Author: matthew

The Matrix is a pretty cool movie. Now witness the coolest thing ever as you watch a favorite scene in ASCII!. That’s right, you too can enjoy ASCII animation. It helps to have your browser font size set very small, or have a high-resolution (1280×1024 or higher screen). Watch it. Love it. Live for the ASCII characters…

Important note: this is pretty big. It takes a while to load, even on fast connections.

Last night, in the latest edition of the grand tradition, four stalwart friends assembled at Denny’s in Murray, Utah (just a few minutes south of Salt Lake City) for a night of fun.

“I don’t know,” I mouthed around a jawful of green beans and half-masticated chicken, “we did the Hoo-Doggy last time, and it just seems dated, you know?” I adjusted my backside a bit on the not-too-soft, very narrow, short green booth bench next to an outside window under the dim lighting in the greasy-spoon.

“Yeah, I know, but what would we yell instead,” questioned intrepid Desert Star Heckling Society leader Ryan Rawlins as he chewed around a forkful of steak, “Oompa-Loompa or something?” His prodigiously wide frame seemed incongruous on the small bench opposite mine.

“Naw, that lacks panache,” I replied, as our two mortified wives glared at us, then began their own conversation. “Maybe Oh My Heck?”

“What about Good Golly?” Ryan suggested, the gleam in his eye indicating he thought he’d found just the thing.

“Oh, yeah, that sounds great!” I shouted enthusiastically, spraying a mouthful of cottage cheese across the table which drew a raised eyebrow from Ryan’s wife, Lynette. “and maybe we can shout ‘Bad Golly’ when the bad guy comes out!”

And thus began our third foray into the world of our newly-formed Desert Star Heckling Society. We began innocently enough one night, with a simple “Hoo-Doggie!” shouted at inappropriate times. The Desert Star players responded enthusiastically to this prodding, with zany one-liners and zingers coming with each inflammatory statement.

Tonight followed that excellent pattern.

“Good Golly!” we shouted in unison after arriving at the theater and the play, “Jekyll & Hyde”, began.

“Exactly!” shouted the actor onstage in response to this bit of audience participation.

Ryan began to get creative as the puns got worse from onstage. “Yes,” proclaimed the ugly Mr. Hyde, played with flair and ham by Jack Drayton, “you can’t hyde from me!”

“That’s just bad!” shouted Ryan next to me. The audience giggled around us.

“What, you think I write this crap?” responded Hyde with a glare and a grin from the stage. This time, the audience guffawed.

A few minutes later, Ryan interjected another one-liner at an appropriate moment when the audience should have been laughing, but wasn’t. “This,” Scott Holman as Dr. Jekyll retorted from behind the desk on stage, gesturing in Ryan’s direction, “this is what happens when cousins marry.” The audience roared!

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The art of good heckling has been refined as a tradition for thousands of years of human history. Unfortunately, it is all too often lowbrow and of ill-humor. Lines like “you suck” or “go home”, while perhaps appropriate at a sporting event, are entirely inappopriate at a a comedy theater. So, in that vein, allow me to share a few tips for good heckling at the Desert Star!

1. Be creative. Use original lines, and be sure to try to have good comedic timing. If a few lines fall flat, that’s OK, but if all of your lines fall flat all night, you’re definitely doing something wrong. If you draw laughs from your surrounding patrons, you are doing it right. If you instead draw frowns and angry stares, perhaps you’d better think up some original lines ahead of time and try them out on friends to see if they are funny. Or just hang up your heckling shoes and realize that you’re forever consigned to the role of laughing plebian, rather than witty repartee-master-of-the-heckle, eh?
2. Remember, you are a foil for the actors and actresses. Your goal is to get them to respond to you — draw their fire, and get them to use those lovely insults they have prepared in your direction. The audience should be laughing at what the actor or actress says — not what you say.
3. Be prepared to be insulted. Your breeding, your clothing, your hairstyle… If you don’t have a thick skin, you’re not going to survive the heckler’s life!
4. Do not try to heckle on your first trip, or perhaps even your third. Know the actors before attempting to engage in sparkling repartee with them.
5. Heckling is best used to involve an otherwise uninvolved audience. If the people around you aren’t responding to the puns, point them out, laugh as loudly as you can, and try to get them to respond.
6. In the vein of “know your actors”, here are some of the principal players at the Desert Star Playhouse as of late 2003 who are fun for hecklers to play with. The playhouse really seems to value an active audience, and readily involves them (willingly or unwillingly) in their antics. I figure heckling is fair play — particularly if you are on the front row 🙂
   

   Jack Drayton is an easy mark. He readily responds to audience heckling, usually to hilarious effect. He has an excellent sense of timing, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of funny, self-deprecating retorts for virtually any audience participation. If you must choose one Desert Star player to pick on, and you have a frail ego, he’s the guy. Unlike some other players, he nearly always responds to provocation, which makes him really fun to barb.

