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otterblossom.
Scott Adams speaks sense about flag-burning.
Lesson learned: interns go where you point them. :-) They'll do exactly what you tell them to do, and they haven't been out in the world long enough to encounter nuance, so don't give vague directions. (In this case: swap in this new logger class, and while you're at it get rid of the direct calls to System.out.println(). Um, yeah -- I should have said explicitly to replace them with calls to the logger where it made sense to do so. I didn't mean wipe them out entirely. Fortunately, that's why we have change control.)
I recently picked up (at deep discount) the first season of a TV show called Jeremiah, pretty much entirely because J. Michael Straczynski wrote it. (Well, he wrote the episodes; the story is based on a comic book by someone else.) The show ran two seasons on Showtime c. 2002-2003. Only the first is available on DVD, so there is disappointment down the road for me, but so far I'm really enjoying what I've seen (six episodes). The premise is that 15 years ago some mega-virus wiped out everyone on earth past puberty; the kids who survived are now adults living in the aftermath. Jeremiah and his sidekick Kurdy are two of the guys in (figurative) white hats; my one-word characterization of Jeremiadh is "paladin". Jeremiah is trying to find a place his parents named before they died, though he's not sure why it's important, and the few people who've heard of it won't talk about it. We've seen glimpses of his back-story (particularly that he feels responsible for his brother's death) and I assume more will be forthcoming. So far the show seems to be episodic with a loose arc, but it's early yet. ( speculation -- not technically spoilers, I don't think, but cut anyway )
My parents wanted to show off their shiny new mall (Pittsburgh Mills), but it was raining so we didn't see much of it. I am not a recreational shopper (unless it caters to my particular obsessions, but I don't get excited over things like clothes), and mostly one expanse of stores is much like another to me, so shrug. I don't need to see the third local Barnes & Noble or the 437th Starbucks; I care about the unusual or unique stores, but they are very much the minority in such developments. (And in the "some things never change" department, service in the new mall's new Eat & Park was very slow. We were on the verge of walking out without paying not because we're that kind of people but because we couldn't find anyone who would take our money.)
Later Sunday we went to afternoon tea hosted by a friend, but the aforementioned rain meant we didn't go out into her garden. It was a pleasant gathering, though, and the tea and little sandwiches and cookies were tasty.
Dani and I didn't catch Firefly when it was on TV, so when we were recently ordering stuff anyway we picked up the show on DVD. We've seen three episodes so far, and it's got my attention. I take it we aren't going to find out what's up with River before the end of the show (or the movie)? I was a little surprised to see how overtly a western it is -- the horses in the first episode and the bar fight in the second augmented the soundtrack and the characters' general style. :-)
Given how little TV we watch (less now that West Wing and Commander in Chief are done), I wonder if it would ultimately be cheaper to cancel the cable and just buy the interesting shows when they come out on DVD. As a benchmark for lag time I just checked Amazon, and this year's Invasion is due out in August. But hey -- it says "complete series"? Did they really not renew it? Bummer -- I'd heard that they did, but apparently they changed their minds.
Erik still needs to gain weight, so he'd been eating mostly canned food. A friend suggested (and the vet concurred) that feeding him baby food might help (more protein), so I bought a few jars of that to try out the idea. He loves that! (Or, to be more precise, so far he loves chicken puree.) Because baby food is intended for people, it has nutrition information -- which tells me that a small jar is 70 calories and 6g of protein. (A baby's RDA of protein seems to be 14-15g.) This makes me wonder what ordinary feline nutrition needs are. Cat food, not being intended for humans, doesn't come with the FDA-required data dump.
I've been listening to a CD by Neshama Carlebach that I picked up recently ("Journey", IIRC). I was surprised to notice that she uses the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew -- surprised because her father, who was also a famous singer and songwriter (in addition to being a rabbi) used the Ashkenazi pronunciation. I guess I just assumed she'd follow her father in this, though I'm glad she didn't 'cause Sephardi is what I'm used to and it makes it easier for me to understand what I'm listening to.
