buffbikedude

08:21 pm: On the ousting of Gravel...
I'm quite certain that NBC didn't mean well when they ousted Mike Gravel from tomorrow's debate, with their new and arbitrary requirements for participants. I think it's pretty clear they want a lobbyist-funded, "mainstream" candidate to win.

However, they might have helped in two ways. First, it's fueled the fire of Gravel and his strongest supporters and they will try even harder to make a difference and get support for Gravel's policies. Second, it may have made a good number of people who were sitting on the fence, trying to decide whether their time and effort would be best spent supporting Gravel or Kucinich, decide to throw their weight behind Kucinich. I am one such person.

I'm excited for the Kucinich campaign. I think Kucinich has a powerful message -- Strength Through Peace. I think he's right on almost all of the issues. Two that I agree strongly with are creating a Department Of Peace and trying to put forth programs to prevent disease instead of just treat it.

Here's to hoping that Kucinich becomes the clear leader of the democratic candidates who really try to move forward the will of the American people and that his campaign reaches new heights!

12:56 pm: LOLspeak Haiku

plz dun luk mai kar
kar iz nt a prtty site
teh trunk clozez nt

12:59 am: The landscape of the suburban night has much weird beauty if you just look.

-- Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash

Boy, is that true tonight in Fountain Hills. I wanted to listen to some music but realized that the CD I wanted to listen to was at work, a mile from where I live. Fountain Hills is a dark city. In much of the town there are no streetlights. The only streetlights on the way to my work are traffic lights.

I grabbed my flashlight and walked to work. It was a peaceful night. A few cars came up and down the road. When they did, I turned my flashlight on. When there were no cars in sight, I left it off. I got to work, grabbed my CD case, checked a couple of websites, and walked back.

Everything was perfectly normal, until I walked up the quarter-mile long dead-end street that leads into the condo complex where I live. As I came around the bend I saw several vehicles without many lights turned on. I looked at them closely and saw that at least two out of three of them were police vehicles. Fountain Hills doesn't have its own police department. They contract their police services out to the Maricopa County Sheriff Department. Not sure all of the vehicles were sheriff vehicles, but it is likely.

I didn't want to walk right past them, so I took a shortcut through some other people's condo units. As I changed directions, I flipped the switch on my cheap flashlight. It broke. Not sure whether it was the switch or the bulb, but it wouldn't turn back on.

At the same time my flashlight broke and I was noticing it, I saw a motorcycle come upon the three vehicles. On closer examination, I saw that it was a police motorcycle, like the one I saw last night when Scott and I went to Denny's. It paused there for a few seconds, went to the end of the street, and finally back to the end of the curve in the road where the other police vehicles sat.

I got to my place and went inside. After sitting down for a few minutes, I heard a loud noise. I looked outside and saw a police helicopter with a searchlight turned on. It's been at least thirty minutes and I can still hear it. It has been quieter over the last 10 minutes. Probably expanded its search.

About a week ago I saw five emergency vehicles go past the place where I work. On rare occasions when things like this happen in a place like Fountain Hills, I'm reminded that even the quietest towns have odd things happen in them occasionally. I never found out what happened with the five police vehicles, and I don't expect to find out what happened tonight. News doesn't get around very quickly in a bedroom community like Fountain Hills.

12:12 am: I wanted to go to Cape Cod while I was in Boston
...but it wasn't on the subway map.

12:27 am: Writing again
I installed LogJam on my Linux box and I'm going to start posting again. Why? I want to start writing about travel experiences, things I have learned in life, and stories and poems I enjoy.

03:00 pm: Funny series of blog comments not related to the original post
Hi,

I'm having troubles deploying CMP entitybean to websphere application server 5.0.

Everytime I try to generate deployment code using that gay-ish Application Assembly Tool, I get this error message:

Could not find type map for attribute 'denomination'. (No type mapping defined for java.math.BigDecimal to DOUBLE)

What should I do?

Posted by WebSphereHater (202.155.37.130) on August 02, 2004 at 06:18 AM EDT #
And please be hurry. I have to fix this as soon as possible. Customers are standing in line, tellers can not process transaction because of this problem. The bank is loosing many transaction opportunities today.

