Bad business strategies

"Hey, we've got extra-large!"

I have a friend.

I had a visitor this weekend, the first one not named Cathy Lin:



I'm not the best tour guide, but we scooted around Seattle and that is pretty much fun no matter what.

true multitasking.

When I go for a run, I usually listen to whatever is randomly populated in my ipod shuffle by itunes. I never skip any songs because I have something like 400 GB of music and have probably only listened to half of them, and I am trying to listen to more of it.

Quite accidentally, yesterday as I ran, a track came up that began: "Chapter 9: The Arrow of Time." I thought this was some sci-fi nerdy hiphop track intro, and as the monotone voice spoke, I kept expecting some bass and beats to kick in. In fact, I thought it was the Deltron 3030 album, which by the way is great, and has just such intros and lyrics, including lines like: "Perusing my 21st century classic comics, the fun is astronomic / I figured since I'm here I'll renew my galactic passport / So I'm not persecuted by no galactic assholes." Honestly, the album is really good.

But anyway, the voice kept going and 30 minutes later, I realized it was an electronic book and when I got home, I plugged my ipod in to see that it was Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. (Sadly, it is not read by Dr. Hawking himself.)

And it occurred to me that audio books are the perfect running material, theoretical physics or not. I really felt like I was multitasking. Now I have eliminated the whole, "I have too much to do, no time to run" excuse for not running. Also, in my recent attempt to rein in my myriad of projects, of which there were too many, I crossed off "reading" as something I had time to do. But now I get to put it back, and I should be able to finish A Brief History of Time in no time at all.

beep beep

I got a:



I am busy scooting!

Ohhhh, we're halfway there.

The half-marathon is a good running distance saddled with a really terrible name. I think it is unpopular solely because of its name. No one wants to do a half anything: it sounds like it's for people with half the energy, half the will power, half the talent; it's a race for half the person. They don't call the 5k a half-10k. They don't call an EP a half-album, a B cup a half-D, the WNBA the half-NBA.

So with that in mind, I will fix the ill-named half-marathon. The marathon is supposedly (but not really) the distance the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Senate that they'd defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Consulting a map, it looks like the town of Nea Erythrea is about halfway between Athens and Marathon. And so I declare the half-marathon dead, the 21,097.5-meter race to be henceforth referred to only by its new name, the Nea Erythrea. Catchy!

Speaking of which, I think I'm going to run the Portland Marathon this year. Nea Erythreas are for wimps.

Bill Clinton made me poor!

I had a pretty indistinct upper-middle class upbringing: there was always food on the table, I got most of what I wanted; I never thought about finances, that we had too much money or too little. At Stuyvesant High School, they groom impressionable young kids to become Wall Street lackies, doctors, engineers, and grown-up rich kids. It seemed pretty clear that if you followed a six-point algorithmic agenda, you would enjoy monetary success in the future, and, by being kept busy with an inundation of schoolwork, there was no time to question any of it. So when I went to college during America's economic heyday, I was presented with a few choices. In my senior year, I could take three more classes and finish a computer science major, take four more classes and finish an economics major, or take three classes and finish an English major. I figured I could do either of the first two and make good money when I was done or I could do the latter and still do all right. How that Bill Clinton economy tricked me! Little did I know the economic boom would die and now I sort of muddle along middlingly in the current economic clime. Alas! It occurs to me that had I grown up in a lower/lower-middle class upbringing, I might have kept a more careful eye on the monetary bottom line of my college decisions because of an omnipresent awareness of financial prudence and responsibility. Maybe there is a swap of the lower-middle class and upper-middle class during a time of economic shrinkage directly following a time of economic prosperity.

Well! I blame all the commencement speakers who say "Do what your heart tells you." Bastards! Commencement speakers are that point one percent that defied odds to achieve success. That's why they're commencement speakers. Clearly they are not statisticians or jilted romantics: they don't know that the heart mostly leads you astray.

232 years old tomorrow.

I was planning on updating this blog a lot more, but then the weather got really nice so I got lazy and hung outside instead. But I will try to persevere from now, and take an hour every day while at work to write an entry here. Of course, I've said this before so I am probably lying.

Here, a picture of Chloe Lin:



Chloe isn't really my dog. and her name isn't really Chloe Lin. But I was dogsitting last month and I am a bad dogsitter so I dropped Chloe and took her to the vet to make sure she was fine (she was.) When I got there, I filled out the form as though I were the owner. When I got the bill, it said: Chloe Lin. So now I call her Chloe Lin. (But I say it like Chloe Lynn, as though she were Southern.) Also, I filled out "Andy Lin" for my name, and yet on the bill they'd changed it to Andrew Lin. ?