The Blizzard of '07

Working up the energy to go dig out the Subaru after about 30 hours of snow that met the NOAA criteria for a blizzard.
There was lots of drifting, so it's hard to tell exactly how much snow we got, but I'd guess it to be around 14 inches.
There's about a two-foot drift in front of the Subaru that needs to be shoveled away.
I had planned to drive Maria to work, then head for the Subaru dealership in Lafayette to get the open-door sensor button fixed. But the Subaru service department reports none of their technicians made it to work today because of the blizzard. So we'll have to keep pulling a battery cable whenever we park, for another day at least.
The del Sol is surrounded by three-foot drifts and isn't going anywhere until the snow melts.
The good news is that the plumber called last night and said he'll be here sometime tomorrow (Thursday) morning.
Is it spring yet?
Note to Tot in Winnipeg: Yes, I realize this looks a lot like your spring.

Deja Vu

I found this on Blonde Sagacity and felt it needed the widest possible audience:

Abraham Lincoln "repeatedly asserted that his aim was to prevent the spread of slavery, not eliminate it in the South." When asked if he was going to outlaw slavery in the South he would reply, "I believe I have no lawful right to do so."

Then, two years into the war he issued his "Emancipation Proclamation."

The North claimed Lincoln had "lied" and "misled the country into war" and that a "bloody and unnecessary war was being fought to bring the blessings of democracy to a people who had little experience with it."

Lincoln was also criticized for suspending habeas corpus — and not asking Congressional permission to do so until long afterwards.

Throughout the conflict, embittered Democrats claimed the war was an utter failure and demanded the administration bring the soldiers home.

The active duty commander, Gen. George McClellan (backed by the "Peace Democrats"), chastised Lincoln for predicting a shorter war with far less casualties...and for not sending enough troops.

(From: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln -Doris Kearns Goodwin)

My 2¢ worth

I've been reading the Amazon.com forum comments on The Shins' Wincing the Night Away and I find it interesting that not much is being said about the production side of the album.
James Mercer and producer Joe Chiccarelli have created some really spectacular aural landscapes that make the album - for me, at least - a treat for the ears. I want to say up front that I probably never would have bought Wincing the Night Away were it not for the fact that my son was one of the engineers on the project.
After seeing people natter away about how The Shins' first two albums were better, I went to iTunes and bought Chutes Too Narrow.
Now I think I see what the problem is. If I'd formed my impressions of what The Shins are supposed to sound like based on Chutes Too Narrow, I might have listened to Wincing the Night Away with a mind too narrow. Where "Chutes" was all about the songs, presented against a plain white background, "Wincing" puts the music in color and three-dimensional space.
For my money, Wincing the Night Away is the best-made album I've heard in years.

System failures

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken.

Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.

Bridge: Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground

Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin',
Everything is broken.

Bridge: Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face

Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken.
— Bob Dylan

It started about a week ago when the mercury dropped to the single digits and stayed there for days. The water line serving our dishwasher froze. It's happened before, but I hoped we'd dodged the bullet this time because there was no wind hitting the under-insulated wall between the dishwasher and God's own deep freeze. So the dishes started piling up and we broke into our supply of styrofoam picnic plates and plastic knives, forks and spoons.
And we hoped for a thaw.
Then, about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, I lost my internet connectivity. I ran through the usual routine - powercycle computer, DSL modem and wireless router. When that failed, I called tech support to ask if Frontiernet had any reports of a service outage in our tiny town. Nope. So I spent about an hour running various diagnostics that the techie thought might get me back online. At one point, he speculated that the problem was with my modem, since the browser couldn't see it. He finally ran out of ideas and put me on hold, saying he was going to pass me on to another geek who had more experience.
When it comes to experience, mine has been that everytime my DSL service goes down, Frontiernet Tech Support says the problem is with my equipment. And they've been wrong every time. Even the time when my modem died, because after all, that's their equipment too.
Moments after he put me on hold, I heard Maria screaming my name from the kitchen. I hung up the phone, dashed downstaris and found a small lake spreading out from the dishwasher.
This is the worst-case scenario of dishwasher water line freeze and it's only happened once before. The freezing water expands inside a valve and breaks it. It only starts to leak when the ice thaws and Sunday's modest warm-up was enough to trigger the flood.
Maria ran to the basement and shut off the water and I got out our floor scrubber, which has a water pick-up feature.
I left a voicemail for our plumber who called back about 30 minutes later to say he was at a basketball game with his son and would call us when he got home and checked his schedule to see when he could get to us. (It's now about 48 hours later and we still haven't heard from him.)
In the meantime, we located the shutoff valve for the dishwasher, shut it off and opened the main valve, restoring water to our toilets, showers, sinks and laundry facilities.
Monday morning, we were awakened by a call from our local Frontiernet repairman, a genuinely nice guy who lives next door to Maria's parents up on the north end of town. He showed up about 20 minutes later, did some voodoo and got me back online. The problem, he said, is a local piece of equipment the corporation is slow in funding. Once it gets installed, he said, these dropouts should stop. And, no, the people at tech support don't have any idea of the local problem and are useless when it happens.
Ok, that's two steps backward, one step forward.
Then Maria got home from work last night and reported the dashboard light on the Subaru that tells you when a door is open, wouldn't turn off. She said she'd checked all of the doors and confirmed they were properly closed. I went out and did the same. Of course the light stayed on. Apparently one of the door sensors had malfunctioned, making the car think a door was still open. Ordinarily, I wouldn't care what the car thought, but the circuit was set up to keep the light on even with the engine off and the key out of the ignition.
That's another step backwards.
With a major snowstorm about to start (We're under a blizzard warning as I write this the next day and the snow is blowing and piling up at an alarming rate.) I wasn't keen to let that dashboard light wipe out the battery overnight. So I rummaged through my tools in the garage and found a 10mm box-end wrench with which I disconnected the positive terminal of the battery.
When I got back inside the house, Maria showed me a rubber piece that she found on the floor by the front passenger seat. I'm 99 percent sure it's a tiny boot that fits over the door sensor button. With the boot gone, the closed door doesn't depress the sensor button far enough to assure the motherboard that the door is completely shut.
We awoke this morning to a call from one of Maria's reporters saying she doubted if she (the reporter) could get to work because a snow emergency had been declared in the county where she lives. Maria told her to stay put. The Indianapolis TV stations were all in Chicken Little Mode and it quickly became obvious that Maria wasn't going to drive the 18 miles to work today.
She saw this coming, which is why she went to Wal-Mart on her way home last night and bought some batting for a quilt she's making for the niece who was born on Saturday.
So we're hunkered down in the warm semi-security (until something else breaks) of our house while Maria quilts and runs her newspaper by phone and internet, directing the handful of people who were able to get to the office.
As a footnote, my Honda del Sol hasn't moved since the first snowfall about a week ago. It has big fat tires that are great on dry pavement, but turn into skis on snow and ice. The car is just plain scary on slick pavement and I let it sit when there's snow on the roads.
The best car I ever had for snow was the first car I owned - a Fontana gray 1965 VW beetle. With its rear engine over the drive wheels and skinny tires that concentrated the weight into small but effective contact patches, it was pretty much unstoppable in snow. Unfortunately, it was frequently unstartable because it was prone to gathering moisture in the distributor. But I'd trade my del Sol for the old bug on days like this.

Shins on a roll

The new Shins album, "Wincing the Night Away," is the #4 album in iTunes downloads.
My son Sean was an engineer on the project.
Damn! That's sooooo cool.

Would you go into space with Lisa Nowak?

STS121-S-002 (5 April 2006) --- These seven astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-121 crew portrait. From the left are astronauts Stephanie D. Wilson, Michael E. Fossum, both mission specialists; Steven W. Lindsey, commander; Piers J. Sellers, mission specialist; Mark E. Kelly, pilot; European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany; and Lisa M. Nowak, both mission specialists. The crewmembers are attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suit.

Image Credit: NASA/JSC

NASA Photo and Orange County Sheriff's Dept. Photo
Tuesday , February 06, 2007
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — A NASA astronaut was ordered released on bail Tuesday on charges she attempted to kidnap a romantic rival for a space shuttle pilot's affections, but was told to wear a tracking device and not to contact her alleged victim.

