Category Archives: Opinion

I just Killed a Bug

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I spent much of the afternoon looking for a bug.  A bug I just sat down and killed after getting frustrated with Super Mario Brothers Wii.  I was so frustrated with the video game I needed to unwind.  I do this, apparently, by killing koopas that are in my kode.  Go figure.

The good news is that the bug is one of the last few bugs I have in this control and I’ll be able to move onto other bug killing tasks.  Dead bugs are good, ones that I don’t know about are the worst, and ones I know about drive me bonkers.  The good news is that as an exterminator I can take off that hat and become a creator.  I can create good, clean, new code that will be tested and reliable (hopefully).  This is the side of my job I like the most: creator.  When I create a bug, its on accident, when I create a feature, its exciting and I can’t wait to get back user feedback, change requests and generally improve the software.  I also like to make it faster and smaller.  This version is at least 10% smaller than past versions, and the good news is that its also faster because of it.

Good night, I’ve killed a bug, I’ve relaxed, and I’ve written a blog post.  That’s more than I can say about some nights.  Bowser, I’ll be back for you tomorrow.

On Being Herod the Not So Great

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One of the things that’s fun about being part of a church body is that for some reason there tends to be a propensity for church plays around Christmas.  I don’t blame the Baptists, but I think that somewhere along the line, they got really good at bigger and bigger productions.  If Steven Spielberg wasn’t a Jew, he’d be a Baptist pastor of drama or some such thing.  I’m not here to talk about Baptists or Jews, but tonight I got to play the brief part of Herod.  I was asked to be Herod, the nasty ruler of the Jewish part of Rome who ordered lots of dead infants and children and generally was not a good guy.

It turns out that I’m too jovial and happy.  Herod was probably selfish, egotistical, and much more middle-eastern.  I’m probably selfish (but less so), egotistical (but less so), and I’m rather white and northern European.  Between those similarities and differences I can tell you that I pretty much did NOT embody the persona of Herod.  I could not pull off mean and angry.  Not a bit.  I was too much of a grinner [I was told].  I wasn’t even trying to grin, thinking about grinning, or even aware that I was grinning.  But apparently I grinned my face off.  Apparently the order to destroy all the males two and under was not convincing despite my best effort.

I’m totally OK with this.  I’m glad I failed at being nasty.  I will sleep well tonight knowing that I stink at being wicked and evil in an overt way.  Of course that means I’m probably just a quieter, more devious sort of bad guy, but we knew that already, too.  Ever since elementary school I was good at scheming bad things for others to do.  I rarely got in trouble because its hard to get caught when someone else is doing the dirty work.  I don’t blame the Baptists for this either.  Be stinky at being little Herods, its probably better for you anyway.

King Corn: A Movie You Should Watch

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Uncle Ben, in the first of the 2000’s Spiderman franchise, tells a young Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Watching King Corn (website) tonight over Netflix’s instant watching service was sobering.  It isn’t the most entertaining movie you will ever watch.  Comparing it to Spiderman might be cruel because one is for fantasy and fun and the other is for education and presenting reality in a film format.  Despite my stating that it isn’t ‘fun’ to watch, you should watch it because the contents of the film are disturbing.

If you think that government spending is out of hand: watch this film.

If you think that Americans are nutritionally screwed up and need to eat better: watch this film.

If you think that you’ve got everything together and your life is all roses: watch this film.

I am allergic to corn grain and corn syrup, though corn oil does seem to be OK in moderation, and so for me corn is just not a great item to eat.  After watching how corn syrup is made, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to eat corn syrup even if I were able to eat it.  I’m convicted, once again, that I should be careful what I put into this body, but don’t take my word for it.  Watch this film, read Michael Pollard’s book “In Defense of Food” – and see where you land.  I bet it isn’t in a field of corn, or in line at McDonalds.

There is a Special Place in Hell for Virus Coderz

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I just wanted to let you know that I’m not dead.  This weekend, aside from celebrating with the family the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, I helped some friends with their computer.  After about 10 hours of funk, trying this, trying that and generally hating malicious people who write viruses I was able to remove it from the machine and then set it up to be more secure, a wee faster, and hopefully useful for them in the months to come.

Hell has a special place for virus coderz and I’m pretty sure they only serve caffeine free diet soda there.

