Owen B. Mehegan's Journal

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Mom tech support
My Mom accesses her email through a webmail service, using Firefox. She emailed me today to say that she had been trying to set up an "out of office" message before she went on vacation, but she couldn't find it. However, "I did notice that my system was set to allow cookies. I thought that wasn't a good idea so changed it." Now she can't get into her email, and she's asking me how to fix it. I want to be like, "Mom, let's apply the scientific method. What did you change? Try changing it back. Did that fix it? OK good." Instead I just say that she should enable cookies, because it's not 1998 anymore and they aren't really a security risk. She replies, "I don't even know where I saw the menu with the cookies thing on it. Any ideas? If I have to be signed in to my email to change the cookies back, I can't do it because I can't sign in."

Now of course we all want to roll our eyes at our parents in these cases. I thought to myself, "Man. When I'm old I won't be asking my kids for tech support." But then I realized, this type of thing is not an artifact of computers and the fast pace of changing internet technology. I remember my Dad telling me that he had a hard time teaching my Grandmother to drive an automatic transmission car! He said, "Mum, you just press the gas and it goes." She kept saying, "But won't it stall???"

I'm doomed.

Livejournal is a ghost town. Less than 20% of the people I am mutually friends with have posted anything in the last 4 months. I don't use it much anymore either. None of my close day-to-day friends read it at all, as far as I know. At this point I write more for myself than anything else, but I'm too busy to even do that anymore. I miss reading about everyone's lives!

This morning when I was at the gym, after I got dressed, I realized my wallet wasn't in my pants pocket. I normally check before I leave the house to make sure I have it and, thinking back, I couldn't remember having taken it out for anything else since getting home the night before. I had left my jeans hanging up in the locker room, so I started to worry that someone had stolen it.

I called Catherine, who was still at home, and asked her to look around on the off chance I had just left it out somewhere. She didn't see it, so I became convinced someone had taken it. I expected to get to work and check my bank account and find that someone had bought a few laptops using my ATM card and left me holding the bag. I cursed the thought of having to cancel my credit cards, get a new license, and on and on. Then, while riding the scooter down the Embarcadero, I had an epiphany: in my mind's eye I saw myself paying for parking after my guitar lesson last night and then wedging my wallet under the emergency brake in my car. I _knew_ I had left it there.

Got home tonight and there it was. Thus continuing my lifetime unbroken streak of never having lost my wallet.

Never lose my hair, I would hate to go without
Never lose direction, wander all about
Never lose my family, never lose my friends
Never lose my youth, I hope it never ends
Hope! I! Never! Lose! My! Wallet!

It's been a challenging few days.

I got up at 6am on Thursday and Friday (Thursday gym, Friday a walk with Catherine). At work on Friday I took over "mascot" responsibilities for our weekly company meeting. Meaning I lead the meeting, call out all the birthdays, anniversaries, new hires, and people leaving, and then call on all the teams for their updates. The guy who has done it for the past couple of years is leaving to go back to school. It was a bit intimidating but I think I did OK.

Yesterday I did not get up at 6am and go to the club to help out with our yearly Alcatraz Invitational swim. Instead I slept late, ate breakfast with Catherine, and then did a lot of chores: went to First Kick and got a new rim for the scooter. Went to Kragen to drop off a battery for recycling (and get back my core charge from the new one I bought) and buy a box of rubber gloves. Got a haircut. Went to the green grocer's for salad makings. Then I headed home to start working on the scooter. The goal: retire the old front tire/rim and make it a spare, mount a new front tire and rim, clean the engine and suspension, and replace the rear tire and tube. I ended up only getting the front tire done - do not ask me to tell you how much of a raging bitch putting tires on rims (even split rims) is.

Today I did wake up at 6am, and went to the club to row in our Bridge to Bridge regatta. I was hoping to get out of rowing, but it's a really hard sell when you're the Rowing Commissioner. So I compromised, and agreed to row if I could take our Cadillac wooden single, which I have only rowed one other time. I ended up being the only one rowing in that class, so I won by default! Woo! The race was 6.5 miles, and the water was dead calm for most of it. The first quarter was a snap, the second quarter was a little tough rowing into a freshening wind, then the last half was a breeze with the wind behind me and the tide changing. My arm didn't act up, and I had a lot of fun just being out there. I haven't done a row that long in ages. I used the MyTracks app on my G1 to record my route. Check it out here. If you click the red tag at the end, it will show you some stats, although I'm pretty sure only the distance and speed are accurate. I sure didn't gain 325 feet in elevation (???).

