View From the Bushes

Tour de France Over

2009-07-26T22:51:00.002-06:00

Well the Tour de France is over. Contador took the yellow. Schleck was 2nd and Armstrong was 3rd. I feel pretty good about my predictions. All three of them were in my top five, and in that order. The two I messed up on were Cadel Evans, who (as my business partner Will is fond of saying) asploded, and Levi who had to abandon the Tour because of a broken wrist. I feel really bad about Levi, first off I think he deserves to be a team leader on his own team, not riding support for someone else. Secondly he hasn't had a lot of luck in the Tour and to have to leave it prematurely again is a real tragedy.

There were lots of controversies in this year's tour. First was the whole dust-up about Contador dropping Klöden on the Col de la Colombière. The recriminations came because there was this idea that Astana might be able to sweep the podium, and by dropping Klöden, Contador made that impossible. Well Bruyneel has been publicly saying that whoever is the strongest would be the team leader. So Contador has that on his plate, and then people expect him, additionally to get two of his team-mates on the podium as well?

Also let's say that all the time Klöden lost on the Colombière went away, well then, yeah, he is on the podium, but he knocks Armstrong off, so you still don't have three Astana on the podium... So while I think the majority felt that the attack was a mistake, in the final analysis, it either didn't matter or was exactly the sort of thing Contador needed to do to win.

One of the other big dust-ups was Cavendish made the claim that the only way Thor could win the Green Jersey competition was by complaining about Cavendish and getting him relegated. So Thor goes on a big attack and manages to take two intermediate sprints to put Cavendish in his place. Cavendish ends up apologizing and basically says that Thor deserves the green jersey. Well guess what, when the smoke finally cleared, he was right. Thor won the green by fewer points than Cavendish lost from the relegation. Another case where the convention wisdom says one thing and in retrospect they were wrong, but no one bothers to point it out...

Overall the Tour could have been better. One problem is that rather than enhancing the drama the Armstrong vs. Contador battle just annoyed me. Also Ventoux was kind of anti-climatic, and not much really happened in the first two weeks. 2010 though, is shaping up to be very exciting. For one thing, I'd much rather see an Armstrong vs. Contador battle with them on different teams then with them on the same team.

2009: First Japanese riders to reach Paris

Long overdue Tour Update

2009-07-22T08:23:00.004-06:00

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Well if you were following the tour very closely you'll have noticed that the first couple of weeks were kind of boring. Sure there was some back and forth between Armstrong and Contador which was much discussed in the media. Whether the rift was as severe as people tried to make it, or whether it was all part of some really deep plan by Bruyneel is not clear, but I suspect it's a little bit of both. The thing that bugged me was that it seemed obvious fairly early on that Contador was the stronger rider. But I guess it wasn't really unmistakable until Sunday, when the tour finally got really exciting. Contador rode to a stage win and finally took yellow.

Today's stage, which is taking place as I write this, has been really exciting. Thor Hushovd managed to get out in front and solo through both of the intermediate sprints giving him a fairly nice lead in the green jersey competition. Then, once they hit the final couple of climbs (two Cat. 1's really close together) there was some great attacking. Bradley Wiggins, the great revelation of this tour, has been dropped though he's staying relatively close, and he's a great time trialist so we'll see how bad this stage ends up hurting him. At the moment he's 1:41 behind the Schleck brothers on the stage.

Some other interesting things from this stage. Cadel Evans, who has had a fairly disappointing tour, finally blew up and was dropped on the first climb of the day (when Thor was in the front of the race) and Carlos Sastre, launched the first big attack of the day among the GC contenders and then he was dropped only a couple minutes later. I've never been a big fan of Sastre. I'm sure he's a nice guy, I just haven't ever been impressed by him. So to see him crack serves to give me a certain level of satisfaction since I previously said that I didn't think much of his chances. Of course I also had Cadel as my #2 pick after Contador, so I probably shouldn't gloat too much...

And Frank takes it...

Big Sandy Lodge

2009-07-08T22:41:00.002-06:00

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Well I'm back. I missed some really exciting tour stages. Columbia managed to open up a split in the peleton, Armstrong made the split, but Contador didn't, and lost 40 seconds. Then the next day after the team time trial, Cancellara managed to keep yellow by 22/100th of a second... Oh well so it goes. I'll catch all the exciting bits on the rest day recap.

So the vacation... We drove up right after church on Sunday and got in around 5 pm. We had dinner at the lodge. That's one thing about the Big Sandy Lodge, they make incredible meals. The next day we started off with a two hour horse-ride. I'm glad it wasn't any longer, riding a horse puts pressure on parts of my body that aren't used to it. My hip was particularly sore after the ride. The rest of the day was spent napping, reading and playing board games with the family.

Yesterday was the hike. I've been really happy with how cool and wet the summer has been thus far. What I didn't realize was that a wet June meant that the mosquitoes would be particularly bad. I've been to the Wind Rivers quite a bit, and I don't believe I've ever seen mosquitoes even half as bad as they were Tuesday morning when we started the hike. I kid you not, an hour and a half into the hike I wasn't sure I could make it. While you're moving they have at least a little difficulty keeping up, but the minute you sit down, suddenly there's literally hundreds of them. I wasn't sure how we were going to eat.

Fortunately we gained a little bit of altitude which helped thin them out and then, shortly before we were going to stop for lunch we got some wind and that really helped out. Without that, I may have lost my mind... In any case I don't want to go too overboard it was still a really nice hike. I figure we ended up doing 9 miles total, which when you consider that my youngest is 6, is pretty impressive. All told we were out for just over seven hours.

Absent the mosquitoes it was really just about the perfect vacation and even with the mosquitoes it was a really good vacation. Still, as always, it's nice to be back.

I would genocide those little devils in a heartbeat

Tour de France

2009-07-04T17:09:00.002-06:00

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Well people have been bugging me about blogging, and I confess that I really dropped the ball. I could say things have been crazy, I could say that I don't have any time, but that's always the case. I'm not sure what exactly caused my long hiatus nor do I make any promises that I will start blogging regularly again, but how could I let the Tour pass without my normal commentary? (Thanks Dismas!)

I should mention that I leave tomorrow for a four-day three-night trip to a place without electricity, to say nothing of internet. So even if I wanted to there's no way I will be posting any updates on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. Anyway, with that caveat I'll dive in.

Today was stage one of the Tour de France, this would normally be called the prologue, but I guess that organizers felt that it was too long to be a prologue. Fabian Cancellara won the stage, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. Alberto Contador came in 2nd. I don't think many people are surprised by this result, but they should be. As you may recall Contador started as just a really promising climber. Initially his time trialing was not that great. For him to get into a form where he comes in second, on a short time trial is pretty impressive. I mean look at the time trial specialists he beat: Levi Leipheimer, Cadel Evans, Kloden, Zabriski, Millar, and of course Armstrong.

So what about Armstrong? Well from what I saw at the Giro, he was coming into form near the end. I expect him to do well, but he's 37, and even if he comes into this tour better prepared than ever he just doesn't have the same engine. So other than Contador who do I think will do well? Okay here's my list:

1- Alberto Contador
2- Cadel Evans
3- Andy Schleck
4- Levi Leipheimer
5- Lance Armstrong

I should probably include Carlos Sastre, but for some reason I've never liked him. Anyway there you go. I'll try and post about the team time trial (even though I'll miss it live) on Wednesday.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

Cold Fusion on 60 Minutes

2009-04-20T13:35:00.002-06:00

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Long time readers may know that I have a soft spot for "Cold Fusion" (though I think they prefer the term "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions") these days. In fact if you look on the right hand side you'll see a link to one of the main Cold Fusion websites (along with some other links that are probably woefully out of date). In any case I've long felt that there was something to the whole idea. And that while it may have been horribly wounded by mistakes that were made early on, that it would end up being a great example of truth eventually prevailing over doubt by dint of massive amounts of experimental evidence.

Anyway it's the 20th anniversary of the (disastrous) initial press conference and people are taking another look (of course some people haven't stopped looking). Including 60 minutes which did a piece on it. I would urge you to watch it, it's about 12 minutes long and they do a really good job of examining the issue, going so far as to ask the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They recommended Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy. Who went from a skeptic to a believer after spending two days at a Cold Fusion laboratory.

There is still the problem that it only works about 70% of the time, and it's not quite ready to give the world unlimited clean energy yet, but the whole thing is tremendously fascinating and exciting.

Coldfusion doesn't work I should know I have had to migrate a lot of sites from it to php.

Parkinson's Law for Hiring

2009-04-16T17:19:00.002-06:00

Cover of Parkinson's Law

I read a fair number of business books, particularly as a percentage of pages. One thing you'll notice when you do read a lot of them is that they don't age well. Which is not to say that they're worthless more that business just changes too fast for anything to be true for very long. The notable exception to this rule is "Parkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson. My dad recommended it to me many years ago. He had noticed the "not aging gracefully" problem as well and so he decided to start with the business book with the oldest copyright, which was "Parkinson's Law".

"Parkinson's Law" is actually grouped with humor books, but like a lot of jokes there's more truth in the jest than in a thousand serious statements. Parkinson makes a lot of points, the best know of which is that "Work expands to fill the time available for it's completion." But there are many others, and it's fascinating to see how true they still are. One of my favorites is that when an organization builds a nice new headquarters the end is nigh. We have a great example of that right here in Salt Lake. American Stores built the tallest skyscraper in downtown (the church office building aside) and six weeks after the opening ceremony they were bought by Albertson's...

Anyway I digress. We were looking to hire an new software developer recently and in the past the methodology which had been used involved giving them a little test project first, getting to know them over the subsequent six months as we gave them increasingly larger project before eventually offering them a full time position. It worked well enough except for the fact that it took SIX MONTHS FROM START TO FINISH!!

Well we didn't have six months, so when it was apparent that we needed to hire someone I suggested using the hiring methodology from Parkinson's Law. What he basically says is that the advertisement should balance the risks and the rewards of the job to such a precise degree that only one person will answer the ad, and they will be the perfect candidate. Here are a couple of examples from the book:

Wanted – Acrobat capable of crossing a slack wire 200 feet above raging furnace. Twice nightly, three times on Saturday. Salary offered $70 per week. No pension and no compensation in the event of injury. Apply in person at Wildcat Circus between the hours of 9 AM and 10 AM.

Wanted – An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of $6000 per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., USA.

He points out that there is no need (in the case of the first article) to insist that the candidates be skilled at wire walking, or that they be sober or free from dizzyness, because the ad has automatically excluded anyone how isn't. And in the case of the second you need not say that the person needs to be mad for archeology, because no one would apply who isn't. The point being that the salary and other benefits should be exactly balanced against the bad parts of the job (of which every job has legion) so that you attract only someone who really fits the position. So here was our posting on Craigslist:

Wanted -- full-time web programmer eager to prove himself as a software hero with mad programming skills. Intelligence, teamwork, and sacrifice will be required. Ideal applicant has read enough programming books to have a publisher preference, has had more computers than girlfriends, and can confidently use closures. Work hours are long but flexible. Starting salary is $40k per year.

About US:

This is a full-time position with an proven company.

We're extremely technical. Even our sales people are programmers.

We are NOT a temp-agency. This position includes health benefits.

Our current platform is built with Perl and MySQL. We use Ajax and HTML extensively.

We don't have old-fashioned time-cards, cubicles or strict dress codes

Employees may listen to music, play games, and surf the web as long as they get their shit done

If the word "shit" offends you, you probably won't work out. You don't have to be vulgar, but you have to have a thick skin and good people skills.

About the Job:

When you get here you will be the new guy. You will have to prove your programming kung-fu to everyone on the team. You will have to answer your phone after hours. It will be tough. It will require you to be extremely bright, optimistic, and a rapid learner.

After working for us for 12 months you'll be qualified to be a senior software developer at just about any company. You'll know more than most people do after a four year CS degree. You will discover tremendous new confidence in yourself and your programming abilities. In short, you'll be a bona fide software badass. Salary increase after you have proven yourself to be an equal on the team (realistically this will take you 9 to 12 months, at a minimum.)

You know all those movies that glorify honor, sacrifice and humility, and show people taking a bullet for their buddy? That's us. Only you probably won't die and we'll give you all the Rockstar you can drink.

If you feel you have what it takes, email a brief resume with references to Ross. If you're young and you don't have a lot of references yet, be prepared to impress us with all the software you have written in your spare time.

In the end we got 10 applications, about half obviously hadn't read the posting so they were immediately disqualified. We ended up interviewing three, one of the three was obviously out of his depth, the remaining two got the PERL Camel book and were told to come back in 3 days and show how much they'd picked up. We hired one of those two and we couldn't be happier with how it's worked out. And what's even more interesting is that the one guy we did hire is the one who really responded to the ad. In other words in his initial e-mail he mentioned that his favorite publisher was Addison-Wesley and that he HAD had more computers than girlfriends etc. In other words the idea that if you craft the ad carefully enough you'll get one perfect applicant has basically been born out in this (admittedly) tiny sample.

Another point to make. We had more than one person e-mail and say, I'm not at the stage where I can work for 40k anymore, but if I was young and out to prove myself I would totally have applied for that job, as one of them said it was "absolutely the best job listing/description I have ever seen".

Parkinson for the WIN

Trip to St. George

2009-04-05T16:16:00.005-06:00

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On of my wife's cousins (the last in that branch of the family) was getting married on Friday down in St. George (about a four and a half hour drive for us), so we decided to arrange babysitter's for the kids and head down. One of the first questions was whether to take one of our cars or to rent a car. I ruled out the van pretty quickly. It's old and tired, get's pretty crappy gas mileage and is kind of overkill for just two people. My car, the 91 Nissa Sentra gets great gas mileage, but always feels kind of fragile on the freeway. So we decided to rent a car, particularly since there's an Enterprise location right near our house and they have a great weekend rate.

So we ended up with a Nissan Altima. Before the trip I'd tweaked my back pretty bad while playing Squash, so I decided to take a muscle relaxant the night before and make my wife drive down, while it wore off. I took the muscle relaxant but it didn't seem to work very well. I didn't fall asleep very fast and I had no problem waking up the next morning and I didn't feel very groggy, but just to be on the safe side I had the wife drive anyway. I did fall asleep without too much trouble about an hour into the drive, but that's just me being normal, I don't need drugs for that.

I woke up and conditions were a lot different than when I had fallen asleep, the rain had changed to snow and the visibility was pretty poor. I believe I said "whoah" (possibly startling my wife...) less than two seconds later the back end started to slip a little. My wife tried putting on the brakes and suddenly we were in a full on spin. At that point there was nothing left to do but hang on and ride it out. I think we did a full 360, maybe more. We missed a nearby car by only a few feet ended, plowed off the road into the shoulder. Down the side, through a barbed wire fence and almost on to the frontage road.

Two cars stopped to see if we were okay, including the one we almost hit, which is how I knew since we couldn't see anything during the spin. He was understandably pretty upset, since if we had hit him the whole thing would have been orders of magnitude worse. Some people drove by on the frontage road and said there was a highway patrol car a little farther down (next to another car that had also gone off the road). The UHP car showed up in a little bit, and the officer was entirely humorless, though I can't really blame him. He wrote my wife a ticket for improper lane travel or something like that and called a tow truck.

The tow truck showed up pretty fast, we were fortunately within site of the town of Scipio. The barbed wire had scratched the hood, punctured one tire, ripped off some plastic under the bumper and taken one of the two mufflers and bent it 90 degrees so that it was within a few inches of the other muffler. Fortunately my wife had gotten the full damage waiver so we called Enterprise and basically said "We broke that one give us another one." Someone had to drive all the way from Salt Lake, so that ended up being a pretty long wait, but within a few hours we were back on the road.

Some additional points:

-We were going somewhere between 75 and 80 when the crash started.
-We discovered, once the car was up on the lift, that one of the rear tires was almost completely bald.
-The barbed wire fence belonged to UDOT, if it had belonged to a farmer I would have tried to replace it, but as it is I'm already paying for it.
-Enterprise was very cool about everything they definitely are getting more business from me.
-We missed the wedding, but made the dinner afterwards.
-I already didn't like Scipio, and this just solidified that, though the mechanic/tow truck driver was definitely a good guy.

Still a little bit shaken up

You Can Always Blog About the Bad stuff

2009-03-26T11:44:00.004-06:00

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Someone commented a while back that the robbers had apparently also stolen my will to blog. That may be true. What I can say is that the final robbery combined with my travel and then my wife leaving town, plus more than the usual level of chaos combined to make March really, really busy, and I feel like I'm only just now starting to see daylight. Busy is good. Business is going really well there are some deals on the table which could be potentially worth millions, the key is that word "potentially". It's in that journey from the potential to the actual that so many good things get beset by cannibals, devoured and made into drums.

In part I had nothing to blog about because, on the whole, things were going well. Fortunately for my loyal readers that couldn't last forever and just this morning I encountered a bunch of annoyances both small and large which served to give me ample reason to vent. A month or so ago I bought this booklet of deals for Midas, a local auto-repair chain. For $40 I got safety and emissions, an oil change and then like 10 more oil changes half of which were free and half of which were 50% off. I figured if all I did was use the inspections and the first oil change I'd be money ahead, so I bought two (one for each car).

Today I finally got around to using one. The big catch to them is that you have to have an appointment. So I showed up for my 9:00 appointment figuring that in the 30 or so minutes it would take I could read my book. Well they said that it was actually going to take an hour and a half. Well I didn't have that much left to read and it seemed like that was a lot of time to sit around. So I decided to walk back to work (where my other car was). It was about 12 blocks (mapquest says it's 1.89 miles) and it took me about 32 minutes to make the walk. Overall not too bad, I like walking, except for the part where this was the one morning I had forgotten my jacket, the temperature was in the 30's and it was pretty windy. My ears did not fall off, but it was a close run thing.

So that got me into a bad mood, then they called and told me that the rear cylinder's were leaking, and one of the bearings was bad and *blah* *blah* in order to pass safety it would be ~$700 in repairs. At this point I told them, hold off on that, I don't have time to do that today, and what I was really thinking is this is what I get for not going to the family mechanic. Well I guess I'll rectify that now and let him make the repairs, even if he can't do them for less at least I'll be giving money to someone I like.

So I hopped into my car, and went to pick up my wife so we could pick up the car. That's when I saw that some (pardon my french...) ASS-DOUCHE had plowed into my parking strip and had completely taken out one of my trees. There's a 3 inch stub sticking out of the ground and no evidence where the other 6 feet went and a gigantic rut through the landscaping rocks... Walking I can handle and should probably do more anyway; Money I can handle and should probably make more anyway; But having some careless assclown blow through the one piece of my yard that I actually liked... In the words of Homer Simpson... "URGE TO KILL RISING!"

Anyway I have some other blogs I'd like to do, so I thought I'd list them here in the vain hope that it will serve as an external commitment to write those blogs.

-Parkinson's Law for Hiring
-Our Vacation Procedure
-Persistent Web Games and Motivation

At the rate I'm going that should keep me busy until Summer.

Tell you what: we come back and everyone's slaughtered, I owe you a Coke.

Robbery

2009-03-04T20:42:00.002-07:00

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Okay... so here it goes. A few weeks back one of my business partners moved back to Salt Lake from Washington. In the process he forgot to bring back his key to the office. So the other partner lent him his key. So that evening he called me to tell me that he was locked out of the office. So I decided to just drive over and let him in. While there I decided that this had gone on long enough and I was going to drive to Wal-mart and get a copy right then. As I was leaving I went to lock the door, but my partner had already mentioned that he might end up having to leave, and that if so he would just leave the door open, plus some other people were coming for a meeting that night and they didn't have keys. So I didn't...