Prejudiced? I Can’t Tell

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Today I was listening to a pop artist because I had heard her name enough times that I had to find out why people were listening to her. For those of you keeping score: it’s not Britney Spears. YouTube had a number of her videos online so I listened to them on the y’ube and got a feel for the style of her album(s). I did not watch more than about 10 seconds of her video but I’m pretty sure I’m prejudice. The reason I say that is that with computers and software being what they are even I can sound relatively decent so I want a genuine artist writing from their heart about things that matter to them. I need something deeper than dulcimer tones.

Am I prejudiced against the pretty faced girl who sings like an ‘angel’ (pardon me while I puke in my mouth after writing that)? I think so. What if the unnamed country-pop star is really a great, talented gal who writes real songs from her heart? I’m scared if she does because she’s got to have a large chunk of bubble-gum lodged in there and its coated with banjos [this makes her songs authentic country, I believe]. Definitely enough to have a need for heart surgery. If she likes country music and enjoys singing about love, broken heartedness and incestuous relationships like traditional country musicians that’s great, but it just doesn’t show up in the lyrics and the videos are more about her hot young body than they are about her personality.  Or, as my sister, who likes country, likes to say: her qualities [a reference to the Bachelor TV show].

Help me find a really, really good country artist who writes quality songs, has depth in lyrics, music stylings, and isn’t just a celebrity for appearance sake.

Stuck at Stink

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I remember in high school there were always people I would overhear saying things like, “Kevin S. Is a good kisser,” or, “Brad is a bad kisser.” Do you recall such discussions? I was just thinking how absolutely lame those discussions were. Can you imagine actually thinking that those people were going to be stuck with the kissing prowess of a sixteen year old?

Do you think the people in the school hallways that said those things will go back to the spouses of the horrific or awesome kissers and engage in an analytical discussion of developmental make-out existentialism? Yeah, you’re right, they probably will.

Missed the Toilet

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If you want to see why some journalists don’t get their work to print, such as Newsweek, look no farther than the short-sighted work of Dan Lyons here.  You would think that the change of having the last Mac World Expo speaker be Phil Schiller would be OK, and not expected to be the second coming of Steve when the first Steve was gone.  Nope.  It is as if the rest of 2009 does not exist and that Apple is waiting until 2010 to tell us anything more about what they’re working on or releasing.  Just because the Expo keynote didn’t involve some new gadget or some new computer that is mind blowing doesn’t mean that it was bad, it means that people who go to a trade show for one event are probably going to be disappointed.

Apple’s last days are not going to be 2009 or 2010.  They’re not out.  Instead they have made it clear that they’re going to announce products on their own timeline and not right after Christmas so that employees are whiped out during the holidays.  Imagine that: niceness to employees.  Dan Lyons is probably a nice guy to some of the people in the world, but this is not his proudest moment and I hope that he learned from this web only publication that actual journalism is not speculation and taking a one-off event and reading into the bones of the carcass of the event.

I hope that Apple invites Dan to their next press event and Dan eats his toupee because he realizes that he’s been horribly mistaken.  I can write drivel like that because this is a blog and not the public facing website of some new source.  He’s supposed to be a journalist while I’m a snarky non-journalist.  Two different things, but he’s making them look similar.  What a sad day Dan had.

My Wife Laughs At My Beard

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Yesterday I noted to Jessica, “My beard is really growing in full now.”  I did this because it has taken it over ten years to get to the state that it is in: almost, kinda, sorta full.  She just smiled and brought up the need I had to exercise.  It’s good to be married to a woman who can artfully redirect the conversation so as to help me not feel bad for having the facial hair growing capacity of a hairless chihuahua.

As for needing to exercise I try to exercise every day, but she’s usually playing We Cheer these days while the kids are down, so it makes it hard to break in and get some time on the treadmill and watch a show at the same time.  [do you like how I artfully deflected that with an excuse?]

WordPress 2.7 Wows Me

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I had installed WordPress 2.7 as a beta last month.  When the final release came out WordPress notified me, but instead of like previous versions, it just let me click a link and it handled the upgrade on the server with very little fuss.  It was like buying a 2008 Honda knowing that when the 2009 Hondas came out you could push a button and for free your Honda would upgrade to the latest.  Before several steps were required, now, I just click a button.  Wow.

The new interface for administration is very clean and polished and easy to use.  Wow.

The ease of editing posts has been taken up just a notch, which is quite nice.  Wow.

I can install plugins from within the plugin interface without having to download and unzip zip files, it just works.  WOW!

Thanks to Matt and the rest of the team at Automattic for a fantastic release that is well worth the upgrade.