Apparently somone forgot to tell me that in Buffalo when it rains really hard, the roads turn into rivers.

Elmwood was pretty bad. Since my escape route back home was cut off and I was on the north section of Elmwood, I thought that I'd fare better on Sheridan. Since Sheridan's a big, heavily used road I thought that its storm drains would be more effective.

Apparently not.



Yes, those are waves. Lucky for me the moon wasn't out, otherwise I'd never get back home.



It's a bird, it's a SUV, it's a jetski, it's...it's...nope, it's just a SUV.



When roads become rivers, sidewalks become roads. I was not proud of what I did and the grass that I and everyone else in Buffalo ruined. But sometimes ya gotta do what'cha gotta do.

Last night, I was really bored. I don't know anyone in this town, so hanging out with friends wasn't an option. There were no movies playing that I wanted to see save Da Vinci Code, and I'm trying to finish the book before I go see the movie. And I looked over a listing of the day's music acts, and nothing looked very interesting; of course, I don't really know the music scene is like up here and which bands are any good, so I usually look at genre and make my best guess.

By some miracle, I had overlooked English Beat's free concert at Gateway Park (apparently Buffalo has more than just one free concert at Lafeyette Square). After 45 minutes of trying to find the place (and missing the previous band(s), I got to see most of English Beat's main act, which was pretty good and really energetic. I didn't see no rude boys, but quite a few people at the front of the stage were skanking.

Overall, I think I'm proud of myself for not having given into the temptation to either see a lame movie I didn't really want to see or to spend the entire night blasting the ficticious residents of San Andreas.

I had originally dismissed my Foreman grill-owning friends as members of a kookie brand-worshipping cult. But after 4 months of living up here with a harried work schedule and having to make a variety of quick meals, I have come to the conclusion that these devices are in fact "The Bachelor's Swiss Army Knife".

People:
1. How did you find out about/why did you become of estrip?

I forget, but it might have been Artvoice's ill-fated Buffalo Geeks movement. Several of the posters to the mailing list had journals here, and "one link lead to another" in typical Internet fashion.

2. How "out" are you about having a publicly accessible online journal. Do your friends know? Does your family know? Do your co-workers know? Does your boss know? Do you use your real name? Do you use your real photo?

No one knows. I've kind of made my presence on this site part of "life up here". I keep it separate from another blog detailing my life back home/down there.

3. How many epeeps have you met real life?

0, unfortunately. I've only been living here a short while and the opportunity hasn't presented itself.

4. How has estrip changed the way that you meet people, on and/or off line?

It's probably pushed my efforts at socialization more towards one type of people/set of venues than another.

5. How has estrip affected you love life?

It hasn't. I've generally kept my love life separate from my postings.

6. How many of your friends have joined estrip because of your influence?

When I have friends up here, I'll let you know.

7. Are you from Buffalo/do you live in Buffalo?

I'm not originally from Buffalo. I moved here several months ago from North Carolina. Though my parents met here in the 60's, so in some broad way I do have a few Buffalo roots.

Equipment:
1. What type of hardware or software purchases have you made as a result of using estrip?

None, though (e:strip) has inspired me to write software to make my (e:strip)/Buffalo experience more enjoyable and give me a creative outlet that I really don't have at work.

2. Have you used the mobile version of estrip? Why or why not?

I don't have cell internet service.

Lifestyle:
1. In what way has estrip changed your Internet surfings habits? Describe the amount of time you spend on estrip, when you use it and about how long?

(e:strip) has saved me from becoming a luddite who has almost nothing to do with computers in his spare time. The people on the site make computers tolerable enough for me to forget that I program them for nine hours a day.

1a. How many journals do you usually read per day?

3-8, depending on how spicy they are.

2. In what ways has estrip changed the way you perceive your local community?

Since moving here, I haven't had a lot of chances to interact with the Buffalo community, so (e:strip) is sort of like a surrogate.

3. How has journaling about your life affected the way you spend your free time?

I don't journal every day, but the one or two times a week I journal, I spend a lot of time (hour+) thinking about what I'm going to write.

4. Has estrip changed your living situation in any way?

Not being very familiar with the town, it's helped to point me out towards things worth doing.

5. Do you find that you mediate/document more of your experiences now that you share them with others?

I've always journaled a small fraction of my experiences in any blog I write.

6. Has publishing on estrip affected the way that write?

Did you mean to say "Has publishing on (e:strip) had any measurable effect on your writing?"

7. Do you have other online journals? If so, with what service and has estrip affected your usage of that journal?

Just the standard home-rolled wordpress kind. It's nice, though, having some other person administer the blogging system for a change.

