As you may or may not know, I hate the fact that people are transitory. Despite not having seen a person for years and years, I still want to know where they are and how they’re doing. It’s obviously impossible to keep in touch with everyone all the time, but I still want to. It’s one of the reasons I like Facebook so much (and MySpace before it) - it’s a great way to find the people who were special to you throughout your life - seeing them reminds you of that specialness.

Every once in a while I think of someone, usually from high school or college, and immediately try to find them on Facebook, or if they don’t seem to be on it, I will google them. I thought of someone this morning - she and I were in drama club together, and when I worked at Thom McAn she was right across the mall from me at Chess King. I used to buy five t-shirts for $15 from her. Of course, we lost touch when I went to college, and years and years passed. But now I wanted to find her, and in about a minute I did.

Unfortunately she died four years ago.

I’m strangely a little heartbroken. It seems like I really could have found her, if I had only thought of it sooner. It’s even more upsetting because she worked at my old elementary school, two minutes from my parents’ house, for eleven years, and I had no idea. I’m not sure if I ever could have just stuck my head in to say hi, if that would have been appropriate or whatever, but knowing she was that close in a way makes me even more sad that I didn’t get back in touch with her.

I’m sorry I never got to say hello again, Kasey.

I love the Polenblog.

It’s been my own personal kvetch factory/fun dump/website directory for years.

But I’ve been a total slack ass about posting, and I didn’t quite realize why, until the rebirthing of Procrastinet made me realize what was going on. . .

When I have something awesome, whether it’s a great video or good news, it used to go here, but now I put it on Facebook instead. When I have an annoyance, I (usually) put it on Facebook. Either way, I know that people are going to see it. I have no idea who comes here anymore, besides me. I mean, maybe McKleinfeld or Jefe every once in a while, but anyone else? Probably not.

Twin A has continuously hosted the Polenblog through basement floodings and computer outages, and I am eternally thankful. And I don’t want the Polenblog to go away. However, the fact remains that it’s completely underutilized.

I’m going to make an effort to post more, perhaps stuff that I want to write about but don’t necessarily care if people see it or not. I’ve been thinking about the fact that I watch The Biggest Loser with PSB, and I actually really love it and really hate it. Perhaps I will finally blog about my experiences shooting a reality television pilot (spoiler alert: it was fucking awful). And I should blog about the highs and lows of being a father. . .

Or maybe I’ll just go play more Zuma Blitz and The Binding of Isaac. Boy, is Isaac hard. Either that or I’m getting uncoordinated in my old age.

aka Brother Bacon

Have a super mega awesome day!

And get on Facebook already like a normal person.

I was due an upgrade on my Droid original, which was barely functioning as anything other than a phone, and so I waited and waited for a new mega-awesome phone to come out on Verizon. The Playstation phone seemed okay but not quite what I wanted (despite being a huge gamer), and the Droid 3’s reviews did not make me excited.

So I took a chance, and picked up the Droid Bionic. On the day it came out.

So far, I LOVE it. I’m still getting it all set up, but it’s super fast (Twin A was right - my Angry Birds WAS really slow before!) and battery life seems to be pretty good. . .

First of all, Saturday delivery? FedEx gets a huge thumbs up. It came in at 9:30 this morning, so I’ve had all day to get everything reloaded.

Next, it runs like a dream, super fast, and Windows 7 seems to be fine although it’s taking a little getting used to. I did like that when I used my external drive to copy in all of my documents and pictures, it asked me if I wanted to sort them into the appropriate folders.

My only complaint is that the little nubs on the new keyboard are REALLY little, so I’m finding my fingers don’t hit home all the time, and then my typing starts to ;ppl as of o dpm”t lmpw hpw tp tp[e. That, and the “home end insert page up page down delete” buttons are in two columns of three instead of two rows of three, so my attempts at deleting are not going that well. Other than that, I am thrilled.

I have yet to go full throttle with the HDMI 1080P monitor, but I’ll find some way to test it shortly with Hulu or Netflix. And I have to game on it somehow. Perhaps I will pick up Limbo on PC instead of PS3, or Bastion.

Assuming that this hard drive does not die in the next two years, I am 100% satisfied. Nice job, Dell.

Should I feel bad that I found someone from high school that I would want to friend on Facebook, until I saw that the person has become very religious and is a Tea Party Republican?

UPDATE: A Republican who I did friend before I realized their political views has just taken offense at my most recent post. I’ve responded with what I think is intelligence and a sense of humor. We’ll see how it goes.

