Monday, November 20, 2006

Perception is Reality

Much to the disappointed of my “bear” friend, I shaved this weekend. No big deal, No pics this time. It was just bugging me, and plus Gilette sent me one of those new fangled razors with 12 blades on it and Jonah begged me to try it out. Though I was tempted to leave a “soul patch,” because it would make me look completely ridiculous, and I’m always up for a giggle.

ONE PERSON out of the eighteen or so in my office noticed that I had shaved. Now of course, I don’t really care, but I thought more people would have noticed and said, “Hey didn’t you used to look different? Like, you had stuff on your face?”

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Ditch Digger School, Here I Come

Since I have 13 children, I work full-time, still need to finish the basement re-model, have this site and another under construction, I really, REALLY don’t have time to become obsessed with a television show. But of course, I have.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

And it’s because it’s well written and I’m enjoying the characters. NOT because I have a crush on Amanda Peet and her enormous teeth.

Anyway, so my obsession has unearthed a major problem with my life (besides that little problem I have with eating an entire container of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream in one breath)

Man, oh man, I hate technology. Seriously. Hate it, hate it, HATE IT!

A small sample of my week last week:

In my quest to watch Studio 60 at a convenient time and un-encumbered by children screaming over the finely crafted Sorkin dialog, I set my DVR to record the entire series. The home built media server (tried using MythTV, ended on Windows Media Center) has never worked properly, you know. It’s probably because I’m a Windows spaz, and I don’t really know how to build a PC, but man… it sucks.

So I went and got a Comcast DVR. I know, I know. People hate it. It’s slow. It’s retarded and sometimes possessed. I’ve never had Tivo, so I don’t have a great frame of reference. Plus, we got a decent deal on their voice, data and TV plan. Fine, I’ll suffer with the icky DVR. It beats what I built.

Except that it really doesn’t work right either. Perhaps they have me in their engineering department and I wasn’t aware of it. Sometimes the local affiliates would come in and sometimes not. The vagaries of signals and interference, apparently, according to the friendly Comcast folks at Comcast Tech Support World HQ. Or a bad DVR unit. So I took it back, waited in line and got another one. It worked. Sort of. Now the Sci-Fi channel is bad. Then channel 5 (NBC and the home of all things Sorkin related this fall) goes kablooey again. I call again and Comcast thinks it’s my wiring. Which is just FABULOUS, since they did they wiring in the house. Anyway, they cable guy comes out, makes tsk-tsk noises at my cable splitters and then discovers that the real problem is up on the pole in my backyard.

Now I may guilty of doing many, many stupid things with technology, (like the time I had the DNS server re-direct everyone’s web traffic to the Regis and Kathy Lee home page at abc.com), but shimmying up a 30 foot pole and mucking around with the cable is not one of those things. (I think someone, at some point was pilfering cable and that made everything go screwy. Whatever. It wasn’t me.) All of that (including goofying around with the media server (again)) in a vain attempt to get it hoofing along enough to record ONE MEASLY HOUR OF TELEVISION. Kill me now.

Anyway, it works now and I can get my Studio 60 fix, until someone at NBC realizes that it costs a fortune to make, isn’t in the top 10 and they can replace it with some other reality TV drivel for an eighth the cost. Then I’ll be sad inside (again) and have to make some actual progress on the basement.

I also tried to install Movable Type on our Xserve. I don’t think it’s possible. Spent all night CPAN-ing and trying to get DBI and DBD::mysql to compile. Played with makefiles and config flags, until I lost the ability to feel the tips of my fingers. (I tend to bang on the keyboard when I type. And when I get annoyed at computers not doing what they are supposed AND JUST INSTALL THE HELLISH MODULE, ALREADY!!/, I also tend to beat on things.) Oh, as a side dish, getting Ruby on Rails to work… not a walk in the park there either.  If you need to do it on OS X Server, just follow these instructions. Though I still can’t get it to work with Apache and I’m testing lightTPD instead. Again. whatever.

And remember this? Apple accidently sent me two processors (when I only needed one), I sent the bad one and the extra one back and then they had no record of me sending one of them back. One definitively made it back to the Apple mothership, and the other was possible lost in whatever place G5 processors escape to when they have a chance to sneak off. Apple charged my AmEx $941.08 for that little gem. So I called Apple, who eventually directed me to DHL, who basically told me I was screwed, since “our system can’t go back that far and we can’t track based on your name.” “Can’t go back that far”?? It was less than two months ago! But I was able to convince Apple (thanks Matthew in AppleCare Enterprise) that the two shipments from Salt Lake to the Apple Return Center in early October were from me. Score one for me.

Final tally for the week: Technology: 7, Jon: 1 (there are a couple of other things I didn’t want to bore you with).

