A security firm came to speak at our blockclub meeting and gave us
these safety pamphlets. Are these really commonly held misconceptions?

work
After a nice long weekend, I had a crazy day of programming, demonstrating, writing letters, meetings and quick hacks. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better. I am feeling frustrated with how slow everything moves at my work and how every conversation requires 75 minutes of small talk before the matter at hand can be addressed. I am so bad at small talk when something time dependent is waiting. Maybe I am just a boring person.

Home Life
The anniversary was nice. We spent the day just hanging out together and fixing things. We fixed a drain and installed a new lamp in our bedroom closet. Then (e:matthew) and I took a bath while (e:terry) studied and at the end of the day we went to Mother's for dinner where I had an 18oz ribeye steak that was so delcious.

So were these little neck clams


Along the way we went shopping at some antique stores and I saw this tray. I always wanted one of these. I also bought a lamb roast to match. Friday, they will meet each other and then my stomach.



They also had these crazy lights in there basement. What were they for. Medical use, disco lights?


Robbers
About 10 people/cars/houses on our block have been robbed including our neighbors the other day. We saw a dude enter their house through the door and we just assumed it was a worker because when I checked the door it was locked. The dude then stole all of their electonics and shipped them over the back fence. I wish I had realized what was going on.

Then last night on the way home from dinner some very capable look, young black guy begged us for money - that annoys me more than anything. I am fine with the cripples and crazzies and old people but when young people who are clearly in better physical shape than me ask for money - I find it hard to believe they can't do something to for work. On the way out the woman who sat next to us found her window smashed. He was still there bothering people for money. He either did it or saw who did it.

I think they may have caught the house robber and it was the same guy that robbed out house two years ago ;(

Other forms of robbery include food costs. I just can't ebeliev how much food costs keep skyrocketing. Look at the cost of these freaking cookies.



Here is a pic of (e:terry) looking cute just before his haircut.

So after the Scion show (Communist Party) (e:terry) and I came home and tried to go to Ohm but it was shut down so we decided to sprint on down to underground and see if anyone we knew was out.

When we were there we hung out with our friend Christoph and some older guy in jeans and leather v-neck open furry chest teeshirt came over to talk to us. He said and I quote:

We better vote for McCain beacuse if we don't its gonna be the beginning of the Niggers and Spics ruling the streets.

I am not even sure what his reasoning was or if it was just that Obama is black, and what do the "spics" have to do with it? I wish I had paid more attention so I could have gotten some better quotes but I was too drunk and didn't want to get into a fight.

I mean think about it. There we were in the gayest of all gay bars, where you would expect people to be the most liberal. It just goes to show you that no group of people consists of just one type of person.

Everyone kows how I feel about marketing. Especially, in your face marketing but what i saw a the Communist Party at Sound Lab - took the prize for most digusting in your face advertising I have ever witnessed. It got so bad that (e:terry) and I left as we couldn't even enjoy the music anymore. I know that events are sponsored and sponsored events have advertising but this took it is a new more sinister direction which intergrated every aspct of the event with the advertiser and every surface with advertisment.

When we first got there I was really enjoying the music. The DJ was and she was totally amazing. I think my favorite party was her playing a childrens light up electric sword during her live set. None of my criticism for the event has anything to do with her. Her blog is also pretty entertaining I wish she blogged here.

Back to the event...

If you haven't been to soundlab the setup is pretty cool. They have a bar on the right and booths in a corner to left. The stage is in the middle. When we first got there, we went over to the bar to get some beers and I noticed that on the side wall there was a scion video advertisement playing. I thought it was weird but then i thought, maybe it was just a TV channel. Then it kept playing and playing. I just ignored it.

Then the place was so packed that we headed over to the booths for a bit to sit. In the booths were hundreds of scion keychains. I thought, I started to take pics.



Well someone must have noticed because with like everytime we moved from the booth and came back, the table was re-decked with more merchandise. After the keychains came Scion music CDs. Well actually the CD's were from iheartcomix.com but it also seems to be a scion marketing front.



Then the last time we visited the booth there were even Scion winter knitted caps which people started wearing truning even the patrons heads into fucking advertisments.



We move away from the booths and decided to just watch the music and dance. But then while we were dancing, someone went and put up a giant 6 ft across scion banner across the stage. At first it seems like a joke. I mean the event was called the communist party and (e:terry) thought maybe it was a challenge to see if we would react to such extreme advertising.

So we move back to the bar to talk about it and low and behold there was a table with more scion keychain, scion metal boxes, and scion headphones, as well as, other scion merchandise and marketing material.





I was out of my mind irritated at this point. Every surface every direction except for the artist herself was 100% scion.

