personal log.

I got the Eye-Fi Share this week. It is generally great, but has some quirks.

Pros:

• Uploads to local folder/iPhoto and Flickr
• Easy to set up
• Dead simple to use
• Does just what it says

Cons:

• Slower writes than other SD cards
• Can’t do burst photography
• Movies are limited in length
• Only works on one wifi network
• Burns out batteries pretty quickly
• Photo uploads hammer network
• Camera is yet another thing to check

Overall, I’m happy with it. The burst mode thing got me at a birthday party, but I got over it. It’s really simple to use, and making me consider Flickr as a primary photo repository.

Wow.

Amazon rolled out a Universal Wish List feature, which lets you add anything from any online store and add it to your Amazon Wish List.

Ten years ago at Trilogy we rolled out something very similar — a single site designed to centralize your wishlist with items from all over the web. It worked well technically, but not financially.

I’m glad to see the idea reappear and be so well executed.

Earlier this week, I had an email exchange with Banjocat about keeping track of what I’m up to. (She’s a senior Human Factors person, so when she talks about these things, I listen.) See, brettpeters.org was intended to be the place where my non-internet friends could keep up with what was going on — but sadly, it wasn’t working as well as it should.

Mostly, it’s Twitter’s fault; the volume of posts overwhelms the non-follower. Archiving them to LiveJournal didn’t help, mostly because no one knew I even had it! And reading the different flows via the badges on the front page is disjointed and lacks flow.

I’m taking Banjocat up on her suggestion that a quick summary of keeping track of me online is in order, and then doing something about the scattered pieces.

The short version: non-internet-obsessed friends go here, maybe here, and if you don’t know where my son’s site is, email me. Zen Masta Steve and Iron Chef Meat might find this interesting, too. And this is good if you’re pressed for time and need a laugh.

You don’t have to follow anything else. Not even this site.

The long version:

First, I post things from me to only six sites:

• Nobody Wants a Stylus, where I talk about iPhones and other technical babble,
• Brett’s Logjam, which has turned almost entirely into a personal log, and I haven’t been sure of where it’s going for about eight years now,
• Twitter, which is a 140-character stream of chatter from my cell phone. The bits that other people like wind up on Favrd or Favotter,
• Flickr, for my photographs,
• My son’s site, which is both the most active and the cutest of all my blogs,
• And, the latest, I just started a blog for Yahzie, my MkIV turbo Jetta.

(As an aside: frankly, this is crazy. It’s not as insane as my elsewhere page is, but it’s still insane.)

Second, I post things from other sites to only one place: Appendix A.

The last time I was in a consolidating mood, I dumped everything into this feed. That didn’t work: normal posts got overwhelmed by little trivial updates. People should be able to choose what they want in addition to getting it all in one place. Some folks are happy reading these infrequent updates. Others try to follow the Twitter firehose, while others just like the pictures.

So.

With all this in mind, I went ahead and created Brettbot-147, an automated site that pulls from my two main weblogs, Twitter, and Flickr. You can read it on the web, follow it in an RSS reader, or even subscribe to daily emails.

I have something similar already in place for my kid’s blog, which if you don’t know the URL just ping me for it. I’ll leave my car’s blog and Appendix A alone for now.

Holy crap. I totally have to redo my home page.

Well, about two weeks after getting whatever-virus-that-was, I’m finally on the mend. Sadly, my son is now sick, so it balances out.

(Hopefully, it won’t hit him as hard as it hit his parents.)

A few odds-and-ends:

• I am both sad to see Cameron Hunt leave professional web design behind, and glad to see him moving on towards things that make him happy. No matter how good you are at something (and Cameron’s got mad skillz, as the kids say today), you’ve got to do what makes you happy. Best of luck with what comes next, Cam.

• A hearty welcome to all the folks coming here from Jason Snell’s Macworld podcast on the MacBook Air. I would like to say that CoolBook fixed my MacBook Air problems, but I’d returned it under the 30-day period and gotten a black MacBook instead. No hard feelings with the Air, though — maybe next time. You may enjoy my iPhone blog, Nobody Wants a Styl.us.

I’ve got some changes coming up with some of my sites, but I’ll leave those in the bag until they’re ready to escape.

Well, if it feels like the flu, aches like the flu, and behaves like the flu, I’ll call it the flu. Ugh. I hate the flu.

It’s been a rough week. I lost my voice early on, but finally started feeling human again on Thursday. Of course I pushed too hard on Friday and paid for it yesterday. Fatigue is the real problem right now.

Having talked to about a half-dozen people who have had this (including Merrystar, who had the exact symptoms before it went into a sinus infection), it pretty much runs 2-3 weeks barring complications. Nearly everyone reports complications, either a sinus infection or bronchitis.

The fatigue reportedly lasts a few weeks after the coughing, aching and fever go away. I’m reading the collected works of David and Leigh Eddings to keep my mind busy while it passes.

Fortunately, Trip seems to have escaped the worst of it; his biggest problem right now is that he’s decided to get up in the middle of the night and talk to his mother, which is not doing either of them any good. Well, that, and also that I’m really short-tempered right now with a voice like a very angry bear. No, really — I could seriously sing lead vocals for Morbid Angel. It’s that deep.

Tip: tired kids don’t take well to being growled at, at any volume. Just sayin’.

So… how’re you doing?

It’s been an intense few weeks here as my project kicks into high gear. This past week has been a rollercoaster, where it looked like the entire thing was about to go off the rails until it didn’t, and by Thursday night I was breathing huge sighs of relief.

Merrystar’s recovery from her first sinus infection continued apace, and I thought we were out of the woods yesterday.

Sadly, I slept 9 hours last night and woke up with the first-stage symptoms of the virus that took her out 2 weeks ago.

HINT: when you’re paler than your red-haired wife, you’re NOT doing well.

So.

As much as I’d like to write about the iPhone 3G / Mobile Me / iPhone 2.0 OS launch, or even play around with them, I’m going to sleep this weekend and see if I can avoid losing the next two weeks.

Wish me luck.

This weekend I realized that I have a few guitars too many, and resolved to either get them into playable shape or get rid of them. I kept one acoustic and one electric, and put the rest up for consignment at Amory Music in Five Forks.

The Ibanez GSR-200 bass guitar isn’t worth dwelling on too much; it was a serviceable instrument that I never played. Seriously — I got it twelve years ago in the event that I might play bass again, someday, in some theoretical band. I won’t miss it, because there’s no history between us. We’re strangers.

