Jason Parker-Burlingham

SNAFU (mostly) resolved

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:05:53 GMT

Oy. When I wrote yesterday about having buyer's regret, I did not realize at the time that I had rented the wrong apartment. I am not speaking in any kind of a figurative sense here: my lease said that I was renting 3819 Beechwood, but the top floor of the duplex is 3817 Beechwood. Of course I could not confirm this (by talking to my downstairs neighbors and asking what their address was) until after I had called all the utility companies and opened accounts, etc. Fortunately no money had changed hands, so correcting everything was mostly a matter of having a few kind-of embarrassing conversations. But I really hope this is not the beginning of some awful "I'm paying your gas bill as well as mine" kind of situation.

Surprisingly, dealing with the US Postal Service was the easiest—I'd dropped by yesterday to get an application for a PO Box, since I'm tired of having to fill out change-of-address forms. I explained myself to the same clerk who served me yesterday (she showed remarkable restraint by not bursting out laughing and was only slightly dubious) and she simply reached behind the counter, grabbed my form and handed it back to me for correction. Huzzah!

All that remains now is for the gas to be turned on, a form to return for electricity service, find some outfit to connect me to the 'net (speakeasy seems to be the clear winner here) and then the handyman comes by to perform a number of useful functions like repairing a garage window, a railing, a stair and PLEASE YES, fixing the refrigerator, whose compressor is approximately as noisy as a jet engine. (Elsewhere on the noise front I have decided that the sound of traffic rushing by is just a kind of urban birdsong. Yeah, that's it.)

More details on my interesting Tuesday evening to follow.

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:39:23 GMT

Pittsburgh is a sporting town. The only radio station I can bear to listen to is something called "The X" (WXDX, I believe) which plays, as far as I can tell, "Classic 90s" rock¹. Lots (and I mean lots) of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Offspring, Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters and the like—as in multiple tracks per day from each of these groups. annburlingham insists this is a sign I am becoming old.

Anyway, the other thing The X does is spend the morning intermixing sporting news and gossip. My first full day in town, they were breathlessly reporting that someone or other had been signed to some local team for a given sport (of course they never bothered to mention which sport). I still can't tell the Pirates (baseball?) from the Steelers (football?) and there are probably hockey and soccer teams too. What must be particularly fun for them is some involved sport! gossip! story about someone called A-rod (Alex Rdoriguez?) cheating on his partner with none other than Madonna. This was all made vastly more interesting to me when I still had a mental image of Dennis Rodman as the hitherto unidentified "A-rod". There's a coupling made in heaven.

On the apartment front: I have buyer's regret. Stairs (boy am I glad I don't have to lug my own belongings upstairs), echoey, the refrigerator is very loud (I may see if I can just have someone take it away and buy my own), and the traffic! Somehow I managed to look at the place when the highway the places faces onto was not very busy. Well, I've lived with high traffic noise before, and I didn't even have iTunes to help out. Maybe it will seem quieter when I have some furniture in place to baffle a bit. But mostly I think I am biding my time until spring to break the lease and get out of dodge.

Did I mention that my downstairs neighbors are parking both their cars in our shared driveway, making it impossible for me to park in my garage (not that I can open the door to it anyway?).

In order to remind myself why I took this place:

Another week of storage would (presumably) cost another $900.
The alternatives were a smaller townhouse I'd have to buy my own washer/dryer for and no undercover parking, or a $1600/mo very well situated place that the realtor never bothered to call back to schedule a viewing for.
It should be possible to walk home from the office, past the post office where I hope to rent a PO box, and through a nice-looking park.
Being near the freeway does actually make it kind of convenient to get places, but I don't have to use it if I don't want to.
I think the downstairs neighbors are, in fact, in the process of moving out.
There's an actual business between me and the owner of the place, so the amount of screwing around to get stuff done should be minimized.
The peaked ceiling in the living room (I can has living room! and dining room!) really is quite nice.

Today's project: get utilities (electric, gas, cable) turned on.

In the meantime I am taking plenty of pictures with my camera and tripod. I think I have the knack of taking bracketed shots to make HDR images. All I need now is a little more skill at choosing good subjects and the ability to use the Gimp to merge them correctly. I tried this already once, but of course I shoot in RAW and the Gimp doesn't natively understand how to read Nikon's RAW format (naturally). I think I'll have to wait for my Mac to get out storage so iPhoto can do its thing.

