Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • The Weekend Entertainment Roundup

    It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I actually got out this weekend (with the sniper on the loose, that’s a feat). Here’s the roundup, in chronological order:

    • The Transporter: So, they gave Turkish from Snatch a chance at his own action movie. Jason Statham is perfect for the action hero thing. He’s buff, has an accent, can deliver catch phrases with a bit of flair and just looks like a guy who could kick a whole boatload of ass if he needed to. That said, the movie was a joke. There were some good fights, but overall, it should have gone straight to video or HBO. Jason Statham and the French cop were the only roles with any depth (and even then, you could see the bottom). The bad guy was a third rate menacer who tried to look tough by feigning constipation and a Sling Blade-like grimage. The other bad guy kept making me laugh because he was the same guy who played to gay club owner in Good Morning Vietnam and had the world’s worst rug on his wrinkled little head. The opening car chase would have been fun if the guy had watched a little less Gone in Sixty Seconds and a bit more Ronin (sorry, at a loss for good car chases this morning…). There were so many jump cuts, it was hard to keep up. If it had been directed better, the sequence could have been top notch. There were a couple other funny inconsistencies like a Cessna going from “graze the powerlines on the highway” to 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds so Jason Statham could jump out of the plane, but it was fun. The fight in the bus garage with the oil was one of the most original fights I’ve seen in a long time, and Jason Statham chews up the scenery when given the chance and more than three words to say at a time. So, rent it when it comes out if you want to see Turkish kick some butt in toe clips (don’t ask), but don’t see it in the theater.

    • Twister: I’ve been watching the DVD on and off just to play with the sound on the new TV. I loved this movie when it first came out. What happened? It has an early (and weird) performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Carey Elwes with another in his pantheon of horrible accents. I think the problem I have with it now is the amazing Wooden Bill Paxton. He just lumbers through each line he has. I liked him in A Simple Plan, and he’s done good work in other movies, but man, he was just wretched in that movie.

    • The Sopranos: It’s nice to see that the first episode didn’t set the tone for the whole season. Last night’s episode was great. The only problem I have is Janice. She bugs me, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s that I know too many emotional vultures like her. Maybe it’s the fact that I like the actress, and feel bad that she’s written so unevenly on the show. She goes from complete wreck to her mother in the span of fifteen minutes. Maybe that’s what she’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t fit for me.

    • Sunday Night Football: Wow, what a game. I started watching in the middle of the second quarter, and didn’t leave until the last couple seconds. There weren’t a ton of points scored, but it was the best game I’ve seen all season. It came down to two long field goals in the last five minutes, and either team deserved to win it. There were so many great defensive plays! It was just amazing. If you missed it, you missed the reason I love the NFL.

  • Puzzling Evidence

    The latest evidence that public education is going right down the crapper? In Virginia, the test you have to take before you can progress to the next grade is called the SOL. An adult who should know better came up with that! Next thing you know, kids will have to take the BBW before they can take gym, the STFU before Study Hall and the WTF before they can take Calculus. People, come on! I am shocked and appalled that Virginia did worse than Mississippi on the “You gots to takes this test so’s we knows we taughts you right” test. Mississippi’s is the FLE, which isn’t bad. I don’t giggle when I say FLE, although, if Oh Brother had come out at the time, I would have asked that they change the name of the test to the R-U-N-N-O-F-T, which suits Mississippi a little better than FLE.

  • T-Shirts Forthcoming

    Ok, they’re not really because I wouldn’t go so far as to actually make any, but we came up with a really great one tonight that I may submit to t-shirt hell (not for the faint of heart). I want a picture of Della Reese in boxing gloves with a nice cursivey font above the picture saying, Punched by an Angel. Yeah, it’ll sell a million!

  • Wearing a New Hat (a Red One)

    I got my uberBox at work upgraded to RedHat 8.0 today. It’s nice. The dithered fonts in XWindows look really good, and the admin tools actually work (as opposed to things like the X Services Tool in 7.2). There were some glaring omissions like ksh and the telnet server made in either the pursuit of ease-of-use or danger avoidance, but if you’re behind a firewall, telnet’s just fine to have installed.

    So, the lesson today kids is to choose the “Custom” option and install what you want. Don’t expect “Workstation” to actually have everything you use in it.

    And in non-geeky news, Jen and Max are coming home tonight instead of tomorrow. They were going to go to the beach, but because it’s been raining for three days, and is supposed to keep dripping right on through the weekend, they’re coming back. Last night was kind of tough. It was really boring without anyone to talk to, and no Max to play with. I didn’t know when to go to bed, partly because I didn’t want to go up there by myself. I’m glad they’re coming back tonight…

  • It’s So NEW!

    I’m learning a new language. Yes, I’m doing it. I forgot how much fun it is to jump into something brand new and see it work. We’re moving to Java/JSP/Tomcat at work, and that means that I get to switch from my beloved AOLserver to the strange world of virtual application urls, beans, servlets and JSP tags.

    To make this fun, I found the fabulous Apache2/Tomcat bundle from the kind folks at Server Logistics. The setup was virtually painless past doing some configuration (that’s unfortunately not in their readme). So, I’ve replaced the Apache that comes with OS X with Apache 2 and a JSP engine. I’ve now written my first jsp. It’s ugly, but it works. I can now include files, do neat-o for loops, switches and if statements. I do like that you can switch from code snippet to regular HTML mid-process (like int he middle of an if statement). You can’t do that with AOLserver, which means you sometimes have problems with escaping quotes.

