So I give people personal nicknames based on something they do or say or some image that I have of them. My son & daughter are not lucky enough to have escaped this phenomena.

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Until I was 24 or 25 I didn’t dream – or if I did, I never remembered them. Now I don’t remember them, but I definately know I do dream. But this weekend I had a totally bizarre dream, and afterwards I lay in that trancelike state between sleep and awake and it put upon me a strange eerie feeling, like the first time I read Bruce Sterling’s ‘The Belonging Kind’.

I was in a bar, and the bar’s layout was very detailed. It was 3 levels, and in the corner of a kind of strip-mall like buisiness space. There were empty stores and offices around it and the whole building was built in a square, with the center being an old courtyard type place, overgrown with weeds and a broken down fountain. I was looking for my daughter, and she was missing, kidnapped by unknown forces. The bar, while actually a real bar, was a gateway into another reality, another ‘here’ that had the same physical space, but was not quite ‘here’, as though it occupied some of the space between the electrons of our current ‘here’.

Rumours about how to get to the other ‘here’ circulated among the young patrons, who would go into the third floor stairwell and try to find the doorway, but few were successful, and fewer returned. I was inside, music overpowered me as I climbed a different stair to the top floor, currently unused and walked towards the fated stairwell. Two girls were running around trying to find the gate, and as I approached, they fled downstairs into the nameless security of the crowd. The bouncers and workers could see people going up to the unused third floor, but merely gave a look that conveyed dismay, uncaring and tiredness all at the same time. The music came muted through the floor and filtered up the stairwell, it’s treble bouncing off the hard wooden stairs and causing me to wince.

I walked into the third floor landing and blinked, and I was ‘here’. I immediately saw my friends, Matt and Sandra, sitting on a bench, reclining with their daughter. The smell told me that I was in the place that I was looking for, and I hoped that here I would find what I was looking for.

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This is a bit on toasters.. and a tangent too. Elke had a post about pictures w/toasters and it inspired me to relate a bad toaster decision of my own. When I moved to california in ’99, I moved in with 2 other guys in a small apartment with no toaster. This seemed OK at the time b/c I didn’t work regular hours, therefore wouldn’t need a toaster for quick breakfasts.

Flash forward a couple years to just before I got married. My lovely wife-to-be Kelly and I were discussing what we should put on our wedding registration. Kelly mentions a toaster, and I, in a flash of not-so-much-now-but-sounded-good-at-the-time-brilliance said something to the effect of “We should get a toaster OVEN so we can make toast, and other toastable things, as well as any other mini-oven related tasks that might crop up.” She is skeptical, given that my mini-oven task list hovers just south of zero, and I haven’t toasted anything in several years (though, to be fair, I hadn’t had toaster-access in several years.). With some fast talking and my effective tools of persuasion, I convince her that a toaster oven is the way to go. So we got a toaster oven.

Now, gentle reader, I must beg a small query from you. Have you ever actually tried to make toast *in* a toaster oven? If not, please let me explain. The word ‘Toaster’ in “Toaster Oven” in no way means that this confounded contraption is in any way usable to make toast.. Let me say that again so that there is no misunderstanding: A toaster oven is incapable of making toast. Oh, to be sure, there are a lot of things that a toaster oven can produce, including funny smells, burnt fingers, blisters, melted candles, melted pill-bottles and swearing. But when you’re in a hurry, and want a simple piece of toast, you are definitely out of luck.

The sad, or should I say sick issue is that the company continues to perpetuate this massive hoax on the consumer by including such things as a ‘light/dark’ knob (which has no discernable effect, and upon taking apart the toaster oven in a fit of rage, is apparently not even connected to anything. It also includes a ‘timer’ which, if perhaps I was using a variable time-frame relative to the star movement on riegel-4 might be relevant, but has absolutely no bearing on actual earth-time, despite the fact that it is helpfully labeled in minutes. It supposedly comes with an automatic toast timer and shutoff to produce “the perfect piece of toast” (actual quote from the literature.) Which does not actually produce toast, but instead will happily produce lumps of bread-shaped charcoal.

So finally, last month, I gave up my quest for mastery of toast, toastable items and mini-oven features rolled into a convenient package and put the toaster oven out in the yard sale for $0.25. I hope that it’s evil will pass from my house and leave me in peace. My wife went out and bought a simple toaster that you place the bread in and press a lever. when the toast is done, it pops up, and eagerly awaits it’s next step (usually down my gullet, often coated in fruit preserves).

It also makes bagels.

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I have this love-slack relationship with the Open source ideal.. I use a lot of open source tools, and I have started a couple projects that I want to release as open source, but haven’t gotten around to finishing them yet. I have every intention of getting to them eventually… really. No, seriously. It’s not like I’m specifically rejecting them, or neglecting them even.. everything gets neglected sometimes. Most times. I mean, I’m lazy, but no more than everyone else from my generation. I just have stuff that gets in the way. And usually when i get 10 minutes to myself finally at 9pm after the kids go to bed and I do my chores, I barely have the energy to lift my hand to the remote control and flip on the hockey game, let alone think hard enough to code. But some day man.. after I win the lottery, or fall into mon-ay. I know it’s coming eventually.

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Earlier this week I was in my old neighborhood, getting my car serviced and I went to BK for lunch. While I’m waiting for my food, I go to the bathroom and it’s disgusting.. like.. not the worst I’ve ever seen, but bad. The kind of the bathroom where you don’t want to risk turning on the water, because touching the tap would make your hand even dirtier than just a little pee. Y’know what I mean? The kind where you need to use a paper towel to open the door to avoid any chance of tetanus. Ick. *shiver*.

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