GRABBINGSAND

What is that? Oh, that’s is the Playmobil Security Check Point. It is out of stock currently at Amazon, but I think I need one for my desk. I could scrutinize wee little passengers whilest on conference calls.

Some other things on my mind …

Caucusin’ Is Hard.

Which is why, I suppose, that there are rumbles and rumors of litigation coming from the Clinton Machine where Texas is concerned. Not content to make do with either one or the other, Texas enjoys the best of both worlds by holding a standard vote-and-go primary in the afternoon, followed by a caucus in the evening. 126 delegates are … um … delegated from the primary and 67 others move according to the caucus. Sounds like a grand ol’ time to me. Admittedly, I’ve never caucused, only primaried, and my head does spin a little when I read about the odd political rituals of Iowa and Idaho. But either way, the people are given an opportunity to speak.

So what’s the big deal? Maybe the Hill-folk can explain …

Clinton campaign aides have argued that caucuses favor Obama, whose campaign organization has turned out overwhelming numbers at caucuses in other states.

Huh. Caucuses favor Obama. The more complicated and involved method favors Obama. People willing to stand their ground and proclaim their choice before their peers favor Obama.

Whatever could that mean?

The End Is Nigh-er.

A little over a year ago, I gave all of you a reading assignment. Maybe some of you took it. Perhaps most didn’t. But if you had, the following names would not only be familiar to you, but they would also trigger a deep-seated response that might border on revulsion: John Hagee and Rod Parsley.

And so, it should be noted that this week, Senator John McCain received the hearty endorsement of both Hagee and Parsley.

Remember how Senator McCain used to be seen as a moderate? He used to be opposed solidly to torture, too. Yeah, not so much anymore.

Now that he has this dynamic duo on his side, his anti-Apocalypse stance might be slipping as well.

Things I expect my dentist to tell me this afternoon:

• You need to floss more. No doubt. Everybody needs to floss more. I guess there are a handful of folks who floss and floss like there is no tomorrow, but I suspect that such people are usually avoided in social settings because of their overall twitchiness.
• Looks like you’ve got another loose filling. If I was feeling truly vindictive, here is where I would post a link to the first dentist I employed upon moving to Atlanta in 1995. And I would proceed to describe how he came off as a really friendly fellow who was free with the distribution of nitrous for whatever ailed you. Seriously. Need your teeth cleaned? How ’bout a little gas, eh? But the flipside of that generosity was his insistence that tooth sealing was the best damned thing in dentistry today. And also that one was far better off with dental composite (”white”) fillings than the standard issue (”silver”) amalgams. After all, wasn’t insurance paying for it anyway? Well, it turns out that tooth sealing is not as preventative as advertised. And the composite fillings have a tendency to fall down on the job in a way that old school amalgams never do. So my current dentist has had to repeatedly perform do-overs to make up for the efforts of Dr Nice Guy.

The one thing I dread my dentist telling me this afternoon:

• Those wisdom teeth are going to have to come out. No. Come on. I’ve kept them for this long, so why not let me keep them. It’s a minor mark of pride for me. Besides, weren’t all of the childhood dental extractions — of which there were many — a way to avoid the whole “no room for more teeth” dilemma?

Thank God for my iPod.

Without it, I’d have to hear the noise of The World’s Loudest Vacuum Cleaner. As it is, I have Alice Smith cranked up to the stratosphere, and that’s better by far. Why is The World’s Loudest Vacuum here? Good question. And while I’m not going to say out right why, I will say that it has everything to do with this morning’s weather. Not content to simply make mine and everyone else’s commutes much, much longer than we’ve ever known, it would appear that Mother Nature decided that my office was in need of some personal attention. Luckilly, I wasn’t the one who arrived to find a flooded desk.

Two whole hours. That’s how long it took me to get from home to work this morning. And this is a jaunt that take me a little over twenty minutes on unlucky days. On federal holidays, I can get from my front door to work in twelve minutes. But not this morning. This morning, I got to sit and creep along with my fellow drivers as we struggled to get the hell out of Johns Creek. But once I’d made it over the city line into Alpharetta, we were all turned back. Some fallen tree or downed power line or something of that nature. What it was doesn’t matter. What it did was set me back another full hour in getting to work. So much so that when I got to the corner of Haynes Bridge Road and Old Alabama, I went to Kroger instead. For one thing, I could stretch my legs. For another, I needed Tylenol of the extra strength variety. And besides, its not like I was going to be any less late.

So finally, I got here. Of all the mornings to go back to work after a day out sick, this had to be the worst return of them all.

Alice Smith is over. Alice Coltrane is next. The World’s Loudest Vacuum has stopped sucking outright, but one never knows when it might suck again. Better to be prepared than sorry.

So yesterday. I don’t know what hit me. Could’ve been food poisoning, because that’s what it felt like. But Nikki and I ate mostly the same things on Sunday. On Sunday evening I felt less than great, but come Monday, I was far from all right. Of course, I could’ve been hit by the stomach flu thing that’s been flitting around our office. Whatever it was, it shut me down for the whole day and left me virtually worthless. I figured that even if I wasn’t going in to work, at least I could do some more research for the next Drama Club production. But no, that wasn’t going to happen. Just the mere act of reading made me dizzy. It was like I was nine years old again, riding along in the back of my mom’s Ford LTD station wagon and getting car sick, only there was no car.

Nikki came home from work in the afternoon and took care of me. She brought me store-brand Emetrol, two flavors of Pedialite and some chicken soup. She’s good to me that way.

And after a night of Nyquil-induced knock-out sleep, I woke up this morning feeling mostly normal, aside from a sore throat from being over-worked and a stuffy head from being unable to take my allergy meds the day before. While I’m moving slower today than usual, kind of like a well-dressed sloth, I think I’m going to be fine in the long run. Was able to go to lunch with no extra-special effort, which is a good sign.

Huh. Just saw a weather update. Might snow tonight.

Joy.

Twenty-five years ago, I wanted to be as cool as Michael Jackson. We all did.

Everything he did was worthy of our attention. I missed his appearance on the Motown special, the night that he debuted the moonwalk, but I sure did hear about it the next day at school. “Did you see that?” The question was almost always followed by a very poor attempt to duplicate the feat. “It was kind of like this … well … not like what I’m doin’, but … aw, crap … man, you should’ve seen it!”

I remember where I was when I saw the “Billie Jean” video for the first time. It was on a Friday night, on some short-lived locally-produced video show, slotted just after a Lionel Richie video (”All Night Long (All Night)”). I was in my grandmother’s room, the only place I could watch television by myself in the house.

I saw the “Beat It” video a few weeks later on MTV. And yes, I wanted the red leather jacket with the chains and the metal mesh patches and all the zippers. Because everyone wanted that jacket. Now, understand that the “Beat It” jacket was much different from the later “Thriller” jacket, but I’m getting ahead of myself. “Beat It” was spectacular because it was something that could be played on practically any radio station, country excepted. Why? Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, of course.

It think it was around this time that I convinced my mom that I needed the Thriller album. Wait. Let me be more accurate. I needed the record, and that’s what I got. Thriller on vinyl, complete with the liner notes and little drawings that Jackson drew himself. Looking back, I have to give my parents a lot of credit for their patience with me. I had a record player of my own, but no headphones. Why would I need them? So they had to endure the countless plays and replays of Sides A and B. I seem to recall that “The Girl Is Mine” was a particular favorite for overplaying, though I’m not sure why. I know that I liked it well enough to pick up Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace on cassette a few months later, because it featured “Say Say Say,” the other McCartney / Jackson collaboration.

But the big event was “Thriller.” This was back when videos were still fresh and a new video was worth celebrating. MTV used to make such a gloriously big deal out of the world premieres of even the most mediocre musician’s latest, but when the video was coming from Michael Jackson, time itself stood still. “Thriller” was good as a video, but the “Making Of” documentary was just about the best thing ever. Not only did you get to see how the zombie effects were done and so on, but we got to see Michael just basically hanging out with director John Landis. And he seemed like a heck of a nice guy. A little shy, even. And he didn’t hide behind sunglasses. Or over-process his hair. Heck, he might’ve even still had the majority of his actual, original nose.

(The “Thriller” jacket, however? Nowhere near as awesome as the other one.)

I’ve said it once. I’ll say it many times again. I miss Michael Jackson. I miss the over-talented kid who could do no wrong, who seemed so kind and who effortlessly rocked the hell out of a groove when the need arose.

That man who spends his days hiding in Dubai? Don’t know him. He might have the same name, but that’s not Michael Jackson.

Originally, this was going to be a rather disparaging assessment of the bonus tracks tacked so needlessly on the 25th Anniversary re-issue of Thriller, for truly, they are abyssmal and not deserving to share even the same physical media as the original nine tracks. But given the way the re-issue has inspired me to remember just how awesome Michael Jackson used to be … I think I’ll stop my post right about here and just give those nine tracks another listen instead. Besides, Rob Sheffield’s RS review burns the bonus tracks to a bacon-y crisp that I would be hard-pressed to match.

Dieter Rams was director of design at Braun from 1962 to 1995. He designed watches, clock radios, cigarette lighters and countless other products, and all according to his own ten principles of design.

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Simple. I think I’ll print this out and put it up at work.

Let’s see … what else is going on?

Spent part of the weekend with my hands in the maw of a PC case. As frustrating as the rebuild process can be, I believe still that doing it yourself is the smartest way to go. With just a few simple rules to remember, an understand of just what will and will not lead to disaster, piecing together your own box is a simple enough process. This weekend, what I did was less of an upgrade as a total conversion. The last build I did was good for the time, but not future-proof in the least. Within a year or so, the interface I used for my graphics card was nigh obsolete. The motherboard had bizarre memory restrictions that didn’t become apparent until much later. By then, the mobo’s manufacturer slowly morphed out of the motherboard business, then later became quietly notorious for bad capacitors.

Geek Factor is about to increase. You’ve been warned.

The new machine is Intel-based, not AMD. I’ve been a staunch AMD supporter for years, but Intel has made some great improvements in the last year or so. No longer is AMD the most efficient chip for the money, so going with the Core 2 Duo (E6750) was the best choice. The chip sits on an Intel P35 motherboard from Gigabyte. The board has enough SATA slots for not only the pair of drives I have (one old and one new), but for another couple should I decide to do such a thing. As with the previous build, on-board audio and networking eliminated the next for extra PCI cards. For video, I stuck with the NVidia chipset. The 8600 GTS from EVGA is not the fastest or burliest card on the market, but it is most definitely a grand step up from my old 5900 XT, particularly for just under $100 (less than half MSRP).

Basically, this machine is better, faster, smarter, more expandable and unlikely to become obsolete before the London Olympics in 2012. (Not that I or the computer will be competing in said Olympics, but I like a good temporal landmark when such is available.)

I’ve gone another week without posting an Obscuriosity tune. But now that I’ve a machine back up and running, I should be back in the music-slinging business in no time.

Speaking of music-slinging … a new little game is being offered via Steam (Valve’s software distribution system) called Audio-Surf. The accompanying catch phrase is “Ride your music.” And you can. Basically, it is a racing game where you speed along in a little rocket on tracks designed to match the characteristics of songs you select. Before racing, you can pick any audio file from your local machine, or pick a favorite song from the Orange Box soundtrack. Along the way, you pick up colored blocks to make clusters. Bigger clusters of brighter colors result in higher scores. And that’s it. The demo is free to try, though limited to only five songs, but the full version of the game is a mere $9.95.

Another thing … the new Threadless shirts are out today, as they are every week. And with them this week arrives the new pricing scheme, now based on the number of inks employed. While I’m going to miss the $15-for-anything pricing, I understand that more ink costs more money. And frankly, I don’t care how many inks it takes, I can’t wait for Attack Of Literacy — detail at top of post — to make the transition from “submission” to “product.”

Wait … just tried updating this entry and it looks like my site is hanging on Technorati’s sidebar widget. Don’t tell me that old problem is back? I thought they’d fixed that issue, years ago. I don’t want to comment them out, but this is ridiculous.

Update: It’s not Technorati. It’s Lijit’s search widgetr. Damn shame, because I like them well enough. Maybe they’ll get their act together shortly.

Martyred saints are great and all, worthy of remembrance and veneration.

But maybe every leap year, we ought to lend February 14th to Rudolph Valentino, a veritable secular saint of fame. Here’s to the spoiled brat who became a busboy, then became a taxi dancer, then possibly a gigolo and maybe a petty thief, until finally (after briefly trying his hand at opera) he found the place that cinematic history had reserved for him. He went from being an undisciplined Italian kid with an unpronouncable name (Guglielmi), destined for life as a simple farmer, to becoming the very epitome of 1920s masculinity on the Silver Screen.

What’s that? You say your saints must suffer? Valentino did, certainly.

Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast — a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside . . .

Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.*

Sounds familiar, particularly if you’ve read the cover story of this week’s Rolling Stone. Just shift the pronouns gender-wise, replace “blushing inside” with “freaking out violently in shopping mall dressing room,” and we’re no longer talking about Valentino at all.

So this raises the question … could anyone ask their beloved to be their “Valentino” with a clear conscience? Or to bring it up to date, “Be My … Britney?”

On second thought, we’re probably better off letting the martyred saint keep the 14th. Far less depressing that way.

(Happy Valentine’s Day, all.)

(Photo from Dr Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans)

(You know, like that Beyoncé song …)

Once again, the inhabitants of our Gold Dome make us all so very proud to make our homes and livings in the great state of Georgia.

SB59. It doesn’t have a fancy little catch name yet, just the unwieldy filing title of “Social Networking Website; illegal for owner to allow minor to create/maintain profile; provide for penalties.” What a mouthful. Here’s a better name:

The “Stop Eating Our Children, Nasty Internet!” Act of 2008.

Now, the legal ramifications and utter inanity of this act has been tackled, pile-driven and smacked-down by other Georgia blogginators (Grift, Rusty, Pye, the gang at Peach Pundit).

So instead, I’m just going to look at this practically.

“… it shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor´s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page;”

What’s a protected computer?

“(3) ‘Protected computer’ means any computer that, at the time of an alleged violation of any provision of this article involving that computer, was located within the geographic boundaries of the State of Georgia.”