I listen to The X because they do occasionally play something nostalgic (good grief, this does mean I'm old, doesn't it) and because the alternative appears to be talk radio or Christian Radio or some combination thereof.

Pittsburg house-hunting update

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:38:36 GMT

There isn't a lot to say, despite having a long post about my cross-country trip queued up, because I have been looking frantically for an apartment before I have to pay yet MORE money to have my belonging stored another week, find new temporary accommodations, etc.

If I can't find a place tomorrow, I think I will certainly have to work like crazy over the weekend (essentially, Saturday) to get it done.

Driving over a bridge to work every day seems to be a bad idea, since in my experience so far many of them are in various stages of roadwork right now, which tends to double the amount of time it takes to get from A to B. In any event the north side of the city doesn't seem to be as nice as I thought it might be; most of the places I see there are pretty old and smell bad.

I don't understand how a city this big can have such incredibly steep streets and so little off-street parking. In San Francisco I don't think this is such a big deal, but in a town when (I assume) the streets are covered with slippery ice and/or half-melted snow it seems to be a recipe for disaster.

I think what I'm willing to settle for in the minimal case is a duplex or townhouse with off-street parking (to save my little Honda from street salt and careless drivers), somewhat close to work without a bridge in the way, with a washer/dryer hookup. I am almost ready to pay Bay Area prices for this. (Yeowch.)

ETA: I don't understand the real estate business model, which seems to go something like:

Collect rental properties, put ads on Craigslist or equivalent
Field calls from interested would-be renters, desperate to avoid living on the streets
Never return any phone call, ever
...
PROFIT!

I know some of you reading this are or have been property managers and the like, I don't mean to be insulting to you personally. Think of it instead as a sign that you would be worth your weight in gold should you choose to move to Pittsburgh.

Initial Pittsburgh thoughts

jasonp@panix.com — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:47:37 GMT

I came to Pittsburgh via some tunnel or other, possibly the Fort Pitt Tunnel, meaning that I came upon the downtown area all at once; it was very reminiscent of driving the small freeway that runs along the Brisbane River.

Afterwards, I had a time driving around Shadyside, a nice suburb that seems to consist entirely of apartment complexes, not terribly nice but not awful either. A fair bit of foot traffic, and lights that don't allow right-turn-on-red (and more than a few left turns that are pretty dodgy given the oncoming traffic).

I arrived somewhat unexpectedly; the last two days of my drive east were devoted to just chewing up miles as quickly as possible, so I drove to Shadyside hoping that I could score a room at the hotel I'm staying in next week while I try to arrange a lease. Turns out they were full, the swanky downtown hotel was ridiculously expensive (I'd surmise that they were just trying to get rid of the unshaven and poorly shod gent from their lobby except the clerk went above and beyond her duties by finding me a hotel with a room, and writing directions. The valets in the lobby agreed with me about the ridiculous prices upstairs.

I'm staying kind of a ways outside where I want to be tomorrow, opening Craigslist pages of houses for rent and recording even more realtors to call. If I can find the perfect place tomorrow, I'll certainly put a deposit down and sign a lease; the sooner I can have my stuff unpacked the better (especially since I'll have to arrange storage if I have nowhere to unpack before this coming Monday).

Lovely city. Really very nice. But in terms of driving, it's hell on wheels, especially by the water. I suspect there's a gravity anomaly of some kind lurking nearby.

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:45:19 GMT

Is there any device on this planet less useful than a leafblower?

Road trip!

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:05:54 GMT

This is the route I kind of plan to take, after playing clicky games all night.

California to Pittsburgh via Yosemite, Dinosaur National Monument, the Ashfall Fossil Beds, and St Louis.

I estimate it'll take a week; I'm hoping to car-camp in the parks and find somewhere reasonable to stay in Vegas. (I figure I can drive safely for at least 6 hours a day.)

The fossil beds in Nebraska are just a side trip to make it less boring, so I'll probably lose a lot of time detouring to get there, preferring to stay in a hotel near I-80. If I'm short on time I'll skip St Louis—that cuts 200 miles off the drive, but I have to go through Chicago.

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:34:45 GMT

OK, it's been official for some time but I have not been diligent about announcing this where everyone can see it. I've been telling folks as I see them, but that's not going to be feasible much longer.

I'm moving to Pittsburgh (PA, not CA) at the end of this month, or perhaps as late as the second week in July—a work transfer I applied for came through, effective as soon as I can get my apartment packed and moved and drive across the country. Sorry if the news catches you flat-footed—I don't mean to suddenly announce this and disappear, it just worked out that way.

I'll try to make an effort to see everyone before I go but it's going to be dicey—I'm oncall for all of next week and weekend. Sorry about that; I think I may be back occasionally or at least for some vacations, since I (now) have significant ties to the Bay Area. I'm particularly sorry about folks in the East Bay and San Francisco since I've so rarely made a trip out their way.

I'm moving so that annburlingham and I can be in the same time zone for a change. Three years of being three hours offset is quite enough. We're very much looking forward to my being able to get off work on a Friday afternoon, drive to Perry for the weekend in time for a (very) late dinner and leave again Sunday night.

More updates as they come to hand, I hope.

ETA: I've all but decided to use my vacation time to drive cross-country. Shipping the car will likely cost more than I'd like and won't be appreciably more expensive than an airfare bought at such a late date. I'm thinking of traveling from the Bay Area through Arizona, with a side trip to the Grand Canyon (north or south end?), cross New Mexico and the Texas panhandle, then on to Oklahoma City, St Louis (I do want to see that arch, even if it's not a real catenary), arriving in Pittsburgh sometime later. I figure I'm going to be traveling in the first week of July. Is this crazy? Should I pick better cities to stop in than OKC and St Louis? Will there be anyplace reasonable to stay in Arizona?

Crazy Battlestar Logic

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:35:28 GMT

Just got around to watching the most recent BSG (s4e6?) and then Razor.

The only conclusion is that there's something in the water—how else to explain the crazy BSG logic?

Cylons invade, kill just about every human.
Humans flee, set down on a new planet, mind their own business.
Cylons invade and occupy, kill lots of humans.
Human H sees a Cylon, C and kills it, as a crime of opportunity.
Cylon does not, of course, "die", but is resurrected as per protocol.
C spots H about 18 months later, when they're working together in a life-or-death situation.
Cylon kills human in act of pure revenge for "killing" her.
Other humans crowd in, ready to kill the Cylon as retribution.
Human fail to actually pull the trigger.
Cylon D comforts Cylon C in her final moments.
Cylon D kills Cylon C (probably to forestall the whiny humans).
Cylon D complains about warped "human justice".

I'm kind of glad I don't have any more of this to watch before Friday. I'm not sure I can handle it.

jasonp@panix.com — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:41:58 GMT

I want to go to this (unique, as far as I am aware) National Park. Does that make me a bad person?

jasonp@panix.com — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:08:27 GMT

Today a friend writes that she is able to confirm that her child is irrefutably hers. I am able to report the same thing.

While I'm on call, my weekend mornings are my own, but the afternoons and evenings require me to be tethered. This is not exactly a recipe for happy times when you have a four year old to entertain. However, some time in the last week I had a corker of an idea and despite not being morning people, both Henry and I crawled out of bed at 9:30 and left the house by 10 to go to the LEGO store in San Mateo on the theory that we could buy some models, have lunch, drive home and spend the rest of the day doing something entertaining.

I'm here to report that my son, at the tender age of four and a half, is more than capable of sitting still for, oh, and hour, maybe two, while he carefully builds a Container Stacker (218 pieces, ages 5-12). It has a few Technic parts with the usual problems of alignment and brute strength required, which I built, the fine detail work is all his.

He has designs on a Cargo Plane (463 pieces, ages 5-12).

Yes, I was a total LEGO nut as a child; apparently I still am (Wheel Loader (200 pieces, ages 8-14)). My brothers and I had pretty much our body weight in LEGO growing up, mostly classic style pieces in those wonderful bright colors and rectangular shapes. I still remember that someone discovered you could snap two 2x2 wheels and tires together to make a passable Dalek—talk about your minimal model.

