What's he building in there

When the wife goes out of town the stereotypical view is that the husband goes out carousing with his pals and causes trouble. If there's kids, he gets a babysitter and stays out late drinking and maybe going over to the Ill side. Me? I retiled the kitchen floor last night. Tonight I plan on doing a test run of regrouting the tile in the main bathroom. I am a wild man, somebody stop me!

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It's the Muppet Show!

Muppets on YouTube doing new original content. This is good stuff!

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Run away as fast as you can from anything that needs discipline

Just finished reading The Year of Living Biblically. I started it in San Diego on vacation and got about 95% done, and finished the last bit over the past few days during lunch. I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend it as an entertaining and surprisingly enlightening book. Jacobs is an effective writer, communicating clearly and expressively in a casual style.

In The Year of Living Biblically Jacobs tries his best to live according to the rules of the Bible. This turns out to be a challenge of course often in unanticipated ways. It's not easy to sacrifice animals in the U.S. What is most interesting is the different and conflicting explanations he finds for why these rules are what they are, and the even more diverse interpretations of the same pieces of text. Certainly there are rules that contradict one another and there are quite a few he never follows through on (there are a number of thou shalt type rules which require positive action rather than restrain action).

Jacobs' musings on the importance of a given rule relative to other rules is particularly insightful and relevant in our modern world. Is it more important to condemn homosexuality (which is mentioned a handful of times) or to help the poor (which is mentioned dozens upon dozens of times)? Another continuous thread in the book is to highlight the impossibility of Biblical literalism. You cannot literally follow every law because some of them are in direct contradiction of one another. Then of course there is the matter of interpretation of what the text actually says anyway. Modern translations are woefully inaccurate and differ tremendously from early Greek editions that have been found which in turn probably differ tremendously from their predecessors and from the oral history that preceded those for over a thousand years.

This is a book that you will not want to put down once you get started.

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I gave a letter to the postman

Fragile indeed.

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There's a word for that

My daughter is sometimes too much like me. I've written in the past about meaningful names. I am something of an organization junkie so the naming thing sort of goes right along with that. I edit all my MP3 files to list the artists names with their last name first. It's a sickness.

Point being: as we were getting in the car today Boo was carrying one of her many stuffed penguins (not all Tux, but that's how it started) and I asked what his name was.

Boo: Penguin
Me: Like Petey Penguin, or Paul Penguin?
Boo:No, just Penguin. That's his only name. He only has one name: Penguin.
Me: That's easy to remember at least.
Note also that her favorite stuffed animal of all time that she cannot be without is a pink rabbit named Bunny.

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Bingo hard drive crashes from the rending

Three days into our vacation the laptop started freezing. Since the whole reason we brought it with us to the beach was so that my lovely wife could be among the first to register for sessions at a conference I placed getting it working high on the priority list. So during naptimes and after the babies went to bed I spent some time working on it. I quickly reduced it to being a hard drive problem of sorts. Fortunately we were vacationing in San Diego, in the Land of Fry's Electronics.

My brother and brother-in-law had ventured there on day two in order to get an Airport Express so we'd have wireless connectivity instead of a single hardwired network link. See? I'm not the only geek in my family. I will also note that my nephew was spending his downtime learning PyGame, which I was rather pleased with as Python is my language of choice.

Not having any tools or install media with me I picked up Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) as well as a multi-head screwdriver with torx bits and an 80G PATA drive. For good measure I grabbed a USB/IDE adapter in the hopes that I could recover my profiles from the dying drive. I at least was able to back up the critical user files to a jump drive.

Taking apart an iBook is not for the faint of heart, as I discovered. I followed the 13 pages of instructions at ifixit.com and managed to only end up with some ugly dings to the case, a dozen or so spare screws, and a battery pack that doesn't quite seat completely so if I'm not careful when I pick it up I lose power. Nothing a little duct tape can't fix. But now I'm on Leopard and adapting to the differences. Some good, some annoying. I'm most interested in trying out Time Machine, and in that vein I finally got around to setting up a network backup drive off the recoverable backup, haven't you?

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The weeds had grown up just as high as the door

I take a back street into our complex at work that is called, I kid you not, Planned Industrial Drive. It snakes through several blocks of abandoned warehouses in various states of decay as well as a number of active warehouses. While driving past one particularly unpleasant looking building I noted a group of smokers hanging out desultorily on the loading dock littered with discarded office furniture. I thought "Man, that has to be a miserable place to work." As I pulled up to the security gate I realized it was my building.

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Wands and wings shiny crowny things

My eldest daughter is quite a character. She sings and dances and concocts elaborate stories that her dolls then act out. So a fairly typical 4 year old girl. One thing she learned (FROM ELMO!) is that 'shake your booty' will invariably get a laugh from adults. The other day when she jumped up on the play table and started shakin her booty, I asked "Where did you learn that?" She stopped, looked innocently up at me, and said "Uhm, internet?"

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Do you hear what I hear?

Last night an old friend and a new one stopped by for a few hours en route to their next adventure. The wonderful conversation reminded me of how much I miss hanging out with the guys from Colorado. Doug has been a mentor and inspiration for me since we first met. He has an amazing ability to distill complex ideas into a few simple sentences and always points me to some interesting new uses of technology. Talking to him and Rebecca all evening I felt a certain sense of ease that I don't often feel in dealing with a lot of people in the midwest.

We talked about a broad range of things, from music to movies to art to politics to family to dreams and it seems we just barely scratched the surface. But as usual Doug has inspired me to be more active in my intellectual pursuits. He would make a good cult leader, and I mean that in a nice way. He's charismatic, grounded, and conveys a sense that everything you are saying is important. Mae and I are working on several different medium term plans that will probably take us out of the midwest and one of those paths could well end up where I would be able to work with him again, which would just be great.

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St Louis got the best of me

My lovely wife has managed to put up with me for 10 years today. Happy Anniversary, hon.

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