In my effort to procrastinate doing the things that will improve my life, I’ve been working on improving Shoshanah’s.  Specifically, her car.  She despises doing anything to maintain her car with a kind of weird passion, so it falls to me.  For example, she’d been bugging me to replace the wiper blades on it so her old ones joined a few dozen others in the trashcan outside the auto parts store.  Plus, I had found replacement gas lifts for her PT Cruiser ($55 for the pair, shipped); the hatch started drifting down and whanging us on the head from time to time.  So I added my sweat to the blood and tears this had cost us (however did I live without this Makita cordless impact driver?!  I’ve needed it so many times now) and now the hatch drifts gracefully up with a little nudge, and stays there, like it did when we got it.  Sweet.

Now here’s the tough one.  Her amplifier.  The power amp under the driver’s seat has caught a bit of abuse in seven years and the right channels for both pairs of speakers were having problems.  Seems the posts from the RCA connectors sheared off inside the receptacles.  I managed to fish one out with a pair of pliers but the other one is way in there.

So being me, I took the thing apart.  I was hoping to poke the post out from behind but the connector is buried.  To slide the mainboard out turned out to be incredibly involved as this Arc Audio Class D amp consists of maybe 30 amplifier IC’s pasted to long heatsink rails with thermal grease and as many black metal retaining clips.  So I let my son remove the clips and I loosened the IC’s from their greasy seal and eventually, after finding a few more screws that were required (and removing a few screws that really didn’t need removing), I slid the mainboard out.  A bittersweet victory because I know that now I’m going to have to run to Fry’s to get more thermal grease — the little tube I have ain’t gonna cut it — and grease and clip and screw it all back together.  Not to mention rebuilding the RCA connectors without losing much wire — there’s a minimum of play to work with and it might end up being a splice job — and I’ll have to replace a fuse I think because (ahem) the hot brushed the case when I was deinstalling it.

And it turns out that’s not going to be enough. I figured I needed to take a break before desoldering the six points holding the connector block in place.  So I sat and had a think, and I think that my best bet is to solder something to the errant post and yank it out when the solder dries.  It might melt the connector interior plastic a bit, which is why I had initially dismissed the idea, but I keep getting into riskier territory with this $350 amp and this is starting to sound safer.

The irritating thing is that I could have taken that approach without even cracking the case.

I’ve resolved to eat my way through our the freezer in the garage. This has been a big bone of contention between my wife and I. She’s convinced anything over about 3 months old in the freezer is “freezerburnt and nasty” and I have a difficult time getting her to prepare it. We end up throwing a lot of stuff away and it makes me insane.

So, between my new (ahem) flexibility in schedule and the need to conserve money, I’ve begun to cook it myself. Starting with breakfasts, mostly. I have a lot to learn. Like — I have to plan ahead! Stuff has to thaw. That’s why, yesterday morning, I ended up cooking those kinda crummy meatless sausages; they don’t need to thaw. But hey — they got et. Check! I tried to cook eggs at the same time. I’m not really ready for that; it’s kind of hectic and I didn’t get to give the eggs the loving attention I usually like to — lots of fussing and adding spices etc. — but I got it done and we both ate it, it was OK.

Today I got the mango sausages from Trader Joe’s, which went considerably better. I didn’t try to cook them at the same time as anything. Later I cooked an egg and toasted an english muffin and added a slice of Havarti cheese and made myself a breakfast muffin.

Shosh identified the trend and got me some things I’ll need at the grocery store, which was pretty nice. But I’m going through a lot of pans now so I kind of have to wash them right away since we don’t run the dishwasher that often. The sucky part is that it’s easy for me to get distracted and forget to come back and do so after everything’s cool enough.

Distracted, for example, by my MP3 server.

I’m using it more often too, now; it’s on an Iomega Home Media Network Drive which can serve music via DLNA and iTunes, so in theory my computers, my living room receiver (an Onkyo TX-NR906), and even my TV (!) (an Samsung LN40B650 1080p LCD) can play music from it directly. And during my time off in October I used features in my Airport Express and my receiver, allowing me to route iTunes output to the living room stereo and, by extension, the speakers in my wife’s studio (I LOVE finally using the just-in-case wiring I put into my walls during the remodel). I’m approaching nerdvana, right?

