Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I'm in my Toronto hotel room trying to use this slightly ancient Dell Latitude someone gave me ( gave me ) a couple of years ago (since this wasn't a work trip and I was leaving the country I decided maybe I'd leave the company-issued laptop at home). I'm running Windows 2000 (it originally had Windows ME - a certifiable piece of shit) and it is slooooooow. Especially after I installed antivirus software. The poor old thing only has 96 meg of memory and swaps like a mad thing. After several frustrating bouts of trying to speed things up I got the bright idea of connecting up with my computer at home using a free tool called LogMeIn . Although they have several commercially supported services for large enterprises, they also have a free (free as in free beer, not free speech) version for the small fish user. So I'm logged into my home office computer, which is more responsive than trying to do it from the poor sad Dell Latitude, which I am essentially only using as...

In Toronto - finally. I'm sitting here on my bed in the hotel room, watching Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles while number one son sleeps in the other bed. It's been a long day. After arriving at 5:30 this morning to catch a 6:30 flight, our plane finally left DFW about 5:00 P.M. Apparently the plane we were supposed to have flown out on this morning suffered some sort of damage from all the storms last night. If we'd had any sense, we'd have abandoned the airport once we found out we had a later departure. But our brains were foggy. Instead we opted to hang out in Terminal D. and look at all the public art that had been installed when they opened the terminal (several friends have pieces). When we grew weary of that, we checked the shops. When our feet finally gave way, we ended up camping out within ear and eye shot of various plasma TV screens tuned to the ubiquitous 24-hour news feed. After a couple of hours, I noticed a strange convergence of stories: the funerals...

Got up at 4 a.m. to catch a 6:30 flight to Toronto with number one son. At the airport we find the flight has been canceled: we now depart at 3:30. Ouch.

Gerald Ford: 1913 - 2006. ...The only Republican presidential candidate I've ever voted for. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

With my First Born soon to be living in Canada, I started looking for some cheap ways to talk. Skype , free until the end of the year for calls to land lines in US and Canada, will have a flat annual fee for this after the first of the year (still a good deal). Still I trolled around to see what else was out there. While checking out the options to call to land lines or have a land line number that pointed to a Voice Over IP (VOIP) account, I discovered AIM Phonelines -- yet another deal concocted by AOL. Essentially it's a voicemail account: someone calls, they leave voice mail and AOL emails you (to one of their free email accounts) an MP3 of the message. How cool is that? The only hang is that you have to get at least 1 call a month to the number to keep it active. Got the set up? So, the other day I went to download some piece of evaluation software from Microsoft (it was for work). One of the required fields on the excruciatingly long form was for phone number. They had to ha...

Joseph Barbera, the surviving member of the pioneering animation team Hanna-Barbera passed away at 95. It is impossible to overestimate their contributions to the art and (arguably more importantly) business of cartoons. They got their start at MGM in the 1940's, doing the original run of Tom and Jerry cartoons for theatrical release. When MGM shut down the animation unit in 1957 ("Sorry boys, we got enough cartoons already") the pair set up shop cranking out original cartoons for television, developing a method of limited animation that could be produced for a fraction of the cost of theatrical animation. The finished product may have looked dodgy, but they created a gallery of memorable characters, including Yogi Bear, QuickDraw McGraw, Ruff and Reddy and Huckleberry Hound (Oh mah darlin', oh mah darlin, oh mah daaarlin' Clementine). They also created the prime time hit, the Flintstones, a stone-age rehashing of the Honeymooners. I have vivid memories of going...

