Morgajel.net Welcome Guest | Login or Register

so I removed about 8 user accounts from this blog because I didn’t recognize the email address or the username. Apologies if any of those were valid.

Stupid spammers.

I do my best to avoid politics on this site because it’ll always piss someone off. I don’t like the bible-thumping direction the republican party has taken over the past decade or two, and I can’t stand the democrats demands that we give up personal freedoms to save the children.

I’m gonna talk about politics today because I’ve noticed something happening that’s so surreal I had to say something. I’ll use the names Candidate A, B, etc to represent the players in this little scenario.

After watching how the Michigan and Florida democratic primaries went down, I started to wonder if maybe there was an underlying conspiracy to guarantee those delegates to a certain candidate. Imagine the following scenario:

1. Candidate A has supporters in a position of power that helps move the state’s primary forward on the primary schedule against party rules.
2. Candidate A has connections in The Party that disqualifies the state and have it’s delegates stripped in punishment.
3. Candidates make a pact not to campaign in the state. All act ashamed of the State’s behavior.
4. Candidates B,C,D, and E remove themselves from the ballot in deference to party rules, while Candidate A leaves their name on the ballot.
5. Candidate A gets the lion share of votes in the state since they’re not only the only one on the ballot, but any votes for names not on the ballot (B,C,D,E) are thrown out.
6. After everything is said and done, Candidate A petitions for the state’s delegates to be reinstated, essentially saying “the citizens shouldn’t be punished for the actions of their leadership”.
7. Candidate A’s connections in The Party change their minds and decide to reinstate the delegates, essentially handing over the delegates to Candidate A with no competition.
8. The delegates handed over to Candidate A is enough to give them enough to get the nomination for the party.

We’ve seen everything except the last two steps. The sane thing would be for the democratic party to have a “redo” on their election and make it fair for all candidates. Anything less will be bad news.

I am curious to see how this turns out- I think that if this does play out like I’ve outlined and the American public figures it out, there’s a good chance the resulting disillusionment will result in a republican president.

When I moved into Secchia Hall back in the fall of 2001, my mom took me to Sams to buy my first real piece of furniture- a Desk chair. The dorm room was unfurnished, so I ended up getting a futon and a desk as well. The desk was cheaply made and only survived one move. The futon was horribly uncomfortable, and given to Jackie’s dad shortly thereafter. The only thing that followed me was the chair.

It wasn’t a great chair. A simple office chair with a padded fake-leather seat and backing, held together at a 90 degree angle by rectangular tube arms. Over the years the fake leather ripped and peeled, cracked and absorbed sweat.

The chair followed me from Secchia to Brookmeadow; it came with us when we moved to Kentwood to be closer to my new job. I sat in that chair through unemployment, and brought it with me to DC. The chair came back to Michigan and into Ramblewood, where it saw me through a hellish job, a layoff and an eventual rehiring. It came to Rochester where I’ve been for over a year.

Today I left the chair up by the dumpster. It’s just a stupid chair. I’d thought of getting rid of it over the past 3 years, but never could. Since I’m always on the laptop these days and never in the office, there’s no need to have 2 chairs. When I dropped it off, it flashed through my head how it’s always been there.

Goodbye chair. I will miss you.

So jackie wants to take her recipes and build an open cookbook sorta thing. I’m not sure how all of this is gonna play out, but I’ve set up the dev environment for it. I’ll try to make notes about it when I can.

Here’s a story from Christmas that I almost forgot to share. Every year we get together- my parents, brothers, aunt and uncle, cousins and grandparents. We go through dinner, do the present thing, then the grandparents leave. That’s when things usually degenerate below the average level of stupidity.

The incident started when my brother Jamie (24) and cousin Walker (29) were talking about getting high from nutmeg. I don’t think Jamie believed it, so Walker offered to eat a tablespoon of nutmeg for $10. My aunt was very vocal about them NOT doing it, so of course they headed to the kitchen to look for spices. The discussion moved from whether or not it would get you high to whether or not you could keep it down.

Since they couldn’t find nutmeg, they needed to find a suitable substitute. I suggested they try Cinnamon instead- it was roughly the same type of powder, and we had a big jug of it available. I laid down $10.

The bet was that Walker couldn’t keep it down- the cruelty came when we said he couldn’t drink water for 30 seconds. So we took a 1 tbsp. measuring spoon, filled it full of Cinnamon, and headed outside.

My youngest brother Brian (21), Jamie, Walker, and I stood outside as he shoveled the spoon into his mouth. The powder instantly dried his mouth like a fistful of chalk. As those around him laughed, he coughed a bit, sending a bit of cinnamon into his lungs, causing him to cough harder. A plume of brown smoke rolled from his mouth. He coughed again, releasing another cloud of smoke. This is when my brother’s and I began roaring with laughter.

Moments later he began the dry wretching. Then came the vomit- he vomited up probably 1/8th of a pound of roast chicken with all the sides, mixed with a thick brown paste. My dad was pretty pissed that he yacked on the sidewalk, so he took a snow shovel and began dumping snow on the vomit to keep the dogs from eating it.

