Category: lil’ chino

the coming spawn

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are we there yet?

I wonder if this would take as long in Mayan time?
Nine months is a long time to wait people. But, it’s to be expected and so I didn’t have much trouble dealing with it, being patient while biology ran its course. But, every post-due-date day I endure makes the pain of waiting that much more acute. Now, my chest barely contains the swells of anticipation which flood in each time I think about another day going by. It’s like a never-ending Christmas Eve to the 6yr old expecting a new bike under the tree, hour after hour of that gut-drop feeling you get as you top the 1st hill of a roller coaster or go weightless at the apex of the chain on the swingset before coming back down. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I made the mistake of letting myself expect her on, or before, her due-date – I made very little mental provision for her coming late, even though I’d been thoroughly warned it was more than likely for a first child. Listen to me, she’s not even technically 24hrs overdue at the time of writing – and you’d think I’ve been in birth-limbo for a century.

When I was a kid, my brother and I would fantasize about creating robot-clones of ourselves. After we had these robot clones, we’d surreptitiously send them in place of our real selves where the situations was such that we’d rather not be there. For instance, these robots would go to school for us, do chores and homework for us, while we lazed about idly, wasting time doing whatever we wanted to. I think it was more of my idea, but I do remember talking to Frank about it and agreeing on the plan’s high level of bitchin’ness. Anyway, the reason I bring it up now – I had a similar idea the other day at work. Usually, I log on and check my work e-mail a couple times from home each evening. Working across multiple time-zones, it’s highly beneficial (not to mention makes a good impression) to check mail during non-US working hours. By logging on and firing responses at night in the Americas, you can potentially avoid the obligatory 12hr turnaround when talking with folks in Asia or Europe. And, besides, logging on at night and getting a “jump” on the work of tomorrow makes me appear productive and dedicated – things which the hippie in me spits on, but the yuppie craves.

Anyway, while swamped yesterday afternoon, I ignored incoming e-mail, thinking instead how how I’d at least have 30min or so that evening to catch up. That’s when I remembered the robotwin idea of my youth – albeit a slightly more realistic incarnation. What if you could hire a secret assistant? Someone who you could train at what you do, and who could share you workload. Only you would know about this person. It wouldn’t work for all jobs, but for a job like mine where there are significant behind-the-scenes in addition to the face-to-face aspects – I could see it working. This secret assistant would have access to my e-mail, could read and respond as me, could produce items tasked to me, and could take care of all sorts of things supposedly “owned” by me. That presentation I’m giving on Thursday? He did it, I just show up and present it. That response I owed customer X? He wrote it, with the knowledge I passed to him during training. You could do the work of two men, you’d be Superman. Better yet, if your kid is going through college and has chosen to follow in his dad’s footsteps and study pop’s job – sign him up for some unpaid OJT. Genius, right? I’m totally getting a secret-assistant.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but the “PortGate” headline on CNN seemed to waffle yesterday. When I 1st checked CNN upon logging on at work (my modern-day substitute for the morning paper), the headline read: “Bush: ‘People don’t need to worry about security.” Reading a headline like could give a body the feeling that GWB isn’t taking the country’s security in general seriously (hey, I said it could be read that way – not that that’s what was intended when it was written). Then, sometime before noon the quote changed to: “Bush: ‘People don’t need to worry port about security,” my own emphasis added. Then, around 1pm it was back to it’s original form. The addition, or not, of the security qualifying word “port” seems to make a pretty big difference in the statement, at least to me. In the port version, Bush is simply saying that people not need to worry about that specific aspect of US security, i.e. the administration’s got that locked. In the portless version, I don’t know about everyone else but the feeling I get from the quote is one of a president being too complacent, even downplaying the import of national security. Funny that they changed the headline, I wonder what the real quote was? A Google News search for the exact phrase “people don’t need to worry about security” turns up a ton of PortGate articles, while the phrase “people don’t need to worry about port security” turns up zilch. Wonder how that errant “port” got in there… wish I had a screencap.

Stumbled on a really cool website the other day called freecycle.org, where people start up geographically-based “communities” of users that post things they are giving away instead of simply trashing. Kind of like the “free” section on your local Craigslist – but better because it’s all free. There are nearly 300 members in my own ‘burg, and just doing a cursory perusal of the messageboard I found several completely free items I wouldn’t mind taking off someones hands. What a cool idea, this is why I like the internet – it’s a big hand-holding group dry-hump.

