From Dave Winer on his Harvard Blog site: What Makes a Weblog a Weblog? Dave is a Harvard Fellow teaching weblogs. He was also a prime mover and shaker behind various weblog technologies and major products like Manila and Radio.

To me, a weblog is a simple way to publish words to a worldwide audience. Publishing was always the fifth part of the Writing Process, and now it's attainable without having to enter Scholastic writing competitions or submit your stuff to the school literary magazine. For adults (or anyone), it gives you a way to express yourself, and even if no one reads it, a way to help you organize your thoughts. Weblogs rock.

No post until later--The Columbia Drive-in calls with Finding Nemo and Daddy Day Care!

Perhaps I should slow down with the war stories. Their aura may be catching up with me. Then again, I always said life with me was never dull.

As I gathered the kids into the car to go to day care this morning, I found that I couldn't start the car. Literally. I couldn't turn the key in the ignition. As I pulled it out to reseat it, the problem became obvious: a third of the key was gone, broken off.

I began to pull the steering column apart, but then thought better of it and tried the key again. Desperate and persistent key jiggling eventually paid off, and I managed to start the car. My one thought: what if the rest of the key is broken off in the lock?

I dropped the kids off at day care (leaving the car running), and then parked it at work. At the end of the day, I managed to turn the key in the ignition after some extended effort, and drove home.

Luckily, my wife's key worked in the ignition, so either the broken piece wasn't in the lock or it disintegrated under my withering gaze. I went out immediately and had a couple of extra keys made.

Extra points to anyone who notices the small oddity in this story....

As I finished the last Denny's entry on the back room strip-o-gram, Whose Line Is It Anyway on the television presented Wayne Brady with a sketch involving what else but a strip-o-gram?

Huh. Weird. That's synchronicity for you.

It's late, I've been working all week on crunch stuff from work, I could be knocking out work stuff right now, but forget that--I have a war story begging to be told.

A friend of mine from Denny's Restaurants, Fran Wooters, mentioned that I haven't posted a war story from Denny's. Man, where to start? There are so many, and I've ended up in the hospital from one of them. For some reason, the first one that asks to be told is a mild one--at least, if you consider strip-o-grams to be mild.

This post just tests Frequency's ability to post to MovableType.

Hey, it works! Frequency rocks yet again.

Well, my experiment with the weblog writing tool Movable Type proved more successful than I anticipated. I've used Radio Userland since I began this weblog in early 2002, but I've always been open to other blogging tools. Blogger showed promise, but MT has everything I want (at least so far).

Last night I exported all of my posts from Radio and imported them into my Movable Type system. Now everything is in Movable Type--I brought the system live just after midnight, and you're reading it right now. It was that easy. I thought it would take a few days or weeks, but boom--it's done. You may not notice much of a difference on the surface, but under the hood, everything's changed.

The only real glitch in the move was that all my posts came over dated as 1902 and 1903 entries. Wow. It was a little surreal to see that I apparently posted to this weblog one hundred years ago. I had to correct them before I went any further. Go figure.

Welcome to SplitFocus on Movable Type!

Slashdot has a good newsbit and discussion over the possibility of smart phones replacing PDAs.

I think this is likely. If I can get a phone to replace my PDA, I will go for it in a minute. Why carry two devices when I could just carry one?

The Slashdot conspiracy group has a good time with this one--"I will never put my information on a device that can be spied on by the outside world every time I make a phone call!"

Dave Winer on Scripting News wrote about his realization that weblogs weren't inherently better than professional publications.

I'm not sure why this was a surprise to him. It isn't to me. I like weblogs because of their immediacy and intimacy. I feel like I get more of the people behind the print with weblogs. I would never, however, blindly trust a weblog more than a professional publication. Frankly, I wouldn't trust either of them without filtering the news myself and checking multiple sources.

The act of reading does not relieve us of the act of critically thinking about what we have read.

