Category Archives: Personal

America's Walk for Diabetes

Posted on by

Ian in the hospital at his on-set of Type 1 Diabetes

I recently accepted the challenge of walking in the American Diabetes Association’s America’s Walk for Diabetes fund-raising event. I am taking part in this event because I believe in and support the Association’s mission: to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes.

You, too, can help by supporting my fund-raising efforts with a generous contribution. Your tax-deductible gift will make a difference to more than 18 million Americans who are affected by diabetes and another 40 million who are at risk for developing diabetes. It is faster and easier than ever to support this great cause – you can make your donation online by simply clicking this link.

Flickr’d photos of Ian in the hospital in September, 2003.

Minor Infringement

Posted on by

Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye Outraged By Nike’s Major Threat Skate Tour
“What the hell were they thinking?” MacKaye, on tour with his current band the Evens, wrote in an e-mail to MTV News. “To set the record straight — Nike never contacted Dischord, nor Minor Threat, to obtain permission to use this imagery, nor was any permission granted. Simply put, Nike stole it and we’re not happy about it. We are not yet sure what actions, if any, we can take to stop this campaign.”

One of the most blatent examples of corporations co-opting cool in order to sell their shitty products. Read No Logo if you’re intersted in finding out more about this phenomenon. Via SvN.

Rest in Peace

Posted on by


Yesterday morning, my wife and I found out that an old friend from high school, Arlene Gavrilis (who was also one of my wife’s bridesmaids) was killed in a car accident, on the day that was to be her wedding day.

We mourn this loss and our love and well-wishes are sent to the Gavrilis Family and Adam, her fiance.

SXSW Trip Log

Posted on by

SXSW was a total blast. Austin’s fun and the sheer number of choices on things to do outside the conference are staggering. Check out Flickr photos tagged as SXSW 2005, the few I have are here. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve done so far:

Friday Evening: Arrive in Austin. Jane and I share a cab with someone whose panel is to interview Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. Meet Jason Fried for the first time in person on our way out to dinner.

Friday Night: Head out with Jane for thai food and then on to Tantek’s birthday party. You may have heard of Tantek, he wrote the Mac IE 5 rendering engine. Not that I have any love for that engine these days, but in its time, a great browser. See Ze Frank on the street outside. Afterwards, we walk over to Break Bread with Brad. Watch how the entire open-air back part of the bar goes nearly silent as Malcolm Gladwell walks in.

Saturday Morning: Oversleep and wake up with a hangover and bad stomach issues. Shouldn’t have had only beer the night before. Wander around looking for Pepto-Bismol. Find it and register for my badge. Mine happens to take forever.

Saturday Afternoon: Jason Fried shows up to get his badge and we all head out to lunch. After lunch, I walk back to the hotel and start to finish my panel project. Start to hear that the other team has done some great stuff, so I put more effort into my interface in order to make it as badass as I can. Meet Chris Wetherell who works at Google, and Dunstan Orchard, both of whom are on the other team. Boo!

Saturday Evening: Meet with my team for the first time in the Green Room. Jaxon’s looking as metro-sexual as ever, and Vera’s pleasant. We all look over our projects and start to think we might actually win this thing.

Saturday Night: Go to Milkshake Media’s party with Jaxon, Jane, Chris and others. After a few free drinks and Cheetos, we go to frogdesign’s party. I get shit on by one of the awful fucking birds here and make my way to the bar. Nice exotic-ish dancers all around and a salsa band playing. Ridiculously packed, and I exit many times just to keep a lid on the claustrophobia starting to well up inside me. After that we walk a few blocks to a super cool bar and I proceed to drink myself silly. I may have a Flickr album up of all the people Jane hugs at this party.

Sunday Morning: Wake up with suprisingly not much of a hangover. Yay for top-shelf alcohol. Decide to go see the BitTorrent guy’s interview, because I’m interested in what he has to say about the future of content distribution and copyright. Unfortunately, he’s not interested in these things and quite an awkward nerd, so I don’t stay long.