Goodnight folks, here’s hoping she comes tonight.

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it all starts somewhere

FetusWatch 2006 - Judgement Day
We’ve arrived. The due-date: Judgement Day, the Reckoning.

Sitting at home early Tuesday afternoon, cellphone earbud and microphone dangling from my ear as I sit, muted, on a conference call. I had a dentist appointment over lunch, and decided to work from home the remainder of the day. Not because my numb mouth was too great a discomfort, no, more because I just wanted to be home – wanted to be close to any potential action, wanted to be near Sharaun. I feel like, if I can just be home, something might happen. Anyway, prepare for an entry having almost nothing to do with the fact that today is my daughter’s predicted due-date.

Does anyone else remember Rocketbals? Oh man, I so remember Rocketbals. Back in 5th grade, my elementary school went through something of a Rocketbal craze. Not unlike the run on Yo-Yos that happens in the days after the Duncan man comes to school, someone brought a Rocketbal to school one day and next week the skies above the playgrounds were thick with the things. I’ve always thought they were the coolest toys, and so simple: a small rubber ball (slightly bigger than a golf ball) with a loop of colored surgical tubing inserted through the center and glued to the thing. You’d put your thump in the loop, pull back on the ball, and let the thing fly. They’d go hundreds of feet into the air, and, with practice, you could actually get pretty good at aiming and playing catch with them. I’m assuming they went the way of the Jart – being banned as too dangerous or something – but I’ve always rued the day mine was swallowed by a storm drain. Thinking about it the other day, I decided to long onto the dub-dub-dub and do some hunting. Turns out, that great finder of lost childhood memories: Ebay, had one available. I immediately put in a bid and am anxiously awaiting slinging one of these things around again. Seems like I’m not the only one who’s searching for one, I mean, they were dang cool… when I get one I’ll post of video of it kicking ass – so you can visualize just how dang cool.

Note: After writing the above some time ago – I discovered that the original Rocketbal company went out of business, and a new company bought the patent – reissuing my childhood favorite as a dog toy, the Go-Frrr. When I found the site linked in that last sentence, I immediately remembered seeing one of these Go-Frrrs across the street at the local pet emporium. Anyway, I ran right over and bought one. I don’t care if you call it a Rocketbal or a Go-Frrr – these things are freakin’ awesome.

Ahh.. beloved memories.
Oh man I can’t wait.

I know it seems like an odd thing to do, but I’ve decided I’m going to try and cultivate my own yeast – for no other reason than just to see if I can. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of food-sources – meaning I’ve often wondered about our intrepid pioneer ancestors and their ancestors before them, and how exactly they managed to make the basic foodstuffs we today are so accustomed to picking up at any corner store. Bread, especially, has been an item of wonder – being the ultimate staple it is. Sounds simple, wheat for flour, some water, and a leavening agent. Oh, but that dang “leavening agent.” I’ve brewed on this all before, and had some success using the ultimate resource of the internet to satisfy my curiosity – but I’ve long wanted to actually put some of that learning into practice.

Anyway, following these excellent instructions – I’ve begun the process of getting my own “starter” going. This basically involves mixing some flour and water and letting it sit until it “catches” the wild yeast and bacterium that in the flour to begin with as well as floating around in the atmosphere. Once it’s nice and “soured,” you’ve got a natural yeasty “soup” that can be mixed with plain dough as the leavener – it’s a base material that you use to make your breadstuffs. Amazing that the process is so simple… dough left out will sour, and grow bacteria and yeast – at that point, rather than throw it away, you mix the bubbly froth into virgin dough to infect it and make it rise. Voila, you’ve got homemade yeast. You can do the same thing with water and starch, like water that potatoes or pasta have been boiled in. Making yeast is as simple as providing a nice home for the microscopic beasties that are yeast.

I’ll make sure and keep you updated on the progress of my starter, like it matters. However, the natural extension of this experiment is to take it out of my middle-class, mortgaged-to-the-hilt kitchen and make it more challenging. The end-goal here is to understand how Joe Ancienttimes made his bread, with only what he had around him. And, because it’s a fantasy of mine, the question I’m truly after boils down to: “Stranded on a desert island, could I make my own bread?” That one, and it’s cousin-question where the desert island is replaced by a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, are the real reason I want this knowledge. You’d need some kind of material suitable for transforming into flour: wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, rye, nuts, etc., some water, and some time – salt would help, but is not 100% necessary.

