The Daily Diversion Archive For May, 2002

Tuesday May 7, 2002

We looked at 16 full-size Ford and Mercury sedans. We went to about 15 different dealers to do it. It seems we met about half the used car salesthings in the metro area and what do we have to show for it? An exceptionally nice '97 Mercury Grand Marquis, that's what. We made our deal, got a great loan rate from our Credit Union, and now we're the owners of the third biggest car I've ever owned. 3800lbs of curb weight. 4.8L of V8 under the hood. 200HP and 215 foot pounds of torque to motivate it. The softest suspension this side of the QEII. Yes, it's a monstrosity. When I drive it, I feel like I'm driving on the backs of the poor, downtrodden masses, grinding them into paste beneath the wheels of my new Mileage Disposal Unit. I must say that I could get used to getting what I want when I go shopping for big ticket items.

We've had a pretty good record of late. We got our Visor Deluxes two years ago and they've done great service since then. We got our lovely house for a song and we STILL can't believe we live there. Apart from a bit of difficulty getting a fence installed, we're doing quite well for ourselves.

On a completely different subject, I've found a great way of getting a hold of new music without buying CDs, ripping old ones or spending money. It's so simple, I'm surprised I haven't thought of it before. Since I'm a network security geek at work, I've been doing periodic audits of our employees' computers. I've been finding shitloads of MP3 files. I must say that this unexpected windfall saves me from buying new tunes, and saves the time ripping the CDs I already have. Since they're contraband at work if they're on the network or on a work PC, I pretty much can do with them what I wish.

Cut

Paste

Transfer to the laptop and add them to the library at home.

Who knew it could be so easy?

Better yet, I'm not even stealing the tunes. Well, yes, I sorta am, but I'm actually confiscating them. They're either downloads (BIIIG no-no) or rips of someone's CDs. I'm not taking the original media, and I'm not stealing any of their property. I'm just ridding our network and our PCs of unauthorized file. I win!

I'm sure the 'donors' of these MP3 files would probably take issue with me for getting rid of their hard won MP3 libraries, but I really don't give a shit. They all know the acceptable use policy at work and if they don't, it SHOULD be common sense that you really shouldn't be doing this sort of shit on work PCs. I've probably confiscated 5Gb of MP3 files in the last week alone. At this rate, I'll never have to go the used CD store ever again.

Of course, if I was a country fan, I would be up a creek. However, the stuff I'm getting is some boss new Emo crap, hour long DJ sets and 'hits' directories. I have a 'hits' directory on my laptop--my property, by the way--that's pushing 3gb. The two 'hits' directories I downloaded this last week were 40Mb and 250Mb a piece. They contained lots of '80s shlock, '70s funk and much other stuff. I consider myself quite lucky to have stumbled on this treasure trove of stuff without having to resort to the evil file-sharing stuff the record companies hate so much.

Don't worry, RIAA, I'm on the case!

Thursday May 9, 2002

We're both coming off the grand stress-trip looking for a car was. We're also dealing with the lousy weather, the coming projects and various other things. To say we're really busy is to say the truth.

That's not saying I don't have anything to say. It's just saying that I don't have much time to say it in.

I'm about to be 35. I don't really know what to think about that. I'm not really looking forward to being 35, however, it should be a day just like all the other ones. I don't think I'll even take a day off. I haven't worked a birthday in a while. I guess I could get all mid-life crisis on this occasion, but the fact of the matter is that birthdays just aren't that big a deal. I like to make a big deal over other people's birthday, but I just can't get into my own.

So anyway, that's the deal. No new insight. No sweeping observations. No profound ruminations on a life this long. Nope. Just 35.

However, I do know a bunch of people born in May and I'd like to give a group Happy Birthday shout to all the fellow Taureans out there.

Happy Birthday to Katie, Morgen, Karen, Sarah, Sandy, Mandy, and Mark.

Tuesday May 14, 2002

I got a 19" monitor for my birthday. It was yesterday. It's very nice having that much real estate in front of you. I'm hopelessly addicted to multitasking and I must say that multitasking in a GUI environment with a 15" monitor is a bit hard on the eyes. Add to that the fact that the 15" monitor is getting tired and you can see why I welcome my new 19" with open arms. And a strained back.

My old buddy Mark gave me a shout out yesterday via email. Good to hear from you, fella.

My wife and I went to see Spider-Man on Sunday night. Now there's a fun flick. I wasn't a comic book reader when I was younger so I didn't have a lot of expectations going into the theater. It was a great story and it had some great acting in it. Very worthwhile movie to see.