After my plastic surgery my parents bought me a LEGO train set. It was probably the moral equivalent of Train Level Crossing (325 pieces, ages 8+). I can still remember putting it together on my hospital bed table—did the boom gates go up and down under their own power? Probably. After that there was a run of electric train themed LEGO, culminating in a transformer plugged into mains power to run the trains. We had a grand time putting coins and the like on the tracks to make sparks, or running the engine without the necessary lead weights to keep it on the track around curves. Good times.

Everything about today's sets—we threw in Mini Digger (36 pieces, ages 5+) and Police Car (59 pieces, ages 5-12) as well—brings this flooding back: the bilingual packaging. The nonverbal instructions almost clear enough to be followed by a child who cannot read. The minifigs (I had no idea that a "LEGO man" was called that until just last year). The satisfying "snap!" of a piece settling into place just so. The recursive instructions—put this to one side while you work on this, then attach the finished object like this. The torn, almost raw fingertips (avoided these days by Brick Separator (1 piece, ages 5-12), but we forgot to buy any).

We started on our models immediately upon getting home at 1pm and didn't look up until dinnertime at almost eight. Good times. Very good times.

Screw Super Tuesday

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:02:42 GMT

Can anyone tell me why Feb 5 2008 (let's just go ahead and called it 2/5) should not go down in ~~history~~ infamy as Waterboarding Day?

"Unapproved" my ass. It seems that that only means one has to get the President and his hand-picked appointees to all agree that it's okay to drown a prisoner.

jasonp@panix.com — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:36:26 GMT

Tonight I sat up until past midnight folding an origami rose. It is very satisfactory, and was fun to make, but I will offer two observations:

There should be more live origami recorded on YouTube (where is the origami youtube?).
Crease Patterns are the work of the devil.

XKCD

jasonp@panix.com — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:42:03 GMT

Woo, the talk is about to start. It seems everyone is showing up.

Someone just claimed he saw Don Knuth. Peter Norvig is here too. Don Knuth is sitting in the row in front of me. Turnout is huge---about the size of the space elevator talk.

There's also a "comic shaped like the internet"-shaped cake. Hah. Friends and I erected a "compiling!" poster we created the day before.

I scored a shirt. Awesome.

"Only at google do you not want to wait 5 minutes for your primes"

"Every generation an artist comes along that redefines how we look at art." "I want to give you your very own google ball-pit ball."

Oops, he dos-ed Maps at some point, generating a plot of driving times.

Richard Stallman [on receiving his katana] had never heard of the comic. "He was very confused."

Crikey. I'm liveblogging, but he's drawing a comic, live. Heh, the Ballmer Peak comic has a little subjoke hidden in it.

"Google has solved my problem of urination."

Guido: Talking about acting out comics...do you expect me to fly?

He's given out props to Project Euler. Cool site.

Don: Have you thought about doing animated cartoons? What is your O(nlog log n) algorithm for searching?

XKCD: You'll have to take that up with Elaine... In fact, let's step away from talking about searching algorithms.

Giving up on the compound eyes

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:28:16 GMT

I cannot make the compound eyes stick.

This despite the fact they are composed nearly entirely of glitter glue.

Having spent close to three hours fighting with pipe cleaners (does anyone use these to clean pipes any more?), a disassembled coathanger, an incredibly noisy pair of spherical bells, a small sewing kit and some transparent elastic thread (don't let anyone tell you you can't possibly thread that thread through that needle—with a threading tool it can be done) and other crafts and kit, I'm ready for bed.

I can't work out how to attach the eyes to Henry's forehead area, and I doubt they'll dry in time anyway; I was pretty generous with the glitter glue. Kind of a shame after all the work I put into cutting them to just the right size and painting them. Little Henry will have to be an ant without the assistance of hemispherical, red and glittery eyes.

Unless inspiration (or another 5.6 earthquake!) strikes before 6am.

Pictures will follow, I assure you.

Outings

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:43:45 GMT

Henry likes to ask, lately, "How long does it take to get to that other planet? The white one." By this he means Greenland, since on Google Maps and his placemat it appears white (actually, come to think of it, sometimes the White Planet is also Antarctica). I give him my best guesses. Tonight he was quite dissatisfied with what he obviously thought was my prevaricating on the simple question of how long does it take to get to Asia. I guessed soemthing like 6 to 8 hours to Japan but more like 13 to get to Indonesia; I see now that I was badly off.

