More Election Woes

So it seems like theres a little bit of anticipation in the air about next tuesday. Obama aired a 30 minute infomercial on just about every channel. I watched it and it was indeed a well crafted, smart piece of propaganda to stir the hearts of the steely undecideds. But will it work? I find it pretty hard to believe that people are still ambivalent about this election, but maybe this gesture will change a few minds. It really is more of a grand gesture than it is anything else. Unless you haven't been in America, Europe, South America, China, Indonesia, or pretty much anywhere else in the world, you've heard just about everything there is to hear about both of these candidates from the horse's mouth.

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Bacon Cupcakes are Glorious

There's nothing better than the satisfaction of a day well spent, and that's why I ate a cupcake with bacon on it. To wallow in one's own crapulence is entirely necessary, if only once in a while.

And here's a picture of a duck I took today.



Some abstract shots, too:





I'm thinking of having another movie marathon tomorrow. There's so much to watch on the Roku, it just might be necessary.

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Saturday Mornings with Dr. Horrible

I had really forgotten how funny Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible's is, yr finger might not be on teh pulse of the internets. Do I have to say more than "Neil Patrick Harris + Singing"??

Here's the full episode from Hulu, which is my favorite site for streaming teev on the internet. Its how I've been watching this season of The Office.

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I'm still alive, but my google reader wouldn't know

So I've been working like an animal at a job I don't like, and I've been letting it get the best of me. I've had to put my other projects on hold, including my blog. It was hard enough to hash out the two posts I made yesterday, which feel a bit strained. I was just at a loss to talk about anything but receiving dozens of boxes of American Apparel clothing or interviewing way too many job applicants in a downturned economy. The latter of which really sucks, by the way.

I've retreated back into things that I know make me comfortable: There's a pawed, dog-eared copy of The Long Goodbye sitting on the nightstand and The Empire Strikes back was in the background of my linux hobby-ing last night. But for today I'm trying to branch out a bit by watching some cable tv, something which I haven't made any effort to do in a long time.

So, I watched Countdown with Keith Olbermann while I was cooking dinner (wow, never thought I'd write the second half of that sentence), and now I'm really enjoying The Rachel Maddow Show. I've caught it once or twice before, and her style of punditry is refreshing. Also, the New York Times wrote this piece about her the other day, hence my going out of the way to view this tonight.

For now I'm looking forward to the weekend and somewhere lurking in the future is the return of normalcy in my work life. The colors have been changing, and I'd like to get out and I shoot some more pictures this weekend.

Oh, and Amy and I have been together for two years today. I love you monkey :)

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One more thing...

Oh, and I voted early today.

It felt really good. I had mailed in a ballot for the last presidential election, so this was my first time going to a polling place and filling out a paper ballot. It only took about 35 minutes and now I don't have to worry about scrambling to get it done on Nov. 4th.

I went ahead and took the opportunity to set precedent at my work by not clocking out when I walked the two blocks to the courthouse to cast my ballot too.

Wanna guess who I voted for?

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7 Reasons Why Roadhouse Is the Best Movie Ever

1. Patrick Swayze's strength is derived entirely from Thai Chi.

2. Zen philosopher who earns $500 a night to 'clean up' rowdy bars? Yes.

3. Patrick Swayze includes his alma mater in his medical records.

4. The gratuitous nudity (e.g. The Swayze's butt shot).

5. The idea that the main protagonist is rich from "running" such a small town. It has like three businesses total.

6. Sam Elliot's glorious silver mane.

7. Nobody wins a fight.

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TV as Second Display: Check.

In addition to a bunch of new furniture, Amy and I were given a tv
over the weekend by her parents. So I decided that it needed to go
into my office to act as a second display for the Linux server.
Earlier this week I had put in a new video card with multiple video-
outs, so all I had to do was configure the xorg.conf file and plug it
in. It's great for watching movies through vlc, but not much else due
to the low resolution.

I also upgraded to the beta of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, which
solved some nvidia driver issues. Everything is running smoothly and
I'm glad I upgraded rather than waiting or the full release.

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Firing People Sucks

So up until yesterday I had never had to fire anyone.

I've been working in management positions for a few years now, and although I've been through some firings, I've never had to do it myself. Or involving someone I work with almost every day. I'll avoid going into detail, but don't show up drunk and late and expect to keep your job.

I've been working on the website a little more, and now my blog will live at blog.samuelbreed.com forever, and I should have a css version up this evening.

In other news, the new Macbooks are looking good, and I figure I'll be ready for a replacement in about another 6 months or so. Better start saving now...

