Recent Heros

Steve Albini


John Rawls


Alan Kay

On Side-Projects

Side-projects are important to every programmer I admire. Google's much-publicized 20% time is a corporate codification of the importance of side-projects; even a company that's worth billions knows that you can't keep good people working on the same thing all the time.

Side-Projects and You

There are lots of good reasons to always have some side-projects going:

• Projects keep you learning. New programming languages, new technologies, new ideas.
• Projects are mentally refreshing. Taking a step away from the problems you normally deal with is relaxing, and can lend a new perspective on how you work.
• Projects can be fun. Fun is fun.
• Projects can be profitable. Little ideas can turn into products and services that people want to pay for (or at least click ads on). Unusual ideas can forge new markets.
• Projects make you friends. Getting involved with a community is rewarding personally and professionally.

All that may seem obvious if you've made a habit of having side-projects, but I'm always surprised by how many people don't bother. But then, you don't hear about those people because they don't blog, attend meetups and conferences, or generally do things that would make them visible. Side-projects are a sign that you care. They're something we ask about when interviewing at Twitter.

Side-Projects and Me

I've had two side-projects on my to-do list for ages. The first and oldest is Peeramour, which is more or less a dating site for bloggers that emphasizes one's existing online presence rather than requiring yet another half-baked profile. I've been wanting to build this for about the last three years. Peeramour was conceived to scratch a personal itch, but I think there's a business opportunity there too. It's also something that I think would make people happy, and I feel an obligation to give something back to the web community that's been so good to me. Peeramour isn't hard to build, but I want to build it right, both aesthetically and technically.

The second project I've wanted to work on is Quotidian, a Mac OS X (Cocoa) application with which you can store, tag, and organize your favorite quotations. I've also considered building a web compliment to Quotidian that would allow you to share your favorite quotes with friends and interested strangers, but Trsly pretty much gets this job done to my satisfaction. My goal for Quotidian is mostly educational: I use a Mac every day, but I have a relatively limited sense of how I'd build a native Mac tool for myself to use. I'm also concerned that too many of my eggs are in the web-programming basket. Web apps may be vogue, but desktop application programming isn't going to disappear any time soon. It's tough to be a skilled generalist, though, and while I've learned a bunch of theory about how to write Mac software, I haven't had time to get into the nitty-gritty with this project. Once again, the difference is between doing it and doing it right, and the latter requires a ton of knowledge about a development platform with a nearly 20-year heritage.

One of my old side-projects, acts_as_sanitized, has been forked and surpassed (with my hearty blessing) by xss_terminate, written by Luke Francl, who's blogged about it here. acts_as_sanitized was released just before I got swamped by work on Twitter, and I owe Luke for making it something useful again. It's a lesson in the value of open-sourcing, and it leads me to what follows.

Side-Projects and Twitter

Working at Twitter is more than a full-time job. As I mentioned in a previous post, we're still a very small technical team (presently five people writing code and two looking after servers). There's always something work-related I could/should be working on, which means that there's basically no room in my life for guilt-free side-projects. No surprise, right? We're a startup.

One of my goals is that Twitter gets big enough that we have room for side-projects. Right now it just doesn't make business sense. We barely have time to open-source projects like Starling that can benefit from the community's support, much less to code up our own off-the-wall ideas. Compared to our peers in the Bay Area Ruby community we open-source a pathetic amount of code, and I'm eager for that to change. Part of making that happen is approaching our internal goals with the idea that the solutions need to be generic enough that they can be readily opened-up to outside contribution.

The people I'm really excited about working with are all big open-source contributors, and I don't think I'm alone in that. As part of scouting for talent becomes evaluating open-source work, it's going to become a standard part of every good company's growth to standardize policies around open-source contribution and side-projects. After all, Twitter started out as a side-project, which pretty much says it all.

My Zipcar Horror Story

Two years ago I went "car free", which is a nice way of saying that I was sick of paying through the nose for gas, insurance, and all the other expenses of car ownership. I still wanted to drive occasionally, so I applied for a membership to Zipcar, the premier car-sharing service. Zipcar didn't like the couple of speeding tickets on my record, so I went with their competitor, Flexcar.

