I've often heard church-going friends of mine say that they were reluctant to put any overtly religious symbol (e.g., Jesus Fish) on their car, because it would add all this extra pressure to be a kind & courteous driver, to best represent their group.

I have felt similar pressure about our Obama yard sign. Elsewhere in our town, there are plenty of campaign signs (about 3-1 Obama over McCain), but on our quarter-mile stretch of road, ours is the only presidential sign at all. And our local polling place is in a building directly across the street from our house.

Thus it was that at 8:30 last night (3 hours past dark), I was still out in the yard, raking leaves, until the whole yard looked presentable. Have to display the sign with pride.

So if Obama wins Pennsylvania by a couple hundred votes, and it all traces back to 100% Obama votes in my little precinct, you'll know who's responsible.

You're welcome.

It's October 28. It's snowing. Something ain't right.

Speaking of people who recently resumed their blogs, it looks like Kim is back too. Cool...

Kathy has a new special blog all about the current presidential campaign. You can find it at http://obama.kathichelle.com/. So far she's covered war, religion, abortion, health care... you know, just some little stuff.

Check it out.

Back in May, Kathy & I took a trip to Hawaii, this time visiting the Big Island. It was somewhat quieter than Maui, and somewhat less lush & green than Kauai, but there was a lot to see, especially with wildlife and volcanoes. There were several excellent snorkeling spots, including one right next to our hotel, so we could just walk over with mask & fins and take a swim anytime.

As usual, I took tons of pictures (a little over 3,000 I think), and as usual, it's taking me forever to sort through them and post the keepers online. For now, I have a handful of photos (and one video) posted on Flickr, including turtles, eels, molten lava, and a rare Hawaiian Hawk (even thousands of miles from home, there's no escaping the hawk photos).

Besides the wildlife that we caught on camera, we also saw an endangered Nene (Hawaiian Goose) and a Hawaiian Owl, though we didn't get pictures of these (we sped past the Nene on the highway, and the owl flew across the road at night). It's definitely true what they say about Nenes grazing by the side of the road and nearly getting run over all the time.

For our trip, we had the mixed blessing of lots of volcanic activity at Kilauea (the only active volcano in Hawaii). The upside was that we got to see molten lava splashing & steaming at the ocean's edge. The downside was that the fumes were blowing everywhere, shutting down some areas of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (to avoid exposure to poisonous sulfur dioxide), and also casting a gray haze in the sky for almost the whole week that we were there. Breaks of blue skies were rare, but we definitely enjoyed them when they appeared.

It was definitely worth the trip, and there was plenty to see. But I think our next visit will be to either Oahu or Maui again.

Update (6/14/2008): I also posted a few more of the photos from our previous Hawaii trip in 2005. I'm sure I'll catch up eventually.

On the way home from work last Tuesday, I noticed one of our local red-tailed hawks was perched in its usual spot on top of a cellular phone antenna tower. I had been looking for another opportunity to try out the new telephoto extension on the camera, and the best test is to use it on a subject I've photographed before, to see how much closer I can get under similar conditions.

So, the same as I had done a couple of times last year, I drove into the parking lot near the antenna tower, snapped a few photos of the hawk perched on the antenna, and then more as the hawk got spooked & flew away. Fortunately, the flying away involved some circling around overhead first, so I had plenty of opportunities to take some in-flight shots.

The only downside was that it was cloudy and getting close to sunset when I did that last week. Then last night (another Tuesday), I saw the hawk was there again, on a brilliantly sunny afternoon, with vivid blue skies. The hawk followed much the same pattern again, taking off a few minutes after I arrived, but this time I had much better lighting, and more time for in-flight photos before the hawk disappeared beyond the tree line.

I put all the new photos in the existing Flickr set from when I visited the same spot about a year ago. You can tell that the recent ones toward the end turned out a lot better than the early ones from last year.

To celebrate primary election day in PA yesterday, I went back and took the Political Compass test again. It was so sad. Apparently, a year and a half of home ownership must be taking its toll on my "lower-left" principles - instead of being negative 9-point-something, I'm now barely negative 8-and-a-half on both axes:

Economic Left/Right: -8.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.56

For comparison, *all* of the credible presidential candidates for this year (even Dem ones) show up somewhere in the upper-right quadrant. The only Dem candidate (dispensing with the label "credible") who's with me on the lower-left is Dennis Kucinich, with roughly -2.5, -2.0. Next closest is John Edwards, at about +2.5, +1.5, giving me about a 10-point spread. Not too long after that is Obama, at about +3, +2.

Of course, at our office, Bruce is still the standard bearer, at -9.75, -9.79. If I believed in authority, I'd say he was one.

Here's what you do.

Catch a respiratory virus that gives you a persistent cough for 10 days (so far). And I mean persistent - I cannot overstate this point. Even after a full dose of NyQuil (or more), you should lie awake in bed for hours, unable to stop. Convulse with the effort of coughing out every last bit of your breath, then take a big gasping inhalation (sometimes only halfway in), before falling back into the next cascade of coughs. Repeat "n" times.

To slim down & better show off your abs, it would also help to accompany this with a sore throat that makes you completely uninterested in eating (or ideally, unable to do so).

I'm not saying that my plan is actually yielding any beneficial results, but hey, it's only day 10. And at least I have a plan.

This is getting ridiculous.

On our first anniversary, Kathy & I took a trip to Jamaica. We both got really sick, and had a miserable journey back home.

Then last year for our second anniversary, we stayed home in Philly. We had snow (in mid April), an overturned car in front of our house, and I again got sick from something I ate.

Our third anniversary is coming up in a few days. So far this week, I've had a sore throat (so bad that I would wake up out of a sound sleep just trying to swallow), a cough that's keeping me up all night & giving me muscle strains from the contortions, and just last night I added pinkeye to the mix.

Either I've got some bizarre curse, or I just happened to spend a whole afternoon with a toddler last weekend, and picked up every possible affliction that's going around at his daycare group.

I just found out tonight that Flickr now supports video clips as part of a photo set.

I'm starting with posting a video of the bald eagles, which I had originally posted on my own web server.

I'm sure I'll have more soon.

Almost exactly a year ago, I did some experiments with using Atom to replace the old RSS feed from this site, but I didn't actually put that into production until now.

Behold the new Atom feed, with all the delightful images, links, & formatting: http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-feed.xml.

Enjoy it in Firefox, Thunderbird, Bloglines, etc.

Update (3/7/2008): I changed the filename to not include "RSS" since it technically isn't RSS anymore.

As promised last week, I've now posted the wildlife photos from our Walkabout tour at You Yangs Regional Park & Serendip Sanctuary, two wildlife parks outside Melbourne.

This set includes all the koalas and kangaroos, as well as lots and lots of Australian birds.

Yet another bald eagle photo shoot.

I went to Conowingo Dam again last Monday (my 3rd visit so far). The weather was supposed to be Mostly Cloudy, but we ended up with blue skies for most of the day. A fog had just lifted when I arrived, and rain started falling just as I packed up to leave, but in between was mostly beautiful, warm weather.

This time I was using our own camera (instead of the one I borrowed last time). I was trying out a new telephoto extension for our camera, which gives some extra zoom and also collects more light, which makes it easier to get a quick, focused shot.

I didn't get so many overhead flight photos on this visit, but there was one particular spot, on a low branch in a nearby tree, where two different bald eagles posed for close-up shots. First an immature eagle was feasting on a fish there, and then an adult eagle bullied that young one away from the perch, and proceeded to stay there striking poses for over an hour.

Best of all, I happened to have the camera running in video mode right when the adult chased off the juvenile, so I got a video clip of the whole event.

All in all, a nice, satisfying visit.

I've finally gotten around to sorting through more of the Australia photos, so we now have the set from Melbourne. This includes a game of Australian Rules Football, a van tour around the city, a visit to the Immigration Museum, and some general wandering around town.

Next up, I should have some more of the wildlife photos from You Yangs Regional Park & Serendip Sanctuary soon. Update: Got 'em.

A couple of weeks ago, I went back to Conowingo Dam for more bald eagle photos.

This time it was pretty darn cold, and there wasn't much activity until the electric company turned on the generator at 4:30pm (thus churning out the free fish). By that time, the light was fading, all the other people had gone home, and I could barely feel my toes. Even so, I took about 400 of my 800 pictures just during that last hour or so at the end of the day.

