Kids and Zombies

Stacey is gone for two weeks, and I'm bummed. Summers are pretty hard because I don't see her at all when she is with her mom. During the school year, I see her after school every day, and she usually spends the night when her girl scout troup meets.

Summers are harder when she isn't around, but more fun than usual when she is around. Take the last two weeks: School just ended and all the kids are excited. We set up a pool in the backyard, got a dog, and when the kids aren't swimming, they're helping Stacey and I run the dog until she gets tired. Afterwards everyone stays for dinner, and I then go back to the store and stock up on my emergency surplus of macaroni-n-cheese and various box dinners that can quickly be thrown in the oven and ignored for 20 minutes.

We're having some filter problems now, so I had to close the pool until I figure out what's going on, so as a substitute Stacey and a girl across the street went out with me to the Rec Center pool, and another day to an outdoor pool with her mom. This obviously takes time out of the other mom's and my day, but during the summer it's a given that kids are going to need entertainment, so parents' plans become penciled in for three months.

We've also got big plans like my vacation week, Stacey's Girl Scout camp, and Grandma and Grandpa coming down to camp for a few days. All of that helps alleviate the depression that comes with the periodic absence of the person I love most in the world.

I went to see "Land of the Dead" as a pick-me-up; zombie movies have always been a favorite of mine. The semi-recent "28 Days Later" and the recent remake of "Dawn of the Dead" were just fantastic, and "Shaun of the Dead" was so funny it damn near made me spit soda through my nose about a dozen times. "Land of the Dead" was directed by Romero, and had the interesting concept of zombies becoming slightly organized, so my hopes were high.


** Warning -- spoilers! **


The first thing I noticed was that the zombies returned to their meandering gate. 28 and the remake of Dawn introduced the concept of zombies being much more terrifying by being able to run quickly, and having a sort of scared, confused look on their face... as they ate you. This was a nice change, and added a lot more tension as they didn't have to sneak up on you while you were doing something stupid in the open, but could just run you down at any time. But, Romero's original zombies shuffled and poked along, so he's being consistent, so I can't fault him for not accepting the new paradigm.

The movie did also have some noteable good points, like a general disrespect for the people who were now undead, for example instead of just killing them, soldiers would string some of them up to use as target practice, and entertainment entrepreneurs would stage fights between them, or chain them up to have people pose for pictures with them.

I didn't like the thing with fireworks being a distraction, but a did like how a pack of zombies could immediately tell when their current set of victims were all dead and would turn as one and start mozying towards new victims.

Ultimately, Big Daddy wasn't cool. Is he a mutant zombie? Does he teach his fellows, or are they evolving as a whole and he's just doing it faster because he's Big Daddy? Why are they getting smarter? Why, if a single bullet to the brain kills them, and they are clearly breathing can they survive underwater where brain damage would be done due to lack of oxygen? These were interesting concepts, but were just kind of left out there as "sure, why the hell not."

It was interesting, but it's not going into my book of great zombie flicks. It wasn't the pick-me-up I was hoping for, so I'll have to find another way to pass the remaining 13 days.

Headline Highjinks

The following are a sample of news headlines concerning the Detroit Pistons recent game 6 NBA finals win over the San Antonio Spurs:

Pistons force Finals finale
Tim comes up short in chance to stand tall
Pistons drive to stay alive
Not a slam Duncan
'Sheed's deeds silence critics
Rasheed keeps Pistons pumping
Spurs' stars sputter, fizzle down stretch
Detroit motors to rare Game 7
Rundown: Detroit dials long distance to save season

The last is in reference to good three-point shooting, the rest are attempts at poetry, alliteration, or double entendre. Watching this series has allowed me to hear at least three comparisons between the name 'Duncan' and the verb 'dunk'. You know what, sports commentators and journalists, you just aren't that witty. And why do you need to fill every moment of a game with speech?

