Incompatibility

It has been called to my attention that some people who view this site are seeing it with formatting errors. One error, specifically:

This vertical alignment of the journal title is not intentional.  The titles are formatted via a WordPress plug-in called FontBurner which calls a separate site to get the antique-looking font they use (the advantages being that it’s easier than coding that myself, and that you, the reader, will see that font regardless of whether or not you have it installed on your computer.)  Apparently the interaction of FontBurner with the WP template in play causes this distribution of the title characters to occur when the journal is viewed using IE7 or IE8 32-bit.  (I’ve never noticed because I don’t use IE;  I use Mozilla Firefox.  IE8 64-bit will also display it correctly, although in that case you’re buying the correctly formatted title at the price of being unable to view the Flash and Quicktime content, since IE8 64-bit doesn’t seem to have supported plug-ins for that yet.  Sheesh.)  So if you’re seeing Tales in the above configuration, it’s because your browser and FontBurner are at odds.

I’m not sure how to fix it yet.

There’s a Principle in There Somewhere

Jack (eating cereal):  When I run my tongue along the inside of my teeth, it makes it feel really weird.

Ace:  Yeah, it does.  And the more you do it and think about it, the weirder it feels.  And then you keep noticing it all the time.  So I wouldn’t think about it too hard.

Spore: First Contact

We actually spoke to the Grox for the first time last night…

Teach Your Children Well

“Jack!  Come under the tree!” yells one of the other kids.

He’s a stocky boy I don’t recognize, from another group:  about Jack’s height, but broader, with a pudgy face.  The tree in question is seven feet high, and the only one of its size near the parking lot;  just tall enough for its drooping branches to shield a tight circle of children in commiseration.  The stocky boy is waiting underneath it with Jack’s friends Roderick and Tam, looking for a fourth.

Jack runs over to join them.  For a while I watch them as they all stand facing inward, shoulder to shoulder, holding a discussion I cannot hear.  But eventually Jack decides he isn’t interested.   He leaves just as easily as he joined, runs off to watch the members of a nearby group battle on the asphalt with Yu-Gi-Oh cards instead.  The remaining three watch him go, without malice, then close their circle.  I tousle his hair as he runs by. Read the rest of this entry »

“Bench Boom”

Jack’s first “animated” movie (make sure your computer’s sound is on, and double-click on the image to play):

Yeah, What She Said

“People find something very comforting about the notion that words are the problem, not concepts.  When words fail us, we tend to blame the words.  We’ve all experienced the frustration of not being able to say what we mean to say.  When we struggle with language, we have the sensation that our clean, beautiful ideas remain trapped inside our heads.  We accuse language of being too crude and clumsy to adequately express our thoughts.  But perhaps we flatter ourselves.

“Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is.  This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe.  Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.”

-Arika Okrent, “In the Land of Invented Languages”

Blue Tape

While I was visiting her the other day, Opal casually let it drop that the reformation of the Willowview house to her and Iris’ specifications will involve cutting down the three 30-foot tall maple trees in the backyard, two of which my father planted as saplings back when he and she moved in, plus a dozen smaller pine trees along the back line of the property that he planted likewise.  (It will also involve the destruction of the pinewood deck attached to the house that he built himself from the ground up, but no-one has bothered to make this observation out loud, as it pretty much goes without saying.)  When I expressed my outrage at this, Opal responded with a carefully rehearsed phrase about it being “necessary” in order to build the addition.  When I then went on to ask her how the construction workers who added the in-ground pool in the 1970s had managed to pull off that entire project without cutting down those same trees, and also whether or not it would also be necessary to fill in the pool to effect the addition, since it was closer to the house than most of the trees in question, she faltered and made some vague observations about how one of the trees was a “swamp maple” that had already been there when they arrived, and how the other one “really should have come down last year” and other absurdities.   The reality, of course, is that she long ago decided that she would rather not have to worry about the trees anymore, and now with Iris behind her and my dad gone, she has the support and the excuse to do something about it.   It’s about fear, and about burdens-   and of course, about the pool:  the pool, the pool, that all-coveted, all-meaningful sink of fucking chlorine water.  Trees drop leaves in my pool, she is saying to herself. Trees block the sun from shining on my pool.  Trees have dead branches that might fall on me and kill me. And who will disagree?  Iris?  Trees will block the sunshine from streaming through the oversized bay windows of the private castle she’s building on the ashes of our childhoods.  Trees might crush its walls.

The trees themselves, meanwhile, stand silently, where they have stood my entire life, nodding in the hot summer wind, dappling me with precious shade-  only now, each one has a thin ribbon of bright blue tape wound around it, tied at the front with a bow knot.  They don’t know what it means…

Opal is considering leaving and going to her condo in Florida for the eight months it will take for the construction to completed.  I’d like to do the same thing, although not to Florida.  The difference is, I don’t want to come back.

And That’s the Way it Is

Good night, sir.

