July 29, 2009

Sometimes I check to see how people are finding my website in Google.  Apparently I'm #1 for "michael was crazy" and #2 for "bluejay trying to get in my house".  (It wasn't me, I swear.)

May 8, 2006

At the grocery store today I saw a tabloid newspaper with the cover story, "Aliens raise the dead: Building an army to attack humans!"  Great.  As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

You know, it's like I have a hard enough time dealing with work, deadlines, obligations, bills, taxes, etc., and now I've got to prepare to defend myself against this zombie army that's being raised to attack me.  Great.  Just one more annoyance.  I guess my To-Do list this week is going to be something like:

• Dentist appointment
• Schedule meeting with prospective client
• Buy cat food
• Fortify house to protect against attack from zombie army being raised by aliens

December 26, 2005

Yeah, it has really been eight months since I've updated this page.  So sue me.

Nursing Home Experience. Yesterday April Porter and I did our annual Christmas musical performance at the nursing home.  I play piano, she plays flute, and we both sing.  She sings like a frickin' angel.  Her boyfriend John came along and wished he'd brought his drum.  One old man clapped in time to all the songs, even the ones with difficult rhythms.  Turns out he'd been a drummer in a marching band.  New songs we added included my favorites "Feed the Tree" (which got a lukewarm reception even though we did it well, probably because people don't like what they don't recognize), and "Rubber Band Man," which got an enthusiastic reception. "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin (inspired by the sheet music I found at the Wizard's place earlier this month) went okay.  Afterward we went to April's and watched the Timothy Leary biography. When he died they severed his head from his body to freeze it, as per his request, and they showed it!  It was gross, a decapitated head being carried and put into the little cooler! Yuck!

Tonight I went for a jog and stopped by Jerry's place to hang out with him for a bit.

April 23, 2005

Endorsements for City Council.  I endorsed three candidates for Austin City Council, via my BicycleAustin.info website.

March 14, 2005

Psychologists would have a field day with this. I've always been baffled by this phenomenon:  Someone is talking to a foreigner who doesn't understand because their grasp of English is poor.  The speaker should obviously say their spiel again slower and with simpler words, but instead the speaker just repeats the exact same difficult-to-understand-English at a difficult-to-understand-speed, only louder!  This has always struck us as profoundly stupid.  I always feel like saying, "Look, they can hear you, they just can't understand you."

So today someone sends a message to my Ask Mr. Electricity website and the message makes absolutely no sense.  She might as well have asked one of those nonsensical questions like, "Why is a hamster when it spins?"  So I wrote back saying simply, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

And she writes back pretty much the same question, but in ALL CAPS.

Chew on one for a minute.

The psychology here is interesting.  Whatever is causing people to think that they increase clarity by increasing volume in the physical world makes them think the same thing will work in the online world.  Fascinating.

March 13, 2005

Quadracycle.  Yesterday I picked up my new two-person, four-wheeled bicycle.  It's basically a bike car.  I spent a few hours riding it around with friends.  I'll try to post some pictures soon.

Weird Dreams. Last night I dreamed I was in a shop in England and I had a gift certificate.  I figured I'd get some cereal, and I was looking over the various boxes looking for something that was vegan.  I'd dismissed about four or five boxes that listed whey or non-fat milk powder, when I came upon one that had all of these pictures of plain, middle-aged people in bondage.  I didn't really care about that, so I kept turning it around trying to find the list of ingredients. I was running my finger over the box while I was scanning, and this apparently upset an old man next to me who thought I was getting off on the pictures or something, and he told me that it's against the law there to pick up or touch a package unless you're going to buy it.  The shopkeeper confirmed this for me.  I asked, "So how are you supposed to be able to see the ingredients list if it's not already facing you and you're not allowed to turn the package around?"  They didn't have a good answer for that.  I conducted my conversations with them in their local accent but they didn't pick up that it was fake, although a bigger dead giveaway than that it might not have sounded genuine was that I obviously wasn't from there, since I wasn't familiar with the local law.

March 12, 2005

Vegas Trip.  I spent most of February in Vegas, hanging out with the Wizard and working from there.  My laptop is pretty much my office, so it doesn't really matter whether I'm working at the Wizard's place or my place.  Plus, the Wizard and I had a fair bit of business to discuss.

