Like most people, I imagine, I have a morning ritual I go through most weekdays whilst preparing for the day. All the usual stuff, of course: exercise, bathe, coffee, breakfast, coffee, dress, coffee, morning commute—admittedly, a total of 45 steps down a flight of stairs into the basement, but a commute nonetheless—and coffee. From there, one of the first things I do is to scan a selection of Web sites for important and/or interesting news and information. Accelerate Your Mac, Snopes, Slashdot, Endgadget, EcoGeek, Versiontracker, SmallNetBuilder, US-CERT’s Cyber-Security Bulletin and the forums of a couple of hardware vendors whose products I use both personally and professionally. Then there’s a few sites trawled for their pure entertainment value: Fark, Penny Arcade, Dork Tower, Kotaku, Cute Overload, Daily KOS, and Wonkette.

I don’t usually do much more than skim Wonkette; not because it isn’t funny and clever and quite to the point, but because it tends to be a bit too aggressive for my taste. Or rather, Wonkette on top of my regular early weekday morning wake-up of Stephanie Miller is a bit too aggressive for my taste. One or the other is fine, but both stacked on top of each other is a bit too much snark for that time of the morning. And since I started listening to Stephanie Miller first, she gets grandmothered in.

However, I just became aware of Wonkette’s ongoing comic strip entitled Ayn Rand’s Adventures in Wonderland, by artist, blogger and Wonkette contributor Benjamin Frisch, and I suggest that everyone go and take a look at it. It is a delicious, bile-fortified, snark-frosted scone of satire, fit for any breakfast buffet.

FIREWOOD!

Early Tuesday morning, a medium-sized dump truck backed up our driveway and delivered a cord of mixed hardwood. We don’t typically heat with wood—though if we have another verdammt middle-of-the-winter power outage we may change our minds about that—but we do have a spanking new fire-cum-barbecue pit in the back yard, which we intend to use as a replacement for our venerable “two army-issue broiler pans filled with charcoal sitting on cinderblocks” arrangement at our various and sundry holiday grillvaganzas.

It took me about five hours to move and stack the wood along the east side of the house, setting a leisurely pace so as not to cause my spine to explode, sending me shrieking across the sky on a contrail of suddenly-liberated synovial fluid. Later on, I thought to look at the stills from our driveway surveillance camera, and what I saw there gave me a hum-dinger of an idea.

So here, for your amusement, is a time-lapse of my log-haulin’ Tuesday, set to the musical stylings of Yello’s Tied Up! It’s a toe-tapper, and safe for work, so turn those multimedia speakers up!

Margaret and I were at our local pet store this weekend buying some feeder mice for the snakes. Being a nice May day, there were quite a few folks out in Ye Olde Burien Towne enjoying the weather, including a medium—er, sorry, Starbucks, that’s Grande—sized horde of children with parents in tow in the pet store itself. A small tactical nuclear family was crowding the aisle where the rodents reside, Mom kind of squashed in the far corner while the kids crowded the plexiglas front of the cage, oohing and ahhing at the snake snacks contained therein. Dad had propped himself up against a shelf at the head of the aisle, making jokes and generally messing with his kids’ minds in just that sort of way I tend to admire: “How’d you like to be the guy who has to shave those hairless rats every day?” he asked of one of his sons. I smiled to myself as I watched #1 Son turn and look up quizzically at his father. Soon enough the kid had lost interest and wandered off into another part of the store. Dad turned to watch him go, and as he did, I saw the 9 millimeter handgun holstered on his left hip.

I should preface anything that follows with the statement that I am, in general, pro gun rights. I think that, in a democratic society, stronger limits on legal gun possession tend to restrict the possession of firearms by those least likely to misuse them. (Which is not to say that I wouldn’t support tougher rules regarding the training that one must undergo in order to legally own a firearm.) I also suspect that there’s a really good chance the drafters of the Second Amendment intended that citizens have the means at their disposal to violently overthrow their own government if ever it became necessary in the name of protecting our freedom. Problem is, that’s not the way the passage actually reads, and I tend to believe in divining the intent of the Founders through their legally-binding documents, not tea leaves, goat entrails or other forms of constitutional augury. Also, given the size and lethal sophistication of Federal military forces these days, to insure true parity by a citizen militia would require the legalization of civilian-owned armaments to horrendously destructive as to make the existence of any form of local law enforcement—from beat cop to National Guard—an act of suicide on the part of its members. So it seems obvious that a certain amount of restriction must be exercised when choosing who may own what sorts of weapons.

But handguns, shotguns, rifles, even so-called “assault rifles” that are made illegal simply because they look more badass than their big-game-hunting counterparts (an act tantamount to classifying a Hummer H2 as a “tank” because it’s encrusted with sorta-kinda-militaryish-looking plastic carbuncles)….I think that the right to keep such weapons should, by and large, be preserved. The “and bear” part takes a little more convincing. I don’t necessarily want to restrict the right of a citizen, lawfully licensed to own a handgun, from being able to carry it on his or her belt in public. That being said, I also don’t want to restrict the constitutionally-protected right of a citizen to, say, write fiction extolling the virtues of rape, incest and child molestation. In either case, I’d simply prefer that the individual in question choose not to.

Whenever some unexpected tragedy of mass murder occurs here in these United States, we are bound to hear from both sides of the aisle in the endless debate over gun ownership in America. The anti-gun folks will staunchly pretend that anyone who wants a gun can’t in all likelihood go out and find one with little or no trouble, legal or otherwise, no matter what kinds of laws are passed; and the pro-gun side will act as though a college/church/Safeway full of individuals armed to the teeth would somehow, against all understanding of human nature, be statistically safer than one without. The actual answer is a lot more nuanced, and a whole holy crapload harder to legislate. A level-headed, well-trained, emotionally-healthy citizen with a firearm might very well be a godsend in such a situation. And if there were any way to instantly and accurately distinguish the level-headed, well-trained, emotionally-healthy people brandishing guns from the paranoid, whacked-out testosterone-poisoned wingnuts, then this would not be the hot-button issue that it currently is.

Personally, I don’t feel like I should have to exercise such intense and potentially life-changing deliberation concerning the mental, emotional and moral stability of my fellow Man every time I enter a public place. Particularly if the only real way to be sure I was protecting my own safety in the face of such ambiguity would be to either a) never leave my home or b) start packin’ heat myself every time I run out for a quart of milk or a can of mice.

To be honest, there’s something a little unnerving about a person who wants to walk down the street with a singular killing device like a Glock strapped to his side. In fact, one has the distinct impression that “unnerving”—or, to put it another way, “intimidation”—is exactly what this guy was hoping to achieve in doing so. It’s a form of pre-one-upmanship, a way of taking all advantage away from the other guy, whoever and under whatever circumstances that may be. “I am prepared to blow a generously-sized hole in you if you make me feel sufficiently threatened, and I have the tool to accomplish this objective not four inches from my dominant hand, so you’d best watch everything you do and say in my presence.” It feels….well, like a form of cheating, I guess. This guy has decided to end the conflict before it starts, by so totally overbalancing the situation in his favor. It’s like deciding to wear a suit covered with millions of spines dipped in shellfish toxin out in public; nobody will have any problem so long as they keep their distance. It’s not your fault if they happen to accidentally brush against you.

