Know your Internet, Christmas Edition

So in addition to keeping our country safe from Saddam's voluminous WMD collection, our government takes on the extra duty on Christmas Eve to track Santa's progress around the globe. The site is called NORAD Tracks Santa, and is actually pretty cool, imho. You can go there now and it's not much to see yet, but starting Christmas Eve they update it every hour with a short computer generated video that shows Santa on his sleigh wherever in the world it is currently midnight. You know, Santa circling the pyramids, Santa flying over the Eiffel Tower, that sort of thing. Our girls love it and they keep checking to see where Santa is at the time, so it's a great run-up to Christmas day.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Chappy Chanukah! Krazy Kwanza! Fun Festivus! Pleasant (insert your celebratory event of choice here)!

Better Know an Internet, Cosmic Edition

Today's edition might seem like it would only be for you space geeks out there, but check it out anyway; it just may wow you. Or maybe I'm such a geek that I just think regular people would like it. Either way, I've been hooked on Heavens Above for several years now. And there's no better time to visit the site than when the Space Shuttle is up there cavorting with the International Space Station. If you know where and when to look, you can frequently see the shuttle/space station linked up in orbit, sometimes brighter and larger than a jet in the evening sky. And this site tells you exactly where and when to look.

Just go to the site and tell it your location (you can look up the latitude/longitude of your city on the site). Then you can get a daily chart of most of the brighter satellites wafting over your particular head, and the chart tells you exactly what time, which direction and how high up to look. And for the next week or so, click on the Shuttle Mission STS-116 link to track the shuttle.

Special note to my friends in Seattle. You may have to climb the Space Needle to get your heads above all those clouds, or maybe just wait until summer when the clouds clear up to see all the satellites. Sorry about that!

Yyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Awesome. The Who can still rock. I'm always wary of any arena rock tour because they seem pretty impersonal to me, as opposed to a small club where you can see the whites of the band's eyes from anywhere in the place. But I have to say, they put together an amazing light show befitting of the arena surroundings. And they had lots of big screens so you could usually see close-ups of Pete and Roger doing their things. Roger said he had a bad cold, and he did shy away from the high notes mostly, but that raspy voice was still plenty powerful. And Pete still has plenty of guitar windmills left in him.

They played a good mix of new songs from their latest, Endless Wire, and the old classics. The new stuff was good, and to my surprise I have to say that one of the high points was the very last song of the night, a quiet rendition of Tea & Theatre with only Pete and Roger onstage and Pete playing the acoustic guitar. Townshend played accoustic on several of the newer songs.

But man, the old standbys were a-smokin'! Pinball Wizard was Good, Behind Blue Eyes was Better, the long, long jam in the middle of My Generation was Even Better, and Won't Get Fooled Again proved once and for all that it's the Greatest Rock-n-Roll Song Of All Time: nee nee nee nee NEE NEE NEE NEE ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum-dum ba-dum dum YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! You get the picture.

And the perfect concert moment of pure joy: When they hit their stride about a third of the way into the show with Baba O'Riley. Something about that flowing synth just makes me happy!

Who?

We are going to see The Who tomorrow night, and I'm pumped! I first saw them 24 years ago in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the UNI-Dome. That was their first farewell tour. I was in high school and I was able to con my folks into letting me camp out all night at the Dome to get tickets, which was good since it sold out in a few hours. (There was no internet back then. Remember?) The show was amazing.

Then in the early nineties KT and I saw them in Kansas City. It was a sold out show at Arrowhead Statium and we had nosebleed seats, but you could still watch the old geezers rock out on the big screen. And it was good.

So now, we'll see. The show didn't sell out this time. I don't expect it to touch the experience I had at my first one back in high school, but I hear the shows have been good so far. And I've been listening to Endless Wire a lot lately to get ready, and I have to say it's pretty damn good.

I'll report on the concert in a few days.

Because computers aren't scary enough...

My folks came to see us this weekend. When they come they stay in the guest room, which is actually the futon in the basement. The basement is also where the computers are set up.

The morning after their first night, my Mom and I had the following conversation:

Mom: Jon, does your computer want more power?
Me: Huh?
Mom: Your computer was on in the night, and a couple of times it said it wants more power.
Me: Huh?
Mom: That voice. You know, on your computer. Every now and then it talked to us. It said it had to have more power. Why would it do that?
Me: (Long pause) Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh! I get it. Did the voice sound anything like Christopher Walken?
Mom: Huh?
Me: The actor. Christopher Walken.
Mom: (Long pause)I guess so. Maybe.
Me: It doesn't want more power. It wants more cowbell!
Mom: Huh?


