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May 31, 2005
Forecasting the Fallout/ Cookout in Crawford...
If you head on over to Foreign Policy.com, you can read an article by Robert McNamara concerning US Nuclear Policy. Scary stuff, especially the part about the "better than a 50% chance" the US will face a nuclear attack of some kind in the next decade (think terrorists, folks).
I've known for some time that the Bush administration had commissioned new research on nuclear weapons. What I hadn't been aware of is some of the historical issues surrounding nuclear armaments, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968.
After reading this article, I'm even more glad we have a kook like W running our government today than ever before. I surely am.
Kim's brother is going to Bush's ranch in Crawford next weekend for a cookout. It turns out they came to his unit asking for volunteers to bring their families out to the President's place. Now Ben is a single guy with no kids, but he chimes in with "I can bring my dad," so he's off for ribs with the President this weekend.
Kim was very excited about all of this. "He's going to meet the President of the United States!" she says to me. Not that she likes George any better than I do (well, maybe she likes him a little better, but John Kerry might very well like him better than I do, comparatively). But he's the President, you know?
I'd be excited if Ben got to meet the President at the White House. Or on-board Air Force One. Or even maybe at Fort Hood. Getting to meet the President during some sort of exchange of his office, while performing his duty.
But to go out to his ranch, with his "family" in tow, just sounds like a photo op for Georgie. Here's the President rubbing elbows with our boys and girls and uniform and their family — isn't he just a super nice guy? I smell bad approval ratings, folks. I smell lots of dead troops in the middle east, folks. I smell something cooking on the barbeque that is nothing at all like pork or beef or chicken.
There was a guy at Pegasus who was bitching about having to troubleshoot a doctor's satellite because the doc had complained about how important he was and how much his time cost because he was a doctor. "I don't care who you are. You call in here, you've gotta work with me or I can't help you. If the President of the United States called in here, I wouldn't treat him a bit differently!!" this guy stated.
"You wouldn't, Tim?" I asked him.
He looked at me incredulously and said, "You mean to tell me that you would treat him differently than another customer?"
"I certainly would," I told him. "I'd say 'Thank you for calling Pegasus, Mr. President. By the way, I think you are a fucking idiot. Now, how can I help you?'“
Tim just smiled. Maybe it's a good thing Ben's going to Crawford and I'm not.
Posted by john at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
May 27, 2005
Congratulations to Jeffrey...
Zeldman.com has been up and running now for almost a decade. Jeffrey Zeldman is a legend among web developers and designers, and maybe you should get to know him, too. Here's part of an e-mail I sent him earlier today:
Congratulations on ten years! It's a little early, I know, but your site will have been here ten years next week, and that is the kitty cat's pajamas!!You've helped out countless people in this time, entertained us, chided us when we needed it (Remove forebrain and serve, anyone?), and been the all-around go to website of the decade. Way to rock on!
Here's to another decade of Zeldman.com!!
Ten years. That's actually longer than Kim and I have been married, by a few months at least. Wow.
Posted by john at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2005
Darth Vader Made Him Cry...
I just finished reading an article called Darth Vader Made Me Cry
This is classic. I have to tell you all about Episode III, okay? Remind me later, if I don't...
Posted by john at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
A Day in the Life...
5:30 AM: The alarm goes off. I spent most of the night waking up every half hour as, alternatively, the rain pounded on the house, William stole the covers or otherwise kicked them off, or my body decided it had been asleep for seven hours already even though it was only 1 AM.
5:34 AM: Kim's alarm goes off. She has to go to work early today because Barbara is going to work Kim's normal 9-6 shift. Interestingly, although Kim has worked there for over a year, and though they are interviewing people to fill two recent vacancies at the company (somehwhere around half of Kim's immediate co-workers will be working their last day at Kim's company today), they are still interviewing people to work from 8-5 and expecting Kim to continue working the shit shift. My words, not hers.
5:37 AM: My alarm goes off again and I actually get up. I decide to shave this morning even though Kim's probably waiting to get into the bathroom, but I'm quick about it.
6:19 AM: I'm out of the shower and dressed, almost ready to walk out the door. William announces that he wants to go to work with me ("I wanna make some money!"). I almost take him up on the offer, if only because if he becomes too disruptive to the office, I could take him home. And who would expect me to drive another hour back to the office after driving an hour to get home?
7:00 AM: Tony and Dwight are ratling on about Jane Fonda movies, USA Today, Maxim Magazine, and the usual mess. I'm passing the rest area in Shelby County headed East on Interstate 64.
7:32 AM: I pull into the parking garage below the shopping center where I work. No, really-- The office is in a run-down-but-once-high-class strip mall. My boss's boss isn't in the office yet, so I put out the flag. It seems like a year and a half ago around here.