Flexcar was one of my favorite companies ever — one of those things you end up evangelizing, like Apple or your favorite local record store. Flexcar was always professional, available, friendly, and reliable. The one time I had trouble getting a car, they bent over backwards to make sure I could have an equivalent car that day and credited me twice-over for lost time. I loved Flexcar so much that I'd pay to refill the tank of the car I had out on my own dime, even though they pay for gas.

Then, on Halloween 2007—when any proper horror story should start—Flexcar and Zipcar merged.

Post-Merger

I noted the merger with trepidation, and forgot about it. Weeks passed. Then, one day in December, I went to book a car and couldn't. The merger had finalized, and Flexcar had been subsumed into Zipcar. I called Flexcar and a disappointed-sounding representative told me to talk to Zipcar from now on for anything and everything.

So I called up Zipcar and asked them what a lil' ol' Flexcar customer like me had to do to book a car, post-merger. I was told with bepuzzlement that I should've long since received and activated a "Zipcard". I was told that one would be in the mail. I was about to be told a lot of things by Zipcar, and this was the first.

A few days passed, and no card showed up. Another call and an email to Zipcar suggested that my best bet was going to the local San Francisco office to pick one up. When I arrived, another frustrated Flexcar customer was trying to get her account set up. Apparently there were "technical problems" with the merger. Zipcar apparently had one small IT team on the East Coast working on the merger, and they were overwhelmed. I was told I'd be contacted and sent on my way.

Card In Hand

Once again, nothing for days. I went back to the San Francisco office. This time I was handed a card, but told that I may or may not be able to access it. It was unclear as to whether I'd be able to use Zipcar at all, as I'd been previously rejected. This despite being a model customer and motorist while with Flexcar for nearly two years. Once again, I was told I'd be contacted.

Even more days passed. Emails were sent and calls made by me in attempt to get my Zipcar account wording. Nothing but confusion. The holidays came and went and I'll but given up on getting the thing working. Then, after the new year, I got a call from the local office saying I should be all set.

The Zipcar site, however, said otherwise. It said that someone else already had my card. Two calls couldn't resolve this; I actually had a customer service representative muttering "shit" and "what the hell am I doing?" under her breath when trying to figure out my situation. I actually got an email back from someone for a change, but it was in response to someone else's complaint.

So I went back to the San Francisco office for the third time, now more than a bit cross. I managed to get assigned a new Zipcard and actually signed on to their registration system while in the office.

When I got back to my desk, I had an email saying that my account had been tied to the first card, which I had left at the local office. Totally unwilling to trudge back, I requested that they just goddamn fix it to work with the new card, and amazingly, this got done. Success! I had a working card, I could sign into the registration system, everything was hunky-dory.

Until I looked at my bank account balance a few days later.

The Great Bank Heist

Once I finally got my account set up, Zipcar's billing system decided that charging me $50 at least once, sometimes twice a day every day was a great idea. Not only had I been charged account setup fees that I didn't owe as a Flexcar merger customer, but over $300 of these $50 charges had piled up against my credit card.

Unsurprisingly, days of calling an emailing yielding nothing more than empty promises that I'd be contacted by their billing department. So today, to finally end this tedious tale of consumer woe, I had my bank reverse the above charges and block all future charges from Zipcar. Then I got on the horn with Zipcar, and failing the availability of an actual human in the billing department, spoke with a manager who closed out my account and supposedly (fingers crossed) removed my credit card from their system.

Horrorshow over. I think. I hope.

In Summary

$340 in erronious charges. 27 emails. Three trips in person to the San Francisco Zipcar offices. At least a dozen phone calls. All in all, the definition of consumer hell.

This has been an impossibly boring blog entry, I know. But I can't help but feel that it's important to give stories like this one an audience, even if just for the sake of search engine posterity. Dealing with Zipcar has been one of the worst consumer experiences I've ever had. While I know plenty of folks who've used the service without issue, I hope that if they'll keep a close watch on Zipcar from here on out.

