Recently in babble Category

I haven't had it in me to do any blogging since the hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast.

More and more it seems like this country is divided along class lines. There are those that have enough to live comfortably and then there are those living in the 9th Ward of New Orleans. I hope the disaster affects change in our economic policies so that the poor and underclassed are given a fair chance at fulfilling their American Dream. With the Bush Administration and the Republican majority in Congress, I fear that there will be little change in our tax code that is so out of step with what's needed for our society to work more equitably.

There are a millions of us who are angry and confused by what's happened in the last two weeks. I got an email from a friend urging me to call for the impeachment of Bush. I would like nothing more but his ouster wouldn't change the fact that we need radical change to make this country better for everyone.

It's harder and harder for me to enjoy all the things in my life that so many will never be able to afford. A car. A computer. Leisure time. A house. Freedom. Giving money to the Red Cross is a temporary salve for me but deep down I know I need to do more in order for things to change. Every day while out in Los Angeles I see the urban poor. Normally I have to pretend that they are not there just so that I can go on living my privileged life but since Katrina I can't look away.

I've been staying clear of politics on this blog and in my life ever since the reelection of George W. Bush. I know that there are readers of this blog who voted for the guy in 2004 and I know I have my fair share of friends who will always agree with the posts I throw up here. Thanks in advance for staying with me.

The activist fire in me has been re-stoked and so I want to share with you some links that can't be ignored:

Keith Olberman on MSNBC - Quicktime movie from Crooks and Liars
Blame Game - Quicktime movie from Salon
Eye of the Political Storm - Newsweek poll shows Bush @ 38% approval

Cay has one more week of Summer vacay and she had the notion to have some friends over for a "Wine Tasting" which is really just an excuse to get a little schnockered.

Click above for the jump to my Flickr page which has a new set that I uploaded today. Thanks to all who came and if we failed to invite you it was an egregious mistake. It was Cay's first time building an Evite and I think we missed some peeps.

I finally got around to scanning the last roll of slide film this afternoon and the results can be found in a new set called Shibuya.June.2005 on my Flickr site. Click above for the Jump.

Had a great first show on Two and a Half Men last night. All went smoothly and our director Gary Halvorson got us done by ten o'clock which is really nice. I had a long wrap and I hung with some of the crew until around midnight.

This morning I woke up early for my first training run with the LA Leggers. I plan on running the LA Marathon on March 19, 2006. An email from my buddy William Brown convinced me that it's something I want to experience. (Published here without permission - Top Willy won't mind.)

After the run I worked on the basement until around one o'clock and since then I've just been scanning like a madman. Tonight we are going to take it easy even though we had plans with friends to go east. I hyper-extended my right ankle so I should rest up for this coming full week of work.

Woke up this morning and headed over to the Motion Picture Westside Medical Center on Sawtelle where I saw a GP about getting referrals to my allergist and my dermatologist.

As many of you know, I suffer from atopic dermatitis and normally it's under control thanks to allergy shots that I give myself and some topical medication. Well I did a bad thing recently and I let my allergy medication get to room temperature overnight and you're never supposed to let it get un-refrigerated.

I went on using it anyway like an idiot and this past weekend after the algae swim my face swelled up and the next morning I could hardly see out of my puffy eyes. I don't think the algae got me going, I think it was all the swimming and drunken exertion that tipped the balance along with the bad serum.

My skin hasn't been this bad in years. I don't get to see my allergist until next week so until then I'm just gonna keep on bein' the sufferin' bastard that I am. Ah well. Things could be worse, I'm sure.

Got some links to share:

Yahoo! News Photo that Cay turned me onto.
Flickr: Explore!
Bad to the Last Drop ... Great NYT article on bottled water
Apple's new mouse ... H3llz y3ah.
Arstechnica's review of the new mouse.

Finally I'm sharing a song that Cay likes: Frou Frou's "Let It Go" 4.88MB @ 160kbps.

Bleh.

