Dave Mancuso dot Com

From Neil Gaiman’s Journal, a question from a nascent writer:
“My professor for comic book scripting told me once that it is impossible to listen to music and write at the same time.”

Neil replies:
“What an odd thing to tell people.

I’m sure it’s true for him, mind you, but deciding that it’s true for the rest of the world is a leap of faith I wouldn’t have made, much like deciding that everyone in the world needs to write using your lucky brand of pen or it won’t be any good.”

I do find that occasionally it’s hard to write with music playing, but it’s certainly not a rule of thumb for me.

So…Drew was talking at dinner about how he watched the end of Almost Famous with me the other day. He proudly answered Denise’s immediate question with “there was no violence in the movie, Mommy.” I felt obligated to mention that there was a bad word in the movie, but Drew said “Don’t worry Mommy, I didn’t learn it!” He didn’t remember it, actually.

Which put me in mind of a story I then told the kids. When I was little, four or five years old, I came back home to my dad after playing with Johnny Pritchard down the street. I revealed to my dad that Johnny had told me a bad word.

“What was it, David?”

“Daddy, it was a very bad word, I think. I can’t say it.”

“No, tell me, David. What was the word?”

“OK–it was f*&%!”

I saw the shocked look in my dad’s eyes almost (but not quite) in time to avoid the loud slap. My head wasn’t ringing, but blank surprise would be a good description of my own reaction.

“DAVID! Don’t ever say that word again!”

I think I learned that day that it’s not always wise to always give your parents what they ask for. (grin)

I was skimming the Classmates.com message boards for my old hometown and I came across a thread regarding Munchkinville.

Munchkinville? What the heck is that? It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. A place in Ridley where the houses were munchkin-sized? Where was this all the time I was growing up?

So I asked my family and had the answer immediately. Munchkinville was a lane behind the houses across the street from me on Swarthmore Avenue. It was an alley with small houses, but the odd thing was that the doors and windows were very small; hobbit-sized, in fact. I walked down the alley once, but I’d forgotten all about it. My father told me that these houses had been built long ago as small vacation cottages for people from Philadelphia. My brother told me that he was in front of the houses once talking about them and a woman came out of a munchkin house yelling at him. “Normal people live here! Go away!”

Munchkinville is gone now, all but a few of the houses, and they have normal doors and windows. Here’s to a unique architectural and historical landmark.

I drove my mom to the Philly airport on Sunday to take her flight back home. As we motored through the Departures lane, I saw a section of the airport made of tan brick with a turqoise control tower. It was the original airport from way back in the ’60s. It looks strange, surrounded by the white concrete of the current airport.

I remember that my dad once said that all the original airport needed in the ’60s was carpeting. It had red brick floors back then. They added the carpet, but they didn’t stop there. They never stopped at all. They kept adding, and adding, and adding. I’ve never seen a structure that grew like this airport–it just swelled piece by piece until it became the huge behemoth that you see now.

Even the terminals speak to the piecemeal construction of this complex. The A terminal was the last to be built, years after terminals B through E. After it was finished, it still wasn’t enough, and they had to add a terminal before A. What do you call the letter before A? Well, in Philly they call it terminal A-East and now terminal A-West. Wow. I realize that it’s one of the largest airports around, but the thing has become massively unwieldy.

Here’s another weird fact. If you work in the part of the airport that’s in Philadelphia, you have city wage tax taken from your pay–three and a half percent or so. However, if your employer is in the part of the airport that’s in Delaware County, you have no city wage tax–it’s almost like a 3.5 percent raise (if you look at the bright side).

http://www.mrpicassohead.com/

Enjoy!

Thanksgiving…mmmmm…Turkey…mmmmm…no, I won’t fall asl….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…turkey…mmmm….zzzzzzzz

So I’m installing Linux in between other things today. Start the PC with the boot CD. Click through the install screens. Stop dead at the “no network installed” message. Click backward through the screens to the network card option. Select the proper network card in the list. Stare at the next screen, “Enter parameters for the NIC.” Enter nothing. Go forward. Network fails. If I can’t install the network card, I can’t download the rest of the installation files to the PC.

Look around on the Internet. Apparently I need the documentation. The documentation is supposedly easily available, but exists nowhere in downloadable form.

Find the documentation, but you need to be running Linus already to download/install it.

Try several parameters blindly–IRQ, base address, hex numbers.

Find out later on that I don’t need to enter any parameters. Hmmm. Why didn’t it work then when I left it blank?

Later in the day, come back to click other options. Amazingly, using the Install with ACPI disabled option works. What is ACPI? A new power management standard for PCs, which seems to kill the network card. Clear as mud.

Leave it to download and continue the installation. Realize that it will fail, since I won’t be there to click through the next screen that comes up, since I’ll be home. It will drop the connection (it installs over the network).

Linux, easier than ever. Definitely a learning experience, but how could this ever be for the casual, everyday user?

I’m installing Linux one more time–the first time I’m installing it on a decent system that’s not obsolete. I think I’m going to work with KDE as the interface (for lack of a better word) rather than Gnome.

I came across this quote at http://people.etango.com/~awaite/blog/archives/000004.html:

“Then I found kde-look.org and went nuts. I practically have OSX emulated perfectly. That is a great and active community of graphically inclined enthusiasts!”

Dude, not to give credence to what Brad’s been telling me all along, but why don’t you just get a Macintosh?

Contrary to local office perception, it looks like Huey Lewis is still alive and kicking!

(Later)–Yep, and he just performed a few weeks ago.

Tonight Alyssa came home with us from day care acting surly. It was weird, and not like her. After a few minutes, Denise dragged out of her what was really bothering her.

Alyssa: Mommy, it’s (Girl1) and (Girl2). They’re just driving me crazy!

Apparently they each want to be friends with Alyssa, but not with each other. It’s driving Alyssa to distress.

It’s really amazing watching your kids grow up. If this is already stressing her out at five years old (six on Tuesday), what will things be like in ten years?