What should I do?

Posted by WebSphereHater (202.155.37.130) on August 02, 2004 at 06:23 AM EDT #
Hi Y'all!? Are you deaf? Can't you be more agile? Answer my question... or suck my dick.

Posted by WebSphereHater (202.155.37.130) on August 02, 2004 at 06:39 AM EDT #

01:54 am: Denny's
Tonight, after watching TV with some buds, I decided to head over to Denny's with the intention of finally satisfying my month-long on-and-off craving for a Grasshopper Pie Shake.

I drove there, and arrived at about 1:00AM. The parking lot was half full. I walked in and waited to be seated. I'm sure anyone reading this knows what Denny's is like in the early morning. The guy who seated me was vaccuming at the time, and he pointed to my seat, under which he proceeded to vaccum before I sat down. I saw that he was having a hard time with it and commented that the vaccum was small, and he agreed, "Yeah, and it's wireless." I thought that this was interesting--when I was younger just about everyone would have called that "cordless".

As I sat down, there was a strong sense of nostalgia for my freshman year when I would go to Denny's after midnight with friends. I saw young college students sitting in a group talking. I saw the employees do their work in a way that is really only done at Denny's, casual but caring. Unfortunately, this nostalgia started to break down as I was having trouble finding the Grasshopper Pie Shake on the menus. During all of this, however, a friend from the previous year saw me on his way to the door for a smoke, and wandered over. He looked very tired (as did I, I'm sure), and came and half-sat on the booth bench across from me. We talked (mostly about how late it was), and I kept searching the menus for a Grasshopper Pie Shake. I told him about this, and after a while he left. I was still waiting for my waitress, wanting to ask if they still had it, but now also looking for other options.

Eventually she came by, and I asked if they had Grasshopper Pie Shakes. She said no, but I'm the second person who asked that. I thought about it for a brief moment and decided that the only thing I wanted was a Grasshopper Pie Shake, so I told her that I had a very specific craving and nothing else really seemed appetizing. Then I said "Thank You", grabbed my coat, and walked out the door.

Once outside, I talked to my friend who was smoking. I had just learned that he changed his major from Chemistry to Visual Communications. I asked him when he planned to graduate, and he said he didn't know but he was transferring to University of Colorado at Denver after this semester. I happen to be leaving NAU (graduating) at the end of this semester, and am fed up with it, so I said, "great!". So we bitched about NAU for a while. Our conversation ended with him saying "there are some great teachers here", and me replying with "...Yeah, and I hope they leave before NAU gets any worse!". He concurred, and I walked to my car.

This was kind of an interesting experience. I think it was kind of weird of me to leave without ordering anything, but come on, how can I replace a Grasshopper Pie Shake? I also found it interesting that, even with some unsettling changes, things haven't changed much since 2000. Finally, I enjoy the social solidarity that such a terrible institution as NAU provides.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and yes I am nuts. I admit it.

10:54 am: Class Cancelled
My Distributed Systems class has been cancelled by the instructor four times in a row. First day, "to pack" for his conference. Second and third days, at the conference. Fourth day (today), "I ate something that did not agree with me".

I hoped to learn something in this class, but knowing the teacher of this class, that isn't much of a possibility. So I'm glad he isn't wasting my time.

I may finally give his boss (the department chair) my laundry list about this teacher. This idiot is responsible for my only F, and it was in a class that didn't have a syllabus. The class I am taking now has the same name as the class I failed, but because it has a different number I am having a hard time getting a grade replacement.

Two more months of school, and I won't ever have to deal with this asshole again. Or any of the assholes at NAU.

10:34 pm: Wal-Mart to skirt size limit by building side-by-side stores

I'm disgusted, but not really surprised. While watching our city government try to keep Super Wal-mart from Flagstaff, I've really noticed how well they fight fire with fire. Hundreds of conservatives in Flagstaff and the surrounding towns have come out in support of Wal-Mart - in public forums, in the paper...There have even been a couple of picketers.

11:40 am: A couple of friends joined, so I figured I'd start posting again, but only if anything interesting happens...could be a while.

EDIT: I'm also going to post when I'm angry. That's what blogs are for, right?