Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Bang, Bang – Oh, We WEREN’T Supposed to Sell You That Gun?

    What do you do when you can’t trust your government? Not that this is a new problem. Maybe I’m just paying more attention, or listening to All Things Considered more. This report angers me to no end. To sum up, the Administration and Congress have decided that some civil liberties are OK to destroy and others, like the right to buy automatic weapons and provide terrorist organizations with all the firepower they need is OK. Why is it OK? Because they’ve all sold their souls to Charlton Heston and the gun freaks in the NRA. They’ve tightened airport security, can hold people without trial or even a hearing, can do all kinds of things they shouldn’t – and still, you don’t have to go through a background check to buy a gun, and can ship 900 automatic weapons to Columbian Guerillas without telling anyone, and that’s fine.

    I just don’t get it. Is it the money? Is it power? Is it the fact that the NRA provides a certain amount of votes for those folks every time they’re up for re-election? The people who like guns really can have it both ways. I don’t see the problem with registering a gun. You have to do several registrations, tests and inspections to drive a car, why not to own a firearm? It makes no sense. We can have logical and responsible gun control. Why don’t we? Who do we have to get out of office to get it? Who do I have to vote for?

  • Guilt, Failures and Triumph

    It’s been an insane week. I would tell you about it, but I really can’t. It’s all work stuff: top secret and stressful and aggravating. Something that was supposed to work doesn’t, and everything I did to work around it, hack it, massage it, tickle it, talk dirty to it, etc, failed. So, it’s not going to happen until things change or we figure out a workable hack.

    And tomorrow, we go to Arizona, on separate planes. Why? Poor planning, mostly. I didn’t know how much time I was going to be able to take off, and we just put it off until it was too late to get on the same flight. So, Jen gets to fly with Max all alone and spend four hours in Houston. I take off an hour after her and get to Tucson two hours before she does. Fun, huh? Poor poor Jen. Me? I get my Powerbook, two batteries, a working installation of Movable Type, games and a book (I haven’t decided what to bring, Java in a Nutshell or JavaServer Pages). It’s totally unfair and I feel really bad, but it’s too late to change it now. I just have to come up with some way to make it up to her.

    I told you the other day about my shell script discovery. Well, I made another related discovery today. I’m pretty sure this would apply to the Windows version as well, but I don’t have PhotoShop 7 for Windows. In PS 7 for the Mac, you can create new Web Gallery templates!! To verify it, I just duplicated the Simple theme’s directory as “MT Import” and it showed up in the list of Styles under File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery. So, another task for the plane is to mess with my new directory and see if I can get Photoshop to create the import files for me. I’ll post the instructions when/if I figure it out.

    I am such a geek…

  • Max: King of the TP

    Max has been on a creative tear lately. He’s been making up interesting games, songs, etc. He’s also been full of energy from dawn to dusk and not taking naps. I guess he’s really three now.

    Last night, I came home from work to find Max and Jen sitting on the sunroom floor building “sand castles” out of pieces of toilet paper. Apparently, while Jen was downstairs doing laundry, Max found our stash of TP and decided he could make sand out of it. He ripped up the entire roll in the sunroom and proceeded to build things with it. When Jen came up, he hastily pointed out, “It’s sand!! I building SAND CASTLES!!!” I think he was trying to tell Jen he wasn’t being naughty, but had a reason for mutilating the roll. Jen, of course, sat down with him and started playing. When I got home, I took over with the camera. Max thought it was really cool to pick up a bunch of pieces, throw them up into the air and walk under them. We had a TP fight, made some TP origami, wore TP hats and Max stuffed a bunch of it down my shirt. Who knew TP could be so much fun?

  • Spiders, Wolfs and Steve McQueen, Oh My!

    Jen was sick this weekend so I ran to the local video store and grabbed some sick-movies. Here’s the recap:

    • Eight Legged Freaks: A small town in Arizona, dumbass, cute cop, colorful local characters… big scary monsters killing the population? Oh yeah, this is Tremors with more eyes and legs. The spiders were pretty cool for the most part. The only real problem I had with them is they had too much personality for spiders. I think it would have been better if they’d left the funny to the people (although with David Arquette, might want to let the spiders try the funnny). Altogether, it had some good moments, but it was completely forgettable. Perfect sick movie.

