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Hey, there will be a Fireside Lounge at The Crucible in Oakland on May 10. Free for members, $10 for the public. It should be a fun evening.

I’ll be there with some flame effects.

There will be a discussion panel with some cool artists. The subject, “Creation”

And there’s always some fun, unexpected stuff going on. At memorable one, an artist friend smashed a beautiful piece of his own art on stage. It was sublime. See a photo about that one here. It’s the third photo down .

Panel Discussion participants
Continue reading ‘Fireside Lounge at The Crucible May 10 7pm’ »

I was assigned to write about this website in my Sociology class this week. You can click on the health data charts and see that although Americans spend twice as much per capita on health care than almost every country in the world, we have higher infant mortality and lower lifespan than a long list of countries. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Israel, and Cuba are kicking our asses. I’m ready for a shake up of the US medical system.

Claripro is marketed as a product to eliminate nail fungus.  It’s crap.

Let me count the ways…

Their website don’t say what is in the product because there is nothing useful in it.

All of the claims on the site are specious:

• The site says “FDA Registered Company” which means nothing.
• “As advertised on MSN, CNN.com…” Taking an ad out doesn’t legitimize a product.
• They mention their “Homeopathic Oral Nail Fungus Relief Spray”, in case you were wondering, homeopathy isn’t medicine
• Their return policy is absolute crap. You pay return shipping and  “…Refund Processing and Restocking Fee: $6 Per item e.g. 1 bottle return = $6…” They usually sell you 4 bottles at a time, do the math.
• They don’t even say how much their product costs on the website

I think the most revealing point is that Claripro is mentioned on several Zetaclear websites as being a recommended product. The Zetaclear people are bad people.

I could go on for a long time about their site. Read my blog (and the many comments) and don’t give these jerks any money.

I know the exact moment when I got my first eye floater. I was on CCSF campus at a bone marrow drive, October 2, 2012. It was windy and I thought something had gotten into my eye. It only took a few moments to realize that it wasn’t on my eye but in my eye.

I went to an eye doctor who said, “Yup, you’ve got a floater.” It hovers in my right eye, usually below and to the right of the focus of my vision, but it floats… it lags behind the movement of my eye like the answer-die in a Magic 8 Ball settling in to tell you “Concentrate and ask again.” Megan and I named it “Oliver” because he is all-over my vision. It bothers me because there is nothing to be done about it and there is a good chance it will never go away, an annoyance and obstruction to my vision for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, some day it will catch on something inside my eye and stay in the same spot; then I’ll hardly ever notice it. But for the last six months, and right now as I write this, it hovers in front of every blank surface I look at: computer screens, blank walls, blue skies.

Blah.

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith is a good movie… as long as you watch it with the RiffTrax soundtrack! (Otherwise, it is an awful, awful travesty)

Went over to Andrea’s apartment last night, potlucked, chatted about the state of teledildonics, and watched Star Wars III with Rifftrax. My sides hurt.

I started writing this in 2006 and it has sat in my Drafts folder as a reminder of… I don’t know… a reminder. It’s about my first Burning Man experience. Dunno if I’ll ever finish it, it’s a good start though. Maybe if I put it out into the universe, it’ll get finished. So here you go…

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Black Rock City, September 4th, 2004:
I was having a fine time on Saturday night, the night the Man was to be burned.

I had brought my art over to near where I was going to fly it. I was having some technical problems with it so I got out my soldering iron and I was fixing it on top of a giant box labeled “Glass Ball” in the New Day’s Eve camp. Some guy was trying to help me but was just distracting me with his constant questions; he couldn’t hold the light steady so I rode back to my camp and fetched my head-lamp. When he said that he was going to find some punani to put his meat kilbasi into (yes, he really said that), I knew I didn’t need his help and sent him away. Maybe he was on speed, doesn’t matter.

