RIP David Caminer

I discovered, through surfing to Boing Boing this evening, that one of the pioneers of my profession passed away earlier this month. David Caminer, in his work for British tea shop chain J. Lyons and Company, was the first "corporate electronic systems analyst".

Quoting from his NYT obituary: The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it “the first dedicated business machine to operate on the ‘stored program principle,’ meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program.”

“LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer,” Computer Weekly said last year.

LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.

“Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

Wall*E

Number one at the box office on its opening weekend, with a take of $62.5 million. Not one bad review. Excellent animation. A story good enough to make you forget whether it's animation or live action. A sweet love story. A totally believable environmental message. Brief homages to 2001 and Star Wars.

Pixar has done it again. This studio is the closest thing Hollywood has to "can't miss".

Three personal observations - 1) you know a movie has done something really special when it causes my wife to feel sympathy for a cockroach. 2) Wall*E is heavier on the poignancy and lighter on the laugh out loud moments than any previous Pixar feature. 3) There was a moment in the movie when I was strongly reminded of the most powerful SF story I've ever read, Flowers for Algernon.

Little Brother

This is Cory Doctorow's latest novel. It's a cross between 1984 and The Hacker Crackdown. It's being marketed to the Young Adult market. This is the bookselling segment that Orson Scott Card and John Scalzi have been singing the praises of lately, and if Little Brother is truly representative, that's the part of bookstore I should be shopping more than the adult SF section.

The book is set in San Francisco. It's protagonist is 17 year old Marcus. He and his friends resent their school's intrusive surveillance, and like many a teen from Tom Sawyer on, figure out how to get around it. They're gamers and hackers, and they skip out of school to play an ARG, an Alternative Reality Game. While they're playing, they're almost at ground zero of a terrorist attack as deadly as 9/11. They're definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting caught in a Department of Homeland Security sweep.

What happens to Marcus, how it changes him, and how he fights back makes for one of the most exciting and thought-provoking books I have read in ages. It has a smoothly written first person narrative, and the frequent info dumps do not interrupt the flow of the story. In fact, the info dumps remind me a great deal of the long bull sessions my best friend and I used to have when we were teens.

The most amazing thing, to me, is how Little Brother pushes the old "sense of wonder" button that only comes from the best of science fiction. If this book does not take the major SF awards next year, and I mean wins, not nominations, then there truly ain't no justice.

By the way, this book, like nearly everything Cory Doctorow writes, is available as a free download. Check out his website for details; then, it's worth looking at the blog he co-writes, Boing Boing. And then, help make sure Mr. Doctorow can continue writing such novels; go out and by a copy. No, buy two, one to keep and one to give to a teen in your life.

270

I weighed myself yesterday morning. 270 lbs. I'm six feet tall, so this makes me obese. And this is also a reason to celebrate.

Why? Because three weeks ago I weighed 280. Lisa and I have joined SparkPeople, which is a combination weight loss and fitness site crossed with a social network. It has lots of nutrition and fitness information, even more motivational tips, and lots of community opportunities. I'm using the food diary and exercise journal pages extensively.

So far, so good. We're having more success than we did the couple of times we started South Beach, and I intend to keep a record here as we progress.

The Man with the Golden Torc

These days I read more space opera and urban fantasy than anything else. There aren't many authors who can pull off both. Meet British author Simon R. Green, author of the Deathstalker and Nightside series. Confession: I have not yet read Deathstalker, but the Nightside series is a particular delight. The Nightside is the dark, hidden heart of London, where it is always 3:00 am. The series protagonist is private eye John Taylor, who can find anything. Green takes just about every mythology you can think of and runs them through a blender with hardboiled humor, over the top violence, and just a dash of romance. There are eight volumes in this series, all around 250 pages long, and the characters are really what drive the stories. The plotting is uneven, but all of them are worth the reading.

I've just finished the first volume of Green's new series about a man whose street name is Shaman Bond. His real identity? Edwin Drood. He's an agent of the Drood family, which has been keeping us safe from supernatural threats for millenia. Yes, it's a James Bond pastiche, with all that implies. This book shares the main ingredients with the Nightside, with sharper humor, more appealing characters, a superior plot, and much better writing, at nearly 400 pages in length. Highly recommended, and I expect to pick up the second volume in the series, Daemons Are Forever, very soon.

