June 10, 2005
Some things about me you may not know
1. My middle name is Carroll, because my brother's middle name is Jon, after my dad, and my mother, Carol, thought she was being clever.
2. Yes, I do get a lot of shit about my middle name.
3. During college, I worked about three years in grocery store meat departments. Working with animal fat made my hands soft and smooth.
4. I sliced off the tip of my right forefinger on a deli slicer. Those freakin' blades are hella sharp.
5. I attended an all boys school my senior year of high school. I missed girls. A lot.
6. I used to have the biggest celebrity crush in the world on Loni Anderson during her WKRP years.
7. Nowadays, it's Salma Hayek.
8. Daisy Fuentes ain't bad, either.
9. I have a unibrow.
10. Okay, I don't have a unibrow right now, because my girlfriend plucked out the middle part last night.
11. Eyebrow plucking is an irritating pain.
12. I had knee surgery when I was 16-years old due to a wrestling injury. They removed a piece of cartilage, and even today I notice it when I run.
13. I had a front tooth knocked out in 9th grade when a wrestling teammate threw a heavy pillow at me while I was doing pull-ups.
14. I was the only kid in my 9th grade class who had to put a fake tooth in Polident each night.
15. Boxers. Oh, wait, you already knew that.
16. When I moved to Tokyo my senior year, it was over a month before I ate anywhere other than McDonald's or KFC.
17. My favorite food is Naan bread dipped in Moti Butter Chicken. If you don't know what this is, your life is roughly 70 percent incomplete.
18. Through five years of college, I made the Dean's list twice: after the first quarter, and my last quarter.
19. I only had one D grade in college.
20. It was in my broadcast journalism class. That's pretty much when I decided to stick to the writing end of journalism.
21. After getting that D, I bumped into the broadcast journalism professor in the hall, and he asked me if I knew why I had been given a D. I said, "yeah, because you're a jackass."
22. That, obviously, came back to haunt me during the two other classes I had to take with that prick. He made life particularly unpleasant, although I still managed to get a C+ and a B, respectively.
23. I've been told I have a good voice for radio. I'm sure it's also been implied that I have a good face for radio.
24. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa 405. I thought it was really cool that it had Scrabble installed on it, although I played it, maybe, five times.
25. I didn't participate in my college graduation. Instead, I had to cover the graduation as a reporter for the Winona Daily News. That always struck me as ironic, for some reason.
26. I have recurring dreams about tornadoes.
27. I know the religious significance behind "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start."
28. I don't know how to drive a stick shift.
29. My first car was an '89 Chevy Cavalier. It was baby blue and got over 30 miles to the gallon.
30. I think Lenny Kravitz is one of the most over-rated musicians of our time and that all his shit sounds exactly the same.
31. I used the soundtrack to Rocky IV to help get me pumped up before a wrestling match.
32. I won six wrestling tournaments in high school, to which I largely credit the Rocky IV sountrack.
33. I've discovered over the past month and a half what I've suspected for most of my post-college career: I'm not a particularly good managing editor.
34. I'm picking up my parents from the airport today. They're back from Tokyo.
35. They're going to take me out to eat at a Thai Restaurant. I'll probably order green curry.
June 08, 2005
Making Up Words
Caroline says: Oh, I never saw the forecast where it was supposed to be nice on Sat, which is why I was surprised you'd try the rollerblading thing again.
Caroline says: I figured you were brave.
Ryan says: We rollerbladed once last year, right into a total downpour. Six miles of complete and total drenchitude.
Caroline says: Please use the word "drenchitude" in an article.
Caroline says: That is most excellent.
Ryan says: "The mainframe can continue running, despite conditions that would destroy most systems, including extreme heat and overwhelming drenchitude."
Caroline says: Awesome.
Caroline says: That right there is a $5 word. No more of that silly $1 per word stuff.
Ryan says: I'm a wordsmith of the highest order.
Darth Vader Can Do ANYTHING
I didn't think he had a chance.
He sure knows how to piss off R. Lee Ermey.
The United States Of. . . well, you get the idea..
