Google Wave

On October 13 I signed up for a new communications service from Google called Google Wave. I didn't actually sign up for the service. I signed up for an invitation. Yesterday, only six weeks later, I got that invitation.

I haven't really started playing with the service yet, but I'm pretty excited about it. It has the potential to completely change the way we communicate electronically.

I'll post more later...

The Real Wicked Witch

One night over this Thanksgiving weekend the entire family sat down to watch The Wizard of Oz on DVD. We watched it because Lisa wanted to watch it--she said she remembered as a child that the movie always played on TV sometime around Thanksgiving. 


It's a movie I've seen dozens of times now, and most of those viewings have been in the last 10 years or so thanks to my daughters' love for the movie. And every time I watch the film I become more and more convinced of one thing:


Glinda is not what she claims to be!


I know there's already been a book and musical called Wicked! that dealt with this issue, but I'm not interested in the back story leading up to the events in the original 1939 movie. I'm talking about in the movie itself, Glinda is not as wholesome as she claims to be. The problem is, The Wizard of Oz is seen pretty much through Dorothy's eyes. She's the protagonist, and she's the one we identify with throughout the story. But Dorothy, very early on in the movie, is shown to be a wide-eyed, naive little girl who foolishly believes everything that Professor Marvel tells her, a little girl who dreams of "somewhere over the rainbow." So Dorothy naturally believes Glinda when she describes herself as a "good" witch. But Glinda, in my mind, is NOT a good witch. She's a Machiavellian monster!


Here's what I think happened:


Years ago, the Kansas man who will one day be known as "The Wizard of Oz" lands in the Land of Oz in his balloon. At some point later he convinces the citizens of the Emerald City that he is the Wizard of Oz. When the story begins, there are four powerful beings vying for control of Oz, the "Wicked" Witch of the West, the "Wicked" Witch of the East, Glinda the "Good" Witch of the North, and the Wizard of Oz, whom I will bet is also referred to as the "Wizard of the South." These four beings rule the lands of Oz, and none of them trust the other ones AT ALL! But as none is more powerful than the others, there is a measure of stability and peace in the kingdom.


Enter Dorothy in her tornado-blown house. Her house lands on top of the Witch of the East, killing her. Now, think about what happens next! Almost instantly Glinda arrives in her bubble. The first thing she does is ask Dorothy, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" She's measuring up Dorothy to see how powerful she is. I think Glinda very quickly realizes that a) Dorothy is nothing to fear and b) Dorothy is from the same land as the Wizard of Oz. 


Then the Wicked Witch of the West shows up demanding revenge for the killing of her sister. And before Dorothy can try to smooth things over with the Wicked Witch of the West, maybe try some of that mid-western charm on her, Glinda goads the Witch of the West, reminding her about the ruby slippers, and when the Witch of the West goes for the slippers, Glinda makes them appear on Dorothy's feet. Glinda makes Dorothy a target! 


Once the "Wicked" Witch of the West leaves, Glinda convinces Dorothy that Dorothy will have to Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz to take her home. Glinda doesn't offer to send anyone along as a guide, nor does she offer to accompany Dorothy herself. She sends a 12 year old child alone on a long journey through a dangerous, dark forest where the trees are alive and where living scarecrows and metal men with axes live. And she does this assuming that Dorothy will either be killed before she ever gets to the Emerald City, or if she does, she will meet the Wizard of Oz, who will either a) send her off to kill the Witch of the West (Maybe he makes this demand of anyone who wants something from him!) or b) he will decide to get in his balloon and take her home. If either of these events happens, Glinda gets rid of one more of the two remaining foes in her way to total domination of Oz. And if Dorothy gets killed, it's no real loss for her.


Imagine Glinda's surprise, then, when at the end of the movie Dorothy kills the Witch of the West AND convinces the Wizard of Oz to leave in the balloon. Sure, the Wizard leaves the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion in charge of the Emerald City, but do you really think the three of them will be much of a match against Glinda that "Good" Witch (though I think you're beginning to see now what I've been seeing in all of these viewings, aren't you? She's no GOOD witch!)? Glinda will be in total control of the Land of Oz before Dorothy can finish chanting "There's no place like home!"


And if you still have doubts, consider this: When the Wizard goes off and leaves Dorothy alone, Glinda shows up and tells Dorothy that she could have gone home anytime she wanted--all she has to do is click her heels, say "There's no Place Like Home," and remember that everything she ever wanted was in her own back yard. Dorothy asks Glinda why she didn't tell her that in the first place, and Glinda replies that Dorothy wouldn't have believed her, that Dorothy had to find out for herself...


...well...


....if I'd been Dorothy, I would have said to her, "Oh yeah? Well, I would have liked to have tried it anyway!"



What a load of rubbish. Glinda didn't tell her at the beginning of the movie because she still saw that she could use Dorothy to at least occupy the Witch of the West for a little while. She had no idea how swimmingly things were going to go for her.


Or maybe I've just seen this movie too many times...

Disoriented

Sometimes a dream will disorient me for a while...

Last night I dreamed that I was teaching English at a strange school, and I couldn't find my way to my classroom. I wandered the halls, occasionally stopping people to ask them how to get to my classroom, but no matter what direction I went, I always seemed to be on the opposite side of the school from where I was supposed to be. Then, when I finally neared my classroom, it occurred to me that I had no idea who my students were, what I was supposed to be teaching, or even what grade level I'd be teaching. It also occurred to me that I hadn't done any lesson plans for this class.

I woke up suddenly from the dream, and after lying in bed for about 30 seconds it occurred to me that in my REAL life I hadn't done any lesson plans in a LONG time. I got panicky over that, and then I realized that I couldn't even remember HOW to do lesson plans in the new student information system that the state of Kentucky uses. And I started to get really agitated and upset until I remembered...

...I haven't been a teacher for six years now...

Practically Done Now

Monday I wrote about how stressed I was at work because I had three major reports that I needed to get into the state by the middle of December. I was so excited Tuesday afternoon because I FINALLY got started on one of these. After about two hours of work, I looked at my computer screen and this is a sample of what I had:

I am practically finished now!

