Ramblings (January 2006)

01/27/06 - 1:19 a.m.

"My true love drowned in a dirty old pan of oil that ran from the block of a Falcon sedan 1969..." -- Neko Case, "Star Witness"

The new Neko Case song is mighty nice (download it [7 MB] from the Anti site, here).

01/27/06 -- 12:59 a.m.

"There's a cough in the water, and it's running into town" -- Son Volt, "10 Second News"

Went and saw me some Son Volt tonight. I hadn't seen them in about five years or so -- maybe longer -- so I was interested to see how they'd sound.

It was a good show. Shannon McNally opened, and she's pretty good. Better live than on record so far, which isn't unusual -- there's just something more immediate about seeing most acts live.

For their part, Son Volt played very well, but I was reminded that a lot of their songs tend to sound the same, that Farrar's voice always gets a little lost in the mix, and that I really dig only about 30% of their songs.

And it was loud, a lot louder than I thought it would be, so I probably spent the last third of the show standing outside in the lobby chatting with people I knew. The crowd for the show was huge, and I saw a lot of people I knew (which is unusual - I could probably go to my high school reunion and see only strangers), so it was a lot of fun. I ran into my friend Niel, who has a new record coming out soon (I'll pimp the heck out of that thing when it hits the street) and we laughed a bit about our old days in what was essentially a halfway house, his expulsion from a local gated community, his email correspondence with a local right-wing radio host, and -- despite his wealth of tales -- how we were both impressed by my sister's almost supernatural talent for attracting stories.

Ran into some old buddies from the bartending days, the owners of a couple of record stores, and lots of men with interesting beards.

I used to scoff at people for going to concerts as social occasions, and I'm still against folks talking during the show, but since it was a show I was only half-heartedly into, it was a refreshing change to kick back with a beer and just chew the fat.

Guess that makes me a bit of an old man, but I'm OK with that.

01/25/06 -- 10:41 p.m.

I've been doing a bit of tech support around the family lately, which I don't mind. I mean, I used to be a computer science major back in high school (learning languages that are now more dead than Latin), and I've been around them most of my life.

So I've gotten used to the way computers do things, and even though part of my job is gleefully emailing my product manager with suggestions and complaints about his user interface designs, I've learned to put up with quite a bit. FTP? No problem. Configuring modem strings back in the day? Piece of cake. Fouled up configuration strings in Visual Studio at work? Well, maybe time to bring in a developer to figure that out.

At any rate, I take a lot of nonsense for granted until I help my parents with something -- usually getting pics off of their digital cameras and into an email.

That's when I want to mail flaming bags of poo to the digital camera companies. My mom has a digital camera and a nifty new printer dock. The good part is that she just has to dock the camera and push a button. Presto! The pics start uploading to the computer and the software automatically opens up on her computer.

But do you mean to tell me that within that very same piece of software, there's absolutely no way to export the pics outside of the file structure within the camera software, that there's no way to work with the pics within the software in any meaningful way? That if I want to email a pic from the camera software, that it makes me go through some web service, and that I can't link to Outlook or Outlook Express?

That to move files around, my best bet is to open up Windows Explorer and manually move files around there?

I'm OK with that, but for my mom or dad, who have maybe been around computers for five years, it's ridiculous. They don't need to worry about file formats, the difference between saving and exporting, and why, when they click on a button that says "Email Pictures," a browser window opens up asking them to sign up for a webmail service.

Part of the problem I guess, is that these are free programs that come with their cameras, so I guess development time really isn't slanted towards usability. And there's the age-old problem of user interfaces being designed by people who just take it for granted that everyone understands the mechanics of file movement and formats. I don't have a solution -- there'll always be setup involved, even if it's just getting the family computer geek to come over and establish the links to your email program, etc. (although, really, a diligent software company could write wizards that would handle that sort of thing pretty well).

But with digital cameras becoming more common, and with them being pushed out to the general population, it just means that more people will be confused and that more people will have to deal with these software packages that don't do simple things as simply as they should.

And don't even get me started on how many steps it takes to put pictures onto a CD.

01/25/06 -- 9:54 p.m.

"Three-fiddy!"

No matter how often I see it, I laugh my butt off at the South Park episode where Chef's getting married. That whole thing with Chef's parents and their endless stories of the Loch Ness monster asking for $3.50 just cracks me up.

Chef's mama yelling, "Succubus tryin' to take my baby!" at the wedding ain't bad, either.

01/08/06 -- 11:30 p.m.

When my wife and I bought our house, it was with the understanding that pine beetles had decimated the pine trees on the back acre, and that the previous owner would clear them out. This was fine, as was the fact that he fixed the problem by bulldozing everything over the property line. I mean, it was a mess back there to begin with. The bulldozing left everything pretty rough, though. The ground's uneven, branches and splintered stumps are everywhere.

I didn't know, though, that the problem was deeper than the topsoil.

I mean, I should have expected it. The previous owner was the sort of old country guy who just threw things in the woods when they'd outlived their usefulness. To this day, I've found tires, plastic trash cans, old Christmas trees, gutters, bricks, car batteries, a laundry basket full of old springs, and too much broken glass to count. If you think that's bad, you should walk over the back hill and check out his property, which looks like a veritable shantytown of abandoned stuff.

Anyway, this weekend, I finally got around to planting the Christmas tree. We'd bought one of those small live ones, with the intention of using it to start a tree barrier on the back forty.

So I cart the tree and my tools down the hill and start digging, having found a perfect spot for the tree. I get a few inches down and I start hitting the dead tree roots from the old pine trees. No problem. I get the axe and hack away. Then, about eight inches down, I come across an old 4 X 4 plank. More hacking. Under that, I find strands of barbed wire, still taut from the fact that it's apparently buried under the ground, leading about thirty feet up the hill where it's wrapped around a tree.

Up the hill I go to get the wire cutters. Then more digging, and I come across the remains of a telephone pole! Yet more hacking.

At this point, a more reasonable man would have just picked another spot to dig a hole, but I figured it was going to be like this anywhere I tried to dig. Plus, I have a stubborn streak like that.

So I hack away enough of the telephone pole to get my hole where I like it and what do I find about a foot down, but sheets of tin. Sheets of freakin' tin that just got bulldozed under ground instead of being picked up.

Good grief. At this point, I felt like I'd come across something like the Mystery Pit on Oak Island, that giant shaft that supposedly has pirate treasure at the bottom, but which has succeeded only in bankrupting almost everyone who's owned it.

Ultimately, to wrap up an anticlimactic story, I clipped and hacked away at the tin until I was able to get it clear, and got the tree properly planted, but what should have been a half hour job took over two hours. What's worse, I have to wonder what horrors await us in the coming seasons as we try to refurbish the back part of the property. I'll probably have to deal with this with every tree we plant and every hole we dig. Good times, and god help anyone who explores this yard with a metal detector.

01/02/06 - 1:48 a.m.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to make myself learn HTML. I'm finally, after a year and a half, getting around to that, starting to manually tweak the automated code that Frontpage and Visual Studio hath wrought. I'm also learning about style sheets. So please forgive and be patient with any weird formatting or broken links -- all two or three of you family members and friends who check this blog out <G>.

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