So, Brenda & I headed to Denver today to see the Body Worlds exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. This is an exhibit of real human cadavers that have been “plastinated”, their solidified remains exposed to reveal the amazing complexity and beauty of the human body and its systems. The show is so insanely popular that they sell tickets to the show and have staged fifteen-minute entries. With the show closing next weekend, I was excited that we had tickets for the exhibit today.

Brenda read in the paper this morning that since there was a power failure in Denver yesterday—the result of the brutal temperatures we’ve been experiencing here lately, no doubt—the ticketholders that were turned away from a dark museum yesterday afternoon would be honored today as well. Great. Thoughts of overly-crowded museum galleries in New York and the attendant hassles of being stuffed into small rooms with large people, long lines and general annoyance with humanity filled my head. But I’ve moved far away from New York City, and surely this experience would be different, right?

We left at 3PM for a 3:45 entry slot, arriving with a nice ten minute cushion. The parking lot was packed, the end result of the anticipated crowds, and we descended to the lowest levels of the parking garage to find a spot. With the car parked, we headed for the doors of the museum. They had kiosks where we could retrieve our prepaid tickets, which was nice for avoiding the lines. We checked in, and the kiosk cheerily printed out one ticket for the two of us, which obviously wasn’t going to work, so we ended up on line anyway. After getting a second ticket, we headed for the ticket takers, just a few minutes past our expected 3:45 p.m. entry time. The gentleman asked: “Body Worlds? What time are your tickets for?” 3:45, said I, and handed the bloke our tickets. He gave us directions for the third floor, and said we were to present our tickets later. On the way to the escalator were were brusquely accosted by a woman in a museum staff shirt, hand out with the universal “halt” signal, and asked us the following question: “Body Worlds? What time are your tickets for?” 3:45 was my answer again, and again I offered the tickets, but we were simply waved through. We entered a doorway, into a darkened gallery, and I thought surely we had arrived at the actual entry to the much-vaunted exhibit. Instead, a long gallery ended with a doorway that had a Body Worlds sign in front; surely that was where we needed to go. We made a beeline for that door and as we passed an older woman who I thought was a patron she shot an arm out with another halting gesture and said: “Excuse me! Body Worlds? What time are your tickets for?”

It was an interesting moment, because I realized how easy I’ve had it for the last year since moving to Boulder. I used to be accustomed to people making me want to kill them, but that had subsided since moving out here. But here was a nice old lady who I wanted to kill with my bare hands. THREE FOURTY FIVE.

“Jesus Christ, how many fucking people are going to ask us what time our fucking tickets are for before one of them actually fucking takes the goddamned things”, I asked my wife, who was growing unhappy with my increasingly intolerant mood. Luckily, shortly after running the ticket time gauntlet (four askers, total) we ended up on the end of what appeared to be a very long line, the Body Worlds Line. But it was moving along pretty well, and as we were actually snaking through a natural history gallery, the exhibits themselves were interesting enough. As we approached a display with a stuffed mountain lion chasing a deer, the lights dimmed a couple times and I thought “uh-oh”. In the next instant, we were in the dark.

Now, I know a thing or two about blackouts, and as soon as we were plunged into darkness I know full well that Brenda & I have should have made a beeline for the car, but we waited. We stood there like idiots, with all the other idiots, hoping the power would magically come back on and we could resume telling people what time our tickets were for. But after about five minutes or so we came to our senses and started heading out the door. Unfortunately by this time a lot of people had the same idea, and worse, the security guards had started to feel the need for taking control of the situation, which of course made everything worse.

By the time we got to to the car, everything was all fucked up, and as an added bonus I could tell that the power had come back on (all the garage lights were on instead of every fourth fixture or so). We tried to leave, but the traffic didn’t move, so we got out and walked around the park surrounding the museum. Still delusional that we were going to see this fucking exhibit today, we walked back to the museum entry only to hear that the museum was now closed for the day. We went back to the car and waited out the Bataan Death March out of the garage.

