jayprickett.com

Conundrum

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:24:52 -0600

What with the heat and lack of rain in these parts for the past month or so, the air quality seems to be suffering. As a result, my respiratory system has been acting up. I feel like my sinuses are draining a lot of the time, and I am often stopped up and snotty when I wake up in the morning. This last point is made even worse by the fans by my bed.

But...

The temperature in my small apartment stays pretty high during the summer, especially since I turn off the a/c while I am at work to save on my power bill. And I don't have central air, just a window unit. So, when I get home from work, the thermometer by my bed normally reads about 89°. It is still about 81° when I finally lay down to sleep.

So, obviously, I can't turn the fans off; it's far too hot for me to sleep comfortably. But, on the other hand, I wake up, normally late, feeling crappy and stopped up. This morning, for example, I woke up barely able to breathe through my nose at 4am, and could not go back to sleep. And I can't switch the fans off, or I will have a hard time even getting to sleep, not to mention sleeping through the night.

What to do, what to do? It's a pickle I tell ya.

Welcome to the new version of jayprickett.com

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:06:15 -0600

Greetings! The new version of the site is live and mostly kicking.

I made the decision to switch to the new version of Movable Type after some major issues with both installs of WordPress. This, combined with the decision to unite my blog and my front page, will mean little to you, dear reader. But I will explain the few differences anyway.

The first difference is that there is no longer a front page and a blog, instead both are now a part of the main site. There is still a shortened version of the linkroll and my latest Twitter post are in the sidebar (and both are still pulled into my tumblelog, along with whatever random crap I run across on the net). The most recent blog posts are listed in truncated form on the front page.

The change that most will not notice is that the site is now rendered in static html files, rather than being entirely virtual and rendered using php, as WordPress handled things. This will hopefully mean slightly shorter load times, and none of the odd, random issues that plagued the previous version towards the end. It also means that if something goes wrong with the software that runs the site, the site will still be live and accessible.

There are still some issues with the import of the data from my old blog, mainly due to some formatting of characters like quotation marks. I will try to fix these over the next few weeks. If you see any of them, feel free to let me know.

It took a bit to convert the andreas01 by Andreas Viklund template over to work with Movable Type; that was in fact where most of the conversion time went. Like it? Hate it? See any mistakes or stuff I missed? Let me know in the comments or drop me an email or a Facebook message.

Hope you all like the new site and good day to you all.

Free!

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:56:47 -0600

Tonight: Steeldogs arena football game, free tickets scored at work. Tomorrow: Free MySpace Secret Show, Patton Oswalt at The Bottletree Cafe Next Thursday: Free Joshua James(never heard of him, but he messaged/friend requested me on VIRB and mentioned his free show, listen at his virb profile above) show at work/play. Free is good.

No, I will not be in your wedding.

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:31:54 -0600

Previously... Also Previously... My little sister's wedding yesterday completed my cycle of weddings which started last October. I have now been in three weddings in the past 8 or so months, bringing the total number of weddings that I have been in to four. And as of this moment, Sunday, 08 Jul 2007, 6:30pm, I am stating this as my official response for the discernible future:

No. I will not be in your wedding.

I am posting this statement to my blog so that if some friend should unexpectedly fall in love with the Dominican girl at McDonald's and feel for her and her plight and her lack of a green card, or if some condom should break, or if some couple should pull that "Oh, I hate you let's get divorced...Oh, I was wrong, I love you, let's get married again" bullcrap, I want to be able to send them this link and hopefully avoid any messy confrontations. Truthfully, I can't see any possible weddings in the near future. My cousin and his girlfriend are a slim--and I mean like Kate Moss slim--and distant--and I mean like light years in distance--possibility, but I doubt I would be in that wedding. So, this is mostly an empty, symbolic act, a spitting into the wind on a still day. But, just in case, allow me to reiterate:

No. I will not be in your wedding.

World War II Photos

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:22:22 -0600

p011720.jpg
Originally uploaded by PhotosNormandie.