All in all, he lasted maybe 15 seconds. While Walker is a pussy, I don’t think many others could do much better.

So this brings me to the purpose of this post: are you man enough to take the Cinnamon Challenge?

*update*
Apparently there’s a whole section on youtube dedicated to this.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those.

Family

The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now. He’s just now to the point where he’s taking his first steps. He’s a smart kid, very inquisitive, but stubborn. Within a few years he’ll be learning how to read and write- I’m guessing it won’t be long until I’m teaching him how to program. He’s got an eye for any type of electronics, but goes nutty for my blackberry or laptop. Yeah, he’s a geek in training.

Jackie’s been doing fairly well, all things considered. She’s been staying home with Ian rather than going back to work, and it’s driving her a little stir crazy. To help ease the cabin fever, she got a laptop for christmas- Ian wasn’t letting her stay in the office, so now she has a way to keep in contact with people from the living room.

Weddings

This was the year of the wedding… Brad and Erin, Jordan and Beth, Matt and Carrie, William and Charleen, Jackie’s friend Joslyn, Jackie’s sister Lori, and Paul and Kristen. I only made it to 4 of the weddings, but I was standing up in two of them. The ones we went to were all in Grand Rapids, so we had the joy of driving back and forth 155 miles each way, with the added bonus of dropping Ian off somewhere along the way

Work

Work started off pretty rough. I have a habit of reflecting the attitudes of those around me, and my supervisor at the beginning of the year was pretty negative. That coupled with Ian’s birth and all the associated expenses turned me into a pretty miserable person. Fortunately the supervisor left and was replaced with a cautious optimist. Things got better- so much so that I just passed the 1 year mark at my current place and still find it interesting and entertaining.

Technologies

I’ve played with many new technologies this year- Jboss, Netscaler and CentOS being the three foremost. I’ve dug back into ruby with a couple of new projects, as well as LDAP and a plethora of new utilities. I even picked up a bit of python. This trend doesn’t look like it’s gonna let up, so the job should be exciting and interesting for some time to come.

Projects

This year saw me move away from music and go back towards software (although I have been playing harmonica in the car at stoplights on the way to work). I joined the Luma team as head cheerleader and started the QT4 branch. After becoming frustrated with the python, qt3->qt4 transition and the codebase in general, I started an unofficial sister project, Ruma. I still sit in the Luma channel and help when I can, but I’m gonna sit back and wait until we’re ready for QT4- hopefully we’ll scrap the entire codebase and start fresh.

Right now I have two other developers “working” for me on Ruma, Lars and Hiro. They’ve put a lot of effort into bringing this bad boy to life, and I’m thankful I’ve had their help. For those of you not aware, Luma and Ruma are LDAP administration tools. As a System Administrator, I use LDAP a lot, so having specialized tools can be helpful.

Another project I started this year was competing in National Novel Writing Month. I finished the rough draft for my first book, Sinblade, a week early. It’s only 150 pages or so, but not a bad start all things considered. Jackie’s (sorta) working on revising it, and once she’s done I’ll open it up for others to start giving me feedback. I’m excited and nervous about it. If it takes off and people like it, I have 6 or so more books that I’m interested in writing.

The money situation is still pretty tight, but it’s getting better. Hopefully next year will be as much of an improvement over this year as this was over last year.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display:

It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book:

• Rough Draft: First complete version of the story.
• First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked.
• Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged. English is checked. Plot is evened out. Facts are checked.
• Third Draft: Spell-checking, punctuation, and formatting.
• Fourth Draft: Repeat of third draft with different audience.
• Final Draft: What’s sent to Lulu.com for printing.

My goal is to get the Rough Draft done by December 1st, and that seems a easily reachable goal. Next is to get the First Draft (the first copy to leave the house) out the door for editing and revising by the end of December. I’m not sure how reasonable a goal that will be- I have some catching up to do on my neglected Ruma project. As for the rest of the draft, there are no hard and fast rules- I suspect I’ll be lucky to get to the second draft, let alone the third or fourth.

The end goal is to self-publish through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand book service. This means you’ll be able to buy an actual paperback copy of my book! How cool is that?

Seeing as how it’s now 40 minutes into Thanksgiving, I think I should send out some thanks to those that have helped me:

• Jackie: for bearing with me through another time-consuming project. Hopefully this one will make money.
• Ian: for mostly behaving when I was trying to write.
• VP: for encouraging me to compete in NaNoWriMo with his books, Shining Star and Pulling Strings
• yojimbo, dev_null, mylo, my coworkers, and everyone else who offered to help me: I’ll be taking you up on your offers to help revise

Thanks again everyone for the support! Wish me luck!

Update: Don’t take this post as an example of my writing- it was 1am.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.
The contest started yesterday, and I managed to get off to a great start with 4000 words on the dot- you can check my progress here.

ok, now back to the important writing.

We just took her to the Humane Society. I am a sad monkey
Bye bye Chaos, I’m sorry it had to go down like this.

2004-2007