BunkBlog

I had some custom shoes made at the tail end of the Dot-Com Era. They were cool. I actually still have them, although they’re kind of worn to the point of being slippers. Anyway, I wandered over to their site tonight, just out of curiousity about what new designs they might have. Last time I headed over there was maybe a year ago. Tonight I discovered they seem to be gone. There is another site with a similar name (Customatix Kix) but I’m not 100% sure that’s the same crew, and they don’t do individual shoes.

Damn. I was kind of thinking about getting another pair of uniquely Gary shoes sometime this fall. Oh, well. Guess it’s Big 5 specials for me. *sigh*

I think the most important thing to take away from this article is the following pair of sentences. Do you see a problem with the rationale for the ban?

Some members of Congress, citing the case of shoe-bomber Richard Reid, feared terrorists could use lighters to ignite bombs.
Reid tried unsuccessfully to use a match to ignite his bomb during a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001.

We’ve been playing with Celestia the past couple days, and boy is my graphics card tired.

Alex keeps wanting to look at the lava flows on Venus, and I’ve got models of the Deepspace 9 station and Babylon 5 and stuff all over the universe. This is going to be such a timesink this summer, I’m betting. Wonder if I can get it working on the TV-out for the Linux MythTV box I’ll be putting together. That would be cool – flying around space on the television, making Alex go, “ooh! Let me see the lava, Daddy!” over and over again. hehe

Adobe Acquires Macromedia in $3.4 Billion Stock Deal

Holy cow, that’s a lot of theoretical money. Now, with Adobe owning Macromedia, weird things will happen in content-land. Why keep all those programs around, when they overlap some functions? Some of us remember when Adobe acquired Aldus (500 million dollars in 1994). I really liked PhotoStyler. The only piece of Aldus remaining is Pagemaker, and even that is not getting much support nowadays.

Hopefully, they’ll realize that some things are better left alone. Adding more bloat to Dreamweaver, for instance, would be a bad idea. Merging Fireworks into Photoshop would also be a bad idea. The products are different, and they work differently so don’t belong in one mega-program.

Having watched the price of the Photoshop program rise, and now the CS Suite is above a grand, I can just imagine if Adomedia creates some uber-bundle with all the Macromedia programs and all the Adobe programs stuck in one box. Maybe three DVD-ROMs for distribution? Mac People will line up around the block to plunk down their two grand for software they will barely use.

As mentioned earlier, the Congress has now passed the bill that makes it harder for anyone to declare bankruptcy. Well, anyone but large corporations that donate millions to politicians, that is. Any bets on whether the President will develop a conscience and veto it? Yeah, me neither.

Although the headline says that Rudolph reveals his motives, it really doesn’t shed much light on things. How does attacking an abortion clinic strike a blow against the government? How does killing adults make you “pro-life” in any way? As Bill Hicks said, “It’s a basic kind of irony. Pro-lifers killing people.” And the Olympics? How is that going to shame the U.S. for its legalization of abortion?

For that matter, wouldn’t a protest against the legalization of abortion have made a lot more sense if it was sometime earlier than 1996? Roe v Wade was in 1973, dude!

Pretty sure I saw JabberJenny down by the Concho today, with her family. I was a bit distracted trying to corral The Boy, as usual, but how many women in San Angelo have short dark hair with pink streaks, and a couple kids in tow? That’s my thought too. 🙂

Alex had another birthday party to go to this afternoon – grabbed a present from the cache in the closet. That is a tradition I’m going to keep up for as many years as kids will let me get away with it – we bought up a bunch of cheap toys at after-Christmas sales. Makes it really easy when one of his classmates has a party. So, this party was at the Rink; Alex has never skated before so you can imagine how much fun that was. Interior monolog: “must not laugh at him…must not laugh at him” heh

If anyone was thinking to themselves, “what would Gary like for an extravagent birthday present” – have I got the gift for you. The Virginia Edition by Robert A. Heinlein will be sold only as a 46-volume set, in a limited edition of 5000 copies. All for a mere $2500 – and, if you act now, you can get it for a 300 dollar discount. That’s right, $2200 for 46 volumes of RAH goodness. Just perfect for your favorite SciFi Geek (hint). 🙂

Perich has written an essay which captures some of my feelings on the absurdity of some academics pretty well. Not all, mind you – some of you folks are actually adding to the global knowledge base. Others – not so much.

bq. If you can’t include a layman in your conversation, what you’re talking about is trash. He doesn’t need to keep up with you every step of the way, but you ought to at least let him know what you’re talking about. Or why it’s important. “We’re talking about the notion of reader viewpoint in literature, and whether the reader has the same presence in a story as one of the characters.” See? Easy.

You scored as Parade Prince. You are the Parade Prince. You know that you are funny and make everyone around you feel better. You’re funny and smart and witty. Parade Prince 100% Musicology Prince 83% 1999 Prince 83% Lovesexy Prince 67% Dirty Mind/Controversy Prince 50% Around The World In A Day Prince 50% Sign ‘O’ The Times Prince 50% You’re Not Prince… You’re The Artist 50% Purple Rain Prince 33% Diamonds & Pearls Prince 33% Slave Prince 33% Grafitti Bridge 0%

Which Prince ERA are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Rented Ray on Friday, finally got around to watching it last night. Great movie. I really liked the saturated look of the flashback scenes – interesting effect. I wonder if Ray Charles was really tormented by the nightmares as they showed, though. Can’t really ask him now.

The demons that possess many tremendously talented people still don’t stop them from producing fantastic work. And yet, many other people are tormented by the same demons and produce nothing of value. Guess correlation is not causation.

Yeah, I know it’s not deep. I’m tired. Daylight Savings Time is like a week of jet lag. And, of course, my job is so exciting I can barely keep up. 😐

Went to see Sin City last night. Definitely not the feel-good movie of the year, there. Wow.

Best-looking stylized adaptation of a comic book I’ve ever seen. More violence than three Robocop movies, and boy did we laugh at some inappropriate scenes. Really, the whole theater was laughing at people getting dragged down highways and other shit that just shouldn’t be funny.

Great movie, as long as you don’t mind lots of violence. And boobies. Mmm….boobies….

I’ve got a song stuck in my head, with the lyrics, “it’s freakin’ me out, freakin’ me out” and something about a system in my head or something similar. It’s a fairly recent song – anyone help me out? Google is not being my friend on this.