Morning in Paradise.
July 12, 2009
A familiar part of the morning routine.
Despite the complete lack of behavioral evidence to support this claim, I am a morning person. Early mornings have a way of making the world seem simpler and so much less crowded. The root of this simplicity is routine, and nothing simplifies life more than a routine. Years ago I worked nights at a grocery store, and ever since then I have longed for that sense of routine that had me driving home before most people had left the house and leaving the house after most business had closed for the day. It sounds harsh, but I was pleased to review an old blog post—one of my first—and read the following:
“…its just the same as any full timer only I sleep when they work and vice versa. I love my job though, and not everyone can say that.”
These days, I don’t have a routine and my life is hardly simple, but I am thrilled to say that I have come full circle and I still love my job(s). I do miss really enjoying mornings though, and since I woke up before 11:00 AM on a Sunday, I felt I needed to be rewarded for that.
It appears someone else did too.
I took the opportunity to check out Paradise Café for the first time, and walked away with a cup of coffee that may as well have been my gold star for getting my lazy self out of bed. As a first impression, Paradise Café respects a desire for good coffee experience, serving locally roasted Nor’west Coffee. Tucked into
Paradise Cafe endorses the $2 bill and the $1 coin.
a corner on Main St. at the edge of downtown, they’re easy to overlook but hard to forget once you’ve been there. If you’re a coffee novice, they’ll give you a solid cup o’ joe. For the connoisseur, they’ve got an assortment of loose leaf teas and press pours brewed to order. As an additional treat, I received a $1 coin and a $2 bill in change. Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at their menu and drop in sometime.
At the moment, the owners are considering extending Paradise Café hours to 7:00 or 8:00 PM and seeking feedback on the idea. If there’s anything driving me nuts about Vancouver Cafés, it’s that I’m hard-pressed to find one open past 5:00. If they extend their hours, they’ll certainly have my patronage. I mean, heck, they’ve even got free WiFi…
If the whole world moved to their favorite vacation spots, then the whole world would live in Hawaii and Italy and Cleveland.
-Floyd
I’m my own grandpa’
July 4, 2009
“…and just like for an instant, all his life is just folding in on itself and it’s obvious to him that time is a lie.”
Sippin' Rogue at the Terrace.
A year ago when I was blasting off fireworks with siblings that were strangers to me merely three years ago, I figured it wouldn’t be possible for another Independence Day to live up that one. Never again would I have such a unique combination of family, friends, fireworks, and spirits.
Cafe Flame Lily, which I broke into.
A year later, well, it still seems pretty impossible. I certainly would have never thought I’d come close though. I woke up today on a sofa in Tacoma, Washington. I ended the day sipping a mini Afritini at Café Flame Lily, an African Cuisine Restaurant that I broke into.* I also had dinner with the mayor of Lake Oswego and enjoyed some fantastic food expertly prepared and served by the staff of Terrace Kitchen. We swapped crazy family stories sipped Arnold Palmers (iced tea and lemonade), and enjoyed a panoramic view of a dozen fireworks shows in Portland and various surrounding areas.
All because I decided to attend a jazz jam session at Proper Eats on Thursday night. Causality is a crazy thing.
I’d love to elaborate, but it’s damned late. Happy Fourth, y’all.
*for the record, I did not actually commit breaking and entering.
Oh yeah. Tell me about your terabytes, baby.
July 2, 2009
According to NaBloPoMo, it is National Blog posting Month, a “fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you.” Since I am an irritable tech curmudgeon , I will take this moment to share what an irritatingly obnoxious idea it is to encourage people with the overdeveloped sense of self importance to post every day for a month, particularly when there are organizations working very hard to archive all this crap that we’re spewing into the collective eConsciousness.
The camera which recorded the plenary session on data storage. I took a picture of it in an existential moment.
A few months back I attended the Sixth Media in Transition Conference at MIT where the plenary session “Institutional Perspectives on Storage” primarily consisted of the panelists, archivists from various European organizations, getting off on how much storage space they had to offer. My favorite contribution came from Richard Wright, an archivist from the BBC who not only pointed out that they had the least amount of space to offer because they only archived items of value, but also shared that as the amount of space we have for storage has increased exponentially, the durability and reliability of the medium decreased exponentially. This is why we have stone tablets with three digits on them that are thousands of years old, but have to buy a new flash drive every other month or so.
I also admired Wright because he was brazen enough to not only illustrate a file corruption example using an image of Steamboat Willie, but also add the caption “Used Without Permission.” Wright has certainly got some balls bollocks going up against Disney, but perhaps the BBC is full of hardcore badasses cheeky bastards, and the archivists are the cheekiest. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lets move on.
