Simian Farmer

Mister Dude

I've been given my first taste of filial rejection.  Been cast aside by my own.  I'm glad I was near the kitchen at the time because I found it hard to swallow and I needed something to drink to lube the old esophagus.  Being spurned by one's own son the first time isn't an easy thing.

I mean, sure, there have been plenty of times when either boy has hurled himself out of my lap in favour of the softer, kinder ministrations of his mother.  Or just wanted to be by himself.  Or preferred a much more entertaining uncle or aunt.  Those I can deal with and have always expected.

But now it's the neighbour kids.  They're more fun to play with.

Last week Declan wanted to be a robot.  He proclaimed this to me in very plain terms and stood gazing up at me with the most guileless eyes.  He didn't even look like he expected me to do something about it -- he KNEW I was going to!

Once my sci-fi, geeky heart contracted in upon itself after blowing wide open with indescribable paternal pride, I did then immediately set to doing something about it.  One square drawer from a small cardboard toy chest became his robot helmet.  I grabbed one of my rolls of duct tape, a utility knife, and pilfered one of the many stray diaper boxes we have loitering around the house.  A few minutes later and an armoured robot body encased my vulnerable son.  A couple of the freshly hewn flaps from the diaper box, when rolled up and taped, made for excellent robot legs after holes were cut for pink, fleshy toes to protrude.

I had nearly finished the second of the cardboard robot arms when the doorbell rang.  "Oh!  It's the kids!" was all Declan knew to exclaim.  He quickly kicked off the robot legs, tossed aside the colourful helmet, and wormed himself out of the body so he could run outside to play with the three neighbour kids who seem to have parasitically glommed on to us ever since we had our garage sale and they hung out in our driveway all day, every day, for three days.  (I don't mind them.  They're good kids.  But they're over here knocking on the door All The Time.) 

It took them a while to learn my name.  They caught on right away to Declan, Tavish, and the energetic dog Jango.  But until just a couple days ago I have been politely referred to as, "Hey!  Mister, uh, Dude.  Can Declan or Tavish come out and play?"

Once The Kids arrived at our front door, Declan underwent an immediate reprioritisation of what it was he wanted to do at that instant.  And lo!  It involved his father not one whit.  Gone was the fervour that had my first boy sitting in the kitchen chair, staring raptly as I made a diaper box transform magically from mundane cardboard into the impervious casing that would protect the tender innards of my excited cybernetic machine-child. 

With a simple, resounding DING-DONG, my ad hoc Dalek disappeared and the Declan that replaced him was also gone.  Fled.  (Well, I could see him playing with The Kids in our backyard, but you get my point.)  It's already time to get used to being the Parental Unit and not Daddy quite as often.  My mother's probably going to get a real kick out of reading this.

*****

Speaking of robots...

Wordless Wednesday (3)

Holy bigger picture, Batman!

More holiday stuff

Lacking the energy, inclination, motivation and creative burst to write something engaging here, I present more photos from the recent holiday type thing the four of us (and the dog) took down south to Lethbridge.

Photos ahoy!

Wordless Wednesday (2)

Click this link to enter the photo's embigulatorium.

Vacations so totally rock!

I'm sort of tired this evening.

It'll be a little past midnight when I finally post this, but we arrived home from our vacation down south this afternoon.  We've done a fair bit of unpacking, some grocery shopping, and our house isn't nearly as messy as the state in which we left my in-laws' place Friday morning.

It was a very busy week away from home, and I don't discount lounging on the couch watching Blade 2 on TBS from being busy.  It totally was.

The easiest sort of holiday recap is the photographical sort, so I'll focus just on the little getaway Amy and I took overnight to Waterton, an hour and a bit away from her folks' house, but a stunningly gorgeous place to go.  Also, as you can see from the photo of the sign on the right, potentially dangerous.

But don't worry -- we both got home alive and relatively unscathed.

Wordless Wednesday (1)

Bigger

A certainty

It would be difficult for me to think of a better way to end the work week prior to a holiday than the actual culmination of this one.

We had a big staff meeting at 4 PM in the heavy equipment shop lunchroom -- partly to honour the guy who left the company a few months ago after 13 years' service, and partly to honour the guy (I work with) who's been here 32 years.  But mostly to partake of free beer and wine on the company dime.

I impressed the hell out of the room full of 50-ish co-workers several times with my party trick of popping the cap off bottles of Corona using my engineering iron ring.

And now, sitting here at my desk with the last half of my own bottle of Corona, all I have left to do is summarize my week's work, put it in a folder, send an email to the general manager who's overseeing that project, and leave it for somebody else to finish while I'm on holidays next week.

I'm ignoring the fact that, two days after I return, I have to give the first of several one-hour presentations before our executive, with little preparation or time to review the material.  Good thing I'm at my best under the gun.

But for now I just have to summarize and send an email.

