Sober Poop Moment - Number 1

Alternate title: When did it get so complicated‽

I know what most of you are thinking. I have the word "poop" and "number 1" in the title, and someone will invariably make a comment about which is it, number 1 or number 2? And it will happen on the second post as well for obvious reasons. Hopefully most of you will be mature enough not to go there, but then who am I kidding.

Know your audience.

Normally I would leave the feces-related reporting to more experienced individuals, but this is all-out war!

So, if you happen to follow my blog, you'll know that I moved recently. Until now, I have not yet had a chance to exploit this for the blog. I've never lived in a particularly fancy place. I have my standards, but as long as I have a frig, stove, working toilet and shower I'm pretty much set. My new place, in contrast, is in a fairly new building and one of the reasons I moved was to gain some "luxury" amenities. Definitely one deciding factor was the dishwasher. This is not only an awesome timesaver, but probably will help me prevent health-code violations. Also, there is no door on my new kitchen to hide the stacks of dirty dishes.

There have been many wonders in my new apartment, but none more confusing than what I found in the bathroom. Now, I've been to many bathrooms, so it's not like I'm a water-closet newbie or anything. I've even used a urinal in the Vatican.

I guess you're expected to kneel when you use it.

However, when I got to my new toilet, I was greeted by what was to me, an unusual sight. Rather than the typical flush handle that one would expect, there were instead two buttons! Now at this point I was feeling a bit like Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man when he is in the future trying to figure out how the three seashells work.

I would have gotten a better picture, but the buttons are right under a shelf. Brilliant planning.

Apparently, the buttons are supposed to help you conserve water. The button on the left with the half-filled circle is supposed to flush half as much water as the button on the right. Nevermind that I have to memorize which button is which because I have to stick my hand underneath a shelf to press them. Now if it's one thing I appreciate about going to the bathroom is that it is relatively simple. Your body pretty much knows what to do and does it. The disposal of those bodily functions should be equally simple. Now, with this system, each time I go to the bathroom I need to stop and make a decision...do I need a half flush or a full flush for this particular visit? I have to make decisions and struggle with issues all day, now you are going to complicate my bathroom experiences? My solution, and the irony, is that I pretty much pick the buttons at random and probably use the same amount of water either way. Seems like if I push the 'half' button, I have to press it a second time anyway, so why complicate my life with flush choices‽ Now if one button flushed with red water and the other blue, THEN they might have something. Make flushing fun and colorful. I could choose my flush based on my mood. Was it a good bowel movement? Ok, blue then. For those constipated visits, red....although that could have repercussions I won't go into here.

So in the end (heh, had to GO there) lets keep the bathroom simple eh? Although a butt-massage option might be nice.

Experiments In Duplication

(In some circles, this might be referred to as plagiarism, but those circles are jerks)


to the fella' in india who found this blog by googling "synonym and palindrome for ship detection device," i'm sorry to have let you down with my whiskey-infused poop lectures and complaints about financial corporations and umbrellas.

i'm sure that's not what you were looking for.

but if you're still reading, the answer is RADAR.

you're welcome.

for everyone else, check out the billboard liberation front's improved version of the mcdonald's advertisement.

i'm sick of it. as seen at cala foods on california and hyde.

wellp, with that said, it's time to drink whiskey and poop. (poop is a verb in this sentence, not a noun.)

kbye.


If it helps justify any of this, I DID see the sign first-hand WITH the guy who took the picture and wrote about it, AND we discussed it (sortof). Also, he bought me at least two of the beers I drank last night which I think contributed to me forgetting two other great blog post ideas that I had on the way home from bar-hopping. So there!

Raiders of the Lost Boba Fett

I have finally completed the move into the new apartment, and the horrifying experience has left me with many tales to tell...mostly ones where I am ready to strangle someone. Here, on the other hand, is a tale of rediscovery!

The one thing I can say about moving is that it gives you the opportunity to look through boxes and closets that had been undisturbed for months, if not years. As a result, it gives you a chance to play archaeologist with your belongings. I was fine without Nazis storming my bedroom to stop me from finding that t-shirt I thought I'd lost, but I wouldn't have minded finding an attractive, young woman tied up in my closet....ahem, but we'll get my fetishes at another time. The process of finding a long-lost tchotchke, or even something you had forgotten you even had, can make moving a little more bearable...until until you have to figure out where you are going to put it.

(how many of you knew "tchotchke" began with a "t"? Come-on, be honest.)

Almost everyone has too much of something. For some it's little, ceramic Scotty dogs; or books by French poets that they can't even read; or hatred of the Proletariat...but for me, it tends to be Star Wars figures, robots, and stuff made by Apple. I probably have more Star Wars toys than most kids, but then I HAVE been collecting since 1977. Most are in storage, but a number of favorites grace my desk and shelves at home. One of my favorites has always been Boba Fett. I mean, who doesn't love a mysterious guy in full body armor who doesn't take shit from Darth Vader. In fact, Boba Fett originally had a smaller part as a generic bounty hunter, but he was so popular, the character was given a bigger role. One day, while playing...I mean, adjusting my Jango Fett figure, it dawned on me that the Boba Fett figure that usually had a prominent place on my desk was GONE!!! -GASP!- -HORRORS!- I spent quite a bit of time looking for him with no luck. I was convinced Jango had dispatched him to gain the #1 spot on my desk...which he did. As a result, the search for Boba was made a top priority!

