Category: Personal

Once again the gremlins struck at the San Jose Mercury News and I was compelled to write a letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,

Headlines are an important element of newspaper articles but they should also reflect the facts explained in the body of the article. In an election campaign where one major party candidate is making the ethics of the other major candidate a key issue, this becomes even more important to ensure.

I cannot speak one way or the other to Gray Davis’s practices in this regard but even a simple reading of your front page, lead article leads to the simple conclusion that the Mercury News has sensationalized the situation regarding worker’s compensation back surgery coverage. Sure Michael Drobot’s companies, along with other companies who would benefit from the law, donated serious cash to Davis’s campaign. But so did Fireman’s Fund and at least a dozen other insurance companies who would have preferred the opposite result.

Face it, nearly every bill signed into law by the governor benefits someone financially while not signing would benefit a different group–and they all give money to politicians. Further, all bills have to be passed by a majority of both houses of the legislature, which means quite a few people have to be convinced of the merits, not just two. For better or worse, this is the system we have today. What would have been egregious, and worthy of a front page article, is if Davis had signed (and the legislature passed) a bill that gave financial benefit to a donor but no benefit to California residents. That’s clearly not the case here.

This reader thinks you owe Gray Davis, and Michael Drobot, a retraction and your editors need to be far more careful when writing front page headlines. And when selecting articles because on a close reading this one hardly seems worthy of newsprint.

Regards,

Bill Lazar

If the NFL was upset with Terrell Owens for pulling a Sharpie out of his sock after scoring Monday in Seattle, wait until he pulls a trumpet out of his ass and plays some jazz after scoring this Sunday in New Orleans.

$5,000 fine for an “untucked shirt.” What a load of cow pie. Football gets the ratings it does because the games are terrific entertainment, not because people want to admire the incredible athleticism. Be real, Paul Tagliabue, and stop harrassing the best wide receiver in today’s game.

As mentioned in the previous post, I felt pretty rotten today so I mainly hung on the couch. To get the day off to a good start, not counting workout and breakfast, I cued up this Robert Redford/James Gandolfini flick from last year. Perhaps you remember it, the poster originally had a tattered American flag but after Sep. 11 that got changed fast to one featuring the two stars’ head shots.

The Last Castle is a classic two character face off picture. Redford is a disgraced general, court martialed for refusing an order from the President, and Gandolfini is a martinet colonel who runs a military prison for convicted soldiers. The Castle of the title is a historical reference to the original prison on the same grounds as well as to the psychology of the place. Gandolfini, an officer who’s never been on a battlefield, is at first all excited to meet Redford, who wrote the modern classic on battlefield tactics.

But during their first meeting Redford, not realizing the other is in earshot, makes an offhand comment about the Colonel’s prized collection of military artifacts (such as minie balls from the Battle of Gettysburg) and Gandolfini is instantly turned into an enemy. So, in a sense, the conflict here is mostly in the mind of director Rod Lurie, similar to the disaster from a few months ago, K*19. Redford’s character must be lured into the conflict, reluctantly, by abuse and degradation to other prisoners.

I did enjoy this movie, mainly due to the quality of performances. Not just by the two stars but also Mark Ruffalo (who also starred in You Can Count on Me), Clifton Collins Jr. (also in the opened last weekend Rules of Attraction), and Paul Calderon. Aside from an unnecessary minor subplot featuring a daughter, there are no woman in this prison flick.

This film was Lurie’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Contender. I didn’t like that film much at all. As prison movies go, or even military prison movies, I’d take, oh, The Great Escape anyday. The conflict here is far too contrived to be truly interesting and captivating. And the quest for respect on which Redford leads the prisoners devolves directly into an exciting yet impossible battle.

Barely recommended

On the one hand, Sun Microsystems stock price was up nicely today (+ $0.19) and is continuing higher in the initial after hours trading (+ $0.16 more) and, definitely for worse, it’s still my biggest holding. But the reason for this movement is news that the company will layoff 11% of the staff, about 4,300 people. And I still have quite a few friends working there. I sure hope they all miss out on the severance packages.

On the third hand, I am sick. Started with a sore throat last night and added naseau and general tiredness today. I went to the gym this morning after dropping the Sweet One at her train and did my standard aerobic workout on the Life Extension machine but just have had no energy. I’m supposed to revise my resume based on some very good, very specific suggestions but I don’t have the will power.

