Tag: Meta-blog

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Tools I want, and tools I don’t (and a bleg)

UPDATED BELOW

UPDATED AGAIN

(I’m keeping this post at the top of the blog’s main page until Monday; after that, I’ll let it slide down and put up new posts on this subject as events warrant. Newer content appears below this post until then.)

In the course of learning various maintenance-related skills at The Day Job, I’ve learned that it’s better to have more tools than fewer. You’re pretty limited if all you have is two kinds of screwdrivers, a single size pair of pliers, one hammer, and maybe an allan wrench.

Likewise, as a proto-writer, I’ve long known that since words are my tools, the more words I know, the more tools I have. However, real life in the last couple of years has forced certain words upon me, words that I suppose are useful but I frankly could have lived long and happy without knowing, tools or no. Such words include G-tube, fundoplication, cerebral palsy. And now the last few days have added some more words and phrases in that unwelcome category: incompetent cervix, premature dilation, viability.

For those wondering where on Earth I’ve been, the answer is that I’ve been spending most of my time at The Wife’s side as she reclines in a hospital bed where she is confined for the time being. There she rests because right now, only gravity and luck are keeping what we had hoped would be our second healthy child inside her womb. The strangest thing about this scenario is the reversal of the standard hopes: the longer she is in the hospital, the better it is for the child’s ultimate chance of survival. The odds we are facing are very long, but we’re going to face them anyway. What else is there?

Posting here will be sporadic for the time being. Oddly, this is mainly because I’m not at the computer much; I’m finding that I still have the same amount of stuff to babble about, and just not as much time to babble about it. (Maybe someone should do a study of blogging as psychological defense mechanism.) Also, I again note the reversal of the typical medical hospitalization scenario: we are hoping for as long a hospital stay as possible, as we are some weeks away from “viability” (what an awful word). However, hospital stays are expensive, and if by some miracle we do not lose this child before she comes to full term, The Wife will have endured a hospital stay of four months.

So what I’m saying here is that if anyone out there has any inclination to hit the tip jars in the sidebar — Amazon or PayPal available — now would be the time, and it would be greatly appreciated. Believe me, this is not the way I’d wanted to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting; fact is, I didn’t want to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting at all. What I wanted to do was post a photo of our new daughter just after her late-September birth. Her name, though, is decided, no matter when she comes. She will be Fiona Quinn.

That is all. Further bulletins will be made as events warrant.

(I will also be keeping this post at the top of the blog for a few days, so any newer content I manage to post will appear beneath this one probably until at least Monday, unless disaster strikes and The Wife is able to come home before then.)

UPDATE 5-11-07: Well, this is a strange kind of update: one in which I have nothing new to report. But in this current version of We Do Stuff the Hard Way at Casa Jaquandor!, having nothing to report is actually desirable. For now, Little Fiona is right where she should be.

Thanks to those who have offered and continue to offer kind words, thoughts, and deeds. All are welcome — especially the monetary donations, for which I hate to ask but for which I also need to ask. Every little bit helps.

UPDATE II, 5-13-07: Nothing’s changed, thank goodness. Fiona still in her gestation chamber. Me going through money like Grant went through Richmond. And so it goes.

Thanks again for the continued well-wishes and the shekels tossed in our direction!

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Quizinalia

Time for another quiz, via Tosy (or was it Cosh?):

What was the first recorded music you bought?

The soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. Holy crap, I played that thing into the ground over the next nine years or so. I played it so much that it has taken years of listening to subsequent CD releases to get to the point where I no longer hear the music the way that it was edited together for that album. (The tracks were not in film order, and some bits of score from different scenes were edited together into longer tracks.)

What was the last?

The 4-disc set of the scores to the Karate Kid movies, music by Bill Conti. Wonderful 80s cheese for the most part, but there’s one track in The Karate Kid Part Two (underscoring the tea ceremony between Daniel and Kumiko) that I consider to be among the finest bits of love music in all films.

What was the first “professional” music show you ever went to?

