Hopeless Geek

I have no idea why, but last night God drained his pool on us. For four to six hours we had nothing but wet coming down on us.

Normally, I like a good storm, but the first wave from that storm included what the National Weather Service called “quarter-inch hail” that, by the time it got to us, was golf-ball-sized hail. Of course, I only realized this when I saw it on the ground … and heard it hitting the house and car.

Oh, did I mention the garage was full because we have things we have no place for just yet? So the two of us hit the garage and pushed it all towards the back and made room for the car. We got it mostly in and away from the storm (save a few inches that were protected by the roof and such) only to look at the hood and realize we were a little late. Three dents.

Of course, that’s for the whole car, so it’s not so bad. I managed to get some photos and video of the fun, though.

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I started blogging on the desktop with Kung-Log, the precursor to ecto. It was hackish, but worked. Then ecto came out and I was joyous. Then it lay still and broken for years with promises of ecto 3. Then I saw ecto 3.

I bought MarsEdit today. It’s much more Mac-like than ecto 3 is and is, overall, a much cleaner and more usable program than ecto.

If you’re using a Mac and use a website package that accepts an XML-RPC client, hit up Red Sweater Software and take a test drive. Things are much easier with this beast.

 

John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama for president, dealing a major blow to Hillary Clinton
[From Edwards endorses Obama]

 

About three months too late, but good to hear none-the-less. I’d love to see these two in office together.

The wife and I went to see the first showing of Iron Man at the Cedar Park Cinemark last night (at 12:01a no less). The midnight showing is an old trick to be the first to show the movie, and it’s usually a theater full of losers that can’t wait another day to see it.

So, of course I show up.

Aside from initial difficulties with the nature of having losers in the audience (“I’m drunk! Woo!” “I’m stoned! Yeeeeah!”), everyone settled down for the show, which was good because this is easily the best comic conversion since Superman Returns and Batman Begins. The previews hinted that it would be good, but the general fear with good previews is that all the good bits were used to make the previews. That was decidedly not the case here.

If you’re waiting for Ozzy’s iconic musical appearance, it is, sadly, at the very freaking end as the credits roll. Of course, when you get there, you’ll see that the only better spot for it was when the final version of the suit was finished, and that would have been a little too “expected” to be anything but campy.

There’s a piece over at Space Westerns (found on reddit) that breaks down the Last Supper photo released by the BSG folks during their long hiatus. I’m not sure I believe the conclusion, but I do agree that the water glasses probably mean something along those lines.

But I have some other ideas based on the quote from the Hybrid that they listed:

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We went to Bear Rock Cafe for lunch this afternoon, each with a grin and thinking about the card we brought with us. After getting some drinks and sitting down, I took out the strip of sonogram prints and we looked at them together, trying in vain to decipher the fuzzy shapes and see what our child will look like outside of the wading pool. The card sat on the table, sealed, and we would stare at it now and again trying to guess at the contents without opening it. We wanted to wait as much as we wanted not to.

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I’m finally happy with wireless access outside my home. For years I’ve been pissed that I had to buy a second Internet plan in order to get online outside my house, even at the same vendor’s service. No longer. Barnes and Noble has moved to using AT&T WiFi (aka SBC FreedomLink) and lets me login with my home DSL login.

One bill. Thank the maker.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.
An open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos | Philadelphia Daily News | 04/17/2008