Written on a white board in a meeting room... Select * from users where clue > 0 0 records returned

As we schlep towards the end of the (work) year, our overseers have seen fit to remind us that performance reviews are right around the corner. I can only pray I'm crushed by a semi on the way home some evening. I forced myself to participate in a Lunch and Learn session dedicated to discussing TURD (Totally Unified Review Decider), our web-based 3rd party career evaluator. There was free pizza and I needed the training hours. One of our upper management, "Herman" (not his real name) described how to set trickle-down goals based on our superior's goals and his supervisor's goals, from a stream that leads all the way up to the CEO. The piss, as they say, flows downhill. Since the CEO got a 16 million dollar bonus last year, I guess he sets good goals. My bonus was $300. Herman seems like a nice enough person. The trouble is, he obviously believes in all this shit. I walked out of the meeting depressed and demoralized. I realized I was totally fucked. And the sad ...

Got tired of hearing the depressing radio news the other night on the way home from the Salt Mine and flipped the car stereo over to a CD. My wife had driven the day before and had left whatever she'd been listening to in the player. What came on was some tasty piano jazz with drums and upright bass. I couldn't quite place it but it had echoes of Dave Brubeck and Brad Mehldau. Driving home it drove me crazy. Finally when I pulled in the driveway I ejected it to check the label. The Phil Aaron Trio. Good stuff.

I confess one of the things I'm thankful for in my undeserving life is that the Morning Snooze carries the bitterly unfunny "comic" Mallard Fillmore only on Sunday, so I don't have to grit my teeth every single day at its grumpy rants at all things Liberal ("Liberal" being anyone to the left of Bill O'Reilly). It's like a train wreck: on Sunday morning I want to avert my gaze but try as I may, I can't help but look at it, thinking "Surely it's bound to be funny sometime ." It's not. Calling it a comic is a stretch -- Indiana creator Bruce Tinsley spews tired Reagan-era babble out of the mouths of talking heads. There is no action, no plot, and not much drawing -- mainly it consists of lots of hand-written screeds masquerading as guffaw-filled dialog. My father probably thinks it's hilarious. Comics Curmudgeon (my new favorite blog) had a brief mention of Mr. Tinsley this morning, who managed to get himself picked up for DU...

Saw the above at Target - suspiciously similar to something I once did for Bombay Co.

We all have events that mark the beginning of the holiday season. For Wal-Mart executives it seems to be the passing of the 4th of July. For me it is my church's annual Messiah sing -- I've been a part of it for around 16 years. This year was especially fun since my 15-year old is now in the youth choir and sat next to me. Of course his participation is not without occasional grumbling, which meant I was subjected to glares and eye-rolling from time to time, but it was worth it to hear him sing. He's good. He and I also went out and snagged a Christmas tree after church. This was relatively early in the Advent season for us. There have been years (I confess) where to save a few bucks I waited until the last minute. I come by this tradition honestly: I remember my dad and me scouring the tree lots in sub-zero weather in suburban Chicago one Christmas eve, he'd put off buying a tree so long. Maybe that's why I like to wait until the weather gets cold before buying a t...

...Yet another thing concerned citizens of the world must find time to worry about. Thank you, NPR .

At 7:00, twenty minutes before I left for the night, our fearless CIO, Beany Countwell ("I'm a numbers man. Just show me the numbers") stood in the lobby of our building, pontificating on the virtues of putting in a few extra hours of overtime for the good of the Company. I was working late, writing test cases for a server migration that someone realized THIS WEEK had to be completed before the end of the year. Nice save, someone. I ought to be working them now, since I have to be finished before the end of tomorrow, and I'll be baby-sitting a consultant of dubious competency all day. I'm afraid I'm not highly motivated to put in much more overtime tonight. Blow it out your ass, Beany.

Okay, I've given in and switched from the old version of Blogger to the Beta version (which has been around for 6 months now), not that anyone out there actually reads this drivel, much less gives a shit about how I do it. However, since blogging software, in the broadest sense, overlaps somewhat with what I do for a living, I thought I'd comment on it, whether anyone cares or not. From a technical perspective, the biggest change is that the new Beta version is dynamically rendered from a database, where as the old (or as we like to say in the marketing world "classic") version rendered the pages as static files, written to a file system. There are advantages to doing it each way. Static (Classic Blogger) pages can be FTPed to another site, which was a feature touted by Blogger. These can be delivered from a simple web server, which can run on a lower powered box. They are also pretty much platform independent: your webserver can run on Windows, Unix, Mac OS, Solari...

