I admit to being on a huge Stevie Wonder kick right now. For the last two days I have cranked the factory stereo on my Toyota subcompact and dialed my iPod into 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered' on the way to work and 'Superstition' on the way home. These are the only two Stevie Wonder songs that I own, and they are both excellent for their respective commutes.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Apple tech support. Apparently there are two different levels of service according to how much you paid for your maintenance contract. Initially I had called Proletarian Tech Support where they read to you from the back pages of the user's manual and there is no on-hold music; when they determined I was apparently made of money I was transferred to Bourgeois Tech Support where they really know their shit and the on-hold music is .. oh yeah .. 'Higher Ground.'

Which, oddly enough, put me in a much better humor when the technician told me I would have to back up my terabyte of data and reformat our video server. Because let me tell you, if he laid that on me after making me listen to James Taylor I woulda reached right through the telephone and strangled him.

- Z

We recently bought a couple new 4x2.5GHz G5 computers for our video department, with beefed-up nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT graphics cards. The graphics card has 2 DVI ports; one of our video guys has 2 VGA monitors, necessitating two DVI-to-VGA adapters, conveniently supplied by Apple. Except the DVI ports are very close together on this particular card, and Apple's adapters have all this extra plastic shit around them so that they look kewtiez, so that they cannot fit together closely enough to plug into this expensive graphics card.

So the video guy - let's call him John, because that's his name - calls up Apple tech support, and explains his quandary. The tech support specialist, initially incredulous, finds a 7800GT and a couple adapters in 'the lab' and gets back on the phone.

'I see your problem,' he says. 'I think I may have a solution. Can you hold for just one more minute?'

'No problem,' says John. Then he hears the tech support specialist put the phone down, and off to the side he hears, 'Crack! Crack! CRACK!!'

Tech support gets back on the line. 'Yes, I have a solution. Um .. do you have a hammer?'

- Z

_______________
ps. Be careful where you buy your next videophone.

The aforementioned two-bit NOC called us this morning to let us know that one of our two data lines is down. Which was very nice of them. What with the automatic failover and everything, I never would have noticed otherwise. So I said, yeah, fix it up, do what you gotta do.

So they took down our other T1.

I love these people in the way that I love Rudy Ruettiger.

- Z

I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus I hate Cyrus

If you had trouble connecting to (e:strip) midmorning today it was not my fault. I blame a certain two-bit NOC who shall remain nameless. Fortunately they seemed to have taken care of it before I got all up in they grill. Unfortunately when I rebooted our server it fucked Cyrus with a weedwhacker and I spent until 7pm picking up the pieces. If you are an IT manager and your boss says: we need IMAP, you may think: Cyrus! but it is my opinion that you should choose something else. Anyone have any experience with Courier?

- Z

Why are you on the computer?

I've been in denial about coming down with a cold for two days now. Sore throat, phlegm, but thankfully no cough. I had planned to spend the weekend in bed in a code-fugue. I've got some pretty fly ideas that deserve to be done, but ...

Well, then the sun came out and so did the Vespa.

I hope everyone else was able to enjoy this gorgeous day in whatever way they saw fit.

- Z

point / counterpoint

May it never be said that we aren't fair and balanced. (-:

- Z

OK, I admit to being a total Achewood junkie, and the Great Outdoor Fight storyline has got me hooked.

I believe that 'fugue' deserves to become the next overused and misunderstood pop-culture mental health issue [see also: paranoi(a|d) (WIKIPEDIA - paranoia) , anal(-retentive)? (WIKIPEDIA - anal-retentive) ] - once (e:dragonlady7) explained (WIKIPEDIA - fugue state) it to me, that is. With that preface:

Today I am ecstatic because we will have hired someone to take over all my nonprogramming duties by the end of the week - and all the candidates were excellent. Back at my old job my boss was always complaining about how he had to spend all his time 'putting out fires,' as he liked to call it, and could never concentrate on programming. I thought he was a tool. But now that I've tried programming and 'fixing peoples' shit,' as I like to call it - well, I still think he's a tool, but at least now I understand. Back then, though, I was just a programmer [Objective-C, thank you very much], and I would get in around ten to nine, grab a cup of coffee, read the news, and fugue until about ten to five. When I snapped out of it there'd be papers all over the office, half a tuna salad sandwich stuck to the ceiling, and another KLOC (WIKIPEDIA - KLOC) in CVS (WIKIPEDIA - Concurrent Versions System) . Man I miss those days.

