The Daily Diversion Archive For July, 2002

Monday July 1, 2002

It was so hot this weekend...

It was so hot this weekend my brain actually melted and ran out my ears.

It was in the mid to upper 90s here with very high humidity and dew points in the 60s. Uncomfortable is the word I'd describe it with. Stick, sweaty, nasty, hot, hellishly hot. It was hot.

See, I told you my brain melted.

All the same, we ended up doing a few things around the house. Saturday morning was spent going out, coming in and getting some yard work done. Then, for the afternoon's fun, we sat in the air-conditioned bedroom watching a promotional DVD from Mercury about their new hopped up variant of the Grand Marquis called The Marauder. I want. I don't have to have it, but I want it.

The DVD contained a Speedvision advertainment special on the past and present Marauders. I didn't know that Mercury was somewhat of a performance division even back in the '50s. Anyway, the shows were cool, but the DVD didn't have much interactive stuff on the Marauder itself. If you hit the Marauder website linked above, and have the requisite Flash and/or Shockwave plug-ins installed in your browser, you get to play inside and out of a new Marauder. I certainly wish they had burned the website video stuff onto the DVD. Oh well. I really think that Mercury is preaching to the crowd here with this DVD, but I also think it's a darn good idea. Not everyone sends you a free DVD.

I've been on the Marauder bandwagon ever since they started making noise about releasing it. It's a cool idea. Since they seem to be the only US automaker making a full-size rear-wheel drive sedan, you'd think they'd like to make a little hay with it, no? Figure it this way: If you wanted a new full-size sedan with a V8 engine, and didn't want the Mercury or Ford versions, your only options would be to buy a Lincoln, or go for either a BMW or Mercedes-Benz. By the way, you will also spend roughly twice what you would spend on a nicely equipped Mercury on either of those two options.

Granted, you'd get a stellar car, with performance built-in, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that my '97 Grand Marquis is certainly no slouch. It really all boils down to performance and status. The Marauder is about performance. The car guys down at the local tire shop all want it. The guy who's dad built a street-rod in his spare time as a hobby and still loves cars like his dad does wants that performance. The guys in the outer suburbs who pull down six figures want the status. I predict that Ford has another winner on its hands. Now only if they can secure the IROC race with it.

In other news, Sarah and I got new cell phones on Friday. We have the same numbers. We "upgraded" our phones for a couple of reasons: First, Sarah wanted something smaller than her 2 1/2 year old Nokia 5160. Second, my 2 1/2 year old Nokia 5160 was starting to exhibit the random shut-offs these phones get after the case wears and the battery pack starts to slide around. I really can't whine too much. I would never have guessed that it would have lasted this long anyway. It will be nice to be able to say I wore out a cell phone. Better still is that I never had to get a second battery.

Anyway, our old phones were getting rather tired and we both had our wish lists. We decided on a pair of Motorola V.60t phones. I'd link to Motorola, but they just don't have a site dedicated to their particular phone lines. Their phones are displayed according to their call plans/networks as opposed to a page dedicated to their phone's features. Annoying. Anyway, they're super-small, have good battery life, have voice dialing (love it) and have some other features that could prove to be useful. I never thought I'd buy a flip-phone, but I now have one. Things change.

Last but not least on the agenda for today is the new collection of tunes on the site. Go grab some.

Tuesday July 2, 2002

Science fiction on my belt: "Sarah," I say into my phone. My phone dials my wife. Now if only it were a wrist watch...

I listened to the Twins game last night. Instead of using the radio waves like a normal human being, I used my paid-for streaming audio app. Why? I was too lazy to switch the receiver to the AM setting. I also watched the game summary with mlb.com's gametime app. This one's freeware and it does a nice job of charting the pitches, presenting the players and tracking the plays. It's even faster than the streaming audio. That was a trip.

I've also been taking up my free time reading The Atlantic's article on dismantling the mess left by the collapsing World Trade Center Towers. The article is Gooooood. That magazine is pretty darn cool, I must say.

I'm still playing with the idea of a content management system. I've downloaded Moveable Type (MT) and I've started to play with it. It looks good. If I decide to to go with it, this site could start taking responses to my silly daily entries. I guess we'll see...

Wednesday July 3, 2002

I went to the Twin Cities Wireless Users Group (TCWUG) meeting last night. I learned a lot. I got a lot of questions answered and this is what it's all about. I also ran into Carl, someone I know from TCLUG . It's good to know that there are other folks out there with similar interests.

