An Evening at the Shelter

We didn’t get a truck — which turns out to be a moot point, as I’ll explain shortly. Instead, we cleaned out our closets and took a vanload of clothes on over to the shelter early this afternoon.

We got over there, and before we could take our stuff in we had to wait for... a truck & trailer hauling furniture out. Turns out that various organizations are “placing” families in houses & apartments in the region, and (at least) this shelter is simply a whistle stop on the railroad. Good thing, because more are coming in next week; rumor has it that the next group of evacuees includes Vietnamese fishing families (which I remember being a point of ethnic tension the summer of 1980 that I spent in Biloxi). It’s kind of strange: we’re going to have new neighbors of ethnic groups heretofore unknown in “these here parts,” and it almost seems like they’re depopulating the coastal region — given the long-term environmental effects of flooding hitting all those toxic sites in Louisiana, that's probably for the best. I plan to avoid Gulf seafood for... pretty much the rest of my life.

But I digress. Later in the evening, I went back and signed up for a shift at the shelter, offering to do whatever was needed. It was a very educational experience. Some of the things I learned, in no particular order:

• If this shelter is typical, they’re getting overwhelmed by the amount of material pouring in. The first part of my evening was spent tossing bags of clothes (including some I recognized) onto a mountain of stuff to sort through later. There are also two semi-trailers parked at their loading dock, literally packed with bags of clothes. In another part of the shelter, they have clothes that have been sorted through on long rows and racks, in a size to rival some department stores. It’s very likely they don’t need any more clothes.


• There is a list of things they need, but it changes from day to day. If you want to donate material, and you want your contribution to be of immediate use, bring things they want (don’t trust yesterday’s list though!) and mark them. Those things (diapers, I can almost guarantee being one of them) will be whisked into the distribution.


• Don’t expect a well-oiled machine. Nearly all the people at the shelter, including those running the show, have maybe a few days more experience than you do on your first night. If you’re willing to do whatever needs to be done, you’ll stay busy for as long as you want to be there. Ask for directions, someone will point you the right way.


• At this particular shelter, they need volunteers most between 9–11 a.m. and 9–11 p.m. I suspect that the evening shift is going to be pretty universal, because people are helping the families settle down for the night & get their kids to sleep.


• Just don’t donate used underwear. Period. I guess anyone intelligent enough to read Tales from FAR Manor has enough sense to know this, but I’d have thought anyone with a room-temperature IQ (in Celsius) would know it. Lordy.


• Volunteering at your local shelter is worth the effort, even if you don’t interact with (or even see) the people you’re helping. Stuff needs to be done, just go do it.

I’ll be going back as often as I can in the next week.

The Routine

Current music: Red Rockers - Eve of Destruction (not as good as Barry McGuire’s original)
Went to see Just Like Heaven last night with the girlies (The Boy and his girlfriend saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose). I’m rarely in the mood to go to the theater, although I usually enjoy what’s set in front of me when I get there, and last night was no exception. A halfway-decent plot line and a little ghostly physical humor helped. The Boy liked Exorcism so that went well.

So work is work and life is life. I was hoping to get up to the resort today, but wife found out some of the evacuees are getting moved into otherwise unoccupied houses here & there. They have places to put people, they have furniture, but they don’t have a truck to move the furniture. Neither do we, but that’s never stopped her before. If we find a truck, that’s what we’ll be doing today. I’ll update later (with pictures, I hope) if things go off. Seems like something happens to scuttle relaxing weekends at least 90% of the time, but this one is actually worth the effort for a change.

“We’ll go next week,” she said. That’s what she said last week too, but (as usual) I refrained from saying so.

The Pledge

A lot of my misguided brethren are up in arms over a court ruling that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance infringe on the rights of school kids who are expected to stand up and recite it every morning (often garbling it — I remember when I thought it said “and to the republic for witches’ stands”).

A couple of thoughts...

First: the words “under God” do not appear in the original pledge — they were added in 1954, at the urging of Republican role model Joseph McCarthy (yes, that McCarthy). It’s important to remember that religious demagoguery is certainly not a new force in American politics; it has always been lurking in the tall grass, ready to bite any politician that strays from the broad middle. Removing those words simply restores the Pledge to its original form.

Second: welcome, my brethren, to the push-back. You have worked tirelessly for generations, attempting to establish your theocratic dystopia, and crying “persecution!” when you are simply not allowed to impose your beliefs on other citizens or our government — eventually, you provoke the wrong people and they won’t be intimidated. For every “Sponge Dob” Dobson and Pat Robertson trying to push non-Christians to the margins of society, there’s going to be a Madeline Murray O’Hair or Michael Newdow pushing back at us. Naturally, it doesn’t end there: I imagine that Newdow is getting death threats tonight, and we know Ms. O’Hair came to a bad end.

Third: this could be the work of God Himself. Personally, I think that the 1963 Supreme Court ruling that banned required prayer in schools (kids can pray on their own, and “they took prayer out of schools” is simply a Big Lie) was the result of God running out of patience. Why would God want His name taken in vain, through kids forced to pray in segregated schools? I think if Christians in general had been in front of the civil rights movement, rather than far too many white Christians fighting for the status quo, we might have a very different situation today. But now, we have segregation by class — poor school districts get the cast-offs of wealthy ones, and Christians largely either don’t want to see or (especially in the wealthy areas) actively oppose any kind of revenue sharing. Again, if Christians were in front of a movement to insure equal education for all in this country, we would be living in a different country.

Behold, this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

--Ezekiel 16:49

Perhaps we are being judged. But not with a hurricane.

When Icons Exceed their Shelf Life

Current music: BlueTonicWorld - Paradise (slow-mo-tonic mix)
I rarely — never, actually — post from work. If I run across a topic I want to blog about, I'll tuck it into a Sidenote pane and (with any luck) give it some thought.

So when I saw this posting about Garrison Keillor waving lawyers at a blogger for his parody T-shirt, my first thought was to rip the superannuated geezer a new one. You mess with one blogger, you mess with all of them — and God help you if your offense gets noticed by the likes of Kos or Commander Taco. I’d be willing to bet a doughnut that there are more people reading blogs than listening to Prairie Home Companion (which is a trademark of Garrison Keillor, and I couldn’t care less).

But upon reflection, it struck me as sad. In a way, Keillor’s radio show was an early form of blogging: he talks about stuff that’s happening around him and throws in a little humor. It’s ironic that, as I type this, he responded to a letter-writer (on a different topic), “it's pretty much an established rule in American life that when you are in power, you are the object of satire.” Unless, of course, you can file SLAPP suits against people satirizing you. Instead of keeping his show relevant to the changing times and media, he has let his brain ossify. It’s one of the saddest things of all, when a formerly creative mind gets rigid: the first sign of death.

I’d been planning to give his show a listen some time. Now I don’t think I’ll bother.

They’re here!

Rumors condense to fact: the local megachurch wannabe is taking in 150 evacuees. Not 150 families, 150 people. They’ve put out a flyer listing all the stuff they’d like to get help with — furniture not the least of it. We’re batting around the idea of converting part of the detached garage into living space & inviting a family, but the climate control would be a nightmare (even if the walls & roof are already insulated).

Looks like CNN finally got wind of the SOBs from Gretna blocking the bridge. They had the police chief on, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying in the way of excuses, because it was in a pizza joint & the sound was off. I truly hope some of those responsible (in Gretna, not the pizza place) do jail time.

Crazy land

Some friends of ours have a flaky daughter, who’s 21 and has 3 kids (all at once — triplets). She “tried” to commit suicide today; I use quotes because it was one of those attention-getting mechanisms, the usual post-fight-with-boyfriend kind of thing. She did leave a note, “love to everyone and sorry I’m such a screw-up” or some such tripe.

It backfired on her though; she got a bit more attention than she wanted. They're keeping her in the hospital overnight for “observation” — meaning they’re going to ship her to a psychiatric hospital as soon as there’s an opening. whoops!

Wife’s bro and his wife are splitting up too. Everyone’s wigging out around here. We probably ought to have the water checked or something.

Spider wisdom

Spiders and me are not exactly the most compatible creatures on the planet. The little SOBs seem to think it’s great fun to run a guy line across a walkway, about the same distance from the ground as my nose. For my part, if I’m wearing shoes and I see one near the ground, it’s stompin’ time.

So one night a while back, the night I finished bottling my beer in fact, I had cleaned up the equipment, loaded it up in its box, and carried it to the outbuilding where I keep it in between batches. I had some extra bottles, so I had to make several trips. Coming out onto the small stoop, I saw one of the biggest spiders ever, off to the left, hanging on a guy wire. He saw me too, and immediately started (wisely) putting some distance between us. It was dark, and I didn’t have a stick, so I glared at him (which made him back off even farther). He had a huge web between the uprights of the stoop and a tree, that much I could see in the dark.

Next morning, I armed myself for battle and marched over to... nothing. The spider had taken down the entire web, except for a single guy wire, and left for parts unknown! Smart little barstid — which is probably how he lived to get that big.

Some thoughts on the “debit cards”

Among the government and private assistance (finally) being offered to victims of Hurricane Katrina is a $2000 debit card being offered to various households. Experience with The Boy's girlfriend¹ suggests that $2000 is, at best, barely adequate to establish a single person who has nothing. I seriously doubt it would be enough to get a family of even three set up, even with all the other help they might be getting.

The girlfriend, I figure, might be able to get established in her own place with $2000. She would need: deposit on an apartment plus a month's rent, a car (no public transport out here!), insurance & fuel for the car, deposits and payments for turning on lights, gas, and phone, maybe some furniture (like, you know, a bed & a dining room table for starters) if the apartment doesn't have any, and enough food to tide her over to her next paycheck. Oh, and there's cigarettes, but don't get me started on that. Evacuees need all that to get back on their feet, plus a job or two (the girlfriend has a job at least). It might take $2000 or more just to live on until they find work.

It's difficult to be independent when you're starting — or starting over — from scratch. Some will go back to rebuild their city... and I wonder if some of the refuseniks stayed because they hoped to be first in line getting cleanup and repair work. Others will be glad to relocate, especially with people wanting to help them get started. For all the noise we make about New Orleans “charm” and so forth, living poor would certainly obscure the charm. I suppose it would be like that for me if I moved to the beach: it's a nice place to visit, but if I lived there I'd have to fight traffic every morning, and I'm not used to living cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of people; beach communities don't seem to have a problem cramming a thousand people into the same amount of land as FAR Manor's acreage, where it's just the six of us (including Lobster and girlfriend).

Maybe that's why hurricanes do so much damage these days.

---

¹I really need to come up with a nickname for her....

Energy gloom

I saw several stations on the way home with bagged-up pumps yesterday. The BP near the office, that had been out for two days, finally got a shipment in though. Around home, the gas stations have nothing but regular, and now at least some of them put a 20 gallon limit on purchases (“during this temporary energy crisis” says the sign). I'm getting the impression that supplies are really tight at the moment, and it wouldn't take much to create out-and-out shortages.

As if gas(oline) was our only problem. Natural gas production got hosed up big-time by Katrina too. Economist/blogger Jerome a Paris wrote, “Now that [natural] gas costs 3-4 times more, power prices are set to increase by 50-100%.”

Got wood?

Morning runaround

The lawn mower is finally fixed. No sooner had I put the blade on, Daughter Dearest mowed out back until the replacement bolt I put on the handle came off & got lost. I went by the lawn mower place (among other things) and the guy let me take a couple of the bolts with big plastic wingnuts (lets you fold up the handle for transportation or storage). Other things we did on the trip this morning:

• ate at Waffle House


• got groceries (I put some ice in a cooler, which helped keep the milk & ice cream cold coming back)


• complained to the cellphone peeps about my phone's camera being out of focus (they gave me a number for a warranty exchange, yay)


• swung by the library to pick up a loaner (Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright)


• gassed up the minivan — more on that in another post

Now that's how you combine your trips!

Here they come

I'd forgotten that schools have a pretty good rumor mill. The kids are telling us that a largeish church is taking in either 100 or 150 families, just that one church. They've heard that something like 700 kids will be signing up for school soon. Seeing as the system currently has about 2000 kids, that's going to be a pretty big influx. I presume the actual number will be somewhat less, but if they can do it without problems, bring 'em on.

Now we're hearing the death tool in New Orleans may not be as horrendous as we thought. Good, let's clear out some space and make room for them, then.

Funeral for a friend

It’s been said that nothing travels faster than bad news, but the cosmic rule that makes me the last to know something takes precedence even over the speed of bad news. Wife called me this afternoon: a kid that used to go to our church got himself killed in a car wreck a couple of nights ago. Not even a year older than The Boy, and *poof* he's gone. Ran wide in a curb and hit another car, according to the papers.

I told The Boy that this was exactly the reason we worry about him. He laughed.

The stuff I have to document...

One of the products I write about at work has a command-line interface (CLI) used for debugging and troubleshooting. Customers got wind of it, requested documentation, and that’s usually where I get involved.

One particular (or should I say peculiar) troubleshooting command is “ti_ts” — which starts a troubleshooting routine on some TI chips in the box. I tried to get them to change the name, to no avail. So on this development cycle, they added a “codesperms” command (which translates to “active codes per minislot’). I have a pretty good idea what the next oddly-named command will be, but don’t want to give them ideas just in case one of them stumbles across this blog....

Brevity

This is what happens when you try to be a little too concise with your writing:



On the other hand, the shoe fits....

Sign of the Times

“No Fuel”


I noticed the place where I usually get gas had run dry overnight, while I was on the way in this morning. I gassed up last night there, and they only had regular, so it wasn't a complete surprise. But I saw several stations with bags on their pump handles on the way home this evening.

Given the situation along the coast, gas being hard to find is nothing to complain about. Just sayin’.

More FrameMaker 7.2 Leakage

A post on the FrameUsers mailing list (thanks Thomas!) suggests doing a Google search on “FrameMaker new multiple undo” and then reading the cached page from Adobe UK (the first link when I tried it). Doing this turns up some more new features:

• multiple undo (one of those long-standing malfeatures I griped about yesterday)


• some support for XML Schema (probably conversion to EDD)


• support for native Photoshop (PSD) files

A sidebar had links for Solaris and Microsoft updates, suggesting that MacOS users are still left out. Figures.

The Boy: Good News, Bad News

The Boy grabbed Stephen King's Dreamcatcher from the school library last week. He's been at it pretty heavily, taking it to work with him and reading it on breaks & waiting for me to pick him up. It's good to see him that interested in reading; it has to lead to improving his spelling skills.

That was the good news. The bad news I expected: he's once again gotten difficult to get up for school.

Homebrew, glorious homebrew

I opened the first bottle of Proud Mary — a stout with some fresh rosemary boiled in. I've achieved a personal best with this one; there's no edge to it. Just smooth, dark beer.

My only beef: it could use a little more carbonation, in contrast to the last batch that had a bit too much. The difference may have been the first fermentation — last batch went for a week; I left Proud Mary going for two. Next batch, I'll try 10 days and see what happens.

Adobe Leaks FrameMaker 7.2 Info

In which I take a break from chronicling my personal life and talk about work stuff.

Over the Labor Day weekend, various pages on Adobe’s website mentioned the unreleased version 7.2 of FrameMaker, the preferred tool of the trade for most technical writers (who often affectionately call it “Frame”). Adobe (usually one to hold its cards close to the vest) has since revised the pages, although the old ones lived another day in Google’s caches before those too were updated.

But haste often leads to things getting skipped over, and that was the case with a migration guide white paper on Adobe Germany’s site. I grabbed an unrevised copy of the PDF Tuesday afternoon; the good people at Adobe.de have certainly gone home for the day but I expect the white paper to be sanitized first thing tomorrow morning (by about 2 a.m. EDT).

If you download too late, here’s what searching the PDF for “7.2” turned up in the way of new features:

• XSL processing at XML import and export (alongside existing read/write rules) — this is a feature I’ve wished for, but (see below) probably won’t get.


• Conversion tables, which add structure to unstructured files, can create a “first draft” EDD (a combination of DTD and style sheet).


• Conversion tables also support a “root element” to be applied to the converted document.

All this is structure-related, which doesn’t do you much good if you aren’t interested in moving to structured Frame. I’m sure that there will be the usual bug replacements (i.e. removing some known bugs and introducing new bugs) as well.

A group of vendors and trainers have been constantly flogging their “FrameMaker Chautauqua” conference on various mailing lists where FrameMaker is either the main or a common topic. The conference includes presentations by Adobe and will be held in early November, so I expect that Adobe will officially announce version 7.2 either at the conference or shortly before. If I’m right, it’s safe to assume that 7.2 is in beta testing right now.

FrameMaker has languished in a near-limbo pretty much since Adobe bought up Frame Technologies some years back. Frame has benefitted from minor updates from time to time, but long-standing bugs and malfeatures have persisted. That, and an abortive foray into porting the Unix version to Linux, have lead many to believe that Adobe is less than enthusiastic about supporting the program. The final straw for some of us was in January 2004, when Adobe dropped support for MacOS citing lack of sales (largely brought on by Adobe’s reluctance to modernize the MacOS version to run natively on MacOS X, leaving FrameMaker one of the last reasons to ever use the “Classic” environment).

Pretty much all summer, the “Chautauqua” people have been hyping Adobe’s presence at their upcoming conference, promising Frame users that they won’t be disappointed by what Adobe has to say about Frame’s life expectancy. Unfortunately, there’s no word on re-introducing MacOS support, preferably for MacOS X. That’s a show-stopper for me and many others: if the rest of the tool chain works well, why change the underlying platform if one tool is no longer supported?

Personally, even if Adobe repents of Windows-centricity, I’m not convinced that page-oriented WYSIWYG tools like Frame are the way forward for technical writing — in a world where our final output is more likely to be PDF and HTML than paper, it doesn’t make much sense to work on the electronic equivalent of a printed page. It makes more sense nowadays to work with markup, either directly (ooo, icky tags, say my less-technical brethren and sistren) or indirectly through an interface that provides formatting hints but no fixed margins or other page-centric details. LyX is a good example of the latter kind of program.

In the end, I expect little or no surprises come November. I’m certainly not going to ask my boss for $695 + hotel to attend a conference for a tool I’m currently planning to abandon, even if the conference is close enough to drive to.

Slow progress

Current music: di.fm EuroDance
I haven't addressed the pile of logs that need splitting in some time now. I started whacking at them a little bit today, but decided instead to pick up some sticks in the back; it's about at the point now where I can start weed-whacking without getting the string tangled in a fallen branch. I also need to address the front of the place, on the other side of the driveway, where we had the timber people clear the pines. Picking up the sticks, tilling or plowing the ground to smooth it out, and planting grass seed are things that remain to be done; later this month is the best time to do it.

