The Blog with No Name

Saddam has been executed.

May God have mercy on his soul.

Longest post title yet? Maybe.

I was able to enjoy Christmas in Alaska with an abridged family. My older brother had to stay in Ohio due to work duties. The poor guy. It was an interesting Christmas. My parent’s kitchen was in the final stages of a renovation, so it was barely usable. In fact, when I first arrived there was no water. Needless to say there were no Christmas cookies this year, which means that basically half the point of Christmas was gutted. We also didn’t have a Christmas tree because the living room was completely wrapped up in plastic until two days before Christmas. Instead we had to make do with a Christmas Plant:

That picture is taken with my T-Mobile Dash, which is a nice smartphone but has a crappy camera.

So, was this the saddest Christmas yet? Perhaps. We were a man down, we had no cookies, Dad was working a lot, and we had to make do with a plant. Still, it was good to go home and spend time with the family. I also got to see some old friends from high school, and the first offspring from one of my friends. I guess this is what happens when one gets older: Christmases get different and friends get kids. I think I can cope with that.

The weather was fairly dreary, cold, and snowy. I don’t think the temperature ever made it out of the teens, and several times it dipped into the single digits. We did get a bit of sunshine, so here’s my obligatory picture of the sun passing through the hanging valley across from the house (again pardon the crappy camera on the phone):

The nice thing about being in Alaska when it was so cold is that when I come back down to Seattle the sub-40 degree weather seems warm. I still haven’t turned on my apartment heater yet.

I didn’t take my shaver with me, so I haven’t trimmed my manly facial hair in a while. It’s a short, prickly, and annoyingly sparse beard right now. It’s very prickly, but I’ve grown attached to it, so I can’t bring myself to trim it. I think it’s in these moments I really need a woman in my life to say, “Shave your stupid face!”

This is what steevak.com looks like on the Nintendo Wii:

Nothing remarkable yet, but Internet on the Wii is still in trial version. I’m sure this will be exploited well by both Nintendo and other parties (like this which makes the Wii a media center). It is pretty cool surfing YouTube and Google Video from the Wii. Now I just need a real TV for this to really be worthwhile.

Check out one of my first gifts through work connections:

SOCKS! Branded with the vendor of the platform I admin! Tubular! This is why my job rocks. Rocks my socks.

Seriously, folks. Really, can it get much better than sitting in a high-back leather chair at a 24 hour diner during the wee hours of the morning with dear friends you haven’t seen in months with a full spread of bacon and eggs laced with Tabasco sauce before you, capped by a good beer? I submit to you, here and now, it can’t get much better for me.

And you are too. My first thought when seeing this was that Time magazine has finally, really, truly taken the wussy and lazy route. How boring is it to say that 300 million people are the persons of the year? Didn’t we learn anything from The Incredibles? If everybody is special then nobody is special. If everybody is person of the year, then it really doesn’t mean anything at all. I also was a little bit gratified when Time’s editor basically admitted they have no balls:

“If you choose an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people,” said Richard Stengel, who took over as Time’s managing editor earlier this year. “But if you choose millions of people, you don’t have to justify it to anyone.”

Good job, Time, way to avoid any possibility of having to stand up for what you believe. You’re now the little pansy of the news world.

Shameless plug for my Amazon wishlist. Look at all the fun items! Remember, the Season is all about the giving! So, I’ll take one for the team and do all the receiving while everybody else does all the giving. You can send me a thank you card for that selfless little bit right there too.

I wasn’t really aware of how bad the storm hit us. Probably because I never lost power and was fairly sheltered from the winds I think. A photo gallery of some of the destruction can be seen here (sorry if it resizes your browser window).

Last night my team at work had our holiday dinner and gift exchange at my boss’s house down south. He didn’t have power, but he decided to have it any way. Driving over the I-90 bridge from Seattle which had minimal power outages to the east side was a little creepy. The normally sparkling, light dotted hillsides were completely dark. Not even streetlights were operating. I wasn’t expecting the situation to be that bad. I still had to buy my white elephant gift, so I planned on stopping at a Target along the way. The mall it was in was completely dark except for a few emergency lights in the Safeway. Fortunately, somehow, Target had enough power to operate registers and have enough light for people to read price tags. It was pretty creepy being in a big store like that with people talking in hushed voices, low light, and a slight sense of urgency. Coming out of the store into complete darkness was odd too. I may not notice streetlights and other lights very much when there is power, but when they’re gone it’s definitely noticeable. I suddenly felt like I was back in Alaska where they don’t pollute the environment with lots of extra light.

It was definitely a different dinner party experience when there is no light besides flashlights and candles, the house is the roughly the same temperature as the outside, and none of the food can be served piping hot because there’s no way to heat them. The grill had to be fixed with a lot of banging, so that the meat which was originally going to be cooked in the oven could be cooked at all. It was still a very pleasant experience, and a good time was had by all. Have I mentioned before how thankful I am for my job and my co-workers? I am.

Bad weather in Seattle last night, so a bunch of poor saps are without power including my work, so I got the day off. They won’t even let us in the buildings to get laptops so we can work from home. I guess I’m fine with that. It’s nice to have a day off, but I really am swamped at work. I’ll definitely have to put in some OT next week. I just find it ironic that it really isn’t a horrible day. Right now it’s not windy; it’s not raining; I even saw some patches of blue sky earlier. It’s like the virtual snow day we had at the end of November. It snowed 2 inches or so, which caused pretty much everything to shut down, and then the actual “snow day” I only saw dry, clear roads and a beautiful sunny sky. Go figure.

I love raging storms. Last night, two of my friends and I had to walk clear across town after the Seahawks’s embarrassing loss to San Francisco. The wind was gusting something fierce and from all sides as it swirled around buildings. I had a blast just trying to stay on my feet. Earlier that day, it was pouring rain and extremely windy. When we were driving into town from work it was as if huge buckets of water was being poured onto the car. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it rain that hard in Seattle. The pounding of the rain against the car body was almost scary.

NASA captured a sunset on Mars:

For some reason, I think this picture is really cool.

UPDATE: Dan prompted me to make this a wallpaper. Get it here (1920×1280, so best suitable for widescreen displays).