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Tuesday, December 2, 2008

to get you into the spirit...

two version of a new Christmas classic: "I Believe in Father Christmas" orginally by Greg Lake and now, covered by you know who.



Here is the original by Mr. Lake:

Friday, November 14, 2008

the problem with being a dreamer

is that you go to sleep each night. and when you wake up each morning, the dream was different, and your focus is then distracted by the fact that 'each' is a very strange looking word.

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Friday, October 31, 2008

This is a song called "Little One"


And I wrote it for my daughter before she was born. She's turning 2 next week, so unemployment has its benefits of being able to finish up stuff like this.

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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Tweeting Tonight's Debate

Planning on experimenting with twittering/tweeting on #currentTV for tonight's debate. http://current.com/debate --- readying the pithiness.

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Monday, October 6, 2008

one microwave sold, the rest still to go...

The fight to unload a few items in exchange for a few dollars has re-commenced on craiglist. We sold the microwave last night to a nice family who, emailed, called, and then acutally showed up with money and bought the thing! From craigslist! Amazing, right? I know! So my marketing and haggling ego has been restored... now, who wants to buy my fridge? Or my washer, or my dryer? Or my playstation?

POLITICS & TELEVISION

So, who is having fun with politics? I know I am. I decided I was going to watch all the debates and be really engaged with the whole process, even though I decided who I would vote for as soon as John picked a Canadian as his running mate. Then it turned out that all the really good stuff was happening on Saturday Night Live. Spot on impersonations, spot on hilarity, so we started watching what we had previsouly sworn off as a lost cause. Record, watch, delete, record watch, delete... hey wait a minute, eveyone is just posting the choicest bits from hulu.com on facebook... so now we don't even have to do that. Check out hulu.com, it's pretty great.

JOBS

Meanwhile, the job hunt continues. I talked to some folks at Talenthouse.com last week about a temporary position but that didn't go anywhere due to being a bit overqualified. This week I'm talking to Telegent Systems and Sybase. The job market it pretty intense right now, I had one recruiter tell me they were looking at 100 resumes for the position and half of them were from mortgage/real estate/financial people... ugh.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Please Calm Down...

10 links to walk you through today’s financial crisis — and make you smarter than 99% of other people: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/…her-people

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

we can all calm down now...


It's not another great depression.

http://www.businesspundit.com/…-not-anoth

er-great-depression/

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Re-utter/tweet/post: MUST READ

America Must Rescue the Bonuses at Goldman Sachs



http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news

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PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

Not quite sure what to make of this...

http://www.wptz.com/…etail.html



The question is, would you?

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Friday, September 19, 2008

I like the sound of my own voice

or do I? Here is service that will really put that question to the test. I recently got introduced to utterli (formerly utterz) by my friend Randy. Utterli is a service that allows you to do text, audio and video blogging from anywhere. Today I tested out the audio via calling in my post from my phone while having lunch with another friend.

here is the result:



like how I say 'bye' at the end? Who says 'bye' at the end of a blog post? In the near future I will test out some of the aggregation features on this that will allow me to post video and text along with it. I'll have to keep my eyes open for something videoworthy.

Ok. Bye.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

For Sale: Dumb Craigslisters

So I'm selling a bunch of stuff on Craigslist. Craigslist is great because you can post stuff for free and it's super easy to use and everyone knows about it. But the best part is that all these people call and email me and ask questions about the stuff I am selling and then they never show up to get it.


Here is a typical exchange with a craisglist "buyer":

Subject: Playstation One with Games - $50 (mountain view)
From: sergio______@aol.com
Date: Sat, Sep 13, 2008 1:08 pm

hi jon my offer is $40 is ok?

In a message dated 9/13/2008 5:46:50 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jonwrites:

OK. I'm in Mountain View, near San Antonio Road and California Ave., Can you come pick it up? call me at 408.___.____

Subject: Playstation One with Games - $50 (mountain view)
Date: Sat, Sep 13, 2008 5:53 pm

i live in san francisco

In a message dated 9/14/2008 6:48:40 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jon writes:

Ok it sounds like you want to pick it up in San Francisco. My wife works in sf on Mondays and she has agreed to meet you at the Starbucks on 4th and King at lunch time. Please provide a cell phone number so we can call you in case anything comes up. Let me know if this works for you.

This is the next email I got from this doofus, replying to my previous email where I tell him where I live --

Subject: Playstation One with Games - $50 (mountain view)
Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008 8:24 pm
hi were are you? in san francisco?