PhotosNormandie is a Flickr user who has posted thousands of old photos from World War II. I believe all of the photos are from the time around the invasion of Normandy, but I'm not sure of that. I added them as a friend a long while ago, and it's been neat to see these old pics show up in my contacts feed. It's like getting a bit of history mixed in with iPhone shots and pictures of people's kids. Some are mundane, some are really good, all of them seem to be released under a Creative Commons license, and all of them are captioned in French, so I have no clue what the photos are actually of.

Additionally, if you like those, check out this series of photos from Lost Films. Lost Films is run by a guy who looks for and develops old, found canisters of films. It's an amazingly fascinating look into people's lives.

The particular set I linked above appears to be from a US soldier who served in Italy. Assuming all the canisters were from the same person, then the photos show a (seemingly out-of-order) progression from basic training to service in Italy to possibly being wounded and shipped back to the states, possibly for a while, possibly for good.

I am not a WW2 historian by any stretch of the imagination. But based on my meager knowledge, I would say there is a chance the soldier was in the 82nd Airborne Division, since the images from basic training show some signs that the soldiers are paratroopers (until near the end of the war only paras were allowed to "blouse" their pants over their jump boots) and due to the other images being from Italy, where the 82nd jumped sometime in the war years pre-D-Day.

For further reading on European Theater paratroopers, I highly recommend David Kenyon Webster's Parachute Infantry. Webster, who viewers of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers will remember from a later episode even if the producers did mangle his story to make it more palatable for audiences, is one of the more fascinating WW2 characters I have read about. Born to a wealthy and powerful New York family, he left Harvard, where he was studying English lit, in 1943 to enlist in the Army, specifically to become a paratrooper. This meant more rigorous training and more exposure to danger as paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines (that's kinda the whole point of paratroopers).

Webster did it so that he could be just a normal grunt like the other men, and maybe write a book about it. He jumped at Utah Beach and during Market Garden and only narrowly missed being a part of the Battle of the Bulge. He never volunteered for anything and was a terrible shot. But he wrote a wonderful and honest account of his experiences and feelings which stands out as a great look into the mind of a soldier in war time.

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:51:24 -0600

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"It's just 'Cirroc', your Honor.. and, yes, I'm ready. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?" I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know - when a man like my client slips and falls on a sidewalk in front of a public library, then he is entitled to no less than two million in compensatory damages, and two million in punitive damages. Thank you."

â€”Phil Hartman as "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer", Saturday Night Live, November 23, 1991

What It Has Come To

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:53:09 -0600

I went into my kitchen today and opened the freezer. I was looking for ice cream. In the door, along with the personal-sized tub of strawberry ice cream, were two packages of hot dog weenies and a package of bologna. The only times I eat hot dogs are at cookouts and baseball games. The only way I will ever eat bologna is fried, and that particular, and somewhat embarrassing, craving is one that hits me rarely. Perhaps once or twice a year. So, why do I have these in my freezer, along with the other package of bologna sitting in the fridge? Because Piggly Wiggly was having a sale; $.99 for bologna and the same for the weenies. So, I bought two packs of each and put them up in the freezer for later. And it was not until today I realized the reality of what I had done and why, and how it meant I was turning into my mother.