The point of this trip was mostly to try out a different kind of camera, a Canon Digital Rebel borrowed from Jane. I think it went pretty well for my first day out with a DSLR, but there's still plenty left for me to learn.

Kathy's Giants are going to the Super Bowl. They tried to mess it up a few times (mostly fumbles and missed field goals), but finally managed to pull out the win.

Of course, this just means we can schedule additional heart attacks for the big game two weeks from today. Let's just hope it goes better than 2001.

My sister-in-law is an incredible chef, and I found out today that the restaurant where she works, Momofuku, was rated #1 Best New Restaurant in NYC by the New York Times. Hard to get better than that.

And here I thought the coolest thing about Jo was that the answer to "How are things at work?" includes the phrases "knife bag" and "squeeze-bottles of pork fat".

I mentioned in my earlier post about Hawk Mountain that we got to see a bunch of migrating birds of prey that day, but no eagles.

That omission has since been rectified.

We were talking to Dan, one of the volunteers at Hawk Mountain, about what we might see that day, and how we were really hoping for an eagle.

"Well, if you want to see bald eagles, you should really check out Conowingo Dam, especially in the winter."

So I did.

As it turns out, besides having arguably the best hawk migration site in all of North America (Hawk Mountain) just an hour and a half northwest of us, we also have arguably the best bald eagle site east of the Mississippi just an hour and a half southwest of us.

Conowingo Dam is in Maryland, just over the border from Pennsylvania, where US Route 1 crosses the Susquehanna River (the dam itself is also the bridge for US-1). The dam has a hydroelectric generator, and the water that passes through the generator brings fish along with it. The fish, often stunned from getting knocked around in the turbines, make an easy lunch for eagles & other birds on the downstream side. Also, the moderate climate here makes this a good destination (with a steady food supply) for migrating eagles from up north, so the eagle viewing gets even better in the winter.

Last Sunday, I went for a few hours, and I took some pictures.

This was in late October, as the migrant eagles from upstate New York are just beginning to arrive. In another month or two, it should *really* get good.

I've added two new sets of hawk photos on my Flickr account.

First, a couple of weeks ago, I went to pick Kathy up after work, and a huge red-tailed hawk swooped right over my head, carrying its dinner. I (along with a very patient Kathy) ended up hanging out there in the parking lot for about an hour & a half, taking tons & tons of pictures. Besides the pictures, I also got some of it on video.

Then, this past Saturday, Kathy & I went to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a little west of Allentown. They have a couple of good mountain lookouts right on the migration path of several species of raptors, including various hawks, falcons, and eagles. We got some pictures of the migration, and also some closer views of rescued birds (a great horned owl and a red-tailed hawk) back at the Visitors' Center.

We were at the North Lookout for about 2 hours, and must have seen at least 100 sharp-shinned hawks, a handful of red-tailed hawks, and the occasional osprey, Cooper's hawk, American kestrel, northern harrier, and northern goshawk. We also saw at least a dozen turkey vultures go by, but those looked more like local scavengers than migrators (looping around at low altitude, rather than cruising with definite direction & purpose).

The official count that day included 2 bald eagles & 1 golden eagle, but we didn't get to see those. Guess that just gives us reason to go back...

Kathy & I are recently back from a 3-week trip to Australia. We had a great time, and we have tons of pictures, but it'll probably take us a while to sort through the pictures & put them online.

For now, we have a quick photo preview from the first few days (outdoorsy stuff near Melbourne), and a more complete set of underwater pictures from snorkeling & scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef.

That set of underwater pictures contains about 135 photos, narrowed down from 900, and we still have another 1,800 land pictures to sort through. I'll post more as I have them ready.

In the meantime, back to catching up on 500 other things...

Early last year, Ice Breakers mints had a TV commercial featuring various people exclaiming "Whoa!" upon experiencing their "Ice Cubes" gum, in response to one actress's mocking question, "'Whoa'? Who says 'whoa'?" The key to the gag was the final one, a cameo by Joey Lawrence reprising his trademark "Whoa!" from the TV show "Blossom".

In what appears to be a slightly more subtle in-reference, French's mustard now has a commercial featuring a voice that sounds exactly like Didi Conn, saying "Food loves French's." Conn, you may recall, played Frenchy in the movie version of "Grease".

If that's not actually Didi Conn doing the voiceover, it sounds like a clever impersonation.

In Ocean's Thirteen, did anyone else notice Al Pacino's character quoting the Paul Anka "The Guys Get Shirts" rant?

"I move quick and when I do, I slice like a hammer."

It's that time once again. Time for me to exhort people to go and see a theatre production in Philadelphia that's about to close this weekend.

Last night Kathy & I went to see The Fantasticks at Mum Puppettheatre. It's an excellent show with a superb cast - they're not only technically skilled (great singing voices, very deft with the puppets, etc.), but also very expressive & just generally interesting to watch.

I don't want to dwell on the usual questions that people have on first hearing of Mum Puppettheatre, but just to clear a couple of things up... No, it's not a "puppet show" in the sense that you might be thinking. It's theatre. There are actors playing parts. Like most plays, there are props, costumes, and other devices that help tell the story. In some particular plays, the actors seem to have more self-awareness about these devices, and awareness of the audience. The nearest comparison I can think of is "Our Town", with the narrator directly addressing the audience and explaining the sparseness of props & set pieces. In this show, you're simultaneously aware of the puppet and the actor, and the character in most cases lives in the combination of the two. The puppets interact in their own scale, but it's also useful to watch the facial expressions and eye contact of the actors (much like communicating in sign language, where you're watching the face as well as the hands that are making signs).

Anyway, we had never seen Fantasticks before, so we weren't just comparing what's *different* about this production, but enjoying it on its own, and it was very enjoyable. Lots of laughing, lots of emotion, and really impressive execution on the technical side throughout the show.

Our main reason for going was because we knew one of the cast members, Dave Jadico (well, I knew him - Kathy just met him last night). Dave was hilarious & fascinating to watch in a variety of roles (sometimes 2 at a time), including "The Old Actor" & Mortimer (his tragic-death-expert sidekick), "The Mute", orchestra (on mini piano, ukulele, and mandolin), and general prop master. I especially enjoyed some of the physical comedy with his props and his puppet characters, including the Henry/Mortimer bit with the flashlight - a little improv moment that's funny, then it seems played out, then it goes on even longer so that it's funny again (a lot like the Sammy Davis Jr joke that I mentioned from Bomb-itty).

The rest of the cast was equally strong & compelling - the young couple in love, the parental machinations, the dashing El Gallo (played like a young Ricardo Montalban)... all excellent, and well worth the ticket price.

Speaking of the ticket price, it's normally $30, but if you mention this review from the Phillyist web site, you can get tickets for half price ($15). Not bad at all.

So, to sum up, if you're in Philly, and it's not yet past May 6, go see this show. If it's after that, you can still catch Dave on stage at ComedySportz on Saturday nights.

The plagues just keep on comin'...

Apparently this was a bad weekend for fires. First, early Sunday morning, near my sister's house in Oakland, a fuel tanker truck crashed & exploded into flames under an elevated highway, causing the roadway supports to melt & collapse. Nobody died in the crash nor in the collapse, and apparently the driver of the truck came out with only some moderate burns. That area will be a huge traffic mess for at least several months.

Then early this morning, a fire broke out at Eastern Market in Washington, DC, and basically gutted the place. About this time 7 years ago, I was in a production of No Exit on their stage at Market 5 Gallery. It was a great performance space, especially if you didn't mind some of the interesting smells of having portable toilets indoors. I don't know for sure if the fire hit this part of the building, but I'm guessing that the all-wood stage would probably be one of the first things to burn... :(

Update as of 5/1/2007: According to the Washington Post, the fire only destroyed the South part of the building (mostly food markets), but not the North part (art gallery & stage area): "The North Hall, where artists and craftsmakers set up shop, was spared."

Last week Kathy & I had our anniversary.

For our anniversary last year we took a trip to Jamaica, where we both got deathly ill, and Kathy had the worst part of it during the trip home, making for a thoroughly miserable bus ride, airport visit, and flight home.

This year, we're both pretty busy this month, so no time to take a trip. We decided instead to take a long weekend at home, and do lots of silly touristy stuff here in Philadelphia. But the curse nearly caught up with us anyway.

Day 1: Everything's just fine.

