Category: Life

It’s time to play fanboi or professional. Quick, guess, am I an Apple fanboi or a grizzled computer industry veteran?

There was a day, gentle reader, when I lingered over Radio Shack ads in the Sunday paper to look at and imagine what it would be like to get a TRS-80 and program on it. Some years later, I got a Commodore 128 for Christmas and dabbled on it a bit. Then I got onto what they called the clones in 1990.

And every couple of years, when I got (or built) a more powerful computer, I was excited. It would have better graphics, it would have a faster processor, it would run cooler games that were almost like movies. Whoa.

But sometime not long after the turn of the century, that joy left me. The excitement in getting a new computer. I started working with them, I suppose, and doing more things with them that were work and not fun. I did like having dual processor machines even unto 2007 or so, but now the performance differences are kinda meh. Also, lately they’ve started making movies that look like computer games, so I’m less impressed with how good a game looks because the movies look so bad.

Where am I going with this? Ah, yes. Getting a new computer is a bit of a chore these days because I have to copy data and install a pile of applications and whatnot (if it’s to be my Primary computer). And it’s not like I play a lot of games anyway.

So three or four weeks ago, I (my company) got an iPad 2 because I’m doing some mobile testing, and I’ll eventually need to test under the current iOS version and on a tablet. I configured it in a couple of minutes, and then I set it on the desk.

And it’s sat on the desk for the better part of those weeks. Hardly touched. The cats have swiped on it more than I have, but I didn’t give them my pass code, so those tweets are from me. Even the ones meowing great symphonic overtures.

I mean, it’s just another computer, smaller and lighter, but basically a thin Web browser.

There you have it: I am not a fanboi.

UPDATE: Also not a fanboi: Mr. Hill.

So way back in 2010, I blogged about my gym equipment, particularly the Tony’s Pizza Super Bowl bag that I used for over 20 years in gym-going and whatnot.

You know, I’d seen people with the big gym bags and thought it was something akin to a sports car in the gym. Look at how athletic I am! they screamed. I am so athletic that I need a BIG ATHLETIC BAG for all my ATHLETIC GEAR. And all I, unpretentious I, needed was a little bag for some sweats, a lock, and some weight gloves.

Well, life has changed.

It’s not that I am MORE ATHLETIC, LOOK AT MY BAG, CAN’T YOU TELL HOW HEALTHY I AM BY THE SIZE OF MY GYM BAG? Instead, as you might know, I go through phases where I dress more nicely than I have to. Hey, I work from home, so I could wear jeans and t-shirts all day–and I do some days–but when I go out, I like to have khakis, a nice shirt, and oxfords on. These phases often run counter to my going to the gym phases–that is, I dress nicely until I realize what a hassle it is to additionally port around a pair of gym shoes, gym socks, and whatnot. When going-to-the-gym phases became ascendent, dressing-nice phases became descendent. This cycle, though, I’ve held on, but the shoes stuffed the little bag.

And on Saturday, I went to the gym and the martial arts studio, and there was no way that the change of clothes and a gi were going to fit into the Tony’s bag (and, as it was Saturday, I was in jeans and a sweatshirt and not the full Grant).

So, also on Saturday, I bought a cavernous gym bag that can hold a couple changes of clothes, a couple of magazines, a pair of shoes, a couple of magazines, and a couple of snacks. And maybe a decorative little gym bag dog like a golden retriever.

Meanwhile, the Tony’s bag will hit the showers and become an inactive relic in the museum of things I keep to remind me of the old days. It’ll fall under a pile of bags in the closet (Look! here’s the bag I got from the company that had the funeral for my mother! Hey, this backpack had a GenCon patch on it twenty years ago!).

At least until I find that my Big Gym Bag does not easily fit into a locker at the YMCA. In which case it will return triumphantly from premature retirement, a little canvas Mario Lemieux.

But, for now, LOOK HOW ATHLETIC I AM!

So my five-year-old, somehow my youngest, child gets fixations, whereupon he dwells upon one concept or another for weeks. This month’s obsession: Where he’ll have his next birthday party. Which is amusing, as he’s got until next spring to decide. He’s considered parties at the local bouncy house (bouhaus?) and at the Ozark Community Center (somehow abbreviated by its marketing team to “The OC” because appropriating southern California slang is hip).