"I think the team to win this game is going to be the one that scores the most points."
"You're right, Bob, and I also think good defense is going to be the key to keeping points from being scored."
"Good observation, Joe, and as you'll note, Ben Wallace has tamed his wild afro into his 'road hair' again for this game."
"Road hair?"
"Yes, 'road hair', where he styles his hair in corn-rows for road games."
"Ah, why do you think he does that?"
"Well, it may be superstition, or it may be that it makes him look like less of a criminal, since we know how all the Sheriff Lobo's down in Texas have that itchy trigger finger."
"Good observation, Bob."

My new solution to all that nonsense, and to help get through the boring parts of the game is to let my Tivo record the game for awhile, and play it back on 1.5x fast forward, which silences the commentators and helps you to see patterns that would otherwise be subtle, like how the Spurs in game 6 were moving slower and holding onto the ball longer, and how a three point score on one side was usually followed by an attempted three on the other side.

In the Autery household news, most of the neighborhood kids (5 of them) went with me and Stacey and the dog to the local middle school, where we took turns running with Heidi in an attempt to get her tired out. She loves all the kids, and didn't try to bite any of them when they fell down, which is a good sign. We also finished setting up our inflatable pool on the deck last night, with some of the kids helping us with leaf removal and smoothing out wrinkles while it filled up.

The dog and the pool are helping to make our house a popular summer hangout, which makes it a little more difficult to follow the "nobody leaves hungry" rule, and much harder to just sit and be alone when I want to. Such are the trials of being a good daddy. Those being my biggest problems, life ain't so bad.

News of the day

I've been reading lately about Stetson Kennedy, the anti-bigotry activist who infiltrated the post-WWII KKK. His claim to fame was giving the producers of the Superman radio show information about the Klan, such as passwords, rituals, and coded speech used to identify fellow Klansmen while traveling. The information promptly made it into a four-part "Superman vs. the KKK" series, which humiliated the Klan.

Interesting man, outspoken and a little full of himself, which I find likeable in this case. I was just reading through an essay of his about us gearing up for war against Afghanistan and Iraq at http://www.stetsonkennedy.com/terrorist_hunt.htm. Interesting read, and I don't agree with all of it, but he makes a number of good points.

On the lighter side, some of today's Google news headlines eerily match some popular television shows:

Miss. jury split 6-6 in 1964 murder trial	- Cold Case
Democrats playing politics with Bolton	- West Wing
Intruder fatally shot in US courthouse	- The Insider
Rigases sent to prison for looting cable firm	- Law and Order
Cruise to sue water squirters	- Nip/Tuck
15 Iraqi police die in suicide bombing	- Over There
FBI Chief Won't Mandate Terror Expertise	- The Closer
Justices fault defense lawyers for not digging deeper for evidence	- CSI

Odds

I finally purchased some life insurance, and my policy just came in the mail yesterday. My work gives me twice my salary, which is nice, but wouldn't send my kid to college after paying off the house and my other debts, so I opted to buy some more. $250,000 more, to be exact.

So what is the likelihood of someone like me dieing in the next 20 years? Thanks to my insurance company and some unresearched assumptions, I have a rough idea that it's about 1 in 125. Here are the basic facts:

I am a 34 year old white male.
I don't smoke or drink.
My blood sugar and cholesterol are normal.
My resting heart rate and blood pressure are normal.
I am a parent.
I live in the suburbs doing white-collar work.
I excercise moderately.
I don't have any diseases.
I don't have a criminal record.
I haven't been involved in a traffic accident in the last 10 years.
I have had two traffic citations in the last 10 years (one speeding, one running a stop sign).

Apparently that profile is good enough to qualify me for "preferred", but not "super preferred", which would require me to be a little younger and skinnier, and a slower driver. I came to my 1 in 125 estimate by running the numbers and guessing at the insurance company's expected profit.

$300 per year buys me a 20 year term of $250,000.
$300 * 20 = $6,000 to the insurance company at the end of the term.
$250,000 / $6,000 = about 42.

