Author: cdwan

Terri Gross interviews Gene Simmons (of Kiss) on Fresh Air.

Drugs are bad, kids.

Originally published at chris.dwan.org. You can comment here or there.

It occurs to me that it may make my political views more comprehensible to remember that I grew up near Washington DC. My somewhat cynical views on politics probably stem from Marion Barry more than anything else. Of course, years of early exposure to the washington post couldn’t have helped.

In our random junk on the web department, we have a grades for national flags, a thrasher cat, and the ebay punishment

Woot.

Originally published at chris.dwan.org. You can comment here or there.

Back from the first trip. It was good.

The trip

Headed for a wedding in Kalamazoo today. Drive out today, wedding tomorrow (plus, conveniently, a bridal shower in St. Joe, MI tomorrow morning), drive back on Sunday. Pack Mon – Thu, load the truck on Friday. Say goodbye to our stuff for a while. Sleep on the air mattress until we close out of the house on Monday (the 28th). Drive like bandits to Rhode Island to be there for closing on July 1 (Thursday, two weeks hence). With luck and perseverance, we’ll be in our new house waiting for our stuff to arrive a fortnight from now.

Woot.

Originally published at chris.dwan.org. You can comment here or there.

This guy is a genius.

I got back from the gym this evening with a singular vision: Spinach soup. I don’t think that I’ve ever even eaten spinach soup before, yet I was filled with this wild desire. So I looked online. There is wide variety among the available recipes for spinach soup. It is a dish eaten either hot or cold. It either requires a food processor, or it does not. It may be flavored with ginger, nutmeg, or parsley and salt and pepper.

I made the hot version, cooking carrots, potatoes, onions and peppers “until soft”, then adding spinach, parsley, and dill. It was pretty good. A rich broth, very nutrient filled.

Then, there was robot night. It was good to be, once again, among my peeps. In a place where I am accepted with some degree of honor for finding this pretty damn amusing.

And tomorrow, to Kalamazoo, for a wedding of a cousin in law. W00+.

Pitch Black was a pretty good movie. It was a B movie that made it into that rare and slender category of movies which, on a low budget and starting from a sci-fi horror film plot, create a character or two whose development I actually care about…even a little bit. In general, I appreciate truly horrifyingly bad movies which are self-mocking at some level. Jason X and Eight Legged Freaks managed this. Pitch Black, on the other hand, did not appear self deprecating at all. It was exactly what it was…and within that context I came to appreciate Vin Diesel’s character, Riddick. My appreciation for Riddick is exactly the same as my appreciation for Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. Not a great movie, but a well played and executed character in a limited world.

This new movie carries on the Riddick franchise, but it makes up a crazy-ass mystical world where all the aliens are humanoid, Gods and Devils stride the cosmic stage, and none of the pseudo-science will survive even a passing glance. The character who fit so well in the tiny world of Pitch Black (against a limited backdrop of weak kneed humans and vicious reptilian aliens) gets lost in the cities and planetscapes. The physics also drove me nuts. Either interstellar journeys require cryo-sleep or they do not. Please adjust story timelines accordingly. Either the bad guy has superpowers rendering him physically unbeatable, or he doesn’t. There was a vague hint at some sort of order-maintaining behind-the-scenes matriarchy managing an ongoing power struggle between two warring powers…but then it turned out to just be an opportunity for more cleavage to be flexed at.

I mean, sure, he’s still the gravel voiced beefcake that the ladies (and some of the men) wanted to see again. He delivers physical intimidation and cornball lines just like in the first movie. The problem is that the first movie provided a very small stage on which this interesting but limited caricature of man could show off…this movie dwarfs him.

The effects, rocked and the fight scenes were good though. Don’t mean to belittle that.

My in-laws had their car broken into last night. Four years in this town, and in the last month here my guests get victimized. They had their car parked in the hotel parking lot (out front of the building) directly under a light. The thieves destroyed the driver side back-door window with a rock, cleaned up the shards around the edges, and crawled in through the still locked and closed door. Apparently, if you do it this way, it fails to trigger the car alarm. Fortunately, the thieves were dumbasses, and got away with a bag filled with books-on-CD and an old model digital camera. They totally ignored some other juicy pieces of consumer electronics that were under the seat. The only lesson I’m getting here is “don’t leave anything that might appear to be of value (CDs) visible in your car.” Oh yeah, and also “you people can’t have nice things, you just break them.”

In totally unrelated news, we all need a zombie detector in our homes, to go with our other useless products.

The rest of the day was spent moving a database bottleneck around. When I started the day, I was blocking at the network between the cluster nodes and the DB. I combined the SELECT and INSERT queries into one big query, and moved the bottleneck inside the DB. At that point it was blocking as each of these mighty queries locked the entire table for the duration of their work…leaving the rest of the queries to hang in the wind. I enabled row-level locking instead of table-level, and now we’re experiencing some new sort of pain. Each of these improvements has resulted in ZERO speedup…though I keep feeling that if I just plug at it a little bit more, we’ll break the dam and slam through to high-speed updates.

Riiiiiight.

An analysis of how long the power grid would last if the zombies started to take over. Stolen from jwz.

(picked up from capital_l)

A summer vacation with an honors reading list to work through
A hammock to do it in
An extra two weeks to strip, paint, sand, and otherwise fix the new house before the furniture arrives
A job: signed, sealed and delivered.
A big pile of spare cash to cover weekend trips and crazy, over-the-top presents
About a solid week to pack.
About another solid week just to hang out with and say goodbye to Minnesota friends.
Mature plants in the new garden: four tomato and six pepper would be a good start.