The issue of archival stayed with us well into the session on information sharing. In response to a fascinating presentation by Alison Byerly entitled What Not to Save: The Future of Ephemera, I formulated what some tweeters would call the “Scrooge McDuck Theory of History.” This was partly a mistake, since I only likened obsession with saving ridiculous amounts of useless data to Scrooge McDuck swimming in a pool of more money than he could ever spend. My real point was the fact regardless of the effort we put into archiving damn near everything, historians 10,100, and 1000 years down the road will be obsessed with whatever we don’t save anyways.
So yes, I refuse to support this silly cause, and it is only by mere coincidence that I have now posted every day in July. All two of them.
What’s the point? We all gonna die anyways.
-Meatwad
I dub thee…
July 1, 2009
Yes friends, it’s official. I’ve coughed up $15, and now my little corner of the interweb may be found at juliosus.com, from this day forward.I intend to celebrate by breaking a bottle of champagne on my monitor.
As you may or may not know, I began this crazy little blogging adventure four years and a month ago, working the night shift at Safeway in the summer between undergrad and grad school. I actually had full intentions of quitting, but I heard a statistic that the vast majority of blogs receive little attention and go the way of the dodo. Since nothing irritates me more than following the crowd, I cherished in my low numbers and kept up my blogging to spite both the trend and myself. Much to my bemusement, I’m still at it. I’d like to quit, but now that Twitter is the thing to do and blogging is sooooooo last year, I’m even more proud to stick my domain name flag in the ground and keep shouting nonsense into the abyss. Bring it, fool.
In the spirit of this occasion, I figured it would be best to re-visit the disclaimer which I carefully articulated on old Extroverted Introversion back in February 2006. Some of the info is outdated, so I’ve made a few corrections. For the most part, it still rings true.
Disclaimer.
I hear that part of the reason people chose to have blogs is so they can keep people updated on their personal activities, provide some kind of social commentary, or serve some greater universal entertainment purpose. I would like to take this opportunity to re-assert the following:
1) My life is boring. It consists of playing the bass, studying working, being very poor, reading, sleeping, and the occasional social activity. Most of my posts are derived from how boring my life is. If something interesting does happen to me I do not hesitate to mention it. If my life seems to be full of exiting or interesting events, I’m probably making some of them up (but not the Red Power Ranger post. That one was real).
2) I do not feel obligated to offer social commentary. If I do provide it, I take no responsibility for my opinions. The opinions stated in this blog do not necessarily represent those of the owner, moderator, and sole contributor of this blog, because even I don’t really listen to what I’m saying.
3) I do not find myself particularly entertaining. If I entertain you by means of blog, that is not my intention. Being un-entertaining is also not my intention. I do not intend to invoke any manner of emotional response (including no response) from the reader. If the reader is entertained, I am surprised.
4) If my blog causes dizziness, headaches, loose stools, dementia, upset stomach, loss of motor skills, convulsion, hives, drymouth, unproductivity, drowsiness, conception, sudden loss of sex drive, seizures, shortness of breath, restlessness, scorching of the colon, decapitation, increased sex drive, depression, spontaneous combustion, or unexpected temporal displacement, I will take credit, but no responsibility.
Why you gotta’ bring up old stuff?
-Riley Freeman
Mom, you really know how to hydrate a pizza.
June 26, 2009
San Francisco Airport - Free coffee courtesy of hotels.com
Woke up in Palm Springs at 4:30 AM to catch a flight. Used the wireless internet to prepare a blog post about a Canadian show that ran its course in 2008 that I’m catching up with through online streaming video. Forgot my Lakewood shuttle reservation and pulled it from my email using my mobile phone (fortunately the terminal had a USB wall charger for free use). Landed in San Francisco at 8:30 AM, where I plugged into the wireless network using a Boingo subscription I picked up five months ago in New York. Tried to catch a friend in San Francisco whose number I didn’t have, so I tossed him a facebook message and found out he was back in Boston, which reminded me that I needed to update a document from a a tech conference which I had left on a 2 gig Mini card back in Palm Springs. My flight was late so I called my fiancee, who I missed terribly. I then napped for an hour on the floor.
