Tikkabik

My mother was kind enough to take Emmeline and James off our hands last night for a sleepover at her house, across town, so it's just been Bonnie, Bob, the cat and me this morning. It's like a completely different world -- no shrill yelling or screaming, just relative peace and quiet. Bonnie and I slept in until about 9AM -- really unusual for us, we're usually up before 7 -- and Bob just watched TV and helped himself to breakfast.

The quiet won't last, of course. We'll get the kids back sometime this afternoon, and it'll be business as usual. But we're just enjoying it while it lasts.

We've mostly recovered from the recent poor weather. It's sunny today, though bitterly cold, and the meteorologists tell us that it will slowly warm over the next few days but should be relatively quiet, otherwise -- a blessed relief, all things considered. The kids will be back in school on Monday, and life will once again return to normal.

Posted by flargh at 10:57 AM | Permalink

From Corey's blog:

I'm issuing this as a challenge to the other bloggers who read coreytamas.com: To use the old wedding-day adage of "Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue" as a jumping-off point for a blog entry in which you cover all four of those criteria as they're relevant to your own life and thinking. I'll be checking your blogs to see if it's there.

Something old

Check this out.

Something new

I want one.

Something borrowed

Best intarweb post evar.

Something blue

... and vaguely disturbing.

Posted by flargh at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember that Bill Murray movie, where he's doomed to live the same day over and over again until he gets it right?

I looked outside this morning and saw snow falling, and knew how that character felt.

Posted by flargh at 09:12 AM | Permalink

Looks like school is out for the rest of the week, thanks to the recent blizzard. Some of the parents and others I've spoken to seem to think that the schools will cancel spring break as a result, but I suspect the teacher's union will have something to say about that, if it comes to it.

We got several more inches last night and it's still falling -- I haven't gone out yet to shovel it but am not expecting any problems, as it's the light and fluffy kind.

The kids and the parents in our house are all getting rather stir-crazy with cabin fever. Frankly, none of us are really "into" the snow, so we've basically just been staring out the windows, and the kids have been playing board games or tormenting each other to pass the time.

After being sick for more than a week I'm feeling more like my normal self today, though I still have a persistent cough that isn't going away. It's the same one I've heard from both Emme and James -- I'm not sure who gave it to whom, and I don't really care, but it's just one of those winter things we all have to deal with until we can all collectively shake it.

James has been down for the last couple of days with a fever, but that's gone now, replaced with a rather thickly running head cold that doesn't show any signs of lessening. Fortunately he's clinging to Bonnie less, so she has greater mobility -- even if he is grossing his brother and sister out with thick clots of snot running down his face (he has to be constantly reminded to blow his nose into the tissue).

Me, I'm trying to make the best of the situation and just work straight through it. The kids at home have given me the excuse of working more from my basement office, which is actually quite pleasant once the space-heater kicks in and warms the place a few degrees. The basement casement window in the office is normally obscured by the porch, so it doesn't let in a lot of natural light, but all this snow surrounding the porch has made it totally dark.

Being down here has made me realize why I don't come to the office more often. I have so much work still to do before it's "done." I'd really like to run permanent heat down here, whether it's electric baseboards or a new zone for the forced hot water system that heats the rest of the house, I don't care. And I need a floor: There are great and relatively inexpensive vinyl solutions that would work great, but it'll still cost a couple of grand to do right. And shelves. I really need shelves for the tons of software and peripherals that otherwise just occupy moving boxes or piles scattered hither and yon.

Once all that is done, my office will be real and habitable. Now, it still feels a bit too much like a workshop for my taste. But, like anything worth doing, these endeavors take time and money, neither of which I have in any great supply. So I make do.

Posted by flargh at 01:31 PM | Permalink

Bob, Emme and James will be home on Wednesday -- we found out this afternoon that the kids have yet another snow day tomorrow. Major roads are clear and dry, for the most part, but secondary roads are still in pretty rough shape, with lots of snow and slush just about everywhere. Many side-roads are only one lane wide.

And the latest weather reports are predicting another 6 to 9 inches tomorrow night.

What's more, James is running a fever and has been fighting off a cold.

When it rains, it pours...

