Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Four Years and Counting

    This blog is four years old. It’s not as old as Max, but a lot older than Brian. It’s been here through some pretty crazy stuff. It survived two years of Blogger, and two more years of Movable Type. It’s been my space to keep my journal, my little signposts along the way because I know I’ll never keep a real journal. This is it. Even though my posting has been more sporadic recently, I think I’ve become a better writer through sharing my idiocy.

    I would say more, go deeper into why I blog and what I’ve learned after posting 1,340 entries, but I have to get to work.

  • The Boys

    The Lawver Closeup
    \
    The Lawver Closeup, originally uploaded by kplawver.

    Here we are, all smiles. I took a nap. Brian took a nap. Max played some Super Mario Sunshine. Jen took the picture. What’s not to be happy about?
    Oh, and Flickr rules.

  • I’m Somebody!!

    For the longest time, Google thought I was a typo. When you searched for “Kevin Lawver“, it used to tell me that I was nobody. It used to tell everyone that they really meant “Kevin Lawlor”, whoever that is. But, no longer!! I am somebody now!! We’ve been using me as the spellcheck query at work long enough that Google’s figured out that I really exist, and “Lawver” is spelled correctly (how sad is it when the entire world, including major search engines, misspell your last name?). Now, when you search for me, I am me, and Google doesn’t think you’ve made a mistake. Heck, if you misspell me, it tries to point you back to me! How cool is that?

    This totally makes my day. Thanks to Franco for pointing it out.

  • He Should Work For A Campaign

    And after the Bush/Hitler ad from last week, this almost sounds reasonable.

    I still can’t believe John McCain would do an ad for the Bush campaign. After the lies they told about him in SC in 2000, and after all the issues he’s had with the GOP in the Senate, and with the Administration. What happened, John?

  • Playtime!!

    To sum up Working out our Play Muscle: play for thirty minutes a day. Yep, gotcha. How about play for eight, nine or ten hours every day? That’s what me being a pirate is all about. I play almost all day, every day. A couple years ago, I figured out that work is a whole lot more manageable and livable if it’s a game. I make up games during meetings, I turn stupid tasks into something subversive or silly. I make coding into a puzzle or a race. I see how much faster, better, smaller, neater, more complete I can make something than some mythical villain I pick out (look out, it may be you). I turn a gigantic task like getting an entire company to embrace web standards into a game of pirates…

    I may be crazy, but it keeps me sane.

  • What I Wish I’d Written About F9/11

    Steven Johnson puts it better than I did:

    What the film makes clear — without ever coming out and saying it — is that for those victims destroyed and dismembered, the horror was just as terrifying and brutal as what happened here on 9/11. The motives behind the violence were different, of course, and in fact they were better. But the motives behind the violence don’t matter when the bombs are dropping on your family.

    This is exactly why I needed to see the movie, and think other people should too. I agree with the rest of his observations about the movie. The first paragraph especially mirrors my disappointment in parts of the movie.

    As uneven as it was, it was still my first exposure to the real cost of the war. If you can get some idea of the price our soldiers, the people of Iraq and the other civilians over there, are paying for our attempt at “liberating” Iraq, then don’t go see the movie. But, we all need to let sink in the fact that more than 60,000 people have been killed and wounded; whole families have been lost or torn apart, and countless lives have been destroyed. We may never know how many, but all the families that have lost a father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter are never going to be the same, no matter where they live. Those people lost will never fulfill their potential.

    To quote Mr. Johnson:

    To that I say: if we’re not grownup enough as a nation to confront these questions and still “support our troops”, then we’re not grownup enough to be starting elective wars in the first place.

  • Perplexing Post From Politicos

    So that’s what happened. I wondered why I received a picture of the President (wearing a gigantic belt buckle, I might add), and two other solicitations from the GOP in the past couple months. I knew it couldn’t have been my subscription to Utne or Mother Jones, or maybe my donation to the ACLU or Amnesty International. I figured maybe because I voted in the 2000 Republican primary, but quickly dismissed it because I would have been getting mail, especially during the 2002 mid-terms.

