It’s that time of the year again, where I get to enjoy all the itchy eyes and sneezing. Something else to look forward to.

One thing I was asked repeatedly at speed dating was, “What do you do for fun?” Honestly, I couldn’t describe what I do for fun to anyone but specialized geeks. Building radio gear. Getting on the radio from time to time. Reading books (less specialized, except I tend to read a lot of mysteries). Playing with my computer.

One of the women asked me if I had a metal detector, because her ex-boyfriend had one. I thought I was on the top of the geek heap with the ham radio thing but the metal detector question made me slightly introspective on that point. I think I decided that a metal detector would make me a creepy old man, not a geek. (At least my ex-girlfriend has told me that I’m smart, funny, and kind. I wonder what she says behind my back. 🙂 )

In any case, I followed my sister’s two instructions. I don’t know if I pissed anyone off (instruction #1 don’t piss anyone off) but I tried not to, and I didn’t talk about porn (instruction #2). However, one of the women told me she rented some Japanese demon porn anime. I don’t know what was up with that, but it didn’t bother me much. At least no one told me they were in favor of making Oregon a red state. Any right-wing sentiment would have sent instruction #1 out the window.

I finally caught up on watching two weeks of “Alias,” two weeks of “Numb3rs,” one “Without a Trace,” “Committed,” and “Scrubs.” Now I can move onto other pursuits. I finished the latest Patricia Cornwell mystery (with ME Kay Scarpetta) and now I’m filling in the ones I missed in between. And I can start surfing google to see if I can find goofy songs like the 50 Cent and Nine Inch Nails remix called “50 Inch Nails.”

I got some weird songs (mostly from the 80’s) because I’ve been scoring free iTunes from Diet Pepsi, including “Talk to Ya Later” by the Tubes, “Dance and Shout” by Shaggy & Pee Wee (a remix of the Jackson’s “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” which i also got), “Stepping Out” by Joe Jackson, “Best of My Love” by the Emotions (a 70’s song?), another copy of “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick since I’m not sure the ones I had before were legal, and now I’m trying to decide what else to get. Charlie Sexton vs. Marshall Crenshaw. Modern English vs. Split Enz. You get the idea.

I did spend most of the day doing what I did most of the weekend: sitting in front of a computer and typing. At least I was getting paid for it today. Unfortunately, it was one of those Mondays that kind of came and went and I can’t even tell you what I had for lunch without having to think about it for a while. (Half a grilled cheese & tomato sandwich and a bowl of Hungarian mushroom soup. They had Tomato Basil on the menu board, but they lied.)

In any case that’s about all I have to say. I was quite tired because it’s hay fever season and that always makes me tired. My server, or probably more properly my sister’s blog server, appears to be working now.

Do you know that the latest fiasco (which led to me sitting in the basement typing all weekend) was because she couldn’t upload a picture, and it turns out she couldn’t upload it because the file name had spaces (OK) and single quotes (not OK) in it? Yeesh.

On the weather front: warm and annoyingly nice. It should be raining. On the romance front: bleak and inconsequential.

I have a faux girlfriend, a friend who is a girl, who is also single and we have dinner once in a while. Anyway, she had some suggestions for our mutual plight, but it wasn’t the suggestion I was hoping for. She think we should look to India to find our romantic entanglements. Great. not only is my job going to India, but she thinks I should outsource my romantic needs there as well.

My sister thinks I better find someone F.O.B. or I’m lost. Nice that she seems to think about the same thing.

So I think my server might be getting back to normal soon. After a week of crashes, someone mentioned some new code implementing TCP SACK. Lucky me, I rebuilt the system after those changes were made. I was given a work-around and if I’m lucky my sister’s web site will stay up and I won’t have to hear any grief from her. Yep. Another weekend full of fun and excitement and typing at a keyboard in the basement. Woo.

My boss has studied a lot of the “fast seduction” and “get a girl tonight” kind of books and likes manipulating women for his own amusement. He found out that I didn’t do so well at speed dating and said if I didn’t read the instructions and buy into this whole smarmy control structure, that I’d be fired. (He often “fires” me for the songs I have on my iPod which includes lots of 80’s schlock.)

Well, I told my sister about this and she said, “Hah. Like you could get any of that to work” My friend Greg thinks that I’d be overcome by my honest streak (which is a way of saying I can’t keep my frigging mouth shut).

In any case, I found information on the intarweb about how to seduce women. It seems kinda cheesy. It probably works, but I don’t know if it fits into my goals in life. Those goals are a mystery even to myself, but I don’t think it includes becoming the ass-master of Portland.

Unfortunately, it also deleted some blog entries from my blog and, more importantly, my sister’s blog. SuperEggplant gets bazillions of hits all the time.

I was able to find my sister’s last post but I couldn’t get mine, which was my adventure of Tuesday night: Speed Dating. After I went through one round, I was asked to fill in for a no-show on the second round. It was fun to talk to all the women, but I think with a little effort you can talk to anyone for six minutes. And this was supposed to be for ‘professionals’ so I figure they can make the effort. I also know that there are about five single women in Portland who want to go out with an Asian guy, and they’re probably on my list of women I don’t want to go out with:

1. Republicans
2. Reed College graduates
3. or the worst: Stanford graduates

I suppose they could be some sort of mix of the three as well. You might think that some combination might cancel things out, but no.