Orange County Judge Mike Murphy said Lisa Marie Nowak, 43, will be released on $15,500 bond. She said "yes" when Murphy asked her if she understood not to contact the other woman.

Nowak stood in a jail uniform, usually with her head facing down during the hearing. She planned to return home to Houston once released.

Nowak is a married mother of three and police believe she was in a love triangle with a fellow astronaut. She faces charges including attempted kidnapping, attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery.

Police said she drove 900 miles, donned a disguise and was armed with a BB gun and pepper spray Monday when she confronted a woman she believed was a competitor for the affections of Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein.

Nowak and Oefelein, 41, were both first-time fliers during separate shuttle missions last year. They trained together but never flew together.

Two other astronauts attended the court hearing. Steve Lindsey, the commander of Nowak's Discovery flight last July, testified that Nowak would obey the conditions of her release.

Chris Ferguson, a pilot on the mission, also attended the hearing. When asked about Nowak's behavior after the hearing, Ferguson responded "perplexed is the word I'm sticking with."

Nowak told police that her relationship with Oefelein was "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship," according to an arrest affidavit. Police found a love letter to Oefelein in her car.

According to authorities, Nowak believed another woman, Colleen Shipman, was romantically involved with Oefelein. When Nowak found out Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her early Monday, according to the arrest affidavit.

Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers in the car so she wouldn't have to stop to go to the bathroom, authorities said. Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.

Dressed in a wig and a trench coat, she waited for Shipman's plane to land and then boarded the same airport shuttle bus Shipman took to get to her car, police said. Shipman told police she noticed someone following her, hurried inside the car and locked the doors, according to the arrest affidavit.

Nowak rapped on the window, tried to open the car door and asked for a ride. Shipman refused but rolled down the car window a few inches when Nowak started crying. Nowak then sprayed a chemical into Shipman's car, the affidavit said. Shipman drove to the parking lot booth and police were called.

An officer reported following Nowak and watching her throw away a bag containing the wig and BB gun. Police also found a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, $600 and garbage bags inside a bag Nowak was carrying when she was arrested, authorities said.

Oefelein and Shipman, who the Houston Chronicle said worked at Patrick Air Force Base near the Kennedy Space Center, did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

NASA spokesman James Hartsfield in Houston said that, as of Monday, Nowak's status with the astronaut corps remained unchanged. "What will happen beyond that, I will not speculate," he said.

Hartsfield said he couldn't recall the last time an astronaut was arrested and said there were no rules against fraternizing among astronauts.

Police said Nowak told them that she only wanted to scare Shipman into talking to her about her relationship with Oefelein and didn't want to harm her physically.

"If you were just going to talk to someone, I don't know that you would need a wig, a trench coat, an air cartridge BB gun and pepper spray," said Orlando police Sgt. Barbara Jones. "It's just really a very sad case."

According to NASA's official biography, Nowak is a Naval Academy graduate who has a master's degree in aeronautical engineering. She has a teenage son and younger twin girls.

Oefelein has two children and began his aviation career as a teenager flying floatplanes in Alaska, according to a NASA biography. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and later earned a master's degree in aviation systems at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. He has been an astronaut since 1998.

Cmdr. William Oefelein

Smugness

I'm feeling smug this afternoon.
We went to our nearest Barnes & Noble today, looking for books on photographic lighting. I found two - one for $19.95 and one for $24.95 - that I wanted. Then I used my Treo 700p cell phone to surf to the Amazon.com website (they have a separate site configured for hand-held devices) and was able to buy used copies of both books for a total of $9.73, including shipping and handling.

Just for the record

I don't give a shit about the Superbowl.

Shins Album is #1

Marty Crandall, Joe Chiccarelli, James Mercer and Sean Flora



Hey, the new Shins album - Wincing the Night Away - is #1 in four Billboard album categories:
#1 Rock Album
#1 Digital Album
#1 Independent Album
#1 in the "Tastemakers" category
Am I proud that my son Sean was an engineer on the album project? That would be a serious understatement.


Here's the pertinent blog entry pirated from Sean's MySpace account:


The new record by the Shins, Wincing the Night Away, comes out this Tuesday.
I'm super excited, as this is by far the biggest engineering credit for me so far. These guys were great to work with and were about the farthest you can imagine from being Prima Donnae (or pre-madonna?).

I always marvel at the constant interplay and balancing act between composing and studio experimentation. Sometimes you get people recording songs before they've even written the lyric. To me this is nuts. It seems like the posture is: "Oh, I just come up with something at the last minute...whatever comes into my head."... Well, it usually sounds like it... In my opinion, the best writing takes work and focus - even the songs that seem to come out easily require your attention and patience to get them down on the page. There are nuances in the music which have to be informed by what's going on in the vocal line.

Where I'm going is this: James came into the sessions pretty fully prepared as far as having the songs written. In fact he had already recorded at home some of the elements of each song - a vocal and a guitar part, the steel-drum-sounding keyboard part on Red Rabbits... Yet there was also quite a lot of room - meaning openness and willingness on the part of James and the band - for experimenting with forms, sounds, rhythms and other elements...

I have to say, having a lot of room for experimentation can also, for some folks, lead to getting mired in too many options. Producer Joe Chiccarelli [you have got to see his credit list; it's HUGE and varied] really kept things on track, getting the home-recorded tracks to mesh with the live-in-studio parts and all the guest musicians.

This past week, I've been doing some behind-the-scenes work as the Shins get ready for TV appearances and touring... Look for some great remixes coming out soon, including at least one by DangerMouse.

Changes

Changes are in the air this month.
Maria and I signed up with our doctor for his weight loss program. At the end of three weeks last Wednesday, I'd lost about 15 pounds and Maria was down about 8 or 9. And we're feeling better already. Taking Phentermine, chromium and vitamin B12 every morning, paying closer attention to what and how much we eat and aiming for 10,000 steps/day with pedometers we wear on our belts.
We've also had our initial meeting with the contractor for our new garage/studio. The plan calls for the razing of our two ramshackle garages. They'll be replaced by a heated two-car, two-motorcycle garage with an upstairs photo studio/office. Plumbing would add $10k to the cost, so we're skipping that amenity, but it should be a great addition to the property. We're also planning to pave the area between the garage and house and put up a privacy fence for entertaining and hot tubbing. The hot tub desperately needs something to block the wind. As it is now, any wind over about 10 mph makes getting in, and especially out, of the tub a bone-chilling experience.
I need to remember to call Galen Perry, who runs a BMW motorcycle parts operation up near Delphi, and have him pick up what's left of my old '91 K100RS. I've parted out most of it on Ebay and am down to the frame, forks, front wheel, engine and drive train. We have a lot of stuff to dispose of or, at least move before the garage goes into the dumpster.
Anybody want a Franklin stove that runs on gas? I'll probably offer it on Ebay with local pickup only. No way I'm going to ship that beast.
And I went under the knife last Tuesday to have a cyst removed from my back. No big deal, but the incision is starting to itch as it heals and I can't use the hot tub until the stitches come out in another week.
Maria fired her night copy editor, so she and I have been working together at her paper evenings since last Monday. It's fun to be back in the newspaper harness and paycheck is nice too. Sure beats flipping channels all evening.
We're shooting a wedding next weekend for the son of a couple of Maria's longtime friends. The kids are extremely short on money, so Maria offered to do it for $300. I was willing to come down to $500 as a charity case, but $300 is downright painful, considering the post-shoot production work I have to do to edit the images and burn them onto CDs. This is essentially the same package for which we just raised our rates to $1,000. I told her this is the only semi-freebie she can give away this year. And we need to get these kids to swear they will never tell anyone how cheaply we worked on their wedding.
As I write this, the mercury is down to 15 degrees (F), heading for an overnight low of 10 or 11. It's the closest snap of the winter so far, so I guess I shouldn't complaing. But I've been cold all day and it's got me thinking of a tropical escape.

Shins album

Amazing. Simply amazing.
The new Shins album, that is. I bought a copy this evening, mainly just to see my son's name in the liner notes, but it turns out to be the sweetest piece of ear candy I've found in a long long time.
I'm sitting at a computer at my wife's newspaper office, writing obits and editing copy while listening through earphones.
The second thing I do when I get home tonight, after letting the dogs out, will be to rip this CD to my iPod.
Good work, Sean!

