Been wanting to blog about my thoughts on Snowmageddon 2010 after the fact. But first, I want to say, Obama copied *me*. I started using the term "Snowmageddon" at least 3 days before he did.

So there. :-P

I grew up in Upstate New York. I enjoyed seeing snow and in large quantities. But I've decided I've had quite enough for this year. Andrew's school has used up 10 of its allotted 4 snow days (yes, they're in the hole 6 days meaning extended school year or losing part of Spring Break). Declan hasn't been to pre-school in 2 weeks because while school is back in session this week, it's starting 2 hours late and when that happens, there's no morning pre-school for Declan. And I'm tired of all the ice that forms from the melting snow every morning. I've ruined 2 snow shovels and two pairs of gloves.

That said, some really great things about the snow. It's brought out a real sense of camaraderie among the neighbors who have helped push each other out of snow drifts, shovel sidewalks, driveways, and even the street by hand (after one storm, the snow plow got stuck trying to push the snow on our street, so we went out and cleared part of the street by hand....). Some neighbors had to dig themselves out of their cul-de-sacs after the county failed to plow them out!

But the kids had a great time, and me - I got a great workout from having to go out and shovel snow for 7 straight days. Lost another 2 lbs! And I actually feel pretty good too!

Some pictures: http://www.stickman.org/Pictures/Pictures-2010/Snowmageddon2010/

Too bad it doesn't still look this nice. It's turning gray and dirty and icy. Ready for Spring!

This entry is more because I thought of a cute catchy title to describe one of my current questions about life. When I will get my full sense of taste back.

I had my tonsils out almost exactly 2 months ago. The issue it was intended to cure is now indeed gone and I'm much happier. My ENT was fantastic, my recovery really quick, and I found vicodin in my milkshakes to be quite the yummy treat for someone in throat pain. That said, my sense of taste has not totally recovered, and it kind of drives me nuts.

I tend to be a creature of habit -- I tend to order the same foods and usually like them to taste the same from order to order. I've noticed that there are some things I definitely cannot taste as well as I used to. Garlic is one thing. Salt as well. It has made me cautious when I cook not to over spice.

Fortunately, my sense of smell is still fine -- I can smell garlic in food, and so on. Just the taste is, well, off. But that also makes for another question which is why if my sense of smell is okay, why is the taste still off. The two are related after all.

Oh well, just be forewarned if you're coming over and I'm cooking, the food might taste a little off!

A few weeks back, Zandra and I had a chance to attend a talk on Autism. The talk was actually a talk for the Pediatric service at my wife's hospital, but they were nice enough to let a surgeon and her spouse attend to listen. The talk was given by Dr. Andrew Zimmerman from the Kennedy Krieger Institute where Andrew goes for his speech therapy.

Disclaimer: Don't blame Dr. Zimmerman if I write a few things wrong. I'm sharing what the uneducated engineer in the family took away from a talk aimed at physicians...

This was a very refreshing and informative talk, though I have to admit, it helped that at least I have, after all these years of living with a doctor, picked up on some medical terminology. The most encouraging point, for me, was one of the 3 objectives of the talk that Dr. Zimmerman listed - the challenges in autism research and the need for evidence (his italics, not mine). It made me think of a phrase a co-worker of mine has used a lot in the past: "In God We Trust. All others, bring data please." It's refreshing to see someone talking scientifically on this topic. I'm tired of all the movie stars who pretend to know more about medicine than doctors (I can list several examples, but then, this would turn into a rant).

Without outlining every single slide in his talk, here's a few thoughts that I found enlightening (that I didn't know before or were refreshing to have confirmed).

- 3 core deficits with Autism: Communications, Social Interaction, and Sterotyped Behaviors. Of the three, the Social Interaction part is what eventually hurts children the most. For those with Asperger Syndrome, they are often spared from communication deficits.

- Stunning fact: Children diagnosed with Autism has gone from 1:2000 in 1987 to 1:150 this decade to 1:91 in the last few years. Wow. Talking with our pediatrician a few days later, even he was stunned to hear the 1:91 figure. Yet, there is no specific "test" for Autism, which makes diagnosis difficult.

- That said, even though there is no specific "test", there are a lot of "comorbidities" associated with Autism, including ADHD, OCD, Seizures, Bipolar, Depression, Anxiety, and even Tourette Syndrome. And there are other notable physical features which tend to be more common in those diagnosed with Autism. But none of those alone is a "trigger" or "cause". I think the expression Dr. Zimmerman used was something along the idea of a "Perfect Storm" of genetic pieces that made a person more susceptible to Autism.

- Something else that was interesting were that certain antibodies were more likely to be present in children with autism along with different nerve activation patterns in the brain.

- There are definitely environmental items that influence the development of Autism. If detected early (and early detection/identification is important), many effects can be overcome with various treatments and therapies. He also noted that many children develop normally, up to a point, and then begin to regress. Examples are that they will start to speak and communicate, and then stop. In retrospect, Andrew exhibited some signs of this. Especially in the area of communications, one sign of proper development is an infant pointing and looking at the parent/adult to get their attention, even before speech. Absence is apparently an early sign of possible issues since it indicates behaviors which aren't developing correctly.

- The thimerosal/mercury/vaccine theory for causing autism has been thoroughly disproven. Dr. Zimmerman's comment here was something along the lines of, "If we had only had all that money to use over again for other Autism research..."

Conclusions, if any can really be reached is that there is no "one thing" that is a trigger nor is there "one test". Environment, genetic susceptibilities, and timing all have a hand in this.

My blog is not broken - I just haven't had that much to say of any length that I felt like I wanted to expound about. And it's been a busy summer including fun things like family gatherings.

I did, a few weeks ago on Facebook send a link to this article that I found interesting. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html. I still find it interesting, but I think the most I really want to say about this is that it's a shame that we no longer teach, through schools or parenting, how to run a household. And that means doing things like budgeting. Surely, lots of people were misled by ARMs and shyster mortgage brokers hawking mortgage products that didn't make sense.
That said, it really is sad that people don't realize that even at the absolute lowest payment you could have on your ARM, that they didn't realize they didn't have enough money to make that mortgage payment. That they were in over their heads from month 1 - forget a few years down the line when the mortgages adjusted upwards.

But I don't feel like writing more about that, other than to say that that particular article made me think of the concept of Home Economics (for whatever reason - maybe the idea of "Home" and "Economy"). To that end, I'll leave readers with another link. http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/home_mgt.html. Cornell University was well known for its Home Economics degree - I found this site to be fascinating. And think that maybe teaching budgets and "how to select dishwashers and washing machines" in an educational setting instead of in a commercial setting might be more effective.

Of course, on the cynical flip side, a university today would probably take a grant from a major appliance company to start an endowment to fund this program, inevitably opening up the door to bias towards those who funded the endowment...

But maybe safer than learning about mortgages from someone whose commission check depended on you signing on the dotted line.

I got an interesting piece of Nigerian 419 spam today. For those of you who don't know what Nigerian 419 spam is, this is the spam that you get asking for assistance to transfer a large sum of money out of some overseas company where you are promised a percentage of the money for helping - aka "Advance Fee Fraud".

This particular message was interesting because of the intro. I paste it verbatim below:

Hello,

I am Mrs. Annette E. Jenkins, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside in District of Columbia 20534. My residential address is as follows 320 First Street, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20534, United States, am thinking of moving since I am now wealthy.

I wondered what this particular address was. So I ran it through Google. Here's the search link.

Should be pretty obvious from the search what's located there.

You have to believe this is deliberate....

Tags: Humor

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo - in the last year or so, it seems like the use of social networking sites has totally exploded. Being a computer nerd, I've been playing around with these sites in increasing amounts as a way to network with friends, colleagues, and even relatives.

But I've spent the last 24 hours or so re-evaluating my use of social networks. For what it's worth, I'm putting my thoughts down in writing, and then firing off a reference to this blog entry so people will understand why I think you're going to be finding me using these sites and their resources slightly differently. Feel free to disagree -- like in many other cases, people view things differently, and I respect that. That said, I'm changing the way these sites work for me. And maybe, give some of you a different perspective by sharing how someone else views social networks.

Disclaimer: All my specific examples are made up. I'm not trying to send any kind of hidden message to anyone who reads this.
Warning: I do include a few personal experiences where some readers might guess about what started me down that path. Again, I'm not sending you any kind of hidden message. You just made me think.

All social networks seem to have a purpose of allowing you to connect with others. You find friends you've lost touch with. You even find relatives you didn't know you had. You find business connections in industry. It's like a giant game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", except you replace Kevin Bacon's name with your name. The idea of networking isn't a bad one (unless of course, you find someone you really didn't want to find, but in that case, most social networks allow you to block that person and that is the end of that). I think most folks agree with this part.

The real differences seem to come about with the way people use these social networks. There's folks like the "Twitter Quitters" who try a social network tool like Twitter or Facebook by logging in once, then never ever logging in or doing anything with it again. That seems to be one extreme. The other extreme are the folks who, I will swear, update their status even when they are sitting on the toilet. Ugggh. Too much information. For those people, and probably those who trend to this extreme, http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/index.html is an interesting article to read. A majority of folks I will bet will agree with this.

Some use these sites to upload and share pictures, some play games, some just use it to send notes back and forth. Things that you would do normally with other people around you, in person, if you all happened to be in the same place. To me, social networking seeks to resolve the problems caused by distance and disparate time zones by one means or another. Some sort of moderate use (in between the two extremes) seems appropriate and the way to go. Where one falls in that range seems to be the question.

Given this starting point, what does James think is an appropriate use of a social network? Maybe, more controversially, what does James think is an inappropriate use of a social network? Stop reading if you don't want to know or think you might be offended.

Appropriate (and things James will continue to do):

I think social networks are fantastic for reconnecting with people. There were people that I wondered how they were doing after many years, but whose contact info I had long since lost. Sites like Facebook allowed a great mechanism for searching for and finding these long lost folks.

Catching up, seeing pictures, and sharing interesting events and items. Excellent. I love seeing where some of my friends have travelled. I love hearing funny stories (to a point, and "funny" is a subjective term). I like knowing generally how people are doing and interesting things they've seen. I'll continue sharing things like this.

Light banter back and forth. This seems cool too. I love encouraging other people when momentous events occur.

Games. I admit, I like some of the Facebook games. I'll still play some of the games. (But I gave up on WordChallenge -- took too long to play and was getting boring).

Inappropriate (and things James won't do, and wishes other people wouldn't do or would at least think about more):

There are folks, on the other hand, who feel like sharing every detail of every moment of every thought in their daily life, comment on every little thing, and generally, never seem to be logged off. This makes me think of the Buy-n-Large spaceship in WALL*E where people only talk to each other via their computer screens. Sure, sometimes it's great when you're Twittering about a special event. But do I really need to know you're walking into the grocery store? And finding the hamburger? And complaining it's $.29/lb. more than last week? And you see only 4 packages on the shelf? And about how you don't understand how could the store possibly sell meat that's expiring today at a discount? In 5 separate postings? No thank you. Pardon me for saying this, but get a life, and pay attention to where you are walking. And don't ever drive a car.

Where I think I'm going to potentially trample on nerves is "what is appropriate" to post on something like Facebook or Twitter or even a blog. There's this story that has been posted in a number of forums about a person who was offered a job at Cisco. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29796962/ (it can be found at other places on the internet as well). So you say you will never do that? Do you really know all those people reading your "Tweets" well enough? Do you really know your Facebook friends well enough, especially if you're off trying to be friends with your friend's daughter's boyfriend's father's boss? I've always limited who my "friends" are and not tried to win any contests of "how many friends can I have on Facebook". And I won't ever get into that contest. I've now limited who can see my "tweets" to people who are following me, and I control who does that too.

But to get back to what people consider to be appropriate materials for social networking sites. From what I've seen (and this includes what I've seen reports of as well as what I've experienced), people dump out problems, partying activities, phone numbers, and even suicide threats on to these networking sites (there was the well publicized suicide tweet to Ashton Kutcher for example). Again, do you really know about everybody who's reading your posts? Default privacy settings really should be considered to be default publicity settings. Open by default isn't a good idea in computer security. Neither is it for social network sites, in my opinion. But that's what we have. I've seen the phone numbers and addresses and other "private" information coming by my Facebook account as replies by people whom I've never met, but happen to somehow be related to someone else I know. And did you know when you affiliate yourself with a Network like "New York City", often times, that means everyone in "New York City" can possibly read your information? (Have you checked?) Do you really know everyone in "New York City"? Do you really want "New York City" knowing about how you were so horribly offended when your boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with you today? Or that you are lounging around in your bathtub with the window open? Or that you think you just forgot to lock your front door? "Everyone! Come and break into my house! Come try to hook up with me! Tell my ex-boyfriend/girlfriend that I'm really messed up by the break up and I'll do anything to get back together!" Good moves? Maybe if you know the folks who are reading your postings well enough. I'll admit, I'm probably guilty as charged to some degree of some of this. You're going to see less posting from me except for fun things like trip pictures, interesting items, and general events. I've decided letting everyone know how I'm feeling today isn't necessary. If you want to know, ask. Just not on a social networking site in front of hundreds of other people. Try email or a private message.

I think social networking status updates are not tuned for long, in-depth issues. They're also not meant to be turned into long running public therapy sessions. They're meant for short updates, which, in 140 characters or less, can sometimes really get mis-interpreted. You certainly can't paint a complete picture of a major issue in a status update. In fact, you're almost certain to leave out important details, even if you write a long summary. Or even if you write about something every day. Or every hour. There's a high likelihood that someone comes in on a discussion mid-stream. Example: You get into a minor car accident. You post about it. You post about how you have left the scene. You find out the person you hit now can't drive to work, so you post about it. You feel horrible. You post about it. You post how you feel so bad, you could just shoot yourself after hitting another person. Now stop. Where did you come into that thread? Are you really getting ready to commit suicide? How embarrassing is it when the police come over and ask to take you in for a psych eval because someone thought you were involved in assault and attempted suicide? Hit and run? Okay, that's a silly example, but you get the idea. How does one know the history behind a series of posts, or what's behind a single post? You're going to find me making fewer "serial story" posts, or I'm writing them in such a way that you don't know the whole story. And you're going to find me making a lot fewer comments about other posts, except when it's something like, "I'm enjoying the baseball game." That's hard to misinterpret. And all forms of electronic communication are inherently imprecise and fraught with misinterpretation opportunities. There are times when you need to pick up the phone, or even go visit the person in person (what a concept) and ask about what's going on. And likewise, to communicate something important. Next time I read something that seems totally out of character with someone, I'm going to ask first, and not via Facebook.

