For those who wanted to know what my true time was, it ended up being an hour and a half from leaving work to arriving home with all my shopping done. It would have been an hour, but I ran into some friends at Media Play and we spent a half an hour talking about this funny thing which happened on Monday. Since I brought it up, I might as well retell it...
Well, on Monday we had the family Christmas party and just as my brother-in-law was getting ready to leave, his boss walked in and wanted to talk to him about a big project he'd been working on. After a few minutes it became apparent that he was going to need my sister to pick him up from work if he was going to have any chance of making the party on time. Since his boss was there he couldn't use the phone, but he could IM someone. So he decided to IM his neighbor whose last name begins with "Will" but instead he ended up IM'ing another Will, someone whom he hadn't talked to in probably a year, and who was more of a friend of a friend. Will and another friend of mine, Josh, was who I ran into at Media Play.
So in any case, my brother-in-law e-mails Will thinking it's his neighbor and asks him if he can have his wife call my sister and tell her to sign on to IM. Will was understandably puzzled that my brother-in-law would ask for his wife to do something seeing as how he had probably never met Will's wife, but since Will works from home he explained that well... his wife couldn't do it, but he could. Will then proceeded to ask for my sister's name, to which my brother-in-law (still thinking he was talking to the neighbor) said in an accusing manner, "I know your wife's name, how come you don't know mine!!" Will is bad with names so he let that comment slide and proceeded to call my sister.
"This is kind of akward," he began, "I don't think you know me, but John just asked me to call you and ask you to sign on to IM." So my sister did, at which point my brother-in-law told her to come pick him up. When she arrived she asked him, "Why did you have Will
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, gender neutral, low stress, non addictive, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious / secular persuasions and or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.
Ross
I'm finally ready to start Christmas shopping. Before I can go shopping, I have to know what I'm going to buy and exactly where I'm going to buy it. At that point it simply becomes a matter of walking into the store, grabbing it, paying for it and walking back out. The ideal shopping trip takes less than 10 minutes. Actually the term "trip" may be inaccurate: the ideal stop takes 10 minutes. I'm going to make multiple stops, so the whole thing, with driving, might take me as much as 45 minutes. Anything less than an hour is probably okay; over that and I'll feel like a failure.
I'm going in
Ross
I spoke too soon about the Royal Tenenbaums being the best gift (particularly in light of my wife's comments). Firstly, I'm sure that the presents my wife gets for me will far surpass in majesty and utility anything so mundane as a DVD, and secondly, a friend of mine from work got me a Moleskine Notebook, which as you can see if you follow the link, is so outrageously neat as to inch ahead of the DVD. So far it's shaping up to be a pretty good Christmas. Now if I could just figure out how to get out of the family reunion so that I could go skiing....
Enervated with excitement
Ross
Last night was my family's Christmas party. In years past all the gifts everyone got from everyone else in the family were all opened, and it took forever, plus the kids got restless because any one kids was only on deck about 2% of the time. So this year my parents hired a Santa Claus and he came and only gave out the gifts the grandkids were getting, so it went much quicker and the children were far more engaged with the whole deal. Of course that meant I didn't get to open my gifts from my parents -- instead, we were given a bag and we took them home. I lasted about an hour before I decided that I needed to open all of my gifts. My parents did very well this year; they got me:
The album Final Straw by Snow Patrol which I've almost bought at least a half a dozen times, so it's nice that I didn't. I haven't listened to it yet, but I have very high hopes.
The book Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages by Harold Bloom. Which was a delightful surprise, seeing as how I'd just barely added it to my wishlist.
And finally, the two disk Criterion Collection edition of The Royal Tenenbaums which may be the best gift I get all year. It was nearly criminal that I didn't already own it, but now I can rest easy knowing that the single largest hole in my movie library has finally been filled.
In any case, that's all for today.
Already on vacation
Ross
I'm off today, so generally I wouldn't blog, but I was told by some of my family members that sometimes they would like to leave comments and they can't because there's no blog entry to attach them to, so from now on I'm back to blogging every day so that my critics will always have a forum. Though I can't promise they'll be very long.
Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future
Ross
Today is the IT Christmas party here at work. There's a potluck lunch and a gift exchange. In the past the gift exchange was one of those things where you could either take a new present off the table or steal one from someone else (a gift could be stolen at most twice), but I guess the executives decided that was taking too long, so today it's just going to be a random assignment. Generally I get stuck with something pretty lame. I imagine this year will be no exception, but one can always hope.
Last night was the kids' Christmas piano recital. It was just the two older kids, and they both did really well. I'm very hopeful that they will continue with piano lessons and get really good. Certainly I regret not spending more time on my lessons and eventually giving up. One of my goals is to eventually take piano lessons again, but I fear I'm too old to really get to where I'd like to be, and I can't at the moment foresee when I might have the time for it. If nothing else, I'm hoping that I can keep my kids at it by highlighting my own negative example; of course, it could just as easily backfire and give them the license they need to quit.
