Way to Go, Kakapo!

Over the weekend I was reading Bird: The Definitive Visual Guide (well, I was mostly looking at the pictures, but I read some parts), a hefty new book from our local library. The Boy kept dropping the book saying it was too heavy, and The Girl tried to rip out the index page. Yikes! I've since moved the $50 book to safer environs.

Despite its failure to include White-Eyed Conures, or any other conures for that matter, it is an amazing, informative book.

Scent can be a strong trigger of memory and the shiny, plastic-y smell of the pages brought me back to the days of sorting and browsing through the Safari Cards I collected as a kid; they had the same smell when first opened from their shrink wrap. By the way, I saved the Cards for my kids although if this Wikipedia entry is to be believed, some of the taxonomy information on the cards is outdated. I don't think I saved the special Jade Pendant, though. Oh, well.

Anyhoo, one part of the book I did read was about an extremely rare flightless parrot, the Kakapo.

Unlike my now-flightless white-eyed conure, the kakapo evolved on an island near New Zealand where there were no natural predators so over time it grew larger in size and lost the ability to fly. Once predators were introduced into its environment it was in big trouble. The Bird book noted that there were about 85 left in the world, and the survivors have been taken to safe locations for breeding.

I could appreciate how up-to-date the Bird book is from a news report I read today:

A species of flightless parrot edged back from extinction with the hatching of five new chicks in New Zealand in recent weeks and two more on the way, officials said Monday.The latest births of owl-like kakapos in southern New Zealand brought the population of the rare bird to just 91, said Emma Neill, a senior official of a Department of Conservation program to save the parrot.

Check out www.kakapo.net to learn more about this unusual and endangered parrot.

Fun Fact o' the Day

Former Senator Lott's real first name isn't Trent, it's Chester.

Futurama Predicted the Future

Over the weekend I re-watched the very first episode of Futurama, which originally aired on March 28, 1999 (I didn't realize I was marking the anniversary). The main character, Fry, who was accidentally frozen in suspended animation for 1,000 years, is standing in line at what he thinks is a phone booth so he can contact his last living relative. We don't even have phone booths in 2008, forget about it in the year 2999. It is New Year's Eve so naturally people are queuing up at a suicide booth.Fry manages to survive and hear a smiley-sounding recorded message, "Thanks for using Stop-N-Drop. America's favorite suicide booth since 2008."

Back to 2008, lo and behold, this article from the UK Times:
"Death for hire - suicide machine lets you push final button"

To paraphrase Futurama's Anthology of Interest II, "You've read it. You can't unread it!"

Spring 2008 Compilation

Finally. Finished burning a new compilation (my 99th since '91/'92) and making it into a list on RateYourMusic.com. The list took a while because of missing track lists in the database; had to do some research and make several additions to RYM.

Most of the songs were pulled from free compilations and tracks from eMusic. A few remaining tunes were from albums I've been listening to lately. Plus the obligatory Stereolab song, this one, Blaue Milch, newly acquired, it's an instrumental they contributed to some sort of tribute album to Peter Thomas.

News for the Boy 3

We recently watched a DVD lecture on dinosaurs, can't remember who the paleontologist was who delivered the lecture but he was very entertaining. This guy argued that, contrary to popular belief, the dome-headed pachycephalosaurs (GIS) didn't butt heads because many had ridges and spikes around their skulls and they would run the risk of having their eyes poked out.

This new article argues that perhaps teenage pachycephalosaurs butted heads.

NyQuil

My Button

I can't get behind the Republican nominee, but I oppose his likely opponent, Barack Obama. Here is a button I could wear:

No BO in the White House!
Socialism stinks

An alternate tag line could be:

I smell a socialist!

Del Ray Blogging

I was looking for some blogs about our neighborhood, the Del Ray area of Alexandria, VA, but didn't easily find anything current.

Mydelray.net looked interesting initially, but then I noticed that it hasn't been updated in 211 days. Do'h!

The blog AlexandriaDailyPhoto had a good concept, "One year of daily photos of the colonial town of Alexandria, Virginia," but the blogger/photographer finished up her project in May of 2007. Here are her photos taken in Del Ray. Enjoy!

Any other links would be appreciated.

More Housekeeping

I added a widget down the right side of the blog to keep track of news The Boy might be interested in. So far, it is just pulling an RSS feed from a Yahoo News search for the word "dinosaurs."

The widget is courtesy of WidgetBox.com. It was fairly easy to create. And they have a gallery of other public widgets that you can subscribe to or edit.