Another low mileage year

I turned in my 2006 mileage for the Indianapolis BMW Club's mileage awards this afternoon. It was an embarrassingly low total - 6,093 miles.
I suppose some casual riders would consider that pretty good, but for a BMW rider it's pathetic.
For more than a decade, I was a regular recipient of the club's 10,000-mile award at the annual awards dinner, but this will be the second consecutive year when I've failed to make 10k.
And it looks like 2007 won't be a high mileage year either, because our wedding photography business is picking up. I like the money, but I miss riding.

Right on, Sean!

I got this e-mail the other day from my son Sean Flora, who is a recording engineer/producer in Portland, Ore.:

The new record by the Shins, Wincing the Night Away, comes out next Tuesday. They will be appearing on the David Letterman Show (whatever it’s called) that night. They were on SNL this past weekend. This is my first engineering credit on a major release of this magnitude.

Needless to say, I'm enormously impressed and proud. I've watched him work with musicians in the studio and am impressed with his ability to tweak things and to guide in a friendly way, so as not to bruise egos. He has excellent people skills and is damned good at what he does.
Check out his MySpace page.

No thanks, Mr. Jobs

Okay, maybe I don't want an iPhone after all.
After listening to various podcasts in the wake of Steve Jobs' introduction of Apple's new cell phone, I'm a bit less awed.
Yes, it is a spectacular design. No moving parts or keys, just a big gorgeous touch-screen. That means Apple can update your iPhone with tweaks and new features - maybe even completely change the user interface when you synch your iPhone with your internet-linked computer. That's freaking revolutionary.
But when I start thinking about how I use a cell phone and what the iPhone supposedly will do and won't do, I find myself having to give up too much.
The word is that the touch-screen keyboard makes typing e-mails really difficult, compared with the thumb typing and accessory fold-out keyboard for my Treo 700p.
At present there is no provision for third-party software additions, so I'd have to give up Pocket Quicken that synchs with my PC Quicken, my various Palm weather programs, my Palm document reader, and on and on.
And, like the iPod, the iPhone does not have a user-replacable battery. Plus, the presumed battery life is only about 5 hours.
And that gorgeous big screen looks like it can be easily scrathed and marred in normal day-to-day use.
And the mp3 player capacity is pretty piddly, compared with my 60GB iPod.
The idea of rolling an iPod and cell phone into one package is alluring. I find myself carrying both whenever I leave home. But somehow the iPhone doesn't quite get me there. It's kind of a cell phone and kind of an iPod and kind of an internet device, but it doesn't compare with the power and versatility of a regular iPod and a Treo.
Plus, I'm locked into contracts with Sprint for the rest of my natural life and have no desire to switch to Cingular.
So I think I'll pass on the iPhone and stick with my Treo.

iPhone

The new iPhone unveiled yesterday is excruciatingly cool.
But they forgot to build a camera into it.

Added later: I was watching Steve Jobs' keynote address at Mac World online today and discovered I'd missed the reference to a 2 megapixel camera. So the iPhone is perfect, after all.

Sad duty

I covered another soldier's funeral today - this one a hometown boy. I can see the cemetery from my bedroom window. Here's his mother with the flag from the casket.

Life without the Internet

I lost my internet connection a week ago this morning. I was looking at movie previews on the Netflix site when the connection failed. I tried all of the usual tricks - power cycling DSL modem, wireless router and computer, poking the reset buttons on the modem and router and snugging up the cable connections on modem and router. None of it worked.
So I called the tech service people at my ISP - Frontiernet. The friendly techie ran me through his diagnostic flow chart and concluded that my DSL modem was hosed. Well, he avoided that term, preferring to say it needed "a rest." So he transferred me to customer service where the friendly lady tried to talk me into a DSL modem/wireless router combo, which would add $4 and change a month to my phone/DSL bill for equipment rental. I declined and asked for a simple DSL modem, since I have no complaints with my D-Link wireless router.
"How soon can you get it to me?" I asked.
"Jan. 2," she replied.
This was on Dec. 27, mind you.
"Is there any way to expedite that?"
"No."
So I sat and stewed for a day.
On Friday, I decided to go to my local Frontier office on the off chance that they would have a DSL modem I could borrow until my new one came from afar.
But the door was locked and bore a sign announcing that the office was closed for the New Year holiday.
Seriously Jonesing for an internet fix, I took my laptop to the local public library and used their Wi-Fi to check my e-mail and surf a bit.
The one glimmer of hope in my disconnected despair was the realization that, although the U.S. Postal Service wouldn't resume deliveries until today (Wednesday) because of President Ford's funeral services, UPS might be working on Tuesday and my modem was coming via UPS.
Nevertheless, I went back to the local Frontier office yesterday (Tuesday) to let them know I was without service.
(The last time I lost my DSL connection, the Frontiernet techies said my router was at fault, but it turned out that the problem was at the local switch where one of the guys had snipped some wires and a tiny piece of wire fell into contact with the wires associated with my connection. Consequently, I have learned that the distant techies are pretty much always wrong.)
So the woman at the local office took down my information and said she'd ask their only tech guy - who was handling problems in a nearby town - to get on it when he got back.
In the meantime, the UPS guy delivered a brand new Speed Stream DSL modem/wireless router combo to my house. Remember that I said I declined the combo? Well, here it was.
So I hooked it up and, sure enough, I still had no internet connection.
The DSL indicator light shone a happy bright green, but no data was coming through the connection.
Once, again, the Frontiernet techies misdiagnosed the problem, pointing the finger at my equipment when the fault was on their side of the connection.
Naturally, the local tech guy didn't get back in town in time to fix my problem last night and I'm still waiting at 9:15 a.m. today.
So how am I connecting to post this?
I'm piggybacking onto my next-door neighbor's unsecured Wi-Fi signal.

Lunch

I'm having lunch at the Mandarin House, a Chinese restaurant next door to where my newspaper office used to be. We had a hillbilly secretary who called it the "Medarin House."
My cookie fortune: "Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals."
Well, to a point...

They're crazy and they're not going to back down

From Reuters:
TEHRAN - Iran condemned a U.N. sanctions resolution as “a piece of torn paper” that would not scare Tehran and vowed on Sunday to accelerate uranium enrichment work immediately.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose sanctions on Iran’s trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology, in an attempt to stop uranium enrichment work that could produce material to be used in bombs.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said those who backed the U.N. resolution, drawn up by Britain, France and Germany but supported unanimously by the Security Council, would soon regret their “superficial act.”

This is disturbingly close to the League of Nations' feeble attempts to curb the Axis powers in the years leading up to World War II. Will we elect a Neville Chamberlain in '08 or will we have the good sense to choose a Winston Churchill?

Tying up loose ends

I am now officially caught up with obligations to photo clients.
I delivered a 100-page album this afternoon to a couple whose wedding we shot Sept. 23. We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to get it to them before they left town for Christmas, but MyPublisher.com came through brilliantly.
We placed the order on Sunday afternoon and the FedEx guy delivered it to our front door on Wednesday afternoon. And it was perfectly printed.
The temperature hit 53 degrees (F) today (that's 11.6666666 for my friends in Canada and elsewhere in the Metric world), which is sort of an early Christmas gift - especially considering the hammering our friends in Colorado got this week.
I was tempted to get one of the bikes out, but I had too much to do and I didn't want to upset the balance of fuel stabilizer to gas in the tank. So it appears my 2006 riding season is over and I can record and report my BMW miles to Harold Patterson, who succeeded Martha Thomas as the keeper of mileage records for the Indianapolis BMW Club. I think I only rode about 6,000-some miles this year, which means I'll fall short of earning one of the club's 10,000-mile awards for the second consecutive year.
One of my New Year's resolutions will be to make the 10k and not let work interfere with my riding.

Wicked fast

I delivered the CDs today to last Saturday's wedding client and finished the CDs for the Sunday portrait shoot yesterday. This is absolutely incredible!
The fastest I've ever been able to turn around a wedding shoot is four weeks. What a spectacular machine this is.
I finally got my Treo synched with the new machine today. That's the last major thing I had to do to settle in on the new computer.