Friday July 5, 2002

I took yesterday off because of the 4th. I spent most of the day doing the busy little chores that have stacked up for the better part of the early, hotterthanhell summer. The day was warm and dry. The sound of fireworks was everywhere. It was pleasant. More please.

Last night we went to one of our friend's place for a party. She lives in view of the Mississippi and right down the river from downtown Minneapolis. It's a neat place to be on the 4th because from her deck, we could see no less than 9 fireworks displays. It was really wild. The downside is that we are a good bit away from all of them and so the noise and proximity aren't what you'd want from a fireworks display, but then again, there's no mosquitoes. Or other people.

It was an odd crowd. Most people there would have been considered odd by just about the entire population of the U.S. for one reason or another. I hadn't known many of these people for very long, but some of them I look forward to seeing every time we go to this person's house. The others I don't care for very much. They're too much.

I think I must have been one of maybe 4 people at the party that didn't have a piercing or a tattoo. I've played with the idea of getting a tattoo, but when I think of it, I can't seem to find a design that I would be as happy with 60 years from now as I would be with now. Yes, I don't know what I'll be like in 60 years, but I have a feeling that a tattoo acquired today would look like a big blue blotch 60 years hence. On the same note, I can't fathom getting any kind of commercial logo tattooed on my skin because companies change, they stop producing products and they move sports teams. I'm not ethnically enlightened, so Irish, Celtic, African, Chinese, Japanese and Maori icons and shapes don't appeal to me. I really don't know my heritage. Northern European to be sure, but what else mixed in is really quite unknown.

Add to all this the fact that I nearly passed out the last time someone stuck a needle in me and you get someone who isn't likely to get a tattoo any time soon.

I'm not even going to go into why people want a tattoo. It's just something I don't understand. I'm good with that, really.

Piercings, at least for me, are right out as well. I can not fathom why anyone would want anything further than the socially acceptable piercings of the ears. First, there's the needle thing for me again. Bad. Second, when I see someone with a ton of metal shit in their face, it instantly triggers a switch deep inside my head that essentially puts the mute on anything that person has to say. If you have a facial piercing, I'm sorry, but I can't take anything you say seriously. I've even found that I have a hard time hearing folks like that. I'm distracted by the sight of a shiny thing where shiny things should not be. I guess I would be interested in hearing why someone would do that to their face, but someone without facial piercings would have to tell me. I wouldn't be able to listen carefully enough to someone who had a facial piercing.

And then there's tongue piercings.

I don't get it.

I have yet to hear a valid reason for anyone to pierce their tongue.

Give yourself a speech impediment? Damage your teeth and/or dental work? Force people you talk to to think about why you did such a silly thing instead of having them listen to you?

If anyone can give me a clue here, drop me a line.

That was a big digression. To pull it back to the party, it seemed that a lot of people there were very into being vegetarian, tattoos, piercings and other alty-lifestyle choices. Fine. The think that got me a bit irate was when we pulled up in our car, someone got all huffy about a joke my wife cracked about the car. The fireworks display was going on in downtown Minneapolis, and we were standing outside watching it and getting eaten by the bugs. As I pulled up in the car, Sarah offered to let anyone who wanted watch the fireworks in the air-conditioned car. A person waiting with the rest of the people said something to the effect of, "Well, if you're going to sit here in your car, we're leaving." and with that, left. My wife was joking about sitting in the car, but not so much that we wouldn't have done it after pulling away from the group if someone would have wanted to. The fact that the alty-girl had so little tolerance for humor, a big car and air-conditioning pretty much laid bare the fact of the matter: We offended her with our car and our approach to dealing with our surroundings.

You know, I'm sure the outdoors are fun. I remember them to be. However, the outdoors is often too hot or cold for my liking. Sometimes there are bugs that bite. Sometimes you get a sunburn. The outdoors are great, but to me they should be treated like something else I like but treat with great respect: Beer. Beer should be taken in moderation, and so to me should the outdoors be taken.

Now that I have a house, a couple of cars and make a fairly decent wage, I believe that my environment should be controlled and comfortable. Air-conditioning is a must during the summer. Heat is a must during the winter. It's as simple as that.

Sure, I don't get out and run around as much as I used to. I've put on a few extra pounds because of it, too. Frankly, my hobbies aren't exactly physically taxing either. So as my environment becomes more comfortable, I find it harder to come up with reasons I should be out in the outdoors getting bitten up by bugs, getting sunburned and sweating. I read books, geek around on the computers and surf the internet. It's not wrong, it's a reward for having a comfortable life. Perhaps that's the gist of the whole matter. You start to have money, you start to get fat. Apply that to the party guests, and it seems that the people who own houses and have steady jobs seem to be spreading a bit in the middle. Those who don't are thin and healthy looking and, for the most part, have tattoos, too. Hmmm.