Thanksgiving

I am thankful for

• my wife
• my children
• days off work
• that moment when you think you've already eaten the last cookie from the bag, but then you realize that there is one left
• family
• coffee
• forced air furnaces
• that it is not a year ago today, because I came home from Thanksgiving dinner and then loaded the  moving truck and worked from then until Monday morning
• for work
• for my health
• for police officers
• that no one I know personally has died in the War on Terror. I'm also thankful to those I personally know who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have done so, and that most of them are home now
• for turkey
• for dressing
• for pumpkin pie
• for potatoes, that wonderful vegetable that you can deep fry or cover with cheese or mash or cover with bacon...or heck, I guess you can do all of them at once!
• for friends
• for Facebook
• for blogs
• that the world seems a little smaller thanks to the Internet
• for co-workers
• for my job
• for peace of mind
• that, with the economy as bad as its been lately, I have not gone hungry or filed for unemployment or even really worried about my own job
• for soft blankets and pillows
• that I am not homeless
• for board games and chicken wings
• and for Ladder Ball or Hillbilly golf or whatever you want to call it, which is what I was playing in that photo from yesterday...

What am I doing?

Yesterday I wrote a post about the family dog. As I was browsing through pictures on the hard drive of our computer, I came upon this picture. As I looked at it I thought, "You know, if I remove everything from the photo but me, that's going to be one weird looking photo." So I did it.

Can you figure out what I'm doing in the photo? Any guesses? (I'll tell you tomorrow).

The Warrior Princess

It occured to me today that I hadn't really written about our dog since right after we'd gotten her, so I thought I'd give a quick update and give some photos.

Her name is Xena, as in Warrior Princess. Don't make fun of the name. We didn't give it to her; it was from her previous owners. We did, though, keep it, which I guess we didn't have to do.

I just re-read the last thing that I wrote about her, and it almost made me laugh out loud. I didn't really know the dog very well back then. In that post I described her as "a dominant dog" that tried to run the show...

...This is the most submissive dog I've ever seen.

Here is a short list of just some of things that terrifies this dog:
1. Garbage trucks.
2. Any plastic container, like a bucket or a trash can.
3. Any other dog, no matter the size.
4. Me.

The last one is my fault, I guess. I really did think that she was a dominant dog when we first got her. She wasn't a dominant dog at all--she was just an enthusiastic puppy, but I decided that it was my job to try to break her. So I read some books about dominant dogs. Never mind that the photo on the cover of one of these books was of a Doberman Pinscher, and that on another was a huge Rottweiler with its teeth bared, and never mind that my dog looks like a black lab puppy and is smaller than a beagle. I assumed these books could help me. One of the books suggested that the next time that the dog did something I didn't want her to do, I should point at her and shout "No!" as loudly as I could. Seemed a little extreme to me, but I thought I'd give it a try.

The next day I came home from work wearing a suit. I let Xena in the back door and she ran over to me and jumped up on me. I shoved her roughly away, pointed a finger in her face, and shouted "No!" as loudly as I could. I literarlly hurt my own ears I shouted so hard. Xena's ears fell back on her head, she crouched down, and promptly emptied her bladder on the hardwood floor.

For months after that this was the kind of greeting I got from Xena--an enthusiastic greeting, but when I bent down to pet her she'd squat and pee. I knew that I had to be patient with her. If I got frustrated and yelled at her it would just reinforce the situation.

Eventually she got to the point that she quit peeing, but she still didn't want to be around me when we were alone together. I told my family about it, and they thought I was lying, I think. She acted absolutely fine when anyone else was around, but the moment she realized it was just the two of us she'd run into Natalie's room and hide under her bed. I finally proved to Lisa how she acted one afternoon when the dog and I were in the back yard and everyone else was inside, and Xena didn't know anyone else was inside. "Don't make any noise," I told Lisa. "Just look out the basement door and watch this." I then went out and threw a rope bone to Xena. She merrily went and got it, but when I approached her to take it from her she dropped the bone, rolled over onto her belly, tucked her tail into the air, and peed on herself. I looked over at Lisa. I think she finally believed me.

For a long time it bothered me, but then as I got to know the dog better I noticed that it wasn't just me--she was just one terrified, insecure dog. As I mentioned above, she's terrified of plastic containers. She loves to go for a walk...except on garbage day! Then it becomes an experience similar to you or me going to a haunted house. All those empty garbage cans!

She's actually gotten a lot better, though. She hasn't peed on herself when I've approached her since Halloween night (when she was about to pull out of her leash and run off and I leaped toward her to keep her from getting away), and she no longer hides from me when we're alone in the house. She's still a pretty timid dog, though.

The video below was taken back in July at a "dog park" in Covington. This dog park is basically just a fenced off area where you can let your dog run free where other dogs are so that your dog can get worms. We took Xena to the dog park twice, and she spent the VAST majority of time hiding under the legs of whatever human she could find. If she wasn't doing that, she was literally foaming at the mouth from anxiety. The only time she played AT ALL with any other dog is in the video below. She played with this dog for the length of time in the video and maybe a minute and a half more before a larger dog raced into the fracas and got in between them. At that point Xena ran back over to where we were and got between Natalie's legs.

Short Week

Today is the start of a short week at work. That's good and bad.

Good because I could use the break. It's been a stressful...uh...a stressful year, really. About this time a year ago my school district switched its Student Information System. It took months to get all of the data corrected from the transition and to learn and teach the new system. Right after that the federal stimulus rolled around and my district used a lot of the money to purchase technology, which of course my department had to purchase, install, and train staff to use. And then in October of this year I had two day-long trainings to organize and participate in. I don't think I've taken a breath at work in a year. So I could use the break.

Bad because I actually have three MAJOR documents due to the state on December 15, and I need to find time to write them. I will work all day Wednesday with most of the staff not in the buildings, so that will help, but I'm going to come back a week from today  from a four day weekend rested and relaxed but knowing I have two and half weeks to get these things done.

Holy cow, just saying that stresses me already!

Quote of the Day

With apologies to the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes...

There's a time to laugh, a time to cry
A time to live and a time to die
A time to break and a time to chill
To act civilized or act real ill
But whatever ya do in your lifetime
Ya never let a mc steal your rhyme
                      --"Rapper's Delight" 

What Does the Internet Say About You?

A few months ago I made a post about a site called Wordle and how cool it was. One of the things I didn't talk about is how Wordle can quickly summarize a document for you by taking the most common words in the document and presenting them in a "wordle" with the most commonly used words largest. For instance, if you take the Health Care Bill currently being proposed by Congress and put it into Wordle you'll get sometehing like this:

Now I found a new website, 123people.com, that will do something similar. Put in a name, and the program will created a Wordle-like cloud based on common words found around that person's name in web pages. If you put my name in you'll see this:

It's not perfect, but it's kind of interesting. On the other hand, be warned: 123people.com is a website where I got a lot of the information for the post that I made a few days ago. If you go there, you may find there is more about you on the Internet than you'd ever want available. It's scary what conclusions a machine can draw about you in 10 seconds.

