Les Bonnes Choses

I've got a few hours left of 2009 in the eastern timezone - just enough time to labour over a final blog post of the year. I know, the shoddy editing may have lead you to believe I can just crank these things off, but you should see the stuff that didn't make the cut [garbage in, garbage out - your shoddy editor].

Let me start by saying that I don't yet know the topic about which I'm about to write. So let's see where my keyboard takes me, starting with the obvious: The new year is a time to reflect back on the previous year, which brought many big changes: new baby, new job, new house in a new city, new friends. Same old rash though. I really thought that would have cleared up by now. Speaking of old rashes, I see Harper is still up to the same nonsense as this time last year. I gotta hand it to the guy though, he is a really good politician. Dude has a minority government and he's baiting the opposition into calling for an election. He's a master. [rim shot]. Seriously though, he's getting sh*t done. It may be the devil's work, but if you represent less than a third of the population but are making the remaining two thirds of the population your bitch, you are good at what you do.

Come to think of it, isn't that how capitalism works? Anyways, I wish that power could be channeled for the forces of good. Maybe then some of those "radical" ideas being floated around South of the border could actually get somewhere without being watered down to the point of ineffectuality.

Hmmph. Political proto-rant, eh? Whodathunk?

No Hulu. Can't buy mp3s from Amazon. No academic pricing offers online from Lenovo. Why do we get the shaft up here in Canada? I had no idea that getting in at a .edu institution was going to be so lucrative - I can use my VPN connection to Northwestern to access all those verboten electronic resources while in Canada. And my .edu email account just let me purchase a Thinkpad X301 loaded up with MS Orfice and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional for under $2K, all in, saving me $1K. I hope this doesn't count as a taxable benefit. Ooh, taxes. I wonder if I can claim this. The prospect of filing taxes in two countries this spring makes me quite anxious. If any of my readers has any advice or reassuring words, please comment.

And for those of you who have been following my journey, I was able to use my Bank of America Visa debit card, which will get me another 2% cash back. I'll have to drop a line to Capital One and tell them I have everything under control, no thanks to them.

I doubt anyone will be reading this anytime really soon, but I have a spare moment as I digest dinner, so, hey, why not blog, right?

I'm thrilled with my haul this Decemberween, having added to my collection of cooking gear and games. As of the time of this writing, however, there is one item on my wish list just to the right of this post, and I didn't get it. This conclusively proves that my family either doesn't believe me, or else doesn't read my blog.

We played the Santa card to the hilt this year, and Jude has been a "listening boy" for a greater proportion of the last month than usual. And as far as he knows, whereas he got his Rusty and Dusty cars from Santa on Christmas Eve for being a listening boy, his cousins got nothing from Santa. It's not often you get a chance to show your child an example of getting stiffed by Santa. That's powerful. No wonder parents have been so willing to blatantly lie to their children about the jolly old elf for so many generations.

A week ago tomorrow, I picked up my 3 year old Lenovo X60 notebook, which I had sent in for repairs just 9 days before the warranty was set to expire on it. A week ago Saturday, I walked away from the table after Skyping with Heather with the gee-dee microphone still clipped to my shirt, sending the thing off the table and on to the tile floor beneath. Its been a little off ever since, and the Page Up button no longer works. So now I'm shopping for another notebook. In truth, the timing isn't all that bad, as the reason the extended warranty had run out was because I feel that 3 years is a reasonable lifespan for a notebook; after that point, it's hard to tell whether your computer is acting screwy because it's become misconfigured, the hardware is malfunctioning, or it just isn't up to running some crazy-ass software that you need to run in order to read your client's bloody email attachments.

As I am still affiliated with an academic institution, I qualify for academic pricing, so I was shopping around at the Lenovo site. I may have picked out the notebook that will see me through my next round of job talks and conference presentations. The insurance payout from my written off motorcycle means I could even buy it with cash in hand. The catch: you can't buy over the internet with cash in hand; you need a credit card. I have a credit card -- two in fact. However, one is from a Canadian lender, and the other has a paltry $500 credit limit. If I use the Canadian card, I lose money on the exchange rate when I make the purchase, and then again when I convert US dollars back to Canadian to pay it off. Screw that. I contacted Capital One to see if I could make a big lump sum payment upfront so that I would have a large credit showing on my account. To my surprise, they wrote back to tell me that, even if the credit showing on my account equals or exceeds the cost of the purchase, making a purchase that goes over my $500 credit limit will still entail me exceeding my credit limit, and bring on all the financial fire and brimstone that goes along with that.

I'm posting this on the internet because I'd like it to be documented forevermore that Capital One is run by people with rather poor business acumen. Somewhere along the way, they have forgotten the point of a credit limit, which is to manage the risk they are willing to assume in lending money. Credit lenders get a slice of every transaction made with their cards. My credit limit is preventing me from making a purchase that would earn the company maybe twenty or thirty dollars. By suggesting I put a credit on my account, I have proposed a way that they can earn that commission without assuming any risk whatsoever. It is literally only upside for them. And they don't want anything to do with it. So, I'm doing the electronic age equivalent of shouting from the mountaintops! Come, google search bots. Index my account, and let it show up in the shareholders reports and competitor's due diligence reports.

This doesn't mean I'm an activist. Just crotchety.

Followup: I just wrote a letter via the Capital One message center asking why they don't like earning revenue and if they can recommend a product that would allow me to complete my transaction. Except I was maybe a little bit condescending.

My holidays begin tonight. Sort of. At the very least, I won't be in at work for the next few weeks, but as the department is pretty empty as it is with the students gone home for the holidays, I'm not going to be missing much. Just in time for the holidays, my mp3 player has frozen up on How Soon is Now, and I'm hoping that the battery runs down and that I can recharge it in time for when I leave the house tomorrow morning. I'd pop the battery out so that it has to reboot just like I do with my laptop when it goes all squirrely, however the the battery isn't accessible because the device has been designed to be disposable: by the time the Li-ion battery needs replacing, the thing will be obsolete. I know, it sucks that this is how things are made.

I took the long way home today because I had just missed a shuttle bus, and I calculated that it would take me just as long to walk home as to wait for the next shuttle. This way, I got a bit of exercise and investigated a few streets I don't normally walk down. Most interesting was this house, apparently a landmark house built in 1931, with really interesting oversized christmas tree ornaments:






I love the holiday season, when houses are decorated all festively for Christmas, or in anticipation of the Chanukah Smackdown Miracle, when Barrie Horrowitz brought the smackdown for one night, but there was enough smackdown to last for eight action-packed nights. You haven't seen anything until you've witnessed the awesome destruction wrought by a gefilte fish smuggled into the ring.

I've had a busy last few days. I wend downtown with Amy and Gill on Friday to pick up my laptop, which I had brought in for repairs just days before the extended warranty was set to expire. Now that they've fixed my LCD, I thought it might be wise to walk away from the table with a microphone still clipped to my sweater and pull the laptop off the table. Only a very minor break in the plastic case was observed, and the computer seems to be otherwise fine, though it appears as though it now sits at the BIOS splash screen indefinitely until I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue with the booting up. I don't know if that's related, but it's a new "feature", and it's annoying.

I spent much of yesterday cleaning up the house (now that no new messes are being created), doing laundry (now that very little dirty laundry is being generated), and downloading music that has no right being in the iTunes collection of a 35 year old married male (now that very little respectable music is being created): songs by Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas, and Chris Brown. To follow that up, Amy and Gill came over to watch a chick flick. A dirty chick flick. The only thing missing from my day yesterday was that I didn't get my nails buffed and polished.

Today, I tried to make up for it by walking to the harware store, only to find it closed at 1:45, despite the sign indicating Sunday hours to be between 10:00 and 2:00. It was a good walk, however, and I got to check out the neighbourhood. Holy crap are there some nice houses. Had I brought my camera, I would have posted some photos. As it is, you can experience my walk on google maps streetview and see what I mean. I stopped in to talk to Comic Book Guy, just next door to the hardware store, but found him to be a little less Asperger's than the typical Comic Book Guy, whose scorn can only be avoided by being familiar with the six forms of Manga. (I just made that last part up. What I know of manga comes from watching Battle of the Planets AKA G-Force in 1979).
So I am now on the computer checking on the correctness of my intuition that smoked paprika would go well on salmon. Indeed, it seems that it will, though if you check out the steps included in the recipe, step four seems rather bizarre:

4. Roast the salmon in the oven for 10 minutes. Check for doneness, but find that it is not quite ready. Cook it for a few more minutes.

