Seen on ESPN.com:
"Steinbrenner released, ready to return to work"
I thought he'd finally gone over the edge and fired himself but it turns out that's not the case. Oh well...
December 2003 Archives
As in my wife's blog I'll separate them by person...just because. I don't know why.
From my parents: a new green parka and a red sweater from LL Bean (both
"long tall"...that's my official size designation), a stack of books (The DaVinci Code, Master & Commander, EB White's One Man's Meat, a book I've never heard of by an author I've never heard of (The Same River Twice) and Michael Crichton's Prey) and "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" on DVD. They also got me this stuff called Epilyt that basically is like taking a belt sander to my skin - I have extremely dry skin and this is the best stuff I've found to rectify it. Works wonders. Three days of using it and I already feel like I have to be careful getting into bed because I'll just slip out the other side.
From my wife: another "long tall" sweater, a pair of casual khakis (all I own are creased ones that I feel nervous just lounging around in), a battery charger and four rechargeable D batteries (very much needed for the amount of electric charge I go through thanks to my taping hobby), the new version of Mac OS X, and a book called "Schott's Miscellany", because obviously I don't possess enough random trivial knowledge yet.
From my brothers: the "Indiana Jones" trilogy on DVD and the chance to waste hours and hours in front of the TV watching it. Apparently Tom Selleck's audition cut is part of the bonus extras. I may have to do some extra exercising just so I don't blow out a latissimus muscle laughing at it.
From my mother-in-law: A gift card to Best Buy. Just in case I didn't get enough doodads and techie stuff for Christmas.
To coin a new category not previous mentioned, my favorite present to give was a pair of ticket's to Movin' Out the musical based on Billy Joel's music. Partly because my wife had asked for tickets a while back but completely forgotten about it, but mostly because tickets and other such small things evoke another Mallick family holiday tradition - the art of the fake-out, also known as over-wrapping. For this one, since I hadn't received the tickets as of the day I had to wrap them, I printed out a page about the musical, and put it inside some tissue paper in a circular tin that Viv gets these butter toffee peanuts in. I then put the tin inside the cardboard box that it's typically shipped in. But that wasn't enough, not by a long shot. That box fit snugly into another box that had previously held some Valentine's Day chocolates (another good fake-out) and then of course there was the box that the chocolates had been shipped in. In all, that ticket was wrapped in a layer of tissue paper, a peanut tin, three different cardboard boxes and a layer of wrapping paper. Minutes of entertainment watching someone paw through all that stuff, I tell you.
The wife and I have been hitting the last shift of Guster shows on this tour...since the 12th we've seen them in Hartford, central New Jersey, Boston and finally Portland for two unbelievably high-energy shows. Here's a shot of us and some friends at the Portland gig - this is actually posted to Guster's web site. They were filming a DVD and were STILL nice enough to let us tape the show. That's my taping equipment on the left, our friend Greg's head leaning to the right, then me (look straight down from Adam, the guitarist on the left) and Viv. So if you've never met us before, now you'll know what we look like. In the dark. From the back. Ah, whatever, just look for the big stick in the air and I'm likely standing next to it.
I guess technically that wasn't the beginning of our Christmas vacation since actually had to come home and work Monday and Tuesday...and I'm going back again this Monday to pretend to work for eight hours or so. But for all intents and purposes (not "intensive purposes" as I've seen people write...ugh), I've got more days off these past two weeks than I have days in the office. Good enough for me.
After that it was back up to Portland for Christmas at my parents' place. We had decorated the tree the weekend before, including my replacement of the yearly dozen bulbs that our Christmas lights decide to molt. This year I diagnosed a faulty fuse in one cord, which essentially constituted my handyman-ness for the weekend. Somehow my handy quotient has increased over the past year; it's quite satisfying to be able to puzzle things out. Anyway - upon arrival we saw an already-large pile of presents underneath the tree, to which we were able to add significantly. We had a minor break with recent tradition and opened a few presents on Christmas Eve (apparently when I was wee, we used to open most of the presents on Christmas Eve, but the gift-opening migrated mostly to Christmas morning when we got older and supposedly more patient). As evidence of our increased patience, the present-ripping carnage didn't start in earnest until 9:30 or so the following morning, and I am now surrounded by a surfeit of quite satisfactory gifts.
The best feeling of the whole weekend (and there were many - sleeping until 10 one morning, eating some wonderful home-cooked food, being entrusted with the carving of both a goose [impossible] and a turkey [much more rewarding] and having some good quality vidiot time with my brother playing Super Mario Kart Double Dash) was being charged with setting up the various and sundry projectors that my parents claimed from my grandparents' house after my grandfather died back in October. He was quite the gadgetry buff and shot reels and reels of both 8mm and 16mm film as well as hundreds of slides. We had a family viewing up in my father's office above the garage; it was recently repainted and I proposed that it be the central repository for family viewings, since it's such a large room and has so much storage space (though they may have to invest in shades for the skylights if they want to do more daytime showings). So we had three projectors set up, and sat there for hours on end watching film of my mother's side of the family, from as early as 1943 onward. They even had a few color 16mm reels from 1944 (an extravagance in those days) and my wife got to see film of me from when I was just a few weeks old, all the way up to around 1986 when we took the last of the home movies on our cross-country trip that summer.
