Throwing Back the Lobster

A while back, we made it pretty clear to Lobster — as well as The Boy and M.A.E. — what was expected from each of them individually and all of them as a group... and if they didn’t want to live up to those expectations, they knew where the door was.

Lobster is kind of a special case at the moment: he’s the only one actively in school. The Boy started flinging the “this school is stupid, I’ll be able to do better at the private school” (that he couldn’t wait to get away from last year) crap. Fine, whatever, as long as he finishes, right? So we started making the arrangements to get him back in the private school. We figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem — especially since the preacher at the church told Daughter Dearest that they would try to make some arrangements if they wanted to come back — and The Boy just jumps and expects the soft landing to be there anyway. The upshot is, he quit the public school and the principal at the private school said “I prayed about it and it’s not the best thing.” I’ll spare y’all the obligatory potshots at pentecostals.

So ever since, Lobster has been whining and complaining each morning that he has to get up while The Boy just lays there. We’re trying to arrange a home school program for The Boy so he can finish up (as if he’ll put any effort into it, but he won’t be able to say we didn’t give him the chance), but these things don’t happen overnight. None of them have any sense of responsibility, it seems... as if we didn’t know that already.

President’s Day weekend rolls around, under the unskilled aegis of the worst president ever. Daughter Dearest & even your humble correspondent get Monday off. But not Lobster (nor Mrs. Fetched, because chicken houses never rest, but anyway). That private school has some good points, but they’re seriously weird in others. The Boy and M.A.E. decide they want to go to a movie, along with Lobster. Since it was 8:30, I figured they could go, be home by 11, and I’d be able to get Lobster off to school. I fiddled around, did a little exercise (been slacking on that lately, bad FARfetched, bad!), and called Lobster’s smellphone around 11. No answer. I told him he needed to be home ASAP to get to school the next day.

Around midnight, still haven’t heard anything. I called his phone, he picked up & hung up. I tried it again, same result. The third attempt went straight to his voice mail, and I left him a rather pointed message. About five minutes later, I tried again, got the voice mail, and started leaving a real happy note when he called. “Oh, we decided to just come home around 6 and you can take me to school.” I told him at that point to not bother coming home, he could get a ride to school with whoever was carrying them around.

“But what about my bookbag and uniform?”

“Not my problem,” I told him. He whined about my trying to “control” him, and I told him it had nothing to do with control and everything to do with responsibility. After some more whining on his part, I just hung up, turned off the phone, and went to bed.

So of course they don’t show up at 6... it’s almost 8 a.m. sharp when The Boy calls and says, “we’re outside, can you unlock the door?” The three of them came in and all of them, including Lobster, got in their beds. Uh-uh, Lobster, you’ve got school. I said I’d take him there but not bring him back; he could find somewhere else to live and whoever takes him in can come get his stuff.

On the way to school, I told him I really do hope he succeeds at whatever he decides to do, but we obviously can’t help him take the next step. He wants to be his own person, it’s time for him to step out on his own, and The Boy and M.A.E. will be gone just as soon as he gets his car legal. He just grunted, as if I expected anything different. Now Mrs. Fetched starts criticizing me about how I shouldn’t have said anything about the others leaving, and Lobster has paid rent through the end of the month, and M.A.E. still owes us $270... and that, in a nutshell, is why I haven’t made much effort to play much role in what goes on around here: when everything you do and say gets criticized or negated, why bother? I told her as much, and she clammed up after a couple feeble attempts at self-justification. As far as M.A.E. is concerned, there’s such a thing as cutting your losses.

So that’s my day off. Now I need to get The Boy up to help pick up some brush trimmings....

Dude... you got a discount

We got a company-wide email a couple of days ago, announcing that we were now part of the Dell Employee Purchase Program (EPP). We can get up to 12% discounts on Smelly Dell consumer models, plus a free download of XP Home.

ooooooooooooooooohhhhh... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The funny thing is, we’re in a de-Dell-ification process at work; people needing new computers are getting IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. I’ve suggested to those who are waiting for their Smelly Dells to finish flaking out to “accidentally” drop them on the way to a meeting or something so they can get to the front of the line. Just trying to be helpful....

From experience, when people ask me what kind of computer to get, I tell them two things: 1) Don’t get a Dozebox. 2) If you ignore #1, don’t get a Dell. Then they get a Dell, have all sorts of problems with it, and I get to say I told you so. :-P I’d take one if they gave it to me, but I’d install Linux on it and use it for a music/video jukebox.

Weekend Cinema

Having missed Friday Night Cinema due to playing catch-up and other distractions, we bring you a Saturday Night Special. Hat tip goes to VoodooMike, who serves up tonight’s double feature.

Feature #1 is a whimsical selection called Musical Roundabout.

Feature #2 is rated NSFW. It’s a rather interesting Deleted Scene from Star Wars.

I would have been in bed earlier...

...but I found my old website from my Nyx days in The Wayback Machine. The home page proudly states that its last update was November 7, 1998... in Internet time, that’s like gaslight and 2400 bps “high-speed” modems. It even has the lost episodes of Chicken House Hell, which I may scarf up and repost here if I’m feeling sufficiently disgusting. Anyway, I spent way too much time looking at stuff I wrote over seven years ago. I thought I’d had a detailed analysis of the Concept virus there, which is why I tried to find it in the first place, but it either didn’t get archived or I put it on some other page (it might have been an internal corporate site).

If you’ve been around a while, long enough to abandon a web site or two, your old sites may well be gone but not forgotten. If you can remember a URL, punch it in and see what happens.

Now I’m going to bed. Maybe I can get over this and sleep....

The End of Innocence

We knew it had to happen sooner or later: now Mac users have the Leap.A trojan to worry about. Something like 50 people, total, have been hit by this... but judging from the press coverage, you’d think it was Apocalypse Now. Just don’t accept any files called “latestpics.tgz” from iChat and you should be fine.

Way back when transferring files meant schlepping them around on a floppy, Mac viruses were fairly common. I kept a fairly extensive collection of disinfectant software and had a fairly detailed plan for cleaning up the department Macs when we got hit (which only happened twice in five years). Later on, the primary viral focus shifted from floppies to Microsoft Word files; you could write viruses using Word’s macro language, and they ran on both PCs and Macs. I remember the first Word macro virus; it was called “Concept,” and it was simple enough that I took it apart and analyzed it. It was rather chilling to see a routine called “PayLoad,” which contained only the comment “this should prove my point” — and indeed, it wasn’t long before more destructive macro viruses (that mostly only damaged PCs, fortunately for me) appeared.

After that, malware activity on Macs faded away gradually and those disinfectant utilities withered for lack of need. Lordy, it’s been 7 or 8 years since there’s been anything beyond breathless pronouncements, quickly debunked. Part of it, of course, is the sheer number of Dozeboxes in the world... and the larger part is how easily it has been for malware to infest those Dozeboxes. Macs represented too much effort for too little return, so we have enjoyed a long period of innocence which may well have come to an end this week.

If you use a Mac, grab the Free ClamXav malware scanner if you haven’t already. I think it’s already been updated to detect Leap.A, and it’s a good idea to use it if you transfer files to Dozeboxes... you can’t get infected by their viruses, but you can be Typhoid Annie and transfer them. Be a good citizen and avoid doing that.

While Leap.A is probably not a serious threat — you have to accept an incoming file transfer, unpack the archive, double-click the executable (that tries to disguise itself as a JPEG file), and enter your password to allow the installer to do its thing (and if a JPEG file wants your password, it’s probably not a JPEG) — it represents the straggly first weed in your putting-green lawn. Time to get the shovels, rakes, and implements of dee-struction... and keep them safe in the garage. For now.

Nice winter days

The only thing you can say for certain about January and February on this planet is that the days steadily get longer. I noticed yesterday that there’s now more light at 6:30 p.m. than there was at 5:30 p.m. at Christmas. Spring training is about to get under way, another sure sign that winter really is not permanent. I don’t follow baseball nearly as much as I used to, but to me baseball is still a metaphor for summer nights, the voice of which is Ernie Harwell calling the play-by-play for the Tigers on a static-y AM radio:

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

I mean, really. The announcers for the Braves are OK, but nobody can do “swinnnnnnnng an-a miss!” like Ernie. God, I miss him. Maybe that’s why I don’t follow baseball these days; my personal Voice of Summer is now only in my head.

So yesterday, I didn’t feel like fixing lunch, and I needed a little exercise. I stepped outside and ohhhh yeahhhhhh, sixty-some degrees, the sun was shining, and you can’t enjoy a day like that in a car! Off to the Kroger Grill to get some grilled chicken, to be consumed at an outdoor table with some baked beans and a Diet Cherry Coke (an indulgence I allow myself once or twice a week). I walked quickly, both to save some time and so I could count it as my day’s exercise. Just to have a little fun and make it a bit more aerobic, I took the shortcuts through the weeds in the back of the office park and the parking lot of the building where I used to work.

And... the grill wasn’t open? WTF!?? A day like this, when people are going to want to have lunch outside, perhaps for the first time in months? Sheesh! There are plenty of other restaurants close by, but nothing I particularly want (or need, given I’m trying to limit sodium). But wait! They have a sushi bar inside! I asked the chef on duty about sodium, and he showed me their booklet that has all their nutrition info plus other neat sushi facts (not to mention all the groovy things they’ll sell you, including a complete DIY sushi kit for $37.50... yum). The Shoreline Combo looked like a pretty good match of moderate sodium and low cholesterol, so I grabbed one. Since I was there, I picked up a six-pack of ramen since I was out. The cashier actually asked me if I was from California. Um, no... but Lord knows this planet could stand to be a little more like it.

Turns out that little soy sauce packet they give you has more sodium than all 12 pieces of sushi combined, so that went in the trash and I just spread the wasabi over each piece. It was a very pleasant meal, and I had the entire outdoor dining area to myself. I saw another (full) soy sauce packet on another table, so it looks like someone else may have had the same idea before I did. Walking home after a very satisfying meal, I had to take my coat off and carry it. Mid-February can be like that, or it can be cold steel rain, or slush storms. You just make the most of the good days.