RIP George Carlin

We've lost one of the sharpest wits ever. I did the teenage boy thing and snickered the first time I heard the Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television. In fact, I still laugh at it, even when I know that its influence had a lot to do with the coarsening of public discourse. It's a double standard I can live with.

The Last Lecture

Want an uplifting hour-and-a-quarter? Watch this. You've probably heard about it: Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and expert on virtual reality, gets a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer and gives the talk of literally a lifetime. It's really as good as has been billed.

There is now a book out, also called The Last Lecture, that expands on the speech and amplifies its theme. I bought it, have almost finished it, and recommend it highly. It's about how to live your life, which is of course a cliche. But, as Pausch says, "I love cliches. They're cliches because they're true."

One Amazon.com reviewer, a former hospital chaplain, decries the fact that Randy Pausch didn't spend the book expounding on some deep philosophical revelation brought on by his impending death. He even acknowledges that Randy says the book is about living, not dying. He missed the head fakes.

Congratulations, Andy

We're celebrating a new high school graduate. Andy, I'm proud of you. Purdue University is a excellent next step for you, a great choice for an aspiring electrical engineer. I have no doubt that you'll succeed there; indeed, that you'll thrive. I've never seen you set your mind to something and fail.

Remember where you've come from. Roots run deep in both the South and the Midwest, but those roots are never meant to hold you down. They're meant to to give you a solid launching pad.

That leads to my promise to you. The song in this video is probably meant as something a faithful lover says to one who may be leaving, but I think the chorus especially works as a message from a father to a son. Here's When You Come Back Down, by Nickel Creek.



When you're soaring through the air,
I'll be your solid ground.
Take every chance you dare,
I'll still be there,
When you come back down.

Today's self-realization

As a joke, "I've always wanted to procrastinate but keep putting it off" is kinda cute. As a way to lead your life, it sucks.

Relay 2008: Recap and Reflections

The 2008 Greensboro Relay For Life was this past Friday, and I'm finally feeling coherent enough this Sunday morning -- Saturday, like after every Relay I've taken part in, was given to sleep, wonderful sleep -- to put my thoughts on the event together.

• Fundraising:




• It was harder for our team to fund raise this year. We didn't get a corporate sponsorship that we had gotten for the past three years, and that cut our bottom line by about 50%.


• Over the past two years, Lisa and I have spent a boatload of our personal money on projects that we thought would really be big moneymakers for us. Last year we put together a cook book, which sold well at first. We still have just under half of the copies we had printed left. This year, we bought tickets to the Wachovia Championship PGA tournament to raffle off. We didn't recoup our costs here, either. I think the biggest problem is we just don't have a good grasp on how to publicize what we're doing.


• We did find that a lot of local businesses are willing to help out with donations of their goods and services. The key is asking, which in the past has never been something either of us has been eager to do. This changes, now.


• Thank you to the following Greensboro businesses for their generosity to Team Investing In A Cure: Elizabeth's Pizza at Quaker Village, Gander Mountain, Great Harvest Bread Company, Merchant's Tires, P.F. Chang, Phoenix Asian Cuisine, Red Robin, and Remington Grill.




• Setting up our campsite:




• It was a very long half-hour waiting to get the van and car unloaded at the gate to the Page High athletic complex. I don't think our logistics chair ended up with quite as much help as he was expecting.


• Once, just once, Lord, we'd be awfully grateful if the weather would be really cooperative. Still and all, rain and wind are just a couple of things to be endured; we're here to fight cancer, and there are a lot of symbolic reasons behind Relay being an outdoor overnight event. We had some inconvenience; the people we're serving through Relay are in danger of their lives.


• Lisa and I prefer Western Guilford High School as the event site to Page High School. We're in the minority, which is why we were back at Page after two years at Western Guilford. It is possible we're part of a silent majority, because the site switch happened in response to a post-Relay survey last year. Any way, put this down as a minor quibble.


• Pop-up gazebos are much easier to put up than tents, but it's harder to stay out of the mid-May wind under them. At least it wasn't cold enough this year for us to see our breath.


• It was good to be set up close to the bathrooms.


• It's always a bit lonely and a touch frustrating that, no matter how many people we have signed up on our team, Lisa and I are the only two setting up our campsite, staying all night, and cleaning up the next morning.


• We did have several team members completely new to Relay this year, and at least one family showed signs that they might become invested in it like we have. If so, future Relays will be even more rewarding.