I think I chose my reaction to this spectacle quite well; I elected to ignore him. But at the same time—and please don’t imagine for one moment that I am anything but ashamed of this—I have to admit that the more alligatory bits of my brain entertained another possible course of action. Namely, to slip in behind him and shove the knife clipped inside my pocket into the base of his neck, thereby proving the singular futility of attempting to hold back life-altering tragedy through the ostentatious display of lethal force.

But even setting aside the legal, moral and basic human decency questions, all told it was probably better that I didn’t. No doubt his wife would have pulled a Walther from her purse and blown me away.

Now personally, I hates me some Oscars. I may or may not take some of my movie-viewing cues from what people I’ve never met in my life have to say about a given flick, but I have zero tolerance for the pimp and circumstance of Hollywood award shows. Overcelebrated people gathering together to further overcelebrate themselves—huzzah!

But even with fewer than half a dozen Oscar ceremonies under my belt, this little scrap of genius, sent to me today by Shawn, seemed to me to hit it right on the mark. View and enjoy.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I have been running a serious sleep deficit for the last week or so and only caught up Saturday by sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon, by which point I was in no mood to do anything but watch TV and grunt.

For my birthday this year, Mat & Shannon bought us tickets to the Friday night Jonathan Coulton concert at The Moore Theater, which was an absolute blast. We took the train from the Tukwila Park-N-Ride into Westlake Center, which was an easy walk from both the theater and the Steelhead Diner, where we had a nosh before the concert. If you’ve never been (we hadn’t either), let me fervently recommend the Steelhead. They serve a wide variety of elevated diner grub, with lots of seafood and vegetarian choices in addition to classy upsells of old favorites. Margaret and I both had the Wagyu burger, Matt had the catfish and Shannon had potato latkes and a plate of roasted broccoli. Four people, appetizers, beer, entrees, one dessert and coffee for just over a hundred bucks, in downtown Seattle, canyoudigit. We’d go there again in a heartbeat, any time we were in the area.

And by gum, we plan to be in the area more often. I simply cannot describe for you how much of a rail whore I have become. I hate driving in downtown. Hate. HATE. Driving. In downtown. 1st Avenue South is like some sort of grim death march for much of the day. And while there are a multitude of highways, byways and myways one may use to get into the area, once you’re there you’re still….well, there. You still have to crawl along the clogged thoroughfares. You still have to deal with the throngs of tourists who treat the crosswalks as their own personal pedestrian footbridge. And you still, God help you, have to find a place to park. Instead, for about half the cost of parking downtown, Margaret and I were able to park for free at the Tukwila station and ride round-trip into the heart of downtown, well within walking distance of a dizzying array of shops, restaurants, museums, theaters (both movie and live), the Pike Place Market, and just about anything else we might care to pursue in the metropolitan area. And trains run until nearly one in the morning….which is way later than I’m running these days, lemmetellyou.

So after a leisurely dinner, we meandered up to the Moore and got there in plenty of time to see the opening band, Paul and Storm, who naturally opened with their song about being the opening band entitled “Opening Band“. They were hysterical, and the crowd ate them up like so many Pepperoni Hot Pockets.

Both of these bands represent a wonderful trend in indie music, namely the ascension of nerd rock. Sure, nerds have had their place in music since time immemorial, probably all the way back to the point where the rest of the tribe decided to feed the one guy who could knock old water buffalo skulls together in an esthetically pleasing way. But it seems as though the Information Age has been particularly kind to the musical nerd. From the advent of synthesizers and sequencers (allowing for the creation of the 256-piece one-man band) to the rapid evolution of the home recording studio and the rise of the Internet as the ultimate distribution channel, ghost white, pencil-necked AV wonks have profited from their appropriation of the means of production as much or more than any other musical genre. And since so many of us in that demographic long ago learned to shield ourselves behind a fecund and self-deprecating sense of humor, it’s not at all surprising that nerd rock tends to be hilarious.

Margaret and I were absolutely enchanted with the performance, and looked upon the audience of fellow travelers with something akin to affection. The overwhelming preponderance of suspenders, scruffy facial hair, and bellies overspilling waistbands was strangely charming….at least, it was strangely charming once we came to our senses and went up into the largely vacant balcony seats, away from the enormous sweaty man who sat next to us singing along off-tempo and out of key with every song. When Paul and Storm performed—no shit—a tribute song to the inventor of the chicken nugget, they suggested that it would not be inappropriate for folks to hold up their lighters—or, for those who had iPhones, to hold their phones aloft with the Virtual Zippo app running. And holy crap, you would not believe the number of iPhones that shot into the air. And those rarefied few who did not yet have the Zippo app feverishly scrambled to download it from Apple’s store before the chorus. Sometimes my fellow tribespeople can give me a minor case of the creeps; seriously, these were nerds whom I wanted to beat up and take lunch money from.

Jonathan Coulton played for about two hours, both by himself and with accompaniment from Paul and Storm, and local ukulele artist Molly Lewis, who also played a couple of her own songs. All of them seemed to have great fun performing (believe me, you have not heard “Mr. Fancy Pants” until you’ve heard it live, with Coulton pounding out crazy Gene Krupa riffs on a hand-held drum controller hooked to his laptop), and God knows they couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic audience. All in all, a wonderful, fun-filled evening.

Picked this up from Kotaku this morning (kinda not safe for work, in that way that only Japanese pop culture can seem to manage):

I’m generally not a fan of Kirsten Dunst; the last film I liked her in was Interview With The Vampire. However, the sheer moxie it took to prance around the Akihabara District in a Takashi Murakami-designed sailor suit singing The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese” is enough to make me reconsider. And the tiny skirt doesn’t hurt either.

One of the things I really love about this video is that it’s kind of hard to tell which people in it are actual paid extras and which are just—ahem—normal citizens going about their day.

Actually, anything that keeps The Vapors in the public gestalt is all right by me. Even if their fame derives chiefly from possibly the worst song in their repertoire. Give me “Bunkers”, “Trains”, “Isolated Case” or “Magnets” any day….

On a related topic, I’m glad I don’t use tags on my blog; I shudder to think what I would put this particular entry under.

EDIT: reworked the video so it shows. Up yours, YouTube! My version looks better anyway.

My friend Mike sent me a link to this, which is just hysterical: a parody piece of columnist Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs about the iPad. Includes NSFW language.

