Category Archives: Ramblings

God’s Country

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After two years away, I’m finally back at the Mag.  Joined Dianne, Cy and “T” at around 3:30 yesterday afternoon after a fairly pleasant drive from Lima, OH, in which I’d spent Saturday night.

The drive from Atlanta to Ohio was uneventful – once I actually managed to get out of Atlanta.  Seems like the west-side traffic gets worse down there every day.  It took me close to an hour to make it from Duluth to Kennesaw.  After that, it was smooth all the way to Lima, and I arrived there at around 7:30 Saturday night.  Woke up early and hit the road by 7 :00 in order to get to Magnetawan before dinner.

After said dinner (dirty bird (a.k.a. bastard bbq)), the four of us played Oh Hell until 10:30. CY was the big winner, followed closely by “T”.  I, as usual, got my ass kicked.  Never have been good at cards.

We got a couple of brief showers on the lake last night – enough to hatch some mosquitoes – but the sun is out today, and it’s absolutely beautiful weather.  When I woke up this morning (at 5:30 – ugh), it was about 68 degrees in my cabin.  I’d estimate that it’s currently in the low 70’s, and there’s a perfect western breeze coming in off of the lake as I sit on the porch this morning.

No plans for today at the moment. I’m sure that napping will be involved, and maybe some tennis. There is also a decent chance that I’ll go into town, as I need both Vodka and a mosquito/deerfly net for my hat.  I took a walk this morning, and the flies were terrible.

 

Oh yea! Spammers!

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You know how I said that this weird URL might help keep spammers out?

Yeah, that didn’t happen – although it’s fairly obvious that the 11 spams so far were all robotic.  Guess I can’t do anything about that, and some of the “comments” are sort of amusing in their complete idiocy.

Taking a short break from fixing software issues while listening to the soundtrack from Hamilton this afternoon.  Not really paying attention to the words, but the music isn’t bad.  Considering its success on Broadway, I’m sort of surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

Andi Sprague had surgery on her leg yesterday.  Jenny tells me it went well.  Now the fun part – recovery – begins.

The picture for today is one that I took of the river, Little Santeetlah Creek, on the banks of which a buddy and I set up camp a couple of weekends ago.  It rained the whole time – pretty miserable, really – but the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is so damned gorgeous that we had a good time anyway.  JK is definitely in my top 5 places to throw up a tent and spend a few days (camping is allowed just outside the national forest part).  Great hiking, a beautiful river, very few people, no cell coverage.

Anyway, Brett and I spent a few days shooting at cans with my pellet pistol (purchased for its remarkable resemblance to a real gun and hopefully a deterrent to anyone who wants to mess with me when I’m camping.  If it’s not, I guess I’ll get a real gun one of these days), getting soaked under a leaky tarp, taking one short hike, and taking cheesy pictures of the river.  I rarely bring my DSLR with me anymore, and decided to see how much I could mess with the aperture and shutter settings on my phone’s camera.  I thought it did okay.

I need to empty out the band’s folders tonight, but I really don’t want to.  Would much rather go play trivia.

So maybe I’ll do the folders tomorrow.

Snuffles

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Had a fairly boring weekend.  Mowed the lawn and did some shopping on Saturday before going to a watering hole to play some trivia (came within 18 points of a perfect score – good for #2 in North America); and did absolutely nothing on Sunday other than taking a long walk in the morning.  Spent most of the day watching the new implementation of Roots and doing laundry.

Also took a walk on Saturday morning.  Both walks featured tiny bits of rain which did not mitigate the ungodly heat and humidity.  You’d think that it’d be comfortable at 5:30 in the morning.  Not at all.  This is going to be a long, hot, summer.

I’ve been sneezing my head off for the past several weeks and it’s really getting annoying.  Picked up some Claritin and Flonase last week to see if either of those will help.  Just started a regimen of the latter yesterday.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m allergic to at this point.  Thought it was the cats, but I’m ruling that out for now.  Also thought it might be a new detergent that I started using about a month ago, but switching back to the old one hasn’t yielded any improvements.

The Puff’s company is pleased, anyway.  Can’t buy enough of the stuff.  Here’s hoping that a couple of weeks in Canada will clear things up at least temporarily.

In my spare time, I’ve been amusing myself for a couple of months by playing two computer games in a series called Medal of Honor.  Both are first-person shooters (in that the action involves a scene as it would be seen if you were in it, and you’re shooting at things) set in WWII.  The first one, Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault, puts the gamer in the marines at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and a few other Pacific islands.   The second, MoH, Allied Assault, has the player landing at Normandy and fighting through the French and Belgian countryside.

Both are graphically excellent, and seem to be fairly historically accurate, too.  Both have inspired me to look up details of several of the battles that “I” have been involved in (Tarawa is fascinating.  I wouldn’t mind visiting).

I found it somewhat amusing that, when I watched Saving Private Ryan last Monday (Memorial Day), it became apparent that a number of the scenes depicted in MoH, Allied Assault were taken directly from the movie.  Not just close or similar, mind you.  Exactly.  From the scenery and “battle plan” for D-Day to the towns, weather, and sniper towers throughout the movie.

Anyway, they’re fun games that kill time and make me curious enough to look up WWII history, something that previously hasn’t interested me in the least.  I’m currently watching an HBO series, Pacific – you can probably figure out what it’s about.  Quite well done.

