March 2008

I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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Right around 11 o’clock on the night of Sunday, March 16^th, is when my dad and I realized that our iPods had been stolen from our hotel room at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. My dad had left his charging on the bathroom counter and mine had been in the zippered front pocket of my bookbag with my headphones wrapped around it. We both knew immediately that they had to have been stolen, but we still tore the room apart looking for them. And we went down to the rental car and inspected every inch of it. It was laughable, of course. If you know me at all, you know I am absolutely psychotic about losing things.

After about an hour of searching, my dad was ready to go to bed. He had shot a 95 at Desert Pines that morning — his best round ever and first time to break 100! — and knew there was little chance that hotel security was going to care and / or help us at all. I was so angry I couldn’t see straight.
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Totally awesome: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

A year or two ago I was returning to my office from lunch with some co-workers. I spotted an old, rusty, razor blade on the sidewalk. “You don’t see that every day,” I said. In retrospect I was probably wrong. Everyone likely sees dozens of rusty razor blades on sidewalks and in gutters every day. We just don’t notice them. That’s not the point. The point is that I told my friend, Jon, that it would make a good domain name. “You should register rustyrazorblade.com,” I said. And he did. Now, if you’re looking for an esoteric, complicated, intense Apache and / or MySQL resource, it’s the place to go. True story.

Last night I finished reading When the Mob Ran Vegas, a great book that I grabbed at the McCarran Airport on my last trip to Sin City. At times the book suffers from some pretty poor grammar and editing, but the stories are so fascinating that you can forgive the author’s quirky, personal style. Plus, I mean, the guy has got to have a contract on his head; there are dozens of personal anecdotes involving organized crime and its perpetrators, and he really lays the lumber to Sinatra a few times. My mom’s side of the family is 100% Italian — the old school Rhode Island kind <wink wink> — so I recognized pretty much all the characters. (Tales of “the Family” were frequent dinner conversation at my house when I was a kid.) I really enjoyed reading about all the connections to Hollywood and the movie industry, too. If you order a copy from the author’s website, he’ll send you an autographed copy.

I am amazed that Paper Denim & Cloth doesn’t have its own website. I have searched Google and cannot find any authoritative site for the company. How strange. You’re selling $200 pairs of jeans and you don’t have a website?

Anyway. I was pretty proud of myself for snagging a brand new pair of PD&C on eBay for only $35. The original price tag showed that they were retailing for $198.00, so I felt like I made a steal. But then it was pretty funny when I wore them to work today and found another, handwritten, price tag stuffed in the pocket.

Good Will $6.99

I just noticed that a few days ago was the eighth anniversary of this blog. It seems like only yesterday …

Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save the day. Alas, after about five hours troubleshooting and researching and on the phone with Microsoft and Dell customer support, I was forced to admit that the hard drive was toast. Three different Dell technicians all gave me the same advice: Reformat the hard drive and reinstall WindowsXP.

Doing that would have deleted all of her data — including her 3000+ iTunes library. This was clearly not a good solution.
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My dad and I met in Vegas for a weekend of golfing after I visited the huge Con/Agg convention with Kelly and Bill. We stayed at The Tropicana, a classic Vegas hotel that has fallen on hard times. The place is just a wreck. Every night and every morning there was trash in the hallways, bits of paper, candy bar wrappers, ashtrays (on our no smoking floor). Someone had smashed the glass fire extinguisher box near the elevators and there was broken glass on the floor this morning. It was really just pathetic. The safe in our room’s closet was malfunctioning so if I wanted to stash any valuables I was out of luck.

In a decent hotel you’d expect the maid service to do several standard things: replace the towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, and used toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, soap), make the beds, and throw the trash. I’ve been traveling a sick amount in the last six to ten years and I’ve gotten accustomed to getting at least those things done. Not at the Trop. They made the beds. That’s it. No new towels, no shampoo, no soap, trash wasn’t thrown … you get the idea. My dad and I both have pretty short hair, so it wasn’t until Sunday night that we had to call the front desk — press zero on the phone, all of the special phone buttons like bellhop, room service, security, etc. were inoperable — to request more shampoo. And that is when we realized that both of our iPods had been stolen.