Yes, my priorities are a bit messed up.

Months went by, and I finally began to let go and assumed Boba had been carried away by a ninja pigeon or something. Life went on and I cluttered my desk with other items like bills and stuff I would "look at later".

Flash forward to this weekend as I stacked the last of the boxes from my old apartment into my new one, approximating the home of one of those people from that Hoarders tv show. Like most people, I expected to pack neatly and orderly, with proper labels on the boxes indicating contents. That probably happened for the first box but the rest involved shoveling items into boxes, bags, or suitcases. At the end, I was left with an apartment of boxes with unidentifiable contents, and the search began for those vital items that I need from day to day...like my PS3 controller, a bottle opener, and my iPhone charge cable. This scattershot search technique led me to many remarkable discoveries, but none so profound as the revelation that Boba Fett WAS NOT LOST!

"What?! I went out for some chicken & waffles. How long do you THINK that takes when you are 3 inches tall?!"

I also discovered that I had a Mace Windu figure I forgot I even had. Sorry SLJ! I expect to have many other fanciful discoveries in the next few weeks, some of which will be ushered by "top men" to a warehouse referred to as "Goodwill" or eBay, so I won't break my toe when walking from my bedroom to my living room. (picture withheld because, trust me, it looked bad and nobody wants to see my feet)

Dear John Letter

Dear Richmond District,

What can I say, it's been great. We've had an amazing 12 year relationship, but I just feel I'm in a different place now and need a change. It's not you, it's me.

When I first came to San Francisco, you were there with your cheap rent, larger apartments, and close proximity to the beach and the park. That is what allowed me to stay in this fantastic city, but it also made me complacent and reluctant to try new things. You made it all possible, but now you are holding me back. It has taken me a while to realize that.

Close enough.

Also, some of your friends are just plain annoying with their loud music upstairs, yelling, honking, and stumbling home drunk and waking the entire neighborhood.

I still remember the good times eating at Bill's Place, Tommy's, Drunken Sushi, movies at The Four Star, the great produce at 25th and Clement, the friendly guys at Tiger Liquors (whom I may have gotten too acquainted with in the last couple of years), and walking into Royal Ground where everyone greets you with a smile, and they always know what I want and how to make it. I think they order Amaretto syrup just for me.

There were also some odd times, like when I locked myself out of my apartment, and in broad daylight got a ladder out of the garage and climbed into my second story apartment through the kitchen window...without anyone blinking an eye! And then there was the time nearly every pair of pants I owned was stolen from the laundromat across the street. Awkward.

And then there were the bad times. The closing of the Alexandria theater and the Coronet (ok not in the Richmond but I went there a a lot) cars flipping over and plowing into one another at the intersection below my window at 2 am, the 3 year old kid who knocked on my door asking me dial 911 because of the fight his Mom was in and having to explain it to the cops before they led the boyfriend off in handcuffs. Also unpleasant was the time immediately after that when I wondered if the guy would come back and beat the crap out of me.

-sniff-

This move was a long time coming. I will be closer to work and downtown, and best of all I will be able to almost completely eliminate MUNI from my life! Long have I suffered the evil, sweaty, stinky, slow, unpredictable grip of San Francisco's mismanaged public bus system. There will be new sights, new sounds (hopefully quieter ones), new stores, new people, and new experiences. I'm hoping friends may even want to come over to my place to hang out. I'm sorry Richmond, but you were isolating me from the world.

I'll miss you and won't forget you. I hope someday you'll be able to forgive me.

No, I don't understand why it says "goodbye" on his stomach either.

My Job, Apparently

Ironically, in spite of my handle TechBoy that I use here, I seem to rarely talk about tech. I suppose that is because I talk tech just about everywhere else. I started this blog to sort of balance that out and give the other half of my brain some exercise. According to this blog posting, however, that isn't good enough, so I feel inclined to inject a little tech related musings today. Maybe I'll throw in a little more tech once in while, just to keep some people from nagging me.

I would imagine that the biggest and most prevalent tech news is the release of the iPad last Saturday. However, rather than talk about how awesome it is and go on about all the apps, I thought I'd set the Wayback Machine and take the iPad back to some of my early techie days and speculate what reactions I'd have.

"But Mr. Peabody, this isn't the Wayback Machine!"

"Shut up Sherman or I'll make you pick up my poo again."

The year is about 1995. I've had a Macintosh IIci for about 3 years and traded it in for a refurbished PowerBook 180c color laptop which had a screen an inch or two smaller in each dimension than the iPad. The World Wide Web was pretty new and you could only make your own website by learning how to hand-code HTML. The first WYSIWYG editor for HTML was coming out, called Adobe PageMill. It seemed nice, but really mangled the code so that going back in and customizing by hand usually took longer than if you had just built it that way in the first place.

The laptops of the time really give you a good comparison...