Explanations

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Might as well kick this thing kjiayunbqgpm7onkmoikig5re6xs8pqfn7x5ube8jk1xoytyw95ooff with a few explanations.  Why am I doing this again?  What is Graceful Chaos?  What is that weird green logo?  What’s with the photo of a photo on a wall?  And where did that stupid URL originate?

Have no fear.  I shall endeavor to provide satisfactory answers for each of those questions.  If I can’t, then sue me.  It’s my website, and I can do what I want.  I’m an American.  I have the right to be an idiot if I so choose.  Says so right there in The Constitution or The Bible or The Catcher in the Rye or one of those books that starts with the word “The”.

So why am I doing this again?  Why not?  I told Dad I was thinking about firing up a blog (or revisiting one of the old ones) to entertain him and myself.  And I’ve had a spare domain just sitting out there on a server in Arizona doing nothing for the last year, so I thought I could kill a couple of birds with one sniper-like shotgun blast.  Anyway, I started playing around with the unused domain a while ago – and recently renewed it for a few years as a kind of catch-all for my stuff – so I installed WordPress on it.

And then I reached my limit for reading political garbage on Facebook and nuked my account there.  Sorry.  It was just making me angry all the time and I saw no need for that.  Maybe I’ll sign up again after the election.  In any case, I’ve got a blog again.  And I’m not wasting time on Facebook, so maybe I’ll keep it updated.

Graceful Chaos.  Believe it or not, I put some thought into that, and I’m still not satisfied with it.  It might change if I can come up with a one-word description for something which I can’t believe doesn’t already have one.  See, my favorite style of music, by far, has no name.  It’s a combination of styles, really.  Paul Lovatt Cooper writes a lot of it (I’ve considered both Lovattetto and Cooperando) as did Paul Hindemith (maybe it’s a Paul thing??).  Basically, a simple theme is stated somewhere, gets lost for a while, and then comes back as the central flowing theme layered over the top (or underneath) a riot of technical, usually presto, counterpoints.   This type of thing happens a lot in brass band music, which may explain why I love it.

Example (indulge me):  Philip Sparke’s Tallis Variations is based, not surprisingly, on a very simple theme by Thomas Tallis.  Yes, I know that Ralph Vaugham Williams used the same thing for his Fantasy on a Theme by Tallis.  Focus, people.  I’m talking about brass bands, not orchestras.  Moving on.  It’s an extremely simple theme (it is, in fact, Tallis’ Third Mode Melody, which you can see here if you’d like: Third Mode Melody).

Sparke takes this hymn, states it early, and then goes about doing what Sparke does, which is blowing up brass players’ faces for 10 minutes.  “Cornets, play lots of 16th notes.  Horns, go fox hunting or something.  Euphs, play etudes.  Snare – I need shock accents!  Tubas, oompah your guts out. Flugel..are you drunk again?  Play like you’re drunk.  Now, everybody do all of that together.  Oh yeah – bones, take the melody and make it pretty.”

The result winds up being something like this (courtesy of the Yorkshire Building Society Band):

https://youtu.be/svI-wYQ6lpY?t=770

You see how that works?  Simple melody.  Played strongly.  On a bed of spaghetti.

I love that shit!  And there isn’t a term for it!  It is, therefore, my duty to come up with one.  Also, since it is widely known at my workplace that I am able to remain calm when everything is falling apart, Graceful Chaos seems like a decent interim name for my blog.

Understand that the reason I remain calm is because I really don’t care about the things that are falling apart.  It’s just a job, after all.

The green logo thing (an original TWD, entitled Rawr!) also fits the theme.  It is a monster.  It’s lifting weights.  It’s on a fluorescent green background.  It’s got pointy teeth.  It’s wearing a sort of argyle/plaid sweater.  It’s chaotic.  But I drew it during an outage meeting at three o’clock in the morning a few years ago and the act of doing so kept me calm.

It was at around the same time that I superimposed the glamour shot of myself into an art gallery.  Why did I include that picture in this post?  No idea.  I wanted a picture to break up the text and that’s the first one I found on my laptop.

Lastly, what’s up with the funky address for this page?  Migration?  What’s that all about?

Long story as short as possible.  I got TheUFFP and wrote stuff for it.  It was on a Windows server.  Then I wanted to upgrade lots of the stuff and put everything on Linux, so I got UFFP2.  I’d planned to move everything back under TheUFFP name at some point, but as more and more went into UFFP2, that became a bit of a hassle.  Logically, I should have dumped TheUFFP.  Except that I’ve had @theuffp email addresses for nearly 20 years and doing away with the domain name would have been amazingly painful.  So I kept it with nothing on it.  Until I was informed that the hosting account tied to the TheUFFP domain was moving to a different server and I had to move everything.

Well, there WASN’T anything in the hosting account.  It had all been moved the UFFP2 or deleted.  But, since it was such a huge hassle for other domains on the same server – the ones that had websites attached to them – I got a free hosting account for a year, and all I had to do to make it work was name it something other than TheUFFP.com.  So I named it Migration.TheUFFP.com.

Because it was, you know, migrating.

Since this is just an experimental site – a place where I can test code, store databases, post photos, etc. – I don’t really want people to just stumble into it.  Sure, some robots will find it eventually; but, realistically, if I don’t give out the domain name, normal people won’t find it.

And if they do, I’ll just delete all of their comments and lock things down.  I have the power.

I like that.

Anyway, welcome aboard.  I guess this thing’s live now.

TWD