jdmaddison

Yes, Eleanor has turned 3 today!  We're planning a quiet evening celebration. Eve bought cupcakes to take to Daycare with Eleanor, so I guess there's really two celebrations.

It's snowing quite a bit today. It's notable because it turns my dull gray parking lot window view from my work cube into a beautiful white field dotted with pine trees. (Yes, the trees were already there, but they don't really go with the field of grimy cars).

On Saturday, we picked up otookee and went to United Noodle a fantastic place for Asian foods ranging from noodles to frozen appetizers and all sorts of strange vegetables and exotic fruits.

( and now onto the Warcraft report... )

We stayed in Minneapolis over the holidays and put together some modular furniture. Amethyst now has the top bunk in a set of bunk beds we put together, finally freeing up the space where one of the beds sat in boxes in the basement for a few years. We also put together a dresser for Eleanor (and deconstructed her crib, as she's now in a real bed on the lower bunk). Eve put together a play kitchen mostly by herself (with too many screws!) a month or so ago, which the kids just recently got on Christmas Day.

( Read the Warcraft update... )

Like a lot of places, Minneapolis became sub-zero over part of the weekend and this morning. Brr. Roads were deceptively good-- fine most places except where cars stopped for traffic lights and their exhaust put a thin layer of ice down-- black ice, though with the snowpack on the roads, it looked more like snow. Thankfully, I made it in to work without incident.

( There was quite a bit of Warcraft over the weekend... )

We went to Obento-ya Japanese Bistro last night. The food was tasty, but we probably should've ordered a bit more, given the portions. We were quick to be seated (the very box-like booths were very uncomfortable for those of us without perfect posture) and the order came reasonably quickly. Eleanor really liked the miso soup. The follow-up after that was lacking and it took a bit of standing up and putting on my coat (everyone else having gone out didn't seem to register) before the waiter returned to take my credit card. We'd have order dessert if we'd been asked right away. I think we'd go back again, but we'd likely order everything at the start.

( Read the Warcraft update here... )

Here are some snippets shamelessly borrowed from News of the Weird. I wouldn't normally post this, but it so happens my step-father and some other close relatives live in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and my brother lives in Poway, California. What are the chances both places would be featured in this week's weird news?

Larry and Diana Moyer set out in November from Beaver Dam, Wis., in their oversized RV to spend some warm days in St. Petersburg, Fla. Since they travel with their pets, Jack (Diana's "service" kangaroo) and Edward (an elderly goat that uses a cart for mobility because of front-leg paralysis), their route south was circuitous because of some states' restrictions on "exotic" pets. The RV broke down three times. In Florida, Larry had a stroke and was hospitalized for two days. Then, a fuse box short-circuited, and the RV burned up, torching their money and ID. Diana was hospitalized for smoke inhalation. With Red Cross help, they found a motel that accepted goats (but not kangaroos, so Jack went overnight to a wildlife facility). At press time, according to a Tampa Tribune report, the couple had bought a junk car and were headed home, with Jack curled up in Diana's lap. [Tampa Tribune, 11-18-08]

When the Poway Unified School District near San Diego cut teachers' printing budgets this year, some handout-intensive instructors had to dip into their own pockets to keep their students supplied. Calculus teacher Tom Farber decided in September to sell ad space on page one of his exams, at $10 for a quiz and up to $30 on the semester final. As of November, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune, only parent-sponsored inspirational messages have been bought, but he said he would welcome certain retailers' ads. [San Diego Union-Tribune, 11-22-08]

We got the first hard frost yesterday morning. It seems later than usual. Eve rescued one extremely small cucumber-- at first, I mistook it for a chubby green caterpillar we'd seen a few weeks ago. We got flu shots for the kids on Monday. Hopefully, I'll get one this weekend.

Well, according to Peggy Callahan, Executive Director at the Wildlife Science Center, a non-profit research center, all the documented incidents were shown to be coyotes. That's one of the things we heard when we were up there on Friday. Eve, Amethyst, and I went up to Forest Lake, MN, about 30 minutes north of the Twin Cities, to see the wolves as part of a program put together for Carleton Alumni-- Peggy graduated from Carleton in 1985. Although I was a freshman that year, I don't think we ever met before. Eleanor stayed at daycare, but Amethyst had the day off from kindergarten. We saw wolves-- red and gray, coyotes, raptors, Lynx, and a few other critters. It was interesting. It was amazing what they could do on a limited budget. The state provides free roadkill deer (apparently it's a steady supply) and they get out of prime produce for the bears. The bear enclosure has chickens living in it. They had been intended to be food for the bears, but the bears never figured this out!