The Jackson JDR-94 Reverse Dinky and I, however — we have history.

Dark blue, with the crazy-aggressive reverse Jackson headstock, it wasn’t a wallflower. I don’t have many concert pictures from the mid-nineties, but I used the Jackson (pictured here, in concert with The Lozenges) the way it was meant to be used: to play grinding, grungy metal and alternative rock. Good times.

(Well… mostly.)

I don’t have any studio-quality tapes from that time to let you hear how the guitar sounded back then. Heck, I don’t even have any good quality tapes from that time. But I dug up an old practice tape of mine from 1994 with a band called Mostly Harmless, which at least preserved the noise from the jam sessions. (“Sound boards? We don’t need no stinkin’ sound boards.” sigh)

You can hear the Jackson on the tracks below:

• Hologram
• Onyx Sun
• Joan of Arc

(I did mention the production quality is non-existent, right? Right.)

On the first track it’s the rhythm guitar, and somehow manages to not cut totally loose until the 5:30 mark. The second track has no such qualms: next to the drums, it’s the loudest instrument in the room. The third track is sadly missing the guitar solo at the end that is present on a few other versions, but the rest of the mix on those takes is so bad that I can’t in any good conscience put it online.

It’s a good guitar, and I hope it finds a good home with someone else. If you’re looking for guitars in the Williamsburg area, please consider stopping by Amory Music and giving it a try.

But it’s time for me to let go, and move on.

I seem to be on the mend; I actually enjoy taking bird pictures again.

Flowers, too.

My ear is healing well, with substantially fewer periods of dizziness or pain. It’s still a bit numb, but as the nerves were cut it’s expected. (Apparently, it’s going to itch a lot when they regrow.)

I am cautiously optimistic about regaining some hearing. I think it’s a little better, especially in crowds. I’d like to see the hearing test results in a month or so before really believing it, though.

Mostly, I’m glad it’s all over with. Less thinking about ears, more listening to birds.

The weekend was filled with a welcome set of domestic activities, none of which were beyond my abilities; mowing the lawn, planting some trees and bushes, putting together a bookcase for T.

This is a modest list, to be sure.

But I take great joy that these tasks were merely exhausting, not debilitating.

It’s a welcome change.

Okay, enough about computers. I’m tired about talking about computers. All sorts of stuff happened this week. Non-computer stuff! News!

Like … notebooks!

I got a new set of notebooks. Really cool notebooks: Field Notes notebooks.

These are most excellent notebooks. I like them even more than my pocket Moleskine. The paper quality is excellent. They fit well in the pocket. They are really well made. They ooze utility.

But, still… notebooks.

If it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing.

(Notebooks, I say!)

(I should probably call it a night.)

Recovery takes time, I wrote. And usually longer than you want.

I’m showing improvement over last week. There were a few setbacks, like the ill-fated trip downtown, or anytime Trip accidentally bonks me with his head. But if I can avoid the occasional blows to the head, or overexerting myself, things have improved.

One of my friends noted that I looked really haggard in the previous post, which is probably true. I got a shave (thank goodness), but now I could really use a haircut. The left side of my face and head is still noticeably swollen, though it’s slowly returning to normal. The incision is healing well, there are no problems with taste, and the pain is usually manageable. The ear is still a little numb in back around the incision, but the bruising is mostly gone.

I had my post-op on Monday, where my doctor removed the surgical packing from the outer ear. There is still foam in the middle ear, behind the eardrum, which will eventually turn into a thick ooze and drain out the eustachian tube. But in the meanwhile, it’s causing a certain amount of dizziness, particularly when I turn my head too quickly.

The dizziness is damned inconvenient. It comes on suddenly and leaves me nauseous for hours, which I don’t think it was doing before. Or, perhaps, I’ve attained a general state of well-being where I didn’t notice it because I felt like crap all the time. My doctor assures me that dizziness is very normal at this point, so I try not to freak out about it… too much.

I drove my car on Monday, which went okay, but I had a dizzy spell and couldn’t drive back from my in-laws. I haven’t driven since. I also put on my glasses for the first time on Monday, and even with lightweight glasses it’s too uncomfortable to do for long. The arm rests on the incision, so I usually go without. After two weeks I’m used to the fuzziness.

The variable hearing is still present, and I have no idea if my hearing has improved because of the surgery, or because I no longer have an inch of foam on top of the eardrum. It’s really weird.

Also, my doctor was suitably impressed that I shared the pictures online.

There’s not really much else to report; no satisfying conclusion to reach with this post. It’s simply another week with a new eardrum. I think I’ll keep it.

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s a day where silliness and craft are celebrated; where a good joke is one that can be played even though the other person expects it.

Sadly, I don’t have any jokes today. But I do have the Muppets.

I mentioned that I love April Fools’ Day, right?

I twittered today:

Post-op recovery sucks. Little things defeat you. Big things are inconceivable. And it’s amazing how many big things there are to do.

Today was my first day without painkillers in a week. The picture in this post was taken yesterday, when the pain was still really bad, but the drug fog was even worse. So I gritted my teeth and stopped taking the Vicodin. It wasn’t great — there were plenty of things that you still can’t do because they hurt too much, and sudden motion is definitely to be avoided — but it wasn’t terrible.

I came enough out of my fog to remember that I really hate having a beard, and shaved it off. I joke that I shave because Merrystar hates it, but really it’s me doing the hating. I feel better with it gone.

I’m not back yet. I still get really tired at the simplest things, and just don’t feel up to most anything. My ear sticks out and I can’t wear my glasses. I can’t drive, or fly, or lift up my son to rock him to sleep.

But I feel a little better today than yesterday. I’m recovering. It takes time.

Before my eardrum replacement surgery, the doctor asked me if it would be okay if students observed.

“Of course,” I replied.

“What about pictures?”

“Totally!” I said, excited. “But only if I can get copies!”

So this is why, a few hours later, the doctor was handing my wife totally gross medical pictures of my ear. She’s all, “ew, what are these? He told you to take them? Why would any sane person want them?”

(The funny part is how our mothers reacted. Merrystar’s mom was also confused and grossed out; mine said “Cool!” I guess some things really are learned behavior.)

Anyhow, pictures. Gross, icky, surgical pictures. Of my ear.

I has ‘em. But I have a distribution problem.

