Archive for the ‘general’ Category
It is always hard to come back after a break from work and suddenly be 100% productive again. Whether its some inherent slowness in the brain due to too much intake of tryptophane, or needing to gear things up again after having been idle for a week.
Who knows, either way, it hasn’t been easy. Blah.
So next week I have off from work. Family coming into town on Tuesday. So that gives me three days to get my fill of Halflife 2, Metroid Prime 2 and World of Warcraft before they get here. Oh, and clean the house. Oh well, so much for having vacation. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.
Christmas break will be different. 2 uninterrupted weeks of no obligations or distractions. God help me.
November is a busy month. In about 4 hours, work will begin (for many) on their nanowrimo work for the year. Am I ready? I have no idea, really. I suppose I don’t have to wait long to find out, though.
Elections in 2 days. It is my intent to hit the polls in the morning, and just get into work whenever that is done. It is worth taking the time to do it right. Especially this year.
Finally got the new drives installed in my computer, and avoided doing a complete reinstall through some fancy drive footwork. I still will do a reinstall at some point, but now is not that time. In the short number of hours before tomorrow, I think I’m going to redesign the color scheme for my desktop, and give myself something new and fresh to look at. I think I need to reinvigorate myself in order to maintain energy this month. That might help, if even a little bit.
Finally, if you ever see the movie ‘Samourais’ on the shelf in your local video store, leave it sitting there. It may be interesting to look at, but even by my own mercilessly loose standards for movie entertainment, this thing was a complete piece of shit. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
I’ve decided I’m going to try to make a consolidated news/comics/etc page that gets RSS feeds from all the stuff I want to read. Who knows, it might just end up being the only place I go to read anything anymore. It does get back to an idea that I was throwing around awhile back to have a page that you could completely customize that was just other news/content sites pulled all together into one ‘newspaper’ (except in an online form, obv). So no more browsing through dozens of sites to get what you want. You get all the headlines, and then shoot off to specific content if the headline grabs you.
Imagine google news only extrapolated to deliverable content in general (be it comics, specials in your favorite section of amazon.com, top 10 national book best seller lists, etc).
We’ll see.
<update> And it works! See the link to the right </update>
We watched Passion of the Christ last night. Largely because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’m still formulating an opinion, I think. It hasn’t completely sunk in yet. I can make a few comments now though.
The very first impression that struck me was that regardless of the religious tones of the movie, that was a brutal and horrible time and place to live. The manner in which we, as humans, treated one another was just atrocious. Or maybe we still do that, but we’re less open about it. I think the most cruel characters in the movie were Christ’s punishers, or torturers. Between the original caning and flogging, to the very end where they finally had him up on the cross, several of them were just constantly laughing and merrymaking in the pleasure of the torture. Just brutal.
I guess I’m not sure I want to comment on the religious aspects of it. It was certainly a pretty stark deviation from what I remember reading of the Bible. The lack of compassion of the Jews who wanted him crucified doesn’t map well with me. The conflict in the Roman leader and his wife struck me as more honest than anything reflecting back to the more controversial aspects of the movie(book). The flashbacks to his teachings was fairly well done. Again, some creative license taken, but not overly much.
I suppose when you consider that by the time the work in question reached some sort of rigidity in its translation and publication, it had already passed through dozens of (mis)translations of varying degrees, quibbling over a word here and a phrase there is pretty meaningless. As an example of what I mean, you’ll recall the phrase “Peace on earth, good will toward men”. Well, according to some sources, that was a pretty silly mistranslation. The proper translation was “Peace on earth toward men of good will”. Hmm, interesting twist of a couple words, and the entire meaning changes.
So who really is to say what went on during that turbulent time. Who really is to say who is ultimately responsible for his crucifixion. Who really is to say precisely what portion (if any) of Christ’s teachings made it through unfettered by the mistakes of monks. Certainly not I. Sometime, I’ll get back on a rant about religion in general, and maybe this will come up again. For now, I’ll let it lie.
So after 4 or 5 failed attempts to reload my wife’s machine with XP Pro and associated stuff, I finally buckled down and took the hard road. I followed my own advice to friends about the proper methods for installing a machine securely, and keeping it secure. It worked. But Jesus, this is scary stuff.
So in the early steps of the installation, for the XP CD and the SP1 CD I burned, the network is unplugged. I also have an applications CD burned which has the firewall on it (Tiny Personal Firewall, if you must know), which I then installed. Also installed the virus checker (PCcillin), and did the first of many rounds of virus checking. Once again, this is before its actually been live on any network.
