Had a pretty crazy dinner tonight.

Extracurricular “work” has pretty much stalled on all fronts. The car’s not getting painted, ’cause I’ve gotta thoroughly sand the roof down due to a bunch of particles getting in the last coat, ’cause I didn’t clean up thoroughly after the last sanding. Argh. The project with the peoples has hit a bit of a snag, ’cause half the peoples are so busy with their regular work that no one’s been really free to meet up. Which sucks, but such is life. Still – it’s something I want to make sure continues, it’s just a question of figuring out *how*.

Work’s alright – sort of neither here nor there. I could be giving the presentation as soon as tomorrow, or if the schedule doesn’t work out tomorrow, it looks like it’ll be put off another two weeks, ’cause the boss-man’s outta town. Bleah. Hopefully tomorrow, then. I gave the presentation yet again today to some people who’d been involved, but went on vacation and recently came back. Didn’t go as well as the run through on Friday, but it pointed out a couple bits of weirdness that I’ll have fixed by the next time we do it.

Been *really* slacking on exercise – I haven’t been to the pool in almost two weeks – part of the problem is I keep forgetting my stuff at home. I should find out how much it costs to rent a locker, or just leave my swim stuff at work. Bleah.

Oh – I got my knee checked out – I don’t know if I mentioned that yet. Structurally, it’s sound, but there’s definitely something funky going on. Still, knowing the joint is strong is a good thing for me – I’m just overstressing it in some fashion, so I’ll have to figure out what’s causing the stress and deal with that. But it’s good to know the ligaments are still good, even if the joint itself is sore.

Listening to Holly’s Junior Boys CD – I really like the song “Double Shadow,” and I picked up The Bravery’s album The Sun and the Moon. I like “Time Won’t Let Me Go,” and “Believe.” They’re almost some sort of ’80’s revival band, but this album’s a lot less faux-New Order than the big single off their first album, so that’s good. Now, they’re sort of fake New Order meets the fake Cure, or something. I dunno.

Been playing the Bioshock demo, DiRT, just finished the Darkness, and keep contemplating reading Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” but yesterday ended up reading a variety of cookbooks, instead. And now, it’s time for sleep. Whee.

So, I read an article on Bioshock here, because I was curious why a certain Bastard was so convinced it was pro-Objectivism that he wouldn’t even consider it, despite there being a free (awesome) demo out for it.

Having played a fistful of Irrational’s previous games (System Shock, SS2, Terra Nova, etc.), one of the main tenets of their games is that they give the player the freedom to develop their own character. So, for Irrational to have done something objectively pro-Objectivist seems out-of-character to me.

Now, having read the review, it seems like Rand “appeals” to Levine, though (and perhaps this is desperate rationalization) he doesn’t necessarily say that he espouses those beliefs. The way I read it, my impression was more that it was fertile ground for an interesting setting/story/characters, and that the ideas were interesting enough that they’d make for an interesting story.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Objectivism is good – I, like A_B, think that it’s a fundamentally self-absorbed, immature worldview. But at the same time, it’s sort of like Communism – the distinction between how it plays out as an ideology in an ideal setting versus how it interacts with basic human nature is fertile ground for discussion of what human nature really is, how people are motivated, and why people are drawn to particular philosophies.

I mean, in general, I like Communism as an ideal, but in practice, I’d never, ever want to live in a communist society. I want rewards when I do well, and I want success to be personally meaningful. That’s not to say that I want to be completely self-centered, either.

But I like the idea of fiction using that as a starting point to illustrate the essential perils of the philosophical extremes, and seeing how those play out in a world like this. To me, the opening of Bioshock certainly doesn’t paint a positive picture of Objectivism – it seems like you had a megalomaniac who was in love with the concept, then when he put it into practice everything went to shit. Whether that’s what plays out in the game or not, I don’t know – but a world in which the people were supposedly free of the burden of altruism and needing to work with others/rely on them/help them out – having the player walk through the consequences of an embodiment of that philosophy, and essentially even make some choices relating to how they want their character to interact with that clash of philosophies – seems interesting to me.

Of course, the problem is that on the other hand, I understand the reason you’d be completely turned off to the concept as well – I *don’t* want to play a game based on fundamentalist right-wing evangelical Christianity. I just don’t. I find the sort of Fred Phelps version of Christianity utterly repugnant, and want nothing to do with it. You *can’t* pose interesting moral questions based on that philosophy because it’s so obviously insane.