Hold a Moonbeam in Your Hand

There's been a lot of uproar in the news lately about whether this week's cover of Newsweek, which shows Sarah Palin in a runner's uniform, is sexist.

I'm a subscriber to Newsweek, and though I was interested in the debate, I decided to ignore it until I got MY Newsweek because I wanted to judge the photo for itself, without any prior knowledge. I usually get my Newsweek on Tuesday, but for some reason it didn't come this week until yesterday.

I don't see the problem with the photo.

It's not sexist at all. It's (very) mildly sexUAL, but that's not the same thing. The photo was originally taken for Runner's World magazine, and it shows Palin in a runner's outfit in what looks like a political office holding a couple of smart phones. The text that accompanies it asks, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?," a reference to The Sound of Music. The accompanying article is about the difficulties that Palin presents for the Republican party.

The photograph is perfect for the story. It encompasses everything that is problematic about Palin. It is extremely difficult to be both a celebrity AND a politician, and that's what she's trying to be at the moment. Many have argued that Newsweek would NEVER have put a photo of Barack Obama standing in a jogging suit on the cover of its magazine, nor would they have put a photo of Hillary Clinton dressed similarly on their cover. And those people want to scream that the fact that they put Palin on the cover dressed like this is an example of their bias against Palin.

But that's simply not the case. The reason that you'll never see Obama or Clinton on the cover of the magazine in such a pose is that they never would have posed for the photo in the first place! National politicians are necessarily famous, but you can't straddle popular celebrity and politics and get away with it for very long. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger has dialed his celebrity appearances WAY BACK in order to effectively govern. Palin has taken the opposite approach, resigning from the only major office she's ever held in order to write and promote a book.

Despite all of that, Palin is extremely popular with the most conservative part of the Republican Party, but the vast majority of Americans thought she was unfit to be VICE-President, much less President. So what does the Republican Party do? It's a conundrum for the party, and the photo summarizes nicely exactly the absurdity of the situation (So does the song, by the way). That's all that Newsweek meant by the photo.

Personal Information

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how my name appeared in a phone book for the first time ever in my life, and how angry I was because that meant people could find out where I lived now. I then wrote about how silly it was for me to get upset about this, because I volunteered so much infomation about myself anyway. And since I'm a fairly heavy USER of technology and of the Internet, and since I've been publishing web sites and web pages in one form or another since 1996, I'm a pretty easy target. Also, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world with my first and last name, so if you type my name into Google you will very quickly learn a whole lot about me, probably more than you ever wanted to know.

The idea of our lack of privacy never went away, though, and I have spent some time on and off thinking about this. Then, last night, I decided that I would try a little experiment: I chose someone I went to high school with, someone I hadn't kept in touch with, and I tried to find information on the person. I looked for someone with the following criteria:

• Female. I chose this because females are typically harder to find than males due to name changes caused by marriages.
• Someone with a fairly common name, unlike mine. A unique name would make the search too easy.
• Not on any social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
• No obvious results returned in Google Searches.

In other words, I was looking for someone who, at least on the surface, did not have an online presence at all. No blog. No photos on the Internet. No easy way to find information about this person.

I had to immediately eliminate the first three people I chose because I found information very quickly on them.When I searched for the fourth person using her first and last name I got nothing. Nada. Zip. No Facebook page. No work listing. Nothing. This would be my person.

Just to make sure, I logged into Facebook and did a search anyway. Nothing. I then went to the Facebook section for my high school and went to the year I knew she had graduated--maybe her name would be there, spelled diiferently or something. Nope.I then remembered what I thought was the middle initial of this woman. I couldn't remember her middle name, but I did remember the middle initial. I ran a search on just her first name and middle initial and then came up with WAY too many results. So I ran the search again, this time with quotation marks around the first name and middle initial, and with the word "Kentucky" following. I got a number of hits, and I scanned down them. About four or five entries down I hit pay dirt. It appeared to be some kind of geneaological site, and it listed the woman's name followed by a middle name. THAT was her middle name, I thought to myself. Also listed in the text that could be seen on the Google page were the names of two of her brothers and her father.

I clicked on the link, and it led me to a scanned page of a very poorly written 2002 history book from an eastern Kentucky county historical society. The book didn't just give me (very poorly written) information about this woman. It actually told me the (very poorly written) family history of her father's family, where in Europe her grandfather had emigrated from, what he did for a living when he came to the United States, and then it listed a family tree, all the way down to and including this woman's husband and her two chidren. And once I had the woman's married name, the sky was the limit. In another fifteen minutes I had the following information:

• Where she worked
• Her email address at work
• A spreadsheet from a government entity that included a list of 11 different trainings she had attended from 2006-2008. These trainings gave me a fairly good idea of what she did in her job.
• Her birthdate was included on a spreadsheet from a volunteer organization, along with her height and weight (She's apparently put on a few pounds since high school). The spreadsheet was a list of participants in a charity 10k run that happened in May of this year. Why it was on the Internet, I don't know. My guess is that the organization has no idea that the spreadsheet is available for anyone to see.
• There were several other links to charity runs this person has participated in over the last two years. Apparently she's trying to shed those pounds.
• A website dedicated to finding people teased me with information by telling me what city the woman lived in. It wanted me to pay $19.95 to find anything else about her. I immediately left that website and went to a white pages website, typed in the name of the city and the woman's name, and got her home address and telephone number for free.
• I used Google Maps to search for her house, and then I used the "Street View" to actually look at a 360 degree representation of her house. It was a pretty nice house in a pretty nice neighborhood. The car in the driveway was kind of beaten up, though. Maybe it was a friend's. Or her 17 year old daughter's. I know her daughter is 17 because...
• The middle school where her children went to school had posted a page in honor of a teacher who was named "Teacher of the Month" during the 2008-2009 school year. This woman had written a letter to the principal about this teacher and her letter had been the impetus for the teacher receiving the award. The web page honoring the teacher included an electronic copy of the letter, which mentioned the ages and names of the woman's two children.
• The website dedicated to finding people actually showed her husband's name alongside hers, and it listed two cities she lived in, one until 2006 and one from 2006 until now. When I clicked on her husband's name, it listed the same city until 2006 but then a different city from 2006-2007 and then another city in another state from 2007 until now. This suggested that she MIGHT be divorced or separated from her husband. Apparently she kept the married name, though.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. Twenty years ago if you wanted this kind of information about someone you had to hire a private investigator. Today it took me 30 minutes sitting on a bed with a laptop on my lap. And keep in mind, this was a person who--at first glance--didn't even exist on the Internet. This is not someone who tweets every day about what he/she had for dinner. This is an invisible person.