Got it. Okay. So how do you plan on enforcing this law?

Perhaps you are expecting social networks to be more self-policing than they already are. When a new user registers on Facebook or MySpace, should there be an additional question triggered by that user selecting “Georgia” as their home state?

Something along the lines of “If you live in Georgia, are you over the age of 18?”

Frankly, the culpability of the social network administrator would end right there. If a user answered “Yes” to being an adult, then that is really all the confirmation the administrator needs to know. If a minor lies and says “Yes,” well, then you have a lying kid on your hands who should’ve been raised better.

(Oh, sorry … I keep forgetting that we no longer expect parents to actually parent these days, particularly when their are nanny laws like this one to rear ‘em up in the traditions we hold so dear.)

However, it could be stipulated in an addendum to your bill that self-identification as an adult needs verifiable proof. From where would that proof come? Would you insist that the administrator ask for a credit card, a technique that has been employed historically to varying degrees of success and mistrust? Or would you ask that the administrator compromise the security of the applicant by asking for a copy of their driver’s license or some other form of identification equally ripe for identity theft?

Even these stipulations are for naught. Once it becomes apparent that an admittance of Georgia residence is a one-way ticket to interminable hassle, then the only recourse for an enterprising minor (or adult, actually, given the need for proof) would be to register as a resident of any of the other 49 states in our Union.

But, you are wondering, doesn’t the Internet know where users live? Can’t users be located IP address?

IP addresses are issued by Internet Service Providers to client computers on their network, thus allowing those clients access to the network-at-large. In other words, to be on the Internet, a client must have an IP address.

But you should realize that most IP addresses are not representative precisely of the geographical location of the addressed client computer. At best, the geographical location will coincide vaguely with the client’s locale. At worst, the location reported could be many states away.

Want an example? A visit to the IP Address Locator at MelissaData will allow you to enter your own IP address, then learn where in the world the Internet believes you to be. Right now, as I type this post, I am physically a few miles north of Atlanta.

According to my IP address, however, I’m in New Jersey.

Funny how that works.

Really.

Just been so busy. (Doing science, of course.)

We spent the weekend in New Jersey. For the first time, I arrived at Newark Airport for the sole purpose of visiting the state that hosts it, rather than just using it as an often cheaper access point for New York City or even Philadelphia.

(And trust me … if you’ve not figured this out yet for yourself, do your life a favor and just pretend that LaGuardia and J.F.K. don’t even exist. With the ready availability of New Jersey Transit from EWR right into the heart of Manhattan, why bother?)

We were in Edison, NJ, to bear witness to a wedding. Two of the nicest, smartest people we know, in fact. Their wedding was one of those things that was a perfect and pleasant inevitability from the moment we met them both. Sooner or later, they’d confirm publicly what they’d known privately from day one. Congratulations, Kevin and Jen.

(I took pictures.)

The return flight was harrowing, I must admit. While the flight up was aboard a rather comfortable MD88, the flight back was via a much smaller CRJ700. And if that wasn’t enough, right when we were boarding, it started to snow. Flurries at first, but these little flakes were soon joined by many, many others. So by the time we’d pulled away from the gate, it was an actual snow shower. This was made all the better by the swirling gusts of wind that sent the snow flying up from the tarmac and into the side of the plane, filling the window frames with clots of ice. The pilot came over the intercom and told us that we’d get some turbulence during the climb to 30K feet. He was not lying. Honestly, it felt like New Jersey had decided that Nikki and I were not to leave the Garden State. But after the roughest take-off I’ve ever known, we plained off and were relatively steady until we got back to Atlanta.

In other news … (more…)

Got a notice from Dreamhost that the web server that hosts my blog (that’s this blog, this one right here) is going to be undergoing a physical move from one data center to another on Friday night, from 10pm PST until 6am PST the next day. In all likelihood, this isn’t going to be a big deal and everything will be right back to normal by Saturday afternoon.

Of course, if the Prius (or Mini Cooper or Yugo or some other mode of vehicular transport) carrying my web server gets a flat tire or something more detrimental … well, we’ll just try not to think much about it and hope for the best.

(Particularly since it appears that this very same web server hosts not only my site, but also Alenda Lux, Miss Misc and the North Fulton Drama Club blog. So many eggs for one basket, eh?)

(Image: Detail from Salvadore Dali, “Sleep” (1937))

Nutter Butter Bites, Now With …, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

We’ve been paying closer attention to what we eat these days. As a result, even the ingredient list on a lowly bag of Nutter Butter Bites is worthwhile reading material.

Of course, I didn’t expect to find such … well … violent content.

(You’re probably going to want to click on through to Flickr to get the full picture and the handy note.)

Update: Turns out that I’m not that good of a botanist after all. Check the comments for enlightenment.