BunkBlog

My darling bride made the garnishes. Later, we’ll have pictures of the cranberry cheesecake.

Alex has occasional potluck shindigs at his daycare. This week, of course, was in honor of Thanksgiving. Most of the parents pick up something from the grocery store on the way in that morning. We, of course, don’t do that as a rule (one time we signed up for the potato chips, but just once!). We made cranberry cinnamon rolls in big Christmas tree shaped arrangements. 16 rolls per tree, and little candied cherries for ornaments with icing garland.

I guess they liked them, since we only got 3 back of 31 (we swiped one – phbt!). Now, we need to make more. Nobody else is getting any of this batch! And maybe I’ll take some pictures. Definitely going to take pictures of the cranberry cheesecake I’ll be putting together tonight for tomorrow’s gathering at my father-in-law’s house.

As my old buddy Cory would say, a celebration of excess; gotta love America.

Ok, all you SoCal folks, it’s that time again – time for me to beg for a CD. Starting the 30th of November, you lucky bastards will be able to purchase Kevin and Bean’s Christmastime In The 909 at your local Best Buy stores. I, on the other hand, will have to resort to eBay again if nobody takes pity on me. I’ve got the albums from the past four or five years now, and I’m not gonna break my streak.

Anyone? Anyone?

With the recent What Would Chthulhu Do sale, I’m 40 cents from getting a commission check from Cafepress. Since they raised the minimum from ten bucks to 25, I’ve received no checks. That’s about two years now. I actually got two checks in 2002, for a total of 28 bucks. Not exactly paying for any extravagant vacations, eh?

I’m still surprised that someone bought the WWCD shirt. It was a joke!

I realize Livejournal is a young place, but I’m in the 97th percentile? Dayum.

LJ Age was bought to you by imran and MemeLand.org

Check out our Halloween photos. They are coolio. Yo.

We have a crazy amount of pecans falling from the 2.5 trees that drop into our yard. Lots of pecans.

Realizing that the military (and veterans groups) leans about 70% Republican, you’d think I’d get used to the insane drivel that spews from them on a daily basis.

The offtopic chat room, after ten minutes of lurking, has already managed to annoy the piss out of me this morning. I don’t even know what the context is, but at least three (of eight) members of the room have comisserated about how horrible the New York Times is, that liberal media mouthpiece. I guess they forgot how the Times was used as the unofficial news outlet for every lie told by Ahmed Chalabi about the inevitability of finding WMDs in Iraq, or the various other ways that paper held up the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare as a good thing. These are the same people who use Rush Limbaugh the druguser and G. Gordon Liddy the convicted felon as news sources. How can any reasonably intelligent person (all M.I. guys here) actually believe that there is a liberal media, when Fox News is the highest-rated news channel and Air America is struggling to survive amid the Rush and Liddy radio waves?

I don’t like people who mindlessly parrot viewpoints formulated by wiser heads. I don’t like people who can hold such wildly contradictory beliefs to be self-evident as, “Bush is good for the country and he lowered my taxes.” Does anyone think that we can keep going with trillions of dollars in debt, while continuing to dig deeper? Hell, Cuba has told its citizens to stop using dollars. When our money isn’t even any good in that broke-ass country, what does that tell you about our economy?

Karl Rove and friends have done a fantastic job of snookering the American people. Many undecided voters (how can it be a week from Election Day and you be undecided?) are going to vote based on whether they think Dubya or Flippy is the more honest or agrees with their views on gay rights. Who gives a shit what your neighbor does in his bedroom? All I care about is what the impact on my bottom line is from the government. If I notice the inconveniences imposed by a shrinking set of civil liberties, that is a big deal to me. If I notice that my income is shrinking because of the government’s actions, that is a big deal to me. Social issues like abortion and gay rights are not the job of the government anyway, so how the candidate feels about each issue is completely irrelevent. Or it would be irrelevent in a sane world. We live in Bizarroworld.

Mtzlplk lives.

In case I don’t mention it enough, my webhost (Greg) is the coolest guy on the planet.

I recently got saddled with took over the local Cancer Society website for the Relay for Life in the spring. The previous person used Frontpage to create the site on Freeservers. This combination makes my head hurt. Frontpage is evil, makes bad code, and is a bitch and a half to maintain. Freeservers are overpriced (funny for a company with “free” in the name), underpowered, and annoying.

So, I ask my webhost if I can use some of my excess capacity to host this small (30 megs) site, under my own account that I’ve been paying $75 per year for. His response? Well, normally that would be no problem, but I’d like to give you a separate account for the .org site free of charge, for as long as the Cancer Society needs it.

That just totally fucking rocks.

While chatting in the “off topic” room at work today, one of the morons participants mentioned how laws are made, not by the President, but by Congress and activist judges. I objected to the adjective before “judges” since they are judges, whether appointed or elected, and the term has become one of derision used by the neocon nutjobs.

When pressed, he averred that judges were making law, in contradiction to the wishes of the electorate and the legislature.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases is a good reference.

