Category Archives: uncategorized

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.

Shhhhh… don’t tell anybody, but there are some very early screenshots of tangelo here. Everything you see in these screenshots is subject to change, and some things already have.

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.

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

A few weeks ago, Paul Reubens, also known as Pee-Wee Herman, pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing obscene material.

This is the same guy who was busted for indecent exposure in an adult theater in Florida in 1991.

This is also the same guy who had a brilliant kids’ show on CBS for several years, a hit show on HBO in the early ’80s, and a successful movie in 1985.

Too weird.

I will say that he sucked in “You Don’t Know Jack” a few years ago. The only person aside from the original narrator that could have pulled off that role was David Spade.

Anyway, MSNBC has excerpts from a recent interview, in which he discusses some of what the last dozen years have been like. Great quote: Yeah, I mean, I’m hating to admit that Pee-Wee was healthier than me. But I think in some ways, he was.

On another sad note, Gilligan apparently beat Pee-Wee in a WWWF Grudge Match.

Pee-Wee, I really want to believe that you’re innocent. I really, really do. But it’s tough.

Wow, been a while since I posted last. I’ve been slaving away at Frequency 2.0 and at a very early version of tangelo. Frequency 2.0 was unleashed tonight, so that’s done for a while, barring any unforeseen disasters.

tangelo is coming along nicely. This week I wrote the templating engine, which was harder than I thought it would be, but it’s done and it seems to work great. I also tweaked the RSS feed and added an Atom feed. Last week I wrote a “wizard” to help new users create their weblogs. Hopefully that will make it easy for people to get started.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to, at least during evenings and weekends. At work, we’re beginning a pretty major shift in responsibilities, one that I think will fit everyone a little bit better.

As far as our search for a new church, I think we’ve settled on Lancaster County Bible Church, also known as LCBC. We had also considered the Lancaster Vineyard Church and NewSong Fellowship. Each church has a lot to offer, but at this point we just feel kind of drawn toward LCBC. It’s kind of funny. Vineyard has about 40 people, NewSong about 400, and LCBC about 4000. Orders of magnitude. I don’t know if that means anything or not.

My mother has yielded in the Great Thin Mints Controversy. After seeing my exhaustive research and receiving confirmation from esteemed men like Desktop Joe and Cousin Ron, she has admitted that Thin Mints were probably not always dark in the middle.

But, stubborn is as stubborn does, it seems.

My sister is bound and determined to disbelieve until her dying day. Her husband stands by her side, almost unflinchingly. It’s touching, really, because you can tell by looking at him that deep down inside, he knows I’m right. Although he actually accused me of doctoring the picture, despite the link to the official Girl Scouts of America Web Site. Someday, someday, he and my sister will come around.

Because, honestly, I think I know the difference between cookies and candy.

Since I missed the last two Fridays, here are my answers to a Friday Five from April 4, 2003.

1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life?
Five. First was my parents’ house. I lived there from birth until I was 21, when I moved into the tiny house in Millersville where Jen and I lived as newlyweds. In 1996, we moved into the renovated firehouse in Mountville, which was a way cool place to live for a young couple with no kids. Dave will tell you that I was raised there, but that’s not the case at all. In 1998, we bought our first home, a poorly constructed townhome in Mountville. It was a mistake. We took a loss and bought our current home in 2001. We’re very happy here. In fact, I’m going to be buried in the basement when I die.

2. Which was your favorite and why?
I love my current house. It’s a great place to have a family. But I have to admit that the firehouse was cooler. So, it’s a tie.

3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why?
I kind of like moving. But I also kind of hate it. You waste a whole lot of money every time you move, switching cable and electric, buying little odds and ends. But it’s still kind of fun to move into an empty house. Jen and I look at that like a blank canvas. In our current house, we bought it about two or three weeks before we moved in, so we took that opportunity to paint every room in the house a different color. Very cool. Drove my family nuts.

4. What’s more important, location or price?
In the end, location. Although once you reach a certain price point, nothing else matters.

5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)?
All of the above. Nice, high fence to keep the dog in and prying eyes out. Nice big pool. Hot tub. Huge yard. Daylight basement, all fitted up to be my computer and music room. Island in the kitchen for Jen; she’s always wanted one. Maybe an indoor pool, too. Why not? We’re dreaming here. Incidentally, my in-laws’ former neighbors recently bought a house with an indoor pool. But they don’t like to swim. Man, if I had an indoor pool, I’d be swimming every day. Get up and swim a few laps before work. Get home and float around for a while. Year round. Sweet.