Ryan's Journal

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.”

Ocean’s Twelve (the sequel to Ocean’s Eleven) is filming on the lot right now, and while I’m not generally the movie star stalker type it’s impossible not to be curious about a film starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, Don Cheadle and Bernie Mac. They’re using three gigantic soundstages for filming, there are more than twice as many movie star trailers parked on the lot than I’ve ever seen before (each with a nametag of “Linus”, “Danny”, “Rusty”, etc), the sets look to be huge, but sadly aside from knowing that Matt Damon’s car is much, much nicer than mine, and that George Clooney is apparently driving a souped-up Honda motorcycle these days, my lunchtime strolls have otherwise not been very informative.

Site’s back up — a power outage knocked out the router a couple of weeks ago, and this is the first weekend I’ve been back in the Bay Area to fix it.

The SAG union contract is an amusing read. The last clause, “If an Background Actor is rigged with any type of explosive device (including squibs)…” is particularly well-done.

ESPN today named Cleveland fans as the most tortured fans in all of sports. No disagreement here, although I’ll still swear to the fact that God himself came to earth in the form of Bernie Kosar, accompanied by the angels Newsome, Brennan, Minnifield and Dixon.

And yes, I know the site is unavailable. I think it’s an issue with the router, but I won’t be home to fix it for another two weeks. It’s thrilling to know that after finally getting the site onto all of the major search engines that I’ll probably be dropped again. Thrilling.

I think this is the longest I’ve gone between entries since starting this journal… anyhow, here’s a summary of the last two weeks:

July 2nd

The Goob had the brilliant idea that we should go to the Giants vs. A’s game on Friday, so I flew home and we headed off to the stadium. We missed the first couple of innings standing in line for beers and dogs, but it was all good. We had bleacher seats, and no sooner had Aaron told me that they never hit home runs when he goes to the game than Bonds cranked one about six rows in front of us. In all the Giants hit something like six dingers, at least ten people were thrown out of our section by security, and they gave us these cool rainbow glasses to watch the fireworks with.

July 3rd

Lounged around all day, played some basketball at night (and got rocked in game two after playing it close in game one) then caught a late night showing of Spider Man 2. All women should be red heads.

July 4th

The Goob worked all day, then at night we went to a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. We were early, and the people who owned the land where the lodge was located were setting off fireworks. The third one they launched hit a tree, veered towards the ground, and lit some grass in a gully on fire. Aaron, fireman in training, was astute — “Um, there’s a fire over there, um, burning… in the grass… the fire.” Meanwhile everyone else ran for hoses and buckets, and disaster was averted. The sweat lodge started really late, lasting for almost two hours until well after midnight. It was an intense experience.

July 5th – 12th

Flew home Monday, and the effects of the sweat lodge really kicked in — I’m not great with heat (imagine that, the guy who loves Alaska and Antarctica) and I was drained all day. By Tuesday the smoke and steam had given me a really sexy voice, and by the time Saturday rolled around I had no voice at all and was reduced to speaking in signs. Julie had fun with that one, and then today at work my voice left me again, allowing the boss to have all sorts of fun at my expense. With luck I’ll soon be capable of communication more advanced than nodding, although I’m not holding out a lot of hope that I’ll be resuming my concert career before the week is over.

Went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday — the lines from the theatre streched for over a block, which surprised me. It disappointed me that Moore twisted facts in the first half of the film (the Bush-Bin Laden connection is very sketchy) because I think it blunted his message during the second half of the film. That message, however, was spot-on: the responsibility of putting someone’s life in danger is a grave one, and those in power owe it to those fighting to never put them at risk needlessly. Moore’s harrassing Congressmen was a bit over the top, but it made a point: if you don’t feel strongly enough about a cause to send your own son or daughter, what possible right do you have to ask someone else to?

Aside from the film, a highlight at the theatre was a lady passing out anti-Patriot Act flyers while we were standing in line. Person after person refused to take a flyer, and finally when one person turned her down she just smiled and said “All right, save the trees.”

The itinerary for the Falkland Islands portion of the Fall trip is just about nailed down. Since almost all of the lands in the Falklands are privately owned the only way to visit is to make arrangements in advance, and then hop a ride on one of the small government planes to get to the chosen destination. The public face of this air service is apparently a man named Fraser, and he informs me that it will indeed be possible for me to visit everywhere I’m planning to go, but that I’ll be limited to thirty pounds of baggage. For a two week trip I’m guessing I’ll have 10-15 pounds of camera equipment, so there is a very real danger that a choice might have to be made between filters or extra boxers; let it be known that I really love my polarizer.

Anyhow, here’s how things are looking thus far:

• 30 Oct – 01 Nov Return from South Georgia to Stanley
• 01 Nov – 04 Nov @ Sea Lion Island
• 04 Nov – 07 Nov @ Saunders Island
• 07 Nov – 12 Nov @ Pebble Island
• 12 Nov Return to Stanley
• 13 Nov Depart Falklands

Score.