See, I don’t want to subject my wife to looking at them again, and she’s one of the primary readers of this weblog. On a normal weblog, I’d hide them ‘below the fold,’ in the extended entry field so that it wouldn’t show on the main page.

Only, uh, I customized this back in the dark ages and used that field for something else. Oops.

So I thought, and thought, and thought, and then remembered that Flickr lets you have guest passes to private photo collections. That would work, right?

Yep. That would work.

So, if you’re feeling brave enough, I invite you to look inside my ear at the before and after pictures.

(But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Merrystar’s right: they are gross.)

I basically worked myself into a funk today over tomorrow’s surgery, worrying over every single far-fetched worse case scenario, no matter how implausible. (And some of them were pretty implausible.) I turned a molehill into a mountain. So, my apologies if I was overly dramatic — I’ve had a hole in my ear for over 20 years, and it’s been a part of my identity for that long.

But it’s time to let go of that and move on.

I’d also like to thank numerous people who stopped and shared their own battles with hearing loss, tales of ear surgery gone right, and general well-wishes. I really appreciate you taking the time. I really do.

My surgery’s scheduled for just after 9AM tomorrow in Richmond. Merrystar will be with me, and I should be done around lunchtime. Twitter will, as usual, have the latest news.

And it will all be good, tomorrow.

(Well, good news from me, at least. No comment on the mortgage securities markets.)

A bit of a surprise announcement: I will be going in for ear surgery on Tuesday. My left eardrum is almost totally gone, the bones in the middle ear are damaged, and the mastoid bone surrounding the ear is filled with material left over from a series of massive infections. The surgery will replace the eardrum, examine the ossicles and possibly replace them with prosthetics, and drill out the infected mastoid bones. This will, in turn, help stop the repeated infections I’ve had over the past few years, and is the first step towards regaining my hearing.

The backstory on this is long and somewhat painful — literally, since it involves having one’s eardrum ripped out — so I will save it for later. Suffice it to say, if you ever wondered why I am a very active listener, yet can’t hear you when other people are talking … well, now you know.

I have mixed feelings about this surgery. I am very nervous about addressing a problem that has lingered for two decades; every time we poke and prod at the problem, the news gets a little worse. Until they open up the middle ear, there’s no way to gauge the extent of the damage. The reconstruction has a chance of making my hearing worse instead of better.

But I’m also a little excited, because I’m finally doing something about these problems. The problems are there. Ignorance of them doesn’t change anything.

I was thinking about some of the things people have said about Gary Gygax’s influence, especially how:

Gary Gygax saved more lives than pennacillian (sic). When I was 10, he was 39. He knew he was writing a book for 10 year olds… but never talked down to us. He was the only adult presence in my life from the time I was 10 to the time I was like 15 that didn’t preach, didn’t talk down and didn’t have any parameters.

I, too, was 10 years old when I played my first Dungeons and Dragons game, and this observation really hit me tonight. There was no pandering, no dumbing down of concepts to fit an adolescent game. We may not have understood all Gary and Dave put in front of us, but it challenged us to learn and grow into it. Statistics, economics, cartography, linguistics, storytelling, history, tactics, drama — all were part of the great Dungeons and Dragons tapestry. What’s the difference between a halberd and a glaive-guisarme? Which weapon is more effective, one that causes 1d8+4 or 1d12? What happens when you walk into a town with buckets of gemstones and unload them on the local market? These are questions that this crazy game posed to kids, and you know what? Kids learned.

I credit Dungeons and Dragons for vastly expanding my vocabulary, too. When my High School Literature teacher came across a passage in Gogol that talked about a wraith, I already knew what it was and moved on. When someone asked the teacher what a wraith was, and the bluffed, five hands immediately shot up and corrected him.

I remember how he looked around, more than a little startled, and asked how we all knew about this alternate name for a spectre.

“It’s in the Monster Manual,” I mumbled. Everyone who had raised their hand nodded, and the rest of the class looked at us with a mixture of awe and pity. (At least we didn’t tell him how many Hit Dice it had.)

Years later, one of my co-workers complained to a group of us that a client had corrected her use of e.g. in an email. “Who can keep them straight, anyway?” she vented.

“But e.g. is ‘for example,’ and i.e. is ‘in other words,’” I replied, puzzled. (Admittedly, this was not my best management moment.) Silence fell on the group.

“Do I dare ask how you know that?” asked another co-worker.

“The first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide,” I replied, promptly. “I learned all the latin abbreviations from it when I was a kid.” They still had that mixed look of awe and pity, but I felt nothing but thanks to that book for making me figure out i.e., c.f., n.b., e.g., etc..

So, thank you, Gary Gygax, for all the great things that you gave us. Little or big, we are better for them.

I ordered the new series on the textual history of The Hobbit as a present for Merrystar, but my motives are not exactly selfless.

Jim hit me up on IM earlier today to tell me to take a deep breath, because Office 2007 is not the spawn of the devil.

He proceeded to enthusiastically enumerate the ways in which Excel 2007 is superior to its predecessor — so enthusiastically, in fact, that I gave in and just let my hate for the new look go. I may not like it — especially PowerPoint, argh — but I’ll give it some time, and see if it’s just the learning curve or actual flaws.

Mostly, he told me (without so many words) to go play in Excel, which I did, and honestly did make me happy.

(But I still don’t think the Ribbon is my Very Special Friend, Jim. I remain suspicious of the Ribbon’s intentions.)

Her: You can’t really be rooting for the Giants.

Me: No, but I want them to win tomorrow.

Her: You have never, ever, in all the years I’ve known you, rooted against the Cowboys.

Me: That’s true. And I’ll certainly be rooting for T.O. and Romo and all the rest tomorrow. But I want the Giants to win for three reasons:

Her: I’ve got to hear this.

Me: First, they fought with honor against the Patriots.

Her: How very Klingon of you.

Me: Thanks. Second, Jerry Jones.

Her: Okay, you still hold a grudge there, got it.

Me: And third, because I want the Packers to have home field advantage next week, so they can go to the Super Bowl.

<brief moment of silence, watching the snow fall on Lambeau Field>

Her: That’s a good one.

Me: I thought so too.

Her: So I’m going to ask you something, and I’m pretty sure that I’m opening up a can of worms that is better left unopened.

Me: <nervous now> Okay. Shoot.

Her: What does this “Digg It” button actually do?

Me: <silent>

Her: <raises eyebrow>

Me: I’m thinking.