It's my intention to sign up with City Car Share. They have fewer cars in the Bay Area and no presence in other cities, but far lower rates and a good reputation. They don't have cars on my block here in the SOMA neighborhood, but close enough.

I may find a new car sharing service, but I'll always be missing Flexcar. Tears in heaven.

Update, January 18th:  I had an automatically-generated email in my inbox this morning from Zipcar saying that they couldn't charge me $35.00 for some reason, and could I please sign in and update my credit card?  This after I closed my account.  Holy hell.

Living In The Past

At some point in my early adolescence I began to feel as if I was living in the past. Not in terms of personal emotional history, but in terms of history itself. That what counts as the present might as well be the past.

It's not the where is my jetpack feeling. It's not that Now isn't the now we thought it would be. It's looking around and knowing that the way we clean, the way we read, the way we communicate, our whole way of life will be a sad, whimsical footnote in history books that probably won't be books. It's the they thought they'd have jetpacks feeling.

Working with technology exacerbates this feeling. It's hard to suss out the worth in Right Now if your head is wrapped up in what comes next: the next release, the advances you know are around the corner. Engineers working on version 2.0 wave away bug reports on the current version. "It'll be fixed in the rewrite." Don't bother me with that. It's already in the past, even if it's a current trouble for someone else.

You can't live in the past, but it's never the future.

When We're Moving, and Why

We’re moving to San Francisco on Monday, April 16th.

We pack our stuff (books and household items; all the furniture is being given away) into a shipping container over the preceding weekend. Then we get on a plane, cat stowed in cargo, and go. There’s an apartment waiting for us in Hayes Valley. We might actually be crazy enough to drive to the local Ikea across the Bay Bridge that same afternoon. If we don’t, we won’t have any furniture. Our stuff arrives a while later.

That’s the “when” and the “how” of this move. The “why” is, first and foremost and as previously mentioned, to work at Obvious. Twitter is growing rapidly and we’re a small team; trying to keep up with the other engineers from across the country, all the phone calls and brainstorming and small crises, is a challenge. I’ve more or less been living on Pacific time since working out there several weeks ago, and I’m tired of it. My head’s already there.

There’s a broader question of “why,” though, given that: a) I already lived in San Francisco once and b) Timoni and I really liked Portland, Oregon way more. The answer is more or less that there’s more in San Francisco, even if it’s not all better. There’s more neighborhoods, more weekend trips in easy driving distance, more people, more shows, more possibilities, more going on. More than DC, and way more than Portland. We really want a change, and San Francisco delivers on the change front.

It won’t be too long before we’re back to visit on the East Coast, though. More about that soon.

Totally Obvious

I’m happy to announce that today is my first official day as a full-time Obvious employee.

If you’re a frequent visitor to the About Us page on Twitter, you’ll notice that I’ve been on there for a while. That’s because I’ve been doing contract work on Twitter since earlier this year.

Our recent trip to San Francisco was in part to see if I liked working with the Obvious folks and vice versa. I definitely did, and Timoni and I will be moving to San Francisco in the near future.

I’m looking forward to continuing to improve Twitter. It’s been great fun to work on something that so many people are enthusiastic about. But more than that, I’m looking forward to working with the awesome people at Obvious. It’s a great place to be.

Frontiering

Timoni and I will be in the midwest as of this evening, visiting her family for the holidays. We return on December 29th.

I’ve been told that everything from the landscapes to the people are depressing. It will be bitterly cold. But, on the upside, our week is essentially composed of driving from one holiday meal to the next. I am not concerned.

Flying, then, to the flyover states.

Pedal Pwned

My bike got stolen. If you see anyone riding around Arlington on a maroon Novara Fusion, tackle ‘em. And maybe think twice before leaving your bike locked up overnight at the Clarendon metro. Yes, Clarendon.

