I'm surprised to find, having had to move to a new workstation at my job and setting it up from scratch with Leopard and VMWare Fusion and my own choice of applications, that I rarely turn to my Windows XP install anymore. Really, I'm only in there to test deploying applications to Coldfusion MX 7, and occasionally to use the SQL Server Management Studio Express software when I need to get into one of our SQL Server DBs.

Everything else I need is sitting in my OS X install. Also, I have an Ubuntu 8.04 VM I drop into occasionally since some of our Coldfusion 7 applications are running on RedHat Enterprise 4 and 5.2, and I need to test my apps against an *nix environment. I don't feel lost without my Windows, which is probably the best feeling I've had in a while. One step closer to not relying on Microsoft, and one giant step closer to total OS independence.

That's right. Twitter.

Twitter is essentially useless to me right now. I don't like SMS, so I don't use my phone to 'tweet'. I love the idea of twitter, and how it could be wrapped up into a micro-blog kind of situation. If more of my friends used it, I'm sure I'd use it too.

Except for the fact that they stopped supporting GTalk as a method of updating. I can no longer send 'tweets' to twitter@gmail.com, so I have to go to the site to use it. Which defeats the purpose. I shouldn't have to visit twitter.com to use twitter's main functionality, which is sending and receiving 'tweets'. I could drop cash on a third party app, but again - not cool.

Anyway, maybe they'll finally get things fixed and I can start using the IM functionality again.

So I am now officially one of those computer nerds who gets mad at other computer nerds for doing crappy illegal things.

I had to tell a coworker the other day that breaking encryption on wireless access points was unethical and that he shouldn't do it and I wouldn't tell him how to do it.

New guitar arrives tomorrow. ESP LTD FX-260SM. That should mean absolutely nothing to almost everyone. Here's a picture:


I swear I had something else I was going to write about. Can't remember. Probably will later.

So I've been having a bit of fun with Ubuntu 8.04 since Saturday. Sabrina's mad she lost her computer, but that's the price you pay for disobeying your mother. Here's what I've done:

• Installed ruby 1.8.6 and rails 2.1
  
• Installed apache 2.2.9
• Installed subversion 1.4.6 (don't know why the distro repository doesn't have 1.5.1 yet)
• Set up Apache2 to serve my SVN repositories
• Set up OpenSSH so I can access the Ubuntu machine remotely and securely

Next on the agenda is setting up a DLNA server on the box. I'm sure it can be done, I'm just trying to figure out the best application to do it. I'm thinking of using GMediaServer from the GNU project, since it's free as in speech and looks to get the job done. My dream is to build a headless low-power media/file server to host all of our movies and music and pictures that will in turn be able to serve them to the PS3 in the living room.

Right now I'm using TVersity for that on my main Windows XP machine, but I don't think it's the best computer for the job. This may or may not be better.

Ooh, I should install MySQL as well on Ubuntu. That would be fun.

There was something else I wanted to do tonight, and now I can't remember in the slightest. Damn.

It's another big pull week, which is good. I'm avoiding all of the mini-series tie-ins in the Marvel U, but still getting roped into the Final Crisis stuff over at DC. Oh well.

DC COMICS

  Batman #679 (Batman R.I.P.)(Regular Alex Ross Cover), $2.99
  Booster Gold #11, $2.99
  Final Crisis Revelations #1 (of 5)(Character/Story Sliver covers), $3.99
  Green Lantern Corps #27, $2.99

MARVEL COMICS

  Astonishing X-Men #26 (X-Men Manifest Destiny Tie-In), $2.99
  Punisher #60, $2.99
  Secret Invasion #5 (of 8)(Regular Gabriele Dell Otto Cover), $3.99

Sometimes - like tonight, and especially like last night - I get to thinking I should give up the creative stuff. I'm good at my job, but that's what I get paid for. That's the creativity I keep for everyday tasks. There are a million people out there who can do what I can do for work, but they can't all write a novel or compose songs. But I wonder if where I was ten years ago with these skills stagnated - and in some places receded - to the point that I shouldn't even bother anymore.

Note: this is not fishing for compliments; this is being recorded for posterity.

Back from ID. Tired. Full of pizza and tired of trying to get the boy to stop complaining about the teeth that are surely coming in. Looking forward to getting comics tomorrow and going to my writing group.

AVATAR PRESS

  Crossed #0 (of 9)(Wrap Cover), $1.00

DC COMICS

  Detective Comics #847 (Batman R.I.P.), $2.99

MARVEL COMICS

  Hulk #5 (Ed McGuinness/Olivier Coipel covers), $2.99
  Invincible Iron Man #4 (Gabriele Dell Otto/Salvador Larroca covers), $2.99
  Punisher War Journal #22, $2.99

On the way to breakfast this morning there was a sign along the road that said

"A Taxpayer Voting for Barack Hussein Obama is like a Chicken Voting for Colonel Sanders"

It amazes me that, given that we're in one of the worst economic down-turns (call it what you will) in thirty years, and given that we're in one of the poorer states in the Union, and given that the next president faces the worst budget deficit ever, you'd think that chickenshit line of reasoning - oh no, those damn Democrats are gonna raise my taxes - wouldn't even factor. But there it was, on the side of the road in God's country. My sister-in-law pointed to it and said "Man, that's just like the one's I seen in Louisiana." I won't even go into everything else that's wrong with the above text.

As David Cross said, he can't believe all the poor people who voted for W, since that man has to just hate them. I can't remember the last time a Republican president stood for fiscal conservative values and actually backed that up with action.

I thought it was smart when Obama dismissed claims that the McCain campaign was being racist towards him, instead stating that they were simply being cynical. The 'flip-flop' term is being thrown around again, though. That's got to stop.

