Category: Home Life

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All I Want Is a Half-Decent Sombrero!

Sadly, last summer, my $12 sombrero ranchero purchased in Mexico in 2003, was accidentally squashed during our return from vacation in Moultonborough, New Hampshire. (If one is a cowboy, rather than a farmer, that same hat might be called a somebrero vaquero.)

Six months later even I, with my less-than-excellent fashion sense, had to admit that it was time to retire the hat, so I’ve switched to a Kronos-issued, “100 Quarters of Revenue Growth,” baseball cap.

Although a cowboy hat is certainly unusual in New England, there is nothing better for keeping the rain, snow, and sun off of one’s head. I find I can weather the most severe rainstorm without a jacket with the proper headwear, and a ball cap just doesn’t cut it. I’m also a bit picky about what type of hat I get. I don’t want one that is so fancy or obviously expensive that it will label me as an outsider during my trips to Mexico.

I’ve toyed around with purchasing a new hat online. Long-distance co-worker Ricardo Castillo, who works for Kronos in Cleburne, Texas, referred me to Cavenders, which seems to have a reasonable selection. I spent an hour searching for similar sites online, and found only one or two sites that fit into the “reasonable” category. Most had a truly horrible selection. Only one had affordable prices. My biggest letdown is that none of them seemed to include the traditional Mexican four feathers in the brim. Still, I should be able to remedy this by sending my wife to a craft store. (The feathers consist of one each of green, yellow, and red, plus one smaller, spotted one. I assume the colors are linked to the Mexican flag, although its major colors are green, white, and red, in that order. It may be the yellow feather is used to better contrast against the typically off-white color of the hat, or that it is easier to dye a feather yellow than bleach one to white. Maybe yellow has better color retention. Life is full of small mysteries. I did find this link about cross-cultural palettes.)

Part of the problem might be the same reason most people would be hesitant to buy shoes online. The buyer wants a hat that he knows will fit well and look good, and there is no substitute for being able to try the item on and handle the materials. So, clothing—especially certain items—purchased online would probably have a very high returned item ratio, and could, I surmise, dramatically harm the profit margin.

So, imagine my delight when, while we were up in Manchester, New Hampshire, I spotted a store, El Cowboy Pasedo, with two huge Mexican flags in the windows. After our bus visitation work, Nichelle and I eagerly entered the store.

Inside was a variety of Mexican clothing, including some very attractive sombreros.

I found an excellent hat nearly right away, confirming at least the size I need, and asked what it cost. (Hover over the text for translations.)

“Dos ciento.”

“¿Docientos dolares?” I asked, incredulously.

The sales clerk went on to explain that some of the hats were only $150.

I explained that the hats were indeed very beautiful, but that I was accustomed to spending only about $12 in Mexico, but that these were of finer quality. I would easily spend $25 or $50 on one like this, but that $150 to $200 was simply unaffordable.

The search continues….

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IBM DeathStar / Down in the Dumps

I don’t usually write about my mood, but today I woke up feeling really down. Thankfully, I haven’t been sent into massive panic attacks over the issues described below. (One of the ironic points of living with an anxiety disorder and being a computer Geek is that a trigger point for my anxiety is problems with my own personal computer.) I am grateful that God convinced me to make a critical backup at just the right time, so everything important is intact and backed up.

It looks like I’m going to have to replace the old IBM drive on my primary computer. I noticed last night that it was an IBM DeskStar drive, which my friend Charlie Dunn said was so prone to failure they nicknamed them “DeathStars” when he was working in IT.

At first it looked like I had a problem with overheating—and that still may be the problem—although it seems to be getting worse. Last weekend Nichelle compalined that her e-mail was missing for a period of several months, but after rebooting the computer, everything was fine. I took the precaution of backing up our photos (most of which are already on CD as yet another backup), financials, and documents folders to a nonused partition on a drive I’d added in December.

