The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

Greetings from Titletown USA, Green Bay. I’m making my first trip to Wisconsin this weekend. It’s a combination of work (visiting Netsonic, the company that provides datacenter hosting for SkilTech), and play (doing some improv with the fine folks from Comedy City).

I got into the Green Bay airport around 7pm last night. Downtown Green Bay is pretty small, so it’s hard to pick out from the air. The stadium, however, is not. It’s like this giant NFL stadium sitting in the middle of small town America. Which, I guess it is. Green Bay, according to the signs, has around 100,000 people in the city limits, probably around 300,000 in the general metro area. That would put it about the size of, oh, Roanoke VA. But it’s a town the size of Roanoke that can support one of the most famous and successful NFL teams in history. Amazing.

I met up with the Comedy City guys last night and saw their high school league show. They asked me “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” “Nothing,” I replied. “Ok, then you’re going on the radio.”

Turns out that Comedy City has a regular gig on Thursday mornings where they send a player or two over to “106.7 The Eagle – Classic Rock” and pal around with the morning show guys from 8-9am. Ken, the club manager, picked me up in front of my hotel at 7:30, and we went in to meet with the morning show guys. They were very nice people, and I did most of the talking, as I don’t think they’d ever had a real live southerner in their studio before. Alright, I may have turned up the southern accent a little bit to give them more to play off of, but by and large it was just me being me, and they seemed to like it. Somehow we got on the subject of southern foods, and they were making jokes like grits are kind of nasty. I said that southerners eat nastier stuff than that, and proceeded to tell them the (true) story of going over to my friend Brock’s house in high school, seeing a pot boiling on the stove, and lifting the lid to find three squirrel heads boiling in the water. Upon asking Brock what in the holy hell that was about, he informed me that his stepfather ate them. So that provided fodder for discussion.

After that, I walked over and met with Adam from Netsonic. I’ve been working with him since 1997 or so, but had never met him. He was very nice, took me on a tour of their datacenter (built in an old warehouse), and offered to take me fishing on Lake Michigan. Unfortunately, he goes fishing in the evening, and that’s when I’m going to be doing improv every night until I leave. We may work something out for Saturday, though.

Tonight is the first “Raleigh vs. Green Bay” show of the weekend. JMatt is on his way up, and we’re going to draft a Green Bay player to round out the team. Tomorrow, I’m going to make it out to the Packers Hall of Fame and Lambeau Field. Tune in for more!

• Leave a comment... (0)

The Democratic National Convention is going on in Boston. Security is at absurd levels. The list of banned items is large, including things like flashlights.

So if you’re a Boston-based business like Gillette, and want to put a free sample in attendees’ gift bags, what do you choose? That’s right, razor blades. According to that story, Gillette spent millions in product placement to get their razors into the bags, but anyone trying to bring their bag into the event got the razors confiscated for security reasons. It also added to the long lines that people had to wait in.

That’s quite possibly one of the most braindead things I’ve seen. Smith & Wesson better take notes if they’re planning on advertising at the RNC in September.

• Leave a comment... (0)

I think every neighborhood has them. “Those” neighbors. You know the ones I’m talking about. Yeah, them. Ours happen to live right across the street from us, so we get the pleasure of watching their antics on a regular basis.

They started off on a bad foot when they bought the house from the nice old Scottish couple who was living there when we moved in. Ok, one could argue that it’s not their fault that the old folks sold, but we blame them for it nonetheless. The star of the show was The Shirtless Wonder. He bought the house with his girlfriend. Guy looks like he’s in his mid-30s or so, and he has the defining characteristic that when the temperature gets above 40 degrees, he never wears a shirt. And he’s this scrawny, hunched over thing, so it’s not like anyone is enjoying the view. I think the girlfriend had the same opinion, because she moved out not long after they bought the place.

He was in the house alone for a bit, and we were hoping that the loss of income would force him to sell. No such luck – this other guy (who we later found out was his brother) moved in with him. This guy is kind of a fatass, and brought along his pug dog Pooka with him. And what is a Pooka? That’s right, it’s a hobgoblin. Another sign that these people are sketchy. Many a morning I’d be awakened by Tubby outside calling his dog. “Pooka! Pooka! POOKA!” And there have been a couple of occasions where I’ve been loading my car up for work, looked down at my feet, and into the eyes of the Pooka itself. It’s not pleasant to know that there’s a hobgoblin at your feet. Fortunately, he must have sensed that years of system administration have crushed my soul past the point of being useful, so the little demon tends to trot away before attempting to take it.

Now that I’ve given you the background, let me say that they’ve been in rare form this weekend. I think they’ve been hosting a family reunion. There’s this old person of indeterminate gender in an RV pulled by a truck – I’m thinking that’s Shirtless and Lunchbox’s mom. Her primary recreational activity is smoking and having white hair. There are three or four other vehicles out front, and a handful of adults and kids milling about all day.

What pushed this weekend over the top is that someone in this extended family brought along a scooter. Not the trendy foot-powered ones that the 1337 t\/\/33nz are pushing around the malls, not even something as hilarious as a Segway. Nope, this is a gas-powered, two wheeled sadmobile. People who ride mopeds would shun it. It has a lameness that trancends lameosity. And these people have been riding it up and down our subdivision’s one street from sunup to sundown all freakin’ weekend. They honk the horn (which sounds like a mouse farting) when they ride past the house, which I’m sure was a laugh riot the first hundred times or so. “Lookit me, I’m on a scooter! And I’m driving past the house! Isn’t that great?!”

