Thinkcorps

I’ve decided I’m sick of writing what I usually write on this blog, and need to expand outward into other areas of life. The easiest way to open that up seemed to be to add a new category, named Portland, to redirect some wayward thinking. We’ll see if it does any good.

Here’s our story (copied from an email I sent a friend. so what? i’m lazy):

Don’t ever use U-Haul for anything but an in-town move. It’s so not worth it—seriously. I packed up a whole truck and our car, and with only the TV set left to pack, my back went crazy with these super painful spasms. So I was useless and we enlisted Patricia’s father to drive up with her (we had the truck and our car). There’s definitely a plus side to having family local. I stayed at her sister’s house and flew up to Portland instead.

Meanwhile, PK had a flat about 2 hours out of the Bay Area and sat waiting the rest of the day for someone to come help (they did). I think the next day went OK, but the next day, Patricia had to stop to rearrange the packing in the back of the car, and ended up spilling a bag on the side of road. The combination of cold weather, age, and falling out of the bag did my poor coffee maker in. The carafe hit the pavement and the plastic shattered, but since it’s an insulated model, the now broken carafe shell acted as a cushion for the glass interior, which was now rolling into highway traffic, Patricia scooting after it, trying to pick everything up and avoid causing an accident.

Plus, her dad snores really loud, pretty much precluding her getting any sleep. I, of course, was fine—though I did convince the Southwest gate agent that I was lame enough to deserve preloading with the babies and elderly. I did pull through by hiring two guys to unload the truck after it arrived. I think I overpaid (still only $140 total) but it was worth it to bring the whole ordeal to a quick and tidy end.

So, that was kind of long. Otherwise, Portland is pretty sweet. It’s a nice town, growing in ways that bother the locals, but I find their “problem” areas to be pretty comfortable. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’ve seen too much nastiness in the Bay Area. We rented a little 3BR in the Northwest hills, only a few blocks from Forest Park, which makes it a little remote, but we like walking, and can get all the way downtown or to Powells pretty easily. One night, on our way to a film festival showing, we walked all the way downtown while outpacing the streetcar the entire way.

Parking at its worst is SF at medium-easy. So, I’m pretty psyched. I don’t think you really give up that much, and you can buy a monster home here for pennies. Other than that, we’re just trying to settle a bit, which takes longer in the rainy cold winter, but hey, Spring is coming, right?

It definitely rains a lot here. Which is a change from California weather, but not as bad as everyone says. First off, it’s water, people. The same stuff that washes over you in the shower. Second, it’s usually pretty intermittent and of the light shower variety. So you can let the rain imprison you in your home if you want, or you can get a jacket. Your call.

While our current rental does lack that old-time historical charm (being built in the 70s, when our neighborhood was apparently lower middle class), it does have a few amenities that I think are key in any house—and especially one here in Portland. I learned a harsh lesson back in the Bay Area, when our SF apartment was sold and we moved to Albany (by Berkeley). The “flow” between indoors and out is very important in a house. Since houses are built to keep the outdoors out, getting good “flow” is not necessarily easy. The more barriers you have, the more you’ll feel trapped in your house.

Personally, I hate this feeling. It incubates the culture of fear running rampant through American society and evidenced in our fences, SUVs, etc. We think that mediating our lives will protect us, but it doesn’t.

So—flow is important to me. We have a little back patio that looks out over the NW industrial area. There’s even a little yard engine that passes by on the train tracks nearby every few days. You can hear it chugging and whining. This probably bothers some people, I love it. The important part, however is that we have a little porch out front. It’s nothing fancy, but we can set a couple chairs out there and sit while it’s raining (or we will when it warms up a bit). We can see the trees of Forest Park above the neighbors’ houses across the street. The back and front of the house are very different, but they bring us two very different dimensions of the city.

We needed new shelves for our place, and Patricia was kinda set on the Blu Dot Chicago shelves (see ‘em here at dwr.com) although they are most definitely out of our price range at $1,600. We noodled around for some other options like this or this. But after Ikea wanted to charge me $198 shipping for a $149 bookcase, I decided that maybe DIY was the best path.

(Despite this conclusion, I remain firmly committed to purchasing some Cubitec shelving in the near future. Just so you know.)

After some thinking, I realized that the Chicago shelves would be really easy to make—it’s just 8 boxes—if I could just find a solution for the long legs that run the height of the piece. I considered just getting some 1”x1” stock in a cheap wood, but the presence of metal legs really seems important to the piece. But where am I going to find metal legs? I thought of pipe, but that seemed too complicated and expensive when you add in all the fittings you’d need. Plus, I’d have fittings lined up on either side of each shelf board—aligning them would be a pain and probably look silly.

