shelbinator.com

I hate a bad internet meme, but I love a good one, and Amber and Rusty have a good one. I was hoping to pick one picture per month and hit all twelve, but with 4 minutes left in the year, I’m going to just be a bit haphazard, especially since some of the pics I wanted to use aren’t on Flickr (and are trapped on a computer 600 miles north of my current location).

January

A trip I’ll never forget to the Iowa Caucus — last meal before the big day with some of Team Biden.

From Iowa almost directly to New York to join fellow YouTuber Erica America at MTV and become part of Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, for what it was worth.

February

Super Tuesday — most special to me for getting my first taste of the Nokia N95, but enhanced by its coincidence with Fat Tuesday and one rather drunk McCain voter at the Vortex.

Prom photo — Broken Hearts & Bicycle Parts bike ride for SoPo Bike Collective.

March

Got Hope? Vine City gets mauled by an in-town tornado. Crazy times.

April

Cracked! Two years later than expected, I finally start generating mixed-mode fatigue cracks. Fat lot of good that did. Please kill me.

May

Hook up with New Media Strategies to cover ISEF ‘08.

July

I got older. And people came out for beers. And my mom didn’t even have to pay them this year.

August

Reconnected with a couple former summer camp-mates in Highlands, NC after, like, 20 years.

October

“Go big or go home,” as they say; I completely FUBAR my hair trying to achieve Greg House, M.D.’s mousey brown. Lauren buys a lab coat.

November

There’s like this historical election thing. I try to enjoy the moment as much as possible while pseudo-working.

December

My mom (right) gets me to march in the King Mango Strut Parade, our last as Miami residents.

We pop a little champagne in my dad’s chambers for one last Christmas amid burn barrels of confidential documents and moving boxes. The judge retires at 80 in January.

Alright. It’s 2009. Yeehaw. It’s also bedtime.

Updated with video below!

There were many reasons I loved supporting Joe Biden. Among them was the fact that I have a tendency to speak my mind before I know it’s a good idea, and I admire that in a politician. Sometimes I’ll get really riled up and start talking trash, but then someone will call me on my attitude, and I’m sorry I have to put my money where my mouth is.

I would have been indignant, righteous, nay furious in the 1960s about civil rights. But I think when the po-po showed up with billy clubs, I mighta gone runnin’ home to momma. Not Rep. John Lewis, he got his skull cracked for the right to vote. So he knows a thing or two about hostile environments.

God forbid he denounce the general air of hostility being fomented in the final throes of the McCain campaign, as people scream “Kill him!” and “Terrorist!” from the audience as Gov. Sarah Palin reminds us over and over again of his Otherness, and Sen. McCain only counters the mob once when he accidentally gives the microphone to two xenophobes at one rally.

George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.
[emphasis mine]

Naturally, Sen. McCain’s reaction is to get upset with Rep. Lewis and call his remarks “outrageous,” “unacceptable,” “brazen and baseless.” Oh, and of course to call on Barack Obama — who had nothing to do with it — to repudiate Lewis’s remarks (not like that would do him any more good than his repudiation of Rev. Wright’s remarks or Bill Ayers’s domestic terrorism).

McCain cannot even for a second acknowledge the (perhaps unintended) consequences of his campaign’s strategy of fomenting fear about Obama, and he blames the messenger for trying to bring him back into the light. What the heck do you think is going to come of a campaign based on constantly stoking fear through vague but threatening comments about a candidate’s loyalty to the American way of life? What on earth are you doing even going on stage after some nut pastor opens your rally with an invocation like this?

There are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that [McCain’s] opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day.

These are the kinds of people John McCain “pals around with.” Totally acceptable, yes?

But no, it’s Lewis who’s out of line for suggesting caution. It’s like the same irrational anger you get from an alcoholic when you tell them they drink too much. How dare you accuse them of such a thing!

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, as they say.

Tonight, that bastion of East Coast liberal media elitism CNN showed some video their correspondent Gary Tuchman collected while talking (calmly and rationally) to supporters at a McCain-Palin rally about their beliefs that Obama is a terrorist, a Muslim, a one-man sleeper cell, and various other brilliance. I hope they put it online so I can embed it here for posterity.

Oh, here it is!

I don’t care what it’s called, I would totally subscribe to that guy’s blog or bring him on board projects and campaigns. Just look at how amazingly citizen journalismy he looks! And sweaty, too!

If you feel like turning this into a caption contest, knock yourselves out, but this image will definitely be incorporated into whatever re-branding goes on around here. Many thanks to @leslieann44 for snapping the image — no, I was not posing, that’s an action shot, baby.

Because this is the most interesting thing to happen to me all week at work, I bring you camels. You don’t have camels where you work, do you? I didn’t think so.

Yeah, that’s all I got. I mean unless you want to hear about tuning the gains and valve dither rates on a servohydraulic load frame for maximum cyclic actuator displacement in torsion.

When a presidential campaign folds, the first thing to do is thank your supporters. The next thing to do is settle your debts; Bill Richardson did this within a fortnight of his collapse in an email that teased us about an endorsement, faked us out with talk of issues, and then asked for some final donations.