On my way out of the building I passed a tall skinny guy with a closely shaved head of blond hair and a backpack. Something felt wrong about the guy, but what can you do? Tackle everyone that doesn't seem cool? Of course I should have followed him, particularly when he went up the stairs towards our office. But the front door is open till 8:00 because we have a youth counseling center downstairs... Anyway I didn't stop him, or follow him and our best guess is that he was the thief. He (or some other person) walked into the office through the open door, walked over to a desk with a laptop, grabbed the laptop, the laptop case, a checkbook and walked back out. People were in our office at the time, just around the corner.

So I guess that was Wednesday, the next Tuesday when I came into work first thing that morning, things seemed weird. When I got back to my office, some files from my filing cabinet were on the floor and my monitor was gone (I have a laptop and I just plug it into an external monitor when I'm in the office). So then I walked back into the main area of the office and that's when I realized a brand new iMac we'd just bought was gone and another, older, imac was gone. That said a lot of stuff was still there, some of it was cable-tied, but it was apparent that they had gotten spooked. In the final accounting the things mentioned were gone, plus a credit card, a camcorder, an old mac desktop, and the checkbook of the guy who'd lost his check book the last time around...

We had an outside door that led directly into our office. For awhile it had not shut properly, you had to lift up on the door when closing it for it to latch (we're pretty sure we told the landlord about it he claimed we didn't, in any case we didn't tell him strongly enough). In general we told people not to use it, but we didn't really stop them from using it. One guy in particular used it just about every day to go to lunch. So when it was obvious that's how they had gotten in, it seemed equally obvious that this guy had not closed it tightly. (For the curious he was one of the people who's computer had gotten stolen.)

So we sat down and had a big meeting with the landlord and he agreed to implement bunch of new security features, fixing the door being pretty high on the list, but just as important putting a lock on the door between the outside door and the main work area. We also wanted him to have a horn right next to that outside door that went off the second it was opened, and a couple of other minor things as well. To his credit, with the exception of the horn, everything went in pretty fast, and I was personally feeling pretty good about security.

We were leaving for LA on Sunday and I really had to scramble to be ready. In the course of the scramble I missed getting my long-awaited watch. I finally decided on a model (MTG-1500-9AJF) assembled the necessary funds and ordered it from Japan. USPS claimed that they tried to deliver it on Saturday and left a notice (which is a lie) and by the time I discovered this it was too late to just go to the post office and get it. I was pretty disappointed that I was going to have to wait until I got back to get it.

On Monday I considered trying to arrange for a redelivery by calling the post office and calling my guys back at the office, but I didn't get around to it. On Tuesday I checked and the site said that it had been successfully delivered the day before. So I called on of my guys and he said, oh yeah that came yesterday. And a thrill of joy coursed through me, and even though I was eyeball deep in a bunch of work for the client I was in LA for, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. Well he wasn't in the office at the time I talked to him, but I told him to give me a call when he was just because I had some things I needed him to do.

Well when he got into the office he couldn't find the box with the watch. I figured it had just been misplaced, but after several minutes I started wondering how hard it could be to find a box in the midst of our fairly tiny office. That's when he told me that he was sure that it wasn't misplaced, that it was gone. And of course I couldn't understand how it could just be gone, and then he mentioned that the cops had been called. Initially I honestly thought he was joking, but no. There had been yet a third break in (and I'm not even counting the incident between break-ins one and two where someone shut off our power from the outside). And basically the new security measures had worked, except that when the watch had arrived rather than going to the guy who had the key and putting it in my office the same guy who might have left the door open on break-in two had just left it outside my door, in the hallway that the outside door opened on.

This time it was obvious that they had a crowbar and with that info it's unclear if the door had been left open the 2nd time or if they had just jimmied it in the same way they did the third time. It was also apparent that they had tried to bust open the door between the hallway and the main area. So basically things worked, but unfortunately there was a really nice watch there for their effort. Plus as I found out later our payroll packet was also placed in the hall next to the box. So that included my paycheck and the payroll report, which had everyone's social security number.

Anyway... so that's basically it. Most of our employees are feeling pretty freaked out and for the near term we've decided to just work from home. We'll see what happens from there. I sort of feel like if I had blogged about the first two robberies that the third one wouldn't have happened. That by leaving the subject open from the blog, it was left unfinished in reality. But I probably am ascribing too much power to myself...

Sign of the times?

Nostalgia

2009-02-26T21:17:00.002-07:00

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So last week was my birthday and this year is my 20th reunion. As a result of the two I ended up getting into this loop or rut or something where I spent a lot of time last week thinking about high school. So Saturday night I'm out at a play (Romeo and Juliet, not bad, I think the actress playing Juliet really nailed the 14 year old girl vibe) and when it's over I leave out a door I don't normally take. And there standing next to the water fountain is the first girl I ever dated. Because of all the time I'd spent thinking about high school I wasn't sure if I'd summoned her by force of will, or (more likely) seeing someone who resembled her and because of my state of mind I'd mistaken that person for this girl from high school.

Just on the off chance it was the first I walked up to her and sure enough that's who it was. You have to understand that I don't believe I've bumped into a single person from my high school (that I'm not still in contact with) in 10 years (since the last reunion) even though my high school is only an hour away from here. So after spending the week thinking about it to bump into someone in that fashion seemed like an amazing coincidence.

We talked which was a little awkward as you might imagine. Partially because it took a lot of brain power to even remember the threads of a relationship which had ended nearly 20 years ago (I had seen her at my 5 year reunion, but that hardly counts), but overall pleasant. One bonus to the whole event is that (all modesty aside) I looked good. I had on my nice Nordstrom sport's coat (which hides my gut...) with a turtle neck. My beard had just been trimmed earlier in the day, and overall I think if I was going to bump into someone you once dated I couldn't have dressed nicer if I had known in advance.

Next... The Robberies!!!

I'll be good...

Birthday

2009-02-18T13:16:00.002-07:00

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Well it's my birthday today. I'm 38. That sounds pretty old. I don't feel that old. I still feel kind of young, but I know I'm not anymore. I don't think I'm having a midlife crisis, possibly because I already had one, possibly because I'm too busy to get that introspective (yesterday I said that work feels like being eaten by ants, but I added that the last week or so when I've dared to open my eye, I've liked the scenery). I graduated from high school nearly 20 years ago. And yes high school does seem like a long time ago, but not 20 years long. I've been married for 13 going on 14 years and that seems like it's flown by. I guess the sobering thing is that if the last 13-20 years went by so fast it means that the next 13-20 years are going to go by as fast if not faster. To put some numbers out there.

In 13 years I'll be 51, all of my kids will have graduated from high school. I've always hoped that I'd be semi-retired by that point, but really? In 13 years?

In 20 years I'll be pushing 60, It's entirely possible that all of my kids will be married. My parents will be in their 80's. My time in the 21st century will be equal to the time I spent in the 20th...

So what freaks me out is how soon all of that is going to happen based on how soon all the last stuff happened...

Anyway whatever, it will happen when it happens and I imagine I won't be any more prepared for the future than I was for the past or present, so I guess I'll continue to play it by ear and hope to keep from screwing up too much. On a more celebratory note I went out for a various nice dinner with my wife and my two business partners. I ended up having a $70+ piece of Kobe Beef. I spent so long savoring it, that when I got near the end it was no longer warm, and I was getting too full to fully appreciate it, but there were some bites in the middle which may have been the best bites I've ever had. So even if nothing else fun/exciting happens for my birthday I think I'll have done pretty well.

If youth only knew: if age only could

Book Reading Update

2009-02-12T20:58:00.002-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

I'm doing pretty good on my book reading. I started the month off by reading "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't" by Jim Collins, a business book about how businesses made the transition from merely doing as well as the rest of the market to beating it by more than 3 times. Very few business books age well (except for "Parkinson's Law") and there are already companies featured in the book who have not turned out very well (Circuit City and Fannie Mae being the two chief examples.) But I think this one does as well as any of them. It's short and if you're interested in books like that you could do a lot worse.

The second book I read already this month was "The Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor. My #1 daughter wanted me to read it and I was interested in seeing what he had done with the world. In case you're not familiar with the book, the conceit is that it wasn't Lewis Carroll making up the stories of Alice, but rather Alice telling them to Lewis Carroll, and that he got them all wrong. Let me start out with the good points. It kept me engaged, I was never bored and I definitely wanted to see how it ended. Also, where a typical fantasy author might spend an entire trilogy covering the amount of time and narrative ground he does, but he covers each scene pretty fast, sometimes too fast, which brings us to the negatives.

For someone who's work would not really exist without him, and who wouldn't have achieved nearly the success even if somehow it did, he's really unkind to Carroll. Also one of the pleasures of this sort of book is taking something from the original and explaining it in a clever new light, there's almost none of that going on here. Every connection is really done in a very cursory fashion only a very tenuous link to the original story. Finally as I mentioned one some levels I liked the pacing, but I really could have used more detail, at some points it felt like he was just trying to through the scene as quickly as possible.

Audio book wise I'm working through "The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, Revised and Updated." I'm finding that history books don't go done quite as easy as novels in the audio format. I'm having the urge to flip back to re-acquaint myself with the various people. I think I'll still get plenty out of it, but this time I don't think I'm actually going to experience an increase in comprehension with the audiobook.

Also I've been watching "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" while composing this entry, and it's actually quite good. If you're into quirky teen movies I'd definitely recommend it.

Lame, Literally

Broken Toe

2009-02-11T12:56:00.002-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday we had initially agreed to play squash at 9:30 that morning. But one of the guys I was going to play with decided that because he had an important project he was trying to finish up that night that 9:30 was too early. So I took it off the calendar. By later in the day it looked like we might be able to play at around 4:30. Unfortunately the other guy I was going to play with ended up being on a call he couldn't get out of and we missed that window (all six courts were booked solid starting at 5:00). Fortunately things opened up again around 7:00 and we headed down then.

I was playing with my two business partners, one of whom had just moved back into town, and hadn't played squash in many years. I myself had only played a few times since picking it up again, and this guy is younger and in overall better shape. The first game I played with him he was still getting the hang of it and I beat him pretty handily, but by the second game with him it was apparent I was really going to have to play hard to keep up with him. As a result I ended up going for some shots that I might otherwise not have. Including one soft shot that dropped really close to the front wall. I did manage to get that shot, but I had to sprint to the front of the court to get to it, and I wasn't quite able to stop in time and I ended up essentially kicking the front wall with my right foot.

I could tell I'd slammed it pretty good, but I initially I just chalked it up as another minor bump in the course of playing. And I played out the rest of the game. I'm pretty sure I didn't exacerbate the injury by doing that, but who knows. The point was that initially it didn't seem that bad. Once I got off the court I could start to sense that it was hurt pretty bad. I considered the idea that it might be broken, but I thought I'd wait and see how I did. My two partners played another game, and then we went and grabbed a bite to eat. I ended up getting home around 10:30. As soon as I told my wife what had happened she started looking up stuff on the internet and quickly assembled a mountain of evidence indicating that I should go get it looked at. Faced with that, and my wife's concern I decided to go to the emergency room.

Overall the ER wasn't too bad. I was out by around 1:30 or maybe even a little bit earlier. The X-Rays confirmed (or revealed) that it was in fact broken, A fracture down the center of the first bone from the tip down to the joint. That latter fact means that there's some risk of developing arthritis later, so they want to send me to a podiatrist, because I guess there's some things that can be done to mitigate the risk. I took me quite a while of tossing and turning before finding a position I could sleep in without making my toe hurt, and overall, while my toe feels better than last night, I'm definitely feeling out of sorts. Supposedly it should take about three weeks to heal, I'm optimistic that it won't be a huge inconvenience, but who knows, I've never broken a toe.

I'm older than I've ever been and now I'm even older...

PS I'm trying this blog add on called zemanta which suggests links and images. So far it's pretty cool.

The General

2009-02-05T21:40:00.002-07:00

I donate platelets today. This time, rather than watching one of their movies I brought my own. I've had "The General", the well-regarded 1927 Buster Keaton movie, out from Netflix for a couple of weeks, but I hadn't found time to watch it because, as a silent movie I figured I would need to give it my full attention (as opposed to a "talkie" where the sound can help you keep up with the story). So I figured watching it while donating platelets was perfect.

It wasn't quite what I expected. I expected it to be funnier, with more really outrageous physical comedy. It did have quite a bit, but I guess I'm so used to the really over the top physical comedy of more recent fair that the more restrained and realistic physical stunts of "The General" took awhile to get into. But once I got over that and started to really enjoy Keaton's amazing expressiveness I really enjoyed it. My suggestion if you happen to decide to watch it go into it with the attitude that it's a classic, and not a comedy.

One scene in particular killed me. (Minor spoiler) He's rescued the girl and he's racing back towards safety and while he operates the engine he has the girl adding wood to the boiler so that they can stay ahead of their pursuers. As she's doing that she notices that the cabin is untidy and she starts sweeping. It takes him a second to notice, so intent is he on the the following train. Obviously he's a little upset and he throws the broom over the side of the train and tells her to keep putting wood in. So she picks up a stick maybe 2 inches in diameter and maybe a couple of feet long, more of a twig, really. Opens up the boiler and tosses it in. At this point he's at a loss and he bends down a picks up a large splinter, the size of couple of toothpicks. She looks at it, like "great idea" and tosses it in as well. At that point he loses it and sort of throttles her, then in the fashion of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction he realize there's really no point and kisses her. The toothpick part was particularly funny.

#130 on IMDB above "The Sixth Sense" but below "Die Hard"

500th Post

2009-02-03T18:05:00.002-07:00

This is my 500th post on blogspot, so it should be something epic right? Well what could be more epic than discussing that gigantic volume of libertarian thought and objectivist philosophy, "Atlas Shrugged", which I just finished, as an audio book... Yep I listened as someone read the entire thing to me. That was 52 hours and 22 minutes of talking, and it did take awhile, two or three months (I did take a big break around the holidays though).

Before I get into a discussion of the actual book I should take a moment to comment on audio books. I will admit to being anti-audio books for most of my life. It just didn't seem like real reading. That was the elitist front I presented to the rest of the world, but secretly I was also worried that I wouldn't be able to follow an audio book, that I would get distracted and miss some critical piece of information. Once I actually gave one a chance I found the opposite, I think that I probably retained more of the book listening to it then I would have had I read it. Of course Atlas Shrugged is a gigantic polemic where most things are repeated three times so maybe it's not the best test of that particular point. But overall I would say that I'm sold on the idea. In particular I think it's a great way to get through fairly dense classics. I plan on rounding out my Dostoevsky reading once I have powered through some shorter works.

Okay the actual book. Any discussion of a 1200 page book is going to be long, and even though this is the 500th post I feel that I still need to keep it to a size where I can pretend people are going to read it, so I'm going to do some rapid fire bullet points:

-As I mentioned it is a polemic. It is not subtle and I think this fact more than any is what puts people off.

-That said I think there are some really interesting ideas in there, ideas that aren't in wide enough circulation. And I'm not talking about adoption, just comprehension.

-The first half was much better than than latter half.

-The three hour speech at the end was in fact three hours on the audio book, and yeah it was a little long, but probably more bearable split up over several listening sessions than read in one sitting.

-Her theory of love and the romantic episodes in the book are... distracting. And some of the super-human stuff at the end bordered on being silly.

-Given the strong female protagonist at the core of the book I would think that Feminists would be more excited about Rand, but she was never mentioned in any of the feminist literature classes I took as part of my English Major. And most of the references I see online describe the relationship as "conflicted".

-I understand some of the libertarian core beliefs much better now. Some, like the oath to renounce the "Initiation of Violence". Are well worth adopting, others, like the gold standard are more questionable.

-People who casually dismiss this book (and the larger Rand canon) do so at their peril and to their detriment. (Check out the Praise and Influence section on Wikipedia)

-I liked Francisco d'Anconia better than John Galt.

-Her vision of unbridled capitalism is much closer to reality than Marx's view of fully-implemented communism.

I have a hard time recommending the book because it's so long, but if you were leaning that way perhaps this will push you over. I would recommend, however, if you're not going to read it then you should avoid making generalizations (good or bad) about it. A sin I think I was guilty of on more than one occasion. As you might imagine something that is ~1200 pages is going to have lots of nooks and crannies which resist easy categorization

Who is John Galt?

Super Bowl

2009-01-31T22:15:00.002-07:00

I'm on of those people who generally thinks the commercials are the best part of the Super Bowl. I'm particularly interested in seeing this years commercials. I assume that the current economic crisis (what is the official term people are using? Downturn? Gigantic Correction?) will produce a different crop of ads then we're used to seeing. Will they be more subdued? Funnier? Will it be 90% beer companies? I assume the auto companies won't be advertising. Will Go Daddy do it's traditional risque ad?

Last year's Super Bowl was truly one for the ages, I'm not expecting anything as exciting this year. I think part of my apathy stems from the fact that I kind of feel like I've already seen the best football game of the year (Go Utes!)

Mostly I'm trying to avoid getting blamed for a Pittsburgh loss...

The Thirteenth Tale

2009-01-28T21:48:00.002-07:00

As I have mentioned I have a goal to read four books a month. It looks like I'm going to make it this month, though only by using the "counting one book as two" methodology. The first book was "Holidays on Ice" by David Sedaris, which I believe I already talked about. The second book was "The Thirteenth Tale". My wife is reading it for her book club next month and she enjoyed it so much that she wanted me to read it. It was about the right length and looked like a quick read so I took it on.

The basic premise is that an author who has never told the true story of her childhood is about to die and so she decides to finally come clean. Her choice of biographer is unusual. She selects a young girl who works with her father in a rare book store, and has done only a few amateur biographical articles, but something connects the two of them and the young women begins to record her story. Obviously there several twists and turns in the story. I can't say too much more without giving away critical aspects of the story. But it was a good read, if there were a sequel I'd pick it up.

As far as the third (and fourth) book, it's an audio book and I'm about 45 minutes from the end so you'll have to wait until Thursday or Friday for me to talk about it.

I really need to start these earlier

Miscellany

2009-01-26T22:47:00.002-07:00

-First the word "miscellany" is there anyone out there who doesn't think the British pronunciation of this word is 10 or 20 times better than the American?

-I woke up successfully at 6 am this morning and felt pretty good. Part of the reason for waking up at 6 is so that I can be to work by 7:30, unfortunately this morning I spent the first hour I was up shoveling some very heavy snow. It was good to get it taken care of, but hopefully every morning won't be like that.

-I discovered, shortly after arriving at work, that we had gone from using 3 MBPS (MegaBits per Second) at our data center to using over 20, within the last week. We figured out who it was and we're probably just going to pass the costs along, but it was still quite a shock.

-I've decided to just start leaving my car at work, so that I don't have to guess if I'm going to need it and decide whether to drive over in the morning, I can just walk to work every morning and if something comes up, then my car is right there.

-After much deliberation I've decided that I will count some books as more than 1, and in fact I'm going to make it even more complicated than I initially said. Any fiction book over 750 pages counts as two and any non-fiction book over 500 counts double as well (and if it's over 1000 then it would count as 3...)

-The kids are watching "Chuck" and they really like it, even my 5 year old daughter...

Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all folks!

World of Warcraft

2009-01-23T16:10:00.003-07:00

I have never been that big of a WoW player, at least not compared to many of the people I know. The highest level I've ever made it to is 46, which if you're familiar with the game is nothing. (The level cap is 80 and levels 70-80 take as long as the rest of the levels put together, or so they say, obviously I wouldn't know). In fact I canceled my account and went without for five or six months (and should have canceled it six months before that given how I wasn't playing). But a variety of circumstances brought me back...

The first was that one of my business partners moved to Portland (actually a town just across the river from Portland that's actually in Washington.) We used to have an "Executive Meeting" every Saturday Morning, but with him in another state that was no longer possible. Secondly the other business partner had not ceased to bug me about playing together some night (which we had done for quite a while over a year ago). Also I had go essentially without playing any video games except for work (I know a very weird concept but you'll have to trust me on that) for many moons and I was ready to start playing again. Finally "Wrath of the Lich King" had just been released. So the solution to all these problems was to start a Friday night game with the two other partners where we would play WoW in a group and have our "Executive Meeting" at the same time.