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There's a Doin's a Transpiring!

So I've been making some changes to my website and managed to midly break it, which means that my blog address isn't linked to my domain name currently. Need to fix that, but its getting a little late.

I'm experimenting with web design for the first time since I was a kid, and am really enjoying it. Its fun learning the new coding standards and playing with the graphic design.

But as it stands, I own and host samuelbreed.com, and there's no reason to not have my blog hosted there too. Maybe the redirect from blog.samuelbreed.com will start working soon, but until then, I'm just hard linking here from my home page.

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New Moniter, Super Exciting

Amy's parents gifted me with a new flatscreen monitor today! It's nice to finally have a non-ancient monitor in my little home office, as I'm beginning to spend more and more time sitting at my desk. My personal workflow is finally getting the kinks worked out of it, and soon enough I'll have a new graphics card in the desktop, opening up the possibility multiple displays. It's not a current card, but I'm living on the cheap these days, and I'm tired of hiccuping video on an amply powered computer.

My home server has been up for about 2 months now with 21 days since the last reboot and its still going strong. Another few months and I'll upgrade the ram again and possibly an SATA hard drive in the months to come, since I'm starting to run out of disk space.

Still raining in Boulder, so I'm going to spend the afternoon getting some work done & possibly writing.

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Re-Building My Photography Portfolio

...has been a real pain in the ass.

I used to have a fairly good portfolio going. Some would say it was even kick ass. Good examples of portraiture, uses of artificial and natural lighting and some action photography. I took many of the pictures when I was freelancing as a production photographer during my freshman year, as well as from that summer photographing bands in Tampa.

Only about 20 stills, but most are now lost and gone forever thanks to a fried power book about a year ago. I think I still have a paper copy of it at my mom's somewhere, but even getting scans of those wouldn't be anything compared to having the .RAW files. So this pretty much sucks. It really really sucks.

So now I'm going through the process of reconstructing my portfolio. I've culled through the few gigs of pictures I did manage to backup, but only came up with a few pictures I still like. Which means that I need to shoot more, but its a bit hard with my work schedule.

There's a link in my sidebar now, and here's the gallery below.

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Another Frightening Week with the Economy

So the Economy is failing. Really failing, actually. It's impossible to ignore, even for someone that lives on cash, like me. The numbers may seem unreal, and the entire structure of the global credit market can be at times surreal with all those trailing zeros.

Personally, its been a tremendous learning experience for me because I was never interested in economics in school, and barely remember passing high school econ. But I'm a shrewd and curious person, so when I started hearing about the subprime mortgage crisis earlier this year, I began to look into it.

That was about the time that I started listening to This American Life religiously. And of all the unlikely news sources, I've learned the most about the global credit crisis from this oft-kilter left of center Saturday afternoon radio show.

TAL has a great way of breaking down the relationships and steps that have led to 3 weeks of roller coastering stock averages and a freeze up of the credit markets that are threatening to plunge America, and the world for that matter into depression.

Admittedly, I was upset about the bailout when it was first propsed. Partly, this is because the politicians in this counrty aren't capable of properly explaining such a complex problem. Although the roots of this are spurious and deplorable, its imperative to stop the freezing up of credit markets and attempt to bring stability to the stock markets.

And most important of this whole thing is to learn to regulate again and vote for responsible leadership. I don't necessarily think Barack Obama has all the answers, but I think of either of the candidates he is more to listen to intellective advice instead of an anti-intellectual base.

Here are some useful links:

Planet Money - An extension of This American Life's financial coverage.

This American Life streams all of their episodes. Listen to Giant Pool of Money and
Another Frightening Show About the Economy.

The New York Times talks about how TAL has done such a good job of explaining this by asking the "dumb" questions.

Also at The New York Times, a great interactive graphic about the severity of the current crisis.

How Credit Default Swaps are spreading the effects of the Sub Prime Mortgage Crisis.

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Meta Kills

Had time on my lunch break today to stop by Meta to pick up a new shop deck, and was rewarded with a new super scary graphic just in time for halloween. I'm usually a big fan of simple graphics on boards--that's why I started buying shop decks--but this is pretty rad. I love the feeling of a new deck the first few times you skate it, when all the pop is still in the tail, especially when you combine it with new wheels and bearings.

I'm psyched to skate this weekend, too bad it's supposed to snow.

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Sarah Palin Scored an 841

http://buzzfeed.com/scott/sarah-palins-sat-scores

Which is fucking ridiculous. At least George W. Bush went to Yale, for christ's sake. Can you even go to community college with a score that low? Is this an example of a rational choice for a VP? Answer: no.

