Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Hellish Shellfish

    I’m feeling better. No more nausea, and just a little sleepy from staying up too late last night. This weekend was pretty good in spite of my bout with the shrimp. We rented movies for the first time in several months and had pretty good luck with all of them. If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you’ll remember that I used to do my weekend movie wrapup, but since we got DirecTV and TiVo, we don’t rent movies very often. This weekend, no one was feeling well, so we broke down and made the trip to the video store. Here’s the wrap-up in chronological order:

    • Rockstar: I couldn’t sit through this movie. Marky Mark’s character was too much like Dirk Diggler from Boogie Nights. Earnest, naive and well, dim. The downfall was completely apparent and the only difference between his character in Boogie Nights and this movie was the cheesy ending (I came back in time to see the ending… stupid me). Jason Flemyng did have a nice little part as the closeted frontman though. It was a small part, but he really pulled it off.

    • Evolution: I wasn’t expecting this movie to be as funny as it was. If you liked the Sci-Fi comedies of the 80’s (Spaceballs, Darkstar, Ice Pirates), you’ll love this movie. The sci-fi element of the movie is actually kind of interesting, and well, that’s a shock. I figured it would be a vehicle for a bunch of booger jokes. The cast pulls off the comedy well without making it the focus of the movie. They balanced the “Hey, we’re people fighting aliens” with the “Look at me, I’m that guy from the 7-Up commercials being funny!”. Fun movie – and get the DVD. The deleted scenes are actually worth watching.

    • American Pie 2: I was surprised. I thought this one was funnier than the original. It’s no great film, but it is funny. Allyson Hannigan was especially good in a much larger part than in the previous flick. Speaking of, Jen’s been watching Buffy almost non-stop for the past few months (thank you, TiVo), and I’ve been impressed with Allyson’s chops. She’s got great comedy instincts while still keeping that innocent redhead vibe. And remember, you’re a special boy. The DVD is great. The outtakes and deleted scenes are worth watching, and the original casting tapes are funny just to see the casts initial impressions of the characters and compare it to the final product.

    I guess I should say something about the Super Bowl. We turned on the pre-game stuff at 6, because we thought kick-off was at 6:20. Oh no! We had to watch a bunch of old football players read the Declaration of Independance and then watch a bunch of other non-football patriotic shmaltz for 35 minutes. I can’t imagine anyone sitting through ALL of the pre-game. I was sick of it after five minutes. I’m patriotic, but I don’t need the Declaration of Independance read to me by guys who were probably reading it for the first time. I don’t need everything Hallmark-ized for me. It’s a football game. Once the game started, it was great. The Patriots shut down the Rams like no one has all year. It was amazing to watch. And what happened to the Rams defense? They turned into the crew from last year. It’s like they thought they already had the game won before they stepped on the field and by the time they really started trying in the fourth quarter, they had too far to go and not enough time to get there. Kurt Warner was hurt, and that’s excusable, but it looked like they just weren’t trying very hard. Great game though. Too bad it’s the last real game until next fall.

  • Lessons Learned

    No more sushi for me. I didn’t sleep well (it doesn’t help that Max has a cold and has been completely unpleasant today – waking up at 6:30). My head is swollen, throat is sore and nausea is the general theme. I think the sushi was fine. It certainly tasted fine. I think I’ve developed an allergy to shrimp. It’s the weirdest thing. I love shrimp. I used to be able to eat it all the time and in large quantities without getting so much as heartburn. But, around Christmas, I tried some and got a little queasy, with the same sore throat. With my short memory, I had a shrimp roll yesterday and well, here we are today. Is that possible? Instant food allergies?

    Well, either way, I’m miserable. Max is miserable, and we’re not getting along. It’s really hard to understand a stuffed-up toddler with a pacifier in his mouth when my head feels like a cinder block, and my throat feels like I’ve swallowed one. We’ve watched Blue’s Clues all day, and it’s driving me nuts. Every time I try to watch something else, he throws a phlegmy fit and I give in before my brain explodes.

    Let’s hope one of us feels better tomorrow…

  • The sushi from lunch is

    The sushi from lunch is not agreeing with me. I bet I’ll have some colorful dreams tonight. Here’s a tip for the uninitiated: sashimi is raw.

  • Don’t Say I Never Participate

    Yours truly is sponsoring the Bad Hair Blog category of the Anti-Bloggies this year. Want to see what I’m offering as the prize? You have to go check out the contest to see.