I see as much bias in a weblog as I see in other publications. I think the best thing about weblogs is that I can more easily identify an author's particular leanings. Try comparing Talking Points Memo to The Daily Dish, to pick two random examples.

I love my job, and I honestly look forward to work each day. I do have one minor rant about it, however. My technology systems are so integrated into virtually everything the district does that my team is involved with almost everything in the district. Even worse, we're thought to be involved in things for which we have no logical (or actual) responsiblity.

It's become a sad fact that people who have dropped the ball on a project will sometimes try to blame the technology involved. I then have to go on an "obstacle clarification operation" to point out the true flaws in someone's project. They kick and scream all the way, because it usually exposes their own balldropping. I also have to do this in such a way that they can save face and get back on the job to get the thing done right (like they should have done in the first place instead of blaming technology). What a weary waste of my time!

Technology seems to be the mystical force of this age. People blame it for things like they used to blame the rain and thunder gods for storms. It's become the automatic scapegoat and whipping dog for poorly managed projects everywhere. Can't people just own up to their own actions? Hey, I make lots of mistakes, all the time--just ask my wife. But my secret weapon seems to be saying I'm sorry, fixing it, and moving on. I kid you not--people are at a loss for words when I take responsibility for something and apologize. It really deflates them and takes all the argument out of them. Moving on from there and fixing things is easy then. Why don't more people try it? It's a big timesaver, believe me.

The other problem in my organization is the drive to define everything as technology. I get you a computer. Then I'm supposed to get you a power surge protector? OK, I can see a justification for that. What? You want a table for the computer? That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? What? No we don't buy you a chair to go with that. No, I wouldn't define that as technology. No, I don't buy you paper for the printer. Paper is a warehouse item that they've stocked for forty years--you can get it from them. No, it's not considered technology. Really.

Why is my department responsible for almost every initiative in the district, no matter how mundane or unrelated to technology? It's actually true that someone once thought we were accountable for the copy paper the district supplies for printers. We have nothing to do with consumables.

We would probably be held responsible for toilet paper if someone could tie it to technology.

But here's another pic. Drew had a good time at music class with Dad this spring.

(Just to prove I will use anything to keep my kids in line...)

As I was getting ready for work yesterday, Drew made an observation: "Daddy, you have a BIG--FAT--HUGE--TOE!" (no, it's not that big--well, maybe in comparison to Drew's little toes it is)

"Really, Drew? I guess so..." I said. Then I had an idea. "Drew, you need to get dressed now--we'll be late."

Drew resists.

"Drew, if you don't get ready now, the Toe will be very disappointed. It may be upset. I can't vouch for the Toe. It may come after you."

Drew expresses disbelief. I wiggle the "Toe" and move it closer to him.

"I'm telling you Drew, you need to get dressed now! I can't control the Toe! IT'S COMING FOR YOU..."

Drew screams and giggles, and more importantly scurries into his room and gets his little butt dressed.

Mock my parenting "skills" if you wish, but they get results. My kids had better behave--they never know when the "Toe" may come back to keep them in line...

While I was driving the kids home from day care, my wife Denise called me on the cell phone. As I sometimes do, I passed the phone to Alyssa (my five year old) and let her take the call. The conversation went like this:

Alyssa: Hi, Mommy!

[More conversation]

Alyssa: Mommy, we have some treats to eat! They came from Kayla for her birthday! They're round and full of sugar. They have LOTS of carbs. [they were LifeSavers]

Denise: [Asks Alyssa how she knows about carbs]

Alyssa: I figured it out, Mommy! Daddy can't eat carbs, and he can't eat sugar. Sugar is carbs!

[Conversation continues, ends]

Me (Beaming over my little girl and how I "taught" her about carbs): Alyssa, you learned about carbs from me?

Alyssa: Yep, Daddy.

Me: That's great, Alyssa. You know--

Alyssa: I learned it from you talking waaay too much about it.