Just think... in a few months, we’ll be wishing it was cold again. But for now, it might snow again tomorrow night. sigh

When Computers Go Bad

Saturday night, Daughter Dearest came in with her laptop and said “it’s doing something really weird: it gets all these pretty colored lines on the screen, then it goes black and freezes.” I held down the power button to force a shutdown, then restarted it. It got to the "Welcome to MacOS X" screen, then did exactly what DD said it did. I shut it off again, jotted down her serial number, and looked it up. Whew, all of three weeks left on the warranty! Thank God it wasn’t three weeks after.

It’s not unheard of in the G3-series iBooks (maybe the G4s too) for this to happen. It’s either the cable the runs from the screen to the motherboard (new cable) or the graphics chips (new motherboard). DD is jonesin’ for her laptop, and using mine some nights (which partially explains why I haven’t updated much this week). The bright spot is that she might get a G4 motherboard out of the deal, a nice little upgrade.

Since she had my laptop, I picked up Bedbug, an old (as in 100MHz Pentium) NEC Versa laptop running Debian Linux. Some time back, it had gone sour after an upgrade, and I’d never gotten around to fixing it. Without getting all geeky on you (that’s coming though!), the upgrade had lost the network (and other) drivers, which turned its network into a not-work. The old kernel (the central piece of the OS) was still on the hard drive, along with its drivers, so I told Bedbug to drop back to the old kernel. Presto! Well, not quite. It now realized it had an Ethernet port, but the hardware was acting like it didn't work right. It might be the cable I was using; we’ve strung it through more than a few doors in its day and it might have finally broke. I’ll try it tomorrow with a good cable and see if it does any better.

...and we got an offer to extend the warranty on DD’s computer for another year, for $148. Mrs. Fetched and I had the same thought: if it flakes out again, we’ll be way ahead on that deal. Now where’s that checkbook....

M.A.E.: You’re Fired

How romantic. Valentine’s Day rolled around, and M.A.E. was scheduled to work at Arby’s. A lot of her co-workers were taking the day off, which gave her the opportunity to get some needed hours on the job. She decided that she wanted to spend the day with The Boy instead of working too... and depending on whose story you believe, she either called in or she didn’t. Either way, the result was the same — terminated for no-call/no-show. So much for being responsible.

There’s a bright side: the business at Arby’s has been a bit slack as of late, and M.A.E. had recently been lucky to get in more than 16 hours in a week. Given that she still has to get her driver’s license back, and has no car anyway, Mrs. Fetched has been providing transportation. Yes, M.A.E. has been paying for the gas, and it was a noticeable chunk of her take-home pay. She applied for a job at a resort about two miles from FAR Manor, and with any luck she’ll get that job. But it’s always best to hang on to what you have until you can grab something better... something I’ve had to start reminding The Boy about lately.

Snowy morning

The Boy, in a rare role reversal, rousted us out of bed this morning so we could take him to his job. It snowed again last night, and everything was covered up. I got a few pictures while it’s there, because it will probably be gone again by late this afternoon. Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest ran over to the church this morning to sweep the floor downstairs, and they said there was hardly any snow at all over there.

The dogs don’t seem to mind the weather too much (a nice way of saying they don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain). They have the option of crawling under my out-building to snooze and stay warm, but they’ll lay out in the snow or ice just as often.

Since I got an ourmedia account to stash my podcast(s), I decided to put the camera in video mode and take a slow pan across the front yard as well.

Podcast from FAR Manor (#1)

I don’t know if I’ll do this often, or again, but I thought I’d give it a try.

I kept it fairly short, about 6 minutes. Give it a listen.

Um... okay...

Caught at a stoplight on the way home from work yesterday, this is what I saw.



I can’t think of anything to say.

Friday Night Cinema

No money? No time? Let’s try this again.

Tonight’s feature is rated RL for Rude Language, the kind of stuff you would hear in junior high hallways. But once you get past the profanity, you’ll find out why this poor schlub is swearing and has the Worst Job Ever.

Worth a listen

I subscribed to O’Reilly’s Distributing the Future podcast a few weeks ago, but have just now gotten around to listening to the first one. The one I listened to on the way home from work today, Attention Span, is really worth 25 minutes of your time. If you don’t have 25 minutes, at least listen to the first part — the part about Continuous Partial Attention. It is soooo true. The second part, “What Business Can Learn from Open Source,” is pretty good as well and is not tech-heavy stuff.

Just in case you don’t know, you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts. Just click the link and listen at your desk if you prefer. Like I said, this one is worth a listen.

Trivia fodder

I’m more than a little cheesed about Friday night’s posts getting eaten. Nothing puts a writer off his feed faster than losing work. Anyway....

Here’s something to regale trivia buffs with at the next opportunity: Benito Mussolini had five children. His youngest son died last week at the age of 79. What did he do for a living?

I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Crossing fingers

Maybe Blogger has stopped eating posts now....

The Lobster Crash

So yesterday morning, Lobster dragged himself out of bed and headed on to school. I’ve always been a little leery of the turn into that school (the private one where the kids went last year); it’s just below the crest of a hill on a fairly busy highway. So Lobster is waiting to turn left into the school/church lot, with the sun in his face. He went for it... and some goober in a big pickup pulling a boat, came wailing over the hill and clipped Lobster in the rear, totally destroying Lobster’s truck bed.

Nobody hurt, fortunately... just a couple grand worth of repairs that nobody can pay for. Of course, Lobster got the ticket because he was doing the left turn, but he’s going to ask for an investigation because the guy was traveling at a pretty good clip in what should be a school zone.

One more expense for the kid. I’m not much inclined to cut him a break; his attitude of late is that he is entitled to do what he pleases, regardless of how we feel about it, and to live here basically for free. I kind of think his living here is compounding the problems he’s having with his own parental units — both sides may feel like they don’t really have to work out their differences because he can just come here instead.

I’m not sure whether it will take a crowbar, or those new mini-nukes they want to drop on Iran, to get the extra peeps out of FAR Manor. Maybe I should grab an axe like in The Shining, yell “Honey, I'm home!” and chase ’em outta here.

State of the County

We had a town-hall meeting for our county district tonight, hosted by the church I go to. I’m sure it was far more interesting than any collection of talking points the pretendersent might deliver. I’ve found in general, when you miss TV, you don’t miss much.

The hot topic (and I do mean hot) was the county commissioners having a study... well, commissioned... to see if we would benefit from a “general aviation” airport. You could build a gays-only wedding chapel in this arterial-blood-red part of the planet and not get people stirred up as quickly as just talking about an airport. The problem is, Atlanta’s aviation authority owns a large tract of land in the county, and (after bulldozing it level and cleaning up a highly radioactive spot, which I may talk about in another post) could put a commercial airport on it. The FAA tells us that building a smallish airport (i.e. a place where individuals and businesses could hanger their planes) would overrule any larger airport in the area, so it seems like a case of the Lesser of the Two Evils. But you can’t tell these people that....

Other interesting topics included road building. This part of the county is still mostly (51%) dirt roads. I asked about bicycle routes, which have been talked about in conjunction with other highway building projects before. Cyclists have marked out a couple of routes already and (even at this time of year) are out & about on weekends; I get nervous for those guys on our narrow roads with drivers who don’t always pay attention. The road guy is going to get back to me about the status of the bike routes. He did say they (with the DoT) are working with some cycling clubs, so maybe something will happen. I hope so; the way things are going, the bike paths will get used pretty heavily before too long just for transportation.

The really interesting part is that they have a zoning plan for 2025 (20 years from now) — our area is expected to be “exurban residential,” and it’s primarily agricultural right now. I don’t envy the first developer who starts building out here.

My father-in-law told someone he wants me to run for the county commission. I said I’d do it on the Green Party ticket. Actually, I think Greens could actually do well in this area if they describe their platform in the right words. People like to fish & hunt; you need clean water & healthy forests for that. They prefer the government keep its nose out of their business. And above all, they don’t want a lot of (or more than a little) development out this way. All Green positions. I’d do it, but it would be such a hassle if I actually won....

Changing your mind...

...is said to be a mark of intelligence. It works for The Boy, anyway.

Last night, he came home to an irritated mom, who demanded the van keys immediately. This set him off, and he announced that he was quitting school. We talked for a while about it; he said he would go back to the private school next year and finish up. “I doubt you will,” I said.

“The public school sucks. I don’t get any help from the teachers or anything. I’ll be able to work at the other one.”

“That’s exactly what you said about the private school last year,” I reminded him. “You said you couldn’t concentrate, the teachers didn’t help you, etc.”

“The old principal is back; I did great when he was there before.”

“Whatever,” I said; I get tired of his pretzel logic in a big hurry these days. “I hope I’m wrong, but you won’t go back next year. By then, you’ll be too busy.”

We left it at that, and went to bed. He refused to get up this morning, but apparently changed his mind sometime today. He did end up going to the doctor with his cold... and she said it appears to be early signs of emphysema. He must have Mrs. Fetched’s constitution, if smoking one or three cigs a day for a couple of years brings it on that quick. I’ll have to remind him that he only gets so many do-overs, and he’s had more than most people get in a lifetime.

But he asked me to get him up for school in the morning. He has a doctor’s excuse for the two days he was out, and maybe he at least subconsciously understands the do-over part....

Daughter Dearest, Zombie Queen

If you need a zombie queen for your next horror movie, I have just the girl for you...



Need I say more?

Recurring dreams

When I was little (like 4 or 6 or so), we had a flat tire in our rustbucket ’59 Impala; Dad pulled off to the side and changed the tire. For whatever reason, that event stuck with me and I would dream about it. In the dream, I usually stood across M-40 (on one side of town or the other), looking at the car as the wheels and tires sagged like one of Salvador Dali’s clocks. I had that dream several times, even after the Impala got traded in, and never figured out why.

