Profile Pages

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In the course of updating my about page, I spent a little time cleaning up some of my profiles on other sites that I’ve picked up memberships in at one point or another over the years. Most of them I haven’t bothered to do much with after initially signing up, so it was interesting coming back to them and seeing the changes that have taken place.

The two most altered from what I remember are my Tribe.net and Yahoo! pages. Tribe has apparently undergone some rather major updates since I was there last, and Yahoo recently introduced their Yahoo 360 service. Amusingly, the two services now offer enough similar features that I’ve been able to nearly duplicate my profile on each one — everything from recent weblog posts to my del.icio.us links to my Flickr photos, all collected together on one page. Must admit, while I’m not likely to become a heavy user of either service, all the new fancybits are nice to see, and should be quite handy when connecting to other people who use them.

Feel free to check out my profiles and add me if you use either of the services. Or not. Y’know…whichever. ;)

iTunes “Da’Ale Da’Ale (Remix)” by Haza, Ofra from the album Just Say Mao (1989, 6:05).

Choices

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The Leaky Cauldron has been running an interview with J.K. Rowling over the past week (in three parts: one, two, and three) with questions posed by Emerson Spartz of Mugglenet and Melissa Anelli of The Leaky Cauldron. The whole interview is very worth reading — though full of spoilers, so I don’t recommend reading it if you haven’t finished the latest book yet — but one section stood out to me when I read it.

JKR: …because I think there’s a line there between the moment in “Chamber of Secrets” when Dumbledore says so famously, ‘It’s our choices that define us, not our abilities,’ straight through to Dumbledore sitting in his office, saying to Harry, “the prophecy is significant only because you and Voldemort choose to make it so.” If you both chose to walk away, you could both live! That’s the bottom line. If both of them decided, “We’re not playing,” and walked away… but, it’s not going to happen, because as far as Voldemort’s concerned, Harry’s a threat. They must meet each other.

ES: I remember thinking when I read “Order of the Phoenix,” what would happen if Harry and Voldemort just decided to —

JKR: Shake hands, and walk away? We’ll agree to disagree!

[Laughter.]

ES: What if he never heard the prophecy?

JKR: And that’s it, isn’t it. As I said, that’s what I posted on my site –

ES: I’m glad you put that up.

JKR: It’s the “Macbeth” idea. I absolutely adore “Macbeth.” It is possibly my favorite Shakespeare play. And that’s the question isn’t it? If Macbeth hadn’t met the witches, would he have killed Duncan? Would any of it have happened? Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen.

MA: If everyone would just shake hands and play a round of golf, everything would be fine.

[Laughter.]

Obviously, nothing necessarily mind-blowing in and of itself, but it’s a theme that I’m quite happy that Rowling has been using in the books, and expanding on in interviews. So many of the troubles people face, both on a personal and on a global scale, all just boil down to happening because one party or another want them to.

Obviously, the solution to all the world’s woes, then, is never to want to cause any sort of conflict whatsoever, so I’ll shortly be embarking on my daily routine of laudanum and thorazine to ensure I can do my own small part in making this world a calmer, less embittered place.

Erm.

Well, okay, maybe not.

iTunes “Movin’ On Up (Demrocked!’s Movinunbelievable)” by Primal Scream from the album screamixadelica (2005, 5:00).

Bad Timing

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There’s a guy who works in the mailroom just down the hall from me who greets me every time he sees me by calling my name out in kind of a sing-song fashion — “Mi-chael…!” It’s a little odd, but not really a big deal.

Unless he does it as he enters the restroom, while I’m standing at the urinal. Suddenly, my name is echoing from tile wall to tile wall, and, well, as delicately as I can put it, all bodily functions immediately cease. That’s just not a good time to be startled.

Shmoe.

What’s your funny?

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Another online quiz — though this one (unlike many others), actually gave me a result that seemed pretty accurate: the three-variable funny test.

The Wit

(60% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK

You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you’re probably an intellectual, but don’t take that to mean you’re pretentious. You realize ‘dumb’ can be witty–after all isn’t that ‘the Simpsons’ philosophy?–but rudeness for its own sake, ‘gross-out’ humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it’s also the best, in my opinion.

Also, you probably loved The Office. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart – Woody Allen – Ricky Gervais

Humor Test Result Graph

My test tracked 3 variables. How you compared to other people your age and gender:

   
You scored higher than 54% on dark
   
You scored higher than 0% on spontaneous
   
You scored higher than 9% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

(via James)

(And, once again, I’m driven up the wall by the mind-boggling horrible HTML code that these quizes generate. I just don’t have the time to clean it up any more than I already have right now…grrr!)

