Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Bad Math

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Approximately 60 units in my apartment building, a mix of studios and one-bedrooms.

Three sets of washers and dryers. Of these six machines, at least one will be broken at any given time. This week, it’s one of the washers.

Wash loads take about 30 minutes. The dryers take about 60 minutes.

What all this adds up to is laundry taking an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to do. I started my two loads at around five this afternoon. It’s now eight in the evening, and I’m looking at, oh, at least another hour and a half if all goes well.

Meh.

iTunes “Ba and the Ka, The” by Anubian Lights from the album In to the Mix (1997, 6:02).

Old Technology

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Does anyone out there have any need for an official Windows 2000 Professional install CD, complete with serial number? Update: Eight minutes later, it’s spoken for. You people scare me. ;)

As part of an initial stab at starting to weed out the junk from my apartment in preparation for my upcoming move, I’ve finally given up on any hope of resurrecting the PC that’s been doing nothing more than holding my desk down for the last year and junked it. This leaves me with the OS install disc, which is useless to me.

Admittedly, in these days of XP and the upcoming Longhorn Vista (in, what, another three years or something?), a Win2kPro install probably isn’t that valuable even to Windows users. Even so, I thought I’d toss this out there just on the off chance someone could use it. First come, first serve, just let me know where to mail it and I’ll send it your way.

If I don’t get a taker in, oh, a week or so, I’ll just toss it.

iTunes “Love Your Enemies” by Burroughs, William S. from the album Dead City Radio (1990, 1:13).

Bridal Parties are Fun!

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At least, as long as your definition of “fun” includes 20-some 20-something sorority girls drinking far too much alcohol, being incredibly loud (which is saying something in a dance club), having no concept that there’s anyone else on the dance floor, nearly starting a fight near the bar, and eventually having one of them carried out of the bathroom by two big beefy guys because there was no way she’d be able to walk.

So…yeah. Interesting night. Certainly amusing to watch all this from the sidelines.

Still, good times were had. A little flirting, a few new people met (Hope, Jennifer, Elizabeth and Felix), chatting outside in the cool air with Melissa, Suzanne, Brooke, Mickey, Ogre, and Ron, and some bouncing around on the dance floor (though that was somewhat hampered by both sorority girls and the Vogue‘s famous lack of ventilation…but I hear that Mony has a new fan ready to install, so hopefully that’ll get a bit more air flow going through in the near future). All in all, not a bad night.

Also (and totally unrelated to any of the above), after Prairie declared that one of my pictures of the Teatro ZinZanni acrobat to be quite “yum”-worthy, I tweaked it a touch to turn it into a suitable desktop image.

Teatro Zinzanni Desktop

There’s a 1280×1024 version ready to be used as a desktop image (or “wallpaper” for you Windows users) available to download here, should you wish.

Now…bed.

iTunes “Pigs on the Wing 1” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 5:48).

Al-Qaeda’s Shoes

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As if it’s not bad enough that advertising in RSS feeds is showing up more and more often, we’re also being subjected to the many instances where the context-selection fails miserably when deciding which ad should go with which story…

Al-Qaeda's Shoes

Teatro Zinzanni at Pacific Place

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Teatro Zinzanni's Sam Alvarez, Pacific Place, Seattle, WAIf you get a chance, stop by Pacific Place just at touch before 5pm any Thursday through Sunday in August. One of the performers from Teatro ZinZanni is putting on a short show throughout the month to promote their dinner/circus/cabaret show.

I’ve been wanting to go to one of their shows for quite a while now, and seeing this guy go twirling and spinning sixty feet above the floor — without any sort of safety harness, just the red fabric strip — just made me want to go more. It’s a pricey show at $99 a ticket, but for a full five-course gourmet meal and a three-hour show, I’d say it’d be worth it.

One of these days…

Podcast 8: Eclecticism

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And again, I’m running late. Sensing a trend yet? This, then, is the next of my mixes to go up — and probably the last one for a little while, as I don’t have any ready to go up, and the next few weeks are probably going to be busy with apartment hunting for Prairie and I. Hopefully once things are settled down again, I’ll actually start putting new mixes up. That’s the plan, at least.

This is probably my favorite of the mixes I have available right now. There’s no real set style through the piece, I just slapped together a bunch of tracks that I happened to like a lot. Luckily, it all seems to work pretty well…possibly better than it should?

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Eclecticism (1h 17m 32s, 88.74Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Dario G ‘Carnival de Paris’
  2. Goodmen ‘Give it Up (Batacuda Refrescante/Hot Tracks)’
  3. Chemical Brothers ‘It Doesn’t Matter’
  4. Fatboy Slim ‘Song for Shelter’
  5. Lionrock ‘Are You Ready to Testify?’
  6. A3 ‘Woke Up This Morning (Drillaz in the Church)’
  7. Psykosonik ‘Unlearn (Hot Tracks)’
  8. Everything But the Girl ‘Wrong (Deep Dish)’
  9. Annie Lennox ‘Little Bird (Utah Saints)’
  10. Clivilles & Cole ‘A Deeper Love (Underground Club)’
  11. Sagat ‘Fuk Dat (Raw)’
  12. Lemon Interrupt ‘Big Mouth’
  13. Technoclassix ‘In the Hall of the Techno King’

Arrogant Bastard Ale

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Divine nectar James, Marc, Chris: I think I’ve found the perfect drink for you guys. ;)

Arrogant Bastard Ale!