In the end, I spoke to 20 women and I matched none. I’m no stranger to rejection, though this was fairly minor. It was almost like 20 job interviews. I left feeling OK, but in the end I was no better off than before I started. And I missed “House.” Oh, well. No guts, no glory. So far, just plain no glory.

I was busy doing something. Perhaps un-screwing-up my computer. I do a lot of fiddling, and it’s sort of like backing your car into a spot that you can’t seem to get it out of. Ah, well. In any case speed dating is tomorrow and today was merely the day of disappointing lunch. It was late, it was cold, it was mediocre. What are you going to do?

Which also reminds me: time for another “free” iTune. I bought “My Girl” from Chilliwack the other day and I think it’s time for “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick.

Why do I need a girlfriend (or a cat) when my iPods all get all huffy if I don’t pay attention to them every single day? There’s no way I’m getting through a shuffle of 580 songs because if it sits for too long (longer than a day) it just resets itself.

So, nobody asked, but here’s the story with yesterday’s picture. My friend Greg cut down a lot of his trees to put in a pasture for horses. I think horses are stupid and stay away from them, but his daughter likes them. So far, he’s cut down five acres of trees, put up a $60,000 barn (or something like that) and it was time to seed the pasture. Anyone with any sense would rent, borrow, or buy a seed broadcaster. But not us. The picture shows what we did. We tied his leaf blower to the back of his pickup truck, drilled a hole in the blower tube, and taped a funnel to it. I stood in the back of the pickup with four 25lb bags of seeds, pouring the seeds into the funnel with a cup as he drove around in circles. Luckily, I didn’t fall out.

Besides mowing the lawn and finishing my parent’s taxes, today I tried to see if I could start an electrical fire. I finished a PIC programmer and it requires 18V at probably around 70mA. I found a power supply that puts out 18V at 7A. That’s 100 times more than required. It also means that if I had screwed up the wiring somehow, I’d have some nice sparks to watch. You’ll also notice that the power supply is open has wires with “DANGER” labels on them.

Oh, and I also got a call to try speed dating on Tuesday. My sister thinks I’ll probably piss every one of the women off, and probably some of the men as well. I told her I’d see, since a certain unnamed person is still talking to me, I thought I’d lost my touch. She thinks that a certain unnamed person is a female white version of me, so that’s why we seem to get along. HAH.

Well, we’ll see if I can still make women’s eyes glaze over in under a minute. I used to be good at that.

It has to do with a couple of idiots trying to make their own seed broadcaster rather than buying, borrowing, or renting one. I’m too tired to explain right now, so here’s the picture:

More details tomorrow.

I want to update my iPod mini’s software, but I have it on “shuffle” and I want to listen to the 580 songs on it at least once. If I update the software, it resets the iPod and I have to start over with a new shuffled list of the 580 songs.

I didn’t go to the gym today because I got a ride home and started thinking about the chip programming kit I got in the mail yesterday. Then, of course, I had to start building the kit and you can imagine why I never made it there. I only go three times a week, so if I get motivated enough, I can go tomorrow. Or not. My sister gave me permission to take the day off. (I always call her for permission to alleviate any guilt I have about not exercising.)

OK, so she wasn’t lost, I just lost track of where she was. She even has a blog where she said something, well, controversial and everyone is writing their opinions to her. Obviously it involved religion, politics, or both. You can check it out for yourself. BTW, did I mention my friend is very attractive? She’s also happily married with two kids. 🙂

Speaking of blogs, all my complaining got Carolyn posting on her blog, but now I have to hear about all her escapades with the boys of Chicago. And I’ve had dry spells. You better believe it.

Well, I got my new soldering iron and chip-programming kit from China, so I’ll be geeking out in the basement. ‘Cause you know, chicks dig geeks. They’ll be on me like bees on sh*t.

Or as I’ve heard it called, Drag-on ball. I used to watch it in Japan on Wednesday nights at exactly 6PM. Japanese TV was pretty darn precise back then. I don’t know what it’s like now, fourteen years later. Anyway, it’s a serial cartoon that came from a comic book. I used to read comic books all the time and I think it might have helped me with my Japanese reading. Or maybe I just looked at the pictures.

I’ve been tracking two of my packages on UPS’s web site. One was shipped 2-day air and it’s in Portland already. The other is making it through a bunch of towns I’ve barely heard of: Mesa, AZ, Phoenix, Riviera, AZ, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boise, Hermiston. OK, I was in a wedding in Hermiston but I’m not sure why my soldering iron is stuck there.

My co-worker had to get his passport picture for a trip to Fiji (his dad’s a DOCTOR after all) and we saw some awards in frames at the photo shop. I figure we should start getting them for ourselves, and post them on the walls at work. Unfortunately, the only thing we could think of is giving ourselves awards for going to the same Mexican restaurant FIVE DAYS IN A ROW. It probably wasn’t all that good for us and it wasn’t the best Mexican food I’ve had, but it was good.

I think I get to work late again tomorrow. Joy.