Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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are you being served?

GIS for lawsuit.
I can finally breathe a sigh of relief, because the Halloween decorations are up. Sunday, I put up the ghost, the graveyard, and even the witch. I completed the witch’s broom using a gnarled old stick and some twig-scrub-stuff I bought from Wal Mart. The finished thing looks really good, too bad she’s not flying around the yard. I did, however, put her up and focus a green spotlight on her, which is timed to come on at the same time the ghost and her blacklight do. All in all, I ended up being really impressed with the results – the complete display looks awesome. If the small green floodlight on the ghost ends up looking good, I’m going to add a couple to the corners of the graveyard – and get some chilled, ground-hugging fog drifting through. Should be really cool. I’m just glad it’s up, and, although I’d’ve liked to have had it up earlier, I at least feel a little better having finally done it. I am disappointed I didn’t work on the backyard at all… too many projects.

Friday evening after work, I decided to do some picking up in the garage. Since the driveway’s been blocked with pallets full of pavers for months now – I’ve just been letting things pile up all over the place. Nearing the end of the pavers, I thought it would be a good time to clean up for the eventual return of the cars. So, I found myself working in the garage with the door open as the sun was going down.

As I worked I noticed two girls walking down the street, each with a handful of newspapers. Knowing I was about to be solicited, I kept working as one of the girls broke off and walked up the driveway towards me. “Good evening sir, ” she said. “Evenin’, what can I do for you?” I asked. Turns out she was hawking some free-trail of the local newspaper, and she already had 49 subscriptions. What’s more, if I would just be her 50th subscriber, I’d be directly responsible for her hitting her quota and winning a trip to Disneyland. Now, let’s talk about this girl: I figure she’s about 15 or 16 years old, how much motivation is a trip to Disneyland to today’s youth? Anyway, I told her I thought she was lying about the 49 out of 50 thing – telling her I bet they taught her to say that to everyone. I wasn’t mean really, just joking with her. She stuck around trying to convince me for what must’ve been 5min as I continued to clean. At some point, I said something like, “If you really wanna go to Disneyland, you better hit the street and get that 50th subscriber – because it’s not gonna happen hanging out in my garage.” She laughed, thanked me for me time, and turned to leave.

As she was leaving, dejected, she walked down the driveway and over the spot where I had a big pile of decomposed granite for the back porch last week. The DG is all gone, but I haven’t had the chance yet to sweep up the crumbs. While my back was turned, she slipped on the small loose stones and, as her feet flew out in front of her, she fell right on her ass. I turned when I heard the noise and saw her sitting on the ground, her friend had re-joined her and was helping her up as I asked, “Are you OK?” She turned to me, red-in-the-face, and said she was. As the two walked away, I started imagining the letter I’d be getting in the mail in a week. Sued by a 15 year-old girl for negligence, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I’m outta here, g’night.

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eminent domain

Exhausted.So, things are nearly 100% with the blog migration. I’ve migrated posts, comments, links, pictures, files, etc. There are still some… “artifacts”… that I’m working on, for instance, if you browse through past entries you may see some Chinese characters or find a broken link or five. But for the most part, it’s OK. I’m switching the domain over tonight, so by the time you read this it may have propagated to you or not. Anyway, I’m sure readers will find more errors than I already have by spot-checking, so drop me a comment if something’s not working for you. I’ll still be updating both sites for a week or so until the domain change fully propagates.

Honestly, I’m too tired to write. It’s 11pm and I was up ’til 2am the past couple evenings – I just don’t have any more staying-up in me. So, instead of writing something good… I’ll just tell you what I see right now. I’m sitting in the living room, Cold Case Files is on the TV but I’m not really watching, Sharaun’s asleep on the couch. There’s a cold pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove and some drying noodles in a double-boiler in the sink, our electric filtered-recycled-water cat dish is making the noise it makes when it’s low on water. There are too many lights on for being so late and only one person up, and that makes me think of how much money they cost – not quite enough to get me up and turn them off, I decide. The cat is curled up beside me on the couch, and Sharaun’s worked-too-late-to-cook meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken is sitting in a plastic dish on the coffee table in front of me. I’ve already made up my mind that I’m tired enough to not care that I won’t pick up that dish, or clean those pots, before going to bed. They can wait until tomorrow.

