101

Now that I have a Zip drive in hand and working, I’m going through a box of old Zip disks before I throw them out.

Scoff all you want, but I have found some treasures to hoard. I know have a backup of my CompuServe account (I was member 73144,2466). I found a few documents left over from my time as a sysop in the Dinosaur Forum. Here’s one:

Making Fossils – The Home Game

This recipe has been tested and actually worked. Still, I take no liability if you burn down your kitchen.

Get a thick wax candle and carve it into a bone with a knife. Try to get a bone that does not have wick in it. Get a big foil roasting pan (the size used for turkeys) and carefully cut a hole in the bottom just large enough for a piece of wide-bore heat-resistant tubing. Stick a piece of the tubing in so that about an inch sticks up, seal it in place with some heat resistant sealant and trim off the bottom.

Balance the wax bone on the top of the tube and seal it there with sealant.

Fill the roasting pan with enough plaster or something to cover everything. Be careful not to jostle the wax bone.

When the plaster is dry, stick the whole shebang into a hot oven (check the melting point of candle wax for how hot). Place the contraption over a dripping pan. If this works, the hot wax will run out the tube leaving a bone-shaped hole in the plaster. You might have to shake the thing to get all the wax to run out.

When the wax has run out, let the pan cool. Get a lot of castable resin and pour it in the tubing so that it fills the space where the wax used to be (I guess you can also use molten bronze instead). Let it dry.

After it dries – voila! The plaster is the sediment, the heat is the water leaching out the bone and the resin is rock minerals replacing the lost bone. Kind of.

Good luck.

I also found an archived copy of WarBirds 1.11r3, which measured a tiny 38 MB in size. I’d need a System 9 emulator to run it, but it’s neat to have.

Best of all, I found some photos I don’t have elsewhere, taken in the Bahamas in the winter of 2001-02. Here’s one.

Bonus strange conversation:

Elvi and I went out to a new bar with some of her choir mates last night. (Given its location, I guess the bar will have a lifespan measured in months.) We were the last of our group to leave but Elvi went to the bathroom just before we did.

I half-stood, reaching into my front pocket for my car keys but awkwardly sat down again at our table when I realized it would be a few minutes. A guy was standing there as if he wanted to grab the table for some other group of friends. I told him he was welcome to sit down.

He sat right next to me. A few seconds later he amiably said, “You look like you need to have a giant fucking shit.”

I explained that I’d decided to leave my keys in my pocket until my wife came out of the bathroom. At that, he got up and left.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that he had pitched me some sort of come-on. The bar was very gay-friendly. It’s the only explanation I can think of.

Child Two and I took I took Child Three and some of his friends to paintball today. A grand time was had by all, especially by those of us who escaped without wounds.

I was shot once in the neck (by Child Three!) but recovered quickly. I was shot once in my bad knee by a paintball that didn’t burst and that hurt for a minute.

Child Two and I formed an effective fire team in the latter games. We got ourselves into enfilade positions and ripped through the opposition like the killers we are.

My favourite moment of the day came when one kid crept up to the corner of a building to get a shot at Child Two. I let loose a volley of five shots and all landed. I saw my target dance a little and disappear behind the wall. I learned afterward that four of my shots had hit his hand and made him drop his gun – uh, drop his marker. My trophy:

Child Three got hit three times on the bicep in the last fight:

It look like two hits, but the top welt is two hits stacked. The lower, fainter welt shows up much better this evening than it did when I took the photo.

Here’s a masked “before” photo and one from a break in the action.

This is the time of month when I list the accomplishments of my fantasy baseball team.

These were my starters at the beginning of the year, and I added Marco Estrada whom I picked up at the start of May:

Mat Latos
Ted Lilly
Jordan Zimmermann
Jhoulys Chacin
Erik Bedard
Chris Narveson
Corey Luebke
Chris Carpenter
Marco Estrada

These were my healthy starters Sunday night:

Mat Latos
Erik Bedard
Jordan Zimmermann

Narveson and Luebke are out for the year. Chacin and Carpenter are still not throwing. Lilly and Estrada are expected to miss weeks, possibly months.

I added Travis Wood on Monday but there’s no recovering from this disaster.

It doesn’t help that my power has disappeared.

.281 batting average (barely 2nd)
71 HR (tied for 2nd)
295 runs (2nd)
272 RBI (4th)
46 SB (7th)
4.04 ERA (9th)
1.32 WHIP (9th)
306 K (10th)
21 wins (7th)
9 saves (tied for 7th but not for long)

Last time, I established that I come from a line of antagonists. This post, we move from the theoretical to the practical.

