Author Archives: brad

Let’s put it to a vote.

Hottest “Princess”

Ariel
Belle
Cinderella
Jasmine
Mulan
Pocahontas
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White

Vote
View Results

Gracie has a bunch of books about Disney Princesses. This is, I believe, to be expected. She’s a four year old girl, and very much into things that are girly and pink. Disney Princesses fit the bill quite nicely.

But she has one book that lists eight princesses: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas.

I have issues with this; I don’t think they’re all princesses.

Snow White is definitely a princess. That isn’t even up for discussion. Same goes for Sleeping Beauty. Even a cursory examination of these stories clearly reveals the characters as royalty (or royalty in exile). Cinderella I can also accept. Although she doesn’t begin life as a princess, she marries a prince.

Those three are easy. The others are a bit trickier.

Ariel: yeah, she’s a princess, I guess. Her father is the King of the Sea, so that makes her the mermaid equivalent of a princess. And even if you don’t buy that, she marries a human prince at the end. I’ll also take Jasmine as a princess or princess equivalent, since her father is the sultan.

So we’re up to five bonafide princesses so far.

Belle, one of the “Classic Six” as near as I can determine, is problematic, so I’ll get back to her in a moment.

Mulan I’m rejecting out of hand. She’s not born into royalty. She doesn’t marry into royalty. She doesn’t marry at all, in fact, at least within the story as Disney tells it. I suppose a romance and eventual marriage are implied, but even so, her beau isn’t a prince. He’s a soldier. True, he’s a high ranking soldier, but that’s not quite the same as a prince, now is it? So, I’m sorry, but Mulan doesn’t make the cut. Great soldier, but no princess.

As for Pocahontas, I could go either way. Her father is the chief of the tribe, but that does that really qualify as royalty? Especially in that culture? I don’t know. Like I said, I could go either way. We’ll count her as a half princess.

Back to Belle. As far as I’m concerned, Belle is no princess. Allow me to explain. She’s the daughter of an eccentric inventory, not a king, so she’s not born into royalty. She does marry a “prince” at the end of the story, but for me, it’s the princeliness of the former Beast that raises the most questions. I don’t think he’s a genuine prince. He lives in some huge castle in France, near a village where no one even knows about the castle. None of the villagers seem to be aware that there’s a prince in the proximity, and there doesn’t seem to be any other sort of constituency within a reasonable distance of the castle. So what, exactly, is the Beast the prince of? Just the castle? Hogwash. And where are his parents? In the story, he must fall in love by either his eighteenth or twenty-first birthday (I forget which). How did he amass such wealth and power so early in life, and apparently entirely on his own? He even has a full staff at his disposal. Obviously, the Beast attained his position illegally. I think he sold steroids to Gaston and his cronies. I reject the Beast as a prince, so that rules Belle out, much as it pains me, because she is the second hottest of the so-called princesses.

So out of eight potential princess, we have five and a half.

iTunes just keeps getting better. The new 4.5 release adds a slew of great features, including some I’ve wished for. The best is the new ability to add Music Store preview tracks to your own playlists. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, because many times I’ll browse the store and think, “Oh, I want to buy that later,” only to forget within minutes. Now it’s not a problem.

Don’t miss the free songs they’re giving away. I just snagged “My Hero” by Foo Fighters after upgrading. Check out music videos and movie trailers, too. The new Disney section gives me a great idea for a birthday present for Gracie: her own custom mix CD, chock full of songs that won’t annoy Daddy in the car.

Printing CD inserts is a really nice touch, too. The mosaic on the left was generated from my Purchased Music playlist. Party Shuffle seems cools, but Jen and I will need to have another Un-Valentine Party so I can check it out. I haven’t tried Apple Lossless yet, since AAC and higher bit rate MP3 compression are acceptable to me, at least considering the file size trade-off.

This weekend, I…

– mowed the front yard for the first time this year, nearly obliterating my lawnmower in the process. I should have mowed sooner, but I didn’t want to mow right after installing the invisible dog fence.