Thats it for right now, just pretty incensed by that.

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Broken Skateboards and Domain Names

I don't think those are two things that should necessarily go together, but I guess that's a testament to how strange my day has been. After cramming 5 hours of work at the slave house this morning, I met with Carlos to set up and appointment and then found Amy when she got out of class. Came home and had lunch on our balcony because the weather is still beautiful. Minus the internet not working all afternoon, fuck you comcast, everything was comin' up Milhouse!

Until about six o'clock.

That's when I decided to take advantage of the last hour or so of daylight and go skateboarding. I've been loving these ledges of the pedestrian underpass near my apartment, so naturally I was just going to hit those up for my new favorite trick, the bs noseslide (ollie up, slide along rail / ledge / whatever with the nose of your board). But on the way I brilliantly decided to epic fail a gap ollie. Great, bloody elbow & swollen wrist + palm before I even fucking get to where I was going. Shaking it off, I hit both ends of the ledges for a while and was having a great sesh. Progressively moving to higher and higher onto the ledge, I was hitting new slides pretty well for not having skated for a few days.

Then my fat ass decided to crack my board at the nose.

It wasn't a complete break, so I was able to angrily limp across the street to get a gatorade and then push home on a creaking, broken board. And that was epic fail #2.

Then at home with hurt hands and in need of a new deck, I decided to finally register my domain name. I did it through google, but not through blogger, which turned into a fucking two hour nightmare which left me frustrated and upset and Amy mad as hell because of my shitty attitude.

I stepped away and talked to Amy about how terrible my evening had turned, and less than 15 minutes later I sucessfully linked my newly founded domain with the blog and was feeling much, much better about things.

And I wanted one of the new Meta decks anyway.

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Drunk Goggles for Gmail

So, not that this has ever happened to me, but sometimes when you're drunk on a friday or saturday night the internets get dangerous. Facebook, myspace, gmail, all can make for some serious regrets when you're sober and hungover in the morning. (Note: I stopped using MySpace about a year ago because it was too slow and full of spammers.) So Google labs is offering a filtering service before it lets you send that drunken proclamation of love / hate on friday night.

I think its a funny idea that has great practical applications. Always impressive, g-men.

On another note, there's a fabulous blog post over at Small Parts: Choking Hazard, and I expect good things to come from this. And I love the title, wish I'd though of it. A few other things to check out: Alex's excellent biweekly podcast has been giving me excellent tune-age when I'm trapped behind budget spreadsheets in my home office. And for the record Google Reader is still trying to ruin my life.

I've been super busy working on an upcoming project (one whose details I'm unfortunately unable to divulge until a bit later in the game), but I'm working with some great people.

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New Writing

Here's a single session piece I wrote before bed the other night:

What a vague, terrible time we live in.

I ride my bike to work and picture a future where there are no new cars, just rusted out hulking suvs that burn expensive fuel and pollute the already polluted streets. It feels like this is the beginning of something real actually happening. You can feel it. People are nervous. Even the weather is erratic. The delicate balance as they say has been knocked off kilter, and is slowly spiraling downward towards chaos.

At least it feels that way.

There's nothing more pathetic than an empire in decline, and thats how I feel the first of October two-thousand and eight. Even when I drop all the politics I still have an ugly, vapid culture staring me back in the face. There's no surprise that real greed is even more painful and damaging then what's in the movies. Real greed pushes this entire country off the edge of a cliff with nothing to do about it but sit back and occasionally blog. My generation is too busy updating its damn facebook to look around and realize that the america that they grew up in is changing and falling behind the rest of the world.

A few months ago I read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. There's great emphasis in the later books about the empire's decline, about its shabby fall into physical and intellectual decay. It's weird that I can see little examples of that here and there, little cracks in the facade of the richest nation on earth.

Even the homeless population in Boulder seems to have grown a bit, favoring the young and desperate. Why get a job that takes money out of your meager paycheck when you can panhandle and keep one hundred percent of your profits? Some of the street performers make hundreds of dollars a day, and even the least pathetic looking vagrant is bound to get a least a few bucks every couple hours. And they just get to sit around getting high and talking shit with their other street kid friends. We call them mall kids, and avoid eye contact at all costs, except for the occasional sneer. But how are they any less american than I am? They're living on terms that they alone brokered, like cowboys in the old west. Except their horse is a pipe and the mall is their sunset. But anyway, this population has always been here, regardless of whats happening with the economy.