A few months ago, I discovered that Navigon was on sale in the US iTunes Store for around half price. I bought it, I used it, I like it. Setting a target address is a little annoying – you have to set the city, then the street, then the number instead of typing or pasting it all in at once. Other than that, and a few pronunciation errors, it works great.

(I think the Quebec map has built-in French pronunciation, which reads “chemin” perfectly but requires five syllables for “Mountain Sights”.)

In February, I head about Waze, which is a free, crowd-sourced GPS navigation app. You can use it for free and live with the reasonably correct maps. Or you be like me and start editing those maps to make them better.

From what I gather, Waze started with a satellite map and had an algorithm (or slave farm) find and plot the streets. After that, users took over and continue to edit the maps into shape. We name streets, set the street directions and types, mark legal and illegal turns, etc. The central Waze brain monitors drives and alerts editors to mistakes they may not know about. Drivers can also send an alert to the system to be dealt with, whether that alert is an incorrect map issue or a traffic jam. The app requires a minuscule amount of data transmission but it’s worth it. Map-editing is perfect for those of us with compulsion issues.

There is a slight problem when it comes to editing: too many cooks spoil the broth. While the Waze wiki provides some guidelines for editors, there is no firm standard for mapping and no oversight. This leads to problems, which is where the antagonism comes in. Remember the antagonism? It’s between cooks.

Some people get a kick out of editing the maps, and for us, there are two primary annoyances. The first is idiots who go on the map and make global changes to amass Waze points with no consideration for accuracy. That’s why, for example, the current map features “Ville St. Laurent”, “Montréal (Saint-Laurent)”, and Saint Luarent”, among other variations for the Montreal borough and former independent city of Saint-Laurent. It’s a huge pain to fix that to the accepted standard (the second one, by the way).

Montreal provides rare challenges to map editors because of the language situation. Street names of more than one word take a dash according to the Quebec government’s strict toponomy, but the cities don’t always follow that rule on their signs. French names take a hyphen (Boulevard René-Levesque Ouest) but English ones don’t (Avenue Mountain Sights). The island is Île Perrot; the city is Île-Perrot.

One of the features/bugs of the usage of Montreal street names is that rarely do we use the generic part of the street name. We say, “Take a left on Saint-Denis,” not “Take a left on Rue Saint-Denis.” We say, “It’s near Décarie and Queen-Mary,” not “It’s near Boulevard Décarie and Chemin Queen-Mary,” or, heaven forbid, “It’s at the corner of Décarie Boulevard and Queen Mary Road.”

Of course, when you use Google Maps to look up street names, all the streets are listed with the generic indicator. Official municipality maps, such as Dorval’s, often skip that formality. Driving and looking at street signs doesn’t always help as many of those are also missing the generic indicator for reasons found at the intersection of budgets and anti-English politics.

It’s my contention, then, that to make a better GPS app means taking into account these real-life considerations – but I’m just one cook.

Two super-users constantly “patrol” and edit the map of Montreal in Waze. The Waze forum allows users to send messages so I know about about the other guy. He’s a francophone Montreal police officer (that’s a bit redundant…). He goes by something like Duff, so let’s call him that.

Duff is all about the rules. I’m all about accessibility. If it were up to him, all roads would have their full names. We have battled a bit about Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Luc, which to me is a ridiculous thing to put on a map when everyone just calls it “Côte-Saint-Luc”. Similarly, who cares if it’s Avenue O’Brien, Rue O’Brien, Chemin O’Brien or Boulevard O’Brien? The advantage of not putting down the street-type designations is twofold: it cuts down on map clutter and it better matches the street signs that drivers see.

Duff disagrees. Early in my Waze phase, we battled over naming, until coming to an unspoken agreement. I stopped changing the names of major streets (e.g. Rue Saint-Urbain) and he stopped renaming minor streets and streets with ridiculously long full names (e.g. Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine). Together we have converted E and O to Est and Ouest, St. to Saint (to avoid Waze pronouncing the abbreviation as “street”), and put missing French accents into town names (Montréal, not Montreal). We also have begun using abbreviations for boulevard (Boul.) and avenue (Ave.), both of which Waze pronounces correctly, in English at least.

Waze has a problem with accents. It pronounces Décarie as “Dee-Ay-copyright-caree”. I thinks it’s better to leave the accents in and wait for the system to catch up than to poke language purists. The Waze disagreements are language issues, but not typical Quebec head-butting language issues.