So that's what I'm doing right now (I'm on follow) and it's actually worked out surprisingly well. A long time ago I read this chess book by, I want to say Alekhine, I only remember one thing from the book, but it's stuck with me, he mentioned that everytime you move a piece you want to accomplish as much as possible with each move. So ideally you'd want to protect one of your pieces, threaten one of their pieces, firm up your strength in the center of the board, make room for other pieces to develop, etc. Now translating this into non-chess terms this mostly just means multi-tasking, and anything more than that may just be me looking for some weird rationalization. But I've always felt that there was a level to that idea beyond just frenetically multi-tasking. That perhaps there's a way to do things in a way that maximizes the benefit and enjoyment you get out of any activity. It could be combining exercise with watching the program you're never able to catch, or combining exercise with getting the time outdoors you never seem to have time for. I don't know if you get my point, or if I even have a point, but there there it is...

My personal favorite is to combine regret for the past, anxiety about the future, and paralyzation in the present moment.

Fail

2009-01-22T19:00:00.002-07:00

Well, today was going to be my first day on the new schedule (waking up at 6 am as I mentioned yesterday). Unfortunately I came down with something last night and ended up awake at 4:00 hunched over the toilet puking. It's just not my winter. Fortunately it appears that this was just a short term thing and I only threw up the one time and other than a headache I'm feeling pretty good right now. So hopefully tomorrow will be the day.]

On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking forward to watching "The Daily Show" again now that Bush is no longer in office. Perhaps I'm making a hasty generalization, but anytime I tried watching the Daily Show over the last few years it was almost entirely one-sided. I felt like I was watching that episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer gets a job standing in for Krusty the Clown and he's at the opening of a Krustyburger and the Krustyburglar comes by and Home is so enraged by the idea of burgers being stolen that he attacks the Krustyburglar and beats the holy crap out of him, and one of the kids in the crowd comes forward and, in between sobs, begs Homer to "Stop. Stop. He's already dead!" Two years into his second term and that's how "The Daily Show" started to feel.

But I think the long beating is beginning to come to an end. This clip in particular was very encouraging. Not sure what Colbert is going to do, I'm cautiously optimistic there as well, though it's entirely possible that without Bush to galvanize the left that his show won't be a successful. I've heard that conservative media enjoyed a huge boom during the Clinton years and I wonder if Olbermann and the like are going to suffer from a dip in viewership and popularity. Anyway I've probably wandered around aimlessly in the post for long enough.

After about the 40th one saltines start to get old

Sleeping

2009-01-21T15:44:00.002-07:00

One thing the holidays completely screwed up was my sleeping schedule. This is not to say that I'm now staying up until 4 am and sleeping until 2 or anything like that, but I am sleeping later than I want and not napping very often. So I'd like to get back to waking up early and taking naps. Part of the impetus for this is that I'd like to be into the office every day by 7:30. This gives me 30-45 minutes to get settled and get set up before anyone bugs me (there's another guy who comes in right after dropping his wife off for work at 8:00.) And obviously if I'm not waking up until 7:30 that's not going to happen.

I would also like to exercise in the morning as well. One might think that now that I'm playing squash, morning exercise could be done away with, but I think it's even more important to cross train a little bit and to also do some strength training and stretching. When you combine arriving at work at 7:30 with morning exercise and the showering and other stuff I have to do I pretty much have to wake up by 6:00. So that starts tomorrow. Since that's earlier than I'm used to I'm assuming that tomorrow I'll also take a nap, and voila! I'm back on track.

I think one of the big changes I'm going to make this time around is to wake up at 6:00 seven days a week. Which sounds like an awesome idea on Wednesday at 4:00 pm, but will probably sound substantially less cool Saturday morning at 6:00. Oh well, that's future Ross' problem (like so many things) and while I think near-future Ross is going to hate me for it, I think far-future Ross is going to thank me.

Now if I could just do something about past Ross...

Watch

2009-01-19T18:08:00.002-07:00

My birthday is in less than a month, and I think I'm going to angle for a new watch. The problem is that, while I am happy driving a $1000 car, reading used books and wearing thrift store shirts and patched levis, my taste in watches is pretty expensive. My old watch was a monster, but the barometer is broken so it no longer can use pressure to detect an oncoming storm or tell the temperature, and two nights ago the band broke. Obviously none of this really takes away from it's ability to tell time, but I already tried buying a replacement band at a Casio specialty store and was told that they didn't have anything and weren't even sure if they could order it.

So not an iron clad case for getting a new watch, and certainly not an iron clad case for spending a lot of money on a watch, but my birthday is approaching, and if I don't catch this window then the next major opportunity will be next Christmas. Part of the way I justify spending a lot on a watch is the use I get out of it. You've probably never seen anyone in your life who looks at his watch as much as I do. Now normally this trait annoys the hell out of people, as well it should, but it does have the one positive benefit of decreasing the $/use figure of any watch I buy, and so I think I should take advantage of that on the rare occasions when it's germane.

I've spent a little time looking around, and initially I was thinking of getting an ana-digi watch (for example the watch reviewed here) and I still really like the look of a watch with multiple faces. But the current top end model of the watch I'm replacing is also very attractive. Both initially seem out of my price range, but the internet is a wonderful place and great deals abound...

Anyway as I said I have nearly a month to go, so if you want to offer any ideas that'd be great. There are a lot of watches out there and I've only begun to scratch the surface...

Oh crap! I'm late!

Squash

2009-01-16T20:12:00.003-07:00

One of the other partners and I have been talking about renewing our Squash Club memberships. Renew maybe to strong a term since it was probably five years since my partner had a membership and and probably closer to ten since I had a membership. So things were finally going well enough that we decided we had the time and the money (the company is paying for the membership, I'm sure I'll come to regret that come tax time but for now it's nice) Our first stop was at the Nordstrom Rack so I could pick up some white soled shoes, which are surprisingly rare, but because of scuffs they don't allow black soles in the squash courts. After that we had to go back to the office because my partner had forgotten his wallet with the company card. But we eventually made it to the Squash Club.

The two women at the sign-up counter were super nice, though the locker room had suffered some water damage and was being repaired. Anyway, I could tell that I would need to work on my equipment. I don't really have any athletic shorts, so I was using some pretty heavy cargo shorts. My gym bag was a plastic sack from walmart, and I forgot the key thing for someone who's going to exercise, deodorant. Fortunately I do have a squash racquet of my own from back when I used to play. I was pretty worried about how I'd do, from a conditioning standpoint and a cardiovascular standpoint. It wasn't pretty, but I ended up playing for an hour and we got four games in. (the record was 2-2 if you're curious) Overall a very satisfactory experience.

You may think, "Why Squash?" Well the story of how I ended up discovering squash is long and complicated, and I'll have to tell it some other time, but the story of what drew me to it once I started playing may be worth telling. The sport most people use as a comparison for squash is racquetball, and there are similarities. But IMHO, squash is clearly superior (I enjoy racquetball, but hear me out.) With racquetball, the ball is very bouncy as a result it ends up being primarily about strength, hitting the ball as hard as you can, with squash on the other hand, the ball is not very bouncy at all and as a result there's a lot more skill/choice involved in where you put the ball. To give one example hitting the ball backwards and banking it off the back wall is a fairly common shot in racquetball, but a fairly difficult shot in squash.

I realize I'm not explaining myself very well. Fine I'll go to my hole card. Back in 2003 Forbes decided to put together a list of the "10 Healthiest Sports" Squash was #1. The most important thing about exercise is that you enjoy it so that you do it a lot, and I really, really enjoy squash, so there you have it.

If I could have survived a fifth game I think I would have won

Books

2009-01-15T14:30:00.002-07:00

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to read 48 books (4 books a month). As usual with most of my goals this may be too ambitious, but I did make one correction which I hope will lower the ambition and increase the feasibility of this resolution. As I mentioned in a previous blog I have all these heavy tomes sitting on the book shelf behind my desk. Each of these books is a major undertaking and could possibly take all month to get through just by itself. Previously I my (completely unrealistic) goal was to read a book a week and to generally select from that stack. So the change I made was to drop it from one a week to 4 a month (mostly to give myself more flexibility in getting through books, though shaving four books off the total is nice too) and to allow myself to read shorter, fluffier books. Since reading almost any book is better than reading no book at all.

In that vein I picked up David Sedaris' revised "Holidays on Ice" while at the library on Monday. It's only 166 pages with about 25 lines a page as opposed the 40 lines per page in a typical paper back (though I think I've seen as high as 50 lines a page). At 166 pages of 250 words a page (10 words per line seems about average) it comes out to 41,500 words. Which just barely makes it a novel according to the SFWA. No it's not Science Fiction, the SFWA is just the only group of writers nerdy enough to have thought about the dividing line between a Novel and a Novella.

Actually there's enough white space between chapters that it's probably less than 40,000 words, but I'm not going to let myself get hung up on that. It's clearly a book, hardback even, a group of pages bound together between a single cover. The big question I have is should I ever count something as two books? For example the other book I checked out from the library is Ken Follet's Pseudo-Sequel to "Pillars of the Earth", "World Without End" which clocks in at 1024 or 2^10 pages. Which if we assumed even 350 words per page would make it 358,400 words or more than 8 times as long as "Holidays on Ice". While I don't intend to count it as 8 books, counting it as two for the purposes of my goal doesn't seem excessive. But on the other hand it ruins the purity of the system. A book is a book, a collection of pages between the same cover (don't start in on audio books...) And whether it's 166 pages or 1024 it should count the same. What do you think?

The economy can't be all that bad if I'm honesty worried about stuff as petty as this...

Sprinkler Crisis

2009-01-14T21:31:00.003-07:00

So exactly a week ago I was taking a nap (still trying to get over the cold) and my wife came in a told me that the sprinklers had suddenly turned on. I confess that initially the idea was so bizarre, and being still somewhat asleep I couldn't really process the idea that the sprinklers were on. When I finally processed the information and got up shortly thereafter the sprinklers were indeed on. One set in the back yard and one set in the front yard.

Before I get into the comedic, three-stooges-esque, attempts to fix the problem a little history is in order. When I moved into the house the automatic sprinkler system was already there, and I used it for the first year (maybe two) before decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and switching to just using a rain-bird. Now when I decided to stop using the system I should have figured out how to turn it off, but instead I just ignored it. Which brings us to the present day...

So anyway the sprinklers were on. By the time I started looking into the problem the sun was already setting. I wasn't sure exactly what would happen if the sprinklers ran all night, but I couldn't imagine that it would be good. So I started off by looking at the box that controlled the system. It was set in the "Rain(off)" position. Which is where it had been for lo these many years. So I unplugged it. That didn't do anything. So then summoning all the mental power my aged brain still possessed I remembered the box set in the front yard that I thought might have something to do with the water. Sure enough, there was a water meter in there, a big pipe and a valve. So I turned the valve and the sprinklers shut off. Yeah! But then I quickly discovered that I had shut off the water everywhere, including inside the house.

Well the next step was to look around for individual valves for each of the different zones. As it turns out there were several in the back yard and one of them actually did control the back set and so I was able to shut that down, but I still had the problem of the front sprinklers. Unfortunately by this time it was completely dark and my extensive search yielded nothing, and since some of the kids were supposed to shower I had turned the water back on so I was rooting through the bushes through leaves and mud all while being sprayed down by the nearby sprinklers.

After the first big search turned up nothing I went in and tried calling my dad, no answer. So then I called my brother-in-law who always seems to have a knack for these sorts of things. He said there had to be a separate shutoff within about six feet of the water box. So another search ensued without any success. At that point I went next door to see if the neighbor had a similar sprinkler set up to me and could tell me where to look for the shut-off. Unfortunately he did not, and in fact his own shut off had been covered up by sediment.

I think it was a this point that I started calling some friends. One of my friends thought he might be able to get his brother or dad to help me out. His brother wasn't home from work yet, but he was able to get a hold of his dad who ended up giving me some useful things to try out (none of which ended up being the solution, but they made me feel like I was working towards a solution.) The next-door neighbor had suggested I try another neighbor farther down the street who was fairly handy. So that was the next step, and he was very gracious and offered to come down and see if there was anything he could do.

I was sitting out on the lawn waiting for him to arrive and clearing away more of the snow when I noticed something of a divot in grass. After poking it a bit I thought it looked promising. So I started clearing away the grass and pulling at the sod, and after pulling away several large clumps of mud and grass I uncovered a green plastic cover about six inches in diameter. It took getting rid of a couple more clumps of sod before I was able to pull off the cover to reveal a long white pipe with a valve at the very bottom. It was right about then that the other neighbor showed up.

I took the long turner thingie (yeah that's it's actual name) I had and tried to turn it but it wouldn't budge, but since the neighbor had just shown up I decided to bring him up to speed on the situation. He had some ideas and questions, but eventually we came back to the valve I'd just uncovered. I thought that perhaps it was frozen, and he thought that maybe we needed some cheater bars (or pipes in this case) so I decided to boil some water and he went to his house to grab some pipes.

The water didn't seem to do anything, and he and I were both worried that if we put too much torque on the thing that we could break it, but we decided to give it a shot anyway, and with him on one side and me on the other we were eventually able to turn it off. And once we turned the main water back on we discovered that it had in fact fixed the problem. The whole thing took about three and a half hours. Overall, pretty lame, but as usual I assume I have no one to blame but myself...

Yes, the initial message I left for my brother-in-law was pretty pathetic

The Horrible Holiday Illness

2009-01-13T13:15:00.002-07:00

I wasn't too concerned about not getting as much done as I'd wanted while I was on vacation because I figured I'd have the majority of New Years Eve and all of New Year's day available to take care of whatever I couldn't get done while I was up at Bear Lake. Well when last we left our "hero" I had really bad chills. Well I did in fact make it home where I immediately took 800 mg of ibuprofen, cranked the electric blanket up to max and collapsed. Things are hazy but as I recall I was in bed for basically the next 18 hours (really horrible "sick dreams", you ever have those?). New Years day I woke up pretty early but only because my back couldn't take being in bed for any longer. The fever and chills continued for the rest of New Year's Day and I spent most of the day wrapped head to toe in blankets, that is until the fever broke and then I would immediately throw everything off and break out in heavy sweating.

Other than the fever and chills I had body aches, a horrible chest cold, coughing, a runny nose and generally a pretty grumpy disposition. By the 2nd I thought the worst was over. As it turns out I had just reached the "manageable with huge amounts of drugs stage". Which allowed me to actually progress from spending most of my time in bed to spending most of my time in a recliner in front of the TV. The good part was this gave me the opportunity to watch the Sugar Bowl. Where the boys from my Alma Mater made Alabama look like 2nd tier pretenders rather than #1 team in the nation for much of the season. (I was happy to see that Utah ended up at #2 on the final AP poll of the season.)

I gradually improved over the weekend. The aches went away and I slowly weaned myself off the 3200 mg of ibuprofen I'd been taking every day. The rate of improvement slowed down over the course of last week and I still have a cold. Though my chest/lungs are vastly improved. I sneezed five times in quick succession this morning, if my lungs had been in as bad a shape as they were a week ago five sneezes might have ended me. I took until Thursday of last week before I was in the office for any significant amount of time. But as of this week I think I'm back to fighting strength. Of course I've got a ton of stuff to catch up on, which is really the most annoying thing about being sick, but I'm optimistic that I should be caught by April, May at the latest.

The tubes are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And piles to sort before I sleep,/And piles to sort before I sleep.

Skiing/Snowmobile Vacation

2009-01-12T17:36:00.005-07:00

Well this year like every year for the last 24 (I haven't been to all 24 I've missed at least 3 years that I can think of) my family went on a winter vacation between Christmas and New Years. For most of those 24 years it was the "Snowmobiling Vacation", within the last five or six years I've tried to add skiing to the mix, with some success. Taking a big vacation every year presents all manner of difficulties. One of the biggest is housing, particularly given how big my side of the family is. At this point we're up to 29 people and for many years we had to rent a lot of condo's which ended up being spread over quite a big distance. However as of last year we moved into an inn which has more than enough rooms for everyone, a giant entertainment room and a huge dining area. Last year it was awe inspiring, this year it was nice, but not quite the dramatic change it had been the year before.

Anyway my own vacation was kind of mixed bag. Still 10 times better than not being on vacation, but not quite as nice as in years past. My back had been bothering me since midway through November and I'd desperately needed to take a muscle relaxant, but they knock me out for about 18 hours and I'd never had 18 hours to just check out. In an attempt to fit in all the snowmobiling and kids activities we had ended up scheduling two days of skiing, Saturday and Tuesday. That may seem like a good thing if you like skiing, and if I had the muscle tone and the conditioning it would be, but I don't I'm old and fat and my back was killing me. Fortunately I was able to work out an arrangement where everyone would get all the skiing they wanted on Tuesday (as it turns out when Tuesday actually came I had still scheduled too much skiing for the kids). Which allowed me to take a muscle relaxant on Friday night. Good for my back, bad for getting anything done.

I should pause at this point to mention something that's probably obvious to anyone who knows me. My goals for what I was going to accomplish while on vacation were ridiculously ambitious. Not to get into too much detail, but there was a lot of overdo organization and other stuff I wanted to do on my shiny new laptop. In between movies, meals, muscle relaxants, outdoor activities, exhaustion and e-mail I always have a lot less time than I think. And I should know that. Oh well, it wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't got sick, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway so Saturday was mostly wiped out by the aforementioned medication. Sunday was pretty nice. We went to church but other than that it was a nice day. I think I may have taken a nap... Monday was kids day. That morning we got out the 120cc snowmobile and let all the kids (at least those who weren't too big) drive it around in a circle on the snow covered lawn outside the inn. After spending most of the morning outside I figured Kid's Day was done and I could relax the rest of the afternoon. Unfortunately the kids had other ideas, they wanted to go sledding. Unfortunately the best hill for that was at the top of Logan Canyon, so we piled into the cars and headed up the road.

When we first got up there I wasn't sure if we were going to have snowmobiles. And the kids were eager to get started so I took the first sled ride with one of my kids (my #2 son I think). What I hadn't counted on was that it was warm, and the snow was pretty soft and wet, there was no crust. So walking back up from the bottom of the hill was a ridiculous exercise in wading through snow up to my mid thigh. To say it was "aerobic" would be the understatement of the year, and within 10 minutes of showing up I was already in the red zone. My heart was beating fast enough to be mistaken for a hummingbird and I was breathing in great big gasps. Shortly after that the snowmobiles showed up, but even so I was breathing heavy the whole time. I needed at least 20 minutes of convalescence to get everything under control and instead I spent the next hour and a half in a constant loop on the snowmobile, stopping only to get off and wade through more thigh deep snow to retrieve kids and sleds. Oh and I should mention I had no gators or long johns on, just levis and gore-tex pants. As a result there was nothing to keep those two items from ending up around my knee everytime I took a step exposing my bare lower leg to the snow... Yes, I did a lot of dumb things in a relatively short period of time.

That evening I was pretty tired, but the worst was yet to come. Tuesday we went skiing. We got up there pretty early to make sure the rental shop wasn't a zoo. And that part went pretty well. The morning was dedicated to teaching. We were taking the #2 son up for the first time and me and my youngest brother took on the task of teaching him while the #1 son and daughter went off with two of my sisters. #2 son did really well. But after being accidentally clotheslined by his uncle he was ready to quit after the 2nd time down the hill (not including one trip down the rope tow hill) but after sitting and resting for about an hour I convinced him to take one more run. That run was amazing. He basically skied continuously from the top of the hill to the bottom with only a couple of minor tumbles on some turns. But after that he was completely wasted.

