Let's all have another Orange Julius.

I'm in Baltimore again. You'd think after traveling this much, I'd have gotten good at packing. Sadly, not so. I have exactly 1 meeting up here, so I packed exactly 1 nice Oxford shirt with French cuffs. Unfortunately, I forgot to pack exactly 1 pair of nice blue Kenneth Cole cufflinks. What's a boy to do?

So at 11 p.m. after flying for 6 hours, I got out and about in Baltimore. As it turns out, the chain of 24 hour cufflink stores appears to only exist in my dreams, so I hit up my standard sources for cheap plastic crap: Target, Wal-Mart (eww) and Wallgreens. Target closed at 10. Wal-Mart doesn't sell cufflinks. Wallgreen's doesn't either. What they do sell, however, is random crap.

After 20 minutes of MacGyver-ish-ness, I procured for myself a pair of needle nose pliers, a picture hanging kit, some super epoxy glue, and a game of Mancala. $26 well spent.

I was able to use the pliers to bend the picture supports into a shape that would keep my cuffs together, and very carefully glued some blue marble pieces from the Mancala set to the ends. 6 hours of drying later, I am in possession of 2 very stylish links, and still have enough Mancala pieces to make a game of it, had it not already been solved.

Red is so passe.

Specialist Steenson has left again for Texas, but, as Doug has suggested, we'll be seeing him pretty regularly.

Hertz, from my understanding, has now made official its arrangement to outsource IT/MIS to CGI. The "re-badging" process is commencing as we speak. I'm eager for gossip. Spill!

Happy Birthday, Mom. You're old, but then, so am I.

Now, I've been mopey and forlorn for the last two weeks or so, due to some weird pseudo-revelations. How time distorts things. Thus, in keeping with the title of this post, I include lists below.

Top 5 OKC Mexican restaurants: I rank based primarily on quality of queso, and secondarily on quality of everything else.

1. Chileno's It's just that good. The queso is top-notch, the drinks are plentiful, and the food is just yummy. It's seriously the best Mexican in the OKC Metro.
2. Abuelo's I think it's pretty decent. Their queso is creamy without crossing any textural lines. I'm also a big fan of their spinach enchiladas.
3. Tarahomara's One of Doug's favorites.
4. La Luna I may be a bit biased as I usually ate there for free, but their queso was worth actually paying for.
5. Dos Gabachos New flavor in Edmond that has par-level queso, good food, and downright delicious tortillas.

As has been noted elsewhere, there are more good albums than there are spaces. This is a good problem to have. Also, this list is weighted in the indie-rock direction as that (and Simon and Garfunkel) is all I'm really listening to at the moment. Hence, my top 5 albums of 2007:

1. Radiohead - In Rainbows Just. Wow.
2. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank I had "Florida" on repeat for almost 3 straight weeks. The whole album is just about as good.
3. Pinback - Autumn of the Seraphs Despite using the incorrect plural form of "Seraph," this album is beautiful and flowing.
4. Interpol - Our Love To Admire More of what I love of these kids.
5. Battles - Mirrored Found this in Time's list, and have been enjoying it ever since.

Keeping in mind my somewhat...lax views of the status of copyright, you could probably ask me for a sample of any of these, and I could point you to some well protected bastion of freedom from which you could pull them.

Also making me feel better: pedantry. Attention KCRG writing and editing staff! Specifically, whoever wrote this article on Huckabee! Your third paragraph makes a mockery of sentences everywhere. You use two semicolons, but neither correctly. You get sharply negative points for perverting that most precious of punctuation marks. You also lose a frightening number of points for missing an apostrophe on the possessive "plans," while putting an extraneous one on the plural "American's." Finally, you shouldn't put a comma in front of an in-line quotation if you're setting it up to read as a continuation of your sentence. Seriously now. Who writes these things? Who edits them?

More information on the "Fair Tax" later. Strangely, I don't hate it on face.

Lay there with your mouth on mine.
Stay there with that thought in mind.

Hillary is a decent candidate, I guess. The most oft-repeated arguments against her from the Republicans that I deal with on a semi-regular basis seem to be that she's slimy and tends to politicize things that she shouldn't. This doesn't hold that much weight with me. She's a politician. She's good at what she does.

Hillary is on record as being in favor of net neutrality legislation, but not very vocally. She's also big on keeping the DMCA as scary and foolish as it is now. Want to make a backup copy? Too bad. You're not allowed to take proactive steps to protect the things you bought. You might do something "wrong" with that copy. DVD get scratched? Go buy another. Hopefully that movie is still being sold.

Obama is in favor of actively toning down these restrictions. Yay for thinking.

I make a dash in the Lazy Boy 100.

