Ultranormal

  • Haggis Virgin

    Until last night, I’d never tried haggis and never really wanted to. But, we went to a lovely Scottish restaurant last night (“we” being Arun, Bert Bos, Chaals, Chris Lilley, Shawn, Carolie, Richard Ishida, Thomas and Liam – they were all here for the W3C AC Rep meeting), and they had haggis as an appetizer. And well, that was the opening. We all convinced each other than it was OK to try it as an appetizer because it would be a “wee little haggis.”\
    So, we got it, and shared a few. Shawn and I were “haggis hosts”, and Arun and Thomas were our “haggicytes.” And you know, it was actually quite good. It’s really rich, but the barley gives it a kind of weird texture. I don’t think I need to eat it again, but I’m no longer a haggis virgin. My haggishood has been taken by a charming wee chunk of barley and sheep organs. Yum.\
    Dinner was a lot of fun. I love hanging out with really smart people, and these guys fit the bill. They’re all brilliant, and terribly funny. We laughed a lot (I think the whiskey and wine helped), and told a lot of embarrassing stories about ourselves. Good times.\
    Today, it’s conferencing, which probably means less fun (and wouldn’t you know it, it’s not raining today).

  • Another Little Movie

    Back at Easter, I got a little (shaky) movie of Brian laughing at the little flying disk he was playing with. Check it out if you want a laugh (and can put up with the awesome cameraman).

  • Edinburgh Travelogue Day One & Two

    Since Jen asked, here’s what I’ve done/seen so far:

    • Since my hotel room wasn’t ready when I got in, I wandered around the High Street area, and got a lovely cup of soup in a little cafe.
    • I walked by a bunch of interesting shops that were closed because it was Sunday.
    • Today, I walked by a bunch of interesting shops that were closed because it’s a bank holiday.
    • I walked to the conference center to register and got a little lost.
    • I took some pictures, but because the network wi-fi sucks, I can’t upload them to Flickr.
    • I went to the grocery store across the street from my hotel looking for snacks and was disappointed.
    • I walked past a bondage shop, and it had a display window, which was a first for me… I’ve never actually seen a bondage shop. I’ve only ever heard that they exist.
    • Now, I’m working on my presentations, which I have to have done today (which is why I’m not out site-seeing). I thought I was done a little while ago, but after re-reading them, I still have some work to do.
    • I walked over a mile today, which is probably more walking than I’ve done since surgery, especially after you consider my marathon at Heathrow yesterday. I’m doing OK, just a little bit of tightness along the bottom of my foot. It did kind of punctuate just how out of shape I am, though.\
      Oh yeah, Heathrow. Holy crap. We landed at 6:40AM and we all promptly rushed to the bus. Unfortunately, between us and the bus was a gigantic throng of about two hundred people also trying to get to the bus. It was this huge mess of humanity, with no traffic cop, just a formless queue of people trying to catch their connecting flight and growing increasingly agitated. I had two hours between flights and got on board five minutes after the flight was originally supposed to leave (thankfully, it was delayed). If you’ve ever been through Heathrow, it took two hours to get from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1, and I had to jog the last bit (and if you’ve ever seen me, you know that’s not a good idea). It normally takes no more than an hour, usually thirty minutes.\
      A couple observations about Edinburgh before I post this. First, Edinburgh doesn’t seem as friendly as Dublin. Maybe it’s just the part of the city I’m in, but I’m downtown, and I stayed in downtown Dublin, and the vibe was totally different. When Sean and I got lost in Dublin, someone came up to us and helped without us even asking (we just looked lost). Here, people don’t return smiles and avoid eye contact (maybe it’s because I’m all shaggy again). In shops and restaurants, people are nice enough, but it’s not the same cheerfulness I fell in love with in Dublin (any why compare the two? because they’re fairly close together?).\
      Second, there are a lot of cobblestones here, and that freaks me out. I rolled my ankle on a seam in a parking lot in Austin. I’m a little paranoid about rolling my ankle again and cobblestone streets are like minefields.\
      Third, Edinburgh has really good chip shops. I had some amazing chips last night for dinner, and the fish was awesome. Edinburgh also has a lot of strip clubs. I walked past at least six on the way to the conference center (and don’t forget the bondage shop). The only reason I noticed this was that my friend Tom said there weren’t any strip clubs in Edinburgh (he only told me this because he was telling me about coming to the city while he was in the Navy… OK, I have no idea why he told me this, but he did). Yeah, I don’t think I’ll say any more about the strip clubs.\
      And lastly, I love British television. DirecTV should offer a Brit Pack that has all the BBC’s, SKY, and Channel 4 on it, live. Forget BBC America, I want the real thing. BBC News is better than anything we have here, and the Brits have the best/worst reality TV.\
      The conference starts tomorrow and I’m going to the Kendra Initiative dinner tonight (which, luckily enough is right down the street from the hotel), which promises from fun Scottish culture stuff. More blogging later… and maybe I’ll be able to upload pictures from the conference network.

  • Edinburgh Day One

    It’s cold and rainy in Edinburgh and the hotel wi-fi sucks. I think I’m almost done with my presentations for this week and I’ve already registered for the conference and hit a grocery store (disappointingly, they didn’t have Smarties, Kinder Eggs or orange Lilt). I watched Top Gear on real TV and caught the UK version of Big Brother. Hats off to you, Channel 4. You guys really know how to pick a cast! I’ve been a fan of the US version since it launched a few years ago, just because it’s really funny how stupid people get when they’re cooped up with strangers. This version? They’re not only stupid to begin with, they’re all pretty much insane in some way (and it doesn’t help that the UK version is much crueler than the US one). You’ve got:

    • Richard, the self-labeled “sexual terrorist” who dresses like a cross-dressing nazi youth cowboy (yeah, really)
    • Shabaz, the “Paki-poof” (he said it himself), who reminds me of Mario, this guy I used to work with in Tucson who was the first person to make me realize that being gay’s not a “choice”. Mario couldn’t be anything else if he tried, and neither could Shabaz.
    • Pete, the rock-n-roll Tourette’s guy who says “Wank!” at the top of his lungs every couple minutes.
    • Bonnie, who can’t even say her own name.
    • Lisa, the Chinese girl from Manchester who has the most AMAZING accent you’ve ever heard.
    • Glynn, “the sexiest lifeguard in North Wales”, who went into the house in a big red swimsuit, is actually really scrawny and kind of gawky, and who has the second most amazing accent you’ve ever heard.
    • and little Nikki, who’s life ambition is to marry a professional footballer.\
      There are others, but they’re the pretty filler to keep people looking for nudity all summer.\
      I’m only a little jet-lagged. I got a solid 8 hours last night, and am only slightly in need of a nap right now. Time for a Dr. Pepper! Oh, and cobblestones? I could really live without them. They’re kind of daunting to a guy who’s paranoid about twisting an ankle.

  • Ack!

    I’m 32! When did that happen???

  • 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.