Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Nucular Strategery

    “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas – probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

    Wow. How did this guy get elected? Every day I watch a news conference or read the news, I cringe at what comes out of his mouth. And now the National Sanctity of Life Day and Patriot Day? On NSoLD, I don’t care where you stand on abortion, and I’m not going to get into my position on it here, but how big was the wheelbarrow he used to roll his balls into the room to make that announcement? This guy has no sense of what he’s doing looks like, does he? He’s all for sticking us with his wacky Religious Right agenda without considering the objections of anyone who may have a differeing opinion. There are now dozens, if not hundreds of examples of the Bush (part Deux) Administration making Black and White declarations about things without knowing all sides of the issue. For example, let’s create an energy policy in secret without talking to even the most conservative enviromental groups? Not one! Let’s create a national Anti-Abortion day without thinking that this is a Democracy and there is a large percentage of Americans who will be offended by it (probably much larger than those who think this is a good idea)! Woo-hoo!! Ok, on to Patriot Day… What a meaningless and stupid name for a day to commemorate one of the worst acts of violence in American history. One of the others, an act of war that led us into WWII in the Pacific doesn’t have a holiday. We don’t celebrate December 7th. We don’t give it a name. It’s the day something terrible happened. Let’s leave it be and let people remember it how they want or need to.

    Compassionate Conservatism is a joke. It’s an evil joke played on the American people, and I’m sick to my stomach over it. Bush Junior has done nothing but stick it to the middle class and the poor in his time in office. He’s bungled situation after situation with his unnuanced and uninformed positions and policies and I for one can’t wait until I get to cast my next ballot for President.

  • Get Used To It

    301.0 – Yup, that’s a pound and a half yesterday. At this rate, I’ll be at 299 tomorrow or Saturday!!! And, in case you’re already tired of this weight loss saga, get used to it. You’re gonna hear about it pretty much every day until I’m down to 220 (gunning for 200, but 220 would be my lowest “adult” weight when I was riding a bike every day and eating tomato soup two out of three meals a day).

  • My 7.5 Days Of Music…

    are now useless!! I found FlareSOUND yesterday in iTunes and am in love. They stole my whole music library and put it up on their jazzybeats channel. They threw in stuff I’ve never heard before and then proceeded to beat me silly with it. Great downtempo chillout coding music for the musically adventurous.

    And yes, my iTunes library is currently 7 days, 14 hours, 15 minutes and 10 seconds and takes up 13.2gb of hard drive. And it’s 95% music I own (or someone in my immediate family owns) and 5% samples I downloaded for free. I should be the poster boy for the fight against the RIAA. I’m not a music stealer. I’m a perfectly legal fair-use consumer of music that I’ve legally purchased through retail outlets. I love being able to listen to several hundred CDs on shuffle without having to bring the CDs to work every day, or leave them here. It’s a perfectly reasonable use of the CDs I’ve overpaid for over the years, and any attempt to take it away will be met with untold amounts of hacking and debauchery to get it back.

    I didn’t mean to turn this into a rant about the RIAA, it just kind of happened. Why? Because I’m in a good mood today. 2.6 pounds to go and I can say I no longer weigh 300 pounds. How cool is that? I’m down to 302.5 (that’s a pound and half gone from yesterday alone and a pound the day before). Needless to say, the diet’s working and Jen could even tell the difference this morning. She says I’m lookin’ gooooood, and that’s all the matters.

  • No More Whining

    I’m feeling better today. No more whining today. I’m playing with using Tcl around Movable Type and it’s a lot of fun. I wrote a little template that spits all the categories and entries into a tcl array, where things can then be sorted, goofed with, etc. Since everything is in MySQL, I could just go right to the db, but I can never get the MySQL driver to build right on my Linux box. I know I’m kind of wasting my time because I’ll never ever find a hosting company that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to run AOLserver, but it’s a nice diversion.

    For example, I don’t like how Movable Type’s MTEntryNext and MTEntryPrevious work. I usually only want to go back and forth within a category, not through the whole site. You also can’t re-sort by field or ascend/descend like you can with MTEntries (which means your next/prev are out of order if you sort any other way than the default). I’ve already posted it to the Request a New Feature board (although I think it’s a minor minor bug).

    I’ve done all kinds of stuff today. I wrote documents, finished up a project, put off starting a new one, ate a salad, drank a gallon of water and wrote up my goals for the first quarter:

    • I will write more code than documents this quarter.

    • I will mourn Steve Case’s resignation quietly and keep my grief to myself. I will no longer start sobbing in meetings and crying out, “Oh, STEVE!!!! WHY DID YOU LEAVE US?!!”

    • I will stop laughing when I hear the word “functionality”.

    • In the interest of cost savings, I will institute a toilet paper rationing program. I will personally set an example by using no more than four sheets per visit to the little boys’ room.

    • I will stop putting rude comments in my code.

    • No more easter eggs (I swear, there haven’t been ANY in anything y’all might have seen).

    • Instead of wasting company time walking all the way to the bathroom, I will install one in my office.

