Following Edge

This week I had to visit the Multnomah County library in Portland to get this copy from the August 19, 1998 issue of Willamette Week. I was happy to find it 120 miles from home, in the middle of microfiche roll in the midst of a room full of microfiche rolls. This was one case where the library beat out the power of the Internet to find something I really wanted.

Have you guessed that this ad was what brought me together with Anne Marie? This ad was the pinnacle of my research on personal ads over the Summer of 1998. There is such a difference between what you ask for in a personal ad and what you get in responses, that you have to really make a study of comparing the two if you want to be successful. After three ads and pages of notes from talking to and meeting dozens of people, I ran the ad you see here as my "coup de gras" with the expectation of finding just the person I needed.

Of course, it worked! But, not before it was selected as "Ad of the Week" and my life briefly became a socially rigorous process of talking with and meeting a bunch of people. (I know I got Anne Marie's name and her age wrong in my notes, but she didn't spell her name and only said that she was concerned that she might be too old since I didn't specify an age range, so I guessed.)

Now you may be wondering why, having kept all of this detailed information about these ads for this long, I didn't hold on to the original copy of the ad. Unfortunately, when we stopped seeing each other two months later, I threw it away (and used the $50 "Ad of the Week" prize to place another ad... which didn't work out well since I was so gloomy about Anne Marie). Obviously, it's a good thing that everything subsequently worked itself out.

It has been nice to revisit all of this following our 5-year wedding anniversary this month. I always say that even though it's only been a few years, it seems like an eternity. But, of course, I mean that in the best way.

It's becoming a bird world around here. Last month, Anne Marie camped out on EggBid and bought both a pair of Silkies (chickens mentioned here before) and the pair of Lady Amhearst Pheasants pictured here.

These are the first pairs of birds we've had (and the first rooster -- and the rooster has not been crowing too early or too loud, thanks for asking), so we've had our incubator in the ready waiting to make fertile eggs into chicks. The Silkies have been the first to give us eggs, so we now have two tiny eggs in our large incubator. There's sure to be pictures when they hatch in 21 days.

Even having lost 2 chickens this winter, there will easily be a dozen birds on the farm soon. Since Anne Marie is a Cancer with a very strong maternal instinct, I figure it's better to handle a dozen birds than a dozen children.

However, last month when Anne Marie was on her EggBid binge, she jokingly entered the room saying "Honey, I ordered some Emu eggs," to get a rise out of me. We laughed about it then, but, a month later, she told me she has 2 Emu eggs and 6 Partridge Cochin chicken eggs on the way and she isn't kidding!

(The picture is just a distraction for you, I have nothing cute to say that could justify its cuteness.)

A recent Wired article titled "The Web Not the Death of Language" confirms my suspicion that instant messaging, blogging, and email probably are not eroding writing and language skills as we have heard from other media reports.

Especially considering Kinsey's project (at tvindy.com) to publish a book of some of the best of blog writing from the past year, there seems to be plenty of evidence that there may be even more accessible and relevant content that is well written. I'm very excited to see the book when Kinsey is unburied from his schoolwork.

In fact, Anne Marie is overwhelmed with her schoolwork and, earlier today, I felt compelled to remind another local blogger not to get too run down my her schoolwork.

Emu eggs, Partridge Cochin eggs, princess bicycle, amazing progress in Javascript with XMLHttpRequest, why I love laundry, and many more random thoughts are in my head, but I think they'll percolate to full articles, so stream of consciousness ends here.

The butter dish saga: it all began when I broke our butter dish. How I did it doesn't really matter. It'll suffice to say that it involved a bottle of Southern Comfort and, eventually, a mess of broken glass. I didn't consider this to be a catastrophic event because one can just go buy another butter dish that will be just as good... or so you would think.

The only butter dish at our usual store was a very plain clear glass version as pictured to the right (the text is a comment, not part of the design, if you haven't figured this out). This seemed to meet the basic requirements: it has a place to put butter and (since we have a cat) it has a cover.

