heslin.org

Recapitulation

heslin — Sun, 18 Aug 2008 12:38:50 -0400

Bren and Pina made it back safely from the shore. Bren continues his experiments with wind and light materials. Pina is not sure she likes this new "smug, confident Matt" (as seen last post, see below).

Chuck won a Nerd Award. All the nerds get together and have little nerd arguments over what the best nerd stuff is, and as a group they decided Chuck wrote one of the best electronic gaming books this year. Good job and congratulations to him. Nerd.

Mikey blew through town again, long enough to make me go see Star Wars: Clone Wars with him. I apparently need people to tell me "we should go see X movie" because I missed the Indiana Jones movie, the Hulk movie, and conceivably could have missed The Dark Knight had Barry not intervened. Clone Wars is totally not as bad as you've been hearing. It's a fun, fairly light-hearted cartoon about Star Wars. There's a lot of fun futuristic violence, and Jedi Knight fighting you can't do outside of animation or CGI. I'm not saying it was amazing, or even finely crafted or anything. It was just a fun flick. Haters need to calm down and accept. Waiting for DVD? That's cool. I had very low expectations going in, and left pretty happy.

I'm hungry. What's for lunch?

--12:32 PM, EDT, Holland, PA, what do we do when a sprog acts a fool?

215? 610? 267?

heslin — Sun, 15 Aug 2008 17:15:57 -0400

Last night there was this party.

See, Jeff used to be a partner here at my office. He interviewed me on my first visit to the office. But, sometime between then and my offer, Jeff decided to set off on his own and open a new firm. I think we were co-workers for one week before he moved to Newtown as a founding partner of Cevallos and Wong.

Cevallos is a guy who also used to work here at the office, and has been on his own for a while. He does guest spots on CN8, sometimes opines in the Metro op/ed roundtables, and apparently teaches classes sometimes at Drexel.

So, they had this party to announce their new firm, down in the city. At one of those crazy hip expensive joints with $14 cocktails, terribly attractive staff, and a VIP lounge. We were in the lounge. I did not think this made me a VIP.

I congratulated Jeff and Danny, apologized for the rest of my office's failure to show up (excuse: past their bedtime), gave Danny an office-warming gift, and helped myself to some free booze. Well, after paying for a $14 screwdriver, I felt I had a few free ones coming to me.

The above is just prologue. So, I'm hanging out, wondering how young these people are, if they're lawyers or just related to the practice of law somehow, when this young lady asks me about court reporters. It's a random question that I just happen to be able to answer. We discuss things for a while. It's excellent party small talk. She's lovely. Her friend is considering law school, so we talk with her a while.

I mention I should be going (I took the train, just in case I drank a lot of free vodka) and she says okay. She then -- and I just want to emphasize this, for the folks in the cheap seats -- she then reaches into my shirt pocket for my business card, which she takes, and writes her name and info upon. She then slides it back into my shirt pocket and tells me to look her up sometime.

I love Philadelphia.

--5:02 PM, EDT, Holland, PA, let's hope I remember where the close tag for italics goes this time

Just an aside

heslin — Sun, 14 Aug 2008 11:49:47 -0400

This amused me. There is harsh language in the link, heads up.

--11:46 AM, EDT, Holland, PA, that's how I roll

Well, that doesn't make any sense

heslin — Sun, 13 Aug 2008 09:20:47 -0400

Google Ads suggests the following, based on the content of my e-mails:

"Free 14 pack of Pringles - www.healthierlifestyleoptions.com"

First off, I'm not writing about Pringles, or chips, or junk food, or snacks or anything even vaguely related to Pringles. Secondly, I don't think a boatload of Pringles should be available from a website called "healthierlifestyleoptions.com."

But that's just me. And I'm probably not your go-to guy for anything "healthy."

--9:13 AM, EDT, Holland, PA, we have blue eyes, we have green eyes, we have grey eyes

Omnia moderatio

heslin — Sun, 8 Aug 2008 10:16:25 -0400

Or some dead language to that effect.
So, Barry tells me he catches up with people on Facebook. And Chuck says there's networking to be done on there. And my colleagues at work say it's a good tool for keeping your name out there. So I signed up for it.
Holy crap, there's a lot of stuff going on there. First off, at my age, there are a lot of people you've known and lost track of. Classically, you meet these people again at weddings, in airports, or in wholly unlikely situations lending themselves to sitcom or rom-com plot devices. Today, you add them as a friend on Facebook and then receive constant updates as to what kind of bagel they are getting today. Secondly, there's a bunch of little games and features and doo-dads for you to screw around with -- but forget that, look at all those people. I've been on for about three days or so, and I have close to 100 "friends."
I'm not comfortable with it, but then again I wasn't really comfortable with WoW, and see where that got me. It's not a replacement for real contact and real friendship. It's a tool for organizing relationships and contacts, and that's probably important to remember.
Must get some housework done this weekend. The apartment wasn't nearly as clean as I hoped for company. Though, I had a look around and I realized that my apartment only has cabinets in the kitchen. No hutches, nowhere to put cleaning supplies, no closets (other than the dwarf-sized one and the cat-box one), no shelves. And I brought in very little in the way of organizing furniture. As a result, even with perfect organization and consolidation of space, my apartment probably looks like a crazy person lives there. I'll get Barry's opinion on that when I can reach him -- he's a busy dude. Somewhere, I'm sure he's wearing two layers of clothes in 106 degree heat and complaining about how mild it is.
I'm sure of it.
--10:10 AM, EDT, Holland, PA, this is grace in gravity