I didn’t particularly like the bike from an aesthetic perspective. It got me places, but it didn’t have the relaxed ride I’d want from a commuter bike. It was increasingly having little glitches, a bit premature given how new it was and the light riding I do. Screws coming out, the handlebar loosening every couple rides, fittings coming off, the lights not working most of the time.

But hey: that’s someone else’s problem now. I hope you end up with a spoke through your lung, thief.

Breaking News: It's Kind Of Cold In Chicago

Landed in Chicago this morning a bit ahead of schedule. Getting to the airport bloody early can have its advantages.

We had a delicious brunch at Orange: pumpkin pancakes, fresh orange-carrot juice, and frushi. I’m presently in one of the much-touted Intelligentsia Coffee locations. Their barista skills are confirmed; my espresso macchiato was excellent.

Today we’re bumming around Bucktown, then seeing some improv at Second City before dinner at Adobo Grill. Tomorrow we take an architectural boat tour of the city before C4 kicks into gear.

I’ll try to blog as much of the conference as time, facilities, and circumstances allow. If I can live blog, I will. If I can’t, expect posts the next morning for the conference’s respective days.

I hope I packed enough warm stuff. It’s nippy.

al3xs On A Plane

We leave for London later today, and I get to re-discover the joys of red eye flights, albeit with Jack Daniels and melatonin this time around (I was maybe 15 last time I went to the UK). Wednesday we do touristy stuff, Thursday and Friday I’m at RailsConf Europe while Timoni explores the city on her own, and then tourism resumes for me over the weekend. We return next Tuesday.

I’m happy with how my talk for RailsConf has come together. There looks to be lots of good content at the conference, and I’m happy they finally sold out. It’ll be interesting to see the differences between hacker cons and more, uh, “professional” conferences.

On the same topic, I’m registered to attend the aforementioned-on-this-blog C4 conference in Chicago next month. I hope I’m not taking a slot from a real actual Mac developer, but I’ll try to make up for that by noteblogging the hell out of the respective talks.

It’s nice to be traveling regularly again!

Car Free

After months of trying, I finally sold my car this past Friday.

For all the hassles of selling one’s car privately it went pretty well, though it baffles me that the bank I had my car loan with (BB&T) had no facilities to transfer a newly lien-free title expediently. What buyer is going to be comfortable handing over a chunk of cash and then waiting around for 10+ days for the new title to show up? Honestly. Banks.

It’s a burden lifted not to be saddled with car payments, insurance payments, ever-higher gas prices, and the general feeling of anchorage imposed by large and costly personal property. That’s less an indictment of owning cars than of taking on debt to own a largely impractical car.

As largely impractical cars go, though, the 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS I owned was nothing but pleasant. It had no mechanical problems in the year I owned it, accommodated a couple of improbable loads in its time, and always offered its absurd stereo system to maximum bass advantage. I bought it to make my daily commute - when I had one - more bearable, and that it did.

In the years previous to the Eclipse I drove a hand-me-down Honda Civic. My future cars will undoubtedly tend back towards that practical end of the vehicle spectrum. I’ll miss the perception afforded you on the road when you drive a sportier car: I found that fellow motorists are more likely to give you a wide berth and yield the fast lane. It’s a convenience, but not one worth the expense of a sporty car.

For the time being I can walk, bike, and Metro most everywhere I need to go. When we return from London I’ll probably sign up for Zipcar for weekend Trader Joe’s runs and such, but I intend to put off owning a car again for as long as possible. Until the auto industry can deliver to US consumers practicality, design, post-petroleum fuel efficiency, and low environmental impact in an affordable package, I’m simply not interested.

Take That, Sturdy 1940s Construction

As of last night I’m comfortable saying that Timoni and I are All Moved In. Walls are painted, books are on shelves, boxes have been removed, new Ikea furniture has been built, everything is organized.