Friday night we had a fabulous dinner out at our favorite Melting Pot restaurant. Very lovely, and nothing went tragically wrong with that one.

Day 2: Start out running.

After a morning of lazing around the house and watching Charlie & Lola cartoons, our Saturday adventures began with the journey into Philadelphia. We wanted to go for maximum touristy flavor, so as we waited for the train into center city, we got out the camera and took pictures of sitting around at the train station. We got on the train and started moving.

"Hey hon, do you have the camera?"

"No, you had the camera. You mean...?"

Oh crap. Must've left the camera on the bench at the train station.

On a Saturday, these trains run about every 20 minutes. The stops are all about a half-mile apart. If we get out at the next station, we could probably walk/run back to our station, and (assuming the camera's still there) we could hop on the next train and still (barely) make it to our 3:00 tour in the city.

Start running. Or rather, jogging. Or rather, stumbling uphill in a slightly-faster-than-walking gait.

The first half of the journey back home is all uphill, for about a quarter-mile. Jogging & wheezing soon gave way to walking & wheezing, but we eventually got back to our starting point with about 10 minutes to spare.

I came to the bench where we'd been sitting. No camera.

A guy approaching the station sees me looking confusedly at the bench. "Did you leave a camera here?"

"Yes."

"We found it, and figured we'd hold onto it and put up a sign at the station, rather than just leave it lying around. We live in the first house right over here, and my wife was actually just in the process of making the sign. Hold on, I'll run back and get the camera."

He's carrying a folded-up baby stroller, and was visibly on his way to meet up with friends on the opposite platform, waiting for a train in the other direction. He jogs back up to his house, stroller still in hand. He's in the house for a minute, then comes back out with the camera.

He hands the camera to me and goes running off again, because by now his train has arrived and is waiting on the opposite platform. Fortunately his friends are over there to hold the train for him, but he still has to run down the path, through the tunnel under the tracks, and up the stairs on the other side, still carrying the stroller, to get to the train that's waiting there.

Way above & beyond the call for an act of neighborly goodwill.

So, friendly neighbor guy (I never did get his name) got on his train, and a few minutes later we got on our train (with a firm grip on the camera this time), and we continued on our mission. Gotta remember to write him a thank-you note...

Day 2, continued: Quack.

For the anchor day of our tourist weekend, we went for the ultimate cheesy tourist event, the Ride The Ducks tour, where you ride in an amphibious bus/boat, first around the streets of Old City Philadelphia and then down a stretch of the Delaware River. Upon boarding, you're issued a little plastic duck-call toy, and you're encouraged to quack on various occasions throughout the trip.

On cheese, it did not disappoint. Captain Fred can break out enough embarrassing puns & juvenile jokes to put any father of middle-school children to shame. I resisted the temptation to answer any of his riddles about "quacking up" or about exactly where the Declaration of Independence was signed ("At the bottom!"), but I finally gave in & answered the very last one on the drive back to the visitor center: "They had to build this brick wall around the cemetery. You know why they had to put up the wall?" "Because people were *dying* to get in!" I swear, I was Captain Fred's best friend after that. I'm not proud. :)

Day 2, continued some more: Poissons de poison.

After the tour, we wandered around center city for a bit, and ended up at Caribou Cafe for dinner. It's kind of a fancy place, but they were nice enough to let us in with our jeans & sneakers and no reservation, probably because it was still early, before the prime-time dinner crowd would arrive.

On the window of the restaurant, there's a sign for "Steak Frites, Escargots, Poissons". So we decided to get all 3. Escargot for an appetizer, then Kathy had the Steak Frites (steak & French fries, basically), and I got the featured special of fish. The waitress introduced it as "escolar", and when I asked what that was, she said it's also known as "Hawaiian butter fish" or "walu". It sounded interesting, and presented well. Everything was delicious.

For dessert, we went to Naked Chocolate Cafe for some very intense "drinking chocolate". Not so much like your average American hot cocoa, but more like a chocolate bar melted into a cup. About midway through my 6-ounce chocolate, I had the distinct sensation that I had drastically overdone something. It felt like the same reaction I have to cigar smoke. Very uncomfortable, and very much wanting to stop whatever it was that may have brought me to this place. So I left half of the chocolate, which is not at all like me.

My symptoms only got worse after we got home. I was fine after a couple of hours, but it wasn't until several days later that Kathy showed me where the Wikipedia page about escolar details the common "gastrointestinal symptoms following consumption". Apparently this is just a known feature of eating this fish, and yet restaurants seem to serve it, and suckers like me seem to eat it. Well, once, anyway. I think that's one that I'll remember to avoid from now on.

Day 3: Hey, I know that dude!

On Sunday, we headed back into Philadelphia for dinner and a show, but not in that order.

We had tickets to a 3pm matinee of "The Bomb-itty Of Errors" at 11th Hour Theatre Company. I hadn't heard of this group before, but this show was written by the same guys who did "Nerds://A Musical Software Satire", which Kathy & I both loved, so we were very psyched to see it.

On a Sunday afternoon, I'd expect a small, dead crowd, and on a Sunday afternoon under the flooding rains of a noreaster, I'd expect them even smaller & deader. So imagine my surprise when we came into a lively room of about 40-50 people, and I knew *two* of them.

Right after we sat down, Madi Distefano, the teacher of the acting class I'm taking, came and sat right in front of us. She was there with her daughter and some friends.

Then I was looking through the program for the show. The DJ (in the sound booth right next to our seats) looked vaguely familiar, even through big, dark sunglasses, a giant afro wig, and a hat. Then I read that this was, in fact, Mark Valenzuela, who was a few years behind me in college. We were in Nomadic Theatre together, and we acted together in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (coincidentally, another wacky adaptation of a Shakespeare play).

Who knew I was so plugged-in to the theatre scene in Philadelphia?

Oh, and if you have the chance, you should totally see Bomb-itty (it's here until April 29). It was excellent. Even my teacher said so. There was one part (a joke involving Sammy Davis Jr.) that had me laughing so hard I was gasping for breath for several minutes. Right up there with Little Miss Sunshine, in terms of the danger it posed to my health & safety. Go see it.

After that, a lovely dinner at Roy's. No ill effects from dinner this time, so I had all of my chocolate dessert plus half of Kathy's, trying to catch up. So after another anniversary dinner that couldn't be beat, we went to sleep and didn't get up until the next morning, when things started to fall.

Day 4: Plagues & strange noises.

On Monday, Kathy & I had both taken the day off. It was going to be nice not to have my alarm clock go off at 5:30, but I awoke at 5:00 anyway.

I could swear I heard Kathy in the next room (or maybe downstairs, I wasn't sure) moving boxes around or looking for something in the closet. Just the sound of footsteps and some thumping around. But no, Kathy's right here. That's odd. The random thumping noises continued.

Now let's think about this rationally. No, it's not a burglar. These thumping noises are slow and not accompanied by any clattering or crashing like you'd expect if someone was moving in the dark in an unfamiliar space, or trying to get out in a hurry. But seriously, what the hell is that?

I knew we still had that storm moving through, but this didn't sound like rain, so I figured maybe a tree branch was hanging low and bumping into the house or something. Worst-case, maybe such a branch had poked a hole so a squirrel got in? Time to go take a look.

I checked the guest room, checked downstairs, checked the basement. No water getting in, no holes in the house, all good.

Finally, I looked outside.

Snow.

Big piles of wet, slushy snow. Here in the second half of April.

Mind you, we got married on this day a couple of years earlier, and had a beautiful sunny day of 70 degrees. But this year we had mounds of wet, slushy snow. It was apparently accumulating on the branches of the pine tree that towers over our house (directly above the guest room), then the high winds were blowing it loose in fist-sized clumps, which were thudding onto the roof.

The sound, as well as the incongruity of snow in late April, just kept reminding me of the scene from the movie Magnolia ("Exodus 8:2"), where frogs are raining down on everything. Of course, in the movie, they come crashing through the roofs of houses & cars, so I kept expecting the crashing noises to follow.

With all that, it took some time, but I eventually did get back to sleep until a more decent hour.

Day 4, continued: More strange noises.

Later in the day, the snow had mostly been washed away by rain, which then tapered off to just a light mist/drizzle by early afternoon. It was turning into a nicer, more peaceful day.

