Okay, so I mentioned my computer count had grown over on my Facebook page, and Bill asked me a bunch of questions about what’s what, so here’s a quick rundown, in reverse order of age:

1. Lenovo ThinkPad T410 - the new work machine, running Windows 7.  Maybe this doesn’t count because it’s not mine, but it’s here 100% of the time now.  The hardware is pretty nice, with a lot of extras: 3G modem, DVD burner, 4 GB memory, a million ports I’ll never use.  But man, Windows 7 sucks.  I’ve spent far more time trying to figure out why the hell some 32-bit software won’t work, or why you can’t install 64-bit Visio and 32-bit Office at the same time, and why they insist on you installing 32-bit office on a 64-bit machine, and so on.
2. MacBook Pro - My main machine, a 17” 2010 Unibody with the fastest i7 CPU, 8 GB memory, and a half-terabyte of disk.  I absolutely love this machine, and it’s an example of how to move from 32 to 64 bit without turning your entire life sideways.  Other than reinstalling all of my MacPorts stuff, it Just Worked.  This machine is home to my iTunes library, my pictures, my writing, and pretty much everything else.
3. MacBook Pro - Sarah has the 2009 17” model.  Not sure of the processor, but it’s not the fastest one, and it has 4GB.
4. Samsung NC10 - A tiny netbook, with a tiny screen and almost no memory, still running XP.  It’s next to the bed, and I mostly use it when I’m sitting in bed reading.  It’s also a nice travel machine, because it’s so light, gets incredible battery life, and if it gets stolen, the bag it’s in is probably worth more.
5. MacBook - My old 15” white 2007 model.  I don’t use this much anymore, but maybe every few weeks, I find something that I need on it or that won’t work in Snow Leopard.  For example, I still use it to import video, because I’m too cheap to go buy a different FireWire cable.  And until a week ago, I couldn’t get our scanner to work with the new Macs.  (Turns out if you swear at it enough, you can get Preview to scan stuff.)
6. Toshiba Portege Tablet - This is a 2005 model that has convinced me that as long as it runs Windows, Microsoft will never get a tablet to work.  (A Windows Phone tablet?  Maybe that would work.)  It’s no longer running XP Tablet, because it needed an XP reinstall, and the included media won’t work.  It’s sitting next to my couch downstairs, and it’s a dedicated IMDB and baseball score machine.

Other computers-that-aren’t would include two iPhone 3Gs, a PlayStation 3, a Kindle, and maybe you could count the NAS I have in the closet.  (It takes up an IP address, anyway.)

The tablet is on its last legs, and the MacBook will eventually get fully retired.  I sometimes wonder if I just used an iPad for casual web browsing and travel, if I could get rid of everything but the MBP and work laptop.  But as I become more convinced an iPad would be an okay purchase, I get more in the hole with this move.

I was talking to Tom yesterday about something - I think how my body is physically falling apart as I reach the 40 year mark, and I somehow started thinking about how I was forced to take a gym class in my freshman year of high school to meet some bogus Indiana PE requirement.  I obviously was not the jock type in high school, didn’t play sports, and begrudgingly took this gym class and suffered through it.  I mean, I had to also take physical education periods in all of K-6, but you don’t shower in those, and they are unisex, and instead of doing hardcore calisthenics, you play four-square or play some stupid game with a kickball on a giant surplus parachute that everyone holds and flips up and down.  (Note to people born after 1990: four-square was a game you played on a playground with a 2x2 grid drawn on a pavement and an inflatable rubber ball, long before it was a stupid web site where you reported to your friends list every location in the city where you stopped to take a dump or buy a bottle of water.)

