Cal's linklog pointed me to Tagyu.com, which claims to make "Your tags, smarter." The idea being you put in text or a URL, it gives you back tags. I think the idea is that it'll suggest tags that you wouldn't think of, but that the collective might. Sort of a free association thing.

Well, have to try this out. Currently on my mind? Why, ultimate, of course.

The lone tag back?

"pens"

Um...

Oh, it's a sad, sad day when a friend asks you what the last book you've read is, and not only does it take you four minutes to remember what book it was, but the book was actually crap.

In all fairness, it wasn't complete crap, just mostly crap.

The book in question is Carpe Demon. I read it on the way to Chico nearly two months ago. Two! I haven't even finished the latest Harry Potter for goodness sake. Sigh.

Kris purchased the book for me a few days before our drive to Chico. We had been at Borders, nominally for Kris to purchase the soundtrack to Wicked. In as much as I love bookstores (having worked at bookstores for over five years in high school and college), I wasn't quite ready to leave when Kris was ready.

Well, Kris was completely ready to leave, so even though I was resisting, he was insisting. After a few moments, Kris turned to me and said, "I'm getting in line. You can put whatever books you want into my hands until I get to the register, but I'm leaving now."

Um...

Okay!

I immediately plunked the stack of books in my hands into Kris' arms, and followed him out of the stacks. Along the way, I started picking up books and adding them to Kris' pile. A couple of them were ones I had been thinking of purchasing, but wasn't quite ready to get (realizing I had a 2' stack of books at home not yet read), but some of them were completely spontaneous.

Like the Carpe Demon book, whose sub-title of the book is "The Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom."

The back cover makes it sound interesting:

Lots of women put heir careers aside once the kids come along. Kate Connor, for instance, hasn't hunted a demon in ages...

That must be why she missed the one wanderin through the pet food aisle of the San Diablo Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, he managed to catch her attention an hour later -- when he crashed into the Connor house, intent on killing her.

Now Kate has to clean up the mess in her kitchen, dispose of a dead demon, and pull together a dinner party that will get her husband elected to County Attorney -- all without arousing her family's suspicion. Worse yet, it seems the dead demon didn't come alone.

It's time for Kate Connor to go back to work.

I read the first three pages in the store, to see if I could stand the writer's voice. It seemed okay, so sure, why not?

Well, by the end of the first chapter, I realized why not.

The style of writing was annoying. She was unable to make any statements of actions without explaining them to death. And the descriptions weren't entertaining either. Quite often the author tried too hard to create the scene and character voices, managing to just annoy me instead. An example:

"Mo-om." She managed to make the word two syllables. "You don't have to be gross."

Writing the word as two syllables puts both of them into my head as I read them, I don't need the description afterward.

The plot was predictable. The character development was unsatisfying and shallow. The lead character, Kate, pretty much had to be an idiot to behave the way she does in the book. And her husband? A complete moron.

The parts that should be exciting, the fight scene descriptions, for example, were lame and boring.

The book is 360 pages long, and satisfyingly thick. Until you open it and realize the paper is thick, the lines widely spaced, the font large and there are less than 300 words per page.

The part I think I found the worst was on page 279:

"Demons are the bad guys," Ediie said. "And believe you me, I've known some bad ones in my time, that's for sure."
I opened my mouth to get a word in, but Eddie rambled on.
"Vial things. And the stench? Hoo-boy..." he made a strong motion as if to dispel the odor.

Vial.

Sounds a lot like "vile," eh?

Yeah.

That was the one I remembered, but there were a number of misspellings in the book that were really annoying. Those, and a series of grammar errors just grated on my nerves.

Bleh.

The book sucked. Time to get this copy out of the house.

They're gone before you realize it. That very well may be the best thing about them in some cases, but it's also the worst thing about them, too.

Pretty much most of my childhood I struggled to forget. I'm sure most people (though definitely not all) are in the same boat of hating the awkwardness of growing up.

I became darn effective at forgetting memories, and being aware of the ones I wanted to remember. I remember sitting on the Olive Walk with Ari Pine, just talking on cool Southern California evening some time during my junior year at college, and thinking, "I want to remember this. This is a good moment." I have no idea what we talked about, nor who else was there, but I do remember that it was good, and that I wanted to remember.

I find myself more and more wishing that in the destruction of my bad memories, I hadn't lost the good ones, too.

