Aaron's Rambling Inanity

More Cleaning

2011-09-24T20:15:00.005-07:00

I used to collect Kool-Aid fairly seriously (as seriously as someone can collect Kool-Aid, I suppose). I had amassed a sizable collection of discontinued flavors, mostly from the mid-90s, but with a few dating back before that. I had about 150 packets, representing about 35 different flavors. The oldest piece in my collection is from 1970 or 1971. It's a pack of grape Kool-Aid presweetened with cyclamate, an artificial sweetener that excelled in every possible way except for the way of not giving you cancer and killing you.

Post marriage, kids, and house, I just don't have it in me anymore to collect much of anything, so this has been stashed away for the last ten years. I just dug it up yesterday and I think I've found it a good home. There's no real market for this stuff on ebay anymore, and I can't find quite so many collectors on the internet as I used to. I did find one guy who looks like he's serious enough to appreciate my collection, so I emailed him and told him I'd send my whole stash to him at my expense. He seemed quite excited, but honestly, I think I'm more excited to have found a good home for this. The alternatives would be for me to keep it forever, drink it, or trash it, none of which made me happy.

Cleaning

2011-09-23T21:10:00.002-07:00

I don't normally keep mementos like this around anymore. I found this while cleaning out a box of old stuff tonight, and it saddened me that both Elliott Smith and DV8 have died (by self-inflicted stabbing and fire respectively). The only reason that Grandaddy has been spared a horrific death is that they didn't show up that night. We had Teddy Thompson instead (if I remember correctly).

Camper Van Beethoven

2011-09-13T21:00:00.003-07:00

My favorite band (Camper Van Beethoven) playing my favorite album (Key Lime Pie) in its entirety. Live right now in Scottsdale.

Aaron's Famous Shrimp Boil

2011-01-18T23:32:00.004-07:00

The last couple of times we had the whole family at the beach, I made a good old fashioned shrimp boil. It's basically a giant pot of boiling seasoned water with potatoes, corn, sausage, onions, clams, and shrimp. When done, you just dump it out onto an outside table covered with freezer paper, and everyone gathers round to eat it up with their fingers. It's really the embodiment of my three favorite qualities in a meal: huge quantity, tastes delicious, and little cleanup (you just wrap the remainders up in your table covering and throw it away).

On this last trip, I heard it referred to as "Aaron's Famous Shrimp Boil" (see Danniey's blog), which is hilarious because I've made it a whopping 2 times, for basically the same crowd each time. Still, I did take copious notes both times about the ingredients and quantities and cooking times. So, even though I've only done it twice, I feel that I have at least 10 normal peoples' shrimp boils' worth of experience.

Given this wealth of accumulated skill, I feel it's only right to share this proficiency with you, dear reader, and so I present for you here my accumulated knowledge on the subject of Shrimp Boil.

Shrimp Boil

Servings: makes enough to serve 12 very hungry adults (this quantity will fill the turkey fryer near to the brim, so don't increase any one ingredient without making a corresponding decrease somewhere else.)

Ingredients:

2 bags shrimp boil seasoning (Zatarain's)

1/4 cup to 1/3 cup salt

1-3 heads of garlic

1-2 lemons (quartered)

4 lbs small red potatoes (cut in half. If you don't cut them, they'll roll off the table when you dump out the boil)

3 med. sweet onions (no need to peel; cut most of the way through the onion into quarters, but leave connected at the root end)

3 lbs sausage links (spicy but not too spicy - kielbasa's okay; Farmer John Louisiana Style Smoked Sausage was well liked; Bar S Hot Links were not; anything called red hots are probably too much)

16-20 frozen mini ears of corn

10 lbs clams (rinse the shells)

7-8 lbs shrimp (either shell on or deveined but with shells still on)

Instructions:

Fill turkey fryer with water about 2/3 full (at least 3 holes on the strainer basket still showing above the water line) (Keep a pitcher of hot water on hand in case you underestimated the water and have to add more. It's easier to add more water than to have too much water and have to bail it out at the end). Bring to a boil, then throw in the salt and seasoning bags. Cut the garlic half longitudinally and throw that in. Slow boil for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, squeeze lemon juice into pot, and throw the remains of the lemons in. Put in the onions and potatoes. When you put in the onions and potatoes, check your watch, because every five minutes after you put in the potatoes you'll add another ingredient in this order:

sausage

corn

clams

shrimp

Keep everything at a low boil, but crank up the heat right before adding each new ingredient so that it'll return to a boil quickly. After throwing the shrimp in, cook just until shrimp are pink and cooked through (2-5 minutes).

Pull out strainer basket, then dump on paper covered table. Serve with squeeze butter and cocktail sauce. Also, remember to get your drinks before you start eating because your hands will be too messy to go back and get them later.

A white Christmas. I'm dreaming of it.

2010-12-15T23:22:00.003-07:00

In most of Arizona, you can't count on nature to really do anything that you'd consider festive for the winter, like, say, snowing. Or getting below 70°. Any festive atmosphere is entirely artificial, brought on through decorations.

I can't be arsed to hang lights outside even on a good year, much less when the house is still under construction, so our house normally doesn't radiate the Christmas spirit out to the neighborhood. But, it got this coat of white primer yesterday, and I'm kind of surprised how much I like it as a seasonal thing. I wish I could have told the painters to just leave it and come back in January to finish the job. (I'm trying to tell them to come back a couple of Januarys later to pick up their check.)

I remarked to the foreign students we host at our house that our house looks like it's all decorated for Christmas, and one of them, the not so great at English one, later asked Becki if we repaint the house to decorate for winter every winter, or just this one.

The Pixies, and theories thereon

2010-09-24T23:45:00.007-07:00

The Pixies and their doppelgängers (from left: The bald one, the fat bald one, the other bald one, the fat one that's a woman)

There are a handful of albums that I feel like I know so well that I know every single note of music on the album; that if you dropped me into the album at any point, I could hear exactly what comes next before the sound even came out. Albums I've heard so many times as a whole album straight through that the album in its entirety becomes an indelible mark on my brain. The Pixies' Doolittle is one of those albums.

Joey had a copy my freshman year at BYU, and we had to have played that whole thing from beginning to end at least 200 times. There were some nights where I feel like I heard that album five times in a row. (That album and Camper Van Beethoven's Key Lime Pie were the two albums I think I heard the most that year. In fact, you could probably take this entire blog post and replace "the Pixies" with "Camper Van Beethoven" and replace Doolittle with Key Lime Pie and still have it be about as accurate). Even after I no longer lived with Joey, it took me a long time before I finally broke down and bought my own copy of Doolittle since I didn't think I really needed to. I knew every note already.

So, I was already familiar with the Pixies before that year, but that album really made me into a big fan. Alas, as was the case with so many of the bands I liked, the Pixies broke up (in a very big way) before I could ever see them play live. This was sad, but eventually I got over it and learned to accept it. Then, in 2004, the unthinkable happened. The Pixies reunited for a handful of shows, then a full fledged tour. There was a time in my life when I would have been driving cross country if necessary to see one of those shows, but being married with kids has kind of made that kind of thing a lot less likely. So, since the Pixies were never playing anywhere close, I would just find bootlegs on the internet and live vicariously through other people's concert experiences.

Luckily, instead of breaking up again, the Pixies have continued to tour off and on. This year, they were coming to Mesa Amphitheatre (only a 90 minute drive), coming on a Friday (meaning it's a lot easier to find a sitter for the kids because I can just leave them overnight with someone), and coming right after Becki's birthday (meaning I can justify the expense as a birthday present and throw in a hotel room to make it a romantic weekend getaway). To make it even that much better, this is their Doolittle tour, where to celebrate that album, they play the entire album straight through from beginning to end, throw in the B-sides, then finish with a couple of other hits.

So, of course it was a fantastic show. As were walking out of the amphitheater, I was wondering if this was better or worse than it would have been had I seen the band 20 years ago. Since I hadn't seen them then, I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty convinced that this show would have been better, and I'll tell you why:

The band looked genuinely happy to be playing together.
I'm sure that since tensions ran high in the band for quite a while in the old days that it would have shown in their playing somewhat. Just a guess on my part, but it seems easier for older band members to overlook the little things that would have bothered younger musicians. Also, when you spend a long time without something that you really liked, and you get it back, you tend to not let little things threaten to take it away again.

The band looked genuinely appreciative of the audience.
Same as above. None of these guys really played to audiences like this in their other interim projects, and even during the heyday of the Pixies struggled to muster up these kinds of crowds. They're clearly making more money playing to more people than they ever did when they were active before, but they went without that for long enough that they're obviously very happy that we all showed up to make that happen.

The audience was very obviously thankful that this opportunity even exists.
Seriously, probably 95% of the people at that show didn't have the chance to see the Pixies in the old days either because of circumstances or because they hadn't become fans yet or hadn't been born yet. So, we all got a second chance and are respectful to the band at the concert to show them that.

40 year olds are generally much better behaved at concerts than 20 year olds.
There are some drunk people at every show that try to ruin it for everyone, but the drunk jerk contingent was proportionally less well represented at this show. Same with the pushing shoving people. All else being equal, I like going to shows with people who know that their enjoyment of the concert needs to not somehow prevent other people's enjoyment. (There's one weird difference in favor of the kids though: When I went to concerts as a kid, they were just constant clouds of smoke. You'd come home smelling like an ashtray, and that's just the way it was. You accepted that as the cost of seeing live music. With indoor smoking bans, it's been a long time since I've been to a show with any smoke at all. This show was outdoors, and it was just as smoky as any of the worst smoke filled venues I've ever been at. I've been to other outdoor shows with hardly any smoking, though, and the only difference I can see is the age of the crowd. These people tonight are the same people who were smoking at the shows 20 years ago, and they just haven't quit. Outdoor shows with a young audience don't have smoke, probably because the kids there never started smoking. There's a valuable lesson and some good news in there somewhere.)

The band is tighter and are generally better musicians than before.
After the band broke up, all the members played a lot of music with a lot of different people in a lot of styles. They all practiced up some, and that reflects in their playing.

I get to not drive straight home.
The band doesn't get credit for this. It's just nice that I'm old enough that I can afford to stay in the hotel right next to the amphitheater so that I can just walk over to the show and walk right back instead of having to deal with waiting an hour to get out of the parking lot and drive a couple more hours home.

So, while I'm on the subject of theories, there's probably a whole other blog post to be made out of trying to formulate a theory that would explain why I only see old bands. Maybe because I like the older crowds? Maybe because I just can't get into the new music as much? Maybe because these kids won't get off my lawn? I don't know, but off the top of my head, here are all the shows I've seen in the last ten years (I'm sure I'm missing a few, though, and these are definitely not in order):

Badly Drawn Boy (twice)
Elliott Smith
Peter Murphy
Weezer (where I was clearly the oldest person there)
Cake
The Samples
Cracker (four times)
El Vez (twice)
Spinal Tap
Joe Jackson
Ben Folds
Robyn Hitchcock (once solo, once with the Venus Three, and where both times I was the clearly the youngest person there)
INXS
No Doubt
Fishbone
Café Tacuba
Nitzer Ebb
Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
Gogol Bordello
American Music Club
Camper Van Beethoven
They Might Be Giants

Badly Drawn Boy was right after the first LP, and again after the second. The Trachtenburgs and Gogol Bordello had been playing maybe 5 years by the time I saw them. Café Tacuba had been around a while but hadn't yet peaked (and possibly still haven't). Elliott Smith had released his last album and was playing one of his very last good shows when we saw him (Election Day 2000). Ben Folds is a weird one, because this was after Ben Folds Five, but before any solo record came out. I'm still leaning towards the solo career being a demotion from the band career, so I'm going to mark him as being on the downslide. Everybody else on this list was at least 10 years into their career, and on a definite downward trend career wise. This isn't a judgement on them. Some of them, like the Pixies, were playing their best shows, or releasing their best work. They just had long since peaked popularity-wise.

So, I only mention that because I can't figure out whether this is a problem or what the problem might be if there is one. I've got tickets to see Robyn Hitchcock again tomorrow. But he plays Tucson so often I feel like he's local and no longer counts in my list. I saw that School of Seven Bells is coming next month. I bought both of their albums, and really dig them (think Cocteau Twins with some of the shimmery guitar replaced with beats), so I might try venturing out to see a new act for a change. Other than that, you'll probably find me down at the state fair or at the casino watching whatever thirty year old band is playing over there.

Google Voice gives up

2010-08-13T19:14:00.005-07:00

Today, I got a wrong number call to my Google Voice number, and the message that was left was entirely in Spanish. So, what transcription does Google Voice give when it can't manage to figure out a single word of your message?

(Actual unretouched screenshot)

iPad, Part 3

2010-07-06T09:01:00.005-07:00

As prophesied in my previous writings on the subject of iPad, my Dad purchased an iPad over the weekend. He's absolutely tickled that he's got a "computer" that's all his and that he can actually use.

He coined an absolutely brilliant term for the device. He calls it his flaptop, originally as a portmanteau of faux + laptop, but also because the Apple case has a little folding flap on it for to cover the screen.

Parenthetical aside: As far as I can tell with a 2 second Google search, he's the first to use that word (at least in this context), so I'm memorializing the event here on the interwebs for all succeeding generations to see.

We are sorry for inconvinience.

2010-06-23T06:56:00.005-07:00

Internet Explorer crashed on my work computer today, displaying the following error message:

(The actual text, for Google purposes: "Internet Explorer raised unhandled exception in third party module and should be closed. We are sorry for inconvinience.")

The lack of articles and the misspelling made me think it's some browser hijack cleverly disguised as an error dialog. However, any anti-virus or anti-malware program I can find to run doesn't throw up any flags. Googling for the specific text doesn't give any hard info, but does show up instances of this message dating back to 2004!

This was in IE 8 on XP today, so either this is in some little-touched section of the IE code that hasn't been updated in forever (less likely), or it's thrown by some library that's used by toolbars or plugins (slightly more likely), or it's actually from XP, and never got updated in any of the 3 1/2 service packs and 45,000 other miscellaneous updates rolled out for that beast (most likely). Either way, text like this isn't supposed to make it out in a release, much less persist through many versions over many years.

Happy Mother's Day

2010-05-08T22:21:00.007-07:00

Every Mother's Day, our ward, like probably every ward in the US, puts together a little gift/treat thing to pass out to all the mothers (or any woman of apparent child-birthing age). This year, I got tasked with deciding what to do for the mothers and putting it all together. I'm not sure exactly how that happened, and I'm really confused as to why I was chosen for this responsibility.

I'm sort of a non-believer in Mother's Day (and all greeting card holidays for that matter). It's not that I don't think mothers deserve respect. Quite the contrary. Mothers are awesome. I'm just more of the view that every day should be Mother's Day. We should reward mothers every day of the year, and if we're not, one day in May is not enough to make up for it. So, I'm not exactly your first choice to be in charge of the Mother's Day celebrationing.

So, I thought and thought, and got a few ideas, and eventually found some chocolate covered almonds at Costco that were a great deal. I put them together with some Jordan almonds from Target, then Becki and I wrapped little piles of almonds in sheets of cellophane, tying them with ribbon.

Then, to give it a little more of a gospel focus, I thought of printing little quotes on motherhood and tying them to the bags. Michelle had suggested Sister Beck's conference talk this year, and I remember liking that one a lot. So, I went back through it and found the perfect quote for the compulsory Mother's Day treat distribution.

So, remember that old Shel Silverstein poem where if you hate to do the dishes and you drop one on the floor, maybe they won't ask you to do the dishes anymore? Think this might work?

An Evil Twin?

2010-02-12T23:45:00.003-07:00

My beloved wife Becki, during tonight's Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies:

"I can't decide who I can stand less, but I think I can stand Sarah MacLachlan more than that red haired lady who sings 'Adia'. Who's that lady, again?"

(In the meantime I kept yelling at the TV every time they introduced another musical act that wasn't Rush.)

More iPad

2010-01-29T21:32:00.006-07:00

This started as a comment in reply to Scott's comment on the last post. I began to ramble on (as is typical for me), and after a while, it just seemed too long for a comment so I put it up here.

People have often asked me, "I'm getting a new computer; what should I buy?" Problem is, the people that really can make use of a computer usually already know what they want. So, the people who are coming to me for advice are people who can't really explain what they even want a computer for or what their needs might be. For most of those people, I flippantly reply "WebTV", "Typewriter", or in some cases, "Etch A Sketch". The only genuine component to my reply is that they should just buy a computer from whomever has the best phone support, meaning whoever's going to take their phone calls when they can't figure out where all these new toolbars came from or why the computer that they over-specced to somehow be "future-proof" is now running so slow. I sure as heck ain't taking those calls.

Whenever anybody like that asks me about a computer again, I will completely absolutely seriously reply "iPad" from now on. 99% of the people in that situation would be best served by an iPad. It's not an issue of something else being more than they need. It's more an issue of something else being a downright hostile user experience for them.

This kind of thing would be perfect for my mother. Or my mother-in-law. Or my sister-in-law who just spent large amounts of money on a laptop but literally only does 2 things with it: MySpace and watching Robert Pattinson movies. Or my aunt. Or my uncle. You get the idea.

I think specifically of my Dad who I don't really trust with a TV remote, let alone a computer. He accidentally erases the contacts on his phone every other week because he can't find the one number that he knows he saved somewhere but accidentally got saved to "SIM Card" instead of "Internal Mem". He got an iPod touch for Christmas and he loves it. More importantly, he uses it. He can figure out how to make it work and how to do things with it. It's downright amazing. He could totally use an iPad and be a web surfing emailing internet using fool.

The more I think of it, the more I think that Apple is not trying to shoehorn a device between the computer and the phone. I really think that they are out to replace the personal computer entirely for a huge segment of the market. And, more power to them. I've long thought that the computer was the wrong tool to choose for millions of people, but there really wasn't another tool that they could choose instead for their particular needs. This is the first real alternate choice there.

iPad

2010-01-28T20:10:00.003-07:00

A few people have asked what I think of the iPad, so I figure I might as well write it down here. The answer is "I don't know." I'd have to actually have one in my hand to form a real opinion. If it's anything like the iPhone (and it obviously is), then reading about it is a far different experience than actually picking one up and putting your fingers on it. Therefore, it would be foolish for me to really come up with a concrete opinion without some actual hands on time.

That said, I can answer a few more specific questions, like "Do you think you're going to get one?", and "Do you think it will be a hit?"

I'm attempting to be a more provident provider right now, so the answer to any question asking me if I'm going to spend money on anything is a reflexive "no". However, if I had extra money lying around and was debating whether to buy this or something else it might still be a hard purchase to justify.

On paper, it doesn't seem like I'd really need it. I use my iPhone for many things, and my MacBook for everything else. There is almost nothing that I do that couldn't be done by one of those devices yet could be done by an iPad. Still, the iPad could be more useful at some of the things those other devices do, like surfing the internet on the toilet, for example (there's about 1 hour of my week right there).

An iPad would actually be really useful in church (I'm the executive secretary). I've got 2-3 meetings each Sunday, and I have a big padfolio plus my iPhone to manage it all. I'd honestly really rather do everything electronically, but my laptop would be a poor choice for that. It's too bulky, and I can't use it in the hall or in priesthood or anything. An iPad with nothing more than the built in apps, Pages, and the iPhone church apps that I already have would really already be perfect in my church workflow. If someone makes an iPad-specific app that's more useful for what I do at church, even better. I would feel a little self conscious using it for reading in priesthood or something, but there are already 5 guys in the elder's quorum who use their iPod touches or phones for scriptures, so I'd get over that quickly.

I said that there's almost nothing that couldn't be done by one of my other devices that could be done by an iPad. There's one thing I can think of that neither my laptop or phone could do that the iPad would be perfect for: sheet music. I've got a ton of sheet music, yet my collection is puny compared to others (I've got maybe 3 cubic feet worth. I know people who have rooms of their house dedicated). Still, I can never find what I want because there's no rhyme or reason to the way I've got everything thrown in a cupboard. On top of that, half of what I have is photocopies, so without going through each page individually, there's no way of telling what's what. Imagine an app for displaying sheet music that could also catalog and manage scanned music, import the various electronic score formats, give all the expected options for the electronic formats like transposing and audio playback, and couple that app with an online sheet music store with a wide selection. That would be a dream come true for me to be able to sit down at any instrument anywhere and pull up any music I own, or buy/find what I don't. If someone put together the right combination of app and store, I'd be digging through the couch cushions starting today for the money to buy one of these things the second they're available.

Yes, there already exist electronic solutions for this, but they suck. Hard. The MusicPad is $900, is single purpose, and is too big to really carry around idly. The software is also terrible. There's another package that attempts to replicate the MusicPad's functionality for Windows on any Tablet PC. That's a slightly better value, since you can get more use out of a Windows computer, but almost every Tablet PC would still be too big and heavy and poor in battery life. There's the other problem that the program's designed like a Windows program. What works with a mouse and keyboard doesn't work the same with a stylus and certainly not with a finger. That's the big hangup when you try to take an existing solution and just put it in a new context.

What Apple does is different. Rather than use the existing solution, they really rethink the problem instead. They usually do that in such a way that their solution is unrecognizable and unfamiliar. But, if you try what they came up with, you'll often find that they really have come up with a better way. Does that mean I think this thing will be a huge hit? I have no idea. It's hard for me to come up with a list of reasons why anyone would need one, much less me. But, I would not want to bet against Apple on this one. If they're entering a market, you can be sure that they've really done their homework and they have every reason to think that they'll succeed. If they're attempting to create a whole new market, a market that many others have attempted to define and failed, they must really have some reason to believe that they've cracked it, that they've figured out what's been missing from all these other attempts.

If it was any other company, I'd laugh at them and wait for them to fall flat on their face. But, it's Apple, and they've pulled this off twice before with the iPod and iPhone. So, if you don't want one and can't understand why anyone else would want one, that's fine. But don't think that means that no one will buy it, since Apple clearly knows better than you or I about what people want.

(Further evidence that Apple knows what it's doing: the Apple stock I added to my IRA back in 1996 is up over 3800% since I bought it. Sure would have been nice if I had the foresight to buy more than 5 shares, though...)

He has the power...

2010-01-18T22:38:00.001-07:00

Blinged-Out Cabbage

2009-11-19T16:05:00.003-07:00

Just seconds ago, I got in an order for only my second ever Bag of Crap. There's no possible way it can be as good as last time, but I am still beside myself with excitement.