    • Brotherhood of the Wolf: Thankfully, Jen was feeling better by the time we started this one. I’d seen the trailers and thought it looked different. I figured, hey, it’s a werewolf movie, right? It’s French, and set in the late 18th century. The DVD offers either English dubbed, or French with English subtitles. I would go for the subtitles. The dubbing is sometimes distracting. Past the dubbing, I really liked this movie (and so did Jen!). It’s a period, horror, mystery, upstairs/downstairs, romance, political thriller. Yeah, really. It’s gorgeously shot, well-directed and paced just like you’d expect a French horror movie to be. The story is well-told, and we were fully involved even though the movie is pretty long. Definitely go rent it – and keep an open mind.

    Another possible title for this site: Sitting on my butt between the mainstream and the bleeding edge. It’s long, but I like it.

    My sister wrote all about the big bowling excursion last night. I bowled two 127’s in a row, which I’m pretty proud of. I haven’t bowled since the league ended last year, so woo-hoo me. There’s a certain freedom in bowling alleys. No one’s expecting anyone else to be quiet, prim, proper or even really that nice. Everything is in good fun. In that spirit, Heather and I came up with our new team motto that I’m thinking of having made into a t-shirt: We bowl straighter than Steve McQueen. Now, this may sound bad, but it’s really funny in context. Heather has this really funny approach and release because of her toe. She throws it straight down the alley, practically no spin. Hell, the ball doesn’t even hardly roll. It’s hilarious. So, that’s where my horrible motto came from… and I’m not apologizing for it.

  • Like Tide For Your Pics

    I’ve been visiting the site for a few weeks for the pictures, but wow, the Amelie Effect just posted at a.lifeuncommon.org is just the coolest! It makes the colors really pop out in an image. Cool stuff. If you’ve got PhotoShop 7, definitely check it out. She has some other cool unsharpitating (yes, i made it up) actions you can hoark as well.

    Remind me to tell you about The Brotherhood of the Wolf before I forget all about it. Work is rabid this week as I try to do everything in the world before we leave for Tucson on Saturday.

  • Again, Said Better Than I Ever Could

    Zeldman’s latest My Glamorous Life tells a story I could never write myself, and expresses things I will never have the talent to say. It’s beautiful to say the least.

  • I’m Not So Dumb AFTER All!

    Apparently, I’m not as dumb as I thought I was. I’ve been working on this photo blog because keeping them all on Max’s page just isn’t working. I wanted an easy way to create Movable Type export files from PhotoShop exported web galleries. Sounds reasonale enough, right? Since I’m doing all this on my Powerbook, I figured I could do it with a shell script. I’ve been procrastinating since I didn’t really want to deal with it. Here’s where the dumbitude comes in. I went poking around the /usr/bin directory and… TA-DA!!! I see tclsh and the light goes on. Duh. I know Tcl. I know Tcl better than most . So, last night I do a quick and ugly script that rips JPG’s from a directory and creates the export file; worked like a charm. Tonight, I created a holding directory where I can put all the web galleries. The new script reads in the directories, uses the directory name as the category, then reads all the images in the images directory and creates the entries. Then, it copies the images and thumbnails into two separate directories to make them easier to copy and returns the export file (which I pipe to a new file which contains aaaa-aaaall the entries). Smooth, huh? You wanna see it? Well, OK, if you really wanna, here it is. I may clean it up and put sweet happy comments in it, but it works.

  • Disgusting Polling

    It’s time to talk about Tuesday’s election. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and this has been boiling under the surface for a while. I’ve not been able to actually put it into words until (hopefully) now. Less than 40% of the country turned out to vote on Tuesday. That 40% changed the balance of power in this country, leading the way for a far-right President and his friends in Congress to implement their programs with little to no real resistance from the woefully disorganized Democrats.

    Why do we stand for this? Why don’t more people get involved? I don’t know for sure because I haven’t talked to everyone about it. I think it may be that no one thinks they can make a difference. It’s because nothing said by the candidates or elected officials in our country speaks to them and motivates them to make their voice heard. The fact that less than half of those eligible use their one real voice is a disgrace.

    The fact that we reelected the vast majority of representatives in both houses who since the last election voted against Congressional term limits and gave themselves a pay raise just amazes me.