The plan was to have the wife pick him up at noon and then ski from 12-2 with the older kids. As it turns out the older kids had decided they had had enough as well so we sent all three of them home. #2 son was so wasted I was actually a little worried, but unlike old farts such as myself kids bounce back amazingly fast and he was running around later that after noon. For my part my trials were just beginning. I had planned on only two hours of high intensity skiing with my siblings, but since my children left early it ended up being twice that (okay I only made it three hours, but I'll get to that).

So you know how when you exercise to hard, particularly in really chilly air the next couple of days your lungs burn when you take a deep breath? I assume you do since generally I only get through the first half of that sentence when I tell this story in person before people start nodding. Anyway... That's what I was feeling on Tuesday, the whole day I felt short of breath. So my initial hypothesis was that I had overdone it the day before with the sledding and that, in combination with the straining of muscles I didn't even know I had was why I was feeling crappy all afternoon while skiing the blues and the blacks with my siblings.

Right before 3:00 (the ski resort closed at 4:00) I told my youngest brother that I had "two blues or one black left in me". He immediately decided that he would take the one black. So we set off down a black run we'd never tried before. As it turned out it may have been the toughest black at that resort. It was all moguls from the very top all the way to the bottom. The moguls would be broken up by the occasional flat, but each set was longer than the last. Anyway it was pretty brutal, but I made it to the bottom without crashing, so I considered that quite the victory. At that point I hoped into my sisters van and we drove back to the inn.

I think my body was running in survival mode and once it got into rest mode all the lingering fatigue hit. By the time I got back I could barely walk. When I got into my room I collapsed at next to my bed. It took me an hour to take off my winter gear and get into a warm bath. The rest of the night I was completely wiped out. I went to bed early and by the next morning I was feeling a little bit better. But it had begun to occur to me that maybe it wasn't just being old fat and out of shape that maybe I was coming down with something. I managed to get the car loaded and drive to my sister's house. I had left my car there because we had to much to fit in the van and she had taken some stuff up in their suburban. So my wife dropped me off there and I waited for my sister to arrive so I could get the stuff and drive the rest of the way home.

It was while I was waiting that the chills set in. I managed to load the car and set out to make the last 45 minute leg home. I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I was shaking really bad, the heat was on full and I knew then for sure that I was sick, and not just out of shape. This a tiny comfort, in the midst of all my suffering but only a very tiny one. Not to spoil the next leg of this story, but I did make it home okay, and I'll pick up the next leg of the story tomorrow.

Still old, but not as frail as I had feared

Parts list for new PC

2009-01-09T12:13:00.002-07:00

The last time I put together a new PC was nearly four years ago. At the time I posted a list of all the components in my blog. As I mentioned yesterday, none of my past entries come even close to that entry in terms of how often I've gone back and referenced it. So I thought I'd do it again. Both for the value to "Future Ross" and also because my brother-in-law is thinking of building a machine and he wanted to see what I had built. The grand total for all of this was $420 and I ended up with a pretty good machine. Not the liquid-cooled demon I was secretly dreaming of, but a machine that had no problem playing the latest games. Now of course that $420 doesn't include a monitor, keyboard, mouse, the OS or any applications, but even so...

Here you go:

Kingston HyperX 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Desktop Memory

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

PNY VCG96512GXEB GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

Antec NSK4480 Black/ Silver 0.8mm cold-rolled steel construction ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 380W Power Supply

ASUS P5KPL-CM LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

Sony NEC Optiarc Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache IDE 20X DVD±R Burner

Looks like the case may have been on sale, so it's slightly more expensive now. But you're still looking at only around $450 for a brand new gaming PC.

Here's hoping you get to spend more time gaming on yours than I do on mine... :(

Off the Rails

2009-01-08T21:04:00.002-07:00

Wow, I really went off the rails there. My last entry promised an review of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert and then several weeks of silence. Well I have a lot of catching up to do. The following topics demand to be blogged about:

1- Review of Mo Tab Concert
2- Final Results of Fantasy Football League
3- Specs and Parts list for my new PC (The parts list for the last computer is my most frequently referenced past blog entry)
4- The Horrible Holiday illness
5- The Vacation
6- Sprinkler crisis

I'll start with the review. The soloist was Brian Stokes Mitchell. If you know him at all you may remember him as playing "Cam Winston" the upstairs neighbor Frasier feuded with, on Frasier. Anytime you get a great male baritone for a Christmas Program I really feel like you have an obligation, to the Universe, to do "Oh, Holy Night". My wife retorts that they did that song when the King Singer's guested. To which I retort that they've done some version of "I Saw Three Ships" at each of the the last three concerts. Anyway, as you've probably guessed they did not do "Oh, Holy Night". Which is okay, they did a lot of great songs. And BSM brought a lot of great songs to the concert. The problem was that they were all modern songs, largely with nothing to do with Christmas. I enjoyed them, and I enjoyed the concert, but I go to the Mo Tab Christmas Concert to get the old timey religion. The big Christmas choral pieces that bring the house down.

So in that respect it did not measure up to the previous two years. Which let me make clear is a pretty high bar. So by any other standard the concert would have been a 9 or a 10, but when compared to the Kings Singer's and in particular Sissel it was only a 7 or an 8. The one thing that was superlative about the concert was the narrative section. They had Edward Herrmann do a piece called "Longfellow's Christmas" which covered the period during the Civil War when his son was wounded and shortly after his wife had died. Now if that didn't bring tears to your eyes I don't know what would. So as usual a fantastic performance, just not quite the transcendent event it had been in years past.

1 down 5 to go

Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert

2008-12-11T15:55:00.002-07:00

The annual Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert (or as we call them around here Mo Tab) is tonight (and the rest of the weekend). I personally think they peaked with Sissel, but it still should be really good. We're not going to have as big of a group as we normally do from my family. My dad is busy with school so he can't make it and my sister and her husband bailed at that last minute with sick kids. But I expect to still have a really good time. One of the highlights is going to Crown Burger before the concert. Which won't be the same without my brother-in-law who currently holds the record for the most consecutive days eating at Crown burger, but I'll try and keep my uncontrollable weeping from disturbing the other diners.

I'll let you know how it was tomorrow.

It's my steak sandwich and I'll cry if I want to

Fantasy Football

2008-12-09T11:17:00.002-07:00

Well we've finally reached the playoffs for Fantasy Football. Which of course start before the actual NFL playoffs so that all the players are still available. Last week was the first single elimination game and I managed to squeak out a victory- 72.3 to 70.9. This week I'll be up against the #2 seed (I was the #3 seed) and if I can win that game I'll be in the "Fantasy Bowl". I'm feeling pretty good about this week's game I've outscored her every week since week 7 which was the week she and I played and she beat me. Let's hope that it's not some kind of weird cycle...

I'm not sure if I've ever told this story in my blog, but several years ago I had the idea to take up wine-collecting. See I don't drink and I figured that because of that I would be the ideal collector, I would never drink up my profits. My wife was opposed to it for obvious reasons, and I was only half serious, but it was my Dad who put an end to what little seriousness the idea had when he pointed out that since I didn't drink I would never have the "gut feel" for what was a good wine, or more particularly which wines were undervalued or which had a good potential to appreciate in value.

You may wonder what this has to do with fantasy football. Well my wife made the point that maybe fantasy football was like wine, that I would never have the "gut" to be truly great at it. I suspect that's true. I think I've made one or two good "gut" moves but mostly I've just read Roto's columns over at ESPN, follow his advice and hope for the best. Of course like many things it's surprising how few people actually take the time to just read what's available.

Literacy for the win!!

Snow

2008-12-08T13:11:00.002-07:00

As I look out my window it's really coming down. The snow blowing through the gap between my building and the Custom Closet next door is nearly horizontal. It's been snowing for several hours, but it's only just barely started to stick to the grass. This isn't the first snow fall of the season but the previous snow we've gotten had long ago melted and wasn't that impressive in the first place. Of course there's been snow in the mountains all this time, but even that has been pretty pathetic. Some of the ski resorts are opened, but I believe they had to supplement the natural snow with additional snow making.

Some people don't like the snow. I'm not sure why those people live in Utah, though I confess that we don't have the harshest winters in the world, so for those people the storm is bad news, for me it's great news. Not only do I love the first snowfall of the season (so pretty...) but I go on a ski vacation every year between Christmas and New Year and as of yesterday the ski resort I use was not open yet. It's still a few weeks between now and skiing, and one storm does not a season make, but it's nevertheless a good sign.

Happy until the shoveling starts

Cars

2008-12-05T16:31:00.004-07:00

Well I dropped $900 and change on car repairs today. Not my favorite thing in the word to do, but I'm confident that I'm still ahead money ahead with my used car vs. a new car, though sometimes I wonder. It'd be tough to do the math because you're never sure how many repairs a new car would need. But I think even if you assume that a new car would have needed zero repairs we're ahead, but probably not as much as I would like. Of course there's also the intangible benefits of having a new car. We had to buy a portable DVD player for the van, whereas they all come with them these days. And of course other kids that ride in the van can't understand why the doors on our van don't close by themselves like all the other vans they've been in.

When I went to pick up my car I talked to the mechanic about how his business was doing. I figured this was one job that might do better in an economic downturn. Since people wouldn't be buying new cars but rather trying to keep the ones they already had running. He said people were just paying for the bare minimum, which makes a certain amount of sense. He then went on to talk about the "Big Three" bailout. He was basically in favor of it, he mentioned all the jobs that would be lost because of all the secondary industries which rely on the automakers. That's the problem really, no matter the issue no matter the industry or the amount of money you'll find someone who regardless of their other convictions will firmly beleive that their personal case is different. And I'm not saying that maybe it isn't, but I think this is how we got the gigantic government we currently have.

Anyway back to the van. Apparently it was leaking oil in a fairly dramatic fashion and it was about 30 minutes from of driving from seizing all together. And the water pump was shot as well and there was a rusty pipe, etc. etc. But the car does have nearly 200,000 miles, so when you think about it, it's kind of amazing that there wasn't more wrong. I'm not sure how much longer it's going to last, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.

New car? What's that?

WotC Layoffs

2008-12-04T13:59:00.002-07:00

Aozora requested a blog about the Wizards of the Coast layoffs. It is an interesting situation. They're infamous for their pre-christmas layoffs so it shouldn't be too surprising. What is surprising is some of the people they laid off. Jonathan Tweet was probably the biggest name. He was the only person left at WotC from the core design team and he was the lead designer for DreamBlade. I assume they were paying him a pretty penny at this point, but I have a hard time understanding even then why they'd let him go. I mean you can build a whole company around someone as talented as that, and I'm guessing someone will, and when they do, my prediction will be that WotC will have a pretty serious competitor on it's hands, which can't be very good business. But perhaps I'll be wrong and Tweet will become a political pundit, the guy has some interesting and unique opinions.

The other big name, at least for me, was Dave Noonan. I remember meeting him right when 3E was launched. For me that was when Wizards become a company I could actually like rather than a faceless giant that had taken over for TSR. I saw him at every GenCon after that, sometime he'd be DMing a Dungeon Delve, or sitting on a panel, a couple of times I talked to him at some length. I know he's married with kids, and I know how big of a difference that makes when you're laid off as opposed to being single. In any case hopefully he'll land on his feet with some high paying video game gig. Based on the economic conditions, I'm guessing that's unlikely, but I'll keep hoping...

The final name on the list that jumped out at me was Randy Buehler. I've never met him (not like the other two) and I have no particular affection for him. He was the VP of Digital Gaming, and if anyone deserved to be laid off I think it was him. The whole Gleemax thing was a fiasco from the beginning. The whole digital initiative has been a joke. I'm still cautiously optimistic about D&D online, but as a whole their online and digital strategy has been appalling. An appalling over reach which is different from the vast majority of people who half-ass it, but still appalling. I'm still trying to decide whether to signup for DDI. It's less than what I was paying for a paper version of DUNGEON and DRAGON back in the day, but I'm still on the fence...

I know I didn't warn you it was a gaming post... sorry

My Uncle's Old Volvo

2008-12-03T11:20:00.002-07:00

My uncle bought a Volvo back in oh, '79 or '80, and drove it forever. He ended up racking up a lot of miles, but he really wanted to hit 300k miles. The problem was that the car had what might be termed "multiple organ failure" right around 290k miles. So those last 10k ended up being disproportionately expensive. I don't believe he ever made it to 300k, but he could have, I'll have to find out. Anyway the reason I bring this up is that I just looked and I have 480 blog posts (not counting the old system, which reminds me I really need to get those into some tangible format) and perhaps the problem I've had with blogging recently is similar to my Uncle's car. Actually that's a really poor analogy and the two have almost nothing to do with one another, but that's one whole paragraph made out of nothing, at this rate I'll hit 500 easy...

Last week I went to Canada on Monday and Tuesday. Let me describe the schedule:

Monday- Wake up at 4:00, 4:30 drive to airport, 5:00 weird "Breach" experience in security line, 6:00 plane leaves, 11:00 arrive in Canada, 20 minutes of really intense questioning while going through customs for a 2 day trip, 11:30-6:00 Meeting with clients and another development studio, 6:00-8:30 Dinner meeting (great steak) w/ clients, 9:00 collapse into bed.

Tuesday- Wake up at 5:30, 6:00 Put all the notes from yesterday's meeting into a flow chart, 8:00-1:00 Meeting at Denny's (we sat at the same table and had breakfast and lunch there) 1:30-3:30 another meeting with development studio, 3:30-4:00 phone meeting on way to airport with clients, 4:00-6:00 waiting at airport, 6:00 plane leaves, 11:15 arrive back in Utah, 12:30 bedtime...

I have a lot more sympathy for my Dad at this point, traveling as a consultant is brutal.

Other than that last week consisted of Thanksgiving, rabbit hunting, and being sick. There you go, all caught up...

England expects that every man will do his duty.

Chuck

2008-11-17T23:11:00.004-07:00

Well it's been awhile since I blogged. I switched it my "Bedtime List" which essentially meant that I was setting myself up to blog at 11:00 every night. Needless to say I often found that I didn't really have the energy to write at that point. So I was successful in that I wasted less time in the morning, but unsuccessful in that there were a lot of days when I didn't blog. So I'm still experimenting. Since I rarely actually take a lunch I'm thinking moving it to around then. Anyway enough excuses on to the main subject.

I have spoken of my fondness for "30 Rock" in past blogs. But apparently I'm the only one who likes it. It's my understanding that the ratings are not great. I'm hopeful that the recent popularity of Tina Fey and her Sarah Palin impersonation will help the show out. Anyway that's not the point of this post. I wondered if the critics felt the same way so I did a search on "The best show you're not watching", (something of a TV critic meme) expecting that a lot of critics would be talking about "30 Rock". But the most common result was for "Chuck". I'd already heard good things about it from a friend of mine so I decided to check it out.

I was not misled. It's quite good. For those unfamiliar with the premise, basically the series stars Chuck, a hapless member of the Nerd Herd at his local Buy More (a parody of Best Buy's Geek Squad). He's sent an e-mail from a friend of his which contains the only remaining copy of the combined secrets of the NSA and CIA. Through some kind of magic (i.e. don't look too deeply at this part) Chuck absorbs all the information and becomes a human computer. For reasons that are largely glossed over he continues to live a largely normal life but he ends up with one handler from the CIA (an attractive blonde) and one handler from the NSA (Adam Baldwin who played Jayne on Firefly).

So the show works on a number of levels:

First, there's the juxtaposition of the normal drudgery of being in the Nerd Herd at the Buy More, with the high danger of hanging out with spies. It's sort of the same feel that Buffy had, pretending to care about what everyone else thinks is important, when it's actually meaningless when contrasted with the truly important stuff going on behind the scenes.

Second, there's this who back story involving Chuck getting kicked out of Stanford by the very friend who sent him all the information. So you get another layer of Chuck wondering what might have been if he'd been able to stay at Stanford. He obviously (for good reason) thinks that he would be better than working at the Buy More as "Chief Nerd".

Third, with an attractive blonde as one of the handlers, whose cover is playing his girlfriend there's also considerable romantic tension. And of course exploring what part of their relationship is real and which is pretend.

Fourth, the Buy More plotlines get in some of the same workplace humor you find in "The Office" or even "Office Space".

Fifth, Chuck desperately wants to be able to trust his two handlers, but of course their undercover operatives who pretend for a living, kill when necessary and who's final loyalty is to the government.

There's even more to it than that, but I think five levels should be enough to make my point. In any case check it out. I'm pretty sure I'll be buying all the DVDs myself.

Maybe this will be the one show I love that won't be prematurely canceled, but probably not

Darjeeling Limited

2008-11-12T23:36:00.002-07:00

Last night the wife and I watched the the latest Wes Anderson movie The Darjeeling Limited. I enjoyed it, but then I've enjoyed all of his films. I would put this ahead of Life Aquatic but behind Rushmore, which in turn is behind Royal Tenenbaums. One thing that I think Anderson does very well is character interaction. I don't think all of his characters are exactly believable, they're basically caricatures, but the relationships between them are always rich and compelling. This was once again the case with Darjeeling.

I think another thing Anderson does very well is create atmosphere. His soundtracks are always awesome, and the little world he creates for his movies are always full of vitality. We watched the featurette which came with the movie and they talked about how everything in the train was hand crafted, or hand painted. The attention to detail definitely showed. As I mentioned Tenebaums is my favorite, possibly just because of the sheer volume of great interactions. In Darjeeling you have basically three characters, which I think is also true of Rushmore, but in Tenebaums I can think of ten right off the top of my head.

In other related news I'm working through my Netflix movies with impressive rapidity. In addition to Darjeeling last night I watched Get Smart on Sunday, and Wonder Boys the week before that. My goal is to do one movie a week, at that rate I don't feel bad about the money the subscription costs. Of course even at a rate of one movie a week it will take me over four years to work through the movies in my queue assuming that nothing gets added in that time... Maybe I need to watch two a week...

How can a train be lost? It's on rails.

FRS

2008-11-10T23:23:00.002-07:00

I was going to make a post about how Bush wasn't as bad as everyone thought, but I'm basically out of time, so I thought I'd talk about this new energy drink I'm trying. If you've been on the internet recently you've probably seen the ads. It's called FRS and it's endorsed by Lance Armstrong. This did make a difference in my buying decision, so I guess they're getting their money's worth.

So anyway I ordered five cans and a package of 30 chews. I had two chews yesterday afternoon, a drink first thing this morning, and then 2 more chews after my nap. So far I'm impressed. I don't necessarily feel hyper, but I've haven't really experienced any fatigue and I've felt well-rested and basically in the "zone" all day. Which is different than normal energy drinks which keep me from sleeping, and combine fatigue with hyperactivity. It's obviously pretty early in the experiment to make any definitive statements, but I've got a good feeling about it.

Of course the big question a lot of people are going to have is how much caffeine does it have. Well a 12 ounce can has about the same caffeine as the same 12 ounce can of Diet Coke, so less than a Mountain Dew, but more than regular Coke, in other words a lot less than some of your more typical energy drinks. Yet another point in it's favor.

Okay, it's 11:30 and yes there is some fatigue...

Obama the day after

2008-11-07T23:18:00.002-07:00

There's a big name VC I follow who's based out of New York who's a pretty big Obama fan. He made the point (as countless have) that expectations are so high for Obama that he'll never be able to meet them (how this will affect his popularity is an interesting, albeit seperate discussion), He said that, despite this, he thinks there are six things we will get from Obama:

1) A world class management team. I remember the first debate I ever watched Obama participate in. He was asked whether he was a "strong operatating executive." He replied that he was not "the COO", that he was more like "the CEO". And then he went on to talk about surrounding yourself with the best people you can find and then letting them do their job. He did that with his campaign which was a masterful thing to watch, he did that with his VP pick (in stark contrast to the Palin fiasco), and I expect he'll build a killer cabinet and a killer administration (look for some picks from across the aisle).

