Top eight list of short reviews of things I've done or seen recently

Every successful blog revels in numbered lists. That's where all the hits come from. Just look at the number of top-whatever lists that hit the front page of Digg every day.

Today, I join that parade. This would be longer (a full 10!), but I'm running low on energy, and while I did repeat yesterday's 84 ounces of fiasco again today (that's a 64 ounce fountain drink, followed by a 20 ounce bottle), I'm not willing to push it past that, considering the three hours of sleep I ended up with last night.

Now, this top eight list only includes recent activities that I would consider novel. For example, although I would like to review The Ultimate Sandman Volume 1, which I just finished reading, I've read it before, and therefore exclude it. Other recent review-worthy activities or experiences that do not count as novel include Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Scorched Earth 3d, cuddling with Jill, Halo 2 as a party game, and the stocking cap-hoodie combo as a sleeping aid.

8. Borders Wi-Fi

What is it? When you go to Borders, and you have a computer, and you want to use that computer, for example, to access Pandora, for example, so you can drown out the pyramid marketing guy giving his money management PowerPoint presentation to the couple in the corner who is in financial straits and has a new baby and says they've stripped out everything unnecessary in the budget but aren't willing to give up their seventy-dollar-a-month satellite TV, or the book group in the corner discussing Kafka or whatever but who are really there to try to proselytize you for Jesus, and you can tell because they're very earnest about the objectivity of their discussion and between the philosophy they talk about small groups or other church program/politics topics, or even the group of aging English teachers who are sharing their short stories which they are trying to make feel authentic even though they've lost all perspective on normal reality being confined in a secondary education academic environment for twenty years.

Who else has experienced it? Oh, the Jill has. Believe me.

Rating? Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Review? Let's see. What's a fancy internet connection cost. On the outside? Like, a really nice one. $150 bucks a month? $200? Plus a one-time fee for a good wi-fi router; $500 for your needs. You don't need one of those monster $25k Cisco System AIR-WLC4404-100-K9. Really. You could easily make enough in sales to cover that, just from people who choose to come in to use the internet, and then buy something else when they do.

Near my house there's a place called Crave Cafe. It's a coffee house in a house, which is my favorite kind of coffee house. A little smoky, but local and homey. Good drinks. They've got free wi-fi. Dragonfly Boba Tea in the strip mall across from Target? Locally owned and operated by a family who got started on their grandmother's recipes? Free Wi-fi. Broadway Cafe? The public library? Panera? Yeah, free wi-fi. Borders' T-Mobile Hotspot? $29.99 a month. That's right. Three times as much as a low tier DSL plan from AT&T (you have to ask, they don't advertise it) just so you can sit in Borders (or Starbucks, I suppose. It's there, too.) and sip on the overpriced liquid addiction and dink around on the Gawker Media blog empire. They don't even carry Diet Mountain Dew. And it's so darn PINK.

See, this is the kind of assumption of consumer attendance that's made Union Station an embarrassing ghost town with overpriced snoot restaurants, and Sony's dalliances in rootkits and PS3 overhype that's transformed it from a bastion of Nippo-American commerce to the least trusted company since Shark and Thief Attorneys at Law, LLC. Look, Borders . . . Starbucks, I don't have to go to your cafe. Ever. Not once. You are just one of many places I could spend my time and money. One in a Legion, I might say, but that might be too harsh.

Nah. Not too harsh. Borders, you're Legion. Go live in some pigs for twenty seconds or so until you find yourself in a short stampede off a short cliff.

7. The Frontega Chicken Sandwich at Panera
What is it? From the Panera website: Smoked and pulled white meat chicken, mozzarella, tomatoes, red onions, chopped basil & chipotle mayonnaise, grilled hot on Focaccia.

Where and when did I eat it? The Panera near 119th and Strang Line. Last night.

Rating? No complaints. Not as good as free Panera's free Wi-fi.

