Put your hair up for Detroit!

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Yesterday i discovered that i can use one dreadlock to tie bunches in my hair! Pretty cool -- self-tying hair. So i fiddled with it all evening at work. One of our autistic kids refused to talk to me unless i put my hair down, and made me promise to leave it down whenever i did bedchecks. Zane kept saying "Daddy! You don't need to look like a girl!!!" There is a lot of autist style thinking going on in a three year old's brain.

On Facebook recently, there was a meme to have your profile picture be a celebrity look-alike. I bear a striking resemblance to Hugh Laurie, even from his pre-House days, especially when he played Bertie, the blundering gentleman from ITV's "Jeeves and Wooster" series. Even his mannerisms were very Juanito-like. House MD doesn't act very much like me... but still. So i put a pic of Mr Laurie as my profile pic, but now i needed a new one, so i took that picture of myself. I like my silly hair.

Um... i have a new ZUMBA! song. Two, really. Actually, three and maybe another one. And i guess we'll be filming another round of Grand Rapids Zumba routines for the InterTubes. Speaking of the 'net, i can now be asked anything right here.

Genius!!!

I'll talk about the genius part in a minute. But first, allow me to discuss a very uncommon occurrence. Katrina was caught doing something naughty.

If your household is a freewheeling chaotic environment like ours, something like this may have happened to you, as it has happened to us. Say there's an unnoticed spill of milk. Then the kids play with paper, strewing pieces of it hither and yon over the floor. Then the milk dries, and come clean up time, there's little that casual pick-up and damp-mop techniques can do to get rid of the ripped veneer of paper on the floor. Well, that happened in a corner of our floor. Yesterday we broke out the plastic scraper and wet rag to get stuck stuff off the floor...

And under the suspiciously rectangular piece of stuck paper, there was writing from a permanent marker. Permanent marker. In Katrina's handwriting. Houston didn't know anything about it. Katrina was standing behind a nearby doorjamb, her eyes huge. "Katrina, did you do that?" Her eyes stayed huge, and her lower lip began to protrude. She nodded ever so slightly. Then, she crumpled, and started keening. Poor girl.

She agreed with Karen and i that having something like that hanging over your head is a drag, and it feels so much better to get things out in the open. The truth shall set you free. I do remember a while ago she was working on crafts and drawings, and came to me saying "Um, Daddy, I spilled some glue on the floor and then some paper got stuck in it, and now the paper is stuck to the floor..." and i said, imagining a routine dribble and scrap, little did i know it was a burying of a greater transgression. I wonder if Katrina was hoping HOPING that i'd find it right away.

Fortunately, my faith in the impermeability of my urethane finish on our hardwood floor, and my trust in little plastic scrapers to remove glue and lighter fluid to remove ink was not misplaced.


On to the genius part. Last weekend, the kids woke us up at the improper hour of "the sun's not even up what's wrong with you?", which is what they do every morning there's no school. Karen said in her barely-awake mumble, "Okay, tidy up your rooms, then go downstairs and play. When we have to wake up, it will be time to clean the whole house." Magic. That tiny little conversation allowed both Karen and i to sleep in until, i dunno, ten thirty! INCREDIBLE!!! And it's been like that every weekend morning since then! The extra mess of three young kids running wild for three hours is worth it. At least i think it is... Karen ends up doing more tidying than everyone else. Combined.

So yeah, Karen's a genius. And Katrina's got a well developed conscience. My two favorite girls in the whole universe.

Houston Update

Yesterday Houston spent HOURS (well, minutes, but double digits worth) of time actively, energetically procrastinating and resisting working on his book report. Finally, the book report was done. I've heard that pulling teeth isn't actually very hard, so getting Houston to put forth some effort to finish this project was WAY harder than pulling teeth. Let's say 1,386 percent harder. And that's exact.