One issue that may not be an issue with social networks in particular, but one which plagues other aspects of life. Who do you ask important questions to? Why does it seem like people think Facebook or Twitter is an appropriate place to post for advice about really personal and important life decisions? I somehow fail to understand why "New York City" and 200 Facebook "friends" are an appropriate audience to ask these questions. First and foremost, life isn't a democracy where you're trying to "Get out the Vote". I agree, advice and opinions don't hurt. But are "New York City" and all 200 friends going to tell you what you should hear? Or what you want to hear? Or even have enough of a clue to give you a good answer? Maybe others have better friends than me. Friends that are in tune with every little aspect of their lives, or friends who know better when you're not really serious. But given that's not the case here (and sorry folks, but not all 130+ of my Facebook friends really know the day-to-day routine in my household, or read my mind that well), you're never going to find me doing this. I wish others would think before posting. And commenting.

I'm tired of writing. I've brain dumped enough. Maybe I'll brain dump more thoughts in the future. But my conclusion:

Social networking is a powerful mechanism for communications. Use it wisely. Use it thoughtfully. And like I'm learning, learn the consequences of using social networking. Who is reading what I'm about to write? Are they reading it the right way? Think about it.

Went to take Zandra's Lexus in for service a week or so ago, and when I went to pick the car up, noticed something new in the lobby of the dealership -- a cash register by the food in the Waiting Area. Previously, it was nice to pick up a free bottle of water and maybe even a small snack when picking up the car. I was a little surprised by the food charge.

I mentioned this casually to the cashier while paying, and she said, "Oh, if you're hungry, just go over and get something on the way out and show them the receipt for the service. In the future, if you come in and want something, just have your service advisor walk over there with you -- it's all still free for customers." When I asked what the cashier was there for, she said, "Oh, believe it or not, we had people walk in off the street because they knew we had free food, and clean the fridge out. By 10am, there was nothing left." Wow. And it's not like the local Lexus dealer is on a main street -- it's quite out of the way and not near walking distance of anything.

Another interesting sign of the times -- on my last work trip, I noted that I had actually gotten what I reserved at Avis 6 times in a row -- a Ford Focus. In the past, you got whatever was on the lot and it was rare you actually got your compact car. The last Ford Focus I got actually had over 31,000 miles on it -- they used to retire rental cars every year or at 30,000 miles I think. At least, this was the oldest rental car I had ever gotten from a major rental company.

My luck did change on the last leg of my trip -- I got a Ford Mustang, breaking the streak at 6.

On the trip to San Diego last week, I was met by a happy surprise - WiFi on my Southwest Airlines flight. Southwest Airlines is currently running trials on WiFi Service on some of its flights. I believe they currently have 3 planes equipped with this service. During the trial period, the service is free. It is satellite based internet service and appears to go through Directway (or Hughes Network's satellite network) with the equipment apparently through Row 44 (per internet searches on this topic).

On a long non-stop flight like Baltimore to San Diego, WiFi was very welcome. It was easy to connect (my MacBook Pro found it quickly) and the performance was pretty good, as long as you remember it's satellite. Your data packet goes up to a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit, back down to the ground, and then out to the internet. Speed of light suggests you'll have at least 300ms of travel time between the plane and a ground-based router (where's the FTL when you need it?). And then the time it takes to make it across the internet to wherever you're going. I saw ping times ranging anywhere from the 700ms range to over 2000ms (yes, that's 2 seconds per packet roundtrip). I wouldn't want to do interactive editing.

Throughput was pretty good too overall. Pushing a 5MB file out to my server was about 30KB/s max - varying between 20KB/s and 38KB/s. Pulling the same file across to my laptop from my server was initially about 30 KB/s, but then it looks like some sort of burst mode kicked in
after 10 second as I got about 300 KB/s after that. VPN worked, and I was even able to acid test the link by firing up our corporate ERP software from the plane. Slow, but usable in a pinch.

Other nice things - the Yahoo! sponsored web page showed flight status while you were connected, so you could see where you were along your flight. VoIP was specifically banned (hooray for privacy!) and there were warnings that large downloads would be restricted. For doing email, IM, Facebook, and even transferring files, this service was quite good.

Bad things - bring a spare battery. No power outlets. Service improved as I think people ran out of battery. And remember, the service is in beta test. Zandra also managed to get a WiFi equipped plane the day before, but on her flight, the WiFi wasn't working.

How much will it cost when it's released? The web survey suggested they were thinking $4.95. Given the popularity and the fact that several people were asking for it on the flight back, I fear the price will be higher in the end. If the service is this good, though, it might very well be worth it!

Good job Southwest! 10 thumbs up for the service!

Tags: Technology, Travel

Great news! Hostage captain rescued; Navy snipers kill 3 pirates. Way to go Navy!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/12/somalia.pirates/index.html

And will give credit where it's due - Obama authorized the action. Gutsy call. Great outcome. Until the nations of the world start taking a stand, this piracy insanity is going to continue unabated.

It's a snow day out here! Looks like about 7" of snow. First (and probably last) major snow storm of the year. No question that March came in like a lion this year.

Tags: Andrew

A number of folks have asked how dinner went the other night. I posted in my Facebook status that Zandra and I were headed off to a nice restaurant to celebrate our 11th Wedding Anniversary and folks were impressed by the restaurant menu.

So here's the promised review.

Zandra and I went to the Charleston Restaurant (http://www.charlestonrestaurant.com) for dinner on Friday. It came highly recommended from a colleague of my wife's and we had heard about Chef Cindy Wolf and were interested in trying the restaurant of this well acclaimed chef. In short, the dinner was excellent and we had a great time (except we forgot Zandra was on call and she got interrupted twice during dinner and had to step out to take the calls and I left my hearing aids at home so it made hearing the conversation difficult).

Charleston's menu is a "tasting" menu. You pay based on the number of items you select, and the size of each selection is "smaller than average" (I think that was what our waiter said). Three courses is a "light dinner". Five or Six is "pretty substantial". Some reviews of the restaurant which were negative I think didn't understand the "tasting" concept - so people "left hungry". This was not our case and we felt we ordered the right amount, or maybe even a little too much.

Zandra ordered 4 courses - the Butternut Squash Soup, the Wild Rockfish Ceviche, Grilled Ostrich Tenderloin, and Grilled Colorado Lamb Rack Chop. She enjoyed every bit, and the portions were not nearly as small as some reviewers had led me to believe. They weren't huge, but they were substantial. Zandra says next time she goes back, she'll just order 3 courses.

I chose "The Season" which is a menu prepared by Cindy Wolf which is different every evening. I also opted for the additional Wine Pairing which was a glass of wine (on the smaller side) matched with each course. The menu is below:



I deliberately chose this menu because of the wine pairings. I enjoy good wine, but don't find myself very knowledgeable about the specific choosing of wines with dishes, so thought I would let the chef make the recommendation. This was a terrific idea in hindsight and I highly recommend doing this when given the chance. A great example was the Pinot Noir which came with the salmon. When I sampled it before the course, it was not at all what I was expecting. It was pretty bold and complex tasting, and I seriously wondered why this wine was paired with a fish - even a stronger fish like salmon. After eating the salmon and its excellent reduction sauce (the dish reminded me a bit of an Asian Fusion dish), the wine took on a whole different character and all the flavors of the wine blended nicely with the salmon. It was a very "complimentary" wine with that particular dish. Fantastic. I think it demonstrated precisely why you pair certain wines with certain dishes.

The rest of the meal and wine pairings were excellent as well. My only negative comment (and it's barely a negative one) was the salad - I felt the Reggiano kind of overpowered the Vinaigrette. I guess I also prefer a little more texture from my cheese on salads, but it was still a great salad.

The deserts were fantastic. Unfortunately, I was so full, I don't think I was able to enjoy them as fully as I wanted.

Other comments - the food is very rich, extremely flavorful, and the presentation and preparation were excellent (as you would hope). Service was great (a lot of attention to detail) and the restaurant was comfortable, and very quiet. But if you can't appreciate and/or respect a chef's "artistic license" to present and prepare food in the way he/she wants to, don't go here. I can see now where the (very few) negative reviews originated. If you try to treat this as a dinner at a more "traditional" restaurant (where you get salad, appetizer, main course, and dessert, with a big main course being the star), I think you'll be more disappointed. The menu favors all the dishes as "equal" and everything being balanced. This is reinforced by our waiter's comment when choosing dishes that you could choose as many dishes as you wanted from each category - you didn't have to choose just one each from cold, hot, fish, game, and meat.

We thoroughly enjoyed dinner!

How cold was it this morning?

- When shopping at Super WalMart this morning, I realized that inside the ice cream freezer (at 10F) was warmer than outside (8F).

- I looked at our back door this morning. Clearly we have a small air leak around the hinges.



That's condensation freezing on the hinges. INSIDE the house.

Brrr.

Good news is it's a warm 20F now outside!

Saturday, we went for a tour of the White House and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the public parts of the White House in full Christmas decorations. Unfortunately, no pictures as cameras were not allowed inside (you had to pretty much leave everything in your car). Our gracious guide was a patient of Zandra's. She is one of the handful of permanent staff at the White House that serves regardless of the administration in office. So she told us of lots of interesting little stories.

A funny moment came right off the bat - we were having our identities checked at the entrance (you must submit your names and social security numbers in advance for screening). Turned out, the person checking our IDs and names had the same name as Andrew! We were thinking, gosh, wish Andrew could have borrowed his ID....

Lots of interesting history and sometimes humorous information behind what you see. Coming in, we saw a portrait of Hillary Clinton in the hallway. We were told that that location is always reserved for a portrait of the immediately preceeding First Lady. So when Obama is sworn in, the picture of Hillary will come down and up will go the portrait of Laura Bush. This tradition, though, did lead to the awkward occurrence of George W. having to take down the picture of his own mother and put up Hillary's portrait in its place. Wow!

There's also a portrait of George Washington that she told us Dolly Madison saved when the British burned the White House. Dolly Madison was just finishing a chocolate cake when the British arrived (so much for advanced intelligence gathering in those days), so she ordered the staff to break the frame and she rolled up the portrait and took it with her. There's often a portrait of Dolly Madison hanging around nearby so "she can keep an eye on the portrait".

We were told about the Christmas trees inside and the Nativity scenes, and learned of the "private" dining room that is a much more intimate setting with "only" about 25-30 seats. Hmmmph!

We also heard an interesting story involving the Presidential Motorcade. For security reasons, President Bush had to take a motorcade from the White House across the lawn to light the National Christmas Tree. We were told there was too much empty space around to make a walk to the tree safe. The Presidential Motorcade has 27 cars (by the way, we found you can tell how important someone is by the number of vehicles in their motorocade - it's all set by protocol...). It's so long that to the Tree Lighting Ceremony, half the motorcade was still in the White House driveway. A cat chasing its tail moment....

No Oval Office tour. No Lincoln Bedroom tour (those are all off limits). That said, still a great tour with insider insight into the day-to-day operations of the White House!

Tags: Humor

I just got off the phone with Southwest Airlines because I needed to cancel a flight. They were very busy this evening handling flight cancellations due to bad weather, so I got the very unusual opportunity to listen to their "hold music".

I have to tell you, I was laughing so hard when the agent picked up, I almost couldn't talk to ask her to cancel my flight. They've got a lot of great one liners - like "The Captain has turned off the fasten seat belt sign. You are now free to move about the cabin. Of course, unless you're calling from your car." Then there was the "Pirate Song" which I didn't get to hear all of, but started off with an intro of "It's always more fun to say Caaaaarrrrgo if you're a pirate, so here's a pirate song..." or something like that.

More businesses really need to approach things this way.

Good work Southwest. You made my evening.

Tags: Humor

So the Dina week two update is a good one. She's doing great and we're all enjoying having her around. Of course, we've had a few ups and downs:

Ups - She's much more relaxed, she's eating better, she's learning to sit and stay better, and she's not pulling on her leash when we walk her.

Downs - She's had one accident in the house, she still tries to dart out the door, and she sheds hair all over.

Side effect - We finally have a total tally on the cost of adopting the dog. Realize the dog had to have a few accessories and necessities, such as a fence (for the backyard). This last item was *really* costly. Because it was fence, lot survey, and irrigation system repairs (twice). Then we had vet bills, food, gotta get the dog a doggie bed, blankets, combs, brushes, collars, leashes....but we did save money as Zandra is making home made doggies biscuits which Dina just loves.

Worth it? You bet!

Tags: Dina

And another good one from the Simpsons:

Tags: Humor

Announcing the latest arrival in our household -- Dina!

Dina is our new 7 year old black Labrador mix. We think she's part Chow as well, but as with most rescue dogs, we don't really know that much about her.

So far, she's been great around the house. She is house trained (thank goodness!) and is very mellow. We are getting used to having a dog and so are the kids. Dina is being very good and barking at the kids when she's had enough of them.

Here are some pictures:





These are from her Animal Rescue site - http://www.paw-rescue.org I have to say that I am so impressed by these folks. After we got the medical records for Dina, it's clear that they sunk a lot of time, effort, and money into rehabilitating our dog.



This is a picture of her lounging in her new home.

I'll post more pictures of her soon in the pictures section.

Tags: Dina

Found on an internal mailing list today.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/11/10/how-we-know-that-matrix-doesnt-run-on-windows-xp/

This is a good one, in my opinion.

