My good friend John T (Tiberious?) Finnegan died last year. His community was most solidly defined by playing NERO. Michael Ventrella told me about his death and directed me to the Nero Alliance online forum where many people came to mourn him. Here are the the pages of this memorial as of 2-20-09.
Note: You’ll probably want to right-click and open these images in a new window. Otherwise they will look like long, illegible strips
Oh and also… the Chairman of the FDIC wants to fucking give all of MY money to the thieves and shyters that gave and got bad home loans over the last several years. Listen to her give away MY money in this NPR interview: FDIC Head Sees Wide Benefit From Foreclosure Plan
The primary benefit to the American people of course being that I won’t be able to buy a cheap house that was forclosed on from one of these bastards.
“Bastard” isn’t an entirely appropriate term. Only the lenders that knew they were making bad loans should be called that. The people that were buying them should be called “idiots”.
A friend wrote to me today about his failed hard drive:
This weekend my laptop HD, a hitachi 250GB. suddenly stopped.
While running disk warrior on it, it failed into the famed click of death.
Would be very interested in recovering some of the data from it if you have any brilliant ideas.
If the data is very important, you can try using Drive Savers. It’s an expensive service where they open your hard drive up in a clean room. It might cost $1000-3000.
If you go with Drive Savers, I’m a reseller and I might be able to get you a discount on their (very expensive) service. Try giving them my reseller code: DS14221.
The deal they gave me with the reseller code is:
* 10% discount on our services to my customers.
* 10% commission paid on the net invoice after customer discount.
* No up-front charges to my customers.
* No “Attempt Fee” if data is not recoverable, there is no charge (a $200 savings).
* No charge for return shipping, if data is not recoverable.
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And you really should set up an automatic online backup. I used to use Mozy. I now use Crashplan for about $60/year. How I have Crashplan set up:
* I backup about 250 gig online and it would be a bother to backup too much more than that since it takes so long to run the backup over my internet connection.
* Crashplan also automatically makes a backup of ALL my files to a local external hard drive I got for a hundred bucks.
* I do some free peer-to-peer backups with friends using Crashplan.
Being human, I often worry about not fitting in, not being good enough, not being… blah blah blah. Geez, you’d think after 30 or 40 years, I’d have gotten over all that. But no.
Well, here is a reminder to myself that things are ok on that front.
Here are some compliments I’ve received in the last couple weeks, copied and pasted directly from emails:
I woke up yesterday morning thinking about you, so I think I must have been dreaming about you. I bet it was nice. :)
always remember we would love to see you some time!
Thanks again.
Best regards,
Peace,
Hugs
Right on Lee! Thanks! See you tomorrow
Thank you. It was nice meeting you too. do you have a myspace? most cool,
funny story: the other week I actually went to plain old lee.org… since the minute I learned your name I wanted to sing the Tenacious D song at you, but I was like ‘mehhh, he might not know what the hell I’m talking about, and then I’d just look silly…’
yay! sounds like a productive night!
Great minds!
aWWWWWWWeeeeeesome!
This doesn’t include the compliments paid to me in person and on the phone. So now I can officially let go of my angst.
My friend Marnia made these beautiful porcelain shells. She’s planning on bringing them to life by putting them in an environment with moss and such, having them glow and make sounds with some microelectronics. It’s going to be very cool. She took this photo just after taking them out of the kiln to check them out.
Charlotte got me 200 billion Zimbabwe dollars for Christmas. I love it. But now there is a 10 100 trillion dollar note. Must have for the collection! They are worth WAAAY more as collectibles on eBay than they are “worth”. A 10 Tril will set you back almost ten bucks US.
Hey wait… When I got my $100 billion notes, I heard that $100 billion would buy about 3 eggs… so they’re worth maybe $1 US. So the $10 trillion notes should be worth 100 times that… $100 US. But they are selling on eBay for $8 US…. Oh this inflation will continue / through the morning I am listening / to the bells of the cathedral / I am thinking of your voice… / and the midnight picnic / once upon a time / before inflation began…
Friday started with a battle to the death with house ants. They always come out when it rains. So I went under the bathroom sink and found the super-toxic goo the pesticide guy squirted out to kill ants. I put a chip of it on a piece of paper, added a drop of water and put it in the path of the ants. I got on the floor and watched as the ants came along and took a sip from the poisoned well I had created. I kinda feel bad.
Friday night we went out without a plan. First Charlotte Brendan and I went out looking for pizza. Standing outside our garage, bikes at the ready, our evening plans seemed kind of weak. So I called out to these people standing around, “Where should we go to dinner?” They suggested a couple different pizza places. At least it got us going. We biked all over the Mission and ended up having sandwiches at St Francis Fountain on 24th. We followed it up with going to a Super Hero Party on 24th. We met a feline superhero/villan and her friend Michael K from KQED. I mentioned Soon I Will Be Invincible to him. Oh and the little girl at the front door asking everyone what their super power was and how they would save the world was just a joy.
Saturday, Charlotte is continuing to take classes at the Cupertino extention of Santa Cruz College to become a trainer. She’s now taken 2 weekend-long courses. She described to me how she got pleasantly tipsy after class Saturday showing the bartender how to make a Sloe Gin Fizz in a good ol’ boy bar.
Saturday night Rick, Charlotte and I went to an “Apple Pie, Poker & Booze” Party at Dan Schick’s house. We all met some nice folks and I parlayed my 3 excellent hands in Anaconda into 1 ok pot and 1 large pot. The last game was intense. I started with 4 kings (a very good hand) and Alexis accidentally passed me a 3… a wild card! That card had been passed to her by her neighbor and she just passed it on! After the game, we were talking about why no one else folded even though I kept raising like a crazy person. Josh said he thought I was really crazy and didn’t have anything. Apparently I should play the crazy card more often.
Sunday morning: Waffle Time! Rick (he stayed at our place), Charlotte and I went to Treasure Island to investigate the Fire sale of the TV show Prototype This. I got some nice shelving and a big giant pile of scrap metal that SWARM can hopefully turn into something awsome.
Charlotte and I were discussing this a little while back…
When you are telling a child that they are good at something, you shouldn’t generalize, you should be specific. You shouldn’t say, “Oh you are very good at math.” Instead, say, “You did very well on that test.” If you say that they are very good at math, the first thing they will think of is how terribly they did on their last test…. they got one or two wrong. Along those lines, when you are speaking to an adult it works much the same way. If you say, “Oh Lee, you are really good at writing.” The first thing I think about is how difficult it is to write well and how much effort it takes (regardless that my final product may come out well). Instead, you can stress things like interest level and specific tasks… how well someone performed on a specific task and how they might do something more interesting and more different the next time. Don’t suggest they do something “harder” next time. Though an adult frequently associates “harder” with getting a pay raise, which would be a good thing. But that’s entirely another subject.
