Lazy Blog

I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but my POS computer bit the dust and I didn't want to put a new video card, or motherboard for that matter, into the box. This opening paragraph inspired by Jim Anchower.

Jim Anchower's Hard Rockin' Home Page

I bought a shiny new laptop, it's totally awesome, it's really fast and has a really good video card. Windows 7 seems alright to me, but I'm having problems figuring out how to make audio come out of the HDMI jack, it says it should but it don't...

Lazy post: email converted to a blog post.
I just love bringing up the Za za za song. But, I have good reason to because last night there was a great interview on Fresh Air of Jake Adelstein who was a reporter in Japan who often covered the Yakuza. Really interesting about how a bunch of the crime bosses came to UCLA medical center (or other Cali medical university) for liver transplants with help from the FBI by rolling on some other Yakuza dudes.

http://www.npr.mobi/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120237244

Transcript:

http://www.npr.mobi/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=120237244

The book sounds really good, plus other book whose authors have been interviewed on Fresh Air have turned out to be great: Fahreed Zakaria's The Post-American World, Illicit, and that book about the ADM informant.

Audio Book Run Down (1)

I got a new job, woot! But, when I was searching for work I was also doing stuff around the house (see the tags marked home project and while I did them I often listened to OPB, music I've got, or audio books. I'm sorta new to audio books and devoting a little bit of the focus to the story while doing something else can be tough.

Here's the list:

Homer's The Illiad then The Odyssey -

Both were great tales of mythological conquest and adventure, I liked the Odyssey more because there was more travel involved while the Illiad is staged in and around Troy, when names are mentioned it's harder to keep track of what they are doing if they aren't moving somewhere. Made me want to reread Route 66 A.D., a great book about the beginning of travel and tourism in times of Ancient Rome.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers then The Tipping Point then started Blink - Outliers is about individuals and other groups of people who have bucked the trends and been successful or limited their success by the culture, period of time in which they lived, and social interactions. Once example I found interesting was about some airline pilots in Korea, because of their social structure the co-pilot often speaks in a differential tone to the captain even when there are serious problems the plane may soon encounter, this made Korean Airlines an outlier because accidents were happening more frequently not because of inexperienced pilots or planes needing repair but because there was an ingrained culture of hierarchy.

I liked The Tipping Point to learn how some new fashion trends had gotten started.

Blink, seemed like stuff I already knew so I didn't finish that one.

Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, Freaky Deaky, City Primeval, Bandits - These were all great bubble gum novels about detectives bending the law, con men setting up a grift, organized crime, but what made them all great was that they were read by Frank Muller. I just found his personal website and learned that he's dead! He's the best!! Luckily I've got more Frank Muller narrated books for the bus rides.

Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes The Sign of Four - Good story, I couldn't really get into it, but I've got just about the whole Sherlock Holmes collection so I may do them all.

The Beav

There's a couple of things going on in this post: a book report of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, thoughts about sardines based on the recent NPR article I heard today, and a broader look at Monterey & Fort Ord.

Cannery Row is the street in (New) Monterey, California that in the 1940's was the processing locale for sardines, tuna, and other things like squid. Steinbeck's novel is set after those plants have basically ceased operation. The book isn't about the fish processors, their workers, but about the people that inhabit the area around it. I don't know if I will be able to go to my book club meeting about this book, if I can then I'll know a bit more about the book. Bottom line - read it!

I think I've only had sardines from a can once, but since then not so much. Sardines were over fished, but they've recovered now, the season is pretty tight so they may be tough to get. A short recipe in this NPR article sounds really good! Because they're small they don't have the high mercury concentration that tuna might because of their place on the food chain.

I love Monterey! I spent many weeks out at Fort Ord doing range recon and sampling groundwater. The most fun thing was hiking around the different ranges with Charles Luckie, Tom Ghigliotto, and another guy whose name I can't recall, to do what's called range recon - going around by foot through the scrub brush, previously burned areas, and poison oak to locate exploded ordinance. Because Fort Ord is being transferred over to the city or the state the lead contaminated areas need to be cleaned up, the lead being from bullets soldiers had shot at targets in those range areas way back when. But, working with those guys was great, I laughed so hard at the jokes they'd make, and have a great time hiking around. Their nickname for me was the "The Beav!"

