Tonynet Explorer

I can't believe I missed it. Saturday was International Bacon Day. This important holiday is the Saturday before Labor Day (August 30 this year). I'll have to make up for my omission with a double-serving of bacon. (Which of course, is impossible since the serving size of bacon is whatever is in front of you.)

(Flag courtesy of YesButNoButYes.)

I said it four years ago, and I'll say it again - I love the Olympics. This particular Olympics is even more special for me since it's in China. Even though I'm an American-born Chinese ("ABC" in the lingo) with more direct family ties to Taiwan and Hong Kong, I can't help but have feelings for China. I definitely feel some sense of homecoming when I visit.

In any case I can't get enough of the Olympics. Go USA!

(P.S. I thought the opening ceremonies rocked. Holy cow.)

Thought this was funny, but of course, bacon increases my overall health...

From xkcd.com, courtesy of John.

Aaron Wider, CEO of the HTFC Corp, dropped the F-bomb at least 73 times in a deposition over the mortgage crisis on top of not answering questions and being a general ass. The judge fined him and his attorney $29,000 for violating the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Here's a little snippet for your enjoyment. Mr. Wider is being questioned by opposing counsel:

Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don't know. Open it up and find it.
Q: Look at your loan file and tell me.
A: Open it up and find it. I'm not your fucking bitch.
Q: Take a look at your loan application.
A: Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q: Sir, take a look--
A: I'm taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You'll retire when I'm done.

We've certainly had a bunch of legal missteps historically at Microsoft, but I don't think we've ever been this boneheaded (I'm sure others will disagree). I seem to recall something in our legal training about not being such a doofus in a deposition. Oh wait, they didn't say anything about this because anyone with half a brain would know better.

HTFC's website is equally classy.

From The Legal Intelligencer

Continuing my fascination with super-sized sea life, check out these ginormous seastars found in Antartica.

They're so creepy they almost look fake.

More info here on MSNBC.

Happy Chinese New Year! This year is the Year of the Rat. Once again, here are a few comments about the new year from ChineseAstrology.com:

2008's socially adept Rat year brings us charisma, intelligence and the ability to charm the pants off of just about anybody – literally. Romantically, 2008's repertory will be as eclectic and varied as this first sign of the Zodiac. High-strung, curious, and ever alert to sexual opportunity, during Rat years we will all feel the need to make an emotional connection with our love partner. It is after sunset that the Rat year comes alive with numerous acquaintances, lively discussion, and intensely romantic interludes. We will all value companionship and love more than anything else this year. Enjoy the concealed and stealthy midnight hours ruled by the Rat of romantic secrets and delicious debauchery. People fall in love easily during Rat years and we will all be prone to some memorable infatuations...

...

2008 will also be an intellectual one, as the Rat is the curious professor of the zodiac. Expect a renewed passion for knowledge, and interest in the sciences in 2008. Travel and a hunger for new experiences, will also becon...

Words and language will become ever more important and poets, musicians and writers can easily produce their best work to date under the influence of the talented Rat. Exchanging and communicating are the priorities of a Rat year. A hyperactive and restless year of potential nervous disorders and neurosis of every type. A good year to explore relaxation methods such as meditation more thoroughly. You may find yourself more sensitive to illness, environmental insults and allergies this year as well, so be sure to get that flu shot and eat your vegetables!

As a Monkey, I'm looking for the forecast of "exhausting nights of love" and being in "a very comfortable and prosperous position." Much better than the difficult year they had forecast for me last year.

So there you have it. Have a great year!

OK, hopefully this is the last post on the Chris/cancer topic. It's Happy Dance time at the Evans house!

His pathology report came back and had good news. The renal cell cancer was confined to the removed kidney and the lymph nodes were clear. He has some follow-up checks, but no radiation or chemo or anything horrible like that. He's home now and eating/drinking real stuff again, so hopefully it'll be clear sailing ahead.

What a relief!

Kellie, Kristen, Eric, Katie, David, and I visited Chris yesterday at the hospital. (Wow, not a very prolific set of bloggers...) Like I mentioned recently, Chris learned last week that he has renal cancer. For a guy who just had major league surgery to remove a mutant kidney, he looked great. I was mentally prepared for him to look a bit ragged, but he looked pretty normal. The only real indication of his condition (aside from the fetching hospital gown) was that his voice was a bit gruff, probably from not being allowed to drink or eat anything for the past few days. (More on that here).

His wife Leslie looked good too and was in high spirits. We also got to meet Chris' mom. I love meeting my friends' parents; they're almost always as cool as their kids (clear correlation). It would crush me to see my kids with cancer, but she seemed to holding up well too.

