$80 Mistake

For my flight today, I scheduled one for 6:00 AM instead of one for 6:00 PM. A quick call to Continental straightened things out and I'm now flying out as originally envisioned. For the life of me, I cannot seem to travel without running into problems.

Today

I'm taking off early today in order to fly from Midway to Newark so that I can give a talk tomorrow at Brian Kernighan's advanced programming course. The tentative title of my talk is "I have a $150K CS degree. Now what?". I'll be covering some of the stuff that I've done in the last two years and hopefully I'll be able to share some of the things I've learned over the past two years to those just starting out. Continue...

Going to Hell for this One

Remember the penguin image from some time ago? Well, it's been eating up so much of my bandwidth, I had to do something. So today, I swapped it out with this one. I'm sure that many will be surprised at their new icons. Lesson: Mirror an image on your own server before using it online as you have no idea what kind of jerk is in charge of the server. The old penguin image is available here. I'll swap it back in once I get some of my DSL line back. (Here's the original Mickey page from 1998'ish.)

Shamrock Postmortem

I've been slow to post this as I've not been in much of a blogging mood of late. I did run the Shamrock Shuffle 8K and unfortunately failed to reach any of my goals I set. The race was eight kilometers and my legs started to hurt too much to run at around a pathetic one and a half miles into the race. I missed my time goal of forty minutes by eight and a half minutes, running a 48:37. (The winners were in the low twenties.) So, what went wrong? Continue...

JediMan

I don't know if JediMan is a real person, but reading this really made me laugh. Not that I have room to laugh, judging by my prior posts... I just finished making the site XHTML-compliant and I had the chance to read some of my prior posts while fixing them up. I've learned that I have a really lame sense of humor and that my political stances are way too fluid. Back to work...

Shamrock Shuffle Prerace Commentary and Thoughts

Later this morning, I'll be running my first race in a few years, the Shamrock Shuffle. It's an eight kilometer course (4.97 miles) through downtown Chicago. It's a relatively flat and quick course as the course map indicates. I'm not really in running shape, but my overriding goal is to run the entire thing without having to stop to walk. I figure that this can be a good indicator for finding out exactly the shape I am in, and I'm hoping that if this goes well, it will serve as motivation for me to train for other running races here in the Windy City. Continue...

Imminent Threat

Lots of fire was going back and forth over the administration's (non)use of the phrase "imminent threat" to describe Iraq. MoveOn has been most effective (IMHO) in laying the matter to rest.

Clarke v. Rice Solution

The core controversy in the Clarke situation is whether he is telling the truth. A simple (and obvious solution) to the problem is to put Rice on the stand in public and under oath and have her testify against Clarke. If the right can make a case that Clarke perjured himself before the 9-11 commission, they should push that case and try to have him convicted for perjury. If the left can make a case that Rice is lying under oath, they should push that case and try to have her convicted. At the moment - regardless of whatever his testimony was - Clarke has more credibility because he has put his ass on the line by testifying under oath. If the case against Clarke is so clear, the administration and its supporters should have no problem putting Rice's ass on the line and letting the facts shake themselves out. At the moment, Rice talking to Fox, CNN, NBC, and every other news venue does nothing to bolster her case when Clarke's testimony was given under oath. The administration needs to put up or shut up with respect to Clarke and his credibility.

IE 6 Sucks

I spent some time tweaking the layout of this site and adding some additional links. I'm happy to report that the site looks pretty good in Mozilla, Safari, Internet Explorer 5.2, and others. However, IE 6 cannot render the pages right due to a bug in its CSS system. If you would like to see this site in its full glory (with link bar to the right), download a real browser.

More on Iraq / Bush / Honesty

I figured that I'd follow up on some of the comments that I made on some weblogs about Iraq and Bush and all the nonsense that has come out of this. To be completely honest, I go back and forth internally when I try to think about how I should consider the Iraq war of 2003. One part of me is glad that we've taken Saddam out of power and that Iraqis can now start rebuilding a representative and civilized society, while the other side of me wonders if the cost was worth it and whether the ends justified the means. Continue...

Discussing Clarke et al. on the Reverend's Blog

In order to scroll the penguin off this front page, I will now post a link to a discussion on Rev. Donald Sensing's weblog: jump on in.

