Category: Personal

Is there actually life offline? Do not believe the sushi, the sushi seeks only to deceive. And be eaten.

I am peeved. You came all the way here from Visalia for more than a whole day and didn’t even call me for coffee. How ever do you explain that? And, oh yeah, forget my email, guess I ran in to that DNS problem too.

…

Okay, just kidding, don’t get bent out of shape. (Did anyone else get the Visio joke?)

What does Pam mean by “latter-day Yes Meets early Beatles”? I cannot begin to fathom this, some combination of raw, simple guitar chugging music with corporatized, out in the aether art rock. Don’t misunderstand, I really like both bands but I just can’t see how O.A.R. can sound like a mix of them. I listened to a couple of tunes, Hey Girl from both Risen (studio) and Any Time Now (live) and Missing Pieces from The Wanderer and didn’t hear what Pam did but then maybe that’s the difference between live performance and studio recording. What it comes down to is I’m glad Pam enjoyed her party evening listening to good rock and roll.

She can be so funny. Just check out the first line of a current column on Ah-nuld and the Recall: “One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts.” Tell me that does not make you sit down and laugh!

I’m using their TurboLister software to prepare a batch of items for listing all at once. Go, but go big is my motto here. The items are an assortment of things I’ve got laying around the house: a couple of no longer used cellphones, an old DSL modem, some promotional tech company t-shirts, an ELP CD box set, a couple of videotape box sets (I don’t have a VCR any more…), and a combo pack of iPlanet promotional items. Not really sure how to price the last one but I’ll probably start it at $19.99 plus shipping and see where it goes from there.

I’ve also had some further conversations with Rogulus. I’m going to pick up some inexpensive DVD and CD sets at Costco, then break them into individual items and profit on the arbitrage. He’s had some very good results with the specific items and I hope to copy that success, with permission of course.

Plan is to go live tomorrow.

Coming from David Levien and Brian Koppelman, the same pair that wrote Rounders, no one was surprised that Knockaround Guys is another movie about young guys caught up in the underworld. But Guys does not have anyone like Matt Damon or Edward Norton to play the young men struggling with The Life and no femme like Famke Jansen to add spice. In the end, the pair’s script and direction is pulled under by overly pretenscious speeches and a simplistic plot.

It’s all about putting words in the mouths of stereotypical characters. Barry Pepper is a mob boss’s son, whose father doesn’t give him the respect he craves, Seth Green and Andrew Davoli are also second generation hoods not living up to dad, and Vin Diesel is the muscleman who ‘understands’ the truth of their path better than any of the others. John Malkovitch is Pepper’s evil, slick uncle, chafing under the thumb of Dennis Hopper. A bunch of no-name actors play the hicks who get in the way of Malkovitch’s plan to flip the pecking order and none stand out. Might have expected Levien and Koppleman to use the wide open spaces of the Montana location a little more attractively but that didn’t happen either.

Not really worth the time

The Sweet One made me some tasty ribs tonight. I love eating her cooking. Makes married life even more wonderful.

Mainly has been a semi-lazy day, as a good Summer Saturday ought to be. We did get up early and go the gym, eat some breakfast and then I drove TS1 to the office so she could earn some overtime $$$. I then enjoyed the Manchester United 2-1 victory over Newcastle. Really, I couldn’t care which team won as they aren’t Liverpool but I’m infatuated with ManU’s new American goalkeeper Tim Howard and their awesome goalscorer Ruud van Nistleroy and both of them had excellent games.

I had to deal with far too many of the SoBig-generated emails. That was a midday downer.

In the afternoon I got an eBay tutorial from PowerSeller and buddy Rogulus–do you see that rating? +2815 is very impressive. He gave me a bunch of good tips and I’ll be putting them into effect this week with auctions on some extra equipment I have laying about, some clothes, maybe some music CDs. Just waiting for my PayPal account to go into effect.

To top off the day, the 49ers are beating the Saints at the half and after dinner coffee is brewing.

When asshat gets comeuppance: Alabama Judge Suspended for Refusing to Remove Monument.

This sounds cool: New Line will re-release the first two Lord of the Rings installments for one week each beginning two weeks before the release of the concluding movie, Return of the King. But not just what we saw before, the extended versions: 208 minutes for Fellowship of the Ring and 214 minutes for The Two Towers. Some theaters will even go over the top: on Dec. 16, a daylong marathon during which all three films will be shown back-to-back. Exhib guidelines call for a 3 p.m. showing of Fellowship followed by a 7 p.m. screening of Towers and then an 11 p.m. screening of King. Oh my. Think of your bladder and the big picnic baskets. OH MY!!!

Once again a bored writer fell prey to the rants of an aggravated homeowner and published a story on the evils of homeowner associations. One of my fellow MeFites, though he violated the posting guidelines by simply posting a biased phrase as hyperlink text without any additional commentary or explanation (which I find oddly amusing), put it up for discussion on MetaFilter. Given the often (small l) libertarian bent of many commentators, the cries of fascism were not long in coming. Being president of the HOA in which I live, I feel the commentators are generally giving us a bum rap and said so, in detail. To summarize: HOAs are not evil but are also not for everyone.

