Please, just the hit singles

I've only had time to really listen to and review two recently: Joe Jackson - Volume 4 and Jane's Addiction - Strays.

It's been a good year for music...

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What's he building in there?

I was reviewing the home improvement projects done in the past year, and those looming in the near future, as I struggled to wake up this morning. I noted that the vinyl cove base wasn't really holding very well. I put some the cove base on in the middle of winter, some during fall when it was warmer. The parts done in the fall are doing just fine. I'm going to theorize that the mean temperature should remain above about 60 until the cove base has properly set. I come from a place with a very different climate from St. Louis. My people have 87 words for "sun", but only one for snow: Tahoe. That's a joke, son.

I'm planning several large projects for the next few months. Finish the kitchen cabinets. Finish the utility room wall (tile around the catboxes, texture the wall). And possibly build the new desk I designed. There will probably be a few baby related ones as well ;)

I'm wearing new underwear. Just thought you should know.

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It's fast, it's flexible, just feel those frets

Python 2.3 final is out. I see myself doing a lot of compiling and experimenting tomorrow. I wonder if _socket has been renamed again, just to keep us on our toes?

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Baby you can drive my car

While driving to the gym, there was a car driving fairly erratically. Jumping lanes, speeding up and slowing down a lot, etc. The sign on the back of the car was Missouri School of Driving (or some such), but there was only one person in the car. Either they let the students drive with no instructor, or the quality of their instructors goes a long way towards explaining the insanely bad driving I've been seeing of late.

As I've noted in several blogs, the whole "Hunting Bambi" thing was a hoax. And the Vegas DA's office will be prosecuting, I'm sure.

Check out the STL version of craiglist at saintlist.

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I'm old school, I'm like an old fool

If you are a guy in St. Louis and need a good haircut I have the place for you. Southampton Barber Shop on Hampton. It's an old time barber shop (it's been there as a working barber shop since WWII). Original chairs, guys who've been working there for 30 years, and a steady stream of regular customers. Anyone who can make my hair look good is worth $11 plus a tip. Cash only, none of that fancy modern credit card stuff. They shave the back of your neck with a straight razor (and your face if you want). I've gotten $50 haircuts at chi-chi salons that weren't as good.

Two of the barbers came back from lunch late while I was getting my hair cut, and one said that the other just talked and talked and talked and that's what took them so long. Warren (my guy) said "Yea, he's the Mouth of the South... City". I laughed, anyway.

The guys there are real conservatives. Not the neofascist "neo-cons" running our country into the ground today. Real conservatives. Small government, lower taxes, take responsibility for your own actions, free market guys. I like them. I don't necessarily agree with their positions, but I respect them. Talk touches on politics, but it's mostly plenty of old talk of cars and planes and family.

If you really want to make a day of it, there's a great used record store on the corner too (Record Exchange).

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I got tha skills to pay the bills

Conversation in the kitchen last night while making the shopping list:

Me: What is liquid hard soap?
Mae: Huh? That's liquid HAND soap.
Me: It says hard.
Mae: It says HAND!
Me: Yea, OK. Because liquid hard soap really doesn't make any sense. I guess my handwriting has gotten worse too since I got into computers.
Mae: Mine really has.
Me: Mine wasn't particularly legible to begin with, but now it's really bad.
Mae: Yea, for me it's been ever since I started programming.
Me: [blank stare]
Mae: I've god mad programming skillz! Woot!
Me: [laughs]
Mae: WOOT! I do!

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So leave a candle in the window, and a kiss upon his lips

We strolled over to Union Station, as is our wont, to patronize Starbucks. There was a line of women snaked out the door and several yards down the mall. We seem to have been invaded by a PartyLite convention. There are a LOT of them. All with their bright neon green messenger bags. Oddly, in the 15 minute we stood in line several of them spoke with us but not one made the slightest move towards trying to promote their products to us. Do they just assume that since we are men we aren't interested in whatever it is they sell (I understand it has something to do with candles, in which case their assumption is correct). The Starbucks employees seemed remarkably stressed. The PartyLite people are here for 10 days. Might want to avoid Union Station for the next few days...

