Ultranormal

  • This Is Kevin Whining

    I’ve got a loaner laptop… it’s a PC… running Windows 98. I think I’m in hell. It’s about 18-months behind on updates and other tomfoolery. It’s crashed three times in an hour, once giving me the blue screen of death. It’s short on RAM. It’s ugly. They still don’t know when/if I’ll get a new Powerbook. If the stupid thing had landed on the carpet, everything would be fine. I would be using it and all would be happy happy. Now, I’m in Windows Update hell (Windows Update is evil, if you didn’t already know, but I haven’t installed anything yet and the machine really needs it).

    In other news, I think I’m going to die. I had my first workout with my Personal Trainer (who is a woman, but we will call Bob to protect her anonymity). It was tough, but I made it all the way through without having an asthma attack, passing out or dying. It’s a start. Tomorrow may be a different story. Already, my body parts are screaming profanities unfit for polite or even impolite company. My shoulders are tied up in gigantic knots. They feel like Delta Burke’s shoulder pads in the first couple seasons of Designing Women. My calves feel like those two loaves of bread I made last week, stones. I am committed though, and I will go buy new sneakers, because hiking boots do not make good workout footwear. I will walk for 45 minutes on the C&O trail this weekend with Max (and Jen if she’ll go with us). I will come in to work on Saturday to use the gym. I will do my squats, push ups, bicep curls and ride the bike while reading CNN on the TV. I will sweat and smell bad and use a communal shower. Not because I want to, but because I have to. I will be a shape other than round and blobbish, and if I’m not, I will at least not be as round and blobbish, and I will be able to keep up with Max and play volleyball, and maybe even basketball again. I now see an excuse to get an iPod… one can only read CNN on TV for so long before diving through the nearest window.

    In good news, I think I have the menu all worked out for next week. Jen invited some folks over, and I’m going to make something yum-tastic. Maybe not the soup from last weekend, but maybe. You never know. I’ll post the menu when it’s final and I’ve purchased all the goods.

  • A Titanium Disaster

    There was a death in the Lawver family last night as I brutally and accidentally killed my TiBook. Now, it’s not dead dead, but it might as well be. I was putting it away last night when I picked up my case only to realize that it wasn’t zipped up. Unfortunately, the sound the clued me in was my beautiful Powerbook landing with a mortal crunch on the marble base of our hearth in the basement. There it lay, battery sprung out and a horrible crack in its face. The CD drive looked at me from behind its wounds in a grimace.

    Unfortunately, it landed on the front right corner of the case, right by the slot-loading CD drive. There’s a big crack in the case right at the point of impact, another right through the bottom lip of the CD drive, and one more small one on the left top side of the drive. The whole case has a sickening lilt to it now, with the right side sitting a little higher than the left. The metal on the bottom is completely separated from the frame, and only held on by the screws. The battery won’t stay in if the machine is moved. The hard drive has a coughing whir.

    And the best part is, the computer people don’t have any in stock! So I have to do the whole purchase, approval, wait forever process in order to get a replacement. I think today is a good day to start drinking.

  • Too Many Computers? Is That Possible???

    People at work give me a hard time about the number of computers I have under my desk. Honestly, I think they’re just jealous. Here’s the rundown:

    • Dell Precision P3-733 running Windows XP – the former home of most of my work computing. No longer, since I switched to…

    • Apple TiBook – G4-550 – it’s not as fast or as beefy as I’d like, but I do like taking my work home with me (Jen doesn’t).

    • Apple Quicksilver – G4-867 – It’s fast, but I’ve got everything installed on the TiBook. I’m thinking of coming up with a neat-o rcp syncer so I can work on this beast and still take everything home… BUT, I have the TiBook hooked up to an external monitor and I’m really loving the wrap-around workspace.

    • Dell Precision – Dual Xeon 1.7ghz running RedHat 8 (soon to be 9, hopefully) – This is the uberbox. I love it. It hosts my big intranetEmpire and runs some really funny daily reports. It has two giganimous hard drives and fuels my evil plans.

    • Sun Ultra 10 – 400 – Bleagh. It’s not even turned on, but it’s still here under my desk. It used to be the bane of my existence until the day I was able to turn it off. Sweet monitor came with it though…

    That’s not too many, really! I use all of them on a daily basis to get my work done (well, the Quicksilver may be overkill, but it has my 8.7 days worth of music on it – that I own… really, I do. I swear). The XP box may get demoted to 2000, because XP makes my buttcheeks clench. XP is evil.

