Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Damn. I missed National Train Day. I was going to post to LJ about my recent ride on Amtrak, and lamenting the dearth of passenger rail travel in the USA. But that will be for next time. Maybe later tonight, maybe tomorrow.

Today, at UU services, the message was about social justice, also called social actions or social concerns. One woman talked about our monthly activity of serving lunch at one if the local homeless shelters. Another talked about grass-roots community organizing in Vermont, where a paper mill in neighboring New York was planning to burn used tires to generate electricity.

( There's so much more I can do, if I choose to do it. )

One of my favorite springtime tunes is "Garden Party" by Marillion, off of their first album, Script for a Jester's Tear. It's a somewhat romanticized version of the goings-on at an English garden party -- punting on the Cam, beagling on the downs (which I assume is a reference to a fox hunt), consumption of fine alcoholic beverages, and some casual trysts. The lyrics are here. (Not exactly safe for work.)

Marillion is one of my favorite progressive rock bands. Although I must admit I haven't heard much of their music after the departure of lead vocalist Fish. And I wish I can solo like keyboardist Mark Kelly. I often find myself playing air keyboard to some of his solos.

My day started at about 4:50am. I showered, shaved, downed a cup of Café Bustelo, and headed to the local polling place where I was to work all day. (The polls were open from 6:30am to 7:30pm. I had to be there no later than 6am.) The building maintenance guy got there at 6 on the dot to unlock the building. We scrambled getting things set up in time for the polls to open on time. Thankfully the Diebold voting machines were set up and nearly ready to go. And we had a few people there ready to vote at 6:30.

We had a decent turnout at our precinct -- nearly 200 voters for a single issue: a 5.9 mill school levy for Centerville Schools. That's nearly a 25% turnout of the total number of eligible voters. I don't know the totals because I didn't closely examine the final tally. (And if I did, I couldn't report them here.) There were a few impatient people, but most everyone was patient and understanding. I even managed to take a few minutes off and cast my ballot.

In the past few weeks, I hadn't seen a lot of signs for or against the levy, except for a cluster of "Vote No on 11" signs along one of the roads.

I'll find out this evening (via the 11 o'clock news) if the levy passed or failed.

Needless to say, I plan to sleep in tomorrow.

With the exception of Monday, it's been raining all week. Not much to do except eat, sleep, watch TV, pet the cats, and go online. I feel like I'm becoming a hermit. Maybe that's why I hoard -- nothing else to do at home. Maybe that's why I go out shopping -- just to get out of the house.

My church is having their annual garage sale in two weeks. This is the perfect opportunity to look for things I can get rid of. My condo complex isn't a place that's very conducive to garage sales or yard sales. I'm already starting to build my "sell" pile. And I'll also be working on a "donate" pile, since they're collecting for some immigrant families. I just need a place to put it all.

My crewmates from the Bismarck went to dinner at the local mall's food court, and saw a movie afterward. I can't afford movies these days. And I didn't feel like fighting the gauntlets of people and parking at the local mall, so I stayed home.

[Updated 22:30] Do any of you have "blah" days? What do you do on them?

Faux News is reporting that Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter is leaving the Republican party and joining the Democratic party.

And there was Much Rejoicing. At least here in LJ-land.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday patoadam!

This past weekend, at a camp in southern Indiana, 19 courageous men went through our initiation weekend. I got to "brother dance" with them and welcome them into our community of initiated men.

I don't often talk about the work I do in New Warrior or the ManKind Project. The battles we fight are the ones within, and therefore, deeply personal. In other words, they're too personal to share on LJ.

There are men out there that I think would benefit from being in my community of men. But in my opinion, they're not hungry for it yet.

Here we go again.

1. Reply to this post and I will pick five of your icons.

2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose if you damn well feel like it.

3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.

4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

This time around, filkerdave asked me about these icons:

  This one's a snapshot from Devo's groundbreaking video "Jocko Homo". I typically use it when I want to proclaim or assert something.

  This one's Steve Porcaro from Toto in front of the huge Polyfusion modular synthesizer they called "Damius". I often use it to denote computers or something complex. I don't currently have a computing icon, except for Tux the penguin.
  This one came from an ad for the Moog Liberation portable keyboard. That's Tom Schuman from Spyro Gyra using it. I often use it to denote musical efforts. (And yes, I do want a Moog Liberation.....someday.)

  This is Foo from the Canadian childrens' show "The Save-Ums", which used to air on America's TLC. I don't often use this icon.

  This is my cat, Marcus, scowling, because I took a picture of him in a dark room when he was standing on the footboard of my bed. Someday I'll post the entire picture. But I thought the expression on his face was priceless.

Aside to athenawindsong, dragon_pet, and iolanthe95: I didn't forget about you. My icon picks from three months ago are here.

Press release here (Sun) and here (Oracle).

( How do I feel about this acquisition? )

I pulled in to my condo's parking lot at 12:30pm. I can now tell the tale of my recent adventures in Indianapolis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Part 1 is here.

( Continuing where we left off... )

I brought my laptop to class this evening. During a break period, my instructor and I tried to come up with ways to resolve the problem I was having. To recap, Eclipse wouldn't start; I'd get an error screen instead. So after searching on Google, I had the idea of specifying the VM in the parameters on my desktop shortcut, and it worked.

The solution: Change the shortcut to C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_13\bin\javaw.exe"

Now I can start working on my first JavaServer page (JSP) project.