For the very first time in my life I have to live on a budget. It strikes me as pathetic to have made it to 31 without learning this skill firsthand, but there it is. The apartment me and my sister shared was relatively inexpensive and we split everything right down the middle. Which meant I did not have to watch my money that closely. If I was in Target and I saw a DVD I wanted, I bought it. If I was in Old Navy or Gap and saw a shirt and a pair of pants that I wanted, I bought them. If I was in Barnes & Noble and I saw a book or a Moleskine that I wanted, just pop out that debit card and don't give it a second thought. In the grocery store and have a sudden craving for cake or some other treat? Buy some, and if I don't eat it all, just chunk the rest. This is, of course, not the healthiest way to live, financially speaking. I am fortunate to work at a company with a credit union which I can divert a portion of my paycheck each week into a savings account, before I even the see the money. So, I suppose that I am glad, on some level, I have this new opportunity to learn about frugality and the horror of waste. My new place is cheaper than my old apartment, and I have fewer monthly bills (no landline, no water bill, no gas bill, cheaper cable and power), but I am now paying them on my own. Added up, the amount I will likely be paying out each month comes perilously close to being the actual amount that I earn in a month. Most people live this way, I am sure of it. There is a reason the phrase "I've got month left over at the end of my money" and other phrases like it are in popular usage. But for me, it's like walking into a party everyone has been at for a while and marveling at the decorations, the crystal punch bowl, the little transient knots of conversing people, and how beautiful the hostess looks in her little black dress. Everyone else has noticed and experienced these things and moved on, getting into the rhythm and flow of the party, but I still have yet to go over, get a few drinks in me, and find a group of interesting people whose conversation I can crash. Okay, maybe that metaphor is a little thin. But the basic idea is sound: everyone else seems to have gotten this already, everyone but me. When I saw those packages of weenies and bologna in the freezer today, two things suddenly occurred to me. First, this was something my mom would do, see and ad for some cheap food she knew she could prepare easily, buy a few packs and put it in the freezer for later. The second was that it was something that, prior to going on a budget, I would have never done. Were I a younger man, the realization I was turning into one of my parents would have been more terrifying. Now, at 31, it only has the power to produce a kind of sad bemusement about the inevitabilities of life. So seeing those little tubes and platters of processed meat and knowing it was something "Joanna"-like only tweaked me a bit. But enough to stop me for a second. It was one of those seconds where you suddenly see stretched out before you an endless road of days, all alike. In that second I saw myself opening a freezer with bologna and hot dogs in it at 40, and 50, and beyond. Seeing myself eventually beginning to buy the Sunday paper, not for the crossword or the funnies, but for the sales fliers and coupons. Seeing myself become one of those people who have their wallet and its limitations at the forefront of their minds.

The second passed. I took out the little tub of ice cream and closed the freezer. I told my sister about it later. She said, "You realize you're turning into our mother, right?" She told me she would be sure to tell mom, in the hope that our mother will begin to call me saying things like, "Winn Dixie is having a really good sale on ground beef, hon. You could get some and make Hamburger Helper. Do you have any Hamburger Helper?" I laughed; it was funny. Hopefully, it will continue to be.

Quote regarding cartoon violence from Tom Kenny, voice of SpongeBob

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:13:44 -0600

From The A.V. Club:

AVC: Because it's a kids' show, it seems like there'd be a lot of restrictions. When it comes to "protecting the children," people lose their minds. TK: People do lose their minds with kids. Also, [they] don't give children, who are really smart and funny and whimsical naturally, credit for being able to tell cartoon comedic behavior for what it is, whether it's a kick in the butt or a funny pimp-slap to the face. When they do these studies, "By the time they're 6, children see over 30,000 violent acts on television." They're counting Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny around as if it was Reservoir Dogs. No, that's apples and oranges.

The Dangers of Owning a Mac

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:12:56 -0600

I told someone in an email that one of the things I looked forward to about owning a Mac was that, since there were fewer games available and most were of the kind that I don't play, there would be less distraction and less opportunity for sitting around and wasting time. It would be great I thought. Stellar. Maybe I will be able to get more things done with fewer distractions in my life. Or maybe not.
5 Vignettes from jay on Vimeo
5 more vignettes from jay on Vimeo
Chris Thile @ Vulcan Park 16 Oct 2006 from jay on Vimeo
Walking from car to home from jay on Vimeo Also, Parallels announced that its new version supports 3d games, meaning I can now play Half-Life 2 on my laptop. And EA games announced at WWDC that they will begin releasing many of their popular games for OS X. I'd like to say that's it's been good knowing all of you. Maybe I will see you again, maybe I won't.

