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Sunday, February 11, 2007

It's About Time

So I'm into the second month of the new year and my new year's resolution has finally come to me. I need to start prioritizing better, eliminating non-essential e-mail and other activities, and generally managing the little free time I have much better. (Yeah... The irony of writing this all in my pointless blog is not lost on me.) The shortness of life is more salient each year and I've been wasting a lot of time and energy on things that probably won't matter in 30 years.

So this year I resolve to stop spending time sorting and categorizing the thousands of songs, pictures, and documents on my PC. I'll stop spending so much time on Slashdot and other sites, reading things I don't need to. I'll unsubscribe from mailing lists I don't have time to read, let alone act upon. I'll focus my modest political activism on Global Warming (which will likely matter more than any other cause in 30 years) and fighting the moronic/evil forces that won't acknowledge the problem. And I'm going take the reclaimed moments to spend as much time with the kids as I can find.

posted @ 8:50 PM | Feedback (26)

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Bye American

2006 checked out with the departure of two great Americans: James Brown and President Gerald R. Ford. (They say famous people always die in threes. Would that make Saddam the third?) I will certainly miss the Godfather of Soul the most, but I was moved by the response to Ford's passing and the way it reminded us all of simpler times in politics, before partisanship trumped honest debate.

The remembrance made me long for an era before pundits and politicians figured out how to turn American against American, fooling us into believing we have more differences than common interests. Would it be too much to ask to get the Republican party back to political center? Somewhere in the neighborhood of Clinton. Bill was too centrist for my tastes (despite the absurd imagination of the wacko right, calling him liberal), but at least a majority of America's voters seemed represented rather than Bush's (dupped and increasingly remorseful) 51%. In a landscape of moderate politics nobody gets everything they want, but at least we do some real work on the issues we all agree on.

posted @ 9:26 PM | Feedback (17)

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Dolby Surround

What a great privilege it was last night to not only see Thomas Dolby play live (I never thought I'd have the chance), but to shake hands and thank him personally for his music. Wish I hadn't been quite so hammered on Patrón when the opportunity arose, but I think I did a passable job of expressing my gratitude. It must be a huge sacrifice to leave his family for so long while on tour, but his fans deeply appreciate the effort.

Dolby's one-man show was more raw and personal than his studio work and really connected to his audience. Having fumbled around with synths and sequencers myself, it was amazing to see how many things Dolby was juggling at once as he built up and manipulated the layers of each song. The only thing lacking in delivery was the beautiful vocal harmonies in his songs. Not a problem though, since I was able to compensate by singing them myself. (Out of my collection of 800+ albums, Dolby's four are among the few I actually know by heart.) Besides the great autobiographical narration between each song, Dolby's performance was full of little treats --like finally hearing Airhead without "go" substituted for "shit" (as in "does the Pope go in the woods?").

I'm not one prone to idol worship, but Dolby's music is deeply personal for me. It's a goofy thing to say, but I feel a special connection with many of his songs. Close, but no Cigar, for instance, seemed to be about my personal life, when it was first released. At the time, my girlfriend of several years was returning to Rio de Janeiro ("the wide Brazilian sky that swallowed you"), much to my sadness. Then there are the more universal messages of songs like Cruel and Weightless; if you can't emotionally relate to those songs, you've got to be a pretty dispassionate person.

Dolby's work has always appealed to both sides of my brain: the analytic, software developer part and the emotive, amateur pianist part as well. His music is unique, unorthodox, and unbelievably hummable/singable. He'll be on heavy rotation at my place for many years to come.

posted @ 2:35 PM | Feedback (1)

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

The Elephant NOT in the Room

Just when I thought my despair and frustration would never lift, looks like political miracles still happen. Hard to believe the confluence of scandals and luck we've had. Almost makes me grin and wonder if the Dems have a Rovian strategist working behind the scenes. That last gay Republican outing was timing genius! If only we could dominate the pre-election 24-hour news cycles with real issues, we'd win a lot more often.

I wonder if anyone will recognize the leadership of chairman Dean, with his 50-state strategy that had Democratic operations in place --even in the red states-- when seemingly hopeless races suddenly became competitive. Or will beltway insiders ignore his efforts and try to replace him with someone more to their liking?

posted @ 1:04 AM | Feedback (0)

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Everyone's a Critic

I had read about this in parenting magazines, but last night, for the first time, I experienced unwanted parenting advice from a complete stranger.

Maxwell was practicing for being a terrible two and started a whining --then crying-- temper tantrum while we were in the bookstore. Naturally, I wheeled the stroller outside and we waited for Jen to finish shopping. After about 15 minutes of sitting calmly, reading the paper, waiting for Max to regain his composure, a group walks by and one of them asks "is that your baby?" I answered "yes" and she asks why he's crying. I explained "he's having a temper tantrum. Babies do that." The nice, but stupid person tells me "you should try holding him." It took a lot of restraint (and reminding myself that she probably thought she was being helpful) to keep from delivering a snide retort like "Wow... What an original, brilliant idea! Thanks Dr. Spock!" or "Oh, does that work with your (imaginary) two-year old?"

Parenting is annoying enough now and then without armchair quarterbacks implying you don't know anything about parenting.

posted @ 9:17 PM | Feedback (17)

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Chimp Update

The Chimp-O-matic is alive and well. My best estimate is that the Little Divider is being loaded over 1.5 million times on an average week. I was kind of shocked a few weeks back to see that The Chimp-O-matic is was even #3 on Google's gadget rankings! Wow, this must be my 15 minutes of Internet fame, eh?

