INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

Yesterday I successfully perpetrated an April Fools Day prank in my office. Last week I wrote a little javascript file that makes links, buttons, images, etc. on a webpage go skittering away from your mouse whenever you try to move the mouse over them. It was pretty great! Then yesterday morning I set it up on our company's admin site, so that it only loaded for computers in the office, and only randomly on about 1 in 8 page loads.

At one point in the day, I heard my boss exclaim in surprise about his browser doing something wacky. That was the last I heard about it until later in the afternoon. Then I heard that one of the support guys had been surprised by it a few times and kept rebooting his computer every time it happened, which was pretty funny. But the best part was that he did some client training in our conference room later and it happened then too, and the client thought it was really funny. I had forgotten to exclude the conference room computer! I'm glad our clients generally have good senses of humor.

Apparently my boss and the company president encountered it at least once while discussing things too, and then eventually I confessed and people were impressed. It was quite a neat little effect, and everyone enjoyed it.

I want to apologize to people with whom I haven't been keeping in touch (including my whole friends list here, because I really haven't been posting much). The baby has sort of made me go all introspective and focus more on Sarah and Me and The Future, which I guess has resulted in less communication with the outside world.

Things are going well, though. Life is good!

Every now and then I come across some technological limitation that bothers me a little, and then at some point that limitation disappears, and it makes me feel a little like I'm living in the future. A past example: I used to have to carry around separate gadgets to make phone calls, take photos, and listen to music, and now I have a convergence device in my pocket that does all those things and more.

Right at this moment I am wishing I could just access my entire music collection (which sits on a fileserver at home) without having to worry about hosing either my work connection, my home connection, or overheating the fileserver. I suspect in a couple years I'll feel comfortable streaming music from home to any networked device without worry. I also suspect it'll be a couple years beyond that when I can stream said music to my phone without having to worry about the cost. And possibly it'll be a few more years until having a home media collection starts feeling a bit anachronistic, instead of just paying my subscription fee to have always-available streaming access to anything I want.

I am breaking unintentional radio silence because the other day I came across Thru You, a YouTube musical mashup album put together by Israeli artist Kutiman. It is one of the best albums I've heard in a long time, absolutely inspired, every song catchy and layered and amazing.

In case the site doesn't work (it's been hammered a lot lately), you can find all seven of the tracks mirrored at this YouTube user's page.

Here is our 20-week ultrasound. It's a baby!

I keep meaning to update about Boskone and other stuff but for some reason I haven't gotten around to it. Next week, I promise!

Here I am, in the Westin hotel in Boston! I have just gotten to my room and unpacked my stuff. The trip was smooth for the most part -- the highway up north was icy and slow, but fine south of Montpelier. I met the_jenya in WRJ for lunch and delivery of various items, and she gave me a copy of her beautiful collaborative golden-age-style horror comic, which I look forward to reading at some point in the near future!

It is a beautiful sunny day here, and the weekend is supposed to have temperatures around 40 so I am planning to get out of the hotel at least a bit. I have lunch plans (well, semi-plans; better confirm them) with katesg7, whom I haven't seen in like four years, which is crazy since when we were in college we hung out every day. I think that will nicely counter the second-day convention blues that I normally get.

If you're at Boskone and read this, look for me and say hi! I like meeting new people, and old friends.

Man what a day it has been.

So I mentioned the car's starter battery was shot. The replacement came in, so I made an appointment to get it (and its new mounting bracket) installed. I brought the car over today, they installed it, at lunch time I went back and paid and got the car.

When I got to work, the car suddenly lit up a bunch of dashboard warning lights and the screen showed the Red Hazard Triangle and the Check Engine symbol and the Main Battery symbol. I called the car place back and said, "Hi, WTF?" and they said "Um, bring it back in."

So I set off driving to the car place, about two miles from my office. Every time I stopped at a stop sign or a red light, the car was having a little more difficulty accelerating. Eventually I couldn't get it to go above 25, then 22, then 17. Shortly after passing the highway, I was creeping along at 7 mph (and dropping) with my hazards on and I decided this was stupid, and pulled over and called AAA for a tow truck.

Half an hour later, the tow truck arrived and took me to the car place, where they apologized profusely and said they'd fix it at no charge to me. About an hour later (after watching a lot of C-SPAN) they let me know it was a weird, unpredictable (but known) bug in the Engine Control Unit, and they had reset the computer and done extensive testing and that should take care of it.

I got back to work around 3:30 and worked until 5:15 and then tried to get cheesecake and pastries for Sarah, but failed because the bakery was closed, and now I'm home and tired.

I think I will have a drink.

Fell off the internet for a while there. Whoops.