And finish my beer.

eBayrrassment

As a card-carrying geek, I love me my techie toys.  Fun tasks are made that much funner if they can be performed with a bit of technological hardware that adds an unnecessary element of convolution to an otherwise simple process.  Unfun tasks can be made at least tolerable the same way.  It's part of how my brain works.  Same for a lot of geeks.

Take number-crunching as an example.  As an engineer, I use numbers in some way on a daily basis.  I've become fairly adept at performing simple arithmetic in my head.  Say, for example, that today's gas price is currently sitting at 109.9 cents per litre, and I can tell you pretty quickly that, at 3.8 litres to the gallon, and about 95 cents to the US dollar, I'm looking at paying USD$4 per gallon for that trip out of town this weekend.

For anything much more complicated than that, I'm going to need my calculator.  (Which tells me that number should have been $3.97 per gallon.  Close.)  But not just any calculator will do.  No.  It must be a geeky calculator.  Yes.  Many geeks will admit that the enjoyment of complicating a simple task through technology is further enhanced when that technology is, itself, unnecessarily complex.  This may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, and you're right, it is. But no less true for that.  My own experience can attest to the veracity of that claim.

The simple gas price calculation I made up there?  I did it with my Hewlett Packard 48GX RPN calculator.  I've had it since my first year in university, which pegs it at 14 years old now.  Would you believe me when I claim that I get a greater glow of physical pleasure from using it than I do from a lame old ordinary calculator?  I do.  The buttons on my hp all have a subtle clicking sound to let you know, audibly and tactilely, that they have been fully depressed.  It plots graphs, can perform calculations with complex numbers, has awesome statistical and financial library data, and just about every button has two functions in addition to the main function printed on it.  I can store reams of text in its memory, play video games, transfer data to other 48GXs via infrared sensors (I call it "having hp sex"); hell, it even has its own programming language that I've never used.

So the fact that I rarely do anything more with it than perform arithmetic calculations and unit conversions (like from metres to inches, say), should stand as a testament to the joy I gain from utilising such a surfeit of technological prowess for something so mundane as multiplication.  Like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.  Overkill, sure, but WAY more fun!

But the best part?  The very best part?  Is what the "RPN" stands for in the title.  Reverse Polish Notation.  When I first heard the term I thought it was a joke, but it really isn't.  It's an entirely different way to enter and manipulate data, that at first doesn't come naturally, but is totally intuitive and after some practice turns one inevitably into a calculator snob.

For that gas price conversion, most folks would use a normal calculator and enter:

109.9 x 3.8 x 0.95 =

to come up with the answer of 396.739 cents, or $3.97.

But using RPN on an hp calculator, I do that same calculation:

109.9 [enter]
3.8 x
.95 x

There is no "=" button on an RPN calculator.  Techie, geeky craziness!

(Don't even get me started on the awesomeness of the slide rule I have in my credenza at work.)

The one down side of my lovely 48GX is its rather unwieldy size.  I can't just pack it in my pocket and whip it out for unexpected trigonometric emergencies.  It would barely fit, might break if sat upon, and, in mixed company, might appear grossly inappropriate if my khakis were viewed from the wrong angle.

Enter the hp 42S.

It's a pocket calculator with all the basic functionality of its larger sibling, the same crazy Polish data entry (see that big ol' "ENTER" button?), yet stuffed into a compact case that can be discretely thrust into a shirt pocket.

The problem here is that these bad boys were discontinued in the early '90s and the only way to get your hands on one is through second hand sales.  I've had a hankerin' for one for a while now, so I finally broke down and checked 'em out on eBay.  There weren't a lot there, but some.

I put in a bid, crossed my fingers, and waited to see if I got that email telling me I'd won my auction.  A week later I got that email.  I had entered the winning bid on my item.  I was to contact the seller to arrange payment and delivery for my hp 42S Users Manual.  Excuse me?!

I ended up paying for, and two days ago receiving, a 272 page manual featuring, on its cover, the calculator I thought I had won.  I spent about 30 bucks on it, plus shipping from Florida.  Turns out the actual calculators typically go for over 200 bucks on eBay, so popular, and rare, are they.  I stuffed the manual in my desk drawer, beside the even larger manual for my 48GX.

I'm not sure yet how I'll console myself, but it'll probably be more complicated than it needs to be.

Anatomy of a stag party

I think I was about 21 when I went to my first stag party.  The groom and his wife are still together and doing well, with two girls nearly eight and six years old.  Leading up to the wedding, in somewhat stereotypical fashion, the groom didn't crave much input into the details of the wedding.  His only non-negotiable terms were that his 1980s Han Solo and Princess Leia action figures were to be used as the cake topper, and that the post-vow processional out of the hall would be to the strains of Darth Vader's march. 

That man knew where his priorities were at.