Tags: Humor

Great but tiring weekend this weekend. Zandra and I went up to New York City to spend the day with her sister and our brother-in-law. We did a touristy thing by visiting Liberty Island the Statue of Liberty. Here's a picture of me at the Statue of Liberty (more pictures in the Pictures section of the website).



We also walked around the city. Zandra and I visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We had dinner with Zandra and Sandy's cousin April at a really great Japanese restaurant. A great way to spend the day. Unfortunately, it was a longer day than we had anticipated. For the second time in a row, we had difficulties getting home on the train, with our train being delayed almost 3 hours (putting us in the door at around 3am).

Also got up early to attend a really great marriage conference led by Dr. Gary Chapman. If you've not read his book The Five Love Languages, you really should. It's an excellent book and Zandra and I both enjoyed the conference immensely. It's great to find ways to make a marriage better. Especially when you things really aren't going that badly.

Now, back to the challenge of getting everything ready to erect a new fence in our back yard. That has to be the next blog topic...

Was sent this picture today:



I need to get one of these....

Tags: Humor

An interesting news story I heard on the radio the other day underscored something that I’ve long known since taking my PoliSci 300 class in Michigan with Professor Greg Markus. How you write a survey question can greatly influence the answers you get (and what your polls show as a result).

In addition to the normal examples that they gave, they gave an example of how not to write a survey question that I hadn’t heard before. Survey question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” If you answer “Yes”, the assumption is you were beating your wife previously. If you answer “No”, then the assumption is that you are still beating your wife. The smart ones are the ones who I guess have no opinions on that survey. It seems like that would be the only “correct” answer....

So when listening to polls on *anything* for the upcoming election, find out how the question was asked. Or, if you’re like me, ignore the polls and vote the way you would anyways! It’s *your* vote. You don’t get paid for voting with the winning side.

And as a side note, not that I think anyone would ever *find* this entry looking for recommendations on PS300 at the University of Michigan, but that class was one of the best classes I took while being an undergrad at Michigan. Not only was it interesting and insightful, but the fact that grading was on a 100 point straight scale (meaning, 90+ was an A, 80+ was a B, etc.) and that you only had a chance to get 100 points in a 15 week semester really made the phrase “Making sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s” really relevant.

Another sign of real economic issues - with the price of oil plunging, I just filled the Freestyle with gas at Costco for $2.37 per gallon. 10.5 gallons was around $25. That would have been almost $15 more a few months back.

That paid for pizza today for me and the boys.

I’ve gotten lots of questions about, “How was Disney”? In short - wonderful. I really admire how a company can get all their employees to be so consistently happy all the time. The only time they were close to not being happy was when Declan decided he didn’t like the kiddie coaster and jumped out of his seat while we were still out of the station to dive into Zandra’s arms. Sigh....

The weather was warm (maybe actually a little too warm the first 3 days) and we did come back sick to some degree. Still, a great trip.

We also got to go see some old family friends of mine - these are the folks responsible for my preference for Italian food. I’ll get pictures posted eventually (I did the first step which is get them off my camera...)

Some other thoughts:

- You’d never think that the favorite family ride would be the PeopleMover/Tomorrowland Transportation Authority (TTA) ride that takes you around Tomorrowland. Declan and Andrew love it. I wish Mr. Tom Morrow would ring his party from Saturn some day though. They’ve arrived after all.

- We got to see the inside of Space Mountain. One of our rides on the TTA, Space Mountain was in a “set up” condition. When the ride is down, the lights go up, and you can see the entire inside of the Mountain. It’s quite impressive. Especially for an ex-roller coaster operator like me.

- Declan doesn’t like roller coasters at present. Not even the Goofy Barnstormer coaster. And I wonder why they call the coaster an flex-octoplane. It only has 6 wings....

- All the fireworks are spectacular.

- The WDW Swan and Dolphin hotel were very nice, but I think the consensus is that next time, we will try to pay extra and get a villa again. The ability to have a fridge/kitchen and maybe eat in a few nights is really invaluable with young kids.

- 4 days is probably the right amount of time for a trip for us. I think after 4 days, we were ready to come home. Even if we had all been healthy.

- I am proud to say, I never checked work email once, and we never set up the laptop in the hotel.

So we’re back from our 4 day adventure at Disney World. It was great fun! The kids had a good time (we think) and the two parents enjoyed no work for 4 days. I even deleted the work account from my iPhone to make sure I didn’t check email.

Of course, no vacation is perfect and we’re all back with some varying degree of coughing. Zandra and Andrew are the worst off.

But to prove at least the kids were there, here’s a picture of the kids with Pluto at breakfast.



More pictures later!

Tags: Andrew, Declan

While it doesn’t make up for the losses in the stock market, the fact that the side effect has meant lower oil prices became evident to me this weekend. Filled up the Freestyle at $2.89 per gallon at Costco. Wow. Big change from a few months ago when it was almost $1 more per gallon.

Also, taking some lessons from driving Zandra’s hybrid has meant that I’m also getting better mileage on the Ford Freestyle at the moment - the current tank is averaging a little over 25 mpg.

Question now for me is will silly Americans go back to buying gas guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks now that gas has dropped $1/gallon. Maybe not this time, because Americans don’t seem to be buying much of anything right now....

It wasn’t all smooth, but yesterday, I updated the map in my Garmin Nüvi 650 and realized that my Garmin now knows my home address! Living in a new house in a new subdivision, the various online map services have only just in the last 12-18 months begun to accept our home address as a valid location.

Of course, getting this map is never as easy as saying, “Update my map”, especially when you are trying to take advantage of a free offer. First I had to upgrade the system firmware. Then I had to get my Mac to talk to the GPS. Then I had to download the (2.16GB) map. But about an hour later I was done. So I thought.

I took the GPS out for a spin and realized it was no longer speaking the names of streets. After getting home and spending some time with Google, I found out that I needed a TTS (Text to Speech) voice for that feature. Except there wasn’t one listed.

Then I remembered during the system firmware update the note about “optional voices will be erased with the update, but you can download them again later.” I had ignored it because, hey, I had never added any optional voices. Apparently the TTS voice is optional, but happened to be loaded with my GPS.

As a further pain, I could not find anywhere on Garmin’s website how to update voices to the Mac. I found the PC installer, but no Mac information.

Frustrated, I loaded up the Garmin WebUpdater software to see if I could maybe revert back to the older version of firmware to get my TTS back. The second the WebUpdater software detected my GPS, it immediately offered to add optional voices, like my TTS back. Hey! Why didn’t they just say that in the first place!

So now, I’m happy. My GPS is back as it was with new maps. Now why couldn’t they have made that voice installation instruction a little more obvious? Hmmmph!

But everyone with a Garmin - if you want to come over and not have to punch in the address to the pool house to get here, get a map update!

Tags: Technology, Rants

I just looked at my electronic EZPass statement from last month. For those of you not from the East Coast, EZPass is the transponder thing you stick in your window to allow electronic toll collection (aka FastTrak for you Californians).

I was amused at this entry:

08/20/08 NJTP 1 08/20 08:28 9 08/20 09:38
(some personal info fields deleted).

I had a trip I was doing for work last month, and decided since the day was so nice, to take the trip from home to New Jersey in the Mini Cooper (with the top down of course).

What does this entry mean? It means I entered the NJTP (New Jersey Turnpike) at exit 1 at 8:28am and exited at exit 9 at 9:38am. That’s 83 miles in 70 minutes. And I made a 5 minute pit stop at one of the rest areas to purge coffee.

I think that works out to an average speed of 76.6mph (factoring in the pit stop).

Even more impressive, I made the same trip 1 minute faster (but in reality, 4 minutes slower due to lack of pit stop) in the middle of afternoon traffic.

Fun! Glad the NJ State Troopers don’t look so carefully at this info...

Painting the family room has been “next” on our painting list for quite a while. A few weeks ago, I started tackling this project. I’ve been doing one wall per week (it takes a while to tape and move furniture and stuff).

Of course, the first wall I picked (actually one wall and a part of a second) was the corner that Declan has tended to call home for his activities. It was first not only because it had the lightest furniture to move, but also because Declan had drawn all over the walls with crayon. With the original builder paint on the wall, scrubbing the crayon off was out of the question...

The “after” pictures (I didn’t think to take “before” pictures - click on the pictures for full sized versions):





That chalkboard is actually a usable chalkboard - I picked up some Benjamin Moore chalkboard paint. I figured I would try it - at least it looks really nice.

Tags: Declan, Home Improvement

(I struggled for a bit to decide whether or not to tag this as “humor” or not....we’ll give it a shot)

So one of the things we did when in Boston was visit the Coop at Kendall Square so Zandra could load up on a few items from her alma mater. The Coop at MIT is more interesting than most typical college bookstores, simply because of the intellectual culture that exists there.

Here are a few items we did not buy, but that I found pretty interesting.

First - the childrens’ books:



Next - an explanation of light (could I have gotten away with this in physics?):



Finally, something that came close to making the list home:

Tags: Humor

Last week, we took a family trip to Boston. Zandra had a conference, so we all took the train up to Boston with her.

One thing I learned is that it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of someone on a moving train. Here are some attempts:





Finally got something close:



Because you can’t tell, this is Declan “chillin’” on the train with blanket in lap, juice cup in mouth, headphones on head, and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse playing on the iPod.

Tags: Declan

Since Ronald Reagan was in the White House, there has been this association with jelly beans (in particular, Jelly Belly ones) and the President.

Last week, we found M&Ms was not to be outdone. One of Zandra’s patients brought us a few boxes.



They contain, as you might guess, red, white and blue M&Ms. The boxes are more interesting than the M&Ms (they’re just regular M&Ms after all).

Wonder what else they’ll think of next?

While I was away on business last week, I got one of “those” calls from Zandra. Kind of went like this:

Zandra: “Hi - guess what your son did today?”
Me: “Um, what?”
Zandra: “He wanted some candy at 8am out of the pantry and was told he couldn’t have any.”
Me: “Okay, I agree with that.”
Zandra: “So he got mad and put a hole in the door.”
Me: “What?!?!”
Zandra: “He got mad and put one doorstop through the door and broke the other one off.”

Here’s the pictures of the hole.



Here’s the picture of the broken doorstop.



Can’t wait for those teenage years....

Tags: Declan

Every year, parents all over the US go through this horrible experience called “Back to School Shopping”. I am happy to announce that this year, I’m done. Early. Now. Fini.

As schools begin to ask parents to supply more and more basic supplies, it becomes a bigger and bigger task to make sure your kids have all the right notebooks, pencils, tissues, etc., to do their work. You get a nice big list, and then head to the store where nothing is organized in remotely the same order as on your list.

I think I orbited the 4 aisles at least 4 times making sure I had all the necessary items. It probably took over half an hour. For someone like me who sets land speed records for getting in and out the doors at the grocery store, that’s an eternity.

It seems like if you were really good, you could make money shopping for people and delivering custom kits for your kids. But I’m not really good and the frustration isn’t worth the money to me. Can someone develop a standard for listing items, organizing items in the store, and then just put everything in one long aisle? Probably not.

All I can say is, I’m happy it’s over for this year.

I can’t wait until Andrew gets a little older and then we have to add on the pain of Back to School *clothes*.
Not.

Tags: Rants

I’ve posted pictures of the annual household garden in the Pictures section. For those of you too lazy to click on multiple links:

http://www.stickman.org/Pictures/Pictures-2008/garden2008/

So far, we’ve picked about a half-dozen tomatoes (early blooming Romas and large Grape tomatoes). 4 zucchini (including the one pictured - I picked it after the picture) and half a dozen cucumbers. We also picked some green peppers and one of the chiles this evening (which we’ve come to realize can’t be Serrano Chiles because they’re not the right color).

This garden doesn’t vary much from last year except it’s twice the size and we’ve added a bigger assortment of herbs. Our one disappointment this year is that both Sweet Basil plants we’ve planted are doing poorly - but in different ways. One is small, but the leaves are deep green and very flavorful (but way too small). The other is pretty big, but the leaves are very light green and taste like, well...leaves....

Will probably update this as the summer goes along.

This year’s garden is courtesy of my second cousin and her family. They bought me a huge gift card to Lowe’s for my birthday, and I spent a bunch of it on garden stuff! Thank you all!

Tags: Gardening

Someone sent me the following two links as overpackaging demonstrations by HP.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/hp_packaging/

and

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/enormouse/

Ayup....items definitely overpacked. Must be that oversized European A4 paper....

Tags: Humor, Technology

A bit of an overdue posting.

I got this wonderful present from my wife on Father’s Day (I was allowed to get anything that would encourage me to get some exercise - it was a hint...)



It’s the bike, not the Mini Cooper, silly....specifically, a Cannondale Adventure 4 hybrid bike. It is compared against the similarly green Mini Cooper though.

I’ve been riding almost every day. Fridays are the major exception - I mow the lawn for exercise on that morning. I’ve only fallen off twice, and probably average a short 5 miles per ride. But it does get me out of the house and getting some exercise! There are lots of nice trails around here and the terrain is varied enough that I do get a pretty good workout. I love the peace and quiet too (no iPod on these rides for me!)

Tags: Bike

I took some time over this long weekend to clean out the basement. Since moving into our new house almost 3 years ago, our basement has become less and less, um, “clean” as it were. I set out Thursday to do something about that. In addition to freeing up some walking room, the other goal was to take advantage of the dwindling supply of free dumpsters in our neighborhood (the result of contruction being almost complete in our subdivision).

I made great progress, but only got 1/4 of the basement sorted. I found lots of things like pictures from junior high school and high school, documents from my office I hadn’t looked at for 5 years, and, well, junk. If I get motivated, maybe I’ll scan in a retrospective of some of those old pictures. I also tossed all my old college notes (so all thoughts of Aerospace Engineering as a second career are now gone).

