Soluble Fish

The Standing Desk, A Brief Update

2012-01-17T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'm still going strong with the standing desk. The scale says I haven't lost any weight, but lately my jeans keep wanting to slide down. I might need to buy a new belt.

Even with the gel sole inserts, standing on that hard, flat floor all day was starting to get to me. (Any padding that used to be under the carpet has long since been stomped into flatness.) So, a couple weeks ago, I brought in a child's sleeping pad* — it's just a rectangle of blue sponginess — and set it on the floor where I stand to give me some extra cushion. It has helped about as much as the passage of time has. I've gotten used to standing all day, though I can sure feel the difference when I finally sit down.

It reminds me of those horrible days at McDonald's when I was a teenager.

But at any rate, the standing desk has become a regular part of my day now.

* We bought the sleeping pads to take camping because I couldn't afford bonafide camping cots. Sleeping on them was slightly better than sleeping on the cold ground. Slighty.

The Standing Desk Experiment, Entry 2

2011-12-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

A week-and-a-half ago, I rearranged my cubicle so that I could stand while I work in an attempt to be more fit and less sedentary. You can read about what sparked the change here.

After only a few days of being on my feet through most of the day, I realized one problem: I was ill-equipped in the shoe department for this experiment. My ankles, knees, and hips were threatening to call the experiment off.

So over the weekend I bought myself some nice gel inserts and "installed" them in these colorful plaid numbers, which were still in decent shape save for the hole I had worn through the bottom. (Not good for wearing in the rain.)

They will stay at the office, and I will be doing a Mr. Rogers routine every morning — walk in, change my shoes, sing a little song, and talk to my tiny, make-believe friends.

As for the standing desk itself, my first configuration put a cabinet right in front of my face, and I had to leave out a small bulletin board. I realized I could put the cabinet under the desk, leaving room for my big head and the bulletin board. It took a little loud work and a screwdriver, but I moved things to more useful positions, as you can see:

There are two things to learn from creating this second configuration: First, if you're considering a standing desk for yourself, don't run out and do it in a flurry of excitement; make better use of your time by planning it out first. Second, if you're dealing with furniture that is designed to be modular — like the type of cubicleware I was moving about — take a good look at it first. After needlessly turning screws in and out in knuckle-scraping spots, plenty of loud noise, and quite a few curses, I noticed that the cabinet (like everything else) was designed to be easily disassembled and reassembled.

Had I noticed that earlier, I would have saved quite a chunk of time, energy, and sweat.

I seem to be adjusting to the standing desk fairly well. My legs and feet aren't as sore as they were after those first few days, and I generally don't get as tired at work as I used to, back in those sit-down days.

I'm considering getting a stool and nixing the chair, but what I really want is a set of wireless headphones, or at least headphones with a six-foot cord (those purple ones in the pic have only a three-foot cord).

It's awful hard to dance around the cube when I'm so closely tethered to the CPU.

The Standing Desk Experiment

2011-12-11T21:40:00.001-05:00

I avoid my doctor.

I don't dislike him — he's pleasant, easy to talk to, and shows no egregoius character flaws that might make spending time with him disagreeable. It's just that he's my doctor, and doctors on the whole aren't in the business of telling people how great everything is.

In my case specifically, I don't like visiting him because I already know what he's going to say, and I don't want to have to pay him to say it.

Plus, I don't want to hear it.

But the reappearance of my anxiety problems this fall necessitated a return to the offices of Dr. C. A visit Halloween got me back on an antidepressant (at twice the dosage I had been on a few years ago). Then, last Wednesday, I had a full physical, replete with blood tests, awkward questions, and even more awkward touching.

Considering the intensity and strangeness of my most recent episodes, I honestly expected (and alternately hoped and feared) that the tests would reveal some new, underlying problem — an ulcer, a pituitary malfunction, celiac disease, cancer — something (preferably treatable) that would explain how bad I was feeling. And you know what Dr. C told me?

Exactly what I knew he would, what I didn't want to pay him to say, and what I didn't want to hear: not enough good fat (HDLs), too much bad fat (LDLs), triglycerides through the roof. I need to lose weight and get more exercise.

And nothing else. No medical abnormalities that hadn't been there five years ago, no viruses, no infections, nothing in my blood that shouldn't be there. I was essentially back where I started, still suffering the repercussions of my sedentary life.

But it just happened that a few other bits of information had sunk into my brain in the days prior to my physical. First, there was the December 1 episode of The Office, in which Dwight replaced his usual work desk with a standing desk, silently regretting the absence of a chair just a few hours into his workday but too proud (or too pig-headed) to admit any sort of defeat in front of Jim.

I had heard of the idea of a standing desk before. It made sense, and it sounded like a good idea. At least in theory. And that little seed of a thought rattled around in my head for a while.

Then earlier this week — it might have even been the morning of my physical — someone tweet a link to this infographic about the detrimental effects of sitting for long periods.

You remember sitting, right? The one thing besides breathing that I am always doing while I work, whether I'm editing, writing, drawing, or playing the clarinet.

I've been around long enough not to blindly trust the numbers fed to me in infographics like this. For all the great information on the Internet, there's a lot of horrible, inflated, politically spun misinformation out there, too. But I'm sure there's some truth behind just the idea that sitting all day every day is unhealthy.

Which brings me to the Standing Desk Experiment. I left Dr. C's office the way I usually do, with a renewed focus on living a healthy life. (It usually lasts for a couple weeks before disappearing.)

So the next morning, hopped up on excitement, caffeine, and Zoloft, I set about rearranging the modular pieces of my workspace to create my own standing desk.

I knew from past excruciating experience in retail that I would neither appreciate nor enjoy standing for the entire work day, so I was sure to arrange the space so that I could still work sitting down when I need to. As you can see, I've raised the monitor so I can look down to it while standing and up to it while sitting. The monitor stays there, but the keyboard and mouse can move back and forth.

So far, I've only used this configuration for two days, and I've already started tweaking it. But in that time, I have made three observations that you might find interesting if you're considering your own stand-up workspace:

Standing at a desk + Spotify = More dancing at work.
Those annoying "are you gellin'" commercials suddenly won't seem so annoying.
It's damned hard to fall asleep at your desk when you're standing up.

Anyway, watch this space as I chronicle the saga of the Standing Desk Experiment. I hope that I'll be sharing a thousand little joys and not too many disappointments.

For the Imperial Art Gallery

2011-06-06T23:19:00.001-04:00

My contribution to an already bloated meme:

Click to see it full-sized on Flickr.

Family and Music, Music and Family

2011-02-28T21:58:00.000-05:00

Today was my grandmother's funeral, the last of my grandparents.

Funerals are sad things. Even when the deceased lived a long life -- as my grandmother did, almost making it to her 95th birthday -- the recognition that you'll no longer walk into a room to see her, or hear about something she's done, or even feel guilty that you missed sending her a birthday card sneaks up on you throughout the day. You can go from being perfectly fine to verging on tears in the blink of an eye without any warning.

Funerals are also stressful things. Trying to find some calm from looking at an empty body in a casket that just never seems to look quite right -- mouth too tightly shut, eyes too tightly closed -- is near impossible for me. Then there's the stress of trying to figure out what exactly I'm supposed to do there. And of being introduced to people I've never met, whose names I'll immediately forget. And of trying not to cry, or trying to cry.

Funerals are also great things. They bring together family from far and wide -- family you haven't seen in a long time (whether by fate or by choice), family you've never met, and family you think you're supposed to remember but can't quite place. Cousins you knew as infants who now have children of their own. The day is full of talk about how beautiful or adorable or well-behaved such-and-such a child is, and my how they've grown up so fast.

I recognize that I am, for the most part, a loner. I try not to rely too heavily on my friends and my family. But today, my grandmother's funeral reminded me, as all funerals should, what a family is and what it means. It isn't just a group of people who by chance are linked together by common ancestors. A family, especially in a time like this, is a support group. It's a shared past. It's a collective memory that comes together to remind itself of its past joys and sorrows.

A funeral gives a family a time to come together and replenish itself, and to remind us that, even as we go our wildly separate ways, there are things we share, common touch points in our past that shaped who we are, though they shaped us in vastly different ways.

And I was reminded of that today. And I'm thankful.

So here's a little song that I dedicate to my family. It's accompanied by adorable pictures of my own two boys, but it goes out to my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all their kids, my entire extended family. If you or someone you love has ever had the surname Hollandbeck, this is for you (and I apologize for the sound quality):

Death to Robocalls

2011-01-17T14:07:00.000-05:00

When I moved into this apartment about a year and a half ago, I received some last bits of mail sent to the previous tenant, DT. I expected this, and it wasn't a big problem. Eventually, I stopped getting mail for her, except the occasional "DT or current tenant" junk mail.

What I didn't expect was to start receiving collections calls for her. They started trickling in about a month or two after I moved in. It was weird, to be sure, but it made a bit of sense. The people DT owed money to googled her name and got my address, which used to be her address. Then they googled that address to find a phone number, and they got the current phone number for that address -- my phone number.

DT must owe a lot of money to someone, because the calls were coming four or five times a week. It got so bad that I changed my outgoing voicemail to something along the lines of this: "This is the voice mail of Andy Hollandbeck. If you would like to leave Andy Hollandbeck a message, please do so. This is not the phone number of DT. If you are looking for DT, she does not live here. I do not know who she is or where she now lives. Please remove this number from your database. This is the phone number of Andy Hollandbeck, not DT."

They eventually got the message; the collection calls from live people stopped. But now I have a different problem, one I don't know how to fix. The problem is robocalls -- those automated collections calls with one voice saying most of the message, and a second voice chiming in whenever the person's name needs to be used. They come every two or three days now, and robots don't listen to voicemail.

They usually come during the day while I'm at work, so I don't get them. Instead, they pile up in my voicemail, and I end up spending four or five minutes dialing in, starting each message, and deleting it. But today, MLK Day, I'm home, and I'm expecting a call from apartment maintenance (my furnace is out, but my space heater is doing an outstanding job), so I'm answering the phone.

So I pick up a robocall:

"Hello. this is an automated message for DK. If you are DK, please press 1. If you are not DK, please press 2..."

I press 2, and this is what I hear:

"This call is for DK. If you are DK, please press 1. If you are not DK, please disconnect now..."

Apparently, they weren't wasting enough of my time already. I am so glad they gave me the option to press 2 to hear about hanging up instead of just telling me to hang up. What I would like is a way to talk to a real damn person to get my phone number off their list. Grrrr!

I'm sure that, with a little research into the problem, I could find some resource that would let these robotic morons know that they can stop calling me, that I'm not DT. But I am loathe to give them more of my time than they've already taken.

I guess it's a good thing I'm not David Banner, eh? HULK SMASH ROBOCALLS!

Problems at Work

2011-01-07T17:28:00.000-05:00

What happens when the server is down at work all day long? It gets a little weird. The inhabitants of my cube start goofing off.

Not me, of course! I'm talking about these guys:

This is Office Voldemort, aka The Dork Lord. Few people know that Office Voldemort is master of two different dark arts: the magical dark arts and mime. Here he does his famous "walking into the wind" performance.

And here is Office Zombie, happy to be at work. He's a decent editor, but most authors don't like him because he drools all over their manuscripts.

Not known for playing nice, here's Office Voldemort using the Imperius curse to force Office Zombie to do his bidding . . .

. . . which apparently involves reenacting scenes from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This is . . . well, this is just my clip-on fan. Ain't it purdy?

Office Voldemort spent part of the afternoon videoconferencing with his snake oil supplier, a Czechoslovakian mountain troll named Blurgle.

The day ended badly. Here, Office Voldemort casts the Dark Mark after hitting poor Bart Simpson with Avada Kedavra."Eat my muggle shorts!" was perhaps not the best response to Office Voldemort's questions.

New Year's Resolutions 2011

2011-01-03T22:04:00.000-05:00

Usually, the only new year's resolution I make is to not break my new year's resolution. This year, though, a number of things are coming together, and a number of things need to change. So I'm going to take a stab at this resolution thing. We'll see how it goes.

Resolution 1: Finish My Novel

I signed on for NaNoWriMo this year but only got about 20,000 words in. I need to put in the time to get this story on paper, er, on screen. Ideally, I'll finish it by the end of February so I can print it out, wrap it up, and give it to my mom (with a pack of red pens) for her birthday. (Don't tell my mother.)

Resolution 2: Lose at Least Five Pounds a Month

This is the biggie, and I still don't know how I'm going to do this. Five pounds a month seems like such a small amount that it's doable, but I'm really going to have to get my act together. And fast.
I'm at a totally unacceptable 226 right now. (Don't worry: I won't inflict a "before" picture on you.) If I can lose just five pounds a month until December, I'll be at a much nicer (but still not optimal) 170 pounds.

I won't kid myself into thinking that I could possibly lose weight during December. It'll be hard enough not to put it all back on at one Thanksgiving dinner.

Resolution 3: Me + Ukulele + YouTube

I want to learn an awesome piece on the ukulele (preferably an instrumental -- I don't have the best singing voice), record myself playing it, and upload it to YouTube. Why? Just to prove to myself that I can.

But what song? Malaguena might be a good choice, but I'm taking suggestions.

Resolution 4: Draw More

I doodle all the time, but I haven't done a serious art project since the picture I drew for my parents a few Christmases ago. I want to create more drawings that I can call "finished." I love the idea of actually putting together a regular comic of sorts, but I don't want to aim that high here in the first week of January.

Resolution 5: Remember to Come Back Here and Remind Myself about These Resolutions

Don't want to forget I made 'em!

The Creep on the Christmas Ukulele

2010-12-26T14:07:00.000-05:00

The more I think about the story behind the video at the end of this post, the longer it gets. I'll try to relate the shortened version here:

When I first joined Twitter, over 2,700 tweets ago, I, like practically everyone else, wasn't sure whom I wanted to follow. One of my favorite authors is Neil Gaiman, and he has been recognized numerous times as a mover and shaker on Twitter, and someone worth following. So I did.

It didn't take long, then, for me to discover his fiancée, Amanda Palmer, a quirky, eccentric performer who is as active on YouTube as she is on Twitter, which is a lot. While I was nosing around on YouTube, I found a video of her performing Radiohead's "Creep" on a ukulele. (There are actually quite a number of them out there, but this is one of the best.) I loved it. I love the song, and I loved the idea of covering it on ukulele.

Closer to home, my father took up luthiery as a hobby some time ago. At some point, I mentioned that I'd love to have a ukulele. Lo and behold, on Christmas Eve, we exchanged our gifts, and out of one box I pulled this ukulele, hand-made by my father:

It seems fitting, then, that the song that made me want to find a ukulele and learn how to play it ought to be the first song I learned. So here it is: My rendition of Radiohead's "Creep" (the PG version) on ukulele, a la Amanda Palmer:

Thanks, Dad.

The Annual Festivus Airing of Grievances

2010-12-23T17:11:00.000-05:00

Today is Festivus. Part of the joy of Festivus is the Airing of Grievances. I did my airing today one grievance at a time on Twitter, but it seemed like a good idea to record them here. Maybe next year I’ll be able to avoid some of these.

So here are the things that cause me or have caused me grief, as seen on Twitter:

People who will wait 10 minutes in the Taco Bell drive-through but complain about the cost of gas.
“Unnecessary” “quotation” “marks”
People who misuse comprise to try to sound smarter.
Tandem mountain bikes
I blame John McCain for Sarah Palin.
Movies made from 1980s TV shows
People who use SMS shorthand when they’re bloody speaking
No one recognizes my genius except my mother
Justin Bieber will make more money this year than I’ve made in the last 36.
People born into wealthy families who wrote books about how to become rich.
@BrnzBarbie wrote: People that think “conversate” is a real word annoy me. To which I added And “orientate.”
When people say “people that” instead of “people who”
It’s almost 2011! Weren’t we promised flying cars by now? Where are the flying cars?!
Still haven’t gotten my birthday presents from Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.
Indiana went back to being a red state.
Stupid gravity made my grandma fall down.
Still haven’t finished my naNoWrimo novel.
That beautiful woman would rather stay married to her handsome, rich, stupid husband than go out with me.

Loss of Passion -- a Followup

2010-10-27T02:26:00.000-04:00

Back in December of 2006, I published this post about how I felt totally unmotivated and lacking in passion. Some anonymous commenter who is suffering the same problem asked me to post an update, hopefully with some advice on overcoming this lack of passion.

I wish I had some real advice to give. Most advice is so general and hypothetical that it's utterly useless. For example, this morning at work, a friend outlined a process to get out of a bout of negativity (she was talking about her own mother at the time). The process was simple: when you feel negative thoughts coming on, stop yourself and whatever you're doing and think of one little thing that makes you smile.

She said it worked for her in the past. More power to her, but I had to bite my tongue to keep from lashing sarcastic at this idea.

Negativity -- or depression, which is really what we're talking about here -- isn't like hiccups. It isn't like a bug bite. It isn't something that starts at a specific point and interrupts the "normal flow" of things. You can't hold your breath until it stops, or rub it until the pain subsides.

It isn't a feeling, it's a sense of being. It's like the fish that someone heated up in the office microwave: You can wave your hand in front of your face or even hold your nose so that you don't smell it, but the odor is still there, and now what you're doing to avoid that odor is getting in the way of what you really need to do.

Depression is also, I've found, like writing a novel. Everyone has to find his own way to get through it, to find the motivation to work away at it day after day. To some people, it's just a matter of setting aside some time to oneself to focus. Others really need a support group just to get started. Still others see it as an insurmountable task and never even try.

This is really a bad time for me to write this particular post. I'm in a hole right now. A couple of them. Right now, the clock reads 1:53 a.m. I can't sleep. My checking account is currently over $400 in the red, and I don't get paid for three more days. My food supply is dwindling, and what food I have doesn't lean toward the healthy side. Fresh fruits and veggies? Try Ramen noodles. Which I know isn't good for my already high cholesterol and my too high and getting higher weight, but what choices do I have? I have no clean pants, and no quarters to do a load of laundry. And little extra time to do it.

I'm behind at work, too. I have enough to keep me busy for the next three weeks. Of course, three more weeks' worth of work will come in during that time, too. And I get little satisfaction from it anymore.

On top of it all, I've been feeling lonelier than usual. My ex took our two boys out of school for a week (which I admit isn't the greatest idea, but what can I really do about it?) to spend 10 days in Florida, hopping from one theme park to the next. I haven't seen them in almost a week, and I miss them more than I thought I would.

I honestly don't think I've been touched -- not so much as a handshake or even just someone brushing up against me -- since Friday, five days ago. That isn't good for the soul or the ego. Nothing seems to be going my way, and I see little change and few prospects in the near future.

I know I'm just feeling sorry for myself. It's very easy. (If you're reading this, please don't leave your own sob story in the comments, letting me know how much worse you've got it. I don't need to add guilt on top of everything else.)

There have been some brighter points, though. Of late, I've taken to writing sonnets in my spare time -- or in meetings at work. I do get a brief rush of satisfaction and pride when I click that Publish Post button the sends a new poem up to my other blog. As always, it's the act of creation that gives me a sense of self in this world. And there are always people to "talk to" on Twitter.

I did have a young lady over last Friday -- all afternoon and most of the evening -- to help me with the visual presentation I'm doing for the IWS concert this Saturday. After we hit a stopping point, she stayed and kept me company for a while. It was nice, but it really emphasized how lonely it was when I was by myself on Saturday. How's that for instant karma?

Still, it gave me some hope that I wasn't a total outcast. That someone out there actually knew I existed and thought I had some worth.

And I think that is the first breeze that will get you over these oppressive doldrums: Hope. If you have some hope, if you have something to look forward to, to strive for, it gives you focus. Hope isn't always easy to find, though. Sometimes it's downright difficult. Like now.

I'm done whining. I'm going to try to get some sleep now, knowing full well that I'll be dragging myself around all day tomorrow, zombified. Maybe next week I'll have something more helpful and more inspiring to write or write about. Baby steps.

An Eventful Evening for the IWS

2010-09-30T21:48:00.000-04:00

Or at least for me.

I had announced way back in February my plans to step down as the president of the Indiana Wind Symphony at the end of the season. The end of our regular season came and went with our May concert, and I didn't relinquish my post. The summer season started, and we made a big push to expand the size of the board, and I still remained at its head. The summer season ended, we had built the board up to 12 people (probably the largest it had ever been), and I still hadn't stepped down.

But last night, September 29, 2010, I made it official and abdicated my post.

I couldn't remember how long ago I had been voted in, so I looked back and found this post from September 20, 2006, noting the beginning of my term. Completely by accident, my tenure as president of the IWS had lasted just over the "presidential standard" of four years. It couldn't have worked out more mathematically.

I had decided to step down last February basically because I was getting tired. My responsibilities with the IWS have grown over the years -- creating the concert programs, building visual presentations for three or four concerts a season, running the board meetings, reporting to the band . . . oh, and playing. (It is, after all, a band.) It was getting to be too much. I was forgetting things, and not giving enough focus to any single project.

Most of those responsibilities involved a lot of creativity, which I love -- and didn't want to give up. After a little reflection, I realized that all the noncreative responsibilities were linked to my position as president. So the decision to give that up wasn't all that difficult. In theory.

But actually giving up the position didn't turn out to be so simple. We didn't really have anyone else on the board who was a strong leader and who I thought could be as dedicated to the position as I would want.

Or at least that's the excuse I told myself.

In truth, I had established a certain sense of comfort and regularity. I had just gotten used to my position. And I'm sure there was a certain sense of power there that was, well, addicting. Addicting like salt, not like meth. It does feel good to have people defer to you, to accept your opinion as an "official decision."

So I was essentially split: a part of me looked forward to surrendering those headaches and travails, and the other part didn't want to rock the boat that I had gotten so comfortable floating around in.

But some big changes are coming to the IWS this year. The biggest by far is that we're trying to hire a director of development -- the band's first paid position. That employee will report directly to the IWS president, adding a new managerial element to the position.

I have all of zero management experience. And I don't want any. We do have a few people on the board with managerial background, who can certainly do that part of the job better than I could. With the evolution of the president's position into areas I was uncomfortable with, and with an expanded board with new and useful skill sets, it became much easier for me to give up the post.

And so now I have.

And I miss it already. But I'll get over it.

And I'll still have plenty of things to do with and for the band -- but now I can focus on them better. Starting first with talking to a marketing rep from WIBC. Keep your ear on the radio and listen for us!

Ten Reasons I Hate People (6)

2010-07-27T10:30:00.002-04:00

TMZ is still on the air.