At 8:45 this morning, for the first time since college (I think), I locked myself out of my apartment, having neglected to grab my keys and wallet before taking the garbage out. I cursed a lot, because I had a 9:30 am meeting that I was going to be able to make with time to spare, except now, not so much.

I called my landlord, who said he could be there around 1:00 pm. That wasn’t going to work. I called the super, who said that he didn’t have a master key and he was in Manhattan, and that he usually used a credit card to break into people’s apartments when they locked themselves out, but since my wallet was in the apartment, that wasn’t going to do me any good either. I called Twin B, but he was at work. I wasn’t about to call PSB, since she already was having an insane morning and I didn’t need to add to her stress.

I then realized - sure, I didn’t have a credit card, but I did have my work ID, which should work just fine. I got to work on the door, but didn’t quite know what I was doing. I called the super back to ask how he did it, and he said “Put the card in by where the handle is and try to push the latch open - the door should just open up if you do it right.” So I tried again, but it still didn’t work.

It was 10,000 degrees in the hallway and I was getting more and more frustrated, and to make matters worse, my cell phone was dying. (In retrospect, this was not actually such a big deal, since I had my work Blackberry with a full battery if it came to that.) I decided to call a locksmith. I called the first number that came up when I searched “Brooklyn locksmith”, but the service I reached must have been 1-800-SLOWEST LOCKSMITH IN THE UNIVERSE, because it took the guy 15 minutes to take my information, and then he said a technician would call me back with an estimated arrival time. After 15 more minutes of waiting and sweating and cursing, I decided to go back at it with my ID, which was now looking a little worse for wear.

30 seconds later, the door popped open. I cheered, grabbed my keys and wallet, said goodbye to Hamilton, who had been calling to me wondering what was going on, and ran to work, where I made it in just in time to miss the end of the meeting. (I let them know I wasn’t going to make it via Blackberry.)

So now I’m at work, feeling much better, and actually a little bad ass at being able to jimmy my way into my own apartment. Tonight I will feel even more bad ass, when I have my poker lesson with Annie Duke. I then have to go pick up Harry, bring him home, meet up with the sitter, and then head back in for the Moth show tonight, where Annie will be telling a story. I can’t wait!

I’ve got a whole lot lined up for next week when I finally turn 40. . . starting with PSB’s first present to me: on Monday I am going to get an hour long poker lesson.

FROM ANNIE DUKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m so incredibly excited. I don’t even know what I want to talk to her about! I’m a relatively solid ABC player with a few tricks up my sleeve, but I’ve got a ton of leaks too. She has a new poker book that came out that I want to try and get and read beforehand (I’m sure I could polish it off in a weekend and retain at least some of it, and could take notes on questions I might have). . . just to be able to sit and talk poker with her though is pretty amazing.

On Wednesday she’s telling a story at The Moth, and I had already planned on fawning over her there. . . I’ll just have to try not to look like too much of a donkey during the lesson.

Thursday night I’m meeting up with some friends for some karaoke, and Friday night the Polenboys are heading over to Peter Luger’s for some good old fashioned meat rage. Afterwards there is a late night burlesque show called “Nerdlesque”, which is going to feature striptease with video game themes. AWESOME!!!!

And then I’ll be 40. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to feel any different. Still like a 15 year old kid who wants to play games and laugh and have fun all the time, but knows there are responsibilities too. Not so bad, really.

The freezer trick didn’t work - it’s gone.

The backup from February will have to work. I think other than some crappy pictures that no one was ever going to see anyway, a few MP3s, and a Borderlands character who was pretty built up, everything else is okay. It’s just a matter of redownloading all the programs I lost.

And remembering to back up weekly from now on.

Great Spruce Head Island was beautiful as usual. We had a lovely time. Harry especially enjoyed all the extra running around and lots of frolicking in the grass once the weather got nice enough (it was a little rainy the first few days).

We took a lot of pictures of him, as well as a bunch of seals we went by in the ferry on the way there, that I would upload to my photo site, except that somehow my hard drive on my personal computer shit the bed. If you recall, right around this time a year ago, my hard drive also shit the bed. This was the replacement drive, which was definitely supposed to last longer than this. It boggles my mind that I have hard drives that are years older that are still alive when I plug them in, but two newer ones in two years have both conked out? BLARGH.

I know I’ve backed up files at some point, but I don’t remember when. It’s a little heartbreaking. I’ve ordered a new hard drive again which will come in later this week, and once again, I begin to recreate my computer. I have to stick the old drive in the freezer once I can stick it in the static-proof bag that the new drive will arrive in, and then hope that somehow I can get it alive long enough to pull documents and pictures off of it. The rest I can just re-download or whatever. . .