November 2006

There were 16 posts published in November 2006 (this is page 2 of 2).

The Little Death

Kris has been in Colorado this week, undergoing some sort of top-secret forensic scientist training. I took the week as vacation. I had grand plans that I would clean up the yard, work on Kris’ car, whip all my web sites into shape, and maybe write a short story or two. I was also going to spend a lot of time with friends.

I took Kris to the airport on Sunday morning. I came home and wrote three articles about personal finance, and an entry for foldedspace. I went outside and cleaned up the yard. After an hour of work, I came inside to take a hot bath. But while I was soaking, I started to sneeze uncontrollably. When I got out of the tub, my nose was running.

“I can’t be sick,” I thought. “I just got over being sick two weeks ago.” No matter: I was sick.

In the evening, I went to our monthly Monday Night Football gathering. (Yes, you read that right: our Monday Night Football gathering now occurs once a month on Sundays.) Jenn and Jeremy hosted a family game night, and I tried to play along, but I felt like crap.

On Monday I had lunch with Matt. He spent some time giving me tips on how to improve Get Rich Slowly. I was eager to hear his advice, but my sinuses were killing me, so I left early. I stopped at a drug store so that I could get a bunch of sinus medication. Later, I met Mac in Wilsonville for dinner and a movie. I was miserable the whole time. (Though I must say, it was the most fun I’ve had at a movie in ages. The Prestige is highly entertaining, even if you guess the plot twists. It was great that Mac and I were nearly the only ones in the theater. We could carry on a low-level conversation without bothering anyone.)

I had planned to dive into web work on Tuesday and Wednesday, but instead I lay on the couch, wallowing in my illness, watching Seinfeld on DVD. (Great fun!) Outside, the rain came down in torrents. The sky was grey — almost black. I missed Dave’s election party. I struggled to write anything of any sort. My mood turned as black as the sky.

Basically, I wallowed in stuffy sinuses and self-pity for two days. This morning I woke feeling slightly better. I made a slow start to the day, but managed to make it outside, to talk with the neighbor for a while (as usual, he has lots of advice for trimming our holly trees), to take Kris’ car in for new tires, to spend some time at the library. I even managed to write a couple of articles.

But I’m exhausted tonight. I spent some time soaking in the tub again, reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Worry dogs me, and I know it, but I don’t know how to stop. Carnegie shares the following quote from Thoreau:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I know that quote, and love it, but I don’t often act upon it. In fact, I act un-confident. I am afraid of social situations. But why? I never used to be. I love interacting with people of all sorts — friends, families, neighbors, strangers, colleagues, etc. “I thrive on social situations,” I told Mac the other night. “I know,” he said. So why do they frighten me so?

I’m also reminded of this litany from Dune:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Only I will remain…

Recipes from Rosings Park

Kris and I are lucky to have friends who love food, friends who love to cook and share their cooking with others. I’ve often said it would be fun to create a friend cookbook — to collect favorite recipes from everyone we know, and to publish them in one of those cheap spiral-bound fundraiser books.

Kris and I have already begun the process, to some extent, though not in a truly systematized fashion. Whenever we taste something we love — at book group, at a dinner party, and Monday night football gatherings — we ask for the recipe. We’ve been adding these recipes to MacGourmet, an inexpensive recipe database.

I was afraid that MacGourmet would be pointless, but we actually like it. It’s easier than collating piles of recipe cards, or dogearing pages in cookbooks. “The best thing is that you can search,” Kris says. “You can say, ‘I have zucchini. What can I make with zucchini?’ If you have enough recipes, you can get some good answers.” I like that MacGourmet lets you tag recipes with keywords, add photos, and note the source.

I also like that MacGourmet lets you publish your recipes to the web. If you’ve ever followed the “eat” link in the sidebar, you’ve discovered Recipes from Rosings Park, which is our ongoing collection of favorite dishes from friends (as collected in MacGourmet). We recently updated the list. Here are some of my favorites:

There are some notable dishes missing here. Paul’s posole, for example, and anything from Kara or Kim. Also, there’s nothing from Craig! Actually, we still have tons more recipes to enter. “I haven’t even put in a quarter of my recipes, so it’s kind of silly to post this now,” Kris told me when she saw what I was writing. I’ll just have to post again later when we have everything in the computer.

