Memnison Journal

Some updates from the home front:

M&M-3

Originally uploaded by Shelia of Two Sisters.

Just beautiful. (My Mere’s on the left in this one.)
More at this flickr site. *sigh*

M&M-8

Originally uploaded by Shelia of Two Sisters.

My daughter Meredith (on the right) and her sister Meredith, from last summer in Alabama. The twins radiate cute, don’t they?

A quasi-meme:  list out your languages, both computer and ’standard’, and your relative fluency in them.  If you have a particular accent in any of them, mention that too.  (meme invented here)

Weirdness upon weirdness.  New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was speeding towards his mansion at 91 miles an hour so as to host the Don Imus v. Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team meeting recently, and got into a bad accident when another vehicle lost control and hit the SUV.  Corzine’s still in critical condition, and got seriously busted up.

Turns out that the driver (a state trooper) was fiddling with his  Blackberry at the time of the crash and just before, and was really upset.  Turned out that the trooper had been having an affair with some guy’s wife, and the guy (1) found out, (2) blew up, and (3) sent a seriously nasty email to the trooper (complete with how-could-you-bust-up-this-family photos) about it that the trooper had just read before the accident happened.  Details at the link.

Went off with Dale Cozort to Penguicon this weekend; long drive both ways, and without significant breaks on the way back. I’m seriously achy and tired, and waiting for the allergy/decongestants/painkillers to kick in so I can go back to bed. It’s probably the first truly ‘new’ con that I’ve been to in a while; heard of it for years, and the programming and guests drew me in.

Dale was a good chatter on the trip, and a good roomie, and I tried to look after him; I’m sure he felt a little fish-out-of-water on the trip to a new con and territory. Our biggest regrets were mostly circled around the amount of good programming that we didn’t get to because it overlapped each other.

There were some things about the con that didn’t work: the internet connections were very on and off, especially the wireless one in the computer area (didn’t work worth a damn) and being in the overflow hotel. The shuttles were very infrequent, and shut down at 10 pm, and that screwed up a lot of out connections on Friday. Saturday, I just gave up and drove over. Next time, I stay at the main hotel….

Also, someone should draw up a food-places list. Finding food was hard unless you went far afield in the area, and the hotel’s restaurants were pricey-plus.

Dale was also having a lot of trouble with his rest, and zonked out during some of the panels. I crashed early both nights; I was tired, and the parties were limited.

The programming was beyond amazing, and I recommend that you go to their site and look it over. The various experts and guests went out of their way to be approachable. The staff of the con were helpful, and the general atmosphere of the con was vibrant and chummy. The attendees were generally much younger - from about late high school to about 33 or so - with a few old pharts I hadn’t seen in ages, like Clif Flynt, Richard Tucholka (just back from bypass surgery), and Tom Barber. It was Friendly Geek Land. Lots of cute Geek Ladies, by george.

Ended up at the Saturday noonish LJ get together, as per beldar’s post, and Dale got his introduction to LJ, and the rest of us to each other. Adoption and the girls ended up being a topic; two adoptive parents, a birthmom, and an interested outsider who knew about Nancy Segal and her separated twin studies! A very good talk with some nice people.

The con suite had some seriously interesting oddities; a large cylinder of liquid Nitrogen, which was used at various times by the staff to fix different batches of really good ice cream!  An outside barbeque of Brazilian beef (auto-chuscarreria!) on Saturday that made the joint smell heavenly.  Rocket fuel, aka strong coffee fixed with caffeinated water!  (There was a ton of caffeine-related goodies and stuff in the con suite.)   A cow passing out ‘ox tails’, a rather interesting candy.

The computer area also had a huge rube goldbergian device called a ‘Chaos Machine‘,  a LEGO exhibit, a burn-box for burning your favorite distros of Linux (I picked up a Edubuntu and Ubuntu 7.04) onto con-supplied CDs, and a Myth-TV box as an example of what it could do.   There was an installfest, but it seemed to be also some sort of hardware thing as well, and people were working out various bugs in this and that.

Highly recommended.

My Word, That’s A Pink Car.  We saw this today in the parking lot and died laughing.  Powderpuff pink with sparklies in the enamel.

Hardware assembly and rebuilding.  Also Linux Distro distribution via free dial-it-yourself burnbox.  Lots of people there to help out on installs of whatever, and I was even doing my part.

Ginger flavored ice cream, created in the con suite by MOLLY! and heavy use of Liquid Nitrogen (the big silver cylinder in the background).

The CHAOS MACHINE, a huge rube-goldbergian maze of tubes, bells, balls, conveyors, lights, and you name it, constantly played with and added to by a ton of kids and grownups.   DING! TWONK!

Dale Cozort at play in the Lobby.   Er, asleep.

The LEGO exhibition - ancient and sciencefictional.   Lots of kids checking this out.

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

Many happy returns of the day to Mr. Silver, having another one of those birthday critters.

He was kind enough to invite me over for the festivities, but I’m leaving in the morning on my Carpe Diem trip to Michigan and Penguicon.  Susan and Mere would be bored silly; it’s a tech-heavy experience.  But the guest list is dazzling, and as a new Linux convert, I’m going to learn from the Ascended Masters.  And listen to Charlie Stross read, and so on.  See you at the LJ party there!

Actually, one correction.  Some things are easier to do in Windows; my favorite video conversion program (ConvertXtoDVD) works miles quicker and better and has better options than a roughly similar (torvid) Linux program.

It’s a quick trip out and back; Dale and I should be leaving around 9 tomorrow morning, and getting back at dinnertime on Sunday night.  It’s approximately a 6 hour trip with brief breaks in the drive, and the laptop is coming with (loaded for dual boot).

BTW, Mere has become (at her mom’s knee) a serious convert to Adobe Photoshop for scrapbooking, etc.  She loves it.  Wants to learn more.