Who turned out not to be so invisible after all.

Does this bother anyone else? Is the ready access to all of this kind of information worth the privacy we have to sacrifice? Or am I overly worried about this?

Email Pet Peeves, part two

Yesterday I wrote about one of my pet peeves when it comes to email. But as I re-read the post later, it occurred to me that the pet peeve I wrote about is not the ONLY pet peeve I have when it comes to email, and it's not even the worst one I have. Here are some others:

1. Fancy backgrounds: When I open an email, I want to read the text of the email. I do NOT want to see a bunch of puppies dancing around or a bright pink background with pretty green hearts. And what makes this matter worse, when I go to forward the email the background wants to forward itself right along with it, and I have to go into the settings of the email and change it from HTML or RTF to text and then back again to make the background go away. Otherwise, the person receiving the forwarded message from me might think that I am the one using the cutesie background.
2. People who write in all caps. I think pretty much everyone is irritated by this, right? So maybe this one isn't a pet peeve. AFTER ALL, I THINK A PET PEEVE PRETTY MUCH HAS TO BE SOMETHING THAT IRRITATES YOU more THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON, and since no one likes to read writing in all caps, maybe I should remove this from the list...Nah.
3. People who send LLLLLOOOOOONNNNNGGGGGG emails. This is actually a bad habit that I had myself until just a few years ago. In the name of being thorough, I used to send very long emails, sometimes divided into sections with hyperlinks to jump from section to section and back to the beginning. I was very proud of these emails. And then one day I was talking to a teacher who--back when I was a classroom teacher--had taught right next door to me. He asked me a question about a new email system that we were installing, and I told him that I'd put it in my last email to district staff, and hadn't he read it. "Read YOUR emails?" he said to me. "No way! They're too long. I just delete 'em as soon as they come in!" This wasn't friendly ribbing from a co-worker, either. I could tell by his tone that he was serious. And after he said that, I started analyzing my own email reading habits, and darned if he wasn't right. If an email is more than, say, the length of the screen, I probably won't read it when I first get it. I'll scan it and save it for later. If it's more than two or three times the length of the screen, I probably NEVER read that saved email. I just end up deleting it. And if it's any longer than that, I don't even bother saving it. I just delete it as soon as I open it.
4. Spammers who try to fool me into reading their messages. I really hate all spam. Who doesn't? But I REALLY get upset when I get an email with a name like "Cindy" on it and some kind of subject that sounds like it could be legitimate. "Re: Hi" doesn't fool me any more. Neither does "Funny Joke" or anything like that. But "Missed Your Call" or "Returning Your Defective Item" sound like they could be legitimate emails, and I'll open them up. And when the text of the email says something like "Find an Adult Friend to Spend the Evening With...Tonight!" I get really upset. Especially if I open the email on my cell phone, which takes several seconds to open each message as it has to go out to the server and retrieve it. I look at it and think, I wasted ten seconds of my life waiting for this?!"
5. People who forward jokes, sappy stories, or other chain letters. Of all of these, I think I hate the Christian messages the most, because I'm a Christian, and because I understand that these chain emails were not written by well meaning Christians, but were instead written by ill-meaning people who have co-opted Christianity in order to clog up people's inboxes. "If you send this email to 12 people then you will be blessed by God" the messages say. Really? Why 12 people? What if I only sent it to 11? Am I damned to hell at that point?

Holy Cow! I was going to keep writing this post. I actually had about four other pet peeves on the top of my head. But I just realized--do you know who I sound like in this post?

That's going to give me nightmares for weeks!

Email Pet Peeve

One of the things that really bugs me about email is when I get an email from an individual and at the bottom of the email is some threatening-sounding message like this one:

NOTICE: The contents of this email are the property of SOME BIG COMPANY and are only intended for the intended recipient. If you are that end user, you are hereby forbidden from forwarding this email. If you are not the intended recipient, you should notify the sender and delete this message immediately. Reading, printing, saving, or forwarding of this message for any reason is prohibited.

What bugs me about this message is a couple of things. First of all, it's always at the END of the message, and if the "end user" has bothered scrolling down to that point and reads the warning, chances are he's ALREADY read the message, so the warning not to read the message is nonsense!

Second, and more importantly, these messages tick me off because of the semi-legal language used in them. Words in them like "hereby" and "prohibited" sound a lot like contract language, and they can lead a reader to the conclusion that if they read the email or forward it to someone that they are somehow going to be sued. Some even state that the notice is legally binding under federal contract law.

But understand this, all you who put this message at the end of your emails: You and I are not parties to a contract unless we BOTH agree to the terms of that contract. In the same way that you couldn't create a contract giving yourself a two million dollar salary, sign it, and take it to your employer and demand to be paid the money, you also cannot dictate to me how I am to use an email that you've already sent me and that I never agreed to receive under your terms. Your little legal sounding language means NOTHING. If you're the Coca-Cola Company and you accidentally email me the secret formula to Coca-Cola, I can email that formula to the entire world if I want, no matter what you've put at the bottom of your email.

And no, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it regarding this. Take the words of this person and this person and especially this person.

So quit trying to scare me with your stupid little autosignature.

Who Dey!

Who Dey!

Who Dey!

Who Dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?

Now I'm a believer! The Cincinnati Bengals are going to win their division, and if they keep playing this way they'll get a first round bye! I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Bengals are serious Super Bowl contenders!

The last time that happened? Twenty years ago!

Who Dey!

Quote of the Day

My calendar lies crumbled laid to waste. 
It's been scrawled on, thumbed through and changed. 
Will this be the measure of my days? 
Dinners and appointments 
and deadlines I can't make. 
And when I start to see it making sense for me 
That's just hope springing eternally. 
--Emily Saliers


The part in red sounds like my life at work. 

Someone Turn the Station!

I was driving back to work yesterday afternoon from a meeting that I had in Owenton when I heard the song below on the radio.