Posted by flargh at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I spent a few hours getting snow out of the way today, a day after our blizzard. All told, well more than two feet of snow dumped down in our area. Basically the first hour was spent clearing snow off the porch and away from the kitchen door, then digging a path down from the driveway to the front walkway. Then I cleared the walkway and the front steps, and eventually dug a path to the van. At that point my new neighbor, who just laid his hands on a heavy-duty snowblower last week for a song, was kind enough to dig us out to the street. I reckon he easily saved me an hour of digging through slushy crap.

The worst part of a blizzard is that the snow drifts so dramatically. In some spots, especially the leeward ones or where the wind was occluded somehow, such as the corner of the house, the drifts ran easily four feet tall. In other spots, such as near the front steps, where the wind had a pretty clear path across the yard, it was markedly less -- closer to two feet. The snow was light, for the most part, so I didn't cripple myself as badly as I did almost a month ago during our foot-high snowfall after Christmas.

Still, it's annoying, slow work I don't want to be bothered with.

The weathermen are saying we're going to get another four inches or so on Wednesday. This is just bullshit.

Posted by flargh at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I kinda surprised myself earlier today by stepping on the nice digital scale that Bonnie bought me for Christmas, which I frankly have barely glanced at since then. When I stepped on it the day after Christmas I weighed in at 285 lbs -- which is, for better or worse (well, for worse, actually), the weight I've more or less resigned myself to for the past few years.

Just checked myself this morning when I was getting myself ready for the day and I measured in at 268. This isn't a doctor's scale, so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but it seems pretty consistent (weighed myself a few times on it throughout the morning and the value didn't change), so I'm pretty sure it's fairly on-the-mark. And I expect the bulk of that loss is water weight. I'm not exercising, to be honest, and I'm not eating radically differently.

For the past few weeks I've been concentrating harder than I have in years to better hydrate myself -- drinking upwards of two or three liters or so a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Part of it is simply an awareness that I was really, really dehydrated, all the time. After I started getting my blood sugar better under control last fall, my unslakable thirst disappeared, and with it, so abated my desire to have cold fluids on hand at all time. So I went from drinking maybe two quarts of fresh-brewed iced tea, plus a few glasses of diet soda, plus maybe a glass of water or so, to almost nothing. The payoff is great -- you can't know what it's like unless it's happened to you how desperate that diabetic craving for liquid is. Imagine being a sieve, where the water goes through you but doesn't stay with you at all.

That lack of conscious desire to drink beverages has, in fact, dulled my sense that I *should* be drinking fluids at all. I went from constant fluid uptake to almost none at all: Most of the time, I'd go through lunch and dinner without having anything to drink. My skin started flaking, I'd get rashes, bad acne patches, dry scalp irritation, headaches. As painfully obvious as it is in retrospect, it didn't dawn on me for weeks and weeks that my problem may be that I wasn't keeping the water levels up high enough.

So starting a few weeks ago I picked up the pace and started drinking more. Water, specifically. I've largely lost my taste for diet soda all together, especially since I've developed a paranoid suspicion that the artificial sweeteners in that crap may be dulling my mind. (I can thank AlphaX for that, after he posted to one of my blog entries from last August telling me that NutriSweet made his mom forgetful.) I haven't convinced Bonnie to write that stuff off, but one step at a time: When we first met, she was drinking whole milk and sugared soda.

Anyway, we'll see where it goes. But at least now I know why I had to close my belt another notch last week.

Posted by flargh at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am a New Englander born and bred. I've lived here for most of my life. Having said that, I have no particular sworn allegiance to this region, and would be perfectly content to live elsewhere.

Preferably some place with a warmer winter climate not prone to snow.

I live here because my wife wants to live here; because we're close to her family, and she doesn't want to move away from them. And having a sense of family is, I guess, good for the kids.

But with a winter blizzard bearing down on us preparing to dump 20 to 30 inches of snow, I'm ready to get the hell out of here for good.

Posted by flargh at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Longhorns haven't anything to do with why Dubya is making that sign. It's what you think it is. Really.