A couple of days ago, I logged in to the computer and was notified that numerous updates were ready to be installed to Java and Windows XP. These updates had already been installed, and it was rather obvious what had happened—the primary drive, from which we have been booting for nearly all of the lifetime of the computer had disappeared, and the machine rebooted to an imperfect Windows setup on the second drive. (That setup was toasted, apparently, by a bad power supply, now replaced, that caused some data loss.)

Part of the time the IBM drive isn’t being recognized at all. After a certain amount of time—perhaps due to overheating, perhaps due to another type of drive failure, it won’t be recognized at all. Rebooting the system sometimes catches it and boots to the original drive, especially if the whole system has been off for a while. On a really hot day, or after a period of high disk activity, the drive will fail again and the system will reboot to the bad partition.

I’d like to try copying the image over to a new drive, using Ghost or whatever comes with the new drive (I’m leaning toward Seagate), as it would get me instantly up-and-running without having to reinstall. Of course, I do not have that much hope that the old drive will “hang in there” long enough for such a data-reading-intense operation to happen.

If that doesn’t work, I’m willing to bite the bullet and do a reinstall of XP Pro. However, there is a drive size limitation (I think it’s 120 GB) in the initial release of XP Pro (pre SP-1), which is what I have. Installing from an SP2 CD would be even sweeter, and less prone to failure than upgrading to SP2 from a previous version.

:: sigh ::

Editor’s note added June 13, 2005:

It looks like the drive is only flaking out when it overheats. I think it may fail soon, but letting it cool down with the machine off so far makes it recover. In the mean time, I’m keeping my data backed up daily, and when the drive does fail, I can boot to my “February” installation, and still run all my apps, so replacing the drive is now less urgent, and I can plan for this at my convenience.

Editor’s note added June 21, 2005:

No, it’s not necessarily related to overheating. Or, if it is, the drive is “overheating” at a temperature far below what its temperature sensor would indicate shoud be a problem.

Last night I was running at a reasonably cool 35 degrees C, when the whole things went kablooie. At first I had the usual trouble recognizing the drive. Then, when I finally got it to recognize, it was dog slow, and told me that Windows couldn’t boot because windows/system32/system was missing or corrupt. I had just finished backing up everyone’s e-mail, pictures, etc., except mine.

This morning, after leaving the system off overnight, I got the drive to be recognized by leaving it running for a few minutes, and everything seemed to be fine.

So heat may be playing a factor, but I think it’s time to just retire the drive.

I’m also looking at putting together a new system that would kick butt for as little as $500, but I also need to get this one back to a reliable state.

Editor’s note added June 27, 2005:

Wednesday night after church, I went out and grabbed a 120 GB Seagate Barricuda drive to replace the boot drive. On Wednesday, the IBM DeathStar drive seemed to fail completely, and I was looking at rebuilding my system.

On Thursday evening, I decided to give the IBM drive a few more tries, and got it to recognize at startup!

Hurriedly, I rebooted with the Seagate drive, hoping to be able to copy my IBM drive over to the Seagate drive, which would become the new boot drive, and save me from having to reinstall everything.

Seagate’s drive setup software is supposed to be easier to use than Western Digital’s. I actually didn”t find that to be the case. They both are about the same, but there were some nonintuitive points that I had to keep hitting the help file and documentation for. Once nice thing (which I did not need) is that Seagate lets you print installation instructions that are customized for what you’re actually doing.

It took hours for the drive to copy, mostly due to the read errors (all were being corrected, but it was having to perform each read multiple times) that SMART was reporting. Copying also appeared to be slow because of Seagate’s verification process, but getting an exact drive copy is far more important than getting a fast copy.

I only found three problems:

  1. Trying to access the System Restore tab crashed. It turned that is always caused by a drive copy process, and all I had to do to fix it was disable the System Restore service, then re-enable it.
  2. The next problem was a missing FrontPage icon (the link would work, but the icon itself was the default rectangle). It was looking for something under installs that clearly wasn’t around any more. I simply replaced the shortcuts with new ones.
  3. Lastly, the icons on my own logon are weird. Unless I run in 32-bit color mode, I get ugly 2d, 8-bit icons. It seems to happen only on my account. I find it disturbing, but it can’t be described as much more than a cosmetic issue. Some of the menu colors are off as well. Again, it’s no big deal, but it does bother me.

