Keith's Complete Waste of Time

As some of you know, because I emailed you and asked you to donate to the American Diabetes Association for my ride in the Napa Tour de Cure.  My friend, Mark, had organized a team, and because I had the same kind of bike as he has he asked me if I’d like to join in.  He promised the ride would be pretty and flat.

My friends totally came thru and donate a bunch more money than I even expected, and I’m both proud and extremely humbled by the generosity of people I know.

The bike ride itself was up in Yountville, CA, just north of Napa, on the morning of May 5th.  Loretta’s sister Maureen went up with me and also did the ride.  We went up the night before because we needed to be at the start between 9am and 10am, and actually got onto the road about 9:45am, and rolled back over the finish line about 2 hours later, just before noon.  I was a bit tired, and my feet were a bit tingly, but nowhere near as worn out as I’d expected.  It was, as promised, mostly flat and quite pretty.  Much of the ride was on nearly deserted roads, with only a few mile segment on a pretty busy highway.

I taped a short movie at the start of the ride, so you can see me in all my glory, and I also taped about the last 15 minutes of the ride because I wanted to show what it was like.  Sadly, the camera does jerk around a fair amount because of the bumpiness of the road.

/keith/blog/wp-content/TourdeCureRideEnd052010

up in San Francisco, at the Great American Music Hall.  It’s probably been a number of years since I last went to a concert — heck, maybe the last real one was Voice Farm, which would have been in the mid 1990s.  Jonathan was great ( and, the two opening acts were also good — a music/comedy team called Paul and Storm and a dude named Kid Beyond, who was musical in a way that I can’t describe. ) I taped a couple bits of the concert on my Flip Video HD camera, because apparently it’s cool to do so with Jonathan and the openers.  This is the first song of his that I can recall hearing, and I rather like it since (at times) it seems to pretty adequately describe my life.  I suspect you can vaguely hear me singing along. 🙁

http://www.stattenfield.org/keith/blog/wp-content/uploads/video/CodeMonkey

He also wrote “Still Alive”, which is the ending song from a game called Portal that I quite enjoyed.  Loretta also loved this song, and we bought the actual from the game (sung by the character in the game ).  Here’s his version

http://www.stattenfield.org/keith/blog/wp-content/uploads/video/StillAlive

He also did another song that I rather like, “Re: Your Brains”, sung by a zombie to the last few survivors of humanity giving their point of view on things.

http://www.stattenfield.org/keith/blog/wp-content/uploads/video/ReYourBrains

Here’s a song he did called Always the Moon, with Paul and Storm.  It didn’t do a lot for me, but they had a good rapport up there.

http://www.stattenfield.org/keith/blog/wp-content/uploads/video/AlwaysTheMoon

And this was one where Kid Beyond came up to do a modern day banjo duel, except with electronic equipmen

http://www.stattenfield.org/keith/blog/wp-content/uploads/video/MrFancyPants

I ordered a fitbit a long time ago, and they finally shipped a few weeks back to their first customers, including me. My capsule thoughts on the pros and cons of this thing

Pro:

• Keeps track of actual times I exercised and walked around, with more info than a “steps this day” thing
• Uploaded data to their website wirelessly so I didn’t have to remember to check and record each day how much I did
• Pretty graphs on the website

Cons:

• Tiny and easy to lose about 10 days after you pay $99 for it.

Sigh. Don’t know if it’s worth spending another $99 to get a second one.

-Keith

Although it’s two months since the November 2008 election that passed Proposition 8 in California, it’s still rather big news, or at least it still makes the news with fair regularity. It’s roiled a couple mailing lists I’m on, still has public protests, sparked complains about the influence of the Mormon church ( and out of state residents contributions to a California initiative ), and has led to the creation of a number of websites which display and track the donations to the pro Proposition 8 folks. For example, yesterday I heard about www.eightmaps.com, which shows the amounts and addresses on a Google map of everyone who donated to the Yes on 8 campaign.

