Dave Brown

Bitter songs, fight!

I was listening to the Wallflowers today, a band known for a cynical point of view and somewhat bitter lyrics. They came up with the following lyrics from the song “Health and Happiness”:

I wish you health, I wish you happiness, I wish you happiness, but absolutely nothing else.
I wish you health, I wish you happiness, I wish you happiness, but absolutely nothing else.
Now I’m not here to keep an eye on you, I think you misunderstood.
Yeah, I could make thing easy for you. I won’t but I could.

Which kind of reminded me of a different song, which I then had to listen to several times to get out of my system.

Dreams Come True is a band known for their generally-positive outlook and cheerful lyrics. Hence the following lyrics:

I can feel the sun is rising,
I open up my eyes and then I see
You’re not next to me
I think I feel a little dizzy
Maybe I should sleep away the day,
And make it go away
But now the leaves are falling,
A brand new day is calling…

I don’t want to lay here feeling sorry for myself
I don’t want to hate you, but I don’t want to wish you well

Ouch.

I think that Dreams Come True wins this one pretty well hands down. At least Jakob Dylan wishes his ex health and happiness. Dang. Miwa Yoshida is just...more bitter. I wonder what happened to her.

Odd weather

I think there must have been a small tornado around these parts in the last few days. On Tuesday morning, both of my bikes were covered in a fine layer of mud, and it took a bunch of puzzling on my part to figure out where it could possibly have come from.

I took the big bike to the car wash and endured the strange looks of the other patrons as I hosed it down. I’d rather have a clean bike than an obvious commuter bike that looks like I decided, on a lark, to take it offroading.

This modern world

How’s that whole male privilege thing working out?

Stupid datacenter monkeys

I just got phoned to confirm that a fileserver wasn’t down.

At five in the morning.

Because it wasn’t fucking obvious from the nagios display that the stupid fileserver wasn’t down.

As a bonus, I’m dead fucking last on the on-call list this week. And the on-call list has four people on it. They went through every single other sysadmin and all of them ignored their phones. I’m turning my phone off now. If the rest of my team isn’t competent enough to answer their phones, that’s officially Not My Problem.

Christ, I work with a bunch of worthless incompetents.

Guess I'm doing something right

Tonight I went for dinner to a local restaurant that I hadn’t been to for a few weeks (which is a bit of a shame—it’s really good, and I should really go more often).

Normally after an absence like that, the greeting I’d get would be “Ohisashiburi desu!”—“Long time no see!”. Instead, the lady who part-owns the place (with her husband) looked at me and said, “Wow! You’ve lost so much weight! How did you do it?”

I had to admit that the Wii Fit helped. She laughed.

The iPhone has a clearly-better user interface

When I broke up with an excessively-spammy girl, there were something like three hundred text messages from her clogging up my phone. I didn’t want to delete messages from other people, but my choices on the Nokia were either delete everything or delete individual messages. Very, very slowly.

So I got rid of the phone and got an iPhone instead. It was easier, and the Nokia was crashy and falling apart anyway. I’m unimpressed at Nokia’s recent efforts—and they used to make really good phones, too.

The most recent ex-girlfriend wasn’t nearly as verbose, but there was still communication from her clogging up the phone. However, on the iPhone, deleting all of the correspondence from a single person is a simple matter of going to the message index page, swiping your finger across their name, and hitting the “Delete” button that pops up.

The iPhone: for those times when you just need someone entirely out of your life.

Ouch

Apparently in my dreams I am Mark Trail, punching out villains with a vicious right hook.

Well, that’s the only reason I could come up with for why my right hand was painfully cramped when I woke up this morning.

Kaboom!

My ride to work today featured not one, but two accidents.

The second was, as far as I could tell, pretty minor. A guy hit one of the slippery spots in the Shintoshin Tunnel (which has these weird rainy bits all the time), and spun out, banging into the wall. As far as I can tell, nobody was hurt, but he still apparently managed to do enough damage to merit police attention.

But the first was considerably more spectacular. I first saw the flotilla of cops that’d closed off a couple of lanes of the road so they could clean up the mess. Then I saw the car with its entire front end bashed in.

Then I looked again, and saw the van that the car had hit. Several feet away. With a huge dent on its side. Which was at this point, facing skywards. Apparently the guy had knocked the van over on its side and made it slide up onto the sidewalk a decent distance.

I just hope everyone in the van was wearing their seatbelt. When I tried looking for news of the crash on Google News, I couldn’t find anything, which presumably means that nobody was injured or killed.

Seatbelts, guys. Wear them.

Bechdel's Rule

There is a meme that has been propagating around the Internet, that has been dubbed “Bechdel’s Rule”, even though Alison Bechdel was only passing on her friend’s suggest. It says that a worthwhile story is one that has two women talking amongst each other for a significant conversation, about something other than a man.

This is a pretty easy rule to satisfy.

I propose a straight-guy corollary to Bechdel’s Rule. In my world, a story is also worthwhile if it has:

(a) a man and a woman of similar circumstances, who

(b) engage in an extended, plot-advancing conversation, and

(c) do not end up in bed together.

I’m just getting a little burned out on the number of men and women in the stories I read who get to talking and this (apparently, obviously) leads directly to romance. Men and women are just as capable of seeing each other as equals and (shockingly-enough) friends in the real world. Why shouldn’t this also show up in fiction?

Brainfart

On Monday, I took my bike to the shop to get its 15,000km checkup, maintenance and a new drive belt and various other possibly-expensive things. Depending on how worn out those various other things are, of course.

So yesterday, I sucked it up and took the train to work. I managed to get in early enough that it wasn’t overcrowded at least, which was a good thing. Nice chance to get in a bit of exercise before starting work too.

This morning, I woke up, and really really didn’t want to take the train. Then, while I was getting dressed, I was thunderstruck by a sudden revelation.

I have more than one motorcycle.

So I took the little bike to work instead. Roaring along Yamate-dori at terrifying speeds of up to 50km/h! Man, that thing can go.

On the way home, the roads were eerily free of traffic. It was actually kind of frightening, because there was so little traffic that what cars were there were speeding along with merry abandon, flying right past me as if I was standing still.

And then there were the suicidal bicycle riders. On the way home, I narrowly missed creaming a young fellow who was riding way too fast, not looking where he was going, had no lights on, swerved out into the road right in front of me, and was going the wrong way on a major road. I wish him good luck on his dream of a violent death, but I’m glad I wasn’t the agent of it.