BunkBlog

Went to see March of the Penguins with monkey boy today. Wow, what a fantastic film. I can’t believe the amount of time the crew must have spent on the scene during an Antarctic winter. Great views of the birds, especially close-ups of the fur-like feathers. Beautiful.

If you want to see a movie that is rated G and doesn’t involve talking animals, this is probably the only one that will come out this year.

Conversation between father and son:

Son: Could you super glue this back together?

Dad: No.

S: But I want it back together.

D: Did I tell you that if you bashed your toys together they would break?

S: Yes.

D: Did you bash your toys together after I told you not to?

S: Yes.

D: Did they break?

S: Yes.

D: There ya go.

Someone sent me a package. I’m pretty sure it’s not something I ordered, but when I check the tracking information, it gets weird.

If you click that image and check it out carefully, you’ll see the origin of the package (Santa Rosa, CA) and then you’ll see its travels on its way to San Angelo, TX. Although it’s silly, I’ve grown accustomed to the “everything UPS has to go through Dallas” thing, so that detour was expected. The detour to Cerritos, CA and then back to the Bay Area before shipping it to Texas is a new one though.

Another interesting thing: The package left Santa Rosa on the 13th of June, went to Cerritos on the 15th of June, and then went to San Pablo on the 21st of July. Was it taking a vacation in Southern California? This is very odd.

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow, when I finally get the package. The UPS automated system won’t let you schedule a time to go pick the blasted thing up until they have made the three tries at the door thing first. What makes this amusing is they repeatedly attempt delivery at the same time every day. Most people are at work at 11 am, right? Do you think that if I’m not home at 11 am on Wednesday, not home at 11 am on Thursday, maybe I’ll be home on Friday? Nope, that isn’t very rational. But, when I call the number listed to “prevent your package from being returned to sender” the only option I am given is to listen to where the stupid thing IS, with no option to stop them from another fruitless delivery attempt on the morrow. *sigh* I hate stupid people.

In case you are unaware, I’m a “Data Management Specialist” for a defense contractor; this means something rather vague, but includes a lot of database administration. Unfortunately, the particular DoD agency which employs my company at this location doesn’t think we need an actual enterprise-quality database management system. I use Microsoft Access.

I know, it’s shameful. Alas, it is my lot in life and I must do what I can with it. The near-complete lack of concurrent transactioning in Access was not much of an issue back when the office had a half-dozen people entering data throughout the day. We’ve got a few dozen now, and boy does it suck. Somehow, the upgrade to Win2k and Office2k a few months ago (right on the cutting edge, eh?) seems to have only exacerbated the errors. In Access 97, I could edit the forms or even the design of a table while people were using other forms or other tables; in Access 2000, I have to have completely exclusive control of the database to make even the slightest structural change.

Structural changes should be rare, you would think. Not with some of my cow-orkers attempting new and astounding feats of “what does this button do” every few days. To make things more interesting, the network we are on has random hiccups of a distressing length and severity. And, just for kicks, the system design folks (who don’t work on this base or even in this state) forbid any exposure of the network group lists so I can’t automate any sort of real security on the database itself. That means, anything I can do as the programmer/administrator, any other user can do too. You can imagine how much joy this brings me.

So far, I’ve had to redesign a couple forms to stop someone from changing his own name and therefore reassigning all his work to a non-existent person; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from filling out a date inappropriately, thereby moving documents into the wrong stage of the review process; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from erasing someone’s name from the database.

Did I do these things preemptively? No, I didn’t think anyone would ever try some of those things, so it never occured to me to stop them from being possible.

Can I get MySQL and PHP, please?

We got a MiniDV camcorder for our recent vacation – the best thing about MiniDV over older analog camcorders is the ease with which you can dump the video to a computer for editing, without losing video quality in the transfer. Strangely, I’d assumed the transfer would be faster than 1:1 – maybe it’s just my camera, but maybe I’m just hoping for more than is commonly available.