Ten Reasons I Hate People (7)

Ten Reasons I Hate People (8)

Ten Reasons I Hate People (9)

Ten Reasons I Hate People (10)

Voting for a New IWS Logo

2010-07-26T23:00:00.001-04:00

This is for members of the Indiana Wind Symphony only — I'm using this blog because it's easily available...

Here are the finalists for a new logo base on the feedback I've received for the two dozen or so logos I posted on Flickr. Please vote for the one you like best below.

Logo 1 -- Indiana Flag Theme

Logo 2 -- Phoenix Sans font

Logo 3 -- Cygnet Round font

Don't change the logo

[Update 7/29/2010: I'm going to call the voting now because we need to get the season brochure to the printer. The vote is evenly split between the Indiana Flag theme (#1) and the Phoenix Sans logo (#2). The third logo is a lot like the second, so I think it's safe to assume that, if we had a runoff between the first two, the majority of those who voted for #3 would vote for #2. I'm going to use that as a tie-breaker and call the Phoenix Sans logo the winner -- and the new logo of the Indiana Wind Symphony! Andy]

My Mammoth Vacation, Day 2

2010-07-16T08:06:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, we were up with the sun. We were visited in the morning by three young deer out getting their breakfast in the morning mist. Simply idyllic.

After a late hearty breakfast at the old traveler's standby — The Cracker Barrel — we went to a place called Guntown Mountain. The brochures called Guntown Mountain an Old West–themed amusement park set on the top of a hill; you reach it by chairlift.

I'm not going to include a link to their Web site (which hasn't been updated in a while anyway) because I don't want to encourage anyone to go there. It might once have been an amusement park, but it isn't anymore. I learned later from a conversation with the lady manning...er, womanning...the camp store that Guntown Mountan used to have some carnival rides, but they're gone now.
What they are now is a troupe of about two dozen employees putting on a series of Old West–style shows.

The chairlift ride was pleasant and relaxing — the best part of the park, in fact. When we got to the top, we found a ghost town. In one sense, it was a fake ghost town, but in another it was real: the place looked deserted. Apart from the bitter man who helped us off the chairlift and the gap-toothed man in the information booth, we seemed to have the place to ourselves.

We walked to the end of the street (about 100 yards) and found their "Animal Farm" — goats, piglets, peacocks, roosters, a fuzzy black bunny, and a pony that, judging from the warning signs and the electrified fence, had no problem biting the hand that fed it. Or that didn't. We took a look at them all, got a picture with a ram, and then headed back.

We wandered into the "saloon" and discovered where all the people were. There was a can-can show, with some stilted comedy acts in between, on a small stage in front of maybe three dozen people sitting on iron seats around iron parlor tables. The boys were already whining that there wasn't anything fun. I couldn't blame them, but I wanted to do my best to get my money's worth, so we stayed (in the air conditioning, I might add) to watch the end of the act.

After the can-can show, they announced that the country music show would be starting in about 20 minutes in the "Opera House" across the street. To pass the time, we peeked in the "shops" along the street: a bank, a sheriff's office (where you could spend a minute in jail for $1), a general store, and a trader's shop (where an old Indian sat with his oxygen tank peddling dream catchers made from cheap, brightly colored plastic beads and fishing line). By that time, all the other guests had filed out of the saloon. A couple of kids were feeding the piglets from baby bottles (for only 50 cents for about two ounces of liquid), but most people were sitting in the shade of the overhanging roof of the saloon, waiting for the next show to begin.

And that's what Guntown Mountain really is. It isn't an amusement park, it's a series of shows. The people who pay to get in go to one show and then sit around while the same dozen performers change clothes and locations and put on the next show. And they weren't even good shows — I suppose they were about what you'd expect from a non-animatronic amusement park show. The country music show sang five or six covers, including an ironic country-western version of "Old-Time Rock 'n' Roll." My boys were not happy, and the "Opera House" smelled funny.

According to the schedule, a "live-action gunfight" was coming up next. When the country show ended, the customers once again gathered in the shade of the eaves and waited for the next thing to happen. The boys were still whining, but I wasn't going to leave this supposed Old West experience without seeing a gunfight.

Which was ridiculous. Unbelieveably so. They played a recording of a Johnny Cash-sounding narrator who explained what was going on in the street over the sounds of movie-western background music. And the CD skipped.

This is a prime example of ridiculosity of this place. They couldn't get (or simply didn't think to get) a live person to read a script into a microphone against some background music. Instead, they used a CD recording of a narrator that skipped. And the "gunfight" itself wasn't an OK Corral–type fight between a group of lawmen and a band of black hats; it was the story of two brothers who robbed a bank, and one got away. The one who got away returned the day his brother was to be hanged, but they both ended up being killed. It was about a 10-minute show with 10 second worth of gunplay.

The only thing more ridiculous than this sorry, rundown tourist trap is that I paid money to get into it.

We left after the gunfight.

At the base of the entrance to Guntown Mountain (and, I hope, unaffiliated with it), is a junk/antique store. This place had a few antiques and a lot of junk. an amazing amount of junk that people could find one reason or another to buy. It was practically a museum itself. Here, you could find old Japanese slot machines, rusty manual farm equipment, pocket knives of all shapes and sizes, homemade bird houses, Coca-Cola memorabilia, and Navajo blankets. It was like wandering through a museum.

That afternoon, we went on the Historic Tour of Mammoth Cave. I won't bother you with the history that we learned along the way; you can get that from their Web site. Suffice it to say that this was a pleasant, cool, 2½-hour walk with entirely too many people on it. The sheer numbers of people didn't inhibit enjoyment of the aactual hike (it was a more like hiking than spelunking), but those few times we did stop to hear about some of the history, we had to wait for five to ten minutes for the people at the back of the pack to catch up, which gave the boys time to complain.

The Historic Tour was great; I'd recommend it for people who like to hike. It was a little jarring, though, when at about two-thirds of the way through, we passed lighted, fully functional restrooms that had been carved out of the rock. For that moment, the whole thing seemed as fake as Guntown Mountain.

We were pretty tired by then, so we returned to the campsite and got a good fire going so we could roast hot dogs for dinner and then play a few board games. The deer came back around sunset, too, to see what was going on.

My Mammoth Vacation, Day 1

2010-07-12T22:51:00.000-04:00

I got to spend last week with my boys, just the three of us. This year, we went on a camping excursion to Mammoth Cave National Park.

It wouldn't be a vacation with me if I didn't forget something. This year, it was my camera. I'm not a huge shutterbug, but I do like to snap a few shots every now and then to mark the occasion. I was forced to purchase a single-use camera at the camp store. A single use film camera. I hadn't realized it had been so long since I'd used a film camera, and I had forgotten the joy and, for some reason, anxiety that comes along with spinning that little clicking knob after taking a shot. I missed my digitial camera.

As I said, I'm not a huge shutterbug, so I didn't get many pictures — not enough to fill the camera. Eventually, I'll fill the camera, get some digital prints, and post some of them here. But for now, this'll be mostly unillustrated.

So anyway, we left Monday morning after breakfast. We lunched in Seymour and had a quick rest stop just south of Louisville. As we journeyed deeper into Kentucky, we combed over the handful of tourist brochures I had snagged at the rest stop. The Mammoth Cave schedule said that there was something called a "River Styx Tour" at 3:30. Both the boys have been reading Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, so Greek mythology is at the forefront of their minds. It looked like the gods of time might be with us, and we could make it there just in time to get on the tour.

We pulled into a parking spot just a few minutes after 3:30 and rushed into the visitors' center, where two things happened in quick succession. First, we learned that Kentucky is on Central Time, so it was actually just after 2:30 there. A whole hour before the tour started! (Time zones have never made a great deal of sense to me, and this makes it even worse.) Second, a quick trip through the ticket line revealed that the River Styx Tour was completely sold out.

Through Sunday.

So let this be a lesson if you're planning a visit to Mammoth Cave during peak vacation season: Buy your tickets early online. I, for one, am not a big planner when it comes to vacations, but I do hear that there are some people who schedule every waking second of a vacation. I assume that the River Styx tour that we missed included quite a few of this latter type of vacationer.

But no matter. I got us three tickets to the Discovery tour, the only self-guided cave tour. We checked in with the ranger, got ourselves a camp site, and set up the tent before returning to the mouth of the cave.

A snapshot of our camp site will eventually go here.

The neatest thing about Mammoth Cave in the summer — and caving in general — is the natural air conditioning underground. It was in the mid-nineties above ground, a steady mid-fifties below. A wonderful summer respite.

The Discovery Tour doesn't go very deeply into the cave, sticking to wider areas of the caverns. What's more, it's the starting and ending points of some of the longer, guided tours. The moral: Don't buy tickets for the Discovery Tour if you're going to buy tickets to one of the other tours that goes through there.

For my younger son, this was a first experience with caves. He was rather nervous, as I probably was the first time I went into a cave. My elder son, though, is now a Boy Scout. He's been dirty-kneed, head-lamped spelunking a couple times before, so this cool, dark, open space was a little tame for him. I was just happy to be out of the heat and finally having some vacation-time fun with my boys.

One of the other things that we found in our brochures was Lost River Cave. I had gone to Mammoth Cave on a family trip when I was younger. I remember that Mammoth Cave Nat'l Park had offered underground boat tours, but at the time, the water level was too high and the boat tour was closed.

Mammoth Cave doesn't offer boat tours anymore, so we hopped in the vacation-mobile and shot down to nearby Bowling Green, where we just managed to get tickets to the final boat tour of the day.

Vacationers: If you're looking for a souvenir or gift to take back with you, the gift shop at the Lost River Cave is a great place to go. They do have some kitschy stuff, but they also have some really wonderful keepsakes at prices you don't usually see in a gift shop. I was tempted to spend a lot of money here.

The boat tour itself was pretty cool, and at least one of my boys thought it was the best part of the vacation. For an adult, the history behind the cave is as interesting as the tour itself. You can find out more on their Web site, but the really interesting part doesn't start until the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy" section.

While we were on this tour, we found out why Mammoth Cave doesn't offer boat tours anymore. It seems that a rare species of blind cave shrimp was discovered in those caves. To protect the species, boat tours were discontinued. All of Mammoth Cave's boats were then sold to the Lost River Cave people, who now use them.

After that, it was a late dinner at The Olive Garden (love their new dishes, hate their new prices), firebuilding at the campsite, s'mores, and sleep. Well-earned sleep.

The Dangers of Theocracy

2010-05-17T10:34:00.000-04:00

Warning: The following post is of a political and religious nature. The only talk about cute ducklings, my genius sons, the joy of music, and my love of language occur here in this warning, and are therefore already past.

Last week, I read from a few sources about Sarah Palin calling for a "return" to a government based on the ten commandments, which are of course just gateway rules to full-on theocracy based on someone's interpretation of the words of the Bible. So many Christians and ultra-conservatives (which are not mutually exclusive groups) believe that such a shift in government can be only a good thing, because Christians are holy and just and all those good things. What could go wrong?

A story I found this morning from Mail Online gives us some hint about what a theocracy can be like. According to the story, a 23-year-old woman asked for a ride from a man. That man, instead of taking her where she needed to go, took her to another house, where she was gang raped by that guy and four others. That rape was followed by an unwanted pregnancy. The woman tried to get an abortion but wasn't allowed.

When authorities eventually heard the whole story, what was the result? The woman was convicted of adultery (even though she wasn't married) and sentenced to a year in prison. After her rape baby is born, she will receive 100 lashes — and I ain't talkin' about no Revlon lashes here. The fate of the five rapists? Apparently, no one really cares about them.

This case comes from Saudi Arabia, which adheres to what Mail Online refers to as "a strict form of medieval law," which is based on the tenets of Islam.

But there can be no connection between this Saudi corruption of justice and a Christian USA, right? Perhaps, but it really depends on whose interpretation of Christian dogma and scripture holds in the White House, the Supreme Court, and Congress. There are certainly some hard-liners who oppose abortion in any cases, even in a case of rape, so, in a Christian America, this woman could face the judge for attempting an abortion.

If a Defense lawyer — or worse, the judge — wants to adhere to the writings of the Old Testament, the results could be much worse:

If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her. Deut. 22:28–29

A strict interpretation of this passage would result not in a rapist put behind bars, but in a woman being forced to marry (and never be able to divorce) one of the men who raped her. Still, it could be worse:

If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. Deut. 22:23–24

So, unmarried rape victims must marry their rapists and never get divorced. Married rape victims are put to death. That's some good ole godly justice for ya.

But, you say, these are taken from the Old Testament, and Christianity is all about the New Testament. True, but does that mean that Christians ignore the Old Testament? Of course not. Creationists wallow in the words of Genesis. Women look to Old Testament scripture for guidance from strong Biblical women — because there aren't many in the New Testament. Christians find their morality lessons in the Old Testament stories of Job, of Lot, and of Noah. And don't forget, Mrs. Palin called for a return to the ten commandments, which are found in Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament.

So how would a Christian theocratic government choose which parts of the Old and New Testaments from which to draw legislation and legal decisions? Would we just leave it to our elected, Christian officials (and their ministers/pastors/priests) to make that decision? Would you feel safe with that? Would you feel that justice has a fair hand in that? Would you vote for that?

Yummy Mother's Day Meals

2010-05-09T23:42:00.000-04:00

Saturday afternoon, I headed down to my parents' place for Mother's Day weekend. When we got there, my mom wanted to go down to Bloomington and check out the Bloomingfoods co-op. So we hopped in the car and headed south.

The result was two wonderful meals. For dinner on Saturday, we had this nice sampler spread. (I apologize for the quality of the photo.)

Here you have spinach gnocchi with (a bit too much) basil pesto, banana peppers stuffed with mozzarella and prosciutto (the whole think was harder than I expected), and marinated sweet red peppers stuffed with goat cheese and spices (these are absolutely delicious!). On the second plate were three cheeses: A locally produced Gouda, a soft and nutty St. Jerome cheese, and the most amazing cheese ever: cocoa-rubbed goat cheese. I couldn't really taste the chocolate while eating the cheese, but it left a mocha-y aftertaste. Deeeeeeelicious.

For Sunday lunch, we sculpted this masterpiece:

Carrots, broccoli, onions, chicken, a little mayo, and dill weed wrapped in crescent roll dough and topped with an egg glaze and slivered almonds. It was a delicious cross between chicken pot pie and a calzone, and we ate it with fresh polenta and pesto-marinated mozzarella balls.

I haven't eaten this well in a long time. And it was otherwise a wonderful Mother's Day weekend.

And, seriously, those marinated sweet red peppers stuffed with goat cheese and spices were absolutely divine!

Free Reward! An Infinity of Hoops!

2010-05-01T21:23:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Taco Bell, Dr. Pepper, and EA Games for wasting a good twenty minutes of my evening with your ridiculous offer of free stuff. Grrrrrrr.

It started innocently enough. I had lunch at Taco Bell on Friday and got one of their ecologically unfriendly plastic fountain drink cups. On that cup was a 12-character code that, according to the cup, I could enter at TacoBell.com to get some "exclusive in-game content for [a handful of] EA Games and more!"

One of the games is Spore, one of my favorites. So I went to TacoBell.com. As expected, I had to create a user account there. After I did that, I had to answer four simple questions about my drink choice, and then I entered my code. Simple enough, and totally expected.

Clicking the button to continue took me to a page at DrPepper.com, where I expected to download my freebie stuff. I was faced with a login page, and so I entered the user account info that I had just given at TacoBell.com. That was the wrong info.

I was at a new site. And I was expected to open a new user account at DrPepper.com. I rolled my eyes, but I am a big fan of Spore. So I took a couple minutes to enter my information and create a new password. After that, I was asked THE SAME FOUR QUESTIONS THAT I WAS ASKED BY TACO BELL.

Weird, yes, but not all too time-consuming. I forged ahead, entering my 12-digit code AGAIN at DrPepper.com. I was notified that I have a "reward" that I could redeem, and the only thing I had to do was LOG IN TO THE EA GAMES WEB SITE to retrieve it. And I didn't have a user account at EA Games.

I managed to hold back the deluge of four-letter words that were threatening to shoot from my mouth -- my two young sons are here, after all -- and I was ready to give up. I had already spent too much time and received nothing but the promise of more spam e-mail.

But my elder son is even more of a Spore fan than I am. And he has some adorable puppy-dog eyes.

So I created a new account at EA Games. I wasn't asked any questions about my drinking habits, and I didn't have to enter the 12-character code again, so I hoped I was actually getting somewhere.

Once I was logged into EA Games, I had to choose one of the games that offered some in-game content. I clicked on Spore, and I was getting a little excited -- the "prize" was a set of cybernetic body parts that I could use to build characters in my game. Totally Star Trek cool.

When I chose Spore, I was magically transported to the Spore Web site where -- guess what?! -- I was supposed to log in yet again. This time, though, I already had an account there, and I even remembered my password.

So I logged into the Spore Web site and got to the page with the longed-for link to the free awesome download. The link was right there! But the other text got in the way -- specifically, the text warned me of a known issue with a file path, followed by these instructions for working around that problem:

To fix this issue, please complete the following steps:

Uninstall Spore and Spore Galactic Adventures
Re-install Spore
Re-install Spore Galactic Adventures
Return to this page to install the Spore Bot Parts Pack.

So I jumped through the TacoBell.com user account hoop. I jumped through the DrPepper.com user account hoop. I even jumped through the EAGames.com user account hoop. The Spore.com user account was a much easier hoop, so I just stepped through that one. And now I am expected to spend the next hour uninstalling and reinstalling two programs on my computer before installing my "exclusive in-game content."

I like Spore, and I would really like to have this Bot Parts Pack. But I like my time better. I can make much better use of my time than un- and re-installing software. Sitting here typing away about this travesty of a marketing campaign is a better way to spend my time than that.

I wish I could say that I was denying the perpetrators of this crap what they wanted, but unfortunately, the marketers at Taco Bell, Dr. Pepper, and EA Games have already gotten their rewards.

If any marketers are reading this, take this as a great example of how to piss off the very people you're trying to turn into customers. I will undergo this Sisyphean effort for nothing less than a new car. And it better not be a Daewoo.

And to the people at QDoba: You're now my favorite Mexican fast food restaurant. See you Monday.

Signs of Spring

2010-04-02T17:18:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, I found this undeniable sign that spring has arrived . . . on my patio.

I was a little worried that the duck that laid these eggs had abandoned them. But then, when I came home from work today, I found this:

So, good news. And Spring is definitely here. (I wish someone would tell the Canadian geese.)

I hope the heat stays away for a while, though, because it looks like I won't be running the air conditioner until the ducklings arrive.

My Mistake: THIS Is the Definition of Irony

2010-03-29T11:59:00.000-04:00

From FriendsOfIrony.com via FAILblog.

The Definition of Irony

2010-03-29T10:01:00.000-04:00

Ten Reasons I Hate People (7)

2010-02-17T18:35:00.001-05:00

You can find a lot of people worth hating at (The Customer Is) Not Always Right.

This is a collection of all-too-believable interactions that employees have had with customers. Many of them are, as the banner advertises, stupid and funny. But buried (not too deeply) among the hilarity and stupidity are some of the core psychological problems that just scrape my scabs. It won't take you long to find interactions with people who believe that the world should fit itself to them; that anything that inconveniences them in any way is stupid and unnecessary at best and, at worst, is a violation of their rights.

I wish the sense of entitlement among some of these people (which I will now refer to as "self-centered douchebags") was unbelievable, but we see it every day — in TEA party rallies, in Congressional debates, in international politics, at stoplights, where people walk dogs, in the 12 items or less lane. They're everywhere.

Along with the sense of entitlement, these self-centered douchebags never seem to recognize the possibility, no matter how minute, that they could be wrong. And that's sometimes worse. These are the douchebags who rear-end you and then insist that you stopped too suddenly; the douchebags who buy a vacuum cleaner, use it for a month, and then return it for a full refund because it completely lost suction because they never cleaned the filters; the douchebags who "buy" a ginormous, flat-screen HDTV the day before the Super Bowl and then try to return it the day after and see nothing wrong with that.

(sigh)

People.

Ten Reasons I Hate People (8)

Ten Reasons I Hate People (9)

Ten Reasons I Hate People (10)

Sarah Palin, Language Victim

2010-02-06T20:22:00.001-05:00

Sarah Palin has been victimized be language again.

The perpetrator is Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, in a private weekly strategy meeting "featuring liberal groups and White House aides," some expressed their intention "to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama's health-care overhaul."

Emanuel's response: "Fucking retarded." (It's unclear from the reporting whether he was speaking about the ideas or the people who had the ideas.)

Mrs. Palin has gone to Facebook to show her outrage that a public figure would use such a derogatory term, saying that retarded is a "slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them...," comparing it to a more well-known and more universally hated derogatory epithet: the dreaded "N-word."

What does Mrs. Palin want? "I would ask the president to show decency in this [internal discussion] process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm's continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts." Leaving the Chief of Staff out of discussions by the White House staff? Is Mrs. Palin expected Rahm to be fired?

Once again, Mrs. Palin overreacts to a situation she doesn't like, which leads me to the following gripes:

Gripe One: Who Called Whom What?

In her Facebook reaction to Rahm Emanuel's horrible misdeed, Mrs. Palin once again put her son Trig — who suffers from Down's Syndrome — on public display. She argues that Trig, and the thousands of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, were denigrated by Mr. Emanuel's scornful soubriquet.

Rahm was speaking to and about some of the people in the meeting. Mrs. Palin, Rahm Emanuel did not call Trig retarded; you did. Why are you so vehement on turning your son into a victim?

Gripe Two: Sarah Palin Plays the Race Card?

Mrs. Palin compare's Mr. Emanuel's use of retarded to "the N-word." This is an unfair comparison. Retarded has a long history of legitimate use outside of the medical (and name-calling) field, and it is still used as such. Numerous situations exist in which I — or Rahm Emanuel — could use the word retarded and no one would bat an eye. Hell, the word retard is part of the California Health and Safety Code (Section 9636)!

On the other hand, situations in which the word nigger is acceptable are few and far between (such as in a discussion of derogatory terms). Nigger has no history outside of racial disparagement.

Yes, in recent decades the word has been claimed and owned by some African Americans and defused so that it is acceptable within their groups — in the same way that the homosexual community has claimed ownership of fag and dyke. But that's the opposite of what Mrs. Palin is apparently doing with retarded. Instead of defusing a term that can and has been used derogatorily, she has suffused it with more power.

