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UAL to PRC

Sweetcase.Friday and, wow internet…

…I think I actually hit all five days this week.  First time in a long time and it was a busy week, too.  Good on me, I suppose.  By the time you read this, I’ll likely be on a plane somewhere over the vast Pacific.  I’m still waiting for the day when the trip to Asia take as long as the trip to Florida and the trip to Florida takes as long as the trip to Oregon (the trip to Oregon, I suppose then, would be near instantaneous).  Point being – flying to Shanghai takes too long.  Especially when the direct flight is all booked and you have to take the crappy layover version through Tokyo.  But anyway, let’s move on.

OK well, maybe not move on too terribly much… since I’m going to talk about flying still.  For the morrow, I’ve think I’ve got stuff ready.  I’ll be bringing the current book I’m reading (book freakin’ ten of this massive fantasy epic I’ve been trying to get through off and on for ten years now), as well as the next one in the series.  Book twelve just came out and I think I have to wait another couple years before the two final volumes are published.  This means that I’ll have been working to get through the story for near fifteen years.  That’s a long time to read a “book,” even it’s over 10,000 total pages.  Additionally, I’ve got my laptop, my iPod, and my iPhone.  With these things, I feel well-equipped for the long flight.  Since I got the business class upgrade, I’ll at least be able to lay flat to sleep and plug in to a real AC outlet to keep my tech running.  So, I think it’s sorted.

We went out for dinner tonight, used a coupon.  Just a little family thing before I split town.  Got there early, got back early, and was all packed before 8pm.  Not bad, actually… and was able to spend the rest of the night (after coming here to write this last paragraph) hanging out on the couch with Sharaun watching TV.  Yup, just wasting away in front of the tube.  And now it’s time to hit the sack.

Goodnight and I’ll talk to you next week from the People’s Republic of China.

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sayanora, trumpet man

Sayanora, trumpet man.Happy Thursday folks.

If you’re viewing the page via your iPhone or Android device today, you’ve likely noticed that I installed a much more mobile-friendly theme that takes over when the page is viewed in a mobile browser.  I like it a lot, and it’s actually what inspired me to change up my current desktop theme (the main look and feel of sounds familiar).  I haven’t done this in a long while… but my current theme was kind of clunky compared to some of the more modern themes.

My goal was to maintain as much of the look and feel of the site as possible while taking advantage of something less hacked-together (I still have to go through and reformat some of the more kludgy CSS remnants, but I’ll get it all modernized soon enough).  I think it’s mostly in-place now, the only drastic change being my decision to drop the years-old header logo… which meant ditching the Bible-times trumpet man image Ben stole for me off the internet way back in 2003.  Sayanora, trumpet man.

OK enough website junk.  Let’s talk about something better.  Maybe something funny… Oh, I know!

Sunday evening this past week my daughter spent nearly five minutes explaining to me the wonder that was her Halloween-acquired Ring Pop.

See Dad, it’s like ring but you can eat it like a lollipop.  It’s candy.  You put it on your finger like a ring and it’s pretty like jewelry but it’s also candy like a lollipop.  See?  See it on my finger like a ring?  But watch, Dad!, look with your eyes!, see… I can… mmmpphh… see, I can lick it like a lollipop.  Isn’t that neat, Dad?  Dad… did you see?  It’s a Ring Pop.  It’s called that because it’s a ring and a lollipop.  Dad.  Dad?

About two explanatory sentences into her rant, I started laughing a little.  By the third or fourth recitation of her stark wonder, I had all but lost it and was cracking up.  Sharaun, sitting opposite me on the other couch, was also laughing.  By the end, I was playing with her (I think she figured it out).  “But wait,” I’d stop her to interject, “Is that thing a ring, or a lollipop?”  Aaaand we’d start all over again.  Good stuff.

Changing subjects…

Recently, I’ve started using the track rating feature on the iPod.  I never really used the functionality before, for a couple main reasons: 1) I pretty much only put music I like on the iPod, so I would hope not to find anything less than “middlin'” were I to do a “rating audit” or somesuch and 2) I don’t use iTunes to manage my music, so the track rating metadata would only live on my iPod and not be transferred permanently back into my collection.  If my iPod ever went south or I had to reload tracks off disk, I’d lose the ratings data anyway, so I’ve always considered it fleeting and useless.

Over time, my mind has changed somewhat on each point.  Yes, everything on my iPod is there because I at least “like” it.  But, as I’ve learned being a manager at the sawmill, even a group of top-performers has a bottom performer – regardless of whether or not that person is generically “good” or not.  Same with a huge batch of “good” tunes, I suppose.  Even if I like it all, there are some tracks that deserve a star or two more than others.  I figured that exploiting the natural strata of my tastes might actually make for some neat ratings-based “smart” playlists.

Furthermore, about a year ago I bought some software that promises it’s able to make a complete, hardware/firmware agnostic, restoreable backup of my iPod.  The idea being that, as long as I keep up with the backups, were my iPod ever upgraded, lost, or ruined, I could restore it to its previous state – including track-by-track metadata.  Still, ratings wouldn’t get sync’d back into my master collection on disk – but I gave up on this a long time ago after a couple failed migration attempts.  But, at least I could carry the ratings metadata through an iPod crash or upgrade… better than nothing.

Anyway… I’m trying it out.  Why not?

Goodnight.

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to do

Oh, and... thank God.

Note before we begin: Yes, I am playing with new themes.  No, they are not 100% yet so please pardon the dust.  Moving on.

Things to do before I leave for Shanghai and Taiwan:

Get a haircut. For my Halloween costume, I shaved my beard super tight in hopes it would help the faux beard and moustache stay attached. It didn’t. However, the transition from this short facial hair to my overlong already-needed-a-trim head hair is now too stark. When I go overseas or even to a customer domestically, I like to have a fresh haircut. For some reason, having a tight crop in the “fade” area makes the baldness on top appear a little more… “intentional” or something. Also, a nice close cut helps me carry authority and appear erudite when speaking. So says me, at least.

Wash the dress clothes. For a week now I’ve not had anything brown-based to wear. I’ve been cycling through the grey, black, and dark pinstriped pants coupled with the same three or so dress shirts that are un-wrinkly enough to wear. The problem started back when Sharaun was in Florida. Not that I rely on her to do my ironing, but she will occasionally iron all my dress shirts so that I have a nice stable of wearable items. Problem with sticking to blacks and greys means that I’ve also run out of clean black dress socks. I’ll need a range of colors for the week abroad. It’s important to not only come well-groomed but to come well-appointed also. Shockingly, I haven’t been to the Asia-Pacific region since before Keaton was born. Managing to dodge the love/hate bullet that is Asia travel for this long, I’d like to show up looking as if my station has improved since that last visit years prior. I mean, why not, right?

Get the big-trash people to come by the house and take away this massive pile of big trash that I’ve been storing alongside the house. We bought a new dining room table a month or so back, one that can accommodate a larger dinner party or maybe someday a real family Thanksgiving. I had to do something with the old table, so I moved it into the backyard. Some friends had indicated they might want it as a prop for a house they were trying to rent, to fill out the space and hopefully make it more attractive to potential tenants. I left it out there while we went to Mexico and the thing got rained on heavily. When I returned, it was literally a woody mush holding precariously to the shape of a table. When I tried to move it it fell apart in pulpy pieces, literally crumbling in my hands. I threw it back by the shed, along with the chairs, amongst a growing little pile of things I don’t use anymore (like my years-old Craigslist-purchased lawn mower and some large wood and plastic scraps from various projects). Time to move this off the property before the coming winter rains reduce it to even more of a mushy mess.

Call the floor guy. As part of the (now overdue) Q3 “home upgrade” item I try to include in each year’s budget, we’re getting hardwood flooring installed in the house. I bought the materials long ago, and have been delaying the actual install to work around various travels and events now for too long. I need to call our friendly Eastern European contractor and get the dates scheduled so we can have the things in before the holidays. We’re both pretty excited about the floors, and have also both become quite detached from the care of the current carpet – not even bothering to give it a clean post-Halloween Bash. We’ll also have him replace the carpet in our master bathroom shower/sink area (carpet in a bathroom, really?) with some nice large tile – since we’re doing “floor stuff” anyway.

Order some of those credit card “convenience” checks. To pay the floor guy. We don’t carry a balance on our single credit card; we pay it off every month. However, we use it almost exclusively as our preferred method of payment for as many purchases as will allow it. All this to accrue airline miles which we can use to shuttle around the USofA visiting our scattered friends and relatives (or for the occasional international trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, “cough-cough 2010”). Since the flooring install will be check only, and will be a substantial outlay, I can’t overlook the chance to net miles from the transaction. The card we have allows me to get one mile for every two dollars on checks (one-for-one on most normal transaction and two-for-one for a limited set). Yes, the checks impose a minimum fee for usage, but ultimately, doing the math, the miles are worth it. We typically end up netting between four and five free round trips per year, or enough for a family jaunt and some me-alone or Sharaun-alone travel to boot. Not bad.

Fix the walls. Again, as part of the Q3 “home upgrade” bucket, I had some wiring work done in the main room. Because most of the wiring had to run through external or hard-to-access internal walls, the work was somewhat invasive and required a good deal of drywall cutting. This leaves me having to go back and patch, texture, and paint the worked areas. It was worth it though, not having to do the work myself (I hate working in the attic pulling wires) and getting the surround speakers mounted attractively only the wall sans visible wiring. The last items on that Q3 list involve mounting the flatscreen and getting a custom entertainment cabinet built on the wall below it. In the end, everything will be attached to the wall with no wires to be seen. Should be a large improvement to the room.

Wow.  Gotta run.  Tons to do.  Goodnight.

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on abundance

More lines than one!Howdy for Tuesday morning folks.  I got lazy tonight, left the dishes to rot in the sink until tomorrow.  Not my normal M.O., but I was preoccupied.

The other night our neighbors invited us over for dinner to celebrate a birthday with them.  We had some great food and sat around watching some gameshow broadcast via satellite from the Philippines.  At some point I ducked out into the backyard with the neighbor to check on the ribs on the barbecue, and noticed all the fruit trees growing.  I’ve been over before, but had forgotten that they had so many trees planted.  Turns out one of those trees is a Gala apple.  And, being that it’s planted about 30ft from my Fuji tree, I think I’ve perhaps found the answer to my questions the other day about this year’s apple crop.  Hopefully the Gala and Fuji can continue to cross-pollinate and make better crops for each of us.  Kinda cool I don’t have to worry about planting another tree to do it.

Yesterday, as I prepared and posted the pictures from the Halloween party, I realized just how behind I am on posting new pictures to the gallery section of the website.  I haven’t updated the pictures of Keaton since back in June when we went to Aruba, and before that not since February.  This used to bother me, actually, I’d feel way behind on updating the content, like I was letting folks down or something.  Now, however, I’m almost of a mind that static “gallery” installations on personal webpages are fast becoming a thing of the past.

There’s just no guaranteed permanence with any of the current solutions: free online services are likely to fade away and die at some point, so Flickr, Picasa, and the like are unattractive to me; and hosted services like Gallery and Coppermine and the like are only around as long as you maintain them and don’t lose the database (has happened to me at least once).  All this makes me think that perhaps the future of photo-sharing online isn’t a centralized repository that has staying power, but rather a Facebook-style quick-and-easy type of instant-sharing.  Something that casual enough that you don’t feel overly committed to uploading and sharing, something quick enough that you’re apt to upload frequently, and something fleeting enough that you’d not feel gutted if everything were lost in the internet ether.

I’ve almost convinced myself that it’s the way to go… timely, frequent, small bursts of quality photos posted to the blog instead of doing massive dumps to a dedicated location.  Furthermore, I’m going to try and make this happen here on sounds familiar from here on out.  I mean, nothing says I’ll keep up with it – look at how much my daily writing has fallen off lately (things have been busy, y’all) – but I’m gonna give it a go.

Goodnight.

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‘nother ‘ween gone

My chicks forever.Halloween has come and gone.

We had our usual party.  It was well attended and fun.  The costumes were great.  The next night, Halloween proper, we got together with a few close friends and took the kids trick-or-treating around the block.  I also fired up the fog machine, strobe light, and scary music while I handed out candy.  A neat story came of this, read on.

At one point, while I was out trick-or-treating with Keaton, a friend stayed back at the house to hand out candy in my stead.  While he was there, a young girl braved the path to our door.  As happens with some of our ‘treaters, they get a little scared and edgy by the time they’ve navigated around the pop-up coffin, an animated witch, and a hovering ghost – and by the time they get to the door it’s a testament of will that they’ve made it.  And then, just in time, a skeleton drops from the ceiling above their heads with a loud ooga-booga noise.  For this girl, it must have been to much.  Bill, the buddy covering candy-distribution while I was out, said she turned and ran as fast as she could into the house.  Too bad the screen door wasn’t open.  She ran right into it at full speed.  Man, why couldn’t that have happened while I was there?

I’m afraid that, tonight, I don’t have much for the blog.  I spent most of Saturday nursing a hangover and cleaning up the aftermath of Friday night’s party, and then after church Sunday I killed the afternoon taking down and storing the Halloween props for another year.  Both days were long and made busy with the work of the hands.  But, the house is back together and things are as much in order as the ever are.  So, not much writing… but, I did find time to upload the costumes from the Halloween Bash to get the voting started.  So head on over here and cast a vote for your favorites from the evening.