7:45 AM: I read an article about Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith being available via Bit Torrent. Complete with the Bit Torrent link. Ouch.
7:56 AM: Kim reports via Yahoo! Messenger that "William was bouncing off the walls this morning. No one should be that wide awake before 9". I laugh.
8:10 AM: I read a Joystiq article about Marriage Proposals at E3. The last line is the best, and I have to laugh again. I post the first version of the entry.
8:21 AM: Hell freezes over as Kelsey Grammer will be playing the Beast in X-Men 3.
8:50 AM: I go to my car to retrieve some cough suppressant medicine I have in my jacket. My co-worker, Sri, has tried everything to get rid of his cough, and I'm hoping this will do the trick. Incidentally, Kim makes fun of me for the amount of stuff I carry in my coat pockets but I prefer to be prepared.
9:24 AM: Kim admits that the "Top 10 Uses for Dromaeosaur Claws" is her favorite t-shirt design on Paleo Artisans page. I prefer the Top 10 Reasons Dinosaurs Went Extinct shirt, myself. As she put it, we are both "complete and total science geeks" for finding them amusing.
10:02 AM: Intense pain in my stomach makes me wonder if I need to eat something.
10:19 AM: Eating peanuts doesn't help much at all. Diet Mountain Dew is sneered at. I wonder if I've got a case of what Kim had a week ago to the day. Ah geeze.
10:31 AM: I am offered a copy of a certain new blockbuster out in the theaters. No names here, people. And no, I don't have it.
11:19 AM: While walking across the courtyard, I spot several reporters hanging around. As it turns out, they're hanging out waiting for the folks from the personnel board to get out of a closed session meeting. I know this, of course, because I went over and talked to them, amazing anyone and everyone I have talked to since. What's the big deal, so he has a camera the size of my refrigerator?
11:30 AM: Lunch with Tim at the Thai Smile. He tries to carry on a conversation while I eat, a fact made more difficult by the fact that I am worried about just how this food will affect my stomach. But I chill out a bit and things go well enough.
12:53 PM: The reporters are still out there, and they're growing in numbers. I try to convince one of my co-workers (who is wearing slacks, a tie and a dress shirt for some reason) to go outside and tell them that the Governor will be having a press conference at 3 PM to announce his resignation.
1:38 PM: Sri and I are talking about the project I'm working. I try to avoid falling asleep as we talk. It doesn't go very well. No, Sri isn't boring— I'm just sleepy about this time every day.
2:12 PM: Chaotica's show starts on RFZ. I dance in my office chair like a little fanboy and hope against hope she plays the song I've been looking to purchase so that I can get the title and artist.
2:37 PM: Finalized the layout on the page I've been building all day. Started working on the Javascript that's going to make it sit up and bark when someone walks past.
3:09 PM: Discuss Visual Source Safe issues with Jason and Mike. Follow Jason to Abe's desk when he asks about the new VPN. Stay at Abe's desk after Jason leaves to discuss road bikes.
3:40 PM: I said the hell with it and left work. Okay, I'm leaving a little early. It's Friday. And I got a lot done today. It's off to pick up my kids or something.
4:20 PM: While passing into Jefferson County, the "Low Fuel" light comes on in the Mustang. I decide to press on rather than stopping for gas at the Sams Club
4:45 PM: After gassing up, I'm at home and planted on the couch. I watch the news hoping for a glimpse of the happenings in Frankfort.
5:20 PM: Kim arrives home from work after stoppping to pick up William from day care. She's home more than an hour early. A new girl will be starting at her job sometime next week who might be working 9-6 at least one day a week.
6:32 PM: William and I ride our bikes for a while. We have to practice using the brakes after William rides into some bushes instead of stopping. Fun times are had by most.
7:01 PM: In the Ardennes, US forces barely manage to hold off the German assault at the Battle of the Bulge. William accounts for 1 tank while I scrape by with 20 or 30 kills.
7:15 PM: Dinner is served. Home-made calzones made by Kim are the meal of the day. Yummy goodness ensues.
8:00 PM: More time is spent clearing the beacheads of Normandy, fighting thru Berlin, and otherwise killing Nazi's.
10:00 PM: Battlestar Galactica is on. Kim and I are there, with bells on.
11:39 PM: We're still up. William is asleep but Darian is still crying. I've passed out a couple of times, momentarily. Not sure about Kim. One of us is going to have a late night.
Posted by john at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2005
About a weekend...
William watched an episode of Oobi on Noggin yesterday in which the characters played around with a video camera and made a movie. Now he wants to do the same thing. That's just so cool.
