Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been planning on upgrading my desktop for a while now, and almost ordered an iMac a few months ago. I’m so glad I waited for the next generation of iMacs to be released, though! They were released this morning, and mine is ordered and on its way!

My final configuration:

• 27” screen
• 3.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 4GB RAM
• ATI Raedon HD 4850 w/512 MB RAM
• 1TB Hard drive
• 8x dual-layer SuperDrive (CD/DVD)
• Full (wired) keyboard with 10-key pad
• Magic Mouse
• iWork ‘09 Preinstalled
• AppleCare

It should be here sometime next week. Exciting!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I don’t know how soon he’ll see this, as he and Mom are off on a big, five-month trip around the Lower 48, but today’s my dad’s birthday — I hope it’s a good one!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Hottest Day Ever!, originally uploaded by djwudi.

I’ts official: as of 2:38 this afternoon (though this iPod screenshot was taken about an hour later), today is the hottest day in Seattle history! This is actually the second high temperature record set today, as temperatures last night only dropped to 71 degrees, breaking the previous record for highest low temperature…which had been set (well, okay, tied) the night before.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Lon, Prairie and Grandpa Don, originally uploaded by djwudi.

Today is Prairie’s grandpa’s 84th birthday!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I just woke up and realized that I’d completely forgotten to say anything about Father’s Day yesterday. Oops! I hope all the dads I know — mine, Prairie’s, my brother Kevin, Prairie’s brother-in-law Peter, and all our fatherly friends — had good days yesterday (and will continue having good days tomorrow and in the days to come)!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

These have already been flying around Facebook, but for those of you out of that particular loop, here’s photos from last weekend’s “Every Day is Halloween” costume night at Vogue Night…

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

As briefly mentioned earlier, Prairie and I went out to see Star Trek on Friday evening, and, long story short: given the unenviable and potentially disastrous goal of reinvigorating a much-beloved but floundering and stagnant franchise that most people had written off as long past its prime, J.J. Abrams and company managed to beat the odds and pull it off with style. In the many long months leading up to the release of the film, I’d wanted it to be good, I’d hoped it would be good, and as we got closer, the many outstanding reviews gave me hope — and for once, I wasn’t let down.

Non-spoilery Rambling

The biggest question, of course — beyond even the redesign of the Enterprise and her big nacelles, or how well the story would mesh with established canon — was whether recasting characters that we’ve known for so many decades would even work. Could they manage to be the characters without either slavishly aping the original actors, or fall into parody? Would Kirk be Kirk without Shatner’s (not quite) inimitable delivery?

Thankfully, the answer is yes. As I’ve been thinking back over the film over the past couple days, the biggest thing that stands out to me is just how incredibly well the cast did at inhabiting the essence of the characters and their personalities without falling into the trap of mimicking the original actors. Pine, Quinto and Urban as the “holy trinity” of Kirk, Spock and McCoy likely had the toughest jobs in making us believe in them as the characters, but all three of them (along with the rest of the primary cast) managed to make me a believer.

Given that much of what was done in this film was necessary to ‘reset’ the franchise so that they could move forward from here without being trapped by canon — really, I don’t quite understand how people can be upset about the device used to reset things, as without that, we’d know the future of the characters and there wouldn’t be much long-term suspense or real sense of danger — I am really looking forward to seeing where we go from here on out.

I want to see this movie in the theater again, I want to have it at home to watch again, and I already can’t wait to see what this team can do with the sequel, when they’re free to move forward.

More thoughts under the cut, as they’re going to be more than a little spoileriffic…

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

When I get a haircut…

…I get a haircut!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Continuing on the theme I started babbling about in The End of Empathy comes this Newsweek article asking, Are We In a Narcissism Epidemic?:

Perhaps, one day, we will say that the recession saved us from a parenting ethos that churns out ego-addled spoiled brats. And though it is too soon to tell if our economic free fall will cure America of its sense of economic privilege, it has made it much harder to get the money together to give our kids six-figure sweet-16 parties and plastic surgery for graduation presents, all in the name of “self esteem.” And that’s a good thing, because as Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell point out in their excellent book “The Narcissism Epidemic,” released last week, we’ve built up the confidence of our kids, but in that process, we’ve created a generation of hot-house flowers puffed with a disproportionate sense of self-worth (the definition of narcissism) and without the resiliency skills they need when Mommy and Daddy can’t fix something.

