Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Lemon Jelly Est Fantastique!

    New music Friday!! I should have written about this instead of my Java vs. Tcl conflicts, but hey, I’m tired, have a headache and am hungry as hell, so forgive me – please. I went a little nuts on Amazon last week and bought a bunch of new music. The first batch arrived last night, and after listening to it all day, here are my impressions of these two albums by Lemon Jelly. Where did I hear them? Why, JazzMusique, of course. Usually, I don’t check the track names of the songs as they play, but last week, three songs really caught my attention during the day, and they all happened to be by the same group. So, I bought ’em. Here’s what I think of the albums:

    • Lemon Jelly.ky: This is a collection of three EPs the group (two guys) put out. What’s weird about knowing it’s a collection is that the songs all flow together really well. It feels more like a concept album than a compilation. What do they sound like? They’re a little like Groove Armada if you replace the vocals on Groove Armada‘s stuff with funny spoken word samples and add some more horns. It’s trippy, groovy lounge music that’s not at all boring. It has some pep to it, which is a nice change from some lounge music that makes you want to nap. I have no idea why, but it makes me think of late spring sun showers. It’s raining, but the sun’s out and I’m happy that it’s raining. Yeah, I know, must be the allergy pills talking.

    • Lost Horizons: A complete album, and you can tell. While there may not be an overarching theme (not that I can find anyway), there are riffs that show up in the background, and some of the voice samples are probably from the same source (sounds like the same guy anyway). This is great coding music. It’s interesting enough to keep you focused, but not overpowering enough to distract. There are an insane amount of layers to the songs. You can hook into the bass line, the drums, the samples, or the other instruments hidden under the covers. It’s perfect headphone music. Spacewalk and Ramblin’ Man are breathtaking in the sheer beauty of the songs and the layers of complimentary sound they pack into them. If you’re going to buy just one, get this one.

    The one downside to both albums is the packaging. While both CD’s come in fantastic looking cases, they’re completely unusable. It’s hard to get the CD’s out, hard to put them back in, etc. Thankfully, I’m burning backup copies so I can put the CD’s away in the “vault”. I should get the other CD’s from the splurge this weekend, so expect reviews of them next week.

  • Tcling Bodies

    Switching back and forth between java and Tcl sucks. Do I use parens or curlies? Do I use a dollar sign or not? Do I have to put a semi-colon? I’ve been doing more Tcl stuff this week than I have in a long time, and it’s nice. I can make it do whatever I want, unlike Java where I’m constantly looking things up and making mistakes. My mistakes in Tcl are almost always typos and not syntactical boo-boos. I’ve been playing with tDOM, and I have to say it’s veddy veddy nice. It makes parsing XML so much easier than ns_xml and is millions of times better than ripping it up using plain old string commands. Now that I’ve started playing with it, it makes me want to write an RSS reader or some cool Google API application. It really makes me wish I could afford to get an AOLserver hosted site instead of the normal Apache/PHP/MySQL setup I’ve got now (and like 99% of you, I bet).\
    I didn’t hit 276 today (didn’t go up or down… stayed right at 277), so I have to wait another day to order the Sidekick. Oh well. It’s funny. It happens every few days. I’ll go three or four days losing between half a pound and a pound, and then one day where nothing happens. The next day, I could be down two or two and a half. Bodies are weird.

  • The Great Gastree

    When oh when will the burping end? I can’t stand it anymore. It’s insane. I don’t eat as much anymore, and I drink a lot of water. I can burp like the kids on South Park and my little brother, Tim (hi, Tim!). I can do the alphabet and rustle birds from their perches. I can rattle windows and break champagne glasses. I can do the first half of the Gettysburg Address. My stomach hurts. If I weren’t laughing so hard at my own effervescence I would be doubled over in pain. This definitely goes on the list of things to address with the doctor on Monday (boy, i hope my appointment’s on Monday and not tomorrow… should have called). In other news, I can almost guarantee I’ll be at 276 tomorrow, which means I get to use my groovy employee discount and save almost sixty bucks on my new color Sidekick.

  • Unfatterer

    278.5 – That’s 47.5 pounds I’ve lost since December when I started all this. That’s also three pounds in two days (for some reason I gained half a pound and was a 280.5)!! Only two and a half pounds to go and I’ll have lost fifty. That’s half a Calista Flockhart!! Or, as Mike lovingly pointed out earlier, that’s almost 6 human heads. When I hit the magic number (hopefully Saturday), I’m going to get myself a reward of some kind. I really want a new color Sidekick with the unlimited data plan. That would be \$5.98 a pound. I think I’m worth at least that.

  • And Another Thing…

    Notice anything different? No, really… I’m super proud of this one. No, I didn’t design it. I did build it and redid everything so I don’t need any more style hacks (server-side scripting to add different CSS depending on the browser), and things are a little more proper than they were before. Keyboard navigation is good, and it works really well in the IBM Homepage Reader other than a couple things I have no control over (but am trying to exert some influence over). I don’t have JAWS, so if anyone has it or better yet, uses it, please let me know if you run into any problems.

  • Why Are We People?