Her: You look like I’ve asked another one of those questions.

Me: Well… yes. Why do you want to know?

Her: I see them everywhere, and they might be useful in promoting different Wikia sites.

Me: Okay. You know del.icio.us?

Her: Yes. You have an account there. It has the funny “dell-issy-ous” URL.

Me: Right. Ever actually visited it yourself?

Her: No.

Me: Okay. Well, it’s kinda like del.icio.us, and kinda like slashdot.

Her: <confused> Like, the current directory?

Me: No, the root directory.

Her: No, the current directory.

Me: No, the root directory.

Her: They may have changed something, but every Linux distribution I’ve used in the last ten years has the root directory at slash root.

Me: Right. But slash dot is the root directory, and dot slash is the current directory.

Her: No, slash root is the root directory.

Me: The directory at the top of the tree. The slash directory.

Her: The slash directory, not slash root?

Me: Right.

Her: <calmly> Why didn’t you say that to begin with?

Me: MOVING ON, I‘m talking about the site, not the directory.

Her: Oh. Are they still around?

Me: Yes, but they’re about three weeks late with news, and overrun by freetards, so nobody reads them anymore.

Her: Freetards?

Me: I can’t believe I just used a Fake Steve Jobsism.

Her: <delightedly> That’s that Apple guy!

Me: <Groans, buries face in hands>

Her: I’m sorry. But that’s so much fun to do to you.

Me: I know.

Her: Please, continue.

Me: I’m not sure that I want to.

Her: I’ll be good.

Me: I doubt that. Where was I?

Her: Losing?

Me: Right. So. Digg is a site like slashdot, where users vote for stories — “digging them” — to see what makes the front page. And then they bury stories once they become stale.

Her: Okay.

Me: So, it can drive traffic to your site very quickly if something gets popular, slashdotting it. There’s that term again.

Her: Got it.

Me: But, that traffic is mostly composed of hyperactive, attention deficit disorder fourteen year olds with civility problems.

<long period of silence>

Me: Yeah.

Her: So, the “Digg It” button summons a horde of wiki vandals?

Me: Likely not your target market for quality contributors.

Her: I probably shouldn’t have asked.

Me: Can open, worms everywhere?

I don’t normally do self-portraits. Call it a character flaw, but I find the rest of the world far more interesting than the face I shave in the mirror every day.

This was a different day. This was the day I discovered that one of my immediate family members has cancer.

I was jovial and positive on the phone. But after I hung up, I grabbed my camera to go shoot outside in a desperate attempt to not face it.

It worked about as well as you think it would have. Nothing held my interest.

Finally, I just sat down in the middle of the woods, put the camera on continuous shooting, and let myself think.

This is not a good picture of me. It’s not going to win any awards, or convince people that I should quit my day job and become a model. I’m not happy, or positive, or any of the things people usually associate with me. The lighting is going as the sun sets.

But it’s an honest picture, one that captures a moment that I pray I never have to face again, but know that I will.

And honest pictures should be celebrated for what they are, not what you think they should be.

Just like life.

Meet Thievey, a ring-tailed lemur. He’s very cute, but he needs your help.

Consider doing something good and help Mike reach his goal before the end of 2007. He’s got 3 2 1 lemurs left to give away.

Update: Mike reached his goal, but there’s still time to make a difference. The MGF is totally blown away by the amount of support they’re getting here ($10,450 + $167/month for the next year), but there is still more need.

You may also consider purchasing one of the Moon Bears from Vermont Teddy Bear (which we got Trip for Christmas), or a contribution to Defenders of Wildlife. There are still like three hours left in 2007! Go!

Today was the first day of my December vacation: I am taking the rest of the month off. Aside from the holidays, I have no plans.

Hooray!

During a warm spell in October, thousands of bugs swarmed my backyard, trying to get into my house. They were everywhere — coming through any hole they could find, flying about for a little while and then dying en masse in the house. Squishing them was counterproductive, as they stunk, so we just vacuumed them up.

I dutifuly called my termite company, they came out and informed me that they weren’t termites at all, but some form of Japanese Beetle. Dur, okay, I said, as long as they’re not eating my house, I don’t care that they don’t look like any Japanese Beetle I’ve ever seen. The hot spell passed, and the bugs eventually went away.

Well, the latest edition of my neighborhood newsletter contained a little gem: these bugs are Ischnodemus Falicus, who have moved in to the recently-marshified Lake Powell. They eat crops, and trying to eliminate them from anywhere but the source is doomed to failure. It took sending a sample of them to the Smithsonian to identify them (Virginia Tech didn’t know what they were), and not much is known about them.

Let me tell you, I can’t wait for spring. Ugh.

Ain’t broke? Don’t fix it.

Now, if only I could heed my own advice.

1. I was seriously considering upgrading the software that runs a few of my sites to Movable Type 4.x to allow the use of the the iPhone/MT interface plugin. Yes, you read that right: I’m considering installing an entire CMS to get an interface for my phone. This plugin makes posting from the iPhone very, very easy. And a clean install of MT 4.x is actually quite easy as such things go.

   But upgrading from an old version, with an extremely custom template and unsupported database? Very, very difficult.

   So difficult, in fact, that I gave up trying to upgrade the existing installation and instead evaluated how much effort it would be recode several sites on the clean install.

   And the answer? Way more effort than it’s worth.

2. I’m of a similar feeling of my second recent upgrade, of that to Apple’s Leopard on my G4 Powerbook, Hithlum.

   My first upgrade attempt resulted in an unbearably slow system. This was not the desired outcome.

   So, after several hours debugging processes, killing off all sorts of little performance-stealing problems, I opted for a clean Tiger (10.4) install and trusted my backups. Tiger was great in all the areas I remember, and weak in all the other areas I remembered (cough cough Spotlight cough).

   After a few days of that, I thought that since there were enough other people having success with a clean install, that I would give it a try with a clean upgrade back to Leopard. In other words, I lost my marbles.

   You know what? I have not been entirely happy with Hithlum since I started meddling. And really, there’s no turning back.

   Leopard may be faster than Tiger, but it doesn’t feel faster. The 10.5.1 update helped stabilize some of the applications, and I’m sure that on a newer machine that I would be happy as a clam with Leopard. But instead I ask, was this really worth the time, effort, and money I spent?

   I suspect that the answer is no.