Posted by flargh at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I woke up this morning about about 6:30, and felt relatively normal for the first time in the better part of a week. I still don't feel *quite* right -- I've got a nasty rattling cough in my chest that doesn't seem to be going away. But the big news for me is that my head isn't spinning, my temperature isn't up, and I don't feel like throwing up. That's good progress.

Posted by flargh at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Probably every other time I come home from a trade show, I get really, really sick. This trip was no exception. Ever since I got home I've been coughing, nauseated, running a fever and bed-ridden. I expect it's a combination of rapidly changing climates and shaking too many hands.

This puts Bonnie in an unfortunate situation, and as crappy as I feel, I feel worse for her. She's spent the last week taking care of our three kids by herself. Now in addition to the kids, she's had to take care of me, too. She's not feeling particularly well herself, so it adds insult to injury.

I'm hoping that I've finally turned the corner. My fever hasn't exactly broken, but it's lower now than it was this time yesterday, and I guess that's progress. Hopefully I'll finally feel better tomorrow -- just in time for the first day of The NAMM Show in Anaheim, which my boss is covering. He gave me the afternoon off, so I spent it sleeping.

Posted by flargh at 08:28 PM | Permalink

So our beloved cat Max has been with us for almost a year now. He's a hefty boy, always has been, but his weight spiked to about 17.5 pounds last fall. To put that in perspective, Max is about half the weight as James, my four year old son.

17.5 pounds is big for a cat, and while Max is a big boy to begin with, being a Maine Coon (adult males of the breed can often reach 20 pounds without an ounce of fat), that was too heavy. So we put him on a diet using a doctor-prescribed food formula: 1/4 cup twice a day of Dr. Hill's Prescription Diet -- it's a low-carb, high-protein dry food.

Today Max went to the vet for a rabies booster. He measured in at 15.1 pounds. That's an impressive amount of weight loss for four months, especially considering how sedentary he is. I consider that good progress.

Posted by flargh at 08:18 PM | Permalink

So Sci-Fi is showing a new series based on a mini-series they first ran last year, in turn based on the old 70's sci-fi series "Battlestar Galactica."

I admit it's always been a guilty pleasure of mine. Despite wooden acting, laughably two-dimensional scripts and a total absence of character development, it was always fun watching the show. Maybe it's because I was only 8 or 9 and didn't know much better.

So while I was on my trip I recorded the repeat of the mini-series and the first two episodes, and holy crap, am I surprised.

In the mini-series alone, the writers have been able to flesh out more character development and backstory than the entire first series did during its whole run. The special effects are, of course, much better, and the acting is way better too. How can you lose when you've got Edward Olmos as Commander Adama? And the series itself is off to a rousing start with two gripping episodes dealing with practical aspects of what life on the run, leading a convoy of ships, must be like.

One thing I really like about this incarnation of Battlestar Galactica is that they've really grounded the series in a tangibly human setting. The premise was always that these were the "original" twelve tribes of humanity and that Earth was their long-lost cousin, but still, despite the occasional "Frack!" and "By the Lords of Kobol," you really get a sense that these people live like we do. It connects the show and its characters in a way that the original never did.

Anyway, check it out if you get a chance. Looks like Sci-Fi's new Friday night lineup: This, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis -- will be an unbeatable combination.

Posted by flargh at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just a quick note to say that I'm back safe and sound from my San Francisco trip; arrived in Boston early in the evening on Saturday. I'm happy to be home, though I'm a bit tired and managed to get sick as well (spent last night and this morning shivering and sweating in bed with a temperature of about 100.3).

Macworld Expo itself was fun and entertaining as always, and it was good to be among the Mac faithful once again. This is the one chance I get during the year to reaffirm relationships with vendors, too, so to that end it was very helpful and useful time spent.

Of course, the social aspect of the show -- meeting friends and acquaintances for dinners or parties -- is the big draw for me, and this year was no exception. Outside of a great dinner with my editorial colleagues from Macworld, I was really happy that Corey and I got some great face-time in this time around. It was also great seeing the Back Beat/Mac Observer crew on Friday night, after the show was over.

As far as the announcements at the show, I think the iPod shuffle is cute and that Apple will sell millions of 'em, but what I really want is the Mac mini. That's an awesome-looking little system that should appeal to a broader range of users than Macs have up until this point. Let's hope it's the system that finally 'moves the needle' on Mac marketshare.