Around 3pm, when I was at the back of the house, I heard the noise of a sharp crash or snap outside. My mind instantly jumped to that giant pine tree towering over our house. The noise was big enough that I imagined it as the sound of the top 20 feet of the tree breaking off. Of course, if that were to happen, it would be followed closely by another big noise of the tree landing on something (possibly us). While half-expecting to hear that other shoe drop...

"Kathy, you OK?"

"Yeah."

"What was that?"

"I don't know."

"Sounded like it might have been a big tree or something."

"I'll look out front... Oh my God! Oh my God! There's a car, and it's upside-down!"

Indeed it was. Right in front of our house, on our moderately steep hill, slick from the rain, a car apparently swerved off the road, bounced off a low wall of loosely-piled stones in front of a neighbor's house, and rolled onto its roof.

Now, as a person who (A) used to be an EMT many years ago, and (B) once was in a similarly inverted car crash, I had sort of a unique sense of familiarity about this situation.

You're first on the scene. What do you do?

By the time I even got to the front door, Kathy was already on the phone calling 911. We ran outside to see what's going on, if anybody was trapped inside the car, etc.

Other than being upside-down, the car seemed mostly intact. It was still mostly holding its shape (not squashed down or anything), and there didn't seem to be any external danger (moving parts, fire, fuel leaks, etc.). Nobody had come out of the car yet, and it was pretty quiet, other than the horn that seemed to be stuck in the honk position.

The car hadn't hit anyone else, but there was another driver who happened to be coming up in the other direction, and saw the crash happen. She was now out of her car and coming to get a better look. She & I came around the driver's side of the crashed car, where the driver was in the process of untangling himself from a seatbelt and climbing out. He looked fine (other than a bit dazed), seemed to have no trouble moving, and he hadn't said anything. He was able to get out without much trouble in a matter of seconds.

We asked him if there was anyone else in his car. No.

We asked if he was OK, if anything was hurting. He's fine.

He kept pacing around, looking at the car, looking for the pack of cigarettes that had fallen out of his shirt pocket.

Usually in a car crash, the common injuries (which might go unnoticed) are head trauma and back/neck injuries, and all this walking around is not going to help him if he's got any of those. Kathy ran inside to get a chair, so we could have him sit down, away from the car and out of the road. One of our neighbors who's a doctor had walked over, and was asking the driver some questions to make sure he's OK.

All of that was within about the first 2 minutes and then the first of several police arrived. Pretty darn quick response time. Ambulance & fire truck similarly appeared within about 5 minutes.

As far as we could tell, the driver was completely uninjured. Not even a bad scrape or anything. Eventually, the towtruck crew got the car turned upright & hauled away, the ambulance & firefighters drove off, and the owner accompanied the towing crew back to base, while the main police officer followed along.

Looking at the street an hour later, you wouldn't have guessed the scene that was there a little while ago.

So anyway. A nice quiet weekend at home for our anniversary. We're just hoping for an *actually* quiet one next year.

I wasn't sure whether to go with the Matt O'Donnell reference or the Bonnie Tyler reference. I guess history will decide whether I made the right choice.

In any case, I've determined that I haven't yet figured out how to work all the manual controls on this camera in order to get a decent moon photo.

Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse, with the moon fully in Earth's shadow from about 5:45pm to a little after 7pm EST. From about 7:00 to about 8:00, as the sunlight was beginning to spread across the moon again, I was standing in a field under a sky of thin, fast-moving clouds, trying to snap a photo any time a gap would appear in the clouds.

This camera (Olympus C-770) is mostly a point-and-shoot, but it has 10x zoom, a decent built-in lens, and a bunch of optional manual controls (manual focus, aperture, shutter speed). I had the camera on a tripod on a park bench, and I tried to do all the manual settings that I've been reading about, but I still feel like the white light was coming out way too bright, so even on my best shot it's impossible to make out any detail other than a giant ball of light.

My ideal would be something more like this one on Wikipedia (also taken tonight), with visible dark & light areas on the surface of the moon. Perhaps that's a bit ambitious for not having an SLR camera with a fancy lens, but I'll keep trying. There's another lunar eclipse coming in August, so I have 5 months to practice on regular full moons and get my technique down. We'll see how that goes.

Update (3/5/2007): The first step on my journey - Bruce pointed out to me that by default Flickr shows EXIF information from the photo, including the camera model and the settings used. E.g., this page has search results for all photos tagged with "eclipse", taken with an Olympus C770. Hmm, some used the same settings I had...

A couple of years ago I hastily threw together an RSS feed for this web site, but I kept the format very sparse so that I wouldn't run into errors (no links, no text formatting tags). I'm now in the process of updating this from loosely-defined RSS standards to the more precise Atom standard.

My old RSS feed was at http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-rss-full.xml. My current test of the new Atom feed is at http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-rss-full4.xml. Once I settle all the formatting issues, I'll probably move over to another new filename to reflect that it's more Atom than RSS.

But for the moment, I'd just like to ask any of the people using RSS readers (Google Reader, Bloglines, Thunderbird, etc.) to let me know if the new test file works in the reader. Does it?

Update (3/3/2007): Another one to try, this time including images: http://www.salubrio.com/mike/index-rss-full6.xml

On the local morning news here, Matt O'Donnell is one of the anchors. His sense of humor seems to have been honed at a fraternity or an all-boys high school, always full of snarky comments and especially innuendo for the blonde traffic/weather lady, Karen Rogers. His comments are easily the most compelling reason to watch the show, always walking that line between merely inappropriate and downright obscene. It's delightful to watch.

Sometimes it's just silly stuff like this, after a report on 6-foot-tall longstem roses at Valentine's day (paraphrased from memory):

"Bet you'd like one of those roses. / 6 feet? That would eclipse me. / Eclipsing is what I do best."

My favorite so far was earlier this week (unfortunately I didn't catch it on video), when one of the transitions back from commercial showed kids building a snowman on a slushy, muddy snow day. Matt's female co-anchor Tamala Edwards (who plays straight-man to Matt's clowning) made some throwaway comment about "That's got to be the dirtiest snowman I've ever seen." Unable to resist an easy target like that, Matt had to raise the ante: "But if it were a dirty, *naughty* snowman, Karen would be all over that, right, Karen?"

If anything ever happens to Matt, I have a feeling Karen's husband would be a prime suspect.

But anyway, today we had not one but *two* examples - the first one was facilitated by a teaser for a later story about pole dancing (almost too easy), but then the later one was completely out of the blue. And Karen seemed to play along with both, in that awkward way that makes it even worse.

Priceless.

Here's the video.

(Random aside: like my previous citation of bizarre segues on the local ABC news, this one also featured footage of an abused dog - perhaps that's an omen, my signal to fire up the Tivo?)

Last night Kathy & I went to see "Nerds://A Musical Software Satire" at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It was awesome. We haven't laughed that hard since "Little Miss Sunshine".

It's only playing at this theater until next weekend (Feb 25), and the decent seats are not cheap, but even so, we're considering going back to see it again.

Part of the humor is a wealth of nerdy references - various computer things plus Star Wars, Star Trek, and other cultural icons - but even outside of that it's just hilarious, very energetic, and very well performed.

I don't want to spoil too much of the plot, but I do need to mention that there's a lightsaber battle onstage involving Bill Gates. If that statement alone elicits a positive reaction from you, then you'll like this show. If not, you're really missing out.

I should also mention that Kathy (who got these tickets for me as a surprise) also went the extra mile & booked us for a night when they had a "talk-back" session with the cast after the show. The actors all seem really great, and in particular Jim Poulos (playing Bill Gates) just seems like the nicest guy you'd ever meet. As we were leaving after the talk, other actors disappeared back to backstage, while Jim came out and continued chatting with audience members. When we got outside, we saw him waving down a taxi for an older woman from the audience who was having trouble getting around on the ice & snow on a cold night. Helluva guy.

If you go, you would do well to get seats downstairs, not in the balcony. We've sat in the balcony there before, and discovered that it can be a problem if your legs are more than 8 inches long. Besides, you want to be close enough to smell exactly what Steve Jobs is smoking in his scene with Woz. :)

Last night Kathy happened to turn on the TV right when ABC was doing a teaser for the upcoming news broadcast. It's a 10-second segment, and I would assume they tape these things at least a few minutes in advance, and yet this apparently got through:

"I'm Rob Jennings. Coming up tonight on Action News, new developments in the Anna Nicole paternity fight, it's called the worst case of animal abuse in recent memory."