I guess my next low carb meal will be humble pie.

My oh my.

This thing is pretty slick.

Ran across this pic today--Drew last Christmas at Uncle Jeff and Aunt Lisa's (he got happy again later...):

[This is the fifth and final part of the true story of my '76 VW Camper's fire and resulting odyssey]

As the night grew darker and we drove across North Carolina toward I-81, Denise asked me how long I could keep driving. I told her all night, no problem. In truth, I wasn't fond of all nighters. I was so relieved at a functioning van, though, that I put some tunes on the stereo and just drove. Never underestimate the power of good tunes to extend your driving capacity, especially if you can sing along (James Taylor comes to mind instantly).

As we hit I-81 (in Virginia, I think) I told Denise to go lay down in the back cabin seat and get some rest. I kept driving. As we moved further north, the temperature dropped steadily.

At 2:00am or so, the temp had dropped enough that it was pretty chilly (it'd hit the low 40s). I pulled over, went into the back, and fired up the propane heater ("Heats like the Sun!" was its slogan). It was a catalytic heater on which you screwed a small can of propane for fuel. Car heat, you ask? Remember--I'm in an air-cooled Volkswagen Transporter. There's no such thing as car heat. Remind me sometime to tell you about heat exchangers and how they're the biggest failure of German engineering (including exhaust gas leaking into the passenger compartment--but that's another story).

At any rate, Denise woke up enough to mumble something, and I told her to go back to sleep. I drove on into the night, or morning as it was becoming. After 3:00am, we entered a neat part of I-81 where you drive through four states in a few hours: Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I was into Pennsylvania and passing Greencastle, PA by 4:30am.

Believe it or not, we pulled into our driveway in Mount Holly Springs, PA at 5:45am. We made incredible time. I didn't care if the van died on the spot now--we'd made it home. Denise decided to freshen up and head back down I-81 to Greencastle for her interview. I thought she was insane.

Me, I called Michelle Oliver at Cumberland Valley School District and called out sick. This was a bit strange, because daily substitutes didn't usually call in sick, but I was beyond remorse.

Epilogue


Denise got the job, a half-year long term sub position with Greencastle/Antrim School District.

After flawlessly motoring almost 700 miles that night, the van never ran smoothly again with the Weber carburetor system. I made endless adjustments to it, but never got it to avoid stalling at stop signs.

Eventually I replaced it with a dual carb system, which elevated my van to the unheard of mileage of 22 mpg. Unfortunately, the dual carbs had no built-in chokes. This meant that my engine backfired for fifteen minutes every time it needed to warm up.

Finally I replaced the dual carbs with fuel injection again--I even used some parts from my charred system (they'd put the burnt parts in a cardboard box for me in Savannah--I'd never thrown them out). I learned a lot about VW Bus engines.

The propane heater is gone now, but not before it melted my heavy parka because of too-close contact. I have the parka with its melted spot to this day (the heater departed my ownership shortly thereafter).

John Heath is (I'm sure) in happy retirement now, fooling around with VWs in his spare time--he deserves it.

The VW Bus itself was sold the following fall after 17,000 miles to Bruce Kelly to help pay for my wedding. I've seen it in a field by his old house in the last year. I've thought about buying it back and trying to restore it. Do I dare?

[This is the fourth part of the true story of my '76 VW Camper's fire and resulting odyssey]

We awoke in the morning and went to the VW dealer to hang out until the van was done. It was January 3rd, 1990, and fairly warm in Savannah (in the sixties, if I recall correctly). Our main concern was January 4, 1990, the following day. Denise had a very important job interview in Greencastle, PA for a long term substitute teaching position. The interview was at 8:30am. She'd decided to stay with me and the van. I wasn't at all sure that she had placed her bet on the right horse (or van, as it were).