   Scott Holman is another easy mark, but only for the thicker-skinned potential hecklers. Scott, like Jack, readily responds to hecklers, but his responses (like the one above), tend to be far more oriented toward personal insults to audience members. Don’t get me wrong, they are still hilariously funny, but delicate egos need not apply.

   Kerstin Davis is also a regular DS performer, and an excellent choice for the budding heckler. She will often ignore the heckling if your timing is off, though, so it’s probably best to cut your teeth on Scott or Jack before trying out Kerstin.

If done properly, heckling can be an excellent way to make a night at the Desert Star even better. But fair warning, competition is fierce in this arena, and some nights you may only find room for one or two barbs. Never fear… if you attend enough, you will find a night when the audience is dead, and your heckling talents can really bring the best out in the performers to warm the audience up and get them rolling!

So, I’m in Day Two of my low-carbohydrate diet. Trying to make sure that I get multivitamins, and have a good mix of veggies to keep me healthy. I’m really trying to avoid the diabetes that seems to traditionally afflict my family, and from the diabetic community, this seems to be a really sure-fire winner. It involves lifelong diet changes, though, which may be hard, but as for the weight-loss and diabetes-avoidance aspects, I only have two words to say: Cool stuff!

One thing I’ve really missed, though, is potatoes. One poster on the alt.support.diet.low-carb newsgroup suggested using daikon for hash browns rather than potates. One also suggested that Turnips work really well, but you have to soak them in water plus a little cream for about 20 minutes before cooking them.

Going to have to try it! Apparently the Daikon is only 1 to 2 grams of carbs per serving, while turnips are around 3 to 4 carbs per serving. Time to get creative…

So, today, I turned in a few resumes. Called a friend in Great Britain (Ahh, IP telephony is so nice!) and asked if he knew of any jobs available, or people I could talk to looking for a job there. No dice, but I’ll be talking to him again soon I think, seeing if he remembered any names. Played Planetside for about 30 minutes… didn’t even go into the new expansion area. Dead world, nobody on this time of day (11 AM Mountain time).

Answered a lot of emails. Fixed emailing problem from my web site… it turns out that I hadn’t synched over the “sendmail” binary from my old system. Using a different version of postfix’s sendmail interface really made it unhappy, and every message bounced. Finally fixed the primary DNS on a couple of my domains. All DNS requests for those domains were being answered by the lowly little Pentium Pro 200 in my basement running OpenBSD. Uck.

Still hanging out in my pajamas, and it’s afternoon already. Oy, I need to take a bus into town with a written plan to hit a few businesses I’d like to work for. Hmm, now to write down the plan!

We scheduled a vacation to St. George for the weekend of Nov 15th. Kind of nice — we’re Worldmark owners, so it doesn’t cost us anything more than we already pay ($90 a quarter for maintenance fees). Pretty nice thing to be able to do once a year. Anyway, Christy’s friend’s wedding is on the 15th, so we’re driving down the night of the 13th to St. George (about a 5-6 hour trip), staying the night, hanging out in St. George the next day (Friday), then driving to the wedding Saturday morning, attending, and hitting Las Vegas for the rest of the day. Without wanting to spend any money, we’re going to rely on mostly the “free” entertainment in the area! We’ve done it before, and it’s pretty fun.

Then Saturday night, it’s back to St. George (about a 2-hour trip) to go to bed, pack up, and scramble out in a mad dash Sunday morning so Christy can make her church meetings at 1 PM. It wouldn’t be a big deal to miss it, but the kids are putting on some kind of presentation. Guess I’ll gussy myself up into my “Sunday Best” (Heh, black shirt, white tie, khaki pants) and head out so I can watch my children perform.

Umm, and that’s what’s going on in my life at the moment! I normally would have some witty quotes and stories from other sites, but nothing’s interesting me much at the moment.

Today marks my first day of “joblessness”. We have some money in the bank, and a decent severance package, so we’re nowhere near out of money… yet. But by the end of February, the savings will have dwindled, the unemployment wouldn’t be making up much slack, and we’d begin feeling the pinch pretty hard.