These days, I dream about going back to college. The dream itself is a lot more variable than the Impala dream — in one dream, I’m standing outside the dorm I lived in, chatting with some people; I might be walking to a classroom in another — but it’s always the beginning of the school year. In last night’s dream, my old roommate and I were moving into a largish two-bedroom apartment that had a third bed right in front of the door. The centerpiece of this dream was a large clothes hamper on casters, lined like a baby’s bassinet, that could tip its contents into a basket on the floor. Toward the end of our dream, the landlady was getting ready to move it out thinking we didn’t want it in there; we protested and then she showed us how it worked.

Other details I remember (more or less in order) include:

• Thinking the bed by the door was mine, until I realized I had my own room


• Seeing the hamper


• Plugging in the clock-radio that currently adorns the dresser on the wife’s side of the bedroom, and throwing some luggage on the bed


• Wondering if my ex-girlfriend would want to sleep over, and wondering why I even thought I wanted her to (the breakup was not amicable) — dreams truly do have their own #%@*&!!! logic


• Making a list of things I had to drive home to get — a 10-hour drive in the dream and when I was in college; it would be a much longer trip now, and I wasn’t college-age in my dream


• Being interrupted in my list-making by the landlady coming in to get the hamper

That was the first time in some months that I’ve had one of those dreams. I haven’t figured out what the deal is with those.

Why I’m a Cat Person #72,379

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction. I laughed my butt off reading this story, and I have a LOT of butt....

They're inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring.

It just gets worse from there.

All’s quiet

The Boy, as usual, is taking his sweet time getting home. He has to get up & go to work in the morning, and he hasn’t had much sleep as it is lately, and he has a cold... but when you’re 18, you can burn the candle at both ends for a while. Things have settled down into a series of head-butting contests with Mrs. Fetched; she’s ready to take him back to his apartment and leave him there. Now if only he would stop the head-butting crapola, she might let him have the old minivan (we got it back this week) and he could have all the fun of living on his own for real.

The chances of his (and Lobster’s) graduating this year are pretty slim at this point. Lobster has often elected to sleep until whenever instead of going to school; The Boy is a little better but is often tardy. Report cards are pretty rank, with the usual I’m-doing-better-now protests that don’t pan out. If Lobster wants to spend the rest of his life working in a KFC, he’s certainly going about it the right way... at least until he sleeps late once too many times and gets fired.

The wife’s new dog (Crissy, although I often call her Princess Bladder or Pissy for reasons that should be easy to guess) is learning the ropes amazingly quickly. I think today was the third day she’s been to the chicken house and she’s already picking up dead chickens and bringing them to Mrs. Fetched. There was the incident last week where one of the in-laws’ dogs attacked her on her first day at “work,” chewing on a foot and freaking everyone out, but she has pretty much healed because this afternoon she (again) climbed over the top of her pen and jumped out. Nothing wrong with that foot if she can take a six-foot drop and not yelp! Her breed, whatever it is (I was told blue healer but she doesn’t look anything like the photos I found on Google) is energetic and thinks a chain-link fence is a ladder. We’ve had several dogs from this line, and they’ve all been like that.

Me, I’m doing OK. I left a post on Eat4Today that lists some of the benefits I’m already seeing from trying to get my own situation under control. Those first 15 or so pounds were easy come, easy go; I suspect the next 15 pounds won’t be quite as easy or quick to shed (they’ve been there a long time). There are other things I talked about that I think are more important than simple numbers... maybe I’ll start feeling more energetic before too long too. Or maybe I should try getting more sleep....

As gimmicks go... I like it

The former oldies station in Atlanta, Fox-97, is now calling itself “97.1 The River,” playing what they call “classic hits.” The format is similar to Jack FM, no DJs and a medium-size playlist, but River seems to stick to lighter stuff. For example, “School’s Out” is the only Alice Cooper song they play.

Yeah, just another not-too-oldies station... except for their kickoff promotion. They’re claiming to play “10,000 songs in a row, commercial-free.” Assuming they started on New Year’s Day, I expect they’ll wrap it up some time over the weekend or maybe Monday.

Gutsy move. I’ll retreat back to Album 88 when the ads start running, but for now it’s a nice change of pace.

Fiction: A Picnic at Mt. St. Cardiac

This is one of the five or so short stories I found when cleaning up the outbuilding, getting it ready for its new carpet, and the second to appear on the blog.

I wrote it in the early 1990s, I believe. Cyberpunk had by then established itself as the up-and-coming sub-genre of science fiction, although by then some people thought it was well in decline. Me, I thought people were missing out, treating “cyberspace” strictly as the habitat of criminals and mega-corporations. Certainly, people would work, play, and perhaps even work out emotional issues in cyberspace as well.

So click the “Read and Comment” link, and see what happens when a family takes...

A Picnic at Mt. St. Cardiac

The VR headset magnified the circuit board until it looked like... well, a miniature city. Clichés, even at the microscopic level, Mike grinned. But an exotic ghost town of copper streets and black epoxy buildings was just what it looked like.

Mike lifted his viewpoint above the board’s surface — and there was the problem. A hairline crack in a solder joint, although at this magnification it seemed big enough to slip his hand into, on pin 3 of chip U407. He reached up with gloved hands and brought down a huge — or so it seemed at this scale — soldering iron and a line of solder as big around as his arm. In a few seconds, the crack was patched.

As Mike was about to start diagnostics on the board, his phone chimed. The status area in his headset said simply, Dad. Mike smiled and opened the video onto one corner of the display. His father’s puzzled face appeared in a window on the side of one of the chip-buildings.

“What’s this? You playing that new VR City game, Mayor Mike? Patching up potholes? But where’s the media with their photo-ops?”

“Nope,” Mike grinned even wider. “Hey, why don’t you join me?” His image froze, one finger held up toward Dad in the universal gesture that meant Wait a minute, then reanimated; a pair of silvery benches appeared behind him. “Link up and come sit for a few. Remember that RW-4 factory rework unit you helped me pick up last week?”

Dad raised one eyebrow skeptically as he stepped into the rework unit’s VR, the window dissolving behind him, and sat on the bench opposite Mike. “Naw. You couldn’t have got that thing working, could you? I thought you bought it for scrap.”

“I did,” Mike chuckled. “In fact, I opened up the power supply first to see if there was anything worth salvaging in there. What I found was a mouse nest and a bunch of chewed wires. I thought ‘what the heck,’ spliced everything together, and it came right up. I think it has repair maps of most everything built through last year.”

“Quite a find. And a steal, for fifty bucks. I’m impressed. Y’know, you could go into business with this, fix up stuff —”

“Or buy up rejects and sell ’em as refurbs,” Mike finished. “I already have a flyer out, looking for a batch of boards.” He looked around to see if the slow fade he’d set up was noticeable yet. Sure enough, the circuitry was starting to look grainy and rippled, the benches grew darker and rougher, and his clothes were fading away completely.

“Good. If you need a little help from time to time, let me know. I’ve gotten down to twenty hours a week at work now.” Dad looked around him, went Wait a minute, then returned with a grin and a different look. This image of Dad was younger and thinner, with black hair (only one or two grey strands) down to his shoulder. The appendectomy scar was still there, though. Mike’s next thought started him: He used to look like that when he was younger. And it’s how he still sees himself.

Dad brought Mike out of his reverie. “I’ll go along with the nude beach. Better be careful with the wood benches though; wouldn’t want virtual splinters in your old man’s backside.”

“No probble,” Mike said, then subvocalized. The benches became canvas beach chairs. “Better?”

“Yeah, but you forgot the babes.” A volleyball game popped into existence nearby. “And this is kind of a generic beach — may I? Thanks.” Wait a minute, then the sand became coarser and darker with grassy dunes marching up from the shoreline. “I always liked Lake Michigan; too bad they didn’t have nude beaches up there.” They watched the volleyball game for a quiet moment.

“OK, Dad,” Mike said to break the silence. “I give up. I didn’t shock you with the nude beach. So what’s happening?”

“Shocked you, though,” Dad grinned. “I pretty well know you, son. You’re not much different from me when I was twenty-eight, even if you were on the way by then. Anyway, I was just going to make sure you were coming by —” Wait a minute, a prolonged one. Dad’s image reanimated with a worried look. “Trouble,” he said.

The volleyball game disappeared just as Mom popped in, sporting a grainy image that indicated a real-time meatspace scan. “Hi, son, I — God!” she gasped. “What do you two think you’re doing?”

Mike and Dad quickly added swim suits. “And a good afternoon to you too, Mom,” Mike replied. “Dad and I were just playing Shock Each Other. He won.”

Dad glared briefly at Mike, then stood to face Mom. “You ought to try it some time,” he said. A quick subvocal, and a four-foot schlong sprang from his swim suit, complete with sound effect.

“You wish,” Mom hissed. “Fifty-six years old, and that’s still all you think about.”

“Uh, Dad,” Mike said. ”You broke the rules. No caricatures.”

“Woop,” replied Dad, and returned to normal proportions. “You’re right. Congratulations, hon; you won your first game of Shock Each Other by default.”

Mom ignored the attempted deflection. “So when did you ever look like some long-haired idiot?”

“When we met,” Dad said evenly. “Don’t you remember?”

Before Mom could respond, Mike spoke up. “Good to see you, Mom. You don’t usually visit by VR; what’s the occasion?”

“Well, I was going to make sure your dad didn’t forget to ask you if you were coming by tonight —”

“Which is what I was about to do before you butted in,” Dad snapped. “Besides, didn’t you ever figure out that this is what VR is all about, to be what you always wanted to be?”

Mom smirked. “You never wanted to be a nudist. Besides, the resort is just a few miles up the road, where it’s always been.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dad retorted. “You’ve got to stop looking at just the face value of things —”

“Uh, you guys are running up a tandem bill with this little discussion. Maybe a change of scenery would be appropriate,” Mike suggested. “How about the golf course?”

Mom looked skeptical. “I don’t golf —”

“No probble, Mom. You’ve never come to visit our masterpiece; just sit in the cart and enjoy the view.” Dad laughed and nodded as the beach dissolved and all three stood before a black iron sign. The sign read, in animated dripping blood:

MOUNT SAINT CARDIAC
The golf course from Hell!