Sorry, that’s it for today. Too much webpage-makin’ and I’ve lost heart. Dave out.

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need more dirt

I talk about winter, check it out.
I didn’t write much about it yesterday, because I had to flush the blog buffer, but this weekend was kickass. I took Friday off to cut pavers for the porch, and got about 70% done with the major section, as well as cut all the bricks I’d need to do the sidewalk. On Saturday I formed up the sidewalk and filled it with decomposed granite – then did some eyeball leveling. Sunday it rained, but Erik came over and we worked anyway. Fine tuning the leveling and laying bricks, we completely finished the sidewalk and the rest of the non-cut porch. I have about three hours of cutting and the whole thing is done, 100%. I’m already at the point where I can bring in topsoil – which I’m planning to do this coming weekend. I just need to do the math and see how many yards I need. I want to get sod in before the rainy season really gets here – so that leaves me only a few weeks. It’s do-able.

Big things happening back behind the curtain here at sounds familiar. I’m nearly done migrating the whole blog over to a new system, the open-source b2 weblog system. Eventually, I’ll complete the migration – at which point the whole pharaohweb.com domain will be moving to a new server. If all goes well, the transition should be transparent to the outside world. Anyway, it’ll make it easier for me to write and edit my entries remotely, and the comments and search components will be better. The page will be laid out a bit differently, but it should look familiar enough. Also, the blog will have a different logo – and, t-shirts. Yeah, that’s right. I’m gonna make t-shirts, simply because I can. Even if I’m the only one wearing one, I’ll still think it’s cool. Anyway, that’s what’s coming soon in the blog department. This will be the first day I “double blog” on this site and the new one, in anticipation. Hold on for the switch sometime late this week.

It’s been raining the past couple days here, and getting colder too. With the gray skies and rain, it’s really sending me into a wintery mood – which I love. It’s coming up on my favorite time of year, the holiday trifecta, the cool of winter, the strange desire to be around family or go “back home,” and the perceived “slowing down” of things in general. At least, that’s how it is for me.

And, I have nothing more. Really, I suck. Dave out.

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the gyrating women of sabado gigante

Bible-stuff.
Went out to lunch the other day for Afghani food (no, not in celebration of the recent election in which the first person to vote was a nineteen year-old woman). I’d never had it before, and it sounded intriguing. That’s one of the things I like about California, it’s so much more diverse than Florida. Sharaun notices it more than I do though, she’s always amazed at how diverse her class makeups are. I know, it’s silly to call it “diverse” based on the cuisine choices – that’s just what kicked off the idea in my head. Well, I’m happy to say that the food at “Taste of Kabul” was yummy. Too bad my $10 lunch probably paid for some terrorist-camp recruit’s standard-issue pipe bomb, or maybe the poppy-seed startup costs for a budding opium venture. And that folks, is good sarcasm.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to write a paragraph about the restaurant and food, I wanted to write about the conversation. Had a really good conversation, covering the two most “taboo” topic you can think of: politics and religion. It’s awesome when you can have intelligent conversation with someone willing to be objective about things. I guess, to a psychologist, that’s probably the equivalent of saying “It’s nice when you can have a conversation with someone who has a similar opinion to yourself.” I mean, you’re naturally going to think of someone who more or less agrees with you on things as someone with their “head on straight,” or “in his right mind.” What’s intelligent and objective to one person could be ignorant and close-minded to the next, that’s the beauty of opinion I suppose. Anyway, it was a good conversation – and good spiced yogurt-covered dumplings too. Those Afghanis may be terrible at making peace, but they’re not too shabby at making lunch. Sarcasm, again, it’s good to close on a laugh.