Can you imagine if all instructions directed you to screw up and then fix the problem?

• Open box. Take out printer


• Plug printer into computer. Get error message about not plugging in printer until drivers are installed.


• Unplug printer. Install drivers.


• Plug printer in again. Realize that you didn't insert the ink cartridges. Unplug printer...

After nearly four months here in Chicago, I got around to getting a cell phone -- or, rather, getting my existing cell phone to do something (incidentally, if you have a Motorola V360, a weekend, and alot of faith in me, I'll unlock your phone for you). I did a fair amount of reading of reviews on wireless providers because I like to turn every purchase over $20 into some kind of research project, and concluded that T-Mobile's pay as you go plan would probably be the best deal for my rather infrequent cell phone usag-- SPEAK OF THE DEVIL!!!

Why did I use that clever writer's convention to indicate an interruption? I'm glad you asked! First, it was because I'm a clever writer. Second, and more importantly, it's because something just happened that directly pertains to what I wanted to write about. I will preface this by solemnly swearing that I am not making this up: I just now received a phone call on my cell phone from some roofing company (at least, that's what I believe they sell, as their representatives pronounce their product "ruff") looking for a "Mrs. Max". It is the third such call that phone has received. Other misdirected messages include some texts that confirm the employment and job details for some guy who I believe was supposed to set up an auditorium (and is now presumably back on the unemployment line), a text about whether I received "the email", and a few calls from Capital One regarding a fantastic job opportunity.

With T-Mobile's prepaid service, I pay $.10 per minute for each call or sent text message, and $.05 for each received text. When I was signing up, I was asked what area code I wanted. Not having a preference, the T-Mobile rep gave me a (773) number because "it's the most popular" (it had never before occurred to me that area codes had such a rigid social structure). As misdirected calls have now eaten up twice as much of my phone balance as have calls that I have intentionally made, I now wonder at the wisdom of acquiescing. Incidentally, now that you know my area code (773), if you're willing to put in a little bit of effort, you can figure out the remaining 7 digits of my number, which I have obfuscated by decomposing it into its prime factors: 3² • 29 • 31 • 1,009.

I suppose I have just guaranteed that I will only get calls from a very peculiar segment of the population.

So it seems that the family flew into London under the wire in other respects too. Aside from the extensive commentary on the weather, the next biggest story concerned the TSA document leak. Now that "the terrorists" know what to look for, talk is that we can look forward to even longer "security" lines as the TSA redoubles their efforts at preventing terrorism. Irony is, if you consider the end goal of terrorism to be instilling fear in a population, it looks like Homeland Security and the TSA are doing a fine job all on their own. I mean, I sat in at a departmental colloquium not long ago, where the speaker (JPM will have to refresh my memory as to who it was) very convincingly demonstrated that you're not likely to spot a weapon in someone's luggage, even if you're hypervigilant because you've been told that you probably won't be able to find the gun pictured on the display. And anyways, these measures are always reactionary. Someone puts a bomb in their shoes? From now on, you have to take your shoes off at the security check point. Someone brings liquids onboard that could be combined to make a bomb in-flight? From now on, you cannot bring more than 100ml of a non-solid in your carry-on. This is cumulative, folks. Maybe someday someone will have explosive rivets in their jeans, and we'll be boarding the plane thirsty the next week in our socks and boxer-briefs. Smelling an opportunity, the airlines will provide hospital gowns at $10 a pop when we check our luggage for $15 a bag.

And, now that I've gotten myself on the no-fly list, I shall go eat my dinner. Porterhouse steak. Yum!

Rebecca called a couple of hours ago to let me know that she and the kids arrived in London. They must have left under the wire, as hundreds of flights out of Chicago were cancelled this afternoon, and the inbound snow storm was the lead-off news story this evening.

I don't know how to segue the weather into a funny story, so I'll just say that I'm relieved that my wife and my two best little guys had a good trip. I'll also wonder aloud why there aren't like airport bellhops or something. There was no way in hell Rebecca could have gotten from the Terminal 1 loading zone to the baggage check and then to the security screening by herself. Thus, we were obliged to park at Terminal 5 at the opposite end of the airport and make our way back to Terminal 1 together. Not that I minded, but it seems that someone is missing a good business opportunity here.

So, now that I just have my own mouth to feed, I have the particular tastes of fewer mouths to consider when it comes to preparing meals. Unfortunately, in anticipation of having just myself to feed, we have let our fridge empty. Looks like I'll be having mustard soup tonight.

The family flies back to London tomorrow afternoon, though most of our cargo comes with me in the car when I drive up exactly one week later. Living here in the land of plenty, some of our relatives have been availing themselves of our mailing address and ordering goods that do not ship outside of the contiguous 48 states. Hopefully douanes won't give me a rough time as I try to cross the border with Amazon's inventory in the trunk. In the next week, I'll be winding things down here, and maybe getting a bit more work done than is typical because I'm pretty low maintenance -- hell, one of the perks of a shaved head is that I only have to do my hair every four or five days or so.


I'll also be bringing along our Settlers of Catan game because Carolyn hates the game (though she has never played) and I want to see her stroke out when we tell her we've invited people over to her place to play it. We won't be staying with her the whole time; we'll be splitting our time between there, my in-laws, and we may spend our 7th anniversary (December 28) at the Idyllwild Inn, where we stayed on our wedding night. Unlike our wedding night, I expect I will not be running a high-grade fever and hallucinating that the room is on fire.

Now that Thanksgiving is done here, we move into that time of year where we are encouraged to want stuff. I don't really want stuff, or at least, not in such a way that I can't just lay down until the feeling passes. That makes gift giving problematic for those that care enough to feel the need to give me a gift. I've tried the obvious solution this past year, which was to just be such a big jerk so that nobody wants to have anything to do with me. But overcoming my innate lovableness is just impossible. So I've resigned myself to having to want stuff. This makes me a bit uncomfortable - not because composing a wish list violates some sort of higher moral code that I try to live by, but rather, because when I read a compilation of things I desire, I feel like a spaz. Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it.

One thing that isn't on my list is a Corvette. When I was much younger, it was the ultimate car. When I became old enough to drive, naturally, I could never afford one -- and still can't. And therein lays the crux of the matter: when it comes to luxury sports cars, by the time you can afford one, you look like an asshole if you're driving it. Seriously. Next time you pull up next to a new model 'Vette at a stop light, glance over at the driver. If he doesn't have a young blonde beside him and look like a spokesman for Just For Men, I'll eat my hat.

My mom and dad came to visit this American Thanksgiving weekend. Mom has been down since Monday morning, and my dad arrived Thursday evening. They left about an hour ago, and I am now pausing to reflect on the holiday visit.

We visited the Chicago Botanical Gardens on Friday, which marked the opening of the Wonderland Express model train exhibit. Both of my uncles Dave would have been really impressed by the G-scale model train setup:

Those buildings? They're models of Chicago area landmarks made of plant bits: twigs, seeds, shells, leaves, bark, etc.

Yesterday we went to the Field Museum of natural history. Jude is into Dinosaurs, so it seemed like a guaranteed home run. There is a large T.Rex skeleton on the main level, and that was a hit, but by the time we got to the dinosaur exhibit, Mssr. Jude had quite enough of the place. We lingered briefly after that to see the Egyptian exhibit. Entering the exhibit through a mockup of a pyramid catacomb, the curator's attention to detail lead to disappointment: they had apparently went to great lengths to recreate an actual pyramid visit. As we know, with the exception of Tutankhamen's famous crypt, nearly every pyramid was raided by thieves (usually the same people hired to construct the tomb). Thus, at every turn we would reach a dead end with a sign saying something like, "This is where golden urns filled with dried fruits would have been stored for the dead's voyage to the afterlife. Unfortunately grave robbers have long since emptied the room...". I'm not even sure that anyone from the museum ever visited Egypt. I've never been to Egypt, but apparently already have most of what I would need to put on my own Egyptian tomb exhibit.