His 30GB and my 60GB (with my favorite Sony headphones) were jacked from room 559 at some point between about 6pm and midnight on Saturday. I know it was between those hours because that was the only time period in which my laptop bookbag — where I had stashed my iPod — was not locked in the trunk of dad’s rental car. We took our laptops and stuff like that with us when we went golfing, and left them locked in the car when we were away from the hotel room. Sucks.
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If you’re looking for the best fish and chips in Los Angeles, head to The Gardens on Glendon. Tricia and I had dinner last night at this little place in Westwood — basically on the UCLA campus — and the simple fried cod and shoestring potatoes dish once again shocked me with its awesomosity. Yes, it’s a $24 entree and yes, everything at the restaurant is magnificently overpriced, but I’ve had fish and chips from one side of America to the other (and in London, too) and theirs is the best. (You can get the exact same dish at their sister restaurant, Kate Mantilini’s.)
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I really dig the idea of Campus Quilt. I have probably a good two hundred t-shirts from crew and college; and growing up in Daytona was like living in a land of free t-shirts. And, hey, they say that “We completely quilt the entire quilt on a commercial quilting machine.” It’s quiltarific!

On Sunday I ran the XXIII^rd Los Angeles Marathon. My goal was to beat my time from last year, when I ran it in about four hours and forty-five minutes. Unfortunately I was felled by a wicked flu bug about two weeks ago which knocked me on my ass for a while. I didn’t start training until the end of January and taking a forced ten-day break right before the race didn’t help. I managed to murderize the 26.2 miles in 5:40, about an hour worse than last year (but about ten minutes better than two years ago). I swore that this would be my last one, but I can’t live with that time, so it looks like I’ll be back for 2009 …

allison: did you know i also get earthquake text messages?
allison: anything over 4.0 in so cal
allison: bitchin
GatorDVG: so when the big ones comes and you’re lying under a pile of rubble, like five minutes later you’ll get a text message
GatorDVG: that’s great
allison: yeah well i’d like to know how bad it was
GatorDVG: you’ll be able to tell by simply counting how many of your limbs were severed
allison: totally
allison: but in numbers

I graduated from Father Lopez Catholic High School in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1991. I was, if I remember correctly, the Vice President of my Senior class. I was on the Model United Nations and in the drama club. I spent a few months on the swim team and on the track team. I was in and out of the French club. I was in and out of detention much, much more frequently. I loved my teachers. I loved my classmates. I had a great time in high school.

When I graduated they put a plaque with my photo on it on the wall of the cafeteria, the first “Crest of the Wave” award … er … awarded. I took all the honors classes offered. I had a stellar GPA and I produced, wrote, and starred in our Homecoming pep rally. I got suspended once for lighting the door to the teacher’s lounge on fire. I had — literally — the keys to the campus and would go on weekends to help teachers with projects. Over the course of one semester I managed to methodically and surreptitiously steal each and every one of the bathroom hall passes. I was voted “Most Intelligent” in my Senior yearbook. I was the DJ for our school dances. I was the star of the theater department.

We were the Fighting Green Waves and we had a ridiculous cheer about “rolling, rolling, rolling” over the competition:

Deep down in the ocean (Deep down in the ocean!)
I heard a great roar (I heard a great roar!)
Was a mighty mighty wave (Was a mighty mighty wave!)
And it went like this (And it went like this!)
Rolly-rolly-rolly roll! (Rolly-rolly-rolly roll!)

I didn’t just love my high school. I ruled my high school.

So it was with some sadness today that I read that they’re tearing down my old school. It will soon be replaced by a Super Wal-Mart. They’re building a new school way out on LPGA Blvd. It’s an odd feeling. I no longer keep in touch with any of my classmates and I haven’t visited the campus since about a year after I graduated. But it was my high school, dammit. My parents were divorced when I was very young so I don’t really have a “home” from my childhood. Both my maternal grandparents have died and their home is not in our family any more. My mom seems to move to a new house every four or five years. My paternal grandmother sold her house in Massachusetts a few years ago and moved to a new place in Rhode Island. My dad got divorced (from his second wife) so the house where I spent my summers is now owned by some randoms. I am very much a man without a past. Now that my high school will soon be gone, there is not a single physical location from my youth remaining. That’s kind of a bummer.