The Rocketdog Blog

One Night at the Sushi Hut

Still one of my favorites.

Labels: goofy student films

posted by Nick Ryan @ 1:18 AM 0 comments

FORA.tv's Summer Reading List

We had a lot of fun with this one:

Labels: FORA.tv

posted by Nick Ryan @ 10:53 AM 0 comments

So It Turns Out...

...that I'm almost, sorta, kinda formerly related by law to the guy who cleans the anti-war graffiti off of Nancy Pelosi's house.

The world is both small, and weird.

Labels: etc., San Francisco

posted by Nick Ryan @ 4:05 PM 0 comments

Best of 2007

AKA, "A Buttload of Hyperlinks." Presented in no particular order.

Best video game: Okami, PS2
Runner up, even though I’ve only played it for about an hour: Bioshock, Xbox 360
Best book (fiction): For Whom the Bell Tolls
Runner ups: Independence Day, Siddhartha, The Plague, A Deepness in the Sky
Best book (nonfiction): Wild Swans
Runner ups: Infidel, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Clock of the Long Now
Best graphic novel: Watchmen
Runner ups: Persepolis, Pyongyang, The Complete History of the Modern World Part 1
Best baseball book: Clemente
Runner up: The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
Best movie: Fitzcarraldo
Runners up: Waitress, Ratataoullie, Perseopolis
Best TV show: 30 Rock
Runners up: House, The Office
Best classic TV miniseries: Cosmos
TV show or movie I’d most like to see in HD: Planet Earth
Runner up: Metropolis
Best baseball memory: This one, obviously
Best minor league baseball cap: Montgomery Biscuits

(Yes, that's a real mascot.)
Best baseball-related website: McCovey Chronicles
Best FORA.tv FORAcast:



Best new favorite album: Goldfrapp, Black Cherry
Best new favorite band: Gnarls Barkley
Best new favorite album by an old favorite band: Cornelius, Sensuous
Best website: Netvibes
Runners up: Tumblr, Facebook, Pandora
Most overrated website: Second Life
Best print magazine: Washington Monthly
Best online magazine: Slate
Best bay area hike with dogs: Phoenix Lake Trail, Mt. Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
Worst natural disaster: SoCal Wildfires
Best short-film compilation DVD series: Wolphin
Best new favorite nonprofit organization: The Long Now Foundation
Best new hobby: Skiing
Best board game: Polarity
Best major life change: getting engaged
Best photo:

Hope everybody had a great year.

Labels: baseball, etc., FORA.tv, movies, music, news, photoblogging

posted by Nick Ryan @ 7:10 PM 1 comments

You Decide!

Obviously I'm biased, but I think this is just silly. Marc Ecko claims he's using the ball as a spark for serious public debate (I'm guessing the mountain of publicity it's getting him also may have been a consideration). Here's his opinion on the matter:

Ecko, who is letting the public decide what to do with Bonds' record-setting baseball, said he had voted to brand the historic sphere with an asterisk that would suggest the Giants slugger used steroids on his way to breaking Hank Aaron's career homer mark. But Ecko said Major League Baseball is to blame for Bonds' predicament because it ignored signs for years that players were using performance-enhancing drugs.

"The notion that a system in Major League Baseball kind of knew that this was going on, and kind of played ostrich, and then indicts its players for wanting to achieve great things and earn big bucks - I more have a bugaboo with a system that fosters and actually rewards unnatural behavior," Ecko said in a phone interview.

I actually share Ecko's opinion that MLB itself is mostly to blame for the face it's lost over this issue. But regardless of what you think of Bonds and the impact steroids have had on the last few decades of professional sports, the record is what it is. The ball is now a part of baseball's history, and it would be a shame to see it defaced or destroyed simply on the whims of the internet masses -- who, in my experience, cannot always be trusted to have the best judgement.

Anyway, here's a thought I had at work today while doing a podcast of this program for FORA: a century from now, when only the people playing pro sports are those whose parents could afford to buy them, in vitro, the genetic makeup of athletic supermen, will steroid abusers of our day still be seen as cheaters?

I'm kind of serious. Remember this?

-----

Labels: baseball, news

posted by Nick Ryan @ 8:05 PM 0 comments

Bonds HR 756

The whole at-bat, from my seat in upper deck section 315, row 13, seat 19. I don't care if anyone reading this is a baseball fan or not. This was simply one of the coolest things I've ever personally witnessed.

Labels: baseball

posted by Nick Ryan @ 1:50 AM 0 comments

I've got Ebola!

I stopped by UCSF Medical Center last Friday for some tests (nothing serious) and decided to poke around the bookstore on my way back to the parking garage. Right inside the door was an entire barrel full of these. Apparently this is the kind of thing medical students are collecting nowadays instead of Beanie Babies. That's ebola there up above, the notorious and super-deadly virus capable of turning your guts into a delicious banana-berry slurry...or at least something that looks kind of like that. My favorites are the STDs -- who knew syphilis was so cute? -- and I love the little bloodshot eyes on rabies. Also awesome: chickenpox, bedbugs and flesh-eating bacteria.

Another photo, for size comparison:


Ozzie wuvs exotic diseases. Silly doggy!

Labels: etc.

posted by Nick Ryan @ 4:08 PM 3 comments

Here I Go Again

Every three months or so, judging by my archives, I get the urge to jump back in to blogging. I put up a post, edit and re-edit said post for about a week, get depressed that no one's ever going to read the stupid post I've just spent a week re-editing, and resolve to drop blogging again for another three months.

