Category: daily tedium

I swear I’m still here. I’m too busy eating good (read: real) Mexican food, chasing Max, getting my butt kicked in Pinochle (I don’t know why, but I still don’t get the whole stealth table talk language they have), recovering from TiVo withdrawal, and going to Zia for cheap music.

I will leave you with the first of the big list I’m working on: Why I Love (and Hate) Tucson. The big number one is that it’s easy to be poor in Tucson. Housing is cheap; there’s always cheap fun stuff to do, pawn shops and used record stores. It’s great, and there’s no stigma attached to it. In Northern Virginia, it’s practically impossible to be poor. It was so much harder having no money in Virginia than it was in Tucson. Now that we’re not so fund-deprived, Tucson looks a little depressing, but the memory is still there.

I’m in Arizona and you’re not (or are you?). We’re here, it’s gorgeous and we’re having fun. I just made it through all 100+ e-mails in both of my inboxes and checked my Fantasy Football score (I’m down by ONE point. All his players are finished, and I still have my quarterback. I can smell a win).

I guess there’s a lot to tell, but we’re gonna go get ribs now!! Aren’t you jealous?

It’s been an insane week. I would tell you about it, but I really can’t. It’s all work stuff: top secret and stressful and aggravating. Something that was supposed to work doesn’t, and everything I did to work around it, hack it, massage it, tickle it, talk dirty to it, etc, failed. So, it’s not going to happen until things change or we figure out a workable hack.

And tomorrow, we go to Arizona, on separate planes. Why? Poor planning, mostly. I didn’t know how much time I was going to be able to take off, and we just put it off until it was too late to get on the same flight. So, Jen gets to fly with Max all alone and spend four hours in Houston. I take off an hour after her and get to Tucson two hours before she does. Fun, huh? Poor poor Jen. Me? I get my Powerbook, two batteries, a working installation of Movable Type, games and a book (I haven’t decided what to bring, Java in a Nutshell or JavaServer Pages). It’s totally unfair and I feel really bad, but it’s too late to change it now. I just have to come up with some way to make it up to her.

I told you the other day about my shell script discovery. Well, I made another related discovery today. I’m pretty sure this would apply to the Windows version as well, but I don’t have PhotoShop 7 for Windows. In PS 7 for the Mac, you can create new Web Gallery templates!! To verify it, I just duplicated the Simple theme’s directory as “MT Import” and it showed up in the list of Styles under File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery. So, another task for the plane is to mess with my new directory and see if I can get Photoshop to create the import files for me. I’ll post the instructions when/if I figure it out.

I am such a geek…

The intermediate redesign is coming soon (hopefully tomorrow). It’s plain and green and I like it. It’s hopefully a clean slate to add the new design to when my brain starts functioning again.

So, I worked on this big project earlier this year and there was a $100 gift cheque I was supposed to get when the whole thing launched in April. Of course, it was a surprise at a party I was too busy to attend and it sat in a folder on someone’s desk until this week. Woo-hoo!! Free Money!! So, I took Max to Best Buy (3 minutes away and oh so tempting) and walked out with Spiderman on DVD, Burnout 2 and SSX Tricky. I hadn’t seen the movie yet (loved it), or played Burnout 2 (I played the original, and wow, the sequel is amazing, best racing game I’ve ever played). SSX Tricky is just too much fun to avoid. The grand total for this fun? $99.24! I walked out with seventy-six cents in change and a smile on my face.

Halloween at Chez Lawver went off well. There weren’t as many kids as we expected, and we have TONS of candy leftover, which is bad news for my diet. I loooo-oooove Halloween candy. Bite-sized versions of candy bars just taste better for some reason. Mmmmmm, teeny Twix, be still my heart.

Possible new titles for this site:

• Working at the Speed of Stupid

• Tired Beyond All Recognition

• More Round Than Square

• UltraNormal (there’s a great graphic that goes with this one)

• The Bags Under His Eyes Say What They Feel

• Sleeping With Feeling

Can you tell I’m really really tired? Not getting a weekend really messed me up. I havent’ slept well in almost a week and just feel like I’m under this gigantic weight all the time. Yep, definitely time for a nap.

Today, everything is dumb. Why? ‘Cuz, it’s all dumb. That’s just the way it is. I’m dumb; you’re dumb; it’s dumb; they’re dumb; we’re all dumb together.

We can be smart tomorrow. Today, it’s all dumb.

