2009 On The Horizon: Welcome!

As my daughter said when she was two years old, running to me with her arms outstretched to be picked up, "Happy Near You!"

Nuggets For Me To Remember

1. An den Familienversammlungen ist politische Diskussion verboten.


2. Exercising at the speed of masochism relieves a lot of stress


3. Choice can be exercised against you.


4. This is my blog; no one else is owed an explanation.

A Christmas Classic

The Little Angel on the Top of the Christmas Tree

One particular Christmas season a long time ago, Santa was getting ready for his annual trip but there were problems everywhere. Four of his elves got sick, and the trainee elves did not produce the toys as fast as the regular ones so Santa was beginning to feel the pressure of being behind schedule. Then Mrs. Claus told Santa that her Mom was coming to visit; this stressed Santa even more.

When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two had jumped the fence and were out at heaven knows where. More stress.

Then when he began to load the sleigh one of the boards cracked and the toy bag fell to the ground and scattered the toys. So, frustrated, Santa went into the house for a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered that the elves had hid the liquor and there was nothing to drink.

In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the coffeepot and it broke into hundreds of little pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found that mice had eaten the straw it was made of. Just then the doorbell rang and Santa cussed on his way to the door. He opened the door and there was a little angel with a great big Christmas tree.

The angel said, very cheerfully, "Merry Christmas Santa. Isn't it just a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Isn't it just a lovely tree? Where would you like me to stick it?

Thus began the tradition of the little angel on top of the tree.

Author Unknown

December 23, 1982

I was first married 26 years ago today. I got three children out of that marriage. Each of them is part of my reach to immortality; each of them gives me more joy than I can adequately express.

I am now married for the third time, and this also is a source of more joy than I have the words for.

Gigi, Andy, David, and Lisa: I love you all and treasure every minute we have together in this life.

War For The Oaks

Tor.com occasionally gives away ebooks. You have to be a registered member, but it is free to join. And there are times that these giveaways are treasures. Let's talk about one of them.

Have you ever read the real Grimm's Fairy Tales? Not the sanitized versions that so many Disney movies are based on, but the ones that are dark and violent. Where the magic is based on Fae, not the more familiar Fairy. Where the supernatural Folk never lie but are always deceitful, are unfathomably powerful, are deadly and inhuman and coldly seductive. And they're beautiful, rather beyond human ken.

There has been a trend in books, steadily growing in popularity, since the late 1980s to mix Faerie, or some like variant, and our everyday world. This collision of magic and mundane is usually marketed as "Urban Fantasy".

This is the milieu of War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull. It was published in 1987, and it is one of the earliest Urban Fantasies, almost a prototype of the genre.

It is set in the rock and roll scene of Minneapolis. Eddi McCandry has just broken up with her boyfriend and left his band. She's thinking of getting a 9-to-5 job, of growing up and making ends meet. Instead, she is chosen by a phouka, a Fae who can shift from human to dog at will, as the Mortal whose presence on the field of battle between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of the Fae will allow immortal life to spill out with immortal blood. She can shift the balance of power and enable victory, rather than stalemate.

Simultaneously, Eddi starts her own rock band. The group that forms around her is uncannily good, there is power in their music, and Eddi herself is unknowingly a Power in her own right.

This is a story of deceit, of magic, of blood, of loss, and of love. It is a first novel that does not read like one, and it is a rich and rewarding tale that is to be savored, many times over.

Let's Skip These This Holiday Season, Shall We?

• Grinch II - Cindy Lou, THAT'S Who.


• Saving Christmas, A "Rainbow Six" Adventure


• Winnie the Pooh and the Human Shield


• The Dyslexic Who Sold His Soul to Santa


• Jack Frost vs. Jack Reacher - This Time, It Counts!


• Flat Rudolph: Grandma's Revenge


• Snosty the Fro Man


• Charlie Brown Gets a Pit Bull!


• Pretty Paper: You've Been Served


• The Story of O, Christmas Tree

Compressed, Compared To My Intentions

When I was composing my post last week on the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Christmas Eve and Other Stories, my intention was to discuss the popularity of the CD versus critical incomprehension of that popularity, with a sidebar of what the CD means to me. It's not unusual for me to do a rough draft and several revisions; you know, like a real writer.

This time, I could not find the words to coherently express my ideas. It felt stifling, an aphasia of the page. It's usually enough to leave the draft for a couple of hours, maybe overnight, and the words I need will come to me. My subconscious mind seems to be a competent prosesmith, if no one's poet. That's fine with me, since I strive for clarity, not allusion.

This time, the clarity for the extended essay I had in mind never materialized. I was left with a quote and quip, grasping for an emotional shading. Did I succeed? I'm satisfied with the effort, but the success really depends on whether I intrigued anyone else into listening to the music.

Emissaries From The Dead

The Diplomatic Corps is part of the government of an interstellar Commonwealth. This is not your father's Star Trek future. Humanity is if anything more fractious than today, even in the face of meeting many other intelligent alien races as it moves out into the galaxy. One such race is the AISource, a collective of sentient software agents that gains new members as they outlive their programmers. They built One One One, a huge cylindrical habitat, and populated it with several engineered species. One of the species is the Brachiators, an intelligent sloth-like race that lives in the Uppergrowth, a forest at the central hub. A group of scientists from the Diplomatic Corps is onsite to do field studies of the Brachiators, and one of their number has been murdered. Enter Andrea Cort. She's a Dip Corps investigator, who considers herself a monster, as do many others, for a childhood atrocity.

This novel starts out very bleak. In fact, I almost quit reading it more than once during the first half of the story, because life is too short and there are too many books I really want to read to stick with something that's just depressing. I stayed with it, though, because Adam-Troy Castro's writing flows smoothly, and before I knew it, I was well and truly sucked into the story.

The murder mystery at the heart of the story is not really that surprising; I correctly anticipated several twists in the tale, and that's not usual for me. However, I got almost the feeling that I used to when I watched Columbo as a kid, where we the audience knew who committed the murder, but the pleasure was watching Peter Falk's Lt. Columbo figure it out. I say almost that feeling, because we don't know who the murderer is until Andrea Cort figures it out. And that feeling is pure pleasure.

It was also a particular pleasure to catch resonances to quite a few other science fiction novels I've read over the years: One One One is Arthur C. Clark's Rama writ large; the AISource is the very sort of pervasive artificial intelligence as the TechnoCore from Dan Simmon's Hyperion; the character of Andrea Cort strongly resembles Paula Myo from Peter F. Hamilton's continuing Intersolar Commonwealth series; and the way that Andrea Cort unravels and reveals not one but a half-dozen intertwined mysteries, so that we're forced to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the setting and characters again and again, is like the heart of Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead.

This is a heady brew of a book, with the richest portion being the positive growth that is imposed on Andrea Cort. Yes, imposed on her.

Outside of Doctorow's Little Brother, I consider this the finest science fiction novel of 2008, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Christmas Eve and Other Stories

And here was the danger
That even with strangers
Inside of this night
It's easier to believe.

If you've ever seen TSO in concert, you'll understand when I say, "Have yourself a metal little Christmas."

Another Sign of the Times

My daughter Gigi called me yesterday afternoon. She's been working at an Office Depot since early this year, and the store is closing in a couple of weeks. She's out beating the bushes to find another job already, but she's worried about getting Christmas gifts and then about college expenses next semester.

I told her not to worry about presents for us. After all, we have more stuff than room.

There are always jobs out there, even in bad times, she has several years experience as a cashier, and, well, she's a lower priced alternative than a lot of other people.

As for college costs, she still has financial aid, she has help from me and her mom, and she has her savings. None of us want her to have to dip into the savings, but they're there at need.

To my daughter - Gigi, remember these things: 1) The greatest gifts you can give us are your own high achievements and your love, and I know we have those. 2) We're here when you need us. 3) This is only a stumbling block. Stay on your feet, keep focused on your goals, and keep moving. I love you, girl.