So: Future Brett! Listen up! I will make this simple for you. NEVER UPGRADE! Okay? Never.

(I don’t know why I bother. Future Brett never listens.)

Paper spam sucks. It’s a waste of time and resources (both yours and the planet’s.)

Do something about it.

• Catalog Choice is a non-profit who gets you off of catalog lists. Free, and they do it well.

• OptOutPrescreen.com gets you off of firm offers for credit and insurance for 5 years if you do it online, permanently if you mail in the form they make up for you.

• Register for the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service to get out of most everything else.

Okay? Go to it.

Busy again this year; 91 kids, one more than last year.

Trip was more interested in answering the door than collecting candy.
He’s a funny kid.

My car YAH is on the shop again. This is a fairly normal state of affairs for my VW Jetta; on my way for routine maintenance she’ll throw a CEL and decide to spend a few days at the ‘spa’.

In this case, she was going in for her 90k mile service and a headlight upgrade. Apparently a breather hose failed, causing a variable-speed fan to stay on max until it burned out, and several other parts of her engine need fixing. I am admittedly hazy on the details.

I just know that the repair bill will have four digits left of the decimal.

With that in mind, I am somewhat less excited about the headlight upgrade that I decided to treat myself and my car to. See, the Mark IV Jettas have headlights that scratch and cloud over, rendering them less bright than one might like. I watch the new cars pass me on I64 and wonder if that many people really drive with their brights on.

There is also this unshakeable guilt that we might have seen that deer coming last year with brighter lights in a wider dispersal pattern.

So when the headlight polishing had worn off, instead of dropping in the same OEM lamps for the GL/GLS model, I opted for the very cool GLX/GLI style, with integrated fog lights for better peripheral vision.

Yes. I pimped my ride, and all I did was add fogs. No smoked glass, no Angel Eye reflectors, no HID/Xenon upgrade kit.

I think I’d rather have an engine that runs instead of 19” wheels, anyway.

Jackson Bohlender asked me for an interview earlier this week about my thoughts on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and my computing background.

(I admit, it was a little startling to realize that I got my first computer 25 years ago.)

The interview is now up at his site.

This may be heresy, but I have to ask it. Why are we (Rice University) still in Division I-A Football?

• It loses millions of dollars for the athletic department, turning a department that would otherwise be operating in the black into the red.

• We lose to I-AA teams. (Unlike Michigan, we weren’t heavily favored to win.)

• Yes, we went to a bowl last year, but that’s something that 53% of all college teams manage to do. And for Rice, it’s a rarity.

Does this sound like a good use of time, effort, and money to anyone else? I sure doesn’t to me. I’d love to see us ditch I-A football and concentrate on those things that we do well.

Like, you know, Baseball.

Trip was playing with his dvdvdvdeees tonight when he saw that Merrystar was on her computer. He walked over, climbed up on the couch, and looked over her shoulder.

Her: “That’s Noah, and that’s his mommy.”

Him: “Dats Noah, and dats his mommy.”

Her: “Would you like to see pictures of Trip?”

Him: Makes agreeing noises. Merrystar calls up his site.

Him: “Backhoeses!”

And then he reached out and tried to swipe the page on Merrystar’s Toughbook, just like it was an iPhone.

Me: “You’re going the wrong way.”

Her: “You hush.”

Him: “Boats! T-t on the boat!” more swiping motions, more of the page not going the right way.

I find it both wonderful and a little scary that my son knows that much about using my iPhone already.

Epilogue

After Trip had gone to sleep, we had the following exchange:

Me: “Finally, I found something your computer can’t do.”

Her: Swipes at my laptop screen. “Doesn’t look like yours can, either.”

Have I ever come out ahead in these?

Don’t answer that.

Trip was in his playroom today when suddenly he got up and walked out.

“Trip, where are you going?” his mother asked.

“To get dada’s phone,” came the answer from our bedroom. A few moments later, he returned with my phone in hand.

“Who are you going to call?” I asked. (Keep in mind that he called Manila before his first birthday.)

“TT taking pictures,” he said, swiping at the phone to unlock it.

He had some problems aiming it, and ended up taking a lot of pictures of his feet, but he knew what he was doing with it.

I remain constantly amazed by this little person in our midst.

"There are no items to show in this view."

Sweeeeeet. It’s quittin’ time.

I hadn’t realized it, but comparing this —

to this —

Shows what part of my problem with my backyard is: it’s featureless. Just a big plain of plants to be maintained at a 2-3 inch cut, with 35 feet of conservation area in the back. There’s nothing to focus on, nothing of interest. Just… green. Lots of green.

This would be desirable if I were playing football on a regular basis back there… but I’m not. (Even then, then I’d have to exterminate all the voles and regrade the soil. They’ve made it bumpy back there.)

Paths, and gardens, and slopes, and benches, would go a long way. We’ve already planted trees. More will follow. But maybe the problem isn’t just that I need a robot to do my lawn mowing; perhaps the backyard just needs to be more interesting.

‘Simple’ should never equal ‘boring.’

Eight hours wasted on this?

Looking through the The Items We Carry pool on Flickr, I see an awful lot of Apple/VW crossover things.

Yeah, I threw my pockets into the pool, too:

(Via.)

Trip has recently learned how to ride on my shoulders. He’s not convinced that it’s the best way to get around, but it’s all right in moderation.

(Now that my father-in-law has an iPhone, hopefully pictures of me will become a little less rare. It’s difficult to remove one’s good camera when said camera is strapped in underneath a toddler.)

And that’s good enough for us.

It’s funny what putting the “web in your pocket” (dirty!) makes you reconsider.

For example, Twitter. Before iPhone (BiP), it was undeniably cool to be able to text status updates to my website. Where am I? What am I doing? Just check my home page! Oh look, I’m downtown, taking pictures. Or mowing the lawn. Or driving to DC. Or driving from DC.

Wicked cool, I tell you. And for many users of Twitter, it really was, because the service would spit those updates right back out into a variety of places - SMS, IM, web, even email. But for folks like me, with normal, sane friends who do not need to know my every move, that’s not very useful.

I found that I very much enjoyed the minimalism of Twitter. 140 characters encourages you to post without having to think too much about it.

But there were a lot of things about it that I didn’t like, especially when they changed their badges so that you couldn’t publish private tweets somewhere else. (This was the infamous login problem on my homepage.) Why put it all somewhere else for the world to pick over with their APIs and fancy-schmancy web services … all because you like texting in the entries?