Two Words: Rodrigo y Gabriela

2009-11-15T21:26:00.001-07:00

I'd like to now call your attention to Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Mexican flamenco metal duo. I had heard the name mentioned a couple of times, and probably even heard a song or two. But, it totally didn't register with me until I saw a video clip as part of a NPR podcast I keep up with.

I guess if I had heard the songs before, they must not have triggered anything because I assumed they were ten people or something. No. All this is made by two people and two nylon string guitars, and once my brain had visual confirmation of that, it attempted to process that information and then exploded. Seriously, I haven't gone out to buy the CD or anything because I don't think I could take any more than 10 minutes straight without my mind being completely blown. Were they to come to my town to play a concert, I would love to go to see this in person. But, I would most likely go to the show, watch the performance for ten minutes, then excuse myself to the restroom to sob uncontrollably about how pathetic I am and how cruel fate forbids that I could ever possibly hope to do anything this cool ever.

Seriously, watch this clip of "Buster Voodoo" from Craig Ferguson the other night and see if there's any way your pathetic human brain can even hope to withstand the sheer awesomeness. If you're still breathing after that, download the NPR podcast clip and see what that does to you.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113641457

Toyota Customer Service Rant

2009-11-11T15:48:00.006-07:00

I'm pretty upset with Toyota right now. I've had a bad experience with their "Customer Experience Center" that I wish to share with the world.

I've got a 2006 Prius that I bought new in April of 2006. My passenger side headlight started winking out about 10,000 miles ago. I would be driving and notice that I had no headlight on the right side. What's weird is that turning the lights off then back on again quickly would solve the problem for a few weeks until it happened again. My car's got the fancy HID lights which have a bunch of supporting electronics, so I assumed that a transient problem like that was an electrical issue and not a blown bulb or anything.

I did a little research to figure out what the repair might be, and found that this is apparently a widespread problem affecting Priuses (Prii?) of that vintage, spawning an NHTSA investigation and at least two class action lawsuits. It appears to be a failure in the capsule (bulb) itself or possibly a mismatch between the capsule and the ECU. Evidently, the capsule requires a certain voltage range, and the high end of the range of voltage that the ECU is putting out doesn't overlap much with the low end of the range required by the capsule. If the ECU doesn't put out enough voltage to keep the metal in the capsule vaporized, the light shuts off. Restriking the lights gives them a boost of electricity and starts them going again.

Here's the thing: Just because it's the capsule (the HID equivalent of a bulb) doesn't mean I can just pop down to AutoZone to pick up a replacement. The replacement capsule costs $150-450, and the installation has to be done by a mechanic because the bumper has to come off.

Because it's such a widespread defect, many Prius owners have reported being able to call the Toyota Customer Experience Center (i.e. Toyota Corporate) to get the repair cost covered even out of warranty. I've got an extended warranty on mine, so I figured I'd be covered by that.

I finally got the problem to happen during the day so I could show the dealer. Without even lifting the hood, they said they've seen a lot of these, the capsule needed to be replaced, it's $250 per headlight to replace, and not covered under the extended warranty. I called the Customer Experience Center (800-331-4331) the next day and told them about it. I was called back a day or two later by a rep who said without batting an eye that Toyota would be able to help me and would take care of it, but the only catch is that I would need to go back to the dealer and have it fixed and Toyota would reimburse me. I asked specifically about the possibility of it being something more than the capsule (like it being the ECU), and she said that the dealership would need to do a diagnostic to determine what parts would be at fault, but that Toyota would reimburse me that cost as well.

(Normally, if someone says "yeah, just go spend some money and I'll reimburse you later", I'd be pretty skeptical, and demand something in writing. In this case however, I had heard all the stories elsewhere about Toyota Customer Experience Center making good, and thought there was no reason not to trust them. Turns out that was a mistake...)

A couple of weeks later, I took the car in to the dealer, and told them I needed the headlight fixed, but that they needed to do a diagnostic first to make sure it was just the capsule. They did the diagnostic, but waived their usual diagnostic fee, then replaced the capsule at a parts cost of ~$160 and labor of only $55, for around $217 including tax. That's way better than some of the prices I've seen quoted around the internet.

I faxed all of the documentation back to the number they gave me, and two days later I got a message on my phone saying they had reviewed the case and determined that they had good news: they could assist me by paying the parts cost and leaving the $55 labor for me to pay. That's not what I felt like I had been told initially, so I called back to talk to the case manager. That's when things started getting really surreal.

First, I had to wait on hold 15 minutes for someone to answer the phone. When they finally answered, they offered to transfer me to the case manager, but I somehow got disconnected at the time of the transfer. So, I call back, wait another 15 minutes, and finally get to the case manager, over 30 minutes after I first started trying to call.

I started to tell the case manager that I felt like I had been told something differently at the start, and that's when I found out I wasn't even talking to the same person I had initially. Apparently, the first case manager I had talked to was someone filling in for my real case manager, and I was only just now talking to my real case manager for the first time.

I had a list of about 6 reasons why I thought Toyota should cover the full cost. I was fully prepared to have a calm reasonable conversation about each point and to chalk up the $55 to my stupidity for not insisting on something in writing if they didn't agree with my points. However, a calm reasoned discussion wasn't even remotely possible. I started to try to explain each part of my position, but this person instead on cutting me off halfway through every sentence to say what the Toyota position was and why they weren't going to change. I did a fair bit of interrupting myself, but only because I thought I had been cut off and was trying to finish my point. I absolutely cannot stand when someone won't let me finish my sentence. To me, it's the worst kind of insult that you can give to someone you're talking to and shows that you honestly don't care at all about what they have to say.

I finally broke down and begged please, just let me finish my sentence because it's making me way more upset than I was when I placed the call. After that she did make a couple of attempts to ask if I was done before responding, and I was able to go through all of my points:

I think Toyota told me something different when I first called, and based on what they said, I had the expectation that the repair would be covered.

This was a really good deal at this dealer, and if I had gone to another dealer with a higher parts cost or been charged the diagnostic fee, Toyota would have been reimbursing a lot more than what they're offering here, so quibbling over the remaining $55 seems cheap.

Even at $55, that's way more than I've ever had to pay to replace any other headlight in any other vehicle I've ever owned so it seems slightly unreasonable.

The HID option was a very expensive option and is sold partially on the idea that the lights would last many times longer than a conventional headlight. If I knew beforehand that I would have to replace the headlights more often than a conventional headlight at a cost many times greater, I would have been a lot more reluctant to get this option. Based on how this option is sold and how the technology works on other vehicles, I would expect a life of much greater than 69,000 miles for the capsules.

I paid a huge chunk of money to buy the Toyota Platinum Care Extended Warranty so that I would specifically not have any repair costs in the first 100,000 miles. The factory warranty covers replacement of the capsules in the first 36,000 miles, and the extended warranty is sold as covering everything the factory warranty does. Turns out the extended warranty specifically excludes "bulbs", and they use this exclusion to not cover the headlight capsule replacement. I can totally understand them not including bulbs, they same way I wouldn't expect them to cover brake pads or tires or other wear items. I would never expect the extended warranty to replace a burned out taillight, for example. However, we're not talking about a "bulb" in the regular sense here. We're talking about a capsule of glass filled with gas and vaporized metal and electrodes to energize the whole process. The cost alone makes it clear we're not talking about a regular bulb. Also, the fact that it can't be replaced without removing the bumper makes it clear that we're not talking about your garden variety taillight bulb here.

From the reports on the internet and with the NHTSA, it's apparent that there are a large number of similar failures indicating a model wide defect. It's clear that this is below Toyota's standards. It's clear that Toyota is aware of the problem. Therefore, Toyota should be the one who would want to make it right.

I got some good answers to some of these points as well as some silly answers. The extended warranty argument was countered by passing the buck and saying that they're a different division of the company, and she couldn't speak for them. That's understandable, but the car, the dealer, and the warranty all say Toyota, and when I have a problem involving all three, I still don't know who to call. If this corporate Customer Experience Center isn't it, then what is?

My expectation of the HID life and the value of purchasing the option isn't valid, because they don't specifically warranty an expectation. Fair enough. If it was just me, I would accept that. But, other cars don't have this problem. And, when it's happening to a lot of people and Toyota knows that but doesn't fix it, and it's a problem only the dealer can fix, it starts to look like Toyota cares more about padding the dealer service departments than it does in keeping the customer happy.

The cost options didn't sway the case manager at all, because she explained that the reason Toyota's asking me to pay the labor is not because Toyota can't afford the total cost but because they want me to share in the cost of the repair. That want to make sure that I pay something. Even though they would have to pay extra for the diagnostic and pay $350 for the part somewhere else, they'd still have me share the cost of a repair that's half what it would cost elsewhere. It was explained that this was because it was so far out of warranty that they felt it was fair that I contribute some amount toward the cost myself. I countered with the fact that as far as I'm concerned it's still in warranty, and I would expect to foot all of the cost if it was my fault or if it wasn't in warranty, but both of those arguments led back into the other arguments again, which kept going around in circles. This led directly into another round of cutting me off before I could say anything.

I tried to go back to my first point, which was that the first rep told me something different. I wanted to see if I could talk to first rep to figure out why they would have said something different. That's when the case manager accused me of changing my story.

She said that I never said the first rep said anything at all and that I was just assuming they would take care of it, and that I said I just had an expectation that they would take care of it. I said that I had said nothing of the sort; that I had said the first rep specifically said "We'll take of it" and that's why I would have had the expectation that they would, in fact, take care of it. I said the most likely situation is that the case manager didn't hear anything I even said about the first rep initially because she was too busy interrupting me. The case manager said we should "just be honest" and that she "didn't appreciate" what I was doing by changing my story. Basically, stopping just short of calling me a liar. It's weird, because she wasn't accusing me of lying about what the first rep said. That would have been normal because of course nothing the first rep said was documented. No, this crazy person was accusing me of lying about what I previously had said the first rep said, like she was so proud that she was able to take down my whole argument by catching me in a lie or something.

I told her how upset this was making me, and that it's not helping anything when a customer calls in already upset about one problem and you do something to make them upset about something else. She said "I'm sorry you're having personal problems". That just floored me. "What do you mean, personal problems?", I stammered. She said, "You just said you were already upset about something else." I told her, yes, I was upset about having to pay to fix my car. That was the something else, and now, I'm more upset about the way this conversation went and that this person is completely incapable of communicating with someone else in a respectful way.

So, lessons to be learned here: First, don't believe anything anybody at Toyota tells you until you get it in writing. I suspended my normal skepticism about such things becuase the first rep was so accommodating, and I was so trusting of Toyota. Second, while some have been getting satisfaction by going through the Customer Experience Center, whether you're satisifed with your experience clearly depends on who your case manager is. Lesson for Toyota: There's a way to say no and yet still be respectful toward your customers, avoiding pissing them off even further.

As for me, I started the call bummed that I was going to be stuck with $55, but willing to accept it if necessary. I ended the call about 100 times more upset than I was at the start. I hope the check for reimbursement for the part still comes, because at this point I'm skeptical of whether or not that's even going to happen and whether this person just put the brakes on that.

Now I'm 100 times more determined to get reimbursement for the $55 than I was at the start of the call and intend to explore whatever other avenue I can find to seek reimbursement.

I still love my car. I'm not in the market for a new car right now, so I don't know if it would dissuade me from getting another Toyota. I can tell you that I no longer have any faith that the "Customer Experience Center" actually cares about customer service. I would definitely think twice about getting another Prius with the HID option, but it turns out I don't have to think about that at all. In a seeming acknowledgment of their HID problem, the 2010 Prius has removed the option for HID headlights.

In Which We Choose The Best Song For Capturing The Sometimes Strained and Tortured Relationships Betwixt Fathers and Their Sons

2009-08-14T14:22:00.011-07:00

I was maybe 10 when I heard Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the the Cradle" for the first time. It really made me sad, and I would get choked up pretty much every time I heard it. As I got older, though, I started to feel that song was just too blunt, too manipulative, and I got over any like I used to have for the song. (To give credit where it's due, Ugly Kid Joe really helped me get over this song also.)

As is typical for me, what I'm listening to right now is heavily influenced by what I'm seeing on TV. A couple of times over the past few weeks, I've seen the trailer for the upcoming film The Boat That Rocked, about pirate radio broadcast to England in the 1960s from a boat in the North Sea. The trailer features Cat Stevens' "Father and Son", and after hearing it on the trailer a couple of times, I pulled out my Cat Stevens collection and started listening to this song over and over during the last few weeks.

In my opinion, this is the song that people should be listening to insted of that "Cat's in the Cradle". It affects me the same way as "Cat's in the Cradle" did, but in a much more poetic way that can better stand up to multiple listens. So, why are people listening to that Harry Chapin song, or worse, the Ugly Kid Joe version?

Am I wrong about this? Is "Cat's in the Cradle" actually the better song? Or, is there something else that I'm not even aware of that fits this particular micro-genre more appropriately? I'll make you a deal, dear reader. Vote for your favorite, then explain in the comments why you choose what you do. In exchange for you participation, I will embed here for your viewing pleasure the trailer for The Boat That Rocked:

The Best Song For Capturing The Sometimes Strained and Tortured Relationships Betwixt Fathers and Their Sons:

RIP, Captain EO

2009-06-25T21:11:00.004-07:00

Google always impresses me with the speed with which its index is updated. Still, as fast as it is, it's not actually instantaneous. This afternoon, one of the girls at work got a call from her husband saying Michael Jackson had died. He didn't have any details, so she immediately turned to the internet and googled "Michael Jackson dead", clicking the first result that came up.

After 1 minute of skimming the article, she started running around the office telling employees and patients alike, "Did you hear? They found Michael Jackson dead at his house, and he's been dead for like 20 years and the guy that's been running around saying he's Michael Jackson all the time is an imposter!"

I immediately smelled something fishy, so I followed her back to her room to check her source. Sure enough, since the Google index wasn't quite updated yet, that first Google result she followed was this article, from that bastion of sober journalism, The Onion.

Lost/Found

2009-06-20T21:01:00.007-07:00

Next to one cupboard in our dining room is a small hole where a power outlet used to be. The hole sat uncovered for a while until we noticed that some toys were inexplicably vanishing. I discovered that by contorting my hand just right, I could get my camera in just far enough to get a picture of the inside of the wall, all the way down to the bottom between the drywall and the studs.

Before

Tonight, after a good solid 90 minutes of strategically maneuvering the shop-vac hose, I liberated the following:

12 Crayola Color Wonder markers
1 teacup
1 tea spoon
1 child's fork
1 Fisher Price Little People figure (the one known as Maggie?)
1 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (believed to be Michelangelo)
1 orange motorcycle thing that fits inside aforementioned Ninja Turtle
1 toy croissant
1 toy mashed potatoes blob
1 wooden knife from a kitchen set
1 Happy Meal™ car
2 stuffed cats (a gift from one of our exchange students)
And, Diego, the animal rescuer. Judging by his position on the top of the toy heap, he had jumped in to try to rescue them all.

After

While You Were Out...

2009-06-09T22:14:00.003-07:00

It seems that in most blogs, there's a flurry of posting, then a gradual slowdown, then a few months in which nothing happens and you wonder if the author died or just got lazy. That period is always followed up by an apologetic post wherein the author apologizes for not keeping up with their responsibilities to their audience and swears that they'll be more faithful in their duty in the future.

This is not one of those posts.

Christmas Video & iMovie '08 Review

2009-01-15T15:52:00.007-07:00

Apple announced a new version of iMovie this month, and yet I had still never sat down and looked at the old one (iMovie '08). iMovie '08 was a ground up rewrite that took away a lot of the functionality that had been present in previous versions in favor of a more simplistic approach that was ostensibly quicker and easier to use.

So, to try it out, I put together a little highlight reel of the kids opening Christmas presents:

My conclusion from making this is that iMovie '08 is a piece of crap. If I had never used editing software on a computer before, iMovie '08 probably have been easier and quicker to make a simple movie like this from start to finish. But, for me, it took way longer than iMovie '06 would have because I kept looking for things that just weren't there. For example, I spent an hour trying to figure out how to change the length of an individual transition (apparently, you can't; you can change the length of all transitions in the project, though), and another hour on how to change the volume on a song that you've added (you can't do that, but you can go to every single clip in your timeline and use the "ducking" option to make sure that your background audio is appropriately muted).

I would just keep using iMovie '06 for anything, but it doesn't transcode AVCHD files from my new camcorder natively, so I'd have to transcode those in some other program first. Still, that would most likely be worth it for the extra functionality.

iMovie '09 has added a lot of features that make it seem like it might be enough for me, but I still fear it might not be all the way back to what iMovie '06 had.

Bandolier Of Carrots

2008-12-09T18:46:00.002-07:00

There's a Woot-Off going on over at Woot right now, so I figured this is a good time to brag about my haul from the last Woot-Off.

If you're not familiar with Woot or the idea of a Woot-Off, see "What is Woot".

Usually about once every Woot-Off and at infrequent other occasions, Woot will list an item for sale called simply "Random Crap". This is an item, priced at $1.00, which entitles you to at least one item of random crap thrown in a box and sent to you. Like any Woot item, you can choose to buy up to three. Buying three and adding their fixed $5 shipping charge, you'll end up buying a mystery box with at least three items for a grand total of $8.00. This is usually how Woot gets rid of broken items, scratch and dent stuff, stuff they have too few of to actually sell in normal Woot fashion, or stuff they thought was funny but couldn't justify selling through normal means.

Woot is very up front about the idea that this stuff is most emphatically crap and really not worth the $6-8 you'll spend to get it. However, that doesn't deter the masses of Wooters from jumping on this thing whenever it's available. The appearance of Random Crap, or "Bag of Crap" as it's more affectionately known, usually foreshadows the complete meltdown of the Woot servers under the crushing load of everyone trying to get in on the crap action. Sellout is usually acheived in less than 5 minutes, and trying to get an order to go through in that time is pretty difficult considering that every single browser request times out or comes back with a server error.

I've been watching Woot-Offs closely trying to get the bag of crap for like two years now. Usually it comes on right when I step out to go to the bathroom or something. But, I've been sitting right at my screen when it comes up several times only to be stymied by the server meltdown.

Last month's Woot-Off, I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and had the bag of crap pop up right in front of me. I began clicking furiously, and was getting nowhere for about 5 minutes. I was sure that it was sold out and done, when finally, my order went through, and I got the confirmation page. Success!

To save money on shipping crap, Woot sends the bag of crap out via the absolute slowest shipping method imaginable, which probably involves loading things on an actual slow boat somewhere. It seems from checking the Woot forums that 2-3 weeks seems to be the average it takes to actually get your crap. So, even though the Woot-Off was about a month ago, I just got my crap last week.

Getting the crap is of course the highlight of the experience, because that's when you find out if you've scored anything great, or if you should be embarrassed that you wasted the eight bucks. I had the crap delivered to work, and when the delivery person brought it, I was really surprised at the size of the box. It seemed rather big for just 3 little items of crap. I was cautiously optimistic.

Opening the box showed me a lot more than three items, and the more I dug into it, the more excited I got. Here is all the crap laid out:

I got (going sort of clockwise from the far left):

A 4 pack of iGo cigarette lighter power adapters. These are universal power adapters, the idea being that you have one adapter and just buy interchangeable tips for all the electronics you have. Well, I have 4 of the actual adapters now, and no tips, so that's kind of useless. The tips cost as much or more than cheap cigarette lighter adapters do, so I don't anticipate using these much.
A RCA remote control. It doesn't appear to be universal, but has controls for VCR/DVD/TV/SAT, so it probably came with some RCA product and controls other RCA products. Well, I have an RCA TV in the bedroom, so I guess this will be a good backup remote if the three other remotes I have for that TV get lost or break.
Some cheap Chinese earbuds. I thought these would be great for running. They weren't.
An expansion pack of cards for some trading card game of which I've never heard.
A JVC camcorder bag. I actually needed something like this a couple of months ago, but just went and bought a bag instead. I'm sure I'll find good use for this to hold something though, as it appears to be pretty durable, and has good size pockets and stuff.
A ThermoHawk infrared thermometer. This is actually pretty cool. Basically, it lets you measure the surface temperature of something without touching it. It's fun to watch the pan heat up, or see how much colder the window is when compared to the wall. It has a built in flashlight as well. I don't have any serious use for this, therefore could never justify paying actual money for it, but it's nice to have.
A Motorola Bluetooth headset. My car has a built-in Bluetooth handsfree speakerphone, so I don't have a lot of need for this, but it might come in handy around the house. Or, I might just start wearing it around at work so I can look like a tool.
A Kodak digital camera. The camera comes with computer cable, carrying case, power adapter, and EasyShare dock adapter, but doesn't come with a battery or a crack-free LCD screen. I assume it would still take pictures even without displaying them, but I haven't a battery, and haven't broken out the power adapter to try it.
Mr. T & The Mystery of the Mind Thieves, a book and record set still in the shrink wrap complete with old school Wal-Mart price tag ($2.77, if you're curious). This is quite possibly the choicest item of the bunch.
The last item is definitely the highest value item. It's a white 30GB Microsoft Zune. The box is pretty banged up, but it has all the accessories, and the player itself is spotless. I don't quite have a need for this, since I've got music on my phone and would rather just carry one device. However, this could be a great gift or make a good profit for me on eBay.

Disclaimer: Not all bags of crap are created equal. This is not at all representative of the average haul. Your crap may vary. Don't go out wasting two years of your life expecting to get something as good as what I've got.

Let 1000 Personalized Oil Paintings Bloom

2008-11-26T11:22:00.008-07:00

This is why I love the internet. Ever since I was a little child, I dreamed of having myself appear in a Maoist propaganda poster. I had always assumed that the only way I could get that to happen would be to move to China, become a foot soldier in the revolution, then work my way up the ranks until the Great Leader saw fit to immortalize me by having me painted into one of his many propaganda posters.

Now that we have the internet, I've discovered an easier way. Apparently there are people on the internet who will take an emailed photograph of you and send it to an actual Chinese propagandist, who will then paint a complete oil painting in the Maoist style with you as the subject. Three weeks later, your painting finishes its long march back to your home, where you can hang it to permanently commemorate your fight for the glorious solidarity of the motherland.

The examples they show are quite remarkable, and very high quality. Definitely much better than my own attempt:

We haven't finalized our home decorating and artwork budget yet, because we're still assembling our "keep the house from falling over" budget. However, once we move on to the "spend money on artwork" phase of our existence, I'll definitely be plunking down the $200-$300 it would take to get one of these.

"Is that Dave Coulier?"