Well, apparently it's about that time again, and for this go-around I've decided to try something new. I started up a Tumblelog. Tumblelogs (via Tumblr) are a form of microblogging -- no comments, minimal design options and only basic tools on the back end that point towards an emphasis on rapid and supershort (or "micro") blog posts. My principal complaint with blogging, and online social networking stuff in general, is that the shit just takes too much time. That's particularly true for my perfectionist ass, who can't seem to put up a flip, two-paragraph post without spending several hours -- if not days -- writing and re-writing the thing until I've got it just fricking right. (Seriously. I do this every single time. For blog posts.) So we'll see if the microblogging thing, with its inherent stopgaps against over-blogging tendencies, works better with the way I prefer to spend my time on the net.

To the extent that I still use it anymore, this blog isn't going anywhere. I love this site, even if I don't update it very often, and in the event that I have an itch to post some longer original content I'd much rather l do it here than on someplace like MySpace. Who knows? If it works, or even if it doesn't, at least it will give me something to post about the next time I get the blogging bug. Which, going by my usual pace, should be around mid-October.

Here's that link again, if you're interested in tracking my progress. Here's the RSS feed.

Labels: metablogging

posted by Nick Ryan @ 11:19 AM 1 comments

Stalker!

I finally got around to uploading another video to my YouTube channel. If you haven't seen my goofy student film Stalker! (although that's a slightly redundant description...I imagine every film I've ever made could reasonably be labeled "goofy" in some way) here's the embed:



And while I'm on the YouTube stuff: One fricking star? What's up with that?

Labels: goofy student films, movies

posted by Nick Ryan @ 12:45 PM 0 comments

Baseball. Whoop.

Hey! Baseball's here!

Ok, so the season started two weeks ago. It's not like anybody reads this shit anyway. My picks for the season (asterisks indicate Wild Cards):

NL West
San Diego
Arizona*
Fuckin' Dodgers
Giants
Colorado

NL Central
Milwaukee
St. Louis
Cincinatti
Houston
Chicago
Pittsburgh

NL East
New York
Philadelphia
Atlanta
Florida
Washington

AL West
LAA of A
Texas
Oakland
Seattle

AL Central
Detroit
Cleveland
Minnesota
Chicago
Kansas City

AL East
New York
Boston*
Toronto
Tampa Bay
Baltimore

And for the postseason:

NLCS: Arizona over San Diego

ALCS: New York over LAA of A

World Series: New York over Arizona

Yep. Yankees win it all this year. Pbbbbt.

Labels: baseball

posted by Nick Ryan @ 5:47 PM 0 comments

R.I.P.

Kurt Vonnegut.

posted by Nick Ryan @ 9:48 PM 0 comments

Tahoe Pics

Photos from our Lake Tahoe trip in late December. We spent the entire time in downtown South Lake Tahoe, a fun, if over-touristed, place to visit. Christy and I took a few days to bum around town with our dogs before Boyne came in for a visit from San Jose, then he and I went skiing at Heavenly while Christy hung out at the Tahoe Marriott's day spa. We chose Heavenly as a matter of convenience, since the ski resort's gondola stretches right down into the middle of town, but I'm glad we did because it's also a great place to ski.

This is very near the highest summit at Heavenly ski resort. That's the lake there in the background (click pics for a larger version).


This is me roughly 10 seconds later, after falling over backwards down the hill.


Boyne stands at the edge of a steep drop. Heavenly is unique in that its ski terrain is divided almost equally across both California and Nevada. That's Nevada there in the background, with all the dirt.


At the state line between California and Nevada, elevation appx. 10,000 ft.


Christy and the dogs down by the lake. Christy's cringing here because the wind whipping off of the lake is incredibly goddamn cold. As soon as this photo was taken, all four of us were running to the far side of the nearest cabin for shelter.


A shot of Maya wearing the goofy booties Christy insisted I get for her at the dog boutique. The snow was unseasonably light during the entire trip, evident here. Amazingly, the entire time we were in Tahoe the daytime temperature never dropped below 38 degrees.

Labels: dog stuff, photoblogging

posted by Nick Ryan @ 2:52 PM 0 comments

Yeah, That's a Pretty Badass Phone

Here's Farhad Manjoo in Salon.com on Apple's new iPhone:

There are probably only a few of us who really need to have a cellphone, an iPod, a Web browser, a text chat system, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi all in one device wherever we go -- maybe if you're an E.R. doctor or a FEMA official. (Maybe not a FEMA official.) For most of us, all this will be as necessary as a Hummer in Riverside. The real point is how the iPhone looks and what it says about the people who own it. And it looks marvelous.

He's dead right. I've never been the kind of early-adapter to jump on the first generation of any flashy new electronics product -- I'm more content to wait out the bug fixes and price drops -- but this thing is another story. I mean, holy shit...I want one of these. Almost as bad as I want a Nintendo Wii, and that's saying something. And I just bought a new fucking iPod six months ago!

What's funny is that on Monday, when I'd first heard that Apple would be releasing a new cellular phone, I couldn't possibly imagine how they were going to make it interesting. I'd actually figured this was a signal Apple had finally jumped the shark, they'd run out of new ideas and were standing at the precipice of a new post-iPod decline.

Boy, was I wrong. This thing is going to be huge.

UPDATE: Oh, well, except in Japan.

From behind his busy counter, Kurita giggles when asked about the excitement in America over the arrival of Apple's iPhone, which can also be used to download music and surf the Internet.

"Sounds like business as usual," he says.

Sure, go ahead and laugh, you spoiled bastard.

Labels: iStuff

posted by Nick Ryan @ 10:12 AM 0 comments

Let's Go Cardinals

Clap, clap, clap clap clap.

Labels: baseball

posted by Nick Ryan @ 10:03 PM 0 comments