Year: 2004

I apologize in advance for posting politics again, but this is the first thing Kerry has said recently that actually made me more enthusiastic about voting for him (from CNN):

“The president stood right here where I’m standing and didn’t acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq,” Kerry said. “He didn’t tell you that with each passing day, we’re seeing more chaos, more violence, indiscriminate killings.”

“That is the truth, as hard as it is to bear.”

“I believe you deserve a president who isn’t going to gild that truth or gild our national security with politics, who is not going to ignore his own intelligence, who isn’t going to live in a different world of spin, who will give the American people the truth, not a fantasy world of spin … “

It would have been nice if that last bit was worded more positively rather than as an attack, but hopefully Kerry is beginning to push the message that he will be honest about the state of the world. He doesn’t need to attack the Bush administration, but simply say “they have not been completely truthful with you, but I will be”. If he can do that then I (and many others) may become enthusiastic about voting for him, rather than enthusiastic about voting against Bush.

I’ve got ten working days left with Warner Brothers before the third retirement starts, and I’m pondering what might come next. I keep thinking it might be fun to do something like work at Starbucks for a while — there’s always at least one cute girl behind the counter at Starbucks, the customers are generally friendly, you get to work with muffins, and for the first time in my life it would be a job where wearing a hat to work wouldn’t be frowned upon. Granted, having a job where wearing a cowboy hat to work wasn’t frowned upon would be way better, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

I found a trip log from a previous trip to South Georgia aboard the Golden Fleece. It’s a fairly crazy tale, here’s a sample:

South Georgia (11/6/01) Hey this is Doug Stoup live from the island of South Georgia for IceAxe TV… We’re now positioned in Drygalsky Fjord — a beautiful fjord… there’s 3000 foot walls right out of the water… right now, there’s an overcast sky. The barometer dropped 4.7 millibars…that is the most I’ve ever seen it. It’s not a good sign; it could mean either high winds or a storm coming…the temperature’s 45- degrees and I just got a 45-knot gust of wind that about blew me off the boat…

South Georgia (11/7/01) We’ve been up for about 17 hours straight, trying to battle 80 mile-per-hour winds in the boat, The Golden Fleece. Jerome has been an amazing captain, staying up the whole time, trying to keep the boat into the wind…in the fjord…We’re now positioned at Larsen Bay, around the corner from Drygalski Fjord… 80 mile-per-hour gusts have been coming up and down the fjord…currently a low-pressure over us right now and we have five to eight inches of snow on the boat itself and minimal visibility — so we’re just sort of hunkering down and waiting for the weather to break…

A few travel-related notes for once…

I’m working out the details with Greg & Thalia for the 2006 Galapagos trip. Interest has been high for this one, so I’m hopeful that a good group will sign up for it pretty quickly. I’m trying to determine the feasibility of doing the standard Galapagos trip, followed by a scuba trip to Darwin and Wolf — I should hopefully know more before the end of the month.

South Georgia is only three weeks away now, and more details of the trip are coming into focus:

• It will take four flights spread over four days to get from Oakland, California to Stanley in the Falklands.
• From Stanley it will take another three to four days, depending on weather and currents, to sail to South Georgia.

• The captain of our yacht, Jerome Poncet, is a legend in the South Atlantic. I’ve heard several stories already, and can’t wait to meet the man in person.
• We’ll have approximately eighteen days on South Georgia. Ted is planning to take three days to retrace Shackelton’s route across the island with part of the group, but unfortunately my lack of experience traveling over snow and glaciers is going to cause me to miss that one.
• On Ted’s advice I’ve purchased a set of alpine touring skis, which are basically light downhill skis that allow the heel to unhinge, thus doubling as cross-country skis. They’re pricey, but should be great for the terrain we’ll experience.
• Snowfall was lighter than normal this year, and temperatures are expected to be mostly between thirty-two and fifty-five degrees fahrenheit, much cooler if we go inland.
• In addition to the new digital camera I’ve purchased a new tripod, so with luck the pictures will come out well.
• Following the South Georgia trip I’ve booked two weeks in the Falklands, mostly at guesthouses on outlying islands. It should be isolated enough that I may not know who the next President is until nearly tens days after the election.

I’m pushing for Kerry pretty hard in this election, but it’s not because I’m a staunch democrat — if the election was Kerry vs. McCain I don’t know who I would vote for — but because I think George Bush is a terrible, terrible leader. He seems like a nice guy, but he’s a very bad President. I’ve been absolutely baffled as to how anyone with any intelligence could support him — the arguments put forth on pro-Bush web sites and on right-wing talk radio are so blatantly one-sided or else based on false information (“Saddam orchestrated 9/11”, “Kerry will raise taxes on the middle class”) that I can’t believe anyone of even moderate intelligence would fail to see through them. Tonight, however, I stumbled on Andrew Sullivan.com, which is written by a staunch Republican who actually makes reasonable arguments. I disagree with him on many points, but for once I can actually sort of understand a Bush supporter’s position.

So my brother calls me tonight and tells me that he’s going to the Dave Matthews Concert. I scoff, and tell him that I checked, and Dave isn’t coming to California anytime soon. To prove my point, I go online and discover that there is a free concert in Golden Gate Park on the 12th (which is of course now sold out) and a concert near Sacramento tomorrow. Ticketmaster and their concert notification service can bite my white butt, ’cause I didn’t know about either of these.