    I’m looking forward to this move. This afternoon was a lot of fun.

    In sad news, Jen and Max are in Pennsylvania with my mom for the next couple days. I’m aaaa-aaaall alone, which explains why I’m still at work.

  • Stupid Questions

    Inspired by a comment about this post, I’ve decided that I have a new life’s passion. I’ve been searching for something for a while, and well, I’ve found something that fits my speed perfectly. What do I want to do? I want to become the world’s first fat, white Tai Chi Bad-Ass. I want to be able to slowly and methodically whoop anyone in the world. I’ll start out with the old and decrepit, then move to the folks who fall into the unfortunate category, “fatter than me”, and whoop on them with my fluid (molasses is a fluid) moves. Eventually, I’ll be able to beat anyone, or at least bore them to death.

    Does Tai Chi have belts?

  • Three, Two, One, RIBBIT!!

    My med student little brother and his wife the accountant sent Max a lovely birthday card and little stuffed tree frog. It’s a lovely green and orange frog with big amber eyes.

    Max opened the card himself, and then wouldn’t give it to us to read it to him. He wanted to read it himself. ‘Lo and behold, he did! He read the entire ten line poem Tim wrote in the card all by himself. We only had to interpret one word (which I’m blaming on Tim’s penmanship, not Max’s reading ability). It was just amazing.

    After reading the car, Max opened the frog and went nuts. He loves it. We decided it needed a name and started giving Max options, Fred, George and my personal favorite, Pesto (to go along with the little British Palace Guard Heather got him on her trip to London named Basil). He looked at us after each suggestion, then looked at the frog. Then, he declared with finality, “His name is Rocketship!” He then started teaching Rocketship to blast-off and ran the poor little frog around the house. I think three is going to be a good year.

  • Too Quickly Forgotten

    You know how you read something really great, but after a while it slowly slips away and you forget all about it? That’s happened to me and Bone. It’s this amazing comic by Jeff Smith, full of wonder, humor action and amazing characters and it just slipped out the backdoor of my mind without so much as a good-bye.

    I think Max would love it… maybe for Christmas (shhhh, don’t tell him).

  • The Top Secret Trust Task Force

    Did we learn anything new from the President’s speech tonight? Not really. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ve heard/read it all before. I still have serious concerns about the motivations behind this sudden drive for armed conflict in Iraq, but the evidence is compelling. I’ve read some of the evidence against Iraq, and am ashamed that my own country knew about the chemical attacks on his own people and in some cases even supplied the chemical agents to Iraq during that country’s war with Iran (another case of the U.S. supporting the lesser of two evils).

    What really bothers me is that this is yet another case of a regime we supported with money, arms, and an unknown quantity of “other” things coming back to become a threat. I understand the need for backdoor diplomacy. I know we need intelligence and espionage, but I would be much more comfortable with the President’s case if our rapsheet were much shorter, and there were fewer members of the Administration involved with Interests that could benefit from a new regime.

    What would make me feel better? I don’t know. I think I’m past the point of arguing against the use of force in Iraq. I just want my government to stop supporting the enemy of our enemy, even though the regime we’re supporting is only slightly less evil than our enemy. If our government (including our politicians) were more trustworthy and honest. If the motivation behind policies were more transparent, and Dick Cheney had his “Energy Task Force” meetings in public where we could all witness what happensed.

    My real problem? I don’t trust George W. Bush. I don’t trust Dick Cheney. I don’t trust Congress. I don’t have faith that the CIA, FBI, DEA, ATF or any other acronymed agency can stop a determined maniac from killing me. Has it always been this way? Was Abraham Lincoln trustworthy? Was FDR? Harry Truman? What happened? If it was never the way it should have been, what can we do to make it that way?

  • I Don’t Know an Alias From A Join In The Ground

    In the spirit of learning something new every day (and the fact that the way I was doing it took 20 minutes each time I ran the query), I learned how to select aliased tables with Postgres today. For those of you who aren’t geeky, you may want to skip this post altogether.

    I’ve been using SQL when I had to for almost five years now and never run into a spot where I’d do something like this, but it worked really really well and runs a whole lot faster than the old way (mostly because I was doing a JOIN of a table with almost a million records to one with 250k records).

    I know the suspense is killing you… how do you do it? This example is completely unrelated to what I’m actually using it for, because it’s work related. Let’s say you have a table full of used car ads and you want to get each distinct manufacturer and how many ads there are for each of those manufacturers. Now, if you have a separate table of car makers, this is fairly easy. But, let’s (for sake of my precious example) say manufacturer is a free text field where the user can enter whatever they want. To get out the list of manufacturers and the number of cars ordered by most often listed, you could do the following:

    select distinct lower(manufacturer) as carmaker,(select count(*) from car_ads where manufacturer = carmaker) as car_count from (select lower(manufacturer) from $table where timestamp between $begin and $end) as all_ads order by car_count desc,carmaker

    How cool is that? You can create a virtual table with a select statement from either the same table or a separate one. You could even join your virtual table with another virtual table for even MORE fun!