moving parts of the kasper clan

Dang, things have been totally nuts lately. We of the relocating-Kasper persuasion have had a tumultuous couple of months.

Our home in Harrisburg has sold, thanks to my good friend and Real Estate agent, Tom Waller. (Thank you so, so, so much again, Tom!!)

Our family is all back together again, finally!! We’re all in a temporary apartment, graciously provided by CVS. But the important thing is that we’re all together again. I will never, never, never go ahead of my family like that again. Lesson learned.

We thought we found a house again just yesterday, put an offer in on it, and found out last night that someone else had just put a full-price offer in the night before, so we don’t have a chance. Stink. Let the craziness to try to find a house continue…

We have several large, loud-ticking countdown timers going right now. The first is the mad rush to try to find a home to live in. We only have one more month of temporary housing and we either need to find a house and rush like mad to get into it within a month or resign ourselves to living in an apartment for 3 months at least and paying for storage for whatever of our possessions don’t fit in the apartment. Stink.

The second loud-ticking clock is the fact that we only have 22 days to get all of our possessions out of temporary storage or we start paying $30 per day for the privelege of having all of our possessions in storage.

My ‘93 Tercel is broken again, and this time I can’t seem to be able to fix it myself. Last couple of times, it was simply a matter of putting new spark plugs in. Not so this time. It is shaking like mad while idling and it feels like something is seriously out of whack. And we are 400 miles away from the only mechanics we have ever known and trusted (Ubers in Mechanicsburg, PA, by the way, is the place–the best mechanics I have ever met and I trust and recommend them whole-heartedly!!!). Stink. Anyone happen to know of a good (honest, God-fearing, fair, not over-priced) auto mechanic in Rhode Island or Mass?

Along the way during the past 2 weeks, we’ve managed to have the most chaotic Christmas ever. Heh. No, really. With everything going on, we hadn’t gotten anything together to celebrate Christ’s birth at all. So at 3:00 p.m. or thereabouts on the day before Christmas (you know–Christmas Eve–the day that your mother always warned you not to go out shopping on) we all bundled into our family jalopy and headed out to WalMart (you know–WalMart–the place your mother always warned you never to go to on Christmas Eve).

My darling bride bought the most pathetic 3-foot tall table-top tree (1 foot of which seems to be the “stand”) that ever you would want to see and some decorations for it. No, really, the thing kept falling over under the weight of the star atop it. Heh. It was funny, to be sure, if not entirely pathetic.

Also, me being super-Daddy and all, I wanted to try to do something fun and different with Lynn and the kids for Christmas so that there was at least something memorable about it. So I had everyone write down 4 things that they might like to find as gifts on Christmas (the next day). We each then drew 2 pieces of paper out of a hat until each of us had 2 people to buy presents for and everyone had 2 presents coming, theoretically. In thought, this was an amazingly good idea, replete with sound forethought, good planning, and sure to bring happiness to all. Note–this is the first sign of trouble–being sure that you have a good idea.

So we went to WalMart, on Christmas Eve, each with our 2 secret pieces of paper, and set about buying things for each other. The only problem with such a marvelous idea is that:

1. it’s very hard to pull this off when you’re all in the same store at the same time
2. you have to really think about how to combine the present-buyers on their treks throughout the store so that they aren’t buying for the person they’re with. This was almost as difficult as some of the college-level discrete math work I’ve done. =;)
3. you need a whole lot of present-covers/disguisers so that when said trekkers come back to the shopping cart, they can’t tell what’s in the cart
4. I forgot about the fact that my little present-buyers might not be able to find the present that they are looking for to buy for their target giftee. Luckily, I had brought the left-over present-idea papers with me so we had something to fall back on when said problem arose (and it did–like at least 6 times).

All in all, though, I am really pleased with how things turned out. We managed to get everything that everyone had pulled out of the hat by trekking through WalMart for entirely too long, then with a quick stop at Bed, Bath and Beyond, and finally the ever-faithful Borders. I don’t know if everyone was ecstatic with the amounts of presents that they got this year, but I think it was neat to see each gift-giver more focused on the gift that they were buying, wrapping, and giving to someone else than the “ooh, what am I going to get” fever that can so easily beset children and adults alike. I love my wife and kids sooooo much and I hope that even though this Christmas wasn’t the most all-out amazing, they will forgive me for it and focus instead on the good times we have had.

Lastly, in the “good times we have had” category, we all bought cheap “laser-sighted” Nerf dart guns and have had several all-out dart wars thus far, and I can assure you, there are more to come. My darling bride has the annoying habit of stealing one of the children’s Nerf guns and dual-shooting with extreme prejudice at anyone who happens to be in the house. I believe a reckoning is coming. I won’t give away any details, but I think that this is how several pirate mutinies have started….

“A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all the [Cratchit] family re-echoed. “God bless us, every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

I think I’ve mentioned before how much movies affect me. They really do. And the really thought-provoking ones affect me the most. Duh, I suppose.

I just saw K-PAX this evening. How I managed to miss this until just now is beyond me. Comes with the territory of having a hectic job, a beautiful wife, three amazing children, a very busy out-of-work schedule, outside-of-work hacking ambitions, and an Xbox, I suppose.