Fourth, the Blogger system lost this post the first time I wrote it. I know many authors like to write, rewrite, publish, then rewrite again, but I am generally a point and fire kind of guy. Also, and I don’t want to make too much of a fuss, but I am sick today.

Plus, I need a shave. Badly!

Today was the big live concert that Bruce and MTV chose only to show in Europe. Making up for it, in a way, was my finding via RMAS of Bruce Springsteen Live Videos. This site posts for your downloading pleasure a few (currently six) concert video clips that were never commercially released. Note that these are not exactly big polished productions but the three I’ve seen so far are quite watchable. The files are very large, from 30-120 MB for each song, but that does mean better quality too.

I grabbed a solo acoustic Growin’ Up from a little 1972 club show, Spirit in the Night recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, in 1975, Candy’s Room from the classic 1978 Birthday shows at the Capital Theater, Passaic, NJ, and Waitin’ on a Sunny Day recorded at the very same San Jose show the Sweet One and I rocked out at just this past August. When will Reason to Believe be back for the taking?

Don’t miss the second page of clips, which aren’t really whole songs but decent sized portions that could be gleaned from broadcast documentaries and shows. Including a three minute plus clip of Cover Me!

Go see for yourself or come by the house here for a show. Thanks Pete!

Today is Garret’s Birthday!, but no, not that Garret. For starters, the man I’m celebrating has an ee cummings fetish and never uses capital letters. Not to mention our boy is 43 and no longer young enough to get the children’s discount for movies. Last year, Dan wished him HB with a bottled fart.

garret is such a nice guy that even in the depths of inebriation he remembers to send congrats to others born on his day.

I highly recommend his excellent photography! Not to mention his high quality, high volume daily linkage–to me he is the epitome of the link (as opposed to commentary) bloggers.

Someday I hope to travel to the exotic Santa Fe and meet this man.

Face it, a lot of the web is all about copying. Copy somebody’s images, some page’s styles or look, copy somebody else’s music. No worries, that’s the way it’s done.

One of my favorite guys to to play Follow the Leader with is Phil “I live in the middle of nowhere” Ringnalda. I first encountered him in the Blogger mailing lists where he has helped me and many, many others. So when he does something smart, like use Morten Frederiksen’s Syndication Subscription Service, I don’t hesitate, I just do it. Okay, he did switch to Movable Type, which I’ve pondered, but that’s just too huge a change for me and unnecessary, but this one is good.

Frederiksen’s service simplifies the current jumble of formats and tools used for publishing and reading RSS feeds. RSS is, arguably, Really Simple Syndication according to one of it’s primary developers, Dave Winer, so I’ll go along with that. If you are into RSS, then you can get mine by clicking the green SUB button at the top of this column.

Thanks again, Phil.

Yes, that amazing bit of PHP coding that I keep yakking about is now available for public consumption. You can find it at PHP Classes. I’ve already seen 13 hits in the referrer log from people clicking through, so there i some benefit. The site’s maintainer, Manuel Lemos, recommends registering it at Freshmeat so, what the heck, I did. The whole idea is publicity for this site after all. And a goof.

Update, a day later: So sad. Received a ‘no thanks’ message from the Freshmeat administrators: “freshmeat tries to avoid listing projects which fall below a certain level of size and/or complexity (please see http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/198/ for more information), and yours is unfortunately a bit too simple for our application index.” I wonder if I should extend the silly little thing and resubmit.

I’ve been so caught up in weblogs and their discussion boards, not to mention the chat room where I met the Sweet One, that I never did get into Usenet newsgroups. Last weekend, though, I realized that I needed some PHP help and the slow interaction of Google Groups just wasn’t getting the job done. Sure enough, ATTBI provides a news server, so I hooked up with comp.lang.php and got the help I needed. As long as I was there, I looked into Springsteen as well.

And found RMAS (rec.music.artists.springsteen), which is very active, and AMB-S (alt.music.bruce-springsteen), which has some traffic but not nearly as much. The people are very friendly and helpful and are a great source of recorded Bruce shows to trade and share. Seems like I will be getting two myself (Detroit, 8/15/2, and an NYC show from the 2000 tour).

This world has a jargon all its own and here are some amusing examples: BNP – blanks and postage, meaning someone will make a CD for you if you send them blank CDs and a mailer with postage; ALD – Assisted Listening Device, which is the closed circuit system concert halls use to broadcast the concert (inside the building only) for the hard of hearing, but which some enterprising geeks have learned how to record; L/NBC – Little/No Bruce Content, so the message is off-topic and often concerns politics or some musician other than Bruce and I know I can safely ignore the message thread.