Then, after we went to the YMCA and Houston dropped a couple bucks worth of coins on ridiculous vending machine snack food, we came back home. In five minutes he wrote a book for his best friend Summer, and the book went something like this:

Disease Doctor
"It looks like you have a fart disease."
"Hey! I didn't even start yet!"
"It looks like you have a butt disease."
"Stop. Once upon a time--"
"It looks like you have an elbow disease."
"Stop that! Once upon--"
"It looks like you have a leg disease."
"Let's just ignore this bull--"
"Hey! Why did you call me that?"
"Well, you are!"
"It looks like you have a fart disease and a butt disease and an elbow disease and a window disease and a foot disease and a head disease."
"Oh, i give up. The end."

Really. There's a touch of potty humor there, appropriately enough for Houston's age, i guess. But funny, imaginative, and nothing but dialog. I never used to write dialog, not that i remember, at least. So getting Houston to channel his creativity is hard. And we can't just let him earn the scores he would earn if we indulged his natural tendencies to play all the time. Or rather, pester his siblings and beg for time spent on the computer.

Speaking of which, Houston asked recently if he'd ever get his own computer. I assured him that he would, but it would be a long time. It's not like there's not enough to go around in this house. We have one per person, if you count the headless server. That means there's no monitor/keyboard/mouse. Also, i assured him, by the time he gets his own computer, it will probably be better than any we have currently.

Finally, i heard on the radio that "young people" are turning away from blogging, preferring to write more frequent short updates on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. I was like "no duh. And i'm not young." But Tweeting and Facebooking sure don't leave me as enthusiastic about writing on The Blaaahg. So i have to kind of force myself to slap a few words up here now and again, to keep this showing what's going on. 'Cause FaceTweeter stuff disappears into the aether after a time. It's evanescent, ethereal.

Second post: Review of AVATAR!!!

Everybody has acknowledged that Avatar's plot is utterly predictable and unoriginal. Cool. It's a mashup of plots which are as old as storytelling itself, with blue aliens and helium filled landscape thrown in for good measure. Dances With Wolves, The Matrix, Romeo and Juliet, um... Helen of Troy... But this isn't the point. The comfortable, well worn plot is like a nice pair of broken in shoes. We're kind of okay with boy-meets-girl and underdog-beats-oppressor stories. This is about the pictures!

And oh my, what pictures! It's no wonder that it's such a success. The eye candy would have resulted in eyeball root canals in both eyes, if that's the way eye candy worked. And the technological accomplishment is mind boggling. You really forget that every single thing you see for much of the movie is entirely computer generated. Thousands of trees on-screen with millions of leaves, hundreds of creatures, motion-blur (early CG like TRON and The Last Starfighter looked very stop-motion for lack of motion-blur... and motion-blur is very costly in terms of computer processing time) and... well, everything. And they went nuts. Everything in the jungle is made from glow-sticks. Everything in the human domain is transparent and/or reflective. Oh, pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty.

The acting isn't bad. Oh yeah, who cares? I was racking my brain trying to recognize where i'd seen Sam Worthington before, and upon researching it, the answer: nowhere! They got a competent barely-known to play the male lead! Good for James Cameron. Sigourney Weaver is a professional, and does very well. Most of the supporting cast are tragically two dimensional, and in such a sumptuously rendered three dimensional world.

While reading a review-of-reviews somewhere, i saw that someone said that Avatar is like a Rorschach test -- it's about what you bring to the experience. A quick Googling finds this blog post, which seems pretty insightful. So let's take the Rorschach test: here's what i got.

***spoilers*** (although if you've seen, say, Disney's Pocahontas, you're not in for many surprises)
Pandora, the planet, has an (apparently) biological information-carrying network between the trees and other flora and fauna. So memories and experiences and other information can be transmitted. The Na'vi can interface with other creatures on their planet via little tendrils they have on the end of one of their braids. The Na'vi worship their planet, and well they should, since it's totally sentient (the goddess Eywa) and a vastly superior being.
But anyway, here's what i took from the movie. The Na'vi have organic versions of the Internet (Pandora's network) and near-in-the-future-Google (sentient, superior consciousness) and USB connectivity (the tendril plug things). Therefore, their technological development halted right after they developed tools to kill predators and food animals without being trampled or bitten. But they skipped the industrial revolution and never had any wars or anything, because they had access to, you know, the Internet.

