Category Archives: uncategorized

We spent last weekend in Ocean City, New Jersey, with Jen’s family. Her aunt and uncle co-own a beach house on 3rd Street, so just about every year, in the fall, we get a free weekend at the beach. It’s a great time to go; there’s no one around and even the boardwalk is practically empty. I love it like that, because I hate crowds.

It might have been our last weekend there, though. There was talk of selling the beach house, or even rebuilding, which would take a long time. If they tear down the house and rebuild, they can only build two stories high, as opposed to the three they have now. But if they simply refab, they can stay at three stories. That means they can tear down everything but one wall. As long as one wall is still standing, the building hasn’t been demolished and it doesn’t count as rebuilding.

I asked what happens if you later replace that one wall. No one knew the answer.

Sometimes, though, it’s just easier to rebuild something new from scratch. I’m dealing with something similar at work. We have a program we’ve been using for years that was supposed to be able to let our teachers view student assessment data. We were just set to roll it out when we discovered that it was giving us completely bogus numbers. There was no obvious error or discernable pattern. They were just wrong.

So late last week I began building an assessment analysis system from scratch. Fortunately, most of the pieces were already in place: our PostgreSQL server, my copy of REALbasic, Corey Redlien’s brilliant ChartPart classes. All that remained was putting the pieces together, which I’ve been doing non-stop ever since, including at the beach.

As of this writing, the pieces are almost together. The bulk of the programming work is done. Most of what remains is moving our existing assessment data from a multitude of Excel spreadsheets into PostgreSQL. But when it’s done, hopefully our teachers will have a tool that will meet their needs. And when that moment comes, I’m going to take a well-deserved nap.

This was in my junk mail folder.

Although the accompanying email message doesn’t specify exactly how. But it does mention that Spyware is the leading cause for PC failure and hard drive corruption.

Because that has a lot to do with rectums.

By the way, if anybody out there needs v1c0d1n or c.ial1s, let me know. I may have a lead for you.

Remember all the fuss in the 80s about backward masking and the subliminal messages hidden in commercials, rock music, and such?

Remember the G.I. Joe cartoon series?

Turns out Destro did some backward masking in one episode. Check it out: In the G.I.Joe episode Sins of Our Fathers, Cobra Commander evokes a monster that dwelled in the ruins beneath Destro’s ancestral home. Destro and G.I.Joe team-up and Destro uses an ancient chant to lure the monster away. Destro is voiced by actor Arthur Burghardt, Dialtone is voiced by Hank Garrett.

I’ll admit here that I was, for all intents and purposes, a complete G.I. Joe junkie. I collected the action figures and sets, and I read the comic book religiously for several years, closely following the saga unfolding between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. I started to lose interest shortly after the quite ill-conceived Arise, Serpentor, Arise mini-series, though. By that time I was in seventh or eighth grade, and the whole “create-the-uber-evil-emperor-from-the-DNA-of-past-evil-people” theme was kind of silly.

This is not surprising.

I wondered how long it would last.

So strange…

… and yet I cannot stop.

Well, the show was washed out by the side effects of Hurricane Ivan, so the band-with-no-name didn’t get to play yesterday.

So now we’re looking for more excuses to practice music.

And a name.

We thought about Vote Quimby for a name, but it turns out it’s taken.

Bill had suggested The Jebus Band, and we’re still considering it.

Your pirate name is:

Calico Sam Kidd

Often indecisive, you can’t even choose a favorite color. You’re apt to follow wherever the wind blows you, just like Calico Jack Rackham, your namesake. Even though you’re not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

What’s your pirate name?

Wow. In seven days, we have an honest-to-goodness gig.

Kind of.

On September 18, Mountville will hold this year’s Mountville Days. Yes, it’s Mountville Days, despite the fact that it’s self-contained within a single day. At least I think it is. Maybe I’m wrong about that. If so, I shouldn’t have been quite so dogmatic just now.

Anyway, Mountville Days is when Mountville, Pennsylvania becomes the world’s largest garage sale. Everybody and his grandma has a table, stand, rack, or some sort of display outside, where they sell junk they no longer want. Various companies and organizations set up shop along Main Street (yes, the name of the street is literally Main Street; just one of the many endearing features of the town) to hawk their wares or provide cheap snacks to harried garage sale patrons.

Along Main Street sits Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, an incredibly old building that dominates the street’s landscape. Jen’s mother works there as the secretary. Her employment is the root of our long and checkered history with the town of Mountville. The church’s computer consultant, Charlie, lives right down the street from the church, and at one time operated his business from his home. It was during that time that he mentioned a need for some cheap labor, and my mother-in-law gave him my name. This is also, incidentally, how I got involved with computers as a vocation. Up until then, it had been strictly a hobby. Anyway, I ended working for Charlie for several years. Our business relationship ended in 1996 when I set off on my failed quest to become a teacher. Later that year, we moved to Mountville and lived in the renovated firehouse. It was such a cool place.