Wow.

The song's not all that new. I think it's maybe a year and a half old, and I'd heard it once it before, I think, but it had been in the background in a restaurant where I was with other people, and I didn't have a chance to focus on it like I did yesterday when I was alone in the car.

Wow.

I absolutely HATE this song.

And I'm not using that word lightly. I don't just dislike the song. It doesn't just bother me a little. I HATE it. If I could meet the bandmembers who wrote and recorded it, I'm pretty sure I'd punch them.

I'm not sure what it is about this song, but it's like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Maybe it's the singer's voice, which reminds me of the lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys, a band that I hated back in the '80's.  Maybe it's the repetition of the words "You Gotta Spend some Time, Love" over and over throughout the song with exactly the same pitch, a sort of hellish ostinato.  Maybe it's just the sophomoric lyrics. I don't know. But I hated the song so much that I felt like I ought to share it...



(I can't see the video.)

A Humbling Moment

When it comes to physical competitions with my children, I like to hold back a little, build up their confidence. A few days ago I just about had my confidence ruined...

...Tuesday night my daughter Natalie, who is 10, walked up to the school for the school's Book Fair Open House. We looked at books, played some games, and had a couple of cookies. None of Natalie's friends were at the school, though. It seemed the event was being run BY the high school kids and designed FOR the primary level kids, and Natalie's age was in between the two, so after about 15 minutes we headed for home.

Our house is maybe 250 meters from the school, and Natalie, who wants to run track next year, said to me, "You want to race home?"

"Sure," I said to her. "On your mark, get set, go!"

As I said at the beginning, for my daughters' entire lives I've held back a little for them. If we were going to race, I'd let them get a little bit of a lead, and then I'd race ahead of them for a few steps before putting on the brakes and letting them pull back in front, and then at the end I'd explode forward and either barely beat them or barely lose to them (I tried to make the victories about 50/50 so that the girls could taste both winning and losing). I don't know whether the girls ever realized I was letting them win sometimes, but in any event they didn't seem to mind.

When I yelled "Go" on Tuesday night, things began as they always had in the past. Instead of running full blast I broke into an easy run, barely a jog, and after Natalie got a few steps in front of me I turned on the juice and took off.

Except that, when I turned on the juice, I didn't gain any ground on Natalie! In fact, I was still LOSING ground, falling now a good four or five meters behind her. She was BEATING me! For real!

This race went from being a cute game to serious business at that point. I forgot that I was wearing blue jeans and a heavy henley shirt. In my mind, I was in my uniform back on the track in high school, having just turned the second curve in the 400 meter dash and heading down the final straightaway. "Get your legs up high!" I could hear my coach yelling to me from the stands. "Relax, and don't cross your arms across your body! Everything in a straight line!"

I slowly began to gain ground on Natalie, but the emphasis was on the word "slowly." We were more than halfway home, with maybe another 100 meters to go, and I didn't think I could overcome the head start that I had given her. I DID have one additional gear that I could have gone into, but it was a cool night and I hadn't stretched and hadn't been in that particular gear for a long time, and I was afraid I might hurt myself if I really opened myself up. But darn it! If I didn't catch her by the time we got to the near edge of our nearest neighbor's house I was going to go all out, injury or not!

Thankfully, though, the heavens had mercy on me, and I didn't have to chance it. With about 50 meters left Natalie somehow stopped on a dime and I shot past her. I screeched to a stop and turned around. She was bent over with the palm of her hands on her knees taking huge gulps of air. "You win!" she managed to gasp.

Apparently, though Natalie was faster than I was, she didn't yet have the endurance that I did. Thank goodness our home wasn't a little closer to the school!

It was humbling moment, though not perhaps as humbling as it COULD have been. After all, I'd already been through all of this before, in my late teens. My two younger brothers, who were three and four years younger than I was, and whom I'd always dominated physically when we'd been growing up, ended up being a good four or five inches taller and 40 or so pounds heavier than I was. Their growth seemed to be almost overnight. I remember one summer playing basketball in the back yard with them, and slamming back into their faces pretty much every shot they took. The next summer I was learning the art of the fallaway jumper in order to avoid getting my own shots rejected back into my face.

I used to wonder why I'd been doomed to be the shortest male by far in the family, all three of my brothers inches above six feet and me inches below it. But maybe it was all preparation for Tuesday night. I'd been through it before, so I knew how to react. I walked up to Natalie, myself out of breath, and said to her, "That was...fun...If you hadn't gotten tired....I think you would have...beaten me...Good job."

She smiled, and we WALKED the rest of the way home.

Trapped by a Vision

One of the consequences of working in the IT field is that you become the "Go To Guy" for any computer issues that affect your friends and family. That's not unusual, I guess. It happens in a lot of professions. Lisa has a good friend who is a nurse, and we pretty much use her as a free Urgent Care center ("Bryan's hurt his back and he's complaining that it's a pulsing pain. What could be wrong?"). The woman who replaced Lisa as curator of Vent Haven Museum is married to a home improvement contractor, and we use him as a free DIY contact ("We're replacing electrical outlets in our house, and what do the gray, white, and black wires do and where do they need to be connected?") It's a part of life, I guess, that people will expect you to help in whatever your area of expertise is. At some times, though, being asked to help friends and family with their computers can be darned inconvenient. Here's a story...
___________________
As I just mentioned above, until about a year ago Lisa was the curator of Vent Haven Museum, the world's only ventriloquist museum. Each year the museum holds a convention, and about 400 ventriloquists from all over the world come to this thing for performances, lectures, a chance to meet with the stars of ventriloquism, a chance to purchase figures from vendors. Your typical convention-type stuff. The week prior to this convention is fairly stressful as Lisa and I get the museum ready for visitors on the final day of the convention, but the rest of the convention itself is nice.

And three summers ago, on the Friday of the convention, one of the presenting ventriloquists was all set to give a lecture on...I don't know what, to be honest. In all the years we attended I never actually attended ANY lecture. In any event, on this particular summer, I WAS in the lecture hall watching whatever was coming before. The vent was getting ready for his lecture, and he was setting up his computer, which was a Mac (This particular vent is a HUGE Apple guy). He went to plug his brand new Mac notebook into this six or seven year old LCD projector, and immediately he was stumped because the projector only had a VGA input and his laptop only had a DVI output. He came over to me.

"Hey, do you have an adapter for this thing?"

I looked at him like he was crazy. "On me?"

