Ultranormal

  • 5 Years Ago

    It sounds like a long time ago now, but it doesn’t feel like it. Five years ago today, I got married to the coolest girl on the planet. She laughed at my jokes then and she still does. She still gives me that look that makes me feel like I can do anything. She makes me feel younger than I am. She makes me want to be a better man.

    Five years has gone by in what feels like a couple months; but, when I look back, there are all these memories of things we’ve done and well, yeah, there are five year’s worth of memories there. Other than a broken knee and a pretty rough birth , things have been blissful, even when they shouldn’t have been. It’s funny how much can change in five years. We’ve gone from really poor to comfortable. We’ve gone from the sunny dustbowl of Tucson to the (now) frigid greenery of Northern Virginia, from a tiny tiny tiny one bedroom apartment to a townhouse we frequently lose each other in. We went from the two of us playing house in our little box apartment to having a kid to mess up a home we own.

    Jen, I would do it all over again in an instant. There are very few things I would change (the whole broken knee thing) and couldn’t imagine my life without you. Happy Anniversary, baby!

  • I’m So Fat

    I need a new belt!! Yes, I’ve said it already, but today I realized I can’t suck in my gut or my pants will fall down with my current belt hiked all the way to its last hole. Yep, Mr. Me, I’m doin’ pretty good.

    I’m taking a Java class this week, which is a little weird since I already built this huge thing in Java without ever having touched it before and NOW I’m taking the class. But, while I was building this thing, there were lots of times I went, “Hey, what the?!” and got really frustrated because I couldn’t figure out why something worked one way and not another. I didn’t have the time to figure it out because I had to move on to the next problem. In the first three hours of class today, a lot of those frustrations melted away. Yeah, Java’s still a little too strict for me, and packages are still a pain, but at least I understand what they are now.

  • Learnin’ Is Phat

    I’m in training aaaa-aaaaall day and then have a meeting that will keep me here past dark. So, you probably won’t hear a lot from me today unless l get inspired during lunch. Go read something else and then come back and tell me about it.

  • A Moving Experience

    The article isn’t scary to me. What scares me is it actually sounds like a good idea.. Warning… intense gastric descriptions await you in that story.

    After a small scare yesterday (went back up to 300.5), I’m back to 299.5, and that’s after going out to breakfast and having chili for dinner. I’m really not getting crazy about this, but I’m seeing results and it makes me extremely happy. I have more energy. I can see my toes. I need to go shopping for a new belt because this one’s on its last hole and not doing a great job of holding things up. I wore pants to church that I haven’t been able to fit into for over a year, and they weren’t the least bit uncomfortable.

  • Let The Wild Rumpus Begin

    299.5 – YES!! Under 300!! Yeah, I know it’s cutting it close and with my first glass of water, I was back over 300… but it still counts. I’ve discovered the trick to this whole weighing myself thing. Only do it once a day at the point when I’ll probably be the lightest: in the morning first thing after waking up (and of course, taking a leak, because water’s really heavy). 20+ pounds down, 99.5 to go.

    In non-fat news, we watched The Mothman Prophecies the other night. I wasn’t expecting much, but Jen and I were both awake and in the mood for a scary movie. It was a lot better than I expected it to be. It was very creepy, and did a great job of setting the mood. It was a little over-stylized, especially in the cut scenes. But, Jen screamed once which is a vote of confidence in a movie. If Jen screams, it is good. It’s better if Jen screams and then jumps into my arms for comfort… that’s a GREAT movie. A scream and a giggle, that’s a good movie. No screams and she falls asleep? That’s a horrible movie. Can you tell we’ve been married almost five years?

  • Here I Go Again

    Here I go again. I used to be a Republican. I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I read his first two books. I thought Bill Clinton was a bad dude (and I still he is in some ways). This was all in high school and for a couple years afterwards, maybe until 1995 or 96. I am no longer a Republican. I think Rush Limbaugh is is a big fat idiot. I think the GOP is morally bankrupt. I think they long ago sold out and are now no more than puppets for Corporate America. They play on the middle class evangelicals and devout by promising to outlaw abortion, get prayer back in school and bring God to the heathens in Washington. They play to those who feel left out by saying they’ll bring jobs to the little people and they’re “compassionate”. They don’t really mean it, obviously. Sure, they’ll create a day, but all they really care about is making money for themselves and their patrons. They want to keep us fat and complacent while they run off with the bank.

    What about the Dems? They’re no better. They may have better positions, but they’re incapable or unwilling of fighting the Republicans at the moment. After decades of being able to articulate their positions and get popular culture on their side, they’ve lost it. The cats (or Elephants) have run off with their eloquence and left them with nothing to say. It’s depressing. At a time when we need a fiery and vociferous opposition party, we get Casper Milquetoast and His Band Of Capitulators. Where’s the fight? Where’s the fire?

    And third parties? Dream on. Ralph Nader turned into Andrew Dice Clay after the election and I’m not sure we’ll ever hear from the Green Party again. The Libertarians, who actually showed some promise in ’92, were nowhere to be seen in 2000 (at least not in DC). Jesse Ventura did more to set his little party back than more it forward and… well, that’s all the ones anyone knows about, isn’t it?