I have not been a true Mac fanboy for many years, despite my having worked with and on their products since 1988. My philosophy goes something like this: if you are new to computing, if you are afraid of viruses and spyware and what to do about them, if you are not a rabid gamer and/or do not play all your games on a console, you’d do well to get a Mac. The more or less seamless user experience and piss-elegant hardware design is a winning combination. Alternatively, anyone who has a more-than-basic knowledge of the workings of computers and operating systems, who knows how to bring up the Task Manager and Google any processes that look fishy, who wants to play the widest possible range of computer games, and/or would rather shell out half the clams for a top-of-the-line workstation, is probably better off with a PC. There it is, in a nutshell. Somewhere in between these polar extremes lies the realm of Linux, CP/M, the BeOS and the venerable propeller-heads who cook their own operating systems.

All that having been said, the iPad looks to me like the most ridiculous waste of time, money and R&D Apple has undertaken since—geez, the eMate? Actually, I take that back: for its time, the eMate was far more revolutionary than the iPad, which at its heart is just a crippled iPhone with a thyroid condition. It’s a proprietary e-book reader with a double-amputee Web browser tacked onto it. For 500 bucks.

I’ll admit, I like the idea of Apple getting into the electronic book market. Any competition in this arena is going to be good for the consumer. And maybe Apple will do a better job of representing the interests of both authors/publishers and the public than has often been the case with other companies. Probably not, but just the fact that there’s another hat in the ring can’t hurt. And there’s that aforementioned elegance of piss they’re known for; in terms of human engineering, the iPad comes pretty close to the state of the art in this sort of e-reader, with color, WiFi and Internet capability. It just needs to either get a lot cheaper or a lot more capable before I’d do anything but laugh at the prospect of plonking down 500 bucks for this thing. This coming from the guy who spent 450 dollars on a GPS-enabled Windows Mobile PDA about a year before the GPS-enabled WM smartphones came into their own. Let’s just say I’ve learned my lesson….hopefully.

So someone give me a nudge when the iPad comes down to $299, and I’ll take another look.

We spent a good chunk of this weekend re-watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD. The theatrical cuts won’t be available on Blu-Ray until later this year, and according to a well-placed source (our friend Ed who is somehow wired into the movie scene by any number of invisible-yet-Trans-Alaskan-Pipeline-thick conduits of pure informational flow), the extended cuts won’t be out until after Parat 1 of The Hobbit hits the silver screen sometime in 2011. So it seemed like a good time to give our new TV a chance to really stretch its legs and steep ourselves in fantasy for a weekend.

I had forgotten how much of a workout those films can be. In addition to the fact that the extended DVD versions of each film weigh in at somewhere between three and five geological epochs’ duration, they can also be more than a little wearing emotionally. Unless you are the type of person who is immune to manipulation of one’s feelings through the medium of the moving picture, The Lord of The Rings is something of a roller-coaster ride, at times leaving the viewer awash in alternating waves of exhilaration, sadness and joy.

But this time through, I became aware of another feeling imparted by the trilogy; a sense of my own essential banality.

This should hardly come as a shock, seeing as how a good five percent of my waking life is spent looking at the people around me and finding myself wanting by comparison. I don’t make as much money as her; I have nowhere near the coding skills as him; I don’t have his acumen with languages or her talent with a paintbrush; I weigh three times what he does, yet my boobs aren’t nearly as shapely as hers. There’s basically no end to it. So why should it surprise me that I also compare myself to characters in fiction, wholly artificial beings crafted on practically a mitochondrial level to be inhumanly strong, courageous and noble, and find myself envying them for the very qualities that put them out of just about anyone’s reach?

In case you’re wondering, of course I understand the pure folly of this. Beyond the simple waste of energy represented by such musings, there’s the fact that these people represent a totally idealized distillation of their less distinguished historical analogues. (I’m speaking here primarily of the icon of the Knight or the Soldier, rather than, say, wizards or wood elves; I may while away some unseemly portion of my existence wishing I possessed qualities I do not, but those qualities at least graze the surface of that which might possibly be achieved. I don’t count my inability to ward off Balrogs or teach trees to speak among my many failings. Instead of pining for those particular skills, I left my parents’ house, married someone and have regular sexual intercourse.)

The idea of comparing oneself to “the knights of yore” has any number of pitfalls. First of all, it’s like comparing a horse-drawn cart with a loaded Ford F-250 Super Duty Crew Cab. Neither exists in a vacuum, and both have their advantages and their drawbacks. A pickup truck owner might long for the simplicity represented by the horse and cart, free of the infrastructure of petrochemicals, mechanics, spare parts and insurance bills. On the other hand, a farmer living in any century save the last might cheerfully trade his eldest son for the chance to hook his plow to the tow hitch on that Ford for a planting season or two….particularly if it came with on-command 4WD. The point being, things—including human things—tend to work best in their own environment, and my environment happens to include Asynchronous DSL and hot and cold running lattes.

Secondly, romanticizing the past is a sucker’s game. In addition to overlooking the “romance” of pestilence, starvation, primeval medicine and a life span less than half that of  modern First World humans, the concept of “ye parfait and genteel knight” was probably as much a product of fiction then as it is now. I don’t really have the knowledge of history to back this up, but I rather suspect that the warrior class of just about any civilization of bygone eras was built on as much a foundation of oppression, rape and wanton cruelty as any other factor….as cosmically distant from the mythos of Aragorn or Eomer as a Harlequin Romance is from a porn film.

The more I think about it, the more I think that looking back on the days of the Knight Errant through rose-tinted spectacles is like one of those conservative types who look back fondly on the 1950’s while forgetting things like polio and lynchings.

So my unhelpful tendency to compare myself to these “people” and find myself wanting is tempered by my very real understanding that I would in all likelihood not trade places with them—if indeed such a place existed—for love, money or fair-trade coffee. All of which I have in sufficient quantities right now anyway. I’m sure also that at least some of the flaccid envy I feel regarding many of the characters in these films is due to a case of action-movie-surplus disorder. Author Neal Stephenson hit the nail right on the head in his novel Snow Crash:

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

Now in my 40’s, I’m old enough to know better. Sadly, I don’t yet appear to be old enough to actually start acting my age. Or rather, I probably am acting my age. In fact, by some accounts I could be said to be acting supremely mature for my age….given that, emotionally, I’m probably about twelve years old.

So I spent the weekend watching these films on my big-screen TV in my comfortable living room, basking in the company of my wife and my cats and my cushy upper-middle-class life, with a mixture of excitement and a sort of wistful longing. And when I was done, I set both back on the shelf, alongside the DVDs, and got back into the groove of my comfortable, humdrum existence. Or perhaps it’s a rut. Either way, the sides are smooth, which makes it tough to climb out of….not that I want to.