The nail in the move-in coffin was actually a number of screws embedded in our ancient and infinitely dense walls. I’m not exactly “handy” – I didn’t really know where to start when trying to get shelves and such hung in such material. Thankfully, that’s what the intarwebs are for. One masonry drill bit and assorted anchors later I now have a swanky glass marker board and a fold-out standing desk. As much as I like working from the coffee shop, it’s going to be hard to leave such a nice work space.

I’m really happy with how the place looks. I bet Timoni will have pictures up soon, and we’d love to have you over. Yes, you. Bring vino.

UPDATE: Here are the photos, as promised. You still need to come over!

Some Other Things

Because my life happens in tiny, atomic events:

1. It’s our intention to move to the Eastern Market neighborhood of DC before the lease on my current place in up in early August. My rent is being hiked several hundred dollars to a whopping $1400 per month. It’s a 560 square foot studio. I can’t even usually get a parking space near it if I come home later than 8PM. It’s not a bad place, but fuck that.


2. I’m selling my car. It’s been a good car, the Eclipse, but driving in the DC area is unpleasant and entirely too costly. I’m also concerned about its lack of fuel economy. I’d like to be greener.


3. I’m getting a bike. Though I’ve been surrounded by bike people for years I’ve never been one of them. Bikes make a lot of sense.


4. Getting a bike and walking more means getting a bag that’s actually comfortable on the shoulder, unlike the (otherwise nice) Burton DJ bag I picked up a while back. I’m probably gonna comission one from this guy. His bag compendium, amongst other things, suggests he’s hella into bags.


5. I went back to eating mostly vegetarian, this time making an exception for fish and shellfish. Health, morality, and meal-planning convenience were my impetus.

Generally, I’m trying to bring my life here in DC back into line with the positive changes I made when I moved to San Fransisco. I kind of did a 180 upon my return home last summer, and I’m gradually getting back where I want to be.

Several Things

Condensing events since my last posting into easily-digestable info-nuggets:

1. The network attached storage solution I settled on is the Infrant ReadyNAS NV, which I purchased diskless from Aegis. It arrived yesterday. First impression: cute. The disks I’m putting in it arrive today. Review to appear in due time.


2. Craig and I are booked to play the Beat Research night in Boston in August and other gigs are falling into place. We’ve been deep in practice mode the last few weeks. A new mix will appear when we’re good and ready. In the mean time, if you know of a quirky, friendly DJ night in your town, please let us know. We don’t expect to be career DJs but we sure do like playing music for people.


3. I ran into an old high school friend the other night who’s apparently been reading this here blog on and off for the last several years. If you’re a regular reader but rarely comment, please say hi.


4. Timoni moved in with me on Monday. I am, unqualified, the happiest guy.

Like A Pillow. Like a Lock.

The best girl trouble album in the world is, and has been, and will be: Mad For Sadness by Arab Strap, and that’s all there is to it.

I think my perspective on male-female relationships is lying somewhere in the media valley between When Harry Met Sally and Songs About Fucking.

Reasonably sure this is not healthy.

A Large Apple

I will be in NYC from today through Monday afternoon. Since the rest of The City is going to SXSW I expect that it will be a pleasant and carefree time.

Upon my return you can expect the same insightful, authoritative, and deeply personal blogging I’ve been delivering daily over the last two weeks.

Seasonality, Projects, and Escapism

I’d like to offer a word of advice to any readers who deal with with SAD: remember your known good state.

When you’re seasonal, you can find your life suddenly unrecognizable. When the dark months come, the ideas, routines, duties, and people you care about will seem distant and unappealing. You become a different person, but it’s nearly impossible to see the change from your low, gloomy purview.

It affects me the same way, year after year: I start looking around for new projects that will take me away from the familiar; I consider moving and uprooting my life as a distraction from the depression; I blame the people around me when they try to point out these changes rather than heeding their concerns. Every year gets a little easier, though. Every year I manage to listen less to the voices that want me to make foolish changes, deflecting them with a mantra composed of the qualities of the person I am when I’m not under the winter’s cloud. I remember my known-good state.