Review? Look at that picture. It's almost that good. Really. It's a delightful sandwich. Great combination of flavors and a'that. But can it climb out from the shadow of the brilliance that is the free wi-fi at Panera? No. The sandwich is a temporal delight. The wi-fi is a lifestyle improvement. I had some soup in a bread bowl too, last night. Hadn't spent any points yet. Totally acceptable. Broccoli and cheese. Good, but not as good as free wi-fi.

6. Trilby: The Art of Theft
What is it? An adventure style game with an emphasis on gameplay, made in the Adventure Game System by Yatzee, the guy who does those hysterical Zero Punctuation video game reviews, based on his previous series of true adventure games for the same system which star the same guy.

How did I hear about it? Yatzee's funny. He has a website. The website has games. Ta-da.

Rating?



Review? The story is top notch, as you expect from Yatzee. It's engrossing. There are twists, and dang is his pacing good. It always is. Every game I've played of his so far lays the story out just as it needs to be. And, overall, the gameplay is solid. Of course, you'd expect that since he said that the whole point of making this game was to flex his gameplay chops. As far as the game itself goes, I like it. A full hat rating worth, as you can see above.

But as the 8th heist will show you, even a hat rating isn't perfect. Close, but not quite. As you progress in the game, your protagonist can buy abilities. Which is completely absurd considering he's a master thief already, but hey. It's a game. I'll go with that. The problem is, you can't ever earn enough points to buy all the skills. Not even half of them. You can go back and redo levels for more points, but it only increases your total by the difference between what you got this time and the next best time. Admittedly, some of the abilities are crap, but your first time through, you don't know that. In fact, the ones that give you more alarms and tazers look great. But they're useless in the long run since you don't want to use any tazers or get any alarms as you try to improve your scores. Heck, by the time you know what's worthwhile and what's not, you're almost through.

Also, the sound really sucks on almost every system I play it on but my new laptop (see below). But that's AGS, not Yatzee. And the sound freakouts make lockpicking way easier. So that's nice. I'm a better lockpicker on my work computer than anyone I see in speed runs on YouTube.

But here's what you need to know. It's FUN. Especially going back though levels once you've earned better skills. You should play it. Right now. Come back to number 5 when you've beat it.

5. This project at work that really ought to be done by Friday, but since I'm blogging all the time, will get done on Friday.
What is it? We have this page of information on the intranet that documents all the different clients we have here at work. It's a huge spreadsheet that gives you contact information, website addresses, and specific configuration information. It's a beast of a website, and takes forever to load, and we use it on almost every call. The problem is, it's updated by our boss, who is a really busy guy, and as part of the end of the year clean-up we do, he assigned Phil to make sure certain information was correct. This information is hidden in a variety of places in our software, and to get it all verified, takes a substantial number of steps. Phil went ahead and sorted the spreadsheet, and organized it, and printed it out so he could set up to knock out as quick as he could. Problem is, he's got the same sit-at-a-desk-and-wait-for-people-to-call job that I've got. We don't have time for projects if we're busy. So some days he could potentially get tons done, but most days, not much. So I volunteered to help. I got half, he got half.

Rating? Best in show. I mean, it's the only substantive project I've had here. And it's nice to be busy. Also, worst in show.

Review? If someone asks you to do this project, say no. It's not bad, per se, it's just a time consumer. I could be surfing the net, or blogging, or doing a merry Frodo-esqe jig. Instead, I'm sliding a piece of paper across a printed spreadsheet and delving though slow menus to get info on what I need to know so I can highlight what needs to be changed. Once I get into it, it's pretty quick, but there are SO many clients. So, meh.

4. Our router at home.
What is it? It's our wired router. I don't remember what his serial number is, but that's a good pic there on the left. We connect to the cable modem and then to the internet through him. He's got a firewall, and UPnP, which makes torrenting easier.

