chewykolchuk.com

Hey folks, guess what? I won something! That’s right, you heard right, Chewy Kolchuk done won something for hisself, all by hisself! As it turns out, I had entered a caption into a contest being held by a Roanoke, VA newspaper back during the 1st week in December. It was to be a caption for a picture of a guy kissing a picture of Sarah Palin, whose image was on a bus. In situations like this where I want to retain some privacy, I log in using a junkmail acct, and that’s exactly what I’d done this time. Ready for the punchline?

I had no idea, cuz I’d been drinking when I entered the contest. So tonight as I was cleaning up my junkmail inbox, I came across an email from the guy who had set up the contest, and he was needing my address so he could mail my prize to me.

Well, howdy doo!  Details here.

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3 people have responded to the change in my site’s look.  2 of the 3 didn’t like it.  Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse ME!!!

However, a 66% disapproval rating kinda confirmed it for me.  Time to change it up.  WordPress has had some neat additions and widgets and abilities come along in the recent months, and so I’m still playing with some of that.  There will be a link to my Twitter page, which I’m learning to use, and there will be a link to my Flickr page, which I’m trying to be more active with.  And then there are the “featured” posts, much like with the last theme I was using where there will be more images and general flashiness.  Not too much, mind you, just enough to get you, the reader, all twitterpated.

Stay tuned…work in progress.

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Here is my brain dump from the last little while:

• Buckethead is an interesting fellow.  He releases something silly like 5-10 albums a year.  Granted, they all start to run together after a while, but it’s still infinitely better than listening to the radio.  It’s as though he has only 5 albums to date, but they each have 276 songs apiece, and were each released slowly and simultaneously over a 20 year span.  Tonight I’m cooking a chicken and as it cooks, I’m trying to decide how I’m going to deal with the cooked bird after it’s done.  As always, a beverage and some music while I go into Zen-cooking-activity mode and I thought, “Why not Buckethead for repentance  and inspiration?”  And I made it so.
• Speaking of “making it so”.  Here’s some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever seen in a LONG time.  “Happy in Paraguay”.  What some folks do in their spare time.  I love teh internets!
• Today the Seahawks played at home.  I had planned on riding down to the general area of the stadium and meeting up with a couple buddies down there.  However, it was pretty cold and I didn’t want to have to deal with ice anywhere on my bike, so I decided against that.  Normally, it’d be a done deal and who cares, right?  Right, but in addition to that, I’d already made plans with my buddy and he was going to bring a GPS unit for me to borrow, and at that point Project GPS was Go Mission and I was obligated to get there somehow.  As it happened, I ended up driving down in my girlfriend’s rig and retrieving the unit.  She had to get to work still, so I was kinda wondering the best way to get to the freeway from over by the two stadiums, because hey, I ride a bike usually, I don’t know about traffic.  Not only traffic, but during a ballgame and in a section of town I usually don’t party in?  Oh great…this will be fun.  And then it dawned on me.  Uhhhhh….you just picked up a GPS unit from a friend.  Uhhhhh….USE IT!  OH YEAH, that would be AWESOME!  Whew…disaster averted!
• I had strange dreams last night.
  • At one point, I was in the Anchorage airport and I couldn’t find my bags.  I remember in my dream thinking REALLY hard, “Do I have just one bag, or two and what the hell do they look like?”  Needless to say I had a hard time trying to locate my luggage.
  • Another time, I was in the woods.  The woods were very like Juneau, wet and mossy and temperate rainforesty…  I stop in the trail because a full on Fuck-you-I’m-from-Africa lion is running like hell to save its life through the woods across the trail right in front of me.  WTF!  Flash to me and Veronica kinda jogging through a clearing in the woods, trying to get away from something or to some specific place and we are in a hurry, but we’re tired so instead of sprinting we are more like loping along.  Oh yeah, and it’s winter.  I don’t know where our destination was, but we went into the base of a huge tree that had fallen over  toward a cliff face and the inside of it was hollowed out, and we were going to use that as a way to climb up to the top of the cliff and keep going.  In typical Hollywood style, as I boosted Veronica up into the inside of the log/tree, I looked back and about 100 or so yards back, here comes this damn lion and he’s on our trail.  And it’s winter.  He’s a damn lion.  In AK.
  • At another point, Veronica, and I were at a Burger King inside an airport or a mall or something like that.  I was hungry and she wasn’t, so I ate while she used the waterslide that he had at our table.  For our exclusive use.  I think each table had its own waterslide.  Hmmmm…
• My buddy Dave had to put his dog down last month.  That was a bummer.  Pimba was a red heeler, and as such, she was a really intelligent dog to the point of being a pain in the ass.  She thought for herself and if you told her something she didn’t like, she would growl at you and let you know she thought you were full of shit.  Anyway, she’s now taking a dirt nap and we all miss her.
• I’m getting tired of basting that chicken, but only because I don’t have the squirty baster thingy.  I’m having to use a ladle and tilt the pan and all that, so I’m whining a bit.
• Dave also went to Australia and New Zealand last month.  It was my job to make sure his bunny and his cat were fed and dealt with appropriately.  That was weird, since Pimba wasn’t there, being a pain and nipping at the kitty at every chance.  The point here is that while he was gone, I had his car.  In the 2 weeks he was gone, the weather went from coldish and wettish to Frozen Nuggets in Spandex!  I rode my bike in to work for the first time in two weeks last Friday and I thought they were going to fall off and shatter in the shoulder of the road.