Computer Hog Heaven

Good God!
This Dell XPS computer is freaking amazing!
The Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM give me enough computing power to do two or three tasks – any one of which would have choked my old machine – simultaneously.
I was able to organize and burn a couple of CDs for the client who hired us to shoot her grandson's high school senior photos and also edit and post a 454-photo gallery from the 1,800 wedding images we shot last Saturday. This is nothing short of astonishing – that I could get both projects done in a few hours of work, in the same day. I have never been able to turn projects around that quickly with the old machine. Whatever anxiety I had about the cost of this setup is evaporating in the light of the time it will save. If our business continues to grow in 2007, there is no way I could keep up with the photo editing and album building with my old machine. (Incredible how much improvement there's been in the less than five years since I bought the old one.)
And this fabulous 24” LCD monitor is like having a billboard-size screen in front of me. Our scenic photos displayed full-screen are so huge, yet so vivid, that it feels like I could walk right into the scene.
I'm running a 1920 x 1200 screen resolution. Everything looks gorgeous and I finally have enough screen real estate to run Photoshop CS with the tool pallets off to the outside of the workspace and still have an enormous view of the image being edited.
I discovered to my chagrin yesterday that the hard drives in my old computer were IDE drives and the new Dell is set up to take SATA drives (no, I don't know what the difference is, other than that they take completely different data and power plugs).
So how to get the data I need to rescue from my old machine without putting the drives back in and dragging the box and big CRT monitor back into the office and stringing a bunch of cables?
I found a couple of solutions yesterday afternoon at Best Buy.
Solution 1 is to get a card that adapts the IDE drives to work in the new machine. That involves getting back into the new XPS box, popping in the card, the two drives and the appropriate ribbon cable.
Solution 2 is to buy a USB external hard drive enclosure – basically a small aluminum box that contains a circuit board upon which you mount the hard drive. Poke it back into the aluminum box, screw on the end piece with its on/off switch and power and USB connections, connect to the XPS and turn on the power.
I opted for Solution 2 because it made it possible for me to use one of the old hard drives as an external storage device for photo files and I was charmed by its elegance. And it only cost $49.
So last night I transferred my iTunes library from the old drive to my new C: drive. But when I synched my iPod, I suddenly discovered that none of my purchased music from the iTunes Store would work because the XPS is not an “authorized” computer. After a moment of panic, I found I could easily go to the iTunes site and authorize my new computer. Phew! Problem solved.
Next, I transferred all of my image files from the old drive to my C: drive. Oops. Now my 300 GB new hard drive is down to 133GB of free space. Maybe it's time to start archiving to DVDs...
Today's work involves putting my other drive – the former C: drive of my old machine – into the aluminum box and retrieving my Treo/Palm desktop and its database. I've misplaced my original installation disk that came with the Treo 700p and, of course, it has stuff on it that I can't download from the Palm website, so I need to continue accessing the old one. I hope I can just copy the Palm folder and program over to the new machine, but I fear it may not be that simple and there may need to be changes made to the Windows registry or elsewhere that only the installation disk can make. That means I may have to keep using my old C: drive as an external H: drive with the XPS, at least until I find the Treo installation disk.
Eventually, I plan to wipe the old machine's second hard drive – the one that had my pictures and iTunes on it – and install the Ubuntu version of Linux that I downloaded last night for free. If I don't like Ubuntu, I can always go back to the Windows XP that's on the old C: drive, if and when I no longer need it hooked up to the new machine. Stick a WiFi card in the old box and voila, we've got an extra work station or another machine in the house to surf the 'net.

Not a pup anymore

Yesterday began Pete the Aussie's second year with us.
He was only six weeks old when we brought him home from the farm where he was born on Dec. 17, 2005.
So, at the risk of seeming to perform the doggy version of one of those hideous annual personnel evaluations that a generation of micro-managers forced upon us, maybe it's time to reflect on how that first year has gone.
Pete has grown into a fine, funny, affectionate dog who charms everyone he meets with his friendly, playful personality.
His toilet training has been a bit, uh, spotty, if you know what I mean. We gave himt he run of the house much too early and, as a consequence, he developed some favorite places to relieve himself when we weren't looking. Like on the stairway landing and at the top of the stairs. So we quarantined him and Ruthie, a golden retriever mix, in the kitchen with only supervised visits to the rest of the house.
But with our encouragement, he has figured out that the back yard is the proper place for his bathroom activities. The only problem was that he wasn't very good at letting us know when he needed to go out.
So about two months ago, Maria hung some decorative holiday bells on the back door doorknob and showed Pete that we would open the door for him if he'd ring the bells by poking them with his nose. To our amazement, he picked it up right away. Like, in one day.
Of course, now he does it whenever the mood strikes him to go outside whether he needs to do doggy business or not.
But that's alright. The accidents on the kitchen floor are much less frequent and pretty much only happen when we don't hear the bells.
But he also has a shy and fearful side and at least one bizarre behavior.
As I write this, Pete is pacing back and forth on the rear deck, looking nervously up at the sky.
He's the only dog I've ever know who took any interest at all in the sky.
I think it's because he thinks the sky tried to kill him a couple of times.
The first time was back in the spring when a fierce thunderstorm hit. Maria and I were away from home and Maria's daughter Morgan was at home with the dogs. They were in the back yard when the storm blew up, but Morgan was unaware of it because she was organizing stuff in the attic and had her boombox cranked up.
It was Pete's first close encounter with lightning and thunder and he fled in terror. A neighbor said he saw Pete streaking down the street illuminated by the flashes of lightning. We caught up with him two days later after a woman who works for the local veterninarian recognized him and called to say we'd find him about a mile north of town.
Pete's second traumatic sky experience was around the Fourth of July when a neighbor's errant bottle rocket crossed into our airspace and exploded over his head. Even though Morgan was standing nearby, Pete bolted and was gone for three days.
So Pete worries about the sky and notices details that might even escape human observers.
Clear, sunny mornings are the worst, because he has an unobstructed view of the southern sky and frets over the criss-crossing jet contrails tracing the paths of east-west airline traffic.
Conversely, he's relatively worry-free on overcast days when there's nothing up there but a blanket of gray.
I'd love to get Cesar Milan's take on it. I'm sure the Dog Whisperer could cure Pete's sky anxiety in short order.
So, on balance, Pete is turning out to be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving love and entertainment.

Real soldiers respond

Love that open source freeware!

When I decided to stop using a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 that wasn't exactly licensed to me and opted, instead, for the free open source OpenOffice suite, I was forced to stop using Outlook, the Microsoft e-mail client.
So I installed Thunderbird, the e-mail client that comes with the Firefox browser and is also free.
It lacks the scheduling and calendar bells and whistles that Outlook has, but I don't need them because I keep track of that stuff with the Palm Desktop, synched with my Treo 700w smartphone.
But it does have a pretty good spam filter that is more efficient than the spam filter than comes with my Norton Internet Security package.
And, by the way, I'm going to dump Norton when the new computer arrives, in favor of Nod32, which is recommended by Leo Laporte and other people I trust as being superior to Norton and McAffee.
Maria's Norton software expired a couple of weeks ago and I replaced it with Nod32 for $39.
The big problem with Norton and McAffee is that they are "bloatware" - big, cumbersome programs that slow a computer down, yet provide less antivirus protection than the smaller, more nimble Nod32. Maria's machine is running a tad faster since I yanked out the Norton stuff.
Nod32 has a package price for two computers for something like $64, so I think I'll take advantage of that deal to protect my new machine and add Nod32 to our Sony VAIO notebook computer.
FYI, the Windows firewall is unnecessary if you're using a router, since the router serves as an even more effective firewall against unwanted internet intruders. Laporte says the Windows firewall should, however, be turned on if you're using your laptop on an open WiFi network away from home, like at Starbuck's or a hotel/motel.

Dell+UPS=Damn Fast Service

The UPS tracking system says the three Dell packages - computer, monitor and speakers - arrived in Indianapolis at 4:02 a.m. today, which means they may show up on my porch today instead of the projected Monday delivery date. Amazing, considering that the order was placed Sunday afternoon. And it wasn't an off-the-shelf order in that I made some custom tweaks.

In the UPS pipeline to Indiana...

Dell says I should expect the new computer and monitor on Monday.
UPS says it left Mesquite, Texas before dawn this morning.

Bring it, Moonbats!