Probably the most interesting thing I did on this trip was to deliver $30,000 in cash to one of the Wizard's associates for him to place bets on the Superbowl.  For fun I put it in a briefcase and handcuffed it to my wrist. From the Wizard's place I walked to the bus stop but then as the bus come I suddenly realized that I might not have change for the bus. That would be ironic -- carrying $30,000 in cash but not being able to get on the bus because my smallest bill was $100. But it turns out that I did actually have change, so that worked out okay.

I didn't actually handcuff myself to the briefcase until I got off the bus and into the casino. Being handcuffed to a briefcase on a bus would surely make it more likely that I'd get mugged. Heck, they might cut off my arm to get to the goods. I mentioned this to the Wizard's wife before I left. She works as a nurse in a local hospital, and she told me that if that happened I would go to her hospital because they have the only trauma center in Vegas, and that I should ask for her. Comforting.

Anyway, I arrived at the casino and delivered the money. I made the guy I was delivering to pose with the money while I took a picture to prove I delivered it. It wasn't really necessary, he and I and the Wizard all know each other, but I was just being thorough.

Main Street Station put me up for three nights for free to play in their blackjack tournament, apparently just because I'd played a couple hours of blackjack there a couple of years ago. Since I had a free room I emailed a few friends to see if any of them wanted to spend some time with me in Vegas, mentioning that I could probably swing airfare, especially since I was up a bit from playing blackjack. I think I invited Emily, Callison, Kimberly, Nick & Andee, and Corinne & Sony. Emily replied first all excited, so I bought the ticket. Kimberly called next but I'd already bought the ticket for Emily. Emily emailed me every day, excited about all the stuff we could do. Then the night before she was supposed to fly out, she flaked out. I guess I should mention that she and I had dated a couple of years ago but I broke things off because I didn't feel she respected me, or that I could trust her. She'd recently made contact again by email and I thought that I didn't need to hold a grudge, plus it was just supposed to be platonic anyway. So I guess my first instincts were right, and I regret trusting her again. In the last month a similar kind of thing happened with two other people, whom I thought I couldn't rely on before, and whom I thought I should give another chance to, and who confirmed for me again pretty quickly that I really couldn't count on them. Anyway, I guess the lesson here is that I need to focus on being around the people I know I can trust.

To close out Vegas, I lost the blackjack tournament, but I came in second in a slot tournament. I also did okay on video poker, and finally updated my beginner's guide to video poker.

Gambling Ads.com. Since I've been pretty successful at selling ads on the Wizard's website for him I decided to branch out and start selling them for other sites. So I spent the last several days programming my new venture, GamblingAds.com. I've been glued to the computer all day every day, leaving only to go to the convenience store to buy the only vegan things they have, bananas (when they have them), canned beans, orange juice, and these little fig cakes. I've supplemented that with oatmeal, potatoes, and popcorn, the only other things I have around the house. Today for the first time I went out and ran some errands and ate at Veggie Heaven and went shopping. I also stopped by my old co-op, House of Commons, to clean up al the junk in their back porch area since I like to help out over there when I can.

Jan. 21, 2005

Cockeyed makes us famous.  Rob Cockerham over at Cockeyed and I have linked to each other for years.  In fact, his is the very first link on my home page, where I quote him as declaring MichaelBluejay.com to be "The seventh-best site on the net."  But although he's linked to me for years, recently he put a plug on his front page, and sent me thousands of visitors for a few days straight.  I normally get around a thousand visitors a day from Google, but he was sending me about 2500 by himself.  Damn his site is popular.  Thanks again, Rob!

Permission to link? I don't know why so many people write to ask "permission" to link to my site. I'm always tempted to say, "No, I published on the Internet because I didn't want people to read what I wrote."

Seriously, do these people write to book authors and ask the same thing? "Dear Mr. King: Is it okay with you if I recommend your book to others? For some bizarre reason that only I can fathom, I thought you might not want me to tell others about your book, so I thought I should ask first. Please let me know soon since I'm holding off on telling others about your book until I hear from you."

Today I got an email from a college professor asking if it was okay to tell his students about my site. Not link to it, just tell them about it. And whether it was okay to display part of it on the overhead projector. Not copy and pass it out, just display it on an overhead.

What is the net coming to?

