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How I Went Fishing With Michael Pryor

Ok, since I started ranting about fishing, here’s a good story.

I went fishing once with Michael Pryor, whom you might know as the president of Fog Creek Software. We went on the Dorothy B VIII for a half day of fluke fishing.

The trip wasn’t going well. The boat was a bit crowded, there was an obnoxious redneck with a loud kid right next to us. And neither of us were catching anything. Well, actually I caught two really big skates. But skates are not fun to catch. It was still nice to be able to get some fresh air, fish and talk, but I was afraid Michael was regretting taking the train all the way from Manhattan to Sheepshead Bay for that.

Exactly the second the captain announced “lines up, let’s go home” Michael got a bite. And caught the biggest damn fluke on the entire boat, effectively winning the pool for the biggest fish. Fishing on that boat for years, I never caught a fluke that big.

The secret, is of course luck, but in addition, we were both fishing with a special kind of a bucktail called the Atomic Bullet. A bucktail is a sinker with a hook attached to it. I never liked those, but I’ve been hearing that the biggest flukes were caught on that. And it looks like that’s true. I’ll be using those this season.

P.S. If you know of any good fishing blogs, please let me know.

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The Not So Darth Waders

Since everyone liked my last fishing post so much, I’ll do another one on the topic. For those of you who are not into fishing, hunting or sewer exploration, I’ll explain. Waders have nothing to do with Darth Vader, although they were probably named after the old English word for water. They are special waterproof pants with boots attached that allow you to keep dry while standing in water. They are usually made out of rubber or neoprene. I own a pair of neoprene Red Ball® brand waders. Yeah, I know. Ha, ha – red balls. It’s a good brand, dammit.

Well, I knew about this for a while – there is a company that produces “Women in Waders ™” calendars.

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WMW: World Wide Pants

I am down to only one pair of good, wearable pants. I need some good pants, dammit. I want to buy them in bulk. And I want them to be the Best. Pants. Ever.™ They’ve got to feel good and look good. Well, not this kind of good. But still.

Warren Buffett doesn’t like shopping for clothing either. He is kind of cheap, but buys $1500 Italian-made Zegna suits off the rack in bulk. Probably because he likes the fit. I want some similar kind of pant buying strategery.

Maybe I’ll even get them custom made. At some point Levis wanted to make custom jeans, and I remember sitting in a meeting at iXL where it was announced that my team would probably be doing a website for those jeans. But the whole concept didn’t take off.

What I need is regular pants, not jeans. I remember reading in Cryptonomicon about the fact that well tailored suit is much more pleasant to wear than any kind of casual wear. And I totally agree with that. So maybe I should get some dress pants custom made.

But I also don’t want to spend more than $40 – $70 per pair, so maybe custom is not an option.

So here’s the WMW question: What is The. Best. Pair of Men’s Pants. Ever.™ in your opinion?

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Michael and Friends

The number of ljusers who added me to their friends list has reached 100. There are probably some more people who read me through “friends of friends” newsfeeds and non-lj aggregators (I think I saw a poll answer from and somewhere). And I bet there are some inactive ljusers who still have me added. Nevertheless, it’s a nice round number. Woohooo!

I think the number of friends would be much larger for me if I automatically added those, who added me. That is probably true in real life as well. I should know – I am down to only two close friends who keep in touch with me right now. One of them is my dentist ( a childhood friend). In fact, I am typing this on my laptop while in his waiting room. The rest don’t call me unless I call them, lost contact with me altogether or got married to people I can’t stand and became too much like them. None of my real life friends (except my wife) read my journal.

In any case, now that there are more people reading me, I am going to try to use them as information resource. I could do that on Usenet but posting to Usenet is a pain in the ass for a variety of reasons. Google answers costs money (although I think about trying that). So I in addition to wildly informative and awesome WML (What Michael Learned) type posts I am adding a mildly annoying WMW (What Michael Wants (to know)) category. Stay tuned.

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Senor Developer

My job title is Senior Web Developer or something to that effect. On of my managers at iXL joked that it’s really just a typo on my business card, and it should say Señor Developer. Har har.

In any case, I think I found a perfect food commensurate with my station:

This kind of reminded me about a story somebody told me about a graphics designer that worked at iXL. This designer dude liked to get really into his “creative process”. When somebody wanted to talk to him, he would ignore that person or try to chase that person away from his octapod. You see – he was CREAAATING! He was very creative all right. At one point he was working on a website for Lucent. And he spent a lot of time creating logo images. Boy, was he pissed when the client was very unhappy with the result. On his version of the logo “Lucent” became “Lucentè”. Lucent-ey. But he still could not understand why that was wrong.

By the way, I’ve heard some disgruntled programmers refer to the red circle on the logo as “bloody asshole”.

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Did I Mention that Purple is the Official Brooklyn College Color?

I wrote about Monk parakeets before.

Well, it looks like the Brooklyn College Environmental Education Science Masters Program. members are involved in some cutting edge research:

“On the athletic field we saw 5 birds perched on the lamp post on the right side. They were flying back and forth. While we watched their flight we viewed one of the birds relieving themselves. We approached the ramp and examined the droppings. We counted 11 droppings and saw a distinct color change in its appearance. This change was not the same as what we had previously viewed, it was purple in color.”

“On East 23 and Avenue J we saw three birds eating acorns and making a lot of noise. “

This reminded me: