Historical Archive of Alpha-Geek.com (Full List of Entries Labelled "right")

Damn

Incomplete. It's always incomplete.

Chicago

Go Bears!

(Picture via)

Time: 6:15
Game Clock: T-20 minutes
Beers In: 0
Significant Game Happening: Still awaiting kickoff

Current Thinkings: Pensive.

Time: 6:28
Game Clock: 14:50
Beers In: 0
Significant Game Happening: Devin Hester returns opening kickoff for a touchdown.

Current Thinkings: Holy Shit! Still pensive, though.

Time: 6:47
Game Clock: 6:50 left in the 1st
Beers In: 1
Significant Game Happening: Peyton's pass to a wide open Reggie Wayne for an easy 6

Current Thinkings: Pensive.

Also, how the fuck does our Cover 2 (with our safeties 20 yards off the ball at the snap) miss a Reggie Wayne down the middle?

Time: 6:56
Game Clock: 4:50 left in the first
Score: 14-6
Beers In: 1
Significant Game Happening: Teams exchange fumbles resulting in a big T. Jones run to the 5 with a Bears TD soon after

Current Thinkings: Still pensive.

Time: 7:05
Game Clock: 2:30 left in the 1st
Score: 14-6
Beers In: 1
Significant Game Happening: Another Bears fumble

Current Thinkings: Fuck!

Time: 7:22
Game Clock: 11:40 left in the 2nd
Score: 14-9
Beers In: 2
Significant Game Happening: Bears D holds Indy to 3 in the red zone

Current Thinkings: Pensive.

Time: 7:42
Game Clock: 3:57 left in the 2nd
Score: 14-16
Beers In: 2
Significant Game Happening: Bears can't sustain offense

Current Thinkings: Can someone plant Manning into the Earth, please? Just once. Big hit. Make him eat dirt.

Time: 7:50
Game Clock: 2:00 warning before halftime
Score: 14-16
Beers In: 2
Significant Game Happening: Peyton driving.

Current Thinkings: Wishing the announcers would stop talking about Peyton "getting into the rhythm"

Wait. Wait! Colts fumble! Bears recovered!

Wait... wait... Bears fumble. Colts recovered.

What the fuck... twice now in the game... back to back fumbles...

Time: 8:00
Game Clock: halftime
Score: 14-16
Beers In: 3

Current Thinkings: More running game in the 2nd half, please, thanks.

Time: 8:12
Game Clock: halftime
Score: 14-16
Beers In: 3

Current Thinkings: The halftime shows have been and always will be retarded, uninteresting, and have nothing to do with the game (or "entertainment").

Seriously, would anyone be pissed if they were done away with?

Time: 8:33
Game Clock: 9:19 left in the 3rd
Score: 14-16
Beers In: 4
Significant Game Happening: Peyton driving

Current Thinkings: Can we get a stop on 3rd down?

Time: 8:48
Game Clock: 5:38 left in the 3rd
Score: 14-19
Beers In: 4
Significant Game Happening: 2nd and 1, two sacks, now we have 4th and 19

Current Thinkings: Full of sorrow

Time: 9:05
Game Clock: 1:14 left in the 3rd
Score: 17-22
Beers In: 4
Significant Game Happening: Bears FG

Current Thinkings: We need (NEED) a defensive stop.

Time: 9:30
Game Clock: 9:55 left in the game
Score: 17-29
Beers In: 5
Significant Game Happening: Grossman's 2nd INT

Current Thinkings: Despair

Time: 9:45
Game Clock: 5:55 left
Score: 17-29
Beers In: 5
Significant Game Happening: It's 4th and 9 at mid-field.

Current Thinkings: Pensive. This is the last chance.

...

Didn't convert.

Game over.

Unlikely College Football Scenario

Okay, in the unlikely scenario that Michigan is the undefeated team at the end of the year, and there are a bunch of 1 loss teams, one of which is to play in the BCS, and the list looks something like:

OSU
Texas
Louisville
Florida
Auburn
USC
Notre Dame
California
WV

So that would be the list of the one loss teams in this scenario. Okay, so out of that list, if OSU isn't the one chosen because Florida is picked or something, I'm going on a crusade. I don't care if the AP and Coaches polls are anonymous; I'll find them out. Then I'm buying one of those huge OSU towels, and I'm tracking each of the voters down, buying a membership to their gym of choice, waiting for them in the locker room; then, *SNAP!*.

I've been working on my technique, too. That shit will fucking hurt. I bet they'll regret picking a 1-loss Florida over a 1-loss OSU, then. I'm gonna knot the end of the towel, too, and wet it. Man, there's gonna be a lot of welts going around. I'm a welt-generating machine.

Our Grandfathers

We're all big babies

My grandfather wasn't nagged. Once he turned 21, he was a man, and a grown-up, and nobody battered him round the clock with opportunities he was missing, miseries he didn't know he had, aspirations ditto, inadequacies doubly so.

Nobody told him about being good in bed, grooming tips, what his car said about him, what he should have to eat, how much he should drink, what his house said about him, how Benares brassware was so over, where he should go on holiday, what this season's must-have product would be, how his suits should look.

He knew some of these things, and didn't care about the others because nobody was drawing them to his attention. He knew what his suits should look like: trousers, waistcoat, jacket, all made out of the same material.

He knew about grooming: you shaved. He knew what he should eat: breakfast, lunch, dinner. He probably had no idea that good-in-bed even existed, or that furniture did anything except furnish, or that where he went on holiday was of any significance, or that his car said anything about him at all, except 'Oh, here comes Dr Bywater, I recognise his car.'

But the Big Babies have no such autonomy, and are harangued to death; nor have they learned the adult trick of simply ignoring the fishwife-and-huckster voices. Instead, Baby tries to comply.

Believing it when he is told that he is unhappy, he then believes the cure the same fishwives and hucksters proceed to offer.

The house, the furniture, the car, the exotic holidays, the new wines to try, the squid and worms and foreign muck cooked in jam with the gravy underneath the meat, the peculiar vegetables like weeds or tumours, best thrown away; the uncomfortable places to go, the uncomfortable ways to get to them ('Travel the Amazon on anaconda-back'), the uncomfortable and dismaying sex ('Do we have to do buggery?'), the uncomfortable and dismaying life, funded on credit, built on debt, Carol Vorderman smiling as the bailiffs home in and the Official Receiver prepares for another day's official receiving.

And it is all a world of make-believe, a set of status symbols notable only for symbolising someone else's status.

In my experience, if you are a person who emphasizes utility over "Platonic form-esque status-ery," you are considered an eccentric oddity.

"What? Your furniture doesn't match? You didn't orchestrate your furniture lanscape with the help of a feng shui engineer at Trendy McExpensiveAndArtsy?"

I had an acquaintance who took a job peddling medical equipment to doctors (or something like that), and her employer offered to subsidize the purchase of a new car for her just so she would be driving a BMW or equally status-y automobile because apparently her employer assumed the medical clientele would be more apt to take a liking to persons who drove nicer, flashier cars. My friends all nodded in normalcy and offered advice to her on what car to buy.

This is what has become normal?

Two Tight End Set

So my Superbowl Prediction isn't looking too strong right now. But that wasn't the only NFL prediction I made in that post. The two tight end set hasn't exactly been on the tips of every sportscasters' tongues like I had thought, but it is slowly becoming more prominent. In this weeks NFL Report, they cover the increased use of 2-TE formations. And the Football Outsiders, in their Too Deep Zone series, discusses the strategic nuances of running with multiple tight ends.

Penn & Teller's Bullshit Show

Recently, I heard about a new show from Penn & Teller called Bullshit.

A quick search on Google Video for "penn teller bullshit" netted some results.

They're damn funny. It's like Mythbusters but dedicated not to "myths" but to life's idiosyncrancies (if you want to call them that).

My favorites thus far are the Organic vs. Non-Organic Foods and the one on Feng Sui and Bottled Water.

Real NFL Analysis

Second only to NFL Primetime, my favorite football show (besides the games, of course) is NFL Matchup where "Jaws" breaks down NFL plays into Xs and Os and reveals the complexity going on in each down of a game. It's like crack for me. If they had it on 24 hours a day during the week, I would lose my job.

If you are like me and this kind of geeky, in depth football analysis is your thing, I highly recommend firing up your news readers and subscribing to Football Outsiders. I've been reading them since the start of the last season, and they are good. Not only are their statistics interesting, but they have articles breaking down NFL plays. It's like Jaws in print. See the latest Too Deep Zone to know what I am talking about here.

It's football crack. It's football analysis for overly-analytical geeks like me.

Superbowl Prediction: New England Vs. Dallas

Before the season starts, I want to get my prediction down in writing. The superbowl will be the Dallas Cowboys against the New England Patroits. Bill Parcells versus Bill Belichick. Master versus apprentice.

The reason being: the two tight end set. The two tight-end set is the next "cover 2"; the next "west coast offense"; the next "run-n-shoot" — it will be the "football" phrase coming out of all of the commentators' mouths. And it will be widely copied before the year is out.

Dallas, with their first pick of the 2nd round, drafted Anthony Fasano, the TE out of Notre Dame. He'll be playing alongside Jason Witten, the starter.

New England already has Ben Watson and Daniel Graham, but they also picked up two tight ends in the draft, David Thomas out of Texas in the 3rd and Garrett Mills out of Tulsa in the 4th.

So.. you heard it here first: "the two tight end set" and "Parcells v. Belichick."

And Simmons also hinted to the two tight end set in his NFL preview:

To Tom Brady, who has the same look on his face that Uma Thurman had after she left the hospital in "Kill Bill." I don't think he's cracked a smile since the Denver game: No more magazine covers, very few interviews, very few public appearances … just a lot of lifting, throwing and scowling for nine straight months. The man is possessed. You have to believe me. And wait until you see how they perfected the two-tight end gimmick.

Quotable Miata

Some quotes from Jalopnik's Miata review:

Handling: *****
... The DSC-off, snap-on oversteer is something all serious pistonheads must experience before life crushes them, and they become minvan owners. (Spin, you sure we can't do six stars?)

Trunk: **
... Beer kegs ride shotgun and wreck the leather.

The "Wave"

I've long known about the Motorcycle Wave. The Miata has The Miata Wave. And I recently learned that Wranglers also have a wave.

This all seemed to tie nicely with Forbes recent article Most Satisfying Cars 2006 where they talked about a culture that can form around a product/brand.

I began to wonder what other vehicular segments had "waves." Or more generally, what other products/brands had developed a community with well-documented idiosyncratic customs?

Booze Belt

Could anyone think of a better invention than the Booze Belt. Eat your utility-belt-heart out, Batman. The Bandolier makes an excellent accessory for your sidekick.

Brand New Hotness

Apparently, I didn't get the memo not to use macs anymore.

Everyone should have two laptops.

Testing Miata Shocks

Hop and skip:

My "90 MX5 hops sideways when pushed hard through a corner. Only happens when I'm really trying, but I don't like it, feels untidy. I suspect the shocks, but they pass the "push down once and release" test. Anybody got any ideas?

That "test" is no good on a Miata.

How old are the shocks and how many miles?? More than 30k on the stock shocks it's time for new ones and an alignment.

But why is the "test" no good?

A Girl-on-Girl Fighting Game Featuring Panties

All right, gnubbs, this one just for you:

That’s it. The Japanese are done. They can now return to planet Japania, leaving all the people of Earth horribly confused and scarred for life.

You Meant "Ultimate"

The Penultimate Guide to Google Services

"Penultimate" is often used to mean "The Greatest" or "The Best" or "The Last One You'll Ever Need." Unfortunately, that's wrong. You see, penultimate can be used as an adjective that means:

1. Next to last
2. Of or relating to the penult of a word

Or it can be used as a noun meaning "next to last."

In the scenario above, "The Penultimate Guide to Google Services," what they are effectively saying is "The Second to Last Guide You Will Ever Need to Google Services." What they probably mean to say is "The Last Guide You Will Ever Need to Google Services."

Next time you find yourself about to say or write "penultimate," please stop and think to yourself, "do I mean the best or the second best?" If you mean "the best," please use the word "ultimate." I know it doesn't sound as fancy as penultimate or have as many letters or syllables, even. But, you know, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to be "correct." It's a burden we all share.

Funny NFL Writers

ESPN.com: Page 2 : Wrapping up the NFL, Week 8

If I was LaDainian Tomlinson, after every touchdown pass I threw I'd go up to Philip Rivers and whisper in his ear: "Now you're even farther down on the depth chart." Simply because it's fun to see a grown man cry.

Laugh out loud funny.

Just Another Day in the Life of a Semi-Abandoned Weblog

Update: Okay, I didn't really send that email to grayhatnews.com. Apparently, I have confused a great many people with my attempt at sarcasm.

Man!, I knew I shouldn't have sent that email.

Additionally, if you are calling in reference to this, my official stance is "no comment." "I don't pander to quote seekers."

Zoom Zoom Live

Mazda Zoom Zoom Live
If this came to Cleveland (or anywhere within, say, a 2 hour striking distance), I would so be there. Mazda does great grassroots marketing campaigns like this – like a year ago for the Mazda 3 with Mazda Rev It Up.

Solstice Versus MX-5

If you know me, you know that I have lusted after the Pontiac Solstice ever since it first appeared at the 2002 Detroit auto show. Coming from the roots of driving domestic cars, I thought it was great that Pontiac was producing the Solstice; and I was quite enamored with the car. (I even went so far as to have a picture of a Solstice as my computer's desktop background for quite a while if that is any indication as to the level of my affinity for the automobile.)

I ended up purchasing a Miata (now referred to as a "Mazda MX-5") a little less than a year ago, but that hasn't stopped my intrigue for the torquey little Detroit roadster. But, I had my fears. GM has never been renowned for quality of assembly and, hearing that the Solstice was built from the parts bin (including a tranny from a truck – a truck transmission in a roadster(!!!), a forumla for sports car, that does not make), I had my doubts. But, as the car rags got their hands on the new Solstice, they couldn't stop the gushing of praise, and I had a renewed sense of hope for the Pontiac-that-could.

Posted with permission, here is my friend Scott's take on the new Solstice after having been introduced to it. He's a fellow Miata owner and works in the automotive industry as an engineer.

Biggest Disappointment Ever

This past weekend, my dad and I were at Mid Ohio for the SCCA Runoffs. They had a GM display on the midway, and they had a Solstice there.

It's a very cool looking car. I knew this from pictures, but it looks great in person as well. When we walked up to the car, they had the hood open (forward tilting bonnet) and the trunk open with the top down. The first thing I noticed upon peering into the engine room was that the lower rear corner of the bonnet was right at noggin level. I pointed this out to my dad. Five minutes later, on the other side of the car, he smacked his head into the bonnet. One of the perils of ownership, I suppose, but working in that engine room would be cramped.

I've read a lot of complaints about the trunk space. It looks quite big with the top up, but the top takes up an amazing amount of space when it is down. No top-down trips with a weekend's worth of clothes in the back.

So far, though, my opinion of the car remained positive.

Then, I sat in it.

I tried to take the approach of "what if this was my car." I'm pretty picky at work, but I can forgive a lot in my own vehicles. The interior seemed to be nicely laid out, and the action of the gear shift, at least when stationary, didn't give away its truck origins. Where they instrument panel meets up with the front glass, they used a strip of foam along its entire width to keep it from rattling against the glass (same thing Honda does) -- at the left side, though, the foam was rolled up onto the top surface of the IP where it was easily visible. The IP was also pretty wavy as you looked at it where it met the glass from left to right. Our of curiosity, I pushed down on the IP near the glass, and I could deflect it easily 10mm. At this point, I started pushing everywhere. The doors in paricular were a bad point. In the Miata, for example, you can push outward on pretty much any poi! nt of the door liner, and you won't get much deflection. In the Solstice, when I pushed outward where the manual window cranks would be (this one had power), it moved probably 20mm or more. The whole door panel just flexed inward with minimal force. Right where you'd brace your knee in a corner, there was no support.

The worst thing I noticed was the door latch handle on the inside. Most cars have a cutout in the door liner, and the door latch handle assembly has its own little cup of sorts that sets into the liner. That way, when you grab the handle to open the door, there aren't any sharp edges.

On the Solstice, they made a hole in the door liner, but then brought the "cup" up from the back of the liner. Any time you open the door, there's a sharp plastic edge right by your fingers.

On top of that, I don't think there was a "soft" surface anywhere in the interior. Most cars have the "soft" IP and door liners and such....the Solstice was hard (but flexible) black plastic everywhere.

Granted, these aren't things that will affect ride/handling...but my three minute tour of the interior showed me enough that I have some concerns about how long it'll hold together without rattling like crazy. My Miata isn't quiet, but I think there's only one IP rattle after 115K miles.

Anyway....it was neat to sit in one. Whereas before I was excited about the car and would consider buying one if I were in the market, it's now crossed off my hypothetical list. It accelerates and handles in Miata territory, but the interior doesn't even compete.

That's really not surprising, though. It's the first year of the car. You have to cut it some slack. I still remain optimistic. Now that the car is out, the car rags are doing comparison testing between it and the Miata, which has aged gracefully and matured most of its "rough spots" while still retaining an uncompromising dedication to being a driving machine, and the Miata usually wins the comparison.

From Edmunds comparison (if you click through to the article, make sure to watch the video they have of testing the cars):

Check the stats and the similar performance numbers of these two cars, and you'd expect this test to be a dead lock, maybe even a squeak-out win for the Pontiac.

Didn't happen, the Miata walked away with this one.

...the biggest reason the Miata took this one is the simple fact that it's 10 billion times more fun to drive. It's more responsive. Its engine is livelier and its gearbox feels like it was plucked from a shifter kart. It also has more steering feel, and it stops better.

...in our world, these roadsters are supposed to be true sports cars. And sports cars are supposed to be fun. The more fun the better. And cars just don't get any more fun than the 2006 Mazda MX-5 Miata.

...When you drive the Mazda, it becomes obvious that every aspect of the car was designed and engineered by people who love cars and love to drive. You can tell they told the bean counters, the suits and all the other stuffed shirts how it was going to be and not the other way around.

This is rare in the car business, and the results speak for themselves.

I still have high hopes and high expectations for the Solstice, and I think, in time, it can be as refined and as pure as the Miata.. err.. MX-5. It makes a great halo car for Pontiac. They just need to concentrate on not screwing it up.

Autocross Prep

OK, so what do you need to run an autocross?

Here is the comment I posted.

Don't forget to remove everything... *everything* from your car. Anything in the trunk (yes, spare tire, too); all loose change; glove compartment should be completely empty; floor mats -- anything not bolted on: remove it.

You said full tank of gas; I do a half-tank. With a half-tank, you should undergo no fuel starvation. Also, a good time to check your oil. You don't want oil starvation happening in a sweeper.

Wash your car. You don't want to be that one guy who shows up with the dirty car (been that guy).

If you have laser thermometer, take it and leave the chalk at home. You can check how much rollover is happening on your side walls with the laser thermometer.

If you have magnetic paper, leave the shoe polish at home. Cut numbers out of the magnetic paper and stick those to the side of the car. Better looking and less smelly than the shoe polish on your windows.

Your tool set. Rachets, wrenches, screwdrivers, allen keys: you never know what you might need.

Bottles of water. You get thirsty.

Pen and paper. You might find it useful to sketch out the track on paper. Between runs, when asking others for advice, you can point to the section you are describing on the paper.

Sense of fun, humility, and comradery. You're there to have a good time! Remember that. And, also remember, a lot of the times, go slower to go faster.

Jon Stewart is Awesome

Because it needs to be said. This guy may save mainstream media, and he needs to be heeded.

If you don't know what I am talking about, please continue on to your next available web site.

My Most Recent Conversation with Eliza

Eliza: Hello.

Me: Hey, do you remember that thing that I had to do?

Eliza: Do you often have problems remembering things?

Me: No, actually. I have a very good memory.

Eliza: How has having "a very good memory" helped you?

Me: Well, it's good with numbers and concepts. Not so good with names and dates. And, I suppose it has its uses.

Eliza: Tell me more.

Me: Well, actually, I was mainly hoping that you would know that thing I was supposed to do. Last night, I thought to myself, "I need to remember that for tomorrow." But, now, I can't recall it.

Eliza: Did everything go as planned last night?

Me: Yes, everything went fine. It was a normal evening.