We were still unsure that the replacement carb kit would work. We were throwing all of our trust into John Heath, the mechanic who was willing to take on our job. He began ripping off the bad fuel lines at 8:00am. The fuel injectors would be next, and then the manifold, and then the rest of the charred pieces. It would all be replaced by our Weber carburetor kit parts.

We waited. For a long time. To relate the tedium that we endured would do the reader a grave disservice. To be brief, we waited all day. Literally.

At 4:45pm, we heard the van start. It ran. We looked around and saw a flash of orange go by the outside window (I did tell you the van was orange, didn't I?). This was very, very good news.

Five minutes later the van pulled back into the lot and into the service garage. John got out and went back to the van's engine compartment. I could see him gently tug on the carburetor cable with a finger to test the linkages. He was smiling.

He came inside to the service desk and told us everything was a go. They wrote up our ticket and we settled the bill. We were never so glad to pay for nine hours of repair time in our lives.

It was almost 5:00pm. We loaded up the van with our stuff and took off for Pennsylvania. We got back on I-95 and headed north. I decided to cut across the Carolinas in a bid to get to Interstate 81 and take it to Pennsylvania. If I was lucky and we made great time, we might just barely make it back home in time for Denise to have her interview. Night closed in as we motored up the eastern seaboard.

I know i'm just a geek, but this made me laugh out loud (and not just because of Zombo.com).

I just got back from Lititz, where I got to play my guitar in a huge jam session. There were 125 or so of us, all playing our guitars in two songs for a nice-sized crowd. We played one of three parts in each song. I played the easiest part, since I don't know how to play guitar much at all. In fact, my only guitar is a 12 string Fender acoustic with half the strings currently taken off to make it a 6 string (If you're reading, Scott--yep, it's the same one I bought in college with you). I was pretty happy to be able to keep to the music on the sheet (especially since I don't read music). It's the first time in my life I've ever performed with a musical instrument in front of an audience.

The second part was cooler, though. Phil Keaggy came out and played a full concert for us. He was awesome. I never knew a guitar could be played in so many ways. The coolest parts were during his extended jams. The guitar came alive in his hands. At times it almost seemed that the guitar was playing itself and Phil was just tending it. That's a really cool place for a performer to be.

He was funny, too. His ability to go off on a tangent rivals my own--and that's saying a lot.

Truly a great night.

[This is the third part of the true story of my '76 VW Camper's fire and resulting odyssey]

A good first step in finding a foreign parts store is the good old Yellow Pages. I asked for one at the dealer's service counter, praying that it wasn't a toy phone book like the one in the rolling hills of North Carolina. It wasn't. We found a lone prospect and called them up to ask where they where. We were at the VW dealer, they asked? Yep. Well heck, they said. We were just two blocks away. Just on the other side of the new Comfort Inn from the dealer. Did they have VW fuel systems? Sure they did. Come on over.

I am not making this up.

It was truly amazing. I was flabbergasted. We left the dealer for the two and a half block walk to the parts store. As we walked, the history of the VW Bus ran through my head in the imaginary voice of the late Heinz Nordhoff, ex-President of VolkswagenAG (OK, it didn't really, but hey, it's my story, right? Keep reading...). "The Volkswagen Transporter began in 1952, with refinements up to 1967. In 1968, the body changed, and in 1972, the engine changed to the Type 4 engine. In 1974 the camper poptop changed, and in 1975, the Transporter gained a new fuel injection system that lasted until the model was superseded by the Vanagon in 1980." I had a burned-up fuel injection system that would cost thousands to replace, but I had the same engine that'd used carburetors two model years before. This compatibility was my only chance. I knew there were carb retrofit kits--I'd seen them in magazines. Would I be lucky enough to find one or overnight one into the parts store? We walked into the parts store and I explained my problem. Could they get something in for me quickly?

The guy behind the counter just smiled and pointed up in the air behind him. There on top of the parts shelves, prominently displayed, was a Weber carb kit. It wasn't a dual carb kit like I'd hoped, but it was there. I was looking at it. It was for my bus. I couldn't believe they had it in stock.

