I somehow bumped into the new Synch Magazine site today. They had created some imaginary IT products for gangsta's.

I think I know enough about Photoshop to start creating my own similar photo inventions. That is what I have been doing with trying to build an OEM channel at work. The work is mainly taking the existing product, other products, and photoshop to show how they would work together. It is a fun activity and is generally received well because people are able to appreciate the visual prototype more than the conceptual one. They can look at it and go... "oh that is exactly what we need to have." once they see it.

I personally want the gun remote control or the low-rider laptop. My only problem with the gun remote control is that it didn't appear to have the universal remote buttons that I need.

On the entrepreneurship side I was talking to Bijoy Goswami who started a group called Austin Bootstrap that has been steadily growing. The bootstrap mantra at some level is one that most people don't intuitively trust but is very important. It is sell, build, market. You have to find some customers willing to pay for the product and then build it for the ones who pay for it. You can then market the success to other folks with the same needs. At least that is among the solution to the problem of getting out of the cycle of needing capital.

Bijoy wrote a book that he self-published and talked me into being the leader of Bootstrap Boston, the wing of his organization. He also had made a keen observation about the differece between east coast entrepreneurial culture and west coast culture. The west coast culture provides a greater degree of respect and importance to the entrepreneurial activity of evangelism while the east coast is still focused on the technologist who can build the solution.

As a convert to the religion that the problem with technology is that people try to make products but don't know why anyone needs the technology or how to convert a generic tool into an actual business solution I was happy to hear about it. It filled my head with crazy ideas including that schools teaching technology (ahem MIT) should also teach courses in evangelism to give the students a real edge. Evangelism is different from marketing and even the generic entrepreneurship although they go hand in hand. Maybe I can mention this to folks around MIT like Ken Morse and see what they think.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Summer is blurring away fast. I’ve been living on the fast forward button for a week now. Every day there was something leading to the next thing and onwards.

On Thursday night we went out to the Parrish Café to meet with a crew of people to celebrate Canadians in America day. It was a beautiful night but also too busy of a night so we had to wait for a few hours to get a table outside. I decided to go on a mission to the Rattlesnake across the street to ask about their upstairs patio. The bouncer at the door decided to give me a hard time because I was wearing a red construction paper maple leaf on my chest. Once past him I found the line to go upstairs. The bouncer in front of that door was useless and being a jerk. I asked him how long he thought the wait would be and he told me he didn’t know but I could look at the line and figure it out for myself. I then let him know that his job is partially to answer questions and that it was a reasonable question. Based on his experience, he had admitted to working that door for five years, I asked him, could he estimate how long it would take for the line to pass through to upstairs. He told me no. So I told him that it was fine. I didn’t need to buy beer from their establishment if they didn’t want to be helpful. The next time it is a crummy night and empty at the Rattlesnake I’ll be going anywhere but there.

Sarah and I drove back from work on Friday and then to Olive’s for a fantastic dinner with Hattie, Jose, Matt, and Kate. Kate’s friend Meredith is a chef there, actually an apprentice chef who used to be an intern who works the pasta station. Meredith sent over a sampler of pasta after we had our appetizers including some pasta with truffle oil. I don’t know what is in truffle oil but I am surprised that nobody has made it into a narcotic. I was then far too full to eat my short rib until the next morning but did make room for the assortments of desserts that Meredith sent out after the meal. Kate has been going to art classes where they ask her to draw with non-traditional media. This boils down to decorating with beard shavings, drawing with celery, or making a picture out of the sharp end of thumbtacks. It sounded fun but won’t help in my quest to be a better digital artist.

At the wedding on Saturday afternoon I was looking forwards to a long day of meeting and greeting strangers playing the role of new but unfamiliar to everyone husband. I didn’t know anyone there but Sarah since it was her college roommate’s wedding. We got lucky and sat next to some fun people at our assigned table. I chatted for hours with an animator who worked on the movies Ice Age, The Polarbear Express, and Robots. His job was to move the models like a puppeteer to create the sequences to look realistic. He answered all of my questions about when they do the sound, how they inspire the actions. For example, in a board room scene with Ratchet, the actor pounded his hand down on the table when he delivered the line. The animator saw the tape of this and edited the motion to mirror what the actor had done. He wasn’t a big fan of how they did the Polarbear Express with the motion capture stuff because for him it wasn’t really animating. They were just trying to fix the jerky strange movements from what they had captured. Another wedding highlight was the fountain of chocolate. A company in Waltham rents out a chocolate fondue fountain where they send an attractive college student to help you dip an assortment of items including marshmallows, strawberries, pretzels, whatever into the chocolate. We drove from the wedding to the Marshfield house at 11:30 after trying to dance to some music that we weren’t very fond of. Sarah was feeling a bit self conscious about being pregnant. I kept looking at the little girls dressed in their formal wedding dresses dancing with their fathers and cousins and thought to myself. When I have my little daughter I’ll be dancing with her whenever I can.

In the morning when we awoke in Marshfield we decided it would be easiest to go to town for breakfast. We found a nice place that had a deck overlooking the water and an all you can eat buffet. After that we went back with our bellies full and made a full assault on cleaning the swimming pool. The pool was murky and had leaves at the bottom and flies floating on the surface of the water. The pump didn’t seem to be clearing most of it. Mom went after the flies from the edge and I figured out, while in the murky water, how to set-up the water vacuum attachment. Even that wasn’t working too well so I checked out the big hole in the bottom of the pool where the water gets sucked through and it was clogged by leaves and twigs. So I did some little dives to clear it and that started to move things along. The pool should eventually filter itself through but it needs to be able to pump the water through the bottom to get all the organic material that settles to the bottom. I think that next time we go the pool will be very clean.