So, yeah, I get it – but based on my previous experiences with Irrational’s games, I have faith that Bioshock is going to be an interesting, stimulating experience – whether because of, or despite the philosophical trappings I can’t say. But my god, that demo is incredible.

So, I was looking through the Chowhound’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I was wondering, where’s all the Oakland restaurants? And then I got to thinking, what is it about Oakland I *like*, anyway? So, I figured I’d see if I could write down some stuff, maybe figure it out:

• Restaurants
• Geta – cheap, good sushi
• Gregoire – expensive French takeout
• Cuvae – Asian fusion tapas, but good
• Le Cheval – upscale Vietnamese
• That place across the street from Merritt Bakery – downscale Vietnamese
• Merritt Bakery – best waffles ever, by leaps and bounds
• The Belgian Waffle Guy, at the Farmer’s Market – second best waffles, and totally different.
• Jade Villa – good, inexpensive, accessible dim sum
• Cactus Taqueria – best Cali-Mex food around, with an extraordinary tres leches cake
• Pearl Oyster Bar – a nice, upscaley seafood-oriented tapas place, with great, friendly service
• Angelfish – best sushi I’ve ever had
• ici – bizarre, but delicious gelatos
• Lamyx Tea Bar – local tea bar with a wide variety of stuff, open way late
• Flavors of India – new local Indian food, surprisingly good
• Zachary’s Pizza – best Chicago-style pizza I’ve had (never eaten pizza in Chicago, tho)
• Other Random Crap
• The Saturday Farmer’s Market under 580 – A great, bustling group of people shopping for fresh veggies, fruits and other various foodstuffs. Grows every week.
• Lake Merritt – it’s a lake, with some parks around it, and right now, a whole mess of Canada Geese
• Chinatown – it’s… uh… Chinatown. Close enough to get to easily, though not great to park near.
• Point Isabelle (not technically in Oakland, but relatively easily accessible) – A really scenic dog walk by the bay where I can let Mobius off-leash, and he can interact with the hundreds of dogs that are always there
• The Parkway – A second-run theater that serves beer and pizza, and where half the seating is couches
• The Grand Lake Theater – A local old-school movie theater that’s unabashedly lefty
• Liberal political environment – the kind of place that’d support an unabashedly lefty old-school movie theater
• Great weather, most of the time – not that humid, not that cold most of the time. Could use warmer evenings, but overall, the weather’s usually awesome.
• Bike-friendly – You can get pretty much anywhere you want in the East Bay by bike. From our house, you can get to anywhere in Oakland, Berkeley, or Emeryville within 45 minutes.
• Joaquin Miller Park – A nice place to go mountain biking on trails, less than 20 minutes away.
• Anthony Chabot Park – A place to actually go camping and feel like you’ve gotten away from it all, less than 30 minutes away
• Things I’m Looking Forward To
• Trader Joe’s in walking distance – less than a mile from our house – easily walkable
• Whole Foods in scootable distance – three or four miles away – I could easily scoot there and pick up awesome meats, fishes, etc.
• The new restaurants on Grand Ave.
• Neecha Thai – a highly regarded Thai restaurant we’ve yet to go to. It’s been around for a bit, but we haven’t tried it yet
• Camino – A new restaurant on Grand by some ex Chez Panisse folks
• Cafe DiBartolo – another new, sort of mid-upscale type place on Grand – sort of in the no-man’s land between “upscale” and “cheap-ass” – it hits the wrong price point for me, but I’ve heard reasonably good things.

I dunno – it’s not like Oakland’s got *everything* like say, NYC or SF, but some of the things it has, it’s hard to get in the city. Parking anywhere you’d need to drive, (relatively) affordable housing, friendly neighborhoods, relatively little crime, trees, parks, and more or less everything you’d need in walking (or short driving) distance.

What can I say? I like it here.

…you’re just on fire. Today was one of those days. I ended up leaving work at about 2pm, ’cause I had a doc’s appt. to check out my knee. The knee, for the record, is apparently mechanically fine. There’s something bobbing around inside that’s causing it to “click” a lot, and it’s been on the sore side, but apparently all the ligaments are intact, and strong. So, that’s a plus, even if there’s no specific reason for why it’s currently sore.

Anyway – work today was *awesome*. I’ve been prepping a pitch we’re putting together for the office higher-ups, and we’ve (a fistful of the coworkers who’ve been working on this with me) been honing the presentation for the last couple weeks. Today was the first time it went off not only without any hitches (okay, one slide was f’ed up), but it *flowed* right. It was like magic. Great thing is that the game sells itself – it’s the right concept at the right time for the right company – but making that clear to the people in charge is going to require a bit of finesse.