Aside to cat owners: If you have a cat and you have a butter dish without a lid, you need to realize that your cat it eating the butter occasionally. Have you ever thought, "Hmm, we sure went through that stick of butter quickly". Our experience with many cats confirms that almost all cats eat butter. When you consider that their paw or their tongue are involved and consider where else these parts go, you may want to think about getting a cover for your butter dish. Maybe your cat doesn't eat butter, but, in our experience, there are only two ways to keep your cat out of the butter: keep them fat enough that they can't jump onto the counter or get a cover.

However, this butter dish is EVIL! It is barely big enough to hold a cube of butter, has no handle, and is clear. So... unless you have perfect manual dexterity and nerves of steel, you're going to get butter on the cover when you put it on. Then, not only is it an ugly mess, the butter then makes it even harder to pick up the cover without it slipping into the butter. Ayee!

Here's where we get to the big problem... All of our local stores (Fred Meyer, Target, Wal-Mart and even Bed Bath and Beyond) all have exactly this one butter dish for sale. I was especially surprised by BB&B since they seem to have 10,000 kitchen gadgets in 100 styles. I asked for help finding butter dishes and was told... "this is the only one we have", to which I responded "EVIL"! Even our nearest thrift stores (Goodwill and St. Vincent be Paul) have no butter dishes.

Where are they? Obviously the company that makes this model of butter dish is the pride of all of China, but I need something better than this lowest-common-denominator.

So, this brings us to the Internet. Only the Internet seems to offer a complete (and even overwhelming) selection of butter dishes. No wonder the Internet is such an overwhelming success. It has nothing to do with technology... it's all about selection... of butter dishes, at least.

After fretting for a month, dreading for a week, and preparing for hours, I've now upgraded this blog to WordPress 1.5 partly because it's good to move forward, but mostly because my trackbacks to other blogs weren't working, which really upsets the self-promotional part of me.

What improvements will you see here thanks to the upgrade? Uh... none. Maybe the upgrade will simplify improvements in the future. My goal is that everything should look the same and that took only a small amount of work.

Actually, upgrading only took about an hour, which really puts David's death-spiral after the upgrade into question. He does claim that he has a short attention span for the documentation, which could be a problem here. Of course, although I read the documentation and finished the upgrade quickly, I then spent hours puttering around making minor changes.

Sorry for breaking my RSS content feeds. Those of you following my RSS feed will see fallacious updates to my articles.

Given that WordPress is becoming somewhat common (including among Eugene weblogs), I want to give my hearty recommendation for the new version. I'll be happy to try to explain my insane upgrade notes to anyone who has questions about the process.

I have recovered my sense of humor and perspective since Wednesday and enjoyed a relaxing day of programming. It's thanks to feeling more healthy by increasing my daily dose of synthetic thyroid by about 9 micrograms (5%). For most people, the body's thyroid and insulin levels are so automatic that they don't appreciate how perfectly they are regulated. Having to regulate these things manually is a crap-shoot where it's hard know how much to increase or decrease my doses, so I'm happy to be feeling a bit better in the last couple of days. Oh, and Kinsey's picture of me and Lauren helped bring a little levity as well.

And, what do I do when I'm feeling better? Programming. The big project I'm working on with Keith is at least a few weeks behind my optimistic goals because of my recent limited energy and the ever-present big project problem: unexpected problems. Hence, while I had important new features to work on, I instead spent time solving an unexpected performance problem. You see, our small test program was taking about 12 seconds to start up which meant the final program might take two minutes (which only an extremely distracted user would fail to worry about).

I spent the day tracking how many milliseconds various parts of the program took to run. Kind of reminds me about worrying about teeny micrograms of thyroid. Anyhow, once I found the slow and lazy parts of the program that were taking more than 50 milliseconds, I beat them like sweat-shop laborers until they got their noses to the grindstone. (Well, not exactly, but that's a good way to understand it.) And what makes it all feel even better is that I had good results: the test program now takes only 2 seconds to load... a significant improvement.

Now, perhaps I can get back to expected problems and get this project closer to completion. It'll be a lot easier now that I'm feeling a little bit better.

How's this for a bank that cares. I got this with my credit card statement today:

Change to process for posting foreign transactions...
Currently, when a purchase is made in a foreign country, the transaction amount is... adjusted by a 1% currency conversion fee...

Effective April 2, 2005, the currency conversion fee will the discontinued. Instead, a 1% International Transaction Fee will be assessed...