This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory — maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this.

(Photo originally uploaded by dantc)

Girl talk, MT32b3, and Alan Moore

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Had a pleasant evening after work yesterday, when I headed up the hill to Charlie’s and got together with Melissa, her daughter (whose name I either didn’t catch or, more likely, have forgotten), Christa, and Erin. Quite fun, actually, being as I ended up in a situation I’ve stumbled into quite a few times before in my life and always enjoy when it happens — being the only guy in something of a ‘girl talk’ session. Laughter, rants about current and former lovers and friends, ongoing drama…all that fun stuff.

There are times when I really enjoy not being the “typical male”…or at least far enough removed from that stereotype that I can occasionally be around for such things. I may have worked over the years at decreasing the amount of drama in my life, but I must admit, I do enjoy being a spectator! ;) Quite enjoyable, in any case, and it seems that this may become something of a weekly event.

After coming home and chatting with Prairie for a while until she wandered off to bed, I upgraded my Movable Type beta installation to v3.2b3, which is essentially the final candidate build. Ran into one small oddity during the upgrade process, but after filing a bug report and having Brad Choate pop up in iChat to talk about it, I’m leaning towards it being a caching issue and nothing major with the system.

I’m looking forward to upgrading my main site to v3.2 once it’s finalized and I’ve had a chance to go over the new documentation. This may end up meaning that I do a full redesign — there are a lot of changes in the new templates, and it may take me some time to wrap my head around all of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll upgrade the backend and keep the current design and then work on a new one in the background, or just go whole-hog and start over with the new basic designs…more to ponder.

I’ve also just finished reading Alan Moore‘s ‘V for Vendetta‘ graphic novel after the movie trailer peaked my curiosity about the original movie, and am currently working my way through Moore’s ‘The Watchmen‘. While Prairie (a confessed ‘book snob’) may giggle at me for reading “comic books”, I’m enjoying both of these, and ‘V for Vendetta’ in many ways seems very topical in todays world — which, given its subject matter, is actually a little disturbing.

And that pretty much sums up life in the world of me at the moment. Not quite sure what my plans for the weekend are, though there’s a lot of Seafair stuff going on around town right now that I may see if I can find a way to check out at one point or another. As is usual for me, though, I’m not planning much of anything more than about 20 minutes in advance…except for running off to work, which (insert overly melodramatic sigh here) I must go do. Off with me, then!

iTunes “24 Hour Man” by Lock Up from the album Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes (1990, 4:46).

Re-Meme (‘Michael is…’)

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There’s a meme going around the ‘net right now (I’ve seen it on at least seven different blogs over the past day or so, I’m not going to search them all out) where you do a Google search for “$yourname is” (where $yourname is your name, and including the quotation marks) and pick the best ten results to post.

Rather than join in, I’ll just point you to the post where I did this two and a quarter years ago. :)

iTunes “Calling All Angels” by Lang, K.D./Siberry, Jane from the album Until the End of the World (1991, 5:11).

Live Octopus Tentacle

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Okay, admittedly, I’m no fan of seafood — generally, I tend to limit my meat-eating to animals with legs that stay on land most of the time. However, even if I were more into seafood than I am, I still think that I’d be far too squicked out to try eating a dish of live octopus tentacles.

In every scenario I played out in my imagination as far as eating this dish was concerned, I predicted nothing more than a brief slimy struggle then stillness — the last words of an insignificant creature low on the food chain. Silly me. I could not have underestimated my dinner more because once in my mouth, the tentacle went into attack mode and aggressively suctioned on to my teeth, tongue and bottom lip making it nearly impossible for me to manipulate my mouth in order to eat it. My dinner was instinctively trying to preserve its own life while attempting to take mine by asphyxiating me. Needless to say, I was just a little mortified by all this. It was—how would you call it—bleepin’ freaky!!! And if that wasn’t enough, the tentacle then launched phase two of Operation Indigestion and began to whip itself about in a frenzy like it was krump dancing. In my mouth was the mollusk version of the Tasmanian Devil, ferociously flaying at the roof of my mouth and gums. I could not believe it. The feisty, little shit was kind of hurting me. Immediately, I snapped out of the absolute stunned trauma of having to fight with my food and attempted to regain control of the situation. Overpowering the tentacle with my tongue and with a little assist from my fingers, I pried the wicked thing from my gums and teeth. At last the tentacle became vulnerable to my molars. Without hesitating, I bit hard on it over and over and over again while mumbling “Die! Die! Die!” Before it could resurrect itself and do a surprise attack like some slasher movie villain, I swallowed deeply and gulped it down. “Get in my belly!” I gasped.

The dust finally settled. After all that, how does live octopus tentacle taste? A little like fury fused with fear. Spicy and garlicky because of the sauce. There is no aftertaste but there are aftereffects. (Just don’t think about what the tentacle might be doing in your stomach.) It certainly doesn’t taste like cooked squid and nowhere near fried calamari. It’s almost completely devoid of flavor. Texturally it’s highly viscous, more resembling mucous. As far as attitude, it’s the meanest and rudest piece of food I have ever brawled with. And this was only the first piece.

And if that’s not disgusting enough, here’s a video of the dish in question.

Oh. My. Lord.

Never.

(via Pharyngula)

iTunes “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy from the album Fear of a Black Planet (1990, 4:42).