PowerBook 180c: 7.1 lbs

iPad: 1.5 lbs

PowerBook 180c: 2.25" thick

iPad: 13.4 mm thick

PowerBook 180c: 8.4" diagonal screen

iPad: 9.7 inch diagonal screen

PowerBook 180c: $4,110 (new)

iPad: $499 (new)

So there are a few figures to give you an idea of how far we've come. No wireless or broadband internet yet either. 300 baud (yeah, I know you have no idea what that means) telephone modem.

My friends and I were geeky enough, but if you had arrived from the future and handed us the iPad, with a transdimensional link to the current day internet....I don't think we would have bothered leaving for college. I think the only reason we spent any time away from our Commodore 64s and TRS-80s was because you couldn't do a lot with them, and the games sucked. However, we managed to loose a lot of time to them anyway. Does anyone remember "light pens"?! Now we just have fingers, but we thought it was way cool to be able to draw on a television screen. Yes, television screen. You would hook up your computer to your television. Ok, I reset the Wayback for high school...that wasn't 1995.

To be honest, I'm not sure how things would have been different with the iPad. My friends and I generally just were excited to play with new technology. I'm not sure we would have seen it as life changing, although seeing what technology could do, we might have been more inspired to invent things that would use it. That, and we would have bought a shit-load of Apple stock and be billionaires!

The iPad is really a device for today, with it's social networks and need for immediacy. We gobble content as fast as we can download or browse to it, although there is a lot more garbage content now with an emphasis on entertainment and time-killing rather than education.

"The new Apple Store is great isn't it?!"

"Yeah, but it sucks that they make you buy the spacesuit just to see the new iMonolith."

PS: Here's some crappy Atari games from the time too.

A Magic Trick Gone Wrong

This is not the first time I have written about the difficulties and process of writing a blog post, and I suspect not the last. As was illustrated by a previous post, the process between initialization and conclusion of a point, thought, or concept can be a rocky one. This is definitely something I've been working hard at to improve. I'm sure there are some kind of mental devices for planning out what you want to say so that it either fits in a given space, or takes a particular time to write, but I've always been a free-flowing kind of writer. I start with an idea, roll it around in some flour, bake it for a while, and then sit down and just start writing what comes to mind. Yeah, I know, I completely mangled that metaphor, but you get the idea.

The trouble is that free-flowing mode I'm so fond of tends to not have any boundaries. I write until I can reach a concluding point, or can't think of anything more to say about the subject; assuming I haven't changed the subject several times. Welcome to Tangentville! What tends to be the worst case scenario is when I'm interrupted (like I just was with a phone call) and it becomes difficult to rediscover the stream of consciousness I had been traveling along.

I have likened this writing process with the age old magic trick of pulling a streamer from your mouth. The "device" that allows you to do this is called a "mouth coil", but that as far as I'll get into the mechanics of the trick. The magician seems to pull an endless, colorful streamer from his mouth.

"I don't remember eating anything that color."

Now imagine that you are the magician, ready to wrap up this little trick and anticipating the end of the streamer, but it just keep coming out. In fact, you realize that it is no longer a trick and you seem to have no control over it anymore. Yes, I do have a lot of nightmares, why?

Anyway, it gets out of control, and so you snip off the streamer, swallow, and move onto the next trick. The only difference is, with my writing, you don't see that first part of the trick where it all went wrong. It's more like if the trick went haywire during practice and it was just eliminated from the show. So what is the point in writing about it? Well, I sometimes think better when I write it out, and maybe someone will read this and offer some suggestions for working out my writing obstacles. In the meantime, I'll keep drafting up things to say, and maybe one day someone will put all those unfinished thoughts into a book and it'll make millions! Hey, it worked for the son of J. R. R. Tolkien.

I think I'd much rather do this trick, but maybe with Jessica Alba.

Why Can't Women Be More Like Sandwiches?

Updated…for your reading pleasure. Two reads for one post…whatta deal!

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You know, I can't for the life of me remember what prompted this title, but I felt it was too good to not use, if only for its controversial overtones.

Sexual references aside, let's examine why one might want a woman to be like a sandwich. It might trigger something. It should be said that it is perfectly resonable, as a woman, to wish men were more like sandwiches, but you'll have to write about it on your own blog because I'm not going to go there.
Ok, so a good sandwich has lots of toppings, but that doesn't translate well since I'm not a fan of a lot of makeup, but an attractively dressed woman is always nice, as is an attractively dressed sandwich.

I guess I could be snarky and say things like, sandwiches don't argue with you, you can just make a sandwich and go because sandwiches don't keep trying on different meats and veggies...you know, the usual stereotypes. I think the original idea was simpler than that. The sandwich represents something simpler, and relationships can be difficult.

The effort you put into making a sandwich is almost always rewarded with the eating of the sandwich. It's usually a 1:1 relationship. Hopefully the energy you put into a relationship is returned in an equally rewarding result, but sometimes that may not be the case. People are generally more complicated than sandwiches, let's face it. I think it goes without saying that the company of a woman (for myself anyway) is probably preferred over that of a sandwich, but some days….you just need a sandwich.


Trust me, you do not want to do a Google image search for "sandwich girl" without SafeSearch on!