Rating: -thbbbt-

Review: This daddy-o used to be cool. Yeah, every now and then he'd flake out when I was playing Halo 2 online, but he's been a real smooth cat otherwise. Swell, upstanding gent; kept his hair short and his pants long. But then we got a new cable modem, and he hasn't been the same since. Twenty-three skidoo, if you know what I mean. Every time the new cable modem sends a new dynamic IP address, the router goes mental. He doesn't let you by to the cable modem. He disappears from the network list and you can't even go straight to the IP address to log into him. Even unplugging him and plugging him back in doesn't work. We had to unplug him, and the modem, plug the modem back in, wait for it to flash the 'ready' signal, and only then could we plug him back in and our blessed internet would return. Not only that, whenever I sign on to Windows Live Messenger on the laptop (see below) it disconnects me from the internet.

The other night, when I couldn't sleep (like that ever happens . . . sadface), I looked online for some help, finally. Now we can get him up and about a lot easier, just by depressing a recessed button on the back. But that resets the password, which means I have to go back in and change it for security purposes. But an hour later, he just wigs out again and I've got to reset him again with the button. Thank goodness he's confided the location of that button like I'm his own personal Dr Crusher, or we'd be out of luck.

Sometime in the near future, a mysterious, nigh-ethereal stranger will be dropping in, giving us our own wi-fi at home, but in the meantime, we'll deal with this schlob and his poor work ethic.

3. When Jill said, "I haven't seen blood like that since Soylent Green"

What is it? Last night, in reference to the glistening red glop in the new Johnny Depp feature film Sweeney Todd, Jill said the above.

Where were we? Driving home from Borders (see above) last night.

Rating? Full blood drops, across the board, all categories.

Review. Funniest thing I've heard all week. Best reference of the year.



2. Juno
What is it? A movie. It's got an IMDB. Like all movies do these days. Wonders never cease, eh? It's like there's an informational beam of magical glowing energy flowing from mystical tubes that run below the ground in steam tunnels. Hurray internet.

Who did I see it with? Jill, Amanda, Juliet, Jeremy F, Brett, Katie, uh . . . some other people? I don't remember

When with? Like, last week when Steve was still out of town.

Rating? On a scale of one to ten, I give this movie three thumbs up.

Review? High school that looks like a real high school, teenagers that act like teenagers, parents that act like parents, hifalutin vocabulary in a natural conversational flow, fresh voices, honest characters, emotional depth: aaaahhhhhh, yeah. Also, It's Brett Parker's favorite movie now (Is there higher praise?). So good it's worth seeing thrice.

Now, Eric didn't like it, and neither did Jeremy Ford. But they're flat wrong. They did like it. Deep down, they were so overwhelmed with joy and happiness at the delightful characters and fresh storytelling, they had to deny their true feelings to be able to cope with the awesomeness. Like a fourth quarter senior in high school with a crush on that really cool, down-to-earth student teacher. It's only four years, man. Just because you can't act on it, that doesn't mean your feelings aren't real. Buck up, sport. Ok, they're not not real, you are in high school, which is inherently myopic. Get over yourself. You've seen Rushmore. She's out of your league. Grow up, man. Don't be that guy.

Wait, what?

1. My New Laptop
What is it?

Inspiron 1520 (This means nothing to anyone, anywhere, ever)

Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 1.5GHz/667Mhz (runs The Art of Theft like a clockwork man)

Jet Black Color with Matte Finish (It was an extra twenty bucks for any other color, which would be glossy. And I type well in black, so . . . . Plus, a matte finish is good for stickers and decals should I trot down that road.)

High Resolution, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch display (1440x900) (It was extra to get to that resolution, but I thought it was worth it considering I've already installed the GIMP.)

128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M (Any more video RAM, and it would have been at least an extra $150)

160G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive (Now full of bees, I mean, music.)

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (As far as I can tell, Premium just means transparent title bars. But basic seemed a little too, well . . . sucky.)

8X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive (I can pirate anything I want now. Thanks, technology)

Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0 (Sounds fine to me. I've got some cheap-o headphones (not the new earbuds) and Miles Davis comes in as loud and clear as you'd expect from a non-remastered recording.)

WLAN (802.11a/g) Mini Card (Great range so far. Except at Borders. See above.)

Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam (For talking to Juliet. And others. If our router wasn't so screwy. See above.)

Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Mod. (No use for this yet. But the possibilities are , well, limited. But cool. Wireless headphones, mouse, connect to a stereo wirelessly, that kind of thing.)

ADOBE ACROBAT READER 8.1 (BALEETED. Installed Foxit.)

Roxio Creator Basic (Not yet BALLETED. *goes to get Nero Free, or ANYTHING, really*)

Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security, English, 15-Month Subscription (BALEETED. Installed AVG Free and Spybot Search and Destroy)

How did I acquire it?
Very generous family members who realized that I would never, ever get something like this for myself, so they gave me a huge down payment for Christmas and my birthday.

Rating?





Review?
Well, in short, it rules. Like a potentate. Of a small island nation. Good for typing, good for connecting via wireless internet (Given a good location. See above); its speed is nice and Vista is pretty and runs smooth. The webcam is fun. Although, right now, the home button you can see in the picture above takes me to a fancy flash ad for the computer itself. Which is kind of lame. I can't imagine anyone wanting any more advertisement for a thing they've already purchased. Like this morning, on the way to work when I turned on the radio to hear if there was an accident, and then turned it off because Steven St. John was trying to sell my a Time Warner cable package that I had already rejected in full and taken just the internet portion of. Am I the only person who thinks advertisement is cast a bit too wide of a swath these days? I already own the product. Let me alone.

Back to the laptop. I wish I had more accessories, like a bluetooth mouse and a thing that sets off heat-seeking missiles at the click of a mouse. But those'll come in time. Oh, yes. Or not. I'm a lousy consumer and tend to think that if I don't have it already, I probably don't need it. It's almost anti-American, I know.

Also, now that I can write anywhere I can pull the laptop out, I've written more, even though I'm mostly writing in places I could have before.

Anyway, thanks, familial types.



There's the list. I left off Tim Keel's book Intuitive Leadership, and the office that's two doors down from the corner office in the vacant part of the building here at work. Such is life.

If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation.

At James's birthday party on Sunday, one of his old youth pastors asked me what I do for a living. There were, actually, two of his old youth pastors there along with about 20 other close personal friends of our dear own Mr. Parker. We sat in the back room of Chubby's along a long set of table table that grew more tables like mitosis o as people showed up. Chubby's is a place I can hardly recommend to anyone on Weight Watchers, but I can hardily recommend to all those whose weight is not currently held under suspicion, like mine is. Especially if you're hungry at three in the morning, and you want something a little less sketchy than Poncho's over on Main. Which, although delicious, is not my first, chubby's choice for pre-pre-dawn meals.

I had already decided how to answer the question should someone ask. I asked him if he meant what I do for living, or what I do for a job, because they're different things. For a living, I spend time with good friends, and eat meals, and hang out with homeless people, and love my wife. I read books, and comic books, and web sites, and I blog (now), and play in the rain. I work with the youth at church, and lead (ish) a small group, and am part of a smaller group of guys who are trying to encourage each other by speaking the truth, as hard as that is when you're good friends and you want to enjoy each others' company. But, once a day I head off to Olathe for 9 hours or so and do tech support for real estate software.

I used to be a teacher for a living. Like the Spice (without the cool eye color change) it permeated my whole life. I talk about the caffeine affecting my sleep cycles back then, but the teaching was just as much a part of that as anything else. A normal, good life should have a rhythm. Nights and days and rest and hard work. Live in the seasons and let them reverse the pathetic fallacy on you. But teaching for me was a full-revved engine twenty-four hours a day, all the days of the week, even on breaks. At a gaming session I once drank one and a half shots of AMP after having consumed three or four cans of the Diet Mt. Dew (seeing any trends yet?) and my heart started racing, and I felt seriously up for a couple of hours. The tail end of that feeling, when you're out of activity but still full of energy was what teaching was for me most of the time.

