Coffee and Code

Sheesh! It has been far too long... I don’t know whether to pat myself on the back for getting another blog entry in before September ends, or to chide myself allowing more than a month to pass in-between blog entries!

Anyway, the reason for this post is simply to inform you that it’s September 19th: Talk Like A Pirate Day! This time, even Google’s gotten in on the pirate action! You know... you really should take advantage of the only opportunity this year to call your boss a Scurvy Dog, Bilge Rat, or even Scallywag, and get away with it! (Is "scallywag" a pirate word? I don’t know. Let’s pretend that it is, for the time being. Let’s also pretend that your boss will actually let you call her/him that without consequences... sweet!)

I still have me pirate eyepatch here at work from last year's Pirate Day. Yes, I am wearing it. I had to take off me pirate spectacles to wear it though, so you can just call me "Reddish-Brown Beard: The Cyclopic Myopic Scourge of the Seven Seas"! Arrr...

In other news, I picked up my 2009 MINI John Cooper Works hardtop! It is way too fast, and way too cool, for a ragged buccaneer such as myself. But, I love it anyway! It is beautiful. I’ll post pictures soon. Happy Friday, and happy swashbuckling!

Okay, this is just a short post to explain the above photo:

My sister snapped this photo in Denver that was posted in someone’s shop... At first glance, it looks like your typical "Pet Found" ad... Except that this is not a cat! As near as I can tell, it's an Opossum.

Either the person who made this is an evil, brilliant genius, or very, very confused... My favorite part? "Not very friendly! I think he might be scared :-(" HA HA HA!!!!

Left: AudioSource Db5 mobile speakers. Right: Flying Alarm Clock.

I received some excellent birthday loot this year. I hear that I have more on the way, too. Thanks everybody!

Pictured here:

• AudioSource Db5 Personal Stereo Speakers
  The speakers feature a "3D sound" feature and fold in half for portability. They run on batteries or USB, are small enough to fit in your coat pocket, laptop bag or purse, and sound awesome! I have my network walkman plugged into them in the picture.
• The Amazing Flying Alarm Clock
  When the (LOUD) alarm sounds, the helicopter apparatus flies off the top, taking the alarm's shut-off key with it. To disable the deafeningly loud klaxon, you have to get up, find the key, and return it to its base. By the time you've done that, you're awake enough to make a pot of coffee. Check out the Flying Alarm Clock in action at thinkgeek.com.

Wow, I've gone a whole month without posting anything to this blog. I am LAZY.

I'm currently well-caffeinated and happy, other than having to deal with some minor gastrointestinal misery for the past couple of days. Oh, our telephone line is on the blink (again). This tends to happen when we get a lot of snow; last winter we went through 5 or 6 days without a phone line. Oddly enough, my internet connection still works sometimes. Time to call the landlady!

So I've been [helping] a friend out with an ASP.Net knowledge base application for the past few days. A couple of nights ago I was working on a module that uploads Flash-format tutorials to the application. Anyway, at one point when I was testing the module, I did an upload and waited for the response.... After about 10 seconds I figured something was screwed up; No page was coming back and I had to Ctrl+Alt+Delete out of Firefox.

I fixed the problem that night, but didn't find out until the next day what had actually happened: due to some hasty coding and inadvertent recursion, my application had created 6,608 copies of an uploaded SWF, nearly filling up my hard drive...

I am a danger to myself and to my computer.

Sunday: Accosted by a fake Scottish hobo outside Smith's. Says he: 'I'm from Scotland and I'm here to kick your a**! He ends up bumming a cigarette, mumbling at me for a while, and is finally shooed away by a manager for drinking beer. But not before telling me, 'You're a very pretty man.'

Wednesday: Co-worker plays Linkin Park loudly. Co-worker also defiantly refuses to lower volume. Jeff becomes annoyed and begins plotting digital revenge... BWAHAHAHAHA!

Thursday: Statewide meeting, and my first trip to Rio Rancho! (Ugly). Emergency lunchtime trip to Albertson's for deodorant. Motivational speaker somehow makes me feel WORSE about myself. Whiskey, the very same evening.

Friday: Dinner at Masa Sushi. The heart attack rolls live up to their namesake (Well, technically, acid reflux. Don't want to worry any relatives here.) Nonetheless, the delicious food leaves me with the 'warm fuzzies' and a distended stomach. Lisa buys the third installment of Hellsing. I smoothly talk her into buying the copy that comes in a metal case and with a vacuum-molded Father Alexander Anderson Super-Creepy plaque (For the collector's value, of course). We play the DVD and revel in the scary vampire freaky monster-ness.

