Sunday Night Internet Cafe Stop.

Earl and I are at the local Panera, having a little bite to eat and doing to Mac surfing in public. It seems like a fitting way to wrap up the weekend, as it’s seemingly been all about relaxation, being in public and eating.

Last night was Bear Night in Albany and it was rather enjoyable. I liked seeing our friends from the Capital District and meeting new folks as well, but the club was JAMMED packed with people. The “Bear Den”, which is in the basement of the club, has a typical cellar low-ceiling and little to no ventilation. While I find the smell of a “natural man” quite intoxicating, sometimes a cub needs a breath of fresh air. So Earl and I had a hot and sweaty time and we weren’t even doing anything leud. Well, nothing out of the ordinary.

On the main floor of the club is good-sized dance floor. It was somewhat cooler up on that floor, but still relatively hot. The DJ was playing great music last night, at least from what we heard. He had this habit of mixing in the middle of a musical phrase, for example halfway through a verse of in the middle of the chorus. The boys would be jamming to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston and before one could find out if he really loves me (or yell “Bobby!”) we were suddenly in the midst of Conga, which was then promptly interrupted by Bad Girls. Before we were bad, bad girls, we were then into some cha-cha song. It was then that I gave up on trying to dance for the night.

Even though the clubs in that part of the state are open until 4 a.m., Earl and I decided to call it a night and head back to Motel 6 around 1:30. They left the light on for us. I went straight to bed, as apparently I’m getting old or something, but Earl roamed the motel looking for the afterhours party. He came back to the room about half of an hour later, so assumedly there wasn’t much going on.

This morning I sent a text message to Sean and Jeffrey to see if we could get together for breakfast. Jeffrey was still in bed, but Sean and his friend Andrew were on their way to the Gateway Diner and they invited us to join them. What a lovely breakfast. It was good to relax and just hang with friends this morning, so it made the whole Albany experience worthwhile.

This afternoon, I decided to get a little exercise (see previous entry) and then attempted to mow the lawn, where I promptly lost interest and decided I’d finish tomorrow. So now we’re here at Panera. Homework awaits before bedtime.

And there’s the life of two bears on a weekend in the middle of September.

Social Whirlwind.

The social whirlwind continues, as Earl and I have installed ourselves in the capital city of Albany, New York. We started with a diner-iffic lunch at the Metro 20 diner and then stopped at the behemoth Crossgates Mall for an obligatory Apple store excursion. I really wanted a case for the new iPhone, so I picked up a rubber case made by InCase. I’m loving it.

Tonight is bear night and Earl and I will be hanging out with friends and growling and woofing in various directions. It’s always a good time.

Kathy Griffin!



Kathy Griffin!
Originally uploaded by iMachias.

So get this. Tonight Earl and I went to our local casino to see one of the two sold out shows of the one and only Kathy Griffin!

She was fucking hilarious!

Kathy has been in the news quite a bit lately, mostly due to her acceptance speech at the Emmys (she told Jesus to ‘suck it’ and this offended some), so she had LOTS to talk about tonight.

Earl and I had a blast!! It was our first time seeing a show at the local casino and I must say it was a pleasant experience. The seating was comfortable, the audience was pumped and Kathy rocked the house. We tried stalking the backstage door but she disappeared through the catacombs so we didn’t get a chance to meet her afterwards. But that’s o.k. because we had an absolutely great time. Earl and I have seen several stand up comedians over the years, by far tonight’s show is our favorite.

Persona.

I have been a computer user for quite a few years. Well, more than quite a few years. Actually you can count my computer use time in decades. I’ve been playing with computers since 1983 and I had my first online account in 1985. I’ve been online ever since.

During these years I’ve had a wide selection of internet names. “DJ JP”. That’s too short, I can’t use it to register for anything new these days. “BlueMarvel37”. Wanting to be just BlueMarvel, there’s already a bunch of BlueMarvels out there and quite frankly, I see myself as the only BlueMarvel so I’m not going to append a number to the end of my name. I even tinkered with “J.P. 2.0”, but the dots and the dashes must come too close to resembling morse code or something because half the websites I register with won’t take that for a screenname/username/handle.

Many of my friends have one internet name that they use across the board. My friend Eric has the same name whether he’s on Yahoo, MSN or AOL, as well as various other message boards. I’ve decided that I need to have just one name across the board. So I’ve changed my username on Flickr, AOL/AIM, YouTube, Yahoo, all over the place.

Introducing… iMachias.

I’m a Mac fanboy through and through and since I tend to use formal names when referring to people (I call my friend in Connecticut Gregory instead of the more common Greg, for example), I figure Machias is like a formal name for a Mac fanboy. At least in my hyperdrive curious little mind. So I’ve settled on iMachias. It’s not common, there’s no number appended to the end, I’m the only iMachias that I’ve run across.

