Epsilon Exploits & Familial Foibles September 2008 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec Blog Archive: 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 Physics Glossary Thumbnails Wine Glossary Video Archive Links are good as of their posting date. Comments may be directed to bradley@wogsland.org.

Tonight we had our first fire drill in our new house. It was very stressful and scary for Zara, who had never had the responsibility of getting herself out in a fire drill before. Nevertheless, she got out and down to the streetcorner so she was extremely proud of her performance. Afterwards we talked about how fire drills were like seatbelts and Maxwell explained to her things he'd learned at school about fire safety, like stop, drop and roll. We'll see if she comes upstairs with nightmares tonight as her little brain runs the necessary Monte Carlo to assimilate this new information.

Julie came to visit on Thursday for the weekend and we've had alot of fun. The girls and Julie did a bunch of girly stuph like shopping, and then Friday night I met them after work at Lazlo's, our local steakhouse/brewpub. After dinner I took the little kids home and the girls all went back out shopping. Saturday afternoon we headed up to Omaha. None of us had never been to Omaha, and Julie had never been to Iowa - so we made the obligatory trip across the border. Then we headed down Farnam street to Oktoberfest! The kids ate for free and the adults drank alot of Bier. We danced the Polka and sang with glasses aloft into the night among an interesting mixture of culturally attuned families, serious dorks like myself, and college kids. There was a pretzel eating contest for kids and adults so the girls and I entered, because even it we didn't win we would still get free pretzels. Surprisingly, Alora won the kids and I beat out the other adults, so in addition to free Brezeln I got free Bier, and the girls got $5 apiece for playing. Julie brought supplies and this morning the kids baked a Halloween cake to decorate in the afternoon. While he unloaded the dishwasher, Maxwell sang about Bier. I guess that means he had fun yesterday. Then it was off to the JDRF 5K at Haymarket park where I ran and everyone else walked. Seriously. I thought, 5K - someone will run, actually no one else ran, so I felt a little silly. It was a great day though, shopping in the haymarket and then going to a Greek restaurant for dinner. Marvodaphne!

More pictures from Julie's visit are on Shutterfly.

I have a list in my head of things I will buy when I eventually win the lottery sometime in the next 4 billion years. Things like an ultrasound machine ($150,000) - wouldn't it be fun to look at your internal organs whenever you wanted? Living on the great plains and having recently read a book on all the megafauna which used to inhabit the place until a few hairless African apes came in and ate them, I can't help but imagining lumbering giant ground sloths and woolly mammoths all the time. So today I was thinking I really need to add a herd of elephants to my list. Wouldn't it be great to re-establish wild proboscideans on the American continent? Admittedly, it would probably behoove later scientists much better to have a breeding population of Chimpanzees here to prevent their all becoming bushmeat in Africa sometime this century, but, while elephants crossing the plains to the river seems majestic in my mind, chimps just seem goofy outside of a lab setting (perhaps that's a lack of imagination on my part). But if you're in the market for an elephant, where do you buy one? A zoo? A circus? An elephant farm? And which are cold heartier - African or Asian? Asians live near the Himilayas, but they're classified as endangered (so probably more expensive). The internet can tell you alot of things, but buying an elephant does not seem to be one (unless you are a Thai national). It doesn't help that a book came out last year entitled "How to buy an Elephant". Couldn't he have just written a blog? Did you know elephants get three sets of teeth and they die of starvation when the third set falls out around age 65-70? Argggh...

20 September 2008 The soil in our backyard is a thick, black glacial till piled up through the Cenozoic ice ages as rivers of ice ground the recently uplifted Rockies down to their present altitude. This till is freshly ground rock and as such is some of the most fertile soil in the world, but it's smallest particles are easily windblown so dustbowl conditions can form during drier times if the earth is stripped of vegetation. Nevertheless, it's thickness would allow for even the worst soil erosion practices to persist for a thousand years before it would all be washed away leaving only the barren rock below. Before the Rockies started their upward climb and subsequent erosion, however, there was an inland sea in western North America for much of the Cretaceous. Eastern Nebraska represented the sea's eastern shore for much of this period and so sandstone was the primary rock laid down and later covered by hundreds of feet of glacial till in the Cenozoic. There are in some places rare outcroppings of this sandstone though, and today we went to visit one in Pioneers Park on the Western side of Lincoln. The red sandstone weathers less quickly than the surrounding till, so it formed a hill upon which a statue of an indian sending smoke signals was built. The kids also had quite a bit of fun running about the prairielands nearby...