So, when I found the site, I was of course curious which, if any, of my neighbors had contributed to the yes campaign. We had a no on 8 sign in our window for the month or so before the election, and didn’t see any yes on 8 signs in my immediate neighborhood, but I do remember driving past them to and from work, and eightmaps.com did show me that some folks near where I live had contributed. I’ve heard a couple folks on the radio talking about places where this information is available, and that it has led to harassment of people and some folks have resigned from their jobs after their donations were revealed.

Which leads to my real point, which is now that I have this information, what do I do with it? I didn’t recognize anyone that I know, which I suppose makes things a bit easier, but there are thing there. The nVidia executive who donated $10,000 — I’ve bought nVidia video cards for my computer before, but maybe next time I’ll think more about ATI. Of course, I don’t really know how many donations any ATI executives may have made, and they’re big companies, so it may not be quite as cut and dried as that.

But, what if I found my dentist there — not that I have, but what if? He’s a nice guy, and a good dentist, but he does own his own practice, and I’d hate to think that he is using the money I pay for teeth cleanings to deny my fellow citizens their rights. There are a lot of dentists in the valley, and I’m sure a lot of them are good ones. I could find another dentist if I needed to.

And that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to go out of my way, but if I find out that the folks at my favorite restaurant were big donors, well, I guess I can find another place to eat, because there are a lot of restaurants and many of them have good food. If the manager at my auto repair shop chipped in $500, well, I like him but I’ll miss him. Years ago, I found out that Orson Scott Card, a science fiction writer of some acclaim, was a pretty virulent homophobe. I haven’t bought or read his books since, because I don’t want to be giving money to, well, to a troglodyte. There are plenty of good science fiction writers out there, and the sooner the world says “you are dead to us because, even though your books may be good, you yourself are a horrible person” the better off we’ll be.

local, Santa Clara City Council elections and who I’d be voting for. Other than an initial “Do you work for a radio or television station?” ( which, by the way, who cares considering the questions they then asked ), it was basically “Who do you expect to vote for in this city council seat: Seat 3: Will or Mario or Mary, Seat 4: Kevin, Seat 6: Jamie or Brian, Seat 7: Jamie or Ciaran or Chuck? ( City Clerk & Police Chief weren’t in the poll, although both Rod and Steve are running unopposed )

And, I’m not going to tell you who I answered, other than to say “Kevin” for seat 4 since he was the only choice in their survey ( apparently, Karen as a write-in doesn’t rate as poll-worthy ). They also asked two questions, vaguely about the two “big” issues in the campaign, namely whether the city should look at a stadium and what the city should do about the Kaiser site development. I couldn’t answer anything about the second question, since it will eventually come before the Planning Commission.

And, the reason this is at all blog-entry worthy at all, other than my sheer amazement that someone is doing local, city-council level polling, was that the nice woman doing the survey had almost no idea how to pronounce anyone’s names, and she kept calling it “Santa Clarita”. After we were done I asked her a couple questions about how many calls she was making, and how it seemed to be going ( apparently lots of people just don’t know who they’re going to vote for ), and told her how to pronounce everyone’s names. Except Ciaran, since I have no idea how to pronounce that one.

I’ve been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my Wii ( and having fun ), but somehow I never thought it would get Lord Vader on my case…

As many of you know, I’m spending stupid amounts of time on one of my gag websites, Penis Reduction Pills I started it last year partly to learn how to use a new web content system ( Joomla ), which we wanted to put up for Loretta’s tv show site, and I also thought that I could have fun with a somewhat extended joke, as well as play around with stuff like internet advertising and “marketing”, which I have no real exposure to in my day to day life.

One cool thing is that every once in a while folks contact me and really get the joke, and want to share it themselves with folks. I’ve had people email me and say that they saw my ad somewhere, and want to write about it on their blog, or they just link to me in a post on their site. And, in those cases where it’s been a site linking to me in a language other than English, I get to have fun using Google to translate it back into English and then laugh at the wacky words and ideas that seemingly are expressed.