We got a new lawn mower blade today and I put it on. The boys are now out of excuses to mow the lawn. (I'm sure they'll find some new ones though.)

I helped Lobster change the oil in his truck today... meaning I did most of the work while he watched. Rangers mount the oil filter vertically, leaving very little room for a strap wrench (I told Lobster to get a cap wrench next time he went to the parts place). That sucker was tight. But eventually we succeeded, just in time to get him off to KFC. Then I put my Civic up on ramps and changed the oil in it too. But I'm kind of surprised that Lobster's dad never showed him what to do — he works for one of the pipeline companies (yeah, one that got clobbered by Katrina) and has weird hours, so maybe that's the reason. Or maybe he makes enough $$$ that he just has it done.

Chicken house duty for a couple of hours today as well. Hope everyone else's Labor Day weekend is work-free and fun....

What do you want out of life?

Perhaps the best way to get what you want from life is to know what you want from life in the first place. As I cruise toward what I hope is the mid-point of my life, I think I know what I want of life and (being a guy) it's a fairly short & simple list:

• A place to stay


• A few toys


• “Whoopie” a couple of times a week


• Weekends mostly available for rest and/or recreation

Beyond that, a quiet, modest life with a quiet, modest retirement would pretty much wrap it up.

I'm halfway there: I have a place to stay (FAR Manor) and lots of toys. The rest is a faraway dream. I haven't had nearly enough to drink to willingly expand much beyond that. I'm interested in hearing what other people want though, and how far along they are to getting it.

We're on our own... aren't we?

Given the lackadaisical initial response to the New Orleans flooding, one has to wonder what would happen if we had a nationwide disaster, like the Spanish Flu pandemic, that affected more than a “mere” million people in a few hundred square miles of coastal territory. Given the reports we've seen this week, we can pretty much assume we'll be on our own. “Our” government has dumped too many resources on, and given too much attention to, a war we didn't have to fight to worry about details like saving lives at home. You know it's serious when reporters tee off on a Senator, telling her he saw rats eating a corpse on TV.

In the middle of all this, Daughter Dearest asked me if we could get a picture of the night sky. I cranked the aperature wide open, put the shutter on its max of 15 seconds, and took a few shots. She was able to use iPhoto's one-click Enhance to get something worth keeping:



(The thumbnail doesn't do it justice, click it to get the full-size picture.)

Looking up at all those stars, some of which we know have planets, you can't help but think that there's someone out there, someone who maybe has figured 'most everything out. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, because the alternative is almost too terrible to give much thought: that we're alone in the universe, stuck on a planet run by the worst of us.

The mayor of New Orleans is right: God is watching. He knows why it took so long to get aid rolling in. I cannot curse, I cannot condemn, for that is not my place. Perhaps feeling empty like I do is better in that respect.

70s flashback

45 cents my foot... more like 55 cents. My cellphone camera is somewhat not so very good at distance shots; that's $3.12 for regular on the sign. People are lining up to buy it, too: the Shell station across the highway had $3.49 up. The BP stations were $2.79 everywhere on my run home — I don't know how they're doing it. But a 70 cent/gallon spread isn't tenable; things will level out.

The long lines and frayed nerves remind me of the 70s shortages, not long before I was old enough to drive. There's already rumors of shortages, gas stations closing down. It will be a good two weeks, minimum, before the refineries and pipelines get sorted out. If stations are closing now, we're in trouble. Thank God I can work at home.

Yeesh

Current music: Kate Ryan - Scream for More (Club Dub)
We all gathered 'round and ate supper last night, everyone but Lobster — something that doesn't happen much what with various people working and so forth. The Boy's girlfriend is still with us; we're trying to find her a place to stay and coming up short (but we'll get there!!!). We were talking, and the girlfriend was saying something, and it struck me: this could actually be my future daughter-in-law. The Boy is telling me they want to get married after he graduates from school “this year” (I don't think the graduation part will happen, but that's my pessimistic side).

Quite frankly, I'm not ready to have those kind of thoughts yet, but I probably don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Fatherhood itself was something thrust on me before I felt ready, the gift of a birth control failure. It's not the girl* herself; I doubt I would feel much different if she was a genius, or rich (she's very very much neither). I'm just not ready to process this kind of input. I'm also not ready to be thinking about grandchildren... sure, I'll be 50 in a few years, maybe I can think about it then.

---

*She's 20, but the important part (mental) is closer to 16. So I use the term “girl” here in its strict sense, to indicate an immature female human.

When drains rebel

The perfect storm: plenty of rain, running the dishwasher & clothes washer, and a toilet with a stuck-open flapper. The bathroom with the stuck toilet started taking on water last night after my last post; fortunately, there were plenty of dirty clothes and used towels (and an area rug) to soak up most of it before I realized what was happening. Walking in the bathroom & getting my feet wet was how I figured it out.

A night of rest and not so much rain seems to have settled things down for now. But I guess we need to check the drain field and maybe pump the septic tank.

Rain coming down, gas going up

FAR Manor is far enough from Katrina that we're only getting a little taste of it. Having had to drive home through nearly blinding rain this evening, without wind to complicate matters further, I don't envy anyone closer in. I drove through a tornado warning area, and I saw everything but rotation at one point. The intersection where I usually get off the four-lane was getting lots of lightning down the way, so I went up and around.

During a lull in the action, I poured the water out of the bottom of my potted basil and dragged all the herbs in pots (and flowers in hanging baskets) into the garage. I think one of the sage plants (in the ground) is soggy toast, looking at it, but maybe it'll perk up. I think we already got the two inches of rain predicted for the area, and we have another day to go. Yuck! Then we went into town and filled gas tanks and containers... one of the attendants told the wife that they're going to jump the price from $2.63 to $3.08 tonight! Katrina has hosed up a bunch of production down along the Gulf, so we may actually see some genuine shortages before too long. I took The Barge today and gassed it up where it was $2.47, and we got a 10 cent discount, which made a pretty big difference compared to around here (especially tomorrow). Turns out The Barge gets close to 25mpg with fresh oil and careful highway driving, maybe even a little better than the minivan (big shock). But I tell ya, Dominic Tocci nails it.

Plan B is in action. I'm working at home tomorrow, maybe Wednesday if things don't go haywire, and I have the motorcycle if I need to go anywhere. Maybe things will recover before we have to buy much gas again. (Yeah right.)

Familyyyyyyyy Feuuuuuuuuud

So Big V asks to come over today and talk to The Boy and his girlfriend. Fine, we say, just no raised voices. So she comes by with itemized invoices for each of them, listing how much they owe her: which came to about twice what she said they owed her on Thursday (anything Big V says is usually forgotten, at least by her, within 24 hours). I sit quietly, mostly, and listen to her harangue them for a while, raising her voice bit by bit, until her tone got this “I'm the queen of the farking universe, you owe me” edge that I've heard from the girlfriend's crazy mom.

At that point, I had enough of her yelling at them and told her so. She rounds on me with some crap about how I must want them to be freeloaders. Baaaaaaaaaaad move. This female is a professional leech, hasn't paid squat on a house they “paid” to move onto the property, has stuck her parents with co-signed loans, etc.

I probably shouldn't have said anything, but at that point I no longer cared. “I wouldn't be calling anyone else a freeloader if I were you,” I said.

“What's that supposed to mean?” in this self-righteous tone that just about anyone gets when they're called on something like this. I ran through the stuff above, and it was go time. I was informed how they mow the parents' lawn twice a month to pay for the house, and blah blah blah, and then she called The Boy a bastard. Now it's really go time, as the wife shot to her feet and Big V beat a hasty retreat out the door. And went running straight to her mother with the boo-hoo-everybody's-so-mean-to-me song.

About five minutes later, I get a phone call from the mother-in-law, wanting to know if I'd accused Big V of being a freeloader. I repeated the conversation best as I could, and she goes, “well, there's more than one kind of freeloading, so don't call someone else a freeloader when you're doing it too.” That basically went right over my head, but I didn't have time to process it since she went on, twisting what I'd said. I called her on that, and refused to back down. She finally said, “well, let's just say this is in the past” and we said toodles.

This was when I finally told the wife something I've felt for a long time now: Before God, I wish we didn't live here. I mentioned to her off-hand that the mom-unit said we were freeloading too, and that (to my surprise) was like arming a nuke. I repeated that part of the call, and Wife-o-licious was immediately spoiling for a fight. She's the confrontational one at FAR Manor, her & The Boy at least, and I think she was irritated at herself, sitting on the sidelines while an amateur (me) took the floor before.

We piled into the minivan and drove down to her mom's. Big V was still there, all pitiful and blah-de-blah. Wife totally ignored her, she had a bigger fish to fry. Turns out we haven't paid for the minivan and “my” car. So I think we'll be taking the car back down there & I'll probably cash in some stock to pay for the van. After that, I have no clue: if the wife stops helping in the chicken houses (and I've provided plenty of free electrical and plumbing work there, but mentioning that would have started a big tedious tit-for-tat, so I didn't say anything), it's pretty much over for their farm.

