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.

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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.”

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The Empty Chair Campaign

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