• The Event Itself:




• After onsite registration began at 5:00, we had a brisk couple of hours getting cash donations for bread, cook books, and our restaurant gift card raffle.


• Emily Byrd did a very credible job as our M.C. for the Opening Ceremony.


• The bird feeder my dad donated for the silent auction did well.


• Page High has a fairly new rubberized track, so we couldn't use candles in the luminaries. We used a couple of glow sticks in each bag, instead. The light from the luminaries was much more diffuse than that from candles, almost ethereal. Maybe too much so. I think next year I'll recommend, in my role as part of the Event Committee, that we use three glow sticks per luminary rather than two.


• For the second straight year, I brought in about $25 in donations by taking part in the Dude Looks Like A Lady contest. I think I looked better this year. I'll have to post pictures for comparison.


• I don't often get up the nerve to sing in public, and after deciding on a lark to take part in Relay Idol this year, it may be quite a while before I do again. I usually like the sound of my singing voice, but not this time. I sounded, to myself, a bit off tune, a bit sharp on many notes. I also forgot too many of the lyrics to The River, one of my favorite Garth Brooks songs. On the other hand, no one else had the crowd raising their hands and waving in time to their song.


• The Coleman Camp Drip Coffeemaker that Gander Mountain donated works very nicely. It fits over a burner on a propane stove and then works just like your kitchen drip coffeemaker. Only a lot slower. Especially in a breeze. But it does make fine tasting coffee, and we had a nice overnight fund raiser, at a donation of $1 per cup. The chilly temperature was a plus for this.


• We actually had a Closing Ceremony this year. I like that. Our event chairwoman announced that we have so far raised almost $250,000 for 2008. We have a few more weeks before the formal close of Relay 2008, so I like our chances of meeting our $300,000 goal.




• The Future:




• Our Event Committee -- I'm part of it, as the Online Chairperson -- knows how to put together a Relay that's going to make a certain amount of money. The fund raising goal has been right around $300,000 every year Lisa and I have been part of the Greensboro Relay, and the amount raised has been within 10%, plus or minus, of that goal each year.


• It's certainly not a terrible thing for a charity like the American Cancer Society to know that it has a reliable and steady source of income, as our Relay has been.


• I can't escape the feeling that, both as a member of the Committee and as an individual, that I'm not doing enough. My wife came to Greensboro from Harrisonburg, Virginia when we married. She was part of Relay there, and that event made more money from a rather smaller population base than the Greensboro event.


• So, what's the difference between the Greensboro and Harrisonburg events? I've taken part in both, and from what I can tell, it comes down to the emphasis that the Committee places on detailed communication. Harrisonburg seems to do a more effective job of this.


• I've learned that the more you ask people to help, the more they do. But, you have to keep asking. This is my key lesson from Relay 2008.
  

One Stride

We watched the Preakness Stakes yesterday, and I have never seen anything in sports like the way Big Brown accelerated in one stride, once jockey Kent Desormeaux let him run as the pack entered the home stretch. I am pulling for this horse to win the Triple Crown.

Not a commercial, but should be

Feeling swept along on life's ebb and flow? Ask your doctor if Effluvia is right for you!

The Wachovia Championship

Today, my old friend Al and I are going to the Pro Am at the Wachovia Championship golf tournament in Charlotte. Neither one of us has ever been to a PGA tournament, so I expect this is going to be fun.

We bought the tournament tickets to raffle off as a Relay For Life fundraiser. I'm glad Al won them; he's been my best friend since we were in elementary school. We worked summers on Dad's farm together, went to rival colleges 30 miles apart, and in general, have always been just a phone call away for each other.

I did hold the pot at the raffle drawing, but I had someone else pull the winning entry.

---

Some points from the day:

• You won't get an autograph from José Maria Olazabal by calling him "Sergio".
• Vijay Singh is very impressive in person.
• The golfers concentrated on signing autographs for kids, and I for one can't fault them for that. It's an investment in the future of their sport.
• I've never had a smoother time parking 15 miles away and being shuttled to the event site, finding food and drink, watching world class athletes, and getting back home. The organizers of the Wachovia Championship are truly on top of the game.

Celebrate, Remember, Fight Back

1996 was in many ways a bad year for my family. I separated from my first wife. My brother lost a job he'd had for the better part of a decade, and he and his family ended up moving in with my parents for several years. My mom had her first bout with breast cancer.