I never thought it would be so much hassle to evict a mailing list. I'm currently hosting a list at my shell provider. There is a Yahoo mirror of the list, but for historic reasons that's not the "main" list. Well, I want to stop hosting it, so that's going to change now. This should be a simple matter of moving subscribers, flipping a switch at Yahoo (so direct posting is allowed), and shutting down the current (non-Yahoo) list. In practice, though, moving subscriptions requires the subscribers' active participation (which isn't happening), and only the owner of the Yahoo list can flip that switch (I'm a moderator; the owner is bouncing email), and I'm starting to wonder if moving the list requires sacrificing a goat under a full moon at midnight or some such. (Which would be a problem, as that's pretty likely to be avodah zarah, or alien worship. And squicky. :-) )
He also pointed out a test to eliminate the TV: run the signal through a VCR. Yeah, it degrades the signal and that's not a permanent solution, but it's good enough for a test. Running a DVD signal to a VCR never occurred to me -- but then, bootlegging DVDs onto tape never occurred to me, either.
At Shabbat services we had both rabbis, for the first time in at least a month. We also had a large turnout, including some prospective new members. I guess that's one way to tell that summer is ending. :-)
This week, my rabbi said, pretty much all of the congregations in town (not just Jewish, everyone) started organizing efforts to relocate storm refugees to Pittsburgh. (Those that want to come here, that is. No one's insisting, but we do have space.) Apparently we've got hundreds of spots already and buses ready to go, just as soon as FEMA will let us talk to the refugees and drive those buses in to get the ones who want to come.
This map shows some of the bigger disaster risks in the US (funny). I forget who provided the link.
There have been lots of posts on some SCA lists trying to organize replacement SCA stuff for the folks hit by the hurricane -- new garb, scrolls, etc. Their hearts are in the right places, but most of this seems months premature to me. Let those people get housing before you start saddling them with stuff!
Why do so many people on mailing lists believe that a major event trumps the topic of the list? These people seem to think that somehow you won't find out about national news if you don't read it on the SCA kingdom list -- as if that was each subscriber's only source of information. Sheesh. The people on the lists I frequent are being better about this than they were for 9/11, but still... I've been deleting a lot of stuff from the moderation queue for one list.
osewalrus (aka ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif){kind=small}
hfeld_blog).
Last night's D&D game was fun (though long). The campaign will be ending soon, and that makes me sad even though it's necessary. Ralph set out, four years ago, to play out a particular story arc, and we're almost done. We've had some great moments, and we have some good story yet to come. I wonder what we'll do when it's all over.
We're nearly done watching Wonderfalls, a half-season TV show we borrowed on DVD. The first half-dozen episodes were wacky and quirky in a fun way, and on that basis we bought a copy for a friend as a gift. The last few episodes have been growing more dark and weird. While I know that the decision to kill it was made by episode #4 (that's all that aired), I'm not sure the outcome would have differed if the entire run had been allowed to air. But then, maybe something's coming in the last episode to tie it all up; we'll see.
From the "just shoot me now" department: We got a glimpse of the new time-tracking system we'll have to use at work starting in a couple weeks. The first sign that this would not meet our usual high standards for user interfaces came in the text shown in the desktop icon: "3270". Yup -- text-based COBOL system, no shortcuts, no UI brains. Whee.
One
WallMart now requires employees to commit to work any shift, 24x7, or
be fired (link from revlaniep). Got kids with specific
day-care hours? Have a problem working on the sabbath? Tough noogies.
I found this quote from the article ironic: "The officials who did know
were attending a conference on diversity and could not be reached, he said."
Diversity, huh?
This doesn't come up in all fiction, of course. A TV show with an ensemble cast, by definition, doesn't call out one character as "the main guy", and I find I both tolerate and relish many shades of gray there. B5's Londo is a fascinating character to me, for instance. I actually prefer ensemble shows, by the way, because they seem to allow for richer characters.
Jack Bauer on 24 tries to be a hero, but as this season goes on I'm becoming convinced that he is pretty much completely amoral, and there's nothing heroic about that. The character and the show do not fit any of the molds I've described as liking -- he's not a hero I identify with, he's not a fascinating character study, and 24 certainly is not an ensemble show. And yet I find myself watching it every week, and wanting to watch it on the broadcast night. I don't know why.
This ramble was inspired in particular by the last five minutes of this week's episode. There darn well better be consequences.
