Geek

Gay.

With the New Year well underway I am proud to say that I have been working out again on a more regular basis and I’m starting to feel the results of my hard work. I don’t know if you can see any changes yet but I certainly feel better and that’s what’s most important to me.

The increase in gym time has created a little bit of a dilemna. Being a kid at heart, I was watching episodes of “Josie and the Pussycats” on my iPhone while doing cardio. I love the show and it’s probably one of my favorite cartoons of all time. Unfortunately, not that many episodes were made and I have a hard time with “Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space” so I found myself without any episodes to watch. I decided to go campy and last night I started watching the first season of “Alice”. Tonight I watched the second episode of season one, “Alice Gets A Pass”.

I don’t remember this episode from when I was a kid.

In this episode, Alice starts to date an old college friend of Mel’s. Said friend is a pro-football player turned actor. He’s good looking in a mid 1970s way (the episode originally aired 9/29/1976) and I remember the actor from being a thug on that Wonder Woman episode with the mean flute player played by Martin Mull. He also played a football player on “I Dream of Jeannie” towards the very end of the series.

Anyways, Alice goes out with this guy a couple of times and tries really hard in a tame-1976 way to get him to get more romantic with her when he tells her something she didn’t expect: he’s gay. Her first reaction is “Are you sure you’re not just jolly?” He assures her that he’s not and that he’s really gay and he’s happy that they can be friends. The big dilemma of the episode is that Alice had asked him to take Tommy on a fishing trip and now she’s not sure if she should let Tommy go with the gay guy. Again, you can tell that it’s from the mid 1970s with some of the gay jokes and the whole “will he be inappropriate with Tommy” thing that is briefly touched upon but on the whole I think the episode was sort of groundbreaking for it’s day. I have always thought that Linda Lavin was cool with the whole gay thing, being that she got her start and continued to be in theatre and all, so in a way I’m not surprised that the subject was explored on the series but I have to admit that I was surprised that it was explored in the *second* episode of the entire show (and the first episode for Philip McKeon to play Tommy).

All in all I found the episode to make my cardio workout fly right by. Naturally the ending credits theme song is a good way to finish up, especially when you sing along with the “fa fa fa fa fa” so all in all I’m happy that I jumped onto Alice to be my next short-cardio workout series1.

It’s a shame that only season one is on iTunes. And believe it or not, whilst Linda Lavin sang nearly 10 versions of the theme song over the years, there is a specific version from the second season that I like best. I’m trying to find it but I haven’t been successfully lately. It’s buried on YouTube somewhere.

1 For longer cardio workouts, I prefer “Xena: Warrior Princess”, in case you’re wondering.

14 January 2010 by Fitness. Gayish. Geek 1

Errands.

So yesterday I took the afternoon off from work to catch up on some errands that were neglected during my recent bout of on-call. Oddly, I found relaxation in this.

First on the list was the chore of picking up some needed non-food items. I hate going to the grocery store and I wasn’t in the mood to wrestle my way into the mall to visit our only Target, so I decided to honor my childhood and venture a visit to K-mart. I had my new Sears/K-mart rewards card and everything. As a quick aside, I think the new card should be blue, but it is not.

K-mart, alas poor K-mart, what has happened to thee?

Before the big store of Ames moved into our little farm town in 1978, we would go shopping at one of two K-marts near Syracuse. The primary choice was K-mart across from the “Northern Lights” shopping center. Said store is still there today and she’s holding up pretty good. If we didn’t go to the Northern Lights store we went to the Western Lights (such a copy cat) store on the west side of the city. That store was a little bigger than the Northern Lights store and for some reason I remember eating in that cafeteria in the back of the store but I don’t remember eating in the cafeteria in the Northern Lights store. As a K-mart kid (we didn’t have the money to afford Sears or anything like that), I found some comfort in the old fashioned green and orange “SSK” stacked logo in the back of the store where it said “S.S. Kresge Corp”.

