So now on gfmorris.net, I’m using YOURLS. If you see a link from me that’s http://gfmorris.net/urls/[something], it’s generated by YOURLS.

What kind of things am I linking to? Well, lots of things, but … usually, goalie fights.

I could watch goalie fights all day long…

@gfmorris dude, you have over 18k twitter updates. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? the math boggles my mind.

– @derekwebb

My reply:

@derekwebb Follow me for a day and you will understand.

Maybe.

[This is one of those "I blog out loud and hope it makes sense to someone else ..." posts.]

That pretty much does it. Thanks to Kari for this one.

[I went to work at GEOFCON 2, then went all the way down to GEOFCON 4 by the end of a completely wacky day.]

1. What time do you usually leave for lunch?

I try to go as close to 1100 as I can. There are a couple places close by that are packed by 1115, so I learned to go early if I wanted a table without a wait. Every Tuesday, I meet with friends for Thai at 1115, but then on Thursdays, I have a telecon at 1100, so … it varies.

2. How long do you usually take for lunch?

It varies depending how busy I am at the office. If I’m covered up, I take a shorter break. The inverse of that is that, if I’m really stressed out, I’ll go a little longer. I’ve taken up to two hours, but that’s very rare. Usually an hour if I leave the office for lunch, a half-hour if I eat at my desk.

3. Ever eat lunch at home?

Yeah, I’ve done it. Not as often now that I live in Madison, though.

4. What are your favorite places to eat out for Work Lunch?

I personally am craving Thai Garden since we didn’t go on Tuesday. Like … I want Thai, and it’s before 0700 on a Saturday.

5. How often do you bring food in from home?

When I was a broke college kid, all the time. Now, not so much. Lazy. Plus, when I bring lunch, I tend to not leave the office, and I’ve found that leaving the office is good for my stress level.

6. Are you a lone ranger or a community eater?

I eat with co-workers or friends 2-3 times a week. Some weeks, it’s every day. Some weeks, it’s not at all.

7. How often does your company pay for your lunch?

Once a quarter or so, if a meeting runs into lunch.

8. What is your favorite lunch meal of all time?

Mmm … three-star chicken Pad Thai.

But even those who once said “I would go raving nuts trying to use the iPhone as my mobile device” are now consuming on their iPhone:

I credit Brent and the excellent NetNewsWire for iPhone for my newfound ability to (almost) keep up with my feeds again.

Mind you, I don’t expect that Alex wrote the post on his iPhone … or his Crackberry. And this is not an argument that Alex should make the switch. He can’t get the hang of the iPhone keyboard, and he’s used to the Blackberry. Arguing that he should switch would be like me arguing that he should drive a manual transmission—just because I love it and think that it’s awesome doesn’t mean that it’s for him. I’d just argue that, well, he should know how in an emergency—and I’m sure that he does.

[Okay, I've only ridden with Alex a handful of times, and I can't remember whether or not his car is an automatic. I'm fairly sure his wife's is, but I won't hold that against him.]

[[And Alex, yes, I wrote this so I could tweak you and go all "iPhone FTW!!!" You know you're laughing.]]

If you’ve never owned any of Elliott’s albums and want to give him a try, leave a comment below. If more than ten people chime in, I’ll randomly pick ten names from the comment list. Please leave your real email in the comment form, as that’s the only good way I’ll have to contact you. When August 25th rolls around, I’ll pick my ten names, get the addresses, and get you a copy of XO from Amazon shipped to your location. If you don’t want to give me your address, then put it on your Wishlist and I’ll buy it for you.

Simple enough for you? I’ve often heard it said that if you love something, you’ll give it away for free. I’d love to do that for you, dear reader.

[If you're an Elliott fan and want to link this on your Weblog to help spread the love, that'd be cool. Thanks.]

Update, 7 Aug: Thanks to Chad’s publicity help, I’m definitely now past 10 people. So yeah, keep on commenting … everyone who comments will get an equal chance [so, in other words, commenting a dozen times won't help, and will probably just irritate me]. And for those of you who’ve just jumped in to say that this is cool, thanks. Tell people that you know about it, eh?

Is it wrong that I want a syndication feed of my changes on Wikipedia?

Jason replied:

yes, you mad bread crumb collector, you.