1975

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:18:17 -0600

This is a video I made for the Birth Year Project, started by Fuzzy Dave. It was my first real project made in iMovie, which was much easier to work with than Windows Movie Maker.
1975 from jay on Vimeo

Fire Your MySpace!

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:42:42 -0600

With the exception of Facebook, no other social networking platform has enjoyed as much success as MySpace. In spite of (or arguably because of) a crappy and difficult to work with layout and an ad and "useless click" heavy site design, MySpace continues to be the go to choice for people setting up profiles on the web, if only because of the large number of users on the site. But, if all of your friends are not on MySpace or you are not concerned about using a social networking site to hook back up with your buds from high school, allow me to suggest another alternative for you. VIRB is a social networking site with few ads (and I have seen none of the blinky clicky variety), extensive and elegant customization, integration with several other popular web services, and generally none of the cruft one finds on those other sites. As a for instance on the cool integration with other sites, you can upload your photos to VIRB, or you can tie your profile in with your flickr photostream and display those in your profile. There is also a iTunes plugin that works similar to last.fm's iscrobbler in that it displays what you are listening to in iTunes on your profile. The feature set on the music part is not quite up to the snuff of last.fm and won't replace it for me just yet, but if they continue to improve there is a possibility that it might. So, go ahead, give it a shot. *VIRB.com *Me on VIRB *VIRB is - about page and examples of some of the beautiful profiles people are creating.

Let me show you my view

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:17:45 -0600

my view...let me show you it I moved into my new place on Saturday with the help of my sister, Chad, Jerry, Cori and Kelli. My mom and grandmother helped by going to my new place before we got there and giving it a major cleaning. We started loading stuff at my old place about 8:25; the last elevator load went up to my new floor at 10:03, which might be some kind of moving record. By Sunday afternoon I was fully settled. Short video tour (it's a small apartment so there isn't much to see) to follow, this weekend most likely. One of the main reasons I picked this apartment over ones on other floors or on the other side of the building was the nice view of Highland Avenue and Rushton Park that it provided. The above photos don't really do it justice, and I might to a pano-stitch later in an attempt to capture the whole thing.

As your legal representative in these matters…

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 07:30:57 -0600

...I strongly urge all of you to watch this video in it's entirety immediately. You might wish to use your head phones as the sound quality is crap. Preview of the upcoming Family Guy Star Wars special "Hey when we get out of here maybe you can show us around your home planet of Alderaan, awwwwwwww."

“Why, thank you.”

Thu, 31 May 2007 07:52:23 -0600

The other day I called the cable company to move my sister's cable from our apartment to her new place. I gave the woman on the phone the address and all related pertinent info. She looked over the bundle of services we had and the amount we were paying for them and said, in that ever-so-mildly excited manner that only telephone CSRs can adopt:

"Wow, you have a really nice package."

lolcat poem - Updated

Wed, 30 May 2007 13:15:40 -0600

From: Making Light

I in ur sonnet, doin ur ritin. How do this hapn? I just a kitty. Main job of catz are just 2B pritty! ('Cept with the doggies, then us be fitin.) Course back in da old days catz was workin Eatin ur mouses an axin fr milk... Now giv me treatz or me clawin ur silk! An bring em here fast, none of ur shirkin. U humanz r comin under r powr Uzin ur money to pamper n feed us, Learnin from websitez how much u need us. R clvr planz is comin to flower! Now mousie are safe in his tiny holz Nless u go catch him. I da boss. LOLz

The lolcat meme is a strange one for me in that at this point during the memetic lifecycle I am normally finished with and mildly annoyed by the previously interesting/cute/funny thing that has snowcloned it's way about the web. However, with lolcats, they seem to be growing more endearing and funnier the more I see them. Strange that. Updated: OK, one more and that's it. I swear. But this one was too good to pass up. Again, from Making Light, via the Ficlets Blog.

im in ur fridge eatin ur plums sorry they wuz delish