Caught my flight at 11:47 AM and, upon reaching cruising altitude, watched a video game review (produced by a British-born Australian) which I had downloaded several hours prior. Was delayed in catching my shuttle since my carry-on luggage was checked when an elderly gentleman took the last overhead bin with a box containing a set of digital picture frames. After another short nap, I would be further delayed when the descending escalator in the terminal wouldn’t allow me to reach floor 3 of the parking garage, and a malfunctioning GPS system held up my shuttle. Somehow I was able to get back to my mother’s home in Tacoma by 5:30 PM where I prepared a frozen pizza before watching ’90s cartoon on reruns YouTube with my brother. Finished up by buying a 2002 comic using a borrowed Barnes & Noble membership accessed via cell phone number.
Just another run-of-the-mill 21st century day.
Remembering the “fun” in “dysfunction.”
June 20, 2009
Breakfast @ Mamacita's Mexican Cafe
I’ve performed enough improvised music to recognize the odd, chaotic way related events can line up to make fortune or misfortune alike. Buying Douglas Coupland’s All Families Are Psychotic on a whim a couple days before my own family life played a variation on that exact theme was, if anything, musical. Long lost uncles who work on fishing boats dropping in from Alaska and unheard-of cousins calling me on my way home from work, for me, is getting off light.
Am I complaining or am I celebrating? Neither. As I said, this is business as usual for me. Attempting to
I'm gonna' need glasses too? Oy...
genetically decipher your future balding patterns, discomfort with flying, and condiment preferences from people you last saw before you lost your baby teeth is simply part of the fun. I quote a purple haired vixen from a fanfiction novel based on an anime series from the mid-‘90s:
It’s just nice to think that there’s a reason why you’re so messed up. That there are people somewhere that just by the sheer power of their genes made you this way. It’s nice to think the way you are isn’t an accident.
Wise words, Ms. Valentine.
Giving the people what they want.
June 18, 2009
I got the pleasure of seeing this on my blog stats this morning. I imagine it has something to do with this post.
Extroverted Introversion: covering your hairdresser dominatrix news needs since 2005.
My 15 minutes of “fame.”
April 29, 2009
One of my personal favorite bloggers, author/speaker/generally-awesome-dude Daniel Pink posted a picture of “emotionally intelligent signage” that I snapped in a Bangkok shopping mall. This is me feeling special. Sadly, I didn’t include a link to my blog when I sent it to him, so you won’t see an Extroverted Introversion book deal, reality tv show, or novelty badminton set anytime soon.
Check it out: Emotionally intelligent signage in a hurry.
My favorite response: Sorry don’t get it, why are knees bent??
I am trapped in this silly boat.
April 3, 2009
So this has been a few days of grading and writing. More grading than writing really, but a lot of both nonetheless. Since I can’t get anything done at home (been like that for years), that explains my consistent up-and-about-ness on the coffee shop front.
I did have an odd existential moment today, courtesy of Microsft Word. While using the “track changes” feature, I was prompted to choose to either Accept Change or Reject Change. “My word!” I thought (my inner monologue being a woman in her early ’50s), “that’s quite a big choice they’re asking me to make.” Not wanting to make a big thing of it, I opted to accept change, and I have not looked back. I applaud Microsoft Word for challenging its users to decide whether to go with the flow or rage against the machine.
“In this old ship I spend my life
With stupid captain and his stinky hat…it’s pathetic.”
-Shane Harden – “Living With Pirates”
It’s already a good day.
March 28, 2009
"I'll have a 12 oz. wet cappuccino...no, an 8 oz...actually I'll just have an 8 oz. coffee...12 oz."
I’ve been back from Southeast Asia for a little over a week now, and I had my first dream about it last night. I found myself back in Fiji, checking into a hotel. Our attache let us know that we should probably hurry up and eat because there was another event we had to get to, but I wanted to stay at the buffet dinner longer. I decided to stick around a bit longer, but ended up not eating very much. I seemed momentarily confused, but when I gathered my bearings, the whole place was empty and I had no idea where I was supposed to go. I walked out of the hotel and realized that there was a softball game that I was supposed to be in. There were a lot of players in the game, including the big dude from The Italian Job and our embassy rep from Samoa. I woke up before I got to play in the game.
On a separate note, I thought of new email addresses for those in need of a new eIdentity.
- duplexinmychest@gmail.com
- distilledturkey@gmail.com
- ahtgeemayle_duttcahm@gmail.com
For those keeping track, expect a full week of updates from Tangerine this coming week.
It’s good to be back.
“Teeny Little Super Guy
Pops right up before your eyes.
He’s no bigger than your thumb.
‘Snap you’re fingers, here I come!’
Don’t look in the sky,
Don’t look in the sea,
He’s inside of you and me.
You can’t tell a hero by his size.
‘I’m just a teeny little Super Guy (Oh Yeah…)’.“
