Getta Grip on your Creativity!

No more pins, no more pain! My friend Paul has put the finishing touches on his "Getta Grip" line of sewing clips. They're in production right now, and will be available this July.

For any of you (or your friends) who dabble in making clothing or even if you are just hemming your pants, these clips will let you get rid of those nasty pins that poke your fingers and ruin your fabric. It's been great fun working with Paul on getting these things created.

And of course, they make great gifts! Check out his blog at GettaGripClip to find out where they're being shown, and for online ordering later this summer.

Mmmmm.... bacon.

Splurged and made bacon and eggs before work this morning. Yummm!!!! Sparky is biking all the way to work in San Bruno so I figured I'd get him started with some serious sustenance. Then I had to make double extra for me. :-)

It's looking like a fun weekend is brewing: hanging with friends tonight, then the Maker's Fair tomorrow to help Paul unveil his latest creation! I should have a post on that soon, but it's still under wraps. Probably by this afternoon, though! Happy weekend everyone.

Divorce Court

Yesterday I spent about 90 minutes in Divorce Court. Well, actually at the San Francisco Superior Court "Family Law Self-Help Center." I'm still jumping through hoops to get my domestic partnership dissolved. Now it looks like July 15th will be the big day.

Very strange timing, given this week's affirmation by the California Supreme Court that gay people are second-class citizens. While all of my "facebook friends" (i.e. people I don't really know) are all a-twitter about their outrage and how we'll get-em-next-time, I must say that it's been pretty much a non-event and unemotional for me. The long list of forms just to eliminate my domestic partnership are pretty serious. I hope all these gay people dying to get married know that it's both a right and a responsibility. Gay Marriage: The Dark Side!

I still say, the best sign at last year's protest march was, "The only relationship gay marriage will ruin is my own." Tee, hee!!

Speaking of sweethearts,

Speaking of sweethearts, I'd be remiss if I didn't make clear that Sparky is absolutely the biggest sweetheart of all. We had a fantastic weekend together, and he is just the sweetest guy ever. Even sweeter and cheesier than the cheesiest soufflé!

Soufflé Weekend

I've spent the last two weeks obsessing over cheese soufflé. Yes this is ridiculous; please join Sparky in making fun of me. But as you can see, on Memorial Day I finally was successful in creating the difficult French culinary masterpiece. Behold my first soufflé, full of eggy Gruyere goodness! It didn't deflate as in I Love Lucy and was... well... interesting. It basically tasted like a big poofy cheese sponge. Maybe next time I'll try chocolate.

In other news, the long weekend was terrific. Played dice all night Friday with the boys; spent Saturday helping Gallo with a big project he's creating (more on that shortly), and then saw some of Sparky's friends at Lucky 13 (and what a gross a dive bar that is. Complete with girl puking into a potted palm on the back deck... yuck); Sunday out dancing 'til all hours with Sparky, and Monday in Phancy's back yard having a nice relaxing barbecue. His yard looks great and I'm so glad I got to hang out with him yesterday. What a sweetheart.

Now I have to continue playing catch-up at work after being gone so many days last week. So, back to the grind — no time to even think about the Prop 8 ruling just yet.

Houston - What a shithole!

YAY! I'm back from Houston after a four-day transportation conference. The conference went very well and all three of our presentations came off without a hitch. I even got not one but two "Oooh"s from the audience during mine. Seriously, yay!

But that's not the real story of the trip. The real story is that Houston is a big shithole. I can't believe that it's the fourth-largest city in America (by population -- it covers a huge swath of Texas though); I can't imagine anybody wanting to ever live there.

First of all, downtown is incredibly dreary. The photo above is a main downtown Houston street at about 7:05pm, and as you can see there is one car, and one bus, for as far as the eye can see. I did manage to get one blurry pedestrian in the photo, which was also a surprise because, believe me, nobody walks anywhere in Houston. Even the McDonalds had already shut its doors by 7:00. Totally dead.

Then one night I took a cab out the 'burbs to find the gay bars with my fellow queer transit planners. The neighborhood known as "Montrose" has all the gay bars clustered together, which definitely had a feeling of circling the wagons in enemy territory. The neighborhood had "sidewalks" but I use the term loosely, because some blocks actually didn't have any sidewalks, and others had sidewalks at one point in the past, but now had ripped up concrete squares that literally rose three or four feet up where tree roots had busted them -- at least a decade ago. Walking the streets of Montrose really was a new form of urban hiking which required special footwear. I only wish I had a photo of that too. (Oh, and once inside, the bars were full of clean shaven twinkies no matter where we went... Texas is not bear country.)