I Love A Parade

We were in the Greensboro Christmas parade last Saturday, with the Relay For Life committee. It was really windy and we didn't want everything to blow off the float, so we didn't decorate it until we had checked in with parade officials and gotten into line. Four of us got the heavy lifting done in about 30 minutes, and the rest of our group put the finishing touches on in another 15. The parade theme was "Our Gift to Greensboro"; we had packages wrapped in purple (the Relay color) and emblazoned with Relay slogans, a purple tree, and a bunch of kids on the float.

Once the prep was done, we had an hour-and-a-half before the parade kicked off. One of the committee members brought doughnuts and hot chocolate. It was really cold, so the hot chocolate was appreciated. So was the sugar rush from the doughnuts.

Thank goodness there was a Duron paint store nearby with a public restroom.

We had candy and Relay literature to give out to the crowds. There were so many kids with their hands out that we were constantly behind our float, so it was pass out candy manically and then run to catch up with the float. I couldn't have run like that six months ago.

It was way more fun than I expected it to be. It also has already had a positive effect for the 2009 Relay, because we got a commitment from Starbucks.

A Brief Saturday Morning Conversation

Enter two friendly souls, as the sun arises:

Wide awake me: Carp!
Sleepy Lisa: Carp?
Wide awake me: Yeah, it's what you say when your crap goes to crap.
Sleepy Lisa: Sounds like you have a sig line to me.

Exit Lisa, stage sleep.

Where Does It Stop?

I commented on the Wal-Mart worker who was trampled to death when the store opened the day after Thanksgiving. Yesterday, I heard on the news that Wal-Mart, by which I'm guessing employees of the store involved, could be indicted for the incident. The store management has said, and I believe local government officials have acknowledged, that they beefed up security and took precautions that were a bit beyond reasonable for Black Friday.

How's this for an idea? Find the people who followed a herd mentality looking for a bargain, knocked a temporary maintenance worker to the floor, and kept stepping on him and stepping on him, and stepping him on him, until he sustained injuries serious enough to kill him. Hold them responsible for the act. If you can't identify culpable individuals, then sad to say, no one gets prosecuted.

Common sense seems to have been sucked into an evil vortex of negative energy and spit back out as the justice system in New York state.

Planned Reading For 2009

I've read about half of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, and now I'm feeling inspired by the new Legend of the Seeker syndicated series to finish it. Of course, I'm going to have to re-read the first five books...

I'd also like to catch up on some classic SF, particularly those novels that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

And, it's probably time to re-read Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels.

As always, Lisa and I will snap up anything new from Dean Koontz.

What's on your list?

Grumbles From The Job

I have an administrative user id that I use on several Windows servers at work. I needed it last Tuesday, to research some production results that a user felt were incorrect. When I went to login to the prod server, I couldn't remember the password.

This happens from time-to-time, and it's usually solved in 10 minutes with a call to the help desk, with a request to reset the password. This time, it took six days.

The contractors that man the help desk aren't allowed to reset admin accounts. Such security work is done by a subsidiary in Europe. There was a language gap, and the technician assigned to my case didn't understand the request. By the time on Wednesday that I realized my password hadn't been reset, the European office was closed for the day. Since Thursday was Thanksgiving and we were going to be closed Friday, I didn't complain very much on my second help desk call. Really, I expected that the work would be complete when I got to the office this morning.

Once I realized that it wasn't done, I made my third help desk call on this case. This time the help desk analyst was casual with me, almost slackerish, rather than professional. He made excuses for the work not being done in the previous five days, and that just pissed me off. I'm usually the most civil guy you could want on such a call, but this was just too easy a task to take almost a week to complete.

I had the case escalated to a much higher urgency than I normally would, and it was taken care of within a half hour.

Not long after this, I needed to use a test server for some enhancements on another application. I tried to map a network drive to the test server, and that failed. I tried to login remotely to the server, and that also failed. After another help desk call, I learned, to no surprise at all, that the server was shut down. A Windows support tech got the server restarted, and I was off to the races.

Between these two incidents, most of my workday was shot. I'm reminded of an Emo Philips quip: Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa

I would never have imagined that a movie could have successfully combined references to Jaws and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King along with a sacrifice to a volcano in one scene. That was before Lisa and I saw Madagascar 2 this afternoon. Since this movie is from Dreamworks Animation, there are lots of clever pop culture references. The CGI animation is state-of-the-art, and as such may be taken for granted. That's a bit of a shame, because it is so well done.

We laughed quite a bit and had our heartstrings tugged, too.

Thinking back to the summer, three of the last four movies we've seen at the cinema have been CGI comedies. The other one was Will Smith's usual big summer release. I find that I have no desire to pay $8.00 for 2 hours of heavy melodrama, tragedy, or completely mindless action any more. A $4.00 matinee that makes me laugh is what it takes to get me to the cinema nowadays.

If you saw the first Madagascar three years ago, you should remember the penguins. They steal the show again, especially when they stage a mugging just after the opening credits.

Black Friday

Yesterday, on the biggest shopping day of the year, an employee at a Long Island Wal-Mart was trampled to death when, just after the front doors were opened, the crowd of around 2000 "out of control" shoppers surged in. These same shoppers protested the store closing for several hours because an employee had been killed. One Wal-Mart worker was quoted, "How could you take a man's life to save $20 on a TV?"

I have no problem with quite a lot of the commercialization that comes with Christmas. This is the time of year that most American retail establishments live or die by; but, people that will trample someone else to death over savings on material goods? They've lost touch with why we give gifts.

I refuse to sully the spiritual underpinnings of the Christmas season by honoring the dollar to anything close to that extent.

Another Thing About That Elephant In The Room

I had both a mammogram and an ultrasound this morning. The radiologist interpreting the tests diagnosed me as having gynecomastia, which is the development of large mammary glands in males, resulting in breast enlargement. This can be caused by certain prescription drugs or by changes in sex-related hormones; many cases have no clear cause.

In my case, I'm not taking any drugs known or even suspected to cause gynecomastia.

The radiologist indicated that the lump is benign, and there's no need for any follow up treatment. That's why the elephant is doing a happy dance.

The Christmas Season Has Started!

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra came to Greensboro last Friday, and as is our custom, Lisa and I went. This is five years running we've gone to see TSO live, and this year we took Lisa's mom Meki, brother Rusty, nephew Cooper, and niece Ripley. A couple of the vocalists were different this year, as were the bassist and one of the keyboardists, but the heart of the performance is guitarists Chris Caffery and Alex Skolnick, who have been in the traveling troop we've seen every year. Oh, and the light show:



We also went to the Tanglewood Festival of Lights in Winston-Salem, on Saturday night. There are roughly 1,000,000 lights in all the displays, and a great deal of cleverness. Here's the final display:

In the woods

CNN reported this bemusing story today.

Last Night While We Slept

My car and the bush that guards it got a dusting. Central North Carolina, November, and snow just don't mix.

The Future is Here, and So is the Past

I've just read two wildly divergent bloggers / columnists, John Scalzi and Chet Flippo. The first is a science fiction writer, the second a music journalist who covers country music. And they both had some extremely interesting points about human behavior and identity (both individual and group), and how these are affected by technology.

Scalzi is here, and Flippo is here.

DotNot, Part 3.5

I forgot to mention the most frustrating characteristic of Microsoft .Net in my last DotNot post. C#, Visual Basic .Net, and indeed any .Net language, are strongly typed programming languages. Types in .Net include not only all data items, but all classes.

I have never before programmed in languages that are so rigid in conversions between data types, and this concept is harder to wrap my brain around than any purely object oriented concept I have encountered.

About That Elephant In The Room

I've long heard the saying about ignoring the elephant in the room, and I don't want to be guilty of ignoring an obvious truth. So, here goes.

I have a lump in my right breast, and my doctor is sending me to a specialist for a mammogram and an ultrasound. It's also a source of concern that my mom has twice had breast cancer.

This may be nothing, or it may be everything. I'd be rather deep in denial if I said I were totally unconcerned, but I'm not afraid. I'm going to wait to freak out until I have something to freak out over.

DotNot, Part 3

Previously in this series, I have covered my professional history, my past. Before I move on to an extended discussion of the present, let's sum up a couple of pertinent points concerning the past.

