Casual Hex

I’m up, I’m up!

Graeme woke up around midnight tonight wanting a bottle. Since I was already awake it wasn’t much of a discussion of who was getting up with him. I started “Lord of Chaos” this evening and was just finishing the prologue when Graeme started to whimper.

A year ago I was doing this a whole lot more often with Aegwyn. Only then, I didn’t even bother going to bed most nights. I’d sit up here at the computer until 1am or sometimes even 2am just listening for her. I knew if I went to bed I’d never wake and Christina would end up getting up with Aegwyn. So I did my best to stay up as many nights as possible.

This time around, bleh… since January it seems that I’ve been sick more days than not so I’ve stayed up for Graeme maybe a handful of times. Rather selfish, I know and I’ve paid the price. Sitting with him tonight after he was done with his bottle was just awesome. He wasn’t ready to go back to bed just yet so I placed him down on the couch and sat so that I could easily keep him safe but that he could see me easily too. He was all wiggles and giggles. Laughing and playing, grabbing at my hands and just smiling at anything I did to entertain him. After a good bit of play time I had him all cuddled up with me— blanket secure in his hand, just barely touching his face. And he was out like a light. So trusting, so peaceful… so cool.

I’m perfectly aware that I’m still leaps and bounds behind the big bad majors in web design. Really. I’m aware when I start a site design that I have to take Internet Explorer into account. I get all of that. And it’s something that doesn’t usually bother me. I’ve put so many hours into learning the ins and outs of design over the past year that I’ve improved greatly.

But for my own personal site— I want it to look nice. Really nice. So far, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not flashing with blinking lights and scary images of kittens being eaten by domanji monsters or what-not, but it’s not clean, sharp and awesome either.

So I’ve been working on a new design. It’s great. I werves it. I’ve kept IE in mind the whole time. Or so I thought. Today when checking my design out in IE I got some sort of evil, twisted mangled twin of what I thought I’d see. Yes, I could be overreacting since I didn’t really give any time to figure out why it looks so bad. I’m just annoyed that it looks bad. So, big bad fit of pulling my hair out just to relieve some stress over nothing? I sure bleepin’ hope so. Because otherwise… I’m gonna hunt down each and everyone person on the IE dev team and… ::sigh:: I’ll get it all figured out. Pity party of one, please!

What is it with Ellen Page? Good grief!

Hard Candy was hard to watch. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good film, and she was great in it… but the subject matter was a bit overwhelming. Then we have Juno which was just plain awesome. Now, next month Page is back with The Tracey Fragments. The woman is only 20 years old, getting away with 15 in this new film, and already she’s had her share of complex, thought provoking roles.

Mark David Chapman. John Lennon. December 8, 1980.

I was only nine years old that day, but I remember it. I didn’t really understand much at the time and I recall my grandmother making negative comments about the man that had been shot— but it made me sick thinking about what happened to that poor man. I remember that day.

Jared Leto put on 60 pounds to play the role of Mark David Chapman. The picture above is so freaky, because Leto really does look so much like Chapman. The film is based on a book, written from notes taken during an interview with Chapman. I had no idea this film had been in the works. I just clicked over to the trailer page at Apple to see what new stuff they had and there he was, staring at me…

The title comes from Chapman’s obsession with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. When I was assigned that book for a freshman literature class I was blown away. There’s a reason so many latch onto that book. There’s a reason why so many get lost in that book… or think they’ve found themselves in that book.

Just looking at that picture… a whole lot of powerful stuff all bound together in a polished Hollywood banner.

Here’s the trailer.

Sometime last year two years ago (!!!) I made the move from WordPress to Textpattern. Or I sort of did. The content was converted and I changed the layout around but I never really finished everything so barely anything has worked properly for a long, long time.

I’m giving up on the site as it is. In the coming days I’ll be archiving what’s here and starting over with a clean slate. New design, new site, new everything. Yep.

It’s about steenkin’ time.

It just occured to me to look this up… I starting thinking about the average life expectancy when Social Security was established. It turns out that the retirement age of 65 was set when the average life expectancy was 63. So… now that average life expectancy is somewhere around 80… yeah, do some math in that head of yours. Social Security was a bad idea when it was first set up. Even if we weren’t living longer it’d be sure to be a stinking mess after a few decades. Throw in the fact that we’re all living a lot longer and it’s a wonder that our country hasn’t collapsed from supporting Social Security.

Save now for retirement. Don’t blow your income on daily coffees, slushes, danishes, gigantic widescreen TVs, monster gas guzzling vehicles, etc and most likely you will enjoy a fat return during your retirement— without ever depending on the government.

On a side note, I have no idea what-so-ever who I am willing to vote for this fall. All of the Democrats give me visions of a nation pointing a shotgun at its own collective head and the Republicans.. oh, shiver. Not much better. Ron Paul? He’s my only hope and I’m still not so sure about him.

Wow, I just noticed after posting that last aside that I haven’t written anything here since November. I’ve had my reasons. I’ve been busy with other sites and when not sitting here I’ve been spending most of the rest with Christina through her last few months of pregnancy. What!? Yeah… and just a few days ago (9:59pm, Monday, January 14, 2008) she gave birth to our son Graeme Henry— 6 pounds, 14 ounces. C-section and all. Which wasn’t cool but it went well and other than some minor breathing problems Graeme has been doing fantastic. And yes, Aegwyn’s first birthday is coming up this Saturday.

My lack of any previous mention of Graeme is not due to lack of interest or any other such nonsense. It’s more of a nine-month shock thing (or roughly 37 weeks). Four years married before we have Aegwyn and then BAM, she’s pregnant again. Last time, last time. No more. Really. But I’m so happy about Graeme. The past months just flew by so extremely quickly and now he’s here!

Both Momma and Graeme should be home Friday.

Silly.

Stupid.

Ridiculous.

Idiots.

I wanna go buy me a new teddy bear and name him Mohammed.

No.. no, wait… I shall find poo in a neighbors yard to keep as a pet and name it Mohammed.

What am I talking about? This.

Mohammed would strike you idiots all down for being so insanely screwed up in the head. If he weren’t DEAD. But.. oh, well, whatever.

Bah!

While I’d love to have a MacBook Pro I’m stuck using my wife’s Dell Inspiron 1501 whenever I need something portable. After finally getting used to the similar functions of CTRL and ALT (er, that’s COMMAND, bucko) in Windows being pretty much reversed in OS X three years ago it can be a real mess now when I’m using Windows. I don’t want to get used to both. I’m not even sure if I can.

So what can I do? I can easily switch the key actions in OS X to match those of Windows. But I’m not doing that. CMD (er, ALT for Windows users) C/V/X/A to copy/paste/cut/select all is easier than CTRL C/V/X/A. So… how do I change the keys in Windows? There’s no easy method in the control panel. I could dig into the registry and mess with the scancodes but that can be an ugly mess.

What about a nice little application to do all of that messy stuff for me? Might such a creature exist? With only a little digging into Google I found something! AutoHotKey will switch CTRL and ALT around in Windows for anyone used to Mac OS X. It’s easy to install and it’s easy to configure. It’s also free. What more could I ask for?

AutoHotKey is capable of so much more than simple key re-mapping, so once you’ve downloaded it why not check out the documentation and add a few other extra Mac-like keyboard commands to your Windows system? The potential is great within this one.

Oh! Here’s the simple script (only 279 bytes) that I created to remap the CTRL and ALT keys. Just toss it somewhere on your system after installing AutoHotKey and run it whenever you want to switch your keys around. Hit WinKey-Q to exit the script.