Last night when I got home from work Nichelle could barely open her mouth, because her TMJ was acting up.
Her description of the problem was perfect, though: “It’s awful—I can’t yell at the kids.”
Nada
Nada is now what happens when we turn the key on our 1994 Buick Century Wagon. It’s got about 160,000 miles on it, and has served us extremely reliably, and we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to it. AAA is coming by later to deliver the car to our new mechanic.
At work on Friday just before leaving a great thing happened! I was modifying our demo application, and we needed to pass a parameter for a specific localization file to the right module. I coded it, cycled the server, and it worked, all in less than 5 minutes. Struts has not always been so easy, but it’s getting easier.
Naomi turned 5 months old this weekend. She is babbling more, and able to roll over now, and wants to get her hands into everything from what we’re eating for dinner to the computer keyboard. With 3 brothers, I predict her first words will be, “Mom, he’s bothering me.â€
What Is the Deal with Our Foreign Policy?
[nuke][doug]I am not normally very critical of the US government, especially having traveled a little and seeing what life in other countries is like. However, the official reactions to the pardon of Dr. AQ Khan have me completely flabbergasted.
For the record, these faults existed long before the Bush administration—in fact, there have been few times in US history when a clear foreign policy was applied consistently. Let me make a few points to illustrate why we desperately need a consistent foreign policy:
- We know that Saddam Hussein was completely evil. If he did not succeed in building weapons of mass destruction, he certainly wanted to. He is by many estimates responsible for the death of 3 million people in the past two decades. Getting rid of him was a good thing, even if some of our intelligence was bad, and the road ahead for Iraq is not going to be an easy one. But, if we apply the “threat to us, threat to others†rules to other countries, we have to overthrow the governments of North Korea (threatens Japan and South Korea; may have the capability to hit us with Nukes), Pakistan (threatens India; created a global black market for nuclear technology), and China (threatens Taiwan; helped distribute nuclear weapons technology; directly aided Communist Korea and Viet Naam in the past).
- What about the “evil dictator†rule?If we follow this, we need to eliminate Fidel Castro in our own back yard, the Saudi royal family, several African leaders, the current rulers in Haiti after the coup, etc.
So, why are we making a deal with the devil (despite claims to the contrary) in Pakistan? I will have to get back to this later.
This ’n That
Just a few quick bullet items:
- President Bush had some great lines in his speech last night. Here are my two favorites:
- “The other party’s nomination battle is still playing out. The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions. They’re for tax cuts and against them. They’re for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They’re for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They’re in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that’s just one senator from Massachusetts.â€
- “They now agree that the world is better off with Saddam out of power. They just didn't support removing Saddam from power. Maybe they were hoping he would lose the next Iraqi election.â€
New Arrivals at the Wilcox Home
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No, we’re not having another baby.
For a long time, Isaac has been begging for a second pet. He has had his crested gecko, Kim, for quite a while now, and has done a good job of taking care of it, and has wanted a snake. (Nichelle just bought a juvenile corn snake, named Jaden, but I do not yet have any good pictures of it, although there are a few on my friend Mark Sohmer’s BLOG.)
I told Isaac if he saved up half the money for his new pet, I would chip in the other half, figuring it would take a while for him to save the $60 or so he would need for his half payment on a decent pet snake. Well, we stopped at the reptile store, R.J.’s Exotics, on the way home from church, and Isaac fell in love with a Pink Zebra tarantula, which was only $30, of which Isaac already had saved $15. He named it Chandan, which was on our list of gender-neutral names.
David has been begging for a pet, too, and the store gave him a couple of goldfish (they raise them as feeders) for free. He is thrilled to finally have pets of his own, and named them Luke and Kyle. (Luke Skywalker and Kyle Katarn are characters in the Star Wars Jedi Knight series of games.)
I have to admit, this tarantula is pretty cool.
Computer Problems
Last night Jedi Academy started acting funny. When playing a sound, the sound would start repeating, and the screen would freeze. Usually, after a few seconds, this would correct itself, but a couple of times, the graphics would get distorted (even after exiting the game), and only a reboot would fix them.
As time went by, this got worse and worse. Eventually I ran through several of our games, and all of them that used advanced 3D graphics had the same problem. Some would freeze and stutter often (Dungeon Seige), a few would show the graphics problem right away (Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast; Star Trek Voyager Elite Force), and a few would work for a while (Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy).
In addition to testing, I reinstalled the video drivers, sound drivers, and DirectX. The operating system is behaving just fine, and we're up-to-date on virus definitions and doing nightly scans. The problem seems to occur only with stuff that uses high-end 3D rendering, but isn’t confined merely to openGL, as far as I can tell. The DirectX diagnostics all ran perfectly.