[…]

But no matter how you were raised, the handiest cure for narcissism used to be life. Whether through fate, circumstances or moral imperative, our culture kept hubris in check. Now, we encourage it. […] Well, you may need a supersize ego to win “America’s Next Top Model” or to justify your multimillion dollar bonus. But last I checked, most of our lives don’t require all that attitude. Treating the whole world as if it works for you doesn’t suggest you’re special, it means you’re an ass.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Crazy Like A Fax, originally uploaded by djwudi.

Back in 1996, this fax came in at the job I was working. There was no cover sheet, and no TO: or FROM: information that we could decipher. We saved it for a month to see if anyone would actually claim it, then were going to throw it away when I decided that it was too gloriously insane to lose. I saved the papers, taped them together, and laminated it for safekeeping. I’ve had it ever since then. Gotta love the crazy.

Click through to the image on Flickr and then mouse over for my notes doing my best to interpret the scrawls.

This really deserves to be seen larger to get the full impact.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

The writing’s been on the wall for some time now, but it’s just been made official: tomorrow’s print run of the Seattle P-I will be its last. I’m going to want to pick up a copy somewhere.

For me, first notification of the official announcement came via @moniguzman on Twitter: “Publisher Roger Oglesby just announced in the P-I newsroom: Tomorrow will be our last print edition, but seattlepi.com will live on.”

A “breaking news” banner went up on the P-I’s website about the same time, but now there’s an official story.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will roll off the presses for the last time Tuesday, ending a 146-year run.

The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the newspaper, Seattle’s oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.

The company, however, said it will maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.

“Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time,” Editor and Publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroom Monday morning. “But the bloodline will live on.”

In a news release, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack Jr. said, “Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region.”

I’m sad to see the P-I go — of the two local papers, I always liked the feel of the P-I better than the Seattle Times. It’s a little hard for me to quantify just why (though I’m sure those who follow the media more closely than I would be able to make some educated guesses), they just more often seemed to be my paper of choice.

Best wishes to all at the P-I who are being affected by this, and best of luck to the P-I’s online-only incarnation.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I suppose I should take a moment to expand a bit on today’s happenings, though there’s really not a whole lot more to say than what I tweeted earlier: the company needs to cut back, and as I was a temp employee, I was easily expendable. Apparently I should have been notified over the weekend, but for some reason all my temp agency had was my cell phone number, which I never bother checking. Still, everyone at my job was quite nice, and the manager has said that he’ll e-mail me a letter of recommendation.

I took today off to rest, process things, and generally mope around the house. Watched the most recent Battlestar Galactica episode, imported another old vinyl album, napped, and just aimlessly dinked around on the ‘net. The plan for the next few days is to take Prairie to work so that I can have the car, and then start seeing what I can find. First stop will be my temp agency to see if they have any positions open, and then…well, I’ll just have to see what I can find.

Wish me luck! The way the job market is these days, I may need it.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Meat My Valentine, originally uploaded by djwudi.

We saw this at our local Safeway while doing our morning shopping, and I immediately cracked up. Disgusting, bizarre, and kind of creepy, all in one. At least it’s “guaranteed tender”!

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone — or Happy S.A.D. (Singles Awareness Day), depending on your situation. Whichever it is, I hope you have a good one.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Last week sometime, I was brainstorming with ways to personalize the design of my site a bit while still working within my limited artistic and design sensibilities. On a whim, I emailed Shari, a comic artist whose blog I’ve been reading and whose artwork I enjoy, to see if she might be willing to sketch a version of me that I’d be able to work into the design somehow.