90% There

I went to the doctor's office to check up on the hand. He told me that it was fine to take off the gauze glove I'd been wearing and replace it with something a bit more lightweight. I went to work today and managed to accomplish quite a bit. I'm currently chilling out, finishing up the second season of Frasier. I'm hoping that tomorrow, some more Deep Space Nine discs will arrive tomorrow. For a while, I'd been pining for a military-oriented Star Trek series, and after reading a bit about the Dominion War, it seems that DS9 may hit the spot.

Cleaning the Paper Shredder

Blogging has been light the last few days and will continue to be light as I managed to stab my left hand while cleaning my paper shredder (which was unplugged). Since I have plenty of paying work that has first claim when the hand gets better, I'll be absent for a bit. In the meantime, I'm following the Dick Clarke testimony about 9-11. Interesting stuff...

Me262

After a full day of having been assaulted by CRT and LCD radiation, I took a break last night and started building an airplane model. It was nice to build something with my hands that has a distinct physical presence in contrast to the intangibles that I deal with most of the time. I ended up putting together the German Me262, the first jet fighter in World War II. Everything is mostly glued and ready to go, and I'll put the finishing touches on it tonight. The most difficult part of all of this is the painting. For the life of me, I cannot seem to paint those very small knobs and crevices all that well. I might post some images tonight after I apply the decals.

Ha Ha

Please, continue to give them hell, Senator McCain.

It looks like he was also right about the price of the Medicare bill.

Weekend Report

With the exception of going out to a Field Museum benefit this weekend celebrating their new Chinese exhibit, the weekend was relatively uneventful. In addition to the benefit, I watched my three Netflix DVDs, played some F-Zero and put a new server in my closet. This morning, I also managed to rearrange my bedroom to accommodate the increasing chaos of new furniture, computer parts, and so forth. I guess the weekend wasn't that uneventful afterall. Continue...

Faith-Based National Defense

It's not my intention to be blogging every bit of back and forth between Bush and Kerry in the 2004 election, but this article from the New York Times is an exception. The gist: For the 2004 election, Bush and Co. are pushing for the deployment of the controversial ICBM defense system. The problem: No one is confident that the damn thing actually works. Commentary from the left-wing is available at the Daily Kos. I haven't heard of any right-wing commentary or defense of this $10.2 billion dollar fiasco.

F-Zero GX

In a moment of weakness yesterday, I went to the local game store and picked up F-Zero GX. It's a solid racer and I anticipate that I'll be spending much more time on it than I did with the others by playing through the many many racers and doing things like building my own cars and racing them. The pace is fast and furious, but a lot of fun. One weakness is that track memorization is a must if one wants to advance very far. In all the racers that I've played, one feature that would be most welcome is a random track generator. This would allow racers to compete to see who is the best racer, not who has the track best memorized with all the shortcuts.

More Same Sex Marriages

I've largely been following the same-sex marriage debate at One Hand Clapping. Rev. Sensing has collected a decent number of links and has written about it in a substantial manner. While I agree with his solution - get the gov't out of the marriage business completely - I keep finding myself arguing with the anti-SSM folks to try and see their point of view. So far, two themes seem dominant: SSM will negatively impact society's ability to produce and raise children by rendering marriage moot, and SSM was wrongly legalized via judicial activism on the part of the MA Supreme Court. I find the first theme preposterous while gays are singled out for constitutional amendments but Britney Spears would be continued to be allowed to wed in Vegas, but I am more sympathetic to the second "activist judges" theme. I snuck a look at the MA state constitution, and it appears that the issue is murky indeed. I could see a court ruling on the interpretation of that clause either way and being able to reasonably defend their decision.

Site Traffic

I checked my web stats today and saw that I was moving between 100 and 200 megabytes of data a day. Excited that I had gained enough interest in this site to warrant that kind of response, I went looking for the pieces of content that people were requesting like mad from this site. After about ten minutes of looking, I figured out what it was:



It was that goofy penguin picture. People could care less about what I write. *shrug*

The Right Ring

Watch as the the 2004 campaign season meets Middle Earth.

McCain

Between the talk that McCain would entertain a Kerry VP nod if asked and his recent vote to raise the number of votes required for a tax cut to sixty, I imagine that the Arizona senator (and former Bush opponent and now chair of his Arizona campaign) is causing plenty of grief among the Republican Party. Keep giving them grief, Senator, and continue to help bring the Republican Party out of it's current unprincipled and power-drunk state.