Lisa and Dave came out to Marshfield as well. It was Big Papi Day, F-Day, however you need to put it. We were there because of dad. Lisa was learning some Dylan songs from Dave. Sarah and I put the bed together in our designated room. From our construction method of using a drill to screw in and strip the 40 wood screws holding the slats together I think the bed will need to be disassembled using karate. Mom and dad were discussing whether to take the architects advice and put the kitchen where the living room is or to go with their instinct and leave the kitchen where it was. Sarah was working on an eval using my laptop that needed to print on our dysfunctional printer this morning.

A barn swallow had moved back into the porch so mom wasn’t allowing people to walk out the back door to disturb the barn swallow and her four babies. The swallow was moving back and forth into the woods every thirty seconds to return with a new live insect for her children. Mothers work hard to keep their children alive. Dad made some tasty margaritas in the blender with fresh limes.

We grabbed some BK on the drive back to Brookline and then hurried over to the MilkyWay in JP to watch Faith Sollaway’s latest schlock Opera – The F-Word. We arrived about twenty minutes early and given that Sarah and I weren’t the core audience segment, lesbians, we were mainly just sitting in our seats trying to look as normal as possible in a room packed with women wearing shirts like the one that said “Dykes against Bush”. I was surprised by the wide variety of lesbians in the room and thought it would be interesting to perform a anthropological study on the whole society of lesbians in JP to understand the culture. All cultures are formed out of a common bond and a need to band together to protect that bond. In the case of lesbians it is a sexual preference.

This means that their rituals like going to the Milky Way to see a Schlock Opera are bound to focus on this common bond. The show delivered on this promise. During the introduction to the musical faith did a little audience participation where she asked “Only the lesbians” to sing the line from the song then she asked “Just that guy in the corner” to sing. They also had some choice visits to the sexy OB/GYN office where the female doctor was asking questions normally delivered in a professional manner with cruder terminology. The schlock included some funny bits about repressed Jewish memories of uncle Hyman and some cruel angry Chasid telling a little girl that she would never get gimmel on the dreidel. We exchanged gifts for dad’s day after the show as the crowd was dying down.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Thursday afternoon Deloitte and Touche was running their fourth annual play bocce at the Tech Center afternoon networking event. The main draw suggested that we would be able to play bocce with venture capitalists and potential investors. Actually the main draw was also free food and an open bar. Since Jeremy doesn’t have a car I had driven him over to Burlington in the morning and he didn’t have a way to get home other than to go to the VC Bocce thing Aaron, Jeremy, and I all wandered over to this Waltham event in two cars. Upon arriving both Jeremy and I were lacking in the pre-registration category so we didn’t have our nifty name tags pre-made. So we got the low-budget ghetto hand written name tags. Jeremy was one step lower on the name hierarchy because I at least had a card to drop in their bucket of who attended. Jeremy had to write his name onto one of my cards. I suspect they use these business cards for witching ceremonies creating broths fed to CEOs for special corporate events like IPOs and FEC investigations. “Eye of newt, tongue of frog, business card of software engineer, cackle, cackle.” Actually business cards in buckets perform an important role in the economy. They are consumed by hungry interns who diligently enter large buckets full of them into spread sheets and then generate beautiful but useless reports to new employees at consulting firms who then roll-up the reports to real partners who ignore them and are glad to not be distracted by the underlings but also happy that the underlings are miserable and staying-up all night making reports.

The bocce game itself was quite fun for almost an entire game. The people we were playing with were not venture capitalists. I actually didn’t meet more than one venture capitalist the whole night. Most people were either other entrepreneurs looking to find the venture capitalists, a ton of young accountant/consultants from Deloitte clustered together and chatting about how they were going to make a great report out of the business cards later, and some service providers looking to sell things like part time CXOs, leasing at high rates on office equipment, executive recruiting, and IPO document management. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not but since the bar was open and the Corona’s had limes in them I wasn’t going to complain too much. So we played Bocce against a pair of people, one of whom I swear was Slobidan Milosevich or Mikhail Gorbachev but since he spoke very little English I never figured out his name or nationality. His business partner was a tall guy who thought that bocce wasn’t quite as much fun as boule, a similar game with an oblong shaped throwing stone that processes and spins in cycles after being thrown. I’m still waiting for space bocce although the game might take too long.

In my defense the Waltham Tech Center is at the top of a hill overlooking a large reservoir. The road itself that leads to the parking lot is at the bottom of a cliff that is at the end of some woods with a steep incline that are at the base of the hill where the grass forms a slight saddleback where while there is a stone barrier, the stones are mainly level to the grass, especially where the saddle reaches it’s lowest point into the woods leading to the cliff leading to the road. The bocce courts we played on were defined by string rather than regulation wooden border bocce courts. The end of the court was at the top of the saddle leading down to the woods. We did manage to play until the score was seven to five when I decided to go for a long and high shot where the white ball was near the back corner of the court. The big green ball bounced once and then started rolling first slowly and then more quickly down the hill. One attendee stood by and watched the ball roll past him and then proceeded to watch the ball tinker down the saddle through the grass to the low point in the stones lining the border to the woods, hop over a stone and then roll down through the woods.