After I capitulated on streets like Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue Jean-Talon Est and Ouest and he left the Côtes alone, we have an uneasy ceasefire, with hotspots. Duff and I are still at war in Verdun and parts north. I think he wants to set full names on every street that is indicated by an exit. We bombard each other with changes over des Irlandais, Riverside, Mill, Oak, Marc-Cantin, etc. He also likes to invade Lasalle and change the lonely streets west of Angrignon – uh, Boul Angrignon: Senkus, Cordner, Lapierre, etc.

That’s not all I do, though. I have completed every street and intersection in Hampstead, Côte-Saint-Luc, Montréal-Ouest, and the boroughs of Lachine and Saint-Leonard. I’m halfway through Dorval. I’ve completed large chunks of Lasalle, Saint-Laurent, and within the pre-merger boundaries of Montreal proper.

I feel I’m rambling a bit so I’ll cut out now. I do heartily endorse Waze, even if you’re only a consumer of it rather than a contributor. The traffic updates alone make it worth the price.

I come from a long line of antagonists.

My dad’s mother died a few months before I was born and my grandfather was not a capable bachelor. He met a slightly older woman on a cruise and they got married. Then they got divorced. Then, on her terms, they got married again.

My grandfather needed someone to take care of him. His wife was willing to do that, for a price. It was a marriage of convenience. It was certainly not love.

This woman was the only grandmother we knew on my dad’s side and, as kids, we knew none of this. Nor did we know that this grandmother and my dad shared a white-hot hatred for each other. They hid it well. But this isn’t about my dad, yet. This is about my grandfather.

There was a certain amount of resentment mixed into the convenience. My dad rarely told us much, so I only heard this story from his Wife Two. My grandfather had somehow discovered that his wife detested the phrase “bum wad” as a synonym for toilet paper. Every chance he got, he’d use “bum wad”. “Frances, when you go to the store, pick up some bum wad.” Oh, that must have been a jolly household.

You know what just occurred to me? This was my step-grandmother’s first marriage. She had short hair. She always wore pants. I can’t recall ever seeing her in a skirt or dress. Maybe she was gay.

Anyway, that was my grandfather. My dad’s attitude can best be explained by the following printout I discovered while cleaning up his office in March.

Note the dot-matrix quality of the text. The printout had been laying around a while.

The sheet speaks for itself. I don’t have to make any more comment – well, except to point out that it makes more sense if you replace “on purpose” with “by accident”. The red could of vendetta can muddle one’s editing ability.

So that’s my genetic heritage, which sort of explains this, although a) my vendetta is more passive; b) my vendetta was actually carried out until it overwhelmed me; and c) I never bought a paint gun with which to peg speeding jet-skiers in the canal behind my house.

I was going to go on and explain the Waze bit, but I think I’d rather take a nap now. Stay tuned for part two.

So far, it’s a pitcher’s year in major-league baseball. Not on my team, however.

I pass the first monthly milestone with massive advantages in hitting, due in part to Matt Kemp, who leads the National League in batting average, home runs, RBIs, runs, and hits. David Wright, with the second best batting average, and Jay Bruce, with the second most homers, are a capable supporting cast.

My pitchers are also bucking the trend somewhat, unfortunately. Mat Latos has been almost as bad as Matt Kemp is good. My relievers have had some bad outings and I’ve lost for the year a back-end starter, Chris Narveson.

Yet I find myself in third place at the end of April. I dropped Narveson and picked up Marco Estrada, his replacement on the Milwaukee Brewers. Estrada will get more strikeouts.

.284 batting average (1st by .013)
46 HR (1st by 16!)
146 runs (1st by 2)
145 RBI (1st by 13)
20 SB (5th in the middle of a pack)
3.68 ERA (7th)
1.28 WHIP (6th)
145 K (9th, ten out of 7th)
10 wins (tied for 6th but two out of 4th)
6 saves (tied for 6th)

Remember how I estimated 46 points of hitting? Right now, I have 46 points of hitting. I estimated totals of .275, 225 HR, 910 R, 900 RBI, and 140 SB. On a pro-rated basis, I have .284, 276 HR, 876 R, 870 RBI, and 120 SB. Of all my estimates, I’m only really off in wins and strikeouts, and with seven active starters (Chris Luebke and Estrada qualify as relief pitchers, and if Chris Carpenter starts, he would make it eight), those numbers should start to climb.

On March 24, YouTube sent the following notice about the half-minute “Futurama” clip I had uploaded to illustrate my point in “Futurama commits clownslaughter“.

Dear 101Webs,

Your video “Futurama commits clownslaughter”, may have content that is owned or licensed by FOX. As a result, the video has been blocked on YouTube.

This claim is penalizing your account status. Visit your Copyright Notices page for more details on the policy applied to your video.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

When this happens to you, you have two options. You can succumb to the man and take down your video or you can contest the accusation at risk of losing your YouTube account.

I contested. In my reply, I claimed fair use of the clip for illustrative and educational purposes.

What do you know – FOX agreed. I got this today:

Over the past year, I’ve added several fellow managers in the Irrational League to my Facebook friends list. Doing this little monthly updates may expose my position, but so what.

We held our draft last Saturday. As a reminder, we’re in a ten-team NL-only 5×5 league with 25-man rosters and four reserves apiece. We start with six keepers (new) and over five hours scrape every last dreg out of the pot.

This year, I had some choices to make. I had eight protectable players: Matt Kemp, David Wright, Matt Holliday, Lance Berkman, Jay Bruce, Mat Latos, Corey Luebke, Chris Carpenter.

Chris Carpenter’s neck injury quickly whittled the list down to seven, and as much as I love fellow Rice alum Lance Berkman, he was the oldest of the bunch. Bye, Lance.

I went conservative this year. Last year I finished in the money by the hair of my chinny chin chin, with Chris Carpenter’s masterpiece edging me in. A lot went wrong with the draft, as several of my hitters fell off the face of the Earth. This year, I went with more reliable choices… I think. We’ll see. I did take a chance on Chris Carpenter, but that was a late pick and he’s deep in my reserves. And my only first basemen are both question marks, but how hard is it to find a first baseman?

My 2012 hitters and projections:

C: Yadier Molina: .290, 10 HR, 50 R, 55 RBI, 5 SB
C: Miguel Montero: .285, 15 HR, 60 R, 70 RBI
1B: Bryan LaHair: .270, 15 HR, 45 R, 50 RBI
2B: Aaron Hill: .245, 20 HR, 70 R, 70 RBI, 15 SB
SS: Jason Bartlett: .255, 5 HR, 55 R, 45 RBI, 20 SB
3B: David Wright: .285, 20 HR, 80 R, 80 RBI, 15 SB
CI: Justin Turner: .260, 5 HR, 45 R, 45 RBI, 5 SB
MI: Omar Infante: .290, 5 HR, 55 R, 55 RBI, 5 SB
OF: Matt Holliday: .300, 25 HR, 75 R, 80 RBI, 5 SB
OF: Matt Kemp: .290, 30 HR, 100 R, 100 RBI, 30 SB
OF: Jay Bruce: .255, 30 HR, 85 R, 90 RBI, 5 SB
OF: Nyjer Morgan: .280, 5 HR, 55 R, 40 RBI, 20 SB
OF: Chris Heisey: .260, 20 HR, 55 R, 60 RBI, 5 SB
UT: Jim Thome: .240, 15 HR, 35 R, 35 RBI
UT: Gerardo Parra: .290, 5 HR, 45 R, 35 RBI, 5 SB

Adam Kennedy and Josh Hamilton have bench spots. Hey, if the Rangers tank, Hamilton will be on the move.

I estimate totals of .275, 225 HR, 910 R, 900 RBI, and 140 SB. That’s less than I normally draft, but I think that’s a function of last year’s overall reduction in hitting. By last year’s stats, those numbers are good for first in average, home runs, and RBI while well above average in the other two categories. Let’s call it third. That’s 46 points, which is amazing, but I think it’s an exaggeration.

I like my pitching, especially Luebke, who still qualifies as a reliever. There are very few decent starters who qualify as relievers this year. I can think of one, and I have him. There are others, but I don’t like their chances.

SP: Mat Latos: 14 W, 175 K, 3.45 ERA; 1.20 WHIP
SP: Ted Lilly: 12 W, 145 K, 4.15 ERA, 1.25 WHIP
SP: Jordan Zimmermann: 12 W, 140 K, 3.60 ERA; 1.25 WHIP
SP: Jhoulys Chacin: 12 W, 145 K, 3.70 ERA, 1.40 WHIP
P: Erik Bedard: 9 W, 135 K, 3.90 ERA, 1.35 WHIP
P: Chris Narveson: 11 W, 130 K, 4.50 ERA, 1.45 WHIP
RP: Corey Luebke: 12 W, 145 K, 3.50 ERA, 1.20 WHIP
RP: Sean Marshall: 30 Sv, 4 W, 70 K, 2.60 ERA, 1.15 WHIP
RP: Eric O’Flaherty: 5 W, 60 K, 2.20 ERA, 1.10 WHIP
RP: Bill Bray: 3 W, 55 K, 2.90 ERA, 1.15 WHIP

Chris Narveson is the only guy I can’t stomach, but he’s only holding a place for Chris Carpenter. I also have Francisco Rodriguez on the bench for emergencies, or if John Axford goes toes up.