Posted by flargh at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I flew into San Francisco on Saturday; the flight was a bit late but otherwise uneventful. I had a chance to talk with the event's marketing manager, who just happened to be on the same flight. We've known each other for a while so it was a good opportunity to renew acquantances and find out what's going on at the show -- and no, I'm not privy to any inside information about what Apple will announce on Tuesday -- IDG World Expo isn't either, and even if they were, they have the good sense not to tell a journalist.

The hotel is fine -- I'm staying in the same place I did last year, and oddly enough, the exact same room! I'm only two doors down from Jim, my boss, and a short jaunt to the hotel's club lounge, which serves a continental breakfast in the morning and light fare in the evening. It's oddly comforting to be in a hotel I'm familiar with.

Today was largely an R&R day -- the only such day I'll get at the show this week, since things will start hopping later on today and will continue unabated through much of the week. So I had breakfast with Corey and then we spent part of the day with my father and his significant other. We actually took in some of the sights of San Francisco -- saw the buffalo paddock at Golden Gate Park (it's an inside joke -- my father's nickname is Buffalo) and then had a cappucino at the Cliff House before driving over the Golden Gate Bridge and taking in the sights of the city and Bay Area.

It's been raining recently, which is great -- often times the city is shrouded in haze, but it was clear today, so we got a good view (and a few good pictures as well). After that we dropped Corey off back at his hotel and went back to Benny's studio. She's an artist who works in a variety of media, including glass, and recently she's been crafting glass beads which she fashions into exquisite jewelry. She let me have a go at it, and while I've got to say my attempts were ham-handed at best, I found the work compelling.

The process consists of heating long, thin rods of colored, leaded glass over a hot flame, then fusing it to a metal rod. Once you've got enough glass on the rod, you slowly turn it over the flame, using gravity and various carbon tools to mold the bead into the shape. If you want to get fancy you can apply multiple colors of glass together, or use thinner-gauge glass rods to decorate your bead with dots and stripes.

It's really cool stuff.

So, today (Monday), the show begins. Monday is a conference day, but many vendors are using it to get a head-start on the chaos that's sure to follow on Tuesday, when it's widely rumored that Apple will be making introductions of compelling new products.

Hard to believe it's been a year since the last Macworld Expo in San Francisco, but there it is.

Posted by flargh at 03:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Checking MT-Blacklist, I see that it has blocked more than 42,000 spam attempts made to the comments fields on this blog. That's pretty ridculous, when you come right down to it -- I've been running MT-Blacklist since September, and before that, had to cull them by hand.

As it was, I was still putting a lot of work into spam control. Every day, I'd have to add more entries to MT-Blacklist's ... well, blacklist. Sometimes I'd wake up and find forty or fifty new spam entries. Whoever these people are, there's a special place in hell waiting for them.

Part of it, admittedly, is my fault. I've never actually gotten around to closing the comments fields of all my old blog entries. As you can see from the calendar, I've been writing for a while. And what's more, I'm chatty. So there are a lot of potential points of entry.

Enter Conversation Killer, a nifty little Movable Type plug-in that can automatically shut down comment fields after a pre-determined period of time. I have it set to shut off comments more than 28 days old.

While there are still a few old blog posts that generate legitimate traffic, the great percent is nothing but spam. Most of the new blog posts don't get spam -- for whatever reason, the spam-spiders only go for the old stuff.

It took a bit to configure, and I had to figure out how to set up a crontab to make my server automatically run the job periodically, but once I did, it seems that it's working. I checked some old forum posts and people are indeed prohibited from posting there, so it's had its desired effect.

For how long, though, I don't know.

Posted by flargh at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most so-called "reality TV" is exploitative and stupid. But there's a new show on Bravo (original home of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) that breaks the mold -- it's called "Project Runway," and it's actually worth checking out, mainly because the contestants are actually being judged on their creativity.