Some biologists see sentience as the end goal of evolution. So what if the whole point of technology is to develop the Internet? We got there the hard way, with ever more complex machines and while energetically trying to figure out how to kill each other more efficiently and from farther away. But for the Na'vi, it's all built in to their biosphere. Of course, Pandora could be the result of technology so advanced it's post-technology. Organic substrate, self-organizing computer network built into the forest, bio-engineered animals (and people) to be able to interface minds... If i could fly around on pterodactyls and go cliff diving from floating rocks through glow-stick jungle, and be able to keep my email (they can even email dead people!!!), i'd be okay with a non-technological existence. Given that they've got the sewage problem worked out.


Karen took something else away from the movie. She just said that fundamentally, the movie was about fighting for justice. On the way out of the theater, she said to me "Really? Out of that whole movie you got the Internet and USB cables???"

First post today: BORING COMPUTER SPEAK.

Did i mention i got scratched on the eyeball? Okay... how about getting buzzed on caffeine because the frappuccino stuff i make is really tasty? Okay, i did a couple times. And forgot to go to bed at a simple hour. How about how convoluted this whole tablet/laptop repair process is getting to be?

Okay, so i don't forget, i'll write about that. Ignore this paragraph unless you have a high tolerance for boring tech-speak. Or if you're a little off, and want to torture yourself. Recap: the computer's BIOS is password protected, which means it will only boot from the hard drive. Fine, but the hard drive is corrupted, so i'd like it to boot from something else. Please? So after the obvious password tries like "0000" and "ADMIN" didn't work, i took a deep breath and grabbed a handful of poster putty (to stick the screws near to the holes they belong to) and a few screwdrivers and tore into the laptop looking for the button battery, which requires nearly complete disassembly to get to. Grr. After putting it all back together again, the BIOS remained password protected. So i thought i'd put WindowsXP on there to boot "live-CD" like, which is possible, but not very simple. I fiddled and fiddled with THAT, until i realized i was doing all this fiddling which was designed to get XP to boot from a USB hard drive (or memory stick) on any arbitrary computer. This was an IDE attached hard drive. Grump. I launched Microsoft VirtualPC, which creates a little pretend computer inside your actual computer, so i installed Windows XP Tablet Edition (thank you bittorrent) (but i'm annoyed at you, Windows, because your legit serial number wouldn't work, forcing me to do pirate hacks to something actually paid for) onto that virtual machine, and then made an image of that pretend hard drive to put on, but the virtual machine's "hard drive" was 60 gigs, and the actual hard drive was 60 gigs, but the former was formatted capacity while actual hard drives are calculated differently, so a "60 gig" hard drive is a few gigs smaller than that. So the image wouldn't fit. So i turned to more open source partitioning tools and cut the size down to 20gigs, which fits on the hard drive, but now the laptop hard drive only has 20 gigs of usable space. I'll need to mess with the partitions more. And see if it even works inside the laptop which is totally different hardware compared to the virtual machine's pretend hardware.

See? Boring!

Thanks, America!

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The government decided to give us a lot of money. It's because we're kind of poor. They've been doing it for several years now, and every year i feel weird. It's not like i WORKED for that money... Maybe somebody richer than us thinks it's impossible to live quality lives making as much as we do? Because i'd say we are doing okay.

Maybe people richer than us are the ones buying expensive frivolities like "paying other people to fix their roof" and "crystal meth" and "cable TV". And "new clothes". I'm not sure how that works...