First, he started playing video games. Now he wants to make movies. Next thing I know he'll be wanting to play role-playing games. I solemnly swear that once gets a little darker, I will refrain from calling him "Mini-Me".
Darian has been smiling for a long time now, but she has progressed into full throated belly laughs now, and it is a sight to behold (and take part in, because once a 3 month old squeals and laughs at you, you start laughing right back). I got her to do it for Kim and Susan the other day and they couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I was the only one she had gotten so tickled with. Ah, fatherhood.
Kids are kinda cool. I recommend them to anyone who has a couple of spare hours on their hands.
Watched a lot of movies this weekend, mostly. Watch About a Boy if you get the chance. Kim came down with something Friday and spent most of the weekend curled up on the couch trying to avoid having William jump on her stomach. Thankfully, she's gotten better. I don't like it when my sweety is sick.
I brought a disc of music from RFZ to work the other day, and now both of my immediate co-workers have gone on a Nightwish frenzy.
Posted by john at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)
Everybody's Somebody's Baby
Everybody's Somebody's Baby
By BARBARA KINGSOLVER
As I walk out the street entrance to my apartment, a kid in maroon high-tops and a startling haircut approaches, saying "Hi gorgeous." Three weeks ago, I would have assessed the degree of malice and made ready to run or tell him to bug off, depending. Today, instead, I smile, and so does my 4-year-old daughter, because after dozens of similar encounters I understand that he doesn't mean me but her .
This is not the United States.
For several months I've been living in Spain, and while I have struggled with the customs office, jet lag, dinner at midnight and the subjunctive tense, my only genuine culture shock has reverberated from this earthquake of a fact: People here like kids. They don't just say so, they do. Widows in black, buttoned-down c.e.o.'s, purple-sneakered teen-agers, the butcher, the baker, all have stopped on various sidewalks to have little chats with my daughter. Yesterday, a taxi driver leaned out his window to shout " Hola, guapa !" My daughter, who must have felt my conditioned flinch, looked up at me wide-eyed and explained patiently, "I like it that people think I'm pretty."
With a mother's keen myopia, I would tell you, absolutely, my daughter is beautiful enough to stop traffic. But in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, I have to confess, so is every other person under the height of one meter. Not just those who agree to be seen and not heard. When my daughter gets cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?), the waiters flirt and bring her little presents and nearby diners look on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that before now I have only seen aimed at the dessert tray. Children are the meringues and eclairs of this culture. Americans, it seems to me now, sometimes regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it's not their own they don't want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.
If you don't have children, you think I'm exaggerating. But if you've changed a diaper in the last decade, you know exactly the toxic-waste glare I mean. It goes far beyond diapers. In the United States, I have been told in restaurants: "We come here to get away from kids." (This for no infraction on my daughter's part that I could discern, other than being visible.) On an airplane, I heard a man tell a beleaguered woman whose infant was bawling (as loudly as I would, to clear my aching ears, if I couldn't manage chewing gum): "If you can't keep that thing quiet, you should keep it at home."
Air travel, like natural disasters, throws strangers together in unnaturally intimate circumstances. Think how well you got to know the bald spot on the guy who reclined in front of you on some long flight. As a consequence, I think of airplanes as a splendid cultural magnifying glass. On my family's recent voyage from New York to Madrid, we weren't assigned seats together. I shamelessly begged my neighbor -- a forty-something New Yorker traveling alone -- if she would take my husband's seat in another row so our air-weary and plainly miserable daughter could stretch out across our laps. My fellow traveler snapped: "No, I have to have the window seat, just like you had to have that baby."
Her remark left me stunned and, as always happens when someone is remarkably rude to me, momentarily guilty. Yes, she's right, conceiving this child was a rash, lunatic moment of selfishness, and now I had better be prepared to pay the price.
In the United States, where people like to think that anyone can grow up to be President, we parents are left very much on our own when it comes to the little Presidents-in-training. Our social programs for children are the hands-down worst in the industrialized world, but apparently that is just what we want. In an Arizona newspaper, I remember seeing a letter from a reader incensed by the possibility of a school budget override. "I don't have kids," he declared, "so why should I have to pay to educate other people's offspring?" The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to dismal and one is inclined to ask that smug nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.
Our nation has a proud history of lone heroes and solo flights, so perhaps it's no surprise that we think of child-rearing as an individual job, not a collective responsibility. I hold that view myself, apparently, for here in my new home I'm surprised when my daughter crash-lands in the playground and a sanguine Spanish stranger picks her up and dusts her off. When a shrieking bundle lands at my feet, I instantly look around for the next of kin. But I'm coming to see this detachment as perverse, when applied to children, and am wondering how it ever caught on in the first place.
