MySpace for Grownups

Blatant manipulation of photos just to make people they disagree with look unattractive. Very crudely done, too. Even considering the source it's quite surprising.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807020002

Of course, they might just be setting up an alibi of sorts, establishing a certain baseline of competency so that when they are caught somewhere down the road manipulating photos in more subtle ways that actually matter, they can point to this and claim that they couldn't possibly have done such an expert job. Sure, you laugh now...

Wow, that was a blast!

I'm sure I'm the last one to see it, so I'll be brief. Very fun movie, humor and acting were all fairly well executed (at least by the principles; the bad guys were painfully shallow and stupid, but what's new?). A few highly improbables left unexplained, but hey, it's a comic book! The ending felt a bit abrupt and the expectation of a sequel a bit too obvious, but overall very enjoyable.

“Bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, motherbleeper, and bleep.”

I love NPR.

It gets one star because it makes me feel like high school Spanish class did me some good. Other than that, very little to recommend the experience.

Blackwater's aviation subsidiary is defending itself from a lawsuit brought by widows of men killed in a plane crash. They have now asked the judge to defer to Shari'a law, which would cause the case to be dismissed as they would not then be a legitimate defendant in this situation. Even as I type that, I feel that I must have been trolled by The Onion. I mean, SRSLY. I really can't imagine any company less likely to make such a demand.

The comments on this page, which I assume are primarily from American soldiers (although I guess civilians can comment there, too), show that I am not alone in my WTFedness.

From another (decidedly non-political) site that I frequent:

"If you watched Steven Colbert last night, he said the same thing.That Obama was sworn in on the Koran. All I know is what I read in the papers."

Start:	Jun 12, '08 9:15p
Location:	multiply.com

It didn’t seem right that this doesn’t show up in the “events” thingy on the right side of the page.

One of the better ice creams I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy. The base vanilla ice cream is probably four stars, but Lewis Farms is a pick-’em-yourself berry farm, so this ice cream is chock full of sweet, red goodness. (Well actually, the bowl I’m halfway through right now is chock full of sweet, purple goodness.) The strawberry is a bit better, but the blueberry is still quite good.

Be honest now. We’re all capable of a few minutes of research. I wanna know what you thought was the case right before you read this.

If you are using a third-party DLL in your project, you will eventually discover some very exciting aspects of Visual Basic's internal error handling: if you move the app to a new machine that doesn't have that DLL installed, the first run of the app will fail on a completely unrelated function. In my case, it’s always been a string function. So if my TWAIN support DLL isn’t loaded, the app fails the first time it calls either Left() or Mid().

Troubleshoot that, bitches!!!

I’m shopping for a hard drive for a friend’s backup solution. Who’s making reliable SATA drives these days?

And I’m damn glad to have done my part.

An awesome Joel rant on standards in general, and the IE8 mess in particular.

Recently I did a workshop with the world renowned speedskating champion Eddy Matzger. As part of the workshop he videotapes your performance halfway through the weekend. This is the key portion of that video. Unless you’re into speedskating or you wanna see what it is that I do with most of my spare time, this probably won’t interest you.

I had my first firsthand experience with Windows Vista today. Until now I'd been keeping my mouth shut (no, really, I had!) when others held forth on how much suckage it had. But now I have glimpsed the fail with my own two eyes, and it is indeed epic.

Jenn and I both need new earbuds. Mine because I use them frequently and they are starting to get the decrepitude, hers because they seem to have interacted with a stick of gum and replacement is preferable to refurbishment.

Any of y'all got any suggestions? They don't need to be audiophile quality (as if such a thing were possible with 0.2" drivers), but should be fairly clear and make at least some passing attempt at something resembling bass. Reasonably durable is a plus, as almost all usage is athletic.

I was nervous. I suppose that’s to be expected. I was never terrified, but my apprehension increased until about 24 hours prior to the race, when it basically just vanished. Oh, I’m sure it was still there, but it was no longer detectable at the surface. Odd.

