February 2006 Archives

I completely forgot to post the follow-up to our snubbing by the Mariners' Moose a couple weeks ago.

A couple days after I sent my complaint letter, the Mariners' head of PR and Marketing called our house to personally apologize. He promised to send Ray some make-up gifts.

A couple days after that, a package arrived for Ray containing a signed eight-by-ten of said Moose (pictured at right) along with a few 4-year old baseball cards and some stickers.

Whereas I appreciate the promptness and personal nature of the apology, I can't help but think that if I had sent my original, un-edited-by-Amy letter — the one with the references to the tears streaming down Ray's frost-bitten face and his repeated sobs of "Where Moose?" all the way home — that we'd have scored some free tickets.

As a corollary, Ray became quite enamored of the stuffed Moose we bought him as consolation, and started referring to himself as "Moo-sss," making "moose" the first word in which he ever pronounced the "S."

My nighttime skydiving buddies canceled tonight, I'm all caught up on my vigilante patrols, my band doesn't have a gig, and Natalie Portman is washing her hair. So, since I can't do any of the exciting things I usually do on a weeknight, I decided to organize my Internet bookmarks. Let's face it: no one can lead the fast-paced life that I do every single day; even I need to take a moment and do something painfully banal and tedious.

I haven't reviewed my bookmarks in a really, really long time. Frankly, with Google just being so darn good at finding stuff, I don't use them much anymore. But in dusting them off tonight, I came across some rather good sites I haven't looked at in a while. Here are some of my favorites.

Based on some further thinking and some feedback on this post, I've decided to go to the baseball tryout sessions throughout March but not sign up to play for the season.

Basically, it came down to money and time to spend with Ray. Since he goes to bed so early, the weekends are the only time I get to spend with him. It'll be different next summer when he probably won't be napping and can attend games, but this summer, it would just be too hard to not hang out with him every chance I get.

Two recent conversations that demonstrate what a crazy, topsy-turvy life I lead with my two wacky housemates.

Situation 1: Toddler only wants to wolf down one type of food on his dinner plate to the exclusion of all else.

Parent: You're not getting any more Brussels sprouts until you eat more of your chicken and noodles!

Female: Let's just drive back to the interstate, turn around, and start over again.

Male: Why don't we just pull into a gas station and ask for directions?

Female: No, we're not doing that.

I haven't been inspired to write anything lately, so here are some photographs. Enjoy.

1. Nostalgia (e.g. the Berlin stuff, Morrissey)
2. Good songs from bands/albums I don't otherwise care for (OutKast, Gorillaz, M.I.A)
3. Both 1 & 2 (The Cult, Skinny Puppy)
4. Unfamiliar stuff I'm trying out (TV On the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

Hey, I just won Oscar Madison's weekly word verification contest!

According to Oscar:

It's called "word verifictionary" and it's the latest craze!

That's right. Take those nasty blogger word verification letter-strings and turn them into a fun game. Make a word out them and define the word!

Updated at 19:20 PST to include illustration.

I've been wanting to try out an old-fashioned safety razor (similar to the one at the right) ever since I read somewhere that it gives a closer shave than disposables (even my beloved triple-blade Mach3). Men's shaving gear has become a multi-million-dollar industry, with sites like The Art of Shaving catering to the swelling ranks of men who spend loads of money on skin care products. But I wasn't willing to fork out $45 + S&H on a fancy new safety razor because I didn't know if I'd like it or not. So, I've been periodically hunting for one at antique stores.

I finally found one in West Seattle the other day. Next, I needed double-edged blades, and I was surprised to find them at the regular ole corner drug store. One quick stop into the bath and body shop on University Ave. for a shaving brush later, and I was ready to lather up like it was 1929.

I was able to find everything I needed for my excursion into antiquated shaving practices much easier and much more cheaply than I had counted on. This, of course, meant that the actual practice of shaving would either not work as well as I hoped, or I would end up slicing my jugular.

But not so! Today, I withdrew the shining, deadly piece of stainless-steel from its case, screwed it into my new antique Gillette holder, liberally applied my Tom's of Maine mint shaving cream over my beard, and gave my face a scrape.

The result: no blood ... and no hair. I can't say it's the absolute smoothest shave I've had, but it's pretty close to what my Mach3 can accomplish. The one difference is that I shaved only with the grain using my new razor whereas I have to shave both with and against the grain with the Mach3. Most shaving enthusiasts will tell you that it's verboten to go against the grain (it's bad for your follicles, or something) so maybe this will be a good thing for my face in the long term.

One of my favorite songs is P. J. Harvey's "You Said Something" on 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. It's not a 5-star track on my music list, but it's at least a 4.5. I especially like how it ends:

A rooftop, in Manhattan
One in the morning
When you said something
That I've never forgotten
When you said something
That was really important

In looking back on my life, the words that have prompted the biggest changes for me have rarely been intentionally profound. I can't recall one speech, book passage, poem, or lecture that carried the weight of some of the more off-hand and casual remarks that have struck something deep inside me. Like P. J. Harvey hanging out on a rooftop in the middle of the night talking with friends, the most life-altering realizations have sprung from throwaway lines. Here are some of the ones I remember:

Back when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, I played three seasons of second base on a recreational baseball team known as the Madtown M's. In spite of my rather paltry .146 career batting average (damn curve balls) and a crippling injury suffered midway through my second season (a broken thumb), I thoroughly enjoyed being on the diamond — the infield chatter; the late-inning, nail-biting tension of a close game; the thrill of turning a tailor-made double-play. I didn't play ball in high school or college and I considered myself lucky to have this latter-day opportunity to participate in my favorite sport, especially since most post-collegiates were expected to play the more beer-gut friendly game of slow-pitch softball. I played my last game for the M's in August of 2003; we moved to Seattle the following March. After two seasons off, I now have to decide if I'm going to play this year.

This week's Blog Shout Out focuses on Valentine's Day. But first: Post a comment on my birthday post, you lurkers! (You know who you are...)

• A valentine to Valentine's Day from Holly
• be mine by nina (Warning: Cute polar bear photos!)
• Tonya goes a bit overboard for the holiday!
• Althouse passes along the news that Women love Lloyd Dobler
• the bonster's not too into it

Back around 1994, I worked for a University library system and we started offering web development training courses as part of our user education program. It seemed somewhat odd that a library should be doing that and not, say, the computing center, but we were interested in the whole burgeoning 'Net phenomenon from an information science point-of-view, so it sort of made sense.

My colleague, Paul, and I would teach librarians and patrons all about how to format and publish "pages" using "HTML" so that people could use "browsers" to access them. Since we taught in a Mac classroom, we would use SimpleText as our HTML editor. We taught people how to code links, ordered lists, unordered lists, apply bold and italic formatting, and properly use the 6 header tags. I still remember the excitement when background and link colors, tables, and inline JPEGs made their appearance. Sigh.

Not too long afterwards, software developers began creating "WYSIWYG" (what you see is what you get) tools. The first round of these products were buggy and produced awful HTML code in the background. We reluctantly added something called Claris HomePage to our curriculum, but we spent a lot of time in "code" mode so that our students would learn the standard and not just one vendor's interface to it.

One day, Paul and I met with the user education steering committee, one member of which was a rhetoric professor of mine and a web enthusiast. He questioned our need to continue to teach "raw" HTML since the WYSIWYG tools were pretty good and just going to get better. He foresaw a time when people wouldn't need to even look at HTML code, just as they don't look at the formatting code underneath a Word document.

I argued in favor of continuing to teach HTML since there was still signficant utility in going "under the hood" to fix formatting problems, and for the pedagogical reason that it was always better to teach people what was happening under the surface so they could choose their own path in how they wanted to use it.

His point-of-view eventually won out, however, and the user education program drifted more and more toward teaching tool-specific courses on general web page-making.

Flash forward 12 years to the present day. Again, this is a work-related story but I think it's cleansed of any identifiable detail. I just spent the morning reviewing about 50 pages of documents and email correspondence among a small group of people involved in a relatively small web site implementation within one of our units. There is a dispute about the deliverables and whether or not the third-party design group did everything they said they would do.

The chief source of conflict, I have determined, hinges on the word "template." The third-party designers feel they delivered an HTML "template" when they turned over source code for the main page design with placeholder text ("Lorem ipsum...") where the content should go. The other party says what they meant by "template" was a Dreamweaver template; a specially-coded HTML page for use in one particular web editing program. Without this kind of template, the "web developer" cannot fill in the content and edit pages on the site.