As has become the custom, we welcomed in the new year with a cornucopia of friends, food and fire, here at Chez Us. We made pizzas, quaffed drinks of both the hard and soft variety, set off fireworks and made much merry. At 12:42am, naturallement,  we hid our heads in propitiation to the Spam God. Many thanks to the 20+ friends and family members who showed up and joined in the rannygazoo.

Like last year’s celebration, we capped off the overall experience with a bonfire, attempting for the second year in a row to completely use up the ginormous applewood stumps we got from Margaret’s parents’ house. For the second year in a row, we were unsuccessful in getting the damn things to completely burn away; this may become a yearly effort that spans well into the (un)foreseeable future. Unlike last year, however, we decided to hold said bonfire in an actual fire pit that we built from those sort of wedge-shaped concrete blocks you see holding up the more frufru retaining walls in your better neighborhoods. This was a tremendous improvement over last year’s plan, in which we dug a hole in the dormant backyard garden for the fire, thus forcing our brace of inebriated guests to stagger back and forth between our muddy backyard and our poor innocent carpets. The fire pit worked out so well that we’re going to keep it around for use in other occasions, including as a replacement for our aged and highly improvisational charcoal grill system, which consists of two army-issue roasting pans, filled with briquettes and standing on cinderblocks. I plan on getting a couple of big stainless wire racks to span the pit and use as a grill surface for our various barbecue parties. I’m also bound and determined to use it for a monster chili-pepper-roasting party next pepper season…..it’s been entirely too long since we’ve had us a big pepper-palooza.

Among the highlights of this year’s celebration was a fire-breathing demo by Jason, who brought his very own personal stash of tiki torch oil for just this purpose, even though by the time he started he could probably have just spit on the fire and gotten a similar effect.

We also took the occasion of the new fire pit as an opportunity to burn a sage bundle that my sister Meg had put together and sent us many years back from New Mexico. That makes us sound way more New-Age-Hippie-Airhead than we actually are; we weren’t trying to summon the good spirits or align our chakras. It just seemed like a good time to make a little offering to Whatever’s Out There for the plenty we seem to have more than our share of. Sage burns nice and stinky….an acrid, cleansing smell. Made a nice topper to the evening. Well, morning, really.

This year’s party was nowhere near the drunken bacchanal of least year. While the liquor flowed freely, most folks seemed to rein themselves in a bit this year; we dropped from four pukers down to one, a very respectable decrease. And no one had their face drawn on with indelible marker this year. True, one of our revelers got on his phone and started prank-calling after-hours emergency vet clinics (interestingly enough, the same reveler who later barfed), but to be fair he was kind of goaded into it by others who shall remain nameless. Ethanol surplus or no, everyone remained the fun, happy, easygoing folks they are when sober. Which is yet another thing I love about our friends; on the occasion that they get shnockered, they just become the same people that we love and respect in the first place, only more so. Our friend Steve proffered the opinion that the inhibition-lowering effects of alcohol give you a chance to see what kind of person someone really is—a happy drunk is probably happy in their regular life, a nasty drunk is probably a bit of an asshole, etc.—which in the case of our group is an encouraging thought indeed. The sight of one fellow, two and a quarter sheets into the wind, cleaning our kitchen floor with a paper towel because he was a bit scandalized at how much dirt folks were tracking in from outside, just made me want to give him a big ol’ hug and thank whatever forces shape our destiny that we have such fundamentally decent and good-hearted human beings to call our friends. Everyone should be so lucky.

It occurred to me as we were cleaning up after the party that, without expressly intending to do so, we have put ourselves in a position that pretty much perfectly accommodates the goals we envisioned for ourselves early in our domestic relationship. Back when we were still ensconced in the wilds of deepest darkest Pullman, we used to fantasize about what our lives would be like once we returned to civilization. We envisioned a home in/around Seattle, where friends would gather for parties or drop by on the spur of the moment, where we could all just sort of bask in each other’s company and fellowship. And while ’tis true that we don’t all gather together as often or as extemporaneously as we might otherwise like, this is more a factor of the crazy-demanding schedules by which most of us live our lives….sort of a “the spirit is willing but the day planner is weak” kinda thing. And when the opportunity arises and friends and family manage to congregate here, whether for a movie night, a game brunch or a birthday party, it’s always a good time. Through sheer serendipity and some effort, we have created a home in which folks seem to feel welcome, which is really the very best we could have hoped for.

To all of our friends and family, near or far, the very best in Ought Ten.

I had myself a mini-epiphany—I guess that would be an “epiphanette”—a few weeks ago. I had decided it was high time for me to upgrade my desktop publishing rig from my serviceable but long in the tooth Power Mac G5 to something more robust. I have been working non-stop on a variety of creative projects for the last four months or so, and I have calculated that a good 15% of my time is spent simply waiting for my computer to catch up with me. Photoshop filters, export translators, disk activity—all of these and more take processor and disk time, and it’s time I had to spend sitting around with my thumb up my tuchis instead of getting other shit done. The Mac OS is good at multitasking, but interrupting a highly intensive task by starting up a few less intensive ones tends to cause all tasks to slow down; better just to wait until Job A is complete before starting up Job B.

Anywho, I calculated the money required to get myself a top-flight new Mac Pro, plus a few other components that would greatly improve the experience. The total came out to about four thousand dollars. The only remaining question was when to go about getting it. The Mac Pro was getting well past it’s normal development cycle; there was bound to be a new model announced any day now. This would not only mean improved performance and new features for the money, but sale prices on the previous models. So I quelled the voices yelling “now now now now now!” in my head, and hunkered down to wait for the announcement.

About a week and a half into my vigil, I had my epiphanette. Why, I wondered, was I waiting for the advent of a new computer from Apple, when for the same money I was planning to spend, I could buy a top-of-the-line PC, cross-grade copies of all the software I use, and a fast PC laptop to go with it?

It sounds like a Microsoft ad, I know, but there it was: logic was staring me in the face, and I could deny it no longer. So, as of about seven days ago, I have become—in the timeless words of my brother-in-law—Bill Gates’ butt monkey.

Not that this is quite the tectonic shift that all my drama-queen bloviating would imply. Of the six (!) working computers in the house prior to my purchase, three of them were PCs anyway; two gaming machines and my Web server. I’ve run Uncle Andrew dot Net off of both PCs and Macs over the years, with few complaints about either platform, once I prised my blog from the clutching talons of IIS 5 and moved over to Apache. And while it’s true that I’ve done all of my creative work on the Mac platform, the actual software used to perform my job differs little between the two platforms. There are a host of keyboard shortcuts that one must retrain oneself to use, of course, and there are certain pitfalls of cross-platform translation that one must be aware of. But the interface, and the visual metaphors that support it, are essentially identical. I’m finding my way around the new software with relative ease.