I was stunned this morning to discover that there is talk of a Clinton-Obama ticket in 2008.
There are web sites selling t-shirts for what they're calling the Democratic "Dream Team."
Astonishingly naive.
It's actually the dream team opposition the Republicans would love to face - a ticket that would be completely incapable of attracting crossover red state votes.

The computer has shipped!!!

I just checked my Dell account and found our new computer shipped today. Woo-hoo!
Should have it by the middle of next week.

None of that fake chocolate for me!

"Made with real chocolate?"
So what's in a Hershey bar or Lindt chocolate?
Seen in the Lafayette, Ind., Meijer store.

Oh, no! I missed Edvard Munch's Birthday!

Norwegian expressionist painter, born Dec. 12, 1863, at Löten, Norway, died Jan. 23, 1944, at Ekely, near Oslo.
Happy 143rd birthday, Eddie!

TCB

I've taken care of a whole bunch of things today that I was putting off.
Maria and I did a bunch of Christmas shopping our favorite way – mousing our way around Amazon.com.
And I finally bit the bullet and bought that new business computer that we've been needing. After weighing the relative merits of Mac and PC, I opted to remain in the PC fold and ordered a Dell through Leo Laporte's web link at twit.tv/dell.
I've dealt with Dell before and, like Leo, find them to be a company I can feel comfortable with.
So I bought an XPS 700 Special Edition Formula Red with Intel Core2Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and a 24” Dell UltraSharp Widescreen Digital Flat Panel monitor.
It comes with a free upgrade from XP Media Center to Vista when the new operating system is released late next month.
Since the new Dell cases have bays for two additional hard drives, I can yank the two drives out of my old computer and have all of the files on board without having to do a lot of transferring. In terms of familiarity, it should be like my old machine on steroids (going from a 2400 MHz processor to a 1.86 GHz processor) with a display twice as wide as the one I have now.
At last, I should be have a machine that runs Photoshop fast enough to stay ahead of me. I'm stalled out on a current wedding album project because my computer is choking on the big Nikon D200 and D100 images to be manipulated.
And, since the temperature got into the mid-40s this afternoon, I was able to check and correct tire pressures on both cars (the del Sol's little donut spare tire had zero psi) and put fuel stabilizer into the gas tanks of both bikes and the lawnmower.
That little Sears air compressor paid for itself a long time ago when it comes to convenience. I hate crawling around my car at a gas station topping off tire pressures.

Reason #98 why I love my iPod/iTunes

Here's a neat trick you can do with iTunes that I learned from Steven Levy's book “The Perfect Thing.”
If you're on a network like an Ethernet hookup at work or a WiFi network at home or maybe Starbuck's or McDonald's, you can look and play selections from any other iTunes user on the network.
That is if they have the “sharing” feature enabled.
Levy says in his book that sharing is the default setting, but that may be prior to the current v 7.0.2 of iTunes because I had to manually turn it on to get it to work on the computers on my home WiFi network.
So I can fire up the Sony VAIO laptop in the kitchen, which has iTunes with an empty library on it and see the libraries on my desktop computer and on my wife's desktop computer. And I can play any selection from those libraries on the laptop.
Sorta like the feature Microsoft is so proud of on the Zune that lets users “squirt” (yeah, that's the word they use) songs via WiFi to any other Zune in range. The difference is that there is apparently no way to capture the song on the iTunes receiving end other than to play it in real time. The Zune recipient can keep the squirted song three days or three plays, whichever comes first, which makes it a completely different listening scenario.
To enable the feature in iTunes, click Edit, the Sharing tab, then check the appropriate boxes and circles. The resulting SHARED list shows up in the far left column of the iTunes window between STORE and PLAYLISTS.
Cool, huh?

Photo contest - Please Vote!

Click this link to go to the photo above at JPG Magazine's site and vote for my photo of window washers in downtown Portland, Ore. The category is "9 to 5," people at work, and the criteria is (1) does it fit the theme and (2) is it a good shot.
If I get enough votes, I get included in the next issue and win $100 and a year's subscription.
Also, there's a ton of really good photos on the site, of which a few are mine.
Oddly enough, the one that's getting the most attention is a picture I shot in September, 1970 of KFC founder Col. Harland Sanders on the occasion of his 80th birthday in Greenwood, Ind.

BW3

One of the consequences of a newspaper career is that one finds oneself overqualified for most trivia competitions.
Our nearest Buffalo Wild Wings (BW3) restaurant has a wireless online trivia game that lets you compete, not only with other players in the restaurant, but with thousands of players in restaurants and bars worldwide.
Our BW3 is in a Big Ten college town, so you would expect a slightly higher level of play than some place where the average I.Q. is room temperature or below.
But I'm pleased to say that each of the three times that Maria and I have played as a team, we've beaten everyone else in the joint to emerge the local champs at the end of the evening.
We're both highly competitive, which makes winning particularly gratifying.

Good news

I got the results of the polyp biopsy from my doctor today - no colon cancer.
I wasn't terribly worried, but it's a relief to know for sure. So I don't have to think about another colonoscopy until 2009.
We also signed up for his weight loss program, since all of my problems:
Diabetes
High blood pressure
High cholesterol
Sleep apnea
are consequences of carrying too much weight around.
With any luck at all, I'll be shopping for smaller motorcycle apparel next spring and changing the setting on my bike's shock absorber.

Bad news

James Kim, the CNet gadget guru who went missing in the Oregon wilderness with his wife and two daughters more than a week ago, was found dead today.
His wife and daughters were rescued a couple of days ago when Kati Kim used an umbrella to get the attention of a search helicopter crew. She and the kids stayed with their stranded car and James struck out on foot last Saturday morning to get help.
I remember him from the late lamented TechTV. My condolences to his family and friends. It's a very sad day for the tech community.

I'm a Guinness

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's Your Beer Personality?

Evan Bayh in '08?

Even though I consider myself a Republican these days, I was raised in a Democrat household.
My grandfather was a township trustee and later the Carroll County (Ind.) treasurer, elected each time as a Democrat. The family archives include a receipt Granddad received for a $1 contribution (that was a substantial amount in those days) to the 1908 presidential candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost to William Howard Taft, but later served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson.
I still revere Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. I went to JFK's funeral in November, 1963, in Washington, D.C.
But the late 1960s saw the party of my father and grandfather drift farther and farther to the left. I guess I date my estrangement with the Democrat Party to the presidential candidacy of George McGovern. Over the past 30-odd years, the party has pandered to a nutball constituency that shares none of my values. The candidates they fielded in the last two presidential elections - Al Gore and John Kerry - were so flaky and devoid of character, I was astonished that anyone took them seriously.
I fervently hope the party comes to its senses soon, but the hype surrounding Hillary Clinton is worrisome. She's not flaky, she's downright evil and scary.
But yesterday brought the news I'd been hoping for. Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana's junior senator, announced he's forming an exploratory committee - a first step toward a presidential bid.
Bayh is the son of a former senator (Birch Bayh), was a two-term Indiana governor and is loaded with poise, style and charisma. His wife, Susan, is pretty and whip-smart and they have beautiful children. It doesn't hurt - from my perspective anyway - that he's among the more conservative Democrats in the Senate.
So I could be comfortable with a Bayh presidency, especially if the Republicans don't come up with anyone better than John McCain.
Evan has my vote, for sure, in the primary.
And, if he is elected, he'll rehabilitate Indiana's image on the national stage after the horrible damage done by Dan Quayle.

Doh!

