I tied my best-ever Disc Golf score for Provo’s Bicentennial Park: One over par. I’d love to be able to just get PAR for nine holes, but after a full year of playing I’m not there yet. My drives are still 100 feet short of where they need to be, and my putting game is crap outside of 20 feet.

I bought an InStep portable Disc Golf target on eBay for $58, and it showed up while I was in Africa. I got it set up and found that with the single ring of chains it has a tendency to not catch discs as well as the targets at the park. Rather than put up with a basket that teaches me gentle putting, I decided to install a second ring of chains.

I’m pretty pleased with how that turned out. It took about an hour’s worth of planning, and 30 minutes of shopping, but once I had the parts it took all of 5 minutes to install, and only cost another $23. I used mini-carribeeners from Wal-Mart, and seven two-foot lengths of chain from Home Depot.

I’m taking that basket with me to Aspen Grove in hopes of improving my game, having fun throwing in a new environment, and ruining my vacation.

–Howard

(Buffer update is here)

I saw The Day After Tomorrow on Tuesday.

(Okay, if today is Thursday… [insert probably done-to-death “that’s today” joke here])

Great effects. Fun story. The cardboard cut-out characters were cut from a decently thick-enough cardboard that they had me fooled for a while.

NOT ENOUGH DEATH.

Sweet merciful crap. If you’re going to run a wall of water through Manhattan, you need to inflict us with the bloating, floating corpses. Sure, we see a few bodies here and there, but the reality of this disaster movie is that we come out of it thinking “bad weather would be fun.” Sure, a few unnamed characters disappear, and in one or two cases we see someone actually get killed, but for the most part it’s all passionless stuff.

Remember that scene in The Sum of All Fears where we see the fast montage of people at the football game? And then the nuke goes off, and we are forced to IDENTIFY with at least one now-incinerated person in the crowd? PASSION. EMOTION. POWER.

The message in The Day After Tomorrow is “don’t screw up the environment.” It’s heavy-handed, the science goes from decent cutting-edge stuff to the inane contrivances of narrativium and “plot device,” and the power figures are all straw-men. Fine — that’s typical eco-political sensationalism. But they screwed it up, because IT LOOKS COOL AND YOU CAN BELIEVE NOBODY REALLY GOT HURT.

Bleah.

Here’s a comic about it.

Pathetically, I enjoyed the movie.

–Howard “hypocrisy now, procrastination later” Tayler

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/06/02/modest.clothing.ap/index.html

(quick-take: modest clothing for teens is on the way back in, and the movement has an 11-year-old champion.)

–Howard

It’s not often that I can talk about day-job stuff here. After all, most of what comprises my day is the sort of strategic thing that would be Bad For Novell to have as common knowledge. Not sex-lies-and-videotape stuff, mind you. I’m talking product plans, competitive advantages, and nasty things I’m preparing to do to my dim-witted and evil competitors.

No, usually the Novell stuff I need to talk about I talk about at Novell. But THIS time I’ve got a gaffe I need to excise publicly.

I said “frangible” when I meant “fungible.”

I said it in a presentation to 50 of the most influential people in the company.

My buddy and self-styled nemesis Ted called me on it, right down to the “you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“Frangible” means “easily broken.”
“Fungible” means “interchangable.”

Thus, in context, “frangible” is non fungible, and its inappropriate use rendered my entire presentation rather frangible.

How embarrassing.

In other news, just this morning I learned how to pronounce “autochthon” (aw-TOCK-thun) and managed to use it in a casual conversation. Sadly, that experience failed fungibility for redemption from this afternoon’s gaffe.

Had my vocabulary been a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, I would have put my eye out by now.

–Howard