However, amid his musings, he announced he wants an Ambush party.

That’s not his five-year-old way of saying a surprise party. He means an Ambush party. Continue reading “The Laddie Wants An Ambush Party” →

The trees are starting to turn here at Nogglestead:

What the? you might ask. That’s the smallest maple we have here at Nogglestead, although we have many small ones.

The previous owners went maple-nuts with new plantings; they lined the driveway and put a number of young trees in the yard. But they didn’t protect them from neither buck-rubbing (wherein young male deer rub their antlers on trees), deer-nibbling (wherein deer eat the bark around a tree, effectively killing it), or frost-cracking (where the bark splits at the base of the tree from the temperature changes near the ground in the winter). This particular tree had frost cracking and some fungal growth on it, and during a summer storm with seventy-mile-an-hour straight ahead winds, the majority of it toppled over. I cut it off near ground level, but this never-say-die maple threw up a couple of leaves to turn red in October for us.

This maple was joined in calamity by a couple of brethren that I also cut low; however, they threw up enough twiggery to resemble topiary Peckingese:

I’m not kidding about the Peckingese: Sometimes, in the early morning or in the evening twilight, I double-take because I think those runt trees are some sort of short animal.

These trees will soon be joined by the remainder of the maples that the previous owners planted, as they have been ringed by the deer so the maturish top parts are dead and small branches from the root stock have leafed out (so I have maple bushes instead of maple trees). Next spring, I shall probably remove these runts and replace them with leaf-spotting-resistant peach trees that I’ll special order (instead of dropping in the leaf-spotting-OPEN-FOR-BUSINESS peach trees one buys at the local hardware store). Which I will surround by a small fence and coil around their bases so the trees actually grow.

Not too long ago, my beautiful wife commented on the number of coffee cups in a phrase that indicated I should get rid of some. She was probably being defensive because she was not properly allocating said resources between the upstairs collection and the downstairs collection when she unloaded the dishwasher. Not properly according to my unpublished schedule. You see, the coffee cups downstairs are for the little single cup brewer that I use down there; others, including the large mugs, are those allocated to the upstairs portion of coffee cups used with the upstairs, pedestrian 12-cup coffee maker.

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.

You see, I prefer to drink from the large mugs, but I have only two. I use the downstairs coffee maker in the mornings when I’m going to have a cup when I start my work day before my children arise. Then, when they’re up, I switch to the big coffee maker and to the big mugs (12 cups, the side of the carafe says. Or 4 mugs).

And yet.

We do run the dishwasher once a day or almost; given this, do I really need thirty coffee cups?

The partially depleted reservoirs look like this:

I mean, what am I planning? A coffee party?

As you know, gentle reader, I am an artifact-based life form. Most of these coffee cups have some significance to me. I have some that are Fiestaware, which go with our Fiestaware dishes in case we ever have people over for a party and we have coffee. However, we’ve upgraded our company dishes to some white porcelain stuff that does not have matching coffee cups. I have coffee cups that were my mothers, including one from one of her old commands, one with a snowman on it, and whatnot. I have a couple of Gevalia coffee cups that were free gifts for subscribing a subscription or two back (when I cut expenditures, I cut my Gevalia shipments). I have a couple that were Christmas gifts (a set of Monopoly cups from Aunt Sandy which are, honestly, outside the two-year window to retain them before putting them in the garage sale). I have a Green Bay Packers cup which is, of course, sacred. I have a couple from my Aunt Dale bearing the logo of her former employer and its brands. A couple of St. Louis Blues cups we got when we were frequent visitors to the Savvis Center. And so on.

So they all mean something, sort of. Although I could probably lose the Gevalia cups and the Monopoly cups, which is four.

And yet.

This week, my wife traveled for her job for four days, which left me tending the boys and drinking heavily. Or so it would seem.

I had my cup in the morning. I had my mug in the morning. In the afternoon, I braced myself with another cup. And, as it was cooler and autumnal in the evenings, I had a powdered hot cider mix as a treat. That’s four cups in a day. And as Mommy was not cooking and Daddy was not grilling to impress Mommy, we had a tour o’ fast food for dinners which meant I did not run the dishwasher for days.

Suddenly, my supply of cups dwindled to dangerous levels. Well, to the point that I could have seriously run out of coffee cups if I didn’t put forth the effort to pour some soap into the dishwasher and press a button.

