Krissy and I decided that it had been far too long since we went Geocaching. Today is only the second time we’ve been out since we moved here. Since the weather is so nice right now, it’s the perfect time. There are parks all over the place out where we live, and that where this cache took us. There were tons of muggles out on this beautiful Saturday, but they were not close to this one.

The cache must be getting sprayed by sprinklers or something, because the logbook inside was soaked! Thankfully I had a pen that wrote on the wet paper without smearing and without tearing it.

You can learn (but not master) any language in one hour or less. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s what Tim Ferriss says. He says most language learners neglect the most critical first step in learning a new language: deconstruction. He claims that the fastest language learners deconstruct the language they want to learn before they start memorizing lists of vocab words. His reasoning is that for native speakers of a particular language to learn some languages might be very easy, while others might be nearly impossible.

I took an intro to Linguistics course in Southern California and the instructor also happened to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. Most of his students were Japanese students who wanted to learn English, so they enrolled in student exchange programs. My Linguistics instructor and Ferriss both point out that Japanese and Mexican Spanish have very similar sets of sounds (phonemes) in their languages. Many students would become frustrated learning English and wound up learning Spanish from other students at the college.

Treat Language like a sport. If you are very short, you might have more work to do to be a successful basketball player. The same holds for languages that are very different from those you already speak. Learn how to deconstruct a language first so you know what you’re getting yourself into.

I subscribe to the local freecycle mailing list and have filters set up in Gmail to label all freecycle mail and have it get archived automatically so it doesn’t clutter up my inbox. I don’t check it every day, so I just want to see what’s available right now. Sometimes I also have a specific thing I’m looking for. To help look for these things, I use the following search string in Gmail.

label:freecycle subject:offer subject:-wanted subject:-want subject:-needed subject:-need subject:-taken

You can also add subject:bike and it will only return results that have the word bike in the subject line. This assumes that the label you are using for all of the freecycle messages is freecycle.

The most recent album by They Might Be Giants, The Else, closes with this really catchy song called The Mesopotamians. Now you can watch the video for The Mesopotamians! You might find that it bears a passing resemblance to The Monkees, which is undoubtedly the inspiration for the traveling band concept. Near the beginning of the Monkees video they are walking toward the camera with their arms behind each others’ backs. Near the end of the video for The Mesopotamians they are shown doing the same thing. There are a few other parallels, but I’ll let you find them yourself.

The vast majority of people ignore signs with more than two words on them. Ideally, signs shouldn’t have any words on them. There were no ducks near this sign. At first I thought that maybe the sign was placed improperly where no one would see it. Another possibility is that the ducks were there until they put up this sign and people stopped feeding them. People near the edges of other parts of the lake were unaware of the sign and fed the ducks there, where they can now be found in abundance. In any case, I thought it was common knowledge by now that you’re not supposed to throw bread at the ducks.

Want a free cell phone? Lessig has one to give away. Get a free phone from the Lessig Blog! I know I tried. You have to be the 100th person to complete the instructions. I guess he just doesn’t have any use for it. That’s pretty nice of him to give it away rather than eBay the thing. I guess I’m not as altruistic as he is.

Around October of last year I started using a blog marketing service called PayPerPost to make a little bit of extra money while I was going to school. In about a month’s time I had earned enough for a Nintendo Wii! Then in November life came at me fast and I ended up taking a job in Arizona. The resulting change in circumstances caused me to put my participation on hold. I had intended to come back to using PayPerPost as soon as things settled down. Well, things never really settled down, so I figured: What the hey! I’m excited this time because I’m going to be able to apply the proceeds to my arcade cabinet in progress! PayPerPost is really great. The other users on PayPerPost, called “posties,” have been great in helping me out every time I’ve had a question. It’s a great community and a great way to help you post to your blog more frequently. What’s not to love? I’m excited to see what sorts of new technologies I can find out about early as a result of my involvement with PayPerPost. If you use PayPerPost I’d love to hear about some of the experiences you’ve had with it.

My boss came in to the office with a little birthday present for me. He’s taking our group at work out to lunch for my birthday. He wants me to wear at least the eye patch when we go out since it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

UPDATE: We went out to the Olive Garden. I wore the eye patch and scared a little girl with a teddy bear while waiting in the lobby. I wore the eye patch up until after we ordered drinks. When the waitress came back and I didn’t have the eye patch on she told me that she thought there was really something wrong with my eye! I felt a little bad for having unintentionally deceived her, but she seemed to think it was all right, and she gave me extra ice cream for dessert. Of course, I was so stuffed after the ravioli, breadsticks, and 2 bowls of Zuppa Toscana that I couldn’t have eaten a regular portion of the chocolate-caramel goodness.

Overall, we didn’t do too well when it came to talking like pirates. I guess there’s always next year!