That’s relatively simple, right? So, I’m on an island – I find some nuts, or some cattails or some reedy thrushy things, boil some pre-salted seawater to remove any living nasties – and I’m good to go. Ferment-up some starter and get to baking on hot stones left in the fire. Soon I’d be making Island Flapjacks with coconut syrup. If you find this at all interesting, check out this Cree Indian recipe for Bannock (traditional Indian cake), made with corn, flour from cattails, and wood ashes as baking soda. Imagine the process by which people came to try putting the ashes of last night’s fire into the next day’s food. Awesome.

During this whole process, I learned that all bread was once sourdough – although it likely wasn’t called that because not all of it was actually “sour.” I was getting hung up on the term “sourdough,” which true bread aficionados take to mean any starter created using the above process – not to mean bread that tastes sour, like the San Francisco stuff. All “yeasts” of old were produced this way, and then dried and stored for later use. Modern commercial yeast are laboratory-bred for fast-action and “neutral” flavor – while bread flavor of yore was based on several different factors, including starter cultivating temperatures and mixtures, and of course the breeds of yeast and bacteria that were floating around the region from whence they came. Once you got a starter that made good bread, you held onto it – drying it and using it forever and ever to reproduce the flavor. Yeah, I’m kind of skipping over things like salt-rising bread and the non-leavened breads – but my focus today is on “making yeast.” Hey, it may be boring to you, but to me it’s totally amazing to think of old world folks arriving at these processes via trial and error. But, let’s move on anyway…

Oh my God, I seriously wrote about bread and Rocketbals. Sorry Keaton, daddy loves you.

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the rumpus room

It's where I want to be.
Birth-Eve. 24hrs and it’ll be the day the doctor predicted as our daughter would arrive. I know, due dates mean little, but it’s a psychological milestone at least. This weekend, Sharaun took the advice of a friend and went to get a pedicure, so her toes are now neat and pink – the idea being that at least they’ll be more pleasant to look at for the umpteen hours where they’ll be front and center during labor. And, on top of those pink toes, she affixed little stick-on letters, one per piggie, that spell: “YOU CAN DO IT.” Y’know, the power of positive thinking and whatnot, plus – it shows she’s got a fine sense of humor about the whole deal. I’m more ready than ever, in fact I’m downright impatient… wanting pretty badly to just be able to hold her in my hands, covered in vagina-juice or not.

Monday was a vacation day, Presidents Day here in the States, and it was a gorgeous one. The rains of the weekend-proper ended and we had a crisp clear day, colder than normal but with a nice warm sunshine to help balance it. I spent the morning working around the house, doing more nesting. Cleaning bathrooms, hanging new shelves, and putting the baby swing-thing together. For that last task, I moved the truck out of the garage to gain some working room, put some Otis Redding on the stereo, and puffed my pipe as a I pieced the thing together. I love being able to smoke my pipe while I work. The other day, I even puffed it as a mowed the lawn – people driving by must’ve thought they’d time-warped back to the 50s to see me. One day, I’ll have a real man’s “den,” with a large standing floor globe, shelves of leather-bound books to match the leather sofas, and a pipestand next to my chair, again, leather with brass brad seams. Isn’t that every man’s dream? A cloistered room with a hunting lodge vibe, warm fireplace and maybe bearskin rug? Yeah… one day…

Recently, I discovered the excellent Cheetah line of CD/DVD burning apps – which are free. Up until now, I’ve been using CDBurnerXP Pro and BurnAtOnce, both of which are good – but the Cheetah apps do a better job of integrating users’ most frequent burning and copying tasks into one nice UI. So, if the trial version of Nero that came with your new laptop is expired, check them out here, good stuff.

Goodnight.

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them wacky new saints

Get the fire.
You’ll have to excuse my lack of writing lately, or rather my missing of days. I’ve been doing the working evenings thing again, but making sure to limit it to about an hour. That’s part of it, but really we’ve just been busy at night – having people over or falling asleep early or just not caring to write. Here goes what I’ve done today, good or bad.

Did you guys know that my daughter is going to be born already equipped with math skillz? That’s right, this story will tell you about it. Half the reason I like the story is because its unabashed use of the word “maths,” as in a plurality of math, or multiple math-like things. I myself like to use the word “math” as a verb in addition to its more accepted noun-form, as in the statements such as, “I need to math that out,” or “Look at you mathin’ it up.” Ahh… I really just wrote this whole paragraph because I could talk about babies and make a “maths” joke.