Then I came home, determined to finish working on the scooter. I got the back end up on a milk crate without any help, got the tire off, and proceeded to clean what I think might have been 33 years' worth of accumulated grease, oil, and dirt off it. Holy crap, I cannot believe how much junk there was built up around the engine and suspension. I had bought some spray solvent and a little brass brush for the job, but both were instantly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of crud there was. I ended up literally chiseling it off with a screwdriver, huge chunks of garbage falling off as I went along. After I got the bulk of it off I went back to using the solvent to clean it up more fully. It's not immaculate by any means, but I cleared away a lot of the mess, and I'm hoping it will have the side-benefit of helping me determine where my oil leak is coming from. Then I set to putting the new rear tire on, and once again went through the hell of trying to get the old tire off the rim. It took all my ingenuity and all my brute strength to do it, but eventually I did. Putting the new one on was easier today, and the only mistake I made was inflating it before I mounted it - the inflated tire can't fit around the rear bodywork to get onto the hub, you have to mount it deflated, then fill it up.

Between the row and the two days' worth of laying on my garage floor and jumping/pulling on tire rims, my back, arms and hands are killing me and I'm whipped. Now I'm doing laundry, and in a minute I'm going to mix up a double martini and sit my ass down to watch the Italian Grand Prix.

That is my update.

hawver: "Ok, you are my first official supporter. Your name will go on the protected scrolls, and when I come to power you will not be harmed."

A public service message
People, please. Host things yourself. And make backups. Thanks.

Danger is dead, long live Danger
I wanted to write something like, "After being a Sidekick user for 5 years, four months, three days and two hours, I have finally switched to a new phone." But LJ has never provided the ability to search old blog posts, and ljseek.com has never worked for me either, so I don't really know when exactly I got my first Sidekick. It was when I worked at Perseus, so it's been between five and six years. I was a Sidekick fan way before I actually worked at Danger, and I was so enamored of it that the chance to work for the company that made it made me want to do a backflip. I can't think of any other piece of technology that I've stuck with for as long or gotten as much mileage out of as the Sidekick.

But time marches on, and I've felt for a long time that the Sidekick handsets weren't what I wanted anymore. They weren't NERDY enough. When I first got the Sidekick, the fact that it had a terminal app was totally mind-blowing. But in the last few years they've really stagnated from a feature standpoint - having an app called The Complete Idiot's Guide To Picking Up Women in the production catalog really underscored this. I held out faint hope that the long-delayed 3G Sidekick with GPS would be the device I was waiting for, but when even people at Danger told me it sucked, I knew the dream was dead.

Danger is dead, long live Danger!

Today I switched to the T-Mobile G1 running Android. The irony that I've simply moved over to a new handset and OS designed by Andy Rubin is not lost on me. Overall it's pretty nice, but once you're as entrenched in a particular way of doing things for as long as I was with the Sidekick, getting used to something new is really challenging. All you see at first are the BAD ways that it's NOT like what you WERE using. But I'm sure I'll come to love it in time.

The Formula 1 pit stop: 26 men, less than ten seconds. Sick video from the BBC with some amazing footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUBvt98uTTQ

My first two weeks on the job have been really good. Everyone has been cool, helpful, and apparently happy to have me on board, which is good. I'm digging into the app and learning as much as I can, and I got some props for a minor bug I found. I also did something kinda cool on the automation side on Friday. It's good, I feel like I'm making measured progress, and I think I'm really going to enjoy this job.

Last night I had a dream that Bob Dylan was my guitar teacher, and he was frustrated with me because I hadn't been practicing. He kept saying, "Come on, man!" in the Bob Dylan voice. Very disconcerting.

This is a new spin on the Nigerian money scam emails... designed to appeal more to Americans I guess.

Compliments,

As you very well know, Iraq is gradually undergoing a rebuilding process in some parts and there is much need for reconstruction. I am John England from the hospitality state (Mississippi), an army contractor attached to the US Military force for the sole purpose of reconstruction works in some parts of Iraq. I evaluate the level of destruction and offer professional advice inline with the way they intend rebuilding. With no doubt, work has been risky and challenging as we sometimes collide head on with armed insurgents and loose some soldiers during confrontation.

On the early hours of 4th September 2008 I lost a friend whom I had known for 12years during one of these confrontations. It was a very sad day but at about 1100hrs during a normal inspection routine along Haifa Street, built and occupied by the late Saddam Hussein while he was still alive and one of the hide outs of the Al Qaeda and Ayman al-Zawahiri forces. I, along side with 3 soldiers proceeded to a marked site and as I commenced evaluation under close guard by the 3 soldiers, I discovered an unusual bulge in a cellar, which I presumed to be storage room and as I proceeded to have a closer look at it, I kicked a metal covering and found several metal boxes (6 in number) piled on top each other and locked with a padlock.