So, you now see why the title of this post is about how Promethean my forethought is. This is exactly the kind of scenario I envisioned 12 years ago: someone representing him/herself as a "web developer" but who is locked into one vendor's platform and unable to strip off the skin and monkey around with the insides. In this case, the extra work and all the time it has taken to sort out who meant what is costing the unit thousands of dollars, not to mention now about 4 hours of my time.

A few months back, I wrote about my relentless search for a pocket-sized mechanical pencil. This was to accompany my favorite pocket-sized pad of paper, the 3"x4" staple-bound Rhodia graph pad. I eventually gave up and settled for a "Pilot G-2 mini" gel pen, which did the job but caused me to cringe everytime I had to cross something out.

One day last week, I pulled out my pad and (inferior) pen on the bus to write something down and my bus-partner, a Japanese woman named Yasuko, mentioned that she had a tiny mechanical pencil about the size of my pen. I demanded to know where she got it, and was disappointed when she told me "Japan!" "But," she continued, "you might find one at the Kinokuniya bookstore inside Uwajimaya" (a Japanese supermarket in the International District).

That Saturday, Familia Steel headed down to the ID....

In a previous post I wrote about how I didn't really mind meetings too much. I said that 70% to 80% of meetings I attend are at least somewhat worthwhile. When they are good, they can be really useful; when not, I just want to poke my eyes out with sharp sticks.

Yesterday, I had meetings at both ends of the spectrum. I don't typically blog about work, but I have omitted enough details to satisfy the lawyers (I hope).

I promised Amy I wouldn't write about ex-girlfriends, but this story is from so long ago, it's about Valentine's Day, and it's not mainly about an ex-girlfriend, so we'll see if I'm sleeping on the couch tonight or not.

SEATTLE Feb 14, 2006 (AP)— A non-record-breaking storm buried sections of the Northwest under less than 1 inch of snow on Tuesday, slightly inconveniencing a couple dozen travelers and marginally interesting winter-lovers who took to the streets with boots or thick-heeled shoes and slightly warmer jackets.

None of the major Seattle-area airports were closed for much of the day, and airlines did not cancel more than 500 inbound and departing flights. By Tuesday evening, the airports were expected to remain open with full service.

The storm came on the heels of a typically rainy January that had people donning light raincoats and umbrellas.

The National Weather Service said 0.5 inches of snow fell in Discovery Park, which was not even near the most for a single storm since record-keeping started in 1869. The old record was 48 inches in January 1880.

"We might not see anything like this again this winter," Jason Rosenfarb said as he walked with his 5-year-old daughter Haley. Just then Haley jumped head first into the snow and said: "Help me. There's not enough snow and I bumped my head on the ground."

Seattle officials expected all roads would be cleared by early morning after the snow melts, which costs the city nothing.

Related News: Northeast Storm Sets Mark for Snowfall

Advertising that your hotel is "modern" is only risking obsolescence; proclaiming it to be "fireproof," however, is just asking for trouble.

The Bush Hotel in the Internationsl District surrounded by 4 Seattle Fire trucks. 2/11/06

Apologies for the crappy cell phone photo....

I've been busy lately hammering out last minute details for a half-day conference I've been organizing at work. I used to scoff at the notion that "certified event planner" was an actual professional credential, but now I know that event planning is hard! Though a CEP probably wouldn't have broken a sweat pulling together today's gathering, I've been having nightmares for the last few nights. The event went well overall, but it wasn't made any easier by:

• the venue listing the event incorrectly on their event board
• the venue staff directing people to the 4th floor ... when there is no 4th floor in the building
• attendees not bringing their own copies of the agenda despite it being emailed to them, like, four times, and the event planner (me) not having 200 printed copies of the agenda available for people who didn't bring their own

I'll admit that I dwell pretty firmly in the past when it comes to music. I don't really listen to the radio and none of my friends are really into music so I don't have a whole lot of ways to get introduced to new stuff. Ever since I ripped all my CD's into iTunes, I've spent a good deal of the time organizing, cataloging, and rating the songs in my library and not so much time expanding it.

I have my nifty little widget over to the right there that displays what I'm listening to at any given moment, and I recently added the little star icons that display my rating of each song. You can also click the link underneath the song info to see my entire iTunes library. To make this exciting service available to you, my loyal readers, I have a nighly task set up on my PC that dumps the song information into a database on my web server.

