Perfect Hibernation

Oh, I want one of these so bad:

This Week In Quakertown: Stripping Quakers

The biggest news item is clearly the fight over a new strip club Gentlemen’s club out by the Turnpike, Coyotes Show Club (“Tuesdays Nights Are Ladies Night!” (sic)).

(Sorry I don’t have a link for this article, but the Free Press doesn’t make it easy to find old articles online. Here is the boring fact sheet from Milford Township’s web site. Additionally, here is a recent article from the Morning Call)

Given the personality of Quakertown, though, it is not surprising that there is some opposition to the new establishment. A hearing was held on Feb 7 to allow “concerned residents” to hear the issues and voice their opinions. What are the issues? I’m glad you asked:

As far as I can tell, the only real issue that the township has any legal standing for is the location. Adult Entertainment venues are prohibited in the township from being within 1000 feet of a home or “recreational facility”. Technically, John Fries Park is within 1000 feet of Coyotes, but the CEO of Coyotes’ parent company, Barnett Food Group (a name that just screams “tits”, doesn’t it?), denied the park was a recreational facility.

Well, common sense says that a park is a recreational facility, but when dealing with legal issues, common sense rarely comes into play. The ADA defines recreational facility as “amusement rides, boating facilities, fishing piers and platforms, golf courses, miniature golf courses, sports facilities, swimming and wading pools, and spas” for purposes of providing access to people with disabilities. I suppose Barnett Food Group’s lawyers are using this type of semantic argument to get around the local ordinance.

Of course most of the beef is that the townspeople (boy, doesn’t that just conjure up an image of an angry mob with torches and pitchforks?) are concerned about the effect on the youth in the area (“Won’t somebody please think of the children?”). They had what has to be one of the best protest sign slogans since “Get a brain! Morans”: “Don’t be a wuss bag. Say no to porn.”

The strongest resistance is coming from, of course, a religious group, The King’s Men (wasn’t that the name of a gay porno? If not, it should be) who are anti-pornography and will protest the club “weekly or daily if necessary.” (“Say, Bob, can you hold my protest sign for a bit? I just need to go in and, uh, use the rest room.”)

There was another hearing this past Wednesday, Feb 20, but the Supervisors are postponing any decisions until their March 18 meeting.

In other news, some local sports teams won, others lost, and the High School gym was destroyed in recent rainstorms.

Get Off My Lawn!

I keep seeing these complaints on the web, that “twenty years ago, I could surf the web and write email on my Timex Sinclair, and that’s all I need a computer to do now, so why do I need six thousand times the CPU power?” Well, not quite, but close.

For example, in his analysis of the MacBook Air, Gruber refers to an article by David Galbraith:

He points out that the Air’s CPU is several hundred times more powerful than an original Intel Pentium, and most people still use computers for the same sort of tasks.

Well, yes, if you’re still running NCSA Mosaic 1.0 and PINE, then sure, go ahead and use your Pentium I, 33MHz computer. But if you want to surf today’s web and send today’s email, you’re going to be using something like FireFox 2, Safari 3 or IE 7; and Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail; all of which require many times the processing power and memory as did their primitive predecessors. It’s the way of software: You gots more features, you gots more UI, you needs more hardware.

Not to mention the amount of data you get off your average website these days, what with your streaming video and six megabytes of javascript and all – I’d love to see you shop on Amazon with a Newton MessagePad 2000, or what have you.

Mind you, I’m not disagreeing with Gruber’s main point, which is that the Air has enough power to do what many people need it to do. I’m just saying that the claim that surfing the web today takes the same computing power as it did ten years ago is blatantly false, if only for the fact that the current crop of browsers/email clients demands more. Whether they are being wasteful or not, I can’t say.

Another choice quote from Galbraith:

You would need six hundred Pentium based computers, in an office the size of a hangar, to equal the processing power of a single Macbook Air that fits in an envelope.

Do you think that IE7 has six hundred times the power of IE1, with the according hardware needs? I’m not sure, as I don’t use it. But I know that Netscape 4.x ran like a dog compared to 3.x because it tried to do way too much, and that was ten years ago.

Touchdown in Q-Town

After sleeping on an underinflated air mattress, getting up at 5am, getting to the airport and on the plane with three cats, two suitcases, and two backpacks, 5 1/2 hours in the air, an hour and a half on the road (with a stop at Baja Fresh – probably the best Mexican food in PA) we finally arrived in our new home, Quakertown.

Well, it’s my old home, as I grew up here, but it’s entirely new to Anne, and since I left right when I was old enough to get around on my own, we’re both looking forward to exploring the area. Despite the fact that it’s a town of 9,000 people, there is quite a lot of interest in the area. To name but a few:

• Hershey
• The Crayola Factory
• Valley Forge
• The Burgess Foulke House
• And of course, the Liberty Bell, and all the other Philly attractions

Of course, since Anne will be in freaking Antwerp for six months, she’ll have to put off exploring exciting Quakertown PA, while she makes time in dreary old Europe. Boo hoo.

Anyway, it’s getting cold and my fingers are developing frostbite, so I’ll sign off and get into bed.

T-Minus 2 Days

If you’ve never hired professional movers to pack your stuff, it’s truly an amazing experience. The efficiency with which these guys take your worldly possessions, wrap them up and stick them in a box is astounding.

Part of it is the fact that, like any professional, they do it so often they have the tools and skills to really steam through it, and do it well at the same time.

But I think the biggest performance gain comes because since it’s not their stuff, they don’t linger over it like you would. To you, it’s the commemorative glass your grandmother got you from Niagara Falls. To them, it’s just one more thing between them and done.

Personally, I am finally starting to relax. I was so busy and stressed out the last few days getting the place ready for the packers (separating out what needs to be packed, from what we need with us for the next week, from what we’re just going to leave here or get rid of). Now that they’re here, I can just relax and let them do their job. I was also worried that they weren’t coming, since I hadn’t gotten any confirmation recently. And we need to be out of the house on Friday, so if they didn’t come today to pack, we would’ve been screwed.

The cats are spooked, of course.

EPIC FAIL!

I woke up this morning, unemployed and nearly homeless (four more days!), looking forward to a busy day of packing and dealing with fence repairmen. One of my jobs was to empty the fridge of foods we’re not going to eat this week and cannot move.

To that end, I inserted a fresh garbage bag in the trash can and opened up the fridge. Let’s see:

• seven kinds of mustard
• “lite” mayo
• Korean BBQ marinade, tempura dip, peanut and soy sauces
• three different kinds of pickles, plus relish
• jelly, jam, and preserves
• olives
• half a dozen jars of salad dressing
• etc …

You caught the seven kinds of mustard, right? Just checking.

Very quickly, the trash can reached capacity. Attempting to pull the bag out of the can proved fruitless, as the weight of the food and glass jars far outmatched the structural integrity of the plastic trash bag. No problem, the trusty Costco garbage can insert has a metal handle – I’ll just carry the whole thing downstairs and dump it in one of the garbage bins.

Remember that mustard? Good.

Our garage, where the trash bins live, is down 13 steps from the main floor. I got as far as two steps when the handle on the trash can popped out, causing it to tumble down the stairs, in a glorious cacophony of broken glass and condiments.

Several of the jars of mustard, being in the bottom strata of the trash can, had already broken, so they emptied their contents on the carpeted stairs going down. The pickle jars mostly broke when they hit the tile floor at the bottom, a few making it into the den as if beaching themselves on the inviting carpet.

The smell that wafted up the stairs was like a Lucky Dog cart that exploded from the New Orleans heat.

While this catastrophe, piled on top of the stress that’s been building over the past few weeks due to our upcoming move, should have easily pushed me right over the edge and into book depository territory, I must have gone clear through the crazy and right out the other side, arriving at a serene, zen-like calm about the whole thing.

Lessons Learned

• Girard’s brand salad dressing uses thick glass and forms their bottles in a very strong pyramid shape, taking advantage of the natural strength of triangles to keep their dressings protected in most circumstances.
• Costco trash can handles are not to be trusted.
• Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit caffeine.

Another Round

A while ago I wrote an article about a drink called The Tregea. Up until recently, the response to that article consisted of Quint making fun of me because I still don’t order it by name in bars. (My reasoning for this, other than that I’m chicken and don’t like awkward situations, is that I don’t frequent any bars enough to make it worthwhile.)

But for some reason, the last few weeks have seen a sharp uptick in Tregea activity.

First, I got an email from a guy named David Tregea who read the article. As it turns out, he knows a bit about the family history and the Tregea’s apparently came over from Cornwall and settled in various small towns in southeast Pennsylvania. My parents have some of the Tregea family tree written down so I might be able to figure out if and how I’m related to this guy, which would be pretty cool.

Then, just last week I got another email from a guy asking how to pronounce Tregea, as he was taking out a prospective client with that name (ironically enough, his boss told him the guy likes martinis – we must be related).

Tonight, we were out for dinner at Aqua Bleu, an asian fusion/seafood place in downtown Santa Cruz, and of course I had a couple rounds of Tregea. After dinner, an elderly couple came over and asked about the drink. They had seen me drinking it and were curious. I think I may have sold them on the idea – and I was quick to tell them the name so they could confuse bartenders everywhere.

I’m looking forward to finding a local bar in Quakertown (I think the Spinnerstown Hotel is the closest one) to get to know the bartenders and teach them the drink. With any luck, they’ll even know how to pronounce it.

Sound Off

Irony can be so ironic sometimes. As I mentioned here, one of the lessons I learned doing film work is “always do a sound check”. I went on to say that due to my equipment, I cannot monitor the sound as it’s being recorded, so I had to record a bit, rewind, and play it back.

Well, through the camera’s speakers, it sounded fine, but once I got home and imported all the video, I found out that the one of the mic cable connections was not connected completely, as only the left channel recorded. (That’s not entirely true – the right channel did pop in and out occasionally very noisily.)

So, the new lesson learned is: When doing a cheap-ass sound check, make sure to use headphones so you can tell if the mic is plugged in all the way. Even better, get a field mixer with monitor output.

I should be able to fix it by duplicating the audio in the right channel with GarageBand or Fission, but it just makes it that much more work, and now I really have to worry about audio sync.

I’m Another Uncle

My sister Gayle just had her second daughter, Elizabeth Rose, this week. Here are the stats:

• Born on 1/28/08
• 8lbs 6oz
• 20 inches

Here she is with her sister, Alyssa. Does this define ‘cute’ or what? I can’t wait to see them (less than two weeks now!).