Categories
life

The Game of Life

Last night I had a very interesting dream about a computer program called “Life” or “The Game of Life.” This was not the one that some people have heard of where cells live or die based on some mathematical rules although it was similar in some ways. To “play” the game I was given a controller which I could configure for 30 to 60 seconds. After that point the game started and ran according to the internal rules without further regard to the status of the controller. In my dream version the game was played out in a virtual house with a lot of very interesting people – they reminded me of the family from You Can’t Take It With You. After wandering the house and observing the characters for half an hour I decided to leave the game.

I went home and learned from my wife that at the time I started the game strange things began happening at home. I soon discovered that this was true as very odd things began happening around our home – for example, we were visted by a virtual character who looked like my best friend. I realized that this game was not as innocent as it had appeared. I was forced to take comfort in the thought, when I attained a state of minimal consciousness in my sleep, that this was all a dream and that when I woke up there would be no intrusions from this so-called game of life.

Finally at 5:45 my wife woke me up so that I could go feed our son, Isaac, for his early feeding. As I got out of bed I noticed that the lights were on downstairs. I assumed that our oldest daughter, Savannah, was having one of her early mornings and was awake downstairs. That’s when things started to get weird on me again. While I was standing on the landing I heard Isaac cry and realized that he was not in his room. He was in the workroom next to his bedroom. I feared that Savannah had taken it upon herself to lift him out of bed and carry him to the next room.

I went downstairs to fix a bottle for Isaac and that is when I discovered that Savannah was not awake – although all the lights were on downstairs. I began to wonder if someone had come into our house. That didn’t make sense considering that nothing was missing, not even any of the computers in the office (where the lights were also on). I finally went back to my bedroom and shook Laura awake to ask if she knew anything about Isaac or the lights. It turns out that she had been awake with Isaac and Savannah during the two or three hours before she woke me up. She had moved Isaac and Savannah had turned on the lights downstairs.

The mystery was solved, but I had been wrong in my dream – the weird occurances had not stopped when I woke up. This really was “the game of life.”

Categories
life

Desk Job

When I was interviewing for this job they warned me that, being a small company, people have to wear a lot of hats. I liked the sound of that because monotony is not my bag. What they didn’t tell me was that this desk job included making my own desk. I spent a large portion of the day, between customer service calls, working on building my desk so that the person whose desk I have been borrowing can have his space back when he returns tomorrow.

Building the desk and a small utility stand was a fun project, but I would be very surprised if I ever had another job where I would be required to build my own workspace.

Categories
life technology

Internet Outage

As if to prove what I said yesterday about becoming dependent on modern conveniences, I had to endure a total lack of internet access until 5:00 pm today. To add insult to injury, my mom called and asked if I had received her email.

Oh well, I have the email now.

Categories
life technology

Deals

I have been looking at the advertising by Comcast for their big bundle – three services for $33/month (each). I say to myself “that’s $100 a month to Comcast.” Then again, Cable can easily run $50/month so that’s a steal. Their internet service goes for $40/month so I guess $100/month to include phone is not bad. Of course I don’t want cable so it’s not a deal for me, but then I realize that they were advertising that their digital phone service would be about $14/month so it’s really only about $4/month worth of savings.

I save a bunch on Cable, a little on internet, and pay two and a half times for the phone. Nice marketing.

Categories
life

Idiosyncracies

My one-year-old has the funniest little trick. We have been meaning to get a picture of it, or capture it on video, but it is possible that we may never succeed, so I decided that I would write it down, lest it be forgotten.

Somehow she learned to drink off of flat surfaces. She likes to dump drinks on the table and then stick her face in the drink to slurp it up. One time, at a barbecue with some friends, she found my root beer sitting on the patio and she knocked it over on purpose. She then planted her face on the concrete to slurp up what daddy was drinking. Like always, she came up smiling at what a great trick she had just performed. I, on the other hand, was hoping she would not repeat the trick on concrete in the future.

Categories
technology

New Spy Movie Gadget

I can’t help myself here. I was looking at an article in BusinessWeek Online about cell phones of the future. They had a slide show of a bunch of cell phone prototypes and when I got to the fourth one, I instantly saw it on a new Johnny English movie, or possibly Austin Powers. I can just see the super-spy carrying one of those phones around as they travel the world thwarting evil.

Categories
culture technology

Can I Join Too?

I have to whole-heartedly agree with the thoughts of Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman about the way reality TV is showing our decline from civilization.I think it is ironic that D’Arcy is offering to help buy an island to get away from reality TV with royalties from a reality TV show. Despite the irony I volunteer to pitch in my pennies and be among those refugees on CDB Island.

Categories
technology

Acid Test Results

Just for fun I ran Firefox (1.0.3) and IE 6 (XP SP2 etc.) through The Second Acid Test after hearing the Safari passed the test. I was slightly disappointed to find that Firefox had problems with: shrink-to-fit on floating elements, paint ordering, collapsing margins and some CSS Table elements.

I was pleasantly surprised by IE6 though.

It rendered the CSS 1 properly.

Categories
Education

Seriously Funny

I have never laughed so hard as when I read Don’s partita in D. I could never do it justice in summary so let me just say that it is well worth the read – especially the last paragraph:

To turn to a musical metaphor, let’s look at a modern History 101 class. The chief instructor who knows all the notes has just been given a new synthesizer (think PowerPoint) that has all the range of his old saxophone, which he never quite mastered but at least it was familiar, but adds bagpipe, harmonica and peddle steel guitar to his possible instrument range. He has of course never been given any instruction on any of these instruments, but his father was a big Hank Williams fan and his mother watched soap operas while she ironed. The instructor has also been provided with a graduate student backup group. Two of these also have no musical training but one isn’t bad on the thumb piano which the university provided her and the other is working hard on the slide trombone which he found after last years homecoming rally. The third graduate assistant actually has some background, having taken tap lessons between the ages of 8 and 14, but has lately developed an unfortunate interest in late 70’s acid rock. So there we have our quartet, and it really is Bach, or maybe Mozart, they’re playing. And there really is an audience trying to make sense out of it.

Categories
thoughts

Touché

I am surprised to find that Leon reads widely enough among educational bloggers to have found little old me. I am both surprised and pleased that the Guru of the Obvious acknowledged me for my less than flattering commentary. I obviously did not take him seriously enough before.

He has forced me to use French – and apparently MT does not like French.