This was not my family's only encounter with cancer that year. Mom's brother-in-law Buddy had been battling, I believe, brain cancer for nearly two years. Mom had a simple lumpectomy this time around; I know she had follow up treatment, but I'm not sure if it was radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination. The bottom line is that she survived, but Uncle Buddy didn't. He passed away in mid-December. And we faced even more before he died.

Mom's other brother-in-law Carlyle fell at work right around Thanksgiving, and he didn't bounce back like we all expected him to. He went to the doctor to get checked and found out he had liver cancer. A very aggressive, pervasive form of liver cancer. He decide not to postpone the inevitable and opted for no treatment except pain management. He passed away right after Christmas.

Heavy, heavy times indeed for the White family.

Over the next three years, we had many more health concerns for my mom. She was diagnosed with lupus, or at least some form of auto-immune disease that attacks the entire body, starting with the central nervous system and working out from there. We're not totally sure if it is actually lupus, or if there's a more refined diagnosis these days; we just know it's played merry hob with Mom's health for a dozen years. For simplicity's sake, we call it lupus.

Summer, 1999. Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, again. There was no question but that she would have a radical mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. There was considerable question about what her follow up care would entail. Lupus greatly complicated things; her body couldn't tolerate radiation treatments. Fortunately, there were chemotherapies specifically for breast cancer that had much more manageable side effects than radiation; Mom's oncologist chose tamoxifen for her. It worked, and Mom has been cancer-free for almost nine years now.

Fall, 2002. I was dating Lisa, who is now my wife. Her mom Meki was diagnosed with cancer (she prefers that the type not be disclosed publicly). It required very aggressive treatment. Meki wore an infusion pump for chemo for several weeks, and she had twice weekly radiation treatments to shrink the tumor. Finally, she had surgery in January 2003 to completely remove the tumor, followed by more chemo. Our happy ending is that the cancer was caught completely, and Meki is now five years free of cancer.

Even before Meki's diagnosis, Lisa was involved with Relay For Life. A co-worker's mother had cancer, and Lisa's co-worker asked her and another fellow to join her at Relay. They did, and it's blossomed from there.

I started Relaying as a way to spend more time with Lisa. After all, we lived 200 miles apart then, so any reason to see her was great. I didn't come close to matching her commitment to and passion for Relay For Life. To be honest, I still don't, but I have found more and more reasons to deepen my involvement. I'm in my second year as the Online Chair for the Greensboro Relay for Life, which make me part of the Committee in charge of the event. I find added enjoyment in Relay each year, as well as hope and meaning.

For 2008, the slogan for Relay for Life is Celebrate, Remember, Fight Back. Celebrate the survivors, share their joy in living. Remember those who did not survive, shed a tear in the sorrow of their absence, smile at the memory of their lives. Fight Back against cancer, spit in its eye and shout defiance.

Cancer is no respecter of person or station. Anyone can be stricken. Join us, give what you are willing to of your money and your time. You may help save a stranger. A random acquaintance. A friend. A family member. Yourself.

Only three...

Here's an exercise. Let's say you've got children. Let's say further that you want to leave them something. Something that will guide them, make them think, provoke them a little, perhaps. Here's your final requirement, your final refinement -- your bequeathment must contain only three parts, no more, no less. Here's mine.

• Humility...just enough to realize that "I might be wrong about this" is a pretty good organizing principle for your life.
• Curiosity...sincerely question everything, with the intent to learn from the answers you get, but remember the first point in this short list.
• Compassion...always, always, always be ready to say, and mean, "Let me help."

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Huston turns 76 today. He worked in his shop today for the first time since he had surgery last December to repair an aneurysm on his aorta. He's built bird houses and feeders since he retired from farming, and while I'm definitely prejudiced in his favor, he does a mighty fine job at his craft.

I hope you have many more years to do this, Dad. I'd love to see you be able to give your great-grandchildren a bird feeder, directly from your hands to his or hers.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction

The golden age of science fiction is twelve. - Peter Graham

I was actually thirteen when I became aware that my favorite genre of fiction was, and still is, science fiction. The author I was reading when I made this discovery was one of the giants of the days when SF first became popular, its "Golden Age". The author? Arthur C. Clarke. The novel? Childhood's End.

Clarke passed away earlier this month at the age of 90. He was not only a justly celebrated writer but also a visionary scientist. He wrote a paper in 1945 that postulated communications satellites in geosynchronous orbits (now called Clarke orbits).

