ernball_95014: by the way - still bitter at blogyou?
ernball_95014: you know, for a domain name of fury.com, i do agree; it's not too... furious.
kfury: Yeah, yeah, and not enough fucking monkeys. If I'd heard of blogyou before I'd probably have felt better, but it was the first I'd heard of them...
ernball_95014: you'd never heard of blogyou?
ernball_95014: they've been around for a while.
ernball_95014: they called me "too whiney"
ernball_95014: think of it this way -- the guy who gave you 1.5 sutherlands gave me 3 because he was asian too.
ernball_95014: scream racism.
kfury: I should have a link that says "Not furious enough?" and have it link to some Rob Zombie/Trent REznor/Marilyn Manson simultaneous mix mp3 with pictures of dead puppies.
ernball_95014: HAHAHAHAHAA
ernball_95014: i swear, for a practical joke, you should make fury.com look like a camgirl site
ernball_95014: or one of those crazy mega graphics 17 year old weblogs
kfury: Hah. Did you ever see cutieland.com when it was up?
ernball_95014: with mouseover scrollbars that goes against EVERY bit of UI you've ever thought of
kfury: My god, the thing made jennycam look like a rusted engine. That's how clean and
my-little-ridemelikeabigboy-pony that site was.
ernball_95014: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ernball_95014: promise me you will say "ridemelikeabigboy-pony" the next time I see you in person.
kfury: I'd like to see blogyou review that site. I bet they wouldn't rate it down for 'not having enough monkeys'.
ernball_95014: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ernball_95014: make it a tagline.
ernball_95014: "fury.com - not enough monkeys."
kfury: I DID THAT! It's one of the new taglines. Idid it this morning.

As I mentioned on the morning of my departure, there's a certain amount of exhilaration in the whole family (well, with a few exceptions) coming together, walking away from their everyday lives for two weeks to travel to a distant shore, like the introduction of a superhero movie. The feeling of coming together to create a greater whole is almost palpable.

To be precise, today started with Karen and I finishing my packing for the trip. Karen came over yesterday to help me put my bags together, motivate, and help make sure I didn't forget anything.

Karen took off for her home at 12:01am and I was asleep soon after. At around 6 I woke up to do my final reality check, put my bags into my car, and drive over to Karen and Crystal's, where Karen would drive me to Oakland Airport and I would meet up with Emily, creating the first grouping in the inverse tree which, days later, would eventually result in the big Fox trunk.

Jet lag is always a funny thing when you're travelling across 9 time zones in a day, but from a personal perspective, July 3rd and 4th joined into one very long day. (As I write these words I'm actually on the return flight, on the Munich-Los Angeles leg of a journey that started at 4:30am local time in Istanbul and will end over 26 hours later, somewhere around 9pm in what, at 34 hours, will literally be the longest day of my life.) Today's travel (meaning July 3rd. I'm playing fast and loose with verb tenses to hide the fact that I'm actually recapping these events two weeks removed (and using parentheses to bring that fact into clear focus, so go figure)) includes meeting up with Emily for a 10am Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland International (OAK) to Los Angeles International (LAX) where we would, an hour or so later, meet up with the majority of my family at the Bradley International Terminal to check in for our 2:20pm departure for Munich, subsequent hour-long layover, and 2 hour hop to Barcelona, our destination for the next several days.

So I arrived at Karen's on the later side of 8:30am and we piled the bags into her trunk and parked my car on Alameda's friendly streets. (Friendly, that is, compared to Berkeley's streets, where a car with expired registration tabs (bad Kev!) can go weeks without notice, then get three tickets and a complimentary tow within 73 hours.) She drove me to the airport and by the time the gate opened for check-in I had been, in rather atypical fashion, waiting around for a good 10 minutes. Emily should have had such good luck...

Emily's mode of airport transport was to be City Express. She called them the day before, arranging for an 8:30 pick-up. At 8:35 she gave them a call and they told her the shuttle would be at her door in 10 to 15 minutes. Within the next 15 minutes the only thing that rolled to her door was an ever-growing feeling of unease, and as 8:50 came and went Emily gave them another call and they told her (with just over an hour before her flight was going to take off) that they weren't going to pick her up at all.

After panic, phone calls, a hurried taxi ride and a promise from the airporter company to cover it, Em arrived intact and ready to leave San Francisco behind.

Memento was, well, memento. It was incredibly well acted, written, and directed. I just think it was designed to have people leave the theater debating their own interpretations, when all along there isn't a right interpretation, just a movie that was supposed to spur debate into a mythical 'true intention' of the story.

