Ultranormal

  • Two Extremes

    As good as yesterday was, today is that bad. I didn’t sleep well, woke up too early from a nightmare that refused to leave my head after waking. The horrible thoughts meant I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up, showered, dressed, medicated, stumbled out of the door and drove to work, two hours early for no good reason.

    The impending hurricane’s pressure (increased or decreased, don’t really care) is torturing my sinuses. It feels like my face might pop and run down my skull any minute, leaving me with gaping holes in my skull, and a lot of goo to explain to the housekeeping people when they come to clean tonight. My eyes are sandpaper on the inside of my eyelids, and the rest of my head is no better.

    Today, everyone sucks. Really. I still love you, I do, but you all suck. You suck because your faces don’t hurt, and you’re all so damn smiley. Stop smiling. There’s nothing to smile about. We’re going to get a million feet of rain in the next seventy-two hours, DQ no longer makes cherry Dilly Bars, my face hurts, George W. Bush is still the President, people still go to bed hungry, there’s another worm exploiting yet another hole in Windows, an asteroid might crash into earth any day now and destroy us all, did I mention my face hurts, they freakin’ cancelled Homicide, Firefly and Sports Night but somehow 7th Heaven and Charmed are still on the air, Mark Sandman died so there will be no more Morphine albums but there will be more Britney Spears albums, no one makes good noir anymore, and my face is killing me. You all suck.

  • Good Days and Balls of Meat

    Today has been a good day. Even though I got up early, didn’t eat breakfast, had to hold my bladder for two hours after waking up, had two vials of blood drawn, and have had a monstrous sinus headache all day… today has been a good day. I found the super-sweet Listutorial which helped me fix a particularly vexing problem with a new project at work (which you’ll be able to see in a week or so). A weird feature no one thought was possible, that I was able to figure out and implement, was finally approved this afternoon (you’ll see it in a month or so). I smiled a lot, and walked with a bounce in my step, despite all of those things listed above. I’m still wearing my little hospital bracelet (two vials of blood, and they tagged me like a bear in the woods), a bright Hawaiian shirt and my stupid orange hair.

    Tonight, I’m going over to celebrate my littlest brother’s twenty-first birthday (wait, don’t get excited – we’re Mormon: 21 don’t mean nothin’), see my mother-in-law (which despite popular perception, is cool), and eat some yummy yummy balls of meat I made myself last night with sausage, ground beef and rolled between my two hands.

    Then, I get to go to bed, wake up and start all over again, and hopefully get the results of that CAT scan from last week.

  • Great Freakin Wallpaper

    Oh yeah, it’s time to beautify your desktop with some gorgeous wallpaper via the fine folks at Veer. Ultra-swank and incredibly varied for one little place. You will like it, I promise.

  • Another OS X Tip

    Have trouble with your Mac hanging up during boot, or have weird application problems you’re not quite sure how to fix (like jEdit all of a sudden stops working)? Try booting into single-user mode!

    1. Reboot, and hold down the Apple key and S.

    2. When you finally get a command prompt, type: fsck -y and hit Enter.

    3. When it finishes, type: reboot and hit Enter

    If that doesn’t fix, then you’re in real trouble and need to seek professional help.

  • I Am Geek Yenta!

    I just found out that a girl I used to sit next to four years ago is getting married in December to a guy that used to work in our Unix help desk. It turns out that I introduced them over four and a half years ago!

    First, he gave her an IP address and a login, then he stole her heart. I freakin’ love geek love stories! And I’m a part of this one! I am the Geek Yenta!!

  • Palestine and Israel – A Solution

    The following is a drug-induced attempt at humor:

    You can thank Dawson’s latest treatise on Israel and Palestine for this piece of stupidity. I was thinking the other day about Israel and Palestine and how part of the problem is the proximity of the two parties and how all they really need is some space. Israel’s well-established, and has a working government. The Palestinains don’t. They’ve got resident crazy bastard Yassar Arafat and a bunch of cronies. The one guy who looked reasonable and actually agreed to wear a suit and tie just resigned.