Toward the end of 2002, Charlie called me out of the blue. Knowing that I was a worship leader at the time, and knowing that I had a history of helping out with both worship services and church youth groups, he asked if I’d be interested in going on a retreat with Saint Paul’s Church’s praise band, which almost entirely made up of youth group members. Basically, I’d be helping them learn to become worship leaders. Jen and I packed our bags and headed off to Camp Innabah with them, and it was super cool. We had a blast.

A few weeks ago, Charlie called out of the blue again. This year, during Mountville Days, the church is setting up a stage outside, and the praise band is going to be playing. I think this is a cool idea. What would be nice, he said, is if the praise band could take some breaks but somehow still keep the music going. He asked if Jen and I would be interested in playing two one hour sets. Our answer, of course, was yes.

What Charlie didn’t know, and something I haven’t been advertising, is that Jen and I have been working on putting a new band together. In fact, we’d already found a willing guitarist/harmony singer by the name of Josh. This gave us a much-needed excuse to get together to practice. We worked on some material that Josh, Jen, and I are all familiar with from our Westwood days, and we even dusted off some Anonymous Joe songs, too. And they sound pretty good. Josh’s guitar playing and his singing blend with mine very well, I think. We still lack a drummer, but I suppose that will come when the time is right.

So, we have our first gig on September 18. I’m really excited to be playing out again. I’ve missed it terribly.

If you want to see the new band, or at least what we have so far, we’ll be playing from 10 to 11 and from noon to one outside Saint Paul’s Church. Don’t bother coming to both sets unless you really want to; they’ll be identical.

Now all we need is a name. We haven’t discussed it as a group yet, but I don’t think I want to use the name Anonymous Joe again. That part of my life is behind me. I’ll still use some songs I wrote for Anonymous Joe, since they’re my songs and everything. I just don’t want to use that name again. So I guess I need suggestions. I came up with The Blessed Rhinos. I was half-joking when I suggested, and I half-like it, but I’m not sure. Let me know what you think, and if you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

So the Olympics are over. All the athletes have gone or are going home and Athens is being swept up. We’ll have to wait another four years for another Summer Games.

Truth be told, I really hate watching sports on TV. About the only thing I dislike more is actually participating in sports. All that running and jumping and… whoa… I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

But, I have to say, one sport I enjoy playing is volleyball. I don’t know why, but I always found volleyball to be fun to play and rather satisfying as well. Maybe it’s because you don’t have to be in super shape or because you don’t have to run much, but I like it. I really enjoy two on two, although it’s a lot more work. And I actually enjoy watching it. Watching Misty May and Kerry Walsh mop up the court with every single was somewhat inspiring. I won’t mention the other reason I liked watching them play, but it’s probably obvious.

Anyway, volleyball is an OK sport. In fact, in college, I took Class Volleyball as one of my PE electives. I was thinking back to that class while watching the olympics the past couple weeks. I was in the class with three other English majors. I did my student teaching at the same time as one of them. I think his name was Tim. Tall guy, blond hair. He was a closet Mac guy, and I tried to coax him out, but Doom got the better of him. Anyway, the other two guys were kind of peripheral for me during my college career. In the cast list of my life, they would have been Other Volleyball Guy 1 and Other Volleyball Guy 2. We had a good time in the class, though.

Believe it or not, we four English majors were not stellar athletes, me especially (remember, this was college, so picture me with 50 pounds more than I have now). But we didn’t care. We had a good time, but we annoyed the living crap out of the professor. Professor seems like a strong word. Professor of Volleyball? Anyway…

When the prof would give us advice, we’d twist it into Zen Volleyball advice and use it as a mantra. For example, one piece of advice the prof gave us was the deeply insightful: “Jump, find the ball, hit the ball.” We turned this into: “Jump, find the ball, be the ball.” Personally, I disregarded the prof’s advice, and still do to this day. I prefer to know where the ball is before jumping, otherwise I’m just wasting jumps and looking more stupid than usual.

We always played six to a team, and the four of us would always team up together, much to the great disappointment of the other two players that got stuck with us, because we lost every single game we played together. We didn’t just lose. We get creamed. Whooped. Cleaning of clocks. You name it. But we did it laughing, yelling to each other, “Be the ball!”

One day, apparently, the prof had had enough. After his demonstration, he told us to team up. So the four of us searched for two victims. But the prof stopped us. “No,” he said. “No more.”

We looked at each other in surprise.

“You guys are all on different teams from now on.”

We sulked off and joined other teams, but Class Volleyball was never the same after that.

After class that day, I walked up to Tim and said, “You know what?”

“What?” Tim replied (since it was the obvious response to my prompt).

“We were mainstreamed today.”

As education majors, we found this hilariously funny and laughed for a long time.

I ended up with a B in Class Volleyball, mostly because I had a positive attitude and I did well on the written final exam.

Seriously, there was a written final exam.