So basically to make any money off of this policy, it would need to be sold to myself and 42 of my peers, and only one of us dies in the next 20 years. They would do little more than break even after holding our money for 20 years, which I doubt is good enough for them. No, they want to make 5% a year or more on our money. Let's run the numbers that way:

$cash = 300;
while (++$counter < 20) { $cash *= 1.05; $cash += 300 }
$cash ends up being 9919.78623086652, according to my trusty perl interpreter.

That makes about $10,000 per policy that they want to have after 20 years from our $6000 per policy investment, for a profit of $4000 per policy. A little basic algebra gives us:

6000x - 250,000 = 4,000x
2000x = 250,000
x = 125

The insurance company can only make 5% a year on our premiums if it sells to 125 people like me, and only one of us dies. Hence, my peers and I have a 1 in 125 chance of dieing in the next 20 years. Assuming that my wildly slung together numbers and my insurance company's life expectency estimates have anything to do with reality.

Batman Begins

This movie is a nice compromise between the darker Batman comics, and the farce that was the preceding 4 movies in the franchise. In this movie, Batman employs stealth, dropping from above to grab a badguy and quietly drag him to the shadows without giving his position away. He uses more believable martial arts. The Batmobile is a good hybrid of the previous movies and the behemoth used in the graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns".

The movie departs from the Michael Keaton Batman storyline in that the murderer of his parents is not the Joker (dance with the devil by the pale moonlight, indeed), and he actually obtains his training and gadgets as part of the storyline rather than just background noise that is unimportant to the plot. Obtaining things didn't matter that much in the Keaton movies, for example, Danny Devito as the Penguin just happened to have schematics of the Batmobile laying around. How did he get them? Not important.

This was gritty enough to appeal to fans of Frank Miller, with just enough lowest-common-denominator standard Hollywood BS to appeal to standard moviegoers, and of course cross-eyed, obese fanboys sporting their Spock ears and alt.jar-jar.die.die.die t-shirts will have a roaring good time nitpicking the movie to death. Good fun for all.

I hope that this will begin its own franchise and my fellow old-school comic fans can pretend the earlier Batman movies never happened.

Go see it.

Timing is everything

Columbus Ohio is getting to be a big city. The population of Columbus and its surrounding suburbs is close to 1,500,000 as of 2000 according to a few minutes of census Googling. The office building I work in is 32 floors with a 7 floor parking garage. The drive from my house is approximately 17 miles, most of which becomes congested with traffic during morning and afternoon rush hours.

At 34 years old, I have all the grey hair I want for awhile. Working 9 to 5 would be nothing short of a nightmare for me. My day would consist of dodging other people in the house to make breakfast, competing for shower time, getting stuck in traffic, waiting in the garage for people in front of me to find parking spots, being aggressively hustled past as they attempt to save a minute or two going into the main building, pushing my way into an elevator and watching it stop on every floor on the way up to mine, and doing it all in reverse at the end of the work day. By the time I got home I'd have murder on the brain and no love to give to my family. And it would repeat, day after day after day, until it broke me.

Fortunately, I'm a morning person, following the sage advice of my grandmother of getting the worm, and becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise all with the simple chore of going to bed and getting up early.

I'm the only adult I know who falls asleep at 9pm, but it works out perfectly for me. I roll out of bed at 5am, having slept a full 8 hours. No one else in the house is awake, and I have an hour and a half to make breakfast, check email, watch a little TV, and take a shower. An hour and a half of "me time" every day, uninterrupted, first thing in the morning. Nothing does more to keep me sane.

The ride to work is usually pretty calm, but at 6:30am some of the roads are already getting full. One particular bottleneck through some freeway construction can make you stop and wait to merge onto the freeway even that early. After that one bad spot, it's just me and my audiobook of the week, and clear sailing. After work, the book is eagerly waiting for me to listen to more of it, and I get home just before rush hour gets going.