    I don’t think Palestine and Israel will ever live together in anything resembling peace. So, I’ve come up with a plan. Let’s give the Palestinians half of Montana. I don’t even care which half – we’ll let Montana vote on it. It’s more land than the Palestinians could ever hope to milk form the Israeli’s, and they’ll already have streets, a highway system and McDonalds on which to build their own economy.

    I think George W. Bush could be seen as the greatest peacemaker of all time if he pulled this one off (although the Republicans would never win Montana again, but really, they have what, 1 electoral vote?). He’d be seen as a hero in the Middle East because now Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran don’t have to hear the Palestinians whine about Sharon anymore, or have Arafat over for dinner.

    All this problem needs is some creative thought. I think GW should through in cowboy hats for everyone too – and a pony – and maybe some brush for the new Palestinian Prime Minister to clear. I hear it makes you look presidential.

  • Jon Morris Is Going to Have My Babies

    He really is, and all because he created a lovely little thing called The Philosophers.

    Oh, and Jon does the world’s greatest Sean Connery and Chewbacca impressions – well, other than the actual Chewbacca and Sean Connery.

  • The Year After the Year After

    I was going to take today off, but that didn’t happen. There’s too much going on, which in itself is reassuring. I have a full day of stuff to do, things to look into and places to be. I wanted time to reflect on my feelings about today, but with my sinuses being what they are, I probably won’t do much reflecting today either. I didn’t want today to be “just another day”, but it’s turning into that. I guess in way it shows that I’m moving on. I still remember everything about the day, and I still feel as helpless to explain my emotions as I did then.

    I thought it would be interesting to look at what I wrote on that day, and afterwards. I don’t normally go back and look at what I write after it’s posted, but I decided to go look and see what I felt then. It’s pretty much what I felt then, only maybe a little less raw than two years, and then one year ago. See for yourself:

  • Lies

    I just finished reading Al Franken’s book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. It’s an amazing book that I can’t recommend highly enough, with a couple caveats:

    Don’t Read This Book If:

    • You can’t take a joke, especially if it’s about “your guy”. I believe this book is very well researched, and honest in everything it says, but the humor is pretty rough. If you love Bill O’Reilly and think he can do no wrong, well, you’re going to hate this book. Should you read it? Yeah, you should, but be prepared for your guy to get tarred and feathered.

    • You can’t handle profanity. It’s not over the top (ok, this point is totally for my parents), but there is some.

    • You can’t handle the truth. This book will shock you. It will make you question everything that this Administration has done, and you’ll never see those in the Right-wing Media or the Administration the same – which is a good thing.

    Why You Should Read It Anyway:

    • This is a great piece of research. The sources are impeccable, and it felt like Franken went out of his way to not take quotes out of context. It’s an amazing and depressing read. Not depressing because it’s bad, depressing because he’s right.

    • It is funny. It’s really funny. The line about the Malawi Space Program was hilarious. I laughed out loud many many times.

    • It will put lies in perspective. It does a great job exposing the Administrations lies, and exposing the mainstream media’s absolute hypocrisy in not exposing them.

    I loved the book. But, I can take a joke and knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t. I want my family to read this book, but I won’t ask them to because the book doesn’t come in a “humor-lite” version. I want them to see the proof of all the lies, but I know they won’t be able to get past the jokes. They’ll take them too seriously and get so offended by the humor that they’ll shut down to the real meat in the book. I know why Franken wrote it this way. It falls under satire if it’s funny – even though the book is an amazing indictment of the right-wing media and campaign politics.

    Is there a book that’s this well researched that’s just the facts, ma’am? If so, pleeeee-ase tell me!!

  • Dawson Is A Smart Guy

    He knows the emperor has no clothes. It’s time to see if the rest of the Republicans in the country will see that Bush has actually kept one of this campaign promises: to run the government like a corporation. Unfortunately, he’s modeled the government “corporation” after his friend Kenneth Lay’s corporation: Enron.

    Anyone, anyone? Write any letters to McCain this week?