There are also some good artwork sites (informally) associated with all of this too. John Joyce maintains John’s Bruce Springsteen Artwork Links Page. The artwork is intended for use as covers for the different Springsteen concerts that are available for trade. A couple of good examples come from Loose Ends for the 1999 LA Reunion Tour show and Joosse’s for the 1980 LA Show that was the first Bruce concert I ever attended.

As I mentioned above, it’s possible to get started in this hobby even if you don’t have any BruceLegs of your own. Then there is the other newsgroup, alt.binaries.music.springsteen (ABMS Info), where people post music that can be directly downloaded though this takes better news reader software than I have just now.

As I found, the two simplest ways to start are the freebies (that’s how I’m getting the NYC show) and BNP (Detroit). Besides the newsgroups, people post their own trade lists and as you get disks in hand you can contact traders directly or use some of the exchanges that have been set up. Having a CD burner certainly helps but I have friends who I will be pestering to help me out here as well.

The show I’d really like to get, and I’m sure this will be possible in the near future, is the 1978 show from the Capitol Theater in Passaic that was broadcast on radio nationwide. Talk about a momento of my youth!

From the Official Springsteen mailing list:

“FOR EUROPEAN BRUCE FANS – “A Night With Bruce Springsteen”

MTV NETWORKS EUROPE PRESENTS

‘A NIGHT WITH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

AND THE E STREET BAND’

London, October 7th, 2002: MTV Networks Europe is to present ‘A Night With Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band’ – a unique live concert with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to be aired live across MTV Networks Europe and VH-1 UK on 16 October 2002, it was announced today.

Set to air to over 127 million homes across MTV’s ten feeds in Europe and VH1 UK, the unprecedented musical event, ‘A Night With Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band’ will comprise a cross-channel ‘live to air’, commercial-free concert from Palau Sant Jordi, Barcelona, with an exclusive one hour backstage ‘Countdown To Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band’ prior to the concert.”

What the heck is going on here? Don’t we American fanatics deserve to see this show too? There’s never been a real backstage show from Bruce on American TV. One can only hope they’ll figure it out quickly and broadcast it here too, live or not.

[via garret]

On the Atkins diet, one eats copious quantities of meat. So about every four or five weeks we make a meat run to the butcher shop at Costco to stock up. The bill came to just over a C note, including some salad, Ziploc freezer bags, swiss cheese, and whipped cream and we got:

• 4 lbs sliced Turkey Breast (for lunches)
  

• 4 lbs Bacon (actually this is usually weekend breakfast food)
  

• 2.35 lbs Top Sirloin (4 steaks, 2 meals)
  

• 4.15 lbs Pork Loin Chop (10 chops, 3 meals with leftovers)
  

• 6.25 lbs Fryer Thighs (14 thighs, 5 meals with leftovers)
  

• 5.52 lbs Ground Beef (12 large patties, 4 meals with leftovers)
  

• 3.19 lbs Salmon (sliced into 2 meal-sized portions)
  

• 9.61 lbs (2) whole Chickens (each ought to be a dinner plus several lunches)

That’s at least 19 meals not counting leftovers to go with salad for lunch and the breakfasts!

And for the curious, yeah, it’s working. I’m down 18 pounds and the Sweet One has shed 20(!) in 40 days. We’re both working out regularly, too. This holiday new and smaller clothing will make great presents.

“Senate Bill @xxx provided a one-time increase of the benefits on your unemployment insurance claim. The new weekly benefit amount is $330. The new maximum benefit is $8480. A check for the difference in benefits for the weeks of unemployment compensation you received is attached.”

Another foreign film, this time from France and 1967. Directed by Louis Malle, who said that after 10 years in the business he tried to make a story of rebellion from a comfortable middle class existence, set in turn of the century Europe, just as he had tried to rebel. I think he was even more influenced by the ennui and existensialism of mid-60’s Paris.

Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as Georges Randal, The Thief of Paris, a slick thief who preys on (mostly) absent rich homeowners and, I’m sure you’ll be as amazed as me, all the women can’t give it up fast enough to him. Particularly Genevieve Bujold as his cousin and lifelong love Charlotte and Marie Dubois as Madame Delpiels, a woman trapped in a harsh marriage who Randal stumbles upon during an evening’s work as she is attempting to join his profession.

