Category: Rants

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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.”
  • “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.”
  • Last night I took Isaac and David sledding at Roby Park in Nashua. David has become quite the daredevil, which was surprising, because the last time we went sledding, he pretty much didn’t like the big slopes at all. (In fact, he used to beg to go to a nearby school for sledding that was about as thrilling as watching golf.) The slope at the park was mostly ice, so we got some great speed, and proved without a doubt that the best way to sled is to use David or Isaac’s smaller sled in front of mine, allowing me to hold onto the back of theirs and providing excellent steering.
  • Earth to the Palestinians: Want to get anything you want? Stop blowing up innocent people. One isn’t exactly going to garner sympathy by creating busload after busload of noncombatants killed by suicide bombers.
  • My team leader, Brian Cortez, gave us a milk crate full of model rockets and accessories. We will be repairing some of his old models (an X-16 looks particularly cool), and hope to have him present for its re-launch after so many years.
  • At work, I’ve been learning and working with the Jakarta Struts framework, which has been both challenging and fun. The only gripe is the number of “silent failures” that occur (a code-500 server-side error with absolutely nothing in a log file is not exactly easy to diagnose and debug).
  • The new commute is awesome. It takes me only about 45 minutes to take the kids to school and then get to the office in the morning, and I can get home in as little as 20 minutes. Even with slightly longer work hours due to the new project, family time has improved dramatically.
  • The new house, with the entire first-floor in an open layout, is also very good for family interaction and activities. I also have to thank Nichelle for her graciousness in allowing the Lego collection to stay out for days at a time.
  • Speaking of Lego, the new family room has enough room to spread out and build, and we are developing the habit of spending Saturday mornings building with Lego. It’s been great, although I’m still missing one box of miscellaneous Lego that got shuffled in the move.
  • Speaking of Lego, I have to commend them on their customer service. I e-mailed them a suggestion on improving the Lunar Lander set, by using gold visors for the astronauts (instead of the clear ones provided), and they sent me six of the gold visors for free.
  • Moving out of state costs money! (God has provided all that we need, but we have spent quite a bit on car registrations, new licenses, new insurance, new cell phone services, etc.) It seems one has to spend money to save money. (Our car insurance will drop about $125 to $150 per month. Our new cell phone plan will save us up to $100 per month. Gasoline savings will amount to about $100 per month. School tuition is cheaper. Now, if I could just get out of donating 5% of my income to the State of Massachusetts … but the law on that isn’t likely to change!
     
  • The Route 3 widening is a few months behind the schedule that had been listed on their FAQ until a few weeks ago. They are now promising a “substantial completion” by May of 2004, instead of February. Still, that is not very far off.
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    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.”

    Last year Nashua got mountains of snow. This year it’s just unusually cold. But the winter is not over yet.

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    In MegaTokyo, This Would Be a “Dead Piro Day”

    Okay, that’s a bit of an “in” joke. MegaTokyo is an online comic I read. Every now and then the artist gets behind schedule or is overwhelmed with other things, and posts a sketch instead of a comic strip. We’re wiped out from moving (but things are great!), but I need to get something up on the BLOG.

    How Big Is a Billion?
    The next time you hear a politician use the words “billion” casually, think about whether you want that politician spending your tax money.

    A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into perspective in one of its releases:

    • A billion seconds ago, it was 1959.
    • A billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive.
    • A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
    • A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate Washington spends it.

    How Long Is Too Long?
    People are complaining on how long the war is taking but consider this:

    • It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.
    • It took less time to find Saddam's sons in Iraq than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.
    • It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Teddy Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sunk at Chappaquiddick.
    • It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!!!!!!
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    One of Those Days

    I was on my way to Nashua to drop off the check for our insurance binder (only $368), when Nichelle called.

    She explained that there was a problem, and that I should call our agent

    So, I spoke with our agent, and it seems that, despite being given a commitment letter, Fleet is demanding $7,000 more from our buyers, due to, among other things, their insurance costing more than they expected.

    They want us to come up with $3,000 of that. And I’m fresh out of $1,000s.

    Further details as I have them.

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    Happy New Year and Moving Madness

    Here, Naomi shows off one of her Christmas presents, and her destiny (Nichelle is too busy getting ready for our move to read this), with a “Geek in Training” t-shirt from ThinkGeek.com. She also received the TCP/IP creeper, but won’t fit into it for several months.

    Back at the Wilcox family, we are moving in one week, and packing in earnest. Thanks to Nichelle’s extremely hard work and planning, it looks like everything is going to go smoothly.