Judging by the images on screen, it would appear that these were intended to be two separate stories, but I didn't watch the newscast, so I can't say that with absolute certainty.

I'm guessing that the teleprompter left out something important in the middle, such as "[Pause. Change gears. Perhaps insert a conjunction.]"

Everything I need to know about surreal musical collisions I learned from mall food-court background music.

Last night I was at the mall, sitting by the Sbarro's, when something caught my attention in the midst of the bland jazzy ballad that was playing.

No, I must have imagined it. Sometimes one's brain can subconsciously attach patterns & meaning to something just to try to recognize it, but... Wait, there it is again.

I needed a witness. So I called Pax.

"Quick musical question for you. To the best of your knowledge, did Tony Bennett ever do a cover of the Soundgarden song 'Black Hole Sun'?"

In my experience, those words had never been strung together in the same sentence before. But if this song was really out there, then perhaps that was my fault.

As it turns out, it wasn't Tony B, but Paul Anka. It's from his album "Rock Swings", full of similarly incongruous big-band covers of modern songs. And since we live in the age of iTunes, 5 minutes after learning that, I own a copy of it.

In looking up some details about Paul Anka on Wikipedia, I happened upon a link to "The Guys Get Shirts", a surreptitiously recorded, profanity-laced tirade that Anka once leveled at his musicians after a show. It's full of great lines like "When I move, I slice like a [bleep]in' hammer." Very funny stuff.

But even beyond all that, I think my favorite part was when I started listening to the album and heard track 1, the Bon Jovi song "It's My Life". Now, with all the Bon Jovi songs out there, why not go for an earlier, more iconic one like "Livin' On A Prayer" or "You Give Love A Bad Name"? Then he got to this couplet from the original Bon Jovi lyrics:

"My heart is like an open highway / Like Frankie said, I did it my way"

Except the Paul Anka version changed that second line slightly: "Frank said, he did it my way".

The main difference is just a pronoun, and it seems pretty subtle, but it's hugely important when you realize that Frank Sinatra's signature song, "My Way", was actually written by Paul Anka. Thus, "Frank said, he [Frank] did it my [Paul's] way."

He really does slice like a hammer. Or hit like a knife. Or whatever.

It was a long time coming. After 4 months in our new house, Kathy & I finally have books on bookcases. And there was much rejoicing.

The plan from the beginning (last fall) was to set up our 3 big bookcases on the sun porch at the front entrance of the house. Two problems: (1) the floor in that room is noticeably slanted; and (2) three of the four walls in that room had non-functional baseboard heating units, long since disconnected from the radiator system, taking up space along the wall (and providing shelter to unknown numbers of spiders). So, all we had to do was remove the baseboard heaters and level the floor, and then we could put up the bookcases.

Oh yeah, and also figure out how to attach something to a brick wall, so that the bookcase against that wall wouldn't topple over. So I guess that's 3 problems.

Bringing that plan to fruition (removing the baseboard heaters, cleaning & repainting the exposed wall paneling, caulking the gaps, installing baseboard molding, leveling the bookcases, and attaching various fixtures on wood & brick walls) took about 4 months. Most of the visible progress happened in the past 2 weeks, but the mental preparation was an important part of the process too.

Equally important was calling my sister about a dozen times, because she has more experience in these kinds of remodeling & demolition tasks.

But now we have the bookcases up, and the whole process is documented in pictures here.

The other day, I got an email message from someone who uses Yahoo Mail. Messages sent from Yahoo always have a little footer advertising something about their services, usually in about 15-20 words. Just 15-20 words, carefully chosen by marketing people and probably reviewed by dozens of employees before going into production, so you'd think it would be easy to spell those words correctly.

The footer this time:

"Don't get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut."

I had a boss a while back who consistently wrote "take a peak" where he meant "peek" (or, more rarely, "peak one's curiosity"* instead of "pique"), and it always bothered me. But he couldn't afford a full-time copy editor. The folks at Yahoo have no excuse.

(*) At least the example of "peak one's curiosity" could be construed to convey the same meaning, if you take the alternate transitive verb meaning "to cause to come to a peak, point, or maximum". The "take a peak" expression is still just plain wrong, unless you actually mean that someone should steal the summit from something. And even then you'd say "from" instead of "at".

At about 9:00am yesterday I broke a tiny piece of my Dell laptop. I knocked off the tiny plastic pin that tells the computer when the lid is closed, so that it will shut off the backlight for the screen.

I contacted Dell tech support using the online chat.

I found a web site that linked to a Dell support page, which pointed me to the Service Manual explaining how to remove that plastic panel.

The tech support guy told me he would go ahead and sent out the replacement part (that whole plastic strip with the switch buttons attached). No charge.

The package from Dell arrived this morning. From my support chat yesterday morning, they sent out the part from Houston, TX, yesterday afternoon, and it arrived here in Philly at 9:00 this morning.

Dayum.

It's now installed and working fine. Less than 24 hours in a broken state (which wasn't *tragically* broken anyway), and no cost to me.

That's some good support.

Wonder how good it will be in another couple of weeks, after I pass the 1-year warranty period... :)

Yikes. Almost 3 months since that last post. Here's the quick version of what's been going on the last few months:

* August-September: We bought the house, which has been great.

* October-November: We had our niece & nephew staying with us for a while. Lots of fun, but very exhausting, and we postponed a lot of the unpacking and setup tasks at the house.

* December: As usual, mostly one big stampede from Thanksgiving (in California) to Christmas (in Florida). In the midst of all that, most of my time at work was consumed by multiple levels of SOX audits - questionnaires, audit meetings, system changes, all TOP PRIORITY, and all in service of making my reporting system *less* streamlined... oh, what fun.

* January: Starting to emerge from boxes in our house, while also gearing up for Rick & Vicki's wedding next week.

Then comes the serious unpacking. And posting many more of my photos on Flickr. And maybe a month or more of not flying anywhere. And time for our Philadelphia Renaissance, aided by our new neighbor the Railbus. All good stuff.

We saw this car on the highway yesterday with a scrolling LED text bar built into the license-plate frame. Apparently it's this "License Plate Flash Frame", with programmable messages for the person behind you. This one was advertising to get recruits for the PA Air National Guard, which operates at the nearby base in Willow Grove.

I guess I missed my chance to wow the world with the communication system I was talking about back in 2003 and 2004.

Not the cave crickets from my previous post. This time it's Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs, which recently invaded our soon-to-be-former apartment. We regularly have 1 or 2 of these showing up (crawling in through a window screen that's not properly sealed), but they seem to arrive in droves around this time each year, just as the weather is beginning to get cooler. Apparently they seek out a warm place to hide out for the winter, and they give a scent signal that others follow to come to the same place. So when you have one, you'll often have many more a short time later.

Anyway, yesterday we had a full-on invasion. Kathy was working from home, and she managed to catch about 25-30 of them by the time I got home, and then I caught another 10 or so. As with the cave-cricket thing, we have a whole technique for this (originally developed for a wasp in the house, so we wouldn't have to smash it or set it loose):

1. Trap the bug in a small glass.
2. Where one would normally slide a card under the glass, we use a CD in a paper sleeve - it keeps a rigid flat shape better than cardboard.
3. Put the glass & CD in the freezer.
4. When the bug is frozen dead, dump it into a holding tank with previous catches (another glass or a tupperware container).

Normally, step 5 is to dump them in the toilet, or outside, or something like that.

But this time, Kathy was curious just what the heck was up with these crazy bugs, because we hadn't heard of other people getting infestations like this. It turns out this is a relatively new invasive species, which came over from eastern Asia less than 10 years ago, and started spreading through eastern Pennsylvania in the past few years. Biologists at Cornell and Rutgers are studying the spread of these bugs (which are a major pest for fruit & vegetable farms), and even asking for samples.

Last night I emailed the Cornell guy, Rick Hoebeke, about our catch, including individual and group photos. He wrote back that he wants them:

-------------------
Thanks for your message regarding the sighting of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug in your home. Can you do me a big favor? Can you send a bunch of these specimens (dead in among crumpled tissues in a crush-proof box) to me for an ongoing molecular study of this invasive stink bug? We need specimens from around the NE for extracting DNA (best when bugs have been recently killed by freezing). Please also include your full address and date of collection! They can be sent to my business address under my signature (see below). Please send by First Class or FedEx.

I thank you in advance for this courtesy.