I notice that emails I receive in SCREAMING ALL CAPS is much more likely to be from an AOL address. Illiterate/moronic email in general is more likely to come from an AOL address, such as two recently from people who saw my complaint about United Airlines and thought that I could help them with their own complaints against United. Yes, they actually thought I worked for United.

Jan. 9, 2005

Adopt-a-Soldier update. I finally heard back from Soldiers Angels thanking me for my donation, but there was no word about giving me the address of a soldier to adopt. I wrote back and they said they'd look into it. The signature of their email quoted the late science fiction author Robert Heinlein, saying, "You can have peace, or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once." So they believe in perpetual war in order to ensure freedom? Scary.

Adventure Cycling uses my route. I convinced Adventure Cycling to include my route into Austin as an alternative to the one they were using on the coast-to-coast bicycling maps they print. My route is shorter and safer. It's interesting to think that I've affected where hundreds of cyclists will be in time and space as they traverse across the country.

Jan. 5, 2005

My experience in a cult. Those who don't know me very well wonder why it is I'm so weird. Those who know me better know that it might have had something to do with my being born into a mind-control cult. I dealt with this the same way I deal with everything: By making a website about it. At first it was just a single web page that I put up last summer, but when the cult saw it they went nuts and put up a whole new website of their own to try to counter what I said as well as statements by other former members which I linked to. So I greatly expanded my site and reprinted some newspaper articles which support my claims. Check out Aesthetic Realism is a cult.

Web article in HighRankings.com. My web development article about Changing Domains and Redirecting Pages was just published in the email newsletter High Rankings Advisor, which had a subscriber base of 27,000 people a couple of years ago. I imagine it's double that now.

Dec. 23, 2004

I'm adopting a soldier. I signed up for an Adopt a Soldier program where I agree to send an American soldier in Iraq weekly letters and a monthly care package. I want to "support the troops" with something tangible, rather than just rhetoric. I oppose the war but the war is not the fault of the people who are dying over there, on both sides, it's the fault of the Bush administration and the Congress that authorized it. Probably my soldier will feel that their efforts are somehow involved in "defending America", and maybe even that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. No matter. Even if my adopted soldier thinks the war is a good thing, that doesn't mean they deserve to have been put in harm's way to serve corporate and political interests. It is offensive how their lives are being wagered for political gain, even if they don't see it that way. No one should be put in a position of being shot at and having to take others' lives without extraordinary good reason. I hope my small effort will provide at least a little comfort to the soldier I adopt.

If I get accepted into the program, that is. I applied on a non-profit website and if they approve me they'll send me the address of a soldier, but that won't happen if they do any kind of background check and find out that I'm "un-American" since I didn't vote for Bush and I don't approve of the war.

I encourage readers of all political stripes to adopt a soldier at Soldiers Angels. You can also see other ways to support the troops, from donating frequent flyer miles so they can see their families while they're on leave, to sending phone cards, to donating old cell phones, and more.

Dec. 19, 2004

The pot calling the kettle illiterate. In response to one of my pages mentioning poor working conditions for Mexican strawberry pickers, a reader sent me the following lovely message:

From: David Owens, res08hao1@mac.com To: Michael Bluejay Date: Dec. 19, 2004 nobody gives a fuck about stawberry workers. Considering the fact they can't read or write, Mexican or English, they are lucky to be working at all.

Considering that Mr. Owens is not aware that the language in Mexico is Spanish, not "Mexican", his charge of illiteracy is especially ironic.

Nov. 24, 2004

Sorry, Everybody. Americans can apologize to the rest of the world for electing Bush at Sorry, Everybody. And non-Americans can accept those apologies at Apologies Accepted. Both sites feature reader-submitted photos.

Nov. 14, 2004

Trip to Ann Arbor. Earlier this month I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan to present some workshops about finances at a conference run by NASCO for student housing co-ops. (Here are my handouts for those courses.) In the evening I was playing the nice Steinway in the student union and the folk hip-hop band set to play later that night asked me to sit in with them. It was nice to do some music while on the road.

Trip to Toronto. After Ann Arbor I went to Toronto to visit my friend Amanda whom I hadn't seen in three years. And guess who forgot to bring his passport with him? Mark me down for general incompetence on that one. Bad Bluejay, bad bad bad! I did happen to have a photocopy of my passport with me, along with traditional state ID, thankfully. The Canadian officials rightfully chastised me for being an idiot but they let me into the country without too much fuss. Once I got to Amanda's place I called my friend Billy who always helps me out of problems like this one. I told him where to find the spare key to my house so he could get my passport and FedEx it to me so I could get back in to the U.S. when my trip was over.

