November 2007 Archives

My parents tell this story about me when I was probably four or five. One day, John the Hippie who lived next door was out in his backyard trying to repair a blown bicycle tube on his 10-speed. I went over there to "help" as I enjoyed talking to John the Hippie and he seemed to enjoy chatting with me. After I watched him struggling with trying to cram the tube under the tire, I suggested that maybe he take the tire off, put the tube inside, then put the whole thing on the wheel. This seemingly obvious solution hadn't occurred to John the Hippie, so he beamed about the whole thing to my parents and the story lives on in family lore.

The other day, I was putting up new wall sconces in our living room (check them out) and Ray was helping. I had removed the old ones and was starting to screw the new brackets to the wiring box, but the new screws were too big for the 75-year-old non-standard wiring box holes. I let out a small grunt of frustration and thought: "Great. Now I have to replace the wiring boxes." Images of former home "improvement" projects I have attempted flashed before my eyes. I envisioned that, before I was done with this, there would be a four foot hole to the outside above our fireplace and we'd just have to move.

Ray heard my grunt and asked: "Daddy, why 'Ugh!'?" So I explained the predicament.

Ray just shrugged and said: "I guess we'll just have to use the old screws."

You know, the ones that I had just removed two minutes earlier? Those screws? The ones that fit?

I climbed down and gave Ray a big hug and thanked him for his suggestion. The sconces were up within minutes, and I didn't even electrocute myself.

I am well pleased with my son, but, of course, this all means that his dad is no smarter than a hippie.

Here is Ray's new favorite song, Tom Waits' "What's He Building in There?"

OK, so it's borderline (or maybe wholly) inappropriate for a four-year-old, but he requests it and he doesn't seem at all disturbed by it. Today he called it "a funny song" so maybe he gets the humor.

One of my first assignments on my high school newspaper ("The Tower Tribune") was to write a review of "Santa Claus: The Movie," which I passionately hated and gave a 3 out of 10 following a snide and scathing dressing down.

Apart from "A Christmas Story" and the Alastair Sim version of "A Christmas Carol" I have yet to encounter a holiday-themed movie that hasn't just sucked, but sucked hard. I'm such a Scrooge about Xmas movies that I even hate "It's a Wonderful Life."

But I can only aspire to achieve anything near the brilliant levels of Xmas-movie-directed venom accomplished in Pajiba's review of Fred Claus. If you're not familiar with Pajiba (rhymes with "vagina"), go and read this review. Go there now.

Amy went to a fund-raising auction at Ray's school last night. It was apparently quite a scene. She won a color consultation and six hours of professional painting services, so it looks like our bedroom will finally be getting painted. Other items we had our eyes on, such as mosaic paving stones made by the middle schoolers, went for multiple thousands of dollars. Where the hell do these people get that kind of money?

Anyway, more importantly, she gathered some more intelligence on Ray's status at the school. Specifically, she learned:

That the female director of the school and a female teacher (who is not his) have argued over who Ray likes more
That one of Ray's female classmates considers him her "best friend"
That another female classmate has named one of her stuffed animals "Ray"

Yes sir, that's my boy!

For the last several years, I have been gradually building up this inordinately complex, highly sophisticated Excel spreadsheet to track every last aspect of my personal finances. All my investments, all my expenses, all my tax liabilities, even projections into the next couple years ... everything. With one keystroke, I could see the effect of, say, changing my withholding or increasing my retirement contributions.

When I had three computers (work, home, laptop), I saved this spreadsheet to my GMail space using a Windows extension called GMail Drive. GMail Drive lets you mount the GMail file system as a networked drive. You can open it in Windows Explorer, see all your files, double-click them to open them, etc. I installed it on all three computers and never had to worry about keeping the file in sync. Also, it was already on a networked drive, so it was just like it was backed up, too. Right? Right.

Do you see where this is going yet?

Yesterday, I opened up the file, tweaked some stuff around, saved it, and closed it. As GMail Drive was copying the new file from the temp directory to GMail, something went horribly wrong.

"Unable to create file," it said.

No problem, I thought. I'll just open up the temp version and re-save it.

No temp version.

Never mind; I'll just open up the original from GMail and re-do all the changes I made. There weren't that many.

No original.

No biggie, I thought. I'll just cry and bang my head against this large wooden table right here for about an hour or so.

OK, now Gmail Drive is an unsupported hack job, so I was probably stupid to trust it, but I figured the worst that could happen is that it would simply stop working once Google finally decided to block it, or restructure their file system, or something. I could always get to the file via GMail itself. It never occurred to me that it could be in some way responsible for losing data.

But I guess that's why my employer doesn't trust me with any information systems of my very own....

Today, Ray and I made some hors d'oeuvre for an auction happening at his school tonight. We mixed up mayonnaise and buttermilk, added chopped up sun-dried tomatoes and grated smoked gouda cheese, threw in some paprika and spread the mixture into some celery sticks. Yum.

It occurred to me afterward that the remaining stuff would nicely mix into tuna fish for the makings of a fine tuna melt sandwich. And I was right! Yummy!!

