Category: Uncategorized

When they say:
“Is that really a good user experience?”
They really mean:
“You’re cutting into my World of Warcraft time.”

Heh.

Davezilla: Clean humor, filthy comments » How to speak in Programmer

I. Am. Stunned. Congratulations Zeeland for pulling yourselves out of the 30’s.

For the first time since it’s inception as a city in 1907, alcohol can be sold in restaurants and stores. Prepare for moral decay, rioting, and a murder or two now that people can buy booze in town. Oh, wait, they have that already (maybe not the rioting) and they can buy booze by driving 3 miles.

As someone who grew up in this community I have to wonder why it took so long. Any teenager can tell you exactly where to go to buy beer in town. And there are liquor stores in almost every direction leaving town within one mile of the city line.

Sorry CRC, it’s over. Get your recount on but I imagine you’ll still lose. Too bad the vote was so close (40 votes!)… it emboldens the prudes to try and re-instate the ban. Of course, once residents get a taste of having beer with their meal at Community Kitchens, they’ll never go back.

Oh, and family that are reading, I’m buying the first round next time I’m in town.

Zeeland voters overturn alcohol ban

And another Bush crony is in. As much as I want to be happy about this, I filled with dread about the devil we don’t know.

So, we’re officially the third-most intolerant state in the union, voting down Proposal 2. Through lies, deception, and a dubiously-worded proposal, affirmative action is now illegal in Michigan. And, although it’s only correlation, isn’t it somehow fitting that Michigan also has the third-highest rate of hate crimes in the US? Congratulations Michiganders; you really showed the country what we’re made of.

Speaking of which, here’s the break-down of the voting for two Proposals (PDF). Hm, let’s see, the Proposal was approved (meaning these people voted to not help minorities) by non-union, white, Republican men with less than a college education. I hate to talk in broad generalities here, but how many people in that demographic took the time to actually, you know, research the issue? How many of them knew Michigan the third-most segregated state in the country? That’s right, fellow citizens, we’re more segregated than many Southern states. Whoop it up. Election’s over so we don’t have to think about that again… whew.

I’m so disgusted with this state. We’ll overwhelmingly vote down a proposition to allow a hunting season for cute birds (dammit), but when it comes to giving a hand to the oppressed minorities (and, yes, despite your protests, they are oppressed), it’s the middle finger and “get a job” to them.

At least we didn’t elect DeVos.

Got your attention? Good. You took the time to surf over to this site and, let’s face it, you’re not reading something in the top 1,000,000 pages on the Web so you’re scraping bottom here. You obviously have the time.

Go pick a governor, vote on some propositions (PDF), maybe elect a judge or two. Just don’t sit on your butt all day and then slap your forehead at 8pm when the polls close.

Get up! Move it, buddy. See your ballot before you go. It’s easy now; I’ve done all but drop you in front of a voting booth and pointed where you should make your mark.

Wow, I had no idea how close to annihilation we came this past week. How close, you ask?

How about a marching band forming Star Trek logos with Star Trek actors in the stadium. That’s close.
Photographic Proof!

Whew. (Oh, and Patrick Stewart was in the stadium; Royal Shakespeare was in town and he guest conducted.) God help us he even said “Make it so.” Perhaps all the Ann Arbor snootiness and entitlement somehow canceled out all that concentrated geekiness, nerdiness, and Star Trek fanboy, helping us to narrowly escape total destruction as the Earth herself would have reached up to consume all that social awkwardness and self abuse.

Been a while… busy… blah blah blah.

Instead of a long-winded “sorry I dropped off the face of the earth” post, I going to root through my hard drive and talk about something in my backup folder.

Like this:

This is a logo for a band named Cycle. When I lived in Grand Rapids, Cycle was a rock band that had a modicum of notoriety, playing the standard GR haunts: The Intersection, The Radio Tavern (now destroyed), Ten Bells, etc as well as some opening shows for major-label bands (American Hi-Fi, Sponge, Bowling for Soup).

At my day job, I worked with one of the band members, drummer Jay Blakeslee. In my smokin’ days, Jay and I frequently ran into each other outdoors, catching a break.

Conversation led to outside interests, his musical, mine web-related. They needed to revamp their website, I needed a reason to hack and draw so we started working on their site. I hacked together a website for them (and it was a hack); no server technology, nothing but JavaScript, images and hypertext. I wish I’d kept the damn thing cause it wasn’t that bad, it just didn’t have any oompf. I also did some graphics work for them.

The image above is the first logo I showed the guys for the band’s logo. There were some other ideas, now lost to backup discs gone missing, but this is the one they liked and went with. I have to say I liked this one most of the concepts I showed, and it had a lot of potential.

Unfortunately, the site became tough to keep up with after I moved to the East side and my relationship with the band drifted away. The URL is no more, but Cycle lives on through MySpace.

Check ’em out, ask for a CD.. they’re not bad.

DenverPost.com – Haggard fired for “sexually immoral conduct”

One bigot down, a few million to go.

In between working at work and working at home, J– and I took a couple hours to lead a few more kids down the path to juvenile diabetes Sugar High City by passing out candy to the trick-or-treating kids.

Chelsea has, like many towns, a designated trick-or-treating time for the kids to minimize the amount of traffic in town at night. As with last year’s event, this year was from 4-6pm.

This has a couple downstream effects. The first is all your neighbors are home for the festivities. Everyone comes home early from work, camps out in front of their houses and chucks obscene amounts of sugared treats at teenagers and toddlers alike. We met around-the-corner neighbors tonight… we’ve been here for 16 months.

The second effect is that all the country kids pile into trucks, conversion vans, mini-vans, and all manner of soccer-mom modes of transport and descend on the city like locusts on Egypt. The actual amount of kids that live in the city and who wind up at your door is pretty small. But when your clientele is a steady stream of little guys and girls like this…

… you cough up the snacks to all comers.

We went through 11 giant-sized bags of candy in 90 minutes. We were inside calling for pizza by 5:30. And the best part? All those kids went home with someone else.

In no particular order

• Allow cats to rub against the main air vents, causing a sickly build-up of hair, dander, and catiness.
• After allowing cats to deposit general catiness, fail to clean inside of computer for 8 weeks…
• …then crank up the resolution on your favorite graphics-intensive application (video editing is best; games work in a pinch); Play “Count the Crashes” while attempting to figure out why computer crashes.
• Through dog toy under desk, when the only path from dog’s current position to said dog toy is through a 6-inch opening made by your office chair and computer tower.
• Bonus points if dog is wider than 6-inches; guess what happens to a computer tower?
• Disconnect your computer from a VPN with multiple application-created connections to that VPN.
• Eat Cottage Inn, thin crust pizza over beloved keyboard.
• Remove portable hard drive from protective case with a) bare hands, b) ungrounded, c) on a cold, fall day, d) over carpet.