I’ve got one clip built for the eventual DVD, but it’s the clip from after we came home – Independence Day fireworks at the lake. Added some cool songs to the soundtrack, without obliterating the booms from across the water.

Now, to tackle the hard part – Disneyland. It’s a world of laughter a world of . . . well, it’s not a small video, after all.

And then we went to Arizona. Flagstaff, although not really a “destination” for our purposes, is a neat little city. The service at the restaurant was sluggish, but the food was quite good. I guess they do things at a different pace there.

The Canyon was the Canyon. Grand. Deep. Smoky. Yeah, we went during one of the biggest wildfires in Arizona history, so we couldn’t see the North Rim from the South Rim, and could barely make out the bottom at any great distance. Pretty darned impressive anyway, of course.

After seeing the deepest part of Arizona, we saw the highest point, Mount Humphreys, from Kendrick Park – a fine place for a picnic. The ravens cleaned up any crumbs quite thoroughly after we ate. 🙂

After San Diego, we drove up the coast, getting to the Holland American store just as it opened. Then we continued past Santa Barbara and spent an hour or two in Solvang, including the Mission Santa Ynez. Alex scored a bag of candy.

Monterey! There is just so much cool stuff to do in the Monterey area that we ended up cutting out a lot of planned trips to do the unplanned.

Of course, we went to Cannery Row and Fisherman’s Wharf to eat seafood and watch sea lions.

And we went to the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium, where we spent much longer than my usual 3-4 hours. I’ve never spent a full day at the aquarium before, but there was much to see and many people to push through.

Alex got a stuffed sea otter, which has become one of his favorite sleeping buddies for the past week. We had some of the most inattentive service imaginable on Cannery Row, and made up for it with the best service on Fisherman’s Wharf (we love you, Fadi!).

We also went to two missions in the Monterey area, Carmel and San Juan Bautista. Carmel Mission is where Junipero Serra was buried, and San Juan Bautista includes a view of the original El Camino Real behind the cemetary.

We spent a day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park with my grandfather. He’s a member of the San Diego Zoo, so we only ended up paying for Alex’s ticket. Pretty sweet deal, and Grandpa knew his way around the park pretty well – he’s spry for 87.

Among the lions and tigers and bears, Alex also got to feed some lorikeets. Those little buggers sure can suck down that sugar water!

When Alex is older, we’ll go back during a cooler time of year and take all those long walks into the various habitats. Two miles of leisurely strolling is neat; two miles of dragging a recalcitrant five year-old is less so by far.

We learned a lot about the different animals in the park; I even discovered that Europe has bison too – who knew?

We spent a rather long day at Disneyland, waiting in a lot of lines. This is the first time I’ve been to the park during tourist season, and it will hopefullybe my last. We got to see the big 50th Anniversary parade twice, and went on the big rides.

Alex and I started out with the Astro Orbiters – he only wanted to go up, never down. 🙂 We all went to Star Tours, which is just as cool now as it was nearly twenty years ago when they put it in. Always worth the wait, especially with the cool waiting area you get to hang out in. Space Mountain is closed until next month, so we went on Autopia, which reminded us that the FastPass thing Disney does is essential for some rides. When did Autopia become a popular ride? It was always a short line when I lived in SoCal, but definitely not this year. Hooboy.

Armed with the knowledge that the park was substantially more crowded than any other time I’d been there and that Alex really wanted to go on Splash Mountain, we headed across the park to get our FastPasses for that ride. Amazingly, at 11:30 we got passes to return at 4:30 that afternoon! While I waited in the line to get the passes that would allow us to not wait in a longer line, Angela and Alex went on the Pooh ride. He was very happy.

Then we had to hit the Tiki Room, which is just as over the top as always, although it is prettier now.

As the day progressed, we hit the Matterhorn, watched the big parade, met up with Dave and family, hit the Matterhorn again, attempted to go on Pirates (closed as we walked up, darnit), and shot Zerg with the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. All told, a pretty fun and busy day. We stayed through the final fireworks show, which is fantastic.