When not riding the scooter, they primarily amuse themselves by attempting to park their cars. I think everyone has an SUV, and after four or five days, they still haven’t figured out how to get their cars straight. They’re avoiding the driveway, I guess out of deference to the Sketchy Brothers’ “Only On The Weekend” Jeep, which they have in addition to their individual cars. Can’t block that in – might have to whip the shirt off and go ride up to Food Lion. So the parking plan they’ve decided on is to park all of their vehicles diagonally, nose down in the ditch in front of the house. It looks like a demolition derby hit. But they’re somehow able to back out of the ditch, so they can resume swapping parking places around without actually going anywhere.

It’s like watching a monkey in a suit – you know that at some level, there’s a dim flicker in these people’s minds that normal folks have houses and cars, but much like a monkey, their lives appear to just be a sparse imitation of civilized society. Unlike Jane Goodall, we’re content to watch these creatures from afar.

• Leave a comment... (0)

I wrote a few days ago about switching to Subversion for my source control and, with it, WebSVN for the web frontend.

Well, WebSVN was not very useful. It didn’t do diffs well, had no way of doing diffs between arbitrary revisions, and had a side effect of screwing up the permissions in my respository every time someone accessed the site. Which is, to be blunt, crappy.

Fortunately, Steve told me that the software I was using to do the web frontend to the old CVS repository, ViewCVS, now does Subversion as well. Of course, you’d never know this from looking at their page, since there hasn’t been a new release of ViewCVS since freakin’ January of 2002. I mean, honestly. Work with me here, developers. You’ve got new functionality. Push out 0.9.3 or something.

Anyway, development of the product is still going on, and I was able to grab the HEAD out of CVS and find the subversion support that I needed. And, true to the quality of ViewCVS, it works great. The only thing that WebSVN had that ViewCVS doesn’t is an RSS feed for the changes, but if I ever get any free time, I may be able to hack that in.

So everything old is new again. I’m using ViewCVS for my Subversion repository, and all is right with the world.

• Leave a comment... (0)

I got a call from the local cable company, Time-Warner, the other day. They were offering me two months free on their PVR service.

I’ve been interested in the PVR/Tivo concept for a while. I don’t watch much TV as a general rule, but there are occasions where I’d like to record something or set up to get a whole series. The Hardware + Service cost of Tivo is a little more than I can justify, and I don’t have nearly enough free time to play with something like MythTV right now, either. Time-Warner’s PVR offering is $7 a month, which is still somewhat high on top of digital cable and Roadrunner, but a little bit more managable. The question is whether or not we’d use the service enough to make it worth our while.

I’ll keep you posted.

• Leave a comment... (0)

The new World Hockey Association had their Free Agent “draft” recently. I use the quotes because they were drafting NHL and AHL players. The WHA is banking on an extended NHL lockout, the result being a bunch of hockey players looking for work who don’t want to go to Eurpoe to play.

A small handful of 2003-2004 Hurricanes were taken in the draft:

• C Mike Zigomanis (3rd Round, 19th overall, Detroit)
• G Parick DesRochers (6th Round, 46th overall, Detroit)
• D Bruno St. Jacques (11th Round, 81st overall, Quebec)
• RW Craig Adams (15th Round, 120th overall, Florida)
• D Damian Surma (27th Round, 209th overall, Quebec)

It’s kind of interesting to see that the higher players picked are mainly minor leaguers, with the only experienced NHL veteran (Adams) going near the bottom, and none of the real Canes regulars going at all. While I have my doubts as to whether or not the WHA will actually play a game (they’ve got seven teams, with one homeless team called the “Founder’s Franchise,” which doesn’t exactly scream “quality”), it’ll be interesting to see how this plays into the cat-and-mouse game between the NHL players and owners.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Like a lot of geeks my age, I cut my teeth on MS DOS, and the games therein. From fairly famous games like Empire: Wargame of the Century and Front Page Sports: Football Pro to more obscure ones like Conflict, Alley Cat, and Supremacy, those were the games that shaped my young geek life.

I’d occasionally fired up DOSEMU to play these old games, with mixed results. Recently, though, I found a new, maintained DOS emulator – DOSBOX. And what really takes the cake is that there is a nice native OS X GUI for it – Radnor. Just download the app, start it, choose the .exe or .com to load up, and you’re there! Speeds and graphics/sound support seem to be great.

I think I’ll put it on my iBook, so I can take a trip down memory lane when I travel.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Taking inspiration from Mark, I’m now including the raw .band source files for my Garage Band songs. With the .band file, you can get the source music for my songs. From there, you can remix them, build upon them, whatever.

I doubt this will really take off like gangbusters, but it’s easy enough for me to do. So why not?

If anyone downloads one and does something interesting with it, let me know!

• Leave a comment... (0)

I was listening to Lewis Black’s Rules of Enragement (released September 2003) on the iPod the other day, when I noticed something spooky.

He’s talking about Dick Cheney, and relates a (fictional?) conversation between himself and the VP. He’s talking about Cheney’s $31 million goodbye present from Haliburton, and how it was wrong of Cheney to keep the money when he left Haliburton to become the VP. Black says “And at that point I said ‘Uh, Vice President Cheney, I think you should return the money,’ and he said ‘Uh, Lewis, I think you should go fuck yourself.’”

It’s like he could see the future. Spooky, eh?

• Leave a comment... (0)

The blackberry vine is starting to wither, which means I may have gotten my last sizable picking off of it last night. I went out in style, though – we cooked up two batches of jam over the past couple of nights, and I also cooked another cobbler.

We now have about 25 jars of jam in the cupboard (some of it will be going to friends and family), the cobbler is going to work, and junebugs are eating what’s left on the vine.

It’s been a good summer.

• Leave a comment... (0)