Where’s the peanut butter?!

Today’s addition to my favorite music post series is dedicated to The Jam. I really don’t know that much about the Jam but Paul Weller and the Jam really symbolized a lot of the British mod punk scene in the late 70’s and this song - Going Underground rules. Here you go.

Going Underground
Some people might say my life is in a rut,
but I’m quite happy with what I got.
People might say that I should strive for more,
but I’m so happy I can’t see the point.
Something’s happening here today -
A show of strength with your boys brigade and,
I’m so happy and you’re so kind
You want more money? Of course I don’t mind
To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes

And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society’s got -
I’m going underground, (going underground)
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground, (going underground)
Well let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow

Some people might get some pleasure out of hate
Me, I’ve enough already on my plate
People might need some tension to relax
Me? I’m too busy dodging between the flak
What you see is what you get
You’ve made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You’ll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns

And the public wants what the public gets
But I don’t get what this society wants
I’m going underground, (going underground)
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground, (going underground)
So let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow

We talk and talk until my head explodes
I turn on the news and my body froze
The braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!

Going underground, I’m going underground!

Four years ago Tanya was out of town in London and I had a boy over. Well, at the time, I thought he was a girl, but that’s another story. Anyway, his name is Jupiter and I let him sleep in my bed while she was away and today, he is the first cat I’ve come to really appreciate and love. If you’re ever lucky enough to take care of him - here’s how it goes…

Food - this is straightforward with his automatic feeder. As long as food is in the feeder, it will dispense the right amount at intervals throughout the day until it runs out of food. It’s somewhat important that he not be allowed to overeat, since he tends to eat grass from the neighborhood and will very frequently vomit due to the combination of too much food and the grass. But he means well. As a special treat, Jupiter also likes the dog’s canned food. He looks forward to a small scoop of this plopped on a saucer and flattened out a little with his dinner.

Water - Jupiter tends to drink from various places around the house. Favorite locations include the dog’s water bowl, the dog’s water holder inside his crate, or glasses of water on bedroom nightstands.

Asthma - (it’s not just for Sufjan Stevens’ record label) Jupiter suffers from asthma. Around the time we officially adopted him, I remember taking him to the vet because he had developed a bad scar on his back (probably from rubbing up against a hot pipe or something - this is where the bald spot on his back came from) and was also having great difficulty breathing. I was terrified and decided we needed to take him to the vet and so called the Cat Clinic of Seattle. The vet investigated him and wasn’t sure what to diagnose but prepared us for the worst indicating that he could have some sort of terminal problem. It was then that I realized how I could love a cat and how devastating it could be to bring a newly adopted pet in for a checkup and be told “he might die.” But he lived and was diagnosed with asthma, so now we give him one puff with an inhaler every morning and night. The procedure is outlined in a photo slideshow on my flickr.

Affection - is the one thing Jupiter needs most. He came from the neighborhood and is well loved by all our neighbors and passers by frequently tell us how he has worked into their hearts. At home, he especially likes to play with various toys which we have dangling over the doorways in our home and he is also very fond of laser pointers. He is very fond of playing with any of these toys on carpet, especially the stairs leading to the second floor. He is also very happy to have a lap, preferably adorned with denim/jeans, to sit on. Jupiter enjoys having his head, cheeks, and rear end scratched and also enjoys having his ears gently rubbed between an index and middle finger knuckle.

Commands - Jupiter understands more than he lets on, but he definitely knows his name and responds to a three toned - “high-low-high” - whistle.

Personal matters - Jupiter only uses nature’s toilets - there is no indoor litter to change.

Io, the fourth largest moon of Jupiter and my first dog. If you’re ever lucky enough to take care of him - here’s how it goes…

Food - Io is very skinny but he loooves to eat! For breakfast he gets one scoop (cup) of dry food (Wellness Super 5). At dinner he eats one scoop of dry food with about a third of a can of wet food (Wysong beef). He basically inhales whatever he’s fed, so don’t expect it to last. Usually after his morning walk he likes to get a frozen kong treat. These are usually packed with a coating of peanut butter and a combination of dry food and chunks from Natural Balance’s rolls. During the day, he sometimes gets more of his dry food inside treats, commensurate with how fussy he seems.

Water - Io’s usually goes through his waterbowl daily and he likes having a good supply of fresh water.

Affection - like Jupiter, Io is incredibly affectionate and craves human interaction almost as much as he craves bones with raw animal flesh. He loves to go for walks, short runs (under 4 miles and preferably not on pavement), and to chase sticks or wrestle. He lets you know when he needs affection and can sometimes be persuaded to leave you alone but usually it’s easier on one’s conscience to just give him the small token of your affection that he’s asking for.