Current Game Wish List

I've been treading water with respect to video games lately. I did beat "Metroid: Zero Mission" a few days ago and I'm now working on "The Two Towers". After I finish "The Two Towers", I may take another stab at "Resident Evil: Zero" or some of these games on my wishlist:

Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes - It's Metal Gear and it's made by Silicon Knights. 'Nuff said.

Prince of Persia - I keep hearing good things about this one.

F-Zero GX - I would like another racing game.

Soul Calibur II - I likewise yearn for a fighting game.

This list will probably keep me busy for the forseeable future. One outstanding wish, though - Ninja Gaiden on the GameCube.

Hidalgo

I went out and saw the latest Viggo and horses film at the local theater. It was a decent movie - very Hollywood - but I was suitably entertained. This morning, I purchased the James Newton Howard soundtrack from the iTunes Music Store, expecting a typical score, but I was surprised at the quality and variety of music in the soundtrack. There is the traditional orchestra soundtrack score, but Howard has managed to integrate enough Middle-Eastern influences into the score to make the listening very interesting and enjoyable. I don't think I've had this much fun listening to music since I found the Eternal Darkness score online. (I couldn't purchase it or find it for sale anywhere, so downloading was my only option. I'll purchase a copy as soon as I am able.)

Bank and Other Shenanigans

I got up this morning, and started my morning routine of firing up Quicken to download my new transactions and to see how my investments did the day prior. After the "Online Center" is complete, I look to notice that the payment schedule that I'd meticulously built for my Bank One account was fubared. Apparently they have changed their online bill pay process overnight. Instead of saying I want to pay $X to Y on date Z, they changed it to extract $X from my account on date Z - Q to pay Y on Z. Since Q is a variable number of days depending upon the payee (and thus is unknown), I no longer have any way to reliably pay all my monthly bills on one day. I suspect that the change to debit the account before the charge actually clears is another way to catch unsuspecting customers in a trap where their balance will go red for a day before the paycheck is deposited and the bank can collect overdraft fees. I don't like it, but unfortunately this behavior does not surprise me anymore. Continue...

Stale Internet

I've been working on getting a Flash-based Project Pad applet working that will allow our Spoken Word collaborators to better search the BBC catalog and collect records for teachers. I'll code a bit, and surf a bit. I've been making progress working, but my surfing has been disappointing lately. I hereby declare the The Internet to be Dead and Uninteresting at the moment. Continue...

Pain in the Neck

As I got up this morning to go through my morning routine - check e-mail, update Quicken, etc. -- I somehow managed to screw up my neck. As I was stretching, I turned my head to the side and the next think I know, I was hurting. I don't know what's happening, but I suspect that I've managed to pinch a nerve. I feel fine when I'm in a normal position, but some turning of my head generates a quick sharp pain. Ergh. I'm planning on doing things as normal and hoping that this goes away, but I'll schedule a doctor's appointment if this persists. Continue...

Bush Economy Links

I found the following interesting links while browsing Yahoo Finance:

Warren Buffett on Bush Tax Cuts: "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."

Congressional Budget Office: Bush tax cuts having minimal effect on economy.

Bill Richardson for Vice President?

On some Democratic-leaning weblogs, I see lots of mention that Bill Richardson of NM should be the vice-presidential candidate for Kerry. Now, my dislike for Richardson is well known, but I figured that I'd put it online for the world to read.

Some reasons why people think Bill Richardson should be vice president and why they are wrong.

1. Bill Richardson is a Hispanic and would attract Hispanic voters: I've been in the same room as Richardson during my high school years (he was my district's Congressman before he started his globe trotting adventures on behalf of the Clinton administration) and during my time as a Dept. of Energy employee at Los Alamos. From my first-hand experience with the man, there is nothing Latino about him. I know Hispanics, and Richardson never came off as a Hispanic to me. Personally, I was surprised when people started talking about him as a Hispanic. He always seemed to be the typical pudgy white guy to me. So what that he speaks Spanish?

2. Bill Richardson has diplomatic experience, and knows a lot about the conflicts we face: It's true that Richardson was an ambassador to the UN and was also the pretty prominent ambassador to North Korea in the 1990's where he convinced them to give up their nuclear program. In hindsight, it looks like he did a pretty good job. Except that NK kept developing their nukes. Good job, Bill.

3. Bill Richardson has cabinet-level experience: Richardson was Secretary of Energy when the Wen Ho Lee crisis broke out. Given DOE's handling of the situation under Richardson's watch (a racially-motivated trial of Wen Ho Lee and later acquittal), I doubt that he's suitable for any position of authority.

