Hiding all weekend.

Well, not so much hiding. Saturday my friend Greg said he’d come by and kill some time while his daughter was attending a birthday party. But he blew me off. And my friend John wanted help wiring under the whatever-you-call-the-dashboard on Sunday, but he blew me off. And then today…

OK, so that really isn’t the complete story. Saturday night I went to a housewarming party at a friend’s house. I hadn’t seen him for a few years an now he’s all all growed up and married with a big house in the suburbs. We were out of there by 10PM, but it was fun nonetheless. I even forgot my jacket there and had to go pick it up the next day. I even had to go back the next day to get my jacket and cell phone that I forgot.

I ended up helping John with his boat on Monday, and he took me out for a ride around Hayden Island. Fortunately, all the wiring I did underneath the whatever-the-dashboard-is-called-on-a-boat worked out and we made it back intact.

I also got a new old computer.

That means I spent a LOT of time trying to get NetBSD running. I even bought a new monitor. All this so I can hook it up to my ham radio.

Bad movie town.

Portland is a bad movie town and I hope it stays that way. In fact, I was told by a filmmaker that the film crews here suck especially hard. That and the lack of success of the movies that are filmed here should scare off any new movies. Or so I hope.

Think of the movies that filmed here in the past: The Hunted (2003) with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, Zero Effect (1998) with Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman, Body of Evidence (1993) with Madonna and Willem Defoe, Down and Out With the Dolls (2001) (ok, so my ex-girlfriend was involved with this one), and something with Burt Reynolds that I can’t remember. Oh, and I think something with Andrew Dice Clay. All forgettable.

The reason I’m against movies filming in Portland is purely selfish. That Burt Reynolds movie blocked streets and rerouted traffic in my neighborhood. That’s an even larger pain when you’re riding a bike on hilly roads. There’s only a few routes over the west hills and The Hunted blocked the road that’s closest to me.

I thought about this because there’s some dumb movie trailers downtown. I have no idea what movie is filming. All I know is the names on the doors of the “Star Wagons”: Sarah, Berman, Paul, Russell, and “Enter and Die.” I think the “Enter and Die” door was for the make-up trailer.

We have enough trouble with presidential candidates showing up without this crap going on.

yaaaa! I broke EVERYTHING.

My NetBSD system is still kinda horked. They’re making some changes to the filesystem, and that keeps the system from booting properly. Geeky. That’s what I get for running the “latest” code rather than the “stable” code. Bad for me and for all the knitting blog fans looking for my sister’s blog.

I also updated MacOS X and WordPress today, and they’re not getting along. WordPress v1.2 doesn’t like Safari 1.2.2 (v125.7) and won’t let me log in. Yeesh.


Earlier today I had a “discussion” with my boss about kung fu. My boss practices Wing Chun and I’m not a real big fan of the whole thing. I mean, it’s all about fighting and I’m not a fighter. I think anything that advocates starting fights should be avoided. In any case, he enjoys it, but it’s not for me.

And then at the gym I saw this woman who was very attractive. Not only attractive, but carrying herself in a way that drew attention. I shouldn’t have been so distracted, since I was watching an uninteresting basketball game and slogging on the elliptical torture machine. I saw some of the exercises she was doing on the mat, and besides yoga she was doing Wing Chun Siu Lim Tao. Maybe there’s something to all this.

When it rains, it pours.

I tried to rebuild some software on one of my computers and it broke three of them. That’s what I get for using the current tree of NetBSD.

I went to the Bank of America ATM this morning and they’d changed the nice blue and yellow screen to grey and black. I had a hard time seeing anything because of the lack of contrast. I tried to call to complain and they changed their phone maze. Not only are they changing the phone number but the whole thing requires a separate PIN and new levels of crap to get to a useful choice. When I tried the usual trick of hitting 0 to get to a human, it just hung up on me.

Yay progress.

I am so fired.

So I’m probably one of the few who thought Blade 2 was better than Kill Bill Vol. 1 but there you have it. Both were cartoonish and silly and took themselves too seriously, but I really like Blade. That was even the first DVD I bought.

OK, so now I have to see if I can get fix my antennas when the weather gets nice. Computer geeks have nothing on ham radio operators. We’re ultra-geeks.