    Instead of blaming people, our culture, our politicians, I’m going to try and find a way to fix it. How do we get more people involved in the political process? How we get those eligible voters who feel they’re either not represented or don’t see the connection between who represents them and the effects of the votes those representatives make on their daily lives. How? We start a revolution. Ok, put down your pitchforks and torches. I don’t mean that kind of revolution. Ever since the 2000 presidential election, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a viable third party in American politics. I think it’s time.

    What would this party be called? I don’t really care. What would it stand for? I’m not sure, but it should be centrist/left, supporting things like rational gun control, the absolute separation of church and state (if you want to pray while you’re at school, peachy keen, go right ahead, but we don’t need a moment of silence before class. if you need to pray during school, fine, set up a special room for those who need it, but no more ‘prayer in school’ laws), a logical and fact-based discussion of our nation’s drug, foreign and welfare policies, support public schools and advocate honest dealing with foreign nations. Yeah, it’s a tall order and everything’s up for discussion.

    I’m not really going to start a political party. I’m not charismatic or enthusiastic enough. I hope someone else does. I’d support it because I’m disgusted with the two parties I have to choose from. The Republicans prey on the God-fearing and crazy, leading them on with the promise to overturn Roe v Wade, keep the liberal freaks who want to take their guns away and create some law that will bring God back into school in order to keep getting elected and keep feeding the bank accounts of themselves and their big business patrons. The Democrats have lost the middle and their message and are an incoherent mess. They’ve decided that they can’t fight the President and are still so shocked they lost the 2000 Election and now the Senate, it may be decades before they recover.

    See, it really is time for a third party. Who wants to start it?

  • Your Computer is What?!

    My mom and little brother bought Max a $5 laptop last week with Windows 3.1 on it. It’s an ancient Texas Instruments with a floppy and clip-on trackball. Max loves it. It stays at mom’s house and Max plays with it when we come over.

    We were over there for dinner last night. We were sitting at the table talking like we always do and Max was in the living room playing with his new favorite toy. We heard some frustrated grunting and the stomp of little feet walking towards the dining room. Max opened the door and with a sullen look on his face declared, “My computer’s dick!” Of course, we all lost it. Thankfully, Jen translated for us that his computer’s really just “sick”, but his computer being “dick” is really much funnier. I’m going to start using it in every day parlance. “How’s my computer? It’s dick!”

    Think it’ll catch on?

  • RRrrrrrramblin’ Geek

    The network was down here at work for about half an hour. It’s amazing how connected I have to be in order to do my job. Everything I do here entails connecting to some external system, getting data, formatting it and then spitting it out somewhere else. When the connection is broken, there’s nothing to do but sit and wait.

    Before the network went down, I installed Webmin on the uberBox (Dual-Xeon Linux Monster). I have to say that I’m extremely impressed with its features and ease-of-use. It was a cinch to install (rpm –install webmin*.rpm), run and connect to. The best part is the MySQL admin tool, because MySQL pretty much sucks when it comes to providing any usable admin interface. With MySQL up and running, a db created and users set up, my pal Al can go create cool Perl-based calendars and stuff without having to use AOLserver’s Tcl interface that we have set up for Postgres (he don’t like Tcl so much).

    Yes, this is a geeky ramble, but what else am I going to do? The network’s down and I’m stuck here staring at code that has nothing to do.

    While we wait, let’s talk about RedHat 8, shall we? Guys, what happened? RedHat 7.3 was the coolest, most stable Linux distro I’d ever had the pleasure to use (yes, even more stable than when I had YellowDog on my Powerbook. I had high hopes for 8.0. I’d heard great things from beta testers and the press. As soon as it was released, I hopped on an FTP mirror, downloaded and burned it and installed it. The installation went fine. Booting up went fine, and then the problems began. While it certainly is pretty, it’s really unstable for me. Even simple commands like ls take an inordinate amount of time on directories that don’t have a lot of files in them. The telnet server didn’t come pre-installed. There were other things missing that I can’t remember now. KDE won’t even start up. GNOME works, but it’s almost too pretty. It won’t work correctly when I choose the mouse I actually have (not a weird one either, a regular old PS/2 Intellimouse), and I had to switch back to the regular 2-button profile. No scroll wheel!! How will I get anything done?!!

    Ok, enough of that. I apologize for this post. It would have been about the election, but I’m still too angry about all of it to talk about it here.