Today, though… man. It wasn’t perfect, but honestly, it was as close as I’m gonna get. Or rather, let’s hope next time (the time I give it for real), it gets a little closer.

A couple other things at work just went right today. Progress made where we’d been stuck for weeks on a different issue, and all it took was the idea that “history is written by the winners.” Or, rather, that maybe in some cases, the history-writers determine who the winners are.

Fun stuff. I don’t expect it’ll last, but it’s nice when stuff like this happens on a Friday. Makes the weekend a little more upbeat. 🙂

So, a friend of mine from work showed me some stuff he’d been messing around with in GarageBand – Apple’s music tool that ships with iLife. I’ve had it installed on my Mac since I got it, but never really messed around with it. After I got a chance to see it in action, though, it reminded me a lot of Sonic Foundry’s Acid, which I really enjoyed playing around with.

GarageBand isn’t as powerful as Acid, no doubt – at least, to me, it’s strangely not as immediately accessible. But it does a lot of what Acid does, and it’s free. I’ve got Acid Pro 3.0 lying around, but I can’t seem to ever find the CD Key and the CDs at the same time, so it’s been unused, unfortunately.

But finding GarageBand, and also finding out that it’s actually not only useful, but fun to use, has made me poke around iLife a bit more. Turns out, I ended up using iMovie to edit a clip of Serenity for use in a pitch presentation I’m giving at work. Took a little poking to figure out everything I needed, but it’s relatively straightforward, and looks like all I’d really need to actually do movie editing if I wanted to.

It’s strange – in the same way that the iPhone may not do more than most Windows Mobile phones, but it makes the functionality *accessible*, I feel like the Mac does *more* than the PC did, simply because it’s there, and it’s easy to use.

iLife gives me the ability to edit video easily, create music easily, manipulate my photos easily (except that introductory phase, which sucked, and its inefficiency, which still sucks), make a competent DVD, and basically take care of whatever media mishmashing I want to. It also integrates really well with Keynote and Pages, which I’ve used for work-related stuff.

Keynote, for the record is fucking *AWESOME*. It’s so far beyond Powerpoint in terms of ease of use and visual style that it’s hard to actually describe its value. The difference in impact between the presentations I used to make in Powerpoint for work, and the current thing I’m doing in Keynote is indescribable. If I had to estimate its value, functionally, I’d say the difference could literally be the difference between getting this pitch into the pipe and not, simply because it looks better, and as a result, it conveys information more easily.

I’ve been really happy with my Mac. The functionality’s just awesome, it feels great, it’s sufficiently powerful for anything I want to do, and I’m constantly surprised by *what* I can do with it.

My sole problem is that I have yet to find a browser that doesn’t behave really oddly in some fashion. I haven’t spent a lot of time with Safari, but I threw my hat in the ring with Camino, and it’s fine, except for the fact that it periodically completely loses its mind, and becomes unable to read the *format* of a webpage, and then just periodically stops loading anything. A quick restart of the browser fixes the problem, but it’s sort of a pain in the ass, given that it’s probably the application I use the most.

That said, I’m floored by the quality of the laptop, and the sheer volume of bizarre stuff that I can do with it easily.

So, reading through a friend’s post, I realized that I have a couple hobbies that I used to really be into that I just don’t particularly care about anymore. I suppose it’s not that odd – you just don’t have the time, money, or mental space to devote to everything you might be interested in, and my hobbies were often niche enough that it took effort to keep up.

Comics: I wish I could still be “into” comics as much as I used to be, but I’m just not. Whether it’s that I don’t have the time or ability to sort the wheat from the chaff, or that *most* comics (just as they did back in the day) suck, I haven’t been able to find anything that’s really caught my attention and held it. Recently, an ex-coworker of mine had lent me The Walking Dead, which I enjoyed, the Kurt Busiek Conan books, and Y: The Last Man. Of the three, I liked Y the best, but they were all pretty good. Oh – he also loaned me the Joss Whedon-written Astonishing X-Men, which was absolutely awesome. Based on these reads, I went back to a comic store, but was utterly unable to find something that I was willing to spend money on without a guarantee they’d be of a similar caliber.