Oh, and I just tried the radio. Lots of interference on 20M, but I just talked to Lithuania. Yay.

Today’s avoidance of Tokyo Story…

Is A Mighty Wind, which was even funnier than I expected. I watched it twice through since it was so short. The second time I listened to the commentary.

Other than that, the only thing I did was read Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin, another Inspector Rebus mystery. Also imported all the comments from my old blog into my new blog. And, most important, took a nap.

Am I supposed to be getting healthier?

So another doctor’s appointment today. It’s a bit weird to me, I had a bone marrow biopsy before treatment started, at 3 months after treatment started, and I’m supposed to have one at 6 months. In between 0 months and 3 months I had a doctor’s appointment almost every other week. Between 3 months and 6 months I have one appointment. So it feels to me like I’m getting the next biopsy, the one at 6 months, right after the one at 3 months.

Anyway, the doctor says I’m doing well and the molecular and FISH studies looked good. Good thing I’ve forgotten all my molecular biology.

But the worst part is that every one of my many previous appointments I only weighed 169 pounds. Always. 169 pounds. This time I’m up to 174 pounds. Isn’t this going to the sports club thing supposed to be making me feel better (I feel like someone beat the hell out of me) and make me lighter (not 5 pounds heavier)? And for those who don’t recognize my attempt at humor: I know things don’t happen overnight — except for feeling like someone beat the hell out of me.

A late Friday night workout was nice and quiet, and there were still a couple of attractive women to look at. The tough looking guys who were there didn’t sound so tough when I heard them speak. In fact, they sounded more girly than the women there.


I finally saw Blade 2 today and I must say that I’m not disappointed. But I am disappointed in my picks from GreenCine. I keep putting “good” movies on my list — in this case Tokyo Story — and then only watching the fluff. Oh, well, I guess this tells me a little more about my own likes and dislikes.

Still moving things over.

OK, so bozo the blog converter is editing a lot of stuff by hand when he should use whatever little bit he learned in his computer science classes to use. But I keep thinking, “Oh, there’s just a couple of these comments I need to move over….” More like a couple hundred.

Who knew I wrote so much random tripe? And weird pseudo-html from some odd blosxom plugin I found somewhere. And who would guess that other people read what I wrote?

Well, anyway, all the comments should be imported soon. Unless, of course, I go to the gym and get so embarassed that I have to hide for the weekend. (And boy are my triceps sore today. Who knew I even had triceps?)

The second time at the “club”.

The things I do at the club are pretty limited.

  1. The plank
  2. Squats with a giant ball
  3. Double Barbell shoulder press
  4. Cable low row
  5. Bodymaster chest press

So I’m only there for a short time. Today I saw this tall, thin blonde woman (taller and thinner than me) who was doing the double barbell shoulder press with 20-30 pound barbells. Good thing I’m used to looking foolish.

The barbells I use for the double shoulder press have the Number “8” on them. I’m hoping that’s pounds rather than ounces.

In any case, once my arms quit being so sore, I’ll try heavier weights.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH.

Heh. So I imported my old posts into WordPress. Well, I need to do a lot more to fix the posts. So, if you look and it all looks like crap, that’s why.

Also, I’m slightly sore all over from waving those light weights around. Not that anyone else cares. It almost feels like I have the ‘flu. My friend Melanie laughed at me when I told her about it. I guess she did some work with a medicine ball and it hurts when she laughs. Well, back for more fun tomorrow.

Hey, it looks like the dumb TV show I saw about Hawaii (and guess what? it’s called Hawaii) is on NBC’s fall schedule. Too bad they didn’t call me back to ask me about it. I could have told them what I really thought.

Trying a new blog.

OK, so I heard that Movable Type is causing all sorts of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Their new pricing scheme is cheesing people off. Well, honestly, I hated it from the start. Installation was a nightmare. It seemed like they wanted to keep the instructions minimal so you’d pay for the installation service. Fortunately, it was written in Perl and used a MySQL database so I could poke around a bit and figure it out.

So now I’m trying WordPress. We’ll see how it works.

I finally went to the Sports Club and spent a half-hour waving some very light weights around. And I feel very, very tired. I felt pretty stupid wandering around and being a weenie-boy, but what’s a geek to do? Well, I can look stupid in front of attractive women. I’m good at that.