Nothing But Words

I just posted my old ’88 Nissan for sale on Craigslist (Craigslist is the last refuge for those of us too cheap to pay for online classifieds). It needs a new muffler to pass inspection, and I hardly drive it anymore, so I’ve decided it’s time to say goodbye. I bought it in 2000 for $800 and it has served me well (I drove it cross-country with my brother John when we moved here 3 years ago).

Every car has at least one good anecdote to go with it, so here’s mine: not long after we bought our Toyota Echo, I was weeding in my front yard when a 8 or 9 year old skinny black boy with close-cropped hair was walking by. He was curious about the unusual looking new car in our driveway, so he stopped to ask me a bunch of questions about it. His last question was, “do you like driving it?,” and I responded, “yeah, but my wife drives it most of the time.” “Oh, what do you drive?,” he asked, and I responded simply by pointing to the beat-up looking Nissan parked in the street. “Oh,” he said, with a knowing look on his face, “I see how it is.” And with that, he continued on his way.

We have liberated ourselves from the clutches of Comcast, and it feels good. More specifically, my checking account balance feels good. For extended basic and a cable modem our cost went from about $60/month 3 years ago, to $95/month today. When I first encountered cable TV in the early 80s, I thought it was bizarre that you had to pay and still watch ads. That first impression faded as cable became ubiquitous, but it crept back into my brain recently as I’ve been watching the cable bill climb month after month.

So tonight I bought a modestly sized roof antenna, which I’ll install in the attic. Don’t worry, I didn’t buy the one in the ad (click on it – it’s hilarious), but like the ad says, it’s legal in all 50 states, and we’re watching TV for free. For internet connectivity, I switched to DSL for $15/month. It’ slightly slower, but for everyday web surfing, the difference isn’t noticeable.

Does watching broadcast TV make me a backwards looking luddite? No, not at all! There are only a few shows that Maria and I have the time and inclination to watch, and we realized we can now download them from iTunes. The total cost of the downloads will be much less than the cable bill, there’s no commercials, and I have a PC hooked up to the TV, so the viewing experience is mostly the same (I say “mostly” because the resolution of the iTunes downloads isn’t great, but they’re perfectly watchable). I gave up on the cable news channels a while back, as they’ve become little more than 24-hour, wall-to-wall tabloid journalism (the saturation coverage of the JonBenet case being the latest example), so I won’t be missing them.

Another motivation was Kai, as he’s been asking for every toy he sees advertised on TV (we’ve been using SageTV on the PC to record his shows, with the idea being that he could skip the commercials, but it doesn’t always work out that way, since he seems to like the commercials). In the few days the cable has been gone, his TV watching has dropped dramatically. At first I thought he might want to watch his DVDs instead (he has plenty of them), but he didn’t. The DVDs require him to think about and choose what he wants to watch, instead of just flipping to whatever’s on Nickelodeon, and it seems that creates enough of a barrier that most of the time he chooses to do something else instead. Cool! (We used to be good about placing consistent limits on his TV watching, but now that we’re chasing Eidan around the house all the time, we haven’t been as good about it, so it’s nice to have this not be part of the discipline equation anymore).

If you’re curious about the antenna ad above, I copied it from the milk.com site. It’s an old site that hasn’t been updated much, but it’s “Wall O’ Shame” was one of the first humor sites, back in the day (1994!). Buying the TV antenna made me remember this very funny ad.

Today’s Photoshop Phriday at the Something Awful site had me in stitches. The original photo is at the top, and then many pages of doctored versions follow (don’t miss the “next page” arrow at the bottom). The set of historical photos on the last page is my favorite (although the picture of them on the bridge of the Enterprise really got me too). Note the fun many of the pictures have with the fact that one of his shoes is off.

Here are the pictures from Maria’s 3 week stay in Newport with Kai and Eidan. I was there first with the boys for one week (that’s the previous batch of pictures), then Maria and I switched places. I came to visit them on the weekends, thanks to Southwest airlines cheap fares from Philly to Providence.

As I mentioned before, I worked on remodeling the bathroom while they were away. The pictures will be coming…Maria had the digital camera, so I had to use our old film camera, and I still need to finish the roll.

The farm pictures are from the farm where my brother John works. The Taiko drummers were part of Newport’s annual Black Ships Festival. They were playing at none other than Toppa Field (named after my relative and local legend, football coach John Toppa). It’s a shame the photo of Maria, Eidan, and my sister Rebecca has so much glare in it – otherwise it would be a great picture.

Please don’t use the navigation arrows when you pull up the pictures, otherwise you will miss many of them. A project I’m hoping to get to during our stay in Japan next year is the photo management software I’ve been wanting to write – I want to do things like pick my own order for displaying photos, even if I’ve picked photos from different albums.

Sorry for the ongoing dearth of posts. After I finished putting in the new bathroom floor, I started helping my friend Ed re-build his deck. Also, Maria’s mom is visiting, and my office at home doubles as our guest room, so I haven’t been able to get in there much at night, which is when I usually update the blog. And lastly, work has been sucking my brain dry, as I’ve been in “bootcamp” all week, learning our new security system. It’s a home grown application called CEAL, and its based on the Signet and Grouper models (if this interests anyone, let me know, and I’ll write up something).

This weekend I’ll finish the bathroom project – all that’s left is putting in a new vanity and sink. After that life should return to normal – or as normal as it ever gets…

…You see early morning commuters starting up their cars at 5:30 in the morning, and then going back in their houses for a while, so the cars can get fully air conditioned before they leave for work.

Sorry for the long silence. Maria and the boys are still in Newport, visiting my family. Kai is having a fantastic time playing with his cousins, and Eidan has taken his first steps! But I wasn’t there to see it . Apparently he’s done it twice now – just a few steps each time. But he only does it when he’s angry, kind of like the Hulk (he did it once when my sister took something away from him, and once when he was fighting over a toy with my Dad’s dog). They’re coming home tomorrow.

I’ve been here in Philly, and all my time outside of work has been consumed by my work on the new bathroom floor. It’s a big job, but it’s coming out nicely. I’ll post pictures of the work, and more pictures from Newport, soon.

Also, I’ve made a few changes to the blog. The biggest change is that I’ve removed all of the political posts (but I may go back through them and re-publish some of the best ones – I haven’t decided yet). I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m ceasing my political commentary for a number of reasons, which I’ll try to explain in a future post. I’ll probably still occasioanlly point you to something good that I’ve read, but that’s all. As far as I know, my readership is very small, and consists of friends and family, whose main reason for coming here is not to hear my views on politics anyway.