Did John Tesh rewrite my article?

I sort of promised that I'd shut up about my article on jerk-gadgets, but I found this link last night that I hope you'll forgive me for sharing.

It looks like John Tesh, or someone associated with Tesh.com found my article, excerpted parts, and made them yet safer for a family audience.

I honestly don't know how one should feel about it. It's so curious.

Have a look for yourself:
http://www.tesh.com/ittrium/visit?path=A1x97x1y1xa5x1x76y1x243dx1x9by1x2442x1y5x19c28x5x1

Meanwhile, on the topic of Tesh, this Brandon Bird picture cracks me up every single time I look at it. You should go check out his other art as well. It'll mess with your head.

More the little red engine than sisyphus, I hope.

Sometimes, during the deep of the night, I'll consider my life and make sad, musical harumphing sounds like a plaintive Scandinavian walrus. In the last year and a half or so, I've had some setbacks. My salary rose sharply, then dropped precipitously. I saw the end of a relationship I thought had a lot of potential, and I moved from NYC to Reston-goddamned-Virginia.

Very recently my salary rose again (from 0, but not to earlier heights I'm afraid) and now I'm getting the hell out of Reston and back into a town where there is stuff to do. I'm hoping that this marks the upswing of various trajectories of my life rather than the valley of a sine wave, but I guess we'll have to wait to see. If I can just get my business off the ground, figure out the details of my plan to save investigative journalism, and find a smart, hot, interesting woman to date, I'll be grand.

If I can't make that happen in the coming year, I'm taking my money, moving to Cuba and really leaning in to a dotage of dissolution, drink and decay. Ole.

Moving to D.C.

Let me just say that Craigslist works like a charm. Holy cats!

Maybe it's because the last time I looked for an apartment I was living in NYC (where I recently, no joke, saw a Craigslist listing where someone was willing to sublet their bathroom for someone to live in - as long as they got out when the owner needed to use it), but this process seemed crazy easy. I started looking up apartments yesterday and by this morning I'd seen two places I'd consider moving into on Monday.

I have a handful more to see tomorrow, but I'm happy with the ones I've seen thus far, so I'll probably be a D.C. native by two weeks from now. I can move stuff slowly, because I have to give my current landlord some notice.

I guess I could wait and find a place in a month (since craigslist seems to work so well), but I hate Reston as you already know. More than I hate Reston though, I loathe my commute with the fiery intensity of 10 billion white-hot suns. I'm moving sharpish.

--- UPDATE ---
Fuck Craig and his list. I found a place through a friend. Yay!

Oh no! We might have to learn to amuse ourselfes!

Clearly someone at the FCC made an error when thinking about the change to digital TV. Apparently even with the required converter box, lots of TVs show crappy pixelated pictures.

Obviously, folks who have been happily paying nothing for TV and getting fair pictures for years are going to be perturbed. Still, the tone of the complaints makes it sound like the government is cutting off water.

I'm no "Kill your TV" guy, but seriously, it's just TV. Listen to your radio for news then go outside and run and jump and skip and play. TV mostly disappoints after all, doesn't it?

I am a slow-ass writer

This weekend has been largely written-off to proper work. A project I was working on sort of as a lark became increasingly important as it evolved, so now I'm working on the weekend to get it ready by Monday.

At the same time, as long as I'm spending a great deal more time close to home than I'd anticipated, I'm also catching up on some writing I owe MSNBC. My clever friend at MSNBC talked about how they pay pretty well for freelance stuff, but I'm starting to think that's because she can write witty stuff in about a tenth the time it takes me. I've been laboring over this piece for ages and I'm still not happy with it.

I guess I'll continue to rely on coding to earn my keep - at least until I can write an interesting piece in 4 hours and be assured of more demand.

Going snowboarding

Well, I'm headed up to Whitetail today for some snowboarding and reflection.

I hope not to freeze, and I hope to get back in time to finish some work. Still, skipping it isn't an option yet.

Ah the new year

Well, I went to MI and passed a great xmas with the family. New Years was spent in Boston with some buddies, a couple of whom I'm working with on GiftGaff. (Hi guys! The code's coming along nicely and I'm right now avoiding it for a moment because all the PHP errors have me down ever since I turned them on to root out whatever's eating a whole chunk of page). It was good to see everyone face to face, especially including Eric and Erica my hosts.

The only bummer was being literally the only single straight person at the party at the stroke of midnight. It might have been worse to be the only single gay guy though, so perhaps I didn't get the worst of it.

I started a job on Monday and it's in Annapolis which might almost just as well be Pluto for the commute. Jesus. Christ. The new commute, among other things, is finally turning me into a full-on misanthrope. Look, the rules are, you drive on the right until you come up on someone going slower in front of you. Then you move to the left and pass. If there's no one to your right, you go back the hell over there. Rinse and repeat.

If we all do it, the emergent property might be that I get to goddamned work without having an embolism so urgent I choke on it. Also, your signals inform people where you're driving your stupid car. It's not goddamned rocket surgery.

On the plus side, it's been raining to fill the pound lo these last couple of days and commuters' common sense seems to be made of spun sugar. No, wait, on the plus side, when I did get to work today, I learned about some neat-o technologies for using twitter. How neat-o? Perhaps neat-o enough to make me want to use it more. That's pretty good really. Soon all my (not very many) followers will get twitter spam from some magpie jerks.

If nothing from that previous paragraph save the oblique reference to raining cats and dogs made sense to you, count yourself lucky. Seriously, I'm becoming a carpenter or an ascetic or something. I can see the appeal to going offline altogether. Maybe I'll just walk the Earth like Caine from Kung-Fu. I do, after all, know kung-fu, which is more than could be said for David Carradine when he did the show.

Okay, back to coding and then to bed so I can wake up an hour ago to assure a manageable commute.