Well, I've had three months off so I shouldn't complain. <snicker snicker ha ha> Still it is a shock to the system to have to get back into the weekly rhythm. Driving to the Valley four days a week will be a bummer but two of those days I'm hoping to commute with my friend Dan.

Today I helped load in a camera package onto Stage 20 of the CBS Radford lot in Studio City where I'm starting the fourth season of Still Standing, a CBS show that has kept me in good work for many years. This coming Thursday and Friday will be the first episode of Two and a Half Men's third season. We'll shoot three episodes of each show and then have a hiatus week toward the end of August.

I wrote about the Complete Disaster two posts ago and I just wanted to share with you here the lesson I learned: Always have a backup. Most people recommend backing up to an external firewire drive that is larger than your hard drive. Remember to keep your hard drives at least 20% empty. That goes for Macs and PCs.

For good backup software for the Mac check out Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! <via MacUpdate.>

You PCers out there running XP might wanna look into download.com's page on backup software.

Oh and Jason Hadley over at Woodpussy and my contact with Robochrist (who have a show this Friday night) has turned me on to The Kingdom of Loathing which might interest you gamers out there. It's a free open beta comical RPG that has to be seen to be believed. I can't wait to find a Meatloaf Helmet. Jason is frumble and I'm Niggle.

The last thing I'll share is a cool mp3 I ripped from Demonoid. It's Fila Brazilia doing a remix of "Soul Sauce" from the Verve Remixed 2 compilation. It's 5.88MB and the bit rate is 192kbps. Enjoy!

I'm off to see Back to the Future on the Santa Monica pier if Cay gets home from her mom's in time. Hurry!

John Mans has been a very good friend since I met him through Cay back in 1989 or so. He was Cay's neighbor during her sophomore year in Boulder and he's become someone who has the same interests and sensibilities as the two of us.

John's been living on Speedway in Venice for the past year and he's decided to pack up and go home to Colorado. This past Saturday night a few of us got together to send him off. We had about a dozen friends over for sake, beer, and cocktails. Around 1:30 in the morning I remembered that I had seen signs of phosphorescent algae out in the Santa Monica bay. After scouting it out, the entire group followed me to the beach where I assured them an experience they wouldn't soon forget.

The green phosphorescence was the most intense I've seen it in almost ten years. The water has been unusually warm lately and I think this contributes to their well being. The dozen of us stripped down to our birthday suits and headed out into the ocean. Neophytes soon learned how incredible the phenomenon of the algae can be and those of us who have experienced it before enjoyed it all over again.

It was 3 in the morning by the time we all got back. What a great night. Thanks, John, for bringing all of us together. We love you very much and will miss having you live right around the corner.

Cay took some pictures with the D70 that night and they can be found on her Flickr site here. Too bad we didn't have a camera with us out on the beach.

On Saturday, July 16, I managed to wipe my boot drive clean on the G5. It was a Complete Disaster. I was trying to backup my first drive to the second internal and I started having problems after duping it.

Somehow Disk Utility on the Tiger Install DVD mixed up the two drives when I commanded it to erase the second one. Poof. Gone. All my apps, all the digital pics, all my settings. Luckily I had the music collection on an external firewire La Cie and Cay's D70 pics from Japan were still on the camera cards.

The past two weeks have been hell and now I finally feel like I'm almost back to normal.

One of the casualties of the Disaster is the ole kaleidoscopic lemming site. Since there was no backup outside my home folder, my old blogging software wouldn't publish to the old url. Bummer. I'll try to archive that blog which was published from November, 2003 until now. The redirect page will be there for awhile until I can figure some things out. Google's cache may be holding the old blog at this link.

I'm using new blogging software (ecto 2.3.7) with Movable Type 3.11. One of these days I'll upgrade MT to 3.17 or 3.2 Beta. I'm hoping to add a horizontal navigation bar and maybe three fluid columns. With work starting again this week I don't know when I'll be able to fit that in but I'll give it my best.

Thanks for visiting. Your comments and suggestions for the new site are most welcome.