I can't make this stuff up... look:


Friday, September 12, 2008

In retrospect

The day after the day after Sept. 11 was when it really sunk in for me. If that Tuesday were the nightmarish bad trip, then Wednesday Sept 12 was the hangover.

I remember waking up to the clock radio and hitting snooze a couple of times. "Blah, blah, World Trade Center" ... 9 minutes later... "New York blah blah blah Airplanes" 9 more minutes... "our correspondent in New York blah blah" ...

And I started the day with just a throw-away groggy thought... "they sure are talking a lot about New York today." And off we went to start our day.

About an hour later I'm walking to the train station and I get a call from Doni, my Austin co-worker at the time.
"Are you in the office?"
"Not yet, on my way, why?"
"Get there fast, we need you for some emergency communications stuff."
"Why, what happened?"
"You don't know? Two planes just hit the world trade center in New York."
"What? Uh, ok well I'll be in as fast as the train can get me there"

How could I have been so oblivious? The clock radio thing made sense now. By the time I reached the shuttle, Kirsten called and wanted me to come home. She was pretty freaked out. But duty called and we were pretty sure there was no immediate danger to us since by then we had figured out all the planes had been grounded.

So I spent the day posting information to the Intranet about what was going on and how it affected the company. We also had a CC-TV system in all the buildings tuned away from the regular corporate slide show and tuned to news stations instead. The web was actually unreachable from our desktops for many hours that day as I recall, due to the traffic, so live TV became the outlet of choice.

(Interestingly, or not, upper management decided to take the TV system out of commission a few years later, as people were getting all their info from the web at that point. The only justification for keeping them was for another 9/11, and they chose to focus on the positive possibility that it would not happen again. So far, so good.)

Obviously very little work was done that day. People were standing around riveted at the TVs.
I know I spoke with this co-worker that day, and had no idea what was going on with her: Monkey Business: Remembering.

But the crushing blow for Kirsten and I personally came that evening, watching the local news, and seeing the picture of our friend who died on Flight 93. Kirsten had know Mark since just after high school, and we had reconnected a few years earlier at a friend's wedding. I had not know him as long or as well as Kirsten had, but Mark was the kind of guy that you just got a good feeling from and I liked him right away. When we reconnected with him, Mark was just starting his PR firm, and Kirsten was just starting her freelance web design business. So of course he says "I need a web site!" and he became one of her first clients.

So his picture flashes on the screen "...local man Mark Bingham among those on Flight 93..." The hours and days that followed were a blur of phone calls and memorials and now the memory of that time is foggy. Well, the experience of that time was foggy... just indescribable sadness and shock that kept the clouds dense in my head for a long time.

A few years later, my band was on tour as Bush-Cheney were spouting their streak of lies to start a war in Iraq. I remember any time on that trip we stopped into a bar or someone's house that had the news on just hearing the lies repeated so many times they became "the truth" and feeling like I was in a twilight zone. Did I miss something? Is Afghanistan all taken care of already? No? Well did they catch the guys that killed our friend? No? Well wtf is this all about?

And then we got stuck in a blizzard in Denver and watched the Iraq war start on TV. The clouds and the fog were back.

So yesterday, on the 7th anniversary of that day, as I was driving after dropping my daughter off at day care, I passed by a local fire station. There was a ceremony being held at that moment, firefighters all in their dress blues with flags and a small crowd gathered. I didn't stop. Just stopped to remember that day, again, and let the fog creep back in again for a little while.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

re-packaging | what the world needs now is one more blog

I've decided to re-engage with the whole blogging thing. It's been a few years since I've blogged about anything non-baby related. (Parental self-absorption!) Before that I was on the livejournal and I suppose I will still keep that one around for the more esoteric stuff.

THAT VOICE

Kirsten is telling me that the greens we bought a few days ago are no good. Such are the musings of an old married couple, when one works at home (with a real job) and the other works at home (looking for a real job).

REPACKAGING

So I've been doing a lot of packaging and repackaging lately. Here are some things that I have been un-packaging:

1. boxes
2. framed pics
3. candles and playing cards (why do we have so many? they breed like rabbits and coat hangers!)

Here are some things that I have been repackaging:

1. things to be stored in the attic
2. things to be donated to goodwill
3. things to be sold on craigslist
4. things to be sold on ebay
5. things to be thrown away
6. myself.

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION

Writing resumes is hard. I've written a good one, then every time I go to submit it, I see something on it that needs to be tweaked or re-ordered or whatever. Every recruiter has a little bit of a different take on the resume... and every change causes a new issue with another recruiter. So, the resume is a living document.

AND THIS CONCLUDES THE MOST BORING BLOG POST EVER.