Now, the film intentionally leaves you guessing as to what the problem is, to quote Mr. Lawrence (I LOVE that line!!). And it’s unnerving to me to walk away from a film without having a clear idea of what really happened in its imaginary universe. Vanilla Sky drove me nuts because of this, as did others. So I had to watch the deleted scenes for K-PAX, and do a little reading on the Interweb, and I think I have a pretty good stance on the story now.

Based on the deleted scene with the scientists explaining the whole star map thing, as well as all of the early hints as to the unmistakable alien-ness of Prot (humans can’t see ultra-violet light, kids), as well as the comments I’ve found from those who read the book, I am of the belief that the truth within the universe of this movie (suspension of disbelief here kids to think inside that universe) is as follows.

• Prot was indeed an alien.
• He had some tie to Robert Porter. That is to say that he cared about this human and watched over him.
• He saved Mr. Porter from drowning himself.
• He did so by guiding/using/controlling/protecting Mr. Porter’s body for 5 years.
• Prot then took Mr. Porter to the best psychiatric hospital in the area and helped the Doctor to believe that Mr. Porter was a person who needed his personal help and belief. He then left Mr. Porter’s body and what was left of his mind for the Doctor to care about and for.
• Prot then took Bess back to K-PAX with him.

There you have it. Comments, please!

Also, Kevin Spacey is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors. He is absolutely amazing!! I love this guy!!

I’ve long-been wanting a nice WYSIWYG editor for my WordPress blog. And, let me just say… there’s not one that I could find for Linux, which both sucks and is honestly quite a surprise. And yeah, I know there’s a partial resource in kdepim 3.5, and I had it on my TODO list to look at helping to finish it/get it working, but that’s obviously not happened yet. Oooh! Maybe that can be the itch that I need to scratch! But anyway, I’m sure I missed this killer app in my searches and there is, in fact, one out there, but I sure as heck couldn’t find it.

So, it occurred to me that I now have one of those… how do you say… commercial operating systems (that being the lovely and talented OS X Tiger), and that there just might be some neato little blog editors for said lady. And indeed, there are. I’ve found Ecto and have decided to give it a spin.

It’s nice!

Although, I can’t imagine myself ever in the place in life where I’d joyfully fork over money for the pleasure of using it, it is a well-done little application, and it does indeed do WYSIWYG blog editing. I think that the length of time that I’ll use it is directly related to how long I can use it without having to pay money. Which brings me to the point of Open Source development on OS X. It doesn’t seem to have caught on nearly as well as I would have thought. I mean, the idea of developing software just because you love doing it and are fine with sharing your source code and applications with the world without feeling obligated to charge people for the privilege doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent on OS X as it is on BSD/Linux/etc. Bummer, that!

Also, there are a couple of pet peeves I have with iTunes.

1. First, it doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Amarok of watching the directories that it’s supposed to be. If I add songs to my directories outside of iTunes, it doesn’t know about them until I restart iTunes. And there’s no “rescan collection” that I can find, unlike the one that is readily available in Amarok.
2. Second, it doesn’t have a cover manager like Amarok does, from what I can find. This plainly sucks. It looks like Apple actually wants you to manually put in the cover art for each album?? No thanks. I can go get a pet rock if I want that boring of a hobby. Or maybe this is intentional–Apple wanting to make it as easy to get all this working if you use only the iTunes store, and as difficult to do it any other way?
3. This is a third bullet item, having nothing to do with iTunes at the moment. It may at some point, but it doesn’t right now. Actually, there’s something odd that Ecto does with ordered lists, like the WYSIWYG and code get out of sync or something. Ick.
4. Oh, I know–Lyrics. iTunes doesn’t do Lyrics?? Amarok does, and does it really smoothly.

Blah! So, I spent some time last week and got Amarok up and running through Fink in OS X. And it really, really, really works well!! Really really! I was expecting the same level of weirdness that one sees in Linux when trying to get Windows-ish things to work, but it all just worked flawlessly. Sound works fine, although it seems that amarok only wants to use esdsink for its engine, which seems odd, but multiple apps can still access the sound card, which is important (and problematic in Linux on most cheap sound cards) so there’s nothing wrong here. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with that which I’m used to, but I find Amarok a nicer interface to work with. So, seriously, two thumbs waaaay, way up, Amarok guys and gals!! =;)

And lastly, I’ve been jonesing for some Pink Floyd lately. Out here in Rhode Island, I’m without all of my CD’s, etc., so I went and found some songs from my favorite Floyd CD, Delicate Sound of Thunder. I am always amazed at how intricate, emotional, ahead-of-their-time, smooth, and experiential Pink Floyd songs are. I surely hope this isn’t one of those signs of me getting old, but I am still drawn to their songs, lyrics, arrangements, and musicality as much as I was 10 years ago+. My favorites from this CD are definitely:

1. Learning to Fly
2. The Dogs of War
3. On the Turning Away
4. One of These Days
5. Comfortably Numb
6. Run Like Hell

Awesome, awesome music. Makes me wish I could have seen them live myself. =:) Oooh–also, One Slip from A Momentary Lapse of Reason is awesome!! =:)

And with that, I bid you, fare reader, adieu.