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, when I was ten or eleven. My sister was taking French horn lessons from a then-member of the orchestra. I don’t recall what was on the program, but Julius Rudel was the conductor, I believe.

What was the last?

I haven’t been to any live music in so long that it’s really very depressing.

What’s your “desert island” album?

Lord, I can’t name one. Truly. The LOTR scores? Geez, I dunno.

What’s your favorite album/song title?

Album title? Maybe Fire in the Kitchen by the Chieftains (amazing album, by the way). Song title? I’ll go with “Seven Spanish Angels”. A song with a title like that can’t help but be gorgeous.

What’s your favorite album art (include an image of it if you can)?

I always loved this cover to the Solti/VPO recording of Das Rheingold:

The version I own has this dull cover:

(OK, that’s for Gotterdammerung, but the art’s the same, just with the right name for the opera.)

Ideal choice for a karaoke song?

Lord, I don’t know.

Song you don’t like that WILL NOT LEAVE YOUR HEAD if you hear it.

“Hey Jude”. I absolutely detest that song. And yet if I hear it, I end up hearing that interminable “Na na na nanana naaaa…” crap in my head for hours.

Which is cooler? — Vinyl? CD? Cassette? 8-track?

CD. I like having a physical object, and I’m not wild about the idea that if your hard drive goes kerblooey, there goes your music.

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A quiz thing

Geez, two angry rants in a row in this space. I need a quiz to push them down a bit, and here’s just the thing! I saw this on Andrew Wheeler‘s blog. (Bad enough that I keep giving the guy my money — he’s one of the honchos with the SF Book Club — but now I’m giving him traffic, too!)

What do you think about Ouija boards? Complete nonsense.

Your favorite TV shows? Scrubs, American Idol, Grey’s Anatomy, The Office. I’m also enjoying NBC’s midseason show Raines, but I’m not holding my breath since the spectacular failure of the last midseason show I liked, Eyes (the Tim Daly private-eye caper show — did anybody besides me watch that?).

What’s on your mouse pad? My mouse. Duh.

Favorite board game: We just taught The Daughter checkers, so that’s probably it right now. Chess will come in a year or two. But I love Chinese checkers. Othello is fun, too. Some day I want to learn Go.

Favorite magazine: Just subscribed to Mental Floss, and that mag is just a ton of fun to read. I wish it came more often. I also still faithfully read WIRED (even though I still find their “Digital good, not-digital BAD” stance annoying at times).

Favorite smells: Cooking garlic and meat. The Chinese restaurant when I walk in. The main food alleys at the Erie County Fair. Maple. Tilled earth. Freshly-cut wood.

Worst feeling in the world: Losing a child.

Best feeling in the world: Ask me again when the Sabres win the Cup! But for now, noticing that The Daughter has learned something new, or getting a smile from a pretty woman. Good thing I married one.

Favorite soundtrack: Star Wars (all six), Lord of the Rings (all three).

What is the first thing you think when you wake in the morning: If I’m getting up for work: Ihatetheworldandeverythinginit. On my days off: Huh. I could sleep a little more. Think I will.

Roller coaster – scary or exciting? Fun, but I don’t like the upside-down ones.

How many rings before you answer the phone? Zero. We don’t answer the phone, and the ringer is shut off. If it’s important, we’ll get back to you. (Seriously. Why should I feel any requirement to answer the phone?)

Future daughter’s name:

Future son’s name: (You know, I’m going to avoid these ones for now.)

Favorite foods: See here. Not enough space here.

Chocolate or vanilla? Both! I reject your dichotomy! (But Dark Chocolate over Milk Chocolate; and French Vanilla or Vanilla Bean over regular vanilla.)

Do you like to drive? Yes.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? No.

Storms – cool or scary? Thrilling, actually. Except the ones that destroy stuff. Those aren’t very much fun at all.

What type was your first car: 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit with a diesel engine.

If you could meet one person dead or alive – who would it be? You know, I think I will now vow to never answer this question in any blog quiz again.