So this would be the ultimate vengeance: sell FAR Manor and move closer to where I work. Their freak-out over the property being up for sale is why we ended up buying it; they wanted that 10 acres “back in the family.” The 10 acres would be gone-zo once again, and we'd have a much-needed distance between us and the in-laws.

Now I'm going to do the church bulletin, then pour myself a generous helping of Barbarossa spiced rum. Wife said she didn't want her family driving me to drink; I said “too late.”

The Kiss

Pucker up!

My Haiku Corner is open

Current music: Groove Salad
I guess I could “blame” my online friend White Trash Poet for this. Like WTP, I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger. Most of it was, you know, the kind of stuff that rhymes — with a little free verse and a fair amount of haiku-style poems.

We were introduced to haiku in 7th grade, in one of our English classes. I took to the form right away and started cranking out stuff. Our teachers didn't say boo about kigo, a keyword or phrase indicating season that is a traditional part of haiku, and so I happily and ignorantly cranked away. A multi-stanza haiku (which could loosely be called a renga, I suppose) I wrote at that time, a typical schoolboy's lament, was published in the student paper.

Some time in high school, I put poetry aside for other kinds of writing and non-writing activities. Since then, I might jot down a spontaneous rhyme, but what little I wrote could be classified as senryu (comic haiku). I think what attracts me to the form is the challenge of expressing a thought in 17 syllables (or less, technically), something I can hold in my head and compose without rushing to find pencil and paper. I read a few on-line discussions about haiku, and found a couple of misconceptions confusing references to weather or nature with kigo — these are often a subset of kigo, but (for example) “rain” can occur in multiple seasons in most places. And yet, that told me that there was something more to haiku than a five-seven-five syllable pattern, and I needed to find out what it was.

Back to today. Reading WTP's blog must have reamed out a couple of channels that had been clogged, because earlier this week the haiku started flowing out. The last two nights, I've had to get out of bed and write down haiku that came to mind before my Muse (capricious b**ch that she is) would let me sleep. Rather than to clutter my diary here with who knows how many haiku and senryu, I decided to open a new blog. Maintaining two blogs ought to be interesting.

Full house

The Boy came back last night. The half-empty nest has gone back to being a little crowded.

Events precipitating his return were just a little more dramatic than I'd expected. Big V has been checking his grades online, and he's doing OK in all his classes except for one. She got all huffy, made him sit down and do the homework for that class, with her breathing down his neck. Unfortunately, there wasn't that much to do for that class that evening, so he wrapped up before Big V got bored and walked away. She told him he needed to do more, he said that was all there is, so she decided to finish tossing his girlfriend out of the house.

He walked out with the girlfriend, and Big V grabbed him and pulled him back into the house. (How she did that is a question to answer... despite her moniker here, she isn't that big — and he is.) His temper, not the most amiable under normal circumstances, got away from him (again) and he punched a hole in an interior wall.

All this is going down while I'm on my way home from work, held up because I have to make a PDF of a manual before I could leave and this sucker has lots of bitmap graphics (meaning it takes over a half hour to build). After a couple of botched attempts and clearing some old files off the hard drive, I email the PDF to Mr. Anxiety Attack and get on my way. I'm supposed to meet the wife and Daughter Dearest at a local Mexican joint, but the wife was gone before I could get there (without telling anyone what was up, and forgetting to leave $$$ to pay for the chow).

So we had the four of us that make up the core family, plus Lobster, plus The Boy's girlfriend. She stayed with us last night, and probably will again tonight, but she knows she can't stay much longer than that. As big as FAR Manor is, it's kind of crowded for six adult-size people. So between trying to blast a PDF out at the last minute, and all the other stuff that was going on, I got kind of stressed out last night. Wife noticed it, and said, “I don't want you getting sick.”

“I doubt I will,” I said. “If I was going to get sick from stress, it would have been when we bought the house.”

“You did, don't you remember?” said she. “You got the shingles two weeks afterwards.”

Oh. Then she gave me a hard time when I wanted to get some milk to settle myself down and sleep. She probably thought I was going to head for the rum bottle. Nope... that's tonight!

But The Boy seems amenable, at least at the moment, to try counseling. We need to get to the bottom of what it is that's giving him a short fuse on a nuke.

Lobster's back

Something must have really went BOOM with Lobster. He and his dad got into a gen-yoo-wine fight, and Lobster packed up and came back here. I have no clue at the moment what happened, and I don't think I'll be blogging about it when I do find out.

Man. Must be something in the water. All the outrageous stuff going on lately...

Outrage #1: Robertson's Fatwa

So now Ayatollah Pat Robertson has apologized for his remarks about having President Hugo Chavez assassinated. Good. He really should get up on TV and do a Jimmy Swaggart “I have sinned” routine, but we all know that ain't gonna happen.

The Bush administration passed up an opportunity to prove that we've not become Iran with a cross instead of a crescent, opting to mumble something about “private citizen” instead. Yeah. I could buy that if it were just some backwoods Talibaptist blathering to his little congregation. But this “private citizen” happens to have a major TV network and the ear of the entire White House and about half of Congress, any time he wants it. At some point you cease to be a private citizen, elected or not.

An attempt to pretend he didn't mean “assassinate” apparently didn't work. I have a feeling he was getting calls and emails from people saying “take me off your lists” and had to backpedal a little farther to salvage his empire.

Thanks, Pat, for making all Christians look bad. On the other hand, you may have jumped the shark here, like Oral Roberts with his “send me money or God will kill me” shtick and the whole Jim Bakker/Jimmy Swaggart thing, and this is the beginning of your long slide into obscurity. This Christian certainly hopes so. “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, take up your cross, and follow Me,” is what the Son of God told the rich man. Think about it, Pat.

Outrage #2: Utah Rave

Current Music: DJ Lithium

You kann haff zee paperz, und zee paperz kann be in ordaire, und ve vill bust you anyvay. Ja wohl!

OK, if you suspect that someone in a crowd of 2,000 people is doing drugs (and in a crowd that size, you can bet on it), you bust those people. It doesn't warrant shutting down an entire concert. I'll bet you could go to any twanger concert and you'll find some attendees lighting up — but somehow the Gestapo doesn't see fit to point guns at people, kick women, and spray tear gas indiscriminately at a Travis Tritt concert. Oh yeah, kickers tend to be armed; they might shoot back.

Well, have a look at my “Current Music” links down through my earlier posts. Spray me with tear gas and call me a criminal: this mid-40s white churchgoing male likes electronic music, and has since Kraftwerk released Autobahn in 1975. I like the trippy ambient stuff, I like the hard-thumpin' dance numbers, and 'most everything in between. Next rave within driving distance of FAR Manor, I'm going just to make a statement.

At least there's still some vestige of the America that used to be, the one where people had freedom to peaceably assemble; the thugs were sufficiently embarrassed to try confiscating video cameras that caught them in the act. Fortunately, some of the video escaped. I'm generally an easy-going, forgiving type of person... but I hope the people in charge of this raid end up with new careers outside of law enforcement: poultry plant workers or garbage sorters would be too good for them. Making license plates, now there's a suitable job for 'em.

A Boy and his computer

Current Music: BeatBlender
After a rather unpleasant episode Friday, The Boy and his aunt (whom we shall call “Big V” here on the blog) sort of patched things up between them. They have made a pact to help each other track their glucose levels (she's Type II, he's Type I), and today he had his act sufficiently together that he was pretty civil for a change (I've noticed he really gets whacked out when his glucose goes about 220 or so). So Friday, he was probably riding a serious sugar jag; he wrote this rambling letter about how much he hates us for trying to separate him & his girlfriend (we aren't trying, but would be overjoyed if it happened) and made a not-so-veiled threat to kill himself if he succeeded. That was enough to get me to call the local mental health agency and talk to a counselor there. We agreed that he needed to get in there, although there just wasn't any way to force him to go.

So today, he asked me to call him. Turns out he wanted to use the iMac that was still in his old bedroom to write papers and so forth. I didn't have any problem with that — when you need a computer you need a computer — so I tossed it and a smallish desk in the van and drove it down to Big V's place.

The interesting part was when I asked him what his paper was about. “Psychology,” he said. “I have to interview a psychologist.” Welllll, I was right there with a name and contact info on that one. On the way out, Big V stopped me and told me she was booting the girlfriend tomorrow because she was giving The Boy cigarettes. Perhaps our prayers are being answered!

Sports vs. arts

Current music: Aura - Orbit Revival
Daughter Dearest had a pool party today, put on by her chorus teacher. Parents were invited too, so I got a little more sun than I should have without slobbering on sunscreen (another symptom of oncoming age; I used to never burn). She's in the Honors Chorus after a brief & successful audition.

As Arlo Guthrie said, “I told you that to tell you this.” I only find out after she starts school that last year, this chorus won a nationwide tournament in their division last year. Sheesh. If it had been any kind of sport, all the way down to middle school badminton, there would have been billboards at every road on the county line. If it's art, it gets in the papers and the school puts it up on their sign, but where's the community pride? Where are the billboards? Even a little sign as you enter the county?

Then we wonder why nobody seems to think funding the arts is any big deal.

The Aviator

My father-in-law bought a DVD of “The Aviator” and we gave it a watch last weekend.

I'll admit having no clue what the movie was about going in — and I was impressed how they told the story of Howard Hughes's early life as a movie maker and aircraft manufacturer, ending with his worsening mental condition. I was even more impressed when I realized that was Leonardo freeking di Caprio in the lead role! Sonuvagun, that guy actually can act!