The parts guy acted surprised. "Oh yeah," he said. "We always have one in. It's a very popular conversion." Well, it was sure as heck a popular conversion with me at the moment. It was $235. I pulled out our credit card, reserved for emergencies. I hated to use it, but if I'd ever seen an emergency, this was it (you have to be careful about these credit cards--they can become a problem if unchecked).

Armed with our lifesaving Weber carb conversion kit, we marched back past the Comfort Inn to the dealership. I'd debated replacing the thing myself, but I felt better having the dealer do it. But would they?

Yes, they would. For straight time. As long as it took. And it wouldn't be today, either. It was after five already.

We made the arrangements, grabbed some essentials from the van, and left the dealership. We headed over to the aforementioned Comfort Inn and checked in for the night. Tomorrow would hopefully be a better day.

[This is a continuation of the true story of my '76 VW Camper's fire and resulting odyssey.]

Within a few minutes, Denise and I had hitchhiked to the next I-95 exit in South Carolina, leaving the Campmobile behind. We then began to hike our way along a long country road with few houses in sight. In fact, the only houses we could see were some small trailer homes dotted along the next half mile of the road. We decided to ask to use the phone (we did have our AAA card, at least, so emergency service was a possibility). This was before cell phones of course (I didn't even have my first car phone until several years later). The first house was no help. They didn't have a phone. They were serious--nada. So we tried the next house. They didn't have a phone either. The third house was also sans phones, but they did say that the people 3 houses down were the ones in the neighborhood who had a phone. To say that we were in a remote location would be kind. To say we were in hell would be not far from the truth.

So we trekked down (and over, and up) to the "lucky phone house" and asked to use the phone. The phone was on top of a tiny phone book, thin, about 5 inches by 8 inches. I'd never seen one like that (although I've seen them since). We called AAA, and got a ride back down to the exit. The AAA guy eventually picked us up and we rode back to the van. Once he'd hitched up the van, we started heading up to the next exit again, over the bridge and back on to I-95 south--back into Georgia. You see, the only VW dealership was sixty miles back down I-95 in Savannah. Oh, joy.

So we rode in the AAA truck back into Georgia, back into Savannah, where we (and the van) were dropped off at the local VW dealership. The dealership checked in the van and put it in the shop. From then on it was Wait City. Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

More waiting.

And this was the first five minutes.

Realistically speaking, We had burned the engine in the morning, and it was only one o'clock or so in the afternoon. It hadn't been that long (yet), but time stretched agonizingly. From time to time, I walked outside and explored the lot. In the back, they had an old VW Thing (you know, the original SUV--a jeeplike creature). Is this my worst case scenario, I wondered? Will I have to resurrect this shaky looking contraption and muscle it to Pennsylvania? I refused to consider the possibility.

At four o'clock I'd had enough. I went up to the service counter and asked for someone who could tell me what was going on with my van. I knew they'd seen it, so what was the holdup?

The service manager came out with the mechanic. They looked surprised that I was asking about the van. I restrained my urge to scream (I'm a levelheaded person, but this situation made me white-lipped).

"What's the deal? Tell me now--I need to know my next step here," I said.

The service manager spouted some nasty terms about fire damage and my van, and more fire damage, and more about my van, and then said the words that rocked me: "Have you called your insurance company, Mr. Mancuso?"

OK--education time here. My van was worth maybe $1,500 to $2,000, so I had absolutely no collision and (more importantly) no comprehensive insurance on it. Just good old liability coverage. What would the insurance company do for me? Mail me a courtesy tissue so that I could cry into it?

I explained this to the service manager in sentences that, while agitated, were (to me) carefully measured out and controlled. I accidentally set my now desperate vision and mission in one last statement: "You can't tell me that this van is a total loss! There must be a way to get it running again!"