Yeah, so, I did watch about half of the third debate the other night? it all seems like rehash now though. Kerry’s a liberal, Bush is bad, I get it. I wasn’t too impressed overall, I kind of just want it all to be over now. No more stupid misleading commercials, no more character-attacks, let’s just vote and be done with it. I was, however, disappointed in the way Kerry (and Edwards, for that matter) brought up Cheney’s lesbian daughter. I mean, how thin is that veil? Everyone knows you’re only mentioning his lesbian daughter because you want to make sure every knows he has a lesbian daughter, not for whatever false premise you’re supposedly talking about. “By the way America, and particularly you, Bible Belt: your incumbent republican VP has a Satan-loving lesbo of a daughter. Do you really want a vice-president who’s seed is so accursed by God that he can father such a moral abomination? I think not. Vote Kerry.” Stupid politics.

Ever since upgrading the TiVo to a ludicrous 140hrs of recording time, I decided to re-enable the “TiVo suggestions” feature. TiVo suggestions is a feature that lets the machine record shows it thinks you might like, presumably based on intelligence gathered from what you watch and what you already choose to record. I decided to enable it mostly as an experiment, y’know, to see how intelligent the thing really is. I thought it would be fun to see what kinda stuff it chose to record, perhaps it would even give me some insight into my own mind. But, alas, I think TiVo suggestions is mostly whack.

It’s been on a little over a week now, and man does it record some odd stuff. This morning I woke up and there were two episodes of some Spanish soap opera it had recorded off Univision. What? I mean, other than stopping on Univision for a minute or two while channel-surfing (gyrating women on Sabado Gigante pretty much stop you in your tracks), I’ve never watched a Spanish show in my life. It recorded two hours of infomercials – what in my viewing trends keyed in on that? It does, however, sometimes get it right – with things like I Love Lucy (it sees Andy Griffith and Leave it to Beaver), COPS (duh), Futurama and the Family Guy (probably based on the Simpsons and Aqua Teen “season passes” I have set). Of course, it’s skewed from purely “my” habits because Sharaun also watches TV. So the “suggested” list is rife with MTV “real life” shows and “making the video” and crap like that. Yup. Paragraph over.

Enough, Dave out.

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commercial tendancies

No idea.
As a “blogger,” I think I’m supposed to have a huge list of other blogs I read frequently. I didn’t read this anywhere or anything, it’s just something I’ve noticed about other “blog” sites on the internet. They all have links to another ten or fifteen blogs, and they all cross-link and refer to each other. Not me, I don’t read any blogs. I wonder if that makes me some kinda blog-snob elitist or something? All I do is write and post, and then do it again the next day. Anyway, your blog sucks.

Whatever the impetus is, I’m in that state of writing again where I end up with pages and pages of backlogged, pre-written stuff. I have a Word doc filled with blocks of three and four paragraphs on certain subjects, and on any given day I cobble them together to make an entry. I actually like being in that situation, because I can essentially “take a day off” from writing, not that I don’t enjoy it. I mean, I love writing, or else I wouldn’t have this stupid website, but it is kinda nice to be able to just press “upload” and not have to think up new ideas. Thing is, when stuff keeps happening, I feel compelled to write about it – and then it becomes the entries, leaving the backlogged stuff to go stale. Maybe this week I’ll just work on “cleaning house.”

I’ve talked about daytime TV commercials before, but last Friday I was at home for lunch and I decided to try take it one step further. Usually when I go home for lunch, I check the TiVo and see if there’s something worthwhile watching while I eat my sandwich. Finding nothing this time, however, I decided to go with the default back-to-back hour of COPS that runs simultaneously on Fox and FX. Usually, if you time it right, you can pretty much avoid commercials by switching back and forth between the episodes. This time, however, the commercials were actually what I was interested in. I decided to document the contents of each commercial break during an hour of COPS on daytime TV, noon-to-one, what I would assume is the equivalent of prime-time for the daytime audience. Here’s what I found:

Aladdin Bail Bonds
NFL Sunday on Fox promo ad
Personal injury attorney
Get a degree in criminal justice (stick with what you know?)
Cheap auto insurance (as low as $29 a month!)
Check ‘n’ Go (paycheck loans, not a scam at all)

Valtrex (genital herpes drug)
Gun show at the local expo this weekend (with a banjo music soundtrack)
1-800-DENTIST (“… good dental health may change your life! Maybe get a better job or even an exciting new relationship!”)
Quick & easy auto financing (even with bad credit!)
Public Service Announcement (eat 5-9 servings of colorful fruits and vegetables a day, because X% of the state’s population is overweight)
Cost-U-Less auto insurance

Kentucky Fried Chicken (extra-crispy meal deal, now with a half-gallon Pepsi “mega-jug”)
entucky Fried Chicken (new chicken breast salads)
Carmax (sell your car)
Carmax (buy a car)
Heald College (be a dental assistant)
Kaiser-Permanente affordable healthcare

X-Men video game
Advil Liqui-gels
ITT Technical Institute
Diabetes testing supplies by mail (I think it was the Quaker Oats guy, on horseback, in a canyon)

Hmm… you think that commercial lineup is in any way indicative of what the station sees as their target 12pm-1pm audience? I think, from the information above, we can do some detective work and construct a pretty good idea of the type of person Fox thinks is likely watching COPS during lunch. From my analysis, their target demo contains overweight, uneducated, out of work (probably due to injury), oft-arrested, herpes- and diabetes-afflicted, destitute yet money-lusting folks with poor credit and no insurance.

Did you guys know that Costco sells coffins? Kinda weird, right? Dave out.

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Snap into a unilateral war! Ooooh yeeeahh!!
Upgrading the TiVo was an awesome idea. Although, I hate talking about it because it makes me seem addicted to the teevee. While that’s not the case, there are some shows which I am now happier for being able to watch on demand. The Daily Show, for instance, is outstanding, and I never seem to catch it when it’s regularly on. Also, I like recording those sensationalist news-magazines like Dateline and Primetime Live, because sometimes they are awesome. Otherwise, I’d rather be on the computer.

Overcome by laziness and awash in a sea of apathy, I once again made less of my evening than I could have. I wanted to work on the witch, I need to mow the lawn, instead I chose to sit here and write. The grass is long, the witch is not done, and I’m only one lousy paragraph better to show for it. Now I’m sitting here falling asleep and watching the one where Barney is acting sheriff for eight hours and arrests the whole town, that Barney.

You know, I heard an amazing argument in favor of the war recently. The “those people have been allowed to be unchecked savages for too long, and we’re finally taking a stand and showing them we won’t tolerate it.” Whoa whoa, what? I mean, I’m paraphrasing there, but the basic argument is that “these people” (I assume we mean Muslims, or maybe even the slightly more racist, “dusky races of the sands”) are inherently savage and violent. What’s more, we Americans, God-fearing examples of truth and justice, are obligated to swoop in and change them. We have intelligent people in this country who can justify this war as some big “charm school” for the heathens of the Middle East. Rope them wilders, slap ’em on the knuckles with a ruler, and show them the error of their ways. Help them establish a real country where they go to a Baptist church every Sunday morning. Real, intelligent people think this. This, I don’t understand.

You wanna see something really disturbing, check out this website. The internet is gross, I wonder how representative it is of our collective thinking? I really don’t feel motivated, I’m outta here. Dave out.

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mistaken identity I

But I need it to sleep!
The debates were on, I watched them. I will write about them later maybe. Intro paragraph over.