Well, there was one hitch.The server had indexed like 80,000 songs, so whenever I chose that server it would take like FOUR minutes (literally) to load the library. And I quickly discovered that you can’t make playlists from shared servers. (@%$^$%*) Finally, a problem I’ve been dreading solving for a long time:

Duplicates!
My main folder has a lot of dupes from accidentally reripping, or consolidating libraries or whatever. Plus, that server hosts all my backups from various retired machines, iPods and (ahem) other peoples’ collections. (Like, 290GB worth!) So when I hit that server I’d have like 5 copies of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones or whatever and each song would play 5 times in a row. Combined with the lack of playlisting, there was really nothing for it but to consolidate those libraries.

I guess I kept waiting for the software that would go by ID3 tag and neatly consolidate my libraries for me and eliminate duplicates. I tried a few Windows products that all sucked, and I didn’t see anything promising on the Mac. So I copied the server to a USB drive and sat and consolidated everything more or less by brute force. It sucked, and took forever. But I was really surprised at how much music I have, stuff I didn’t even know I had. Kind of exciting, actually.By the time I had finished I was down to 180GB. I suspect there are plenty more duplicates, so I’m going to go through it again, maybe using some of the organizational features in iTunes itself. But I’m already in vastly better shape.

I really like that I’m able to make music a part of my life again. It kind of fell by the wayside.

Today wasn’t really about job-hunting, exactly.  I got word that two of my classes have been accepted for Art Unraveled in Phoenix next August — Dynamic Digital Collage (like last year) and the new Digital Distressing class.  No Pajama party, which was really helpful last year for my day class students to retain what they had learned.  This time I have two full day classes, each requiring a fair amount of prep, so I’ll need to allow time and energy for that.

I helped out at my kid’s school during the gardening section.  It was pretty fun to watch all the kids get into rooting through compost to pluck out the worms to seed our new compost bin.  Some of the kids refused to touch the worms, painstakingly gathering them one by one with sticks and trowels, where other kids harvested handfuls at a time.  There was no pattern — boys girls, whatever.  It simply varied from kid to kid.  The best part was seeing them squeamish at first and then get the hang of it, enthusiastically.

My amazingly flaky plumber showed up to look at a few problems around the house.  No results yet, but finally we’re underway.

Ah, geek update: My iPhone magically started syncing to MobileMe, merging it with the stale data on the phone.  So I had to go through MobileMe one more time to prune the contacts, 264 in all.  It did a lot of weird things like re-merging matching phone numbers so that there would be two identical entries, and the Web site does not always display the data fields that can be seen in the address books on the phone and the Mac (making it hard to figure out which duplicate entry to nuke), but whatever. It’s all sorted now and I’ve now synced the address books of all the Macs in the house.  I’ve done the same for my wife’s iPhone too.  She uses Thunderbird as her mail client, which does not currently sync to the Mac address book, so all that data is orphaned in Thunderbird, but the way she uses the Mac and the phone it probably won’t matter.

I had a lot of trouble staying awake today, and took I guess five little catnaps.

Big trauma in the house:  I killed HBO and Showtime, then killed the upper block of channels (110 to 570 or something) to get the cable bill from $150 (!) down to a still-horrifying $80.  That block carried National Geographic (Lockdown and Globe Trekker) and BBC America (Graham Norton, Being Human and — ouch — Torchwood).  That block is an extra $17 a month and I really don’t think it’s worth it.  But Shoshanah showed me how many shows on the TiVo were from that block and is begging me to add those back in.

OK, bedtime.

Today was spent mostly wrestling with technical problems in the computers at the house, especially Shoshanah’s iMac which has been kernel-panicking routinely.  I wiped the internal drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard and copied the data from a backup on an external drive.  It SEEMS to be stable now but we’ll see.

I’m sure glad for Time Machine, though restoring a half terabyte over a network took 12 hours when I did it Friday, and connected via USB it still took like 5 hours.  >whew!<  But now Time Machine is complaining that my server volume isn’t big enough.  I think it no longer recognizes what’s already there?  Not sure.  More housecleaning to do.