Upon hearing that there’s a concert tomorrow Aaron was immediately in full-on “I’m going” mode. I warned him how the last time he went to see Dave Matthews without me his girlfriend got sick and practically puked all over him, but he wasn’t dissuaded. Left with no other option, I made a quick call to the boss, did some magic on iflyswa.com, and now in about twenty hours the Holliday boys will be jamming along with Mr. Matthews and friends. At some point I’m told that I’m going to grow up and become responsible, but until then it should be a heck of a ride.

Sadly there has been nothing of interest to write about lately. The daily routine right now consists of getting up at 7:30, working until 8:00 or 9:00, either going to the gym or else reading a bit, and then (hopefully) falling asleep at a reasonable hour. I have the lifestyle of a seventy year old while still only twenty-eight.

Also, from the soapbox, if you live in a state where your vote is going to matter (which sadly excludes all but a handful of states), please make the effort to get out and vote for Kerry. Practically every issue that matters to me has been trampled by Bush, and yet he stands a good chance of being given four more years to continue. His record on the environment? The past four years have been horrific, with everything from logging in the guise of fire suppression to attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Fiscal responsibility? The deficits are at a record due to the tax cuts and uncontrolled spending. International relations? Anti-American sentiment is as bad as it’s probably ever been. Morality and values? The country is the most polarized it’s been since the sixties, we’re in the midst of the dirtiest election campaign I can remember, and personal liberties are being attacked in this country (see the Patriot Act) and abroad (see Abu Gharib). Bush seems like a nice, well-meaning guy and all, but I don’t see how four more years of his leadership could be anything other than a disaster.

Went to my ten year high school reunion in Cleveland this weekend, which was a ton of fun but also rather surreal. Everywhere I looked was someone who kind of looked like someone I used to know, but in this case they actually were the person I used to know. A highlight of the reunion was receiving an award for following up my “most likely to win a gold medal” accolade as a senior by getting beat eight years later by a 66 year old woman in the San Diego marathon — next time I’m definitely not going to fill out the pre-reunion questionnaire.

Aside from seeing Caitlin, Amy, Rob, Chris, and the rest of the gang, I got a chance to talk to a lot of other people that I hardly knew during high school. For some of those folks we were just filling an awkward moment where we happened to be standing near one another, but for others I really enjoyed the conversation and regretted not having known them better. And of course, with most of the old group of friends it was like nothing had really changed — before even saying hello to Rob we were giving him crap about his parking, and the group at Tommy’s quickly glossed over the obligatory “where are you and what are you doing” questions and launched into the more important matters of how many milkshakes and brownie monsters we should order.

Another thing that was weird about coming back was all of the things I didn’t realize I missed. People have a lot more space in the Midwest than they do in the cities of California, and everything is really, really green. In addition, stuff like Bob Evans, seeing people smoking in public places, and the Duck Pond’s killer attack geese induced a weird sort of deja-vu/nostalgia that I hadn’t been expecting.

Today I slept in and drank a ton of coffee to work off the slight hangover, then met up with some of my college friends who I hadn’t seen in years. Now on the flight home I’ve got my first airborn celebrity sighting as I’m sitting two rows behind Kevin Smith (aka Silent Bob). All in all a great weekend.

Here’s a poor attempt to show what the Warner Brothers lot is like (satellite photo courtesy of http://terraserver.microsoft.com/).

• Most of the big white squares on the left are soundstages.
• The “Big” soundstage is the thing that you see just before the Warner Brothers logo in the movies. It has the same footprint as the other soundstages, but is considerably taller.
• Slightly less than half of the stages have regular shows that film in them — Friends (now Joey), ER, West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Two and a Half Men, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. Most of the WB network shows shoot at a separate lot that is about a mile down the road.
• The soundstages that aren’t used for TV shows are usually either empty or else used for whatever movies are filming (at the moment Ocean’s Twelve is using three stages).
• The outdoor sets cover a big chunk of the east side of the lot and include everything from ER’s County General Hospital to a row of brownstones to the New York alley that the Spider-Man upside-down kiss was filmed in. They’re used nearly every day for whatever is shooting that needs an outdoor setting.

Fifty-two days to go…

Scaled Composites has posted a video of Mike Melville’s flight into space aboard Spaceship One. Compared to the sterile formality of a NASA flight, it’s pretty cool to see a pilot tossing M & M’s around the cockpit just to watch them floating in zero gravity.

I’ve been trying to avoid politics in this journal, but this article by Ronald Reagan’s son perfectly summarizes every reason why the Bush administration scares me.

On the tendency of the right-wing to label anyone who questions the President as either a liberal or un-American:

“It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.”

On the way the administration changes its justifications to suit the moment:

“They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don’t welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don’t trust us because they don’t dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we’re in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we’ve got him; we’ll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we’ll be there for years to come.”

It’s a well known fact that attractive women can use their hotness for good or for evil. It’s also well known that the likelihood that a woman will use her hotness for evil is directly proportional to how much hotness she possesses. Today at Kinko’s a woman came up to me who was so far off of the charts that the thought “I need to come to Kinko’s more often” actually flashed through my head before my idiot filter was able to stop it.

She wanted to borrow my cell phone since hers had died and the person she was meeting at Kinko’s hadn’t shown up. Knowing that evil was imminent I was on my guard, but since I had no where to be I handed over the phone, and watched for the next twenty freakin’ minutes as she argued with her boyfriend. Judging solely by her looks I had expected that she might either steal the phone or else use it call in a bomb threat or something somewhere, so being able to just sit around and wait for her to finish was in a weird way almost a relief.

“I’m George W. Bush, and I approved this message; in fact, I think it is awesome.”

From an essay by Paul Graham:

“The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don’t learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn’t teach you anything, because the bugs are random. So it’s not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It’s more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.”