Kellie, Kristen, and I brought Chris a few Vosges Bacon Chocolate bars, which are fantastic, of course, because they have bacon. Hopefully, Chris will be able to enjoy them in a few days, unless Leslie keeps trying to kill him.

It's great reading the comments on his blog. I think it's a real testimony to the man Chris is that so many people care about him and are concerned. As Leslie mentioned in the blog, EVERYBODY LOVES CHRIS! Go, man, go!

A few years ago I worked on the MSN Explorer 8.0 team; the project was code-named Texas. I made a few really good friends on that project. This weekend two of them had serious medical surprises.

Craig, movie critic - really, he was the FOX13 movie dude - and former speech writer for Bill Gates, had surgery to get his appendix out; his blog post just said, "They say it has to come out tonight."

Perhaps even more severe, Chris, golf and ski buddy now at DeepRockDrive (guess they couldn't afford spaces for their name), went into the hospital with a sharp pain, thinking it was as kidney stone. Unfortunately, it turned out to be cancer. Chris goes into surgery tomorrow. He and his lovely wife, Leslie, have started a blog to document the experience.

Other than the fact that these two good friends of mine (both of whom are about my age) had these problems on the same weekend, the weird thing about these was that I found out about both on Facebook. Sign of our times, I guess.

I admit I'm a little freaked out by my friends having these kinds of health problems. I know these are strictly age related, but it's playing on my impending feeling of doom around getting older. Of course, my feelings here are nothing compared to what Craig and Chris are going through. My prayers and best wishes go out to them and their families.

Welcome to 2008! I'm not really one to make New Year's resolutions, but I have been thinking about things I want to do this year. Mostly, I have a list of things I've wanted to do for a while that I never quite got around to. Over the past few weeks, I took some steps to get going on these. Here are a few things I want to do and the steps I've taken. (Blogging about them will also help create a little public accountability.)

Spend more time with the boys
I think the kids and I do quite a bit together already, but I think these are the prime years I have with them where they're old enough (7 and 10) to really participate and still don't mind hanging out with dad, so I want to double-down on our time together.

The kids have been bugging me to go camping beyond our backyard for some time, so I thought I'd start there. I haven't ever really camped (OK, we went once when I was two), so I've been dragging my feet a bit, but I really want to try it as well. I looked into camp sites last summer, but it was almost impossible to reserve one at that late date, and I didn't want to chance driving somewhere and not having a site. So, this week, I reserved a choice site at Deception Pass State Park (close enough to home that we can bail out if it sucks) in June. I'm pretty excited and will probably book a few more dates just in case we love it.

Incidentally, the Washington State Parks reservation system is pretty good. They show you the individual sites with descriptions and ratings of quality and privacy, have photo(s) of the site, and make it easy to see what dates are available. Good use of our tax dollars.

Work out more
As I've chronicled on this blog, I've been up and down with my working out. I definitely do best when I have scheduled events I'm working toward, so this morning (the first day of sign-ups), I signed up for the RSVP (Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party). It's a ride like the STP (Seattle-to-Portland) that I did two years ago. I tried to sign up last year, but I waited too long, and the ride sold out. I'll do the Chilly Hilly again in preparation too, but I'll probably skip STP. Good to have the goals on the calendar now. I may do another half marathon (probably Kirkland in May instead of Mercer Island in March).

Learn to play an instrument well
I took piano lessons on and off growing up (mostly off) but never really reached a level of reasonable competency. I've always wanted to play well, so I started piano lessons last month, taking the half hour before Andrew's lessons (can't skip my lesson without making him miss his). We also just had a little Yahama grand piano delivered yesterday. It's been fun playing again, and my instructor has me working on theory as well to better understand what's going on. This had added an interesting new dimension.

I thought about starting guitar instead (which I've also always wanted to play), but I'm much closer to competence on piano, so I figured that was wiser. (I also played clarinet for six years, but I don't have much interest in picking that up again. Not too many social opportunities for clarinet...)

Learn to speak another language to adult fluency
I grew up speaking Chinese at home, suffered through eleven years of Saturday morning Chinese school, took a year of Chinese in college. I also took four years of high school German (enough to get by as a tourist). However, I can't really do business or carry on adult conversations in either language. Since I'm closer to fluency in Chinese, I decided to build on that base. Although I'm basically illiterate in Chinese, I figured I'd start with my listening and vocabulary skills. I started listening to Chinese language podcasts. There are a few good ones, but my favorite so far is by a guy named Serge Melnyk (really). More on these later.