I did, however, come across 7 full file boxes that have documents that require shredding. Great. Shredding one box left me with a yard bag full of confetti for recycling, and an overheated shredder which no longer seems to be shredding as well after accidentally ingesting what I think was a paper clip. Sigh.

And I never realized how tall dumpsters were until I had to toss a 30 lb. box of old course notes into it....

All in all, a useful exercise in exercise. And the basement is now *slightly* cleaner.

Tags: Home Improvement

Reading the BBC news feed this morning, I came across this interesting article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_west/7471102.stm

This is about a man in the UK who was punished for putting 13 people in his Volvo S70 station wagon. The BBC video on that page talks about how “hard” this was to do (and failed to put 13 people into the car -- they only got to 10 and they were using infants and children).

All I can say is: They didn’t try hard enough.

Back in 1984, at a summer computer camp (hey, remember, I’m a nerd), we decided we wanted to go out to a movie. There were 22 of us high school kids. And only two cars.

No problem. One of our cars was a high capacity Toyota Tercel (example pictured below). Fortunately, we had the 5 door hatchback version.



We put exactly 13 people in that car and drove to the movies. 1 driver in the driver’s seat. 2 in the front passenger seat. 4 in the hatch area, 3 across the seat in the back, 2 on their laps, and one laying across the two on top of the 3 with feet out one window and head out the other window (he had the misfortune of being 6’ 2” tall). We drove very carefully the 5 miles to the theater.

So come on you guys in the UK. If we can cram 13 college students into that Tercel, the 13 in a Volvo station wagon should have been a snap, especially with all the babies and young kids you had....

Disclaimer: But of course, I wouldn’t try this today because this would obviously be a violation of local seat belt laws (which didn’t exist back in 1984).

Hooray! We had Andrew’s Birthday Party today and we survived!



Zandra made an ice cream cake (yummy!) and Andrew had some of his school friends over. I’ve posted pictures here.

Tags: Andrew

A couple of entries ago, I noted that my sister had a blog. Since then, she's made more than a few references to me that I just feel compelled to respond to. So I will. In *my* blog.

In the entry Momma' Night Musings, the question about censorship "...I realize I have passed this blog info to my big brother....hmmmm, maybe censorship is good,." Big brother says...."write what you want." I'm probably not the one you need to worry about reading your blog. There's always the future employers, etc., who will find the blog and wonder about the person they're considering hiring....there's no such thing as anonymity on the internet. Not with Google around.

In the entries Suds, Glorious Suds! and Work, glorious work!, my sister makes a reference to the recent Thomas the Tank Engine release "Mud, Glorious Mud". I'm disappointed that my sister fails to cite the correct reference to the (noun), Glorious (noun) phrase to the lyrics of "Food, Glorious Food!" from the musical Oliver! based loosely on the great work Oliver Twist by none other than the beloved Charles Dickens. However, the fact that it shows her total dedication with her kids (because everything is now referenced from the starting point of something related to her children) indicates that she is doing great as a parent. Or at least fully immersed with being a parent....

Sis also notes I probably have all the tunes memorized since I have a 6 year head start. That's actually probably not true since with a 6 year head start, I've learned to start filtering out children's music in my head. It's on, but it's more like white noise than anything else. Nothing really sinks in. Except Barney. Which is why Barney is banned in our house. Sis should learn in another few years this little trick to successfully tolerating parenthood.

As far as the question, "Was I like this to my mother? Is this payback?" Hmmm....well, we were both prone to doing things like that, so payback? Probably. I have Declan (who by the way, just broke another dish in the time it has taken me to write the last 8 lines of text - but he was trying to be helpful by throwing the dish (literally) into the sink). You have your Asha and Aisha. Oh, and your ever-so-articulate Nate.

Finally, as I've been reading my sister's blog, I'm having great fun with each entry clicking on her "Location". It appears that in her blog, what location she types in gets fed into Google Maps. It leads to some very interesting results. "Padded room" sent me to the Excalibur Hotel in Vegas of all places. Interesting what those pidgeons pecking at the keyboard come up with at Google....

Are you wishing you'd never told me about your blog yet, sis?

I love you!

Tags: Humor, Sister

Random thoughts about signs I saw today:

"100% Beef" (McDonald's BigMac Billboard). Okay, so what were they made of before? Chicken?

One that Zandra saw on a bottle of solution: "For use by professional de-germers". Versus the amateur ones?

"Area Patrolled by Military Working Dogs": Versus the Military Vacation Dogs? Military Unemployed Dogs?

Probably thinking too hard about these signs.

Hey! My sister has a blog! I'm excited. Okay, maybe *too* excited, but excited nonetheless.

http://chez-hsieh.livejournal.com/

Cool!

Happy Birthday #9 for Andrew!



Andrew holding his present - a Lego City Cargo Plane. Andrew put it together himself!

In the last few weeks, I've had to go a few places where it has been beneficial to take mass transit. I normally don't take mass transit - not because I don't believe in it, but because working from home, I don't really need to use it. And where I go, I usually don't get a chance to use it. So mass transit is not an everyday occurrence for me.

My recent trips on the MTA Light Rail and CTA "El" Trains made me realize this - they're both dollar coin friendly.



When I bought my ticket for the MTA Light rail, they only accepted cash, and I only had a $10 bill. Somewhat to my surprise, I got a pocket full of 1 dollar coins back - and variety of them to boot (examples above). Going to Chicago the next week, I still had them in my pocket, and found that they were much easier to use to buy my CTA ticket than dollar bills. If you remember the movie Chicken Little, there's a scene where Chicken Little's friend Runt of the Litter is trying to buy a soda from the machine, and having his dollar bill rejected over and over and over again. That's me using dollar bill machines.

Wonder why the rest of the US doesn't use dollar coins?

So my FiOS line was installed yesterday. Again, for those of you who don't know what this is, look here. And so far, it's been great except for a few James inflicted issues....

All during the week, I've had people painting my yard (marking various utilities) and then digging up my yard (a nice neat trench) to run the fiber cables to my house. There was a little drama on Thursday. I walked outside to find 3 trucks from UtiliQuest (the utility marking company) and the cable digging subcontractor for Verizon all pointing at my driveway. Turns out, the electric lines that feed the houses across the street go underneath the dead center of my driveway. Oh joy. This resulted in a 3" x 3" cut in the driveway so they could make sure the fiber lines didn't take out electrical power (I agreed that that was a safety precaution worthy of sacrificing the driveway - and they promised to come back and fix it).

Friday morning and John, my installation technician, showed up as scheduled all ready to do the installation. He took a look at the wiring and where everything came in in the basement, and my ethernet switch with rack of servers and blinking lights and said, "This shouldn't be too tough." It took John about 4 hours to install the new interface box, run the cables into the house, hook up the FiOS router, install the TV boxes, test everything, and be on his way. No glitches in the install. Everything worked great.

I firmly believe that no technician should ever be subject to the insanity that's called my network at home, so I instructed John to set it up as for a "typical" customer, I would verify everything was working, and after he left, I'd proceed to destroy all of Verizon's neat consumer setup to integrate it with my network -- absolving him of any responsibility for sorting that mess out. He left me with full administrative access to the Actiontec router and pointed out the master reset button in case I did something I couldn't recover from. I get the feeling he figured out I've occasionally needed that in the past.

The only real challenge in making the setup work with my existing network was figuring out how to handle DHCP requests. Changing IP addresses on the router was easy enough, but the set top TV boxes obtain IP addresses from the router, so the DHCP server on the router had to be changed. *AND*, the router also is programmed to hand out IP addresses in the x.x.x.100 to x.x.x.150 range. And John warned me that having the set top box hand out the IP addresses was important, though I have yet to figure out exactly why...

Problem with this is that I have other devices on my network also needing DHCP addresses, and I have my own DHCP server set up to configure them as needed. And there are devices on my network which I need (okay, really, really want) to get the same IP all the time (for troubleshooting purposes - those devices also don't allow static IP assignments as best as I can tell). And, how do you handle the multiple outbound routes from my home network (there's the FiOS route out and the Comcast Cable Modem route out) without accidentally routing Comcast traffic to Verizon, and vice versa. Oh, and how to best use the now 3 wireless networks in the house (though the new one added by the FiOS router really isn't usable in most of the house because it's in the basement and the signal doesn't reach well to the second floor).

In the end, what I did was for all known DHCP clients in the house, have my DHCP server hand out a static IP based on MAC address and can access the network via hardwire or any of the 3 wireless networks. Simple enough - there's about 5 devices, and that's a limited amount of work. Servers have static IPs defined and manual routes set to route out through Comcast. Also simple enough. If you're hard wire into the network, you have a manually assigned IP (I set it up for you - and I can't think the last time someone came over to my house and needed a Cat-5 jack). 100-150 is now reserved for the televisions and that DHCP range is handled by the FiOS router. Guest laptops (or anything else I don't care to set up a static IP or permanent DHCP assignment) now connect to the second wireless network which is off a Linksys WRT54G unit which hands out IPs on its own subnet, then NAT's into the main network.

So far, this setup seems to be working well. I quickly found out when the TV's got the wrong IP addresses assigned that functions such as channel guides and OnDemand services didn't work, and the set top boxes were very unhappy. Reconfiguring my DHCP server fixed that (I think). The speed off the FiOS is as advertised - 15M down and 2M up (actually, more like 15.5M down and 1.9M up). So far so good.

More reports as I spend more time with the service.

Tags: Technology

No, this has nothing to do with IBM computers.

Mother's Day is always a little sad for me. Not having a mom around to call and wish Happy Mother's Day to somehow never seems to get easier even as time passes. Yesterday, I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about one person's reflection on his mom through a car of hers that he still owned, and how he was having difficulties parting with it. He affectionately called the car "The Big Red Sled". Link to the story.

This made me think about my mom's old blue 1979 Mercury Zephyr Station Wagon. A car that we purchased just as my mom and dad were getting divorced - with just a few hundred miles on it, we drove it cross country from New York as mom, my sister, and I started life on our own in California. It was definitely a "Big Blue Box".

At the time, that car was really cool. It had every option available (from cloth seats to power everything to a really cool blue interior to a 3.3 liter 6 cylinder engine). It was really neat. It was a big blue box. But like all cars of that era, it didn't seem to do well in the long-term durability department. I remember as mom had that car 10 years later (with well over 100k miles on it) that it had all sorts of problems, kind of like what was described in the WSJ story. I remembered the morning mom telling me how it caught fire while warming up (an eternal oil leaker, one morning, the oil leaked on to the catalytic converter and started a small fire which was put out by a passing school bus driver with a fire extinguisher). How it hated starting. Steering wheel cracked. Windows that would go down, but not back up. And finally, the thing that convinced her maybe it was time to give up the car, but the steering shaft snapping in half in the middle of a left turn because the power steering pump had done its morning cut out/in/out routine at an inopportune time.

I have lots of fond memories of that car. I learned to drive in that car. I spent a lot of time going places in that car. I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time in that car. It even made it on to an episode of Simon and Simon (remember that series?). It served us well. It just wore out. Mom I think kept that car 5 years longer than it had business being in existence. The car dealer gave her $500 as sympathy when she traded it. But we were poor and getting a new car wasn't something mom could afford until I was out of college and on my own. She finally traded it for a blue Ford Escort station wagon that, honestly, endeared itself to none of us. When mom passed away, my sister asked, "Please don't make me drive the Escort." With its less than hearty 1.9 liter 4 cylinder engine, it struggled to make it up on-ramps. I considered it unsafe getting it on to the freeway, where flooring the gas pedal just meant louder noises from the engine. I traded it at my first opportunity.

Funny what reading articles in the WSJ will trigger in terms of thoughts. I hope the car has found a nice resting place somewhere. I hope it's not still on the road 29 years later...

And Mom, Happy Mother's Day. Thanks for sacrificing by putting up with that old car for so long so I could get through college and my sister could have things we might not otherwise have been able to afford.

Verizon finally flipped the switch on FiOS in my neighborhood. After false starts, more false starts, and lots of digging, I'm on the books to be installed on Friday May 16th. I was even able to help my neighbor out who works for Verizon (he gets a referral fee for sending people over).

Cost-wise, I think monthly service will be a wash with respect to Comcast cable. However, my backup DSL line (at 3M/550k) will get replaced by a FiOS internet line which is advertised at 15M/2M.

Will report on how the install goes. I just hope that they don't hit any sprinkler or cable lines while digging, and that the orange paint that they've used to mark line locations will stay on the grass through this torrential downpour we are having.

Tags: Technology

Some of you probably won't find this that interesting. Certainly not anyone who has been to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. But I found the elevator system at the hotel to be kind of fascinating.

You walk up to the elevator banks and push a keypad as your floor destination.



It then tells you which letter elevator to go to:



After an small eternity waiting for the elevator, you walk in and the elevator takes you to your floor. There are no floor buttons.



The no floor buttons is the thing that took me the most to get used to.

What also appears to happen is that the computer system keeps track of the number of people who have requested a particular floor. So after a certain number of buttons presses for, say, the 40th floor, the next request for 40 will send you to a different elevator. Unfortunately, the system is a bit flawed because people keep pushing the pad when the elevator doesn't arrive, and there's no accommodation for people and large pieces of luggage.

But it's an interesting system nonetheless.

Tags: Technology

I'll post a few lighter pictures, but wanted to share the link below. Zandra and I were on our way back from New York City on this Amtrak train when this happened just outside of New Brunswick, NJ today.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/104-05042008-1529108.html

Say a prayer for the train engineer and the crew. The engineer said the guy stood in the middle of the track, squared himself at the train, and just stood there looking at him.

(updated 8:17am on 5/5/08 due to old link being removed)

Remember the movie Groundhog Day? I feel like Bill Murray in that movie. I keep reliving my 40th Birthday. Over and over and over and over.



When I was out in California last week, we celebrated my 40th birthday again. As I was pointing out in this photo, it's my 4th 40th birthday cake. Yummy, but, well, can we stop yet?

But thank you to my sister and my in-laws who made this all possible.

And thank you everyone who has given me a cake for *not* putting 40 candles on each cake.

