Posts from 2001

Kat and I just returned from the company retreat to Curaçao, which was quite lovely and very warm but also lacked Internet access.  There was also a distinct lack of stuff for me to do besides sit around, read books, and swim.  Sounds like heaven, right?  Wrong.  My head was in danger of imploding, to reference Babylon 5 once more, and frankly the island pace doesn’t suit me.  I don’t care how relaxed life is down there: it should not take fifteen minutes to screw up an order for three scoops of ice cream in a bowl.  I expect that level of incompetence to consume no more than five minutes, tops.

On the other hand, I did at long last learn to snorkel and got relatively good at it, so I was able to enjoy gliding over coral formations, minor shipwrecks, and brightly colored fish while the sun warmed my (SPF45 and T-shirt protected) back.  So I can’t say the trip was a total loss.

• Thursday, 29 March 2001 was published on Thursday, March 29th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been no replies.

Not much new to say this week.  We had an out-of-town friend visit us over the weekend, which was really nice, and Kat and I have been discussing plans for home improvements this spring and summer.  It isn’t so much what we want to do as what we want to do this year, and what we want to put off for following years.  I’m also starting to assemble my thoughts on the subject of renegotiating my home finanacing, what with interest rates as low as they’re about to be.  Hey, if we’re going to be forced into a downturn by (insert your preferred scapegoat here), we may as well benefit from it in some fashion.

• Monday, 19 March 2001 was published on Monday, March 19th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

At the risk of making myself sound like a fanboy, I’m going to quote Babylon 5, specifically the end of the last episode of the third season:

All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.  This had the feeling of both.

And so it is for me, at the moment.  Life is a continual surprise to me—not in the sense it is for golden retrievers, thank you, but just in terms of how it never unfolds in a predictable way.  In the last few days the surprise has deepened into a strange species of wonder and a muted sense of surreality.

• Monday, 12 March 2001 was published on Monday, March 12th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

The lead story on CNN.com had the following lead-in:

As the House of Representatives debated, President Bush said today he was “confident they’ll do the right thing” on a Republican tax bill that will reconfigure the tax rate structure.

Somehow, I think the President and I have a very different vision of the outcome of the House doing “the right thing.”  (How like a conservative to assume that there is only one “right thing.”)  If you’re at all interested, one of my co-workers did an analysis of the effective raise people would receive as a result of the competing tax plans.  Note that the x-axis is logarithmic, so each major tick is a tenfold increase in yearly income.  It turns out that (if you believe these numbers) the very poor get a 5% raise, as do people with an annual income of $600,000.  While I can’t absolutely guarantee the accuracy of this chart, I dug through the numbers and they seem right—plus, the lines are more or less what you’d expect from each party’s position.  Of course, the beauty of this kind of chart is that each side of the debate sees it as ringing support for their position.

Gonna be a long four years.

• Thursday, 8 March 2001 was published on Thursday, March 8th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

I surfed past Molly’s Web site and found that I’d landed (as had Kat) on Molly’s new “Famous People I Know” page (thanks Molly!), so I started wandering through some of the other sites she has listed.  Some people I know, some I don’t.  I came across a striking contemplation from a person I do know, Leslie Veen: “Is [this] what being a part of a democracy means—taking turns at cringing at the one who occupies the oval office?”  Amen, sister!  Can I get an ay-men from the audience?  Thank you.

The HWG class is settling down into some sort of interesting groove.  Week 2 went much better than Week 1, mostly because I gave the students something to actually work with, instead of grilling them on theory.  Hands-on learning—what a concept!  So we’re going to stick with that mode for the remainder of the course.  I’ve heard from a few students that while they’re struggling and sometimes confused, they’re really learning something and enjoying it.  On the other hand, roughly half the students have yet to send in any of their homework, which is a little bothersome.  Well, I’ll deal with that in a bit.

• Monday, 5 March 2001 was published on Monday, March 5th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I was going to post more political material, but realized that I’m either becoming more activist, in which case I’ll soon be writing plenty of political stuff elsewhere; or else I’m going to stop caring again, in which case why bore us both with the transitory partisan nattering?  Like you need me to tell you what to think—I can barely figure out what I think.  Anyway, the catalyst for this near-ramble was an article titled “Education, Texas Style” which I found on CNN.com.  Feel free to read it and draw your own conclusions.  Then share them with me, or your friends, or your dog, or whoever.