As a software developer primarily using COBOL, I thoroughly internalized the procedural programming model. This methodology requires an extremely straightforward, step-by-step mode of thinking. A flowchart is a very good representation of this style.

Scope is the lifetime of a data item in a program. It is also the reach of both a piece of information and executable code. In a program written in a procedural oriented program, scope encompasses the entire program.

So, to the present. The dominant software development methodology currently is object oriented programming. What, you may rightly wonder, does this mean, and how is it different from what went before?

Object oriented programming, or OOP, is a philosophy that focuses on "black box" entities rather than processes. It is a way to represent real life items, their attributes, and their behaviors in executable code. These representations, these "objects", are discrete building blocks that, when combined, form functional programs. They are also easy to reuse.

OOP is accomplished through myriad programming tools, among them the classic languages C++ and Smalltalk, as well as the contemporary Java from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's C# and Visual Basic.Net. Each of these languages must support certain concepts: encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism.

Encapsulation is the embodiment of a program as a black box object. The idea is that the user of an object needs to know that as long as the interface to the object is consistent, he will receive consistent data back on each use; there is no need for the user to be aware of the inner workings of the object. The interface defines what will be passed to the object and the what will be returned to the user. The how of achieving this is hidden from the user, encapsulated in the object.

Inheritance is the notion that you start with a very generic template in code. This template is called a class, and it contains your basic functionality. Now, describe a slightly more specific case, one that requires one or more small functional extensions. This more specific case requires a new class that is derived from the generic base class; the only new code is what the extensions require. Everything else is inherited from the base class. Think Car or Truck based on Vehicle. This can be extended to more and more specific cases.

Remember that a class is a template for an object; an object in turn is an instance of a class. When the program for a class is executed, an object has been instantiated.

Polymorphism means that something has multiple forms. Objects have methods, which, when invoked, do something; in fact, an object can have multiple methods with the same name. Imagine Car Starts using only a key in normal circumstances, but it Starts with a key and jumper cables when the battery is dead. Object Car has at least two Starts methods, and the one that executes depends on what parameters are passed when the method is invoked.

There's certainly more to OOP than this introduction, but take away this basic difference from the procedural model: where procedural programming is extremely straightforward, specific, and concrete, OOP is indirect and generic. Its goal is the abstraction of functionality, especially very common functions, into a library of plug-in modules that can be snapped into an application wherever they're needed, and reused as often as possible.

In OOP, the scope of both data and executable code is severely limited compared to a procedural program.

My company uses Microsoft technology in software development. Microsoft's approach to OOP is the .Net (pronounced dot net) framework, and as I've said before, OOP is a struggle for any programmer who learned and practiced procedural programming, as I did, for 15 years. That's why this series of essays has been entitled DotNot.

I learn any new concept or skill best by hands-on practice. As I do more OOP, the struggle lessens, so maybe I'll reach DotYes someday.

---

An addendum, wherein I whine about the .Net type system.

If the Matrix ran on Windows XP

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Somebody stop the wagon...

...that I fell off of last week! I didn't make the best choices in what I ate last week, but at least I didn't gain any weight. I did exercise a bit more than I had been.

Empire From The Ashes

This is an omnibus edition of three early novels by David Weber: Mutineer's Moon, The Armageddon Inheritance, and Heirs of Empire. This story is grand scale space opera, and it's a great deal of fun.

In Mutineer's Moon, we find that Earth's moon is actually a disguised starship named Dahak that has been in place for 51,000 years. It is following the orders of its captain, to quarantine a group of crew members who mutinied, fled to Earth, and have used their superior technology to control and reshape the destiny of the human race. Dahak has over the millenia become self-aware and more autonomous than his initial programming allows; he impresses astronaut Colin MacIntyre to be his new captain. There is a new urgency to Dahak's actions. He was part of the fleet of an interstellar empire, the Fourth Imperium, which was formed to combat the repeated encroachment of the genocidal Achuultani, and readings from still active sensors tell him that the Achuultani have returned and are a couple of years away from Earth. War against the mutineers ensues.

The Armageddon Inheritance chronicles the larger war against the Achuultani and the formation of the Fifth Imperium.

Heirs of Empire tells the story of an unbelievably ruthless and deadly conspiracy against the Fifth Imperium by one of the human descendants of the Dahak mutineers.

Despite coming out early in his career, these novels show many of Weber's considerable strengths: tight plotting, furious action, intricate political maneuvering; and few of his faults: straw man characters (his villains especially tend to be rather two dimensional) and bloated prose (he handles exposition by resorting to huge info dumps, often in the middle of conversations).

Weber often has pivotal events happen off-stage and then has other characters tell the reader what happened. This greatly dilutes the impact of the climax of one of the plot strands in Heirs of Empire. A more stringent editor could help keep this from happening.

Veteran's Day 2008

Today is Veteran's Day here in the US. It's Armistice Day in many other countries. World War I ended 90 years ago today. My grandfather was on a troop ship headed for Europe on that day.

My father was drafted not long after the end of the Korean War. He had no desire to be a warrior, but he served his two year tour of duty in Germany.

I am forever proud of and grateful for their service.

I can't match what they did. To my lasting shame, I failed Air Force Office Training School.

I would not want to see my children sacrificed to the machine, the grind of War. But, if any one of them told me she or he was answering Uncle Sam's call, I would look her or him in the eye and tell them how very proud I was. And I'd mean it. You give up a great deal to join the Armed Forces, and I'd never dishonor that decision.

I have twice in my life knowingly stood on sacred ground. Abraham Lincoln said this about the Gettysburg battlefield: The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. And the other place?



Blood, memory, and sacrifice. The willingness to give everything. Some do it for blood lust. Some do it for discipline. Some do it for love.

To our troops past and presence: Thank you. May we serve you as well as you have served us.

A Fine Carolina Autumn Afternoon

Today I had to work, testing several web transactions for a client company's dealer network after a mainframe upgrade. It would have been very straightforward, if I'd remembered to bring a list of user ids and passwords home. I'm glad the office is only a 15 minute drive away. I'm not so glad that there was network maintenance going on in the office. On the other hand, there were only intermittent outages, and I was able to test everything within 30 minutes.

Life's good, and I just had to share this view:

----------------
Now playing: Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lookin' Out My Back Door
via FoxyTunes

The Odd Connection

I recently finished re-reading Odd Thomas, and I see a bit more clearly now why Koontz fans are split over the character of Odd. He's a very humble fellow, but his humility is almost aggressive. We're to accept him as nearly as hesitant to act as Hamlet, if we're to accept him at all. And yet, if we buy into the premise that Odd sees the "restless dead" and acts as an agent of justice and perhaps comfort for them, we must buy also that he has to be very sure before he does act. Additionally, we have to understand that he has to live a very simple, almost ascetic, life to maintain his sanity.

Odd accepts, indeed embraces, Mystery in his life. See the Black Room in the Fungus Man's house as the prime example in this first volume in the series.

I am currently reading a collection of HP Lovecraft stories, beginning with The Call of Cthulu, and incredibly I have noticed marked similarities between this story and Odd Thomas. This is most notable in the Lovecraftian narrator's acceptance of Mystery, and in the tone of prose. This part I'm not really sure how to explain; it really has to be experienced in the reading.

Of course, Mystery in Lovecraft means something quite different than it does in Koontz. After all, remember that Cthulu and the other Old Ones are the very incarnation of evil and horror and madness. I guess I can't push this connection, this similarity, all that far.

The Last Political Post

Did you hear the speeches last night? John McCain was as gracious and honorable in defeat as it's possible to be. Barack Obama showed himself to be a master orator capable of rising to a historical moment.

I've heard the cliche all my life that, in this country, anyone can grow up to be anything if he or she has the vision to see the path forward and the persistence to stay on it. We now see that to be more true than in the past. Only in America indeed.

Thanks, Dad, for the phone call tonight.

RIP Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain. Westworld. Congo. Jurassic Park. ER. This man provided me much entertainment in my younger days, and he was one of the very few people who succeeded as a bestselling author, a film director, and a TV producer. He was a Harvard trained doctor who never practiced medicine, an Emmy and Peabody winner. He may not really have been a Renaissance man, but he was surely close.