I've managed to steal away a moment or two this Thanksgiving (part deux, as we already celebrated the Canadian edition back in October). On top of the usual bustle (I've decided to use bustle instead of busyness because the latter doesn't seem like it's really a word, and it seldom gets to go out for a night on the town without hustle), it's been difficult for me to blog because I brought my laptop in for warranty service on Tuesday, 6 days before the warranty is set to run out. That has left me without my usual computer. Sure, I could use Macho Me, the Mac Mini that we use as a media server (primarily to watch episodes of Glee on Hulu, these days), but the 720 line resolution on the television is irritating.*

This lead me to go to the Best Buy (also known colloquially as stalker buy around here -- I believe this is explained in a previous post, and I will link to it if I can ever remember where the hell it is; the story is comedic in its bizarreness ) yesterday to pick up a wireless network card for my desktop, sitting idle these last three months so that I can continue to bring you the thought-provoking editorials you have come to expect from me.** Unfortunately, "works out of the box" means different things to different people, so I spent yesterday evening frustrated with the fact that the rules of English grammar do not apply to hardware troubleshooting, and that being wireless-less did not make me wired. The only thing that assuaged me was the triumph that I felt when I confirmed that I had unlocked the cell phone that came with my contract with Rogers. When I canceled my service with Rogers, the friendly customer service representative reminded me that I got to keep the phone, like it was some kind of asset. She omitted the part that the phone is useless with any provider other than Rogers unless you managed to get it unlocked. Well, screw you, Rogers. It may have taken me the better part of last weekend to unlock it myself (rather than pay a shifty person at Pacific Mall), but I'm now using my phone with T-Mobile. So if you get a call from Rudy Renteria, that's just me, digging into my prepaid minutes. The Caller ID database is apparently a little behind in the updates.

*Given the holiday, perhaps I should give thanks that I have 720 progressive scan lines (1080 interlaced). I know there are some out there that have no scan lines, and that is really unfortunate, because they're missing a really good season of Glee.

**I have learned from Amy that my recent period of infrequent updates has lead her to stop checking for new posts, so perhaps nobody has any expectations of me anymore.

One of my facebook buddies recently posted a link to a story about a family who, fed up with the life-draining* homework treadmill, have negotiated a homework-free grade school experience for their kids. If that's what grade school is going to be like for my kids, I can see why our current hosts have taken the home-schooling route. Among friends and family, I have access to many, many teachers, so I would be interested to find out what that's all about. It certainly wasn't like that when I was growing up. I don't remember ever having homework. Or, more accurately, I can remember not having homework because I recall spending Labour Day each year wondering whether this would be the year that I'll have homework (for the record, I also wondered each June whether I would be passing that year because I apparently had no idea how the system worked, nor of my place in it).

(Also, for the record, it didn't occur to me until well after grade school that there was really nothing that obliged me to write out lines as punishment when the class misbehaved. However, I do wish that I was precocious enough to have instead spent that time writing out mini-essays on the injustice of the punishment.)

(I also should have not skipped out of school on the day that we were taught the correct use of parentheses).

Jude's still a couple years off from going to school, and we don't yet know what sort of school system we will find him in. Perhaps we'll negotiate something similar with his teachers should it come to that point. He's already interested in reading and math, so I'm not worried about his ability to do well in school. But that first day of grade school is going to come really quickly -- especially if we stay in our neighbourhood much longer: Jude was standing at the end of our driveway as I went in to bring a suitcase out to the car. While I was inside, a school bus stopped at the end of the driveway to pick him up for school. Fortunately, Jude had both the good sense to not get on, and was articulate enough to explain to the bus driver that it wasn't his bus. They apparently take "no child left behind" very seriously in Illinois.

*Apologies for the link. It was a trap.

When one finds themself uprooted and building a new circle of friends, one is quite vulnerable. There are some things one might not be comfortable revealing about themself to strangers for fear of being labelled abnormal and ostracized. It is inevitable, then, that one has to keep some aspects of themself secret from those around them -- at least until they have earned one's trust.

That's how I feel now.

Before our circle of friends started to diffuse (this is common among academics and profesionals, I imagine), we regularly enjoyed all sorts of games: physical games (dodgeball), card games, board games, and if I go back far enough, RPGs. When we moved, I left most of my nerdiest gear in a box in London. Two things that did come with us, however, were our set of Settlers of Catan variants, and a Cranium variant called Pop 5. Pop 5 is the sort of game that can be easily brought to any old party (we brought it to Lori and Mark's NYE party this year where it seemed to go over well enough). Settlers of Catan, however, requires between 3 and 6 thick-skinned people (the game may involve screwing over your friends).

So as our games collect dust in our living room, we are left with the problem of sifting through the people that we meet to find people with whom we could share our hobby. At the birthday party for one of Jude's classmates, I asked one friendly set of parents flat-out whether they played board games, and if they had ever heard of the game. Engineering a conversation so that you can ask about Settlers of Catan is awkward. And for the number of people I may have to ask, it's also time-consuming. One approach I have taken involves using a gaming cant to try to discover other like-minded individuals. For example, I could point to the tile floor in a public washroom and say something like, "Hey man, look at all those hexes. I wonder where I'm going to put my first settlement," and see who responds with that sly knowing smile. I have found, however, that this doesn't go over well in the men's room. It went even worse in the ladies room.

I had been refraining from posting anything lately for fear of making anyone feel bad about themselves after reading about my fabulous life. But alas, the amazing All-Clad brushed stainless steel 4-quart saucepan that I finally selected from Williams-Sonoma for my birthday gift from my family is probably more than outweighed by the fact that my motorcycle ended up being a writeoff, despite that the damage was basically limited to broken plastic. Stupid plastic. Sportbikes look cool and I think are more my style, but all that plastic is damn fussy. Still, I think I made the correct choice in doing everything I could to keep my bike upright rather than wiping out on the road. My bike would have been in better shape, but at the expense of my right leg. As it happened, the worst injury I sustained out of the whole thing are the welts from the fabric bandage that I applied to my shin -- yep, it looks like I'm still allergic.

There was a brief moment just a few days back that my life nonetheless seemed like a dream. I don't mean to disappoint those of you interested in metaphor (even the cliched kind), but I mean this quite literally. The local community (and I mean really local) is centered around the park behind our house.

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There is a long-standing tradition whereby one of our neighbours puts up a large screen just in front of an earthen mound in the middle of the park and shows a movie. In previous years, this has happened on Labor Day weekend. For whatever reason, this year's Movie in the Park feature was delayed until last Sunday, when he produced the showing of the original Ghostbusters movie. The movie ran between 7 and 9 pm but, because of the time of year, and because we are at the Eastern edge of the Central timezone, it may as well have been midnight. We eventually managed to convince Jude to go out to the park by telling him about the marshmallow man, and were able to catch the last third of the movie. Jude wasn't especially interested in the movie itself, so we entertained him on the swings and the teedee-todder and watched the film from a short distance. It was as I was gliding back and forth on a playground swingset in an eerily lit park in the middle of an oddly warm November evening that I found myself unable to shake the feeling that I was in the middle of a remarkably lucid dream from which I could not wake. If only there were a midget in the park, then I could have been completely flummoxed.

I feel compelled to apologize for my week-long absence. I promise I haven't been sitting idly by in some deliberate attempt to provoke a riot of anticipation -- mostly because, deep down, I know that what I have to say isn't really that important. However, there may have been a few people out there with, say, H1N1, and with nothing to do other than read my blog or else read old Marmaduke comics. It is for their sakes that I am truly sorry.

In the last week, I have been scrambling to piece together enough of a really long project to determine whether I could submit a poster for a conference in Montreal next spring. As if that weren't enough, I have also been trying to problem solve for a local motorcycle shop tasked with repairing my motorcycle. There are slight but nonetheless very real differences between the US and Canadian models of my motorcycle, and Kawasaki doesn't make it easy for US dealers to obtain parts for Canadian models, and, for whatever reason, I had to solve their distribution chain problem.

I didn't mention that I smashed motorcycle into a tree, did I? Yeah, that happened to me too. I live in a neighbourhood with alot of really old trees. It's like a deciduous forest with sidewalks. This being fall, all these trees are shedding their leaves. This being Chicago, it seems to rain almost every night. When the road is covered with slimy wet leaves, you might as well be driving on banana peels. I was completely aware of this hazard, and yet still managed to have my tire slip out from under me as I turned off of my street, sending me careening into a large tree just at a neighbour's curbside. I was irritated at the damage done to my motorcycle, but walked away otherwise uninjured. That's right, I drove a motorcycle into a fifty-year-old tree, and was irritated. I told you I was hardcore. You had best keep that in mind before you get all up in my grill.