Edit: A cleaner way of saying this might be: if there is a main character then I want to either like or be fascinated by him; this is not true of Jack Bauer; yet I still watch.
schulman, who might have been a pusher in a past life, lent us Wonderfalls on DVD. This was a very-short-lived TV show that I've heard her gush about. But I'd never picked up from the gushing just what the show is about.Last night I got a call from a TV-market-research outfit. First they asked how many nights anyone in the house watches anything that airs during prime time, and after thinking a moment I said "4". (I should have said "3"; I forgot that Jack & Bobby airs on Sunday at 6, not 8. Oops.) This exactly matches the number of shows anyone in the house watches, so they probably drew an incorrect conclusion from my answer, but I answered the question they asked.
They then asked to speak with the oldest male resident age 18-49, but he said talking to him would be pointless so they took me instead. It sounds like I get to be part of a test market for some new shows; they'll call me to ask me to watch something and, if I do, they'll call me right afterwards to get my feedback. Could be interesting, and if not there's no obligation, so I told them sure. Who knows, they might air something that's really good but risky, and maybe my feedback will count for something. We'll see. Not as good as being a Nielsen family, but we do what we can. :-)
Neverwhere focuses on Richard Mayhew, a businessman (banker?) in London who gets sucked into the underworld. Not underworld like in mafia -- underworld as in a different world that exists beneath the streets of London and that is populated by some very other-worldly sorts of folks. Gaiman seems to do particularly well with putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations and making good story come out the other end. One of the things I liked about Sandman is that despite the millieu, I felt I was reading about people. Maybe not people who could ever exist on Earth, but people nonetheless. Some of the core characters in Neverwhere share that quality.
There are stock characters, and caricatures, to be sure. The visible bad guys (who I keep wanting to call Guido and Luigi though those aren't their names) are stereotypical but well-done and just the right blend of archtype and creep. The enigmatic Marquis is a mystery until the end. Door, the sweet young thing at the center of the conflict, seems helpless but isn't entirely so.
At the center of this is Richard, who doesn't really fit in either world and is now caught between them. The resolution of his story is nicely done, but I won't say more lest I spoil things.
There is one bit of cinematography (or art design, or something -- not sure where to place the credit) that was very effective. Somewhere in each episode we see this sequence of images -- the first time it's a dream, but not always -- that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's always the same sequence. Over the course of the six episodes, the meanings of the images become clear. Nice.
In general the production values are, um, toward the lower end, but you know what? I don't care. It was well-done within what was apparently a limited budget. I care a lot more about story than about sets and props.
Neverwhere was released on DVD in the US last year. (That's good, because Nth-generation PAL-to-NTSC tapes aren't always so wonderful. :-) ) The show aired in 1996.
Caveat: There is also a book. I read the book before seeing the show. I didn't know it had been made into a TV show when I found the book, actually. When I learned about the TV show I thought it was based on the book. Nope -- other way around. The book is a novelization. I think I might have enjoyed the show more if I had not read the book first.
Grouper is quickly becoming my favorite fish to cook with. (But where do they get these names? :-) ) When baking fish there's a fairly small window in which the fish is cooked all the way through but not over-cooked. This window seems to be wider with this particular fish. I don't know why, but I'm not complaining. (It's also a fairly sturdy fish without strong flavor, meaning you can do just about anything to it.)
Tomorrow my company is having its annual retreat, so I won't be online. Usually they have these on some mid-week day; this year it's a Friday and after the time change, so I'll have to leave early due to Shabbat. Fortunately, it's in a location that's not hard to drive to and from. (There's one site we've used in the past for which my reaction would be to not go unless I could ride with someone willing to leave early.)
(Shabbat before 5:00, all of a sudden, feels weird. I'll get used to it, of course; I always do.)
Our company plans to grow pretty substantially over the coming year, so I assume a major theme of the retreat will be growth and change. We've got a lot of good people, so I think we'll mostly come through this growth fine, but there are landmines we have to watch out for, mostly (based on past experience) in the areas of communication, general management, and (avoiding) disenfranchising people.