His books were written in such a matter-of-fact way, usually tied very close to the present day, that you had to wonder if they factual, if they were true. That's a mark of a superior storyteller. I hope he's enjoying spinning tales in Eternity.

The downside can be harsh and steep

The evening after I posted my Election 2008 entry, my dad called and told me he'd read it. This was quite a surprise; he's got a severe computer phobia, and he can't type.

He took strenuous exception to my political choices, to the point of imploring me to change my mind. I declined.

My dad then proceeded to declare that my judgment is impaired. When he said that, I felt part of the bedrock of my life shift, and break.

How long does it take for something like this to heal?

234

This is the least I've weighed in probably five years. It really does feel good, especially on my knees.

My rate of weight loss has slowed. That's not really surprising, since I'm not exercising as diligently as I did for a while. Nor am I really eating quite as well, although I couldn't stand the thought of again eating fast food like I used to.

All in all, I'm happy with my progress.

A World Series follow up thought

To Cole Hamels: Congratulations on winning the Series MVP award. You earned it. But, on your comment that "This is the best thing to ever happen to this city. Ever," you play in Philadelphia. There's a place not far from Citizens Bank Park called Independence Hall. Go take a tour, kid, and learn some history.

Election 2008

In short, I am more aligned philosophically with John McCain than with Barack Obama. However, I'm terrified by the thought of Sarah Palin as President if something were to happen to McCain.

I'm also thoroughly disgusted by the hatchet job the Republican Party machine has run on every single Democratic candidate this year. Not that the Democrats haven't slung their share of mud, but the GOP has run a particularly heinous campaign.

I am going to vote for Obama for President, Bev Purdue for NC governor, and Kay Hagan for NC Senator.

Phillies 4, Rays 3

And so the 2008 MLB season ends. Game 5.5 of the World Series was very entertaining, very well played.

I'm not particularly a Philadelphia Phillies fan, and the Tampa Bay Rays are the baseball story of the year, no doubt, but I am a National League fan first and foremost. So, I'm happy with tonight's outcome.

I found it sweet that no New York team made the post season this year. The Mets have had a good team for the last three seasons, but in 2006, the NL pennant slipped away from them in Game 7 of the NLCS, last year they blew their post season chance on the last day of the season, and this year it happened in the last weekend of the season. I see a trend here.

As for the Yankees, well, sooner or later they're going to buy another championship. I just hope A-Rod is long gone before then.

The Sad Truth

After finishing the first chapter of The Secret Life of Bees, I am moved to recount a few things.

The sad truth is that there are still too many people who believe that the color of someone's skin makes a difference in their character or their intelligence.

The sadder truth is that I sometimes fall into that trap.

The sad truth is that there are people who believe that God wants them to kill other people who don't believe exactly as they do.

The sadder truth is that they do kill people who believe differently than they do.

The sad truth is that people seeking public office trust political handlers who believe that the best way to win an election is divide and conquer.

The sadder truth is that this strategy succeeds.

The sad truth is that organizations feel a need for diversity training.

The sadder truth is that there truly seems to be a need for this.

The sad truth is that it's a parent's job to become obsolete in their childrens' lives.

The sadder truth is that I became obsolete too early.

Hope was the last thing to emerge from Pandora's Box. The sad truth is we're still waiting.

I can't get it out of my head

Ever have a melody that you seem to hear unceasingly? I do from time-to-time...actually, it's more than that. I'm not only serenaded in my mind, but I need to play it out loud, over and over. On my CD player in the car; on the Favorite Songs playlists on both of my mp3 players -- I know I have a mild touch of dyslexia, which I am aware of and cope with, but OCD I can do without!

So, who are the current artists-in-residence in my mental musical salon, and what are they playing?

The poet John Keats once said, "Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel." I can see this description in Wild-Eyed Southern Boys by 38 Special.

The song is really nothing more, on the surface, than a well-crafted Southern rock song, basically a ditty you'd hear on Classic Rock radio, with a couple of lead guitarists swapping licks and two vocalists singing about a rowdy bar crowd listening to a hot band, everyone looking for an excuse to brawl, to throw back a beer or a shot, to hook up for a night's romance.

Look, or more properly listen, more closely. The singers are right on tune, both on leads and harmonies. The guitar solos rock, the two drummers lay down some very solid and complex rhythms, and the rhythm guitarist and bassist handle some tricky time and harmonic changes.

Whether or not there are worse songs to obsess over, this one makes me happy.

Happy Birthday, Lisa

I can't think of a better reason to take a day off from work than to spend it with you, sweetheart, and there's certainly no better person in my life than you. I love you.

Happy Belated Birthday, Gigi!

Gigi, I'm sorry I didn't get this out on your birthday. I'm glad you enjoyed Wicked, and, well, don't spend all we sent you in one place! Love, Dad.

DotNot, Part 2

At the end of Part One of my professional biography, I promised to come back to both my programming philosophy and why I entitled the piece the way I did. Let's get back to these ideas.

As a mainframe Cobol programmer, I learned the "Top Down" model of programming. This means to take a problem and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks. This is done iteratively, until a chunk is of a manageable size to be turned into computer code that can accomplish a very specific task. Then, the next chunk is tackled, translating part of a business or technical requirement into a program. And then, do the same for the next chunk. And again. And again, until the entire set of requirements has been translated.

There is nothing magic here, just the methodical, detailed, and painstaking transformation of an idea from one idiom to another. What has historically intimidated many people about this is just how detailed you must be to do this successfully. That, and the fact that programming languages are simply not natural expressions of how people communicate. Of course, when we program, we're not communicating with people, we're communicating with very persnickety machines.

Cobol is a particularly verbose method of communicating with computers. It is a third generation programming language. The first generation was binary machine language, 1's and 0's grouped into specifically sequenced patterns that matched exactly how the central processing unit executed them. The second generation was assembly language, mnemonic codes like ZAP and MVC and BLR that were slightly less cryptic representations of patterns of binary, that were translated into machine language by programs known as assemblers.

A third generation programming language is more human-readable than earlier generations. Its statements may resemble mathematical formulas or English-like sentences.

Consider the normal calculation for straight time pay, hours worked times hourly rate. In Basic, this could be rendered as: Pay = Hours * Rate. Contrast this with a typical Cobol rendering: Multiply Hours by Rate giving Pay. Both are easily comprehended, and the languages are much simpler to learn than a first or second generation language.

In both cases, and this trend has not only continued but accelerated with time, the drafters of programming languages have continually taken advantage of increases in computing power to make the job of the programmer easier. Languages are not only more comprehensible to more people -- there is less of a caste of programming "high priests" or "wizards" than there used to be -- but programming environments are more conducive to troubleshooting programming problems and to higher productivity in writing programs in the first place.

The syntax and grammar available in a language both shape how ideas are expressed and limit what can be expressed. Cobol was my primary programming language, counting school, for a decade and a half. That has had a profound effect on how I program, as well as on how I think about programming.

The top down development methodology imposes a discipline that is process oriented, which lends itself to Cobol quite nicely. Cobol is a procedural language, which means that the flow of control, the sequence of execution, throughout a program is in a straight line, step-by-step from beginning to end. Each Cobol program is a whole, a single unit, and each executable statement in a program can access and affect any piece of data being processed. This concept is known as "scope", and it's another idea we'll come back to.

There are statements in the language that cause program execution to branch to another place in a program; this is a necessary feature of all programming languages. Loops cause certain program instructions to be repeated over and over; subroutines isolate certain functionality in a single piece of code, which can be executed from wherever it is required in a program. Branching instructions, when used haphazardly, give rise to a programming style know as "spaghetti code". This means that you can jump from any point in a program to any other point, leaving an execution trail that resembles a plate of spaghetti. I learned a more disciplined style known as "structured programming", which requires a designed execution path through a program, where each subroutine has single entry and exit programs, and scope is designed to be limited rather than global.

Cobol and top down design combine to form a simple and straightforward programming methodology. This does not mean simplistic; this methodology is behind the majority of the world's business data processing. It is a rigid methodology; once development has started, it is not easy to change directions if requirements change.