The Cutting Edge

Warning: religious discussion ahead.

I’ve become a full-fledged member of the Cult of Mac. These machines are great for a number of reasons:

  • They come with everything you need built-in, both via hardware and software.
  • They really are easy to use.
  • They just work. You don’t have to futz with things. They just work.

I don’t begrudge people their Windows-based PCs. Many people have to use them. Others believe they’re the only real option. Some genuinely prefer them to Macs. That’s great. I’m not any of those people. I’m one of those geeks who could live in Windows or Linux, but who has decided he has better things to do. I’d rather live on a Mac, not have as many options (though really, I’ve never noticed a limitation), and be able to constantly productive.

That’s not to say that Macs are perfect. They’re not. They crash, though not often. (Mostly they just freeze up when they crash.) Certain individual programs have a tendency to crash, especially web browsers. Safari (the default browser) can be damn sluggish. I have problems with Mail several times a year. iTunes is a bloated resource-hog. iPhoto isn’t particularly useful.

Or is it?

Here’s the thing: I’m constantly amazed at how different Mac users know how to do different things. I think that iPhoto is a piece of crap, but Jenn thinks it’s fantastic. She thinks it’s versatile, easy-to-use, and totally worthwhile. And you know what? She amazes me with the things she does in iPhoto and iMovie. She does things that I didn’t know were possible.

I like getting together with Paul Carlile because he, too, shows me ways to use my Mac that I never would have imagined. He seems to know iTunes inside and out. It’s amazing to watch him work with it.

Paul has also taught me a lot about chat. I’m old. To me, e-mail is cutting-edge technology. In reality, it’s trailing edge stuff. Kids today are on to bigger and better things. One of the things they were into a few years ago (and still use today, though it’s certainly not cutting edge) is instant messaging — internet chat. I don’t do instant messaging. I find it overwhelming. I used to do IRC, and I do in-game chat all the time, but for some reason I find one-on-one instant messaging intimidating.

But Paul prompts me to try new things. He often e-mails asking if I’m available to chat. And so I chat. But he goes beyond that. For example, because I knew he and I had been e-mailing back-and-forth this morning, I set my iChat status to “available”, which is something I’ve never done before. Paul pinged me and then requested an audio chat. An audio chat! And so we chatted over our computers, just as if we were on speaker phones. Very cool. He sent me an mp3 via chat. I sent him a photograph. I realized that when my new computer comes in a week or so, I’ll have video-chat capabilities. (Remember when I did product-testing on the videophone?)

Yesterday I experienced my first unbridled splurge in many months. I went out and bought a video iPod to send with Kris on her Colorado trip. I brought it home and spent the afternoon loading it with music, games, and television shows. Last night I took it to bed, and while Kris fell asleep, I watched an episode of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

I feel so cutting edge.

Site Tweaks

I’m taking ten days off to work on web sites. I’ve started with this one. You’ll be happy to hear that there are no major changes planned. Instead, I’m making small improvements that have been requested for a long time.

For example, I updated the ‘elsewhere’ links in the sidebar. More importantly, I doubled the number of images that rotate in the upper right corner. Lots more cats and kids, of course, but other shots as well. If your favorite isn’t there, please drop me a line.

Later (tonight? next week?) I’ll finally do something with the archives. They’re still the old archives from before the crash last year. None of the entries since then are accessible except through tedious manual slogging, paging back post-by-post.

If there are any enhancements you’d like to the site, now’s the time to speak up!

