Not much going on today… but I did manage to move my links from the old site to this one, and they have a page all their own.
Author: Jason
The Sound of Silence
The one thing that sucks most about having your car stereo stolen is driving without music for several days until you get it replaced. I’ve never been one much for keeping quiet when I drive… singing or talking, there’s usually something being said or at least thoughts rumbling around in my head waiting for the right moment to come out. But music always fills in the empty spaces. Driving now is creepy… when I stop talking to myself, I can hear the tires on the road with perfect clarity. I can hear the changing sounds of cars switching lanes. I hear the plink of little bits of road debris plinking in the wheel wells.
Silence has always kinda creeped me out. When people ask that question, “If you had to choose, would you rather be deaf or blind?” I agonize on it for a long time, but ultimately come down on the side of blind. I think I could handle not being able to see… but living it a world of silence, I think that would be too much for me.
Anyway, my replacement stereo arrived today by UPS, so I shouldn’t have to put up with a music-less drive for much longer.
Tremors
“Running’s not a plan! Running’s what you do, once a plan fails!”
-Earl Bassett, Tremors
Its funny… I often find myself quoting Tremors, but this one stands out. Mostly, this quote keeps popping up because of how I have come to apply it to life. Too many people rely on things that should be backup plans or fail safes as their primary plan. You can see it on the streets when you drive. There are people out there who have insurance, and they’ve covered themselves in the safest car on the road, and they drive like they don’t care about anyone else. They trust the car to save their lives and the insurance to cover the damages, and it never crosses their minds to, you know, pay attention to the road. They run yellow lights at high speed, they change lanes without signaling or even looking, and they are more intent on finishing phone conversations than they are on actually driving their car.
Lots of people deal with relationships, jobs, and other things the same way. They run out instead of trying to work on the problems, instead of trying to fix it.
That’s what this quote means to me. And he’s right… running isn’t a plan, its what you do when every opportunity to succeed has failed. Running is a last resort, and should be treated like one.
Fever Pitch
Ever since I saw ‘Stuck On You’ I’ve been wary of anything with the Farrelly brothers names attached. But then I think of movies like ‘Outside Providence’ and I always give them another chance. From a source that is so hit-or-miss with very little middle ground, I was extremely surprised with ‘Fever Pitch’.
The basic story is… a guy, who is a math teacher, meets a girl, who is some sort of business accountant executive or something, and they hit it off. All winter long they have what is the beginning of a great romance, and then he reveals his deep dark secret… He’s a Boston Red Sox fan. And when I say fan, I mean he’s got season tickets and he hasn’t missed a game in 11 years, I mean he’s got Red Sox stuff all over his apartment… He’s not just a fan… he’s a fanatic. He goes to spring training instead of going to meet her parents, and so on…
The movie was good. It was funny, and romantic. It was great. And to top it off, they filmed the movie during the actual baseball season where the Red Sox locked in the wild card slot and took on the Yankees for the playoff, made it to the world series, and broke the Curse of the Bambino and won the whole thing. When they filmed the movie, they rewrote and reshot the movie as the season progressed, and they wrote two endings… one for a Red Sox World Series win, one for a Red Sox defeat, then went with the one that matched reality.
3rd time’s a charm
Its a good thing I don’t write on Mondays, because if I did, yesterday would have been a venomous stream of epithets denegrating the upbringing of a portion of society and a slander of the dubious pedigree of their mothers.
For the third time in six months, I exited work with a skip in my step. Having completed a good solid day of work and embarking on my journey home, ahead of schedule and ahead of the traffic, I came upon my car in the parking lot, minus one window and a stereo. In the morning, I’d had visions of program code dancing in my head, and absentmindedly forgot to take the faceplate of my stereo with me. When I returned in the afternoon, I found my rear passenger door was missing a window, and my dashboard had been skillfully disassembled and my stereo deftly removed. I say ‘skillfully’ and ‘deftly’ because the thieves, as always, caused no damage to the dash or the wiring in removing the stereo. They just popped the dash, pulled the stereo and unhooked all the wires.
As with before, its largely an exercise in annoyance to me… my insurance has been in great standing for years. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in almost a decade, have had only one accident and that was eight years ago, I pay my premiums on time. The last two thefts caused no change in my insurance. This one won’t either. I have a zero deductable for glass damage, and the stereo is fully covered. As of today, just one day later, the glass is already fixed, and the check is in the mail for the stereo. By the end of the week, I’ll actually have a better stereo than the one they stole, for less money than I paid for the last one (and certainly less than what the check will cover). I just don’t get it though… is there really a market for stolen stereos? The one they took, you can buy new for about $100. So the thief will hock it for maybe $20 to a fence or pawn, who will turn around and sell it for… $50? I get $200, buy a new $100 stereo and pocket $100. Hell, if I could just get them to steal my stereo every week, I’d make $5200 a year in non-taxable income.