The CSS2 class I’m teaching is now a week underway, and I get the distinct impression I’ve overwhlemed the students pretty thoroughly, in a big fly-meets-sledgehammer kind of way.  This was not my intention, I assure you, but I believe I’ve done it anyway.  I’m going to try some new approaches in week 2, to see if they help the students reach better understanding of the concepts we’re covering.  We’ll see.

Final edits on both new books should wrap this week, and the titles should hit shelves within a month or so.  In theory.  Then I get to think about things like “watching videos” and “relaxing,” which are oddly familiar terms I’ve heard other people use and have resolved to investigate more closely.

• Monday, 26 February 2001 was published on Monday, February 26th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I was recently asked what I thought, as a liberal-type not-quite-Democrat, of the investigations into the Marc Rich pardon.  I hadn’t actually thought about it much, but was surprised to discover I had an immediate response: “From what I’ve heard, the pardon stinks to high heaven.  But unless there’s some reasonable chance of prosecuting Clinton for it, I would ask the Honorable Congressmen to please stop masturbating in public.”  Besides, isn’t anyone bothered by Clinton’s pardon of his own brother for drug-related charges?  Is nepotism less reprehensible than bribery?  (Note: I have no idea if there was any bribery involved in the Rich case or not, but that’s what everyone seems to be screaming about.)

For the love of Mike, people, he couldn’t be convicted while he was in office and had much bigger things to distract him, like nuclear proliferation and terrorists.  What makes anyone think the teflon will suddenly peel away now that he’s a private citizen with plenty of time and money to devote to his own defense?  The only thing conservatives are managing to do it perpetuate media coverage of a man they’ve worked so hard to bury.  This is your big chance, dittoheads.  You wanted Clinton gone.  So why do you keep dragging him back into the spotlight?

Irony patrol: the guy heading up the pardon investigation is none other than Dan Burton (R-Ind.).  Yep, mister “Bill Clinton is a scumbag; did I mention I fathered a child out of wedlock during an adulterous affair?” is once again presuming to pass judgment on the morality and decency of our ex-President.  Pot, this is kettle; kettle, pot.

• Monday, 19 February 2001 was published on Monday, February 19th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Happy Valentine’s Day, or whatever.

Okay, I’m not actually bitter this year (for once!), but the holiday still drags at me a bit.  I think it’s the obligatory nature of the whole thing, the sense that if I don’t observe the holiday then I will suffer mightily for it.  And that’s not even coming from Kat, who is perfectly happy to buy herself a present and then say, “Look what you got me!”  I love her for that (and a whole lot more).  What I’m talking about is the general all-pervasive air of expectation which the holiday creates all on its own.  It isn’t nearly so bad as the anti-joy field which Christmas seems to generate, but it’s still there, taunting me.  Like, I don’t know, some kind of taunting thing.  Hm, apparently today is not a day for brilliance in letters.

Anyway, time to fill in the blanks in what’s been a very blankless life.  Kat started a new job two days ago, working as a labor and delivery nurse at a hospital in Bedford, and is interviewing for midwifery positions in and around the Cleveland area.  So she’s exchanged the stress of having no job for the stress of having to get up early in the morning.  She’s also been doing some volunteer work which takes two nights a week, so some days are fifteen hours long.  You’d think she was in my line of work.  Not that I pull fifteen-hour days, of course, but I hear that some people do.  She’s also been asked to write an article on Kangaroo Care for an online resource, and I suspect that once it’s done we’ll be reprinting it here on the site.

Speaking of writing, I’m wrapping up two books in the next week.  The easy one is the CSS Pocket Reference for O’Reilly & Associates, which required not much more than repackaging portions of the first book, polishing the text a bit, and running with it.  The second, the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference for Osborne/McGraw-Hill, required substantially more work in many ways.  For example, I had to figure out some of the nuances of parts of CSS2 which I’ve never really visited.  Since it isn’t a tutorial, though, it meant that I could just concentrate on explaining properties and values and not worrying about stuff like illustrations.  I suspect they’ll both hit shelves within a month of each other.  And, of course, there’s the start of my HWG-sponsored CSS2 class this coming Monday.  Is this too much Eric all at once?  You decide.

• Wednesday, 14 February 2001 was published on Wednesday, February 14th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Books and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.