davemclain.com

I’m starting to want to do client side Linux again. There is no excuse for having that desire as I type this on a MacBook which has all the features I could possibly want from a UNIX-y environment with the additional features of Just Working for things like Flash movies, .doc files, power management, graphical user interfaces, wireless networking and booting. Clearly I hate myself.

Last week I saw this video http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/10/urban-bee-keeper-vid.html, and since then I’ve been reading what can only be described as all the beekeeping materials I can find. I recommend Beginning Beekeeping for Kentuckians.

I still only consider myself a steward of the boat rather than a true owner, but as I am now mostly capable of doing the various activities on the boat I thought it would be a good idea to document them. The page is designed to serve as both a primer for first timers on our boat as well as a reminder to veterans of the ridiculous amount of steps that happen and how overwhelming it is to somebody on their first time.

Some of the information will hopefully get better after I make another trip out to the boat, I wrote this last night, and we haven’t raised the 155 in a while, so I forget what the head and the tack look like.

I don’t know whether I should break this out into multiple pages or not, its still lacking information on stuff like “How long does a trip actually take?”, “What should I bring?”, “What should I wear?”, “Do you accept cash?”, “Where is the yacht club?”.

I noticed (as did my mom) that many of my recent posts involve the word suck. Life does not suck, it’s just that in a life that is generally quite good, the things that go wrong tend to stand out more than the things that are just slightly above the medium level of greatness.
The transition out of college continues to amaze me even though it has been 4 months since I last saw the inside of a classroom. Success is much less measurable when there aren’t things being returned to you with evaluations on easy to understand scales.

Congratulations on your improvement in learning new marketable skills, you’ve brought yourself up to a 92.5. Unfortunately due to the fact that you aren’t calling your friends your Social Skills have dropped to a 67, if you don’t get off your lazy butt, you’re going to do terrible on the final.

And yet, despite the flux, I feel like i’m getting the better end of the stick.

I feel like i manage to not ever be photographed. I either show up at the party before or after the shutterbug, or maybe I’m part vampire and don’t show up in many of the pictures that are taken of me. The more likely explanation is that the social circles I’m in aren’t generally big photographers. Either way, I feel like I’m missing out on future opportunities to look back on my wasted youth.

I’m acutely aware of the lack of pictures of me in a sufficiently large number of awkward BYX events, or minorly injuring myself bike riding, or working at my desk at amazon, or my desk at microsoft, or with any of the people at Austin Capital, or hanging at Matt’s place, or sitting with a  laptop in Dan Brown’s living room, or playing poker at the Mansion, or smoking cigars on Travis Pry’s porch, or drinking wine with Marcoux when we were roommates, or burning cedars at the Lemmon homestead (is it now the Lemmon ranch? (that sounds like a salad dressing)) or sitting at Einsteins with Murk, or chilling with Telschow on a Wednesday (except that real awkward one), or sailing the boat with Mac (somewhere pictures of this exist). Some of those are moments I’m looking forward to having again, but others are gone.

Apple treats its developers (people building on their “platform”) like crap. Today every person developing with the 2.0 firmware woke up to find that their iPhones are now iBricks. Apple, you don’t have to roll out the red carpet for people to come in and make your products more useful, but do you really have to continually kick us?

No, Longino did not tick me off, this post is about why Austin, TX, the city I love, is terrible. Certain cities that have a lot going for them have managed to keep away a lot of people by having stereotypes propagated to keep people away.

Seattle is a lush, green, urban landscape with only like 2 places in the whole city that don’t have views of the cities 412 lakes. The restaurants are awesome, the people are very polite and you can go skiing by driving in any direction. The summer is pleasant and cool enough that many places don’t even need air conditioning. Oh, and no state income tax plus a vibrant economy catering to an extremely educated populace. But ask any person about Seattle? “It rains ALL the time, its an alright city if the weather doesn’t make you physically take your own life.” The city did an excellent job of branding to keep people out.

