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Memestealing from Pat, Kitty, etc.

The rules, such as they are:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers. (Right click the mosaic to copy and save.)

And the questions/answers:

1. What is your first name? Corey
2. What is your favoriate food? sushi
3. What high school did you go to? East
4. What is your favoriate color? blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Bob Roll
6. What is your favorite drink? Martini
7. What is your dream vacation? Tofino
8. What is your favorite dessert? Scotch
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? retired
10. What do you you love most in life? Stephanie and Fletcher
11. What is one word that describes you? caffinated
12. What is your flickr name? cap

One of my favorite things about our neighborhood is that it’s ideally set up for the Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge. There’s a grocery, a green grocer and a TJ’s all within two miles of the house. The green grocer (Dogwoods) we’ve ridden to a couple of times for the produce run. Pavilions we walk to whenever we’re only picking up a couple of things. The TJ’s, on the other hand, has always seemed a bit ambitious to us. Our usual run there is food for the week, which we just don’t have the gear to get home on the bike. Today, however, we’re going to a Chardonnay tasting, and that’s definitely within the realm of what we can fit in the rack bag:

Perhaps the best part of biking to the store is that it feels more like a fun outing that it does an errand. It’s nice to know that TJ’s is within easy bike distance for small runs.

By way of brief product review, we use a pair of TransIt grocery bag panniers for the Dogwoods run:

They can hold our produce for the whole week and come with shoulder straps to make shopping with them easy. We even took them on a bike camp out with Fletcher’s scout troop, on which they very capably carried our sleeping bags and tent. Recommended.

The rules of Bingo Scrabble, such as they are:

• Every play must be a bingo
• Normal dictionary rules do not apply. (That is: words may not be challenged)
• Definitions for each word must be provided
• Score is not kept
• Everybody wins

Tej and I have the same accent. Not too surprising given we’re both (more or less) from the highlighted part of the map.

Panic’s Steven Frank explains the company’s MacWorld bribe policy:

• Sandwiches / Pizza / Burritos: A sincere effort will be made to resolve the bug upon our return
• One of whatever new hardware Apple announces: Our special “white glove” service — while working on your bug, we’ll wear tasteful white cotton gloves
• Cash bribes in excess of $10,000: Please talk to a Panic representative regarding our Platinum Level Bribery Plan, which includes rights to sleep on our office couch when in Portland and a secret handshake

Good stuff.

Available now at discerning news stands everywhere: The September/October issue of Pilot Getaways magazine. This was Stephanie’s first issue with PG. She’s had a grand time working with the whole team there.

I love games, but I hate dice. They vex me so. Especially while playing Settlers of Catan. If you’re twice as likely to roll a seven as you are a four, then why in the hell has four come up five turns out of the last six? Etc etc. You get the idea.

Inspired by Erich’s dice-by-cards Catan variant (and also by not having a spare deck of playing cards, and also by having recently taken pictures of a six-sided die) I put together Fair Dice. It’s a goofy little JavaScript application that will roll all thirty-six combinations of two dice once in random order. When it’s done, it will do it again.

Now, is this sort of thing useful? Who knows. Probably half the fun of a game like Settlers is watching people fume when threes and elevens come up over and over and over again while those sixes and eights that they so wisely choose at the beginning of the game go fallow. So you know me: I like to destroy fun.

A random non-gaming aside: How do people write web pages without FireBug? I looked briefly at making sure that this works correctly on IE and Safari, and I couldn’t tell what in the world was going on. For the longest time the page didn’t do anything because apparently Safari and IE (IE 6, at least) don’t understand the “const” keyword in JavaScript. Infuriating! Anyway, if you’re having to contend with JavaScript, I can’t recommend FireBug quite enough.

(Fair Dice)

This morning, Stephanie, The Kid and I decided to go on a hike. We had already blocked out a chunk of the afternoon for sitting in front of the TV watching the Kentucky Derby and (for two of us, at least) having some mint juleps, so an afternoon out in the mountains seemed like a good counterbalance.

We drove up to Big Santa Anica Canyon and decided on the trail up to Hogee’s camp. The way up was fine. The weather was perfect. The trail was in good condition. Good times. We made it maybe two thirds of the way up before we had to start heading back in order to make it home before post time.

About a mile from the trail head The Kid stepped right over a rattlesnake. Literally. The snake must have been crossing the trail just as we were coming down, because another couple coming up had passed that point not two minutes before we got there. I seriously doubt that the snake was, you know, hanging out on the moderately busy trail sunning itself.

As it turns out, even people who have never heard a rattlesnake before know exactly what one sounds like. The Kid heard the hiss and the rattle and took the hell off down the trail. I’ve never seen him — or anybody, for that matter — move so fast. This was a good thing, because it got him out of the way of the snake, which was absolutely the appropriate thing to do. However, it did put me and Stephanie in an awkward position, as The Kid was down the trail and around the bend, we didn’t know if the snake actually bit him, and chasing after him was made difficult on account of the pissed off rattlesnake sitting in front of us on the trial.

Being a lifelong suburbanite, I’m not nearly as up on my animal kingdom language as I should be. There was a troop of boy scouts maybe a quarter mile up the trail from us, and I’m sure they could have accurately intrepreted what the snake was trying to tell us. Left to our own devices, all Stephanie and I could come up with was “stay back there or I’ll bite you.” I think we were probably right, or close enough at any rate.

Wanting very much to find out if The Kid was ok — we could hear him yelling at us from around the bend, which was promising — I did my best to communicate to the snake that it should get off the trail. There was a good sized stick by the side of the trail, so I grabbed it, broke a little chunck off and threw it at the snake. The message I wanted to send was “my species got to where it is in large part because of its ability to use improvised tools. So piss off before I get that big rock over there and crush your skull.” I don’t know if this was a good idea at all or even necessary — the snake probably would have taken off on its own had we left it alone, just like the other couple rattle snakes I’ve run in to have done — but I was in a hurry, and it worked, so oh well.

We trotted down the trail a bit and found The Kid just around the corner. He was a little shaken and all the way adrenaline-tastic, but the snake didn’t get him and he didn’t go tumbling down the side of the hill, so we were happy.

What did strike me as silly is that while we had water and first aid kits and whistles (well, most of us. While Stephanie and The Kid were well prepared for the hike and had whistles on them, I choose to not bother with probably the most important piece of gear you can have out in the woods. Smart.) and what have you, I don’t think we had anything for snake bites. And honestly, aside from “keep the bitten bits lower than the heart, stay calm, etc etc.,” I don’t at all remember what to do with snake bites. Had he been bitten, our only real save would have been the boy scout troop with all their gear up the trail from us (It looked like they were doing a shakedown hike for a trip this summer), as most of the looked to be the right age for having somewhat recently earned their first aid merit badge. I think that covers snake bites. Either way, I feel silly for not having a better idea of what to do in that situation.

It wasn’t too far from there to the trail head. I picked the winner for the race and probably won’t hike in shorts next time.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63

I personally would have gone with f8 rather than f9.  F9 is so last year.