Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Ummm, Ah, What Was I Doing?

    Things in my head are kind of weird lately. Weird in what way, I can’t really say. Thoughts are jumbled and incoherent. I’m more absent-minded, as ideas are shotgunned around in my skull. I’ll start thinking about politics, and jump right into my big project at work, and then off to Dublin (where I might be going again in April), to some flukey design idea for this site or one of the others I need to redesign, to the fact that I should probably clean out the dishwasher, to phone calls I should be making for church, to what I need Jen to get at the grocery store this afternoon, to lunch, and then back again. It’s hard to concentrate, to focus on any one thing for very long.

    Is it a sign that I have too many things going on? Or is no one thing pressing enough to grab my full attention? Am I over-medicated , hopped up on allergy meds that dry up my brain as well as my sinuses? Am I just out of inspiration? Have I used it up?

    On the good news front, I am still in love with jEdit, and Jen (who I am definitely more in love with than I am with any text editor) agreed (easily, I might add) to switch to Linux once we get the cable modem set up (tonight, tonight, tonight). And, Max knows more about the human body than most sixth graders, and knows the scientific names of more bones than most high schoolers (I’m betting, anyway). We had a quiz (his idea, which is even freakier), and he could name all the “major” bones, plus knew that his fingers are phalanges, and that the bones in his wrist are called carpals and metacarpals. The only bone I stumped him with was the shoulder blade, I think just because he has a problem saying “scapula”. The kid surprises me every day.

    Ok, back to work… no more day dreaming.

  • Oh, Those Big Spending Democrats

    I was rolling through this whole thing. 17 Things You Don’t Know About Howard Dean is one of the funniest profiles I’ve ever read of a politician.

  • A Rant That Wasn’t That Ended Up Was

    I was going to write a whole thing about why you should vote for whoever the Democrats put up against GW in November. I really was. But, I just can’t do it. Not because I don’t believe it – I do. I just can’t get started. There are so many reasons to vote against him. From his ties to big business and his “crony capitalism” to the war in Iraq – there’s just so much to cover that I can’t see myself writing it today.

    There are so many themes to run against him on, from the economy, to the hundreds of lies he told during the lead-up to the war with Iraq (come on, don’t even try to argue this one – the U.S. Army War College, the Carnegie institute, The Washington Post and others have done a fine job of ripping this one to shreds I won’t even bother), to his complete incompetance in pretty much everything his administration has tried to do. I don’t care if “his heart’s in the right place” or he’s a Christian. He’s incompetant. There really isn’t much else to say. The evidence is out there. George W. Bush is not fit to be President. He never was, and never will be. He, and his advisors, have done more harm than good, created a deficit we will spend the next three generations getting out of, has damaged our relations with the rest of the world to the point that it may take the better part of a decade to repair them after he leaves office, has appointed lobbyists to enforcement positions from the very industries they’re supposed to enforce, and done more to damage the middle class than any administration I can think of.

    Take a step back and review the last three years. What have they done that matters? What have they done that was any good at all? I can think of one thing: Afghanistan. But, they’ve blown the reconstruction so badly that we may never recover from that. And that’s the problem – even the “good” things they’ve attempted to do have been undertaken with such incompetant management that they’ve become failures.

    Please reconsider. I know that a lot of people will never vote Democratic, but look again. Look what the President and the willing Republicans have done to our country, to our future… it ain’t pretty.

    update (in response to my sister’s comment): the things I’ve written here aren’t personal. George W. Bush may be a “nice” person, and may be doing these things with the best possible intentions. The consequences of his actions and policies are concrete, and the only thing that matter to me now. His policies and actions are wanting. His Administration is a failure, and I can’t wait for vote against him, and for whoever ends up as the Democratic nominee.

  • Shorthand for Jackass

    Busy, sick, installing open source content management systems, and working too. Watching TV, playing video games, giving son a bath, sending e-mail, making phone calls, playing video games, making the best roast ever, planning on voting Democrat in ’04, watching as Clark grows on me while Dean cools off, loving making lists, getting tired of explaining the benefits of XHTML/CSS and web standards in general to people who should already know, getting frustrated with unwilling webservers, and really really tired of software with crappy documentation. Jeez, people, if you’re going to write software that other people are going to use, freakin’ document it.

  • Broadband and Good-byes

    Things to do now that I have AOLserver, PostgreSQL and tDOM installed on the Powerbook:

    • Start working on Heather’s site and build the CMS that I want (well, that she wants, but built the way I want).

    • Build a note-taking utility that came to me in the shower the other day.

    • Build an organizational management tool that can take imports from our crappy tool and make them better.

    And this weekend, we get broadband at home!! Finally! I just couldn’t take dialing up anymore. It’s painful and just not worth it after sitting on a gigantic fat pipe at work all day. I got the gear for a nice wireless network so I can surf in style on the couch, and I should have time tonight or tomorrow to hook everything up. Then, it’s bye-bye Microsoft, and hello Fedora! I just have to convince Jen to switch to a lawver.net e-mail address… wish me luck.

    And how are you?