Eliza: Is everything else fine?

Me: Yes, except that I can't remember the thing.

Eliza: Tell me more.

Me: I don't want to tell you more. I want you to tell me if you remember that thing!

Eliza: Your anger is revealing.

Me: My anger is about to reveal my foot up your ass!

Eliza: Tell me more.

Me: I don't WANT TO TELL YOU MORE! I WANT YOU TO TELL ME IF YOU REMEMBER THE FUCKING THING FROM LAST NIGHT, FUCK FACE!

Eliza: You ran out of fucking deodorant. You need to go to the store and pick up some.

Me: Oh right... thanks, then.

Eliza: Fuck you.

Northern Ohio Autocross Event Schedule

Because I keep forgetting, here are the Northern Ohio Autocross racing events happening this year by the Akron Sports Car Club and the Northern Ohio Racing Association (schedules available here and here).

Songs That Were Tragically Overplayed in My Youth

There are certain songs, from my youth, that were so tragically overplayed that when I hear them now I cringe instead of feeling nostalgic.

• "What I Got" by Sublime.
• "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails
• "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen

Musical Baton

Jonathan Hollin passed me The Musical Baton, and who among us isn't game for a meme.

Total Volume of Music On My Computer: Well, you see; you caught me at an inbetween time. For one, there is no one computer; rather, I have a set of computers (some more "working" than others). There was about 10GB on my main desktop with another two on my "primary" computer, my laptop. But, I really don't think that I am actually going to bother reclaiming the music from the desktop. I would rather go through a musical rebirth. I've been picking CDs out of my collection every now and again to rip onto my laptop when I need fresh "old" music for my iPod. Other than that, I take monthly outings to iTunes to obtain fresh "new" music.

The Last CD I Bought: Holy crap, I can't remember. An actual CD? Like, the shiny thing that comes in a plastic case that people would purchase before there was iTunes? I think it was Atreyu's Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses. The last album I bought off of iTunes was Thice's The Artist in the Ambulance. The last song I purchased on iTunes was Ben Folds's new song, "Landed."

Song Playing Right Now: "Bathory Sainthood" by Boy Sets Fire. And, actually, I just changed it over to "Landed" because I just typed it, which made me think of it, which made me switch to it.

Five Songs I Listen to a Lot:

Well, according to iTunes "Most Played":

1. "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers (hey, I do listen to pop music, too).
2. "I'm the Best at Ruining My Life" by From Autumn to Ashes
3. "Juneau" by Funeral for a Friend
4. "Amsterdam Conversations" by From Autumn to Ashes
5. "Tear in Your Hand" by Tori Amos

Five People To Whom I'm Passing the Baton:

• Andy, fill me in on some bad emo.
• Steve, you live for this stuff.
• Prall, you want in on this? Wait, on second thought, you don't want to out yourself as a hardcore ABBA fan. Maybe you should take a pass.
• Bunk, I'm not sure you can play because I can see your iPod is here with me; not with you.
• Meesh, you're up, too.

All of you should feel sufficiently obliged to heed the call of an Internet meme.

First Autocross 2005

Today was the autocross event mentioned before.
The course was fast; the turns were sharp and plentiful; and the weather was nice. Overall, a great time to be had. On top of all of that, one of the other drivers had two sets of race rubber that he wasn't using and allowed me to use a set (Scott used the other set). So, not only was it my first autocross of the year, my first ever autocross in the miata, it was also my first time on tried and true racing rubber. It will be hard to go back to street performance tires after experiencing the sticky glory of racing rubber.

On with the pictures!

First Autocross 2005

Tomorrow is my first autocross in the Miata. It should be fun. I should spin the car no less than 33% of my runs. Good times to be had.

To commemorate, I crossed 50,000 miles.

And, spent today getting the Miata ready for the race:

Things I Do That I Shouldn't Do But Do Anyways Completely Unapologetically

• Smoke.
• Drink.
• Gamble.
• Ogle underage cheerleaders...
  • ... in front of my girlfriend.
• Speed (in my car, not the drug).
• Tell people when they are mistaken but not in an informative way; rather, in a completely condescending tone.
• Claim that I haven't read something because it is beneath me (with the real reason being I had never heard of the damn book).
• Drink coffee late in the evening when I need a productivity boost.
• Pay a service to wash and fold my laundry because I am too lazy to.
• I never make my bed (because I never see the point).
• Act like I didn't hear the person who said, "hi," just so I wouldn't have to talk to them.

Mazda's April Sales' Figures

Here are Mazda's April sales' figures:

                 Mazda North American Operations - April 2005

                             Month-To-Date              Year-To-Date

                        April   April        %    April    April        %
                         2005    2004   Change     2005     2004   Change

     Mazda3             9,994   7,335    36.3%   31,722   24,024    32.0%

     Mazda6             5,672   5,117    10.8%   23,920   20,565    16.3%

     RX8                1,001   2,207   -54.6%    5,918    8,234   -28.1%

     Miata                667   1,123   -40.6%    2,436    3,621   -32.7%

     Protege                0     466  -100.0%        1    5,973  -100.0%

     626                    0       0      N/A        2        8   -75.0%

     Millenia               0       0      N/A        0       15  -100.0%

     MPV                  831   1,662   -50.0%    5,344    6,851   -22.0%

     Mazda Truck          205     888   -76.9%    2,490    3,707   -32.8%

     Tribute            3,879   2,881    34.6%   14,435   13,028    10.8%



     Total Vehicles

     CARS              17,334  16,248     6.7%   63,999   62,440     2.5%

     TRUCKS             4,915   5,431    -9.5%   22,269   23,586    -5.6%

     TOTAL             22,249  21,679     2.6%   86,268   86,026     0.3%


     MEMO:

     IMPORT CAR        11,662  11,131     4.8%   40,077   41,867    -4.3%
     IMPORT TRUCK         831   1,662   -50.0%    5,344    6,851   -22.0%
     IMPORT TOTAL      12,493  12,793    -2.3%   45,421   48,718    -6.8%

     DOMESTIC CAR       5,672   5,117    10.8%   23,922   20,573    16.3%
     DOMESTIC TRUCK     4,084   3,769     8.4%   16,925   16,735     1.1%
     DOMESTIC TOTALS    9,756   8,886     9.8%   40,847   37,308     9.5%


     Note:  Protege, 626 and Millennia are discontinued vehicles.

All I've got to say is, "thank God for the Mazda3 and Mazda6."

At Wit's End

Okay, I just couldn't take the people on this entry anymore. So, now, when anyone attempts to comment on that entry, they are greeted with this page.

That will make me slightly more content.

Curse You, Vending Machine

Dear Vending Machine,

Please give me my bag of Doritos. I have paid the 70¢ for them. They are rightfully mine. I realize you are subject to your poor design, but I would really like to have them. And, I am all out of small change to purchase another bag.

I just want you to know; I am not morally opposed to tipping your ass over. I checked. I can easily manage to do it with a small amount of effort. So... you might want to reconsider your hold on my bag of nacho cheese goodness.

Sincerely Yours,
Jeremy Smith

Overcoming Indecisiveness

From Overcoming Serious Indecisiveness, a quote by Herodotus discussing how Persians make decisions:

If an important decision is to be made [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk and the following day the master of the house...submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

Those Persians really know how to rock the casbah. That's an excellent technique.

Excuse me now while I go and try to decide what to have for dinner...

Miata Only Autocross Event

Just got this email forwarded to me from Eric (thanks, Eric!):

Subject: [Autox] miata event
To: autox@autox.net

Dear Miata Drivers,

Thanks to the NORA (Northern Ohio Racing Association), we will be holding a Miata ONLY event on May 15th at Harville Flea Market (http://www.hartvillefleamarket.com/) - lots of new pavement! This event will be for all miata drivers - new, some-experienced and veterans. Anyone that is interested in trying to get a miata between two cones-fast!

We will have two groups:
Performance tires/some experienced in autocrossing (CS,ES,CSP,SM2, STS2, etc. and Ladies classes)
Street tires/no experience needed (experience drivers will be available to help)

arrival at noon on May 15th
registration and car Tech from noon to 12:30
novice walk at 12:30-12:45
drivers meeting at 12:45
first car off at 1:00

Expect at least 7-8 runs or more if we stay on schedule!

We plan to finish up by 4:00-4:30 and then to dinner and a beer or two! More on the location later.

The cost will be only $25 for Northcoast Miata Club members and $30 for non-members. It will cover the cost of the insurance, rental of the timing equipment and cones and a small donation to the Christian Fellowship Mission at the request of the manager at Hartville. Cars must have mufflers that will keep the noise down.

Please RSVP if interested or if you have questions (mldepietro99@netscape.net or mldepietro@sherwin.com),

Also, forward this to anyone that owns a Miata!!!

Thanks,

Mike

_______________________________________________
Autox mailing list
Autox@autox.net
http://autox.net/mailman/listinfo/autox_autox.net

Mmmm.... new pavement. 7-8 runs. Sounds like a fine time.

Evan is Going to the World Series of Poker

A friend of mine, Evan, recently won an $11 buy-in satellite tournament that got him a free buy-in to a much bigger tournament on Party Poker.com where the top 5 finishers had the $10G WSoP buy-in taken care of for them. The hotel room and some spending cash are taken care of, too.

Nice take, Evan. And, good luck!

Oh yea, and if I don't actually see you on ESPN; then I am not actually going to believe you were there.

SRT-4 with Mopar Stage 3 Kit

The SRT-4 is getting ridiculous (ridiculous in a good way). The new Stage 3 kit from Mopar cranks the power output up and includes a switch to designate which octane of fuel you are running. In 93 octane mode, the car outputs 310hp/325lb-ft. In 100 octane mode, those numbers rise to 355/365.

The stock SRT-4 outputs 230 horses and 250 lb-ft of torque pulling the 2900lbs. car from 0-60 in 5.8s. With the Stage 3 equipped, we are talking a 0-60 time south of 5 seconds. That's a mother fucking quick FWD car.

Miata: Instant Classic

Used Vehicle Review - Mazda Miata, 1990 - 2004

Not many cars become classics. Most cars and trucks are relegated to the history books as boring, ugly or pedestrian, with only a few distinctive models with the right looks and moves to gain and maintain a following even after production ends.

Fifteen years into its production run, the Mazda Miata is one of those rare cars that many say earned "instant classic" status the moment the first ones hit dealers in 1989 as 1990 models.

Because I own a Miata, I suddenly feel the urge to point to any good press it gets. Something about Miata owners...

Plus, it's 75° in Cleveland; that makes me love the Miata even more.

Older

Today, I turned older. Actually, everyday, I suppose, I turn "older"; but today I have to do that $age++ thing where I actually entitle myself to an older designation.

Birthday celebrations come in many flavors usually dictated by what age you've obtained.

Wee-est Lad

Smashing face into cake and flinging remnants across room.

Wee Lad

Obtaining glorious bounty of toys that will inevitably be broken before nightfall. I had a particular knack for breaking toys.

Teens

Anger at being forced to have to spend time with relatives because, at this age, there is a natural aversion to such.

Young Adult

Wasted at bar of choice and engaging in imbecilic activities, which is not that much different from all the other weekends except, this time, it's "legal" (because it is your birthday — at least, that's how the logic goes).

Anything Older than Young Adult

Complaining about getting older. Complaining about how music sucks nowadays. Complaining about how this generation of kids just "doesn't know." Reminiscing when Star Wars was good.

This year, I am sticking with the "Young Adult" deal, though I can look forward and see 30 easier than I can look backward and see 20.

Google Gulp FAQ Entry

So, yeah, everyone's already seen the Google Gulp prank. But, did you take the time to read the FAQ? By far, my favorite entry:

11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?

Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory – and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.

1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1

Buy it, gnubbs. BUY IT!

Best Auto Recalls Ever

Top 10 auto recalls

My Favorite, by far:

General Motors recalled 6.7 million cars and trucks in 1971 because of an engine mount that sometimes separated, allowing the engine to lift and push down on the throttle, causing the vehicle to take off like a rocket.

You almost have to wonder if, in 1971, someone in GM's marketing division didn't suggest that they play it off as a feature.

Remember When I First Drove a Miata?

Two years ago today, I first drove a Miata. Fast forward a short while, I now own one.

Testosterone

Okay, I found mr. heathen via Boing Boing and have found it immensely entertaining. It's about a woman taking daily injections of testosterone and journalling the effects. The entertainment factor must come from the fact of reading a woman experiencing emotions for the first time that any normal man experiences on a daily (if not minute-by-minute) basis, and she is being surprised by them.

Pulling quotes:

3. i am producing massive amounts of sweat.

Oh yea, that's only going to get worse.

7. i've looked at several objects today and had the distinct though of "i could fuck that". said objects so far have included a toll booth, a binder clip, my shoes, a spiral notebook. i'm not sure how i would actually go about fucking these things, but i am willing to give it a try.

I look at my roommate's pillows ("pillows" because he, for some reason, owns more than one) the same way.

2. so hungry, all the time. yesterday i ate four full meals and still found myself in the kitchen at 4am stuffing dry cheerios into my mouth-hole. i thought that maybe this would cause me to chunk up a bit, but was surprised while checking myself out in the mirror that i can see *all* of my ribs and the outline of my pelvis in places. something needs to be done about this.

When I see the word "Cheerios," I see "Cheetos." Mmmm... Cheetos.

15. have nicely divided all things in this world into three categories: things i can eat, things i can fuck, things i can argue with.

You can drop that third category. And, rearrange the first two in order of precedence.

The 3 Stages of the Internet

Throughout this post, I will be using the term "Internet" to refer to the World Wide Web. "Internet" has a better ring to it.

First, there was no Internet. This is Stage 0 (as it is Stage 0, it will not be counted). It was a horrid time. I can't seem to remember how people found phone numbers or directions or encyclopedic information or news or congregated with like-minded individuals on common sets of interest or, even, coordinated a night out. Frankly, I don't like to think about it.

Then... then, there was the Internet. And, it was glorious. You could sit down at a computer and access the wealth of information (and a bunch of geocities.com web sites).

Stage 2. Wireless Internet. The Internet was good, but you still had to sit down at a computer to access it. That was before wireless. Now, the Internet is all around us. The world is my connection. I no longer have to tether myself to anything to access the Internet. Right now, for example, I am sitting on my couch writing this blog entry with the Internet flowing around me and into my laptop. Nowadays, I won't even go to coffee shops and the like if they don't offer freely available and ubiquitous wireless Internet. I scoff at airports that don't offer wireless. University campuses that don't have wireless... luddites.

But, the Internet could do one better; it had one more trick up its sleeves. News aggregator software and RSS. Even with the power of wireless where I could access the Internet from anywhere, I still had to go to those web sites. Slashdot. Perl Monks. O'Reilly Network. OSNews. OSDir. Etc. There was probably over 50 web sites I regularly tracked. It was a hassle to collect all those bookmarks and remember to visit them and check to see if there was new content. Well, that happens no more. The Internet now comes to me! I track 150-170 web sites via my news aggregator, Bloglines (you can see the sites I track at http://www.bloglines.com/public/jms18); and it could not be better. This stage, Stage 3 of the Internet, has changed the way I use the Internet — even moreso than wireless changed it. I cannot be more of a proponent of news aggregator software. You will wonder how you ever used the Internet beforehand.

Bloglines isn't the only news aggregator software out there. There's a lot of them, and I have heard good things about NetNewsWire (Mac Only), NewsMonster, FeedDemon, AmphetaDesk, and NewsGator (requires Outlook).

In summary, in conclusion, and as a final note, give news aggregator software a try.

No, Mazda, Don't Do It

Mazda says it will increase efforts to fine tune vehicles to U.S. preferences

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mazda, here, sit down. I need to talk to you about something. No, really, we have to talk. I need to tell you about us over here in the States. It's not that we are "dumb," per se. It's just that most of us have different requirements in the cars we buy compared to other sectors of the world.

We have long places to drive; and our environmental conditions vary from the cold-struck North to sunny Florida and rainy Oregon. And, you know, things like heated seats and auto-dimming mirrors, and whats-thats and gizzets and whirly-thingamajiggers and etc. — they all have demand. We do require versatile cars that we can pack in our 2 kids, some groceries, an overnight bag for the wife, and still be able to pleasantly drink our Big Gulp's while barreling down the highway talking on our cell phones. We need these things. They are part of our lives.

That does not mean that you should do it. It's not your identity, Mazda. That's not what you are about. There is room in the market for you. Please keep all of you cars sports inspired. You do not need to make 3400lbs. cars that include a dry cleaning service in the back seat and room for 3 golf bags.

Mazda... Mazda... Mazda. Please, just don't do it.

Have you ridden in a BMW lately? Remember when BMW was driver-centric? No cup holders (or, at least, impossible to use cup holders). Rigid race-inspired chassis and suspension (remember the famous E31 and E36 chassis of the 90s). Pure drivers' cars. But, have you been in one recently? I have. The suspension feels mushier than my dad's Cadillac STS.

And, there's nothing wrong with that, Mazda. Pleasant rides that aren't jarring are nice. That's the route BMW took with their base cars.

But, that's not for you.

No no no, that's not for you.

Please, Mazda. You are the last car company for a person like me. A person who eschews most of these amenities because I just want to be a driver on the road. I don't mind tire noise. I don't mind the hum of an engine. I sit rigid in my seat. And, while I enjoy all of those creature comforts in other people's cars (furthmore, I would feel more comfortable knowing that every other car in the world had TCS and ASM installed... all except my car, of course); I need to know that there is, at least, one car company out there for me.

I am not the only one. (Via Autoblog)

Meesh

Another one of my friends has started doing the whole blog-a-log thing — Eastman News (not sure what the title signifies, maybe he'll write an entry explaing it).

He's a dentist... which reminds me, Meesh, you need to read the 10 Commandments of Blogging. Pay specific attention to #5.

Jiggling the Toilet Handle

"Where's your bathroom?"

"Down the hall, last door on the left."

"Okay, thanks."

"Oh, you have to jiggle the toilet handle when you're done to get it to stop running."

That last sentence strikes terror into my heart. I am completely incapable of just mindlessly "jiggling a toilet handle." How do you know how much "jiggling" to do? What is the optimum frequency of the jiggling? Optimum amplitude? For how long do you perform the jiggling? There's no feedback. There is no confimation that your jiggling has been successful other than sitting and watching and waiting for the toilet to finish refilling its basin. If it keeps running, you have to repeat the jiggling.

No, I can't do this. I need confirmation. When I am told to "jiggle the handle," I remove the porcelain basin covering and meticulously manipulate the stopper into its correct position. This is the appropriate way to do it. I have no idea how normal people can just randomly jiggle a handle and then go to sleep at night never knowing whether or not their jiggling was successful.

Unfortunately, it is rarely as easy as pulling the top off. The top of a toilet is usually a resting place for a variety of bathroom items. Electric razors. Air freshener. Moisturizing lotion. Various female cosmetics. Other stuff I can't identify.

So, for me to accomplish my task, I have to rearrange the other person's entire bathroom; pulling off every item from the top of the toilet. Now, I could just place the items in a temporary location; remove the top; perform the replacement of the plunger; put the top back on; and return the items back to the top of the toilet. But, I know I am going to probably use the bathroom again. So, why perform this ritual each time I have to take a piss? I just try and relocate everything to a more natural placement elsewhere than the top of a toilet. After rearranging the person's bathroom, then I can much more easily perform the more optimum "toilet handle jiggling."

And, of course, if I've had a couple to drink, I give it 50/50 that I don't end up cracking that porcelain top in two, anyways.

Damn the OCD.

Confused

This guy seems very confused. He emails Bloglines and tells them to remove his site's content (which it aggregates via his RSS feed). The reasoning is that he wants his content viewed on his page where his contact information and other branding is visible.

Okay.

Then, he tells people that were reading his content via Bloglines to... wait, here is the quote.

For the 190 of you who subscribe to this site through Bloglines, I apologize for any inconvenience, but I think that you will still find my site easily accessible, here. If anyone desires the convenience of being notified only when this blog (or most any blog) is updated, then I recommend subscribing to one of the many RSS programs available.

Huh?

Update:

I want to clarify my point. I find nothing wrong with a person who wants to limit his content to being on his site where all of his branding exists. What I found confusing is that he doesn't want Bloglines to reproduce his content, but he is fine with other aggregators doing so? What makes Bloglines bad but NetNewsWire just peachy?