So I can’t get rid of those cups because sometimes Heather goes out of town for five days at a time instead of just four, and I could need over twenty cups.

HOARDING RATIONALIZATION: COMPLETE

One thing that continues to amaze me on the rare days when I can drag my carcass from the keyboard is the sky above Nogglestead.

It’s been four years since we moved from Old Trees and since I left my urban and semi-rural* upbringing to live in the Ozarks. With wide horizons, high skies, and tall clouds.

And an occasional sunset:

Something you don’t realize living in the city is how far the sun moves on the Western horizon during the course of the year. At Winter Solstice, the sunset is behind the wind break to the left. At Summer Solstice, it’s to the right of the house back there.

Another thing that’s apparent where the horizon isn’t a row of houses thirty yards away: The sun does not rise and set directly up and down: it lowers at an angle to the right. What! I’m not on the equator after all?

And something we get out here several times a year: Rainbows.

We had two last week, in fact. One was a full arch. This one just a partial. But how many of those do you see in a year?

One more thing I might have finally spotted in my lifetime: shooting stars. You hear about them. But unless they’re meteors big enough to almost start World War III***, you’re not going to see shooting stars in the well-lit city sky. Notice I don’t say “light polluted” city sky. Light means relative safety, urban dwellers. I have a bit of light out here so I can keep the predators away from my doors. But it’s not so much that, if I lie on my back, I can’t see more stars than I did in St. Louis. And a couple of times I’ve seen streaks of light that were not planes as they started and stopped in relatively short order. So they might have been shooting stars, but I am a skeptic who is not one hundred percent sure of things I can’t create (in the old days, they called this sort of thing science, but now whatever one imagines or builds on a playset counts as science), so I’m only willing to say I might have seen shooting stars. How many of you have seen a real shooting star? Probably campers and Boy Scouts amongst you, but that was not my pay.

Four years in, and the location still fills me with wonder on occasion. I should really seek out these moments more frequently. Or will that make them lose their wonder, I wonder?

* But, wait, Brian! I thought you said you’ve lived in a trailer park and down an old dirt road. This is true, gentle reader, but both of these locations were in distinct valleys, where the sky was impeded by hills covered with trees.

** “World War”. What a 20th Century concept. Do you, gentle reader, seeing a large number of countries going against a large number of countries ever again? I doubt that there’s currently enough vigor in the West to support it. And a nuclear exchange from here on out is likely to be just a couple of countries with the rest of the world going, “Tut, tut,” ainna? This is just my spurious musing this morning, subject to change this afternoon after careful assessment of new data gleaned from fastidious Internet sources.

Trog is a healthy nut, with his own regimen that preps him for his infrequent runs to the refrigerator. But who couldn’t use some additional tips on exercise? In that spirit of camaraderie, from someone who has given up on cold drinks because the refrigerator is so far away, I present some workout tips from Danica Patrick from Shape magazine in 2009. Continue reading “A Public Service for Trog” →

I read this in the Wall Street Journal this weekend: A Skeptic Sidles Up to the Wine-Bar Boom:

WHY DO PEOPLE love wine bars so much? A single-beverage bar where the food is tiny and the tables smaller still is an arrangement whose appeal is a bit of a mystery to me. Yet I realize mine is a minority point of view, since the number of wine bars all over the world just keeps growing and growing.

When the wine-bar boom began about five years ago, I thought it was a trend that would eventually end. How big an audience could there be for establishments that specialized in small plates of cheese and wines by the ounce? I was sure that people would realize that a good glass was best savored by the bottle and not in a “flight.” (A “flight” is a cute wine-bar name for tiny glasses of wine with a big price.) But clearly my powers of prognostication are flawed, as Americans’ love of wine bars seems to be a long way from flaming out.

You know why else they’re booming? They’re not corner bars.

It reminded me of something I posted ten years ago about how West Milwaukee was starting to deny liquor licenses to less trendy watering holes:

West Milwaukee, the organic entity, has determined that the time of small entrepreneurs running their own taverns is over. Instead, it’s time for West Milwaukee to look like Springfield, Missouri, and Chesterfield, Missouri, and most of the other suburbs in most other towns. Bring on the Applebees!

Wine bars are novel and upscale, so cities can approve of them in a way they can’t approve of another bar where working men will drink beer.