    Our new address as of January 9 will be:

    329 Nowell Street
    Nashua, NH 03060-4453

    Phone: 603-886-5225

    I should also mention that my friend Mark Sohmer has finally taken my advice and started a BLOG of his own at http://blog.sohmer.net/. Of course, since he is using Bryan Harrington’s code, later modified by me, guess who gets pestered with questions?

    I’d like to BLOG some reflections on the past year, but am too busy at the moment.

    In more recent events, Christmas was excellent, and despite being sad, Dad’s funeral was really wonderful. I will defiitely write more about that later.

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    Not Enough Vitamin N*

    This from Reuters (I’m duplicating the article below, because they don’t maintain links past a month or two.)

    Today’s Toddlers Act Like Teens?
    Thu November 6, 2003 07:47 AM ET
    By Matthew Jones

    LONDON (Reuters) – Kids today. They waste hours in front of the TV and get their parents to spend money on designer clothes and haircuts. And they're not even three years old!

    A new survey in Britain says toddlers are increasingly leading a lifestyle once associated only with moody adolescents.

    “Today’s toddlers act like little teenagers—they've been there, done it and got the T-shirt—but they miss out on good old-fashioned, imaginative fun,” said Karen Pasquali Jones, editor of Mother and Baby magazine, which commissioned the survey.

    The survey showed that by age three, 42 percent of youngsters have a television in their own room and 50 percent have a CD player. The average toddler spends more than two hours a day watching TV.

    Two thirds of mothers said they bought designer clothes for their toddlers, while 86 percent spent more on their child's clothes than they did on their own. More than a quarter of the little consumers “choose their own haircut.”

    Tots have sophisticated taste—61 percent will eat Italian food and 51 percent will eat Indian or Chinese food, though only three percent like sushi.

    But parents of previous generations will not be surprised to learn that mothers still describe mealtimes as “nightmares,” with three-quarters of toddlers refusing to eat and over half opting to throw their food rather than swallow.

    Three-quarters of mothers say their children’s behavior has affected their relationship with their partners and just under half declared it has “wrecked” their sex lives.

    © Reuters 2003. All Rights Reserved.

    *The term vitamin N, was, as far as I know, coined by Dr. James Dobson, the well-known conservative child psychologist. Children need to be told “no” on occasion.

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    Coming Soon to Country [Not] Near You—Your Job

    My yaar Pankaj Verma sent me a link to this article this morning, which predicts that by 2015, 348,028 U.S. computer jobs will move “offshore.” This is a rather frightening prospect for those of us who have been burned by the dot-bomb crises of the past few years, although this report includes the comforting statistic that approximately 1,761,000 new jobs will open up in these areas by 2010.

    While I’m on it, I still have two former co-workers who are looking for work after the big corporate “treatment” a year ago by [fomer employer’s name deleted]. These are both hard-working, highly-skilled, dedicated people, who, frankly, don’t deserve to have been unemployed as long as they have. Grrrrrrrrr.

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    Traffic

    [doug]It took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to get to work today. I didn't get past second gear until I had already passed Needham. Yesterday it was an hour and 45 minutes. Last week as another 1:45 trip. I guess I should be glad the ride home is only taking 1:15 to 1:30, typically, but even there the traffic has been unusually heavy. :: sigh :: It will be nice to live closer to work.

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    Lies, Darned Lies, and Marketing

    I’ve come across this new breed of popup ad a few times in the past couple of weeks:

    Brought to you by the evil folks at ZendMedia and the vendors of ComputerShield (http://ad1.zendmedia.com/ad-rpc.php?id=ad46) ...

    Yet again we have an attempt to prey on the gullible and less-than-well-informed computer users. What infuriates me most about this—even beyond the desire to trick the user into thinking his or her computer has a problem (much like the “Your Internet connection is not operating at full speed” garbage ads)—is that the ad site claims the user’s computer is infected, regardless of the fact that the user’s computer (like mine) might be patched or firewalled and completely invulnerable to the RPC worm.

    I wonder how many people have been duped by this scheme? This makes me very angry indeed.

    Folks need to learn to differentiate between a scam advertisement and a real security threat, and this sort of schrecklichkeit is abominable.

    And a Final Rant Is Due: Look, if you’re going to have a computer connected to the Internet, or even just receiving e-mail of any kind, you must install some good antivirus software and keep your machine updated with the latest security patches (which means running the Windows Update service for most people). Do not use McAffee because it stinks—you’re much better off with Norton Antivirus. Do update your virus definitions at least every week, and run a full scan that often as well. If you can’t afford Norton AntiVirus, try one of several free alternatives, such as BitDefender, Avast, AntiVir, or AVG Anti-Virus.