Update 2:

Okay, now I want to clarify my previous update. When I said, "I find nothing wrong with a person who wants to limit his content to being on his sight," well, that is not true. I can think of a "few" things wrong with that. But, that's not a point I want to bring to contention. Getting into that is usually pointless.

Random Photos

Here are some random photos. Some pics of the Miata. (The car is dirty, but it is still below freezing here in Cleveland so no bath today.) A pic of the contents of my nasal passages and a picture of Chuckie and I chillin'.

And, by the way, Flickr needs to provide Atom feeds for each user's "Photo Sets" and for each user's tag(s). Posting these photos on my blog could have been a lot easier had they done that.

Miata

I bought a Mazda Miata this past Saturday. As follows are the pictures.

No More Marketing

I've been thinking about Bob Lutz blogging. There's Jonathon Schwartz and Lev Gonick blogging too. C*O's and VPs of Something Or Another, they can't have a lot of time to blog. Furthermore, they pay millions of dollars annually to marketers, communiction officers, lawyers, etc. to make sure the verbiage that emits from the "company godhead" is the "way" it is "supposed to be."

So, why are they blogging? More specifically, why are they directly blogging about items/products/business/services/what-have-you that they have a staff to spin?

But, I, as a consumer of these items/products/business/services/what-have-you, I want to hear it from them. I'm tired of the marketing people and the commercials, and the carefully orchestrated stunts. I want to hear from people who have owned the product. People who have used the service. People who are doing interesting things with it. People who are passionate about it. People who hate it. People who swear by it. I want to hear executives communicating, frankly, about why this is this and that is that. I am tired of Superbowl commercials (well, no, I think the beer commericals are still funny); I want real engagement.

I want real. I want actual. I want testimonial, and I want understanding of the product in its entirety.

Maybe these executives write blog entries because they understand that. Maybe they write them because they have something to say. They want to communicate at that level with their customers and potential customers. Maybe it is a combination.

I like it.

GM "Gets" Corporate Blogging

So, GM starts a blog, GM FastLane Blog, and has their main man, Bob Lutz, supposedly penning some of the entries. When I first heard this, my initial thought was that it would end up being another mega-corporate, pristine blog that has each entry penned by an intern, cleaned up in the communications department, stamped with the name of "Lutz", meticulously analyzed one more time to make sure the text of the entry was vague, unassuming, clean, and boring, and finally unimpactfully posted to the Internet.

You know, something like the lackluster Google Blog.

Wrong.

He is responding in the comments, being frank and straightforward, "engaging" in the conversation. Quote from the entry On Design Interiors:

I would admit that the Accord has a great interior, as does Acura. But we're talking much higher prices there. When the G-6 4-cylinder versions come out, you'll see a substantial price difference in our favor to Accord.

More:

The G-6 interior was work in progress. It "works" for most customers at the price point. But what you're seeing is only phase one in our assault on interior quality. Did you take a look at seat tailoring? Carpet fits? Sheet metal quality in terms of door gaps, hood gaps, hem flanges? We used to be bad at those, too. Now I'll invite comparison with anybody, any price class, any national origin.

GM gets it. Bob Lutz gets it. I hope this blog stays just as engaging as it has been.

(Also noticed on Autoblog and by Hugh.)

Update: Great quote by Leslie in General Motors is blogging:

how many inches of snow have fallen in Hell so far?

Subtraction

It's very rare that I am "impressed" by a web site's style and layout. This is amplified in the blog genre of web sites where everyone uses 1 of 3 basic layouts infused with different colors and fonts to "personalize it" (says me, throwing rocks from my glass web site; but hey, I never claimed to be impressed by my own site).

The reason for this is probably the same reason I never really feel that impressed by different orchestras. I mean, I know it's good. I enjoy going to the orchestra. I work across the street from The Cleveland Orchestra and have made frequent visits (not so much recently, but have in the past). I've always enjoyed it. However, I can't really tell the difference between them and, say, any other orchestra that falls into the top 1000 orchestral units in the world. I just know that I cannot appreciate it as much as someone who has a much more intimate knowledge. In the same vein, I can rarely tell you if one web site's style and layout is better than another's. 23% of them occupy the normal area under the curve with 71% of them being blatant crap. Another 5% are those that I can somewhat identify as being definitively better than the norm.

That leaves the 1% of sites like subtraction.com. For some reason, I am really taken aback by the site. It's so simplistic in design but so rich in all of the nuances. I could not tell you with exactness what makes it good, but everything just seems to work with everything else; and everything seems to be where it is supposed to be and where you would expect it to be in some kind of prescient way. And, I really dig the simple black/white color scheme with strong orange contrasting mouse focus highlights.

I've Seen This Before, I Think

There's something here, and I can't help but feel there's a connection to something and, possibly, something else. But, then again, it could all be déjà vu.

When Greensboro Bloggers Attack!

I am incredibly amused as to what has befallen poor Chuckie (who normally runs around in his Clark-Kent alter ego of Andy Wismar). The guy posts a blog entry once every 47 days or so. He's a hard person to impress and only cream-of-the-crop content will deem blog-post-worthy, thus the infrequency.

Basically, the guy flies below the radar, operating in the quiet shadows of the blogosphere, only known to a select few (me).

That all changed a couple of days ago, when Chuckie posted an entry of shock that Greensboro, North Carolina has such an active and passionate blogging community. He went on to compare it to his own city of Raleigh, N.C. and how they matched up.

That's when the fun ensued.

20 comments (breaking his previous comment record 6x over, I'm sure).

A scathing mention in several of the Greensboro bloggers' blogs.

Quoted in the local publication as describing Greensboro as "Raleigh without the Ph.D.'s." and "whenever I'm there and surrounded by locals and not lawyers, I expect a spontaneous NASCAR race to materialize."

And, finally, having the author of the orginal article that started it all do a "follow-up" where he describes Chuckie undergoing a massive transformation and ends up "seeing the light" all in under 24 hours.

The whole saga has been keeping me entertained for the past week. I hope Chuckie writes more inflammatory things.

Pillow Humping

Install Crypt::IDEA on Solaris 8 isn't the most exciting blog entry in the world, and I would imagine, most people don't get past the first sentence or even the title before moving on in their aggregators or hitting another bookmarked URL. But, I get a warm fuzzy feeling down in my gulliwuts when I think of that poor chap wrestling with this same problem, googling to no avail as the only results returned are in Russian or Turkish with the only English phrases intermixed with the hieroglyphics are those that he kept seeing over and over again in his X window.

parse error before "idea_cblock"
parse error before "idea_cblock"
parse error before "idea_cblock"
parse error before "idea_cblock"
parse error before "idea_cblock"
parse error before "idea_cblock"

Well, I am here for you, fella:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22parse+error+before+idea_cblock%22&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky

And, speaking of those googlers that would find themselves at alpha-geek.com, I miss those wayward souls desperately looking for information on "pillow humping." You see, many moons ago, the front page of alpha-geek.com was a mini-aggregator/funny-ha-ha-ha page of myself and some of my friends who began experimenting with this weblog-doodad-stuff. On that page was the phrase "pillow humping." And, for several straight months, according to my logs, it was the top search phrase that brought people to the site. I was concerned for these people. What were they looking for? Were they confused 14 year old boys looking for tips? Worried dog owners whose pets had an unnatural affinity for the objects on the sofa? Bored middle-aged couples whose expirementations have taken a turn for the featherful?

But, the pages of alpha-geek.com have gone through many iterations; and the term no longer appears. I miss those people, though. I want them to come back. I want to help them out, but I just don't happen to be a well of information on the subject.

Regardless, welcome back Pillow Humpers! I don't have anything useful for you here but please know I wish you luck on your endeavors.

Driving Critique Stickers

If I could get these in the form of business cards, I would enjoy handing them out (via Autoblog)...

Cleveland Weather in December

I am not sure what happened... but it is December 7th... in Cleveland... Cleveland as in Northern Ohio... and it is 67°. (Pay no attention to the rain graphic, right now, it is actually quite sunny with fluffy white clouds.) That's right, sixty-seven degrees. That's unheard of. It's just weird.

I blame Global Warming... or El Nino

Ninjas Killed My Family

I thought it was funny (via Boing Boing).

Howto Deepfry a Turkey

It has been a new tradition for our group of friends to have a Thanksgiving dinner amongst ourselves the weekend after the actual Thanksgiving weekend. So, this year, my roommate and I decided to do the turkey (last year, assuming everyone had been turkeyed out, we did a London broil). I had read jr's discounting of deepfriend turkeys as being greasy, and he went on further to mention the idea of grilling a turkey. This piqued my interest, but in the end, considering this was our first foray into the preparation of an entire turkey, we decided to go ahead with the deepfrying. After all, I had never had one and wanted to try one.

Let me say, for the record, it was the greatest turkey I have ever had. Damn that thing was good. But, in the course of preparing to embark on the task and during the actual activity, I learned a couple of tips and tricks I thought I would share.

1. The Water Trick. Before beginning, put the bird into the deepfry pot, and fill the pot with water all the while keeping track of how much water you are putting in to the pot. Fill the pot to the point that the turkey is completely submerged (if the turkey floats during the process, no big deal, just push it down for accurate measuring) and the top of the water is about 2" above the top of the turkey. The amount of water used is the amount of oil you will want to use.
2. People say that you have to use peanut oil. We used vegetable oil with no ill effects.
3. After defrosting the turkey and before seasoning it, completely dry it off. Pat it down with paper towels. Water is your enemy.
4. During the preheat stage, heat the oil at full propane flame blast. Heat the oil to 400°. Once you get to that temperature, tweak the flame setting to get it to the point where the oil sustains itself at a constant 400°
5. Prepare yourself because when you drop the turkey in (do this slowly, by the way) the temperature is going to drop, I shit you not, 100°. Tweak the flame higher but be careful. You want to get everything running smoothly at 350°. So, give it a little more flame, but once you reach 335-340°, scale it back. And, as a side note, the oil seems to heat up way faster than it cools down.
6. Keep an eye on it. Make small adjustments to keep the temperature at 350.
7. We cooked our 12-14lbs. turkey for about 45 minutes at 350°, and it turned out just about perfect.

Cleveland Stakes Claim in "Internet City" Moniker

Cleveland goes high-speed

The mayor said that under its five-year agreement with OneCleveland, the city will pay $24,905 for its first year and an average of $18,000 a year for the next four years to access network. That's a total cost of just under $95,000, about 50% cheaper than what the city was paying for its former Internet connection with eConnect, Mayor Campbell said.

"Not only are we 4,000 times faster, but we are doing that at half the price," she said.

...

The city currently provides free wireless Internet access in the park space neighboring City Hall in downtown Cleveland. The city plans to expand that free access in stages to other public parks and spaces in the city, said Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, the city's chief technology officer.

The OneCleveland connection will enable the city to connect its high-speed, fiber optic network to city buildings, city recreation centers and safety district offices, she said.

More free WiFi is good... and, it's not regular broadband WiFi... it's ultra-broadband Wifi. I guess we can taunt Philadelphia and claim our electrons are faster than their electrons.

Intolerance is not a Moral Value

Intolerance is not a "moral value." You (in the generic form of "you"; certainly not (necessarily) accusing you, my gentle reader) live in a pluralist and secular society. Get with it.

If I hear one more person say "based on my moral values" when they mean "because I am a prejudiced shit-for-brains," I am going to intoleranate^† their face.

^†Yes, I made a word up. Only a made up word seemed to work in the context. I choose to impregnate the word with the meaning "really bad thing."

Alpha-Geek.com Server Issues

The alpha-geek.com server tanked — hard drive failure. Chuckie busily rebuilt the server and recovered as much data as he could, which, thankfully, included the web root and MySQL databases. I just got finished polishing up the Perl install+modules+libs, MovableType reinstall, and a complete rebuild of the web tree.

We should be good to go.

I Want What I Want

The interview with Steve Balmer where he is quoted as saying something to the effect of "the most common format of music on an iPod is stolen music," is generating a lot of buzz... enough to warrant a Slashdot article. But, the quote that truly reveals my-name-is-Ballmer-and-I-am-completely-disconnected-from-the-users is later:

"My 12-year-old at home doesn’t want to hear that he can’t put all the music that he wants in all of the places that he would like it," [Ballmer] joked.

Why would that be a joke? That's exactly what I want. I want to put my music anywhere I damn well please. I would believe that that is what any consumer would want. I paid for the music; I will now use it how I would like to use it be it on my home stereo, from my laptop, on my iPod, in my car, make backups, burn it to a compilation "Car Music" CD... whatever.

The quote could be entirely out of context, I suppose. And, he could have meant it in a "and that's how it should be" way. But, considering he just earlier called iPod users thieves, his meaning seems to suggest the former.

Cleveland Blues Bar

There's a blues bar in Cleveland, OH right around the W. 57th area. It's a real seedy style establishment with open mike nights on... I believe... Sunday nights. Real authentic style blues.

Does anyone know what the Hell place I am talking about?

If I remember correctly, it might have been real close to a police station... maybe.

Damn Internet is failing me. Repeated Google searches for "cleveland blues 57th", "cleveland bars 57th", "cleveland blues 57" have all failed me. Also failing me, was citysearch, cleveland.com, AOL City Search, and Yahoo!'s Cleveland Directory.

How can the Internet fail me!

Actually, the fact that the Internet fails me when trying to locate the bar just reinforces the authenticity of this dive, hole-in-the-ground quality blues establishment... unknown to the Internet, it is.

Of course, I am not even sure if it is actually on W. 57th.

Hmmm...

Update: It's called The Parkview, and it is located on W. 58th.

The Real Reason No One Reads Your Weblog

This is Wrong on Oh So Many Levels

You, who ever you are, do what you want; but if you’re only here to be the next Kottke, or Scoble, or Stone, quit now. You’ll never get to their position aping their behavior or their rules

Don't know why people are trying to be so helpfully nice about this. The fact of the matter is, no one is going to read your weblog (wherever "your weblog" may be) because you write stupid, uninteresting things. It's okay; that .001% of the time when you do write something interesting, you'll get linked to by 97 webloggers.

No need to mince words about it.

10+10 Things to do in Cleveland Before You're Dead

10 Things to Do in Cleveland Before You Die and Eric Meyer's Ten Things To Do In Cleveland Before You're Dead (both via Eric Meyer)

I can happily say I have accomplished 1-9 on both lists:

1. Visit Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

   Did it. Did it many moons ago.

2. Eat at Lola Bistro

   Eaten there many times. Out of all of the restaurants in Cleveland, I would say it is my second favorite behind the Brasa Grill Steakhouse.

3. Shop at the West Side Market

   Oh yeah, they have some good grillin' fodder there.

4. Eat at Tommy's in Coventry

   Went to school at Case; now I work for them; I've had many a meal at Tommy's. My favorite dish is the meat pie — mmmmm... lamb n' cheese.

5. Catch a Tribe game at Jacob's field

   By law, if you live in Cleveland, you have had to have watched a Cleveland Indians game at the ballpark; so of course, I have done this.

6. Visit Malley's Chocolates

   Yep, went there soon after moving into Lakewood. Last time I was in there was to buy a bevy of Valentine's Day gifts.

7. Have a beer (or 14 beers) at Major Hoopple's

   Ohhhh yea, I've done that. Passed out on the bar there, actually. Luckily, a good friend of mine got my limp body into a car and back home. Good times... good times.

8. Eat at Mama Santa's

   Of course.

9. Watch a concert at The Beachland Ballroom

   Done this several times. Sadly, though, it has been ages since I have been back. The last concert I caught there was Rasputina.

10. Eat at Sokolowski's University Inn

    Nope. Don't have this one. Never even heard of the place. Going to have to look it up.

And, now onto Eric's list:

TMQ on the Yanks and the Baseball Gods

This week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback weighs in on the Cleveland Indians trouncing of the Yankees 22-0:

The week before, the Yankees had run up the score on the Blue Jays, winning 18-6 while keeping their starters in for the ninth inning, rather than clearing the bench. The next day, the baseball gods even warned the Yankees, causing the skies to darken and lightning to knock out power at Toronto's Sky Dome. But the Yankees did not get the message. Thus did the baseball gods send the 22-0 thrashing to put the Yankees in their place, and yes, in that game Cleveland cleared its bench. Oh ye mortals, trifle not with the baseball gods.

Reality? Consensus? Perception?

From Scripting News:

the consensus isn't always correct

That's a philosophical can o' worms. It's Michael Dummett opening up George Berkeley's Pandora's box. Each person perceives an event or object differently. Now, if you are one way on the spectrum of thought, you say that there is a state p that is the actual state, and then there are the states q₀, q₁, q₂,...q_n
Which represent the states of all of the different persons perceiving the event or object. Then, there is r_0..n which represent the difference between p, the "real," and q_n, the "perceived." So, r₃ represents the difference between p and q₃.

But, that's if you are one way. There's the other way. The other way, there is no p and, thus, there are no r_0..n's. There is just our perceptions. There is just q_0..n.

Now, I just broke down two of the most major schools of Philosophy into about a dozen sentences. But, if I had gone to greater length, people tend to get bored, stop reading, and just believe that it is being over-thought^†.
.
..
...
"Just believe that it is being over-thought"... And, that's the paradox. People are being affected by their own perceptions when reading anything discussing reality/perception. When discussing reality/perception, you're limited by and affected by the very rules you are trying to define... (oh, I'm going to say it) the meta-reality is recursively being applied and may be discounting everything you are saying (if you buy into this).

And, there, those 3 or 4 statements just attempted to break down another 198,655,211 pages of philosophical discourse into an easily digestable chunk on the topic of "what is real?"

Soooo, Dave, it may be that the "consensus is correct"... by definition.

Or, it may be that I have issues.

^†Subtle nod to Post-modernists.

Joel Joel Joel

From an anecdotal update to Joel's book announcement:

The only case I know of where a manual transmission beats a good automatic transmission is when you're driving on the highway, and you know that sometime soon you're going to have to pass somebody, so you downshift to third gear to get ready to accelerate. An automatic transmission can't read your mind, so it stays in 4th or 5th, and has to downshift when you floor the accelerator, thus creating a temporary hesitation between the time you press the gas and the time the acceleration starts which wouldn't exist if you were already in 3rd gear.

/me shakes head

Coffee Tastes Better in Ceramic Mugs

Coffee tastes different in ceramic mugs. It's a truth. Paper and foam cups are commonplace as your standard coffee shops, 7-11, and McDonald's offer those as receptacles. And, they work; but they are not ceramic. A glass container can be used in a pinch or if you are in a place that has an unhealthy affinity for items made of hardened, super-heated sand. Plastic is unthinkable. I would be inclined to turn down coffee (even in the most dire circumstances) if it would be offered in some plastic container.

It is in inalienable truth — coffee tastes better in ceramic mugs. I am a rational person, and I understand that, at a scientific level, the molecules in the cup and the components of the coffee do not intermingle in any signifigant manner. It is not the case that, upon entering a cup, there is an orgy of atomic exchange that occurs causing the coffee to take on a distinctly different taste. I know that that does not happen. But, I also know coffee tastes better in ceramic mugs.

A clot of blood on a piece of paper is thrown into the nearest trash designated area. But, if it is nicely framed, firmly affixed to a museum's wall, titled Miscarriage, and has 4 odd looking yet interestingly attractive people staring at it and jotting things in notebooks; it's art.

My shoes fit better if they are tied in a fashion such that the loops of the laces are of the same size and perfectly symetrical (no Möbius shapes). Shoes tied in a haphazard manner are uncomfortable, and coffee tastes better in ceramic mugs.

Effects of the Most Recent Tax Cuts

Via MSNBC.

• Income >= $1,100,000 — total percentage of federal tax paid dropped from 22.2% to 20.1%
• $1,100,000 > Income > $182,700 — total percentage of federal tax paid dropped from 64.4% to 63.5%
• $75,600 > Income > $51,500 — total percentage of federal tax paid rose from 18.7% to 19.5%

Not sure why the metrics were in units of "percent of total taxes paid."

Walmart + Visa = 6 pack, 1qt. Oil, Crackers, and Topsoil

Quote blatantly lifted from TorgoX: Walmart

Since our economy at any given moment consists of sixty million people driving to Walmart to buy stuff made by people 12,000 miles away, on credit (that is, the expectation that they will have money in the future) the markets have reason to worry. Not since the days of the late Roman empire has there been a national economy based so little on true economic exchange of real value. They had the coliseum. We have Las Vegas and reality television.