"Yeah," he said. I guess he figured that--since I was a computer guy--I just carried that kind of stuff in my wallet.

I told him that I didn't have one, that I had several installed in classrooms at my work, but that I didn't think on a Friday night in the summer I could find anyone to let me into the buildings to get one (I have keys to the buildings but not the classrooms). I said that a better option might be to get a USB flash drive, copy his PowerPoint onto it, and use MY laptop, which was in the trunk of my car. But we couldn't find anyone who had a flash drive.

So I said this: "You keep looking for a flash drive here. I'll jump in my car and race out to Best Buy. They'll have an adapter. If you find something, let me know."

And so I got in the car and raced off. I started doing the math in my head. It was now 20 minutes until the lecture was scheduled to start. It would take me 10 minutes to get to Best Buy, 3 or 4 minutes to locate the adapter if I was lucky, 5 minutes to check out, and another 10 minutes to get back. I couldn't get back in time, but the ventriloquist was a professional performer: he could kill time for a few minutes.

I don't usually speed, but I did that day. I pulled into the Best Buy parking lot and practically jumped out of the car while it was still running. I raced into the store and headed for the computer section. An old student of mine, Gary, worked in the computer section, and I was hoping he was on duty that day. As soon as I walked into the computer section I saw him helping some customers. "Gary," I shouted to him, "where are the VGA to DVI adapters?"

"Hey, Mr. Sweasy," he shouted back. "Aisle 10, on a j-hook on the bottom."

I raced to the aisle, spent about 60 seconds looking for the thing, and finally found it. I grabbed it and headed for the register. I was about halfway there when I heard a voice behind me call out, "Bryan? Bryan Sweasy?"

I spun around to face the person and continued walking--now backwards--towards the register. My plan was to tell whoever it was that I didn't have time to talk to them. But then I saw who it was: my dentist. First of all, I was a little surprised that he even knew who I was. I only see the guy twice a year, and he remembered me? Second of all, what could he possibly want?

He came up to me with a big smile on his face. "Hey, fella. How's it going?" My dentist is a tall guy, a gentle man with an easy, slow manner. "How's Lisa and the girls?"

Are we his only patients? I thought again. How does he REMEMBER this stuff? I can't keep straight the names of the people who work in my own office!

"I'm doing all right," I said. "But I'm really in a--"

"You got a minute?" he asked me in his even tone. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. "I got my daughter with me. She's going off to college in a couple of weeks, and we're buying her a laptop. I could really, REALLY use some advice on what to get her. You're a computer guy, right?"

My first impulse was to tell him that I honestly didn't have the time, that I really had something important going on, that at ANY OTHER TIME I would be more than happy to help. And I almost DID tell him that.

But then my brain played a little movie in my head. Four months later I'd be sitting in his dentist's chair, and I'd be moaning in pain because of the toothache I had. And he'd come into the room, bend down, but instead of his usual, easygoing manner, he'd say to me tersely, "Hey, Bryan. I hear you got a toothache. Oh, by the way, you remember that time in Best Buy when you couldn't take five minutes to help me look at laptops? Well, I bought one, and it's already broken! Thanks a lot. And you know, I'd really like to help you with that toothache, but I honestly don't have time. I got something important going on. ANY OTHER TIME I'd be more than happy to help. Why don't you come back next week?"

No, I couldn't say no. I lowered my head, sighed, and said, "Yeah, I can help you." And so I went back to the computer section and spent maybe fifteen minutes answering questions about laptop models, processor speeds, extended warranties, and the like. We finally settled on a computer, and he thanked me profusely. And I headed for the registers.

I looked down at my watch. The lecture was scheduled to start more than 20 minutes before. I decided to call Lisa to see if I still needed to buy the thing. She picked up the phone on the second ring and said in a whisper, "Hello?"

I knew by the whisper that I was too late. "Has he already started? Do I need to buy this thing?"

"What?" she whispered again. And then she realized what I'd said. "He started a long time ago. We figured out something here and it's working. You don't need to buy the thing."
____________________________

I'd always known that there were certain people in my life that I don't really have an option but to help with their computer problems, people that I can't say no to. But I'd always assumed that those people were my family and certain people at my work: my superintendent, my finance officer, the head of maintenance, the school board members. I may need something from them in return one day, so I need to make sure they're taken care of. I never dreamed that the circle of special people could include anyone outside of those few work colleagues.

Until I had that vision of four months into the future.

VERY Funny Bit

I almost NEVER listen to morning radio shows because I cannot stand the jabber. Usually, as soon as I turn on the car stereo on the way to work I'll switch over to CD mode and listen to whatever is in the CD. For some reason, though, yesterday I found myself listening to The Bob and Tom Show, and I'm glad I did, because I heard comedian Jim Breuer, someone who's apparently been around for a while but that I've never heard of before, do the bit below. And I laughed out loud, louder than I've laughed in a long time. I then heard him tell Bob and Tom about the time that he actually was invited onstage by AD/DC to do his bit with them (I love a band that's able to laugh at itself!), and he did. A rough shot of that video is also on Youtube. It's all funny, and it gave me a good start to the day yesterday.



(I can't see video 1.)



(I can't see video 2.)

Four Minutes

I have four minutes to write a post. That's it. That's how busy I've been lately. I'm going to time myself. Let me see what I can get out in four minutes:

• I'm starting to believe in the Cincinnati Bengals. If they beat the Pittsburgh Steelers next Sunday I will REALLY believe in them.
• Yesterday was such a nice day that I almost felt guilty for staying inside from 1-4 to watch the football game. At one point I was even considering the feasibility of having a TV outside. I (wisely, I think) decided that was a bad idea.
• Our dog is pretty smart. She starts the night on Natalie's bed, and as long as she stays up there I let her stay all night. In the past, though, if Lisa or I were out and came home after the girls were in bed, the dog would come running down the steps to see who was home. When she did, I'd put her away in the basement for the night. Lately, though, she's figured this out, and she doesn't come down anymore.
• I hate when other people have a telephone on speaker phone and are carrying on a conference call with their office doors wide open. They invariably end up shouting at the phone and turning the phone up as loudly as possible, making it impossible to concentrate. That happened twice yesterday at work.
• Fozzie Bear is my favorite Muppet. Either Fozzie or Animal.

And that's it for my four minutes.

Too Soon

Here in Cincinnati a local radio station began November 1 playing all Christmas music all the time. 24 hours a day, presumably until January 1. Two solid months of Bing Crosby and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "The Little Drummer Boy."