– finally saw The Passion of the Christ. Wow. What an amazing film. Incredibly moving and powerful. Yeah, in the end, it’s just a movie, and Gibson took a few liberties, but it’s a great movie. I highly recommend seeing this movie if you haven’t yet.

– released tangelo 1.0b1 to my testers. What? You didn’t get the message? Then you’re obviously not on the mailing list.

– was dismayed to realize that SQLite doesn’t support ALTER TABLE. That sucks. I’ve worked around it, but it still sucks.

– attended the newcomer class at LCBC. The best part was when the pastor pointed out that one of their leadership principles is to “eliminate entropy in its earliest stages.” Or, in other words, to change direction when something isn’t working, the earlier the better. My good friend Andy, who happens to be a hydraulic engineer, was sitting next to me. He loved it. Any church that can refer to thermodynamics in its leadership principles is OK with him. Plus, the pastor opened this week’s sermon by driving a Plymouth Prowler onto the stage, and you have to respect that.

– re-read a hilarious story about a blimp and alligator brains and a large, silent, menacing presence that could fly. If you’ve never this story, you must. It is absolutely hilarious and very well written.

– had a lovely evening with Jen on Friday. Grace had an impromptu sleepover at Jen’s parents’ house, so we had the place to ourselves, after the movie and dinner with a friend.

– fixed some issues and bugs for tangelo 1.0b2. Sunday afternoons can be very productive for me. We almost always eat lunch with Jen’s parents, at their house. After lunch, Grace plays Barbies and make-up with Nana and Jen while Pops settles in for a well-deserved Sunday afternoon nap. I break out the laptop and crank out code. I also revamped some of the button icons, with a little bit of help from Jen (the globe icon carries her influence).

– finally made it to Celebrate Life this morning to see Tanya and Steve. Steve wasn’t there.

– wondered where I’ll be working this time next month. I thought about PowerSchool, IMSeries, LDAP, and writing my own CMS from the ground up. I hope SwordFish is ready soon. I just sent an email to REAL Software asking if SwordFish will be available for beta testing the way REALbasic currently is.

– finished watching Pulp Fiction. I’m probably the only guy around who watched Pulp Fiction and The Passion in the same weekend. It was pretty good. It wasn’t as non-linear as Mike had led me to believe, but telling the story out of sequence was effective. It was the first of Quentin Tarantino’s films that I’ve seen. I’d watch another. I think Dan wants me to see Reservoir Dogs.

– decided that I will use four by fours to prop up the new gazebo. Or as the Engrish instructions call it, my Ancient Pavilion. Three stacked horizontally should do it. Then I’ll put some faux-stone paint on them.

– ate several bowls of sugar free ice cream with sugar free chocolate syrup. And yes, I paid for it. Several times.

Looks like the FBI is getting ever more serious about copyright violations. This is good, as I feel strongly that they’ve been frittering away too many precious resources on frivilous pursuits, like catching killers and stuff.

Yesterday in Arizona, and allegedly in other places as well, the FBI raided Deer Valley School District: FBI agents raided the Deer Valley district’s Administration Services Center, just south of Deer Valley High School in Glendale, at 6 a.m. and stayed most of the day. The site houses the district’s information services and technology offices, essentially the “brains” of the district’s computer system, said Timothy Tait, district spokesman.

Interestingly, this copyright violation seems to be in reference to music and movies, not to software, which I would think is a much more viable target in cash-strapped schools.

Perhaps the FBI should be cracking down on poor editing at kpho.com (emphasis mine): Those agents will only confirm that they’re investigation does not involve terrorism or any kind of a threat to students.

Fortunately, the local Fox affiliate asked the tough questions: NewsChannel 3’s Olivia Fierro asked the FBI spokeswoman on the scene if the search was related to possible child pornography. Susan Herkskovitc said that people should not jump to any conclusions, and reiterated that the warrant is sealed. Cute.