Shari was kind enough to agree, and since I didn’t have a particular image or pose in mind beyond knowing that I wanted to be wearing a Utilikilt, I directed her to my Narcissism set on Flickr and let her go to town.

A day or so later, Shari sent me a first set of preliminary sketches. There were a number of versions of ‘me’ that looked very promising, but down in the middle of the page was a funny little very anime-style version that she’d dubbed the ‘Valiant Camera Warrior’ which I got a big kick out of. When I wrote back to confirm that I liked the direction she was heading with the sketches, I also mentioned how much I enjoyed the Valiant Camera Warrior.

A couple days later she sent me the final artwork…and I was floored! Not only has Shari come up with an incredible comic version of ‘me,’ but she went ahead and inked the Valiant Camera Warrior as a bonus! I’ve worked the artwork into a few different places into the site design now, but under the cut are larger versions of her work.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

First off, the good news: we’re not being affected by the current weather craziness hitting the northwest. While we’re near the Green River, which is pretty high at the moment — the National Weather Service Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service has one checkpoint on the Green River, near Aburn (just south of us), which shows it at ‘Action Stage’ but already crested and predicted to drop (check other NW area rivers here — it doesn’t look like it’ll be flooding in our area.

That said, this is nuts! This stormpocalypse hit us in two stages: first the snowpocalypse, and now the floodpocalypse (yes, the nomenclature is silly, but that’s part of the fun). I’ve been watching #waflood on Twitter, and it’s been fascinating watching all the updates appear.

It’s also neat seeing just who all is involved with this method of awareness and communication. In addition to all the “normal people” giving updates, the Washington State Department of Transportation is using WSDOT and @terpening (as well as their Flickr account, the city of Bellingham, FEMA (a far cry from Katrina!), the Red Cross, King County, and probably plenty of other official organizations are joining in. Lots of good information coming out…even when the information isn’t good:

Washington Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond says Interstate 5 at Chehalis could be closed for four days.

The Transportation Department is monitoring the flooding. The DOT says I-5 is closed from US 12, milepost 68, to Grand Mound, milepost 88 in Lewis County due to the rising water in Dillenbaugh Creek south of Chehalis.

Hammond says the flooding is similar to the December 2007 flood that caused a four-day blockage on the main north-south route in Western Washington.

Hammond says when the Chehalis River crests Thursday night, officials expect water to be 10 feet deep over the highway. After the water starts falling, crews plan to use pumps and breach a levy to help the water drain out.

Hammond says about 10,000 trucks a day travel I-5 and the financial impact of the closure on freight movement is about $4 million a day. That’s made worse by the closure of the three major Cascade passes.

In fact, according to an early morning WSDOT tweet, “There are no north south routes available between Seattle and Portland, or east west routes from Western WA to Spokane at this time #waflood”. Unless you want to go to Canada, Seattle and its surrounding metro area is essentially completely cut off!

Crazy stuff, and I’m counting myself quite glad to not be directly impacted by any of this — though it came close, as Prairie’s dad sent us a shot of the Lewis River just outside his house in Woodland (in southern Washington, just north of Vancouver, which is just north of Portland).

The river holding, the rising has slowed, four feet to the top of the bank, then four feet to the main floor. Am watching close, a fireman rang the door bell, said be ready to evacuate, have been planning but have taken no action, hope that I don’t have to scramble.

It sounds like the river didn’t get quite high enough for evacuation, but that’s pretty close!

So…what’s going to be Stormpocalypse Part III?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Congratulations and best wishes to Royce and Steph, who are getting married this afternoon up in Anchorage…in fact, the ceremony starts in about twenty minutes at the time I write this. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, but hopefully we’ll get together again before too many more years pass!

My best to you both!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

We have so many books in our apartment!

