I began today with yet another time zone flub. I had my venture mentoring meeting scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon in my calendar but when I looked at the invitation to the meeting I saw that the meeting was really at 10:30. This would have been no problem were it not 10:00 AM at the time and if I had a car handy. But my car was not handy as Sarah was using it while hers is in the shop. This still would not have been a problem had it not been raining the remnants of hurricane Helen, Xavier, or Zachary. So I biked to MIT today in the rain wearing my goretex rain gear top. This did nothing for my khaki pants or shoes.

Arriving at the venture mentoring meeting my pants were sticking to my legs and covered with whatever grit came from the mud and puddles to shoot up into my pants. Luckily we were sitting at a table so I could keep my wet pant legs from showing too obviously. I was listening in to the conversations around me and one in particular caught my interest. The person sitting across from me was talking about how he had bought an assault rifle last week because the assault rifle ban had been finally lifted. He had bought something like a Bushman 5000 Megasport killer special.

Normally I would naturally be an opponent of guns but he seemed to be both doing a good job explaining how he has a target range in his backyard and that it is useful to lower property values in his neighborhood and can continue to buy more land. He also could protect his town in the event that there is a hostile takeover from insurgents. Since he had good reasons for owning an assault rifle I changed my mind on the topic of the ban. People should be able to buy really powerful military grade weapons for home use provided they have a good reason to purchase. Jeremy wanted to buy an assault rifle simply because he can but given the price tag of $1,100 it is a little out of his league for a gun that could be used to lower the population density in Quincy market. I actually am torn on the subject because I have noticed that there are sane people who purchase these guns with no more malace than the other guns that they purchase. So the philosophy that people kill people and guns just makes it easier basically leads me to the conclusion that unless we can forget how to make guns altogether we aren't likely to be able to stop people from killing each other with them by modifying the grades of guns that are easy to purchase from a store near you.

With the Venture Mentoring meeting behind me I had to move on to another few pieces of important pending activities. The first of these was to install a PHP script with Robert for "The Swedish Nurse Foundation". The foundation is a non-profit that is having an event on Halloween to outfit as many women as possible in Swedish nurse (sexy nurse) costumes as possible and then to take all of them on a pub crawl with the sponsors who donated money to purchase their costumes. My job for the day was to install the PHP script that would be the back-bone of the auction site. PHP installations always boil down to the same basic set of instructions but I do tend to screw them up.

First - Find a cool FREE php tool that does what you need - like auctions or chat
Next - Unpack the software at the host site.
Next - Struggle to find the installation help files
Next - Look around for a bunch of passwords including the MySQL password
Next - Set-up a MySQL database by running a sql script
Next - Find the friggin configuration file (that they don't tell you about properly in the installation help files) that has the pointers to the database.
Next - Run the scripts changing little items in the configuration file until they stop showing errors like "Could not connect to MySQL localhost".
Next - Realize that the script is pretty crappy and might not be worth all the trouble.
Next - Drink something alcoholic


I went to my improv class after the installation and did a fun scene where I got to tell a story along with two other players each from a different perspective. It basically consisted of a beauty queen being attacked on a float during a parade by a group of anti-beauty contest protesters dressed in monkey suits. I got to play the dumb cop who was "outnumbered" by the monkeys while the other two people played a protester and the beauty queen. Another group did a great story about a hot dog vendor dressed in a hot dog suit who couldn't see out the flap of the hot dog and ruined the world series game 7 for an intense Red Sox fan.



Women

I did finally get the drink at Bukowski's in Inman Square. Most of the improv Boston class goes there after our class. For the first time in a long while I was at Bukowskis and had been reading a Bukowski book the night before. Jeremy has added "Women" to our library as a part of the move off of his boat. He thinks he has reached a Bukowski like status but getting lots of women to come over to the apartment to sleep with him but I think he hasn't because he doesn't have an alcohol problem, boils, or a strong reputation as a beat poet. "Women" is a very readable book. It fits into the big pile of books and films about the seedy undercurrent of people who exist in the world but you don't think about from day to day. The amazing thing about him is that from the accounts that he gives of the world around him there seems to be no reason why he would be literate enough to be able to record the accounts. He is supposedly a drunken leacherous deviant man that never can get anything right. It is a work of fiction but how much fiction could this "Chinowski" character really be?

The last observation of the day came as the evening was winding down and the Red Sox had scored two runs in the bottom of the 11th to beat the Devil Rays. One of the people in my improv class has the problem that his job is at risk because his CEO and him share a similar affiliation. Because someone passed this information throughout the company it seemed that he was the one who communicated it and it could be bad when the board of directors hears that both he and the CEO frequent the same dungeon. I hadn't realized that there were dungeons in Boston but I guess they are everywhere.

I also guess that we all live on the fringe of many worlds. We can breakfast with millionair entrepreneurs that shoot 800 rounds per second for fun, dine with former sailors who aspire to become drunken philanderers, and share drinks with folks who like to be whipped and beaten, and we can still take a moment to pretend to be a police officer fending off protesters dressed in monkey suits or a giant hot dog.