Against overwhelming odds, I didn't play Half-Life2 all weekend while my wife was out of town. Instead I caught up on a few little projects I've been meaning to do for a while. I've added some new flavors of Chimp like an RSS feed and a graphics-only version for sigs. (and any other odd things you might think of). I also added 10 new Bushisms, some funny, some just completely contradictory with his previous statements (can you say Flip-Flopper?).

Next I'm going to add a variety of Chimp heads and a tidy page with step-by-step installation instructions for all the different implementations.

posted @ 11:44 PM | Feedback (15)

Thursday, August 31, 2006

All Politics is Ugly

With primaries coming up next week the volume of negative political ads is getting pretty stupid. One candidate exposes the dirty laundry of every lawsuit ever filed against his opponent, claiming it as evidence of financial irresponsibility. Meanwhile, his opponent fires back with a laughable list of every traffic violation the other guy incurred in the last five years. How can you trust a man that ran a red light back in '03 with our future?!?!! Sigh... But it gets worse.

We're also seeing a monthly effort to get our local city commissioner, Steve Gonot, thrown out with a California-style recall petition. Every few weeks a well-funded group of thinly-veiled Republicans sends another petition and pre-paid envelope trying to convince constituents of the necessity of removing an honest man from his second term. Their reasoning? [Take a big swig of the right-wing Kool-Aid to understand this...] They claim he talked about work with another official after hours once. Of course the real reason seems to be that developers are being blocked from "paving the beach" and there's a lot of money to be made by an unscrupulous few in removing the commissioner. I hope everyone's bullshit detectors are working at election time.

posted @ 12:44 AM | Feedback (6)

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Not how I remembered

I've just returned from the first birthday party I've ever attended for a one-year old. The magic that was Chuck E. Cheese in my youth has become an overwhelming hellscape of screaming children in tight spaces and horrifying, dead-eyed plastic automatons mumbling through a distant P.A. Imagined without the bright lights and wall-to-wall little people, Stephen King would have enough material for a trilogy. It wasn't like that when I was a kid, right?

posted @ 11:41 PM | Feedback (16)

Friday, July 21, 2006

Routed

Well... I knew the day would come. After hammering my little LinkSys 4-port router for months with up to 300,000 hits from over 25,000 unique users every day, it finally fried. Fortunately I had a much newer D-Link router sitting on the shelf. Unfortunately it was there because after a few attempts over the last two years, I gave up trying to get even marginal service from the thing. Fortunately I called D-Link and got what I'd consider amazingly good customer service (and I'm not easy to please) that got everything working. Unfortunately everything didn't include my incoming traffic. My apologies.

I'm not sure if the router is misinterpreting the daily barrage as denial-of-service attacks, or maybe there's a setting that I missed, or maybe there's a real malfunction in the router, but I've found my incoming services (like this blog) seem to come and go. It would be better if it didn't work at all. At least it'd be consistent. Not sure what to do now but keep tweaking and buy yet another router if things don't settle down.

posted @ 12:20 AM | Feedback (16)

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Taking the Fourth

Over the Fourth of July weekend we took a trip to Washington, D.C. We spent most of our time walking from monument to monument, occasionally stopping for a meal at a great local restaurant. Much like Paris, there's always another interesting landmark in sight, begging to be hiked to. And although the last two days were very hot, we had a great time and got to expose Maxwell to museums, art galleries, the zoo, a folk fest, and lots of other interesting sights.

Our hotel was on K Street, not far from the White House, but the smell wasn't that bad and luckily we weren't mugged even once by lobbyists.

posted @ 11:03 PM | Feedback (21)

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Swirling further down the drain

A lot of what I read today in the paper and on the Net made me even less hopeful about our nation's future. Saw a poll of teenagers in USA Today's fluffy weekend section that claimed, among other pitiful/horrible things, that 52% of teens think celebrities only pretend to care about charities for self-promoting PR. Sigh... So I guess American idealism is dead.

What an ugly result of an increasingly cynical society ignited into complete distrust of their fellow man by Republican spin. You know, that pathetically hollow rhetoric that you'd have to be retarded --or at least very mentally immature-- to believe. Things like the idea that the sole motivation of Jesus W. Bush's critics is to promote their latest book. Or that climatologists and other real scientists have completely fabricated global warming so they can get rich and famous. You know, like... like... So I can't think of one, but I'm sure there are hundreds of multi-millionaire climatologists sipping juleps in easy chairs down in Antarctica, right? Maybe a conservative reader out there could name a few of these rock star scientists?

posted @ 10:25 PM | Feedback (61)

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Server Administration Is Hell

Who would think configuring and maintaining a web server could be so difficult? Since realizing that my server was getting slaughtered by the surprising popularity of the Chimp-O-Matic, I've been working hard on moving my site off of Win XP Media Center and getting everything up and running on Windows 2000 Server --a "real" server. So far the experience has been a complete disaster. I've tried everything I can think of, but for reasons beyond explanation IIS works great for several hours and then just stops working! Even more bizarre, despite not being able to get anything but "Server Not Found" in the browser, the machine doesn't log any errors and the IIS server logs show no disruption in service (that I know of). All other services on the machine work and even limiting the hell out of IIS (e.g. no sessions, only 50 users, etc.) doesn't fix the issue.

So... Until I find some cheap ASP.Net hosting (with SQL Server), I guess I'll keep supplying the 80,000+ hits per day for the Chimp-O-Matic with a lousy consumer OS that's limited to 10 simultaneous users. Go figure.

posted @ 10:46 PM | Feedback (40)