I'm a regular listener to several of Leo Laporte's podcasts and generally learn at least one new useful thing everytime I listen.
Friday's gem was the discovery of Open Office, an open source, free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite that retails for about $400 and has a street price around $330.
I'd been using an obsolete bootleg copy and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Mostly, I was just using Word as a word processor and Outlook as my e-mail client.
I downloaded Open Office and installed it and determined it could, indeed, open and manipulate all of my old MS Office-created files and create files in those MS formats. In fact, I'm composing this post in Writer – the Open Office word processor.
So, without giving it much thought, I deleted Microsoft Office from my computer.
Oops.
As a result, Outlook – complete with all of my saved e-mails and my e-mail address book – went away.
Fortunately, I have almost all of my important e-mail addresses backed up in my Palm/Treo contacts list, so it's not a complete disaster.
But still, I feel like a bonehead for failing to realize that Outlook was a component of Office.
I no longer had a copy of Outlook Express on my computer, so I turned instead to Thunderbird, the open source e-mail client that came with Firefox when I tried it out a month or so ago.
Thunderbird will be more secure, since it's not so thoroughly hacked as is Outlook and Outlook Express, so I guess I'm better off.
But I know I'll be kicking myself in the days and weeks to come whenever it occurs to me that I need a piece of information that resided in those old e-mails that no longer exist.
BTW, you can check out Open Office at openoffice.org
It's a complete office software suite with lots of bells and whistles that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Ouch

Okay, so the anesthetic was incredibly smooth - just dozed off and woke up with amazing clarity. No grogginess or headache.
Turns out the big thing is getting pumped pull of air.
Damn! I've spent the past four hours dealing with savage gas pains and cramping and doing my level best to equalize internal pressures.
The doc found and removed three polyps and sent them off for routine biopsy. I get the results in his office Dec. 6.
Another hour or two and I ought a feel reasonably normal again.

Empty and waiting

It's 5:51 a.m. and I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy in a couple of hours - the first since 1968.
I spent yesterday flushing out the pipes with a liquid diet and a couple of doses of an industrial strength laxative. I suppose I should be hungry this morning, but I'm not.
This is not my idea of a good time and I will be deliriously happy to be done with it.
Maria is taking the day off to be with me for the procedure - I'll need a driver to bring me home since they'll wig me out with drugs. That's something they didn't do 38 years ago. I'm supposed to see this as an improvement, but the desire to remain conscious and in control is pretty strong and I'm not eager to relinquish it.
Friends and even strangers tell me this is no big deal and they're probably right. We shall see.

Adios, Clint

Went to the funeral home visitation last evening for Clint Husted.
I was pleased to see his wife had placed a floral arrangement, including his motorcycle boots and Schuberth helmet on the casket.
There were still bugs on the helmet - the mark of a true BMW rider.
Lots of people there - we stood in line for 90 minutes to express our condolences to Lynnette.
I was pleased to see that the video slideshow of Clint's life included this photo I shot a few years ago in Brown County, Ind. That's Clint on the left and Rich Nathan on the right.
We went to dinner afterward with seven other club members at a restaurant run by the nephew of our club friend Dominick. It's an extremely upscale Mexican place with fabulous food and spectacular presentation. They make fresh guacamole at your table and mix some of the best margaritas I've had.
Unfortunately, Friday night is salsa dancing night and we also got a waiter whose brain imploded when we asked him to calculate separate checks. Forty-five minutes later, Dom siezed control of the situation and declared he'd pay the tab and let us know what our share was by e-mail.
I stuffed myself stupid and slept so poorly that I was in no shape to ride or drive to the funeral which is going on at this moment.

What First Amendment?

At the request of my wife, there will be no further references to her children, her ex or any controversy attached to them in this blog.
Maybe it's time to start a new blog elsewhere with names changed to protect the guilty.

Grrrrrrrr

I'm really disgusted with Blogger.
I recently changed over to the beta version and now can't upload photos from my cell phone.
Don't be surprised if you see me move to another blog hosting service.

McMistake

I had to drive to Lafayette to deliver a set of wedding photo CDs and stopped at McDonald's for lunch.
I ordered a Filet-o-Fish sandwich and a medium drink.
What I got was a F-o-F bun with tartar sauce and cheese around a spicy chicken patty.
Tasted odd, but not horrible.

Sad day

This is the second consecutive day of cold November rain, made even more depressing by the news that Clint Husted, a BMW Club member somewhat younger than I, dropped dead yesterday with a heart attack.
Clint wasn't a close friend and I don't recall ever riding with him, but we socialized at club events and rallies, so he was certainly more than an acquaintance. He had recently taken a buy-out and early retirement from General Motors which begs the question whether there was a connection between ending a career and ending a life.
It's certainly not unusual for guys to die within six months of retiring.
Retirement ranks high in the Life Event Stress Scale, well ahead of sex difficulties, the death of a close friend and a change in residence.
He seemed to be focused on the future. On Sept. 22, he responded to a (retired teacher) club member's e-mail teasing that questioned his usefulness and compentence with, "I can assure you that my teaching skills plus supporting individuals in saving money is still greatly appreciated. I am not like some retired teachers who have receded to the depths of watching daily TV, plus being prodded to clean the house."
I have no idea what other stressors were piling up on Clint over the past year to aggravate what I can only suppose was an undiagnosed heart problem.
Looking back at the year following my mother's death and my early retirement, I certainly had my share of stress points:
Death of close family member - 63
Retirement - 45
Marriage - 50
Change in financial status - 38
Mortgage or loan over $10,000 - 31
Change in residence - 20
Total - 247
A score of 150-299 means medium susceptibility to stress-related illness. Anything over 300 means you're really fucked up and are headed for trouble.
Reviewing the last 12 months of my life, I have to really search for any points at all, so I guess that's encouraging.
Clint's widow Lynnette is at the funeral home in Noblesville as I type these words, so we should have the memorial service information soon. The funeral and burial will be in his home state of Michigan, so I don't expect the club will be asked to provide any kind of motorcycle escort here in Indiana.
Anyway, it's a damned shame he had to check out so early.

Skipping and Shuffling

I'd been withholding my classical music xikkwxruib from my iPod because I didn't want to have the third movement of Beethoven's 6th Symphony pop up between the Seeds and Miles Davis or get the Gyuto Monks chanting on the heels of Beck or Neil Sedaka when I have the iPod on shuffle, which is most of the time.
Then today I noticed the option in iTunes track Info, letting me designate a track or an album to be skipped while shuffling.
Hot damn!
Now I can include everything - maybe even my three CDs of sound effects - and segregate out the stuff I don't want showing up in the shuffle rotation.
Seems like I find a new reason to be impressed with the folks at Apple every day that I use that amazing little device.
So now I have something like 6,400 tracks, plus a whole bunch of podcasts and a smattering of music videos and other videos.
The podcast lineup is constantly changing, since iTunes keeps me current on a day-to-day basis.
So now it's gotten to the point that I feel naked if I leave home without it. All this for a gizmo that I was certain, six months ago, that I neither needed nor wanted.
Thanks again, Sean, Steve and Maria. You hit a home run with this birthday gift.

O, frabjous day!

TechTV, the glorious cable/satellite geek network that got bought and killed by the greedy idiots at Comcast, is coming back in an updated internet form.
Undotv.com should be up and running sometime in mid-January with all of the old stalwarts, including Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo.
I've been getting my geek fix via the various Leo Laporte podcasts, but this will be much better.

Short book report

Cool book about the iPod phenomenon.

Oh say, can you see?

Maria spent much of yesterday hunched over her new Bernina sewing machine and tensely complaining there isn't enough light in her sewing room. She's in what is arguably the brightest room in the house with lots of windows and a southeastern exposure with a three-bulb overhead light fixture and a built-in light in her Bernina.
I recognized the complaint as a symptom of presbyopia - the inability of the eye to focus properly on nearby objects, which is a common occurrence in middle-age.
Maria has good vision and has never worn glasses. Her last eye exam was about 13 years ago when she was 30. At that time, her eye doc told her she'd probably need reading glasses when she turned 40.
I've worn glasses or contact lenses since the third grade, so it's no big deal for me, but she was loathe to surrender to the fact that it was time for some vision correction.
So on the way to the Meijer store for our weekly grocery run last night, I explained why people who need reading glasses initially complain that there isn't enough light to see closeup stuff.
There is a phenomenon in photography called depth-of-field. When you close down the aperture on a camera lens, i.e., make the light hole smaller, it makes the light waves more coherent and sharpens the image of objects in front of and behind the point where the lens is focused. The same thing happens with the human eye. When you increase the light intensity, the iris closes tighter and the depth-of-field increases, making closeup objects appear sharper than they did before.
You can get by with adding light for awhile, but eventually you have to turn to reading glasses.
So I suggested we cruise by the pharmacy area of Meijer last night so Maria could try on some reading glasses and see if they helped.
It was, to say the least, an eye-opener for her. The first pair she tried had a magnification factor of 1.75 and she was startled at how much sharper fine print appeared. She tried various lens strengths and finally settled back on the 1.75.
She wore them to do a bit of sewing last night with good results, but refused to take the plastic tag off - keeping her options open to return them (refusing to completely accept the inevitable conclusion that she needs them).
She still has the tag on this morning, but I predict it'll be gone by tonight.
Here's a photo of her taking to her daughter on the phone, eyes closed because she gets disoriented looking at distant objects.