Yeah, that’s me … a digital bread crumb collector. I’m as much trying to understand myself as anything. My instinct as both an engineer and a manager is to always get data.

We had quite a storm roll through Madison County, today, and there are limbs down all over our neighborhood. This is the tree in the front yard of my neighbor’s house just to the west of me; I expect that it will be a total loss, because the tree pretty well split in half, with a slight majority of the tree now being on the ground.

I took this photo as I left the house, and as I came back, my neighbors pulled up. They were, suffice it to say, a bit surprised. They have to walk through their front flowerbed to get into the house.

I’m just thankful that the tree in my own yard didn’t split and hit my WRX. As Amy said, “Then it would have been Hulk Smash.” Persactly.

… I will post this photo of myself at age 15. Check the 1) College Republican haircut 2) kickin’ red paisley tie [okay, I actually like that tie and wish I still had it; I think Dad got it at one point] and 3) terrible, terrible shoes.

We’re singing a small group arrangement of the Whitney Houston version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Two of the five people in that photo are in the music industry today: Stacey [center, in the terrible blue dress that is, I think, causing her existential angst today as she's seen this photo] is doing vocal work in LA, while Cory [far right] is working as a hip-hop producer. Tom [far left] is a lawyer working for a bank, and I don’t know what Jennifer’s doing.

If nothing else, though, this photo is proof that I was once just a wee bit pudgy, instead of being a big ol’ fat boy like I am now.

1. Nationals @ Reds on my XM radio.
2. Wimbledon on my TV, since Chip let me know that Wimbledon is into its fifth set.
3. All the stuff going on with the new iMac [named Discovery, FTR]. You know, my standard set of programs and all that.
4. My work laptop humming along, adding music with Exact Audio Copy.

Yeah, I have three large screens to look at—the smallest being the 17″ widescreen LCD on my work laptop, which I have taken to referring to as “a battleship” and my back has taken to referring to as “that thing I’m glad that he only makes me lug home two or three times a week”. I’m happy as a pig in slop.

:twitch:

Found via Amy, who also points to where to get your own.

The rules of the “game” are simple:

1. list your top ten favorite films (in no particular order).
2. if you’re tagged, you’ve got to post and tag 3-5 other people.
3. give a tag back (some link love) to the one who tagged you in your post
4. give a hat tip (HT) to Dan

I’ll follow those, except somehow along the way, Dan lost the linklove. Sorry, dude. Since these are in no particular order, I won’t use an ordered list. That saves me brain cycles on ordering them…

• Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back: Yes, they are defining movies of my generation, even if the first one came out before I was born. I don’t include RotJ because I hate Ewoks, and the first three … well, the problem is the same: letting Lucas write dialogue is like letting me plan an exercise regimen.
• The Big Lebowski. I adore introducing this farcical romp of mistaken identity to people. Goes better with a good Caucasian, and I mix a hell of a Caucasian, Jackie. And yes, because I am a large, bearded man, I often get pushed into role-playing Walter. Eight year olds, Dude.
• Primer. I’ll go off the board here with a movie I’ve seen only once, but have probably replayed in my head a number of times. It absolutely blew my fuckin’ mind when I saw it.
• Clerks. So recently, a friend called this “a whiny bitch movie”. And, well, yes. It’s crude and hilarious, but it’s also pretty ingenious. Well, for a buddy movie shot in black and white that involves playing roller hockey on the roof of convenience store. This movie, of course, made Kevin Smith’s career. Thankfully, it was the first of his films that I saw.
• Arma … okay, no, I couldn’t finish typing it. Seriously, this is a fun movie to watch with me ONLY IF YOU LIKE TO LISTEN TO ME YELL AT THE TV AND THROW STUFF AROUND THE ROOM. Ahem. [I'm a killjoy.]
• Swingers. Right up there with Lebowski, a movie I can pop in at any time and always feel better afterward. When I thought yesterday that I’d be driving to Houston last night, I said, “I can be to Houston by midnight. Hell, I’ll be up five hundy by midnight!” Too bad no one in the room got it.
• Miracle, for two reasons: the agonizing “AGAIN! [whistle]” scene, which is totally legit, and … well, beating the fucking Soviets. Okay, a third reason: Kurt Russell’s son plays hockey for my alma mater, and not yours. Chumps.
• Apollo XIII. Um, hi. I work in manned spaceflight, and this movie makes heroes out of engineers. Not all of my days are as exciting as the “We’ve got to make this fit into this using this” scene, but some days, it feels like that. Without, you know, the deadline and the risk of people dying if we keep on fucking around.
• High Fidelity. Let’s just say that I watched it last week and lived it starting Sunday. Well, not really. But I did consider autobiographically organizing my CD collection. [I'm okay, though. Really.] Admission: if I were independently wealthy, I would buy a big, old downtown building and put a coffeehouse/bar, record store, and music venue in it. I would also hire John Cusack to manage it and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
• Shawshank Redemption. If you have to ask why, you clearly have not watched the movie, and … well, you should. Mind you, this comes from someone who really doesn’t watch movies that often.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ending with Kubrick is always a great choice. Stunningly beautiful, hauntingly weird, terribly quotable, and spot-on. Well, other than the fact that we’re seven years past that and still fucking around in low Earth orbit.