I kind of agree with this, and it's one of the reasons I warmed up to Obama. I would disagree with the point that his VP pick was a great example of this "mastery", and the early word on his cabinet picks has not been particularly inspiring. Kerry as Secretary of State? I guess I'm just not a big fan of long-serving senators in general, but even then. And as you can imagine I wait with breathless anticipation his, long-rumored, pick from "across the aisle" and I don't think Colin Powell counts... My guess is that it's going to be non-existant or underwhelming.

2) Honesty. He said this last night and I am sure he will live up to it: "But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."

This is where we start to diverge. Call me cynical, but I don't think any politician can be considered honest by any objective standard. And even if we use a more relative standard I really don't think Obama should be at the top of the heap. If we consider nothing other than filling supporters heads with visions of a utopian future that anybody paying attention know will never come to pass, he's got to score pretty low on that count. I'm not criticizing him for that, it worked, and that's what politicians do, but it's not honest.

3) A steady hand. I have never seen a cooler customer in a position of such responsibility. Obama has an incredibly calm demeanor. He will be a steady hand, he will make well vetted decisions, and I expect more of them will be right than wrong.

Another area where there's some convergence between us. He does seem reasonably calm and collected, it was one of his secret weapons during the campaign. Being calm doesn't necessary lead to right decisions, but I'm willing to wait and see.

4) Diplomacy. Thank god we've slayed the ridiculous notion that you can't talk to bad people who do bad things. I expect that Obama will spend a lot of time meeting and working with our friends overseas and at least talking to our enemies. I expect to see a lot of diplomatic progress under his leadership.

Another divergence. I do think we need more diplomacy and a better diplomat as president. One of my big regrets in the period from 9/11 to Iraq was how we seemed unable to preserve all the goodwill we had accumulated. That being said I think there are certain countries and leaders that are willing to talk as much as we want, all while continuing to do exactly what we're hoping they won't. I'm very interested to see what happens with Iran. Certainly it's possible that Obama will be able to get the support of Russia and China and we'll be able to hit them with some really painful sanctions which will weaken the fundamentalists enough to bring the reformist to power, but I would bet against that scenerio. More likely Iran will continue to play the security members against one another while continuing to enrich Uranium, secure in the knowledge that there's no way we would invade yet another country, particularly with Obama in command. Now this is not to say that invading Iran wouldn't end up being a horrible idea, but if they think we might just do it anyway as bad as a US invasion of Iran is for us, it's even worse for Iran... In any case I don't claim to have the answer for Iran, the point is more that a president needs more than one tool in his foreign policy kit.

5) Fairness. The republicans call it "redistributing wealth" and I can totally understand why people go nuts over Obama's tax policy. But we are going to get fairness in tax policy where the people who make most of the money like my family will pay the highest taxes. My bet is we'll go back to where we were under Clinton and that's fine with me and should be fine with everyone, but it won't be.

The idea of "Fairness" imposed at a federal level is a profoundly scary thought (Harrison Bergeron anyone?). And this is another area where I think the value is incompatible with being a politician in the first place. As far as the specific example of taxes. Last I checked the people who make the most money already pay the highest taxes. Whatever. Considering the budget deficit I'm not going to whine about raising taxes, but what about cutting spending? I know, neither party is going to come up with a budget that's lower than the one from the year before (even adjusting for inflation) That's why I'm a libertarian.

6) Leadership. Our country is in a mess, much of it self inflicted. More than anything else, we need a charismatic leader who can inspire us to face the facts, make the sacrifices, take the losses, pull up our boots, and get on with it. I believe Barack Obama can and will do that.

I'm not getting a real "make sacrifices" vibe from Obama. Now admittedly I haven't listened to every speech or read every one of his policy papers, but I don't think that's what his supporters are taking away from his candidacy either.

My point would be that even pretty clear-eyed people who admit up front that Obama can't do everything he said, still buy into an awful lot of the hype.

So in the near term I'll be watching his appointments (and waiting with barely concealed excitement for his move "across the aisle") -- My prediction here: His appointments are more partisan and less "best person" than people expected and he makes some token RINO appointment.

Come February of next year I'll be REALLY interested in his first budget, and the projected deficit -- My prediction here: Significant military cuts. Significant tax increases. But despite that a budget that's higher than the last Bush budget adjusted for inflation with a deficit approaching a trillion dollars.

And in the longer term I'm interested in seeing how he handles Iran -- My prediction here: Iran will have a nuclear weapon before the end of his first term.

Anyway I've put off work long enough. So I'll end here.

His Majesty's Loyal Opposition

Grandma

2008-11-06T21:41:00.002-07:00

So Grandma died yesterday. She had lived to 96, which is a pretty good run by any account I would think. She had 10 kids, 44 grandkids and (according to my best estimate) 78 great-grandkids at the time of her death. Which, unless you're Paul Ehrlich is really impressive. As you can imagine with a life that long there are a ridiculous amount of stories, so many that I honestly don't know where to start. So I'll just say that I'm going to miss her.

Too somber for cleverness

Election

2008-11-04T21:01:00.003-07:00

The election has just been called for Obama, and I never did get around to doing that political post I wanted to do. The last few weeks have just exploded. The end of last week I was about as stressed and overloaded as I'd ever been. It's a little bit better now. My grandma is in her final hours and I've been taking some "death watch" (for lack of a better term) shifts. Given my weird schedule I felt particularly suited to the 3 am to 6 am shift, and I felt guilty about not doing more over the last few years as her health declined. So I did one shift sunday night/monday morning. And I'm doing another one tonight. As I said things are better, and I don't mind doing it, but it does mean that my time for venting my political views is limited. In any case I am going to repost this bit from Jonah Goldberg:

Look, I expect to be one of the most severe critics of the Obama administration and the Democrats generally in the years ahead (though I sincerely hope I won't find that necessary). But Obama ran a brilliant race and he should be congratulated for it. Moreover, during the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. Let us hope that the Obama his most dedicated — and most sensible! — fans see turns out to be the real Obama. Let us hope that Obama succeeds and becomes a great president, for all the right reasons.

As for John McCain, he is an American hero and arguably the best candidate we could have fielded. I will in the days to come offer no small amount of criticism about his campaign. But where his campaign may have lacked qualities that would have helped it win, the candidate never lacked for honor and integrity. Thank you John McCain for your sacrifice, commitment, and honor.

God bless America, and may He guide Obama to be the best president possible.

Further Karl Rove, that arch-enemy of the left, just said of Obama's victory, that, "Every American should celebrate tonight". My contention would be that had McCain won, you would not have heard these sorts of things from the left, obviously there's no way to prove this, but if anyone can dig up anything from a liberal pundit where they talk about being gracious winners I would love to see it. In any case I digress.

I had not yet decided who to vote for this morning, though I had narrowed it down to Bob Barr or Chuck Baldwin. As I was falling asleep last night I realized that I should look into who was the stronger proponent of Nuclear power. As it turns out they both are very strong proponents. I managed to find another article on a libertarian web-site that compared the two, and mentioned the fact that Baldwin is not as strong on free trade as Barr and had in fact some rather protectionist impulses (placing tariffs on foreign goods until their price equals the price to produce them locally). So I voted for Barr.

Anyway back to Obama. I like Obama. I have some good feelings about him. I think we disagree on a LOT of things, maybe even most things, but I agree that he is now the president and there's no sense considering what might have been. I'll close with some quotes from "The Economist"'s endorsement of Obama:

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble...[but] he has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

Ron Paul in 2012!!!

So much to write so little time

2008-10-28T23:41:00.003-06:00

I feel this great need to write. I have an e-mail from a friend of mine who disagrees about the benefits of having the legislative and executive branches controlled by different parties that I want to respond to in detail. I've had a political blog post in mind for the last two weeks that just keeps getting pushed back. There's a message board I sometimes frequent with lively political discussions that I haven't even glanced at in several months. And then there's a comment on my brother-in-laws blog that's so full of simplistic over-generalizations that I let out a primal battle-cry when I read it and felt like I was on the plains of Africa hunting lions.

Alas, I'm not doing any of that, the only time I seem to have to write is just before bed, when my energy level is not sufficient to battle the forces of ignorance. In fact as busy as I was this summer, it's worse now. The key difference is not in the level of work, but in how many people are bugging me. Before I had a ridiculous amount of work, but I was largely left to myself to tackle it at whatever pace I could manage, and if I needed to take a break, then I could. These days, every time I turn around there's an urgent e-mail which needs answering, and when I do manage to clear a little bit of time it's to tackle the big projects that I've been trying to get to all week, not 30 minutes of relaxation while I write a little bit in my blog...

I'm not sure how long I can continue at this level of pressure, but I keep thinking that there will be some lessening of it if I can just get X done. I'm beginning to think that I'm going to crack first before I can get on top of things. I'll keep you posted.

There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

Near Future Shelf

2008-10-23T23:30:00.002-06:00

In the course of organizing the office I have designated a shelf on a bookcase near my desk for books I'm hoping to read in the near future. This is a huge delusion. So far there are 27 books on the shelf, I could probably add more though I realize the madness of having even 27 books there. I always wanted to be able to read a book a week, though I've never managed that velocity for more than a month or two at a time. Even at this ridiculously implausible speed it would take me 6 months to get through those books.

To add to the insanity only one of the 27 is what would be considered a quick fictional novel. Among the rest are 2 1000+ page historical novels, 7 straight history books, 2 pop-math books, 2 books of punditry/opinion, 6 pseudo textbooks, 3 biographies, 2 business books, and 2 miscellaneous books ("Dangerous Book for Boys" and "Areas of My Expertise"). Just eyeballing things I would guess that average page count is at least 600 if not more... *sigh*

A friend of mine ran into some financial problems and there is a slim chance he could end up on the street. Obviously when I heard this I was sympathetic, but part of me was jealous. Obviously being on the street with a wife and four kids is out of the question, but if it was just me... I think I could survive without too much trouble, and if there was even a tiny chance of spending all day every day in the library reading, suddenly you have the jealousy... I confess it's unrealistic, but isn't it beautiful nonetheless?

How did it get to be so late?

Blogging Break

2008-10-22T20:03:00.002-06:00

Well it's been about a week since I last blogged. Things have been pretty crazy. I think I brought it on myself by titling my last post as "chaos". The cosmos saw that and said, "You think your current situation is chaotic? Just wait!" I had already agreed to undertake a big reorganization of the office over UEA (a four week holiday that the kids get while the teacher union has their annual meeting). Which threw me out of my normal groove.

A little bit about that before I continue. I was actually really excited about the office project. I love organizing things, but I have a tendency to be a completist, which is a big problem if you're undertaking the organization of 20,000 books and magazines (I'm not sure if that's the actual number, but I bet it's at lest that many. Plus I feel guilty since my wife has carved out a time when the whole family can be involved in cleaning up my gigantic disorganized pile of stuff.

Anyway the office cleaning got me out of my normal schedule, so that was Thursday and Friday (if your curious things are out of the office and into the storage room and now we have to decide what to move back in and what to keep in the storage room). Saturday was the used book sale, a hike up city creek, several hours of prep for the family campaign, a nap, the family campaign, and prepping my lesson for Sunday. That took us till about Midnight and that's when it happened, the illness struck... The less said about it the better, but that basically took me out until Tuesday, since then I've been trying to catch up.

In any case I'm not sure how interesting any of that is, but I've already typed it so there you go. I do intend to eventually do that political post I was talking about in fact I took a little bit of time this morning and decided how I was going to vote on everything (all except for President and Governor, I'm still trying to decide those two). Anyway I mostly just wanted to get something out there to make sure people knew I was still alive (and to convince myself of that fact as well...)

Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps

Chaos

2008-10-14T19:13:00.002-06:00

You ever get into that position where your carefully crafted system for maintaining order over the chaos gets overwhelmed? For me I have about 150 to-do items with various time horizons, priorities, levels of effort, etc. As long as they kept carefully corralled in the zoo then things are okay. I can go to the monkey section and make sure all the orangutans are still there, or over to the where all the lizards and snakes are kept and walk slowly down the aisle tapping on the glass (I know you're not supposed to do that). But every so often as new animals are being delivered to the zoo there's a break out and suddenly there are chimpanzees, lions, snakes, zebras, and pandas all over the zoo.

The big problem is know I don't know if I have all my monkeys. Some of them may have escaped, some may even be ransacking the ministry of defense and carrying off secret files. The hippos I know about, and they get a lot of the attention. It's unlikely they're going to escape, or even wander very far from the big pool of water, but all the little animals, how do I deal with them?

In any case there's been a zoo break. I think I have it under control. At a minimum I feel like I've established a pretty good perimeter, but that doesn't mean that there's still not a whole lot of poo being flung...

You should definitely follow the "Ministry of Defense" link, and that article doesn't even mention the drunkenness

D&D Tiny Adventures

2008-10-11T00:01:00.002-06:00

Well I've been slacking the last couple of days, I've actually been meaning to do a long political blog, but I just haven't had the time/energy. Fortunately a guy I know in San Francisco (I don't actually think his location is germane, but whatever) asked me if I'd ever heard of D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook. I said I hadn't, but that I'd check it out. I have a Facebook account though I don't really do much with it, except accept the occasional friend request from people I know who do actually use it. My younger sister sent me a message about a play were were going to through my "Facebook wall" which was bizarre, I mean of all the ways to get ahold of me. Fortunately that triggered an e-mail which I do check...

Anyway I digress, so I googled Tiny Adventures and in seriously less that 30 seconds I was playing it. There's no great strategy involved, but it's simple and takes very little time. Basically you pick an adventure and then every 5-10 minutes you press a button to go to the next step of the adventure. The Game handles all the rolls and you actually have very little control over things, but it's just the kind of game that lately I've been really enjoying. A game that takes 10-20 minutes a day, but that gives me a tiny bit of enjoyment throughout the entire day.

If it sounds like something you might enjoy check it out. It's not revolutionary, but it looks like a good way to feel like you're playing an enjoyable game without having to spend the time required for a more traditional computer game.

Charo may be the greatest sin of the 70s

Weather

2008-10-07T23:57:00.002-06:00

Well Autumn has finally arrived. We were able to stop using the air conditioner quite awhile ago though there were some days where it really touch and go, particularly if we cooked anything in the oven, but we powered through with no heat and no A/C for, I think, the entire month of September. But now were getting to the point were we may have to turn on the heat, and I'm just fine with that. The Weather Channel is saying that it may snow on Sunday (predicted high, during the day, is 46) which would be really nice.

It's weather like this that makes it hard for me to believe that anyone could live in Arizona or Las Vegas. I have a friend who's moving to Vegas at the end of the month, he says that Vegas isn't as bad as people think, because you're either in a pool, or inside. The pool would be okay (though I think I would tire of it pretty fast) but not being outside ever sounds like the cure is worse than the disease. He can make a lot more money in Vegas, which is something I can identify with.

Time for bed

The Cubs

2008-10-06T23:52:00.002-06:00

Well they couldn't even win one game. 100 years without a World Series win is now 101. After doing so well in the regular season to collapse so bad is... pathetic. Now obviously this happened just because I was paying attention, because I mentioned them in my blog. But if that theory doesn't work for you then consider the enormous amount pressure the team was under. I think everyone really thought that this would be the year, but unfortunately (as I've mentioned before) round, base 10 numbers are significant only in the human imagination. There's no law of the universe that says that 100 years is some kind of magical number...

If there is a magical base perhaps it's base 2 and the Cubs will win the World Series after a 128 year drought. In any case I can't say that I'm surprised, though I am disappointed. I guess at this point it would be interesting for them to go so long that no one alive remembered the last time they won. They're already pretty close, just another couple of decades for people to have been too young, not from Chicago or simply senile. I'm sure they can manage that.

In order to get all the sports news out of the way in one post. I lost this weekends fantasy football game. I was at the top of the league with two other people at a 3-1 record. Fortunately they both lost as well, so now there's six of use with a 3-2 record. It would have been really nice to be the only person out of the people with a 3-1 record to win, but alas it was not to be...

I really should already be in bed

The Cubs

2008-10-02T21:00:00.002-06:00

100 years ago the Cubs last won the World Series. This year they ended with the best record in the National League. For the first time since 1908 they went to the playoffs two years in a row. ESPN picked them to take it all. Truly it seems that the stars are aligned. They took this sense of destiny and promptly lost the first game and, at this moment, seem well placed to lose the second game (they're behind 6-0 in the bottom of the 5th). If they lose this game they'll be in a pretty bad position: down 0-2 and heading to LA, one Cubtastic loss away from a winless post season...

I mostly don't like baseball, but when I follow/watch the Cubs I feel like I'm observing history, and I like history. I have a feeling (though I'm trying not to jinx it, probably too late) that what's going to be really historic is their continued inability to win it all. But I suppose they could still pull it out, however I don't think history is on their side.

My distaste of baseball is evidenced by the fact that those two short paragraphs was all I had to say on the subject... So I think I'm going to end here.

You can't spell "fungi" without "fun"

Sleep Schedule Update

2008-09-30T22:01:00.002-06:00

I missed my nap today. Not the end of the world, but it did throw things off. On the plus side it gives me an excuse to try a modification to my sleep schedule that I'm considering. I found it as I was browsing Ye Olde Internet, so you know it's solid. The guy suggested that you always wake up at the same time every morning, but you go to bed when you're tired. I know it's not rocket science, but it's something I haven't tried, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Normally it's easy to stay up later but difficult to go to bed early, so that may be a problem, but I think as long as I stay away from the Red Bulls and Rockstars I should manage. Anyway I think I may have reached a new low in terms of interesting content, but is was either that or not blog at all. Yeah, you're right, I shouldn't have blogged at all.

Death by Snu-Snu!!

Shawshank Redemption

2008-09-29T22:27:00.002-06:00

Shawshank Redemption is the #1 movie on IMDB. Obviously any ranking like that is by nature very subjective, but it's one I can live with. There are movies that I like better, there are movies that I enjoy for a specific reason, or when I'm in a specific mood, but in terms of broad appeal, in terms of a movie that speaks to just about everyone I think that it's as good a candidate as any. Obviously in any case I'm glad that it's no longer "The Dark Knight" (though it's only dropped to #3, which is still significantly inflated in my opinion).

You may be wondering why I would be blogging about the movie now. Well I put Disk Two of Shawshank (the bonus disk with all the special features) into my NetFlix queue. I've never put a bonus disk into my queue, and I confess that I kind of thought it was going to end up being a waste, but that I'd give it a shot in case I was wrong. I haven't watched all of the features yet, but so far I'd have to say that I was in fact wrong (mark it on your calendars). Now obviously this is probably not true for all movies, or even most, but I'm a little bit more open to the idea. Of course this realization is quite inconvenient. I just got done adding a bunch of movies to my queue bringing it up to 200 total (I admit that I suffer from the same irrational fondness for round numbers common to most human beings). I did the math on how long it's going to take me to get through those movies based on my past viewing history, and it's too embarrassing to share, let's just say that it's going to be awhile, a long while.

Some other movies that might make the "top ten", for those that are curious (and yes I'm aware that there are more than ten, thus the quotes): Empire Strikes Back, Royal Tenenbaums, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Se7en (it's all about the last line), Last of the Mohicans, Groundhog Day, Casablanca, Sunset Blvd., Glory, The Mission, Tommy Boy, Die Hard, and Iron Giant. That's probably enough, I think I hit most of the different genres. I'm curious what sort of movies would make your "top ten", in other words comments are welcome.

One final point, my lovely and long suffering wife let me out of the reception on Saturday, so I only ended up being on the road for three hours which was still a lot, but vastly preferable to the alternative.