Favorite alcoholic drink: Spum-and-Coke. (“Spum” being “spiced rum”, of course. Since Spam is “spiced ham”.)

What is your zodiac sign? The Avenging Sword of Dismay and Doom. (I got bored with Libra, so I made up my own.)

Who is your favorite poet? Alfred Lord Tennyson

Do you eat the stems of broccoli? Broccoli is a vile, hateful thing that should be expunged forever from the Universe.

If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be? Keeper of one of the Beacon Fires of Gondor.

If you could dye your hair any color, what would it be? Fiery red that might strike fear into the hearts of my foes.

Have you ever been in love? Are you kidding? My default reaction with stuff is to fall in love with it.

What is on your walls in your room? For the purposes of this quiz, I’ll assume “my room” to be my work area at home. I have two maps of the world, one a print of an antique Renaissance map and the other a National Geographic map of the world (both are now partially obscured by bookshelves), a wall sconce bearing a candle, and posters for Casablanca and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Is the glass half empty or half full? The glass is always in flux. But the bottle? Ahhhh, that’s too empty. Gotta get to the store this weekend.

What is your favorite Snapple? Oddly, I no longer drink Snapple. No real reason; I just like other stuff now. Like that Vitamin Water stuff. And pomegranate juice, but that crap is expensive. Boy howdy.

Favorite movie(s): Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, My Fair Lady, Casablanca, and so on.

Are you a lefty, righty, or ambidextrous? Right handed.

Do you type with your fingers on the proper keys? No. And I still type at around 70 wpm.

What’s under your bed? The bodies. Oh yes, the bodies….

What is your favorite number? Pi, because it rhymes with pie and I like pie.

Favorite sport to watch: Football and figure skating. (Were the World Championships even televised this year? Did I miss them that completely?) And here’s an embarrassing admission for a Buffalonian: I’ve always had a hard time watching hockey on TV, so much so that I actually liked it when they superimposed that little dot over the puck for a while and did this “streaking laser” thing when the puck was shot.

Say one nice thing about the person who sent this to you: Well, I don’t know him personally, but I’ll ask a favor that he go a few months without putting books I want into the SFBC flyer, so I can get caught up on some reading and bills? Please?

[Two questions from this quiz’s original e-mail circulation genesis removed]

Favorite quote: Too many to list, but I’ll note one thing I once read in a book of funny quotes. Apparently there was once a photo in a sports magazine of the officials with the stop watches in a track-and-field event, which was captioned thusly: “These are the souls that time men’s tries”. I love that.

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Paging Dr. Wertham

Apparently there’s some kind of discussion going on about a “Blogger’s Code of Conduct” somewhere. I didn’t know about it because I didn’t hear about it until John Scalzi wrote about it in a response that basically boils down to “Yeah, whatever.” (Like the title of his blog!)

Anyhow, my take is pretty much the same as his: this is my blog, and I’ll make the rules here. (Which, by the way, can be found here.)

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Huh-whuh?!

This will be a navel-gazing meta-blog “Inside Blogistan” kind of boring post, so scroll on if such topics bore you. Really.

That said, what the hell is Atrios‘s problem? This is just absolute crap. Here’s the entirety of his post:

Things Which Make Me Want To Shoot People In The Face [That’s the post title; Atrios has been making in-jokes about shooting people in the face ever since Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face. -Me.]

People who bitch about other peoples’ blogrolls who don’t even have a blogroll on their main page, but just a link to one.

Gee — I do the same thing. I have a link to my main blogroll. Who the hell said that a blogroll has to be on the main page of a blog to be taken seriously? Note that I do the same thing: a while back I decided that my blogroll was taking up too much space in my sidebar, and further, that editing the actual blog template every time I wanted to edit the blogroll (which almost always either means adding a new blog, or deleting one that has fallen silent) was a pain-in-the-ass of editing the entire blog template. So I decided to move the blogroll to its own post in the archives. There it’s nicely out-of-the-way, and editing it is a snap, as I simply edit it as I do any post. And the link is right there, reasonably close to the top of my sidebar, and I even made the link in bigger letters.

