Kennesaw State University is looking to join the ranks of D-I men’s ice hockey.

Yeah, I woke up after I passed out.

Great. I think the power supply in this machine’s gone bad. Not only did it crap out over the weekend, but it crapped out just 15 minutes after I booted it up this morning … :sigh:

And the panicked sound you’re hearing is me uploading my Outlook archives to the server so I don’t lose my email again.

I can’t find myself really able to write coherently about the thoughts and feelings surrounding my brother’s wedding. I could start, but I’d have to go down a thousand rabbit trails to show you all the tangents and have it all make sense.

I’ll remember a lot of things about the weekend …

• The ride down from Laurel to Hattiesburg on Sunday morning with Dad, where we said a lot without saying much.
• Mostly sleepless nights on the two couches I slept on over the weekend.
• The feeling of helplessness that came with watching my grandmother fall … twice.
• The feeling of awe at watching Mom walk down the aisle to be seated. She was never supposed to walk again after her stroke, and here she was, on her older son’s wedding day, processing in with Dad and a cane for support, buoyed by her determination and hard work through hours in the pool. She’d never admit it, but all her water aerobics work the past few months was focused on that day.
• My cousin Shelly thinking that I’d somehow never met her husband. Funny, she’s been married to him almost twenty years. I’ll give her a free pass—most of the times we’ve been down to see them have been very traumatic for her family, so yeah.
• Really not knowing what to say when giving a toast. [It wasn't nearly as cool as the toast I gave at Sean and Katharine's wedding.] I hope that my message came across okay.

The moment I’ll longest remember, though, is a private one shared by my brother and his wife just outside the church, before anyone but the wedding party was outside. I wanted to share it with my folks, but for some reason, I couldn’t. Something Dad said on the aforementioned drive sealed the deal, though: “There are some things that [his younger brother] Ray knows about me that only he and God know; the same goes for me with Ray.”

“Little” brother, I love you.

Like thousands of Webloggers before me, I panned the first two offerings in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and perhaps unlike many, I refused to go opening weekend as a result. I went today, though, and I have to say that I liked it. As I exited, I remarked to the Kings, “Well, that was good and dark.” I like dark. Rick and I proceeded to argue about whether Empire or Jedi was better; my dark comment gives my answer away, no?

I watched Menace a second time, just to see if I still hated it. [After all, I saw it the first time at 0500 for free thanks to a contest I won with The Huntsville Times, and I was afraid that my mood was modified by the hour. It wasn't.] I only saw Clones the one time, and I was so nonplussed that I almost quit caring about Star Wars altogether.

Sith makes me want to watch A New Hope and Empire back-to-back …

Yes, please. I’m still speccing out my box … by the time I get around to finishing that, maybe someone will have already done a reasonably-priced home NAS unit.

Two hours down, and I’m through all my email [15 minutes] but still slogging through all the feed backlog. If I remember correctly, the unholy tally when I started through the feed items 90 minutes ago was 837 unread. :cringe: I’m about to take a breakfast break, as I’m realizing that the last time I ate was a brief lunch yesterday as I drove home.

After while, I’m going to go over to the house to wander around it for a while, and then this afternoon, I’m going to go watch Star Wars Episode III with the Kings.

Awful glad I installed mod_security a few weeks ago: WP 1.5.1 had a vulnerability that couldn’t be exploited if you were running it.

See, even Spencer thinks I don’t ever take a vacation. [Not that a family wedding is ever easily termed a vacation, but anyway.] But anyhow, I got home from Mississippi sometime late yesterday, afternoon, but I had the energy to go all of one place—to my own bed. I watched a little of my TiVo backlog, crashed, woke up, watched the Indy 500, crashed again, and now I’m here.

I started to say that I was “home”, but in my mind, “home” is that townhouse out in Madison where I’m not right now. It’s really kinda weird to be thinking this… but it’s true.

Heading into a five-day weekend with an event on tap that my family really cares about, is it any wonder that my level of motivation is really, really low this morning?

Man, I wish I was still in bed.

