Patti's random noise

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:32:21 -0700

Court overturns 12-year-old girl's grounding

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Rodolfo

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 02:25:01 -0700

I took BART to and from the city today. Since it was a spare-the-air day, and transit was free for all or part of the day, lots of people did the same thing. The train into the city wasn't too bad, but on the way home, all eight cars were standing room only.

For the ride home I stood against a pole by a door, and occupied the time by reading a Mark Stantz trip report on my phone. (If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it; it's not really relevant.) As we were passing under the bay, an older Hispanic gentleman with tanned skin and a head of wavy white hair motioned to me. I walked over.

"Your hair, it is very beautiful."

"Thank you!"

"Very lovely. Did you do it because you wanted to be different?"

"Actually, yes, I did."

"It's very beautiful. You must be a wild woman."

"It's been said." I smiled.

He asked my name, and told me that his was Rodolfo. He reached his hand out as if to offer a high five, but instead he grasped my hand in his and smiled up at me. The conversation seemed to come to and end, and so I reached for my phone to start reading again.

A few seconds later, he started singing to me in a melodic but untrained voice. The song was in Spanish, but it was clearly a love song. The other patrons on the crowded train seemed completely unfazed by this-- in fact, none of them seemed to be paying even the tiniest bit of attention. I briefly considered enlisting one of them to help me out of the situation by pretending to be a friend, but Rodolfo seemed more sweet than creepy.

When he finished his song, he reached for my hand and kissed it.

The West Oakland stop came and went.

He touched my hand and smiled at me again. "You are the most beautiful..." He lifted his hands wide above his head, and looked heavenward. "Thank you god!"

The next stop was mine. He kissed my hand again as I turned toward the door, and smiled up at me one last time. "Thank you. You have made my day."

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I'm tired of Sin City

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:18:04 -0700

For most people, Vegas is a vacation-- a wild getaway to a weekend of gambling and drinking and strippers and things that happen and stay in Vegas. It's bright lights and partying, bachelor parties and free drinks. It's the real city that never sleeps, the one where you can bet as much money as you have any time of the day or night, while cocktail waitresses in skimpy outfits bring you and endless river of booze.

For me, Vegas is annoying strip traffic, stupid tourists, obnoxious drunks, ugly strip malls, bad mass-market food, bad plasticized entertainment, horrible weather, and crowded airports-- Disney for grownups, with a shiny corporate-built facade carefully calculated to appeal to the masses, and no character or substance. The whole thing is paid for by people who are bad at math. It's also poker and video poker and lots of my friends and free hotels (last weekend a comped suite at the Palazzo, much nicer than the comped room I had the weekend before) but even with the good stuff it gets tiring pretty quickly.

Two weekends ago I went to Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker ladies' event. After three money finishes in a row, this year I was in the car and driving away from the Rio 45 minutes after the tournament started. It's poker, c'est la vie. I played well, and some hoser got lucky. At this point I've done this so often that paying $25/minute to enter a poker tournament doesn't really faze me, and I could barely muster the tiniest bit of emotion for losing all my chips sso quickly after the tournament started. Most of it was regret at not having an opportunity to vacuum up chips from the horrible players at my table. I just couldn't feel the crushing defeat that the hometown heroes do when they take their big shot and miss... it's just another poker tournament.

Last weekend I played a private satellite to the WSOP, and made the mistake of winning. Normally I would have used the entry to play Saturday's nolimit event, but I had a date in town with me and there was no way I was going to abandon him for the weekend after dragging him all the way to Vegas. Knowing that I couldn't play on Saturday and would have to come back, I even made a valiant effort to not win the seat. The cards wouldn't cooperate.

Friday night, for the third weekend in a row, I head to Vegas. I'll rent yet another car (probably a PT Cruiser identical to the last two I've had), stay in yet another free hotel room, and play more poker. Going to Las Vegas is starting to feel like a multi-hour commute rather than a trip. I'm sick of it, and I really want to just stay home for a weekend. Unless something really unusual happens, though, this will be my last Vegas trip until... sigh, the end of July.

(If by some strange miracle I manage to cream 3000 opponents and win this weekend, I'll probably feel obligated to play the main event in a couple of weeks. If that happens, I'll be willing to suck it up and go back.)

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Scotch!

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:35:53 -0700

That's a lot of alcohol for someone who rarely drinks. The top shelf is all scotch, and basically all "the good stuff". the bottom right is the overflow scotch, the stuff that's more mass-market and less interesting. The bottom left is a few random bottles of non-scotch-- absinthe, tequila, gin, and a couple of other things.

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New York rundown

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:35:14 -0700

Three days. Four shows.