    Where does that leave us? I feel that if I vote Republican, whoever I vote for isn’t really going to do anything for me, and in my district, we don’t really have any Democrats running for anything important (John Warner ran unopposed for the Senate… huh?!). It makes me almost want to give up and stop voting, but I know I won’t. It’s the only way I’ve got to make even a little difference. Man, this was depressing.

  • Nucular Strategery

    “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas – probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

    Wow. How did this guy get elected? Every day I watch a news conference or read the news, I cringe at what comes out of his mouth. And now the National Sanctity of Life Day and Patriot Day? On NSoLD, I don’t care where you stand on abortion, and I’m not going to get into my position on it here, but how big was the wheelbarrow he used to roll his balls into the room to make that announcement? This guy has no sense of what he’s doing looks like, does he? He’s all for sticking us with his wacky Religious Right agenda without considering the objections of anyone who may have a differeing opinion. There are now dozens, if not hundreds of examples of the Bush (part Deux) Administration making Black and White declarations about things without knowing all sides of the issue. For example, let’s create an energy policy in secret without talking to even the most conservative enviromental groups? Not one! Let’s create a national Anti-Abortion day without thinking that this is a Democracy and there is a large percentage of Americans who will be offended by it (probably much larger than those who think this is a good idea)! Woo-hoo!! Ok, on to Patriot Day… What a meaningless and stupid name for a day to commemorate one of the worst acts of violence in American history. One of the others, an act of war that led us into WWII in the Pacific doesn’t have a holiday. We don’t celebrate December 7th. We don’t give it a name. It’s the day something terrible happened. Let’s leave it be and let people remember it how they want or need to.

    Compassionate Conservatism is a joke. It’s an evil joke played on the American people, and I’m sick to my stomach over it. Bush Junior has done nothing but stick it to the middle class and the poor in his time in office. He’s bungled situation after situation with his unnuanced and uninformed positions and policies and I for one can’t wait until I get to cast my next ballot for President.

  • Get Used To It

    301.0 – Yup, that’s a pound and a half yesterday. At this rate, I’ll be at 299 tomorrow or Saturday!!! And, in case you’re already tired of this weight loss saga, get used to it. You’re gonna hear about it pretty much every day until I’m down to 220 (gunning for 200, but 220 would be my lowest “adult” weight when I was riding a bike every day and eating tomato soup two out of three meals a day).

  • My 7.5 Days Of Music…

    are now useless!! I found FlareSOUND yesterday in iTunes and am in love. They stole my whole music library and put it up on their jazzybeats channel. They threw in stuff I’ve never heard before and then proceeded to beat me silly with it. Great downtempo chillout coding music for the musically adventurous.

    And yes, my iTunes library is currently 7 days, 14 hours, 15 minutes and 10 seconds and takes up 13.2gb of hard drive. And it’s 95% music I own (or someone in my immediate family owns) and 5% samples I downloaded for free. I should be the poster boy for the fight against the RIAA. I’m not a music stealer. I’m a perfectly legal fair-use consumer of music that I’ve legally purchased through retail outlets. I love being able to listen to several hundred CDs on shuffle without having to bring the CDs to work every day, or leave them here. It’s a perfectly reasonable use of the CDs I’ve overpaid for over the years, and any attempt to take it away will be met with untold amounts of hacking and debauchery to get it back.

    I didn’t mean to turn this into a rant about the RIAA, it just kind of happened. Why? Because I’m in a good mood today. 2.6 pounds to go and I can say I no longer weigh 300 pounds. How cool is that? I’m down to 302.5 (that’s a pound and half gone from yesterday alone and a pound the day before). Needless to say, the diet’s working and Jen could even tell the difference this morning. She says I’m lookin’ gooooood, and that’s all the matters.

  • No More Whining

    I’m feeling better today. No more whining today. I’m playing with using Tcl around Movable Type and it’s a lot of fun. I wrote a little template that spits all the categories and entries into a tcl array, where things can then be sorted, goofed with, etc. Since everything is in MySQL, I could just go right to the db, but I can never get the MySQL driver to build right on my Linux box. I know I’m kind of wasting my time because I’ll never ever find a hosting company that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to run AOLserver, but it’s a nice diversion.

    For example, I don’t like how Movable Type’s MTEntryNext and MTEntryPrevious work. I usually only want to go back and forth within a category, not through the whole site. You also can’t re-sort by field or ascend/descend like you can with MTEntries (which means your next/prev are out of order if you sort any other way than the default). I’ve already posted it to the Request a New Feature board (although I think it’s a minor minor bug).

    I’ve done all kinds of stuff today. I wrote documents, finished up a project, put off starting a new one, ate a salad, drank a gallon of water and wrote up my goals for the first quarter:

    • I will write more code than documents this quarter.

    • I will mourn Steve Case’s resignation quietly and keep my grief to myself. I will no longer start sobbing in meetings and crying out, “Oh, STEVE!!!! WHY DID YOU LEAVE US?!!”

    • I will stop laughing when I hear the word “functionality”.

    • In the interest of cost savings, I will institute a toilet paper rationing program. I will personally set an example by using no more than four sheets per visit to the little boys’ room.

    • I will stop putting rude comments in my code.

    • No more easter eggs (I swear, there haven’t been ANY in anything y’all might have seen).

    • Instead of wasting company time walking all the way to the bathroom, I will install one in my office.

    • I will stop referring to my co-workers as Squeaky McSoggypants