Sunday Afternoon: Have mediocre tex-mex with Jane, Jaxon, Jason, Eris and Chris. Discuss the death of the browser. Go back to the hotel and work on my presentation for another solid 5 hours. Meet Jay Allen of Six Apart (makers of Movable Type) outside the hotel.

Sunday Night: Go to the Hotel Sane Jose with Lane, Danah, Jane, another Kevin and Jeff Veen. Find out that Kevin is an attorney for theEFF, defending PowerPage and AppleInsider from Apple’s litigation. I figure out the meaning behind his supposedly non-sensical “storm trooper from starwars drawn as Che Guevara” shirt and earn some street cred. Find yet another mediocre-to-not-so-bad mexican restaurant and discuss the Apple case some more. Smoke way too many cigarettes for my own good, grab some ice cream and go to bed after meeting Halcyon, Doug Bowman and Anil Dash.

Monday Morning: Barely sleep, I’m so nervous about my presentation later in the afternoon and grab my first regular-schedule breakfast: a soda and a cigarette. Attend “Does design matter?,” a panel with Jeff Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria and others. Interesting, yet I can’t help but think to myself “How could design NOT matter?” Once that’s done, I attend “How to Inform Design” with Jeff Veen and others, and learn about the value of up-front user-research. Try and think of ways to include that in my company’s process. The wheels are starting to turn.

Monday Afternoon: Go to lunch with Jason Swihart for barbeque and find it terribly disappointing. Must find a better BBQ place while my short stay in Texas lasts. Try and ignore the butterflies flying around in my stomach and gather up my gear and head over to the Green Room, as Wonkette is using our panel’s room as overflow from her main-stage keynote. Wish I could hear her being interviewed, but I have too much to work on, and I just learn that the projector display we’ll be using is 800×600, and my application is designed at 900px wide. Fucking great. Fret and worry and edit code 45 minutes before my presentation to accomodate the lower-than-expected resolution. Head into the room to get set up and find that we actually can use 1024. Edit code up until 5 minutes before my presentation to get it back to 900px wide. Everything is kosher. The panel starts and all of a sudden I’m totally at ease and proceed to knock my presentation out of the park, despite our formidable opponents. Jane uses my Flash-based Applause-O-Meter to measure audience reaction to each set of presentations. HTML team wins, but only beacuse Chris Wetherell is fucking JavaScript badass. I guess he’s got to be good if Google hired him to do it, eh? Get props from Jeffrey Zeldman and notice that the people whose panels I’d wanted to see actually attend mine, which blows me away. I imagine I see Jason Kottke at our panel, but he might be in there for the next one. Try and decide if I should introduce myself but I feel like too much of a nerd to do so. Rush into the HomestarRunner presentation and laugh my ass off for the next hour. When It’s done, I head to the front to introduce myself, as my picture is directly next to Mike Chapman’s in the SXSW program booklet. He signs it like a yearbook (“Raise hell this summer!!!”) and asks me what I do. I tell him and he responds that I’m smarter than him, I reply that he’s funnier than me so it all works out. A relatively complete transcript of the panel.

Monday Evening: Go to 20×2, a show where 20 people talk for 2 minutes each about a concept. This year the concept is “What’s the word?” and Jaxon is fucking hilarious during his diatribe about grief.

Monday Night: Go to grab thai food (again) and then go to the Blogger party, which we actually miss, and find that we’re now going to the Gawker party. Drink many drinks, smoke many cigarettes and actually feel noticed and recognized by people who I don’t know. Discuss CSS vs tables with Jaxon and Chris. Find that Chris’s band, Dealership, has played with the Arcade Fire in San Francisco and that the artist who did The Shins’ album did Dealership’s artwork as well. I wish I was a rockstar.

Tuesday Morning: Wake up and rush down to Eris’ presentation on what the web might look like in 10 years. Find it’s more of a discussion than a presentation. I was hoping for bright-green spinning cubes or something and get boring talk about CSS and thin clients. Yawn. Start to write this post and decide to go get lunch.