In the religious-blog world, a recent re-hash of the whole “DNA disproves Mormonism” thing is making for good conversation. Among the many things that non-believers cite to discredit Mormonism, the lack of a DNA link between Native Americans and the Tribes of Israel is a more recent tact. (With things such as Kinderhook Plates, and proven-fake languages reigning as more established fights).

From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago…

A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East…

For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.

The book’s narrative focuses on a tribe of Jews who sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC and split into two main warring factions.

The God-fearing Nephites were “pure” (the word was officially changed from “white” in 1981) and “delightsome.” The idol-worshiping Lamanites received the “curse of blackness,” turning their skin dark.

According to the Book of Mormon, by 385 AD the dark-skinned Lamanites had wiped out other Hebrews. The Mormon church called the victors “the principal ancestors of the American Indians.” If the Lamanites returned to the church, their skin could once again become white.

(read the entire article)

Not that you really need DNA evidence to question a theory about a lost tribe of Israel finding their way to Central America and producing generations of color-changing Hebrew descendants, one of whom one day would use magic glasses to receive revelations from the Lord… but, y’know, it helps. I want to make a t-shirt with the evil Galactic Overlord Xenu boofing a prostrate Angel Moroni while Jesus looks on from heaven, crying. That would be so money. Oh man, I’m running the risk of going to like three different Hells right now. I need to go to confession, or maybe an audit, or perhaps just wash my Holy Underwear – so, Allah willing, I can be right with Jah again.

I am so not into writing right now. Goodnight.

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geezer in training

FetusWatch 2006
One week to go! That’s one measly week, or seven even measlier days. Funny how havin’ babies makes you change the way you think about things. I was watching the Simpsons at lunch yesterday, and was aware for the first time that, in the opening theme, where Maggie’s sitting in her carseat turning a fake steering wheel, she’s doing so from the front seat. For a baby Maggie’s age, it’s a cardinal sin of modern parenting to ride in a front-facing carseat – let alone one in the front seat next to mom. See, that and my constant yelling a the local “whipersnappers” to “tone down their hootenanny” show me I’m already a geezer in training.

Heard about this new “Digital Wax” program via Coolfer, and was pretty excited. It’s an auspicious effort to digitize rare, out-of-print, and perhaps previously unreleased vinyl. I’m not too interested in the initial lineup of labels, seems kinda underground punk and hip-hop based – but if they every make it around to some of the stuff that was released in the 60s and never again after that, I’d turn my head. I guess it may be doubtful though, that any major/major-owned label with potentially marketable unreleased stuff would license it for the project when they could skip the middle-man and digitize/sell the stuff themselves. Either way, the audiophilia associated with the press release is certainly boner-inducing:

The system, almost eight months in the making, offers Orchard labels a digitization platform that is unrivalled and unlikely to be exceeded in the future. A modified Simon Yorke S7 turntable fitted with a Kondo IO-j cartridge feeds the esoteric, rare, expensive and exquisite Kondo M1000 preamplifier, via a Kondo KSL SFz step-up transformer. This signal is in turn converted via an audiophile A-D 2 channel converter, and archived in DSL. All wiring is Kondo age-annealed 99.9999% pure silver wire, and all components are isolated by Vibraplane active isolation platforms.

Falling asleep, goodnight.

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the two iPod family

Happy Valentines Day, nerds.
Happy Valentines Day peoples. I hate Valentines Day… I really do. But, if I get a nice dinner with my wife and unborn child out of it, I figure I about break even.

A loooong time ago, I signed up for a website that was all the rage at the time, a website called freeipods.com. I linked the site on the blog, and also added a link to my completely old and busted, yet still highly trafficked, ? and the Mysterians page. When my free iPod didn’t materialize in a month or so, I lost interest in the whole deal – it seemed it took too long to get five people to sign up and jump through all the required hoops. Every few months or so, I’d log on to freeipods.com to see if I’d perhaps accumulated enough folks – but despite nearly fifty people registering, only four of them had completed their offers. Then, the other night – I got an e-mail at my hotmail address saying one of my referrals had completed an offer. I logged on to freeipods for the 1st time in several months and, sure enough, was greeted with the the free iPod screen. So, if all goes well, Sharaun and I will have gone from iPodless to a two iPod family in the course of a month – both free. There was some rigmarole about them needing 7-10 days to “verify” that all my referrals were real and did whatever they’re supposed to – but if that all goes off without a hitch, my 60GB video will get a new little 30GB video sister to play with. I’m so pumped.

