Laurence Simon, the chap who runs the Amish Tech Support Dead Pool, put out an open call for contestants to be interviewed. Because I simply cannot pass up a chance to stick my foot in my mouth, I volunteered. Go forth and witness my cleverness, or lack thereof.
ATSDP Interview
Month: December 2002
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Interviewed? Me?
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On holidays and family
Before I start I’d like to point out that two of the last three “Thoughts” entries are in consecutive Septembers. Gee, I don’t do a lot of thinking, do I? And I think I’ll apologize right here to any family members who find themselves offended by what I say here. Anyway, let’s get on with this.
Those few of you who are close to me may have noticed that I’m not the world’s biggest cheerleader for The Holiday Season ™. My lack of enthusiasm can be chalked up to my philosophical beliefs as well as my upbringing.
I get some amusement out of all the vitriol from Christians about how Christmas has become so commercialized. I can laugh because I’m tired not only of the rampant moneygrubbing but also the blatant religious imagery. That’s right, I’m equally offended by “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and “O Little Town Of Bethlehem.” That’ll be my favorite part of December 26th, not having to listen to holiday carols. Bleah. I heard that abomination of a carol that Michael Bolton (himself an abomination) perpetrated upon the listening public. Right after that I was forced to listen to “Jingle Bells” as rendered (in more than one sense of the word) by synthesized barking dogs. Grr. Hulk smash.
Oh, here’s a note to store owners (as if they care what I think): If your Christmas decorations go up on or before Thanksgiving, I will most assuredly say bad things about your establishment to anyone I converse with. Putting them up before Halloween will put you on my “avoid shopping here at all costs” list.
Do you want to know what Christmas means to me? It means enforced gatherings of what we all sarcastically refer to as The Family. Hi Grandma, Hi Aunts, Hi Cousins. Hi Dad, or Mom, or Sis, but never any two or all three of you at once. Yes, let us do make tense and lifeless smalltalk until we can escape. Oh yes, we really are one happy family. And let’s do it again next year, okay? You bet your sweet bippy.
Let’s face it. The Kerezmans and Kelseys and, ah, various other last names used on account of marriage (and divorce and marriage and divorce) aren’t exactly a chummy, casually friendly family. We don’t call one another up for idle chit-chat. We don’t go out and do stuff together. Family gatherings are almost always of the “someone stops by for an hour’s visit at the end of which they’re glad to escape” variety. We’re not bad people, mind you. We’re merely a band of socially awkward iconoclasts. Makes for riveting drama, I assure you.
I’ll grant you that I’m much, much, much better about this time of year now that I have my own small family. Wendi is determined to turn me into a Christmas-loving kinda guy. I think she’s out of luck, though. I will (at best) tolerate the so-called holidays. There’s too much psychic baggage and too much disgust at all of the greedy foolishness for me to become some sort of bright-eyed happy-go-lucky sort at this stage in the game.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. What a damned fine, clever, adorable movie.
No, I’m serious. It’s one of the best of the Muppet movies. I’m not a complete Scrooge, you know.
Statler: It was stupid!
Waldorf: It was pointless!
Statler: It was…short.
(They look at each other for a moment.)
Statler & Waldorf: We loved it!Scrooge: You seem a little absentminded, spirit.
Spirit of Christmas Present: No, I’m a large absentminded spirit! -
Tales of a wasted Saturday.
My glorious employers, in what’s supposed to pass for Christmas spirit, gave me again what they’ve given me every year for just about every year since I took on a full time position: $50 of Fred Meyer gift certificates.
Since Santa won’t be putting on a command performance in our house this year due to the money troubles I mentioned a few weeks ago, I decided to use my bounty to get something the kids could appreciate. That’s right, my hard-won bonus went into a pair of USB gamepads.
The kids play a lot of console-style games on the computers, okay?
