Daylight savings.
Feh.
I hate daylight savings.
But I thought this picture would be amusing.
Enjoy.
Category: Blogging
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Spring Ahead
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No clever title
I love the irony in this Slashdot posting: “XML Co-Creator says XML Is Too Hard For Programmers“. Reads to me like a title The Onion would publish.
Anyway. The Slashdot post led me to Tim Bray’s weblog, which is pretty cool to me. (But then, I’m a geek and this probably won’t be as cool to you.) This is the guy who helped invent XML. His blog posts look pretty insightful and/or entertaining, and I rather like the design of the site. Simple. Uses CSS for all the layout, no HTML tables. Nice. I need to brush up on my CSS.
On another note, I’m finally re-launching The Brew Site. I’m working behind the scenes to get all the PHP working and the site active, but I figure if I don’t do this now, I probably never will…
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03/03/03
By now I’m sure everyone in the Gregorian calendar-using world has commented on how cool it is that today’s the third day of the third month of the third year of the century/millenium. I got a kick out of it when I saw it as the due date on a Blockbuster receipt a couple of days ago. Isn’t it amazing how our brains can construct patterns and meaning out of what are basically arbitrary numbers?
Just wait til 06/06/06…
I just got around to watching last week’s episode of Enterprise tonight, “Canamar,” and boy, what a riff on Con Air, even right down to the name. Con Air takes place on a plane full of convicts being transferred to another prison; “Canamar” takes place on a ship transporting prisoners to a prison planet. Con Air has a criminal mastermind escape, take over the plane, and hijack it to parts unknown; “Canamar” has a criminal mastermind that escapes, takes over the ship, and hijacks it to parts unknown; Con Air has a hero on his way to freedom when disaster strikes, forcing him to save the day; “Canamar” has a hero (two, actually) about to gain freedom when disaster strikes, forcing them to save the day… I’ll stop there. You get the picture.
I was actually one of the few people who liked Con Air, by the way.
Random web link: Harlan Ellison’s official webpage; “Ellison Webderland” as it’s called (which is a not-so-clever play on “Ellison Wonderland” which was clever. At the time).
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I had what?
My friend Justin just turned 30 a little over a week ago, and for his birthday I had all the video of our little public access show that we did together in Spokane transferred to DVD (almost three hours’ worth). Six episodes and a short movie (The Crusader), all at least 8 years old; the show ran in 1994 and ’95, I think, and all the filming was done then or from even earlier projects.
Watching it all again and looking back on that time sure brings back memories. Most embarrassingly (and I think I blocked this out), I was at the time in a long hair phase, but all my hair was not uniformly long (as it would later become); no, it was nice and short in front and fairly long in back.
That’s right.
Worst. Mullet. Ever.
I was like the poster boy for mullets. Bearing in mind, I’d never heard the term mullet back then, and was blissfully clueless. Now, though. Damn. And it’s all captured in DVD glory forever.
It didn’t last forever, though. I got it chopped to a uniform length and let it grow out again, and for a time had nice, straight, long hair almost down to my tailbone. That phase ended in 1998, though, the year I got married. Now, I keep my hair very short. Go figure.
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Recap 2002
Back with the first posting of the New Year, looking back on 2002 and some of its key events for me.
- 2 weddings; the first in January, of a close family friend. The second in Las Vegas just this last weekend between Christmas and New Years, of my brother.
- I lost both my grandmothers in the first half of the year, fairly close to one another.
- My youngest child celebrated his first birthday.
- My oldest celebrated her third.
- I myself celebrated my 30th.
- I changed jobs, in a bit of a rollercoaster few months.
- A tree fell on my house. (No damage, thankfully.)
- Some memorable trips, including:
- The trip to Portland for the first wedding;
- An anniversary trip to Portland, away from the kids, on a dinner cruise and expensive hotel;
- A week-long vacation traveling down the Oregon coast;
- The trip to Las Vegas for my brother’s wedding.
2002. Had to love it.
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Snow! Good grief!
Winter’s coming early this year; it snowed in Bend today, about three weeks early. Ordinarily Central Oregon doesn’t get its first snow until late November, and that melts off and it doesn’t snow again until after Christmas. (When I say snow, I mean a significant amount that covers everything under a white blanket, not a light dusting that’s gone before the end of the day.)
At least that’s the pattern I’ve noticed over the past four years or so.
I hate driving in the snow, especially the first snow of the season. Traffic jams up, because everybody forgot how to drive on slick roads and panics, and cars creep along at 15 miles per hour or slower. Worse, many people living here are transplants from elsewhere that doesn’t have the snowy conditions we get here, so they don’t have a clue. Not that I’m the best winter driver, but damn.
We carved pumpkins tonight. I always get a big kick out of pumpkin carving, especially now that the kids can start appreciating it more. I outdid myself this year; I carved my pumpkin (a big one!) with the likeness of Charlie Brown.
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Random Thoughts
Two of the best shows on TV are on Cartoon Network: Justice League and Samurai Jack.
I filled out a quiz on Emode today, “What’s Your Best Quality?” It tells me I am Reliable.
phpMyAdmin kicks serious ass.
In an odd moment, I realized today that vampires are violating the laws of physics by not casting reflections. This bothers me.
Of all the things I want to buy from ThinkGeek, the first thing is going to be either the WTF? coffee mug, or the beer glasses. Much to my dismay, they don’t seem to carry the “All Your Base” mugs anymore…
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One for the kids
Here’s something to mull over. I was emailed this a few months ago, incorrectly attributed to a commencment speech Bill Gates gave at a high school graduation in California. The reality is, it’s from Charles J. Sykes (view snopes.com for the whole story and list). I think this is brilliant and well-said, and definitely needs to be said more often.
I’m paraphrasing a bit here.
Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School
Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it.
Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock.
Rule No. 3: You won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either.
Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.
Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.
Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible.
Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off.
Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs.
Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.
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Lapse
I’ll be more active on the site again, soon. Until then, here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been doing:
- Reading A History of Knowledge
- Working the new job (programming, programming, programming)
- Getting caught up in the new season of TV (grrrrrr….)
- Pouring concrete (well, I only spent a Saturday doing this, but it was 800+ pounds of concrete…)
That’s about all for now. Changes coming though!
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9 – 11 – 02
Peace.