Things get a little more hectic now. My folks are leaving for South Mississippi tomorrow for my brother’s wedding; Sandra, the lady that stays with Mom sometimes during the day, was going to go to my grandmother’s on Thursday, and between her and Josie, the lady that stays with my grandmother, were going to escort my grandmother down to the wedding. [I don't know about anybody else, but I consider them a part of our family at this point.]

Well, unfortunately, Sandra had a death in her family, and with the funeral plans up in the air, she can’t really take off at this point. We understand, so my plans of leaving here on Thursday morning have changed to leaving here for my grandmother’s tomorrow night; that means all laundry and packing has to be done tonight. That really didn’t occur to me until I was on the phone with my grandmother earlier, telling her, “I reckon I’ll see you tomorrow night.” Crap. It is Tuesday.

This is how life is when you live life by the principles of the Indiana Jones School of Management: elaborate preparation is generally a waste of time, because you could doing something else truly productive while you’re getting every last niggling detail in place. It’s not just some kitschy Weblog slogan, people.

Dear readers of the .net persuasion:

“For A Friend” wasn’t about anyone you know. Stop speculating. Now, dammit.

Yeesh. Y’all act like you have a right to my business, rampantly running through to people you think I might be talking about before they’ve even had a chance to read what I’ve had to say. I’d like the cluefucked among you to write this on your hand and then slap yourself in the forehead: I have friends outside of our little group.

For the record, no, I don’t know who among you went off half-cocked. I don’t want to know, either. But you need to get out of my business. Thanks.

I’ve got a meeting this afternoon to work on a training program with UAH’s SGA … again. Maybe this time, we’ll actually get this off the ground.

While I’m there, I’ll probably swing by the Registrar’s office and make sure that my conditional graduate school admission’s still good. Scott, being stubborn, wouldn’t fully withdraw me when I dropped classes a couple years ago. I need to know before I can start back to graduate classes. I’ll probably bring up what it would take to be admitted for a second baccalaureate while I’m at it; I’m not going to do it concurrently with the MSE—I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy—but I just want to know what the policy is and if it’s likely to change anytime soon. [UAH gets a new catalog soon.]

It’s been seventy years since the Cincinnati Reds brought night games to Major League Baseball.

Suck it, Cubbies.

For whatever reason, moving to WP 1.5.1.1 has broken my feeds; it only shows one post at a time.

Also, for whatever reason, I can’t get to Mosquito to file a bug report. :sigh:

Oh well … reckon I’ll wait for Matt to read and comment.

Update: Bug filed on Trac. Good night.

Bye bye, Danny. You’ve been … DFA’d.

Funny thing is, when the Reds cut bait with D’Angelo Jimenez last week, the guy most featured in an interview with the Enquirer? Danny Graves.

I love that Carl Lindner has gotten the concept of sunk costs. At this point, there’s really only two Reds that could credibly never see this axe: Junior Griffey and Sean Casey, the former because he’s a Hall of Fame talent and the latter because he’s such a fan favorite. Thankfully, Adam Dunn won’t see this treatment because he’s wailing away at every at-bat, as his homer and strikeout totals show.

Kudos to you, Carl. Next year, though, don’t let your GM sign fly-ball pitchers in a ballpark that pads homer stats but depresses run scoring on balls that don’t leave the ballpark, eh?

Alex has developed a nifty post popularity plugin that I’ve been using off-and-on for the last, oh, month or so. [I called myself a beta tester in the comment I left, but I guess I'm really an alpha tester, eh, Alex?] It powers the popularity statistics you see in the metadata area over in the sidebar for individual entries. I have no intention of publishing this data anywhere but on single-entry pages and on a static page I’ll publish later today that has the overall totals.

One thing I’m hoping to get out of the overall totals is an interest in old entries. When you have over four years’ worth of entries, as I do, you like to show off those oldies-but-goodies.

I don’t have use for one—I can just close my door—but some of you in cube farms might [although $400 is steep]: Herman Miller has a new device out called the Babble, which is designed to mask your conversations by repeating random snippets of your conversation through its speakers so that passers-by and lurking cow-orkers can’t eavesdrop effectively.