I have lots of other things I want to do, but I figured this is a good start. Hopefully, I can stick with these and build some good habits. What are your plans?

Our move went well despite the fact we had a crazy rainstorm the day of the move (nothing like dragging everything you own through a downpour.) Fortunately, the movers did a pretty good job keeping things neat and dry (hats off to Hansen Brothers Moving).

We're mostly unpacked now; we even have the cars in the garage. We also have the old house pretty well cleaned up and ready to sell; it should list tomorrow.

Unfortunately, we still don't have real internet access; we've had to continue to use our T-Mobile Dash mobile phones as modems like we did after the big windstorm last year. (For those who read my Comcast rant, I decided to follow the advice Adam left in my comments to use Speakeasy. I'll blog about them later, but so far so good. We should have service about a week from now.)

Just as we are getting settled in, it's time to go again. I'm chaperoning Andrew's (10) fifth grade class (actually, three classrooms) for four days and three nights at Islandwood, an outdoor education camp on Bainbridge Island (about a 45 minute ferry ride from Seattle). I think moving or work would be easier, but it should be interesting. Wish me luck.

Sorry I haven't been posting much recently. As I mentioned a little while ago, we bought a new house. The movers show up tomorrow morning, so things have been a bit hectic. Lots to write about though. Once I get data in the new house (still don't frickin' have service installed!) I'll pick up again. I'm taking all of December off of work, so I should have more time to write.

Gotta love a holiday mostly centered around food...

I know this is like saying ""I hate evil" or something similarly obvious. We're buying a new house (more on that later). Obviously, we need Internet service and cable is generally the fastest connection type around, so I didn't even think about who to use. I went to the Comcast website to get service and figured we might use them for phone service too (reminder: we don't have TV).

I went through their long wizard to order my service and was connected to their chat service to confirm a time for the installation truck roll; I thought this was a nice touch and better than waiting for a call back. I was "on hold" for about an hour (terrible), but it got worse from there.

The service person proceeded to ask me everything I had already typed in only to say that she couldn't transfer my service since the new address wasn't in her database. It's a new house. Don't people who are moving into new houses ever need Comcast service? Their site couldn't have flagged this an hour ago before I wasted this time?

Now, I have to call the local Comcast office. What's worse, she couldn't transfer any of the information I typed to the local office, so I'll have to do the whole thing on the phone again. Lovely.

I am going to spend some time looking for alternatives to Comcast broadband now. Why do companies make it so hard to give them money?

We're getting ready to go to Chicago this week for my brother's wedding (finally!). This will be a big family get together with my cousins and aunts/uncles from both sides of our family coming with spouses and kids in many cases. Even though the family isn't huge, I don't recall ever having had both sides together before, and I've certainly never met many of my cousins' spouses/kids.

So, one of the longstanding questions I needed to work out was the proper terms for each relation so I can describe it to the kids. I didn't grow up around my cousins or extended family, so I never really had to learn this. In particular, I never understood the ideas of removed and degrees (e.g. first/second/nth cousin).

For the English terms, I turned to the cousins article in Wikipedia, naturally. Briefly:

• Degrees indicates the minimum number of generations separating two cousins from a common ancestor. My uncles/aunts' kids are my first cousins since we share common grandparents (one generation - parents - separate us from our common ancestor). My kids and my first cousins' kids are second cousins because they share common great-grandparents.
• Removed indicates the number of generations separating the cousins.

Therefore, my cousins and my sons are first cousins, once removed. First because the minimum number of generations separating them from their common ancestor is one (my cousins to my grandparents), and once removed because there is one generation separating my cousins from my kids. Whew.

The Chinese terms seem hopelessly complex, so I asked my mom for a table. Although there does appear to be a grammar of sorts for these terms, even among Chinese it's confusing. In Chinese the birth order and side of family of the various parties changes the terms, so the terms for my father's side are completely different from those on my mom's side and the order of each generation's birth changes the words (fortunately, at some point, the strict numbering appears less important than the older/younger bit. I remember struggling with some of these growing up because Chinese refer to family relations using these terms, and it's important to get them right, lest you insult someone. However, even my mom suggests that we stop the practice among the cousins because it's just too hard (and we don't see each other often and the kids don't really speak Chinese, etc.) I'll spare everyone the gory details here, but let me know if you're interested. I may try to build tree/generating function for these terms if I get bored (maybe this would be a good Wikipedia article to write...)

Anyway, I feel somewhat relieved to finally understand this stuff a bit and be able to explain it better. The boys were dying to know. (Well, not really.)

Absolutely hilarious.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1770138

Thanks to Chooky for the link.

In a moment of insanity, Michelle bought the boys a pair of Nerf dart guns last week. Despite my interest in guns (or maybe because of it), I have been reluctant to get them toy guns because I don't think they're great things to play with.

Anyway, now that they have them, I've been teaching them safe gun handling rules. It turns out watching TV and playing video games is a great way to learn exactly the wrong way to handle guns. I don't know why anyone would want to put the working end of a handgun near their head, but on every TV show, you see actors holding their gun up as they go around corners or through doors. The end with the hole is the dangerous part. Keep it away from your body parts...

There are four basic rules for safe gun handling:

1. All guns are always loaded.
2. Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot.
3. Don't point the gun at anything you're not willing to destroy.
4. Know what's behind and beyond your target.

The neat thing about these rules is that you have to break two before something bad happens.

The first rule means that you should always assume a gun is loaded until you've proven otherwise yourself. When someone hands me a gun (like at a gun store), I always check to make sure it's not loaded, even if I just saw the person do the same. Even if I set my own gun down, I'll re-clear it when I pick it up. I don't want any surprise bangs.

The other rules are pretty self-explanatory, but they take practice to be aware. I'm at the point where I keep my finger off the drill and weedeater triggers too.

Anyway, regardless of what you think of guns, it's good to know how to be safe around them.

Since third grade, I had worn progressively thicker glasses and contact lenses. At my worst, I was -9.5/-10; this is bad. If I had to read without correction, I had to close one eye because I had to hold the reading material was so close to my face that I lost binocular vision. In fact if my vision had gotten any worse, I wouldn't have been able to wear disposable contact lenses; they simply don't make them any stronger.

So, about eight years ago, I had Lasik eye surgery done. The result was something of a miracle. I went from being effectively blind to having better than 20/20 vision. I'm a totally satisfied Lasik patient. (It's a good thing I got my surgery when I did. I guess they're more cautious about doing Lasik on people with my old correction.)

Unfortunately, with age come inevitable changes. I went in to my eye doctor for my first visit in six years (I've been busy, OK?). He said things were still really good, but my left eye could use a little correction, especially for close-in work.

So, for the first time in eight years, I have glasses again. I don't need them all time, but they're meant to be helpful for computer work and reading (not that I do much of those...) However, since my correction is slight now, I can have much cooler and thinner glasses now than I ever could before. After trying on a bunch of pairs, I picked up these Ted Baker frames.

Andrew (9) thinks they make me "look weird". Michael (6) just thinks they make me look "girlie". Michelle took the more diplomatic "I just have to get use to you in glasses again." I haven't decided if I like them yet; I need to get used to me in glasses again too.

Once every few years, I seem to have to relearn that having naturally darkish skin does not make me impervious to sunburn.

On the first morning of the trip to Cabo, I took the boys down to the beach; none of us had sunscreen on. Michelle had the bag with sunscreen and was supposed to be right down, but she got sidetracked trying to find a live network connection for her laptop.

Of course, I was well protected with my extensive base tan after a Seattle winter (not). As a result, the three of us were unprotected in the Mexican sun for about three hours. By the time I realized there might be a problem, I was good and red. That evening, I could barely sleep for the pain. (Somehow, the boys managed to escape serious burns; Andrew (9), in particular, just got a little more freckly.)

Two or three days later, my face started peeling in earnest. It was pretty horrific. Michael (6) started peeling a bit too, although he was more excited about it, thinking he was shedding his skin like a snake (he's clearly a Slytherin...).

As the trip was winding down to the last few days, I could go outside again without feeling the searing heat reburning my skin. Must remember to be smarter next time...

For our trip to Cabo, I had prearranged our airport transfer online before we left. Transcabo clearly warned their customers on the site to ignore the touts in the airport, explicitly stating their representatives would be outside the airport in distinctive orange shirts.

So, of course, as we left customs, I got sidetracked by a dude who looked very official and said my Transcabo guys were just out and would be back in a few minutes. He started telling me about the free breakfast, return transfer, and activities I could have. Michelle caught on immediately, said we weren't interested in a timeshare pitch, and left. I stood there like an idiot for a few more minutes until I clued into why Michelle left. Transcabo was just outside the airport holding a sign with my name on it, as promised.

Michelle, once again, proved that she's the brains of the operation.

BTW, Transcabo was great. I'd use them again any time. They were right there ready for us, the van was nice (unlike the taxi we took back to the airport), and the driver was friendly/helpful.