Diana Ross is an American singer, songwriter, and actress, whose musical repertoire spans R&B, soul, pop, disco, and jazz. Ross first gained prominence as lead singer of The Supremes, before establishing a successful solo career in 1970 that lasted through the decades. Ross married music business manager Robert Ellis Silberstein in August 1971. After divorcing him in March 1977, Ross publicly dated actor Ryan O'Neal and rocker Gene Simmons of the group Kiss, before marrying Norwegian tycoon Arne Næss Jr. in October 1985. Arne Næss, Jr. was a Norwegian mountaineer and businessman. On January 13, 2004, visiting friends while on a business trip, he died in a climbing accident during descent of a peak in the Groot Drakenstein mountains near the town of Franschoek outside Cape Town, South Africa. According to police reports, Næss' anchoring equipment loosened from the porous mountainside, leading to a 100 m fall.

Don't you see? There is a mountain high enough.

War is over now.

Good: Sendmail 8.14.2 contains a patch that I wrote while I was at Hertz that corrects a flag-timing issue I found.
Bad: My name's not on it. The name on it is the senior guy from my group. He's a good guy, and I love him quite a bit. As far as my resume goes, though, this creates a little complication in the story.

If the message transfer time to sendmail (when acting as server)
exceeds Timeout.queuewarn or Timeout.queuereturn and
the message is refused (by a milter), sendmail previously
created a delivery status notification (DSN). Patch
from Doug Heath of The Hertz Corporation.

Good: No intense family time over Thanksgiving.
Bad: Vern, my paternal grandfather, is in a bit of a way.

Good: Not really a good part here
Bad: Rebekah Burgess died earlier, leaving her little girl without a mother, and a good number of people without a friend.

Good: I've been far enough ahead in my studies to where I haven't needed to go to class.
Bad: Work has kept me on the road for solidly half of the month.

Good: Denise was in town. Yay!
Bad: Denise had family stuff going on for most of her trip here that kept us from hanging out.

Good: My halloween costume won me some tickets to the movies.
Bad: There's not been a movie I want to see, nor has there been anyone to take. December promises an Aaron Sorkin film called Charlie Wilson's War that has my long-lost West Wing heart all a-twitter.

Good: I've been coding up a storm at work.
Bad: I've not been in the mood to code (or study) at home.

Good: I started a different exercise program.
Bad: I'm achey all the time now

Good: Mike and Heather came to town for Thanksgiving. Yay!
Bad: Trying to get everyone together in the same room dredged up all the old drama with all the new awkward situations.

Good: Christmas is coming!
Bad: I have no idea what to get people. Also my house is not decorated due to me being gone a bunch and CB apparently having a grinch-heart.

Good: Got to see everyone at the UCO tournament. Made better friends with Mikale and some of the new kids.
Bad: I received exactly 0 rounds to judge. It made for some long rounds with nothing to do.

At least it's over. On to December with a more positive outlook!

Reindeer, reindeer, reindeer
I caught one of your horns
And even if it rains here
It's much worse in the north

1. I'm sick again. My throat is all sore, my muscles achey. Hertz/Postal Tim is similarly afflicted, as is Denise, which makes me think it's an actual plague as well all got sick immediately on the first. Oh well.
2. Work is being annoying. There is no direct, approachable way to do the things I need to do. Specifically, the XSL-FO spec by design has no provision for blocks that span a number of columns smaller than the total number of columns on the page, but larger than one. So, I have to write insanity using third-party extensions to XSL-FO. Usually I would be energized by such a challenge, but the tools that I have to work with limit the number of ways that I can describe that insanity. I'm a huge fan of TIMTOWTDI, and XML is based around a single "right" coding strategy that covers 80% of what I want to do, but leaves the non-trivial 20% as a sacrifice so that implementations take off. This is what happened with "span." It's hard to make blocks span arbitrary numbers of columns, and the XML group wants the FO standard (and XML) in general to be implemented widely so that the terror of SGML doesn't happen again. Their response is to nerf the standard so anyone (except apparently the Apache group) The problem is that an almost-completely-useful standard is also almost-completely-frustrating. Oh well.
3. New relationship drama. Though it seems to have cleared itself, there were some awkward conversations and non-discussions. I'm concerned, but have no basis for how to change behavior or conversation patterns. On the one hand, this is frustrating. On the other hand, I'm having a hard time feeling guilty without knowing the cause. Oh well.
4. Old relationship drama. Being nice to exes causes problems. Being civil to exes causes problems. Being a jerk to exes causes problems. Ignoring exes causes problems, and is impractical. I'll just have to cause problems being nice as that's the way I deal with the world, regardless of complexities or weird coincidences. Oh well.
5. No good way to deal with the above. My better conscience has me at a debate tournament helping out Blake this weekend, so Tulsa is out. Boston is like a million miles away, so queso is out. There go my two best support structures for a few days. Oh well.

My congressman won't let me give my brother a clean syringe.
If he should get AIDS and die, that's just too bad.