We had done the whole carbo-load thing at an Italian restaurant the night before with some notorious skaters from Florida, a group that will, for the sake of brevity, be referred to from here on out as The Goof Troupe. We then spent what seemed like sixty three hours trying to find a grocery store to buy bananas and bagels for the morning. We finally got back to our room around 11:00pm and got to sleep very shortly thereafter.

The morning of the race I still wasn’t nervous, which surprised me. It was a bit chilly out so I wore two shirts and threw some tights on over my grape-grabber shorts. I wasn’t really concerned with comfort so much as preventing cramping. We had our breakfast of untoasted bagels and weak hotel lobby coffee then set out for the race. We got there around 7:00am, and I was damn glad to be dressed the way I was. I put my skates on and ate a banana while doing some warmup laps around the parking lot. By that time the anxiety had finally kicked in. Gearing up next to a half dozen pros probably didn’t help. In fact, I’m sure it didn’t.

I eventually found the Goof Troupe, and then a few others from SLF. We joked around a bit about our abject terror, picked up our timing chips, then eventually wandered over to the starting line. All of us non-elite racers had discussed things previously and decided to hang out toward the back of the mass start, as trying to skate through a ten second elbow-fest just didn’t seem like a great way to start the race. So we were hanging back by the Group W Bench just chillin’ out and having a good old time.

I have to admit that the actual start of my first competitive event was kind of anti-climactic. Of course, I guess that was sort of the point of avoiding the elbow-fest. But still. The course starts off with a swift downhill run, so that set a good pace right off the bat. Me, Bill, and Brett had planned on doing a paceline, but as none of us had any experience whatsoever, that didn’t really pan out. I think that one’s a bit trickier than what they show on TV, ya know what I mean?

The way the course is set up the first half is in the park, and even though it has some hill climbs, is basically a walk in the park. Then you exit the park, and take a slight downhill on a public street into a gale force headwind. After a mile or so you turn right and although it’s level ground and the wind is less harsh and coming from the side, the pavement for that mile is not quite ideal, and it’s a bit of a slog to get to the traffic light where you turn back into the park and cross the start/finish line to begin your next lap. Then it’s down that little hill which slingshots you back into full self-confidence that’s boosted further as you zip past some slower skaters feeling like you know what the hell you’re doing because you’re making small talk while skating up a slight hill. Repeat as needed.

It took me until about the tenth mile to get past the desire to stop and retie my skates, thinking I had them just a hair too tight and that was causing the moderate cramping I experienced. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. But after the tenth mile I was glad I hadn’t stopped and the only thing really bothering me was my lower back. Well, that and the wind. Nothing like a headwind so strong you have to push at about 70% just to maintain your speed going downhill.

On my second or third lap I drafted two people for about a mile on the level straightaway, but other than that single mile, I did the whole thing solo. So considering that, I guess my time isn’t too bad. I had been hoping for 1:45 (ya know, back when I still thought it was a 26.2 mile event) but the day I left for Texas I checked out the 2007 results and saw that Danny Dannels had done 1:45, so I realized that probably wasn’t a realistic goal. One of the high points of the day was that Jenn spent most of the race hanging out with him and Hillary, so I was able to tell him that right after I finished. He seemed to be amused by that.

My official time was 2:06:41, but my time at 26.2 miles was 1:57 so I’m kinda conflicted as to which one is more correct when I talk about my first marathon. Oh well, I know which statistic really matters: I started skating when they said to, and didn’t stop till I crossed the finish line. (I was all psyched up to flip around and skate across the finish line backwards, but I chickened out at the last moment when I realized I was too exhausted to pull the maneuver and had a very good chance of finishing the race on my ass if I tried it.)

Conclusion: I lapped, and was lapped. My time is considered decent, maybe even slightly toward good for a first race. I'm doing a clinic in two weeks with the Yoda of the sport, Eddy Matzger. What I learned this weekend and what he will soon teach me will give me plenty to work on for the next few months, and I fully expect to knock at least ten minutes off that time later this year.