The demographics of my PE class in 9th grade also made the situation difficult.  There was me, Jia, and these other two geeky guys.  Then the rest of the class was evenly divided between multi-letter varsity sport athletes, and every drug-fueled shop class major that would soon be a convicted felon.  My worst fear on any given day was that we’d do some activity where we’d get divided into teams, because I was one of the absolute last people that would get picked in any situation like this.  It wasn’t just that I was unpopular; I mean, in 1985 I was pretty much my current height but weighed something like 120 pounds, and I know I could not bench even half of that back then.  And I had absolutely no hand-eye coordination, couldn’t swim, hated running, and forget anything that involved hitting a ball, like tennis or baseball.  My best hope was that we’d play something like soccer, where I could just sort of stand off to the side of the field and run back and forth with the pack and not do anything.

One saving grace: our gym teacher was also the basketball coach.  And at that time, Shawn Kemp was a sophomore, but he was a starting varsity player and was scoring an average of about 96 points a game and appearing in Sports Illustrated every other week.  So for months on end, Coach Hahn would need to spend his days reviewing scouting footage or conducting press conferences with ESPN or finding Kemp a college program that would pay him well under the table but not require him to know how to read.  And on those days, he’d dump us all in the gym with a bunch of basketballs and have us divide up and play unsupervised.  This was good, because nine times out of ten, I could get on a lopsided team with one of my computer buddies and talk about the Apple II on the sidelines while the rest of our team practiced for their future college athletic and/or department of correction basketball careers.

Anyway, the reason I remember all of this is the Presidential fitness test, or whatever the hell it was called.  It was some neo-fascist Reagan Youth attempt at getting the country into shape, and I think Ahnold had something to do with it, and I’m sure it was a stepping stone toward reinstating the draft and having a huge mass of young recruits ready to run obstacle courses at top speed.  The challenge consisted of a dozen or two different exercises, and to get an A on the semester, you had to do a certain number of repetitions, or do exercises in a certain amount of time.  And of course, if you at least tried to do these things, you’d get a C, but giving a competition based on how fast you can do a shuttle run to all of the type A personality disorder jocks in the class made this probably the worst possible outcome, short of having everyone line up the cars their parents gave them and hand out grades based on which ones were newest or cost the most.

When they came up with this test, they basically said, “let’s find thirty things Jon Konrath can’t do, and then invent some ridiculous numbers for each one and hope he gets publicly humiliated thirty times in a row.”  For example, there was the aforementioned shuttle run; I don’t remember how fast you had to run it, but I would get shin splints from running any more than thirty feet, and had the aerobic capability of a high-level World of Warcraft junkie that typically needed a Rascal wheelchair to get from their SUV to the grocery store for another case of ring-dings, so it took me roughly double the required time.  Chin-ups?  I think I did one.  Push-ups in a minute?  I’m sure I could do at least a couple, but it probably required 30 or 60 or something well outside of the reach of someone who could only do curls if you took all of the weights off the bar first.

Probably the worst one was the rope climb.  I don’t remember how high the rope was, and I’m sure if I saw it now, it would be shorter than the ceiling in our apartment, and I’m also sure some crazed helicopter parents got the thing removed years ago because they were afraid their precious spawn would fall.  But we had to climb the damn thing, and do it in a certain speed to meet the challenge.  And two things went through my head as I sat on the ringworm-infested wrestling mats and looked up at this thing tethered to the ceiling.  One, there’s no way I can pull my weight up this damn thing if I can barely achieve a single chin-up.  And two, if I did manage to climb up to the top, how the hell do you get back down?  I had vivid visions of sailing thirty feet down, balls-first against this coarse rope that had splinters of whatever the hell ropes were made of back then scraping against my sac.  So I managed to get maybe two arm-grasps up the thing, froze, and dropped back to earth.

And of course I got endless shit from all of the jocks in the class, along the lines of “yeah, your fuckin’ computer’s not going to help you now.”  And all I could think of, which was little consolation at the time, was that in twenty years, all of these fuckers would be stuck on an assembly line, five minutes away from where they were born and where they would die, their good looks faded, their physique gone, their trophy cheerleader wives worn and uglied by a half-dozen kids, and I would be long gone, riding whatever technology I could find or invent to riches and happiness.  Okay, I’m not rich, and the jury is still out on whether or not I’m happy, but from the looks of the reunion pictures, I was right on all other counts.  But that didn’t comfort me much when I was sixteen and had to shower with these fuckers after failing their stupid tests repeatedly.