I don't know about you, but November 1 is WAY too early to begin playing Christmas music. And radio stations like this are absolutely KILLING the Christmas spirit for me anyway. And it's not just the radio stations that are doing the murdering...

One of the things I used to love about Christmas was seeing those Christmas TV specials that used to come on TV only once a year, and I also loved hearing those special Christmas songs on the radio. You know the ones I'm talking about--the songs you really like, but not enough to actually go out and purchase, so you only hear them on the radio.

But all of that magic is gone. The TV specials that I used to love to see (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and my all time favorite, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown) the family owns on DVD and can see whenever we want...and see them WITHOUT commercials. I'm not at all excited when they're on TV. And oddly enough, because I CAN watch them whenever I want to, I don't feel the need to see them anymore. I can't explain it, but years have gone by when I haven't watched one or more of these. 

And thanks to always on Christmas radio, which by December will include most likely at least 2 other local stations playing all Christmas all the time, I will be SICK of Christmas music by Christmas day. There are some Christmas songs that I perpetually HATE (I plan to write about them in a few weeks), but even the songs I love, the songs I used to look forward to hearing on the radio (Bruce Springsteen singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the Eagles singing "Please Come Home for Christmas," and a new favorite of mine, Sarah McLachlan's "Wintersong") I will hear so many times that when they do come on the radio, I'll switch to a different station. And besides, even these songs I can hear any time I want 365 days a year on YouTube by going here, here, or here. 

I don't mean to sound like a crank with this post. I guess I'm just saying that there's a price to be paid for the immediate access of the Internet and the constant barrage of Christmas music for two solid months. And that's why--when I hit the Christmas radio stations on the dial--I'll skip right over them.

At least until the middle of December...

...or maybe the day after Thanksgiving...

A Zealot

I'm not exactly sure how, but somehow I ended up being the de facto chairperson of my school district's state-mandated "energy-management team." I think I ended up in that position because one of the state-mandated requirements of this energy management team is that it create a district wide "energy management plan." 

I am an English major, so I end up chairing lots of things just because I can write the plans.

But that's not the point. I'm not here today to complain about the work I have to do (That's a blog entry I have planned for another day coming soon, but not today). What I wanted to talk about today is that--because I'm on this energy management team--about six weeks ago I attended an "Energy Management Institute" at Morehead University. I'll be honest--I had a really difficult time focusing on that day. I mostly just wanted to enjoy Morehead's beautiful campus.

There were three of us there, though, and we split up to attend sessions throughout the day. I ended up attending the curriculum sessions which supplied us with information we could take back to teachers. I learned a lot of information during these sessions, including the fact that Kentucky leads the nation in energy created by drilling into garbage dumps and mining the methane inside. Lots of useless stuff like that. But one useful piece of information I learned was about how much better the new compact fluorescent light bulbs are compared to the old standard light bulbs. I always knew the CFL's were MUCH more energy efficient, but I also thought they gave off ugly, bright, glaring light. And it's true; the cheap ones do just that. But I found in that session that the newer bulbs give off more of a "soft white" light that we're used to seeing from our standard light bulbs.

Ever since that day, I've become a zealot. Every time we go to the grocery store I pick up another multipack of bulbs, and I'm working to change the entire house over to the new CFL's. And the presenter at that conference was right--the bulbs labeled "soft white" do look pretty much like standard bulbs once they warm up. The only downside is that they come on dim and take maybe 60 seconds to get up to full strength, but you'll generally save about 75-80% in energy usage by switching. 

My goal is to switch the entire house over by Christmas. I guess I could do it en masse in an entire weekend, but those darned bulbs are so expensive (about $4 apiece for the ones that have the glass covers to make them look like standard bulbs) that I hate the idea of buying them all at once.

Just doing my part for the planet.

And my wallet.

1 in 7

I got an unsolicited email at work the other day with the below image attached. And I wholeheartedly agree with it. I think if U.S. educators would put some REAL effort behind it we could get that number up to 2 in 7, or possibly even 3 in 7!...

Sums up My Life

I walked into my office Thursday afternoon after spending some time at the middle school. I glanced down at my desk and saw what's in the photograph below. I felt like it pretty much summed up how I feel all of the time and why I'm so stressed...

Home Project

Saturday morning the girls called me up to their bathroom because they said they were having problems. Great, I thought. A flood. It turned out not to be a flood--the handle on their toilet had broken. A pretty easy fix.

 But that's not what I want to talk about today. Sunday afternoon I went to Home Depot to get a new handle for their toilet, and Lisa went with me. Since we moved into the house, both she and I have disliked--no, that's not a strong enough word--we have HATED the red counter top in our kitchen. But darn if the thing wasn't in such good shape that we couldn't bring ourselves to replace it. It looked almost brand new, like maybe the woman who sold us the house had installed it right before she put the house on the market. Maybe she thought everyone was going with red counters that year. Anyway, we lived with it. But finally Sunday Lisa said, "I'm going with you to Home Depot, and I'm going to order a new kitchen counter top." And we thought that was going to happen.

Until we got there. As we walked toward the toilet repair area we passed the painting supplies, and there, prominently featured, was a product called Rustoleum Countertop Coating. It's an oil-based enamel paint that you can supposedly paint right over a laminate countertop without priming or sealing. It cost $20. Lisa and I looked at each other. Why not? we thought. If we hate it, we're out $20, and we were going to get a new countertop anyway. So we bought it.

 I have to say, so far, I'm very impressed by the product. It was one of the EASIEST home improvement jobs I've ever done. It took from start to finish all of about 2 and a half hours. And it looks great, like a new countertop almost. There are some imperfections in it, sure, but I think if I could go back and do it again that I'd do an even better job the second time. I learned some tricks along the way. The only downside is that we had to wait three days after we painted the countertop for the coating to cure, so that means we were without a countertop from Sunday night until last night.

 Of course, the real challenge is not what it looks like now, but what it looks like in three months or in a year. I'll keep you posted.

Life Without Screens, part three

As I mentioned earlier in two very brief posts, Lisa and I decided that we would try to spend the entire days Saturday and Sunday WITHOUT watching TV or getting on the computer. The impetus of this decision came from a conversation in which we both admitted that--while we were spending time together--we were not always spending time focused on one another. Instead, we sat and watched TV, or Lisa might be on Facebook on the computer while I was sitting beside her looking at Facebook on my cell phone (A couple of days ago that happened and I commented to Lisa, "You just commented on what SO AND SO posted on Facebook? I thought you were working!"). We decided we were letting these screens distract us, and that we needed--at least for the weekend--to stop. We also wondered aloud whether we'd be able to even do this.