Update: federal laws governing how news is reported require me to note that the collision with the tree was at about the speed of a brisk walk, making my lack of injuries actually rather unsurprising.

Evanston kicks ass. We received a community newsletter in the mail last week outlining the Hallowe'en day events. The Northwestern Wildcats played against the Penn State Nittany Lions (NU lost 34-13), and, because of the date, they had a number of kids activities that drew us out there. We didn't stay too long because le p'tit monsieur was a malcontent, though Jude did get a balloon "ghostes" (pronounced ghost'-ezz). We also stopped for a couple of minutes to appreciate the NU Marching Band (NUMB, which probably carries a dual meaning late in the season). I think a tear might have come to my eye when the band performed Thriller -- with one section at one point putting down their instruments to do the thriller dance.

We were home just after 3, in time to prepare for the trick-or-treaters. The other reason that Evanston kicks ass is that the community newsletter indicated that trick-or-treating runs between 4 and 7pm. There is little more irritating than teenagers ringing your doorbell at 8:30 dressed either in normal clothes (the punk costume) or else a boyfriends' football uniform (the jock costume) scavenging for whatever candy was not given out to the little kids earlier on. Having a definite end time makes it just a little easier to relax at the end of the night. This year, Jude would have nothing to do with trick-or-treating. He wouldn't even put on his costume. But perhaps he's just brilliant. We have a metric boatload of leftover candy, and he didn't have to ring a single doorbell to get it. On its own, this might not mean much, but keep in mind that Jude also helped give out candy at the door, and was quite a miser.

No sooner do I move to the US where I can finally watch reruns on Hulu when I find out that they're toying with becoming a paid service. Just my luck. Rebecca's able to catch up on Glee, which is pretty amusing. Marc's right though: they do make rather gratuitous use of the Auto-Tune. Perhaps it would be just too much to have actors that sing as good as they look. Where I'm concerned, the only valid use for auto-tune is in making humorous remixes, as in this brilliant slap-chop remix (brought to my attention by John and Panic):


I spent about forty minutes cleaning these pumpkin seeds only to scorch them when I put Jude to bed. Forty minutes. Considering I bought a bag of salted roasted squash seeds from the market last weekend for about $1.50 ... I don't even want to continue that thought.

Ooh! Shiny!

What was I talking about? Anyways, the family is getting better at going to church since we've moved here -- in part because fellow Catholics Amy and Gill were also raised with the belief that, if you don't go to church, it makes the baby Jesus cry. It's not just Catholic guilt driving us there, mind you. We also have a baby heathen in the house, and our home parish in London required us to take another pre-baptism course if we want to get the devil out of our baby. I'm not clear on what has changed in the last two years since Jude was baptised. In any case, I think we're doing pretty well at raising our kids in the church. For example, Jude now has very recently taken to roleplaying the mass. In his game, I am given a rolled up drawing and told to sit down on the church-pillow (which, I might add, is an absolutely brilliant idea and might be a reasonable starting place for Vatican III). As per his instructions, when Jude comes by with the wicker basket, I am to say "Oh Jesus" (emphasis on the oh, as though you just noticed your toilet is overflowing) and put the picture into the basket. And that concludes the mass, according to the Eastern Unorthodox rite.

Facebook has completed yet another round of improvements to their popular social networking website. Whereas before your homepage would be filled with a random assortment of updates about your friends, you now have the choice between a small random subset (news feed) and a larger random subset (live feed). I have yet to figure out what sort of things qualify for one or the other. I have, however, figured out that facebook seems to select pairs of friends who are themselves friends, and for a short period suggests that you might be friends with everyone they both know. In practice, this means that my each of my married friends have their in-laws foisted upon me for a couple days at a time.

Another proactive measure that facebook has taken concerns making sure that you keep in touch with friends with whom you have had the least amount of contact. Under the heading suggestions on your home page come directives to write on so-and-so's wall. This can be somewhat amusing, as I know of at least one occassion where facebook suggested that a friend of mine reconnect with her husband by writing on his wall (he was in the room with her at the time). Aside from the absurdity, this feature is bound to change eventually, because it also comes off as rather fascist. However, at least it doesn't judge your friends like another suggestion that I recently noticed: "[so-and-so] has only 11 friends. Suggest other friends for him (emphasis added)." I can only imagine what the programmers decided to name the function that searches its member database for people that haven't reached its popularity threshold. findLosers() or something like that, perhaps. Good thing there's something like Facebook to help these sad hermits make friends!

The family made a trek to the Costco this afternoon to get a few things. A family of 4 doesn't generally need to buy things in bulk, but Jude's preschool requires each family to sign up for a snack week. Ours is next week, so we needed to get enough wholesome treats to feed 14 preschoolers for a week. I saw an interesting dynamic as we stood in the checkout line: a girl about Jude's age in the shopping cart in front of us was smiling, making faces and waving at Jude. Jude, for his part, was studiously avoiding her gaze, and surreptitiously casting sideways glances at her, as though he was waiting for her to tire of the whole thing and just go away. I don't know how far into the future this blog will be available, but if it's still available when he's about 14, I'd be interested to find out what he thinks of all of this. I did try to help him with his socialization by telling him that if some one is smiling and waving at you, it's good to wave back. This is especially true if the person waving at you has mistaken you for someone else, because that's your opportunity to really confuse somebody.

Interestingly, we were unable to actually purchase one of our impulse buys -- Sting's newest album, If On a Winter's Night. It turns out that the album hasn't been released yet, and therefore shouldn't have been on the floor. I suggested he let us pay for the CD and we could promise not to listen to it until Tuesday, but he didn't go for it. However, one thing that made it past the checkout was a ten-pound bag of carrots. Some of them are destined to become carrot sticks for snack week. Many of my friends came back with suggestions for what to do with the rest of the carrots. Here's one suggestion from our friends in Cincinnati. It's a Scottish pudding recipe (think: figgy pudding, not Bill Cosby style pudding).

Carrot Pudding

• 1 cup grated raw carrot


• 1 cup grated raw potato


• 1/2 cup butter


• 1 cup white sugar


• 1 cup flour


• 1 tsp baking soda


• 3/4 cup raisins


• 1/2 cup currants


• 1/2 tsp each of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon

Cream the butter and sugar. Add carrot and half of the potato.
Dust raisin, currants with a bit of the flour and mix in.
Add the remaining flour and the nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon.
Dissolve the baking soda into the remaining potato and add to the mixture.
Mix lightly and pour into your cooking vessels, filling no more than 3/4 full. Place the cooking vessels into a pot of simmering water so that the water comes up to just shy of the height of the cooking vessel and cook at low temperature for about 3 hours. If your cooking vessels happen to be quart mason jars, you can seal them and store your jar of pudding in a cool pantry for some long while (I'm not sure, but I think that the lid is supposed to be on the jar before you start the cooking).

I'm not a fan of the raisins, so I think I'd probably substitute something deadly like walnuts instead (I'm allegedly allergic). Apparently, I'd rather die than eat raisins.

Asher just beat up Jude. Jude is crying. Mark your calendars.

So I was cooking last night when an obscure word popped into my head. I often experience this. Occasionally, it'll be a word that I don't actually know and will have to look up on wikipedia, such as avoirdupois -- that was the previous word from the sky. I don't know where I may have encountered it before, other than that the word has french roots, so I had to look it up, because to have some peas doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

Yesterday's word from the heavens was defenestration. Go ahead and look it up if you're not familiar with the word; nobody will think less of you because it's got a pretty limited scope of usage. I did already know what that word meant -- that's not the source of my puzzlement. Rather, I got to thinking about how words enter the vocabulary. In the case of a verb like defenestration, before the word existed, people must have been instead using the word's definition, as in "I'm going to march over to the town hall and throw the mayor out the window". And if you only have to string a sentence like that together once or twice in your life, this might work fine for you. It's not until you often find yourself tossing people out the window that you might find it handy to have a single word to describe your intentions. In fact, using a word like defenestrate buys you all the more time to defenestrate other villagers. Of course, nobody else will understand your fancy word unless they too have been emptying townsmen from the windows like last night's bedpan. In other words, the admittance of a word like defenestrate into the English language suggests that there must have been period in our history where it was raining men (hallelujah).