But here’s the one thing I did good at: sit-ups.  We had to do something like 56 full sit-ups in a minute, and I thought there’s no fucking way I’ll do 30, given my progress on the rest of this nightmare.  But I slugged it out, and ended up doing seventy-two.  I have no idea how I did this; maybe it’s something about weighing next to nothing, and having absolutely no gut at the time.  But I did that.  And now, I don’t know if I could do ten sit-ups without throwing out my back, so it’s a good metric about how far from being in shape I am now that I close out my fourth decade here.

The other thing about that stupid class was that by the end of the year, I had played so much damn basketball, I was pretty much an idiot savant for shooting from anywhere within the three point range.  I mean, I couldn’t defend, or do lay-ups or any of that shit.  But if you wanted to play Horse or something, I would completely kick your ass.  All of this quickly faded after I got this stupid requirement out of the way and never thought of basketball again in my life, but for a brief period in the spring of 1986, you could give me a ball and place me on any random point, and I knew the exact physics and the exact angle to get it from here to there.

By the way, I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will be in Vegas this year for my 40th.  If you have the means and you’re free the weekend of the 20th, drop a line.

Here’s an interesting way to make yourself lose any faith you had in ever winning the lottery by playing the same numbers every week: Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!. It lets you select five numbers, then plays them against a random drawing, simulating two tickets a week for ten years.  I just tried it and it cost me $1040 to win $116, which is better than the average rate of return on most peoples’ 401K these days, but still pretty disappointing.

As a Midwesterner from a lower-middle-class family, I’m all too familiar with the lottery.  When I was a kid, we didn’t have the lottery in Indiana, but you could drive across the border to Michigan and buy scratch-off tickets.  (Indiana offset the trade imbalance by not having a ten-cent per can deposit, so people from Michigan would drive down to buy their beer and save $2.40 a case.)  I think they may have had a pick-three or pick-five drawing then; they didn’t have the actual Lotto until the mid-eighties.  But scratch-off tickets were part of the whole Sunday routine: reluctantly attending CCD in the morning, sitting through the 11

mass and wondering how much of the liturgy got cribbed by George Lucas in the Star Wars movies (“may the force be with you/and also with you”), then getting a box of donuts and some scratch-off tickets at the Harding’s grocery store and then going to my grandma’s.  I recall hitting the occasional free ticket or $1 prize, but mostly remember getting silver dust underneath my fingernails.  I was also logically perplexed about those games where you scratch off one thing in each column to match three numbers.  Like, say there were nine numbers and you scratched three and did not win, what if you then scratched off all nine and found out you just uncovered the wrong three things, and a winning combination actually existed on the card?  And what if I scratched off three and won a million dollars and then my little sister got ahold of the card and blindly scratched off the whole damn thing?  Also, couldn’t Superman use his x-ray vision to look through the silver scrapeaway paint material and cash in?  I mean, I guess Superman had a lot of other fallback income opportunities that would utilize his superpowers (safecracking, dentistry, express package delivery, etc.) but that’s one that seemed to always come to mind when faced with a new stack of scratch-off tickets.