But, I guess memories are like that, too. You don't get to choose.

Since he's looking over my shoulder, it's only appropriate to now mock him about his being unable to pronounce "basil" either.

Sometime last week, I had lunch with Cal Henderson.

I'm sure if I bothered, I could look up which day it was (okay, I looked: Thursday), but, eh, I'm relatively lazy at this point, so let's just say "last week."

Cal had recently discovered this site. Not surprising, though, as I've linked to this or my other site from BarCamp and SHDH He had commented to me that there was no way he was going to read all of what I wrote on a regular basis, as I was writing too much. He was too busy. So, hey, no problem, I could write anything I wanted about him and he'd never know.

Turns out, however, he lied.

At lunch, he turned to me and commented on my "10 page post about Chris Messina." The actual quote included a fuck in there somewhere. I laughed, and continued to be humoured when he admitted after reading it, he paged back to see if I had a post about meeting him.

I don't, so I have to wonder if Cal isn't maybe a wee bit jealous of Messina.

I met Cal in June at his Carson Workshop on "How we built Flickr". I had convinced Mike to go along, so he was there, too. It was then that I first met Chris Messina and Ryan King, too. The presentation was fantastic. Mike and I agreed it was a good confirmation of our processes.

Well, assuming Cal knows what he's talking about.

I had introduced myself to Cal in the bar after the workshop, though I was pretty sure that 1. he didn't hear my name in all the noise, and 2. he wouldn't remember who I was even though I was one of only two women in 40+ people there. You'd think all the ladies would be memorable, but no.

Fast foward to last month, and SHDH. Similar to BarCamp, I greeted people at the door, told them to label themselves with name tags, indicated where the food, presentations and bathrooms were (three distinct locations, mind you). I'm really beginning to enjoy it, which I think is a bit frightening, actually.

At some point relatively early in the evening, Cal arrived and I reintroduced myself to him. I say "reintroduced" because from my perspective, it was. I knew who the hell he was. From his perspective, it was all shiny and new!. When I said, yes, we had met before, his response was, "Oh? We have?"

In an adorable English accent, of course.

He promptly took my spot at the development table, and started working.

I promptly messaged Mike, "You are now completely jealous of me. Cal from Flickr is here at SHDH." Mike replied that he was, indeed, jealous, then promptly secured permission to go to the next one (November 5th, Mike!).

Cal spent the next two hours effectively ignoring all of as he worked. When I asked him why he bothered to show up if all he was going to do was work on work projects, he commented that working at a house full of socializing geeks was ever so much more fun than working at home alone.

Couldn't argue with that one.

Cal ended up leaving sometime around 2 or 3, after watching the Dojo presentation, switching some work server deployments around, mis-spelling my name with a Y, and trying to root my system with Andy. When he left, everyone started crashing. I fell asleep by falling over sideways on the couch I was sitting in and passing out.

The following Monday was Flickr Fiesta, which I had intended to go to, but was unable to get away from work that evening. I think I was really tired, too, from a lack of sleep on Friday night and too much ultimate on Sunday.

But, yeah, about Cal.

He shortened his name (sur and family) when he had the chance. Works at Yahoo! on Flickr (d'uh). His girlfriend's name is Elina (and she's adorable!). They have a white, medium-hair cat (Mr Kitty?) with different color eyes. He moved down from Vancouver, where he had met Andy Smith (which is how he heard about SHDH).

How do I know this? Well, the night before Webzine 2005, I managed to invite myself to dinner with him and E. Okay, not really, he invited me up to their place to meet E, and E invited me out to dinner with them, but I did feel like I was imposing a bit. Elina is heading off to Art School this semester, which is really cool. Boo that Immigration won't recognize her degree forcing her to attend school to stay here in the U.S. Stupid INS.

BTW, the view from their place is spectacular. And remarkably clutter free. Definitely worth inviting oneself to.

Cal wears only T-shirts and shorts (he owns six pairs, all of the same style, four of the same color).

Even in winter.

Even winter in Edmonton.

The man is clearly insane.

There is, however, photographic evidence that he has at one point worn pants. We think the picture has been digitally altered.

So, now, if you read posts where I'm talking about Cal, you know who I'm talking about.

Oh, and by the way, Cal doesn't know how to pronounce "schedule" correctly.