Because of all this, I'm happier, have more love to give the family, and more energy both at work and home since less of it is being sapped by waiting in traffic. By the way, listen to these audiobooks (ranked by my preference, links take you to the Westerville Ohio public library catalog):

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
Faster, James Gleick
Hegemony or survival, Noam Chomsky
The Minority Report and other stories, Philip K Dick
The Neil Gaiman audio collection
Between Good and Evil, Roger Depue
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Electric Universe, David Bodanis
Matchstick Men, Eric Garcia
Edenborn, Nick Sagan
Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King

Heidi

Stacey, my mom, and I went up to beautiful Delta Ohio this Saturday and brought back Heidi the Siberian Husky:



We bought her from a Husky rescue group, and dealing with them was both inexpensive and painless. If you're looking for a young adult pet, I recommend trying a rescue group.

Heidi is affectionate, energetic, and fun to have around. Stacey loves her, the kids in the neighborhood enjoyed playing with her, and she enjoyed trying to jump on them and lick them as I tried to keep her down on all fours. I picked this breed because of its reputation as being kid-friendly, as at some point during the week at least 4 of the 8 neighborhood kids come over for dinner, wreck Stacey's playroom and bedroom, play in the backyard, etc, and we needed a dog didn't have aggressive tendencies or stranger anxiety.

Read more about Siberian Huskies here.

Heidi already understood a few hand gestures and verbal commands, but more importantly is interested in trying to figure out what you mean, which I think will make her easier to train.

We've introduced her to most of the kids in the neighborhood and their parents, and it was relatively painless to coax her into not jumping up on them all, but she really wanted to. Everyone but one girl liked her and petted her, and a couple of the kids have asked me and Stacey to bring her out to play with. The girl who stayed away is shy around new things for awhile anyway. Ironically, one of her two dogs is a Husky, so she'll probably come around.

No biting or aggression, although she has done a little playful nipping once with me when we were playing, and was remorseful when I told her to stop. I think the only real problem we'll have is getting her to settle down in the dog park, where she is playful, but a little domineering with the smaller dogs, and once she gets excited she wants to go meet all the people and jump up on them. I'm confident that will work itself out, though. On our next couple visits to the dog park, I'll keep her leash on, and work on some voice control beforehand.

She's comfortable with us, and although she has a lot of energy, she already lays down in the family room when we're watching TV and doesn't demand constant attention, just as long as she can stay in the room with us. She's also comfortable sleeping beside the bed, or in it if I let her. If I make her get down, she doesn't mope. Good natured dog, we're definitely happy with her.

Back to normal

By the grace of God, a good sized tax return, and my .mac calendar, Stacey and I have made it through the busy season of little kid activities, and are returning to standard daddy/daughter time. This Sunday was the first in a long time that wasn't busy or rained out, so we went down to the local park to learn some soccer and softball basics, and capped the day off by inviting some of the neighborhood kids over for dinner, my famous oven-fried chicken and cream of chicken rice.

Stacey's first tap recital was Saturday, which was the last major activity before her trip to Oregon at the end of the school year. The recital was interesting, it was mainly about a select few high school senior girls who were skilled and in about 5 or 6 acts each. Stacey's class was in one act, where they danced to a big-band tune that had a Squirrel Nut Zippers sound to it. She was happy to be on stage again, and happy to get her flowers and trophy at the end.

Next on my Stacey agenda is this year's birthday party this August, which I already have planned and partially paid for. The theme this year will be climbing. We're going to a place that has rope courses and climbing walls, and letting Stacey and her fellow 9 year olds climb on the ones that don't go up too high. Should be a lot of fun.

A haypenny will do

Prize tickets at my favorite video game parlor buy about a half-cent to two-thirds of a cent of prize value. Some of the prize categories are stuffed animals, childrens games, Barbie stuff, RC cars, OSU memorabilia, CDs, game cartridges, consoles, and handhelds, and miscellaneous cheap doo-dads for the kids who didn't win very many tickets.

I've been playing there for the better part of a year now, and can bring in close to 1000 tickets on 8 quarters on my favorite game, VRS Marbles. That works out to somewhere between 60 and 80 cents of prize value per quarter spent (my old website has a lengthy article about my habit).