Watching the news in between episodes of the Simpsons Monday night, the 10 day extended forecast came on – and I realized that Keaton’s due-date was on the screen. You know it’s getting close when the weatherlady is saying it’ll be cool and partly cloudy on the day your daughter is set to be born. I wonder, y’know, if she’ll actually come on the due-date. I wonder what that percentage is… babies born on their Dr.-pronounced due-dates? I never thought the last few days would be so excruciating – being able to see that little baby squirm and move under the seemingly paper-thin skin on my wife’s swollen belly, I know she’s all crunched up inside, she must be ready to get out and stretch her legs, right? I know she hears my muffled voice from behind all that blood and goo and thinks, “I can’t wait till the day I get to met this handsome lumberjack of a man, the timbre of his voice alone tells me he’ll be a good dad.”

Somehow I came across a remastered/re-released copy of a 1968 album by a British group called Love Sculpture. Now, I’d never heard of Love Sculpture, but allmusic tells me that the one and only Dave Edmunds was a member, and, man… does this record cook. I mean, outstanding driving guitar-based blues rock. Edmunds showing on this album is simply brilliant, sharp and slick and a pleasure to listen to. If you ever get a chance, pick up this disc – or stop by my house with a USB key and I’ll “loan” it to under the Fair Use clause, with explicit instructions for you to delete it to NSA standards 72 hours later. That way, you can hear some great music, and we’ll all be cool under the watchful eyes of the RIAA – the music lover’s best friend and compulsory conscience.

‘Night.

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blues on the speakers

I'm sky high.
Not just any old Monday for me this week folks, nay – this Monday marks the 1st day of single-digit pre-baby waiting. Nine days to go, nine measly days… incredible. A weekend filled with a few last-minute baby-related tasks: installing the carseat in Sharaun’s car, putting together the baby swing, and getting Sharaun’s hospital bag ready to go when the contractions finally come. When the contractions finally come… wow.

I don’t know what it is, maybe a sign of musical maturity – but lately I’ve been wanting to listen to nothing but blues. I’ve been on a rash downloading streak, grabbing byte after byte and building a pile of gigs in my blues directory (all legally purchased music, of course). I always enjoyed the blues, had always been aware of it’s influence on rock music, and was an instant fan of blues-based rock acts like the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. But, despite all that, I never really was a hard-core roots blues fan. Lately though, I’ve been immersing myself in the scratchy acetates of Furry Lewis, Son Seals, Blind Boy Fuller, Mississippi John Hurt, and a myriad of other amazing blue pioneers. I just can’t seem to get enough – the music makes me feel anything but blue. It spreads a smile across my face, and makes me somehow feel connected to the beginnings of rock and roll. Some of this stuff, being nearly 90 years old, is completely amazing and engaging, like being musically transported back to another time.

The past few days in Northern California have been simply outstanding. 70 degrees and sunny, with the air clear enough to see the Sierras stretch from the edge of my left eye all the way to the edge of my right. Friday was so gorgeous, in fact, that I decided to play work-hooky and pull a “working from home.” Unfortunately, I had meetings to call into most of the afternoon – but even sitting on meetings was ten times as good in the ground-level, breeze-thru-open-windows, blues-on-the-speakers comfort of home. I keep thinking about my upcoming time off in a week or so – sitting at home with the windows open and sun shining, holding my new daughter. I’m anticipating spending hours just looking down at her tiny face and drinking in her baby-skin-smell. Damn, I am straight homo.

Everyone’s on about Songbird lately and, I must admit, it does look pretty dang cool. An open-source music app, not unlike iTunes, built on the FireFox browser engine but with some pretty cool twist. Songbird treats webpages containing MP3s as playlists, and even has the ability to auto-download songs from your favorite canon of MP3 blogs. I grabbed it for the home PC, and plan on pointing it to me regular rotation of music sites to see what happens. Who knows, maybe they’ll build in iPod support some day and this thing will be a working iTunes alternative. A guy can only dream.

Before I go, I wanted to pass on my congratulations on to the now two-bigger family of sounds familiar reader maygsters – who gave birth to twin boys this weekend. You guys beat us by just about a week, way to go. Can’t wait to get all the babes together for a puke ‘n’ poop party.

Later peoples.