Okay then, I’ll post more and oftener and I’ll post a post about that very thing here tomorrow.

Remember:  Happy little trees!

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As I’m digging myself back out from underneath the rock I’ve been hiding under, I am remembering things that had an effect on me in recent months.  Two are as follows:

Cpt Pearson sent me a link a few months back that he thought should go on my site.  He was right.  Let’s go back a few years…

I think it was 7th or 8th grade when I first saw Iron Maiden on MTV.  I was hooked.  Why?  Well, my dad was a high school English teacher and in his syllabus, Greek mythology was featured.  He taught the creation story from the ancient Greek perspective as a teaching tool, and so I’d been hearing it most of my life and as a result, I thought (and still do) that Greek mythology was cool as hell.  (Don’t tell anybody, but all my computer devices have names deriving from the Greek pantheon [geeks do that - have a theme for naming all the devices in their network])

Okay.  So by 7th or 8th grade, I already had an interest in Greek mythology and one day I saw a video on MTV.  This video was for a song called Flight of Icarus.  ?!?!?!  WHAAAA????  What’s this?  Imagine my surprise when the lyrics actually accurately adhered to the subject matter, which I already had taken an interest in.

That’s why I took an initial interest in Iron Maiden and I must say, they haven’t disappointed.  Well…the 90s sucked for them, but the 90s sucked for a lot of viable music, so what do you do?  At any rate, I’ve always loved Maiden ever since then and so what’s my long-winded point?  It’s this:  Anything (in this case, Maiden) + Star Wars = AWESOME

Now…having said that…as if that wasn’t even enough… Peter, who sometimes goes by the name Meatbucket, recently turned me on to another phenomenon whereby somebody out there on the Internets tried to answer the question “What happens when you make Rush a doom metal band?”  Well, I’d have to say that Total Awesome is what happens.

Enjoy your day.

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Hey there crimestoppers!

I was eating a schnitzel sandwich last Thursday when I heard a firecracker go off, or maybe it was the ice cracking under my feet.  Funny thing is, I wasn’t hiking on a glacier, nor was I playing with explosives.  No, I was eating my dinner.  So when I heard the noise, my brain said to me something like, “Hey, there’s that noise you hear in your dreams sometimes, but I think this time it’s for real.”

It was for real.

Of course, my first course of action was to get the Denial Machinery up and running.  “OH NO YOU DINT!”  But after sending my tongue out to do some intel gathering, I found out that, “OH SNAP!  YOU DID!”

I had cracked one of my molars such that about 1/3 of it had calved off into my mouth.  Oh goody.  I say that because I am one the many Americans who are going to be affected one way or another by the current health care debate going on around us.  Mainly because I don’t have any insurance.

The next day I made some phone calls and found that the University of Washington School of Dentistry takes patients and, since you essentially end up being a walking training session for some post-grad wannabe dentist, the rates are cheaper than going to a private practitioner.  Hey, I live right by the UW, let’s go!  It’ll be fun!  Especially when I found out that they were going to have to install a crown.  Me?  A CROWN!?  I know my name is a kingly name (not Chewy, my real one), but this is AWESOME!!!  When I’m king, I’m going to make everybody ride a bike for a year before getting a driver’s license and I’m going to make Rainier available to every – what?  Different crown?  What the hell?

No, this sucks.  I don’t want them to cut into my mouth and chop my gumline down to install a cap on my toof and…it’s going to cost money too!?  Oh jesus…

What’s the moral of the story?  Chuck E Cheese pizza is terrible, don’t eat it.  I realize that it doesn’t relate at all to this post, but it’s a good maxim to live by.

