So, I spent eight hours at work today, and that was too long for a beautiful Saturday. I took enough time to take Jen and Max to the Dominion Brewery for lunch. The service was pretty bad, but the food, root beer and ginger ale were good. It’s funny. The place is way back in this industrial park near work (turn left twice and look for the empty kegs) where no one would happen on it by accident. Once you get inside though, it’s this nice little restaurant with big windows looking in on the brewery and bottling areas.

The sandwiches are pretty tasty and the boneless chicken wings are awesome. But, the whole reason to go is their root beer and ginger ale, made on the premises. It’s divine. I got Max a root beer (which I don’t think he’s ever had before) and he went nuts for it. I had to hide it from him so he wouldn’t drink it all at once.

And here I am at 9:30 on a Saturday night. My wife and son are asleep and I’m watching Donnie Darko again. I was right the first time, it’s a great film. It doesn’t make sense, and it really doesn’t have to. The performances and feel of the movie just work so well. Just amazing. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on Cinemax now, so TiVo it, rent it, buy it, do whatever you have to to watch this film. You won’t regret it, even if it’s just to see Patrick Swayze play a totally convincing motivational speaker, and SparkleMotion.

There’s so much to say and so little time. I’ll be working all weekend on this huge thing that I can’t tell you about, so I won’t be here. I’ll be around, somewhere, doing things.

I can’t believe I said “loon” twice in my comment on Reid’s sniper tipline post. Yeah, I said I’d avoid mentioning the sniper stuff, but that was the last post and this is a new one.

I’m going to try to avoid ranting today. It’s going to hard because I was dumb last night and watched John Walsh on Larry King last night. But, I will say no more. I will instead tell you what I’ve been doing while trying to avoid cable news and my paranoid fear of being clipped while getting into or out of my car, and the gut wrenching thought that it might happen to my wife or son.

Max and I have a new favorite show. TLC has decided to combine Junkyard Wars and Battlebots to create the perfect television experience. Full Metal Challenge was an extreme amount of fun. Max almost lost it when he saw the cars run into the big bowling pins. He clapped and jumped up and down and cheered, counting at Max Volume 10, “1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 PINS!!” When I wasn’t enthralled with watching that little Chilean car beat the crap out of the other two huge monsters, I was laughing at Max and egging him on. When they blew up the third place car (in the only truly lame part of the show, in my opinion), Max cheered and yelled, “BOOM!” I have never had so much fun watching TV with my son. Thank goodness it was TiVo‘ed because Max wanted to watch it again last night. He was just as excited last night when we watched it again. I’m going to record Junkyard Wars tonight and see if he likes it. There isn’t as much action, but there is still the blowtorching, greasy goodness of geeks and their machines.

In other geekly news, I’m starting to fall in love with Java and JSP’s. Yes, I know, I never thought I’d say it either, but I really dig being able to separate everything I don’t want to write into a servlet and do JUST the display stuff in the JSP. The only ugly thing so far is closing if/while type statements. It’s hard to keep those hanging }’s tab-aligned properly (because I’m nothing if not anal about my tabs). Other than that, it’s a lot of fun. I’m still at the hunt and peck stage where I have to go to my two trusty books, O’Reilly’s great JavaServer Pages and Java in a Nutshell for answers where in Tcl I pretty much have everything memorized and writing it is no harder than the writing I’m doing now. In Tcl, it’s all about style and the best way to do it. In Java and JSP now, it’s how to do it at all, nevermind the “best” way. For a while, I’ll have to say, “I don’t know if we can do that”. In Tcl, I can say with authority, “No way” or “Sure, that’s easy” (because in Tcl it’s either impossible or trivial… no idea why that is). I’ll get there. It took me about two months in Tcl, writing something every day, to be able to start thinking more about the problem I’m trying to solve than the code I have to write to solve it. I figure Java’s a little more complex and the syntax is foreign, so it’ll take me maybe three months to get totally comfortable.

I also found an odd bug on this site yesterday. For each post on the homepage, the text would drift to the left for every paragraph tag. This doesn’t happen in Mozilla, and I’m having a hard time understanding why IE would do it. So, for now I’ve just set the left margin to 15, which seems to keep the text from running over the left edge. The other weird IE-ism today is form padding. If you have a form tag outside a div, IE decides that you want padding around it. The only way to get rid of it is to style the form tag with padding:0 and margin:0. How weird is that? Again, Mozilla doesn’t do this. IE for both Windows and OS X do. Again, odd.