And we didn't. Not completely. But nonetheless, we made some real progress. At the end of the weekend I had learned some valuable things:

First of all, I found that skipping TV was pretty much a breeze. Lisa might argue with that since she did not watch ANY TV during the two days, and I did twice. The first time we were out in public and I saw on one of the ESPN stations a college football game between two teams that I didn't even know existed. But when I walked by I saw that there was less than a minute left in the game and the team that was down by four points was driving toward the goal, and I couldn't help myself: I NEEDED to know who was going to win this game. I didn't even watch one play of the game, though, before Lisa walked behind me, touched me on the shoulder and said simply, "Busted."

The second time I watched TV was Sunday night. It occurred to me that Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre was returning to Lambeau Field to take on the Green Bay Packers for the first time since he'd had a very public dispute with them, so I turned on the TV to see the score. As soon as I did so I felt guilty and so I turned it off, but I did have it on for about 30 seconds (Also, to be honest, I turned it off because I saw that the Vikings were ahead 31-20 with just a few minutes left and the game was pretty much over, but let's not talk about that...).

Still, despite those two slip ups, I did not have much of an aching to watch TV over the two days. I did find Sunday morning a little bit tough, as our usual routine was to watch the morning news shows before heading to church, but I got over that, and I actually found NOT watching the news, and NOT watching politicians and reporters arguing about health care and Afghanistan and the President's first year in office kind of nice. I felt more at peace without the dis-ease created by those shows.

So missing TV wasn't that hard. The computer--that was a different story. For starters, we realized very quickly that we had to change "No computer" to "No Internet," because we use the computer for a lot of things. Without ever getting on the Internet, I needed the computer over the weekend to edit a document in a word processing program and to use a financial software package to take care of our finances. I guess I could have waited until Monday to do those things, but I didn't think putting things off was the point. I didn't see a problem in using the computer because I NEEDED it as a tool.

And I also found that, in the end, I couldn't avoid the Internet entirely for the same reasons. I never got on the Internet for pleasure, but I found I actually needed the Internet on four separate occasions over the weekend:

1. Saturday morning I needed to know the weather before sending one of the children off to a band competition for the day. We don't subscribe to a newspaper and I couldn't turn on the TV, so I had to go to the National Weather Service page. I guess I COULD have turned on the radio and waited for a report, but again, I don't think that was the point of the weekend.
2. As I managed our money I needed to go online to do so online banking.
3. I felt a need to update this blog so my parents wouldn't think I was dead.
4. I needed to look up a phone number. As I mentioned in a prior post, we no longer have print phone books in our house, so the Internet is the only place to go.

More than those four times, though, I found it HARD to not get on the Internet just to get on it. I mentioned a few months ago how the way we accumulate information has changed thanks to the Internet, and I was VERY cognizant of that on Saturday and Sunday when I could NOT quickly jump on the Internet to find out

• what others thought about the movie This is It, which Lisa and I went to see on a date
• what that gurgling sound behind the speedometer in my car might be
• what reviews were for Rustoleum countertop paint
• why some leaves turn yellow while others turn red or orange

I also found it hard to not get on Facebook and to not upload pictures of my trick or treating children and the over the top Halloween house we visited (see yesterday's post). In fact, I actually thought to myself about Facebook,  "How do I know what's going on with my friends? Their whole weekend is passing by and I'm missing it!" Never mind that this time a year ago I hadn't starting using Facebook much, and that prior to getting on Facebook I hadn't heard from most of my friends in years and years and years. I usually hear on a nightly basis where these people are eating dinner, WHAT they're eating for dinner, whether or not they're sick, and so on. I felt I NEEDED to know these little details of their lives!

So the Internet is so ingrained in our lives that staying away from it was MUCH harder than avoiding TV. And neither Lisa nor I succeeded 100%. But we did succeed in cutting WAY back, and it did make a difference. Both Lisa and I admitted that--over the weekend--we spent much more time together actively involved with one another than we would have on a normal weekend, and that it was nice.We agreed to try to spend less time when we were together staring into these screens, and maybe we'll have another screen free weekend one day.

...but not THIS coming weekend, because the Bengals are back after their bye and will be playing the Pittsburgh Steelers! Who Dey!...

Halloween

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a ton of things to talk about after 48 hours of no Internet, but I want to begin with Halloween before that subject becomes completely out of date...

...Our older daughter did NOT get to go trick or treating this year. She had a band competition on Halloween night, but our younger daughter and her friend from down the street did get to go together, and they had a great time.

Easily the highlight of the whole day was a trip to a street about a half mile away from ours. Two neighbors on this street put on a uber-elaborate Halloween display every year. It's absolutely over the top, but it's fun. They usually make the local news with their display, and one year they even made the national news. They spare no expense, including renting a hearse, floating a giant Shrek body over one of the houses, placing automated moving displays all over, and this year--a first--they replaced a few of their classic moving displays with actual people dressed up like those moving displays and standing very still. When you leaned in to get a good luck at them they jumped at you (You can see one do this to Lisa in the video below).

My apologies for the shaky video. I think I'm going to have to get it through my head that if I'm going to use our new digital camera as a video recorder that I have to hold it VERY still and pan slowly. I didn't do that, though, and the video below looks like a scene from The Blair Witch Project.

Which is fitting, I guess.



(I can't see the video.)

Life Without Screens, part two

Lisa and I survived the weekend without screens, and we managed to stay off of the TV and the Internet (for the most part). I will write more about it tomorrrow.

Actually, I'll probably be writing about it all week. A lot of times I don't have anything to write about on a day to day basis, or I really struggle to think of what to write. But guess what? On the two days I decided not to write anything I kept coming up with topic after topic to write about, so that I easily have a week's worth of stuff backlogged now.

That's life.

Life Without Screens

Friday night Lisa and I decided that we would try to go the ENTIRE weekend without watching television or using the Internet. I'm breaking our pact long enough to write and tell you that--because I usually write my blog entries a day in advance--that means I won't have one for today or tomorrow (other than this). On Tuesday I will have a new blog entry, probably one about this whole experience.

Just wanted to post this so you wouldn't think I'd died or something...