Behold, the security of 3-bold locking:

I remember a different world and a different era where things literate people proofread marketing material before sending it to the printer for some expensive rendering on vinyl. But I remember a world that was different in so many ways.

In this 21st century, I keep checking the bottom of my shoes for dead butterflies of a distant era.

I’ll never understand why Labor Day isn’t nine months after Valentine’s Day.

So, how many times do you think the question “Twerking hard, or hardly twerking?” was asked in workplaces this week?

What have you done, o Sunflower, to hang your head so?

I’d say, “Open thread,” but the posts here are a whole lot of open and not a lot of thread.

As seen on Amazon:

You know what’s more humane to a cat than a declaw? Holding a cat down every month while you glue some press-on nails on each and every one of its claws, that’s what!

I’m surprised that the “Customers Also Bought With This Item” section did not include gauze, bandages, and scale mail armor. (Not chain mail, because that catches the cat’s claws uncomfortably. Take my word for it.)

We recently integrated three cats into our household as house-only cats, and at first the veterinarian was not in favor of a declaw and counseled us lightly against it. But as the end of their first week of isolation in my office, I thought about them moving into the household where, as we enter middle age, we’re getting nice furniture, and I decided to blunt them.

In my mind, here’s the humane scale:

1. They have a procedure, use special litter for a couple weeks, and get the run of the household with a loving family for the rest of their lives.
2. They don’t get declawed, and we worry every day of our lives that they will damage something. And when they damage something, we mourn it and/or have it repaired and worry every day that they will damage it again and/or shred our other declawed cats, which they very well might.
3. We either before or after something or somecat has been damaged place the bladed cats with someone else who might not take as good of care as them as we do.
4. We wrestle with them every month to get these things on them.

Some people have strange ideas of the humane treatment of animals. Forcing a cat to take medicine is bad enough. This sounds like torture to both the humans and the cats.

But I have made the links above Amazon Associates links, just in case you disagree and I can profit from your naiveté.

Well, I’m only speculating here, but no doubt future numbers will bear out that domestic drone surveillance use is or will soon cause big problems in the home skylight industry.

On the other hand, I’m looking forward to my new career as a home skylight tinfoil cover installer.

(Link via Ace of Spades HQ.)

Always drive with your hands on the wheel at the ten o’clock and the two o’clock position.

This can obstruct or obscure your spouse’s view of the speedometer and avoid commentary upon how fast you’re driving.

As I predicted:

Throughout Missouri and probably the nation, people are deciding that they want to raise chickens in their suburban and urban backyards (see stories in St. Louis and Springfield). These people are doing it as part of an environmental nutbar fad and they’re doing it with a bit of Internet research and without any experience in farming or treating livestock qua livestock instead of livestock qua food-providing-pet.

Ergo, when their circumstances change, when they get tired of them, or when they reach the end of the hens’ productive years, people are going to need to get rid of these damn birds. Are they going to slaughter them? Of course not! They’d just as soon slay their bichon frise or lifestyle accessory only child.

In 2013, the New York Post reports "Hipster urban farmers learn that chickens are hard to raise, animal shelters inundated with unwanted hens":

Raising chickens in backyard coops is all the rage with nostalgia-loving hipsters but apparently the facial hair obsessed faux farmers often don’t realize that raising hens is loud, labor intensive work because animal shelters are now inundated with hundreds of unwanted urban fowl.

From California to New York, animal shelters are having a hard time coping with the hundreds of chickens being dropped off, sometimes dozens at a time, by bleary-eyed pet owners who might not have realized that chickens lay eggs for only two years but live for a decade or more.

Amazing how the forward-leaning and forward looking don’t see very far forward, ainna?

(Link via Ed Driscoll.)

From a news story entitled "Visitor discovers nearly three carat diamond at Arkansas state park, I learned about the existence of Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park:

Arkansas The Natural State is blessed with an abundance of geological wonders. Crater of Diamonds State Park, the only diamond-producing site in the world open to the public, stands out as a unique geological “gem” for you to explore and enjoy.

Here you can experience a one-of-a-kind adventure hunting for real diamonds. You’ll search over a 37 1/2-acre plowed field, the eroded surface of an ancient volcanic crater that 100 million years ago brought to the surface the diamonds and some of the semi-precious stones lucky visitors find here today.

How cool.