Posts from — March 2006

It’s not that it’s always crowded, it’s not the hypocrisy of their touting sustainability while selling Chilean Tomatoes in the Garden State, it’s not the fact that they charge five clams for a tomato and cheese sandwich. The real problem with Whole Foods, at least here at the Boulder branch, is that the entire joint is crawling with two kinds of people, both of whom are irritating to the point that they give me a headache.

On the one hand, you have these self-absorbed health nuts wandering the aisles in their Patagonia walking pants and their Crocs and their hydration packs, zipping to and fro, stopping short at every goddamned free sample hawker (of which there are too many crowding the crowded aisles — a topic for another rant later), all the while wearing these sickeningly smug, self-satisfied smirks on their faces that seem to say “look at me; I’m never going to die”.

On the other hand you have these Patchouli-laden Naropa University poetry majors (hippies) to contend with. These free spirit-types like to float around the aisles — slowly, I might add — in search of tempeh, or flax. They get in the way, and they annoy me when they get upset over my overt displays of displeasure with their aroma and their happy attitude.

I just want to get something with meat in it and get the hell outta there, for chrissakes.

After doing battle with these evil forces for 20 minutes, I have usually lost whatever appetite I had, and my blood pressure is up 20 points to boot. I could actually eat nothing but grass smoothies in that joint and I’d still be unhealthier than if I simply went to El Taco Loco every day as is my wont, simply because the chilled-out groovy healthy climate in Whole Foods drives me NUTSO!

(I guess this is the first post on this website filed under Boulder and complaints. Don’t worry, I still love it here. I just hate everyone in Whole Foods. Oh, and the drivers all suck here too.)

According to my friend Paul in this post, he was obligated to post an anti-war song on his blog, and having read that I’m obligated to do the same. So:

Let Them Eat War
by: Bad Religion

There’s a prophet on a mountain and he’s making up dinner
With long division and riding crop
Anybody can feel like a winner
When it’s served up piping hot

But the people aren’t looking for a handout
They’re America’s working corps
Can this be what they voted for?

Let them eat war
Let them eat war
That’s how to ration the poor
Let them eat war
Let them eat war

There’s an urgent need to feed
Declining pride

From the force to the union shops
The war economy is making new jobs
But the people who benefit most
Are breaking bread with their benevolent hosts

You never stole from the rich to give to the poor
All he ever gave to them was a war
And a foreign enemy to deplore

Let them eat war
Let them eat war
That’s how to ration the poor
Let them eat war
Let them eat war

There’s an urgent need to feed
Declining pride

We’ve got to kill ‘em and eat em’
Before they reach for their checks
Squeeze some blue collars
make them bleed from their necks
Seize a few dollars from the people who sweat
Cause it’s freedom or death and they won’t question it
At a job site the boss is god like
Conditioned workhorses park at a stoplight
Seasoned vets with their feet in nets
A stone’s throw away from a rock fight
But not tonight, feed ‘em death

Here comes another ration (feed them death)
Cause they’re the finest in the nation (feed them death)
But there’s nothing left to feed them
When it’s freedom or it’s death

Let them eat war
Let them eat war
That’s how to ration the poor
Let them eat war
Let them eat war

There’s an urgent need to feed

Well, it was long overdue, but I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress installation (the software that powers this blog) to the latest version. This also allowed me to install the latest version of Spam Karma, a comment spam moderation tool. Yesterday I got about 80 comment spams, and what really pissed me off was that about half of them were posted to my friend Bil’s memorial post and one of the posts I wrote during my dad’s demise. Spammers suck.

Everything seems to have gone smoothly, but please let me know if you find anything amiss. At first blush, the new version of WordPress seems really nice.

I also got virtual hosting, MySQL and WordPress set up on my new MacBook Pro, so I have a local test bed for any tweaks I want to try with my site. I think a website redesign may be in my future…

Peter Tomarken, the host of the 80’s TV game show “Press Your Luck”, got himself and his wife killed in a plane crash the other day. The ultimate whammy.

