Category: Personal

From SportsFilter, my predictions for EPL 2005-06. Looking good for Liverpool, the optimist in me says. We’re also doing the fantasy league again, here’s my squad, a little light on LFC players in an effort to spend wisely.

If Garret says so, I must help the Blogger Twins.

McNealey and Schwartz get stock options–and stock: Cuz things, uh, are going so well at Sun. Oh wait, no they’re not, that’s why these two stellar executives laid off another 1000 people two weeks ago.

Working on a redesign for this blog, a little late for that Reboot but time to get something simpler and cleaner. Will let you know how it goes, maybe. Right now just wondering about the old Firefox v. IE issues, probably need to revist the box model hack lessons.

Later: Got the IE centering thing answer from the All My FAQs wiki.

Naughty!

[This is from six years ago, written in a work notebook uncovered in sorting out the move…]

I can see a whole life racing time
In a single tear dripping from your eye,
Colors and expression and people pass through
Baby born, an old woman waiting to die.

My head feels the heat from the passion
Radiating from your cheek to my skin.
I would pull away, run away, except our
Horses gallop together, as the day begins.

“Make me taste yesterday’s passion,”
You scream across the morning sun
Trying to say what, I wonder idly,
Since our lovemaking was so mundane.

Another tear slithers down,
And another, catching the light
Glaring in my eyes, glaring thoughts
Confusion spreading, anger rising to match

The horses jump a brook and we cross
Into a new terrain, peopled with brush and ravines
“Stop,” I say, “tell me why you need this taste.”
But you ride on, oblivious in the morning sun.

Oh man, oh man, if you have a broadband connection go and get the hi-def version of the new Serenity trailer. Suh-weet! September 30, I am so there. Which reminds me that this is the first movie all year to give me that urge, to see the movie the first night. Cool!

Pete from The Blog of Doom was one of several to report getting offers for his domain from Brandon Oropallo of Verisoft LLC. These were all in the area of $1000, which seems pretty pricy considering the offer was only for the domain name, not the content or other material. Pete’s got a good name, I’ll grant him that, especially with the upcoming Doom movie.

Still, I was surprised to receive an offer from the same guy of $2300 for billsaysthis.com! Too bad he didn’t offer me the money for capspace.com, I’d definitely part it with for that sum. Maybe he’ll read this and make the offer. TS1 and I have a vacation a’planning for winter and the cash would be sweet.

Brad Davis scores the game winner: One of my SpoFite buddies actually got to see the Gold Cup semis and Final and posted her pics on Flickr. Cool!

I tell you, getting LittleSteven back from Fry’s yesterday morning was a relief. Though it also meant nearly a day of pulling down Windows updates and patches, reinstalling and updating Office, reinstalling UltraEdit, SmartFTP, HotPopper, WinZip and SharpReader, reinstalling EazyBackup and restoring from backups. Last, copying back all six gigs of music files (all ripped from CDs I own, Mr. RIAAman!). Plus, TS1’s PC Twiggy is having an ongoing problem with Norton AntiVirus and the instructions provided by Symantec are not terribly useful so that’s still being tended to.

However, making the chores much lighter are the two wins the Earthquakes had this week lifting them into a tie with FC Dallas for first place in the West. The Texans do have two games in hand and one of them will be made up Wednesday so this may not last but I’ll enjoy it while I can. Our boys get a decent break now; no more matches until after next Saturday’s All Star exhibition against the Premiership’s Fullham and none of ours were picked for it.

I was also happy to watch the US Men win the Gold Cup over Panama (in Spanish as I couldn’t figure out how to get to the third audio channel for the English commentary), 0-0 after extra time so we won on penalty kicks. Kasey Keller was the man, though two Panamanians blew their own chances by hitting the crossbar and going over top. I thought their keeper, Penedo, was the only one preventing a US landslide as he made up for many mistakes by the back four. Nice to have the trophy.

Alerted by AdamV, I popped over to Amazon to check out the free (after rebate and with two year service agreement) Motorola RAZR offer. See unlike some women, my TS1 is not excited by the prospect of shopping for shoes, clothes or jewelry but by the prospect of a slimmer, shinier new cell phone. Can’t explain it, I just accept it, happily since a new phone can generally only be had every couple of years.

But it has been two years since we got our matching pair from Sprint and her birthday is coming up. Shopping at Amazon for a complex product attached to a complicated contract is never easy, though. Finding answers for simple questions requires searching for the phone number the retailer refuses to put anywhere on its site and dialing. Fortunately I got a human quickly and he knew the answers:

No, you can’t order two phones on a family plan through Amazon. No, you can’t transfer your existing cell numbers to these phones because they’re pre-authorized before shipment.

