March 2002 Archives

Saturday started off with rain but turned into a nice day. Archie and Jessica came over and we took Homer to the Walnut Creek park for a walk. It was a bit muddy and the creek turned out to be running fairly high. At the main crossing the water was too high for us, although Homer splashed around in it - a bit cautiously - with some other dogs. We eventually found a crossing - Archie had to carry Jessica over since she didn't have the right shoes. We saw bluebonnets and other wild flowers and the trees are starting to fill in with leaves. The second creek crossing was a breeze.

When we got to the last creek crossing, the water there was running pretty high, too. We'd been there several times before, and Homer has crossed it before many times over the rocks that span it. Well, for some reason, yesterday he thought that there was solid ground under the opaque water surface a leisurely jumped off a rock into it. To his great surprise (and our greater amusement) he completely went under the surface, only to immediately pop up and, fairly calmly, swim across the creek and get out of the water. We were rolling on the ground laughing - the surprised expression on his face and the hair plastered to his head were just priceless.

He had the last laugh, though, because Jessica stumbled into the water after a log, which I had just praised as being "incredibly stable" went under the surface when she stepped on it. So she got one of her new shoes wet, despite all our efforts.

After we got home, we grilled some wurst and finally finished off the last of the créme brûlè.

Our Bookgroup party was a success. Jennifer's menu selection (portabellos stuffed with fajitas and créme brûlè) was perfect. It turns out that our division of labor works very well for both of us. She did most of the prep work (which I don't like and at which I suck) and I did most of the cooking (which I enjoy) - allowing Jennifer to be the involved hostess to our guests. As I anticipated, the créme brûlè turned out on the runny side, but it wasn't much of an issue. The caramelizing of the sugar was awesome, everything I really thought it would be - fire and sugar rock!

Although not everyone finished the book, most of us liked Tracks quite a bit. It took me a while to get going with the book, but once I figured out who was who, the characters became very enjoyable. And as it turned out, the book wasn't as much of a downer as I feared - although there probably isn't any literature about early 20th century American Indians that has bubbly happy endings (at least I hope not).

Which brings me to next month's book selection. Again, being the lazy person that I am, I let Jennifer select the books so I really can't complain too much about the pick, The Vintner's Luck. It teaches me to be more proactive in this area, next time we're hosting there probably won't be any "gay angel" books in the selection.

We finally found an excuse to use my kitchen torch and thus are serving Créme Brûlè at tonight's Bookgroup meeting at the house. Last night I made the custard based on the recipe that came with my torch. The recipe was supposedly for four portions, I tripled it only to discover that their "portion" is big enough to feed an army. So after filling 12 ramekins I still had about a third of the goo in my bowl. I scrambled for more dishes but ended up with two cookie sheets in the oven instead of one. And I forgot to cover the dishes with aluminum foil. So the custards now look all bubbly on top and some of them might not be completely gelled.

I'm sure it's going to taste just fine (heavy cream + egg yolks + vanilla + sugar = yummy) - I just hope that no one's going to get sick. Well if anyone is, it's going to be us, since we'll be living on créme brûlè for the foreseeable future.

I talked with Shannan for close to an hour last week to follow up on the trip report she emailed about her climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We also talked about our wedding preparations (or lack there of) and I asked her if they had any plans. She said that they'd talked about it, vaguely, but that there was no planning going on.

Then last night Shannan calls to let us know that John popped the question! I'm very happy for both of them - I think they make a terrific couple and complement each other very well. It seems that they'll even beat us to the wedding, since they plan to get married before John's school year starts in the fall. Of course, if anyone can organize a wedding on short notice, Shannan is that person. Jfer and I think that she would make a pretty good wedding planner - maybe that's something she can consider as a career.

I've finished reading the Web Design Workshop book Jennifer got me for my B-Day. The book is way cool - I have a couple of her other books and they are all excellent as well.

It made me realize that I need some better image editing software, though. I've been using wwwArt for way too long. It was only $20 so I'm not complaining (too much) but I want something better. I'm thinking of Photoshop Elements or Fireworks. Photoshop is a bit too pricey.

Jennifer continues to maintain the flower bed in front of the house (where the sun don't shine). Unfortunately the faucet conveniently located right next to it has been out of service for the last couple of years. The water is there, but the axle was completely stripped so you couldn't use the handle - instead you'd have to use a vice clamp or pliers to open/close the water.

I bough a new valve a couple of years ago, but never successfully installed it. Partly because the old one was impossible to get off (it's all corroded and crusty and there is no easy access with a wrench) and partly because I really had no need for the faucet. I let the grass fend for itself (the weeds are winning) and take my car to a car wash.

Well, now there was a reason to use it and I tackled the problem, again. I still couldn't unscrew the old valve - the nut on the pipe was to far in the wall to grip with my adjustable wrench (I didn't have an exact fit). So I unscrewed the internals of the valve and took them to Home Depot. After we found the section where they have faucets I quickly discovered that they don't have the internal part I wanted to replace. They didn't have a matching valve that I could strip for the internal part, either, and the valve handles they had would not fit on my old valve :-(

We decided on one more try to replace the entire valve (and thus bought two large wrenches to make sure one would fit) and if that wouldn't work, to permanently use a vise clamp instead (so we bought a mini vise clamp).