Its so weird the way that they slowly built it up to this nauseating advertising crescendo. And then the final straw. I say to (e:Terry) specifically, well at least scion is not in the art itself. I mean that would be the most ridiculous thing even. Within a minute the artists video screen from her dj set turned into these high tech graphic scion collages and advertisments as her set was ending. I thought I was going to throw up. There was no direction without it anymore. I know I am particularly sensitive to advertising but this was something I just never imagined and I could hear other people talking about how unpleasant it was.

In the end (e:terry) went around and just threw the merchanidse off the tables and onto the floor. Then he started chanting scion, scion, scion and some of the dudes around us jokingly joined in, making it totally insane - we had to exit.

Apparently, for some scionistas it wasn't even enough

After that we went out on the town, invited people to our halloween party and maybe made a new friend. We tried to stop at Ohm at like 1am but it was already closed. Thats sad for that place. Tabu is also closed now. We got home at around 4:30am.

The corner of Franklin and Linwood by my house is ridiculously dangerous. Its so weird that intersection is in the middle of a city, does not even have a sidewalk on the southside. You guys who have walked downtown from our house have all seen how crazy that corner is, especially at nighttime. I wonder when they decided to make the street curvy like that. Both sides Franklin and North Pearl are curvy.

Dear Sir,
I am writing to express my concern for the safety of pedestrians at the corner of North and Franklin. I own the house at 24 Linwood, the first house on Linwood after the intsersection and have witnessed many near accidents as pedestrians, including myself, attempt to cross the street. The southside next to the park is especially dangerous because it does not even have a sidewalk. It is so strange, right in the middle of the city, to have a busy intersection with no sidewalk and just a dirt path along a stretch of it. When you add to the mix the extreme traffic from rush hour or that many drunken drivers head home from Allentown and Downtown bars via Franklin->Linwood, the confusing corner becomes even more of a danger.

I encourage you to please include the final stage of funding for the Franklin, North, Linwood Intersection project in the 2009 Capital Budget.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Visco

I freakin love the bathtub in the back bathroom but I hate the shower
connector faucet. It is so relaxing to take a bath. If you javent
taken one in a long time, you should try it. The heigt of our tub
gives you that wild west bathing in a bath bucket feeling.

So back to the faucet. It's an ugly, dripping piece of crap. I
stopped at home depot and bargain outlet to try and find a nicer
replacement but neither sells bathtub facets sans shower. At home
depot the guy acted like I was crazy to even ask. I guess no one has
just rubs minus shower anymore.

The rejuvination catalog has fancy ones but they are like $300-700+
and I want to spend like $100.

I had no idea that these plain grey looking leaves would make such
pretty yellow flowers in our garden.

I am so confused about the housing market. My friend bought a house of the lower west side for $137,000 that was like $20,000 last year before it "got its hair did". I thought those flip days were over.

I thought housing prices were slipping. Then I was looking at Zillow to see if our house's estimated value had change. In fact it had. The value went up a lot. Our house is now estimated at $279,000 a good $100,000 more than we bought it for. I guess that was a good investment. I mean I put some money in, but nothing like that. Imagine if it had a new exterior paint job and new roof. I don't think this value will hold when the depression starts but I really have no interest in selling or moving. Its proximity to my job is worth well over $100,000 - especially over a lifetime in travel costs saved.

The creepy part is how did they know we went form 3 bathrooms to 2 bathrooms. I used to say 3.

Okay, I totally don't know anything about women's menstrual cycles but
putting sea sponges up there seems crazy. I mean, I get that dioxin
is bad and tampons are bad. That unbleached cotton is safer and that
you probably should try and not lose a multitude of tampons up there,
like one of my friends - you know who you are. But this borders on
totally strange to me and they are $15. Maybe you just rinse and
repeat.

Then again, I was in the feelrite buying ear candles- so maybe it's
not that strange.

Well, after working like 24 hours staright, I have upgraded surebert toolkit a bunch and released a flash player 10 compliant javascript accessible multi file upload way ahead of everyone else . I have to hurry an intergrate it into all my projects before people start moving en massse to flash player ten and no one can upload multifiles anymore.

I am much happier with the new version and I learned a lot. Like how much MXML application suck for tiny things. The smallest I could get it as an MXML application was about 150k which is so freakin lame considering it is just a bttton. I didn't even think to look at the size until I was done and I was so pissed. There was no way I was going to add a 150k button to pages.

So I scapped where I was at and build one form scratch as and Actionscript 3 project in Flex and used the flash drawing API to draw the button states etc. Its nice with an actionscript project you can really get the project size so tiny. I ended up managing to get it all under 10K which is a lot more reasonable. You can style everything bou tthe button from javascript and all the event handlers are the same as the old surebert multifile uploader ones so implementation should be easy. I commented the javascript API but no so much the flex code. The Javascript is here and assumes you are using the surebert toolkit although you could adapt it to run on anything else. Anyways, the flex code is here if you are interested