E. R. Hoebeke
-------------------

We'll be mailing those out tomorrow. My only regret is that I have but 35-40 bugs to give for my country.

* All instances of the singular possessive adjective shall be assumed to include the plural, and vice versa.

If you've never encountered a cave cricket (a.k.a. "camel cricket"), you might not know how to react when you first see one up close. You'd probably be a bit grossed out. The big ones have peanut-sized (or even cashew-sized) bodies, with lanky legs more than 2 inches long.

But if you see one in the garage of a house that you're about to buy, and then notice there's a cluster of 50-100 of them the day *after* you buy the house, and see them hopping haphazardly off the floor, walls, and ceiling (they especially like the ceiling), your required reaction is pretty obvious - What the ___ are these things, and how do I get rid of them?

Then you'd look them up on Wikipedia and find a few more references via Google, and you'd mostly learn that they love damp, dark places (e.g., our garage), and that the most effective natural predator is the equally unpleasant-looking house centipede.

If you're into poisons, you could try spraying insecticides, but a few sources say that common pesticides are only *partly* effective on these guys. If, like me, you're *not* into poisons, you'd probably be reluctant to spray stuff on the ceiling, where (A) pesticide would waft through some cracks & crevices to the main house upstairs, and (B) the poison will drip back down onto you whenever there's some condensation on the ceiling.

So how to get rid of the creepy-crawly menace? Enter the Shop Vac, my new best friend.

Vacuuming bugs is a time-honored practice, but what do you do once you've caught them in the vacuum? If they're still alive, you don't want to handle them, and if they're dead, their guts might gum up the works of the vacuum. That's where the "wet" part of "wet/dry vac" comes in handy.

1. Set up the shop vac in "wet" mode (i.e., no paper filter inside).
2. Fill the vac bucket part-way (I did about 4 inches deep) with water.
3. Put a long extension and a pointy tip on the end of the vac hose.
4. Vacuum every living (or dead) creepy-crawly thing you see.
5. Just to be sure, vacuum up some water after the bugs to make sure they've all been doused (have this pool of water ready beforehand).
6. Turn off the vacuum, open it, and dump the contents outside.
7. Rinse the vac innards with a hose as necessary.

Naturally, you should only vacuum up things that are safe to dump outside (e.g., bugs & spider webs, but not household trash, construction debris, etc). If all goes according to plan, everything you vacuumed should now be dead (either from the impact or from drowning), so you shouldn't have to worry about angry bugs taking their vengenance on you. If you're worried anyway, you can dump the contents farther from the house to prevent recidivism, but I really doubt there will be any - mine were all thoroughly dead.

I did this on Saturday, and then another round on Sunday to pick up some stragglers who hid out during the Saturday attack. I think there are still some few survivors, but compared to the infestation we had before, it's a tremendous improvement. Almost ready to let the other bug move in...

I feel like I've been way behind on blogging, so here's the main news: Kathy & I bought a house. We had our closing in late August, and we're officially moving in next week - there was a lot to do in between.

The house is just in the next town over from our apartment, so we're still in the same area.

I'll probably be writing a lot more about the whole process, but I just wanted to get the basic facts out first.

What could be cooler than a rock band with three cellos? How about a rock band with three cellos and a song named "Trogdor"?

Meet Break of Reality.

Oh, and speaking of Trogdor, his nemesis Kerik was in the news this week too: "Kerik now a criminal" and "NY jail ditches former top cop Kerik's name".

I don't know quite how or when the controversy first arose, but a couple of friends & I have long been uncertain about the correct pronunciation of Jeremy Piven's last name. We knew him mostly as the sidekick in a bunch of John Cusack movies, and somehow we had only ever seen his name in print, but hadn't heard it pronounced authoritatively. The two candidates were:

1) "PIE-vin" - long "i", follows the general pattern of long vowel sound before consonant-"e"

2) "PIV-in" - short "i", rhymes with "driven", which shares the same combination of letters

Either one seemed reasonable & logical, but for whatever reason, I found myself favoring (and defending) option #1.

Well, last night Jeremy was on The Tonight Show, and they pretty well laid the issue to rest. The announcer, host Jay Leno, and Jeremy himself all said his name quite clearly as "PIV-in" (option #2). And I managed to capture it all on Tivo.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the video.

Is it just my imagination, or did Dell just take the best laptop I've ever seen (Inspiron 700m/710m) off the market? I don't see it on their product list anymore, and it looks like they might be replacing it with the heavier, fatter, more expensive XPS M1210... :(

A couple of weeks ago, Kathy & I took a weekend trip to visit her parents in Florida. As usual, I came back with a whole bunch of pictures, but no people in any of them. :)

Got some good pictures of some creepy-crawlies around the outside of the house - mostly a couple of lizards and some spiders. The pictures are now posted on Flickr.

This is not a spoiler or anything, but...

If you're going to see X-Men 3 in the theater (as many of you apparently have done), please make sure you stay through the end of the closing credits. There's a bit at the end that you'll want to see.

When we went to a matinee show last Saturday (opening weekend), our group of 5 were the only people left at the end of the credits. All those poor people will now have to go pay for the movie again, or make a very convincing argument to the theater manager, just to get back in and see those extra 30 seconds.

Here's my movie review, in 10 words or less: It's a good popcorn movie. Get the big tub.

Now I'm waiting for the DVD release, and hoping it has an alternate version that digitally removes Halle Berry from all of her scenes. She's just too annoying.

You & your friend went to high school together. You currently work together. You worked together at your previous company too.

You have an extensive music collection stored on your laptop hard drive. This morning your friend asks you if you have a particular David Bowie song. You say "I think so...", but then check and find that you don't have it. Hmm, you really thought you should have that one. You're determined to correct that omission.

Your company policy frowns upon doing personal downloads (especially stuff like MP3 music) on the company network. But that's OK; you have an idea.

At lunchtime, you go off on your own to pick up something at Baja Fresh, but first drive over to Panera Bread. But you don't actually go in to Panera Bread. You park outside & switch on your laptop, which has built-in wireless networking. You connect to Itunes via Panera's free WiFi network, and you buy that David Bowie song. Then you shut down the laptop, and drive over to pick up lunch & bring it back to the office.

As you eat your lunch, you burn that Itunes track to a CD-RW disc, so that you can then convert it to an MP3 file (using a rewriteable disc to avoid waste, because it's just a stepping-stone in the process).

You walk over to your friend's desk with the David Bowie MP3 file on a portable jumpdrive. You hand it to him. You say "Here's something you were looking for. You'll know which one when you see it."

He says, "Hold on, I'll copy it onto my laptop in a minute. I'm busy burning a CD right now."

"OK, but you can take a quick copy of this in the meantime. It's the David Bowie song."

"Really? Where'd you find it?"

"I parked outside Panera & downloaded it from Itunes."

"What time?"

"About 12:30. Why?"

"I was there about 12:45. That's what I'm burning on the CD right now, so that I can..."

You're scary.

Kathy & I just got around to watching last week's episode of "Lost" ("Two For The Road", from May 3) last night. Holy crap. People weren't kidding when they said there's a surprising twist in the last 5 minutes.

If you haven't seen it yourself, you can watch it online here (requires Flash Player 8 and sitting through a few commercials).

They continued to develop that new plot line this week, but I'm just wondering if the episode title has anything to do with this unlucky night for two cast members. For further exploration of this angle (and some major plot spoilers right in the first line of the article), check out this story on Yahoo TV.

This morning, upon encountering the phrase "two shakes of a lamb's tail" for the umpteenth time, two thoughts occurred to me:

1) Somewhere on the great, all-knowing Intarwebs, surely somebody has taken measurements of the tail movements of actual lambs, and calculated a time interval for an "average" or "typical" shake.

2) Perhaps the clever folks at Google would even go so far as to to provide a conversion factor in their search engine, such that I could type in the search phrase "2 shakes of a lamb's tail in seconds" as easily as something more standard like "2 minutes in seconds".

But alas, the Google conversion isn't there.

Furthermore, when I checked at Wikipedia, I found that there actually is a scientific time unit named "shake", based on that same expression about the lamb, but it's only a figurative connection, in that it refers to a very short time interval. A "shake" in nuclear physics terms is 0.00000001 second, or one hundred-millionth of a second. I suppose it depends how excitable the lamb is, but a hundred million shakes per second sounds a bit too ambitious.

