We would love to have you[inlink]paul,2629[/inlink].


View from the

e:west e:bungalow

.


Current weather conditions at 10:26am PST --

lisa: Partly Cloudy 48 F (9 C) 96%

I've been thinking a lot about this lately as I gear up to get users to join

e:west

. I was one of the high maintenance user-wannabes who needed a freakin' engraved invitation to join. Oh, I was totally intrigued by the site and wanted to join. But I had my excuses. Now I can't imagine my life without it.

So now I can tell you a dozen reasons why I love posting here. But I'm more interested in what almost kept me from making that first post. And what it was that got me past that. And what got anybody else past their first post bugaboos.

I'm going to have to think about it some more. In the words of the Magic 8 ball, "Reply hazy, try again."

Just got back from a whirlwind tour of Oakland, land of diversity. Started out at the Oakland Public Library, Asian Branch, to sign up for their Lawyers in the Library service. The guy on the phone put the fear of Buddha in me that the 10 slots would sell out if I didn't sign up early. So I did that then killed some time poking around Chinatown. Last time I spent any amount of time in Oakland's Chinatown was for the Street Festival last August. That was a mob scene! Got some cool free stuff though, most notably a sampler pack of condoms (two "designer" colors and two rough rider "studded," which I'm sorry to say are still burning a hole in my pocketbook). I love getting free stuff, but that mob was crazy.

Also had time to swing by the new Cool Neon offices down on Mandela Parkway to pick up my naked skaters card[inlink]twisted,138[/inlink]. One of the skaters gave me a tour and even cranked up one of their Cool Neon wire sculptures from Burning Man last year. They have Cool Neon sculpture workshops before Burning Man each year. I'll have to check that out. I love glowing sh!t.



You can program these things for different sequences and stuff if you know what you're doing. I told the Cool Neon guy about (e:Paul)'s foray into basic stamp programming. The Cool Neon guy (Benny, from the naked photo) said these things run on something that runs on the basic stamp. He lost me there. I was feeling pretty knowledgeable just being able to bandy about the basic stamp reference.

Benny also told me about the "Midnight Rollers" Friday night skate every week in San Francisco. I'd love to dust off my skates, although I really haven't done any serious skating since I was a kid. Sounds like fun though.


Oakland Public Library, Asian Branch


Estrip on the library PC. I couldn't open any links targeting new windows (among many other limitations).


Year of the Rooster art work


Waiting for their turn with the lawyers. I think they set it up in the children's section just to watch everybody trying to look comfortable in the kids' chairs

Yeah - I had a lot of time to kill waiting.

At 02:34 PM 1/20/2005, you wrote:
>Hi there. Are there any local retailers where I can buy the Naked Skaters
>Crossing Golden Gate Bridge Greeting Card?
>
>I live in Alameda and bought one of the cards at the bookstore at Stinson
>beach, but now I really need another one!


From: "Funhouse Productions / Cool Neon Wire"

Lisa,

You can place an order on line and choose "Will-Call" ($0) as your shipping option. Then, call or email us to set up an appointment to come to Oakland and pick one up from one of the skaters in the picture! He will be clothed, but you can amuse yourself by trying to figure out which skater he is! ; )

We look forward to getting you glowing!
Heather Hornsby
Funhouse Productions
(510) 547-5878

I read this article about LiveJournal last week, and it prompted me to create an account there to check out "the competition." They're also revamping their Terms of Service now that they've been acquired by Bay Area blogging tech company Six Apart (home of Movable Type), and I was curious about that too.

Here's my one and only LiveJournal post so far. I can't take credit for the userPic. That was (e:estrip)'s old Second Life avatar before I gave her a digital makeover[inlink]estrip,6[/inlink].




(Just in case you thought I was exaggerating.)

Have one on me tonight, Paul. I'll make a deposit to your paypal account to cover it. LOL.



Wish I could be there too!

[size=l]Have a Freakin' Great Happy Birthday, Paul. Stay warm![/size]

My kitchen is based on fire chicken[inlink]paul,2599[/inlink]too, and I didn't even realize it. In any case, I think it bears a striking resemblance.



I knew I was in trouble when every single person I showed the formica counter sample to tried to talk me out of it. "Sunlight" by Formica, available from Home Depot by special order. Now, who couldn't like a color called "sunlight?" Screw them, it's my kitchen. Maybe not the best choice for resale value though.

I liked it so much I painted the trim the same color. The guy at Paganos did a great job matching the color, based on Ace color "marigold."

I really wanted to buy these knobs for the decoupaged cabinet doors, but they were $8 each! At the time, that seemed like way too much. In fact, it's only a drop in the bucket campared to the other expenses. If they had been earrings I wouldn't have hesitated. (Well, right then I would have. I've been on an austerity plan ever since that dang kitchen renovation.) When you come right down to it, knobs and pulls are basically earrings for your kitchen.


