Happy new year and all that

I'm a bit underwhelmed by everything this year.

Best Dentist Ever

That would be the good folks at AtlantaDentalArts.com - not cheap but there were able to work me in and do a lot of emergency work nearly painlessly. Highly recommended and quite worth it. Nice, non-judgmental folks too

Wrapping up a miserable week, and onto another

Work has sucked, my dog has somethign wrong with him, and I've got a massive toothache. But paying in art instead of money makes me smile.

Brushes with greatness

I went to college with this guy. Ward Anderson was a comic then too, but in much worse shape.

Tornado parties and the kindness of strangers

So, last night I venture out into one of the more interesting parts of downtown to go to a party at the offices of my good friends at Lucky Fish. I carefully check the weather beforehand so as I can be home before any thunderstorms so my dog won't have his usual psychotic break that happens when a storm comes and I'm not there. The storms were supposed to come around midnight and I planned to leave around 11:00 PM. All was good.

It was a great party, with casino games and cool people. I'm near the door around 9:30 when I notice the wrath of God happening outside. Someone checks news on a ubiquitous I-Phone and says that CNN Center and the Georgia Dome have just been hit by a tornado. The first tornado to hit downtown in living memory. The history is made more notable by the fact that the party is a quarter mile away. Crap I think. I'm not worried about my personal safety as we were in a converted 100 year old well built factory . Nonetheless leaving is out of the question. I've driven through one tornado and I'm not driving through another one.

We all head down to the basement, and the party continues. The power goes out too, which makes for a very fun party by candlelight. The second tornado warning passed around midnight and I made my way back home through downtown Atlanta.

Not surprisingly the city looked like a tornado had just passed through (photos from the AJC here and here. My house is about four miles from the first link and two miles from the second.). I resign myself to the thought that the dog had destroyed the remaining blinds in my office (his favorite target) and hope for the best in terms of structural damage.

I return home to find the house untouched, the blinds shredded, the back door open, and the dog gone. Fresh teethmarks on the knob tell me that he had opened the door to come look for me when the thunder hit. I also make the unpleasant discovery that the back door no longer latches (hence his ability to open it).

I first look in the jungle/backyard area beyond the fence where has sometimes jumped, to no avail. I sneak through all my neighbors backyards and can't find him. I drive around the neighborhood looking for him, and he's nowhere in sight. It was quite dark and foggy and the odds of finding him were close to zero, so after several hours I decide to wake up at dawn and look then.

I get a call at 3:50 AM from someone asking me if I was missing a dog! I thank them profusely and congratulate myself on the custom tag I'd gotten him with my name and phone number. I then rushed over to where they were.

Somehow he'd make it all the way to the East Atlanta village, a distance of two miles. All the power was out in that neighborhood, even emergency power. I find the very nice people on the sidewalk standing over an exhausted but unharmed pooch. Apparently he had stopped to rest and they came over to him thinking he was hurt, and found my number. Why and how he made it all the way over there I have no idea. I thanked the good Samaritans profusely and went home. Drex was almost asleep by the time we got back and he's been sleeping for most of the day.

And that was my Friday adventure.

Quote of the moment

From Megan McArdle on Adderol

But if you don't like the self you got, surely you're entitled to murder it and replace it with something better. Whether or not your true self is the sick one or the better one, you only have one life and limited scope for action; why should you fritter away your opportunities just because nature destined you to be scattered or sad?

On the turning of 35

I turn 35 and Castro resigns! Who knows what else will happen this year...

Somehow I thought it would be different. Apparently it hasn't made me any more prompt with blogging since my birthday was actually Sunday.

In any case, Schelling Point now has it's own Wikipedia entry.

Just in time for Valentines day!

From this article from The Atlantic

Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me.

When irony meets the homeless

One of the more annoying things about my fun new area is the increased encounters with the urban outdoorsmen of our community. I was making a late night caffeine run for one my increasingly frequent all-nighters and I came across some guy bumming for money outside the grocery store. He did the usual story, then closed with "I need money for food."

Naturally he was eating a bag of Cheeto's at the time, which actually dovetails nicely with my more famous moment involving orange snacks and grocery stores, which you can hear if you see me play at any music venue...

Gadzooks I've been busy

Sorry for the light blogging, it's been crazy lately.

This is an insightful post

From an Econolog post about raising children

Laugh if you like, but I want to give me kids a better life than I had. I don't want them to be bullied or mocked by teachers or other kids. Since adult life is far more civilized than childhood, sheltering your kids is not "delaying the inevitable"; it's skipping pointless suffering.

That strikes a chord with me. People have been much nicer in adulthood than in school. Civilization begins with voluntary association I suppose. If I were feeling hyperbolic, I would say that the only thing forced association in the form of mandatory schooling prepares you for is prison, but that's not accurate. It's certainly not the only thing anyway.

Me and MasterChief

My visit to MicroSoft was interesting.

Sorry for the light blogging

Work has been quite hectic lately.

By means of contrition, check out The Bar Fight Primary.

Quote of the day

From a phone call with a friend of mine

It's just not a Steve story without additional commentary...

What a crappy few days

First I find out that the "We buy ugly houses" people want a 30% discount over the market rate (I declined), a project extends by 24 straight hours, Delta won't do anything about changing my flight, and now I'm getting sick. Humbug.

Day 4 of my slightly less caffeinated life...

I reach day four of my caffeine cutback week, and I do have to say it's helped my mood and attention span. Surprisingly I don't get headaches when I do without it totally, as do most people.

An interesting article in the New Yorker

Check out Parallel Play by Tim Page, about a life with Aspberger syndrome. I've got most of these personality traits (and other characteristics) but several orders of magnitude less severe.

Random links from the laptop

• Christianity and China - history is going to be interesting for a long time to come.
• Confessions of a BBC Liberal - The politics of it aren't terribly interesting, but the illustration of groupthink is. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of party affiliation by profession.
• Nerds One and Two: The Hyperwhite - It seems that someone did research on nerdiness. Some choice excerpts -

  Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

  ...

  In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.

  The author seems not to realize that the appeal of hyper-proper English is that the rules are memorable and never change, which reduces the aren't tied to a peer group to stay current. That's my theory anyway.
  

A milestone

I just found out today that someone wants to pay for some of my art photos! I've been a "professional" (been paid for it) photographer for awhile, now I'll be a real artist! I think I'll shop for a beret and a narcissistic attitude on Amazon.

Days of rage

Not only have I worked for free for 30 hours in the past two days on a Classic ASP (obsolete in 2003 if any one is curious) project mind you (a long story I won't share here) but now I find that my car won't start.

Predictably, I've noticed that I'm fighting the urge to grind my teeth and have a sudden urge to clean the house. It's odd those are always my responses to anger and stress.