And to top it all off, my hotel room had a fantastic view of Enron 1 and Enron 2, both now occupied by Shell Oil. Enron 2 was only half-built when the company collapsed under the weight of its shell-game crooked accounting scandals. Then, the huge american flag which they attached to the building in fall 2001 to commemorate our fallen, ripped off during Hurricane Ike and the flag's connector hooks clawed huge gashes out of the building's glass window curtain. That's some serious metaphor. The shiny 50-story building still has plywood taped over some sections of its facade. There are a lot of other evil corporations with HQ in Houston -- Waste Management, Hess, Elpaso Gas (which had great propaganda posters at street level).

What a creepy town, still filled with hucksters and crooks. Of course none of this should surprise me, because the head of Houston's travel modeling agency applied for my open position and spelled his own name wrong on his résumé.

Too bad about that iPhone

Bummer — a friend of mine just got an iPhone without asking me first. I know a lot of his friends already have one and it's great to be in the pack and get the same thing everyone else has... but, *sigh*. I ended up having to completely erase and reformat TWO of his home computers and put Vista on one and a bootleg copy of Windows XP on another, just so he could run iTunes and sync his phone. And he had to cancel his account with T-Mobile and get a locked AT&T phone, even though AT&T spies on Americans.

If he had just asked me, he would have known that the T-Mobile G1 with Android works perfectly with Linux, is completely synced automatically with his contact list on Gmail (and gets his Gmail direct to his phone), and has a videocamera built-in with upload to YouTube. Can't do that on an iPhone. Oh and it still has all the games and a beautiful touch-screen. And a slide-out full-size keyboard. And it's cheaper.

I didn't say a word to him about it, and instead spent the entire afternoon on Saturday doing computer maintenance for him so he could get his stupid locked-in Apple device to work.

Why do people listen to anyone other than me for technology advice? *sigh*.

Obama loves Drupal

Anybody out there know the best integrated solution for a grassroots community website which needs both wiki and forum functionality?

I love Twiki/FOSWiki, and have used it for years. But it doesn't do web forums. And both Django and Drupal seem to have really solid forum capabilities, but their wikis suck. Obama loves Drupal, by the way — the new recovery.gov website is all Drupal. How weird that our President has an open source website. Rock on. (And you just know that McCain used ASP pages)

So, do I have to hack two separate systems together to get wiki+forum working, or is there some option that I've overlooked?

Seattle wrap-up

Seattle, as always, was super fun. I just love that town, and have felt for many years that it was a good fit for me. Not that I'm moving or anything -- I love SF too -- but the trip reminded me of all the reasons I like it there. Back when I was married, my love of the Pacific Northwest was a source of friction because my Ex really hated it up there.

The conference was pretty great and then Sparky came up on Thursday night so we could hang out for the weekend. He hadn't been there since he was a little kid, so I got to show him all my favorite hang-outs!

Plus, Sparky's Aunt Jezzana lives there. She's a tarot card expert, and quite a hoot, and they hung out while I was in my conference on Friday. And then we spent the next two days just running around. Saturday was overcast but otherwise the weather was fantastic, especially on Friday when it was 70 and beautiful. I packed in quite a bit: breakfast in the U-District; Gasworks Park, Fremont and the Troll under the bridge; the Ballard locks -- which actually had fish swimming down the fish ladder!! -- and a great hike in Discovery Park. By Saturday night we pooped out on Alki Beach and watched a storm blow through.

Sunday we had dim sum in the International District (chinatown) with my friend Charlie, one more dose of Aunt Jezzana, and a flight home around dinnertime. Not to be outdone, we returned to San Francisco with a vengeance and saw Suppositori Spelling doing her patented watch-how-many-shots-I-can-drink-before-I-pass-out performance. Wow!!

In Seattle!

I'm in Seattle for a land use growth forecasting conference for the next few days. Having lived here in the '90s, it's crazy seeing how different things here have become. I don't remember downtown having so many people living in it -- it was more of an evening ghost-town financial district back when I was here. Looks like the new urbanism is really happening here!

Sparky's meeting me here tonight and we're spending the weekend in town, so more to come shortly.

Dominion

It's been a long time since I spent all weekend playing a card game. This Saturday I picked up Dominion at Gamescape on Divisadero, and pretty much played it all weekend.

Zabe and Pooja came over that evening, and after some serious affogato caffeine injections we played round after round until 1:30am. Sparky and I hadn't had enough so we continued the madness on Sunday. And since he was struck by a car while cycling to the gym yesterday, I'd say staying home playing cards was probably not a bad idea. (Don't worry, he's fine, but he was definitely shaken up by the ordeal.)

It's not exactly a drinking game, at least not like Killer Bunnies where you can be pretty toasted and still know how to play. There's more strategy and thinking, but it's surprisingly fun and every game plays out a bit differently. Two thumbs up!