I'm glad they're working on my behalf here. Heaven knows I don't want to pay a "currency conversion fee" when I can be paying an "International Transaction Fee".

I continue to be in poor health, am working a lot, and find the monthly Eugene Weblogger Mettup frustrating to keep going. Hey, but my health may improve soon and my Apple stock just went over $90 and is ready for a split.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

We had our first-ever parent-teacher conference at Lauren's preschool, College Hill Montessori, where she has been going 3 days a week since the beginning of the school year. Of course, every parent wants to hear that their child is brilliant and exceeding every expectation.

Of course, a Montessori school will never tell you that. The magic of Montessori is that students have a variety of engaging "work" to choose from and get to work independently or in a very small group on the skills that they are most ready to learn and interested in absorbing without having to either keep up with or be kept back by the pace of an entire class. There are no expectations for performance placed on the students, only expectations for good interactions with the other students and good care of the materials. So, the parents of a rocket-engineer genius who applies herself to her "work" and the parents of a ditch-digger dolt who applies herself to her work will both hear how well their child applies themselves to their work.

So, the great news is that Lauren applies herself to her work, is conscientious about completing activities and taking good care of the materials, is a good communicator (except that she mumbles sometimes -- wonder where she gets that ), spontaneously assists other students who need help, and is a pleasure to be around. In fact, the teacher's nickname for her is "Twinkle" due to her engaging smile and laugh. She is adept at all of the "practical skills" work, has been working on the "tactile" materials, and is having good luck with exploring the "beginning to read" work.

Overall, it's great to hear that Lauren is kind, engaging, and a pleasure to be around, and it seems like her progress is very good for having just turned 4. Plus, we're certain that "Twinkle" is better than the poor kid that gets the nickname "Smudge".

I've been wracking my brain for the last 10 days about the best place for this Wednesday's Eugene Weblogger Meetup (and future meetups, perhaps) and have been extra busy making calls and visiting potential spots in the last few days based on excellent input from several people.

It's a pain to spend this much time on this simple question, and I mostly discovered a lot of things that were not very helpful:

EMU Coffee Shop is difficult to reach by car. Cafe Paradiso has music events scheduled almost every night (and I'd like to avoid the same trouble we have at The Strand). Starbucks seems to be reviled by many and has very limited proper food in the evening. About 7:00pm, almost every table in the place is taken and squeezing about 15 more people in would be difficult. The scheduler for the community house at 13th and Jefferson (the McNail-Riley house) never returns phone calls.

Given all of that, I've decided to have the meetup at Track Town Pizza, near the University at 1809 Franklin Blvd. When I went there about meetup-time this Wednesday, it was pretty quiet and there was plenty of space at their "long table" for a bunch of people. While it's not the coffee-shop atmosphere that some are looking for, I think it's a nice casual place that meets all of the essential requirements with only Internet access missing (which I may try to provide in a lame-ass way). Plus, it's close to the University, which was an important additional request.

I hope the Eugene webloggers (and "weblog stalkers") will be good natured in trying out this new spot. I'm looking forward to seeing the usual folks this Wednesday and have heard from a few local webloggers that they will make a first appearance. Should be great! I'll be sending out a reminder email in a couple of days.

We've been finding Geocaches for years, but have just this week hid our first one. For those who haven't heard about it elsewhere, I can describe that Geocaching involves someone hiding a box of stuff (the cache) and others trying to find it using a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver and GPS coordinates published on the geocaching.com web site to get within 50 feet of the cache. Then, a bit of searching and sleuthing. Once found, you make a note in the cache's log book, take a bit of "treasure" and leave a bit of "treasure". The "treasure" is usually worthless trinkets, nothing valuable. The value in doing it is the joy of finding something and in visiting many neat places you've never seen before.

Anne Marie and Lauren and I were finding caches when Lauren was just 4 weeks old and have continued to find them recently [1] [2]. In the last week, we published the coordinates of the first cache we've hidden. Already, two avid Geocachers have found it and logged their visit. It's a neat new aspect of a "sport" we've enjoyed.

I'd highly recommend Geocaching to anyone who likes to get outdoors (or even anyone, like myself, who barely likes to get outdoors.