Between the dictionary.com and wikipedia entries for the word, it appears that the word appeared sometime in the early 1600s in Prague. I guess what I'm saying is that, if you ever find yourself with the opportunity to go back in time, check the dictionary before selecting your destination.

Looking back, there have been a number of recurring themes in the sorts of things that motivate me to write. One of them is the thought that being a productive member of society often involves doing wasteful things in order to waste money on useless things. Nothing epitomizes this better than the bureaucracy. Interestingly, business-minded people must be aware of this, because the first thing to get cut after a corporate merger is middle-management. And yet, it persists.

Am I being uncharitable in my rather negative description of the sorts of make-work clerical positions that currently have me riled up? You decide: I arrived at school today to find a message in my email inbox from the Northwestern HR department, asking me to call regarding a benefit for which I had applied that entitles me to a contribution towards Jude's preschool costs. The entitlement depends on my income, which they determine from the previous year's IRS filing. As a newly-arrived Canadian, I have no such documentation, but was told to provide the equivalent Canadian documentation -- I provided my CRA notice of assessment from 2008. The problem was in an inconsistency between the value I listed as my income, and the fact that my CRA assessment indicates that I have been living in the sort of squalour normally found in the slums of Calcutta. Once this issue was sorted out, the HR contact informed me that, during the Open Enrollment period, I would have to re-enroll for this benefit. This entails re-applying on the HR website, and (here's the punchline) because I will not have submitted anything to the IRS, will require me to come into the HR office again and provide the very same documents she had in front of her. Now, keep in mind that the Open Enrollment period begins in 12 days. All I could think of was suggesting she seal the documents into an envelope and in a couple of weeks, open it up and pretend it was a big surprise!

Now, I'm not suggesting that this woman doesn't deserve a livelihood. It's just that the money spent paying her to make my life more difficult might be better used. Hey, they still haven't figured out how to pay for healthcare down here, have they?

So Canadian Turkey Day has come and gone, and in my neck of the woods, there was no exception. Rebecca's parents arrived in the afternoon on a cold, drizzly Friday the 9th, and her sister and brother-in-law and Jude's 3 cousins, and her aunt and her husband arrived later on in the evening to help us be thankful this weekend. All but her aunt and her husband stayed with us, so we also got a chance to see how well our house can accommodate the large volume of visitors we were hoping for. It seemed to have worked out pretty well, as our 2-bedroom house can masquerade as a 4-bedroom house pretty well, and that's without anyone sleeping on a couch.

Jude also got his third kick at the birthday can on Sunday. Neither my family nor Rebecca's family were with us on Jude's actual birthday, so it was only natural that they would want to celebrate this weekend. The family went back to London with the caravan of vehicles early Monday morning, so it seems likely that Jude will have yet another round of birthday cake this week. We have a custom calendar with pictures from Rebecca's rather large collection of digital photographs. The month of October features a picture of Jude blowing out candles on a cake on his second birthday. Between that calendar and the series of birthday celebrations, that boy is going to spend his formative years believing that his birthday lasts the month of October. As it is, you can't go into a store without him collecting items that he wants for his birthday.

I wasn't sure whether I could make a blog entry out of this, but in light of the fact that I don't have a twitter account, I really had no other choice than to interrupt this regularly entertaining blog with a public service announcement. For all of you who are drinking the version of Tetley's Decaffeinated tea sold in the United States: you are in the placebo group. Even after 10 minutes of steeping, I can't tell the difference between this and a mug of warm water.

However, while the national brand teas might be inferior, they have some really damn good bacon here, in Illinois, at least. Hey, I wonder if I can steep that...

Google Street View went live in Canada. I head heard rumour that it was coming, and have been waiting until today to see this. Legend has it that this Toronto house is haunted. If you look closely, you can see a ghastly apparition in the second floor window. Sadly, London doesn't merit a privacy invasion from the google people, so the only GSouvenir we have of our old house is a satellite image that shows that we own a red car, and, wow, did our lawn ever look shabby.

There are certain topics of study that the media seems to really find 'sexy'. I've seen enough newspaper articles and evening news clips to have formed a pretty good idea of the sorts of things that make a good general interest story about how amazingly cool brains are. Stories about interpersonal relationships and communication are a good example -- everyone has heard of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which, despite being a pop-culture book, has a crunchy (as opposed to soft and fluffy) foundation of scientific research. Developmental psychology also seems to be sexy enough to garner lots of funding -- after all, the next generation is already going to be handicapped by an educational system designed with the social goal of maintaining and improving self-esteem (as opposed to actually, you know, educating). And stories about the amazing capabilities of the child's mind are prime grounds for a news cast's obligatory feel-good content. Given the newsworthiness of stories such as these, it seems we still have a way to go until we realize that, yes, even babies are really smart. They had better be. Have you ever seen a pigeon? Their heads are really small, and that includes the beak. Their brains are even smaller, but you (or someone qualified) can teach a pigeon how to do all kinds of things. If your child is getting pwned by a pigeon, you need to ask yourself some hard questions.

Now, Le P'tit Monsieur? He's on top of things. There's still lots of stuff he doesn't know, but what he does know is that, when he wakes up in bed at, say, 9pm, and doesn't have a boob at the ready, the surefire way to remedy the situation is to wail. One thing he hasn't learned yet is the poker face. As I pick him up from the bed, his screaming only intensifies. It isn't until I hand him off to his mom that he stops. Immediately. And then grins at me. He apparently doesn't know what I do for a living. He doesn't know this yet, but he's also grounded until he's 13.

Uncle Bill's here. I'm off to the cottage now. See you Sunday!

No, you're not. You're grounded.

Wha..? Why?

Go read my blog. By the time you find the relevant entry, you'll be free to go out again.

So I tried a little something this evening. Inspired by an episode of Good Eats, Rebecca bought a celery root last week. Implied with the purchase is that I would figure out how to cook it. So this evening, I staged a rather scaled down Iron Chef with celery root as the not-so-secret ingredient, and without the competition. There was judging, however. Jude wasn't very subtle in his evaluation, and spat a mouthful of mashed celery root out on to his plate, and exclaimed that he didn't like it at all. In case there was any confusion, he continued to make "pthooey" sounds until the taste left his mouth. Rebecca and I didn't mind it so much, though we both agreed that it needed 'something'. Being a fan of peanut butter on celery, I tried a forkful of mashed celery root with some Skippy, and decided that it wasn't bad. I don't know how I might make that into a side dish, however.

The accompanying meat product was a pork tenderloin with a dry herb rub. I browned it in a 12-inch cast-iron skilled and, not wanting to dirty another dish, I just put the whole thing into the 425° oven. After I took it out of the oven and had served it up, I wished I had some wine with which to deglaze the pan. But then it occurred to me that vinegar is sour wine, and that balsamic vinegar becomes a sweet syrup when you reduce it, and I now highly recommend balsamic vinegar as a deglazing agent.

If you're still reading, waiting for the moral of the story, you're in the wrong blog. I don't do fairy tales. Though it just occurred to me that Hans Christian Anderson Cooper 360 would be an awesome name for a blog.

"Live and let live," that's what I say. Except when it comes to bugs in my house. Look, I'm all for doing my bit to minimize my environmental trashing. It pains me to throw away plastics. When I cut the grass, I've been dumping the clippings into ever-growing piles along the garbage alley, rather than send it off to landfill. But I draw the line at insects in my house. The most obvious irritants are those that get into your crap and eat it. I'm talking about the earwig you find in your oatmeal (or in Carolyn's case, the half-earwig), or the trail of ants exiting your pantry. [Editor's note: for those of you who may be considering visiting us, we have neither earwigs in our oatmeal, nor trails of ants]. I think we can all agree that those guys suck. But then you've got the "good guys" of the insect world: the spiders and such, who eat the guys that suck. I'm of two minds about those guys. On one hand, they do try to pull their weight and keep your house clean of roaches. But check out this little fella:

That's the business end of a centipede. As I learned from Christine (and later from wikipedia), centipedes are technically on the 'good guys' team. But, damn, they're creepy. Fast little buggers, too. So, which would you rather see: a centipede skittering in your sink, or cockroach skittering on your floor? Neither? Me too. And, really, have you seen the half-assed web jobs that house spiders try to pass off? I don't know if it's just union spiders, but there's not alot of fly traffic going on between the ceiling and the drapes. Laying down some DDT is probably the best thing you could do for those buggers. Save them a slow death due to starvation.