The concept is that a dozen fairly untested designers -- ranging from recent fashion school grads to professionals who own their own boutiques -- are tasked with creating clothing designs within a strict set of parameters -- being given $50 and told to use only those materials they can find in a supermarket, for example. Judges with backgrounds in fashion then look at the outfits, ask the designers to defend their ideas, then judge who's got the best outfit. One contestant is eliminated each week. The finalists will square off at an event in New York this February, with the winner getting a $100,000 purse, an Elle magazine spread and a mentorship.

I've seen three episodes so far (I believe the fourth is being broadcast for the first time this week), and it's been slightly different each time -- the supermarket concept was the first show -- the theme was "innovation." The following week the theme was "envy," and the contestants needed to come up with clever designs using cottom fabric and $50 worth of additional materials to demonstrate their vision. The third, and arguably most compelling so far, was to come up with a design for Banana Republic's Winter 2005 line that was good enough for the chain to actually sell the design in their stores. As you can see, there is some product and brand placement, but nothing out of the ordinary for this sort of endeavor.

The show's producers have done the usual thing of assembling a mix of contestants with wildly different personalities and backgrounds -- a few prima donnas, a few wallflowers, a few folks who look like they're a step away (in either direction) from some very intensive therapy and rehabilitation -- which makes for some interesting on-camera drama, with the inevitable breakdowns, screaming fits, drunken rages and so on.

But it's a nice switch from the usual shtick of taking otherwise interesting people and forcing them into humiliating, compromising or just plain weird situations -- these people are coming up with really creative ideas, having very limited parameters to work from. This is certainly a hell of a lot better than "The Swan" or "The Littlest Groom."

There's also a subplot involving the models they're using to show their designs on the runway. Each week, a designer is eliminated -- so the following week, a model is eliminated, too. That's a bit interesting, as well, because at the end of it, the top model will also get her own spread in Elle. So we can count on that competition getting a bit more heated as time goes on.

Anyway, I realize this isn't for everyone -- a show about fashion designers is bound to turn some people off from the word go -- but if you're open to it, it's really entertaining.

Posted by flargh at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Five years ago the industrialized world was in a panic at the thought of changing from 1999 to 2000, because of the so-called Y2K bug -- caused by an old software programming trick that reduced year date values from four to two digits in order to conserve memory.

Computers and ATM cards would stop working, we were told. Power plants would shut down. Hell, planes would drop out of the sky. Seems absurd in retrospect, and nothing bad happened -- the shortcoming was discovered and, for the most part, fixed long before the date actually switched over.

Seems that memory limitations are still plaguing us, however -- remember the Christmas week problems with Comair? On top of wretched weather-related delays and cancellations that plagued the midwest during Christmas, a Cincinatti-based subsidiary of Delta airlines managed to bollox all of its 1,100 flights.

The problem, as it turns out, is a 16-bit memory register issue. Put simply, its computer system couldn't handle the massive amounts of scheduling changes that needed to be made.

Comair's scheduling system, which was built by a Boeing subsidiary called SBS International, was hard-limited to about 32,000 changes in a single month. Normally, this is fine, but bad weather and highway closures nearing the end of the month created a scheduling nightmare that caused Comair's antiquated scheduling software to overrun.

Apparently SBS has a newer scheduling software application that fixes this particular glitch.

Don't you find it reassuring that in 2005, we're still running into computer problems with critical infrastructure services like air travel that should have been fixed in the 1980s?

Posted by flargh at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

And so 2004 ended and 2005 began. Yesterday we observed tradition and spent the afternoon at my grandmother's house -- we don't get to see her on Christmas, so New Year's Day has become her holiday. My cousin Richard and his wife were supposed to come as well, but only Rich appeared -- Lisa was laid up at home in the dark, suffering a migraine headache.

This also marks the end of the kids' Christmas break. Today -- Sunday -- they go back to CCD (Cofraternity of Christian Doctrine, or what Catholics call Sunday school). Tomorrow, much to Bob's wide-eyed horror when he learned this, the kids go back to school.

That also means my break is over -- I go back to work tomorrow, and next weekend I fly to San Francisco for Macworld Expo, which I'm looking forward to, partly because of the expected new product announcements, but mostly because of the chance to renew old friendships and meet new acquaintances.

Posted by flargh at 09:50 AM | Permalink