We've had our new hybrid vehicle for about a month now. We're still enjoying the car immensely, but we're still getting used to a few of the nuances of driving the vehicle. So far, our average mileage is around 28 mpg in mixed driving. Pretty good. The part that takes the most getting used to is that the hybrid system shuts the engine off when it's not needed, and can cruise around at speeds of up to 35 mph in all electric mode - running purely off the car's batteries. I call this "Electric Golf Cart Mode" when this happens - especially at the mall or in a parking lot.

The great benefit to Electric Golf Cart Mode is that you can cruise around the parking lot looking for a parking space and not be burning any gas. This is a tremendous gas savings and does a lot to boost mileage. It does have the side effect that people no longer get out of your way when going through the parking lot at Costco for example. I was quite frustrated yesterday about this lady who was walking along, apparently oblivious to the fact that I was driving very slowly behind her, unable to pass because she was in the middle of the road. It then dawned on us that she *was* oblivious - we were cruising around on the electric motors and I'm sure she *couldn't* hear us. You're kind of stuck in this case because I think beeping your horn in this case to be really a bit rude and unnecessarily annoying.

When I worked at Six Flags Magic Mountain many years back, they had little electric cars that went around a track as a ride. These cars were originally the gasoline lawn-mower-powered cars you still see in amusements parks outside of California, but were "upgraded" to be more "clean". The year they did that, we realized, the effect of the ride was no longer the same - the cars were totally silent except for the whir of the electric motors. The solution was to add an artificial noise maker to add a sound effect. Maybe I need one of those for our car now....

The other issue is that the display on the navigation system which shows battery drain/generation is really fun to watch. Too fun to watch though. It's distracting. But it's really helpful to know how you're doing in terms of driving. I'm hoping that this issue goes away with time.

Tags: Technology

I received the most thoughtful gift from my sister today.



This is a scan from the cover of the book my sister had made for me for my 40th birthday. It includes notes from people who have known me longer than 40 years and from just about every stage of my life. Pictures I don't ever remember taking. Things I don't ever remember doing (and no, it wasn't because I had too much beer or something...).

I apparently taught my sister well - she tricked me into giving her my Christmas Card mailing list which is huge, and I understand that she mailed everyone on the list and then collected and collated the notes and pictures in the book. Sis has, on this rare occasion, now left me speechless.

Thanks sis. Thanks everyone. I wish you guys could all see this book. I guess you could ask my sister to send you one, but I have to say, I don't think I'd want it on my coffee table... :-P

Zandra and I bought a hybrid car to replace her car about 3 weeks ago. The decision was somewhat accelerated after her Volvo got hit in the parking lot at Costco, causing enough damage to need fixing, but not enough to call the insurance company about (i.e., about equal to our deductible).

We had long been considering getting a larger vehicle to replace her Volvo S40 - we had purchased the Volvo when we were a family of 3. As a family of 4, the car was tighter and taking along a stroller or any amount of kid stuff effectively eliminated our capacity to bring anything else home. Our Ford Freestyle is wonderful as a family car, but sometimes, it was just *too* big (I think our eyes were bigger than our stomachs when it came to deciding how much capacity we really needed...) The Mini Cooper, of course, is just for fun.

But, with gas prices doing what they are, we wanted something relatively fuel efficient. We'd always been interested in getting a hybrid, and that's what we ended up doing. I won't mention what kind of hybrid we got though.

The hybrid has been living up to our expectations (and then some) when it comes to mileage. For an SUV type vehicle, we are averaging about 28 miles per gallon. Not bad for 4400 lbs. of car. We are now driving it almost everywhere, averaging about 400 miles/week in various errands, etc. It's comfy, quiet, and pretty good on power too.

Of course, I was curious to figure out how long it was going to take for us to pay for the difference in the price of the car over a non-hybrid. I calculated we paid a hefty $4500 premium for the privilege of owning a hybrid over a gas model. Here's the math.

For the gas version of this car: 15000 miles/year / 22 miles/gallon == 681.81 gallons of gas per year.
For our hybrid version, assuming our mileage stays the same: 15000 miles/year / 28 miles/gallon == 535.71 gallons of gas per year.
I save 681.81 gallons - 535.71 gallons == 146.1 gallons each year.
At $3.50/gallon of gas (what it *currently* costs for premium unleaded where we are), this works out to roughly $511.35/year in savings.
$4500/$511.35 == 8.8 years to pay the difference.

A less optimistic calculation is if you compare it to the 22 mpg we average on the Freestyle (which uses regular gas).
681.81 gallons * $3.25/gal == $2215.88 per year versus 535.71 * $3.50/gal == $1874.99
This results in a savings of only $340.89 per year, or 13.20 years to make up the difference.

If the price of gas changes, however, the time decreases. Let's say I go up 20%. Using the Freestyle calculation:
681.81 gallons * $3.85/gal == $2624.97 per year versus 535.71 * $4.20/gal = $2249.98
This results in a savings of $375/year or roughly 12 years to make up the difference.

Worth it? From an environmental point of view, yes. Dollars, it's probably a sacrifice. I may revisit this calculation later in case of errors or other new interesting data....

(Followup on 3/31/2008 - I forgot to mention that even though the $$$ may not add up, having twice the space is definitely not to be forgotten! -- JH)

Tags: Technology

So as I turn 40 years old today, a whole bunch of random thoughts passed through my mind.

Mid-life Crisis? Probably not - I borrowed against it two years ago to get the Mini Cooper S Convertible with the personalized license plate.

They are still debating, 40 years later, about who shot JFK.

We haven't cured the common cold. Or cancer. But we're making progress at least.

My eye sight stinks. Memo to self - need to make another appointment with opthamologist. Probably need bi-focals.

I can claim that I'm only 28. If you're counting in hexadecimal of course.

I've had a number of 40th birthday "reminders" in the last two weeks. My second cousin's family very thoughtfully got me a cake and celebrated when they were all over here (I'll post a picture at some point). We skipped the second chorus of Happy Birthday which goes "How Old Are You?" though. Tonight, Zandra and I had a date night and went out Morton's of Chicago. Made me realize I can't eat like I used to - I used to be able to eat everything on my plate without splitting anything....Everyone remembered to send me a card this year it seems.

A good friend of mine pointed out that wine gets better with age, why not me? Good point!

Anything else running through my head about this topic? Yes. I'm thankful to have reached 40. I'm thankful for all the things I have at 40. And I'm looking forward to another 40 years at least.

Only 10 more years until I get to join AARP!

Set aside about 20 minutes total to watch both of these videos if you are so inclined. And be prepared for a major mood swing between the two.

The first one is called Treeless Squirrel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k22oHm0O3Sg The squirrel in this video is the son of a good friend of mine (who also does other advertising design when he's not busy being nuts (sic)). This one is funny.

The second one is one you may have seen. http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw Randy Pausch is a CMU professor dying of pancreatic cancer. Given I've lost a couple of friends to this disease and know currently of two others with it, it's a very interesting view on living life. http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ is his website which folks should visit for more information. This video may lead you to tears. The full length video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo .

Tags: Humor

I was just on hold with Verizon discussing a phone bill issue. There was a little bit of a wait for the agent (about 4 minutes) but what got me was the elevator music. It was playing the James Bond theme "You Only Live Twice".

Hmmmm.....appropriate for hold music I guess.

Tags: Humor

A sample from our recent vacation photos. Which one is James?

Tags: Travel

A few random thoughts as it's been 3 weeks since I posted anything.

My friend Fourth Breakfast sent me a pointer to a rather cool YouTube video (if you're a Jackie Chan fan). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKAtwK1tOaE .

Was looking for a box to send something off in this weekend and found a box of stuff from my Ford Explorer (the stuff I cleaned out of the car when I sold it 5 years ago). In the box was my missing Jack-in-the-Box Jack antenna ball. I put it on the antenna of the Mini.

I drove with the Mini Cooper's top down on Monday. It was 71 degrees and sunny. Lovely.

I am not going anywhere in the Mini Cooper today. Top up *or* down. It's snowing. Go figure.

10 years since this very memorable picture.



So as my sister-in-law put it, 2 kids, 3 houses, who-knows-how-many cars, certainly-too-many computers later, and 10 years, here we are.

We celebrated with a nice dinner -- my comment is that despite us having a 10 course Chinese Wedding Banquet for our reception 10 years ago, we ate better now than we did back then. We only made it to course #2 10 years ago before we had to start the dress changing/table visiting/toasting thing.

Wow. Where did 10 years go?

Every year, I wait until the weekend after New Years to go calendar shopping for a calendar for my office. I kind of started this tradition years ago for a number of reasons.

First was that some years, I received calendars and didn't have to go out and buy one. Whereas, if I bought one before Christmas, sometimes I'd end up with an extra calendar.

Second, the calendars are always dirt cheap (at least 50% off) after New Year.

The bad part, of course, is that you are stuck with the selection of calendars that no one else wanted.

Last year, I ended up with the "Dubious Saying of George W" calendar which contained all sorts of humorous quotes from our President. Even die hard right-wing supporters usually see the humor in George W's choice for words.

This year was more challenging. No, I really didn't want an Obama or Hillary calendar. I've long since tired of Far Side calendars, and I have to put up with too much of Zack and Cody to want one of their calendars. We have a Thomas Kinkade calendar in our bedroom.

The verdict was the "GTV Garfield Television 2008" calendar. A bunch of drawings of Garfield making his favorite editorial comments about today's TV shows and commercials.

It tells the date and is at least mildly tolerable.

Tags: Humor

Andrew performed in his first violin concert the other night. Dad was very proud.



Even better - good form on bowing and left wrist for this camera shot! And Andrew followed dad's advice - at least start and finish at the same time as everyone else.

I'll post a few more pictures in the picture section when I get a chance. I've got a few weeks worth of pictures to post.

Tags: Andrew

So no offense to Christmas Tree 2007, but this tree isn't the overwhelming success of last year's tree.

We purchased the tree on December 9th - it is a nice Douglas Fir that has pretty full, even coverage, and a good shape for a Christmas Tree.



You'll notice though it's a little sparse on ornaments. And that the bottom half of the tree is even more sparse than the rest. First, this year we have a mobile and curious Declan to test the ornaments within his reach. This has relegated anything breakable to branches above his reach. And most of our ornaments are of the breakable variety...

Second, most likely because of the drought in our region this year, the branches on this tree aren't quite as stiff as the branches were on last year's tree. Our ornaments also tend to be heavier (though not heavy). This has required some creative placement and use of Christmas tree lights to support branches to support the ornaments.

The additional side effect of the drought is that this tree is shedding needles at a far faster rate than last year's tree. Last year's tree dropped needles sparingly. This one is dropping it by the handful (even though it's still drinking a good amount of water) daily.

But it's still a nice tree. And it's real and not fake. As much as I dislike vacuuming up needles daily, I dislike fake trees more (childhood trauma of memories of an overused artificial tree....)

Merry Christmas!

(If you're offended by the Christmas greeting, then Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or as one friend says, "Kwanukkahmas". Or can we just agree on Happy New Year then?)

I just went online and purchased a couple of items from Amazon.com - a piece of electronics equipment and a train DVD for Andrew.

Ordinary transaction, until I got to the "Thanks for your order" page. The recommendations they gave on that page really gave me cause for pause for just a minute. Based on a train DVD order and a gift for someone else, I get:

* DNS & BIND Cookbook (it's a reference book about configuring name servers so when you tell your web browser to go to www.stickman.org it knows how to find it).
* Just Your Type (apparently about creating a [implied romantic] relationship using personality types)
* Wedding Crashers (the DVD starring Owen Wilson)

If it were baseball, they'd be doing okay. The first one would apply (except I already have that book). The other two....what???????

Maybe they're using pigeons randomly pecking at keyboards to generate answers....

So in my previous entry, I talked about a reported 1954 article from Popular Mechanics about the future of the home computer.

Turns out, as pointed out by my friend Fourth Breakfast, I was duped. It's a fake picture. See the referenced note about this picture at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

I don't tend to fall for these too often, but every once in a while, it happens. And here I was thinking that big wheel was to open the beer fridge...

Still, I don't want one of those consoles in my house for the same reasons I wrote before!

Tags: Technology

A friend of mine recently forwarded me the picture below (with caption). It's from a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics.



If you can't read the caption, it says "Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 30 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve those problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran (sic) language, the computer will be easy to use."

There are times I think my laptop is too big. Then I look at this and stop complaining. Think of how much *power* that thing would consume.

Then again, for those that have seen my basement, I already consume plenty of power as it is on computing devices...

Tags: Technology

Lots of folks have written about this week's fires. Like many others, I paid a lot of attention to them, but for me, a bit more maybe than most since I used to live in both Los Angeles and San Diego, and in particular, in neighborhoods in each city which were evacuated.

I found this picture to be pretty representative of the scale of the fires. Taken shamelessly from The Weather Channel website...



The Witch fire in San Diego resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood there. The Buckweed fire in Los Angeles resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood in Santa Clarita (aka Canyon Country).

I can't imagine what it must have been like in Southern California this last week. If you can see the smoke from space...

My friend Fourth Breakfast made a comment recently about never knowing I played the violin. I'm positive she forgot. I think we crossed that path once before when reviewing the odd similarities in our lives....but nonetheless, here's an answer for her and others who might (or might not) have been interested.



So the story about the violin. Recently, Andrew started playing violin at school. It's offered at our local elementary school starting in 3rd grade. First thing you need in order to play the violin is, well, a violin. A friend suggested I just get one off eBay. I disagreed with that. Having played violin myself for well over 15 years, you don't just buy a violin like an iPod. You have to audition it. They don't let you do that on eBay....

I happened upon a local violin store. Gailes Violin Shop in College Park which isn't too far from us. The moment I walked in I knew this was the right store. Violin shops, in my opinion, have a certain atmosphere, including smell. It smelled like a violin shop. Some nice mixture of rosin, wood, along with sounds of instruments being played in a wonderfully silent environment. I spent a fun hour trying out the quarter-sized violins before selecting one for Andrew.