In short:

1. Had strep. Worked from home sick for a week. On antibiotics. Better now.
2. Car starter battery died. Replacements backordered. Bought portable jumper. Winter is fun.
3. Fetus is healthy so far. Quad screen came back negative for genetic problems. Sarah feels it move!
4. Nadal beat Federer. Sigh. I want my awesome R-Fed back.

My company is hiring a web developer and a junior. Come work with me in Burlington!

That is all.

Ha ha. If you read that subject line out loud and don't enunciate well, it describes me!

Earlier this month I said to myself, "Self," I said, "you have like 5 weeks until Boskone. Surely you can read 4 books by Boskone-attending authors by then!" So I went to the library and they just happened to have Farthing by Jo Walton (guest of honor) and Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder (book 2 of Virga; I read book 1 last year).

Since then I have read maybe 2/3rds of Farthing, even though I love it. I am just a slow reader and I'm distracted by shiny other projects all the time.

Maybe I'll set my sights a bit lower. I bet I can get these 2 books read by Boskone!

Last night I had dinner with Sarah and viellen. Now I have met TWO of the moderators of vaginapagina, if you include Sarah, whom I liked so much after I met her that I married her. VP mods are like Pokémon; if I catch them I can use them to do battle against ignorance about sexual health.

We ate at the new Asiana Noodle House on Church St., which is a spin-off of the Asiana House restaurant that is just a couple blocks from the north end of Church St. The Noodle House is where Paradise Burrito used to be, and they've done a good job sprucing the place up. It's very friendly and the menu is quite varied and not terribly expensive. I want to go back and try more stuff since they had a ton of things that sounded good!

Today because it was really crazy cold I am working from home.

I feel like I've seen the word "snowpocalypse" bandied about way way more in the past month than ever before.

At the beginning of 2008, I started posting "Book Notes" entries about all the books I read. That lasted a whopping five weeks or so and then I slacked off, and really, my reading frequency has dropped precipitously. However, I do have a list of (I think) all the books I've read since then (not in any particular order, though). Here is my catch-up, with mustard.

( This is very long but maybe someone will find it interesting. )

While the untimely demise of LiveJournal is not likely in the immediate future, yesterday's furor over Sup's downsizing made me think, and what I thunk is this: the (technological) problem with LiveJournal is its single-point-of-failure capitalistic architecture. If LiveJournal isn't sustainable financially, it will disappear. Sure, someone will try to save it, and there will be attempts at organized moves to other weblog platforms, but any move big enough to maintain the LJ community's cohesiveness (which is what gives LJ its real value) will result in the same thing: if the chosen platform isn't profitable enough, it'll collapse.

On top of that, no other blogging platform of a reasonable size has the same community-enabling features as LJ. Blogging on Blogger or Wordpress or Typepad just doesn't feel the same; it's like posting in a vacuum, where people might stumble across your posts if you're lucky. Blogging on LJ feels like posting in a busy marketplace, where even though you don't know most people, there's a sense of life.

If LJ fails, we don't need to move to another blogging website. Even the fledgling Dreamwidth, supposedly the great white hope for when LJ goes under, isn't addressing the problems involved with having such a huge userbase. What we need is a blogging community platform that doesn't require profitability to sustain itself. Instead of users trading money (or ad impressions) for the use of Sup's server space and bandwidth, why not each user give storage space and bandwidth according to his ability, and use according to his needs?

( Here's what I've been dreaming up. )

Now that the holiday period is thoroughly over (despite working four out of five days last week, it still felt like holidays), and I'm faced with 2009 stretching out ahead of me, I find myself sort of wondering what to do with myself. I'm not much for making and sticking to resolutions, but there are a couple projects I've actually been making slow but steady progress on, and I sort of think if I decide to finish them this year maybe I can actually pull that off.

We've got a baby coming in July (!) which will, I'm sure, pretty much sap my productivity from that point on, for who knows how long, so if I'm gonna try to get stuff done it should probably be before then. So here's my plan: complete and release at least one of my things by June. I think that's doable.

Sorry to be so vague, but I've got that particular type of geek-paranoia where I feel like if I talk much about my projects that will doom them to failure. Suffice it to say the one I'm most excited about is a small web-app, and I'm developing it in CakePHP because that's a system I'm familiar with and a language I can use in my sleep.

I also want to try to write more (last year's fiction output was nonexistent), and even though everybody says "oh, write every day, stick to a schedule," etc., I can't do that, so I'm just going to make an effort to at least do it occasionally. I'll leave publication goals for the future; right now, I'll just write more. I'm kind of tired of going to cons and having people (including authors I admire) ask me, "So, have you written anything lately?" and having to sheepishly say no. If that's not motivation I don't know what is.