Mike and Dad had created this elaborate construct several years ago as a practical joke on a few golfing friends of Dad’s. The friends thought it was hilarious, and told other friends. The word spread, and father and son quickly found themselves adding and refining. Soon, Mount Saint Cardiac became the place for people who wanted a break from real-world golfing. It was one of the most popular golf-oriented constructs in VR, running neck-and-neck with the authorized virtual St. Thomas. The visitation fees they made from Cardiac usually paid the entire family’s monthly VR connect charges with enough left over for a weekly gold outing in meatspace.

Mom looked even more skeptical. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy this. It doesn’t look like my idea of a good time.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Just come on, will you? You won’t enjoy it if you don’t give it a chance, that’s for sure. Here, hop in the cart.”

“That’s a cart?” Mom goggled. The golf carts at Mount Saint Cardiac looked like a cross between a black 1970 Corvette Stingray and a plain golf cart. It had an open top and the back end was rebuilt to hold a pair of bags, but the rest was one evil-looking vehicle. It purred menacingly as it rolled, driverless, to where they stood.

“It’s safe, Mom,” Mike reassured her. “This is VR, remember? You can’t get hurt.” Mom climbed into the passenger seat, Dad took the driving position next to her, and Mike grabbed handholds on the back. “Hit it, Dad.” The motor roared, tires squealed, and they fishtailed up to the tees on Number One. Dad grinned like a maniac and whipped the cart into a power-slide that slung the rear next to the tees.

“I see your driving hasn’t changed much,” Mom remarked dryly as they climbed out of the cart.

“One big difference,” Dad deadpanned as he and Mike selected Cardiac Drivers — clubs with heads roughly the size of a bowling ball sawn in half. “No tickets here, and nobody wrecks.”

Number One was typical: 570 yards to the green, with the tees on the edge of a sheer cliff far above the fairway. The sign, which showed the layout and the hazards, named it Over the Edge. Dad and Mike both teed off and watched their balls land in the fairway below, then everyone climbed into the cart.

“Another good thing about this course,” Mike chattered. “You can’t lose your ball even if you try.”

Mom looked around. “So how do we get down there? I don’t see a path.”

“Here, I’ll show you,” Dad grinned. “Remember the name?”

“Over the Edge — nooooooooooo!” Dad floored the accelerator. The cart roared, tires howled as they spun around, and Mom shrieked as they vaulted off the cliff. Before they dropped more than a few feet, the cart spouted wings and became a glider. As they descended, Mike picked himself up from the back of the cart, laughing hysterically. “Mom — you should have seen — your face,” and again fell giggling to the floor.

“I ought to slap you,” Mom growled, then allowed herself to smile as the cart landed and folded its wings away. “So what other surprises do you have in here?”

“Oh, every hole has its own little personality,” Dad replied. “Like Boa Boa. When your ball hits the fairway, a big snake slithers out and swallows it. If you stomp on him, he coughs up the ball and goes away.”

“Your snake phobia gave us the idea for that one, Mom,” Mike continued. “Another hole is pitch dark, except that the green and your ball glow in the dark. The idea is for you to remember where you are — in VR where you can’t get hurt. Here you can overcome whatever fears you might have, since they really aren’t here.”

“Psychotherapy?” Mom looked skeptical and a little sarcastic.

“Funny thing, Mom: some shrinks actually bring their clients here. We get email all the time from people who said this place has helped them out some way.” Mike chattered on about other comments they received, while Dad steered them to a picnic area in the shadow of an erupting volcano. They sat in the lush grass and watched the lava flow endlessly down.

“But what’s the point of all this?” asked Mom. “Just entertainment? Or is there something else to it? You know I don't go virtual, or whatever you call it, very much.”

“Sure, it’s entertainment,” agreed Dad. “But are you talking about the golf course, or VR, or the entire Net?”

“All of it, I guess,” Mom sighed. “I know people go to work over the Net all the time, and there’s lots of games, and stuff like this place — but why do you go around looking like that, twenty and hair down to your back?”

Dad sighed in turn. “What’s the whole point of an illusion — or a fantasy world, if you’d rather — if you can’t control it? There’s a part of me who’s still twenty, and will always be twenty no matter how old I get on the outside. Here, I can let him out.

“But what about you? Haven’t you ever wanted to look different?”

“Well, you know I’ve always wanted to lose weight,” Mom grimaced. “But what’s the point? I could look like a supermodel here, but that won’t change anything.”

“It might change how you see yourself,” Dad replied. “Here, let me work your image. Now don’t look at me like that; I’m not going to do anything weird in front of your own son.” Dad went Wait a minute, then reanimated. “You wanted to be thinner? Here you go.” Dad reshaped Mom’s image into a young woman’s, made her hair longer and pulled it back into a tail, then replaced her generic floral print dress with overalls and a flannel shirt.

“Hey Mom,” Mike grinned. “You look gooooooood.” He subvocalized a full-length mirror so Mom could see herself.

Dad winked. “You know, women in overalls always did turn me on.”

“Uh, guys, I’ve got a board to finish fixing,” Mike said, recognizing his cue. “See you tonight in meatspace.” He dissolved and was gone.

Mom looked at Dad and grinned shyly. “So now what?”

“We go for a ride,” Dad replied. He whistled, and two horses with full tack trotted out of the woods. “Somewhere a bit more traditional. This can be your fantasy, too.” The scenery shifted, becoming a grassy meadow, with hazy mountains in the distance and a chuckling stream nearby. The horses ambled over and drank.

“Let’s go somewhere different,” Mom countered. “How about that beach? We can build a driftwood fire when it gets dark.”

“You’ve got the idea,” Dad replied happily. They mounted up and rode across the dunes.

Are we there yet?

A while back, I wrote a letter about the oil crunch to come, probably sooner than later. It looks like it might be getting started.

This IEA¹ graph, from their Oil Market Report, shows world oil production from 2002 to the end of 2005. As you can see, total production seems to be levelling off — only in the last half of 2005 do you see production for two quarters in a row lower than the previous quarter.

Better news is in the text of the report: production climbed to 85Mbpd in December, resuming the steady climb (US production was hosed up by the hurricanes, and is slowly coming back on-line). But what the text giveth, another graph taketh away: follow the link and compare the "World Oil Supply" and "World Oil Demand" graphs. Demand is consistently outstripping supply, which suggests the reserves that Western nations have been building up for an emergency are being tapped and slowly(?) depleted as well.

So are we getting close to Peak Oil? The graph above suggests world production is starting to plateau, although it may well be a temporary hesitation while the Gulf of Mexico producers get their collective act back together. OPEC et al can still increase production, but it’s getting more and more difficult. My crystal ball is a little murky, but I think we’ll see another year or two of increasing yields before the trend turns the other way. The wild card is the deteriorating situation in the Middle East: military in Iraq, diplomatic in Iran. As bogged down in Iraq as we are, we can’t make a credible threat to Iran.

What’s more important is the difference between demand and supply. Unless Americans suddenly get rational and park their SUVs, permanently, demand will continue to climb. But even if we could control our own consumption habits, we can’t control China’s and India’s increasing thirst for oil: anything we leave on the table, Asia will grab with both hands.

The only thing I know for certain, the era of cheap oil is over.

---

¹International Energy Agency, a consortium of energy-consuming nations.

Dangit

Mrs. Fetched baked some salmon last night, with some potatoes etc. on the side. I put the leftovers into two microwave plates — one for my lunch today and one for The Boy after he came home from band practice.

As things really went, Lobster ate The Boy’s plate... and The Boy ate my plate.

Hey Solar-bro...

Gimme a call tomorrow morning, 8 a.m. would be great, let me know that Dad got there OK... OK?

Thanks!

Camera shakeout

Seems that the photography industry has started quietly shaking out: Konica/Minolta is throwing in the towel and Nikon is dumping most of its film cameras to concentrate on digital — quite a turnaround in attitude at the iconic manufacturer.

Film is going to be around for quite a while — unless you have massive thousands of bucks, digital is going to lag film’s quality for some years to come. On the casual/consumer end, a lot of people still have good film cameras and aren’t ready to drop $350–$400 for a decent digital just yet. But for those of us who have them already, the quality is fine for snapshots and 5x7 prints (if you don’t look too close). The best part is that we can blow through the equivalent of four rolls of film in a day, keep the good shots, and make the bad stuff disappear with no guilt, extra cost, or waits for processing. It’s also nice to not have to keep a scanner around when I want to put my pictures on my blog.

One of the neat things about digital cameras is that many of them have a video mode, so you can take at least short clips of video. My camera takes video at 320x240, roughly equivalent to VHS quality, and can manage up to 3 minutes at a time (which about fills a 128MB card anyway). iMovie, to my pleasant surprise, converts and upsizes its AVI files so I can edit them and even mix them with DV video from my camcorder. Some digital cameras can take full-screen 640x480 video, which would require the biggest flash cards you can afford since it would require about 4 times the space of 320x240 video.

But that’s where things will head, eventually. Flash memory will continue to get cheaper (I’m thinking about a 512MB card for my camera), processors will continue to improve, and I expect solid-state camcorders to start pushing into DV territory in the next few years.

The Boy and His Pills

The Boy gets a pair of trips to his endocrinologist each quarter — one to draw blood, one to get the results. As we expected, his sloppy maintenance resulted in an A1C score of roughly 10... if you don’t know what that means, it’s not good; it should be around 7. After a stern lecture from the doc, who went into graphic detail of the slow painful death (piece by piece) that awaits him if he doesn’t get his act together, he confirmed that The Boy is indeed a Type II rather than Type I. “He would have probably hit 500 and ended up in the hospital over the summer if he was Type I.”

This is very good news for The Boy: it means he’s down to typically one injection (the Lantus he takes at bedtime) per day, with the Novolog as a backup if he needs it. Of course, he still has to poke himself and meter his glucose, but that’s no big deal by comparison.

