Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

The Social Wall
March 12, 2006

We were sitting in a booth in the Burger King rest stop on the turnpike when I was struck with oour situation’s coincidental similarity to japanese rice walls.

The couple in the booth behind us had three children, boys from what I could tell. The father was doing his best to keep the children at an even keel - something at which I have personally been doing a poor job during this excursion.

I forget exactly what he was doing, partially because I was staring off toward the restrooms, but he noticed my gaze and returned a look of “why are you staring at me?”

Two Dinky but Useful WordPress Plugins
March 10, 2006

I’ve been using these two plugins for a little while, and they seem to generate interest in people when I mention them, so I have decided to release them and see what happens.

The first plugin, Auth Only, allows only logged-in users to access your blog. It also allows you to customize your login page by adding a login.php template to your theme. Using a login template will allow you to create a customized experience for your registered users.

You will need to use a plugin like the Role Manager to edit the capabilities of roles to grant view_site capability to whichever users or Roles should have permission to view your site.

Wireless Broadband Everywhere... except Johnstown
March 09, 2006

This weekend marks another trip to Johnstown to visit Berta’s family. Without intentionally disconnecting myself from the outside world, this is one of the few times I can’t connect to the internet. And boy oh boy, it’s like quitting crack cold-turkey.

Johnstown isn’t a very high-tech area. Most of its residents are elderly, so I wouldn’t expect much of an uptake in internet connectivity. They do have DSL and cable connections there, and there is a business-grade fiber installation company out there, but Berta’s family are not as computer-dependent as we are to have contracted any of these services.

So if I’m to connect my notebook to the net at all, it’s going to happen via dialup over a very old POTS line. Ugh. I have been trying to find some alternative solutions to my connectivity problem, and I’m coming up short.

War of the Worlds and Ultraviolet
March 08, 2006

I watched War of the Worlds and Ultaviolet over the weekend. There were many things that I liked about War of the Worlds, and many things I did not like about Ultraviolet.

I enjoyed the fact that the main character of War of the Worlds was flawed. Perhaps a bit too much. On one hand, he wants to protect his kids. On the other, it really does seem like he is trying to get them to their mother so that he can dump them off.

Judging from how Berta reacted, she seemed to think that the gun was a sign of bad things to come. I’m not sure I felt that way. I think that in a situation where I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to survive, I’m certainly not going to leave the gun behind. Yet, I think the movie tried to enhance her feeling about the gun - in the scene where they enter the mother’s house and try to get rest in the basement, the camera seems to focus on him removing the gun from his belt. This seemed unnecessary to me, since the gun didn’t factor in that scene at all.

When it finally came time to use the gun, did he really think he was going to be the only one who had one?