Music: I have essentially the same problem, here. I used to really be into music – finding cutting edge stuff, really getting into it. I went to a lot of live shows in high school, and had a lot of fun. Saw Radiohead on their first tour of the states, and really early Pearl Jam, before they hit it *big*. These days, I hear about all sorts of bands I ought to like, and probably would if I was willing to invest the time, but I’m just not. I like music – it’s not like that’s changed, but I don’t *care* about it. It occupies almost no mental space. It’s not something I think about, pretty much ever, unless I’m actively looking for something new to listen to, and even then, I can barely be bothered to really try any of the hip new things.

It’s sort of strange, because these things have a way of sort of defining who you are, when you’re obsessed with them. One of my friends, H, I think of as “music girl,” in some respects, because I know if it’s hip, and new, she knows of ’em, and has an opinion. My ex-coworker was really into comics, and you’d see it in the clothes he wore, and things like his computer backgrounds. Not that that’s a bad thing – he wasn’t asocial, he just loved comics. So, it’s weird, because in high school, it was pretty much music and comic books, and now it’s not.

*shrugs*

So, my right knee hurts. When my leg’s straight, it feels like someone’s stabbing me with a steak knife right below my right kneecap.

I don’t think that’s normal, and I’ve had some pretty fucked up experiences with that knee.

It comes and goes, but it’s basically been persistent in varying degrees for the last few days, so I went to see the doc today. The nurse practitioner looked at it, went, “Hnrgh,” and directed me back at the guy who originally operated on my knee, who’s apparently a pretty renowned local knee specialist. So, that appointment’s at the end of next week, and ’till then, I’ll be hopped up on painkillers more or less nonstop. Fun!

Knee.

Not really.

So, I’ve had plenty of wacky customer support experiences – some bad (Best Buy), some good (Oakley). My Macbook had a problem the other day – the lip from the top plate of the laptop, near where my right wrist rests, snapped, and a chunk of it had broken off.

I took my ‘book to the Genius bar, wondering whether it was covered by warranty. They said it would be, but they’d have to order the part. So, I waited a couple days, got a call from ’em today, and took it in. They said they could do the repair while I waited, so I bit on that. Brought the thing home half an hour later, and here I am, typing away.

What strikes me as odd is that they didn’t just replace the plastic piece – they replaced the entire “section” of the laptop. New trackpad, new trackpad button, new plastic piece, entirely new keyboard. Which feels great – feels like a brand-new laptop, honestly.

So, score 1 for Apple in the “good” category. The Genius Bar system’s sort of a pain in the ass, but only compared to “good” customer service elsewhere. Compared to any other laptop manufacturer, it’s stellar.

So… another friend of mine from college passed away. I’m not gonna write anything specifically about him, because we’ve been asked not to. But it makes me examine my reaction to the news. I’d gotten news a couple weeks ago that it looked like something bad had happened, but it was only today that we got confirmation. I think part of the reason I feel so… distant from it is simply that the news from a few weeks ago was pretty likely the end of it. Chances of a different outcome were slim, at best.

I felt terrible then, but because it wasn’t *conclusive*, I think it was easier to say, “Later, I’ll feel bad. There’s still hope.” Now, knowing that there isn’t, I feel like, “Well, that seemed likely from the news weeks ago.” It’s terrible. It hasn’t sunk in what’s happened, though academically, I can certainly understand it.

When my other friend died, I felt quite similar. My response was almost, “Oh. That’s terrible news,” move on with life. A month or so later, it hit me like a wall – I have no idea why.

I guess part of me wonders whether it’s a hard-wired reaction – that maybe in times of bad news, some people just have to not respond to the news. Maybe I’m just trying to justify my lack of emotional response. I don’t know.

I will say this about my friend – I never felt like I really knew him. There are some people who are so effervescent, so enthusiastic, and so positive that I feel like they’re seeing a different world than I am. I think knowing someone who sees the world so differently than you is a great thing – and when I say I don’t think I ever knew him, it’s simply that he was so different than me that I could never imagine seeing the world in the same way he did.

Another friend of mine at one point in college said that it’s the differences that make friendships interesting – that it’s the surprise, and the challenge that makes these friendships worthwhile.

He was someone who could genuinely see the best in people, and I feel like he loved the process of living more than almost anyone else I know. He was one of those guys who cared when you were down, did his best to bring you up, and… I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like to really love everyone that unabashedly. But knowing him showed me there are people like that out there, and that such a worldview is possible. I’ll miss that.

I’ll miss him.

(Edit – this was published recently, but originally written in 2007)

This may be the best episode of Top Gear I’ve ever seen. Absolutely insane.