I grew up with a cousin who was born with mental retardation. At the time, we used the phrase mentally retarded to describe his disability. In our family, he was retarded, and there was nothing derogatory about it. That was way back during the 1980s. If calling my cousin retarded was acceptable in the Christian family I grew up in, then comparing retarded to nigger is totally too far. At worst, retarded is comparable to person of color. Or Afro-American. Or homeboy.

And anyway, who dealt Mrs. Palin a race card?

Gripe Three: A Tribute to Eric Clapton

The knee-jerk reaction of right-wingers to any faux pas, simple error, or moment of temporary stupidity from a Democrat is to call for a resignation or termination.

As Eric Clapton sang, "Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself." Right-wingers' lack of "outrage" to the (sometimes extreme) shortcomings of fellow right-wingers is a clear sign that it isn't about Right or fairness or "protecting the children"; it's all about politics. Consider:

Pat Robertson claimed that the entire population of Haiti suffered from a horrible cataclysm because they made a deal with the devil. Yet the outrage that Mrs. Palin most assuredly felt at such unconscionable claims apparently didn't merit the public response that Rahm's gaff did.
When South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer compared people on government assistance programs — including children on reduced-price lunches and the hundreds of thousands of people who suddenly found themselves on unemployment comp in the last few years — to stray animals, Mrs. Palin did not feel compelled to call for him to withdraw from the race for South Carolina's governorship. Why not?
But the greatest example of hypocrisy — and the most ironic considering Mrs. Palin's attempt to play the race card — is that the GOP and southern conservatives (and yes, I recognize that Alaska isn't part of the South) are the ones who kept segregationist Strom Thurmond in Congress until he died of old age! Calling an African American a "nigger" is one thing; trying to keep African Americans out of the good schools, restaurants, theaters, etc. is something entirely different.

Gripe Four: What a Rush

I feel dirty that I fall on the same side of this controversy as Rush Limbaugh. Filthy. Ick!

Gripe Five: V for Victim

Sarah Palin didn't get a fair shake because of sexism. She was treated unfairly because she had an accent. She was unfairly mocked because her teenage daughter got pregnant out of wedlock. She was made fun of because someone overspent on her wardrobe.

At every turn, Sarah Palin is a victim of some new liberal attack. You might say she's made a career out of being a victim. And now she is steering her children toward a lifetime of being victims. Her younger daughter was a victim of David Letterman's unacceptable and unfunny "jokes." And now her poor son Trig is a victim of the potty-mouthed Chief of Staff of ultra-liberal, un-American President Obama.

It's time someone in that family reconsidered what it means to be strong and stopped being the victim.

Gripe Six: Members Only?

Who told? The real douchebag in all this isn't Sarah Palin or Rahm Emanuel, but the person who attended that private meeting and took it to the press. If the President needs to eliminate someone from these closed-door strategy meetings, is the one who opens those doors to let the press in.

How She Should Have Reacted

The reaction I would have loved to hear, which would have finally put a point on Mrs. Palin's "Sarah vs. The Liberals" scoreboard, would go something like this: "Rahm Emanuel's the one who's fucking retarded. My son Trig has enough of a sense of decency not to talk to people like that." But that would have been out of character, unfortunately. Too much for me to ask for.

So besides that, Mrs. Palin's response should have been to demand an apology from Mr. Emanuel.

But wait. He did apologize. Twice. First, in a private phone call to Tim Shriver, head of the Special Olympics. And then again to a group of disabilities advocates. (To be fair, the apologies probably started after Mrs. Palin's Facebook reaction.) I would hope that this would be enough, but the story is still growing like a foot fungus.

The Worst Part of Fatherhood

2010-01-18T19:34:00.002-05:00

During the last weekend of 2009, Gremlin the Younger, who had just turned seven, was complaining about a toothache. I peeked in that gaping maw and saw that his gums were a little red area, but not much else. When the next day rolled round, he wasn't complaining about pain anymore. After a while, we just sort of forgot about it.

This evening, I got a call from the Mom, and apparently the toothache is back. She took a gander in his gob and found some sort of red, infected-looking growth on his gums. We're going to try to get him into the dentist tomorrow, but in the meantime I've got the fatherhood flutters, imagining all sorts of horrible worst-case scenarios, from oral cancer to herpes, that result in the most horrid medical procedures: pulling a tooth, slicing out a growth and sewing his gums back together, chemotherapy, removal of his entire lower jaw. Sometimes it doesn't pay to have an active imagination.

This isn't nearly as bad as the time he literally cracked his skull and spent a night in the hospital after a playground stumble, but the worrying is definitely the worst part of being a father.

And I'd like to take this moment to apologize to my parents for every time I put them through this. Especially the time, that one summer, that I gave Beth a ride home after band practice — with a little half-hour unplanned 'diversion' on the way. Don't ask.

[Update Tuesday morning: Got the little guy to the dentist after lunch this morning. The X-ray showed that he had tooth decay between two teeth, and it had eaten down to the root of both. This decay had caused an abscess in his gums. (Imagine cutting the eraser off a pencil and shoving it up under your gums, on the outside. That's what it looked like, plus it was red and bleeding a little. Yuck!)
Anyway, the best course of action was pulling the two teeth, which isn't a big deal because they're both baby teeth. When I left him there with his mother, he had made it through the syringe-to-the-gums stage (the worst part), and they were waiting for the Novocain to kick in.
All in all, not even close to the worst that could have happened. Stomach flutters are flittering away.]

The Ten Top 2009 Top Ten Lists

2009-12-20T17:52:00.002-05:00

Sweet December, the time when editors scramble to use up the last of their vacation days by the end of the year, when their temps and interns abandon forward-looking news and recycle the content from days past. In short, December is the time for lists of the best and worst of everything from the past year.

And so here I follow suit, offering my choices for (and links to) the best "Top Ten of 2009" lists out there on the Internet. Some of them are informative, some fun, some beautiful (and at least one that's all three). And in order not to be a total spoiler, I offer up the number two item for each list.

10. Top Ten Sports Moments from AskMen.com

I don't follow a lot of sports, so this type of highlights list is perfect for me. Why watch the whole forgettable game/match/round/inning when I can just skip to the cool parts and then go back to reading and writing? (The pix of bikini- and underwear-clad babes are a plus as well.)

Roger Federer regains his #1 position after defeating Andy Roddick in a marathon 4 hour, 16 minute final match encompassing 30 sets at Wimbledon.

9. Top Ten Google Doodles from InventorSpot

You never know what you'll find on the Google home page from day to day. Over the years, the "standard" Google logo has been artistically replaced with so-called "Google Doodles" to mark holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries of all sorts.

#2: On November 4, GoogleUK marked the 20th anniversary of Wallace & Grommit with this search page image.

Note: This is currently listed as #2, but when you get to the end of the list, you'll find a poll that lets you vote for your favorite. Vote now to move your favorite to the top spot!

8. Top Ten Books of 2009 from The Book Maven

Everyone and their brother has posted a list of the top ten books of the year, from book-biz mainstays like Amazon, Publisher's Weekly, and the New York Times to readers, writers, and influencers like Stephen King and Oprah. Although I haven't read any of the books on any of these lists yet, I prefer The Book Maven's list for her relaxed writing style and succinct yet informative summaries.

The Book Maven lists her books in no particular order, so there really isn't a "#2" to list here. From the descriptions, though, Zoe Heller's The Believers goes near the top of my to-read list.

7. Top Ten 2009 Cryptozoology Deaths

This is a strange one, yes, but it is interesting to see what insiders have to say about the frontiersmen of fringe science. This list includes people who searched for Bigfoot, people who spotted the Mothman, and even the recently deceased director of the X-Files episode in which the word cryptozoology was first uttered.

The deaths are listed in the order in which they occurred. The first, James Colvin, who died January 4, was the director of two expeditions in search of the Loch Ness Monster, funded by World Book Encyclopedia in the late '60s and early '70s.

6. Top Ten New Species of 2009, from the International Institute for Species Exploration

We so often hear about the effects of global climate change and the endangerment of various species around the world that we sometimes forget that scientists are discovering (or creating) new species all the time. I'll give you #2, but you've really got to see #1; it's just difficult to believe without seeing.

#2: Coffea charrieriana:
A new caffeine-free coffee bean from Cameroon.

5. National Geographic's Top Ten Discoveries of 2009

This list is based on the popularity of the coverage and not on the decisions of Nat'l Geographic Researchers or any other scientific (or intern-packed) committee. The list is in large part taken up by large, dangerous, and downright weird animals that were discovered, rediscovered, and sometimes eaten.

#2: Fish With Transparent Head Seen Alive for First Time

4. Discover Magazine's Top Ten Astronomy Pictures

As new technology for studying the heavens is created and improved, the images we get of the outer reaches become clearer, more useful, and more beautiful. To quote the blog itself, "Colorful stars, wispy, ethereal nebulae, galactic vistas sprawling out across our telescopes . . . it's art no matter how you look at it."

#2: Images from Mars: This is an image of the sand dunes of Mars, swirled and swept by the mysterious winds the tickle the Red Planet's plains, taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

3. Top Ten Fails of 2009 from FAILBlog

From cryptic signs and stupid warnings to crotch-crunching skateboarders and Darwin Award nominees, FAILBlog offers up the stupidest, silliest, and most unbelievable idiocy in the world today. FAILBlog offers not one, but three lists of this year's top fails:

Top Ten Most Memorable FAIL Moments: #2. Bolivian newscasts air a scene from Lost as actual footage from the last moments of Flight 447.
Top Ten Most Memorable FAIL People: #2. Jon Gosselin.
Top 10 Most Memorable Videos and Photos on FAIL Blog: #2. A photo of a playground slide that ends in a small pit about a foot deep — suitable for an episode of Parks and Recreation.

2. THE FUTURIST Magazine's Top 10 Forecasts for 2010 and Beyond

From the site itself:

Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into our annual Outlook report. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War. Here are the top ten forecasts for 2010 and beyond.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

#2: In the design economy of the future, people will download and print their own products, including auto parts, jewelry, and even the kitchen sink. (Neal Stephenson fans may recognize a hint of The Diamond Age in this forecast.)

1. Buzzfeed's Top Ten Flash Mobs

There's something heartwarming about a large number of strangers coming together for a single purpose, even if it is only to dance in a public place. (I assume that these are actually listed in reverse order qualitatively, considering that the video in tenth place is listed as "The apex of flash mobs. This is what all flash mobs strive to be.")

#2 (er, 9): Sweden's Tribute to Michael Jackson

Wish List 09

2009-12-06T13:35:00.006-05:00

Holiday season rolls around again! Last year's wish list did so well, I figured I'd give it another go. So, here are a few gift ideas to consider:

Music

Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces
Amanda Palmer, Who Killed Amanda Palmer?
Coldplay, Viva la Vida
Stevie Wonder, Talking Book
The Tiger Lillies with Kronos Quartet, The Gorey End
~~Counting Crows,~~ ~~August and Everything After~~ [thanks to the kids!]
Anything from Red Hot Chili Peppers

Books

Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (yes, I've already read it, but I want to read it again)
The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English from Shakespeare to South Park by Jack Lynch

Other Stuff

An application to turn PowerPoint presentations into videos
An end to debt
~~A microSD card for my phone — the bigger the better~~ [thanks, dad]
~~The new Star Trek movie~~ [didn't get it for Christmas; couldn't wait so I bought it myself]
Spiderman 3
A house
A 32GB iPod Touch
~~Something I can use as a medicine cabinet~~ [thanks dad, er, indirectly]
Bath towels — navy blue or a dark olive
Spore Heroes for the Wii
Nine ladies dancing
Whole-bean coffee
A fun calendar or two
A comfy office chair
A nice dinner
Pretty much anything from the ThinkGeek catalogue

We're Too Fat! Please Send Money!

2009-12-02T10:08:00.001-05:00

I honestly hope someone can come along and prove that this article in the Telegraph is a hoax. Here's the short of it:

A family of four in Blackburn (somewhere in the UK) has a combined weight of 83 stone. A stone is (somehow) 14 pounds, so in total they weigh 1,162 pounds. The members of this family receive government assistance because of numerous medical conditions — all related to being overweight — in the amount of £22,508 a year, approximately US$37,500. They claim that their income assistance checks are too small.

But here's the rub: They haven't worked in 11 years! They claim that their hereditary weight problems keep them from working regular jobs. They believe that the government should give them more money, and that they shouldn't have to find jobs. Says the father, "It's not our fault we can't work. We deserve more."

Where does this overblown sense of entitlement come from? I'll admit to having problems with my weight, but I would never, never, claim that someone else is responsible for my livelihood because of it. Someone please tell me this is a hoax, that there really aren't people in the world like this!

(Sadly, the next "job" this family is likely to find is a reality TV show. Will we soon see The Couch Potatoes on BBC? Superfatties on FOX? Little Minds, Big Asses on TLC?)

The Story of the Birthday Roadkill

2009-11-09T15:24:00.001-05:00

My 35th birthday was Saturday, and as usually happens among my friends, we celebrate by going out for sushi. J and E and lil Lil arrived at the apartment first, but V wasn't far behind. As soon as I close the door behind V, she says, "You know how they say that it's the thought that counts? That really applies here." Turns out she made some sort of rich, fat-packed chocolate-brownie/cookie dessert squares for me. She took them out to the car, along with her coat in case she needed it (she didn't), set the nummies on the roof of the car and fished out her keys to unlock the door. Then she slid into the car and started off.

Somewhere between her condo and my apartment, she heard a couple mysterious thumps. She didn't realize what it was until she got to the apartment complex that I just moved into. She had left my chocolate nummies on the roof of her car, and the directions to my new place were on a sticky note attached to them!

Luckily, she remembered my building number and some sketchy directions, so she made it there for sushi. I guess she was able to find the doomed desserts the next morning, completely flattened at the edge of the road.

When I came into work this morning, sitting on my office desk were four dessert squares that V hadn't originally wrapped up the night before. (They're like finger sandwiches but with cookies for the bread and fudge for the meat. I think she's trying to kill me.) The note on top of the nummies said "NOT ROADKILL."

It's the thought that counts.

Generic Update Title about Being Really Busy

2009-11-05T12:12:00.001-05:00

I haven't posted in quite a while because I've been so godawful busy. And stressed.

The last week of October was particularly packed for me. During the course of that week, I moved to a new apartment. It's a bit cheaper, and it's a lot closer to where my kids live and go to school. Moving there has cut 10 minutes a day off my usual morning drive to take them to school, which I'm hoping will help clear up some of my financial difficulties.

So I spent most of my free time that week packing stuff up and moving it. I got the last of my stuff moved on Halloween and turned my keys in with time to spare — though I realized the next day that I forgot to empty out the freezer at the old place. Not much of a loss, though: months-old half-empty bags of frozen tilapia and broccoli. I did have two relatively recent servings of ground turkey that I left behind, though.

Friday night, the IWS had its Halloween concert. Since I do the group's programs, as well as a lot of other stuff, concerts in general can be pretty stressful. This one was moreso for three reasons:

We played The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I haven't had my ass so thoroughly kicked by a piece of music in quite a while. Essentially playing the violin part on a clarinet is normally a horrid experience, but this was one of the worst. (Not that it wasn't a good transcription; it was just so damned hard!)
We were supposed to come in costume. I fretted (waaaaay too much) over my costume since the end of September. I originally thought of dressing as a cubicle, but in the end, I took my mother's old bee outfit and paired it with a sword, shield, and crown. That's right, I was a Bee King. But not just any king! I was Bee Arthur. (I have to stop being so obscure with my costume. Nobody recognized it right away, and when I told them the pun, I got a mix of laughter, rolled eyes, and disgust. Two years ago, very few people even recognized that I was dressed as Ned Flanders. Next year, I'm just wearing a white T-shirt with the words "Obscure Fictional Character" written on the front.)
I had to create a PowerPoint presentation to be shown while the band played Barry Kopetz's The Raven. Our concert was in part billed as a commemoration of Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday. We had an actress from Cabaret Poe (which I know nothing about) come in and enact the poem before we played. For the presentation, I was lucky that Gustav Doré had created a series of engravings to illustrate "The Raven," so I could just use those. If the recording of our performance is any good, I'll eventually put the two together, turn it into a movie, and then post it online.

All this on top of my usual nine-to-five job, some freelance copy editing, and going with my kids to see the Headless Horseman at Conner Prairie. Things are finally calming down, though.

My "next big thing" is that I'm making my way through Beginning XML, Third Edition, from Wrox Press. (Full disclosure: I work for Wrox Press's parent company.) I'm trying to learn XML for a number of reasons — number one is just because it's there. I'm hoping that, eventually, I'll be able to put together a small XML program that'll let people track Google Sidewiki comments on their Web sites (I'll probably write more about Sidewiki later), but I won't consider my efforts a failure if I never make it that far. I'm learning XML mostly for fun and to boost my overall skill set.

Is 7 Lucky for Microsoft? Changes You'll See in Windows 7

2009-10-22T00:13:00.001-04:00

Windows 7 becomes widely available today, and it's big. How big? On Amazon UK, more people have pre-ordered Windows 7 than pre-ordered Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I haven't had the chance to actually try Windows 7, but I've been editing a lot of articles about the new OS at work. After reading a bunch of Windows 7 how-to's, I'm kind of excited about the new Windows. At least as excited as someone can get about an OS upgrade. Here are some of the changes you can expect to find:

New Win7 Features to be Happy About

Aero Shake. Grab a window and shake the mouse, and all the other windows minimize. Shake it again, and they all pop back up. It sounds like a great way to unclutter your desktop, and also to quickly hide what you were really doing when your boss walked into the office.

Aero Snap. Drag a window all the way to the left or right, and it automatically resizes to cover half the desktop. You can place any two application windows side by side now!

Slide Show Wallpaper. Can't decide which picture of your kids to plaster on your desktop? Select them all, and the desktop wallpaper will flip through them like a slideshow.

Expanded calculator. It seems kind of backward that it has taken so long to make the built-in calculator as powerful as some TI handheld, but there it is. The calculator noew does unit conversions, date calculations, statistics, and number system conversions (e.g., decimal to hexadecimal), as well as, well, adding, subtracting, and the like. These improvements will make someone, somewhere happy.

Adjustable user account settings. One might describe Windows Vista's security as, well, paranoid. Any time anyone does something that remotely looks like it will affect the system, an annoying UAC security window appears. Sometimes twice. Windows 7 lets you customize how, er, paranoid the Windows lookouts are.

The Sidebar is gone. All those gadgets that you added to the right side of the Windows Vista desktop — from weather alerts and stock price tickers to xkcd cartoons and virtual strippers — have now been cut free from their anchors. Place your gadgets wherever you want to on your desktop and they'll stay there. ('So what?!' say Mac owners. 'We've been doing that forever!')

The return of the Disk Defragmenter. Microsoft really wants you to automate this maintenance process, but I guess enough people complained about its disappearance in Windows Vista that Microsoft brought it back in Windows 7. To some, it's an important maintenance tool; to me, it's just a neat-o visualization tool.

Stability and speed. By all accounts, Windows 7 fixes most or all of the major problems apparent in Vista, making it more secure and less prone to falling to the BSOD. Plus, the new search feature is expected to work with Google-like speed to find documents on your hard drive.

Win7 Changes I'm Not So Sure About

The Scenic Ribbon. Microsoft expanded on the Ribbon interface that was introduced on Office 2007 and took it into a number of other programs, rebranding it as the "Scenic Ribbon." Most notably, you'll find the Ribbon in MS Paint and Wordpad, but Microsoft has released the API for the Scenic Ribbon and is encouraging developers to incorporate the Ribbon into their programs.

The Device Stage. Vista switched around the Control Panel, and now Windows 7 is redoing how you interact with hardware. In the long run, this may prove to be a good change, but there'll be a learning curve here that'll slow you down in the beginning.

Fewer parental controls. Microsoft cut down on the parental controls in Windows 7, but they ramped up the parental controls in Internet Explorer 8. (Of course, I use Firefox . . . )

Win7 Changes to Grumble About

Where's Windows Defender? I haven't been able yet to verify this claim, but I have read that Windows Defender, though it's still built into the system, is more difficult to find. It isn't where it used to be. Although I don't interact directly with Windows Defender very often, it is quite good at telling me what programs are launching automatically when I log in.

Fewer built-in freebies. If you upgrade to Windows 7, you might be surprised to find that you no longer have the Movie Maker, e-mail, an Instant Messenger, and a few other things. Some of the mainstays of Windows have been removed from the installation disc (probably because of a lawsuit or the threat of one). You can, however, download the Windows Live Essentials pack. It just makes installation that much longer and more tedious.

No Ink Ball! That fun (ish) new game that appeared in Windows Vista has been axed. (It has, however, been replaced by online, multiplayer versions of backgammon, checkers, and spades.

Then there's the new desktop, which acts a lot more like a Mac desktop. (Is anyone surprised?) It'll be a change, but, like using the Ribbon, it'll just take time to get used to it. The toolbar offers more useful features than it has in the past. Buttons now have jump lists that pop up showing related documents that you pin there, or recently used or frequently used documents (you can tell Windows which you want to see). These really do sound like navigational improvements rather than bells and whistles . . . time will tell.

If Windows 7 is all it appears to be, the days of those last XP holders-on are numbered. That, of course, depends on Microsoft keeping its promises and avoiding stupid choices, both of which have been problems in the past.

One last bit of info that I want to share. It came up in my forays through windows 7 info, but it's something you can use now, in XP and Vista.
I don't know why it never occurred to me that this might be the case, but there are cheats built into the windows games, specifically, in Minesweeper, Free Cell, and Solitaire. Follow those links and get the lowdown. (Anyone know any cheats for Hearts?)

(Full disclosure, those are links to the Web site that I get paid to help maintain.)

Global Climate Change — Whom Do You Trust for Information?

2009-10-15T20:26:00.001-04:00

[Quick note: When I began this blog post, it was going to be about finding honest, complete information about global climate change. It spun off into an epistemological tangent. My apologies if you don't think this truly falls under the "global climate change" topic for Blog Action Day 09 that prompted this post. What can I say? Sometimes you control the pen, sometimes the pen controls you.]

As both individuals and governments scramble to find ways to slow or reverse the progress of global climate change, one barrier consistently gets in the way: The information barrier.

