June 2006

i now have a standard account, which means i can post posts. artlung’s blog

(this is a followup)

Last night around 9:45pm the power went out. Didn’t come back on until about 12:30am. Then we went to bed.
We occupied ourselves with non-electricity related activities. Well, actually, Leah drafted her bio for the BlogHer conference and we talked and stuff. It was kind of a nice mellow night.

I did a kind of stalking panther thing. We lit candles, and I checked outside out front, and I checked out back. I went out to the van and checked the radio for news or trouble. I listened to the neighbors a little. I felt very protective of this rented home and my family, just my wife tonight, no stepkids here last night. There was no trouble on the radio. No natural or unnatural disasters. No special breaking news for Ventura County or Simi Valley. So after about 10 minutes of radio listening I hung it up and came back in.
I couldn’t get any work done, since all my work is digital. I called Southern California Edison. When I first called they had no information on the outage. It thanked me for reporting the outage. I called back 10 minutes later, then the machine-woman said to me that I would get a callback to my phone if the outage were anticipated to be more than 4 hours.
It’s interesting that I never spoke with any human being at Southern California Edison. Is it the future?
So this morning I woke up early, about 8:15am. I got started with my day, did some cleaning up, start up a computer to check email. Just as I answer one email, poof the power goes out again.

So much for work and email, again.

I call SCE again, they report that the outage has been ongoing since 10pm last night, and should be back online at about 11am. It came back on at 10, after Leah and I were just about to get in the car, laptops in hand, to go get breakfast and check email and work.

I don’t know what the problem was in Simi (western end of town)—the SCE robot woman said it was “Equipment Failures,” but it’s definitely flaky as of last night and this morning.

It’s a brand new day. Full of possibilities. The reset button of life has been hit.

Grace.

This day is spelled ridiculously.

Or maybe beautifully.

Brand new day.

Kick butt.

Changes on the work front on the horizon.

Stay tuned.

My experience has been essentially the same as Rafe Colburn’s:

rc3.org: Vox: day one
after using the invitation I got my first surprise—when you sign up for Vox, you don’t start out with all of the toys that everybody else has. You are initially inducted at Starter level. What’s that mean?

The other day Devon was looking over my shoulder at my email and saw an email with a subject line that was made of Chinese ideograms. He exclaimed: “That’s so cool!”

I sighed and said, that’s spam, Dev.

Devon said: “I don’t care, that’s so cool! I want Chinese spam!”

I said to him, “uh… no you don’t. Spam is spam, no matter how cool looking the subject lines are.”

He was adamant, “yes I do! I don’t get any emails with cool characters!”

I explained that my email address (not the gmail one) is old, and has been harvested over and over again all over the web, for a long time, and so everyone spams me. Every scammer in the world wants to solicit me for viagra and Nigerian spams and all the various crud of the internet. I then told him that I get spam in other languages too. Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and even Hindi. Everyone wants to, and does, send me spam.

Exhibit A:

I showed him the spam. He was still envious, not considering that continuously having to train one’s spam filters is not “cool.” To him, my multilingual spam has cachet.

I respect his point of view. When I was his age I thought that Japanese things were cooler than any other things on the planet. Other cultures inform and inspire and even get integrated into our own in some ways. Appreciating other cultures is a way to see the world beyond our own provincial existence.

I still wish I got less spam though.

well, I keep on thinkin’ ‘bout you, sister golden hair surprise
and I just can’t live without you, can’t you see it in my eyes?
i’ve been one poor correspondent, and i’ve been too, too hard to find
but it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind

The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity of adventure!

A Google logo you won’t see:

a little ragged and tired.

proj on!