Indochine lacquer round knobs

Anyway, I didn't want to pay that, so I tried making some out of those 70s-style concave metal knobs from Home Depot for 79cents each. They didn't really come out the same way. I probably should have molded them out of something. If my time is worth anything, the home-made ones are probably worth a lot more than the store-bought ones would have been. Maybe I should just put the real ones on my Christmas list for next year. Small and easy to pack.

p.s. - speaking of Christmas lists, nobody got me the bike light I asked for. What's up with that? Doesn't my family care about my personal safety? Maybe they think I won't ride at night if I don't have a light.

Ok, I'm just procrastinating now. Back to work.

Oh wait, here's the original mock-up for the cabinets. Unfortunately some of those art prints didn't come in the sizes I needed for my cabinet doors. Oh well.



I still need to paint a red detail line or something around the smaller prints. It's so much easier to undo in Photoshop than in real life though.

Hey (e:Soyeon) - your poster looks great in my sewing room. I'm going to have to matte and frame that thing. It's almost camouflaged now.



I've started a new marketing campaign for (e:) west. It came to me during a wine tasting road trip to Healdsburg/Geyserville yesterday .



I have to remember to carry a sharpie with me at all times now.

Somehow I knew this post[inlink]twisted,124[/inlink]would generate some interest, but I didn't expect it to be the breakthrough post for a crossover audience of friends from Boston (Steve!!) Ok, I probably should have figured that too.

So here's the rest of the story. What I remember of it.

After discussing her travel schedule (she had worked a club in NYC the previous night and was now flying to her home in LA before a trip to Las Vegas for the "Oscars of Porn," which coincides with the Computer Electronics Show every year), the conversation turned to places she had lived (born in Wisconsin - where she had spent Christmas with her mother, previously lived in Austin, Guam, Mexico - oh crap, there were a bunch of others I can't remember now, anyway - now she lives in LA where her video production and web businesses are based).

Then she asked me what I did so I told her I was a web designer and I was flying to Buffalo to meet a friend/collaborator on a new community site. She was TOTALLY interested in that (or maybe she just wanted to keep me talking so she could eat her sandwich), so I told her how (e:Paul) and I met and how we'd only communicated online so far, so this would be the first time we met in real life, etc. I also told her how I'd found out just that morning that (e:Paul)'s grandmother had a stroke the night before, so mostly I didn't want him to be occupied with me if his grandmother took a sudden turn for the worse. She chimed in that would be very bad karma to have on my head. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah, I guess so. (Yes, Nonna was a topic of conversation with the porn star. Hope she doesn't mind.)

Between bites she asked me if I did any print design. She was going to fire one of her print designers when she got back because he was being a pain in the ass and not getting the flyer for the Vegas show done in time. She gave him a sample from last year's show and the text for this year. He emailed back that he needed a layout from her. (That is such BS!) I told her that was a classic procrastination/avoidance technique - say you're still waiting for something to justify not having done the work. If he's a freakin' designer he should come up with the layout or figure it out from the previous year's flyer. I mean fer cryin' out loud. If there's something complicated/questionable about it, at least give her a couple variations early on to see what direction to go in. (Sorry to rant, but it pisses me off when people do that too.) She said that was exactly what he was doing.

Anyway, maybe I could have gotten a job out of it, but I'm really not a good print designer. Would have been interesting though.

I'd better wrap this up since I hear people don't read posts longer than two paragraphs. Although maybe I shouldn't care if nobody reads the whole thing.

She was really interested in the community website thing, which she correlated to adultfriends.com. (That might be a stretch, but then again, maybe it could be model for possible future estrip expansion. ;-) ) She had a VERY bad experience on adultfriends.com, which I wish I could tell you about here, but I think that would be crossing the line. She thinks sites like that should have a filtering system so women can block guys they would never consider meeting.

So naturally I asked her more about her websites (there are 16 of them, all linked from her main site porn site). She told me how she is known as the niche b!tch (pardon the expression), which of course raised all kinds of questions I wish we'd had time for.

She did have time to tell me her list of specialties, and I wish to high heaven I could have captured that in an audio recording. She said she was 31 years old so she can do whatever the hell she wants to do. And what she wants to do is dominate men. And there are quite a few ways she does that. She said her sites also branches out to other niches of interest to her. You'll just have to check those out yourself.

The thing that struck me most about the encounter was the interesting segue from my previous 16 days of mostly wholesome family holiday fun to what was then the brink of an unknown future. But that's just me.

Oh yeah, somewhere in there she asked me what sign I was. She's a Leo. Apparently that makes us extremely compatible. One of her good friends (a grip in her video business) is also a Sagittarian and she told me a few stories about him. She said she went through a 3-month period where everybody she met (lawyer, cabbie, etc.) was a Taurus, which she is very incompatible with. I told her about my similar run with Virgos, although I wouldn't say I'm incompatible with them - they just kept showing up. Life can be weird when you're paying attention.