San Francisco has the same thing with how outlandishly liberal everyone thinks it is, all you ever hear about is how the pinko-commie 9th circuit court of appeals is upholding 4th graders’ rights to snort pixie dust while taking Pastafarian religious holidays off from public schools or how the nutjob mayor is putting the homeless population to work growing weed to give to anybody who wants it. But the city rocks, like seriously, I don’t remember the last time I was north of San Mateo and didn’t have a blast.

Austin needs a way to keep out all the Californians*, cuz all they hear about is how its the only sane part of Texas. I think the harsh environment is the key to success in this marketing campaign.

Texas is HOT. I know you think its hot wherever you live because sometimes you sweat when you wear a t-shirt outside. No, that’s not what heat is, heat is when you lose 10% of your body mass to sweating walking from your car to the grocery store. When you leave the car running to keep the air conditioning on cuz otherwise you’ll get 2nd degree burns sitting on cloth seats. Every year about 12 percent of the population suffers mild brain damage as a result of the heat, which leads into my next point.
Texans are crazy. Sure, there’s that whole ‘friendly’ thing that we try to sell you on, but a lot of it is just to size you up, figure out if you need to be culled (for those of you not from Texas, culling is the process by which the weak are removed from the herd, think barbecue). Many newcomers to the state from the coasts are startled by the fact that people will strike up conversations with you at any time, in line at the market, in a parking lot, in a park. DO NOT BE FOOLED! The Texan is probably armed and Chapter 14 of the penal code actually classifies target practice and insufficiently friendly as crimes of passion which are only class B misdemeanors with either a 25 dollar fine or up to 2 hours in a county jail (and in Travis and Williamson counties, you get a complimentary 6 pack of Shiner Bock during your stay if the victim was from a state that voted for Kerry).

And if it’s not the human Texans out to get you, its the wildlife.Central Texas is one of those happy regions home to both the brown recluse and the black widow, the two deadliest spiders in North America, and while in other states they generally avoid humans and can be crushed by a common shoe, in Texas they are aggressive and most can only be killed by boots (hence their continued popularity). I say most, because there are those few that cannot be dropped by less than a .22 round (the reason so many Texans carry firearms (and of course to finish off conversations in the supermarket)).

In conclusion, Austin is terrible. Philip Henry Sheridan, a calvary officer in the civil war and overseeing Louisiana and Texas in the Reconstruction era, once stated “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell”. The rent better be cheap, because the A/C is permanently broken, the place is infested with deadly critters and the neighbors are homicidal maniacs.
*Yes, I spent the years between the ages of 4 and 18 in California and then immigrated to Texas. But my birth certificate says Dallas on it and I say yall and fixin’ to and will not ever build a Mediterranean style home, nor continue associating with someone who through action or inaction allows one  to be built.

I apologize to those of you who feel that they ought to have gotten more advance notice, but don’t feel left out, nobody knew this was coming, not even me.

I was cruising crewseekers.net a few hours ago and one listing caught my eye about a delivery of a 46 foot yacht from Houston to Edinburgh with brief rest and resupply layovers in the Bahamas and the Azores. One of their junior crew broke their leg Saturday afternoon. The schedule is very tight and so they desperately needed crew willing to ship out tomorrow, they’re paying 3000 dollars and covering expenses for a flight back to Houston from Scotland. The listing said to call as late as necessary, that the posting would be taken down when the slot was filled, and I did. I told the skipper that I only had experience on a lake and on a much smaller boat, but apparently just having a warm body and knowing port from starboard was enough.

I’ve spent the last hour and a half throwing together the stuff I need for the 2 month trip plus a few weeks in Scotland at the far end. I don’t know that I’m going to tell my boss tomorrow morning, but we ship out at 10 am, and I’ve got to get to Houston. My lease is expiring May 31st, so if somebody is willing to move me, there’s 1000 dollars in it for them. I wish I had another day to clear everything up, but the later we wait the worse the potential of running into a tropical storm which apparently raises the insurance rates for transatlantic voyages immensely, so really the latest that you can leave and get good wind, but still be safe is April Fool’s Day.