A surprising amount of testiness, it seems, coming from a person who can’t even be bothered to alphabetize his blogroll, in order to make it an actually-useful resource.

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Zounds!

OK, according to my SiteMeter, something here got linked at Fark.com; problem is, following the referrals, it apparently comes from a section of Fark that is for paying subscribers only, and I’m not. So, could someone drop a comment here to tell me what the deal is? I love traffic, but I love even more knowing why it’s coming!

(I hope it’s not someone laughing at my stupidity…I hate it when that happens….)

UPDATE: Well, according to what someone has helpfully posted in comments, I’m getting roasted over there for some reason. I wonder what the original catalyst was? Somebody sure hated something I wrote here! Anyhow, welcome aboard, FARKers who think I’m fat and fashion-challenged (guilty on both counts) and that I haven’t left the basement (sorry, upstairs apartment, gainfully employed, married, child, et cetera). Feel free to look around the archives; having been blogging for five years, I hope it’s not all crap. But you never know! At least it’s free, right?

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Meh….

This week has been a blend of busy and not-feeling-like-posting. So I haven’t been posting. Will that continue? Who knows?

Anyway, a few thoughts on various stuff:

:: Watched Raines last night, and I had one of those cases where I read a lot of middling-to-negative reviews of a thing, watch it, and wonder if they watched the same thing I did. I found Raines very enjoyable; Jeff Goldblum delivered a fairly understated performance (as compared to, say, Jurassic Park, in which he hammed it up) as Detective Raines, who has conversations with the murder victims whose murders he is investigating.

The commercials made this all sound rather Sixth Sense-ish, but it’s not — the show makes clear that Raines isn’t really talking to the dead, but hallucinating them, which makes the conversations with them interesting in that the dead can’t give him hints, seeing as how as they have no more information than he has at any given point in the investigation.

Anyway, I found the pilot nicely written, with a story that moved right along, and some good and snappy dialogue. Sure, the murder mystery is fairly pedestrian — nothing there that you wouldn’t have seen on any episode of, say, Rockford Files or Magnum PI, but I enjoyed the show anyway.

:: Lance Mannion asks who our favorite TV detectives are. Mine is Andy Sipowicz from NYPDBlue, whose character growth over the show’s run was always fascinating to behold. The show creaked quite a bit with age as it got older, but even so, I always loved ol’Andy.

:: My “guilty pleasure” TV cop? Why, Don Johnson’s Nash Bridges, of course! I just found that show ridiculously entertaining a lot of the time. The show went on probably at least a season too long, but it was a lot of fun for a while. (In fact, with its Friday 10:00 timeslot, it made a wonderful partner with Millennium.)

Of course, watching Jodi Lyn O’Keefe blossom on the show was always pleasant:

:: I will buy this. Shut up. Those movies had nice music, aside from all the pop stuff.

:: “But Bill Clinton did it too!” Yeah, right.

:: I’m often the one on various Interweb fora to interject into long threads devoted to complaining about some TV show or book or whatever along the lines of, “Geez, if you hate it so much, why do you watch it so much?” A grand example can often be found over at the FSM message boards, where one regular member is a religious fan (and I mean “religious” quite literally) of the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, so much so that he’ll denounce with appropriate fleckling of the monitor with spittle the various plot machinations of the current version of the show. I once asked, “Why the hell are you watching something you loathe so completely?”, and he replied, “So I can discuss it.” I just don’t get the impulse to keep dwelling on something that brings you displeasure.

So why do I keep reading For Better or For Worse, then? Hell, I dunno — but I guess it’s fun to see that plenty of folks are annoyed by it in the same way that I am. Here’s a perceptive comment as to the way April is being treated in the strip:

But April is the only one of them who has a valid excuse for acting like an adolescent.

