I added a new page to the site titled "The Ruby Show". Those of you who have been paying attention to humanclock.com instead of yourpayingjob.com probably noticed the little "story" that appears around 2:45pm. I made up a page and the three contributors all wrote details about creating the story. Thanks again to Camille, Leanne, and John.

Submissions are mostly caught up. There are still about 30 that I can't put in since they won't fit right or they were taken in an Austrian town with a naughty name, to which I don't have my "office filter" implemented yet.

I also discoved I'd "misplaced" about 200 master copies of submissions from early 2004. Couldn't find them in my backups or anywhere. Found them sitting amongst a clutter of files on a server in the boonies. Lesson here is to leave a lot of files around and not delete anything.

The photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is from a regular contributor to this site. Going across that bridge has always been some sort of weird life checkpoint thing for me:

If I mention that I ate raisin bran for breakfast and I went to a new coffeeshop at 48th & Hawthorne this morning, this will start to sound like a blog, so I'll stop now.

(*) Caught fire in 1987, right in front of my high school when my mom picked me up.

Astoria, Oregon

In front of the house where they filmed The Goonies. In addition to catching up on all the submissions, I'm in obvious need of a haircut too.

I'm almost done with my code rewrite and will be able to get submissions into the site soon. This also includes all of those photos that won't fit into the site because they need to be cropped. Thanks for being patient.

Ok, I feel like I'm having to make excuses as to why my homework isn't done. I have a couple days off this week so I'm going to get the 300(!) submissions I have piled up into the site...plus I have a special page to add to the site too. Thanks for being patient!

From the department of it-never-hurts-to-ask...

Yesterday The Knitters played free show (!) out in Forest Grove, Oregon. At one point Greg (see below) brought up how cool it was to be sitting in the grass with friends, watching the Knitters play 30 feet away on a nice summer day. These things along with a plate of overcooked tater tots made the moment complete for me.

One of the best shows I've ever seen was X at La Luna in 1998. I never got a chance to seem them play as The Knitters before, so this was a special treat. They played a great show. Afterwards I went up to John Doe (musician/actor/Winona Ryder hugger [link expired] ) and asked him for a clock photo. He chuckled a bit when he saw the photo book I carry around and said "sure". Although I had the big cardboard sign with me, I opted for a handwritten one instead:



So afterwards a bunch of people end up at a BBQ down the road. Greg comes and grabs me: "You gotta see this! Bring your camera!" Inside the house was an original concert poster for the Replacements' ignominious* July 3rd, 1987 show in Portland. Tim Hanlon's comic strip below best describes this show:

^*This is my attempt at setting a new trend. I was originally going to put the word "infamous" here, but much like the word "virtuoso" is overused to describe the the guitar gawd Yngwie J. Malmsteen**, "infamous" is a bit overused to describe The Replacements.

^**This example is provided for the sake of argument, it should not be assumed that I actually own any Yngwie albums.

Behind as usual in getting clock photos into the site. Thanks for submissions. Funniest thing of no relation to this website happened last night. I woke up at 3:30am to the sound of a tricked out white Honda civic cruising around my neighborhood. It kept circling around mysteriously. Music was emanating from the car at an earth-shattering volume. The music? It was the thumping beats of DJ Bruce Springsteen's incredible 1982 acoustic album Nebraska, recorded on a cheap 4 track in his bedroom in New Jersey.

Two of the girls from the Australian band Royalchord stayed at my house last weekend. I met them when I was in Melbourne a couple years ago. Me and part of my record collection made it onto their photo page. They are playing tonight in Chicago. Go see them! Take them veggie hamburger patties.

I have lived in Portland for nine years now and learned something new today. This morning John in Minnesota emailed me asking if I had been to the smallest park in the world, located in downtown Portland. I hadn't been there, so after work (and a few beers) Kevin and I decided to "go to the park". So we stood there in the middle of the street near a couple of discarded, um, balloons...and took photos.

Ok, so we went to Newport, Oregon this weekend. My friend Jen was graduating from Naturopathic school and had a big party. She also decided to announce that in addition to graduating from school, she was getting married to my buddy Chris. The next day MCQ, Julie, Bryan, Kevin and I went to the beach. I couldn't sit still and started making this gigantic clock time in the sand. Julie, Bryan and I all ended up making a huge "2:34" on the beach (and also had an intense hourlong fling with Ms. Carpal Tunnel unbeknownst to us). Awhile later we had this nice clock time on the beach. Heads were turning. I have some great video from this that I hope to get online someday. The photo itself was pretty random. Julie and Bryan are making up the colon, Kevin is on the phone to his brother Mike in Whitefish, Montana, and MCQ is hungover facedown on the beach in the lower left corner of the photo.

Greetings from the the FoHo^* district of Portland

^* FoHo is a new term coined by Zac C. trying to make the Foster-Holgate area sound a bit more trendy and become overpriced like the rest of Portland.

I'll get clock photo submissions in this weekend. I bought a house a few days back and am in the process of moving my stuff. The new house has a garage so I can start taking analog clock photos again and replace the ones that I took four years ago.