This may sound like an odd statement, what with this ginormous, ubiquitous Internet thingy out there feeding us terabytes of new information every hour. There's plenty of information — or data, or just words, depending on how you look at it — about climate change out there on the Interwebs. A quick Google search for "climate change" yields 46.5 million web hits in under a second. So it isn't the lack of information that's the problem, it's too much information. With so many words and images and tables and charts and graphs to choose from, how do we separate the noise from the music? The opinions from the facts? The jejune meanderings of schmoes like me from the hard data from the people working the front lines of discovery?

And when we do find a morsel of seemingly good data, how much can we trust it?

Government debate — salted with both expert opinions and million-dollar science budgets as well as corporate lobbyists and pork barrel politics — is one thing, but when it comes to really understanding what the global climate change conversation is really about, and what it all means, it really boils down to the individual. What do I, a lowly, lonely nonscientist, really know about climate change?

I don't have the gear or the background to test, research, and gather my own raw data about what is happening in the world. And even if I get my hands on raw data, I likely won't understand how to read and interpret it. No, I must rely on someone else, or several someone elses, to discovery, decipher, and deliver the relevant scientific research. But how do I know that such technological jargon is being interpreted accurately?

I don't.

And that's the point that I've been getting to: My understanding (hoi polloi's understanding) of global climate change boils down to a matter of trust.

Whom can you or I trust to give us accurate and complete information about what's really going on in the atmosphere? Very rarely do we get unfiltered information directly from researchers. We get science news from, well, new reports, and bloggers, and science magazines, and movies. Many times, these reports are based only on a reading of a research abstract. More common, though, is a report written after reading a couple of other articles or reports which were in turn written after reading a research abstract.

Science journalism in particular has taken a pretty
severe
beating
around
the
head
and
shoulders recently. Reading about shoddy and suspicious journalism in particular cases can make one wary of journalistic practices as a whole. Even if people aren't consciously withholding the truth, it's too easy to just let some fact-checking slide. But if I can't trust the news media, where do I go for good information?

There's always Al Gore!

I trust that Al Gore's efforts truly are an attempt to create positive change. Unfortunately, that trust also leads me to more doubt. "Creating a positive change" isn't the same as "presenting the whole truth." Al Gore (and Michael Moore, and Ralph Nader, et al.) have their own agendas based on what they believe and the information that they trust. And when you have such an angle, it's difficult, if not impossible, to be totally unbiased. It's too easy to ignore or undervalue data and opinions that don't jibe with what you already believe and what you're trying to say.

(Who'd've thought that science and religion would have so much in common?)

But if we can't trust someone to accurately describe the facts, surely we can trust what we see with our own eyes! There are plenty of videos and images floating around out there showing glaciers crashing down and icebergs melting and starving penguins, but do we really know that we're seeing the effects of climate change? Do we know that an image is truly representative of a larger trend and not just an isolated event?

So if we can't totally trust science journalists to get it right, and we can't trust Al Gore and his ilk to give us the whole story, and we can't connect disparate images to global data, who can we trust? Where can we get the information we need to draw real conclusions?

Some may argue that the simple volume of apparent evidence is enough to point us toward the truth, that so many people saying the same things couldn't be wrong. But how much of the buzz about climate change is just the same handful of stories recycled and rewritten and reposted online . . . the game of Telephone on a grand scale?

And besides, the idea that general agreement can dictate truth is a cop-out. Think flat Earth. Think slavery.

So I guess the issue of trust is really just a stepping stone. Ultimately, deciding whom and what to believe is a matter of faith. (Again, science meets religion.) You have to believe something, but you can never know everything about anything. Ultimately, you have to have faith in the sources you've chosen and go forward as if that information is infallible — at least until some better, more trustworthy information comes along.

And that's the epistemological conundrum behind every decision we make: we're always basing our decisions on incomplete and unprovable information.

Not to elevate my intellectual status, but I imagine this is the type of conundrum that Descartes slogged through before arriving at his famous Cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am — the ultimate undeniable truth. I doubt even Descartes could start with that one foundational belief and work his way all the way up to global climate change.

I certainly can't.

Keeping Schools Safe by Avoiding Common Sense

2009-10-12T15:22:00.001-04:00

Six-year-old Zachary Christie has been suspended from school and faces 45 days in a reform school. What Stephen King novel–worthy acts did he perpetrate on his teacher and classmates? Is he a budding pyromaniac? Is his vocabulary limited to four-letter sailor-esque slurs? Did he disfigure the class hamster?

Of course, it's none of this. Little Zachary got excited about joining the Cub Scouts and wanted to share that excitement with his friends, and he made the mistake of bringing his new "camping utensil" to school. This camping utensil serves as a spoon, fork, and knife. That's right . . . Zachary Christie has been suspended from the first grade for bringing a knife to school.

In the wake of Columbine and Virginia Tech, Zachary's school has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for bringing weapons into a school. What they haven't done is temper that lack of tolerance with common sense, forethought, and concern for a child's intellectual and emotional education.

Honestly, I thought we were past this. I don't personally think that zero-tolerance positions do any good — especially at this age level — but you can keep your zero-tolerance policies as long as you consider what "zero tolerance" really means.

Take a different example of something that is not tolerated in schools: bikinis. All schools have guidelines about what students can wear to school — from dress codes to school uniforms — and whether it is written down or not, you simply can't come to school wearing nothing but a bikini. It simply isn't tolerated.

So if a girl (or boy, I don't want to be sexist!) comes to school in a bikini, are they suspended and carted off to a reform school for 45 days? No. They are sent home to change clothes. It's that simple: A zero-tolerance policy that doesn't involve horribly marring a child's education and extinguish any love of learning that a child might already have.

(And before you argue that a pocketknife is more dangerous than a bikini, consider the my-child-is-ruined attitude that many had following Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.)

Unfortunately, the rules don't give school officials the leeway to deal with these situations case by case — for fear of seeming discriminatory. Zero-tolerance rules don't account for the differences between a handgun, a Swiss army knife, a Molotov cocktail, or a box cutter. How long will it be before schools start applying the same rules to the contents of a student's backpack that the FSA applies to carry-ons? We're nearly there already.

So zero-tolerance policies aren't the problem; the discipline punishment that follows with them is. Here's the worst that should have happened to poor Zachary: He gets his pocket scimitar taken from him and is sent to the principal's office; his parents are called in for a conference; they have a chat about the zero-tolerance policy. Maybe Zach gets detention.

If Zachary continues to try to bring his death-maker to school, then and only then does the reaction need to escalate.

What? That sounds like a three-strikes rule? Well sure — a three-strikes rule might make sense. What's more, a zero-tolerance rule and a three-strikes rule are not mutually exclusive!

Think about it, zero-tolerance is about rule-breaking, and three-strikes is about the punishment for that rule-breaking. Zero-tolerance for something means that you won't let it exist or happen in your bailiwick. It doesn't (have to) mean that whoever tries bring that something into your bailiwick is a dangerous, psychologically broken individual who should be separated from the general population and punished beyond reason.

I wish I could say I'm surprised when I read stories like this. Saddened, yes. Frustrated, absolutely. But in a country where school boards consider teaching creationism in science class, I can't really expect them to apply common sense when they decide what a student can and can't bring to class. And apparently I can't expect them to realize that fair rules must take into account that first graders, sixth graders, and high school seniors each have different intellectual, emotional, and physical characteristics.

Homeschooling is looking better all the time.

The Language of Twitter with Indy IABC

2009-10-08T21:31:00.001-04:00

Participated in a "Coffee & Conversation" hosted by the Indy IABC after work today at the local Stir Crazy. (I don't know how their coffee is, but they have great chicken potstickers.) The topic of the day was incorporating Twitter into business. The dozen participants ran the gamut of Twitter experience — from those who hadn't created a Twitter account yet to those who've been tweeting since 2007. I haven't been using Twitter long, so I had something to learn. Here are a few thoughts and ideas that came up concerning how one can make Twitter a more useful tool:

(If you aren't at all interested in social media or social marketing, or if you're a Twitter pro, or if you don't have a cell phone and you have to go to the library whenever you need to use a computer, you've probably already stopped reading. If you haven't stop now.)

These are admittedly random, as group conversations often are, and they certainly aren't comprehensive to any stretch of the imagination.

Retweet tracking

I liked this idea: One gent tracked his retweets by creating a new shortened URL whenever he retweeted someone. By comparing the tracking on his retweet URLs to tracking on the original URL, he discovered that links in retweets often garnered more traffic than the original tweets. From a business perspective, this points to the idea that, with Twitter, your customers can be your best advertisers. People are more likely to look at something if someone who isn't trying to make money off of you sends you a link. Self-promotion can get you only so far.

What you can do with your Twitterfeed

If you have a business Twitterfeed, why not stream it to your home page? It's a simple widget that you can add with minimal customization, and it will further humanize your brand/business, create a more dynamic site, and make your customers part of what's going on.

Easy way to get involved in conversations

Just search for a question mark! You'll end up with a whole bunch of tweeted questions. Just reply and join the conversation!

The difference between replies and mentions

This is probably just a sign of my ignorance and relative inexperience, but new Twitter users might appreciate someone putting this in print: If you just tack an @username in a message, it's a mention, and it appears with a link to that person's Twitter page. Only slightly different is if you use the Reply button. It appears the same as just adding an @username, but under your tweet is an "in reply to" link that will take you to the original tweet that you replied to. This link lets you see what a person was actually replying to.

Building a social marketing campaign

An important part of a social marketing campaign is figuring out how you're going to measure success. Is it the number of links back to your site? Is it the number of followers? The number of retweets? Are you using Twitter for marketing or PR? There's no wrong answer here, just questions that need to be answered in the earlier stages of creating a social marketing campaign.

Not André Breton’s Blog: Unique vs. Original

2009-09-26T18:31:00.001-04:00

When I came up with the name Soluble Fish, I swear I thought of it on my own. But now that I look around a little more, maybe not.

French Surrealist André Breton wrote a book called Poisson Soluble. I've had a copy of Poems of André Breton
(trans. & ed. by Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws; pub. by U of Texas Press) since sometime in college. From the 1994 Kroger receipt serving as a bookmark, I must have read up to page 125, well past the excerpts from Soluble Fish. When I named this blog, I thought I had come up with an interesting, paradoxical name, full of metaphorical potential. (I knew that there used to be a Canadian band with this name, but hey.)

Did part of me "know" about this surrealist tome? Or was my mind able to formulate it on its own, having completely forgotten Poisson Soluble? Was this an independent yet non-unique creation? Or subliminal plagiarism? I'll never know.

Luckily, Breton won't be complaining about it; he died in 1966. I do rather enjoy being linked to the surrealist movement. Like many others, I went through my Salvador Dali stage, but I also expanded into surrealist literature, too. But that was a while ago.

So anyway, thank's André. Here's some of what he wrote:

Avec la musique j'ai lié partie pour une seconde seulement et maintenant je ne sais plus que penser du suicide, car si je veux me séparer do moi-même, la sortie est de ce côté et, j'ajoute malicieusement: l'entrée, le rentrée de cet autre côté. Tu vois ce qu'il te reste à faire. Les heures, le chagrin, je n'en tiens pas un compte raisonnable; je suis seul, je regarde par la fenêtre; il ne passe personne, ou plutôt personne ne passe.

En anglais:

I've kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for if I want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the re-entrance, on the other. You see what you still have to do. The hours, the grief, I don't keep a reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out the window; there is no passerby, or rather no one passes.

Google Sidewiki: CyberGraffiti vs. Online Marginalia

2009-09-25T20:46:00.001-04:00

This week, Google released a public beta version of its new Sidewiki, a browser sidebar feature that lets you add comments to any (yes, any) Web page. (You can read the official Google blog post or an article from Ars Technica that describes it.) You actually don't add the comment to the Web page itself, but your comment is linked to that page, and all comments added for that page can be seen by anyone else who visits it and who has downloaded the Google toolbar. Google Sidewiki is a feature added to the browser and not to a Web site, thus giving the Web site owner no control over the comments and no legal ground to stand on if you end up with a lot of harsh comments. (I can only imagine the kind of ranting we'll see on Creationist Web sites!)

I'm going to have to reserve judgement for the time being. It's exciting the way a new pit bull puppy is exciting: In the beginning, it'll be fun to feed it and watch it grow, but it can quickly grow into something dangerous that could eat your children.

There are some safeguards built into Sidewiki:

You have to have a Google account to use it. This will (one hopes) lessen the opportunity to leave profane, argumentative, juvenile, and jejune comments anonymously. It also gives Google a lot more information about its users; some bloggers are bringing up Big Brother in their descriptions.
Comments won't appear in chronological order. Sidewiki will use an algorithm (Google has an algorithm for everything, no?) to rank a page's comments by relevance. If it's anything like their search algorithm, I don't hold much hope that it'll work well. If you own the site (presumably indicated by linking Google Analytics and Webmaster codes embedded in the site to your Google account), you can create an anchor comment that will stick to the top of the Sidewiki panel. Site owners can use this space to inficate what type of comments are expected of site visitors. (So far, the people who've tried Sidewiki haven't really know what type of comments to leave.)
Comments can be policed and ranked by the community. Drawing off the ideas crowdsource ranking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, visitors can thumb up or thumb down a comment that is more or less helpful. There is also a way to report over-the-top, unacceptable comments. (It seems to me that it would take an enormous workforce just to review these abuse reports. Could we see mass hirings of low-level workers at Google soon?)
Google's legal language sets decent limits. Google reserves the right to limit the number of transmissions or the amount of storage space that a user can use. This ought to rein in bots and automatic spam in the Sidewiki. They also prohibit access to the Sidewiki services through any means other than Google's interface. (This, of course, can be bypassed with a written agreement with Google.)

I think people's biggest fear right now is that using the Sidewiki gives the Google folks an awful lot of personally identifiable information about online habits. It's a breakdown of the wall of anonymity. I perused the user agreement looking for language about what Google can do with your comments. I was uplifted when I read the legal language allowing Google to "pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse, and remove" comments. Notice some missing words: republish, sell, market, repackage, etc. However, farther down in the legal lingo we find that Google can give your content to its partners for syndication. Your comments could make someone else some money. I'm not opposed to capitalism, but I am worried about plagiarism and intellectual property. As I said before, I'm going to have to reserve judgement until I see what actually transpires.

I'd been looking around for a cheap, simple commenting feature to add to my own Web site (Infinite Cadenza). Now I'm going to hold off on that and invite (the few) people who visit my site to use Sidewiki. I think a tool like this could be quite useful for small sites like mine, and could be a great source for me to figure out what types of content I should publish next. I don't know that big sites with lots of visitors will get much good out of being forced into social media. It's going to be a big mess come election time in 2012.

I couldn't find any information about what types of analytics Google will be able to offer Web site owners, and I'm really interested in what I'll find. (I've added a comment to my own site to see what pops up in my analytics.) I'm sure I'll post more about this later as I learn more about it.

My Heroes Predictions

2009-09-22T22:10:00.001-04:00

[Spoiler alert]

The new season of Heroes kicked off last night, and I wasn't disappointed. Already we've seen the return of characters presumed dead (Tracy and, of course, Sylar), the death of one bad guy (Danko), a new power in Peter's arsenal (speed), and a collection of carnie freaks a la HBO's Carnivàle. The Heroes folks certainly aren't shying away from a ginormous cast.

Of course, that only means that a number of them won't survive the season.

True to form, the Easter Eggs have started as well — you know, like George Takei stepping out of a car with the license plate NCC1701. I only caught two that made me giggle like a little girl, but I've seen the episode only once:

At the math class test, the professor is reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a real book that has been on my too-read list for a couple months now.
Angela Petrelli's chauffeur is named Alfred, a la Batman.

I'm sure there were more that I just didn't catch.

Anyway, here are my predictions for the next season:

Sylar isn't going to stay in Matt Parkman. At some point during the season, Sylar will move into the mind of either Mrs. Parkman or Baby Matt, or both. Big Matt will sacrifice and take Sylar back on. In the end, though, I think Sylar will return to his own body, but Nathan will still be in there, too. Then we'll have a full-blown, devil-inside, Hulk-vs.-Bruce Banner psychological conflict on our hands, made more serious by the fact that Nathan is a US Senator.
Samuel, the new ink-controlling character, and his topless muse are reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. Keep your eyes open for people reading Bradbury (especially this book) and your ears open for references to his work: something wicked this way comes, fahrenheit 451, the martian chronicles, etc. (Note that his first collection of short stories was titled Dark Carnival.)
How will Tracy and Noah's relationship develop? They'll probably go back and forth, never falling for each other at the same time (shades of Ross and Rachel). It'll probably provide a good deal of tension between Noah and Nathan, though, who will probably also want to hook up with Tracy.
Claire's new friend Gretchen has a power and caused Annie's death. Gretchen is one of the carnies. I mean, it has to be her, right? Claire hasn't met any other characters at college yet, so who else could it be? The appearance of the suicide note points to passing through walls, freezing time, or being invisible. I vote for the last.
Matt is going to be the wildcard, at least for a while. Eventually, he'll return to NYC to get away from his family to keep them safe from Sylar.
Who will die and who will live? The old guy and the knife guy at the carnival will be minor losses. Tracy won't die — honestly, they can't kill Ali Larder every season, can they? (Or are they going for a "They killed Kenny!" vibe?) Last season, I thought that Angela would bite the dust, but now that she's the last of the old school, she's got to stay around. Someone will have to die to get rid of Sylar — either Matt or Nathan. Or maybe they'll come to their senses and Matt will push Sylar into the mind of someone on death row?
One possibility that might throw a wrench in these predictions: Samuel and Sylar somehow team up — maybe Sylar takes over Samuel, not only giving him a body and a new power, but putting him at the head of the gaggle of geeks, the Heroes version of Magneto's Brotherhood.

So I'm excited about this season. I do need to go back and rewatch some of last season's shows because I'm having a hard time remembering who is still alive, even.

Where is Mohinder, and what is he doing?

Monopoly City Streets Still Crime-Ridden

2009-09-22T09:19:00.002-04:00

Last Thursday, Hasbro relaunched Monopoly City Streets with a new set of rules designed to make the game fairer. I wasn't sure about all the changes (read about it here), but I was happy to see that Hasbro was trying to make their online game better.

Well, it was a good try, but there are still problems. Take a look at the leaderboard as of this morning:

The game has been running for less than a week, and already these Cheaters show earnings of over half a quadrillion dollars. Mathematically impossible. And when you actually click on one of those names and take a closer look, the results are even more confounding. Some of them place high in the rankings, but when you look at what they own, they have only two or three streets and less than $200,000.

At least they aren't hiding the fact that they're cheating. (By the way, all those "Cheaters" in the top spots come from the same place in Iowa.) I can only hope that the Hasbro folks will put the kibosh on most of these accounts.

Meanwhile, I'll keep playing by the rules.

Was I Right? Monopoly City Streets Takes a Do-Over

2009-09-18T20:07:00.001-04:00

I was doing okay with Monopoly City Streets, building up my kingdom by slowly buying up my hometown. While following "the rules," I was taking in about $7 million in rent. Or at least I was set up for that, and then Friday morning, I couldn't log in.

Eventually I noticed and clicked the Blog link in the bottom right corner and found out why. After about a week of gameplay — and bugs and cheaters and slow servers — the Monopoly folks decided they would RESTART THE GAME. Essentially they're giving themselves a do-over. Check out the Monopoly blog posts starting at September 15 for the details.

But they didn't just start over, they changed some of the rules. A few of them worth noting:

They removed the bidding cap for streets for players over Level 3. I don't know about this one. The cap is what made it harder to cheat. Without a cap, it's possible to buy cheap property and then sell it at a super-high price to a shell user account. Which is probably why they instituted the next rule change.
Property can be exchanged only once per day. I assume this also includes changing hands from the bank to a user, so you can't buy an unused problem and immediately resell it at a higher price.
Taxes?! That's right, taxes find their way into this game, and they're a little odd. Here's what they say about it on the blog:
There is only one certainty in MONOPOLY City Streets. Tax. Just like in real life, tax now plays an integral part of the game. Tax works as follows: The first 5 streets owned are not taxed. Thereafter, the current tax rate is 3% PER STREET you own.
For example, if you own 15 streets your tax will be 30% of your total rent collected every day. If you own 25 streets your tax will be 60%. Remember, at 38 streets you will effectively be taxed 100% and so won't be making any profit and your bank balance won't increase.

This changes the strategy of the game a bit. Now, as you build an empire, it behooves you to sell your smaller properties — your shorter streets — when the tax you pay exceeds the amount of rent you earn from those streets. I suppose it's good for people who discover and join the game later in the game, too.

I'm really glad that they have been listening to their users. I'm not thrilled that I lost all my streets, though. I'll get over it. I wish they had made a more obvious statement of the game restart on the game page instead of just on the blog, though. I would have re-created my profile (Andyman) this morning had I been told.

At any rate, I think this version could actually last until the January 31 end date, unlike my previous predictions. See my earlier posts here:

Worldwide Monopoly Goes Online

Monopoly City Streets: The Letdown

Windows 7 and Ribbon Changes

2009-09-15T19:41:00.001-04:00

I've been reading up lately on what we can expect to see in Windows 7 (coming October 22), and I've mostly been excited about the new features. But today I found something that worries me a bit.

Windows 7 is implementing what MS is calling the "Scenic Ribbon." Essentially, they're expanding the Ribbon interface that they introduced with Office 2007 to more of Windows. We'll find a Ribbon in WordPad and Paint (which hasn't been updated since Nixon was president), as well as the next version of Visio (Visio 2007 didn't have the Ribbon). They're releasing the Scenic Ribbon API so that developers can bring Ribbon functionality to their software.

None of this worries me. In fact, I think it's kind of cool. What worries me, though, is that they will be releasing an update to Vista and Office 2007 so that it integrates the new Scenic Ribbon feature. That worries me because I have a bunch of Ribbon customizations in Office 2007, and I don't know for sure whether (a) the customizations will stick with the new API or (b) my normal route for customizing the Ribbon will still be usable. Microsoft is normally pretty good about backward compatibility (they'll continue to release XP security updates until 2014), but their documentation is wanting. I've noticed a distinct lack of consideration for intermediate programmers (aka tinkerers like me) in the coverage. For example, you can see a highly technical video that gives an overview of the Scenic Ribbon and how to use it in your programs, and you can find plenty of information for Office novices, but I have to rely on outside sources for the in-between info. (A warning or two about the video: You need to have Silverlight installed to watch it, and one of the two guys in the video has a heavy accent. French, I think. It took me a bit to realize that "zamil" is XML.)

A lot of the information about Scenic Ribbon creation involves C++ programming. I don't know squat about C++ programming. I can only hope that it only applies to application development.

