Unfolded Mind

Sucks to be 45 and out of shape. Just rode my bike, and it KILLED me.

I know I need to do it more, and it won’t be so bad, but I’m just not good at forcing myself to take a step like that. We’ll see how it goes

Has it really been that long? 19 fucking 81? I graduated from high school that year. First year of the Reagan blight, which was made easier (for me anyway) by the release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. By this time, I’d allowed my young mind to be scorched by some pretty advanced shit, for the time…Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Velvet Underground, Zappa, Devo: this was something else. It sounded like the future of music, like shit was seriously evolving, like nothing would be the same again. Turned out to be true, in ways that only W. S. Burroughs could have imaged; but I digress…

Eno and Byrne have a new album out! Wubbada wubbabda whah huh???? Yeah I know, it’s quite different, yeah it’s “proper songs” and not audio collages with found sounds, but who the fuck cares: it’s Eno and Byrne together for the first time in umpty-billion years!

Plus, there’s a tour!

Holy shit, the world is NOT a COMPLETE pile of suck!

Nobody will read if I don’t post. Even if I do, it’s no guarantee, but if I don’t, then they won’t.

My wife just started on of these blog thingies, and she’ll leave me in the dust if I’m not careful.

Zuzu was out in the yard this morning, and wouldn’t come back in, so I investigated. She was in the side of the backyard, just barking at this

(That’s a rabbit’s nest, with four babies in it.)

Here’s one of them…

…and another shot.

I got on Jeopardy, America’s Favorite Quiz Show ®.

Maybe. More on that below.

Went to the mall, found the tables they had set up outside Sears, waited for a seat to open up, sat down and answered enough of the 10 questions to get invited to round two.

This was on Saturday, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. There were about 60-70 people there, or so it appeared to my eyeball. We got a general rundown of how things were going to work, then took a 50-question test, much harder than the screening test of the previous day, and with the questions presented on a computer projection screen, looking just like on the show. While the tests were being scored, we were kept busy by Sarah of the “Clue Crew”, who told some stories from the show, and did a question and answer session.

I was one of nine chosen to stay. We were given some training on how to use the buzzer, and then we were brought up in groups of three to play a mock game. The game was very mock, I think they were just making sure we could buzz in correctly, and speak up when answering, and then snappily choose the next category.

We got to do a simulated little interview, to get us used to when Alex does his little human interest break, and to make sure we weren’t going to just stammer and drool.

So the deal is, I’m now in their active file, and will stay there for 18 months. they may call me, they may not. I guess the only sane way to approach it is to choose to believe that it just won’t happen, and be pleased if it did.

Oh yeah, by the way…

I got a job back at the beginning of the year.

Here

I’m rewriting some PHP web applications into .NET and SharePoint. That’s right, I’ve gone to the dark side, and I’m having fun.

Oh yeah, my company is responsible for these guys.

Much has happened in the pet world, since last I posted. We got a new puppy back in August, a yorkie-maltese mix named “Zuzu”. (was “Karma”…yuck!). She was 6 months old at the time.

In November, Bear, our ten year old Silky Terrier, got cancer of the spleen. We had it removed at great expense, and he did great for a while. Then he died in January.

Sadness for a couple of weeks, then my wife found a dog on Petfinder.com, and persuaded me to drive out to Yankton, South Dakota to pick her up. We wound up with 2 1/2 pounds of 9-week-old Silky Terrier-Poodle mix, who we renamed from “Jenna Lynn” (yuck again) to “Peanut”.

I was laid off on Monday. It’s the second time in two years this company has laid me off, just in time for Christmas. Just like last time, I got an unsolicited call from a recruiter the very next day. I have a phone interview scheduled for one place, and phone interview done, and a face-to-face to be scheduled for another place, and have had my resume submitted for a third. All you fans out there, please keep you fingers crossed for me!

Klortho as been a work-in-progress in my mind since 2004 or so, but nothing beyond the creation of a sourceforge project has really happened with it. Well, I finally got around to making something happen: I made a small perl fastcgi script for doing automatic XSLT transforms, and added some .htaccess/mod_rewrite plumbing to my www.unfoldedmind.com account. (It’s on a shared host where I can’t use mod_transform the way I wanted to). after that, I was able to whip up a rudimentary main template, and add a couple xml pages, with their own stylesheets.

There is not much to see on the surface at present, and there may not be for a while, but I’m pleased to have enough of a scaffold in place to start working on the harder parts.

These harder parts include:

• Getting the fastcgi to pass GET, POST and COOKIE data to the underlying request
• Building data models with Berkely DB/XML
• Getting Haskell and Lisp to talk to the C++ API for BDB/XML
• Learning enough Haskell and Lisp to make working this way fun, and not frustrating

Anyone want to help?

http://www.43places.com

http://www.43things.com