Dale Miller

Smurfin’
Originally uploaded by Dale Miller.

In case anyone wonders what happened to every tube of blue Halloween makeup in town…

I spent Saturday preparing the house for the party (probably more on the party later), and preparing a bit for Sunday’s kickball game. After the party I didn’t get to bed until around 2:30am (post time change). Then it was up early on Sunday to make Smurf caps and custom t-shirts for the umpires. We had to get to Hindman park early to deck the entire team out as Smurfs. After mixing up lots of blue and white makeup to get the right blue, I then proceeded to paint my entire body (with minor exceptions) blue. We lost the final game to the Skeet Throwers. Their team did an entire Michael Jackson Thriller routine to start the game. It was inspired.

Since there’s no good way to get makeup off at Hindman, I drove home still wearing it. I suspect the folks at Sonic on Cantrell are used to see me driving up in odd clothing, so that’s where I had a quick dinner. By the time I got home I could barely get out of the car. I climbed in the shower, washed off as much blue as I could, and hit the bed. Apparently the easy-to-wash-off makeup combined with my underarm deodorant becomes blue dye. It washed off easily everywhere but there. It’s a very strange visual accent. It’s a good thing I had already scheduled today off as vacation, because I don’t think I would have made it in to work today anyway.

So, kickball season is over. What am I going to do with myself on Sunday afternoons?

I had three conversations yesterday that made me go “huh?”.

1. My phone rings…
me: Hello
voice: Hi, my name is Angela. You don’t know me, but I heard you were having a party on Saturday and I wondered if I could come.
me: Sure. Do you need directions?
voice: No. I have a copy of the map.
me: Okay. See you tomorrow night.
voice: I’m looking forward to meeting you. Bye.

I don’t mind random women inviting themselves to my house. I just wonder who it is.

2. I’m standing in the bathroom brushing my hair after my shower…
voice (at a high volume): Dustin!
I was rather startled, wondering just what the H*** was going on. I wrapped a towel around myself and walked into the front room. There is a kid (about 12-14 I would guess) with his head inside my front door.
me: May I help you?
kid: Is this where Dustin (some last name I forgot) lives?
me: No. What address are you looking for?
kid: I don’t know. He just said he was around here and there was a dead-end sign in front of the house.
me: Well, it isn’t this one.
kid: Okay. Sorry. [he leaves and climbs back into the passenger seat of a white car, which drives away]

What’s wrong with ringing the doorbell???

3. I’m picking up a prescription at the Kroger pharmacy.
pharmacist: Are you read for the kickball game on Sunday?
me [slightly taken aback]: Mostly. Are you on a team?
pharmacist: Yep. Kelly (I think that was the name) [indicating a co-worker] play for the Skeet Throwers (the team we’re playing tomorrow). What’s the theme this time?
me: Do you really think I would tell?
pharmacist: No. But we have some plans ourselves.
me: I’m sure it will be a good game.
pharmacist: No doubt. See you Sunday.

Out of the population of Little Rock, how likely is it that I would run into a member of the opposing team who recognized me?

I live in rural Arkansas. Yes, it was my choice to live here, and I enjoy the peace, quiet, and darkness, but sometimes I really dislike some of the things that come with living in Perry County.

A few days ago, I received a postcard in the mail from the Bill Seliskar (state representative), campaign. In it, he provided his stance on several issues, and stated that his opponent, Johnny Hoyt, hadn’t provided answers. The implication was, of course, that Hoyt held opposing views. The issues were:

So from this list, I knew nothing about Hoyt, but was ready to vote for him just because I disagree with what Seliskar stands for. (Actually, the fourth point is debatable. “enhanced” penalties probably mean something different to me than to him. I’m thinking I could agree with castration.)

The problem is, a day or so later I got another postcard, this time from the Hoyt campaign. In it he states his positions as:

Johnny Hoyt believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

Johnny Hoyt opposes same-sex adoption.

Johnny Hoyt is pro-life.

Johnny Hoyt supports student-led voluntary prayer in Public Schools.

So, now I know where Hoyt stands, and cannot, in good faith, vote for either of them. I hate having no good choice in elected officials.

At least in the race for governor we have one reasonable candidate. Though I doubt Roderick Bryan stands any chance, he has my vote.

Yesterday — good and bad.

The good. The kickball games were tremendously fun. For the first game the entire team dressed as members of KISS. At least we had the face paint, some of the costumes (mine, for instance) were somewhat contrived, but at least black and silver. We had a great time, won the game on points and came away the winner on spirit. That meant we moved on to the semi-finals. Since we can’t re-use an idea, we each dressed up as a parody of a member of another team. This idea also went over quite well. Again we won on both points and spirit. I suspect that throwing out chocolate and giving away high-octane punch didn’t hurt matters.

The bad. While we were playing the second game, someone took my laptop out of my car. This did not make my day at all. Fortunately, I don’t think I had any information on it that was either irreplaceable or sensitive. I’m in the middle of changing every password I have, just in case. That’s a pain in itself.