Statue Game

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Katrina excitedly wanted to play "The State Game!!!!" that she remembered from, i dunno, over a year ago. She LOVED that game, she said, so she was overjoyed when i wanted to play with her!

How to play: have the person remain in whatever pose the player chooses. What Katrina did: put a plastic corn-on-the-cob in one hand, make me pretend to eat it, and give me a random bib in the other hand, and put it near my mouth. Then she danced off to get that little table, another chair, and a whole meal worth of plastic food. She carefully set it all out with cutlery and glasses, set up her doll on the other side of me, and then i had to get up to see if Houston was downloading viruses onto Karen's computer. So then Katrina totally put the whole affair away! Which made me and Karen really happy -- spontaneous cleaning up! but also made me wonder what the whole point was. I don't get it.

Houston i get. He industriously drew a chaotic looking but very well laid out story about "Mr. Silly" who does things like run "100 MI." away from a polar bear, and set his finger on fire. And sell his house because he can't get into it because he put the dresser right in front of the door, and his idea of using a wrecking ball to make another door just made that part of his house collapse.

And Zane wanted me to carry him upside down today. Aaah, i love my kids.

Ow! My eye!

A kid at work scratched my eyeball today. It was gross because it was with his fingernail, and he's not hygienically aware, and it hurt because, you know, he scratched my eyeball. Right on the cornea. I couldn't open my eye for a few hours, and it still hurts. The guy at the med center expressed bemusement that i wasn't in more pain.

I got to say how bad my pain was from one to ten! Awesome. I could safely say that right at first it was a five, since the pain of spraining my knee and ankle while being launched into the water was worse. That was nine or ten. I was underwater feeling my leg to make sure sharp jagged ends of bone weren't protruding from my skin. I couldn't believe that my knee and ankle felt normal. Breaking my femur was a good eight. No... seven. That wasn't so bad. I mean, it lasted a long time and stuff, and was ridiculously inconvenient, but the pain wasn't horrifying. I wonder if it's really possible to pass out from pain.

My eye will heal quickly. The MD said that eye scratches heal overnight, usually. Weird. Where does the cornea get the nutrients? There's no blood circulating to those cells... How can cells be clear??? Eyeballs are really really cool.

Besides that, our little ones sure do hate tidying up their rooms. Also, corrupted laptop hard sure are a hassle to recover.

Who, me competetive?

ZUMBA! is enjoyed overwhelmingly by women. When i'm a big class, i'm never the only guy, but there's never more than, say, five guys among the fifty or more women. Group classes are generally attended by more women than men. Why? i wonder to myself. The fitness machines are about half and half. The people lifting weights are probably more than half guys, but there's always many girls pumping iron. The track is completely mixed. But then when one wanders to the basketball or racquetball courts, there you see overwhelmingly more men than women.

Aha! So girls generally prefer a cooperative fitness experience, and men are generally interested in something competitive.

Epiphany! And something i didn't even remember until i thought of this.

When i was in gradeschool, we'd play playground games like keepaway or dodge ball, and i'd keep switching teams to be on the losing team. I would feel bad for the losers and want to use my skills to bring their scores up. I think this makes me a... loser?

Computer Fixing!!!

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I took that computer totally apart to reset the BIOS to clear the password keeping me from getting into the hardware settings so i can get it to boot from USB so i can reinstall Windows. The battery was hidden so well i had to actually take the motherboard apart from all the rest of the parts of the laptop to get to it. Wow.

And now there's still a BIOS password. Stupid. So maybe i'll put a live version of XP on the laptop's hard drive so at least it'll boot.

Oh! And i lost my Palm Pilot, but found it. And in the process i put together parts from the two broken ones i had lying around, so now i have a spare, theoretically. Except i'll give it to Beth, because hers broke. But i still have one more part from one of the aforementioned broken ones, which should get me another spare. So, out of five Palm Pilots, i've got mine, Karen's, Beth's and a spare. Awesome.