So, I found this poem that Matt & I were working on several minutes ago:

Bones of Johnny Cochran

On nine eleven oh four,
Four boys are in the middle of main street Newark, USA
Between Dunkin Donuts and Rainbow Music

Two boys stand blocking traffic
Hands frozen overhead in shiny shirts
Legs spread –
carefully caught midway through a jumping jack

Two boys in blue and white with jet-engine noises,
riding their lips between arms spread:
They are playing a game of live action airplane
slamming into 78th floor ribcages.
Cops arrive with patriot blare and leather belts just after they collide
And a smoke bomb stops traffic as they’re dragged away.

That was a plane-crash of a passion-play
no one wanted to see,
reenacting the twisted wreckage of a day
no one really tries to understand…
You see, they hate us for the reasons we don’t know why they hate us.

Dewey, Screwem and Howe’s phone ringing at the news of their good fortune
“That’s right, Jim.
Some rich guys son thinks he’s an activist
Got himself arrested
with enough cash on hand to resurrect the best of us…
That’s right!
He’s coming to the bench ‘cause
The Bones of Johnny Cochran are alive!

And as the wheels spin
And the system begins
The smoke bomb is still stopping traffic on Main Street--
A statement left unanswered and mostly ignored.

A brash Escalade with an engine the size of Iraq
charges through the smoke blindly,
madly, taking out a mailbox, and a parking meter,
and somebody’s sons and daughters,
while the other cars chant “Patriot!” and overheat,
spewing a new kind of smoke
And the bones of Johnny Cochran scream “That’s why they hate us!”

Leaving a statement that gets acquittals and stops traffic
But remains dust colored, unaddressed, and mostly ignored
See, they don’t want us to go away
And it’s not about death,
Dead guys can’t ever understand, they didn’t want what they did to 3000 in one day
They wanted what they did to billions globally
And as a misnomered act is quietly extended beyond the sunset
Unaddressing a statement that remains unanswered and mostly ignored
The point rests in the papers existence
They win since the goal is leave each of us
Chained
and silent.

Faction Champions.


Stoopidist raid boss ever.


Heroic Faction Champions.


Heroically stoopidist boss ever.

A long time ago, I destroyed my high-school yearbooks. There were many reasons for this, most of which I don't really want to get into but none the less it was completely reasonable and necessary at the time.

I was poking around on facebook today and totally stumbled through like 19 people from high school -- and had a vague moment of "what the hell was that person's name" in which said yearbooks might of been useful.

This was followed by the far more concrete assertion of "wait, i don't really give a damn and fuck me silly if they do either."

Hi Ho.

So it's official now. I'm moving to the Netherlands before the end of the year. All of the paper work is in to the immigration lawyer, my employer has signed off on the assignment and the intermediate travel expenses before they sign off on my long term living expenses and relocation moneys.

The first travel date is supposedly Oct. 12th.

So if you have an interest in seeing my handsome face in the meat, sometime between now and later, then by all means let me know, as I'm trying to put in the time with my family and what not.

Otherwise, come visit me in Utrecht. We'll go out for "coffee."

@ the year 2000 -- I hate you. I should of danced.

In the products which you provide that implement a servlet container, and an EJB container, and perhaps a JMS container, can you please refrain from implementing, or bunglingbundling anything more then that? Please do not include apache commons on the default class path for deployable applications, no matter how many applications use commons projects. Please do not bundle hibernate, I may hibernate differently. Please do NOT bundle ANYTHING that even VAGUELY appears to be a JSF implementation, as I, as one among millions of vendors, am likely to just tear my hair out for eons before noting in the errata section of our software that these 9-500 libraries in web-sphere/logic/boss/thingy/PITA-cat needs to be specifically overwritten and worked around by using these special builds numbers 1-155 ( please match your application server major and minor version number on the left with the build on the right that works around it's dysfunction. )

I would like to build 1 war file, and bundle it within 1 ear file. I would like it to be my responsibility to bundle all of it's dependencies appropriately and in a standards compliant manner. I would like it to be your responsibility to deploy it appropriately, and in a standards compliant manner. If this is a confusing statement, let me make something perfectly clear.

YOU DO NOT ADD VALUE.

Not by bundling extraneous apis or frameworks or their dependencies or their dependencies frameworks and certainly not by exposing it to me who wants to do nothing more then ignore that frameworks very existence.

You add value by providing management interfaces clustering and various other things which hopefully i can adequately control unlike say, IBM's WLM which nearly everyone attempts to TURN THE HELL OFF as soon as they can; usually by "enabling pass by reference -- a standard and recommended method if increasing performance on websphere who's primary impact on performance is DISABLING WLM!

By attempting to add value to a space that YOU CAN NOT ADD VALUE TOO, you, application server vendors, are making the lives of developers difficult and you, personally irksome to the ISV, the partner, and the client.

This is, more and more, why web-sphere/logic/fish/onimo are being replaced by simpler, more predictable, more manageable things like tomcat, and jetty. They work, they don't bitch, they don't override our dependencies with crap or muck up our classpaths, and custom implementations of clustering on top of jgroups or coherence or shoal tend to be more functional and reliable anyway.

So please

please please please please please

Stop.

-L

It's weird the way a song can spark a memory. I know that's something I've blogged a great deal about in the past in different ways, but it never ceases to amaze me the way a song can inspire a memory so distinctly. So complete is the memory, summoning scents, visuals, altering my perception so completely that I feel incorrect inhabiting a body who's shape and consistency is noticeably if subtly different from what it was at the moment of the memory's inspiration. It feels as though the very meat of my heart is lifted up and turned struggling against its pulmonary and aortic tethers attempting to fight it's way back in time... It just dawned on me that 2004 was five years ago -- simple math escapes me sometimes.

2004 was a nutty year for me, a distinct "time of troubles." My decisions that year set into motion a series of events that would change me more completely then anything since puberty. I lost a relationship with an amazing women for whom I cared for in a way so deeply that both it's existence and the separation began a process of redefining how I understood and acted in love.

It was a year of ending. My heart was so transitional that I started a series of relationships I had no intention or even ability to follow up on in any sort of meaningful way, sort of tripping my way through a number of people with a ham handed self centeredness. I lost a friendship with a young woman I wanted to love, lost a love with a young woman i had befriended... and then her friendship as well, ended a friendship with a man after we both failed to love each other nearly completely, and wandering through the affections of two more people whom I think had no more Idea what to do with me then I with them before at the close of the year stabbing a fork in my eye that I would continue to twist for the next year and a half.

That was definitely the year I lost my sense of childhood, and that, more then anything else, defines the nostalgia a few bars of a ho hum gothadelic song can inspire based simply on the timing of it's imprint.

Brains are neat.

Edited for Sooopidity.

We all know that songs get associated with particular times and events in our lives. But i've also found that songs get attached to certain games -- i tend not to listen to game music much -- i tend to listen to whatever the hell i want while i blast things -- so here's some songs that I associate with certain games: If ya'll are games what games do you associate with these songs or songs to these games?

Poison - Unskinny Bop: Battletech
Prince - Pussy Control: Unreal Tournament
Sepultura - Refuse/Resist: Quake 3 Arena
Metallica - Master of Puppets: Legend of Zelda
Ministry - Supernaught: L5R
Atmosphere - God Loves Ugly: Shadowrun
Brittney Spears - Slave 4u: Vampire: the masquerade
Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills: Dungeons & Dragons


So there.

i really wish the apache commons-collections project would be updated to fully support java 5, especially what with java 1.4 being EOL'd and all that.

-L