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Guess what? It’s Mastodon!

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Okay, so I got one element working. That’s the “featured content” feature, which features a given post by allowing you to upload a large, custom image that suits the aforementioned featured content.

Gonna try some others in here to see how/when they affect each other. See you in a bit.

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Yep…haven’t posted in 2 months. Finally got The Email from Dudeman saying, “You suck, post or die!” And since I was bored with the old layout, I decided to change it up again. The next few posts are going to be tests of the Standard Operating Procedure of this new layout.

There you have it.

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It’s all about the ‘cross right now.  This is a fun event that was started and run by my friend Steve Westover when we both worked at K2 Bike years ago.  I don’t know if he still promotes or represents it, but it has turned into a national-level race and is a complete blast to attend.  The beer garden, the banked corner in the velodrome, the huge crowds and a chance to get to see many friends in the cycling industry that I don’t see on a regular basis.  Oh yeah, and it’s fun to photograph as well, which I’ll be doing this Saturday.  Anyway, here’s some outside press and the poster for you.

Here’s the official website

And here’s an article from VeloNews

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Here I am, surfing the iPhone app store. I recently switched to AT&T so that I could start getting used to the iPhone, cuz Dave wants to write apps for it. So every day I try to think of what might make for a good app and then I search the app store at iTunes.

Recently I was looking for bicycle-related apps since I’m a bike dude, so I was searching terms like “cycling”, “bicycling”, “bikes”, “bicycles”, and when I typed in “cycle”, I found a bunch of apps concerning the ‘menstrual cycle’. WHOA!!! I mean, I guess that just makes sense, cuz that’s kind of a big deal for a number of reasons, all pertaining to one BIG thing that most young people want to avoid, so okay…there’s a bunch of apps for it. But you know…I got curious. So I downloaded one of them.

I feel like I just read my girlfriend’s diary or something! I opened some sort of Pandora’s box and it can never be closed again! This app is CRAZY!!! Okay, sure, you can type in the start and finish dates of your last period, as well as how long in between cycles it usually is, and then as time passes, it will become more predictive for you as to when your friend will next show up. That would seem to be standard fare. But delve a little further and it starts to make one (if male, like myself) feel a little crunchy, like I furnished a false password and am now in some place that I shouldn’t be. AND I’m about to be found out at any moment!

When you open the app, it asks you to furnish when you had your last period, and when you choose any specific date, there’s an option to choose whether you had intercourse or if your period started on that date. I chose intercourse. It then asked me if it was protected or unprotected! WHAT!!! Who are the dirty whores downloading this app?

Well, me, for one. But I digress.

When I went back into the setup portion (always start with a new program by setting up your preferences, it helps one understand just what the program in question is capable of) to adjust parameters, it asked me to input my Luteal Phase. Off to Google I went and found out what that shit meant. Then I was asked if I wanted my Fertile Days to be displayed. Uh, no.

So that was interesting to say the least. However, I was still doing research for the brilliant app that I have in mind and so I went back to the app store. I typed in more search terms and saw many apps that made differing levels of sense in my mind, from the idiotic-but-I-suppose-that-matters-to-some kind of apps to the (like the above-mentioned app) holy-crap-I-had-no-idea-because-I-don’t-live-there kind of apps. At one point though, and I suppose it just makes sense, I did stumble upon a couple of apps that were based on the sex-offender registry idea. Holy shit! If I know ONE thing, it’s Never Look Up Sex Offenders Online. Why? Because you’ll find out where they are! And they are in your neighborhood! Now…I don’t have children, so I don’t worry as much about this as some, but I don’t wanna know that shit! I’d like to think that the nice person walking their Akita at night in our neighborhood simply has that dog because it’s a beautiful animal, and not because they are fiercely loyal to ONE person and will fight to the death for them…and that maybe this person is a sex offender and they need that kind of protection. No thanks, I’d like to think otherwise as the dog (who is as big as a fucking horse) looks me right in the eye and silently challenges me every time I walk by. I’m stupid enough too, to fall for that shit…and I stare right back and the owner has to physically pull him along, cuz this dog ALWAYS wants a piece of me. Funny thing is…I KNOW that dog would rip me a new one too, but I can’t stop letting him know that I’m still higher on the food chain, or totem pole or pecking order. Whatever…try to light a lighter, pal. Try to hitch-hike. Not so easy with paws is it? Fuck you, I’m going to the bar!

Anyway, I learned something new today at the ol’ app store. There is always something out there for you, no matter what your taste.

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