Tuesday Afternoon: After trying to figure out how to get the hotel to charge my employer’s credit card instead of mine, I go to lunch with Jaxon and Jane and have cajun food, after which I head back to the hotel to get the billing issue further figured out.

Tuesday Night:Take a nap and when I wake up, meet Jaxon at the Red Vs. Blue panel, which we then find out actually occurred two days prior. Awesome. We head back to the hotel bar and discuss XHTML/CSS vs tables some more. We then go and grab pizza from a walk-up, hop in a cab and go to the Wired party at the American Legion. Wander around wondering what the fuck is up with this place, use my one drink ticket to get a Stoli and cranberry (bad idea), and fuck around with the tinker toys in the “fun” room upstairs. Decide that I’m feeling really sick and jump in an arriving cab back to the hotel and call it an early night.

Wedneday Morning: Wake up around 9am and find that Jane is still not in the room. Must’ve been a long night for her. Walk down to the hotel restaurant and have a filling, relaxing breakfast and read the paper. Get a call from Jane that she’s at the convention center and that my old boss is here, and that he’s moving to Mexico soon so I could see him here before he leaves. Go to the center, talk for a bit, type up the rest of this post, and go get my shit together to leave.

Can you see the tumbleweeds roll by?

Posted on by

At the risk of making a personal-based post (oh no!), I’ve really just got to say that I feel pulled in a thousand different directions at once right now. Hence the lack of posting. That’s what happens when you have too much going on; some things get dropped. So, look forward to new stuff soon, but only if my life’s hecticness lessens a bit.

Sigh

Posted on by

A depressingly intelligent and measured argument for why Kerry actually won, but how Bush got the crown.

I know I’ve been a little heavy on the song lyrics lately, but No Control just really stands out as pertinent here:

culture was the seed of proliferation
but it has gotten melded into an inharmonic whole
consciousness has plagued us and we can not shake it
though we think we’re in control
questions that besiege us in life
are testament of our helplessness
“there’s no vestige of a beginning,
no prospect of an end”
when we all disintegrate it will all happen again

time is so rock solid in the minds of the hoards but they can’t
explain why it should slip away
history and future are the comforts of
our curiosity but here we are
rooted in the present day

if you came to conquer you’ll be king for a day
but you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away
and believe these words you hear
when you think your path is clear

we have no control
we do not understand
you have no control
you are not in command

I want to be Hunter S. Thompson

Posted on by

Hunter S. Thompson on Dubya.

I want that for breakfast every day at 67, dammit.

Oh, and a good quote:
I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn’t handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn’t pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub,” Thompson adds, “then I noticed him. I’d been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away.”
…
What immediate message would the Doctor deliver, if he could address the US electorate?

“I would tell them that, if George W Bush wins again, the United States faces utter disaster. That the question facing voters is no longer whether or not George W Bush is a pathetic fascist stooge. The question is whether – Bush having already demonstrated himself to be a fascist stooge – the American people like it that way, and see that as their future.

“If this president is re-elected,” he adds, “we are facing the total death of the American Dream as I know it, and I have spent a lot of time knowing it. I would tell them that if this gang of criminals get in once more, we will be in the position of a family who have sent the Hell’s Angels written invitations to their Thanksgiving party.

“Such a decision represents a serious error of judgment.” Thompson laughs, good-naturedly. “Because certain people never leave. Consequently I would urge them…” He pauses, his voice soft, measured and utterly serious, “to vote out this baffled little creep, on November 2.”

Filet Oscar, Cochiti and Champagne

Posted on by

I spent this last weekend at a cabin near Cripple Creek, Colorado, about an hour west of Colorado Springs. In the Central City/Blackhawk tradition, it’s a mining town that has been converted to a gambling one (albeit with all-too-few table games). This in and of itself is unremarkable. We were expecting a relaxing good time.

Saturday evening, we decided to head into town for dinner. My diabetic son had had a snack earlier, so we weren’t in any particular hurry to decide on which place to go, but I was under the impression we were going to go into the closer town of Florissant to get a cheap burger and a beer. I was wrong.

We instead went into Cripple Creek, found a place to park, and we proceeded to follow our hosts and fellow cabin-dwellers down the main street, through a Starbucks, down 2 flights of stairs, and into a restaurant by the name of Winfields. Two of the women we were with were quite a bit ahead of us, and by the time I reaached the bottom of the stairs, they were speaking with an older gentleman in a baseball cap with long gray hair spilling out beneath it. It was my understanding that we had been invited to dine with him and his group of 3, as they’d had a good night at the tables or slots and he felt like sharing it.

We politely declined, and I took the kids to check out the fishtank.

A few minutes later, we were sat at our table and I realized it wasn’t far from our new friends from the bottom of the stairs. Some polite words were exchanged, but I really wasn’t paying attention, what with figuring out who was sitting where, whether the kids should next to eachother, etc.

We ordered drinks, appetizers and dinner. It is at this point that I should mention that this restaurant was relatively pricey, ranging from $15 for chicken dishes with pasta to $33 for Filet Oscar. I said fuck it, I’d lose this money gambling anyway, bring me the $33 dish. My wife figured the same and ordered the Lamb Chops. Between the salad course and the entrees, one of our waitresses started placing champagne flutes in front of every adult’s place setting. We looked up, confused, and asked about why we were getting these.

“They’ve ordered you a bottle of champagne,” the waitress responds, with a slight smile and nod in the direction of our apparently new-found friends.

We were flattered, of course, and tried to decline. No dice. The husband of one of my mother’s friends decided that since we were being treated so well, that we’d return the favor and instead of a simple thank-you, we should toast him and his group for “new friends and good neighbors.” Not the kind of thing I’d normally do on my own, but I’ve only had complimentary champagne once in my life, and that was by the hotel on my wedding night when we both were under-age. I have very little experience in toasting people.

So we all stood up, walked the short distance to our benefactor’s table, and toasted them for their generosity and kindness.

“The world needs more people like you,” he said. “People need to show eachother more hospitality. This is going to make me cry,” he said.

We then exchanged some glass clinks and kind words, and returned to our table and meal. The rest of dinner was pleasant and delicious. When the checks arrived, I was a little perturbed at our portion of the check, some $120 worth. No big deal, again, I would have lost it at the tables anyway.

As I reached into my wife’s purse for our cash, the bill mysteriously disappeared from my hands. I looked up, astonished. “He’s got it. It’s taken care of,” the waitress said.

Huh?

“He has many points and comps from the casino upstairs, and he’s taking care of your bill for you.” All 6 of us were floored. What? Someone taking care of our meal? Easily a $200 bill? Sure enough, we didn’t pay a dime toward our food, only toward the tip. I asked to buy them a round of drinks. “It wouldn’t matter, he’d only get them comped anyway,” was the response.

We thanked him profusely, and starting getting engaged with a recently-arrived member of their party, a man clearly Native American and clearly very proud of his culture, sporting 2 long braids and strong Native American facial features. Upon learning that a few of the people in our group work at a school named “Cherokee Trail” in Denver, he opened up to us that he’d worked at Denver’s East High School in Native American studies and as a counselor for the NA kids there. My mother, ever the diplomat, asked him where he was from. “Santa Clara pueblo in New Mexico,” he responded. My mom replied “My sister’s husband is from Cochiti.” Which happens to be a few miles from Santa Clara. And he’s got an aunt in Cochiti. We’ve probably attended a ceremony with her.

Suffice it say, we had a long conversation and a wonderful evening. Sometimes when you’re too tired to be nice to people you don’t know, maybe it’s best to be nice anyway. You never know what might happen.

Glucoboy

Posted on by

I’m totally getting this for my son, when he’s old enough to check his own levels and understand them.
GLUCOBOY is a glucose meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GAMEBOY. The product operates independent of the video game system but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GAMEBOY as a reward for maintaining good blood sugar control.