4. Richardson is a man of integrity: Now, I can't speak directly for Richardson and his integrity. From my personal experiences, he always came off as the double-talking slimy politician who was simply looking for a way to climb the political ladder. While this does not measure the man's integrity, the few times I've been in his presence, I've never been able to feel that I was in the presence of a guy who was trying to do anything other than grab more power. Richardson never gave me that feeling that he was looking out for me as an employee or constituent, but was looking out for himself.

I'll close with the caveat that many of these observations are based off my experiences with the man as a constituent, employee, and general observer. Richardson may be the thing that great vice presidents are made of, but I've never seen anything to support this idea. I think that Gore was right to pass him over in 2000, and Kerry would be smart to do the same in 2004.

It's About Time!

As I do every Sunday night, I watched Enterprise last night. A couple of thoughts: 1. Finally the plot moves along in some meaningful way. I was remarking to a friend that the writers of Smallville seem to be moving their story along at a better tempo than the folks on Enterprise. Enterprise seems to be on a rhythm where only one in four episodes actually moves the Xindi conflict along, while the rest are filler. And it looks like I was correct in my prior predictions that this would be a time travel mess. 2. My next prediction is that Archer ends up being the founder of the Federation because of the Xindi conflict. The captain on the Enterprise J spoke of his Xindi crew members and I suspect that Archer will end up winning over the primate Xindi and alienating the reptilian and insectoid races. This will set the stage for the next war, which will be a Xindi civil war. Continue...

Corrine and The Rock

I couldn't believe it until I saw it either:



Looks like someone's getting the can of Whoop-Ass (TM). I don't know who will be doing the serving -- The Rock with that intense gaze, or Corrine with that manic red-eyed cannibal grin. In any case, it'll probably be coming soon to a TV near you via Pay-Per-View.

Angeline...

... is the name of a great new song that I heard this weekend, courtesy of The House theatre company. For the last several weeks, they have been putting on the first part of a Valentine's trilogy, with Act One being "San Valentino and the Melancholy Kid". It was a unique poke / tribute to westerns and was incredible. The acting was humorous, but the thing that sealed the deal for me was the soundtrack. I can't seem to get the Depeche Mode-inspired (or so I think) songs out of my head. I'd like to write what I think works well with this one theatre company, but words fail me. To me, it seems to be some of the most honest and interesting drama that I've read or seen. In retrospect, in my playwriting course last semester, I wish I could have learned to write and be as creative as Nathan Allen and company are.

RealOne Criticism

So true, so true. Luckily Real hasn't figured out how to do all this stuff on the Mac.

Tweaking MusicPublisher and daapd

I've downloaded and installed MusicPublisher for sharing music from my iPod in place of having to share it from a largely-duplicated iTunes library on my laptop. The program is pretty small and easily understandable, so I've jumped into the code and started modifying it to conform a bit more to what I want. Continue...

American Gods

I've been working my through "American Gods". The writing is excellent as expected, but the thing that really makes the book is the fundamental idea that there are still old gods and that they walk among men in the modern day doing things like robbing banks, driving taxis, and slaughtering cattle. The old gods are locked in some sort of conflict with the younger gods of television, credit, and so forth. The nature of the conflict is unclear to me at the moment, but the fundamental premise has to be one of the more interesting I've seen in some time.

In His Own Words

How Lessig Lost Eldred

"Liberal Blogger"

I couldn't help but smirk -- I've been classified as a liberal blogger at BushOut.TV. (Search for "Zeno".) This was apparently in reference to entry on the new Bush TV spots. Fair enough, I guess. Update: Now I'm a conservative blogger. My identity crisis continues. :-)

Update Stalemate Scenario

Holly sent me an updated stalemate scenario in iConquer. She took the one I posted a few days ago and let it run for twenty-four hours. Nothing really changes other than there being lots more armies in lots more places. I guess it was a lot more stable than I imagined.

More on iPod Music Sharing Idea

I've been looking around for documentation about Apple's music sharing protocol, and I ran across an announcement about NetDrives being able to do exactly what I want to do with iPods. I've also found information about setting up a DAAP server in Linux that iTunes can see. It looks like this project may be feasible after all. Continue...

Didn't Run

So much for all my talk about getting up early and running this morning. :-P I was in bed and it felt much better to be there than it has in recent memory, that I neglected to get up and run this morning. I should be much better about this, but so far I've been mediocre at best. Blah. Continue...