"So what, you foul braggart" you ask? Allow me to explain.

In the recent past, Stacey and I have used ticket caches to purchase birthday presents for her friends, usually a big stuffed animal, and usually a big hit. Last December, I used some tickets to buy Christmas toys for a children's charity that AEP sponsors, which felt good to contribute to.

Stacey saw a 20,000 ticket item that she wanted, and I don't know what it is, but I'm saving up the tickets for her anyway. I've been playing aggressively over the last two weeks, and have saved up about 18,700 tickets so far, each ticket counted and thrown into the back of my car in giant stacks. Good game play tonight will put me over the 20,000 mark.

Hitting the game's jackpot score takes intense concentration, good timing and reflexes, and quick planning. It's mentally tiring. I'm dreaming about patterns of marbles now, and I can't go more than a few hours without thinking about the game. After hitting my ticket goal, I'm going to stay away from the place for a little while.

Last week's goings-on

My kid is still a genius. She passed four time-trial multiplication tests in two weeks, the first try on each of them. She had previously missed a time (nines, I believe) and had to take it again, and afterwards became a drilling, flash card reading machine so that it wouldn't happen again. The test requires writing the answers to 16 questions in 30 seconds. Try it. Try it with a random set of 12s questions. I managed to make the time with a few seconds to spare, but then again I can also drive a car, something I wouldn't expect a third grader to need to do.

I survived my third reorg in eight years without getting laid off or fired. This is one of those things that makes me unhappy with big business and yearn to become self-employed. Some reorgs are legitimate attempts to better structure a company, some are unnecessary and serve as a front to shake up an organization so the less desirables don't have a place to land, and most have a curious side-effect of saving the company a lot of money in salaries. I tend to believe my current company is trying to solve some internal development and communications problems with this reorg, and hopefully that will be the net effect. My last company had some unchecked politics that tended to favor those who followed the party line and kept their mouths shut when they saw things they didn't like. Honest and moral people tended to get either beaten into submission (metaphorically) or laid off. I was pleased to leave that atmosphere.

I survived a month without using a credit card. Going back to cash-only required only a couple of weeks of skimping, and a major rewrite of my budget spreadsheet. Now I simply substitute a debit card for a credit card, don't eat out, and watch the numbers very closely. By my current estimate, I'll have the card paid off and in the trash by the end of the year, along with my second mortgage. After that, I'll have extra money to pay off my car loan early, and then more extra money to put into Stacey's college fund, my retirement, and the home mortgage. All I need to do is keep my job, learn to love Ramen Noodles, and wait.

Link of the day

Skype blocked in United Arab Emirates

The assumption is that the UAE is blocking Skype because the national phone company, Etisalat, wants it that way. My assumption is that the UAE wants to keep monitoring the phone calls of its citizens.

This reminds me of a story from 1995, when I was working as a phone jockey for the (then giant) online service CompuServe. A guy called from Saudi Arabia, who was clearly a native English speaker, and was looking for local access numbers for the UK. I looked them up for him, and then asked why he didn't want numbers more local.

"Go ahead and look it up," he said.

The contact number listed was for the "Ministry of Telecommunications", and didn't list any network interconnect info like direct-CIS, Equaint, France Telecom, etc.

I explained all this to him and he said "Yeh, I called them already, and the next day the secret police knocked on my door and asked why I wanted to be on the Internet."

Good daddy week

I'll be honest, sometimes I'm not motivated to be the uber-dad. You will always burn yourself out if you focus your enthusiasm and energy for too long. "Above average" will always outlast "best". I did, in fact, burn myself out on volunteering. I was turned down for my regular gig this year of teaching a computer class to a local school's fifth graders, and in a way that was a very good thing.

