Sporadic

I was up at 4:30 AM this morning so that I could drive to Fairfield and pretend to commute back into the city.

I’m going to sit here and let you reread that little nugget because you didn’t understand it the first time. Go ahead.  I won’t move on until you get back.

See? I knew you were gonna have to read it again, because it doesn’t make any sense to me either. So here the back story:

John, our friend from back in the Circle days, called me up and asked if I would like to appear in a webisode he cooked up for a client of his. The treatment is such: some IT guys* who commute in to work together** talk about servers and stuff on their way in.

Two of the guys in the car are actual real to life super geeked out IT dudes, then there’s a woman who works for a bank and me***.  All these people actually live Fairfield. This is thier commute. It’s what they do. Me? Not so much. So I have to drive to Fairfield so I can drive back to the place I came from****.

 By the time I get in the car I have had two large starbucks coffees***** and two bites of a weird sausage starbucks sandwich John had purchased for me******.  So two coffees, no substantive breakfast, and very little sleep made me a little glassy eyed. Combine that with the fact that these two IT guys are talking a mile a minute about “cloud computing” and what happens is that I don’t speak at all for almost 20 minutes and when I do speak I say stuff like “I like email!”, “Sometimes I buy muffins!” and “My laptop is nice!”. I sound like some kind of adult, borderline-retarded version of Ralphie Wiggum. It was not pretty.

The good thing is that tonight, after working all day, I get to pretend to commute back to Fairfield. I am spending the day reading about blade servers and packet sniffing, so that I’ll be able to actually have some input on our fake ride to my fake home.

However I do hope to use my favorite IT guy joke at least twice, which is to tell and off color story and close with the line “I guess you can tell who installed her operating system!”

—

*which I am not

** which I do via BART

*** I was refered to, more than once, hysterically as: “The Talent”

**** Dear Earth Day, Sorry about that. Love, dac

*****There were no Peets in Fairfield, as a matter of fact it took us almost 15 mins to find Starbucks because every building in Fairfield looks like every other building in Fairfield. The place is an infinite loop of strip malls which ends in a feild with cows.

****** I forgot to include in my rider the list of demands I had as “The Talent”, but the sandwich was not bad and his heart was in the right place.

I have developed a new way to detect changes in our global climate. I think this datapoint may be the perfect way to track and manage changes to our climate without having to pay for sending IceBreaker ships deep into the sub-arctic sea ice.

I call it the SDI or Shirtless Dude Index.

As many of you know, one of the lovely things about our fair city is the weather. It only rains between December and March, and the temperature runs between 50 and 68, pretty much year round*.

We have two summers a year and they are never during summer. We have a spring summer and a fall summer. They are the times when our weather behaves like what summer is in other places, i.g. 80 degrees and sunny. We are now in the middle of our spring summer. When this happens it does two things:

1. everyone clogs up the beaches

2. people put on their 2 or 3 “summer” outfits**

This year I feel like we’ve had more summers than we usually get. So this weekend when I went for a run on Saturday I decided that I needed some type of measurement for this. Thus the SDI.

No one ever goes shirtless in San Francisco unless they are either

1. a crazy homeless man (zany musical spaceships…give me a dollar)

2. one of the weird middle age nudists out at Baker Beach who spend all day naked and for some reason, in a superman stance***

So if I count the number of shirtless dudes I see during the day ****. I should be able to get an accurate Idea of how much we’ve been affected by Global warming.

Saturday SDI: 16 (including the baseball game which may skew results)

Sunday SDI: 6 (including Ocean beach which may skew results)

Today SDI: 2 (thus far)

*Except for (like right now) we get 3 days of 80 degree days or (worse) 90 degree days in spring and fall.

** For me this means it’s the one time a year when I veer from my normal work clothes which are always Button down shirt, grey t-shirt and jeans. Today I’m wearing a *short sleeve* button down and khakis (I know! It’s a huge leap!)

*** legs spread, chest out, hands on hips

**** excluding the Castro, for obvious reasons

Okay, the sporadic has been on an incredibly long hiatus and I feel that now it’s time to get back to it. I couldn’t think of anything particularly witty to open with except that I intend to

1. update at least once a week
2.  switch completely to blogity blog mode*
3.  start thinking about the funny things that I might type here.

So there you have it. Not only can you read me if you want, but now you don’t have to set up an outlook rule to delete my emails when they arrive.

*Yes, tony.