Give it to me now!!!!

I know I’ve been slacking about posting, but I have perfectly valid reasons. Like anything with life, stuff runs hot and cold. Work is hot right now. Blogging – eh – not so hot. I’ll still post daily, but probably not the deluge I had been offering. Also, life is hot. Max has decided that sleeping is not his ‘thing’ at the moment, and that means everyone at the Lawver house is doing a little adjusting. Jen’s not getting her normal nap because Max isn’t taking his. We’re staying up later because Max is. We’re getting up earlier, cuz, yet again, Max is. So, we’re making due with Carry-Out and lots of help from my family (and moral support from her parents in Tucson). Once I wake up, I’m sure I’ll be all chatty and sharing again.

In the sharing vein (which, kids, you should never do. Remember, sharing veins is for foreigners and weirdos. If you share veins, the terrorists have already won! Ok, you can ignore me now.), I’ve rediscovered iTunes radio tuner feature, and am totally addicted to Groove Salad. It’s trancey, groovy and conducive to half-awake coding.

In good work news, my new LogCrunching machine should be here in the next week or so. It will be berry berry nice:

  • Dual Xeon 1.7ghz

  • 1gb Rambus RAM

  • 2 36gb SCSI hard drive

  • nVidia Quadro2 video card w/ 64 mb

  • dual NICS

  • RedHat 7.2

  • Sweet free mouse pad

What will I be doing with this machine? I’ll be crunching lots of files and extracting numbers from them like a SuperJuicer. How? I can’t post the code or anything, but I’ll be using AOLserver because it does a great job of scheduling jobs and I already know it. I’ll use Postgres to dump the numbers into. It will be lots and lots of fun and give me my desktop machine back so I don’t have to run the numbers I run now on it. A winner all around.

My poor little Powerbook.

My poor little Powerbook. I have one of the older G3’s with the bronze keyboard (pre-firewire). It’s been through so many complete wipes and re-installs that I think it’s having a personality conflict. After getting tired of waiting for OS X to load anything, I’ve decided to switch to YellowDog 2.1 again now that Ximian‘s available.

What’s funny is I don’t really use it for anything. I used to take it home and use it for MAME. Now I use my poor little Dell laptop for Civ3. So, I’m turning the Powerbook into my little crash machine where I can play with compiling kernels and other geeky stuff.

Speaking of geeky. I’m sliding down the slippery slope of complete geekhood. I had a dream in code the other night. I now speak Tcl better than I speak English. I find it harder and harder to relate to non-geeks. I have dark circles under my eyes. I wear geeky shirts – like today. I got this nice polo from the guys at Overture, and well, I’m wearing it. I also got really excited yesterday when I got mail from the guys at YellowDog saying they’d posted my Howto and are sending me a t-shirt.

I need to start painting that huge canvas in the basement. I need to read that book. I need to stop thinking about work all the time and get a good night’s sleep.

Please, Mr. TiVo

Jen and I have talked about this one a couple times, and man, I wish TiVo would just do it. TiVo should have playlists. For example, say you have a two year old who loves Blue’s Clues and you’re exhausted because said toddler woke up too early. Wouldn’t it be great to hit the Keep Max Happy playlist, put it on repeat, and escape to the couch for more sleep? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Ahhhh, finally. Ximian GNOME is

Ahhhh, finally. Ximian GNOME is finally available for YellowDog 2.1. Let the geekRejoicing begin.

Unlawful Combatants

Our government continues to classify the “detainees” in Cuba as unlawful combatants, and therefore are not covered under the Geneva Convention. While I agree that they may not be traditional POWs, I still think we should go out of our way to afford them every privelage given to POWs under the Geneva Convention. What?! Yes, I know. Just yesterday I was all for stringing them all up by their toes until they tell us everything they know. I realized that in all of the future, yet-to-happen fighting, undoubtedly some of our troops will be captured. We don’t want to give the other side any excuse to not extend the same privelages and treatment to our soldiers.

We have to be beyond reproach in this respect. We’re America – the biggest, the strongest. We can’t go gathering up the angry little guys and putting them in cages. We have to treat them like soldiers even if they’re just terrorists. Just because this is a “new kind of war”, we shouldn’t stoop any lower than we have to. Treating the captured Taliban and Al-Queda fighters as POWs is an easy and internationally visible way to start.

Crappy Segue

If I hear anyone else from the Bush administration call Al Queda “the evildoers” one more time, I’m going to lose it and start throwing things. It’s President Bush’s favorite phrase, and just yesterday on Meet the Press, I heard it from Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff. Come on. Don’t you think that over-simplifies what they are and what they’re trying to do? Al Queda is not Doctor Doom, or Boris and Natascha or Muttly. They’re fanatics who believe that America is the Great Satan. And that’s just the beginning. Calling them “evil-doers” and “the bad guys” turns this into an episode of Starsky and Hutch. It minimizes the threat into a two-dimensional comic book instead of a global ideological war, a bloody culture clash that could drag on for decades. So, stop it, you poops.

If the people who play

If the people who play EverQuest have too much time on their hands, what does that say about the people who spend months researching them?

Yesterday afternoon was all REM

Yesterday afternoon was all REM and for no other reason than I listened to my Randy Newman stuff and REM was next in iTunes’ playlist. I didn’t have the heart to change to something else. There’s something comforting about REM (the old stuff). It’s safe and sweet and innocent and reminds me of junior high parties in basements, games of sardines and hours spent trying to sing along with It’s The End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).

I used to work with

I used to work with this guy, I swear!

The Little Man

We were going to the doctor this morning, Jen and I. We were early and decided that we should check out the mysteriously named Yas Bakery on the way. We entered to the smell of fresh mint and exotic fruits and spices. After passing a refrigerated glass case filled with assorted strange loafs and pans of tofu, we came to the pastry case, filled to overflowing with baklava, dozens of different small cookies, odd but tasty looking gooey treats, rock candy and a little woman in a white apron with olive skin and a gigantic smile.

I decided to try the baklava and asked for six pieces (not all for me, of course). When she asked if there was anything else, I spied the gooey tubes. About the size of cocktail wienies, they glistened with what looked like corn syrup. I asked what they were, and she quickly took two out of the case and her small hand came over the case to offer them to me. They were sticky, but the pastry was still slightly crunchy when I bit into it, releasing the honey inside. It was amazing. I added six of those to the six baklavas, and the bag of “super seeds” I had picked up from the “seed table” in the middle of the small store.

When I went up to the register, the little man came out from the back. He asked us with a thick Greek accent if this was our first visit to his bakery. It was. He threw up one hand in a triumphant salute and scurried behind the pastry case where he produced two almond cookies, one for Jen, one for me. The small shortbread was covered with paper-thin slices of almond and garnished with what I think were ground pistachios. It was very dry, the almonds slightly sweet and woody, but delicious. He then came around the case to face me across the counter where he promptly rattled off all of the amazing confections he could create and then produced a photo album. He proudly displayed pictures of baklava towers, three-tiered wedding cakes, a picture of the little man wearing an apron holding a frosting sleeve at the ready above a half-finished masterpiece.

We paid, and I decided never to pass up the chance to visit the little out-of-the-way on the way to the doctor’s places of the world. I will always remember the little man and his family in their little sweet-smelling bakery and the cookies. Trips to the grocery store for milk and bread are quickly forgotten.

I really wish I had

I really wish I had something to say. Work is crushing my spirit, and my lack of caffeine is sapping my strength. I’ll hopefully be back tomorrow full of vim and vigor (and caffeine).