His writing is marked by a boundless optimism, by vast vistas of time and space, and by that old fashioned hallmark of science fiction, sense of wonder. You don't read Clarke for character development or emotional depth; you read him for ideas and plot. Don't get me wrong, he was a competent wordsmith. He just wasn't elegant.

He was one of the first three giants of science fiction, along with Asimov and Heinlein. He was the last of the three to pass away. Those of us who enjoy SF were enriched by his presence in the world.

Another trip to the airport

My daughter Gigi and her boyfriend Chris came to visit us for their spring break a couple of weeks ago. It says a lot to me that they not only chose to spend their vacation time in North Carolina, but that they paid for their airfare.

Chris, like Gigi, is a child of divorce. He is close to his brothers, in fact lives with one of them, if I'm correct. Still, I wonder how he feels when he visits here and he get thrown into the extended family. He appears to handle it well, and even to enjoy it.

Gigi now no longer disappears into herself when we visit my family. It is good, not only that she interacts with her grandparents, aunts, and cousins, more, but that she put herself front and center more. She is studying elementary education with the intent of becoming a teacher, after all.

Gigi and Chris aren't engaged, but they are thinking about marriage. I'm happy that my daughter's first truly serious relationship is with a young man who respects her, and who is working to put himself into our family. That's better than I had in the past.

They flew home out of Charlotte, a week ago yesterday. I always try to get to the airport well more than an hour before domestic flights these days, but we got out of Greensboro 30 minutes later than I wanted -- I guess the stop at Bojangles for breakfast was worth it as a last bit of Southern cuisine for our Midwestern bound pair -- and we got to Douglas airport about 50 minutes before their flight was due to leave. Gigi asked us just to drop them off curbside at the terminal, instead of parking and walking them in. For once, there weren't tears at departure, just hugs and promises to see each other again as soon as we could arrange it. That will be at Andy's high school graduation in June.

As we drove away from the terminal, Lisa saw that the hourly parking deck was just across the street from the terminal. We could have parked and gone in with them through check-in and up to security. Live and learn.

We stopped at a nearby Wendy's, got a couple of sodas, and simply waited with our phones on, until after their departure time. Just in case, you know.

Our soundtrack for the ride home was Simon "We play everything" 98.7 FM out of Greensboro. Back to everyday life, with an interlude of a phone call from Gigi, just before we reached Greensboro, to let us know that their flight had landed in Chicago.

A connection

I was looking at the liner notes for Raising Sand and saw that my favorite cut on the CD, Stick With Me Baby, was written by Mel Tillis, one of last years Country Music Hall of Fame inductees. It's interesting when I find my blog entries intertwining.

Today's small irony

I was just going through my online checking to make sure my checkbook is up-to-date, and I found a McDonald's charge for $4.04, which I had to add to my check register. What do you know, an "entry not found" error...

Raising Sand

You've heard of this, haven't you? The duet CD that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss did? I had several reactions when I first heard about this one, ranging from quirky to odd to intriguing to "Who thought that would be a good idea?" I mean, you can't be much farther apart musically than Black Dog and The Lucky One, can you?

Once I thought about it a little more, though, it didn't seem as far off base as I first imagined. Consider the Led Zeppelin songs The Battle of Evermore, which is basically Jimmy Page playing the mandolin while Robert Plant sings part of The Lord of the Rings, or When the Levee Breaks, which is Delta blues played louder than usual. Or consider that Alison Krauss + Union Station have covered songs by the Beatles and Bad Company. Or that Alison herself has waived off millions in income by staying largely as a bandleader in the bluegrass/acoustic music tradition. She has to be the most notable iconoclast in American music this side of Willie Nelson

Okay, having built a case that the pairing isn't so strange as it appears on the surface, what about the music? Glad you asked. It goes down about as smooth as a drink of well water on a July day on a Carolina farm. Both Plant and Krauss stretch outside their usual leanings, they have some pretty sweet harmonies together, the song choices have some real personality quirks, and the sonic landscape is appealing. The last two aspects of the project can probably be ascribed to T-Bone Burnett, the CD producer who's also responsible for the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou. Remember that Plant is a songwriter who had a hand in most of Led Zeppelin's better known songs, and that Krauss is a highly skilled song interpreter, almost on par with Tricia Yearwood. All in all, Raising Sand is one of 2007's biggest, and most pleasant, musical surprises. I won't be at all surprised if it is considered a classic in a few years.

