Read this and tell me if you still feel like keeping the current administration in power. I’ve found my illustration subject for the week.
To-do list for Italy.
- Travel books
- Power adapter—iPod, Camera, and Powerbook
- New walking sneakers
- Weather information
- Copy of Indigo for the house lights, 2 more light controllers.
Besides the fact that I’m pissed that the debate is only available on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates all sound very good. I’m impressed with all of these guys, and they all have made some fantastic points. Dean doesn’t sound as good as Clark or Kerry; I like Kuchinich’s points and gusto, Lieberman sounds like he finally woke up, and Sharpton impressed me with a couple of great points. Food for thought.
Greasy Kid Stuff. Our buddy Nate is one of the more intelligent people I’ve ever met. There are only a few people on this earth I know who can lead a conversation through science fiction, programming, anime, music trivia, politics, and random philosophy safely without losing anybody; the man is sort of a geek buddha. There are a few areas where I tease him goodnaturedly, and because he is a benevolent, friendly fellow, he doesn’t kick my ass.
Among the many choices for fast food here in Happy Valley, there is a tasty Iranian kabob restaurant in a nondescript strip mall. The food is good, the service is friendly, and the garlic in the food has a half-life of fifty years or so. Next door to this restaurant is a store where Nate buys comic books. He’s unapologetic about this, for which I give him credit (some guys get all mad and insist that they’re called “graphic novels”, not comix, as if a different name for a picture book featuring guys in leotards makes it literature), and I’ve often followed him in there to browse while we wait for our food. Now, I’ve not bought a comic book in ten years or more, so it’s always kind of strange to walk in there with him. I don’t want to be that guy, the one who has a whole wing of his house devoted to boxes of comic books, or the shifty guy who buys the anime porn on the top shelf, or the guy who has the bust of Spider-Man on his dresser. I like books that have a good story, or look pretty, or in some rare cases, both.
So I see some Hellboy comix on the shelf, and think back to the ones Nate showed me, which I liked. I find a book that I haven’t seen, which looks great, and… I take it up to the counter. Unfolding my wallet, Ronnie James Dio starts singing “Stranger In The Dark” on the radio behind the counter. And suddenly, I’m that dork wearing the denim jacket in 1987 all over again.
It is a good book, though.
(Note: I did not like Ronnie James Dio in high school. I was just surrounded by people who did.)
Pop Media Recap. There’s a disturbing ad on the radio right now for Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club in downtown Baltimore where they’re promoting midget oatmeal wrestling. I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the thought of midgets wrestling in breakfast cereal, or the way the dumb announcer chick pronounces the word ‘eoowwt-meel’ in that peculiar Baltimore dialect. There’s no accent more disturbing than a Balwmore accent, Hon.
I disagree completely with this reviewer’s take on Psyence Fiction, so I’m taking his review of the new UNKLE album with a large grain of salt.
Jen and I caught the Kajagoogoo episode of Bands Reunited on VH1 last weekend; besides humming the melody of “Too Shy” for the rest of the day, we thought it was pretty good. The band seems to have dealt with their meteoric rise and sudden plunge to obscurity pretty well; they were able to put aside their differences with relative ease and it looked like they had a great time playing together again. Discussion topic: Why would anyone change their name to “Limahl”?
I got this from Jen this morning, under the heading I have a totally sick sense of humor: “All Wal-Mart and K-Mart stores in Iraq will be closing on or before March 17th. After that, they will all become Targets.”
Winner, Worst Customer Support/Runner-Up, Poorly Designed Website: NikonUSA. Go to their site and attempt to find the support section. Or, try to find an informational page on a camera not created in Flash. Flash should be banished to designers’ websites, K10K, and humorous 2-minute cartoon videos, not commercial product pages. Get that through your thick, vacant skulls, you marketing hacks.
Meanwhile, Nikon does not have the manual available as a PDF on their site, and the printed version is backordered for up to three weeks. Thanks.
Runner-Up, Worst Customer Support: Buy.com, for only responding to inquiries via email and charging $9.95 to talk to a warm body. I’m about ( ) this close to cancelling the order. On the positive side, I got the memory I ordered this afternoon.
On other fronts, I visited Mike Lee’s site and noticed he’s jetting out to Portland to attend an information architecture summit. I got to thinking, and did a little research, and I’m looking at a few different associations around the country wondering if joining would be a worthwhile investment. I definitely have some required reading to catch up on—a good idea for my upcoming plane rides.
All that led me to Chris Crawford’s excellent (and weighty) repository of game development (and other) writing. There’s lots to read and digest in here, and I’m looking forward to diving in.
This morning, buried down by the bottom of the ‘entertainment’ section of abcnews.com, I found an obit for Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Merry Prankster extraordinaire. I spent a long semester reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and became a Kesey fan pretty quickly; taking a Beat class by the late Joe Cardarelli at MICA drew me into the world of Kerouac, and I loved the idea of Neal Cassady driving the bus all over the country while Kesey and the other Pranksters howled and tripped in back. Kesey withdrew from public view in the late 60’s and quietly farmed in Oregon with his family; only in the early 90’s he came back out and began teaching and publishing again. He was 66, and passed away after battling cancer. God bless, man.
I went out and bought the wire rack from Sam’s Club last night; installed in the basement, it just clears the tops of the joists and holds nine of the green Tupperware storage tubs, which is perfect. There’s room on the top shelf for another set of items; currently I have all the old CPU’s up there but I’ll replace them with other stuff when they get put in the closet. I was able to remove everything except the cooler and radio boxes from the dining room last night- what a relief. Tonight I’ll organize some more and hopefully be able to get the rest of them downstairs so I can begin cleaning the dining room and perhaps *gasp* paint…!