Amethyst liked seeing the skunk (de-scented) and porcupine closeup as part of the childrens' program. She also liked the campfire and s'mores they provided as part of the event. The coyotes really did look like wolves, until we saw the wolves-- much, much bigger. It was a good time and we'll take Eleanor along next time. Here's a picture I've borrowed until I replace it with one of the ones I took last Friday.

Amethyst and Eleanor are growing and learning new things. Eleanor is starting to use longer sentences. She recently said, "Mommy, I finished all of it!", while holding out her cup. Amethyst is starting to read. She had gotten a package of Goldfish crackers in her lunch that prominently displayed "100 calories". When Amethyst came home, she proudly announced that she was going to eat the rest of her 100 Goldfish crackers. It's exciting that she can understand numbers like that.

In other news, Warcraft underwent a great reality shift as changes were applied to the servers early Tuesday morning in preparation for a new expansion being released next month.. Staghelm, where my friends and I play, was down for most of Tuesday and Wednesday. I took the opportunity to create a character on a totally different server, Thaurissan, which was already back up.

This one is "PvP", that is, the players in the opposing faction can attack you in neutral territory. It wouldn't seem to necessarily be a good idea, but it's... well, different and we wanted to see what it was like. I also picked a server in the "Oceanic" region, Pacific, that is. Warcraft has day / night cycles that reflect the day / night time where the server is. That means a lot of my play on Staghelm is "after dark". The Oceanic server is about 9 hours ahead, so it's on tomorrow's day time by evening here. Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be much lag on Thaurissan compared to Staghelm, as I might expect if the server were located somewhere in Japan.

I went to a computer conference over the weekend. It was interesting, but the really interesting part was that my company paid for me to go to it. That hasn't happened for a long time. I was down in Bloomington for most of the weekend.

After I came home Saturday night, my home computer abruptly shut down and would not switch back on. I was pretty sure it was the power supply because nothing would light up at all when it was switched on.

That wasn't a whole lot to go on, but the next day I bought a slightly higher watt power supply over lunch and installed it that evening. Despite not remembering just how much of a nuisance reconnecting and rewiring all the power the connections was, I did replace the power supply without any major hitches. That resolved  the problem and I was able to resume my normal scheduled World of Warcraft entertainment.

My step-father is recovering in the VA hospital in Madison, WI, after a scheduled surgery to unblock an artery in his neck. That will unfortunately postpone his hip replacement surgery at least 3 months. He's 85 years old, having outlived both my mother and my father. I can only hope I do half as well, if I live to be that old.

murumatsu  is still in her DBA job at Oracle and still hates it, so nothing new there. She's working part-time, so she can escape the daily grind a little bit and enjoy the summer. She works hard on her time off. I know I couldn't (or wouldn't) do half of it, if I were home part-time, so I concentrate on bringing home a full-time paycheck.

Amethyst is wrapping up the last of her 5 years at Montessori daycare and will be going to full-time kindergarten in September. Full-time is something of a misnomer because it both starts later and ends earlier than a typical 8 or 9 hour job. There's a program called rec+ that should help bridge the time gap between kindergarten and work.

Eleanor has been a busy 2 year old. She really loves going for a walk around the block, which we try to encourage when we can, since it's better for her than watching movies with her sister, which has become a regular evening event.

Dad (me) is still spending way too much time with World of Warcraft, but is choosing to play a bunch of different characters rather than concentrating on leveling a single one as fast as possible. I won't bore anyone with the details here-- look here if you really want some details.

Sorry, it's been a little quiet around here. I've discovered a new and wonderful time sink. Well, it's not so new, and maybe even not so wonderful, but it is for me. David introduced me to World of Warcraft on May 10th, 2008. I've been playing it ever since. It's not the newest game, having been released about 4 years ago, but it is the most popular multi-user online game. Hey, 11 million people can't all be wrong, can they? I guess they can.

I've held off computer games for at least 10 years. I can spend way too much time in them and type way too much, but I've been looking for something fun, something that was the way the Magic: the Gathering card game once was. I haven't kept up with it and it has gotten harder and harder to play well when there's no one who wants to play it near me. The online version has similar problems and actually costs more than a month of WoW, just for a single tournament. I'm not entirely giving up on Magic.

It's neat being excited about a game again. I am spending too much time on it, but I'm trying to balance it with other, more important things.  Like keeping in touch right here with my LiveJournal readers.

