I'm thinking in code, apparently

I'm looking to buy a new car. What I'm looking for is another Sebring Convertible. Yes, I know Michael Scott drives one, but there's so few non-sporty convertibles to choose from. It's not like I worship Michael in a Schrutian way. I used to own a Sebring, but traded it in for something that I can haul stuff around in. I miss it.

Fall and Spring are really the best times to own a convertible. You really do become a part of the environment, and a long time ago I learned how dense glass really is. It sounds weird, I know, but everything is filtered through glass. Might as well be a brick wall. Maybe I'll come back to that thought another time.

So anyway, I was trying to explain to someone what color car I was looking for. I like the "classic" colors: black, silver, gold maybe, but the other day I saw a car that didn't totally suck and was trying to explain what color it was.

"I don't know the name of it. It's sort of blue, but sort of green," I said.

"No, not teal. Well, sort of teal, but darker and less green."

"Hell, I don't know."

"Maybe."

"I don't know."

"Well... it's sort of... #006699."

I had rattled off the HTML hex equivalent without even realizing how geeky it sounded or comprehending the lack of comprehension on the other end. I didn't realize until then how much coderspeak has seeped into my vocabulary.

From Maysville, Episode 7

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode we take a field trip to Ripley, Ohio, to check out the Tobacco Festival and the Rankin House.

Evil 23

Prelude post: Is the 23 in your life?

I went to sleep this morning at 5 am, after a night of binge coding. Tracie woke me at 8:30 saying that I had to go pick up my mom. She had fallen and broken her leg. My mom lives on forty-acres in the backwoods of Ripley, Ohio, a half-hour away from civilization in any direction, and it took me at least forty-five minutes to get there. My brother had already made it by the time I showed up (he lives in Ripley), and together we loaded my poor mom into the back of my PT Cruiser. It was only after we got to the hospital that I noticed today's date: The 23rd of August. Guess what her room number is at the hospital? 323. No bullshit.

Compounded: When the movie The Number 23 came out back in February, I wrote a post about it on one of my more popular blogs (not this one). A marketing firm for the movie read it and contacted me to see if I wanted to offer a promotional movie package (t-shirt, poster, soundtrack, tickets) in a sweepstakes on the site. I said yes, and as a bonus they sent me an extra package for myself. Since the movie wasn't playing around here, I gave the t-shirt and tickets to my younger brother living in South Carolina. My mom and dad just got back from a trip to see him on Tuesday. Guess what t-shirt he was wearing when last visiting with my mom? The Number 23 movie t-shirt I had sent him!

Did I curse my mom? One thing I am convinced of (at least somewhat) is that Life secretly tries to fuck with us. I realize that some might consider that to be superstitious or smacking of magical thinking, and that's fine. Believe whatever you want to believe. I'm not going to argue with you. All I know is that I have a very detailed timeline drawn out that represents my life, and clearly shows that in the very least Life is constantly trying to fuck with me.

Sorry Mom. Didn't mean to 23 curse you.

It's not the years. It's the mileage.

Just found out today that my friend who works on special effects is doing work on the new Indiana Jones movie! I have no idea what any of it entails. It's all hush hush and stuff, but I am so excited. Drooling to see it anyway, but now I have this flimsy (ok, lame) connection to it. I really need to move out to California.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the very first movie I ever became obsessed with as a kid. I had myself a fedora by the age of eight I think. I even wanted to be an archaeologist until I realized how boring that actually is, not at all adventure-filled, no whips, no idols. Still, I was a slacker student sleeping through most of high school but always managed straight A's in history. That's all because of Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones in the early years, Huckleberry Finn through my teens, and Kerouac by my twenties. Don't ask me how, but those guys made me who I am today.

I don't think it's gay to say that Ford looks damn good for his age. If I look as good as him when I'm — what is he 60? — I'll be happy. I don't even look that good now, but I'm hoping the wine effect will kick in (not liver damage, but ripening with age). Of course Indiana Jones the character is immortal.

Favorite Indiana Jones quotes: "It's not the years. It's the mileage." and "That's why they call it the jungle, sweetheart."

Alternative endings part 2

Then there was the time that we thought it would be fun to rappel off Rob's grandfather's four-story warehouse down in Covington. Of course we didn't know anything about rappeling (I'm an expert now) and decided to go off the side with just a rope sans-harness. And of course somehow I was chosen to go first. Luckily I survived, but I came down so fast that the rope literally tore through my fingers so much that you could see the bones. Nice.

I don't remember whose idea it was that the wounds needed to be cleaned with alcohol when we got home, but I'm going to blame it on Rob. I do recall him laughing while doing it.

Hey Rob. Fuck you, that hurt! : )

Alternative endings

I was trying to think of some of the most dangerous things my buddies and I did as a teen. My first thought was the time Billy and I caught a Metro bus to downtown Cincy to go to a club in Over The Rhine. The club was closed that day and we were too dumb to check the bus schedules and didn't realize that the next one wouldn't arrive until 7 am. We ended up sleeping down at Sawyer Point. That's probably not that dangerous unless you buy into urban stereotypes, which I don't.