Commands - Io knows many commands, including:

• sit - to sit down (note, the command is not “sit down” since that confuses “sit” and “down”)
• down - to lie down
• on your side / roll over - actually he doesn’t know either of these but sometimes he does something that looks like he might understand them
• stay (commanded when showing him an open palm) - to stay where he is
• find it - a game. You can play either by putting both hands behind your back, putting food in one hand, and extending both arms out with closed fists telling him to “find it!” and giving him the treat when he pokes at the correct hand. Or you can play by commanding him to “sit”, “stay” and then putting food somewhere in another room and when you get back, point to approximately where the snack is and telling him to “find it!”
• hug - a new command not that well understood, but this gets Io to hop up in a loving embrace
• go to your bed / go to your crate - to get him to go to his bed or crate (these only really work when he has an incentive like if you’re about to give him a Kong).

Personal matters - Io “takes care of business” a couple times a day. Usually once in the morning and again later after dinner before bed. This schedule is highly volatile, though, oftentimes with longer periods with business not being attended to after extended sessions eating sticks. Accidents in the house may be cleaned up with the Bissel Spot Bot, which should be standard issue with any puppy.

Note: This is all way obsolete

welcome, dear reader! you are reading the weblog of patrick niemeyer. i should not be confused with various other patrick niemeyers the world has known or who google knows more intimately (like the peace
corps volunteer or the guy who wrote the java book). i’m the patrick niemeyer you’ll find if you traverse to google links 81-90 and then look for the page listing upcoming.org
users. UPDATE: Since signing up for adwords I got to about #65 in Google (which I’m assured should have nothing to do with adwords) and about I’m about #32 in Windows Live Search. therefore I have no choice but to replace the Google search box with Live Search. i’ve found live search equal to or better than google in a bunch of ways lately, anyway.

this blog is based on rael dornfest’s excellent blosxom platform and with a few of its plugins for comments, syndication, the calendar view, and a few other things. i use the webservice provided by  captchas.net to do verification on comment posts and prevent comment
spam.

my blog is hosted by dominet, who have combined able hosting, support, and reasonable prices. if you are in the market for a linux based host, i definitely recommend them
(and thanks to nick for referring me to them!)

occasionally i post entries to my blog from my phone using a modified flavor and the wikieditish plugin for blosxom. those entries (including this one!) are usually recognizable by their lack of formatting and hyperlinks (special characters are a relative pain with my phone’s keyboard) as well as higher density of typos (partially the keyboard, partially me being a modern spell check cripple). please forgive me. for this post i have done some post-processing to fix typos and add links, though.

when i do post from my phone, that is with an hp h6315 pocketpc phone. i recommend the windowsce line of pdas and think they have gotten to the point of integration where it is definitely worth considering a pocketpc phone or smartphone, but the h6315 (which is about a year old by now) has a few obvious annoyances and while i would not advise someone against getting one, i can’t really advocate
it. when i’m on the go, i use the mobile flavor of this site to see if anything has broken.

I also have a cat named Jupiter and dog named Io - sometimes good friends help take care of them.

here are some qr codes that used to be on my navigation bar:

width=”135″ src=”/files/qrw.png”>

width=”135″ src=”/files/qrc.png”>

this entry will be updated directly as seems necessary. thanks for visiting!

Nick has been raving about Mitch Hedberg for years but I never listened to any of his standup until this morning. When I did, I heard this bit on business cards:

I got a business card, cuz I wanna win some lunches!

That’s what my business card says, “Mitch Hedberg, Potential Lunch Winner”

Gimme a call, maybe we’ll have lunch…if I’m lucky!

and it was a moment of clarity that brought together a few parts of my life. Now that I’m not working, I feel like I need some sort of business cards. I’ve been wanting to use this almost-free business card printing service from Vistaprint for about a year (for $5.25, the cost of shipping, they’ll send you 250 cards). And now I’ve got at least one card to print. So I’ll be looking to have lunch with people and dropping these off at the Chili’s of greater Seattle - invite me out some time, the next one might be on me!

So yesterday I ran the Sound to Narrows 12k in Tacoma and had some good news and bad news. The good news is I’m happy with my time again and stepped it up a little bit from my time on Beat the Bridge. Considering that conditions were terrible (raining), the Sound to Narrows course is a much harder (see the elevation map, which I completely missed before doing the race and compare to a flat 8K), and simply being able to keep a comparable pace (which you can project using this online calculator) I feel very happy about that progress.

The bad news is I was hyperthermic at the end of the race and had a temperature of 106°. So until the times are posted I won’t know exactly where my time was because I don’t remember seeing the clocks. I do know it really doesn’t matter that much because if the crew wasn’t there I might have died. They put me in an ice bath for about twenty minutes which eventually got my temperature down to 101°. Then I was taken by ambulance to Tacoma General hospital and by the time I arrived I was hypothermic with a temperature of about 96°. After about an hour and a half of taking blood, running tests, and doing the regular hospital stuff, they let me go.