So if you have me as BlueMarvel37 or itsjp2.0@gmail.com or anything like that on any message board or instant messenger, I won’t see you anymore. It’s full speed ahead with iMachias.

Cat’s Ass.



Cat’s Ass
Originally uploaded by iMachias.

So I was trying to type a meaningful blog entry when someone decided to start drooling on my computer.

Thank god he didn’t eat beans.

iDid It.

Back in June during the big Apple iPhone hype I said that I wasn’t going to get an iPhone. I found them to be a little too expensive and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to stand in line for days for a cell phone. Well then Steve Jobs announced a couple of weeks ago that effective immediately, they were dropping the price by $200. While still a tad on the expensive side, the 8GB model was something that I could handle.

Guess what we bought tonight.

iPhone.

Aside from the fact that my Motorola Razr has not held up well over the past year, I wanted something that I could manage my school deadlines and assignments and whatnot easily with. I’ll admit it, I also wanted to be one of the cool kids on campus. I haven’t seen an iPhone in use yet at school, I’m hoping to be one of the popular trendsetters.

Lunch Mates.

Tom and I had some friends over for lunch today. I like it when friends dropped in unannounced. They didn’t have much to say while they were here and they were seemingly quite content while we hung out in the lawn together.

They come by from time to time. Lately they’ve been visiting quite a bit. Perhaps I’ll throw some seed around tonight after work so they can have a bedtime snack.

They were happy I wasn’t serving turkey sandwiches today.

Turkey

Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.

When I decided to go back to school back at the end of last year, I met with the adult education (cue Hall and Oates) advisor and mentioned one of my biggest concerns about being a back-to-college adult.

P.E.

I had visions of being a nearly 40-year old man, clad in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, straining to keep up with my 18 and 19-year old peers as they raced through some obscene obstacle course involving push-ups, pull-downs, wrestling and cartwheels. They’d point and laugh and I’d end up being picked last for some game involving a medicine ball.

It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

When I met with the advisor, she advised me that in lieu of physical education classes, I could take a two credit health class to meet my P.E. requirements. I’m in that health class this semester.

I should have risked the medicine ball.

When I mentioned the collection of depressing students last week, I was referring to many in my Tuesday and Thursday morning health class. I’ll just come out and say it, this is a class of slackers. This is a group of young men and women that have little interest in living a healthy lifestyle. They’re in this class just for the health credit and are willing to go to 8 a.m. class to get through it. They look like the last vegetable they ate was courtesy of Gerber and their physical exercise is limited to their thumbs on their Wii. The teacher is also the men’s soccer coach and he is a lively, excited, motivating, physical fitness type of guy that I enjoy listening to. When he speaks about the benefits of watching your cholesterol, I’m ready to swear off McFood for the rest of my life. When he talks about the rush from aerobics, I’m ready to run a miracle mile.

The rest of the class isn’t so moved.

One of the requirements of the class is two write a one-and-a-half page article review about the health topic of your choice. It’s a piece of cake. I whipped mine out in an hour or two. There’s a few requirements: 1. It must be typed. 2. It must be turned in on the day we’re talking about that topic. 3. You must take a few moments to tell the class a little bit about your article and review. As I said, a piece of cake. Hell, you can even pull something off the web and write about that. I gave a presentation on nutrition last week, becoming quite animated when I told my classmates that the healthiest way to grocery shop is to play “ring-around-the-rosie” and shop around the perimeter because the processed stuff is on the inner aisles.

It’s amazing how many of my fellow students find this assignment to be difficult. During the break today, I overheard future-Woofster (my private little nickname for him) talking to Sniffles (a portly girl that seems to have a constant cold) about his paper. He was concerned because his computer wasn’t working so he had opted to write the paper in longhand, which was against the assignment requirements. Sniffles said, “Yeah, I was having a hard time typing the paper too because my computer was acting gay.”

When I hear something like this I arm myself quickly with witty retorts, because the “acts gay” thing gets on my nerves.

1. “Did chiffon leap out of the monitor?”
2. “Was iTunes stuck on Barbra?”
3. “Did the computer print on it’s screen Lions and tigers and bears oh my?”

Before I was able to inquire as to what made her computer “gay”, she quickly apologized to future-Woofster for using that term. My response was twofold. First of all, she didn’t need to be chastized, she already knows that her phrasing was inappropriate and secondly, future-Woofster bats on my team as he responded, “That’s o.k., I know what you mean.”

Nevertheless, when presentation time came around, future-Woofster had bolted from the classroom five minutes early so he wouldn’t have to give the presentation and risk turning in his paper written in longhand.

‘Tis a pity, I’m sure it would have been an easy A.