On a related note: The upcoming release of Windows 7 has given whiners new energy to complain about the Ribbon and bemoan the loss of the good ole toolbar interface. Like many of those who protest healthcare reform, these people seem to believe that the "old ways" are intrinsically better. Honestly! These same people would still be whining if Microsoft had started with the Ribbon back in the 90s and decided to switch to toolbars in 2007. All these anti-Ribbon whiners essentially just don't like the idea that they might have to learn something new — even though the difference between driving a manual and automatic transmission is larger than the difference between Office toolbars and the Ribbon.

All right. I'm shutting down MS HighHorse.

A Second Nerdgasm: Spore Heroes

2009-09-14T18:54:00.001-04:00

I just heard about the forthcoming Spore Heroes game for the Wii!

My initial excitement about the Spore Galactic Adventures add-on wore off quickly, and I honestly haven't played Spore in quite a while. (I think I need to upgrade my video card.) But the Spore Heroes game has got me excited again. No chance that my Wii is not up to snuff to enjoy it! I can only hope that I don't waste too much time (who am I kidding — of course I will) in front of the TV when this hits shelves on 6 October.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2009-09-11T10:10:00.001-04:00

The Internet, like the real world, is full of idiots:

When you play with fire, there is a 50/50 chance something will go wrong, and nine times out of ten it does.

This is a complete blog entry from The Abstinence Clearinghouse, a group trying to "teach" us that schools should limit their sex ed classes to abstinence-only training. Is this proof that lack of sex makes you stupid? I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but you're certainly welcomed to.

Monopoly City Streets: The Letdown

2009-09-10T16:28:00.001-04:00

It was an ambitious idea: Create a worldwide, online, Monopoly-like game, using Google Maps (and thus practically the entire planet) as the game board, and call it Monopoly City Streets. When I first read about it earlier this week, just a day before it was set to launch, I got all excited. This looked like it could be a neat combination of Monopoly, Sid Meier's Civilization, those crappy "games" on Facebook, and maybe a little Second Life thrown in. Then reality hit.

The first and most obvious problem was that they weren't ready. Perhaps more likely, the technology does not yet exist for them to have been ready. I tried twice on 9/9/09 during the day to start playing, but their servers were so overloaded I couldn't get in. I didn't start buying any property until shortly after midnight, by which time the world leader was already worth over 12 million Monopoly bucks.

And it was still soooooo slow. I don't know that the server power exists that can handle the number of people trying to get in and play this game. I'm sure it will die down after a while, when people get bored with it, and it might speed up a little. Time will tell.

Regardless of whether Monopoly City Streets will be fun to play, it could be an excellent way to learn about the difficulties of SEC oversight of meatspace businesses. The game is about buying, selling, and trading high-priced properties, and is subject to some of the very same graft and fraud (in the gaming world, it's simply called CHEATING) that real-world business is subject to.

Here are the basic rules: You start with $3 million. You buy property. You build rent-producing buildings on that property. Rent is delivered daily. You can trade properties with other players online. You can also, occasionally, sabotage other people's property by bulldozing buildings or erecting hazards that lower the overall rent.

Now notice what I said before: the world leader, just after midnight of the first day that the game was going, was worth $12 million. How could you turn $3 million into $12 million in a single day? It's really an easy cheat.

Given the availability of free and disposable e-mail accounts, you create one main Monopoly account and then use the others to create shell accounts. Then,

If you want to build up your property holdings, you have the shell accounts spend their $3 million buying up streets, and then you sell them back to your main account for cheap.
If you want to build up your money, you have your main account buy up the cheapest property it can find, then sell each property to a shell account for, I don't know, $3 million?
And you can have the best of both worlds: Have your main account buy a $200,000 street. Sell that street to a shell account for $3 million, and then have that shell account sell it back to your main account for $100 (I'm not sure how low a price you can offer). Voila! Your main account started with $3 million and nothing and now has $5.79 million, all with one little street! Repeat that 4 more times and you'll have over $14 million plus $15 in property!

These are some of the same tactics that the SEC keeps an eye out for. They have landed real-life unscrupulous fraudsters in prison. If course, the price of being exposed as an online unscrupulous cheater isn't nearly as high.

I don't think Monopoly City Streets will last all the way to its January 31, 2010, end date. I'll be surprised if it lasts until October.

But I'll still play, if only for the joy of trying to buy up the streets of my hometown.

Worldwide Monopoly Goes Online

2009-09-09T07:32:00.001-04:00

Hasbro and Google Maps are coming together to launch the new online Monopoly City Streets today to raise some hype about the new version of the Monopoly board game that's coming out soon (I'll probably be playing it at Christmastime). It's still early today, so it isn't up and running yet, but it sounds like fun. You start off with $3 million in Monopoly bucks and you can purchase practically any street that you can find in Google Maps. Then you develop that area with parks, high-rises, and other buildings that were apparently built in Google SketchUp. It's free to play, but, like Second Life, I'm sure there will be options and upgrades that you can spend real money on.

It's being billed as a global Monopoly game with Google Maps as the game board. Sounds pretty ambitious, so I'm curious to see how well it does.

I'm kind of excited about this, but I hope it isn't horribly labor-intensive. I really don't need another place to waste time online. As soon as I can, though, I'm going to sign up and buy up as much of my hometown as I can. Maybe put a castle on top of the house I grew up in.

And Just Like That, I'm a Twit

2009-09-08T16:58:00.003-04:00

I'm a junkie for new online doohickies, especially when they're free. I have, however, been avoiding Twitter, partly because I know how quickly I can become addicted to this stuff, and partly because I (wrongly) thought that using Twitter would require text messaging on my cell phone, which I don't have (and don't want) as part of my cell phone plan.

But I work on the interweb, and we're constantly trying to connect with our audience and stay up to date on all the new online fun, especially, these days, social networking. So today I opened a Twitter account for business.

And, just like I thought, I was immediately hooked. So now I've created a personal Twitter account: twitter.com/4ndyman. I've even already downloaded Twadget, the Vista Sidebar Gadget that lets me read and post tweets from the desktop.

We'll see if I stick with it.

Be warned, though. I'll be tweeting many of the blog posts here at Soluble Fish, but more often they will link to the entries on my other blog, Logophilius, simply because those posts are of more general interest than the mundacities of my life that I write about here.

I Won! I Won! I Wo- . . . wait, I won what?

2009-09-08T14:31:00.001-04:00

Going back to work after a long weekend is always difficult, even more difficult if you had as sorry a "vacation" as I did. I was figuratively a zombie all morning at work. For lunch, I enjoyed a nice too-big sammich from Subway. Subway is doing their now-annual Scrabble contest — you know, you get a letter with every drink, and if you can spell out, say, HYBRID, you can win a Prius. Since Scrabble is one of my favorite games, I can't resist logging on to SubwayFreshBuzz.com and entering my codes.

I haven't been able to spell anything on the board to win a "big" prize (I keep getting N's. A string of these might win me a bionic leg [say it with me: "nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh"] or, more likely, a ball gag ["Nnnn! Nn NNN!"].). But after you enter your code, you get to spin the instant win wheel. Well, today, the wheel didn't stop on the big SORRY spot!!! I won a three-month subscription to Club Pogo!

After giving them my info to claim my prize, I set out to find out what the hell Club Pogo is. Apparently, it's some sort of online gaming site, like WildTangent or PopCap (or, for some of us, Facebook). Just what I need: Another place to waste time on the Internet. I'm sure my boys will appreciate the free gaming, though, if I decide to tell them about it.

Actually, this is the second thing I've won at Subway this summer. I also have a little paper square that says I won a cookie, which I haven't redeemed yet. Subway's white chocolate macadamia cookies are num-nummy! I won't be sharing that one with the boys, that's for sure.

At any rate, it was a ray of joy in an otherwise Monday-esque Tuesday.

Ten Reasons I Hate People (8)

2009-08-31T15:08:00.001-04:00

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."

—Joseph Baretti, a friend of Samuel Johnson's, though the quote is often mis-attributed to Johnson himself.

See Reason 9 and Reason 10

Did Microsoft Get Some New Blood for Windows 7?

2009-08-25T14:39:00.001-04:00

Microsoft is scheduled to release Windows 7 at the end of October. I've been editing a bunch of articles at work about the upcoming Windows 7 release (based on the release candidate), and I must say that I'm pleased with some of the changes to the OS. Perhaps Microsoft finally got sick of being accused of copying the look and feel of Apple's OSes and hired some new people with new ideas, because these sound to me like bona fide unique additions. Granted, they're mostly bells and whistles, but they're the type of bells and whistles that I love to have fun with. Here are a few things you have to look forward to with Windows 7:

Slideshow backgrounds: Instead of choosing one picture as a background, you can choose multiple pictures to create a slideshow background. Can it be long before we start seeing animated backgrounds, perhaps based on the trademarked animated screen savers of a decade ago? (I still remember a Disney screen saver in which Goofy physically moved file icons around the desktop, and Donald Duck, descending on a window-cleaner's trolley, painted over everything on the screen in plaid.)
Aero Shake: This is just a neat idea. Say you have ten different windows open, and you just want to concentrate on one. Click and hold on to that window's title bar and then shake your mouse back and forth, and every window but that one automatically minimizes.
Aero Snap: This is more than a bell or whistle: drag a window all the way to the left side of the screen, and it automatically docks there and shrinks to half-width. You can then do the same on the right side of the screen with another window, making side-by side windows a breeze with any applications.
Expanded calculator: I don't know why, if Microsoft is going to take the time to upgrade the built-in calculator, they don't just go all the way and put in a complete graphing calculator. Windows 7's calculator offers Standard mode, your basic desk calculator; Scientific mode, for trigonometric calculations; Programming mode, for dealing with binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal calculations; and Statistics mode, for doing linear regressions and other statistical number-crunching. It also includes some special features that normally I would open Excel to calculate, like calculating a mortgage payment, making calculations based on dates, converting among measurement systems, and figuring interest. You can probably treat this like a Gadget by dropping its shortcut in the StartUp folder.
Adjustable User Account Control settings: Microsoft promises that, even if you don't change a thing, you'll see fewer of those annoying UAC dialog boxes, but they also give you the opportunity to adjust how closely you want the UAC to watch what goes on. You can even turn it completely off.
New parental settings: You can now set when, what, and how much a child can play on the computer. I'll definitely use this. (I wish Nintendo would build this into the Wii!)
Frequently accessed/recent documents from the toolbar: From the Windows toolbar (which itself has undergone a facelift), you can access a pop-up window for each application showing a) any open documents or files; and b) a list of recently used or frequently used documents or files — presumably the same type of list that appears in the Office button of any of the Office programs.
Internet-like search speed with auto suggestions: The online demonstrations of new Windows 7 search feature show it working a lot like Google does now. You start typing in the search box, and as you type, Windows suggests what you might be typing. (Assuming it works this well . . .) This type of searching won't seem "new," but the underlying Windows indexing and search process is supposed to be improved and extremely sped up, making it actually useful.

Although they aren't quite as exciting and/or useful, here are a few other changes you can expect in Windows 7:

New Aero Glass colors: With Windows Vista,
Microsoft introduced Aero, the translucent window effect. Windows 7 offers more colors for translucency. If you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, you can now look at your computer desktop through rose-colored Aero Glass, as well as a few other colors.
The Sidebar is gone, but the gadgets stay: Vista came (and no doubt Windows 7 will come) with a slew of gadgets that you could add to the Windows Sidebar — things like an analogue clock, a CPU usage gauge, a slider game, etc. — and plenty more were available online. I, for one, have a piano gadget that lets me play an octave worth of notes. The Windows Sidebar was docked to an edge of the screen and held all those gadgets. In Windows 7, the Sidebar is gone, but the gadgets can stay — they're now free-floating!

No word yet on what the upgrade will cost. The Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrade hits shelves this week for a mere $29. Dare I dream that Microsoft will attempt to compete with this price? Would a $24.99 Windows 7 upgrade be too much to ask?

Probably.

Three Stooges, Two Children, One Video

2009-08-22T23:32:00.001-04:00

Today, thanks to the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, I introduced my children to The Three Stooges. I haven't been much of a fan of Moe, Larry, and Curly — it had been a long time since I'd seen any Stooges — but while I was perusing the DVDs at the library, I saw this one and had to snag it.

Although my elder son was much more interested in playing Civilization IV, my younger son just loved the slapstick. I have to admit, I got a lot more laughs out of it than I remember. We might start getting

So I've put in my share of contributions to the delinquency of minors this weeking. Tomorrow, we're going to the zoo. I just hope neither of my children poke any baboons in the eyes.

Tonight Was a Good Night

2009-08-20T22:20:00.001-04:00

What a great, relaxing night! First, I performed with the IWS in an outdoor concert at the Carmel Gazebo, and we couldn't have had better weather. We had a decent and appreciative audience. With the exception of an accidental piccolo solo at the end of the first piece and some drag during Nimrod, the music went really well and we sounded really good. All in all, a great concert.

After tearing down the set, a bunch of us went to Bub's in Carmel, where I had a delicious quarter-pound elk burger with all the fixins. After a concert like this, six or eight band members sometimes pick a restaurant and have a little after-dinner gathering. Tonight, we had 17, which involved squeezing us all around 4 round tables on the patio. A cool evening, yummy food, and camaraderie. No deadlines, no expectations.

Like I said, it was a good night. Wish I had more of them.

The Importance of Planning a Vacation, or, Stymied by God

2009-08-05T20:28:00.015-04:00

I and my sons (the Elder and the Younger) have the whole first week of August together — one last hurrah before school starts up again. On the Thursday before, still not certain what we would do with our week together, I got the idea of going to Vincennes to see the George Rogers Clark Memorial and camp out. The Elder studied his Indiana history last year in the fourth grade, so he knew a lot more about GR Clark and Vincennes than either I or the Younger did. So I thought he, especially, would enjoy the trip.I made some hasty plans and, after plotting our journey while the oil was changed and the tires rotated, we set out on a sunny early Monday afternoon.

I saw that not far off I-70 is the largest waterfall in Indiana, Cataract Falls. So we made a little side-trip to see the wonders of nature and the unstoppable force of gravity. It started okay, with a covered bridge to nowhere.

Through a portal on the covered bridge at Cataract Falls.

This is near the top of the falls:

"What do you mean it's bath time?"

Sure, it was pretty there, but we were hoping for a mighty drop, the deafening rush of millions of pounds of relentless water. So we hopped back into the car and followed the signs to “the lower falls.” When we got there,

"You call this a waterfall?!"

The Elder pondering the nature of water, the sound of one hand clapping, and whether Ivysaur can defeat Pikachu.

No constant thunder. No misty rainbows. Just Bigfoot’s shower. We were underwhelmed.

So we went on to Vincennes. About two hours later (it could have been five), we arrived at our destination, the George Rogers Clark Memorial:

What was it the ranger said? The largest Greek revival memorial in the United States outside of Washington, D.C.?

I had come here with my fourth grade class a good two decades ago and remembered seeing an awesome, massive, limestone structure. It’s still awesome, still massive, and, er, still limestone. Unfortunately, there was a little snag:

The largest closed-for-renovation Greek revival memorial in the United States outside of Washington, D.C.

The memorial is closed for renovation. The visitors’ center was open, though, and we got there just in time to watch a rather old half-hour movie about Clark and what he and his troops did. Historically, he sounds like an impressive character and military strategist, but I wouldn’t have wanted to know him in person. He came off sounding like a dick.

"You don't think he'd really fire, do you?"

Not exactly Injun Joe

Reenacting our favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon

After getting directions from the park ranger, we drove a short distance to Ouabache Trails State Park. (Ouabache is the French spelling of Wabash.) We paid our fee, got our camping permit, and set up the brand new tent that we had purchased from Gander Mountain that weekend.

Hoosier ingenuity . . . and well-written instructions.

I had originally thought we might stay in Vincennes (or at least the area) for two nights, but with the memorial closed and the town pretty much dead, I changed my mind. Looking over the map, I traced my finger along more central areas and found that Bluespring Caverns was a straight shot east from Vincennes. I was hoping we could enjoy a nice, hike-resistant underground boat ride the next day. That could have saved the vacation.

We still needed hot dogs, buns, drinks, ice, and breakfast, so we set off in search of a nearby Vincennes supermarket. I drove up and down 6th street — north to south — passing two ice cream parlors, four pizza places, and three tattoo parlors, but no supermarkets. ‘Perhaps perpendicular paths could prove profitable,’ I thought. I ended up driving about three miles out, nearer the highway, before finding a Wal-Mart supercenter.

Now, I hate Wal-Mart, but I hate going hungry even more. Worse than that is spending time with two pre-teens with rumbly bellies. So I sucked it up and we got some food at Wally-World.

Back to camp, where my Webelo and I built a healthy fire upon which to feast on weiners and s’mores. (A tip: “Regular” s’mores are good. S’mores made from very dark chocolate are superb!)

My little scout prepares to feed and warm the family.

I tried to get a good picture of the Elder in the firelight; this is what I ended up with.

That night, I learned that the Younger really doesn’t like to camp — at least he doesn’t like to go camping when there isn’t something fun planned for every second of every hour until bedtime, which ought to be somewhere north of 11pm. Eventually, we went to bed — well, to bag.

A few hours later, after both children were unconscious and I was trying to get comfortable, the rolling thunder started, followed closely by some impressive lightning. After a while, this died away and the rain began. I thought it might rain, so I had put everything in either the car or the tent, so our stuff was relatively safe. This turned out to be the night that we tested the tent’s imperviousness to rain.

There was at least one leak — directly above where I laid my head.

I didn’t get much sleep, and when I did, I had strange, exhausting dreams.

The next morning, the rain had stopped. I discovered that I hadn’t gotten everything out of the elements. My little styrofoam cooler was lying on the ground under the picnic table. A racoon had apparently knocked it off the table and clawed his way into it in the night. He made off with our three extra hot dogs and two juice pouches. He wasn’t much interest in the ketchup.

After donuts and juice water, we (which is to say, I) packed away the damp, dirty tent, took showers in the nearby facilities, and made the short drive to Fort Knox II because it was there.

Fort Knox II is easy to miss. And if you miss it, you shouldn’t be too upset about it.

Keeping an eye out for injuns.

We had decided the day before that, for lunch, we would try out a local pizza place — Bill Bobe’s. The crust was thin and the cheese was plentiful. I loved it; neither the Younger (who got his own cheese-only pizza and who immediately complained about the “green stuff” [oregano] on it) nor the Elder (who tried to act like he was really enjoying and savoring his one thin piece) liked it. It was a whiny, hard-fought meal.

The rain started up again toward the end of the meal. We dashed to the car through quickly forming puddles and took off to the east. The rain picked up, turning into a downpour, and then into a deluge, and then into something that would send the Biblically minded to the Internet in search of ark blueprints. The only traffic on the road was my little red Jeep and some kamikaze truckers, still driving ten miles over the speed limit.

I decided that I must be heading in the same direction and at the same speed as the storm, and then the Elder’s bladder started screaming, so I pulled off in the first town I came across that looked like it still had electricity: Loogootee.

This picture hasn't been color-corrected or anything. This is how gray and dark it was after the rain let up a bit.

It was one of those small-town restaurants with holes in the tablecloths, mismatched chairs, and a dry-erase board showing misspelled daily specials. It seemed like a good place to stop and have a snack. The Younger had a chocolate sundae: three small, round scoops of vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate syrup and topped with oily, generic, aerosol whipped cream. No cherry. He loved it. I had two cups of coffee (in a mug advertising the local insurance salesman) and a piece of chocolate swirl cheesecake, which they obviously did not make themselves — it was so thick, rich, and delicious that it must have been store-bought. The Elder had a vanilla milkshake, thin and mostly flavorless. It could have been a few drops of vanilla flavoring in a glass of plain old cold milk whipped into a foam.

While we waited for the rain to subside, I concluded that Bluespring Caverns was probably not feasible. With all the rain, the underground rivers were probably too high to accommodate boating tourists, and everything else would just be too blamed muddy.

We decided the best bet, the safest bet, was to retreat to Grandma’s house, about halfway between Loogootee and home.

That took us near Bloomington, which really is one of the neatest small cities I know. (I’d love to spend a week there just trying out all the restaurants.) Bloomington is home to Wonderlab, the neatest little children’s museum you could pack in a space that size. The folks at Wonderlab know how to do it up right to make learning fun. The only things that really qualify as exhibits are the half-dozen aquaria and terraria holding various fish, lizards, and snakes; and a small beehive with lots of information about bees and honey. Everything else is hands-on, from the heat-sensing camera to the makeshift oscilloscope (made from a spinning cylinder and a neckless guitar) to a whole room dedicated to making bubbles in various ways.

It really is a neat place. If you’re ever in Bloomington, take your kids there. (Good luck figuring out where to park, though.) I won’t say that Wonderlab saved our little outing, but it made it not a complete loss.

And now we’re back home. The tent is airing out on the balcony, the kids are watching Star Wars, and I need to make us some dinner.

I’m setting my sights not so high for the second half of the week. A movie, maybe, or the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. And lots of sleeping in.

Movie Marathon

2009-07-25T23:23:00.001-04:00

I gave Blockbuster $15 on Friday, July 17, for the privilege of watching as many movies as I want for a week, checking out two at a time. So I've been having a bit of a movie marathon this week. I've certainly gotten my money's worth:

Knowing (Nicholas Cage): Freakin' intense! Do not watch this alone or before you go to bed; this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The story is compelling and intense, and punctuated by horrifically realistic and realistically horrific scenes of death and destruction: a jumbo jet crashes in the country, a subway at high speed derails and crashes through a subway station filled with people, and ultimately . . . well, I don't want to give away the ending, because it isn't what you expect to happen. It was a good story, but I won't be watching this again.

Zombie Strippers (Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson): Another in a long line of great, low-budget, campy zombie movies. If you liked Shaun of the Dead or Night of the Living Dorks or Evil Dead 2, you'll get a kick out of this one.

Religulous (Bill Maher): What Michael Moore does to conservativism, Bill Maher does to religion. If you don't like Bill Maher, you won't like this movie. I enjoyed it. I thought it interesting, though, that, out of all the purveyors of all the religions that Maher interviews, the Catholics come out seeming like the most down-to-earth and reasonable.