2008-10-20T17:07:00.003-07:00

Cheeth alerted me to this literal version of Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels", done by the same person that did the "Take on Me" one. Funny stuff.

"There's No (Long Pants) In Baseball!"

2008-10-15T23:51:00.007-07:00

I was a huge baseball fan growing up. But, a combination of missteps and blunders culminating in divisional realignment and the strike caused me to turn my back on Major League Baseball in 1994.

I will occasionally catch a glimpse of a game on TV or something, but I would be hard pressed to tell you who current players are, or what teams are ahead in the (now meaningless) pennant race. Flipping through the channels today, though, I saw something that completely freaked me out.

Apparently, baseball players wear long pants now. Not just long, but hanging down past the ankles dragging in the dirt kind of long. When did this happen?

I'm going to set aside all of my rants about disrespecting tradition, because they've been falling on deaf ears all these years anyway. Instead, I'll just step right to this: Does no one realize how stupid this looks?

Oh, and in related news, apparently they have baseball teams in Florida now. Who knew?

An Open Letter to CrashPlan

2008-10-09T20:06:00.006-07:00

This worked so well last time, I thought I'd try it again.

(cc'ed to support@crashplan.com)

Dear CrashPlan,

So, I launch the front end to CrashPlan tonight and find that suddenly everything looks a little different. Turns out from checking the log, my CrashPlan client updated itself last night. Wow! What new features/gotchas did that bring?

Hmm... There's nothing about any new release on the CrashPlan blog. The release notes on your site are still from the June release. The "User Guide" PDF on your site (the hard to find one that's only linked to from the download page and not the support page) is still from the December 2007 release.

So, now, I have a piece of software running on my computers (I bought three Pro licenses) that operates differently than it did before with different settings and options, yet I don't get any documentation about the changes? Do you plan on updating either the release notes or the "User Guide" soon? Given how out of date the "User Guide" is, I'm guessing the answer is "no".

It's not a bad thing to autoupdate software, but it's a horrible idea to do so when:

A) none of your very sparse documentation ever mentions the possibility of an autoupdate.
2) there is no setting in the application to prevent an autoupdate from happening.
d) you make available absolutely no information about the new version, or changes, or anything like that.

Bad form, CrashPlan.

Pipe Wrench Fight

2008-10-07T20:41:00.004-07:00

a-ha is my absolute all-time favorite Norwegian pop band, so I was excited to come across this video the other day. Of course, anybody who has seen television has seen the video for "Take On Me". This little gem takes the video, and replaces the song with a... more literal version.

Googling ex-girlfriends

2008-10-02T23:27:00.002-07:00

Derek sent me a link to an Onion article that ends with a reference to "Googling ex-girlfriends" which made me think that it's been quite a while since I've ever tried Googling my ex-girlfriends.

The one and only time that I did actually try Googling ex-girlfriends, I was stymied by the fact that either I didn't know enough about their current situations (married name, location, etc.) to get a fix on them, or they had a common enough name that there was no way to find the specific person I was looking for in the Google morass.

I was struck by the wide variety in all the results that came up when looking for a specific name, however. While I rarely found the person I was looking for, I found plenty of people that were arguably more interesting than the girl I had dated, though I guess they'd have to be something notable to be ranked so high on the Google search. This discrepancy between reality and the results caused me to reflect on just why I was even looking for these people in the first place.

Why do people Google their ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends/spouses, etc.)? If I ask you, you'll say you're just curious to see what they're up to, or you want to make sure they're having a good life or something like that. But, that's all baloney. There's only one reason people Google their exes, and that's to make sure that their ex is somehow more worse off or miserable than they are. People want validation for their own miserable experience, as well as ensuring that their ex is somehow worse off for not being with them anymore.

I've already moved through the whole Kubler-Ross stages of grief about my own miserable lot in life, and in general I'm not the sort of person who likes other people to suffer. So, I guess that's why I haven't spent a whole lot of time Googling my own ex-girlfriends. However, this all got me to thinking about what it would be like if I was comparing my own life to that of the more exotic people who would come up in my Google searches.

I devised a little experiment whereby I would first compile the names of every girl I ever kissed, then whittle it down to the subset comprising every girl who ever kissed me willingly, thus eliminating truth-or-dare hookups and that one really awkward scene where the police were called. I would then enter each name into the search box at Google.com and click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to go straight to the highest ranked result. (By the way, the first commenter who attempts to sully my little sociological experiment by making some off-color comment using an alternate meaning of "Lucky" will get smacked, or, complimented if it's particularly clever.)

I'm putting the following constraints on my research: Each name will be enclosed in quotation marks. Each name will be typed in using the form in which I would expect to find it written. If the person goes by a nickname or diminutive most of the time, then that will be used. However, if the diminutive is normally only used in a casual setting, I'll use the regular given name. If I know the married name, that will be used. Otherwise, I'll use their maiden name.

The Results:

Ex-Girlfriend #1 is a professor in the Philosophy department at Spring Hill College. A rather pretentious one from the looks of her website... Since I wouldn't want to be this person or even know this person from the looks of the site, I'm going to go ahead and call this one for me and say that I'm better off than the person that Google's turned up in this search.

Ex-Girlfriend #2 is a veterinarian in Madison, Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the name I searched for is gender-neutral enough that I could be looking at a guy. It's unclear from the LinkedIn profile I landed on. I'm going to give this round to the veterinarian, unless, of course, he/she is a post-op transexual veterinarian.

Ex-Girlfriend #3 brings up a Classmates.com profile, and although it's not really filled in, it appears to be a direct hit. The town and the timeframe match up with the actual person I was searching for. There's no other information there, so it doesn't tell me what she's doing now or anything, though. So, I'm disqualifying this round and moving on.

Ex-Girlfriend #4 is an orthodontist outside of Austin, TX. Orthodontist beats desk jockey, so orthodontist wins.

Ex-Girlfriend #5 is a middle-aged lady holding up a glass of champagne in her Facebook profile. I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't know if it would show me any more than this if I did. Either way, she's ugly, and apparently a drunk. I win this one.

Ex-Girlfriend #6 is a LinkedIn profile for a product designer and computer software consultant in Zürich, Switzerland. It seemed a little too good to be a girl that I actually dated, but then I noticed the LinkedIn profile mentioned BYU, so I might have scored another direct hit with this one. Zürich beats Tucson.

Ex-Girlfriend #7 is the former human resources director of a San Francisco company and "the 2nd former director of that company to be sentenced in the nation's first criminal trials for stock options backdating". Whoops. Let's just call this one for me and move on...

Ex-Girlfriend #8 is a profile at an athletics-geared social networking site of which I was previously unaware. I can see right away from the picture on the profile that this is the actual person I was seeking, and I can see from the data on the profile that said person is a way better athlete than I am. I'll call this round for her.

Ex-Girlfriend #9 is another LinkedIn profile of someone working in the Georgia State Department of Human Resources. I'm calling this one for me because that just sounds so boring.

Ex-Girlfriend #10's name is such a distinctive spelling that Google only has a single entry matching that query. It's a Classmates profile of the actual person I'm looking for that doesn't have much info at all. It does list a married name, though, and if I rerun the query with that name, I get another high school alumni page with even less info. Boo.

Ex-Girlfriend #11 is a swimwear designer. That's way cooler than me, but the swimwear's hideous, so I'm calling this one a wash.

Ex-Girlfriend #12 is a legal marketing consultant in Ohio. Her picture on her site is better looking than me, so I'm going to give this one to her.

Ex-Girlfriend #13 works in community journalism, whatever that is. Her website says she lived in Japan for 6 years, so that right there makes her cooler than me.

Ex-Girlfriend #14 arrives at a page of someone who has chosen an online pseudonym using the first name of her favorite writer and the last name of her second favorite writer. This just happens to coincide with the real actual name of the person I'm searching for. The person I found is an English high school pretentious aspiring writer girl. Since she's British, I shall use words like "wanker" and "prat" to describe her. Either way, I win.

Ex-Girlfriend #15 links to a page about an opera singer in the Juneau Opera. I was sure that this wasn't the person I was looking for until I saw a picture on the page and saw that it was exactly the person I was looking for. My memories of the time period in which I spent dating this person are really hazy in my mind, but I don't honestly remember her as a singer at all, much less at the level you'd have to be to perform with any sort of opera company. I feel bad for not knowing or remembering that, like I've really underestimated her or something, so I've got to give her the win here.

Ex-Girlfriend #16 is a representative on a church council in Newfoundland. She loses, because, well, it's Newfoundland.

Conclusions:

I was surprised that I found any of the actual people at all. I assumed every single search query would be miles off the mark. So, that's something. One other surprising thing was that at one point I reran one of the queries to check something and noticed a different page came up first. Google's page ranking is so dynamic I saw it change in just a few minutes. For fairness sake, I went with the first one I found.

Other than that, it was much as I expected, and I feel that I effectively proved the hypothesis that random people found on Google are cooler than me.

Fall TV Review: Worst Week

2008-09-29T22:30:00.002-07:00

Worst Week is an American adaption of a British series about a guy going to visit his girlfriend's family preparatory to asking for her hand in marriage. Along the way, there's a series of contrived mishaps that put him in increasingly embarrassing situations.

There's one episode of The Brady Bunch (Season 5, Episode 18, "Two Petes in a Pod") that I use as my farce benchmark. This is the episode where Peter meets an identical looking kid at school, then puts him to work when he accidentally has two dates on the same night. The doppelgänger later backs out, and Peter has to keep both dates on opposite sides of the house, while running back and forth keeping them entertained. One date expects to be going to a costume party, so Peter's dressed up like Dracula, with a cap, and fake hair and teeth. Everything starts to fall apart when Peter forgets to take off part of his costume when going to the other side of the house.

If I'm watching any sort of show where there's any case of mistaken identity, or someone has to keep someone else occupied while pretending to be something else, or there's some giant misunderstanding, I immediately think of Dracula and try to determine if what I'm watching is better or worse than "Two Petes in a Pod".

So, back to the review. In the opening credits, there was an "Adapted for American television" credit. Becki saw this, and said "It must have been French. Or worse, Belgian". I thought about this for a second, and actually, this show would have been way better if it had been French. I don't mean of French ancestry, but actually French, like with French actors, speaking French, with English subtitles. If I went to the movies and saw something this silly and contrived (example: guy pees in a pot containing a marinating goose, thinking he's in the bathroom), but in French, I'd probably be rolling in the aisles. I would expect that out of the French. Instead, I'm just groaning.

There are other things wrong with this show besides the fact that the premise of ridiculously forced predicaments can't possibly last more than a few episodes. Example: the male lead looks like a potato. There were a couple of good things about the pilot, though. Aziz Ansari was in it, which made it a little more bearable for the 30 seconds he was on screen. In a scene in a funeral home, Herb Alpert's "A Taste of Honey" was on in the background, which is funny because it's so out of place.

We recorded the second episode to see if we could figure out how they could possibly extend the premise past the pilot, and see if by chance it got any better or what. It didn't.

So, anyway, this is worse than the one where Peter left his Dracula cape on.

Beautiful Naked [Large-Chested] Women Just Don't Fall Out Of The Sky, You Know...

2008-09-03T08:12:00.002-07:00

A couple of weeks back, I made a post about backup software that posed questions and concerns that I needed addressed. I was amazed to see that within hours, there were several relevant comments, including one very in-depth comment from the maker of the software in question. These comments were completely out of nowhere, from people who don't read my blog, but just jump in whenever and wherever some Google alert tells them they're needed.

The first thing I thought of when all these comments started pouring in was a scene in Dogma, where Jay and Silent Bob are following the lead, Bethany, and yelling at her about not choosing to stay with them. "Guys like us just don't fall out of the [expletive deleted] sky, you know", says Jay. At this point, a naked black man falls from the sky. When the man lands with a thud on the road in front of them, Jay is quite taken aback. But, he pauses only a couple of beats before looking up at the sky and yelling, "Beautiful naked [large-chested] women just don't fall out of the sky, you know!"

The second thing I thought of was that one time, when Scott made the post about chicken fingers, and then the guy from Raising Cane's got in touch with him and gave him a gift card. That was awesome.

Well, it turns out that I'm going to Vegas in a couple of weeks. They have Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers there, so I'm finally going to get to try the goodness that is Raising Cane's for myself. I thought it must have been cool for Scott to get a gift card, and wished I had a gift card for myself, so that I could either eat in greater quantities, or perhaps obtain more food for others in my party to try for themselves. Then, I thought, "If it worked for Scott, maybe it can work for me, too". So, I decided I would post here to see If I can perhaps show up on the Raising Cane's radar with equally positive results.

This is part experiment and part shameless begging on my part, but I figure if there's someone out there actually looking for blog postings about Raising Cane's, they might see my post and see fit to bestow a little bit of free chicken fingers on me. So I'm purposefully trying to shake that dude out of wherever on the internet he/she lives with this Google-bait so I can state my case for free chicken fingers. So, how about it, Mr. Raising Cane blogger searching guy? I've heard such good things about your establishment. I'm already committed to trying it for myself, but would love the opportunity to also treat my wife and mother-in-law to your fine chicken fingers. I promise that if you give me anything at all, I will come back from my trip and post glowing reviews of your establishment and your food items here on my blog where all 4 of my readers will see them. Hey, I may not have many readers, but every single one of my readers has considerable influence in their household.

If this possibly works with Raising Cane's it wouldn't hurt to try with the other places I plan to eat in Vegas as well. Cafe Rio, your salmon tacos and tortilla soup are wonderful, and my wife loves your barbacoa pork salad with salsa instead of dressing and no cilantro. We don't get to eat at Cafe Rio where we live, but would like to in Vegas. Can you help?

Togoshi Ramen, we will definitely be visiting you if you are not closed for health code violations. If you are not too busy trying to stay open in the face of whatever vermin infestation you are battling, can you spare some ramen or even just some gyoza to throw our way?

I'd also really want to go to one of the good buffets, like Paris or Bellagio. I'd especially like to try the Wynn Buffet, because I haven't been to that one yet. Casinos, do you have some way that someone like me can enjoy a free buffet? You do? So, let me get this straight: You will provide me free things as long as I stay there and gamble a lot at your games of chance? Hmmm... Intriguing... Just out of curiosity, do you perhaps have some way that doesn't involve me losing a lot of money?

Fall TV Review: 90210

2008-09-02T21:00:00.003-07:00

The local CW affiliate has their transmitter located south west of our house, and 'A' Mountain is directly between our house and the transmitter. So, I can't get an HD feed over the air from them. DirecTV doesn't include the CW in the HD locals they provide, so I can never see anything on the CW in anything better than blurry over-compressed satellite delivered standard definition. So, anything on the CW automatically has a strike against it.

Because of some screwup with the DVR where it was trying to get the over-the-air channel that it should have known it can't get, I lost the first 45 minutes of the 2 hour premiere. I'm not sure that having those 45 minutes back would have made this any better though.

The first scene I saw had what looked like a spoiled teen shrugging off someone's attempts to protect her and taking responsibility for her own actions. I thought I was watching some pilot from Bizarro world, but luckily it didn't last.

Shortly thereafter, some people went to some rich people's birthday party where Tilly and the Wall were playing. This part was awesome. The only bit of the original Beverly Hills, 90210 that I ever watched was one time when I recorded it because The Cardigans were on. It's fitting because Tilly is likely all I will remember about this version. I was only able to enjoy Tilly for a little bit, because it was at this time that the local affiliate declared a tribute to the silent movies of yesteryear and stopped broadcasting sound.

The sound was cutting in and out for about 15 minutes, and the picture was lost a few times as well. During this time I saw Lori Loughlin, who strangely doesn't look a second older than she did on Full House. I also saw Jessica Walters apparently reprising her role as Lucille Bluth. I also saw Shannen Doherty who looks about a ton uglier than she did before somehow.

By the time the sound came back for good, they were into some sort of plot that I couldn't keep straight because I honestly can't really tell all these young good-looking people apart. Like when one girl is introduced to a guy, but looks awkward, is it because this is the guy she was just on a date with, or this is the guy that she ditched to go on the date? I don't know. The kids these days all look the same to me. Especially when I'm yelling at them to get off my lawn.

So, I didn't really follow any of this well enough to determine if it was any good, but, come on. It wasn't likely that this one was getting added to my list anyway

Annual Fall TV Review 2008

2008-09-01T20:30:00.005-07:00

It's that time again, time for my annual assessment of the new fall TV season, where I sift through the crap so you don't have to.

It's starting early this year, because the CW was hell-bent on getting 90210 to start on September 2nd, as in "9/02". Thanks a lot, CW. I just barely finished the Olympics, and I was counting on taking a few weeks to catch up on other stuff. But no, you needed the gimmick of the date (because every little bit is going to help this turd, right?). So, why couldn't you get the show to start at 10 PM?

In Which I Run A Marathon For The Very First Time

2008-08-25T14:34:00.004-07:00

Those of you who haven't seen my other, far more boring blog are possibly unaware that I have been training to run a marathon. On Saturday, I actually ran said marathon. I bring it up here in a brazen attempt to solicit more recognition for this rather impressive feat.

Please feel free to read my write-up here, then review the rest of that blog if you're at all interested in my training saga.

Then, you should feel free to offer me any sort of congratulations or kudos that you deem appropriate. I feel no shame in pointing out how cool I am, and you shouldn't either.

One Backup Solution I Won't Be Considering

2008-08-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

My recent post on the subject of backups brought out a couple of helpful comments that I'd like to address separately from the main post.

One such comment was from Roberts G Keeling, who writes:

Aaron, did you look at Togglenetwork's TrueVault? www.togglenetwork.com,
Totally automatic,encrypted (448 bit) onsite and fully secure (level 4)offsite, totally pain free trial.
Incremental backup and restore and easily programmable both as to what is backed up and what is restored. Inexpensive due to efficient design and compression.

(I assume Mr. Keeling is affiliated with Toggle Networks in some way. That's not a bad thing; the info's still helpful either way. A little disclosure would be nice, though.)

I had not heard of TrueVault before. URL is www.togglenetworks.com (with an 's'), by the way.

I went to the web site, and spent a couple of minutes looking around, but then I tripped and fell into a giant pool of buzzwords and drowned. I have a general feeling that if I can't figure out what a product is and how it's different after a few minutes, then the web site/brochure/other marketing material isn't doing it's job. I also go by the old adage that "If you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it." There's not a hint of pricing on the website, so I assume it's out of reach for this small business.

But the most annoying thing about the Toggle Networks website is that if you click in any text portion (besides a link), you get a popup that says "The contents of this page are copyright protected".

Really, Toggle Networks? You're really choosing to do this? You really think someone's going to steal your whole website if not for the little bit of JavaScript protecting you? And if I want to send an email to someone at my company to say, "Hey, we should consider paying unspecified amounts of money for Toggle Networks' TrueVault" and want to copy and paste a paragraph from your website to show why we should, you really want to keep me from doing that?

Sorry, Toggle Networks' True Vault, that's strike three for you. You're out.

Gold Medal Embarrassment

2008-08-17T22:15:00.003-07:00

Becki and I were watching a particular Olympic event the other day when a particular athlete with a rather unusual name came up for their turn in the event. Becki and I both commented how stupid we thought the name was and placed the blame solely on the parents for making up such a silly name. At one point, one of us probably said "What kind of mother would give their kid a stupid name like that" or something equally insulting towards the mother.

Today, we found out said athlete's mother is in our ward.

Whoops.

Backup Manifesto & CrashPlan Review

2008-08-16T11:36:00.009-07:00

Whenever I'm dealing with a fairly complex problem over a long period of time, I find it helpful to write a manifesto to lay out exactly what I want to to accomplish and how to go about doing that. It seems to organize my thought process in such a way that I more clearly understand what the desired result really is, and lets me achieve that desired result sooner. Here for your perusal is the manifesto that I worked on for several days on the subject of revising my backup strategy at work (and at home). If either of my readers can add anything to my thinking here, I'd definitely appreciate the feedback.

At work a couple of years ago, we started scanning all paper that would otherwise be filed, and also started taking all x-rays digitally. This has huge advantages, and I'd never consider going back, but the big current drawback is we've now outgrown the capacity of the DAT72 tapes we were using for backup.

At the same time, I've been trying to reevaluate my backup needs at home. I decided I wanted to get all my data onto my laptop, including my music collection, so I never had to use our flaky sucky desktop computer. So, I upgraded to a 320GB drive in the laptop, which is great, but it's now the biggest drive in the house, so I can't conveniently back it up to an external drive like I used to without spending more money on a new, bigger external drive.

I've also just got a new flash memory based Hi-def camcorder (the Canon HF100, which I'm very enamored with so far). Flash is convenient, but I can't just keep a box of tapes around the house anymore, and I'm sure as heck not going to buy a new card every time it fills up (at today's prices, anyway). So, I needed to calculate some way to store my "magical moving graven images" as part of my backup strategy.

My needs at home are fairly simple. I just want all my data backed up, and I don't want to have to fiddle with anything to make it happen. I want a backup off-site, as well. I used to use Time Machine (OS X built-in backup magic), but I'm stuck with a couple of it's limitations, now. Time Machine's usefulness only comes when the external drive you're backing up to is larger than your computer's drive. Time Machine can back up a smaller data set than your whole drive, but unlike other backup programs, you don't tell Time Machine what you want it to back up. Instead, it defaults to the whole drive, and you have to go in and tell it what you don't want backed up. I find the interface for setting exclusions to be a little cumbersome and time-consuming, especially if the only thing you actually want to back up is buried several directories deep on your hard drive. Additionally, Time Machine doesn't provide me any off-site backup unless I use a different external hard drive and take it somewhere, which isn't a huge hassle, but gets out of date unless I bring it back and swap frequently.

My needs at work are simple also. I need all the patient data to never go away or go bad ever for any length of time. The actual implementation of this ideal is a little more complicated though.

The server's got a mirrored RAID, so that addresses the problem of immediate hard drive failure, but then I need something external to the server to handle the case of complete server meltdown or database corruption, neither of which RAID can help with. So, I back up to tape every night. But, there may be cases where some problem or change happens that we don't catch right away, and need to go back a few days. So, I set up a week's worth of backup tapes to be able to go back to any point during that week. I may need to go back farther than that, so I've got a set of tapes alternating weekly backups so that I can go back a couple of weeks if necessary (although not necessarily to the precise date that I want). And I need offsite for disaster recovery, so I alternate a set of monthly tapes and take one with me every month.