On forcing the boxes open, we discovered several armored weapons including bullets. One of the boxes was filled with hard drugs(heroine) and two to my amazement was filled with money. On discovery of this money, I and the soldiers for close to 3 hours counted the bundles of the currencies which amounted to about $23.5M.I believe however that all these belongs to the Al Qaeda and Ayman al-Zawahiri forces, and because of this reason, I instructed the soldiers with me to handover all the boxes containing the drugs and amours to our superiors in the US army and agreed to keep the funds to ourselves, so as to help establish ourselves when we return from Iraq. Presently, we have the money hidden in a safe and untraceable location only known to us.

Why I am explaining all our findings to you is to seek for your assistance and immense contribution to the actualization of our dream of getting these funds out from here. We are in desperate need of a reliable and trustworthy person who will receive, secure and protect these boxes containing the money for us until our assignment ends here. Since Iraq is getting unsafe and more dangerous everyday, we cannot afford to leave these boxes here in Iraq for any reason and knowing fully well that these were funds used in sponsoring terrorist attacks on our innocent citizens. We have no idea what could happen next as everything remains inconclusive at this point. This is a true story of what we came across here in Iraq. I intend to include some pictures I took here and my ID's issued by the US army and government for you to know better whom you are dealing with but I will include that in my next email to you. I assure and promise to give you 20% of this fund before sharing with the other 3 soldiers when we leave this place. However, you are free to negotiate on what you wish to have as your percentage in this deal. Please assure me of your keeping this top most secret so that my job would not be jeopardized.

My Sincere Regards,

John England.

I was working on my car with Nick and under the hood I found a dead bee. It looked like it had landed on the engine, wings spread, and then died. I thought it was alive for a moment. Later on I realized, it was a bee in my bonnet.

I got a job doing QA for Six Apart. I start Monday, which marks precisely 3 months of unemployment. I'm glad it's finally over.

The job hunt is definitely starting to get to me. I've been out of work for over two months now and, in spite of having lots of leads and interviews, I haven't gotten a single job offer yet. That in itself wouldn't bother me that much; finding a job that's a good match for my skills is pretty difficult, and almost all of the places that have turned me down have had valid reasons for doing so. The thing that's making me crazy is the pace of the process at most places. Multiple phone interviews, one or more on-site interviews, and a lot of space in between them all is the norm. It's sometimes hard to get people to follow up and tell me the status of things, which makes me feel helpless, and that's not pleasant.

I've tried to fill my time with personal projects and stuff, and I've gotten a fair amount done, but I'm starting to get bored with it all. I can see clearly why retirement isn't always such a blessing for some people. I need the structure and challenges of work to keep my mind sharp. Otherwise the temptation to just sit on my ass and watch TV is too great.

One thing I have gained from this predicament is a greater appreciation for the government support network we have in California. I'm sure it has its flaws, but within a day or two of being laid off I was on the dole, and I started receiving checks a couple of weeks later. It's not a lot of money, but it really makes the difference for me between freaking out about my situation and not. Of course having Catherine here to split the rent and bills and otherwise generally be supportive is also a great help.

In an effort to make myself feel a bit better, here's a list of useful stuff I've done since getting laid off:

Practiced my guitar a lot more and gotten much better
Worked on my scooter
Cleaned the hallway carpet where Catherine spilled a cup of concentrated laundry detergent
Put up a coat hook and whiteboard

Uh OK, that doesn't sound like that much, but when you add in job hunting and interviewing, it's been a fairly good use of my free time. Of course there's also been a decent amount of screwing around on the internet and watching TV, but hey, I have to keep morale up somehow.

If you're over the age of 25 and you're sad, this will surely cheer you up. Under 25s, you're on your own.

Thoughts on my grandmother. ( Read more... )

_Seriously._ Is it _THAT_ hard to set a fucking timer when you start doing laundry and move it all through the machines in a timely way so that, oh I don't know, _someone else can use them without inconvenience?_ Particularly when you live in an apartment building with only one washer and dryer? Apparently not. Apparently it's easier to a) not own a laundry basket, and thus leave your dirty laundry in a gigantic pile _on the garage floor_ b) just wash and dry it whenever you feel like it and not worry about whether this annoys anyone else c) shake the lint and crap off your newly dried clothes (sometimes 2-3 days later) after an annoyed neighbor leaves them on top of the dryer because you didn't come back for them and don't even leave a laundry basket nearby (see a). People like you give bartenders/aspiring screenwriters a bad name.

My photos and movies from my last Australia trip are online here if you want to take a look at them.

Time between getting engaged and hearing Catherine whisper, "My precious" to her engagement ring: 4 days.

The answers in this Ask Metafilter question are hilarious.