Ars Technica’s Eric Bangeman writes: While this may be just the first in a series of law enforcement actions, it’s also possible that yesterday’s raids were a warning shot intended to put the fear of God into schools and school district network admins. What is glaringly apparent is that the DoJ is getting serious about cracking down on copyright issues. It’s a shame that they are more concerned with shielding the industry than looking out for the rights of consumers. Well put, although I do think many people, especially in education are horrendously guilty of copyright infringement, but have a tendency to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, “FAIR USE! FAIR USE!” That said, I do hope this is only a warning shot. If not, there are dark days ahead.

For more reaction and gnashing of teeth, read the related Slashdot discussion.

In August, 2002, Anonymous Joe played a show in the Elizabethtown Borough Park as part of the Summer Arts Festival. Mike’s brother Jim was kind enough to record the show for us. I’ve finally gotten around to splitting out the tracks. So, here they are.

I had to remove the tracks that I can’t legally distribute (cover songs). Included are 13 Anonymous Joe songs, four of which we had never recorded before) plus a brief intro. All songs are ripped into MP3 format at 160k. They are properly tagged and even include (admittedly lame) album artwork.

The songs feature me on guitar and vocals, my lovely wife Jen on bass, and the multi-talented Steve Goss on drums and percussion. This was an acoustic show, so the songs have a pretty laid-back feel for the most part.

I used the wonderful open source program Audacity to split out the tracks and smooth out the opening and closing of each song.

Be forewarned: the ZIP file is over 60 megabytes to download.

Here’s a track list if you’re interested:
Welcome
Forever (never recorded before)
It Happens All The Time
Strange Days
If I Fell
Enough
Sorry
Burning Bridges
Lucy The Angel
Take It All Away
Call Your Name (never recorded before)
Waste (never recorded before)
Anymore (never recorded before)
No Soul For Sale

BBC: Gmail, the planned free e-mail service from Google, could be facing strong legal opposition in California. A draft law is being drawn up by local Democratic Senator Liz Figueroa, who calls Gmail “an invasion of privacy”.

What? Are you freaking kidding me? Legislation? Don’t you have anything better to do?

Wired: “We think it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. It’s like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home,” said Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont). “We are asking them to rethink the whole product.” Nothing like overstating things, eh, senator? Absolute invasion? Rethink the whole product? Come on!

Charles Cooper writes: This is the kind of technology advance that gives me the creeps.

Here are my feelings on Gmail. Take them or leave them.

1) Google is expanding, like it or not. I like it. I think it’s a good company that does good things. Are they entirely benevolent? Of course not. They have to make money somehow.

2) Google is really, really good at doing targeted ads, specifically non-obnoxious text ads. I don’t think that’s even up for discussion. So it makes sense that they would build on this strength.

3) They’re offering you a full gigabyte of storage. That’s a lot of email. I’m an email whore. I save every message I’ve ever sent or received in the last seven or eight years. I have about 300 megabytes of mail, less than a third of the storage that Google is offering.

4) You don’t have to sign up for it. Sure, if you do, your mail will be indexed and scanned for the purposes of presenting you with targeted ads. But you would have agreed to these terms in the process of signing up!

5) It’s not like there’s a group of people reading your mail. It’s not like John Ashcroft is scanning your messages. It’s all done by machine. Nobody’s invading your privacy.

6) Privacy is basically a myth anyway. Look, I have a four year old daughter. I forget what privacy is. No, seriously, anyone who is serious about privacy and security should know that email, by its very nature, is inherently unsecure and public in nature. Any script kiddie with a packet sniffer can read your email, folks, and that includes your account information and password. It’s not even a challenge.

7) The common retort I’ve seen can be summed up thusly: “Fine, don’t use it yourself, but remember not to send email to anyone using it, because now your mail is being scanned, too!” Two words: big whoop. I understand that email isn’t secure anyway. If I wanted it to be secure, I’d use PGP or GPG or PCP or something like that. Well, maybe not PCP, but hopefully you get the idea.

8) The only useful criticism of Gmail that I’ve read recently came from Mark Pilgrim, and it was all about accessibility. In another post, Mark writes about why he won’t be using Gmail: And not because of the much-discussed—and mostly specious—privacy concerns. The day I signed my mortgage contract was the day They broke my spirit of any absolutist privacy fantasies I might have had growing up. Sure, privacy is important, but not enough to live in a cave with no credit cards.