I've said enough. Suffice it to say it was good to see our host and a couple of other of the guests. Particularly nice to see was the fellow who shall go nameless, but who talked to me about Tarot cards.

Monday July 8, 2002

We're going to have visitors this week. Sarah's folks are coming to town. We're sincerely hoping the weather is a bit more pleasant than it's tended to be in the last couple of weeks. All I'm asking is for dew points in the lower 60s. The heat I can handle.

I'm going to try to sell Sarah's dad on wireless ethernet. It shouldn't be hard. He'll bring his cool little laptop and I'll slap in the card and it will be bliss. We'll probably send him home with an access point.

The balance of this weekend was spent fixing the small things, tidying up and trying to stay cool. The latter was the hardest part, really. On Saturday night we went to our friends' place to have dinner with their extended family. Their whole fam damnily was around for their baby's christening. It's fun to meet your pals' parents. After dinner, me and the Public Radio Guy sat around outside and shot squirrels with a wrist rocket. We drank some beer and lit off some of our stash of fireworks. It ended up being a pretty darn nice evening.

On Sunday, in pursuit of more of the little things that needed to be done before our company arrives, we went shopping at the local strip mall hell. I wandered into two of my least favorite geekstuff retailers and was reminded yet again how much I hate commission-based salesjerks.

Stop one was the Circuit City I ranted about before. Sunday, instead of having too few people on, the place was crawling with guys in vests, shoving their card in my face. I think I took three cards while I was there. I think I know how business cards work in places like that. It's the, "HE'S MINE!" thing. "If you need anything or need any questions answered, just give me a shout." Whatever, dude. I asked one particularly annoying guy a highly technical question about a laptop I was looking at. He had pretty much tromped up to me with his card in the air. He asked me in a tone of voice usually reserved for the stupid or the hard of hearing if he could answer any questions I might have about this fine (yes, he added the word fine) laptop. He didn't know the answer and I asked him to find someone who did. Rude is as rude does. The really funny thing was, he didn't return.

The more I go there, the less I want to go back.

The next place was CompUSA. Not the same place I ranted about about a year ago. A different one. Anyway, here I was left largely alone. That's good. The only person that came up to me was a sales guy who asked me where I got my cool sideways holster for my Motorola V60t phone. I told him that it came with it. He took his holster off, turned the phone cradle 90 degrees to the left and thanked me. I think he was embarrassed a bit, but I could see he was completely jazzed to find that the thing he really wanted he already had. Life sometimes throws you a bonus. I recognize he was a fellow technophile/geek and to a geek there's nothing quite like finding a new feature on a piece of equipment you own to make you a happy camper.

I'm considering adding TV to the main machine downstairs. I'm thinking that most of what I need is just a tuner card, but what else should I get in the meantime. Time to do more research.

Life is research.

Friday July 12, 2002

It's been a busy past few days. We've been busy visiting people with Sarah's folks, I played softball last night and we're gearing up for a big weekend. Draining.

I know it's old news, but I must say something about this:

A TIE?!?

What kind of stupid-ass thing is that?

I'm disgusted. Bud Selig has turned the Major League All-Star game into something with as much sporting value as All-Star Wrestling. I know that's a slap against ASW, but it had to be said. Worse, he feels "sorry" about how the game ended. I bet he does. Major League Baseball stepped on its own dick again on Tuesday night with the help of the of the All-Star Managers and Bud Selig.

Much as I want to hang this ALL on Selig's shoulders and then kick him in the pants, I really can't. A lot of the blame has to go to the nitwits who managed the two sides. They didn't hold a pitcher in reserve in case of extra innings. Nice job, guys. Fuckups. Yes, it's a shame that all the All-Star pitchers wouldn't get to pitch if one or two were held in reserve, but how many games happen in a season of baseball when all the position players and all the pitchers get into the game? Precisely zero. The All-Star game should be played like any other game, except no pitcher should be allowed to bat. That's when the managers would make their substitution.

What irritates me even more is that the fans don't even get to pick the pitchers. What makes these idiot managers think that they HAVE to play all the pitchers?

It's painful to watch MLB writhe and struggle under the absolutely criminal management it presently has. I'm not talking about the player managers. I'm talking about the team managers, directors, officers and owners. I'd have to say that these guys are worse than OPEC. It's a cartel. It's a bunch of guys taking our National Pastime and running it as a business. If you guys want to run this thing like a business, then let's get rid of the anti-trust exemption. If you guys want to run it like the National Pastime, then DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE.