The experience made me decide to dust my old violin off and get it back into playing shape.

I have faithfully carried my violin in its case around, by hand, for 18 years. It has always moved in the back seat or trunk of the car. So it actually was in pretty good shape. I needed a bow rehair, new strings, and a little adjustment to the bridge. Otherwise, the violin was amazingly just as I left it when I closed the case 18 years ago. Opening the case and getting the instrument tuned up was quite like rediscovering an old friend.

Getting the violin to the violin store was how I discovered it fit in the boot of the Mini, by the way. It happened to be the car with gas in it that day.

Andrew and I are now practicing together, with my hopes that not only will Andrew keep up with the violin, but that I'll get enough rust out of the fingers to actually join an ensemble or some other local group. I have discovered, though, that my double-jointed pinky fingers haven't gotten any better with age...

Tags: Andrew

Saw this today on an email list at work (and this does *not* apply to me):

Three things are certain:
death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?

Tags: Technology

Today is the 2nd birthday of my Mini Cooper (okay, it's not really the birthday, but more like the adoption day - I took delivery two years ago).

Since then, I've been amazed at what I found fits well into the tiny little boot (or trunk) of my Mini. See the picture below for a reference point (I took this picture two years ago).



The little boot actually carries quite a bit of stuff. I don't hesitate going to the grocery store with the car, nor have Costco or Home Depot runs been out of the question either (within reason of course - I'm not hauling home a 37" LCD television home in the car for sure...). But in the same way my Roland D-70 keyboard used to fit perfectly in the back seat of my 1988 Mustang LX 5.0 coupe, I have found a couple of surprisingly perfect fits in the boot of the Mini.

- My full size violin in its case snuggles in perfectly between the tire jack case and the opposite wall of the Mini in the left-right direction in the lowered section of the boot.
- Refrigerator 12-packs of CocaCola fit perfectly in that lowered section in the front-back direction. You can get about 5 in (I forget exactly how many) but it's a perfect fit whatever the count.
- Eddie Bauer overnight duffel. This might seem intuitive, but the one I have really is a perfect fit once inside. Sometimes, a little, um, "encouragement" is required to get it into the boot. But once there, it's a happy camper.

In a previous posting of a similar name, I talked about a company, LetsTalk.com and how a unique email address I had created for use with dealing with this company had been leaked somehow, and I was receiving many spam messages from them.

As a statistic, I recall that I counted an average of over 400 blocked spam delivery attempts to that email address alone per day over a 4 day period.

I contacted LetsTalk.com through their communications web page. And got nothing. So after a week, I contacted TRUSTe.org per LetsTalk.com's privacy statement and filed a complaint. Here's how things went:

TRUSTe made an initial return contact within 24 hours asking me if I had been infected by a virus/trojan/malicious website. I responded that since I use a Mac, there are no known malicious viruses circulating for it, that most Malware doesn't work on Macs, and I have standard NAT and firewall security. I will admit it's not bulletproof, but, my point to TRUSTe was if my system had been compromised, I should have leaked the hundred or so other unique email addresses as well, and all those were silent. TRUSTe agreed and forwarded my complaint to LetsTalk.com

TRUSTe enforces responses times and acts as a facilitator for the whole complaint process, and after about 10 days (and me sending in logs, spam samples caught in my spam filter, etc.) LetsTalk.com delivered a report where they showed that a third party they had hired to scrub their advertising email lists had leaked out all the email addresses to be scrubbed.

So, on one hand, it's bad that the info leaked. But on the other hand, they did find the source (or so I believe since the spamming has stopped), and they indicated it was email addresses only. No other information reportedly leaked.

LetsTalk.com was responsive, asked appropriate questions, and at all times seemed interested in resolving the complaint. Refreshing and appreciated. TRUSTe's system also appears to have worked well - less than 2 weeks to resolution once I contacted them.

Maybe there's hope yet for the internet...

Tags: Technology

It hasn't even been two weeks since you left us, but we're still thinking of you on your birthday. We miss you dad.

My friend Fourth Breakfast posted this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=D9bMM3prOFo which is an, um, "interpretation" of Brokeback Mountain. Absolutely hilarious!

Tags: Humor

One of advantages to having your own domain *and* running your own mail server is that you can create as many email addresses as you want on your domain. So some time ago, tired of the spam thing, I started tracking "who does what" with my email addresses, by assigning each contact with a new company a unique email address.

There are few surprises. Shortly after linking my Safeway grocery card with my United Airlines Mileage Plus account, my United Airlines address started receiving emails from Safeway. I posted my address on my high school's alumni website and immediately began receiving emails telling me I had just inherited $2 million dollars. Harvesting bot. Things like this make sense.

Other things are surprising. Like receiving male enhancement spam at an address reserved for transactions with legit companies. Today's example is LetsTalk.com - a popular cellular phone service reseller. While their service when I placed my order with them was excellent, the fact that my LetsTalk specific email is now receiving massive amounts of spam doesn't reflect well on the company and raises concerns about their security practices. I've fired off a letter to the company and we'll see what we get back.

Other sites that I have, in the past, tracked to email address leaks are such popular sites like classmates.com (though I haven't received email to that address in a few years now) and one of my *former* banks. That latter event was quite interesting, especially since I proved to their security officer that the breach was coming from a compromised PC *inside* their corporate network. They lost my business not so much because one of their PCs became infected, but because their security officer was so cavalier in handling the manner (oh, your email is not private information, I can find it anywhere on the web).

The bottom line - as has often been pointed out, your information is not as secure as it seems.

Tags: Technology

We decided to head out for ice cream last night as a family and finally decided to test a theory that we've had for a while.

Question: Does a forward facing car seat fit in the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

So the next question: Does Declan like driving around with the top down on the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

How do we know? Aside from the wide grin on Declan's face for the entire ride last night, when we went to take the Freestyle to go shopping this morning, Declan kept tugging at the door handle of the Mini and looked confused when we put him in the Freestyle.

Tags: Declan

Last Thursday, Andrew and I had a chance to visit and ride on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad originating in Cumberland, MD. It was a great chance to spend time together and to for me to get out of the office for a day.

The excursion starts as a 1 hour train ride from Cumberland, MD to Frostburg, MD on tracks from the original Western Maryland and C&P railroads. On our trip, we were pulled by a Western Maryland diesel locomotive, but other trains are pulled by steam engines. Below is a particularly scenic shot taken in Frostburg.



More pictures can be found at http://www.stickman.org/Pictures/Pictures-2007/WMR/

After the 1 hour train ride, the train engine is turned around on a turn table (you get to watch!) and you are then given an hour and a half to eat lunch and explore Frostburg. One of the neat attractions in Frostburg was the Thrasher Carriage Museum which houses various restored horse-drawn carriages and sleighs. There's also plenty of scenery to enjoy in the surrounding area and town. You then go back to Cumberland on the same train you came in.

It was a 2.5 hour drive from our house to Cumberland, but I think we'll be going back. In the fall, I think the scenery should be spectacular and the people all around were friendly and made the trip thoroughly enjoyable.

Tags: Andrew

My friend Fourth Breakfast has tagged me for one of these little blog tag games. Like my friend, I'm going to limit my responses in a few cases otherwise, we're going to be here all year....

Jobs I've held:
I was a Ride Operator at Six Flags Magic Mountain in high school and part of college. I ran roller coasters. When I worked there, I was known as the only operator to ever hit Emergency Stop on Freefall 3 times, and not be terminated or reprimanded for any of the occurrences.



I've also been an engineer for McDonnell Douglas, Megatek, and Sun Microsystems (current).
I've been systems administrator for the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego.

Places I've lived:
Schenectady, New York
Canyon Country, California
Ann Arbor, Michigan
San Diego, California
Hershey, Pennsylvania (actually, Palmyra, but close enough)

Movies I can watch over and over:
The Hunt for Red October

My guilty pleasures:
Playing blackjack in Las Vegas

Shows I enjoy:
House
The Weather Channel

Places I've been on vacation:
Too numerous to list, so I'll say Lake George, New York.

Favorite foods:
Anything Italian, but Veal Parmigiana is my benchmark food.
Just about anything else my wife makes is next.

Websites I visit daily:
http://www.stickman.org/ (of course)

Body parts I've injured:
Knees. Both of them. Not requiring surgery, but I know when the weather is changing....

Awards I've won:
I choose to list "Perfect Attendance" in 3rd grade.

Nicknames I've been called:
Stickman. Or course. The origin goes back to my Magic Mountain days...


Now that I've played, we'll see if Mr. Chuckles is game...

Tags: Blog Tag

The silence in the last week is because we've embarked on a new project at home - painting. Our house is 2 years old now, and we've decided we're tired of white everywhere. So we're repainting. We started with Andrew's room, and after one week of work, here's the result:



Now if you wonder why it takes a week to paint a room, this is an evening/spare time project, and, I had to do the ceiling. I usually go out of my way to avoid painting ceilings. There was no alternative in this case because during the drywall repair for the typical settling nail pops and such, we discovered that the touch up paint was still very noticeable. Repainting the ceiling was the only way to fix that...

The colors are Hawthorne Yellow and Linen White (from Benjamin Moore). Great paint, by the way. Very happy with the stuff and the local dealer.

Now, we're on to the dining room...

Tags: Home Improvement

One of my relatives docrpm posted this interesting entry on his blog about something he saw at his local Safeway.

As I posted in my comment to him, this seems to be a great example of the problems you encounter when you try to legislate common sense. It's too bad that more and more, we are forced to do so.

With the garden in full production mode, the family has been hard pressed to come up with new ways to consume all the produce. We stumbled upon a recipe (on the back of a box of pasta) that seemed perfect for our garden's abundance of zucchini, tomatoes, and basil.

Penne w/ Zucchini Sauce and Sausage

1 lb. Italian Sausage (crumbled)
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium zucchini, chopped (2 cups)
1 cup chopped plum tomatoes (approx 4)
10 fresh basil leaves, torn
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 t. salt
1/8 l. ground black pepper
1 lb. Penne pasta
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
1 T. chopped parsley

Boil pasta according to package. Drain.
Cook the sausage in a large skillet over medium-high heat until done. Remote from skillet and set aside
Heat oil in a skillet. Saute zucchini, tomato, basil, garlic, and seasonings 6-8 minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally.
Add sausage to vegetables. Stir. Add sausage and vegetables to hot pasta. Toss. Sprinkle cheese and parsley.

Notes - basil needs to be fresh. The quality of the sausage obviously makes a difference. Don't overcook the pasta. We also find the dish tasty the next day as a cold leftover.

Tags: Gardening

Growing up, one of my favorite games was Trouble. I first got the game when I was about 6 years old.

This weekend, we picked up the latest "travel" version of Trouble. I thought it would be interesting to compare it to my original game. Which I still have and which still works great.



Obviously, the newer one is on the left, old one in the center. Box describes Trouble as a "Frustrating Chase Game" made of "sturdy plastic". Yup. I actually do keep things forever. I've also somehow managed to keep the original game with all its original pieces, and with the Pop-o-Matic still functioning (even though you can see oxidation from the metal inside the dome).

I would never have thought over 30 years ago that my sons would be playing with the same actual game today.

A couple of interesting websites with videos I've found today.

The first one begs the question "Does it spill your drink when you get a Blue Screen of Death"? Click here for the first video.

The second one gives me a chance to answer a question I've been asked a bunch lately - did I get an iPhone. The answer is no. But if I did, I certainly wouldn't treat it as seen in this video. Click here for the second video. Warning - not for iPhone owners that are faint of heart.

Tags: Technology

So it's early July and the garden has just been working overtime.



Zandra's happy as she loves tomatoes. We've already picked a few and according to her, they are yummy. Along with the cukes and zucchini. Just picked some peppers last night. Hoping this keeps up for the summer -- still a long way to go.

More garden pictures here.

Tags: Gardening

For Father's Day, Zandra and I went out on a "date night" for the first time in quite a while. It was intended to be a dinner and movie night, but we chose to go see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - meaning we missed dinner because the movie was so long (the official running time is 2:45, but if you do the commercials at the beginning, it's longer).

That said, we weren't disappointed. The script was very well done, and so complex that I can't imagine the screen writers keeping the plots, sub plots, and sub sub plots straight. I was thoroughly baffled about 2 hours into the movie. I'll have to look at things again when it comes out on DVD. And because we got there late, we had to sit closer to the front than we would have liked. Resulting I think in us missing some of the widescreen action (this is one DVD you will want to get in widescreen version). We had a great time and I won't say too much more since I don't like spoiling the plot for those few people who haven't seen it.

But two comments do come to mind: 1 day every 10 years just seems sad. And stay for the ending after the trailer.

Seen on a church announcement board near our house marking the last day of school last Friday:

Students: YIPPEE!
Teachers: WHEW!
Parents: HELP!

Tags: Humor

Happy Birthday Andrew!



What's not shown is the "Busted Balloon Incident". Zandra bought Andrew this huge mylar balloon which also played "Happy Birthday" when you thumped it. It lasted all of 60 seconds in our house as Andrew, totally by accident, walked under the ceiling fan with his new balloon. Ooops.

We did buy him another one today and it's now safely tied up in his bedroom. Away from the ceiling fan.

Tags: Andrew

So tonight, a thread on an email alias at work had me do a speed test on my cable modem. I used the speed test at Speakeasy Networks (my former ISP whom I had to give up because I moved to an area they didn't service). I was a bit surprised. 14729kbps down and 1562kbps up. Wow. Almost 15Mbps/1.5Mbps. This is about twice what I was getting a month ago.

My suspicion is that since Verizon is on the verge of digging up our neighborhood for FIOS, this is Comcast's answer - boost their speed.

While I love the speed, we'll see if the infrastructure stays any more stable. That's been my biggest gripe with Comcast. The intermittent service interruptions....

Tags: Technology

So every year since getting married, I've tried to have a garden. This year is no different - we have 4 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, and some various herbs.