I got the plane to light up. I recall the happy neon glow on the box and the annoying guy. I was close. But then I had 2 problems. The playa was completely filled with people wandering toward the Man; I couldn’t be assured of a safe landing spot. And I couldn’t fit all of the electronics inside the fuselage. Argh! It was just too tight. If I had just 1 more day to put it together back home… When I realized it was going to be more of a pain than it was worth, and potentially a danger to bystanders, I decided to forget it. I was standing on the Esplanade and could see the Man. He was going to raise his arms any second and the anticipation was too much. My friends were waiting for me on the playa. So I stashed the plane in the Asylum container and went looking for Marah.

The plan was for Marah and I to meet at the Temple and watch the Man burn from there… A nice secluded spot (and Marah isn’t much for ambling crowds). But as I rode out, past the Man, past the solar system, I realized that the Temple was way too far out. Finally making it out there and looking back, the Man was just a dot on the horizon.

I looked about for Marah but wasn’t having any luck. Then I heard her calling me; She was walking out, alone, to meet me. I found her about 80 yards away in the dark playa. She said that, yes, the Temple was too far out. We were going to meet up with friends at an art installation.

On the way back… And while I was riding out, I got to look at the sky. The huge, gigantic, tremendous sky. I recall standing out there, looking back at our homage to “The Vault of Heaven”. So many people had put forth a tremendous effort to gather and praise the heavens and, from my vantage point just 1/2 a mile away, it appeared as nothing but a thin strip of lights on the horizon. And then I looked up. Just a 1 degree above our party, stretching for a billion billion miles in every direction, the heavens hung. My eye followed the bright swath of the Milky Way galaxy across the sky. I felt, as one does the first time they see our moon through a telescope, “Ah! It isn’t a cardboard cut-out, it’s real! It’s not just a picture, it’s a place. I could go there if I had the means. Maybe people already do live there and I just can’t see them!” I recalled how Galileo Galilei must have felt, being possibly the first person on this little marble to look up and see that the objects in the heavens were in fact real objects and not perfect celestial bodies and pinholes in the black velvet of the night’s sky.

Image: Stiched panorama of The Vault of Heaven Horizon from The Temple, Burning Man 2004

(to be continued)

Sent to Chase online today (yeah, it’s a small matter, but it bugs me every time I pay a bill)

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I know you’ve worked hard to make the new Chase site look and feel good. It’s pretty good but the new Payment Activity page is lacking.

When I go to this page, I am doing accounting and want to see all of my recent bill paying activity. Unfortunately, I only get to see some of it. For some reason, you have separated it into two thumbnails, “My Bill Pay Payees” and “My Chase Credit Cards”. As it stands, I see everything except my Chase accounts, which is rather frustrating. I can click on the “My Chase Credit Cards” page to see the rest of my information, but why should I have to? the types of information on the two pages is the same; please make the two pages into one.

The upshot is that on the Chase Bill Payment website, the hardest to manage bills are from Chase. I’m sure you didn’t intend that. Please work on it.

I wrote this to Chase Bank today
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Your new version of the Chase site has made it impossible for me to search the page with my browser (for example: ctrl-f). It is important for me to be able to search the page because it is so full of tables that are very easy to search but hard to scan with my eye.

When I try to do a search with my browser on “Pending and Past Payment Activity”, I can’t find text that spans a line. For example, The payee is likely to read something like this because of the tight columns:

Blue Cros
s acct 1234

If I search for “Blue Cross” the search comes up empty. I can tell you why this is the case. Looking at the HTML, it reads:

Blue Cros <br/>s acct 1234

That br tag is messing things up! If not for it, my browser would be able to search across the lines and find the text. Please use CSS instead of hard tags.

Made a Ruben’s Tube with Mark Rosin last month.

Saw my family in Florida for Easter

Had Squash Flower Fritters (my grandmother’s recipe!) for the first time in 20 years.

And Fried Smelts and Brustenge and all manner of foodly delights

Went to a wonderful party at Cindy and Carlo’s

At first I watched this video because it’s another Crucible thing, and an Exploratorium thing.  Then my heart welled up in my throat.

I’m lucky enough to be able to go and shake Nick Diphillipo’s hand, and Steven Young’s hand and say “thank you”.