So why don’t you check out my excellent resume, available right here at barnson.org, and let me know if you happen to see something that suits my job history?

I’ve been hitting it pretty hard today. I put in several applications this morning, and I’m planning on making at least one “cold call” a day: that is, a call to an employer who has not advertised they are hiring for a position. I expect to be roundly rejected on these calls, and that’s OK! My goal is to build up my sales skills and networks of people who know my name, while also building my research skills in companies, and not necessarily to get a job that way.

The job boards are also pretty good, but for Utah, pretty lean as well. Monster boasted only two positions in Utah that fit my job description, and dice and hotjobs came up pretty lean as well. I haven’t hit Salt Lake City Help Wanted yet, nor The Deseret News. I’m not a big fan of classified ads, but you know what? They do work, but you often end up with a job that pays less because the cometition is so fierce. My former boss took a substantial pay cut, but he felt the pay rate was “fair” with a local hospital.

Fair? I don’t want fair, I want equitable and fun 🙂

Anyway, it’s exciting. And it’s nice that there’s not a ton of pressure, like I’d need to have landed the job yesterday or something just to make ends meet… living under that kind of pressure, every day one is unemployed, just stinks. I’ve been there before, and at the very least I feel like I have a solid month of full-time job-hunting before that is going to start preying on my mind. So for now, all the pressure is coming from inside of me to find that job right now, rather than from bills going unpaid and children wailing in hunger… 😉

I’m seriously considering the consulting scene right now. There seem to be a lot of 1-week to 6-month positions being advertised all over the country, and I’m a good fit for a large portion of them. That might satisfy my need for change and excitement, while also satisfying the wallet. The only concerning thing there, really, is the instability and travel requirements. My wife thrives on stability: if I can come home the same time, every day, she really loves that. Many of these consulting gigs would require a week or more away at a time, and I’d sure hate to put her through that kind of instability.

Then again, a paycheck with an uneven schedule is better than a regular schedule of never leaving the house because I have no work!

Anyway, wish me luck.

It’s days like today that make the rest of life worth it, you know?

The snow fell softly outside the window, gently covering our part of the world in a slushy blanket of white. Since we allowed our front yard to die this last summer in order to do a low-water yard, it melts faster on the part of our lawn that have turned to bare dirt.

The kids, of course, were simply beside themselves with misery.

Sara lay crying on the couch as I drifted downstairs from a comfy-snuggle session with my wife of nine years. I glanced her way. Her eyes implored me to ask her what was wrong. However, I knew exactly what was wrong, so I refused to do what her silent glare tried to tell me I must do. I smiled, nodded, and kept walking into the kitchen, returning a few glasses to the dishwasher.

Sara kept sobbing.

I walked past on my way back upstairs, paused, and said “Sara, I understand you’re upset about something. Your crying tells me you really don’t want to talk about it right now, and that’s OK. As soon as you feel like asking me, I’ll be happy to help however I can.” I returned upstairs, tucked my six-months-pregnant wife in for her afternoon nap, then again returned to the main floor of our three-floor townhome to do a bit more cleaning in the kitchen. Sara interrupted me on my trip.

“Dad, I’m so sad! Nobody can play today! Katherine isn’t home, Madison is busy, Emily’s mom is sick…” she began, then trailed off with an ‘entertain me, Dad!’ kind of look.

“Well, that’s pretty sad,” I responded. “Have you tried asking if any of them can play over here?”

She siezed on this idea and called.

Gator is changing their name to Claria (see A Gator By Any Other Name – [Slashdot] ). So, this means that a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking product will change from a somewhat reasonable moniker that implies a carnivorous, mud-dwelling reptile to a name that means… nothing. Sounds sort of like Claritin, like “oh, yeah, my computer is going to have freed-up nasal passages because this software is on it”.

What a load of horse manure.

I remember when Amway changed their operating name from Amway to Quixtar. Same company, but they had a bad reputation with one name, so they changed the name they operated under (note: it’s still Amway under the hood).

A name is who you are, and in the real world, for real people, it’s an intense decision to figure out if you want to change your name. It’s often in response to some trauma, and it is both an intensely personal and difficult decision.

There are at least two classes of people for whom operating under a different name is their modus operandi; these individuals find it easy to adopt another personality to avoid their more shadowy endeavors.

Career criminals. And superheroes in comic books.

