Kennon’s Space

“It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.’”
- Sam Levenson

Warning…it looks like the federal government is now going to be regulating CO2 emissions…you know that gas that we all expel (some more than others) when we exhale. This could mean dire consequences for porn theaters, sporting events and gyms alike!

Ms Jackson concluded that these impacts would fall disproportionately on people who were poor or in ill health, and on indigenous groups.

Well that makes sense since most of the people in the US are poor and getting poorer due to Obama’s whiz-bang budget and his policy of crushing the value of our currency.

The EPA’s next step will probably be to grant the ‘California waiver’

Whew…I guess I am safe for now…but what about all those poor souls who live in the other 49 states? I hope they don’t all move here so that they can breath.

The agency says it will “conduct an appropriate process and consider stakeholder input”

Hmm I wonder if that means they are going to ask us how often we feel like we need to breath? Maybe we can avoid some of this unpleasantness through self-regulation. I personally would agree to decreasing my own physical excersion but I am not sure if that is possible without passing into some kind of catatonic state.

The endangerment finding also empowers the EPA to regulate the other five greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol – methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride

I guess this means that we will be banning beans soon too?

So while you are reading this try not to laugh too much when you check out the headline on this article. After all, laughing expends more oxygen thus increasing your personal CO2 emissions…

One of the managers in my office told me that today’s Dilbert reminded him of me…He said something about me being a highly technical asshole…it’s a good thing I am so damn good looking…

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

This is usually not my kind of thing but it blew my mind. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Why I live in California. Imagine being some pedestrian on a busy street minding your own business, thinking about your family or work or whatever as you walk along the sidewalk then *thunk* an ice dagger plunges into the top of your head and snuffs you out. The air here in California might eventually do me in…I am sure it will shave 5 years off my life. But I can pretty much know for certain that I will never be skewered by a piece of falling ice as I walk down the street…Damn thats gotta suck.

I am spending the week in Irvine with my wife who is attending some Cisco training. I have a few weeks of vacation saved so I decided to head down with her and spend my days on the beach. Work has been a serious drag lately with all the end of contract craziness so it is good for me to get out of there for a week or so. Last night we drove down to Newport Beach for dinner. We had a pretty great time at the Bluewater Grill. The food was great and the service was decent. And for the quality of the food the price was very reasonable. I think tonight I am gonna try to talk the wifey into heading over to Benihanna’s.

One of the things that strikes me most about this area is the sheer opulence. Sometimes I feel like I am the only person down here not driving a car whose original MSRP wasn’t at least $40,000. Tons of Mercedes…and not those shitty little C200 Kompressor jobs people where I am from drive. I am talking the AMG or super slick SLK models with all the appointments. BMW’s are to this place what Chevy is at home. I’m not intimidated or anything, if these wingnuts want to drive cars that cost the same as homes in some parts of the country then that is their prerogative I suppose. But the first time a valet down here turns his nose up at my modest 4-door I am gonna smack em back to east LA.

Otherwise my daughter and I are having a blast while mom is in class. We are just chillin on the beach, collecting seashells and building sand castles in the 75 degree sun. What more can you ask for?

He who tells the truth must have one foot in the stirrup.

I am in San Francisco this week on training. Staying in a decent place called the Monticello Inn. It isn’t bad. I have a few complaints about the accommodations such as, the wireless Internet connection is pretty dang slow. I was fortunate enough to get a room on the side of the hotel that faces another taller building that is very close, so I have a lovely view of a white washed brick wall. The ironing board in my room was totally broken when I first got here. But it only took the staff about an hour to bring up a new one when I called them and asked for a different one. Considering the price though I shouldn’t complain much. All the other hotels in this part of town were like double the rate of this one, and this is no dive. It is only about 100 yards away from a great sushi bar called Hana Zen. I swear if I lived in downtown SF I would weigh 300+lbs and be broke almost all the time. I love the restaurants in this city.

So I am walking to my class each day. The training facility is about 1.1 miles down Market St. from my hotel so I am getting more exercise this week than normal. Considering normal for me is almost nil now a days. The walk is really nice, San Francisco is a great walking town. The sights and smells are pretty extreme. I mean traffic sounds like traffic pretty much everywhere but San Francisco looks and smells like no other place I have ever been. And I have been around. Visually the city is crazy diverse. From really modern glass towers to ancient looking office buildings.From ill kempt transvestites, to slick bankers in silk suits. You never run out of stuff to look at. The experience is like sitting on the bench in the mall and people watching, times ten.
SF is boggling to the olfactory senses as well. One minute you are walking by Boudin and it is like you are somehow consuming this SF sourdough through your nose and the next minute the wind shifts and it is like someone just hit you in the face with raw sewage. Tobacco, both cigarette and cigar, sea salt, fish, spices of all kinds, perfumes, and body odor and other less than desirable aromas are all swirling around in the air. And the air here is rarely still. A constant breeze whips around between the tall buildings stirring all of these ingredients up into some kind of bowl of assorted Jelly Bellies for your nose. You never know which one you are going to get next, sometimes it is really good, and other times it isn’t. Still, no matter how fondly I talk about the City I am usually ready to go home to my little podunk town when the week is over. SF is somewhere I will always enjoy visiting but I could never live here.