So I’m seriously thinking about hanging up my keyboard and going to electrician school. Or even better, bulldozer operator school! (Is there a school for that?) That would be eleven-teen kinds of awesome. And maybe they’d let me take the bulldozer home every now and then. I could use it to make all my other household appliances behave. Threaten them with squishing unless they straighten up and fly right. And how cool would it be to commute to the job site in a bulldozer. Road rage take on a whole new meaning when you are perched up on a big yellow machine!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

We Are Hooked

Guitar Hero II came out. We have all been glued to the PS2. I got it on Tuesday, election day, and we switched between CNN and watching Lucas totally rip on that game. Even Reha likes playing this game. (That’s a five star rating if there ever was one.)

Look at these pics of Jonah. Dude’s got an attitude and everything. Thing is: He is PLAYING the game and making all these acrobatic maneuvers with his little bod. Seriously. Come over to my house and watch. It’s way better than TV. Even if the Republicans are taking a pounding, it’s more fun to watch Jonah wiggle his booty. I really should photoshop a tattoo that reads “Born to be Wild!” on his bicep. Though knowing him, he’d just complain that it wasn’t a “flaming death skull” or some such.

And he has a posse!

The pasta necklace is hardcore, you know. Chicks dig the pasta. It’s all about the semolina.

My left hand is killing me. And I can beat the game on medium, but I’m a total loser after that. But playing YYZ, even on a wimpy setting like “medium” in co-op mode: Wicked awesome. Totally worth the price of admission.

Monday, November 13, 2006

It’s Because Deep Down They Are ALL Lawyers, I Think

Everyone at our house has something to say about any given topic. “Talkin’ back” is what they called it down South when I was a boy.

Reha: “Why does everyone here want to argue with me?”

Me: “I think you are mistaken about that. Not EVERYONE wants to argue with you.”

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Education, Dad Style

In exchange for not having to make the kids’ lunches, I do the junior high car pool in the mornings.

I have an irrational thing against spreading peanut butter on bread, it’s better if I don’t go into it, trust me. I just don’t like to spread stuff, OK? It bugs.

As a part of my duties, I’ve taken it upon myself to educate these children of the 00’s on what good music sounds like. Or at least, what the music I like sounds like. I usually go with a theme. Last time I did “member of the band died of drug overdose or suicide” (Sex Pistols, Joy Division, The Who, you get the idea.) I also sometimes have a whole car pool trip featuring just one artist/per day. Though the folks with larger oeuvres get more than one day.

Anyway, today was The Police, one of my all time favorite bands. Though Sting by himself ends up grating on me a bit, I love The Police with all the fibers of my being that aren’t dedicated to loving other things, like Mac OS X, Photoshop and the way my wife looks at me askew sometimes.

Again, anyway… The Police.

I usually hit play on the iPod and say, in the most condescending way possible I’m sure all the junior high kids in the car pool would agree, “So here we have Band X, and they were great during time period Y, until they Sold Out/OD’ed on heroin/let Yoko into John’s life/etc.”

So we were listening to The Police and I realized, “Man, those guys were MESSED UP.” And I never, ever realized this as a boy/young man/grumpy balding old guy until now. I know, I know. I’m slow on the uptake and should have been playing closer attention, and everyone has known this kind of stuff for aeons, but it was a simpler time for me, way back in the dark days of the 80s. I had just discovered girls AND video arcades. And lyrics will pretty much always take a back seat to those things when you are as easily distracted as I am.

Back to my point, Sting, Summers and Copeland wrote some screwed up stuff. To wit:

“Every Breath You Take” That dude’s a STALKER, man! I know, I know, it sounds very romantic and very John Cusack in “Say Anything,” but I’m thinking that the guy in the song *knows* where she lives and has a web-cam on her 24/7. Spooky.

“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” Pedophile! Even grosser knowing that Sting was a teacher.

“Can’t Stand Losing You” Perhaps too easy a target, since it’s all right there in the title. But, jeez man, get some meds to deal with that obsessive stuff, OK? Get a hobby, like the rest of us did after our girlfriends broke up with us. Yes, mine was collecting Beanie Babies and playing Dungeons & Dragons, if you *must* know.

“Roxanne” OK, this one is too easy, really. But yeah, pretty messed up to be in love with a hooker, who I’m guessing probably doesn’t look like Julia Roberts

“Message in a Bottle” While not overtly creepy, it is a bit disconcerting to realize that by the end of the song he’s actually singing about how we are all pretty much lonely losers. (See above about me and the Beanie Babies).

And those are just the big “hits” from the days of yore. Delve deeper into the discography and you have psychotic gems like “Mother” off of Synchronicity. That one is totally icky. And the last track off Synchronicity, “Murder by Numbers” is no happy joy song either, I might add. “Be My Girl Sally” from their first album Outlandos d’Amour? Catchy little tune about a man’s love affair with his sex doll. Awesome.

So that’s what I do for America’s youth, my friends. I introduced them to all the tormented and psychologically twisted songs/artists from my past. I seem to have an iPod full of them.

 

Novus

Proximus

 

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• From the Office of Mis-directed Email
• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2008 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.