Last night I was up late working on my computer, and late-late, not just late. It was about a quarter ’til two in the morning when I heard my cellphone ring back in the bedroom. As with all unexpected late-night calls, I expected some terrible news – so I went back to grab it. I didn’t recognize the number, so I took the phone out of the room to answer so as to not wake up Sharaun. When I answered, there was a very obviously drunk girl on the other line responding to my “Hello?” with “Who is this?” “Who is this,” I replied, to which she responded, “Who is this?!” We went ’round like this for a bit before I finally asked who she was trying to call, at which point she started sobbing and said “I don’t even know.” “Well,” I said, “What number were you trying to dial? Because I’m pretty sure you got the wrong one.” “I know I got the wrong number!,” she sobbed, “I don’t even know who I’m trying to call.” Being as this whole exchange was hilarious to me, and I had nothing better to do while my RAID array rebuilt, I decided to stay on the phone.

“I lost my cellphone, and I need it back,” said the girl, “I’m so effing drunk.” “Yeah, I can tell, where are you now, are you OK?” “I’m at home,” she said. “Well then, I think the best thing for you to do is drink a lot of water and go to bed, you can find your phone in the morning.” “No! I can’t find it in the morning, you don’t understand! I need it now! I have so many important numbers in there, everyone I know! Who is this?” “This is Dave, remember, you called me by mistake and now you’re talking to me.” “Yeah, hi Dave, nice to meet you. This is Katie, and I can’t find my cellphone, can you help me?” “Wait, Katie from Tahoe Joes Katie?” “No!,” she cried, “Not Katie from Tahoe Joes Katie, Katie who lost her cellphone Katie!” I laughed. “Don’t laugh at me, it’s not funny! Everyone was mean to me tonight. Some guy got so mad at me and took me home, all because I wouldn’t have sex with him. How old are you?” “I’m twenty-seven, you shouldn’t hang out with that guy anymore. Be glad he took you home.” “Twenty-seven! I’m eighteen” “Wait, you’re 18?! Where were you drinking?” “At a friend’s house, I don’t even know where.” “I gotta tell you Katie, being that it’s like 2am and you don’t know who you’re calling or where you were, I don’t think you’re finding this phone tonight. You should just go to bed and find it in the morning.”

“I already told you Dave, I can’t find it in the morning! I have to go to work. Can you drive?” “Umm, yeah, I can drive. Well, what time do you have to be at work?” “Three in the afternoon.” “Three?! You have all morning to find it!” “Nooooo!, I can’t, I need it now… important numbers… everyone was mean… guy yelled at me, etc. Can you come pick me up and help me look for my cellphone?” “I don’t think so Katie, it’s kinda late.” “I live? (here she gave me detailed directions to her address, not far from me).” “Listen Katie, when you wake up in the morning, if you remember that you talked to some random dude last night for like 30min about your cellphone, and then freak out because you think you remember giving him your address – just try to remember him saying, ‘I’m not writing any of this down,’ OK?” She laughed now. So far we’ve been on the phone about a half hour.

“So come over and pick me up and help me find my phone.” “I thought you didn’t know where it was, how many places did you go tonight?” “Two. Two houses and then in that mean guy’s car. He yelled at me because? blah blah.” “I know, I know. Well then, your phone can only be in one of three places, just go look in those places tomorrow.” “I can’t, blah blah.” “Well listen, what kinda phone was it? Nokia? Motorola?” “No, it was a Sanyo.” “Oh, no worries then, you can get a new one for like two bucks at Wal Mart.” She stops sobbing to laugh. “How old are you again?” “I’m still twenty-seven.” “Yeah, I remember you told me that.” “Yes. Yes I did.” “So are you coming to get me?” “Uh, no, probably not.” “I need my phone!!! Why did I drink so much?! Everyone was mean to me, my friends left me!”

Oh man, I talked to this poor girl for like 40min, until 2:30am last night. I ended up calling her cellphone for her on 3-way, and we got her voice mail. We talked about this mean guy who wanted her to “go farther than she wanted to,” and I gave her some 27-year-old-to-18-year-old “fatherly” advice to stay away from such dudes. It was a hilarious conversation.

That’s it, I have no more. Be happy with the story, it’s hard to type all those quotation marks and get a conversation down in writing. Dave out.