Even more disappointing is that I haven't found a satisfactory resolution to issue #1 - my search results turn up plenty of references to the physics term, but no sample data from actual sheep. Perhaps I've found my niche as an ovine research biologist?

One of my co-workers mentioned that some people he knew "aren't buying gas from Exxon anymore, you know, because of that email that's going around, to make prices come down."

The logic was that if everybody shuns a particular supplier, that company will have to lower its price, and then other companies would lower their own prices to stay competitive.

As usual, Snopes has the debunking of this popular myth - here's the important part: "To meet the sudden demand, the 'good guys' would have to buy gasoline wholesale from the 'bad guys', who are suddenly stuck with unwanted gasoline... So motorists would end up paying more for it, because they'd be buying it at fewer stations."

Egads, it appears that these selective-boycott people also have at least one web site solely dedicated to this foolishness - interestingly, they go out of their way to criticize a different fallacy, a competing notion about not buying any gasoline for one day. Naturally, Snopes has that one covered too.

Man, what did we do before we had Wikipedia & Snopes? We didn't know anything, so we'd just believe whatever people sent us in chain emails...

Sorry, I've already used my favorite mattress-related subject line twice before. I'm all out of cleverness.

Just had to jot a little note about the new bed we recently got. It's a good one, but I'm not here to talk about what brand it is, or how comfy, or any of that. Mostly this is about salesman Phil.

Kathy & I went to look at fancy beds about a month ago, and I was dreading the sales pitch. What we got instead was Phil (on the receipt it said "Philip S."). Very helpful, and (at least on the surface) he seemed much more interested in getting things right than in getting the upsell. The key was this exchange:

Phil: "So, do you like this mattress?"

Us: "Yes, it's good."

"Do you like that other one more?"

"I dunno, maybe a little bit."

"But do you like it a thousand dollars more? Because that other one costs a thousand dollars more. The difference is mainly in the mattress topper, and you could always just add your own mattress topper later if you want."

So, he did his job. And he sold a bed. A good one at that.

But that's not the best part. About a week later, we got the followup postcard with the "hope you're happy with it, let me know if you have any questions..." type of message. Signed... Phil Scheetz.

You just can't make this stuff up.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to copy some very large files (video source files larger than 6 GB) from my friend's Mac to my Windows XP laptop. This sounds uncomplicated, but it was a big mess.

1) His files were on an external hard drive (Maxtor OneTouch Firewire/USB). I tried connecting that drive to my laptop, first by Firewire and then by USB. No luck. My machine wouldn't recognize the drive (possibly Mac-formatted) at all.

2) We tried connecting my 160 GB external USB hard drive to his Mac. The Mac didn't like the drive, because it was NTFS formatted (for Windows). He was able to see the existing files on the drive, but unable to write anything new on the drive. I had other files that I needed on that drive, so no option of changing the format.

3) I had thought ahead and brought with me a second portable drive, this one a 40 GB external USB, again NTFS formatted. Again, we could see the current state of the drive, but couldn't copy new files onto it. However, on this one I had no other files, so I was perfectly happy to reformat it.

4) I tried reformatting this drive on my laptop. Windows XP offers format options of NTFS or... NTFS. That's it. No FAT32, which might have accommodated the Mac.

5) Oh well, as long as I'm there, I might as well let him reformat the drive on the Mac, copy the files, and then I'll just see what I can do with that later. He formatted the drive with default options on the Mac. He then started the files copying, and we went for dinner. For whatever reason (probably a limitation of the USB hub built into his keyboard) the USB drive was only responding at USB 1.1 speeds, which is 1/40 of the USB 2.0 speed I was expecting, so the copying was only about 10% done after dinner. I guess I'll come back for it tomorrow.

6) Came back the next day for my portable drive. All the files had copied successfully, as far as we could tell. I plugged the drive into my laptop. No luck. Again, Windows XP didn't recognize the Mac-formatted drive. I kept that Mac-formatted drive with the files on it, but for the moment I didn't have any way of reading it. And he doesn't have a home network, so I couldn't just connect my computer to his.

7) I figured maybe we could squeeze the files (at least one or two of the important ones) onto a DVD-R disc. The main important file was 5.5 GB. We tried zipping it down on the Mac, but the smallest it would get was 4.5 GB (too big for a 4.37 GB recordable DVD). That won't help.

8) A regular recordable DVD (4.37 GB) is too small, but what if we tried a DVD+R double-layer disc (over 8 GB)? We tried this. He copied the files onto a $10 DVD+R DL disc (which required a separate trip out the store to acquire discs), including the zipped version of the main important file.

9) I copied the files off the DVD+R DL disc, but for some reason the zip archive created on the Mac wouldn't open as a normal zip file on my PC. Perhaps password-protected, or compressed in some odd format, but in any case, the thing won't open.

10) In desperation, I start flailing about looking for somebody who can lend me a Mac for an hour or two to copy these files off onto a PC-friendly drive. Perhaps Kinko's or Best Buy? Perhaps the Apple Store at the mall? I tried Kinko's - they don't let you connect external drives. I tried Best Buy - they work with PCs, but not Macs.

11) One last thing before I go off to the Apple Store - perhaps I should check if there's any way I could make use of that Mac-formatted portable drive on my PC. Search Google for "mac formatted hard drive" and "windows computer". Somebody in a forum somewhere mentions a program named "MacDrive", saying "MacDrive is for using A Mac formatted hard drive connected to A windows computer (physically connected)." Well, gee, that sounds like exactly like what I need.

12) I look up MacDrive on Google, and then 5 minutes later I have the program installed for a free 5-day trial, and about an hour or two later I have all 35 GB of data successfully copied onto another (PC-friendly) drive. Done. And the files all work.

See, all I really needed to do was skip steps 6 through 11, install MacDrive, and I could have saved about 5 days of countless headaches.

Buying the MacDrive program costs about $50, and if I had a routine need for this, it's well worth the price. The program is basically just a Windows device driver for recognizing Mac-formatted drives that are connected to your PC (doesn't matter if they're internal, USB, Firewire, or whatever). When it's running, you can plug in a Mac-formatted drive, and it shows up as just another hard drive in Windows Explorer. Completely seamless.

As it happens, the 5-day trial was more than enough for the 2 hours of use that I had in mind, and I'm HUGELY grateful that they made this so easy and also free for a quick use.

Everybody should go out and buy this. And if I ever need it again, I will too.

Hypothetically, if one takes a week off for vacation, and then gets seriously ill for part of that vacation, is it possible to reclaim one of those vacation days as a sick day? In this hypothetical question, let's say the illness was a stomach ailment serious enough to warrant a documented nurse visit and some prescription medication, and it happened on one of the weekdays of the vacation.

I'm guessing that a lot of it would depend on company policy, but I'm wondering if there are any legal limits relating to such policies.

One of my sources tells me that this sort of reassignment is standard practice with at least one former employer in the UK, but I didn't have any information about policies for US companies or US employment law in general.

Anybody have ideas? You know, hypothetically?

I love it when the AP can't get an interview with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, so they have to base their reporting on what they read in my high school newspapaper.

The shocking revelations about enjoying hiking and Seinfeld may not sound like much, but it certainly makes my front-page article about the juggling club seem less like the high point of the paper's history.

Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day is today, in case you hadn't heard. Go.

Atrios today has an interesting chronicle of a recurring pattern:

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5/25/2004: "Bush Seeks to Reassure Nation on Iraq"

8/22/2005: "Bush plans bid to rally Iraq support"

12/1/2005: "Bush Presents Plan to Win Iraq War"

Today (3/10/2006): "Bush again aims to rebuild support for Iraq"
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Plus ça change...

...equals the mini-cherry on top of the regular cherry on top of the sundae of awesomeness that is my life. (credit to Barney, as you might have guessed)

See, it all started when Kathy & I recently stopped having cable TV. More precisely, we used to have satellite service from Dish Network, which gave us all the basic cable channels for less money than Comcast cable, plus a couple hundred channels we would never have occasion to watch.

In mid-January, near the end of NFL playoffs, and shortly before the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics (two of Kathy's favorites), our Dish service abruptly stopped working. We called it in, and (after walking us through some troubleshooting steps over the phone) they said they could come for a service visit to fix the problem, but (A) we'd have to pay for the visit, and (B) they couldn't come for about a month.

Not looking good, but we figured we'll take what we can get.