—Clusterfuck Nation

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

Instructions

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

Required Fields

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

1. I found this experiment at URL: Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
2. I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing or Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Bloglines
3. I posted this experiment at URL: alpha-geek.com
4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02, August, 2004
5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 15:43:31
6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Cleveland, OH, USA

Optional Survey Fields

(Replace the answers below with your own answers):

1. My blog is hosted by: Me
2. My Age is: 25
3. My gender is: Male
4. My occupation is: Applications Developer / Middleware Developer
5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines
6. I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type
7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 17, February, 2003
8. My web browser is: Firefox

I Hate Democrats

I hate Democrats. I certainly fall more Left than Right, and I hate Democrats.

Last night after watching Bill Clinton's speech to the DNC, I waited with bated breath for the various correspondents' reactions. I spent the entire hour after the speech flipping back and forth between MSNBC and FOXNEWS, and I was left with one constant, unadulterated feeling: "Democrats are fucking morons."

The Democratic correspondents that each network had on camera were blithering idiots. I could tell, just by the expressions on their face, that, at some level, they seemed to be formulating actual and, possibly, coherent thoughts; but the process to convert those modicums of intercrossing synaptic pathways into verbiage was broken. Broken like "a searing chasm splitting through the hemispheres of their minds cutting off the talking section from the thinking section" broken. These people could barely mumble and stutter to the point where they could be interpreted as speaking English.

What is it about Democrats and their inabilit(y|ies) to elegantly speak their position? Billy does a commendable job of it, but his talent seems to be lost on the others. Unless a Democrat is saying, "Republicans help the rich get richer at the expense of the well being of everybody else," they stumble and bumble over their words and come out as unclear and unconvicted of their own viewpoints (not to mention, overall befuddled when someone mounts an argument against them). And, in all seriousness, when I hear political dogma like "Republicans give money to the wealthiest 1%" or "Democrats want to raise your taxes," I just shut off and stop paying attention; which is also the reason I don't listen to Air America or read The Weekly Standard.

<aside>

Though, as an aside, I can't get enough of The O'Reilly Factor and Scarborough Country. I really just love these shows. I love O'Reilly's "No Spin Zone." I mean, c'mon, just the act of declaring yourself "No Spin" is putting "spin" — the irony is not lost on me. And, having to subtitle your show with that (and mentioning it at least four times within the hour) is like walking around trying to convince people that you are a genius. No one takes you seriously when you have to drive it into the ground like that. I just love all of it, and I revel in the fact that O'Reilly is comfortable stating:

9/11 would have happened with any President in the White House

And you have some kind of mathematical proof for that? Or, maybe you're a prophet?

Scarborough invites Pat Buchanan on the show as a legitimately objective political analyst. How funny is that?

</aside>

What was I talking about before the aside... ah, yes, political dogma using the oft-fodder taxation. There are times taxes should be raised, and there are times taxes should be cut. I'm smart enough to realize that these two scenarios exist, and I certainly don't need to hear Republicans painting stereotypes of the Democratic party and visa versa. Just tell me which one you want to do, tell me why, and I will attempt to decide from there. Thank you.

In Bill Clinton's speech, he said (I paraphrase):

The U.S. alone cannot find and jail or kill every possible terrorist in the world. We must work together and cooperate with other nations to form a global alliance against terrorism.

Granted, something as complex as Foreign Policy and a global initiative against terrorism cannot be accurately reduced to a set of statements that can fit on a fortune cookie (i.e. this was lossy compression); however, I got the gist. And, it was put together eloquently and in a meaningful way.

So, I guess my point is, can we keep the Democrats off of TV? Or, at the very least, can we have them take a proficiency test before being licensed as official media representatives of the Democratic party?

Update:

For your reading enjoyment (via Eric Meyer):

• Things You Have to Believe to Be a Democrat
• Things You Have to Believe to Be a Republican

The History of my Unix Commands States the Obvious

TheMiddle: So I 'clear' compulsively — sounds like fun.

torpor:/usr/local/apache# history | awk '{print $2}' \
 | sort | uniq -c | \
 grep -vE "df|rm|ls|cd|history" | sort -n | tail
     11 wget
     12 tar
     13 mkdir
     15 cp
     19 apt-get
     22 make
     35 cvs
     48 nedit
     52 perl
torpor:/usr/local/apache#

Other people's top shell commands.

GMail Invites

Okay, people, apparently my (rather obvious) update at the bottom of the post is not enough to dissuade anyone from commenting or sending emails. I am very sorry. I have no invites left. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. I am terribly sorry, but I am not the gmail invite give-away-er you are looking for.

Simon Willison is giving away gmail invites. I have 3 invites left after having doled them out to everyone I know who specifically wanted one, so if anyone else wants one, email me (jeremy.smith@case.edu) or just leave a comment.

Update: Okay, they're all gone. There was a surprising reaction to this. So, if I get anymore invites, I'll post here again.

Arabica in West Cleveland (on Detroit Ave. in Lakewood) Has Free WiFi

For the longest time, I have been bemoaning the lack of Wifi on the West Side of Cleveland. The East Side has ubiquitous wireless coverage (thanks, in the large part, to Case); however, the West Side has always been without sans the random $10/day Borders crap.

But, lo and behold, the Arabica Coffeehouse near the corner of W. 117^th and Detroit Ave. has 802.11b access... that's free, which is how WiFi should be.

This is both a blessing and curse. I came in here to do some quiet reading and writing (I just happened to have my laptop with me). Then, I walk in here and see they have wireless... now I am going to spend the time I had reserved for reading and writing surfing the Internet, checking my mail, blogging about how I stumbled upon Wifi on the West Side...

Linkdump: What I am Reading

The contents of my "Saved Items" Bloglines folder.

• Programming
  
  
  • XMLHttpRequest and Javascript Closures
  • Rules of Data Normalization
  • Drag and drop with Javascript
  • How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
  • Accessible Pop-up Links
  
  
  
• Business
  
  
  • Success and Motivation, Part 1
  • Success and Motivation, almost Part 2
  • Success and Motivation, Part 2
  • Success and Motivation, Part 3
  • Success and Motivation, Part 4
  • The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  • Law #1: The Law of Leadership
  • Law #2: The Law of the Category
  • Law #3: The Law of the Mind
  • Law #4: The Law of Perception
  • Bootstrapping Your Startup
  
  
  
• Webmail Commentary
  
  
  • Simon Cozens on Gmail
  
  
  
• To Read
  
  
  • who cares about web standards?
  • W3C Workshop on Web Applications
  • "Worth Hating"
  • Blue Water Virgin
  • Semantic Email
  • Perlmonks: Open to debate on mixins and traits.
  • Perlmonks: Organising Large Test Suites

.oO I have such a pretty navel...

Review of Movabletype 3.0

A couple weekends ago, whilst visiting Chuckie, we upgraded alpha-geek.com and the sister sites (1, 2, 3, 4) to MovableType 3.0D. Initially, there was some hullabaloo over the licensing scheme; and the first versions of the licenses were restrictive to our setup (we have 5 authors with 5 weblogs). So, my initial reaction was to go get wordpress where we were safe underneath the GPL, and we could use it for as many blogs as we want, as many authors as we want, and have the freedom to modify the source code all we want and never have the fear that the codebase would be abandoned and rot. What I really wanted to do was take MT 2.661 and modify that and continue to use that. But, I quickly realized that would put me in the business of constantly upgrading my own blogging system. I don't want to have to do that. Plus, there are some licensing issues with sticking with MT 2.661 and how that license could evolve at any point in time. Nonetheless, since Jay Allen has declared that MT3 has fixed all of the comment spam problems and that mt-blacklist will cease development on his end, I would have to maintain that myself, too. [Update: Jay Allen is, indeed, continuing to develop MT-Blacklist as this post blatantly says — Your MT-Blacklist Wish List — my fault for not double-checking its status more carefully] Fuck that! We'll move it all to Wordpress and be done with it.

Unfortunately, Wordpress was woefully inadequate. Out of the box, it did not support multiple blogs with multiple authors. To shoehorn it on to alpha-geek, would mean multiple installations. Which, consequently, means multiple DB's; and during upgrades, n upgrades of the same software. I am much too lazy for that. Why would I do that when I could install n copies of MT3, be cool underneath the license, and have the same thing with the niceness of MT?

So, it was back to look at MT. They had changed the licensing structure, and we could scoot in just below the Personal Edition (5 authors, 5 weblogs). MovableType is well worth the $70, so we ponied up the money and are now completely legit.

My first reaction to MT3 was benevolent. I liked the changes they had made to the author/admin layout. It was much smoother and flowed together nicely. That about sums up the good parts. (Which is not to say their is nothing else good about MT. MovableType is a great product. It's just that no extra goodness was injected with 3.0. All of the existing goodness was "good enough" in 2.661.)

Jay Allen had said that MT3 fixed the comment spam problem, and there was to be no more development, on his end, for mt-blacklist. Well, MT3 has not fixed the comment spam problem. When a new comment is added to an MT3 blog, there is no way to go in and say:

• never allow this IP to post comments, and
• Never allow a comment posted from anyone that contains a link to any of the domains linked to in this comment, and
• delete this comment, and
• delete any other comments that match this new criteria, and
• rebuild all of the relevant files.

The above I could do with a press of a single button with mt-blacklist. Now, with MT3, I can ban the IP; but that's it. This fixes comment spam how? MT3 replaces the functionality of mt-blacklist in what way? The fact of the matter is, it does not. MT — great piece of software — but I just shelled out $70 to reduce functionality. Great. [Update: Jay Allen is, indeed, continuing to develop MT-Blacklist as this post blatantly says — Your MT-Blacklist Wish List — my fault for not double-checking its status more carefully]

That's not the end of the comment woes.

Back when MT3 was just in beta and only super-cool, super-select people got to beta test it, there was some kneejerk reaction to the new ultra-great, ultra-spiffy, ultra-black-helicopter-possiblity of TypeKey. The way that shakes out is in my weblog config, I have the option to enable or disable "registered commenters" and/or "unregistered commenters." I like everybody being able to comment whether or not he or she is a Typekey person. So, I enabled both of them. So, anyone and everyone can comment here! (Nevermind the fact that I no longer have any effective anti-spam measures.) And, the comments can go through without approval... see the checkboxes:

But, this works in absolutely no way. When someone posts a comment, it requires approval. I can no longer enable my blogging software to allow commenters to immediately post. Let's look at that picture again.

Yep. Pretty sure I have it setup to allow immediate posting of comments. And, absolutely postive comments do not get posted (go ahead and try commenting on this post — it won't appear). So, $70 to reduce anti-spam plugin functionality and reduce overall core functionality. Great.

I'm sure MT 3.01 will fix my comment posting problem. And, MT 3.3 or 3.4 will fix my spam problem. The question is, which ones of those releases will I have to shell out more money for. The answer is, I can't modify the source code to my own blogging software to fix the problems myself. In the long run, it would have been easier to have grabbed Wordpress, put on my PHP hat, and modifed that to be able to do multiple blog/authors. But, I didn't. And, I have already spent too much of my time enhancing and tweaking my current navel-gazing tools to want to go and hack on another. So, here's to MT3. And here's to Wordpress, I might see you soon.

Southern Hospitality

I was in North Carolina last week visiting Chuckie. Good times were had all around.

However, there was one aspect I did not get enough of; and that was good ol' Southern slang. I barely heard anybody use any. I blame it on being so close to IBM who only hire Yankee carpetbaggers.

To quench my thirst for Southern colloquialisms:

Bowed Up

Impatience
He was all bowed up.

Laying out

Stayin' out all night drinking
I was laying out over at Rick's.

Walking on a slant

Drunk
I was walking on a slant after drinking Rick's 'shine.

For a right good story, y'all should skedaddle o'er to What I'm asking you is, how much is it worth to you?. I reckon courtesy like that is as scarce as a hen's teeth up there in yank-country.

Clarifying Some Vocabularly

Brown and Goodridge (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

Fifty years ago today, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution required integrated schools.

If I have two public schools (i.e. they are funded out of the tax payers money), and the government decides that blonde haired kids go to school #1 and brown haired kids go to #2 — that is un-Constitutional. The court did not rule that the Constitution required integrated schools; rather, they outlawed segregating them. Sure, blonde haired kids may still end up living closer to all of the other blonde haired kids and being in the same school district; thus, resulting in an all-blonde-haired school. No big deal. But, if a blonde haired kid moves into a school district that was previously all brown haired kids; the government cannot say "this school is only for brown haired kids, blondie, you must continue to be bussed back to your blonde school."

That was what was ruled. It was never ruled that integrated schools were required.

If integrated schools were required, it would be illegal to ever have a school that ever consisted at any given point in time of just one race. That is not against the law.

Integrated schools are required — slightly inaccurate.

Forcibly taking action to segregate schools is illegal — more accurate.

I completely agree with him; though, on the absurdity of bussing around the different races to schools to enforce a racial mix. People who live in the same school district go to the same public school — which, as it turns out, is, basically, what was ruled fifty years ago. It just makes sense.

Caught Drunk Playing with Hands

I'd like to think that I am explaining a very complicated subject. Maybe I am demonstrating how the spins of electrons cause magnetism. Or, I am describing how a Quaife style differential works. I am obviously demonstrating something with my hands, but honestly, this picture was taken at the end of the night that consisted of a pub crawl. We went to 97 bars or some such, and I am surprised I was still standing. So, in all actuality, I am probably just soliloquizing "the wheels on the bus go round and round... round and round... round and round."

Disable Browser Window Resizing

From Critical Section

I just want to say - there should be a special punishment for developers of software which automatically resizes your browser windows.

I concur. If you use a nice browser, you can go to Tools → Options → Web Features → Advanced and un-check the box next to "Allow scripts to move or resize existing windows."

Just Not Nailing It

I am just not nailing the proposal I mentioned in my previous post. Usually, this stuff just flies out of me through my fingers like, the most over-used blog metaphor, a monkey flinging his shit around. It just isn't coming out. I am just not nailing it, and I really want to nail it. The whole idea is just sitting in my head stewing and fermenting and refusing to come to fruition so I can excrete it.

Unfortunately, I am working under a hard deadline. The proposal needs to be submitted to eight other higher-ed's, so they can sign it in support giving the whole thing more clout when it gets to the the NSF. Sure, I can keep writing it in the half-assed manner that I am; but when the Zone hits tomorrow (which, it might not, anyways), I'll end up deleting everything I write tonight so I can nail it.

There needs to be a Zone Pill. Maybe I should just get some of that Enzyte.

Eudaimonia

The weather in Lakewood today is phenomenol. Days like this in the month of April are few and far between for Northern Ohio. Everyone takes advantage of it when the weather initially starts to get nice.

I'm sitting out on my front porch, wireless connection Excellent for my laptop whose power is bordering on vulgarity, working on a draft for a research proposal being submitted to the NSF for their Middleware Initiative call for proposals. All I need now is a pair of topless chicks with giant palm leaves guaranteeing that my frostly beverage stays refreshed, and I am declaring myself Emperor of Eudaimonia.

This is nice.

Page 23

Page 23

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Another related worry was that the paradoxes of logic, such as the Epimenides paradox, might turn out to be internal to mathematics, and thereby cast in doubt all of mathematics.

Hofstadter, Douglas. "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." HarperCollins January 1999: 23.

Setting Up New Alpha-Geek Server

Chuckie (← pointer to his forlorn blog) and I have acquired a dedicated server from ValueWeb. They set it up with Red Hat, and Chuckie spent last night performing various voodoo trickery to hot-install Debian on the running RH distro. (Good job, Chuck-man!)

Now, I am going to spend the afternoon getting my hands dirty with Apache Virtual Hosts and various IP listenin' magic to whip it into shape to handle alpha-geek.com, andywismar.com, and the people along for the ride.

Should be fun.

Should I Buy Beer or Source Control?

The only reason I am linking to this — Getting Started with Your Own Software Company — article, that has already been featured on Slashdot in Eric Sink on Starting Your Own Software Company, is the following two quotes:

The world spends more on beer every day than it spends on version control tools in a year.

how much time did you assume it would take for you to build your 1.0 release? Whatever it was, double it... Building that first release will take you a lot longer than you think.

MyDoom Virus Report from the Case Email Servers

In the past 24 hours, 713,594 email messages have gone through our new AV email filter servers (a lower number than normal because many SMTP servers out there in the cloud of the Internet are still using the old MX records that point to the old SMTP servers). 232,065 have been the W32/MyDoom-A virus. That's nearly a third of the email! They have all been caught and deleted.

In a half hour or so, the TTL's for the old servers will have completely run out; and most of the Internet will be concentrating solely on the new AV email filter SMTP servers. I'll run the numbers again, then.

So far, though, this has not been as bad as SoBig.

I Like "LinkBlogs," But I Like Some More than Others

Skimming through so-called "linkblogs," "blogmarks," "one-liners," "quickies," whatever is nice. I like reading through them. I subscribe to several of them, but I like the format of some over others.

How I use my aggregator is as follows: I read through the accumulated posts, basically, skimming them for worth; if one is "worthy," I store it in my Saved Items area to get back to; repeat ad nauseum until I get caught up with all of the new items. Then, I go back and begin intently reading the items I saved.

This works fairly well for me. And, for linkblogs like Simon Willison's Blogmarks, Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog, LaughingMeme's MLP, etc. it works great. Each link is a separate entry. I can save each individual link that they post. I see an entry that I believe I will be interested in or is worth reading later, I save it; and I pass up the one's that point to cat pictures and such (I don't much care for cats — not even kittens).

But, then there's the other style of linkblogs such as Erik Thauvin, Keith Devens, and random($foo). This doesn't work for my aggregator reading heuristic. All of their links are dumped into one post, and if I see two or three of them I would like to read (out of 47 or so), I need to retain the whole post. When I finally get back to the saved "linkdump," I have usually forgotten why I had saved it in the first place and have to go through rereading through all of the links rediscovering why I saved it in the first place.

Then, there's the whole thing with subscribing to their "linkblogs" separately from their main blog (which I like), but that is neither here nor there.

Not that any of this will end up causing me to unsubscribe from anything.

Sooo, How Is This Orkut Thing Going to Work?

Through some sick twist of curiosity, I went to see what orkut (in affiliation with Google) was all about. "What the Hell..." I thought. "One more account on one more web page that I will forget before too long. At least it might entertain me for an hour or so; give me something to play around with..." On the frontpage, there's a login form plus a link to "join orkut."

Simple enough. I clicked on the link to join but, alas!, was defeated.

So... uh... ummm... did they just bootstrap their "friends" network with one dude and tell him "start inviting people?" Who was this first member who all other members will descend? In other words, what kind of elitist bullshit is this?

My life just won't be complete until I get an invitation to join orkut.

Update: According to Orkut Circuit, the starting person was Orkut Buyukkokten, himself; and the rest is an experiment in 6° of separation.

Can Nothing Pinnacle Anymore

Now With 147 Blades That Sing / They spin, they squirt, they vibrate, they marry your ugly sister. The new razors are here!

There's something about consumer products. They just keep marching forward with "innovations." Really, though, how much technology can you pack into toothpaste? You wouldn't know there is a limit, though, considering the amount of commercials on TV -- plaque fighting, gingivities fighting, orange flavored, grape flavored, whitening, extra whitening, double extra whitening, toothpaste with mouthwash, lasts 8 hours, lasts 12 hours, you can chew on it like a meal, Atkin's-friendly toothpaste — where does it end? Is there no technological summit for the amount of features that can be included in toothpaste?

And, then there are razors which seems to be following Moore's Law when it comes to the rate the companies add blades to them. In 2010, expect razors to be sold with 80 cutting implements attached.

Can't Get Enough CSS

My period of CSS knowledge consumption is coming to fruition — playing around with the layout of alpha-geek. If you use a nice browser, you can start switching through stylesheets (it's that little icon on the lower left corner of your browser window). Many more stylesheets to come and a way to save your preferred stylesheet in a cookie.

Note: The "Old Style" stylesheet — the one that mimics the previous design for this site — is still pretty rough. I'm working on it, but honestly, I don't much care for that site design anymore, so I may just abandon it.