I think it's great he's asking about geography, but I do still need to settle the question of how long it will take to get to Portland for Thanksgiving this year...

Tonight he also asked about where the world came from; I talked about how our Sun is just like all the other stars you can see at night time, glossed over the possibly scary idea of a supernova, talked breezily about accretion disks and then glossed some more about actual planet formation. Frankly I'm not sure how I said might differ substantially from what an actual cosmologist or geologist might say. Henry was unresponsive, I think I lost him as soon as I started talking about the Sun when he was asking about the world.

We have another camping trip booked for November 9th; it's another new moon, conveniently the day after I finish my next oncall shift—two days camping away from civilization seems very appropriate at that point; I'll have to make sure I pack well beforehand. With any luck the weather will oblige with heavy ran on Thursday but clear skies on Friday.

Violet Blue

jasonp@panix.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:46:15 GMT

I did end up going to the Violet Blue talk. It was just as awesome as I'd hoped. I had no idea of just how much her work merges geeky online stuff and the sex ed stuff (such as data-mining Craigslist!). My question comes second-last when the video makes it online.

NCOD make-up

jasonp@panix.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:41:15 GMT

Phew, still a few hours left before the deadline. Gracious.

I feel as though I let the team down a bit, today. Can I make up for it by attending the Violet Blue talk at work tomorrow and seeing if I can find a way to ask a question at the end?

I came out to exactly no-one but perhaps syndication will help somewhat. We'll see.

jasonp@panix.com — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:06:10 GMT

Nations must fight climate change like terrorism, Rice says

Shit. If only!

I am sitting back and imagining a world where the United States was first to act unilaterally, largely alone (although in concert with Australia and Great Britain) to fight the Global War on Climate Change (GWOCC), sticking with the fight no matter the cost or anyone's opinion of the eventual outcome, based apparently solely on the administration's fervent and unshakable belief that it's the right thing to do and that anyone who says otherwise is dim-witted, pessimistic or unpatriotic. (Not to mention dropping a few hundred billion dollars into it even when it looks like a total rathole.)

Wow. Just imagine.

For jdev, who has doubtless seen it already

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:48:27 GMT

BEES!

Pesto-enabled

jasonp@panix.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:26:13 GMT

Why didn't anyone ever tell me that Pesto sauce was so easy to make? Henry is awfully impressed.

Last night I hit on a good solution to his night-time worries: after someone turns out the light (usually me, sometimes him), he complains at length that "I really can't see". Just those four words, over and over whenever there is a gap in the conversation. I have tried asking for more information, I've tried pointing out there is plenty of light, I've talked about pupils and night vision, I've bought night lights and suggested various toys that light up.

Last night I dimly remembered some parenting classes recommending role-reversal play for anxious kids, so I started sobbing uncontrollably and complaining about how I couldn't see, and I was going to have to be in total darkness until the sun came up—the sun was going to come up again, right?

Between fits of laughter, Henry reassured me that all would be well, the sun would return and bring daylight with it, and that there was light coming in through the bedroom door, and pointed at all the little toys laying around that could provide temporary bright light, if I was that upset about it.

He didn't go for more of the same tonight, but I think he did seem a little less upset about being left alone when I had to go.

jasonp@panix.com — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 06:18:08 GMT

Today was a bit of an up-and-down day. I had hoped to wake up early, have brunch, buy a new phone, go to a movie, shop and houseclean. Well, I woke up early...

The early wakefulness started at something like 6:30. Henry was upset (and so by extension, I was upset too). After some hard work we managed to go back to bed until about 10:30.

Then we had brunch, which was wonderful as always. Henry complained bitterly that he had been served three sausages instead of four. Because he's four. Four is his number. Four must occur with regularity in the course of his day, or the Universe risks appearing to be a capricious and dangerous place. (Hush: as of yet, I think he has no idea.) I summoned a server and she was incredibly gracious and served another sausage from the kitchen to make Four. All was well. My original plan of simply cutting a sausage in half to make Four would not have gone over well.

Mobile phones are never simple; why did I expect that today would be any different? I fought with the Nokia website for an hour to settle on a model of phone and called for advice on how to get it activated for use with my existing SIM, but the advice was that it would probably not work. Feh. At least Henry was entertained by drawing on my whiteboard and interior windows.