Okay, since I have to have a list of victims …

• Kari
• Amy
• Stephen and Misty, since we watch movies together.
• Alex, because he’ll be pissed at me for calling him out.

Let me explain my expected use case so you can use that to tinge your suggestion: I wish to have geodata for content generation, largely photography. I’m not really so concerned with GPS directions for driving, really, because I typically have a good sense of direction [unless I'm on a date, and then it goes to hell ... no, really] and also have an iPhone, so I’m good when it comes to directions, mainly.

That posted … suggest away.

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

1. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t use a laptop that much. My iBook gets some use around my house, and some use when I leave the house, but I don’t seriously attempt to work from it, unless I’m on the road with work. Which leads me to …
2. The fact that I’m about to have a work laptop [sadly, a Windows machine], which obviates any “need” [being such a relative term when we're talking about $2000 machines while people starve on far less per year in Africa; yes, I want cheese with my white whine] for having a personal laptop for quasi-work purposes. Here I ask myself: on a business trip, am I going to carry two laptops, one for work and one for personal use? The answer is, of course, no.
3. I don’t yet merit a Mac Pro, although I want one. My budget for this endeavor is largely the $2500 biennial computer purchase money I get from corporate [you'd do this, too, if you got the money interest-free]; the only machine I could see myself outspending this for is a Macbook Air with a solid-state drive, which I’d get based off of Alex’s experiences with his MBA. The top-end iMac fits in my budget, although I’ll have to be the one paying for the RAM [which is fine; I'll just get some software I'd buy otherwise pre-installed to offset that cost].

That said, I’m gonna go until at least the end of the week on this decision, because I don’t wish to act rashly just because Apple put out a new play-pretty today. [Lunch break over, back to the salt mines.]

Thanks to Chris for pointing to this earlier today when Jeff was bored. [Yeah, I know, the pidgin's not bad, but I laffed.]

1. It would have been worth $2,000 to my parents to send me there over two years. If nothing else, I probably shaved a year off of college, and that was worth $2,000. Plus, it was one of the best experiences of my life.
2. I know a lot of folks that I went to school with would not have been able to afford this at all. Yes, as the Commercial Dispatch notes, there are waivers for those MSMS students who come from very poor families, but there is a group of students that would be left behind in that case, and as an alumnus, that saddens me greatly.
3. If this really goes into effect, I’ll give $1,000 a year to the MSMS Foundation to offset the cost, and I challenge my fellow alumni to give as well.

Now, I don’t live in Mississippi anymore, but I have family that does, and so do my friends that are also alumni. I really hope that they’ll all get involved, and frankly, I really hope that Doug takes this and runs with it as a member of the media. Big brother, if you need help finding a local student who would be affected by this, I can absolutely put you in touch with the right folks to find out.

But John, just because you’ll get my vote today doesn’t mean you’ll get it in nine months.

In that same entry, I listed three topics that would likely shape my vote:

1. Technology funding
2. Fiscal policy, especially towards health care
3. Foreign policy

Well, McCain’s health policy is a non-starter with me at this point, for pretty much all the criticisms of it in that NPR story. And McCain’s push to holding the line on discretionary spending sounds nice and all, but good luck getting any Congress to hold up to their end of the bargain. And suspending the Federal gas tax is … terribly short-sighted populism. Egad.

