Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at May 29th, 2004

Last night Kristen and I watched “Bubba Hotep.” I liked it. Kristen didn’t. That’s not much of a surprise given our different tastes in movies. Kristen basically wants to watch something funny with the occasional drama mixed in. My interests range from action to drama to comedy to old movies to well… basically just about anything. In theory.

In practice, I tend to like movies with a certain minimal level of complication (or perhaps inaccessibility?). That could be in terms of plot, storytelling style, character motivations/relationships, or an interesting setting (science fiction/fantasy, historical…). This means (for example) that I tend to avoid your average comedy and like the movies of Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma…).

I don’t claim this means I have good taste.

“Bubba Hotep,” however, is a movie that fits pretty well into what I like. Here’s the plot: Elvis Presley is still alive, having switched places with an Elvis impersonator. Unfortunately, he’s old and stuck in a rest home and has no way of proving who he really is.

Worse, there’s an evil supernatural entity loose that’s killing other people in the rest home. Helped by “Jack” (a black resident who believes himself to be John F. Kennedy), Elvis attempts to stop the killing and save the other residents from having their souls sucked from their bodies.

The movie also touches on our society’s attitude toward aging, casts an amused look at 50’s-60’s icons (including the Lone Ranger), and arranges all the material it has to convey (Elvis’ background & current emotional state, the evil being’s origin) in a way that’s not confusing. Better, it managed to be surprisingly funny at points along the way.

Run out and rent (or buy) it. The DVD came out this weekend.

Posted by Jim at May 27th, 2004

Sometime in the last couple months Abby (3 year old) discovered her salivary glands.

Since then she’s been experimenting with them. I often come upon her and realize that she is swishing liquid around in her mouth. There is no cup in sight.

Even worse was discovering an enormous wet spot on one of our chairs. Apparently she does not believe in swallowing.

One last thought on this theme: I picked Abby up from daycare today. As usual, I checked the page on which they chronicle important events of the day. Today they wrote a comment about Abby’s nap. Abby doesn’t actually take naps anymore. She sits quietly on her cot while the other children take naps.

I assume that this is quite boring.

The comment went more or less like this… “During her nap, Abby spit repeatedly over the side of her cot.”

She will get bored with saliva soon, I know, but not soon enough.

Posted by Jim at May 26th, 2004

In a bid to amuse myself at work today, I decided to check the uptimes on the various servers I’m responsible for.

Windows 2000 fileserver: 23 days
Windows 2000 Small Business Server (Windows Terminal Services for ACCESS’ food pantry network): 26 days
FreeBSD fileserver: 315 days

The FreeBSD server would be higher except that I accidentally rebooted it once. The Windows servers would be higher except that I have to reboot after most updates… AND…. both seem to develop minor, inexplicable problems that can only be solved by rebooting every so often.

Oooh… One more thing… During the time I’ve been working at GRACE and ACCESS, both organization’s web hosting providers have switched to FreeBSD. GRACE’s provider switched from Sun’s Solaris. ACCESS’ provider from Linux and (get this) SCO Unix.

I’m not trying to argue that FreeBSD is the greatest operating system ever, but I do like it and find these things amusing.

Posted by Jim at May 24th, 2004

Sometime during the fall or winter of last year, I bought a used copy of “Spirited Away” at Blockbuster.

I had not seen the movie, but had heard it recommended enough times that the combination of low price and good reviews made it seem worth buying anyway. When I did finally get to watch it, I liked it a lot. Much to my amusement, Abby (my 3 year old daughter) loved it. She wants to watch it again and again.

I can only wonder what kind of sense she makes out of it. Of course, at her age the world in general is a bit of a mystery and “Spirited Away,” a product of Japanese culture, probably seems only marginally more mystifying than anything else.

I liked many things about “Spirited Away.” The music’s mood is wonderfully right (somewhere between amazement and melancholy). The main character’s expressions are just right for a child and are not generally the most obvious reaction to the situation.

Though the movie doesn’t really have much of a plot, the characters seem real. The art always feels exactly right for the scene and is occaisionally beautiful.

My wife has never sat down to watch it, sometimes walking through the room as it plays. I suspect that she will never watch it.

She has an aversion to watching movies that include disembodied heads.

Posted by Jim at May 22nd, 2004

Here’s something I’ve often found amusing about the media and politics:

We pay people to propagandize us. Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Bill O’Reilly and other similar people are paid to tell us why Our Side is right and the Other Side is wrong. People listen to them because they have a particular point of view, not just because they are amusing.

Even if they had a change of heart, it would still be in their best interest to keep it quiet in order to continue to get paid. An example: After the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, a book came out purporting to tell the true story about Anita Hill (whose accusations of sexual harrasment threatened to derail Thomas’ confirmation). It portrayed her as mentally ill. The writer of the book later admitted to making up a great deal of what was within it.

In a later book, he admitted that he knew what he was writing wasn’t true, but he enjoyed the connections, the influence and similar things that came his way as a result. Since then, he’s come out as homosexual, admitted he lied, moved over to the left and dropped out of the public eye.