Liz had a pretty good independent life going for herself, until she suddenly and mysteriously decided that she was homesick and couldn’t take it anymore. So she quit her job and asked her boyfriend — who had already moved for her once — to move again, and then she fled south like a scared rabbit and moved in with Mommy and Daddy at the first opportunity. And then she was surprised when her boyfriend turned out not to be so excited about the “follow Liz wherever her whim takes her” plan as she’d thought he would be.

Mike and his family had the fire, so they had a pretty good reason for moving in… but why are they still there? They’ve got plenty of money to find another apartment, even if they do decide that they want to start looking for a house sometime soon. But no, Mike complains that every apartment they see is too small, too far away, too expensive, too something; and he’s completely terrified of the idea of buying a house. So they stay on in his parents’ house, and stay, and stay…

In the meantime, April has been evicted from her room and is sleeping in the rec room — which is also the storage space for Mike and Dee’s extra stuff. Too many people are using too few showers in the house, and apparently the people who can drive — which is pretty much everyone except April and the little kids — can’t be bothered to go grocery shopping often enough. April has been shunted off to a corner while her theoretically-adult siblings clamor for their parents’ attention.

Meanwhile, their grandfather has had a stroke and April is the only one of the family who seems to visit him consistently and still treats him like a person and not a fixture.

As James notes, on the scale of things all of this isn’t that huge a problem… but it is hard for a sixteen-year-old girl. What I find disgusting about the situation is that consistently, every time that April tries to suggest that this is hard for her — every single time — she’s smacked down and told that other people have it worse than her, so shut the hell up. Mike the Literary Genius and Liz the Broken-Hearted are treated with kid gloves, because of course their problems are serious and weighty — but April? April’s problems aren’t worth worrying about. Go back and hide in the rec room, April; the grown-ups are talking.

It’s incredibly dismissive of her feelings, which justified or not are still her feelings. This is how you teach people that they are worthless and insignificant and that nothing they do matters. April may be a fictional character, but I’d still rather that she not learn that lesson.

And here’s a great post on why Anthony is evil and must be destroyed.

:: Tomorrow morning: pancakes, bitches! We weren’t successful last year, but we did get a nice consolation prize: Charlie’s Diner in East Aurora, which is just a great little breakfast joint in the classic tradition.

:: The NCAA Tournament: as always, “Meh.”

And so it goes.

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Mesa back!

Well, that wasn’t long. Certainly not long enough for anybody to actually miss this blog. Maybe I should go into hiding again!

Anyhow, yes, the DSL has been installed and life is now happy and blissful at Minas Jaquandor. The moral of the story is: if your dial-up modem is about to die horribly, order your DSL upgrade package ten days before it does.

Although there was one minor hiccup: The Wife actually left the apartment yesterday morning for about two hours, which is of course when UPS tried to deliver our modem. They left the little post-it note saying “We’ll try again on Monday”; my response was, “Oh no you won’t. I’m coming to get my package.” Or, as I said to my fellow Wayne’s World-quoting friend at The Store, “It will be mine, oh yes. It will be mine.”

So at 7:00 on Friday night I’m driving through the East Side of Buffalo, heading for the UPS shipping center. And wow, is that place big. I figured it would be, but damn, it’s a huge joint. I was amused by the little signs on the streetlight posts lining their long service road: “Leave yourself an out”, “Make sure they see you”, “Aim high”. Refreshers from Driver’s Ed for UPS drivers, I suppose?

Anyhow, I got the modem and had it fired up in about an hour after we had dinner (Chinese) and put The Daughter (not Chinese) to bed. The only technical problem that I ran into during the installation was that one of our other phone jacks in another room had an old length of phone cord still plugged into it, from an older phone setup of ours. Took me about half an hour to realize that was screwing things up and interfering with the DSL line, but when I unplugged that, everything started working.

And now my Internet connection is fast. Like, “I don’t have to wait for YouTube stuff to download” fast.

All I need now is a cellphone, and I’ll be in the 21st century.

Regular posting will resume later on, perhaps.

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