There are only two classes at the upcoming Academy (SCA
event) that specifically interest me. (Thanks, dagonell, for the list.) Naturally, they
are scheduled against each other. Sigh. (They weren't
on the previous draft.) There are some classes that
I wouldn't mind taking so it's probably worth
going, mind; I'm just a little frustrated. (The advance
information doesn't include names of teachers [update: just
added, yay], which could
make a difference for classes I wouldn't attend just based
on title. A good teacher can make all the difference, and
we have some of those in this kingdom.) Still, it looks
like a weaker slate than I'm used to.
A news story reported that someone was convicted of "attempted first-degree intentional homicide". I thought the difference between homicide and manslaughter was intent, meaning there's no such thing as unintentional homicide. So I'm assuming sloppy writing here, though I'll admit to being a little confused at times about the degree thing, which might be relevant. My impression is that "first degree homicide" means "I specifically meant to kill you, in cold blood if necessary, you scum", that "third degree manslaughter" means "I was doing something I should have known could kill someone, but I sure didn't mean to kill or hurt anyone, let alone you specifically", and that everything else falls in between.
To the writers on West Wing: we want our characters back; could you repeat the ransom demand?
The relevant network [1] moved Jack and Bobby into the same time slot as West Wing. That's a smart move, as the show seems to be aimed at the same viewers (though the shows are very different) and WW is floundering. But I also wonder how much scheduling actually matters these days; doesn't just about every TV-viewing household have at least one recording device? Competing shows aren't the problem they once were.
[1] Yeah, branding is real effective on me... I notice the intrusive logo on the screen but just don't retain the data, and the VCR takes care of remembering what channel it's on.
(Noted in passing: fourth season of West Wing in September; second season of Blake's 7 allegedly in October.)
I sometimes wonder about the security implications of the quizzes and other memes that run around LJ. Consider: your passowrd is (I think) stored in a cookie. You follow a link while reading your friends page (so you're probably logged in) to some unvouched-for site where you give your user name as part of getting some bit of content to post in your journal. I don't know a lot about cookies, but isn't it fairly straightforward for a malicious meme-writer to harvest your password that way? I try to never fill those things out while logged in, personally. (Yes, I do sometimes fill them out, out of curiosity -- the ones that are likely to have interesting content, like the mind map and the friends-list-evaluation ones, not the "what kind of eggplant are you?" ones.)
The two instances of Giant Eagle that I shop at seem to have both stopped carrying my cats' favorite food (Tender Vittles). While googling to try to find out if the product had been discontinued (no one at the store seemed to know anything), I found a place where I can mail-order it by the case for about what I normally pay for it. Ok, that works. Gee, I wonder if I can mail-order the cat litter under similar circumstances, rather than shlepping it home from the store myself? I'll have to try that.
This afternoon I attended a bridal shower for a friend. I so do not know how to be a girly girl. :-) It was a fun time, but there was a lot more estrogen in the air than I'm used to.
ralphmelton, I thought of Tobin in our D&D game.) These half-humans/half-animals ("hochi"?) are only a couple steps above out-worlders to most people.Sunday evening we had dinner with friends from my synagogue (the same folks whose seder I went to last year when Dani got sick; they've also invited us to other parties). It was a fun evening. Another couple (also from the synagogue) was there too. I worried a bit that Dani would feel left out even though he's met all these people on many occasions, but it wasn't a problem. There was enough of a geek density to work. :-)
I think it may be time to give up on Andromeda. It's been a while since the show was actually good; Sunday night I fell asleep during this week's show and found that this didn't really affect my enjoyment of it. Um, yeah. There was a change in creative control about a year ago (I think) and things went downhill then, but I held on in case it was just transition pains. But now, two of the most interesting characters are gone (for all practical purposes, in the case of Rev Bem -- the character as shown this week is not the one we know), and the stories have been more and more about action at the expense of plot. Yawn.
A few months ago the Contractor Who Rarely Returns
promised to find the source of the water damage to
the ceiling in the front hall and deal with it.
(This damage is almost directly below a spot in the
bathroom that is, in turn, damaged from an apparent
roof leak, but he thinks that's a coincidence. We
have been hypothesizing a bathtub-related plumbing
problem, though a plumber we had in a while ago
hadn't found anything suspicious.) In both cases,
we were probably snookered by the sellers; the
CWRR pointed out places where problems had been
covered up rather than fixed.