Even this short and purposeful trip to work was not without drama: apparently, some former telephone cleaner once had the idea that the button to flush a toilet could be a safe harbor for bacteria and invented the auto-flushing toilet. Like all parents of small children in our modern world, I hate these things with a passion that may not be apparent to the rest of you. The problem is that bathroom stalls are very small and prone to impressive echo, making even a modest toilet flush sound like the very clap of creation itself to small ears that have not had their function dulled by listening to "Sweet Child of Mine" 47 times in a row in a single hot summer afternoon. The "helpful" autoflushing function makes it impossible to control when the damn thing will flush, or to move said small child out of earshot before it goes off. All I ask before I die is that I might have five minutes alone with the person responsible for these labor-saving devices.

However! Then we came home and I finally got to unpack the package I have been waiting for all week: last Sunday I caved in and orderd a large pack of Zome from zometool.com. Zome, if you're not inclined to click the link, is an ingenious stick-and-ball construction toy. The balls are small white solids whose edges form the space to insert the shaped ends of the sticks. Henry and I spent many hours this afternoon building various models from the instructions and our own imaginations: pyramids, cubes, hypercubes, icosahedrons, truss bridges and so on. Tonight after he went to bed I used most of my blue struts and something like half of the little balls to build a piece of what is called "MetaZome": a single "ball" that perfectly models the proportions of the ball zome piece.

What good is a construction toy if it's not recursive or self-hosting?

A retrospective

jasonp@panix.com — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:38:03 GMT

Today Henry and I ran errands all day: up at the crack of 10am (I'm having trouble being in bed before 1am, again), leave the house in time to miss the Farmer's Market, and then to Lozano's Car Wash after a frustrating trip for the weekly gas top-up (ever since yesthattom's book recommended getting gas on Sunday, needed or not, I've been doing it). Getting gas was frustrating because it ended with me finding out that while the State of California may require the merchant to give me free air with a gas purchase, it probably does not require the air to be in working order at all times.

Lozano's turns out to be quite cheap for a cleaning, inside and out ($15 or so) but was somewhat lacking this week: for once I really did want the Works but got something somewhat short of that. No real detail work on the interior, and the outside is inexplicably covered in very evenly distributed fluff. I'm not sure what that's about, but it's a vast improvement over having an oddly brown-looking car, so I'm sticking with it.

After the car wash, we found a place to get Henry a haircut (he's needed one for some time). It was the "Haircut!" salon in the less fancy part of Mountain View, but they did a reasonable job and didn't make Henry cry, so that's a win. However I was not about to trust them with my hair (it's only 2007, after all).

Then it was time to go to the park. There is a park across the street from Hobee's which Henry always wants to play at, so today I relented. Usually I assert that we're in too much of a hurry to be able to stop but I am working very hard at adopting a more relaxed attitude toward being on time and being efficient with time (to the point that I may never really allow myself to read much more advice from Tom's book, see above). We spent about an hour at the park, Henry running around for most of it, and then being utterly entranced watching the older (and not-so-older!) kids scoot around on roller blades, skateboards and razor scooters.

Permit me to interject somewhat in my own reporting to talk about this for a while.

I can't really be more serious when I say that Henry wants to have some kind of wheels in the worst possible way. He has been suggesting all week that today should be the day that we go to a toy store and buy him a bike. He had to be persuaded quite heavily to not try to get on someone else's skateboard at the park (I'd have allowed it but:

while most property in the park can be safely assumed to be temporarily communal, I have a feeling that kids are more territorial about their skateboards than, say, their sandpit tools or other sporting equipment;
no safety equipment was in evidence (we did not get into that, but it occurred to me later);
I don't think Henry is really ready to manage a skateboard in any shape or form: I think he's more of a sporting kid than I was (or am!) but I doubt his sense of balance or fun is up to it.
In any event, when he started making eyes at the razor scooter about 20 minutes later, I was in the middle of asserting that he was too young when he suddenly agreed that perhaps when he's Five he can do it, at which point a small kid we'd met at the park and determined to be Four ran over, grabbed his scooter and scooted off on it. Talk about mixed feelings: on the one hand, the scooter is gone and I don't have to come up with any reason to not use it; on the other hand it's just been clearly demonstrated to both Henry and me that why, yes, Five years old is plenty old enough to have and ride a scooter.