I’ve been hitting the mobile Twitter site on my iPhone this week, when finally it hit me. Why do I need this if 1) no one I know in real life uses it, and 2) I already have a blog? I can send out tweets blips all I want now that I have an actual web interface at my disposal!

(I dunno. Sometimes these things take a while for me to put together. )

Anyhow, I whipped up a template in Movable Type this afternoon to put these little blips into practice, using some of the twitter badge javascript to make things look the same. They’ll be where the tweets were (on the home page) but blips will show up in the logs, too. I’ve hidden them on the home page to keep things simple, but will have to figure out how to remove them from the individual archives later.

Right. As you were.

The iPhone may be my first phone in years I don’t hate. And it might be the first one you don’t hate, too.

I don’t really talk a lot about my drive, because, you know, it’s boring.

But tonight was a doozy! Thunderstorms followed us the entire way home.

No, really. When I left at 6 I drove right into one. Stopped for dinner, back on the road at 7, get down past Quantico, blammo, right into a major storm.

7:45 pm, we’re still in the red:

It followed us the entire way down I-95.

A brief reprieve right outside of Richmond around 8:30, then right back into the red at 9:00:

Exciting stuff, I tell you! My headlights and windshield haven’t been this clean in months!

(P.S. The best part? It still hasn’t rained here. Just lots and lots of lightning.)

From Banjocat:

Photos, too.

When Merrystar and I lived in Alexandria, we devoted most of the bottom floor of our townhouse to our library. We had more than 150 linear feet of shelving (mostly Billy from Ikea) but we never, ever had enough.

The bookroom started out as a disaster, which turned into a bookroom, which turned into a library. We enjoyed it as such for the month that the house was on the market and the few weeks that it took to close on the house. That was really it.

Then, there was a moving related purge, and our books were packed into 32 boxes and moved into our new garage. And there they sat.

Bit by bit, Merrystar and I have worked through half of those boxes, but there’s been a dozen or so sitting in the garage for the last five or six months. Sitting. Taunting me. Waiting for something to prompt me to move them.

Like, er, mouse poop. All over the recently-cleaned garage.

So after much cleaning with masks, the remaining dozen boxes were unpacked last night. And the inevitable bibliophilaic crisis ensued. As both Merrystar and I rested, we asked the exact same question:

Why do we need all these books?

There are dozens of books that I want to keep. But there are hundreds that I honestly can’t answer why I have kept them, other than… what, exactly? Sentimentality? Utility? To impress others? (And who would that be, specifically?)

I don’t know if this is a universal crisis that all book collectors go through. Maybe it is, and only the serious ones get through it.

As for us?

I took a half-trunk load of books to the local bookstore today. (Store credit for those they can use, the rest to charity.)

And we’re just getting started.

I wish I had talked more tonight.

I’ve updated my contact page with a few new services, including twitter, jaiku, and a new Google Talk address.

At some point, the madness will end, right?

It’s been a long couple of weeks, with a lot of changes around these parts.

• I have a new phone, the Samsung SYNC SGH-A707, which is… well, it’s okay. I don’t hate it, which is saying something. It has odd limits on things that the RAZR didn’t (like which files can be used as ringtones), but the 3G is nice enough. The outer display broke in DFW during my mad dash through DFW, which would suck were I not planning on getting an iPhone sometime next month. (Oh, my precioussssss…)

• I took a new job within my current company. It’s good, but it keeps me very busy, and that’s all I’ll say about that here.

• I’m getting burned out on the whole photo sharing site thing. I like the free hosting, but not conditions around it. So less activity there than before, and not likely to be a lot in the public sections.

• Still, I take pictures when I can.

If anything, the next few weeks promise to be even crazier. And I suspect that’s a good thing.

There are times that I honestly do see the utility of Twitter. Having a simple interface to send updates about status from a phone is infiinitely easier than trying to post to Movable Type via Blackberry or cell phone. The MT mobile interface sucks. What am I talking about? There is no mobile interface. If you don’t have javascript installed on the phone, posting no worky.

But that’s neither here nor there, is it?

Partial power is restored to the terminal, so I’m on the laptop again. Broke down and paid my fee to the wifi extortionists to get online. Foolishness. Free wifi may not be a god-given right, but it is certainly something that makes me think fondly of a facility. It’s like the rocking chairs in Charlotte: something that makes your stay nicer. Even if you take it for granted and don’t remember it, you won’t be irritated by it.

Now we’re delayed until 9:45. Shouldn’t have checked that bag; otherwise I’d be home by now. I only checked it because of the toiletries.

Can I pull it off the plane?

No. Plane’s not at the gate. Plane’s not at the TERMINAL? What?

I probably shouldn’t tell the Army squad who were on the flight that their weapons lockers were off somewhere else, should I?

How long of a drive is it, anyway?

Huh. 3 hours, 45 minutes.

How long to home?

3 hours, 30 minutes. I bet I can shorten that by taking the Scotland Ferry.

Have to go pick up my car later, though. That’s another 2 hours.

Damnit.

Shouldn’t have checked that bag. If I’d left at 6:00 when I woke up from my nap, I’d be home by now.

What are we up to, 10:00 am now? I’m afraid to ask.

Power’s back on in the terminal. That’s something, I guess.

And just to think: I get to drive another hour once I land to get home.

Glad I took a vacation day today. Yeppers.

Totally exhausted now. Still waiting for the funny part.

Tuesday morning I watched the sun rise over the Atlantic as a submarine steamed into the harbor of Newport News, flanked by escort boats. I stopped in Dallas, had breakfast with my parents, and went to work in Los Angeles.

Yesterday I left LA at lunchtime, got grounded by thunderstorms in Dallas, got close to Norfolk at 2:30 AM, found Norfolk closed, diverted to Raleigh-Durham, landed at 3:30, slept two hours on the floor, and now am watching the crews try to restore power to the part of the terminal where our plane sits. (My bag is checked, or renting a car to Norfolk would be done.). I don’t think we’re going to make our 8:30 departure.

Now we get to the funny part.

On the way out, I sent seven emails and read one book and one proposal.

Since leaving Burbank airport, I’ve sent 45 emails, written one proposal, made 8 calls (not including the ones to Merrystar), and scheduled 5 meetings. And now, written one blog post. I also learned how to check the weather radar on both my phone and blackberry.

Oh, wait. There was supposed to be a funny part. Nevermind.