I mentioned that Brown v. Board of Education was just such an event, and does this mean that we should have kept segregation in schools because the electorate and the legislature wanted it?

Response: If I say yes I’m a racist biggot (sic), if no then I’m inconsistant (sic).

Yep. Don’t want to be a flipflopper, do you? Or a good speller. 🙂

I’ve added another photo to the photo gallery, a satellite shot of my old high school. I’m having way too much fun with World Wind.

New photos in the gallery, of Alex’s birthday party. He had lots of fun and there was much chaos.

I fully intend to go to In n Out at least once on the Great Californian Trip next summer. Looking at their nutritional information, it might be only once. They’re not as bad as Burger King with their 1200 calorie Double Whopper, but one meal is a day’s supply of calories and a couple days worth of fat. Geez.

Add it up:

* Double Double 670 Calories
* Fries 400
* Chocolate shake 690 (!)

That’s 1760 calories for one meal. I won’t get a Double Double, because I can never finish one, but even dropping down to a cheeseburger only loses 190 calories.

I hate being aware of what I eat – it’s no fun.

Had a conversation with one of my cow-orkers today which was quite surreal. It’s like I’ve had a similar conversation before…

One of the geeks at work is the only person who really understands how some of the tools work. This is because he’s the one who wrote the tools, and he uses the strangest user interface non-standard widgets seen since Kai’s Power Tools. So my cow-orker says the problem we’re having is that Mike just is so smart he thinks differently than we do.

This is insulting and wrong. It’s insulting because it supposes that Mike is smarter than I am; I’ve seen no evidence of this. It’s wrong because smart people need to remember to make their projects accessible to the people who will be using them. If you’re a designer and you break every convention that people expect to see, you’re an idiot or an artist. If you’re an artist, get off the Intelligence Training System. If you’re an idiot, stop being dumb.

And why do people continue to lump me into the group that does not include the “crazy smart people” anyway? Is it because I’m capable of a normal conversation? Is it because I try not to pepper my speech with too many obscure references? Is it because I’m not a prick, as so many of these people who are perceived as “crazy smart” are?

Maybe I should start insulting people gratuitously and then they’ll think I’m smarter than they are. Still won’t make any more money, but they’ll stop asking for my help anyway. 🙂

I am now 5 lessons shy of 400 total created at work since September of 2003. I’m past the 400 mark if I look at the previous contract numbers, but that requires opening two databases instead of one, so I’ll stick to just this contract.

If you count up the lessons produced by the next-highest producer (137) and then keep going down the line until you beat my total in aggregate, you’ll have rounded up five of my cow-orkers and still be 20 lessons short.

On the plus side, I finally got some recognition from this company yesterday, with an employee of the quarter award and a hundred bucks in Mall Money. I do need some new socks…

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a cool movie. Alex is running around the den screaming random Sky Captain-related phrases now, driving his mother insane.

Gorgeous movie, really. The first 30 or 40 minutes were fantastic, and then it slowed down a bit. Still maintained a great noir-like look and feel, but Paltrow was doing way too much of the intrepid female reporter crap. I know the movies it is aping were kind of melodramatic, so I’ll let it go a bit. The performance of the late Laurence Olivier was pretty cool, but not as realistic as I thought it would be. The trailers made it seem that Angelina Jolie was the lead, but she doesn’t even show up until at least an hour into the film.

Anyway, fun movie. No particular depth, and some of the surprises are telegraphed 5 to 30 minutes before the punch lines, but fun matinee. Go see it. Take your hyperactive little boys. They’ll love it.

One of my coworkers this morning attempted to declare a jelly donut as a near-complete food. There’s jelly, which (theoretically) means fruit. The donut itself has eggs, milk, and grains. Sounded good to me, so I ate three.

OK, not really. The banana muffins someone brought in were good, though.

Anyone want to give me a massage? Didn’t sleep well last night, for some reason, and now my shoulders are tight. Sitting at a computer all day won’t help, I’m betting.

Ah, well… off to work.

Driving down a four-lane one-way street this morning, I had the interesting experience of watching someone turn left from the second lane right in front of a motorcycle officer of the local PD. The officer, sensing an easy ticket, did . . . nothing at all and drove away.

This is such a typical move by the police here. The only laws they enforce seem to involve speeding in school zones. Park on the wrong side of the street? No problem. Park on a corner, rather than the required 15 feet away? Still good. Run every stop sign in town? Hey, you’re from Texas. Never use your turn signal? That’s okey dokey. Go 22 miles per hour in a school zone, with no children within a mile? Busted!

Is it any wonder we have more accidents in this small city than in the much larger Midland-Odessa area? Our drivers suck and the police let them.

I know I said I’d have tile photos up “as soon as” the family returned from Holland, and it’s been weeks since then. Better late than never, here are some pictures of the new tile, in bathroom and kitchen. Unfortunately for contrast, we don’t have any good pictures of the yellow kitchen before we started working on it. It was hideous, though.