The operating system itself, that’s a different matter entirely. My new computer is running, of course, Windows 7. My impression of it is somewhere between lukewarm and warm. It’s not a bad OS, by any means; the common lore that Vista was Vista 0.5 and Windows 7 is Vista 1.0 seems right on the money. As with Vista before it, I like very much the fact that I can turn down various special effects like the whole Aero Glass thing, which to me is just an embarrassing distraction, the nerd equivalent of a big gaudy spoiler and a Street Glow kit on a Honda Civic. That’s something I wish Apple would incorporate into OS X, though I doubt they ever will. I really like the new way of grouping system tray items into “always visible”, “sometime visible” and “never visible” subsets; that’s a huge space-saver. I like how dragging a window to the top of the screen automatically maximizes it. And as has been the case since the Earth’s crust cooled, printing from a Windows machines seems infinitely faster than printing from a Mac, using either of the most popular printing languages, PCL and Postscript.

But my biggest requirement of an operating system—that it not get in the way of what I’m trying to do—is to my mind one of 7’s biggest stumbling blocks. Much of the Windows 7 experience seems geared towards tricking it into doing what I want it to do. Why is it that I can put the shortcut to a folder on my computer in the Start menu but not a shortcut to a folder on a network volume, like a NAS? Why don’t folders in the Start Menu jump open when you mouse over them, instead of requiring you to open the root folder and then dig through the submenus to find what you were looking for? (And for that matter, why is it that when you do click on a folder in the Start menu, the OS doesn’t instantly recognize what you’re trying to do and show you that folder on the desktop, instead of keeping the folder hidden under whatever program window happens to be in the foreground at the time?) Why can I put a shortcut to an application in the Quick Launch area of the Task bar but not a folder? Why can’t I rearrange the order of Toolbars in the Taskbar dynamically by dragging them around? Microsoft helpfully included a “Navigation Pane”, a sidebar on the left side of folder windows with links to commonly accessed items. That’s great, just ducky; so why the fuck would they not make it so you could add things you commonly use to the Navigation Pane and remove things that you don’t? I will never, ever need the “Homegroup” link. What I could really use is a list of folders, selected by me, containing my most commonly accessed projects.

And the killer, the Big Kahuna granddaddy WTF³ feature of all time has to be the way Windows handles special Unicode characters like ®, ™, ß and so forth. On a Mac, in any application and the OS itself, if you want a ™ symbol, you hit “Option-2″. In Windows, if you want the same symbol, you hit “Alt-0-1-5-3″. That, or you go to the Start menu, open the Accessories folder, open the System Tools folder, select Character Map, find the ™ symbol, highlight it, select Copy, go back to your document and select Paste. What could be easier?

Now it is true that many individual Windows apps have much simpler keystroke combinations built in for such characters, but the Mac OS has used “Option-2″ for the ™ symbol for any and all scenarios since time immemorial. I imagine that there must be some good reason for keeping Windows wedded to such a bizarre array of rules regarding special characters, but I have no idea what it is.

[I brought this particular gripe up at a party yesterday, and my friend fisherbear explained that this convention was a holdover from the early days of Windows, and that it allows for access to the complete UTF character set from the keyboard so it is in fact a more complete solution that that offered by Apple. To which I say; maybe so, but just because a system offers more options doesn't necessarily make it better. My feet can take me over a broader range of terrain than my car, too; doesn't mean I'm going to walk to my in-laws' house in Bellevue instead of taking my car.]

And yet despite all my kvetching, here I am with a brand-new 2.6GHz Core i7 machine with 12 gigs of RAM, two 1-terabyte hard drives, two DVD burners, a Radeon HD 5850 video card, Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer sound card and Windows 7, lovingly constructed by my favorite local computer store, plus a lovely little Sony Vaio laptop and up/crossgrades to all my software, all for around the same price as a dual-Xeon Mac Pro with 6 gigs of RAM, one 640 GB hard drive, One DVD burner, an NVidia GeForce GT120 and stock audio. And no upgraded software, save for a copy of Parallels so I could run Windows on it as well.

None of which is to say that I don’t still love the Macintosh; I’ve just kind of drifted away from it over the years as I’ve gotten my hands “dirtier” in the working innards of computers. I think that the Mac platform is a boutique product. It’s there for people who want performance, stability and superior design from a computer, and are willing to pay a premium price for it. Unlike days of yore, the Mac is no longer solely for people who “don’t know anything about computers”. Because of the UNIX roots of OS X, there’s now a sort of “donut hole” effect in the demographic of Mac users; a demographic that spans all the way from grandmothers and dorm-dwellers to oceanographers and astrophysicists. In the middle of the donut hole are those of us who want power and performance but don’t want to pay out the pooter for top-notch ‘puter. People who are willing—nay, are compelled—to tweak and tune, fiddle and futz with our machines until they are everything they could possibly be, or at least until we break something and have to start all over. I would never dare to imply that this sort of person is either smarter or dumber, more or less mature, higher or lower on the invisible yet pervasive ladder of technocracy than those who choose another path. There is room in the digital firmament for every constellation; Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix, Amiga, BeOS, what have you. All except the CP/M folks; they need to be cleansed from the Earth. Joke, people, it was a joke.

As my darling (and patient) wife said in her previous post, I’ve been  r e a l l y  busy lately. But I thought I’d post a little animation I put together from some photos I shot.

In truth, there is no “Nom Box I”; it just sounded better as a sequel.

That was one of the better Halloweens we’ve had around here to date. To begin with, the newest addition to our Halloween decor, a Shishka Bob Torture Box from Gore Galore, was a big hit. We decked out Fernando with a bloody chef’s apron and hat and set him and Shishka Bob out in their usual place on the front stoop. The video below doesn’t really do the tableau justice, but it gets the general idea across:

Secondly, this was easily the best year we’ve had for Trick-or-Treaters since we moved to this neighborhood in 2001. We must have had 15 or 20 total, of all ages, spread out over a four hour period. Sounds pretty meager, but when you consider that 15 kids is 15 times more than we had last year, it changes one’s perspective a bit. We actually had to refill the candy bowl this year….a real red-letter Halloween. As significant is the fact that every one of them was actually in some sort of costume, versus years past when teenage moochers have come to the door with nothing but a tennis racket as a prop (“I’m a tennis player!”. A tennis player in a raincoat, no less) or the year when half of our traffic was teenage girls whose entire getup consisted of a—*shudder*—pacifier. This year’s crowd was diverse, amiable and polite; one kid even shook my hand and congratulated me on our decorating acumen.

The third thing that made this year a topper was the presence of family and friends. Our usual m.o. for Halloween night is to order pizza and sit around eating junk food and watching horror movies. Since this was exactly what more than a few of our contemporaries were planning on doing at their own homes, we decided to band together and do it as a group. We managed to wade our way through Night of the Creeps, Return of the Living Dead (a classic schlock horror movie, and the origin of the meme of zombies craving brains), Blood: The Last Vampire, and then washed it all down with Shaun of the Dead. All the while gorging ourselves on pizza, candy, chips, coffee, soda and mixed drinks.