It’s a cautionary tale for the Michael Moore’s and Ann Coulter’s of this world. If you begin to change your views, you’d better not tell anybody or your career may disappear.

In thinking about people on either the right or the left who produce work that is of interest only to their side, I can’t help but note the lack of ambiguity. “We are right. The Other Side is evil. There is no middle ground.”

My general experience in life is that there’s plenty of middle ground and lots of ambiguity so why does anybody take this stuff seriously?

My guess is that a clear, unambiguous perspective is easier to comprehend. It’s much easier to express the point of view that the Other Side is evil (or stupid) than it is to expess the idea that they’re right on some issues and wrong on others.

Analysis takes effort to read. Well-written, unambiguous derision can be not only easy to read, but can turn out to be hilariously funny as well (at least if you agree).

Careful analysis also tends to raise up situations in which people have to consider the possibility that they’re wrong about certain views and ideas they have (i.e. cognitive dissonance). People don’t like experiencing being wrong. Thus it becomes easy to listen to people you already agree with and harder to listen to people you don’t.

As a result, people listen to people whose views agree with there own, reinforcing the views they already have. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

The people promoting a particular set of political views don’t mention the views they have that differ with their own side. The people who listen/read get their own views reinforced.

I don’t see an obvious way that this can be changed, but I do wish for more voices that don’t fit well within the artificial right/left dichotomy. Excessive certainty about one’s own perspective seems a liability in politics (and life in general), an area in which compromise is not just an option, but actually a necessity.

Posted by Jim at May 20th, 2004

A while back, I mentioned the possibility that I might actually mow my lawn this summer.

I really don’t have much of a choice. With the rain we’ve been getting, my grass would likely hit my knees if left alone. Soon after that, we would probably be fined (or at least warned).

I’ve no real interest in my lawn, but I would prefer it reach certain minimal standards of niceness. What sort of standards? Basically, I don’t want the lawn to look like unsettled grasslands.

Sadly, my own actions tend to defeat my reaching even those very low expectations. In a fit of environmentalism and cheapness (with an emphasis on the cheapness), I bought a pushmower rather than the standard gas-guzzling powermower.

There are advantages to pushmowers. They are purely mechanical, powered only by the push you give them. They don’t use gas (or oil) and thus you don’ t have to store gas. Better yet, they always start and they’re cheaper to buy. They take less space than powermowers, and, in seven years, I’ve never had to bring it in to get the mechanism fixed.

Also, their method of cutting is supposedly healthier for the grass.

There’s just one problem. While they do cut grass very well, they don’t cut certain sorts of weeds very well. What sorts? The sort of weed that is also a type of grass, one that is too thin to be caught by the pushmower’s whirring blades and thus tends to grow high enough to go to seed, spreading even more copies of itself throughout the lawn.

Cutting the grass makes these weeds even more obvious than they were before, making the lawn look even worse. In other years, I’ve had local kids drop by pushing powermowers the day after, asking if they could mow the lawn.

Now I trim the taller weeds with an electric trimmer, much to the amusement of some of my neighbors.

Actually, the pushmower itself provides amusement to not only neighborhood children (who sometimes gather when I mow), but also people in passing cars. “Passing” cars doesn’t really describe the cars accurately. A more accurate description would be stopping cars.

People stop to tell me how they haven’t seen one of those mowers since the 1960’s, remembering their fathers mowing the lawn.

One person stopped to tell me that he would mow my lawn himself–if I paid him. When I said no, he attempted to sell me a powermower. After that he left, but, then came back the next day and attempted to sell me a powermower again.

Back in the 1960’s, back when pushmowers were used regularly, they must have had some way to deal with the weeds. That or they had lower standards for how their lawn looked.

The next time someone stops to reminisce, I’ll have to ask them about that.

Posted by Jim at May 17th, 2004

The place I work for has been having money problems for as long as I’ve been there. It is a small, religious non-profit that does work in the area of healing racism, transporting low income AIDS patients to medical appointments, raising money to fight hunger, and a variety of other things.

It is a wonderful place to work.

Unfortunately, it continues to have money problems–particularly in summer. Our programs don’t have any public events scheduled for the summer and thus we don’t have much money coming in via donations.

One of my goals has been to spend this summer job hunting. I need a job that’s greater than part time and would like one that better uses the programming and system administration skills I’ve had to develop in working there–not to mention the master’s degree that I’m almost finished with.

So… Now I just have to find someplace that needs someone with my skills: php, java, unix/windows system administration. That’s the hard part. I’m not even sure where to look at this point, but I know I have to.

Posted by Jim at May 15th, 2004

I’m sort of back to running again.

I say “sort of” because it can get really hard to actually run some days. When I was going to grad school for my masters in sociology it was pretty easy. Kristen and I had no children. I didn’t have to be at work until 9 am and even then I didn’t work for a full day.