I upgraded the firmware in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive to v1.0.40 and mostly it’s a step backward. The media shows up in iTunes but with 57,000-odd files it takes four minutes for the list to appear.  There are many duplicates so I cn’t usually just hit Play, and I can’t manage the duplicates from within iTunes on a shared server.  And I can’t make playlists either.  So in the end: Not useful.  In the meantime the permissions control now works backwards: Each share point is set to “Everyone” by default, and there’s a list of users you grant access to — which is weird.  And when you choose a user, it gets set to “Secure”, which makes sense, but then the list of users disappears, which does not.  But it doesn’t matter because now all my Macs only see a “backup” share and none of the other shares regardless of setting or how they’re connected.  If I log in it offers another share named for the user but that mostly can’t be accessed when you click on it.  The BitTorrent feature doesn’t work at all and according to the user forums it never has.  They added a new feature with a new release for automatically resizing photos or some shit but pulled it because that feature didn’t work right — the few who got to it in time were outraged that it didn’t fix the torrent thing.  The ftp server feature thinks it’s working but the connection keeps being refused.  I’ve routed all inbound ftp requests to the server in my firewall.  Still could be a configuration issue, but as upgrade features go I’m 0 for 5.  Monday I’ll try to figure out how to downgrade the firmware.

I cleaned up the kitchen Mac of bloat and got it backed up; it’s sort of my development machine for the moment, with all my Web development, Flex Builder and so on on it.  I need to get that on a separate machine since it’s supposed to be a family machine.  I’ll do that when I get the office sorted out.

I’m plowing through various external drives and consolidating data.  I’ve deleted hundreds of gigabytes of Adobe stuff, chiefly test movies.  That felt pretty good.  Bummer for my friends still at Adobe but that’s the way it goes.  They can make more test movies I’m sure.  I have a lot of partitions that aren’t the right size or format for what I need them to be so I have to keep moving data around so that I can wipe the drives.  The ones where I used a Master Boot Record can’t be resized or anything, got to start fresh.  Basically trying to wrangle my backup and archive space has been feeling like scooping up mercury.  But I’ll get there.

I’m experimenting with the beta of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.  Right now I’m distracted by FB4’s support for PHP, that’s pretty fun.  I’m making a Flex-based admin browser for osCommerce.  I’ll let you know how it goes.   I think an admin console for osCommerce might be a nice portfolio piece.

I got DreamWeaver set up to edit all of the sites I’m managing. Synchronizing took a long time mostly because of all the copies of the HannahGrey server I have — ZenCart versions, staging versions, backup versions etc.

I also sucked down all the content from a hosting service I don’t use any more.  Now I think I can kill it, which will save $100 a year.  Not much but hey it’s something.

Hopefully this is the most boring blog post I will ever write.  And the most boring weekend I will ever have.

Day 3 continued in the same vein — get up, get kid to school, and go to work getting work.

The night before I was considering how to jumpstart my Photoshop and Lightroom teaching opportunities.  I was a bit rueful that I had lost my Acrobat Connect Pro account with my Adobe job; it has a REALLY cool system for doing online training.  I even looked into paying for it out of pocket.  But it’s like $55 a month and that version doesn’t appear to have some of the features I wanted, like being able to create breakout sessions and stuff.  The one that does, they don’t even quote a price, you have to talk to Adobe.

So I created an Acrobat.com account and tried out their ConnectNow module with a friend in a faraway land.  It’s not as slick as Connect Pro but I think it will work.  The 2-way webcam/voice chat thing worked, cross-platform, and I was able to let her take over my computer and operate Photoshop.  There’s a little chat thingy and a whiteboard.  And to get more users it’s just $15/month.  So that’s pretty cool, I’ll probably start doing that pretty soon.

Also, I take back the mean things I said about Adobe’s chosen outplacement service.  It’s more elaborate than it seemed at first blush; I had just expected them to be a kind of employment agency, which they aren’t.  They do, however, give you access to something similar called JobScout. The first thing I got enthused about was was the 2½ months of technical and business training at skillsoft.com.  (I also found out that if you start in December you get another 2 weeks.)