Bite of Seattle 2005

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End of the Rainbow, International Fountain, Seattle Center, Bite of Seattle, Seattle, WA

A small photoset of shots from wandering around Saturday at the Bite of Seattle. Not my usual onslaught of pics this time…I just wasn’t as into it on Saturday as I am sometimes. Still managed a few decent shots, though.

Housekeeping

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I’ve finally gone in and made a few slight tweaks to my about page, adding a short list of other sites that I participate in and a few other bits and pieces here and there.

One change that is more major in my head than anywhere else is the addition of a paragraph about my identity as “the Microsoft blogger”. I’ve resisted this until now, as I’ve always felt that: one, it’s a very small part of who I am, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable with looking like I’m trying to capitalize on the fracas; and two, it was a dumb mistake on my part that I keep hoping will evetually disappear into the great bit bucket of ‘net lore.

However, given that the three primary posts about that event (the picture, the day I was let go, and my wrapup from a few days later) are consistently the most heavily trafficked pages on my site — lately, they’ve been getting a boost every time new information on the Xbox leaks out, as one person or another feels compelled to point to me during the ensuing discussion — I figured it was time to just shrug my shoulders and admit that yeah, that’s me, and point to the pages in question.

I’m still not entirely comfortable with that, but ignoring it in the hopes that it would go away hasn’t done much, and I’m not so determined to get away from it that I’d actually delete the posts in question…so, there they are.

At least I didn’t end up inadvertently coining a new term for getting fired — ‘djwudi’d’, ‘michael’d’, or ‘hanscom’d’ just doesn’t roll off of the tongue like ‘dooced‘ does, anyway. ;)

Okay…who washed their car?

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For the past week, we’ve had gorgeous high-70’s to low-80’s sunshine throughout Seattle, with more predicted through the weekend and on into next week.

So how come I woke up to grey skies, rain, and “possible thunderstorms,” according to Weather Underground? Some fool must have gotten the urge to wash his car yesterday. Everybody knows that that’s the surest way to bring on a sudden burst of rain!

Ah, well…I’ll just keep my fingers crossed for the weekend. This weekend’s the Bite of Seattle food festival, so I’ll likely be wandering around the Seattle Center for much of the weekend, camera in hand. As long as nothing unexpected crops up, I should be out at the Vogue on Saturday night, too — things have been so busy lately that I haven’t been able to get out dancing as often as I like, but I need to get some bouncing in when I can.

And to close (for the moment, at least), a shot I took yesterday at Westlake Plaza of people camped out in the sun on their lunch break.

Lunchtime, Westlake Plaza, Seattle, WA

Podcast 06: ToriMix v2

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A little late today, but here’s number six in my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. Another “theme” mix, this is a forty-five minute mix of Tori Amos’ dance remixes. As a fan of Tori and bouncing around on the dance floor, this one was probably bound to come out sooner or later during my DJ days.

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: ToriMix v2 (46m 37s, 53.36Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Tori Amos ‘God (Rainforest Resort)’

  2. Tori Amos ‘In the Springtime of his Voodoo (Hasbrouck Heights Club)’

  3. Tori Amos ‘Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’)’

  4. Tori Amos ‘Jackie’s Strength (Wedding Cake Meltdown)’

  5. Tori Amos ‘Talula (BT’s Synethaesia)’

  6. BT feat. Tori Amos ‘Blue Skies (Hot Tracks)’

Eclinkticism returns

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Assuming I’ve managed to figure out the right combination of shell scripts, SSI includes, CRON jobs, and other associated voodoo, the Eclinkticism linklog in the sidebar should be up and running again. As before, it’s just a dump of the most recent items I’ve added to my del.icio.us account, so feel free to add that RSS feed to your reader if you like.

iTunes “What’s Going On” by Lauper, Cyndi from the album Twelve Deadly Cyns…and Then Some (1989, 3:51).

Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers

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Bag'n'Pipe HoppersOne of the local street performers I enjoy running into is the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers. Actually two performers who team up together from time to time — Don P. Scobie on bagpipes* and Jesse Bishop (or Bishnutz) on drums — their combination of traditional Scottish piping and modern hip-hop beats is always fun to stumble across.

Last Friday evening while waiting for the Half-Blood Prince to come out, Prairie and I took a wander and found the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers playing at the corner of 4th and Pine. Their playing had attracted a small crowd of onlookers, including a few b-boys breakdancing beside them, so I grabbed my camera and recorded a few minutes of video.

May 2010 Update: Though the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers are no more, Don has gone on to form a new outfit, Nae Regrets. Worth checking out!

  • Prairie’s especially fond of running across Don (a.k.a. “the hot bagpiper guy“), whether or not he’s playing with Jesse. Her only complaint about the performance we saw was that Don wasn’t wearing his kilt. :)