Indiana finally got a lottery when I was a senior in high school; it was a referendum in the 1988 election (I think), which I was not old enough to vote in.  (Probably for the best - I would have most likely voted for Dukakis, and that didn’t work out for anyone, unless you consider drinking rubbing alcohol ala Kitty Dukakis’s alcoholic bottoming-out a good outcome.)  I remember at the time I thought a lottery was a no-brainer; if you were dumb enough to invest the money every week in a long shot that never paid out, you essentially gave free money to the schools and roads and whatever else the program would allegedly pay for.  But I remember, at least in Elkhart, a ton of conservative backlash that I didn’t fully understand.  The moral majority types thought of the lotto as legalized gambling, and this was before the days of an Indian casino every dozen and a half miles across the Midwest, so Vegas and AC were pretty much the only games alive at that point.  I thought the whole thing was ludicrous, but I also hated how the median age in Elkhart was something like 87 and pretty much every old, cranky bastard that wrote letters to the editor and put giant stupid signs in their yard about how scratch-off tickets were the devil also ended up at my cash register every weekend at Montgomery Ward’s, yelling at me about how they wanted to talk to my manager because I wouldn’t sell them a distributor cap for their 1927 tractor and it was all my damn fault we didn’t stock parts for every single machine made by every manufacturer from the civil war to present.

If you really want to find yourself some lottery enthusiasts, go visit a factory.  The summers I spent working in factories during college, pretty much every coworker I had played the lottery like a fiend.  These were people with 19 DUIs and three child support payments to three different women who couldn’t add seven to six without counting on their (remaining, not severed in punch press) fingers, but give them a new scratch-off game and they were Albert Fucking Einstein with their theories on odds and probabilities.  If I could have bought a food truck in 1989 and sold cigarettes and lotto tickets in a mobile route that covered all of the major factories in Elkhart’s industrial park, I’d be typing this from my own god damned island right now.

And I’m not just dropping a “poor people are stupid - stop fucking your sister and go learn to read” and leaving it at that, because I realize the situation’s a lot more complicated than it appears.  For one thing, these are people with no way out, at least compared to the non-flyover state elite.  I mean, they aren’t going to land a book deal or sell their web site to Time-Warner or get rich from a startup that’s on the forefront of some new technology.  They’re not getting stock tips from college buddies, and they’re not getting tuition for law school from a trust fund that’s passed through generations going back to the Mayflower.  They’d be damn lucky to get a job unloading trucks for Mayflower for ten bucks an hour.  The only option was to keep working until they dropped dead, and maybe there was the off-chance that they could turn a dollar into a million dollars.  And money can’t buy happiness, but when you have no money, it’s not like you’re infinitely happy.  When you’re broke,  you constantly think that money magically fallen from the sky that would finally shut up the collection agencies and keep the power from going dark at the end of the money would be a great thing.

There’s also the issue that there’s compulsion and addiction behind gambling, even if the gambling is in the form of a lottery.  I used to work with a dude at Monkey Wards who managed us unloading trucks of furniture and electronics at 6 AM every day.  He won the Illinois state lottery, some massive prize of something like a couple million, and he took the option where they paid it out every year for 25 years or whatever it was.  And he bought a house on a golf course even though he didn’t play golf, and had a bunch of sports cars and trucks and other fun toys.  And of course he wasn’t happy.  And he would go nuts just sitting at home, so he worked as a receiving manager for $8.25 an hour or whatever the hell we made back in 1993, and drove a Lotus to work every day.  And even though he had money coming in, and he had money in the bank from this cleaning company he started and then sold, he was a lottery junkie.  He’d play a hundred pick-six tickets at a time, with insane conspiracy theory systems for numbers, and that shit worked for him once, so of course he was a damn expert at it.  And he’d go to a 7-Eleven and buy the entire roll of scratch-off tickets in one clip, several times a week.  I’d come in at 5

and he’d be sitting at the desk back by the loading dock, quarter in hand, scraping away at a giant line of 150 perforated cardboard rectangles, mountains of silver dust shavings everywhere.  “Hey man, look - I won $50 on this one!”  Yeah, but you spent $300.  And you need to spend $30,000 on a good stretch of in-patient therapy at an addiction center.  I’m sure he hit some big cash in small streaks and spurts, and every time probably seemed like a half-step closer to some kind of mental happiness, and of course it wasn’t, just like a little bump of coke or a line of speed is going to make your problems go away… for just a second.