Spring is finally here. Some of the posies from last year came back and are blooming. We had Dan, the roto-tilling guy, stop by and till up the garden beds near the house. Friday, we'll get the plants we ordered from the Co-op-- mostly tomatoes, I think, and we'll be all ready to plant them this weekend.

I biked in to work on Monday. It was cold enough in the morning to chill the tips of my fingers exposed from my biking gloves, but it warmed up by the afternoon. Eve's going to bike in tomorrow, so I'll get to drop off the kids at daycare.

It's been a while since I've written I've been reading my friends' posts and lying low. It kind of felt like I didn't really have much to say and finding it hard to sit and type some more after a long day at the keyboard. I think I was getting a bit stressed by things like work. I'll try to write a little more often. I'm not sure I could do justice to describing what's been happening since early January, but I'll mention some of the highlights.

The taxes are done... with the help of TaxCut. I can't understand tax forms-- it's like some strange dialect of English where the words sound the same, but they have strange new and twisted meanings. It took me a while... I finished them on the last day of March. It's been by far the latest it's been done as far as I can recall. I don't feel happy they're done two weeks early-- it feels like they've really been done two months late.

We took advantage of the warm weather last weekend (before the blizzard) and bought Amethyst a bike. For now, the pedals have been removed and she'll ride it kind of like a scooter. It's apparently the latest theory in bicycle training-- better than training wheels for teaching her to balance on it. We'll just have to see.

I went to another Microsoft launch event on Tuesday. It offered a glimpse of some of the new products I might get to work with eventually. The swag was nice-- the giveaways the different vendors had at their booths were interesting-- a light-up transparent pen, a super-compressed and shrink-wrapped shirt looking like a largish hockey puck, a name badge with a flashing red LED on it, a book light that slowly extends an arm with a nice white LED when clicked, not to mention a handful of Microsoft products-- I've learned to not get my hopes up too much with them-- they're usually trials or beta software, but sometimes I've gotten lucky.

There are any number of reasons why I'm glad that LiveJournal is not a high profile site. Here's just a few of them...

[begin techno-rant]

Blogspot Blogs Help Spread Storm Worm Attacks

Malware-Laced Banner Ads At MySpace, Excite

Holiday Spam Quadruples Storm Worm Infections

This last article explains why opening e-cards may not be a good idea. The Storm Worm is a technological nightmare that infects computers and hides itself from normal anti-virus software. The infected computers can then be remote controlled to do anything-- serve up your confidential data or turn your computer into a "zombie" that infects other computers or even attacks web servers. There's very little that can detect the Storm Worm once it has sunk its claws into a computer. You won't notice anything wrong... even if your computer is infected.

Sorry, I know that sounds like some of the "scam-ware" advertisements that want to convince you that your computer has serious problems and only their "for pay" software holds the solution. All I can say is, follow the money. Legitimate products offer free trials or even free versions. The "BlackLight" product from F-secure, http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/ is one free option that can detect root-kits like the Storm Worm. (Choose the last link on the page, "A standalone BlackLight Utility can be downloaded from our Security Center." )

It's scary stuff. The web just should not be this hard to use safely. It is now far more complicated than driving a car, but it doesn't require training , a driver's test or even a license! The more technically savvy readers of this journal may well ask, "How can we trust you -- or these links?"

The short answer is, "I don't have an answer for you." To quote "The Oracle" from the movie, The Matrix Reloaded, “So it’s really up to you. Just have to make up your own darn mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you or reject it.”

If you can, do your own research or work with someone that you know and trust. Otherwise, if you tend to madly click and download anything offered without a second thought -- here, click these links-- they're good for you!

[end techno-rant]

I made pizza tonight-- it wasn't simply torching a frozen 'za, but the real deal. I made the crust in our trusty old Williams-Sonoma bread maker. It took a while, but the result was worth it. I even persuaded Amethyst to eat most of the 1-1/2 slices and not just eat the cheese off the top. She still picked the onions out, but she probably missed some-- the toppings were under the cheese layer. Eve suggested some bits of apple might be interesting and it wasn't too bad.

I finished Emperor and Clown, by Dave Duncan. The story went pretty slowly through the first two books, but it really came together in the third and fourth books. The overall plot was interesting and the conclusion had some wonderful, unexpected twists.hilarymoonmurph's friend Brett was kind enough to lend me the last two volumes in the series, since none of the area libraries had them, despite having the first two.

I have sometimes wondered if perhaps my mundane entries to this journal might just bore the average reader. After all, I'm not writing a novel or really doing anything particularly noteworthy, or so it seems. Unless I count CD collecting (2,531 listed on LaLa, so far) or my quest for better living through new technology, such as this gizmo, or the typical trials of raising a family. Except possibly today.