Answers on the service plan had to be got from the telco, though, and of course aren’t (easily) found on their website. Cingular at least puts some 800 numbers right on a page labeled Contact. Here’s where we get to the real meat.

The woman I spoke with gave me the answer (sending photos taken by the phone’s camera costs 25 cents a shot but one can buy packs 20 or 40 as a monthly plan) and then switched into sales mode. She could, she said, give me the same price on the phone as the website even though the website says otherwise. Thanks but no thanks, since neither channel will match the ZERO DOLLAR price tag on Amazon.

Uh oh, I must have said something bad. Cingular has exclusive rights to sell these cool phones in the US, Amazon must have gotten them from someone in Europe, maybe Vodaphone. That doesn’t seem likely, I responded, since they’re being sold with Cingular service plans.

Even so, better to spend $200 to get it from her since doing almost anything wrong on the plan from Amazon will either cost me the rebate or a $250 penalty. Even being one day late with a payment would trigger a calamity. Self, I thought, what strange Sales Zone have we wandered into, or is the woman just getting close to the end of a quota period and short on her numbers?

We went around this same track a few times, my dander rising higher each circuit, though the saleswoman didn’t seem to realize it or care. Finally I told I was offended by an out and out attempt to scare me into buying from her, which she insisted was not the case at all. She was only explaining the facts. Then went straight back to the egative pitch.

I finally had enough. I said I don’t do business with companies that treat customers this way, that it’s simply despicable. Instead of Cingular getting one and possibly two new users and making my sweetie very happy, we won’t be considering them at all.

[As an aside I’m wondering where this fits into Dave’s calculus, and if Cingular is more clueful towards the web than Audible.]

Interesting new collection at RawSugar: Ajax for the programmer – anotated searchable index . If you’re a web-focused geek, Ajax is one of the hotter topics of discussion at this moment.

On a completely different note, I continue to be amazed at how unaware people can be of their lives. The challenge question this morning on KFOG, prize was a pair of front row seats to tonight’s Robert Plant concert, was name all nine counties that make up the government-defined Bay Area. Now, I don’t expect everyone to know all nine–Solano County’s pretty obscure down here in the South Bay, for instance–but of the first five callers, three didn’t even name San Francisco!

Comic books are, at the core, simple stories about people with exaggerated abilities placed in overwrought situations. With the limited physical form of only a few pages the illustrator can lavash attention on details that are only now becoming available to their movie counterparts while the story writer as about the least requirements to develop character or fill in plot of any major adult entertainment medium. (The more recent graphic novel form, some of which feature characters originally from comics, differ in almost exactly these ways.)

In making Fantastic Four, the Marvel leadership recognized these elements as the key to why the Spider-Man and X-Men movies were huge hits while The Hulk, Daredevil and Elektra missed the boat. The script by Michael France (who also co-wrote Hulk and The Punisher) and Mark Frost (no previous comic superhero credits) barely takes enough screen time to introduce the five leads before they’re rocketing to orbit where the exotic rays arrive hours early.

The second half of the story, as they attempt to deal with the physical changes, may be what caused so many reviewers to go negative but not me. Director Tim Story (launched a wave of black films with Barbershop but bombed wth personal followup, the American remake of Taxi) turns the conventions 90 degrees by mostly avoiding the evil villain out to conquer the world. Instead Story plays the characters against each other as they work out the emotional hurricanes.

Sure Victor Von Doom is turning into a metal man but until events force him down a bad path he’s no more rotten than your standard American corporate chieftain. The catastrophe in space also ruined his business and with Mr. Fantastic also cutting him out of Sue Storm’s attentions, Doom’s fall is (in comic book universe) understandable. The others, the Fantastic Four, are more conventional and take their new abilities reluctantly; they only fight Doom because they have no choice.

recommended

We made soft polenta tonight for dinner and I liked it but TS1 said it tasted to much like mush, meaning we won’t cook it again any time soon.

Between unloading boxes and figuring where everything goes we watched a couple of amusing flicks, one recent, one the last of a series from the ’60s and ’70s. Both enjoyable though and I think the commonality is a bit of turning audience expectations around.

In Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle we watch a pair of stoned Asian 20-somethings who only want to get those special burgers cooked at the title chain to quench their munchies. What should be a short, simple drive winds up being an all night comic adventure. At some points the script relies a bit too much on cardboard stereotypes but in general John Cho and Kal Penn succeed with a funny movie that’s a level above typical young adult crap like Down to You or A Guy Thing.

recommended

Revenge of the Pink Panther is the final of the five original movies starring Peter Sellers as Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau and one of Sellers’ last three movies. To some degree this was a payday movie for him and writer/director Blake Edwards, part of a sequence of three made a dozen years after the first two; those were critical and box office successes and while these did pull in some cash no rave reviews were really expected.