Moving to Maryland, it was apparent last year that the soil in our particular area isn't very, um, fruitful (vegetableful?) and last year's tomato crop yielded, maybe about 10 tomatoes.

So this year, I made a number of changes - I moved the tomato garden to the side of the house with more sun, worked a *lot* harder to condition the soil, and mixed in some additional fertilizer to get the plants started.

Something worked. The plants this year are great and I've already got more tomatoes growing on the plants than I harvested all last year.

Pictures as I get a chance.

Tags: Gardening

I'm on a trip today and did my customary stop at McDonalds for breakfast. They're in the middle of a massive Shrek the Third promotion.

I didn't really pay much attention to it until I went to go put my straw in my orange juice.

It was Ogre Green.

I guess if it weren't orange juice, the straw wouldn't have looked so bad. But with orange juice, well, it looked like Phyllis Diller with a bad hair day. Nasty.

I decided to forgo the straw this morning....

I attended the memorial service today for one of my mother's cousins. At the sign in table, the family had made little cards from my second uncle's drawings, and had a quote on the back of each (what he used to call SWOTD (Special Wisdom of the Day)).

This is what was printed on the back of mine. I found it quite profound, especially given my second uncle was quite the musician.

"after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music" - Aldous Huxley

The memorial service itself was quite beautiful, and also a bit sad. It's always touching to see how much a person is loved and how different people from different stages of ones life reflect on the same person. All very heartfelt and all very sincere. It was also a beautiful day with a cool breeze and light scattered clouds.

Poor Declan. This last week has been a tough one for him as he was suffering from the Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease thing.

This is one of those cases where you can't do much to speed the illness on its way. All you can do is feed Tylenol and Motrin and keep the pain under control. And try to convince the little one to keep drinking.

It hurts to watch - probably as much as it hurts the child to deal with the sores that often accompany this virus.

Hopefully, now that he's gotten it he won't get it again.

Yesterday, Verizon's contractor went down my street marking cable locations and hanging fliers on the door to indicate that they were about to pull the remaining infrastructure required to get Verizon's new FIOS service. I can't wait. It will finally be a decent alternative to the cable company and my cable modem.

http://www.verizon.com/fios in order to read more about it.

It's not so much the additional speed I'll be happy about (though it certainly doesn't hurt). I'm hoping that Verizon engineered FIOS like they have all their other telecommunications services - with over engineered infrastructure that will hopefully be more robust than that of Comcast. For all the good things about Comcast's service, I'm now tired of the 1-2 hour outages I experience every few weeks or so as the service mysteriously goes down in the middle of the day. These events have become frequent enough that I've gotten a DSL line as a backup to the cable modem. So I can keep working through these outages.

Check back here as I provide updates. As much as being first usually means being on the bleeding edge, I'll probably be first (yet again) to get some sort of new internet technology to my house. (I was first in my neighborhood in California for ISDN. I was first in my neighborhood in Pennsylvania for DSL. Why not be first in the neighborhood for FIOS?)

So I'm trying to figure out why my mulch calculations are off this year....

Saturday, I had 60 cubic feet (a little more than 2 cubic yards) of mulch delivered to my house so I could tidy up the flower beds, around the trees, and create a new flower bed in the back yard. I calculated 60 cubic feet based on the fact that last year, I used 45 cubic feet and it was just right, but that this year, I had one less tree to mulch around (the county took the tree out - BGE installed the street light too close to the tree and the tree got to leave [no pun intended]), which should have meant 3 cubic feet less, and the area of the new flower bed was about the size of the side flower bed, which takes generally about 12 cubic feet. Net gain of 9 cubic feet, so adding 15 cubic feet should have been plenty, right? Wrong. I'm going to be short at least 12 cubic feet.

Another cubic yard over last year...

My math has got to be faulty somewhere. Probably the same reason the yard isn't greening up - I probably have a fertilizer miscalculation....

So last month, I wrote about Andrew winning First Place for his school science project. Some have asked about the background of the project.

First, here's a picture.



The marketing name was "Making Fluffy Buns Bigger". The engineering name of the project is really more like "The Effect of Baking Soda on Biscuits". Andrew got the idea (with a little help from mom and dad) from an episode of Pinky Dinky Doo. This show happens to be a favorite of both Andrew and Declan. There's an episode where main character Pinky gets help from her family who inadvertently add too much baking soda to a batch of "Fluffy Buns" and makes the batch rise so big, it blows the roof off the house. Andrew's science experiment tried to demonstrate the premise behind that show (no, we didn't blow the roof off the house).

Andrew did do quite a bit of the work himself. He helped mix the biscuits, he typed in all the text into the computer, chose the colors, and helped paste the slides up on the display board. Of course mom and dad helped a lot with the actual baking, formatting the slides, and buying the materials.

Interestingly enough, at the Science Fair, it was kind of obvious where and how much parents had helped their kids. Some projects really were clearly "okay, mom and dad came up with the idea and told the child what to say". Others you could tell had a lot more creative thought from the kids.

The "marketing name" really did help - Zandra and I didn't know but part of the scoring was actually based on the title. From one of the judges, "oh, that was a great title. Everyone went around saying, 'Everyone needs more fluffy buns.'" Apparently, the phrase kind of struck a chord among the judges. Advantage Andrew.

The only disappointment is that only projects from the 3rd grade or higher get to go on to the County Science Fair. The pressure is on for Andrew (and parents) to think of another creative topic for next year. Maybe we need to watch more Pinky Dinky Doo....

There's been not a lot of blogging going on by me in the last couple of weeks. First reason is this really inexplicable (so far) stomach ailment I've had. The result is essentially bad cases of gas, but the gas causes an excrutiating amount of pain sometimes - making it difficult to want to do anything other than curl up in a ball. So far, all tests negative but things have been getting better over the last few days.

We've also been on the road - we spent part of the Easter holiday with relatives in California. Issues beyond our control resulted in me having to fly back out yesterday to go get Declan our youngest and bring him back today. Nothing like one lap around the country in 24 hours with the second half being with Declan. Fortunately, it seems like guys hefting lots of luggage and infant children get a lot of sympathy from folks. Never had so many people offer to help me with bags, etc.

Some have asked about the Fluffy Buns from Andrew's Science Fair project. That should be the next blog entry.

Late breaking news! Andrew won First Place for the 2nd Grade at his school's Science Fair today! Yippeee! The winning experiment was, "Making Fluffy Buns Bigger".

Pictures and more commentary on the event later, but this is just cool! Now, if the teachers only knew the yelling, crying, meltdowns, and anguish that we put into that presentation last night....

One of the things I was taught about public speaking is to make sure you know how long you have to speak, and try not to run over. (Having an interesting topic, mannerisms, reading your audience are also important, but not for this blog entry.) It's no different when it comes to pastors speaking in church on Sundays. In fact, church pastors often get unfairly teased about "speaking too long" on Sundays, so they're usually extra sensitive about the time.

When my church recently moved into its new building (Riva Trace Baptist Church), we moved into a sanctuary much larger than the original. We took the old clock we previously had in the sound booth that the pastor used to keep track of time with us. But it didn't work in the new sanctuary. (I *think* this was the clock we had in the old church, but regardless, this clock wasn't working out...)



The clock I referred to is the clock labeled "First (Original) Clock" in the picture above. Pastor Dennis couldn't see the clock with the new lighting and because the clock sits partially in the shadows made it even harder to read. This picture was taken with my Treo camera from about where Pastor Dennis would be standing while preaching.

So the church got a second clock with red LEDs lighting up the time. Great idea. Except the clock wasn't much bigger than the original, and with the small lettering, wasn't really visible either (this clock is labeled "Second Clock" in the picture above).

So this week, the church apparently consulted with NASA to acquire a smaller version of the NASA Shuttle Countdown Clock. This clock is labeled "New Clock" in the picture above. Now *this* is a clock you can see!

Will it help Pastor Dennis finish on time? Only time will tell (no pun intended)....

Like many parents with kids, Zandra and I often help our son with his homework. This week, though, I am curious to find out what Andrew's teacher must have thought about us after his Wednesday spelling homework....His assignment was:

"Write sentences for each of your spelling words and use an abbreviation in the sentence. For example, 'The dog was barking on Elm St.'"

The sentences I helped Andrew with were like, "The peat moss weighed 40 lbs." and "Mr. Smith asked us whether or not we ate lunch."

The sentences Zandra helped Andrew with were like, "There is a shortage of R.N.s in hopsitals, " "The S.P.C.A. encourages you to keep your pet on a leash," and "There is a P.D.R.* on the shelves."

Hmmmm...not sure about some of those.

*P.D.R. stands for Physician's Deskside Reference

So let me make my point-of-view clear:

I am tired of all the news coverage of Anna Nicole Smith.
I am tired of all the news coverage of Britney Spears.
I am tired of all the news coverage of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and so on.

I therefore applaud the following Associated Press posting that showed up on CNN today:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/02/ignoring.parishilton.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

The AP had a "black out" of Paris Hilton stories for over a week. Someone *finally* understands that she isn't real news.

If only they could make that blackout permanent. And if only someone could trigger a virtual power failure about Anna Nicole Smith. It's pathetic we waste so much time, money, and resource on the funeral coverage of someone who was so promiscuous, that no less than 4 people claim to be the father of her child.

MINI has made a bit of a comeback since being purchased by BMW. It's a car that is cute, fun, and gets relatively good gas mileage. When I bought my 2006 Mini Cooper S a little over a year ago, there was no dealer inventory where I was. You built your car, they ordered it, and you waited until it showed up.

MINI has also been known for its rather humorous (in my opinion) advertising. To introduce the new 2007 MINI Cooper, they've taken advertising one step further. Hammer and Coop. This is a humorous spin on Starsky and Hutch, Magnum PI, and Knight Rider (at the least) -- a short series of what can best be described as long commercials -- all done with that same bizarre MINI humor.

I found it humorous. If not a little male-centric. http://www.hammerandcoop.com -- I give it 4.5/5.0 stars of approval. It doesn't get a perfect score because, well, it *is* marketing....

I guess I find this little story mildly humorous, but probably more reassuring.

The current quarterly promotion gimmick with Discover Card is currently a 5% cashback bonus for things related to travel. Hotels, car rentals, etc. So the gimmick is working in that I've recently been putting all my hotel, car rental, etc. charges on my Discover Card. And this month, I've been doing a lot of travel as it turns out.

So I returned home Saturday evening to find a message on the answering machine from Discover Card's Security and Fraud division. Seems like they were concerned with the sudden increase in travel related charges on my card. Hmmm....mebbe because of their promotion?

The amusing moment in the charge review was the question, "And you have a charge here from Southwest Airlines for...." "$5.00" I answered. "Right" the lady replied. "How do you only get a $5 from Southwest Airlines?" A couple of witty responses danced through my head, but I decided to be nice and say "Security Fee on a Frequent Flier ticket".

But in all seriousness, it's nice to know that someone's computer algorithm for detecting these types of things actually worked correctly.

I haven't had a chance to write anything new lately - not because I haven't had things to say, but because I've been traveling around the country and sleep comes before blogging.

Hopefully we'll get back to regular blogging soon.

A resounding endorsement for Dad's spaghetti from its new biggest fan....



More pictures recently posted on the website.

I made a new purchase this last week - a Brother MFC-9420CN multi-function color laser printer. I think this is Brother's flagship printing/multi-function device. If it isn't, I don't want to see the bigger model.



This unit came delivered via UPS Ground weighing in at 100 lbs. according to the shipping label. 31 pages per minute black, 8 pages per minute color. Enough to kill a lot of trees in a hurry. I've named the printer color-termite.

This is a size comparison to the laser printer it will soon replace - the HP LaserJet 4MPlus



The rationale behind this purchase is much like that of the hybrid car purchase. I was tired of spending $30/month on ink cartridges for my previous multi-function unit. Even when I was using it only minimally (like a cat, it constantly liked to clean itself). Savings on ink should pay for this printer in a few years. Also, my HP printer is 11 years old. It doesn't handle some more complicated documents, and recently, the bearings in the cooling fan started to make noise and I was getting accordion folded output. I am replacing both units with this new unit. I got $120 off the unit from costco.com this week. Free shipping as well (and that is a big deal when you're shipping 100 lbs....)

I already have color printing working from my Mac, Windows, and Sun Solaris. I'm very happy.

Trees of the World - Beware!

At various points of the day on Tuesday, I took to channel surfing the various coverages of President Gerald Ford's State Funeral in Washington, DC. At some point, the difference between the coverage on CNN and C-SPAN suddenly struck me. For those of you outside the US, C-SPAN is a channel which pretty much focuses on displaying coverage of the US Congress and other government related events. CNN is CNN.

The commentary on CNN almost never stopped. It was like the constant color commentary you get watching a sporting event. Half the time, I wished they would be quiet. You couldn't hear yourself think and some of the drivel was meaningless. I can see President Carter is talking to Secretary of State Rice. I don't care what you think they are talking about. And even if I did, was that really relevant to the event at hand?

Whereas with C-SPAN, there was no commentary, save for the occasional closed-caption item that went by indicating that music was playing (I usually watch TV with closed-captioning turned on since I suffer from a mild hearing loss). Allowed for total reflection and appreciation for the solemnity of the event.

More is not always better.

So as I noted in my previous blog entry, our Christmas holiday vacation got fairly involved with the sharing of illness and other physical misfortune. Here's the final tally:

James: 1 injured left wrist (note to the person at BWI who stopped short in front of our luggage cart - next time I'm running you over....), 1 repeat sinus infection (still on going) 1 bout of 36 hour GI bug (affecting both directions).

Andrew: Sniffling and hacking cough, 1 bout of 12 hour GI bug (affecting forward direction)

Declan: Sniffing and hacking cough, 1 bout of 12 hour GI bug (affecting forward direction), 1 bout of 24 hour GI bug (affecting rear direction and still ongoing), gagging from sinus ailment also resulting in gastrointestinal upset.