Going to see Memento tonight, months after everyone kept telling me to see it. Jetlagsleep is kicking in around 9pm nowadays (if yesterday is an indication) so hopefully I'll make it through what has been related to me as a very mentally taxing but worthwhile experience.

I'm almost finished reading "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski (and written less than a block from my own house . It's a very strange and interesting book, one that I wouldn't recommend others take on until they read my (forthcoming) or another person's review. This is a book some people I know would love, others would hate, and others would get trapped inside, forced to claw their way to the back cover regardless of their feelings during the journey (that would be me).

At any rate, most of the story centers around this house that has a black, featureless, and ever changing labyrinth inside it. The labyrinth is both a menacing antagonist, and a trope for our own unrealized fears. At any rate, one of the most unsettling (pun not intended, but noticed retrospectively) features of the maze is that the walls (and floors, ceilings, etc.) will change arbitrarily, around a person, and when they're not watching.

Jumping back to reality, last night I dropped off Emily at San Francisco International Airport at around 10:15 last night, and was absolutely zonked. It was hard enough to stay awake going there (jetlag still telling me I should absolutely be asleep) but trying to get back without someone keeping me awake seemed an unlikely venture.

So, after dropping her off I drove to the area known to some as international terminal short-term parking, someplace I rarely think about and never visit. Pumping in and out of turns I make my way through the newly-constructed labyrinth of concrete and halogen to that desolate parking arena, wind up the corkscrew to the third level and find a spot between cars, pull up the emergency brake, throw back my seat and lie on top of it for a good nap.

Having set my cellphone alarm to wake me in an hour, I wake and look around to find that the tide of cars, the defining members of the space around me, has receded, with no car to blemish the yellowblack concrete walls for a hundred feet. Resetting the alarm for another 15 minutes I wake to see the walls restored, bracketed by SUVs and Mercedes. Back to sleep and the cars change again, but nobody's ever there. As I pull out two hours after my arrival, there is no sign of humanity save for the smarte-carte nuzzling my own Honda, obviously lonely for steel companionship in this tidal maze of concrete and industry.

Anyhow, I got home fine, after paying $8 in parking fees and driving through the midnight caltrans construction traffic that, like the tides, serves as the slightly lesser swell in the 24-hour Bay Area traffic oscillation.

Well, off to work!

I'm slogging through roughly half a thousand emails all marked 'unread' and meanwhile new 'current' email is still coming in, and it's irritating that these both get the same level of 'unread' prominence. What I mean is that the unread message from two weeks ago is given just as much visual distinction as the unread message that just came in.

What I think would be really cool is there was an 'age unread messages' button. Say that your read messages are black plain and your unread messages are black bold. I'd love it if I could make my first pass through the unread messages, (but still wanting to fine-tooth-comb-in later to make sure I didn't miss a friend who stupidly titled their email 'Make Money Now #447') then click this magic button that would make all the current unread messages more grey, or given another visual treatment on a linear scale to signify that 'yes they're unread' but 'no, they're not since your last scan through the list'. Ideally, I'd want it to be 'less bold' but current DPIs on monitors don't really allow for that kind of specificity.

To put it another way, 'unread' implies that cognitive effort has not been spent on this message. Now that simply opening a spam message can inform the sender that you're a real person really reading email and is therefore more spamworthy (via embedded tagged image links), I try to not actually open spam messages at all. This means that I spend a considerable amount of cognitive effort on a message, even if it's 'unread'. I want to be able to mark messages as 'screened' so that I can easily pick out those messages that have not only not been read, but haven't even been screened, or looked at.

So, anyone out there working on Outlook Express for the Mac? Oh, wait. I know someone who is. I think it's time to invite them to read the weblog!

So last night, after getting back at 10, I started to unpack the fragile items from my suitcase, and ended up getting wrapped up with unwrapping, and sifted through two suitcases and a duffel to lay out everything I acquired during the trip. This stuff is so pretty it almost made me cry.

My apartment is, of course, a mess. I have 300 work and 300 personal emails to go through (after spam filtering), and jetlag to deal with. I'm always inspired and enthused when I'm taking off for a trip, but luckily I feel the same way when I get back. I just feel like putting so much energy into making my personal and work life have some of the magic of the trip life. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I always feel like there's utopian (Plato's utopia, not Disney's utopia) ideal of how my apartment/cube/life/psyche should be, and that I'm always climbing up the hill towards that pinnacle, but it always recedes. I know I can get there, but when I stop to rest I slip a little further away. Now I really think I have the energy to make it work.