After looking carefully for the ball in the woods and nearly spraining my ankle I was unable to locate it anywhere. Part of the problem was that it was a dark green ball in the middle of some fairly dark green wooded area. I went all the way down the side of the cliff to see if there was a ball at the end of the road but even if it had reached the road it would likely have rolled another half mile down the winding road until it reached the street in front of the reservoir. So Jeremy and I switched places and he went to look for the ball while I continued to play the two folks with only three balls. I was doing fine and then Jeremy returned so that we could play some more.

Among the highlights of who I saw at the event was Mr. Jim Levinger, formerly of Pixeldance and now working at a new start-up that produces software for reading encoded messages through camera phones. The camera phone takes a picture of some dots and it then knows what to do next. It looked quite cool but I couldn’t think of the killer application for this other than in an upcoming spy movie where messages could be hidden in paintings or walls and a camera phone with the decoder software was the only way to read the message. That would be quite cool. He should call the DOD. Some other folks were doing some RFID work and I told them that the killer application for RFID would be a system to find the bocce ball lost in the woods.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Behind hidden doors...

One of the main draws of New York City are the Broadway shows. So the first thing that we did when we arrived at the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Madison Square Garden was to ask at the ticket desk whether any of the great shows like Spamalot or Chicago had tickets available for Saturday evening or Sunday. They came back with a bunch of offers for shows that sounded like they had finally put the music of Brittney Spears into a musical (actually that would be pretty cool). So Sarah and I checked into our non-smoking but smoke ridden coffin of a room, the door looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, and opened the window to air it out. We then rushed back downstairs to where James and Stephanie were waiting for us in the car so that we could go to the other major attraction in New York city – illegal knock-off bag shopping. I better get used to the world of designer bags since I am going to have a daughter.

After parking in a faux little Italy in SoHo we walked the fifteen blocks in a sudden torrential rain shower that was a good change from the hot 90 degree weather. We did manage to buy two umbrellas for the four of us and I had to hold the one for Sarah and me because I am the taller one. I tried to cover mainly her because she is pregnant and might dissolve in the acid rain of New York.

Upon arriving at Canal Street we began the quest for the knock-off bags. As someone who doesn’t understand bags as a fashion statement I mainly was there as a consultant on illegal activities and getting into trouble, which I am better expert for. I was also the only one who had seen the illegal bags before so I was an expert on the process. My former experience was in the winter of 2003 during a massive blizzard that buried the PT cruiser for a week. In 2003 the shops had giant rooms full of knock-off bags. During that blizzard there had been one incident when we were in a big store full of bags and the police came past and the store had completely closed with us trapped inside for five minutes before some fashionable and Jewish looking fashion label enforcement police had busted into the door and started yelling at the proprietors. Times had changed and the stores were tiny and brandless so I figured that either the Internet bust had broken down demand for these bags, the shops shrunk in an inverse proportion to the temperature, or the crack down by the Prada police was taking it’s toll on the industrious Nextel phone and walkie-talkie wielding immigrants of Chinatown.

So we entered a number of these smaller establishments and looked at their bags but unlike the last time I was there the bags didn’t have any labels on them to identify that they were Prada, Kate Spade, Gucci, or Coach. You had to know the style before-hand to figure out which was which. Sarah was quite unimpressed and was looking for a black Kate Spade diaper bag and would settle for nothing less. You have to have standards in these things. We entered a number of shops with all four of us but the bags just weren’t the knock-offs we were looking for. Disappointed we split apart for a while. James and Stephanie ate Lychee nuts. One industrious illegal bag salesman popped out of a basement door bulkhead and started waving a catalog of bags in front of a fashionable teenager in front of us. Sarah walked past and let me know that she didn’t want to go down into a bulkhead to buy a bag. We then found Stephanie and James wandering in a daze and since the heat had returned we stopped into the local Chinatown Hagen-Daaz outlet for some smoothies because James and Stephanie couldn’t find the place that had the perfect Boba-tea drinks.

After the refreshing tropical mango smoothie we were considering leaving Chinatown when we stopped in one last shop to see if there was a chance that they had different merchandise. It was the same crap but this time Sarah asked the magic question. “Do you have any Kate Spade bags?”. The small Asian woman put her finger to her lips and told us to be very quiet. She then pointed to the wall and told us to follow her. We followed and in the wall was a cut-out shape of a hidden door. She opened the door and Sarah, Stephanie, and I all walked into the secret room filled to the brim with illegal knock-off bags of all kinds along with another woman who had been shopping there before we arrived and we had never noticed. So the reason why the stores had gotten smaller was because they had subdivided them into the legal storefront of bags without labels and the illicit labeled back-rooms with hidden doors.

Stephanie wasn’t looking for a bag but she found a shiny gold bag that matched her shoes and was probably a thousand dollars retail. She paid $30 bucks for it and the woman carefully wrapped it and warned her to tell nobody about what had transpired. Sarah was inspired by this but she hadn’t found her Kate Spade black diaper bag yet so we had to press on throughout Chinatown seeking out the illegal door with the secret brand name password in every shop we could find. We had to leave Stephanie and James to eat more Lychee nuts on the street while we pursued our mad lust for this bag.

We tried over twelve shops and found back rooms in so many different shapes and sizes all filled with various Whitman’s samplers of bags. I envisioned that there might be other rooms behind these rooms where the illegal activities kept getting more illegal. If you asked once in the bag room for drugs a smaller door would open. Once in the drugs room you could ask for prostitutes and climb into the basement. Finally you could ask to be transported to another dimension and a strange portal would open taking you to Zeta-7, the planet in a distant solar system where all stolen articles go.

