Ultranormal

  • Beats To Make You Move Your Seat

    Ok, this Samba version of Hit The Road, Jack in Portugese (I think) on Jazzmusique, has me dancing my fat ass off. It’s rockin’ in a way I just can’t explain. My feet are tappin’, my head is a-boppin, my butt is a-shimmyin’, and thanks to Amazon, the album has been added to my wishlist, and just in time for my birthday.

    If you have a speedy connection, you should get on over to Netmusique right now and listen in. Jazzmusique is my favorite. For example, right before Hit The Road, Jack, they played a live version of Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm, which is one of my all-time favorites (now, if it had been live Teardrop I would have exploded from pure music joy). It’s great happy workin’ music without too many distractions. There are 5 second bumpers every hour or so, but no ads and no end to the ger-oovy music.

    They play some rap every once in a while, and to my shock, I actually like it. It’s always downtempo jazzy stuff with interesting lyrics and sweet beats. Most of the time, it’s downtempo happy beats, frequently of an ethnic flavor (pick one, it’ll happen during the day).

    I apologize for the goofiness of this post. It’s set to music you’re not hearing and a beat you can’t follow.

  • Airport Mormons

    I’m back!! I slept sitting up on the couch last night and got seven hours of uninterrupted sleep before getting up for work. I’m back a work, a little tired and a little coughy, but here I am. I’m going to work on a Geekout! tutorial on installing Movable Type in OS X for a friend and try not to go crazy or fall asleep.

    If I ever get it installed, I’ll probably also do a tutorial on installing an airport card in a G4 Powerbook. I thought it would go under the keyboard like the RAM does, but NO. You have to take the battery out, remove the bottom casing and then you can install the card. Being sick, I haven’t gotten around to performing open-butt on my machine (well, work’s machine – shhhhh). Apple, why do you have to make things difficult? You could have used normal screws on the bottom, and included in the instructions with the card. But no, I had to go to your website and download a 9mb PDF to figure out how to install the card. What fun!! Now, my battery refuses to come out for some reason, and I’m real close to giving up. Maybe it’s time to take it to the Genius Bar and have them do it… it’s admitting defeat, but then at least I’d have Wi-Fi at work.

    The Morning News has an incredibly inaccurate but funny editorial containing a request for the Mormons to save the world from Terror. It’s a novel idea, but don’t think Salt Lake hasn’t contemplated it. After life threats of baptism are pretty funny. If the promise of 70 virgins will convince someone to blow themselves up, would the thought of post-death conversion to Christianity compel them not to? Now, I don’t think this would fly. GW and the Boys only like faith-based initiatives of the Fundamentalist sort. The Fundies don’t like us too much. No, really, they don’t. You’d think they’d love the Mormons, but alas, it was not meant to be. To them, we’re a cult and debbil-worshippers. In high school, I tried and tried to understand why they didn’t like us and well, I could never get a solid answer. The only answer I could come up with was ignorance. Every time I explained my religion to someone, they went, “Oh, that’s not so bad.” After they’d gone back to their pastor, they’d always come back and tell me I was lying to them. Ummmm… huh? Thankfully, I don’t live in Mississippi anymore and don’t have those problems anymore. I must not have enough drugs in my system… this is going nowhere fast.

  • Another Reason Not To Watch Local News

    The local news teased that we’re going to get snow tomorrow, so we watched it. I was shocked and appalled that during the weather report, they actually used Comic Sans!!! Channel 7, fie on you for using the world’s most despised and abused font. You should know better.

  • Bad Ideas

    There is nothing on TV from 4 – 6am. Also, staying up all night when you’re not doing anything staying up for is a really bad idea. My throat kept me up all night. Robitussin gave me no comfort. Tylenol – nothing. Motrin – squat. I give up. I’m calling the doctor in two hours and demanding drugs of some kind. Big horse pills with horrible aftertastes that kill micro-beasties and will give me my life back. I’m too old for this crap. Thankfully, Max’s fever broke yesterday and he slept through the night. At least only 33% of my family is sick, down 333% from yesterday. That’s progress, baby.

  • Cough, Ouch, Type, Repeat

    I’m here and I’m sick. Why am I here? I’m not exactly sure. Here I am though, sitting in my office trying not to cough. My throat won’t stop itching or hurting and I didn’t get to sleep until 3:30 this morning. But, I’m here trying to do something productive, and it’s just not coming off.