The next morning, I starting poking around on Wikipedia, starting with the Howard Hughes entry. Turns out that the movie was pretty much accurate. I like it when movies stick to the script, but you could argue that Howard's life was sufficiently colorful to not require much tarting-up.

If you haven't seen it, it's worth renting.

Mint in bloom

It's been mostly a pretty good year for the herb garden, what with all the rain. I'm partly color-blind, so I'm not sure what to call this color; to me it looks like a light blue but some might call it purple. What... ever. :) Just click it to get a bigger image.

I used to have a 35mm Fujica camera way back when; it got stolen in a burglary while the wife was pregnant with The Boy. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy using a macro mode to get up close on things, especially flowers. It's like a secret world.

Computer-related items

Current music: BassDrive

A few more or less related news items and personal notes about today's and tomorrow's computers....

Well, that didn't take long: hackers got the development version of OSX86 running on standard PCs. Personally, I don't see much to get excited about. I (erroneously) expected Mac sales to crater in response to the announcement that Apple is moving to Intel CPUs over the next two years; it hasn't happened yet. My guess that the Intel-based Macs will use a 64-bit CPU and the OS won't run on the current (32-bit) Pentiums. Given I'm 0-1 on this topic so far, though, take that with a grain of salt. If the plan is to use Pentiums for the newer Macs, I doubt that Apple will put that much effort into locking it down — they'll do enough to make it non-trivial, and those people who buy OSX86 and install it on their white boxes will be on their own, support-wise. The way I see it, if Apple sells ten times more OSX86 boxes than their current Mac sales figures, they'll break even on sales and win big on margins.

On my own iBook, I've switched back to Apple's Safari browser. It's tons faster than what I was using (Camino) and it's built-in RSS aggregator works very well. If you were using Safari to read Tales from FAR Manor, you would see a little “RSS” button in the address bar. Click on that, and you'd get the RSS feed for my blog. You can bookmark the RSS feed and it will count the number of unread posts you have in that directory. It's really nice. Dashboard and Automator are everything they're cracked up to be as well. I'm using an older version of OSX (10.2.8) at work, and I already miss having these functions.

Speaking of iBooks, you had to have heard about the stampede in Richmond VA. Wazoo! I think I'd have eBay'ed the whole shebang myself; they could have easily raised $300,000 that way. But you can't expect intelligent thought from a school system that dumps computers that work and replace them with Smelly Dells. Unfortunately, when you use low-bidder purchasing, you get what you pay for.

I sure hope that school district isn't running W2K on their new computers. The Zotob worm hosed up bigger and much better-funded entities than a school district. Another report said ABC News had to use typewriters to get the news out. Wow... I'm surprised they even had any typewriters available, let alone enough to go around.

I'm being a good boy and not blogging from work. More tomorrow, if time allows. The Evil Twins are visiting, but fortunately they're already in bed. I should be in my bed as well. 'Night!

I fought the lawn...

...and the lawn won.

Never had a stump do that to a lawn mower blade before.

Wife is taking it to an old farmer down the road a ways; if he has an anvil, he can heat up the blade & pound it straight. Otherwise, we can always get a new blade.

Cuddling up with Tiger

Current music: Groove Salad

They (who's they? You know, “them”!) say to never upgrade your computer when you have a deadline. Hey, I use Macs, I've never gotten bit before... until last night.

A while back, I wrote about cashing in some stock options. The check finally arrived, and after paying some bills there was about $250 left for “discretionary” items. Our Macs have been languishing on Jaguar (OSX 10.2) for some time now, more and more software requires something later nowadays, and frankly it's been chafing me. So we made a trip down to the mall to get a Tiger (OSX 10.4) “family pack” (5 licenses for less than 2 single licenses) and I got around to installing it yesterday. I figured I'd have it together in plenty of time to finish the church bulletin.

WRONG! Actually, it turned out that the only apps that flaked out were those I use to do the church bulletin: Vim, groff, and X11 (I use a PostScript viewer to check things before printing). I ended up switching over to NeoOffice and finishing up about 1:30 a.m.

It took a little poking and prodding, but all is well with my iBook again. I had to load X11 and Xcode (the development system) from the software DVD, download a Tiger-specific version of Vim, and recompile groff. I'm slowly poking at the new features, starting with Automater. Dashboard looks really nice too.

Vacation's pretty much over... I'll probably be back to updating two or three times a week after today.

Farewell, Lobster... for now

The nest got a little emptier today. Lobster, for primarily economic reasons, has decided to move back home and try to get along with his mom.

We were (mostly, I was) talking about how stupid little things can blow up into huge arguments and how he can recognize and deflect those things. He & his mom have gotten into it pretty heavily a few times. SWMBO unwittingly provided a perfect example; coming in from the chicken houses, she walked by the room and sniped, “why hasn't anyone put away the peaches I sliced!?” I got up & took care of the three slices still on the table, then came back.

I explained to Lobster that I could have easily (and justifiably) responded, “if it's that important, why didn't you put them away?” and then it would have been go time. But would it have been worth it for three lousy peach slices? (I'm not talking about three sliced peaches, but three slices of peach.)

“It looked like you're getting pushed around,” he said. I pointed out that you don't have to look at it that way — I'm just not wasting time arguing over stupid little stuff like less than one peach. I'll save my breath for more important stuff.

It remains to be seen whether he can hold his temper when the time comes. If not... well, he'll be back.

She quit smoking — give her a hand!

Current Music: Music One
RenaRF, one of my C&J pals, has put down the cigarettes and is sharing the experience with the rest of us. Good on ya, Rena!

Peter Jennings's losing battle with lung cancer is only the most visible example of the toll that smoking takes on our friends, loved ones, and even our icons. My uncle is very much on my mind as I type tonight; he quit a couple of years ago (almost to this day) after being diagnosed with an arterial embolism. Years of hard living, heavy smoking and drinking, came with a price: his body can't even take the stress of surgery needed to repair the embolism, and he quit too late — the lung cancer was already lurking and came up earlier this year.

Being a true adult, he has accepted the situation (yep, he's still hanging on). He knows he's (his words) a “walking time bomb” and when the embolism goes, he won't last more than a few minutes. He's enjoying whatever time God has chosen to give him, and frankly he has lasted a lot longer than I expected. This is a good thing for all of us, especially him.

Losing him is going to be hard on him and my family. He's my mom's brother, and one of my dad's best buddies (my parents are long divorced but get along better now than they did when they were married). He got my brother & me summer jobs one year when he was working as a cook on offshore drilling platforms. The worst part is, if he had quit long ago (or better yet, never started), the embolism would have either never formed or at worst would have been operable.

I hope, when she is ready to write about it, that Rena will be able to tell us what motivated her to suck that first butt at age 18. The Boy has also picked up this habit, and hasn't ever really been able to describe his own motivations besides a “peer pressure” cop-out — he's always had plenty of friends and co-workers who never smoked, and has seen what it's done to his great-uncle even if he wouldn't know Peter Jennings if the man rose from the dead and smacked him upside the head with a TelePrompTer™. Teenagers often have self-destructive tendencies; Lord knows I took more chances than I should have even if I was fairly average in that respect. Maybe it's one of those “won't happen to me” things.

School's in. I hate school buses.

Mid-August, and school has already started. I'm obviously not the only person who thinks this is ridiculous: several states are passing laws mandating school start on a particular date — it varies from state to state, but is fairly close to Labor Day. Good idea. I hope it catches on here too. It's not like they're holding more school; they're just building a ton of slop into the schedule now. What's the point?

On the way back from our weekend in North Carolina, I saw a road sign on a four-lane highway: SLOW MOVING SCHOOL BUSES USE THIS ROAD. I swear, my first thought was, “you mean there's some other kind?” Look, I understand the need for buses. Not everyone can drive their kid both ways. With gas prices going through the roof, Daughter Dearest is going to be riding home a lot more often (the school is only a block off my commute route, so dropping her off in the morning is no problem). She can socialize, nap, or do homework on the way home to pass the time like I did.

The problem is how the buses clog traffic. Some drivers are courteous enough to pull off at a good place and let all the backed-up commuters get by... but some seem to revel in holding up as many people as they can. Kind of like the geezers who whip out in front of oncoming traffic then crawl along at 15mph under the speed limit. There ought to be a law, where bus drivers have to let traffic go by when they have 8 or more cars backed up behind them.

OK, rant off.

Chicken House Hell: Your #1 Fan

Warning: Any post on this blog with “Chicken House Hell” in the title is not for the squeamish. You have been warned.

My in-laws, not a mile from here, have four poultry houses. One of the nice things about having a mostly anonymous blog is that I can write about family stuff and nobody is the wiser. Anyway, the chicken houses have unfortunately come to stand for much of what I don't like about life at FAR Manor. I believe that Hell is much like a chicken house: hot, filthy, crowded, noisy. Of my so-called “vacation” so far, 3 out of 4 days have involved at least some time in the chicken houses.

Long ago, I had a personal website (that probably would have been a blog if there were blogs back then) where I kept a series of “Chicken House Hell” stories. Like this one, they were rather graphic and distasteful — but you need to remember, these are the lowlights rather than everyday occurrences, from the perspective of one totally jaded by anything that happens in there. Today was a perfect example.