It has come to my attention that some people are woefully ignorant of the commonlaw practice of yoink. 'Yoink', for the uninitiated, is the phrase, accepted in most Western jurisdictions, that legitimizes certain classes of theft that are about to be perpetrated. For example, a tray of cookies sits on a table for a meeting that has not yet begun. You enter the room, full of witnesses. A cookie, l'objet du désir, has not been offered. Declaring 'yoink' as you grab a cookie allows you to escape the consequences that would normally follow such a blatant theft.

I have personally confirmed from Pat that this practice extends as far Southwest as California, and from Jeff that yoinking is also practiced at least as far Northeast as Montreal. I have yet to verify whether it is also practiced along the Eastern seaboard, or indeed in Europe, though because of the similarities between our legal systems, I would not be surprised to find the yoink practiced in Western Europe.

It is important to note the specific exclusions provided in yoink commonlaw. First, kidnapping cannot be legitimized by a yoink. Babies, can be yoinked for a short period of time, but only if the yoinked child is kept in the same room as its parent (the yoinking of an infant who has just filled its diaper is, in fact, welcome). The charge of grand theft also supersedes yoink commonlaw, and thus vehicles, jewellery, and other high-value items are also not typically subject to yoinking.

This concludes today's expert legal advice column. Be sure to read next week's column to learn how "woob-woob-woob" in the voice of Larry Fine allows one to avoid the charge of reckless endangerment that would otherwise follow the execution of dangerous stunts.

I'm presently sitting in a round egg chair, hoping to passively restore shape to my bum, and undo all the flattening that happened over the course of all the driving I've done since Friday. I'm back in London for a few days for a wedding between good friends that happened this weekend. What with all that driving, I've had plenty of time over the last 72 hours to think, and have thought of at least three things that would make great blog topics. And right now I can't seem to remember a single one of them. Or maybe I can, but, upon sober second thought, no longer see how I might draw it out into a multiparagraph entry. The only thing that comes to mind right now is that I have recently redoubled (I guess that means it's an exponential function) my efforts to instill into Jude a healthy aversion to germs. A month ago, he experienced some gastrointestinal discomfort, plausibly related to eating a peanut-butter covered saltine cracker that had fallen to the ground at the Chicago zoo that day. The sore tummy remains a salient memory, and I took advantage of it to tell him about how bugs get on your hands and into your tummy, and that these bugs don't like soap. After only a day's worth of training, Jude now routinely scrubs down his hands and forearms, up to his elbow, like he's prepping for surgery. And just last week, we were listening to Chicago Public Radio as Jude helped me prepare dinner. On one program, they were talking about bacteria, which I told Jude was the name for the bugs that make your tummy hurt. Naturally, after learning about BACteria, he asked about FRONTeria.

We're in the US Midwest, which comes with a number of subtle differences from Southwestern Ontario. For one, they're in the Central timezone. This timezone sucks. Why? Because, as a market, it doesn't merit its own broadcast schedule. The Eastern timezone, containing the entire Eastern seaboard gets the network news at 6:30, filler crap like Wheel of Fortune and Entertainment Tonight at 7:00 with primetime running from 8:00 to 11:00 for the late night news. The Central timezone gets the same programming, but one hour earlier. I suppose for those holiday cartoon specials that I remember from my childhood, that could be a good thing because the kiddies don't have Charlie Brown as an excuse to stay up late. Not that I watch much primetime television, but if I did, I'd find it irritating to have to rush through dinner and cleanup in order to catch the opening scenes of my favourite series.

Yes, favourite. Not favorite. Another subtle difference -- one that I relish when I send out memos or leave notes. I'll spend an extra minute or two trying to think of synonyms just so that I can use words that use a 'u' in the British/Canadian spelling that does not appear in the American spelling.

Finally, we have the midwest accent. Or 'eayccent'. It's not quite as pronounced (to my ear, at least) nor come with the same dim stereotype as a 'Sathern' drawl, but it's apparently noticable enough that, while visiting a store today, Rebecca was mortified when Jude asked why "the lady asked if she could open theyat for us?" Yes, 'that' has two syllables here.

I begin by presenting the price per ounce of a number of liquids, gathered from various sources on the internet:

• Molten gold: $1016.20 per ounce


• LSD: $120 per ounce


• Inkjet ink: $40 per ounce


• Human blood: $11.83 per ounce


• Soy sauce: $.12 per ounce


• Chocolate syrup: $.10 per ounce

My final bill from Rogers came in the mail yesterday. It sat, opened and exposed to the elements, on my dining room table for part of the day. I had noticed by bedtime that the heading on the page had become smudged. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it occurred to me this morning to take a closer look at the bill whereupon I saw every indication that the bill I was holding was printed out on an inkjet printer.

Now, if you go into any Staples/Office Depot/whatever, and ask for help selecting a printer, the nice young man with the popped collar and frosted tips will ask what you need it for. If you were to say something like, "oh, I just want to print off some pictures and maybe directions from the internet", then you might be directed to any number of nice inexpensive inkjet printers. If, on the other hand, you said, "oh, I run a multimillion dollar telecommunication company and need to send multipage bills to a hundred thousand households," well, the store associate will either advise you to purchase a high-volume laser printer, or else MacGyver the machines to print in human blood, which, as you can see from the list above, would result in a 75% savings over the lifespan of the printer. It might be more appropriate, too. Damn leeches.

Here's a bunch of mini entries. Unfortunately, nothing happened today that merits a grand narrative, so you will have to pick and choose from among them. They won't all be winners, but they're sufficiently small that any duds won't leave a bad taste in your mouth. Last thing I want is some nasty reply from ingrates like my sister or Effamy.

1. Jude quote of the day: "Daddy, I want some more broccoli."
   I would typically be on the lookout for something a little more amusing in the way of Jude quotes, but a child requesting more broccoli is really worth mentioning.



2. It's taken me 35 years, but I finally have a bunk bed. I came home early today to assemble it. I think I may change things up and sleep on a top bunk tonight, just for kicks. Jude likes making forts out of pillows and blankets, and having a top bunk from which to hang blankets is going to make our forts both more elabourate and easier to build.



3. Fortunately, the Jude quote of the day is not a repetition of the expletive he heard me say when putting the bunk bed together. He tried to repeat it, but said something that sounded more like "Daddy, why did you say shut?". I told him it was because I couldn't close the pieces together.



4. I have been using Chex mix for breading for the last two months. It is absolutely brilliant on fish. I discovered it by accident in August when I was lacking anything else that I could grind up into crumbs.



5. Finally: net neutrality: yay! Rogers/Shaw monopolies and collusion: boo! Or, should I say "oops"?

It's just after 5pm here in Evanston, and our buddy Amy should be over shortly to look after les messieurs so that Rebecca and I can go out to Koi for dinner. Nothing good ever hits the theatres anymore (though I think I would like to see the new Ricky Gervais movie coming out in a couple of weeks called The Invention of Lying), so it'll be an early Friday birthday night for us.

In preparation, I have just finished making dinner for Amy and Jude: macaroni and cheese (with peas for nutrition and bacon for tastiness). Rebecca grated a metric boat-load of cheese, which I turned into the most amazing cheese sauce I have ever made. I used most of it in the macaroni, with about 1/2 cup remaining. We're eating it with corn tortilla chips right now. It's really good. I kind of want to skip going out and just eat this cheese sauce for my birthday dinner.

I figured I should make one last post before I become decidedly in my mid-thirties. Assuming I can make it to 70, I should be up for a mid-life crisis this year. Unfortunately, I get to spend tomorrow fretting about a three minute talk I have to give on my research. I remember in fourth grade when we had to do public speaking that a minute seemed like an eternity, and when shorter was better. How times have changed. Three minutes is not a lot of time to describe twelve to eighteen months' work and, I believe more importantly, persuade the audience that they should care.

What will I get in return? Rebecca and I are probably just going out for dinner while Amy entertains les messieurs chez nous.