Burn After Reading (Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton): You've gotta love the Cohen Brothers. They're plots go together like Celtic Knots, and are even more interesting to look at. One of the things that I think sets them apart is that they aren't afraid to suddely kill off major characters, completely obliterating any idea you might have about the "happy ending" just before the credits role.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett):
After watching Burn After Reading, I realized how much I enjoy so much of Brad Pitt's work: Fight Club, Ocean's Eleven, The Mexican,
Twelve Monkeys, The Devil's Own, Thelma & Louse, even Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So I got this one with Brad and my favorite Cate, and was surprised to see Tilda Swinton pop up again. This is a wonderful movie for both the story and the acting. For my money, this movie should have gotten the hype and accolades given Titanic so many years ago.

Taken (Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen): I'm not sure Liam Neeson was the best casting choice for this movie. (A decade ago the role would have been filled by Harrison Ford.) I'm not sure who else I would have cast, though. Neeson certainly did a good job with the role as a retired "preventer" — a Bond-esque U.S. government agent who, according to the character, prevents bad things from happening — who has to save his 17-year-old daughter from the black market sex trade in Paris. It is a nice action-packed movie, and anything with Famke Janssen in it is worth watching. I give it OK.

The Savages (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney): I just love Laura Linney, so you'll never hear me say anything really bad about anything she's in. This was a touching, sad movie about love, hope, death, and family that follows these two siblings as they come together around their absentee father who is descending into old age and dementia. This is one of those movies that should be re-watched about every decade, because it will mean someething different to you as you change and grow older and more experienced. This time around, listening to Linney and Hoffman argue and laugh makes me miss my brother.

The Reader (Kate Winslet): This is a good, thought-provoking story. I don't understand why the movie was so long, though, or why they needed to jump around in time so much. It's just your average illiterate Nazi ethical conundrum winter-spring romance. And within the first half hour of the movie, you get to see every part of Kate Winslet's bare body, including the bottoms of her feet, her furry armpits, and the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. (Not that I'm complaining; I'm a big fan of naked women on film.) So, all in all, a good film, but it could have used a lot less brooding.

12 Rounds (John Cena — not to be confused with Michael Cera...huge difference): This could have been a great, exciting movie, along the lines of Speed, if only they could have gotten (a) Matt Damon to play the protagonist, instead of John Cena, who just looks like Matt Damon on steroids; and (b) Ed Norton to play the antagonist, instead of some unshaven guy who kind of looks like Ed Norton, but doesn't act as well — though he acted circles around John Cena. This is the kind of movie to watch on Fox on a Sunday afternoon, when the only other thing on TV is golf, infomercials, and political roundtables.

Role Models (Seann Michael Scott, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks): Maybe it's because I totally connect with his character, but I think Paul Rudd is just outstanding in this movie. With SM Scott in it, I was expecting something along the lines of American Pie, but instead I got something closer to Office Space, so I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. And this is one DVD that has some good deleted scenes that are worth watching, instead of a bunch of scenes that got cut just because they weren't very good. The movie poster might remind you of Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, but don't let it fool you; this is a much better movie.

Traitor (Don Cheadle): I think Don Cheadle is a great actor, but I don't think this was the best movie to show off his skills. It certainly had suspense, and tension, and excitement, but I think the moral of the story got in the way of the story. Don Cheadle plays a devout Muslim trying to stop Muslim terrorists from the inside. Throw in a devout Baptist FBI agent who doesn't know Samir (Cheadle) is undercover, and you've got a movie about how Christians and Muslims can work together for the greater good. Unfortunately, I was expecting a movie about espionage and terrorism. I also don't think that "Traitor" was the best title for this movie.

Network (Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Robert Duvall): This movie from the late '70s is a little weird, in the sense that you'll want to watch it again after it's over to see if you really saw what you think you saw. It's a story about a television network that will do anything to get ratings. On a larger scale, it's about the things that we'll do for love. This is the "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" movie, and there's a lot of other great, though completely unrealistic, dialogue. This is one movie that everyone should see at least once.

So there you have it: Twelve movies totaling about 24 hours of Hollywood magic. Now I need to actually get some things done.

A New Web Site!

2009-07-11T20:35:00.002-04:00

This morning, I moved my Web site off of Geocities and onto my new domain, InfiniteCadenza.com.

I registered the domain and bought some space on GoDaddy's servers. They advertised a nice monthly price for Web hosting and gave me a discount on the domain registration for getting it and the hosting at the same time. Unexpectedly, even though GoDaddy shows you a monthly rate, they don't take monthly payments — I had to pay it all up front. Not exactly a bait and switch, but, as I said, unexpected.

Still, I'm excited about the new site!

One Small Bonus for Man, One Giant Bill for Mankind

2009-07-10T12:01:00.003-04:00

My annual bonus was deposited in my checking account early this morning. The bonus itself is based on last year's performance, from the performance of the company as a whole down to my own personal performance. These economic times being what they are, this year's bonus is relatively low, but still, it's nice to have this little budgetary boost in the middle of summer.

This year's bonus payment will be put to good use:

Some of it will go to repay the cost of my recent trip to Santa Claus, Indiana. I schedule my summer vacation based on when I expect my bonus to come in so that I know I can pay for it. This year's bonus came a week later than I thought it would.
I'm going to get a new mattress. I may just get it from Big Lots, but I certainly won't start there. Even if I crawl into bed at midnight, it can still take an hour or so for me to be comfortable enough to fall asleep. I blame the mattress and not the caffeine. [Update 7/13/19: I'd forgotten how expensive mattresses were. Or maybe I just assumed that sleep technology, like every other type of technology, would come down in price over time. Not the case. A nice mattresses is now easily more expensive than your standard home PC. It'll have to wait.]
I'll pay off my speeding ticket.
I'll get a new mouthpiece for my clarinet. My current mouthpiece was purchased in 1993 and is quite a ways along on the slow trip to greenness. I'll likely end up with a Vandoren M15 Profile 88, for the few of you (okay, one if I'm lucky) who are interested in such things.
I need to get a new cell phone. My other one disappeared about two months ago. I keep expecting it to pop up somewhere, but Murphy's Law dictates that I won't find it until I buy a new one.
I'll buy a domain name and some Web hosting space from GoDaddy. This is the least expensive (at least in initial cost) but most exciting thing on my list. I have to move my current site off of Yahoo!'s Geocities, which is closing down in October. I'm taking this opportunity to remake the site, learning a lot about CSS in the process, and I have the structure, all of the main pages, and most of the sub-pages already put together and ready to go. And I've already picked out the perfect (and available) domain name for it. (I don't want to publish that domain name here because someone could beat me to it and then try to sell it to me at 50 times the price I can get it for now, but certainly I'll post here when it goes live.)

I haven't done all the precise math, but what's left of my bonus combined with my federal tax refund ought to leave me with enough extra padding in my checking account to keep me from worrying at least until the school year starts up again.

Holiday World/Splashin’ Safari 2009

2009-07-03T23:01:00.001-04:00

The boys and I journeyed to Santa Claus, Indiana, early Wednesday afternoon. We arrived at the Lake Rudolph Campground & RV Resort, where I had reserved a tenting site. I hadn't been to a campground since I was little, traveling with my parents to spend two weeks in Colorado with my maternal grandparents and great grandfather. That was a while ago. I didn't really expect that we'd be on our own, out in the woods, surviving by our wits and guile — after all, the Web site advertises water and electric hookups for the RVs. I forgot what "amenities" really meant in this situation, though: swimming pool, a couple of playgrounds, boat rental, a camp store full of crap, a game room. And in this case, golf cart rentals (which I didn't use) and free WiFi (which I did). If you're a camping purist, you wouldn't like it. If you like the outdoors and want to save some money, it's just the right thing.

Santa Claus, Indiana, is a small country town, but without the town and without the country. It's the exact opposite of the suburbs that I have gotten (perhaps too) used to: A gas station, a hardware store, a pizza shop, a sandwich shop, and a grocery store. Note the use of the indefinite article a, signifying singularity. There were no superfluous retail shops: not the familiar drug stores on opposite corners; no gas wars between Shell and Speedway; no used car dealership; no five "Starbuckses" (not even one!). Maybe there was more to Santa Claus than just what I saw, but we came in from the north and didn't see anything. When we left the campground to find some dinner, I went west and didn't see anything. The next morning, looking for a nice breakfast, I went south, toward the border with Kentucky, and passed through two small towns before I turned around empty-handed. Our breakfast came from the gas station's convenience store.

Just about the only reason anyone would ever go to Santa Claus, Indiana, is for Holiday World/Splashin' Safari. And I guess that suits the locals fine enough. That's the only reason we went there.

We were waiting at the gates when Holiday World opened the next morning at 10:00 our time (because this is one area of Indiana that, for some reason, chose to follow central time). A note to parents and grandparents: If you make this an early-morning trip so you can be there when they open, Kringle's Cafe, near the front entrance, is the only place that offers coffee, which is included in HW's free unlimited beverages.

We spent nearly the entire overcast day in the Splashin' Safari section of the park, which amounts to a large water park within a park. I won't get into the specifics of the rides, except to say that Bakuli was my favorite, if only for the ingenious design of it. Here are a few of my observations overall, though:

The water: Was damn cold!
The hair: We weren't there long before I noticed the remarkable (and, in my opinion, alarming) number of mohawk haircuts. Most of them were on young men between the ages of, say, eight and twelve. But I did notice at least one mohawked man in his late teens or early twenties.
The illustrations: Never before have I seen such a collection of tattoos! (Not to mention various facial and nipple piercings.) Apparently, the management of the park noticed, too, because they included "offensive body art" on their list of park no-nos. One man had his entire back done up in what looked like a symmetrical skull, though I suspect that, on closer inspection, the image was actually made up of a number of smaller items arranged to look like a skull from a distance.
The attire: The water park was filled with hard bodies, soft bodies, thin bodies, thick bodies, bony bodies, and blubber bodies, all in various swimwear. There were a lot of bikinis there; I can see why a teenage boy would want to get a summer job there. Not all of the bikini'ed guests were, shall we say, enriching the aesthetics of the locale, but many a young, tanned lady showed her soft flesh. It made me glad I don't have daughters.
The staff: I know my boys probably didn't really appreciate this, but I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the park staff. The rides weren't manned by the indifferent, dull-faced teenagers that you might find at some other theme parks (and here I'm recalling our trip to Indiana Beach two years ago) or worse — the shirtless, chain-smoking, carny wannabes that show up at the state fair midway each year. The staff at HW smiled and interacted with the guests. At the bottom of each water attraction, a staff member was there to help us out of whatever inflated flotation device had transported us through watery twists and turns, and more often than not, we were met with a smile and either a question about how the ride was or encouragement to enjoy the rest of our day at the park. Maybe this was because my two boys were just so cute, but I'll assume that this was standard practice. As both a parent and a guest, I really appreciated the friendliness of the staff.
The lines: Weren't horrible, especially in the morning. They got longer as the day went on and the temperature rose. I had forgotten that I don't really do great with heights until we were stuck in line for the Zoombabwe.
The worst thing about the park: Since we went on the second day of July, I assumed that the weather would be, well, July weather. Turns out that temperatures were uncommonly low, and the sky was overcast until after 4:00. I hadn't bothered packing any towels, figuring we would dry off in the sun and breeze between rides, which generally we did. But with the cold water combined with the cold air, it wasn't enough. So, I bought a towel. A nice, embroidered towel the color of canteloupe meat that we could use to dry off a bit, but mostly to keep warm, and that would serve as a souvenir to remind us of our splendid vacation. I didn't have it for long; someone stole it while we were waiting in line for a ride.

Holiday World has some great things going for it. The free unlimited beverages were great, and we were never far from either a restroom or a drink station. The drinks were all Pepsi products, but I was glad to see that dieters weren't as limited in their drink choice as they would be at a standard fast food restaurant. The free sunblock was a nice touch, too — I just wish I would have used more of it. The prices for food were high, as expected, but not movie-theater high, not totally exorbitant. The price to get into the park wasn't so bad, either. I know we certainly got our money's worth. We might even go back next year.

Nerdgasm Denouement: Galactic Adventures Review

2009-06-24T15:05:00.001-04:00

Yesterday after work, I called the local GameStop and had them put on hold the very last copy they had of Spore: Galactic Adventures. I took the short journey over there and traded in two games (GTA: San Andreas for the PS2, which I was hiding from the children and forgot about when I traded in my PS2 so very long ago; and SimCity Creator for the Wii, which was an extreme let-down after SimCity 2000 on the PC), which covered about 65% of the cost of Galactic Adventures.

Spore: Galactic Adventures extends Spore's Space Stage to incorporate some of the types of interactions you knew from the Tribal Stage, and then some. In the original Spore, you might be sent on a mission to some lightly-guarded planet to retrieve a statue or a scroll, and you'd fly your ship over to it and beam it up. With Galactic Adventures, you don't beam it up, you beam yourself down.

Loading the game took a while — of course, you have to load the updates for Spore first before you can load the expansion pack — but I was expecting that. It gave me a chance to do something I rarely do: peruse the instruction manual. (I was happy with the effects of the recent updates, by the way: the regular game seemed to run more smoothly.) So I was ready to go when it finished loading.

First up was the basic tutorial, which was almost completely outside the regular game. What I found was a Second-Life-like town inhabited by talking bunnies, ugly aliens, and a reptilian mayor. My first reaction was mild chagrin. Not because of anything in the game itself, but because of how slow everything was running. The characters were choppy and slow to react. I had encountered this before on this computer — it comes and it goes — but I was hoping, just hoping . . . Anyone out there know which settings can give me the best boost?

But I ventured on. After the tutorial, I ventured into Spore space. I retrieved, at great risk to Captain Blurbius Maximus, the Golden Llama; and I dispatched a horrible beast that was terrorizing a village nightly. And it was all seamlessly incorporated into the regular gameplay. It would have been great fun if I had a faster computer, but I enjoyed it all the same.

I read about but haven't yet tried the adventure editor. One can create one's own adventure — creating buildings, terrain, creatures, and puzzles from scratch — and publish it online so other Spore users can have a go at it. Like I said, I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds an awful lot like a fun version of Second Life, but without all the geometry. This total customization offers great promise.

I have great hopes for Spore in the future. At one point in the game, I visited a spaceport, with all sorts of aliens wandering about and muttering to themselves. Add a multiplayer online feature, and these "spaceports" could take on a Second Life social quality. Imagine seamlessly going from the game to an online 3-D interactive space and back again! Pretty soon, we'd see users creating new gear, new color combinations, etc. and marketing those wares online (which, in my experience, was about the only thing you could do on Second Life without forking over the monthly fee). Soon after that, you could go on missions created and posted by other users and, again, it would be seamlessly integrated into your personal gameplay.

But that's the future of Spore, not the present. Needless to say, I like the direction that it's taking. Whereas Second Life was a great-looking car with no engine, Spore is a great engine, and now they're building a great car around it. If they keep it up, it'll go far.

In short, if you enjoy Spore, and if your computer has decent processing capabilities, it's worth the $30 to get Spore: Galactic Adventures.

Oh, and Second Life sucks.

Nerdgasm: Spore Expansion Pack!!!

2009-06-23T15:03:00.001-04:00

I just learned today that a Spore expansion pack hits shelves TODAY! According to the Spore Web site:

Get out of your starship and turn your Spore creatures into legendary Space Captains. For the first time, beam down with your allies to take on action-packed, planetside adventures. Complete quests, collect rewards, and even create and share your own missions!

They also offer some "free" adventures from the creators of Robot Chicken. In this case, "free" means you have to have a valid EA account. Don't know if it's worth it. But the expansion pack definitely is!

The Spore folks know what they're doing: Make a great game, and then keep making it greater.

(You know, I still haven't taken on the Grox and defeated the original version of this game, even though I've spawned species on no fewer than ten planets. Maybe I ought to concentrate on that before dropping the dime on this expansion pack. And then there's the issue of whether to start buying expansion packs for Civilization IV — something that was on my Father's Day wish list. [But I'm not complaining about the Wii Fit! {How deep can I allow my parenthetical statements to go? (I mean, really?!)}] Speaking of the Wii, I can only hope that we'll eventually see a Wii version of Spore that'll let me access my regular online Spore account without paying through the nose. Would I ever leave the house again?)

Father's Day 2009

2009-06-21T22:26:00.002-04:00

This year's Father's Day gathering was Friday night, when everyone was available. Thanks to my children (and the ex) for a Wii Fit. I've done quite a bit of sweating this weekend, and hopefully this will give me the motivation I need to get my stuff together and really start to get healthy. Or at least healthier.

Father's Day itself was pretty boring. Started the day at the laundromat with four loads. Went out and saw Year One (wait for the DVD — the funniest bits were in the commercials). Was basically lazy all day.

Which isn't a horrible thing.

Google Analytics: Chasing Readers

2009-06-15T12:00:00.001-04:00

Last week, while meandering through my Blogger account settings, I found a link to sign up for Google Analytics. I gave it a try. I was surprised by the depth and breadth of data that Google Analytics could give me about who visits my blogs and how they get there (and how long they stay). The most surprising thing, though, was that someone out there is actually reading my blogs! Since I don't think my mother is visiting this blog twice a day, every day, there must be a few other surfers out there who've found my stuff. A few bloggers have even included my other Logophilius blog in their blogrolls. Yeah for me!

Google Analytics also shows what search terms a person who found my blog put in before they ended up here. As it turns out, a lot of people are still wondering about Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" lyrics, because a lot of people land in this blog on my blog post about "Chasing Cars" after a Google search. (And now that I've mentioned "Chasing Cars" [three times!] in this post, some of those surfers will find their way to this post, too, and hopefully follow the link to the original post above.)

That's kind of sad, though. I was hoping that the less pedestrian of my posts — like my review of Man Without a Country, or my experiences with Henoch-Schönlein Purpura, or even the weekend I spent figuring out how to work my camera — would be more attractive than a piddling discussion of some song lyrics.

Looking back, though, the greatest portion of my blog posts are pedestrian. Maybe you should jump over to Logophilius to find something with more teeth.

Addictions

2009-06-08T22:34:00.002-04:00

Summertime means having more free time than I am accustomed to. My Facebook friends have unwittingly presented me with addictive substances that quickly eat up all that extra time.

First, it was Bejeweled Blitz. Tonight, it's Farkle. Facebook itself is its own source of addiction.

When will I ever get something done?

Right after another game of Farkle!

Little Boys and Their Urine

2009-06-02T15:06:00.002-04:00

The two Hollandbeck boys are spending the week with my parents. Yesterday, I received the following message from my mother:

Conversation from back of the car on the way home from fun, fun time at M'ville Park. I hope this sounds as funny written out as it was to hear.

Hollandbeck the Younger: E spinned me so hard on the tire swing I almost peed my pants.

The rest of the conversation is whispered.

Hollandbeck the Elder: Did you really pee your pants?
Y: A little bit.
E. How much?
Y: Maybe an inch.
E: That's not how you measure pee.
Y: How do you?
E: In cups. Did you pee a cup?
Y: What size cup?

After that we got a lesson in pints, quarts, and gallons.

Has Christopher Guest started scripting outings in our family?

Outlook/Excel Success!

2009-06-02T14:59:00.001-04:00

Today, June 2, 2009, I completed a working solution for getting information from incoming Outlook e-mail into an Excel spreadsheet. It isn't the solution I had hoped for, but it works.

My problem before was trying to get three new buttons on the Ribbon. I could do this with ease in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, but Outlook isn't so nice. I never did figure out how to do it — the current solution has the three macro buttons on the Quick Access Toolbar. Maybe in another year I'll have it totally integrated.

So I got the Outlook side put together, and I got the Excel side put together. My next big problem was figuring out how to get the data from Outlook VBA code (the data is in an array, for those who understand what that means) into an Excel subroutine. Passing arguments from one subroutine to another is pretty easy from within a single application, and only slightly more involved if I was going between, say, Word and Excel. But as I said, Outlook isn't very nice.

My ultimate solution there was to create a new, hidden worksheet in the target Excel workbook and filling the first column with the array data from Outlook. Then, I could call the Excel subroutine without passing it any arguments. The Excel code then rebuilds the array from the information on the temporary, hidden worksheet and deletes the worksheet.

Sloppy? Yes. But usable? YES! Big sigh of relief.

Now I can go back to redoing my Web site, which is getting kicked off of geocities on July 13. I think I have the basic style sheet the way I want it!

Not a Good Outlook

2009-06-01T09:37:00.001-04:00

For the last month or so, I've been working on a VBA project at work. The short version is this: I'm creating an Outlook 2007 tool for a shared inbox that will divide the information in an incoming e-mail into different pieces and then insert those pieces into a table in one of three Excel spreadsheets. Which spreadsheet the information goes into depends on which button the mailbox user clicks.

I thought I had gotten the hard part finished. I've put together the VBA code to chop up the e-mail body into pieces and save those pieces into an array. That array will be passed to some Excel VBA code (more familiar ground for me), which will insert the information where it needs to go. I thought that was tha hard part.

But no. All I need to do is add a group to the Outlook Ribbon for the three buttons. In Word or Excel, this would be an easy process: I'd create an Add-in with RibbonX code (XML) to insert the new group (or new tab even) in the Ribbon by using my handy-dandy Custom UI Editor, and then I'd drop that Add-in the corresponding STARTUP folder. Piece of pie.

But Outlook 2007 isn't that easy. It looks like I need to code either in C# or outside of Outlook in VB to do what I want. I might also use an Outlook form, and I've even put the form together, but when Outlook was installed, the IT folks turned off my ability to add the code behind the form. I could probably get my boss to request that IT reload Outlook on my machine and turn on that ability, but even then (a) I don't know how to get that form to show automatically whenever someone opens an e-mail in this particular inbox; (b) this needs to be shared with three others, so they might need to have Outlook reloaded, too; and (c) if it doesn't work, I'll feel even worse.

Normally, you can find just about everything on the Internet. I've looked and looked hoping that someone has published a template of sorts just for adding buttons to the Ribbon, with placeholders and such. But no go. I've found a number of how-to's about customizing an Outlook Ribbon, but they're all over my head and require C# and/or VSTO and/or VB.NET. I just don't have the right resources, and I wouldn't know what to do with them if I had them.

(sigh)

I have one last thing to try today: The Outlook programming book I've been working from showed how to add an item to the right-click contextual menu. It looks like it can be done completely in VBA. I'll try that out. If that doesn't work, I don't know what to do next. I need to have this up and running by the end of June.

