• Crying Over Muppet Songs

    Now for something completely different. I found out quite a while ago that the classic Muppets song ‘Rainbow Connection’ tends to make one of my brothers cry. — Heather’s Blog

    I admit it. I cry whenever I hear The Rainbow Connection. I have since I first saw the movie at the age of four (in 1979) when it came to the little base theater in Germany (I thought it was Iceland, but since I was four, it must have been Germany).

    It makes me cry for many of the same reasons my little sister is inspired by it. It’s a hopeful song about finding our perfect selves, that place we know we’re supposed to be. Of course, I didn’t think this at 4, but the song still made me cry. It’s inspirational lyrics are countered by an almost melancholy tune. It feels like Kermit knows what he’s supposed to be, but he’s stuck in a swamp, on a log with a banjo. It’s a confusing mix of hope and pessimism that captures exactly my feelings about my perfect self. There are things I know I should be and do that I’m not doing – for a multitude of reasons. I will never be my perfect self. I will always be a frog plucking a banjo on a log looking for rainbows.

  • Happy in Many Languages

    Hey look, I may be sick, but I can make people happy in many different languages. I think I comprehended most of it, and Beto’s very happy to have Movable Type installed on his iMac… and so am I.

    Yes, I’m still sick. Not sick enough to stay home (that’s a pretty high threshold for me), but sick enough that I can’t do much else besides work. I’m not keeping up with my blog reading, e-mail or anything else outside of work and home. I don’t have anything to say except my freakin’ head hurts. Why won’t this snot leave? Get out of my sinuses!!

  • We’ve Been Hoodwinked!!

    The argument outran the facts. I had a big long post here about how angry I am about this whole thing. I couldn’t bring myself to post it. You know, I have a couple of subtle but important distinctions in my head. One is the separation of our Government with the current Administration. The Government is all those folks in all the government’s many agencies who’ve made a career out of it. The Government handles the day to day stuff and actually changes very little over the course of any four year administration. The Administration is the group of people who are politically appointed during a President’s term.

    It’s pretty clear that the Administration ignored our Government in the build-up to the war. They cherry-picked evidence and used debunked, suspect and out of date information in making their case to the American people for the need to go to war with Iraq. I’m not sure how to react to all this other than anger. We were intentionally misled. The Administration knew their goal and knew they didn’t have the case to back it up. They massaged, manufactured and created out of thin air, evidence used to convince Congress and the American people that we needed to spend billions of dollars, sacrifice American troops, remove thousands of Iraqis from the face of the Earth and spend untold amounts of money and time rebuilding Iraq. That’s unforgivable to me. They played on our fears and anger about September 11th and sold us a lie. They said Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th when the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been thoroughly debunked. They said that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon “in the very near future” when it’s been shown that there was no formal nuclear program in Iraq. They said that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack in forty-five minutes when we still haven’t found any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. They told us they knew where the weapons are, and again, none have been found. They lied to us.

    This is now longer than the “angry post” I deleted. You know, I am angry. But, I’m also resigned to the fact that not enough people in this country care that they were lied to, or think they weren’t. I know that no one in the Bush Administration will ever be held responsible for lying to the American people, and for lying to Congress. I know that the only way I can do anything is to do my best to make sure that George W. Bush doesn’t with the election next year. It doesn’t feel like that’s enough, but it’ll have to do.

  • Painted Photos

    Thanks to Dawn’s great post on photographic paintings, I’ve had an hour’s worth of fun tweaking some of the pics from today’s farmer’s market outing. Here’s one of them. I like the photo, the peppers in the photo, and this thing:

  • Organic Infections

    We went to the Reston Farmers Market this morning: Max, my mom and dad and Max. With being sick, and the trip, Jen needed some “alone time”. We had a great time, bought all kinds of faboo organic veggies, a little basil plant, and some flowers for Jen. I’m going to try to make something with the lovely eggplant for Jen, and I don’t even like eggplant. But, I like Jen, so it’s worth it.

    I’m still not 100%. I’m congested, tired, and wheezy. Going out today sapped me good. Trailing Max and providing that parental safety thing takes a lot of energy. I’m not taking it easy before trying to make dinner. We may even postpone the faboo dinner until tomorrow. I need a nap.

  • I’m On Board! You Can Now Call Me Esquire

    Would you look at that, Heather went and announced that I’m on the board! I’m in the fourth paragraph. I agreed to do this a while ago, and well, I wasn’t sure when she would announce it to the world.

    My little sister, 9 years and 11 months my junior, is a busy girl. I’m hoping I can help her take this hand-published goliath of her’s and turn it into an easy-to-manage, self-maintaining, interactive, secure and geee-orgeous site with a bodacious content management system. I’m not sure how I’m going to find the time, but I will. Now, the decision is do I build my own CMS, or find one out there that does everything I need? Does such a thing exist? Would building it myself be easier than manhandling a square CMS peg into the round hole that is Daily Prophet?

    We could probably use OpenACS. I’ve installed it before and it looks like it might work. It’s AOLserver and I like that. As much as I like JSP’s at work, I still think in Tcl and translate. It’s too hard to do simple things in Java on the webserver, and that bothers me. Simple things like finding out what page you’re on, or the name of the servlet that’s running are next to impossible to get at, and that’s just wrong.