/Ace salutes

Well That Was Quick

In the space of less than a week Jack and I have gone from mucking about with the games at Nitrome to mucking about with Club Penguin, Disney’s Flash-animated Second Life-lite for the younger set.  In the interest of accuracy, I should point out that he has mentioned this venue before now, having seen it and played with it briefly while at  his friend Crane’s house during the school year.  But apparently Dahl from camp is also a player, or at least conversant with it, and the two of them whistled it up during their continuously talked-about Computer Class.  (Jack’s use of the term “class” in this instance is a misnomer, as it is an elective he as chosen for his down time, and there is no actual instruction in computers occurring during it;  merely supervised video game play.  His proper classes include in their curriculum such topics as chemistry, French impressionist painting and philosophy, but you’d never know it from him.)  That reminder led him in turn to ask me if I’d allow him to play it on Eve here at home.  After some research, I acquiesced.  It seemed hypocritical for me to say “no” when he watched me attend Supergram and Jahuti’s wedding in SL.

You can play Club Penguin for free all you want, but the rewards for winning the games and completing the tasks all come in the form of gold coins, and the gold coins, predictably, are used to buy crap:   clothing to trick out your…  um…  aviatar, and items for it to own.  And you can’t spend the coins unless you have a pay account…  *sigh*

I’m going to have to discuss this with his mother.

Best Quotes of the Weekend II

“Sometimes I try to blow things up just by using the power of my mind.”

-Jack, while entering the supermarket

—

Jack (playing Mad Libs):  I need a boy’s name.

Ace:  Fred.

J:  Fred???

A:  Yeah, Fred will work.

J:  What if there’s a girl named Fred?

A:  What are you, watching “Angel”?

—

“Over the past few years I’ve come to the realization that nothing ever changes and no one ever learns from their mistakes.”

-me, to a former coworker, in a dream I had

Fortunately I Still Control the Off Switch

Meanwhile, in the God’s Revenge on Ace department:  it turns out there’s a burgeoning number of web sites containing nothing but free Flash games and advertisements to pay for them, and that Jack has been given the address for one of these sites (called Nitrome) by his friend Dahl from camp.  The games thereon range from blatant rip-offs of older games that the kids playing are too young to have heard of, to more original creations that are interesting and funny (if also inevitably derivative in some fashion;  there’s only so many 2d game principles under the sun.)  The effect is the equivalent of having an Eighties arcade permanently wired for short attention spans, where the next game is only a click (and an ad) away, with no need to deposit quarters or change discs or cartridges.  Jack will happily allow me to sit next to him and help him play, in case he hits a tough spot in a puzzle game, or a control technique he doesn’t understand.  He will also just as happily sit in front of it for hours by himself, changing from game to game to game, without allowing me to play with him, or even acknowledging comments I address to him…

At the Zoo

Had a great day yesterday riding chaperone on the trip Jack took with his Gifted Camp to the City of Mists Zoo. Tamarinds and tigers and quetzal birds and sea lions and all manner of fun. Plus sunshine and shade, and blue skies, and throngs of screaming kids in matching flourescent t-shirts, and one 30 inch alligator that decided to come home with us:

Would love to deal with it all more detail, but I have a back-log of Tales already, and little time to write…

Limits

Last night, on a whim, I opened an older bottle of the hard cider I make and discovered that it didn’t seem to have kept very well.  The “vintage” in question was the November 2003 “Kings X” bottling, nearly six years old, and the oldest bottle I’ve yet sampled.  (I have bottles laid down for every year from 1993 on;  so does the Empress, but hers are display bottles, laid down for archival purposes rather than consumption.)

I was surprised to find upon decanting that it didn’t smell so great, looked unusually dark and tasted mostly of alcohol, in a tangy, unpleasant way.  Some of that could have been the vintage itself:  different cider and yeast than I use now, and I recall there being some debate even back then about the quality of the finished product compared to prior years.  But it made me suspicious, and I drank only a few sips of it before throwing the rest out.  It’s kind of a bummer, because all along, I’ve had the idea that at some point I would get a few friends together and hold a vertical tasting.  If the maximum undegraded shelf-life of the product is only two or three years, then that idea’s pretty much shot in the ass.

On the other hand, there’s always some variation between bottles, even within the same year.  I’ll have to dig out my testing equipment the next time I decide to reach that far back.

Real Life Principles my Son and I are learning from his first Erector Set

1. The instructions are never as clear as they should be.
2. When the instructions are clear, they are incorrect or impossible to implement.
3. The guy who worked on the job before you was a moron.
4. If it is possible for a dropped part to fall into the assembly, it will.
5. Nothing ever performs as advertised on the trial run.

All About Eve

After nearly three weeks of wrangling, my new computer is finally on-line, and gosh, she’s a beaut:

I watched Pixar’s Wall-E for the first time the night before she arrived, and it blew my doors off, so at the risk of terminal geekdom, I have named her Eve. We’re currently in the “getting to know you” phase.  I was mystified, for instance, as to why she kept insisting that I had 5.1 surround sound instead of two speakers and a subwoofer. (I conjectured that she was in denial, on the grounds that anything less than Dolby THX 7.1 Surround would be an affront to her magnificence.)  Then I realized that Heart Reborn‘s audio color-coding no longer applied, and I had a microphone plugged into one of the speaker jacks.  Whoops!  Sorry, love.

She ran Second Life on Ultra setting with 16x anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and a 256m draw distance, plus at least 8 avis on screen, and the frame rate only dipped below 15 fps when I did 90-degree+ camera turns.  Should be fun to see what she does with something that doesn’t require a broadband feed…

(Oh, and if you’re wondering: she’s plugged into that 4000 joule home theatre surge suppressor I mentioned in Once Bitten, part 1, which runs via extension cord to one of the correctly wired outlets!)