Saturday: I defer self-hygiene tasks until Moment of Clarity arrives. Cartoons, and many, many Calories are consumed. Mildly freakish behavior - all in fun.

Today: All is well in the land of the lost... Snow is falling early in Santa Fe, and it's a fine day to stay inside, drink hot tea and bask in free movie channel previews with Lisa. I'm left only with one nagging decision:

Whiskey or Wine with dinner?

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One looks to the other and says, 'This taste funny to you?'

I've been fighting sleep every single day this week, because every time I visit my parents in Wyoming, my caffeine threshold rises quite a bit (due to the fact that they drink, like, 5 pots of coffee a day). Then, upon returning home, I have to let my body readjust to my slightly more moderate level of caffeine consumption.

Saw Transformers on Monday at the new theater in Santa Fe (name slips me right now; way down on Zafarano street at the end of Cerrillos Road). Overall, the movie kicked ass because 1.) It was about the transformers and 2.) There were enough special effects eye candy to make me cream my proverbial design-happy jeans. I mean, some of the sub-plots and, let's face it, the romantic plot part of the movie were pretty weak. This doesn't mean shit, though, when you see a bunch of Transformers (and Decepticons) lay waste to hoover dam, some freeways and a whole city. That was cool.

There was a scene at the end when the leading human characters were making out on Bumblebee's hood. Is this considered group sex? I dunno.

OK, I gots ta go cook some hamburgers now. Later, people!

I've just returned from a trip to Wyoming, so for now I'm temporarily incapable of pronouncing the 'g' in words that end with 'ing'. Git it?

Anyway, while I was there, my brother gave me this really funny shirt having to do with Chuck Norris. The top of the shirt reads, 'Things You Should Know About Chuck Norris'. Here's a few things (you should know about Chuck Norris):

1. Chuck Norris does not sleep. He Waits.

2. Chuck Norris's cowboy boots are made from real cowboys.

3. Chuck Norris sleeps with a night list because the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.

4. When the boogeyman [sic] goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

5. (My personal favorite) If Chuck Norris is late, time better slow the fuck down.

These are only a few; there were a bunch more that I didn't post here. He he.

I read this article on CNN.com the other day, and it really pissed me off.

To paraphrase the article, apparently talent is just not enough for women to be successful as entertainers - now, they have to be "sexy" too. A music industry executive (a woman, no less) is quoted in the article as saying:

"The music is not about just music anymore, it's about the look, the 'it' factor if you will ... it's marketing."

Is there anything more harmful music than to put more stock in how a musician looks than how he or she sounds? I don't think so. For one thing, professional musicians now must have to devote time and energy to maintaining their "perfect" physiques, which could only eat into the creative process. Should a talented musician have to endure withering comments from fashion critics? Should an extremely talented musician lose out on a recording contract because they just didn't have this year's 'it' look?

To hell with the record industry, the beautiful people, and those that support them. They are the Great and Shallow, and their legacy will be the corrosion of the musical arts in America.

They can keep their shitty Pussycat Dolls, and American Idols, and blonde, brainless lip-synchers galore. I don't want any.

They can keep their lame, quasi-sensitive poor excuses for rockers, too. Those guys aren't fooling anyone (with a brain anyway). Weakness!

Music can change lives. It's capable of awakening and inspiring people. If the trend of valuing phyiscal beauty and style above talent continues, however, music will cease to be a powerful force in our lives.

It's up to us, as consumers, to demand substance and to ignore fluff. So turn off American Idol or whatever, and crank some REAL MUSIC!!

So this teenage kid and his mammy were standin' in front of me in line at Walgr**ns. He says to his mom, 'I gotta start shaving. Clean-shaven men get all the best jobs.'

And here I am, lookin' all haggard with 3 days worth of stubble and camo pants on.... wild-ass hair... so I say to the mammy: 'Well, I guess I'm outta luck!' And the mom says - I love this part - 'Oh, you see, my son means a STRAIGHT job.'

Ho ho.

Anyway, I found this link at leftslipper's website while searching for how to bind an ObjectDataSource to an object factory. The article not only told me what I needed to keep my new weblogger project rolling, but offers an alternative way to handle objects: namely acquiring them rather than constantly creating and destroying them.

It's the day before my 30th birthday, and I'm feeling introspective.

I'm not feeling an overwhelming despair at the loss of my youth, or some pressing need to begin emulating adult behavior. Simply put, after another decade on earth, I want to give you a brief chronology of my life thus far. Lucky you! Here goes:

1977: Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to piano players. Began freezing my ass off and being a dumb little kid.