Julien Guiomar plays a thief masquarading as the priest l’abbe La Margelle. He takes Georges under his wing after the younger man’s first robbery, done more out of anger than anything else, and shows him the professional world. The faux-priest serves more as a sounding board for conversations about life and meaning, though, and I tend to believe that the action in the movie, in bed and a work is simply given to illustrate the meaninglessness of attempting material gain.

With a cool poster:

Recommended for those with a taste of more intellectual romances

Harvard University’s financial relationship with President Bush’s former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the university’s management fund creating a separate ‘off the books’ partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially troubled company, according to a report written by a respected financial investigator to be released today. The same investigator who brought down former House Speaker Jim Wright and the Keating Five.

I have this thing for off-beat Australian movies. Among the more well-known are The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding. But this one is really strange, very psychedelic. One minute our protagonist (played by Johnathon Schaech) is in midtown Manhattan trying to pawn off some cockatoos and the next he’s driving a beat down old VW minibus across the Australian outback.

Welcome to Woop Woop, released in 1997, is actually the next directorial effort from Stephan Elliot (he wrote and directed Priscilla). Elliot will next year be writing and directing the 30th anniversary TV remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Anyway, Woop Woop is a town that’s not on anyone’s map, just a bunch–a hundred or so–of Australians led by Rod Taylor who embody the “leave me alone” lifestyle. When one of them needs a mate, they go off and see who likes to fuck them; the lucky winner gets drugged and shanghaied back to the little outpost. And not only is the place ringed by steep rock embankments, Taylor has guards with rifles and shoot to kill orders to keep pontential deserters in line.

Schaech catches the eye of Susie Porter, a tasty blonde hitchhiker who jumps his bones while he drives her to the sea. She decides she loves him, asks him if he feels the same way. The stupid schmuck, thinking it will keep her in bed a little longer, says he does. Let’s face it, if the boy was so smart he would not have needed to scram from NYC.

The actors all do fine jobs but this is a film that you need to be open to, be willing to not worry quite so much about the reality of the lives. And then you will enjoy the job that Elliot has done.

Recommended

Well, I finally seem to have pulled it all together. Both the Countdown list on the top right of the main page and the Birthday and Anniversary lists on Important Dates have been implemented using the code. A little bit of clean up work and I expect to post it for download. I’m even thinking of turning it into an article for one of the PHP magazines or webzines, probably know more about that later.

Definitely need to say thanks to Andre Naess for his replies to my sometimes blithering doltishness in the comp.lang.php newsgroup. Thanks Andre! And thanks to the people who put their time and effort into the MySQL open source database project (MySQL Manual | 6.3.4 Date and Time Functions was incredibly useful) and, of course, PHP.

So, what does this class do? First, store some information about some number of events into a database: event name, the date it occurs on, associated URL, category, and active status. The basic code grabs the records for a given category, calculates the number of days until the event, filters them based on active status and that the event takes place in the future, and provides a string formatted for inclusion in an HTML page (the list used on the main page). An elaboration, called a child class in object-oriented programming terms, customizes the filtering (all birthdays by definition are in the past), and uses a different formatting for the result; the number of days until the next birthday is calculated and used to emphasize dates less 31 days away.

So essentially this is the guts of what could be a web-based reminder service, not totally unlike Userland’s MailToTheFuture, that could be enhanced to support multiple users and some type of notification service. One could also add additional child classes to handle different types of events. But I wrote this mostly for my own use, to stretch my programming muscles a tad and to have a more automated way to handle the Countdowns list.

Amidst a huge sports weekend (the Sweet One like baseball alot more than me), Liverpool’s Sunday match against Chelsea probably would have gone missing but in any case Fox Sports World did not choose to broadcast it. Still, the Reds did defeat the Blues 1-0 on a literally last minute rebound put-in by Michael Owen (second consecutive match where Number 10 did all the LFC scoring). The big bad news for the team was the aggravated hamstring injury to central defender Stephen Henchoz who faces five weeks out and minor surgery.

Clubs across the Continent now get an early season break, though many of Liverpool’s players will not, as the leagues shut down for 10 days for the first qualifying matches of Euro2004 (at Slovakia, home to Macedonia for England). The next club outing is an away match at Leeds United (13 Premiership points after nine games, eight points behind the Reds) on 19 October and a trip to Russia for the return Champions League leg against Spartak Moscow.

The Sweet One is laying on the couch taking a nap while I watch the ballgame and surf. I would sneak you a photo but she would kill me. She looks so cute though, holding the pillow and turned away, her knitting on the floor ext to her.