And on that note, I'm going to bed, so that I can wake up elderly but refreshed.

One thing I have noticed since moving to the US over a month ago is that the telemarketers are much more of a nuisance. When I first mentioned this to someone, they replied, "well, don't they have ten times the population? Of course you're getting more phone calls!" True, with ten times the population of Canada, it stands to reason that there might be ten times the number of businesses calling people. But they also have ten times as many phones to call. No, proportionally, there seems to be a higher volume of telemarketing traffic, at least by my estimation. In Canada, they recently instated a Do Not Call list. Problem with that was that many people experienced an increase in telemarketer calls after registering their numbers: In effect the list was a registry of valid phone numbers that could be called for the next 30 days.

The DNC list first showed up here in the US, however, and I figured that I am unlikely to receive any more telemarketers calling than I already am. So this evening, I registered my phone number. After 30 days, I'm just going to start making crap up on the phone.

Many years ago, I found myself considering my career options. Daan's dad was a clinical psychologist, which appealed to me at the time. However, I have also always had an interest in the life sciences, so I also considered psychiatry, which is kinda similar, except it requires an MD. One important consideration is that I have never been a particularly good sleeper -- being unable to cat-nap when being on call for thirty six straight hours would probably lead me into more than one malpractice suit, and permanent eye-bags. Thus, when I entered the first year of my undergrad at King's College, my course selection sent me down the road to my PhD in psychology (though I decided along the way that being a clinician was not for me and instead found myself studying cognition and now cognitive neuroscience, which is kinda medical, in a poser kind of way).

I am presently watching How It's Made, a Canadian-produced program that runs on Discovery back in Ontario, and on the Science Channel here in Illinois. As the program's title may imply, it shows how various objects are made; tonight, for example, we had coloured pencils, fancy ball-point pens and iron chandeliers. Just moments ago, however, the icky feeling I got when they were showing how various blood products were made out of whole blood drawn from volunteers reaffirmed yet another reason that I was correct not to pursue med school.

In fact, the whole purpose of this blog entry was to serve as a distraction so that the television program didn't cause me to pass out.

A few days ago, I mused about what I might want for my birthday. Don't get me wrong, if one of you crazy people delivered a yacht or a jet pack to my door, I would most certainly be delighted. And wonder whether you're involved with the Miami drug trade where yachts are plentiful, or come from the future where jet packs are plentiful. However, f'reals, I have been trying to figure out whether I want the pleasure of owning a cell phone again. In London, I seldom used my phone, and so never came anywhere close to using up the 200 minutes per month that Rogers charged me for (after a month of particularly gratuitous usage, I managed to use 50 minutes).

Then my jerk* of a brother-in-law goes and brings his iPhone with him on our car ride from London to Chicago. He's all texting Heather hither and yon, finding our position on a map because my GPS had been stolen, and looking up CITAG. If you're shipwrecked on an island, you want a guy who knows how to catch fish and build a fire using only a pair of shoelaces and a swatch of canvas. If you're lost in the arctic, you still want the firebuilding, but are going to need some rabbit-trapping skills. For pretty much any other situation, you want an iPhone.

Aside: if Apple uses that line, or any derivative thereof, I will sue them into the stone age -- as in, before 3G wireless carriers existed.

Anyways, after JPM stepped in with some words of wisdom, I realized that, if I don't mind only being able to phone from WiFi hotspots, Skype on an iPod Touch at $.021/min is pretty inexpensive; probably even less than the pay-as-you-go plans I've seen. The downside: I just recently bought myself a very satisfactory mp3 player (which would become obsolete), and iPods are the sorts of things that get stolen or get you mugged.

*Note that I don't actually think that my brother in law is a jerk. I rather like him, and have even been accused of having a man-crush on him -- I don't, but will admit that he is somewhat dreamy in a rugged, well-educated kind of way.

Monsieur Jude reached the 'why?' stage earlier this year and hasn't looked back. Unfornately, he also has a pretty good grasp of the while(TRUE){} programming structure, so once he starts asking why [some X], you can rest assured that he'll ask why [your explanation for X] until you distract him with something shiny (ideally, a new 1:55 scale die cast member of the Pixar Cars cast, or even one of those made up cars that I'm sure never appeared in the movie and yet appear on store shelves).

This evening, his stomach squeaked at bedtime.
"What sound was that?"
"That was your belly"
"Why?"
"Because your belly squeaks sometimes."
"Why?"
"... Because it has doors in it."
"Why?"
"Because sometimes doors squeak. Your belly has doors in it to keep all the food from going in there at the same time."
"Why?"
"Because it would get too crowded in there if all the food went in at the same time."
"Oh."

He has a memory like a trap, so he's going to remember that his belly has doors in it right up until he takes high school biology. Then he can learn the word sphincter and have a grand old time, just like we did.

I've tried unsuccessfully a couple of times to submit links to Fark.com. If you're not familiar with the website, it's basically a news aggregator where the headlines are written by a bunch of smartarses. Sometimes you need to click on the story to get the joke; other times the headlines are a self-explanatory play on words or meme. Unfortunately, I'm just one of a horde of web savvy smartarses out there, so getting a headline submission approved is actually pretty difficult.

After today's failure, I decided, screw it. I've got my own forum for smartarsery. So I present my rejected submission for today:

The hunter becomes the hunted

Update: the revisionist bastards at CBC have revised their story. As originally posted, the pair was ghost hunting.

Fine, Carrie.

My birthday is coming up pretty soon, and if you're like most people, you haven't yet bought me a gift. I must admit that I am partly to blame for this, as I have not made generally public a list of suitable gifts. I also must admit that I am becoming just like every other hard to shop for dad out there. However, I can't see how it can be any other way: you're born into this world all bare-ass with nothing. From there on, you're a collecting machine so that there comes a time when you really don't need anything else. Sure, there's lots of stuff out there that I don't have but might like, though not enough that I've already gone out and gotten it for my own damn self. Other things can't be put on a birthday wish list with a straight face, like one of those 35 foot yachts that I've been seeing out in the harbour on Lake Michigan as we follow Lake Shore into downtown Chicago. Yes, one of those things would be a fantastic gift (though upkeep on one of those things would be a bitch), but I don't run in the kind of circles where yachts might be a gift-giving idea. Perhaps if someone could coordinate all of my readers; maybe each could chip in a couple of bucks?

You know, I remember being in the kitchen of my grandparents' house on Oxford St. at Christmas time, 1979. My mom or dad (can't remember which) asked what I wanted for Christmas. My answer: a jet pack. I must have picked the term up on the schoolyard, where the kids played Star Wars every recess. I also remember trying to draw a jet pack to show my parents what the hell I was talking about. I couldn't have been that committed to the idea because, although I am quite sure I did not get a jet pack, neither do I remember being disappointed that Christmas. Maybe I just didn't draw it very well.

So, yeah, a yacht or a jet pack. Take your pick.

They deliver mail on Saturdays here in the US. Isn't that weird? I also get it delivered right to my door, which is kind of nice. Now that my cheques have arrived though, I don't really have much else to look forward to in my mailbox.

My inbox, however, is another thing altogether. I had been having problems retrieving my GMail inbox contents from two accounts in Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird because I hate using webmail interfaces. Not sure why my sensibilities demand a standalone application for reading my email, but that seems to be how I roll. For the last few weeks, however, there's been a problem with the system, which I have documented in earlier blog posts, and also been trying to debug in an online forum (I am user Chris M). If you were to follow that last link and scroll down to the end, you would find that the culprit seems to have been the Lightning plug-in trying to sync with GCal. This is a recent development, because I had been using GCal with Lightning for some while, however I recently switched from using the Provider add-on to using the native CalDAV calendar syncronization.

Coincidence?
Maybe.
Or maybe it was ...
Murder most foul!

This'll likely be my last post for the month of August, which will put me over the entry counts for the last two months. Not bad, considering that my family and I moved our household to a different country at the beginning of the month.

I was just about to jump over here from Facebook to write an entry when I saw the following ad text in the right hand ad column:

How Do I Look Mom
This is what Alex said about going to school. In Kenya, kids in high school must pay tuition, buy textbooks & uniform. Help a student.

Are my standards for ad copy too high? Or is 'spam' an official English dialect?

