The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

A post over at Boing Boing piqued my interest a couple of weeks ago. They posted about a company called “gotlogos.com“, who will do a logo design for you for $25. The trick is that you specify the domain name of the site you want a logo for, provide a general description, and they shoot you back a logo a week later. You don’t get any more say than that. So it’s cheap, but it’s a crapshoot.

I’d gotten a little tired of the current Mr. Voice logo, which I did several years ago. For reference sake, it looks like this:

As I’m finishing up a new release of Mr. Voice, this seemed like a good time to risk $25 and see what they could do. I got the logo back yesterday, and I have to say, I like what they did with it. The new Mr. Voice logo is:

I’ve already started incorporating it into the software. I may drop the extra money to get the logo in vector form, so I can resize it easily.

Good work, gotlogos.com!

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It’s been a busy week – worked late a few nights, and just never found the time to sit down and write. So here are some quick hits to close out the week:

• Work at the new job is going well – I’m slowly making a dent in my big list-o-rearchitecture. I’ve set up an OpenSWAN VPN between the office and the datacenter, set up internal DNS servers (the datacenter was using rsync’d /etc/host files before), and set up an LDAP server with two replicas. Woot. Next on the agenda is getting remote VPN access going, and reworking the mail system.

• Holly reports that Lunchbox is back across the street, possibly visiting his brother Numbnuts, possibly moving in. Who can tell with those folks. Numbnuts has at least one other guy living in the house now, some shady looking character who apparently doesn’t work. At one point it looked like a girl had moved in, too, but we don’t see her much any more. And no sign of Pooka. If we ever vanish, check for shallow graves in that guy’s back yard.

• Holly and I celebrated our fourth anniversary yesterday with a quiet night at home. We did most of our celebrating the other weekend when Hayley was out of town, so last night was just a nice dinner, “Tommy Boy,” and some Trivial Pursuit.

• Somehow yesterday, in playing with Thunderbird, I managed to delete my mail archive from the IMAP server. Um, yikes. When I went to the datacenter people and asked for a restore from the previous night’s backups, they said that the last backup they had on that box was from May 4th. Why do we pay for backups again? Fortunately, I was able to come home to Mail.app on my Mac, which is set to keep a copy of mail locally. I disconnected from the mail server, started Mail.app, created a new local folder, and then copied the contents of the IMAP archive to the local folder. Then, after I went online again and Mail.app synced with the IMAP server (with no folders), I copied the folders back online. Disaster averted.

• The blackberry vines are growing and growing. Looks like it’ll be a good year for cobblers, jams, and more. In the vegetable garden (which we got a late start on), the tomatos, mustard greens, and cabbage are growing well, with watermelons and cucumbers not far behind.

• I’ve been using Bloglines more and more as my primary feed reader, since I can get access to the same information from my Mac at home and my Linux box at work. Plus, the FTP sync feature of NetNewsWire doesn’t seem to work between the iBook and the PowerMac, which is lame.

• I like what Ani Moller did with her year-by-year picture collage. I should do something like that this year, since the odometer will be clicking over to 30 in September. Of course, I’d have to work to find pictures for a lot of years, or pull them out of my scrapbook.

Enjoy the long weekend!

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I’ve finally gotten around to updating the “Who am I reading?” blogroll on the main page to reflect the people I’m, well, actually reading now. Check them out if you’re looking for good content.

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Posted
Sue Cage Farm, Kenbridge, VA
October 3, 2003

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The final part of our big weekend sans baby was a nice meal out. Holly and I like food. A lot. When we travel places (New Orleans, Charleston, etc), we spend most of our money on dinner. A good meal can still bring a smile to our faces.

For an early anniversary present, I took Holly to Second Empire in Raleigh. When Raleigh shut down the normal route I took home from DPI, my alternate route took me right by Second Empire. It’s located in a beautiful renovated 1800s house a couple blocks from the Capitol. Looking around, I found that it had a reputation as one of the best “fancy” places to eat in the area, so it looked like a good choice.

To start off with, information that they asked for when we made our reservations led to them presenting us with a personalized menu with our names, signed by the owner and the sous chef. Nice touch. We had a great table situated in a bay window, and the staff were very friendly and helpful. Since we were doing “fancy,” we started off with a cheese course. There were a couple of mild sheep and goat cheeses, and a cow milk cheese that I picked due to its “sharpness” that turned out to be sharp enough to score glass. A little too sharp, in other words, but the other two were good. We were amused by the name of the goat cheese that had apparently been soaked in wine or something – “Drunken Goat.” Too bad I couldn’t save any for Brock. They also had two kinds of bread – a baguette and a cornmeal bread, both of which were outstanding.

We got appitizers – Holly ordered some mussels that were ungodly melt-in-your-mouth good, and I had a seafood salad that was equally tasty. Our main course was steak – I got a prime Angus fillet special, and Holly got the cut below that, both cooked medium well. It was probably the best steak I’ve ever put into my mouth. Melt-in-your-mouth good. Incredible. I didn’t want to finish it all, because I didn’t want it to end.

To close, Holly got a Bailey’s coffee drink and a slice of cheesecake, and I got creme brulee. Again, amazing dishes.

It was quite possibly the best meal I’ve ever eaten. Though it was pretty expensive, with a bottle of wine included, it was worth every penny. We may have to make Second Empire an anniversary tradition. I highly encourage anyone in the Raleigh area looking for a great meal out to give Second Empire a call.

Wow.