I guess that I should be glad I have a job, even though I hate it, and I should be glad that I at least make the same amount of money that I did a year ago. But I need more. I need to relegate this unpleasantness to my early twenties and be done with it. I need to be paid for doing what I'm good at, and I'm starting to figure out what that is.

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Support Your Local Library

I usually take the care to misspell library on nearly every occasion to (libary being the favorite), but I've decided to take the high road and not do that in my headline.

This week I picked up a great book at the Boulder Public Library, and its really an invaluable resource to me. I tend to buy a lot of books, and although they're mostly used, it still has the tendency to be financially straining. So I've sort of created a cycle to my reading that involves alternating phases of exclusively using the library and exclusively buying my books. There is some overlap, but for the past year or so its worked itself out to be a fairly predictable transition.

One of the best reasons for going to the library is to check out books that you wouldn't normally consider buying, but are still worth a read. Mostly trashy fiction and super serious dense non-fiction--both of which I thoroughly enjoy reading, and the latter of which I'm reading now.

Every Man A Speculator by Steve Fraser is a comprehensive (and I mean comprehensive, complete with thick appendices) history of America's relationship with Wall Street, as sort of a lay man's guide to the most complexly historical parts of our economy. Given the nature of the news the past few weeks, this was an easy choice and is a surprisingly light read. Well, light only in the figurative sense; it's an easy 600 pages.

So generally I'm pretty open with my casual reading regardless of whether or not I'm purchasing. I'll read anything, nearly. Just keep it interesting and keep it moving is the motto I stick to, and I came across this subject via one of my favorite sources of news and cultural commentary, NPR.

I wouldn't say that I'm addicted to NPR, nor have I drank the cool-aide and donated to them or anything, but it does make great background noise for most of my workday. The author, Steve Frase, was on the interview program Fresh Air this past wednesday and lets say he was interesting enough to prompt me to take a walk to the library on my lunch break and pick up one of his books. This isn't his newest title, that one was checked out, but this was one of the books mentioned on Fresh Air.

And remember, kids: knowledge is power!

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Even More Live Blogging!

wookiehangover: #vpdebate quasi-caves, gotta be careful of them
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:26 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate Biden's lookin good
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:25 PM

wookiehangover: all she has to say is 'hockey mom' and i win palin bingo
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:19 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate apparently scott mcclellan was appointed commanding general in Afghanistan while I was tweet'ing
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:18 PM

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Live Blogging the VP debate

wookiehangover: #vpdebate i hate children and people with families
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:13 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate yeah scranton!
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:11 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate ahh she just winked at me
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:10 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate john mccain knows how to win a war, ask him about vietnam
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 8:07 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate oooh, 70% percent disapproval debate honey
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:55 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate this whole administration has been an abject failure, you can go a head and say it, joe
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:54 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate second holocaust, gotta get a point for that
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:52 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate kissinger talking to palin, thats a lark
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:49 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate there is it again new-clu-lur. and again. a third time. she's a dumbshit.
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:48 PM

wookiehangover: Ok, palin bingo is just about tied up now
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:46 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate ouch, tongue tied-much
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:43 PM

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Live Blogging the VP debate

wookiehangover: #vpdebate lies, lies, lies sarah
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:40 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate foreign policy, oh yeah track is in iraq, hope he get shot
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:39 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate you aren't tolerant sarah, you're just not
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:38 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate same sex marriage rocks, joe
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:37 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate NEW-CLU-LUR lol what a dumb cunt
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:35 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate she's rambling!
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:32 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate ooh boy here comes the climate change question
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:31 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate can we all just get over this goddamn main street / wallstreet shit?
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:28 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate Just spit out those econ catchphrases, sugar. Biden just audibly sighed.
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:27 PM

wookiehangover: Attacking the government when ur party's been running shit? DUMB.
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:19 PM

wookiehangover: #vpdebate Dammit losing already at Palin bingo. ooh, Biden's full of zingers
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:14 PM

wookiehangover: joe six-pack, really sarah?
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:12 PM

wookiehangover: Like a trained bird, she starts to speak...
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:05 PM

wookiehangover: Nice outfit, sarah. the whole little "can i call you joe" thing was cute, too.
Thu, Oct 2, 2008 7:03 PM



So I'm gonna try live blogging this little showdown between Smokin' Joe Biden and Dumbshit Sarah Palin, complete with Palin Bingo! Prepping with some Countdown, which makes it pretty clear which side I'm rooting for, but Olberman is a nice change of pace from the O'Reily-centric cable media of the past decade. I think I'm gonna go the route of just tweet'ing the shit of this thing too.

Debate's starting let's go!

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