I'm taking Monday off -- I get to actually use comp-time rather than PTO. I convinced my boss that all the traveling I had to do on Sunday and Saturday for my trip to Boston should be equal to a day off. Actually it's probably more than that, but you don't want to press your luck. Maybe I'll just leave early today.
Three-day weekend!!
Ross
Part of the "lost entry" from Friday was a discussion of the book The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. It's a book I've been meaning to read ever since it was recommended to me 15 years ago. Unfortunately at the time I was on my mission, so it wasn't an idle time, and by the time I got back I had already waiting two years -- what was a few more months, which of course nearly turned into a few more decades. Still I'm actually glad I waited. I think I'm better able to appreciate the book now than I would have been had I read it all those years ago. The thesis is similar to that of The Incredibles, though with fewer giant killer robots and a lot more references to Plato's Republic. A sample passage:
I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.
The idea put forth there that we have abandoned centuries of culture and learning based on some half-formed idealized notion of how the world should work permeates the first part of the book, and dovetails nicely with one of my chief criticisms of the Left. Despite their avowed rejection of any sort of divine power in favor of the hard reality of science, (which nowhere says that there is some kind of mandated equality between all human beings and in fact, gives us multiple examples of gigantic gender differentiation) they then base all of their ideology on just such a divine mandate.
In any case it's a very dense book, and I just started doing some consulting work on top of everything else I have going on, so it may be awhile before I finish the book, but I'll keep you posted.
Is it time to start worrying about Christmas yet?
Ross
Sorry it's been awhile. I actually had a great blog all but done on Friday, and then my browser crashed. Of course you'll just have to take my word that it was great. The weekend ended up being pretty busy -- I ran the family campaign on Friday evening, and then I ran the "friends" campaign on Saturday, add in cleaning, preperation, and ferrying kids around and that was basically it for the weekend. Of course that still leaves Sunday, but we had a complete server room downtime, so I had to go into work, so that wasn't much better.
My boss's plan was to have me there in the beginning, and to let me go home early and have someone else take care of brining my servers back online, so that someone would be fresh today. I told them to call me if they ran into any problems and so sure enough, timed so as to catch me right in my deepest sleep, they did. Rather than calling my home line (which I would have recognized as a phone) they called my cell, which my sleep-addled brain interpreted as the alarm clock, so I stumbled out of bed and tried to turn the alarm off, which you can do by hitting the power button. But it wasn't the alarm, so I ended up turning on the radio. That woke me up enough to realize it was my cell phone, but not enough that I could answer it. See, I have a leather cover on the phone which has to be opened first, but that was more steps than I could figure out. Also somewhere along the line I dislodged a box which I tripped over two or three times as I staggered back and forth between the dresser (where my cell phone was) and the clock radio.
Of course then I had a hard time falling back asleep, so the whole idea of being fresh today kind of got left by the wayside, and as evidenced by the phone call, they didn't exactly succeed with flying colors at handling things without me. I told them that next time I was just going to stay the whole time. I did get pizza out of the deal, so it wasn't a complete bust, but overall, the weekend was not as restful as I would have hoped.
Grumpy when awakened
Ross
It's late, but I suppose I need to blog in any event, since I missed all last week while I was in Boston. Of course, as usual there's a corollary to Murphy's law which covers this situation, something like anything which can wait until you're out of town to break will... On Wednesday the ISP I'm using for DireKobold.com expired the IP address I was using, so I had to work out some way of changing the IP while I was in Boston. I'm still suffering the repercussions of that -- mostly it's affected e-mail; I'm getting some stuff, but I think there's more stuff I'm not getting. I'm sure there are also people who can't get to the website. I understand that sometimes it takes a while for new DNS information to propogate, so I'll give it till tomorrow and see if it's any better.
A couple of other things happened. For example, the van wouldn't start on Friday, but nothing quite as frustrating as the DNS change, or rather the continuing problems it's created. The training itself was just as you might imagine, part boring, part annoying, but mostly long. Friday afternoon I did get a chance to finally do some tourist-y stuff. Basically I walked the Freedom Trail, though I didn't spend an equal amount of time on every attraction. I mostly spent my time on the USS Constitution and in the two graveyards. I really liked the inscription that Benjamin Franklin put on the graves of his parents:
JOSIAH FRANKLIN,
and
ABIAH his Wife,
lie here interred.
They lived lovingly together in wedlock
fifty-five years.
Without an estate, or any gainful employment,
By constant labor and industry,
with God's blessing,
They maintained a large family
comfortably,
and brought up thirteen children
and seven grandchildren
reputably.
From this instance, reader,
Be encouraged to diligence in thy calling,
And distrust not Providence.
He was a pious and prudent man;
She, a discreet and virtuous woman.
Their youngest son,
In filial regard to their memory,
Places this stone.
J.F. born 1655, died 1744, AEtat 89.
A.F. born 1667, died 1752, ----- 95.
In any case I think that's enough for tonight, hopefully you'll be able to get to it.
I'm sorry, he's French, there's really nothing we can do about it.
Ross