Here's the full recipe:

My friend Kate recently alerted me to a campaign organized by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (no, I'm not linking to them) to boycott/protest the upcoming fantasy film "The Golden Compass" because -- according to them -- it has an "objective to bash Christianity and promote atheism. To kids." Kate's fitting response was "I want to slap people."

Got that Christians: Just don't go see it lest Nicole Kidman's bewitching eyes or Daniel Craig's piercing intensity infect you with godlessness. Because we all know that movies are like giant syringes that inject their ideologies directly into your brain. And the kids, the kids!! Won't someone please think of the children?!?! Since they are born atheists, seeing this movie might interfere with the other forms of indoctrination you're subjecting them to. Keep them away!!

Remember when the atheists got all hot-and-bothered about the movie version of noted Christian apologist C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia? Remember when we all advised our fellow heathens to boycott the movie's advertisers and picket the theaters because we were scared for our secularism? Oh wait; that didn't happen. I forgot, we trust ourselves to not be somehow hypnotized through the mere act of watching a movie.

I read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was a kid. What does that tell you?

Anyway, Catholic League, I'm sure New Line Cinema thanks you for the free publicity.

Oh, and how about teaching kids how to engage with and evaluate ideas critically? Just a thought.

The Police's "Synchronicity II" cycled up on one of my car CD's the other day, which caused both me and Ray to seriously rock out (Ray: "He just said 'Dark Scottish lake!'"). After the CD ended, I toggled over to the radio where I heard a few bars of Sting's "Fields of Barley," which acted as a musical finger jabbing itself down my throat causing me to gag. I hastily changed the channel.

It got me wondering: which other pop musicians, if any, have fallen from stone-cold awesome to nauseatingly sucky as far and as quickly as Sting?

Discuss.

Some co-workers of mine and I went to see a production of the play "Cloud 9" at the Balagan Theatre in Capitol Hill last night. It happens to star an insanely talented woman named Juniper, who I've been happily getting to know lately. It's always fun to see a friend perform, and it's been a long time since I've known anyone in the arts, so this was an extra special treat. The play was outstanding and managed to be provocative and compelling about gender roles and sexuality without being pretentious or preachy.

It'd been a criminally long time since I'd attended an independent stage production. To be honest, my experiences with live theater have been mixed, and my personal history with actors themselves has been ... well, that's a subject for another blog post.

Mostly, though, I have always found it exceptionally difficult to become as engrossed in a room full of actors as I can be when confronted with the impersonal detachment of the silver screen. I've always needed the fourth wall to be more of a unbroken barrier between me and "the action." Watching a play, you hear the squeak of the actors' shoes on the boards, you see the broken hems on their costumes, you feel the walls of the set quiver when a door slams shut. The imperfection of reality imposes itself harshly onto the proceedings, and I am too much a child of the cinema and its glossy unreality to overlook the scars that easily.

So maybe I'm actually growing up, or maybe the cast of "Cloud 9" was exceptionally good -- or both, I'm sure. None of those usual petty issues mattered at all last night, and I found myself emotionally engaged and invested in the characters in a way that has been rare to me. I've always subordinated emotions to the intellect -- indeed, I've believed that emotions are, by nature, intellectual -- but I guess I'm becoming an old softie or something. And I kinda like it.

Oh... and go see the play. It runs through November 10.

I was pretty excited to get to see Bruce Schneier at the Educause 2007 conference here in Seattle a couple weeks ago. I've been a regular reader of his blog for a couple years now and I respect his broad-minded view on both information technology and general security.

A couple days ago, Bruce wrote a terrific essay on the post-9/11 fear state we live in called "War on the Unexpected." It's been widely reposted, but I thought I'd give it a mention here in my own minuscule corner of the blogosphere.

The gist of the article is that our national paranoia over terrorist threats has given rise to an environment in which ordinary people are being asked to report "anything unusual" and law enforcement professionals are forced to escalate the situation without performing any real threat analysis. When the threat turns out to be non-existent, the professionals are rewarded with praise and promotion for their "quick" over-reaction rather than being chided for wasting resources.

And in case you don't think Bruce Schneier has the chops to write such as essay, keep in mind that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat.

My strictly self-rationed TV consumption is up to three shows now: The Office, 30 Rock, and, of course, America's Next Top Model.

I am disappointed that 30 Rock is pre-empted tonight by something called Earl so I'm watching 30 Rock clips on NBC.com in protest.

From last week: if Alec Baldwin doesn't get an Emmy from this single scene alone, then something is not right with the world.

Therapy, Jack Style

Ray and I are paving the area next to our driveway. Yesterday and today, we dug out the trench; tomorrow, we go get the bricks and set them in. He's really into this, and was actually quite a big help today with his little shovel and his willingness to do all the little jobs that I don't like doing (like picking out rocks and clearing the dirt of weeds).

When he and I were measuring the area, I decided to teach him a little more about inches and feet. The conversation got me thinking about my favorite fake unit of measurement: the millihelen, which is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

I can't recall where I first encountered it, and I also didn't know that it was coined by Issac Asimov. Again, Wikipedia to the rescue.