I wanted to include "SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2" in the list, but I was too embarrassed

Five Hours of Driving

2008-09-26T23:47:00.002-06:00

So tomorrow we have a wedding. We're invited to the ceremony, the luncheon and the reception. Most everything is about an hour south of here, my sister is watching our kids and she's a half hour north of here. The kids are invited to the reception. So here's the break down:

30 minutes to get the kids to my sisters house
60 minutes to get to the wedding
30 minutes to get to the luncheon
60 minutes to get back to our house (where b-i-l has graciously agreed to meet us halfway)
60 minutes to reception
60 minutes to get back home

So there you go five hours of driving tomorrow. I can hardly wait...

Perhaps we should just send them the $300 dollars we're going to spend on gas and call it good

That's Where I'm a Viking!

2008-09-25T23:46:00.003-06:00

I think I may have blogged about this at some point in the past, but I'm too tired to make any sort of effort to determining whether that is in fact the case. So there was this episode of The Simpsons ("Lisa the Vegetarian" Season 7 Episode 5 to be exact) where the teacher out of frustration with Ralph Wiggum tells him to "just try to sleep while the other children are learning." To which Ralph replies, "Oh boy...sleep! That's where I'm a viking!" Now the most obvious interpretation of this is that he dreams about being a viking. All men of good sense and honest character reject this interpretation as unworthy of the brilliance and subversiveness of The Simpsons. For those with the taste and breeding to recognize it a second, more satisfying interpretation suggests itself. That being a viking is a metaphor for something that he's exceptionally good at.

So I have a a gigantic, awe-inspiring spreadsheet on which I keep all my to-do items, projects, habits, lists, goals, inspirational quotes, notes and anything else I can shove in there. An older version of this spreadsheet was called "Overlord" which may be more accurate, but on one of the revisions I decided to call it Viking, as in "Organization, that's where I'm a viking!" (humorous and inaccurate) Then came "Viking Part Deux" (an homage to Hot Shots! Part Deux)the next revision. I think I'm ready for another revision and I'm trying to come up with another name. I guess I could go for a completely different name, but I'm thinking I should stick with the movie reference. I'm thinking "Viking, Return of the Truth" (another simpsons reference "The truth? You can't handle the truth! No truth handler you! I deride your truth handling abilities!") but as you can see it doesn't quite sing... So I'm interested in suggestions, the person whose suggestion I use will receive the respect of their peers and a life-long glow of pride and accomplishment.

Viking, the Quickening

Last Cycling Post of the Season

2008-09-23T15:18:00.002-06:00

So Contador won the Vuelta. For those of you not paying attention to my previous half-dozen posts on the topic, this means that he is the youngest person to win all three Grand Tours and the person to have done it the fastest. Now there's the whole business of the Vuelta now being in September when it used to be in the spring, so comparing him the other guys is a little bit like comparing apples and oranges, but still there's no denying that it was impressive.

The big take-away from this is that he knows how to train and peak at the right time. You get a lot of riders who have some really great performance at one of the grand tours and then after that they're always in the mix, but they never quite equal that first breakout performance. Having to win to big races in the same year is better proof of that, IMHO, than just about anything else he could have done. So he's a real contender and he knows it. And now that the Vuelta is done he's finally saying what he really thinks about the whole Armstrong return.

He says that he's considering switching to another team if Armstrong returns, and really who could blame him. I certainly get the feeling that Armstrong didn't give a second's thought to how this decision would impact the other people on Astana. However later in the article when he talks about Leipheimer that's less forgivable. I mean he won the Vuelta what else does he want? He claims that someone who was helping him shouldn't have been so close in time. What that says to me is that Leipheimer could of won but didn't precisely because he was subordinating his desires for the good of Contador and the team... Contador certainly lost a few points in my book for that one. I guess it will all be settled 10 months from now in the mountains of France.

As far as this being the last cycling post of the season. Armstrong is giving a few press conferences in the next couple of days, but if you want to know what he says, it's Armstrong for crying out loud, I'm sure you'll be able to find out...

It's not about the bike it's about the ego

Fantasy Football Update

2008-09-22T23:28:00.002-06:00

Once upon a time I had what I thought was a great idea to get into wine collection. See I don't drink and thus I would never end up consuming the profits of wine that had appreciated in value. It seemed foolproof until my dad pointed out that since I didn't drink wine I would never have the visceral sense of what was good and what wasn't. I have the same problem with Fantasy Football. I enjoy football well enough, but other than a few big names I have no idea who's good, which teams are good, I have very little in the way of gut. So I'm mostly going on what ESPN projects for each player. Projections which have thus far been pretty bad (not that projecting things like that is ever easy.)

This week my opponent was completely done yesterday, and ended up 18.5 points ahead. I only had one slot left, I could play Thomas Jones of the Jets, or LaDainian Tomlinson. Normally that would be a no-brainer since LDT was the overwhelming recommendation for first pick by everyone, but he hadn't been doing that well and it appeared that he would not play very much, if at all. In fact right before the game the prognosis was particularly bad and one of my friends recommended playing Jones. I saw the message and immediately went to make the switch, but it was too late the game had started. Fortunately LDT finally lived up to his hype and he ended up scoring 19 fantasy points, meaning that I won by 0.5 points... I can only imagine how much that result sucked for my opponent, but I was pretty happy.

One of the things that's annoying about something like this is that even just three weeks in I've learned enough that I really wish I could go back and do things over starting with the draft. Oh, well maybe next year. Yes I fully intend to get into a fantasy league next year. It's actually just the kind of game I like. I can spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, more if I want to, less if necessary. It's got a good mix of skill and chance, and it's something that makes me less of a nerd...

My wife says she doesn't know me anymore

Block Walk

2008-09-19T22:37:00.003-06:00

Every year the PTA at the kids elementary has a fund-raiser. It's called block walk, and the idea is that you get friends and family to pledge a certain amount for each time the kid manages to walk around the block the school is on (#1 Daughter- 7, #1 Son 16, #2 Son- 13 and #2 Daughter 5). They also sell tickets which you can use to buy food, get your hair colored, go on inflatable rides, etc. And they have a big silent auction with things that people and local businesses had donated.

I was mostly flying solo, because my wife left for her annual trip to Park City with my mom and sisters as soon as I arrived. It wasn't too bad though keeping track of all four kids proved to be a challenge, mostly because I was trying to let them do their own thing. They introduced this new thing this year where the teachers offered up something for auction (lunch with the teacher, an evening of pizza and reading, be principal for a day, etc.) All of our kids wanted to do it, but because of the way it was set up combined with our limited budget only the youngest managed to get into one, and that's when things got annoying...

So you have to pay for the silent auction stuff while you're there. Because of the way this particular teacher thing was set up, I knew I had won long before the end of the auction, but no one would take my money. So I figured as soon as the announced the end of the auction I would rush to wherever they were taking money so I could pay and then leave. As soon as they pointed to the people that would take my money I went over there and ended up being third in line. Well when I made it to the front of the line I discovered that they were only taking checks they couldn't take cash, that was the other line, which in the interim had swelled to like 50 people. So I moved to that line. It finally got down to where I was the next person to be helped. That's when the other line ran out of people and said they could help me. I mentioned that they said they couldn't take cash. "Oh, sure we can take cash!" They told me, so after waiting in line for 15 minutes I ended up being back in the line I'd started in...

grrrrrr....

Napping Update

2008-09-18T21:05:00.002-06:00

So school has been in session for a few weeks and I've been napping or attempting to nap ever since. In general I would have to say that the success of the experiment has been mixed. I'm enjoying getting a good start on the day and I'm also really enjoying having lots of time in the evening/night. But I'm not sleeping as well as I should. I'm having a hard time falling asleep, and my naps are not as deep as I would expect. Generally when I napped before starting this experiment, I would fall asleep and then wake up about two hours later. Now when I nap I seem to be a little bit slower to fall asleep, when I do I'm not sleeping as deeply as during a "normal" nap, and I generally wake up after about 30-45 minutes, nest for another 5-10 and then fall asleep for another 30-45.

Currently I go to bed between about midnight and 1:00 (more often the former than the latter); wake up at 7:00; and nap between 1:00 and 3:00. I don't get a nap at least twice a week (Sunday's and Thursday's, i.e. today, for sure) and sometimes three times. If you do the math you'll probably notice that on those days that I do get a nap I'm in bed generally 9 hours a day, but I'm certainly not feeling over-rested.

So I think I need to make some changes (and I'm open to suggestions as well) I think to be ready for a nap at 1:00 I need to wake up earlier. I've been meaning for a while to start waking up at 6:30, but I've been putting it off with the rationalization that I needed the extra half hour in order to adjust to the schedule. Now I'm thinking that I need to force myself to wake up a little earlier in order to really take advantage of the nap... I think I'll be ok as long as I continue to go to bed mostly at midnight.

"The gaming post got a warning, but this literal snooze fest was presented without any caveat!?!??!"

Swordmage

2008-09-17T20:26:00.002-06:00

***Gaming Post***
You have been warned

I've been playing in a 4E campaign for the last couple of months. It meets every week which actually means we've been able to cover quite a bit of territory, but that's really probably too much time, I think I'd be happier if it met every other week, but so it goes. I started out playing a Paladin, which in 4E assumes the role of defender. That was pretty cool, but even before the books were out I had my eye on a class that had been previewed called the swordmage. Also a defender but with a significantly different feel than the fighter or the paladin. The book which contained the swordmage class (Forgotten Realms Players Guide) was released yesterday so tonight was my first chance to play it. (Normally we game on Friday's but we moved it to Wednesday's because of conflicts.)

Last week the paladin was killed in an epic battle that really all but turned into a TPK (total party kill). There were several points when half the party was down to a single hit point, and actions were so precious that people who had been knocked prone spent the entire combat crawling around after that. My paladin went down at least a half a dozen times before being brought back by the cleric, and every time he'd go toe-toe with the big bad guy. Finally the BBG was sick of it and the next time he was down he coup de grace'd me and that was the end of that. Of course that was fine because as I mentioned I wanted to switch to playing a swordmage.

So tonight was the night. The best thing about rolling a new character was that I had learned a lot of lessons from my previous attempt at playing a defender. First off this whole business of building a defender that focuses on damage? You can if you want, but it's going to suck. You'll never do as much damage as the strikers and if you're even attempting to do your job correctly you'll end up getting the snot kicked out of you because you won't have the AC and defenses of someone who's focused strictly on defense. So that was mistake number one I rectified. Other mistakes were less obvious, but now that I had seen more of 4E combat and had a better idea of how to play a defender my power selection was a lot better as well. And finally the swordmage has some really fun powers.

In any case it was quite enjoyable. None of the combats from tonight were as tough as the gigantic fight from last week, but I think this defender is definitely more durable than my previous attempt. And that's really what I wanted. I want a defender who, not so surprisingly has the best defense. I think I got there.

A possible AC of 31 at level 6 might not sound like much (or may not make any sense at all) but trust me it's impressive

Tech Support

2008-09-16T17:41:00.002-06:00

Through a path too circuitous to document I've ended up being in a position where I have to do tech support. As is usually the case no matter how many (or how few) people you're supporting there's always someone who needs 10X if not 100X the support of everyone else. The problem is not that they're needy, I mean I may not like it when stuff is broken but if it's legitimately broken then telling me about it is the whole point. It's the way they tell me about it.

For example they e-mailed me on Sunday about something that really wasn't that urgent. Maybe I'm weird, maybe I'm a prima donna, but Sunday is basically my only day off, the one day when there is some chance of disengaging from all the crap that's going on in my business and at work, etc. Plus (again for reasons to circuitous to document) I'm doing tech support of the kind where I mostly run interference for the developers. In other words while I can fix some of the issues, many if not most have to be referred to the guy who actually wrote the stuff. Which means not only are they bothering me on my day off, they're bothering me at the only point in the week when it's likely that I won't be able to do anything about it.

So right off the bat getting an e-mail on Sunday puts me in a bad mood. But if it had been a "look at this when you get a chance", then even coming on Sunday it would have not been that big of a deal. But the e-mail was really... aggressive. They asked over and over again why this was broken, why this hadn't happened, why hadn't I responded (cause this was the first I'd heard of it), why? why? why? But the icing on the cake was that each time they wrote the word "why" it was in all caps. Now this is probably just them not being as familiar with e-mail etiquette as they could be, but obviously, "why haven't you responded?" is a LOT different than "WHY haven't you responded? In any case in retrospect it wasn't that big of a deal, mostly I just needed to vent (and a subject other than cycling to blog about).

WHY won't you comment?!?

Tag

2008-09-15T20:01:00.002-06:00

I just got done playing freeze tag in the backyard with the kids. I'll tell you if you want to feel old... Holy cow! Fortunately I didn't throw up, which is something that, sadly, happens all too frequently when I overdo it like I did tonight. We were playing freeze tag and I had to show the boys that the old man could still catch them and out run them, at least for stretches lasting no longer than 3 seconds... I kept hoping that they would freeze me and I could stay frozen, but no such luck. Eventually I did get to sit down and watch the sunset reflected off the mountains, which was quite nice.

Now I'm just sitting here nursing a coke and trying to get my head calm down and watching Sense and Sensibility (the Ang Lee version). As an English major it's hard for me to resist Austen, despite what people may say about my manliness. Hopefully by the time it's over and the older two kids have gone to bed I'll be feeling well enough to get some stuff done, but who knows it's possible that my 15 minutes of running around could have made the rest of the evening a wash...

Die Hard was the first movie Alan Rickman ever appeared in

Interesting Obituary

2008-09-11T19:15:00.002-06:00

Well since I've been on a kick with cycling for the last few days I figured why break the trend?

I just saw this awesome obituary about this long distance cyclist who basically biked every where. I'm running a little bit behind today so I thought I'd toss this out there and let it stand on it's own.

These days I'd have a hard time biking from the bedroom to the bathroom...

More on Contador

2008-09-10T16:55:00.003-06:00

Velonews posted a more in depth article today on Contador's reaction to Armstrong's return. For those of you who aren't going to click through and read the article (I'm actually assuming that no one even made it this far). Here's the interesting bit:

If Armstrong does rejoin his longtime director Bruyneel at Astana, his larger-than-life presence will certainly reshuffle the existing power structure within the team.

Along with Contador, there are Leipheimer and Klöden, two riders who’ve also finished on the Tour podium and who still harbor their own personal ambitions.

Contador seemed peeved Wednesday when journalists kept asking him if Armstrong’s arrival to Astana would undermine his role as team leader.

“We could be good teammates, but if I go to the Tour next year, it’s to win,” Contador said. “What problem would we have?”

Bruyneel said if Armstrong did come back to Astana, he would have to prove his worth within the team.

“I think Alberto is the best rider in the world right now,” he said. “Lance was the best rider in the world, but after being away from the sport for three years, he has to demonstrate again whether or not he can return to the highest level. The road will decide everything.”

A Tour showdown between Contador and Armstrong would be one hell of a race. Whether or not they’ll be on the same team remains to be seen.

The can be "Good teammates", but both of them claim they'll be there to win it? "What problem would they have?" Isn't it obvious?

At least Bruyneel is saying that Armstrong will have to prove himself... And yes it would be "one hell of a race".

My role as team-leader is constantly being undermined...

Confirmed!

2008-09-09T17:34:00.004-06:00

In a Vanity Fair exclusive (warning, somewhat disturbing Annie Lebowitz photo at the top) it's confirmed that Armstrong is going to race the Tour next year and he intends to win it. See this is what I figured. An arch-competitor like him is not going to go back to the Tour unless he intends so win it. It basically goes without question that he's going to be back with Bruyneel at Astana, so where does that leave Contador the current tour winner on the Astana Roster?

Does he stay and publicly say he'll help Armstrong in 2009 while secretly hoping that Armstrong flags and he can jump into team leader position. The problem there is that there's a decent chance that this is not the Armstrong of yesteryear but that he keeps it close enough that it's never obvious (until it's too late) that they need to switch from Armstrong to Contador. Contador is young, so on the one hand he could skip a year and still have a great career, on the other hand he's just getting in the really sweet zone for a cyclist and it maybe Lemond and Hinault all over again.

Does he go to another team? I'm sure there's no shortage of teams who'd love to have him, but Astana is the best stage race team out there, do you abandon it just because you're not going to be the leader for one year? Of course this raises the question of whether Armstrong can just walk into the leader position. I mean I assume he can, but if Johan really thinks that Contador has the better chance is he going to ignore that? In any case a 2009 Tour with Armstrong promises, regardless of what else goes down with Contador and the rest, incredibly exciting.

In this theatre that I call my soul/I always play the starring role, so lonely...

Edit: Contador is reported as saying: "It would be an honor to be able to ride with Lance Armstrong. Nothing in this news seems strange to me. Lance Armstrong is such an important rider that you can allow for everything. He's a rider that you could propose as winning the Tour, but for the moment we can only classify these as rumors."

Is it just me or does the "It would be an honor", sound like just the sort of polite thing people say through clenched teeth...

Lance Armstrong Pulling a Michael Jordan

2008-09-08T16:01:00.002-06:00

So I guess "sources" are saying that Lance Armstrong will race in the Tour de France next year (credit to hallamigo for the scoop). Initially I'm not sure what to make of this. He turns 37 this month, the oldest person to ever win was 36 and that was back in 1922 when it was essentially not even the same race.

The rumor is that he'd race on the Astana team. Which makes sense, since that's the team of his old pal/mentor Johan Brunyeel, but Astana is also the team of Alberto Contador, the guy I blogged about just the other day who won the Tour last year, won the Giro this year and is still favored to take the Vuelta this year. I can't imagine that Armstrong thinks he can win it again, but that's almost an easier idea to swallow then the idea that he's going to be content being a helper...

Anyhow, it could make for a very interesting Tour next year. My fear is that having Armstrong on the team could lead to a situation where neither Armstrong or Contador would win. The Tour of California and the Tour of Georgia are also on the list of races (five in total) he's expected to race, so it's possible that it's as much about helping American cycling as it is about making some kind of comeback. Apparently he'll also be "post[ing] all of his internally tested blood work online, in an attempt to establish complete transparency and prove that he is a clean athlete." So that's another wrinkle. The whole thing is all a little strange.

Is it too late for me to make my comeback?

Fantasy Football

2008-09-04T20:49:00.004-06:00

When I was back at my old job there was always a big group of guys who would do a fantasy football league every year. It always sounded like fun, but I never figured that I had enough knowledge to participate. Well I mentioned this a couple of months ago to a friend of mine and he said that it doesn't actually require all that much knowledge that you could auto draft and it would almost play itself. In other words I could put as much or as little time into it as I wanted. So I said sure, so he created a league posted an invite to some message boards we're both on and next thing you know I was doing a live draft on Saturday with 9 other people.

The live draft was surprisingly fun. There was quite a bit of adrenaline involved since you only have 90 seconds to make a decision, and I had the last choice followed by the first choice from one round to the next so I had to make two decisions back to back. Of course part of my enjoyment inevitably stemmed from the fact that I had first pick. So I ended up with LaDainian Tomlinson a name I hadn't even heard (that I can remember) before Saturday and Peyton Manning (a name I obviously had heard of). In my first match-up, this weekend, I'm favored by 14 points. I think it might end up closer than that, but in any case I think I'm going to have fun. I'll let you know how I do.

At the mere mention of Football my wife rolls her eyes

Vuelta a España

2008-09-03T17:37:00.002-06:00

It's easy to think, particularly if you don't live in Europe. That there is really only one bike race all year. But as you might imagine there's more to Cycling than just the Tour de France. There are in fact three so-called Grand Tours. The Giro d'Italia, the Tour and the Vuelta a España. Only four people have won all three (Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Merckx, Hinault, nope not Armstrong). Alberto Contador won the Tour last year and won the Giro this year, so if he can win the Vuelta he will become the fifth person to win all three and the youngest ever. Why do I mention all this? Well because, of course, the Vuelta is happening as we speak.