Other than that, the machine is working perfectly. My friend Phil Luchon came over and brough his machine. We played WarCraft and StarCraft. The Lego Star Wars game, which the kids play every moment we will allow (one hour on weekedays, 2 on weekends), which had been very prone to crashing and lockups, has not had a single failure in 3 days.

Everything involving disk access is much faster on the new drive: booting, loading big programs, virtual memory swapping, etc.

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Early Memories of Our Children

Isaac:

I found this note in our cellar, originally from May 13, 1993:

Today Isaac was talking about Andrew (my newphew/his cousin) and asking, “Is he three?” while holding out three fingers. I said, “No, he’s thirteen.” Isaac immediately asked, “Where’s the thirteen finger?”

Isaac has a host of interesting things we could write about. He surprised us at 18 months by identifying and naming the letters “O” and “A” on his alphabet blocks. Before he was 2, he could name every letter of the alphabet, and recite them in rapid fashion if one pointed to a word. (He was at least 4 before he mastered the alphabet song.)

We tried to raise Isaac to be “weapons-free.” (We were naive parents.) At age 2, he ate his toast into the shape of a gun, and said, “Look, a toast gun. Bang!” After that we realized that there were just things, like playing army, that are normal for a boy’s development. David now has a huge arsenal of toy guns and swords. Naomi enjoys playing with them as well.

July 2, 2005 (in reference to sometime in 1995): This was what life was like with a newborn.

  • This morning I knocked a book off my nighttable—Nichelle thought I dropped Isaac.
  • A couple of days ago I brought some work home to do on my computer—I fell asleep at the computer, and didn’t wake up until midnight. Then I had to work until 2:00 a.m.!
  • One night I fell asleep when I was feeding Isaac.
  • Nichelle always wakes up, and can’t remember that she put Isaac to bed. She panics momentarily because she can’t find him.

David:

When David was somewhere around 4, he believe the opposite of incorrect was outcorrect.

John:

We adopted John when he was 10 years old. One of the things we really miss is that early childhood history. His sister has given us a few old photos, but there’s nothing to substitute for a decade of missing information. (Even his medical records were woefully incomplete.)

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Mi Hija Méxicana

I bought this dress for Naomi several months before she was born, on my most recent missions trip to México.

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The Force at Midnight (The Star Wars Episode III Experience)—No Spoilers

Being at the first showing of Star Wars Episdode III was really exciting in many ways.

Nichelle and I weaseled our way into attending the midnight opening at the Apple Tree Cinemas, along with our friends Mark and Shelby Sohmer, and six of their friends: Matt and Wendy Camillieri, Phil and Jennifer Wilson, Matt and Heather Graves. Their plan was to go out to eat ealier at the nearby 99 restaurant, and then head over between 9:30 and 10:00 to get into line.

I still had my Jedi costume from Episode I, and Nichelle surprised me by announcing that she would also create a costume. She found one of David’s action figures that would be possible to re-create, and hit the costume shops for makeup, thrift shops for the clothing, and a fabric store for a few dollars’ worth of material.

Nichelle and I had our Wednesday night Bible study at church, and then needed to install the baby sitter(s) at our house and change into our costumes, so dinner with the group was out for us. We got to the theater just before 11, and found the rest of our group waiting out back for the opening at 12:01 a.m.

Below are the costumes my wife Nichelle and I wore (and our son, Isaac, hamming it up). Nichelle is dressed as Jedi Master Luminara Unduli. (Disclaimer: This is a very unflattering picture of Nichelle, and not a very good idea of what my Jedi costume looked like, either.) Nichelle and I were asked to pose for pictures on our way in, and complimented on our costumes on our way out.

Star Wars fans are an interesting bunch, and the fandom was truly in Force (I couldn’t resist—sorry) that evening. The lines went out around the building in every direction. While waiting for the film, we saw dozens of costumes: Lea Organa, Darth Vader (thanks primarily to the Darth Vader Voice Changer helmet now available in toy stores everywhere), Boba Fett, an attempt at General Grievous (which I didn’t figure out until the next day), several jedi. Light sabers were in abundance, including a few very nice plasma-tube models with realistic sound effects and a very convincing (if permanently attached) blade, the plasma in which extended and retracted when it was powered up. (Of course, there is such as thing as going overboard with this.)