Back to yesterday. I went to our local K-mart (ahem, it’s a Big “K”) and joined the four other people that were milling around the vast emptiness of the store. Two of the seven checkouts (numbered two through eight) were open. The cafeteria is long gone and I noticed that the K-mart Cafe at front, where you would find nachos, popcorn and pretzels has been boarded up as well. The Pharmacy in the corner is gone. On a bright note, the Christmas Tree decorations display is still up and fully functional. In between these observations is vast, open space with empty shelves. I thought the store was going out of business. I even checked at the service desk. It’s not going out of business, it’s just business as usual.

Wow. So sad. I still say that K-mart started dying when they did that whole crazy “Big K” thing and they should have stayed familiar (yet attempted to update their stores) with the American public by just modernizing the old red and turquoise logo like Australia did.

Old logo
Kmart19631990Logo.PNG.png

Australia logo
kmart.jpg

K-mart didn’t have half of what I was looking for so I stopped at a local Walgreens and found everything else. After Walgreens I went to the local Army Navy store with the intent of buying a new pair of black combat boots. My current boots are tipping six years old and have little in the way of support in them. Browsing through the shoe department I found the perfect pair of combat boots. Then I found an awesome pair of logger boots. And THEN I found a pair of military style dress shoes. I asked for all three in the same size and tried them on.

All three fit like a glove. They were wonderful.

“Which ones are you buying?”, asked the relatively helpful salesperson.

I thought for a moment and said “all of them”. You see, earlier in the day I had picked up the Jeep from getting four new tires, so I figured if the Jeep had new treads I should have new treads too. I risked the chance that Earl would kill me for spending the money; he opted to just glare instead of draw blood.

There’s my spending for the year.

13 January 2010 by Geek Ponderings and Musings 1

Hard Wired.

So I have been on call for work this week. This in itself is a regular occurrence and something I knew fully well that I would be doing on a regular basis at my current job. It’s not the most pleasant time of my life but it’s bearable. There are some aspects I really enjoy about on call; mostly because it keeps me at home and I do stuff around the house but also because I feel like there’s an extra boost in the team camaraderie department when all of us on call folks are working together (one of us from each relevant department). I get a better sense of teamwork with those I don’t work closely with during the normal workday. It’s not a bad feeling.

One of the things that on call does is make for some irregular sleep patterns. I opt to sleep in the boys’ room when I’m on call because I occasionally have to get up in the night and I don’t want to disturb Earl with my trips back and forth to my office. I sleep on top of my pager, which has been set to vibrate, because the dinging of the pager makes me insane to the point of a rabid response: I foam at the mouth, spout out obscenities that would make a person with tourettes blush and then I throw something. I am not wired to handle the wide variety of the pseudo friendly beeps from the pager but I can easily handle something vibrating under me in bed. Go figure.

Erratic sleep schedules make for some interesting dreams. If I sleep for an hour or two, get called for work for an hour or so, go back to sleep for another hour or two, rinse and repeat a couple of times, by the last sleep cycle before morning I usually am in the midst of intense, whacky dreams. Such a thing was happening this morning around 7:45. I was in the middle of a very vivid, engaging dream that was taking place in a palace of some sort. Smells, sounds and color by technicolor was involved and quite frankly I was enjoying the experience immensely. I was in some sort of third person role and simply observing the action taking place in the dream when everything just froze with the “freeze” sound effect from “Bewitched” (you’d know it if you heard it). From here I walked around my surroundings a little bit a looked at everything frozen when I heard another “ding”. With the sound a Windows XP dialog appeared right in the middle of this frozen scene in my dream. Still fully asleep and dreaming, I was standing in the middle of a palace with all action frozen and a three dimensional Windows XP dialog box in the middle of it all. I walked all the way around the Windows XP dialog box that hung in mid air and then read the contents:

Wake Up And Look At Your Pager
[OK]

I remember reading this message in my dream, musing to myself about the contents of it and then I awoke with a start. Next to me, my pager had accumulated 20 pages in about three minutes and I had slept through the vibrations because the pager was lying on the bed next to me. My subconscious found a creative way to communicate to me and proved one thing to me at the same time.