This time of year, it's rather important to keep the houses cool so the chickens don't overheat. To that end, each house has roughly 25 fans, about 4 feet across and turned by 1HP electric motors. The fans that aren't direct-drive have a fan belt, which require occasional maintenance and replacement to keep them turning. Some of the other natural shocks (literally) that fans are heir to include cut electrical cords and broken thermostats. All of the above were true today — and anything I want to get done, vacation or no, immediately goes by the wayside when the chicken houses need attention.

Preparing to splice a cord that got cut, I had to walk out to the Barge and get some tools and supplies (i.e. a knife, a stripper, electrical tape and wire nuts). Walking along the wall, I heard behind me a BANGsqueeeeeee — not a sound I'd ever heard before. Whirling around to see what happened, I rather wished I hadn't: a chicken had jumped into the fan directly behind me, jamming it. I jumped over there and quickly unplugged it to prevent the motor from burning up. The chicken was at the 10-o'clock position, except for some guts on the bottom of the fan housing and a wing on the floor. I suspect it was killed instantly... at least it didn't suffer.

But I did. I gave the fan a turn, and the chicken dropped to the floor as Instant Chicken Soup. Some guts were still in the path of the fan, so I left it to finish the electrical job. Afterwards, I got a bucket and stick, scooped the remains into the bucket, then plugged the fan back in. It started immediately, seemingly none the worse for wear (fortunately).

The news crew as endangered species

Technology and Society
Current music: StaticBeats Chill

It's not happening right away, but it's coming. Auntie Beeb, as usual with clearer sight than corporate media, sees it coming. A perfect storm of advancing technology and ever-tightening corporate news budgets has signed the death sentence for the traditional TV news crew. But like the typical US death sentence, there are years of appeals and delays to go through before the sentence can be carried out.

The London bombing incidents shows there's now a critical mass of mobile video phones and camera phones out there, whose owners are on the spot to cover just about any important event — long before the camera crews can even be alerted.

Mobile phones have turned members of the public into reporters and camera crews — "citizen journalists". The media are hungry for their digital images and eyewitness accounts.

The BBC received 50 pictures from the public within an hour of the first bomb going off on 7 July. By the weekend it had 1,000 images and dozens of video clips sent by e-mail and direct from mobile phones.

By the time the eastern US woke up to the news of the London bombings, the BBC website was already showing video and pictures sent in by average Brits who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Then during an arrest in the aftermath of the failed July 21 bombings, “one woman gave a running commentary as police, through a loudhailer, tried to persuade one of the suspects to give himself up.”

How are traditional news crews going to stay relevant in a time when any incident is already being covered by on-the-spot reporters transmitting raw footage at least, and perhaps polished commentary and interviews?

Extreme Video Enabled

If you live anywhere near a CVS drugstore, you may have noticed their “one time use” digital cameras and camcorders. Their (CVS's) idea is:

1. You buy the camera ($20 for a still, $30 for a camcorder)


2. When it's full, bring it to CVS for “processing”


3. You pay $$$, they give you a CD or DVD with pix or video, they keep the camera

A very clever hacker named Maushammer, of course, has cracked the code (the link goes to his camcorder page) so you can download the video yourself over a USB port and not return the camera. You have to cobble up a cable, but there's a link to instructions & parts are readily available. The camcorder takes video at 320x240 (QVGA resolution, similar to VHS) using the Xvid video codec and mono MPEG audio. The resolution is identical to the video my digital camera can produce, except that...

I expect this to trigger a new sub-genre of home video that I call “Extreme Video” — a $30 digital camcorder will readily go places that even a low-end DV camcorder (at 10 times the price) often won't: on the ramps at a skate park, bungee jumping, motorcycling, and all sorts of other fun (and potentially painful) activities. I understand a model rocketry club in Texas has already built camera mounts for their larger rockets. If Something Happens... hey, you're only out thirty bucks. Go get another one.

One of the nice features about this camcorder is that it's completely solid state — there are no tapes or disks inside (it uses a Flash disk instead). No tape transport means you could use it to record in very quiet settings without picking up motor noise from the camera itself. Another advantage is that it should be able to stand getting jarred around in an Extreme Video shoot without causing dropouts — as long as the optics don't get misaligned, you should be able to keep shooting.

For more information than you ever wanted to know, unless you're a geek like me, check out the camerahacking forum.

Shiny objects, Boy update, beer, tunes

I didn't get a RAZR yesterday, “just” a V220. Neither the Mrs. nor I were really comfortable spending $200 on a phone; $100 was enough as it is. My primary concern was having a phone that talks to my iBook, and I settled on the V220 instead of the next model up since it has a USB port and I don't need video (the still-camera phone is good enough). I need to get a data cable; leave it to Moto to use a non-standard pinout so we can't use the camera cable that I already have.

The Boy is still at my sister-in-law's. She asked us if we wanted him to come home today; our response was “he has to make that decision.” He & his girlfriend are eating a lot of chow, and they're both going to be paying rent when their checks from the lodge they're working at start coming in. He called last night to talk to the Mom-unit; they managed to stay civil since he was wanting lunch money for school. Daughter Dearest took him $20 this morning. I expect he'll stay in school until he's 18, then quit (he has to do that to keep his driver's license).

I bottled my beer (a stout) last night, after two weeks of fermenting: four 750ml (24 oz.) bottles and 42 regular 12 oz. bottles. I thought it smelled wonderful, although the female family members disagreed. Maybe about three or four weeks from now, it'll be ready to drink.

One of the other things I got at the flea market on Saturday were three CDs from World Wide Message Tribe — they since changed their name to The Tribe, then shut down as a band. That's a shame; their music was high-energy Christian dance, a variety of trance and hip-hop that was nothing like I've heard from musicians around here. Unfortunately, not all Christian music is nearly as fun to listen to.

Look for a brief review of the Left Behind series soon.

Some good stuff

Vacation for a week & a day — woohoo! We spent the weekend at my mom's rented vacation nest in the North Carolina mountains, about 5 hours from FAR Manor. It rained all day today, including most of the way home, but yesterday was pretty nice. We hit a flea market and scored some odds & ends — my particular find was a small whiteboard we can use to for leaving notes to each other or writing down when each vehicle needs its next oil change or something. I'll talk a little about my plans for the upcoming week tomorrow.

I cashed in some stock options earlier in the week, and hit it close enough to the peak that I'm pretty happy. It went up another 3 cents/share after I did the exercise, then slid the rest of the week and lost a whole dollar/share. We'll just be paying off some credit cards with the proceeds; no toys or new cars or anything. But that will free up some money to attack other debts, and killing off a couple of credit cards should increase our credit score a bit.

When The Boy left, he didn't take his GameBoy Advance with him. It's mine now, or at least it's mine for the forseeable future. I'm also getting his phone number, since: 1) I need a new phone; 2) He smashed his phone and isn't getting another; 3) My 2-year term of service is up and his isn't. That adds up to me getting a nice new phone, maybe a RAZR. Oh, I don't care; as long as it talks to my iBook via USB or maybe Bluetooth, and maybe has a camera, I'll be happy.

Book review: American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
(Bear with me, this is the first book review I've written since high school.)

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see?”

There are several ways, I've found, to write a story that people enjoy reading. One is to create characters the readers can identify with; another is to research the absolute heck out of things and create a solid backdrop. American Gods falls in the second category, though you shouldn't take that to mean the characters are cardboard or wooden (it's just hard to identify with gods sometimes). But Gaiman is either an enthusiastic student of ancient pagan beliefs or a fantastic researcher — perhaps both.

The story centers around Shadow Moon (although you never quite hear him called that), a big quiet man. As the story begins, Shadow is counting down the days to the end of three years in prison. He has a wife and a job waiting for him outside, and he wants nothing more than to get home and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But just days before his release, both his wife and future boss are killed in an accident.

Released a few days early, Shadow struggles to get home through a storm, meeting a strange man on the airplane who calls himself “Wednesday.” He knows Shadow's name, offers him a job and refuses to take “no” for an answer. Finally bowing to the inevitable, Shadow sets out on a strange journey that takes him all across America and even “backstage.”

“What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. It's not good growing country for gods.”

To many immigrants, America was truly the Land of Opportunity, where everyone could have a place of their own and live unmolested by nobility. But for their old gods like Odin or Eostre, or mythical creatures like piskies and leprechauns, America is a desert isle where belief fades with the first generation immigrants. Worse, there are new gods to contend with: gods of steel and glass, gods of cathode rays and silicon, gods of intangibles, gods of rail and highway. There's only so much belief to go around, and Wednesday's quest is to rally as many of his fellow old gods as he can to face off against the modern upstarts. And the beliefs and culture heroes of those who came first are still to be contended with.

“You know why dead people only go out at night? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark.”

In the presence of gods and myths, even those who feed on human sacrifice (Old Europe's gods were bloody-minded creatures), sometimes it's hard for the dead to stay dead. But in what we like to think of as the “real” world, sometimes the living do not truly live. Shadow's wife Laura is somewhat more than a memory, and sometimes Shadow seems to just go through the motions of living. But in the end, as Wednesday says, misquoting Julian of Norwich, “All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well.”*

---

*The actual quote is “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Not even pagan gods are infallible.

Odds and ends

Stuff I wanted to share, but don't have time to turn into full individual entries....