Other than losing the ability to play our favorite games on that machine, this has triggered abnormally high levels of anxiety for me.
I suspect our video card has developed a problem, but am welcome to alternative suggestions.
Lessons in Rocketeering
[doug]This should also satisfy those of you who want pictures of our new house.(Well, not really, but there’s a picture of part of one room.) If you are planning to sell your house, then Sell your house quickly with Bonnie Buys Houses Fast which will help you in selling your property quickly and at good rates.
Phil Luchon gave “The Boys†(which includes me) an Estes complete model rocket kit for Christmas. We got permission from Pastor Miller to use the church ball field for launching (try that in Brockton!), and got two flights up on Saturday. The first photo above shows David when it was his turn to launch. John missed out until the next day due to what I thought was bad batteries, but turned out to be a dud engine. So, I bought fresh batteries, and some extra rocket engines, and we planned to have another try at it on Sunday.
Sunday included the regular church service, a pot luck feast (dinner is too small a term for it), and an early afternoon service. We had a guest speaker, a pastor from Arkansas who is being interviewed to become principal for the Christian School. There was a lot of teasing about the weather and his accent—Pastor Miller has a great sense of humor, and both services were a lot of fun, while being spiritually fulfilling as well. Bryan Harrington may be interested to learn that his Temperature Conversion Chart got read from the pulpit.
After the afternoon service, we went back out to launch the rocket again. After discovering that the engine, not the ignitor or batteries were to blame, John got as near flawless a launch off as we’d seen so far. Then I decided to put in a size B engine….
The flight was spectacular. The B engine took off with enough power to send the rocket at least a couple of hundred feet into the air (we haven’t done the triganometry on any of our flights yet), leaving us cheering, “Wow!†and gazing awestruck at the power demonstrated by the rocket’s flight. (The blast was hot enough to mis-shape the steel splash plate where the engine fired.)
Unfortunately, the chute deployed at an altitude high enough to carry the rocket about 100 feet downwind, just enough to get tangled in the top of a tree at the edge of the church property. Despite John’s bravery (see the second image above), he couldn’t get a decent grip on the branch it was on, so the nose cone and parachute are still up in the tree, until we return with some rope or a saw. Thankfully, we shook the body of the rocket (which is not weather-resistant) loose, and that is safely at home.
That evening the church hosted a SuperBowl get-together, at which I dropped John off, while David, Isaac, and I built with Lego. (See the third photo above.) You can see that our new family room has more than enough space to spread the Lego boxes out while we build. The pinball machine and pellet stove are in the background, as are sundry other items that have yet to be unpacked. Nichelle is going to kill me when she sees which photo I’ve posted, but the fun is worth it.
While I was at it, I put up a newer photo of Naomi, for her many fans.
A True Dream Job—Becoming a Master Builder at LegoLand, California
Co-worker Ted Trela sent me this droolworthy, Lego-related link from Wired news. [Editor’s note: December 15, 2005—It appears the link earlier in this paragraph is not working, try this related story this link instead.]
Of course, I don’t get to build with Lego as a profession, but building software is almost as much fun, so my job is just about as close to being a LegoLand, Californi as the winners of Lego’s nationwide search.
Where’s my Snow?
I woke up before my alarm this morning, looked out the window and saw no new snow. Overnight, the weather forecast, which had disappointingly dropped from “snow, heavy at times,†to “3 to 8 inches of total accumulation,†had changed to, “snow showers, possible accumulation of 1 inch.â€
Last year Nashua got mountains of snow. This year it’s just unusually cold. But the winter is not over yet.
A Little Humor (I)—Temperature Conversion Chart
- 60°F – Southern Californians shiver uncontrollably. People in New England sunbathe.
- 50°F – New Yorkers try to turn on the heat. People in New England plant gardens.
- 40°F – Italian & English cars won’t start. People in New England drive with the windows down.
- 32°F – Distilled water freezes. Maine's Moose Head Lake’s water gets thicker.
- 20°F – Floridians don coats, thermal underwear, gloves, wool hats. People in New England throw on a flannel shirt.
- 15°F – New York landlords finally turn up the heat. People in New England have the last cookout before it gets cold.
- 0°F – All the people in Miami die. New Englanders close the windows.
- –10°F – Californians fly away to Mexico. The Girl Scouts in New England are selling cookies door to door.
- –25°F – Hollywood disintegrates. People in New England get out their winter coats.
- –40°F – Washington DC runs out of hot air. People in New England let the dogs sleep indoors.
Fun Fact: –40°F and –40°C are the same temperature