So anyway, the contractor hasn't done anything yet, though some supplies have moved around so we know he's been here. We still have the crack in the ceiling.
Sunday the toilet overflowed (sigh), and we heard the unmistakable sound of running water coming from downstairs. (New experience for us.) Oh joy. The good news is that we didn't lose a chunk of ceiling; the bad news (on reflection) is that the water stopped after several minutes and did not return on subsequent flushes. Why is that bad news? Because plumbing problems are probably easier to fix; it sounds to me like our bathroom floor is suspect (which may, of course, be caused by a plumbing problem too). I was hoping for, say, a cracked supply pipe, or even a broken seal on the toilet, that we could fix and be done with. So I guess it's now time to (1) poke the CWRR and (2) call someone else because we'd like the work to be done sooner rather than later. Not that this is a sure bet, of course; we wouldn't still be depending on the CWRR if contractors in general showed up when they said they would and did the work they said they'd do.
(In case you're wondering, the CWRR replaced the Conractor Who Never Returned, who disappeared off the face of the planet mid-job about half a year after we bought the house. Fortunately, while he owed us work, he had about the right amount of money from us when he vanished, so we eventually decided to call it even.)
insomnia).
This
QotD post from dglenn on conservative Episcopalians
and marriage is worth checking out.
goljerp wrote
a while back that he had a dream that I wrote something
about Mars, but I have not been inspired. So he'll
just have to settle for a picture (and the knowledge
that Opportunity seems to be happy so far).
I recently picked up the first season of M*A*S*H on DVD. (This used to be one of my favorite shows.) It's nice to be able to watch the episodes without the laugh track. The user interface is a little funky, though; instead of selecting this once and playing through the disc, you have to individually select each episode and choose this option. There doesn't seem to be a "just play the episodes in order until I say to stop" option, like there has been on every other DVD I've played so far. How odd.
Tomorrow is Baldur's appointment with the kitty dentist. I'm banking on the theory that a cat who is sleepy and lazy at the best of times will be especially groggy at 7am, and that getting him into a carrier unassisted will not be hard. Catching him is easy, but that's an awful lot of cat to try to manhandle.
Only two roads that form part of my commute had been plowed this morning. One of them was the street on which my garage opens. Had they not plowed it, I would have been able to just force the car out without shoveling -- but not with the mound the plow left for me. If I have to shovel my way out through plow-supplied mounds, I'd at least like to have plowed main roads. :-) (Everything was passable on the way home tonight.)
lefkowitzga, tangerinpenguin, alfiechat, arslan_ibn_daud, and others.lefkowitzga, lyev, rani23, tangerinpenguin, and lrstrobel. Missed seeing a few people at either party.This afternoon we watched the first few episodes of an anime series called "Infinite Ryvius". Dani picked it up recently after seeing a couple episodes at a con. It looks like it will be good. I'm not all that familiar with anime. (This edition has an English dialogue track, which I consider to be a requirement. I think Dani's content with subtitles, which is good for him because I think most anime comes that way.)
Yesterday we had some folks over for gaming. We played History of the World in the afternoon; I think this was my first game with a full six players. If my die-rolling on the final turn hadn't absolutely sucked, I might have been able to win. (I spent most of the game in the vicinity of third place.) Britain in its 19th/early-20th-century colonial phase, with "naval supremacy" to boot, is not supposed to get whumped everywhere it tries to invade. Not that I'm bitter. :-)
After dinner one person had to leave and we had one new arrival, but I was feeling gamed out and didn't want to play more. That left five people, the optimal number for most Rio Grande games, so they broke out Puerto Rico and had fun.
Thursday night was the D&D game. ( Read more... )
I just watched the season opener of Andromeda. No Tyr Anasazi in the credits. (He left the crew at the end of last season, but that didn't necessarily mean he was leaving the show.) Pity; he was an interesting character, and nice to look at besides. :-) I wonder what happened; I get the impression that he was one of the more popular characters, so I doubt it was a marketing decision.
One of the pieces of spam waiting for me tonight had a pitch (well, subject line) that I couldn't imagine being attractive to people of the target gender. So I checked that assumption with Dani, who cringed just like I expected him to. The subject: "stay hard for 72 hours". Ouch! What were they thinking?! Who are they trying to attract?
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