    I suspected that someone at church had given my name (and maybe others) to the GOP. You know, if they did, I’m pretty upset about it. Every year, there’s a letter from the First Presidency read that says that the Church doesn’t endorse political candidates or parties, that all members of the Church should be active in their communities and vote their conscience. Also, Church membership information is never to be given to political organizations (or anyone else for that matter), and we’re not supposed to hold political functions in church buildings. It’s one of my favorite things about the Church – the separation of Church and State is understood as being fundamentally important to a religious and free nation.

    I’m not sure I’m going to pursue finding out if someone gave my name to the Republicans. I kind of like the idea of Ed Gillespie wasting postage sending me mail. I may even write him back, and send it back in the pre-paid envelope. I haven’t yet, because my conscience is gnawing at me. Why? Because I would feel guilty for sending them a letter in their envelope in bad faith. I’m not answering them in the “intended” use of the envelope, and therefore I’m an active participant in wasting their money. In my mind, it’s fine if they want to waste their time and money sending me mail, but not if I waste their time and money sending it back to them.

    Maybe I should e-mail him and tell him how much their fundraising letter reminded me of the shrill tone of the blogosphere, and made me even less likely to vote for GW in November (OK, it would be really hard to make me more likely to vote for GW anytime, ever). Maybe I should write him an e-mail about the disgusting ad on the Bush campaign website that used that MoveOn submission with Hitler in it, and in attacking the Democrats, actually became the first campaign to use the Hitler comparison. For background, the infamous Hitler ad that everyone got so excited about was a submission to a contest, never endorsed by any campaign, and quickly pulled by MoveOn. But, the GOP thought it important enough to put in a commercial, and the first campaign to endorse using images of Adolf Hitler in an ad. That’s “elevating the debate”, “bringing honor and decency back to the White House” and all that other BS.

    And I know, to offer “equal time” even though I don’t have to (because it’s my blog, after all), the Democrats say some pretty unkind things. But, Hitler? That’s really ratcheting it up a notch, don’t you think?

    By this point, you’ve realized that I’ve gotten completely off track. So far, in fact, that I’m stopping here and I’m not even going to try to link everything back up into a nice little package.

  • Crazy Web Standards Guy

    I just have to share this. So, my cryptic and stupid post about me being a pirate was all about this little group I helped start (with Kimberly and a couple other people who I don’t think have blogs). I’ve been writing a bunch of articles for this new site we’ve put up, and I just had to share the opening of this one that tries to dispel the myth that tables are bad. I think I’ve gone crazy…

    One of the mantras of those of us who love web standards is “don’t use tables!!!”, which may confuse people who hear us mid-diatribe. I’m here to clue you in on what those three words mean to us standards cultists. We don’t hate tables. In fact, we love tables. We accept them as part of the HTML and XHTML standards, and glory in their accurate and meaningful execution (not “bang you’re dead” execution either).

    Now that I’ve confused you further, let me clarify. We like tables when they’re used to display tabular data (you know, spreadsheet stuff). The problem we have with tables is that people abuse tables and use them for layout. We feel this is abuse of our little misunderstood friend and think it should stop right now.

    You’re shocked now, aren’t you? I thought you might be. Some of you are gasping for breath and asking yourself, “What? No tables for layout?! That’s insane!!” You’re right, or at least you were right a couple years ago. I won’t go into it, because it’s painful, but there was a time when the only way to get websites to look the same across the stone tablets we called web browsers was to use complex table soup for layout. This was OK because it was really the only way to do it. There was no other option. We were handcuffed by the poor standards support in those early browsers (Netscape 4.x and IE 3, the Statler and Waldorf of the web). Now that Moses has come down from the mountain, smashed those stone tablets and brought us a whole new set (IE 6, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc), we no longer need to use tables for layout!!! (and there was much rejoicing)

    Now that we have decent (or at least with bugs we know about and can work about… ::cough:: IE 6 ::cough::) standards support in these modern browsers, and 99% of the web is using some flavor of modern browser, we can get away from the old ways and move to the wonderful world of standards-based design.