Somewhere in Iraq, the locals have made a U.S. soldier a sheik. The moral of the story: you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I know Iraq is a stressful place, especially around Baghdad; the now-defunct blog This Is Your War depicted a team of soldiers surviving IEDs and walking an emotional knife edge. But it seems like those soldiers who have gotten out and mingled with people, talking (and listening) have had a much easier time of it.

The Evil Weed: it's not just for glaucoma anymore. Scientists at Bath University in the UK have found cannibis may help with Irritable Bowel Disease (aka Crohn’s). Too bad it'll never catch on; the blue-noses would rather have people suffering than risk the possibility of someone feeling too good.

Over the weekend, I literally spent several hours cleaning out a 10 square foot space in the bedroom, next to my dresser. I half-filled a trash bag with stuff that just didn't need to be in my life anymore and created a more compact pile of reading material for the bedside. I also dug out two plastic tubs of socks — some matched, some not — and proceeded to match up about 25 pairs (maybe 1/3 of the singletons). I guess I should attack the top of my dresser next, and maybe take a good look at what's in the bulging drawers.

Priorities

This pretty much says it all.

Feuding Sisters

The wife's younger sister called us yesterday morning: "I'm going to let The Boy and his girlfriend live here — they don't have anywhere else to go." I thought to myself, "seems like we've been here before." But the wife went:

BOOM

At this point, everything they said was raw emotion, and really not transcribable.

The kid came up, supposedly to collect his clothes. But the first words out of his mouth was "Where the hell are my CDs?" The weird thing is, I was sure he collected them last time he came over. Needless to say, this did absolutely nothing to improve the emotional atmosphere. He insisted he didn't have them, and that Lobster had seen them in the minivan before we took it to have the air conditioning looked at. I suggested they could have been stolen from the van, and he gave me a look that said he didn't want to think about that but it was too logical to ignore.

The A/C in the van, by the way, is toast. The insides of the compressor came apart and distributed themselves through the system. $2500 to fix a van that would be worth somewhere between $1000 and $1500 afterwards.

More about rain

I got curious about how much water a storm cloud can hold. Turns out to be a LOT. I decided to go with an inch of rain over a square mile: (5280x12)² cubic inches. That's about 17,378,725.5 gallons! Some of the tropical systems we got in the last month brought a lot more rain than that, and over a much wider area — easily multiple billions of gallons.

Those big dark clouds hold a mind-boggling amount of water.

Dog 1, Squirrel 0

Current music: Audible Experience with Kinetica – Orbital Grooves Radio

This actually happened some time B. B. (Before the Blog), but it's still amusing. It concerns one of our dogs, a highly-energetic Austrian Shepard mix named Buster. I call him Buster T. Butthead. In absolute terms, he's a moron. He's a dog. I repeat myself. But in dog terms, he's been known to display some smarts and even wit at times.

There was the time, for example, when he was lazing in his plastic doghouse when I came out to toss some peelings down into the woods. The back of the doghouse was facing me, so I veered over there and drummed on the roof. He came shooting out with a "What?!? What?!?" look. I laughed and walked on to toss the peelings. I heard a thumping noise, and turned around to find he'd turned the doghouse to face the garage; he had a big doggie grin that as much as said, "You won't catch me like that again!"

We usually keep him tethered to a 40-foot run in a shady area out back, letting him loose on occasion for a few days — until he forgets why he's been tied up and starts destroying the landscaping — then he goes back on the tether. During one of the tethered periods, a squirrel started coming out of the woods to visit him. The squirrel figured out, fairly quickly, that Butthead could only go so far and would stand just outside that line (kind of like in those Foghorn Leghorn cartoons) and chatter at him, just to tease him. Butthead would charge him, getting caught on the tether at the last moment. Then when he wasn't watching, the squirrel would run past him and go up the tree.

So one day, the wife let Butthead loose and watched him. He ran around for a while, then went back down to his doghouse and laid down like he was on the tether. Sure enough, here comes the squirrel. Butthead jumped up like he was on the leash, and the squirrel hopped back to the (supposedly) safe line. He stood up to watch the fun, but this time the dog just... kept... coming. She said the squirrel had about half a second to look surprised before it was All Over. Butthead carried the corpse around front and deposited it.

Since I'm at the office all day, I had no clue this stuff was going on. I didn't know about it until I saw the dead squirrel next to the driveway. That's the only time I've ever heard of a dog plotting to nail a critter.

I thought we had lots of rain here...

Current music: Jazzmusique

This is just amazing.

Officials say that more than 26 inches of rain fell in Mumbai on Tuesday.

One weather official said conditions were particularly bad because the rain had coincided with high tides.

Twenty. Six. Inches. It's pretty serious — at least 200 people dead by drowning or mudslides.

The Guinness World Records doesn't mention the greatest daily rainfall, but it lists the highest monthly total at 366 inches (also in India) — in July 1861.

It's about to rain here, but not 26 inches worth.

ADDENDUM: Our rainfall for July was 10 inches above normal on the 15^th — about an inch short of the record (for here), and the month only half gone. But Mumbai got twice that amount in a day. You can tell I'm still boggled about it.

FAR Manor Food Service

Current music: RaveTrax Radio
Being a little short of cash this week, I had the wife pick up a few frozen dinners last time we went out for groceries (Marie Callendar is a babe! she fixes my lunch), figuring I could grab one on the way out. That worked out yesterday, anyway.

Last night, I'd started a batch of beer (rosemary stout, now fermenting nicely gurgle gurgle) when we get a phone call from the nephew who is just now getting his act together. Seems he was helping out a couple of people, driving them different places (sound familiar? not The Boy this time, anyway) and ran himself out of gas, out of food, pretty much Out. So he calls us, naturally, wanting money. Wife tells him no, but she would bring him some food & put some gas in his car. She wasn't feeling all that great, so I volunteered to go instead. I was at a convenient break point since I'd just finished boiling the rosemary and needed to let the water cool below 165°F before pouring in the mix.

Fortunately, for him and us, he very recently traded in his pickup truck for a car. Payment is the same, insurance is like $280 less, and he said the $25 I gas-carded to fill his tank was less than half what he was used to paying to fill the truck. So he got: my frozen dinners, a box of oatmeal & toaster goodies that I was going to take to work, most of a loaf of wheat bread I made last weekend, and the deli turkey. Of all that, I miss the breakfast stuff most, and it won't cost $4 to replace (I buy store brands).

So while talking to him, I found out why The Boy had been bumped out of the band: I wasn't the only one who had noticed him losing interest in his music after hooking up with his girlfriend. Pity. All that talent, and he's just letting it go to waste.

Beating the Heat

The heat index is reaching 100 or worse around here, and naturally the A/C is broken in my car. And naturally, making payments on FAR Manor means I can't afford to get it fixed. Seeing as the hot weather comes with a pronounced lack of rain, at least for a couple of days, I decided I'd be no worse off (and probably better) riding the motorcycle instead.

Morning was no problem; I wore a long-sleeved shirt (no jacket, which is very rare for me when riding) and was warmer than I expected. Already it was upper 70s and muggy.

The afternoon ride home required a little more preparation. I keep a t-shirt in the lateral cabinet under my desk; I put it over the seat mid-afternoon. With the sun not beating directly on the seat cover, it was no warmer than the air.

On the way out the door, I poured a cup of water in my helmet, sloshed it around, then put it on. What the lining didn't soak up went all over my shirt, exactly where I wanted it. Then I opened the vents and got moving.

Except for a couple of red lights that lasted much longer than needed, I was actually fairly comfortable most of the way home. The air blast cooled my wet chest, the long sleeves kept the sun off my arms, and the face shield kept the hot air blast off my face. The shirt was dry after about 25 miles, but by then I was on the shady part of my ride home and I only needed the wind.

Maybe I can install a swamp cooler in my car.

Meet the new boss

Current Music: Creation Steppin' Radio
With all the other stuff going on around FAR Manor, I haven't really thought much about impending changes at work. I don't plan to go into deep detail about the workplace, partly because they haven't created a blogging policy. I'll have to talk a bit about the industry, though, for you to make any sense of the following. It's the supply-side of the cable (CATV) business; the company I work for makes cable modems, eMTAs (cable modems with telephone lines built in), and CMTSs (what the cable modems and eMTAs talk to at the other end of the cable). I've been writing the manuals for all but one of the products.

There's a lot of noise from analyst-types about the "triple play" in the cable industry -- that is, data (cable modems), telephony (eMTAs), and digital TV. Lately, I've been devoted full time to the latter. We're building a box that can take a bunch of digital video streams, moosh them around in pre-determined ways, and send them down the cable to your home theater or whatever.

Lately, we've been selling so many eMTAs that the management felt it necessary to divide the company along product lines -- eMTAs on this side, all the headend (cable company) stuff on the other. Just as my former boss hired a contractor to take the eMTA load off me, I got moved to the eMTA side.

I'm not complaining (for a change) -- it looks like I'm going to have an honest-to-God budget and the freedom to roll out web and video editions of documentation. I've been griping for about 7 years that we need to put our documentation online; looks like it might finally happen.

It's a bloom! It's a wave! It's... FUNKY CACTUS!

One of the fringe benefits of FAR Manor, that I don't enjoy nearly as often as I ought, is a small outbuilding. It's one of those prebuilt sheds with sheet metal siding that they bring in on a truck and drop off; it's then up to you to add the Comforts of Home™. The original owner, the guy who bought the house, had it brought in and ran a small print shop in there. Thus, it's well lit (six flourescent fixtures, two tubes each) and has 120/240 volt power & an extension for the home phone. I use it for its workbench and sometimes veg out on the love seat I brought in.