It did bring up yet another thing to rant about, though. One of the topics I rant about frequently on this site is something I'll call premiuming. Remember how things used to be? Notice how things like candy bar sizes have been getting smaller? Notice how supermarket-grade coffee sucks? Notice how a lot of things that used to be bigger/better functioning/nicer in the past aren't anymore? Premiuming is the act of a company that used to sell an item, selling the item as it used to be at a premium today.

The perfect example of this is candy bars. Snicker's bars in the '70s used to be very large. It wasn't just because I was smaller then, they were a lot bigger. Today, a Snicker bar is kinda small. Having one doesn't induce a diabetic shock on a person and you really can't substitute one for a meal. In fact, they've gotten small enough so that if you want to substitute one for a meal, you have to buy THE KING SIZE bar. The king size bar is probably just a hair bigger than the regular bars used to be. It's sold at a price that's a little less than twice what a regular size bar is sold for. You can buy the regular, but if you want more, you can buy the way things used to be for a lot more money.

The same thing goes for coffee. Store-bought coffee didn't always suck. A while back there was some kind of coffee shortage and the prices went up. At the same time, to keep the prices down, these companies started substituting less than premium beans in the coffee. Eventually the coffee started to suck and the price was still high. Want a good cup of coffee? Now you have to go to a coffee shop to get it. And you get to pay through the nose for it.

Which all brings me back to my original point. The movie. We went to a brand-new cinagogolplex out in the 'burbs. It had what's called "Stadium Seating." Stadium seating places the chairs on an upward slope so that it feels like you're sitting in a stadium. There are also nicer seats as well. This is the "new way" of going to see a movie. Sorry folks. This is just the movie industry returning to an idea that worked pretty well in the old days. The old Suburban World theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis could well have been the inspiration for this newfangled "Stadium Seating" idea. Back when it was just showing movies, (it's now some sort of eat and watch kind of place, if it's even still open) you bought your ticket and went into the theater. Once inside, you could walk up the stairs to the raised back-end of the theater, or you could walk down the sloping floor towards the screen. This was exactly the same design as the new theater. Of course, it was a LOT more expensive to go to the new theater, but that's progress, right?

Having said all that, the theater was certainly an improvement over the big-box cement-slab movie theaters of the outer 'burbs. The only other things to complain about were the fact that these suburban idiots saw fit to bring their young children to see a movie that was certainly not appropriate for their age. The previews (8 of them!) were also not appropriate in the slightest. The last thing to gripe about was the hired help at the theater. The person selling tickets behind the glass wall never even looked at my wife when she bought her tickets. The young man who took our tickets only mumbled the direction to our theater. So soft and hard to understand was he that I had to ask him 3 times which way we should go. Speak up! Finally, the young man behind the concession stand was obviously out-gunned by the machines he was required to operate. Apparently the pictograms on the cash register didn't look enough like the vended product for him to ring up the right item. After waiting in line for 7 minutes, watching him make change (he couldn't count), fill a popcorn bucket (he did upsell the size like I'm sure he's required to do), and fill the wrong kind of pop in a vat-sized cup that he at least half- filled with ice, I left and went back to wait for the movie to start. The guy didn't look retarded, but he sure was slow.

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

As stated in the I'm thinking bracket to the left, LGF is a darn good weblog/warblog. Apart from being the home of the anti-idiotarian organization, it does a darn good job at picking apart the totally loony Saudi Arabian press.

Here is an article that proves these people don't know their head from a hole in the sand. For those of you who are too lazy to click on it, let me introduce you to the wonder that is the Saudi Arabian take on current events.

Apparently, they've got their undies in a bundle over our President calling for the world to renounce suicide bombings. Okay, here's a statement that anyone with a functioning brain can agree with. Sure, bombings have their place, but the whole culture of martyrdom that the Islamo-fascists seem bound and determined to exterminate themselves with is just idiocy at its most nihilistic.

So what we have here is a Stanford-educated "Doctor" ranting about how bad it is that our President has called on the rest of the world to renounce suicide bombings. He's actually pissed that our President said that suicide bombings are bad. He goes on to state that even though Israel is a sovereign nation, we somehow have complete control over them. He goes on to equivocate our relation to Israel to the lawyers convicted for their dog killing someone else. Apparently we are the master, and Israel is the dog. I think that if this person was truly a doctor and not some nutjob, he would have enough of a notion of international relations to know that what he's referring to is the sort of relation we have towards, say, Puerto Rico, or Delaware. Since Israel is not one of the 50 states and numerous possessions of this country, he should know he's just blowing wind.

The gist of this oddjob's rant is that our calling for a halt and a renunciation of the practice of suicide bombing is taking the pride and the hope away from the everyday Ahab-on-the-street.

"A billion of Muslims are being turned into raging volcanoes by this disrespect: Docile bookworms, redundant bureaucrats, pregnant women usually preoccupied with their pains, doctors busy cutting up humanity for repair work, and countless others usually preoccupied with their lives, are now seething. Is this sanity on the part of policy-makers ruling the world? Caligula's madness never really reached outside Rome itself for obvious reasons. Now CNN can deliver its warped audio-visual accounts to the world."

Doctor Freakout then goes on to say that because our President stated that Arafat betrayed his people (which he did--I don't think anyone wants to send their children to die for any cause for which acceptable solutions had already been proposed), that he should go read some history before dictating how the people of the occupied territory should be governed. Fine, read some of our history. We were put here in this unique position on earth to act as the beacon of light of Democracy and Freedom. Because of it we are strong and committed to ending wrongs as they exist. Encouraging children to kill themselves for a cause that doesn't need that kind of act is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong and no amount of bellowing will ever change that. This man your people "elected" has elected to take his cause straight into the toilet of suffering and death. He's not ready for democracy or freedom because that would mean an end to the state of war and a beginning to the questioning of his authority. Which, by the way, free people not only get to do, but are required to do or they lose their freedom. Arafat has no interest in this because he is far too deep into his act to ever change. But I digress.

Doctor Mohammed T. Al Rasheed then goes one step beyond:

"You [The U.S.] Will Vanish, But We Will Remain"
"In case you do not have the time or stamina, let me tell you this: we are as old as the stone that Jesus walked on, pure as the water Muhammad was given to wash for prayer from, and severe as the laws Moses brought down from the Mount. You will vanish, but we will remain... the world will advance to oblivion, but our date palms and our olive trees will survive your nuclear bombs. And, somehow, something of us will remain. You have it written, not in Holy Scripture, but on the green back you so adore, especially on Christmas Eve: In God We Trust."

What the fuck? Whatever you're smoking, you'd better lay off some, OK dude? Okay, first thing: We are not nor will we ever be afraid of you. Cut off the oil. Just go ahead. I bet we waltz on over and take the stuff. What will you do to stop us? You're flying our planes and fighting with our equipment. Do you think we'd be selling you spares for these things? There's no water in your country. Where would be the first place we struck to make good and damn well sure we had your attention?

Sure, you're as old as the stone. Your heads seem to be made of the stuff. As for being pure, you know that's patently false. If it were true, you'd be listening to your real clerics rather than the equivalents of our nutjobs such as Jerry Folwell and the like. They can say whatever they like, but you don't have to take their word for it.

As for us vanishing, don't hold your breath. Wait, go on ahead. Here's hoping you're so willful that you die. You do have it right that the world will advance. However, oblivion is not where we're going. The future will belong to those of us who willfully advance, not, as you say, remain. You and your wack-ass beliefs will be left in the past as they have already left you. The rest of the world treats women as equals, why not you? The rest of the world eats pigs, why not you? The rest of the world values the lives of its citizens, why don't you? Most of the rest of the world has elected governments, why don't you? Sorry, you're already 100 years behind the times, and you're falling further back every minute.

As for you somehow evading the total annihilation of a nuclear blast, how, pray tell, are you planning to do this? I suspect that if a nuke will be used in anger in the next 50 years, a Moslem country will have something to do with it. Pakistan is about to nuke India. You guys wouldn't hesitate to drag a nuke into our country and use it on New York or Washington. The only nuking Uncle Sam is gonna do is retaliatory. If one of your bozos levels half of Manhattan with a nuke, I'm sure we'd even give you a few days' notice to get out of the area before we turned your whole fetid, stinking peninsula into a field of radioactive glass. No olive or palm trees will be surviving that. Not ever.

Funny how it's our money that always gets talked about. Yes, in God we trust. Everyone else is either with us, or viewed through a gunsight. Guess where you guys are?

It's also funny that you call our consumerism out as a weakness. I'd be willing to bet that the underclass would surely cash all you upper-class twits in in a second if they knew how to trade you for a bit of what we have. You're such a hypocrite. WHERE DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL, ASSHOLE? You surely didn't go to Silica U. Didn't you? I'm through with you all and your loony screaming over pointless shit. You just can't stand the fact that absolutely nobody in this country is scared of you, and that most of the citizens in this country don't even care enough to locate your skeezy little country on the map. We here have that luxury. You don't.

Tuesday May 21, 2002

I ran a ton of errands last night. I got a ton of stuff done. I stayed up till midnight. The dog woke me up at 4:30AM. Thanks, Boo.