I’m thinking Baron Carlos could use it…

[HT to Gizmodo, who pointed to IDFuel, who pointed to the actual article. Phew!]

Now this is how you do open finances. I’d love to see how they’re doing this, because I could use a similar automation tool… although I guess I could put it in by hand if necessary.

I’m not sure what’s more frightening: that I’m a couple weeks from moving into my own home, or that my brother gets married on Saturday. By “frightening”, I’m referring to the “ohholycrapwe’regrowingup!” thing that happens to most anyone in America in their mid-20’s who’s too wrapped up in their own lives to notice the change involving and around them. Just because millions—nay, billions—have done what we’ve done before doesn’t mean that we’ve ever done it.

It all promises to be really cool. In the meantime, it’s a wee bit scary.

I’ve spent the last couple of days ripping through Will Carroll’s two most influential books to date: Saving the Pitcher and The Juice.

StP was a good overview of how pitching injuries could be minimized—he argues eliminated—by implementing proper techniques. It’s a great starter book if you’ve got a kid who pitches or wants to pitch, if you’re a coach on the youth or high school levels, or if you’re a young pitcher yourself. If you’re a fan as I am, it can be a bit slow to slog through, because we’re not worried so much about the ideas to be applied as we are the things to look for in pitchers that we watch. Carroll notes that it’s difficult to undertake the task of writing about this topic, because it’s something that clearly lends itself to video. I would have strongly pushed for a CD-ROM to accompany this book; future work by Carroll on this subject fairly well demands it.

The Juice was interesting because it takes a relatively dispassionate view of performance-enhanced drugs (PEDs): their effects, side-effects, composition, production, use, and abuse. Before I say this, let me be clear that this is not Carroll’s position—but I came away with the feeling that it’s fruitless to attempt to ban performance enhancing drugs, and that it makes far more sense to legalize and stringently monitor them. That’s bound to be a damn unpopular conclusion to draw, but I’d ask that you read the book from cover to cover before you fly off the handle with a comment.

It would be interesting for the WP Links Manager to, upon entry of an URL, go and spider that URL real fast to grab relevant data—info from the <title>, autodiscovering a syndication feed URI, check for links back to the originating site for XFN data…—and dump that into the form for the user’s perusal.

Like, if I put in http://photomatt.net/, it’d spit back:

• Title: Photo Matt » Unlucky In Cards
• Feed URI: http://xml.photomatt.net/feed/
• XFN: acquaintance

All of that data is spot-on, and it would probably keep the user from making a mistake and entering bad data.

Now, you might say, “What’s the bother? It’s not like this data takes long to enter!” But user-entered data always has the propensity for failure, no?

Also, what about the concept of a way to put Image URIs in <head>? Say I provide a banner image for the Indiana Jones School of Management—such a spider could take that URI and grab either the URI or the image itself [stored in a local folder for such a purpose, probably somewhere in wp-content]—and then the whole process of grab, FTP, and data entry is all automated.

You know, I could get a second baccalaureate degree from UAH in Computer Science in two, maybe three years …

I think I’m going to start going through Joel Sposky’s software text reading list. I’ve already got Code on order.

Anything else you guys would recommend? Remember, the only “programming” that most aeros does in school is some crappy FORTRAN hacking [hey, NASA still uses it], so …

WP’s on 1.5.1.1 now. Thankfully, I only ever upgraded one install. I’ve gotta get that done at some point, but man … I’ve got lots going these days.

[HT to Dougal.]

Update: Matt points to a script he uses to manage installs via Subversion. Somewhere, Alex King is mumbling about how I need to use SVN. Maybe I can get that running this weekend.

I love it when metrics only go one way.

I love it when I get to do what essentially becomes busywork as a result of the fact that no one manages to the paper that they demand of us before they’ll do a task.

I love how our financial reporting is always behind the power curve and how we have to keep on top of it by asking for the reporting on our own.

And I really love how one manager is consistently making poor management decisions—mainly inaction—and is not being held accountable for it [at least not that I can see].

And that’s all I will [or can] say about that.