Looking for a New Home Online

2009-05-05T12:13:00.001-04:00

I found out last week that Yahoo! is nixing GeoCities. My (tiny) Web site is housed on GeoCities because it was there, it was free, and it was easy. Now that GeoCities is going away, I need to find a good place to move my site. And, like everything else on the Internet, I'm not willing to pay for it unless I have to. What free Web hosting sites are good, and which should I avoid?

It's actually rather serendipitous. Even before I found out about GeoCities' imminent demolition, I had started reading up on CSS and had wanted to see what else I could do with my site to make it look more professional. GeoCities won't let me upload a .css file, so I'd have to embed the styles in each page, which would eat up my storage capacity like Animal eating up furniture. On top of that, my site's URL is too long and not memorable and, as an aid to spammers everywhere, my e-mail address is embedded in the URL! (Is anyone actually wondering why GeoCities isn't popular anymore?)

So I'd like emigrate from GeoCities sooner rather than later. Any suggestions?

Maddening Year-End Stuff . . . in April

2009-04-29T16:21:00.002-04:00

For what I am sure is some logical and well-thought-out reason, my company's fiscal year begins on the first of May. It's odd to be doing end-of-year-type stuff only four months into the year. At least it coincides pretty closely with the school year. Still, fiscal year 2010 begins in two days.

Anyway, the end of the fiscal year means our annual fingernails-on-the-chalkboard marathon of employee evaluations for the previous year and personal objectives for the next year. Regardless of how well or badly the previous 12 months went, this is always the time of year that I consider quitting my job. Filling out my annual evaluation form is the single worst part of the job, and that's no exaggeration. Someone once said that "opera is where people get stabbed and, instead of dying, sing about it." What opera is to death, yearly evaluations are to work, only I always seem to have misplaced my libretto.

Maybe I just don't have the right organizational mechanism to keep track of what I've done over the last year, or I'm just so damned disorganized and apathetic most of the year that the sins of my past return each April to fiddle with my brain, but this process always gets me feeling the way I felt so often in high school: That everyone else is privy to some basic information that I have somehow overlooked or not been told.

In high school, I remember feeling like everyone but me had been given a copy of Life: A Handbook. Everyone else seemed so much less lost and confused. And now, here again, I feel like this evaluation stuff shouldn't be as difficult, time-consuming, confusing, and frustrating as I'm making it. As if there's some handbook that everyone else uses (and it isn't the employee handbook — I've looked) to guide them safely and sanely through this messy mass of paperwork and data.

Man, do I hate it.

Endorphin Shortage?

2009-04-13T18:36:00.003-04:00

Isn't exercising supposed to release some endorphins or something in my brain and make me feel better or happier? I went to the Y after work and did some straining and sweating, but I left more lonely and depressed then when I arrived.

There must be something wrong with my brain. Or maybe I just really hate exercise.

A Weekend to Learn Photography

2009-04-11T18:34:00.003-04:00

Okay, so maybe not all if photography. It was such a beautiful day, I figured it was a good time to go out and learn how to use my digital camera. I went to Holliday Park and then to the IMCPL Central Library, which gave me the opportunity to wander around downtown Indy a bit. I ended up with 90 photos, and here are some of my favorites (with a small amount of digital manipulation.

I should find out the story behind these ruins, because they're just sort of there, in the middle of this park, surrounded by a fence to keep people from, er, ruining them.

I was experimenting with depth of field here. I didn't get the effect I was looking for (I had my f-stop settings flipped around), but I still like this picture.

Here I actually learned a little something about using a flash to fill in shadows. If I hadn't used the flash, you wouldn't be able to see any of the statue's features. Again, this is from Holliday Park.

This is from the War Memorial downtown, right out in front of the central library. I've lived in the Indianapolis area nearly all my life, but I'm just now really looking at this monument? In this picture, I was playing with the shutter speed settings, trying to get movement in the fountain water against the immoveable stone face of the engraving.

This might just be my favorite picture that I've ever taken. I love the combination of the solid geometrical shapes of the modern building reflecting the distorted image of an older building.

A different side of the same building.

Again, the new reflecting the old. You can see inside the building where the reflection falls into shadow.

So maybe this one is my favorite? It has the great reflection, the light vs. the dark, and the circles of lights can leave you wondering exactly what you're seeing. (They're the lights on the ceiling inside the library.)

Nighttime Visit from an Old Friend

2009-04-05T21:57:00.000-04:00

I dreamt about Popcorn Friday night. Not the buttery movie munchies popcorn; my old dog Popcorn. We got him when I was maybe two years old, and sometime in my mid-teens, after arthritis made his back legs wobbly and permanently stained hair made him more of a light brown than white, he went off by himself somewhere to die. Hopefully I'll find a picture of him I can post here.

At any rate, he showed up in a dream on Friday night. I got to run with him, in that dream-like, untiring way. I got to roll around on the floor with him and rub his belly.

He's been gone for around 20 years, and I don't know what made me think of him this weekend, but it sure was nice to get to see him again, to rub his belly as his tongue lolled out. Even though it was just a dream, it has stuck with me. Even thinking about it now makes me smile.

Funny what dreams can do.

The Jury Duty Story

2009-03-29T19:43:00.001-04:00

It came up on Friday that one of my coworkers would likely be out for jury duty tomorrow, Monday. Hearing about jury duty always takes me back to my jurying experience, so I thought I would share my mildly embarrassing experience.

It was St. Louis, 1999. I was working at B. Dalton at the time. I hated working at the mall, so when I got the jury duty notice, it wasn’t the annoyance that it usually is. I got called in on the second or third day of the week. I showed up as per instructions at 8am and sat around on uncomfortable benches, waiting to be called. I can’t remember what I was reading at the time, but I’m pretty sure I brought something large. Maybe Les Miserables?

Anyway, lunchtime came and went. I was finally called up (along with a lot of other people) sometime after 1pm. I marched into a courtroom with probably 50 other people, one of whom, Colleen, I already knew from my wife’s job.

We got the first bit of “good news” immediately: We were informed that this civil case could take up to two weeks to try. They asked that people who couldn’t be away from their jobs that long to come before the judge in her chambers and give their excuses. Then they gave a long list of things that didn’t qualify as good excuses. Basically, unless you either owned your own business, were a doctor, or had a short-tempered pimp, you couldn’t get out of jury duty.

Then more waiting in benches even more uncomfortable than the first. Finally, after letting a handful of possible jurors go, the actual selection process began. The lawyers began by giving us some very general information about the case: It involved a lawsuit against the gas company by a woman who was horribly injured in a gas explosion. Starting at the front of the list (the 12 people already sitting in the jury booth), they began asking questions. They weeded out people who had been involved in lawsuits against utility companies, and people whose family members had suffered horrible burns, and people who generally thought the utilities people were out to get them. (One guy in particular tried to convince the attorneys that he really wanted to stick it to the man. I think they let him go.)

I had no excuses. I ended up on the jury, and Colleen ended up as an alternate. By that time it was early evening, so they sent us home and told us to come back at 9:00 the next day (which means I got to sleep in a little).

The trial began the next morning with opening statements. The plaintiff was a woman who had been preparing her father’s house for sale after he died. She went into the basement through a pair of storm doors and her husband followed behind her. When she tugged on the cord to turn on the hanging light, the spark lit a mass of gas that had built up in the basement after a gas line coming into the house had cracked. The husband, who was only a step or two into the basement, was blown out onto the yard and suffered relatively minor injuries. The wife, who was much farther down and at the heart of the explosion, didn’t fare so well.

According to the defense, the gas line broke in a spot that was beyond the point that the gas company was responsible for. It was a horrible accident, but it was out of their hands.

The first witness was the husband, who described in horrid detail what had happened that day at the house, from their first arrival until his wife was writhing in agony on the lawn, screaming while the neighbors hosed her down. Now, I’ve been called squeamish before. I prefer empathetic, or even empathic. His story disturbed me. I knew I was going to need a light lunch that day.

Next up was the wife. She had a horribly disfigured, scarred, and asymmetrical face. She had these lumps on her back where doctors had inserted balloons to stretch the skin for a skin graft. Her story picked up after the explosion, explaining how she felt as the flesh burned from her body, how she wished she would just die instead of having to feel so much agony. Then she went on to discuss the painful surgeries and the even more painful rehab, all in unbearable detail.

And I do mean unbearable. As her story went on and on, my head and my stomach conspired against the rest of me. Eventually, I couldn’t take it any longer. In the middle of her testimony, I interrupted:

“Excuse me, your honor, but I think I’m going to be sick.”

She bade me exit with all haste. I ran to the jury room and put my head between my legs. That’s how the remaining jurors found me soon after, when the judge ordered a recess.

Eventually I calmed down enough to stand. The bailiff told me that (gulp) the judge wanted to see me in the courtroom. I had no idea what to expect, what unknown rules of the courtroom I had violated, what my punishment might be.

The judge asked me if I would be able to continue. I told her I couldn’t if the testimony continued down the same path. It was just too much for me. Which was the truth.

So I was dismissed, and one of the alternates took my place.

I found out from Colleen that the case was settled out of court a few days later. I still wonder whether my outburst had any part in that eventual settlement.

The Ups and Downs of a Frantic Weekend

2009-03-23T22:49:00.003-04:00

The IWS had a concert this Saturday -- our last this season in Zionsville. I was putting together a PowerPoint presentation to be shown during one piece to remember the musicians, local and international, who died last year. With that and the concert program on my plate, I planned ahead and took Friday off (up). So I was up really late on Thursday working on the presentation (down), but I still felt pretty nice on Friday since I wasn't trapped in a cubicle (up).

Still, I was up late into the night on Friday working on the presentation and the program (down).

Saturday morning was the dress rehearsal. It went fairly well, and one of the stage crew in particular was very helpful and accommodating (up), which is not always the case because we're dealing with high school students here. After rehearsal, I went to Panera and worked on the presentation some more while I lunched. When I went out to the car, it wouldn't start (down down down). The battery was fine because I was listening to the radio while I waited and stressed, but when I turned the key, nothing happened.

I called the Chrysler roadside assistance number (a small up in this big downer), who arranged towing for the car. It was about 3:15 when the car finally got on the back of the tow-mobile (up, physically), but the dealership's service department closes at 3:00 on Saturdays (down).

So there I was, transportationless. I needed to get over to Kinko's to pick up the programs, and my tuxedo pants were waiting for me at the dry cleaners. And the memorial presentation still wasn't finished! (down down down, though, small up, I managed to peck in all the text that I needed to add while I waited for the tow truck)

Luckily, I have a second pair of tuxedo pants (I coulda been a Boy Scout I was so prepared). My ex-wife, who for once was attending a concert and bringing one of my sons with her [the other was at a sleepover], picked me up, zipped me to Kinko's, and took me to the concert. I got there "on time" (up), but about 45 minutes later than I had originally wanted to get there (down).

The presentation still needed some tweaking (down), and it was to be used during the second piece on the concert, right after an arrangement of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. I ended up in the light booth, sitting out that first piece (up? down?) to get the presentation ready.

In the end, I got it "done enough." There were some mistakes, but nothing too horrid. The main problem was that there were 87 people to get through in about 15 minutes, so it had to go along pretty quickly. Still, I've gotten nothing but compliments about it (up).

The rest of the concert went exceedingly well. The second half was completely taken up by a performance of James Barnes' Fifth Symphony -- an astouding piece of work that had me up so high I risked a panic attack from acrophobia. Really, if you ever get the chance to hear it (especially if you can hear it with the requisite 16 different trumpet parts), don't pass it up. If ever a piece of band literature deserved a Pulitzer Prize, this is the piece.

After the concert, I got to go home and crawl into bed (I lay down, but it was an up for me to finally relax).

Sunday: Decompression. I had some freelance copy editing that I had neglected (down, bad 4ndyman!) that I put in some work on. In the afternoon, the ex picked me up and we went to Holliday park, where my elder son's drawing of a fox was in a student art exhibition with 59 other kids' pieces. (up up up) I am really proud of him. I hope he gets the drawing bug, like I have. Back home for more editing and more decompression (aaaaaah!).

Monday morning: Scramble to find a ride to work (downish). Thanks, Virginia. Around noon, I get the call from the dealership. Some electronic part in the ignition system had malfunctioned. They replaced my keyless entry system and the car was ready to go. And it was all under warranty (up up up up up).

And that's where I am now: After a temmpestuous weekend, I and my car are both home, and I'm still riding high on the fact that I didn't have to pay a cent to repair the car, and it got done quickly. And I'm a little tired. Guess I'll go to bed and dream about roller coasters with happy endings.

Movie Review: The Watchmen

2009-03-12T12:22:00.004-04:00

I went out to see The Watchmen last night. I'm a big fan of superhero movies, so I've been looking forward to this for a while. Back in mid-February, I bought and read a copy of the original graphic novel in preparation. I'm not sure now if that was a good idea, because my impressions of the movie are certainly colored by the fact that I already knew what was going on. I have the sneaking suspicion that the movie was a bit harder to follow by those who weren't already familiar with the story.

Rather than thumbing up or down the total movie, I'll just touch on a few things that stuck in my mind (or my craw) while trying to keep the spoilers to a minimum.

The best place to start is, of course, the ending. There were some grumblings by die-hard fans when they learned that the screenwriters had changed the ending from what appears in the original graphic novel. Personally, I was dissatisfied with the original ending anyway. It came from too far out of left field. In both cases, we're left with an ethical conundrum, but I think that the changes in the movie actually strengthen the conundrum, though many may feel it rides too close to The Dark Knight.

The movie comes in at a bladder-unfriendly 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the writers had to make a number of cuts, for better or for worse, to get it down to that. The things that were left out probably made this more confusing to those who didn't know the story. And here I will tread lightly through possible spoilers:

Gone is the constant return to the newsstand, its know-it-all owner, and the comic-book-reading mooch, though all three do make understated appearances. The lesbian couple is completely gone.
Gone then, too, are the numerous references to The Frontiersman and the sign-wielding apocalyptician (you know who he is) who picks up his daily copies. The Frontiersman shows up in the last five minutes of the movie, just to give us that "uh-oh" at the end.
The maskless Rorschach was too sidelined in the beginning of the movie. When he was unmasked by the police (does that count as a spoiler?), I didn't feel like the audience got the joy of that a-ha moment of "That guy is Rorschach?!" It is amazing, though, how they got the actor to look so much like the Rorschach in the graphic novel.
Speaking of how the actors look, the special effects makeup on Richard Nixon is, in my opinion, the worst part of this movie. It just wasn't realistic. But maybe that's just my age (Nixon was in office when I was born.) Was his nose really that big? Carla Gugino's makeup, on the other hand, was great — I could really believe that she was a martini-sipping senior spinster.
Not enough was made about Rorschach's other, uh, characteristics. Only once do we hear someone complain about his odor. No one says anything about how god-awful ugly he is.
Some things in the movie just weren't explained well. Why, for instance, was Dr. Manhattan naked for most of the movie? What was Bombasto, and where did he come from? (He didn't show up until the action moved to Antarctica.)

Now, a word about the overall content. This movie is rated R for a reason. There was a small family in the theater, the youngest a girl maybe 10 or 11 years old. She should not have been there. Some things to look out for:

Blue penises. Lots of blue penises.
After a certain inferno rescue, there's a sex scene that's twice as long as it needed to be, to the gratitude of lonely, basement-dwelling comic-book collectors everywhere. For me, it was worth the cost of admission; to a pre-teen girl, not so much.
A meat cleaver to the skull. A splash of blood. Then three more whacks with the meat cleaver.
Fat boy gets his arms cut off — on screen — with an angle grinder.
Lots and lots of blue penises. We're not talking sketched-in Vitruvian Man junk here. Dr. Manhattan's man-parts were, well, impressive. For a glow-in-the-dark blue guy. And honestly, it was obvious that the filmmakers were seeing how much they could get away with. Numerous times — and pay attention to this when you see the movie — they cut away from a scene just after a big cerulean schlong makes its appearance, when there's no reason they couldn't have cut away just before.

The majority of the dialogue is taken directly from the source, so the huge fans (who've already seen the movie a dozen times) can mouthe along with parts of the movie at first viewing. ("But doctor, I'm Pagliacci!") And you can also identify specific illustrated frames from the graphic novel that were reproduced almost exactly on-screen.

One final thing: The opening sequence of this movie is absolutely brilliant. It covers well the entire history of America to 1985 since the first masked heroes made an appearance. This opening sequence should be held up as a prime example of coherently packing a lot of information into a tiny space.

I'll definitely buy this when it comes out on DVD. I'm hoping they'll put out an extended director's cut that puts back in all the stuff that was taken out to bring down the length.

The Last (I Hope) Leg Update

2009-03-11T21:24:00.002-04:00

I saw the orthopedist today. Officially, my leg is healed, though there's still some swelling that may persist for another month or so, which explains why I'm still limping. I don't have the range of motion I'd like, either, and I'm a ways away from being able to run.

Which is fine with me.

I am pretty tired of limping, though. My calf muscles are sore in both legs...

I'm Avuncular Again!

2009-02-28T20:49:00.001-05:00

avuncular: Having the qualities of an uncle — genial, generous, tolerant

My best friend Jean had her baby early this morning, five weeks early. At under five pounds, little Lillian Page is pretty tiny, but both people involved appear to be healthy. I'm excited about being an "uncle" again.

Drew Peterson: Homicidal Don Juan or Lucky Bastard?

2009-02-13T08:12:00.002-05:00

Drew Peterson's third wife was murdered, and Drew himself is a suspect. Then his fourth wife went missing, and again he is a suspect. And now, this 55-year-old is engaged to a 24-year-old woman.

I've had one date in, well, let's just say since Drew's wife went missing. I only have one past wife, and she's still alive and well. I'm not a suspect in any police investigations (or, if I am, I've never been alerted to the fact). How does Drew manage to find a woman 31 years his junior and get engaged? It just doesn't seem fair.

Having watched their interview on The Today Show, perhaps I shouldn't be too upset. This particular young lady doesn't seem like the sharpest needle in the haystack. Perhaps I just have higher standards than Mr. Peterson. (I know, I know -- whatever let's me sleep at night.)

One of the oddest things things that came out of the interview was that, between the two of them, they have eight children, with one grandchild on the way. That means that this young lady will be a grandmother (step-grandmother?) at 25. That's just wrong.

Good luck to her. I hope she doesn't get murdered. I hope she comes to her senses before the wedding and finds a nice younger guy who's maybe only ten or twenty years older than she is.

A New Kitchen, and Then Some

2009-02-10T21:59:00.007-05:00

The contractors were here nice and early this morning -- 8am. I guess I was the only one up and ready to go -- they started on my kitchen right away, even though I'm on the second floor. If I wasn't so overloaded with stuff at work, I would have been excited about the kitchen renovation all day long.

I came home to find a beautiful new kitchen. Pix below. New fridge, new range, new cabinets, new countertops. They even replaced the sink (including some more stylish fixtures) and the dishwasher. I didn't think they were going to replace the dishwasher.

My new sink with brushed-nickel faucet even comes with a sprayer. W00t!

My new Whirlpool oven with the clock set to the wrong time.
There's a light in the oven; I'm livin' the high life now!

They even replaced the countertop and cabinet in the bathroom.

That's me in the ugly Hawaiian shirt.

They also replaced all the door knobs with stylish handles, and the three cheap ceiling lights in the hallways and bathroom with nice, frosted-glass lights. They already raised my rent this year, and from the looks of things, I can expect them to do it again next fall.

My inaugural dinner in my new stove was baked to perfection:

I only wish I would have taken a"before" picture. (Of the kitchen, not the dinner.)

I spent all of Monday night getting everything out of the kitchen and into boxes and bags in the dining room. I'm procrastinating on moving everything back. Why ruin such a pristine kitchen?

Good News for Foot and Kitchen

2009-02-06T11:34:00.002-05:00

Good news was waiting when I got home from work yesterday. I got a bright green note from the apartment complex that my building is on the list for kitchen renovation next Tuesday. This is the same kitchen renovation I've been looking forward to since last April. Monday night I'll be emptying everything in the kitchen except the fridge -- all cabinets, the drawer under the stove, the top of the fridge. Not to mention all the junk. (If you've seen the state of my kitchen, you know this is a big job.)

What do you think are the chances that it will go smoothly and quickly, and that I'll be enjoying a new kitchen Tuesday night?

I also got good news this morning. The swelling in my right foot has gone down quite a bit. It still looks uglier than what's in the previous pictures (moer bruising and burst capillaries), but it's gone from bratwurst to frankfurter. When I have the boot on, I can even put some pressure on it, so I've been able to hobble around with only one crutch.

I might have to go find myself a nice cane this weekend.

Good News, Bad News, and Ugly Photos

2009-02-03T22:16:00.004-05:00

The Evolution of a Fractured Fibula

The bad news is that I cracked the base of my fibula — that bump that sticks out on the outside of your ankle. The ER folks put a hard splint thingy on it. Of course, my toes stuck out and just sat there being cold. Here's what it looked like, with Homer giving me a little warmth.

That's the nice view. Underneath that elastic, flesh-toned exterior lies an increasingly purple and swollen hoofer:

You can see the swelling there in my right foot, compared to my left.

The good news (I guess) came on Monday, when I saw the orthopaedist. They fitted me for an expensive, ill-fitting, open-toed ski boot:

I thought the splint was uncomfortable. My foot is forced into a 90-degree angle, which my swollenness does not appreciate, and I can't move anything. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much, though. It isn't a big plaster thing, and I can take it off to (very carefully) bathe.

I was kind of hoping for a little shake-up in my life, for something to change. This isn't really what I had in mind.

Wanted: Sympathy, Comic Books

2009-01-29T20:12:00.001-05:00

If my 40s are anything like my 30s, I'll be dead before my 50s.

Let me explain what happened to me today. I had a nice lunch at Panera Bread and got a large coffee and lemon poppyseed mini-bundt cake to take with me to work. The guys in charge of such things did a remarkable job of clearing the snow out of the parking lot. Considering the slippery state of the roads in general, this was one clear parking lot.

I was thinking this as I walked to the building. I got to the sidewalk and noticed that they weren't quite so clear — mostly just snow that had blown across from beside the sidewalk. It was a little slippery, but a little slip doesn't didn't scare me. I got to the little dip in the sidewalk for wheelchair access — a little slope down to the lot — and I remember thinking that, if I were going to fall, it would be here on this little incline. But I made it across fine. But then,

The first step I took after the handicap ramp was a disaster. Most of my body slipped down to my right to the sidewalk. My right foot decided not to follow suit.