  • Oh, and the best part

    Oh, and the best part about working here? We make up codenames and stupid words for things and then don’t tell anyone what they are. So, if you go to a meeting with another group, they have their own codenames and stupid words. It’s so like speaking another language that the first thirty minutes of the meeting is spent coming up with translations for each group’s terms and agreeing on what to call them for the second thirty minutes of the meeting, at which point everyone forgets the new words and confuses the living hell out of everyone for the rest of the meeting. After the meeting, we send out e-mails with the new glossary and translation charts, which everyone then prints multiple copies of, binds and then stick on a shelf – because we’re a technology company, and that’s how we store information.

  • Dynamicizin’

    You know what I love about our industry? We make up words. We make up stupid words. At AOL, we make up stupid acronyms and codenames for things. The other day, I was in a meeting about a project to add dynamic content to a currently static product. It was me and a bunch of uber-geeks and we were struggling to describe the process of taking this static content and making it dynamic. That’s when I made up Dynamicize. So, this is how the rest of the meeting went, with frowns from the guy with no sense of humor:

    Me: So, it gets dynamitated after it leaves System X and before it gets to System Y or does it happen somewhere else?

    Other Guy With Sense of Humor: No, the dynamicization happens between System Y and System Z, as you can clearly see in my squiggly lined illustration on the white board.

    Guy With No Sense of Humor: Ok, the process to create this dynamic content happens here (points to white board, frowns, head explodes).

    and… scene.

  • I am hooked.

    I am hooked.

  • Blues That Fit in Your Hand

    Whenever I wonder why I don’t have a PDA, I try to think of this. That’s what a handheld should do. And yes, I don’t have a cell either. I just have my lovely work-provided two-way pager. I don’t want an electronic calendar. I want a phone, browser and organizer all in one. Soon, it will be possible, and then I’ll think about getting one. I’ve held out this long, I can wait. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

  • Give it to me now!!!!

    I know I’ve been slacking about posting, but I have perfectly valid reasons. Like anything with life, stuff runs hot and cold. Work is hot right now. Blogging – eh – not so hot. I’ll still post daily, but probably not the deluge I had been offering. Also, life is hot. Max has decided that sleeping is not his ‘thing’ at the moment, and that means everyone at the Lawver house is doing a little adjusting. Jen’s not getting her normal nap because Max isn’t taking his. We’re staying up later because Max is. We’re getting up earlier, cuz, yet again, Max is. So, we’re making due with Carry-Out and lots of help from my family (and moral support from her parents in Tucson). Once I wake up, I’m sure I’ll be all chatty and sharing again.

    In the sharing vein (which, kids, you should never do. Remember, sharing veins is for foreigners and weirdos. If you share veins, the terrorists have already won! Ok, you can ignore me now.), I’ve rediscovered iTunes radio tuner feature, and am totally addicted to Groove Salad. It’s trancey, groovy and conducive to half-awake coding.

    In good work news, my new LogCrunching machine should be here in the next week or so. It will be berry berry nice:

    • Dual Xeon 1.7ghz

    • 1gb Rambus RAM

    • 2 36gb SCSI hard drive

    • nVidia Quadro2 video card w/ 64 mb

    • dual NICS

    • RedHat 7.2

    • Sweet free mouse pad

    What will I be doing with this machine? I’ll be crunching lots of files and extracting numbers from them like a SuperJuicer. How? I can’t post the code or anything, but I’ll be using AOLserver because it does a great job of scheduling jobs and I already know it. I’ll use Postgres to dump the numbers into. It will be lots and lots of fun and give me my desktop machine back so I don’t have to run the numbers I run now on it. A winner all around.

  • My poor little Powerbook.

    My poor little Powerbook. I have one of the older G3’s with the bronze keyboard (pre-firewire). It’s been through so many complete wipes and re-installs that I think it’s having a personality conflict. After getting tired of waiting for OS X to load anything, I’ve decided to switch to YellowDog 2.1 again now that Ximian‘s available.

    What’s funny is I don’t really use it for anything. I used to take it home and use it for MAME. Now I use my poor little Dell laptop for Civ3. So, I’m turning the Powerbook into my little crash machine where I can play with compiling kernels and other geeky stuff.

    Speaking of geeky. I’m sliding down the slippery slope of complete geekhood. I had a dream in code the other night. I now speak Tcl better than I speak English. I find it harder and harder to relate to non-geeks. I have dark circles under my eyes. I wear geeky shirts – like today. I got this nice polo from the guys at Overture, and well, I’m wearing it. I also got really excited yesterday when I got mail from the guys at YellowDog saying they’d posted my Howto and are sending me a t-shirt.

    I need to start painting that huge canvas in the basement. I need to read that book. I need to stop thinking about work all the time and get a good night’s sleep.