No shots of Williamsburg this weekend. Merrystar and I instead spent Saturday up in Maryland at a wedding:

I’m normally quite shy about shooting people in public. I take plenty of pictures of my family, but not so many of strangers. That’s unfortunate, as those shots usually turn out quite well.

I confess: it was nice to be at an event where people expect you to be taking pictures of them.

I am also happy to report that everyone remembered their lines.

(Congratulations, you two!)

While, in general, I do not condone the new style of writing, I must say:

OMG, d00d. 1040 Schedule D is teh sux0r.

That is all.

As promised, I’ve been moving entries from The Blue Lamp Cafe and Flotsam and Jetsam into this weblog. The Cafe posts are complete, Flotsam will take a bit more time. This is mostly due to the nature of the posts, rather than the number (although that certainly plays a part in it, too.)

Honestly, it’s slow going. I’m hesitant to dive into the old posts; there are some that I feel I should bury, and others that I feel were written by someone totally alien, and then there are still others that make me think back to a particular day from years ago, and I wonder where the time has gone.

The oldest published entry in Flotsam and Jetsam is elaborate. from 1999. It was posted to a much different website than the one you’re reading now. I remember what I was trying to create when I first posted it, how frustrated I was when I couldn’t make that happen, and how I had to walk away from it all for a while and grow up before I could be comfortable online again. For several years it was the best post on the entire site. (It may still be, for all I know. That’s a scary thought.)

I’d done all the technical work for the import weeks ago, but it’s sat on my to-do list since then, daring me to attempt to edit my past. The temptation is there, and remains there, to just delete it all and present a blank slate to the world. I am not the same person who wrote those posts. I moved across the country, got married and became a father. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to just delete it all and start over from another point, say somewhere in 2005.

Reasonable, but dishonest, too. I was that person, and there was a lot of good mixed in with the bad. I guess this is what it’s like to come to terms with your past selves? Can’t change what’s happened, can’t unsay what’s been said, move on, there’s more to do. So mostly, I’m only editing the links, correcting the most egregious mistakes, and clicking Publish. It’s slow going, but not as slow as I feared.

Because, you know what? There’s a lot of cool stuff coming up ahead, and I need to get on with it.

I’d like to apologize for the automated links for 2007-02-28 post that will show up sometime later today. Tonight was a banner night for web surfing, as I tried to both catch up on my feeds and try out Camino’s speediness with some traditionally slow sites in Safari. Like, cough, Google Reader, which bogs down in Safari under the weight of the hundreds of posts I’m trying to process. For weeks I’ve wondered about the users who raved about its snappy response; the UI is well done — tap tap tap goes the spacebar with no clicky-clicky required — but after the first 20 articles I spend more time waiting for a response than actually reading.

(Most everyone reading this already knows that I can read really fast: really, really fast when the occasion calls for it. Scanning news is one of those things.)

Camino handled the load far better than Safari did, letting me page through posts quickly, if not as fast as I might like. There’s only so much one can do to cut through all the AJAXy overhead. I grow less fond of AJAX with each passing day. I may soon find myself using AJAX in the same way Merrystar uses Flash — avoid, disable, and enable only when absolutely required.

The only drawback with the Safari → Camino switch is an aesthetic one: small Helvetica type isn’t weighted as nicely in Gecko browsers as it is in Safari, particularly at the lighter weights and smaller sizes. (Sub-10pt italic seems particularly affected.) Also, the line height seems to be crowded in text blocks, so that words seem crowded in a paragraph. It’s very subtle, but I’m known to be picky about my fonts.

(The partial solution is a simple ⌘+ to increase the font size, which makes the web a nicer place to browse anyway. The line height is still awkward, but less distracting than before. It’s still not as good as Safari.)

I’m happy to say that Camino really is chugging along well, and I may keep Safari off the dock and in reserve for specialized tasks. But it’s probably too early to see if there’s a significant difference.

But, back to the apology. The downside of this web browsing is that I’ve been hitting my del.icio.us links pretty hard, and the next post is likely to be pretty big.

Hopefully, you’ll find something interesting in amidst it all.

Merrystar and I have this huge framed poster hanging in our living room that we know nothing about. She picked it up in the Netherlands sometime in the late nineties. We don’t know the artist, or the name of the print, but would dearly love to find other works by this person.

If you know anything about this picture, please drop me a note or leave a comment on the linked Flickr page. Thanks!

I got a call from my old friend Katie tonight at dinner. I haven’t spoken with Katie in maybe nine or ten years, but I was in the middle of having my son smear sweet potatoes and cheese on my sleeve so I took her number and called her back after we’d finished and cleaned up.

She was calling for a reason, of course. Gracie is dead, she said, and my heart skipped a beat. She was killed in a traffic accident: a car ran a red light and hit a cab with her and her coworkers. It was over a month ago.

• 1 dead, 3 hurt in SF hit and run
• Hit-run kills woman in cab and injures 3 — suspect held
• S.F. District Attorney’s Office Files Charges In Taxi Crash

I couldn’t say anything. Gracie, dead? What? That couldn’t be.

Gracie and I worked together at Aromas Coffee in Dallas ten years ago. We worked together Tuesdays and Thursdays and were a great team. We had flow.

But Gracie’s dead. There’s a hole in my life now.

Gracie had a list of things that she wanted to do by the time she was 30. Katie asked me if I remembered it, which I did. It was a gutsy list, one that made Gracie strecth and grow and live her life.

“She did it,” Katie told me. “Every single one.”

I didn’t doubt it for a second.

Gracie was 31 when she died. There were memorial services and a benefit at Bar Crudo (where she worked) to aid Carina Lampkin and Mike Selvera, Gracie’s fellow co-workers and passengers in the taxi.

I had lost touch — I hadn’t seen Gracie since I lived in Houston, and talked to her only occasionally since then — and Katie couldn’t find me until after the memorial services were all done and the holidays had begun. So she waited until after the holidays to call. I appreciate that.

I spent some time tonight looking over Gracie’s MySpace page, reading over the comments of all the people she touched. (Yes, I signed up for MySpace to do this. No jokes. Not tonight.)

I’m not surprised by any of it. It helps, a little.

Goodbye, Gracie. Rest in peace.

Watching Rice play Troy in the New Orleans Bowl.

Though it’s 34-10 (Troy in the lead), it hasn’t been embarassing. We’re losing, but we’re not embarassingly outclassed like so many games I attended in the ‘90s. It gives me hope for the future of the program.