This week's best line in a forwarded email...

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Frivolous fluff, your comments, yes

There are days, like one last month, that I shouldn't even read anyone else's blog, much less comment with such drivel as this:

I met John Scalvi. He was our server at our favorite fine restaurant, the night I became a man in the arms of my beloved. I don’t know what he was so agitated about, but I was still lost in the warm hazy afterglow, and I didn’t recognize that he’d replaced their usual coffee with Folgers Crystals. Unfortunately for Scalvi, Judge Barlowe at the next table did. Justice moved swiftly, and the judge gave Scalvi the choice between becoming a cat wrangler or a Marine. After contemplating the likely future of one who joined what became “The Last Great Cat Drive” of American Shorthairs and Persians from the Florida panhandle to Tiajuana (otherwise known as “The Feline Lonesome Dove”), Scalvi opted to become a jarhead. He departed that afternoon for Parris Island with only the clothes on his back and the textbook from his Genetic Manipulation class. His was the first squad trained with the Winchester plasma rifle, and four years later, he led the liberation of Montreal. After receiving the Medal of Valor, he left the military to pursue his vocation of genetic research and his hobby of Grandmaster-level chess.Given all this, should my family and I tremble in fear or delight over this case of Folgers Crystals that the uplifted Calico just delivered?

What can I say, I was in a very silly mood.

Banner ad of the day

Seen on GoLookOn, a site for Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, Virginia: Pump It Up, the Inflatable Party Zone.

Before I Forget...

Some observations from the last couple of months:

• My dad had surgery December 17th to repair an aneurysm on his aorta. The surgery was a complete success, but he did not recover nearly as fast as we all expected. I guess that's a side effect of being 75.


• Lisa and I, in one of the traditions of our marriage, saw the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on December 19th. Four straight years we've done this. There was a short in a part of the lighting rig over the floor audience, and after electrical sparks showered down on them, they were moved just long enough for the crew to fix the problem. I also thought that the guitar sound was quite a bit more aggressive this time around.


• We spent Christmas with my family in Whiteville, and on our way down there on Christmas Eve, we saw a rare case of justice done. We were in the outside lane coming up on the last exit off of US 74 heading east in Laurinburg. There were a couple of cars slowing down in front of us to take the exit, and there was a pickup in the inside lane probably 100 yards in front of us. As we were passing a state cop who had pulled someone over on the shoulder of the westbound lane, a car whipped past us doing far faster than the speed limit. It pulled into our lane and had to slam on brakes to keep from rear-ending the cars slowing down for the exit. There wasn't room for it to get back into the inside lane because of the pickup, so I thought we were in for a pile up. Somehow, the fool driver managed not to hit anyone, and as soon as he had a clear lane, he took off like a jet with afterburners lit. A couple of minutes later, another state cop passed us like we were standing still. Just as he was almost out of sight, he turned on his blue lights. Sure enough, we passed him with the idiot driver pulled over to the side shortly thereafter. Merry Christmas!


• Christmas morning is a great time to watch It's A Wonderful Life.


• Gift cards are not a bad way to go at Christmas for your extended family.


• The Eagles have been my favorite rock band for as long as I can remember. Long Road Out of Eden has been in my car CD player almost constantly since I got it right after Christms. There's something about the combination of Don Henley's angry, driving commitment, Glenn Frey's sweet grace notes, and Joe Walsh's stinging guitar solos together that makes music like no one else. Out of 20 songs, only I Love To Watch A Woman Dance, which is lovely but is a lyrical mess, is dispensable. The title song is a tour de force, Center of the Universe sounds like a reincarnation of the Beatles (this is a very good thing), and It's Your World Now is the best passing of the torch song I've ever heard.


• The language and the story in The Darkest Evening of the Year continued to live up to the standard I noted in this earlier entry. The story did have a bit of a lapse in the epilog of a last chapter; the climax was in the penultimate chapter, and after that, we were told in the author's voice what happened, where in the rest of the book, the story flowed from the characters. That weakened what should have been a powerful affirmation of the miraculous in our lives.


• For the first time since my children moved away with their mother, none of them made it to North Carolina during the Christmas holidays. I know what bittersweet means.


• Los Angeles is not a bad place to visit in late January / early February. I took a class for work, SQL Server 2005 for Developers, and this will really come in handy over the next few months when several databases at work are upgraded from SS2K.