I hobbled into the building, inconvenienced about a dozen people going to and from lunch, nearly passed out, nearly vomited, and answered a bunch of questions from the woman in charge of the facilities. Then the ambulance showed up.

If you've ever been to the emergency room with non-life-threatening injuries, you know what I mean when I say that it's really just an expensive waiting room. I think I waited for over an hour before I could get my leg x-rayed. The IV they gave me in the ambulance emptied itself into my arm and hung there useless for maybe two hours.

In the end, I learned that I had cracked the bottom of, I believe, my fibula. Not a complete break, but a (painful) fracture all the same. They gave me a temporary cast, some pain meds, and the number of an orthopedist.

Now I'm finally home, laying on the couch. My ankle is throbbing. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to work out the rest of the weekend, and the remainder of the month. I can't drive (it's my drivin' foot). I suppose I could try to drive with my left foot, but that might not be such a good idea. Especially in this snowy weather.

I am thankful, though, that I bought the WiFi router, so I don't have to sit in front of my desktop to do stuff.

When my brother was laid up in the hospital for a few weeks at the beginning of the sixth grade, people brought him all sorts of comic books to read while he was there. I still remember being jealous. One of them was Peter Porker as Spiderham. Since then, I've always equated hospital stays or general medic down-times with comic books.

But I don't have any comic books. :( Maybe I'll go online and read the Heroes comix.

Conspiracy Theory Alert

2009-01-16T16:09:00.002-05:00

Two things happened yesterday:

A plane flying out of NYC was forced to land in the Hudson River in, as newscasts put it, "the shadow of ground zero."
Dubya gave his farewell address.

I suspect a large number of anthropophobic, obsessive-compulsive conspiracy theorists are at this very instant penning their belief that these occurrences are not coincidental. The beginning if Dubya's presidency was marked with a terrible incident involving a commercial jet running into something that it shouldn't. And now, the end of his presidency is marked with another commercial airline incident — and in the same general location as the first!

I'm sure the stories will differ. Some may believe that this incident was designed to show people that, even though things can happen, airlines are still safer than they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Others may believe that this is a failed attempt (by either Bush or his enemies) to crash another plane in the same general area.

Who could be involved? Dubya and Cheney, of course. Barack Obama, likely. Big oil? Commercial airline bigwigs? Osama bin Laden? Rudy Giuliani? Al Frankton? The Illuminati? Martha Stewart?

Regardless of what their stories turn out to be, I'd wager that they will all miss the mark. The downing of flight 1549 reveals a new threat that I'm sure all the usual conspiracy theorists will miss, that will go unspoken even in the most paranoid circles. The threat is, of course, suicide Canada geese.

Of course, these are only the pawns in a global war against homo sapiens. The real ringleaders are the squirrels, the most intelligent animal on Earth apart from humans. (Have you ever been to a college or university — hubs of learning and cutting-edge technology — that wasn't jam-packed with eager squirrels?)

[Hat tip to Tim Bedore]

Who Could Hang a Name on You?

2009-01-13T12:38:00.001-05:00

Why does every day seem like Tuesday?

Well, yes, today is Tuesday. But that was a surprise this morning; I was sure we had had a Tuesday yesterday. Tomorrow will be horrid — such a long week, and it's only Tuesday.

Wii-in 2

2009-01-05T21:10:00.002-05:00

~~113~~ 213 lbs. I count that as a 2-pound loss.

[Oops!]

The First Wii-In

2008-12-29T19:34:00.001-05:00

Thanks to a freelance copy editing check, I bought a Wii today. Tomorrow, I'll sell my PS2 and games to cover some of the cost.

I decided recently that a Wii was for me after I did some boxing and tennis on someone else's Wii Sport (the game that comes with the console). My heart rate was up, and I was sweating...a decent cardio workout. And a helluva lot more fun than a stationary bike.

So I bought the Wii for health purposes. Really! I'll try to play on the Wii for 45 minutes to an hour each day (the sacrifices we make) as my exercise. I'll track my weight, and in mid-January I have to see my doctor again anyway, so I can see if the exercise is helping my cholesterol and triglycerides at all. In the meantime, I'll just have some fun.

So at tonight's Wii-in, I come in at an embarassing 215 lbs. Gotta start Wii-in' it off!

Boxing Day Cleanup

2008-12-26T15:59:00.002-05:00

This Christmas is proof positive that it really does pay to post your wish list on your blog!

Dear Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, et al.,
Christmas may be over, but don't feel that a late gift will be unappreciated. I didn't get that house in Lawrence Township that I was hoping to find under the tree, so feel free to help me cross that off my wish list anytime during 2009.

4ndyman

My Christmas Wish

2008-12-11T09:26:00.003-05:00

Our company holiday party was yesterday. In the past, they have been pretty lame because they try to do too much (like hiring a magician instead of just letting people socialize). But, still, it's hard to pass up free food these days. And there were door prizes.

But in the end, I'm really glad I went. I made the acquaintance of two women I didn't previously know, though I would see them around often enough. One in particular, the (ahem) single one, seems quite intelligent, has a quick wit, seems to share my sense of humor, knows a lot of obscure trivia (like me), and . . . well . . . is single.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to screw my courage to the sticking place and ask her out. I'll be happy if I can get through the conversation without having an anxiety attack, even if she shoots me down.

[Update: I was red as a beet, but I made it through. We're going to a little chamber concert tomorrow night.]

My First Christmas Present 08

2008-12-04T19:09:00.001-05:00

I was surprised this afternoon at work by the delivery of a package. I hadn't ordered anything, wasn't expecting anything. I don't get packages at home, much less at work.

The return address revealed that it was from the production company that put together the new videos we put on Dummies.com (more about this below). Somehow I had become the "math guy" — my degree in music certainly made me qualified, eh? — and I had helped the people at this company decipher what we had given them to use as scripts for some videos about Calculus. (I took Algebra 2 my sophomore year of high school, and didn't take a math class again until my junior year of college, and that was business math.)

Anyway, inside the package I found a little gift bag from a place in Michigan. Inside the bag was a really cool travel mug (bearing the production company's logo) and four little bags of specialty coffees.

This gift, my first Christmas gift this year, brought a bright ray of caffeinated joy to an otherwise somnambulant day.

---

Dummies.com was relaunched recently, and there are a mess of videos and new free content to see there. If you haven't stopped in to check it out, you oughta. Here's a fun little video about adding and subtracting fractions. Much of the rest of my daily labors will go to creating more content to put on this site. There's a lot of stuff there already, but we've left plenty of room to grow.

Fruit of the Womb

2008-12-03T16:29:00.001-05:00

So my best friend found out today that the bean in her belly is female. Let the baby-naming fun begin!

The mother had some horrible heart problems when she was born, so this pregnancy is officially somewhat risky. As such, she has been getting ultrasounds more often than normal, with special attention paid to the baby's heart. The bean's heart looked healthy in today's ultrasound.

With that in mind, I thought they ought to name the bean something that meant "good heart" or "strong heart." Unfortunately, I couldn't find a name online that meant exactly this that was actually a decent name. I don't think they would go for Creuddylad or Azami (though, considering the bean is one-quarter Japanese, perhaps Azami would make a great middle name?).

I did, though, land on Cordelia, which might (might!) come from the Latin "cor," heart. Plus, there's the Shakespeare reference, which is almost always good.

So there. That's my official (and perhaps only serious) suggestion for a name to replace "Cletus the Fetus."

I've Run Out of Context

2008-12-01T13:30:00.001-05:00

Statements actually made over Thanksgiving vacation:

Phrases you hear only from the mouths of young children (let's hope): "Nobody wants to hear about your penis!"

Things only your grandmother can say: "You're getting fat!" I considered correcting her: I'm not getting fat, I am fat. But I made some statement about joining the Y instead.

Life Lessons from Homemade Salsa

2008-11-21T11:39:00.001-05:00

I made some salsa again last night. It turned out yummy, but I learned something very important: the oils from hot peppers don't wash off one's hands very easily. At one point, both of my eyes were stinging from the oils after I unconsciously rubbed them with my fingers.

And then, later, I had to go to the bathroom.

I might just have to buy some disposable rubber gloves the next time I want to make salsa.

Another Year Younger

2008-11-13T10:37:00.001-05:00

I turned 34 last week. They say that 40 is the new 30, but as far as I know, 34 is still just 34.

I wish I had turned 40, so I could be four years younger than I am now.

Voting Follow-Up: Foretelling Results

2008-11-04T12:04:00.001-05:00

On the way back from voting, I stopped at Panda Express for some lunch. My fortune cookie had this to say: SOON YOU WILL BE SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD. Since I'm not planning any trips to Tibet in the near future, this could mean only one of three things:

I will suddenly come in to a lot of money.
The girl of my dreams will drop into my life.
Obama will take Indiana.

I can't decide which is the more realistic option. It has to be one of these. And fortune cookies never lie.

My Voting Experience: Thinking of Changing My Name

2008-11-04T11:56:00.001-05:00

Because I work so close to my polling place, I figured I could avoid the before- and after-work voting crowd by taking my lunch hour a little early and going to vote.

I arrived at 10:40 with two books to read. (I'm nearing the end of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, so I brought a second book in case I finished it.) Two precincts are voting at my polling place. When I got there, I saw one long line and one line with only five people in it. Turns out that both of these lines were for my precinct. There was no waiting for voters from the other precinct, and maybe ten people voted there while I waited in line. (I can't be too certain of that number because my nose was buried Jekyll and Hyde; at any rate, I never saw a line there.)

As I said, both lines — the long and the short — were for my precinct. One was for last names A–M, the other for N–Z. Guess which line I was in!

That's right. I was in the long A–M line. Seems my precinct has more Davises, Johnsons, and Millers than Smiths, Taylors, and Williamses. (Incidentally, I just found a list of the most common surnames in the US; 19 of the top 30 fall into that first half of the alphabet.) Maybe I should change my last name to Ziegfeld so I don't have to spend so much time at the polls?

But, all-in-all, it wasn't terrible. I was out of there by 11:15, and I got some reading done. Now we just need to see if any of the people I voted for actually win. (Cross your fingers that we know the election results before December this time!)

Wish List 08

2008-10-17T15:13:00.011-04:00

Both my twenty-four(teen)th birthday and Christmas are coming up soon, and people always ask me what I kind of gifts I want. Whenever someone asks me the question, though, my mind goes completely blank. So here I'll keep a running list of things I'd like, so you lucky few who read this blog won't be left in the dark. (A certain amount of analysis can reveal more about what kind of person I am, too, probably revealing more about me than I would like to.)

So, here's my wish list for 2008:

~~Caroline Hartig's Clarinet Brillante II. I don't already own this CD from my college clarinet prof, and there's no excuse for it.~~ [Finally bought this, Spring 2009]
~~A wireless router (as opposed to a cordless router — we're talking WiFi here)~~ [All right...so I went out and bought this one myself. I still get to cross it off the list!]
~~A subscription to Games magazine~~ [Thanks, Dad!]
The CD Best of Bowie [Thanks Ginia!]
The Kronos Quartet's Nuevo [Thanks, Mom!]
Coldplay's Viva La Vida
~~Spore Creepy and Cute Parts Pack~~ [Thanks, Nelsons!]
Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem [Thanks, Jean!]
A 26-hour day
Russel Shorto's Descartes Bones
A house in Lawrence township (in hopes that Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, et al. surf the blogosphere looking for ways to spend money)
~~One of those nonclassical-music creation programs, like one of these.~~ [Anyone know of a good Cakewalk guide?]
Effects pedals for an electric guitar (I don't have any, so anything from simple distortion to a wah-wah pedal would be great -- get them used at eBay)
~~Maybe a new watch (analog, something interesting but not too visually loud)~~ [Even better: an old watch. Two, actually, that belonged to my brother.]
A large donation to the Indiana Wind Symphony
~~A small sculpture of a clarinetist, to add to my small collection~~ [Not a sculpture, but a nice framed paper silhouette]
~~Teen Titans: The Complete Fifth Season~~ [Found this at Fry's]
The New England Jazz Ensemble Wishes You a Cookin' Christmas

A Compliment . . . 16 Years Later

2008-10-13T13:45:00.003-04:00

Way back in the early days of the nineties, when big hair bands were giving way to grunge and a Bush-free eight years was just beginning, I took a printmaking class in high school. One of the projects we did was silk screening. I created "my version" of Picasso's "The Old Guitarist," which, hopefully, you can see here:

The original.

This is from Picasso's Blue Period. Thinking of him as "The Blue Guitarist," I gave him an electric guitar and sunglasses and made him "The Blues Guitarist." I made six prints (and I'm realizing now that I never took a picture of them). I have one of them (the first one, which definitely wasn't the best one) hanging up in my office cube.

~~[AND I'LL INSERT IT HERE AFTER I GET A PICTURE OF IT.]~~

The complete and total fraud

I had since forgotten what happened to the other five. This weekend, I got a Facebook e-mail from Kelly. Kelly wrote to tell me that I had given her one copy of this print, and that she had moved it around from apartment to apartment and displayed it for 16 years, framed even. As you can imagine, this made me feel quite good.

Honestly, I didn't even remember who this Kelly was. I looked through her photos on Facebook for a while before I recognized her. I don't remember actually giving her the print, but I do remember that she was a pretty red-head, which in those days (okay, still!) would have been enough for me to do anything for her. I was such a pushover for a pretty face and red hair.

Too often, things from our past can come up and bite us. It was nice that something from my past came up and gave me a big hug.

Language Log Blogroll: A Follow-up

2008-09-26T12:25:00.002-04:00

I mentioned here that I had suddenly experienced a rise in readership on my other blog, Logophilius, for no apparent reason. Well, I think I found the reason. Logophilius is now listed in the blogroll at Language Log, and some people who read that blog (and there are a large number of them) must have seen it and clicked over.

I hadn't noticed because I get their RSS feed in Outlook, and I rarely click over to the actual Language Log site anymore. But today I did.

I am honored to be included. But once again, this means that I need to keep up with posting.

The Networks Get Smart

2008-09-24T21:01:00.001-04:00

It's no secret that, instead of coming up with creative original ideas, TV and movie studios are clamoring to remake hit shows from the 70s and 80s. Underdog, Speed Racer, Get Smart, American Gladiators, Battlestar Galactica Knight Rider, etc.

Well, somebody finally got smart. Instead of putting out the money to create crappy remakes of old shows, someone finally decided to just re-release the old shows instead!

Over at NBC's Wayback Wednesday (http://www.nbc.com/Vintage_Shows/Way_Back_Wednesdays/), you can find episodes of The A-Team, the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Rod Serling's Night Gallery, Buck Rogers, the original Battlestar Galactica, and a couple of shows I'm not interested in.

I thought it was just NBC, but WOOT!, CBS (http://www.cbs.com/classics/) has The Twilight Zone (the original, with Rod Serling), MacGyver, the original Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, and HOLY CRAP! MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE SHOW Twin Peaks!

Looks like FOX and ABC need to catch up...and I can just about get rid of my TV and live on my computer.

You Didn't Say What You Thought You Said

2008-09-22T11:27:00.002-04:00

Without looking at your keyboard, can you figure out what's wrong with this statement:

Okay, so there is really more than one thing wrong with this statement — most notably the fact that someone would be making statements about their penis size in a public forum.

This was just too funny. I had to share.

Computers Launch World Domination Plan

2008-09-11T12:10:00.001-04:00

Complicated, globally linked computer systems are supposed to be labor-saving devices. But at what cost?

Last week, I went through the Taco Bell drive through for a quick bite and ordered three supreme chicken soft tacos and a medium gluggable. I estimated that the bill would be around (but under) $8, considering I ordered four items, each of which costs less than $2. When I pulled around, my bill was up over $9. I questioned the woman in the window about it. Because "Chicken Soft Taco Supreme" isn't in their computer system, she punched up a fiesta soft taco, minus avocado sauce and fiesta salsa, plus sour cream and diced tomatoes. Each "additional" item cost me 30 cents per taco; but of course I didn't get any "discount" for removing items.

I argued with her a bit. It didn't make sense to me that one taco ought to cost 60 cents more than another with the same number of toppings, as if sour cream (plenty of cows in Indiana) is much more expensive than avocado sauce (plenty of avocados in Indiana?), and — more to the point — that diced tomatoes cost more than machine-processed salsa with multiple ingredients. In the end, she argued that she couldn't change the way the computer rang up the bill.

(To her benefit, I could tell she was frustrated, but she didn't lose her temper with me, and always kept smiling.)

Computers – 1; Humans – 0

Last Friday, I stopped in at Papa Murphy's Take-n-Bake Pizza. The sign out front advertised a large pepperoni pizza for $6.99. I ordered one half-pepperoni, half-cheese and one with pepperoni, chicken, and diced tomatoes (a great combination after I added diced garlic to it at home). The bill: $23 and change. I had been charged full price ($10.99) for the half-pepperoni pizza.

I asked him about this — after it was wrung up but before I signed the receipt — and was told that, because he had to ring it up with "special" toppings (as opposed to, I don't know, pushing the big red "Pepperoni Pizza" button), it wouldn't ring up as the special, so I had to pay full price.

That's right: I paid $4 to have half the pepperoni removed.

(Why didn't I just order a pepperoni pizza and move the toppings around when I got home? Hindsight being what it is, this is what I should have done. I very rarely order uncooked pizza, so I guess my pizza-ordering habits weren't quite ready to make the shift. Plus, I was so excited that they actually had chicken as a topping choice.)

Computers – 2; Humans – 0

Just now I went to Taco Bell again; this time I went inside. The customer in front of me ordered a simple lunch and gave the cashier his credit card. She ran it through the Credit card machine and waited. And waited. And waited. She ran it through again. More waiting. She ran it through the machine in the drive-through area. More waiting. Apparently, the credit card machine broke just before I got to order (I was paying with a credit card anyway). A couple of other people tried things, but nothing worked.

It must have been 10 minutes of waiting. Not until production slowed to halt — because no one else could order — did someone with some knowledge and authority assess the situation. Yup. It's broken. Cash only.

The guy in front of me and the people waiting in the drive-through got their food for free. I only had a little cash on me and ended up spending less than a third of what I had planned at Taco Bell. Production stopped, customers got frustrated, and Taco Bell lost money, all because one little piece of technology stopped working.

Computers – 3; Humans – 0

Keeping all this in mind makes me wonder if I really should be worried about the big atom smasher in Switzerland.

A New Face(book), and a Surprising Jump in Readership

2008-09-02T11:51:00.001-04:00

On Sunday night, I finally opened a Facebook account. Why, after avoiding what will surely become another time sink for so long, did I finally decide to do it. Because I had a reason, for once. The Indiana Wind Symphony now has a Facebook page, and I figured I, as president, ought to be in there, too. (I didn't say it was a good reason.) There are probably a dozen or so other IWS members in there, too, that I've already "friended."

I don't know whether it's related, but this weekend saw a (for me) huge jump in readership on my other blog, Logophilius. I got five new comments from five new people in the last three days. I think that just about matches the number of comments I had gotten the entire year before that.

But, now that I know there are actually some people reading it, I'll have to actually update it more regularly. And I don't mean once-a-year regularly. I'll be happy with once a week.

The Abe Martin Lodge

2008-08-06T15:44:00.002-04:00

I took this last week before school off to have a little vacation with the boys. Monday, we went to the Indianapolis Children's Museum. Tuesday, we were going to go to Conner Prairie, but it rained a lot the night before (and it was raining that morning), and I thought it would be too muddy.

This morning (Wednesday), we got on the road at about 11:00 and drove down to brown County State Park and checked into the Abe Martin Lodge, which is where I'm writing this post.

We had come here with Grandma for Easter dinner back in the Spring. At that point, they were in the process of creating a little indoor waterpark (which they laughingly call and "aquatic center"). Now the waterpark is done, so it seemed like the perfect place for a vacation. When we get tired of the waterpark, we're in the middle of Brown County State Park, where we can go hiking, or find a playground, or even leave the grounds and go over to nearby Nashville, Indiana.

So we checked in a little before 2:00. I discovered when I got here that the normal check-in time is 4:00, which I thought was really weird. Luckily, they had a room ready for us anyway.

We spent about an hour in the waterpark after we unloaded our stuff. It's a neat little place: one water slide, a little water volleyball "court," a splash area with all sorts of falling and shooting water, and a hot tub that isn't too hot for kids. The deepest part of the pool is the water volleyball "court," at 5 feet. The majority of the pool is 3.5 feet, including at the bottom of the slide, which means Hollandbeck the Elder has a full run of the pool (he even went down the slide a dozen times, after I talked him into it), and Hollandbeck the Younger has a lot of room to splash around in and have fun.

I have heard that the residents of Nashville are a little pissed off about the waterpark because it isn't open to the public; only registered guests can use it. After being in there, I see why that is a wise choice. If you've ever gone to a public waterpark during the summer, you probably remember how crowded it was — lines for the water slides, people running into each other underwater, all the chairs taken. A waterpark of this size just couldn't handle that many people. You could certainly cram that many people into it, but very few people would have a lot of fun there.

Anyway, it's a nice little place. The rooms are nice, and they're done up in a rustic look. The beds have quilts instead of comforters, and the pillows have quilted covers with a picture of (in our room, at least) big owls on them. The entertainment center, tables, chairs, and headboards are all woodsy, with a lot of bark still on the wood.

Oh, and they have free WiFi. But no free breakfast.

Oral Topography

2008-07-23T22:23:00.003-04:00

Talk about a horrible day . . .

About a month ago, I discovered a big gap between a couple of molars. I thought one of my old fillings had broken, creating the gap. I let it go because it was just a nuisance at the time.

A couple days ago, it really started to hurt, and the pain expanded through the whole right side of my jaw and up to my ear. It got to be so bad that I left work early and drove over to the Immediadent clinic at Castleton Mall. This was the bad news:

I had a cavity eating its way under an old filling. The sudden gap was most likely caused by a chunk of my tooth falling out and the filling shifting a little into the space left by the cavity. The pain started when the cavity ate its way down to the nerves in the tooth.

I had two options:

A root canal, which would cost nearly $2,000 and involve a minimum of two visits to the dentist.
I could have it pulled for $288.

I mulled it over for a while. It was a tough decision. I hope I made the right one. I had it pulled.

I got to see the tooth after it was pulled. (I wanted to keep it, but apparently the law doesn't allow it.) Teeth are apparently like trees: there's more below the gums than there is above. It seemed like it was huge!

I guess, in the grand scheme of things, I've done well. I went 33 years without requiring any stithces — at least that I can remember. Still . . .

Talk about a horrible day . . .