    • I will stop referring to my co-workers as Squeaky McSoggypants

  • Craptastic

    Craptastic says it all. Never take hypertension medicine without eating. Never take a diuretic without eating. I felt like crap all day: swimmy head, jitters, stomach ache; and I just kept going. I got things done and didn’t bitch about it. I even went bowling. I bowled like crap, but I bowled.

    My head still hurts and I’m pissed off. Why? I’m not really sure. It’s a lot of things. Work is vexing. Home is good. I now have to be in training next week on my anniversary. Ok, that’s enough. I’m done. Good night. See you tomorrow.

  • Schillinger Goes to Maggiano’s

    If you’re thinking about going to Maggiano’s, don’t, unless you like being crammed into a postage stamp-sized table two feet away from people crammed around other postage stamp-sized tables. You’re more likely to hear the four tables around you than the person sitting right next to you. The food was good, but the service was pretty crappy. If you want good service, amazing food and a bill in the same ballpark, go to Zeffirelli in Herndon.

    In something completely unrelated, I’ve been thinking about Oz. I love the show, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it. Why do I like it? Why do I love it? It’s completely alien to me. It’s a world where there are immediate consequences for your actions and mercy doesn’t exist. There are no heroes, just lesser villains. It’s absolutely brutal and without remorse. See, so unlike my world. The acting is always top-notch and the story are as original as they come. Seasons one and two are out on DVD now if you haven’t seen it. Just make sure the kids aren’t around. Also, be sure to take it in small doses. It’s sometime (ok, often) hard to take. Ok, that was the worst review of anything ever. But go get the DVD and come back and tell me what you think.

  • Oh, Steve

    Steve Case to resign from AOL Time Warner

  • The Switch Is On

    The switch went well today. I got a lot done and by the end of the day, I was using Apple+Left instead of Home to get to the beginning of a line and having a wonderful time. I see now I do need to go get BBEdit 7. BBEdit Lite is good, but it’s not everything I need it to be. I need macros, dangit!

    Why am I making the switch, you may ask? I hate Microsoft is the easy answer. They’re predatory and unethical. They’ve pirated the greatest innovations of the last twenty years and made them barely usable crap. Through an unmatched marketing machine, they’ve foisted utter garbage on the world, and now the whole world uses it. Ok, that’s a little strong. But, underneath it all, you know it’s true.

    Apple has their problems, like overpriced hardware, a sometimes lax update schedule (which hasn’t really been true with OS X, but was pretty bad with OS 9 and before), and some weird positions on things, like not admitting that some of us need more than one mouse button and some of us who do are left handed and WANT TO SWITCH THE DAMN BUTTONS AROUND. But, overall, my Mac is more innovative, offers me more and is just more fun than my Windows machine. I know all the games come out for Windows, but I have a PS2 now, and haven’t played a game on my Windows machine in months.

    I’ll still use my Windows box for testing and maybe to play UT on, but I’m a Mac (and Linux) guy now.

  • Grandma and Linux

    An Interview With a Grandmother is an interesting look at Linux for the Home User. I don’t see it as a win for Linux, per se, because HomeBase is such a specialized product that wouldn’t work for us geeks anymore than Solaris would work for my grandmother. I think it’s more a rousing recommendation of Linux as a platform for Consumer Electonics and specialized computer needs. It’s open and easy to customize. You can do whatever you want with it and make it your own. That EOne decided to use Linux to build their system on is a testament to Linux’s portability and customizability.

    I think Linux has a way to go on the desktop market, more from a momentum perspective than a lack of features or usability. People don’t switch. They’re not motivated to use something that’s better. They’re happy to use what they know, and unfortunately they know Windows.

    For example, I’ve been working switching my work computers. I have a P3 and my Quicksilver G4 and I want to switch to OS X permanently instead of using OS X and home with the Powerbook and my XP machine at work. But, I have all these workflow habits I’m finding hard to break. Today is the first day of my attempted total OS X experience, and it’s hard going. It’s not that using OS X is hard. It’s not. It’s getting used to writing code and doing my daily thing using different keystrokes, with things in different places, etc. Doubly odd is that when I go back to XP, I notice how cluttered and clunky it feels compared to OS X.

    Ok, this has turned into a ramble and I’m going to stop now.

  • Blubber-B-Gone

    I went to the doctor’s this morning before work and got some great news. Not only have I lost weight (8 pounds in the last two weeks!!!), but my blood pressure is down almost ten points on both the top and bottom. My cholesterol’s not bad either. His exact words were, “It’s not brilliant, but it’s not bad either.”

    He went so far as to tell me to slow down with the weight loss. He said a couple pounds a month is enough. At that point I told him to shut up and punched him in the stomach. No, really, I told him that I’m not doing anything crazy and that I’ve just cut out soda and have stopped going back for seconds. It doesn’t feel all that bad, actually. It’s something I think can keep up for the rest of my life and not miss out on anything. I can still eat the same things, just not as much. I miss the soda, but not enough to start drinking it again, except maybe the root beer at Sweetwater.

    I love good news first thing in the morning…