February 2007

After last night’s 6.7 mile run — Death by Doheny, I call it — my girlfriend and I headed to Hollywood to catch The Perfect Victim (previously mentioned here) at The Knitting Factory. These kids put on a damn good show. The lead singer is energetic and bounces around the stage like a young Billie Joe Armstrong. The songs are slick and powerful, with a ton of punk-hard rock guitar riffs. I could have done without the drunk girl sprawled in a pool of her strawberry-daiquiri vomit outside the front door, but that’s just life in Los Angeles. If you get a chance to see them, go.

When the future finally arrives, I think one of the things I’m going to appreciate the most is the digital shower. (Does anyone make one now?) I think being able to simply digitally set the water temperature will revolutionize my morning ablutions beyond belief. Fumbling the faucets for five minutes trying to achieve the perfect shower combination of hot and cold water is so old school. I imagine a world in which I can use a fog-resistant touch-screen to find NPR or ESPNRadio, alert me when I’ve been in there too long, and deliver the exact temperature to make me happy.

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How’s this for an impossible task? Last night my girlfriend asked me to make her a Bob Dylan mix CD. I have exactly 100 Dylan songs in my iTunes library, and one can only fit about 73 minutes of music on a standard audio CD. Deciding which tracks to include has proven to be a monumental task. I finally chose the following seventeen, but it wasn’t easy.

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Last night I finished reading Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL, by John Feinstein. It took me well over a month to get through this 400+ page epic covering the 2004 Baltimore Ravens season. Regardless of how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get into it. I am a huge football fan, so that should tell you something. I very much enjoyed Feinstein’s 1996 football work, the incredibly long-titled A Civil War: Army Vs. Navy : A Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry, so that should tell you something as well.

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I added my house to Hotspotr. If you are desperate for free WiFi in Los Angeles, feel free to sit in my driveway and use some of my bandwidth. I have had a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router with no password for years and I’m also broadcasting with the free FON wireless access point I got a few days ago. I’m glad to see LA ranked #8 on the list at Hotspotr. Wireless internet access should be free.

Seeing celebrities in Los Angeles is still pretty cool, even though I’ve lived here for 6+ years now. It seems like they’ve been coming out of the woodwork lately. Here’s a quick summary of the last week or so:

• On President’s Day I saw Chad Lowe at the Coral Tree Cafe in Brentwood.
• On Friday afternoon I went to DecadesTwo on Melrose to buy a present for my girlfriend. (I had read at Caroline’s site that they were having a big sale on Christian Louboutins, and I know those are my girl’s favorites. I didn’t like any of them, though, so I got her a sexy pair of Prada high heels instead.) The paparazzi was outside in full force because Nicky Hilton was there shopping, too.
• Saturday morning we had brunch at Hugo’s on Santa Monica and Taylor Kitsch — Riggins from Friday Night Lights — walked past our table with his mini-entourage.
• After brunch we were killing time in Hollywood and crossed paths with Dennis Rodman who was apparently getting his car washed.
• This afternoon I passed Lance Armstrong jogging on Santa Monica while I was on my last ten-mile run before next weekend’s LA Marathon.

This excellent experiment comparing oysters and chocolate in terms of sexual arousal comes via megnut. Meg writes a delicious “foodie” blog which is great fun and chock full of reviews and recipes for anyone that enjoys eating.

In the blue corner, oysters, eight dozen of them. Hailing from Puget Sound by way of Wild Edibles in Manhattan … In the red corner, chocolate. From Peru by way of Jacques Torres …

The referee explains the rules. Four couples have been selected to judge this match. They have been selected because they are the only friends of the author who agreed to do it. Strangely, some friends of the author were horrified at the thought of being publicly identified with pseudoscientific sexcapades.

read the whole story at seriouseats.com …

Five Underappreciated Tom Petty Songs

1. “Cabin Down Below” — from Wildflowers
2. “Change the Locks” — from She’s the One
3. “Billy the Kid” — from Echo
4. “the last dj” — from The Last DJ
5. “Southern Accents” — from Southern Accents

Today I decided that my life would not be complete if I didn’t learn how to use Yahoo! Pipes. So I gave it a shot. I couldn’t really think of anything I wanted in a pipe, so I decided to try building one that would let me search eBay for items on my Amazon wishlist. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

I learned that it is possible to pull your Amazon Wishlist items as an RSS feed, which is cool. I found an example on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. You need to have an Amazon Web Services Access Key (AWSAccessKeyId), but they’ll give those away to anyone nowadays. You don’t need to read the full article; I’ll summarize.

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If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.

Making fun of “homeland security” still makes me giggle. I remember when I first saw these hysterical warnings just after 9/11. They made me laugh until I cried. A half a decade later I still smile when I see them.

Every now and again I’ll see one of these in someone’s forum signature or a blog post and I’m reminded of how great it felt to just laugh back then. It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than five years since that day. It seems like only yesterday.

On Saturday morning I ran a quick 7 miles at 6 am, came home, and told my girlfriend to get ready for an adventure. We packed the truck and headed for wine country (photos). The President’s Day traffic was brutal so it took us almost 3 hours to go what should have only taken an hour and a half. We had a terrific time, though. The Santa Barbara vineyards — of Sideways fame — are just as much fun as going to Napa and they’re only a short drive from Los Angeles. First we hit the Firestone Winery and its sister vineyard, Curtis Winery. Tastings are rough for me because I don’t like any reds, but Firestone had some wonderful whites. I bought a delicious chardonnay and two awesome sauvignon blancs for less than $50 total.

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There is a point on San Vicente while running West when one rounds a corner and is confronted with — shockingly — what appears to be the entire Pacific Ocean. It is an awe-inspiring sight, even at night. It is at this point, during what is more or less a fifteen mile run, that I usually realize I’ve forgotten to do something to protect my nipples. Aside from the Marathon, this route is the longest I’ve ever run. On little three- and six-mile runs I don’t need to do anything about my chest. On a fifteen mile run, though, thousands of thumping strides will cause a man’s t-shirt to chafe and rub against his nipples until they bleed. The adrenaline and runner’s high will prevent you from realizing how much damage you’ve done to your vestigial mammary glands until you finally arrive home and toss your sweat-drenched clothes into a heap in the bathroom floor. The blisters on your feet, the near-unbearable soreness of your legs and lower back and even arms, the inevitable lingering desire for water … none of these things the next day can compare to the burning pain of having basically rubbed off your nipples. File under: Ouch.

One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.

Last week I finally read The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by Mark Kurlansky. My dad gave it to me while we were in Vegas last month but I didn’t get to seriously dig into it because I’ve been a bit swamped at work lately. Kurlansky is a wonderful writer and this is the third of his books that I’ve read. The Big Oyster is every bit as fascinating as Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History. Most of my friends roll their eyes at me when I tell them this, but it’s true. Since I’m from Rhode Island, I have always sort of thought of oysters as second-class bivalves, bastard, grotesque step-brothers of my beloved littleneck clams. Now I have a new respect for them and even slurped a raw one tonight — we had dinner at The Palm with my girlfriend’s parents.

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