I'm beginning to worry a little about myself: I've decided I actually like Kashi cereal. Of course I had to choke down a box of Safeway granola first. My God is that stuff awful.

I find the reaction to the Bush v. Webb flare up interesting. In case you've missed it, newly elected senator from Virginia James Webb, after passing on standing in line for a photo op with The President, found himself experiencing a little unasked for face time with the former Governor of Texas. According to accounts, GWB (no doubt flashing his well documented smirk) found Webb and tried a little small talk. "How's your boy?" Webb's son, as is probably well known by now, is a marine serving in Iraq. "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," was Webb's reply. "That's not what I asked you," Bush pressed on. "How's your boy?" "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," said Webb, ending the conversation. Predictably the voices on the right are in a snit over what they perceive as the "hot-headed" and rude behavior of the Senator from Virginia. I'm sure Bill O'Reilly has been a...

I discovered yesterday that I could assign separate ring tones to groups of contacts in my cellphone. I'd sort of known this but hadn't ever done much with it. This information lay forgotten until I started fooling around with ring tones on my phone. Family gets "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream. It's sort of a shitty sound - lots of compression - but for Christ's sake, it's only a bloody ring tone. Choosing a ring tone to match a given person (much less a group of people) can be a tricky business. But not always. Easiest decision I ever made? Assigning the Imperial March (Darth Vader theme) to Work calls. Yes, Lord Vader. Speaking of which, the funniest Star Wars related bit of humor I've ever seen is this bit from Robot Chicken (not exactly Work suitable, unless you wear headphones).

Once again it's National Novel Writing Month . The challenge: write 50,000 words in 30 days. It can be done. There's nothing like spending the Thanksgiving break staying up into the wee hours pounding out pages. You won't have time for that second piece of pumpkin pie. Update on my effort in 2004: I've got 20 pages left to revise in the 2nd draft and then I begin the 3rd pass. If I can get this done before the week is out I'll start the next epic (last year's effort fizzled out in an ignoble failure).

Upper management in my unit held an "all-hands" meeting the other day at a nearby hotel conference room. Breakfast at 7:30. Powerpoints promptly at 8:00. Meetings like this are primarily corporate newspeak: lots of words you sort of recognize, but used in ways that have been drained of all meaning. Still, to the expert listener, much can be learned; more indeed than the speakers usually intends. Here's what I learned: "We need to work smarter, better, faster." Translation: more unpaid overtime. "We are a global organization and our internal customers expect us to be available." Translation: more unpaid overtime. "You can telecommute as long as you use it to address customer needs in the the evening and weekends." Translation: more unpaid overtime from home as well as the office.

Bush is hailing global literacy as a weapon against terrorism. He could start by learning to read the Constitution.

When I was nine, I saw a classified ad about "comics for sale." The address was in the same apartment development, so I went over to check this out. I was thinking this would be a cheap way to feed my addiction. Not so. At the time the price of a new comic was 12 cents. This kid (with his dad, natch) pulls out a couple of titles from a box where they were stored and starts quote prices in the range of five and ten bucks. My eyes glazed. I realized I had come to the wrong place. The plastic bags should have been a dead giveaway. I'm not a collector. I don't have file cabinets full of originals encased in archival sleeves. Collectors are interested in the object: the original magazine. For me it's about the content: the drawings, the stories. I'm not a purist, anthologies and reprints are just fine - better in some ways than originals, since I've always liked to pore over the pages, re-reading the balloons, studying the drawings. Brittle newsprint in plasti...

Interesting read on 10 reasons why high definition DVD formats have already failed . Anyway, that's what I told my kids when they clamored for a PS3.

Microsoft announced Bill Gates is going to transition out of his day-to day role at Microsoft to spend more time focusing on his Foundation efforts. The Slashdot crowd (who I love) alternately sneered and cheered . Me, I thought it was just fine. I mean, geez...the guy's been doing the Microsoft thing for (what has it been?) 30 years? He's probably ready to pack it it, buy himself a dual boot MacBook, and enjoy himself and his family for a while. In the meantime, he's going to give a shitload of money away to help improve life for a lot of people. Some have compared him to the Robber Barons of the 19th century who, in their old age turned philanthropist. Who cares? Andrew Carnegie sure did start a bunch of libraries which are still serving communities. Steve Ballmer, now HE'S probably pissed! Have fun, Bill!

The Dallas Morning News gave a pretty good (not too stupid) review of last week-end's A-Kon 17. It appears in the Wednesday, June 14 edition of the Guide and can also be seen online .

Went to my 2nd and last day of A-Kon yesterday with Ed and his buddy (work-related crap keeps me from returning today, but that's a rant I care not to make). Arrived just in time for lunch then plunged back into the madness. One thing that has always struck me about A-Kon (and AnimeFest as well) has been the diversity of the attendees: young and old, straight and gay, white, black, yellow, brown (not to mention a fair amount of green, blue and purple). Anime/Manga culture has spread to a wide cross-section of America. Very cool. Caught some good video (as well as some bad). Outstanding was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya , not yet available in the US. It is practically a cult religion in Japan I gather. See the separate post for more info. Searching on YouTube will pull up some fan-subtitled episodes. Also amusing was Hare and Guu , a frisky and colorful comedy, and Desert Punk , a comedic scifi adventure series. Both are available in the US. I bought (on Ed's recommendati...

Finished with A-Kon, day two (see separate post) and probably the coolest thing I saw was 4 episodes of an anime called The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi , based on the Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu novels by Nagaru Tanigawa . It began screening in Japan this spring and (I gather) has practically become a state religion known as Haruhi-ism. The opening episode was one of the cleverest, goofiest things I'd seen in a long time: a fan film made by the characters in the anime. The second episode then started before the first episode, and introduces the characters for the first (second?) time. The Anime News Network describes it thusly: "On the first day of high school a beautiful girl named Haruhi Suzumiya introduces herself as having "no interest in ordinary humans". She asks for any aliens, time travelers, sliders or espers to join her. Watching her weird behaviour is Kyon a boy who sits in front of Haruhi and is the only person who talks to her. Commenting on Haruhi...

Back home after the first day of A-Kon 17 (anime convention) in downtown Dallas. Initial impression: it is a pain in the ass to park in Dallas. This was aggravated by the fact a city-sponsored Arts Celebration was going on in the vicinity of the Dallas Museum of Art several blocks away. Hotel parking (A-Kon was at Adam's Mark) was full by the time we made the drive over around 12:30, as were all the paid parking lots around the hotel. "No event parking" -- that meant us. We ended up finding a garage about 3 blocks away, which ended up not being all that bad, since it meant we had covered parking. Then we faced our next hurtle: getting registered. The pre-registration process was sorely out of wack, with loooong lines (sort of defeating the purpose of pre-registering), which the A-Kon security people tried to reorganize a couple of times as we waited in line, causing everybody's places to become somewhat confused. By the time we showed up, the crowd had grown a bit cra...

Delivered by Bucky Katt in today's Get Fuzzy : "How ironic -- you eat vegetarian and speak baloney."

A couple of weeks ago I get an email from the vendor of this software product I'm saddled with managing. They've organized a user group meeting - the first ever - in Minnesota. I forward to my boss with a note saying this sounds like a good thing and asking if I should go. My boss's evolving response: Two weeks ago - "There's always a lot of useful information at those events. It sounds like a good thing for you to attend. Let me get back to you next week " One week ago - "It would probably be a good thing for you or someone to attend. With everything you're involved in, I'm not sure we can spare the time for you to go. I'll get back to you next week." This week - "These user groups are really more about networking than anything else. So I'm going instead." The good news? It means he's out of my hair for a day and a half.