9) If you think Hotmail and Yahoo! and whatnot aren’t scanning your messages, I have some real estate to sell you. Come on, I mean, really.

10) A ton of people will use it anyway, because they don’t care about privacy and such. And just like Hotmail, it will be very difficult to avoid coming into contact with a Gmail user. Like it or not, it’s going to be a big hit.

We finally did it.

After two years of procrastination, we installed our Radio Fence, a delightful little gadget designed to electrocute the dog if he tries to leave the property. We inherited the Radio Fence from my sister and her husband (you may recall them from the Thin Mints Controversy), who used it successfully with the late, great Luke, whom I had the pleasure to dog-sit several years back.

Installation was not as difficult as I feared. We borrowed Jen’s parents’ Edge Hog (such a clever name) and set it for trenching. Walking around the perimeter of the yard with the Edge Hog gave me a nice 1.5 inch trench, except where I had to stop and wrestle with the roots of the various ancient trees that decorate my property. I didn’t realize it going into the job, but I don’t even own a saw right now. I had an amazingly crappy saw, one that I could only describe as unidirectional (wouldn’t cut in both directions, dramatically increasing your work time and effort, and dramatically decreasing your productivity and its own usefulness), but I threw it away last year because it sucked so bad. I had forgotten about that. So I did the root piercing with a multitool, a flat head screwdriver, and a hammer. It worked well enough.

The Fluke voltmeter confirmed that I had wired the yard correctly with a friendly beep. This was good, as I had to splice the wire in the backyard. So I fired up the transmitter, and nothing worked. Because the batteries in the receiver on the collar had been sitting idle for two years.

After we got back from buying batteries, we fiddled with the settings.

“Jen! It’s not working! I’m not hearing any beeping!” I called from the back yard as I waved the collar around near the now-buried wire. “I think we should — aaauauuuhgghhg!”

Shock one.

“I just turned it up. Did that help? What’s wrong with you?” Jen asked as she entered the back yard to find me convulsing on the ground. “Oh! I guess it works now. Awwww, are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. I’ve had worse shocks than that, believe me. There was a reason a couple college friends called me Sparky for a few days in 1993. But that’s a story for another day.

We began training Jack, which consists of walking to each little white flag around the perimeter of the yard, spaced about ten feet apart, shaking the flag in his face, yelling “NO!”, running back to the safe zone, and praising him. This caused Jack unbelievable stress, but the training was a great success. Jack is now utterly terrified of little white flags. This process was carried out while carrying the collar so that he could hear the warning beeps near the flags. Somehow my grip shifted. “Aaauauuuhgghhg!”

Shock two.

No awwww this time, though.

Yesterday, we continued his training. This time, he wore the collar, and we were to allow him to “wander” into the danger zone and receive a “correction.”

He did, and he did.

He jumped about seven feet into the air, backwards, when the collar “corrected” him.

Shock three.

“Awwww, are you OK?” Jen asked him as she rushed him to the safe zone.

Jack didn’t respond. I can’t be sure, but I think he was thinking about how evil the little white flags are.

Today was, of course, Easter Sunday, so we squeezed his training in before church this morning. When I say we, I mean Jen, because I was busy making breakfast: strawberry pancakes. Mmmmmmm.

Jen came in and reported that Jack received another “correction” this morning.

Shock four. Awwww.

In case there was any doubt:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, unhealthy it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

1. What do you do for a living?
I’m the Assistant Director of Technology for the Elizabethtown Area School District.

2. What do you like most about your job?
Working with Dave, Mike, Nicole, and Dan.

3. What do you like least about your job?
Working with the willfully ignorant, people who stubbornly refuse to learn and resist even the mildest change.

4. When you have a bad day at work it’s usually because _____…
…of working with the willfully ignorant, people who stubbornly refuse to learn and resist even the mildest change.

5. What other career(s) are you interested in?
Taking the fifth for Dave’s sake.