Pickle Surprise

This needs no explanation.

That was easy!

So it turns out, telling my friends to chill and then telling my Ex that it's all going to be fine and there's no reason to be all freaky, was really easy. Now we'll just have to wait and see if they can all actually just chill and be easy. Glad that's over!

My sisters Suzan and Sonya are arriving in two days — I absolutely can't wait to see them, it's going to be two tons of fun. Depending on weather we'll either be sitting in Dolores Park drinking beer.... or sitting at home drinking beer, all weekend long.

Sweeeet!!

Complicated Friendships

John's post on friendship got me thinking a bit over the past few days. I now basically have two separate sets of friends: (1) people I know from my own independent efforts, whether that be from the deep past, from work, or more recent acquaintances; and (2) people that I met either during or because of my marriage.

It's probably no surprise that the set of friends from the married era are the most complicated personal relationships in my life right now. They are tortured because things are now "so different" and they feel that the burden is on them to balance time and social engagements between me and my ex. It's funny; since they do such a good job of fretting over this, I never see what they go through and only see the results (and the results are that I frequently get to hang out with them and do fun things, and occasionally I am subjected to complete radio silence for a day or two when they're too embarrassed to let me know that they're hanging out with my ex.)

It's been almost six months now since our divorce. I think that's long enough that they really need to stop worrying about it; I certainly have. The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. At this point, I don't particularly care if I do or don't see my ex when I'm out socially. That isn't to say there won't still be some awkward moments in the future, because I'm sure those will still occur. Can't avoid that. But it has only as much energy as people give it: I do hope my friends from that era really hear me saying that they don't need to keep doing this. I love them too much to see them suffer.

Happy Easter!

What a fantastic day in the park yesterday. Hope y'all had as much fun as I did! Sorry, no pictures though... some things are better left for the memories and not my burning eyes! :-)

How Billy sees San Francisco

I think this image (which I just whipped up at work) explains my new vantage point of this city: it is a big messy pile of steep hills, with some (not so) secret passages connecting the lowlands.

Now that I'm biking everywhere, I find myself constantly wondering what route has the least amount of elevation climb. This is pretty fascinating since I spend all day at work trying to guess how people make travel decisions anyway; now, there seem to be some new variables entering the equations. If you're driving you don't much care about hills unless you're driving stick and you can't get up the Divisadero Street climb from Lombard without crushing the little green Honda behind you. But on a bike, suddenly about half the city seems pretty impassable.

I love how the "wiggle" to Golden Gate Park shows up on this map, the finger of green and yellow just north of the central red blob. Now that I've biked it, I finally "get" why those bike routes are so important.

Does your Atari have a USB port?

Mine does. :-)

My recent re-fascination with all things retro Atari has reached a new plateau: I soldered a $14 USB port onto my Atari 800 motherboard, melted a hole in the plastic case for the connector, and — voila! — I can now connect my Atari to my Windows laptop, and the Atari just thinks the laptop is a regular disk drive.

What does this mean? It means that I can now download all the old ROM images off the internet, and play them on my original Atari with the original joysticks! I definitely feel a retro gaming night coming up.

Bike ride!

Wow, just got back from a 19 mile ride on the new bike. Sparky and I went from his place through "the wiggle" to Golden Gate Park, all the way to beach. That part was easy, it's basically all downhill. The way back, around Lake Merced and up over St. Francis Wood, was pretty grueling for a first ride -- 1300 feet of climb according to google maps. Ouch.

But, I made it the entire way without walking the bike, and other than a sugar crash in Glen Park which required an immediate injection of beef jerky and Coca Cola, the ride went without a hitch. And what a gorgeous day to be out there all afternoon!!

I love spring.

Sonoma for the weekend....

I'm heading up to Sonoma County for the weekend to test out my new bike on the redwood and bohemian highways. The past two weeks have been unusually packed with late nights at the office and even some work on the weekends, so the blog has gotten boring and the Billy has gotten cranky! This weekend trip should fix both problems.

I'll be heading up to Guerneville with Sparky, and we're going to bicycle either to Occidental or to Sebastopol for the amazing Mexican food at my favorite restaurant up there. Or, we might skip the long rides entirely and just fart around town and hike through the redwood forest at Armstrong Woods... it's supposed to be fantastically gorgeous and warm this weekend, so I don't really care what we do as long as it's outside, nowhere near a computer, and filled with tall trees. Yay, road trip!

Awesomest employee evar!

LOL! I got a framed plaque at work today for creating our new timesheet system — I don't think I've ever gotten an employee appreciation award anywhere before. How cute!

I am now in the running for most awesomest employee evar. I need a new project!