 When I met Susanna many years ago, she was a writer. Her novel was nearly finished, and I imagined it would be out any day. Of course, I also hoped it would be an Oprah book club selection and she’d make millions and I’d never have to work again.
We fell in love, we got married, and lots of life has happened since then. When our little boy was on the way, she woke me up in the middle of the night and exclaimed that she was terrified that she’d never finish her book.
I responded, as only a Zen master (or sleep-deprived husband) could:
“Finish it, then.”
I committed any help I could provide to help her make sure it happened, and lo and behold, a few months later, she finished it.
Now the book is done (absent last minute editing and corrections), she has an agent, and her book is sold. We await its publication date this summer.
This past Christmas Eve, as we were packing up our station wagon to the hilt with presents, dog, luggage, and other accouterments, the UPS truck pulled up with an unexpected delivery… her galleys. This is the first time her book is in actual printed form; an actual, for real, book, before our eyes!
It’s really for real, and the cover looks beautiful – the publisher found a wonderful shot of a stilthouse to use.
Here is her website with more information about the book, and a mailing list where you can get signed up to hear more, when we know more.
 Some advice I recently gave to two friends who are about to have their first kids:
- The labor is the easy part; after that it gets hard.
- For the first few weeks, your wife’s only job is to keep the kid alive. Your only job is to keep her alive.
Feed her, keep the mounds of shit from piling too high, and be the gatekeeper. Be ready to say no – don’t let visitors come if either of them are napping.
In the first few months, people will keep telling you time flies so fast. This is the last thing you’ll want to hear, because every hour seems like a day, every day seems like a week, and every month seems like a year. Time drags for the first three months.
After that, time does start to fly. The first three months seems like a year. The next year seems like three months.
 This picture pretty much sums it up.
True, there is no way we could give up so many points and expect to win.
However, the Packers game back from a huge deficit to get back in the game and tie it up. A little luck from a missed FG by the Cards and it was suddenly our game to lose.
But with a bunch of bad calls (or no calls) in a row, including this blatant face mask to Rodgers as he fumbled the ball (and lost the game), the zebras screwed us.
A terrible end to what became a great season.
 Suz and I saw Avatar this past weekend, 3D IMAX.
I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help watching with a critical eye. I think most people have just been so wowed by the spectacle and technology that they’re calling this a great movie when it definitely has some plot holes and/or character flaws.
The 3D was quite awesome. It’s by far the best movie I’ve ever seen done in 3D. The glasses were somewhat annoying but tolerable.
What makes this special is that absolutely everything was shot in 3D… live action, CGI, all in 3D. It’s not a gimmick (or *just* a gimmick).
That said, it’s still not going to be the Next Big Thing in movies (as 3D has been hyped to be – in the 50s, before in my life, and now again with this movie). It’s beautiful, interesting, but it’s not really helping the storytelling. Given the expense, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to go through such an effort to do this again anytime soon… anyone that isn’t named Jim Cameron, at least.
I loved the Colonel. Great bad ass. Sigourney also fit her role well.
Spoilers Below
So my complaints with the plot:
- They never explain how the link is made between the human and the avatar. One presumes some sort of electromagnetism (since there’s no other option in our current universe). Yet when they went to the Magic Floating Mountains, the link still works? Of course this had to be done, else it would have been a trivial matter to find the humans after they went rogue; if the avatar and human can link, then that human is emitting something that would be easy for the other humans to find. The whole thing was a little bit of hand-waving that I’m prepared to accept, though.
- Michelle Rodriquez’s character is essentially a marine pilot. She trained with the people she flies with and fights with. She depends on her comrades with her life, and they depend on her. War historians have shown time and time again that the reason people give when they fight in horrible battlefield conditions is “for the man next to me”. Not for country, not for honor… but for the men they fight with. That man is your brother, and you are his. You will give you life to save his, and vice versa.
She may have thought what was going on was bullshit, and maybe she wouldn’t pull the trigger on innocent natives. Maybe even she’d bust out the Good Guys to go help the Space Elves. However, no way do I see her actually opening fire and killing her own people. It could happen, but Cameron didn’t give us a reason to believe it.
- How is it that in the first half of the movie, all the arrows bounced off the ships, but then started to penetrate in the final battle scene. Did they get armor piercing arrows?
- Why in the fuck would the armor battle suit (a la Aliens) have a huge armor battle suit knife in its holster? If a knife was ever actually necessary, the gun ALREADY HAD ONE.
- So the Space Elves have a ceremony where the spirit of a human can be transformed into the body of a human engineered half-breed creature by Gaia (or whatever the Pandora mother spirit was called)? This has come up before?
- Clearly the Space Elves were patterned off the modern myth of the Native American in harmony with mother nature. This is a myth, as it turns out that Native Americans were pretty brutal to the local ecology… they just moved on when an area was decimated, and they simply didn’t have the numbers to do any serious damage to such a vast area. I’m just sayin’.
- The Space Elves were pretty fucking stupid. Hey, huge war machines are rolling into your house. You’re going to wait until it’s ON FIRE and FALLING before you get the fuck out? Makes you wonder if Darwin’s rules don’t apply on Pandora.