Eventually we came upon a shop that had hanging above the counter a bag that looked just like the Kate Spade black diaper bag that we were desperate to find. So we asked the Asian woman if they had Kate Spade and walked through a display area filled with clothes and through a door behind it into a large back room with two mothers with their two daughters. The back room also contained someone in a hidden toilet who walked out of a wall so I asked whether I could go to the bathroom. The back room didn’t hold the bag we were looking for so Sarah asked her specifically for what she wanted and the woman though about it and said that we needed to wait for five minutes. We spent the five minutes discussing the features of diaper bags with the two mothers who had been through the experience since they had their daughters in the back room with them ready to be sold into white slavery. The Asian woman buzzed someone on her walkie-talkie in Chinese and after five minutes the same tagless bag we had seen came back with a Kate Spade label carefully superglued to the front. Sarah examined it with the mothers for quality and compliance with the standards of the manufacturer and then negotiated a $35 settlement with the woman. We left the store and found Stephanie and James.

I highly recommend the experience.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So we had a visit to the OB yesterday to get another ultrasound. The big potential news was to know the gender of the baby. Since I was working from home we walked over to the OB together at about 1:30 after Jeremy and I wolfed down a pair of Rachels. A Rachel is a sandwich with corned beef, cole slaw, Russian dressing, and swiss cheese. I believe some heat is applied to make a Rachel. Once at the office I was drenched in sweat from the short walk and had only drank a tiny Orangina earlier in the day. So I rifled around the pharmacy looking for the coldest water I could find and brought two ice cold ones back to Sarah who was waiting patiently in the waiting room. The word patient comes from the latin (patientus) meaning “someone willing to wait in a doctor’s office for an hour and a half before being let into the office for a 5 minute ultrasound”. I was being an impatient because I had scheduled a call for 3PM figuring that a doctor’s visit at 1:30 would easily be over in time. But after an hour of waiting the clock was close to 2:30 so I started to try to create alternative ways to have the important business call. The solution that I created was to acquire a pen and paper from around the office and do the call on the cell phone. Who needs a computer to have a phone call, right? So I went back to the pharmacy with the cold water because patients are not to be trusted with pens in a doctor’s office. That is why they lock the pens to the counter in the front with metal chains.

The pharmacy didn’t sell pens, only pen cartridges and unsharpened pencils. But I managed to sweet talk the pharmacist into loaning me a Bic pen for a short period of time. I then returned to the waiting area where the patients, most of whom were holding twins and triplets inside of their bellies and none of whom was my wife. So I had a pen but was going to miss the grand sex determination act. I started to walk into the area where all of the loud thumping (fetal heart monitors) was coming from but I was blocked by an administrative woman who takes blood pressure of women waiting in the waiting line to determine who has become sufficiently frustrated by the long wait to be allowed in to see the doctor. I told her I needed to see Sarah, who was probably happily visualizing our unborn child. She told me I couldn’t just rifle into offices opening doors on pregnant women, which I fully supported.

After a minute or two of waiting long enough to raise my blood pressure, I think she can take blood pressure readings through a wireless system, I was walked into a closed room. Sarah was already being ultrasounded and the doctor and a young Asian female resident who was very interested in how the computer for the ultrasound worked was intently watching the both of them. The doctor told me we had won a door prize which I was excited to hear since I don’t normally win door prizes. The door prize was a black Bic pen.

The doctor measured things like the radius of the head and different areas. He asked if we wanted to know the gender and then let us know that SHE is going to be a NORMAL GIRL baby.

The whole appointment was only five minutes so we hurried back to the apartment and I took my notes on my trusty computer.

A girl! It is very exciting. I have lots of thoughts on this.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah and I took a road trip to New York to go to Jason Lin’s, Stephanie’s brother’s, wedding. We took most of Friday off in order to get down to New York. The plan we had created involved going out to the Chrysler dealership in Concord to pick-up my PT Cruiser from the shop, driving to Bedford to drop off the Passat, then driving into New York City to check-in to the Hotel Pennsylvania, followed by driving back to the New York Botanical Gardens for the wedding at 6PM. The day started out fortunately enough. My three way Skype call between the US, UK, and the Netherlands started at 8am instead of 9am. Nothing says “wake-up” like a ringing computer next to your bed. The call went to 9:30 which was when I had expected the call to end in the first place but I got a 90 minute call in and felt good about doing it on the Internet dime rather than paying the phone company. Sarah and I then proceeded to run around packing random things. We had to get a stain out of the tuxedo, figure out how to bring the portable DVD player and DVDs, get bathing suits for the pool, and get my contact lenses.

Finding things in the apartment can be very annoying. The other night I lost my glasses and spent a panicked hour looking everywhere for them including going back and forth to the car in flip-flops and tearing off some skin from my arm reaching under the seat of the Passat. I have been more than patient enough with the RFID and nanotech folks and I deserve my HomeID system so that I can find all those HIDden items with a tricorder-like device that points like a divining rod to my lost items and lets me know what inventory of junk I have throughout the apartment. When is this technology going to help me out around the house? There is one product out there from iautomate – I guess I should have registered for it. ( ). The glasses were found in the bed where I had taken a nap earlier in the day and lost them in the folds of the comforter.