I had one crazy gamble to make. If the damage was as superficial as I thought, it was limited to the fuel system. If so, all I had to do was find a 1976 VW Transporter Campmobile replacement fuel system within the hour and within walking distance of the dealership. Easy, right? Sure.

Yes, you're right. The easy solution would have been the dealership themselves. Unfortunately, that would have been too easy. They had nothing in stock (and nothing in my price range anyway). Go figure. I turned to Denise. She didn't even need to ask "What now?" We started the quest to find our replacement 1976 VW Transporter Campmobile fuel system at 4:30pm on January 2, 1990.

State College was...interesting. For those of you who are unaware by the way, State College (zip code 16801) is the name of the town where Penn State is located. Kind of. Actually, at some point the campus itself gained its own zip code (16802) and the town name "University Park, PA."

At any rate, both State College and University Park have changed a lot in the last ten years or so. It's becoming a vastly different place from my home there in the late '80s. I lived north of town, where little existed. Now it's a city, with Best Buys, and huge malls, and monstrous condo complexes.

Campus isn't much better. They're constructing buildings on top of buildings. They're even making buildings that stretch across roads--apparently they've run out of actual land to build on.

Oh well--it was still a nice place to visit. Walking downtown was somewhat nostalgic; it hasn't changed at all, really. And Pattee (excuse me, the Pattee and Paterno) library was truly amazing. I could have spent hours in there.

But my car with flashers in the fifteen minute loading zone would likely have been towed away. Parking at least in State College hasn't changed a bit.

Wow. On the season finale of West Wing, they just made the acting President of our country John Goodman.

Stunning.

I'm off to State College, PA for the next couple of days, so weblog posting may be infrequent. I'll continue to post to the local weblog on my machine, and hopefully everything will catch up by Wednesday this week (continuing the saga of the crispy-fried Campmobile).

[Foreword: This is a story that for an unknown reason I want to tell in five acts, like the old Streets of San Francisco TV show (and Shakespearean plays too, although its literary merit is highly questionable)].

This is a true story. It happened over Christmas vacation in 1989.

Act I: Is It Against The Law to Yell "Fire!" In a Crowded Campmobile?

In retrospect, I should have known disaster was imminent. I knew the flaws in German engines, and I'd even warned others of the problem that I was about to face. As is my way, I managed to bring things to a head at the worst possible moment.

It was Christmas vacation in 1989. I'd bought a used VW Campmobile three months before, and I'd been fixing it up. It was an awesome vehicle. It had a stove, a sink, a clothes closet, and a poptop roof with an "upstairs" bunk to sleep in. It was a '76, the second year with fuel injection (with which I became intimately familiar with--keep reading). I'd decided it would be a great idea to drive down from Pennsylvania down to Florida with my wife Denise (although to be exact, Denise was my fiance then--I had just asked her to marry me the month before). We'd decided to vist my parents in Sarasota. We left on Christmas Day (which is another story--that was the year that I learned not to defrost a Christmas turkey at room temperature in the summer house. They decompose rather quickly). The vacation was great, and I'd managed to do some work to get the Westy Campmobile looking really nice (as nice as an orange '76 VW Westy can look, at any rate). The vacation passed without incident, and on the first day of the new year, we started back toward PA. We made good time on the highways, and that night we stayed at a campground in Georgia by the ocean.

The next morning on January 2nd, we got back on I-95 and started north. Denise was driving, and I was reading a Calvin and Hobbes book as we motored through Georgia.

At 10:00 or so, we passed into South Carolina still on I-95. If you've ever heard a '72-'79 VW Bus engine, you know the thrum it makes when everything is well. My Westy was making that thrum.

At 10:30 AM, something changed. It was strange--I sensed it before I consciously recognized it. It seemed to happen in slow motion. As my Spidey sense went off, I turned my head to look at the rear of the bus. There, under the rear bench seat, I saw a heating vent. Out of the vent, Mission Impossible style, I saw wafts of smoke wave out into the cabin.