I was pushing myself very hard, and I don't always get a warm reception from staff or students at schools, which made my efforts seem futile. After I realized I was burning out, I quit my backup gig of doing miscellaneous work as a teacher's assistant in my daughter's school. I had worked one on one with students on special projects, or helped kids who were falling behind finish an assignment that they had trouble with, and I managed to squeeze in a quick computer class one day. But my heart wasn't in it, and if I had kept at it much longer, the kids would have seen indifference on my face, which to most kids is worse than anger. So I quit before it got too bad. I may return to volunteering when I feel a calling, but I'm not in a hurry.

So now I'm aiming for above average daddy-hood, trying to just be involved in some of Stacey's activities, and push her to do better in school, not trying to make every day the perfect ray of sunshine, and not feel that I should make anyone cry uncle who doesn't agree that Stacey is the world's most perfect child. Last week had me feeling happy to be an involved parent again. I bought Stacey a better fitting bike, signed her up for Girl Scouts summer camp, and arranged for her to audition for "Annie jr.", a version of Annie cast with only kids, put on by the New Albany Arts Council (more on that later). We also decided to be Captain and Tenille at next year's talent show, and I've started working on the piano side of "Shop Around" to accompany Stacey's vocals.

I had time for it all, and didn't have to push myself (or Stacey), which qualifies the last seven days as a good daddy week.

Fun with Google maps

I love google maps. Their terms of service forbid you from reverse engineering, decompiling, etc., but no effort is made to hide how their image indexing system works. It's a piece of cake.

My current "I'm bored so let's geek out" project is to create a street-level map of my home city and make it detailed enough to need a poster-sized print. Coming soon. No, seriously, the check's in the mail.

Until then, here are a couple places you can find me when I'm not geeking out:

$20 to the first person who can name both places and snail-mail it to me. I'll enclose a $20 bill and a congratulations note on a card I recently purchased in Washington D.C. When I'm rich and famous, it'll be a collectors item.

One of these days...

...I'm going to make my millions, and then quit my job and open a daycare. I realize that sounds odd for a tech geek (and a man) to say, but I can't think of any career changes that would make me happier.

The master plan includes recruiting all the women I've worked with over the years who truly loved kids (not just keeping up the appearance of being nurturing and maternal, but who really thought kids were cool -- about 1 in 5), hated their jobs (most), and who would still dane to have a conversation with me (about half), and who have seen me shower my daughter with affection and praise (all of them).

With me and my geek-gone-caregiver posse, we would create a very mentally stimulating environment for young tots, with computers a-plenty, board games, RC cars, maybe an arcade cabinet or two for the school-agers who only stay during the summer. And naturally, I'd be the hero for organizing the whole thing, which, while not my primary motivation, is a large part of the appeal.

On my old site I talk about this a little bit in some of the earlier blog entries in the archive. What got me thinking about it again was this song I downloaded ("Bate, bate, chocolate", a kindergarten song in Spanish about mixing chocolate) when looking for iTunes songs for Stacey. It reminded me of this woman who was a caregiver to Stacey for a while when she was 3 and 4.

Her name was Elizabeth, and I don't think she's ever felt sad in her entire life. She loved the kids she took care of, and the kids all wanted to adopt her as their new mom. The day that always comes to mind when I think of her is one where I was a little later than normal dropping Stacey off. Elizabeth had the kids sitting in a circle of chairs, and when Stacey saw what was going on she booked over there to join in, foregoing the goodbye kiss and sad look she usually gave me.

They were singing "Little cabin in the woods", where each kid has to chime in with what is chasing them to make them go running by, scared as they could be. The round ends with the kid being rescued by the kid who came before, and runs up to Elizabeth and gives her a giant hug when she says "Come little Stacey, come with me, happy you will always be."

I had never seen anything like that before. Stacey was so happy, as were the other kids, and the song leader was enjoying herself as much as Tricia Sebastian is in the "Chocolate" song above. For the two minutes I was there observing before I left, I was in love with her. She really was going to rescue Stacey from all the mean things. It was beautiful.

At the same time, it was a simple child's game, singing in rounds, making up the thing that is chasing you (bears, lions, motorcycles -- none of the girls chimed in "boys", which I was a little bummed about), and Elizabeth and the kids probably forgot about it soon thereafter and went about their normal lives. It was part of the day, and it was normal, and it didn't change anything. But to me, it was special.

