Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Happy Valentine’s Day

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HPPY VDAY Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

The weekend actually didn’t end up being too bad, given that I was feeling fairly miserable when it got started. Prairie came in to town, and we spent most of the weekend laying around the apartment resting and watching movies, with a bit of driving around on Saturday to visit some friends of hers in Anacortes and Bellingham.

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p align=”center”>Sunset over Puget Sound, Bellingham, WA

On Sunday we wandered up along Broadway and stopped by Twice Sold Tales. On their counter is a notice that due to construction on the Seattle Monorail, they will be moving sometime in 2007/2008, as the building they’re currently in will be being demolished. There was a request for volunteers to sign up to assist in moving the store, so I asked if there was a signup sheet available yet.

Apparently this made the store owner’s day, as I was the first person who’d actually asked about volunteering. So, while there wasn’t an actual sign up sheet yet, she gave me her card and wrote “FIRST VOLUNTEER” on it, with promises of goodies and laurel wreaths when the big moving day finally arrives.

Our movie selections for the weekend started with a definite 80’s theme, with Risky Business, Ruthless People, and Big Business. Later we hit Blockbuster and picked up King Arthur (very disappointing) and the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries (very impressive).

After Prairie headed back out to Ellensburg, I camped out in front of the computer and put a few hours into a project I’d been meaning to work on for a long time. I’d always intended for the Hanscom Family Weblog to involve more participants than just my dad and I, but one of the stumbling blocks had been a lack of any sort of ‘instruction manual’ for the site. After Dad forwarded me an e-mail from his brother, my Uncle Doug, letting me know that Doug was interested in contributing to the site, I finally buckled down and got a start on writing out a Users Guide so that more of the extended family can participate.

So, all in all, not a bad weekend. Of course, I haven’t mentioned the number of hours I spent whining and grumbling about being sick, but we’ll just let that slide this time, shall we? :)

Ugh. Ick. Bleah.

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I’m getting sick. No, I’ve gotten sick. This bites. Body aches all over, my eyeballs want to explode anytime I’m not looking directly ahead, and my brain has shut down. For some reason, it’s always one of the first things to go when I get ill — thank goodness for built-in spellchecking, the number of typos and fat-finger errors I’m making is just depressing.

On the bright side, one thing I love about working five blocks from home is that I’ve got time on my one-hour lunch break to leave work, hit Subway, grab a sandwich, come home, eat, hop into the shower and soak under hot water for about 20 minutes, then get back dressed and head back into work. That’s probably about the only thing that made the latter half of the day bearable.

Early bed for me, tonight.

Meh.

iTunes “Most Wonderful Girl, The” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1991, 4:47).

Washington Post article on Blogging and Jobs

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About two weeks ago, I spent some time being interviewed by Amy Joyce of the Washington Post about my expulsion from the Microsoft campus for an article she was working on about the potential pitfalls of blogging about one’s job. The article went live today: Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs. Here’s the section where I’m quoted:

Michael Hanscom started his blog, Eclecticism, before 2000, as a way to keep in touch with family and collect things he found on the Internet. A fan of Apple computers, he found himself working at a temporary job with Xerox on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash.

Hanscom said his family teased him that he would burst into flames when he walked onto the Microsoft campus. So one day, when he noticed a pallet of Macs — the same version he just bought for himself — ready to be delivered to Microsoft, he took a picture and posted it. “It struck my sense of humor,” he said.

A few days after Hanscom posted the picture, he said, his Xerox manager called him into an office. The manager had Hanscom’s blog up, and asked if the picture was his. Hanscom said it was, but said it was posted on his own time, on his own computer. According to Hanscom, the manager then said because it was posted on his own space and time, the company couldn’t ask him to take it down, but he could never come to the Microsoft campus again.

“It makes sense, really,” Hanscom said. “I’ve tried since then to look at it from their point of view. I never gave away any secrets, but I was in a position where I saw a lot.”

Quite a few other webloggers were quoted, too. Looks like my fifteen minutes isn’t quite over with yet! :)

(If anyone happens to be finding my site on a Google search after reading the WaPo article, my 15 Minutes category has all the gory details.)

Grandma’s Memorial

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Mom and dad just got back from their trip to Florida for Grandma’s funeral, and dad posted this photo (with more to come, he says).

Grandma's memorial, Ft. Myers, FL

Harold, my father-in-law, died the 29th of December. We went down for about two weeks, and got Arline, my mother-in-law, who was legally blind, all set for life without Harold. We came back to Alaska. On the 28th of January, Arline died. We got back late last night. […] Our downstairs room contains a lot of stuff we need to organize. Arline had lived 93 years and Harold 88.

iTunes “Shuckin’ the Jive” by Black Happy from the album Peghead (1993, 4:42).

The Al-Can Highway is no more!

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At least, according to Google’s nifty new Google Maps page, that’s the story.

No Alcan on Google

Realistically, I’m quite sure that this is simply because Google Maps doesn’t have the Canadian highway system in their database at the moment. Hopefully that’s only a temporary thing, as that is a search that returns good results in both Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps.

Still, it amused me.

Aside from that and the fact that Google Maps doesn’t work in Safari yet (they do say that they’re working on it), I’ve got to say that I’m very impressed. The maps are prettier than the other systems output, you can drag maps around within the interface (I followed the Glenn Highway out of Anchorage all the way out past Palmer just by dragging along), and from what Joel says, they’re more detailed in some respects than the other systems.

Worth playing with.

Would you survive a horror movie?

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You are so ALIVE

No psycho slayer is going to get between you and your right to life. You’re an ass-kicker, a charge taker, and if need be, a monster masher. You’re level-headed in sticky situations, you trust yout instincts, and you’re not afraid to get a little dirty while getting the job done. Simply put, you rock! But don’t get carried away. Even though your little brother might act like a creep sometimes, you definately shouldn’t be driving stakes through his heart!
Would you survive a horror movie? Find out @ She’s Crafty

Muppets are scary!

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Remember how I was talking about my overactive imagination about a week ago? I had a conversation with Prairie yesterday that reminded me of a couple of perfect examples of this.

The freakin’ Muppets used to give me nightmares. How sad is that?

There are two specific Muppet-related nightmares that I remember clearly. And I do mean clearly — they don’t scare me anymore, but the memories are vivid enough (especially for someone who generally doesn’t remember their dreams) that I know they were pretty traumatizing at the time.

I don’t know if the first was based upon any specific Muppet episode or not. All I do remember is walking through my house at night, with huge — and by huge, I mean the size of large dogs — fuzzy Muppet spiders crawling out of hampers, through doors, over windowsills, and generally throughout the house, trying to get me.

The second is, in retrospect, the more amusing of the two. One of the recurring skits on the Muppet Show was a newscaster reading some bizarre bit of news, after which he’d invariably fall victim to whatever gag he was setting up. In one particular skit, the news item was about strange cases of household furniture suddenly coming alive and attacking people. Of course, after reading the news flash, suddenly his desk opened its eyes, the drawer slid open like a mouth, and it chased him off set.

For months after that, I’d have nightmares of being chased around the house by furniture with big googley Muppet eyes and foam teeth.

It’s funny now. But at that point?

Muppets were scary!

iTunes “Long Time” by Clumsy Lovers, The from the album Barnburner (1999, 3:31).