Complaints of a Boxmaker

I enjoyed the recent AskMetafilter discussion about common pet peeves for different professions. I was reminded of it again this morning when I received YET ANOTHER REQUEST from our webmail form looking for us to make one box for somebody in New York.

sigh

Why does this bug me? Because there’s no way in hell that having us manufacture one box for somebody across the country is worthwhile for anyone involved. The customer pays more. We make less. It’s lose-lose. Why do we make less? Because it takes more time to deal with the person, we have to go out of our way to ship the box, and the likelihood for error and misunderstanding is higher. I hate shipping cross country so much that I’ve posted the following at the Custom Box Service website, right above the quote request form:

We will not respond to out-of-area quote requests. If you are not located in Oregon or Southwest Washington, you should find a box manufacturer closer to you. Google is your friend.

But still I get several requests a week to make 20 boxes for somebody in Georgia or Vermont or South Carolina. We get more of these requests than real leads. (We get maybe one new local customer a month off the form.)

In the AskMetafilter thread, I shared other pet peeves:

  • People who call and ask for a box using only one or two dimensions. "I need a 27-inch box." or "I need a box that’s a 12 by 12 square." I’m sorry. Boxes, exist in a three-dimensional universe, actually have three dimensions. I’m shocked at how many times I have to ask, "What’s the third dimension?" only to be met by baffled silence or by an "I don’t know".
  • People who call wanting a price quote, but who do not have a pen to write the numbers down. These are the very same people who call two weeks later swearing that I’ve quoted them a much lower price. I have a hardcopy of every price quote I’ve generated. Write the prices/specs down!
  • People who need their boxes in a rush (which is everyone), but who then say, "Oh, can I pick those up next Wednesday?" Or worse yet, people who make me rush to make boxes but then are slow to pay.
  • People who want me to be able to manufacture a box to tolerances less than +/- 1/8 inch. I just had somebody request something in 64ths of an inch yesterday. Dream on.
  • People who complain about price increases. Paper is a commodity. Its price fluctuates all the time. I have no control over that. I’m not jacking up prices to rip you off. My prices go up when my costs go up.
  • People who call up the day they need to ship their Whatzit to Aunt Madge. "It has to be to the post office by three." Well you should have called earlier, then. I can’t violate the laws of physics.
  • People who have to tell me their life story in order to convey what sort of box they need. I don’t care about your cousin Billy. Just tell me what size of box you need and how many.

Basically, my list of complaints can be boiled down to one central problem: stupid people. (Don’t I sound like a jerk?)

The real trouble is, when I have to call business for help (a locksmith, for example), I’m the one who sounds like an idiot…

A Letter to a Friend (from Simon)

Dear Nine,

How are you. I am fine. It is cold here now, and even though Dad let me outside yesterday afternoon, I did not like it. I sat on the steps, and when he came out later to get the mail, I went inside. Brother was on the heating pad, or I might have taken it myself. (The heating pad is actually for Sister, because she is old and grouchy. But Sister does not use it because Brother has contaminated it by his presence.)

Mom and Dad tell me that you have a new Sister, too, but that she is pink and fleshy. I am sorry. Is she evil? Your parents are cruel and thoughtless not to have asked your permission. Don’t they understand that cats do not like change? I hope that at the very least they still feed you regularly.

What do you do in South Dakota? Are there squirrels? Are there birds? Are there leaves? There are leaves here, now, and while they are not as tasty as birds, they do have their virtues. (They’re plentiful, for example.) This weekend, Mom and Dad work in the yard. They raked leaves. I helped.

Auntie Tiff came over, too. I like Auntie Tiff. She knows just how to wiggle a stick.

Later in the day, I rescued Brother. He was sitting by the birdbath when he was set upon by Flash. Brother is rather stupid, and cannot cope with Flash alone, so I charged to his aid. It used to be that Flash and I engaged in mind games, and that the outcome was always in doubt. No longer. I have been practicing, and my mind is now so vastly superior that Flash slinks away in fear.

When the yardwork was finished, I summoned Mom to my side and commanded her to carry me inside. She is a good Mom.

It is sad that you are now so far away, friend Nine. I hope that you are not lonely. I hope that your parents feed you well. I hope that you have birds and squirrels to chase. I hope one day to see you again.

Stay warm.

— your friend, Simon Gates