…and one more small errata for python-popt to fix an
dep error introduced into the recent rpm errata.

The amount of pain that silly little commandline parsing
stuff has caused me is great. why oh why did I
just not stick to getopt…

http://www.loopersdelight.com/LDarchive/200203/msg01111.html

For some reason, that made me happy.

Escape From the planet of up2date errata…

the new new up2date errata…

aieee. Knock on wood. Cross fingers. Swing a dead rabbit
over your head. Throw salt over your shoulder at a dead horse.
Button down and roll up the sleeves. Damn the yankee torpedoes.

grumble, logn day, grumble. And all my fault too. Awesome.

At least when I was home UPS showed up with the korg ms2000
I bought off ebay two months ago. About friggin time. It’s not
really for me, was just in a position to buy it for a friend.

But I managed to waste an hour of barely awake time fiddling
with it. Fun. Very mad scientist.

new up2date/rhn_register errata out, finally…

Wasted the weekend away. Oh well.

Did manage to pick up some books and cd’s.

mini reviews attached…

I want to hear adrian blather some more about books and cds

I’ve been thinking about trying to do some sort of
noise/experimental/improv/ambient/glitch/weird/annoying/etc
project just for kicks, and as an reason to do
something not involving computers (much)

So in my head, I’ve kind of decided that if
I come up with a interesting enough name I might
actually try to record some crap and pretend
I’m a muscian. Maybe even see if there are
any “weird music nights” in the area that would
indulge me to try it live.

I’m not really much for just starting these kind of
things, so the name theory is just kind of a hedge
to doing it at all. Trust me, in my brain, that makes
sense for some reason.

So far my favorite name is “Macalister Drywall”.
I’m not sure why. Other possibilities include
“engine factory” . I’ve kind of gotten out
of my teenage metal phase where everything
had to be named after a demon or a medical
condition. Though, “Gaping Thoracic Wound”
still appeals to me for some reason ;-> . “Rocket
Surgeon” was another idea, but it seems to be taken.

Perhaps I can find a way to use my favorite mixed
metaphor ever “Dont change dead horses in mid stream”.
Or perhaps put the subdivision name generator
to work. Would you go see “Country Hollows” or
“Pine River Meadows ”

I seem to be rather verbose today…

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about school busses this morning.

The fact that they havent really changed much in about 40 years certainly
makes them iconic. It seems like it would be interesting just to use a stock
school bus as part of an art installation. Or if you want to go even further,
load up a crowd of 60 or so and go for a ride. If you could drop people off
near there houses, it would be even better.

School busses seem to have an interesting property of being
sort of a portal between institutions. The goal is to get you away from
one institution (school) and to another (home) (or vice versa). The
“rules” of school bus life are kind of an odd mix between the two.
Lots of transitional behaviour is kind of enforced by a ride on a schoolbus.
Why was the ride into school always so much calmer than the ride home?

The act of picking someone up or dropping them off at or near
their house in the presence of others is another aspect of that
transition role of busses. Without the schoolbus, most children would
have no idea how 99% of their classmates lived. Where I grew up,
it wasnt uncommon for a schoolbus to drop off a few kids in a country
club, then drive a few more miles and drop off a few kids in a trailer park.

And talking about institutions, the whole act of attempting to avoid
“missing the bus” has a pretty strong “hidden curriculum” vibe
to it.

I also find it interesting that for many people in their youth, it was quite
possible that school busses were the harshest enviroment they were
subjected to. Both enviromentally (loud, full of vibrations, often
extremely hot or cold, etc) and socially (mixed age groups,
implied competion for resources (seating), and a almost
“lawless” vibe at times). So putting someone on a school bus
is pretty likely to trigger some long forgetten memories of that
harshness. I suspect most adults have either been in, or witnessed
a fight on a school bus as a child.

And from a engineering/design standpoint school busses intrique me.
It always seems odd to me when things do not change. Especially considering
the school bus design is hardly “perfect”. They are prone to catastrophic
fires, they oftend dont have seatbelts, most are poorly heated/cooled, etc.
Granted, there have been some band-aid style attempts to fix some of
these issues, but the general design of the school bus is still the same.

And lets not even get stared with the “short bus”

Been browsing the web recently with the “show tables” style sheet from a
bookmarklet at http://traumwind.tierpfad.de/blog/?detail=2002-02-20_15-07.
enforced as a user style sheet.

Basically, It just shows you all the table borders as thin red lines. For some
reason, I find that interesting. It reminds me once again that I’m glad I
don’t have to design web pages.

So, todays bit of levity…

A couple of years ago I wrote a silly little perl script to generate
random subdivion names (inspired by driving in cary,nc too often).

It can be found at http://adrian.gimp.org/cgib-in/sub.cgi

Today, I get an email from a real estate developer who is apparently using it
to name real subdivisions. Bizzare.

Then someone points me to this google cached page. Apparently
a real real estate magazine pointing to it.

A little more googling finds a
page about Snow Crash, the Neal Stephenson book. For a reason I dont quite
understand, it contains a link to the subdivision name generator. Weird.