Again, it was a fun movie, it was interesting. It was done extremely well. It was pretty. It’s just not a *good* movie; it’s not going to stand the test of time.
 I read about this stuff a while back, but finally picked up some (extract of it, actually). Weird, wild, fascinating shit. Miracle fruit.
Basically, you chew it up so it covers your tongue for a while, then for the next half hour to and hour or so, everything that was previously sour is now sweet!
Suz and I cut up a bunch of different fruit to try in this state. Of course, limes and lemons are the stars since their flavor is such a contrast from their initial state. Basically, they taste like super-sweet candy. Really!
Here’s a rundown of the things we tried and our impressions:
Lime – Like candy.
Lemon - Super sweet, but you can still feel the twinge of the acid sour on your tongue (with only the sweet flavor).
Grapefruit - Not much different. The main flavor component is bitterness, not sour, which was unchanged by the miracle fruit.
Kiwi - I thought much better tasting due to the sweetness, but it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying.
Orange - Very sweet, but a strange flavor difference I couldn’t put my finger on.
Tomato - I thought they tasted exactly the same, but Susanna said they were like super-sweet tomatoes. It may be, however, just good tomatoes (they were freshly picked, ripe from our garden).
Granny Smith Apple – Much sweeter, although the flavor change was not as extreme as I expected. Just tasted like a firm, sweet, apple.
Wine - Super sugary (and pretty much awful).
Red Wine Vinegar – Super sweet, like sugar water.
Balsamic Vinegar – Ditto, just a different flavor of sugar water.
Cherry – Not much different, just no sour note to it.
Cantaloupe – Basically the same, perhaps mildly sweeter.
Altoids - Exactly the same.
I regret not getting pineapple for our first session; it’s supposed to be excellent and definitely something I want to try next time.
We were left slightly queasy after the experience. I’m not sure if it was a side effect of the miracle fruit itself, or a side effect of so much sour fruit in our stomachs (how often do you EAT a bunch of lime slices?).
Definitely a fun experience. So far none of the people we’ve told about this have wanted to try it, though!
A slew of pictures from the last couple of months of the spawn, who decided that Father’s Day would be a good day to start to crawl.
 I sit now in next to Gate 26 in the Sky Harbor airport. It is the end of a long couple of weeks.
It is also the end of an era for me.
For fourteeen years I have worked for the same company, in the same IT department.
I and the people I have worked with have built and maintained the Madison data center for this past decade and a half. Things have changed so, so much in that time. By now of course, people around the globe, across the US, Europe, and Asia, depend on those applications and servers to get their jobs done.
Now the end has come. Over the past two weeks we have planned and toiled towards delivering the entirety of the Madison data center to a new home. We did it with a scant day and half of downtime, as those servers, coccooned in expanding foam packaging, flew across the country in a chartered jet.
We kicked ass… just as we kicked ass in everything. As with all the tasks given to us, we treated it as just another job to do.
But it wasn’t, really, just another job to do. It was a job with a goal to make the Madison office obsolete. Now, in June, we can shut the doors and turn off the lights, and the services that we built will still keep humming along.
The only people that will care that Madison is dark is those of us who lived there. I have given my entire professional life to that place, and now that is done.
Last week, I officially rejected relocation to the Arizona office. There are many good reasons for this, professionally and personally.
The end result, though, is the servers and applications that I have built and cared for for so long will soon be someone else’s responsibility. It is both a relief and a sadness.
Since the announcement about the Madison close, I’ve been so busy trying to make this thing happen that I’ve not had time to take proper stock of what it means to me. Of course I’m sad. I’m angry at the people and reasons this decision was made. I’m relieved I’m not going to get a 3am call that a server is down. I’m frightened about looking for a job in this economy. I’m excited at the prospects of finding something new.
At any rate, it is the end of a long journey. I will miss the people I have worked with. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people I have known through the years, and although it really stinks we’re in this situation, I think most of us will be okay. I certainly hope so.
So, if you know of a good IT position in the Madison area, please let me know. My resume is up at MadisonComputerGeek.com. It may sound arrogant, but I’m really good. I don’t know it all, but I know a lot about a really wide range of technologies (one of the advantages of being the Head Nerd for so long). I’d be lucky to find a place where I get to do half of the things I’ve gotten to do with Heurikon/Artesyn/Emerson over the years.
Good-bye Emerson, and good-bye Phoenix. Take good care of my babies.
My employer is closing the Madison office. I was offered relocation to the Tempe, AZ, head office. A couple of weekends ago, Susanna, Augie, and I trekked down to check out the place.
We went and saw the Chihuly exhibit at the Phoenix Botanical Garden; very cool:
 
Augie is getting more human every day. He thinks lots and lots of things are extremely funny.
He is also now eating some real food! Oatmeal turns out to not be his new favorite thing. Apples, however, he seems to love.
 
Here’s the full gallery link: 
Augie Month Four pictures are up:
Another batch of Augie pics are up… including this one by Suz, which IMHO is the best picture taken of him yet.
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