There are a number of drawbacks with the current setup. One, if someone doesn't put the right tape in on the right day, the backup fails. I assumed this wouldn't be a problem, but I've left it to other people to do instead of doing it myself, and I'm only getting like 90% success that way. That's not a huge deal on a daily backup, but if I miss a monthly and somehow don't catch it, I might end up with an off-site backup that's three months old. With my luck, that would be the month we have the fire, and then we're really screwed. Two, this only addresses our patient record database, and the x-rays. This doesn't back up any other stuff like our accounting records, patient correspondence, internal documents or other stuff that we'd really miss if it were lost.

The bigger drawback, though, is that even though we're just backing up patient records and x-rays using this method, our data set is just too big for those tapes which formerly seemed so capacious. I can fix that a couple of ways. I can get an autoloader, and keep using DAT72. That would fix the compliance issue as well, but cost a lot. I could get a new drive and tapes in some higher capacity. That would still have the compliance issue, and also cost money. Or, if I didn't want to spend any more money, then I could reconfigure the daily backups to be differentials instead of doing a full backup each day. Then, I'd only do a full backup once per week, scheduling that backup to run overnight as usual, but then finishing the next day after someone changes the tape. This would mean even more tape changes for someone to forget to do, and would actually get part of the backup running during business hours, which I don't want to do. Our hardware isn't exactly top of the line anymore, and I want the server to not be spinning its disks feeding a backup at the same time three other people are trying to feed it an x-ray.

So, what I really want to do at work is take the humans out of the equation, and get something automated with a more up to date offsite backup. So, what I really want is to separate the tasks into some sort of local backup coupled with an online backup service. Local backup only should be easy to do, because I have plenty of unused disk space on the network here. I can designate one or more machines as the home for backups, and then just configure my backup software to copy the data to them with the right combination of full backups and differentials to get as far back as I want to go. That part of the problem's solved with $0 expenditure for at least a few more years.

For online, the first place I looked was the vendor of the practice management software. They have an online backup client and storage available, but the client is hideous and ridiculously complicated. Worse, the storage component is ludicrously expensive. We'd back up maybe 40GB, but because it's priced in tiers, we'd have to sign up for the 50GB tier at $150/month. That's after a $100 startup fee, too. That's asinine. This is Dentrix eBackup, by the way. I need to name it here in case anyone is insane enough to consider it and googles the name.

I then checked out Mozy, because I heard a few good things about them. They had a lot going for them, because they were cheaper (even in their business offering), and had a cross platform client. But, when I looked closer, I didn't like what I saw.

They had a free trial, but it's capacity limited, so I had to pony up for 1 month at $26.95 just to test out how it would deal with my full backup set. The pricing is also tiered, although much more reasonable than Dentrix. I still don't like this, though, because it's capped at the level you buy. If your backup set starts to exceed that level, I don't know what will happen, but it seems like your backup will fail. Sure, you'll probably get notified that it's time to upgrade your plan, but I don't want to deal with that. Also, the Mac client was second-class to the Windows client, which was already nothing to write home about.

When I started Googling for reviews, I discovered that they evidently have some really huge issues restoring files. You can restore through the client, but there's some sort of packaging that needs to be done, and that takes a while and apparently doesn't work all the time. You have the option of restoring from a web page, which is really nice, except again you have to wait for the files to be packaged, which could take a day or more for a long backup set, delaying what will already be a painful download. Again, it doesn't work all the time, either.

A third option for restore is for them to burn your data to DVD and Fedex it to you. If you've got 50GB of data, this seems like an excellent solution whatever the price, since it would take several days to download 50GB on a T1. However, the net is full of stories of people who ordered restore DVDs, and then didn't get them for weeks. That's completely unacceptable. If you're going to offer a service like that, you have to automate the process, allocate x minutes for burning each DVD, then when the order is placed, have your order system do the math to determine whether it makes that day's cutoff or gets bumped to the next. Display that delivery date to the customer, and then stick to it!. If you can't do this, do not offer the service. If you do offer a service that you know you can't deliver in the way a customer would expect, you might as well have your order confirmation page be a big ASCII drawing of a middle finger, because that's the kind of contempt you're showing for your customers.

Aside from the DVD thing, a backup system without a bulletproof restore process is no backup system at all. So, after reading all of those horrible things about Mozy, I didn't even wait for the first backup to finish and went to cancel my account. There is no link online to cancel a pro account. I had to email, and the guy told me where to go to find the link to cancel, but it wasn't there, and I sent him a screenshot to prove it. He said he'd cancel it manually, but I'll believe it when I don't see a charge next month.

Sorry, Mozy. I never really got the chance to get to know you myself, but evidently you really suck.

Many of the online reviewers of Mozy mentioned that once they kicked Mozy to the curb, they switched to CrashPlan and loved it. So, that was my next stop. I'm not in love yet, but I do kind of have a crush on CrashPlan.

CrashPlan is a little more of a philosophy than a backup program. CrashPlan's philosophy is that what everyone needs is a nice simple program that can run in the background and backup your data to your one or more friends' computers over the Internet. I've seen some programs with this idea before, but CrashPlan's is by far the most polished and simple. The thinking is that you'll know someone with extra space on their computer who'll host a backup for you, and you might have some extra space to return the favor for them. The common scenario they suggest if you don't have the free space is to each buy an external disk and station it at each other's houses.

Online backup is all it does, over LAN or Internet. No backup to a local disk. No backup to external drives. Just online backups. The software has a one-time charge of ~~$20~~$25 or $60 for the more customizable Pro version, then no other charges as long as you're supplying your own backup location.

If you don't have any friends, fear not, because CrashPlan will offer to be your friend for a fee. You don't have to host their backups for them, either. Their CrashPlan Central service provides integrated hosting for your backups at a flat fee of 10 cents per GB per month, with a minimum charge of $5. That's about half the price of Mozy, and 1/30th the price of Dentrix.

The other features that I like are:

30 day free trial, of the software and unlimited CrashPlan Central
All of the data is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated before being sent to minimize bandwidth. Files that have changed will only send the portion of the file that has changed. ~~They even claim that if multiple computers are backing up to the same location, it will not send any data that's duplicated between them.~~ (note: I had read this in someone else's review. Turns out it's not true. Sorry)
Versioning, with the option to keep x versions, or unlimited.
A pretty simple restore interface. You just pick the date and time you want to restore to off a calendar and go from there.
~~Backs up in order of modified date.~~ An intelligent prioritization algorithm that puts smaller, recently changed files ahead of larger, stale files. Even if the first backup's not done, it'll make sure that recently changed files get backed up first, and re-backed up if they change again before moving all of your super old files.
Will watch files in real-time, and back them up as soon as they change (or after a user-configurable number of minutes)
If you're using their storage, it's just billed by total usage at the end of the month. If you back up 100GB and pare down to 40GB by the end of the month, you only pay for 40GB
If you have multiple computers, they can use the same CrashPlan Central account, which pools the usage. So, you could back up two computers, each with 30GB (for example), and only pay $6 instead of 2 X $5.
There are a lot of customizable options as well, such as when it runs, how long after a change a file will get backed up, how much CPU and bandwidth it uses, QOS, etc.
It's cross-platform, and works the same on all platforms. That should be expected since it's written in Java, though. (Clarification: It's possibly only the front-end that's written in Java. The back-end engine appears to be a platform specific daemon or service.)
A local restore option, in which you get the backup archive onto the machine you want to restore to, moving physical drives if necessary, then run the restore locally. This in theory would go much faster than even doing the restore over a LAN.

I've been using it for a few weeks now, and I believe it will suit my needs well. I've already got it backing up my desktop at work and the server to the CrashPlan Central. I could also install it on the backup machine at work to do my local backups through it, but I'm pretty sure I won't. There's just no need to run through the extra CPU overhead for compression and encryption for local backups, plus I don't want my backups on the LAN to be encrypted. If I need that data, I want at it fast, without anything standing in my way. So, I'll probably still use NTBackup and scheduled jobs to do the local backups even though it's not as easy to use or polished as CrashPlan. However, CrashPlan seems like the way to go to install on the two computers that I need backed up offline.

I'm not 100% convinced, though. I'm still having some concerns and some unanswered questions. The web site is very sparse and the documentation equally so. This is a testament to the ease of use of the product, but there are some options whose interaction could be fairly complex, and it would helpful to have clear documentation about how they work. Either that or the wording in the client could be clarified.

Another problem with the website is that there's lots of references to a business product (as opposed to their Pro product?), but no real information about what it is or why I should use it. Most of the links about it go to pages that describe the Pro product. The few oblique references I could find made it seem like a VMWare server image used as a client/server thing for backing up multiple desktops in your organization. I only need to back up one desktop and a server; all other computers here are glorified terminals. So, maybe I don't need it. But someone probably does, and you can't sell your product if they don't know what it is/does.

The program is dog slow at backing up over the LAN. I've been tryng to have my latop seed the backup to the server here at work so I don't spend three weeks doing the initial backup from home. I'm not allocating it all of the CPU (unknown whether or not it supports dual processor), so maybe that's the bottleneck, but it's barely faster on the LAN than over the cable modem at home. It's certainly not 30-50 times faster than the Internet as they claim on their web site. 1.30-1.50 times faster, maybe...

Another thing is that it doesn't do VSS or have any way of backing up open files. I have scripts shutting off all the computers at 6 PM, so there shouldn't normally be any open files in the practice database by the time the backup starts, but I do work late frequently, and I'm sure that will be an issue at some point. If the backup goes often enough it's not much of an issue, but still. They have a beta client with VSS support, but it's XP only, so apparently doesn't work with Windows Server.

The versioning only lets you specify to retain unlimited versions, or to specify an actual number. That's useless to me. Our database is a set of files that's all got to be in sync or massive corruption will occur. So, having the 7 most recent versions of a file that changes every 2 months extends pretty far back, but then I would also have the latest 7 versions of a file that changes hourly. So, no matter how many versions I set that setting to, I can only go back as far as the most frequently updated file. So, I have to set that to unlimited or none at all. I'd really rather have a time based option like "retain the last x days worth of versions" or something. Think Time Machine.

This is an issue because I can't find out if the CrashPlan Central usage that you pay for is the actual total of all versions of all files on the server, the actual de-duped disk usage of all versions on the server, or just the usage of the current set without regard to versions or deleted files. If it's all including versions and deleted files, and you cycle through these files a lot, you could quickly find yourself with a set that takes 20GB on your box but takes up 200GB at CrashPlan Central.

And then there are the options that might look self-explanatory, but really aren't, especially when you try to figure out how they interact:

There's an option whether or not to keep deleted files at CrashPlan Central and for how long, but if you choose to never remove them, how long are deleted files kept? Is it really forever? Or is it in some way tied to the versions number? If really forever, how does that figure in to disk usage? And what happens in the case of the file that keeps getting deleted and then recreated. I might see that as multiple versions. CrashPlan may see that as a bunch of separate deleted files. If I don't want to see versions, but do want to retain deleted files, what happens there?

There's a setting for "Back up changed files after:" set to some number of minutes. On the surface, this seems useful to control the number of versions of a file I end up with. If I've got a file that changes every minute. I might only want 1 version per hour at most, not 60. But how does this option really work? If this is set to 60, does this mean the file won't get backed up until a 60 minute has elapsed with no changes to the file? Or does this mean that the file won't get backed up until 60 minutes have elapsed since the last time it was backed up? If it's set to 60, and the last time it was backed up was 2 days ago, and the file changes, how long after the change will it get backed up? Less than or greater than 60 minutes?

The program has by default a realtime scan for changes in files, as well as a set interval to do a full filesystem scan, looking for any changed files that the real-time scan missed. If real-time scanning is off, and "Verify Backup Selection Every:" is set to only every 7 days, will nothing get backed up in between? In other words, when real-time scanning is off, is the verify scan the only way that CrashPlan knows to back up a file?

So, if real-time is off, and a file is changed at 5:55 PM on Tuesday, and "Back up changed files after:" is set to 60, and the verify scan is set to run at 6:00PM every 7 days and the scan actually starts at 6:00PM that Tuesday, what happens? Does the file get caught by that scan and backed up? Does it get caught, but not get backed up because it hasn't been 60 minutes since the change? Does it get flagged for backup once 60 minutes has elapsed? Or, does it not get backed up until the next scan catches it the following Tuesday?

I'm good at QA and setting up test scenarios, so given a few days I could answer these questions by myself. However, I shouldn't have to. They should have clear wording for the options themselves, and enough info in the documentation to be able to answer them.

When the documentation (PDF) says something unclear, it has what looks to be a link to further information. For example, when talking about versions, it has a blue sentence afterwards that says "What happens if I keep all the versions of a file?". Hey, that's what I'd like to know. It looks like a link to a FAQ or something, but it's not; it's just blue text. I thought maybe these were links and they broke them in the PDF conversion, but the more I look at it, the more I think these look like notes from QA or a technical writer of questions that they needed answered by development. Maybe some developer wrote the first draft, and then some tech writer cleaned it up and added some notes to answer later, then got hit by a bus. Not knowing the tech writer wasn't actually done with it before his untimely demise, they just threw it straight on the web. Also, the screenshots don't match the currently shipping product. Not good form, guys.

As for my home needs, I've got enough space left over on the server at work to do a full online backup of my latop through CrashPlan free of charge (after initial software license fee) to that server. So, now I know that whatever happens, I'm fully backed up off site in a very current fashion. That's never been the case before, and I'm totally excited by that. I'd like a more readily accessible local backup, though, so I'll probably still use Time Machine and it's crappy exclusions interface just to get my more crucial stuff in locally accessible form. In the long term, I'll either get a nice big external drive, or a Time Capsule, or something like that and do it better.

As for the camcorder, I was holding off on its purchase for a while because I assumed flash would end up way more expensive by the time I backed up the files in a reliable (i.e. redundant and off-site) way. Once I ran the numbers, though, I saw that although initial investment in the backup media may be more, it's actually cheaper on a per-hour basis.

DV tapes, bought in bulk from the Price Club^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCostco might run about $3 a piece, with each tape holding an hour. This camcorder at highest settings uses a little under 8GB for an hour of footage. If I look around for the right deal, I can get a 750GB external drive for $100, or about $1/hour. Drives are inherently less reliable than tapes, so I need to get another one to compensate for that, but then, I'm still only at $2/hour. And, if I take one drive to work, I've got the safety of off-site storage, which I never had with tape. Yeah, a tape will last forever with at most a couple of drop outs or sparklies, but if my house burns down, it's gone.

In the short term (like for the first few GB of footage), I'll just store the files from the camcorder on my hard drive and let them get backed up with everything else, either locally or off-site. Then, when that pile gets too big, I'll move them to two of the external drives I already have, and carry one off-site. When the file pile gets too big for those (the smallest external I currently have is 40GB), only then will I have to shell out for new external drives dedicated for storing video. At that time, pricing might be close to 50 cents per hour, making it way cheaper, indeed.

In the longer term, when I've got a 4TB drive in my laptop, and a 100mbit/s upload bandwidth on my internet connection, I'll reintegrate all my movie footage to my laptop the same way I keep all my photos and music there, and just let it get backed up with everything else. In the meantime, I'm fine with using offline storage for the video because I really don't need access to every minute of video footage I've ever shot all the time.

Olympic Fever... Catch It!

2008-08-13T23:24:00.003-07:00

Becki and I have been watching a shedload of Olympics coverage the past few days. This is very uncharacteristic for me, as I don't watch a lot of sports in general, and certainly not those featuring people, teams, or sports with which I am unfamiliar. But, the last few days, I've been glued to the TV for hours every night. Actually, I've been glued to the TV for hours every night for many years now. But, I'm glued to the TV watching Olympics every night now.

I watched the 1980 Winter Olympics, saw Eric Heiden win all his medals, and then desperately wanted to be an Olympic speed skater when I grew up. In 1984, I watched a lot of the LA Olympics, but I think that was mainly because I was a kid, there was nothing else on TV, and it coincided with a huge promotion at McDonalds that gave free food if the US won a medal in the event listed on your game piece (or something like that).

I didn't really watch any of the 1988, or 1992 Olympics, nor the 1994 Winter, nor the 1996 Summer. I saw none of the 1998 or 2000 Olympics. And even though the 2002 Olympics were in my backyard, and I even went to one of the medal ceremonies, I saw nothing on TV beyond the opening ceremonies. Everything since my first kid was born is a blur in my mind, so I can't remember whether I saw any of the 2004 or 2006 Olympics, but I'm guessing not.

So, with a long history of Olympic apathy, why am I so interested in it this time out? That's a very good question. I'm glad I asked.

I've thought a lot about it, and narrowed it down to two factors. One, is just the quality and quantity of the TV coverage. On DirecTV, there's something like 9 or 10 channels that cover the Olympics, 8 of which are in HD. I've watched a lot of crap that I otherwise would never consider watching just because it's in HD, and maybe some of the Olympics fall into that category. Either way, I'm just fascinated by the ability to get both tuners on the DVR recording two different channels, then scan through them while two more chunks record.

Although I didn't watch any of the 1992 Olympics, I was a big fan of the concept of the NBC Olympic TripleCast, a pay-per-view package of three channels of 24 hour Olympic coverage. If you like watching the Olympics, that really seemed like the way to go. Nowadays, with all these channels, and the VOD replays available, and the internet coverage, the TripleCast almost seems quaint.

So, massive availability always draws me in, just like I'll always eat more than I should at a buffet, even if the food is crap. But, I think the real reason I'm watching so much is that I got suckered in by the opening ceremonies.

We have a Chinese student living with us right now, so we were obligated to watch the opening ceremonies with him anyway. But, after hearing just how much money and effort was spent on putting them together, I was intrigued to see what they would actually pull off. It was really stunning, for lack of a better word, and I was hooked from the first fireworks blast.

Dear Chinese Olympics opening ceremonies,
I was blown away by your massive floor TV, your flying people, your lit up people, your bouncing up and down printing block people, and your running sideways on the Death Star people. But, you had me from insanely massive pyrotechnics.

The opening ceremony was really representative of a lot of things, but mainly representative of what you can accomplish in the singular focus of a totalitarian society. The massive transformation of Beijing in the last few years is another testament to that. I guess that means the one thing we can all look forward to after Russia's current return to totalitarianism is a really kicking Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.

Much has also been written about how this was China's big coming out to the West, but I think it's a little more than that. It's more like China's big spectacle to kick off their upcoming domination of everything: all Olympic sports, economics, world military power, whatever.

So, I've watched a lot. I watched rowing for two straight hours the other day. I've watched what seems like a dozen hours of swimming. I've watched badminton, whitewater rafting, boxing, a lot of gymnastics, volleyball, and a lot of stuff I can't remember. I've seen some pretty cool things too. The amazing come from behind US victory in the 4x100m men's freestyle relay was really cool to see. I've seen tons of records broken in swimming, which is kind of old hat since everyone's wearing that crazy new suit now. But, I saw a cool pair of races where one guy broke another guy's record, and the other guy broke it back in the next race. I watched an entire USA-Australia softball game last night that ended up as a no-hitter.

But, I think my favorite parts are the ones where a commentator has been talking all day and has just given up on sounding professional and just starts to fill time. Those times come often with this level of coverage. Just yesterday I listened to the women's volleyball commentator rail on about how bad the USA team was, and how it was shameful that they're really dishonoring their coach by sucking so much. Beach volleyball has Karch Kiraly providing "analysis", and he's usually good for something stupid. Today, the play-by-play guy asked Karch why a particular athlete would be wearing a watch, trying to find out why she wouldn't take it off for the match. Karch replied by listing all the things a volleyball player would be able to do before the match if they knew what time it was. Basically answering that watches are good for telling time. Thanks, Karch.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

2008-07-13T16:12:00.004-07:00

The New York Times ran a story a few days ago about the quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. They interviewed a few fancy-pants bakers and pastry chefs and developed a recipe incorporating all of their suggested tips and tricks.

I whipped up a batch of these today to try them. I followed the recipe exactly, except for the following modifications: I did not go to New York to get Jacques Torres chocolate, and I couldn't find the Valrhona fèves at my local Whole Foods. This turned out to be a good thing, because I later found out that the Valrhona stuff would have been easily over $15/pound, and I really worry about how much the Jacques Torres stuff would cost. Instead, I splurged on some 60% cacao Ghiradelli chips down to the Safeway for closer to $5/pound. I also discovered after I started that I only had about half the unsalted butter that I thought I had, so I made the cookies with half unsalted and half regular butter. I also only refrigerated the dough for about an hour before cooking the first few cookies, because I'm impatient like that. I've kept the rest of the batch plus one whole other batch in the fridge, though, so I can adequately test the effects of the 24-36 hour refrigeration they recommend.

So, except for the above, I followed the recipe exactly. I even went out and bought parchment paper (which I love but can't normally justify) and cake flour (for which I would normally just substitute regular flour plus corn starch). I'm happy they provided weights for the dry ingredients, as I would much rather measure by weight for dry ingredients than by imprecise measurements of volume. I even weighed out the cookie dough to the recommend 3.5 ounces per cookie. I went through all this trouble because if the cookies did not turn out to be delightful, I didn't want to have to blame myself.

I'm pleased to say they did indeed turn out wonderfully. They really look like a fancy cookie that you'd pay >$3 for in some bakery. They taste great, although the large size and richness of the chocolate limits me to only about one before feeling like I'm overdoing it. Becki doesn't like chocolate chip cookies, and she didn't like these chocolate chips when I gave her some last night. That said, she thought this cookie tasted terrific, and was easily the best chocolate chip cookie she had ever had.

I would definitely make these again. The recipe is no more difficult than any other cookie recipe as long as you have the ingredients. If you don't have the right ingredients on hand though, it's not necessarily worth going to France to get the right chocolate for it or anything like that.

I think the techniques learned here are more important than the actual recipe. For example, I'll probably try the sprinkling of sea salt (which I do always have on hand) on other cookies and baked goods in the future. If the refrigeration trick pays off as well as they say, I'll try that with my cookies as well, no matter what the recipe. And I think the overall shape and appearance of the cookie owes a lot to the parchment paper, which will allow the cookie to spread the right amount on the pan without regard to pan composition. Normally when I bake a batch of cookies, I'll be using a variety of cookie sheets: some non-stick, some not, some light, some dark, some kind of new, some 40 years old. My cookies really come out a variety of different shades and consistencies as a result. I could get all new cookie sheets, but that's expensive, and sometimes I might actually need one kind of cookie sheet instead of another. Instead, I think I'm just going to make sure I always use parchment paper from now on.

