October 2006

My girlfriend and I had dinner last night at The Rainbow Room and then went to see The Perfect Victim play at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Blvd. We didn’t know it in advance, but the Whisky was hosting a “launch party” for a new concert review web site, TheConcertGoer.com, so there were several bands playing and they were filming.

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Once again I found myself in trouble at the Los Angeles International Airport, and once again it was (arguably) my own damn fault. Last Thursday I flew Southwest to Providence, Rhode Island to testify in court on behalf of my dad, who was in the midst of a textbook “frivolous lawsuit”. I detest being late in general, and even more so when it comes to flying. I am the guy that gets to the airport at least two hours in advance. My adventure began almost as soon as I got out of my friend’s car.

I was told by the Southwest skycaps at the curbside check-in that my flight was canceled. “What?! Why?!” I exclaimed. I was told by the first skycap that it was because of inclement weather in Rhode Island. He directed me to his superior, who told me that it was because of a mechanical problem with the plane. (Much later in the day I would be told that the flight was canceled because there simply weren’t enough people wanting to fly from LA to Providence that day to justify sending an entire plane on the route.) She took my luggage and got me on the next flight, due to leave for Phoenix in three hours.

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Awesome! I am the 46th most important “David” in the world. That’s according to Google, at least. Today I read a post over at Tempus Fugit about being a top ten Mark and figured I’d take a look and see where I rank among the Davids of the world. Forty-six! I honestly didn’t think I’d even make the top 100. But there I am — sitting just barely a notch below David Lee Roth and David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd). I’m pretty sure I can take those guys, too.

October 20, 2006 Update: I have somehow since dropped to 89th. WTF?

We have a Norstar phone system in my office. Sometimes people leave me voicemails on this system. When I look at my phone, it shows “Messages” in the little digital display so I know I must check my messages. To do this I press the “Check VM” button and enter my super secret password. Here’s what drives me crazy: The system robot says, “You have three new messages. To listen to your new messages, press 2,” and then ten other options. I am checking my voice mail. Of course I want to hear my new messages. Why in the world would I check my voicemail and not want to hear my new messages? (Cingular handles this perfectly, by the way. When I check my cell phone voice mail the system robot says, “You have seventeen new messages. The first message was received yesterday at 2 pm from some phone number, and here it is …”)

That’s only mildly annoying, though. What really drives me over a cliff is that once I have listened to the (usually quite unimportant) message, I have to listen to all NINE options before I’m able to delete the thing. “Press 1 to listen to the message envelope. Press 2 to forward the message. Press 3 to reply to the message. Press 4 to replay the message. Press 5 to hear the next message. Press 6 to hear the previous message. Press 7 to save the message. Press 8 to delete the message. Press 9 to hear more options.” I have to listen to all of that before I can delete the damn thing! If I press 8 while the system robot is still talking it ignores me until it has finished reading me all nine options! So. The vast majority of the time, I am simply going to delete the message. The option to delete should be NUMBER ONE. And under no circumstances in any universe should I possibly be forced to listen to all the options before making my choice!

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One of the things that has bothered me for some time about the men’s bathroom at my office is that we have no urinals. They are one of the great conveniences of mankind. Toilets are just really sub-par places to urinate. (There’s too much splash and you always try to flush with your foot because, really, who wants to touch the handle way back there?) We have a tremendously large and ornate fish tank with a waterfall and beautiful coral sculptures in our reception area, but I don’t think I’d be able to convince the CFO to invest in the remodeling it would take to install these.

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The college football homepage at ESPN reads “Saturday Bloody Saturday”. Then it says, “Auburn beat Florida. The SEC body count is complete. On every given Saturday, someone loses in the Bloody South.” It goes on to state, “In the end, that merciless SEC claimed another victim as Florida became the fourth team ranked No. 2 in the AP Top 25 to lose this season, joining Texas, Notre Dame and Auburn.”

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“When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters. …
Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research.”

