free as in blog

For me, Christmas is one of those strange seasons. On the one hand, it’s a joyous time where the best of fellow man can shine through the dark night. Smiles on children’s faces, families together and enjoying each other’s company, seeing the world anew after it snows, etc.

There’s also this under part. The darkness that the light has to shine through. Think more melancholy. Not necessarily evil, but maybe sad (my wife may say ‘moody’). Days are shorter, uncertainty about the year ahead, looking back on the year that just passed, parties to attend, cards to write, presents to buy, and dang it’s cold out.

For some reason, the two work together well. Maybe the pagans that came up with the solstice and the Christians that adopted Dec 25 were on to something by inserting a holiday here.

Anyway, there’s two CDs that for some reason define Christmas for me, at least the season as a whole. They combine both of these parts together in a unique way.

First is the soundtrack to Charlie Brown Christmas. Guaraldi was able to put together a number of really fun and happy tunes (most notably the theme you think of when you think of Peanuts), along with some rather haunting tunes like the title of this article. He was even able to put the two together into a single song in his version of ‘O Tannenbaum’. Don’t bother with the 40th anniversary edition - get the original. You can usually find it in a Starbucks.

The other is John Denver and the Muppets. My parents had this as a record for probably 20 years now, and I was able to find a CD of it a few years ago with all the tracks (there was a version in 2000 that was missing a number, go find the one with 13 tracks on it!). I normally don’t listen to John Denver, but he was able to insert the haunting parts in amongst the Muppet fun you expect from when Jim Henson still roamed the earth.

Honorable mention (for Christmas Day itself) goes to this batch of other records my parents had that were sold by Firestone in the early to mid 60s. They’re more religious and celebratory, which would be almost unheard of now, but hey, that’s progress(?). I found a number on eBay a few years ago and copied them to CD - hey, maybe I can use that to get back to the actual intent of this and write technical stuff again.

My happy Thanksgiving came to a crashing halt for a while when my brother (who is serving in the Navy) informed me that he’s being shipped off to Iraq. On December 15. For a year.
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I have only a slightly green thumb, but I try to get a garden growing every year. As you may expect, some years are better than others, mostly depending on how much time I devote to the garden. This year was not as much time as I’d like and thus things did not grow all that well. Got a few cucumbers, almost no hot peppers, and the cabbage…well…best not to think about that.

I had one unexpected success though - three pumpkins. Unexpected because I didn’t plant any this year. The place where they grow is an area that is somewhat shaded due to the wood fence on two sides of that area, and it’s to the side of our compost pile, which I don’t go near very often.

Sometime last season after hollowing out our jack-o-lanterns, we chucked the seeds into our compost pile in the back yard. Some of those seeds must have survived and thrived in the nutrient-rich compost that surrounded it. I looked out about a week ago and found three small yet unrotten pumpkins sitting in that area.

I’ve scooped out two and have enough for a few pies. Yum.

I’m not sure how I thought of this new name, but whatever. Noone else was using the name, so I’m still relatively unique. I really should be putting random things here instead of hackrag.

I’m not sure why, but I’m really digging Hilltop Hoods.  Let me first say it’s Australian Rap.

Yes, you heard right.

Australian Rap.

To verify my brain isn’t doing something dumb to me, I had a friend listen to a track and he concurred - sounded like early 80s rap.  Only they have Australian accents. I like early rap: nice sounds, vinyl scratching, social statements. Especially great are Clown Prince, Stopping All Stations, and Breathe, all on “The Hard Road” which was released last year.  Go, find, listen, enjoy.

Back in 1992, I was writing humor for the Clarkson Univerity Knight humor magazine.  A story that was published was a somewhat fictional tale of a trip to Washington, DC mostly based off humorous observations from my trip.

One of the more telling tales I told was of going to the Museum of American History.  One of the displays was of this new technology available in Japan called HDTV that was supposed to be the new thing in television.  The one HDTV in existence in the display was showing exactly two things.  First was a sumo wrestling match, so two 450+ lb guys running into each other.  The other was a rodeo.  They were visually stunning and lifelike, but if that was the only content that was available, it would kinda suck.

Fast forward to last week.  I joined the growing number of people buying a new television, and I broke down and got an HD-ready TV.  Fortunately, I got a progressive scan DVD player and on the advice of a friend, I’m watching the Helm’s Keep battle tat was in The Two Towers as an example of how this can look.  So far it’s nice.  I’ll probably break down and call Comcast to get their HD cable box before Heroes returns.

I’m sitting here at Logan, with proof that my laptop can get to the Internet via my Treo.  Even found a couple of electrical outlets to keep everything charged.

I hate security.  This is the first time I’ve flown in over a year.  Maybe it’s not security itself, but the fact that the rules are so random from airport to airport.  Manchester, NH allows you to bring a sealed bottle of soda or water with you through security.  Logan doesn’t.  Albany airport doesn’t make you take off your shoes when you go through security (they actually yelled at me when I did take my shoes off).  Logan does.
Wasn’t the TSA created to standardize these rules?  Maybe this is all some plan to make us feel safer my randomizing the rules so ‘the bad guys’ can’t use any one scheme to kill us all.

Ah well.  A few hours from now, I’ll be in Phoenix,and in about 24 hours I’ll be on the south rim of the grand canyon.  I’d like to think that shuffling around without shoes or jacket makes up for it, but I’m not sure.

Mentioning Jesus in your speech?  That’s small government.