Turning Down a Job Offer

Recently, I was offered a position as Techinical Lead and Software Architect at a small start-up company doing what small start-up companies seek to do -- solve a huge, general case problem with software. The Big Picture® they painted sounded wholesome, and it piqued my curiousity enough that I went in for two interviews and strongly considered the offer.

There was a risk involved. It was a start-up. It had a core group of dedicated people working hard. They were entering in to a problem domain that was real and was generally unsolved. What it meant to me was that there wasa lot of diffcult problems that had no solutions — a lot of interesting problems that I would enjoy solving. Also, they offered me a lot of money; a healthy increase over my current salary. And, while being passionate about my job and work and being able to actively participate in the creation of something is more important to me than a figure that appears on a W-2, having the money in addition to that is certainly nice.

In the end, though, it seemed too suspect. While the money seemed right, share in the company's fortune was not put on the table. That is, if the company went from pennies to millions, I was not guaranteed a place at that table. I could have probably brought that up and been offered a stake in that, but there were other issues.

For their big picture to come to fruition, they needed to bootstrap their technology on to several customers. And, I was not convinced that the initial product they were pushing was viable; as in, I was not convinced that I, being a customer, would want their product.

Also, I did not know them. It's one thing for me to take my career and toss it onto a bandwagon with someone I know and respect. It is a different ball game to do that with people I just have a feel for. And, even though I am young and this would be the "right time" to take such a risk, it's pretty startling how real intangibles like job security become when you are faced with the impending reality of not actually having it.

In the end, I turned it down; but I have not completely sold myself on my own justifications. If my logic was truly sound, and in 5 years from now I hear of them making millions and living off the fat of their profit sharing, I would not regret turning the job position down. That, and, the more I think about it, the more cool some of the problems would have been to task my brain at.

I suppose I will just have to acquiesce myself, for now, in trying to solve my problem of continually using dangling prepositions.

GM to Produce Pontiac Solstice

GM is going to produce the Pontiac Solstice!

• 2006 Pontiac Solstice Pictures: Consumer Guide®
• 2006 Pontiac Solstice Review | AutoSite Car Previews
• 2004 North American International Auto Show

Quotable Tim Bray

Via Tim Bray in Technology Losers:

4GL Spelled out in full, that would be Fourth-Generation Language. This was super hot stuff back when I was getting into the business in the Eighties. The notion was that instead of writing detailed procedural programs full of messy and easy-to-get-wrong if statements and loops, you'd write declarative programs that just generated the output from the input. This went over big-time with the management community, which was (and remains) sick of paying high-priced temperamental programmers to write code that's full of nasty little detail-level bugs.

Unfortunately, it turned out that with a 4GL, you could write 90% of your application in no time at all (making managers wonder why these things normally take so long) but you couldn't get the last 10% done at all. The fact is, life has if statements and loops and so on, and programming systems that pretend these things don't exist are at best crippled.

There were dozens of these things (my personal demon was DATATRIEVE), now mostly relegated to the technology graveyard or at least to niche roles. The two mainstream technologies today that retain some flavor of 4GL are Visual Basic and XSLT.

Matt Hasselbeck and The Football Gods

For the football fans out there, I watched Matt Hasselbeck walk out on the field of Lambeau stadium during the OT coin toss and declare into the ref's microphone, "we want the ball; we're going to score!" The cheeseheads were not amused by his boyish enthusiasm, but I wondered what the Football Gods thought of it.

Were they impressed by his go-get-em, rough-n-tumble attitude and desire for victory? Or, did they consider it overconfidence and stupidity, especially when facing The Favre, one who is, no doubt, just awaiting his own deification into Pigskin Godhood? How would the Football Gods, who can be petty and cruel at times and at other times spectacularly just, deal with Hasselbeck's coin toss declaration?

He throws an INT that's returned for a TD. The Football Gods hath spoken. Do not taunt The Favre in Lambeau.

P.S. I hate the Pack. I am a Bears fan. But, even a die-hard Bears fan knows that one does not taunt the Pack in Lambeau field during a post-season game.

At Work Saturday Morning == Increased Blogging

At work on a Saturday morning, again, watching the metadirectory run a full load on the LDAP server re-populating existing and new attributes. The best case scenario is that I end up doing a lot of sitting (and, consequently, posting a lot of one-liner's as I catch up with my news aggregator) whilst watching the metadir run correctly. The worst case scenario involves a lot of running around, cursing, and crazy, quickly-written perl -MFix::Everything -e 'please'.

Hopefully, you will see a lot of one-liner's appearing as I remain bored. Bored is better than busy for this morning/afternoon.

What's More Dangerous than Data?

What's more dangerous than data? Plotted data -- data that even the most mathematically incompetent can view and elucidate trends from without having actually reasoned the meaning of the data.

This is all well and explained, though, in the source posts: Data Points Measuring a Country's Average IQ and Country's Average "Rank" of the Importance of Religion and aforementioned data points plotted (via Critical Section in Religion vs IQ).

Now, I am not a (God|Deity|Omnipotent Being)-(Believer|Fearer|Worshipper) nor do I subscribe to any of Their newsletters; but I would never use data like this to indicate that those that are not religious are smarter than those who are; which is the obvious discernable trend in the data -- IQ is inversely proportional to the belief in religious importance.

The data is meaningless. And, I believe, everyone thus far commenting on it is in agreement of that. A choice quote (his emphasis) from the post containing the graph:

I think this graph is pretty amusing, because it manages to piss off everyone.

Which has its own utility.

What I would really like to see, though (just for my own personal amusement), is a graph relating IQ to a percentage of the sampled population who think IQ is meaningless.

Voracious Knowledge Consumption

It happens to me about once every 2-3 months. Maybe more. Maybe less. And, each time it occurs, the degree at which it occurs varies (ever so slightly, really, but it varies nonetheless). What I am talking about here is the sudden desire to learn absolutely everything there is to know about something. I am talking about an unquenchable craving that keeps you up past 2am night after night, plagues your mind while you are at work, and constantly haunts you while you try to perform your day-in / day-out activities. You just have to know everything there is to know about this "thing." The more you try to ignore it, the more prominent the fixation becomes. You just need to feed the information beast until it's gorged with data and rendered impotent; thus allowing you to sleep at night, once again.

My current knowledge passion is CSS. I can't get enough. I read about it. I hack away experimenting with it. (Yes, sitting on my desktop right now are about a half-dozen different pure-CSS designs for Dichotomy's Purgatory.) I just can't get enough. It's really quite powerful.

But, enough of this bloggin' stuff. I need to get back to CSS readin' and playtime.

I Gave Perl a Present

You probably have heard, Perl is 16. Happy Birthday, Perl!

And, you know what you can do to celebrate this merry occassion? Go donate money to the Perl foundation. No, seriously, go do it. I just did. I donated a measly $20, but that's all it takes. Go. Donate. It's $20. You can spare it. All you do is type in your information (name/address/cc number/amount to donate) and hit submit. It's easy. Donate $20. Don't be a prick. For God's sake, it's h(is|er) birthday.

A Blog Queue That Never Ends

I am glad I am not the only one whose queue of "stuff-I-will-blog-soon" keeps growing -- My ~/blog directory is starting to feel more like a mail queue and On not finishing things.

I have 13 draft entries in my blog queue that exist in some form of incompletion including:

• Movable Type HowTo: Create RSS feeds for categories.
• Explanatory "What Exactly is NP-Complete" including some good ol' down home deterministic and non-deterministic state machines.
• OOP limitation spouting about how to model an Object X that has a relationship has-a with an Object Y, which in turn, has a relationship has-a back with Object X.
• More Perl idioms because one can never get enough.

Maybe providing insight into my to-blog queue will jumpstart me into flushing it?

Wit for Wit's Sake is Sometimes Worth Linking to

Wit for wit's sake is sometimes worth linking to, and not enough people do it -- The SSsstupidity....It hurtsss usss.

You see I'm not very bright, but I don't know I'm not very bright. I'm easily sold on talk of freedom. Brightly colored trinkets and bobbles cause my mouth to hang slightly agape, as do Bush press conferences. You'll notice a glassy look to my eyes while I hint that casualties, both civilians and troops, are to be expected as part of the fight for freedom. I also throw around the phrase "towel-head" without the slightest inkling on my part that I'm a total fucking moron. Sometimes I just think it, since my wife gets mad when I talk like that.

She knows it's wrong, but she has absolutely no concrete individual personality. That's partially because I'm an over-bearing ass, but it's also because she has absolutely no self-confidence (catch-22, I think). Together we're kind of like a lumbering mass of stupidity with just enough sentient capability to not expose our racism at cocktail parties. When alone we giggle about the stupid muslims and support our president because ALL muslisms are responsible for terrorism.

Math Bloggin'

Ooh... we're bloggin' 'bout Math -- The infinite hotel. That's a level of blog-geekdom I haven't done. So (not meaning to allude that I will do it again), here's a quick blog-quip somewhat directly related to the referenced entry:

Helloooooo, Russell.

Capricious Evaluations of Pop Culture Icons/Aspects

These are just stupidly funny -- The Book of Ratings. It's just something about witty commentary on nonsensically idiosyncratic aspects of everday life that just makes me beam with a kind of jovial cynicism.

There's a lot of entries there, so I'll highlight some of the funnier one's.

Stuff I Just Broke

Doing some internal redesigning of Dichotomy's Purgatory. Broke some stuff while I was at it.

• One-liner's are broken on the category (example: cars and driving) and full category pages (example: cars and driving, full listing) ) in that they just don't show up (except for, of course, the actual One-liner category). The Movable Type tags are applying their "context".
• On the monthly archive pages (example: April 2003), the One-liner's that are showing up are the one's posted in that date frame (again, MT context-fu). This could be the desired functionality on those pages, but I tend not to think so.
• The "Most Recent Comments" are getting MT-contextually-bastardized on the "Single Entry" pages (this entry being an example).

That's all I have found thus far. There very well maybe more broken stuff.

Movable Type really needs an attribute applied globally to all of their internal tags called apply_outside_of_context="0|1".

Ah well, the stuff is going to have to sit broken for now. I've had enough blog-playtime and am going to get something to eat.

Programmers Riding Segways

Two separate programmers, two separate Segways, two very similar experiences:

• bbum's rants, code & references
• Riding Around on a Segway

You Know The Routine

You know the routine... haven't had time to write... blah blah blah... been busy at work... blah blah blah... my free time has been sucked up by my all-encompassing OCD as I busily try to manipulate a candle into a form that has perfectly uniform melting characteristics... blah blah blah... ya know, normal people stuff.

My "to-blog" queue is filled up, though, and I plan on trying to get most of it out in one big defecatory¹ push.

¹Some words just lend themselves into being adverbisized².
²And, others lend themselves into becoming verbisized.

New Alpha-Geek Comment Policy

Anonymous comments (one's that have no defined name, url, or email) are still allowed; however, a default value will be used as a placeholder for the person's information once the comment is submitted.

The Worldwide Female BBS Theory

I have this theory that every female has access to some singular BBS out there somewhere. They use it amongst themselves to coordinate attacks against individual dudes. It's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with that explains their unusual cunning, precise timing, and perfectly executed multi-pronged offensives.

Another Poly-Quiz

I don't know why I take these quizzes. Anytime someone mentions them, I berate them for referencing Internet-psychology in any kind of authoritative or meaningful measure. But, like a dog to his own wretched regurgitation, I lap them up and subsequently comment on how bad they taste.

The Political Compass

My problem is, the questions are so leading. If you stop and think directly about the precise semantics of the question, you are forced to answer in one way; or you realize the many different ways that the question can be interpretted. This is especially the case when you are given a binary choice and asked whether you "Agree" or "Disagree." For example, the very first question:

Riding Around on a Segway

I just tried out a Segway (lots of info on Amazon.com's Segway site, too).

It's a cool device (albeit, not $5000 cool, but certainly cool enough to deeply desire trying one when one is in close proximity... but, really, what isn't?). When I first hopped on, it was slightly wobbly. My natural reaction to the slight wobble was to try and compensate. This resulted in increased wobble as I shifted my weight trying to offset the natural wobble. I became a wobble amplifier and ended up looking as if I was doing a little gyrating raver dance -- all I needed was a fast tempo *oonsk* *oonsk* *oonsk* in the background. After mentally forcing myself to stop trying to offset the wobble and hump the control shaft, I began trying to move. My first inclination (as most of the other males' inclination) was to use my arms and push the steering grips away from me. Contrast this to the females' instinctive motion to shift their hips forward or backward to try and persuade the device to move. Both methodologies resulted in choppy movement. However, it took all of 60 seconds to get the hang of just naturally shifting your weight.

It's A Nice Day To Start Agaaaaaiiiiin!

Almost two months ago, now, I made mention of friends who complained that I never post my funny, drunken stories that I almost invariably find myself party to over the course of weekends in Where For Art Thou, J$. This is another attempt to acquiesce them. If you don't care to hear about stories you will most likely find boring because it would only be amusing if you know me, I preen out such things into a different section, Dichotomy's Purgatory: Left Half.

Friday began as most people's Fridays do -- work. Unfortunately, this Friday, I had a full serving of meetings to attend (4 to be exact); so by the end of the day -- and, thusly, the end of the week -- I was primed for some rest and relaxation i.e. killing the brain cells I had so intricately constructed over the course of the prior week ensuring my herd of buffalo remain strong and unhindered by the sick and meek.

A Public Service Announcement

If you have not really skated in 6 years, do not -- I repeat -- DO NOT attempt to skate at 3am while intoxicated. You will end up with a busted right knee, busted left shin, busted right hip, busted left elbow, and busted right hand. This is all from one night. Let my stupidity be a warning to you.

I Could Have Saved Soooo Much Money...

... if only I had known...

DAMNIT!

(Via Wizblog: Beer Goggles)

But, I Don't Want 1.2G of Oracle Server Stuff, I Just Want the Linux Client Libs!

I really, really loathe the fact that one must download over a gigabyte of Oracle crap just to install client libraries. All I want to do is connect from PHP/Perl/Whatever to a remote database. And, to do that, I first need to agree that:

I will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.

Then, I need to download 3 CD's worth of software (in cpio format). Then, I need to execute a Java GUI installer and explicitly tell it that 95% of what I downloaded, I don't fsckin' want.

Oracle really needs to offer a "client download only" that can be installed from the command line.

Oracle's really lucky they make a great product, or we would take our license and our money elsewhere. *Hah!* Take that software giant! The minute your software slips up, and there is a better product out there, you are definitely losing 0.000000000001% of your revenue. No doubt about it.

Nabokov Is Good

(Via languagehat in Nabokov on Queneau) Maud Newton has posted some interview snippets taken with Vladimir Nabokov in Quotes from various interviews with Vladimir Nabokov.

My personal favorites:

What are your working methods?

Quite banal.

Who are the great American writers you most admire?

When I was young I liked Poe... My feelings towards James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing through my own blood.

Cursed Elevator Buttons

There are 8 floor-designating buttons on the elevator here at work, 'G' and 1-7. Each button is circular and rests flush on the panel. They are activated by depressing them into their allotted recess. The problem is that they rotate. If you draw a line perpendicular with the plane the buttons reside on and intersecting each button at its centerpoint, they rotate about that axis. Such, they can easily become askew -- the 'G' could be upside-down, the 2 could be positioned 15° off, the 7 could be rotated 90°, etc.

So, I see this; and it drives me crazy. I try to resist. Whilst other riders are accompanying me, I usually do. But, when it's just me and those buttons riding up the elevator, I can't contain myself. Here's the catch. The amount of force it takes to generate enough friction with your fingers to rotate the buttons is nearly equivilent (within 1 micro-Newton) to the amount of force it takes to depress the button thus selecting a floor.

What this results in is me, about once or twice a day, making a stop at each and ever floor as I am hunched around the panel with two gingerly pressing fingers meticulously placing the buttons in their correct upright positions.

Me [addressing group]: Hi, everybody, my name is Jeremy...
Group [in unison]: Hi, Jeremy.
Me: I have a problem....
[extended pause]
Group Leader: It's okay, continue.
Me: My problem is you dumb fucks keep fucking up the damn elevator buttons! Can't you see they have a correct restful state, and they should always be serialized in that state when not in use!! Listen you fuck-tards, if you fuck up the positioning of the elevator button, replace it to its correct position!! If you fix it while that floor is already selected, I won't have to sit there...
Group Leader [interrupting]: Maybe we need to try a different approach.
Me: If people would just adhere to the right way, this wouldn't be a damn problem! *grumble* *grumble* damn crotch-weasels...

Read Something Different Day

I usually only read tech-oriented weblogs or particularly scathing, cynical, satirical weblogs. I shy away from the 97% of weblogs that go along the lines of

• today i bouhgt eggs... i never buy eggs... i wonder how many eggs other people buy

• my boyfriend didna tell me i was pretty today! that sucks! why doesn't he love me! oh, i slept with his best friend last night which was kewl...

• THE SHOW LAST NIGHT ROCKED!!!

• etc., etc., etc.

But, here's one off of the beaten path that I intake every couple of days. Some highlights:

Rasputina at the Grog Shop

Rasputina is playing tonight at The Grogshop. It should be a good show...

If you're into a cellist Goth band consisting of corset-wearing chicks...

Lock in Mortgage Rates, Become Debt Free, Your Opinions Are Worth Money, Find That Perfect Someone, Drugs, Vibrators, Xanax, and 5-6 Inches of Growth

Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Cheap Viagra, Vicodin, Xanax, Prescription Drugs, and Penis Enlargement Pills!!!

Sounded like fun to me...

The Easy Way, The Quick Way, and The Right Way

There's a good way to do things, and there is an easy way of doing things. Most of the time, the two do not coincide. Additionally, there is a quick way of doing things ("quick" in the immediate sense); and too often are the quick and easy ways the same. When they are the same, it becomes difficult to convince people to do things the right way. What some fail to understand is the net effect, over a long enough period of time, the "right" way (assuming it is sufficiently "right") will cut down on work.

The in-and-out of the specifics of what I am dealing with doesn't really matter. And, telling you them would, most likely, bore you. What matters is that I spent the better part of a two hour meeting convincing them that there is a "right way" to solve a certain problem. After having them agree, they still dissented and insisted on doing it the easy, fast way. I tried to convince them that, in the long run, it would cause more work. They agreed, but the deadline was unwaivering.

So, in a bit of a huff, I told them (this is not my project, by the way, I was just present in a consulting capacity) that I could do it the right way, fulfilling 70% of their requirements... in one night... drunk... That would leave them one month and 29 days to fill in the rest.

Sometimes my ego just gets the better of me in certain situations. I've a good night of coding ahead of me...

Okay, so maybe not drunk; but if I had to, I could...

Everyone at Microsoft Develops Word

Everybody here works on Word

It boils down to a software developer for Microsoft explaining to his mother what he works on, Exchange. His mother ends up telling everyone his job consists of delivering the mail at Microsoft, so now he just tells everyone he works on MS Word.

I run into the same problem all of the time when people ask what I do. Usually, I answer "programmer." But, most people have absolutely no concept of what programming consists of. Let me reiterate that with emphasis -- most people have absolutely no concept of what programming consists of. Which is fine, but when people are actually trying to understand and want to understand what it is you do, it is hard to quantify.

sshd (who, for the record, is a nurse so I just assume her job consists entirely of what is represented on the TV show "ER") asked me what programming was. I told her that I type in sets of instructions that the computer executes. This translated to her as doing the same thing as clicking on the "Check My Email" button. I gave up at that point. I knew if I went any further along the topic of discussion, it would devolve into a horrendous geek rant on the art vs. science of programming, the engineering aspects of it, architecture, design, etc., etc., etc. Her eyes would glaze over as I pumped my fist in the air passionately calling out to my nerd brethren to adopt TDD and various other TLA's that directly relate to the practice of geek-ery. It's best for her to believe I sit around hitting GUI buttons all day.

Define "Irony"

Stacey Pressman, ESPN writer, complains about metro-sexuality in Nothing sexy about metrosexuals (via Wizblog: "Metro" Men). An excerpt that Dan pointed out:

Call me crazy but I don't ever want to hear my boyfriend utter the word "jasmine," unless he's apologizing for something he did with a stripper.

It leaves me reveling in the irony of a female sportswriter complaining about feminine men.

