Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • 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.

  • Please, Mr. TiVo

    Jen and I have talked about this one a couple times, and man, I wish TiVo would just do it. TiVo should have playlists. For example, say you have a two year old who loves Blue’s Clues and you’re exhausted because said toddler woke up too early. Wouldn’t it be great to hit the Keep Max Happy playlist, put it on repeat, and escape to the couch for more sleep? Yeah, that’s what I thought.