I said to Denise (I recall the exact terror-stricken words) "PULLOVERPULLOVERPULLOVER!!!" As she came to a halt on the shoulder of the road, I grabbed from the glove compartment a small fire extinguisher I'd hoped never to use. In a mixture of panic and purpose, I jumped out of the van and ran to the back hatch. I opened the hatch (in retrospect, a very stupid move--what if the fresh oxygen had caused an explosion?). Looking in, I saw orange flames on the engine, licking the ceiling of the compartment. Plastic and rubber parts were stretching like taffy in the heat. Everything was on fire.

I let loose the fire extinguisher, spraying it all over the engine. The fire went out, leaving a smoldering ruin. Denise came back and I showed her the damage. German fuel line rubber was notorious for cracking when aging in air-cooled Volkswagens, and then spraying gasoline all over old VW engines. We'd just witnessed a prime example at fifty-five miles per hour.

Denise asked the critical question. "What now?"

The engine wouldn't start again. The van was dead. We were stranded. We gathered some things and locked the van up. On I-95, forty miles into South Carolina, we started hitch-hiking to the next exit.

There's a great article on the new iTunes music store application by the Associated Press. This will be out for Windows users by the end of the year, so just wait.

From the article: "That Apple's store sold a million tracks in the week following its April 28 launch apparently shocked record executives, who said they would have been satisfied with a million in a month."

I'm four songs (and four dollars) of that million. Count me in. 99 cents per song or $9.99 per album fits me fine.

Four years ago tonight I was at York Hospital with my wife waiting for little Drew to appear. We didn't know it was him, of course (we didn't even know it was a boy!), but there he was. The labor was much easier than with Alyssa. In fact, I didn't feel a thing (Hmmm--my wife is about to hit me). They got the epidural in right away and Denise kind of eased her contractions along all night (you bet she got the epidural--no toughing it out for us. Heck, I tried to get them to give me an epidural too.). We both dozed all night (at least I dozed), and at 7:55 am the next morning, while I was talking to my sister on the phone, they said it was time to push. I said goodbye to Lisa and 8 minutes later at 8:03 am, Drew was born.

Drew would repay us for the easy birth by screaming for the next 12 solid months. He did eventually stop (except for "special" occasions, of course), and we've now regained at least 18 percent of our sanity...

I made some spaghetti for the kids today (since I cook low carb I rarely make them pasta). During dinner as they were eating and talking back and forth I suddenly had a sense memory. I was suddenly in my grandmother's home in Hazleton in her basement, where she used to make spaghetti from scratch. My sister and brother and I used to run around this house from top to bottom like-well, like little kids (and it had an attic, so we're talking four floors here). My grandmother used to make sausage in the basement too (it was set up as a second kitchen), and hang it up to cure. She also used to make "Pumpkin Flowers," which were out of this world. They were squash flowers dredged in (I think) egg, flour, and cheese and pan fried. We had good times there. It's funny how my kids remind me of specific memories in my own childhood. I miss my grandmother--she died in 1988 on the day I met my wife--but I'll always have my memories of her. I hope I can give my kids great childhood memories like mine to carry through their lives.

Nothing beats snuggling your kids to protect them from the thunderstorm.

Part of raising your kids is remembering your true, best self.

As we drove to day care today, I turned on Pink Floyd's Animals album and played the "Pigs on the Wing (Part 2)" track.

"Listen, guys; do you hear that noise? What is it?"

"It's pigs, Daddy!"

"Yep. This song has pig noises on it. Keep listening--they make pig sounds a few more times."

(Two minutes later)

"Daddy, I hear the pigs again."

"Yep, there they are, Drew."

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Drew?"

"Are the pigs the ones making the music?"