8. Have you ever gotten in trouble for using estrip at work?

No, and I don't intend to. I try to keep (e:strip) something I do off the clock. I also try to put nothing in my entries that could be conveniantly Google'd by my employers and directly linked back to me and get me in trouble. Not that I have any intention of posting anything confidential or secretive, but I want to be able to talk about the occasional rough day at work in a generalized kind of way (e.g "My boss was really grumpy", etc) without making more trouble for myself than I have to. That's the main reason why I've still declined to replace the default face with a more meaningful picture.


9. If you have stopped using estrip, why

Haven't stopped yet.

HOLY COW! WE WON THE STANLEY CUP!!!



I raise my tall glass of freshly-brewed southern sweet tea to my victorious home team. People said you couldn't do it and that you'd let your "redneck" fanbase down, and you responded to those people not with equally harsh words but rather superior sportsmanship while your fans responded, eventually, with equally serious enthusiasm. You've rekindled my belief in the good guy who doesn't stoop to the negative levels of his adversaries winning in the end. You have truly lived up to your motto of the season: Whatever It Takes.

My only regret is that I'm 600+ miles away and unable to attend the celebrations.

Today is June 6, 2006.

6/6/6.

6 added together three times is 18.

18 spelled out in Hebrew forms (WIKIPEDIA - Chai_%28symbol%29), the symbol for life.

In summary, I'm lousy about doing laundry, and I'm an even worse satanist. The first few weeks I lived here, I had noticed that at corner of Utica and Richmond embedded in the sidewalk was a hand print and three plastic dice (all sixes). When I first saw this arrangement, I had thought "A Hamsa (WIKIPEDIA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khamsa) and three dice that total number 18--the person at this house must really be trying to ward off evil spirits".

It was only when a friend visiting from out of town pointed out the whole "Damian" thing that I realized the person on the corner was going for the Mark Of The Beast and not the denomination of bar-mitzvah gifts.

Several pieces of good news.

First, we won against Oilers!!! In honor of this event, I'm renaming the venue geocoding software I'm writing to "Category5". My dream of getting the latitude and longitude of every bar in Buffalo is slowly turning into reality.

Second, I'm flying home on Friday to see the folks back home. While I'm not fond of missing the Allentown festival, it's more than made up for by seeing the people I care about who I haven't seen for nearly four months.

Third, I've finally figured out how to put images on estrip after puzzling over it the process for several days.



I was driving down Elmwood several days ago, and out of the blue was a sign that I've been trying to meet women in all the wrong places ;) (not photoshopped--I really found it this way).

Go Team.

First the bad, because maybe putting the good at the end will remind me that there's more to life than the latest thing that I let stress me out way too much. When I moved into my apartment, I signed up for electric service with this company called "National Grid", who were formerly known as "Niagara Mohawk", who were probably formerly known as something else before the all-too familiar conglomeration we see these days. I'm using the term "signed up" very liberally; they're the only game in town for electricity, so it's not like I've really got a choice where my electrons are coming from.

So I sign up for National Grid's on-line service that would allow me pay my bill via the Internet, and like a lot of companies, they stop sending you the dead-tree version of your bill when you decide you'd like the Internet to be one of several different payment options. So you've got to remember that you aren't going to get that letter in the mail, and I happened to forget; since I've moved from NC, there have been dozens of things I've had to sign up for and send off, and occasionally one gets by. So I wondered when I was going to get my bill in the mail, and a month and a half later, I got one of those letters politefully reminding me just what a utility company can do to you if you don't pay them.

Like the mature adult I pretend to be, I tried to make good on my mistake and tried doing National Grid's on-line payment thing. As these past few months I've made a habit of hording most of my earnings, it wasn't like money was an issue, I just needed a way to pay these people, and do it quickly before my credit rating got trashed. But when I got to the on-line section, there was no "pay by credit/debit card". WTF??!!! In NC, all the utility companies give you the option to put your payment on your card (for a modest fee). But National Grid? Nope. The only way you can pay these idiots electronically is going through the whole rigamarole of putting in your bank account # and your check routing #. So I fired up my browser, put the relevant pieces of account info in their various fields, clicked "Submit", and I thought that everything was resolved. Like hell it was.

One *week* later, I get an e-mail from National Grid, telling me that the transaction didn't go through. Yup. One week. This is supposed to be the Information Age. People I pay good money to are supposed to use at least a small fraction of that money to competantly set up a computer system that gives me my billing information right away, particularly when it is in *their* own interest to part me from my money as quick as possible. But this didn't happen; National Grid waited an entire week to tell me something went wrong. With my trust in their computer system completely shattered, I go ultra-low tech and send these folks a check, thinking that there would be no way they could screw this up or be ambiguous about the results of my payment. Boy, I was wrong.