The nice thing about sitting down to a terrible movie or two with friends is that you can feel free to talk to each other throughout the film, occasionally dipping into the narrative to comment on some particularly egregious bit of acting or special effects. It’s a form of socialization that only really works when everyone is on the same page as to the overall horrbileness (horribility?) of the flick in question. We were all more or less compatibly aligned last night, conversing animatedly throughout Night of the Creeps and most of Blood: The Last Vampire while remaining companionably attentive through most of Return of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead.

All in all, this was probably what I would consider to be the absolutely ideal Halloween night. While I am perfectly happy to both attend and throw parties, I am not a big costume person. Nor am I the type to want to construct elaborately-themed soirees of mind-bending depth and scope, the way my sister Meg does on Halloween, Christmas, Flag Day, Yom Kippur, etc; I just don’t have the energy. And with the amount of dough I invest in these studio-quality Halloween props (in lieu of expending any creative energy myself), I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of either leaving them unattended or declining to put them out at all. So spending Halloween night in with a few friends and a giant bowl of Kit Kats and Almond Joys is just about as good as it gets. Many thanks to those who came over and helped to kill off some of our candy.

This year’s Pumpkin Pogrom was, by all appearances, another hit.

Much chili, beer, coffee and junk food were consumed, and by all recordable measures a good time seemed to be had by all.

We had a couple of firsts this year, chief of which being the presence of my venerable Mom and Dad, who seemed rather impressed with the motley assortment of geeks, kooks, waifs and wastrels with whom we associate. Second of the firsts—um—yeah, anyway—was the presence of friend Anne and her boyfriend, who, being from Wales, had never carved a pumpkin for a Jack-O’-Lantern. Tradition in Wales and much of the rest of the surrounding area is to make them out of turnips, which he assured us are a damn sight harder to carve. Did rather well, too.

Anyway, thanks to all who came out to participate and help make the evening memorable. If you were not among those invited this year, please accept my apologies. We had something like twenty people over this year, at the same time that we were hosting my ‘rents for a few days’ stay. As it was, our carpets were heard to be whimpering softly to themselves well into the wee hours of the morning.

My blog has been up and down like a yo-yo for about a week now. I was twigged to it when my friend Scot reported being unable to reach Uncle Andrew dot Net. At first it seemed as though something bad had happened to my installation of Apache, so I un- and reinstalled it, which took a while. That’s okay; gave me the chance to upgrade to the newest stable versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP while I was at it. Never hurts to juice up the system with the newest releases. Okay, so sometimes it hurts, and on rare occasions it outright kills. But this was not one of those occasions.

However, after a few hours of installing, configuring and tweaking the brainstem of my Web server—the hours of 12:00am to 3:00am on a weekday, to be more precise—it turned out that the actual problem was my firewall software.

Now, technically, a blog being served out from a perch safely NATed behind a router that is itself a firewall appliance, on a machine that is filtering all incoming traffic through its own (admittedly rudimentary) firewall, should be fairly secure. I say “fairly” because no computer is ever totally secure, just like no sex is ever totally “safe”. But that much preemptive filtration should be well enough to keep the script kiddies from getting much of anywhere with my machine, and the true black hats would hardly be interested in fucking around with some random jackass and his piddly online soapbox. But I run too many services from this box (and therefore too many port-forwards through my firewall) to feel totally comfortable exposing my tender pink interfaces to the outside world without some extra medicine on board. It’s not enough to be all but certain that I’ve got the majority of my sphincters puckered; I want a second opinion, and firewall software can be a good resource for this. Cheaper than hiring a forensic network specialist to sit in my office with me and hold my hand.

Up till recently I was using Checkpoint Software’s Zone Alarm Pro, which—up until recently—I found to be an excellent and full-featured piece of security ‘ware. Problem is, something just started going wrong with it recently. I really don’t know what the problem was, but parts of the network driver add-ons that ZA installs started causing problems, most notably intermittent network shutdowns and—hilariouser still—random Blue Screens of Death. No amount of un/reinstalling, conflict hunting or system simplification would keep my system stable. So I chucked Zone Alarm and have been evaluating a few different packages since. One or more of these packages were more trouble than they were worth, which accounts for some of the other unexpected outages here at UAdN.

I think I’ve found a potential winner, but for the sake of paranoia I will refrain from naming the product, lest it come up later as having some heretofore unreported vulnerability that someone might exploit by Googling the name looking for those who use it. Yes, that’s highly unlikely, I know. But it helps me to sleep at night. Well, that and Benadryl.

If anyone has any recommendations of their own for reasonably-priced network security software for a home mail/Web server, I’d be delighted to hear about it. I’m always willing to tap the pool of knowledge resident in the vast herd of nerds that make up my social web.

Whilst exchanging emails with a couple of friends, I came up with an observation I just had to share.

Just about everyone is cognizant of the “tramp stamp“, that thankfully-slightly-less-ubiquitous-than-previously lower back tattoo of the young, drunk and judgement-impaired.

Wouldn’t a “Biohazard” symbol be the ultimate tramp stamp?

[I wrote this while waiting for my flight to arrive during a recent business trip. I fully intended to publish this from the airport as well, but Boingo Wireless's equipment does not seem to like my Macbook's packet radio card, so I had to wait until I got home to do so.]

Stuck as I am in the Chicago O’Hare International Airport for a few hours, I thought I’d take a passel of moments to regale avid readers of Uncle Andrew dot Net with the tales, trials and travails of my trip to scenic Pontiac, Illinois for our catalog press check.

Our Winter 2009/Spring 2010 catalog is being printed by RR Donnelley, a rather large conglomerate of various printing facilities seeded throughout this great land of ours. This is our first project with them, and by and large everything has gone quite smoothly. As is usually the case with large, expensive or crucial printing projects (this happens to be all three), we have elected to send a representative—me—to the site of the printing to oversee the process.

The facility RRD is printing our catalog at is in Pontiac, about 120 miles south of Chicago. It’s easy to forget that much of Illinois is highly agrarian until you are driving through it. Take a look at a satellite view of the area and you’ll see what I mean about “agrarian”; practically the entire state looks like a patchwork quilt of farm plots. Along much of I-55, densely packed fields of corn appear to stretch to the horizon on either side of the road. Amplifying the effect is the flatness, the unrelenting, mind-croggling flatness. My brother-in-law once stated that Central Illinois is the only place he’d ever been where you could get road hypnosis simply looking out the living room window. At one point, a series of girdered towers supporting strands of multi-hundred-kilowatt power lines marched across the highway and into the distance, like an advancing skirmish line of War Of The Worlds shock troops. They gradually vanished into the light haze of atmospheric distortion….or possibly over the curvature of the Earth. All in all, once you’ve left the manmade megaliths of Chicago proper, driving through Illinois is basically a traverse through a seemingly limitless expanse of miles and miles of miles and miles.