Joe Biden hasn’t sent that email out yet, but we did get an interesting note out of the blue on Friday morning. It’s a text-only, unceremonious forward that only includes the lead-in,

As work in the Senate begins again, I wanted to pass along this
article. I hope you find it interesting.
Joe

The forward is this article from the Politico, “Biden looks overseas.” At first, you get the impression that this is just Joe’s way of reminding us that, as he reassured teary-eyed supporters in Des Moines that last night, he’s not going away, and that we’d be hearing his voice a lot from the Senate once again. The article talks about how senators return to the hum-drum toil of their day jobs after failed presidential bids; how Biden added some serious issues to the debates and campaign discussions by being part of it; and how there are pressing issues for the Foreign Relations Committee to tend to now that the sideshow is over. Good for Joe, right?

Then, discussing Iraq, the author brings up Biden’s Senate clout and makes the easy leap from there to the possible State Department appointment:

“Whatever choice the new president wants [to make], he or she will need congressional support and bipartisan support, and Biden will be crucial,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name.”

“Whoever is president will be courting him,” Mandelbaum added.

Of course, it’s possible that the next president will view Biden as a potential secretary of state.

Sure, sure, we’ve heard this a million times. After some more talk of the issues, the story drifts back to future appointments, and then kicks it up a notch:

Other foreign policy wonks said the same, referring to Biden as sophisticated and a shoo-in to lead the State Department or, alternately, on the short list for a vice presidential nod should Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois win the Democratic nomination.

Despite his foot-in-mouth comments about Obama being “articulate” last February, some said Biden’s foreign policy experience would complement Obama’s perceived inexperience in that area.

“When it comes to VP nominees, Biden is going to be on that list,” said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a “radical centrist” think tank based in Washington. Clemons added that he hoped the possibility of being Obama’s running mate wouldn’t “distract” Biden “from the more important function of having the Foreign Relations Committee up and doing its job.”

Again, not exactly breaking news; when people weren’t accusing Joe of running for Secretary of State, they were accusing him of running for VP, and a Biden-Obama/Obama-Biden coupling was the dream of many.

But now Joe is sending this out to his supporters. Just FYI, you know? No appeal for money right now, just something you might want to read over coffee.

Uh-huh.

I tried to get some clarification on this, but one former staffer had no insight on who made the decision to send this out, and another, higher-up-the-chain former staffer hasn’t gotten back to me; for all I know the guy is on a beach somewhere drinking margaritas and looking through the WaPo job listings with nary a Blackberry in sight.

I’d be pleased as punch if Biden got a promotion from the next president — if it’s the only one named in the article, Obama. I’d rather he stay put at the Senate if we get another Clinton White House, as he’d be in a much better position to beat that two-headed cyborg about the face and neck on foreign policy from his committee chair post than if he was another toe-the-line sucker of a Secretary of State like poor Colin Powell. And a VP nod? Again, the most impotent and purely ceremonial of positions in the third Clinton administration, but with someone like Obama who seems open to advice and for the love of God sure needs it on foreign policy, it might actually be a job worth taking. Personally, I’d feel a little sheepish about how adamant I have always been that “I take Joe at his word when he says he’s in this to win or he’s going back to his day job, this isn’t about VP” if he turned around and started courting the VP nomination…but I guess I’d get over that dose of political reality.

Or is he courting it at all? Biden also said in Des Moines that he wasn’t going to make an endorsement — another thing I took the characteristically blunt man at his word for. By forwarding this article to all of his supporters before the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, which only mentioned Obama by name among people who would be courting Biden’s favor (if not partnership), was Joe giving a wink and a nod toward his favorite “storybook” candidate?

Eeeeenteresting.

We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.

I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.

Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.

That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.

There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?

I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.

It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything here that remotely engaged you, dear lurker, so today I shall kill two birds with one stone, by asking you for input out of pure laziness.

I need a three-line bio by tomorrow. I am, of course, far too amazing to be contained in such a wee paragraph, so I’m just going to have to make some crap up.

What kind of crap would you make up about me in three lines?

There may be a prize.

My apartment may be a wreck, but my lab is an absolute craphole. Come take a tour of the suck!

Ironic addendum: turns out the Dremel was actually in a logical place, in the giant red tool case in the room I started and ended in. DUH! Why the hell was something where it was supposed to be?

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Quicktime format. | Source page.

Waxing philosophical whilst preparing for another NASA teleconference.

Quicktime version. Flash version. Original Blip post.

Yeah yeah yeah, I don’t care about rules, so I’m back-dating this entry two days late and calling it number 16. It was shot on the 16th, I just haven’t had time to edit and upload till now. No one’s watching these, anyways, and it’s all just for practice, so here: for an annoying 16th day entry, an epic of clusterfrack proportions as we try to give directions to two very lost new grad students.

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I hope Beck’s record label doesn’t come after me, aw shucks.

Tags: navlopomo07