Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Driving In Foreign Countries

    I’ve never driven in a foreign country. When we drove around Ireland, I made Porter do all the driving. Now, I’m going to France for the Plenary, and I’m renting a car. The only thing that’s making me less jittery about doing so is having a friend who lives there and is feeding me driving tips for driving on the Riviera like:

    • Traffic coming from the right has right-of-way unless they have a solid white line or dashed white line.
    • Always lock your doors while driving
    • No turning on red
    • France now has speed cameras, and they’re not friendly.\
      Oh, and I have Doctor Who on my iPod. MoviesForMyiPod rules.

  • Brian the dramatist

    When Brian is told “no”, he throws his hands in the air, looks up toward heaven, slowly flops backwards, rolls halfway on one side, and then half on the other side. And then he is done. It is really funny. Except for the times when there is something behind him that he falls on. I guess that happened one too many times, and now usually he falls forward. But his hands are busy being thrown into the air, so they can’t brace his forward fall, so he lands face first into the carpet. Heh, kids are funny.

  • Progressive Progress

    A couple updates from the weekend (and the end of last week) before I get back to work:\
    I am now a member of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee. I joined officially last week. I’m still not sure what all that means other than attending committee meetings and brushing up on Robert’s Rules Of Order, but it feels good to be more involved in the process.\
    In ankle news, I wore a “regular” shoe all morning after physical therapy. I broke down around 1 and put the Velcro Nightmare back on, but I was walking around in a matching pair of hiking boots for a good three or four hours there. Progress, baby, progress.\
    Yes, now, back to writing javascript and longing for CSS.\
    update: Wearing a regular shoe for the first half of the day was a really bad idea.

  • Little Steps On A Little Leg

    I went to see Dr. Ankle yesterday, and he says to me after playing with my foot, “Yep, everything’s still intact, that’s good.” Yeah, I made a face.\
    I’m allowed to wear normal shoes for a grand total of 15-30 minutes a day and have four more weeks of physical therapy. I see Dr. Ankle in six weeks and he says by then, I should be walking full-time in regular shoes, but should keep the Velcro Terror around “just in case”.\
    I had to walk out of there and try to find the silver lining. I’d built yesterday up to be the day I went back to being “normal”. Yes, it was unrealistic because my right calf is still about the size of my forearm, but it was there. I thought that was the end of having to wear shorts even though it’s 30 degrees outside (jeans and other long pants rip the velcro straps right off), the end of wearing it all day every day no matter what I’m doing or where I’m walking.

  • IconBuffet – Who Wants To Trade?

    I got Taipei Monkey this week and really want the two Taipei Buddies sets. Who wants to trade? I’ve also got Oslo Finance and Shanghai Tech Vector. And if you’re not already signed up for free delivery from , you should be. It’s free!

  • Some Days

    a picture of a sunken ship - actually under the water!\
    Some days, it feels like I’m going through life under water.\
    But in other news, I go to the doctor bright and early Monday morning and find out if I can finally wear a normal shoe on my right foot. It will have been over six months since I started wearing either the Velcro Nightmare, a cast, a post-op splint/wrap/ace combo, an ace bandage or the Strappy Terror.\
    My physical therapist did my “report card” that I have to take to Dr. Wilson on Monday, and my range of motion is greatly improved, and I took my first real steps on Friday morning outside of the boot. Not much pain, just a little tightness, and some swelling.\
    Oh, and I am now the proud owner of the home version of the electrocution machine they hook me up to after every visit. I think I’m going to see if I can make Max smile…

  • Things Guys Don’t Do

    Guys don’t do grief. We don’t handle empathy real well either. Guys are supposed to be “tough”, like ducks, and let all of our troubles (and everyone else’s) roll of our back with a shrug of our mighty shoulders.\
    All this stupid manliness gets in the way of us connecting to those around us, those who might need us. A friend lost a child yesterday, and I don’t know how I would react to that. I don’t know what to say, or how to act. Whenever I try to imagine what he’s feeling, I can’t. It all breaks down. I can’t imagine losing anyone, Max, Brian or Jen. I’ve never really lost a family member that I was really close to before, and I’ve been spared that kind of grief so far, and for that, right now, I feel kind of guilty.\
    I don’t have much faith left, but what I do applies here:

    • I believe in a place where we can live with God again.
    • I believe all children are born innocent.
    • I believe all children who are taken before their time are instantly given the highest levels of glory, because they didn’t get a chance to prove they deserved otherwise.
    • I believe that I have no idea what it’s like to be a grieving parent, because every time I try to imagine it, I can’t.
    • I believe that we will all be reunited with the ones we love after we die, and that any pain we feel in this life is temporary if we have a long enough view.
    • I believe finding that long view is the second most difficult thing we have to do while on this planet.
    • I believe the hardest thing to do is develop charity – charity being true empathy, being able to understand the pain and circumstances of others without judgement but with compassion and love.\
      Everything else is secondary. If you’ve got some time, please pray for them. If it doesn’t end up helping them, it might help us for doing it.

  • Most-Used Apps Of 2005

    Molly did it, so will I. Plus, I need a break from writing about CSS. Why am I writing about CSS? You will know soon enough, my children, soon enough.\
    I’m a Mac person. I think everyone who knows me knows this by now. So, it’s not going to surprise anyone that this list is full of Mac applications (and a web app or two).

    • Mail – It’s not sexy, but I get a ton of e-mail. Other than some quirks with the AOL IMAP servers, Apple’s mail app is awesome.
    • Thunderbird – HA! Yes, another e-mail client! I use Thunderbird for all my personal mail (all umpty-billion accounts too). It’s a trooper and handles multiple accounts and the hundred or so filters I have with aplomb.
    • iTunes – It’s on all day, every day I’m at work. I think I might use it even more than e-mail.
    • Safari – I love how snappy it is (most of the time), and how intuitive and slick the tabs are. It’s my browser of choice for actually browsing the web.
    • NetNewsWire – I read a lot of stuff that comes in through feeds, and there’s no better app on any platform for digesting a lot of feeds (442 at last count) quickly. It also does a fine job of grabbing podcasts.
    • Adium – Yes, I work for AOL and I don’t use our own IM client. Adium just kicks too much ass, and our Mac AIM client is too damn old. Adium does everything, and like NetNewsWire, is the best IM client on any platform, hands down.
    • Firefox – Yes, like my e-mail, I’m a two browser guy. For developing, there’s nothing better than Firefox. Between the javascript console and the web developer toolbar, it’s the best way to get my job done.
    • A tie between Oxygen and BBEdit – I use BBedit for quick and dirty hacking, and editing non-markup code like CSS, PHP, Tcl, JSP or Ruby. I’ve switched to using Oxygen almost exclusively for writing markup. It has just amazing tools for writing markup, from in-place validation to code completion to attribute auto-complete, which is really nice. BBEdit was definitely the winner early in the year, but Oxygen has come on strong late.
    • Transmit – Best FTP client ever, even better than WS_FTP Pro.
    • Movable Type – Yeah, I use my blog a lot, even though you don’t see it all the time. I prototype a lot of stuff in MT that I would normally write from scratch. I just love the template tags.
    • Instiki – I use it almost exclusively for presentations (with my s5 hack, but considering I’ve given over forty of those this year, I think it deserves a spot on the list.\
      There you go. That’s pretty much in usage order. I consume a lot of media…

  • Work

    Kevin is at work, therefore I must hate work.

  • Not even my family?

    Wow, no one wanted to talk about heaven? Huh. I find that odd given the time of the year it is. I understand that religion is a sticky subject, since it is so personal and everyone thinks they are right. But come on, man, Heaven rocks!\
    BW’s special also included a snippet from a scientist who located a “mutated” gene in some people and these people are more likely to believe in a higher power. Because I am already a believer, this just confirms my belief rather than make me question it. Perhaps God has given some people the extra gift of believing easily through this unusual gene.\
    BW also talked about near death experiences. Some scientists claim these experiences are simply hallucinations caused by a dying brain. Having never had one, I can’t say. However, I am confused that some people would be greeted and welcomed into Heaven but then “returned” back to their bodies. Wouldn’t God know that these people weren’t really going to die? So what’s with the big unneeded “welcome”?\
    Just in case it wasn’t clear before, I don’t know everything. 🙂 But it is fun to speculate about.\
    Now then, on to the more pressing topic: who stabbed Felix?