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Just like a prayer

Pat Robertson is launching a prayer offensive with the goal of getting the non-conservative members of the Supreme Court to resign so that the Court will promote Robertson's far right Christian agenda (not that there is any guarantee that they would, but that's what he hopes). The phrase "prayer offensive" strikes me as very odd. Griz notes: " I especially like the picture - looks like he's trying to unjam his colon..."

I posted another entry at Watchblog as well.

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School's out forever

Nice to see that the school board is already doing stupid things. You would think they'd consider the physical plant when deciding which facilities to close. You would think they'd communicate with the people on site. You'd think there would be some transparency of process. No public comment period? I was under the impression that this is a democracy. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Also note, I never thought I'd see the day that I agreed with Ron Paul. However, he has written an amazing piece detailing how the conservative movement has been overrun by the Neo-Cons, which I've been saying for years now. Note that Neo-Con is a semantic equivalent of fascist.

[geeknotes]
When setting up a cron job tto fetchmail from your server every 20 minutes, you may want to pipe cron messages for that job to /dev/null, or you'll get 60 or so emails everyday from cron... [/geeknotes]

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I am an architect, they call me a vulture

Two important things came out of our architecture meeting.

I came in last night and Mike1 was diagramming on the whiteboard in a purple smoking jacket, with a pipe and brandy snifter. And he wasn't wearing pants. So I left. -CuteMatt

We name our machines after physics terms for some reason or another. Gluon, muon, etc. The aforementioned Matt suggested we add "porntron".

We also covered a complete restructuring which supports a mature development process, roundtripping a baseline back from production, and multiple development paths, but those are fairly minor things in comparison.

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That funky monkey

Growlers was a blast. Definitely the most fun I've had in some time. Crackmonkey is just as crazy as you thought. No, he really did not become incontinent, but it was damn funny.

Cybr wants to go back to Guitar Center, and I suppose I can probably be talked into it ;) I wonder if he realizes I'm going to try to talk him into another guitar lesson, primarily for the pained expressions on his face as he fights to position his fingers properly without muting half the strings.

And another thing: For all people rant and rave about the bloat of mozilla, most of the alternatives are pure crap. Galeon's UI is almost unusable, Konqueror is not much better and tries even harder to be all things to all people. Opera isn't bad, but their linux version tends to lag others and I'm impatient. I can't wait for firebird to be stable and support bookmarking tab groups.

Last, but least, through a bizarre confluence of variables, I got a piece of spam yesterday that I actually read. Why? The senders name was that of one of the government managers we're working with and the subject line happened to be the name of one of the projects. Of course, I quickly realized that he wasn't likely to be sending me information about an opportunity to participate in a sales position (read:pyramid scheme). Odd, nonetheless.

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rock the nation take over television and radio station

First up, Frank Rich has a brilliant piece on the hypocrisy of the far right here. Thanks to grover from Watchblog. I just posted the following entry over there:

Michael Savage was fired from MSNBC for saying what he has said dozens of times before. He told a gay person that he hoped they got AIDS and died. Now, this is not a shocking statement coming from someone like him. It's every day conversation. Savage has made a career of being more extreme than Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, David Duke, Richard Mellon Scaife, or any other right wing extremist you can think of. MSNBC hired him with the express intent of out-Foxing Fox, e.g. being more far right and outrageous than Fox. And when they get what they want they fire the guy?

I think a whole lot more heads should roll for this one. Either the strategy as a whole is flawed (which it is, the majority of the country is to the left of Fox, and to the right of FAIR. They're called moderates, and they really do outnumber the left AND the right. And that's how it should be) or they didn't do the most basic background check on who they were hiring (like maybe listening to his radio show or reading his book). C'mon, the only person further to the right in the media today is possibly Ann "If you aren't a conservative Republican then you aren't an American and shouldn't have any rights at all" Coulter.

Fire the whole executive team. Bring in a mix of people from all across the country, show different perspective, maybe even have some balance. Unfortunately the current idea of "balance" in the media is to have a mix of conservative and ultra conservative with the occasional moderate thrown in for flavor (and called a liberal when they really aren't). It is a prime example of how far right this country has gone when Dennis Kucinich is portrayed as a radical leftist. Objectively speaking, he's a solid liberal, not a radical liberal. The fact that he's able to even get his name mentioned in the press is astounding to me.