Nope, my second thought was a lot more dangerous in hindsight. They were doing construction on that huge bridge on I-71 that crosses the Little Miami River just outside of Cincy near the rest stop. We used to go up to the rest stop in my beat up little '79 Chevette and strike up conversations with truckers and whatnot. We said we drove the Chevette all the way from Atlanta, that it had broke down, and that we were stranded. I have absolutely no idea why we said all that. Boredom leads to adventures and adventures need a backstory, I guess. Plus truckers often carry beer in the cab.

So anyway, one night we were up at the rest stop and we got the idea to walk down to the bridge. The bridge had an access catwalk built underneath, there were tons of constuction equipment around, and that was really all it took to turn the place into our personal playground. We all never really matured and when I say my teen years, I'm really talking about 17, 18, and even 19 years old. Late teens and playing in the underbelly of the tallest bridge in Ohio (239 feet) with BB guns because we were too cheap to get paint ball guns. Probably the most dangerous part was not on the catwalk, it was cralling out on the trestles with no support whatsoever. I mean, I've never really been afraid of heights, but that was just dumb. The catwalk was mostly safe enough.

One clear memory is looking out over the valley from the catwalk as dawn was creeping along the horizon, pushing the dark blues away with sweeping brushes of pinks and yellows and oranges. I don't know if anyone else shares that memory, but I always will.

Bit of trivia: The bridge is actually called the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge, something I didn't know until today. How cool is that?

Bit of scary trivia: I also didn't know until today that the bridge is approximately the same design and age as the I-35W Mississippi River bridge which collapsed earlier this month, killing thirteen people! Holy shit.

Untitled

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn burn burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

—Jack Kerouac

Sing it my brother. I'm with ya. People who are truly passionate about — anything, everything. That's what I try to find in myself and others. People who are bored really are boring.

Then again, Kerouac was writing about his friend Neal Cassady. Cassady was walking by a railroad track in Mexico after a party a few days shy of his forty-second birthday. He was trying to reach the next town over when he passed out on the tracks, in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. By the morning he was in a coma, and died a few hours later of exposure. Alchohol and drugs in his system probably didn't help. Mad and desirous.

'Course on the other hand you have the oh so Zen DGAFism. That's important too. Blessed is the one who simply says, "I don't care." It really helps when you're jotting notes at 3 in the morning because you're still wired, and desirous, and don't want to miss out on anything and...

Maybe it's a movie. You know, you're watching a movie that you're really into and you really feel it and you laugh and tear up and you get excited and you grip your seat and you are in-to-it. But you know it's just a movie, and you don't really care.

Passion-zen. © 2007, Jeremy Parnell. Sleep.......

From Maysville, Episode 6

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode it's balloons, balloons, balloons as we visit the Buffalo Trace Balloon Race. I get to ride in a hot air balloon so you don't want to miss it!

The CIA thinks the Pope is Fonzie

Most home connections to the Internet are anonymous. They're tied to an IP address, and that IP comes from a generic pool at your service provider. Without a court order (or the RIAA breathing down your neck), your activities on the web are pretty much private. If someone tells you they have your IP address and know who you are, they're lying, unless they're your ISP.

It's a little different with large organizations and businesses. They typically lease a big data pipe and the IP pool is tied to their organization. Sometimes when I write a blog post about a movie I saw I get a visit from some movie house, Paramount for example, probably checking to see if I'm trashing their movie. Not that my opinion matters much, but they keep stats on that sort of thing. Speaking of stats, that's how I know it's Paramount. The IP is tied to them and I can pull the company from the remote host in the server variables collection.

This is where it gets funny. Wikipedia edits not tied to a user account at Wikipedia are still labeled by the IP address that did the edit. IP addresses are public, and in the case of large organizations, so is the organization's name. Some clever programmer decided to catalog many of the IP address edits made at Wikipedia over the years and link them to their originating company. Some of these links are outright hilarious.

Random examples:
Someone with an IP address traced to the CIA apparently is interested in light sabers and thinks the Pope is Fonzie. Someone at Pepsi doesn't want you to read the long-term health effects of drinking Pepsi, or read any criticisms.

The list goes on and on. In fact, check out the full list here. Highly entertaining.

Help me crack a safe

Roughly three years ago my parents bought a three-story historic building located on Second Street in downtown Maysville, Kentucky. It was built sometime towards the end of the 1800s, judging by old photos of the downtown area, and in the Italianate style, with six cast iron Greek styled Corinthian columns out front. It's still in decent shape and solid, with huge brick columns supporting the underbelly (very cool basement). The building has survived several floods, including the Great Flood of 1937. There's a high-water mark plaque on the wall inside the cafe on the first floor, and trust me, that was all underwater.

I plan on leasing the second floor as an office, but that's not the subject of this post.

The building was part of the Maysville Bank from the 1890s until 1925, and later a drug store. Both businesses are notable because it goes to what this post is actually about. In the back room of the building, tucked away for who knows how long, is a safe. It was there when my parents bought the building, probably because it weighs a ton, but there's really no telling how long it has been there. The safe is locked tight. No one knows the combination, or what's in it. There's some evidence at the bottom that suggests it was in place during the flood, and the web's helped me identify the make and model as a Sargent and Greenleaf safe, dating to the early 1900s.