When we got home, I discovered that both wrenches were too large (so now I have two shiny Husky wrenches 3/4" and 7/8", if anyone is interested). But, I suddenly remembered the hole in the wall in my garage through which I could access the pipe. So I removed some blocking, applied brute force, and finally successfully removed the old valve. The new one went on without a problem and now we have a working faucet next to Jennifer's flower bed.

It only took a couple of years and $30 of tools that I didn't need.

Last night we finalized the spreadsheet of addresses for the Zilker Clubhouse requests. I "learned" ho to do print merge in Word (OK, it's pretty trivial) and printed out 56 letters and then hand fed the printer 56 envelopes. We folded and stuffed and were glad that part was over.

Today, Jennifer dropped them of and learned that we can only submit one request! She had actually called earlier to check, but apparently she was misinformed. If we had known this, we would have snuck in a couple of requests that looked unrelated. Well, we'll know when we're looking for a facility for our anniversary, I guess.

Still, we're hoping that we'll manage to get one of the places, anyway.

I had another birthday on Sunday. Jennifer helped me celebrate by dragging me out of bed and making me help her plant green stuff in the planter in front of the house. Since it's in perpetual shade, maybe we should just plant plastic flowers, as Lynn Ann mentioned.

We had great brunch with Carlos and Dianne and their brood. Both girls are precious and Carlos and Dianne looked great, too. After lunch Jennifer gave my birthday present, Robin Williams' Web Design Workshop. We then went and saw The Devil's Backbone at the Dobie. We (or rather I) really wanted to see Little Otik, but we arrived to late. Maybe some other time (I try to see Czech movies whenever one makes it to town). Still, the movie was great, sort of like The Sixth Sense meets Lord of the Flies.

So Andrea Yates, the mother who drowned her five children in a psychotic episode, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. It took the jury just four and a half hours to convict her and less than an hour to sentence her. It had taken a grand jury over eight hours to decide that she was even competent to stand trial.

The whole case makes me mad at the system. Yates' insanity plea is pretty much impossible to prove in Texas, and especially not in Harris County, the capital of capital punishment. I don't think I know anyone with delusional psychosis so I can't speak from personal experience. But if Andrea in her illness perceived her delusions as realistically as did John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, then I fail to see how the jury could hold her culpable (there is a difference between responsibility and culpability).

While the guilty verdict was disappointing, I wasn't surprised about the sentencing. The jury had to unanimously answer YES to two questions in order to convict Yates to death. A) that Yates was a future danger and B) that there were no mitigating circumstances against executing her. They answered no to the first one (and thus didn't have to address the second one).

What really blows my mind, though, is that the prosecutor, Kaylyn Williford said she thought they could answer the two questions posed to them in a way that would result in death by injection. How can she really believe this? Even if you think that Yates was a future danger, how could you not consider her mental illness a mitigating circumstance?

Do we pay prosecutors based on their conviction rate - with a nice fat bonus when they manage to score a death sentence? Or now that Oklahoma has overtaken us, is Texas trying to get back to being number one in execution? Someone please explain this to me.

So, once again, tougher gas mileage standards have been defeated. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D) said she believed it was:

"good national policy" to avoid imposing new rules on automakers that the industry says would spell the end of low-gas-mileage sport utility vehicles.

Well, yeah, improving fuel standards would spell the end of low-gas-mileage SUVs. That's the whole friggin idea! And since the consumers obviously want SUVs, it would then force the manufacturers to come up with ways to make high-gas-mileage SUVs.

But hey, that would cut into profits. And it might make it difficult for some people (Mikulski perhaps?) to get re-elected.

Fuel's Paradise and Just Say Go! vocalize pretty well how I view this whole thing.

Blogger has been a pain lately - the main reason I went Pro is spell checking and it's currently not working for me. And Blogger over all has been a little flaky the last couple of days (apparently ever since Ev went to SXSW). Although I'm probably not going to jump ship any time soon, I've been looking at some alternatives. It seems that Movable Type has been receiving the greatest accolades.

So I gave it a try and installed MT for a test drive. Installation is not too difficult for the savvy and what you get is pretty amazing. The editing environment is very polished (I love their sense of style) and very full featured. I did some test posts using their default template.

They're supposed to be releasing a version 2.0 in a week or two, so I may take a look at it again in a couple of months (I'm a software developer and I know how stable new releases are). Still, depending on how Blogger is in the near future, I may switch to MT at some point.

I heard on NPR this morning that the unknown Afghan refugee girl whose piercing eyes stared from a National Geographic cover in 1985 was recently found by the photographer. She still has the eerie eyes, but looks a little less haunted.

I hope we keep these pictures in mind as we think of Afghanistan's future and our involvement in it.