So, bottom line: These cookies are good. Try them.

Mullet/Stache

2008-07-07T16:50:00.006-07:00

Back in the end of 2002 or so I cut my long hair down into short hair. I had no particular need to get that done all at once, so for two glorious days, I wore a breathtaking mullet and Camaro-mustache combination.

I tell people this occasionally, but I haven't had any photographic evidence to back it up. I somehow forgot to take any pictures of this myself. I do remember my aunt taking a picture of me at the time, and The Shambles gave me a picture that he took of all of us at the El Vez concert back then.

Up until now, I had assumed that those were the only two mullet pictures that existed. Yesterday, The Shambles sent along another one of the El Vez concert that he must have recently unearthed:

I'm kind of torn about this, because on the one hand I'm happy to have more pictures, yet on the other hand, this picture is so downright embarrassing. It's not even a good showcase for the mullet, although you can at least see the 'stache.

For the sake of completeness, here's the other picture of us with The Thin Brown Duke himself:

The Past Tense

2008-07-01T20:44:00.005-07:00

Joey has always done well at language development, like rapidly picking up new words and easily following new grammatical concepts. One thing he latched on to pretty quickly is the meaning of "past tense".

When kids are learning to talk, they quickly learn that if they want to say that something happened in the past, they just add an "ed" to the end of the word. It works 99% percent of the time, so they figure it's a safe bet. With Joey, every time I heard something like "I eated that sandwich", I made a habit of pointing out "The past tense of 'eat' is 'ate'". I didn't really spend any time explaining what a "past tense" is or demonstrate the correct usage of the new word or anything. I would just throw it out there and see if he caught on. He did catch on really quickly and has a much better usage of all of those irregular declensions than other kids his age (if I do say so myself).

A couple of months ago, we went to Costco for the semi-monthly stocking up. Right after we finished checking out, Joey said, "Wow, look at all these things we buyed!" I responded, "Yeah, we bought a lot of stuff." Joey looked down and muttered, "That's right, the past tense of 'buy' is 'bought'" in his best "Please, Daddy, don't hit me for getting it wrong" voice. I was mortified, but quickly looked around and was relieved to see that no one had overheard this little exchange.

I was reminded of this yesterday when Joey walked up after having just finished a drink and told me, "Daddy, the past tense of 'full' is 'empty'." I could not argue with that logic.

"Hello Michael, where do you want to go today?"

2008-06-22T16:42:00.004-07:00

I have a GPS navigation system integrated with my car, so I'm not really in the market for a standalone unit right now. However, if my needs change and I do start shopping for one, you can believe that this one will be the first one I consider.

As seen in the Cruise Compass

2008-06-12T17:42:00.006-07:00

On my recent cruise I had many issues with incorrect information being presented in the daily Cruise Compass (the onboard program listing the days activities).

Some of the errors were serious ones that caused us to expend a ton of effort to be some place a couple of different times only to find it closed both times, despite what was told us by the Compass and the cruise staff. Most of the other errors were simple grammar or spelling mistakes that were awful hard to overlook because they gave the whole thing this rinky-dink air, like the whole cruise line is being run by the high school journalism club.

This particular typo, though, they can make all they want as far as I'm concerned, because while they may be still in high school, I'm still in junior high.

The Gong Show... With Dave Attell

2008-05-08T16:40:00.004-07:00

I've always been a huge fan of The Gong Show. If I ever get to see clips, I'm hugely nostalgic, which is quite strange considering I very rarely ever saw it growing up.

I was one of about 12 people who saw the movie version of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and since that time I've always been wondering why nobody's ever tried to make a modern day version of The Gong Show (and no, American Idol doesn't count). Just a couple of weeks ago, I was making a list of every mediocre game show that's had a modern day remake and wondering how it was that our national obsession with nostalgia had never revisited The Gong Show.

Today I received this bit of news, which announces the July 17th premiere of the all new Gong Show on Comedy Central, with host Dave Attell. One of my concerns was whether any modern remake would have the same goofy yet subversive sensibilities of its predecessor, and I feel really positive about this one. I'm a fan of Dave Attell, and can easily imagine him as an heir to Chuck Barrus. So, needless to say, I'll be watching this when it's on. Heck, I'd be trying out if I could only come up with something suitably retarded yet entertaining enough for TV.

So, until this new version hits the air, I leave you with The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo:

T-Shirt Sighting

2008-04-16T14:05:00.003-07:00

During the intermission at the Wallace & Ladmo shindig, I saw a guy wearing the exact same t-shirt I got for a 5k I ran in Provo in 2001. It took my brain a full two seconds to process what I was seeing, because for most of that time it was stuck in the mode of thinking, "Hey, that's my shirt, the one I wear to do yardwork. Why did that guy take my shirt?", followed by "What would a 7 year old shirt from Provo be doing here?"

My brain was hung up on this because I wouldn't ever consider wearing a race t-shirt out in public. It's not that it's not a nice souvenir or something to be proud of. I've just got so many other t-shirts and nicer things to wear. And, if I were to wear it around, it probably wouldn't be 7 years later. To me that seems like advertising to passersby "I'm proud of this thing I did 7 years ago, and I've accomplished jack-all since then."

I didn't get a chance to ask the guy about it, because I couldn't figure out what I could say that didn't make me sound like the dork. "Dude, I've got the same shirt!" "America's Freedom Festival 2001, woo hoo!" "Yo, what was your time? I ran over 33 minutes..."

Ho Ho Ha Ha Hee Hee Ha Ha

2008-04-13T16:20:00.004-07:00

If you were a kid in the Phoenix area between 1954 and 1989, a good chunk of your afternoon (and probably morning) was occupied watching The Wallace and Ladmo Show. If you were to meet someone from the area, you wouldn't even bother asking, "Hey, do you remember Wallace and Ladmo?". You can just take it for granted that it was just as much a part of their childhood as it was yours.

I originally became acquainted with Wallace and Ladmo from visiting my cousins in Mesa. When I was 8, we moved to Casa Grande for a year and had Phoenix TV stations, so I watched the show enough during that time to have some pretty fond memories.

My mom's cousin, Mark Arnett, is the producer of a little gang of folks that call themselves the "Citrus Valley Playhouse". What they do is perform on stage in the style of a taping of an old time radio show. Think Prairie Home Companion, but with a focus on Arizona culture and history. All the people involved are top notch, and it's really funny stuff.

Last night, they put on what they billed as "An All-Star Tribute to Wallace and Ladmo". They covered the history of the show and its impact on Arizona. And, they gave out their first ever "Citrus Valley Lifetime Achievement Award" to Bill Thompson (Wallace), Ladmo's widow, Patsy, and Pat McMahon (the utility player best known as "Gerald"). I never got to see them at Legend City or anything, primarily because I never got to go to Legend City, so getting to see Wallace and Gerald live last night was kind of a big deal for me.

Besides Wallace and Gerald, there were a lot of other notables there: Tempe mayor Hugh Hallman, former Attorney General Grant Woods, Dan Harkins (president/CEO Harkins Theatres). They had video appearances from Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon, current Attorney General Terry Goddard, and a handful of newscasters and DJs and things. The most exciting VIP for me, though, was Maricopa County Sherrif Joe Arpaio. When I first saw him before the show, he was flanked by four deputies, ostensibly for security, but most likely to check everyone's citizenship papers.

For the big grand finale last night, they gave away Ladmo Bags. On The Wallace and Ladmo Show, kids who attended the tapings could get their seat number picked to be the lucky recipient of a Ladmo Bag, which was a brown paper bag labelled "Ladmo Bag" and filled with junk food, an autographed picture, and sometimes small prizes from the sponsors. To get a Ladmo Bag was a big huge deal. Most everyone knew someone from their school or church that had received a Ladmo Bag. If you had never got one yourself, though, you never quite got over the resentment.

They gave away 50 bags last night by delivering them to the seat numbers they had previously randomly drawn. You could try to argue that these weren't the real thing since they weren't given away on The Wallace and Ladmo Show, but I don't buy that. The bags were endorsed by Wallace and Pat, and each bag was hand-lettered by Wallace himself, so I'm pronouncing them bona fide. I didn't get one, but the middle-aged woman three seats down from me did. I had overheard the woman saying that she had gone to school with Ladmo's daughter, and Ladmo was her brother's coach, so she had some personal connection that brought her there that night. When I first sat down, she had expressed her envy of the paper Ladmo tie that I had picked up at the VIP reception before hand. When she got that Ladmo Bag, though, the shoe was definitely on the other foot.

When the usher handed her that bag, she was stunned and shocked, which quickly transformed into this joy the likes of which I haven't seen before. It was clear within the first two seconds that receiving this Ladmo Bag was the highlight of her whole year, if not the whole decade. She pulled a couple of things out of the bag to look at, but I think she was afraid to dig into it too much for fear the whole bag would run off or something. She held it tightly to her chest, and when she was walking out of the theater, she had both arms wrapped around it like it was the most precious possession anyone could ever own. So, I was pretty bummed that I didn't get a Ladmo Bag, but seeing just how happy the bag made her took a little bit of the edge off of my resentment.

Creepy Man

2008-04-02T22:24:00.004-07:00

I'm in Phoenix for a couple of days for a convention. Tonight, after we got to the hotel, I thought I'd get a little exercise by going down and swimming in the pool for a little bit. In the hot tub next to the pool was a group of about six or seven twenty-something girls. Besides them, there was no one else in the pool area.

My first thought was that the girls are probably thinking to themselves, "Oh great, here comes this hairy fat creepy man down to the pool, putting a damper on our young girl style". But, when I was getting into the pool, one girl shouts to the other, "Hey, are your boobs real or fake? Didn't you get a boob job?" Then, they all proceeded into a conversation where they demanded to see each others' "boobs", and talked about who had the best set. Then, they went on to discuss which boy celebrities they thought were the cutest.

This whole time, I was getting pretty upset because not only did they not think of me as a creepy man, but they were apparently not thinking of me as a man in their presence at all. I was dismayed that they weren't at all threatened by me. I have to concede that at least part of me would rather be regarded as a pervert than not be regarded at all.

First Day Guidelines

2008-03-31T15:04:00.004-07:00

To all new employees:

This should go without saying, but an incident today with our new intern has prompted me to issue the following memo reiterating our corporate policy on appropriate first day behavior.

The fundamental tenet of appropriate first day behavior is this: When other people are working and are trying to find you to help out, try to make it a point to not be sitting at the front desk computer playing solitaire. When your boss looks at you incredulously, do not make it worse by complaining how hard it is to win.

On the second day, this may be acceptable. On the first day, however it is not.

Exceptions: If you've been hired for our solitaire department, the above policy does not apply to you.

Monkeys in People Clothes

2008-03-14T13:45:00.005-07:00

I came across this article at Ars Technica today, which summarizes a recent paper in the journal Science written by several leading primatologists (including that Jane Goodall tramp).

The gist of the paper is that the frequent appearance of chimpanzees in the media misleads the public into believing that chimpanzees are not an endangered species. The authors asked survey respondents to look at pictures of various great ape species and identify which was endangered. Although almost all respondents correctly identified gorillas and orangutans as endangered, only 66% of respondents identified chimpanzees as an endangered species. When pressed for followup as to why they thought chimpanzees weren't endangered, the most common response was that their prevalence in the media was an indication that they were doing just fine.

The journal article goes on to assert that it's not just the appearance of chimpanzees in media, but specifically their appearance as caricatures that is the cause of all this. I'm guessing they're on to something. It seems true that if you see a chimpanzee on TV or in a magazine, it will more often than not be wearing people clothes. And chimpanzees wear people clothes far more often than all other primates put together.

Now, I've got to admit that I'm the world's greatest advocate for monkeys in people clothes (the word monkeys used here generically to mean all great apes and lower order primates). However, because of my strong stand on monkeys vis-à-vis clothes, I feel a little bit of responsibility to ensure that I'm not unwittingly undermining the efforts to protect these creatures that God so generously provided for our amusement. I hereby resolve from here on out to no longer display any depiction of any primate wearing people clothes without some sort of explanation of that primate's status as an endangered species. I believe strongly that it's now my duty every time I display a monkey in people clothes to warn other people that if they appreciate monkeys in people clothes, they will need to support conservation and protection efforts so that we may always have plentiful supplies of monkeys to dress in people clothes now and for generations to come.

2008 Oscars

2008-02-25T10:11:00.006-07:00

Two observations on this year's Oscars:

Becki and I watched the whole thing, and were a little dismayed to notice that out of every film nominated in every category, we had only seen two, Ratatouille and Once. Yes, it's true, we need to get out more. Are you volunteering to babysit? And to maybe, you know, chip in a little for the popcorn? No? I thought not...

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won the Best Original Song category with Falling Slowly. I did not expect this, and from the looks on their faces, neither did they. But, I am thrilled by this, and I wish to use this space to give them "mad props", as I believe that's what the kids are saying these days.

Project Genesis

2008-02-20T00:20:00.003-07:00

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line is launching a new ship next year in their new Genesis class. This ship will be, at 220,000 tons, almost 50% larger than the current largest cruise ships in the world (also Royal Caribbean's). This is also larger than virtually every ship ever made with the exception of a small handful of supertankers.

I don't believe I would ever pay to travel on such a ship, although I certainly wouldn't turn it down if it were free. Even though I'm turned off by such a large ship, I am totally amazed by the fact that a ship of that size is even possible, and even more amazed that the cruise line can make a business proposition for building such a thing. In reading about the new Genesis ships I stumbled across a naming contest that invited people to submit their proposed names for the two ships that make up "Project Genesis".

I submitted Behemoth of the Seas and Leviathan of the Seas, both keeping with Royal Caribbean's "____ of the Seas" naming tradition. I had great visions of the two great ships locked in battle at the end of the world. I was pretty proud of myself, but I had the distinct feeling that I wasn't the first to come up with this. I searched through the wide wide world of web and found a few posts on cruise forums that showed that others had in fact had the same idea. I'm so disappointed when I find out I'm not as clever as I think I am.

Ignoring my disappointment for a moment, I was very pleased at some of the other naming ideas that I saw represented on the cruise forums.

There were a few attempts to try to tie in to the "Project Genesis" codename:
Paradise of the Seas
Eden of the Seas
Peter Gabriel of the Seas
Phil Collins of the Seas

I was hoping to see some more prog-rock references, like a King Crimson of the Seas. I was also hoping that Project Genesis could expand to a three ship program so that we could see ships that collectively could be named the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer of the Seas. Alas, those ideas seem to be exclusively mine.

There were a couple of attempts to tie the ship names in to the "Project Genesis" from Star Trek II, but those are way too nerdy to show here.

There were a few attempts to dig on the problems associated with a ship of such a large size:
Disorientation of the Seas
Confusion of the Seas
Bewilderment of the Seas
How the Hell do I Get to the Dining Room of the Seas?

Then of course, there were the inevitable jabs at the sheer size of the ship:

Enormity of the Seas
Immenisty of the Seas
Gargantuan of the Seas
Giganticness of the Seas
Monstrosity of the Seas
Colossus of the Seas
Mammoth of the Seas
Titan of the Seas
Brobdingnag of the Seas (look it up)
Ginormous of the Seas
Oprah of the Seas
and my favorite, That's No Moon, That's a Space Station of the Seas

Discussion of the ships also veered towards speculation as to what onboard features the new ships may have. While all cruise ships have swimming pools, this one is rumored to have a full olympic sized one. The largest cruise ships will have a basketball court on the upper deck. This one has a football field. The Voyager and Freedom class ships have a sort of mini-mall on board. This one has a full-size replica of the Mall of America. Some previous Royal Caribbean ships have had 9 hole miniature golf courses on the upper deck; this one is regular size. One of the Costa ships has an auto racing simulator; this one will have a full race track. Royal Caribbean ships all have a rock climbing wall; this one had an actual mountain installed. Repeat ad infinitum.

Huzzah!

2008-02-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

We went to the Renaissance Festival over the weekend. The Festival in Arizona has been running for 20 years now. I've been always meaning to go, but never got around to it. So, we finally went this year, and I was really surprised by how big it was and just how much stuff and activity was involved. It's a fairly huge complex, which makes me wonder how so much investment in building can be justified for something that only runs 8 weekends a year. Maybe they use the medieval village for corporate retreats or church camps in the off season?

All of the workers, and a large percentage of the attendees, were dressed in costume. The costumes weren't necessarily specific to a particular time period. There was authentic medieval garb, but also just some random fairy princess and pirate costumes and things too. I recognized pretty much everyone who was dressed up there as one of those AV club type social rejects from high school that stay in on Fridays to play D&D instead of going out for normal activities with the normal people. I can recognize them easily for they are my spiritual brothers and sisters with whom I shared my own tortured adolescence. For some reason, though, the years of social isolation I experienced did not cause me to make my own knight costume.

At one point, a youngish nerdy-but-cute blond woman in costume came up to me and said, "Prithee, sir, dost thou have the time?". I'm normally a little tongue tied when a member of the opposite sex who's even mildly attractive speaks to me out of the blue, but this had me completely flummoxed. I spent a couple of seconds trying to think of some appropriate way to respond but couldn't think of anything that didn't make me sound like a pirate. "Yar, it be half past four on the dial glass" or some such. So after a couple of seconds of stammering I finally blurted out "um, yeah, it's 4:25". She said "Thanks be unto thee" and walked off. I felt really bad afterward because I felt like I really let her down.

There were some attempts at authentic depictions of the middle ages, but most things you see there are just more medieval influenced. Here's one of the games they had:

Apparently, paintball battles were a big part of the middle ages (as was poor spelling). Other anachronisms abound. At one point I pulled out my iPhone and noticed that there was free WiFi available in the fairgrounds. The SSID for the WiFi network? "YeOldWIFI".

One of the huge disappointments of the day was finding out that one of the stands sold a Monte Cristo sandwich, but that they were all out. I don't know if a Monte Cristo has anything to do with the middle ages, but I would always eat one if given the opportunity, no matter what time period I was in.

There was a free petting zoo for the kids. While I was standing over the goose pen, Joey accidentally bumped my glasses and knocked them off into the pen. A goose saw them fall and started running over to where they were like he was going to eat them or something. I reached down and picked them up long before the goose could get there, but when the goose got to where the glasses were, he was evidently pretty mad that I had taken his newfound bounty away. While I was putting them back on, he stuck his long goose neck through the slats in the fence and started pecking me in the leg. It kind of hurt, and almost caused me to drop the glasses again, which I think was his whole objective.

I'm sort of getting concerned that Joey might be growing up to be a real wussy. Everytime we asked him if he wanted to do something like ride an elephant or something, he'd say no, and kind of shake his head in fear. We finally found this little butterfly swing ride to put him on:

This picture was taken right before the thing started to pick up some real speed. At that point, all trace of a smile disappeared and panic set in. Every time the swing would go around the side where we were standing he would quickly shout "DaddyMommyIdon'tlikethisanymore" or "DaddyMommyIdon'tlikeitgoingfast" in the quarter of a second he had before he spun around to the other side. Miranda, on the other hand, was bored and was trying to climb out until the swing really got going, at which point she was laughing and cackling.

Joey redeemed himself a little at the end of the day when we found a playground at the end of the fairgrounds. Instead of going to the little kids' slide, he went straight to the big slide and started going down it head first, landing face first in the sand every time.

Thus ended our day at the Renaissance Festival. And no, despite my overwhelming desire, I never invited anyone to "sample my fist":

I think the bathtub's leaking...

2008-01-25T19:22:00.001-07:00

I believe I have discovered evidence that the upstairs bathtub may be leaking.

Christmas Hodgepodge

2008-01-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

A wrapup of miscellaneous observations from my Christmas festivities:

Becki and I wanted to take advantage of the presence of family and try to get some of our running done during the daytime. So, on Christmas Day, I called the first annual Family Fun Run. I got almost every able bodied person to go out and do our Tuesday run (run 2 minutes, walk 2 minutes, repeated 5 times total). I wore my short short running shorts for the occasion, but no one thought to take a picture, which is lucky for me.

One of the presents I got was a couple CDs from Christopher O'Riley. He's a classical pianist who's made a little side venture into arranging and recording solo piano versions of contemporary artists' songs. His first two were both Radiohead compilations, and his most recent two (the ones that I got) are recordings of works by Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. These aren't novelty records, though. O'Riley is sincere about his treatment of these songwriters and believes the compositions are every bit the equal of the classical works that he performs. In the liner notes to the Elliott Smith record, he writes that when Elliott Smith died, “America lost her most important songwriter since Cole Porter or George Gershwin." Anyway, I highly recommend it.

The other present I was really excited about was a nearly one pound bag of Cinnamon Imperials (aka Red Hots). I don't know where Santa Claus found them, but I'm sure he got a better deal on them than I did.

Miranda loves clementines. And tangerines. And mandarin oranges. Basically anything that's like an orange but smaller. We can open a large can of mandarin oranges, and she'll easily eat the whole thing in one sitting. There were a lot of clementines sitting around my family's house at Christmas, and she spent the whole day finding them, picking one up, and then carrying it around from person to person saying "Thank you, thank you" until someone would peel it for her. If no one peeled it fast enough, she would just bite into it and eat the whole thing straight, peel and all. I saw her eat about 6 clementines on Christmas, and I'm sure she had several more when we weren't looking.

The day before Christmas, we went running in Becki's mom's neighborhood. That particular day we were running 3 laps of 7 minutes each. I try not to look at my watch too much during a lap, because I don't want to be disappointed to find out there's much more time left in a lap than I thought. However, I allowed myself one look during each one of these laps. Each time I looked, there was exactly 5 minutes 38 seconds remaining. It was weird.

The day after Christmas, much of my family went to the paintball field to play paintball with many others from my parents' ward and elsewhere. It was exhausting but fun. The most entertaining part of the game for me was when I was coming around the corner of a building intending to fire a few shots at a guy (one of the high priests in my parents' ward) who I last saw 50 feet away. Unbeknownst to me, he had also approached the same building, and was coming around the same corner in the other direction. So, when I whirled around the corner and fired, I hit him on his exposed forearm from about 1 foot away. The dude snapped, totally lost his cool, and started yelling while firing about 10 shots into me nearly point blank. Driven by instinct, I kept pulling the trigger to fire back. By the time the ref ran over to pull us apart, we were both pretty messed up.

After the game was over, he apologized for losing it, and I apologized for removing a whole square inch of skin where I hit him on the forearm. It was really bleeding something awful by that time. In my defense, though, the dude had a long sleeved sweatshirt on, but had the sleeves pushed up, leaving his forearm totally vulnerable for some reason. It's only been in the last day or two that I can no longer see all the welts on my body from that little exchange. I'm sure his arm is still healing, though.