So yeah, I don’t really play the lottery.  I think I bought one Indiana ticket in my freshman year of college, just to say I did, and it was about as rewarding as burning a dollar bill (I mean, if you’re not a pyro that doesn’t enjoy burning stuff.)  But I do find myself in front of the occasional slot machine on a vacation, so color me stupid there.

Here’s the latest time machine for me: I got this stupid sunburn on Sunday, which isn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s an annoyance, mostly because I’ll be sitting here during the day, staring at a FrameMaker window, and then suddenly realize I’m scratching my arm like a crank addict trying to break out of a straitjacket, and it takes so much effort to stop, I could probably channel the same amount of energy into levitating small cars.  So I dug through the medicine cabinet, which I should probably be packing into cardboard boxes for the move, and found this Tropicana sunburn gel crap, which is a bright artificial aqua-blue, and smells like some kind of synthetic fruit punch they only sell in inner-city liquor stores for 89 cents per three liter bottle.  I hate putting the stuff on, because it’s got this horrible stickiness to it, like a bad hair product you’d use if you had one of those faux-hawk things and read a lot of Details magazine.  But it has lidocaine or benzocaine or one of the -caines, and it anesthetizes the demon itching, at least for about five minutes.

I got this stuff on my honeymoon in 07, which is why it’s such a strong memory for me.  (It’s also probably why it doesn’t work well - I’m sure it has an expiration date of 08 or 09.)  We spent a week in the Bahamas, at Atlantis, and I spent about 80% of the days on their inner tube ride, where you sit in a circular rubber inflatable oval, your ass in the water and your arms and legs sort of half-sticking in the air, as a gentle current carries you through this artificial winding rapids constructed out of cement and fake scenery.  I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for this kind of ride, especially when it’s hot out and you’re surrounded by ocean and palm trees and a small army of natives all furiously working for their share of the tourist dollar in a place where the annual per capita GNP would otherwise be about the cost of a McDonald’s Value Meal.  I guess the fact that upon egress from the ride, there was an endless number of people all willing to hand you a towel or a fruity drink or a room service-priced hamburger had little to do with why I enjoyed looping around a chlorinated whitewater rapids, but it made the experience that much better than riding the same attraction at Knott’s Berry Farm.

We spent a lot of time trying to go off the beaten path on this vacation, but the whole battle plan of the Atlantis resort is they want to contain you within their economic sphere, and they will be god damned if they want you to pay any less than five dollars for a bottle of Coke.  This worked to our great disadvantage because Sarah’s luggage got lost, and she spent the majority of the honeymoon wearing $39 t-shirts from the gift shop, with no other real options.  We did talk to the bellhops and staff about where else we could go, and everyone was insanely friendly to us.  I found it somewhat disconcerting that most of the people who brought towels to the pool had gone to the US for college, and probably got full rides on scholarships to obscure places in Oklahoma or Wyoming, but then came back to the island to work for tips, which was probably more per day than you could make in a week pulling hard labor on a construction crew.  Everyone we met had five kids to feed, and every women we met spent entire conversations telling us how they were done with men, how the Bahamian male was only interested in one thing and then quickly moved on.  We got that conversation on the first cab ride we took, a 40-minute drive across the length of the island in a right-hand-drive minivan.

I half-listened to the patter of the cab driver while looking out of the window like Captain Willard watching the river unwind in Apocalypse Now, complete devastation on either side of us.  The night was completely black, no streetlights, no house lights, just the glare of the headlights carving through darkness and revealing this winding road that was almost as poorly-kept as an Indiana county road.  We’d pass by someone riding on the wrong side of the road (well, everything was the wrong side of the road here), riding some beat-up mess of bicycles mashed together into some kind of cart/pickup truck hauling a bunch of loose pieces of junk lumber and driftwood.  We drove by this big open area where they held a fish fry, a bunch of blazing fires in the darkness, people huddled around this strange carnival setting, a bunch of single-story houses built by the old British colonists, looking like some of the guard buildings from the movie Papillion.  I’d left the country a few times before this, but it was always to places like Canada, the Netherlands, Germany - I’d never gone somewhere that still featured artesian wells instead of indoor plumbing.

