Ultranormal

  • My Name Is

    My name is Kevin, and I’m rockin’ the suburbs. That is all.

  • Photography is Yummy

    Through k10k, I found this lovely photography site. There are some amazing photos in the portfolio (like this one). A great use of Flash as well… pretty without being unusable or superfluous.

    mario_lalich.jpg

    I’ve got a lot to get done today, on top of getting my car fix (which I’ll tell you all about later). I’ll hopefully be back later today to tell you all about Lamb, the trouble with my car, and other deep Friday thoughts.

  • I’m Huh?

    According to one of the Ops guys at work, I’m Da MAAAAN. I’m not sure what I should do to cement my status as DA MAAAAAN, but I’m open to suggestions.

  • The Folds of Thieving Acid House Hillbilly Jams

    So, the big order from Amazon showed up yesterday with Jen’s Gift Pack and my CD’s. I got Jen the new remastered Grease DVD, the soundtrack, the Grease II soundtrack, Carole King’s remastered Tapestry and A3’s Exile on Coldharbor Lane because she loves the Sopranos theme song, but I don’t like the rest of the songs on the soundtrack. I’ve been listening to the album this morning, and it’s right up my alley. It’s a weird combination of styles, but I love it. Take a little bit of Robbie Robertson’s self-titled solo album, Leonard Cohen, Acid Jazz, rap, a little early Moby beat, and rockabilly. It’s crazy, and there’s some foul language (that’s for you, Heather), but it’s so much fun, I can’t stop listening to it.

    I also ordered Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs, Thievery Corporation’s DJ Kicks and Lamb’s self-titled debut. I somehow forgot to rip Lamb, so it’s still at home and I haven’t listened to it yet. I also haven’t finished DJ Kicks, but I’ve heard almost all of those songs at some point on other compilations or from friends, so I’m pretty secure in saying that I’ll love it.

    Rockin’ the Suburbs is Ben Folds’ funniest album yet. All the other albums have funny lines and some songs that amuse and delight, but this one is far and away the funniest. The title track is great, but it doesn’t end there. On top of being funny, there isn’t a dud on the album. All the songs are tight, catchy and well-crafted. Not once did I skip a track just to get to the next song, or think a song was self-indulgent. It’s a great album.

  • I Have The Power!!!

    It’s sick and wrong, I know. I can’t tell you how disgusted I am by the whole thing. When I first saw it, I knew the end was near. What am I talking about? You don’t know? Oh, you’re gonna crap yourself. They’ve made a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe!! It’s wrong in so many ways. Back in the Eighties, before you were born, there was a cartoon. There was even a movie. There were action figures with nipples, and a green tiger with fuzz on him. It was horrible.

    Now, He-Man’s a little leaner and has better hair, but it’s still the same old thing. You’d think people could do something cool like bring back the Shmoo’s. But no, it has to be muscle-bound platitude man, his green tiger and Skeletor. I blame professional wrestling.

    Did you know that they keep making new Transformers cartoons too? This is what I get for my intermittent insomnia. If only I could plan my sleepless nights for times when Cartoon Network actually has good stuff on, like Saturday and Sunday. If you haven’t watched them yet, check out Mission Hill, Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021. They’re all brilliant.

    I’m gonna go drown in a vat of caffeine now and try to wake up.

  • Go Get Some Chen!

    Mary Chen is back! She used to work here at AOL, and she’s dang funny. It looks like she’ll be posting regular, so you can start keeping up with daily Chen goodness… and until then, you can go catch up.

  • Argh, Me Booties!

    In honor me being four days late for Speak Like a Pirate Day, my pirate name is Mad Dog Rackham, and I love it.

  • Hold My Hat While I Kvetch

    This will interest no one but me, but I don’t care. I’ve found something completely annoying about AOLserver and I need to share. Let’s say you download these bigass (the technical term would be “friggin’ huge”) files every day and have to parse them out and dump them into a database so you can do a bunch of conversions on them and generate spiffy reports. Let’s just say this is a new system that worked fine in testing with small files, but now, it will only parse a small portion of each file before deciding to give up. Let’s then say that the reason it does this, and then doesn’t report any kind of error is a helpful feature in the server that closes active (and very busy) db handles after they’ve been open for a certain amount of time. Does it check to see if they’re doing something? Nope. It just closes it. Thankfully, there’s an obscure configuration setting (MaxOpen in the pool/POOLNAME section) where you can set that timeout to some insane number (did you know that 1,000,000,000 seconds is approximately 192 days?). This will run tonight… I hope it gets all twenty-four hours instead of just ten or eleven. The only good thing is that it made me go in and fix up a bunch of things it was doing that weren’t quite as efficient as they could have been, which got us from 9am to 1pm, but still, sheesh.

    I love AOLserver. I use it for things it wasn’t intended for, like turning it into a cron job handler, and reporting system. I guess that’s why I run into this stuff. I can live with that. But I’m still gonna whine about it when I run into stupid stuff like this.

    The other thing is that Postgres doesn’t handle databases with more than 200k records in them very well without creating a LOT of indexes (like on every column of every table). Before I deleted the records older than two weeks, it took five minutes just to get a count. If I were a real DBA, I’d go find out why. But, I’m not. I use it because it’s easy to install and configure for use with AOLserver. It also supports all the SQL features I’m used to with Sybase. It’s also reasonably fast for normal use.

    If I didn’t have this headache, you all would never have known all this stuff. Thanks, Dr. Nik! (yes, my dentist’s name is Dr. Nik)

  • The Forgotten Insult

    Cranial Endorectumitis: You figure it out.

  • Brusha Brusha Brusha

    I don’t feel like working at the moment because I’m in the throws of a novacaine headache (last one for a few weeks, thank goodness). I’ve tried Motrin, Exedrin and closing my eyes. Now, I’ve resorted to a brownie and a Dr. Pepper to see if that’ll snap it. I had the impression taken for my crown, and have to go back in three weeks for the final. Remember kids, brush your damn teeth. This sucks.