When I returned to programming eight years ago, I became a web developer. I primarily used VBScript, Javascript, HTML, Internet Information Services, and the Oracle database manager. Except for Oracle, my development tools were either Microsoft technologies, or Microsoft implementations of web standards. All of these tools were philosophically aligned with Cobol and top down design.

In the years since, I have continued to support applications developed in this older mode, as well as having done new development in a newer methodology called object oriented programming. This is a radically different philosophy of programming than what I originally learned, one that I struggle with mightily, and the subject of the next essay in this series.

A sense of "History, Violated"

I'm in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to train a contract programmer on an application I support and enhance. The application is used at several North American and European sites by the companies that are IT clients of my company. Most people would certainly recognize the brand names involved.

When I got to the Allentown headquarters, I immediately felt very comfortable. The building was built and dedicated in the 1970s, and it reminded me quite powerfully of the Greensboro headquarters of a company I used to work for. The facilities are showing some age, the building style isn't anything approaching contemporary, and the corporate symbol is displayed everywhere. Everywhere, from peoples' desks to the hallways to the cafeteria to a three story representation on the front of the building that I understand is lit up at night.

This is not some obnoxious and empty form of corporate rah-rah cheerleading. These people, by and large, are proud of where they work. And, they are entirely correct to be so. The company is over 100 years old, their product is a brand name that has become, not genericized like Coke or Kleenex, but romanticized, almost mythical. It's well known and even celebrated, has been for decades.

Economics trumps history.

The multinational that owns all these companies has looked at the market conditions here in the US -- not the stock market, but the larger consumer market -- and reached the cold blooded decision that it cannot afford, in the long run, to maintain two brand headquarters in North America. All of the operations in Allentown are being shut down and consolidated to Greensboro by 2010.

I'm glad to know that both of the co-workers I'm closest to are making the move to North Carolina next year.

Both brands will continue, and I am hopeful the Allentown brand will maintain the quality and the toughness for which it's known. But, for us insiders -- even though I've made only the one trip here, I now consider myself an insider -- something will be missing; our little tribe is being swallowed up.

He gets it, in more ways than one

Chet Flippo is a music journalist. He was a rock writer for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, and today he is the editorial director of CMT.com. He writes a thoughtful weekly column, Nashville Skyline, on myriad things country, and I recommend it to all music fans, whether country music does anything for you or not. Today, he expressed many things I believe dearly and deeply, with a powerful eloquence well beyond what I possess.

Thanks, Chet.

Birds!

A young man realized his long held dream of being accepted at State U in the ornithology program. He *loved* birds and wanted to study and preserve them.

He worked and worked at his lessons, learning things about birds no other undergraduate had even thought to wonder about. After four very hard years, he sat down to his last final. He knew that the good grade he would get on this test would complete his degree with highest honors, and along with his field studies would propel him to graduate school, where he would be able to begin teaching others the wonders of birds.

When he got to the examination hall, he saw five bird cages on pedestals at the front of the room. Each cage was completely covered by a canvas drop cloth. The proctor for the exam was none other than the distinguished elderly head of the department of ornithology, and he had designed the test himself.

At the appointed hour, the professor stood and addressed the gathered students. "You see before you five cages, with the avian in each cage concealed. You must now prove your skills and knowledge in the realm of ornithology by recognizing each avian, giving as full a description of the habitat, the diet, the mating habits, and the parenting style of each as you can. You have 90 minutes to complete the exam." With that, the professor proceeded to raise the canvas over each cage only enough to show the birds' legs.

Our young man was stunned. *Only the legs?! ONLY the legs??!! ONLY THE LEGS???!!!* After all the hours he had spent studying everything about birds except their legs?!

After ten incredulous minutes, he could take no more. He shut his examination book, stood up, walked to the front of the hall and screamed at the the professor, "This is stupid. This is asinine! No one, but no one who is in the least rational can tell you everything you want to know about these birds from looking at their LEGS!"

He threw his exam book on the floor in front of the professor and stormed toward the door to leave. The class was very large, and the professor had had his graduate assistants handle most of the one-on-one contact with the undergraduates. Therefore, he did not know most of the students in the examination hall, including our young man.

He called after the young man, "Just a minute here, what's your name?"

Our young man turned around, hiked the legs of his jeans up to his knees and said, "You guess, buddy, you guess!"

----------------
Now playing: Sara Evans - Born to Fly
via FoxyTunes

RIP Paul Newman

From Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Butch Cassidy to the Piston Cup winning Hudson in Cars, there's hardly been a finer American actor. That he both gave so much to charity through the many Newman's Own products and stayed true to his marriage -- I believe his quote was, "Why should I go out for a hamburger when I have steak at home?" -- shows a true wealth of spirit that enriches the world, all the more for being so rare.

It fits me well

This is my PDA. Why, you may be wondering, am I bothering to write about a gadget? Well, because it's just about part of me.

It wasn't the most powerful Palm PDA on the market when it was brand new, not by a long shot. It was leaps and bounds beyond my previous PDAs. My first one was a Palm Vx, which had 8 megabytes of memory, a green and black display, no expansion slot, and no communications capability. It reached the point, rather quickly, that the the battery would not recharge. A PDA that won't hold a charge is pretty much useless.

This lead me to buy my second PDA, a Palm m130. It also had 8 megabytes of memory and no communications capability, but it did have a color display and an expansion slot. It had a nicely curved profile that fit my hand very comfortably. I bought an SD card with a whopping 32 megabytes of storage. It was completely and thoroughly adequate as a personal information manager, you know, calendar, contacts, tasks. It's real shortcoming was that it had no provision to act as an MP3 player.

Lisa answered this for me a couple of years ago, when she got me the Palm Tungsten E2 in the picture. It came with 32 megabytes of memory, Bluetooth for short range communications, RealPlayer MP3 player software, a 128 megabyte SD card (I soon replaced this with a 1 gigabyte card), and Palm's ebook software. Actually, I had installed different ebook software on my first Palm, from Mobipocket, and I have a nice library built it.

Take a good look at the PDA. There are places where the shiny finish has nearly worn off. It's been used, a lot. It's my alarm clock, my calculator, my calendar, my address book, my photo album, and my portable library. It has almost every novel from Peter F. Hamilton (grand scale space opera) and Kim Harrison (urban fantasy set in Cincinnati), plus a lot of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Cory Doctorow and David Weber and Eric Flint, with room to spare.

It's my secondary portable music player since I got my 30 gigabyte Creative Zen W for both music and movies. Obviously I can't be as expansive with the PDA as I am with the Creative Zen player, so I've limited the music to my very favorites albums: Kind of Blue, Back in Black, Red Headed Stranger, Dark Side of the Moon, Hotel California, Nickel Creek, The Road and the Radio.

I also have a short playlist of favorite songs on the PDA:

1. Bob Dylan is rightly regarded as one of our best songwriters, but in my opinion, he blows chunks as a singer. Jimi Hendrix of course pioneered a lot of rock guitar. The intersection of the two? Hendrix's rendition of All Along the Watchtower, which I think is the best performance of a Dylan song. Ever.
2. The 1960s changed almost everything about America. For a decade that was so much about love and freedom, it ended with in a great deal of despair. That's why Bridge Over Troubled Water was, and is, such an important song. It's about hope, and about a promise to be there when a friend is bottoming out, even if the relationship isn't what it once was. Paul Simon's lyrics and melody are just about perfect, and Art Garfunkel's vocals are stunningly beautiful.
3. I love the melody of Until the Night by Billy Joel, and I like the story that tells the woman you love that coming home to her is the reason you can make it through the day.
4. The Change by Garth Brooks is, in a sense, the flip side to Bridge Over Troubled Water. The latter song is an act of compassion, of simply responding to a spirit in need. The former song is an act of defiance, of reaching out to another to dare the world to crush your integrity and sense of compassion. It's one of the few country power ballads I know of.
5. When You Come Back Down by Nickel Creek is what I hope I have given my children.
6. Anything But Mine has Kenny Chesney's sure sense of melody going for it, along with some nicely rockish guitar. It also has Kenny's patented nostalgia vibe, this time starring a horndog college boy trying to score with his summer romance before the beach vacation is over.
7. Vince Gill and Diana Krall are two of my favorite singers. Their duet Faint of Heart from Gill's 4 CD set These Days sounds right up Krall's alley, like an old jazz standard. It definitely doesn't sound like a Vince Gill composition a la When I Call Your Name, but it is, and despite the low key, relaxed presentation, it smoulders.
8. Martina McBride is one of the best female vocalists there is, easily on par with a Barbara Streisand or a Billie Holiday. She was for the longest time a song interpreter, but she became a first rate songwriter with Anyway.
9. The Eagles released their first album of completely original material in 29 years last October, and Long Road Out of Eden was the title cut. It's a passionate condemnation of the current state of American politics, with an angry Don Henley vocal and a fiery Joe Walsh guitar solo. Rock music doesn't get much better than this.
10. Sugarland, Little Big Town, and Jake Owen were on a CMT-sponsored tour together earlier this year, and they resurrected a 1980s pop gem, Life in a Northern Town. This is the kind of joyful melody that exuberant harmonies were meant for.

