Author (#1)January 2004 Archives
My friend Doug sent me this picture - taken by the communications department at his work - yesterday:
Mike and I quickly turned out this:
and this:
respectively. (The second one may be a bit obscure but Doug enjoyed it.)
Anybody else want to have a go? All I ask is that you send me whatever you come up with.
I held out for a long time - but my resolve finally crumbled.
I finally picked up Shadows of Undrentide this week. Oh yeah, it's the good stuff.
How could I have gone so long without my fix?
[Geeks may insert the obligatory "saving throw" joke here.]
When the kids were six months old or so, we decided it was time to find a babysitter so we could get the occasional night out.
Katy found a college freshman - an education major who was (a) willing to take on infant twins and (b) had her own transportation. Laura quickly became a fixture here, and we missed her when she was away for summers or semesters abroad.
But then, the cruelest cut: She went and graduated from college this December and has moved to the Sacramento area to be closer to her family and fiance. Our kids' first (non-family) babysitter has outgrown the job.
It was tough walking her out to the car that last time. Any parents reading can appreciate the value of a good, trustworthy babysitter. At 8 bucks an hour she was a bargain beyond measure.
We miss Laura around here.
But close enough for this little task.
Today at lunch Mike expressed some anger that he couldn't find a way to call and talk to a Real Person at Spike TV to complain about their time offset. See, they start their shows 7 or 8 minutes past the top of the hour - but they publish their schedule with everything starting on the hour.
(This is a mere annoyance to the casual viewer but screws up the TiVO something fierce. It starts and stops recording at the wrong time, and you don't get to watch Kenny Blankenship's Top Ten Extreme Eliminations of the Day. Which sucks.)
I expressed skepticism. This skepticism was greeted with reverse skepticism. "Well, you find it." The gauntlet had been thrown.
My old boss (the Dave Snyder of the title) claims that you are never more than three phone calls away from something. With the internet I think that number may be shrinking. Via Google, I found a number for Viacom International, the parent company, called it, and spoke with a Real Person about this horrific problem.
Three Cheers and a Tiger for Me!
We went up to my sister's for the long weekend. Here's my favorite shot from the trip:
One of the best parts of Wednesday is reading the new Onion online. And one of my favorite sections has always been the comic Pathetic Geek Stories.
Bad news: PGS is no longer running in The Onion's AV Club.
Good news: Pathetic Geek Stories now has it's own web site.
PGS is a living example of my favorite Mel Brooks quote:
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die."
Stop over and read a few.
This weekend we took advantage of the beautiful weather and headed over to Vasquez Rocks. This is the only park in Los Angeles county named after a bandit, who used the place as a hideout back in the day.
You have probably seen this place once or twice whether you realize it or not. A ton of television shows and movies have used the park's rock formations as a location, most notably the Star Trek episode "Arena." (I looked and looked but could not find any bamboo for cannon-making, should any Gorn show up.)
Click on Cam peeking over the rock to see some more pictures.
For Christmas I received one of those nifty Atari 2600 10-in-1 joystick games. I was thrilled to see that it includes Adventure, one of my favorites. One of the other games is Asteroids.
Cameron really enjoyed playing Asteroids:
He comes so naturally to the glazed look of the gamer, don't you think? I'm so proud!
One other thing - Gravitar for the 2600 is really hard.
You really owe it to yourself to catch an episode or two of "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" on Spike TV (which used to be TNN). The guys at the office turned me on to this bizarre Japanese import overdubbed with nonsensical English commentary.
Mere words cannot describe the hilarity that ensues. Check it out.
Yes, yes I do. Once again, I took a weblog vacation this year over the holidays, and once again I have a lot of ground to cover.
Christmas Wrapup
To continue the "My Kids Are Broken" theme, on Christmas morning they woke up and stayed in bed until we came and got them! I mean, thanks for the extra sleep and all, but this is ridiculous.
I realize this information is too late to help you this year but if you are expecting toys next Christmas morning - or perhaps an ensuing birthday - I would recommend you have some tools on hand:
Of these, the cutters are the most important. Every toy your kid wants comes secured to the packaging by a minimum of five metal twisties. Believe me, you'll be tired of untwisting them by the third one.
Building Toys
Santa brought Cameron a set of K'Nex for Christmas. After spending a couple sessions building things with the kit I declare them inferior to Lego.
It could be that I am just biased due to a lifetime of Lego work, but the K'Nex stuff just isn't intuitive to build with. The "snowflake and stick" construction of K'Nex toys makes it difficult to visualize your end product. I think Cam will have trouble "free building" with them the way he does his Lego.
On to other Lego news. One of our neighbors got Cam a Lego police car for Christmas:
(Please hold your ranting about the specialization of current Lego sets for another time. Thank you.)
He put it together (all by himself, says his proud father) and was playing with it out front one night. I came home and ran it over pulling into the garage. Many tears ensue. Cameron does share some blame for leaving his toys in the driveway but I still felt pretty bad - he'd had the thing for a couple hours. I figured I'd be picking fragments out of my tires.
Not so. Only one brick was damaged, a 1x4 plate, which got bent and a little torn up on the underside. (I took some pictures but it's hard to see the damage.) The model came apart but aside from that one piece it all went right back together.
When Mike heard this story he observed that "we should build the space shuttle out of that stuff." Indeed.
Cards
Once again, I hosted a New Year's Eve Eve Poker Game this year. It was a good news - bad news kind of night. The bad news was that five guys cancelled on the afternoon of the game. (I will be merciful and not name names. You know who you are.) The good news was that in spite of that we still had nine players, and everybody seemed to have fun.
We didn't have a big final hand like last year but there were other distractions.
Last summer I was a guest at a club that has a poker room. The walls of the room were covered in cards - every straight flush that had ever been played in that room was on display, with name and date attached. I thought that was a pretty cool idea and decided to do the same thing, should such a hand ever show up in one of my games. It didn't seem likely, as I had never seen a real straight flush - that is, one with no wild card assistance - in the course of play.
Well, there's a first time for everything. I took Rich's cards after this hand and retired that deck. Soon they will hang on the wall in the one room I am allowed to decorate with impunity.
The garage.