1983: Started kindergarten at age 6. I wrote my first love note to a girl. The recipient of the note had to ask the teacher to read it to her - It didn't dawn on me that other kindergartners couldn't read yet. Ditched class for the first time. Loved: the Space Shuttle. Hated: Beets.

1985: First chance to use a computer, an Apple IIe. My 2nd grade teacher had a beehive with a Cruella DeVille-esque gray streak and drove a red Camaro. I don't feel incorrect to say that she was an uber-bitch who probably had to swim in alcohol to forget how miserable her life was. Am I digressing? Loved: attack helicopters. Hated: tonsils.

1990: The seventh grade begins a year-long attempt to fit in with my preppier classmates. This was a failed experiment that left me looking a little like Screech from Saved by the Bell, and probably embarassed my family. Loved: DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Hated: acne.

1991-1996: General downward spiral into juvenile delinquency and self-destructive behavior, interspersed with inexplicable bouts of ROTC and Mormonism. Toward the end, discovered the joys of dial-up BBS, telnet, Novell Netware, phreaking, sneaking, and especially programming. Loved: urban exploration. Hated: getting busted.

1998: After a couple of years working as a pizza delivery man and a milkman (I never got laid doing either!), I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I ended up at the local community college, studying an odd admixture of exercise science and Microsoft Office. The community college was great because I could basically live there - I was in the gym at 6:00 AM, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in the cafeteria, and they paid me $6.00 an hour to surf the net and hand out print jobs at night! Loved: metal. Hated: granola whores.

2000: This year absolutely sucked on so many different levels. I'd like to forget this entire year.

2001: First programming job! Yay! {... ignore these horrible things happening around you... repeat: the sky is NOT falling...}

2003: Met a really nice girl named Lisa, who I began dating under very curious circumstances! Without saying too much, my belief in the beautiful weirdness of life was reaffirmed. Loved: Scotch. Hated: politicians.

2006: This was a good year, if a little stressful. I hated the holidays, loved the rest of it. Paid off debts,chilled out with Lisa, and ate way too many lime popsicles.

2007: Still alive, still not loving beets. Goal: an actual vacation to somewhere I've never been, to do actual vacation things like relax and sight-seeing.

That's it, folks! I've still got birthday weekend to burn, and I'm getting hungry...

Now, I'm not someone to normally write about Britney Spears. I would usually much rather keep Britney, as well as numerous other purveyors of fluffy american pap music (er.... I mean pop music) as far from my thoughts as possible.

After seeing the flap this morning about Britney's newly-shorn noggin, however, I just have to put my 2 cents in. And those 2 cents are:

1. It looks like Britney was going for the Sinead O'Connor look, but it ended up making her look like the guy in that Powder movie.

2. She also looks a bit like Cancer Boy from Kids in the Hall, or perhaps like the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins.

I'm expecting the media to begin speculating immediately that a combination of paparrazzi (spelling?) harrassment, the influence of Paris Hilton, and repressed memories of being brainwashed by the Disney Mouseketeer entertainment/child assassin juggernaut to kill foreign dignitaries and encourage other American children to abandon their ideas of living lives of substance in favor of subscribing to Disney's twisted vision of filthy children waiting in long lines with fingers up noses waiting for the next gut-churning ride on the spinning teacup, followed by a quick photo session with Goofy.

Thus ends this Saturday-morning rant. Awww, poor Britney.

Quick side note, though: What if Britney's recent decline is due to a Cruel Intentions-style plot between Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake? You know what I'm talkin' about... just saying.

Okay, I guess an explaniation/apology to my audience is in order for my last weblog entry. So here goes:

I, Jeff Woodman, do humbly apologize to my readers for irresponsibly authoring website content whilst under the influence of intoxicants, i.e. irish whiskey. I understand that, as a website operator, I am expected to adhere to a high standard of behavior that naturally excludes the consumption of alcohol-based products while operating my super-high-tech computer thingies. I realize that failure to comply with said standard may result in confusion on the part of readers of this weblog, which breeds contempt toward the content author.

I do solemnly swear to never again indulge in this type of unprofessional behavior, hic, so long as I soberly operate thish webshite. Hic.

Okay, SOMEBODY sent me a link to the Fish Heads video on YouTube.com this morning, with the expressed intention that I view the video before I had coffee this morning. EVIL! I must admit that the video is quite delightfully twisted, though.

Note to spammerz: F*** off! It looks like I'm going to have to expedite the production of my new blogger... The current one, which I wrote before actually learning about blog programs and what they're supposed to do, doesn't allow me to moderate comments, or delete them for that matter! Bleh. I am stupid like that sometimes. My new blogger will be much better!

Now: writing code, drinking coffee. Later: writing code, drinking whiskey.

