watched the phantom menace today, for the first time in a long time. and you know what? it's better than i remembered. still problematic, of course, and jake lloyd is still like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, but you know, it's a pretty entertaining movie. it moves more quickly than attack of the clones, but at the same time, the story is simpler and less complex. and the swordfight at the end is still bad-ass, and actually that's what made me want to watch it--reading the spoiler-free news on tf.n about episode iii, and getting very excited for the duel that everybody knows is at the end of it. just 16 more months...

in other news, it's been pointed out to me that my resume sucks, and needs work, and one possible alternative that i came up with was to make it in pro/e. still needs work (and a model to accent it, but trust me, i'm working on that, big-time).

anyway, that's enough rambling for now, boys and girls. frog blast the vent core...

despite having been burned by the last northeast aids ride, and the less than efficient means by which it conveyed not much of our money to charity, i've gone and signed up for another similar event. well, similar in purpose, hopefully dramatically different in execution. not that i didn't enjoy the hell out of the aids ride, it's just that it seemed kinda enron-esque in its demise.

my company has a team in the pan-mass challenge, and this year, i've signed up for it; i'm only doing a 1-day, 111-mile route from sturbridge to bourne, but that should be enough to get my bones squeaking more than my chain. this is a much more competently-run event, though, based on its reputation; it returns 90-something percent of the funds to the charity, which is of course, the jimmy fund, and their legitimacy is not subject to doubt by anyone who's ever even set foot around here. so, i don't expect to be frustrated to find the fundraising this time to have gone towards aeron chairs and flashy web pages. which is good.

so, i need to get in shape, of course. and i need to start fundraising. so, boys and girls, if you're interested in contributing, here is a link to do so, and it will eventually be put up on the sidebar of my gloomy little corner of the web, too.

And this time, i'll tighten up my shocks, put on some road tires, and not wear chuck taylors for the entire thing. Well, maybe not the last one.

tonight is one of those nights when you can be perfectly warm inside, but if you go to the window and look outside, you can't help but feel chilly. because it looks cold. which, of course, it is. but there are different types of cold. the brisk cold of a november day, where, though the ground is probably wet and cold, it seems like the perfect time for tackle football. there's the inviting cold of a snowy day in december where the white stuff blots out all but the most tasteful xmas decorations (oh, by the way, hey, 31 mechanic st. it's january 26th, for fuck's sake! if you don't take 'em down, at least turn 'em off), leaving you walking through a damned norman rockwell painting. where was i? oh, there's the normal cold of january. a little darker, a little less pleasant, a little more biting, but well, it's january, so you figure you're in for it. and then there's this. by the time this winter's over, we'll have had three to five weeks of 'ow, the steering wheel hurts my fucking hands' cold, which is both abnormal and unpleasant. and it pisses me off more by preventing snow. is there anything worse than 0 degree weather with brown grass and desiccated, salty pavement that's the same color gray as the remaining ice? and sunny. don't forget that. what the fuck is the point of winter, if it's going to be sunny, but wicked cold? bah. and did i read correctly that it was warmer on mars last week? i must've been on crack, but i suppose it's possible. both my loyal readers know i like bad weather. more than most well-adjusted people do, in fact, but this weather isn't just bad, it's no fun.

but on the other hand, in keeping with my new year's resolution to provide more visual aids, i did take this really cool picture of the house next door.

clearly their treachery with the color gray has not dissuaded me from spending money on legos. i went back to the pick-a-brick wall in burlington today (and since when did burlington mall's parking lot get as cutthroat as the one at south shore plaza?), and did pretty well for myself. my latest creation required more 1x2 clear bricks, so i got myself 50 more of those, out of a total of 443 bricks crammed into a large slurpee cup. less than 3 cents a brick. a little over 4 if you don't count the 172 1x1 flat clear yellow tiles, and only count the larger bricks. i'd have been so dangerous as a kid if this store existed... damn...

i don't want to join the pigpile on howard dean; while i don't think he's the man for the job, i think he's been treated unfairly of late (perhaps as a backlash to the fawning that he'd received up to that point), and i think he (and his organization) are to be commended for stirring up interest in ousting bush. whoever does get the democratic nomination will owe much of their momentum in the final election to mr. dean. that said, they played his speech from last night on the radio, and it sounded like he was taking cues from steve ballmer.

but perhaps most amusingly, it finally dawned on me who he really is. he's actually the evil tv station guy from uhf!

it's a crappy picture, but when he laughs showing off the big gleaming-white teeth, it's totally scary. separated at birth, or am i on crack here?

so, the stories on lugnet were true, it seems. i just bought the lego 4492 mini star destroyer set, and verified it. they've changed the color of gray. the picture shown below kinda shows it. left is the new pieces, right is the old ones. the lower right one is clean, it just has a yellow cast from the room light, but in general, the new ones are both blue-ish now. the colors are actually very nice, but they're replacements not additions to the palette, and lego has said this decision is final.

this is as unprecedented as it is annoying for those of us who have a large collection. the dark gray is particularly different; the light gray is more subtle, which is good, since most everyone's light gray collection far outnumbers the dark gray. either way, it's a lot of pieces that are all but deprecated. it's sort of petty, i know, but it really bugs me to think that my collection of proper gray pieces is essentially as large as it's ever going to get. it throws off all my anal-retentive sorting schemes, and they're different enough to make it so you can't mix them together in a structure. and nobody even knows why they did it. rumor has it that it's a cost-cutting measure, indicative of their using a higher percentage of recycled plastic. oh, well. guess i may just have to find a way to dirty up all these new pieces real fast.

