Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • What about a Pop Tart in the dryer?

    From The Salon article about The OC finale: every scene with [Mischa Barton] in it had a way of reminding you that you had a Pop Tart in the toaster or laundry in the dryer.\
    I have absolutely no idea what this means, but I kind of love it anyway. Mischa has been soooo bad on this show, it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork. (Thankfully I stopped watching a long while ago, so no sporking needed.) What I really want to know is, what happened to the wonderful young actress first noticed on Once & Again?\
    Here is a blurb about The CW from some tv critic: the combination alone of Veronica Mars, Smallville, Gilmore Girls and Supernatural guarantee the single best network schedule since the amazing, never-to-be-equaled, 2000-01 WB season that included Buffy, Angel, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, Gilmore Girls, Roswell, Popular and Charmed… (emphasis all mine)\
    I guess I don’t have to be that embarrassed to watch The CW then! Though, to keep my cool points from totally plummeting, I must say that HBO is the second-most watched network in my house. Well, not counting Nick, Jr. 🙂

  • WWW2006 and Me

    I’m headin’ to Scotland tomorrow for WWW2006, where I’ll be presenting twice:

  • Speaking of crappy tv…

    Here is some kiddie TMI. Max has been having a frequent urination problem for the last month. He has to go about every 10 minutes and it is causing a lot of problems. His poor teacher has called me three times about it. I took him to the doctor immediately after the first call, but the doc didn’t do anything except determine Max didn’t have a UTI. We went again, this time to see our regular caretaker. She was very thorough and even sussed out that he had strep throat even though he didn’t have any symptoms! Yay for her. We love her. I should totally send her a muffin basket. Anyway, after some X-rays, it was determined Max was constipated. Poor kid. After a week of prune juice and 4 days of a prescription laxative, he finally pooped lastnight. Twice. Yay for doodoo! Brian keeps sneaking off with the prune juice, so his diapers have been extra full lately. So, in essence, yay for poop.\
    ETA- wow, there isn’t a poop tag already set. That is really funny to me considering the family I married into. I joke that the Lawver Sr family motto is “It all comes down to poop with this family” because whenever the four kids (who are all adults, actually) get together, stories get a little personal. Heh.

  • TV is cooler than real life

    Studio 60 Preview looks awesome! Slide over, Grey’s Anatomy. You’ve got some competition headin’ your way. Too bad there are four decent things on Thursdays at 9pm. Can’t The Powers That Be spread out the good shows a little? Sheesh.\
    The CW video montage looks like a big pile of teen cheese. (And can you believe they renewed 7th Heaven? What was with the big finale commercials I saw for a month?) Those 7th Heaven clips really don’t belong in there. But neither does Veronica Mars, which is actually a great show, nor Supernatural, which is just the right kind of awesome cheese (unlike One Tree Hill and Smallville). Honestly though, I think The CW will be the network I watch the most. Good thing I am not lactose intolerant! Hee. (I bet Kevin regrets ever deciding to work late those many years ago, which is when I discovered Dawson’s Creek on The WB.)\
    Seeing The CW come together has been kind of interesting. I wonder how things will shake out this next year.

  • AIM Pages and Safari

    I’ve seen this now a couple places, and figured I’d comment on it (not in an official way, but in a “I feel your pain” way). The current falderal is about AIM Pages and Safari and how it doesn’t work yet. We tried, honest we did. But, Safari has certain “issues” with its DOM support (it’s a standard, ya know) and other javascript features. We did our best to work around them and get things working, but when it came down to crunch time, we had to concentrate on the big two (Firefox and IE). We will support Safari. We’re actually very close, just have a few annoying things to work around and it’ll be done. We love Safari. All us Mac users on the team were really sad that we had to drop it for the first release. But, we had to.\
    It actually has very little to do with standards compliance. No modern browser is fully DOM 2 compliant. No modern browser is fully CSS 2.1 compliant. They all have quirks. We’ve found more one-line crash-causing javascript commands working on this project than I can count. We’ve found things to hate in all the browsers.\
    I used to think that browsers were in a pretty good place, especially Firefox and Safari. I was wrong. They’re all too slow, too quirky and aren’t reliable enough. They all crash too easily, take too much work to do things the “right” way, and in most cases, it’s actually better to do things the wrong way because that’s the way the browsers “like” it. For example, it’s way faster, takes less code and uses less CPU to use innerHTML than creating DOM nodes and appending them. If the right way’s not the right way, it’s the wrong way. Until the browsers actually reward using the standard, there isn’t much point. The rewards for using semantic and valid markup, and good CSS are well known. There aren’t a lot of rewards right now for using the DOM.\
    But, where was I? Oh yeah, Safari… we’re working on it.

  • Yippee-Skippy, Howdee da Doooo!

    Veronica Mars was renewed for season 3! Let’s do the dance of happy, happy, joy, joy:\
    It’s just a jump to the left\
    And then a step to the right\
    With your hands on your hips\
    You bring your knees in tight\
    But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,\
    Let’s do the renew dance again!\
    If you people don’t start watching though… Well, then you’re all dead to me. Especially you young, hip, cool ones in the targeted demographic!

  • Oy!

    Kevin just told me he isn’t going to take me out for dinner on my birthday like I wanted. I guess I said “no” one too many times. Heh. I am so going to ask my daddy to take me out instead, since he is coming to town tomorrow. Ha, take that, Kev!\
    (Kevin is going to Scotland on Saturday, so he isn’t simply snubbing me.)\
    This works out well enough for me though, since I am over having birthdays anyway. I’ll get my dad to take me out and then head back to my house for cake. Yay cake!

  • I’m 31 going on 2!

    I told Kevin “no” the other day, for what I think was the first time ever since we’ve been married. Turns out, he misstated some of the info, so my no was moot. I am really close to telling him no about something else and just now I told him no again. None of these issues or questions are really important, but it is interesting that they are all happening in the same week. I think I may be drunk on the power. Mwuhahaha!

  • Mother’s Day

    I had the best Mother’s Day ever yesterday. Kevin got up with the kids, without any begging, prompting, or hinting from me. When I finally woke up, at the glorious hour of 9:30, he made me a plate of strawberries and cool whip to snack on while he whipped up a fabulous mushroom and cheese omelet. Then I opened presents and goofed off pleasantly with the boys. My in-laws gave me flowers and a scented candle. Isn’t that nice? It was such a nice morning, makes me actually look forward to next year’s. Big thanks to Kevin, Max, Brian, and the Lawvers.

  • The Strawberry Stealer

    I made a lovely plate of strawberries and cool whip for Jen this morning (I also made her an omelette and toast, and got up with the kids at 6:15 this morning). Brian, ever the sneaker, decided that he’d like to share and promptly took over at the wheel. Jen caught the crime in progress. See for yourself (you’ll need Quicktime to see it… you probably already have it).