There’s nothing left to say about the sniper. There isn’t really anything to say at all today. Go hug someone… or kick a trash can.

Damn. They didn’t catch him. They happened on two undocumented guys from Latin America who are now in INS custody and have absolutely nothing to do with the 9 murders and 3 woundings that have taken place in this area in the last two weeks.

I was so hopeful that they’d caught him, that the person (who cares if the lunatic is a man or woman, not I) got stupid or greedy and was dull enough to call from a payphone and stand around until the cops traced it and came down on them like the wrath of God.

So… what now? We wait until he (he because I don’t want to type he/she or they) strike again and hope the cops catch him this time. Jen asked me tonight after I got home if it’s safe to go outside again. What am I supposed to tell her? I have no idea. He’s hit everyone off of or close to major roadways. Ummm, for all of you people who don’t live here, you can’t go 100 yards without stumbling over a major artery. There are two major roads within two minutes of my house, another and the largest airport in the area five minutes from my house. Our grocery store is in a well-lit parking lot with lots of exits (three weeks ago, I would have said that was a good thing). Our church is right by the toll road (that other major roadway in the area).

I can tell you all the makes and models of the white trucks between my house and anywhere I go. I count them and try to memorize the license plates. I can count ten in my neighborhood alone, one with a roof rack (it has carpets, not ladders and it’s the wrong make, but I’m still tempted to call it in).

See? This is why we’re all freaked out. We all live within minutes of a possible getaway. We’re all exposed. We’ve all lived with the fac that if something bad was planned by someone who doesn’t like us, we live in one of the three prime targets in the country. So, excuse us if we’re all a little frazzled and don’t talk about the cute things our kids do, the games this weekend or the stuff on TV (Full Metal Challenge is awesome, by the way). (switching tense for no good reason) I’m tired of looking over my shoulder and trying to protect everyone all the time, like that poor frightened woman at the gas station last weekend. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be OK, even though I didn’t believe it either. It’s going to be OK… but I don’t believe that either.

(this will probably get updated throughout the day) Police take two men into custody in Virginia

It looks like they may have the sniper(s) in custody! I sure hope so, because I’ve watched more CNN in the past two weeks than I care to mention.

Speaking of, I have yet another problem with CNN’s coverage of this whole thing. With their quiver full of experts and the constantly interjecting Daryn Kagan (don’t really care if that’s spelled correctly), I’ve heard the phrase “We don’t want to speculate” about a thousand times. Yet, what do they do as soon as those five words leave their mouths? They go right on to speculate and offer whatever crocked up theory they have that five minutes. They’ve done nothing BUT speculate for two weeks on this thing. It’s their job to speculate. But, come on CNN, don’t think we’re so stupid as to think that what you’re doing isn’t speculation. It is, especially when it’s your reporters doing the speculation. Seeing as I’ve been giving CNN all this advice, I’ve come up with a new tagline for CNN. I think it would be perfect for the bumper with James Earl Jones saying, “This is CNN”. They should have Richard Lewis’s voice follow that with “Now with spectaculation!” They seem to let everyone in the speculation act: anchors, hosts, field reporters, etc.

Ok, while I’m at it, when did it become journalistically acceptable for one reporter to interview another reporter about a story they’ve both been reporting on at the same time? It happened about a million times on Saturday night after the shooting in Ashland, and it drove me nuts. I understand going to a reporter in the field, like Jeane Meserve (who seemed to be able to get info better than anyone else and made the others look like a high school A/V club), but for Anderson Cooper to interview Ms. Kagan, who was doing the same thing he was was just stupid. She was basically an anchor on location. She’s not a reporter. She’s an anchor. Don’t interview her like she’s been doing investigative journalism while they did her hair and makeup.

I would watch one of the other cable news channels, but they’re even worse. It’s sad that CNN is the best of the bunch, when they’ve clearly gone downhill.

I’ve been giving CNN a really hard time, but I do have to give them credit for covering the shooting on Saturday when even our local DC stations wouldn’t cut into normal programming (on two channels, they were showing second or third run movies… breaking news would have gotten better ratings) to cover it.