At this point I have all sorts of wild fantasies about what's inside. Cash! or drugs. Who knows? Chopped up Jimmy Hoffa? A few empty bottles like the Al Capone vault? Boring receipts or other papers? Could be anything. Could be nothing.

I've tried to crack the safe myself, but I suck as a safe cracker. A downloaded PDF ebook on safe cracking apparently doesn't make you a master thief. That's me in the photos with my stethoscope. That's me learning that stethoscopes don't help. I've considered calling in professionals to blowtorch it, but there's a risk of ruining any papers that may be inside (including cash), and apparently old safes like this one sometimes had poison vials installed to prevent just this sort of brute force entry. It also ruins an otherwise excellent antique safe, worth something even if it's empty. If you have the combo, that is.

So that's what I need, the combination. Thousands (possibly millions) of number combinations and I'm not imaginative enough to come up with them all. Being the clever lazy bastard that I am, I'm crowd-sourcing.

Effective immediately, I am willing to try any combination that is emailed to me. I want this safe open. Whatever's inside, we can split (if it's legal to do so, read as I'm not going to turn over absinthe or human remains). Think of it as a pseudo-lottery. Which brings me to my next point: Send me your combination idea now before I get ambitious and start selling chances on eBay for $2 a pop. If there's any lawyers out there, is that legal?

From Maysville, Episode 5

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode we rip apart the Wikipedia article on Maysville, talk about the current floodwall mural being painted by artist Robert Dafford, uncover an ancient civilization beneath Augusta, and down some Killian's Irish Red.

Is the 23 in your life?

Finally got around to watching Jim Carrey's The Number 23 the other day. I'm not sure that it received blockbuster status in the theaters, but I loved it. Though it was billed more as a supernatural thriller, it was actually (without spilling spoilers) more of a psychological detective story. Carrey's character becomes aware of a lot of occurrences of 23 in his life. The more he looks, the more he sees, which leads to a mystery brilliantly summed up by verse 32:23 from The Book of Numbers: "And be sure your sin will find you out."

The film is inspired by a real-life phenomenon, that I've been fascinated/obsessed by for some time, called the 23 Enigma. The 23 Enigma suggests that all events are connected to the number 23, and the connection can be discovered through ingenuity on the part of the interpreter. The amazing connections aren't so obscure, however. They scream 23.

One of the earliest to subscribe to the 23 Enigma was beat poet William S. Burroughs. For him, it was not just the unusual frequency of the number; it was that in any coincidence he would find the number 23. When he was in Tangiers in the 1960s, Burroughs met one Captain Clark, a ferry captain who boasted of not having had an accident for 23 years. That night the boat sank, killing Clark and everyone aboard. Later that evening, Burroughs heard a radio broadcast about a plane crash. The pilot's name was Captain Clark. The flight number was 23. After that day, Burroughs kept a record of similar coincidences. Throughout his journal, 23 recurred over and over.

The 23rd letter of the alphabet is W. On the typewriter keyboard, W lies directly below the 2 and 3. The earth's axis is on a 23-degree tilt. Twin towers falling on the 11th day of the ninth month of 2001 (2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 11 + 9 = 23!). The first Morse Code transmission - "What hath God wrought?" - was from the Bible passage Numbers 23:23. The Chernobyl disaster happened on April 26, 1986 at 01:23 am and the power plant is located at 51?23′23″N, 30?5′58″E, near Pripyat, Ukraine. William Shakespeare: born on April 23, died on April 23. William Shakespeare's first portfolio was published in 1623. Julius Caesar was allegedly stabbed 23 times when he was assassinated. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper died on February 3 (2/3). Psalms, the longest book of the Bible, is the 23rd book of the Old Testament. Hannah Kersey, a woman with 2 wombs, gave birth to 3 girls (2/3) when she was 23 years old. Michael Jordan was known for his jersey number 23. The Titanic sank the morning of April 15th, 1912 (4 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 1 + 2 = 23). There are 46 chromosomes, but 23 pairs, 23 from each parent. The list goes on and on!

I got married on 10/13 (10+13=23), at the age of 23!

Bad genes

My new excuse: It's hereditary.

I was visiting with my dad the other day, and I can't remember exactly how it came up, but he was telling me about all the things he used to do to torture my mom when they were younger. Things like dumping an ice cold glass of water on her while she was showering, that sort of thing. They've been married something like thirty-five years. So anyway, he was telling me all these stories and eventually it got around to one particularly story that made me stop and think: I am my father's son.

My mom and dad had just recently married and were setting up life insurance on the advice of my grandmother. Granny (grandma) and my mom were talking seriously about it, and my dad was acting much like I probably would, asking questions like, "So if she died this way, how much would I get? What about if she died this way, would I get more? What if she was murdered in her sleep, does that pay good?" He was just joking, of course, but I think he said they kicked him out of the room after awhile.

Well, that night my dad snuck a butcher knife under the pillow and when my mom came to bed he whipped it out and was like "AAAAAHHHHHH!" Scared the shit out of her and the practical joker was banished to the couch.

It's hereditary.