As described here previously, Google has been issuing invitations for people to try its new (and excellent, by the way) Gmail web email service for some time. Less than a year ago, people were paying up to $100 to get access to these, but, as I observed last month, most people who care have already gotten an invitation, so the value of a Gmail invite had dropped just below nothing.

Being the curious fellow I am, you've seen me offer more and more to find what I had to give away with a Gmail invite to find their exact "negative value".

Now, Google has thrown a further wrench into the works and the negative value of invites is plummeting (or raising negatively, or however you say that). I found this week that both Tvindy and Scott's Blog of Doom reported now having gotten FIFTY invites from Google. It's a glut. Look at it as the difference between a four-leaf clover and grass clippings. One if something that you seek out and the other is something you have to work to get rid of. Look at what the readers of those blogs said about Gmail invites:

• I'll see you 50, and raise you the 50 I have from my second gmail account
• Will somebody explain to me what g-mail is? Why would anybody want it?
• I was starting to think I was the only person left on the planet without a gmail account.
• The invites imply exclusivity... If they're gonna pass them out like candy, then you have to wonder.

Can we not wonder how long it will be before Google gives the service away directly instead of putting the burden on us to get rid of them. Actually, I suppose Gmail invites aren't something you have to get rid of, but if you know me, you know that once I've embarked on something, I want to reach the conclusion...

So, I'm now pulling out the stops and the value of items to bribe you to take my Gmail invites (and use them) will now be dramatically increasing (relative to the potty seat and mower blade, of course).

Here's a set of 6 audio cassettes of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit performed by some fine brits (Ray Reinhardt, Bernard Mayes, Tom Luce...) in a very stylish wooden box. There's even a certificate for a free ($3.95 shipping) signed "Gandolf Visits Bilbo" print in there (who knows if it's still valid).

The first person to get me their email address, to receive, and to accept a Gmail invite from me gets this wonderful collectable set of audiobook tapes! Gmail invites may be less than worthless, but nowhere else will you benefit from the negative value of these invitations.

The February Eugene Weblogger Meetup will be February 16 at 6:30pm, but after conflicting a second time last month with a movie at The Strand, I need help from local bloggers to decide where the upcoming meeting should be held.

Here are the features I think a venue needs to have, listed from critical importance to trifling importance:

• Room for 10-20 people
• All ages
• Casual
• Food
• Quiet
• Easy access by Bus/Bike
• Parking
• Beer
• Internet

I put food pretty high on the list since 6:30pm is a time when many of us are just finishing work and need some fill. Given that, I did a quick look through restaurants near to central Eugene and came up with alist (with Marie Calendar's added per a suggestion from Alan, whoattended the last meetup). Being an analytical type, I have attached thepotential problems for each spot and sorted them from least problems of the least kind to most problems of the worst kind:

    Track Town Pizza
    near campus at Franklin and Alder
    Quiet (sort of)
    Internet - No

    G. Willackers
    Coburg Road
    Easy access by Bus/Bike (not really)
    Internet - No

    Pegassus Pizza
    near campus at 14th and Hilyard
    Quiet? (sort of)
    Parking - No
    Internet - No

    Flying Dog
    near campus at 13th and Hilyard
    Room? (barely)
    Casual? (sort of)
    Parking - No
    Internet - No

    Marie Calendars
    near Valley River Center mall
    Casual (not too much so, and a 2 hour limit on meetings)
    Easy access by Bus/Bike - No
    Beer (sort of)
    Internet - No

My list, of course, is not comprehensive and I really need input. If food isn't really important, other non-restaurant options would be possible. Let me know. I have to decide right away, so drop your input here, if you have any.

If you can attend or would like to get more information about future plans (including where the meetup will be held), RSVP at the meetup.com site. RSVPing will really help me keep folks up to date.

Weblog List Updated

I've just updated the Eugene Weblog List in preparation for the upcoming meetup. There are now at least 90 active weblogs in the Eugene area. Check out the updated list if you're curious about the local blog scene.

If you know of other Eugene webloggers, I'd appreciate links to their blogs.

I appreciate having a job that often feels like recreation. I am working long hours on exciting work and helping a coworker in a fun way.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)