The past decade and more has shown me that stag parties evolve as the participating fellows age and, ostensibly, mature.

 

A few observations triggered by this past weekend, on the difference in stags held in one's early 20s versus mid-30s:

1. It's really awkward going to the peeler bar in a group comprised of more than one discernible generation.  Moral platitudes and propriety aside, the crushing reality thinly veiled behind the veneer of physical objectification presented at such establishments is rudely ripped from the curtain rod when you go with your dad.  Or your best friend's dad.  Or you go with a group of friends after class at university and accidentally run into your dad - attending his co-worker's stag party - and you realise you told him you were studying for finals.  (You know... I'm just sayin'.)

I'm rather glad that there was none of that this weekend.  The subject came up about going to a gentlemen's club, but Herr Groom opted for more Ryan Coke and karaoke, and we were all totally down with that.

2. There was a sort of smaller pre-stag barbeque on Friday afternoon, and when I got to my buddy's house there was a Post-It note on the front door reading, "Come on in."  When the real stag started up at the same house Saturday evening that same note was there, but it had been modified to read, "Come on in (mofo's!)"

Of course my first thought as I strode across the threshold was that should be plural, not possessive!

3. With the rare exception, every man present on the weekend was, to some degree or other, in a committed relationship.  And every man had a cell phone.  AND!  At least once, every man could be found chatting quietly to the other half of that relationship.  Not a single guy bitched about being 'checked up on'.  (Some made the call themselves!)

(Uh, I was asked, at about a quarter past midnight, to stop by the 7-11 to pick up some milk, since we were out and would need some for breakfast.  I know you were wondering.)

4. A stag party populated by geeks is a startling thing at times.  Unencumbered by our tolerantly loving and far less geeky counterparts, discussion wended its way toward the tragic discontinuation of Dragon Magazine fully as much as attention did toward the copy of Maxim floating about with Lacey Chabert on the cover.  I didn't realise she was that young chick from Party of Five.  (Holy crap... did SHE grow up!)

What was worse (um, yeah) was when some bit of geek couture eluded the perceptions of one member in conversation, who had to show his ignorance, or lose track of the conversation.  Either way, the smack-down was almost always a reverberating, "You just got AD&D'd!!"

That, to me, is both really, really funny, and really sort of sad.  But way more with the funny.

5.  We hit upon a wonderful idea this time around: two entertainment centres going at the same time!  Past stag parties nearly devolved into fights over whether to plug in the karaoke or the Xbox.  (The fights never coalesced since nobody brought any dice and we couldn't roll initiative to see who got to attack first.  You probably think I'm joking.)

But this time, we set up the karaoke in the basement and the Xbox360 in the living room and everybody was happy.  I think I'd like Guitar Hero a lot more if the unit were set up for a lefty.  I hear you can do it, but that would have inconvenienced everyone else.

6.  Nearly every single man there took the time to use our hosts computer to check his email / Facebook profile / surf for Youtube videos at least once.  Let me say this: at two o'clock in the morning, there is nothing in the world quite as funny as a sheep who's had a skull mask put over his head and trots around the pen scaring the living crap out of all the other sheep.

7.  Not a single man passed out or was forced to reverse his gastrointestinal processes.  Many of us drove home.  I ended the night lounging on the sofa in the basement, keeping company with the groom, and serenading the rest of the house with the sweet strains of Elvis Presley.  Two microphones and a full disk of the King's music.

I'm accustomed to ending evenings like that hoarse from shouting at the bar, not from crooning soulfully to Love Me Tender.

**********

On an unrelated but still musical note, I have to share a video of Pearl Jam's Yellow Ledbetter, with lyrics captioned completely in mondegreens.  It's worth the view just for the part about "Make me fries..."

A new leaf

A new month, a new banner, and a slightly better attitude than the one that led to the morose sentiment that I must have implied in the previous post.  (Egad!  I normally do a much better job of responding to comments, so lachrymose was I.)

I took Tavish to the local outdoor pool after we went grocery shopping yesterday, and with the temperature threatening the 30 degree mark, it was a great end to the day.  (Well, I may have forgotten to feed him any supper before we went shopping.  Or again before we went to the pool.  But you should have seen him stuff that cheese sandwich into his mouth at bedtime while his mother gave me a tolerant glare.  Hoo boy!)

Amy and Declan were at his weekly gymnastics class.  Or, as Dex likes to say, "Fun-nastics!"

It's awesome that we live two blocks from that pool.  All a dad and his kid needs are two pairs of swim trunks, a towel, and four bucks to get in.  (Or, in my case, $3.25 and a winning smile, with a promise that I'd be good for the difference.)  I didn't even bother to wear my sandals.  The opportunity to stroll around barefoot was way too tempting.  All in all, I was in a really good mood last night.  I'm pretty sure I still am.

Here, then, are some happy fun pictures from the past month.