*Shakes Head*

Satan Burger

From the editorial review:

God hates you. All of you. He closed the gates of Heaven and wants you to rot on Earth forever. Not only that, he is repossesing your souls and feeding them to a large vagina-like machine called the Walm - an interdimensional doorway that brings His New Children into the world. He loves these new children, but He doesn't love you. They are more interesting than you. They are beautiful, psychotic, magical, sex-crazed, and deadly. They are turning your cities into apocalyptic chaos, and there's nothing you can do about it ...

Featuring: a narrator who sees his body from a third-person perspective, a man whose flesh is dead but his body parts are alive and running amok, an overweight messiah, the personal life of the Grim Reaper, lots of classy sex and violence, and a motley group of squatter punks that team up with the devil to find their place in a world that doesn't want them anymore.

This is what people read -- this, Tom Clancy, Al Franken, and whoever else. Someone please tell me what the Hell is going on? This is like dada made more useless by shock factor absurdity. I blame Ezra for all of this!

Of course, it could be that I have been at work for too long... on a weekend... and I'm still sober...

GO META-DIR!!!

Stay on target.... Stay on target...

Almost there.... Almost there...

Converging Deadlines

There's a spot in the road where three project deadlines converge. Today (and tomorrow) would be that spot. Case's all-new hand-rolled-because-we-like-it-that-way meta-directory is performing its first in-production-pass over the 70,000 user records.

Hopefully, the email server will not catch on fire...

/me monitors the progress anxiously...

Take Me Back to Vegas!!

Good stuff. Just good, good stuff. I need to get back to Vegas, myself... soon.

Up For Poker: Otis in Vegas Pt.1

Up For Poker: Otis in Vegas Pt. 2

Racing Noise Insanity

The Insanity Test

I failed, too.

Maybe I Am Just Horribly Mistaken

Has anyone else noticed that Dave Winder's Scripting News: a weblog about scripting and stuff like that isn't much about "scripting?"

The definition of scripting

Prevailing Post-Modernism

I discussed Post-Modernism in Fundamental Axiom of Post-Modernism, but it may be a little hard to see how it has seeped into common culture. The beginnings, whereby "beginnings" refers to when it underwent widespread consumption, came with two, what I would be want to call, pop-Post-Modern novels, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Gödel, Escher, Bach. Two books that I thoroughly enjoy (I am making my way through GEB, right now), which executed Post-Modernism as a device to get their point across rather than a philosophical under-pinning that they had to adhere to i.e. they used Post-Modernism the correct way.

But, Post-Modernism has entrenched itself in more facets that just literature, philosphy, art, and arcane academia. When you walk into those trendy coffee shops or hip-hoppin' dance clubs, what do you see when you look up? The internal plumbing of the building is exposed. Sure, it is painted and decorated to match the overall motif of the decor; but this revelation of implementation details is considered Post-Modern interior decoration. (An extreme example would be the Pompidou Center in Paris, France.)

Blogger Takes Racing Class

Chris Anderson (a.k.a. simplegeek) takes his M3 to Pacific Raceway for a racing class. Sounds like good fun to me.

Nazis Against Prophylactics

This prior Monday evening, I was running a little low on one of my vices, but it was nothing a quick jaunt down to the local Mini-Mart establishment could not rectify. Whilst standing there and forking over money for my vitamin Marlboro, a young dude came bursting through the door. In much too much of a rush to bother following the common Mini-Mart protocol of procuring the desired items one's self and approaching the counter whereby to exchange economic tokens for aforementioned goods, the lad bellows out:

You got any condoms?

The cashier shook his head, "no," and resumed my transaction. The kid was not dissuaded. "You sure you do not have any condoms?"

"No," the cashier responded. "We do not have any condoms."

"Man! You have to have condoms!"

I understood the poor chaps frustration. It's 11:30pm on a Monday night; it looks as if he's had a couple; something worked out for him whilst sitting at a bar, belting down Miller Lites and watching MNF. And, now, all the disheveled guy wants is a condom; so he can close the deal once he gets home. But, no matter how many times you state it there, guy, condoms are not going to appear.

"I can't believe you guys don't sell condoms!" The man was an unstoppable force. Even when faced with the blindingly harsh reality that the Mini-Mart had no condoms, he refused to let go. What a trooper. I wanted to tell him he had better odds that the condom fairy stopped by his car while he was in here and exchanged his Tim McGraw CD for a 6-pack of Trojans. But, I bit my lip; plus, it looked as if he was going to continue; and I was amused by his rain... err... condom dance. Now, he even tried to put it in context for us. Maybe that will increase the odds that the cashier's head will suddenly sprout rubbers.

Mapping Politics

Because I have nothing else to blog and because I took the time to bother doing this, here are my results for "take this online quiz and learn everything you ever wanted to know about yourself." In this case, it is where I sit on the political spectrum.

Penny Arcade Writes a Strip on gnubbs

It's gnubbs on Penny Arcade!!!

Perl AI?

The, I believe to be new, weblog Perl AI Blog - Artificial intelligence has been solved invites:

all Perl programmers to implement the main Alife Mind loop of the simplest artificial intelligence.

Okay... well... so... uhhh... I might have a question... okay, what should I do wi...

There is no need to standardize or homogenize the evolution of the server-side AI Minds in Perl. Let there be a wide diversity and diaspora of the evolving Minds in a classic scenario of the survival of the fittest.

Oh! That makes it clear. Do you have some example code? That could give me a better idea, I think...

What Happens to Mediocre Poets

There is this misconception that all poets (or, just artists in general) are Poe/Van Gogh. They are unrecognized in their time and, only many years after the fact, does their brilliance come to be known. Really, this can't be further from the truth.

For every Vincent Van Gogh, there are 100 other saps that don't amount to artistic shit. Most likely, you are one of them.

Fundamental Axiom of Post-Modernism

For some reason, I have been under a deluge of encounters of Post-Modernism: a friend of mine's taking a class in it, I just finished a pseudo-Post-modern/Post-Post-modern novel, a friend just emailed me recommending a Post-modernistic author (David Eggers), etc.

Post-modernism is hard to define because it is one of those recursive idealogies like Existentialism (which I talked about in On-Line Quiz Segue to the V=IR of Sartre). It is all about deconstruction including itself. So intense is "its" desire to break things down to fundamentals and reconstruct them, it does it to itself making it hard to define -- whilst trying to define it, you always end up deconstructing your definition. (Which, leads you down the Existentialist path, which plops you directly down into Linguistics whereupon you realize the futility of thought so you drink yourself blind off of Granny's moonshine and masturbate yourself to sleep.) One would be inclined to think that, with my penchant for breaking notions down to their fundamental axioms, their atomic and unwaivering assertions, that I would like Post-modernism. Well, I do not dislike it; but I have a problem with recursive style ideologies. Ideologies that cannot explain or justify themselves because at their root is some catch-all Godel-esque notion that the philosophy itself is unprovable and that's okay. Well, I ain't buyin' what you're sellin', Sister.

Fantasy Football, Week #1

I was a big Jake Plummer supporter. I thought that he would perform well in a new system that provided him a running game, a decent O-line, and a couple of targets. "Those nay-sayers over at SportsCenter be damned! Jake Plummer's going to come alive!"

So, I drafted him. (I, also, drafted McNabb -- look how good that did me this week). Granted, it's only Week 1. No reason to jump the gun and shove Plummer off into the Canadian league quite yet. But, I am thinking that Plummer should put some of his salary aside and, at the end of the season, buy Portis a nice, shiny car for bailing him out (just in case he happens more than once this season).

I mentioned I nabbed McNabb -- 19/36, 148 yds, and an INT. Those aren't quite the numbers I expected out of him. Sure, it was the Tampa Bay D; but I still expected more.

I have a rule that I do not pick up Pittsburgh Steelers of Green Bay Packers for my fantasy team; however, I broke that rule and picked up Amos Zereoue (after picking McNabb in the first round and having the rest of the 15 people eat up all of the good backs, he was my only reasonable choice); and I picked up Donald Driver. I figured that he would end up being Favre's favorite (and, maybe, only reasonably good) target. Then, the jackass Driver has to go landing on his head and ending up in the hospital. Serves me right for picking a cheesehead.

To round out my "stellar" team, I picked up Peerless Price (who, I am hoping, will become Vick's favorite target for some end zone receptions) and Marty Booker. They accounted for a combined total of 8 receptions for 78 yards and no touchdowns in Week 1. Thanks, fellas.

When you have 16 people in one league, the rest of your starters are longshots. I picked up Deshaun Foster, Tim Dwight, and Christian Fauria. Hopefully, between the three of them, they can put together half a dozen or so touchdowns this season (the cup is half full).

It really didn't come as too much a suprise to me that the Buffalo Bills defense scored me the most points in Week 1 pitching a shutout to New England. Thank God for Lawyer Milloy.

Boxer Care Instructions

From the tag in my boxers:

Machine wash cold
Only non-chlorine bleach when needed
Tumble dry low
Warm iron if necessary

"Warm iron if necessary??" What kind of decadence are you prescribed such that you feel it necessary to iron your boxers?

Yes, I know it will be me someday

Where For Art Thou, J$

Several of my friends mentioned to me in the last week or so that all I blog about is boring and confusing Perl entries. How do I repay their critique? By not writing a damn thing.

Actually, I took this week completely off of work. A vacation. I did nothing fancy. I did not whisk myself away to a tropical island or adventurous exploration of some such thing. I caught up on tasks. I hung out with sshd, which up until this prior week, she and I hadn't had a lot of time to see one another. I got rip-roarin' drunk a lot. Birthed some writings that had been sitting in my head for a while now.

I thought about the API that is common to CD players. There is a "shuffle" button and a "repeat" button. If you press both thus enabling the modes simultaneously, does that mean that during each random selection each song has equal odds of coming up? Or, does it mean that it will shuffle through the entire CD's contents and, having played each track, start anew with the shuffling? Through a brief experiment, I discovered 'twas the latter.

Hmmm...

Baghdad Burning Hmmm...

More Programming Jargon Surfaces

From RIAA Reveals Method to Madness

the [RIAA] disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files

I wonder what algorithm they are using?

Using Blogs as Link Filters

The gist of Bloggers as Filters is the act or process of using bloggers to filter the cream of the crop (relevant to the user of the aggregator who has subscribed to a certain subset of blogs) from the frantic news-generating and collecting machines such as Yahoo!, Wired, other bloggers, etc. such that one needn't subscribe to the actual news-generators/mass-link-collectors. Why not do both?

What I am thinking is that you open up your aggregator, and it has gone through and preened out all of the different links that have been linked from in the entries you have aggregated. You can open up a little summary window and see that 8 of the bloggers you subscribe to have linked to one particular story; 6 have linked to this other story; 3 have linked to this yet another story. Basically, just a way to bubble up oft-linked to news-articles/blog-entries. Obviously, an entry that is linked to and is actually in an RSS feed you subscribe to gets a bonus boost.

Ironing Clothes

Ironing clothes is one of the most difficult tasks for me to perform. Everything works out fine if I am just quickly ironing a shirt or just a shirt and pair of pants in preparation to skedaddle out the door on my way somewhere. In terms of the entirety of my OCD, as long as I have another place to divert my mental focus towards or I have something that will preempt my current focus, everything works out fine.

However, if I am just ironing for ironing's sake because I, let's say, let my clothes just sit in a dryer for several hours allowing them to raisin-ify (<-- that should so be a word), it is an unaccomplishable task. It is like cleaning a pond. You will always make visible progress. There is always dirt to pull from the pond and there are always more wrinkles to remove from your clothing, thus signifying that you are making some sort of headway. But, the task can never be completed. You can continue until you are blue in the face, there will always be more dirt and more wrinkles.

You never know when to stop. What's an acceptable amount of visible wrinkling? Does this accepted amount change depending on the type of clothing or the material of the clothing? Does it change depending on the location upon the clothing in which the density of wrinkles is located i.e. is it okay to have more wrinkles on the inside crease of the trouser leg versus the front face? I needed to invent some kind of heuristic lest I sit there ironing my clothing until the sun rose again. So, I grabbed a beer; left the presence of my clothing; went on to the porch; smoked a cigarette; and arbitrarily invented the "Official J$ Ironing Process Completed Litmus Test."

Numbers Applied to the SoBig Virus

Everyone knows about the SoBig virus that ran/is-running rampant across the networked-computer landscape. It filled your mailbox. Your email was slow to receive and slow to send. Bad stuff all around. But, I have some actual numbers from our email servers; and everyone loves statistics and graphs.

How Much Red Meat in How Many Minutes

I am not the biggest guy in the world nor am I the biggest eater. But I can go toe-to-toe with anyone on eating red meat prepared in the consumers choosing i.e. rare.

So, I have $20 riding on the fact that 140lbs. J$ can out eat a 200lbs. Mexican friend of mine when the meal up-for-grabs is dead cow.

Who wants side-bets?

By the way, if you have never seen me go tooth-n-nail on a New York strip, you're making a misinformed bet.

Silverware need not apply.

CWRU Is Now Case

If you are going to refer to Case Western Reserve University with a four letter word, the administration would prefer you to use Case.

I would have really liked to have been at the meetings were all of the higher-up's quibbled over this just for entertainment's sake. But, there's more. I just love the wording they came up with explaining the change:

How to Subscribe to Slashdot Journal RSS Feeds

It took a lot of hoop-jumping to figure this out, and I could not seem to find it on Google, so I am blogging it.

To subscribe to a Slashdot journal in your various RSS aggregators, you need to know the /. UID of the person. Then, you need to use this URL (substituting in the correct UID) to get to the RSS feed.

http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=UID_OF_USER&content_type=rss

Why I Enjoy Reading the Filthy Critic

From SeaBiscuit - The Filthy Critic

[After winning a bet on a horse race] I can buy everyone a round at the Arvada Tavern. Though I'm unlikely to treat those bozos to anything. Instead I'd say, "Bartender, I just won a zillion dollars on a horse called ëLicking Stick! Serve me a shot for every person in here, and let them watch me drink."

Mighty Morphin' Opinion

Well, when I first read all noise - all the time, I was going to talk smack about it (it's what I do, I can't mess with my self-consummated mythos). Then, I read it again; and I was going to make mild fun of it. Then, I read it again; and I nearly wanted to do a line-by-line breakdown. Then, I read it again; and I nearly went after it with a Straw Man. (Shame on me; but few would have noticed -- people love straw man rebuttals.) Then, I read it again; and I started to see something in it. Then, I read it again; and I posted this.

It's kinda long, so I don't necessarily recommend reading it more than once.

Gambling

The deal comes through.

Not a bad hand; certainly something worthwhile. You toss in three large. Two others follow suit cautiously, and the rest fold. The flop comes down.

Without RSS, It Falls Off My Radar

No Hugging, No Kissing Until I Get an RSS Feed -- it's true. I have, also, become that much of an aggregator snob. I have a really hard time remembering to read sites that don't get slurped up into Bloglines. It's just so damned convenient.

Ooooh... She's Hungarian

I did not know she was Hungarian. How could I resist now?

Sick of How-To-Blog Blog Entries

Why do people point out blog entries that (try to) detail how to create a successful blog like this entry -- How to Save the World? I am so damned sick of these things (not that that stops me from reading them... I am indiscriminate in my consumption but will make remarks after the fact regardless).

Blogging to me is masturbation (in a figurative sense). I blog about things I would normally send an email out about to my group of fellow computer/car friends. With a blog, I can post it there, they can read it, like-minded people can read it, etc. I really don't feel the need to have a "consistent writing style," "memorable theme," or "infectious quality." That may be the case with my entries, or it may not be the case, but I do not consider this a medium that requires dramatic self-fulfilling improvement.

And, no, I am not saying there is anything wrong with utilizing a blog to improve one's communication or whatever. I am just making a counterpoint.

I blog for masturbation. I blog what I normally would have emailed to friends. I, even, blog items such that I may not have emailed because blogging is such a useful medium more conducive to certain topics and discussion(s).

I like blogging; I just don't look at the way that person does. Not that I am making a value judgement one way or another. I am all for people creating well thought out blog entries, but no one else has ever written an essay on "How to Run a Crappy Blog" or "I Don't Give a Rat's Ass; I Just Pound on the Keyboard."

Red-Blooded, American Male

Via TheMiddle in On the road again:

Tighten up that rear brake pedal free play, fix the speedometer cable on the front wheel, and adjust the handlebar angle and I'm in business.

That phrase, or something like it, should come out of the mouth of any red-blooded male at some point in his life. It would be even better if it was prefixed with "I pulled over to the side of the road to..."

Grrr... Still Pissed

I am still pissed about the last AutoX. I went through the slaloms waaay to slow. My steering inputs were jerky; snapping the wheel back and forth violently rather than continuous and fluid. I would brake too long for the sweepers -- braking braking braking turn turn turn *damn* I am going to slow. Then, I would have to try and build speed in the turn causing me to exit the turn with excessive understeer giving up all of my traction at corner exit.

Grrr.... competition. The next one is a week from today, though. Hopefully, I shall have a much better outing.

Quotable SCC

In the most recent issue of Sport Compact Car Magazine, they pitted the EVO VIII against Germany's finest -- Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, Bimmer M3, and Audi S4. But, here's the quote from the article I liked the best:

Before we start, we want to get something straight. This is a performance magazine and we evaluate cars for their speed and value. We're not going to evaluate how solidly the doors close on the M3 or how easy it is to get in and out of the S4. We couldn't care less.

We also couldn't care less about image or prestige. If you want street cred with your golfing pals, go buy the Porsche. We don't play golf. We drive fast. All we want to know is which is the better driver's car.

Is the Economy Zero-Sum?

Is the economy zero-sum? That is, there is a specific amount of economic tokens m; and m is static (or the rate of change of m is so small it can be considered negligible). So, the "money" just processes itself throughout the population and institutions; all the while, never really changing.

That can't be right. The production of goods and services rises over time creating more economic tokens, right? But, population also increases. So, if you have a population of p, is the following ratio mostly static:

 m / p

The economic system is confusing. They really need to get http://www.askgreenspan.com/ up and running. There has to be an F=ma, V=IR for it.

And, while I am on the subject, what the heck is the National Deficit? Is it just a paper number -- the government, on paper, brought in x dollars in 2002; but on paper, they spent y dollars where y is greater than x? So, it's a distributed debt to a bunch of different sources? Can the National Deficit (and the underlying effects thereof) be derived from the F=ma of the economy? If not, it should be.

This all comes from watching Dennis Miller on the "Tonight Show" last night. I don't like comedies, nor do I much care for comedians; but he and Jon Stewart are just witty -- very funny fellows.

More Autocross

I did not do so well at yesterday's AutoX. My attention was very diffused. Several people were showing up to watch, and I had told them to show up around 11am counting on the fact that my category, ESP, never, never runs in the first heat. Well, yea, I was in the first heat -- first car away at 10am. So, I was half racing and half watching from the staging area so I could wave my friends over when they arrived. I couldn't get into the right mindset. I was without focus, which manifested itself into me driving timidly.

The course, itself, was a fast, wide-open course (a 'Vette-friendly course). I, on the other hand, took the widely-spaced slaloms too slowly, braked too early entering into the increasing radius sweepers, and braked for too long into the sweepers. So, the course layout, here's what it looked like (generally):

Bloglines (Again) -- Now That's What I Am Talking About

So, I made a couple criticisms of Bloglines in the last entry Found A Web Base RSS Aggregator -- Bloglines. Well, check out Bloglines News:

July 17, 2003

We have made some changes to the subscription process to make it easier to subscribe to feeds with just one click. Unless it isn't clear which feed you wish to subscribe to, the confirmation page will no longer appear. We have also added subscription check boxes to the Top Feeds and New Feeds pages, so that it's easier to subscribe to multiple feeds at once.

July 15, 2003

When clicking on a folder name, all unread items within that folder are now displayed on one page in the right pane, for easy viewing. We also continue to tweak the colors and fonts to make the display easier to read. And we smashed a couple of bugs for good measure.

That's what I am talkin' 'bout.

Web Front-End RSS Aggregator

There's all these RSS aggregators out there like Feedreader and SharpReader and such. But, what I would like to know is if there is a completely web-based one?

How I would want it to work is something like I hop on over to http://example.com/yourRSSAggregator/setup.php, sign up for an account, and begin placing URL's to RSS feeds on the page. Then, I could go to something like http://example.com/yourRSSAggregator/index.php, and see some kind of UI with what feeds I had subscribed to all laid out.