    In good news, I’ve gotten lots of thumbs up on the redesign, and Jodi even linked to me (aww, shucks). I’ve been playing with the stylesheet some to get the menu and body borders to line up right. I think it’s just about right now. I was trying to line them up so I only needed one border on the right-hand side of the body (that’s the div with all the posts in it), but that wasn’t working on the individual archive pages and would leave the left side of the menu without a border. SO, I gave the menu and the body borders on the sides where they touch and moved the right-margin over one and ta-da, looks good in both places.

    In sad news, Max is sick too. He’s been working on a fever the past couple days and threw up last night. I’ve been less than helpful because of my sickitude. What’s weird about Max being sick is that after taking Tylenol, he’s pretty much his normal happy self. He’s cuddlier than normal (Max is not big on cuddling normally) and takes catnaps, but other than that, he seems pretty normal. He was sleeping on the sunroom floor, balled up with Lamby, in front of the TV. Jen was sleeping on the couch. My wife is amazing. She’s been getting up with Max in the middle of the night the past couple nights, taking care of him and me and being extremely understanding about all of it. She did get to take a well-deserved five hour nap yesterday afternoon after being up since 2am, but that seems like it’s not enough. She does so much. I love her. I don’t know what I’d do without her.

  • Voila! Redesign Done Enough To Show

    Ok, this is pretty much it. There are still some unpleasant chores to do, but pretty much everything’s done. I’ve checked it in Mozilla, Safari and IE for OS X, and as soon as I get back to the office, I’ll check it in IE for Windows. If you notice anything crazy, please post a comment. What do you think?

  • Gloogler

    Everyone has an opinion on what Google’s acquisition of Blogger means. I’ve read a lot of them. So far, there have been some interesting theories about what Google wants out of Blogger. Wired’s theory of the links is a good one, but why would Google buy Blogger when it already does links? Its whole search algorithm is based on links and volume. Having direct access to the posts would make indexing a little faster, but it means they’ll have to build something brand new to interface with Blogger’s backend, or migrate Blogger’s backend to a new system.

    I think everyone’s missing the point. Google already has access to all the links it will ever need. It indexes millions of pages a day and does a pretty good job of it. Adding slightly faster indexing of a couple hundred thousand blogs won’t make them any money (to recoup whatever they paid Evan). So, what do I think they’re going to do? How does Google make money now? They sell services. I think the bulk of their cash comes from selling their search services to companies like AOL (and others). They then give AOL (and others) money to display their sponsored links on their search products, which people pay Google for. They’re in the service business now. What does that mean for Blogger? It means Google probably already has a good idea for how to package Blogger’s product up into XML feeds and XML-RPC calls to sell to other companies. Of course, this is just a theory – I swear. If I actually had any insider knowledge about Google’s plans, I wouldn’t be sharing them here.

    Good theory, no?

  • Redesign Imminent

    Ultranormal is coming!! I started on this today while waiting around for stuff to do (shhh, don’t tell), and am unbelievably happy with it. It still needs some work, and then I need to templify it, but overall, I really like it. I especially like the javascript includes to get the posts from Geekout and Photos on the page. Look ma, no server side scripting! It’s a simple Movable Type template to create the script and then one line to put it on the page. Sweet, huh?

    There are a couple problem spots. I don’t like the font color on the menu headings. It looks disabled. I just can’t decide what color to replace it with. Also, the missing borders on the left side of the menu and photos list will go away once this is live – my posts are almost always long enough to cover up the menu, and the menu will have more links in it when it’s done.

    Oh, and the font I used for the logo is called AIFragment (because I forgot which one I used halfway through it and had to frantically go back and hunt it down). And, I don’t know what it is about me and orange, but I like it.

  • Chicken Noises

    Ok, I just called a friend a chicken over IM. I was trying to type out chicken noises. It occurred to me, how do you type out sarcastic chicken sounds? Here are the possibilities I came up with:

    • Braaaack braaaak (ok, John came up with that one)

    • Bu-GAWK

    • Squaaaaaaaaaaaack

    • Bok Bok BO-GAWK!

    • Coodle-a-doodle-damn-doo!

    See, it’s hard…

  • The Geekery – Reborn As GEEKOUT!

    I loved the old Geekery. It was butt ugly. Last night and (just a little) today, I put the done-enough-to-show-it touches on the new place for my wild Geek Ramblings: Geekout!

    Let me know what you think. I’m gonna try to find the tutorial and tip things I posted here and copy them over. It’s all Movable Type-errific, so it should be much easier to update (ok, it means I’ll probably update it – static HTML is pretty easy too).