I took an empty pill bottle and had him put a few of his pills in it to keep here. His regular supply is at his apartment, but if he comes home for a weekend or whatever he’ll have them even if he forgets his normal supply. (We also have a backup glucose meter.)

A great laugh for Zork players

Former or current, it’s pretty funny. But he left one question unanswered: where’s a grue when you need one?

Exceeding expectations

I was rather amazed.

The Boy actually found an apartment that didn’t ask questions about his educational status. Sure, it isn’t much: two rooms (not two bedrooms, mind you) plus a decent bathroom, full kitchen, $400/mo includes utilities. Good thing about the latter; the door has a pretty good gap under it to let the chilly wind in and keep his heater running. But it's his own place. It’s also within walking distance to where they do band practice, which was probably one of his more important considerations. His 18^th birthday was Friday, he put his own money down on the place: well, go for it, kid. People are giving him furniture; if he’s not careful, he’ll be tripping over it. I suggested to Mrs. Fetched that I, her, and Daughter Dearest all mark a calendar with the day we figured he would have a problem big enough to need some real help. She said no... like it made a difference.

So a friend of his loaned him a little pickup truck to get around with & move his belongings from FAR Manor to his new nest (and pick up gifts of used furniture, of course). Like a lot of young guys, he associates staying up late with being cool, or adult, or something... I remember being that way but can’t really say what the attraction was, just that it was there. So about 2 a.m. Sunday morning, he called Lobster (who was elsewhere) and asked him if they wanted to meet at McDonald’s. After that, they were driving back to his new place when they got the Blue Light Special on aisle 136. Turns out that the friend neglected to tell him the truck didn’t have current plates! Smooooooooth.

That details aren’t too clear about what happened next, but Ossifer Friendly wound up searching them... and found a joint on The Boy. Break down, take down — you're busted. Fortunately for Lobster, the joint was the only contraband in the truck. The second cop (they travel in pairs these days) took Lobster back to his own truck and let him go. The Boy went directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

So The Boy used his phone call to tell the friend who loaned him the truck, whose mom knows a guy with a tow truck; they came and got it. Lobster called M.A.E. (note that nobody so far is in much of a hurry to tell us) about 9 a.m. Sunday morning. M.A.E. went to Mrs. Fetched and said “Something terrible has happened!” With that for a lead-in, the wife’s reaction on finding he was in jail was like, “Oh, is that all?” In other words, major relief. She was thinking hospital or worse.

So The Boy exceeded — no, shattered — all expectations. I figured he’d last about a month until he got in over his head, although I was thinking financial issues or diabetes complications. It took him all of one day.

Then the phone calls started. Collect, of course, even though the jail & we are in the same phone exchange. It sort of complicated things, what with Monday being a holiday... although that at least meant I could be there to help bail him out (literally, for a change). Even though it was a holiday, they set his bail, a bondsman (actually, a freckled young lady) was available, came to the jail & took care of things. I had to ask her how she got in that line of work; she said she works for her dad, who’s an ex-cop (an Irish cop, from the looks of his daughter).

We collected The Boy (who was, ironically, wearing a T-shirt with “How Not to Get Caught” instructions) and took him home. Mrs. Fetched yelled at him; I yelled a little and laughed a little. Fortunately, he’s looking at a misdemeanor charge. Even more fortunately (have I ever said this kid is massively lucky? well, for the most part), he said the cop never read him his rights. Lobster was there & didn’t hear it either. Sounds like he might get off on a technicality, which would suck if he doesn’t learn anything from this — but would be good if he’d just get (and stay) straight. The bad part is that it could drag on for two years before he gets a court date... which makes getting it tossed on a technicality a bit more attractive.

The other bad part was that he told the jailers, M.A.E. called and told them, we called and told them, he’s diabetic. They didn’t give him any insulin while he was there, or check his sugar, or anything. Since Mrs. Fetched knows the sheriff, she’s going to have a little talk with him. I took him to his place to pick up his meter; he was at 296. The more I think about that, the happier I’d be to see his case thrown out for something stupid. If there’s anything that cheeses me off even more than what Bush-league is doing to the country, it’s sloppy local law enforcement.

Friday Night Cinema - we’re back!

You’ve watched up all the DVDs you got for Christmas, the bills started coming in, and you still haven’t cleaned up from that New Year’s Party... never fear, we bring you short flicks that won’t strain your budget or schedule.

Daughter Dearest pointed me to this one. It’s been 8 years or better, and people still find ways to get a chuckle out of the Hamster Dance. Tune in, turn on, and get ready for the Psychedelic Hamster Dance!

Sodium dodging

There's a new extreme sport for middle-aged men, called “Sodium Roulette.” Here’s how you play:

1. Go to the supermarket.


2. Pick up something that sounds good.


3. Now, look at the label and see how much sodium there is in one serving. Write it down.


4. Repeat until someone goes over 2400mg of sodium. That person is out.


5. Last man standing wins!

Actually, I spent my lunch in the supermarket yesterday and actually found some good stuff. I’ve been trying to come up with some foods that are easy to fix in a microwave, don’t require refrigeration, are tasty, and not bad for you. I consider the trip a success, coming back with:

• “Instant” brown rice (I don’t consider 7 minutes cooking time to be “instant,” but whatever.)


• Cipollini onions (they’re small, so you can use whole onions and not have halfies left over)


• Albacore tuna, marked “very low sodium” (at albacore prices, naturally... ouch)


• Sardines packed in water (very little sodium, especially compared to packed in mustard or oil)


• Smoked oysters (more sodium than the fish, but still within reason)


• Low-sodium Triscuits (I was looking for Wheat Thin(g)s, but these will do)


• Bean sprouts (there’s a refrigerator at work, fortunately... I just didn’t want to fill it up


• Mrs. Dash Tomato/Basil/Garlic Blend


• Bananas

I have a few packs of ramen hiding in the back of one of my overhead bins; chuck the “flavor” packet and what’s left is the closest thing to instant pasta that I know of.

Googling for “cipollini onions,” I found some recipes for roasting them that sound absolutely divine as a side dish to beef or pork... but right now, I’m primarily concerned about what I can cook in the break room microwave. I cut up a couple of onions into the rice pot, threw in a small handful of bean sprouts, added some Mrs. Dash, and nuked the whole shebang then topped it with a can of tuna. The result was edible, if a little bland; I need to vary the ingredients a little bit and maybe toss in some green pepper. I’ll post a recipe when I get it right.

I’m thinking about how I can do something with the ramen & smoked oysters...

Weird news items

From the BBC, but worthy of News of the Weird:

Now you can blame “it” on the trees!

Pigs may not fly... but they glow in the dark?

Other things going on

If I haven’t posted in a couple of days, it often means I (temporarily) have gotten a life or something. I think in this case, it’s “or something.” Here’s what’s been going on.

I mentioned this in Vacation Reflections: at FAR Manor, we open our presents on Three Kings Day (Epiphany, Jan. 6). Or, like this year, work schedules can slide it into the weekend. So on Saturday, I got the 4-DVD Firefly series (highly recommended by David) and a Holy Grail T-shirt, showing the Black Knight with all his limbs hacked off and emblazoned in raised red letters: IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND. The Boy got the same T-shirt, This is Spinal Tap on DVD, and a couple other things. Daughter Dearest got her iTunes gift cards, a betta tank (we’ll get the fish this weekend), and miscellany.

Mrs. Fetched got some stuff here & there, but what she needs is a Canon GL-2 to replace her business camera (a Sony of similar specs). The video circuitry went to hell on her while we were shooting the community chorale; fortunately the audio was still good & I was using my ZR-80 as a B-roll camera off to the side. With that, she was able to dub her decent audio onto my mediocre video and produce both CDs and DVDs for the chorale. One good-sized video job will cover the $2800 or so... if she can get a client who will pay quickly, we could get the camera on a “90 days same as cash” basis and not be out of pocket.

I’ve gotten hooked on She’s a flight risk, a blog purporting to be the diary of a young woman on the lam from her ultra-rich family. The link starts you off in the archives, which have been conveniently rearranged to go top to bottom (so you don’t have to scroll up to read). I seem to remember looking at it a year or two ago and then somehow forgetting about it.

Last night, I got myself a break and started working on setting up a computer for EJ, a friend of The Boy’s. It’s not the newest thing in the world — a PowerMac 8500/180 — but it will get him online and work for writing papers and the like. I’ll load it up with a few games and things too.

Working at home today. Time to grab a bowl of cereal and get to it.

The Young Mayor

Some time back, I wrote about Michael Sessions, an 18-year-old high school student who ran a write-in campaign for mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan — and won. I got to wondering how that all went down and started Googling; it would make a good follow-up, anyway.

Well... after several ballots were invalidated because you have to check the box and write the candidate’s name next to it, Sessions was still ahead by two votes. The incumbent, Douglas Ingles, then asked for a recount (well yeah, when it’s that close you pretty much have to). Things got touch-and-go when the city council found an ordinance that barred swearing in an official whose election was the subject of a recount, and called a special meeting on November 18 (the Friday before Session was to be sworn in).

Session himself found out about the meeting while at the Michigan/Ohio State game, and left the game to attend the meeting. A crowd of supporters packed the meeting as well, to see what was going down.

Mr. Ingles then defused the tension by announcing that he was withdrawing the recount request, and pledging his support for Hillsdale’s new mayor, which drew many cheers — probably more than he ever got as an elected official. On Monday, November 21, Sessions was sworn in as mayor in front of a huge group of citizens and media from around the US, as well as international media including Japan, Russia, and France.

Lansing Community College’s Lookout has pictures of the mayor at work and... not-work.

Sometimes, it’s best to fire a customer

So many manufacturers are willing to cut their own throats — or at least those of their employees — to get into Wal-Mart. Once in a while, you find an executive with the vision and nards to get out.

“Now, at the price I’m selling to you today, I’m not making any money on it. And if we do what you want next year, I’ll lose money... we have this independent-dealer channel. And 80% of our business is over here with them. And I can’t put them at a competitive disadvantage. If I do that, I lose everything. So this just isn’t a compatible fit.”