So, I spent eight hours at work today, and that was too long for a beautiful Saturday. I took enough time to take Jen and Max to the Dominion Brewery for lunch. The service was pretty bad, but the food, root beer and ginger ale were good. It’s funny. The place is way back in this industrial park near work (turn left twice and look for the empty kegs) where no one would happen on it by accident. Once you get inside though, it’s this nice little restaurant with big windows looking in on the brewery and bottling areas.

The sandwiches are pretty tasty and the boneless chicken wings are awesome. But, the whole reason to go is their root beer and ginger ale, made on the premises. It’s divine. I got Max a root beer (which I don’t think he’s ever had before) and he went nuts for it. I had to hide it from him so he wouldn’t drink it all at once.

And here I am at 9:30 on a Saturday night. My wife and son are asleep and I’m watching Donnie Darko again. I was right the first time, it’s a great film. It doesn’t make sense, and it really doesn’t have to. The performances and feel of the movie just work so well. Just amazing. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on Cinemax now, so TiVo it, rent it, buy it, do whatever you have to to watch this film. You won’t regret it, even if it’s just to see Patrick Swayze play a totally convincing motivational speaker, and SparkleMotion.

There’s so much to say and so little time. I’ll be working all weekend on this huge thing that I can’t tell you about, so I won’t be here. I’ll be around, somewhere, doing things.

I can’t believe I said “loon” twice in my comment on Reid’s sniper tipline post. Yeah, I said I’d avoid mentioning the sniper stuff, but that was the last post and this is a new one.

I’m going to try to avoid ranting today. It’s going to hard because I was dumb last night and watched John Walsh on Larry King last night. But, I will say no more. I will instead tell you what I’ve been doing while trying to avoid cable news and my paranoid fear of being clipped while getting into or out of my car, and the gut wrenching thought that it might happen to my wife or son.

Max and I have a new favorite show. TLC has decided to combine Junkyard Wars and Battlebots to create the perfect television experience. Full Metal Challenge was an extreme amount of fun. Max almost lost it when he saw the cars run into the big bowling pins. He clapped and jumped up and down and cheered, counting at Max Volume 10, “1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 PINS!!” When I wasn’t enthralled with watching that little Chilean car beat the crap out of the other two huge monsters, I was laughing at Max and egging him on. When they blew up the third place car (in the only truly lame part of the show, in my opinion), Max cheered and yelled, “BOOM!” I have never had so much fun watching TV with my son. Thank goodness it was TiVo‘ed because Max wanted to watch it again last night. He was just as excited last night when we watched it again. I’m going to record Junkyard Wars tonight and see if he likes it. There isn’t as much action, but there is still the blowtorching, greasy goodness of geeks and their machines.

In other geekly news, I’m starting to fall in love with Java and JSP’s. Yes, I know, I never thought I’d say it either, but I really dig being able to separate everything I don’t want to write into a servlet and do JUST the display stuff in the JSP. The only ugly thing so far is closing if/while type statements. It’s hard to keep those hanging }’s tab-aligned properly (because I’m nothing if not anal about my tabs). Other than that, it’s a lot of fun. I’m still at the hunt and peck stage where I have to go to my two trusty books, O’Reilly’s great JavaServer Pages and Java in a Nutshell for answers where in Tcl I pretty much have everything memorized and writing it is no harder than the writing I’m doing now. In Tcl, it’s all about style and the best way to do it. In Java and JSP now, it’s how to do it at all, nevermind the “best” way. For a while, I’ll have to say, “I don’t know if we can do that”. In Tcl, I can say with authority, “No way” or “Sure, that’s easy” (because in Tcl it’s either impossible or trivial… no idea why that is). I’ll get there. It took me about two months in Tcl, writing something every day, to be able to start thinking more about the problem I’m trying to solve than the code I have to write to solve it. I figure Java’s a little more complex and the syntax is foreign, so it’ll take me maybe three months to get totally comfortable.

I also found an odd bug on this site yesterday. For each post on the homepage, the text would drift to the left for every paragraph tag. This doesn’t happen in Mozilla, and I’m having a hard time understanding why IE would do it. So, for now I’ve just set the left margin to 15, which seems to keep the text from running over the left edge. The other weird IE-ism today is form padding. If you have a form tag outside a div, IE decides that you want padding around it. The only way to get rid of it is to style the form tag with padding:0 and margin:0. How weird is that? Again, Mozilla doesn’t do this. IE for both Windows and OS X do. Again, odd.