I’d prefer Lynda.com (or Total Training, but they’re more exclusively about creative apps), since skillsoft.com is so Microsoft-centric.  But it’s still pretty cool, and the business stuff might be useful if I can stomach it.  I’ll probably try to suck that site dry.  I called the company to suss out how much SkillSoft costs.  I never got an answer, but it’s definitely in the four figures per month. (The other two are $3-400 a YEAR.)

But the service comes with other stuff. I guess you can go there and get a little workspace to squat in; desk, computer, phones, printer, fax, whatever.  I’ve got most of that at home (except for the solitude), and if a company wants me to fax something ferchrissakes I’m not sure I want to work for them.  (Seriously, faxes?  Seemed like magic 25 years ago but come on…)  But they do have topic-specific experts who can help you find places to look for jobs, might be helpful, I don’t know.  And there’s training in a bunch of things like how to negotiate salary, can’t hurt, right?

And with the good news comes the bad.  It turns out that, although my title is “Technical Project Manager” I am not classified as a manager.  This is important because when it comes to layoffs there are four classifications: “Individual Contributor,” “Manager”, “Director” and “Vice President”.  This classification determines much of your package — the base severance (in months) and the “service recognition” maximum.  A VP who has been around for 10 years and gets sacked gets 10 months on top of his base severance.  But the maximum for directors is I think 5, and for managers is 2.  For individual contributors it’s 1.  In other words, as an individual contributor, my ten years gets me the same one month that some one-yer newbie gets.  But wait, there’s more!  The manager also gets 2½ months as a base severance, to my 1½.

Because I don’t happen to have any direct reports at this moment I’m in the second-from-the-bottom tier for severance, despite my ten years and the title and the fact that I’ve had direct reports in the past.

Managed not to waste the day again today.  Got up before 8, got the kid to school, did NOT go back to bed. Managed a whole bunch of relevant stuff to future livelihoods.

Idiot plumber flaked out again today.  My brother did not flake out, came over and spent a few hours first with my son and then with me working on some income-generating ideas.

I helped out my electrician friend by seizing control of his orphaned domain name (url on the side of his truck 403’s); I’ll help him build his website back up and I’ll be a consultant on low-voltage (networking, audio, video) issues for his business.

I rebuilt Shosh’s iMac, the hard drive of which got messed up and was causing constant kernel panics (the Mac equivalent fo Blue Screen of Death).  I had a recent time capsule backup, but I had turned it off while relocating the Time Capsule itself and had not turned back on.  But the restoral went OK but DAMN it takes a long time to restore 400GB over my gigabit ethernet network.  It took like thirteen hours.  Next time I’ll hook the drive up directly via USB.  After that I had to use a folder sync utility called Chronosync to cover the last couple weeks, but all seems to be well.

I also discovered that one of my hosting accounts had NO domains pointing to it.  Got that cleared up now.I unpacked several of the boxes from my office, a peculiar sort of humiliation.  And once again faced the stress of not having places for things.  A lot of this stuff went to my office BECAUSE I didn’t have places for them in my home.  But I really needed some of the books and documents in there.

Finished off setting up a Squid cache proxy server on my virtual dedicated server so friends abroad can watch TV on services that check for domestic IP’s. Gordon did the vast majority of the work, for which I’m grateful.  I just had to create some user accounts, test it a bit, and pull reports to make sure it was all working.  abc.com doesn’t think much of it (black screen with a simple error message reading “ERROR” appears in red) but it works OK with Hulu.

Started reviewing the termination packet from Adobe.  The outplacement service appears to be completely worthless.  They review your resume, and you can use their fax machines and stuff, and that’s about it.  They don’t actually help you find a job.  I wonder how much that cost Adobe?  Would it cost as much as, say, a subscription to lynda.com so that I can get some tech training that might actually  help me land a new gig?  I’m actually going to bring that up with them.

My mjenning@adobe.com email is now bouncing but I can’t seem to get them to at least put my new address in the bounce message, much less forward emails.  God that’s annoying.  That is going to bite me in the ass for years.  That’s easily the worst part of losing my job there.

