I think this is the longest I've gone between entries since starting this journal... anyhow, here's a summary of the last two weeks:

July 2nd

The Goob had the brilliant idea that we should go to the Giants vs. A's game on Friday, so I flew home and we headed off to the stadium. We missed the first couple of innings standing in line for beers and dogs, but it was all good. We had bleacher seats, and no sooner had Aaron told me that they never hit home runs when he goes to the game than Bonds cranked one about six rows in front of us. In all the Giants hit something like six dingers, at least ten people were thrown out of our section by security, and they gave us these cool rainbow glasses to watch the fireworks with.

July 3rd

Lounged around all day, played some basketball at night (and got rocked in game two after playing it close in game one) then caught a late night showing of Spider Man 2. All women should be red heads.

July 4th

The Goob worked all day, then at night we went to a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. We were early, and the people who owned the land where the lodge was located were setting off fireworks. The third one they launched hit a tree, veered towards the ground, and lit some grass in a gully on fire. Aaron, fireman in training, was astute -- "Um, there's a fire over there, um, burning... in the grass... the fire." Meanwhile everyone else ran for hoses and buckets, and disaster was averted. The sweat lodge started really late, lasting for almost two hours until well after midnight. It was an intense experience.

July 5th - 12th

Flew home Monday, and the effects of the sweat lodge really kicked in -- I'm not great with heat (imagine that, the guy who loves Alaska and Antarctica) and I was drained all day. By Tuesday the smoke and steam had given me a really sexy voice, and by the time Saturday rolled around I had no voice at all and was reduced to speaking in signs. Julie had fun with that one, and then today at work my voice left me again, allowing the boss to have all sorts of fun at my expense. With luck I'll soon be capable of communication more advanced than nodding, although I'm not holding out a lot of hope that I'll be resuming my concert career before the week is over.

And yes, I know the site is unavailable. I think it's an issue with the router, but I won't be home to fix it for another two weeks. It's thrilling to know that after finally getting the site onto all of the major search engines that I'll probably be dropped again. Thrilling.

ESPN today named Cleveland fans as the most tortured fans in all of sports. No disagreement here, although I'll still swear to the fact that God himself came to earth in the form of Bernie Kosar, accompanied by the angels Newsome, Brennan, Minnifield and Dixon.

The SAG union contract is an amusing read. The last clause, "If an Background Actor is rigged with any type of explosive device (including squibs)..." is particularly well-done.

Site's back up -- a power outage knocked out the router a couple of weeks ago, and this is the first weekend I've been back in the Bay Area to fix it.

Ocean's Twelve (the sequel to Ocean's Eleven) is filming on the lot right now, and while I'm not generally the movie star stalker type it's impossible not to be curious about a film starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, Don Cheadle and Bernie Mac. They're using three gigantic soundstages for filming, there are more than twice as many movie star trailers parked on the lot than I've ever seen before (each with a nametag of "Linus", "Danny", "Rusty", etc), the sets look to be huge, but sadly aside from knowing that Matt Damon's car is much, much nicer than mine, and that George Clooney is apparently driving a souped-up Honda motorcycle these days, my lunchtime strolls have otherwise not been very informative.

From an essay by Paul Graham:

"The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers."

"I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message; in fact, I think it is awesome."