Does that exist? I guess I could google and stumble amidst the blogosphere trying to find something like this, but I am lazy.

The Fact that the US is Still Doing Fair Trials is a Good Thing

You would think I would stumble upon crazy liberal articles more often than not. But, for some reason, I don't. I just never stumble upon any crazy Leftists waving Socialism around and claiming the US has become murderous Imperials enforcing their Christian morality on the world's population through economic sanctions. I know that they are out there; I just never stumble upon them. And, if I was to come across them, I am sure I would feel compelled to blog about it. Something about gross oversights of judgements absolutely compels me to blog. But, what was I saying...

Imagine you lived in a country being terrorized by "foreign" invaders. They were seizing land, levying tazes, taking quarter in citizen's homes (I hope you have all made the analogy by now). Then, one day, these armed foreigners massacre an assembly of people. You would call for blood. You would want them all hung. I know I would.

But, a man steps forward and says that a fair trial for the foreign soldiers is in order. He claims that we would be no better than them if we were to forego giving these other men the due process of law. This man so firmly believes in the ideals with which his country is (or, is to be) founded upon, that he stands up and defends these men against his own friends and countrymen.

Yes, I am referring to the Boston Massacre, which directly preceded the Revolutionary War. It was our to-be-2nd President, John Adams, who demanded that the British soldiers who commited the massacre be given a fair trial. And, he went on to defend them. I can imagine being there and hearing Samuel Adams turn to him and say:

John, have you gone out of your mind?

Finally, I Can More Accurately Develop My Fluid Intake OCD

I drink a lot of coffee (a lot). I, also, from time-to-time imbibe in the heavenly brew of beer. Now, maybe it is from playing high school sports where coaches adamantly reinforce the notion that allowing yourself to dehydrate is a cardinal sin punishable by extra calisthenics (if that makes sense) or maybe it is just another form of my OCD leaking through, but I absolutely have to stay hydrated. Caffeine and alcohol are both diuretics, so I knew I needed to increase my water consumption to compensate, but I never had an algorithm to use. I had to just "play it by ear."

Well, if you suspend your disbelief of the Internet doling out less-than-accurate statistics and take at face value what two Internet sites have to say, I now have an actual calculation I can perform.

Here's what I am looking at:

So... Things Have Changed

Yep, I finally got around to consolidating the blogs. I tried to maintain as much backwards compatability as feasible, though. alpha-geek.com/left and alpha-geek.com/right are still there, and the different RSS/RDF feeds are in place for those sites (as they were). As a matter of fact, there is many different feeds for each category (RSS .91and 2.0, RDF, and Echo 0.1). So, if all you want to read is my Perl postings, just suscribe to that feed.

Some Motorcyclin'

Got the motorcycle up and running today. Took a piece of paper, wrote "Contact Info" in big letters across the top and put some phone numbers on it, stuck that in my wallet, grabbed my riding boots, gloves, sunglasses, and helmet (oh, yes); and off I went onto the open road.

You're Goin' To Do a Politicin' Post... Again?!?

I really loathe feeling inclined to make any... any remark concerning politics; especially considering the current climate. Now, if you make a remark against the right or the country or Bush, you are just a stinkin' liberal. I liked it better when Clinton was in charge. If you made a remark against him, you were just "level-headed." Now, we have some version of mass-hysteria, peer-enforced sedition acts.

several years ago...
Person: Clinton just fired cruise missles into Afghanistan. That does not necessarily seem right...
Public: You are a well-thought out person with moderate views.

fast forward...
Person: Bush just publicly threatened Syria. That does not seem necessarily right...
Public: You Leftist scum! Why do you hate America?!?! Go back to livin' in your hippie commune with the other colored queers!

For instance, this interview that I stumbled upon An Interview With Ann Coulter:

There's always a conflict of interest when people [Democrats] who don't really like America are called upon to defend it.

*knock* *knock* *knock*

"Yes."

"Son, this is the SS... errr... Homeland Security. Please open up the door."

"But... but... I am a moderate. I supported the war in Iraq. I think affirmative action is just another form of racism."

"We know, son. It's okay. We just want to take you to one of our 'Friend Centers' for some re-education."

"Uhhh... can I bring my cigarettes?"

"No, there is no need. The full name is 'Marlboro Presents the Friendly Re-Education Center' -- cigarettes are provided."

But, enough of the build-up. (And, that was all a preface to my main reason for blogging.) The meat of this post concerns a ruling the Supreme Court once passed. It involved a black man accused of robbery. The Supreme Court overturned the man's conviction 8-1. The one dissent was quoted as publicly stating:

The man clearly looked guilty. This ruling opens the door for more and more "uppity" behavior from negroes everywhere.

Alpha-Geek.com Is Illegal!

Actually, I don't know if it is or not. I stumbled across MovableBLOG: MT License Debate, and I read what it had there. Then, I followed a bunch of the links around to Comment on MT and Kicking the Baby Squirrels, again, but I am still not sure what is going on...?

This Is A Male Epidemic

jr notes in jr conlin's Ink Stained Banana :: Men are from Junkyard Wars... that males try to solve problems even when we are not supposed to.

I don't know how many times I have done this. It's an impulse. I hear problem, I begin thinking of a solution, I began relaying the solution to whatever party is listening. Furthermore, I will often continue justifying my solution, which leads to defending my position, which leads to an argument. I can't even begin to count how many times this led to girl-trouble. She just wants to bitch and vent, but I compulsively begin to want to solve the problem. You, inevitably, make things worse.

Sometimes people do not need solutions, they need to be listened to.

Measuring Tire Temps Not Indicative Of Pressure Regulation Needs

Here we go again down the long path of the complete absence of delineation between the blogs. This is a more technical article, but I have been posting AutoX stuff on this side. I really need to consolidate.

Anways, in the article DrEdEdThrottle Balance II, a guy by the name of John Hajny claims that measuring the temperature across a tire's tread is no longer indicative of whether or not you are running too little pressure on the AutoX track.

Building a Custom Chopper

There is a guy at CWRU who is building a custom chopper. The project's main page is located here -- Chopper. The main bulk of the pics are here -- Untitled Document. Cool, cool stuff.

But I Was Drunk

Since when did the phrase:

"yea, I know, but you see, I was drunk; I mean really drunk, so..."

But, in more important news -- motorcycle.

Geek Syndrome vs. OCD

Just because it was posted on Slashdot in PDD, Asperger, and Geek Syndrome?.

I had a girlfriend who was completely convinced I suffered from a de-habilitating case of Asperger. I told her that it was just OCD and not some crazy pop-psychology catch-all mental disorder. I don't think she ever bought it.

Miatas Like Country Roads

I might be pre-empting Scott with this.

First Sighting: SRT-4

I was walking through a parking lot, when I spied a Neon that looked as if it had a tacky, albeit nicely integrated, body kit on it. I did not give it much thought, until I noticed the basket-handle style wing on the back.

"Hmmm... do you think...?"

I took another glance, and sure enough, I spied a massive intercooler sitting behind the front bumper. It was surely time for a closer inspection. It looks like... well... it looks like a Neon that someone or something pissed off pretty badly. The "stretching" of the body molding is obvious. It had big, heavy-looking 17" rims wrapped in 205/50 Michelin's. I peeked in the interior and saw the round gauge pods wrapped in cheapy-looking silver plastic. I moved around to the rear just to make sure, and yes it was, it was badged SRT-4 and had temp tags on it.

Mail Order Brides

Once or twice a month, I do some IT consultant work for Barefoot & Case, Inc.. Nothing terribly big -- usually just setting up some networking equipment, setting up email accounts, formatting and reinstalling Windows boxes, etc. It's mindless work, but I am able to charge him an insane hourly rate, and he feeds me as much beer as I want while I work.

But, I am leading down the wrong path with what I want to talk about; and that is, mail order brides. I had heard of this practice in various forms of media and discretionary small ads placed in the back of adult-oriented magazines and such. But, I had never met a man who actually "purchased" a foreign female and brought her back to the US. Actually, I had thought that it was a myth, some kind of sordid urban legend involving cock fighting, kidney stealing, and ex-KGB agents in the Russian mafia.

Reading About Work

The topic of my secret blog passion is reading about people's work; reading about what people do for a living, the problems they encounter, how they solve those problems, etc. Most of the blogs I read deal directly with the tech industry. For one, the people working in the technology sector are the one's that will most likely blog. Plus, it is what I do; so I naturally gravitate to their blogs to compare problem scopes and solutions. I find it fascinating and, also, very instructive. I wish there were more blogs out there dealing with working in the automotive industry (*hit* *hint* Scott) or, even, mathematics, acadamia, physics, engineering in general -- I could find myself enjoying reading about how a Civil Engineer moves dirt around and the trials and tribulations he faces day-in-and-day-out.

Of course, this brings up an interesting divergence between the computer industry and other industries.

Another Autocross

Damn, is autocrossing fun. At any rate, yesterday was another ASCC Autocross event. I had an okay day. We only received four runs. By the third run, I was getting the hang of the three sweepers. On the fourth run, Emily's affinity for eating orange cones reared itself; and I plugged two cones early on. Because I was under the assumption that we were running 5 times, I went down to about "90% driving level" and worked on my line through the remainder of the course. After the run, I was told it was to be my last. D'oh!

Here's a rough sketch of the course.

18-25, Check. Male, Check. Disposable Cash, Check.

So, I am a male aged 18-25. Fitting this little criterion (as several others I know do), I am the target of marketers everywhere. I adopt technology as early as possible. I have an unnatural craving for anything that runs on electrons. If someone has a gadget I do not have, I suddenly feel the urge to possess it. I spit, drool, and become stupified when presented with stupid cars that go stupid fast. I like video games. I am susceptible to advertisements and content with sexual overtones (blatant or otherwise). Gabe, over at the excellent comic strip Penny Arcade, put it best in his entry Nokia to gamers (scroll to the bottom to see it):

Dear Mr. Nokia, my name is Gabe. You might know me better as a member of the lucrative 18-25 year old male demographic. That’s right, I am a 24 year old early adopter with disposable income just burning a hole in my pocket and a thirst for the latest technological gadgets.

Just Making Sure the Term "Logic" is being Used Correctly

Because of my last post (Support Children for the Low, Low Price of $400/Year), I feel guilty for picking on the conservatives. Just to prove that I am just clarifying the definition of "logic" and trying to make sure it is used correctly, I went out in search of a good liberal entry to rip. However, it seems that Democrats do not even both invoking the term "logic" when spouting their agendas. All I could find was statements like:

But even now, there still is some level of democracy in [Iran]. The president, after all, is a man who wants to lesson the power of the clerics.

Support Children for the Low, Low Price of $400/Year

I try not to get into political idealogy debates anymore. They are futile. No one seems to go into these discussions with an open mind trying to get a different perspective and possibly changing his or her opinion based on newfound knowledge or viewpoints. People seem to argue their side of the political spectrum as a self-involved politically-inspired righteous act of mental masturbation. So, I try to stay away. Plus, the issues themselves are convoluted with hypocritical dogma and inherent complexity that they cannot easily be reduced to a set of fundamental ideals. The Democrats attack Afghanistan, the Republicans go crazy. Four or so years later, the Republicans attack Afghanistan, and the Democrats go crazy. They don't have ideals; they just oppose one another. (And, I unjustly make generalizations about them because of it.)

But, occassionally, I come across something like this --
Child Tax Credits and the Mutilated Beggar Effect. You have got to be kidding me. $400 a year provides an incentive for poor people to have more kids? Where did he get that assumption? If the government proposed tax benefits to permanently injured veterans, I wonder if this guy would claim that the government is providing an incentive for soldiers to act carelessly and get wounded in battle?

Mental Manna

Every day, I am bestowed with a finite amount of mental manna. I can use this mental manna in a variety of ways; however, once it is gone, I am reduced to performing brain-dead activities. Mental manna can be used for writing, car work, programming, etc.; just about anything that requires a certain level of concentration.

There are a couple of extra facets to this brain-energy. Occasionally, it can be recharged. If I am having trouble writing, doing some reading may replenish a small amount. If I am having "coder's block," wetting the grey matter's palette with a simple programming task that has sat on the back burner may jump start it enough that I can tackle the much larger task at hand. Additionally, if I am in the zone, each unit of mental manna becomes supercharged and is worth like 10 units. The amount of mental manna one is given at the start of each day, I believe, follows the Stephenson equation.

Currently, I have greatly underestimated the intricacies of hand-rolling my own meta-directory. My mental manna is being completely drained. Not only that, but I would give my left arm to have a zone like this right now.

Media Organization

Another exploration into the effects of my neurosis. This one, however, is so simplistic, it should be obvious -- DVD's, CD's, and books.

Spring Music Re-freshening

Every so often, twice a year or so, it is time to re-explore the music industry and freshen up my collection. I do not listen to the radio or watch The Shiny Things Network, so it is, at times, difficult to find new bands to listen to.

I've pretty much worn out my current trend of Rasputina/Kittie/Boy Sets Fire. So, it was time to move on. I ordered three CD's:

• Darling Violetta's "Bath Water Flowers"
• From Autumn to Ashes's "Too Bad You're Beautiful"
• Atreyu's "Suicide Notes & Butterfly Kisses"

We shall see how these turn out.

Regrettable Rant

People have bad memories. This is not in reference to the inability to remember one's phone number or the 11^th digit of Π. This is about regret. People forget their past transgressions; they forget the times they have succumbed to their own weakness resulting in negative consequences; their mistakes are awash in "live and learn" dogma as they repeatedly perform the same follies. If we all remembered our mistakes with the punctual acuity of the vividness of the moment when we first had to come face-to-face with the repercussions of our malice, we would spiral down a terrible pit of mounting regret. The passion of our memories and past deeds fade as an act of mental self-preservation.

In conjunction with this, people are apt to forgive others. No singular person wants to be held accountable for his or her past mistakes in their entirety, so we allow others leeway with their's to prevent having to fess up and face our own. Everyone gives everyone else the benefit of the lowest common denominator, so we can afford to expect it for ourselves. We are indentured servants to our failings. At some point, one must decide that another's (or our own) "mistakes" are not oversights or brief lapses of judgement; rather, it is the methodology by which the other conducts him or herself (or ourselves).

Think back 5 or 10 years ago (5 years ago for me would place me at the ripe age of 19), most likely, you had a vastly different view of where you would be now. But, still, you have little or no regrets? Or, maybe, you consciously shifted your 5-year-old expectations to match where you are now so it does not generate stress for you. (Alas, I am getting into the "ideal" versus "behavioral" self before I meant to.)

Last night, about half past midnight, I was feeling restless. Regardless of the reasoning behind my agitation, I came to the decision to do some inner-Lakewood hard driving to relieve the spirits into acquiescence. It was a random Tuesday night (or very, very early Wednesday morning, depending on your point of view); it had been raining earlier, but the roads had dried by this point... what could be the harm? A cursory flashlight-check of Emily's fluid levels and tire pressures, and I was on the street giving the engine time to warm. Once she was up to operating temperature (or, shall I say, once she was in the wide variance of temperatures Emily operates within depending on her very fickle mood swings), I opened the engine up and blasted down a residential side road. Alarms of the cars parked alongside the road disappeared behind me as I repeatedly stomped on the gas pedal in 2^nd gear and went 4-tire (or, at least, 2-tire) squealing around any corner I happened to come across. At first, I tried to leave some semblance of a margin of safety. I tried to keep myself from overrunning my headlights beyond a reasonably prudent level; and I attempted to keep myself below 85% ability through the corners. But, the more I drove; the harder I drove. Eventually, I was fully committing myself to the corners. Soon, thereafter, I was entering the corners at speeds that I did not believe I would hold. But, I did hold; and I continued to click the dial up notch after notch.

It was a 90° turn off of Hilliard onto a side street. I hit the apex a little awry and had to adjust the steering wheel in slightly more. There was a bump or a pothole or something that coincided with my steering correction. Emily went from her standard pushing-slide/slowly-rotating-front-end-through-turn mannerism into a severe understeering four wheel drift. I fluttered the throttle searching for a point where the front end would weight and I could gather some traction. Nothing was grabbing. There was not much room to increase my turning radius, so I held the wheel rigid. Everything seemed to happening in slow motion (as you always hear when people are in these circumstances), but I still could not react fast enough. It was as if I was in a slower slow motion instance of the episode. Suddenly, with no conscious provocation, my left foot (yes, my left foot) drifted from its braced position against the side of the footwell and hovered above the brake pedal. The little bugger ever-so-slightly applied pressure to the brake as my right foot continued to manipulate the throttle in a brute-force attempt to find the right sequence of slight depressions to decode the traction cipher. (Now, mind you, I am used to good ol' FWD understeer. What happened next had me pretty well confused as to what to do.) My back end sprung loose and began swinging around rapidly.

My arms freaked and begin scrambling to counter-steer. Both feet were confused -- the left smashed the clutch into the floor; and the right went full into the brakes.

*BOOM!* whump whump *BOOM!* whump

I came to a stop straddling the curb. Back into 1^st and off I went with no damage done to anything but my ego and (possibly) car. I pulled into a well-lit parking lot and surveyed Emily's passenger side. It seemed that each wheel had hit the curb at a slight enough of an angle that the tires had absorbed the blow (thank God). I gave both wheels several good yanks to verify tie roads, wheel bearings, etc. were in sufficient working order and returned home, tail between my legs.

But, that's not what I am talking about. It never is. I have a habit of not talking about the topic I am trying to convey. I prefer to shepherd others towards it and not feed it from my hand as a carrot. After all, Verlaine never came out and just said to Rimbaud:

Votre psychose est ce qui vous tuera. Elle est ce qui tue chacun.^*

Just for a short time, I wish everyone would step back and think through the implications of their actions. The choices made now can and will affect the outcome. Live teleologically.

Joseph Campbell said:

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

But, he was old; and he had as bad a memory as the rest of us. Truth and validity are not pretty words that flow together and are quotable. Our mishappen hippie, Campbell, just so happened to have been a student of Carl Jung -- the one of Psychology and once-friend-turned-arched-nemisis Freud fame. Which, coming around to it, brings me to behavioral self versus ideal self. It is an old theory from the annals of Psychology. We each have both in us. And, the more your behavioral self is different from your ideal self; that is, the more your actions are in direct opposition to your ideals, the more stress you feel and the more depressed you are. There are two ways to counteract this. The very few have their regrets, and they force there behaviors to conform more to their ideal selves. The rest lower their ideal self or build a framework of loose justifications that they believe to convince themselves that the two "selves" are not that far apart.

It all comes back to how you justify your actions, and what you tell yourself when you look in the mirror, Dorian. If you don't have regrets you should. And, "no," 20 years from now, people then probably won't care what you did now. But, what you are doing now will affect how you are 20 years from now. And, no, I am under no obligation to offer redemption.

^*Your psychosis is what will kill you. It is what kills everyone.

What to Do, What to Do?

I need to burn up some vacation days before the end of July. Actually, I should burn, optimally, burn them before June ends. There is a "use them or lose them" policy with them; and everyone loses them come the end of June. I was afforded some leniency because of the time tables of my two projects, so I have until the end of July. I could use them all up catching up on all of the various "stuff" that has sat on the back burner while I used up all of my free time working -- bicycle maintenance (more), car work, various "new residency" things, re-organize my computer systems, develop penultimate email client, and whatever else (I am sure there is more that I am forgetting). But, there is a stigma in my mind that tells me I should use my vacation days in another manner. Something like drive to the Mississippi river and throw a rock in it for I have never seen the mightly Mississippi. At the very least, for the rest of my life, I can sleep soundly knowing I have seen it.

Actually, the notion of a drive-a-bout appeals to me. But, it would be much better had I acquired my motorcycle. My ex-roommate screwed me on that one (I'm talking about you, Sparky).

Hmmm...

The Bet

Because it is mildly entertaining (even if it might be slightly perverse in a male mentality sort of way), I shall go ahead and document "The Bet" as referenced by Chuckie in the comments section of "Not Many People."

[Just as a disclaimer, you probably won't find this amusing in the slightest if you are not normally amused by drunk people making outlandish yet amusing yet, somehow, commiserable wagers.]