After you either create your widget or pick one to which you would like to subscribe, you have to click on "Get Widget" to make it available for Blogger, Facebook, iGoogle, or where ever. This is where I ran into trouble. Firefox just froze up whenever I clicked on it. Had to resort to Internet Explorer to get it to work. It would have been a lot easier if they just gave you a box of the code to copy and paste.

Don't Tell the Boy This News

A live dinosaur show based on the BBC series "Walking with Dinosaurs" is coming to Baltimore, April 30 through May 4. It looks pretty neat, but $32 a ticket is pretty steep when considering taking a 4-year old. Plus the ridiculous "convenience" fee charged by those mother-less monopolists at Ticketmaster.

News for the Boy 2

"A rare wild jaguar seen and photographed in the United States by hunter Warner Glenn is bayed by hounds during a hunting trip at an unknown location in southwestern New Mexico, February 20, 2006. Glenn and other members of his hunting party caught the hounds and led them away after they cornered the jaguar. The male jaguar, which weighed around 200 pounds, left the site at a slow trot unharmed. Jaguars are extremely rare in the United States, and Glenn is believed to be the only person to have encountered and photographed one in the wild. Photograph taken February 20, 2006. (Warner Glenn/Handout/Reuters)"

(Source Link)

Google Docs Keeps Evolving

Was perusing the Google Blogger blog, noticed a typo in the "help" link, htlp.blogger.com doesn't go anywhere, not very helpful. Do'h! (Update: They have since corrected the typo'ed link.)

Anyhoo, hadn't scanned Google's list o' official blogs in a while and noticed the Google Docs Blog. Google Docs has now been integrated with Google Gadgets so you can make nifty charts from your spreadsheets, charts that you can keep track of in your blog or your Google home page. And they've opened it up so other developers can create their own data visualizations.

Here is a link to a gallery of spreadsheet gadgets.

Handy Dandy Handyman Checklist

Our handyman isn't so much. He's got ambitious plans that he rarely follows through on. Saw him twice over the weekend and these are some of the things he is going to do, or at least talked about doing:

• Finish putting in screens
• Put in a rain spout
• Dig an underground pipe to have the rain spout pour into the vacant yard to our side
• Clear out the gutters
• Seed the yard
• Clear out the trees in our other side yard and put in bricks or pavement instead
• Clear the old roots out of the front yard
  

Op/Ed of the Year

Charles Krauthammer has a brilliant op/ed analyzing the rhetorical gimmicks in Barack Obama's Big Speech on Race.

I had an additional problem with the speech. In assessing the plight of the black community, BO put a heavy part of the blame, correctly, on a history of racism, but the ranks of the black middle class have been growing, so why is it that some parts of the black community have succeeded where other parts are stagnant? His analysis should have borrowed from Bill Cosby in condemning an underclass culture that glorifies criminality and has a disastrous rate of out-of-wedlock births.

But this may have led to a discussion of the consequences of the failed welfare policies of the Democratic Party, policies that Obama's presidency would expand on.

Uh oh!

(Photo Source)

Google Blog Seach RSS

I was trying to feed a few related Google Blog Search result RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes so that I could streamline them into 1 convenient feed, but apparently Google doesn't like that.

I tested each RSS link separately within Pipes, and they worked, but once I put two in at the same time, I got a 403 error.

Looks like someone else had this problem too.

Partial solution, use the search operand | (for "or") to combine 2 into one. Tried using a second | to squeeze in a third search term as well, but that didn't seem to work very well.

Ahh, screw it, system simplification didn't work, so might as well make it easy to see which search term is generating which results. 3 feeds it is.

Housekeeping

Deleted a link to Draft Fred Thompson! What a crushing disappointment that campaign was.

Deleted a few of the links I had posted, since I never use them from here.

Messed around with the colors. Got bored with what I had. I wish there was a way to make better use of all the empty space in blogger. the main column is too narrow. It should either be wider, or it should be easier to add a second narrow column on the left side of the page. I suppose it can be done with html programming, but I'm not interested in figuring out the coding. Maybe there is a Blogger Hacks book from O'reilly.

Deleted the text box of my old Reading List. I had it set to show 5 items, but there was no way to click on it to see other items that are in the list. So I scrapped it and replaced it with a widget from librarythingy.com.

Great, another link and password to remember!