I hear strike talk. I hear lockout proposals. I heard contraction words this spring and now I'm hearing it again. I love the way the situation changes. This spring, MLB was thinking about getting rid of two teams largely because their respective towns wouldn't build them new stadiums. It was said that they needed new stadiums so that they could better compete economically. Pretty much everybody who heard this argument knew it was a basket of shit. It didn't make any sense. Nobody will ever be able to convince me that all ball clubs lose money. I know they make mad loot through MLB products, parking and food concessions and God knows what else. Now we hear of two clubs that are in financial dire straits. Guess what? To absolutely no-one's surprise, the financially strapped clubs are NEITHER of the contraction candidates of this spring.

HAH!

HAH HAH HAH

Caught you, you bullshitters!

Lo and behold, it's the Devil Rays and the Diamondbacks. Frankly, I'm mystified as to why it would be those two clubs. They're expansion teams. They have new, "Financially Competitive" stadiums. One was in the World Series last year. It doesn't make sense. Unless someone's lying about the financial climate of MLB. Could that be, Mr. Selig? Could it be that you lied to Congress Mr. Selig? I'm not saying you did, but it certainly looks like you may have put a nice spin on the truth. Either that or you're the Kenneth Lay of MLB.

Please, Mr. Selig. Before you and your sort hurt MLB even more than you already have, step down. Put someone who cares about the game in there. How about Rudy Guilliani? How about any former President of the United States of America? How about anyone but you?

Tuesday July 16, 2002

My wife and I went to run some errands last night. I went to the sports store and the computer store and ended up only getting the thing I went for in the first place. A bat. When we returned to the house, we both had the idea to take a trip to our local Dairy Queen for a treat. We drove past the house and took a left 4 blocks down the way. The DQ is right there.

It's an inner-city DQ. It's not on a major arterial street. It's just sitting there in the middle of the block almost out of place when compared to the big stand-alone stores in the burbs and the ones in strip malls. This one is small, almost assuredly privately owned and perpetually surrounded by the local neighborhood's kids.

Naturally, since the DQ is located in a more borderline neighborhood than ours just a few blocks away, there are tons more unsupervised kids here. The adults are outnumbered and bunches of young children with no shirts on can be seen pedaling their bikes around the DQ. They are probably hoping for money to fall out of the sky so that they can get a Dilly Bar. Whatever the fact, it was a warm, still night and there wasn't much of a line.

We got out of the car and got in line. As we were standing there, a couple of young kids pulled up on their bikes right behind us. The smaller one of the two pulled up very close to me, but not menacingly. He was fidgeting his bike and talking non-stop with his buddy. His buddy seemed to be tuning the little fella out. I can't blame him. The little kid was talking trash about some injustice that must have recently happened to them. Something about wasting the muufuuka, and if he had a guu he'd have popped dat guy. You get the picture.

Anyway, the din from behind me was not worth paying attention to so I decided what I would have this fine evening. Then it happened.

The little urchin yelled at the top of his lungs, OHHH, DAT CAR'S GOT GOLD RIMS!!!!

The kid then proceeded to
lose
his
shit
over this shitty Camaro full of G's with cheap-looking gold wire rims. I don't think they were even real wire rims. They just looked that way. They were gold, it's true, but never in my life did I think that gold rims were worth even a second look. They're rims. The person who owned whatever car they were rolling under must have had the mistaken impression that gold rims look good. Whatever the fact, this kid loosing his shit over seeing gold rims was just flat-out odd.

He damn near fell off his bike trying to get up on the seat to pedal over to look at these wondrous golden wheels. His pal, shaken from his reverie, seemed somewhat excited as well over the prospect of seeing gold rims. However, he didn't go nuts. He just followed his excitable friend over toward the now parking car.

The little kid was still yelling GOLD RIMS at the top of his lungs as he went around the side of the building. I looked at my wife who validated my response to this whole scene. It was a feeling not so much of surprise, but of disbelief. That this kid could go so completely nuts over something so mundane was a sign. A sign that this kid had absolutely no impulse control. The wires are bare as they say.

Anyway, we got our ice cream and got back in the car. The kid was over by the driver's side of the gold rimmed car talking to the driver. The driver had this bemused look on his face. It was kinda like, "Thanks, little dude for thinking my car is cool." and "What the hell is wrong with this kid."