- Z

When I started this blog lo these many days ago, I decided I wouldn't talk about national politics. People seem to get very excited about national politics these days despite the fact that it's nothing more than a two-ring circus of slimeballs and obstructionists. Local politics is another matter. But, it turns out, I discuss politics the way a pit bull licks your face [and that is not pleasant].

So I think I'm gonna stay out of local politics from now on too, and instead leave you with an excellent recipe for teriyaki salmon I came up with a couple weeks ago when we had nothing to eat but booze and a couple frozen salmon steaks:

In a smallish saucepan, dump in equal parts [1/4 cup]:
sake
sherry
white wine
beer
soy sauce

Add a not-insignificant amount of lapsang souchong tea leaves. I think there was some other stuff in there, too, like sesame oil and Old Bay. Heat it over very low heat until the smoky tea flavor is infused in the sauce. Strain the tea leaves out of the sauce.

Marinate/defrost the salmon steaks in the sauce: put the salmon in a Ziploc bag with the sauce, seal it tightly, and put it in a bowl of warm water. Replace the water when it gets cold. Leave it in a couple hours.

Take the salmon out of the sauce and put the sauce back in the saucepan. Reduce the sauce by half over medium heat. I don't know how important this is, but it makes the kitchen smell wonderful. Strain the salmon bits out of the sauce.

Grill the salmon gently, brushing it often with the teriyaki reduction. When you serve it, say something like, 'Oh, this? Nothing special. Just something I whipped up.'

- Z

So my buddy Chris called me up to go out on a man*date tonight. When I asked him what the occasion was, he said his wife had invited all her feminine relatives over for dinner, and there were just too many women in the room, and he needed a burger and a beer. Going out with Chris is always surreal, because despite the fact that he is a lawyer and an upstanding member of his community, we always end up telling dick and fart jokes.

We drove by the site of the proposed hotel [inlink]paul,4203[/inlink] and we both agree that it is going to look great there. The grubby little stores in the grubby little houses had a certain kind of caché, but I think the hotel will be an excellent fixer-upper for that corner. If I ever had to find a hotel for someone, I couldn't think of a better place to put them than right at the end of the Elmwood strip [because really, I'd end up taking them down there anyway since it's so much cooler than my own neighborhood (MAP TO: 14223)].

Then we started talking about old buildings and new buildings. I guess his father grew up in a building that used to be a funeral home. I thought that would give me the heebie-jeebies. Not that there were still dead people coming in and going out, but that's what the building was for. To my ever-anthropomorphizing mind, it just seems natural that buildings would have memories of what they were used for, and what happened there.

It reminded me of when I used to live in the Lower East Side. I'd hang out in the East Village all the time, and there was this one building on St Mark's Pl (MAP TO: 23 ST MARK'S PL) that I always wondered about. Always spray-painted, never occupied, and always somebody shooting smack on the front steps. Turns out 21-25 St Mark's Pl had a long and sordid history starting as the Polish National Home ["the Dom"], which ended violently when a massacre went down, and eventually the building was purchased by Andy Warhol, who rechristened it the Electric Circus, where the Velvet Underground got their start. That's pretty heavy shit, all of it. The building fell to disuse, though I think some squatters were living there. Then one day, after a prolonged absence involving a move to the suburbs, I came back to my old haunts only to find it had been replaced with luxury lofts, a natural-foods store, and New York City's first Chipotle . New brick facade, well-lit, fully-occupied, no grafitti - as though nothing had ever happened.

But still, some derelict out on the front steps shooting smack.

Gotta love change.

- Z

I am very annoyed right now, because a certain person from a certain organization is angry at me, because this organization was not personally invited to attend an event that I helped organize this past week. But really, if I saturate two major cities and all their suburbs with almost 3/4 million advertisements for an event over a course of 2 1/2 months, and you don't even call to say hi ... whose fault is it that you have no f#cking clue?

It is clearly not mine, but I am nevertheless very annoyed, so I present you with these happy thoughts.

Despite all this sturm und drang, I had a wonderful evening. Went to Ulrich's Tavern (MAP TO: 674%20ELLICOTT%20ST) for a most excellent fish fry. No beer batter on this one; it was breaded and comparatively light-tasting. If you ask nice, they'll serve it with their potato pancakes, which looked phenomenal. Will have to try that later.

Stumbled upon tickets to see Juno and the Paycock on opening night at the ICTC. Tragedy is not my thing, but I liked it. Very intense.

And finally, I found this scrap of paper in the pocket of the coat I wore on Mardi Gras. Apparently Allentown looks like a spotted doggie - but only if you're drunk and bored.



- Z