Doing what Jesus asks?  That’s big government.

- Stephen Colbert

Unlike other months, thsi time I was the one going with a lot of big ticket items and wanted to get some money for it. In addition, I had some items that were in my basement gathering dust (or water, depending on how high off the ground they were). Some of these items were things I got years ago from a former co-worker with the idea that I’m borrowing them and I’ll give them back to him at some future point. (more…)

When I have to drive into work, it’s about 25 miles each way, and a lot of it is highway, depending on the route I take. Now I’ve got my satellite radio set up as an FM broadcaster on 89.3FM, so I just tune my car radio to that and listen to the music.

At least once a week I’m noticing that the station suddenly gets fuzzy and I’m hearing something else over it. Look around the cars near me, and sure enough, there’s the telltale red or blue glow from the dashboard. That person also has a satellite radio and they’re broadcasting at 89.3FM.

What are the odds? Really? That two cars on a highway would both have satellite radio, would both have it on FM broadcast, and both are broadcasting on the same frequency - there’s at least 5-6 optimal ones for my trip, so that should cause the odds to drop rather quickly.

I went to my dentist the other day and got talking to the dental hygenist who was about to scrub my teeth clean with all sorts of pointy objects.  Turns out she’s from Texas and moved to the Boston area about 6 months ago.  So I try out my greatest Texas/Boston joke.

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“One foot on the Mars bars”

I’m trying to get this phrase into common use. And putting it on my blog will do wonders *roll eyes*. On the plus side, once I tell the story of how this came about, people understand it and think it’s pretty good.

Anyway, here’s the background.

My brother (Scott) and sister (Kathleen) were at CVS one day buying something (photos probably) when the person behind the counter started giving Kathleen grief. Scott (being a good older brother) responds by nearly jumping over the counter and giving said person a ‘beat-down’. For those of you not familiar with CVS, they have their candy/gum below the checkout counter in front of you. And the counters are about waist high, so you can see where this is leading.

Good uses:

“That stupid security guard was just giving me a hard time about where I was parking. I had one foot on the Mars bars, and would have pounced if he didn’t walk away. And it was rainy and cold out.”

“The manager just left us standing there while the register was broken and they tried to get it working again. We waited for 20 minutes! 5 minutes more, and I would have put my foot on the Mars bars and fixed the thing myself.”

“Don’t make me put one foot on the Mars bars!”

Bad uses:

I haven’t thought of any yet. I’ll think of something. Or put it in a comment.

I went and bought a Sirius radio a few weeks ago. At the time I bought it, Brenda treated it the same way she treated the Tivo, somewhere along the lines of “you’re spending how much on this thing?”.

The following day, we took a trip to New Jersey to see relatives and see my niece’s baptism. Long trip from Boston to central NJ, and the Sirius radio was a champ the entire way. Julie was in the back sleep and I tuned it to the kids channel, which balanced Barney with Animaniacs and even some Schoolhouse Rock. Once she was sleep on her car seat, I was able to change the channel to BackSpin (classic Rap) or the 80s channel.

So here’s the deal with this thing. You buy the receiver ($79 for the Starmate) and wire it into your car. The receiver attaches itself to your windshield, an antenna runs out to your roof and is held there with a pretty string magnet. Power comes from the cigarette adapter. The reciever then picks up the signal and rebroadcasts it over FM to the channel of your choice. I gotta say, the FM rebroadcaster is far better than my Griffin iTrip and my Neuros - no static, volume is great.

There’s 120-or-so channels you can choose from that vary in genre from random batshit right wing talk radio to about every genre of music to traffic and weather for most big cities. Toss in some channels for kids, two comedy channels (one family friendly, one not so much), and various sports channels.

Reception is pretty good everywhere. Today was nice and cloudy and I was still getting a pretty strong signal. In the city, there’s a terrestrial broadcaster so there’s still a good signal when there’s tall buildings around. There’s a few areas in my neighborhood that has a lot of trees where the signal cuts out every now and then. Stopping under a bridge isn’t good either.

Wow. I finally got this thing back up and running after Debian tried their darnedest to prevent me from doing it. First, they messed up wordpress on me (not sure if comments still work), then bosted MySQL when I wasn’t looking. Thanks guys.

Then again, all the e-mails from my blog friends (hello? anyone?) sent me piles of mail saying they can’t get in and they demand to know my thoughts at this time.

Well, what can I say. It’s been a while, and a lot has gone on. Not all of it bad. Built an island in the kitchen that has a kickass butcher block (thanks Nelson). My friend Rich went and moved off to NC. Went to two family reunions, my niece was born 9 weeks early but doing well, parties galore, and Boston has some way of having 90/90 weather (that’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity - least it feels that way). Visited Geo in CO and got pelted by hail at 12,000 ft.

I had an article printed in the August Linux Magazine and should be available online by December. Learn all you want to know about NFS tuning. I really liked working with them, so I’ll see if I can get back into writing and see how it goes.

Oh right. Finally purchased another Linksys router. This one works a lot better than the old one. Even found some remote device trying to use my connection, which ticked me off and I disabled access to that MAC. Hey, it was Sunday. They should have been in church or something.

Lots more where this came from, but I’ll get this up now and I promise to add more as I think of it. Honest.

New grill grates: $25
New grill burner: $35
Fill the propane tank: $10
New igniter: $15
New aim-n-flame (when igniter doesn’t work): $5

Total: $100 after tax

New grill cost: $199