Year: 2014

Trying out some new looks

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I had this beard that I grew. It kind of started as a joke, but then I didn’t think it looked half bad, so I just kept it. You’d be surprised at how much of a difference it makes when it’s really really cold (although very annoying when your moustache freezes)! And anyway, growing facial hair is about the easiest thing for me to do. I kind of can’t NOT do it: I can just stop shaving for about 30 seconds and *fwoomp* there’s a beard.

At first Sara hated the idea of a beard, but then after a day or two when it grew in all the way she didn’t say anything about it. I kind of figured that, like me, she was surprised at how good it looked! Not so. She was just silently hating at that beard as hard as she could.

Long story short, that beard is no more. So in the meantime, I’m trying out some new looks. What do you think, the James Hetfield?

me_and_james

Or perhaps the…uh…Charlie Chaplin?

me_and_chaplin

I’m hoping to one day work my way up to a full on General Burnside:

10 Years a Blogger

/ Shane / 2 Comments

10 years ago today I wrote my very first blog post.

10 years is like 1,000 years in Internet time. By Internet standards, I’m definitely a dinosaur. I predate smartphones, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook only beat me by 13 days. Myspace was less than a year old in Feb. 2004. Friends was still on the air!

Forget Internet time, 10 years is a long time to do anything. 10 years ago I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t married. I didn’t live in Chicago. I wasn’t writing, knitting, or even really cooking anything more complicated than a frozen pizza. Apparently, judging by all my early posts, 10 years ago I was also the whiniest emo crybaby on the planet.

This is my 1,887th post. I have 2,855 comments here on the blog proper (not counting anything on Facebook, Glipho, Google+, etc.) I’ve been interviewed about blogging, been a guest blogger, and received a comment from a childhood hero.

I don’t know if I really have anything to say about it that I haven’t covered before. I mean, in 10 years I think I’ve pretty much used up all the words. So, sorry future generations, I’m the reason there are no more words left.

Who knew that when I started this thing I’d still be doing it 10 years later? I’m definitely proud of that as an achievement. Someone commented on my first post and asked if this was the first blog post in recorded history. The funny thing was, when I started a blog I knew lots of people who had been doing it for a lot longer than me. The difference is, none of them are still doing it. The vast majority of blogs don’t make it to 1 year, much less 10. So, you know, congratulations to me or whatever.

I’m not really sure what the future will bring, as far as blogging goes. It’s still something I enjoy quite a bit, but I periodically change directions around here as well. If it ever stops being enjoyable, I have to do something new to keep it interesting. Maybe that’s the secret to making it 10 years. Probably not, though; I’d have to attribute that more to pigheaded persistence than anything else. I’m nothing if not relentless!

Anyway, I hate to say here’s to 10 more years because I don’t know if I’ll still want to be doing this in 10 years. I’ll be in my 40s(!!). Ollie will be on the verge of being a teenager, and Evie will be getting ready to drive (in her FLYING CAR). Besides, by that time the two of them will have long since killed me for all the embarrassment this blog has caused them.

A Valentine’s Poem

/ Shane / Leave a comment

For all you geek lovers (and lovers of geeks) out there, I give you the best Valentine’s day poem ever: “Scientific Romance” by Tim Pratt (reprinted with permission).

The great thing about this poem is that, when you read it to that special someone, I think you’re going to know pretty quickly whether or not they’re the right one for you. Do you find zombies and space aliens and time travel romantic? ‘Cause I do!

Enjoy!

Scientific Romance

If starship travel from our
Earth to some far
star and back again
at velocities approaching the speed
of light made you younger than me
due to the relativistic effects
of time dilation,
I’d show up on your doorstep hoping
you’d developed a thing for older men,
and I’d ask you to show me everything you
learned to pass the time
out there in the endless void
of night.

If we were the sole survivors
of a zombie apocalypse
and you were bitten and transformed
into a walking corpse
I wouldn’t even pick up my
assault shotgun,
I’d just let you take a bite
out of me, because I’d rather be
undead forever
with you
than alive alone
without you.

If I had a time machine, I’d go back
to the days of your youth
to see how you became the someone
I love so much today, and then
I’d return to the moment we first met
just so I could see my own face
when I saw your face
for the first time,
and okay,
I’d probably travel to the time
when we were a young couple
and try to get a three-way
going. I never understood
why more time travelers don’t do
that sort of thing.

If the alien invaders come
and hover in stern judgment
over our cities, trying to decide
whether to invite us to the Galactic
Federation of Confederated
Galaxies or if instead
a little genocide is called for,
I think our love could be a powerful
argument for the continued preservation
of humanity in general, or at least,
of you and me
in particular.

If we were captives together
in an alien zoo, I’d try to make
the best of it, cultivate a streak
of xeno-exhibitionism,
waggle my eyebrows, and make jokes
about breeding in captivity.

If I became lost in
the multiverse, exploring
infinite parallel dimensions, my
only criterion for settling
down somewhere would be
whether or not I could find you:
and once I did, I’d stay there even
if it was a world ruled by giant spider-
priests, or one where killer
robots won the Civil War, or even
a world where sandwiches
were never invented, because
you’d make it the best
of all possible worlds anyway,
and plus
we could get rich
off inventing sandwiches.

If the Singularity comes
and we upload our minds into a vast
computer simulation of near-infinite
complexity and perfect resolution,
and become capable of experiencing any
fantasy, exploring worlds bound only
by our enhanced imaginations,
I’d still spend at least 10^21 processing
cycles a month just sitting
on a virtual couch with you,
watching virtual TV,
eating virtual fajitas,
holding virtual hands,
and wishing
for the real thing.