This list is more for my bookmark-like use but feel free to click away yourself on this list of C#-related material:

• WindowsForms – an official MS site
• Sells Brothers – Chris Sells now works for MS but has code and demo goodies and good articles, a well-populated blog, and more.
• ASPxtreme ADO.NET Web Workshop
• CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template based code generator.
• CSharpFriends – self-proclaimed world’s greatest C# community
• Designing Resizable Windows Forms
• RSS.NET – open source library for working with RSS
• Shawn Wildermuth – he wrote the book I picked up today, Pragmatic ADO.NET. Hat tip to Chris Sells for the recommendation.
• C# Scheduler – Code Project article on writing scheduling services.
• Tim Dawson – some interesting looking, worthy of investigation Windows Controls: no charge for you to use in your products royalty-free!

Have fun if you find this stuff fun.

Yes, those are Google AdSense ads you now see on top of the content column on the pages of this website. Feel to click through and help me earn a few dollars. You might also want to help out by starting your Amazon shopping by clicking the “Shop Here” button on the top left of the BST homepage. Hopefully these small efforts will help pay for the incidentals around the house while my job search continues into its–yes–third year. I’m also starting a selling program on eBay and if you don’t have enough books, CDs, beanie babies and the like already, feel free to bid as I put them up for sale.

Very interesting interview looking at going the open source route from a business, not technical, perspective. Seems that when the BSA, the bad guys who went around auditing companies’ PCs (think earlier iteration of the jokers at the RIAA if you don’t remember), targeted Sterling Ball’s company, they made a poor choice. Ball made the smart decision not to fight them but when they left he tossed out his Microsoft software and installed Linux and other open source apps instead; it’s been three and a half years and that choice has worked just fine.

This week’s Spencer Katt column adds a little OSS mirth by relating a rumor that several companies which use Linux are banding together to file a racketeering lawsuit against the idiots at SCO. I say go get’em!

• Putting his money where his mouth is: Kirkland’s dad hopes for payback time. When the Liverpool goalkeeper was about 10, his dad went down to the local bookie with nine friends and the each put up 100 pounds at 100-1 odds that Chris would one day play for the English national team. With the England-Croatia match this week, that bet might just pay off.
• Still Fair and Balanced: Paul Newman Is Still HUD. The great actor pulls a Franken on Fox News.
• The Surreal Life: Headers and Soul. Marks marklarks the marklark, if you know what I marklark.

Afternoon update:

Rob works at the company which makes the operating system running on his laptop. Said operating system seems to have reached a critical negative juncture in it’s life, giving off strange messages when he powers on. Yet he seems oddly reluctant to call tech support. What’s up with that? But Rob, still, thanks for the positive feedback on my little project.

But don’t expect to see this posted to GotDotNet or SourceForge any time, soon or late, it’s for my private use only…

Harve Bennett was as responsible as anyone other than Gene Roddenberry for the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise back in the 1970s so I generally take what he has to say at face value. Sometimes, though, he pops one up and out of play behind the plate as in a recent interview. Bennett says he likes the idea of a new Trek series idea that has made the rounds for a few years now: Kirk and Spock as 17 year olds at Star Trek Academy.

All well and good, possibly an interesting reboot even, except for one little detail: Spock is something like 100 years older than Kirk! I realize we’re talking about fictional characters but if they want to play by the rules than this is a pretty crucial one to follow. A large part of Spock’s backstory in the original series comes from his age and prior experiences. Indeed, if the ratings get dire enough, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a very young Spock pop up as a character on Enterprise even though this would be something of a continuity violation.

Sorry Harve. A series set at the Academy might work just fine and even one where young Kirk is the lead character. Just leave Spock’s pointy ears out of it, knowwhatImean?

Tom Delay is a moron and I can’t say that often enough.

There are only seven basic stories for writers to use and Hollywood ranks the Hero’s Tale right at the top; my favorite genre or at least far ahead of Boy Meets Girl. So I was quite interested when TV Guide mentioned that one such film I’d never seen but which has all kinds of great press, 1960’sThe Magnificent Seven, was going to be shown on commercial-free Turner Classic Movies. This is a film that spawned three or four sequels, a couple of variations, and a TV series. One of the last of the classic Hollywood westerns, Magnificent Seven is itself based on a another film, a Japanese classic called Shichinin No Samurai from Akira Kurosawa.

A Mexican village, a few miles on the other side of the Texas border, is hounded year after year by a bandit and his gang until the farmers decide enough’s enough. Riding up to some no name Texas town seeking guns and ammunition, they find instead two brave gunmen (Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) and hire them instead. The gunfighters recruit four more and a wannabe insists on joining them to make the seven. Once the crew reaches the village, there is only enough time for a little training before the bandidos attack. The story itself is hardly surprising to anyone who’s seen more than three Westerns or really any three decent Hollywood action films.