Everything clean to this point, so I figure out which interface (there are two in the machine, one for the private home network) is which, and IPify the external interface, and finally, plug it in. Immediately switch over to the firewall configuration and put it into the ‘connected to an unsafe network’ category, and sit back a bit to watch. 26 attacks in the first 10 minutes. Not bad. I download the virus checker updates, and rescan the whole machine. Still clean.
Next step is windows updates, which also go on smoothly (no, I didn’t install SP2). Five or six reboots later, and the machine’s pretty much ready for primetime. Clean installation, no current viruses, and based on current patterns, roughly 2-3 attacks per minute on various ports. Gotta love the little kiddies with their scripts. Oh well. If television has taught me anything, its that with great power comes great responsibility. And right now, it appears that to utilize the great power of the Internet, I (and everyone else with any interest in keeping their machines clean) has the responsibility of parenting a bajillion script kiddies and their fucking brainless attacks.
Bah, I say. BAH.
(EDIT) At some point, I will publish the step by step how to on installing a machine (from the OS perspective at least) in a safe manner to keep out the unwanted. (/EDIT)
I hate doing bills, and I love doing bills. It is, on the one hand, very satisfying to see that you have money, and where it is, and that you can reconcile it all down to the penny. On the other hand, it is a process, and one that takes a considerable amount of time if you procrastinate like I’m prone to doing. I suppose there’s a lesson in that.
Its all about discipline, I suppose. Feh.
I was struck with an idea on the way to work earlier this week. It frustrated me that the typical classmates.com type sites (and no, I won’t link to them. If you want to go visit them, you can type it your own damn self) are all based on a charge, or at a minimum, ad-based model. I despise that. So if I find that someone has listed themselves on the site under my college or high school (or even grade school!) graduating class, then in order to actually REACH them, you have to pay. Screw all that noise. So my thinking was to start a free service where people just fill it all in on their own. Completely user generated. I’m not going to looking for your school, you put your school in. Yes, I store your data for you, but it NEVER gets sold anywhere. No advertising. You have to grant an individual permission to view your information, or let it all out for the public to see. Completely configurable on a person by person basis.
The site would have to run itself (yes, lots of up front database and scripting work), but would eventually be very low maintenance. The problem with this type of resource is that invariably, it doesn’t work unless you get people going to the site. I’m not good at site advertising. Flat out. Its not that I don’t see the mechanisms inherent in the Internet and the search engine pages and such for doing so … I just hate investing the time in doing so. Blah. So yet another project that ultimately gets shelved. Maybe I’ll resurrect it at some point when the mood strikes me.
Anyway … the other side effect of all that was it got me thinking about all the people who I’ve lost touch with that I wanted to get BACK in touch with. All hail Google, index of all things important. After about an hour or a bit more of poking around, it yielded up a few email addresses for me to try. And guess what … two replies this morning. One from a high school friend who I lost touch with around middle of college, and another a GRADE SCHOOL friend who was the first person I ever played D&D with. In fact, before we even knew what D&D was, we had made our own role playing type game and maps and stuff. Man, that was cool stuff. We were … hmm, maybe 8 or so at the time?
Bottom line: I’m really looking forward to more correspondence and rekindling some of those old friendships. The Internet is such a great enabler.
So very occasionally, when I fall asleep on my back, I get symptoms that are very similar to sleep apnea. I wake up short of breath, feeling like I had stopped breathing, or something was obstructing my breathing. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happens. Normally, sleeping on my stomach (which is my normal mode anyway) prevents this, because it keeps the airways open better.
Tonight I was sleeping on my stomach, and woke up short of breath anyways. In this case, it felt like I had some acid reflux or something, because I could taste bile, and felt like I was coughing it up. Sort of like when you burp and get a bit too much help from your stomach, and taste bile. Except that it was blocking my breathing. What a way to wake up.
So now I sit down here waiting for the taste to leave my mouth and drinking fluids so I can get back to bed. Joy.
Yes, that’s right. Today begins Talk Like a Pirate weekend, with Sunday being official international Talk Like a Pirate day. The link above has some great tutorials if you’re unitiated in the ways of the pirate’s patois.
So grab yer lassies, buckle yer swashes, and prepare t’ be boarded.
Thats what my head feels like. My ear infection got worse, and is now spread to both ears, so I can’t hear. Well, thats not entirely accurate. I hear everything like it was coming through big gauze pads over both ears. Kind of like the muffling you get from a good pair of headphones.