30 minutes later: the tag is gone.

Easy come, easy go...

This post is long overdue. So long overdue that I've lost most of my regular readers.
After all, why check a blog that seemingly never gets updated.
So here's the update.
Since we sold our rental property we've been taking care of lots of things that we put off for lack of ready cash.
We threw about $1,800 at our two cars - timing belt for the del Sol and catalytic converter for the Subaru; got Maria's wedding ring repaired (fractured baguette); replaced the waterlogged and ripped 6-year-old hot tub cover and added a mechanical cover lifter; replaced the cabinet-mounted microwave that died about six months ago; bought Maria an 80GB iPod; added a Nikon 18-70mm lens to the inventory, painted the front porch, got a proper desktop docking station for my Treo 700p; and bought a new Mr. Coffee coffee maker to replace the one that was prone to leaks and spills.
Still to buy: a new work computer (mine is six years old and makes photo editing more of a chore than it should be), and a Nikon D200 for Maria.
The bulk of the proceeds are sitting in a six-month CD while we draft a master plan to rip out the deteriorating wood deck behind the house and raze the two ramshackle garages. In their place, we plan a fenced patio and a proper two-car, two-motorcycle garage with an upstairs skylighted photo studio and offices.

Happy Birthday, Sean

My son Sean is 39 today.
His wife Ruth organized a collaborative gift with me, his mom and his brother Steve.
Together, we came up with enough money for a really good acoustic guitar.
Sean called to thank me this afternoon and it was clear that he was surprised and overwhelmed.
Mission accomplished.

M&M's what?

Hoping to save me from a diabetic coma, my wife took the leftover Halloween candy - mostly mini Reese* cups - to work with her.
But when she called me in to edit copy and do some other work, I found the cache and attacked it greedily. I also found a bunch of trick-or-treat-size packages of those colorful little chocolate candies that melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
As I ripped one open, my eyes fell upon an apostrophe that I never before noticed.
The name on the package is "M&M's."
What?
How can this be? All sentient writers of the English language know that you don't form the plural of anything with an apostrophe.
What the package designer has done, then, is to declared that the contents of the package belong to "M&M." Which begs the question: M&M's what? Little sugar-shelled chocolate candies?

I was stunned and somewhat chagrined that I'd never noticed this before.
So I fired up Google to find out what, if anything, the Ms stand for in M&M.
I seemed to remember the Mars family - the folks who gave us Snickers, Three Musketeers, Milky Way and Mars bars - was involved in it and I was right.
Forrest Mars left his father's successful candy business and struck out on his own, working for a time for Nestle and Tobler in Europe. Some people belive he got the idea for his new candy from sugar-coated chocolate pellets given soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. At any rate, he patented the idea in March, 1941. He did a deal with Bruce Murrie (the other M and a son of Hershey exec William Murrie) that got him access to Hershey's stock of chocolate. World War II was on and chocolate was rationed with Hershey having the enviable position of being the choclatier to the U.S. military.
After the war, Mars bought Murrie out, but kept the M&M name on the product.
Mars died on July 1, 1999, at the age of 95. At the time of his death, his estimated net worth of $4 billion, according to Forbes magazine, made him one of the richest people in the U.S.; his sons, Forrest Mars, Jr. and John Mars are now executives with the company and also said to be worth $4 billion each, along with his daughter, Jacqueline Mars Vogel. Based in Hackettstown, N.J., M&M/Mars employs 30,000 people worldwide with sales of more than $20 billion per year.
But I still can't get over that damned apostrophe.

*And it makes me crazy to hear morons like the counter workers at Dairy Queen prounounce it "Reesy" or "Reesie" cups. Have they never heard of anyone named Reese? Where the last "e" is silent?

Happy Birthday, Steve

Thirty-six years ago tonight, I found myself a father for the second time.
My son Steve was born in Coleman Hospital in Indianapolis on Halloween, 1970.
He took his daughter Lisa trick-or-treating tonight. She's 2½ and was dressed as a kitty.
When I called to wish him a happy birthday a few minutes ago, he said Lisa was deep into her trick-or-treat candy.
"One of her pupils is more dialated than the other," he joked.
Here's a photo from Halloween, 1974 - Steve's fourth birthday and a week before Sean's seventh birthday.

New Who

Endless Wire, the first Who album in more than 20 years, was released today.
Got it on Itunes.

Strange vacation

This time last week we were bearing down on a cheap hotel near the geographic center of the United States in north central Kansas, hauling ass for the Colorado high country.
We arrived at our friends' place in Alma - the highest town in the United States - Monday afternoon for what we expected would be a week-long visit.
But an intense attack of altitude sickness, aggravated by a powerful low pressure system and the threat of a paralyzing blizzard sent us scurrying out of the mountains Wednesday morning.
We did, however, get to visit our friends at the Colorado Mountain Hat Co. in Fairplay where Maria got measured for a very sassy cowgirl hat that just might show up here sometime after Christmas.
We'd also considered the Texas gulf coast and the New England fall foliage as vacation destinations, but it turned out that last week was a crappy time to vacation anywhere but maybe the Pacific Northwest.
Since Maria's vacation days are precious, she was very unhappy about having to abort our mountain sabatical. She was slightly pacified when we noticed a billboard for the Quilter's Harvest quilt store in Higginsville, Mo., along I-70 east of Kansas City. We exited the interstate and found the store where she loaded up on some great fabric that was on sale. So it wasn't a complete wash-out.
Here's a photo of Maria rooting through the bolts of cloth.
I was also able to turn the quilt store ladies onto a fabulous cache of local quilts at the Ray County Museum in Richmond, Mo., just up the road from them, that had previously escaped their notice. I discovered the place while on a Jesse James country tour for RoadBike Magazine about five years ago.
We arrived home about midnight Thursday.
Maria's son Austin had been house/dog-sitting for us and was getting bored since his girlfriend got grounded for being late to school Tuesday morning because she was hanging out here and also because he got downsized out of his pet shop job.
Losing the low-paying pet shop gig is actually a great thing because it forces him to get unstuck and find a better-paying job as a prerequsite to getting out of his dad and stepmother's house and on his own.
Me, I'm just happy to have found a sixpack of Hofbraü Maibok beer at Kahn's Liquors in Carmel. It's a wonderful German bock beer with a fabulous rich taste and a kick like a mule.
And now I'm going downstairs to get another.

Breakfast

At a cafe on the east edge of Norton, Kans.

We're off

We're pulling things together in preparation for a long-overdue trip to the Colorado Rockies.
Maria and I indulged in new Columbia parkas yesterday - mine came with an iPod pocket and a set of headphones in little collar pouches - so we're ready to go looking for winter before it comes to Indiana.
It's still a few minutes before sunrise, but we haven't packed a thing. I took our external hard drive and our photo CD archive over to Maria's parents last night for safekeeping and Maria's son Austin will be here through the week to care for the dogs.
Maria's never taken U.S. 24 across Kansas and eastern Colorado, so I plan to take that route instead of our usual I-70 bullet run.
Well, I must be off.
I will, of course, post from the road.

Can you believe it?

There's only one electrical outlet situated for easy laptop use at Barnes & Noble.
And it's handy to just one table in the cafe.
And it's being used by an Asian Purdue University student who's sitting there grinning at his screen.
I'm down to 21 percent battery, so my photo editing is at a standstill until I can access some AC power.
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I flopped down in an armchair with a couple of Photoshop how-to books and my iPod and by the time I was through paging through the books, the kid was gone.
I quickly pounced on the table and outlet and, as it turned out, it wasn't a moment too soon. The kid came strolling back and seemed startled to see "his" spot taken. Apparently he has a more robust battery in his laptop because he was able to set up at another table and work.
I hunkered down with our most recent set of wedding photos - 1,700+ images - and winnowed them down to 800 and change for posting to our pay-per-print site for friends and relatives of the bridal couple to see and buy.
I'll give them another go-through tonight and try to get the remainder posted.
On the vacation front, it appears that Austin will honor his commitment to house/dog-sit for us, so we're scrambling to get things together for a Saturday departure.
The del Sol came out of the shop with a new timing belt, oil and lube and balanced and rotated tires for about $600. The timing belt is supposed to get changed every 60,000 miles. I had 189,500 miles on my original timing belt, so I figure I've saved $1,200 on timing belts over the life of the car.
The Subaru Forester, which is our traveling car, goes into the shop Friday afternoon for a new catalytic converter.
I can't image being ready to leave by Saturday morning, but we shall see.
Unless the sky falls, in the form of a blizzard in the plains, our destination is sunny Colorado.