Super Knockoff Brothers

2007-12-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of very poorly made counterfeits, and the video here features something that would surely get my vote for Poorly Made Counterfeit of the Year - 2007. If you've spent any time playing Super Mario Brothers, you'll recognize most everything here, but something's... just not quite right. Actually, make that several somethings. In fact the sheer number of ways this thing goes wrong had me laughing out loud for minutes.

Originally spotted at nintendowiifanboy.com, where you can also see levels 2, 3, and 4.

A Lot Of Wiis

2007-12-10T21:19:00.001-07:00

I have a lot of Wiis on my nightstand.

I'm The Wiener!

2007-12-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to report that I won Derek's inaugural Pop Culture Showdown Two-Thousand Diggity Seven. It was a hard fought battle. I'm happy to have won, but I'm disappointed to have not dominated the challenge like I wanted to. I'm also very publicly embarrassed at some of the gaps in my knowledge.

It was very surprising to me how tense I was during the showdown. I believe at one point I was sweating.

Endangered Candy List

2007-12-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've noticed as I've grown older that some of the candies and candy related items that I remembered from my childhood are difficult or impossible to find now. This makes sense; If new candy is created and sells more, there's only so much shelf space to go around, and some old candy has to drop out to take its place.

What alarms me, though, are when I can't find what I used to consider the staples of the candy section back in the day. It's one thing if one manufacturer stops making one item of theirs (RIP my beloved Mars Bar). But, when you have an item that was not tied to a specific company and used to be found everywhere dwindle and disappear, that's kind of sad.

Example 1: Candy cigarettes. It's kind of obvious why you can't really find these anymore. However, I'm still kind of sad that there won't be any there for my kids to buy so I can yell at them the way I got yelled at for buying them the one time I did.

Example 2: Cinnamon bears. There's only one grocery store local to me that sells these, but it's in their generic house brand version, and they're gritty and just plain gross tasting. The Wal-Mart used to sell some made by Sweet's Candy Company, and I would buy 10 bags at a time in case they stopped carrying them. Sure enough, I ran out months ago, and they've stopped stocking them.

Example 3: Red Hots. Becki asked me to pick up "a bag of Red Hots" at the grocery store yesterday for a church thing. The candy section of the store had no such item. Apparently you can't buy Red Hots to eat as candy anymore. I finally found them with the cake decorating supplies labeled as a decorating aid, and packaged in a little plastic jar. Price: $1.99 for the small 2 oz. jar. That's $16 per pound of red hots. Pound for pound that makes it one of the most expensive food items in the whole store.

Items that are less expensive per pound than Red Hots:

King crab legs ($11.99/lb regularly, on sale this week for $7.88/lb)

Jumbo shrimp ($8.99/lb)

Ribeye steak ($8.99/lb regularly)

Prime rib ($10.99/lb)

A very expensive bottle of wine (It would have to get over $25 for a 750ml bottle to be more expensive than red hots)

Heavy cream ($5.00/lb)

Milk ($.50/lb)

Gasoline ($.40/lb. Not a food item, but still way cheap in comparison)

With the exception of some top shelf liquor and some exotic spices (like saffron), I challenge someone to find me a more expensive food item (pound for pound) than Red Hots.

If current trends continue, I'll have to get all my childhood candies from wherever pioneer village type place I have to go to get my horehound drops.

Song of the Year

2007-12-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

I have a tradition of declaring at the end of each year what is the absolute best song I've heard all year. This is a long-standing tradition, dating all the way back to a few days ago when I first thought of it.

My rules are simple. The song doesn't necessarily have to be released this year. Rather, the year in which it's competing will be the year it first came to prominence, which will be loosely defined as whenever I first heard it. I'm deciding on my song of the year now, because after Thanksgiving, my listening is pretty much booked solid with Christmas music. So, it's better to get this out of the way now before my judgement gets clouded by all the holiday songs I'm hearing.

This year, the finalists for song of the year come down to "1234" by Feist and "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova. I think these are both songs that might have technically been released in 2006, but didn't really get noticed until this year.

"1234" is a song everybody probably knows from the iPod commercials. In the commercial, the video for the song is playing on a bunch of iPod nanos while a disembodied hand stacks and unstacks the iPods. I first heard this song when I saw part of the video for it while flipping through channels earlier this year, but it didn't really register with me until I saw the commercial a few times.

I'm not at all ashamed to admit that commercials have been the venue to introduce me to some of the best music I've heard. The only place I ever heard Badly Drawn Boy before buying his CDs was "The Shining" on that great Gap commercial. And, that same Christmas had another Gap commercial with the Red House Painters' cover of "All Mixed Up" that turned me on to them. Furthermore, I probably would never have got into Nick Drake if not for that Volkswagen commercial. I read something somewhere that said that the Pink Moon album sold something like 10 times as many copies in the months following that Volkswagen commercial than in the thirty or so years that preceded it, and I think that's fine. It's fine because it's such great music that everybody needs to hear it, and whatever it takes to expose it is justified.

"1234"'s beauty lies in it's apparent simplicity, contrasted with the complex layering underneath. It's a light, snappy pop song, and it start outs so plainly, with just a voice and strummed acoustic guitar. But, by the second half of the first verse, the drums and bass have kicked in, and strings start to build. By the time the song reaches the first bridge, the choir's singing and the song's really going strong. That first bridge also introduces the real secret weapon of the song, the banjo. Once the song reaches the chorus, the other secret weapon (a brass instrument that I'm pretty sure is a flugelhorn) kicks in.

The song is able to restrain itself through the chorus, adding only a honky tonk piano break after the chorus. But, at about 2:16, it can contain itself no longer and just explodes in a glorious cacaphony. The choir sings "Ba-da Ba-da-da" over doubled flugelhorns, three banjos, swelled strings, a glockenspiel, and the 1985 Chicago Bears. And then, just before it all becomes too much, the song suddenly cuts back to four bars of strummed guitar and picked banjo and ends.

Even if this weren't the best song of the year, it's easily one of the best arrangements of a pop song in at least the past 15 years.

There's only one problem I have with this song. At the very beginning of the song, when the acoustic guitar is strumming and the vocals come in for the very first time, there's a little bit of ambience around the voice that's not the same as whatever's on the guitar. It makes it sound like the vocals were recorded in another studio, through another set of mikes and console and effects and pre-amp and stuff. It's not uncommon for a song to be recorded this way, but it never actually sounds that way to me like it does on this song. It's not that noticeable, but it's just enough to take me out of the song for a couple of seconds until my ears can adjust.

"Falling Slowly" was written by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova for the soundtrack of the movie Once, which they both also ended up starring in. It's one of those arty independent films about busking in Ireland. I haven't seen the film, because the only time it was playing here that I knew of was at 12:30 PM and 5:30 PM, which were both times during which I would be working.

Glen Hansard is the lead singer/songwriter for the Irish band The Frames, which is apparently the second biggest band in Ireland (second only to that other Irish band, U something or other). They're not yet big in the US, and I don't know if they ever will be, but they're something good, all right.

Marketa Irglova is a Czech pianist and composer that Glen apparently hooked up with to write songs for the movie before actually recommending her to be in the movie (and then getting cast himself).

This song falls squarely in the category of "plaintive love song". At least I think it's a love song. I don't really listen to the lyrics much when I listen to music; I usually just try to let the music itself do the talking. It's the music of this song, and the quality of Glen's voice that tell me everything: That there exists a pain that's so great it will tear you in half, that there are longings that span the centuries, that through this all there is hope that these things for which we long and dream can still be realized.

I have a few versions of this song. The version that comes from the movie soundtrack is just Glen and Marketa, him playing acoustic guitar and her playing piano. They split the vocals, harmonizing through most of the song. This version is simply beautiful. There's another version off of the most recent Frames album, which is different in that it's given the full band treatment. It's mostly just Glen's voice in that one, although there's a hint of background vocals. The Frames version I like because the tension that builds through the song can be released when the chorus bursts and the band just get's loud and raucous, where in the acoustic version, that tension has to remain contained, which is a bit of the beauty of it. The Frames version also has a loud playout at the end which is really cool. I also have a few live recordings of just Glen and Marketa from various radio or TV things.

The best part of this song, what really makes this song for me, is the extra measure right before the chorus. There's a bit of a build into the chorus, and it would seem natural to just follow the pattern established by the verse and just change chords and start playing the chorus. But, right after the last measure of the verse, they keep on that same chord for just four more beats which is so effective in managing that tension that's bubbling through the song and building it just that much more for the chorus. The thing I like the most is that if I were playing in a band, and somebody brought me that song and said "Hey, let's play this song I just wrote", I would have said "Great, but let's just hold on that chord for one more measure before that chorus". This song is just already in tune with my musical interpretation of what I think this song wants and what this song should be.

So, the winner of Song of the Year 2007? It's close, but I've got to go with "Falling Slowly". It's just a great, great song that still moves me every time I hear it, even though I've already heard it 100 times.

Tucson Half-Marathon

2007-12-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

My sister got the idea a few weeks back that she wanted to walk the half-marathon portion of the Tucson Marathon. She called me two days before it and asked if I'd like to walk it with her. I said sure, but only with the understanding that I would try to get her to run a portion of it with me. She said I was free to run on ahead to get a better time, but I figured I wasn't going to get a good time no matter what I did, so I would rather stay with her and try to push her harder so that she could feel like she accomplished more. It's not that walking 13.1 miles is not something to be proud of. It certainly is. However, running a portion of it entitles you to tell people, "I ran in the half-marathon", dropping your voice a little on the word "in" so that they might hear "I ran the half-marathon".

My goal was just to run 1/4 of the distance. We did that mainly by running the first 1/4 mile out of every mile, then running from the 13 mile mark all the way to the finish line so that we could look like real runners. We never had to run longer than about 2 minutes, 45 seconds at a stretch, which was good for Elizabeth since she doesn't yet have any sort of endurance when she gets into that high heart rate/heavy breathing state. Yet, she was able to finish each segment of running without falling over, so that's good.

We finished in 3:20:45 which is nowhere near a good time, but is better than what I expected. I get a big kick out of the fact that I was dead last in my age division.

Even though I did so poorly timewise, I was pleased to find out that I actually won an award for placing third in my Clydesdale division. What I didn't know until a few days ago was that some races have a "Clydesdale" division for men over 190 pounds (and a corresponding women's designation). Apparently fat men get special recognition for hauling their bulk around the course. In the category of men weighing 211-224 pounds, I placed third, and the top three finishers in each category get awards. I'm quite certain that many other men of my weight finished faster than me. However, none of them must have checked the box identifying themselves as Clydesdales. So, I don't know if I get a plaque or a separate medal or certificate or what. I didn't hang around at the finish line to claim my award, since I had no idea I would have won one. Now I have to figure out how I can get them to send it to me. It may not be worth the effort, but it's likely I'll never win an award in an organized race again, so I want all the recognition I can get.

It's now two days after the race, and I'm feeling pretty okay physically. My muscles are a little sore, but not as much as I might have thought. My biggest problem is a sort of shooting/burning pain in the middle of my left foot when I step on it. It comes and goes; sometimes it's so bad I can't take more than a couple of steps without hobbling. I walked a mile and a half on it last night, then iced it a while, and it seems a little better today. So overall, I'm happy at the physical accomplishment, but I'm a little bugged that the recovery is eating into my normal running schedule.

A couple of other notes:

My Forerunner watch calculated that I burned 1726 calories during the race. That's a lot. I had about 500 calories of breakfast and 500 calories of bars and Clif Shot and stuff during the race, but I was still way hungry when it was over.

In perusing the results for the other divisions, I noticed the winner of the men's 80+ division and the women's 75-79 division were a couple that are both patients of ours, and that the husband beat me by about 12 minutes. I called him to congratulate him on having over 50 years of seniority on me and still kicking my tail. He was really excited to talk to me, and I got the feeling from him that he really appreciated the call.

An Open Letter to Bob Geldof, KBE

2007-11-27T20:12:00.001-07:00

Dear Mr. Geldof,

I wish to address you as "Sir Bob Geldof", but I understand that as an Irishman, your knighthood from HRH The Queen is only an honorary one, and does not entitle you to the "Sir" title. I would like to still use the most respectful form of address I can when addressing you, as you are a man of very high honors, and I am about to ask you a rather large favor. Would "The Most High Lord of All Things Charitable, Bob Geldof" work for you? Let's assume it does.

So...

Dear TMHLoATC, Bob Geldof,

I watched the Live 8 concerts two years ago and really enjoyed everything I saw. However, the most exciting moment for me was seeing the reunited Pink Floyd on stage again after almost 25 years. I read with great interest the news reports about how you were able to convince Roger Waters and the rest of the band that the cause was much more important than whatever personal differences they might have. Those differences run deep, and I would never have imagined that anything or anyone could ever mend that rift. Truly you accomplished a major feat.

I was listening to Oingo Boingo in my car the other day and I was awash in a moment of regret that I never got to see them perform live. I had the opportunity once, in 1995, but I was sick that day and didn't go. It turned out to be their last tour, and I've been kicking myself ever since. Interviews with Danny Elfman show him to be pretty dead-set against the idea of a reunion. I started thinking to myself, "Wow, with Danny Elfman being so against the idea, what would it take to get him to come around?" It was then that I remembered you, Bob, and your powers of persuasion.

So, do you think it might be possible to do a favor for me? Can you give Danny Elfman a call and do whatever it is you did with Pink Floyd to get them to reunite? I know you said it's the cause that convinced Pink Floyd to come together, and not you specifically, but let's be honest: You're a silver-tongued devil who must really have some terrific ability to cajole. Just work your magic. If you really think that it's a cause that's going to get everyone back together, I'm sure you can find one, or just make one up. I mean, whoever heard of African debt relief before Live 8? I have a sneaking suspicion you just made that one up so you could see Pink Floyd play.

I would think that this task would be easy for you since you've already demonstrated such prowess at it. Also, you only have to call Danny Elfman. You don't need to call the rest of the band to convince them. They're not working. I'm sure they'll jump at the chance to play again. Thanks in advance for your help with this.

When you've done that, if you're still willing to help, I have a couple of other little things you can do for me. One night, I had the choice of going to see either Matthew Sweet or That Dog. I was more into Matthew Sweet at the time, as was the person I was going with, so we went and saw Matthew Sweet. Turns out, that was That Dog's last tour before a pretty rancorous breakup. Their last album, Retreat From The Sun, has held up better than any of Mr. Sweet's work for me, and I'd really appreciate seeing them live sometime. You know what to do.

There was another band that I was really into at the same time, Suddenly, Tammy! They broke up before they ever even got over to my side of the country. I'm more than willing to travel to wherever for a show this time, I just need you to put the wheels in motion.

I had the chance to see the Sugarcubes in some sort of festival bill with New Order and PIL, but that would have required travelling to Phoenix, so I passed it up. I could have see them again opening for U2, but that would have been another trip to Phoenix, so, meh. Now, I wish I had taken whatever opportunity I had. I just recently found out they played a one-off reunion show in Iceland last year for Icelandic charity. I didn't know about it beforehand, or I would have gone. I'm more than willing to travel to Iceland, I just need you to tell them to do it again, then maybe shoot me an email with the date so I can plan travel arrangements in advance.

Oh, and I see the Commodores play the casino here every once in a while. Can you please arrange for Lionel to come with them, just once?

There's a couple of other things I have to ask you, but I'm not sure you have the ability. Look, it's not like I'm doubting you or anything. I know you have wonderful powers. It's just I've not seen any evidence of them being used in this way.

But, if you can at all make it happen, I'd really like for you to bring Freddie Mercury back from the dead so that I can see a proper Queen reunion show instead of this Paul Rodgers crap. Of course, you'll have to get John Deacon back on board, which may be harder than getting Freddie back, but I have faith in you. If for whatever reason, this isn't going to work out, I'd settle for a trip to Japan to see Kween.

As long as we're bringing people back, can you do something about Kurt Cobain? I'm not asking to see Nirvana live again; I'm just hoping that Kurt may be able to do something to rein in Courtney Love. I just really feel like those two ought to be reunited, and if you can't bring Kurt back to this side of that great divide, can you at least send Courtney over there?

Oh, and I've already seen Elliott Smith play, but I was wondering if you could bring him back and maybe dry him out so that he can make a better last album than that ramshackle mess that became From a Basement on the Hill.

Just a couple of more things, thanks...

Can you call Stevie Wonder and convince him to make good music again? Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life both move me in ways no other records can. But, his more recent stuff, starting with "I Just Called to Say I Love You", moves me to tears at the talent wasted. Please just see what you can do so that I can see what he can do.

Oh, and can you restore Michael Jackson to the physical and mental state he was at in about 1980 or so? I think if we all chip in, we can get him to do it right this time.

That's about all I need. If I think of anything else I need, I'll call. Again, huge thanks for all you can do for me. And, don't forget, if there's anything I can ever do for you, please drop me a line sometime. I'd be happy to pay you back in whatever small way I can.

Sincerely,
Aaron

Semi-Annual Plumbing Catastrophe

2007-11-24T23:23:00.001-07:00

Having a blog means that whenever I have something interesting to write, or can write in an interesting way about something that's otherwise uninteresting, I have a bit of responsibility to myself to actually write it. Today, I'm coming off of a 2 day plumbing calamity (that's actually an extension of the previous plumbing calamity this summer) that I'm sure would make a great story. Yet, I want so much to forget any of it ever happened, so it's hard to even want to write it down. I know there's some great humor in here somewhere, but I'm just not feeling it.

For the sake of posterity and purging, I tell my story here, but in a severely condensed format more suitable to getting past it quickly. I understand there are some who will say to themselves, "Condensed? Egads! I'd hate to see the uncondensed version!" To those wags I would suggest they reread the title of this blog and either strap themselves in or bail out now, because it doesn't get any better.

There's two things you need to know to make sense of this story. First, the very act of fixing or improving something in this old house of ours will always cause other things to break, and all such projects therefore take longer than you'd hope. And second, you should be disabused of the notion that I should have called a professional for any of these jobs. Virtually every complication that comes up in these things would have been just as likely to happen to a professional. If the handle of a valve was going to break off in my hand, it would be just as likely to break off in a plumber's hand, and they wouldn't take responsibility for breaking it either, I'm sure. Sure, there are occasional things that are mistakes that a professional wouldn't do, such as on the water filter installation when I left the hot water valve open after replacing it, then turned the house's water back on, coming back in the house to find water running down the stairs. But, virtually everything else is just going to happen, no matter what.

The story starts at the beginning of July when I try to install a nice reverse osmosis water filter under the kitchen sink. It's a really nice filter, a birthday gift from my mom. It recirculates the unfiltered water instead of dumping it down the drain like most will. I wanted it for a long time, and I'm so glad I have it, and I so looked forward to installing it.

In the process of installation, the handle for the hot water valve under the sink broke off when trying to shut it off which meant that the whole house's water needed to be shut off to replace it. There were several trips to the hardware store due to getting parts then finding the parts to be mislabeled, then getting adapters to make sure every piece could connect to the one valve. There was the aforementioned kitchen flood. But, the project was eventually finished (the same day even).

Shutting the water off to the house means that all the sediment in our 50 year old pipes gets stirred up, and after this filter project was done, we discovered that some sediment had gotten lodged in the body of the faucet in our upstairs bathroom, completely blocking the hot water flow. Some sediment had also gotten lodged in the fill valve for the toilet in our renter Rhonda's bathroom, causing it to not shut off. Then, in trying to shut off the water to that upstairs faucet to see if it could be fixed, the handle for one of the valves under the sink breaks off. So, fix one thing, then have three other things break.

Rhonda had another problem with her kitchen faucet that would require replacing it, and the valves underneath her sink wouldn't shut off, so they'd need replacing too, so the whole house's water would need to be shut off again. So, I waited to find the right time to do all this crap when I could set aside a day or two to do it all.

Rhonda's out of town for Thanksgiving, and I've got a long holiday weekend, so I decided to give it a go. I shut the water off, get her valves and faucet replaced without incident, go upstairs to replace our valve to find that when I take the valve off the pipe, a piece of the pipe breaks off inside the valve. So now, I've got this jagged stub of iron pipe sticking out of the wall.

At that point, I have to either find a way to get the new valve onto that jagged piece of pipe, or I will have to go downstairs and cut off the whole section of pipes that go upstairs since I wouldn't be able to cut off just that one because they split off inside the brick walls somewhere. Then, I'd have to run new pipes to every upstairs fixture, and do it outside up the walls, since there would be no possibility of running them up through the bricks. Once I realized what was in store for me, I decided that I was either going to fix the end of the pipe somehow or I was going to burn the house down for the insurance money.

The jagged end of pipe was still within the threaded portion, so I though if I could just square it off, I'd be able to thread the new valve on. I couldn't really get a hacksaw in there because space was too tight. I thought I could cut it and smooth it out with my Dremel™, but my little battery powered Dremel™ was petering out too fast. Finally, after three hours of screwing around with it, I went to the store and bought an actual plug-in Dremel™ knowing that if that didn't work, I'd be out that cost as well.

After coming back from the store, I offered up my most sincere prayer for the squaring off of the broken pipe, and after 15 minutes of Dremel™ futzing, finally got the new valve to screw onto the pipe (and not even leak!). Moving on to the faucet...

I had got a warranty replacement for the old faucet, but didn't notice until yesterday that the replacement they sent me wasn't quite the same as the original. The original had some metal braided supply lines integral to the faucet, and those just connected right to my valves. The new one just had two bare copper tubes sticking out the bottom with no connectors or anything. It came with compression rings and adapters and things, but I couldn't put those things on before sticking the faucet through the sink or the faucet wouldn't fit through the hole. Putting them on after sticking the faucet through was almost impossible because the space is so tight I couldn't get the leverage necessary to get a tight fit on those compression rings (which have to be really tight so they won't leak). After two hours, I finally got them tight enough and connected to the water supply and turned everything on to find the faucet was actually leaking out of the body of the faucet, and all my previous work was for naught.

I could pursue another warranty replacement, but that's like a 4 week process, and we already went a few weeks without a faucet in that bathroom when we first tried to fix the faucet that came with the bathroom at the end of 2003. So today, I had to just go out and buy a new bathroom faucet, which, when combined with the cost of the Dremel™ and the toilet parts, adds over $200 to the cost of installing our water filter.