Finally speeding home to Boulder, we decided to eat at one of our favorite restaurants in town. Turns out we missed happy hour by three minutes and all I wanted a this point was the burger they serve on that very menu. Getting them to serve me one of those burgers was like pulling teeth, but they did comply and I tipped accordingly. Unfortunately the assholes seated next to me ruined everything by being assholes. The one chick had a shrill voice that could remove old lead paint from the side of a barn, and she was stupid and rude to boot. Anyone who mistakes a plate of complimentary cornbread for the shrimp ceviche she ordered (oh, is this the se-veech-eee??”), and then stares at her phone for three really loud and annoying rings as she squints and struggles to figure out who is calling her, and then takes the call at the table, is a stupid asshole, and I didn’t want stupid assholes seated next to me after all we’d been through.

I managed to enjoy dinner and ignore the assholes next to us, but I’m afraid I annoyed Brenda as much with my complaints as the assholes at the next table annoyed me. So in the end, we lost half our Sunday to a crappy museum and a flaky power grid—and my inability to deal with assholes and stupidity. Oh well, some things never change.

We’re gonna try and get tickets for Body Worlds before the thing closes, but I think I’ll wait till the temperature drops below 95 degrees (which may be a few days yet).

Vegas baby, Vegas. Been there, done that.

My 38 year-long streak of never having visited Las Vegas has come to an end, as I just got back from spending three days in that pit of depravity. Lightfair, the architectural lighting community’s annual trade show and convention, alternates between New York City and Las Vegas for its host cities and this year it was once again being held in Vegas. I generally made the New York shows, but now that I call Boulder home, the desert location makes more sense. We were lucky enough at work to get funding for the entire daylighting team – all four of us – to go, so off we went to Vegas.

My review: eh.

The trade show was great, a chance to meet new people and see old friends, see new products and learn new things. But the town itself was sort of a mixed bag. Las Vegas has never been a place that interested me; I’m a very competitive person, and hate to lose. When you throw money into that mixture, you have a recipe for disaster with me. Losing sucks, and losing money sucks even more. Growing up watching my family play cards and play them exceedingly well only made me withdraw from these games of chance and skill, feeling that I’d never be as good as they were. Furthermore, I’m in a committed relationship with my wife. So a town in the desert whose only redeeming features are illicit sex and gambling just never seemed to make sense for me. I’m funny like that.

With expectations already low, Vegas still managed to disappoint upon arrival. I was staying at the Las Vegas Hilton, which I’m pleased to tell you is a friggin’ dump. Interested in taking in the city (and getting out of my shitty room), I walked down to the strip and then down about halfway, and was struck by its resemblance to Wildwood, NJ – essentially a carnival atmosphere loaded with simpletons oohing and ahhing over all the fancy lights.

As an added bonus, the other end of the strip, with its newer and more extravagant hotels, has that sickening aura of Disneyland; that “we can build our own Paris, because we are rich, and you can just enjoy yourself here at Paris-in-the-desert rather than bothering with those rude French people” type of feel.

One evening, as I stood on the Strip talking to Brenda on the phone, I was treated to a water show in front of the Bellagio featuring forty foot geysers of water blasting into the sky, dramatically lighted, with Toby Kieth’s Lee greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” booming through an amazingly high fidelity sound system. Just as I was choking back the vomit from that whole scene, a truck motored by with a giant advertisement on the back. The ad was essentially a large picture of a whore wearing a black leather bikini lying on a white background in a suggestive pose, with the simple headline “HOT BABES”, and a phone number. As this scene unfolded before me, entire families with kids in the 8-12 age bracket waddled past, taking it all in with smiles on their faces. Proud to be an American, my ass.

