Ultranormal

  • Do you have OS X?

    Do you have OS X? Do you still love Unix? Oh, brother, then do I have something for you! Go check out Fink. It’s a easy way to get Unix packages installed and running in OS X. Sweet, sweet ingenuity.

  • He Shoots, He Scores!! I

    He Shoots, He Scores!!

    I took my little brother (ok, he’s not that little anymore, but I’m still bigger and older) to the Thrift Store so he could look for a new monitor (in my day, there were no computer parts in thrift stores, just crap). While he was testing, I wandered the store looking for anything to keep my interest. I stumbled into a pile of CD’s, covered in dust and under some magazines. I had hit it – the Thrift Store Motherload. My other brother and I used to wander the pawn shops and thrift stores of Mississippi in search of the fabled Motherload – that secret stash of amazing music (or comic books at the time) that the owner is oblivious to the value of. We found many. I am sorely out of practice, and haven’t gone out looking for the sweet vein of value in a long time.

    But here, I had stumbled into it. I got:

    • Orbital – Sides: It has one of the greatest “I’m a spy” songs ever on it.
    • Loop Guru – Amrita: Not sure what it is, but it was stuck between Orbital and…
    • Jesus Jones – Doubt: Who doesn’t need a copy of Right Here, Right Now? I have no idea when it will come in useful, but I know it will pay off one day.
    • Orb – Orbus Terrarum: The Orb are the same group that did the Little Fluffy Clouds song from the VW commercial.
    • Live! In Concert: An Alligator Records collection of live stuff. It has a bunch of stuff from the amazing Koko Taylor who I saw live a couple times in Tucson.

    It was a small vein, but it was just enough of a reminder to bring back all those memories of muggy summer days in our crappy Cavalier, wandering the countryside in search of cheap treasures.

  • Go Away, Bill I despise

    Go Away, Bill

    I despise Bill Walton as a basketball announcer. He’s a flagrant Lakers supporter, biased, banal and annoying. His mock-gravitas is grating. His unending garbage metaphor and purile catch phrases make watching the games almost unbearable. I find myself muting the commentary instead of subjecting myself to the buck-toothed wonder. I hope ESPN is smart enough to realize that they can do better than Mr. Walton. Please, a team of Dick Vitale, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Gilbert Gottfried would be better than anyone and Bill Walton.

    On a related note, how much of a let down have the Finals been? The Lakers/Kings series was awesome. It was the best basketball I’ve seen in years, and brought me back. Of the two and a half games in the Finals so far, it’s just been depressing. New Jersey is completely overmatched by the Lakers. Now that Shaq is hitting free throws, it’s pretty much over. It’s predictable, boring basketball. Snooze-o-rama.

  • Vanilla Coke taste vaguely like

    Vanilla Coke taste vaguely like Robitussin.

  • Back to the back I

    Back to the back

    I think I like the new colors… they’re growing on me. Now, I just need to move things around. You know what my favorite part is? I didn’t have to go to Blogger and mess with my template or any of the other pages on the site. All I did was change my stylesheet, and voila, new look. And moving things around will be the exact same exercise. Position this, position that, ::poof:: all done. I love CSS.

  • If I had disposable income

    If I had disposable income (and a lot of it), I would buy this faster than you can say “money pit on wheels”.

  • The Incompetance Mirror I’ve been

    The Incompetance Mirror

    I’ve been attentively watching the media tempest around the things the FBI and CIA missed before September 11th. It seems that we had all the clues and just didn’t put them together. There seems to be a lot of gnashing of teeth over this. The rhetoric is hip-deep and rising, and it amazes me. Knowledge management is an incredibly difficult concept to grasp, much less implement reliably. While things could have been done better, I don’t think crucifying Directory Mueller is going to help anything. From everything I’ve seen and read so far, he’s doing what needs to be done. He’s streamlining the processes of the Bureau, implementing better knowledge management and will probably fix it.

    I’ve been thinking about how complex a knowledge management system would have to be to have figured out all of the things congress and the media were expecting this mythical system to figure out. The system would have to take data in many formats (wire taps, field reports, eye witness statements, satellite scans, etc), index it, compare it against all other documents in the system, find links between people, all their aliases, organizations, their leadership, membership, locations, etc and spit out usable results. It’s a massive task, one that from what I know of Government bureaucracy, hasn’t been built yet, and will take a long time to get done. I work at a very large company, and we don’t have a company-wide knowledge management system, even though I’m sure it would save us millions of dollars every year in saved effort and combined infratstructure. We rebuild the wheel over and over because we don’t know what the group next door is doing.

    If big business, who actually keep track of the money they make and spend, can’t keep track of its own institutional knowledge, how can we expect the slow moving leviathan that is the government to figure this out overnight, or even in six months.

    I hope the Government (and all their institutions public and secret) get the clue and come looking to the private sector and education to figure this problem out.

    I’ve got some ideas, and I’ll probably talk about them some more later (and this would probably make more sense if I weren’t watching The Wire while trying to write this).

  • Someone at NBC loves Snatch.

    Someone at NBC loves Snatch. Have you been watching the NBA playoffs on NBC? I have, and every time they cut to a stat graphic (Shaq has X free throw attempts per game per blah, blah, blah) they play a snippet of a different song off the Snatch soundtrack. It’s pretty funny. The first time I noticed it was when they played the theme song (called Diamond – track #2) during Kings/Lakers Game 5. They’ve been working their way through the CD. I’m keeping an ear out for Massive Attack Wednesday night.

    Oh, and what do you think of the new colors? I’m going to play with moving things around when I get some free time.

  • It’s time for a redesign…

    It’s time for a redesign… look for some new stuff in the near future (hopefully tonight).

  • I’m not the only one

    I’m not the only one who thinks he’s brilliant. My sister tells a cute little story about my boy. He’s so smart, it’s scary. We’ve talked to enough people about his spelling and other reading-like capabilities that we know he’s really reading now. The scary part is, he’s really reading. He’s figured it out himself, mostly, which is the scariest part. He’s the best.

    He was so cute this morning. I should have taken a picture. He ran into our room in his little running shorts wearing the funny blue cowboy hat Jen got him and singing. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was just too cute for words.

    More later on more stuff…