Once again, the Japanese government has stepped back from accepting responsibility for their atrocities during World War II. This time, no less than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated that with respect to Japanese wartime sex slavery "there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested". This statement is unbelievable in light of the overwhelming evidence. Furthermore, previous Prime Minster's have acknowledged (and here) that "comfort stations" existed, were run by the Japanese military, and the women were often coerced. They've even accepted moral responsibility (if not legal.)

This isn't some reasonable academic debate about what happened thousands of years ago. The people who were there are alive and have told their story. There are statements and books by Japanese soldiers who admit their role. Perhaps an even bigger affront (aside from insulting the intelligence of the entire world) is to the women who were forced into sexual slavery and are still alive today. The Japanese government continues their torture these women sixty-five years later.

The contrast with Germany is amazing. In Germany, Holocaust denial is illegal; in Japan, the equivalent is a governmental pastime. To deny this crime happened is irresponsible and frankly incredible. I'm beside myself with anger. I'm terrified of a re-armed Japan taking a larger world role if their leaders have not accepted their historical responsibilities and learned from that history. Nothing reassures me that this won't happen again.

"Comfort Women" article on Wikipedia

I bet more of you wish you had listened to me three years ago to "Vote Chor in 2004".

I'm just sayin'.

After my Cross Platform Development post, I wound up with with Firefox and Mac OSX ads on my site. A little ironic for the Microsoft IE guy... I think those Google guys are out to get me.

(Of course, this post won't help...)

OK, I was wrong yesterday. I wasn't ready to go back to work. I woke up this am with the sore-throat-of-death -- the same thing the kids went through.

I finally went to the doctor this morning. She gasped in surprise when she saw my tonsils. (I'll take "Top sounds you don't want to hear from your doctor" for $100, please...) I guess they were a little red and swollen...

Now I have the best antibiotics American medicine can provide (thank you, Microsoft, for our unparalleled health benefits). At the advice from doctor, I topped the drugs off with a little organic yogurt from Trader Joe's; this is to restore the fauna in my gut that the antibiotics are killing off, thereby preventing some <ahem> unpleasant side effects of antibiotics. I also picked up some San Pellegrino Aranciata; this yummy "sparkling orange beverage" doesn't have any known medicinal qualities, but it does wonders for my mental health. I never buy the stuff normally, only having it when I'm out. It seems a little decadent to have a whole six pack at home, but heck, I'm sick.

OK, since I'm trolling through my logs this morning, I figured I'd write about the browser and OS stats.

Since January 1, 2007:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0: 34%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0: 23%
3. Opera 9: 10%
4. Firefox 1.5: 8.9%
5. Mozilla 5: 7.2%
6. Firefox 2.0: 3.6%
7. Netscape: 1.4%
8. Internet Explorer 5.0: 1.3%
9. Safari: 1.3%
10. Firefox 1.0: .7%

I admit the high Opera numbers are really surprising. All told, IE versions account for 65% of my traffic. Mozilla variants including Firefox are 21% and Opera is 11%. These non-IE numbers are higher than the market as a whole, leading me to believe that my readers are more on the tech enthusiast side (a segment that use a broader range of browsers than the population at large.)

These stats don't include the search robots who hit the site. Yahoo visits the site a ton, accounting for 13% of my web traffic. Robots in general are about 20% of my traffic - a surprisingly high cost.

On a separate note, who is out there running all these old browsers? WTF? It's not like they're expensive. Everyone should be running the latest version of their preferred browser, if only for the modern security protections! Come on people!

With respect to operating systems

1. Windows XP: 65%
2. Windows Vista: 9%
3. Linux: 5.8%
4. Windows 98: 5.7%
5. Windows 2000: 5%
6. Windows NT: 4.3%
7. MacOS: 2%
8. Windows Server 2003: 1.3%
9. FreeBSD: .8%
10. Windows 95: .8%

All Windows versions account for 91% of my viewers. I'm surprised how many more people use Linux than Macs, but that may again reflect my geeky readership. Whoever is out there running Windows 98 or Windows 95 - please, for the love of God, move to something more modern and secure. We don't even provide security updates for Windows 98 or 95 anymore, so you're running naked.

On the ISP front, Comcast is the single biggest provider at 15% with GTE at 10% and MSN at 5%. This skew may be due to the popularity of those providers in the Redmond area.

Unfortunately, I think the other stats are too heavily warped by the robots and comment spammers to be useful (stuff like unique visitors and pages viewed per visit.)

Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Here are a few comments about Pig years from ChineseAstrology.com (it's on the web, so it must be true...)

Finishing touches, tying up loose ends, last stands, curtain calls and closures will be the urging of the year. So, prepare to finish projects, complete goals and even say some goodbyes. Put your ducks in a row, cross your T's and dot your I's in 2007 and the proper Pig will be gracious to you.