It's from the Cowbell skit on SNL with Cristopher Walken and Will Farrel. Every time we get an email the computer plays the snippet where Walken says " I gotta have more cowbell!". So if you ever want to freak out your folks, or anyone who sleeps near your computer, this seems to be the way to do it.

More Know Your Internet

Today's internet site is all about internet shopping. This time of year I try to stay out of stores as much as I can, so I buy almost everything online as far as Christmas presents, etc. The site is Woot. The crazy thing is that they only sell one product line a day. The new product starts at midnight and stays until they sell it out. Then that's it for the day. And you never know what it will be beforehand. But they do have some good deals from time to time. And the occasional woot-offs and Bags of Crap are kind of cool.

Disclaimer: I have not as of yet purchased from this site, but I have several friends who have, and I've been close a couple of times. Roombas, anyone?

The times they are a-changin'!

I actually have a reason for not posting lately. I started a new job 2 weeks ago now, and so things have been fairly crazy leading up to that and since. But the dust seems to be settling a bit now, and it's all good. So far, anyway.

I'm a computer geek, and the company I worked for sold the software product I've been helping develop for the last several years. I liked working on what I was working on, so I went with it and now I work for the new company that bought the product. I'm still doing basically the same thing, and with most of our old development team intact, which is a good thing. And now I'm at a much smaller company than before, which is a very good thing. I started my career at a 12 person company and my last company has over 1000 people, and I can tell you that size does matter! And you may disagree, but I say smaller is better.

So after 2 weeks now we pretty much have the key people we need to move forward with this, and I'm in a new building that is easier to get to, and I still get to wear jeans and a tee shirt to work any damn time I want to. And I no longer share a building locked in a war of wills with that cadre of insane women who spent all summer whining about how hot they were and cranking the thermostat down to 69 degrees. Hello... maybe don't wear a sweater to work when it's over 100 degrees outside! Especially when other people (me) are wearing summer-appropriate clothes!!!!

The only issue with the new situation so far is that I'm now in a fairly high-profile position. Impressive, eh? Except not really, because what I really mean to say is that my cube faces out onto the corner of 2 main walkways, and everyone walking by can see my computer screen. There's no rule about surfing or anything, but I'm still pretty self conscious about how much time I can spend reading blogs while I'm at work. That's all I need is to be known as that new guy who just farts around on the internet all day. But the good news is that our little product group is a seperate business unit from the rest of the company and so we will move into our own space in a few months. Then I'll either be back in my own office or at least a less-travelled cube, and then I won't be so visible, and can read all your blogs without paranoia. But fear not, I'll still work, too.

It's not like it was 300 pages a day!

Our 4th grader, M, loves to read, and is very into the Harry Potter books. But we have this rule that she can't read them until at least one of us reads them first. Because, you know, 4th grade is pretty young to be reading about murder and death and even worse, dating, which I hear he starts in the later books. Not ready for that talk, yet!

She plowed through the first 4 books last year in 3rd grade and they started to get more violent, so we told her we wanted her to wait a while before she read any more. You can guess how that went over. We were thinking like 2 years or so, but she browbeat us all summer so finally we caved and Momster started reading the 5th book. It's pretty thick, and Momster's a busy gal, but she read a few chapters when she could and after several weeks or a month or something she finished it. Every morning during this time M would look at the page number Momster was on and tell me how many were left. Finally, last Thursday morning, M came pounding at the door when I was taking my shower and hollered in, "Dad, Mom finished it! I can start Harry Potter 5!!!!"

So today M finished it. 870 pages, 3 days. And yes, she did go to school Thursday and Friday, so I'm not exactly sure when she did it, but she did. Now I guess we'll see how long it is before we start hearing about HP #6.

Know Your Internet

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It's time for the first installment of "Know Your Internet", a weekly informative link to a fascinating* web site.

Today's site is for all you woodworkers out there: The Sagulator


*Results may vary

bledication

I think part of the reason I resisted blogging for so long was that I figured I'd have a few posts at first, then I'd run out of ideas or get busy or shy or my fingers would hurt or whatever, and before long I'd realize it's been several weeks without a post. And once that happened I'd be too embarrassed to do a post, because it might just seem forced. And then I'd use that as an excuse not to write anything, which would soon snowball into a big mental block. Eventually I'd have gone months or years and I couldn't possibly post anything anymore because anyone who had ever read it when I did post would surely have stopped checking by then. You get the picture.

