Posts filed under 'Social'
The Project Chanology phenomenon is pretty interesting on a number of levels. While primarily being the never-ending source of lulz that Anonymous never fails to deliver, it shows itself as being something potentially much greater.The organization of the Protest/’war’ on the Church of Scientology appears to be a non-centrally directed protest movement. I don’t have the time to setup the Tor and irc bounce proxies needed to safely join the IRC channels, but everything on the web points to Anonymous truly functioning as a collective.The planned 2/10/2008 street protests will either definitely take it to a new level, or in their potential failure, will turn this fascinating phenomenon into just another Internet joke, attempting to get the lulz. I’m following this story intently - I wonder if the late 200x’s will be like the 70’s, with a new generation of kids coming of age and starting to protest against a bunch of messed up crap…
February 1st, 2008
Makin breakfast
Will and Rachel came over for breakfast this morning, and I took some pictures.
As you might notice, we eat breakfast at noonish in my household 
September 23rd, 2007
This morning, I launched a new version of the HR Geeks website. I’m proud to say we now have the only non-hideous, non-1995 website of any geek group in Hampton Roads
The site is running WordPress, with a highly hacked up GridFocus theme. After much debate, and a not-insignificant-delay, I determined that I didn’t have the free time or energy to maintain the site using a custom CMS, or even a pre-built ‘framework’ like Django. The big scare over a ‘public’ CMS, like WP, is security issues. Luckily for me, I use WP on a number of other blogs, so keeping track of upgrades and the like is fairly easy to do.
As part of the migration, we also dumped the old PHP Webcalendar system, and moved to a public Google Calendar for all event tracking. PHP Webcal was a very non-elegant system to use, while Google Calendar provides a superset of the features, with nearly 0 effort on our part. There is even the possibility that we could grant access to the public calendar for certain groups to modify their own dates. I’m not sure how access controlled Gcal is currently (I know you can have multiple editors, but is it free for all for them?), but it’s worth a look. Having iCal support, now that I’m using OSX full time, is incredibly useful. The HTML output is substantially prettier than any of the other PHP web calendar’s that I’ve seen so far.
September 19th, 2007
This weekend was our 1st anniversary, and strangely, the first weekend we’ve spent almost entirely together in months! Mary got her earings that she’s always been wanting, and I got gift certificates to all my favorite restruants for A Taste of Ghent! I also got a new bike! I called Matt and asked for info on the best place to buy a bike, knowing he had spent a ton of time researching his recent bike purchase. Apparently, we’re both suckers for the exact same sales pitch, down to getting a bike with ‘replaceable parts’. So, I ended up buying the small version of the exact same GT 2.0 that Matt got. That was a little embarassing!
Desperate to try my expensive new toy out, I called everybody I knew with a bike, and we settled on the Virginia Beach Boardwalk as a good first trip. This is the 2nd time in 6+ years I’d been on a real bicycle, so I didn’t want to jump right into log hopping, ravine falling, gear busting fun just yet. Which is a good thing - about 2/3rd’s through the trip, I had to stop to adjust my seat (cause it slid all the way down!), and when I got off my bike, it was like the world got whitewashed. I felt super dizzy and light headed. The exact same thing happened last time I road for a while, so I dunno what’s going on. I can ride on the stationary spin bike @ the YMCA for an hour at nearly full tilt, but here I was, 30 minutes in and dying on the boardwalk.
Me,recovering from almost dying at the VB Boardwalk.
While I rested and tried not to pass out, everybody went down to the water and had fun, so I didnt feel super bad - they needed a break too 
I was able to make it without feeling bad, the rest of the way back to the Hilton, coming in at about 5-6 miles for my total trip. My seat only fell down 2 more times!
I liked the ride, despite the pain, and would like to do it again in the future. I just need to get in shape so I’m not always forcing everybody to stop and wait for me to not die 
I guess that sort of comes with riding more!
July 23rd, 2007
I’m not quite sure I liked it - I don’t remember much. I was too distracted by the Lockheed-Martin product placement in the Die Hard trailer that preceded the movie. An F22F-35? Flying through interstate overpasses? Seriously? Thank god this is going to be the last Die Hard movie.
** SPOILER WARNING **
Watching 28 Weeks Later was a little wierd, what with the US Army shooting all the British civilians. The show of force ‘guarding’ the people going into the city was a bit much as well - especially to just let the 2 little kids skip right on through the perimeter. I wonder exactly what kind of statement this movie was trying to make - I’ve not made up my mind if it was just a crappy plot line zombie fest, or if the writer was trying to pull some kind of Micheal Moore ‘FU’ stunt.
But damn, Bruce Willis and an F22F-35! I wonder what Lockheed-Martin paid in product placement for that…
Overall, I think I did like the movie, if for no other reason than the helicopter pilot wrecked house.
May 11th, 2007
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