Merry Christmas
Here on the East Coast of the US, it’s still Christmas for another 6 minutes or so, so I’m not actually late in saying this :)
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Happy Halloween
This is my son’s pumpkin. He picked the design, prepared the pattern, and traced it. He also scooped out the guts. I did the carving.
For more halloween fun, check out the Great Pumpkin theme in the Style boxlet on the right.
Beat
I am beat. Even though I’ve been promising myself I’d write a real post one night this week, tonight just isn’t going to be the night. I’m only posting this because I challenged dugh to a month of solid blogging after he created the week-long October Blogging Challenge. Which makes this a lame cheat. The first rule of the Blogging Challenge is don’t blog about the Blogging Challenge, and all that rot.
I could sit here and write the rant I’d planned about the sad state of windows “freeware” (yes, those are air-quotes, please make exagerated hand motions when you read them), but that will have to wait until tommorow. Beat, I tell you.
And yes, the comments are still down (see prior post, I’m too lazy to link it tonight). I’ll try to install the blacklist plugin this weekend. If you’re really feeling sorry for me and my abused comment system, email me (link on the right somewhere).
For now, I’m going to fire up the TiVo and watch Smallville, even if they did write out the best character they’ve ever had last week.
Old
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson spends over 11,000 words describing the special cereal-eating ritutal of Randy, the hacker protagonist of the modern thread of the story. It aptly captures the extreme degree of thought a true geek can apply to any situation. An couple of excerpts:
The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.
And:
Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other.
It’s a nearly stream-of-concious peak inside Randy’s head; a summary of the analysis and energy possible when fixating. When I read the book (and when I re-read it), I identified immediately with the mindset being portrayed, although I had no cereal ritual of my own.
Lately however, I’ve developed a minor cereal fixation, a morning jumpstart as well as a power snack late in the afternoon. While I have yet to apply the fanatical levels of analysis exhibited by Randy, I’ve started drawing some mental parallels to this chapter of the book.
Then I considered the fact that while Randy is obsessed with Cap’n Crunch, my cereal of choice is Frosted Shredded Wheat. Yes, Shredded Wheat. How old am I suddenly feeling?
I Still Remember
I originally posted this text on September 11, 2003. I reprint it here in its entirety. Because I still remember. And so we never forget.
I remember my pager going off during a meeting. “CALL HOME ASAP.” My wife never pages me. I left the meeting. It was a little past 9am.
I remember finding an empty office and calling home. I was in Manhattan only for the day, 52nd Street. My wife was upset. “Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center. Are you there?” We live two hours away – she didn’t know anything about New York City, just that I was there. “I’m five miles away, hon. I’m fine.”
I remember getting off the phone after several minutes of assuring my wife I’d find out how to get home and call her back. The meeting was still in progress.
I remember wondering how I could go tell a room full of New Yorkers what had happened. I remember my relief when a moment later, the meeting room opened up and everyone poured out. Someone else had already told them.
I remember wandering down a few floors, looking for a television. I passed someone I didn’t know. “They blew up the Pentagon,” he said. My stomach turned to ice. How far would this go?
I remember talking to my wife again. I had to call someone back in my office, over a dedicated line, and get him to conference us. Long distance and cell phones were completely tied up. “I promise I’ll try to get home today,” I told her. She was trying not to be hysterical. So was I.
I remember leaving the building with four other people from my office, all visiting for the day. Someone had come up over the weekend, and had a car parked in Brooklyn. The 3:30 streets were empty. Subways, the ones that were running, were nearly empty. We walked a long time, away from the smoke. I looked over my shoulder at it so many times I lost count.
I remember riding out of Brooklyn over the Verazanno Narrows bridge several hours later. Looking back at the column of smoke, larger than belief. I will never forget that image as long as I live.
I remember arriving home. Hugging my children. Holding my wife. Calling friends and loved ones, assuring them I was home. Crying. Praying for the families of those who were lost.
On September 11, 2001, over three thousand people lost their lives. At the World Trade 2,972 people were lost. At the Pentagon, 184 people were lost. In a field in Pennsylvania, 40 people were lost. I was fortunate… I didn’t lose anyone. But I remember.
Also: Pwylla remembers. Joel replaced his site with a stirring memorial for the day.