Nothing I did at the time was that special. I waited for my phone to ring and painstakingly waited for a chance to speak so I could explain how the caller had failed to follow instructions, or how our programmers had failed to write a quiality product. No saving people from the bears chasing them, no mixing chocolate. Maybe I was making more money than a daycare teacher, but It was I who had the short end of the stick.

So one day, after I make my millions... One of these days.

Link of the day: Math fun.

This is an old one from my roommate that I re-discovered. A page on calculating the intersection area of two circles given their center coordinates and radii. Check it out here.

Link of the day

Fabien Cousteau and his Shark-shaped submarine.
Read more about it here.

I posted some articles from work today, which is the first time in nearly two years I’ve updated one of my sites from outside of the house. My current job blocks outbound SSH traffic from user workstations, and after a couple attempts at workarounds (trying different ports, for example) I decided to leave it alone lest I get fired for trying to hack the network. Considering that my current position involves transmission of the company’s financial records, the appearance of hacking is a very bad thing, and in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, possibly leading to jail time.

So I couldn’t SSH home and update a page. Using Blogger is easier than my old method of SSH-ing home and running a perl script that calls emacs and updates the blog file system when you exit. I liked the idea of having total system control, but in reality all I wanted to accomplish was to just add a diary entry to a web page, which I can do from any public free blog service.

Tonight is the big UNC/Illinois game. I haven’t watched a UNC basketball game since the roster contained names like Jordan, Worthy, and Perkins, so I’m not sure what to expect. Basketball isn’t the game it was when I was a boy, in fact, sports in general has changed. On one side, sports medicine has improved; keeping players that would have been crippled in the game. Cheap technology makes analyzing everything easier – more statistics until they become too confusing to be useful (Joe shoots worse on Tuesdays, unless it’s raining), more film to watch and more specialists to extract meaning from it. On the other hand, players are bigger asses than they’ve ever been, and sports commentating has become an overly animated talk show hosted by taunting and jeering buffoons.

Anyway, I’m watching the game at my amigo’s house across the street. Prediction: UNC by 8. I’ll say about 65 to 57.

Today (as my calendar indicates) was parent observation day in Stacey’s tap dancing class. The girls went over some basic steps and a 3-minute routine they are practicing for the upcoming recital. Stacey was performing about the same as she did in ballet a few years ago: She was excitable at first and couldn’t follow the instructor’s lead with much precision (only slightly worse off than the other girls) until about half-way through the recital routine, where her superior memory helped her stay on target where some of the other girls began to falter. If I could only get her to calm down beforehand… well, she wouldn’t be Stacey, and that would suck.

So I ‘m looking forward to her recital in May. She’s done performances before and always does great. Her ballet recital went well way back when, her Americheer cheerleading group was the intermission act at a competition downtown and also at Otterbein college, she showed remarkable poise under pressure at this year’s talent show when her music was inaudible and she was forced to sing a cappella (what a champion, I was so proud of her then), and she’s been in about 4 or 5 local parades under various groups. She’s got the crowd thing down. I worry when I see her struggling with her bounciness and not quite having all the moves down, but I trust her to settle herself down and hit all her moves come game day.

I’m also fairly certain I worry about this stuff a lot more than she does.

Day 1

I am.

There, that should satisfy the basic requirement of blogging, self-declaration.

The present:
I am a father to my kid. I am a coder. I am a burned out volunteer. I am self indulgent and self deprecating.

The future:
I am going to put my kid through medical school. I am going to pay for her wedding and send her on an overpriced honeymoon. I am going to retire at 60 with $1,500,000 in the bank. I am going to stop working for the man sometime before then and code and write from my home. I am going to visit Europe. I am going to make $10,000 playing blackjack in Las Vegas without counting cards. I am going to finish my two novels and get them both published.

That pretty much covers it: love for my child, greed, and goals that are difficult but attainable. I'll write more about these declarations later.