The Dish tech support guy said the only better option was to call back during regular hours (our original call was around 9pm on the second day of no service), and they might be able to arrange an earlier time with a subcontractor doing the service visit (no extra cost). So Kathy called back, and the guy she talked to said they could make such a subcontractor appointment for that coming Sunday, 8am-12noon, but toward the end of that conversation the guy said, "I hope this is right - this is the first one of these tickets I've entered."

I probably don't need to tell you the next part.

Sunday came - there was an important playoff game on in the early afternoon, and Kathy was out of town, so it fell to me to be home & conscious at 8:00 on a Sunday morning (when, as it happens, I was out until 3:00am for perfectly innocuous reasons), and to record that game by any means necessary, even if the guy was still working on the Dish service.

8:00 rolled around. I was awake. No Dish guy. 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00; no guy.

I called Dish tech support to ask when the guy was going to be there. They said something to the effect of "Two weeks from Thursday, when you have your appointment."

I mentioned the bit about having changed the appointment to today. They didn't see it that way. I mentioned the bit about the call to the guy earlier that week. They said yes, we see a call in the log. The purpose of the call is marked as "appointment change". But there was no new appointment entered, so the old one still stood. I tried to explain the inconvenience of being home & conscious & not accomplishing anything else from 8am-noon on a Sunday, and how that ought to motivate them to a more satisfactory solution, but I'm sure they've been trained to be impervious to such concerns. Computer says your appointment is two weeks from Thursday, so your appointment is two weeks from Thursday. When's the earliest we could get a guy out there? Two weeks from Thursday.

Yeah. No good.

So I had to fish out an old pair of rabbit-ear antennas from the basement, and reconfigure the Tivo to use regular antenna channels instead of the Dish ones. I managed to get all of that done in time to record the game.

However, by that time our household's rage against Dish Network was getting pretty strong. Two more weeks of this was more than enough time to give up on them completely.

So we got a better set of rabbit-ears, took inventory of what shows we actually watch (now that we were out of Sunday-night football season), and decided that the only thing we would miss, in all the world of cable/satellite TV, was our nightly dose of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oh well, it doesn't make sense to keep paying this much just for that one show, so let's just quit, and hope that Comedy Central comes up with a simple way for us to get our one show.

Yesterday came the announcement (thanks José for finding it):

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Comedy Central and Apple have quietly added "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart and "The Colbert Report" to the iTunes Music Store. The episodes, however, are not just being sold individually like previous shows on iTunes. Apple has introduced a new feature called "Multi-Pass," which is similar to a paid video podcast.
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I got the note from José last night. I signed up for my Multi-Pass, and this morning I downloaded the first two available episodes (from March 7 & 8). I'm listening to them now. This is what we've been waiting for.

It's $9.99 for 16 episodes at a time (the current one plus the next 15 consecutive episodes), and since they only do the show Monday-Thursday nights, that basically means $10/month for a full dose of Jon Stewart. Cheaper than cable, and focused on what was heretofore cable's only persuasive selling point.

So, in that month & a half of no Daily Show, did I miss any major political stories that lend themselves to satirical treatment? I mean, it's not like any of our elected officials accidentally shot a 78-year-old man in the face, and then blamed the victim, did they?

With all due respect to the original name-that's-fun-to-pronounce, the new co-champions are Chiwetel Ejiofor (who starred in the recent Serenity movie) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (currently starring on "Lost").

Oh, and speaking of "Lost" - one of these days, I should probably explain that I've utterly forsworn my ruthless mockery of the writing early in the series - I now hold it as the Best Damn Show On Television. My bad.

Anyway, in talking to Bruce about his upcoming month-long business trip to Singapore, I had mentioned that he ought to make a daytrip to Kuala Lumpur, in neighboring Malaysia, just because it's fun to say "Kuala Lumpur". I followed that up with musing whether Chiwetel Ejiofor has ever been to Kuala Lumpur. Bruce responded that he prefers the name of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

Which got me thinking, I wonder if Chewy and Triple A have been in anything together. And whaddya know.

A quick look at IMDb's "people working together" search tells me that they were both in a TV movie named "Deadly Voyage" back in 1996. The movie exists on videotape, but apparently not on DVD, so no chance of getting it from Netflix. And even the tape is out of production, so the best shot is to spend about $25 to get a used copy on Ebay. Seems like a long way to go for a joke.

Then again, so is this.

Jamie alerted me to this headline currently listed in Top Stories on Yahoo News:

"Man Shot by Cheney Leaving Hospital"

Certainly makes it sound like the VP has a new hobby. Of course, we've had hints of this before.

Has anybody spotted Mr. Cheney huddled in the corner in a red hunter's cap, furiously scribbling notes in his dogeared copy of The Catcher In The Rye?

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Update (as of 3:30pm): For further analysis, see Jamie's new YTMND page (best with speakers turned on).

(via Josh Marshall)

On January 6, 2004, David Brooks wrote a NY Times column ("The Era of Distortion") dismissing various critics of the current administration as conspiracy theorists. He looked all over trying to find the most absurd example, and came up with this:

"Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans."

Two years early.

Jamie suggested that I'd probably have better luck selling the laptop at Ebay instead of Craigslist, so I've moved it there. Here's the new Ebay listing for the laptop, and also a separate one for a wireless G router.

Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. But when I wrote this last year about Netflix withholding DVDs from me, I thought that I might just be imagining it (or that it might just be an accident on their part).

Then today I spotted this article about Netflix's deliberate throttling habits ("'Throttling' Angers Netflix Heavy Renters"), and found supporting testimony in Wikipedia and Google.

And here it is explicitly in their Terms Of Service (section entitled "Allocation, Delivery and Return of Rented DVDs"):

"...those subscribers who receive the most movies may experience that (i) the shipment of their next available DVD occurs at least one business day following return of their previously viewed movie, (ii) delivery takes longer, as the shipments may not be processed from their local distribution center and (iii) they receive movies lower in their queue more often than our other subscribers."

Can anyone give me a good reason not to switch to Blockbuster? Are they worse?

For example, do the folks at Blockbuster have a passage like this in their own Terms of Service?

"In determining product allocation, we use various factors including, but not limited to, (i) the historical rental volume for each subscriber, (ii) historical number of outstanding rentals relative to a maximum number of outstanding BLOCKBUSTER Online Rentals allowed under a subscriber's plan, and (iii) the average rental queue position of BLOCKBUSTER Online Rentals that have shipped to a subscriber in the past."

So, um, yeah. I guess they do.

Crap.

Options?

I just got a new one, so I'm selling my Inspiron 1100, along with all the accessories that went with it (wireless adapter, DVD burner drive, carrying case, etc). Details at Craigslist.

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Update (2/12/2006): Moved this to Ebay instead of Craigslist.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the impression that my lunch at Baja Fresh had become a matter of routine, because before I could state my order, the guy at the register already knew what I was going to ask for.

But then today it got to a new level. There was a different person at the register, so I was expecting to have to speak this time. Little did I know that the usual register guy was working at the back, and he had seen me come in. By the time I got to the front of the line, not only did he tell the cashier what I wanted, but he already had it packed up in a bag ready to go, so all I had to do was pay.

Now there's some customer service.

...and/or a customer in need of a more varied lunch regimen.

I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for Ricardo Montalbán, and I noticed that the page didn't mention his "five stages of the actor". This is a glaring omission.

Then I decided to look around on Google to get the exact text, and I was further shocked to find only one search result, and it was only a secondary reference, wherein Montalbán added the sixth & seventh stages.

I still prefer the original five, so here they are (recently added in Wikipedia):

"The first stage is, 'Who is Ricardo Montalbán?' The second stage is, 'Get me Ricardo Montalbán.' Third stage is, 'Get me a Ricardo Montalbán type.' The fourth stage is, 'Get me a young Ricardo Montalbán.' Fifth stage is, 'Who is Ricardo Montalbán?'"

Next time Kathy & I move, I hope we'll move to Schenectady. And not just because it's fun to say "Schenectady". They also have the ZIP code "12345".

I bet Jake Gyllenhaal lives in Schenectady...

Several people (including Kim and José) have commented that the main reason for watching the show "How I Met Your Mother" is for the Neil Patrick Harris character, Barney. He's a brilliantly obnoxious bastard, but I also like the fact that he's intelligent when you least expect it. Case in point:

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Barney: You don't bring a date to a wedding. That's like bringing a deer carcass on a hunting trip. Oh Ted, oh Ted,