It took almost three hours to visit enough Fred Meyer stores in the area to accumulate two gamepads that didn’t completely suck. (Microsoft’s Sidewinder ‘pads are awful, both models. Four buttons, only one D-pad and no triggers? Bite me.) I really, really wish Freddy’s carried Logitech hardware, but such is life. (The Wingman RumblePad we’ve had for a while? It’s the standard by which all other gamepads I buy will be judged for a long, long time.) We ended up with a pair of mismatched Saiteks, cheesy and cheaply-made ‘pads that fulfilled the requirements of having at least one analog stick, triggers, a D-pad and a relatively low price tag. We’ll see how the P750 and P880 stand the test of time.
Oh yeah, I also picked up the Might And Magic Platinum Collection. Four games for the price of one. No, really. Might and Magic IX was stickered at $29.99 at one end of the shelf, while the Collection was also stickered at that price but sat at the other end of the shelf. Whatever. Mind you, now that I have game IX I’m reading all kinds of bad reviews of it online. That’s okay. I have VI and VII, both of which are well worth playing.
The moral of this story? There isn’t one, except that shopping sucks. And possibly that buying computer games and accessories is a stupid waste of my Christmas bonus. The kids sure love the gamepads, though, and dammit (!) that’s gotta count for something.
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Dear Santa, please bring me five questions.
- What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year? – Define “celebrate.”
- What was the best gift you have ever received? – Define “best.” Oh, okay. I don’t have a “Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever.” for you, I’m afraid. I’m happy to get anything at all, really. I like to think that’s a good thing, because the minute I start ranking my Christmas input is the minute I start taking the “holiday” way, way too seriously.
- What was the worst gift you’ve ever given? – The year Titanic came out, because of how much Wendi seemed to enjoy the film in the theater I decided to get her the two-tape widescreen set. She unwrapped it, frowned at me and said, “What did you get me this for?” Oh well.
- Where will you be celebrating the holidays? Are you hosting? Going away? – Home. No. No.
- If you could spend the holidays with someone who isn’t around, who would it be with? Why? – Grandma Hjordis. I miss her more than any other family member, dead or alive, with the possible exception of Frederick, who Hjordis left this mortal plane to rejoin. If you believe in that sort of thing, that is. Ah, other than that, I’d love to have my friends around me. That’s right, all of them. Dammit.
- What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year? – Define “celebrate.”
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Armwrestling Javascript for fun.
It’s a sad fact that I spend more time listening to music under Windows (and therefore Winamp) than I do on the Linux box at work that used to feed the “Current Music” feature on this page. The time came for a change. The desire to show off my eclectic music collection was unfulfilled, and I had to do something about it!
I found several options, such as DoSomething or finding a way to shim SpyAmp into the site, but I finally settled on BlogAmp. It worked right out of the box, but I wasn’t quite happy. If you look at the BlogAmp site you can see that its music display is quite cool, including clever hover boxes containing the extra data. The default look is just a text dump of title, bitrate and played-time data. Bah!
While poking around I came across references to the acronym tag in HTML, a tag I just now used quite shamelessly to show how it works. It occurred to me… eventually… that I could use it to show the data I wanted in a tooltip.
It sounds easy enough, but I’ve also never dabbled in Javascript before. Learning how to script the output I wanted took the better part of two more hours. (Sad, I know.) At least an hour was spent just looking for a premade function that would convert the raw number of seconds provided by BlogAmp into a nice minutes:seconds display. In the end I just went looking for math syntax references and brute-forced the display.
The end result sits near the end of the left-side column: a list of played songs that you can mouse-over to find out how long the track is and when I listened to it. Hooray, or something.
Do you want to know the really sad part? Of course you do. The really sad part is that I sat down four or five hours ago with the intention of ripping some Ogg Vorbis tracks. So far I haven’t so much as touched CDEX tonight.
Oh well. Tomorrow is another day. I did learn stuff, and I did achieve the results I wanted from BlogAmp. Yay!
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I’m kidding. I’d never vote for Bush.
Thank you, Doyce, for adding some needed joyful satire to my otherwise-drab day.
 
I’ll take either one of these, though the “Evildoer” is probably more appropriate…