Man, it’s amazing what a meal and 500mg of ibuprofen can do for a guy.

Gleetings.

I haven’t had much to say on Xanga since I left for Texas. I’m still there. Er, here. I’ll be here unti a few days after the new year rolls around.

The point is that on Xmas Eve, I started having symptoms of a pretty severe sore throat. I managed to eat dinner with my relatives, but had to cut it short and go lay down. Xmas day was spent in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Today has been slightly better, though the throat is still sore and I really shouldn’t be driving anywhere.

I get sick just about every time I come here.

I’m pretty sure I picked it up on the plane this time, though, since the woman behind me on the Albuquerque/Houston leg of the flight was coughing up something sounding like her lungs, and perhaps bits of spleen and pancreas just for good measure.

And I don’t know who named Albuquerque, but could they maybe have done a better job with the spelling? I know some folks who used to live there, and they’d call it I’ll Be Quirky, and I think I’ll just always spell it that way from now on.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster will smite those who lie!

Via boingboing we learn of the Groovetube, which makes me happy just thinking about it.

Dupseek. A duplicate-file finder in perl.

Cumbersome but free. Also pretty efficient. I started re-writing it in Cocoa/GNUstep, but then I came to my senses and realized I had to do stuff like.. well… pack for my trip to Texas.

Man, I wish I was smart enough to have an intelligent backup/archive system. I have about 20 gigs of photography on the ibook hard drive, and I have an 80 gig external drive with three full-on copies of all these photos, leaving 9 gigs for this backup. Hard drives are cheap, but they’re not that cheap.

So I’m sitting here waiting for this little perl program to sort through 60 gigs of files and kill the duplicates, so that I can make a full backup again. I’m such a fool.

Update: Forget dupseek. I let it run for four hours and it was still flummoxed. Instead, we build duff, and after consulting ‘man xargs’ a few times, we’ve got a few more gigabytes of free hard drive space.

Yay Unixy goodness! I’ll have to make a fink package for it.

Because I know some of my readers would want to see it: A Chattooga River photoset on flickr. Very lovely.

A few nights ago, I set out to buy a hose clamp.

I left at about 6:30 PM, which means it was already dark here in these northern latitudes. The plan was to catch the bus to Lake City, go to Fred Meyer (a local department store, kind of like a mini Wal-Mart without the right-wing politics), get some groceries, and maybe get a bite to eat somewhere.

I missed the bus. I walked down the Burke-Gilman trail to the main arterial where the bus runs, and apparently I just missed it, since I waited about 10 minutes. I looked at my schedule and decided to cross the road and catch the bus going the other way, to the U Village where I could find a hose clamp, but before I could get across the bus had already passed. This left me kinda sorta stuck for another 20 minutes or so, since they run on half-hour intervals at that hour.

Thinking… thinking about other places to buy a hose clamp. Up the hill at QFC grocery? Probably not. At least not worth the 10 minute hike up the hill towards another potential half-hour wait… I didn’t have my 65 schedule with me. Rite-Aid would be closed by the time I got there… Then I remembered that if I hiked down the Burke-Gilman about half way to the U Village, there’s a hardware store! Would it be open? Let’s find out.

The trail used to be a rail line. It has gentle slopes and curves, and runs right through the sleepy suburban ‘east coast’ of Seattle. The trail is paved, and is perfect for all kinds of uses, but especially bike riding.

It was the night of the full moon. I barely needed my flashlight (which I’m sure to carry with me). I used it mostly to signal the occassional biker who would glide by in the darkness. Point it at the ground and swing my arms while walking. Enough of a strobe effect without being blinding.

There were a couple of bikers who went by once, who were having a conversation. I envied their aerobic fitness. It wasn’t really a conversation, though, it was mainly one guy ranting about some workplace BS to the other guy, who would try to change the subject, and then fail. I could hear them coming from about a mile off… It was a still night.

Mostly the path was lined with silver moonbeams and shadows of trees. A feeling of weightlessness, almost. My body having no trouble keeping a good pace, looking at my cell phone occassionally to time the segments. Feeling kind of liberated, realizing that I really don’t care if I get a hose clamp tonight.

It took an hour and a half to walk to City People’s hardware store on Sand Point. City People’s sits in a shopping center with a bunch of other upscale type places. A Great Harvest bread place, a coffee stand that looks more like a jewelry store, the HQ of Windermere real estate, and Sand Point Grill, which looks really good and hopefully some day soon I’ll try it.

City People’s, however, was closed. I was ten minutes late.

Thinking… thinking of where else I could go. Down the trail is an upscale grocery store to go with the upscale nature of the neighborhood. Another ten minutes and I’m at Metropolitain Market trying to figure out if they have an auto parts aisle. They don’t, of course. They have half an aisle dedicated to boutique-brand chocolate bars, and they have more fancy cheeses than you can sneeze at, but no hose clamps.

I bought a few things. Loaded up my pack. Munching on a banana, then a Clif bar, I’m back on the trail.

I got the hose clamp the next day. Caught the bus and everything.

So there’s all this stuff in the news about Bush signing NSA orders to violate the constitutional rights of US citizens.

And then there’s this radio broadcast where he says, basically, “Yup. I did it. Thirty times. Now whatcha gonna do about it?”

Now, I can’t be the only person blown away by the fact that a sitting US President just admitted, in a radio broadcast that he didn’t have to give, that he broke the law and violated the rights of perhaps thousands of Americans. You gotta give it to the guy: Balls of steel.

He’s saying: Fly my flying monkeys! Do battle for me in the press and around the water cooler! Support me, your President, during my trying hour! I’m going to sit here and admit that I’m a fucking felon, while you argue that the war on terrorism turns felony into patriotism! Fly, fly, FLY MY MONKEYS!

And if he wins… If he comes out of this shitstained but still in power, then we don’t really live in the United States Of America any more.

Just a point of information: Wild strawberry Jell-O is not nearly as good as cranberry/raspberry. The strawberry is like eating a packet of sugar, which I suppose is pretty much what it is.