Luckie with the GPS backpack and Tom stretching one morning.


Long run of conveyor belts to move soil out of a range for off haul.

The other thing that I did at Fort Ord is PDS or Passive Diffusion Sampling, in the picture below you'll see a coworked re-attaching a PDS bag to a rope that will be lowered down into a groundwater well. Those wells were scattered all over the base and were monitored on different schedules (ie quarterly, semi-yearly, etc). That was fun too!


Justin about to send the PDS bag back down the well.

One of the other things I would do is: bike around in the back area of Fort Ord on the paved roads that had been open to cyclists. That was a great spot to do hill work. I went one night out by myself, everyone (Luckie, Tom, and the other guy) had warned me not to because mountain lions would jump out of the trees and take me off my bike. I thought that's bull and went out anyways, I had charged up my bike light but it still conked out, I kept going a little ways, but was too freaked out so I spun hard back to the truck. Luckily there was a full moon out!

Cannery Row is now a tourist spot with different shops and a really awesome aquarium! Monterey also has a fun art scene:

Blown glass.

A lot of nights after doing range recon or sampling were spent at the English Ales Brewery in Marina, just north of the Base. Some good strong micros!

Don Quixote Book Report

I joined a book club whose focus is reading and discussing the classics. And, I have enjoyed it immensely because we are reading works that have been influential in literature, the stage, and film. A prime example is Don Quixote. Written in the early 1600's by Miguel Cervantes, an interesting fellow with an adventurous background and a very learned man who interspersed citations and quotes within the book relating to classic mythology and chivalric books popular at the time. The ~1,000 page book is divided into two parts with two significantly different tones, I liked both parts, but lots of people tend like the second half. There is an interesting history to the book and what's funny is another author tried to continue the first part of the book without Cervantes' permission and in the second part published after the first Cervantes poked fun at this other author.

After reading the book and really thinking about how America needs more people that dedicate at least part of their lives to chivalric ideals I wrote an email to President Obama to that affect, I know it's probably bonkers, but I think it's a valid opinion because so many people are just out there for themselves and don't do anything to help society. What would the country look like if more people volunteered a few hours a week.

Below you'll find a video for the song Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal, it's fun to dance to!

Dropping Easter Egg bombs on that A!

I just found Dollhouse when I was browsing Hulu last week. It's a pretty good show, there is something about it, I don't know if it flows very well, there is something off about it, but I'm going to keep watching it. The premise is that dolls can be loaded with any persona or combination of personas to be whatever their client wants.

I fell head over heals for "Altered Carbon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Angels", and "Woken Furies", by Richard Morgan. All three books are science fiction stories about a dystopian future where people can change bodies, called sleeves, by changing the stack or memory chip. The protagonist in these books is a guy Takeshi Kovacs.

I was watching an episode and the guy that changes the persona in the dolls was talking to another person about a Japanese guy that had made a discovery in brain research or something. I stopped it and zipped back to see if he mentioned Takeshi Kovacs, but he hadn't, dang, I'd hoped he had...

Book Report

I recently read this book and really enjoyed it. It is both about a small country in Africa and an Englishman named Basil Seal. Basil is the main character in many of Evelyn Waugh's books, he is sort of a worldly bon vivant that has fallen into a the position of High Commissioner& Comptroller of the Ministry of Modernisation and being helped by an Armenian named Krikor Youkoumian. They came up with strange new laws and policies that the backward country was not prepared for. This was such a funny book, I was reading it on the Max about Youkoumian who was able to find Basil at the train station and got him a seat on the train by moving his wife to the livestock car and giving her a jar of cherries, I laughed out loud at that.

Modernisation eventually became too much for Basil, the Emperor had attended Oxford where he had briefly met Basil, and was prone to thinking up new ways to modernize his country. Everyday it was something new for Basil to try to figure out how to write a new policy/law, from statewide morning exercises and community singing to a ill conceived birth control pageant. The final straw was when the Emperor started printing his own money and his uncle who had been chained in a cave was 'resurrected' and made Emperor.