seanb's Journal: Long time, no post

I'm not fond of the PacMed cafe. After staying home sick for two days after one particularly bad meal, I'm wary of it. That being said, the cafe here does give me one thing that has never been provided to me by any Bellevue employer: a view of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound. For me, "mountains over water" is pretty much the definition of scenery. My new office will be West-facing, so I should have a pretty good view of the clouds rolling and oozing over the mountains with a simple comforting elegence, like a blanket that wants to crawl over your sleeping form and wrap you, cozy and comfortable.

There's a certain simple beauty in clowds and storms, a combination of power and elegence that makes the blue-sky "beautiful" day look as boring as a blank canvas. I can enjoy natural or computer-generated complexity and chaos, but these things in human-crafted art tend to annoy me; if I wanted to rely almost entirely on my own intepretation to imbue structure and meaning onto an external medium, why should I waste time with art?

I've enjoyed Final Fantasy XII a LOT, but the fun is starting to pale a little, now that I'm at the last savepoint stage where you run around doing all of the sidequests and hunts. Perhaps I should just finish it off so that I can spend more time on projects, like finally getting a caprenter to cover the furnace or swapping out the "server" machine or doing something useful with my website or ...

Yeah, I'm pretty close to my manic phase again.

My pudge is fading and Kyna says that my butt is less flat; this urban "walk or take the bus, but hardly ever drive" lifestyle is good for me. The Stranger had a link to this article about links between urban sprawl and obesity.

Did anybody else hear about the Boy Scout Troop being blamed for a wildfire in Utah. This article makes their behavior sound irresponsible, unjustifiable, remorseless ... exactly like adolescent boys. They were campling without adult supervision: "17 Scouts, ages 12 to 14, being supervised by two 15-year-olds".

I don't remember any major outings without any adult leaders. Honestly, I'd be surprised to discover that this wasn't an egregious violation of many, many official Boy Scout policies. You don't leave 15-year olds as the only supervision for 12-14-year olds when they are outnumbered 8-1 - that's how you end up recreating Lord of the Flies.

Finally, the best political rant I've seen about Bush's "surge" Bush exercises the Cambodia option in Iraq.