The weird thing is that I am technically an employee for two more months but I’m cut off from everything.  I went down there to have a few beers with my colleagues tonight and I had to use the visitor entrance, get the escort, the whole bit.  While there I tried to order software but I’m locked out of that too.  I’m still eligible to buy it but now I have to use (shudder) a paper order form.  Sheesh.

So here’s a weird thing.  I went to an event last night downtown called Dr. Sketchy’s (I’ll do a separate post on that) where I had the opportunity to draw some of MY kind of life drawing models.  Afterward I went to talk to the models and the host.  They were perfectly nice to me, sweet and encouraging.  Couldn’t have been friendlier.  But I had a really hard time just being Mike Jennings, some balding schlub who can’t draw.  It wasn’t long before I dragged my relationship to Adobe into the conversation, and I realized that it was completely unnecessary, the conversation would not have been any different if I hadn’t said anything.

So when will I be OK with not having Adobe as part of my identity?

Shortly after my ten-year anniversary with Adobe Systems I got booted in a RIF that wiped out some 680 employees.  As I posted on my Facebook profile:

I was supposed to get laid off in LAST December’s Adobe bloodbath, but my director cadged a stay of execution that bought me another year. During which I developed some really interesting new skills. Cashing out PTO/sabbatical won’t suck. While it’s not a great severance package, it IS a severance package. I get to say I’m technically still an Adobe employee for a couple more months which will help me refinance my home. While I’ll have to pay for my healthcare, at least I don’t have to shop for it and hope I can get it at ALL. My compatriots on the Premiere team (now and previously) have all offered all kinds of support, as have many others, and it may help me get a new job. The bill to extend unemployment benefits passed. I hadn’t finished what I wanted to do in October, now I’ll have time for that. My wife’s Web sites need some attention, now I’ll have time for that too.

And I can make sure the house is in shape for our first goddamn party since we moved in here!

So it’s Day 1 of my pseudoemployment (technically I’m employed for two more months but cut off from Adobe resources — vpn, email, network etc.).  I woke up thinking “What should I do today?”  I have lots of traditional options:

• Resume drinking
• Watch an entire season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Masturbate
• Go see a movie
• Sleep
• Start finding a job

I opted for a combination of the last two.  It took a while to find my resumé on ten years of accumulated hard drives, but I did it and now I’m faced with summarizing a decade of being kind of technologically all over the place.  I hate my resume format but it’s compatible with distribution as .doc, .pdf and .html which seems valuable.  I dunno.  Thoughts?  Anyway, I also spent a ton of time updating LinkedIn and Facebook, of course, and trying to remove references to my Adobe email from important sites like banks and PayPal (since my email is now pretty much routed to dev/null — it doesn’t bounce but I don’t get it either).  I slept more than I should, and spent a lot of time talking with well-wishers.  But in general I think I really need to apply a work ethic to unemployment.  We’re at, what, 12% around here?

When the Daily show was doing a bit that compared the 2008 Republican National Convention to the Superdome during Katrina, one scene showed Jason Jones with a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth.  “I’m here in the print media center… the stench of death is overwhelming…”  This kind of got me thinking about the fate of the newspapers, which is unsurprisingly a favorite topic in the news lately.  And last night, the Daily Show’s guest was hawking a book in which he claims to be able to save newspapers through schemes like micropayments.

Why I love newspapers:

1. The feel.  The tactile experience of going through the paper.  While I don’t smoke or drink coffee, I totally get the idea of the newspaper as being a brilliant part of that hallowed morning ritual.
2. You feel less dorky taking them into the can with you.  You never want anyone to know you’ve brought your laptop into te only place where it’s actually used on your lap.
3. Regional reporting. ‘Nuff said.
4. Editors.  This is what conventional media in general is hanging onto for dear life, and it’s a good one.  For example, an editor would make me actually read this guy’s book before dismissing it out of hand. Fact-checking, editorial review, and so on, the machinery of the Gatekeepers of News Reporting, really are wonderful things in most cases.  I will miss the sometimes erroneous assurance that the story has been vetted and it really worth reading at face value. (Side note: If we could harness misinformation in some way, we coud make travel to disant planets a reality.  Not even light moves faster than bogus facts on the internet.)
5. Community.  This is one of those tings that one doesn’t really value until one loses it.  But reading the Letters page and knowing that these people are in my community and therefore have some degree of relevance and even credibility is an experience I just don’t get on the internet.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m part of many strong internet-based communities and I enjoy them very much.  But there really is something to be said for a central place to discuss issues with people you may actually see in person at some point.
6. Newspaper as an Artifact. While a new breed of archaeology is emerging out of data mining in search engines and the Internet Archive wayback-machine for recent historical information, the newspapers remain a tangible artifact of the past, reflecting so much more than just the actual content of the news article.  Visual aesthetics of illustration, layout and typography of the day, the ephemeral advertisements and so on make newspapers a unique and valuable key to understanding the past in a way that is much harder for the pure-information approach to archiving news items, stripping out the ephemeral “wastes of bandwidth”.

Now for what I won’t miss about newspapers:

1. The mess.   As soon as I get the rubberband off, the thing seems to explode in an oversized confetti of individual sheets coering all horizontal surfaces.  I don’t know how this happens but it’s always been like that for me.
2. The newsprint ink.  Last night, Jon Stewart suggested that newspapers could be saved by impregnating the ink with a highly addictive narcotic substance.  Great.
3. Classified Ads.  We’ll be explaining to our chilren in the very near future that we “paid by the line” for “text-only ads” and had to invent a byzantine language of abbreviations just to get one ad in a non-searchable format for just one week. Good riddance.  That was stupid even then, but we just had to wait for a sensible alternative to arrive in the format of the Internet, and Craigslist in particular.
4. The suspicion that unseen forces are manipulating what is and isn’t seen in the paper.  Traditional media has tried to paint citizen journalismin the colors of conspiracy theorists but the undeniable fact is that by decentralizing control of the media you throw off the constraints imposed by those who would like to control it.  Did you know, for example, that there was a time when what the Chinese government said about what’s going on in its country actually had credibility?  Now the media only repeats what the Chinese government says partly out of perfunctory courtesy and partly as an amusing and pathetic counterpoint to what is clearly really happening.
5. Paying for it.  Sorry, Mr. Walter Isaacson, I won’t pay for the news.  I know it’s not fair but I still won’t.  The iTunes model of minipayments breaks down because (as Stewart immediately pointed out) the song you can enjoy over and over again but the news is ephemeral almost by definition.  I will simply use less trustworthy information sources that are free.  I will even aggregate the same news items from several untrustworthy sources and triangulate the real story from there rather than subscribe to a trusted source.  Even if you could get the toothpaste back into the tube, it’s a leaky tube.  You could never prevent the free spread of information; you never had a chance.
6. Not being in control of the collection of stories.  I like being able to effectively build my own newspaper from the stories I’m interested in through RSS.
7. Regurgitated Reuters and AP stories.  Both fine institutions but it always felt like a copout to me.  Knowing that I could read virtually the same article in any newspaper devalued mine.
8. Censorship.  Never cared for it much.  I have an 18-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son and I cringe knowing what they have easy access to, and I still don’t much believe in censorship.  I understand why other parents want it, but I don’t believe in regional community standards and I still believe that information wants to be free, and trying to censor it is just a giant game of whack-a-mole that just makes the censored information more attractive and leaves you looking as pathetic as a Chinese news outlet.
9. Lowest Common Denominator.  Lame-ass human interest stories are legion, more now than ever before, and especially in TV media.  The more time Nancy Grace spends ranting about an “issue” the less interesting and relevant it is to me. But I still think of it as the newspapers’ fault.  (I still can’t get over the ancient Bloom County in which the harried, weak-willed newspaper editor was helpless to resist Milo’s clichéd human interest stories: “RUN THAT BABY!!!”.  Apparently, I’m not alone.)
10. The Sports section.  Never had any use for it.  It was always in my way, and now it isn’t.

But the news isn’t all bad for the papers.  I predict that the pendulum will swing back, though the Coriolis Effect of the changing face of media consumption will propel it along a slightly (okay, radically) different path.

• People will begin to miss regional reporting and the sense of community that comes with it.
• They will get tired of trying to collage many free but untrustworthy news sources to get a sense of the real picture.
• They will begin to distinguish articles that actually have a monetary value to them, and understand the value of paying for critical information (example: Expensive industrial trade reports today.)
• They will find themselves siloed by their own control of the media.  For example, I will continue to read only stories about technology, science, or whatever else I think to put into my RSS feeds, and eventually realize the value of having completely unrelated but occasionally interesting articles thrown in with the stuff I know I will care about.

With luck, the print media will learn to evolve in ways that take these effects into account.  Unfortunately I still don’t think they’re ever gonna reclaim the prized 18-24 demo, and maybe an even broader range than that; a few of the things I’ve mentioned are only valued by (let’s face it) old people.

Just before my dad died we were talking to him about family histories.  He pulled out a newspaper clipping about the death of Al Jennings, the “last train robber.”  He told us of his presidential pardon, and related an anecdote in which wwhen he was released from prison he went to a museum displaying artifacts from his life and demanded them back.  After a suit in court, he won, recovered his stuff and headed to Hollywood.

Our hearts swelled with pride; he was the only famous guy in our immediate bloodline, and he was the last train robber!  How cool is that?

Two years ago there was a History Channel special on train robbers and my relative was mentioned!  Initially I was thrilled but they made him out to be a bit of a buffoon, which kinda sucked the fun out of it.

Then a couple weeks ago I was reading one of those “15 random things about me” lists, this one about artist Tricia Anders, wherein she revealed her ancestry having included a famous outlaw.  I chimed in with the above, and then thought to google Al Jennings to see what came up.

Big mistake.

According to Sarah Vowell’s favorite Web site findagrave.com, the History Channel had been kind to my great-great uncle. Not only was I chagrined to learn that he was also a second-rate lawyer, a third-rate politician, and (say it ain’t so) an evangelist, virtually every aspect of his infamous career had been exaggerated.

“‘The fastest gun on the range’, as he often proclaimed himself, was an even faster talker. He boasted that he killed 18 men, ‘and I always shot ‘em in the throat so they couldn’t talk back’. Historians say there is no record that Jennings killed anyone.”

It gets worse.  “Real desperadoes like Fred Dalton of the Dalton Gang scoffed at Jennings as ‘the guy who held the horses’ during bank robberies, and his outlaw exploits were marked by such ineptitude that comic moments from films like ‘Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid’ were based on them.”

My heart sank as I read on.  Inept exploits (blowing up a US Mail car while trying to open a safe) pathetic hauls (passing the hat among the train’s passengers), and ignominious defeat (capture with no shots fired).  As a would-be politician, he ran for Oklahoma governor on the platform “If elected I promise to be honest for a year, if I can hold out for that long.”

He was involved in like 100 movies in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, technical consultant, and even an actor.  Hollywood is the only place he truly seemed to be at home, which I don’t consider as speaking well of his character.

Even in his 90’s he was constantly tangling with lawmen over his use of guns on his property.  for example: “One night he chased a chicken thief off his property and ended up blasting one of his own roosters.”<sigh> He died, heartbroken at the loss of his wife, at age 98 — no way for an outlaw to die. Ultimately the article concludes that he was “an amusing footnote” in American history.

Wikipedia isn’t much kinder, only adding that he did not finish last in that Oklahoma gubernatorial race.

For some reason his autobiography has been digitized by Google Books and is available online in its entirety .  Presumably under “Fiction.”

I just woke up earlier than I expected from a late night out with friends, and just felt like blogging about a terrific birthday, probably the best in ten years. But I should step back a bit.

My mom offered to host a big 40th birthday party for me but I passed because:

1. Even if I took over the garage again for old times’ sake it still would have been at my mom’s.
2. Most of the people I’d want there are no longer in Silicon Valley. And the ones that are left, well, my generation has a high rate of cancellations at this point — our schedules haven’t been less under our own control since we were about 8. it would have been terrible if nobody showed.
3. What made parties charming in my 20s and 30s would be creepy and sad now, like those middle aged swingers at a convention on the episode where Real Sex jumped the shark.
4. And I don’t know how to have fun at a party in a house any more.