Yes, Halloween has come and gone; and now it’s time for Thanksgiving and beyond that, Christmas.  That

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run over by the wheel

I'll paint rainbows...When I was a kid, I used to hold my poo.

I thought of a bunch of different ways to start this entry… but that one above ended up winning out.  Simple, true, and gets right to the point.  But, to flesh out the statement with a little more info, let me expound.  ‘Round about the age of seven or so, and right through to the age of, oh, I don’t know, maybe as old as ten, I valued my no-pooping activity much more than the time that actually pooping stole from it.  What I mean is, instead of stopping what I was doing and going inside to use the toilet when nature told me to, I’d “hold it.”

This holding it amounted to, and I know, this is going to be funny, stopping what I was doing (yes), sitting down on the ground with my legs tucked underneath me, and physically holding in the bowel movement.  If I remember correctly, physiologically this meant I was going through the biological motions yet just not allowing my efforts to, ahh, bear fruit.  What I mean here, put a bit more coarsely, is that I would be sitting there and bearing down, but using my legs and feet to prevent anything from really happening.

I know this is disgusting, but I promise I’m telling you for a reason (if “setting up a blog” is a “reason” these days).  “Disgusting” would be word enough for just forcibly holding in poo, but I know that, certainly, this practice had to have some additional impact.  I mean, shunting your poo into a clenched and stopped-up bum can’t be a nice tidy way to delay a bowel movement.  I assume my underwear bore the brunt of this practice.  Thinking back, I can remember my mom complaining about my less-than-clean drawers.  To be clear, I wasn’t “having accidents” or anything… I just think I was leaving a bit more… residual… than a normal youngster might.  In the middle school locker room, we used to give guys with “skidmarks” a hard time – I imagine that my drawers during this time may have made good targets (I’d given up the practice long before middle school).

So why am I telling you this?  Well, because… the other day, in the middle of getting frustrated with Keaton for not wanting to go sit on the potty, I caught myself wondering, “What’s the deal with not wanting to go to the bathroom?  Why is this so hard?”  And then… as I was on about my third, “No, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to, you’re going to try and use the potty before we leave!,” I remembered my old days of poo-holding.  How I never wanted to leave my friends or stop what I was doing to take a potty timeout; how I could get by with just a couple seconds sitting on the ground instead, and it all made sense.  Karma.  I’m being punished by the Wheel.

I still made her use the potty before we left, though.  She went, too.  Go figure.

Goodnight.

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prince charlie

Pod person.Well friends, it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m taking a bit of a break from doing some housework.  Keaton is dancing around in her Princess Araura costume as Animal Collective plays.  She keeps singing something about finding her “Prince Charlie.”

Prince Charlie… I LOL’d.

Oh and yes: housework.  As the sole proprietor of this here shop for another Mr. Mom weekend, I’ve busied myself tidying, laundering, and scullionry.  After church Keaton and I swung by the grocery store to pickup some foodstuffs for lunch (and I couldn’t resist a sixpack of Sam Adams Octoberfest brew, a cold bottle of that goes so well with housecleaning).  She got a turkey sandwich, some grapes the size of small eggs (which were on sale), and a glass of milk.  I had a few salt-and-pepper kettle chips (“send a man shopping,” they’ll say…), grapes, and a turkey sandwich of my own.  I heard they changed the food pyramid recently… wonder how I did?

Random topics today, if you hadn’t already figured it out…

Y’know, I’ve got to hand it to whoever does the new Scooby Doo cartoon on TV.  We caught an episode of it while in the hotel room down in Mexico, and I was pleasantly surprised at how true-to-formula it was (that formula being how I remember the show when I was a kid).  The voices are spot-on, the stories develop and play out as expected, and the jokes are still aimed at adults as often as they are kids.  Keaton seemed to dig it (she is my child, after all) so I was more than happy to setup a recurring recording for it on the DVR.  Watching it with her is like going back in time a little.  Good job Scooby people, good job.

I spent a good bit of time Saturday further tweaking all the props to get them perfectly dialed-in.  And, as expected, once I had things pretty much how I wanted them, two of the props suffered major breakdowns.  Always; always, always, always.  The stupid coffin popper appears to have popped his pneumatic frame right off the bottom of the coffin – that’s not going to be an easy fix; and I found the crank ghost as a sad crumpled mess of glowing cheesecloth, hanging by one arm and going up-and-down.  Ugh.  At first, I figured I’d just let ’em rot for a day or two… not wanting to see how badly things were broken and learn how long it’d take to fix it all.  But, I had some free time Sunday between loads of laundry so I took a look.  Happily, things were all fixed and back to working order in under thirty minutes.

Goodnight.