One day, returning to the hotel after a day at the conference, I entered the hotel at the opposite end from the lobby (which left about a mile to walk before I actually reached the lobby). On my way through the maze of cavernous corridors and meeting halls, I encountered a herd of old zombies shuffling out of a huge room. The banner over the door read “$100,000 blackjack tournament”, and judging from the looks on those people’s faces, the winner was not present in that crowd. Mingling in with the old folks, I was hit with the aroma of farts and Old Spice. It was a memorable moment.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I returned to the craps tables, after my last and only other casino visit (Atlantic City, with my dad, in 1998 or so), and walked out a winner. Not big, but shit, I won. After dropping $80 the first night and $60 the second night, I had a couple hours before my last seminar on Wednesday, and plopped $40 on the table. An hour and a half later, after standing shoulder to shoulder with high rollers who the dealers knew by name, and after being called a “gunner” by one of these same high rollers for making so many points, I was running for my seminar, with my pockets full of chips. After the seminar, I went back to get my bags. With 15 minutes to spare, I placed a couple more bets, backing my pass line bets with odds bets, and cashed out with more money than I started with when I got to that place. Yeah!

My main regret is not purchasing one of the “Barry Fanilow” t-shirts that were for sale in the lobby gift store (apparently Mr. Manilow calls the Las Vegas Hilton “home” in Vegas, which should help my case about the place being a real past-prime dump).

I’ll definitely go back to Fake City, because Brenda still wants to check it out, and because now I have some money I can lose. It’ll certainly be fun to gamble with Brenda, and maybe we’ll take in a show or whatever. But I fail to see the magnetic draw that that place holds for so many people on this planet. It’s a toilet and a real sucker magnet, you ask me.

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’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?

Yeah, so I missed most of the State of the Union, forgetting about the time zone change (yeah, it STILL happens to me). But from the look of things, it was big business as usual so who gives a shit anyway. What’s been fun, in a staggeringly depressing way, is to review the snippets of Karl Rove’s—I mean the President’s—speech, against the cold truth of the facts behind the rhetoric. You can do this not on the major news outlets, because they are all whores who suck. I’m tired of George Snuffalupagus and god knows I don’t need to hear “The Democratic Response”, which is sure to be one more performance of people who still can’t get their shit together, whining ineffectively about this buffoon in office.

What you can do is head over to Think Progress’ site for a nice recap of the whole charade, with factual turdlets that follow each rosy assertion made by that incompetent jerkoff named Georgie Dubya Bush.

Houston, we no longer have a problem. It was the damned channel button.

For the last several months, I have lived in a state of worry and emasculation, unable to get my “home theater system” fully operational. I tried several times, under varying levels of intoxication, to hook up this collection of black boxes and cable spaghetti in just the right way, so that the stuff would actually fucking work as advertised, to no avail. Inevitably, one or more things would not behave. Couple this with an untimely demise of our old DVD player (first it showed movies in black&white, then it started refusing to even play audio cds), and you have me down at the BestBuy looking at DVD recorders. Luckily, my friend Perry was able to recommend a decent DVD recorder that was reasonably priced and was purported to do what I need, namely, a device that I can save TiVo and VHS recordings to, as well as play music and DVDs. I picked one up. After much cursing, I finally got the damned thing hooked up and playing DVDs. But the recording thing was still not working. The whole thing is made more annoying by the fact that my A/V components live in this little cubby next to the tv that is barely wide enough to turn the components around so you can look at the cable connections for the eight hundredth time. I tried a few more times, I cursed some more, and after a definitive “fuck it all, goddammit all to hell, I’m fucking done with this bullshit”, we (I) settled for playback-only mode for the time being. That was a few weeks ago.

Then, on Thursday, the sound died. There was no warning, and I assure you I made no changes, but all of a sudden we stopped getting sound from the main TV. It was time to get this sorted.

And so on Saturday, I pulled the entire rack out and placed it on the dining room table, so I could plug component video cables, audio cables, rca jacks and speaker wires in and out and in and out until I either had a heart attack, an orgasm, or everything was working as planned.