Been way busy lately so getting clock photos into the site has taken me longer. For your history lesson today, Mt. St. Helens erupted 25 years ago, and I remember 15 years ago when I was dishwashing at the Red Robin ($4.00/hr!) in Yakima, WA telling everyone that it was 10 years ago that the mountain erupted.

I'm auctioning off an original piece of the humanclock.com cardboard again. The original buyer thought my auction was somehow related to a popular gaming console. Whatever.

Went to a birthday party of my friend Bill last night. We ate fondue. We made a clock photo with the fondue:

I'll be putting in clock photos later this weekend, thanks for being patient!

I've been a bit busy lately so it is taking me a few extra days to get clock photos in. I also have been poking around the message boards seeing about the supposed relation between this site and one to promote the new Microsoft game thingy. People keep looking for clues within the written text of this website, some of which I wrote during a XXXX beer fueled ramage when I was in Australia three years ago. So no, you are looking for clues in all the wrong places. Speaking of which, "XBOX365" was the high bidder in my ebay auction of an original chunk of the humanclock cardboard, someone tell Bill's ad agency that I want my cash!

This website has been around since 2001 in case you were wondering. It wasn't built last week. I have no connection to the XBOX ad campaign and I don't know why they linked to me other than to show love.

Also, I still don't have any clues. All this talk of clues makes me think of my favorite member of the Go Go's who played a singing telegram girl in a movie once. Sweet Jane indeed.

Clues, Clues, I have no clues! I have no clues as to why you ended up here. I would like to make up clues, such as you will find answers by listening to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album, but that would be downright mean, so I'm staying out of it.
Several of you were wondering if I had pictures of the new game console. Well, I do. Above is the new X-ertcev game console. Below is the press release that came with the unit.

Features:

• Contains the most advanced graphics rendering engine we could design. (see above).
  
• Features a powerful Motorola 68A09 processor running at a blazing 1.6 MHz.
  
• Overloaded monoural sound capablity provided by General Instruments.
  
• "Vector Induction" (tm) sound enhancement provides a pleasant buzzing noise.
  
• 2 Kb system RAM.
  
• Sleek black plastic case with carry handle.
  
• Weighs 15 pounds, doubles as exercise equipment.
  
• Suggested retail price: $403.70.
  

I don't have any for sale, this is just a prototype. It just showed up on my doorstep one afternoon with instructions. This website doesn't have anything to do with a popular website going around right now. I am also not affiliated with the guys who wrote MITS 4k BASIC back in 1975 either. (do your homework kiddies)

The piece of the clock cardboard up for auction now comes in a nice little display collage. The cardboard is in a plastic container attached to the mirror, along with photos of people holding up the cardboard over the years. The new photos are down hear the bottom of the auction. Also included is a card explaining what it is, written with the same cruddy handwriting that graces the fonts on this website.

Ok, April Fools is over. Some were fooled, some were not. I took a few clock pictures on Friday night of random people in Portland, I hope to get those into the site pretty soon. Remember your Hüsker Dü reference today, "Somewhere in April Time we add another hour..."

The clock site will be down Sunday night due to the server being moved a whopping 1.8 miles. At least this time the server is getting moved by a car rather than being strapped to the back of my bicycle and shipped on a train as "Scrap Parts - No Declared Value".

Hey, if you want to see a photo of me tied up to a shopping cart with four other people, sprinting in a drunken frenzy down the waterfront in Portland, look at the living section of today's (Monday) Oregonian. On Saturday some friends and I did the Portland Urban Iditarod. I'm in the yellow t-shirt holding a camera (of course). There is also a photo of our team sprinting to the finish line. I took a bunch of clock pictures at the event that I'll get online soon.

Ok, I never usually link out to big giant websites, but Richard Buckner of 8:14pm fame has a song in a Volkswagen commercial titled "Picture". I'm kind of glad he was able to cash in for once, plus gain a bigger audience.

Greetings from my cheap hostel room located, as Bruce says, "down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don't stop". Canada has been good the last week. I've heard a lot of Crash Test Dummies lately, probably the last time I heard this much was when I worked at the record store in Bellingham, WA in 1994.

I spent a good chunk of today walking around Vancouver taking pictures of the clock. I'm a bit rusty on my humanclock-people-skills. In case anyone needs some large furnace filters, there are about 10 in this box located on the southbound 99A near BC Place stadium. It looks like they literally fell off a truck:

I'm up at Whistler in BC/Canada right now, online via a neighbour's open wireless connection. More clock pics coming soon. I'll be in Vancouver, BC next week, let me know if you want to walk around and take clock pictures of people in the city.

Also, the clock site is going to be on a radio show soon, which means that the site won't be accessible due to the server being overloaded. This always happens when I go out of town..heh.

Three years ago right now I was on a plane to Australia to start the big adventure of 2002-2003. Keeping with this reflection theme, I also learned last night what the difference between being 24 years old and 31 years old is; at age 24 I would spend an hour to make an ethernet cable, at age 31 I can't be bothered with it.

History was made today, the first clock picture featuring the art of unicycle jousting was submitted.

The server has been pretty busy the last week or so, so the clock pictures are taking a little while to load. I'll try and get the bugs out of my "javascript preloader" this weekend so the clock pictures will be already loaded into your browser when the minute changes.

Had a fun night, took a few clock pictures....