Gator has a history of being obnoxious spyware/adware that tells them where you’re going and what you’re doing on your computer. They sell this information to others. While this isn’t illegal, I consider it completely unethical. Yet, because some user clicked “OK” at some point to an EULA they didn’t read, Gator/Claria considers it their privilege to indiscriminately rape and harvest that user’s private information for sale to the highest bidder.

I guess in this case, corporations that change their name easily and individuals that change their name easily have a lot in common. And Gator/Claria sure as hell is no superhero.

I received a note from my buddy, Sam Graber, regarding my comment to this post where I described the difference between ethics and morals from my point of view.

I’ve received some feedback from other people on the topic as well via email, researched it a bit myself, and I thought I’d share with you what I’ve found.

There’s a great discussion over at wikipedia.org about this very thing. And, from what I’ve read elsewhere, it seems as if people are all over the map regarding ethics and morals, particularly on their semantics.

There are many “loaded” words in the English Language; here are just a few I run across weekly, at least:

• cult: most often used when discussing a religion one doesn’t like, this word also has specific meaning to many individuals for only certain patterns of behavior.
• geek: this term had a terribly negative connotation when I was a child. These days, even marketing wonks often refer to themselves as geeks.
• evolution: this is a particularly touchy one. If you’re talking to someone who supports evolution, they are generally referring to natural and/or artificial selection, the proven fact that reinforcement of certain genetic traits happens in response to natural or artificial selective pressures. However, if you are talking to a Creationist, often they are referring to abiogenesis, or the creation of life from non-life.

So, back to ethics versus morals. The two words are not necessarily synonymous, and because of the historical impreciseness of common usage, it’s helpful to distinguish what makes one different from the other (thanks to the Wikipedia entry for some of this information):

• The root word for Ethical is the Greek “ethos,” meaning “character.”
• The root word for Moral is Latin “mos,” meaning “custom.”

So, from where I sit, it appears that ethics are derived from your individual character, while morals are derived from custom, or tradition. I’ll broadly define “custom” here to include commandments, religious tenets, and society’s laws. As a study for myself in what ethical but amoral behavior entails, let’s take a look at the Ten Commandments. There are several variations on The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament of the Bible, but for brevity I’ll choose the shortened forms as are commonly found on wall-plaques and such.

1. You will have no other gods before God.  This seems pretty straightforward custom (morals) to me, rather than anything to do with one’s character. Also rather self-serving, and difficult to enforce, since even Christians cannot seem to agree on who their God is.
2. EDIT by matthew: This is the one I missed!  You will not worship any “graven images”, or idols. This seems to have little ethical basis (by my perspective on ethics for the purpose of this essay), besides perhaps avoiding undue emphasis on materialism. Some today redefine this as a caution to avoid over-emphasis on the “worship”, or veneration, of any material thing. They speak of the metaphorical “bowing down” to money, sports, power, or any other pursuit that keeps one’s focus off Deity. Does this derive from custom (morality) or ethics? I have difficulty seeing how an edict against making idols could have a purely ethical basis, but the more general principal of avoiding obsession with material goods can very well be an ethical principal.
3. You will not take the name of God in vain. Now, this is an interesting one that I think can be approached from two angles. If you were to take the name of someone’s god in vain, aren’t there social repercussions of so doing? Could one form an ethical rule in one’s character here? “I would rather not have someone insult my concept of God, therefore I will not insult their concept of God.” Or, for those of us without a concept of God, “I would not wish my beliefs insulted, possibly causing violent behavior, therefore I will not insult someone else’s beliefs.” This seems to be a pretty good Golden-Rule based moral AND ethical commandment.
4. You will keep the Sabbath Day holy. I’m undecided on this one. Ethically, taking a day off once per week is probably a sound choice for one’s mental and physical health. If God is specifically saying Saturday is the Sabbath, at that point it seems to become custom rather than character-based. This is quite a semantic difficulty, as well, because Christians tend to celebrate the Sabbath on Sunday, while Jews and Eastern Orthodox (if I recall correctly) celebrate it on the traditional Friday evening through Saturday evening.
   I remember fondly Sam’s mother preparing for Jewish festivals on Friday nights by singing some hymns I couldn’t understand, and lighting a candle before we broke bread together. It was always in the evening, and her custom brings a smile to my face to this day.

5. Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long on the earth.  This seems to be a very straightforward threat, to me, with some question as to what is meant by the term “honor”. If it means “obey”, I see little ethical or logical reason to follow this commandment. Obeying someone else’s commands, rather than your own conscience, is what leads regularly to personal ruin. If, instead, “honor” means to speak respectfully of them, and give their opinions weight, it may be wise council with an ethical basis: treating them as you would wish to be treated.
6. You will not murder other human beings.  I intentionally manipulated the wording here. Taken at face value, “thou shalt not kill” would be an impossible commandment to live fully, because we kill microorganisms constantly in our bodies, and rely on plants and animals for food. However, the proscription against murdering fellow human beings seems an ethically sound principle: I do not murder, because I do not wish to be murdered.

   There’s so much more, though, that each character has to work out for himself. War. Self-Defense. Pre-Emptive strike. Abortion. Defense of others. Accident. Famine. Plague. Many of these are preventable. Our custom in this country is largely to take care of our own through social programs, and we consider this moral behavior. Yet we leave millions to die from HIV and related infections in Africa. Do we not help because we have insufficient means to do so? Because we don’t care? Because some priorities are higher than others? Is there an ethical difference between potential life, and life?

   The exciting thing for me is that we’re left to define these areas for ourselves. And on some of these tougher ethical questions, as evidenced by the pro-life/pro-choice debate of the last half-century, it’s a hairy business, indeed.

   Life and death seems, from my point of view, a natural phenomenon. We kill millions of our own body cells in a year. Only one sperm gets through to an egg, leaving the rest to die. Any line in the sand regarding this question is, of necessity, an arbitrary measure — a custom, a moral. Ethics doesn’t seem to have much to say on the questions of life and death.

7. You will not commit adultery.  This seems to be a commandment with both moral and ethical ramifications. If one has pledged fidelity to a partner, one is obligated to honor that contract — on one’s character. If one has not done so, then if you don’t take the moral hard line, you must examine the ramifications of the action. Will it hurt someone else? Is it consensual? Will it result in unwanted pregnancy? Sexually transmitted diseases? Trauma to those around you due to moral considerations?

   From my own sense of personal ethics, it seems as if this custom evolved largely due to the questions above. Now that it is within the power of individuals to minimize the risk, is it worth the risk for them? As for me, I take my marriage contract very seriously, and have no wish to breach it.

8. You will not steal.  Ethical. Straightforward, flowing from a Golden-Rule basis.
9. You will not lie (bear false witness).  Once again, ethical.
10. You will not covet.  This one is kind of weird on context. The Old Testament writers showed their predispositions by including a wife in with ox, ass, and other possessions — a position I think is not ethical at all, but was customary at the time. Another way to put it might be “You will not ‘keep up with the Joneses'” — which has a sound ethical basis in living within one’s means to avoid difficulty in life.

Ultimately, it sure looks to me like the Ten Commandments was a bit hit-and-miss on ethical questions. If it were narrowed down to six or so, it might be a better “ethical primer”. What do you think?

Quick disclaimer: I wrote this on my lunch break today. It’s not been proofread, really, so I reserve the right to change what I said if something came out wrong!

There are a few news tidbits, housekeeping, etc. regarding barnson.org. Read on if you’re interested in technical esotera…

1. Move to a new server. Yep, I’m relocating again. This time, it’s to a faster machine with more hard disk space, so it should be all good.
2. Turned off anonymous posting. Due to a few idiot spammers posting advertisements anonymously to many weblogs, I set it up so that although you can post a comment anonymously, it gets sent to a submission queue — meaning that if it doesn’t pass my review, it doesn’t show up. This means I end up seeing the ads so you don’t have to! I’m scared for what this means for the future of weblogging, though, that these robots go out and try to post to a bunch of weblogs to pump the Google rating of porn sites. But, as far as you’re concerned, it means if you post while anon, rather than using your login, you’ll have to wait until the next time I log on to see the comment. Spammers suck.
3. Enabled the “scheduler” module. This entry, for instance, is scheduled to show up tomorrow (Tuesday), although I’ve written it today (Monday). This allows people to say when they want their post to show up, and when (if) they want it retracted. It’s not perfect, but it is serviceable and beats me changing dates on things to a few hours in the future when I want it to show up tomorrow morning rather than now… Anyway, this one probably won’t affect you, but if you notice posts going up, like, while I’m on vacation or something, you’ll know what I’ve done 🙂 Drupal rocks for weblogging.

That’s about it. Thanks for visiting!

After a brief downtime due to a move, if you’re seeing this blog entry, barnson.org is back up again. Thanks for your patience!