(Context: fourth load of laundry in a new (used) washing machine, after the old one mysteriously broke.)

I knew it was dangerous to wash G's clothes.

I knew to double check that the pockets were empty. I'm used to finding rocks, lasers, petri dishes, etc.


This time, it wasn't until I was taking his clothes out of the dryer that I found the bottle of super glue.

(Amazingly, everything seems fine. The cap was still screwed, and I can unscrew it and glue stuff with it.)

Taiko Hawke
Born April 29 1995
Died September 29, 2008
Reqiescat in Pace

One of my favorite blogs is 30toseoul. The author is spending our summer (her winter) at south pole station.

The equinox here means the sunrise there, after 6 months of night, pictured below. Each 24 hours, that sliver of sun makes a circle of the horizon, rising ever so slowly into the sky, where it will peak in 3 months.

Strange Weekend. G and B had volunteered to help some friends run their 4-H display at The Big E on Saturday. This involved getting us all out of the house at 6:30am, to be in Springfield for 8am orientation, etc.

Both 4-H and The Big E are weird alien cultures to me. Hmmm. More or less than Pennsic? More or less than Usenix? More or less than Hong Kong? I suppose just about everything is a weird alien culture to me, come to think of it. *shrug*

At 5pm they do a parade around the grounds. G volunteered to carry a flag at the head of the 4-H contingent -- he ended up with the Massachusetts state flag. Hopefully some pictures will turn up at some point. B helped carry the local 4-H group banner, and [cue faint surreal music] N and I took turns pulling a red wagon in which rode A, C, and J.

It's such a strange place, with a latino cheerleading squad practicing next to us, large Mardi Gras floats, people selling everything from hot tubs and hybrid cars to cowboy hats and (real) diamond rings, all in an amusement-park setting with roller coasters and ferris wheels, grown out of an agricultural fair setting, with huge-uddered show cows, dressage competition, and a thousand food vendors.

The strangest part for me was looking ahead of G, ahead of marching band in front of him, to see John Kerry strolling along, alone (some distance behind two police vehicles), waving to the crowd.

We're looking for some additional professional instruction in language arts (especially writing) for my older kids. If anyone has any experience/leads on good (and not too expensive) tutors, I'd appreciate pointers.

Seriously. Just about every time I start regularly exercising, after two weeks I get sick. Runny nose, sore throat, general weakness. I never make it to the third week of the program.

Thinking back over it (which I know isn't very reliable) I think I have about 20 data points in the past 20 years, and only two times have I made it to the third week. In those cases I made it several months before something got me out of the groove.

I think what the two success stories have in common is being very gentle and gradual, with no strength training involved. By contrast, this summer, I tried the 100 pushups program (just working on pushups - no other serious exercise), and it was like week-1, week-2, sick, week-2, sick, week-2, sick, and here I am (sick) looking around going "this is crazy!"

My best guess is that exercise shifts my bodies priorities such that either fighting off viruses always nearby in the environment, or even viruses always present in my body, is no longer such a priority. But does that theory have any basis in science?

I really do like exercise (of some sorts). And I like being in better shape (eg able to keep up with the kids). And that second week usually feels great. I guess the bottom line advice is to be very very gradual about it..... but..... ugh. It just seems nuts.

(So: Am I the only one who has this problem?)

I finally got around to watching Obama's 2004 DNC speech (part 1, part 2, and PBS commentary at the time in which they mention people already thinking he'll be "the first black president of the united states".)

Also, nice article about how hard he prepared for that speech.

I sure hope he pulls it off tonight. (And in November. And in the years that follow!)

The kids and I are planning on going to the 4-H fair tomorrow. Company could be fun.... Anyone else going?

I like to post when I travel. I really like the game of posting pictures and asking people to figure out where I am. Being in Montreal, I could play on the French and all the similar-to-the-US features. But, eh.

I had a lot of reservations about this trip. Many months ago I submitted a proposal to present xtan at Balisage and they accepted, but then most of my reasons for working on xtan went away. Alas, I had already committed to present.

Also, I'm missing B's birthday which is today :-( She's 9! (Yes, another B is having a birthday, too. She's a bit older than 9.)

24 hours before I was to get on the plane, I spilled boiling mashed potatoes on my foot. Ouch. Blisters on two of my toes. Walking varies between being fine and very painful. Fortunately, when I was actually travelling and presenting, it was fine. It's not so nice today, though.

8 hours before I was to fly, I was awakened in the night by intense ear pain. I actually managed to see a doctor Sunday morning and turns out to be swimmers ear, which is an infection outside the eardrum, so ouch but no reason not to fly. (and not surprising, given how much I've been swimming underwater this summer and being careless about getting the water out of my ears. Dumb, I know.)