I’m odd.

9 January 2010 by Geek 4

Motivation.

Earl, Jamie and I took the long way home from Natick, Mass. today. I did what is known as “shunpiking”. I avoided all toll roads at all costs. Fortunately, this makes for a beautiful drive through the Berkshires and along the less-traveled roads of Upstate New York.

If you have an extra hour to spare, I highly recommend taking Route 2 west from Boston all the way into New York State. It’s pretty much a freeway or expressway 1/2 way across Massachusetts but it’s not as boring as the Mass. Pike and you pass through some lovely old industrial villages. West of Greenfield Route 2 is two-lane all the way to Troy, N.Y. as it winds and climbs it’s way through the Berkshires. Just east of North Adams, Mass. is the relatively famous hairpin turn. Off the end of the curve is a family restaurant. Earl and I have eaten there before. The food is good.

Once you make your way through North Adams and Williamstown, Mass., Route 2 crosses into New York State and makes it way down from the Berkshires into Troy. It ends shortly afterwards at Interstate 87.

After a bit more shopping at the surprisingly uncrowded Crossgates Mall, we continued our trek home by avoiding toll roads. The route of choice was one of the longest highways in the United States: US Route 20.

DSC04303.JPG

“Route 20” as it’s known upstate, has a decidedly “Route 66” feel to it in that you can tell it used to be a really important road as it crossed Upstate New York with the diners, nostalgic looking motels and villages with grandly built houses flanking the road. Like many of the state routes in New York, it has wide shoulders and a decidedly “open” feel to it as it makes it way over rolling hills and through some valleys between Albany and our point of departure, Bridgewater.

I have said for many years that I want to accomplish a “grand bike ride” before I’m unable to. I have had dreams of riding across The Empire State on a week long bike ride. I have toyed with riding the southern part by following former NY Route 17, but I think I’m going to pay homage to my Central New York roots instead of ride US Route 20 from the Pennsylvania Line to the Massachusetts Line some time during 2010. The ride today motivated me.

It’s always odd that I find the inspiration and desire to ride my bicycle around the first snowfall. Nevertheless, I’m recording this idea of riding Route 20 here in the blog so the motivation continues and I can mark it off my list of to-do items next summer.

6 December 2009 by Fitness. Geek Ponderings and Musings 1

Grindr.

So yesterday I decided to try out the iPhone app called “Grindr”1. For those unfamiliar with the app, it uses the GPS function of the iPhone to find gay men in your proximity, obviously if they are using Grindr as well. It’s basically a hook-up or dating app done in a full 21st century way. You create a profile that includes your picture, your age and various other stats if you choose to and then it tells you who is nearby. Since I was in the mall when I started the app up, I opted to put just a face shot on my profile. I restricted my search to those ages 35 and over. My tag line read “happily partnered, just looking for friendly faces.”

There was a very nice man wearing a Santa’s hat in his profile picture 2,992 feet away from me. I told him he had a nice hat, he thanked me and said he worked at the Lindt Chocolate Shop and had just left work for the day. He liked that my profile said “friends only” as his said the same. We didn’t get to meet him face to face but he seemed nice enough.

The only other profile relatively closeby at the time belonged a guy named Matthew. I noticed his profile because he was another red-headed bear and strikingly cute. The information on his profile was sparse and he wasn’t online at the moment, but there was a link to his website. Turns out he is a avid (rabid?) Mac user (like me!2), is a bear (like me!) and is on Twitter (like me!). His website was created with iWeb, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. We didn’t chat or anything but I’m following him on Twitter now. If you have a picture of yourself with your Mac for all the world to see, you’re worth following on Twitter.

So while 98% of the guys using Grindr are probably using it to hook-up, find potential playmates and just trying to connect to do the nasty, I used it to just see who was nearby in just a curious exercise. I don’t know if I’ll use it regularly but it might be interesting whilst we’re traveling.