I could get out of bed at 6 or 7am, get on the road and be back to the house with enough time to shower, eat and get dressed.

At present, I get up between 6 and 7am (with Kristen), try to feed, clothe and make lunches for children and then make it to work around 9am even though I wanted to be there earlier.

Running after work is theoretically possible, but not always practically possible. Staying late at work is likely if there’s some kind of problem or deadline. Owing to the fact that I make supper, I can’t start running too late or Kristen will be stuck alone with children for an hour and we won’t eat till 7 or 8pm to boot.

Kristen has managed to do a lot of running, but she’s training for the Chicago Marathon at the moment. She has no choice.

Lucky her. I like long runs.

I do some of my better thinking while running. There’s nothing but me and the movement of my legs. My mind drifts away and I get to think about the novel I’ve been working on, a programming problem, or possibly the backstory to a role playing game I’d like to run.

It is a moment of peace, perhaps meditation, but a form of meditation that is punctuated by avoiding curbs, cars, bikes, and dogs. Strange to think that it is peaceful at all.

Posted by Jim at May 13th, 2004

The owner of the domain that allows me space to blog has a project called Crapshoot. It basically amounts to taking lots of pictures with small, cheap, digital cameras and posting the pictures you like.

I, unfortunately, don’t have a cheap digital camera. This is largely because I really want to buy a massively expensive digital camera, but, can’t yet afford it. The cameras I like range in price from around $800 to $2000–I won’t be buying one soon.

The reason for this is that I really don’t want to buy anything with less flexibility than the 35mm I’m using now (a Pentax K1000). Admittedly, the K1000 is old and not the best camera out there, but it is totally manual and forces a person to learn the basics of taking pictures (something I’m interested in).

Though you’ll find little evidence that I know the basics of taking pictures, I do have some pictures online. These pictures are actually semi-official organizational records of events.

Thus, if you feel the urge, you can check out my pictures from:

Summit on Racism 2004 and
Hunger Walk 2004

Summit on Racism is GRACE’s attempt to help the Grand Rapids community to take action on racial issues. Hunger Walk is GRACE’s annual fundraiser for local food pantries and international agencies that fight hunger.

Posted by Jim at May 12th, 2004

One of the trials of being the sole sysadmin/helpdesk type in two different organizations is that you are the only person responsible for solving problems. The tale of woe I am about to relate is a problem I might have assigned to someone else if I had the power.

First, the disclaimer: I use SBC’s DSL both at home and at work. In general, things have been great. I’ve gotten decent technical support when I’ve needed it, downtime has been minimal, and the download speed has been higher than advertised.

That being said, here’s what happens when things don’t go right:

One person in our office has been having wierd problems with sending email for a while. Once, her email program somehow failed to realize that it had successfully sent her messages. Compensating for this problem, it then resent them every 10 minutes or so.

Over the course of one evening, I recieved 50 copies of her email explaining that she had a problem that caused her computer to send multiple copies of the same email.

Updating her copy of Outlook/Office XP to the very most recent, most patched state possible seemed to solve the problem.

Recently however, she told me that messages were staying in her Outbox and not being sent. Simultaneously, however, Outlook was informing her that it was stopped at 2 of some 160 tasks it planned to pursue in the course of sending email. Mind you, she had sent only 2 emails.

In the course of investigating, I found that other people in the office were also having problems with this–people not using the same version of Office or the same OS.

So, I called SBC to find out what the heck is going on. I got the lowest possible level of tech support–the kind that assumes that you know nothing and requires the person to go through configuration of your email before they’ll send you up to the next level of tech support.

I had configured mine correctly, trying both a newer and an older smtp server address. Neither worked. Strangely, things spontaneously started working at the end of the (hour long) phone call. This happened while the tech support person tried (unsuccessfully) to transfer me to the next highest level of support.

Because things had started working with the newer smtp address (but not, I might add, immediately upon trying the newer smtp address), I decided to change people’s smtp server settings. We had signed up with Ameritech before SBC acquired it and were still using smtp settings that pointed to an Ameritech server. Thus, I changed it to the settings Yahoo recommends as apparently SBC has contracted out email to Yahoo.

Things worked. Yay me. That was Monday.

Tuesday: I come into work only to discover that sending email no longer works on some computers. Which ones? The computers whose smtp settings I’d changed to be current. The ones using the old settings are just fine.

So I change all computers back to the old smtp settings. Things work. Yay me.

Wednesday (today): I come in, work on some other things, feel like I’m getting things done for the first time this week and someone comes to me, telling me that people can’t send their email.

After screwing around for a bit, writing SBC an email, attempting an online chat with an SBC representative, and calling our account representative, I change things back to the new Yahoo settings.

Things work. Again. I have no idea what is going on. One would think that if an organization was going to close out the old smtp servers that they would notify their customers. Also, what’s up with the new server settings working the day of the change, not working the day after, but working on the day after that?

I’m thinking there’s got to be some way blame corporate bureaucracy for this, but I’m still trying to figure out exactly how.