Oh, also good — I have found a couple of the kickball lasses who become extremely cuddly when intoxicated. They both have boyfriends, but they weren’t around, and I’ll always accept a nice hug or kiss.

Today I spend half my time getting the rest of the travel arrangements made for the classes I’m taking. I still haven’t cancelled the hotel in Chicago, but I can do that tomorrow. Columbus might be more pleasant in November in any case. I’m looking more forward to Tampa in December and January.

Oh, kickball pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/domiller

If I haven’t already invited you, come to my Halloween party!

Kind of a strange day today. The weather played a part in that. My ballet class was only about half-populated, which I suspect is simply because people didn’t want to get out of bed. I’ll admit, when it’s cold and wet outside that occurs to me also.

Work was, well, work. I didn’t accomplish anything in particular, but I managed to be sufficiently productive that I didn’t feel that the day was a waste. I scheduled the second pair of classes for the Sun Identity Manager, and made travel arrangements for the second and third classes this afternoon. Then, just as I was leaving the office, I received an email telling me that the first class was cancelled. Arrrrgh. So tomorrow I get to call Sun and see if I can schedule it sometime before I’m scheduled to take the second one. That’s annoying. I also will have to cancel hotel reservations and figure out what I have to do with the plane tickets. I realize that they want to have sufficient students to make a profit, but I really think that once I have paid for a class they shouldn’t be able to cancel it. Alternately, Sun could handle all the travel arrangements and if they cancel the class, it would be up to them to re-arrange everything. That’s not going to happen, but I can dream.

Apparently my kitties missed me today. Ashley is snuggling me even as I type.

Yesterday was moderately exciting at work. We have three air conditioners for the computer room (two 15-ton and one 12-ton). Any two of them are sufficient to keep the room cool. One has been out of service for a couple of weeks waiting on parts. On Monday night, the second unit decided to go haywire and start heating rather than cooling. This was not a good thing. It was caught quickly and shut off, but one unit isn’t enough to keep the room cool. By mid-morning yesterday the room was nearing 90 degrees. Computers don’t like it hot. We ended shutting down most of the systems in the room (including the campus email system, the administrative systems for student, financial aid, payroll, etc., and several others just to try and keep the temperature from climbing any more. Physical plant managed some “creative engineering” on the malfunctioning unit to trick it into cooling when it wants to heat (and cooling when it wants to cool) and brought the temperature back into line by about noon. Then we had the fun job of starting everything back up. Fortunately, nothing seems to have been damaged by the heat, but I suspect we shortened component life in several systems.

After work I went to Grady’s for a kickball planning meeting. Team Trippin’ Balls is in the playoffs this weekend, and we want to make a good showing. We have plans for the possible two games on Sunday, and I think we have a good chance at pulling off at least one “win”. If we were actually decent at playing kickball we might even do better. :)

This is mostly a placeholder post. When it appears on MySpace then I will know that my automatic LiveJournal -> MySpace mirroring is working.

I’ve started actually checking my MySpace account, since I have met someone whose journal I want to read, and she uses MySpace. Since MySpace has a blogging feature, it seemed reasonable to have a copy of (at least new) journal entries there as well as LiveJournal. I like using desktop clients for posting rather than web pages, so I went in search of something that would post to both LiveJournal and MySpace. I found Crosspost, which seemed to be close to what I wanted. It was a very simplistic UI, without the nice features I have come to expect from my LiveJournal client (much less Semagic), but it seemed to have the minimum necessary features. So I downloaded it, installed it, configured it, and tried my first post. If went perfectly to LiveJournal (with an annoying “posted by” stamp at the bottom), but nothing at all at MySpace. No error message, it just didn’t work.

So, back to my search. I didn’t find anything else that looked remotely promising, so it was time to start writing some Perl. The WWW::MySpace module looked promising, but it didn’t handle blogs (and was fairly difficult to build in any case — too many dependencies). All right, the next step was to look for a MySpace API. This was the point that I almost gave up on MySpace. It seems that not only do they not have a published API, they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for programmers who want to interface with their pages.

I took this as a challenge. I sat down last night and wrote enough code to get me in the right direction and decide that I could finish it. I finished the posting program this evening. I threw a test post at it and it worked beautifully — almost. The posting time was two hours off! That’s just silly. I never found anything to adjust that, so I coded around it. Subtracting two hours from a timestamp in the form “2006-10-17 18:15:23″ is not an enjoyable task. It’s fine unless the time is between midnight and 2AM, then it’s on the previous day. What if that puts it to the previous month?, etc. I really should just convert the whole thing to an epoch time, subtract 7200 seconds and convert it back. I think I’ll save that for the next version.

Then, I dug out a program I wrote a year or so back to make copies of all my LiveJournal postings (using their well-documented API) and tweaked it a bit to give my output files in a more parseable manner. I then fed July through October’s entries into my program, and, wonder of wonders, they actually appeared in MySpace.

The only thing left to do is to set up a cron job to check LiveJournal on a regular basis and push new entries to MySpace. That sounds like a project for tomorrow night.