Now, on to the original point of my entry. This evening, Amy was hosting a going away party for one of the grad students. Unfortunately, Amy's music collection isn't very awesome. I feel Marc let her down in that respect. No worry though. I live ninety seconds away (no exaggeration) and have the most amazing collection of pop, alternative, electronica and baroque music on a portable hard drive. Amy had lent us a sauce pan when we arrived in town, so brought that with me when I returned as well. On my return, I noticed that there was a furniture store with a delivery entrance off of the alley way to Amy's apartment. As I am looking for bunk beds, I decided to check out the sale that they were having. Let's now imagine what the blog entry for the store owner might look like...

So the Sunday sale is winding down, and I'm just finishing tagging a sectional when some weirdo walks in from the alley carrying a pot -- like for cooking and stuff. Most normal people use the front door, so I immediately thought something was up. I asked him if I could help him, and he said he was looking for beds. And I thought, "Oh my God. Is this guy going to try and camp out here? He's got a pot. If he asks where the stoves are, I am calling the cops."

I was just reading this article on Wired about translating the electrical signals to the hand into the resultant handwriting. And then I noticed that writing with any of my fingers in the air would result in the same "handwriting" as pretending I was holding a pen. That might not seem especially strange until you consider that the instructions to your pinky finger to write your autograph would be quite different from those to your index finger guiding a pen to do the same thing. So it's like the instructions are reverse-engineered from the product. I don't know if anyone else who reads this is going to find this to be an interesting observation, though I can think of a few people who might. For everyone else, Jen posted a google maps link the other day to some busted grow-ops* in London, so maybe you might want to come back later and re-read this post.

*I'm not sure whether 2 plants found at the house on Emery St. qualifies as a grow-op. I mean, was the owner of the plants just getting his feet wet in this exciting new field? Or was he just really bad at growing plants?

What the hell is this?
I'm sorry, the anarchists are right. The whole system is a do-over. Put me and a team of engineers in charge. I'll even throw in healthcare for free. I'm serious about the engineers thing. I've talked about this at length with John. It might not be popular, but an engineered government would be damn efficient. Unsurprisingly, a google of "open source government" just shows how various public institutions are using Linux instead of Windows. I was kind of hoping that there was some project going on at Harvard or something, where a bunch of students were drafting the most awesome constitution ever.

I'm writing this post from the basement of the Northwestern Memorial hospital CAMRI center. All the scanning for the day is done, and we're just waiting for the data DVD for our last participant to be finalized. Today's lesson: DVDs do not need to be finalized.

So I'm anxious to get home so I can call Mom & Dad's. Everyone is over there for Grammy's 84th birthday. I haven't spoken to Grammy since about a month before I left for Chi-town, so I'd like to be able to wish her a happy birthday. Because of the time zone difference, I'm concerned about my ability to call before she gets whisked back home for bed.

A few days ago, I was complaining about the way that life begins with a Social Security number down here. You can't do anything without it, and just about everybody asks for it (though with the exception of your employer and banks, both of whom pay you money, your are not obliged to give it out to anybody). Thus, millions of Americans trust their key piece of identification in the hands of minimum wage employees every day. So there's a certain amount of schadenfreude that I experience when I read that the chairman of the fed was a victim of identity theft. It's not quite irony, because Ben Bernake doesn't administer the Social Security office, but it's kind of poetic nonetheless.

You know, there are methods, known to cryptographers, of devising sets of numbers, one publicly known and the other private, that might be useful in this sort of situation, Using something like RSA would require an overhaul of how SSNs are administered, but maybe the savings might be worth it.

I've been having problems these last few days with Thunderbird + GMail. I started forwarding all my email to GMail back in January, mostly because I anticipated losing my UWO email account, but also because the inbox quota was much much larger than I could ever get at UWO. And at NU, they allow only a paltry 100 MB of email in your inbox -- I suspect someone in the IT department got one of those Far Side 365-day Desk calendars back in '98,left it at a particularly topical comic, and now everyone in the department thinks it's pre-Y2K. Then maybe one year at GenCon, the system administrator who owns the calendar will run off with some cosplay chick and the school will hire someone who is aware that a 100 MB quota is not appropriate.

Yes, it's fine if you're a POP3 n00b who only uses one computer, or adores webmail, but that's not how I roll.

Oh yeah, I got off topic. I started off bitching about Thunderbird + GMail, and ended up bitching about the ridiculously small inbox quota at NU. My bad. Back to the original complaint, which I am documenting so that it pops up on google when someone queries for "Thunderbird freezes on GMail Loading Message", which shows that other people are also having this problem.

Update: the rather impractical workaround I have been using involves deleting the two gmail accounts in Thunderbird, and then re-adding them. Thunderbird is able to read the inbox (for awhile, at least) when it attempts to download the mailboxes for the "first" time. This information might be diagnostically useful.

I sprinted home on my bike this afternoon to find a certain envelope from the Social Security office in my mailbox. I looked at it, tears welling in my eyes, and said "you complete me," before jumping in the shower so that I would be ready for Amy's arrival with the Irish postdoc candidate we interviewed this afternoon. We took her to a quiet little restaurant nearby on the lab's dime, so I had the filet mignon, substituting the asparagus (eew) for broccoli. When it comes time to put in our $.02, I'll give her a thumbs up. I hope she works out, because that would mean that all four of the postdoctoral positions in the lab will be filled with foreigners, which amuses me.

My next task for the day will be to order a bunk bed, hoping the website is somewhat more functional than it was last night. And I expect to fall asleep after talking to Rebecca via Skype. Only 6 more days until she and the little smus return. I understand le petit monsieur is much different from when last I saw him, so I am very anxious to meet him again.

This morning started very early for me -- even earlier if you count the several times I awoke following persistent nightmares about some indestructible agent of death. So, relying primarily on my brain stem, I accompanied Amy, Jenni and Rachna to the downtown campus for a relatively abbreviated scanning session. We finished before 1 o'clock and Amy and Jenni were willing to accompany me to a children's furniture warehouse so I could look at bunk beds. I had checked out the public transportation route on google maps, but, well, just check out the google street view and tell me what you think about taking a stroll in this industrial ghetto.

By the time we finished up, we were pretty famished. In trying to locate a sushi restaurant we had passed earlier, we found ourselves in Greektown and settled on a restaurant there. Did you know that the earliest new testament manuscripts were written in Greek? Modern bibles contain many mistranslations or misinterpretations of the original text ('virgin', for example was used at the time to describe any unmarried woman). A lesser known mistranslation can be found in John 4:14. Whereas the modern text refers to an eternal spring of water welling up inside you, I believe the original greek text may have been referring to the gyros we had at lunch. I swear, I may never have to eat again.

I've got my mac mini hooked up to our TV and A/V receiver, letting me watch ill-gotten television programming, and, more importantly, get big sound out of my mp3 collection. Currently shuffling through my Top-Rated playlist (I am anal enough to go to the trouble of ranking my music), iTunes recently played a song off of The Cure's Disintegration album, and I was suddenly quite aware of being alone. Now, The Cure is not the most upbeat band in the world, but this album instills me with a particular sort of melancholy because I filled my parents' otherwise empty house with its tracks in the summer of 1991 when I took OAC Biology in summer school while the rest of the family went to the cottage (my choice).

Ten days ago, the rest of the family went back to London to spend the rest of August in more familiar territory while I got things in order. Not just the house, mind you. For those of you not keeping track, I've had quite a list of things to do in order to get on track here. For my family's sake, some of these things, such as this weekend's fMRI scan session downtown at CAMRI, involving both Amy and I, are probably best done during this time. In the future, I'll be doing scanning without Amy, leaving the possibility that she can keep Rebecca company if she's free.

Most nights have concluded with Rebecca calling me via Skype from her dad's laptop. As we both have webcams, it's been nice to be able to see and talk to each other. And I occasionally get a quick hello and silly grin from Jude, when he's not having a meltdown or fighting with his cousins. But at the end of the day, all I really want to be able to do is pick my little guys up and give them big hugs.

Fortunately, iTunes has now shuffled along to some insipid 90's dance music that reminds me of running the gauntlet of London dance bars in the summer of '95 -- not an especially glorious time, but fond memories nonetheless. So I'll finish up on this upbeat note, and perhaps practice the running man in the living room with the curtains drawn.