And I got it. Everything was working. I could watch TV, or I could switch input sources and watch a movie from the vcr or the dvd player, and I could also get a TiVo signal through the DVD recorder.

Then I disassembled everything and stuffed it back into the cubby, violating rule number one of final assembly: I buttoned everything up nice and neat, as if I wouldn’t have to take it apart again. And so of course I was greeted by a blue screen when I was supposed to be watching a fucking DVD.

Well, it turns out that when you want to watch a TiVo recording through the vcr and through the dvd recorder, you need to set the vcr to channel 3 on the box, and hit tv/vcr on the vcr remote, set the input source to color stream on the TiVo remote, and then make sure the stereo is on and set to dvd so you have audio, and like fifty other things that I’ve already forgotten, and god help us when our cat walks on the remotes again.

So, I finally have the ability to save to DVD things I’ve recorded with TiVo. More on this later. In the meantime, DON’T TOUCH THE REMOTES! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! IT’S WORKING!

Right on, Sky News, Right on.

This country is lost. The way I see it, when thousands of people die and the reaction is for thousands more to begin looting and shooting at the helicopters trying to rescue them with their ten pairs of Nikes—while rich people argue the details of supply and demand and its effect fuel prices on an aviation mailing list I subscribe to, and the so-called leader of this country goes on television and says he “understands” what’s going on—I believe we are truly in the midst of the most serious reality-disconnect mode I’ve ever seen in my life.

Katrina has caused unbelievable damage to New Orleans, and the reaction of many of the (surviving) residents has been to sprinkle a little L.A. riots into the mix. Yes, it’s a totally irrational act, but the more I look at it, the more I see this as one more example of the chasm between our nation’s so-called leadership and the needs of everyman. These people are PISSED OFF, and I can’t say I blame them.

I got a little upset when this morning’s Center for American Progress newsletter used the Katrina situation to make Bush look bad, but then again, this country’s handling of this disaster—from the preparedness beforehand to the outraged reaction of the residents in the aftermath—is an excellent little view into the priorities of this idiotic President of ours and his complete lack of compassion or understanding of what he is doing to this nation of ours.

I am sad today.

Today, I was to install a new router at my boss’ house. This router would enable him to telecomute to the office, via VPN. He has a DSL connection with Verizon, and since we have a SonicWall firewall at the office, it was suggested (by SonicWall “tech support”, of course) that installing a SonicWall at the remote site would be a snap.

Many of you are already screaming, as you have seen the names of the players involved. I hear you. Perhaps you heard my screams earlier today?

Verizon, already well-known for having some of the worst “customer service” around, and SonicWall? Joined together in one multi-headed medusa of lying and deceit? Yes. All allied in the cause of making my afternoon an unpleasant one. Score one for Red & Blue.

Of course it wasn’t a snap. Of course it wasn’t. But then you saw that coming. For some reason, Verizon’s DSL modem does not want to play nice with the SonicWall, despite the fact that all pertinent technologies are supported. Of course Verizon says it’s the SonicWall. Of course SonicWall says it’s Verizon.

The end of the day, and all I have to show for my efforts is a new private network address, and my boss’ daughter’s computer is connected to the internet, as I had a chance to replace her faulty NIC. At least she’s happy. And I can roll back a Netgear router very very quickly.

Why am I telling you this? Because this, my friends, is how I keep my blood pressure down. I vent. And through this blog, I can vent to more people. My favorite exchange of the entire afternoon was with one dim bulb at Verizon. After explaining that, yes, the private IP addresses are correct, and yes I have the PPPoE login and password correct, she says “Well, sir, I don’t have any other information for you”.

“Surely there’s something we missed here, maybe you need the MAC address of the new router? Flush an arp cache someplace?”

“No, sir, the only other people who might have more information on settings is sales”.

HUH? The sales department is gonna shed some light on this hardware problem? Do people actually accept this level of “support” on a regular basis? I’d LOVE to hear what sales would have had to say. Good lord. Tomorrow’s another day.