1 I used Grindr whilst sitting in the food court and that was pretty much it; I try really hard not to be obnoxious with my iPhone to others in my party.

2 I think it’s well established that I have nothing against non-Mac computer users.

6 December 2009 by Gayish. Geek 2

Perky.

I decided at lunch time that I had enough of feeling a little ‘blah’ today so I pepped myself up with this…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… I LOVE LAUREN! (and dig the groovy guest stars in this one!)

4 December 2009 by Fun and Games Dept Geek 1

Contact.

I’m cleaning up the seemingly hundreds of e-mail accounts I have spread all over the internet. It’s part of yet another attempt to be organized when we kick off the new year in five or six weeks.

I have two e-mail addresses now. jp@jpnearl.com has become so bogged down with spam that it isn’t even funny and the others have unwieldy web interfaces or are a little too public for my tastes, so all the others are getting shut down at the end of the month.

The primary e-mail address to contact me is:
imachias-at-me-dot-com1
(You have to make that look like a regular e-mail address when you send me mail. Robots like to grab e-mail addresses from blog entries.)

jp@jpnearl.com will still work but your e-mail won’t get read. Don’t send anything to my work e-mail address because that should rightfully be used for work only. If it has my last name in it it’s my work address. If you’re sending me something dirty (sorry, mom) you probably already know the other e-mail address I use for that. You can send me dirty stuff at imachias-at-me-dot-com and I won’t mind at all. My Gmail, Hotmail and Live accounts are all going away at the end of the month.

1 So much for that Windows 7 hype I was spun up about a month or so ago.

27 November 2009 by Geek 0

Retro.

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles unveiled the new license plate design slated to start appearing on vehicles in April 2010.

All vehicles in New York will be transitioned to the new license plates over a two year period, replacing plates that debuted in 2001. The official word is that the current plates are losing their reflectivity and were only guaranteed to last for five years anyway. Unofficially, the extra $25 fee to buy the new plates (which you must do to renew your registration) will add a lot of money to the Empire State.

The new design harkens back to the plates used prior to 1986 and will feature the states official colours with blue characters on a gold background.

The official name of the plate series is the “Empire Gold Plates.” Motorists wishing to keep their existing plate number will be required to pay an additional fee. Like the current plate series, NYSDMV will not identify which county you are from by the letters in the plate number, opting to start with “AAA1000” and moving on from there.

I like the fact that there are no fancy graphics on this plate series and that it appears that a huge amount of money was not spent on the design of these plates, since the Empire State is experiencing an unprecedented fiscal emergency.

The official press release from NYSDMV is here.

feature-plate.png

10 November 2009 by Geek 0

Trifecta.



271b.365, originally uploaded by iMachias.

Today marks the third part of the geek-trifecta that was underway as Canonical released the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. One of the most popular desktop distributions of Linux, like it’s brethren Ubuntu is free to download, burn to a CD and install on your computer. On the desktop it is generally thought of us a replacement for Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.

Now I know that last week I was excited about the release of Windows 7 and I’m always excited about my Macs (well, for the most part) but I have a special place in my heart for Ubuntu as well. There is a part of me that is suspicious of all things corporate. I don’t like not knowing what my computer is doing, how it’s doing it and who it’s telling my business to. I have a bit of an issue with Facebook and Google in this regard as well as I don’t quite fully trust “the cloud” yet, but with Linux you can see all the source code that makes up the operating system if you wish, so there is nothing to hide. There are no hidden switches, no secrets calls and no privileged code in Linux and to me that can only be a beautiful thing. Not only are bugs discovered faster, they are squashed even faster than that. And by the way, viruses are not an issue on Linux.

I’m going to install Ubuntu tonight on one of the non-Macs here in the house. I’ll probably yak on about how it went in a couple of days.

By the way, in the picture at the top of this entry I was enjoying my hot chocolate in my Ubuntu Linux mug. I have contemplated getting that symbol as a tattoo as a branding of my geekiness.

29 October 2009 by Geek 1

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

All The Places

Visit my Linktree
December 2024
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031