I figure I’ll get 30 saves (good for sixth), 94 wins (second), 1195 K (third), an ERA of 3.65 (fifth), and a WHIP of 1.27 (sixth). That’s 33 points in total, which is weak on its own. Combined with the 46 hitting points, though, the total of 79 points should be enough to win. It should take 76 (I had 70 last year).

I’m back home now, but I still have a few photos to share. It took three full days, but I finally managed to clear out my dad’s office and closet – only to fill the closet again with stuff Brother Two wants to keep but couldn’t fit in his suitcases.

I found a Mac PowerBook 1400C in the closet, deep in the strata. I think in total, my dad had 11 computers, of which two were hooked up. I cleaned up a clamshell iBook and then plugged in and powered up the PowerBook. As you can see if you click on the thumbnail to the left, it booted into System 8.6 as perfectly as possible. I think my dad last used it in early 2003, judging by the dates on the files. Good thing he kept it around.

We also found a brass case. We have no idea what it is. Other than the photos below, here’s what we know…. The “fan” folds open and closed and rotates freely. The axle fits into some sort of plastic apparatus that barely resembles a small electric motor, although there is no resistance to rotation. There is no place for batteries, and since the entire case is made of metal and there are no wires, we doubt it is an electrical device of any kind, or any sort of motor for that matter. But of what use is a manual fan or propellor?

The bottom of the device opens up. Is something supposed to go in there? Take a look, and please guess – or even better, inform.

The inscription on the bottom of the case reads: “PATENTS PENDING / DON QUIXOTE / MADE IN BRITAIN”. Don Quixote is a cigar company and I suspect this has something to do with tobacco, but I’m stumped.

Speaking of mysteries, this video has me, an avowed skeptic, stumped:

Bonus l33t CSS skillz:

I’ve been struggling with getting slideshows to center. I’m using a WordPress plugin called Portfolio Slideshow, which is easy to use and format, but which is inexplicably impossible to center on a page.

Many people have the same predicament, but the developer’s only official response is that the Pro version ($9) has the ability to center the slideshow.

Nine bucks? I didn’t teach myself CSS for nothing! Here’s my custom Portfolio Slideshow CSS code for WordPress. On your Dashboard, open Appearance > Editor. Click on the Stylesheet link at the bottom right. (I ignore the stylesheets for IE6 and IE7. Screw ‘em.) Add the following code to your stylesheet and save:

div.portfolio-slideshow {margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; width:60%; margin-top:20px; border: solid 1px #d4d7ca;}
div.slideshow-nav {text-align:center; margin-bottom:20px;}

You may want to play with that width percentage to get it perfect on your layout. The margin-top and border styles are optional, as is the entire .slideshow-nav class.

This only works for one specific size of slideshow image. In my case, I’m using 400-pixel-wide images.

We never knew this story until Tuesday, when we cracked open a scrapbook that once belonged to my grandfather’s brother, Max.

When Jacques (my grandfather, although he went by “Jack”) was a kid in the Netherlands, he owned a small dog. His father, Bernard, thought that a big photo of their boys and the dog to hang on the wall would make a great present for his wife, Josina.

The photograph was taken, blown up, framed, and presented to Josina. She took one look at it and exclaimed that there was no way she could hang that in her house. She pointed out the dog, which had an erection that the males had somehow overlooked.

That’s one well-endowed terrier. Jack is on the left, Max on the right.

The gift was modified by the 1920s’ version of Photoshop – that is, an artist – and the final product, um, hung in their home for 50 years. I don’t know what happened to that, but thank goodness we have a print of the original. Jack was born in 1914, so I estimate that the photo was taken around 1925.

The dog’s name, even before this photograph, was Dickey.

But 1925 wasn’t Max’s last appearance in a photo with a strange dog.

That’s a trained dog, allegedly, but the look on its face says, “If you take my picture, I’m going to kill somebody.” This has meme potential.

Bonus schadenfreude: