I got it from Jen, who got it from Andrea, who got it from…

Stolen from Jen’s Journal

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
“Because layout managers have generally been poorly documented and a proper…” – Core Java Foundation Classes. Yeah, I’m at work.

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
The admission wrist bands from my trip to Oshkosh last year.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?:
The first three hours of “Gulliver’s Travels”.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
2:30

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
3:06

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Great Big Sea: Yarmouth Town. If that doesn’t count because it’s coming from my computer, then I’ll answer “a succession of annoying thumps”.

7: When did you last step outside? what were you doing?
This morning when I drove to work.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Vicki’s friends page. Since I haven’t found a RSS aggregator that works through the company web proxy, I use her friends page while I’m at work, and NetNewsWireLite when I’m at home.

9: What are you wearing?
Checked flannel shirt and jeans. Lumberjack clothes, you might say.

10: Did you dream last night?
Not that I can remember.

11: When did you last laugh?
While eating lunch with my cow orkers.

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Two Rick Thistle posters (one showing a Spitfire, the other showing a float plane), last year’s Despair Inc calendar, a white board, a modern aeronautical chart, a 1945 aeronautical chart, and two diagrams that attempt to explain our hideously complex problem report and resolution system.

13: Seen anything weird lately?
Well, it snowed over the weekend. That’s pretty damn weird.

14: What do you think of this quiz?
Well, I wasted all this time doing it, so I must have liked it.

15: What is the last film you saw?
On TV? I tried to watch Bulworth. In a real theatre? Don’t remember. Possibly Starsky and Hutch.

16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
An airplane. Probably a Murphy Moose.

17: Tell me something about you that I don’t know:
Even though I’m mostly contemptuous of the whole “art scene” thing, I’m feeling more and more like I wish I had some creative outlet other than computer programming.

18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
I’d like people to think about the long term and global consequences of their actions.

19: Do you like to dance?
Even before I got bad knees, I didn’t like formal dancing. I did that “jump up and down like an idiot” stuff, though. I was good at it, too.

20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
I think he’s evil and has no conscience and is doing everything he does for monetary or religious reasons.

21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
Her name is Liane.

21: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
Not sure. I know we had some names picked out back then, but I’ve forgotten them.

22: Would you ever consider living abroad?
I am living abroad.

Great Big Sea hove in Rochester NY

I almost left it too long, but I got my tickets to see Great Big Sea, the best band in the world, tomorrow night.

I saw them in concert a couple of years ago at a free concert, and it was absolutely the most fun I’ve had at a concert in 20 years. I already had a few of their CDs, but the live experience just blew me away. “Road Rage” is now my favourite CD of theirs because it brings back memories of that concert.

A few weeks before we went to see GBS last time, we’d been down to Cornell to see Battlefield Band. They put on a good show, but they do this song called “After Hours” about how great it is to be playing after closing time in a pub, but they couldn’t get off the stage at the end of their set fast enough. GBS, on the other hand, did three encores and made it seem like they really did want the night to go on forever.

I hope they play lots of the old stuff, and don’t do the usual band thing of playing every song from their latest CD and leave out better stuff from their earlier CDs. I’m currently listening to “Seagulls”, and it’s a great song. And every CD is full of jems like that.

Al Franken again

Last night one of the few semi-non-political jokes stemmed from how Clinton lied about sex, and how that led to a frank discussion in bedrooms across the country about what wasn’t or was adultery. “My wife told me in no uncertain terms that oral sex *is* adultery. Which I guess is why we haven’t had any since we got married.”

Jokes and the joking jokesters who tell them.

Went to see Al Franken last night. Sure, if you’d read his “Lies and the Lying Liars” book and seen his interview on the Daily Show the other day, there wouldn’t have been all that much new material, but man it felt good. It’s good to allow yourself to think, if even for an evening, that there are a few thousand people in your own city who are as mad about the Bush administration as you are, and (being citizens and voters) are in a better situation than you to do something about it. Hey, all I can do is give money to candidates and organizations like moveon.org and the ACLU, and give moral support to guys like Al Franken, and so that is exactly what I do.

Tomorrow I’m going to set up AudioHijack on the G4 to capture his new radio show to disk. If and when I have a working iPod, I can load the previous days show and listen to it at work.