Pig years are known for their respite from strife, patience and passivity, but also for indulgence, sensuality and fleshly delights. As the last sign of the zodiac, the Pig represents "resignation" accepting human nature as it is - content to live and let live. The greatest risk will be naivete, so by all means avoid confidence schemes and being fooled or duped throughout 2007.

It's also supposed to be a difficult year for monkeys like me. Guess I'll have to watch myself.

That said, I'm ready for some "fleshly delights", especially ones having to do with pigs. Bacon anyone?

Having Google ads on my site has been a source of some amusement for me (in addition to the nice checks). As you know, they pick the ads based on the content of my site, so as my posts change around, the ads change.

The "I Hate Michelle" post (really a provocative title for a post about the TV show 24) generated the "cheating wife" ads here. Hm, not quite contextually relevant, but funny.

As for the other ads, I understand why the running one is the there, but the "union with God" ad? Must be because of the bacon posts, for bacon is truly a sign that there is a loving God. Maybe Google Adsense is smarter that I realized.

We in the software industry are not known for our fashion sense, but there are a few little tips that even the biggest geek can use.

The easiest is to not wear your card key publicly. Your card key only gets you into your office and will impress no one outside your building.

This tip is especially true in a bar and even more true if you're on stage...

According to the Seattle Times: "Americans say they reached - or will reach - their peak physical attractiveness at age 38."

I'm 2.5 months from 39. Crap. This is as good as it gets.

The Stanford's men's basketball cracked the Top 25 coming in at #23 after this week's amazing upset of (formerly) #3 UCLA and (formerly) #25 USC. The team was expected to have a mediocre season this year, so their relative success has been a pleasant surprise.

Of course, making this even more sweet for me is how the UW Huskies are tanking this year. Not that I need to gloat at work, but it shuts up a lot of Dawgs at the office...

The Seattle area completely falls apart when the first snowflake hits the ground, as evidenced by yesterday's storm. Having grown up in Minnesota, land of 10,000 blizzards, I'm continually stunned by this.

In December 1990, a few months after I moved here, I had my first encounter with this. It started snowing in the morning, but we all stayed at work and didn't think anything of it. By 4:00pm, there was eight inches of snow on the ground and reports were coming in that people couldn't get out of Microsoft. Traffic around the area was at a standstill with people abandoning their cars on roads and bridges (sounds familiar). A bunch of my friends stayed the night at work. We walked down to the local Safeway and rented videos, which we watched in a big tele-conference room used for our collaboration with IBM on OS/2. About halfway through Caddyshack or whatever it was we were watching, we realized we were beaming the movie to IBM office in Boca Raton. Fortunately, it was probably 2:00am there... We walked down to the Fred Meyer (local chain store like Target), bought tire chains, and crawled home the next day.

Anyway, things haven't gotten better in the last sixteen years in this regard. I think the region has something like six plows with rubber-edged plow blades (so they don't knock the reflector turtle things off the road), and they don't use salt on the roads because of the cost and increased corrosion. On top of that, Seattle drivers lose their minds in the snow.

In Minnesota, an armada of plows with sharpened steel fangs and spewing great jets of metal-eating salt beats back the snow and ice relentlessly, rendering all but the worst blizzards a minor inconvenience. (On the other hand, virtually every car in Minnesota more than a few years old has rust holes on the bottom.) And, of course, Minnesotans are mentally prepared for snow and experienced since their first driver's ed class in handling snow (we used to do doughnuts with our cars in the snowy high school parking lot - fun stuff). The snow tires we all had didn't hurt either.

In the Seattle area's defense, however, I will say that there are a few important differences that makes snow in Seattle tougher. First, it's almost never very cold for long, so the snow thaws during the day and re-freezes at night. Bad. Second, I think the roads are more crowned than most, sloping off to handle the rain that we get. This makes it easy to slide off the road and hard for plows to really scrape the ground clean. Finally and perhaps most important, it's hilly here. Icy roads in flat Minnesota simply don't have the same impact as the hilly ice rinks we get here. It's amazing to watch a big four-wheel drive SUVs sliding backwards down hills.

Still, I think most the region's snow pain is avoidable. More plows, a little salt, and a few more IQ points among the drivers would go a long way.

Wow, what a winter it's been so far. Yesterday, we had another arctic blast come through Seattle, the second of the season on top of our big windstorm. Of course, this storm had the good manners to hit during the evening rush hour, snarling traffic for hours.