I taught English. Now, the NEA isn't going to acknowledge this, but teaching different subjects amounts to entirely different jobs. Believe me, I subbed for three years. I've seen it first hand. Gym teaching is pretty easy, it's the platform our school system has set up for coaches to actually be able to do what they really care about, which is pour their lives into young people. Something the typical school day is antithetical to. Math teaching is mostly setting up good assignments and then going over them. English is a different beat entirely. I don't want to dwell too much on that time period, but English teachers are tasked with teaching the building blocks of all the other subjects: reading, writing, speaking and listening. And on top of that, they're supposed to teach literature, too. Of course, for a good high school English teacher, the literature is only the delightful and rich tool to teach the other, more important, building blocks of learning. At Turner, every teacher was supposed to be teaching reading and writing (along with problem solving) in their curriculum. You can imagine how well that went over. So it ended up falling to the English teachers, as you'd expect. One short writing assignment is a minimum six hours of grading. And that doesn't get spread out over the whole school. You can't toss a writing assignment at a teacher's assistant like you can a multiple choice test. It was just me.

It was my first year, and I was dealing with learning to be an authority figure, and be organized for other people, and keep my energy up. And on top of that, grading (six hours for a single good assignment, remember), and plan five lectures a day.

It was my life.

More than living it and breathing it and tasting it in my food, it was who I was. I taught for a living. I loved it. I love the students. Like I said when I quit, I didn't dislike any of them. Even the annoying ones. I taught in my sleep. When I bought things I thought about how it would affect teaching.

I trained the new guy this afternoon just like I did on Friday. I took my lunch off to organize my new laptop. This morning, read all the blogs and comics I wanted, searched all the aggragating sites I wanted, played a game I wanted to, talked with Steve about the estate tax and a little about Ron Paul for a couple hours, worked on the book that I've been too lazy to write, and still had time to write this this afternoon. And I still took forty-one calls today. I get to see Nicholas and Dan here and laugh with them (and Rick Roll them). Mondays I have lunch with my dad. That's my job now. You can read Dan's Tech Terrors if you want a taste of the details, but for me, mostly, this job it's a necessary interruption to living, which really gets going when I leave.

It comes down to identity. Teaching used to be it. Performance, maybe. Succeeding. I like to think I'm giving that up. Learning that it's who I know, and how well, not what I do that matters. Being willing to follow Jesus to any weird places he might take me. Palces where I may or may not teach.

I don't know which life is richer. But I know which one affords me rest. And time with friends. And evenings with Jill where nothing happens at all. But it's also the life where I make up not-so-clever answers to the "whatya do?" question so I can spring them on people who think my job is who I am anymore.

Never thought I'd be that guy

The first semester I taught high school, my addiction got so bad that I would drop by the convenience store at the corner of 47th (Johnson County) and 55th (Wyandotte County) and get my fix on the way to work most days. That gas station is a scuzzy place. Like a lot of places in the Turner area. Not shady, mind you, just scuzzy. Like when you go to a small town in the middle of Kansas, and things are dusty, and no one notices because there's nothing to compare it to. That's Turner. small town feel, but they've got some big town issues. Gangs, if you believe it.

There is a liquor store next door, and a bar I went to one time to celebrate an early year Friday with some colleagues. It ending up being just three or four of us, and I had a Mountain Dew, and they all had beer. Step one of the reasons I never fit in with the teacher crowd. By January, I was already uncertified, and one of those guys at the table had drunk-dialed one of his volleyball girls and he got swept under the Turner rug like everything else there that doesn't fit the Turner values. He wasn't the only teacher that left in the middle of the year, but I guess small Wyandotte school districts don't matter in the grand scheme of things unless plagiarism is involved. But then again, Piper's got some money, and Turner's the cat that you walled in during remodeling and you can't even hear the meows to know you screwed it all up. Probably one of the reasons I loved it there. I don't think I would have quit if I hadn't had to.