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A couple of big congratulations are in order. First, to Steve and Sam on their wedding this past weekend. They’re both super-cool people and it’s great to see them together.

Second, to Randy Tennison and his wife. He’s my main man in Kansas City, and just sent out an email saying that their adoption is finally going through! It’s been a year or two since they started the process, and I know it was hard for them to wait so long, but the end is in sight.

So best wishes to both of them from here!

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It looks like the Republican leadership in the Senate is going to go ahead with their plans to remove the ability to filibuster judicial nominees. Never minding the fact that they’re going to have to overrule the Senate Parlimentarian to do it, never mind that they’re going to have to step on over 200 years of Senate rules and traditions, never mind that the Republicans made an art form themselves of blocking judicial nominations from even getting out of committee during the Clinton years, never mind that the Senate has approved around 95% of Bush’s judicial nominees since he took office, apparently the Bill Frist plan is that he gets his way 100% of the time, or people suffer.

That’s fine. The current administration is pretty much shitting on our government left and right, so why should the Senate be any different. However, not that they really have any claim to it any more, but by doing this, the Republicans are forfeitting any right to claim moral high ground. They don’t have the ability to ramrod their wants through the Senate with the traditional rules, so they’re going to change the rules rather than working within a system that has served the people of the United States since the 1700s.

I hope they and their supporters remember this action when the pendulum swings – and swing it will – and they become the minority party again, and the Democrats or Libertarians or Whigs or whoever use this newfound power to start packing the judicial bench. I don’t want to hear any whining when that happens, because this is their choice. In order to put judges on the federal bench and, soon, the Supreme Court, who cannot get the same level of approval that 95% of their compatriots have managed to get, they’re taking a step that will open the door to abuses by the majority from now on.

Fucking Republicans. If they were the party of tradition, of reason, of personal responsibility, they’d be respectible. As it stands now, they’re just power-hungry asstards. I would like to think that enough sensible Republicans in the Senate, like John McCain, would refuse to go along with this harebrained scheme, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Another part of our big weekend was that Holly and I went to the movies to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

I’m a huge fan of the Douglas Adams books. And I knew from talking to friends who had seen the movie that if I wasn’t able to get out of the expectation that I’d see a faithful rendition of the books, I’d be disappointed. So I tried to go into it with an open mind.

Unfortunately, both of us left disappointed. Holly said she felt like her brain was crawling out as she tried to understand what was going on. I understood the plot, of course, and recognized the little chestnuts that were thrown to fans of the book (such as Zaphod calling Ford “Ix”), but it seemed like the important and funny parts of the book were disregarded in favor of over-enhanced minor bits or completely new material (like the Arthur/Trillian romance).

I think the actors did a decent job (though Sam Rockwell’s Zaphod grated on me), but I think the movie tried to downplay the geeky book aspect in an attempt to lure in the casual moviegoer, and left both sides disappointed.

I doubt that I get it on DVD. This also doesn’t fill me with great confidence about what they’ll do to Ender’s Game when it comes out.

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As part of our big weekend alone without the baby, Holly surprised me with an amazing present. Several months ago, she got me some “mystery tickets” for this past Sunday. As I like surprises, I’d done a good job of avoiding finding out what was going on. On the way back from Kenbridge, she told me what was happening. We had tickets Sunday afternoon to go to the BTI Center and see, live and in person, Bill Cosby.

Oh hell yeah.

And these weren’t any ordinary tickets. They were orchestra pit, seats B1 and B2. Smack-dab in the middle of the room, one row back from the man himself. Bill Cosby has long been a comedy hero of mine, so getting to see him in person was amazing. And getting to be, at times, an arm’s length from him was an even bigger thrill.

At 67, Cos can still bring the funny. His set was mainly focused on women and mothers, and we both had our cheeks hurting at the end of the night. He would talk to the people in the room (never me directly, but he did heavily involve people directly in front of me), and go off on a tangent (such as bringing a guy who went to his high school down from the balcony to sing their school song), but he’d always get back on point. I’m not even 30 and I can’t remember things that well. And it was a long set, too – he went over two hours before closing with his classic “Dentist” bit from the “Bill Cosby: Himself” era.

It was a great time, and something I’ll remember for years to come. Thanks, Holly – you’re the best!

Update: Here’s a picture taken from our seats when he was including the woman sitting directly in front of me in the act.

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I need to make the time to keep up with new trends in technology. There’s some interesting stuff going on.

The concept that looks the most interesting is AJAX, a way of streamlining web applications using Javascript and XML. It’s the technology that lets you go to Google Maps and drag the map around without having to reload the page. Another interesting example was linked from Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, where Jason Kottke whipped up a little AJAX magic so that a menu selector on his front page will display the selected posts without a reload.

I pretty much missed the Javascript bandwagon back in the day, so I don’t have a good foundation on it. But I’d like to learn. Even Apple’s new Dashboard application uses widgets that are simply HTML and Javascript.

Speaking of HTML, I also have the itch to do a redesign of Lunenburg.org. It’s been over three years since this design went online, and I’d like to do something else. Ideally, I’d like to move away from PHP and into either dynamic Perl pages or a Perl-based templating system that would generate HTML, but I’m not sure the best way to do it. HTML::Template seems like it might be a little too simple and require CGI parsing of every page, but HTML::Mason and Template Toolkit might be overkill. Compounding the problem is that I have HTML that is “static”, and HTML that is generated (the MT blogs), so I’d have to have a system that worked in both.

If anyone has a suggestion, I’m all ears.

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