The PT Cruiser had $745 worth of repairs. The steering pump had been replaced because it had broken and they had decided to not only fill the air conditioning system with Freon (good timing at least) but also to run some expensive fluorescent dye test that didn’t appear to have had any results according to the payment slip. We were in a hurry so we pushed out of the dealership and I figured I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the dealership staff and I was lucky they hadn’t found some other awful problem like a broken flux capacitor or that a mafia don had installed an explosive device underneath that I would need to have removed. The dealership loves to find problems with the car that I can’t possibly ignore. In general the answer to what will happen if I don’t fix something is “You might die!”

So once we hit the road at 11:40 we figured we were in good shape for a 6:30 wedding. I was listening to the phone religiously because I had told a VC friend of Brad’s that I would be in the city on Friday and he had left me a message via email to ask if I was in town. But the phone never rang so it was all about the wedding.

We didn’t expect it but we hit severe rush hour traffic when we got close to New York at 3:30PM. When we thought about it we were near the Bronx, where the Botanical Gardens are, so we made a significant change of plans to avoid the traffic. Sarah changed our hotel reservations to Tarrytown, and we drove straight to the Botanical Gardens. The major worry that Sarah had, since this new plan didn’t involve stopping at a hotel, was that among the hundred things we had done before leaving for New York, the one she should have done was to iron her new wrap that was likely wrinkled. Since we were going to change somewhere at the Botanical gardens this wrinkly wrap would be unacceptable and she might freeze to death in the 90 degree heat of an unnaturally hot June.

So we walked about the botanical gardens from 4:00-5:45. The botanical gardens are very nice but I noticed that all the signs were pointing in directions that led to gates rather than being like the arboretum where once inside you actually reach the nice flowers when you walk around. The secret to the arboretum is that they charge you multiple times. The initial fee of $6 gets you onto the grounds, but to see a nice rock garden it costs another $1 per person. We enjoyed the rock garden since we were the only people there and it was nice and romantic to walk alone. Sarah wanted it as her backyard since it was maintained in a natural state filled with flowers of all sorts, with waterfalls, and trees. One section of the rock garden area was filled only with native flowers. We stopped on a bench for a while there and enjoyed the warm weather.

They also had a big white building that cost $7 per person to enter and with a AAA card we got some deal that was $7 for two people. The building was advertising the spring flower show so basically if you wanted to see spring flowers at the botanical garden you had to fork over the cash. It was actually very impressive inside of the big greenhouse building since it had multiple mock climates including a desert, rainforest, palm forest, and lily pads in a big pool. I was impressed and thought we got our extra seven dollars worth.

So at 5:45 we suddenly needed to change and drive over to where the Lin/Moy wedding was to be held. The wedding was at the Snuff Mill. I assume that is where they mill snuff? We were parked at the main gate and sweating heavily from our walk out in the heat. So we cranked the new air conditioning on to keep our clothing from sticking to our skin and then changed comically in the car. I had never put a Tuxedo on with a steering wheel in front of me but the secret is to periodically leave the car and return. It took about 20 minutes to change completely and I wasn’t much faster than Sarah despite her need to fuss with beauty products and worry about how ironed her wrap was despite the irrelevance of a wrap on a swelteringly hot evening.

So we arrived at the wedding at 6:25 and were just on time. Lots of other folks hadn’t adjusted well to the traffic problems so there was a commotion about how to handle some of the gaps in the guest list since any delay at the beginning would cascade through the wedding activities throughout the night. They started about 15 minutes late, just like we did at our wedding, and plenty of folks had arrived in that extra window. A few stragglers processed by accident behind the bridal party walking to the stage but it wasn’t important. The ceremony itself was lightning fast. Both Jason and Kathy said some words that they had written themselves. Sarah and I had a good time although we didn’t know most of the Chinese/Taiwanese family members at the wedding. After the wedding we tried to caravan back to Tarrytown behind the Lin family Prius. The Prius contained a GPS device that led us through some crazy back roads to avoid a detour but after about half an hour we arrived back in our hotel room and got some sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was Monday night and I was on my way back from the KIS audition down at the puppet theatre. I had made the third callback along with four other folks. I was really tired from having stayed-up late creating a powerpoint presentation for an analyst at Forrester. So during the KIS audition I made what I believe to be the fatal mistake of making an offer for a scene inspired by “Bald at 15” in the foreign film exercise that related to one of the two people on stage having cancer. It was the main reason why I could justify a bald girl at 15 but afterwards I think it got me into enough trouble as an auditionee to get some black marks. The highlight of my audition was when we were playing worlds worst, but called Die, and coming-up with fake names for cereals and mine was “Chunky bits of Steve”. So it is on to another future audition. I’ll hear that I didn’t make the troupe by Wednesday. How humbling!

But I do have an audition with IB next Monday with my wonderful instructors. It was somewhat uncanny that the feedback that I got from KIS from the first two auditions was pretty much identical to the feedback that I got from the IB classes. I look out into the audience too often for approval, talk too much/mime too little, take on too many high status characters, and don’t explore a wide enough range of characters. My guess is that these things are embedded in my personality but I should try to change them for the good of my adoring fans, mainly Lisa my sister.

So I was walking home from the audition feeling that about to be rejected feeling that is similar to standing under a piano held by a fishing line. Next to the used television store/ mob front money laundering service, on the corner of Harvard and Aspinwall I saw some books in the garbage. The one that caught my eye was a big hard cover Combat and Survival book. That caught my interest and digging a little further I also found a stack of large format hard cover art books with VanGogh, Matisse, Cezanne, and Dali. So I called Sarah and grabbed the stack of books. Then I saw two boxes labeled the Playboy Centerfold Collector Cards The January Edition Collector’s Case. Since I have this belief the collector cards and beanie babies are highly desirable by crazy obsessive compulsive people on eBay I grabbed the two boxes of January edition cards.