Watching the olympics in my hotel room, I think I've figured out how one is actually supposed to kick during freestyle/crawl ... something I never understood. (I was still going on half-remembered and kind of nutty instructions from when I was like 10. I knew it wasn't working but not why.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about posting here, but not quite doing it. From the changing styles and patterns of people posting here, I guess I'm not alone in that.

See how many pictures it takes to figure out the country. Bonus points for the city, of course.

Scoring: If you can get it from the first two pictures, you're a ringer. four, you're amazing. six, you're really good. eight you know your landscapes. ten: duh. twelve: (the answer)

( Read more... )

One of my Working Groups hit another milestone and is the top story on w3.org now.

One of the chairs wrote a nice blog post about it.

I'm enjoying my job a lot these days.... (but it's still very hard).

So, where am I now?

He're a picture taken a few blocks from my hotel.



Non-misleading (dead give-away) picture behind the cut ( Read more... )

If you know me, you know I'm fairly reserved about endorsing anything.

But I strongly suggest people vote for Obama.

There's an excellent post from Cos which offers links to the key reasons.

The Call To Renewal speech (from 2006) (text, video) is, as Cos says, worth it.)

I just came across wikipedia's list of words having different meanings in British and American English.

I only made it through A, B, and C, before I got tired of it, but in just those letters I came across quite a few surprising ones. There are lots I didn't really care about, or which seem clear enough from context, but there are a fair number of words which could be used in the same context but mean something different!

I knew that "chips" were different foods in the US and the UK, that "buzzards" were different birds, and that "awesome" and "brilliant" had rather different senses.

Some of the words I should have known, but didn't: apartment, asian, athlete (athletics), biscuit, bureau, candy, cookie, cowboy, davenport, and (police) commissioner. With each of these, it would be easy to have a sentence in one dialect which has a perfectly reasonable and significantly different meaning in the other dialect. Actually, I had some sense of confusion about "apartment", "biscuit", "bureau", and "davenport", but I hadn't realized it was just a British vs. American thing.

With some work, one could probably make a pretty good LJ poll around this.

(I'm reminded of my first stay in Ireland, some years back, when I was told that the unit of currency (in those days, the Irish Pound, sometimes written "punt") was pronounced to rhyme with "bank manager". I got the joke, but was somewhat surprised (even though the president of Ireland was then a woman) that managing banks was seen as a woman's job. This table corrects me about how that particular bit of slang is used.)

I have some professional interest in this because (a) I work with lots of non-Americans, and (b) I'm currently wandering around in "Extensibility Theory", where language conflicts like these ("false friends") are a particular danger to be avoided.)

So, last week I took the kids on a vacation to Oklahoma. (If you've followed the news, that sentence should get your attention. If not, imagine serious dramatic music under the word "Oklahoma".)

My dad and step-mom (Margaret) and one of my sisters (Brenna) live there, and my kids had never been there. Most of them have never met this sister. It was kind of a last minute thing; I'd been thinking about it for a few weeks, then got serious about it about three weeks ago.

The best tickets we could find had us leaving Boston at 7:05am (Monday, Dec 10). It's an interesting time to get one's self and four children onto an airplane, but we managed. Each kid had a carry-on with their clothes, snacks, some activities. I had a carry-on with my laptop, books, snacks, etc, and checked a suit-case with my clothes, camera, and various extras like swim stuff. (I also moved B's PJ's from her carry-on to my suitcase, without her permission, to make room for her snacks -- a fact she seems to never tire of harassing me for.)

There are no direct flights from Boston to Oklahoma. This one went through Dallas. By the time we got to Dallas, American Airlines had decided to cancel our connecting flight on to Oklahoma City. They rebooked us on a flight the next day. During the night there had been an ice storm in Oklahoma, coating trees and such with about .4 inches of ice. I don't know why this closed the airport. This kind of ice only forms in perfect conditions so a little salt will prevent it, and the roads (and I assume the runways) were fine. Maybe the plane overnighted at OKC and was coated in ice too thick to de-ice; maybe some of the equipment was too coated in ice to function. Anyway, I called my dad -- he said the power was out, but the roads looked okay except for an occasional downed tree. We agreed I'd rent a car and drive up; it's about three hours, and I've driven it before.

The airline said it was not practical to extract my suitcase and the car seats from the thousands of bags en route in Dallas. They said they could put in a request, but it might take five hours and they still wouldn't find it. So I borrowed car seats and figured my suit case would show up on the flight I was supposed to be on. As it turns out, the car seats did -- they were at baggage claim the next day when I went to exchange rental cars -- my suit case is still enjoying an extended tour of north america.

Driving north in I35, about 25 miles from our destination I suddenly noticed the trees and grass and cattle fences looked odd. They were all coated in ice and laden with icicles.

We arrived safe and sound mid-afternoon. The power was out for several blocks around their house, closing nearby businesses. There were some branches down, but not as many as I expected. I saw something like this once in upstate NY, and the forests there looked like they had been through a blender, with branches and twigs and whole trees ripped the shreds and scattered across the landscape. This was not like that (yet). Instead, everything was simply covered in ice. Smaller trees and plants were bowed down, at odd angles. (You could tell, because of the angle of the icicles, that the icicles came first, then the additional weight on the branches bowed them down, making the icicles end up horizontal.)