And to those that have to deal with this (and worse) fulltime? I’m sorry. This just sucks. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I came home today, sat down, and was just about to hit the play button on winamp. A part of my brain realized … ‘why are you doing that? You’re not going to be able to hear it anyway’. Life without music is damn near my definition of hell. Not that I want either, but I think I’d even choose losing my sight before I’d go without hearing. Maybe not. I don’t know. Like I said, I’d rather not lose either.
As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of the medical industry. No, I don’t need the qualify that, I’m not a fan of the medical industry. I don’t go as far down that road as some others. Some people I know wouldn’t go to a doctor unless their leg was only loosely attached. I value the services that specific physicians and surgeons provide, when it is needed. Thats the key right there, I guess. I do believe that the human body has an amazing recuperative ability. Astonishing, really … when you consider all of the complex systems involved just to do something as simple as a cut on your skin healing. So when I absolutely need some kind of care, its usually at the point when I’ve accepted that either a) my body’s ability to heal some particular thing isn’t good enough, or b) that the healing process is too painfully slow for me to tolerate the pain any longer.
Today was just such an event. I am prone to ear infections. Moving to Colorado has been mostly good things, and at least this one bad thing. The lack of humidity in the air means that the skin on the inside of my ear canal is very dry, and itchy. Jamming my finger in there to relieve the itching has a tendency to introduce some bad stuff in there that sometimes gets infected to a lesser (or in this case, greater) degree. The side of my head is kinda puffy. My ear canal is all but completely swollen shut. When she went poking in there with the little light scopey thing, she couldn’t even see my eardrum. Middle ear infection at minimum, and possibly also inner ear (that would be normal for me). So what do they do for this? Usually, you get a systemic antibiotic to handle the infection from the body perspective, and then a topical one (ear drops) to handle the part that is external to the bloodstream. Only one problem. When the ear canal is so swollen shut that the drops can’t reach the parts (or some of the parts) that are infected, they have to insert a ‘wick’. Ok, so your ear canal is dry, irritated, infected, tender and painful. I can’t imagine a more soothing experience than stuffing a dry, chafing cloth wick down in there. Not so much.
I have scales of pain. In your typical scale of 1 to 10, dental pain and gout are competing for first place at 9 or 10. That singular event registered at about an 8. Most things below a 7 don’t even really annoy me too much, or my tolerance for them is sufficient to keep me going without any medication needed. This was so sudden and acute that I nearly threw up on the attending nurse. God. All in the name of getting better. The alternatives aren’t acceptable.
I’ll save my ranting and raving about big pharma companies and the HMOs for another post when I’ve settled down.
So yeah, I eventually agreed that my colors were all too dark and stuff. So now it looks like this. After some tweaking and playing and getting good feedback from others (Thanks Dar/Grey/Lore!), I’m once again pleased with the layout and appearance.
Until the next time I get sick of it.
<update time=”2004-9-1 21:22:04″>
I once again refer back to this site and the work of B A Khan for his Dark Fire template. Sorry for not including the credits up front. I’m such a slacker.
</update>
It was certainly our intent to see the last Phish show in Coventry, VT. Tickets purchased well ahead of time, flights, rental cars, friends to tag along with, etc. Mother Nature, apparently, had made other plans.
The closest we got was about 25 miles from the campsite before Mike Gordon got on the radio with the local constabulary and announced that they were going to begin turning people away. We were roughly 15 miles from where they were going to setup that roadblock. Being the pseudo-responsible citizens of the world that we are, we turned the car around, and went home.
A significant portion of the people in the immense snake of cars, though, had different plans. Some 2100-2500 groups abandoned their vehicles on the interstate and hiked the rest of the way in, and saw the show. In retrospect, it would have meant abandoning our food/drink filled cooler, slogging along 25 miles on a gouty foot (yes, my gout took that opportunity to flare up on me) and spending the remainder of the weekend muddy and/or wet. Did I miss an opportunity there? Sure. Do I regret that we turned back and avoided alot of pain in the process? Not so much.
Additionally, based on an official statement from the band manager, folks who still have unripped tickets will additionally get free downloads of the show and sound checks from their site, as well as an exclusive, signed photo book of the band. No, it isn’t a replacement for the missed show, but it goes at least down the right road of giving us some recompense for the trouble we went through. On the whole, I’m pretty ok with the whole thing.