Author's Footnote: Four days after I posted this entry, the post got spammed, bad. Like 39 spam comments in 24 hours bad. Hence the mysterious absence of the comment form. There's one comment left that LOOKS like spam, but I think it's from my brother instead, ha ha.

THIS MESSAGE IS OF THE HIGHEST IMPORTANCE.

As you lounge at home, or in your comfy ergonomic cubicle-womb, I hope you will take a moment of quiet contemplation to remember those nobly-dressed scoundrels who, in the name of avaricious self-advancement, carved their very countenances on the face of history... who forever set the standard for any rag-tag, adventurous, smelly band of swashbucklers that would seek to call themselves Pirates!

The O.G. Scurvy Dogs... The men who proved that you could stand on the high mast of schooner in a purple silk tunic and STILL intimidate people! The men who proved that beardliness IS more important than oral hygeine... these are the true poseidons, the real Gods of the Sea.

And in my opinion, men like Blackbeard put the two-bit, misguided, whacky Somali pirates of today to shame. STYLE COUNTS in the pirate universe, and that is why a bunch of angry young AK-wielding whackjobs in a motorboat just don't cut the mustard.

Don't forget: National Talk-like-a-Pirate Day is Tuesday, 19 September. ARRRR!

Ho ho. I am now officially halfway through Friday, and then I am On Vacation for an entire week.

Hell yes.

This country boy is returning to his Wyoming roots for a few days of rootin' tootin' cowboy fun. (Actually, I am not really a cowboy. More of a western-infuenced miscreant - which would actually qualify me as a cowboy in some, but not all, social circles.)

Dunno if I will have internet access up there, but I plan on posting pictures from my trip to my Flickr account.

Hmmm, the thought of a real cowboy vacation inspires me to poetry. Namely, someone else's poetry. How 'bout Urban Struggle by the Vandals?

I want to be a Cowboy - I got to be a Cowboy - I'm born to be a Cowboy - I want to be a Cowboy - A Cowboy! Uh-huh

Tonight we're taking me fast car - Were gonna go down to the Cowboy bar - I'm gonna wait till the club is full - and I'm gonna ride the mechanical bull

Refrain: Cowboy look is the one I sought - Can't change now cause the clothes are bought - To be a true Cowboy was my fate - I can't help it if I was born late

All the Cowgirls in their Stetson hats - and their tight fitting jeans so they don't look fat - We'll all be listening to the Cowboy tunes - and stomp around like a bunch of goons

[ refrain.... ]

We're all OD'd on the Olden West - seein' who's Cowboy clothes look the best - I can ride that phony bull so damn good - Sometimes I think I'm Clint Eastwood

[ refrain... ]

I know I'm a Cowboy deep inside - My hat band's made out of synthetic rattle snake hide - After a couple shit kickin' Cowboy movies - I'll check out the Cowboy scene down at Zubie's

[ refrain... ]

Find out who all fights the best - We start fights with them punks at the Cuckoo's Nest - Those damn punks are crazy(though) - and meaner than a bull at a rodeo

[ refrain... ]

You call me an Urban clone of course - A big deal if I'm afraid to ride a horse - With a broken nose and a fucked up knee - Maybe this Cowboy scene just ain't for me

I couldn't make it as a punker....

I'm salivating as I'm typing this post, because Lisa is cooking up veal in the kitchen.... I've never actually had veal before, but it smells dee-licious.

If you're into satirical humor, you might want to check out Landover Baptist Ministries. I came across this site on the net while researching Wicca for a class once... they had this absurd article about identifying Wiccans by their urinary patterns (because we all know that wiccans have genital piercings to split the urine stream into 3 streams - to mock the Trinity, of course), and I've also seen an article in the past condemning Frodo Baggins and Sam's illicit homosexual affair.

One of the site's best features is its well-stocked online store. There were many things that you couldn't find anywhere else. I mean, where else is one to purchase the What Would Jesus Do Thong Panty?

I browsed their e-mail archive section for a while, and it seems many people mistake Landover Baptist Ministries for a bonafide Christian organization. Other people denounce them for being hypocritical christians, threaten beat-downs, etc. All quite amusing... unless you're a Christian, I guess.

That's why, when I came home for lunch, I decided that a Monday Reboot was needed: I took a shower, made some (more) coffee, and ate some breakfast food for lunch. And, of course, donned another nicotine patch.

Surprisingly, afterward I felt as if the crappy Monday morning from hell had never even occurred. I may have to start doing this on a more regular basis!

Well, okay. I'll probably spend a little time at the computer.

Okay, OKAY! I'm going to pull another all-night programming bender! Who needs sleep anyway?!?!?