I had a very productive weekend. Two consecutive days of 4 hours of work a piece on the Water Buffalo made quite a dent in the need to do list. It runs a heck of a lot better. It's tons quieter. Naturally, the job isn't complete. I still don't have right turn signals. The last possible place on the exhaust pipes that could be leaking is still leaking and letting tons of noise go out into the world. All in all, it's a much better bike, although I really need to do a bunch more stuff to it.

Last Thursday I went to a wine tasting event at one of our favorite restaurants. The Modern. It's over in Northeast Minneapolis. Go there. It's good. Anyway, the tasting was showcasing wines from Peterson Winery. We met Fred Peterson and he's a great guy. I can also tell that I don't know nearly enough about wine to be able to even talk wine with the really serious wine people. I did get to talk to the guy for a while and asked him if he's going to have a Barbera this year. He seemed really bummed out about not producing one for the next couple of years. The reason had something to do with something happening to the vines. Bummer. I really liked the Barbera. A lot.

The evening was long--we arrived at around 5:30 and didn't leave until eleven. The folks at the Modern really pulled out all the stops to make sure we had a very good time. And we did, I can assure you.

The weekend was spent getting used to my 19" monitor at home. I like big monitors. They're good. I also have added yet another hard drive to Frankenputer. It's mostly to get a couple other OSes installed so that I don't have to get a hold of yet another machine to do work on. Sheesh.

Monday May 27, 2002

Boy did I need this long weekend.

As it happened, we had nothing planned at all. Sarah wanted to work in her garden and I had a ton of computer stuff to do. If addressing these two topics were the yardstick for having a successful and enjoyable weekend, we'd win. The best part is that we didn't just do these things. We did more.

On Saturday, which I kept on thinking was a work day, we took the Marquis and went for a drive down the Mississippi River. We ended up in Red Wing where we went shopping for antiques. We bought a clock and I bought a couple of post cards and a Sunday Supplement called Sunday Picture from a 1967 issue of the Minneapolis Star newspaper. It had a bunch of historical stuff in it. We then went for tea in Lake Pepin. There's a little chalet there and they do a tea thing. It was some good tea as well.

I must have slept 9 hours on Friday night and probably 10 hours tonight. It's good to catch up on your sleep.

I went to a funeral last Thursday. My buddy Pat's dad died last Sunday. He was exactly as old as my dad when he died. 57. That's too damn young.

Pat, I hope you're doing OK.

Boy howdy has Linux come a long way in just a few months. I had as many as two Linux boxen last summer, but the moving project pretty much shot those projects down. In the past week, I've tried FreeBSD 4.4 Unix and Red Hat 7.3 Linux. Although I had my issues with the FreeBSD install, I was successful. The Red Hat install went off without a hitch except for having to download the second CD to complete the install. The desktop installed perfectly and for once, seemed to nail X right on the noggin. I didn't have to mess with the XConfigurator or even the XFree86 config files. I must say that of the many installs I've done, this one had been by far the easiest. Usually a Linux install goes pretty smoothly until it gets to be time to configure the GUI desktop. I've wasted days trying to get X to work correctly on even old PCI video cards. The fact that it worked, worked well and worked the first time says volumes about how much work is going into Linux install routines. I'm impressed.

I saw Insomnia last night with Sarah. It's the US version of a Swedish movie Sarah and I saw a few years ago. Back in the days of VCRs. It's a very good movie. It didn't annoy, Al Pacino was fabulous and Robin Williams plays a psycho very well. Robin Williams doesn't annoy me, but I know he grates on some of the people I know. Even so, even for those people who are usually annoyed by Williams' comedy stuff, they won't be annoyed by his fabulous job in this movie. Al Pacino really did a great job of an insomniac. It's a really good movie.

Thursday May 30, 2002

You know it's Summer when you're stuffing an air conditioner in a window. That's pretty much the way I know it's officially Summer. Last night, it was very stuffy in the bedroom so I went down the hall to the closet and dragged out the air conditioner that came with the house. If it worked, bonus. If not, it came with the house. No biggie. It worked. It doesn't work all that well--we're not seeing frost on the inside of the windows. I guess that's expecting a bit too much from a window unit and a free one at that.

Traffic sucked royally going home tonight. I'm pretty much resigned to taking the side streets until I have a nice, comfy cage to drive to and from work in. Sitting in a stop and go traffic jam with a cranky motorcycle with a pretty stiff clutch pull will make you aware of ever last one of your 35 years. I wasn't built for that kind of driving. Neither were you, I'd bet. It's darned unpleasant having to doodle the clutch in and out and never get out of first gear. I think this fall I may try to get into one of those van pools. I love to drive, but I really hate driving in rush hour traffic.