I wonder why it’s so hard to shut off a sales channel, even knowing that those sales are losing money and possibly costing you in other ways.

When spammers lose... we all win!

That’s gonna leave a mark.

CIS Internet Services successfully sued James McCalla over claims he sent more than 280m illegal spam messages.... The judgment further bans McCalla from using the internet for three years.

Too bad there wasn’t a one-way ticket to Abu Ghraib involved. Hey, if you’re going to torture something, nothing is more deserving than a spammer.

Smack the Penguin

Daughter Dearest praises this one with faint damnation: “this game is so stupid... but it's so much fun.”

1. Go forth and click.


2. Click the snowman to make the penguin jump.


3. Click the snowman to hit the penguin as he descends from the cliff

What's your distance? I got 587.something my first try, and haven’t beat it yet. Daughter Dearest has been working at it for a while, and beat it with 588.3 in between telling all her friends about the game.

I’ve been tagged

Carnacki got me.

OK, the rules of this little game are: reveal five weird habits about yourself, then tag five other bloggers. Fair enough.

1. The more I like a song, the more likely it is that I will make up my own lyrics to it.


2. I yank the occasional eyebrow hair that gets long (like, half my eyebrow long). That wouldn’t classify as a weird habit for women, perhaps, but I are not one of those.


3. I “clip” my toenails by notching them with a fingernail then zipping it off. I then drop them behind the headboard.


4. For whatever reason, I have a hard time with ending a project. I’ve been known to let them sit for months. I have no clue why.


5. I almost never watch TV. Probably has something to do with wanting to scream at the right-wing talking heads. (When Reagan was sleeping speaking, I used to moon the TV and yell, “FACE THE NATION!!!”)

Awright... that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know. But now it’s my turn. I think I’ll tag two C&J’ers, two Techcomm’ers, and one of the other folks. Hmmm... Mountain Cerridwen, Cosmic Debris, Voodoo Mike, Laugh Practice, and... hm... yup, Austin Post.

Born pure, salted to death

Given my aging-male issues (blood pressure, cholesterol), I decided to take a closer look at some of the labels on stuff I eat. I was surprised; except for that one weekend breakfast where we fix bacon & eggs, I don’t eat that much cholesterol at all. Through the week, I eat oatmeal when I get to work then have a pop-tart in the mid- to late morning; not much of the artery-clogging stuff.

But My God! the sodium!

It’s in everything, it seems. Even Coca-Cola (which I don’t drink much of) has a little! I had lunch at Subway today, and grabbed one of the nutrition charts they keep handy: most of the sandwiches have like 1100mg (or more) of sodium. Hunh? That’s as much as a cheap can of soup (the Healthy Choice soups are better). The sandwiches must absorb it from the Chinese restaurant about three doors down or something. “On average, Americans consume 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium daily” (recommended intake is 2400mg, just over a teaspoon of salt). No wonder over 25% of the population has high blood pressure!

I was already taking a hard look at cheese, thinking the cholesterol might be a problem there. Well, not so much as the sodium. Mom was telling me about touring a cheese-making operation last year; she saw them literally using shovels to throw salt into the batch. Low-fat Swiss cheese seems to be the best bet in terms of both sodium and saturated fat.

Even a slice of bread has 120mg to 180mg of sodium. That just floored me; I often make my own bread, so I decided to have a look at my own product. Aha... preservatives. My bread recipes call for about ½ tsp. of salt per loaf (and I tend to skimp on the salt anyway), the only sodium in any of the ingredients I use — at 14 slices per loaf, I get 82mg of sodium per slice. Yup, gonna be making my own bread from now on. And maybe slicing it just a little thinner, too.

When it comes to scary, Stephen King’s got nothing on food labels.

Eeeeeyaaaaaaaa!!!

That’s what it sounds like to this non-metal fan, anyway. The Boy just handed me a CD entitled, “The Death of Black and White,” which he says is the demo CD for his band. They finally got off the dime and did it! Six songs, a tad over 17 minutes, no “explicit” lyrics that I could tell (but I couldn’t catch about 90% of the lyrics anyway). Ironically, the track “29 Seconds” is the longest cut on the CD, nearly 4 minutes.

The sound is a tad muddy, no highs at all. I think they recorded it in somebody’s living room, but it’s better than I could have done (I tried in the detached garage last year). I’ve not figured out how to keep the drums from over-freeking-whelming the rest of the band; maybe the living room acoustics had something to do with it. Or maybe they put the drummer outside, or just recorded him separately and mixed the rest of it in. Or maybe they just had somebody who knows what they’re doing; The Boy claims the guy who recorded it was with Staind before they got big.

He came home with a small stack of CDs, which he plans to hand out to just about everybody he knows.

How does my (herb) garden grow?

With some inside, and some outside, and I can’t think of a rhyme at the moment.

As the colder weather came on, I dragged the pots in and out of the garage. That worked OK for a while, until it got into the low 20s one night and the basil started getting frostbite. Then I moved them inside, putting them on the coffee table by a window. Mrs. Fetched, for some reason, didn’t want them there (it might have had something to do with the basil almost touching the ceiling)... but I convinced her to wait until I got the carpet down in the outbuilding & things moved back in. That turned out to be a great idea, because she helped & recruited the boys to help as well.

So. In the outbuilding, with a window by day and a plant light by night: basil, marjoram, oregano, and thyme. The oregano especially is liking its new surroundings, shooting out several large sprouts, but the marjoram (after clipping dried stems and flower buds) and thyme are both showing plenty of new growth. The basil dropped a lot of leaves after its frostbite episode, but is showing some new growth here and there. I’m clipping off dried flower stalks and stems that don’t have any growth, hoping the rest of it will come back a bit better. Basil likes lots of light and lots of water, I’ve found — if I don’t water it every 2 or 3 days, it starts to wilt.

Outside: parsley, rosemary, and sage. That rosemary is one tough hombre — The Boy actually ran it over with the van once during the Summer of Discontent; it bent over and sprang back up like it was nothing. It wintered over like a pine tree, shrugging off the cold with aplomb. But my uncle (a retired chef) had the Food Channel on when we were visiting him (he lives fairly close to my mom & bro), and the Barefoot Contessa went out and clipped some fresh rosemary off a plant that must have been the size of some of our shrubs. Now where’s that plant food??? My mother-in-law uses sage in her canning expeditions; she knows she can get what she needs when she needs it. The parsley hung around and did OK through the summer, but really started thriving when the cooler weather arrived. I had a cilantro plant going, but it died for unknown reasons during the summer... maybe too much water.

I want to make a bed for growing garlic... but as cheap as garlic bulbs are at the supermarket, I might not bother.

Music to my ears

I’ve been following the Sony/BMG fiasco, which culminated in several lawsuits, for a while now. The New York class action has brought about some positive change:

Under the Settlement, SONY BMG will be enjoined from using XCP and MediaMax software on audio CDs they manufacture. SONY BMG will implement several changes to its policies and procedures concerning content protection software and the EULAs associated with that software. These changes will ensure that the content protection software will not be installed without the user’s express consent, will be removable from the user’s computer, and will not render the user’s computers vulnerable to known security risks. In addition, the EULAs will be written in plain English and will accurately describe the nature and function of the content protection software.

No more one-cheek sneaks, it looks like. And you thought class-action lawsuits benefit only the lawyers.

Vacation reflections

We got home at about 9:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, to a house full of people. Not only the extras we had when we left, but Mrs. Fetched’s brother, his wife, and their kids. We ended up playing euchre and dominoes until 5 a.m. (that I managed to grasp the Byzantine rules of euchre only goes to show how brain-fried I really was). We spent January 1 not doing much of anything; I was one of the first adults up at 10:30 (Daughter Dearest went to bed around 2 and got up around 9:30). I’ve found that I have a difficult time sleeping much past 9:30 nowadays, no matter how much or little sleep I get.

Yesterday, we went shopping. I think I mentioned that we (as a family) adopted the Hispanic tradition of doing our gift exchange on Jan. 6 (Epiphany or Three Kings’ Day) for several reasons, not the least of which is that it gives us 12 extra days to deal with shopping. Just in case DD or one of the other denizens has started reading, I will not go into details. Neener neener!

The brother & family stayed at our place until this morning: seems the gas company was dragging their feet about sending out a truck to fill their tank until Mrs. Fetched’s mom had a “little talk” with them. Sheesh. To make things even “better,” my cholesterol weighed in at 236 (about 30 points higher than what I expected, yucko). I’m hoping the eating & exercise habits I’m using to attack my blood pressure will also do for the cholesterol. But after only a handful of workouts, it’s taking more effort to get my heart rate up. The way things are going, I’ll have to start running marathons or something.

Chucked right back into the pressure cooker, it helps to reflect on the vacation a bit. We only went down to the beach once — we carried our kites, but it was too calm to fly them, so we walked some instead. The entire week was very nice, except for the flu I talked about earlier.


570 miles from FAR Manor, physically... light-years away, in another sense.

That water is cold, by the way!


Joking with Daughter Dearest, I told her Katrina washed all the dishwashing & laundry detergent out to sea, and the suds are washing up everywhere. In reality, it’s most likely just plain ol’ sea foam.


Back to dealing with reality. *sigh*

Home again

9-½ hours after leaving, give or take. Wife’s brother & his family is here for a little euchre & New Year’s celebration. So FAR Manor is full tonight & I have to go be a host or something. :-P

Outrage of the Day: Bush-league posturing

So you commit criminal acts by using the NSA to spy on American citizens. The news gets out, and what do you do? Stop the criminal acts?

Oh, heck no. Not if your name is George W. Bush, anyway. You go after the “leakers” instead.

I’m sure more readers of Tales from FAR Manor are intelligent enough to know this already: but if you still think this administration is anything but corrupt, you’re living in la-la-land. Period.

Happy b-day, Other Brother!

Hope you got lots of cool stuff!