From Mr. Adams Osei Address: No: 23 East Legon Accra Ghana Telephone: + 233-242-110-400 Fax Number: + 44-870-912-1817 My name is Adams Osei .I am in charge of Treasury Bills in the Bank of Ghana. I don’t know if you know about treasury bills in Ghana. Businessmen and companies both foreign and locally purchase these bills from the Bank of Ghana and it matures after every 3months with 13% interest rate. The interest with the principal is paid to the holder with a cheque/draft of Bank of Ghana payable with any of the approved banks in Ghana. In most cases, holders of this bills do not come for their interests as a result of deaths, transfer, lack of information and mismanagements /liquidations incase of foreign companies. As a result of this development, I have a lot of accumulated interests on some abandoned bills for so many years. These interests has been floating in our system and I have been looking for a very respected businessman who lives and work abroad, whom I can use as th...

Blogger has a "Mail to Blog" feature that allows you to email postings. Since I've decided it's a bad idea to post from my office (call me paranoid) this is a cool feature. In addition, one can (supposedly) post from cellphone, though I've not quite figured that out yet. This is my test post; if it works well, I may be posting more often. And since I can send email from my GMail account using my cell, that's another option, too. Now I have no excuse, other than my own laziness, for keeping this up-to-date.

Inching along as part of the angry red snake of tail lights stretching for miles that is my the daily commute, I looked to the east and saw a rainbow arcing up from the countryside, fading into the clouds. It made me wonder: are there rainbows in hell, too?

One of the cool things about having kids is when they turn you on to something you might have missed on your own and vice versa. The other day my 15 year old told me about Pandora , a new music streaming music service that lets you build custom channels by giving it artists or songs. It then plays music that meets your preferences, based on attributes your song or artist has. This is based on work by the Music Genome Project . While not infallible (it can't read your mind), Pandora is still pretty cool. The player is web browser/Flash-based and should work on any platform that support Flash. I've tested on Windows (XP) and Linux (Mandriva 10 and SUSE 10). Presumably MacOS will function as well. The music selector does a reasonably good job. You can add additional sample songs/artists to fine tune the criteria used to select. It tends to play a good mix of the fairly well known and somewhat obscure (nice from my point of view), and occasionally makes some interesting connectio...

I do my best to avoid taking delight in the misery of others. It's an ugly pastime, and you never know when the tables will turn. The Germans have a word for this urge (they always do): Schadenfreude . Still there are times it's hard not to smirk. For instance the other day I crawled along the freeway, finally exiting, only to have a upwardly mobile MBA type in his BMW convertible whip around and cut me off, his hair and power tie flapping in the breeze. I could swear he smiled at me, the bastard. Suddenly the police cruiser that had been crawling along behind me flipped his lights on and pulled him over. BAM. I wasn't sure exactly what Beemer had done, but what ever it was, he was busted. I smiled back as I passed him. Schadenfreude. And so it was with the news that a jury in Houston found Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling guilty of a total of 29 criminal counts in the Enron debacle. Lay, who had cultivated an avuncular public persona, apparently came off as an arrogant a...

I'm making slow but steady progress on the rewrite. I'm about half way through the ~400 pages. It's interesting how much it has changed. One previously secondary character (a heavy at that) has become a sympathetic primary character. I'm deleting vast sections and writing whole new scenes. This is a good thing. The issue before long is going to be that I'm going to have to re-write the first third of the book -- again. But again, this is a good thing. Complicating all this is that I've started painting again and have let my charming bride tell people I'm having an "open studio" at the end of the summer. So that I don't publicly humiliate myself by having nothing new to show, I'm busy making art AND writing. If only I didn't have to work, I'd be a pretty successful person. My writers' group has universally judged the title --"Eye Pee" -- to be sucky. So I'm trolling around for a NEW title. So far, "No Resistanc...