Alex and Nathan met a princess.

Time to give all the expectant readers a recap of our funfilled two weeks away from San Angelo. First up, Tucson…

We went to the Tucson Zoo, which is pretty nice. The peacock put on quite a show for us.

And, of course, we spent a lot of time talking with my Aunt Bette. Alex liked playing with her Roomba vacuuming robot, and the dogs thought Alex was an alien creature.

Lots of photos were taken the past two weeks. It will be a while to get a substantial number of them uploaded, but a starting set are up now, and more will come soon. Keep checking back, or hit the Gallery to see when new pictures are posted on our site.

Ok, everyone, play nice while I’m out of town.

We’re heading to Arizona and California for a two-week vacation, hitting Disneyland, Grand Canyon, San Diego Wild Animal Park, and as many missions as we can find. We’ll also be visiting family, including some members I’ve not seen in decades and others I’ve never met, not to mention none of them have met Ang and Alex.

We’re outta here.

We had our court date this morning for finalizing the adoption. Alex is now officially and legally my son. Naturally, we got one more dose of “you should have paid thousands of dollars for a lawyer” this morning, but not too bad. Apparently even the judges aren’t sure what to do without lawyers leading them along. Weird.

I finished archiving my digital music onto DVD (replacing the dozens of CDs I’ve got lying around). It took up fifteen DVD-ROMs, all 12339 tracks. As of this afternoon, I’ve got 12782 tracks on my hard drive, since I found a 12-disk set of Sinatra songs and a few other albums that seemed like I might like ’em.

Now to teach the woman how not to delete 3000 tracks from my Karma to add 150. Geez. Took me two hours to refill the darned thing.

Want some blackberries? We’ve got a ton of ’em again this year. Thanks to the relatively heavy rainfall and reasonable temperatures (for the most part), we’ve got a bumper crop of blackberries – we’ve made a half-gallon of jam, a largish cobbler, and the Boy has eaten a ton of fresh berries. They’ll be gone soon, though – one of the shorter harvest seasons for our backyard garden. Next up – tomatoes!

Ferrett’s ruminations on comic books reminded me of the two longboxes I’ve got sitting in the closet. Most of what I bought was purchased because I liked the artwork or stories in them. A few were bought for possible collectibility (some Batmans of the late 80s and early 90s mainly). And then there’s the book I didn’t remember I’d bought.

I was a big fan of the miniseries “Black Orchid” – authored by the now-famous Neil Gaiman. After that run, he came out with a permanent series, and I purchased the first issue of that series, found it had pretty pathetic artwork, and never bought another one. Want to guess which Gaiman book I have? That’s right, sports fans, “Sandman” number one. The only Sandman I ever bought, and it’s a first edition of the first issue. If I’d known Gaiman was gonna be more famous than Eastman and Laird, I probably would have the first ten issues in nice polybags.

You must drink this.

That is all.

Thank krishna, thank buddha, thank allah, thank anybody – I’ve completed my last final test for my Bachelor’s Degree. Now I just have to wait anxiously for the tests to be graded, then wait for them to send my diploma. There’s a nice spot above my Army shadowbox for another piece of “I love me” swag. 🙂

Only took me (looks at calendar) too damned long to finish it, but a milestone nonetheless, right?

Because my ISP now provides more disk space and bandwidth for the same cost, I’ve brought back my LJ Userpics subdomain. I might not be making any custom userpics soon, but there’s stuff there for folks to peruse at least.

Have fun.

Evolution on trial in Kansas

bq. The Kansas Board of Education has scheduled six days of courtroom-style hearings to begin Thursday in Topeka. More than two dozen witnesses will give testimony and be subject to cross-examination, with the majority expected to argue against teaching evolution.

C’mon! Are you guys serious up there? Nikki – tell me your neighbors aren’t all insane.

Anyone read the Crucible? I’m so embarassed to be in this country some days.