The person I am under sunshine is committed to his friends and family, happy living in DC, proud of his job, engaged by the information security field, and so forth. A combination of factors, not least of which is the absurdly mild winter we’ve had here, has burnt off the cloud cover, particularly in the last few days. As ever, it’s a relief, and this time around the fallout is minor.

I started several projects while moody and looking around for distractions. Two of them I’m still excited about (one well predates the winter blues). I’ll be announcing them here soon. The other two I could use your thoughts on whether to go forward with.

Questionable Project #1: a weblog about digital DJing.

The design and static content for this is all done. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but is probably too time-consuming to do well, and possibly unnecessary given the respectable coverage of the topic that Scratchworx offers. I enjoy writing about the subject, but maybe my time would be better spent behind the decks than at the keyboard?

Questionable Project #2: a registry for people who want to fall in love.

No, not quite a dating site. The idea is this: there are dating sites for every sexual orientation, age bracket, ethnic group, religious affiliation, hobby, lifestyle, fetish, and hair color under the sun. Most of these sites pander to short-term dating, or allow for a range from friends/activity partners to long-term with the sleazy outlier of “play” or “hookups”. There is not, to the best of my knowledge, a website exclusively for people who want to fall in love. eHarmony comes close, but is creepy.

My site would be free of the gimmicks of most dating sites – blogs, social networking, quizzes – and free in cost. Members could provide salient details about themselves in a freeform fashion, not suffering the tedious and restrictive profile questions most sites offer. Members would provide their preferred method of contact, eschewing the awkward in-site messaging systems most dating sites employ. It would be simple, humane, and encouraging for the romantics out there. Maybe you’d even put the lil’ badge for the site on your blog: “I want to fall in love”. Aww.

It’s easy to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this project, and the upfront development time isn’t that long. Everyone I’ve talked to about it likes the idea. If it got popular, however, maintenance could quickly become a full-time job. On a selfish personal level, it’s also more time spent coding when I could be out meeting people the normal way; that is, it might be a solution, but it’s more likely to exacerbate the problem.

So now you know a couple of the sort of things a lovelorn geek and bedroom DJ comes up with in the grips of SAD, along with fancies of going back to freelance web app development and moving to Portland or Vancouver or someplace soft, airily lefty, and forgiving. Jekyll and Hyde, innit?

Your thoughts are welcome and encouraged.

Not At All The New Year's Post I Wanted To Write

A few weeks ago I got the urge to modify my personal appearance. This happens periodically, usually in tandem with my seasonality. I’ve been through a couple body modifications which I’ve retired for various reasons:

• Both earlobes, stretched to 00ga (large enough to thread headphone cable through). Retired due to a recurring hypertrophic scar on my left ear. I miss my big lobes, and often consider another dermatological venture at having the scar removed.


• The cartilage of my left ear, dermal punched at a gauge I’ve since forgotten/repressed. Retired the day I had it done due to intensive bleeding, caused dually by poor vein sighting on the part of my piercer and my attempt to remove the jewelry entirely too soon. I got stitched up by a patient young ER doc, one of the more humiliating experiences of my life.

This time around I decided to try two lip piercings (labrets), positioned equidistant below my lower lip, a configuration known as “snakebites”. My piercer did a fine job this past Monday, but they’ve been increasingly uncomfortable. Slightly longer jewelry would likely give the wound more room to heal, but I was duly warned that basically any oral piercing is a recipe for tooth and/or gum damage. As the rightmost piercing began to settle into position I could feel it scraping against my teeth. No good. I took them out a few minutes ago to a mix of physical relief and aesthetic regret.

Body modification is a funny thing, something I have as mixed a relationship to as my body itself. Modification can be a celebration of the body, and I love browsing the galleries at BME and seeing all the shiny, happy, modded people. But it can also be a form of identity escapism, a means to divert attention from what really matters about yourself.

As I mulled over the usual new year’s resolutions, I wondered if my energy was best spent fretting over having the right jewelry in my oozing, self-inflicted wounds or getting more exercise, eating better, meditating, and generally doing things that will actually make me feel better. I suppose it’s not an inherently either/or proposition for most people, but it’s always been one for me.