OK, the "for" and "against" HP/Compaq Merger campaigns are freaky. Is seems like every day there is a full page add in the paper, either for or against the merger. And today, I'm seeing frigging banner adds that point me to VoteTheHPWay.com! And this is financed by HP itself. No wonder they're losing money.

Speaking of voting, you did go and exercised your suffrage in the primaries, right? Even if you didn't, please make sure you do in November. If you wonder why you should bother, take a look at what elections look like in some other places. It makes Florida voting look almost democratic.

We saw Puccini's La Fanciulla del West at the ALO. It is strage seeing an opera taking place in the American West sung in Italian. Still, it was a nice enough show. As usual, the stage was impressive. We loved the snow drifting off and on, it really made you feel like it was winter. The voices were strong and the acting was well done as well. The artists actually fit their roles, something that doesn't always happen in opera which sometimes makes the tragedic love plots less believable. And for once, the story did have a happy ending.

This was not my favorite opera of the season (so far I liked A Streetcar Named Desire best, but we still have Rigoletto) but it was interesting hearing a work by Puccini that obviously influenced many modern musicals a movie scores (I swear I heard part of the Star Wars theme in there).

Next season will bring La Boheme and La Traviata which are both lovely and tragic. They'll also show Dead Man Walking, a recent American piece, as part of the season and then ALO will co-sponsor a show at the Ervin Center in conjunction with the Chinese Opera.

We watched the 9/11 special on CBS on Sunday. It was a fascinating program - and would have been even as just a firefighter rookie documentary even without the disaster. I wondered how the fire department actually delt with and organized the response to what was happening. Lots of chaos, communications problems, bewilderment but still a sense that they had a job and they'd do it. You got a good sense into what life in a fire house is and how the loss of so many colegues affected everyone.

What really impressed me, though, was what was not shown in the program. There was none of the sacharine over-sentimental crap nor the jingoism that seemingly permeates anything written or shown about 9/11. There were no gruesome exploitative shots, either. There was plenty of tragedy to be seen but nothing used for effect. A very good documentary indeed.

So I've spend a couple of hours hacking in PHP and have pretty much rewritten my photo album to be mostly dynamic. I've also posted my pictures from Brazil - although I should get rid of the duplicates, but I'll probably not bother.

Some of my favorites include Olinda, Carnaval, wedding, at (and with) Brennand, confluence at Manaus, double and reflecting rainbows, sunset 1 and sunset 2 (that's bug spray, not sweat :-) on the Amazone, bonding with a caiman and parrot pictures.

I'm coding my pages in BBEdit but would like to get some web design software that would help me with visual design and site organization. Plus stuff I can recommend to the people I play tech support for their web sites. I have FrontPage 2000 on my laptop and have just downloaded an eval version of DreamWeaver 4. If you have experience with web development software, please let me know what you do and don't like about it. I'm interested in both PC and Mac software. And anything that plays nice with PHP would be especially appreciated.

So my hosting empire is expanding. I'm hosting Meredith's TexInTheCity domains and I just signed up Danny's DanielLucio domain. So, I guess I'm building links to the Texan social network in New York City and to the political arena in Texas. I'm going to go far...

This weekend, the citizens of Switzerland voted to join the United Nations. That's right, despite the fact that Geneva houses the second most UN offices (after New York City), Switzerland has waited 57 years before joining. However, Switzerland has been a dues paying member for many years (and they actually pay their dues) and are involved on many of UN's commissions and invariably follow UN's resolutions.

Congratulations on making it official!

This leaves Vatican as the only country that's not in the UN.

We watched my DVD of The American President on Friday night and it was a surreal experience. The movie is filled with actors that you see on TV (is Michael J Fox really that tiny?) and quite a few of them are currently in The West Wing, which we follow religiously. It's weird, though, because they play the different roles. West Wing's President Martin Sheen is the Chief of Staff in AP and WW's Security Advisor is AP's Press Secretary. Besides that, though, the plots are oddly similar. I wonder, are there any presidential movies or TV shows where the good guys in the White House are not liberals? I don't remember what persuasion the president in Wag The Dog was.

BTW, my favorite movie dealing with politics and election is and probably always will be Bob Roberts with Tim Robbins. If you haven't seen it, go and rent it. It should be viewed every two years around the time campaigning for elections starts.

I'd been meaning to see STOMP for years but never quite made it. As part of her entertainment series, Jennifer took me to see it at the Paramount last night. I liked it a lot, although it wasn't as kinetic as I expected it to be. Actually, I preferred the quieter numbers, especially the one where they used rubber pipes, tuned to different pitches due to their varied length.

Still, it's cool listening to all the percussion going on all at once and noting that all the complicated syncopation is performed by eight distinct performers, each doing their own part. It reminded me a bit of a bell choir - except without the stodginess. I wonder how difficult it is to keep your own beat when you're part of an ensemble like that (not to mention all the tap and other dancing they do while they're producing the sounds).