Quicken gets on my nerves. If they didn't make filing with TurboTax that much easier I probably would have quit using it by now. Nevertheless, because I don't trust their fewer features, more separate products business model I finally decided it was high time to backup my data in a more widely readable format. So tonight I wrote a PERL script to convert Quicken's .QIF account files to tab-delimited text files that can be read by Excel. I'm just preparing for that eventual "upgrade" where Quicken no longer makes any graphs (like the financial planning stuph that disappeared into a "new" program a few years ago). I figure others might have over a decade worth of valuable data locked into the Quicken format that they'd like to free so this script might be useful to the wider world. Also, if anyone finds a good open-source replacement for Quicken I'd love an email. Tschüß!

As the crisp cold of Autumn approaches and the grape harvests start to take place in the northern hemisphere the first wines of the 2008 vintage from the southern hemisphere start to hit the shelves. The whites naturally represent the vanguard, and this year my first 2008 came from Kim Crawford in Marlborough, New Zealand. (more info)

Yesterday morning we went out to do our first Nebraska garage saling. Alora & Brittan, still sick, stayed home while we took the little ones with us. To help them learn the value of money we gave them each a dollar with which they could buy whatever they wanted. Maxwell bought an old plastic kite in a bag at the first garage sale, spending his whole dollar. Zara is a finickier shopper though, and didn't find anything worth parting with her dollar for. Our biggest deal for the day was a set of four kitchen chairs for $10. Now everyone can have a chair at their desk AND we can have chairs at the table at the same time! Well, we assumed Maxwell would loose the pieces of his kite or they might not have all been there in the first place, but this morning he came inside beaming and said "Who wants to see me fly my kite?" Surprised, we followed him outside to see that he was, in fact, flying his kite several feet off the ground in the cold, strong wind coming out of the northwest. Looking at the trees above our backyard and thinking of Charlie Brown I suggested we go to the park instead. So Alora, Zara, Maxwell and I jacketed up and headed to the open fields at our nearby park. After trying to fly it backwards and upside down we hit upon the correct configuration and Maxwell's kite soared above the grasslands as we sang the song from Mary Poppins.

I have worked in cubicles before, but I think I have finally figured out why I don't like them. It something very basic and almost animalistic in our psyche which leads us, as possible prey, to position ourselves to avoid being snuck up on. Most offices have doors, so the sound of opening them ques you in to the approach of a possible threat - not that your 3-year-old heralding the dinner hour is actually that threatening, but the knowledge you will hear a threat coming is relaxing. Strike one: cubicles do not have doors. Now true cubicles are square in layout with faux walls and a single entrance. Some office space is in modified cubicle form, without walls isolating individuals but perhaps dividing them into groups. This is the way the grad student offices I've worked in are organized. This set up usually gives you a wide viewfield which also makes for easy threat identification and low stress. Not that the average office is like the African savanna, although some bosses do treat their underlings like prey. Strike two: cubicles limit viewfield. As an aside, it's worth noting the villain in these proceedings: the IRS. Because cubicles can be depreciated like office furniture, which is quite a bit faster than walls of wood and drywall, it makes economic sense for companies to use the former rather than the latter. Of course, even with a limited viewfield, as long threats can only approach in that limited viewfield it can impart a cavelike feeling of security. What is the most space-efficient location for a desk in a cubicle? On the back wall facing away from the door. Strike three: cubicles funnel all approaching threats to our backs. Nearly every day I am snuck up on by a fellow employee, who fortunately usually just wants to discuss a project we're working on rather than feed on my carcass after dispatching me. While this weakened posture does not completely negate the natural homefield advantage of my personal space, it does affect an annoyance to my concentration while working. Perhaps this annoyance effects a lower productivity decrease than being able to constantly see my fellow employees or having more square footage for an entrance-facing desk or some other variation, but it is nevertheless a blip of stress on an otherwise unstressful environment. Come to think of it, perhaps I am only noticing it now because its magnitude was so much less than other stresses at other times in my life...

Here's the recipe Dell sent for the chix:

375 degrees
 
Wash boneless chicken or thighs and put in pan sprayed with PAM.
 
Then pour over chicken the following mixture:
    1 minced garlic clove (optional)
    2 tsp. Italian seasoning
    3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
    3 Tbsp country style mustard (though any will do fine!)
    a bit of olive oil or some other kind...
 