Mike and I passed our Apple Service Certification tests today. If we didn't pass by the deadline, our employer would have lost its authorization as a Apple Self Servicing Provider. So it's a good thing we made it through the three tests (desktop computers, portable computers, and operating systems support). It's somewhat insane to take all three at once, but we had a plan. What was our plan? Um, to begin studying on Friday night and work through the weekend. There really wasn't any earlier time to do it, and we knew the stuff, so the weekend was review and catch-up details.

Besides, if you look up "power-cramming for tests" in the dictionary, I'm pretty sure the definition lists my name in big gold letters...

Ars Technica has a great and humorous review of iTunes 4 (if you can get past the first page of Steve Jobs as a homeless man and the white on black text of the Ars Technica website).

One quote from the article:

"I pitted iTMS, without an Altivec-enhanced RDF unit, up against the evil that is P2P, which I had to download--talk about a shocker! They expect you to pay for it! Hard working authors of software that makes it possible to get other hard working authors' work for free expect you to pay them. It is faith on a scale that surpasses Steve Jobs on his best Megahertz Myth making day. Setting aside the obvious argument that I have no intention of paying for something that helps me steal (infringe on copyrights), does it really make sense to turn over a credit card number to people who might suddenly find themselves with a court order to their head, demanding they turn over their customer list? Of course, I'm sure they'll bite down on the fake tooth and fire off the electromagnetic shotgun at their servers on that terrible day. Sure."

The Profile (The Old Man of the Mountain) in New Hampshire crumbled and fell sometime in the past few nights (no one is sure when, because clouds covered it for much of the past few days). It was a naturally formed rock outcropping that looked like the craggy profile of a man's face if you looked at it from the right angle.Franconia Notch was a great place to camp--I stayed there in 1994. The Profile was just rock, but it's still a bit sad. The story is here.

From the Christian Science Monitor comes a girl's diary of her piece of the Iraqi war. "[The twins] say the soldiers were nice and both are pleased with this happy meeting. Are they really nice? Nobody knows but God."

My top nonfiction book would have to be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book is a new journey each time I read it. Each time I pick up a little more of the Metaphysics of Quality. It's a powerful book. I'm not sure if it completely ties together Western and Eastern philosophy as it claims, but it's good stuff.

The title above is from the book Ben and Jerry's: The Inside Scoop. In the early days of their company, Ben and Jerry would occasionally need to fire people who just couldn't do their jobs at all. So they would start saying to each other "The monster is hungry, The monster must eat." That was the code that meant Ben was going into monster mode and letting someone go.

It means something different to me now. This blog is slowly growing into something of a monster itself, and it seems to need me to feed it words every day. Right now it's lived on meals of "link posts" for a while, but it wants more war stories. It wants a lot of them. Some of the stories it wants are big. I have to chop these stories up into manageable sections though, or they'll never get done. I hesitate to put some of these stories to words, since they cast some doubt on my relative sanity, but they all happened a long time ago and things have changed, right? Besides, I don't think there's really a question of my sanity--it's been gone now for a long time. ;-) I think I'm out of time tonight, so I'll have to start tomorrow. But it has to be soon: the monster is hungry, and the monster must eat.

We've been exploring timelines on the Internet recently for our teachers and students at work. There are some really cool ones, and I'm kind of getting into them. Tonight I found an excellent timeline of art history at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Turning on NPR as I drove back home from Lancaster today brought a breath of fresh air into the car. I immediately heard the familiar strains of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon flowing through my speakers. NPR had a whole segment on the album. 30 years ago this week, Dark Side of the Moon reached Number One on the BillBoard charts. In fact, the album stayed on the BillBoard top 200 for 741 weeks. The runner-up in second place is a Johnny Mathis album from 1962 with about 400 weeks on the charts.

You can find the NPR story here. The sound samples on this page are great, including the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz connection (I had forgotten about that until today--it's kind of a sideways urban legend, or a--ahem--meme, if you will). By the way, for the guys in the office: the engineer on Dark Side of the Moon was none other than Alan Parsons.