Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • I like David Coursey. He’s

    I like David Coursey. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but asks some good questions, and loves starting a fight. His latest missive, the ill-researched, by the seat of his pants Can a Windows User Learn to Love Linux? is hilarious. He wrote is as he was installing Red Hat. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness. To answer his question, yes, a Windows user can learn to love Linux. I did. I love it for its power, speed and all of the tasty stuff that comes with it.

    Learning to love Linux is like learning to cook or speak a new language. At first, it sucks, and things don’t make sense. But, the more you use it, the more you dig into documentation and talk to those who know, the better it gets and easier it is to use. Depending on the distro, it’s not “You opened the box and it tells you how to use it right off”. You have to learn in order to love it, and that’s the beauty.

  • So, mozblog works finally! It’s

    So, mozblog works finally! It’s extremely cool. If you use Mozilla and have a blog, go get it today. It gives you a nice little editing window rigth in your browser with the ability to post, edit and delete posts on the fly without going to Blogger.

    In other news, I went to the doctor this morning about the cough. I have some chest infection and get to take antibiotics for the next week. The best news was that, though I haven’t lost weight, I haven’t gained any since I saw him in March. I’ve got a new plan. I don’t even need to diet, since I don’t eat a lot of junk food now. I just need to eat a little less and do a little exercize and the weight should start coming off. I started yesterday by buying some tilapia at Costco. Have you ever tried tilapia? It’s tasty stuff. It’s a light white fish without a big fishy flavor. It’s nice and firm without being dense, and saute’s nicely. Good stuff… Jen might even like it, and she hates fish.

  • Why is it that I

    Why is it that I always leave feeling like my clothes are on backwards when I go to the chiropractor?

  • Do you have OS X?

    Do you have OS X? Do you still love Unix? Oh, brother, then do I have something for you! Go check out Fink. It’s a easy way to get Unix packages installed and running in OS X. Sweet, sweet ingenuity.

  • He Shoots, He Scores!! I

    He Shoots, He Scores!!

    I took my little brother (ok, he’s not that little anymore, but I’m still bigger and older) to the Thrift Store so he could look for a new monitor (in my day, there were no computer parts in thrift stores, just crap). While he was testing, I wandered the store looking for anything to keep my interest. I stumbled into a pile of CD’s, covered in dust and under some magazines. I had hit it – the Thrift Store Motherload. My other brother and I used to wander the pawn shops and thrift stores of Mississippi in search of the fabled Motherload – that secret stash of amazing music (or comic books at the time) that the owner is oblivious to the value of. We found many. I am sorely out of practice, and haven’t gone out looking for the sweet vein of value in a long time.

    But here, I had stumbled into it. I got:

    • Orbital – Sides: It has one of the greatest “I’m a spy” songs ever on it.
    • Loop Guru – Amrita: Not sure what it is, but it was stuck between Orbital and…
    • Jesus Jones – Doubt: Who doesn’t need a copy of Right Here, Right Now? I have no idea when it will come in useful, but I know it will pay off one day.
    • Orb – Orbus Terrarum: The Orb are the same group that did the Little Fluffy Clouds song from the VW commercial.
    • Live! In Concert: An Alligator Records collection of live stuff. It has a bunch of stuff from the amazing Koko Taylor who I saw live a couple times in Tucson.

    It was a small vein, but it was just enough of a reminder to bring back all those memories of muggy summer days in our crappy Cavalier, wandering the countryside in search of cheap treasures.

  • Go Away, Bill I despise

    Go Away, Bill

    I despise Bill Walton as a basketball announcer. He’s a flagrant Lakers supporter, biased, banal and annoying. His mock-gravitas is grating. His unending garbage metaphor and purile catch phrases make watching the games almost unbearable. I find myself muting the commentary instead of subjecting myself to the buck-toothed wonder. I hope ESPN is smart enough to realize that they can do better than Mr. Walton. Please, a team of Dick Vitale, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Gilbert Gottfried would be better than anyone and Bill Walton.

    On a related note, how much of a let down have the Finals been? The Lakers/Kings series was awesome. It was the best basketball I’ve seen in years, and brought me back. Of the two and a half games in the Finals so far, it’s just been depressing. New Jersey is completely overmatched by the Lakers. Now that Shaq is hitting free throws, it’s pretty much over. It’s predictable, boring basketball. Snooze-o-rama.

  • Vanilla Coke taste vaguely like

    Vanilla Coke taste vaguely like Robitussin.

  • Back to the back I

    Back to the back

    I think I like the new colors… they’re growing on me. Now, I just need to move things around. You know what my favorite part is? I didn’t have to go to Blogger and mess with my template or any of the other pages on the site. All I did was change my stylesheet, and voila, new look. And moving things around will be the exact same exercise. Position this, position that, ::poof:: all done. I love CSS.

  • If I had disposable income

    If I had disposable income (and a lot of it), I would buy this faster than you can say “money pit on wheels”.

  • The Incompetance Mirror I’ve been

    The Incompetance Mirror

    I’ve been attentively watching the media tempest around the things the FBI and CIA missed before September 11th. It seems that we had all the clues and just didn’t put them together. There seems to be a lot of gnashing of teeth over this. The rhetoric is hip-deep and rising, and it amazes me. Knowledge management is an incredibly difficult concept to grasp, much less implement reliably. While things could have been done better, I don’t think crucifying Directory Mueller is going to help anything. From everything I’ve seen and read so far, he’s doing what needs to be done. He’s streamlining the processes of the Bureau, implementing better knowledge management and will probably fix it.

    I’ve been thinking about how complex a knowledge management system would have to be to have figured out all of the things congress and the media were expecting this mythical system to figure out. The system would have to take data in many formats (wire taps, field reports, eye witness statements, satellite scans, etc), index it, compare it against all other documents in the system, find links between people, all their aliases, organizations, their leadership, membership, locations, etc and spit out usable results. It’s a massive task, one that from what I know of Government bureaucracy, hasn’t been built yet, and will take a long time to get done. I work at a very large company, and we don’t have a company-wide knowledge management system, even though I’m sure it would save us millions of dollars every year in saved effort and combined infratstructure. We rebuild the wheel over and over because we don’t know what the group next door is doing.

    If big business, who actually keep track of the money they make and spend, can’t keep track of its own institutional knowledge, how can we expect the slow moving leviathan that is the government to figure this out overnight, or even in six months.

    I hope the Government (and all their institutions public and secret) get the clue and come looking to the private sector and education to figure this problem out.

    I’ve got some ideas, and I’ll probably talk about them some more later (and this would probably make more sense if I weren’t watching The Wire while trying to write this).