Anyway, I got a horrible sunburn from this stupid inner tube ride, and it wasn’t just a uniform shade of red; I ended up with this bizarre farmer’s tan in the inverse of where you’d sit in an inner tube, pure red broken up with a band of white.  And I went to the gift store and bought this 26-dollar bottle of ointment, and spent each evening coating my arms and legs with the junk.  We did a lot of stuff on the trip, but the smell of this bright blue medication reminds me vividly of the evenings we spent in the living room of the suite, waiting for this blue gel to dry, eating giant room service meals and going through every snack and drink in the mini-bar, because the crap was just as expensive in the store downstairs, and you only get married once.  We tuned the big screen (one of the big screens - this room had two giant TVs) to the ALCS games, watching the Indians slug it out against the Red Sox amidst a sea of bugs. The Rockies already finished the NLCS right before we left, and I wanted to know who we’d be playing in the World Series.

(Weird trivia I just found out while cruising through the wikipedia article about the 2007 ALCS: Joe Buck went to Indiana University at the same time I did.)

We did a lot of other stuff on our trip - nice dinners, a couple of trips into town, some decent walks at night, looking at the ocean under the moon and peering into the giant shark tanks scattered across the resort, looking at giant manta rays bigger than my car.  And as I wait for the lidocaine to kick in, and smell this distinctive fake-fruity smell, I remember all of this again, and it seems like it was five lifetimes ago and on a different planet than the Oakland I see outside my window.

Okay, time to get to work…

I think this sunburn is fucking with my head. I went to the Rangers-A’s game yesterday and it was hotter than hell out for the end of September. I think part of it is the Oakland Coliseum is such a horrible place, all concrete and built by the same architects that turned out prisons in former Soviet republics in the mid-1960s. After a couple of innings, I retreated back to the concourse and walked a loop around to see the sights. There’s a huge void where center field is, a concrete tunnel of nothingness where they shut down all of the concession stands and restrooms, and it looks like some secret tunnel system under a major city, a place where mole-men would live, only it’s a handful of people who are looking for shade or maybe cell phone reception.

I thought I escaped with no sunburn, and my arms still looked white, but then like three hours later, almost like clockwork, I looked and everything was the color of a Coke can. Is that like how you cook a steak for a certain amount of time, and then you let it rest for a certain amount of time, and it still cooks on the inside or whatever? I never fully understood the whole resting thing. It’s sort of like how you have to rinse pasta in cold water to stop it from cooking. Why not cook it for less time and not rinse it? I can’t imagine people in 1827 cooking at a covered wagon, saying “you need to let that shit rest for two minutes!” as Indians shot flaming arrows dipped in shit at their wagon trains.

Wikipedia has this new feature (maybe it’s not that new) where you can mark a bunch of articles and then make a print book out of them. I’m tempted to find a thousand cool articles and make a nice bound book out of them, because it seems like I keep going back to the same articles and reading them over and over. Like, for example, every 17 months I feel a need to dig up as much information as possible about The Day the Clown Cried.  I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I think if I eventually google enough, I’ll find a copy of it on YouTube.  Anyway, finding a hundred or a thousand articles would be great, except I’d spent forever doing it, and never finish, because I’d always think the next cool article would be only two more clicks away.  And then I’d get into a huge thing about how to organize and order the articles.  Like, should there be a chapter on cult conspiracies, or should each cult leader be in alphabetical order in a “people” chapter?

It’s time to start work, and it’s now twilight at six AM.  I think pretty soon it will be pitch black, which means I will soon spend an hour a day googling to find the best full-spectrum light bulbs.