The Moka Pot

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Ohhhhh you guys. Oh man. I’ve got a long and sordid tale to tell you. It starts, as all good tales do, with coffee, and ends with a wondrous little invention called the moka pot.

I’ve been periodically documenting my decline into a raving coffee addict, and I believe I’ve just entered a new and exciting phase. Although I dearly love espresso, I have been perfectly happy with my regular old 4-cup, standard (drip) coffee pot (unless I can convince my sister-in-law to lug her espresso maker to our house whenever she visits). Sara, however, not so much. The thought of hot water traveling through all that BPA-laden plastic sends shivers down her spine. She has mostly tried to stick her her cold-brewed coffee, but making it is a hassle in the extreme, and often not really worth it. So occasionally she had to resort to regular drip coffee, BPA and all.

It occurred to me that there were many different ways to make coffee, each with their own pros and cons, but surely there had to be a method out there that didn’t have any plastic parts. After some research (yes, I will research anything, even coffee making) we finally settled on a French press. Simple, straight-forward, time honored, and very similar to making cold brewed coffee. Several members of my family are already French press converts.

Finally, one day at Target and we decided enough was enough, and it was time to bite the bullet. We took a look at their fine array of French presses, and there was not a single one that didn’t have plastic. Frustrated, we decided we would look online when we got home. However, down at the end of the row, was a little Bialetti moka pot, with the coffee part made entirely of aluminum.

I had come across the moka pot in my research, but seeing it there in the flesh at Target somehow piqued my interest. However, we didn’t buy it then and there (did I mention I’m a researcher?). Strangely enough, just a few days later Sara had an amazing cup of coffee at a friend’s house, who happened to own a moka pot. The rest, as they say, is history.

This thing is awesome. It’s an espresso maker, but without all the crazy parts or fancy techniques. It’s kind of like one of the old percolator pots, though the brewing mechanism is entirely different. You just put in the water, espresso, and set it on the stove. That’s it. Ours makes enough for Sara and I in just under 7 minutes.

The Internet tells me that it’s not *exactly* espresso. The mechanism is the same, but it produces coffee at a mere 1 bar of pressure, rather than the required 9 bar. I don’t doubt that someone can make better espresso, but for a simple, low-cost, hunk of aluminum, my mouth can’t taste the difference. This thing makes *amazing* coffee.

One hard thing to get used to with drinking espresso is that you’re drinking a lot smaller volume. Think quality, not quantity. It turns out that a lot of my coffee drinking was more just to have something to do. You must not drink the same volume of espresso as I used to drink of coffee (or else there will be a *lot* more blog posts around here!).

So, moka pot. Highly recommended. It will change your life.

NBC, the Olympics, and the Disappointment of a Sick Little Girl

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Yesterday, Evie had surgery to install a 4th set of ear tubes. At this point, that’s all very routine for that poor girl, and not what I’m here to talk about. I would like to talk about the Winter Olympics and NBC’s right to broadcast them.

After the surgery, Evie wanted to lay around on the couch a bit and watch the Olympics. Specifically figure skating, but anything would do. Knowing that NBC had the broadcast rights, I set her up on the couch with a blanket, and turned on the tv. I honestly thought that NBC was basically broadcasting Olympic coverage day and night, but instead they chose to show Days of our Lives or whatever their normal soap opera is.

Fair enough, no problem. I don’t give up easy: let’s turn to the Internet.

Our first stop was olympic.org, which contains videos from past Olympic games, but nothing from 2014. No video on sochi2014.com either. Okay, how about NBC? They have all the rights, surely they’re streaming video, even if they’re not playing on their broadcast. Oh, I have to download an app first? Le sigh, okay fine.

Now here’s where it starts to get truly frustrating. The app was large and took quite a long time to download. So by the time we’re booting up the app, we’ve been looking for video for about 30 minutes. But okay, we’re on the path now. We’re golden, right?

Wrong.

In order to watch the Olympics on NBC’s streaming app, you have to specify your cable carrier. We don’t have cable. You don’t need cable to watch NBC, and you *shouldn’t* need NBC to enjoy the Olympics. But you do…if you live in the United States*.

We were eventually able to sign up for a limited viewing time (30 minutes only) and get something up, but at this point 1) we had spent so long on this that Evie really didn’t care anymore, and 2) the app was so crappy that we kept freezing and losing video to the point that it was unwatchable anyway.

*The part we couldn’t figure out was why wouldn’t the Olympics themselves be broadcasting? I mean, sure, NBC has the rights in the U.S. so they would prefer nobody else step on that, but what about the rest of the world? They wouldn’t be beholden to NBC, right? Isn’t the Olympics bigger than NBC?

I’ve recently discovered that there are other websites which stream the Olympics, such as the BBC and CBC, but you are blocked from them if your ip address comes from the U.S. You can get around that by tricking them into thinking your ip address is originating from somewhere else in the world, at which point you can stream all the glorious Olympic action your heart can handle. But that’s a little much, isn’t it? (And possibly illegal).

I understand all of this is big business and totally allowable. NBC and the Olympics can sign whatever deal they want. NBC can broadcast whatever they want. I have no inherent right to see the Olympics, so I can want what I want, but that doesn’t mean I can have it. NBC is a private institution; we don’t have a government-sponsored channel.

On the other hand, there was a little girl recovering from surgery and wanting to watch some figure skating. Wanting to root for her country. Wanting to learn about the world.

Well, welcome to the world, sweetheart. Big business wins out every time.