    “Why are we people?”\
    It’s a simple enough question when you think about at first. But then, the bottom falls out and the answers melt into one another until there is no answer. You can take the religious view, the evolutionary view, or the 3 year-old view. I’ll try to address all of them, and then sum up my confusion at the end:

    The 3-Year Old View

    This one is surprisingly easy. We’re people because we wear pants, drive cars and drink out of cups. There are animals that do some of those things, but not all of them. So, that’s what makes us people. Alternately, we’re people because our mothers and fathers were people, and people only have people babies. Monkeys only have monkey babies, and people can’t have monkey babies and vice versa.

    The Religious View

    Again, this one is easy enough. God made us that way. God made Adam and Eve the first people. We’re all descendants of Adam and Eve, therefore, we’re all people (see 3-Year Old View).

    The Evolutionary View

    Son (because Max is a boy), we’re people because a long time ago, a monkey got an opposable thumb, which meant he could develop tools. This meant he could hunt bigger animals and eat more meat, marrow and other yummy things that made him smarter. Over thousands of years, these monkeys turned into dumb people with gigantic foreheads and bad teeth. They lived in France, oddly enough. These dumb people weren’t monkeys and weren’t quite people. They were kind of monples. Back in the days of the pre-people, they were more worried about eating enough and not being eaten. Then, along came people, who invented writing, math, reading, government, silly putty and velcro… and pants, cars and cups. We have the spare time, imagination and means to do all of these things that define us as people. Most people aren’t as worried about sheer survival as our ancestors were. Unfortunately, some people are, which means we still have room for some evolution.

    All of those make sense to me when I look at them under their respective headings. I am very fond of the pants line. But, I believe in all three views. How do I reconcile them?

    The Combined View

    Son, we’re people because in the very beginning, God decided that we needed to get bodies and experience life. We all decided that this was a good idea, and agreed. Then, something happened. We’re not sure what exactly or how long it took, but God and Jesus created the Earth, the animals and everything else in it: flowers, bushes, trees, frogs, crickets, bees, deer, dogs, cats and hamsters. Somewhere along the way, he made dinosaurs, mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, australopithecines, neanderthals, cro-magnons and giant tree sloths. The dinosaurs, mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and the others all died out for some reason. We can see their bones and the art that the neanderthals and cro-magnons made in museums, so we know they existed. Why they existed, we’re not sure about, but I’m pretty sure they did. So, sometime after the dinosaurs and before you and me, God made Adam and Eve. Like I said before, they were the first people. They’re the (more greats than I can ever say) grandparents of all of us, or so they say. I’m not sure if that’s figurative parents or literal, but it doesn’t really matter too much. They probably really did exist. That’s the how we got to be people. Did I leave out the why? We’re people because people have imaginations, guilt, greed, lust, and all the other things that drive us to do human things. Our job as people is to grow as much as possible, and evolve ourselves into the people we want to be.

    Now I think I can’t wait for Max to ask that question. I’ll let you know what happens when/if he does.

  • The Animatrix

    I watched The Animatrix this weekend. Since a lot of the people who come to my site from Google are searching for commercial music (ie: that song from the levi’s french dictionary ad). I’ll do the same for The Animatrix before I give you a review. The song that plays over the main DVD menu, and is used in a couple of the shorts is called Supermoves and is on the Snatch soundtrack (among other places). The song from The Kid’s Story and that plays during the closing credits is called Who Am I by Peace Orchestra. It’s on the Memento soundtrack, and the Peace Orchestra album.

    On to the shorts. First, I was blown away by the quality of animation in each of them. They’re all a little different, but all gorgeous in their own way. The first was done by the team who did the Final Fantasy movie, and was just amazing to look at. The characters were more refined, and the muscles more accurate than in The Spirits Within (although they used some of the same character models, it’s hard to tell – or at least you get past is quickly). The second two, The Second Renaissance Parts 1 & 2) were absolutely stunning. The rest of them are worth watching for the visuals alone, but my favorite has got to be Beyond. It’s the story of a group of kids who find a glitchy spot in the Matrix in an old abandoned house. Things are wonky in the house, and it’s way too much fun to watch the kids play with conventions like bullet time we saw in the movie. The have a falling contest and stop inches from the ground after jumping off a second story window ledge and others. It was the best play on the physics set up in the movies on the disc.

    Overall, it’s fun to watch. The shorts aren’t long enough that you get bored with the story or animation style. And while there are a couple duds on the disk (World Record being the worst), the great and good stuff on the disk more than make up for it.

  • My Political Compass

    According to The Political Compass, I’m: Economic Left/Right: -5.75 and Authoritarian/Libertarian: -3.85, which puts me in Gandhi territory. I think I can live with that.

    It also puts me almost equidistant from the X and Y axis in opposite directions as our President, which explains a lot.

  • I Got German Linked!!

    Took going to Babelfish to figure out he wasn’t saying it sucked, but a German speaker linked to my Movable Type on OS X tutorial! How cool is that?

  • Max Will Be So Happy

    I just checked the listings and The Wiggles are going to be on Crocodile Hunter tonight. Can you believe it? Is Steve going to feed Dorothy some raw chicken? Feed Jeff to Monty? Let Terri run off with the primary colored lotharios who make such great fruit salad, fruit salad? The dramatic possibilities are too much to bear!! Rest assured, it will be TiVoed and Max and I will hang on every word.