Ultranormal

  • Not In Team?

    Possible reponses that may fly out of my mouth the next time someone says “There’s no I in TEAM” (inspired by this – thanks, Ray!):

    • There’s no YOU in it either.

    • There’s no chocolate in TEAM, which is why I‘m not there.

    • Yes, but there is a ME.

    • I go by MEAT when I’m in a TEAM, which is why you didn’t see me.

    • This isn’t about spelling. This is serious! Everyone knows there’s no I in TEAM. It’s spelled T – E – A -M. You should learn to spell and stop relying on spellcheck, honestly.

    • That’s true, but there is a U in DUMB. (there’s also a U in STUPID, but there’s also an I, which is why I used DUMB)

    That was fun… got any to add?

  • Not As Geek As I Wanna Be

    I am 32.54438[/b> geek, which highly disappoints me. I took the test last week, and didn’t take enough time to fully contemplate my answers and only got a 28]{style=”text-align:left;”}. I know you’ve already seen it, but you can take the test too. I am a huge geek. Not geek to the point of nerd, but I’m getting there. I’m such a geek that I’m embarrassed by how low my score is. My boss said I was too “cool” to rank so high on the geek test. That one knocked me back a step. I’ve never been cool. I think it’s probably because I discovered the joys of geekery after high school, so I missed out on the whole D&D, A/V Club thing. I don’t know… I swear I’m making up for lost geekTime. The last eight years working where I do, and meeting the people I have, and learning the things I’ve learned has been more fun than any other career I could have thought of back then.

    Geeks are cool. Geeks are passionate. Geeks get things done, and in many ways drive the innovation that make our lives better. The advances in all avenues of human endeavor have been brought about by passionate, smart people committed to an idea. That’s what we are. Geeks are folks passionate about something, anything. You’re probably a geek too… about something. If you’re not, I feel sorry for you.

  • Miller’s Crossing

    I watched Miller’s Crossing last night. A couple thoughts:

    • The Coen’s have a great feel for language and dialect. The movie is full of great old sayings like “What’s the rumpus?” and “Givin’ me the high hat” that will probably slip into my vocabulary now.

    • Jon Polito can chew up the scenery. I have an affinity for character actors, and apparently, so do the Coen’s. Jon Polito is one of my favorites. He’s just great in this movie (he’s got the “high hat” line and you can tell he loves it).

    • I saw this movie once about six or seven years ago and back then I didn’t catch on that Bernie, Mink and Eddie the Dane were gay. How did I miss that? (Ok, I can tell you why – I was naive)

    • John Turturro is an amazing actor. He pulled off Bernie so elegantly devoid of morals, and subtly adrogynous. It was an amazing performance.

    • Albert Finney with that tommy gun and cigar is the coolest old tough guy scene ever.

    Oh, and I wish my headache would go away. And, the big thing I miss about using my Mac? I miss Shift+Insert to paste. I really really do. Oh, and did you know you can style lists with a little CSS? I’ve been doing it for years. It’s great amounts of fun, really. Try it. You’ll like it.

  • Oh no!

    Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?
    \
    A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

    Brian Countryman: Microsoft TechChat (about halfway down)

    One of the banes of my existence is that people never upgrade IE. From past experience, and the fact that a good portion of the surfing audience is still running Windows 95, I hope IE 6 SP1 is a perfect browser, because it’s the last one people will ever use. People don’t upgrade their OS as long as it still works. People don’t upgrade their browser unless they’re geeks (like me) or forced, usually when they buy new computers.

    Happy freakin’ Friday.

  • In Other Words, Fly

    as the radio man says it is 5 a.m. and the sun has charred
    \
    the other end of the world and come back to us
    \
    and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet

    Soul Coughing: Screenwriter’s Blues

    I’m not often touched by song lyrics. But Screenwriter’s Blues is a weird mix of thumping stand-up bass and beat poetry that forces me to listen. The section above just resonates in my skull. How gorgeous are those three lines?

  • Sorry, Newsreaders!

    I tweaked the rss files (.91 and 1.0) so they only contain the last five complete posts. So, if you get all of the last five posts in your newsreader instead of just this one, I apologize. I should be done playing for now.

    Why did I do it? Well, fifteen complete posts is a lot of crap to download just to read the most recent post. That was just plain inconsiderate of me, and I’m sorry. Second, it means shorter rebuild times for me. Third… I can’t think of a third reason.

    I also added a favicon (I used to have one… I removed it accidentally at some point). If you don’t see it, or have problems seeing it, please let me know (should show up in the address bar of modern browsers).

  • I’ve Been Linked!

    It’s an honor to be linked to by anyone clever enough to come up with this domain name.

  • Yo Yo Max

    New Pictures!!

    Max has discovered some of the joys of yo-yo-ing. Why some? Because he can drop it like the best of them; getting it to come back up is the trick. This problem is compounded by the fact that the string is longer than he is tall (hence him standing on the dining room table). He still loves it and laughs his little head off every time he lets go of the yo-yo and watches it roll down the string towards the floor. Last night, we ended up using the yo-yo as a fishing line. We caught six little fish and made a lovely fish pie out of flour, the fish, carrots, water, eggs and celery (Max and I came up with the ingredient list – he contributed the flour, water, eggs and fish – he’s smart).

    He’s so much fun now. He has a great little blooming imagination, a joy for play and is smart enough to come up with and get jokes. He’s devoid of cynicism and almost completely lacking in guile (almost… he tries to be sneaky, but he’s not very good at it yet).

    This morning, Max helped me water the flower Jen got for her birthday, and then wanted to take some pictures. Do kids come funner than three and a half? If so, I don’t know if I can take it.

  • Oh, I Meant To

    After an extremely productive day (you have no idea – a complete redesign of a major product in less than 48 hours), I expected to come home and want to work. Ummm, nope. I took some pictures of Max playing with my old Duncan Butterfly yo-yo (which will go up tomorrow), showed him some old pictures on the laptop, and then came downstairs, where I’ve been guiding the Aztecs to world dominance in CivIII.

    My boss ordered me a copy of Zeldman’s new book, and I thought I’d want to read that tonight. But, no. It’s building armies and workers and negotiating trade for me. I’m so freaking productive it makes me sick.

  • Readin’, Readin’, Readin’

    On another topic, I’ve been reading a lot lately. We subscribe to a ton of magazines: Smithsonian, Utne (free with my Salon subscription – yet more reading), Premiere, and there are a couple others. I always read Smithsonian cover to cover, and here’s why (all from this month’s issue):

    And yesterday, I read a great article on mushrooms and how they may be able to help clean up chemical spills, counteract chemical weapons, give us new medicines and generally make life better, a mother’s touching and funny love letter to her son, and David Byrne’s frequently confusing essay on good bad art and bad good art in Utne. Between those two magazines alone, I’m caught up on trivia for at least the next year if not longer.

    So, in doing all this reading, and with work as busy as it is, I haven’t been posting as much. I don’t think I mind all that much. I’m going to try to come up with one good post a day, and maybe do a sidebar blog of links and short subjects that I don’t want to spend as much time on. Yeah, I know everyone else is doing it – but it’s a good idea anyway.