So here’s to a healthy, albeit lamentably snakebite-free new year. And no, this doesn’t preclude more tattoos. Those always make me feel better.

A Winter Dream

As snow falls on my surroundings they become first obscured, then hidden. With the strip malls and office buildings out of sight I’m free to paint my own strokes on this new white canvas. I can dream a winter dream, for in no other circumstances would this dream come to me.

In my dream I’m living in a city that I never feel estranged from. I have no car, and no need for one; I experience the city on foot. The climate is wet and green. The rain is frequent, but it plays counterpoint to days of idyllic sunshine.

In my dream I live in a small apartment – not as small as the one I live in now, but small. My mattress lies on bare floor. In the kitchen there’s an aging gas range and a comically large pair of food and water dishes for a dog. These are necessary because in my dream I live with a comically large dog. This dog occupies a fair portion of the mattress on the floor for much of the day and almost the entirety of the mattress when I attempt to sleep there. I am good-natured about this because the dog is my constant companion.

In my dream I wake up to no alarm clock. I rise when I am ready. I feed the dog, but not myself, because in my dream as in real life I do not particularly like breakfast. I cull the stack of emails and news that have come to me while I slept. Then the dog and I go for a run in the warm, sporadic rain. We take in the smell of the city. It smells good.

In my dream I work all afternoon and into the early evening. I work mostly for people I’ve never met face-to-face. I write code, and I write news, and I write articles. Maybe I’m writing a book. I write a lot. I spend several of these late afternoons per week in a coffee shop where they let my dog sleep at my feet while I work. Then I take the dog home, promise that I’ll be back later, and walk to a small bar where I mix records for the patrons off my laptop. I am paid with good bourbon. When I return home, the dog punishes my abscence by refusing to move, having already sprawled out on the entirety of the mattress. I sleep good-naturedly on the couch.

In my dream I wake up the next morning and decide to go for a long walk instead of a run, because the weather demands it. I’m walking through a park when my dog is approached by a beautiful woman. When she’s done complimenting the dog she strikes up a conversation with me, and soon I realize that the routine I’ve become accustomed to is about to change.

I’ve never had this dream asleep.

The First and Last of the Catblogging

When I was in San Francisco the constant presence of dogs sparked in me a strong desire to have a pet. It was suggested to me by a friend that I might consider getting a girlfriend first, and then see if I still wanted a pet. I’ve dated a bit since I’ve been back in DC. I still wanted a pet.

This past week I adopted a cat from the Vola Lawson Animal Shelter in Alexandria. I’d wanted a cat when I was a kid but my mother was terribly allergic. She tells me I once suggested that she sleep in the yard so I could keep a cat in the house. I neither confirm nor deny this childhood memory. Needless to say, we had dogs growing up, and I consider myself a “dog person” if I’m forced to choose. If my living situation allowed I’d have a very, very large dog like a Great Dane or an Irish wolfhound.

The cat I adopted is three, largely Maine Coon with the breed-typical mid-length brown tabby coat and black tail. He’s personable to the point of neediness, though I suspect this due to a lack of human contact while in the shelter. Any time spent in my apartment not attending to him is, in his gold eyes, time misspent, and I’m soundly reprimanded for it. He forces his nose against my hand until I’ve scratched him about the head appropriately and will repeat this, switching hands, until he finally settles into a doze. This guided petting seems to be his activity of preference; toys, treats, scratching, and food are wholly secondary.

I named him Case, after William Gibson’s protagonists in Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, male and female respectively. It seemed a fitting name given the androgyny of felines. My friends, meanwhile, have conspired to refer to the beast as Chairman Meow, or simply The Chairman.

I understand the grave responsibility that befalls any cat-owning blogger. I will not, henceforth, post about the cat again, save in passing or upon its eventual death. I will not post pictures of it. I will not share any cat-related “wisdom” that finds its way to me in the course of pet ownership. I will not be able to get the cat hair out of my laptop’s keyboard, ever.