I saw The DaVinci Code the other day. It wasn't near as bad as the reviews would have you believe--really--although I can see how if you were a member of Opus Dei you might have cause to be pissed. Or if you were into self-flagellation. The Local Paper (nameless, thank you) said that NOAH (the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation) took exception to the fact that the Killer Monk (played by Paul Bettany) was portrayed as an albino, and this portrayal continues a trend in recent years to give albinos a bad rap . Anyone remember the albino twins in the Matrix Reloaded? When I was in high school, I had a classmate who was an albino, as was her younger brother. Both had extremely poor eyesight, one of the hallmarks of albinism. As I recall, the major impediment to her social life was her lack of fashion sense, not pigmentation. A co-worker was aghast that I went to see DaVinci Code at all and said he wouldn't be caught dead in the theater. Sort of the way my wife ...

So I had my annual review yesterday at work. For the record, everybody, EVERYBODY hates these--reviewers and reviewees. I went in not expecting much, based on my previous mid-year review. Long story short: I got the equivalent to a C+. All the traits that I value in myself (my honesty, my creativity, my ability to get along with people) I got high marks in. My downfall was in the areas in which I put little stock. My supervisor, who I manage to more or less get along with, is fairly clueless when it comes to what motivates me. So I guess in a certain sense it was a fair review. I came out of it feeling annoyed. I thought about my annoyance with my review and came to an interesting conclusion. I had been given a gift. I had been reminded of something I've known for a long time: despite being able to do what I do fairly well, I need to be doing something else. My department, for all the lip service it pays to things like this, has very little use for creativity. Our new CIO announc...

It's late and I need to go to bed, but I'm doing a long boring process for work that I'm waiting to end. What better time that have a Novel Update? I'm at close to the halfway point, which is misleading since I'll need to start on the second revision as soon as the first revision is complete. Once I finish the first revision (and a little on the second revision) I may be willing to let some people outside my writer's group see what I've written. People like my charming but demon-of-an-editor wife. I've seen what she does to my children's school work. No way is she seeing this in it's current state. My goal continues to be to finish first revision by end of summer. Ha!

It started because I was saving myself for Kinky. The Primaries are over, and I didn't vote (by design) so I could sign the Kinky Friedman petition. I mentioned this (don't ask me why) to my clever 14 year old, and he couldn't understand why I couldn't vote in the Democratic Primary and STILL sign Kinky's petition. I went through this loooong explanation, to which he would periodically insist "But what if I want to vote for the best qualified etc." You know, the ticket splitter's argument. To which I would say (again) "You can -- IN the general election." It took a while until I got across the idea that the Primary was for the Parties to choose their respective candidates, and if you didn't want to declare yourself in a particular party, you voted in the general election. He finally had an "ah ha" moment (that or he got sick of listening to me trying to teach him civics). He probably now understands it better than a large per...

My youngest just had his first guitar lesson with his new teacher yesterday; his former teacher decided he no longer wanted to make the hour drive from Dallas just to teach a handful of students (can't say that I blame him). New teacher is a UNT grad student working on his Master's degree, studying jazz guitar. Got a call after the lesson and I asked him how it went. "Good," he said. "Ian is cool. He taught me inversions." "Inversions?" "Inverted chords. They sound really cool." That night I had him show me inversions. It was fascinating watching his skinny nimble fingers, now almost as long as mine, fretting the chords. He sounded good. Inverted.

Ann Coulter, right-wing America's fav bimbo shows her funny side when she suggests poisoning a sitting Supreme Court justice . Ha Ha, Ann. You're killing 'em!

Bumper sticker seen on the way home: "If you're not appalled yet, you're not paying attention."