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These little conversations I have inside my head

(10:46:00) griz: oh look. I have email from "Mr. Slutty"
(10:46:07) rev: lol
(10:46:14) griz: makes me wonder why I thought it was important to change my password so I could get my mail.
(10:46:23) griz: oh - and it's high priority, too!
(10:46:38) rev: that's so damn funny it hurts
(10:47:35) rev: I think I'll make my next password an acronym composed from a haiku about how much the bush administration sucks nuclear weasel penis.
(10:48:06) griz: This one readse like a news headline in some alternate world: "Neton Robinson Dramatically Enhances Orgasms!"
(10:48:19) griz: ROTFLMA
(10:48:24) rev: Have you seen spamku?
(10:48:25) griz: O
(10:48:29) griz: yes
(10:49:36) rev: Huh, it sounds like they are saying that someone with the highly unlikely name of Neton Robinson is good in bed. Really only helps the person that he/she/it sleeps with, doesn't it? And only for that particular encounter. I'm quite sure that he/she/it doesn't scale well.
(10:50:14) griz: well, if all the advertisers are to be believed, their products cause you to scale extremely well...
(10:51:13) rev: As many, many people on /. have noted, if I responded to all the spam I got I'd have a 10 foot penis and 58JJJ breasts.
(10:51:28) rev: Both of which would be rather unwieldly.
(10:52:17) rev: Maybe their real business model is to make money from special support bras and jockstraps...
(10:53:30) griz: no - I think their plan is the much more viable and traditional - make money from stupid people
(10:53:45) rev: Hard to go wrong with that one.

On a side note, I'm reminded of the words of a great philosopher I once knew:

You don't pay me, you don't lay me, get out of my face. -Bobbo

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all the things that I used to know have gone out the window

Cybr came over to pick up a little guitar technique, which was highly entertaining. We went over some basic chords, power chords, and a few other random things, and just generally had fun. And yes, B sucks. I am a truly inept guitar teacher, but he did well in spite of me. I haven't played with any regularity since I started working in computers, and it shows. My technique is awful, I'm sloppy, and I don't remember probably 90% of what I used to know. I pulled out some of the music books over the weekend and stumbled through Attitude Song and Satch Boogie quite painfully, though I did better with Call It Sleep and Always With You, Always With Me. Not as well as I used to play them, but tolerable. Since I started playing again I've mostly just been working on rhythm and playing along with songs and not doing much lead work, but I think I'm going to split my time now between learning bass guitar and regaining my lead chops.

It also reminded me of how much fun I used to have hanging out back in the day and wondering what's happened to everybody. Strangely, none of my friends from high school or college that I still keep in touch with ended up somewhere wildly unexpected. Some of them went even further than I'd thought they would (and I have high expectations of my friends, because I think highly of them. Otherwise, why would I still want to be friends with them?). I think I'm actually the only one who ended up somewhere unexpected, at least from my point of view. And I've certainly ended up with a far better life than I'd have thought.

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I'm tired, tired of playing the game. Ain't it a freakin' shame.

[geekspeak]
I'm really tired of the looks I get when I explain our server configuration to people. It's not my fault! This "architecture" was foisted upon me! I plead innocence! I *know* it's not really failover. Stop laughing at me!

So the httpd is on box one, and the WebSphere Application Server (WAS)* is on box one and two. Round robin prefer local. But the thing is, if box one dies, so does the httpd. So, sure, box two is up and running and working fine, but NO ONE CAN GET TO IT. The webfarm offered to handle load balancing for us at the router, but NOOOOOOO.

And while I'm at it, the idea of "I don't want to ask the client to clarify situation X because I don't want to know" is absurd at best. What you're basically saying is you'd rather be blissfully ignorant of reality and allow the developers to spend months developing an architecture that is fundamentally WRONG. Negligent, lazy, inept, call it what you want, but to me it's simply unprofessional. Of course, if you just model it as many to many then it really doesn't matter if it ends up being one to many, now does it?

*that should really be WSAS, technically, but that's IBM's marketing department for you. [/geekspeak]

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