And my current grammar pet-peeve is using 'no' when you really mean 'any', typically in a double-negative situation.

"I don't need no help."

"She ain't got no fruit."

Sabrina has started picking up on the "ain't" language the past couple of days, and I'm already trying to break her of it. I told her if I heard her say it one more time she couldn't watch television for the rest of the week. Crisis averted.

UPDATED 2008-08-04 12:19:54 -

Spent large chunk of today sitting out under a yellow delicious apple tree drinking Löwenbräu after Löwenbräu, listening to Meshuggah and Genghis Tron and Mastodon and writing a new short story. I had fun writing it, even though the end got away from me, and where I wanted to take it went somewhere much darker. I'm fine with that. I took the simple concept of the zombie apocalypse story being metaphor for crass consumerism, and turned it into an observation on the American obesity problem.  I don't know if I really took it far enough. Maybe I'll scan the sketch I drew to put me in the mood.

The rest of the Witsoe clan is descending from the South into the Boise airport as I type this. I'll probably still be awake when they make it back to the house. That ought to be entertaining. I really mean to hammer something out for Illuminerdi.com. I have until November, really. Right now it's working enough that I am almost ready to get started. I have my sketched-out use cases and my data diagram in my (unfortunately) wide rule composition notebook for my home web design stuff. Instead of categories for posts, there will be projects, which will show lifespan and historical data, and multiple user accounts, and the posts will be categorized based on their contents, so that you can go to the Nanowrimo 2008 project and read only the posts that contain statistical data about where I am in the project, or just posts that contain excerpts from what I'm writing. On a user's dashboard they will be able to select the projects that they are tracking and when they log in they can see information about those projects, in the order that they have selected to see them. Users who want to participate in a given project can petition the project owner and can be added and contribute.

This really all came out of all the joint projects I've discussed with friends over the years. First and foremost it's really just a replacement for hollowedOut.com, but I never wanted the current version of this site to just be a personal blog, which has recently been eclipsed by my obsessive-compulsive need to catalog every comic book I pick up, comment on them, and show links recently added to my del.icio.us account that have cryptic tags like 'eris_project' and '[m_s]project'.

I still want to work on the comic book project I started with my friend Erich, who lives now in the middle of BFE, some 80 miles north of Spokane, WA, where even Google Maps fears to tread. Eric in New Orleans, would dig doing some collaborative music thing. Same with Dave up in Bellingham. I'd love Tony down in CA to throw me some CSS and graphics trickery to make the site look bad-ass. We'll have to see. I love the meta idea of a project for the site that involves making the site. Anyway.

Time for me to chunk out some more Rails shtuff. Josh and Eric, I'm checking my MySpace inbox now.

I guess it's 9am here in Caldwell, ID. Oscar decided that it was time to wake up and commence the screaming at about 4:30 this morning. JiSun thought the best thing to do was ignore him, let him cry it out. However, at around 5am I got up, cleared his nostrils with a bulb syringe, and he calmed right down. Then there was no sleep for Josh.

So I've been up since then, talking with the in-laws. I had planned on working on Illuminerdi.com, but that wasn't in the cards. Even now I'm weighing making progress on that front against maybe getting a few more hours of sleep.

Discussion ranged from 'those Mexicans causing most of the problems' to 'gay people are just like normal people, but I think if they want to come into the church they should give up their habit.' I have no problem saying things like this when I'm being ironic, but these little observations were said in all seriousness. Still, I'm a guest here and not about to start an argument. I got my bon mots in where I could - the guy walking into the church a week or so back and shooting a bunch of people was given to me as an example of the world going crazy and no sense in anything, and I enjoyed pointing out that the guy did that because he was angered by that particular church's liberal views towards homosexuality.

The woman cutting my hair on Thursday took a moment between comments on how my hair looks like it's thinning - hair she hadn't seen before that morning, and would never see again and, JiSun assures me, it's just as thick and full as it's always been - to tell me that she's "really scared of Obama." Not that he might win, but that he was scaring her. I don't understand that. The guy is making a candidacy out of uplifting, inspiring but completely vague platitudes, and that scares her? Oh, and as a result she's leaning towards McCain. I don't like painting things black and white, but anyone who sides with someone who's for torture is not to be trusted. It's either willful ignorance, or the actual belief that torture is the way to go. Of all the things this conservative, evangelical society stands up for, always under the banner of moral outrage and indignation and 'Do you really want to live in a country that [insert horrible thing here]? Is that the society we want for our children?" - you'd think they'd be right up there on torture, too. Wait, no, I guess it makes a sick, sad sort of sense.

I've spent the last three days exercising one of my most infrequently used abilities - keeping my mouth shut.

Anyway, drank three different kinds of whiskey in a little bar yesterday. You go in the front door and have to make your way past a barber shop. We figured we should have gone there to get my hair cut, then drinks after, but too late. Played five games of pool. The shots were Cutty, Black Label, and finally J&B. Got some good conversation in. Anything to get out of the house and away from the five foot tall Christmas tree in the living room. Oh yeah, it's Christmas in July, since all the kids are going to be in town as of 10:30 local time tonight.

JiSun and I had to drive down the I-84 business loop yesterday to find a bank. I told her flat out on the way back that I could never live in a place like this. Every hundred feet along those 6 miles of road there was a car dealership, auto parts shop, salvage yard, or mechanic's shop. Everything coated in a layer of light brown dirt. Half of the buildings run down and closed permanently. I love my post-apocalyptic wasteland fiction, but this was a little too up-close-and-personal for my taste. I don't know how anyone lives here who isn't just waiting to die. The wife agreed with me that we shouldn't live in places like this, which means I'll keep her. I couldn't even think of what damage it would do to the kids.

Today and three more days. It's not all bad.