Margaret is a landscape architect. Her garden, as we arrived, looked like a fairy tale scene where there's a castle that's been abandoned for 100 years and the briars have grown up to be impenetrable wilderness. In this case, I gather, it was all about the weight of the ice. A grand archway of plants over the path to the door had collapsed. Other tall plants were laying down, or just splayed on the ground. Some branches had fallen from the trees above.

Inside, there was a nice fire going, etc. Ironically, they had just converted from purely wood heat (as they'd used for 25 years) to electric (heat pump) and hybrid -- a fireplace with a system which forced air through it to heat the house. Alas, without electricity, the fireplace was much less efficient. With that and a wood stove in the back bedroom it was possible to heat the house, but it wasn't cozy. With no long johns or sweaters or anything, I ended up keeping my coat on most of the time. (The kids had more clothing options, but a chilly house doesn't seem to bother them anyway.) As it turns out, electricity didn't come back until just after we returned to Boston.

Margaret was making a stew for dinner over the fire (it has a swinging hook for hanging a pot!) but the general preference was for going to a restaurant, so we went out for Indian. It was good.

Of course, the nice aerobeds they planned for us to sleep on use electric fans to inflate. They also had a couple of normal camping air beds, which turned out to be fine.

(That's about it for my writing energy right now. Maybe I'll post more or expand this later. Short version is: flights back delayed a day by weather elsewhere in country, my luggage arrived in Oklahoma after I got back to Boston, and kids & me got a stomach bug [carried from Boston, presumably] and there was considerable vomit cleanup work.)

(The whole 'State of Emergency' thing makes sense for financial reasons, but the basic sense there was that this was all just an incredible nuisance and/or a fun adventure and/or a trajedy for the trees. The only talk of real danger was from people doing foolish things to keep warm, like bringing their charcoal grill into the house. It was rather a bit like Pennsic. Similarly, as I recall, someone died at Estrella once from using a propane heater in a tent.)

Two of the three young children of a colleage of mine died over the weekend.

children die in house fire

Chime (pronounced chee-may) has always been friendly and helpful and done top-quality work. I couldn't say I know him very well; I don't think we've met in person. But, still, I liked him a lot.

I have no idea how to process this except to cry.

I had some trouble finding my cordless phone handset this morning. It took me four or five calls to it to locate it. It turned out to be deep inside the big garbage bag (of garbage collected from around the house), which I had left sitting in the dining room an hour before!

I *think* one of the kids left it sitting on a dinner plate and it absently got swept into the garbage, ... but I can't really tell. Crazy.

I can't figure out if I was very unlucky it ended up in the garbage, or very lucky that the garbage hadn't quite made it outside yet. It's a dichotomy that I'm often aware of, and am never sure what to make of. (Sort of the optimist/pessimist dichotomy.) I guess it's the budhhist thing again -- the joy or pain in life (the lucky or unlucky) is all about our perception and narrative, not about life itself.

I'm looking for a nice/very-nice restaurant to take a dozen co-workers, more or less within walking distance of the Cambridge Hyatt (where Arisia was last year), tonigh. Any suggestions?

I saw No End In Sight tonight. It wasn't the sort of movie I usually go to..... I try to pay attention to Iraq, but it's also quite wearying. Anyway, a fascinating movie.

What really got me to go, though, was that it was written, produced, and directed by Charles Ferguson. Some of you may remember me writing about my grandmother dying, about two years ago. She would have been bursting with pride over this movie, if she were alive to see it. Charles had been a student of hers (he wrote a nice comment on her memorial web page) and he was also the son of the woman who probably my grandmother's best friend. She was always holding him out to me, conversationally, as role model. She would never be so crass as to say I should be more like him (or that I was in any way inadequate), but the hint was there.

After years of doing cool technical and political things that didn't really make an impression on me, he did one thing that did: he founded a startup to make web-page editing software quite early, and sold it to Microsoft for a boatload of money. (They rebranded it "frontpage".)

On the personal front, I heard n-th hand a story that he and his mom were with my grandmother in the hospital, perhaps six years before she died, when a doctor told her something like "there's nothing more we can do for you." According to this story, Charles took the doctor into the hallway and proclaimed something about having more money than god, being a total son-of-a-bitch, and being willing to do whatever was necessary to keep this woman alive. According to the story, this somehow motivated the doctor to figuring something out and curing whatever the problem at the time was. Someday, I'd like to find out what truth might lie behind this story.

Anyway, I thought I should see his movie, and I'm glad I did.

Anyone know of a way to get a pass to see Stardust in Revere tomorrow?

(Google only suggests one way and I don't think that'll work for me. :-)