What I settled on was threaded rod, I bought 3/8” stock in 6ft lengths from my local Ace Hardware for $4/each. I cleaned out the two stores in my ‘hood, btw. Patricia and I spent 20 minutes counting out all the couplers, nuts, and washers I’d need. I’m using elevator bolts for feet.
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kottke links to a WSJ story about Smucker’s patent application of their “Uncrustables” frozen peanut butter sandwiches.

Having just now read (some of) the application, the real story is not that Smucker’s is trying to patent the sealed crustless freezable peanut-butter and jelly sandwich—because they aren’t. They are trying to patent the sealed crustless freezable peanut-butter and jelly sandwich WITH protein-fortified nut butter, the preceeding invention having already been patented by Kretchman in patent 6,004,596.

So, you see, the sandwich has already been patented.

This puts the story in a potentially different light. If the sandwich has already been patented by Kretchman (which Smucker’s admits, to my reading), then all Smucker’s is trying to do is procure an essentially defensive patent that would allow it to continue to innovate by producing its Uncrustables sandwiches without the fear of reprisals from Kretchman (or whoever currently owns its patents).

When you’re faced with a stupid patent, I guess all you can really do is get your own slightly stupider patent.

[UPDATE: Actually, Smuckers bought the Kretchman patent and were trying to extend it with two extension patent applications: one on the crimping method and the other the fortified nut butter. Both apps were rejected. Smuckers, fire your law firm immediately.]

This is a good idea for the orange task chair in the garage. The task chair frame is angled—both back and seat—but if I offset the wood frame from the chair by an inch or so, and pick the crossbeam points (where the chair rests on the wood frame) carefully, this could work well.

According to Mediaweek, Tracks is dead. My kneejerk reaction was to think that there just aren’t as many old music listeners—but the RIAA data shows that music consumption by age group has actually evened out of late.

I suspect that this might be another demonstration of the ‘Long Tail’—as you get older, you become more of a niche listener and less reliant on mass media recommendations. And this works both ways, as mass media itself has abandoned anyone older than 25 in the rush to capitalize on the young 18-25 demographic (“get ‘em young,” they say). So it’s not like us fogies have any other choice.

Tracks was a trailblazing idea, in many ways, but it was really swimming upstream. I bet it didn’t/couldn’t think of itself as the niche title it really was.

Subway called me this morning at 7am (they’re East Coast), and hung up after 2 rings. Wonder what that was about?

So this guy tries to smuggle in some bologna from Mexico (on a bus) and he gets caught. Which is not surprising since he had around 850 lbs. of illicit bologna and 100 lbs. of cheese with him in 14 suitcases and hidden on his person. Naturally, Customs and Border Patrol is pleased.

First: it’s a frickin’ miracle that there 1) weren’t any drug-sniffing dogs around and 2) they didn’t tear him to pieces. (Actually, said smuggler is apparently unaccounted for … hmmm.)

Second: the reporter (after tossing in a lame aside about how the agency didn’t know if the guy had any bread on him—get it? bologna, cheese … and bread? HA!) mentions that the poor slob stood to make a tidy profit on his sandwich fixin’s which in the US sell for 3 to 4 times the $7 to $8 he paid in Mexico.

OK, I’m just gonna assume that he can really get that much, though I would imagine that any poor soul loitering about a swap meet (?!) trying to unload 1,000 lbs. of hot, sweaty bologna and cheese is gonna take whatever anyone happens to offer. So, that’s gonna tally up to around $6,000 he paid, $18,000 sale price (doubtful), and $12,000 profit (more like $6,000—maybe).

Now, here’s the audience participation part:

Calculate for me the street value of the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and Mexican pharmaceuticals that passed cleanly through the border checkpoints while all the Border Patrol agents were busy unloading those dozen or so meat-and-cheese laden suitcases from the bowels of that bus.

Third: Anyone who eats bologna, let alone strange, sweaty, well-travelled Mexican bologna—deserves exactly what they get.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between life online and in meatspace, one that’s creating clashes on many different fronts, as you probably well know. However, it’s a mistake to portray these conflicts as battles between rights holders and pirates, laws and lawlessness. Again, most everyone knows this. Information wants to be free, and all that. What is interesting to me is that this is really a culture war in which two societies (not individuals) are battling for supremacy.
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