    If you want to read up on why you should move to standards-based design, and its benefits, we addressed that in this FAQ article and this one too. The how is a little more difficult. We addressed some of that in … OK, we haven’t addressed that yet. We’ll get there, really. It’s the next item on my list, I swear on a stack of Jeffrey Zeldman‘s hats.

  • Fahrenheit 9/11

    I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday, in an absolutely packed theater. I have mixed feelings about the movie. Right after it was over, I loved it. Then, after I thought about it, the doubts started creeping in. There are parts of this movie that could convince anyone, no matter how much they love the President, that going into Iraq wasn’t worth it. Unfortunately, there are other parts of the movie – the ones you’ve been hearing about from the right-leaning commentators – that will deflate the impact of the last third of the movie.

    The stuff about the Carlyle Group and the Bushes doesn’t really matter in the long run, does it? It’s interesting, and I hope people go track down the source information. But, there wasn’t enough time in the movie to go into all of it. It also doesn’t advance the emotional meat of the movie.

    The stuff at the beginning about the 2000 election was great, and done with a real sense of humor that belied the seriousness of the charges leveled. It was a great way to open the movie, even though the section that came after it was a bit uneven.

    The last half of the movie was what really affected me. I had posted Thursday about the real price of the war. The numbers blew me away, but seeing the images in the movie just cemented it for me. While many on the Right will have a problem with the happy pictures of Baghdad in March of 2003, those scenes weren’t staged. Yes, Saddam was horrible, and horrible things happened, but the images were of average Iraqis living their average Iraqi lives. The images of the “collateral” damage of the war that came after that were just as real. Those things really happened. Those children were injured, along with thousands of their countrymen. That old woman really lost her family, and really said those things. It wasn’t staged, and the numbers aren’t fake. Someone said to me this morning that the movie fails because it doesn’t mention the “good” things that have happened. You know what, it doesn’t have to. We’ve never seen those images in the U.S. media, and we should. We should see them for the same reason we should see the flag-draped coffins as they arrive at Dover. That’s the real price of war.

    The segment on Lila Lipscomb, and the images of the soldiers in Iraq was even more powerful to me (I know, it shouldn’t have been, but I was). The images of the amputees in physical therapy were too much, and watching Mrs. Lipscomb grieve was more than I could handle.

    And those are the parts of the movie that everyone should see. I can understand why people don’t want to see the rest of it. It’s inflammatory, and doesn’t tell (or try to) tell the “whole” story. No one’s telling the whole story, so expecting a two hour movie to is silly and overly partisan. Where the movie succeeds, it does so with more power and impact than anything I’ve seen. Where it fails, it fails only because of the voice it’s delivered in and the time given to laying out the evidence. It was an excellent review of the past three years, no matter what lens it was given in. The build up to war, the lies, the half-truths, the chest-thumping declarations… they’re all there.

    I think the movie will have an impact on the election, not because it shows Bush as a doofus or evil (I don’t think either is true at this point, which is another post). It will because it shows the true price of war, a price that the media and the Administration have failed to show us in the past year. We should all see what’s being done in our name, under our flag. 60,000 people wounded and killed, never to be the same. And why? For what?

    I hope the movie influences people to find the truth, to honestly seek it. Go see it, then go find the truth – not the truth as presented by either side, but the truth as it is. It’s complex, and difficult to find, much less understand. Every target is a spinning top, endlessly spitting out their description of intent and motive, trying to influence how we see what they’ve done and why. I’m done caring about the “why” and the motive. It doesn’t matter. The consequence is more important to me. Seeing the consequence of the President’s action in Iraq is enough for me to cast my vote for Kerry this November.

  • Baby Brian Gets Chubby

    A selection of pictures from the past couple weeks. Enjoy!