So, I spent like 12 hours on this project yesterday, causing me to get frustrated, get exhausted, and miss my running for the day. And, I still haven't fixed Rhonda's toilet, because the Home Depot I went to today didn't have the right fill valve in stock. And, I just found out that our downstairs toilet is leaking out of the tank somewhere. And, this is all coming on the heels of last week when Joey stuffed a bottle of bath salts into our upstairs toilet, plugging it up and causing us to spend $55 on a plumber to unsuccessfully get it out, then me spending several hours pulling the toilet up so I could dig the bottle out and replace the toilet (After Miranda did the same thing a couple of months ago).

I don't regret buying this house. I still think it was a smart move to pay so little for such a big house, and the work we have to do is the price we pay for this. I don't mind doing the work. However, I just feel like the plumbing thing isn't quite fair. If something's broken, I want to fix that one thing. Don't trick me by throwing other things at me in the middle of a job. Don't mess with me like that, House.

Naming Wrights

2007-11-19T23:42:00.000-07:00

My brother Steven has for a while referred to my brother Carson as simply "Brother", both in direct address ("Hey, Brother") and in reference ("I heard from Brother that you..."). Today, he clarified to me that he also refers to Tyler as "Big Brother", Andrew as "Bigger Brother, and me as "Biggest Brother". Note that this directly corresponds with birth order, not relative size.

I got a huge kick out of this, because this directly parallels my own form of referring to things using descriptive nominatives rather than their actual names. When Becki and I got married, she had two cats. Because I wasn't 100% clear which one was named what and didn't want to stop and think about it all the time, I took to addressing them as simply "Black Cat" and "Grey Cat". A few years later, Grey Cat died and Black Cat just became "Cat". A little while later, Becki took the first cat she had back from her mom. That cat stays in our basement and is "Downstairs Cat". The cat upstairs doesn't have to be "Upstairs Cat", though. She is still able to retain the title of just "Cat".

This is the case for inanimate objects as well. While I do talk to inanimate objects, I would never name them. That's just silly. Instead, I will address them only as "Car", "Computer", "TiVo", etc.

Now that Joey talks so much, I address him as "Joey", but it wasn't always that way. He was "Baby" nearly up until the time Miranda was born. Miranda got to be "New Baby" for a while, then eventually settled in to the now available again "Baby". She's almost a year and a half old, and I still probably call her "Baby" about ten times as often as using her actual name.

I'm trying to think how this got started. How did my brain fall into this pattern of description rather than naming? I've come up with three possible influences that have shaped my way of thinking about names and forms of address. First: there's my horrible memory for names. If everyone in the world would allow themselves to be called by descriptive listings of their attributes, everything would be a lot easier. Instead of seeing a guy in the grocery store and trying to remember "Is that Mr. Palowechez?", you could just confidently stride up to him and say "Hey, Thick Across The Middle Bald Guy! How's your wife, Shaves Her Moustache?"

Two: On the late lamented Viva Variety, there was a segment called "Monkey Sports", where the sidekick, Johnny Blue Jeans, would demonstrate sports with a monkey. The genius of this bit didn't entirely lie in the aptness of its title, however. Near the end of one segment, Johnny Blue Jeans was giving praise to the monkey, who had just done a great vault or something, by saying, "That's a ten for you, monkey".

That line has stuck with me for years, because it just made so much sense that if you had a monkey, you would address it as "Monkey". There's no point in giving it silly names except to impress your friends who otherwise wouldn't be impressed enough that you had a monkey. When you actually wanted to communicate with the monkey, you call it "Monkey". That was one of those points where something just all of a sudden clicks and universal truth shines through the heavens and becomes clear.

Third (and here's where I bring it all back to Steven in my very own warped chiasmus): Many years ago when Steven was little, I was charged with taking the cat now known as "Downstairs Cat" on a plane from Tucson to Salt Lake. Steven was petting the cat in its carrier and said "I think this cat's name should be 'Soft'". Minutes later, the cat scratched him completely without cause (as she was wont to do). Steven said "I think today's the day we change this cat's name to 'Mean'".

'Stache

2007-11-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

I've been growing my current beard since about the end of August/beginning of September. My normal beard progression goes like this:

I stop shaving. Some over aggressive hair follicles start to immediately dispatch long tendrils of wiry beard hair. Some normal follicles grow their hair at a relatively normal rate. And some deficient follicles slowly push hair out at the rate of 1 mm per year. The result is that for the first little while I end up with a really thin looking, patchy sort of nerd beard. I usually take great care to keep the long hairs trimmed short so as to eliminate the scraggly look while the short hairs play catch up. After about six months or so, the slow follicles have grown enough to fill in the rest, and I end up with a full, even, man beard. Then, for reasons passing understanding, I immediately shave it off, wait another six months or so and start again.

This beard, for various reasons, hasn't been trimmed since I started it. I've cleaned up the neckline some, but haven't trimmed the long hairs like I normally do. This means it's more scraggly than normal. This also means I haven't trimmed the moustache either, which makes it more bushy than it otherwise would be.

Today, I was absentmindedly playing with my moustache hairs when I noticed it could do this:

It's a little sick how excited that made me. I realized that a whole new world of facial hair possibilities are opening up to me now, much to Becki's certain chagrin.

With a little more work, I'll be ready for the champeenship.

Super Mario Galaxy

2007-11-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

I have a Wii. I'm not a very avid video game player, but I have been looking forward to the new Super Mario Galaxy. Toys R Us has a sale this week only where you buy the game for $50 and they give you a $25 gift card good on your next purchase. Great deal, but they have trouble keeping the game in stock.

Today, I got lucky and got the last two at the East Tucson Toys R Us. I then went to the North Tucson one, and used the two gift cards to buy a third copy of the game. Now, for total investment of ~$112 (including tax), I am the proud owner of three copies of Super Mario Galaxy, plus one more $25 gift card. Now, if I can sell two copies for a net $43 a piece, and use the last gift card for something I would have been buying anyway (like Christmas gifts), I will have finagled myself a free game.

I am so proud.

José González

2007-11-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

I have friends and family who are into music like Kings of Convenience, Iron & Wine, and Nick Drake. It is to you people that I direct this post. I invite you to check out the work of one José González, a Swedish singer-songwriter (of Argentine descent). Most of his stuff is just him and a nylon stringed acoustic guitar with perhaps a bit of percussion. It's very sparse and subtle, not just in the instrumental arrangement, but also his singing. His recent album includes a cover of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" (one of my favorite songs). It manages to in some ways be even more haunting than the original.

Fall 2007 TV wrapup

2007-11-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

Now that I've watched all of the fall 2007 pilots, I can sum up the new shows and identify for you who the winners and losers are. And the big winner for the fall 2007 TV season is...

Peter, Bjorn and John. Their song "Young Folks" was prominently played on three of the new pilots. I heard it on Gossip Girl, Big Shots, and Dirty Sexy Money. I also heard it on Journeyman's second week. Oh, and the iPhone, which I also saw on three different shows.

As far as which shows are destined to be hits, I have no idea. When I was young, I used to think that whether a show stayed on the air depended on whether or not it was any good. I long ago disabused myself of that notion. Until fairly recently, I thought it was based on what other people thought was good. I've since learned that that's not really the case either.

Even if you judge success based on simple ratings, those ratings don't come from people making their viewing choices of their own free will. It comes down to a complex calculus of what's scheduled when, what the other networks have on against it, what it's lead-in is, et cetera. It seems really odd to me, because if I want to watch a show, I just point at the TiVo and watch it. It doesn't make a difference to me when it airs or what's on the other channels. And I certainly don't watch a show because I left the TV on that channel after the previous one ended. But, apparently, the majority of people still do.

Of course, success isn't even based on simple ratings. Lower-rated shows can stay if they cost less to produce, or bring a more desirable demographic, or draw viewers away from another network, or any of a number of reasons. So, I've stopped even trying to guess what will work and what won't. There are shows that are so bad that it's obvious to everyone they won't last long (Viva Laughlin), but beyond that, I don't even pretend to know anymore.

Viva Laughlin is actually the only show to get cancelled so far, which is very strange. In a normal TV season, several shows would have got the ax already. However, this season with the writers' strike and all, the networks need to hang on to every scripted show they've got. That makes Viva Laughlin's cancellation even more notable, because they're essentially saying, "If it comes down to us running out of TV completely, we'd rather broadcast dead air than this pile." So, basically, every show that isn't Viva Laughlin won.

Here's how my choices panned out:

I gave season passes to Dirty Sexy Money, Journeyman, and Carpoolers. The first two because they're good shows, and I'm intrigued enough in their continuing story lines to want to watch and see them resolved. Carpoolers because it's silly enough to keep me laughing, and because Becki really likes it.

I was really treating this season like a normal TV season, and completely forgot any potential impact the writers' strike would have. That was a big shortsighted mistake on my part. There were three shows that were on the fence for three episodes before finally getting dropped. They were: Pushing Daisies, Samantha Who, and Chuck. Once the writers' strike started, it finally hit me that I was going to run out of TV to watch, and saving episodes of marginal TV is better than getting stuck with the crapful reality fest that's coming our way in January. So I went back and gave all three shows season passes. But now, I've missed two episodes each of Chuck and Pushing Daisies, and therefore I can't watch any of those that I've recorded until I catch up, either from the network's web sites or from iTunes. My hope is that if I wait a while, the networks will start reruns, and I'll be able to get the missing shows within a month or two.

Viva Laughlin

2007-10-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

Viva Laughlin is an American version of a British show (Viva Blackpool) about the young upstart casino owner going up against the established casino mogul with a murder mystery thrown in. Being a British show gives it about 50/50 odds of success, since British imports have split evenly between being long running hits (The Office, Sanford & Son (née Steptoe & Son), American Idol (née Pop Idol)) and the really gigantic stinkers (Coupling, First Years (née This Life), Life is Wild).

It's got Hugh Jackman in it, which increases its odds, but it's also got Melanie Griffith, which decreases its odds by a slightly greater amount. So its odds are still about even until you learn it's a musical. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful TV musical, so you can just about count it out right there.

Don't get me wrong. I'm about the world's biggest proponent of the singing and the dancing and the musical theatre. But, I don't have a lot of hopes for someone to do a musical on the small screen successfully.

All of my worst fears were confirmed when I watched the pilot. It's not a musical like singing and dancing production numbers. It's only a musical in the sense that occasionally a song will play, and a character will sing along to it. Let me clarify. A song will play in its actual recorded version (Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", for example), and a character will sing the same words along with the recorded track (so you hear both him and Mick). It's almost as if CBS bought a musical, but then was too embarassed to actually show a musical, so came up with ways to shield the American public from all that pesky singing.

If CBS took out all of the music, though, what's left would be still unwatchable. It's easily in contention for the worst new show for this fall season. About the only thing the show gets right is the feeling one gets from the actual city of Laughlin. Laughlin, Nevada is Las Vegas's ugly stepsister, where you get all of the desperation and seediness of Vegas without any of the fun or character. It's decidedly second-rate, and you always get the feeling, no matter what you're doing, that it would have been better in Vegas. This show recreates this feeling by being a decidedly second-rate show. The acting, the dialogue, the sets, the costumes and everything seem like low-budget rejects from other, better shows which provides a good parallel to the city of Laughlin. However, that's not a reason to watch this show. There is no reason to watch this show.

Samantha Who

2007-10-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

Samantha Who (formerly known as Samantha Be Good, formerly known before that as Sam I Am) is the new comedy with Christina Applegate as someone who got bonked on the head, develops amnesia, and then slowly discovers that the person she used to be is not really the person she'd like to be.

I never really watched Married With Children, so I don't have any previous experience with Ms. Applegate, good or bad. I find her to be kind of the right balance between cute and annoying in this show, and the show itself is almost funny. I really like Jean Smart, also, no matter what she's in. I'm not sure how long they can drag out the amnesia thing though, because eventually she either recovers, learns everything about herself, or forges a new life and grows to accept it. There eventually has to be an end to the finding her in embarrassing comedic situations caused by her not remembering some crucial element from her past.

Also, I don't understand why developing amnesia after a bonk on the head is such a problem. I learned from Gilligan's Island that it's easily cured by applying another bonk to the head.

Women's Murder Club

2007-10-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

I kept seeing this one come up on the To-Do List on the TiVo and thought, "Oh man, I gotta watch this?" But, rules are rules, so I dutifully recorded it just to see if it was any good.

It's not.

It seems like with a title like Women's Murder Club you'd have a club of women that commit murders. Or maybe a club that murders women. Either would be more exciting than what it actually is, which is a club of women who solve murders. The club is comprised of a medical examiner, a DA, a cop, and a reporter. They solve murders and talk about boys. A lot. It's apparently based on a book.

The pilot had one of the weirder cold opens of any pilot this season. The woman cop is checking her voice mail, trying to figure out where the reporter is that she was supposed to meet when the reporter falls from the sky and crushes the car next to her. That was pretty cool, actually.

The rest of the pilot was just unbearable, though, because the hens in the club really did spend more time talking about boys then they did actually solving murders. Also, the DA lady's short white boy hair was just really repulsive.

Life is Wild

2007-10-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

Life is Wild is about a woman and her kids marrying a man and his kids and then the whole family moving to South Africa so the man can be a vet at a game preserve run by his dead previous wife's estranged father. It's the most common premise around.

The show felt more like an ABC Family type show than an actual network show. It had the same sort of wooden acting and stock footage.

One of my pet peeves is poorly written little kid dialogue. Anybody who's spent any time at all around kids could easily tell the difference between what a kid would actually say and what some writer who's never been around kids would think they would say. Oddly, it usually manifests itself as dumbing down of the kids. I very rarely see kid dialogue where I think "No way would a kid of that age string together that kind of complex sentence structure and raise that sort of insight into the issue at hand." However, I constantly see kids on TV or movies that make me think, "why is that kid retarded?"

Anyway, this show has that problem.

Pushing Daisies

2007-10-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

For most people, it seems like it would be kind of hard to know what to make of Pushing Daisies. It's brightly colored (almost to the point of garish), there's some sort of supernatural or magical element, the sets are almost cartoony. I watched Bryan Fuller's other series Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, so I don't think this is too much of a stretch although it certainly is farther out there than either one of these.

It's got a lot going for it. There's Jim Dale. Kristin Chenoweth is in it (although the crocheted dress she wore in the pilot is hideous). Ellen Greene is in it. There are supposed to be some semi-frequent musical numbers. And, the pie shop is named The Pie Hole. That's brilliant.

However, there's one big problem with this show that keeps me from watching it. Ned brings Chuck back to life, which means that the slightest touch from him kills her. Dead. Forever. But Chuck and Ned seem to spend way too much time in way too close of proximity, taking unnecessary risks. They'll sit next to each other, sit in a booth across from each other, work in the same kitchen together. It makes me physically uncomfortable to watch.

If I'm holding my phone in my hand and walk into a bathroom where the toilet lid is up, I start to freak out because I'm sure that the phone will somehow slip out of my hand and fly across the room straight into the toilet. I have to move my other hand over and hold my phone in both hands to start to feel secure again. This is the same feeling I get watching this show.

Carpoolers

2007-10-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

I absolutely loved the short-lived Sons & Daughters, so I'm really glad to see Fred Goss working again in Carpoolers. He's playing pretty much the exact same character, so that helps me like the show as well.

Another plus is that the show's created by Bruce McCulloch, so other Kids in the Hall will be present hopefully. Also, I think Fred Goss lived in three different houses in the first three episodes, so that helps keep it fun.

All in all, this show is silly more than it is funny, so if it were solely up to me I might not commit to it. However, Becki really likes it, so we keep watching.

Cavemen

2007-10-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

Much has been already been written about Cavemen, from better writers than me. In case you don't know, this is the show based on the successful series of GEICO ads with the cavemen living among our time. It seemed like such a no-brainer, given the success of Mr. Whipple's World in the 70s, and the more recent successes of Noid Patrol and Where's the Beef Now?.

This was a very early candidate for worst show of fall 2007, but I'm pleased to report that the powers that be have managed to make a show that's actually not the worst of the year. (Big Shots, I'm looking in your direction...). It's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. It pretty successfully sets a tone not at all unlike other comedies where a particular class of people, normally looked down upon, have to live among those who normally do the down-looking. Its closest analog is The Munsters, but I think it has just the slightest hint of Jeffersons.

It has a couple of things going for it. Nick Swardson was hilarious in the first episode, and the character of Nick is pretty funny. However, I don't understand why, with the bigger budgets that a series allows, the makeup's worse than the commercials.

Aliens in America

2007-10-20T22:43:00.000-07:00

Aliens in America gets points from me for being a half hour sitcom, yet foregoing a laugh track. That's become more common recently, but is yet still too rare. It also has Amy Pietz, who I've liked in other things. But, the rest of the show just didn't click for me, so I'm not watching it.

Moonlight

2007-10-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

Moonlight is about a vampire detective. Genius. Somebody somewhere realized people like detective shows, and they like vampire shows. It was an idea whose time had come.

Too bad it's not any good. I liked the reference to Hearst College, and I love it when a show uses really old stock footage, like the night shot of downtown Los Angeles showing the First Interstate Bank Building with its big sign on top (which hasn't been there since 1998).

The female lead is terrible. Just stunningly unwatchable. Even if the rest of this show was good, I would not watch it for that reason alone.

Big Shots

2007-10-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

Big Shots has been often referred to as Sex in the City for men. Well, I didn't like that show, and thought there was probably a pretty good chance I wouldn't like this one either. Sure enough, less than two minutes in, I said out loud to everyone and no one in particular, "I hate this show."

I don't even want to write any more about it except to say that I loved Joshua Malina on Sports Night, but if this show stays on much longer he will be dead to me. Also, one of my pet peeves is people being pronounced dead too quickly on TV shows, without proper resuscitation efforts. This show had someone getting knocked over by a golf cart, someone else saying "Call 911!", and then another person just kind of leaning over the victim and saying, "You can forget 911". And that's it, the guy's dead. No CPR, paramedics, AED, nothing. Yes, I know it was important to move the story along quickly at that point, but come on, writers. What's wrong with knocking the guy over, then cutting to the country club the next day: "He died?" "Yes, can you believe it?" "Hit by a golf cart causing a sudden heart attack, wow!", etc. Doing it the way you did takes even slightly intelligent people out of the story.

Oh, and the one slightly redeeming thing about the pilot is the frequent use of the phrase "tranny hooker", which is always funny, even on a crap show like this.

Dirty Sexy Money

2007-10-17T23:43:00.000-07:00

The premise of Dirty Sexy Money is not one that would normally interest me. Spoiled rich people doing spoiled rich things. But, as with Gossip Girl, there's something else to this show.

For starters, it's got Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland. I loved Sports Night and Six Feet Under, so I'll give Peter Krause a chance in anything. And Donald Sutherland's just one of my favorite actors ever, so I'll probably watch him no matter what. If there was a series in development for next fall called White Pages in which Donald Sutherland read from the phone directories of major metropolitan areas, I would watch that too.

The characters are not all that likable, which is to be expected since they're spoiled and rich. But they strike the right balance of being unlikable enough that it's fun to hate them without being so unlikeable as to be repulsive. There's a little bit of a mystery thrown in, and at this point it's not entirely clear if Donald Sutherland's a good or bad guy. I'm really rooting for him to be good, because at this point, he's definitely the most likable person in the whole family, and it would be a shame for the show to lose that.

The pilot suffered a little from making already over the top characters even more over the top so that the audience could pick up quickly on the tone of the show. I'm sure that will smooth out over time, though. One of the best parts of the pilot is that it includes my new favorite phrase of fall TV 2008, "tranny hooker".

Life

2007-10-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

The premise of Life is that a cop gets framed for a murder he didn't commit and then spends 5 years in prison until new evidence exonerates him. Then, a large settlement with the city also gets him his job back, and he solves crimes with some sort of new compassion for the criminals and some intuition he picked up in the joint.

This show seems to be targeting House, in that they both feature a main character who's fairly unlikeable and says completely inappropriate things. The things House says are actually funny, though. This guy's just dull. I can't tell if it's the writing, or bad acting, but the lead didn't seem watchable at all. I think it's something about his fairly high pitched voice.

The pilot was really annoying because they wanted to beat you over the head with the idea that everything's changed so much since this dude went to prison. So, we were treated with bits of dialog like:

phone rings
"Aren't you going to get that"
"Oh, the phone in my pocket? It's so small I forget it's there"

or...
"He sent an IM to the kid saying..."
"What's an IM?"

or...
"Can I take your picture?"
"How? That's a phone."
"It's got a camera on it. Where've you been?"

or...
speakerphone rings in car; car picks up
"How am I talking to you?"

Alright, we understand. He went to prison; the world went on without him. At this point it's like Unfrozen Caveman Detective. "Your modern devices frighten and confuse me." Tune in next week when we see the main character work on his Rubik's Cube and get completely flummoxed by a Starbucks.

The one good thing about this show is it has Adam Arkin in it, so I'll probably watch it once more, but it's long term prospects don't look good for me.

Private Practice

2007-10-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

I didn't watch Private Practice. It's a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, which I'm already not watching since I previously determined that the only point of the show was to demonstrate how many of the characters could have sex with how many of the other characters and in which combinations. Since Private Practice spins off of Grey's, it carries Grey's taint with it, which means it's exempt from my "must watch every new show" rule.

Bionic Woman

2007-10-14T16:14:00.000-07:00

When I'm recording these fall pilots, I've gotten in the habit of starting all the recordings one minute early and ending one minute late, just to accommodate any network scheduling shenanigans. When I went to watch Bionic Woman, though, I noticed my recording started right at the end of a really pivotal scene where Starbuck, the original Bionic Woman, is getting shot.

I checked online recaps later and determined that I had started probably about a minute into the show, which means that NBC had started it a full two minutes before the scheduled start time. I could write pages on how much this bothers me, but for the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the following:

Networks: I don't care what time you start your show. If you want to start it at 8:57, that's fine. If you want to start at 9:14, that's fine too. I don't care that you don't stick right to the hour or half hour in an attempt to jump on other networks' programming. I have enough TiVos that I can keep up and still catch everything. All I want is for you to tell me what time the show starts and then stick to it. I see all sorts of things in my guide like shows starting at 9:58 and 10:02, and that looks like you're doing the right thing. However, if my guide says 10:02 and you start the show at 10:00, I can't watch it. If the guide says 10:00 and you start the show at 9:57, I can't watch it. I refuse to watch only part of a creative work that's meant to be enjoyed as a whole, especially when there's no good reason why I shouldn't be able to watch the whole thing. Remember, you're the ones who want me to watch your shows. Don't make it harder for me.

