Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • The Phone Buying Blues

    My poor Sidekick Color died last week. My wife wants a cell phone. I want something out of Star Trek that just doesn’t seem to exist yet (go figure). Deciphering cell plans, and deciding on a phone that will do all the things I want it to. Right now, I need a phone for Jen that doesn’t have to do a whole lot. A camera would be nice, but not required, and it just needs a good address book and battery life.\
    My requirements are a little tougher. It has to be on this list, has to have a camera, e-mail, support internet-over-Bluetooth, and a calendar. Yeah, I know. I’m tempted by the Treo 650, but the only carriers who have it charge an insane amount of money for their unlimited internet plan (I did over eleven megs a month on my Sidekick). T-Mobile has a much more reasonable unlimited internet plan, but they don’t have the 650.\
    The cell companies’ websites don’t help either. They don’t have reviews on the site, are sparse with the details, and navigation is a pain in the butt.\
    If you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • Lenny Bruce and The Culture of Life

    Before my last trip to Ireland, I stopped by our local used bookstore, and picked up some reading material. One of the books was an ancient paperback: The Essential Lenny Bruce. I’ve been picking at it a little bit at a time since then. It’s really hard to read standup, but I read something a couple nights ago that has been sticking in my head. I can’t shake it. So, I’m going to share it with you, so hopefully you won’t be able to shake it either.\
    bq. Cause the weird part we get hung up with, “I am pure and I am good, and those people are dirty and those murderers are bad and I am so pure, I’m so good that I have to murder those murderers.” And then you end up getting screwed up.\
    How frightening is that? Have you ever heard a more succinct and spot-on description of pious anger? This is the motivation that leads people to kill abortion providers, to threaten the lives of judges, to celebrate life by ruining or ending the lives of others. That’s not a “culture of life”. It’s a culture of acceptable losses, and blatant hypocrisy wrapped in some twisted Christian vocabulary but without any meaning at all.

  • Overall Kid – The Star Of His Own Movie

    A couple weeks ago, I helped my sister with a little movie project that she filmed all on her digital camera. It made me realize I’d never tried using the movie feature on my digital camera. So I did. The day I dressed Brian up in his manly overalls and flannel shirt, I took a little movie of him playing. The voice is me trying to get him to make noise. Of course, Little Wrestler Brian didn’t come out and roar, but he’s still cute.\
    Go see it if you wanna.

  • What I’ve Been Up To

    I’ve totally redone the categories, so they’re more tag-like. I’m also slowly going through all the posts I did while I was on Blogger, over 600 of them, and moving them to their appropriate categories. It’s been fun going back and looking at some of the stuff I wrote a few years ago. It’s a lot of fun.\
    Tonight, I got to my posts around September 11th, now in a new category called terrorism that’s slowly growing. I expect the memories to come flooding back when I get to the sniper attacks here in DC. For us, they were almost worse than September 11th. It went on longer, and had the whole area wracked with fear for so long – all at the same time the anthrax scare happened. All of it local, all of it random, all of it could strike anyone at anytime.\
    Keep an eye on the categories. They’ll keep moving around, and I’ll be redesigning the archives page in the near future.

  • I’m Going To Eat You!

    Brian, Exultant

    Brian is going to happily eat you. If he doesn’t succeed in actually ingesting you, he will at least cover you in drool. That boy is cute, I tell you. I’m sure it’s all from Jen because I certainly don’t have even half that much cute in my DNA. My favorite thing is getting him after his naps. He’s usually laying there swimming. When I walk in, he perks up, lifts his head, craning it to see. When he spies me, he breaks into a giant grin and makes a happy noise. I love baby happy noises and giggly squeals. Brian makes a lot of them. They always make me feel better, no matter what’s going on.

  • The Women Bloggers Are Right Here

    Molly asked the question and I’m here to provide an answer. It may seem strange that a white male is providing the answer, but I step in and help where I can. Even though we pale males are over-represented in the blog-o-whirl, we still serve a purpose sometimes.\
    I’m not sure why this is a question, but since it is, I’ll provide an answer. I don’t know why there aren’t more women at the “top” of the blogging heap. But, I think that question is the wrong one to ask. Blogging isn’t, and shouldn’t be a popularity contest, and it’s certainly not a heap. It’s a community, and each person’s blog is their front porch. How many people you have who come to your front porch isn’t as important as the people you want to come to your front porch. If you write for your family, and they’re the ones who come visit, you’re a success as a blogger. If you’ve made progress on whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish by having a blog, then you’re a successful blogger. Stratifying everyone is an old-world paradigm, that I think is damaging to the medium. I could care less how popular a blog is. If the writing grabs me, and the blogger expresses themselves in a unique and personal way, I’d consider their blog successful.\
    The first blogs I found were written by women, and they’re well-represented on this list. Here’s my list, in no particular order other than the order they happened to show up in NetNewsWire:

    • Heather Armstrong
    • Heather Lawver (I got her started blogging… yay me)
    • Jodi
    • Suzie
    • Lifehacker
    • Rashunda
    • Jessa
    • Betsy Devine
    • Bazima
    • Melly
    • Meg
    • Andrea
    • Molly
    • Chelsea
    • Sarah
    • Gail\
      I got into blogging because of Megnut and Heather Champ. So, my view of what makes a blog a blog was formed by reading their words, which may be why I consider all these women successful bloggers. I never look at their “stats” or see how many other people are reading them. They’re just good people, good writers, and all have interesting things to say. Isn’t that enough to consider someone a “success”? The people who make the most noise are probably always going to be at the “top” in terms of stats, and they’ll probably all be men. We know how to make noise and cause trouble. You can look at the state of the world, and it becomes painfully apparent. But, is that success? There are probably just as many women blogging now as men, maybe more. Isn’t that some measure of success?

  • Redesign In Progress

    Got tired of waiting… I’m not done, but you get the idea. More colors! Some re-arranging of stuff! A little more art, and hopefully some good stuff. I just passed 1500 posts on this blog. This will be 1505. 1500 was, appropriately enough, this one.\
    I started blogging almost five years ago (there’s still a huge mass of entries under the Blogger Entries category that I’m slowly whittling down into their appropriate category). I’ve had this orange color scheme for a couple of those years, and while I still love orange, it’s time to branch out (thanks to the super cool Color Scheme Generator).\
    Over the last five years, I’ve posted over 1700 pictures, and several dozen posts on other blogs around both internal and external blogs.\
    Look for me to finish up the redesign in the next week or so.

  • My Boys

    My Boys

    We took pictures this afternoon when the sun came out. Here they are, my boys. They’re pretty much like this all the time. Smiling, giggling, and happy. They’re the best.

  • Must-Have Apps for OS X

    Since Steve just got himself a shiny new Powerbook, and asked for a list of apps he should throw on it, I decided to blog the list. Here is my “must-have” list of apps for OS X (unless otherwise noted, everything is either freeware or open source):

    • Adium – multi-service IM client. Themes, plugins, icon sets – everything you could ever want to customize your IM experience (and it’s faster than AIM).
    • Azureus – Best torrent client for OS X, even if it is Java.
    • BBEdit – If you can’t afford BBEdit, you can download TextWrangler for free. not free
    • BookIt – Keep your bookmarks synced up across all the browsers you’ve got installed on your machine. not free
    • Chicken of the VNC – Nothing else needs to be said. It is the chicken of the VNC world – light on the calories, long on possibilities.
    • Conversation – My favorite IRC client for OS X.
    • Instiki – Best wiki out there, period, especially on OS X.
    • MarsEdit – For to be editing your blog. not free
    • NetNewsWire – Best newsreader on any platform. Pay for it, because it’s friggin’ worth it (and so you can use the beta). not free (although there is NNW Lite)
    • NVu – I use it as a word processor when I don’t feel like writing documentation in HTML or on my wiki (you know, when you have to use an existing template). HTML editing goodness that just keeps getting better.
    • OmniOutliner – Why don’t other platforms have decent outlining software? Before Instiki, I couldn’t live without OmniOutliner. Even now, it’s great for brainstorming, taking notes during meetings, and making lists. not free
    • OnyX – A must-have for Powerbooks; OnyX runs all those BSD maintenance scripts that are supposed to run at 3 A.M., but never do because your laptop is sleeping.
    • SubEthaEdit – The first and best collaborative text editors. Great for taking notes at conferences, in meetings (with other people smart enough to have Powerbooks and bring them to meetings), etc. semi-not free
    • Tigerlaunch – Nice little menu item that has all your applications in it. Great when you don’t have something in your dock, but need to start it up.
    • Transmit – A great FTP Client with right-click editing of text files in your favorite text editor. Very cool. not free (check out Fugu or Cyberduck if you’re a cheap bastard).
    • VLC – For watching all the TV shows you download with Azureus. It plays everything, and plays it well.\
      There you have it (and I can’t believe I kept it alphabetical). I didn’t include stuff that should have come with the machine, like iPhoto (even though it’s amazing) or Safari. Am I missing anything?

  • Taggy Goodness

    If you’ve got a keen eye, you may notice some changes around here. I’ve started playing with making my MT categories tag-like, and then using rel=”tag” on the categories to make them all Technorati friendly.\
    Why? I think it’s cool, which is the only reason to ever do anything on a blog.\
    My only issue now is getting Marsedit to create categories for me.