    I have no idea where this is going… only that I need more computers. I want a crash PC that I can reformat whenever I want and install goofy stuff on it. It has nothing to do with my job, so it’ll never happen – but it would be fun. When I was on the phones, I had what we called “The Crash Mac”. It was a beige G3 that I installed every flavor of Linux available for the Mac (all of two, LinuxPPC and YellowDog) on and learned all kinds of wicked things you can’t do to Macs on it. It was fun, and a great learning tool. I think everyone should have at least one crash machine. I may go out to Wal-Mart and buy a \$200 crap PC right now just so I have one. Yeah… just try and stop me.

  • They’ve Gone All Communal

    So, I get Dawson to start a blog and now what’s happened? They’ve gone and started a blog commune. They’ve got nine little baby blogs on their site… I’m so proud.

  • Anti-Bloggie Prize Patrol

    Miss Mea-Mea won the best Amazon Wishlist category in this year’s Anti-Bloggies! Her prize (from yours truly) was something from her Amazon Wishlist less than \$25. Her choices (since I thought randomly choosing something was kinda mean) were Pulp’s This is Hardcore and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties The Knot. They’ve both been ordered and are now wending their way through the Amazon ordering system on their way to her door. Congratulations to her and tough luck to the losers with crappy wishlists.

  • Die, Pins, Die!!

    I’ve spent all day mucking about with DOCTYPEs, conditional funkiness and the perils of unattainable goals. I won’t bore you with the details. My mood hasn’t improved, even after listening to Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) about a million times today. Thankfully, tonight is bowling, so I get to go take out all my theological and political frustrations on a bunch of helpless pins.

    Speaking of bowling, since I lost all this weight, I can’t use my giant sixteen pound ball reliably. It’s hard to control and it goes all over the place. I’ve switched to using the house fourteen pounders (which are all pink for some reason, not that I have a problem with that – the 12 pounders are baby blue). I’ve bowled really well for me (high score of 146 last week) the past couple weeks with the fourteen pounder, and am tempted to go get my own light girly ball. I think tonight will be a combo-swearing night, as long as W doesn’t bring the kids.

    I did smile momentarily today when I reaized that General Conference is this weekend, and I don’t have to go to church.

  • Self-Serving Wallowing BS

    This weekend, I read articles about the Wright Brothers, an artist who makes photo-realistic art out of fabric, Degas’ ballet paintings, and an interview with Maya Angelou. Along with yesterday’s freak snow storm, and church, the stories help slide me into a deep funk. There’s all kinds of stuff rolling around in my head, and none of it is making me very cheerful.

    Let’s start with the Wright Brothers. These guys competed against several world governments and top scientists of the day to become the first men to launch an honest-to-goodness powered airplane. They did it through sheer determination and a talent for breaking large problems into component pieces. They solved those smaller component problems on the way to a solution to the big problem. The article contained excerpts from several letters sent by the brothers to relatives and friends, and a couple news stories about them. The writing in the letters and articles was so beautiful in both form and vocabulary that it made me ashamed of all this tripe on my site. I want to be a good writer, and this site has turned into a journal, only a couple one step removed from the form of my instant messages and e-mails.

    Second, Maya Angelou. She’s seventy-five and is never bored. I’m bored all the time. I’ve lost some piece of the fire I used to have. I’m too complacent and willing to sit and let things wash over me instead of standing up and taking the wave head on. I’m tired and unwilling to fight a lot of the time. Ms. Angelou has lived an amazing life, written books, poems for Presidents, sung for albums and still finds time to learn languages and teach. I can barely find the energy to cook when I get home from work, much less do anything else productive.

    Third, let’s talk about church. Or, let’s not. I can’t decide what I should say here. My family reads this crap, and so do several people from church. Let’s just say, I’m having a hard time getting up and going every Sunday. I’m having a hard time biting my tongue. There was a whole paragraph here about the other things I hate about church, but I just deleted it. I get why people leave the church now… it’s hard being Mormon when you don’t fit into the “mainstream” of Mormon culture.