I got such a email a couple months back, from Nerraux with The Awful Show, which is a “radio” show that tapes every week and mostly plays on the “interwebs”. I listened to a couple of their shows, and appeared on their latest show, episode 116. I suspect they get a lot of their listeners via iTunes or a later podcast-type download, but they also have a bunch of folks listening to them do the show live every week, which is pretty brave — I’d never try to do Keith Explains! live ( except for the friends in the audience ), mostly because I think half the humor is the stuff I think of to put up in the subtitles and images as the show goes by, and it always takes a couple hours for me to think of enough funny stuff to pep up the 28 minutes of talking I do each time.

Anyway, I had fun. If you just want to listen to just my part, it’s here and about 20 minutes or so in length. Hearing it again, and even while I was doing it, I can think of so many “better” things I could have said in most cases, and sometimes it was hard to break into the conversation because they all know each other and know when to chime in and make jokes about things. Twenty minutes goes by really fast, much faster than it seems when I’m taping Keith Explains. It’s probably because on my show I’m really only playing off myself — as I say things, I also think of stuff I can put up as text later, and so I leave “space” for it, but when other folks are involved everything goes by a lot faster. I had the same thoughts after I was on Sebastian in the Morning earlier this summer. But, as I said, I had fun and they say they did too, so everyone’s happy.

So, I suspect if I get another 30 or 40 tries, I could finally get this thing right.

Every year, one of the sessions I’m involved with at Apple’s World-wide Developer’s Conference is called Stump the Experts. Ostensibly, it’s a “game” show, where the developers are suppose to ask trivia questions about (mostly) the Macintosh, and we answer them, because we’re all experts and know pretty much everything. I’ve been on the panel since 2000, when I was the lead engineer on Mac OS 9 and maybe did know a lot about the system, but since the scope of the Mac expands every year by this last year I’m certainly not an expert on most areas of the operating system. But, I’m still up there because things never change. Personally, I’ve wondered why developers like the session so much — each year it seems to be more of a madhouse, and we aren’t getting many questions answered — but the session feedback from the folks that come all say that folks really like the session. Maybe it’s the free stuff that gets given away.

This last year, I took a set of pictures from the front just before the session started, just so everyone would see what it’s like for us. Mostly, it’s people as far as the eye can see. For a couple seconds each year it’s kind of intimidating, then I remember that most of those folks actually like us.

While driving down to Gilroy, taking some out of town visitors to the Gilroy Outlet malls because that’s where they wanted to go, and listening to the “3+ stars rated songs” on the iPod, I remembered a line from some Tolkien novel I read long, long ago. Since I’m terrible with quotes, and am probably misremembering it, I’ll paraphrase: “And so came to an end the age of the Elves and began the age of Man.” It’s near the end of the third book, the last book, after the bad guy has been defeated, and the hero has been crowned king, and the hobbits find their way back to their homes.

Which, assuming that I’m actually remembering the quote somewhat accurately, and given that it’s been years since I read it, an that I’m really remembering the first time I read it, back when I was probably about 14, so that it made more of an impression on me than it would not ( although, again, if I’m remembering it at all correctly ) is still one heck of a line.

And, the reason it came to me, while heading to what was to be a somewhat boring afternoon, is that coming on about the 1,000th page of a long, intricate adventure where stuff has happened and ( worse ) where lots of stuff hasn’t happened in between all of the stuff occasionally happening, was that at the time it surprised me because, up till then, the elves had been pretty kick ass. Sure, there was too much poetry and “Go here and tell random Elf-name-starting-with-the-letter-G this.”, and back and forth, but you wouldn’t want to fuck with the elves because they had power and abilities beyond those of the average folk. Among other things, they were pretty much immortal, so they could take their time before screwing you over completely.

And yet, it was the end. Sure, they didn’t really know it. Not yet; at least for lots of them. The upper level ones knew, and the rest were slowly coming to the realization that the world had moved on past them, and what awaited each of them was a trip on a boat to the lands over the sea to the east — to their deaths, essentially.

So, why do I mention this? Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe this is exactly where the USA is today — on top of the world, don’t fuck with us for a long time, and then… well, its over, save for the cleaning up and packing of the bags. It’s someone else’s turn.

And, if the age of the Elves is past, whose age is it now?