[I don't have a huge issue with McCain's foreign policy, because I think that pulling out of Iraq would be more destabilizing than pulling out of Vietnam, and I think the "100 years" business is a bit blown out of proportion when we still have troops in Europe and patrolling the DMZ in Korea. The bit I most enjoyed, in a cold and calculating way, in the last couple weeks was [i]Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil[/i] running a clip of Dick Cheney in 1994 talking about how invading Iraq and removing Saddam would be a quagmire. Thanks, guys. Seriously.]

The Obama take on manned spaceflight funding still concerns me, but I probably overstated my point in that post. If I was closer to the two being even in my mind, this would sway me more away from Obama than it does.

I’m slightly leaning Obama, but it’s still just mid-April.

[Will someone go check and make sure that Dad didn't have a heart attack? Thanks.]

I aggregate all Flickr photos tagged with “Huntsville”, just because it’s fun to see how people see our fair city. [This does mean that I see photos from Texas and Ontario, but far less often than the city that put men on the moon.] There are times when I sometimes wonder why I do this.

Photos like these remind me that doing this is definitely worth doing. This is an absolute gem.

Here’s me today:

A big difference, no?

When I started my Whiskerino journey, I never really thought that I’d get that involved. I figured that I’d stay out of the Hall of Shame—I actually got thrown in there shortly the first week, but begged my way back out—until work made me shave. Oddly enough, work never said a thing about it—okay, there was a little discussion of it at my last staff meeting, but that’s really been it. [My cover story from the start of 2008 on was that I'd trim the beard when we shipped our next set of flight hardware---because I knew we'd ship on 29 Feb, the last day of W'rino.] I never expected to win a King Beard or have Stephen pose with me. [Closest I got to a second KB was last weekend with a photo of my friend Megan in there with me. W'rinos like redheads, apparently.]

All I know now is that I’m hanging out some in the Talk and I can’t wait for 2009. I am happy that I’ve trimmed, though: I was getting tired of eating my beard, and it did hit 75F in Huntsville today. But I’m also very happy that I participated—because in doing so, I became a part of something larger than myself, which is always a fulfilling thing to do.

The Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

This is all Jeff Holland’s fault.

Six Non-important/habits/quirks about me:

1. My keys are always in my front left pants pocket, my iPhone is always in my front right pants pocket, and my wallet is always in my right rear pocket. If I’m in pocket-less shorts, well, my iPhone and wallet always stay to my right, and if I’m not carrying my keys [usually in my left hand, with my left pinky through the keyring], they’re tucked into the waistband of the shorts on my left side. Asking me to change might cause spontaneous combustion.
2. Because I slept for years on loft beds and bunk beds without rails, I have to have my head against a solid surface for me to sleep. It’s the only way I can locate where I am as I sleep. I think if you moved my bed to the middle of the room and removed the headboard, I’d never sleep again. I might kill you first, though.
3. I check all numbers that come into my worldview for divisibility by 3 and 9. One does this by adding the digits; if the sum is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 3 as well. [Same goes for 9.] I used to while away time whilst bored in classes by putting a long number into a calculator, then factoring it down to 1 by adding or subtracting a number and dividing by 3. [No, I didn't date until college. Why do you ask?]
4. I tug on my chin whiskers as I’m thinking, usually with my left hand. My theory for using the left hand is that I’m trying to stimulate creative thinking, so I use the motor skills on that side.
5. I lock everything. Even when I’m pumping gas, I lock my car door. When I walk into the house, I immediately lock the deadbolt behind me.
6. My passive soaks usually find me out driving. In fact, I haven’t had a good passive soak in far too long. Maybe I’ll do that as I leave the office today … drive out east into the Appalachian foothills and see what I can see.

Victims:

• Misty
• Jonathan
• Amy
• Adam
• Kari
• Ronzilla

You know you love me.

1. Go to Wikipedia’s random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to Random Quotations. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to Flickr’s Interesting Photos from the last seven days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your first album.

I had: The Killing – End of the Gun:

[If you blog this, make sure to link to the Flickr photo's original page so you don't violate their TOS. Thanks. ]