Zandra: 1 short bout of GI bug, 1 incoming sore throat, and having to put up with 3 sick members of household for entire vacation.

Collateral Damage: 1 interior of Volvo S40 (Zandra's car), at least 12 loads of laundry (we think probably more), up to 4 baths per day for Declan, 3 pillows, general misery for all.

Welcome to 2007. We all need a vacation...

This Christmas, we're at my wife's sister's house for the holiday week. We've been deeply involved with the theme of sharing.

So far, it's been fun sharing gifts, time together, good cooking, and just being together with family.

Unfortunately, it's also been about sharing sinus infections, stomach viruses, and nasty hacking coughs. We weren't the healthiest bunch traveling out. I'm not sure if we will leave healthier or sicker. Will have to post an update.... The unfortunate part is also that due to illness, we weren't able to visit my wife's parents which was the original intent of the trip....

At least we're not flying through Denver....

Had kind of a bad day (and evening) at work today. Frustrating probably more like it.

The situation reminded me of a character in a movie - Howard Beale in the 1976 movie "Network".

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork2.html

If only I could get away with that. But then, Howard Beale was shot at the end for bad ratings, so maybe I shouldn't....

I have to rent this movie so I can enjoy it again....funny that I remember this movie so well - I should never have been watching it when it came out (I was too young)....

One of my wife's patients brought her husband along for her appointment at my wife's office yesterday. As often happens, my wife received a remark from the husband along the lines of "You don't look old enough to be a doctor." Except the remark came out something like (and I am probably paraphrasing what my wife said), "So how long have you been surgecking?"

So my wife and I learned a new word yesterday. "Surgecking". I guess the definition means "Being a surgeon" in Southern Maryland speak....(and the answer from my wife was "Since 1997 - ask my husband."

I've been sick the last few days, so unfortunately, dinner tonight was frozen pizza. I flipped the box over to check the oven temperature settings and saw the following as the first instruction:

Do Not Eat Pizza Without Cooking

Um.....Sad because you know someone tried this in order for someone to have printed this on the box.

WalMart often touts its ability to offer low prices because of its ability to purchase in volume and the efficiencies that drives. How they handle merchandise, how they stock stores, etc.

So, standing in line at WalMart today (yes, I do shop there) I wonder why they can't seem to improve the efficiency of their checkouts at WalMart and Sams Club stores. The lines always seem long. Movement slow. Frustration high. Even in the 12 items or less line. Sams Club compared to Costco is always a huge difference - same type of store and while the lines at Costco can be long and slow, it doesn't seem to be nearly as consistently long and slow as Sams Club.

Yes, I know that low-paid possibly-less-than-motivated cashiers will play a role. But for all of WalMart's abilities to be more efficient, you'd think they could apply some of that at the checkout....

Some time ago, I blogged about my opinions on the Real Estate Bust many have seen coming.

As a bit of an update, not only are homes not selling in our neighborhood, but prices are beginning to plunge. Prices for houses in our neighborhood seem to have stepped back to the pricing of December 2004 when we first signed a contract on our current house. And they are still not selling.

Wonder how low things will go around here....

Today I am thankful for the good and the bad
Today I am thankful for the happy and sad
Why am I thankful for things big and small?
Because God provides everything, all in all.

Or in other words, be thankful for everything. You could have nothing.

I feel like a horrible mean dad today.

Today was Declan's 1 year checkup. (It kinda goes with that birthday thing from a few days ago.) First, Declan seems to have developed a big case of stranger anxiety lately. Not really sure why. And he's also gone into super Cling-On mode...so taking him to the doctor and having him go into the exam room immediately resulted in screams, tears, and crying....

Then, add the 3 vaccinations. "Pin Cushion" syndrome as Zandra puts it.

Then add that mom had to go back to work and dad got to take him home. Fortunately, he fell asleep in the car on the way home and slept for 2 hours.

But then, after being all rested and fed, dad picks him up from his toys to drag him over to the local lab to have blood drawn as part of his physical. More pricks. More tears. More screams. More blood. More agony for dad.

Makes me wish I had had more meetings today....and it's not like those have been fun lately either...

(Graphic copyright ESPN)

A sad day in Michigan Football. Bo Schembechler has died at age 77 today. Coverage at ESPN. Truly the passing of a legend.

Hard to believe it has already been a year. Happy Birthday Declan! What a difference you've made in our lives!

See more pictures here.

Whether or not you are happy or sad over the results of yesterday's elections, I'm sure that most of us registered voters can agree on one thing.

We sure are glad we're not getting any more of those phone calls reminding us to vote, return our absentee ballot, vote for this candidate or that candidate, or political poll.

Don't you agree?

This cute little creature was helping me hand out treats last night during Halloween!

Many years ago, I met my good friend Geoff Walton while pumping gas at a Chevron gas station in Pacific Beach, CA. We were introduced because of the license plate he had on this primer colored BMW 2002 - SETUID0.

If you don't know what it means, ask someone who has played around with UNIX too much.

I've always thought the plate was cool. I finally did something about it.



So now there's two green convertibles in the US running around with the same license plate (though Geoff has a Porsche now - he's clearly ahead of me...) Thanks Geoff for letting me plagiarize.

While on a recent business trip, I took the following picture:



Let's itemize:

- 1 Mac PowerBook G4 being charged by an iGo Juice Unit
- 1 Nokia 6126 being recharged off the iGo Juice Unit aux power port
- 1 30GB Video iPod being charged off the USB of the PowerBook
- 1 Blackberry 7290 being charged off the USB of the PowerBook
- 1 Canon S50 digital camera (not shown - it was taking a picture) charging off the wall

Glad there was no shortage of electricity...

The more I read about the story of the Amish shootings in Pennsylvania, the more I am simply amazed at the Faith these families have, and the attitudes they are showing, especially to the family of the gunman.


From CNN:
Welk (grandfather-in-law of the shooter) said he had met Tuesday with family members of one of the dead girls, 13-year-old Marian Fisher, for about 30 to 45 minutes. Hess (Welk's daughter) accompanied her father to the meeting, and said family members embraced them.

"They were very consoling," Hess said. "They offered us their sympathy. They let us know that there was no hard feelings. They felt more sorrow for us because of what we were going through, than what they were going through."


From FoxNews:
Though the Amish generally do not seek help from outside their community, Kevin King, executive director of Mennonite Disaster services, an agency managing the donations, quoted an Amish bishop as saying: "We are not asking for funds. In fact, it's wrong for us to ask. But we will accept them with humility."

At the behest of Amish leaders, a fund has also been set up for the killer's widow and three children.


From the BBC:
A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbour had also comforted the family hours after the shooting - and extended forgiveness to them.

"I hope they stay around here and they'll have a lot of friends and a lot of support," said Daniel Esh, an Amish artist whose grand-nephews were inside the school at the start of the attack.


I don't think many would say much if the Amish had come out angry at the gunman who took the lives of these children. The fact that not only are they not outwardly showing anger, but are reaching out to the family of the person who harmed them is just so out of place with what we've come to expect from people today.

I really hope people reading this learn from the example being set here.

Forgiveness is a personal and difficult topic, no matter what your beliefs. Especially when it comes to the matter of tragic deaths.

A tragic shooting at an Amish School not far from where I used to live happened on Monday. Having lived near the Amish for 7 years while my wife was going through her Residency, I came to appreciate these very private people. After reading this article on CNN, I'm more and more convinced that these folks have the right idea.

To quote from CNN:

PARADISE, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- A grieving grandfather told young relatives not to hate the gunman who killed five girls in an Amish schoolhouse massacre, a pastor said on Wednesday.

"As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was making a point, just saying to the family, 'We must not think evil of this man,'" the Rev. Robert Schenck told CNN.

"It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."

End quote.

This grandfather has it right. What an example, and what words of wisdom under horribly painful circumstances. We don't understand why things like this happen. But so often we fail to teach that revenge and anger aren't always the most constructive responses to things like this.

I'm certainly not a pacifist. However, I really feel this is the right answer to be teaching these affected children at this stage. There's no constructive purpose in breeding hatred into a generation. I truly admire this grandfather for teaching this. If only others in other parts of the world had had this insight, perhaps the world would not be the mess it is today.

You have to admire someone who is older than you are, and can still go out and beat guys half his age in baseball.

Trevor Hoffman earned his record breaking 479th save this evening to become Baseball's Save Leader. Wow. Anyone who can go out and do something 479 times (when people are actively trying to keep you from accomplishing your goal) deserves some recognition. Argue as you'd like that baseball players make too much. When a 39 year old guy sets a record like this, that is darned impressive. Add to that that he's a personable guy, a leader, a family guy, and community guy. He's actually a good role model.... Truly a rarity in this day and age.

Congratulations Trevor!

In my friend Fourth Breakfast's blog entry http://fourthbreakfast.blogspot.com/2006/09/tagged.html, I have been asked to "Tell us the 5th through 8th sentences on page 123 of the book nearest you."

To be honest, the first book nearest to me at the time I read this contained company proprietary information. Couldn't do that.

Went back to my home office, grabbed the nearest book, and to comply, here is the text:

"Then *pfa[] is a recognized as a dcl (sic), so (*pfa[]) is a direct-dcl. Then (*pfa[])() is a direct-dcl and thus a dcl. We can also illustrate the parse with a parse tree like this (where direct-dcl has been abbreviated to dir-dcl): [Image in book omitted] The heart of the dcl program is a pair of functions, dcl and dirdcl, that parse a declaration according to this grammar."

The source is "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition (ANSI C)" by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Copyright 1988, Prentice Hall Publishers.

No real programmer would ever risk *not* having this be the closest book on their desk. It is, after all, the C Programming Language Bible.

docrpm, you're it.

Tags: Blog Tag

This past week, a co-worker and I were discussing how engineers always seem to want to optimize everything. Trying to calculate if buying gas at the gas station down the street because it's $.01/gallon cheaper is worth it based on miles per gallon consumed by the car and mileage to the gas station. Placing something at the bottom of the stairs so as not to waste the energy in making an exclusive trip upstairs but waiting until you had another reason as well. Trying to plan a route that combines 18 different errands in the shortest possible distance while minimizing traffic lights and left turns across busy streets. Stuff like that.

Every once in a while, that optimization comes back to bite you.

So we bought a second car seat to install into my wife's car last week. I left it in the garage right next to her car. After all, why waste the energy to carry it into the house when you're going to install it into the other car in the garage, right?

Well, I kept forgetting to bring out a box cutter, or some other excuse and the result was not getting it installed before I left on my California trip this week.

So I went out this morning to install it, and it was gone. And I instantly realized what had happened.

I had placed the box next to my wife's car. It was also next to the bins we put our recyclables into. My wife and our nanny, thinking I had taken the car seat out already, had assumed the box was empty and put it out with the recycling.

ooops.

We bought a replacement today. It's already in use. No procrastination this time....

Wonder how many gallons of gas it will take to compensate for this...

Someone pointed out this interesting fact to my wife recently...have you ever stopped to think about how many Disney movies have characters who are missing a parent?

This came about as we were watching "The Wild" this weekend with Andrew. No mother lion in this move.

Think about Cinderella - no dad.

Think about Finding Nemo - no mom.

Beauty and the Beast? No mom. Pocahontas? Treasure Planet?

Now granted, this isn't universally true. The Incredibles have both parents. So does Lion King (for at least the first third). Toy Story didn't have either parent (but then, they were toys and toys don't, well, you know....or do they?). Maybe this is just coincidence? But it does make you wonder....

A friend of mine recently sent me this:



Pre-school children were asked the following question:

"In which direction is the bus pictured above traveling?"

Look carefully at the picture. Do you know the answer? The only possible answers are "left" or "right."

The pre-schoolers all answered "left." When asked, "Why do you think the bus is traveling to the left?" they answered, "Because you can't see the door."

How did you do?

Major milestone in child development has occurred - Declan has taken his first two steps by himself at age 9 months and 13 days!

We've been noting his ability to walk around when supporting himself with furniture, etc., and in the last few days, noticed that he can actually stand up unassisted and balance himself. Last night, when I went to show my wife how long he could stand, he surprised everyone by taking two steps towards me and falling into my arms!

Great news is he's taken his first steps. Of course, the counter to that is that now he's going to be tearing around everywhere.....

So there seems to a consensus that the real estate market is cooling off. Though, no one really seems to be calling it a bust (yet).

I just can't wait for the banking crisis to follow.

Why?

I'll take my neighborhood for example. A year ago when my wife and I moved into our house, people were lining up at the sales office every month to get a chance to purchase one of four homes (on average) that our builder released per month. There were no homes for sale in our neighborhood. Those that went on sale stayed on the market for a week before being sold. People were coming in with adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), mortgages that were short-term fixed which converted to ARMs, and even negative-amortization loans where the monthly payment didn't even cover the interest on the house. Greater than 100% financing. 2nd mortgages to cover down payments on the 1st mortgage. Etc. etc. We qualified for our house with my income alone (which isn't a trivial amount, granted, but the mortgage payment would have consumed 75% of my take home pay...) incredibly enough.

My point? People literally begged, borrowed, and cheated their way into these very nice homes.

Now I think people are starting to pay the price. They're not lining up at the sales office anymore, and there are 8 or so houses in our neighborhood for sale. Some have been for sale for at least a couple of months. Coincidence, perhaps. But you wonder how much the recent interest rate jumps have started putting the pinch on people who took out ARMs or other adjustable rate mortgages. And if that's the case, how long before the banks start owning these houses? Which have been negative amortizing and are now worth less than their outstanding mortgage? And how long before those losses begin to add up, especially in overheated markets like mine?

And I am sure this isn't just our neighborhood either.

Might be some good buys coming up soon....but too bad that will be at the expense of the appraised value of my home....

I just got back from a wonderful family vacation - posted pictures, but discovered my camera has myopia. Sigh... In particular, take a look at my cousin and her husband's website for happy wedding pictures.

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Mom, Grandma, we remember you, even after all these years.