What makes it stand out so much is that so many elements come together so well. The actors really inhabit the characters, while the script treats the characters with respect rather than as objects to move the plot. The director lets the script breathe and gives the actors space. About the only artificial feeling I got was from the sets, especially the Mexican village, which were a little too obviously built on a tight budget. The villagers are a good example of what I mean; in most movies their characters would have been the objects of condescension but Brynner as the leader of the hired guns talks with them and makes them a part of the plan.

I’m not surprised since the director is John Sturges, who went on to make one of my all time favorites three years later, The Great Escape. And Steve McQueen, when his A game is on, is always a treat. The ending might seem like a bit of a letdown but I saw it as realistic.

Recommended

Falling asleep last night, mind wandering everywhere from finances to databases to disease, I began wondering about obesity and disease. That is, won’t the current epidemic cause lots of health problems for, well, for us? I’m still covered by that description even after losing 53 pounds, I guess, and ought to be honest; I plan to keep at the weight loss until I reach a healthy size, then follow the Atkins maintenance guidelines. But back to the question at hand…

I look around today and see chubby kids, hefty teens, and huge adults and can’t help but wonder how people let themselves get that way. I honestly don’t know myself how I did except that the thought just never occured to me even as I kept needing larger and larger clothes. Thankfully friends and loved ones didn’t let me off the hook but kept asking me when I was going to do something about it. Where are the friends and loved ones of all these other people?

So let’s assume that a substantial majority of the currently obese do not go to the Atkins approach or Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig but continue as they are into late middle age and beyond. The medical problems, one would think, will simply explode exponentially. Anything from bad backs and bad feet to hypertension to organ failures to heart attacks and strokes; heck, I’m not that familiar with disease but I’m probably understating the range of possibilities here.

And all of these problems will cost money to treat. Blood pressure medication isn’t that expensive but all the doctor office visits, X-Rays and CAT scans, operations, hospital stays surely will add up; I bet there’s a study out there somewhere but I’m just not up to the Googling on a Sunday morning to find it. Where is all this money going to come from? If people, especially corporate benefit managers and their bosses, think that insurance rates are going up fast now, wait ten years when this trend starts hitting the books and I wonder if the current system will be brought to its knees.

Up until now, smoking has probably been the ‘voluntary’ activity that caused/causes the most treatment expense but its impact on the system is probably waning as fewer and fewer people light up each year. We allowed insurance plans to cover smokers’ illnesses but in recent years governments and individuals have been winning lawsuits against the tobacco companies to recover the cost, so much so that (one of?) the biggest, Atria/Phillip Morris, now claims that it may go bankrupt due to an adverse result in Illinois.

But health problems due to improper eating are much more easily cured, at much lower cost, if only the patient is willing. A few people, proportionally, do have underlying genetic and glandular disorders that are not simple to correct but otherwise every fat person can become a healthy size without question. They need only make the choice to begin eating in a healthy way. Note that I’m not calling for a mass conversion to a controlled carbohydrate diet or any other specific plan: some will do best with Atkins, others with Slim-Fast, and others just by reducing portion sizes.

Restaurants and food manufacturers can help out though such changes may not be in their best interest. That’s a whole other can of worms and one I’m not prepared to go into in this essay, that conflict of interest, but suffice to say it won’t be an easy obstacle to overcome. After all, how many kids start down the path to Fattyhood because they eat a bowl or two of nearly pure sugar and starch every morning and are helped along by cartoon hero-pushed snacks every afternoon?

Many leaders in our society run under a banner labelled Family Values to strengthen the rationale for their cause. This issue would certainly seem to me to be a true family issue. Parents need to provide proper nutrition to their children and teach them healthy eating habits regardless of the pressure kids put on to have the latest cool but nutionally valueless foods. One may agree or disagree on the propriety of, say, same sex marriage, school prayer, and the like but I find myself having great difficulty believing that anyone would disagree that a primary parental responsibility is to imbue a child with healthy habits.

So I come back to my initial question: who will pay for this? In the end, Social Security may or may not have enough money to pay Boomers what we’re owed in retirement, Nabisco and General Mills, McDonalds and Burger King, Coca-Cola and Pepsi may go broke defending lawsuits and paying of damage awards, but will our system be able to handle the huge financial burden of the obesity epidemic? Or is it up to all of us to come to each others’ aid now to cure this ailment before that happens and the tsunamai’s wave bursts past our shorelines?

I think it is not too late. If a true couch potato like me can lose over half my unhealthy excess in a year with a simple change in eating and a modest increase in exercise, I believe most of my fellow fatties can as well. Emotional support is a truly important element of success, a simple thing for thoughtful friends, co-workers, and family members to give each other. We’ll have to fight the food companies with their huge advertising budgets and teach the restaurants to serve smaller portions again, and fight the temptation to reward every small loss with a Krispy Kreme or small pizza.

What choice do we have, though? If we hope to have a healthy, prosperous America in 30 or 40 years, we cannot be on our knees paying for the cost of treating the overweight. No, we must make war on this problem, a campaign more successful than anti-smoking or the War on Drugs. Even if the result of failure is far less obvious, the true cost is far higher. If you’re already a healthy sized person, look around you to see who needs your support. If you are fat, look inside yourself and find the strength to begin the battle.