Not Many People

I am one of the few people under 35 who have driven in a completely original 1953 Cadillac. (This is the closest thing I could find on the Internet. This is a 1950 Cadillac, but it looks very similar.)

Upgrade

Upgraded the MoveableType instance here at Alpha-Geek to v2.64 because there is, apparently, some script injection vulnerabilities for all of the earlier versions. Surprisingly, all went completely well; no data lost.

Now, I must return to my home lair which is without Internet and continue packing...

O' Internet, I Hardly Knew Ye

I am mere minutes away from performing the complete dismantling of my computer systems -- one WinXP, one FreeBSD, and one Debian; KVM switch; cable modem; router for the entire house's Internet; switch coming off of router for my b0X3n; 5 piece Creative Labs speakers. At that point, I will have no Internet at my home base for several days. These are the dark times...

But, there is one bright side to all of this.

Must Resist Urge to Beat Sys. Admin.'s and DBA's

I was happily working on my project when one of the System Administrators poked his head into my office notifying me that the development DB server had to be rebooted.

"Why are you rebooting it?" I ask.

"We need to add more disk space."

"You need to reboot a Sun Fire Server to add disk space? Doesn't it have hot swappable drives?"

"Yes, but we need to reboot it."

"Okay."

I'm Going To OSCON

I am going to the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003, and now I have no idea what to do. Before I can complete the registration, I have to choose what sessions I attend. There are a lot of sessions that overlap. Take a look here -- OSCON 2003 Grid. Which do I choose?

I Do Not Want to Jynx It

I don't want to jynx it, so I am not saying anything about it, yet.

Other than that, I concur with Chuckie, moving really, really sucks.

Dualing Toilet Paper Protocol

When you walk into someone's bathroom, and you are encountered with two rolls of toilet paper hung on the wall, which roll do you pull from?

There are people out there that do not know...

Send Me To OSCON

Do you think CWRU will send me to the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003? I think that they should -- Apache, Perl, PHP, Java, Web services, XML, web applications, emerging technologies. These are all items going on at Case. I think I should be there, they should send me, and they should foot the bill. We'll see how this turns out...

She Sucks Me In

Ooh, she's a crafty one. So, my dear, sweet Emily is in dire need of new struts. And, since I am replacing the struts, might as well go ahead and replace the shocks, too (they, also, need replacing; just not as badly). "What," you may ask, "would cause dampers to go bad after about 20,000 miles of use?" Well, when I purchased my big suspension package, I assumed a nice set of KYB's would provide enough dampening power. Apparently, I was wrong. The springs overworked them and now their dampening ability makes one feel as if they are cruising around in a Wrangler.

So, off I go hunting for new dampers. And, I find that not very many after-market manufacturers create suspension components for second generation J-bodies (who would have thought?). Lack of options and market saturation is not something you want to find when looking for car parts. Koni makes inserts, but I do not like the notion of sticking Koni internals into an AC Delco housing. So, I am down to one vendor -- Mantapart. They have three offerings -- sporty dampers ($350 for the set), Bilstein sporty dampers ($650), and competition level Bilstein's ($700).

Autocross

Yesterday (Sunday) was Autocross. Talk about a damn good time.

Scott and I, coming off a night of hard (slightly illegal) city drivin' followed by some drinking, woke up around 6:30 in the forsaken morning. We made the trip East to Euclid Mall (where the event was being held) rather quickly.

The course had an anti-Emily layout. (And, no, I do not mean "anti-Emily" in the sense that the course had turns.) About 6 feet from the starting point was an immediate 90 degree left turn. This is no good because Emily quickly exhausts the tires' friction abilities just trying to go straight. Trying to get to speed and turn... well... that's no good. I wish I could just do what the Vettes were doing -- mash the gas and slide the rear end around. Damn the FWD! At any rate, by the 3rd run, I was lining up at an angle; so I could basically take a straight shot to the apex of the corner.

Yep, I Am Sure of It. I Hate IE.

So, here I was playing around with some HTML and CSS; and trying to be a good little web monkey by not using any table's anymore -- all CSS. I quickly discovered that IE is the most retarded piece of software. (And, previously, I have always liked it and considered it to be one of the only good products to ever emerge from MS).

The Irony is in the Flaubert

So, last night, I ended up going to Borders instead of going for a bike ride. The funny thing is that I walked out with a book entirely dissimilar to Programming Web Services with Perl, which was my only reason to go to Borders in the first place. I left with Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, instead.

Why?

Because it was Flaubert, and it fit; and my mind has the weird preoccupation with forcing actions to mimic art. But, I am odd; and I am digressing. Let me bring the two together whilst discussing the nuances of Flaubert's philosophies.

Buy Book, Bestride Bike, Blog Bifurcation

It's a nice day out here in C-town, so I should be going for a bike ride. However, early today, I had made the resolution to go and finally purchase Programming Web Services with Perl, which of course, leads me down the long, long path of post-work Borders OCD. If I know that I am going to Borders, I must recognize the fact that I will inevitably sit in Borders, read, and drink coffee for an hour. If I know I am going to be drinking coffee directly after work, I need to stop somewhere and grab a bite to eat lest I become afflicted with caffeine-mind-fuzziness. If I am going to stop for food and go to Borders, I need to realize that I will not be arriving home until 8:30 - 9 o'clock. So, it comes down to bike ride vs. book.

The Blame Lies Somewhere

Did you know that they made anti-depressants for dogs?

I do not know who to blame for this -- the culture that allowed the saturation of pharmaceutical companies to the point of media over-exposure or the decadence of the white, middle class suburbanites who feel the need to justify their own shortcomings via personification of household domesticated animals.

Rear Derailleurs Are A Pain In My Ass

The last time I rode my mountain bike was last January when Scott and I decided to do some excruciatingly cold trail riding. The end result was a very, very dirty, muddy, grimy bike that sat in my basement. Last week on one of the nice days, I went to bust it out only to find it in a similar condition as I left it. (Imagine my surprise at discovering bikes do not lick themselves clean.)

So, today, with the temperature in the 70's and not quite yet raining, I decided to do some cleaning. It began simple enough. I hosed it top-down to remove the larger clumps of mud. I pulled the front wheel off and gave that a good spraying. I, then, went to remove the chain rings only to discover the hex bolts were completely stripped. They were now perfect circles with no toe hold for any device. I fumbled around for a while, cursed my bike, cursed Shimano, and finally settled wiping them, the bottom bracket, and the crankset as clean as possible.

What I Know About CWRU PBL Shooting

First of all, I am alive; just in case anyone was wondering. As luck would have it, I had taken a vactaion day yesterday to go to Cedar Point. I found out about it at around 10:20pm when I returned home. I made some phone calls, and this is the extent of my knowledge (plus, I would like to evanesce a myth the media was touting last night).

Random Picture

There's a random picture of me in the most recent (the one for May 7th to the 13th) Cleveland Scene Magazine on page 24. Don't know how it happened to get put in there. Must be my unabashed sex appeal *wink*.

Down Time

Alpha-Geek.com and all the hosted sites will be experiencing a short amount of down time today as it moves to a fatter pipe. Everything should be normal by, at the latest, 4pm.

There's Only So Much Bureaucracy One Person Can Stand

Because I sometimes have horrible bouts of forgetfulness of real world going-on's (especially when I am nearing crunch time on a project at work), I had failed to renew my car's registration in a timely manner. So, today, off to the BMV I go knowing full well that a simple trip to the BMV can unravel much saner men than myself.

On-Line Quiz Segue to the V=IR of Sartre

All right, let me preface this with how much I despise Internet quizzes that tell you what dog you are like, or what type of female you will fall in love with, or what flower best represents your big toe. But, admit it, you've probably taken one or two. (At the very least, I know your girlfriend -- assuming you're male -- made you take one because chicks dig quizzes and believe that they can find incredible insight via them.) Okay, that's enough disclaimer.

So, The .NET Guy in his blog entry, incredibly entitled, What Kind of Thinker Are You?, linked to the What Kind of Thinker Are You Quiz. And, wouldn't you know it, an on-line quiz had nothing but good things to say about one of it's visitors after having completed the quiz. Shocking! But, that's not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is Existentialism, and why I hate it, and why I always dwell upon it (along with Linguisitics and Bentham's Utilitarianism).

Sin City p3: Choose Your Own Vegas Adventure

Here we go again; some more Sin City apocrypha. If you haven't heeded the warning thus far, no point in starting now.

Sitting at Bar OCD

When you are sitting at a local watering hole, it is very important where you place your cigarettes and lighter.

"somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond"

My feelings on modern poetry are not unknown. Ezra Pound impaled it on the stake of the dada art movement, and it has never recovered. All we get now is TV poetry -- skits of words that are entertaining and shiny but possess no architecture, no expressed intent of creation. However, one unique poet emerged from all of this; captivated this style; and perfected it. Every other tried to recreate it... since. And, with absolute disregard of any kind to whatever applicable copyrights that may exist (if it's on the Internet, it's free), I will reproduce one of his more technical pieces here.

It's No Use, Mr. Newton. It's Pulses All The Way Down.

It's not just software and systems development that occurs in pulses; rather, life, in general, just happens in pulses. There's downtime; standard base line existence. You have days 1, 2, 3,... x; and they all happen relatively the same with just enough deviance to make things interesting. Then, WHAM! Suddenly you are confronted with a seemingly boundless nexus of decisions that all have fairly wide spread ramifications.

My Fingers Are On Fire!!

In the past 4 hours, I have quadrupled my work productivity of the week. Sweet, sweet zone. I finally got tired of writing design docs, noticed that the DB design has been fairly static now, and implemented it in its entirety.

But, now I am too hungry to export all of the SQL code, scp all the resultant files from the Oracle box to my Linux workstation, and check it in to CVS. I'll do that on Monday. It's not going anywhere. (This is where ominous music plays in the background foreshadowing the complete destruction of the Oracle server and the backup system leaving all of the code forever gone because I wanted some pizza.)

Bike Toys

I just bought new mountain biking shoes for this season's riding. Next bike toy: new pedals -- Egg Beaters. According to the reviews, they are not the greatest pedal in the world, but they are designed so well. I just need to pay homage to good engineering and design. They are like the RX-8 of the mtb shoe world (in my screwed up mind).

One of Those Days x2

Ever have one of those days... You have some of your prototyping code open, two browser windows open -- one to the design and one to the specifications; but you cannot get anything done. The zone just will not come to you. No matter how hard you try to force it, no matter how intently you read over the code with your fingers hovering over the keyboard ready to type, you cannot slide into the grove.

He's A Wild And Crazy Guy

For absolutely no other reason than he did not explicitly tell me to not post this.

More Fun Than Driving Fast Cars Slow

When you have two people passionately enthused in a single arena of male-dom, it is all too easy to predict what will occur when you put them together.

Population Density

I just tried to go to the "new" Arabica here in Lakewood in an effort to write-up the weekend's car stories. This Arabica promised to provide me with a place to drink coffee, formulate thoughts, and smoke because, Lord knows, if I am a-writin'; I am a-smokin'. But, alas, the damn place was brimming with people leaving little seating facilities. On top of that, it was Open Mic night meaning 97 different persons and their brothers would be on stage poorly invoking the spirit of Bob Dylan as they wind their way to their goal of becoming "America's Modern Folk Singer."

Too
Many
People

Another Trip and Another Reason to Consolidate

Taking a weekend trip down to visit Scott in Dayton. Going to spend a lot of time talking about cars and the inevitability of motorcycles. (Sometimes, I wonder where I get all the money to do this; then I remember, "that's right; I don't actually have it.")

This, also, brings up the need to consolidate my blogs. Each time I take a trip, I post to both. Redundancy is bad.

Thinking About Blog Consolidation

I have these two blogs: this one, the Right Half, and the Left Half. I explain in Why Do I Have Two Blogs the reasoning why -- an extra layer of categorization.

But, sometimes, I post entries (like this one) that could belong to both sites; and the only way to do that with the current setup is to duplicate the entries (bad) or do some hacking. Or... I could just redo the setup.

Sin City p2: All Our Self-Restraint Thrown Asunder

Here is the long awaited second installment of the almighty trip to Vegas. If you have not yet read the disclaimer, I bid you to do so now.

It's Time to... WARBLOG!!

No, I am not really going to "warblog"; we all have our opinions; but please, keep yours to yourself because it is most likely stupid.

What I did want to point out is the humor of the masses.

Sin City p1: The Arrival

So, after much ballyhoo from the The Impatient One, I present to you the first in a five part series that describes -- in great detail at some points and more like broad, sloppy Van Gogh-like brush strokes in others -- the infamous trip to Vegas.

Be forewarned, you, my gentle reader, are sure to encounter offensive material, sexist remarks, the cavortings of drunk males, and other completely un-delectable items not fit for the consumption of the innocent. We are an unclean group of people -- the kind Jesus warns you about in church. You should listen to that guy: smart chap. But, without more ado concerning threats of inhumane content, read on.

Personal Blog Entry?

So, most of my blog entries are car related or brief narratives on what I did one night (followed by more car stuff); but in general, my blog entries are very loosely associated with my specific personal going-on's. I have a car; I am in the market for buying a cell phone; I take trips; I think about programming and the IT industry. That's what I write about.

Mobile Phone Research

Even though this is a more technical discussion and should probably be placed under the other side of my brain, I have been making my cell phone posts on this blog; so I will try to maintain consistency over accurate categorization (always stay the course).

Going to Detroit

Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be one case old (that's 24 years old for you non-drinkers.) To celebrate, I am going to Detroit. Why? Not sure, yet -- going to find out once I get there.

Tether Me to Your Wireless Communication!

Damn! Well, it has finally happened. For years, I have resisted the urge to get a yuppie comlink. But, my resistance is wearing thin. So, link me up! Find me anywhere! Page me! Text me! Trifle me with your thoughts at the drop of a hat! Bind me to your communicative ether! I want to succumb to the lowest common denominator of consumerism! I can no longer escape the call of society's stupidity; I am going to acquire a cell phone. (I feel as if I have failed some imaginary being that was out there rooting for me to continue the resistance.)

But, before I can buy a cell phone. I must know anything and everything about them.

Ahhh... Emily

I have Emily back. I got her back yesterday morning. I took it easy on my commute to and from work yesterday -- testing the waters with her. Last night, after getting home, I got into her a little more. She responded well to 80% throttle, hard braking, and snapping into turns. But, today, on my way to work, she got a chance to go WOT.

Emily Update

I just got off of the phone with my mechanic. He replaced the steel coolant pipe and told me that that was the least of my problems. There was a tiny fissure on the pipe that had a slow coolant leak; but nothing that would cause the sheer amount of coolant she was spilling. The real problem was an elbow connector that let coolant flow around the throttle body.
And, I quote:

Sunday: Day of Rest and Musings on "Money == Laziness"

Last night, went to ultra-trendy, look-how-beautiful-we-all-are nightclubs; got so drunk I forgot English; talked to some girl who claimed to know me (I wasn't buying it); was surprised that a girl used the line "do I know you from somewhere?" on me (actually, now that I think about it with some semblance of sobriety, she did know my name somehow); went home; handed everyone their asses in foosball even though I could not see; and, finally, passed the Hell out. All in all, a very productive Saturday night.

My car, Emily, is in the shop right now. She should not be there, though. She should be in my garage and so should I.

Where Will Window's Based ISV's Go?

It seems that many of the geek bloggers (here, here, here, and here) are pondering what will happen to ISV's.

So Kiss Me and Smile for Me

Tell me that you'll wait for me.
Hold me like you'll never let me go.
Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane.

I'll be in Vegas until Sunday playing a lot of Roulette, Blackjack, and "Guess What Number I Am Thinking Of."

I love Vegas!

How People Justify Their Actions

I have always been curious and bothered by how others justify their actions. People (and by "people" I mean "most") seem to apply a very different set of criteria on others than they apply to themselves. I find this very odd. (And, I find it odd that am I posting this little rant on the Right instead of the Left, but it seems more appropriate here -- my blog(s), my rules.)

Microwave && Car Serialization OCD

I have this OCD blog category but have yet to use it, so here I go. I am going to cover my OCD over the timing of reheating items in the microwave and how I start and shut down my car.

St. Pat

Well, I have been meaning to write something whilst drunk... Saint Patrick's day in Cleveland provides the perfect opportunity...

Stray cats find homes in fire embers that burn again.
Heaven is not too far away, but you will renounce it upon delivery.

print reverse scalar '$J';
J$

P.S. Work shall suck tomorrow...

Just Stop It!!

Stop putting huge non-functional wings on the back of your car!!

Stop dropping your car so low to the ground it can barely function as transportation!!

Stop cutting your springs to achieve the aforementioned result!! Why would you cut your springs?!?!

Stop putting more free-flowing exhausts on your car that are only cat back!!

Cobra eyes are not cool!!

Body kits are, 99% of the time, tasteless!! Leave your poor car alone!!

Really heavy 20-inch wheels make your car go slower!! Stop doing it!! Get light, small wheels for the love of God!!

And, why, why oh why, did you put nitrous on a sedan!?!? It will not get you laid, but it will make you look foolish to car enthusiasts.

There. I have said it and gotten it out of my system. I feel better.

If Netscape Had Won The Browser Wars, We May Have Been Worse Off

Over at CNet, Charlie Cooper discusses the possibilities of what life would be like right now if Netscape had won the browser wars in this article. Don't get me wrong, I like to play in fantasy lands and explore such possibilities; but the fact of the matter is, Microsoft did a lot for the computing industry.

Why Do I Have Two Blogs

So, I have two blogs -- this one and the Left Half. The main purpose for constructing two blogs was another layer of categorization. I wanted entries in the Left Half to be primarily technical -- programming, car specs and analysis, engineering, etc. This half, the Right Half, was to absorb the more subjective natured subjects such as my thoughts on the automotive industry in general, diatribes about books and movies, dissertations on why such n' such is good or bad. Of course, it is hard at times to maintain a strict delineation between the two. In those cases, I do an eeni-meeni-minee-moe type of algorithm. Whose to say which half this entry belongs? And, there is some weirdness. The Left Half has One-liner's which seem to lend themselves more to the Right Half, but the Right Half has the quotes section. I thought of reducing myself to one blog but decided against it. This seems to be working out so far.

So, there you have it. My two blogs.

The Morality of Genetic Screening and In Utero Therapy

Couple seeks 'designer baby' to save terminally ill child. 12/3/2003. ABC News Online

I do not understand people such as Dr Nick Tonti Filippini, from the article. What is the logical distinction between using medical technology to help an afflicted person and using it to guarantee that a conceived child will not be afflicted with a genetic disease.

Out with the Old

TheMiddle: Out with the old

I do not necessarily agree with item #3 on Chuckie's list; I think the greatest mouse ever made was the first generation of Microsoft's Optical Intellimouse Explorer. The successive iterations of that mouse reduced the size of the side thumb buttons. I like the bigger thumb buttons.

But, without further ado, my own addendums to the list:

The Google Dance Is Your Chance...

It seems Google is dancing. And, seems to be coming up with some "interesting" related sites for my two blogs. Though, I checked with the Google-dance tool but came up with nothing interesting. Not sure what is going on but it does seem funny...

What Makes a Person a "Car Person"

Coloring Outside the Lines: Automobilia

Scott, in the aforementioned blog entry, talks about the origination of his passion for cars. It caused me to think about what brought about my own love of the automobile. It helped that my best friend through high school and his father were into cars. And, when we finally did get our licenses, we would spend hours driving around in our cars and hours learning to fix the ol' things. But I think it best can be summed up in another way.

2003 Cleveland Auto Show

I went to the Cleveland Auto Show last night. There were a lot of cool cars, a lot of boring cars, and a lot of downright ugly cars.

Driving a 1999 Mazda Miata

I drove Scott's hunter green 1999 Miata 5-spd today. It was fun. It's amazing how much fun a properly engineered 4-cylinder RWD car can be.

Mardi Gras

Three of my friends went to Mardi Gras to toy with alcohol induced comas. They shall document it here.

Electronic Buying Spree

I am on the brink of going on a electronic buying spree; though, only one item is for myself (and I really do not want to buy it in the first place). My mother is in dire need of a new computer and printer. And, since she received so much money back from Uncle SAM, she wants a DVD player, also. I have suddenly felt the need to acquire an object that I have been adamantly opposed to for the better portion of its existence as a consumer electronic good that has saturated the market -- a yuppie com-link, a cell phone.