A New Leaf

This, plus a lucite “plaque” and a telescope. Or a travel fishing set.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting)

Just the first video I could get my hands on of our roving Cantina Band in the Mission last night. I’m on glockenspiel, C is playing the gourd-adorned whistle. Other instruments included: clarinet, fiddle-phone (my own word for it), bass guitar, tuba, flute, and toy accordion.

We roamed the streets, playing street corners and random Halloween crowds, performing in all manner of bars and restaurants – fancy, dive, crystal stemware, pint glasses – to rousing ovations. Most people recognized us on sight – “Hey look! It’s the Star Wars cantina band!” – but it blew their minds when we actually played the music. A great effect.

See some pictures here, including the Cantina Band “Alderaan Road” photo shoot.

UPDATE: for facebook users, more pictures here and here.

UPDATE 2: I swapped out the youtube video above to a higher-quality version. We also have a flickr groups page set up – http://www.flickr.com/groups/1228151@N25/ – and there are other videos here, here, and here.

UPDATE 3: Found on Laughing Squid and Current.com (which seems to have scraped it wholesale from Laughing Squid… tut tut).

It’s alive!

N's American Ale, fermenting

Boiling the wort. It was a bit stressful trying to decipher some cryptic instructions (how do you “crack the grains”?), but I think we’re out of the woods.

Boiling the wort.

An embarrassing lapse between posts – my sincere apologies to both of my readers (not including googlebot!). I’ve been busy with a lot of different things, including:

• Getting ready to move into a new place. On a whim, Christie and I went to an open house in the Berkeley hills. After submitting an application for this truly outstanding house, we figured we’d never hear from them again – as is the norm for these highly competitive properties (there were dozens of people at the open house, despite the rain that day). In the end, thanks mostly to Christie’s charm, they offered us the place. Yay! We’ve been in our current place – small, light-less, loud neighbors – for about 3.5 years. It’s time for a change. Here are a few tiny pictures from the criagslist post:

  

  

  

  

  
  
  
• Playing Flight Control – my current favorite iPhone game.

  

• Making steady progress on a super-not-so-secret new business idea with Greg and another associate. We’ll announce something sooner or later, when we manage to launch a beta version (it’s a website).

High winds in San Francisco and volcanic ash in Alaska conspire against me today. So I’m waiting an extra hour or so in Seoul after 12 hours in the air. Fortunately I have the Traditional Korean Cultural Experience Zone to keep me occupied.

I wrote that a bit sarcastically, but it’s pretty nice – they have a 24-hour Korean craft space where you glue and paint your way to a traditional Korean cultural experience. At least in the airport, there is a kind of pride in the service employee’s clean uniform that I never see in the US. The third-world roots reveal themselves only indirectly, for instance, in the labor intensity of said service operations.

In the end, though, I’m happy being here because in Seoul I’m a tall man.

Reclined in a plush chair at Yali’s, a local Berkeley student haunt downtown, I’m writing this post on the WordPress app for iPhone. Nice to not have to lug a laptop around.

I was distracted from my book (Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson – a Christmas gift, and my second attempt to read it) by a nearby conversation about the cost of tailored suits. According to one of the conversants, reasonably nice specimens can be had in Thailand for less than $200. A bargain at twice the price – I’ll make a point of picking some up in April.

I was determined to sleep in this morning, but was stymied by jetlag.

Happy New Year, all. I won’t pretend to think I’ll fulfill any pledge to work out three times every week or learn a foreign language. So I under-promise: I resolve only to answer the question “What next?”

Current options:

1. Buff up the resume with a few more years of experience as “Product Manager” at a well-known company. Not a bad option, all things considered. The work is interesting and fun, my team is top-notch, I’m proud of what we produce, and I learn something new every day.
2. Re-apply to law school. LSAT scores are good for five years.
3. Apply to some other graduate program. Finance, Information, Economics, some PhD program somewhere?
4. Start a business. Without a doubt my preference, but what to do?

In other news, Obama is going to send us all $500 checks, which is not necessarily the best way to stimulate the economy (more on that later), and gas prices are rising again. Also, stay tuned this week for a dive into the nuts and bolts of how the government is actually going about saving the banking industry’s collective bacon, and why we should probably thank them for their efforts.

How many blogs have I started and abandoned? Approximately the same number of journals and diaries that have found the invisible part of my bookshelf over the years. This is another, but feels different; it is a new leaf.

Vacation is a time of self-reflection and goal-setting, especially the end-of-year holiday season. I am doing just such self-reflection right now in Batavia, IL, after a harrowing journey from San Francisco, a supposedly six-hour sojourn extended to well over 13.

Travelling alone (not always true with companions), I find that passenger camaraderie has a high positive correlation with the following variables:

1. Duration of flight delay relative to total flight time;
2. Triviality of causes of the delay (e.g. co-pilot stuck in traffic, one of many in my case);
3. Proximity of airport bar to the gate.

For AA 1456, these values were: >100%, multiple delays of high triviality, directly adjacent. As such, I chatted with a number of marvelous people, including a lawyer from Hong Kong, the manager of a logistics business in Manila, a Facebook employee, and someone who claimed to do something involving the selection of fashionable items to sell at retail outlets, but whose wardrobe did not inspire confidence in her job security.

Just finishing “A Christmas Story” as the evening starts winding down. (I find the carolling scene at the Chop Suey Palace mildly offensive – who’s with me?) With every sip of glögg, I wish you all a happy pre-Christmas week. Stay tuned for more from this inter-net posting site, it won’t disappoint.