i went to see the triplets of belleville last night, because i had seen the trailer for it and thought it looked cool. and you just can't go wrong with weird foreign animation (in this case, though it appeared french initially, it was in fact french-latvian-canadian). anyway, i definitely recommend it if you like cartoons; the animation is 2d, but it's very evident that 3d software was used to do some of it--things like cars blowing up happen with a definite kind of physics to them (cartoon physics, mind you, but visually consistent) that suggests as much. but what's really funny are the way all the characters are realized; the habits of the mother, the cyclist, and the dog, and the exaggerations of their particular traits (like the cyclists huge thighs). in the end, the story kinda winds up with not a lot of payoff for a considerable amount of setup, but it's entertaining enough overall, and it's nice to see different kinds of animation, in the sense that a: it's 2d in style and b: it was pg-13, particularly considering that even disney wants to shut down their traditional animation and work towards cloning pixar.

so, i have returned from the expedition to go visit mickey. it wasn't exactly warm in florida, but that said, it was a good 60 degrees warmer than it is here. haha. that's why manly men live in the northeast. so, i hadn't been there since 1985, and at the time i was exceptionally excited about it; epcot center was brand-new then, and it was like the embodiment of the future in quasi-amusement-park form. or like a half-breed theme park and museum. but the gleaming, rounded-edged 1980s vision of the future is dated now, and it looks like they've largely tried to make it more kid-friendly instead. goodness knows walt disney's vision of a 'community of the future' wasn't really going to survive the trip from paper to florida swamp intact, but now it very much seems like a place without a purpose. which is sad. the same can be said of tomorrowland, which no longer seems to embrace tomorrow so much as it winks at how goofy our vision of tomorrow once was. and that too, i think is sad. 'cause for all the evil that his namesake company perpetrates, walt disney seemed like one hell of an optimist about the future. but on the other hand, what do we expect the theme-park view of the future to look like these days? no more rockets to the moon in the future for us, and new cell phone or internet technology does not a roller coaster make. so maybe we need a better future first. at least the monorail is still cool.

all that rumination aside, they run a mean hotel. 'course, it was kinda ironic that we flew 1500 miles to stay in a hotel that attempted to replicate a new england beach resort, and be greeted by a guy with a proper boston accent. when i was a kid, i didn't remember there being so many seagulls. a parked stroller had some cheetos in the seat in place of a baby, which was a good thing, since it was besieged by like 8 birds of varying types, who looked like they were picking at roadkill. there were some decent rides there, and i got to ride four more roller coasters than i did all of last year (what a slacker!), but oddly enough, there were no lines. anyway, apart from that, i did take the new toy for a spin: pictures

oh and congratulations to tracey and michelle for kicking ass in their respective races.

oh happy happy day. while most everyone reacted to the mighty steve jobs' tuesday keynote with slightly more than a yawn, santa steve delivered exactly the late xmas present i was looking for. a new version of iphoto. it seems like myself and countless others have embraced the program, and then proceeded to use it well beyond the anticipated limits. because as you put more pictures in, it gets slower and slower. hence you get wonderful utilities like iphoto buddy, which allows you to swap library folders and thereby get an ephemeral clean, smooth-scrolling slate with which to work. but no longer, they say; it can go up to 25k images. awesome stuff. and as luck would have it, it just bought something to help me fill it up, too... muhuhahaha...

oh, and aspyr has announced that simcity4: rush hour is coming. yay! although i'd feel better about it if they delayed that a week and, you know, patched the original to work under panther.

let's see... what else? oh, if you're looking for new telejunkfood, the apprentice is damned entertaining, if you can get past the whole donald trump's hair thing. happily, the new real world has started, too. and it looks like they've moved beyond the old old real world style angst and acrimony of last season for the hook-ups and drinking and moral ambiguity of the las vegas season.

i'm going down to see the mouse this weekend. actually, more to the point, i'm going to see tracey run the marathon. i haven't been to disney world since 1985, so that should be fairly interesting.

i'll be brief today. two things:

hooray hooray hooray we (the usa, humanity, take your pick) are back on mars again. this is a wonderful wonderful thing.

the lego store is even more dangerous than i'd feared. it takes no time at all to fill a slurpee cup with brightly colored plastic pieces, and they change the selection every couple of weeks (fortunately, someone posts their inventory online).

fares on the T went up today. no big deal, i'd thought, but then, i hadn't heard anywhere whether or not the fare out towards the end of the D-line was going up. turns out it is. and that kinda disappoints me. now, the T has always been dirt-cheap. it was 85 cents for the longest time, and then went up to a dollar, and now $1.25 for the most part. that's still very cheap (although you can argue that for the green line, you don't get service comparable to other subways and therefore shouldn't pay a commensurate fare). but it used to be $2.50 out here in newton, and i thought that was a fair price. it's 7 miles to the center of downtown (outside the green dragon pub, actually, is where mileage is measured to), and service here is excellent; it is but a 25 minute ride in to fenway park, for instance, and even faster going out, since people don't have to pay. and i know that's part of the rationale for it being so expensive. goodness knows that given a choice between fenway and kenmore, now, i'll make a point of getting on aboveground even more often. $3 seems like a lot to me, a lot more than others are paying. i don't even commute on the train, mind you, but i do ride downtown probably 5 times a month, more in the summer; i'm sure this is even more than an annoyance for people who do commute. towards the end of the year, they'll have automated fare-card systems starting up, which i hope will lower the fare (even if it's replaced by a reasonable outbound fare). i doubt very much if the price overall will go down, but then, maybe people besides us 'wealthy newton residents' will bear some of the load of building bits and pieces of a slightly more modern transit system. and no, buses in 'transitways' do not fucking count as a subway. pansies.