Today was pretty cold-- near 0 degrees F, but there wasn't too much wind. I stayed inside as much as I could, reading Dave Duncan's Perilous Seas. Still, there were the outside tasks I had mentioned before-- changing Eleanor's car seat to face forward in Eve's car and hanging up the bikes in the garage.

I went out and moved Eve's car halfway out of the garage to make it easier to hang the bikes, but I decided to start with the car seat.  I'm bundled up pretty well, but I'm feeling the chill and I'm trying to get it done quickly (my bare hands got real cold, really fast). I got it turned around, clipped the latch strap from the top of the car seat to the anchor point beneath the rear window, and then I started to push the seat belt buckle through the opening at the back of the car seat. I get it about halfway through and I decided to reposition myself and pull it all the way through from the other side.

As I withdrew my right hand, I noticed it was stuck. I figured I might have to scratch my wrist a bit getting it out, but the harder I pulled, the more it hurt. I was getting nowhere fast. I wasn't losing circulation or anything in my hand, but it was definitely uncomfortable. So, with my left hand, I unhooked the latch strap and brought  the offending car seat into the house, still quite attached to me.

Eve came to my rescue and fetched various objects that I thought might possibly help. We tried hand lotion and some other stuff, such as a dish towel, a crowbar and a wire cutter, but I didn't want to actually destroy the seat if I could avoid it. By this time, I'd figured out that it was two plastic nubbins to guide the seatbelt through, that were keeping my hand stuck. I started trying to use a butter knife to slide my wrist over one of the obstructions, but it just drove my wrist into the other one.

I thought to try taping over the things with some masking tape, but the tape had a hard time sticking and it didn't help. Eve then came up with the idea of using duct tape to smooth over the bumps. We covered the spots with it and I finally detached my hand form the car seat. Whew, what a relief! I think that's got to be the 1,002th use for duct tape. It certainly beat calling 911 and waiting for the "jaws of life" to tear the car seat apart.

Afterward, I had to admit I was puzzled, though-- I thought I had done this particular maneuver with that seat before-- gotten my hand in -- and -- out once before with no problem (at the time, I had been hurriedly trying to get the car seat secured in the window seat on a jet, so we could take off). Eve pointed out that it was always the other car seat that we'd taken when flying. Oops.

We had lunch and then I went back out to finish the job. I learned my lesson, but I also made sure I had my cell phone with me... just in case. The rest of the day was comparatively uneventful.

Just hanging out for a while waiting for the year to end. The kids are in bed. We went out for ice cream (Cold Stone) after dinner, so there was a little fun shared by everyone. Amethyst doesn't exactly understand what's going on tonight, but she understands that we'll put up the new calendars tomorrow. That's enough for now. It'll also be time to hang up our bikes in the garage. We've turned Eleanor's car seat to front facing in my car, and we'll switch around her car seat in Eve's car tomorrow as well.

In a few minutes, it'll be time to light the gas fireplace and sip a little champagne with Eve.

Happy New Year!

I have finally finished building a GORM. Not the Star Trek alien, that's a Gorn. It's simply a free standing storage shelf made out of pine boards that I'd bought this last fall. Until yesterday, it was contributing to the clutter in the basement workroom, rather than alleviating it. I'd brought the pieces in from the garage once it started to dip below freezing -- a few months ago and it sat the rest of the time on the floor of the workroom. I hadn't exactly figured out where it would go, but I decided to replace a metal utility shelf that was still standing only because it was leaning against the stuff next to it. I took that one and reinforced it with the nuts and bolts I'd kept as spares from long ago.

I put the old metal shelf unit in a new location between the workroom and the laundry room. If it doesn't fall apart, I'll move a bunch of the boxes of Magic cards I've collected over the years out of the main basement area where I have too much other stuff. That's been at the center of my plan to reorganize the basement office area.

I suppose it's not a particularly good omen for my continued interest in card playing. I haven't played Magic in months and even then, it's been only in tournaments where the cards were included in the entrance fee. I'm not ready to give up on collecting the cards yet, but I'm certainly slowing down on playing. Online Magic is way more convenient-- the game shops where I've played are quite some distance away and legion_i_am's store is 21 miles away, in addition to being on the other side of the 35W bridge that collapsed.

Speaking of which, I ran across a picture I took of the 35W bridge as we went underneath it on a boat cruise on the Mississippi, four years ago. It's still hard to believe something that big is now completely gone-- even the wreckage has been removed as the new bridge is already being built.