We’ve been doing some serious work on ‘how to straighten out things’ around here, over and above the comments I’ve had about having the organizer in.  Things like paying off the credit cards, for instance, and today, we’re supposed to have a guy over who did a lot of good work for us on the house a couple of years ago; we need some roof repairs, a patched up bit of drywall in the basement, and other odds and ends, and he’s good.

There are some personal angles to this, of course.  Meredith, whose computer is totally inadequate for her, is getting my computer, and I’m getting a new one; I first was looking at the idea of getting our computer-builder guy to build her a new one, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized that  anything she’d be getting now would beat the pants off of mine.  I have video/graphic editing needs that demand a lot of power, and doing that has eaten up a huge amount of time on mine and make it so that my computer is soaked to do much of anything else.   Simpler to get me a new one that will buzzsaw through the work.

So I sat down after work on Monday with the computer guy, and we had a jolly chat in his kitchen while I was looking over his Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard; kewl stuff, Maynard.  The thing has two gigabit ethernet ports, though I’m totally unsure what the heck I can use them for.  (I have 10/100 Ethernet strung in the house, but *two* ports? WTF?)  There’s seven SATA connections on the thing, so I won’t have problems with internal HD connections!

Susan’s tech improvements are two, and needed.  First, she ahas a good point and shoot, but she’s really been dying for years to get a SLR camera that was digital, had a good megapixel range for bigger than 8 by 10s, and a decent shutter speed.  I freely admit that I know darn little about cameras, and when she did the research, I was pretty sure that she’d find a good one.  She picked out the Nikon D40X, and it’s a nice little setup.  Very light.   She was VERY much looking forward to this, and when the UPS guy came, it was interesting (we were at the dinner table, they deliver late to us) to watch her (and Mere) make a serious sprint to the front door to answer it!  (Susan’s mom and I were amused at the speed involved…)

Her other new big item is a PDA/Phone - a Treo 750 using Palm.  She’s had a LOT Of problems with her phone (especially not charging easily) and uses her PDA a lot, and the idea of having an all-in-one greatly appeals to her.  (Her PDA, a Clie, was more underpowered than mine, but mine died out a couple of years ago and hers has been going strong ever since.  I’m next in line to get it.)

We also got adopted the other day by a laptop.  Ours is dead, and Susan was having a glorious time lately using it for digital scrapbooking, and Meredith, who was disdainful of any scrapbooking that didn’t involve cutting stuff up and pasting it, has been entranced with the idea of the digital side of the force.  That’s what you get when you’re raised in a family of techie geeks, kid.

Check out these items:

• http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10532.html#more-10532 
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041601442_pf.html
• http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/04/17/honesty/

In most things, if you or I are in some sort of competition, we have some sort of ideas as to what the heck ‘winning’ means. Pretty concrete ideas.

Put this forward against the war in Iraq. Think about this….what does ‘winning’ mean for Bush and Cheney? Specifics?

Now, match this out: even the Generals presently running things over there have said that there is no such thing as a ‘military’ victory possible, that only a political solution would really amount to anything or be remotely possible. Everyone but Bush and Cheney will pretty much admit that massive and continual bungling of the war in the Rumsfeld era made this a lot harder to accomplish. Bungling that Bush either never detected or stopped. According to him, we’ve been making progress ever since the beginning, and all that was needed was a little more time.

The people who really are the only ones that can fix the political end of things are the present Iraqi political groups, and they have no big impetus right now to do anything but snipe at each other.  Bush refuses to set down hard and fast ‘get your act in gear’ deadlines, because he’d have to pull the trigger and go if he did, and he Will Not Admit Defeat.  That’s the heart of the whole ‘hold off till victory’ bit; trust me until I can get out from under, and then I can say it was someone else’s fault that they Lost Iraq.   If it’s John McCain, too bad for John.

This has been repeated regularly for the last four years. The bungling has continued at all levels, while the Monica Goodlings have quizzed people about their loyalty to specific “conservative” groups and Bush and ranked their usefulness on their adherence to same. To them, it’s more important to be true to the leader than to actually get anything done, and as we see all around us, that’s still the case.

Given that the man in charge has a delusional idea that changes into different flavors of fog as to victory, doesn’t manage the supply and maintenance of the Armed Forces worth a damn, and has do-nothing nincompoops as the people in charge under him to carry out his half-baked plans, we’re supposed to get the idea that we should trust him some more to know what to do, protect the troops, win-win-win, and take care of things in general?

When I start hearing that, I start saying: “I wouldn’t trust these guys with a bucket of fresh eggs across the yard, let alone actually run or do anything.”

I’m far more scared of leaving them to keep fscking up and getting more people blown up.

Photo of Hillary Rodham (later Clinton) circa 1969, with the fashion sense of the time.

Vurrrr.

Highly interesting post on an adoption site on “trauma, neglect and sensory deprivation.”

In general, adopted kids from China have been in better shape than kids from many other places, but in some cases, things like the situation described here have shown up; I have seen at least three cases like the one described here to a greater or lesser degree. Heck, I see some of this in Mere. She’s had sensory integration problems all along, and some of the other elements as well. Read it.

From this morning’s Chicago Sun-Times (and yes, they were on Oprah this week) is more on the story of the Mia twins (sound familiar?).  Yes, we know these folks, and yes, they’re quite legit.  Someone asked today - why weren’t you guys on the show?  Well,  we weren’t asked to.   They’ve  nibbled around the edges at us.  Besides, after the ABC News item last fall,  I think we’ve rested the desire to be in the spotlight.

I will admit one curiosity; when we have the twins together, we have to call them ‘Meredith Grace’ or ‘Meredith Ellen’ to get the right one.  No idea what these guys did for that.