I work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and I am happy to do so. I also commute by bus more often than not, which I’m also happy to do. But now that we’re into the summer season, a huge influx of dorky college kids have flooded into Boulder, and we all compete for seats on the “GS” regional bus from Boulder and Golden and back each day, and this has been a source of irritation for me these last couple weeks, as the intern population has reached critical mass at NREL.

They are young enough to not fully grasp the idea of a line, or a queue — that embodiment of the “first come, first served” concept. No, the stragglers walk up to the front of the line, where their fellow geeks have congregated, knowing full well that the meager northbound bus population is barely able to hold us all. Strike One.

They yammer and giggle all the way up Rt. 93, unconcerned with real problems, and despite being the future geniuses of the world, they lack the basic skills to ring the fucking bell when their bus stop is coming up. This actually gave me great pleasure last week, as I observed the 27th Way stop getting bigger in the windshield, and all the interns blissfully ignorant (and giggling). Generally, some fully developed adults get off there (like me), and ensure the complex chore of dinging the dinger is handled. But on that day I was headed further north, so no ding from me. The 27th Way stop came and went, and suddenly about a dozen geek heads popped up from behind the seats like prairie dogs, wondering what the hell was going on. Once that stop was assuredly behind us, I slowly reached up the six inches, wrapped an index finger around the cord, and pulled. DING, you morons. So, that was fun. I got off with the geeks and took my local bus the rest of the way home, feeling sadly smug about the whole thing. But then yesterday, the geeks broke though my protective shield again.

One of Them was talking to another One about movies. Here’s a rough transcript:

Thing One: “do you know about a movie called ‘A Fish Called Wanda”?
Thing Two: “yeah.”
Thing One: “Oh, I had never heard of it (giggling ensues), what’s it about?”.
Thing Two: “oh, it’s like a comedy, it’s old, it’s like, from like, the sixties—”
Thing Two was cut off by my neighbor, another NREL dude and seemingly a tad older than the interns:
NREL Neighbor: “Oh man, you’re WAY off, that was like the 80’s.”
Thing Two: “Really? I thought it was black and white”.

Strike Two, punk.

I am really growing sick and tired of sciencey geeky youngsters who know how to deal with differential equations but don’t know how to ride a bus, not get taken at three card monte, and lack some very basic historical and cultural knowledge (even pop culture, for chrissakes!). I’m not looking for kids to know when the civil war ended (but that would be nice), I’m simply asking for these kids to know that there was a transoceanic cable across the Atlantic long before we had “satellites” handling things, and that there were funny movies before “Superbad” (which was a hysterical movie, BTW).

Gonna be a long summer.

did a google search of my band name… found this…

So it appears that some one else passed all those highway exit signs in Jersey for “The Amboys” and figgered it was a cinch for a great name for the band!

Folk rock, not my thing. But at least someone has the stones to put together a band and make some music under the banner of “The Amboys”! Check ‘em out on this here myspace page, they might just float yer boat.

It was my idea first, though. I’m just sayin’.

But I kind of like this blog thing. I’ve had some sort of presence on the web since 1998 (starting with a crappy little static page on my old panix account that I can’t even find on the wayback machine), and a “formal” blog, complete with archives and shit, since late 2002. I have documented some thoughts about 9/11, the deaths of my Grandfather / Father / pet cat of 17 years, my move to Boulder, Colorado, commuting in various forms, bacon, TiVo, and of course, all kinds of people who bother me. You know, the idiots. And I don’t want to stop.

In the meantime, I have discovered Facebook, Flickr and lots of other sites that vie for my web attention dollar. Oh and I also have decided I might like to become a veterinarian in my lifetime, and have started taking classes in that vein.

But the fact is, I also just like to write. Life is getting interesting around here these days, and it seems that when I’m doing interesting things that’s when I do my best writing. And when I’m writing, I find myself thinking about writing, even more. And that leads to more writing, for better or for worse.

So I’m going to take some time these next couple weeks as the semester winds down (good lord, is it ever odd to have my calendar revolve around that time frame again) and think about how I might go about this. There is much to do. Update blog software. Maybe a site makeover, with some organizational changes. Maybe finally add in all the missing content and keywords from the last three makeovers. But even if none of that housekeeping gets done, I can at least start writing again, which is what I plan to do.

I’ve got some stuff in the hopper of life and I hope it all bears fruit—on here, and out there.

Check it out: rumblestrip Masthead Image Gallery

The bigger news is that I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. The new version supports tagging, which allows me to assign tags, or keywords, to each post. This allows a finer-grained content definition than the traditional “categories” I used to use. One nifty feature of the new layout is the new “tag cloud” feature, which displays all the tags in my blog; the more a tag appears, the larger the tag shows up in the cloud. This simply offers one more way to select posts by topic. Categories remain, and are selectable from a pulldown menu (as are monthly archives).

I’ve also changed the way images are sized, and as a result (and in order to assign tags to older material) I will be combing through my old posts to update them; in the meantime, old posts’ images will not display correctly nor will the tag cloud reflect the actual total content of this blog for a litle while, until I have a chance to go through them all.

I’ve finally joined the modern age and added a digg section. You’d think that with one of my friends and blog readers being an employee at this up and coming internet company, I’d have latched on by now. Well, now I have a “Digging” section that will list my latest Diggs, or links to things I find on the internets that I find interesting or amusing. My first one is a real doozy, and recommended reading!

Lastly, my static pages are not accessible yet, but that’s ok because they largely said “coming soon” on them. It is my sincere hope that this change, once and for all, motivates me to comb through all my old posts and fix typos, dead links, add tags and, finally, add in all my old static content from my original websites that were online as far back as 1996. Should be fun.

Oh yeah, and if you read my site regularly, you may have to force the css file to reload (ctrl+refresh or command+refresh) to get the images to display correctly. If the pics of Elle are huge, then you need to do this.

Bear with me as I bring all my content up to snuff and online. Onward!

Long overdue is my reinstatement of some very old bits from my older websites, and I’m in the process of doing that now. As such, the new/old content won’t necessarily show up in the blog, so I will periodically post short links at the top of this page to new stuff that’s been added elsewhere on the site.

Since I had drinks with my co-workers this evening to celebrate the engagement announcements of not one, not two, but three couples in the office, I felt the first order of business was to re-post our own wedding “team photo” and the thank-you letter I wrote to our guests. Have a look, here.

I hope you like the new look and the new (old) content!

More later.

Later.

I knew of this alternate meaning when I bought it, and I sometimes refer to my townie bike as the blowjob bike. It’s all fun and games until someone gets inundated with spam. See the thing is, ever since I posted that story I’ve been getting Italian porn spam, and Italian porn sites are even linking back to my story. I don’t know much Italian, but like Potter Stewart, I know porn when I see it, and I could see that some of the text of these spam emails was just dripping with hot, italian fellatio.

Yes, I clicked some of the links. Hot!

Anyway, here’s the thing: the only place that the word pompino shows up in the entire post is in the alt title of the image of my bike. The title of the image is “pompino-snow.jpg”. Now, I ask you: who among us has gotten a blow job while lying in the snow? Have we all forgotten the lessons of the infamous “Shrinkage Episode” from Seinfeld?

At any rate, regardless of where you get your freak on, I thought this was interesting, how a single word buried in a blog post could spark such an (admittedly automated) reaction from so many sites around the world. And I’m sure that after this post, my inbox is gonna be scorchin’ for the next few days…