Cover with foil and bake about 1+ hour.
 
YUM!

. . . and with the cold of Fall has come the colds of Fall. Brittan is the only one going to school today, but I have little doubt that despite Cara's frenetic disinfection of things she will succumb before too long as the other three have. For my part I am doing my best to stay away from the diseased environs - last night I went grocery shopping and then hung out with college boys next door for the better part of the evening. I still don't understand how some people can drink Natty Light. I know it's cheaper than bottled water, but jeepers. Maxwell seems to be on the mend and will hopefully go to school tomorrow; Zara is pretty much fine now; Alora, however, is still feeling pretty bad and isn't sleeping well, so she'll probably be out for the week.

This weekend Cara was in Maryland attending her cousin Bobby's wedding while I stay home with the insanity. Yesterday Deanna came over as did A & B's friend Megan and they ran amok, playing dress-up and having tea parties. Megan ended up spending the night and this morning as I type this the three girls are slathering themselves with thick, black mud. Oh the things daddies allow...

Molly is a trash dog. She just loves rooting through trash. I've always assumed this is a survival skill learned during her rough puppihood on the streets, but now it's more like a habit she can't kick. We can always tell when she's gotten into the trash while we've been out because she doesn't greet us at the door with excitement and kisses when we return but instead hides in some dark corner or under a bed. In Knoxville our kitchen pantry had a door by which we could shut off access to her favorite trash, and usually we tried to throw food trash only in there. Sometimes we would forget to close the door at night or when going out and Molly would make a mess, but most of the time the system worked. Here in Lincoln we have no door on our pantry. It didn't take Molly long to realize this and, after several ransackings of our open-top trashcan, Cara decided to engineer a solution. She got a trashcan with a lid and a put two bricks in the bottom to keep the dog from knocking it over. This worked for a few weeks, but Molly is a survivalist. We still can't figure out how Houdinidog escapes from our fenced-in backyard either. Well the other night we had chicken - the kind that comes still attached to the bones. Having disposed of said bones in the kitchen trash we headed off to bed thinking nothing of the irresistible treasure we were leaving in plain smell. During the night Molly pushed the stepstool over by the trashcan and figured out how to open the lid to find her disgusting prize inside. She couldn't actually reach the bones because they had fallen through the lighter trash to the bottom, but she did pull out and lick off every scrap off plastic or paper those bones had touched on their way down.

Summer is over in Nebraska. Driving to work this morning it was 54 degrees outside and the forecast is that we might get a high above 70 next week. Maybe. The downside of this fabulous weather is the sun receding away from my mornings. No longer does it shine into the bedroom windows; as I wake up now I am greeted by the soft twilight. I have never before inhabited such northerly latitudes, and now understand more personally why the Romans, who inhabit roughly the same latitude as Lincoln (41°54'N vs. 40°48'N), saw the sun running southward away from them in the Fall.

Raise your hand if you know what the DMCA is. No one? I guess Howie's not reading the blog this week. Basically, it's the US copyright law which governs digital media. As I have successfully monetized my YouTube experience I have become, like Lars Ulrich, more entrenched in the current copyright system. This past few days I've had to file a bevy of DMCA notices over copyright infringement of a work I created last fall which involved Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin. In October of last year I attended the 2nd annual Secessionist Convention in Chattanooga, and had the pleasure of meeting Dexter Clark and his wife, goldminers and representatives of the Alaska Independence Party. Dexter is a great fan of his governor, who is a former AIP member, and extolled her virtues in a speech I taped and posted to YouTube later that day. Fast forward 11 months, Palin is the Republican VP nominee and any dirt on her is getting bit play in the media. So people on YouTube started stealing my video of Dexter Clark to get views on their own channels. (I too have played this game.) Being an insider now with Ulrich-like deft I walloped these folks with the DMCA - to up the views on my own video and reposted commentary. Pulitzer would be proud.

Zara, Maxwell, Deanna

Believe it or not, Maxwell and Deanna, who lives right across the street, are the same age. There are few things more exciting than eachother to these three amigos, and they play together whenever possible. Maxwell has taken to this place like a duck to water and is joining the chess club this fall (his idea) while his elder sisters return to playing instruments. We've got some ideas for Zara too, but we may have to try a few things before we hit upon something she enjoys. I have finally hit a stride at my job and have fun every day, although I do worry about my famous (or is it infamous) two year attention span. Cara is the only one who's really yet to hit her groove.