I am still making up my mind about wheels. The real problem is that anything I buy now has to stay the correct size and stay interesting for about 5 months during the rainy season, and probably would not see a lot of use even in spring and summer—the rhythm of our days does not lend itself to taking an hour-long bike ride more than one day a week (and that would be a weekend day at that). I'm somewhat tempted by the razor scooter or the tricycle with a handle that Henry's friend Opal has, and I could possibly see us riding to school together while I ride on to work.

Dinner was Risi e Bisi from the Rice Cooker Cookbook. It was a double batch with twice as much Parmesan cheese as it should have had, and about half as many peas. I probably had another bag of frozen peas but dinner was already 2 hours late at that point, and if I simply emptied the half-used bag, then I could get away with not measuring them at all. It turned out pretty well, but now we have a simply astounding amount of the stuff without a lot of scope for getting it all eaten.

Things I don't understand, part n in an ongoing series

jasonp@panix.com — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 07:48:14 GMT

Can someone please explain to me how it is that the US invasion of Iraq doesn't deserve to have any of the terrorist-inflicted casualties (or not even 100% of all the collateral damage!) laid at its feet, and yet if Congress somehow grew a backbone and cut off funding for the war tomorrow those vile Politicians In Washington have Iraq's civil war blood on its hands?

Just what the fuck does Humpty Dumpty think he is, if not a politician who lives in Washington? (I know, I know, if the question was ever put he'd point out how he's Commander In Chief—oh, if only being a Washington Politican was all that he was...)

Ukiah Camping Trip

jasonp@panix.com — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:14:58 GMT

Things I have learned this last weekend, camping near Ukiah, CA:

Just because you have set up camp, used the pit toilet, cooked food, slept and paid for 2 nights in a spot does not mean you can't desert it immediately if things get a little boring. Instead I am starting to think of a camping spot as being more like a very very cheap (and badly outfitted!) hotel room for the weekend.
I am determined to recoup the cost of my tent, bags, mattresses and other camping kit.
I need to add a trivet, a large pot with a tight lid, a fisheye camera lens, a tripod, a proper lantern and flashlight, handtowels and washcloths to my camping kit.
A map of California and a GPS may be sufficient to blindly navigate your way to interesting places, or it may simply take you to "interesting" places such as Fish Rock Road in Mendocino County, California.
One's map does not do any kind of justice to changes in elevation, scenery and road quality.
The flash-frozen chicken with dumplings was excellent despite almost ruining it by not reading the whole instructions.
The flash-frozen Kung Pao chicken was awful despite preparing it at home, as directed (technically I did not discover this on the camping trip, proper).
It is perfectly acceptable to leave the campsite to buy a burger and a hot dog for lunch, see above.
Doing so may cost approximately twice as much as it would otherwise.
Hairpin One may sound romantic but really requires an adult passenger to either take pictures or admire the view. A hard-to-impress four-year-old is not an appropriate companion while driving this route.
It's entirely possible for parts of California's Sonoma County to look very reminiscent of parts of Queensland's Glasshouse Mountains.
Sonoma County has real mountains whereas Queensland, well, doesn't (I find Google Earth's assertion that the highest elevation on that route is 500m to be very bogus).
If you aggressively coast your way down Fish Rock Road you can get up to 36mpg in your 2000-something Honda Civic.
If you miss your exit for the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, you can easily take 101 over the Golden Gate Bridge, but you will pay the price of an extra hour in city traffic while you're technically (very technically) on the 101.

I am looking at spending our next trip (I'm timing them for new moons) going to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. The park's namesake was not suitably impressed by Redwoods on our way through Mailliard Redwoods State Park (see above), so we're going to try again.

What say you all?

There goes my evening

jasonp@panix.com — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 05:31:33 GMT

I should be either in bed early (read: on-time) with Henry (who is kind of coughing up a storm in there), or at the very least doing dishes, preparing tomorrow's school lunch or doing laundry so we'll have clean clothes.

Then I notice that the DVD-in-the-mail service has sent me a new disc. Uhoh. Part 3 of 3!

Doomed!