Ten Things I've Done You Probably Haven't

John Scalzi made up his list and asked his blog readers to make up theirs. Here's mine.

1. Told Orson Scott Card at a book signing that my ex-wife's mother lived just off a Greensboro street he included in Ender's Game.
2. Was in the operating room when my ex had an emergency C-section and saw spurting blood and drifting smoke over the curtain, just before the doctor said, "This looks like a nine pounder."
3. Took a much loved 17 year old cat to the vet hoping she could hang on, was told she couldn't, asked to be with her when she went to sleep for the last time, watched the vet walk out for a couple of minute, then return and ask me, "Are you sure you want to take the body?"
4. Backed a car that was stuck in reverse three miles through city traffic to meet my ride to work at the service station.
5. Dressed in a grass skirt and coconut bra to raise money at our "Luau" Relay for Life event in 2007.
6. Driven one of my dad's farm tractors sideways into a six foot deep drainage ditch and walked away without a scratch.
7. Preached a couple of Youth Sunday sermons at a Southern Baptist Church.
8. Lost my first wife, after twelve year of marriage and three children, to another woman.
9. Am married to my best friend, who I met through a Dean Koontz newsgroup on Usenet.
10. Was recently a contestant on Jeopardy.

The Darkest Evening of the Year

Funny how you wake up early when you fell asleep at 9:00 pm watching TV, isn't it? With the time on my hands these past couple of hours, I've finally started Dean Koontz's The Darkest Evening of the Year, which I gave to Lisa for Christmas. And, very unusually for me, I feel compelled to comment on a book while I'm reading it.

I'm having the most curious experience with Darkest Evening, in that I'm finding myself both inside and outside the story as I'm reading. Dean's prose is simply gorgeous, moreso than in anything else I've had read by him. His only work that comes anywhere near to this is Midnight, which really isn't one of my favorites. That aside, I find myself going back and rereading passages often, and I intend to pull a few of them out for my quote file.

I've noticed in previous books that Dean, who has an unflagging sense of story and a wonderful way with characters, often tends to overreach on description. That tendency often reminds me of a phrase I tried out in a short story in one of my college creative writing classes, "The old man had bales of cotton-white hair." My classmates had quite a laugh over that neophyte blunder. That's the kind of authorial clumsiness that can grab a reader by the scruff of the neck, yank him right out of the story, and promise to beat him bloody if he has the temerity to crack the book open again. Dean's "transgressions" in description are seldom that egregious, but they do at times present minor obstacles down the paths of his tales.

In the first 75 pages of Darkest Evening, I have yet to find a single description that yanks me out of the flow of the story. Yes, I said that I have stopped often to reread a particularly lovely passage; not once has that broken the spell of the story.

I hope there's more of the little girl Theresa and her "twilight eyes". Perhaps it's no accident that Twilight Eyes is the latest mass market paperback reprint of an earlier Koontz.

For now, it's back to Darkest Evening, with no notion of where the story is taking me, but a willingness to go along for the journey, the expectation that I may have already covered the finest part of this book, and the determination that I won't forget the feeling that has come from what I've already read.

Casablanca and Chicago!

Well, I can finally comment publicly about my Jeopardy appearance. It was an experience that was both exhilarating and humbling. I never really got into the rhythm of ringing in, so even though I knew the majority of the answers, I was solidly in third place going into Final Jeopardy.

Turns out, with Kristen and Anna $500 apart and both with more than double my score, if I'd stood pat, I would've won. Of course, if I'd really comprehended that they wanted to know both of the Oscar winning movies whose one word titles were cities beginning with "C", I would've won. As it was, every one of us missed the question -- I only gave them Casablanca -- and both Kristen and I bet everything. Anna had $799 left, so ironically, for this one show, I made more for third place than she did for winning.

I wonder if I can try again.

----------------
Now playing: Eagles - Long Road out of Eden
via FoxyTunes

My 15 minutes is here

I'm a contestant on Jeopardy tonight. The local CBS affiliate interviewed me last night, corporate communications sent an email to everybody in the company today, and a local radio station wants to talk to me during their morning show tomorrow. And to think that this all started with an online test last February!

A Fallen Soldier

I came across a link at Whatever that lead to this. I've never heard of Major Andrew Olmsted before, but I am grieving for a man of integrity.

Here's his blog at the Rocky Mountain News of Denver.