  • An Entirely Too-Long Update

    I’ve been out of the office for exactly a month. My last day at the office before today (1/5) was Friday, December Fifth. I’ve never done that before, and I liked it, maybe too much. Now I’m back, and not sure what to do with myself. I’m now used to sleeping in, eating breakfast with Max, doing nothing for a while, contemplating doing something, doing something, then going right back to doing nothing. Now, I’m at work, where “something” should be done. I’m having a hard time picking that something…

    There are things I haven’t told you yet that I did with my time off. Since Jen was sick, and her parents were only here for a week, that meant that Max and I spent a lot of time in the week and a half after Christmas entertaining ourselves. We played a lot of video games (Tiger Woods 2004 wherein Max loves to repeatedly hit the ball into the water, and SSX 3 wherein Max refuses to steer), went out to breakfast, to Best Buy, the mall and the library (where I cried reading The Man Who Walked Between the Towers – yeah, I cried, sitting in a tiny chair at a tiny table, surrounded by parents and their tiny children). We had a good time, for the most part. I lost it a couple times when I found out that Max is actually quite good at Tiger Woods, but refuses to hit the ball correctly when he can just hit it in the water. He was also reeeee-ally moody one day, and I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I sent him away to watch his Spongebob DVD until I could handle him again. We also went to the new Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport. I love going to museums with Max! We saw the whole thing in less than an hour, and at incredibly high speeds. Max doesn’t wait around to read signs and ogle shiny chrome (which is my excuse for such strange pictures – plus, the lighting there is complete crap). One suggestion though, if you’re planning on going and live in the area – wait six months. It’s not finished, and you’ll be doing a lot of stairs. I don’t think all the planes are in yet either, and you can’t get close enough to the Space Shuttle. Otherwise, it’s fun.

    I think I’ll close this one with Max’s latest obsession: the human body. Max will gladly tell you where your femur is, where blood cells are made, what his medulla oblongata is doing right now, and that his phalanges like your phalanges (where he got the last part, I don’t know, and body parts are interchangable… my “internal organ” likes your “internal organ”). My mother and I both got him books about the body for Christmas, and he’s just devouring them. He loves to ask me how the heart, brain, stomach, small intestine, muscles, bones, etc work, and will ask completely out of the blue, insanely funny questions about his body. I love it.

    The kid is scary-smart. I’m almost to the point that I want to get him tested. He learns things too quickly, and retains too much for this to be normal. He’s been reading for two years, although frequently refuses to read because I think he likes it when we read to him. He remembers the dates of weird little things that happen, and will bring them up out of the blue and asked how I was feeling on October 14th, or some other day when something miniscule happened. It’s cool, and I love it, but it’s kind of freaky at the same time. For example, he drew his skeleton at church yesterday on a little cutout body, and then his heart, and the blood moving around. Granted, it wasn’t complex, but it was there, and he remembers me telling him that the heart pumps blood all over, where it is, and that red blood cells carry hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to other cells in the body.

    I think we’ll do astronomy next… but thinking that is kind of silly. The boy learns what he wants, and drops what he doesn’t. It’s fascinating to watch him pounce on a topic and go all out asking questions, looking for answers, and then going deeper once he’s got the basics.

    Ok, enough Max-bragging. Back to work with me…

  • He Speaks!

    I hope you all had a merry Christmas. We had a great, although different, holiday this year. Jen has bronchitis and I had a root canal on Tuesday, so things were a little slower this year. Thankfully, Jen’s parents are here, and have been taking good care of us. I don’t think my mother-in-law is happy unless she’s cooking, cleaning or doing laundry. Her dad has already completed a large portion of my honey-do list, and well, I’d be happy if they stayed clear on through till May when the baby’s born. I won’t have to do anything ever again… I can be even more of a lump than normal!

    This was also Max’s first Christmas where he was aware of the whole Santa Claus thing, and presents. He helped pick out his present for Jen, and even got a present for the new baby (six months early, but he wanted to get it, and I didn’t want to discourage him).

    Now, we’re hanging out watching football and snacking… It doesn’t get better than this.

  • Home At Last

    I’m home, off from work, and you’d think I’d been gone a lot longer than a week. So, I’ll be even quieter than I have been. Off spending time with the family, getting the house ready for visiting in-laws, and doing the last minute food and present shopping that always comes up the week before Christmas. If I don’t post again before the 25th, have a safe and happy holiday (whatever your holiday may be)!!

  • The Last Day in Dublin

    We had just one full touristy day in Dublin, and this was it. We’d already walked around the City Centre quite a bit, but still wanted to hit some shops that were closed during the week after work. So, we wandered down to Grafton Street, hit Powerscourt and a couple other shops, made some purchases, and then took the long way home to go past some sites we hadn’t seen yet.

    We dropped off our purchases at the hotel, and grabbed the DART (commuter train) south around Dublin Bay to Dalkey, which is where Bono of U2, and other famous Dubliners live. It’s a cute little town on the sea. We wandered all over town, then ate lunch in an Australian restaurant.

    We leave tomorrow for home, via two taxis, two airplanes, and I’m sure six lines at Heathrow in the middle.

    This has been a great trip, both professionally and personally. I got to know a co-worker better, formed new relationships with the guys in Dublin, and had a lot of fun. Dublin is a great city. If you have the chance to visit, do. The people are great, the food is so much better than I expected, and the whole atmosphere is just perfect. I’ve got more to write about my thoughts on the trip, and my first trip to Europe in over twenty years, but I’m tired, need to pack, and want to go to sleep. Cheers!

  • Morning Commute

    Photos from this morning’s commute.