Tonight, we took Trip to his very first fireworks show.

march of the heavenly horses. Hosted on Zooomr

The weather was pretty meh — drizzly and in the forties — but that didn’t dampen his excitement.

fireworks Hosted on Zooomr

In fact, even though the fireworks only lasted 20 minutes (if that), he couldn’t stop pointing up into the sky and telling us about what he’d seen.

cherry blossoms. Hosted on Zooomr

All in all? It was a good night.

light the sky on fire. Hosted on Zooomr

(Also? I need to get a tripod if I want to shoot fireworks so that they look like fireworks.)

I dunno. I turn around, and llamas are everywhere.

Pirate llamas:

Colonial llamas:

Llamas, llamas, llamas:

Life is like this sometimes.

So.

It’s Monday, which means, you know, Bad Karma Monday.

Went to work anyway.

Drove a lot. Worked a bit.

We saw one deer, in exactly the same place as last week. It was a big buck.

We did not hit it.

We came home.

Going to sleep soon.

That’s it.

Sometimes, happy stories aren’t very interesting.

But they’re happy nonetheless.

Took the family down to the Farmer’s Market this morning.

I took some pictures.

My mom pointed me toward the talented Leslie Riley’s blog today. Leslie taught a class (“Mixed Media Art”) in Houston that my mother attended and raved about.

My mom’s quilt (which she calls “in progress,” of course) is in the last row, far right. Her work never fails to impress me.

Thank you, Edouard Benedictus, for giving us safety glass.

parenting hacks: tell strong-willed toddlers what to do.

Ugh. Spam. I hates it.

So I’d cranked my SpamAssassin preferences down, lowering the threshold to a 3.0 points a while back. All was good. No false positives, some false negatives. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Today I discovered someone was trying to get in touch with me all week, and her emails just kept getting caught in the spam trap.

Some days I don’t know about this email thing.

Holy moly.

Ninety kids stopped by my house tonight. 90.

Tired now.

Up in Alexandria today to close on the house up there. Sold! All my anxieties were for naught.

Unfortunately, Trip is now sick with what we think is Fifth Disease, so the celebrations will be quiet tonight.

Back online. Cable modem humming along. Boxes getting unpacked. Updating online addresses now.

More updates in a few days. (I’m on vacation, after all.)

House packed yesterday, not by me. It’s strange to watch a home become a house. With boxes. Lots of boxes.

Slept there last night. Discovered that all my neighbors have locked down their wireless networks. Realized that this chapter is over.

Truck loaded today. Also, not by me. I am very glad for this, because, well, you know. We have a lot of books.

I took some time this afternoon to look around the very big, very empty townhouse that was once my home. Really. Big. Rooms. They take a lot of work to make right. (And a lot of stuff.)

It took us over three years to get everything to be really usable; we’d finally reclaimed the downstairs and the garage.

Tomorrow, the truck comes to the new house, and — with some work — we will have a home again.

(Hopefully, it won’t take us three years.)

p.s. Remember that cold that had everyone out last weekend that I’ve been valiantly fighting off for the good of the family?

Yeah. Ugh. Off to bed with me.

May as well make it official: we’re moving out of the DC area.

Short version: leaving Alexandria for Williamsburg, keeping same employers, moving to be closer to in-laws and out of DC, because, well, you know.

We’ve been working on a house. It’s turning out pretty well. My biggest looming problem is that I now have a lawn to mow.

Well, that, and the move. The move still has to happen.

Things have been worse.

More details to follow, stress levels permitting.

Congratulations, Alan and Juliet!

(They got married on Saturday.)

In case you were wondering, Merrystar and I both love Tim Gunn.

Just going to take a wee rest…

The two essential weapons in my anti-cricket defenses:

• 4D cell Maglite (to acquire the target)
• Justin Roper (to terminate the target)

If I haven’t mentioned it recently, bugs are the enemy.

No comment.

The good news from this weekend is that, in addition to our normal jaunt to Williamsburg, we had a very pleasant time visiting my aunt and uncle west of Wilderness Battlefield this weekend. Trip found rocks.

The bad news is that Trip got very sick Sunday night, ran a temperature all night, threw up, pooped all sorts of things that don’t bear mentioning, and cried a whole lot.

I stayed up with him, because, well, you know.

The good news is that he’s feeling better now. Not much better, but better.

The bad news is that it’s 1:06 and the tree frogs and crickets outside are very, very loud.

summers of youth. Hosted on Zooomr

On vacation this week. Before I unplug, I’ll leave you with some aurora pictures from earlier this week, courtesy of Doc Searls.

Ugh. First day of vacation, and Trip just broke my glasses. Sweet!

Ugh.

And to think, Texas was hotter than this.

The saga begins.

skyyyellowballoon | Originally uploaded by banjocat.

(First in a series.)

Ugh.

6 hours of sleep this afternoon and I’m still not feeling better.

Ugh.

Holy crap.

We got it.

My neighbor has taken to running on his treadmill at 6:05 every morning. This takes place in the room right next to Trip’s, so there’s this wonderful thump thump thump thump that usually brings him awake. (Loudly, I might add. Shared walls suck.)

To compensate, we’ve been putting the baby to bed at 7pm, which has had some success. Not a lot, but some. This teething, though, has got Trip all discombobulated. He was up and down all night.

This morning, the floor went thump thump thump thump. I got up. And the baby didn’t stir.

Hamana what?

6:47, no more thump thump thump.

7am came and went, still nothing.

7:12, he decided to start talking.

7:25, he decided to tell jokes to himself and laugh.

7:30, kicking his legs. Going abababababababa. Did I mention that he has 8 teeth now? With more on the way?

7:32. Can’t believe I’m liveblogging my son’s wakeup routine.

7:37. Inbox empty. Working on essay. Son still making happy noises. At what point do I go get him up? 8?

7:44. It’s really interesting to hear him try out different sounds. He’s got some words down pat (“Up!” “Out!”) but he really seems to be working on sentences. He has a passable “I love you,” and

7:45. Time to go.

Upon reading the post on fonts, Merrystar said:

“You mean Ctrl-X cuts? I never knew that.”

I rest my case.

Oh boy.

Post before the power goes!

Update, a few minutes later:

Power still on, but we’ve got two more to go:

After Robert Scoble’s mother passed away last month, he