I then tried to figure out what they were worth but it was almost impossible to do so. Instead I found some choice other items including a person who collects Alf trading cards, a useful tidbit about sugar packet collecting. Still no information on the value of my found artwork collection.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does everything always have to break?

I had annoying car troubles on Friday night. I was pulling my standard freakish 180 degree U-Turn to park on St. Paul street in front of the condo when I heard a loud pop and suddenly could barely turn the steering wheel. I managed to get it into the space and was grateful that I had car trouble near home so that I could go inside and ignore the problem for a while. Later in the evening I tested the car and got it to drive all the way to the parking lot but with great effort to turn the steering system. It didn't take the folks at car talk for me to know that the most likely culprit was the power steering system somewhere. I figured a belt, gear, pump, or something like that had slipped or broke.

On Saturday morning I decided that I needed to fix this problem so I called the local mechanic at the Gulf Station and he said he couldn't look at it until Tuesday. So I decided to enjoy the weekend. Sarah took her car to Valvoline and they took 40 minutes changing her oil, checking an engine light that was on because the gas cap wasn't screwed on tight enough, and finding an oil leak that had been going on for years. I drank a big Coolatta from the neighboring Dunkin Donuts along with a bagel. Because the Valvoline folks were helpful and useful I decided that I would take my car to them to fix my belt, pump, fluid, whatever problem. They identified that there was a belt that fell off it's pulley in the power steering and changed my oil. Unfortunately they couldn't fix the belt and told me to go to a mechanic. I had another Coolatta during this experience as well so I was pretty high on caffeine at this point.

I then drove to the Mobil station and they seemed very busy but interested enough to take a look under the hood. They poked around and then told me that the pump for the power steering had broken, which had caused the belt to slip off. It was a $500 job minimum and they couldn't even see how anyone could get access to remove the pump so they instructed me to call the dealer instead and had me drag my power steering-less car in a painful three point turn back to the top of the long driveway to the garage.

The people who I rented my parking space from called to hassle me because I hadn't mailed them the check on time and continued to give me a lecture about how it isn't worth their time to track down parking space renter checks. I profusely apologized and promised that I would impress them with the promptness of payments in the future. I may need to do another parking search soon enough. I actually turned down a parking space offer today while I had fifteen minutes to prepare for a presentation to an analyst and was on the line via Skype to a partner in the Netherlands. I did manage to patch together a miraculous pair of people offering spaces, one who had one from the first through the fifteenth and the other who had the fifteenth onwards to replace the evil space we were renting. The space was evil both because the woman who owned the space got into an argument with Sarah when Sarah complained that the 24hour spot was blocked by deck construction 10 out of every 24 hours during normal parking hours. We then got late notice that we were going to be towed on June 1st if the car wasn't gone so we hunted the new spaces using a cheesy sign I made in Illustrator and an agressive hunt on Craigs list.

On top of all this trouble my mom was mad at me for not having responded to the pictures that she had sent me and the folks at the video store only had the VHS copy of Attack of the Clones which was crappy. Sarah and I went to Home Depot and bought lots of home fix-up stuff like new lamps, dimmers, and a screwdriver bit. It was a really long Saturday. So today I am off to the dealership to get answer#3 on the broken power steering. My guess is that it will be about $900 to fix the damn thing and they will determine that my flux capacitor is also broken and that will cost even more.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday night I met with an influential potential business partner and Aaron in Concord over dinner by the bar. It was unfortunate that I had to skip out on my Improv group practice for this occasion but it was a case where prioritization worked out. The guy was the number two person at a start-up in California with venture financing and their CEO was on the cover of Newsweek last month. At dinner Aaron and I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about our potential business partner. He was an eccentric man including a stint in military school as a child, then becoming an Olympic jujitsu fighter in Korea, getting shot in the gall bladder as a paramedic, working as a recruiter for Cisco stock per hire when Cisco had 35 employees, owned a fight gear clothing company, and finally became a good buddy of the venture community by rescuing some failing start-ups. He also would go crazy if he didn't work 20 hours a day, said "GOT IT" whenever he understood something and loved the restaurant we went to in Concord because to him it was the Cheers of Chinese restaurants.

Upon arriving the partner was drinking a fruity looking beverage in a tall blue Chinese restaurant mug with a naked woman embedded in the side of the mug. I asked him what it was called and he called it a "One of these". This was the name that had been given to it by Paul the bartender, a tall Asian man with large Elvis sideburns who had created the drink for my new friend the partner eleven years ago when the partner was just a kid. The partner used to come in with the most beautiful woman he had ever met but they then moved to California and she had stumbled into a Less than Zero situation before marrying a biker. The partner was now married to a Dolche-Gabana Japanese model who he couldn't love any more and is now living atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. He only was attracted to Asian women and spoke fluent Japanese. At one point he picked-up his Treo phone and answered is "Moshi Moshi" because the ring was the one for a Japanese country code call. It turned out to be an engineer for his company working in Japan who didn't speak much Japanese. He was sending his kindergarten age kid to a fancy school that cost $30,000 a year and the partner thought the kid would be getting the same education back in Concord. That's why I got in touch with the partner. I filled out a form and despite there being a lot of forms being filled-out on the web site, mine came with a 781 area code. So I guess I won the lottery?