It’s hard to tell what caused the hyperthermia except for, obviously, working too hard. But there were probably other factors that could have led to it. I probably didn’t get enough sleep the night before - not for lack of trying, I just couldn’t sleep. I may not have been adequately hydrated - I had some water beforehand but didn’t take any drinks on the course and probably should have, though I’ve done runs this long at this pace without trouble (but they were flat). And possibly the rain, which was between a light to moderate drizzle throughout and which may have inhibited my ability to sweat and lose body heat through evaporation. But I definitely stepped up the pace on the last hill and that was probably the worst choice. At least I stepped it up until my brain started to cook. Tom, who ran with me throughout the race, mentioned that there was a point in the last hill where my pace dropped off considerably. In hindsight there was a point where I remember feeling disoriented but knew I was under half a mile to the finish and didn’t want to let up.

My friend Katie drove (and took second in womens!) and a new friend, Tom, who was a good inspiration and didn’t pressure me to run harder throughout the run at all was along (Tom, I should mention, deserves a Swedish star for running me into the hospital instead of the morgue). They both stuck around throughout the whole deal, even though Tom’s wife and daughter had come down for the run and he was to go back with them and even though Katie was scheduled to work. I definitely felt awful about the situation but felt incredibly thankful for such supportive friends. After I was discharged, we had a short lunch at the Swiss Tavern and drove back to Seattle, where my plans for future running now include: obey my body, do long runs with a partner, and spend more time understanding physiology and nutrition.

UPDATE 2007.06.11 Results are coming in

Furry 5K results are in - bib href="http://www.perfecttimeevents.com/results/event/1844/results.php?bib=3940&p=&ag=&oa=M">3940
in men’s is me - Tanya was href="http://www.perfecttimeevents.com/results/event/1844/results.php?bib=3941&p=&ag=&oa=F">3941
and Eva handily beat us to the finish in bib href="http://www.perfecttimeevents.com/results/event/1844/results.php?bib=437&p=&ag=&oa=F">437
(but she didn’t have a dog, uh, holding her back?). Sound to Narrows
times (where I was bib 1644) aren’t in yet but it wasn’t chipped so
that’s probably what should be expected.

Times are in from the 2007 Beat the Bridge race. My time is listed as 43:45 with a pace of an 8:49 minute mile, but my wave started 5 minutes after the clocks started and I timed the time between our starting gun and when I actually crossed the starting line and that was about 30 seconds which gets me a pace of about a 7:42 minute mile, and I’m totally content with that. The only thing I’m a little disappointed in is the picture organization from the group that photographed the event. There were almost 4,000 bibs, but you can’t find your bib number after the race and even if you could, there is no picture lookup by name or bib. I like posting my pictures (and pictures of my friends from other races in flickr), but I can’t get mine. So that’s a bummer.

But on the bright side, if I *did* find my picture, I might have wound up looking like the guy at right, so maybe I should be happy about how it turned out!

Today I’ll be making this picnic table for Rohini and Moni. Downloading plans for relatively simple projects and then throwing them together is really tons of fun. I wish I had a better space to work in at home - our basement ventilation really isn’t very good and I always need to lug all my tools from the basement up to the backyard and then back down. But putting something together from scratch with my own tools is always super fun!

Man Afraid were the first hardcore band I listened to and really understood. They focused on typically leftist politics but were noticeably educated within the hardcore scene. I’ll tell you how many bands have ever rhymed “hegemony” in their songs - one and their name was Man Afraid. Around the same time, Los Crudos were playing and also doing incredible work. Take the almost completely homogeneous hardcore scene, add some gay Hispanics who only sing in Spanish (except on “We’re that spic band”) and you’ve got something that’s obviously trying to expand that subculture in positive ways. But “What Once Was Life” by Dropdead has to be the most satisfying, blistering 2 minutes of noise ever put to wax.

Just as a small exercise, compare the waveform of that track by Dropdead:

to another song, say, Van Morrison’s “Moondance”:

I shouldn’t need to point this out, but one is as pleasing as a summer day, wind chimes, or Enya, and the other tries very, very hard to crush your skull. So please set your speakers to 11 and then let it.

What once was Life
My murder has become-justified
In your sick-barbaric world
My skin is ripped-from the bone
What once was life-you-ingest

(Industrial part)

A holocaust-unrealized
My lifeblood feeds-a selfish world
My suffering-goes unknown
What once was life-you-ingest

Something makes me think my mom’s instant messaging account might have been hacked or something.

[16:29] MF: your ass is big

But I can’t quite put my finger on it…