Saturday, November 23, 2002

Worked on Domenica's Web site today: Put in the portfolio section by building a small MySQL database and processing images in Photoshop and ImageReady. Put in the PHP code to extract the information from the database. So far thumbnails and titles are working. I have them all in DIV tags and it feels good to be working with a tableless page structure. Somehow a few stylesheet tweaks I made made the resume page break in IE6. Gotta fix that later. In the evening, Patrick and I went to Colma to see Bowling for Columbine, a film by Michael Moore about American guns, media, culture, and politics. It was delightfully enlightening, and Patrick and I believe in a great deal of what the film lays bare about American society. As we drove to dinner in West Portal, Patrick said, "It's embarrassing to be an American." We talked more about leaving the United States to live in another country—ideas we had tossed around in the past and in which the film renewed our interest. We dined at Spiazzo (33 West Portal Ave, 415-664-9511), a very good Italian restaurant. Patrick calls it a "good value." To start, we shared Stracciatella alla Romana, a chicken broth soup with spinach and battered eggs. For a main course, he had Fettuccini con Gamberoni—fettucine with prawns in a red sauce. I had Pizza Vegetariana—a vegetarian pizza which turned out to be much larger than I expected (about 10 inches). Patrick had a glass of chianti. We had no time for dessert because we had to go to a show. Our bill came to US$35.49. After dinner, we went to a dance concert at City College to see a classmate of Patrick's named Yuichi. We saw 13 different performances, and his was the last one—a tap-dancing number to "Moanin" by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The show was lots of fun except for one performance which was quite boring and stretched the meaning of the word "dance." Today in the mail we received our copy of Rainbow Curve which has Patrick's story in it called An Undisturbed Dark Place. Recently Patrick found out that Oyster Boy would not be able to publish his work for another year even though they accepted it a year ago. Pleiades also agreed to publish a story of his long ago, and it comes out next week. He still hasn't heard back from Hanging Loose—another publication that accept his work but has neglected to publish it. Today was also Patrick's first day at Gold's Gym on Market Street in the Castro. He said he was going to go 3 to 4 times a week doing a mixture of cardio and free weights. He met a attractive man named Michael who was helpful and who had the kind of build Patrick wanted for himself. They talked about workout routines.