– from The Handwriting Is on the Wall

I’ve been complaining about the decline in my own penmanship for years now. I used to take pride in how beautiful, in particular, my lowercase e and t looked. And don’t get me started on my q. It was lovely. Truly a sight to behold. Now I am ashamed to see my own handwriting. Unless I’m sending a check — and that’s rare these days, too — I just don’t ever need to use a pen or pencil. Blast this damn keyboard!

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of reading the headline “John Lennon’s killer denied parole again“. With luck I will continue to see it posted somewhere regularly every two years or so. I figure he’s got about the same chance of getting paroled as Sirhan Sirhan does. It’s nice to see that the hearing only lasted sixteen minutes. “The decision came one day after what would have been Lennon’s 66th birthday.”

Last night we went to dinner at Aroma in Silver Lake and then caught a new band — Castaneda (website, myspace) — at El Cid. My girlfriend works for a music management company, so we often find ourselves out seeing new music in LA.

Castaneda is a really polished act, and I was surprised to learn that last night was only their second ever live performance. They’re very, very good for a new band, with a sound sort of like The Killers meets U2. I am a fan of the five-piece band genre — lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboardist — and these guys were great. You can (and should!) listen to four of their songs on their myspace page. (The songs were recorded in their house!) “The Same” is the track I like best.

Words cannot describe how frustrating is it to drive anywhere in Los Angeles. The part that really slays you is when you realize that the problem is not bad drivers. (Warning: It will take you at least a solid year to come to this realization.) The real problem is the traffic infrastructure: traffic lights, stop signs, road configurations, and construction. I’ve written before about the supreme idiocy of the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. Today I was quite upset to learn that in 2005 the Federal government — not money from my California tax dollars, but from my Federal taxes — granted $1,611,962,012 to the California Department of Transportation. And yet it still takes 30 minutes to drive 5 miles.

“Mr. Snuffleupagus is a full-bodied Muppet character who lives with his family in a cave, just off of Sesame Street. He is a snuffleupagus.
– from the Muppet wiki

Obviously I knew that. Though I didn’t know he had a first name. I just always referred to him as Snuffleupagus. I loved Sesame Street when I was a kid. Who didn’t? I only very rarely ever think about Snuffleupagus these days. To be honest with you, I can’t remember the last time I thought about Snuffleupagus. It’s been a while.

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This domain of mine has had stuff on it for a long, long time — before WordPress or MovableType or even Blogger. The original davidgagne.net is, sadly, lost forever. Some pieces of it have been kicking around on my various hard drives and FTP locations for a decade now.

One file that I could never seem to bring myself to delete was an ancient hand-coded HTML <TABLE> listing of a bunch of important events in my life. A few friends of mine actually built a company based on the idea. It was called “ShareTimelines.com”, had a magnificent interface, was all webbed up, and the site — last I checked — is completely dead. I wanted to have that timeline on this site again. I hadn’t updated it in years and years, and I would rather poke hot needles in my eyes than sit and hand-code a bunch of <td>s all day. “It should all be in a database, of course,” I said to myself. “And I should be able to edit it right in the WordPress Administrator, too. And seriously it should be written so that I can just give other people the ability to add timelines like that to their own sites.” ( I should stop talking to myself.)

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If you’re wondering why BlogRolling.com never seems to show your site as recently-updated, it’s likely because you’re not pinging it. I’ve been using the BlogRolling sidebar for years and just yesterday I noticed that my own site never seems to appear near the top of the list. MovableType was apparently pinging the BlogRolling servers, but WordPress by default does not. To make sure your blog is pinging the BlogRolling servers, make sure to add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ to the “Update Services” list on the “Writing” tab of the “Options” panel.

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Gainesville is abuzz these days as the 5-0 Florida Gators embark on a huge October. The fifth-ranked Gators will be tested with showdowns throughout the month. Now the slate has gotten even more challenging. Today coach Urban Meyer announced that Florida has added an October 21 matchup with the Chicago Bears to the schedule.