Wisconsin becomes the 49th state to allow its citizens to carry a hidden weapon with them while they walk around in public tomorrow. I offer the following five items for consideration on the eve of tomorrow's shoot-em up:

1. Is your concealed weapon a secret? What, are you chicken?
2. Do you really have to be asked not to bring it to church?
3. Suggestion: Before engaging in a shoot out, please make sure you're both packing. It's just more fair that way.
4. If you think you are defenseless without your weapon, you're probably right.
5. Your right to bear arms does not extend into my house. Please leave your weapons with a responsible person while visiting. Like one of those neighbor kids who throw baseballs at each other. I bet they're the responsible type. Or, put your gun with the baby. It'll be safe there, since babies don't know how to shoot.

I think that enforced half-hour meal periods for people with desk jobs is stupid. The last that I think most sane people would want to spend a half-hour unpaid every day is in the lunchroom at work.

And so I made this comic.

I'm working on taking better portraits these days. We have a lot of nice gear at work and I have no idea how to use it.

Part of the challenge, however, is that we need lighting solutions that work for both video and still photography. I understand that it's easy to spend a lot of money and get stuff that works, but I need lighting options that are both cheap and portable. I wish I'd have brought out my soft boxes for this one, but they're kind of a pain. Maybe next time.

The other part of the challenge, is that stylistically we're supposed to be shooting for a "selective focus" element on these photos, so while I typically like to shoot wide open and light the natural light pour in, I've needed to think outside my comfort zone on these. They're not great. But they're getting better, I think. Oh, here's the shot of one of the Doctors I was shooting when I made these. Keep Going!

Anyway, point is, I'm starting to think about Photocamp 2011. The other take-away message from these self portraits is that I need to get my glasses adjusted.

I'm trying out a new thing here at the Lakehouse. I'm keeping a camera with a 70-300mm lens sitting on my desk with the intent of shooting pictures of the fuzzy woodland creatures (and the feathered) that hang out there from time to time. Over the years I've seen a good number of cool things come wandering by the backyard here.

Just pulled into Wales Community Park. I'd been circling around Wales looking for a forest or tree to crawl in, feeling kind of crummy and avoiding being mad at my client who had just called to tell me he was going to be a half-hour late.

There are a number of "old" subdivisions in wales. Nice big houses on big lots with old growth trees and that sort of thing. Nice houses tucked way back from the road behind a ridge of trees. Very nice.

Found a house for sale there: $425,000. I suspect I could negotiate down the $25,000. I wonder briefly where the other $400,000 will come from.

I look up and see the disk golfers-- fucking hippies-- following their frizbies around a largely un-treed savannah grassland. This isn't a park, its a wasteland.
Maybe one day it will be beautiful. Not today.

The downs I'm paying for the up I sustained last week-- and will sustain in the coming week of road travel-- are massive. And, what's frustrating about them is not that they're so painful or desperate. That the're just so goddamn apathetic. Big picture stuff wraps itself around my legs making me anxious, but little picture stuff-- the here and now-- is too easy to let go of. Too easy to not care about.

One step at a time. One more step forward. Towards the top of the mountain. Towards hope. And all that.

The clover at the park is deep green and pocked by the white flowwerheads, which bobble in the feeble breeze raking the Wales Community Park. This is not living. This is hiding. I close my laptop and head over to my client meeting. I will try very hard to be engaged and energetic with him. He will not be able to tell how morose I feel.

Tomorrow is another day.

I use Ubuntu like dancing bear; The magic in that is this: its not that the bear dances so beautifully, but that the bear dances at all.

So here's my Dancing Bear recipe for configuring Xampp to start up automatically for Ubuntu 9.10.

The first thing you need to know: There is something wrong with the directions the show for doing this in the Xampp FAQs. This isn't really anyone's fault. But the commands they offer for finding out crucial data aren't right. So don't freak out.

You really only need to know three basic things to set this up. Four if you count one of my excuses as a thing you need to know.

1. You need to know how to list and look at directories from the command line.
2. You need to know what runlevel the root user works at.
3. You need to know what a symbolic link is.
4. You need to not care about not having your machine log in automatically.

So lets get to it:

1. I'm not going to go over this. Even a dancing bear can type cd and ls to change directories and list them. That is, I think, the minimum required to call oneself a dancing bear.

2. The root user in Ubuntu works in Run Level 2.
How do I know this? Because if I change to Super User, by entering the terminal command "sudo su" I can type "runlevel" from the root-level command line. This tells me I'm running at "N 2." This is important, because it means that you have to put your symbolic links to the lammp launch script into /etc/rc2.d/

3.Go then. Make some symbolic links. But before you do, know this: You're making symbolic links to /opt/lampp/lampp in the /etc/rc2.d/ directory. You are going to give these symbolic links special names that will tell the system, when it's booting or shutting down, whether to call /opt/lampp/lampp in the context of starting xampp, or stopping xampp. If the symbolic links name starts with an S, that means, call it in the context of "start" when the symbolic link starts with a K, that means call the script int he context of "kill."
So what you need to do is create two symbolic links to /opt/lampp/lampp. I do this by changing to the /etc/rc2.d/ directory, and then using these commands:

• sudo ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp S99lampp
• sudo ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp k01lampp

What should happen then is that two little symbolic links will appear in the /etc/rc2.d/ directory. Those links are what tell the system to run the lampp start up script when the system is starting. You should also run "sudo update-rc.d lampp defaults" from the command line, but I don't know why or if it really matters. Remember, its not that the bear dances beautifully.

4. Finally, and here's something you'll just need to suck it up and get over: The way my system works, the machine does not enter Run Level 2 until you've logged into the system. That means, since my whole goal was to make the lampp server start without my intervention, I enabled the Ubuntu desktop system to automatically log me in. Problem solved. Unless you really don't care about security don't run your system that way, it's stupid. One day you will get burned.

I don't Tumble anymore, but I have friends who do. And their feeds are the only thing you really need to read on the whole wide Internet. I used this post at work today to emphasize that, in spite of all of our frustrations, I feel like our work in addressing the stigma issues that affect mental health is really making a difference.
"Let's treat every disease like depression" may well be the magnum opus of the millennials. They don't get much, but one thing they do really understand is that emotional states are real things.
My only wish is that the author of "Treat every disease" had offered her work under a creative commons license so I could properly share it with you here.

Just completed a rather lengthy and boring "social media" survey. I'm sure it's aimed at justifying some very high salaries of some very shallow people, and I understand how important that is to our economy, I really do...

But I couldn't resist when they asked for my "definition" of social media.

The rest of the survey was completed in all seriousness. Especially the part where I listed "www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com" as the next big social media thing. You're welcome, hotchickswithdouchebags.com.

Hey, HR. Ur Doin' it Wrong.

Gabe: But eventually, doesn't the surly mustang learn to love his captors?
Jeni: Um, no, he learns to fear them.
Gabe: No, they fall in love and have freaky centaur babies.
Jeni: Pain never brings respect; it brings. fear and underneath that fear is loathing
Gabe: There. Are. Four! Lights.
Jeni: Okay, I need to chart.
Gabe: Was it the Star Trek or the centaur babies that pushed you over the edge?
Jeni: All of the above
***Gabe wins.
Jeni: Sure, congrats