I went to sleep around 1am and when I woke up, eyes shut, I tried to guess where I was. I knew I wasn't on the ship because I remembered having left it. I'd fallen asleep in so many airports and planes, waking up on landings, jostlings, or, more pathetically, self-droolings, that I honestly didn't know where (or when) I'd be when I opened my eyes. It was so surreal to actually be home. Adding to the strangeness was that it was 7am, exactly when I would have awoke at home without jet lag. What I really need right now is a shower, a change of clothes, and a Chai tea and Cranberry scone from the shop on the corner and I'll be really to start hiking up that mountain, with more vigor than I've had in months.

This vacation was so what I needed.

After literally 27 hours of consecutive travel, starting at 4:30am in Istanbul and ending about an hour ago (10pm) here in Berkeley, I'm finally back home!

Regular updates will now ensue, after I get a little sleep. Thanks for hanging in! I've got a ton of cool pictures and stories I'll be sharing over the next week or two, as well as normal day-to-day stuff.

Yay for being back! Boo for the disappointing hardware announcements at Macworld Expo New York. No LCD iMac, on iPad, no CD-RW/DVD rev for the TiPowerbook. Wanh.

Hi there! Love you all! Internet woes. Will post pictures and journals as possible, trying on Saturday in Olympia, Sunday in Athens. Much to tell, much to share, much to read!

Stay tuned, though there's not as much blue as usual on the site these days. I'll be back inthe states soon as well, so there's that to look forward to!

PS: Venice is the best city on Earth (after San Francisco).

I'm not rich, but I am lucky. Recently, each summer my extended family gets the opportunity to go on a group vacation together. Numbering from between 14 and 28 on a given year, we venture to a location outside the realm of our day-to-day lives, to renew bonds, to forget our work lives, to remember the familial ties we shared in our youths, and still have, though we may not notice them every day anymore.

For many years the tradition was to gather at Brown Island, a small wooded island of no more than 40 houses and as many boats and no cars, tucked into a bay called Friday Harbor, in the island of San Juan in the far northwest of Washington State. Our trips would coincide with the Jazz festival held annually in the colsing week of July.

Unlike those Jazz festivals in Sacramento and other cities that have recently been gaining popularity mirroring Jazz and Swing resurgences in my own age group, the San Juan Jazz Festival has for nearly three decades attracted a more mature, more 'authentic' crowd, if you can apply the term to those who lived through Jazz music'soriginal heyday and keep the flame alive within themselves, both as players and listeners.

Sadly, as such a tradition must, the San Juan festival had to migrate its interest base to the younger generation, or see their flame grow smaller until it vanishes in a thin trail of smoke, reminding people of what was, and will not be again. When in 1998 it took that latter and sadder route, the Fox family chartered a new path. Instead of migrating to a brief home for the Summer and flying back home, we took to more exploratory adventures, first with seven days travelling the breadth of Morocco, next exploring the inside passage of Alaska on a weeklong cruise (with a three day homage to Brown Island, to remenice and to clense our mental palates).

This July sees the Foxes on a journey I have secretly hoped for since my first trip across the Atlantic 18 years ago. For two weeks we take to the Mediterranian, 26 strong (on a ship with another 2174 people for good measure). The ports of call read like a litany of old-world history: Barcelona, Rome, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, and afew others. With only a single day in port for each city except Barcelona, our starting point, and Venice, this cruise is a sampler, giving us each ten hours of each city's best to entice us to return as soon as possible.

To better remember this two-week feast of hors d'ovores, and to share them with my friends and readers, I have made a point of taking ample pictures along the way. As mentioned earlier on the weblog, I'm doing little if any winnowing of the pictures at this point. There are many great sites to visit if your goal is to see the places I'm visiting or the ship we're sailing on. The purpose of my photo galleries is to augment my memory, and relation to you, of my journey. At some point I'm sure I'll make a small book with only a few dozen of the best or most meaningful images, but for now I'm taking advantage of the thrift of electronic media and the linear nature these galleries will hopefully provide.

When time on the journey permits I'll conjoin the galleries with journals of the days events, and should I have more time than I ought to, I'll try to go through and correlate some pictures to events in the weblog entry itself. We'll just have to see.

On a final note, though the first of these entries won't end up being posted until our journey is nearly halfway complete, should you have any advice or experiences that you would like to share about the ports we have yet to see, please do write me. Though we will often have pre-arranged schedules, all information is good information,and I'd love to read about your experiences as you read about mine.