Today and tomorrow are set to be the hottest of the year so far, mid-90s, so I finally broke down and went in to put the room air conditioner unit in the window. And here's what the cactus in the next window over was doing:



The light-colored part on top is all new growth. Sheesh, I just gave it a little water two weeks ago, you'd think it wouldn't be all that surprised. :-P

Here's a close-up:



Plants can do some weird things sometimes... and now the mint is blooming, shooting out a small blue cone-shaped flower. I'll post a pic of that when it fills out.

Come and dig my herbs

Current music: di.fm Goa-Psy

Like I've said, it's not a 24/7 suck-a-thon here at FAR Manor. I started a few herbs last year: mint, Greek oregano, rosemary, and sage. The first two went into a flower box that I could bring inside for the winter; the others went into the ground. Turned out there were two sage plants in the little pot, so I separated them and planted them both.

Everything thrived, so I added some more this year: parsley, marjoram, basil, and thyme. Given all the rain we've been having, everything is continuing to thrive. Basil especially seems to like lots of light and lots of water -- if it doesn't rain, I pretty much have to water it every day. I made some pesto with it already (it was GREAT by the way), and it took all of two days for the plant to sprout replacement leaves.

I've included a macro shot of the oregano in bloom. I think it's cool how the buds look like tiny green roses. Actual size is about 2mm across.

Lobster on the Boil

Current music: Transonic - Space After (on Groove Salad)

In all the excitement with The Boy, I neglected to mention that Lobster has been rather scarce this week. Scarce, as in I hadn't seen him at all. Wife-o-licious saw him once or twice as he came in long enough to grab something and leave.

So some phone calls happened. The fast-food joint he works at sent him home because he was too tired to work (think going face-down in the fry machine... bad news). Then they called here to tell him that someone had called to say the police had an APB out for him, for one. We were getting ready to go look for him ourselves, when his mom called and said he was over there. Yay!

Shortly thereafter, she calls again and says he's screaming and carrying on, so we pile in the van to go over there (expecting him to have flown the coop). He was still there, though. Wife called the sheriff to verify what I'd already guessed: the "APB" call was hot air. I have a pretty good idea who it was, but no proof.

So now we get the real story. He's been hanging out with The Boy and Boy's girlfriend pretty much all week, taking them wherever they want/need to go, and finally getting tired of being used like that. He was parked a little ways down the road the other night when Boy said he had walked all the way (told ya he was lying). Funny that he didn't take a guitar though... although I think with his hormones carbonated by the girlfriend, he's temporarily lost interest in his music. They stayed at one place for a few days before getting kicked out, and the girlfriend's crash pad doesn't have room for them. I don't know what The Boy is going to do about sleeping arrangements, but so far he hasn't tried coming back home.

So Lobster, at least, is realizing that he needs to keep his own head on straight and not enable his so-called friends (even if I'm talking about my own son here) to continue on their wrong path. Just in time; school starts in about 3 weeks. Funny, Lobster tells me there are several adults working at the fast-food place who still act like The Boy. "Yeah," I said, "and they're still working in a fast-food joint. That's fine for high school, but don't you want more out of life?" He nodded.

Well, I have a brother who was 30 before he got his act together, and my nephew is just now getting at least a veneer of respectability at 23, but neither of them have the diabetes complication. I just have to keep remembering it's in God's hands.

Answered prayer

Current music: Groove Salad

One of the last coherent thoughts I had before falling asleep last night was praying that The Boy would get serious about dealing with his diabetes, and wondering if I was even getting through to God.

So at 3:30 this morning, we were wakened by a tapping on the window. He'd returned to pick up a bag he'd packed Saturday — apparently he was planning the move-out before his tantrum. Before I could say anything, he filled a zip-lock bag with ice and put his insulin in it. He claims to be living with "a rich guy" about 30 miles away; he also claimed to have walked the entire distance and was going to walk back. Riiiiiiight -- if this "rich guy" is buying him clothes and letting him stay with him, why didn't he loan the kid a car? He's either staying close by or had someone waiting for him a little ways down (probably the former; he would have taken a guitar if he wasn't going to walk too far).

He also told me he was probably going to marry his girlfriend once he's 18... probably to shock me. I wanted to counter-shock him by telling him to not have kids, but refrained because of his bullheadedness. Given his ego and congenital lying, and her being not so bright, that combination would give us something much like GW Bush.

The important thing is, he's at least thinking about what he needs to survive for now. Maybe he'll stay out of the hospital.

The Boy leaves... again

Current music: radioio80s

The latest chapter in the soap opera that is my son.

Since he's been home the last few weeks, we've been going around & around with when we expect him to be home, who he's with (especially the girlfriend who's three years older than him), what he's doing, all the basic parental stuff. Naturally, to him this is thoroughly unwarranted interference in his private life. Any restriction whatsoever means we don't want him going anywhere or doing anything. Then there's the constant lying, and justifications when he's caught, and constant demands to use a vehicle (and paying for gas is always "later"), and never getting home when he says he'll be here.... You get the idea.

The problem with the girlfriend is that he keeps bringing her here to stay for the night. She has a place to stay -- her mom is a serious piece of work, but she's staying with a friend -- so there's really no reason for her to be here constantly. Especially when we tell him to not bring her here for the night (well, we got here at 6:30 a.m., so it wasn't overnight, was it?). Then she hands him cigarettes, in plain site of The Wife, after we've both told her specifically not to do that.

So Saturday morning, we took her back to her place and started toward the retail district for lunch. Wife says, "I guess we'll get a restraining order to keep her away from you, since she's contributing to the delinquency of a minor."

BOOM

Within three seconds, he was in a full-blown tantrum, screaming obscenities at us and demanding that we stop the car and let him out. He actually opened the side door, at 45mph. I thought he was going to jump -- I saw him jump -- which would have killed him most likely, but he didn't. I told him we'd stop at the next intersection since there was another vehicle behind us and he continued to scream and curse and demand we stop right now until we actually got to an intersection about a mile up the road.

He turned, kicked at the door (a slider, not a swinger), then jumped out, screamed at us a little more, then slammed the door and started walking back the way we had come (presumably to the girlfriend's). That's the last we've officially heard from him, although he called Lobster and asked him to bring some clothes over. He didn't say anything about insulin, though.

Speaking of insulin, I found his glucose meter and had a look at it. He took his last reading on Friday, and it was over 400 then (very bad news). I figure he'll be in the hospital in two weeks... I hope it's a wake-up call instead of a permanent sleep. He can't stay with us and continue to treat us the way he has, I just pray he gets his act together sooner than later.

Fire in the hole(s)

So a week ago, wife-o-licious was mowing the lawn while I was splitting logs (more on that later) and ran the mower over a yellow jacket hole. These little barstids seem to think that just because they dig a hole in the ground, they own the ground around it. She got stung on the hand, which swelled up rather alarmingly but just on this side of having to do something about it. The hole was easy to locate, being next to an above-ground root, but with all the rain we've been having there wasn't anything we could do about it immediately.

Now last weekend, I'm splitting logs again. We had one group come and cut down some trees in the back yard that were leaning toward the manor, while another was cutting pines down in the woods. So group #1, not wanting us to get paid by group #2 for the timber, cut the logs into 6-foot lengths instead of the 12-foot lengths we requested. I decided I'd split the logs down to 6 inches so we can rent the biggest baddest chipper-shredder that Home Depot has to offer and make lots o' mulch. So I dragged a log out of the brush at the edge of the woods, and quickly noticed yellow jackets swarming not eight feet away. I high-tailed it out of there, coming back a little later to locate their hole.

Finally, a dry early night. Yellow jackets go down with the sun. So armed with a flashlight, a gallon of gas, and a box of matches, we marched to battle. It was a rather one-sided affair: locate the hole, pour in two quarts of gas, toss a lighted match in its general direction. FWOOMP! Burn baby burn!

I paid way too much for FAR Manor. I'm not sharing it with any wasps besides the one I married. :-P

More wetness

We weren't finished drying out from Cindy when Dennis came by. Oh sure, the center of Dennis was over in the next state or two, but that didn't stop us from getting just shy of 4 inches of rain in two days, and another half-inch the next day.

Being on top of a hill, FAR Manor isn't prone to floods. (If there's ever a flood that nails us here, call for Noah.) However, we do have a gravel driveway, and the heavy rain washed much of it down to the bottom. It actually took less time than I expected with a shovel and rake (no implements of destruction, unfortunately) to fill in the newly-created creek bed and knock down some high spots. If Wife-o-licious runs over it a few times with her barge (aka Nissan Pathfinder), that should pack it down good & solid.

Drying out

The tropical system formerly known as Cindy came wandering by here overnight. I got all the plants in last night, figuring they didn't need to float away.

A bunch of rain, some thunder, very little wind. My rain gauge had almost 4 inches of water in it, although there was probably 1-1/2 inches sitting in it from previous rains this week. So we came in on the low side of the predicted 2 to 4 inches of rain.

Not much flooding this time, certainly nothing like last year. But it's only early July, and we've already had as many tropical systems come to visit as we did last year. Looks like Dennis the Menace is already a major (Category 3) hurricane a couple of days in front of hitting the Florida panhandle, and each forecast update has shifted its track this way. Luuuuuuvly.