Bush Ads Begin

I just took a look at Bush's first TV ads on BushOut.org. Not to complain, but I was expecting more. The first ad I thought will piss off the unemployed, while I was surprised to see Bush using Sept. 11 as ad material so quickly. The second ad also seemed to be saying that all that is going on is something he inherited, and none of it was his fault. That's fine, but I would have run an ad saying that here's what I did, instead of here's the plate that was dealt. (I'll leave it to others to argue the question whether Bush caused the economic problems or was a victim of the business cycle.) Finally, the last message touted Americans' "freedom, faith, and sacrifices" as the means of getting through the last four years. That's also fine, but what does it say about Bush? I don't follow the reasoning since Americans possess the traits above, we should all vote Bush. Perhaps I'm just looking at all these ads wrong -- since the Democrats are campaigning pretty hard and angrily against Bush, perhaps the purpose of these are intended to make Americans calm down and not boot him out come November?

Zzzzz

It's always rough beating the drowsiness that you get thirty minutes after lunch... I've done a bit of Flash stuff today in addition to looking into SRW toolkits. I'm not quite ready to deploy one on Oyez yet, but it seems that there are some good options there. In about twenty-five minutes, I have a meeting with the boss to discuss the future of the weblog project here. I think that my recommendation will be to support it on an as-requested basis, and not attempt to make it a general service that is offered to all members of the University community. A few reasons why:

- Each package does things well, but not one of them does all things well enough for a large scale, thousands of users deployment.

- Each package seems to have its own set of bugs that are fine in a limited deployment, but in a larger one, would be a support nightmare.

None of the packages evaluated seem to have a decent management console for managing weblogs and users.

None of these problems are fatal for the general idea of weblogs at the University. The problems lie mostly in the implementation and design of these packages (MovableType / Roller). This is forgivable as none of these were designed with our environment in mind. I think that the best solution, should weblogs become a standard service, would be for us to simply write our own, with the appropriate customizations and integration with other systems (Blackboard). Given that a weblog is simply an HTML interface to a relatively simple database, this would be the most expedient and economical approach.

Next Mac Application

Once I quit neglecting Books and take care of the backlog of things I need to do, I've been contemplating another Mac application. It would be a program for iPods that users can use to share out their libraries via Rendezvous to iTunes without having to run iTunes. In short, you could take an iPod, hook it up to a random machine, run the application and your iPod library would be as if it were a true iTunes shared music library. It would take some work, but I would learn a lot in the process.

Morning Update

I didn't sleep so well last night, but on the other hand, my legs were not sore from my running yesterday. The other knee now feels a little bit weak, but that may simply be a mental result of me being particular paranoid about the joints at the moment rather than an actual physical problem. I'm planning on going out tonight and doing some light running to keep things in decent working order before my more intensive workout tomorrow morning. Continue...

With Great Sadness...

... I watched tonight's Frasier. I haven't been keeping up so much -- has Frasier quit the radio show? In any case, it hurts a bit to know that there won't be any new Frasier episodes before too long. I guess I'll have to find solace in my DVD box sets. I'm just starting to work my way through season two. Continue...

New Look and Feel

Not expecting any new surprises or hangups, I think I'm reasonably finished with the new blog look and feel. I managed to simplify things a bit and fix some links. Any thoughts or feedback on the new wrapper would be appreciated.

pPod

Wow. I wonder if these people are aware of the man-eating army of lawyer zombies that Apple has at their disposal for things like this?

Stalemate

I've posted the saved iConquer stalemate file I wrote about some time ago. Download it here.

Rotten Campaign

More on the Dean bubble...

Early '90s

I've been on somewhat of an early 1990's kick as of late. I've been on the lookout for MC Hammer albums and other music. I have no explanation for the behavior other than the possible theory that around this time was when I was most thinking how cool it would be to be grown up. I don't know if the latter years spoiled my conceptions of adulthood, but I find myself looking for music in particular from that era. I'm currently listening to the Ghostbusters II soundtrack if that's any indication of my current mental illness.

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Recent Entries
$80 Mistake
Today
Going to Hell for this One
Shamrock Postmortem
JediMan
Shamrock Shuffle Prerace Commentary and Thoughts
Imminent Threat
Clarke v. Rice Solution
IE 6 Sucks
More on Iraq / Bush / Honesty