    Yes, I’m still sick. It’s yet another sinus infection, so I’m coughing up lovely goblins and blowing my nose frequently. I have a ton of work to do and no time to do it in. I’m hung over from the California trip (but the pictures are up). I realized that all this Journals stuff has distracted me from my real job, and that’s not a good thing. I should be able to do everything and handle it…

  • When Will It End?

    I am really tired of feeling like crap. Since Saturday, I’ve had the world’s most outrageous cold. Here I am at work trying to get things done with a head dulled by snot and a brain unwilling to function at normal speed. It’s taking three times as long to get anything done, and twice as long to answer questions I normally can answer right away. I wish it would go away, or maybe I wish I could go away. Go away and take a nap, a bath, anything to get rid of this feeling.

    I’m working on getting the pics up… when they’re done, you should see them on the righthand side. I may not have time or the energy to post a link.

  • Sick and Home

    I’ve got an airline cold… one of those horrible colds you get from breathing recycled air for hours on end. So, no pics yet, but they’re coming. Not only is my hosting provider having database availability problems, iPhoto decided to truncate my photo library again. Why does this happen, Steve Jobs, why? I didn’t do anything to it, half my pictures just disappeared. The files are still there, but they don’t show up in the application. And don’t even think about importing them. That’ll never work. It just sits there with no status messages and churns.

    I don’t think I want to go on any more trips for a while.

  • Ramblin’ And Waitin’

    I’m awake, showered, fed and ready to go. My sole disappointment this morning was the fact that the little Mexican place across the street isn’t open for breakfast. I’ve had a craving for a good breakfast burrito or authentic huevos rancheros since we landed, and I’ve still not satisfied it. I went downstairs and had breakfast in the little hotel restaurant. It wasn’t bad, but was nothing to waste anymore thought on. I did finish a couple articles in the Smithsonian magazine, which is always a good read.

    Today is tourist day!! Tim’s coming to get me in about an hour, and we’re off to do stupid touristy things. Not sure what yet, but we’ll find out. I’m finally taking the camera out and will hopefully have a ton of pictures to show you on Monday (unless Tim has broadband at home… then I’ll get them done sooner). Hopefully, we’ll be able to hook up with Daws and Annie for dinner. Not sure where yet.

    It’s been a good trip, but I hope I’m done travelling for a while. I miss Jen and Max and can’t wait to get home. Today and tomorrow will be fun, and it’ll be great to see Tim and Monica, Daws and Annie, but I really want to see my wife and son. It’s weird. I didn’t feel like this either of the times they went to Arizona to visit Jen’s parents. Plus, I don’t handle jet lag well. This is day three, and I’m still a wreck. I’m relying on frequent Cokes to get me through the day, which is bad. Until this week, I hadn’t had a soda in over six months other than the root beer at Sweetwater. Now, I’m downing them whenever I get the chance (and thanks to Google’s stocked and free breakroom – that was many). I hope my little addiction doesn’t come back and I can kick this as soon as I get home.

    I really want to tell you about the meetings yesterday. They were really cool, and I met some really great (and brilliant) folks. I made some great jokes, and think I may have contributed a little bit to the discussion. Not much, I’m sure, but maybe something.

    In completely unrelated news, I’ve been using Hydra to take notes in meetings. I’ve created a little meeting template html file, and then keep my stream-of-consciousness notes during the meeting. It looks good enough to send out to people afterwards and it bloggable if I need it to be. Plus, Hydra has a really nice HTML preview window that uses Safari’s WebCore to render the page. It refreshes automatically every second or so, does so very smoothly without slowing my already slow machine down, and doesn’t require me to save. Hydra is shaping up to be a great editor – all it needs now is tag completion and I’ll swtich from jEdit.

    I think I’m done not telling you what I’ve been up to the past couple days. There’s nothing secret about the next two, so keep your eyes peeled for new stuff.

  • Long Walks in Tiny Glasses

    I’m not going to talk about my full day of meetings until later, when/if other folks start talking about it. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.

    I do want to talk about the other stuff that happened today. We split up today to tackle different stuff, so some of went to the day-long meetings, and some of us went and did something else. I had fish tacos for lunch, and that made me happy. Tonight, I’m all alone. Everyone’s either in the city staying at a different hotel, or they’re going home tonight. So, I’m here tonight all alone with no car until tomorrow morning when my brother comes and picks me up.

    I walked down the street to Satsuma Sushi and had a lovely scallops and mushroom appetizer,and then a combo with teriyaki salmon and nigiri (tuna and yellowtail). I sat there by myself reading the copy of The Smithsonian Magazine I brought with me on the trip and longed for some form of conversation. After dinner, I went off looking for a movie theater. I walked about a mile down El Camino Real, aaaa-aaall the way to Sunnyvale and no luck. So I walked through an audio/video store, and then walked the mile back to the hotel. Here I am, mail checked, blogs read, sitemeter glanced at and listening to CNN in the background. I am officially bored.

    To display the depths of my boredom, I bring you a pet peeve. Why are hotel glasses so freaking small? It’s only slightly bigger than a shot glass, and is a pretty crappy way to try to rehydrate. I might as well drink from the sink or from the ice bucket (now there’s an idea…). Listen up, hotels of America, we demand bigger drinking glasses! 12 ounces or nothing!