I could do a lot with $5200. But its still annoying, especially when you consider that I would actually prefer to take public transportation if I could get from here to work with transfer silliness and dealing with two systems that seem to want to refuse to work together. And annoyance leads to fantasy, and I dream of car alarms… no. I dream of theft deterant systems. I dream of spinning blades that cut perpatrators off at the knees, simultaneously cauterizing the wound, leaving them to run away on their stumps.
I’ll sleep pretty well for the next few weeks…
Sahara
This was a good movie. Adventure. Action. Comedy. Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn make the best buddies in a buddy movie that I’ve seen in a long time.
Definately worth the price of admission.
Just Playin’ …
So, I spent a bunch of time looking through all the available themes for WordPress. There are a lot of very nice ones, however, none of them really sparked my interest. There are a few cool tricks that I’ll be stealing, but the layouts of them weren’t my bag.
See, I’m a big believer (most of the time) in letting the content fill the browser. Artificially limiting someone to a set width and leaving gaps either on both sides or the right just bugs me. Now, don’t get me wrong.. they have their place, and I use them, for ‘the Front Page’ and some of my other writings where I want the presentation to be exact for column length or whatnot. But in a place like a weblog or online journal or whatever, it just doesn’t fit. Especially when they use a 400 pixel width in the days where most people are running at 1024 x 768, or at the very least 800 x 600. Using only half the screen width just screams of poor layout design.
Anyway… so after reviewing a bunch of themes I’m going to be just sticking with and modifying the default theme. You may notice the colors are a little different today and the menu has moved a little. Baby steps…
There’s No Place Like Work
I’m sure at least one person out there has wondered where it is that I spend most of my day. And it just so happens that this morning as I got into work I decided to snap a picture of my cubicle. When I was just working for ITCS, doing internal work and client support, I had an office. It was nice and big, I had two desks and a conference table. And I had a window. I arranged my desk to face the door so noone could sneak up on me, and I happily whiled away the hours coding and troubleshooting, and sometimes surfing the web. But those days are gone.
I’m down at BellSouth now, contract for ITCS. The money is better, and the hours more plentiful, but when it comes to work space I got shafted. Hard. See that monitor in the picture? That’s not my workstation. My PC is hidden in the corner. That dark screen you see is an application server. And all those file cabinets? Not mine. They are full of other people’s junk. In the lower left corner you can see a bit of blue. This is a spare chair. Its not mine, but it stays in my cube because none of the real employees want it in theirs, except when they need the extra seat, but they always bring it back.
Someday, I’ll have an office again.
The Death of Innovation
There is an article on CNN… Here. And what I have to say only deals with it abstractly. The gist of the article is, a number of years ago, to raise awareness of the ostracizing and belligerent treatment of homosexuals, GLSEN came up with the idea of a “Day of Silence”. People supporting the cause would choose to not speak for an entire day, the idea being that if enough people do it, then perhaps those that treat gays (and other) kids badly might see what its like to be separated from the rest. The article isn’t about the Day of Silence, but about the “Day of Truth” being organized by ‘the other side’. Religious folks and whatnot who are going to use the day after the Day of Silence to wear loud T-shirts and hand out pamphlets, and basically be anything but silent about how being gay is a sin and is harmful to humanity as a whole.
Honestly, I really believe that people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt people who don’t want to be hurt. (Surprisingly, there are a number of people who for one reason or another, in one form or another, actually WANT to be hurt, and I feel they are free to do so.) So neither the Day of Silence nor the Day of Truth will have any real affect on me. But, when the Day of Silence was conceived at least it was original… the whole approach was fresh, and different. It was kinda neat. But these people with the Day of Truth, they couldn’t think of anything other than “Let’s do the opposite of them!”
Come on, you right wing religious zelots! Get out there and show us what you’ve got! Be original! Be imaginative! Be innovative!
Cars and Idiots
I hope I never get into a horrible car wreck in Atlanta on the highway.
Now, while I hope that I never get into a horrible car wreck at all, I feel that if it must happen, I just hope it happens somewhere else. This morning I saw a wreck. Traffic was backed up for a couple miles. Then I spy an ambulance coming up the lane to my left. So I slow up and allow a couple of people from that lane to get in front of me in order to allow the ambulance to pass.
Lo and behold, schmucks from my lane, seeing the lane to their left opening up, dart left to fill the void from all the vacating cars. Slowing down the ambulance as they block the lane and then have to make their way back into their old place. One car even cut off the ambulance, causing them to skid to a halt to avoid a wreck themselves.
Are people really this oblivious? It really makes me was to start taking public transportation despite the fact that it costs more than driving (hideously designed system transfers mean I wind up paying twice for a single ride to work).
I just hope the ambulance arrived to its destination in time, and that the people in the other wreck are okay.