Tough shit drink up and leave

I'm not sure why I'm here at Starbucks. I guess I still am in habit of just walking somewhere...anywhere... God, I sometimes hate the suburbs. There is absolutely nothing to do here.

I don't think the SCOTUS will do anything regarding gay marriage. Of the couple of gay people I've known, I can't say that any of them wanted to get married. I have a bigger problem with straight friends getting married or not married. Actually, I don't care what people do or don't do. What did Robert Burns say? ...whist no o' my fate.

My lease is up at the end May. That's pretty damn soon. And the background check with this contract job is a lot like a sport s team's big strategy which is nothing more than a repeat of the previous sucky year.

I did finally go down and submit the app for a passport. $110!!! The woman asked me where I was going.....tick...tick.... I literally couldn't think of anywhere.  I don't think it's a requirement but I did write Canada and Europe. Canada is only 100 miles away, at least Vancouver is. I need to see if there are any jobs there. Seattle? Been there done that. Supposedly the background check is taking a long time because of all the states I've worked in.  I call bullshit on that.

Value Menu

I wonder when $tarbucks will get a clue and upgrade their WiFi. I usually connect to it so I can listen to any music that isn't their usual repetitive crap, but starts to flake out when it gets crowded. Laptops, phones, you name it. I'm surprised that there is someone else reading a lo-tech book. Speaking of bathos, I need to install win8 on my MBP. Or maybe I'll choose win7.  I sort of regret buying this overpriced toy because I don't really use it except to charge my ancient iPod. And I don't really use THAT.  I guess there was a time that I did but not these days.

I have a week to drop that android class. I already paid for it but I'm not sure it'll help me. I've always been skeptical of the latest tech thingie because I've seen enough of them go poof. I still remember the uber-hype of the 90s where people could get enough of "HTML Programmers."

History is a bunch of over-hyped and failed excursions for the almighty buck/pound/euro with emphasis on the fail. It's not that I'm averse to capitalism, just that its flaws don't go away. Perhaps things would be more sensible if we get to space or get attacked by robotic espresso machines running Android 5.1 ("The Butt Munch").

Not like you do

I don't know what's scarier, the fact that someone bothered to do a cover of Portishead's "Sour Times" or that the singer is auditioning for Motown. Has it been THAT long? It might scarier that this cover was right before a real '60s song and some bad '70s disco tune (with that fake hand clapping sound and synth orchestra.) I'd have more respect for El Hombre if they had a mix or theme rather than hit the random button.

I heard that Michelle Shocked had anti-gay meltdown in (wait for it) SF. I guess she was true to her name, right? I wonder if she had a brain thingie like Prof. Shockley who did espouse eugenics before a car accident.  And Mel Gibson did fall off the anti-Semitic wagon before his third shot of Jack.

Gen X Algebra

I wonder if someone will have a NXNW festival where it rains every day and everyone is an old pale rocker from the late '80s.  People my age (40s) scare little children. Hell, seeing people after 20+ years freaks me out because I keep thinking that they look like their dads and moms.

I've never been good at extrapolating physical appearances. 20 years should equally 20 more pounds (at least) and 20% less hair (at least). One can also add 20% more debt (at least) and 20 things you never really got around to doing (lose weight, buy some Rogaine, move to WA or TX because there's no state tax).

I still have to make a screen cast for my android app. I do think that intellij is slightly better than eclipse, at least when it comes to debugging. But I almost always use eclipse. I wonder what the second android class at The U is about. I can't believe this current class didn't cover fragments or persistence. At least they did cover multitasking, right? That's old hat if you do java and there are good resources about fragments and intents and all the androidiana.

Music: Stoned and Starving by Parquet Courts

And I feel like I just got home

I wonder if there's a CSS style so that I can post code snippets.  Ok, so maybe I really don't want to be another Look at My Code or Look at Yet Another Tutorial.  Good knows there's a zillion of them.  I guess I should try something, you know?

There are about five other people sitting at this Starbucks.  Four are clicking away on their phones, and one is on a laptop like me.  The other laptop guy is also writing with paper and pen.  What's next, a paperback book?  Wait, that's me.  I'd be reading now but part three of that SF series doesn't show up until tomorrow.  At least that's what amazon says.  I actually OWN the third book but I can't find it.  It's buried somewhere in the storage room and there's no way I can find it without taking going through each and every box.  Some boxes have no books but most do.  I still have tons of history and literature books.  I even have crap from Stanford. I remember that most of the literature books were the Norton versions.  I liked the critical essays, and they were pricey, but I'm also a fan of the fifty cent versions I can pick up at Half Price Books over in Tukwila.

Not sure why this ginormous solution keeps killing Visual Studio 2012.  I've noticed that VS 2012 is pretty slow.  I guess I should've been more selective when I installed it and not accepted the default (read: everything).  My big-ass desktop now seems so sad and old.   The quad core was the cat's meow when I moved to Seattle-land, but two years is a long time when it comes to things like computers or programming languages or 4-3 or 3-4 defenses.

I was thinking of my friend Dalal and wondering what ever happened to her.  I miss her emails and hearing about life as a grad student at UCDavis.  Actually, it always felt like I was talking to a sister because our home lives in SoCal were very similar.  I think she got pregnant and probably moved to Australia or something.   Speaking of Australia, one of the women who lives a couple of doors down is from Sydney. She and her little daughter like Rocky the Wonder Beagle.  A lot of people like Rocky.

I still have to make a screencast for my android app.  It's not hard but I can't seem to find the motivation.  We only had to do 4 out 6 assignments, but I did all 6.  I guess I wanted my money's worth?  I bitch and complain about the high price of things but money doesn't enter my mind after I lose the buyer's remorse.   I signed up for the second android class because I could call and put it on my credit card.  I really shouldn't have done that because it's not like I'm rolling in dead presidents.    These courses will undoubtedly not help me with any contract job but you never know.  There are more opportunities for ruby on rails programmers or even python programmers.   Like an idiot, I downloaded the Windows 8 Phone SDK and it killed my win8 partition.  I uninstalled it and haven't bothered to boot win8.   Actually, I did boot win8 and started Windows Update.  A bunch of updates did download and install, and then I couldn't boot from either the win8 or win7 partition.  After a day, I booted off the win7 media and ran the defrag thingie.  It look a couple of hours but then I could get back into win7.    The one thing that's been true for the last 200,000 years is that boxes that run Windows of any ilk slow down and get slower and get totally fubar'd.  It's like a part of natural law.  Unlike my brother, I rarely download anything from untrusted sites.   I only use MS Office when I have to (think: resume) and I almost always have a browser open.    I guess I should start using this macbook.   It's big and clunky and is not doing much.