The Epson printer is dead, at least through the AppleTalk port. I’m taking it home tonight and hooking it up to the NT box through the serial cable, and we’ll see if there’s any luck there.
I went out for beers and some dinner with Jeff C. last night after work; I’ve been putting him off for about 2 months now, and he had a really rotten day, so i thought I’d try to help a little bit. We hit the Stil, which is an Irish brewpub up in Hunt Valley, and had about 4 rounds with dinner- i was feeling fine. Jeff and I got into a discussion about programming languages and learning C++, and the way he explained a lot of things really made sense to me. I want to learn programming now. I think if I come up with some kind of simple project and work on it nights over the winter, I can learn a lot from him and the other guys at work. I’m really excited about this.
As a consequence, nothing got done in the basement last night. Oh, well.
Hmm. What else is new? Here’s a funny clip taken from FuckedCompany.com about the new dress code at Sapient…
Required reading: The Philly Enquirer’s coverage, later turned into a book by Mark Bowden, called Blackhawk Down, about the helicopter raid in Somalia that went so very wrong.
I saw a special on a bunch of officers and historians who returned to a Vietnam battleground in about 1993 on “20-20” or one of those other news-magazine shows. I bought the related book a few years back called We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, about the battle, called “LZ X-Ray”. In it was a platoon leader, a guy by the name of Rick Rescorla, who basically kept an entire platoon together and helped turn the tide of the battle, and who shows up on the cover of the book.
I heard on the radio today a sound clip of Robin Williams, who, during the all-star benefit this weekend, mentioned a security chief for Morgan Stanley by the name of Rick Rescorla, who worked on the 44th floor of Tower 2, and who, in the 1993 bombing, got all his people out of the building safely (and who got their attention by dropping his pants.) He didn’t make it out of Tower 2- they said he was last spotted on floor 77 or so, clearing the building. The Miami Herald claims that he was instrumental in getting about 4,700 Morgan Stanley employees out alive. I looked up his name on Google, found the “We Were Soldiers” website, and found that it was the same man.
It doesn’t seem like much, and probably pretty stupid, but I really felt that news- from the writing in the book, and the stories that were written about him, I kind of felt like I knew the guy, or at least had a connection to somebody in the building.
I didn’t get as much done in the basement as I’d hoped; some of the stuff I tried to accomplish didn’t work. The birch plywood I bought for the shelf is too small on each side- note to self: standardize on common measurements- 4′ and 8′ lengths of wood. Makes it easier and less wasteful. I started laying the kickplate along the walls, and some of it looks great- some of it looks like junk. The short piece in the corner by the closet is twisted and bowed, and is made worse by the bulge in the wall directly behind it. I have to pull it, mill a new piece and replace it. I went out and got some replacement wood, so all should be OK for now, but it’s just annoying. I also have to fix the blade guide on the table saw, which is pulling the wood out from the blade and widening the cut- pissing me off. I bought wood for the shelves on the walls, and framing wood for the closet, and will install that tonight or so. I also have a 10″ plank to be cut into two pieces for the window shelf- there’s nothing else I can do there. And then I need to stop and consider finances.
Here’s the best diagramatical map of the WTC disaster I’ve seen yet. This explains what I want to know about what’s been affected and what hasn’t- something the nightly news has been poor at doing.
Here also is a link to an interesting article in Business 2.0 about LEGOs and the Mindstorms programming kit they ship; I went from there to the LEGO site and cruised around during lunch today.
Today at work, I got the CD-ROM burner working on this Win98 box. I’m going to go home and try to redo it on the NT box- I think in my haste to install I forgot to install the drivers on the NT machine. Stupid me. I think I’ll be able to get all my crap off that machine finally and store some stuff. I need to talk with Dan the IT guy here about making a copy of CDWriter 5 so I can bring it home. Bye-Bye MP3’s, and I can back up the Mac stuff and get it off that drive. Hallelujah. I also picked up a spindle of 50 CD-R’s for $29- a splurge, but something that will come in handy- I have lots of CD’s to burn! Cross one (hopefully) off the list below…
Spent the weekend at Jen’s parents’ place- that was a good time, but I was glad to sleep in my own bed last night. I’m putting in some home time this week before I fly off to Texas this weekend. Cleaning, basement, laundry, and me. I’m stopping off to pick up some drywall this afternoon to start the wall work- hee hee!
11:20PM. Decided to leave the drywall until next week. I did get a call from Home Depot about the window- I have to go pick that up this week before we take off for Texas. However, i did get the CD Rom burner working on the NT box- Duh. What an idiot I am. I didn’t install the drivers for the parallel port, so the machine didn’t know to look there. One quick install from the HP site and i was up and running pretty easily. So I’m burning a bunch of MP3’s to a disk and getting them off this drive- woo hoo!
Let’s see. We went to see Final Fantasy this weekend in St. Mary’s; I was very impressed. It was pretty good- there were some obvious, notable lapses in the modelling of the characters’ teeth, lips and eyes, but i was blown away with the level of detail in the movie- the characters were very well drawn and the story wasn’t half-bad either.
I found these books at Barnes and Noble a few months ago- I want to buy them and learn PHP:
| ISBN 1-861003-145 | Beginning Perl |
| ISBN 1-861003-73-0 | Beginning PHP4 |
| ISBN 1-861002-96-3 | Professional PHP Programming |
| ISBN D-201-35463-2 | Javascript Visual Quickstart Guide |