Most of our group was at the far back of the line, and when we got in, Nichelle and I discovered that only 8 seats had been saved instead of 10. We settled for what appeared to be the only two adjoining seats left, in the far left of the third row of the “orchestra pit” section of the theater—not really ideal viewing.

We ran into several people from our church, most of whom were guys who had left their wives at home with the children. (Personally, I hate attending anything without Nichelle, although a break from the kids is sometimes welcome.)

There was quite a bit of time to wait between opening the auditorium and starting the movie. Some fans brought laptops or portable DVD players and were watching the other Star Wars films. People were chatting, laughing, trying to make pithy (perhaps Sithy) remarks. The atmosphere was festive, yet full of anticipation.

The management held a costume contest, which we had not known about. (As a prize, in our auditorium they gave away the full-size Chewbacca cardboard stand-up which had been used for promotion before then.) About a dozen of us lined up in front of everyone, and a cheer-based voice vote was conducted. It became clear that the winner would not be the one with the best costume, but the favorite character. Nichelle and I did fairly well; ultimately, though, Boba Fett won out over Darth Vader. Vader then attacked Boba with a light saber, which generated laughter and applause.

Our friend Phil Luchon reported via cell phone that in his theater in Randolph, Massachusetts, people set off the fire alarm twice, and they had to evacuate the auditorium. A guy dressed as a stormtrooper yelled, “The first transport is away!” and everyone cheered.

Finally, although a few minutes late, the lights went down, and the trailers started. Of particular interest to our group was the Chronicles of Narnia (see also this site).

Then the magic began! (Except that the left half of our screen was badly out of focus, and I found that very distracting, especially being so close to the front. The manager of Apple Tree Cinemas is sending us VIP passes—there was, indeed, a problem with the lens.)

Without revealing much in this non-spoiler article, we really loved the film. Anakin’s complete turn to the Dark Side is indeed very disturbing. Yoda is amazing in both action and dramatic expression. The integration of the prequel and sequel story lines, and some nagging questions left over from Episode I are handled wonderfully. Lucas has finally succeeded in making a prequel that works.

When we got home, we discovered Isaac had written this note, and put it in front of our bedroom door:

We took the kids to see the film on Saturday afternoon. 🙂

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Potty Time

[nichelle]Well, I’m quite impressed by this, with good reason, I think. Naomi, now just 17 months old, came into the kitchen this afternoon and pulled down her pants partially. I asked her if she had to go potty and she nodded her head yes and walked to the bathroom door. Her brother was in there at the time. She waited, and we went in. Now, Naomi is not potty trained, and I would not even have attempted to do that for at least another year. So for her to do what she did was pretty good. So, I took off her diaper and put her on the potty and she sat there at first and then wanted to get down. No problem with that. Then she wanted to get back on again. She didn't go potty, but the realization that she wanted to use the potty was amazing to me. I decided to get her potty, which hasn't been used in several years. I got it ready and she couldn't wait to sit down on it. Still nothing happed, but I wasn't actually expecting her to do anythiing. Well, Naomi wanted to use the big potty again, along with toilet paper and so I gave her some. She used it, incorrectly, but no problem there and put it in the toilet. She got down and wanted to flush. About an hour or so later, she soiled her diaper and I got her cleaned up and took her to the bathroom to flush it and I wanted her to see what I was doing. At that point she wanted to try using the potty again. The fact that she does answer by nodding her head if she has to go poop, is unbelievable. So I'm not going to push this, starting too soon can cause problems, too, but I'll see what she does today.