Quitting
One of my most truly inspired moments of negotiating came about when I was 17 years old. My parents had just been offered teaching jobs at an international school in Tokyo, and we were having a family pow-wow in the living room because I, having lived my entire life in the Minnesota small town of Harmony, was not all that keen on spending my senior year of high school half a world away from everything that was familiar to me. Obviously, in retrospect, it was one of the best experiences in my life, but at the time, I couldn't see how that could possibly be the case.
Anyway, as we sat there, negotiating terms, I had already scored the promise of my own car come college the next year. That was a good start, but I wanted to hit them where it hurt. I wanted to conjure a demand that would truly make them pause and consider whether all this Tokyo talk was worth it.
"If I go with you, Dad has to quit smoking," I said.
There was a tangible feeling of shock in the room, as if I had settled on a topic no one dared to think I'd even consider addressing. My Dad was a smoker's smoker. The man was at a pack a day, easy, and he'd been at that level for my entire life. I imagine he probably bottle fed me as a baby with a Winston hanging from his lips.
"That's asking quite a lot of your father," my Mom tried to object.
"No," said Dad. "He's right. I should quit."
What transpired after that was over four years of my Dad gradually coming to terms with the ultimatum. You have to understand, my father is a man who operates at an extremely high stress level. Everything he does is, at a minimum, of the utmost importance. Sending him out to buy a gallon of milk is a minor adventure for the man.
So, cigarettes were an important stress-coping mechanism. Now, on the verge of living in a foreign land after over 20 years of the same town and teaching job, here was his son telling him cigarettes were hereafter taboo. He must have thought I was the biggest little prick on the planet. Still, much to my amazement, he acquiesced.
So, my father embarked on a quitting program that was entirely his own, by which I mean he just didn't smoke where any family member could catch him. Upon settling down in our Tokyo apartment, he started running all sorts of unnecessary errands. He'd decide, for example, that we really needed a bottle of Coca-Cola, even if there were already three bottles in the refrigerator. Off he'd go, to the little 7-11 on the corner, and he'd come back smelling faintly of nicotine, and looking decidedly more relaxed then when he left.
My mother and I always knew what he was up to, but we both basically thought it was a little cruel to deny the man a little respite from the uber-stressful reality of assimilating ourselves into an entirely different culture.
Yet, four years later, with Dad still sneaking out to puff his cares away, we all came to the conclusion that it was starting to become a little ridiculous. After all, I had fulfilled my end of the bargain years ago, and my parents had more than adjusted to the Tokyo lifestyle.
So, my father decided that it was time to enlist some help in his quitting crusade, and he found that help in the form of a nicotine patch. And, despite lingering doubts by me and everyone who had known him as a chronic smoker for over two decades, the patch actually started working for him. His unnecessary errands started to cease, and his clothes started to smell less and less like a brush fire.
Finally, after several months of slapping a patch on his shoulder, my father didn't even require that any more. It only took him four years to go cold turkey. And I'm still pretty proud of him.
Not sure why I wrote this, except that Father's Day is on the horizon, and my parents get back from Tokyo for the summer on Friday.
June 07, 2005
Makes Sense To Me. NOT!
Sooo, in order to revive business, the sound strategy is to close plants and fire people? I only took a couple of business classes in college, but I don't remember this particular business strategy being discussed. Then again, I may have skipped that day or something.
June 06, 2005
Hey, Mac Lovers, A Differing Opinion
Gawd, watch this. It's a scream.
Via.
Think Different. . . Okay, Don't
So, Apple computers has decided to dump PowerPC processors in favor of Intel chips. Obviously, this concerns me because PowerPC processors are built by IBM, and IBM pays me money to write good things about the Power Architecture (and, yes, I'm aware of the duplicate lead paragraph).
But, beyond that, Apple has managed to cling to a 2.6 percent computer market share largely because of a PC architecture that thumbs its nose at Windows-based PCs. Now, suddenly, they switch gears and adopt the same underlying chip that powers most of the Windows PCs in the market. Strikes me as an odd, and risky, move.
Adding to the bizarro world of today's IT market, the next generation Microsoft X-Box 360 is supposedly going to leverage IBM PowerPC processors. What's next? Proprietary Linux?