So yesterday I was walking up Market after class on my way back to the hotel. I had this peaceful feeling going on, I am not sure why but I was just kind of enjoying my walk and taking in all the sights and sounds and smells. That is when I came up on 4 or 5 people all sitting at these card tables with these weird little machines in front of them. They each had signs that said: “Free Stress Test”. So I stopped and watched someone who was sitting at the table. He had his hand on some kind of pad and there was this little meter thing that looked something like the speedometer from my brother’s old ‘69 VW and the needle was wagging back and forth really fast. I assume it was some kind of Stressometer or something like that *chuckle*. From the action of the needle I would have thought the 20-something year old dude sitting there with his hand on the contraption would be clutching his chest in the midst of a massive coronary or something. This thing was about to spin off the face of the dial. The girl giving him the test was kind of cute. She had red hair and a pleasing look about her. Then I looked down on the table and saw stacks of L. Ron Hubbard books. Then I realized what I was watching. This was some kind of recruiting station for Scientologists! And before I could stop myself I suddenly burst out in this really loud laugh. I mean it was loud enough that several onlookers and Hubbardites all turned and looked at me. And getting anyone’s attention in downtown SF at 5pm is almost impossible, so I must have been loud…oops. A guy standing near the end of the little card table row who I guess was affiliated with the Hubbardites smiled at me and said. “Would you be interested in taking a free stress test Sir?” For some reason I could not stop smiling. I had this huge grin on my face and it took a substantial amount of willpower to keep myself from giggling like some little girl. I turned and looked at him, right in his eyes, and said “No thank you, really, I know exactly how much stress I have in my life. But thanks” as politely as I could. He started saying something about how Dianetics could change my life and about how many people had already been helped. At that point I was debating on whether or not I should stay and discuss whatever voodoo magic he was peddling but I thought better of it. Arguing with people like this was kind of silly. Arguing with people who are so sure they know what they are doing is like arguing with a friend who has just fallen in love with a chick you think is bad. You can see it in their face when they are beyond the point where reason will reach their ears. And this guy had that look in spades. It is probably the same kind of look someone like Mohammad Atta had on his face right before he stood up to start hijacking an airplane thinking about all the virgins he was going to be with in heaven. It is the same look those teenagers in the Middle East who blow up themselves and people picking out fresh cantalope in their local market in Tel Aviv have in their video farewells. Trying to reason with someone who has that look is kinda like trying to masturbate to a picture of Henry Kissinger…ain’t going nowhere. So I held my tongue and just kept walking.

I went down the street a little further and decided to stick my head into Circuit City. The CC on Market is pretty cool. I was going to buy a new Bluetooth handsfree for my Treo 700p. But the kid at the communications booth in the store didn’t seem to have any interest in waiting on me, so I went home and ordered one online instead. IMHO it was a great example of why brick and mortar retail will eventually fade away. And with service like that being the norm more often now, I would expect sooner rather than later. I hate feeling like I have to beg someone to spend my money. When I can just go home and click on something to buy it. Oh well…So I ordered this. I hope it works out ok. Most of the reviews I have read on it are pretty positive.

ok time for bed, nothing more to see here…move along.

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread and water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia.” – William Saroyan

I just got back from Minnesota last night. I was up in the great white north for some training on that Xiotech SAN we installed a couple weeks ago. The training was pretty great. I mean I went in there not really knowing a whole lot about storage and stuff and now I feel pretty confident with my SAN skillz. The interesting part of the whole thing was less the class and more the travel. I hate sounding like some kind of snobby biatch but I positively hate flying coach. So I decided to fly from Fresno because of some other reasons instead of driving all the way to LAX. The big downside on flying out of Fresno is the Hot-Wheel sized planes that fly out of that silly little airport. I mean we are talking about a city with 500,000+ people and probably close to 1 million in the metro area and the airport is a complete joke. I walked out across the hardtop to my plane because it was so little there was no jetway. The other thing that kills me about FAT is every stinking shop in the place was closed down and locked up at 8pm in the middle of the week. Even the freaking magazine stand was shutdown.

So enough of the negative stuff. My favorite part about flying is all the people. I love listening to their phone conversations. It seems like everyone is on the phone in the plane right until they close the doors. I also like listening to people talk with each other on the plane. Some people see taking a plane as this grand social experience. I mean I have sat next to some people who just would not shut up. Telling complete strangers about their entire lives. It is amazing what you can get someone to tell you about themselves on a 3-4 hour plane flight with almost no effort. People love talking about themselves. If I am not sitting next to someone who is very talkative I like trying to listen in on the conversations going on in the row in front or behind mine. Crazy stuff, and either only the most interesting people in the world fly on planes, they are mostly lying through their teeth, or my life is just boring as hell. All the stories are pretty grand. I mean this is real life reality television. Taxi-cab confessionals or something. On the way from Minneapolis to Pheonix I was sitting next to a 40-something mother and her mid-teen son. I was kind of surprised about all the shit this lady was telling her kid on a plane flight out loud with like 10 people in earshot. About how this was the best trip she had ever taken, so her son asks her if it was even better than Hawaii and she goes into this 30 minute lecture about how Minnesota was better than Hawaii mainly because of her soberiety. About how even though they travelled all the time, this was the first trip she truly enjoyed because she had been sober for the whole thing. She went on and on about how the whole trip was so much better, but how she was really nervous at times because she always felt like she could slip at any moment and get a drink. About 60 seconds into it I could tell her boy was getting sooo uncomfortable. He was trying desperately to change the subject and at one point he even started whistling nervously in the middle of her speech. I got pretty uncomfortable too so I rang the attendant and ordered a vodka tonic.