Kept forgetting to eat. Oops! Good food when I remembered.

Beautiful weather.

Brunch with wonderful friends.

A day spent hanging with my company's founder.

10-15 miles of walking.

Five modes of non-pedestrian traffic. Error rate: 0.

One club, meeting one really cute girl and discovering I've known her online for 15 years.

Perfect hotel, perfect location.

Visited the World Trade Center. Anger overwhelmed sadness.

Randomly found some backgammon players in a park and watched a chouette for a bit.

Cry Baby: fun, good but not great.

South Pacific: magnificent, what I came here to see and worth the trip.

Gypsy: Patti LuPone gave the single best performance I've ever seen-- literally show-stopping.

Passing Strange: strange, passably good. It woke up in the second act.

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Spam-your-neighbors: Vox got this wrong

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:07:45 -0700

Lolcat-internet-failure

This morning I got spammed multiple times by some dude who seems to have added a bejillion people to his neighborhood in order to promote his music. I think that what he did is post a bunch of stuff, and with each post he picked everyone in his neighborhood and notified them of the post. I did what any sane person would do, and blocked him.

However, this totally blows. It's an opt-out rather than an opt-in model for spam. I should not have to go opt out each and every time someone does this-- the system shouldn't permit it at all. A better design would have been for the poster to be presented with a list of people who have him in their neighborhood. These people have already indicated a positive interest and reading this person's blatherings, which can reasonably be treated as an opt-in for notifications that he's spewed.

As it exists right now, the system is eminently abusable. It wouldn't be hard to write a script that walked through the site and added everyone it found to your neighborhood, then write another script that checks everyone in your neighborhood every time you post something. Voila... Vox becomes a big (?) spam cannon.

In fact, I think I may spam my neighbors with this just to prove my point. :-)

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Public service announcement

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:20:09 -0700

If you're getting spammed by some guy who wants to share his new music with you even though you have no idea who he is, it's easy to solve. Go to his blog, hover over his user picture, and click "block".

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Assholes

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:31:19 -0700

I hope you enjoy the visibly empty box you grabbed. I hope it was worth the $2200 in damage to my car.

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Is that your dog?

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:09:43 -0700

Sunday afternoon I had about 45 minutes to kill between commitments. I also had a book that I wanted to read and it was a beautiful sunny day, so I headed up to a scenic park at the to of Potrero Hill. I rolled up my sleeves and availed myself of one of the picnic tables.

This park has lots of kids and lots of dogs running about, and many charming canines came over to say hello and get skritched while I read. I was quite happy to oblige them-- a border collie, a lab, several mutts, and even a couple of yapdogs visited my bench.

As I was leaving, there was a tiny little dog wandering around the parking lot looking lost. A father and his two young children looked up as I came by. "Is that your dog?"

"No, why?"

"He seems lost, and he's wearing the same shirt that you are, so we figured he was yours." I looked, and indeed we were both wearing pink and white striped shirts.

Oooohhhkay. Right. I'm exactly the sort of cutesy person who would dress my dog in a matching outfit. Mmm hmmm. I attempted not to be offended. The dog seemed very sweet and trusting, so I set to work trying to find his owner while the little girl asked, "Where is that dog's person? Why isn't his person here?"

One of the dog owners in the main part of the park recognized the dog, looked around, and said that his owner was gone. Lovely. Did someone abandon their dog? The other dog owner offered to keep an eye on the pink-striped doglet, since I had a photo shoot to go to.

As I was heading for my car, a white station wagon pulled into a parking lot and the inhabitants started calling out a name. Yay! The dog's people had arrived. They were quickly reunited, and I must say that I felt much better leaving with the knowledge that the critter was back where he belonged.

I will, however, make this promise to you. No matter what animals I may have in the future, I will never ever ever dress myself and my pet in matching outfits. If I do, you all have my permission to kill me by any means necessary, so long as you take care of the animal. He'll be so happy to be saved from the embarrassment that he will be loyal to you forever.

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Jack London Square hostage situation

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:43:11 -0700

My street is closed, as is the whole neighborhood. A guy down the street is barricaded in a condo with his wife and two small children. He's a parolee, and he's armed with a gun and a meat cleaver. KTVU has good video.

I'm far enough away to be out of harms way, most likely. If I lived half a block farther down I wouldn't be able to get into my building. Even if he were to get out onto the street, I'm well-protected in my building. Lots of the neighbors are stranded out on the street.

Our buddy fired at the police earlier. Early rumors were that an officer was killed, but that appears to be false. The officer I asked shook his head no, and I'm pretty sure that if one of them had been hit they wouldn't be nearly so calm.

Good times.

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