Michelle and I had the added concern of having to pick the kids up from school. Normally, this is not challenging since they both go to school reasonably close to work, but when it took Michelle twenty minutes just to get out of the garage of her building because traffic leaving Microsoft was so bad, I knew we were in for it.

I decided to head off on foot instead, leaving my car safely in the Microsoft garage. It was amazing to see the cars slipping and sliding. Even though there was only about two inches of snow, the temperature outside was just right to turn everything into ice on the roadway. Even on relatively shallow grades, two-wheel-drive cars were struggling.

I walked to Andrew's school and picked him up - on time I might add, although there were plenty of other kids who were still stuck there. He and I walked home together and had a nice chat. It was actually a pleasant evening for a walk, although I may have ruined my leather shoes. I walked about four miles total.

After 2.5 hours trying to get the few blocks to Michael's school, Michelle had to ditch her car at the bottom of a big hill that she couldn't get up and walked home the last half mile in her three inch heels. We all arrived home at exactly the same time coincidently. She wasn't very happy...

Once the three of us were home, I got into our 4WD truck and went back to get Michael. There were still about a dozen kids at school, even though it was an hour past the after-school care normally closed. I really appreciate the professionalism of the after-school care teachers in both schools. They were calm and matter-of-fact about the whole thing, ready to spend the night if needed.

However, I was disappointed that the cellphone network melted down. Everyone was stuck in their cars calling the network was simply overrun. It was almost impossible to get a call through; text messages seemed to fare a little better.

So, today, school was closed, and most of us at Microsoft worked from home. School is closed again tomorrow too. I can't remember a year when the kids had so many days off of school. I hope this winter isn't a sign of things to come. An inconvenient truth indeed.

Another year gone by. Amazing. 2006 was a pretty good year for me - STP, sailing in Desolation Sound, some nice trips (like Las Vegas for MIX06, New Zealand, Indonesia, Disneyland, and Whistler, of course, shipping IE7 and Windows Vista.

Still, I wasn't as diligent about working out after STP as I'd hoped, I didn't take nearly enough photos (the STOMP load-in time-lapse not withstanding), and I didn't feel like I was hitting on all cylinders at work as much as I'd like.

So, as always, I'm optimistic about making the new year even better. The half-marathon coming up should kick-start my work out efforts. I'm also doing my annual office cleaning right now (whether it needs it or not...) and paving my last XPSP2 laptop for Vista now, so I'll be ready to hit the ground running tomorrow.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great 2007!

Merry Christmas! Well, "Happy Boxing Day" is really more appropriate, I guess. Anyway, we had a very lovely, if lazy Christmas yesterday. Michelle's folks are visiting from Florida and Mike is here too, so we had a full house. Andrew (9) and Michael (6) got off to a mercifully late start (we had company over the night before, and I was up even later playing Santa Claus getting stuff ready.)

The hot stuff for the boys continues to be Legos (especially Bionicle related), video games, and Pokemon stuff (popular again, after a brief affair with Yu-Gi-Oh). Especially popular are combinations of the above like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for Gameboy DS, Star Wars Legos, and the penultimate combination" the video game Lego Star Wars II. The boys also got an Xbox 360 from Santa. We're not the first ones on the block with a 360, but I finally gave in. (I also admit it was as much for me.)

In addition to the Xbox, I had a prosperous Christmas: a nice Riedel wine decanter I've wanted for a while, the The West Wing season seven DVD set, Avenue Q: The Book (Avenue Q is quite possibly my favorite musical I've never seen, the amazingly fun Table Tennis for Xbox 360, some nice wine, and a Nordstrom's gift card. Good stuff.

Of course, Christmas isn't just about the stuff. It's about the food (you thought I was going to say something mushy about family, brr brr brr right?) We had beignets for breakfast, and I made potato chips using the deep frying oil again (damn, those are good - I'll post the recipe soon.) We also took another go at the Honeybaked ham we had for dinner Christmas Eve along with more yummy greens, and macaroni and cheese. (I don't care what anyone says. Twelve pounds of ham is essentially an infinite quantity of ham. It is too much for any sized event. Jesus wouldn't have had to mess with loaves and fishes if he had a twelve pound Honeybaked ham, pork issues not withstanding.)

Tummies full from too much food and eyes glazed over from too much Viva Pinata, we collapsed at the end of day happy. It was a good Christmas. Hope your's was too.

[2006-12-26 Fixed typo]

Ugh. Lost our cable Internet access again. Back to sipping through an EDGE cellphone connection. The effects from this storm keep dragging on. Fortunately for us, it's only inconveniences like this.

I'm back online again with our cable Internet access. Wahoo! It's like taking a deep breath again after breathing through a snorkel.

Yippee!!