For a few years now, I’ve been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we’ve been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing, but it always seemed like such a monumental undertaking that we never actually did anything about it. However, with us both on a bit of a holiday break, we decided that the time had come, and we’ve been plugging away at the collection, putting about a shelf a day into the database on my computer and then uploading the day’s entries into the LibraryThing database.

And now, the project is done: our entire library — all 1,465 books — is cataloged!

It’s a fun library, too. Between Prairie’s years in English Literature classes and love for the classics, my science-fiction collection, our mutual love for good children’s literature, and many other influences, we’ve ended up with a collection that goes all over the place.

This also gave us a good chance to get a look at how we’re doing with those authors we’re making a point of collecting: Agatha Christie, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Roald Dahl, Stephen King (a full set, we believe), and others.

We do love our books!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I’m a little bit early on this one, sure, but Prairie and I are about to head to bed, full of a great New Years Eve dinner (which to most people would look suspiciously like the traditional Thanksgiving dinner). Perhaps it means we’re getting old, but we’ll most likely be celebrating the turn of the year with snores instead of noisemakers and fireworks.

However you are celebrating (or have celebrated) the new year, enjoy it, and here’s hoping we all have a good 2009!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I keep hearing and seeing people grumble about this Holiday season. Between the economy sucking everyone’s spare change away and Snowpocalypse 2008 (that Flickr set is now updated with the rest of my snow photos, by the way) burying the entire Northwest coast under more snow than has been seen in a decade (or more), it seems like nobody’s happy.

Well, just to buck the trend, we’re not doing too badly here. It’s actually been a very nice Christmas this year. Not that these things didn’t affect us — we had to scale back on our presents a little bit, I lost a couple day’s worth of pay from work on days when we shut down, and Prairie’s been going a bit stir crazy from being cooped up in the apartment (the school’s on its winter break, so she’s not working, and she let me use the car to get to and from work, as my Alaskan-trained driving skills — mad skillz — served me well) — but it certainly hasn’t been the WORST. CHRISTMAS. EVAR. that it seems to have ended up being for many.

When we decided not to go for the HDTV, that freed up a chunk of budget for presents. So, we got a couple “big” things (I got a new stereo, so that when we do replace the TV, we’ve got a stereo that can handle the HDMI switching and all that gibberish; Prairie got a very pretty new shiny to wear) that didn’t add up to nearly as much as the TV would have been, then went to Goodwill and picked up a huge pile of books for each of us for right around $30. Once those were wrapped, plus a few other things we’d picked up here and there (dollar stores are great for silly little stocking stuffers, by the way), we had a huge pile of presents under our tree for around half of our original Christmas budget. Not bad!

Short sidenote: I love going digging for books at Goodwill. I’m a fan of sci-fi short story collections, and will pretty much grab ‘em when I see ‘em whenever we’re digging through cheap used book selections. This time, I found a real treasure: a 1958 edition of The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy that includes a special section titled “Science-Fiction becomes Science-Fast—Sputnik and beyond” and on the back notes that it includes “A novelette called ‘The Fly’—one of the great horror stories of this or any other year…soon to be a great Twentieth Century-Fox picture in CinemaScope and color.” As much fun for the era it was published in as for the stories inside!

Prairie’s been on her winter break for almost two full weeks now. The company I work for gets really slow and pulls back to a skeleton crew over the holidays, and since I’m “just” the receptionist/admin assistant, I’m not part of that skeleton crew, so I get about a week and a half off of work, from the 25th through Jan. 5th. Lose a little pay, but it’s really nice to have a bit of a Christmas break! So we’re both enjoying having a little mini-vacation time.

I’ve got a couple projects lined up for my downtime: I’m going to try to get caught up on processing photos (I’ve got a fair chunk of stuff from October and November to get through), and Prairie and I are working our way through her shelves of books, adding them to the database and formally combining our collections. We’re at almost 1,000 books so far, and expect to be fairly easily somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 once everything in the house is entered in.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Enjoy your holidays, everyone. We are!