From the eyewitness reports and the wreckage, it appears that he had a problem with the plane shortly after takeoff, apparently lost the engine, and was trying to glide back to the airport, and it just wasn’t in the cards. The sad thing is, they were out over water as they were turning around, and at some point it was probably better to ditch in the water rather than trying to “stretch the glide” to land. Instead of a controlled crash into shallow water, it looks like the pilot stalled the plane and caused the plane to nose over and descend very rapidly into the water; if they weren’t killed on impact they were likely incapacitated and drowned in shallow water.

Additional sadness: the Tomarkens were on an Angel Flight, enroute to pick up a patient in need of air transportation to a distant hospital for treatment. Angel Flight is an organization that organizes volunteer private pilots who fly these flights entirely for free.

Trying to stretch the glide is akin to pressing your luck.

This past weekend Brenda & I hiked up to Bear Peak, one of the three major peaks in the immediate vicinity of Boulder. It was awesome.

Last weekend we had hiked to the top of Green Mountain, and I thought that was gonna be it for difficult hikes for a while, but for some reason Brenda was very excited about doing Bear Peak this past weekend, so far be it from me to decline. I’m still sore from it, but it was great fun and worth every step.

We took the Fern Canyon trail to the summit, and this is a steep ascent (I checked with some people from work, and apparently this is suitably hardcore). In just over two miles of walking, you ascend about three thousand feet. At the top you face a largish pile of boulders that you have to scramble across to get to the very top, and once at the summit you have a 360-degree view of Colorado. We sat up there for half an hour in raging wind, taking in the view. It’s like flying.

The view below is looking north from Bear Peak; the big bump in the foreground is Green Mountain, and to the right of that is north Boulder; to the left, the Continental Divide. This view gives you a good sense of how Boulder is tightly nuzzled against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

I kept looking east and west, east and west, marveling at the difference between the interminable flatness of the midwestern plains that form one edge of Boulder, and the craggy rocky majesty of the Rockies that form the other. Here’s Brenda against the eastern plains, with Denver and its surrounding suburbs visible:

We decided to descend the same way we ascended, even though that meant a really steep, knee-busting grind to the bottom. I want hiking poles now. I’m still sore, but it was worth it. I still can’t believe I live in a city where we are a mile away from trailheads that lead to such amazing views.

Well, it’s been a few days now, and I have good news and bad news about the new MacBook Pro.

First off, it’s fast; much faster than my old Powerbook, but then again my old Powerbook is four years old and that’s not a fair comparison. Regardless, I’m pleased as hell with the speed, and recently ran a Radiance benchmark test on it and the MacBook Pro proved its mettle. But some other niggly details are pissing me off and ringing in my ears (literally) and I feel the need to vent.

Where the hell did tabbed browsing go? I’m using Safari once again because it’s a Universal Binary, and I’m trying to simplify my life so I thought running the browser that comes with the operating system would be one way to do that (opposed to installing Firefox (or Deer Park, the Universal Binary beta of Firefox)). But there seems to be no way to do tabbed browsing anymore in Safari. What the fuck is up with that?

Battery life on this thing sorta blows. My old slow-ass 550 MHz G4 Powerbook could go five hours with minimal disk activity. This thing expects an olympic gold for three hours. It’s got a Bode Miller battery. What the fuck is up with that?

The Apple email program sucks at IMAP. It lacks the ability to save sent mail to an IMAP folder, and the workaround (prepending “INBOX” to your path) only makes your IMAP folders show up outside of the main mailbox tree. This is, like, totally gay. The best option is currently to save copies of sent mail to a local folder, which of course flies in the face of the whole premise of IMAP in the first goddamned place. What the fuck is up with that?

All the above complaintes are nitpicks. My main problem with this thing right now is that it emits a high pitched whine, basically all the time. It’s an electronic hum, a binary squeal. And it is pretty much constant. I’m thinking of calling Apple on this one, because it’s starting to give me a headache, but I fear that I’ll get some zit-faced surfer on the line telling me that this is “normal”. My old laptop did this very occasionaly, but this thing emits satan’s squeal pretty much all the time it’s on, and it’s starting to make me a little nutso. What the fuck it up with that?

Whenever I spend a couple grand on something, I seem to obsess about my percieved derived value from said purchase. This one is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. What the fuck is up with that? Apple? Apple?