They started with a short team time trial, enough to establish rankings, but not long enough to shake things up very much. Today was the first long time trial. Levi Leipheimer who first came to the attention of the cycling world by coming third in the 2001 Vuelta, won the stage and took the leader's jersey (which they say is gold, but is really more of an Amber or maybe a Gamboge). So not a bad day for America, but of course the question is how did Contador do? Well as you know of course Leipheimer and Contador are on the same team, and as always when something like this happens questions arise as to who the real leader is...

Well Contador came in fourth today which for someone who's often described as "the best climber in the world" is really good. And this Vuelta is definitely about climbing, it includes the l'Angrilu a beast of a climb that includes ramps that are steeper than 20%. The last time the did it, it was raining and the team cars couldn't make it up. In any case it should be exciting to see if Contador can pull off the triple win, so I'll definitely be following the race. If he does I'll let you know, but you can follow it yourself if you want on Velonews.com. Here's the write-up of today's stage.

Winded just thinking about the climbing

Das Leben der Anderen

2008-09-02T11:41:00.002-06:00

We have a three disc Netflix subscription. One of them is for me, one of them is for my wife and the third is for the kids (as you can imagine we were very happy when NetFlix reversed their decision to get rid of profiles). Sometimes I'm pretty good about getting through the movies and sending them back, other times I'm really bad. Recently I was really bad, I had "Das Leben der Anderen" (The Lives of Others) out as my movie. I had heard really good things about it, so good that I wanted to make sure my wife got to see it as well. Also it's rated R (aren't all foreign films?) so it's not something we can really watch while the kids are awake.

So the task then becomes to find two and a half hours where the kids are asleep and my wife and I are both in the mood for a depressing sub-titled foreign film. As you might imagine this is a pretty tall order. So I think I had the movie out for over a month before I finally got around to it. And I'm not sure I'd have gotten around to it even then if my wife hadn't decided that she had seen enough depressing movies recently, and she didn't want to watch it.

Anyway having said all of that it was really good, every bit as good as people said. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried at the end. I'd venture to say that it should be required viewing (once they hit a certain age, say college) for everyone who doesn't remember East Germany or the Soviet Bloc.

In California, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, The Party can always find you!

Labor Day

2008-09-01T11:24:00.002-06:00

Well it's another holiday. Which is good for a number of reasons. For one our power was out from around 5 pm last night until a little after 7:00 this morning, so if it hadn't been a holiday school might have been tricky, I'm sure we still would have been fine, but it was nice to just not have to worry about it. We had a pretty big storm last night which is what caused the power outage. Though as usual it was very localized, which means that if there's 28,000 households without power and your specific outage is only affecting maybe 60 houses you're going to be pretty low on their overall priority list.

Anyway unlike most people who are just goofing off today. ;) I'm actually in the office laboring. One of my partners is here as well, other than that the building is empty. Which is actually kind of nice, it means I can listen to my music as loud I want. Anyway, just taking a break from the laboring, you know. More tomorrow, perhaps I'll dive back into politics...

What are you looking at? You're laborers; you're supposed to be laboring. That's what you get for not having an education.

Sarah Palin

2008-08-29T14:58:00.002-06:00

In Chess they often add question marks or exclamation marks to denote good or bad moves. For example putting one exclamation mark after a move might denote that it's particularly good, the best move that could have been made give the board position and something that's going to cause the opponent significant difficulty. Two question marks on the other hand would probably be put next to a move that caused the player to lose the game. You can also put an exclamation mark and a question mark, which marks the move as a "speculative attempt to complicate". Something who's consequences are difficult to predict. That's what I think the Palin choice is.

Obviously if having Palin on the ticket can attract even a tiny percentage of the disaffected Clinton supporters then that would be huge. It also seems to (in my cursory examination) to have really energized the conservative base. So thus far it seems to have been a good call, but if having Palin on the ticket defuses attacks on Obama for his inexperience (one of the biggest guns McCain has in this fight) then it could end up being ill-conceived. I'm not sure which way it will go at this point. It's often convenient after listing a bunch of pros and cons to say that something will be a "wash". I don't think so in this case I think it's going to have a significant impact on the race, but whether it will be positive or negative I can't tell at this point, but I'm leaning towards the positive.

It just keeps getting better and better

Parkinson's Law

2008-08-28T19:04:00.002-06:00

Aozora mentioned in a comment a couple of days ago that "There is a theory that if overtime is disallowed and it is insisted that work gets done on regular time only, it can and will in fact get done." Which is kind of a restatement of Parkinson's Law, which is generally stated as: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". I've noticed this a lot, and to combat it I have a little timer at my desk which I periodically set through out the day so that the "time available" for the task I'm working on is never infinite, or "all day".

But just focusing on this small part of Parkinson's genius is to miss one of the greatest business and management books ever written. If you have any desire at all to understand how business really works, or at least the underlying cause of the the really dysfunctional parts of business. I cannot recommend Parkinson's Law too highly. Of course I'm sure any local library will have it, so if you don't want to buy it check it out, it's pretty short and it will change your life.

Opps, gotta go, the timer just went off

Fall TV schedule

2008-08-27T08:12:00.002-06:00

I don't watch that much TV. Of course everyone says that. I guess what I mean when I say it is that I have a hard time following a particular TV show because I generally have a hard time predicting if I'm going to be home on any particular night (other than Wednesday) and I'm too cheap and too much of a neo-luddite to have Tivo. I am however perpetually amazed by the the new TV shows that the networks throw out every fall. I think that the Fall TV schedule is the single greatest proof of drug abuse in hollywood (Cop Rock anyone?). If you think I'm joking let's go through some of the new shows this fall:

90210: Yes you read that correctly. They're "rebooting" the 90210 series. Same basic premise, cameos by the old stars, etc. I'm having a hard time figuring out who this appeals to. The tweener demographic is not going to even remember the original series and are the 30-somethings who do remember it really still interested in that kind of stuff? Speaking of which...

Knight Rider: See what I said above. I don't really have anything against either of those shows per se, but if either or heaven forbid both of them succeed I can only imagine the flood of 80s reboots we'll see next year.

Hole in the Wall: A reality show where people have to form themselves into different shapes in order to avoid being pushed into the water. You think I'm kidding?

I could go on for another page easy, but I'm out of time. I'll let you be surprised when you're flipping through the channels come September and stumble upon the horrors of the Fall TV schedule.

Perhaps I'm a post-neo-luddite

School Schedule

2008-08-26T09:53:00.002-06:00

So as I mentioned yesterday I'm hopeful that having the kids in school will help me keep a regular schedule. My plan is to wake up every morning at 6:30, eat breakfast, exercise, check my e-mail, etc. and then be in the office by 8:30 (which gives me at least an hour to an hour and a half of uninterrupted work time before anyone else shows up). Work till 12:30, and assuming that nothing pressing has come up (on my Google calender I call this period "Theoretical" Nap), go home and take a nap. Back in the office by 3:00.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I leave at 6:00 so I can be home for dinner, plus family home evening on Mondays and my wife has Bells on Wednesday nights, so I'm home for good. On Tuesday and Thursday nights I'm still experimenting. I'm not sure if it will work best for me to come back to work at 3:00 and then just stay here till say 10:00, or whether it will be better to still go home at 6:00 for dinner, but then head back into the office at say 7:30 and work till say 11:30. I think I'd prefer the former, but I think the latter may be better for my family.

And then it's in bed every night by 12-12:30. We'll see how it goes. The big variable is getting the nap. I think if I can get one 3 out of the 5 weekdays (and then both days on the weekend) I'll be okay. I'm not sure how interesting this is to all of you, but for me the quest to maximize my available time has always been like some sort of holy grail, so I'll keep you updated...

When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.

Transitions

2008-08-25T21:39:00.002-06:00

School started today for all but my youngest. She's actually starting school as well this year, but Kindergarten starts a week later than the rest of the grades. It's going to be weird having all of the kids in school. I'm kind of past the point where my kids school milestones make me feel old (though my oldest starts Junior High next year so check back then) but that doesn't mean it's still not a little bit weird.

I think what's going to be really weird (particularly next year when the youngest will be in school all day) is the difference it makes during the day to not have any kids in the house. My wife and I were married for only 16 months before the birth of our first child (and that was basically in a dinky, little apartment) and then we went nearly 12 years with kids in the house 24/7. Not having kids around is going to take some adjustment, but I think it's going to be pretty cool (don't tell them).

The other adjustment is waking up early. I had let myself get pretty sloppy with sleeping in, particularly since getting back from GenCon, but I think it will be nice to have some discipline back in the schedule. Also my old reliable CRT died this morning, so I finally broke down and got an LCD. Mostly I've avoided getting an LCD because they never have the resolution I'd like, plus even though my 21" CRT weighed about 23,000 lbs it still worked, so I was loath to get rid of something that was still working fine. Anyway it had served me long and faithfully so except for the fact that I'm poor, and that it screwed up my morning, and messed up my evening, I have no regrets.

I'm looking forward to not doing anything, just sitting and not moving

This is going to be interesting

2008-08-21T22:12:00.002-06:00

On the No-Tossup map at RealClearPolitics:

McCain 274 - Obama 264

(Electoral Votes of Course)

Election Night up there with Christmas for me

Brief GenCon Recap

2008-08-20T12:32:00.002-06:00

Well I'm back. I actually got back late Monday afternoon, but this is the first spare moment I've had to blog. As usual I had a pile of work waiting for me. I slept for 10 hours Monday night and by my calculations that brought my average for the preceding 7 days up to just about 5 hrs/night. Last night I got around eight, and I've had a devilish time keeping my eyes open all day. Obviously getting two extra hours of sleep on one day is not going to be sufficient to catch me up on sleep.

I played a lot of different game systems while I was there. I ran a 4E conversion of G3, I played a 1E game of "Lost Caverns of Tjoscanth". I went 3-1 in a Dreamblade tournament (only one person went 4-0 and that was a friend of mine). I played a bunch of different board games. I played a very fun session of "Call of Cthulhu". I did two sessions of "Tower of Gygax" a 1E Tomb of Horror style setup that was running 24 hours a day. One of the sessions was the 2 am to 4 am slot... Most of the fun, though, came from seeing friends that I only get to see at GenCon, which is probably the biggest reason why I can't imagine missing it.

Aozora mentioned in the comments that there's been quite the uproar in the gamer community over this comment by a McCain spokesman:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

It's was kind of a dumb thing to say, but I think people maybe making too big of a deal about it. Or to put it another way I don't want to find myself as part of a minority that takes offense to the smallest slight. I think it's more interesting that, at least in the minds of this particular staffer all D&D players are mother's-basement-dwelling Obama supporters, which seems like a weird, and very specific demographic...

Supposedly this staffer issued an apology (though I can't find an official source):

This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.

All of which is not to dispute the point that McCain could be a lot more tech-savvy

GenCon Ho!

2008-08-12T11:07:00.002-06:00

It's amazing how much prep goes into attending GenCon even when I'm not exhibiting... (One of these days I'm going to have to find a less labor intensive hobby.) So not much time to post today. And though I always imagine that I'm going to be able to blog from the convention that never happens either (and it's especially unlikely this time since I no longer have a laptop). So I guess I'll see everyone on Monday or Tuesday.

Like a Jew returning to the Holy Land

Olympics

2008-08-11T12:51:00.002-06:00

Every four years (two if you count the winter) when the Olympics rolls around I always start out pretty blase. Even when the Olympics were in my home town, in fact I may have even been more blase about them then. But then inevitably I happen to tune in just to see what they look like and suddenly I'm hooked. It's amazing how nationalistic I can get with just the slightest provocation. Last night the French who were favored to win the men's 4x100 freestyle relay told the media that they were going to "smash" the US. And down to like the last ten meter it looked like that's exactly what was going to happen (rather they were going to win, smash implies something more dramatic), but then in that last few meters the American anchor pulled back nearly a full body length, which is the kind of thing you don't even think is possible while swimming. And right at the end managed to slap the wall 8/100ths of a second before the French anchor and won gold. That was pretty cool.

But it's not just watching the US beat France that's exciting. This morning I was watching the gold medal game for the Men's Team Archery competition between South Korea and Italy. SK got out to an early lead, but then Italy managed to fight back and tie it up going into the final round. But then in the final round one of the Italian archers ended up getting a 7 (Bullseye is 10) and Korea won by 2 points. And you would think how exciting can Archery be? But it was really exciting. Of course now that I'm getting into the Olympics I'm heading to GenCon where I won't be watching any TV, but I guess that's the way it goes.

It's all the Chinese's fault for being so superstitious

30 Rock

2008-08-08T09:59:00.003-06:00

Back in 2006 at the start of the fall television season I (and many others I'm sure) became aware that NBC was launching two shows that were all based on the premise of being a behind the scenes look at an Saturday Night Live style sketch comedy show. One was "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" it was an hour long. It was created by Aaron Sorkin of "West Wing" fame. It starred Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry and all the critics were effusive with their early praise and expectations were very high.

The other show was "30 Rock" it had Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. It was a half hour and as far as I could tell it wasn't getting much in the way of buzz or early enthusiasm. Of course the weird thing was that NBC would be launching what appeared to be two very similar shows in the same season. I'm remember a lot of tv critics remarking on the fact, and the sub-text seemed to be that only one of them could survive. I'm not sure that's entirely true. It's possible I suppose that both could have survived, but given the failure rate of new shows, the chances of both surviving wasn't even that good, and when they had a similar premise? The conventional wisdom was that if either show was going to survive it was going to be Studio 60. Well...

As it turns out after watching the two shows, they weren't that much alike. To be frank "30 Rock" was funny and "Studio 60" was not. Which is not to say that "Studio 60" was not well written, and that it didn't have some good drama, but Sorkin was trying to have it be as dramatic as the West Wing while making it as funny as SNL. It turns out that that's pretty difficult, since even SNL has had difficulty doing that, and they could care less about behind the scenes drama. So "30 Rock" is still going strong, and "Studio 60" is barely remembered.

I really enjoy "30 Rock". And while it does have some of the unnecessary crassness that dominates prime time these days, IMHO most of the humor comes from off-beat weird humor. Here's a great clip from an episode I was watching last night on hulu.com (all of season 2 is available for free):

The Collection

Also another great clip with a D&D reference

Everytime I meet a new person I figure out how I'm going to fight them

Doping

2008-08-07T13:12:00.003-06:00

Well it's been long enough after the tour that any positives should have hit the news, so hopefully we've heard it all. Of course the Olympic Road Race is on Saturday, so we could get a whole new round of positives, though I certainly hope not (though that's where Tyler Hamilton's troubles started). Highlighting once again, the difficulty of all this testing I just read an article on VeloNews about a new article in the journal Nature which calls into question the statistical validity of the doping tests.

He offers no opinion on the guilt or innocence of Floyd Landis, but does mention the tests he failed as examples of tests that are flawed. I've always felt that something didn't smell quite right about Landis' positive. I'm not saying I'm convinced of his innocence I'm saying I'd be more comfortable with how things went down if I was a lot more convinced of his guilt. As I've said before, how about just testing the B sample at a different lab than where you test the A sample? Is that really too much to ask? Plus I've never heard a credible explanation for how testosterone taken the day of his miraculous breakaway would have helped him. And of course I'd like one of the greatest attacks in the history of the Tour to not be completely overshadowed by drugs.

FUD

Heat

2008-08-06T08:40:00.002-06:00

It's been pretty hot for the last few weeks, but it looks like some relief is finally in sight. It's supposed to be overcast and a little rainy for the next few days. That will be nice. I'm hoping it means that the worst of summer is over and that things are going to start cooling off. Though perhaps I'm being premature. It's still early August. Anytime I'm inclined to feel too bad about the heat I just check out Baghdad. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be out during the day in a full army kit.

Support our Troops

7/7 Conspiracy Theories

2008-08-05T08:46:00.002-06:00

Occasionally I've written about the 9/11 truth movement. The group of people who think that the US Government or Israel or the Neo-Cons were complicate in or had foreknowledge of the World Trade Center attacks. The most ridiculous of the claims is the so called "Controlled Demolition" theory. That towers 1 and 2 only fell because they had been pre-wired with explosives. Well one would think that the British would be a little more sensible. Or rather one might think that the 9/11 Truthers were primarily motivated by their bottomless loathing of Bush, but it turns out that there are also conspiracy theories about the 7/7 subway bombings in Britain.

I discovered this when I was listening to last Saturday's episode of "This American Life". They had a little segment about a lady who had survived one of the bombs and ended up because of her prolific blogging of being a spokeswomen for the survivors groups. Well she discovered that some of the conspiracy theorists were using quotes from her blog in support of their theories, and she felt that it made it look like she supported the theories, which, of course, she did not. So she decided to engage them, and start posting on their site. Well you can imagine where it goes from there...

Anyway, it reminds me of an episode of Star Trek Voyager I guess it's called "The Voyager Conspiracy" (I had to look it up, I should have just asked my wife, she would have know.) In it Seven of Nine upgrades some processor and she starts seeing conspiracies everywhere. I can't help but think that there's something of a similar processor malfunction going on in the minds of the people who buy into these theories. But perhaps I'm being too harsh... But then again maybe I'm being too easy on them...

The new Star Trek Movie looks good

GenCon

2008-08-04T10:59:00.002-06:00

I've been so busy that I haven't had much time to anticipate GenCon this year. And in fact things were in so much doubt that for quite a while my attendance was in doubt. But I'm definitely and it's definitely next week... Holy crap! Fortunately while I do plan on doing quite a bit of business while I'm there I don't have any big presentation to prep. I am running a D&D Session while I'm there. I'm converting G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King to Fourth edition. We'll have to see how that goes. I'm actually thinking it will be pretty straight forward, but we'll have to see.

This is the first year since it started that I haven't done True Dungeon. It's always been a lot of fun, but the stress of trying to get a slot and the expense, has just made it too annoying. Perhaps I'll try again next year. What I'd really like to see happen is for my business to start doing well enough that money isn't a huge worry and then for them to double the price of the tickets, or at least set a ticket price where the primary qualifier for a ticket is devoting a whole day to clicking on links trying to find a session with some openings.

In any case, as always, I expect to have a huge amount of fun, it will be a nice vacation and I'm really grateful to all the people in my life who are making it possible. In particular my wife who could very reasonably have said that it was too much. Although at least this year it's not happening on our wedding anniversary (I fly back on our anniversary... so I'll be able to take her out for dinner that evening.)

Let's roll some dice!

Fathers and Sons Post Mortem

2008-08-02T15:14:00.002-06:00

The Fathers and Sons camping trip went pretty well. I actually got some time to read in the shade while my two sons wandered around. I later, upon reading the rules sheet, discovered that kids under 12 were supposed to be under adult supervision at all times. I'm guessing that that's a rule of somewhat recent origin. I can certainly remember lots of times before I was 12 when I was allowed to roam free while camping. But perhaps the rule has always been on the books and we just never followed it. My family has a history of being scofflaws.

The turn-out from our ward was so pathetic as to be embarrassing, and certainly much different than last year. Last year the site designated for our ward filled up to the point that one of the families ended up staying in their van even though they had a tent. So this year I made a special point of showing up early to make sure I got a good spot. As it turns out I needn't have bothered. It was me and my two boys, another guy about my age with is one son, and an older guy with his two sons and three grandsons (plus one hanger on). So three families total. Last year there were at least 10 and probably closer to a dozen.

I felt particularly bad for the older guy who had been tasked with making breakfast. He was told to plan on 24 people, if you do the math you can see he ended up with half that. Needless to say I ate a lot this morning.

Sleeping-wise we had one giant air mattress. I put my youngest son in the middle, which may have been a mistake. He's all sharp points and he seems to have the uncanny ability of sleeping in such a way that they're all jabbing the most sensitive parts of the person sleeping next to him. Of course I slept with my back to him, but that just meant that I had a knee in my back all night. I thought I slept okay, but the sleepiness I feel today belies that, perhaps there's still a little of the muscle relaxant lingering in my bloodstream...