So anyway, I was confused through the whole pilot, because I had missed crucial exposition. I'll probably watch the next episode, but if I feel even slightly confused by what I missed, I won't be able to really get into it, and will drop the whole series. So, it all comes down to that first minute.

As far as the review goes, Starbuck wasn't that good in the pilot, and the girl playing Jaime Sommers was pretty wooden. It had Miguel Ferrer in it, though, and he's cool.

Cane

2007-10-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

Cane is an hour drama about Jimmy Smits and has family's sugarcane/rum business in Florida. Overall it was one of those things where it may be good, but it just isn't what I'm interested in. So, I dropped it. For future reference, here's the good and bad about Cane:

Good:

It has Hector Elizondo in it.
It has Nestor Carbonell (aka Batmanuel) in it.

Bad:

Hector Elizondo's character's dying, so unless the sugarcane has magical healing properties, he's probably not long for the series.
It has Nestor Carbonell in it, which means we'll have to make do with less of him on Lost.
The daughter of the rival sugarcane family is played by an otherwise respectable British actress who puts on the worst Southern accent I've heard on TV all year.

Reaper

2007-10-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to watch the pilot for Reaper. For whatever reason, my local affiliate started the show 15 minutes late. There was no sporting event that day or major news interruption. From what I can tell they just lost their watch or something. Starting 15 minutes late meant that the last 15 minutes wasn't on the TiVo when I went to watch it. If I can't watch the whole thing, there's no point in watching it at all, and if I can't watch the first episode, there's no point in watching the second or third.

If they were rerunning the pilot later that week, or if it had been offered on iTunes or something, I would have had a chance to catch it. But, since I didn't, it doesn't matter if it's the greatest show in the history of TV. I'll never be able to watch it. At this point, I'm really hoping it's a bad show and actively wishing for its demise so that I won't feel like I'm missing anything.

So, congratulations KWBA. Your incompetence lost your network one potential viewer of this show.

Journeyman

2007-10-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

Journeyman chronicles the adventures of a man who leaps back in time in order to make right something that's gone wrong in the past. Along the way he's assisted by ~~a dude named Al~~ his former fiancee who was previously thought dead.

I liked Quantum Leap as much as the next guy, so I figured I'd probably like this. The pilot was good, with the right amount of suspense and mystery to keep someone wanting to come back the next week.

The pilot included a really sappy bit where the lead buries his wife's wedding ring under the porch while in the past so that he can dig it up in the present and prove to his wife that he's really travelling in time and not going off the wagon or something. In the scene where he retrieves the ring, music is swelling while he starts to bust up his porch. His wife gasps, "What are you doing?" He responds, "Saving my marriage". This is a fairly typical TV or movie climax up to that point, but then the writers have the wife respond with "Uh, not really", which took me by surprise and made me laugh out loud. Little things like that really go a long way with me, so thanks, Journeyman. I will watch you again.

Big Bang Theory

2007-10-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

Big Bang Theory is a very typical laugh track sitcom. It's the other nerd comedy this season. After watching the pilot, I've got to stand up for nerds everywhere and say how insulted I am. The setup for the show is two nerds living together in an apartment discover there's a real live girl living next door to them, and it goes downhill from there. Most of the dialogue is taken verbatim out of some sort of "So You Want To Write A Nerd Comedy?" guidebook with all sorts of random science references thrown in every thirty seconds to remind the audience "See, these guys are nerds! Did you notice yet that they're nerds?"

The commercials for this series kept saying "A new comedy from the creator of Two and a Half Men". I didn't pay close attention to the commercials, but I assume they were saying that as some sort of warning.

Verdict: I hate this show.

Chuck

2007-10-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

Chuck is the spy comedy about a guy who somehow gets the government's deepest darkest secrets downloaded straight to his brain, leaving the government to alternately attempt to destroy and protect him.

It's one of two shows this season that feature prominent nerd scenarios (the other being Big Bang Theory), and Chuck is definitely the less insulting of the two.

It's funny enough that I'll definitely watch it again. But what was most notable to me about the pilot was that the female lead (the cute blond CIA agent) had not one, but two extended scenes in her underwear. This indicates to me that the producers are very acutely aware of their target demographic, which does bode well for the long term hopes for the show.

Gossip Girl

2007-10-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

Gossip Girl has got a couple of things going against it. One, it's on "The CW", which is bad enough. Two, I can't get a signal from the CW tower where I live, which means I don't get to watch anything on that channel in HD. Three, it's about, and kind of targeted towards, teenagers. I've watched high school shows before (most recently Veronica Mars), but I always have a tough time explaining to my wife why I'm spending so much of my time watching TV shows about underage girls.

That said, I thought the show was really well done. The characters that were supposed to be bad were almost mustache-twirlingly bad, but the characters that were supposed to be likable really genuinely were. The lead girl, Serena Van Der Something was very sympathetic, and I really felt for her and how difficult her (crazy rich) life was.

I was completely caught off guard by this show. I really didn't expect it to be any good at all. I don't know if I'll keep it for good, but I'll definitely move on to a second episode.

Back To You

2007-10-07T22:08:00.000-07:00

Back To You is the new Kelsey Grammer sitcom set in a news room. It's a pretty standard laugh track sitcom that displays none of the intelligence that Frasier had.

The supporting characters are pretty well defined, which is to say each of their one notes are pretty clear. You've got the slutty one who'll use her body in any way that will get her ahead, the young nerdy guy clearly over his head running the news department, the old news veteran who's seen it all, the good guy that knows he could do it if he could just get his shot. I don't remember any of their names. I don't know if they have names. I think they're just referred to as their archetypes in the scripts.

The pilot's got a twist involving a bastard child that I figured out about 30 seconds in.

The important thing about a sitcom is not plot twists or character development, but whether or not you actually laugh watching it. Did I laugh at this show? Yeah, a couple of times, but not as much as I would have thought considering how funny it could have been. So, yeah, I'll watch this again, but I'm not holding out much hope.

K-Ville

2007-10-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

K-Ville's claim to fame is that it's shot in New Orleans, and set in New Orleans post-Katrina. It's a gritty crime drama about a cop (Anthony Anderson) who practically wears a "I'm a good cop" t-shirt. He stuck with the force while everyone else was abandoning the city. He's a dedicated family man. He's sticking with the city during the rebuilding even though his family wants to split for higher ground. And then, there's his partner, officer Martin Guerre Somersby, who was in prison, but got flooded in Katrina, and then somehow got out and decided to dedicate himself to taking on the persona of a cop so he could make good or something.

I could tell from the pilot that the show had it's heart in the right place, but it suffered from Overreaching Pilot Syndrome, wherein the writers/producers feel compelled to throw way too much into the pilot to try to get people hooked in the first episode. There were something like nine deaths, some sort of shadowy corporate conspiracy to reflood New Orleans, lots of family strife and the Martin Guerre subplot all conveniently solved and handled in about 42 minutes single handedly by the main character. I thought it's entirely possible that future episodes could be better, but although it might be a great show, it just didn't seem like something I'd watch, so I dropped it.

Annual Fall TV Review

2007-10-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

I love watching TV. I am not ashamed to say this. I think it's a worthwile pastime. Now, I'm not talking about the indiscriminate time wasting that people usually rail against. I'm talking about the TiVo-assisted selection of quality viewing entertainment, and the enjoyment of said selections.

rant ahead...

The idea of telling a story through a display of moving pictures synchronized with sound is something that's on the whole done better on television than by the movies nowadays. I'm highly disenchanted with the Hollywood studio system of movie making and distribution. Too much effort and money is put in to movies that have to appeal to the lowest common denominator just so they can justify the enormous effort and money that went into them in the first place.

There are good movies being made, but they're hard to find amongst the intelligence-insulting crap. If you're lucky enough to find out about a good movie, there's a whole world of pain in store for you as you try to go see it. If you're going to a theater, you've got to discharge your responsibilities at home (i.e. find a babysitter, feed your cats, etc.), actually drive to the theater (since we're talking about seeing a good movie, you're probably having to drive to the one place in town where it's playing), pay a ridiculous amount of money for you and your spouse/date/party, pay ridiculous prices for refreshments or be forced to smuggle in your own, then watch the movie in a dirty, sticky auditorium with uncomfortable seats from a scratched print with subpar sound (again, because we're watching a good movie, it's probably not at the newest fanciest theater in town).

If you opt to not see the movie at the theater, you've got other things to contend with. DVD's nice and all, but it means either purchasing (which gets expensive), or renting (which means driving somewhere, or using Netflix, which is definitely not on demand). Downloading movies illegally over the internet works well for those without a conscience. New technologies like Amazon Unbox, or Vudu, or Apple TV or things like that all hold promise, but still suffer from fatal flaws.

Contrast that to television: TV's full of crap; don't get me wrong. However, the sheer volume of stuff delivered through the TV means you can still find a lot of quality entertainment once you've filtered through the crap. The overall delivery process couldn't be easier since TV just falls into your house (at very reasonable prices considering the volume of stuff), and the filtering process of separating out the crap is so much easier now that we have TiVo and the extended word of mouth that is the internet.

rant over

Now that I've established that television is a good value proposition for your entertainment choice, I'll explain a little more about my TV watching. I've got a number of things I watch on a regular basis, and a number of other things I might watch more infrequently. However, I'm always on the lookout for something good to watch. I've had shows recommended to me in the past that I just couldn't watch because I wasn't able to see it from the beginning. I've got a compulsive personality that finds it hard to watch something without a continuing story line, and I can't watch something at all if I've missed any part of the story. That means I can't just pick up a TV series two or three seasons in. The few times that I've tried watching a series after it started I was forced to track down the previous episodes first, either in reruns or on DVD.

A few years back, I made a commitment to watch every new series that came on TV, precisely so that if a show was good, I could be there to watch it from the very beginning. Over the years I've refined my technique and made up some rules for this endeavor which I will share with you now.

I limit myself only to new series on the broadcast networks. There's really great stuff on the other cable channels, but most of the action's still at the broadcast networks. Also, there's just too many of those other channels, and no way to keep up with them all. If something good crops up on one of these other channels, I just assume that I'll either hear about in time, or be able to jump in on the hundreds of reruns.
I don't include reality series. Again, there's too many of them. I'm not opposed to reality TV; it's just that all the series are (generally) the same in my experience, and I don't have time to add new ones when I don't watch the older ones. (I also reserve the right to skip a spinoff series if I already don't like the series from which it's spinning off.)
Every show gets up to three chances before I have to make a commitment. I'll record the pilot episode for a show, and if it's just completely retarded, I'll give up on it right away. If I have any interest in it at all, I'll give it a second chance the following week. If after the second airing, I'm still on the fence, I can record it one more week. After three weeks, though, I've either got to give up on the series or commit to watching it until the end.

As you may tell, there's a lot of pressure on the TV series to really come on strong out of the gate. You may also guess that the end of September/beginning of October is a real workout for the TiVo. Summer is spent watching movies to try to clear space on the TiVo for all the new HD pilots coming up in the fall.

So far the system has worked well for me. Every fall I add a couple of series to my watching, and every spring, a couple of series end, keeping my overall TV watching load pretty constant. I've also been pretty confident in the decisions that I've made. I've only once gone back and tried to start over from the beginning watching a series I previously passed up on (24, which I ended up re-dropping halfway through the 3rd season). And, I've only twice given up on series that I had previously committed to (Prison Break and Desperate Housewives, both for reasons of getting stupid and boring).

One of the reasons for starting a blog that I didn't put in my manifesto was to have a place to keep track of this fall's TV series. I intended to write my reviews of each fall series and what I liked or disliked about it, and it made sense to stick it up somewhere.

So, dear imaginary reader, what follows will be my review of each of this fall's new TV series.

Orangutan

2007-10-04T23:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of an orangutan, inserted solely for the purpose of giving my profile somewhere to link to:

Disclaimer

2007-10-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

I want to save some time and space by taking one post to provide all of the possible disclaimers that I might attach to the posts in this blog. The hope is that if anyone takes objection to anything I write, I can just point them here and say "well, you were warned".

So, here are all the things a reader needs to keep in mind when reading any post on this blog:

I will not provide any guarantee that everything I write is true. I will not even guarantee that most of what I write is true. If you really pin me down, I might be willing to commit to standing behind 51% of what I write here, but no more. Even if something I write is true factually, I won't guarantee that my writing represents my true feelings on the matter, either now or in the future.
This writing does not always represent my best efforts. It may not even represent something as good as a lazy, slip-shod effort.
I am a bad person who has done bad things. My finding of fault in others in no way implies that I am a better person than they or that I would do whatever they are doing better than they would.
I am self-centered and often don't think something through beyond how it might affect me personally. Therefore, there's a good chance that what I've written will not be carefully reasoned, nor give a fair shake to other views on the subject.

I'm certain that I will think of more things to disclaim in the future, and will be sure to update this master disclaimer in such an event.

Manifesto

2007-10-02T23:02:00.002-07:00

Occasionally when starting a large project, I've found it to be helpful to write a manifesto first as a way to organize my thoughts and state my goals for whatever it is I'm doing. If I put what I want down in words, I'm more likely to acheive it. If I list my goals first, I'm more apt to remember what exactly it is I'm trying to acheive. And, if I don't get exactly where I want to be with the project, looking back at the original manifesto is an entertaining way to see where exactly the whole thing went off the rails.

So, that's why I'm writing a blog manifesto. It's potentially a large enough project that I should take some time to define its scope. And, I've held such resistance to this idea of blogging for so long that it's helpful for me to define exactly what my objections are and how to overcome each one.

Several people have asked me "Do you have a blog?", "You're one of those internet people. I bet you have a blog." and "Surely you have a blog." I've always said "No", and then proceeded to lay out whatever objections I could think of to the very idea of me blogging. Over the years, they became more and more ridiculous. Here, in its entirety, is the list of every objection I've ever had to me having a blog:

It's feels pretentious to assume that anyone would want to read what I wrote. The very act of me putting words to paper (or web page, as it were) assumes that there's someone out there who actually wants to read what I wrote. It feel that it's the height of hubris for me to just put articles out there assuming that there's a large contingent of people who have been spending their whole lives up to now just waiting for me to grace them with my witty word.

I wouldn't be able to come up with anything interesting enough to hold the audience that I was so pretentious to assume existed. My writing would be boring, and since it's somehow a reflection of me, I would be boring. Anybody who was interested in reading would no longer be, and I would be talking to myself.

If I said, "This blog's for me, I don't care if I'm talking to myself", I would still be hurt to find out that no one was actually reading it. I would then have to resort to sensationalism to get readers. I would be so dependent on seeing positive comments to ensure that people were actually reading articles that I would start writing just to get a reaction. I think this is the problem with many blogs that I've read, and quite frankly, with much of people's writing, period. Quite often, something is written in such a way to elicit a reaction in the reader, which is quite fine if you're trying to bring the writer around to your point of view, or if you're trying to evoke a specific feeling in them. However, a lot of the things I read on the internet are written just to get someone riled up or inflamed, and not even in a particular direction. It's just written to get someone to keep reading or make a comment (usually, so that the writer or their site can get more page views or more ad impressions). It's not honest writing, and I'm afraid I would find myself so desperate for attention that I would quickly head down that path. Either that, or I would have to stoop to things like announcing I would cut off my own toe and "liveblog" it so as to assure a large mass of readers.

It's nerdy. Let's face it, maintaining a blog is still a pretty nerdy thing to do. Yes, it's true that nobody would ever mistake me for anything but a huge nerd. However, there's still this little part of me that tries to deny it, and assumes that people like me because I'm cool and not because I can fix their computer or do their taxes. I'm also still holding out hope that somebody, somewhere, will only like me for my body.

I was... "involved" with a writer once. It didn't really end up as a positive experience for either of us. It took me a while to realize that she was living her life as if she were writing it in real-time. Thus, all of her actions and the choices she made were geared towards whatever would look best in words. This usually resulted in doing whatever would garner as much sympathy as possible from her imagined audience.
I don't think the same problem would befall me, but I have noticed strange changes in my thinking and consciousness when I write. If I'm writing something big, or preparing to write something and thinking it through, I've noticed that my thinking will change. I will no longer think thoughts and feelings; I think sentences and paragraphs. I noticed even in the last couple of days of thinking through this manifesto my thought process changed as if I was narrating my thoughts instead of just experiencing them.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It could definitely help me become a better writer, because when in that mode my ability to experience feelings is constrained by my ability to articulate what I'm feeling. It provides a built-in incentive to improve the process of constructing thoughts in the form of sentences. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is weird, and feels funny. If it just affected the way I thought things, no big deal, but if it started to color the way I experienced things, or made me think of something in a different way than I would have otherwise, that has the potential to be bad.

I don't know if I want to spend the time. Frankly, I have a lot better things that I should be doing. My house is perpetually falling apart, I'm constantly behind in my work responsibilities, and my kids require constant attention. If I do have free time, I don't necessarily want to spend it writing.

I can't think of a catchy title or theme. Sure, a name doesn't seem that important. So I do need to pick something as an address, and the title will be the first thing that readers see on every page. So, I'm trying to think of something good. I've never had a nickname that stuck or anything particularly identifiable about me. So, I can't use anything like that as a name for a blog. I don't have a particular theme in mind, so I can't really pick a name based on a theme.
Any halfway clever names that I could think of are already taken, although without fail, every name I have checked links to blogs that haven't been updated in years. The most recently updated one was from 2004, and everything else hadn't been updated since 2002 at the latest. Fully half of the names I looked for linked to blogs that only had a single post, usually of the form "This is my new blog. I'm totally going to update it all the time and keep everyone up to date on me and my life." I just really wish there was some sort of blog eminent domain that would allow me to just take over one of those completely useless sites for the greater benefit to mankind.

Everybody's doing it. Notwithstanding the scores of abandoned blogs I encountered, I still know of lots of people, companies, animals, and inanimate objects that have their own blogs. I still try to fancy myself as some sort of trendsetter or rebel or iconoclast, and I'd be hurting that by jumping on the blog bandwagon. In fact, what I'm trying to do is position myself at the forefront of the Great Blog Backlash, should that ever take place. Then I can say, "Oh, the rest of you all just started not blogging when not blogging became trendy. I've been not blogging for years"

I don't particularly like the word "blog". I actively dislike some of the related words, like "liveblog", "vlog", and expecially "blogosphere". I'll use the word "blog" or "blogging", but that's about it. I also don't particularly like that there are a lot of misconceptions about what a blog is, or arguments about what a blog should be.
There is a huge collection of people that think a blog is a political commentary site on the internet that espouses some far-right or far-left view, since that's the only context in which they've ever heard the term. There are people who define blogs as meta-commentary on the web or the user-driven foundations of Web 2.0 "leveraging the mutificiencies of social networks", or "using the meta-synergies of the blogosphere's anthropotopography to inspire an new generational parashift" or something that's only really apporiate for Wired magazine or some such. I'm not even sure what stuff like that means other than they imagine their "blogosphere" as one gigantic circle of one person writing something, another person linking to that and commenting, a third linking to the second and so on. Yeah, that happens, but that's a small subset of what I see out there. Still others would assume that if someone has a blog it's nothing more than that person's online journal. Yeah, that's true in some cases, but not nearly all. Some people have discipline and only post interesting things. Some people are much less discriminating than they would be with a real journal. I'm not going to attempt to define what a blog is, other than to say it's a collection of crap thrown up on the internet that someone may or not read. In other words, pretentious wankery.

People will assume they somehow know me just from reading the stuff on my blog. I still have this impression of myself as a terribly complex person. I fear that someone who reads my blog as a way to get to know me better will either make incorrecty judgements because they weren't getting the full story, or assume they have the full story when they really don't. That would be unfortunate. What would be more unfortunate would be for me to find out that no, I'm really not that complex, and yes, you can derive every bit of my personality from a few postings I made on an internet site somewhere.
I read an Onion article a while back called "Mom Finds Out About Blog". One of my favorite quotes in the article was the blogger, Kevin Widmar, saying, "With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am." Yes, that's terrifying. Believe it or not, it's actually a great concern of mine that someone reading my blog will try to assemble an accurate picture of who I am and then fail, or worse, succeed. (When I was setting up the blog, I was overjoyed to find a help file in the Blogger help called "What to do if your mom discovers your blog..." that addressed this exact situation and even quoted the same Onion article! The weird part is that between the day I started this manifesto and the day I finished it, the Blogger link went dead, and no amount of searching brings it up, although it's still in the Google cache. Hmmm.)

Someone will hold it against me later. As a corollary to the above, it's possible that I may miss out on some future job offer or something because someone somewhere Google's my name, reads what I wrote, and thinks I'm a dork. I much prefer to keep that little bit of information secret until later.

So then, if I have so many objections, why am I doing this now? Well, it turns out that a lot of those objections are not good ones. Who knew? It also turns out that anything else that's left can be fairly easily overcome. Some of my objections require just a little bit of rationalization on my part to overcome. Some require viewing things from a bit of a different perspective. Some require just a bit of stubbornness in the other direction. So, I can get past all of these objections, but still, why blog? Why take the time?

I can think of a few good reasons:

I need practice writing. I'm not as good of a writer as I ever was before. I can't articulate my thoughts clearly and succinctly, and I have a hard time getting the exact meaning of what I'm saying to come across in text. I need a reason to write occasionally so as to keep what little skill I have.

I don't remember things very well anymore. I still remember my name and things like that, but I don't remember the fine details of things that happened years ago. My hope is that if I write more about them, the act of writing will cement them better in my memory, as well as providing a published narrative to remind me what I was doing or thinking at the time.

I quite frequently come across some thought or problem and hit Google to see what other people on the Interweb might have done about said thought or problem. Sometimes I'm alarmed when I can't find anyone else reporting on the same experience, and in those cases, I begin to feel all alone in the world. I decided that if I have a blog, everytime I search for something on Google and can't find it I can post what I know about the topic to my blog to assist anyone who might be looking for said topic in the future.

I don't keep in touch with people well. I don't write letters, and I don't call often. However, I want to keep in touch with my friends and loved ones; I'm just not good at following through for some reason. In recent years, I've really come to depend on other people's blogs so much to keep me up to date on whatever they're doing or thinking. This is a line of communication that's pretty much one way, though, and it's time that I do my part to give back to those who give of themselves.

I'm sure I can think of more good reasons as time goes on, but those are enough reason to get started.