French mobster Douvier (Robert Webber) needs to show his American partners his grip remains strong, so at the suggestion of a lieutenant Clouseau is selected for assassination. Through typical pratfalls and misunderstandings everyone thinks the plan works and insane former boss Chief Inspector Dreyfuss, instantly cured at the news, is brought out to find the killer. At the same time Douvier tosses out his mistress (Dyan Cannon) and in running from her own killers literally bumps into Clouseau; teaming up they of course send Douvier to ruin and Dreyfuss back to the sanitarium.

recommended

My friend Annie went over to Poland to see U2 days after the Live8 performances and sent along some nice snaps like this one that captured the smoke and weather nicely (full size version).

1. The Globe and Mail: Boss of the American ballad, decent appreciation of Springsteen and his connection to the American literary mainstream from a Canadian newspaper.
2. The Guardian: Nick Hornby interviews Springsteen, good mix of Hornby’s writing skills and fanboy-derived insight.

How much do I despise this Compaq Presario M2000 loaner that Fry’s stuck me with? A lot. Any manufacturer that thinks 256MB is sufficient to run even a fairly light load on WinXP Home is trading the immediate bottom line against longterm customer business. Fry’s has probably given up on any future sales to me anyway but HP can now do the same (as if they cared anyway).

What am I running that’s causing such long switch times? Not much on the surface though dig deeper and the demands, unavoidable as may be, grow. Right now (in addition to XPh and in general) I run:

• Firefox (latest rev, 1.0.5)
• Outlook 2003 (yes, I know it’s time to reconsider Thunderbird)
• SharpReader (still stuck at 0.9.5.1 and no product or personal blog entries from Luke in a while) although admittedly this is known to suck up more than its share of RAM

That’s it. You wouldn’t expect to wait 15-20 seconds when switching between apps. Wait, then we need to acount for all the necessities and extras:

• Norton Antivirus/Firewall, because way too many assclowns are constantly looking to pervert, corrupt or takeover unprotected machines, which is actually a bunch of seperate programs (CCAPP, CCEVTMGR, CCPROXY, CCSETMGR, navapsvc, savscan, SymWSC,
• Windows Messenger, not signed in but required by Norton for an unexplained reason
• NDAS Manager, which provides the seamless connection to my Ximeta NAS drive
• iTunesHelper and iPodService, some utilites Apple requires for iTunes whether iTunes is running or not
• ATI utilities and helpers for the video card
• hpqwmi and hpwuSchd2, presumably machine-specific tools from HP
• lsass is a Windows service and a frequent virus target
• jusched is the Java Update Scheduler because it’s important to be checking all the time for the absolute latest version of Java (but not necessary and I’m taking it out)

And so on. A lot of crap, much of it offering little direct value. The complications of an open system, I suppose, and the high return to rogue elements for trivial effort.

In a season filled so far with lethargic 0-0, 1-1 and 2-2 ties and just enough victories snuck in to have them second to the surging FC Dallas, last night the Earthquakes collapsed completely and lost 3-0.

Danny Califf was back from a red card vacation and so I expected the solid backline performance the preferred foursome of Califf, Edie Robinson, Wade Barrett and Kelly Gray have delivered in the 10 or so games they’ve been together after Troy Dayak and Craig Waibel were lost for the season. They simply didn’t give it. Califf also earned another yellow card, meaning he misses Wednesday’s match at Colorado, though I thought Terry Vaughn overreacted in the moment and the kindest interpretation is cumulative fouls.

I also expected to see a bit more flair and connectivity with Dwayne Derosario back from three Gold Cup matches running the Canadian attack. Maybe the unfamiliar humidity of a Washington July evening drained our squad, maybe DC’s constant not-quite-a-foul pounding strategy worked as desired. Whatever the reason the Quakes could not penetrate and pound United’s Nick Rimando all night, managing only one shot that demanded a serious effort to deflect.

Brad Davis is still away with the US team, most likely will be through next weekend if the Men beat Jamaica today and then the midweek semifinal against the Honduras/Costa Rica winner. I’m guessing but Davis’s return should see Ricardo Clarke sitting on the substitute’s bench again and that will be a substantial upgrade. Also, and not that I don’t appreciate the effort and tenacity of Alejandro Moreno, but boy do I miss Brian Ching. The Hawaiian simply has height and in the box power that the Venezuelan doesn’t.

Interestingly, both DC and SJ are in the same ownership fix. Anschutz owns both and has announced its selling both but no new owner has stepped forward, leaving fans to speculate or wander away. At least fans in the capitol have no cause to worry that their side will be relocating; despite leaks indicating that news is imminent for us, the Quakes’ fate remains unknown.