One project that I haven't quite gotten up the gumption to take on involves another trait that I hadn't known about, but when you think about it I suppose it all makes cosmic sense. My grandfather owned an old reel-to-reel recorder and has dozens of live recordings he made of recitals and concerts he was involved in. He would lug that thing around to local churches and concert halls and tape all sorts of classical music. Those reels were still in near-pristine shape in their closets when Mom cleaned them out, and I'll likely take a few of them with me, along with the old Uher, to put some on CD the next time I'm up there. But it only seems fitting that from David H (Hudson) to David H (Harris), the gadgetry and recording bug passes on from generation to generation. I can't wait to figure out how the Uher works...
Ok, so most everyone who reads this is, I suppose...but the question is, how MUCH of a music nerd are you?
Me, I'm 66.66667% - Extreme Music Nerd.
http://members.aol.com/seaofsound/musicnerd.html
Dave is all shook up over the King of conventions.
Dave is smart.
Dave is a remake of a classic C64 game.
Dave is listening.
Dave Is Back.
"DaVE" is Coming to Phoenix!
Dave is on.
Dave is breaking his own rules.
Dave Is A Monkey.
DAVE is a Macintosh software solution that provides file and postscript printer
sharing between Macintosh and Windows users using any TCP/IP-capable network.
Dave is a Sucker!
Dave is...on...Crack.
Dave is claiming the time traveller's reward.
Dave is afraid.
Dave is blaming the entire Echo Project on Tim Bray.
Dave is gone.
Dave is in.
Dave is the man!
Dave is a teapot.
(results obtained by typing "Dave is" into Google. try it, it's fun!)
The office I work in is in a building at the top of a hill. There are streets on both sides of the building; one is at the same level while on the other there's a strip of maybe four or five feet, then a fifteen-foot drop off a retaining wall to the street below. Five minutes ago I got up to walk to the printer, which is on the side of the building overlooking the street below us, and there's a guy standing there with a chainsaw.
Ok, so he's in a bucket loader, cutting branches down that overhang the power lines below us, but still...one never really expects chainsaw-wielding people at one's window, especially on that side of the building.
So Andy Pettitte is no longer a Yankee. Where on earth will they find another pitcher who can win 15 games with seven runs of support every time out? With them trading for Kevin Brown, it gives them a full house, arm surgeries over balky backs, with a knee surgery kicker. I think that beats a flush, no? Good to see Steinbrenner back on the warpath, signing clubhouse poison left and right. Nothing like overpaying for a malcontent right-fielder to fill the gaping void left by..a malcontent right-fielder.
I would, however, like to take this moment to belatedly welcome to Curt Schilling to town. I read a great article by Jayson Stark of ESPN.com that detailed several clauses and stipulations in his contract. There are some that are standard language - bonuses for winning certain awards, etc. Some of them are a little more interesting - if Schilling is unable to sell his house in Arizona, the Red Sox will buy it at market value...and if he's traded FROM the Red Sox (hah), and unable to sell his house here (double hah) the Red Sox will buy it at market value.
But the most interesting one is the focus of Stark's article - that there's an option in his contract for 2007 in the amount of $13m. However, that becomes a $15m guarantee if the Red Sox win the World Series during the next two years. How's THAT for a performance bonus?
Watching TV the other night - I think it was Law & Order...or maybe it was Law & Order? It could have been that other Law & Order...anyway, one of the characters on whatever show it was walked up to a car, carrying an umbrella in the pouring rain. From inside the car, we see the door open, the character sits down, the door closes, all in a matter of two seconds. And the umbrella is neatly folded up, the character doesn't have a drop on him.
I, meanwhile, just walked from my front porch to my car with an umbrella, in a 45-degree rain (that's angle, not temperature, though it's probably both), and it took me about ten seconds to wrestle the umbrella closed, pull it in across my body, and put it in the footwell in front of the passenger side seat.
Then, of course, upon arriving back at work, I managed to stay dry all the way to the door of the building, then while trying to negotiate the front vestibule doorway, smacked my umbrella against the door, showering me with water. Nothing like waiting until you're inside to soak yourself thoroughly.
You may have read the recent news articles about how Congress has approved a bill designed to stop spam. While I'm enormously skeptical that this is going to have any effects on the amount of spam I receive per day (upwards of a hundred messages, I'd estimate), it did provide me with something that's giving me an enormous amount of satisfaction - an open encouragement from the government to forward all of my spam to them. Yes, that's right - apparently they want my (and your) spam. So I've been forwarding every single spam received to uce (at) ftc (dot) gov. I'm hoping that with thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people doing this, maybe it'll force their hand into passing something stricter once they realize the enormous volume of spam sewage clogging mail servers across the country and across the world.
So go on, send your spam to Uncle Sam!