By the way, the picture on the mousepad is entitled Haulin' Ass.

DotNot, Part 1

In the first fourteen years of my career in Information Technology, I worked for a half-dozen companies, but I basically did three jobs. I started out a Cobol and JCL programmer on IBM mainframes. In this job, I learned not only a programming style, but a programming philosophy. We'll come back to this.

There are two traditional career paths for a mainframe programmer, at least if he desires to continue in Information Technology. One path is technical support, which involves building and maintaining a company's IT infrastructure. The other path is called systems analysis; this path consists mainly of serving as a liaison to the business users and translating their needs and requirements into technical specifications that can be used to build applications, which drive today's businesses.

This career path scenario simplifies, indeed largely ignores, several current realities of Information Systems/Information Technology, such as sufficiently flexible PC software that savvy business people can use to create very sophisticated applications, outsourcing, and the rise of the independent corporate IT subsidiary that has replaced many internal IT departments. My work environment is largely a mix of the last two, "competitive sourcing" and the IT subsidiary. There are opportunities because of this that I wouldn't otherwise have. I work on applications across several platforms, including mainframe, Unix, Windows client-server, and the Web; these applications span multiple companies in North America and Europe.

As I faced this branch, I determined that I get much more enjoyment and satisfaction from writing software than from detailing the functionality that someone else should write. Or put another way, I'm a bit of a geek who enjoys cutting code. I would have actually been very happy long term to continue mainframe application development in Cobol. It's not a cool language by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a darn satisfying workhorse of a language, and I'm good at it. But, it was pretty much a given ten or fifteen years ago that programmers didn't stay programmers. You were expected to become either more technical or more business. Otherwise, well, there must have been something wrong with you.

Since I knew I wanted to remain on the more technical side, I began to look for opportunities in technical support. As it happened, there was a very attractive opening as systems programmer supporting mainframe database management software at my then employer. I posted for the position, and I felt very positive about my chances to get the job. I had very good relationships with the people in tech support, including the hiring manager, and I knew I could do the job. It may have even worked out that way, if I'd already had experience supporting mainframe database management software. I didn't get the job, and that was a blessing in disguise. Mainframe technical support turned out to be mostly installing and configuring software packages, lots of troubleshooting performance issues, and tons of after hours and weekend trouble calls. There was basically no software development in that line of work.

Shortly after this, my company ran into business troubles and began a long cycle of downsizing and layoffs. I made it through the first round of layoffs and decided it was time to change jobs. What did I end up with? My second IT job, the one I hadn't wanted, systems analysis. Turns out I'm not too shabby at this, either, but I still wanted be the guy writing the programs.

During most of the next four years, I did get to do a little programming, but more and more, I was writing program specifications and test plans for other programmers, and then testing their programs. I do like the design side of applications, but not as my full time gig. And I definitely didn't care for the on-call and planned overtime parts of that job, the parts that made it feel as if I worked two-and-a-half full time jobs, while getting paid for one.

I moved to a new company again, and I ended up in the third of my three discrete IT jobs. For a little over two years, I was a DBA, a database analyst. This job was actually a move away from programming, even more so than systems analysis. I didn't install database software, but I used it extensively. My job was to design the data structures that programmers needed to hold the business information their applications had to have to do the business work, to maintain the integrity of the data (for example, if there's a credit card account, there has to be a cardholder), and to ensure that the applications got acceptable performance from their databases. A poorly designed or implemented database can kill computer performance; how long do you want to wait on your online banking, or to buy a concert ticket? Yep, that's what I thought.

Now, there are dozens of database managers on the market. I worked primarily with DB2, IBM's mainframe relational database manager. Truthfully, for my purposes here, it doesn't matter which topography of database comes into play, be it relational, hierarchical, or network. What matters is that I was in an infrastructure support position, I was professionally challenged, and I strongly considered staying in that career path. In the end, I didn't like where the office politics were taking me, and I decided to change jobs again. I very happily got back into application development, programming again. This time, though, I stayed at the same company, and I have now been there for a bit over 10 years.

I haven't gotten around to explaining the title of this post, nor have I touched on programming philosophy, yet. I'll get to those in Part 2.

RIP Richard Wright

Pink Floyd's keyboard player passed away last week. He was the group's George Harrison to Roger Waters and David Gilmour's Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison contributed Something to the Beatles' cannon; Rick Wright was the songwriter of Us and Them. What a song - melodic as can be, with a killer sax solo, and just as depressing as anything else in Pink Floyd's oeuvre.

Golden

Fifty years ago today, on Sunday, September 14, 1958, my dad worked the graveyard shift at Riegelwood Paper Company, went to church with my mom and her family, and after the service, Dad and Mom got married. There was a small reception at the church, but they skipped it to go to Myrtle Beach, where they stayed overnight. They returned home on Monday, because Dad had to go back to work.

Yesterday, we had a family gathering to celebrate Dad and Mom's golden anniversary. I got the planning going for this nearly a year ago, and after several iterations, we settled on simplicity. After all, my dad and mom are very private people who intensely despise any hint of limelight.

Friday night, Lisa and I picked up two of our three kids at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Andy, having just started his first semester at Purdue, elected to stay in West Lafayette. Gigi and David's flight from Chicago was scheduled to arrive at 10:08, and we planned to drive on to Mom and Dad's in Whiteville, two-and-a-half hours away, rather than drive an hour back to Greensboro. We wanted to let the kids spend as much time with Mom and Dad as possible, since they had to fly back today.

Well, Hurricane Ike intervened, and that 10:08 flight arrived at midnight. They didn't have any checked luggage, so we were out of the airport in very good order. We wanted a bite to eat and had seen a sign on I-40 for a Wendy's, but we got lost for a short while looking for that restaurant. Happily, once we got back to the interstate, we found another Wendy's at the next exit. So, a quick trip to the drive thru window, four sandwiches, four cups of water, an order of fries, and a frosty later, and we were back on the road.

We got to Dad and Mom's at 3:00 am yesterday morning.

Yesterday evening at 5:00, almost 20 of us met at Dale's Seafood at Lake Waccamaw -- unfortunately, the view was the parking lot rather than the lake, because they don't reserve the lake side -- and between us, my brother Ken and I treated our extended family to a nice seafood dinner. Then, we all went back to Mom and Dad's. Lisa, the kids, and I left the restaurant first, because we needed to put the punch together. I forgot the code to the alarm system, and I was sure the security company would call, I'd fail the challenge, and the party would be spoiled when everyone came downtown to stand my bail. Mom and Dad came to the rescue, by driving up and giving us the code.

We had our punch, a really nice cake that my sister-in-law Susan bought, and for the next couple of hours, Mom and Dad were the center of eating, conversation, and hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures (gotta love digital cameras). We had a few gifts for them, a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse gift certificate and tickets to a Le Grande Cirque performance. I would have done more for them, but in the same way that they dislike being the center of attention, they didn't want much in the way of gifts. It was a celebration for them, so I honored their request.