Fingers crossed

My bro Solar came down with the flu yesterday — fever of 102°F and all. I brought some beef stew from Mom’s last night, then ran & got him some Gatorade this morning. He seemed like he was less than hungry for company, so I came over here to Mom’s for the afternoon. Got a bike ride in (I’m a day behind on exercise this week, foo) and now the bread machine is cranking away at tonight’s rolls. Daughter Dearest is napping, so I have the computer all to myself!

Things are quite a bit different here compared to FAR Manor, which has mostly to do with population density. FAR Manor is in a pretty rural area, sitting on acreage. Pinellas County FL is mostly a low- to mid-density sprawl — lots of low-rise condos, single-family homes, one- or two-story office buildings, and the like. I doubt there are 10 (dry) acres left undeveloped here, or at least 10 contiguous acres¹. At home, I have to go 10 miles just to get to town, 15 to a supermarket. Here, you can walk (or at least bicycle) to the supermarket, since you don’t have to go more than a few blocks to get to one... but going 10 or 15 miles is quite an expedition due to all the stoplights. Trade-offs everywhere you look.

DD and I are talking about going to see Chronicles of Narnia and eating at PJ’s, a seafood restaurant about a block from the beach, tomorrow. Hopefully, I won’t have the flu myself by then.

---

¹I consider a golf course to be developed. Of course, there are lots of those around here.

Vacation blogging

Daughter Dearest is hovering over my shoulder at the moment, wondering when I’m going to get off her computer so she can go back to IM’ing her online buds... hey kid, give me five more minutes, OK?

Internet access is a little restrained here... I need to buy mom an Ethernet hub for Christmas or something. DD is staying here at Mom’s, while my bro Solar is putting me up. He gets his Internet access at work, although he’s talking about having me help him put in wireless.

Have a great Christmas, or whatever holidays you celebrate at this time of year!

Score, big time

Putting stuff away in the outbuilding last night, I found two more short stories from my college days. That brings the total number of shorts found to five since I started this project. I would say those are all I have, but I’d completely forgotten that I’d written these last two... so who knows? Maybe there’s more....

The Ultimate Holiday Greeting

Daughter Dearest has been annoying the Red teachers at school with this one:

Happy Christeidholikwanzukah!

Vacation has begun!

It’s official: I won’t be setting foot in the office until next year.

I’ll take the car in for an oil change tomorrow and generally get it ready. Friday, Daughter Dearest and I will be going to Florida for a week. Woohoo!

My new design mantra

It’s about people, st00p1d!

It applies equally well to product design, documentation design, or work environments.

E-paper becoming feasible?

Category: Technology
Current music: Digitally Imported (DI.fm) EuroDance
According to this article in Wired, Siemens has demonstrated a flexible, ultra-thin, ultra-cheap display technology. Wired’s lead-off is a tad alarmist, though: “The cereal aisle at your local supermarket may soon resemble the Las Vegas strip,” they warn us.

Um, no.

First off, the article quotes several skeptics who question whether Siemens can manufacture the e-paper in quantity. Assuming they leap that hurdle, they’re talking about 30 cents for a piece of e-paper measuring a couple of square inches (or a handful of cm²). The realities of mass retail suggest — no, scream — that when a box of cereal costs about $3 and a can of soup goes for 59 cents or less, adding 30 cents to the per-unit packaging costs will fly about as well as a pig. There might be a handful of special promotional cases, but overall I wouldn’t be concerned about blinking cereal boxes any time soon (where “soon” is 2008 and beyond).

But if the Siemens e-paper idea works out, it could be the final piece of the puzzle that leads to widespread acceptance of E-books. I thought I’d written about this before, but it must have been off-blog. I believe that electronic books will only become popular when the readers are cheap enough to be disposable — selling for $10 in the checkout line racks, for example — and are no larger than a paperback book. The major hurdle here has been the display; they're relatively bulky and too expensive to make E-book readers more than a “bleeding edge” idea at the moment. Take a page or two of Siemens flexible e-paper, put a card slot and some rudimentary controls on it, and you have a reader.

Now watch book publishers try to kill the technology the way the RIAA and MPAA are trying to kill DVD/CD writers....

The War on Christmas: Dispatches from the front

Perhaps The Register won’t yank this story about Bad Santas terrorizing New Zealand like they did with the guy who chatted up his mom online....

Gmail Mobile

Gmail, if you haven’t heard, is Google’s free (but invitation-only) email service. They’ve recently added a useful new feature: you can access Gmail through your cellphone at http://m.gmail.com — I tried it with my Moto V220 and it worked pretty well.

I have 100 invites; if anyone wants a Gmail address just leave a comment. You need to include an email address for the invite. Munge the address to foil the spammers, but not so much that I can't make it out.

Busy weekend

Current music: DI.fm Chillout
I’m not terribly fond of weekends where you have no decompress time.

Saturday morning dawned; Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest headed out to deal with the chickens. I decided to try fixing some pancakes for when they got back, and botched them totally (my brain-fart was forgetting about the self-rising flour). With no milk, I used the remnants of a can of condensed milk plus water to thin it out, then tossed in some self-rising flour hoping to correct the mistake. Didn’t work. Not even the boys ate them.

So we rushed out the door to a 50^th wedding anniversary for some friends of the in-laws. It was a nice outing overall; starting at a Ryan’s, then we ended up at one of their houses where we shot a couple rounds of pool and shot the breeze with people we haven’t seen much of. From there we went straight to a Christmas party put on by a couple at church; I enjoyed some spiked eggnog and we all chowed down again.

This morning, I got dressed and sat down with the iBook for the first time in several days. Her Imperial Highness came out, literally looked down her nose at me, and ordered me to get the boys up and go over to the church early to vacuum the sanctuary and take the greens out of the window (there was a wedding this afternoon). Ooooooookayyyy... first off, she certainly knows that getting the boys up doesn’t go with getting anywhere early. Of course, The Boy had a friend over (we wish he had more friends like EJ, but that’s a different story), so of course he had to have an attitude.

First trip upstairs: “OK, I’m getting up.”
Second trip: “I’m not going to church, I’ll go help at the chicken houses.”
Third trip: “I don’t have to get up.”

At that point, I told him that he could remember that when he was walking to work and back today, then asked EJ if he wanted to come to church with me. He did, they both got moving, I dropped The Boy off at the chicken houses and grabbed the church keys out of Her Imperial Highness’s purse (another minor detail), then took care of things at church.

After church, we ended up getting some pizza, had about an hour and a half before going out again with the in-laws. Then SWMBO decided the living room had to be cleaned up (and it’s mostly her stuff), but I got a reprieve to pick up M.A.E. from work.

Now it’s bedtime. I can’t wait to get back to the office and relax a little...

The Boy meets Reality

One of the recurring theme of conversations with The Boy, especially bringing him home from work, is his assertion that he, Lobster, and M.A.E. are going to move out and get an apartment in January. My audible response has usually been a grunt, although I think “Yeah right” to myself. Trying to explain the Real World to The Boy, I have found, is a waste of syllables; I figured he’d find out for himself.

So with school closed around here Thursday and Friday due to the ice, they piled into Lobster’s truck and went off to secure an apartment they had scoped out some time back. M.A.E. later told us that the manager wouldn’t rent to them because The Boy and Lobster are still in high school, and “we’ve had problems doing that before.” The other minor detail was three people of mixed gender in a two-bedroom apartment. Nobody would come out and say it, but it was pretty clear that The Boy and M.A.E. had planned to share one of the rooms.

The Boy said, “everything was going fine until the manager asked us if we were students [presumably at the local college -FF], and M.A.E. said we were in high school.” He didn’t even mention the other part.

In a vain attempt to further drive the lesson home, Mrs. Fetched ran a few numbers past The Boy: at $525/month rent, each person had agreed to put up $175/month. Lobster says he can’t even afford to pay us $100/month for rent (plus all the food he eats), and M.A.E. barely brings home more than that per month. With the only full-time job among the three of them, The Boy would be the one essentially paying the rent. And then there’s the minor detail of electric bills, heating bills, laundry, food... kiss all the extracurricular stuff (movies twice/week, shooting pool) goodbye. He didn’t respond much. With him, you can’t tell if it’s sinking in or bouncing off.

Last winter’s ice storm

The beginning and end of this year have seen ice storms at FAR Manor now. The storm in January was much stronger, icing up the ground as well as the trees (only the trees today). Even in the northern reaches of Planet Georgia, ice doesn’t stay around too long — so you grab the camera while you have the chance. Today, I didn’t have the chance... but January’s storm was more photogenic anyway. Here’s a few pictures....

On the road in front of FAR Manor.


Part of the front yard. The tree dominating the picture flowers in the spring.


A Christmas ornament of sorts. Too bad it would have been just a stick 10 minutes after bringing it inside...


This is my personal favorite. It has been the desktop wallpaper on my iBook all year now.

Lunchtime blogging

Second night in a row that I couldn’t get to the computer — I was mucking out the gutters in the outbuilding, by hand, in the dark cold rain, last night. Blog stuff is backing up, so I compromised on my self-imposed “no blogging at work” rule and decided to post all this junk at lunch.

The NWS was a little more optimistic about last night’s weather than they should have been — they said we would be well clear of any significant freezing rain. WRONG! Power glitched at the house and rang a phone once, this morning, but everything else seems to be OK. I disconnected the DSL box at home just to make sure. Going to work was a bit of an adventure; the roads were only wet (not icy) but power was out in town and several traffic lights were dark on the highway. And how the juice managed to stay on at FAR Manor is a puzzlement. At work, the power had glitched some time last night, long enough to shut off my G3. I ran the disk repair stuff and got to work.

It’s still this cold steel rain (phrase borrowed from Pink Floyd, it’s perfect) outside, so I dug into the more dubious reaches of my overhead bin for lunch. I have several packs of ramen for days like this, but I only used a pinch of the beef-flavored sodium packet and opted instead for this “Kyo-Green® dietary supplement” packet that’s been sitting on my desk for like forever. Oh, the ingredients sounded soooo appetizing: barley grass powder, wheat grass powder, Bulgarian Chlorella (an algae grown in mineral springs, yum), cooked brown rice, and Pacific kelp (more yum). I’m not a picky eater, so when I say it was “edible,” adjust for your own level of picky. I figured worst-case, I’d be out 20 cents for the ramen and I could still go out. I’m scarfing some potato chips and some quality candy & nuts that the employer handed out yesterday as a side dish. We’ll see if I end up with with a major download event this afternoon....