  • The Wake

    Jen wrote this one…

    Waaaaaaaahhhh! Arizona lost! Arizona lost! Boohoo. They started out so flat, so sloppy, just plain horrible! It would have been Lute’s 500th career win at Arizona. Twenty years ago today he signed on with Az. How great would a win have been? To end a season by playing so poorly is frustrating, almost as bad as a first round NCAA tournament loss (which Az has done.) Even though Az won big, Thursday’s game against Notre Dame did more harm than good, due to the lack of defense. When Kevin heard that Az had lost, his face fell and he said “oh, I am so sorry. are you ok?” He acted like my pet had just died. I was exuberant when Az beat Gonzaga, but my mood didn’t swing the other way for this loss. So I assured him that I was fine. But then again, this is my first ranting blog in almost 6 months. I am glad that Kevin is sensitive enough to inquire about my feelings, even about such a trivial matter as a basketball game. (When Princess Diana died, I called my aunt and asked if she was ok, so I understand Kevin’s motivation.) It did give me the opportunity to talk about my favorite Az moments: the first final four appearance, the national championship a few years ago. One of my favorite game of all time was the loss in the championship game 2 years ago. It was the year Lute’s wife Bobbi died after fighting breast cancer. Lute had taken a leave of absence from coaching during the season to be with Bobbi, but came back after her passing. He had mentioned that the pain of her passing was least felt while the team was on the court. Taking that to heart, the team played and played and played. Going further than any would have thought possible, they lost only in the last round of the tournament when there was not another game waiting to be played. As for the rest of the tournament, I may continue to watch, but only to root for a loss for both Texas and Oklahoma (so that no number one seed makes it to the Final Four. Kentucky lost today too.) It may sound spiteful, but I need a reason to watch, don’t I? In happier news, Lute is engaged to be married in October. How great is that?! Statistically, widowers who were happily married are more likely to remarry than the unhappily married widowers. Interesting thought, huh?

  • Three Cooking Undertakings

    Last night, Max and I made cookies. Our pantry was against us, however and we were missing two important ingredients: brown sugar and rolled oats. Being the creative culinary maverick that I am, I substituted regular sugar mixed with maple syrup (it made the sugar brown, and kind of brown-sugar-esque) and crushed pecans. The cookies turned out a little flat and runny, but they’re still yummy. The maple syrup added a great flavor.

    Today, I decided to try out Mr. Allen’s yummy-sounding soup recipe. Of course, being American, I couldn’t just follow directions. Instead of making chicken stock, I used some store bought beef and chicken broths left over from my braising experiment. I used broccoli, cauliflower and mushrooms as my veggies of choice, along with a healthy heaping of spices: white and black peppercorns, green chili powder, red chili powder, a pinch of curry, and some sea salt. I simmered for two hours, then added two little containers of heavy whipping cream, whipped with my little kitchenaid thingy, and voila – the most amazing soup I’ve ever made. Jen is floored.

    On top of the soup, I decided that Max and I would enjoy making bread together. Unfortunately, Max decided to take a nap, and I got to make bread by myself. It was my first time making homemade bread from scratch aaa-aaall alone. I decided to go old school and mix everything by hand. I’m not sure it’s going to turn out, but it was fun to try just the same.

    Oh, there’s the timer. Time to go see how it turned out.

  • Like A Tofu Sammitch

    Not gonna talk about the war… not gonna talk about the war… not gonna talk about the war… I got flamed over at A Small Victory. I’m not going to say what it’s about or why I got into it other than I couldn’t resist. Go read for yourself (I am taking bets though on how long it will take for someone to call me a Nazi).

    I met Jen and Max for lunch today. Max is my favorite little kid ever. I know, he’s my son, but it still counts. I asked him what he wanted to do tonight while he was sitting there gnoshing on chicken nuggets. Max piped up and said, “MAKE COOKIES!!” We’re going to dust off the cookie sheet, pull out the flour, sugar, baking soda, vanilla and butter and make ourselves some chocolate chip goodness. I then asked him what we were going to do after we made cookies. Of course, he said, “We’re gonna eat one!” And we will.

    Each paragraph in this post will be completely unrelated… if you hadn’t caught that already. I’ve been keeping this quiet since we launched it, but I just can’t anymore. I met with a couple guys from DevEdge on Wednesday to see if we could make our product faster/better/happier. Now, I’m pretty confident that I’m good at what I do. I do my best when at all possible, and the best I can under circumstances that dictate something other than the best. Ok, back to the DevEdge guys. They came in, and told me my DOCTYPE wasn’t in caps, and that was a problem. Fine, I can live with that, and they said it doesn’t affect the pageload anyway. I’m not hip on DOCTYPE’s anyway, and it’s easy enough to fix. That was it. That was the only problem that I have control over. They actually said they learned some new tricks looking at my markup, and that makes me happy. So, what was it that they were looking at? AOL Search. We quietly relaunched it earlier this month. I was able to shave a second off the page load time by totally redoing the markup underneath. Other than a couple places in the results that I don’t have control over, there are no tables, and everything is contained in DIVs. There’s one inline stylesheet. Oh yeah, and it had to look EXACTLY the same as it did before, and I had to learn a new language in like two weeks to get it done. This has been a good week for my ego.