This morning, we had to leave earlier than I wanted to, but Gigi and David had a flight from Raleigh to Chicago scheduled to leave at 12:30 pm. We were on the road just before 8:45, and we were pulling into RDU just after 11:00. The departure board at the United ticketing area showed that their flight was on schedule. After we got the boarding passes and got Gigi and David to security, we checked the departure board again before settling down to wait until their flight was in the air. Their flight was now DELAYED. The Midwest was experiencing very heavy rains; this evening, several Chicago expressways are closed due to flooding. The flight didn't leave until about 2:45, and once they got to Chicago, the flooding interfered with their drive home. In fact, they didn't get home until almost 9:00 pm our time. My poor kids had a hectic travel weekend, but it was in a good cause.

Now, it's time for a short, maudlin note:

Mom and Dad,

Congratulations on 50 years together. You inspire and challenge me to be as constant and attentive in my marriage as you are in yours, and I hope that I have been half as successful a parent as you have.

Your loving son,
Eddie

Happy Birthday, Andy!

My oldest son turns 18 today. When I called him, he sounded happy. He seems to be enjoying college so far. The only downside to his day, from my point of view, is that UPS didn't get my present to him yet, even though I paid extra to get it there yesterday. He's been out both times they tried to deliver it. Frak!

I can identify with this

Today's imitation Shakespeare

Blazer jumped up on the bed, meowing for his breakfast, well before Lisa and I were ready to get up this morning. I told him, "I will rise up and smite thee righteously if ye do not stop, cat."

Sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards

I generally do not post about politics here, but this was just too bloody disgusting. Sure, the cliches are true -- "Truth will out" and "The truth will set you free" -- but no one is entitled, for any reason whatsoever, to the "truth" about someone's cheating spouse. Elizabeth Edwards, regardless of her incurable cancer, deserves the respect of her privacy. It's her marriage, and it's her children to protect.

I do understand her position, because I've been in her shoes, and I held the truth close to the vest until I was ready to deal with the repercussions of telling other people. Yes, I kept quiet, even with close friends and family.

I hope that the Brad Crone mentioned in the CNN article never has to deal with a cheating spouse.

I admire the grace Elizabeth Edwards has shown in dealing with this very public outing of a very private pain and betrayal, and I wish her the very best going forward in dealing with her husband, who I consider the biggest buried turd in the litter box of American politics.

A belated birthday present

Lisa ordered this t-shirt for me well before my birthday, but it didn't get here until today:

Olympics Redux

Yesterday, I commented on the relationship I see between the Olympic games and politics. This commentary was composed while watching the IOC president's speech during the US network broadcast of the Beijing closing ceremonies, and after further reflection, what I said really says more about how politics seizes on the Olympics than the other way around.

I admire the athletes, deeply, and marvel at what they can do. They are the epitome of talent honed by hard work and dedication. Only the barest portion of them can take home medals, but every national team member at the games is one the absolute best at what they do, in the world.

As far as I know, every nation takes fierce pride in their competitors. There are some few Olympians, such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, that capture the attention of the world at large. They are, unfortunately, the exceptions.

The Olympics, like Christmas, are unifying in the abstract, and for the short term. Only the true believer holds on to the positive effect of either for longer than a few weeks. There is less division in this than I gave credence to in my off the cuff post last night, but there is far less unity than the media or the denizens of the Olympic movement would have us believe.

Thoughts on the Summer Olympics

Lisa and I are watching the closing ceremonies. Color me impressed. I am far less impressed by NBC's coverage. On the evening news tonight, there was a story on America's "unsung heroes" of these games, those who won gold medals in other sports.

ABC was the network that broadcast the Olympics when I was younger, and they showed us far more sports than NBC does. They spent less time personalizing the athletes and more time showing us just why they represented their countries in competition. Because of that, ABC wouldn't have had to have a special report on their newscast before the closing ceremonies.

Lisa was terribly bored in the hour before the closing ceremonies started. NBC showed highlights from the gold medal round of men's indoor volleyball, between Brazil and the USA. I played just enough volleyball when I was in college to have a real appreciation for the sport. The Brazilians showed flashes of brilliance, as befits a team that had won a couple of world championships, but it was the Americans' turn to pull out the victory. Surprisingly, the announcers were not jingoistic; they respected the flow of the game and the spectacular skills of both teams.

The Olympics are hailed as a unifying force, as something that is above politics. I'm not sure that this is really how most of the world sees them. For a couple of weeks every four years, people do stop and pay attention to the games, but they do not live them the way many people do professional sports. Of course Olympic athletes, coaches, and organizers live them, but as far as I can tell, the Olympics divide people as much as pull them together. As for the games being above politics, did you know that the "tradition" of the Olympic flame, as well as the huge opening and closing ceremonies, originated with the 1936 Olympics? The ones held in Berlin? When Adolph Hitler was the leader of the German state? Remember 1972, when the Black September terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes? Remember 1980, when the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Remember 1984, when the Soviets retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles games?

I'd love to see the Olympic games be both unifying and apolitical. This is too simplistic to ever work, I know, but I think it would be a fantastic thing if the Olympics were permanently held in Greece, and if only amateurs could compete in the games. This might reduce the influence of politics in the games. If nothing else, the debate would be interesting.

Sometimes I'm evil, evil I tell you

We live in an apartment, and like many an apartment complex, there are lots of young kids here. Now, there are a couple of provisions in the standard lease here that sometimes seem to get overlooked. First, we're supposed to keep the noise down. Second, no one is supposed to play out in the parking lots.

One of our neighbors has a couple of kids, and they spend a great deal of time out in the parking lot. The little boy in the family is probably four or five, and he screams a great deal. Since the weather has been nice and comfortable for the last week, we've had the windows open and fans running, rather than the AC going. Consequently, we have heard the neighbor's son quite a bit.

He screamed much louder than usual about ten minutes ago. I walked out to the parking lot and asked the mom, "Is anyone hurt?" She shook her head no, with a rather surprised look on her face. I said, "I heard the screaming, and I was concerned." Then, I simply walked back inside.

I haven't heard any screams from the parking lot since.

The Phantom Tollbooth

This is a book that I've wanted to read for several years, ever since a fellow I quite liked on alt.books.dean-koontz talked it up. However, I couldn't find it in the local bookstores and just never thought to order it online. Happily, I found it last weekend. At Wal-Mart, of all places.

This book is compared very favorably to Alice In Wonderland, and I think this is an apt comparison. Both books have have story lines full of absurdities and are filled with puns and wordplay. They are both also very much of their times. Alice reflects Victorian England, and Tollbooth is an artifact of 1960s America. It's been too long since I read Alice to comment on it in any detail, but I can say that Tollbooth made me smile, made me laugh, and made me think.

This book is as much a reflection on the importance of knowledge and its acquisition as it is a delight to read. It speaks to a need for looking at the world with fresh wonder and not getting bogged down in the inconsequential, of Wisdom requiring Rhyme and Reason.

This quote sums up what this gem of a book means to me: And remember, also, that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

It's real!

I weigh 249 pounds this morning. I've now lost 30 pounds since the beginning of June, and it feels, well, liberating. My left knee, the one I dislocated in 2003, doesn't ache all the time now. I can bend over and tie my shoes without feeling out of breath. I can bend over.

I want to publicly acknowledge that this would not have happened without my wife Lisa. She started on SparkPeople a week or two before I did, and I joined her more to keep from sabotaging her than to benefit myself. I know how bad for me restaurant burgers, pizza, and other fatty and salt-laden foods are, but I love the flavors and the emotional "comfort" of these foods. You know, a sop to "poor poor pitiful me" through two separations and divorces, job changes, overwhelming debt, and loneliness. I'm following her lead, and while I sometimes want the things I used to eat (and even eat them occasionally), I'm finding now that it's becoming easy to choose the better things. Of course, Lisa has filled the voids that "poor poor pitiful" Eddie was teetering on the edge of, and that makes it even easier to make good choices.