McWiFi

No more free WiFi internet access at McDonald's, at least not at the McD at Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette, IN.
They've contracted it out to Wayport and charge $2.95 for a two-hour time block.
So, while I wait for my Honda del Sol to get a timing belt, I'll stroll across the parking lot to Barnes & Noble where the WiFi still isn't free, but the atmosphere is a bit more refined.

Breakfast with Al Roker

Well, kinda.
He's seated across the restaurant from us at the Renaissance Hotel in Oklahoma City.
He carries an Apple notebook computer.
Now I know why the paparazzi don't use cell phone cameras.
His mother should know that he left without finishing his milk.

OK in OKC

We're at the National Newspaper Association convention in Oklahoma City where Maria's paper has won several awards. Here's Maria being very pleased that her convention ID badge has a prize winner ribbon attached to it.
Dinner last night was at the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame, or something like that. We did an abbreviated tour of the museum - mostly the art galleries - and had a sub-par dinner served at room temperature. Hardly worth the $95 a plate, but we weren't paying, so who cares?

En route

Sitting in a plane in Memphis, waiting to take off for Oklahoma City and a newspaper convention.

iStuff

With a Treo 700p and a 60-gig iPod, I'm so deep into geekdom it's almost scary.
I keep finding new ways the iPod, which I previously thought I had no use for, is way cool.
We're contemplating a road trip - most likely to Colorado - in the Subaru in a couple of weeks and it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to play my growing collection of iPod music on the car's stereo system.
So I stopped by Best Buy on Sunday and took a look at the myriad iPod car adapters.
I finally settled on the iTrip by Griffin - a simple tunable FM transmitter/iPod charger that plugs into what used to be the cigarette lighter power outlet.
I passed on models that include a cradle for the iPod, since I use the black rubber-armor case from Speck that would have to come off for the unit to slip into a cradle.
I especially like the Speck protective case because it makes it much less likely that I'll fumble the iPod and drop it. It's taken a couple of short drops without damage, thanks for the case, so I'm pleased with it.
I just went to the Speck website and found they make a similar case for the Treo 700p/w smartphones and I'm thinking about ordering one for my Treo.
But I digress.
As soon as I hooked up the iTrip unit and started playing music through the car' stereo, I realized I had just obsoleted the 6-disc CD changer/player that had necessitated carrying a big case of CDs the last time we went for a long drive.
I suppose we carried 35-40 CDs with us for the changer. With the iPod and iTrip we have (at last count) 5,748 songs, which amounts to somewhere around 500 CDs, plus various podcasts (I'm addicted to Leo Laporte's technology podcasts).
So the iPod, combined with XM satellite radio ought to give us enough listening choices to make Kansas fly beneath our wheels.
I've ripped nearly all of my CDs - just about everything that I'd care to hear on CD (I skipped some lengthy classical stuff, but may go back and revisit that decision) and am now looking for other things to add. Amazingly, the 60-gig hard drive is only one-third full.
Every now and then, I'll hear something on XM or remember some long-forgotten song that I have to then track down on ITunes or - as in the case with today's addition of a Spike Jones anthology and the Beatles White Album - pick up used on Amazon.com.
The song I flashed on over the weekend, then forgot, then remembered and bought last night is a nice additon - Cheap Trick's "Ain't That a Shame." Damn, what a great piece of rock and roll.

Done

It's official: we're out of the landlord business and my parents' house is sold.
Feels kinda strange.

Chilly riding

It's amazing how much of a psychological/comfort difference there is between 62 sunny degrees and 56 cloudy/drizzling degrees.
I left home for errands in Indianapolis under cloudy skies with the promise of a sunny high this afternoon of 62 degrees.
It's 2 p.m. And I haven't seen the sun yet. And I ran into drizzle as I approached downtown Indy.
WTF?
And I was running on fumes when I got to Carmel, hoping to get to the gas pumps at the Meijer store before I ran out of gas. Naturally, I got caught up in a gawker jam going past a the aftermath of a car-truck tangle in the other lanes. The gas gauge on my BMW K1200GT was reading below empty and I ended up putting 4.82 gallons into the tank - about as close to dry as I've ever come with this bike.
But I have the two cameras I came to pick up and am warming up with a vente mocha at Starbucks.
Going back south through the crash scene to the Interstate is out of the question, so I'll take local roads home.
BTW, this is the first photo from my phone's 1.3 megapixel camera that I've posted on the blog. Sure beats the images I got with the Treo 600.

Mom

Today is the sixth anniversary of my mother's death.
I had moved her into a retirement home/nursing facility near my home about six months earlier after she injured her leg in a fall at home.
She was in good hands and with people who cared about her, but she desperately wanted to get back to her house in Delphi where she had lived most of her adult life.
I got a call from the head nurse about 8 p.m. that day telling me my mother had just died. I couldn't believe it. She was in good condition, I thought.
Turns out, the arthritis medicine she'd been on caused internal bleeding and she died in her sleep.
I still blame myself for not spending enough time with her.
And we're selling her house tomorrow.
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Well, not tomorrow after all.
Slow paper-shuffling has pushed the closing date to next Monday. Whatever. That means the tenant owes me another $75 in rent before the house is hers.

Sew what?

Maria, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, is a quilter. A serious quilter who has written for various quilt magazines and who walks the walk as well as talks the talk.
She's knocked out a whole bunch of quilts in the last couple of years, especially after I bought her a Bernina sewing machine.
She visited her favorite fabric store last Saturday, a store that also happens to be a Bernina dealer. She got seduced by the aurora 440 QE, which has a revolutionary stitch regulator - apparently the first machine to ever have it.
She likened it to BMW's groundbreaking antilock brake system for motorcycles introduced in the 1980s.
The machine was on sale with a special 18-months-same-as-cash deal.
Well, only a fool would pass up a deal like that.
So I drove down to the Bernina store yesterday afternoon and bought her one and now she's a very happy camper, er quilter.

Testing

Testing from my Treo 700p.

New phone

Seems like every fall, I get a hankering for a new cell phone.
First it was a flip-phone that my friend Tim Balough sold me very cheap because he'd given up on having Sprint cellular service at his home in Alma, Colo.
Then I got beguiled by the Treo series of phones and picked up an obsolete Treo 300 on Ebay. I used it for a year until I stepped up to a more advanced, but also obsolete by this time, Treo 600.
That was last fall. I really loved the 600 and bought a folding keyboard for it to do blog entries and e-mail while traveling. The built-in camera was crap, but I bought it mainly for e-mail and blogging and phone communications.
The 600 started going crazy on me last week. It wouldn't respond properly to screen taps or keyboard input. I thought it might have a virus or some other data corrpution, but then I noticed it started doing funny things when I wiggled the stylus around in its silo - a clue that the problem was mechanical and, therefore, not something I could fix.
So on Saturday I bit the bullet, went to the Sprint store and stepped up to the top of the Treo food chain (for the moment, anyway), the Treo 700p. (I read this morning that the 750 was released last week in Europe and Asia.)
Anyhow, it does everything better than the 600 and has the advantage of a user-replaceable battery and a 1.3 megapixel camera, plus video and TV.
However, for some mysterious reason, it doesn't interface with my Sprint PCS e-mail account, so I had to create a new account with Gmail, the Google e-mail service. That necessitated changing over with Blogger.com so it would recognize blog entries from my new phone.
Now I have to pick up a folding keyboard and some styli that have ballpoint pens hidden in them. The 700 is Bluetooth-equipped, so I can now become one of those annoying people who walks around with an earpiece seeming to carry on a spirited conversation with themselves. But I promise that if I get a Bluetooth earpiece, I won't do that. Honest.