A few thoughts on what helped us during the Storm of 2006.

• Our Smartphones were (and continue to be) critical. We could get our work and personal email, text to check on friends, make calls, and get online. They're still serving as our Internet connection for our PCs until we get our broadband back up. Having the right cables was important as was having a way to charge the phones. (They charge from our laptops, so that was pretty easy; I need to get a way to easily charge them in the car too.)
• Getting hotel reservation early was important. The W had filled up by noon or so; friends had a hard time finding any hotels in the area for days. Using an out-of-town friend with a net connection made the process a lot easier than us calling around. (The voice activated Internet!)
• Having gas in the car was essential. Fortunately, I had filled up the car the night before. Virtually all of the gas stations nearby were useless without power to pump the gas; the few that found a way to open had huge lines. Getting around was a slow process given the downed trees, so having gas was important. I used to be good about keeping half a tank at all times; need to get back into that habit.
• Flashlights and battery powered radios were handy. Even in the daytime, our house is dark thanks to the trees. Packing in the dark would have been no fun. The radio helped us understand the severity of the situation and convinced us to get a hotel room soon since so many people were out of power. It's also kind of lonely cut off from the world, so the radio was a welcome window.

We opted not to stick it out at home, preferring light and heat. I'm sure if had stayed home, this list would have had more stuff like firewood, outdoor cook stove, etc. In other emergencies, staying at home would have been more appropriate or even necessary. But, we figured why suffer? We wound up having a good time in downtown Seattle and were very comfortable to boot.

It's been a wild time since my last post. Aside from another trip to Whistler (which I'll write about later) we had a big windstorm here in the Seattle area that knocked out power to over a million households and businesses, including Microsoft and our house.

Last Thursday (the evening of the storm), we heard branches hitting the roof all night. (Our neighborhood is filled with huge old fir trees, 18-20" in diameter.) We lost power around 1:00am and woke up to find a cold house. The yard and roof were buried in fallen branches. I went out to meet my neighbors and see the damage.

Next door, the neighbors lost a big tree. It fell away from the house and across the street, blocking it, and miraculously missing two parked cars and the house across the street. Nearby, other neighbors weren't as lucky. I saw at least five houses that had huge trees lying across their roofs. There were power, cable, and phone lines down everywhere and we heard stories of a nearby transformer that had blown up. On the plus side, I did meet a lot more of my neighbors than ever. Everyone was helping each other, offering whatever they could. It was nice to see, really.

Fortunately, we weren't totally cut off. We had a battery powered radio (with a crank too, just in case) and our Dash Smartphones. We got online via our phones and learned that Microsoft was down to emergency power only and the campus was closed (Friday was the last day I was planning on working this year, so I got an early start to my holiday.) We also learned that the kids' schools were closed (so Michael got an early start to his vacation too.)

In a stroke of foresight, Michelle figured we'd need hotel rooms for a few nights as the power situation got sorted out over the next few days. She got on the phone with Mike, who served as our travel agent, looking for a hotel room in Seattle that had power. We grabbed a few nights at the W Hotel in Seattle and were set. We stopped off at Microsoft for a bit where there was wireless and the hallway plugs worked. There was a little party of sorts going on in Michelle's hallway. Someone even set up a Nintendo Wii (yes, we allow those...), which kept me and the boys occupied for a while. (They're pretty cool, btw, but I think after Michael bashed the Wiimote controller into the wall a few times that it's not for us.)

So, we had a few nice days downtown, just us and the zillion other refugees looking for a little light and heat. We did a little Christmas shopping, saw Eragon (terrible, btw, more on that later), and played at Gameworks. Pretty fun, actually.

We moved back home Monday after the power came back on. We still don't have Internet access (our cable line is still lying in our front yard), so we're connecting through our cellphones (getting somewhere between 92 and 110kbps - not too bad). Lots of clean-up to do in the yard now, but I think the worst is behind us now. I feel fortunate that we got by so easily and were back up before Christmas.

My bitter post about the Stanford football team's poor season must have spurred them to action. The boys beat the University of Washington (itself sunk in a five game losing streak) here in Seattle - a rariety. This breaks Stanford's eleven game losing streak, only tying the worst ever streak in school history.

I missed a chance to see the game. Joe tried to talk me into it, agreeing we'd probably lose but trying to convince me that a miracle might happen. I didn't relish the thought of sitting in the rain, surrounded by rabid Husky fans in purple, watching Stanford get crushed.

Well, I blew it. It was a very nice autumn day, and we won. What's more, we spoiled the Husky's chances of a bowl game, so the fans started filing out early. Serves me right