I found myself thinking that perhaps the state could avail itself of some of the federal stimulus money and buy itself a Z axis.

Pontiac is little more than a wide place in the road, a farm town and railway whistle-stop that just happens to be ideally located for plonking down a rather impressive sheetfed web-offset printing facility. Land prices are doubtless extremely reasonable, and I imagine that the Town Fathers were willing to offer just about any concession—up to and including virgin sacrifice—to secure that kind of industry. From the looks of it, choices in employment in Greater Metropolitan Pontiac are restricted to farming or working at the Wal-Mart (of course there’s a Wal-Mart). The RR Donnelley facility must employ at least sixty or seventy-five people, at a more than appreciable average wage for that community.

(On the subject of the Scuzzy W, something that I noticed since my last trip to Central Illinois many years ago: the Wal-Mart to Hardee’s ratio has drastically altered over time. It used to be that you couldn’t find a Wal-Mart in a community without also encountering at least a brace of Hardee’ses [Hardi?] as well. At the time, Margaret and I concluded that the two enterprises coexisted in a predator/prey relationship, the spry and wily Hardi forming packs to track and consume the larger, slower Wal-Marts. Or perhaps the Hardi served a function more closely akin to that of a remora, affixing themselves to the host in order to make the most of its leavings—presumably soiled Pampers and discarded RV tires, which would go a long way towards explaining the quality of the food served therein. Whatever the real answer, there was not a Hardee’s to be found in Pontiac, despite the all-too-evident presence of the prey/host organism [Wal-Mart is by far the tallest thing in town; you can practically see it over the horizon. Then again, you can practically see folks' mailboxes over the horizon too. In summary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the place is FLAT]. What this indicates about the delicate retail ecosystem of the Midwest is not for me to say.)

Aside from the relative dearth of employment opportunities, the town of Pontiac is one of those storybook-cute farm towns you see all over the United States, anywhere where folks can convince things to grow that other folks can be convinced to buy. Long shady tree-lined lanes, peak-roof houses, small cozy churches, friendly local diners (the main one in Pontiac is called “Baby Bull’s”; great place for a steak, unsurprisingly). And not a decent cup of coffee to be had for love or money. Really, this is just about the last place on earth to be entirely Starbucks-free, much less any local independent gourmet coffee shops. You want that kind of highfalutin’ city slicker shit, gotta go to Bloomington.

I’m being snarky here, but it’s not like I don’t understand that this is the way folks in Pontiac and countless other small American communitites would seem to like it. And that’s great: not everywhere on the planet wants or needs espresso stands, comic-book shops, computer and electronic parts stores and a good spot for Unagi or a Caterpillar Roll. But I do. In fact, I don’t think it’s out of the question to identify these things as a requirement, a staple of survival as vital—for me—as shelter or fire. More than a few days’ abstinence from any two of these things and I’m likely to go into withdrawal. And for those in Pontiac who want a touch of the exotic, the aforementioned Bloomington is only about thirty miles away, and they have at least three of the crucial amenities I listed above. Haven’t tried any sushi there, but I’d be willing to give it a stab. Might stay away from the fugu, though.

Anyway, despite the fifth or sixth worst night of sleep I’ve had in my life (just don’t sleep well in hotels, particularly the day before something important), the press check went extremely well, and I topped off my visit with a quick picnic lunch in a small local park. Folks were out walking their dogs in the crisp but perfectly lovely October sunshine, others were playing with their children or slowly paddling down the lazy Chautauqua River that runs through the community. All in all a positively idyllic scene. At least until the guy in the meshback cap and bracers started bellowing to someone out on the river about health care and the economy, at which point I wadded up my sandwich wrapper and got the fuck out of Dodge—sorry, Pontiac.

Since I didn’t know how long the press check was going to take—I’ve had them last better than two days at times—I scheduled myself for a flight back to Seattle on Tuesday (the day after rather than the day of the press check), with an overnight stay in Chicago, which I’ve never visited except for the airport. Chicago is a surprisingly easy town to get around in by car. I hear it’s also a great town for transit, but since I didn’t feel like paying a cab driver eight hundred dollars to take me to Pontiac, I already had a rental car in my possession, so I decided to keep using it. Heading out for a little dinner, I decided to take the opportunity to sample the famous Giordano’s Stuffed Crust Pizza. I had experienced the stuff sort of second-hand when a friend and Chicago native had some shipped here for a pizza party (we also sent some to my nephew and his wife after the birth of their kid, figuring they had enough cards and balloons to last them for a good long while), but I wanted to try it as it was meant to be eaten—fresh off the vine, so to speak. I found a location in the Irving Park area and struck out in a quest for pie.

Chicago seems to have a lot of just the kind of roads I like, namely “back-”. I never take a trip on one highway when I can take six surface streets instead, and getting around the greater Des Plaines/Chicago area on the local roads was a real adventure, particularly since the Chicago DOT seems to repave their highways and byways once every hundred years whether they need it or not. In addition to tooth-loosening potholes, the trip to Giordano’s featured everything from charming tree-lined boulevards to what would pass for slums in the minds of a lot of spoiled whiteys such as myself, but were probably just mid-to-lower-working-class apartments. I found the restaurant with a couple of false starts, parked on the street and went inside to some of the best pizza I have ever eaten (though my heart—and my gut—will always belong to Peppinos): cheesy, gooey, with a wonderful flavorful crushed-tomato sauce and an amazing, almost pastry-like crust. Outstanding.

All in all a great dining experience, which really helped to ameliorate the fact that, upon leaving the restaurant, I discovered that my rental car had been sideswiped by a Chicago Transit Authority bus while I was eating. Harold, the bus driver, was forced into my car by another motorist who attempted to merge into his lane. Rather than stay where he was and bounce her into oncoming traffic, he pulled to the right, clipping the front of my car in the process. I know all this because Harold, bless his heart, waited in his bus for over an hour for me to get back to my car so he could explain the circumstances. He and I had a nice chat while we waited for the police to arrive. Even now I find myself positively charmed by Harold’s earnestness, his honesty and his unflappable demeanor in the face of what must have been a really long, really boring wait for little expected return. Assuming that the CTA covers the damage to my vehicle without complaint, I will be writing them a glowing note regarding his job performance.

After I and my wounded Hyundai got back to the hotel, I found out from the concierge that there was a Giordano’s around the corner, about a thousand yards from where I was staying. How do you say “D’oh!” in a Chicago accent?