So this is my post about posting, a meta-post if you will. I have to admit I haven't been distracted by 24 since my last post (we are saving season 3 for a while). I've been busy, but probably no busier than everyone else who does manage to keep writing to their blogs. My fingers don't hurt. And I've actually had several ideas, but haven't been able to word them well enough to make myself believe they're even mildly entertaining to anyone but myself. I realize that's just an excuse, so kindly bear with me and I'll try to be better about visiting you folks this way. Really.

Might as well face it you're addicted to...

24.

We got a care package a few weeks ago from Pete and Blade, and in it was seasons 2 and 3 of 24, the series. We'd seen season 1 last winter and I had a vague recollection of how caught up in it we got, but I figured there's no way we'll get all wrapped up in it this time. I mean, Momster doesn't even normally like shoot-em-up action movies. But we fired up season 2 episode 1 early last week after we got home from our Estes Park trip, thinking we could just relax and calm our minds after a long day of driving. WRONG! We were both fished in after the first 10 minutes.

Now, with our two little girls around, we don't even turn on the tv until 9:00 or so, after they are safely in bed. So we can't just have a 24 hour marathon (actually I suggested it, but that idea didn't fly). But pretty much every night for the last 2 weeks we've been watching 24. Sometimes 1 episode if we really got a late start, but usually 2 or 3. And it's so hard to quit watching, there's so many balls in the air: Jack will be flatlining after the latest torture session, his daughter stupidly blundering into yet another improbable kidnapping, the President under attack by virtually everyone he's ever appointed. And it just stops right in the middle! But it's midnight, so we grudgingly turn off the DVD and somehow wait for the next night and a fresh round of murder and mayhem.

Well, tonight we finished season 2. So it's over, we're done! KT's in bed knowing the world is safe (for a while) and I'm on the computer. And it's not yet midnight.

But then again, we do have season 3 upstairs, calling us...

I've found a good way to find out who your real friends are: go to work and tell people that a tree fell in your yard. The true friends are the ones who stick around to hear the story, knowing full well that you are going to ask them to help clean up the mess!

This tree fell a few weeks ago:





It's actually a bundle of several trees joined at the trunk, and one of them fell. Was it a fierce Nebraska storm? Winds? Tornado? Nope, it just rotted out at the trunk and got tired, I guess. So then I realized just how rotted the rest of the tree bundle was, and it was time to take the whole lot down. Which would be easier to do if I had a chain saw, or a wood chipper, or a truck to haul the rental chipper. But I don't, hence the friends.

So I rented the wood chipper, bribed my pickup truck/chainsaw-owning friends with beer and pizza, and we headed off after work to be lumberjacks for a day.

The chipper looked like this one, which I rented a few years ago:



We got the rest of the tree down without crushing my fence or my neighbor's power lines. Then we fired up the chipper and for a while it was just ripping right through the tree. We could put branches in it that were six inches thick and out shot mulch from the other side like they were nothing. Then, BANG! Rattle rattle, rattle. LOUD rattle! Shards of metal spewing out of the mulch chute. Uh oh. That can't be good.

Now I had tree branches covering my yard and a rental chipper with its blades reduced to jagged little pieces because the bolts holding them on had all sheared in half. Since the rental place was closed, we were done for the night. Crap! (They later refunded my rental fee, so I've got that going for me, which is nice!)

Now, Omaha has a summer yard waste program where they will pick up your tree branches on garbage day and take them to be mulched, as long as you tie them up in neat little bundles, no more than four feet long. I figured I didn't want to hassle my friends with finding another chipper for the third of the tree that was still lying in my yard mocking me, so the next Saturday morning I got up and started cutting and bundling.

I had gotten so scratched up by branches the day we felled the tree that I figured it would be a good idea to wear long pants and sleeves to finish up the work. And maybe you haven't noticed, but it's a hot summer. HOT. And humid. So for three miserable hours I dragged the branches into the shade (where it was probably only 95 degrees instead of 102 in the sun), cut them into four foot lengths and tied them up. Because you can't just leave the branches strewn about the yard, I guess.

Here is the tamed brush pile:
It doesn't look like much after it was all cut up, but it sure sucked at the time!

So I've had this blog space reserved since last September, just under a year ago. Every few weeks since then I've thought about what I might blog about. And who would care to read it. I even tried to start it earlier this spring because I had this great idea for the perfect first post. But I couldn't get to the blog because I couldn't remember my password. So I backed off.

Now I figured out how to get into the blog, but I can't for the life of me remember what my "perfect" first post was! Oh, well, such is life. I figure I've been skulking around everyone else's blogs for months now, and if I don't create my own blog I guess that makes me more of a stalker than a peer. So here goes...