While in Toronto the Wizard was there doing consulting for a client so we met up to discuss business, as part of a day trip with Amanda to Niagara Falls. I made a wish on a penny and threw it into the falls, and then the Wizard announced that he'd made a wish too. I said, "But you didn't throw a penny in." He replied, "I wished on your penny." What a cheapskate! He wouldn't even throw his own penny in! He insisted that a penny could hold more than one wish, but I dunno. It was a Canadian penny, which is only worth about eight-tenths of a U.S. penny.

My visit with Amanda was great. She's awesome, and she's in good spirits because of a new girlfriend. I'm very happy to see her happy.

United Airlines and my lost bag. Coming back to Austin yesterday my bag did not arrive at the airport. United Airlines didn't handle that problem well, and my revenge on them is sharing my writeup about it with the world. After 26 hours I finally did get my bag back, by the way -- broken.

Nov. 5, 2004

The election. I decided to express my feelings about the election by commissioning this picture which I made the splash screen for my website.

As Snopes.com notes: "Senator John Kerry had a substantial 60%-39% edge in large cities (representing roughly 13% of the total U.S. population), while the reverse was true in rural areas (representing roughly 16% of the total U.S. population), where President Bush garnered a 59%-40% majority. What we saw in the 2004 election was more of an urban vs. rural division, regardless of state."

Here are interesting election maps showing population density, and Bush/Kerry by county represented by colors. And here's more maps from Feedster. Good stuff.

Nov. 1, 2004

We make TV. The local TV news came over today to interview me about my cheap airfare website. Good thing I have my new iMac G5 with a 20" screen rather than my old PowerBook propped up with old telephone books.

Excitement City. A hell of an entry today. I have a friend in Dallas, Nichole. Two months ago she was assaulted by her then-boyfriend from Turkey. She got black eyes, he was arrested, she moved to get away from him, he flew his mother in from Turkey to argue with her that her son was really a good boy. So today Nichole calls me and tells me that she's with him at his apartment, and asks me, "Can you tell him we're just friends?" Naturally I'm concerned, and I want to tell her to just get the hell away from there if she can, but she's already handed the phone to the Turk, who won't let me talk to her.

After concluding with him I call 911 in Austin asking if they can give me the number for 911 in Dallas, but they don't have it handy! When I did tech support at Apple I had a big list of the numbers of related companies that people might need to contact, you'd think the police would have a list of police numbers. So I find the Dallas Police website on the Internet myself, eager to get the number which should be right on the front page. But in their infinite wisdom the Dallas Police think it would be nice to show you a Flash animation first. I finally get the number and call it and talk to a 911 agent, explaining that I think my friend is in danger but I have only a cell phone number and not an address. The agent says that they have no way of knowing where she is, but that if *I* call the cell company they might give me the address! Obviously (to everyone except the 911 dispatcher) the cell company isn't going to give *me* as a private citizen a customer's personal information, but even crazier is that the police are telling me that *I* could get the address while the *police* have "no way" of getting it.

Nichole finally calls me a bit later and confirms that she's alone and driving away. I tell her I'm relieved and ask her to call me when she gets to where she's going. I tell her I was very concerned about her being alone with her ex-boyfriend, especially when I couldn't contact her and didn't know where she was and didn't know if she was in danger. She replies that he's not her ex-boyfriend any more, he's her boyfriend again! I ask, Didn't you just ask me an hour ago to tell him that you were just friends? And she says, No, she wanted me to tell him that *she and I* were just friends! She went back to her abuser. I wished her good luck and hung up.

It's almost not worth mentioning that a few days ago I saw someone cooking who was making a 4x recipe and couldn't multiply 3/4 cup by 4.

On a brighter note, yesterday at Wheatsville I ran into Johan, whom I met in college. We hadn't seen each other in about ten years, so that was freaky, but it was still good to see him.