I was waiting for my wife to get off work like I do almost every day. She works at a bank. I was sitting in the car for awhile, but after 15 minutes of waiting I decided to relax a little bit. I put the seat into a reclined position and laid back, still waiting. I kept looking up every minute or so to see if she had come out yet. After about 10 more minutes of laying down I looked up and saw a police car facing the drivers side of the car. I thought to myself, “Oh great. They’re here because I look suspicious.” This was the latest my wife had been getting off work for a long long time. I usually only wait 10-15 minutes at the most. The other thing I noticed, which was strange, was that he had a passenger with him in the front seat that looked like an LDS missionary. He was wearing a white shirt and looked to be about 19 years old. He also wore glasses and had a passively curious and non-judgmental expression.

Sure enough, the officer started walking toward the car. I rolled down the window and looked out trying not to look as annoyed as I was. “What are you doing sleeping in a car outside of a bank?” the officer asked smugly.

“I’m just waiting for my wife to get off work,” I said. I thought right after, “…like I do every day.”

I think he kind of answered his question next saying something like, “It sure is suspicious to be sleeping in a car right outside of a bank.” But by this time my adrenaline had started pumping. Not like when you’re being chased by an angry lion, but more like just before you have to deliver a speech in front of a large audience. This made my hands a little bit shaky when he asked, “Can I see your driver license?”

“Sure!” I said in as confident a voice as I could muster. I pulled out my wallet and flipped up the pocket enveloping my license.

“Can you take it out for me?”

“No, probably not,” I thought to myself. “All right,” I politely replied and began to wrestle the plastic card from its plastic sleeve. Just as I had known, the plastic in the sleeve had adhered itself to the plastic license card. I jiggled and tugged at the card attempting not to look like a dufus. I handed him the card and he stepped behind my car.

I don’t know why he decided that behind the car is a good place to stand. I was parked backwards in a parking space, and was facing the bank. I could see silhouettes through the tinted windows. It was getting darker outside and the lights were still on inside. I could hear the officer talking into his radio, “Sierra, Hotel, Alpha…” It was at about this time that I started hoping that my wife would come out and confirm my story. I don’t know if her word would have actually been worth enough in the suspicious officer’s mind to let me go, but I thought it would be pretty good anyway to have someone inside the bank vouch for me. That didn’t happen, though.

The officer handed me back my card after a minute or so. As he handed it to me he wished me a good weekend, walked back to his squad car, and drove away. It was about this time that I started running through my rights in my head. Did I have to give the officer my license? Did he have the right to approach me because he thought what I was doing was suspicious even though I do the same thing nearly every day? When Krissy first got this job I came to pick her up after work on the first day. I thought to myself that it seemed a little suspicious that I was sitting out in my car waiting for her to come out the employee entrance. I guess I started to feel like it was less suspicious looking the longer I had been doing it and the more people I saw that did the same thing. For the record, there were at least two other people that had been waiting to pick people up when I first arrived, but none by the time the officer arrived.

After another five-minute wait Krissy emerged with her manager. They both looked a little surprised, and they both started to walk toward the car. I did not want to talk to anyone besides my wife and was a little bit upset that they had both come over. The manager asked something about what had happened, and I said, “He said it was suspicious to be waiting in a car outside the bank.” I then made some snide remark that was supposed to sound like a joke, but came out with all of the frustration in my voice that I was truly feeling, “I was waiting for my wife who is 30 minutes late getting off work.” It was obviously awkward for both my wife and her manager. I ended up shaking her hand as she introduced herself, and then we came home.

The more I thought about what had happened, the more angry I got. I don’t know what really made me angry about the whole thing, though. Part of it was that my frustrated snide remark had made my wife a little bit upset and now I was mad that I felt like I was being blamed for the whole incident. It may not have been the managers fault that the police came to visit me, but I still kind of felt like it was. What good are schedules, anyway, if they aren’t going to be followed. After all, it wouldn’t have been suspicious to arrive, wait for five minutes, and then leave.

All I wanted to do was to be alone and to vent my frustrations. I came into the bedroom and started writing. Now that I’ve had a chance to cool-down thanks to the twin heat sinks of time and writing down my thoughts, I am much more calm, though I am still unsettled about the whole incident. What is going to happen in the future when I have to wait for thirty minutes? Can I get an indemnity card that says the bank has authorized me to hang out in my car for a half an hour? Was it the laying down that made the officer suspicious? Was there some other suspicious activity in the area that I don’t know about? So many unanswered questions. The officer probably wouldn’t even remember the incident a week from now, but I can guarantee you that my first time being questioned by the police will not be an experience that I will soon forget.

I got an email today that said I had over $300 in “CafeCash” to use at CafePress.com. At first I thought that CafeCash was some form of fake money credit where each CafeCash “point” was worth, like, one cent or something. I figured it was a coupon deal of some kind. I decided I better log in and check it out, though.

It just so happens that I made a few designs for t-shirts sometime close to October of 2006. I intended to make the designs and have a few t-shirts printed for myself. Part of the process on CafePress is any design you upload is added to a store of its own. I made a store for each of my designs. I guess more people liked my design for a Linux t-shirt than I ever would have imagined. When I logged in it showed that I had sold over 100 of these t-shirts in the last 10 months! At the $3.00 markup rate for each shirt, I had made over three hundred dollars! The only reason why they had never cut me a check was because I hadn’t bothered to add in my address or social security number (for taxes). I’m starting to think that I had better hurry up and make some more of these designs for t-shirts.