Pretty fly for a white guy

Father's and Sons

2008-08-01T11:42:00.002-06:00

Tonight is the Father's and Sons outing. It should be pretty fun, my boys are pretty excited about it. Though their idea of fun in the wilderness is quite a bit different than mine. I mostly just want to sit in the shade and read a book while enjoying the beauty and serenity of nature. They, on the other hand, want to be entertained, and while they like camping I don't think they've quite mastered the art of being entertained by it. It's probably my own fault for letting them play video games. So as a result I have to constantly offer them suggestions for what to do. Which is fine it give me a chance to hang out with them, it's just coming up with a new idea every 15 minutes that's taxing.

I'm planning on bringing my laser so that should provide plenty of entertainment for them once it gets dark, I'll just have to stall until then.

Lasers, is there anything they can't do?

The Dark Knight

2008-07-31T11:40:00.002-06:00

So I saw "The Dark Knight" on IMAX yesterday. Visually it was stunning. I would definitely recommend seeing it on IMAX if you can. That said the audio was off. The dialogue track(s) was being constantly drowned out by the background noise. It seemed particularly acute at the beginning of the movie, so either they noticed it and adjusted for it, or I got used to it. I suspect the latter since the person I was with noticed the same thing, but near the end of the movie. It was a good movie, I really enjoyed it and felt I had definitely got my money's worth. It was not however the "Greatest Movie Ever!!!" which seems to have been the opinion of everyone I talked to who had seen it and the users of IMDB.

For one thing I'm getting a little tired of villains who primary superpower seems to be an unearthly command of logistics, human resources and organization. Obviously I don't want to spoil the movie, but The Joker is able to tackle transportation and recruiting issues that sizeable corporations would have a tough time with while operating completely out in the open, to say nothing of doing it in secret while the target of a city-wide manhunt. Obviously this is a point that bothers no one but me, so I shouldn't even bring it up. But on the off chance that part of that 0.0001% of people who are mentally defective in the same fashion as me, I thought I'd mention it.

Anyway like I said, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movie (though I also think it could have stood to be shorter) and I would definitely recommend it, unless gore really bothers you. There's a particularly gruesome... thing... in the movie. Which turned my stomach a little bit. It's just not the greatest movie ever.

We burned the forest down.

More Sleep

2008-07-30T10:48:00.002-06:00

Well after sleeping for 7 hours yesterday during the day I had no problem laying down at midnight and sleeping for another 9 hours. So for those keeping track at home that's 16 hours of sleep in 20 hours on half a pill... But other than the guilt I'm suffering from being a total slacker, I'm feeling a lot better. But you can see why I am very sparing in my use of them.

As you can imagine, since I was only awake for a couple of hours since the last time I blogged there's really not much else to report.

Death rides a Cervelo SL R3

Muscle Relaxant

2008-07-29T21:51:00.002-06:00

I have back problems, but doesn't everyone? In my particular case the middle three or four vertebra in my back settle into kind of a fixed and locked position. The pain then radiates around the rib cage and overall it's pretty painful. There are some stretches and so forth that I can do that help relieve the pain but eventually it gets to the point where I have to sort of reset it by taking a muscle relaxant. Which of course given my low tolerance for just about all drugs knocks me out pretty good.

I've been meaning to take a muscle relaxant for about two months now, but since I was afraid that it would take me completely out of commission for 24 hours there was always some reason why I couldn't. It had finally progressed to the point where it was seriously affecting my sleep, and so this afternoon after I got back from donating platelets. I called around to make sure there was nothing critical and then I took half a muscle relaxant. Previously I'd always taken a full pill. Not sure why, I had always thought about doing a half, but never had. Of course I've only taken it 2 or maybe three times in the past.

After taking it I slept for about seven hours, in the middle of the day. We'll see how that affects my sleep tonight. My back feels a lot better though I'd venture to say that it's not quite as fully "reset" as it is when I take a full one. After waking up I was still a little groggy and possibly grumpy, my apologies if you happened to be the victim of that. But probably within nine hours of taking it I'm feeling pretty good. This is encouraging, because unless I'm mistaken it means I can take a half before I go to bed and not have to worry about entirely clearing my schedule...

Of course I don't want to get too dependent, but given that I got the prescription over a year ago I don't think we're in any danger of that yet.

I'm old and getting older by the second

TdF and 4E Campaign

2008-07-28T10:28:00.002-06:00

Well the Tour is over. Carlos Sastre managed to turn in the time trial of his life on Saturday and held of Cadel to keep the yellow. I really think it came down to the two teams. CSC was incredibly dominant, while Cadel generally didn't have a team mate in site when it crunch time came. It was precisely for the reason that I didn't pick Cadel. As a whole the tour seemed more suited to the climbers which is why I looked at Cunego, who dropped out near the end with injuries. I feel like Sastre winning in some ways vindicates my pick, but oh well. You might ask why I didn't pick Sastre. That's a good question. I guess to be candid I was still bitter from the time when Tyler Hamilton was on CSC and he was supposed to be co-captain with Sastre, and I felt that the divided attention may have cost Hamilton some support. Course Hamilton is so deep into suspension and so old (37) that it's unlikely we'll ever see him at another grand tour.

Speaking of suspended riders next year's Tour could be very interesting. Ivan Basso will be back. Astana with Contador and Leipheimer will also be there (barring any new revelations). And of course I'm sure that Cadel and Sastre will be back as well. Add in all the new revelations from this year like the Schleck Brothers, Bernard Kohl and Vandevelde and before you know it you're talking about a very crowded field of contenders. I'm looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the Vuelta a España. They're doing the Angliru. Can you say 23.6%?

The first session of the 4E campaign went really well. I'd printed out power cards for all of the individual powers and that really helped to keep things moving. I would say that combats went much faster than 3E combats, though I'm comparing 1st level 4E combats to mid-level 3E combats, so that's kind of an apple and oranges comparison. I also used some dungeon tiles for the setting. They were a little more difficult to set up than I thought. I had assumed I could just page through and pull some out and be up and running within a few minutes, but it turned out that putting it all together and finding the stuff I wanted was more time consuming than that. I think before the next session I'm going to have to go through before hand and mark the ones I want with post it notes.

I think the part I was most pleased with (other than the player's having fun) was the ease with which I could toss in a variety of interesting monsters and create interesting encounters. This part is as advertised. I can now spend a lot more time on design and story creation, and a lot less time building stat blocks. That part really excites me and it was the promise of that which convinced me that I could do a homebrew, so it's good to see it panning out. I'll have to post the story some other time (assuming anyone is interested) I'm out of time for blogging for the day.

Because you're mine I walk the line.

Gaming Post You've Been Warned

2008-07-25T11:33:00.002-06:00

A while ago I was offered a spot as a player in a new 4E game. Initially I said I'd have to think about it, which as we all know is code for I'd really like to, but I'm way too busy. Once we decided to spend some time roping up before we tried the overhang a thousand feet up, I thought, hey, I should be able to make some time to roll some dice. Of course before that I'd decided to switch the family campaign over to 4E and had the idea of doing it as a complete homebrew. Yes I made this decision before roping up, and yes I'm not sure entirely what I was thinking there either. The first session in that campaign is tomorrow, and if you've ever started a homebrew campaign you know that getting it started is an awful lot of work.

So I slammed with work, on both fronts, but at least one of the fronts is something I really enjoy. So I'm going to do just that, and enjoy it. I'll let you know how the first session went on Monday, but I have high hopes that people are really going to enjoy themselves.

Finished Oak Cabinets

July 24th

2008-07-24T10:19:00.002-06:00

July 24th is a state holiday here in Utah. We call it Pioneer Day (I never knew that it was once called "Day of Deliverance"). There are parades and fireworks and barbecue's etc. For my wife's family it has additional significance (no, not because she's Brigham Young's great-great-great-granddaughter, it's actually on the other side) it's her mother's birthday. Family legend has it that for a long time as a little girl she thought that the parade was in her honor.

Most people get the day off, or take the day off. I'm in the office, but no one else is. I'm not bitter, it's nice to occasionally have a day where you're working and no one else is, allows you to catch up on stuff. But it's not going to be all fun and games today we're celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday this evening with dinner, a wading pool and fireworks. I bought the fireworks yesterday and I'm somewhat excited to set them off with the kids. I spent a little extra and got a special surprise, we'll have to see how it goes. I'll let you know.

Just came up with a new emoticon for sanguine [:<≠>

l'Alpe d’Huez

2008-07-23T06:39:00.002-06:00

Well I was up again early this morning. Like really early, 4:30 am. But it's Alpe d'Huez, I mean how can anyone sleep? Anyway, it's still to early in the stage to say much about it (it was sad that Vandevelde was dropped and then crashed yesterday). So I'll just refer you to this great article on the 1986 Tour and the battle between Greg Lemond and Bernard Hinault that culminated on the ascent of Alpe d'Huez.

I'm definitely napping today

The Alps

2008-07-22T07:07:00.002-06:00

Well the Tour is in the alps. Today and tomorrow's stage are brutal. Today isn't quite a mountain top finish but it might as well be. The final mountain tops out at 2802 meters (9193 feet) before a 23.5 kilometer (14.6 miles) descent to the finish. Yeah you can make up some time on the descent if you were behind at the summit, but not a lot. And then tomorrow the Tour goes over the Galibier, Croix de Fer before ending on top of Alpe d'Huez. So three hors category climbs, I fully expect that we still won't know who's going to win after today and tomorrow's stage. But anyone who shows any weakness is definitely going to be out.

Of course many people reading this entry are going to say "Who cares? They're all gigantic drug users anyway." And certainly having Beltran, Ricco and the Barloworld rider all get kicked out for drugs has not helped that image, but let's set that aside for the moment. Ed sent me a link to an interesting article from the BBC, talking about concerns about doping at the Olympics. What I found interesting is that the expert they cited for their assertion that positives were being ignored was the director of the Astana team's anti-doping program. Remember? The team that the Tour Organizers decided was too tainted by drug use in the past. I'm not sure if that rises quite to the level of full on irony, but it is weird.

Of course for me personally the biggest problem with the Tour is not the doping, it's the fact that it starts so early, particularly on mountain stages. Today's coverage started at 4:30 am. I didn't quite wake up that early (and yes I know I'm under no obligation to watch the tour at all) but knowing that it's on, it's hard not to want to be up watching it, so I was up about 5:15. As a result of this and previous days my sleep schedule is not quite as tight as I would like, though I am following the "take a nap every day" part of the plan.

Uh, no, you got the wrong number. This is 9-1…2.

Flogging Molly

2008-07-21T11:24:00.002-06:00

Well I went to my first concert in probably 6 years (obviously I'm not counting symphonies and similar events) on Saturday. It was loud and hot and I spent a lot of time standing around compared to the amount of time people were actually performing, and tickets were cheaper at the door then they were in advance and the opening act was kind of annoying (there's a reason most rock songs are 3-4 minutes, not 12) and a can of soda cost $3 and a bottle of Gatorade cost $4, BUT despite all of that, once the main act, Flogging Molly came on it was awesome. Here's a video to give you an idea of what it was like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKWF37OFMw

Anyway it was a lot of fun. Much more fun than I expected. I may have to do it again in another 6 years.

Next time I'll bring earplugs

More Doping

2008-07-17T13:28:00.002-06:00

As Ed mentioned in his comment on yesterday's blog there's been another doping scandal at the tour. This time it was Riccardo Ricco of the Saunier Duval team. This was a particularly big blow in that he had won two stages in fairly impressive fashion and as someone who was only 24 was viewed as someone who was in the new generation. A generation that was hopefully free from drugs. I guess that wasn't the case. Although when you look at how much he idolized Pantani that should have been a big clue.

In any case people are pointing to this as evidence that the tests are working, and I sure hope they're right. The only thing, in my mind, worse than busting a bunch of dopers and giving cycling yet another kick in the crotch would be to incorrectly bust a bunch of cyclists. But once again the narrative makes sense. You've got someone who idolizes a cyclist who took drugs, who does remarkably well, better than expected and took a brand new form of EPO. That last bit is a big one. WADA had never announced that they had a test for this new form of EPO, so there's a good reason to suspect that Ricco may have thought that he could take it without running any risks.

So there you go. At least he wasn't in yellow (though he was the white jersey and the polka-dot jersey wearer...) In the course of the reporting I found out that my man Cunego has a tattoo that says "I'm drug free" (or "doping free" I imagine it's actually in Italian...) Now obviously hypocrisy is not unknown, but imagine for a moment that he was busted, and he had that tattoo. That would open him up to so much crap that just that scenario alone would be enough to make me think that there might be something there.

Dreaming of a drug free Tour

Games

2008-07-16T08:11:00.002-06:00

For a variety of reasons not worth going into we've decided to dial things back a bit with the new company. You could say that, in the terms of Spinal Tap, that we're turning the dial from 11 back to 8 or 9. What this means is that I might actually have some time to do something fun. Not a lot of time mind you, in fact when I look at all the things I've neglected around the house, and the time it will take to get back on top of that I probably don't have any time, but let's imagine, that in theory I might. The question then becomes what game should I play?

It's too bad Diablo III isn't going to be available for quite awhile. I'd play that for sure. Beyond that I'm not sure. A good rpg would be nice, but I haven't seen one of those in awhile. I've got some 4X games that I could play, and that's not a bad idea. Galactic Civilizations came out with their final expansion. So that sounds fun, but it doesn't sound awesome, if you know what I mean. I am playing a little bit of Weewar, which has been awesome, but that's only 20 minutes a day, so the search continues.

I did hear about a pretty cool game yesterday which is supposed to release this summer. It's called "Hinterland". Here's the feature list:

* Fantasy role-playing and character development
* Party-based tactical combat, including item use
* Base building, including building upgrades
* Innovative combat stat leveling system
* Random world generation for maximum replay
* Folklore / fantasy setting
* Intimate scale

Apparently you're in charge of a small group of peasants and you're supposed to lead them off into the hinterland (get it?) and establish a village. Obviously it's entirely possible that they've tried to pack too much into the game, but if that's not the case then this could be the greatest game since Master of Magic...

Nap Time

Viruses, Worms, Trojans etc.

2008-07-15T10:36:00.002-06:00

Well my wife clicked on a seemingly innocuous link yesterday and next thing we know we have this nasty Trojan on her computer. It's hard to say how it happened. It could be that her FireFox wasn't completely up to date, or maybe it was Windows that wasn't all the way patched, or perhaps it was something else entirely. In any case I've spent about five hours so far trying to clean it and I've managed to get it down to the point where there's a single .dll. The root of the problem if you will. And no matter what I try I can't get rid of that last .dll.

While I can't exactly pin the blame on where the bug got in, I can definitely pin the blame on not being able to delete the file. That's Microsoft. On any other OS I'd have no problem deleting the file, but somehow Microsoft through some combination of the registry, permissions, and pure unadulterated evil has managed to create a situation where I can't, in safe mode, with any utility know to man, with all of the resources of the internet at my disposal, delete this one file. It's enough to make me violent.

Next step is to track down an XP install disk (I don't have one but I do have a genuine copy of windows, just ask Microsoft, I've even got the cool sticker...) and try deleting it through the recovery console. If that doesn't work I guess I'll have to "repave it" as they used to say at my old job.

At the final judgement someone at Microsoft will have a lot to answer for

Hautacam

2008-07-14T12:12:00.002-06:00

Well the first big mountain finish was today. As usual it doesn't tell you who will win the tour, but it definitely tells you who won't. Valverde and Cunego are almost certainly out of the running for the overall. They didn't completely crack, but they lost 4+ minutes to Cadel Evans and almost that much to all of the other contenders. So there goes my prediction, though I would like credit for avoiding Valverde. And now that Evans has yellow we'll have to see how his team holds up. He only has a lead of 1 second over Frank Schleck, and CSC has a much better team. Being in yellow by only a second is something you expect to see the day after a prologue, not going into the first rest day.

No further word on Beltran or his B sample. Phil and Paul actually haven't talked about him much. I did read that yesterday's victory by Ricardo Ricco was "too impressive" and people are starting to question whether he's clean. I guess that's where the sport is at, and it's not a good place to be. Overall I was kind of disappointed in the big contenders. There were a couple of attacks but nothing really significant. Still the group was whittled down to five. Christian VandeVelde was in that elite group of five and he's definitely been one of the big stories of the tour. I certainly hope that he continues to do well.

They're lucky Contador couldn't make it

More on Beltran

2008-07-12T07:41:00.003-06:00

Another quick note on Beltran. I'm relatively convinced that he's guilty, but I can't understand why they announced the whole thing before the B sample was tested. Once you've hauled the guy away in a police car and it's been in all the newspapers, that provides a serious disincentive for a lab to reverse all that by declaring that the B sample was negative. How hard would it be to wait for that before exploding everything? I'll just tell you that if the did those two things 1) waited for the results of the B sample before doing ANYTHING (telling anyone) and 2) had the B sample tested at a completely different lab (preferably in another country even). Then I would feel totally comfortable saying "Yeah that dude did it, kick him out of the race and off the team." Whereas now, I'm reasonably comfortable in saying that out of all the people busted for doping that one of them (maybe even more) was probably innocent.

That's all folks!

Beltran

2008-07-11T21:58:00.003-06:00

Today was almost entirely consumed by family stuff, but I have a couple of minutes so I thought I'd answer Ed's question about my reaction to Beltran. Well first off it's kind of early to really have much of a reaction, though certainly I was really hoping that this would be the first tour in a while without even the slightest hint of doping, so this has ruined that. As I look at Beltran, he's 37, he's certainly past his prime. EPO is something which does definitely help, so it basically passes the smell test. I guess at this point we just have to wait for the counter-sample to be tested. I guess it's too much to expect that a completely different lab will test the counter sample?

My ancestors were all like a billion times tougher than me

Sleeping schedule

2008-07-10T10:29:00.002-06:00

Things have actually calmed down a little bit and so I'm thinking of trying to napping idea. For awhile things were so crazy that my bedtime had been pushed back to like 2 or 3 am. But then this week the kids started summer school (it's called "Beyond the Basics") and they have to be up every morning at 8, which is kind of early if you went to bed at 3 am and didn't fall asleep until 4 am. The summer school is kind of cool, it's two weeks and there's sort of a theme. So my oldest daughter is doing some kind of history/archeology course while my oldest son is learning how to design web pages on a Mac. My #2 son is also in a course, but I don't remember off the top of my head what the theme is.

Anyway so the schedule I'm hoping to maintain is to go to bed at midnight, wake up at 6:30 and then take a two hour nap every afternoon. I did the waking up at 6:30 this morning, and of course since I haven't had the nap (and it's my first day). I'm pretty tired, but I'm optimistic that it will work out. My chances of success will be even better once school starts since my youngest will be in afternoon kindergarten. I mean that almost seems like a situation where the universe is laying out the "nap welcome mat" if you will.

Tour-wise it was a good stage, though none of the riders I was pulling for did as well as I'd hoped. Cunego finished 29th, 32 seconds behind the winner, Millar finished 39th, 51 seconds back. Kim Kirchen, riding for the American Team Columbia took yellow (by finishing 5th on the stage at four seconds back), so that's pretty cool. Evans and Valverde crossed the line in 2nd and 3rd, so they are shaping up to be the big contenders, though I still have my doubts about Evans' team. They didn't have to do any work and yet my man, Popovych, was the only one from the team who finished anywhere near the front (and he was 38th, 49 seconds back), on a stage that was really pretty minor compared to the really high mountains. I guess we'll know more come Monday.

Richard Nixon's Head: Hello Morbo, how's the family?
Morbo: Belligerent and numerous.