The Piña Colada Song revisited

“I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams.... But when I got close, she turned around — and we both got the shock of our lives.”

It happened in France, of course. Quality journalism by The Register, as usual.

The Carpet Has Landed

The carpet stretcher worked a treat, as my friends across the pond might say. Mrs. Fetched thought it looked great. I finished tacking down the end where it stops a few feet short of the workbench (desired, although not planned) last night. All that’s left to do is put some plant hangers in the window and bring most of the stuff back in.

It occurred to me that I haven’t done a pictorial entry in a while. I’ll rectify that when I have it together, I hope by this weekend.

Fiction: The Pickup Artist and His Talking Car

I wrote this a long time ago — say, 1992 or so. The original hinted at an 80’s setting, when speech synthesizers were first hitting mass markets and people were amused by them as much as annoyed. But most of the themes are timeless, and it didn’t take much work to make it as relevant now as ten years ago.

So read on to find out just how goofy things get when Casual Sex meets Rise of the Machines...

The Pickup Artist and His Talking Car

Bobby and Amanda lurched forth from the Lizard Lounge some time after midnight Saturday morning, together yet strangers. Her boyfriend had recently left Amanda for one of her few friends; and after about five drinks, going home with a complete stranger sounded like a good idea. A fine idea.

As for Bobby, helping Amanda get back at her boyfriend was an idea that needed no drinks to sound good, although he drank them anyway. So he picked her up — or she picked him up. Whatever. Amanda hadn’t cleaned up her place lately, between work and sulking, so they decided on Bobby’s place.

“D’you think you can get us there okay?” Amanda asked with just a touch of slur. She wasn’t drunk enough to need support, but liked leaning against Bobby. His warmth felt nice in the cool spring air — he wasn’t bad looking either, and seemed like a good enough guy in the bar. There was still a small, nagging doubt about what she was doing, but figured another rum and Coke or three would erase it when they got to Bobby’s place.

“Yeah, the car knows its way home...” Bobby suddenly gave her a nervous look. “’Manda, lemme tell you something about my car —”

“Oh, it’s okay if it’s old. I’m not going home with you for your car.”

“No, no,” Bobby attempted again. “I mean the car... talks.”

Amanda grinned. “My best friend has one of those cars. I’m not some idiot, y’know. I can make my computers at work talk.”

“That’s not what I mean. The thing really talks. And it doesn’t have much nice to say.”

“Oooo, a possessed car. Good thing you didn’t try using that for a pickup line.” Bobby had come to like Amanda’s lopsided grin in the hour or so he’d known her, and even when teasing him now it looked even better than before. (The rest of her looked pretty nice too, he thought.)

“Well, not possessed, really, but damn it’s temperamental.” He tugged at his collar, already loose. “Well, you’ll find out...”

“Temperamental, huh?” Amanda looked intrigued. Sweeping an arm across the parking lot, she cried, “Lead on, Bobby McDuff — or whatever your last name is. Let’s meet this temperamental car.” She gave him a kiss, for encouragement.

Bobby’s car wasn’t particularly noticeable — a brown Nissan, about ten years old, looking reasonably well-maintained. He helped Amanda into the passenger seat, then stalked around to the driver’s side, muttering, “I hope this one lasts more than two blocks.”

He got in and started the car. Bongg. “Fasten seat belts,” the mechanical feminine voice said. Then, “Jeez, you’re polluted. I’d better drive.”

Forewarned or not, Amanda goggled at Bobby. “You weren’t kidding!”

“Yes, Christine, I know I’ve over-indulged,” Bobby said to the dashboard. “Talking cars drive a man to drink; I told you that.”

Bongg. “And who is this?” The mechanical voice sounded definitely icy.

“I’m Amanda. Nice to meet you, Christine.” She looked at the dashboard, and then at Bobby, who wasn’t touching the steering wheel as the car poked its way through the parking lot.

Bongg. “That’s not my real name,” the voice replied. It took on an edge as the car turned out of the parking lot, with Bobby leaning back in the seat with his hands behind his head. “Booby, among his many other vices, likes Stephen King novels. A Japanese car has a Japanese name, and mine is Miko.”

Bobby snarled, with an air of haven’t-we-been-through-this-before, “Yeah, but aren’t Japanese women supposed to be meek or something?”

Bongg. “But Japanese women aren’t made of steel and plastic,” Miko snapped. “And if it wasn’t for me, you’d have lost your license for DUI a long time ago, and you know it.

“Amanda, you should know you’re not Bobby’s first pickup attempt by a long shot. Of course, once his bimbos get to talk to me for a few minutes, they usually sober up and run.”

Bobby slammed the steering wheel. “Amanda is not a bimbo! Now you apologize and I mean right now — or I’ll by God pour sand in your crankcase first thing tomorrow morning!” He grinned nastily. “You’re paid off, after all.”

Amanda burst out laughing. “Bobby, this is wonderful. How did you program this? You really ought to take it on the road; you’d be rich!”

Bobby and Miko responded in unison, “We do. Every morning.” Bobby smiled and said, “One thing we have in common — neither one of us can resist a bad joke.”

Amanda doubled over laughing, catching herself on the dashboard. Gasping for breath, she finally wiped her eyes. “I just can’t believe this! I’ve done expert system programming for three years and I thought it was impossible to create an AI this good! How long have you been driving around in this... breakthrough?”

Bongg. “No work of Bobby’s, I assure you.” Miko’s voice managed to convey a touch of light humor. “He’s an accountant, pretty good at cranking numbers into a computer but not a programmer.”

“I have a theory,” Bobby rejoined. “You know how cars kind of develop a personality when they get older? Well Chri— Miko started talking about the time she — it? got up to about eighty thousand miles.”

Bongg. “I was using oil, and Bobby’s no mechanic. Good with numbers like I said, but — anyway, he got frustrated and yelled at me. ‘I wish you could tell me why the hell you’re using oil all the time,’ he said, so I told him to check the front seals. He was so surprised, he nearly drove right into a tree.”

“Yeah,” Bobby continued, “and since then Miko tells me when something’s wrong and even tells me how to fix it myself. A hundred and ninety-three thousand miles, and runs like new. I figure I’ll have this car forever, if it doesn’t drive me nuts and I drive it off a cliff.”

Amanda looked goggle-eyed at Bobby again. “You mean it — she —”

Bongg. “Home sweet apartment,” Miko announced. “Run on in and have a good time, kids.” They were both sobered up somewhat, and Amanda was keyed up trying to figure out how Miko could have happened, but Bobby had most of a bottle of rum and a few cans of cola in the refrigerator. They had a good time. A fine time.

Bobby woke up alone at about ten, not hung over enough to not wonder what happened to Amanda. He stumbled into the kitchen/dining nook, and found his answer:

Hey sweetie, had to wrap up a project at work.
Would have left you some breakfast but you don’t
have nothing but cereal. Typical bachelor (ha ha).

My place tonight. Supper, whatever, breakfast.


I'll be ready about 5-ish.
Call me for directions. 555-6124 after about 1.

Say hi to Miko for me!
XXX, Amanda

Bobby reached for the cereal, then thought about Amanda’s comment. Throwing on the first clean clothes he found on the bedroom floor, he headed out to Miko, staggering a bit in the bright sunshine.

Bongg. “Where to on a late Saturday morning? Amanda’s place?” Miko sounded not a bit surly for once — rather friendly, in fact.

“Later on, this evening,” Bobby smiled. “Right now, we’re off to the Breakfast House.” He squinted at the reflections off Miko and the other cars. “Whoosh, it’s bright this morning. You mind driving?”

Bongg. “Not at all. I saw her leave this morning; she said ‘see you later.’ I hoped you got her phone number. You need to hang on to this one, I think.”

That evening, Bobby and Miko pulled up to Amanda’s place, to be greeted with a kiss for Bobby and a cheery hello for Miko. As they went inside, Bobby shook his head, “Miko really likes you, and I finally think I’m starting to like her too. It. Whatever.”

“I like her too. But if I ever find out you programmed her, I’ll break your fingers.” Amanda grinned. “Well, maybe nine.”

“Well, I’m safe then,” Bobby grinned, flexing his fingers a little nervously. “But I’m still amazed by it all. How did you get off on the right foot with her?”

“Me too,” Amanda gave Bobby that lopsided grin he liked so much, throwing her arms around him. “But I remembered something about my dad. He had this old Chevy, and I swear he was the only one who could get it started. He used to say you just had to know how to talk to a temperamental car.”

---

The Empty Chair Campaign

I saw this on Street Prophets, and thought it worth passing on.

Woohoo!

A piece of the carpet we pulled out of the living room is going in my outbuilding. This, of course, entails clearing the floor of all furniture and detritus. As I was moving things out little by little, the renter came by to drop off the car ramps I let him borrow a while back — he offered to help me get the rest of the stuff out, and I gratefully accepted his help.

While stacking some loose papers, I came across two short stories I wrote ’way back in the 80s. I was looking for one of them in particular; it was going to be the first story I posted on the blog. Now I just have to type ’em in.

My back’s a little sore from moving furniture and trying to kick the wrinkles out of the carpet, so no happy dance right now. I guess I’ll drop by the chiro-cracker on the way to work tomorrow morning.

Off to type in a couple of stories...

More hot water for Sony

Sony/BMG says they are “re-evaluating its current methods” with regard to copy protection. Another copy-protection method, used on about 32 CDs distributed in the US, turned up security holes — and the patch sent out just made things worse.

Note that they didn’t say “having second thoughts” — it’s just a re-evaluation. No doubt they want something harder to detect and defeat. Remember, the goal is pay-to-play, and they’re not going to give up easily.