Anyway, the next day I returned my slightly-worse-for-wear rental car and headed off to the airport, where I remain to this very minute. I made sure to give myself plenty of time in case Budget wanted to subject me to enhanced interrogation techniques regarding the accident, but they seemed pretty satisfied with a copy of the police report. That gave me  p l e n t y  of time to take in the fleshpots of O’Hare Airport, which, truth be told, are in fact fairly fleshy. I was able to grab a decent cup of coffee to go with my Chicago-Style Philly (?) from Giordano’s, and sit around on some of the more comfy airport benches I’ve ever encountered whilst gnawing on my nosh and assembling this entry. Some day soon I expect to board my flight and bid fond adieu to the Midwest, returning home to my sweetie, my cats and my Tempur-Pedic mattress.

Tap, tap, tap….there’s no place like home….

My Dad sent me this link today, and I think I might have peed myself a little:

In the midst of the unholy shit-storm I’ve been facing at work for the last three months or so, I decided to drop my Internet Service Provider, Zhonka Broadband. Once a fine, fast and friendly team of wireheads offering competitive, high-quality service, they seem to have dropped off the map completely. I can’t get anyone to answer an email, no one ever picks up their phone, and their voice mailbox—terminally full and unable to accept messages—no longer even features their company name. I get the feeling that, as a business, they are just barely holding their shit together, spiraling in towards an inevitable crash of downed name servers and a padlocked NOC full of equipment set for auction. I don’t know that, because I don’t know anything at this point. However, having smelled smoke, I have no intention of waiting until I feel that burning sensation.

So after much shopping around, I went with a residential DSL line from Qwest. Their proprietary caching equipment means that I get nearly a megabit of upload speed where another ISP could only offer 256k. (Someday I hope they’ll upgrade the equipment out here and I’ll be able to bump up to 7 or 20 mbps. And yes, yes, I know I could get “blazing fast Internet” were I to go with Comcast, but I would never be able to run all the services I want out of my house with their throttled, port-blocked Tinker Toy Internet service. I also kind of hate them.)

And just to make my life a lot more complicated, I decided that in addition to running my own Web server, I would now also run my own mail server and, in order to “simplify” (!) my control over both Web and mail servers, my own name server. Needless to say, this particular branch of the decision tree was a) grievously more complicated than I had anticipated and b) hella grievously more complicated than I had anticipated. It was only after having moved over to my new DSL circuit, reconfigured my routers, set up my DNS zone file and configured my mail server settings that I realized—well, was given to realize by a friend much more experienced than myself—something very very important: I was not going to be able to send anyone mail because I was not properly set up for Reverse DNS. Every time my mail server sent out a  message, the recipient’s mail server would politely ask Qwest’s global DNS servers who I was. And instead of replying “why, that’s mail.uncle-andrew.net”, Qwest would say, “oh, that’s anonymous douchebag Qwest customer number blah blah blah.qwest.net”. At which point the recipient’s mail server would yell “PSYCHE!” and drop the connection.

It is at this point that I would like to really talk up Qwest’s DSL Technical Support Department. They are open 24/7, and are just a toll-free call and a moderate number of asinine voice-prompts away. Within about three minutes of calling I was on the phone with a very helpful technician who, once she got it through her head that I really was running a mail server out of my home and not just using the wrong terminology to describe my problem (and oh, can you even imagine how many times these poor folks must have to wade through a sea of misused technical jargon and overheard buzzwords to figure out what the ignoramus on the other end of the phone really wants to do?), she promptly modified Qwest’s top-level DNS zone files to include entries for my mail and Web servers. They did this for me, a baseline residential DSL customer with nothing better to do with his time than complicate his life and theirs. Frankly, I’m extremely impressed.

I’m still working out some of the bugs, but things seem to be pretty stable at this point. Another week without any problems and I’ll be sending my former ISP a “Dear Zhon” letter. So now I can sit back, relax, and get back to neglecting my reading public in favor of my crushing workload. Stay tuned!

This was going to be a fairly decent year for us, financially. We’d paid off the car, fought the credit card into a holding action and were well in place to start really knocking down the home-equity line of credit. In the coming years we hoped to pay for a new roof, maybe an extension of the concrete pad in the back yard, possibly even spring for a new TV.

Alas, all that is probably so much dust in the wind now. In all likelihood, we will be funneling that money into a new and wholly unanticipated expense: suet.

Allow me to elaborate. Yesterday, Margaret and I were going about our time-honored Saturday rituals; pouring coffee, fixing breakfast, and listening to Car Talk. I happened to be looking out the window into the back yard at our bird feeders, a complex of seed feeders, fruit hangers and a suet basket for the Chickadees, Bushtits and Flickers. The only birds we try not to feed are the Starlings.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate Starlings. We both happen to love their squeebly video-game vocalizations and their gregarious natures. It’s just that they are voracious consumers of suet. Worse, they are horribly messy and wasteful consumers of suet. Watching a Starling go after a suet block is like watching Cookie Monster go after a plate of Chips Ahoy. And it’s never just one. If you have one Starling on your suet feeder, in half an hour you will have twenty, grinding and flailing their way through your rendered-cow wafers like a pack of chainsaw artists on crystal meth attacking a cedar log.

Our suet basket is designed to be “Starling proof”. It is commonly understood that Starlings cannot—or will not, I’m not completely sure which—hang upside down to feed. This has been supported by our observations. So in order to prevent Starlings from eating us out of house and home, the suet basket we use can only be accessed from the underside. While a Starling might occasionally grab a furtive nibble by madly flapping its wings and hovering under the feeder for a few seconds, they seem to quickly learn that the number of calories expended in such endeavors equal or exceed the number brought in by same, and they quickly give up.

Until yesterday, that is, when I happened to witness the beginning of the end. I looked out at our feeders and watched in horror as a young male Starling crept out to the edge of the roof of our suet basket and climbed down onto the grate that held the block of suet suspended. There, the little bastard hung upside-down from the grate and happily om-nom-nommed away for a good ten minutes before flying off.

At the time, I was too paralyzed with horror to run outside and impale him on my Grampa’s Weeder before he could get away.

Because you just know where this is heading. This guy is going to be the fattest, sleekest, sassiest Starling in our neighborhood. As such is going to attract a serious number of potential mates. Each generation of progeny is likely to be blessed with both the genetic propensity and the parental instruction to be able to hang upside-down to feed. Within a few generations, inbreeding and self-reinforcement will mean the advent of a whole new subspecies: Sturnus pendeo-conversus. The Hanging Upside-Down Starling. At this point, we might as well just give up and take out another mortgage for the sole purpose of keeping the damn suet basket filled. Might as well enjoy our last year of financial security before the invasion begins.

Ah well; middle class was fun while it lasted.

Okay, this is just too funny. My friend Jayson sent this along; it’s a trailer for a new film from the director of The Day After Tomorrow, the epic CGI-fest about the flash-freezing of the world and Jake Gyllenhaal getting his first girlfriend, though he doesn’t even get to first base in the movie. Oh, and some of the crappiest animated wolves you will ever see in your lifetime.

Anyway, here’s the trailer:

Now, take a look at this fan remix:

High-effin’-larious.