Oct. 27, 2004

Bluejay supports kids not getting killed. Of all the praise I receive for my various websites, it's the messages about my bicycle safety website that make me feel the best:

I have just read your web site I'm 15 a boy scout and have completed the bicycling merit badge and I love to bike all over my town and the towns neighboring it my dad made me get one of those vets a few months back and boy am I glad I have since noticed that cars do see me much better but there still are the few on there cells not paying attention. Your tips are wonderful though not been hit bay a car yet I have had me close calls and I plan to follow all of your suggestions

Oct. 26, 2004

No more free chocolate. Some months ago I had the idea to get exactly one chocolate covered almond from the bulk bin at Wheatsville, figuring it would probably weigh less than 0.01 lbs. and thus they couldn't charge me for it. I was right. Whoo-hoo, free chocolate-covered almond! Today I tried it again but the cashier said she'd have to charge me a minimum of 0.01 lbs., or six cents. I said, well, as long as you're doing that, I'll just get two, since two together weigh 0.01 lbs. But damn. Not only did I have to spend six cents, but there goes my diet.

General incompetence. I went to a home improvement store today to pay my credit card bill with them, handing the cashier a $ 100 bill to pay off the $84.55 balance on my statement. But her cash register doesn't compute the change for bill payment transactions, and she said, "Oh, I don't know how to figure out how much change you get!" Jesus Christ! I remember when my father showed me how to make change like that in my head when I was about seven.

This reminds me of another favorite cashier story. Once another home improvement store was going out of business and they had to hire a bunch of poorly-skilled temporary help. The cashier couldn't get her register to accept my credit card, which had an expiration date of 11/18/99. Turns out her register would accept only month and year, and she was entering 18/99 instead of 11/99. Yeah, what's the 18th month of the year, Stupidtember?

I'm reminded of general incompetence with phone option systems ("Press 1 for this, etc."). The most glaring problem is the unnecessary verbage which simply wastes users' time, such as: "Please select from one of the following six choices." That phrase provides zero benefit to the user. An even worse phrase I once heard is:

"Please listen carefully to the following menu choices and when you hear the option you want press the number that corresponds with that option."

Why can't they just say, "Press 1 for this, Press 2 for that." ?

And all too frequently they leave out a "None of the above" option. You're forced to press an option that has nothing to do with what you're calling about. Sometimes you can bail by pressing zero to get an operator or an agent, but often the system just scolds you for pressing an unavailable option.

This is all depressing to me because if humans can't handle something as simple as programming a phone menu then what hope do we have for things that are actually hard, like world peace? (I guess if current events are any indicator, I have my answer.)

Oct. 25, 2004

NYPD quotes me in a lawsuit. I laughed myself silly when I saw that my work had been quoted in an official lawsuit counterclaim filed by the NYPD. The New York police have been rounding up and arresting bicyclists who go on the monthly Critical Mass bike rides there. There are serious Constitutional questions about the police's heavy-handed approach, enough to warrant a civil rights lawsuit against the police department. NYPD responded to that suit with a counterclaim, and Lt. Albano's statement (you can download it but it's a 2.4Mb PDF) quotes the "How to Start a Critical Mass Ride" from my [now defunct] CriticalMassRides.info website. The lieutenant talks about the unwillingness of CM riders to get a parade permit, and uses my site as evidence since the "How to Start a CM Ride" page on my site says, "Don't get a permit." The reason I recommend against getting a permit, of course, is that motorists don't need permits to flood the streets with cars like they do on every single street every day, so cyclists shouldn't need a permit to ride together on just a few streets for a couple of hours once a month. [Update, Dec. 2004: The police lost, the cyclists won.]

Cosmic Music. My friend and mad scientist Jerry Chamkis created an instrument that measures cosmic radiation and feeds the data to a synthesizer through MIDI. Jesus Christ. You can listen to MP3's on his website, The Kosmophone.

Super Joke. I ran into Callison tonight at Wheatsville and he told me a new joke: So there's this lady at a nursing home, and she's a little bit crazy, and she's going around to all the old men and lifting her dress up to her head exposing herself and exclaiming, 'Super Pussy!, Super Pussy!' [Callison pantomimed this beautifully, and I told him that the joke was already so funny it didn't need a punchline. But he continued...] So she goes up to the next old man and lifts her dress up and exclaims, 'Super Pussy!' The man says immediately, 'I'll take the soup.'

Less controversial jokes are on my jokes page.

Oct 12, 2004

Smooth Reactions. Norman Brown of Cardinal Zen Music Group didn't like something I said on my website, so he threatened to pay a surprise visit to my home with a baseball bat. Geez.