A great birthday present

I posted a review of Little Brother a couple of months ago, after I read the free ebook version. I ended the post by recommending people go out and buy a copy of the book for themselves, as well as one to give to a teen important to them. I've sort of done part of this, as I passed the ebook on to my daughter to read. When I turned 48 earlier this month, I asked my wife for a hardcover copy of the book, which I just finished reading this evening, enjoyed just as much the second time around, and still fervently believe should win all the SF awards available next year.

Yes, I had Lisa put her money where my mouth is.

A college career begins

Andy moved into his...well, it's not a dorm...apartment at Purdue today. His mom called me about an hour ago to let me know that he's there and settled. Barely.

See, he's got a George Foreman grill, a bunch of junk food -- I'm sure he'll manage to survive on Pop Tarts and Cheerwine for a few days -- a bath mat, no plates or silverware or coffee maker, his internet access turned on and his laptop, and no roommates until the middle of the week. He told everyone who tried to help him out with the things that you need to establish a household, even a temporary one like your first college room, no thanks, that his roommates are bringing everything. Andy's never been on his own before, so he's in for interesting times.

He has mandatory events for freshman orientation, and I believe his mom told me that he is being fed for free all week. He's not happy about having to wear an armband that identifies him as a freshman, but I hope he realizes that everyone is going to know he's a newbie. He might as well accept the help that comes with the official recognition. After all, once classes start, it's going to be sink or swim.

Good luck, son. I expect great things of you.

250?!

I weighed on two scales this morning, and they both agreed. I now weigh 250 lbs! It's been a week-and-a-half, roughly, since I last weighed myself, and I weighed 261 then. I certainly haven't stretched myself exercising in the last week, and I went to a party last weekend where there was exactly nothing I could consider really healthy to eat, but I still dug in like there was no tomorrow!

I don't understand how I could have lost 11 pounds in 10 days, but I also don't believe the scales are lying to me. So, to celebrate, Lisa and I went to the NC Zoo today and spent a good 90 minutes just walking, faster than usual, uphill and down. I do believe I'm proud of us.

Ponder this

If you can do lunch, can lunch be done to you?

And now a word from Winston Churchill

My wife calls me "Lemonade Man", from the saying "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." I am, and have always been, basically an optimist. I am now entering a new stage on the SparkDiet, which is LifeStyle Change.

Winston Churchill is one of history's genuinely great men and master motivators, and I'm using one of his quotes as a motivational touchstone, as a reminder to myself of who I am at heart. I believe this is going to work, for weight loss, for better health, and for improving my life.

I now weigh 261 pounds. The journey continues.

I didn't expect this

My Jeopardy appearance, ten months after the taping and seven months after the broadcast, still comes up in conversation from time-to-time. Most recently, a co-worker told me that she talked about it with someone she visits at Hospice, who seemed to attend to the conversation a bit more than usual. Is it possible that something I did largely as a lark was of some comfort to someone who's dying?

My favorite Babbles from the first year

I meant to do this yesterday, but real life intruded. These are my favorite Babble On entries from the first year of the blog: 3) the funniest, especially since it's at my own expense - What not to say at dinner, 2) the best family entry - Blues, and 1) the best written (this one is also the saddest) - Requiem for a Jack Russell Terrier.

David turns 15 today

Unlike this day last year when he and Andy were here, David is at home in Indiana today. I know that his mom's partner Ellen is taking him and one of his friends to the Guitar Center, and I know that David takes a lot of pleasure in trying out various guitars and amps there, even though he's not impressed with either the salespeople or the care they take with the stock guitars. I'll call him later today so Lisa and I can wish him the happiest of birthdays, and I'll ask him to play a little bit for us on his Fender Telecaster, whose purchase we contributed to back in the spring.

I think after that I may go purchase Stargate Continuum. It will be good to see Richard Dean Anderson in the role of Jack O'Neill again.

Babble On now a toddler

And to celebrate, we're giv...no, no prizes. Let's see...I'm publishing my tell-all...no, I'm neither that feckless nor salacious. Maybe...wisdom of the ages...the world probably isn't ready.

Ah, screw it. Here's to me for keeping this up for a year. I've enjoyed it, and I hope that anyone else who's read it has as well.

The Trading Deadline

Ivan Rodriguez to the Yankees? Ken Griffey Jr to the White Sox? Manny Ramirez to the Dodgers?! No front line pitchers moved? The world seems to have turned upside down.

Saddest to me is that the Braves have surrendered hope of making the postseason. It's understandable, since their starting pitching has been ravaged by injuries all year, starting with John Smoltz's season-ending shoulder surgery. Now, with Tim Hudson out for the rest of the season with elbow ligament damage and Chipper going on the DL with nagging leg injuries, and considering the two big leads they blew to the Phillies last weekend, it simply made economic sense to trade Mark Teixeira. The Braves couldn't have afforded him as a free agent this winter, not with Scott Boras as his agent.

As Dodger fans used to say, just wait till next year!

Ashton Shepherd: Sounds So Good

Ashton Shepherd is a 21 year old wife and mother from Alabama who released her debut country CD last March. I saw a lot of positive online commentary concerning her CD, with frequent comparisons to giants of the genre like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams. I've been resisting buying it, because it seems more and more that such hype is empty, and spending my money based on it is only a waste.

While we were on vacation last week, we hit the Wally World in my folks' hometown, and I saw the CD there for under $10. I decided the price was low enough and threw it in the shopping cart.

I am very glad I did. The production on the CD is clean and has much more of a traditional country sound that most current Nashville "product". And, where the typical new female vocalist in country is a willowy blond with a quavery high pitched voice who has had moderate success in some other area of show business and has "always wanted to sing country", Shepherd really has been singing country music as long as she can remember. Writing it too.

She has a very twangy voice, singing in a lower register, with an assurance and emotional maturity that belongs to a much older soul. I think mid-1990s Patty Loveless is a very apt comparison. And, by the way, Ashton Shepherd is a willowy brunette :)

To my ears, Sounds So Good is the finest country debut of the last decade. If I were to use a single word to describe the CD, I think it would be...astonishing.

265

That's my weigh-in for today, and I was actually astonished to have lost another pound. All three of my kids were here last week, we went to visit my parents, which meant all the family came to visit, and you know grandparents like to feed the family well. Then, we took the kids to Myrtle Beach for a couple of days, the Bay Watch resort had a very nice breakfast buffet in one of their restaurants, and dinners out at Fuddruckers and the Original Benjamin's Calabash Seafood with their 170 item buffet aren't really conducive to weight loss.

What was conducive to weight loss were the trips David and I took to the fitness center and the pool at home, and the three hours we all spent playing in the rather rough Myrtle Beach surf last Wednesday (think of it as full contact water aerobics). I did think that we were well protected with the 30 and 50 SPF sun screen we all used, but we didn't take the need to reapply it into account. All five of us got burned, but we are well on the road to the recovery. Or at least we will be, once the itching is past.

RIP Randy Pausch

The world is a sadder place today, as the man behind The Last Lecture has passed away from pancreatic cancer. He had more to say about living well than almost anyone else I've heard, and I feel richer for having experienced them. I believe it's time to install my copy of Alice and start playing. Randy would think that a worthy legacy.

Aunt Mildred

Aunt Mildred is my dad's older sister. She's 86 and has been widowed for 10 years or so now. Sadly, no one misses her husband. No one. They were married almost 50 years, and he moved her around the South, never staying in one place more than a couple of years. Luckily for us, he moved her back to a spot on Dad's farm, where they set up a mobile home not long before he passed away. When he was ready to move on that time, Aunt Mildred told him he could go, but she was home.

During the last 10 years, my sons have usually stayed with Aunt Mildred when we visit Dad and Mom, and I've visited her a lot. We've gotten close, and the best discovery of all is that we're kindred spirits in many ways. I'll have more to say about her soon, and I need to find a picture or two. She deserves for people to know about her, if not to know her for themselves.

Goodbye Gigi, Hello Georgia...Maybe

I think my daughter has outgrown her childhood nickname. Or, at least I did. We're vacationing at Myrtle Beach, and we just got back from a late walk on the beach. Lisa took a bunch of pictures, David spent a lot of time dancing in the waves, and Gigi told me that she was itchy. I asked her, "Where is scratchy?" She said, "I don't know, but I want to find him."