In the natural world, it's understandable that the robin will roll out the eggs an interloping cowbird has laid in her nest and watch them splat on the ground. But we humans are supposed to distinguish ourselves by our broad-mindedness. My grandfather's family took in and raised a neighbor's orphaned children without a thought; in an era of shortage this was commonplace. One generation later, though, that kind of semipermeable household had vanished, at least among the white middle class.
Even in cases of formal adoption, the identity of an adopted child's birth mother was guarded like plutonium, as if the coming together of two different mothers -- matter and antimatter -- could explode the family universe. I know of an exceptional couple who recently adopted a baby, and along with the baby have more or less taken in the baby's 16-year-old mother and various of her friends and relations. I expect the baby will grow up blessed.
My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread. I thought then of the ungenerous woman on the plane, and as always happens two days after someone has been remarkably rude to me, I knew what I should have said to her: Be careful what you give children, or don't, for sooner or later you will always get it back.
Posted by john at 08:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2005
Move Your Feet...
Move Your Feet is worth a look. Especially if you have Quick Time installed.
Posted by john at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Only in Kentucky...
Here's one from the file of things that could only happen in Kentucky...
A guy was arrested for DUI the other day in Pulaski County. Not unusual, really, except that he wasn't driving anything. He was riding a horse. The cop said he could barely sit on it, and his blood alcohol was 3 times the normal limit.
Yes, a horse is classified as a vehicle in Kentucky. How do you like that?
Posted by john at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
Old Dog, New Trick
In Cody news, after several years of not trying to teach him much of anything, Cody learned a new command yesterday.
Lay down? Roll over? Fetch Timmy from the Well?
Nooooo... I taught him to SPEAK.
That's right, my dog will now bark on command. Handy, yes? Well I think so. Cody is really smart— I worked with him about fifteen minutes on Monday and we didn't quite get it. Then he barked at Kim last night as they were playing, and I told him "Good Speak" as I had been doing to other day. And after that, he had it.
I should really work with him more. He has so much energy and he's really quite bright. He's still smarter than Darian, and we're always talking to her like she's so special :-)
I should get this dog into agility trials. I would have already, but his disciplne goes out the window whenever a new dog or a new person comes around. He's hyper-friendly. With people. With dogs, he's just kind of everybody's little bitch. I think he suffered at the hands of the other dogs at the pound.
Of course, it's the fault of his previous owners. Anyone who would name a dog "Soda Pop" and then put him into the penal system was condeming that dog to permanent bitch status. Honestly.
Posted by john at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)
Plumbing
So, the story is that when you have a runny nose that lasts for less than ten days, it's a cold. And when you have a runny nose that lasts for more than ten days, it's an allergy.
So this is the eleventh day of runny noses for me, but it turned green somewhere along the way, so doesn't that mean it's a sinus infection? So does that still count as an allergy?
How come they never mention this stuff on the news? It's always the simple stuff (less than ten days) and not anything slightly more realistic.
Sigh. And to think it had almost cleared up.
Maybe I'm just allergic to horse races or something?
Posted by john at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2005
Oaks...
I saw two cops on the road today as I was driving to work. Coming home this afternoon, there were 10. Really, I swear. And half of those had those evil speeders pulled over.
Yes, it's Derby time here in Kentucky, and the state troopers are popping up like mushrooms. Consequently, it took some extra time to get home today as the persons in front of me decided that 65 mph really was an okay speed to travel even when they were in the fast lane and there were six or eight cars lined up behind them like teenage boys at a gang-bang.
Sorry, that was just crude. Please forgive me. Or don't. I'll survive either way. Just get in the right lane when someone behind you wants to go faster than you are, okay? Leave the policing of speed to the cops, okay?
What else is going down? I've been playing around with lights, as in playing around with lighting an area for the purposes of taking a photograph. This might eventually lead me to being able to light an area for the purpose of shooting video. Super secret plans are being hatched.
I've been setting up my computers to do video capture as well. I drug my old Sony out of the basement and was getting ready to use it to capture video again, but then I remembered how bad it sucked at that job, so I going to do it on my Mac. The Mac is purpose built to work in this capacity and has done so in the past, but it is currently not connected to my network. That makes for several issues, which include but are not limited to:
- The external DVD burner doesn't work on the Mac anymore after I dropped it that one time. It does work just fine on the PC, though.
- I've got some of the video that I previously captured on my Mac sitting on a hard drive in my PC. And it's not likely to leave that location with no network access to the Mac...
- It sucks using a PC all the time since I'm such an Internet whore.
Oh well. Derby tomorrow, Mother's Day on Sunday. Doctor's appointment on Monday, which means no work either.
Okay, I can live with that. Sure can.
Posted by john at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)