Other Naomi News:

Naomi loves to mimic things, like putting on lotion or brushing her teeth, doing her hair, trying to get a drink from the fountain at church, putting a CD in the drive to play a game on the computer, flying her baby in the air making the sounds and then (and this is not mimicked, but something she does) dropping her on the floor and covering her mouth and laughing. She does pick up her baby and give her a hug and pats her back, but then she goes back to the flying thing again. She loves to play rough, but she also does “the little girl things.” Typically every morning, when I go to get her out of bed, she stands up and looks down at the floor and smiles or laughs because lying there next to her crib are her babies and their blanket.

She has the Ocean Wonders Aquarium which plays music on her crib. Her bedtime routine includes reading her book, singing a song (usually “Jesus Loves Me” in Engllish and then Spanish), laying her down and then I pray with her. A few times, I tried putting her music on when I put her to bed, and she would reach up and shut it off. She only likes to play her music in the morning. She doesn’t like to fall asleep with it on.

After I’m done reading her bedtime story, she stands up and grabs her “lovey” (a small, pink blanket) and the blanket she loves to sleep with, walks to her bed, and waits for me to put her in. It’s so very sweet. I love our little girl, and am very thankful to God for giving her to us.

We Have Other Children, Too:

I also love our boys, and am thankful for them as well, in case some of you may be wondering.

I tell my kids often that my prayer for them is that they will grow up loving and serving God with their lives and throughout their lives. We are accountable to God for what we teach our children, and we need to be careful that we teach them as we ought, too.

Time goes by so fast. Isaac is nearly 10 years old, John will be 17 in June, and David is already 6 and eager to graduate from K5 and enter Mrs. Grennon’s first grade class. He's reading now, and going through his school reading books very quickly.

Pray for us as we teach and train our children. I praise our Savior for my family and for all that He does in our lives. I am reminded of a song sung by Steve Green, and the words from the chorus:

Oh, may all who come behind us find us faithful.
May the fire of our devotion light their way.
May the footprints that we leave lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey.
Oh, may all who come behind us find us faithful.

It’s a great song with a wonderful message.

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And That’s … Bad?

The following is an excerpt from a Reuters Article (which probably won’t be available a month from now). I say, anything that gets kids to stop watching television is probably a good idea.

Commercial Leaves Kids Too Scared to Watch TV

LONDON (Reuters) – A Marmite commercial that parodied 1950's science fiction film “The Blob” has been banned from all children's' programs in Britain after leaving kids too scared to watch television, the advertising watchdog said.

…

Six people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that their toddlers had been terrified by the adverts, with four refusing to watch television after seeing them and two suffering nightmares.

I am amazed at how early children can identify with what is on television. One evening Naomi, at age 16 months, picked up her paper “Zoo Pals” plate, held it vertically in front of her face, and hummed a little song as she rotated it back and forth slightly. Nichelle told me that Naomi was mimicking the commercial.

Naomi is also enthralled with “Blue’s Clues,” and David, somewhat reluctantly, had to share his stuffed Blue dog with Naomi until Nichelle was fortunate enough to find one costing only a few dollars for Naomi. We have some old episodes on tape, and Naomi loves the program. Singing the theme song (which I do very poorly) is enough to get her dancing. I find this impact of television both fascinating and a bit frightening. (By the way, if you have heard a rumor that Steve Burns, the original (and best) host of “Blue’s Clues,” is dead, then you have been misled.)

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I am an Idiot

[doug]Nichelle is making me post this, because I used it as leverage to get her to finally post an update on all the cute things Naomi is doing.

As you know, we had some computer problems, which seem to have all been solved. However, after upgrading to Trillian 3.0, Nichelle complained that she was not hearing any sound from Trillian.

We tested sound from other sources, Media Player, Flash animations, etc., and everything was fine, so I logged on to her screen and checked the Trillian preferences. Sound was enabled, and I looked everywhere trying to see what was wrong.

A few minutes later, she looked through the sound preferences for Trillian, and discovered that, despite the fact I had looked at the setting three or four times, I completely overlooked the checkbox marked, “Do not play sounds when I’m away.” Nichelle was, of course, as usual, in “away” mode all the time, because she tends to just be at the computer for a few minutes.

So, I get an “F” in troubleshooting for that day. ::: sigh :::