Yesterday, National Grid sends me another letter, this time saying that the check I sent them was "dishonored". I've spent the last three months without a new iPod or laptop to make sure that there's 20-30 times the amount of that check sitting in the bank. No way could this have bounced. I check my National Grid account on-line--my balance was reported as being paid off; but as these people waited a week to tell me the funds didn't transfer the first time, it's not really like I can trust their on-line service and the balance it's reporting. I check my bank's on-line banking site--the check cleared, as I knew it would. So if the check cleared, why the hell did National Grid send me that stupid letter?

I call National Grid in the hopes of finding a human who can straighten this thing out. Fighting my way through a phone system practically designed to discourage one from talking to a fellow primate, I eventually reach a customer service representitive, but she ends up being even more obstinant than a machine. She repeatedly tells me that I still have the outstanding balance to pay off, and all my attempts to explain that her business' *own* on-line system is showing the balance entirely paid off merely gets me the response "talk to your bank". When I insist that I have to pay this thing off as soon as possible, she recommends I use the same on-line bank draft system that had originally got me in this mess. It's like calling up the fire department to report your charcoal grill being engulfed in flames, and being told the problem is that you just haven't squirted on enough lighter fluid. "Just another dab'll do you--we swear!"

So I call up my bank. The bank's customer service representitive tells me she has no way of figuring out why the direct draft from checking didn't work, but she does tell me that the check I sent a week ago cleared. I even call up National Grid's phone info system, and it's even telling me my balance has been paid off. So why does this stupid person on the phone continually insist that I have to pay some balance, and that their business' inability to coherently represent the state of my account is the problem of myself and my bank? Who the hell ever decided that it was a good idea to give these dolts a municipally-sanctioned monopoly, let alone lots of heavy equipment that they could hurt themselves with?

I suppose I could have spared the 1000 words I've written simply by writing "National Grid Sucks". Or I could even have not bothered writing this posting at all, and instead could have written my elected officials and asked them to either force National Grid to behave like a responsible company, or to deregulate the electric utility system altogether and let customers choose who they're getting power from. This would probably be the more positive way to deal with the situation. I know that this will iron itself out sooner or later, I've just got so much on my plate right now and this is the very last thing that I needed to deal with.

Now for the good. The Hurricanes are still in the game, and tomorrow they'll be playing (and hopefully winning) in the RBC center. I am proud of my team no matter the outcome, and I am proud to have sat in my cap and gown during January's graduation ceremony on what is essentially center ice of tomorrow's game. And maybe the tickets at RBC didn't sell out quite as fast as here, but the fans who are there have been pushing the decibel meter quite a bit on TV. And while there were certainly a lot of Sabres fans coming to cheer on their team in our home territory (as they rightly should), I at least tried to do the same and cheered on the Canes for the first few games in Jimmy Mac's (and only stopped after I had to walk away from patrons trying to pick fights and I got more or less got kicked out of the bar for cheering for the other team). No matter what happens, I think the season's gone really well for everyone involved.

LET'S GO CANES!!!

Wow. This weekend is really one of missed connections and unfortunate circumstance.

On Thursday, I missed Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, who were playing at a concert series that I didn't know existed. I would've liked to have seen them; however good or bad they are, they cater to my nostalgia for the days of my youth when I'd go to Chapel HIll to see Squirrel Nut Zippers shows at the Cat's Cradle for $5 (before they became big and started charging $20 at big arenas).


On Friday, I found out that someone has been putting on free concerts in Buffalo and that I've totally been missing them. Having recently moved, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's still a lot of learning that I have to do in the department of where to find good cheap entertainment (I'm still looking for a $1.50 movie theater with second-run movies, like the Blue Ridge had back home). For most of the time I've been here, the majority of my live music experience has been catching the Lance Diamond show at the Elmwood Lounge. It's a great act and the man is truly an entertainer, but my Motown/70's music circuits are starting to get a little overloaded.

Saturday afternoon, I find out that (e:strip) is having some sort of get-together, which I can't attend because my father is visiting from Durham to help me do some final setup of my apartment. In the grand scheme of things, family is more important than finding out whether someone's voice really sounds like how I imagine it to sound. But now I'm going to have this lingering curiosity that's not going to go away until the next (e:strip) function (whenever that is).

On the bright side, I get memorial day off from work, so it's an extra day that I can spend entirely with my dad.