It occurred to me that since my iTunes library was in a database, I could run some database queries to analyze my musical tastes and trends.

Updated for clarity and style: 2/10/2006 18:45 PST

Neil: Surprise!

Mike: Neil it's very rare that you interest me but today you have. Why do you keep coming in here carrying a cake and saying "Surprise?"

Neil: It's my birthday.

Mike: Now you knew that already and we don't care, so where's the surprise?

The Young Ones - "Summer Holiday"

Here's what I want for a birthday present. I want everyone who reads this to post a comment. I don't care if it's anonymous; I don't care if it just says "Hey!"; I don't care if you don't know who I am and you found this site by searching for "ugliest baby picture" or, as my site statistics inexplicably reveal, "historical pioneer hazerd photos."

My stats show that my site averages 25 unique visits per day. I want to see how close to reality that really is. (Thanks to Oscar Madison for this idea)

And if you really want me to be your BFF, you'll sign up for a subscription (over there to the left) so I can justify the hours of work I put into getting that damn thing to work!

Last week, I was on the agenda of a very high-level University committee to present a report I had written. Some of the issues are complex and nuanced, and almost all of the recommendations involve somehow getting more funding or diverting existing funds to another sector. Nevertheless, I have lived with this report for the last year-and-a-half, and I was confident that I knew the material backwards and forwards and that my recommendations were sound.

I was confident, that is, until the morning of my presentation. Shortly after I woke up that day, I started to question my research and conclusions. I imagined standing in front of this group and being subjected to verbal barbs and ridicule for daring to suggest the things I suggested. Worse, I imagined the members of the group dismissing me as young and naïve, as someone just wasting their time with trivial nonsense. I feared that I had overlooked a significant bit of work, or completely misunderstood some issue that would render the entire report moot.

This sense of my own inadequacy and the fear that I'll be exposed as a fraud are pretty long-standing feelings for me. These are not debilitating fears; I have never missed out on anything because of them nor have I ever completely frozen up at a critical moment. When I'm in the midst of something, the fear vanishes and I usually end up handling most situations pretty well (as I did this time, it turns out). But sometimes the moments, hours, or days preceding an event such as this are filled with dread and insecurity.

While everybody else in the city was watching the Seahawks lose to the ... uh, other team, Familia Steel headed for the hills. Er, mountains, actually. Armed with our $6 sleds, we tackled the challenging slopes near Snoqualmie pass.

After growing up in the Midwest/Great Lakes Region, I can't tell you how much I love the fact that there is no urban black snow or piles of thick sludge on the streets in the city, but we only have to drive less than hour to get our sled on if we want to.

It's Friday; time to review the week in blogging.

• nina posts a paean to February, my beloved birth-month
• Oscar is terrorized by Heidi Klum
• the bonster reports on certain rodent behaviors in Pennsylvania
• mclir picks apart the State of the Union
• Holly tries to get me to meme

I've always prided myself on doing my own taxes before my birthday (February 9). Part of my tax refund then goes into my annual birthday excursion to the blackjack tables. It's a good system.

Before owning a house and having a kid, it was pretty simple — grab a 1040-EZ (later, a 1040A) at the library, grab a calculator, and take about 30 minutes. Things have gotten complicated in the last few years, but I've always made my deadline — though I haven't always made it to the casino of late. The only concession to this whiz-bang modern technology the kids these days are all into was to download fill-in PDF forms from irs.gov. I still did all the work by hand, but my returns looked really sharp!

This year, inspired by a review of tax web sites on the LifeHacker web site, I checked out the top-rated on-line service, TurboTax.

Yesterday, I reported that I felt unclean after ditching Mozilla Thunderbird and loading all my email into Microsoft Outlook. Why should this simple act of using new software have such a visceral effect on me? Read on to find out....

I walked across campus this morning morbidly hopeful that I'd see Thomson Hall teetering on the brink of an enormous sinkhole. But, as you can see, it's still standing. The local news channel has changed the focus of the story to the building's "shifting floors."

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

A building on my campus is collapsing. I'm far enough away for it not to concern me, but I know people with offices there and they've been asked to evacuate. They still don't know why it's falling down... .

I feel so dirty.

I feel like scum.

I'm using Microsoft Outlook instead of Mozilla Thunderbird.

More later on why, and why this is a big deal for me.

Right now, I need to go take a shower....