I don't think I ever linked to our baby weblog, so here: Our Little Pirate is where we'll be writing about pregnancy and family and baby stuff.

I meant this to be a short entry. Maybe I should resolve to be less verbose.

January:
I tried to learn to snowboard, and then I had surgery. The two, surprisingly, were not related.

February:
After the Patriots' heartbreaking Superbowl loss, I felt pretty blue (or, well, purple) and took to regularly drinking down at the tavern. I went to Boskone and bought a lot of books, most of which still sit in my to-read pile making me feel guilty.

March:
As the winter dragged on, I encountered unwanted visitors and unlikely poetry.

April:
I went to Walt Disney World and didn't post about it (but there are photos), and turned 28 years old and didn't post about it, and probably did other things that I didn't post about.

May:
In early May I moved on from my old job despite not having a new one lined up, and I hunted and hunted and hunted until

June:
I got a job in Burlington, VT and Sarah and I began preparations to move.

July:
While busily moving 90 miles north (photos), I traveled a couple hundred miles south to Burlington, MA to attend Readercon.

August:
I spent lots of time enjoying the late-summer weather and getting to know my big little city. Immediately after starting my new job, I took a week off to go camping (photos).

September:
I built something with my hands and power tools which would have inspired me to grunt and feel powerful except that it's a stemware rack.

October:
I climbed a mountain for the first time in years, nearly killing myself carrying my 2-year-old niece most of the way.

November:
I dreamt about shutting McCain up, and then my dream came true! Sort of. Also I became (and still am dangit) inordinately proud of cleaning my computer closet.

December:
I revealed to the world that Sarah and I are having a baby, and then bemoaned my freakishly long arms which I will undoubtedly pass on to my progeny.

Here's to a 2009 in which I post more so that my year-end round-up isn't so dull!

Why is it so hard for me to find shirts that fit? If the torso fits right, the sleeves are almost inevitably too short. I must be an ape or something. We went shopping today and I did find a shirt that fit, but I looked at a bunch of other ones that just weren't right.

Also, I really like mock turtlenecks, but apparently they aren't in style because not a single store I looked in had any. I need shirts with collars for work, but I rarely find button-down or polo shirts that are comfortable.

Grumble grumble.

(Sarah's pregnant and due in July!)

Hey look, it's the end of the year and my posting frequency has slowed to a trickle! Who could have guessed it?

I am well. Work keeps me busy but it's still a great job and I'm not getting burned out or anything, which is a good sign. Life is generally pretty great, and I'm happy with the way things are going. It's wintry and nice (generally -- today it's inexplicably warm and rainy), and I'm looking forward to going snowboarding as soon as I get a chance to start slowly on some easy runs (many mountains only have blue square or black diamond runs open so far; I'm waiting until I can get warmed up on some green circles before I take a chance with the intermediate stuff).

Saturday was my family Christmas party. I made a relatively off-the-cuff spinach and artichoke dip that went over spectacularly. Often at family events the stuff we make is viewed suspiciously and hardly touched; this one garnered rave reviews instead. Yay!

Last Thursday and Friday Sarah and I bought and put up our Christmas tree, and hung ornaments on it. Last night we had some friends over and strung popcorn and cranberry garlands, which was mainly a fun excuse to have mulled cider and fresh banana bread and just chat. That was a relaxing way to spend a Sunday evening.

As soon as work is done this Thursday, I'm off for a ten-day holiday where our only plans are "do Christmas stuff with the family". I am going to do my best to be as relaxed and stress-free as possible.

Last weekend I finally got around to cleaning our computer closet. When we moved into the apartment we just sort of threw everything computer-related into that closet and plugged it in and ignored it, and it was a giant mess, totally unusable. Now I've cleaned and organized and it's actually nice!

I can't do much about the tangle of cables right now, since that would mean shutting everything down and disconnecting it all while I do it. I figure we'll probably lose power at some point and then I'll be able to deal with all that stuff, but for now it's manageable.

(My life is so exciting. Certain people who read this will say, "Wait, he's still on about his computer closet? It's been like five days!" Sorry, certain people.)

The monitor and keyboard on the left are hooked up to our old MythTV box, which I wiped and installed Ubuntu 8.10 server edition on and turned into a development and web server, complete with a handy SVN repository that auto-deploys any committed files. A good dev setup helps me be more productive.

I dreamt I was Obama and I had to take a long train ride with McCain. He kept insulting the other passengers and bothering them and being generally rude so I stuffed some Silly Putty in his mouth to shut him up.

This is why I'm not running for president.