So I tried Office XP recently. I really could care less. The voice recognition software is cool, but my laptop just doesn't have the processor or memory to do much with it. They've also, in the effort of trying to make Outlook less of a virus target, effected the change of disallowing almost all attachments. Nice. Worse, they've started using the preview pane's header bar as a place to put messages. They display stuff there you don't really care about, and now some dipshits in some of the news groups I subscribe to have started putting messages in that pane.

Boy, that's not annoying.

Anyway, now I have to put up with annoying-ass comments by these over-zealous dopes in the header bar. Gee, I can't wait for the next message from the newsgroup. "Caution, Outlook is a hotbed for viruses. Go here for alternatives..." Cute. I liken this to someone building their first web page and thinking marquees and flashing icons are cool. It doesn't take long for most folks to realize they're not and hopefully these guys will get the hint that I don't want to be preached at that they don't like my email client. Worse, one guy even yelled at me saying I had a lot of nerve asking the whole list to tolerate my crappy email client without even saying please. That one kinda chapped my ass, really. Suddenly I have to ask permission to use a certain email client? On an OS-agnostic list? I have to ask permission to stop people from adding insulting messages to their X-headers that they probably had to go out of their way to put there in the first place?

Okay...

Dear list email client nazi,
Would you be so kind as to stop adding stupid comments to your X-headers to the emails you post to the list? It's really not something I or anyone else wants to see. It's puerile. It's silly. It's a troll. Since Outlook is pretty much the only client I know of that displays these messages by default, it's also spoiling for a fight. This is the kind of conduct that reduces useful lists to flamewars. Flamewars on listservs are so 1997. Would you, while considering my request to quit with the dumbshit X-headers, also consider growing up? This isn't junior high. Your rebellion against all that's bad and Microsoft isn't needed here. Most folks on the list either already know M$ sucks, or couldn't care less. Take it off the list, please. As long as I'm asking your permission to use a sucky email client on the listserv, can I ask one more thing of you? Could you please step in front of a speeding bus? There's a good chap.

I feel my time on that particular list is drawing rapidly to an end.

Thursday July 18, 2002

I had a terrible 20 minutes yesterday. I was driving home when a rock came out of nowhere and broke the windshield on the Sable. I couldn't even see where the rock came from. One thing I do know: It was traveling far too quickly for it to be thrown by a person. It had some serious speed on it. I'm sure glad I wasn't riding the bike.

I drove home, called my insurance guy and found out that I didn't put glass coverage on the wagon. Suddenly, visions of winged twenty dollar bills flying out of my wallet flashed through my head. It's gonna cost me about $260 to fix it. Grrr....

On to the next thing. When I got in the house, I thought the trash might have been out a bit long. I packed it up and grabbed a couple of other things and set off for the back yard to dump the trash and to let the dog out. Boo had been acting rather oddly and I didn't associate his behavior with what was to come next. I stepped into the biggest doggie prize I've ever seen on the landing of our stairs out back. So here I am, arms full of trash, a dog who had been trying to say "I'm sorry" trying to get around me to get outside, and standing in dog poop.

It took me a looong time to clean my shoe, toss out the pooped up carpet, clean up the mess and finally get both the dog and the trash outside. It had not been a nice 20 minutes.

Friday July 19, 2002

Thank God it's Friday.

Not much going on this weekend. I'm going to be going to the dump with the trash from our old fence. That'll be nice to get out of our hair. It'll also be nice to get the truck out of the backyard. That'll let the dog have more room to play.

I won't be posting much in the next couple of weeks. Nick and I are moving our blogs to Moveable Type. Mostly it's for the hell of doing it, but there's also a real need to organize my archives and to learn more about XML, RSS feeds and othersuch. I expect to take a couple of weeks with this project, so service here will be spotty at best. Be on your guard for the site being broken, odd looking pages and what not else. Depending on the load it puts on the server and the DSL connection, I may open up the site for comment posting so all you out there on the internet can practice your blogging chops by posting to the comment forum.

True, this will make this site somewhat less of a single person effort, but I'm OK with that. I'm still doing this for the hell of it and I don't particularly care which way it goes. This way, the updates will be nearly every day--if not by me, by the people posting comments.

Another thing to look for in the coming weeks is a best beer contest. I'm in the process of acquiring the beer for a 16 beer, 8 judge shootout. The format of the contest will be based roughly on the format I saw on dack.com back when he was not blogging on the war. If you remember it, cool. If not, hit google's cache or the WayBackMachine at archive.org to go have a look.

Tuesday July 23, 2002

This week has turned out busy, but overly so. We've been planning a bunch of stuff that's going to happen in the fall and pondering just what we're going to do about vacation. That's about all, really.