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...