I never fit in with that teacher crowd. For people that are supposed to be teaching kids how to become, they haven't become very well themseves. Petty people, a lot of them, thinking they're helping, but unwilling to change. I'm not sure if it was that I still felt young, or that they were all very populist and I lean on Libertariansm, or that I liked to hang out with the students and they mostly liked to kick them on the way out the door at 2:30. You home life sucks, but you can't be here. Get out. And they wonder why so many Turner girls drop out right before they move in with their baby daddies.

But besides of a couple three people who were gone at the end of the year, I never made the connection beyond 'hi's in the hall, and the occasional lunchtime debate over politics. Maybe if I'd had more than a year to become a teacher. The common wisdom says you need three years to get acclimated to the job. And stuck myself with one because I'm not much for bureaucratic red tape and reading. But that's my fault, nobody else's.

But like I was saying,there were a whole string of mornings I stopped by that gas station to pick up two cold 2-liters of Diet Mt. Dew. One for before lunch, and one for after. That's 4 liters of caffeinated bliss every day. Or, in terms perhaps more existential, approximately 1/6 of the dose of caffeine it would take to kill a 200 lb. male if ingested in less than an hour's time. And I was right there at 200 lbs. Some days I got a fifth liter as I gassed up on the way home. Or 42 ounces at Quicktrip over lunch.

Let me say something about Quicktrip here: It freaking RULES. If you've been there, you know, man. You know.

It was around this time that I made my Christmas list for that year. Now, this was back in my consumerist days, before I learned to fight the power of the Needs Stuff Empire, and when my Christmas lists were multi-page categorized and hotlinked affairs with options for all price ranges and purchasing abilities. One of the myriad items I asked for from Think Geek that year was a hoodie with the caffeine embroidered on the front. I'm trying to say that I was hardcore into that stuff in late 2005.

After a while I started to notice that my mental math skills weren't working as automatically as they usually do. Most of the time, if I want to know how my 57+62 is, I ask my brain, and it spits it out in a second or two, like an old school adding machine. That fall, I was having to spend the time to write it out in my head. It was like I could feel my myelin sheath dissipating, clouding up in a dust cloud after it left. I wasn't sleeping well either. Wake up in the middle of the night, terrified that I had slept in and missed work. Did that once, even. Sleeping in, that is.. And then there were nights I couldn't get to sleep. Admittedly, my schedule wasn't helping. I am not a morning person, and on top of that, I like late nights. Double whammy. But at least I wasn't doing it with sugar pop. Ida been twice my weight by then ifa had.

So I quit. I remember being pretty irritable and anti-social for three or four days, but I did it. Even with first year teaching and everything. And it felt good. Like I was living again. It was like spring. Every winter I fall away from the surface of alertness and motivation, so slow I don't even know it. And then one day in March or April, I realize how deep I am and kick back up to the surface, finally getting air I didn't even know I was missing. It was like that.

Today, before work, I went to the convenience store with Dan. He got a breakfast sandwich, and I got a 64 oz diet Mt. Dew. Later in the day as I started dragging after lunch, I had a cup of coffee to get the motivation to keep writing this post. And as I'm finishing this up here in the corner at Jeremy's birthday party while people play Halo2 (my favorite game of all time; a post for another day), I almost grabbed a can of Mt. Dew to muster the mental acuity to finish. Like Derek Webb said in that song about the box of letters, I find the same old things are plaguing me still.

I was off for a few months. Maybe it was the fact that I now owned a blue hoodie with an electric green caffeine molecule on the front, or maybe it was just that I like the community coffee creates, or maybe I liked the illusion of being able to function on very little sleep. But I hopped back on that beast as soon as I got the chance and took a ride.

It's not as bad as it used to be. Believe me on that one. I did drink a gallon on January 29th, but that was over 8 hours. And halfa one most days at work. But it's not nearly as bad. Maybe I'll quit again, and get awake again. Maybe I'll take the wide road and go get a can out of the fridge right now. I'll let you know either way. But I've got a party to be at, so, tootles, ya'll.

Edit: I had one 12 oz. can. And it's 2:15. And I'm trying to figure out why our old router doesn't like our new cable modem and flakes out when acquiring a new IP address. I got nothin'.