I decided that I had to try the unique concoction in the girly glass so I ordered a "One of These" as well. The "One of These" was a potent drink and despite it being a unique concoction for the partner it was very similar to a Scorpion bowl in an embarrassing Chinese restaurant mug. Aaron arrived and soon we were all drinking these beverages and chatting away about the adventures of the partner, who he knew in common with Aaron. We did talk enough about business for me to get that the partner felt we had a good shot at success but that we should raise some money to execute faster. "GOT IT".

Paul, the bartender who has the Elvis sideburns, is an amateur singer. The partner had taken his Dolce-Gabana Japanese wife to this restaurant and Paul had sung for her and she had cried for three days. We had gotten there at 5PM but by about 7PM we had already imbibed two "One's of these" and were ordering dinner including a the partner special and an Earl special. Earl was the guy that the partner brought to the restaurant when he owned a landscaping company in the area eleven years ago and was cutting his teeth in business. Earl's claim to fame, other than the aforementioned Earl special was that he could drink 48 beers at a sitting. Now this is quite impossible and he would likely die. Earl's secret was that he would drink them and would throw-up in the middle of the drinking multiple times in a Romanesque vomitorium style. Both of these dishes were off the menu and had been created those 11 years ago when both the partner and Paul the bartender were just starting out and the restaurant had just opened. The Earl special was a seafood dish with scallops and shrimp in a viscous sauce with vegetables including mushrooms and chinese broccoli. The partner special was a fried chicken dish also with vegetables in a viscous sauce.

When the third "One of These" arrived the glass was changed from the blue naked woman to a flesh colored Fu-Man-Chu bearded guy mug. The drink itself was getting stronger and Aaron dropped off drinking, his 50 years experience kicking in. We were chatting a bit with some executives at a table next to ours and it was fun to see the partner talking to an executive who had never heard of their company. That was when I learned about the Newsweek article. The partner convinced Paul the bartender to serenade a woman drinking at the bar and he sang what seemed to be an Elvis song with a great southern twang to his voice. Around 9PM Aaron brought the leftovers home to his kids and the partner and I moved to the bar.

We chatted a bit more about life and getting married. I could tell we weren't birds of a feather because he thought he would slit his wrists or jump off a bridge without working for 20 hours a day and wasn't that involved in his home life. I gave Sarah some glowing marks for having her head where mine was and us both wanting to chill out and enjoy being parents a bit. After the fourth "One of These" it was 10PM and time for the restaurant to shut down for the evening so we parted ways. Paul gave the obligatory warning to drive home safely and I walked out to my car smelling like I had just raided a liquor cabinet. My calculations were that I had four drinks in five hours so I was probably not so drunk to drive but might be close enough to play it very safe.

So as I started to drive home I felt nice a paranoid that I was going to get pulled over by the local police out hunting for DUI cases to throw in jail. Because of this I switched to the slow lane on Rt. 2, which was the only route I could figure would lead me home. Being in the slow lane is an interesting experience because you see more police in the slow lane. They hide in the bushes, pass you in the fast lane, and generally make a very good appearance when someone is up late and night and praying to not get pulled over. One of the police cars that looked like an SUV drove in front of me and then pulled himself over to the side to form what looked like a speed trap. I sighed a good sigh of relief because if he wasn't there when I passed then he probably wasn't looking to catch me speeding or swaying like a snake on the road or whatever else I might have been doing to alert someone that it might be fun to make me blow into a DUI tester or walk a straight line while touching my nose. I don't think I can do that sober. But the same police car appeared behind me only thirty seconds later with lights flashing to pull me over.

I have seen the show Cops many times and I always wondered why any criminal when pulled over by the police for an unknown reason, except for Timothy McVeigh, would get out of their car and run as fast as they could into the woods of Lincoln. The answer was suddenly clear to me as I was pulled over, not for speeding, with alcohol coming out of my sweating pores. Adrenaline! I don't often get shocked with an extreme dose of adrenaline but this was a case of pure fight or flight super-high. I was ready to pop someone in the face, run away from the saber tooth tiger, do whatever it took to get out of that situation as fast as possible. My life could be ruined. This was going to be the most embarrassing incident of my young and foolish life. There goes the presidential nomination. I had just been thinking about how I could try to run for president as an atheist and I could at least say that I didn't have DUI charges like George W., wasn't a coke addict, and after eight days of marriage, hadn't proved to be a serial adulterer. Granted all of those traits actually qualify you for the presidency so I shouldn't have been worried. Now here I am, my own deep throat admitting everything anyways.

So I fumbled my license out of my wallet and tossed the wallet into the seat beside me, grabbed the registration from the glove compartment and greeted the officer when he arrived at my rolled down window with a smile while trying hard to hold my breath and control my breathing. This would be easy if my heart rate wasn't around 205 from the adrenaline but most people appear a bit fidgety when they get pulled over so I may not have seemed that off to the officer. At the window of the car he asked me a question and I was sure it would be "Sir, have you been drinking this evening". But somehow those words had morphed through an act of science fiction into "Sir, do you know that you have a broken tail light?". I answered "Yes." He wanted to know how long I knew it was broken and I said that it had been about a month. He then let me know that I should get it fixed as soon as possible and then turned back to his vehicle to write me either a ticket or a warning.