Eventually I got to thinking about the friends I have locally, and I wasn’t really being fair or accurate. Certainly I’ve lost many, many dear friends to the Exodus, and having a birthday party without them there was indeed weird. But I’ve made a ton of new friends since then, and many of them ARE in Silicon Valley, even if it’s a tiny subset. Some of them I haven’t even met yet — just online. And then I realized that I have a lot of friends in San Francisco that I don’t usually get to hang out with. So I set out to put together a night out.

I wanted to go to my favorite restaurant, Kan Zaman, which I haven’t been to in like 13 years, but from the Yelp reviews it looked like strong potential for a birthday bummer. And I wanted to go to a bar afterward, and that place you pretty much have to settle into to get the whole experience. I wanted the dinner to be small and the bar to have the bulk of my friends so we got out of San Jose as soon as we could and went to meet a friend a place called Layaly. Like many restaurants in the Richmond, the atmosphere sucks but the food is good, reasonably priced and served quickly. Parking was a drag though — it had been a long, trafficky trip up and I had to pee so bad I could barely stay bent in the seat, so finding a spot seemed like it took 45 minutes, but it was probably only 20.

Getting my wife to come along was a challenge. Family emergencies, stress and just not feeling particularly sociable made the idea of hanging out at a bar as a non-drinker sound pretty awful. So I arranged it so that she could bail at any time — I could stay at BJ’s place or catch a lift with someone else. Not ideal — she doesn’t like sleeping in the house alone — but at least she wouldn’t be trapped. I also had to bribe her by giving her a present early, an Eternity Scarf from Urban Outfitters that was cozy, fetching and versatile.

So I convinced her to come to the bar, and Justina Kochansky was already there with her husband Joe, sweet and nervous and reminding me a lot of my shy wife. I was so glad she came — I haven’t met her in person before, just Flickr and Facebook. Julee Herrmann was there with her husband Simon, looking like she owned the place, charming and funny and comfortable. Nikki Meeks’ sister Paula, who I haven’t seen in like 10 years, preceded her sister by a bit, and brought a friend named Jen. And Nina, who kindly suggested the place, came too, sparkly and comfortable, sociable and funny. Great crowd. Perfect.

I immediately started in on the Ketel and Cranberries. My wife Shoshanah had no problem talking to everyone and never looked bored or even uncomfortable. For some reason I was the only one who brought a camera so there aren’t any pictures of me, but I did remember to snap pics from time to time. There were a lot of people that I either missed somehow, or were making a weird face or whatever, so out of consideration I just deleted those. (In the best shot of Shoshanah it looked like she was picking her nose with a pool cue, for example.) But my Flickr has the keepers, such as they are.

There were some people, like Joe and Justina, who I really would like to have just talked to, but conversation was difficult (my throat is thrashed — anyone else?) as the crowd was so loud they made the jukebox (which was loud) hard to hear. (Good conversation starter though: “Is this ‘Holiday in Cambodia’?” “I dunno, I thought it was the Buzzcocks!”)  Paula’s friend Jen deserved more attention than I gave her.  Every time I saw her she was texting someone, but at one point she whipped out some really good cheese and crackers (Joe: “Someone had to class the place up.”), and at the very end she did this faboulous and funny rant about the people in the bar.

I loved this bar. It’s Nina’s favorite and I can see why. For starters, it has the best jukebox in the whole world. If they could get clearances I’d pay good money for the mix CD’s they put in there. I got to listen to Joy Division, Iggy Pop, the Cult, Bauhaus, Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, Devo, and more. They have pinball, though only one machine was working. I kicked its ass and left a credit on the machine. There’s pool and foosball. The place is startlingly dog-friendly. And loud as hell. And it has the most punk-rock bathrooms since CBGB’s. And I was really missing Laura Argilla and K-DJ and Howard and Peter and so many others.

But in spite of thinking about all the people who should have been there, I had a terrific time. It was an awesome blend of old and new friends, people to meet, surprise guests and a fun bar. And my wife, in spite of herself, had a great time.

OK, this was too long but fuck it it’s my blog.