The return to your vehicle for a cop with this mystery ticket or game show warning is always an interesting experience as the driver. It is basically a horror game show. Will you get a ticket that will effect your insurance premiums permanently or a warning that will make you want to hug the officer? In my case I still wasn't sure whether I was being observed for signs of drunkenness so I was just sitting on top of the brick underneath me that had been extruded from my anus and was staring into the mirror trying to see what the officer was doing. The new jumbo LEDs that have been installed into emergency vehicles are very compact and very bright. They are bright enough on a dark new moon evening to cause significant temporary blind spots in your vision. So as I looked back in the mirror my field of vision was slowly turning into a fun, 60's fantasy world of lights and colors no matter what direction I looked in. My cell phone rang and I decided to ignore it, knowing that it was probably Sarah, my pregnant wife, wondering when I would be home. I didn't pick it up figuring that the police probably think of calls by waiting pulled over drivers to be calls for the gang to ambush the officer or spot legal consultation suggesting guilt. I considered closing my eyes to avoid the blindness and pondered how I would drive off blind and potentially DUI in front of the officer if he did let me go and imagined ending-up in the blinking ditch twenty feet in front of the car.

When he returned to the car I smiled again as he gave me the "warning" for the broken taillight. I nodded and gave a guttural OK to continue my policy of not breathing on the officer. Finally he turned back to his car and I pulled out in front of him. Cops love to follow you for about a minute while you drive the speed limit and then pull off ahead of you approaching the speed that a Delorean uses to go back in time. He did this and when he sped into the distance I called Sarah back.

I gave her the scoop on the situation and she offered to come out to pick me up but instead I decided that I was fine driving but totally freaked out by the experience. So I held Sarah on the line as I was driving home, recounted the story, and let her know about the two hundred cops that seemed to be out on the empty roads leading all the way home on Route 2 including two motorcycle cops who kept stopping at lights next to me for three straight red lights. I was happy to catch the red lights for a change and one of the lights freed me from my motorcade of unrequested police escorts. I just dragged myself through memorial drive, storough drive, comm. ave., and Saint Paul Street, until a breathed a heavy sigh of relief upon arriving in the driveway of a private property at which point I yelled into the phone to Sarah that I was free. She was probably home rubbing her belly the whole time wondering why she was on the other end of the line of the late Hunter S. Thompson reincarnating himself in me for some fear and loathing on the way home from Concord on a Wednesday night.

She welcomed me home and let me know that I smelled like I had raided a liquor cabinet before we went to sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Why I can't use Blogger anymore, the trail of support queries. It has been since Tuesday that I heard from Blogger and they still haven't fixed the bug. I also have problems with my Movable Type installation on Netfirms but at least it posts!

========
Oohh... a response giving me hope from Blogger support!

- Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Blogger Support [mailto:support@blogger.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 8:50 PM
To: Dan Housman
Cc: dan@danhousman.com
Subject: Re: FTP port problem with ISPs/remotely hosted blogs (port)

Hi Dan,

Thanks for writing in and for your continued patience. A bug is being
addressed by the development team to resolve the issue you're having.
Please be assured that the bug will be fixed soon. I apologize for any
inconvenience it may have caused.

Sincerely,
Christine
Blogger Support

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: "Dan Housman"
Subject: FTP port problem with ISPs/remotely hosted blogs (port)
Date: Sun, 29 May 2005 11:45:42 -0400

I unfortunately have to report a critical problem to Blogger.

I am having trouble with my blog from Blogger and can't fix it from the
ISP
side because Blogger apparently changed a setting with regards to FTP
ports
near May 17th. The problem is that any posting errors with the error
"Broken
Pipe". This error is entirely new as it hadn't occurred until after the
last
post I had made which was on May 17th in my blog
http://www.danhousman.com/blogger/ .

The report back from the ISP is as follows below. The standard support
forms
do not reply with any information even after a week of waiting and I don't
see that this is listed in the knowledge base for support anywhere. I like
using Blogger as a service but if the blog doesn't publish it will force
me
to switch to a service that I can post to and have the blog publish.
Netfirms is not a minor ISP but has 2 million web sites hosted. Please
advise me whether this is a problem that the blogger team can/will fix or
if
I should switch to another service.

Unfortunately as a service .... having the system work well and then
suddenly not work and not responding at all to requests for information
seems to break Google's motto of not being "evil" which is why I chose to
work with Google's services in the first place.

- Dan Housman
dan@danhousman.com
617.216.9921
Skype: dhousman

-----Original Message-----
From: Netfirms Support [mailto:support@netfirms.com]
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 11:47 AM
To: Dan Housman; dan@danhousman.com
Subject: RE:{Interaction#002-003-364} [us-en] FTP/Publishing -
www.danhousman.com

Hello,

Thank you for your e-mail.

Please be advised that the Netfirms FTP servers accepts FTP connections in
passive mode (standard) which covers a port range of roughly 49000-65000.
That is, these ports are kept open on the firewall to receive these
connections.

When blogger.com connects, it seems to ignore the suggested range and
tries
something that is blocked by the firewall (<49000). As a result, the data
connection is never made and the FTP server sends a broken pipe error via
the control channel.

Normally, a renegotiation takes place, but these too seem to be failing.
We
suggest that you contact blogger.com support to resolve this issue with
them
as it appears that their configurations may have changed recently.

Tutorials, demos, and answers to over 90% of your questions may also be
found immediately at our Self-Help Support Centre:
http://www.netfirms.com/support/

Regards,

Todd
Netfirms Inc.
www.netfirms.com

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)