My Back

Early in February, I experienced pain like I'd never felt before. the day of the President's annual State of the Union address, it happened that I had to do a lot of overtime at work on a project. The next day, another big project was being wrapped up, and at home, I was also absorbed in a extensive round of Sid Meier's Civilization. so there were two days I was sitting around a lot.

Late Wednesday night during that first week of February I noticed a little pain on the left side of my rear as I stood up from the computer chair. Thought, "Hmm, that's odd," and went off to bed. Thursday, the pain was bit more noticeable. By Friday, it started getting exponentially worse. I had already scheduled to take the day off to relax after the grueling week, ended up laying down most of the day to minimize the pain down my left leg. Saturday morning, it was dreadfully painful to walk. When my lovely wife asked if I thought perhaps I should see a doctor, I readily agreed! The thought was already on my mind. So I went off to a nearby clinic.

Turns out, I had sciatica. I was supposed to go help some friends stuff envelopes for their wedding invitations, but there was no way I could help out. I had my appointment, got my medicine, and spent most of the day in bed. Also ended up missing a presentation I was supposed to give on Wednesday because I couldn't walk to the offices in downtown DC, and I was forced to miss CPAC for the first time in 7 years. On the following Wednesday, I made an appointment with a regular doctor who scheduled me for an MRI. Thursday morning, it felt like something clicked into place in my back and I started to feel marginally better. But the recovery was slow going, but mostly steady, at least.

Another 2 weeks went by, I was feeling somewhat better, but still limping, the doctor called back with the MRI results. Turns out I have a herniated disc. That was depressing news. Got over it after a few days.

It wouldn't have been so bad if maybe there was something that obviously caused this, but it really just crept up on me. Maybe it was a combination of Civ and OT, who knows?

Thinking back over the past few years, my left leg was always a little tight and sore when I stretched, early symptoms that I would have never noticed. So it goes.

After digesting the news about the herniated disc, I decided I shouldn't mess around with it so I got a prescription for physical therapy.

Several people told me that for them, PT was a bust and they didn't get anything out of it. That wasn't the case for me. It was worthwhile and beneficial.

The insurance approves 6 visits without another doctor referral. At that point the PT place automatically sent over the proper forms to the doctor. I tried to call my doctor to see whether I should keep going. I had no point of comparison to where I should be recovery-wise. The doctor's response was the equivalent of, "Duh! It's up to you." So that wasn't entirely helpful.

Went to a few more PT sessions before I decided I'd had enough and could just as easily do at home most of what we did in the sessions. And I couldn't shake off a nagging sense that while, yes, they were interested in my recovery, they were also very interested in having a paying-patient for as long as possible.

Record Flippin'

The Boy has been in a jazzy mood, but Baby Girl is showing a preference for exotica:

"Nope....

...nope....

..that's the one!"

Things I Learned Listening to the Big Speech

Obama can travel through time!

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together .. .

Obama is black!

I am the son of a black man from Kenya ... .

Wow, what a long-winded speech, shy of 5,000 words. I guess that increases its Importance. I'll have to find time to finish reading it later when I get some free time. First impression, is that it was a 1 part "we should come together", 1 part socialism, and 1 part obfuscation to distance himself from his "crazy uncle," without, you know, really distancing himself from his "crazy uncle."

Obama's Big Speech

Obama was supposed to start his Big Speech on Race at 10:15. Running about a half hour behind now. Fine tuning his speech? That's already been sneaked out on the Drudge Report. Extra rehearsing? He's been giving pretty much the same speech over and over again for the past few months, perhaps he needs some extra rehearsal time for his new delivery.

While waiting for the Big Speech, check out the American Thinker blog, they found an interesting passage in one of Obama's books about his style, in particular manner of interacting with white people, Make No Sudden Moves.

News for the Boy

An extremely rare mummified Edmontosaurus was discovered in North Dakota!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Now That's Marketing!

http://producten.hema.nl/

Netflix Redesign

If you're like me and can't stand the redesigned "New Releases" page on Netflix, the old-fashioned link still works.

4-Year-Old Jazzhead

Me: Do you know who we are listening to?
The Boy: No.
Me: This is Frank Sinatra.
The Boy: Could you put on the be-bop jazz?
Me: You mean the Coltrane?
The Boy: Yes!

More Wisdom from a 4-Year-Old

"Do you know how many mountain lions there are in the wild? Two. We are running out of mountain lions. And do you know why? Because sharks and whales are coming to their terrain and eating them all up. I'm telling the truth!"

Obillary

A boy's interests

Our son's favorite toys or interests change over time.

Thomas the Train
Since he was 11 months old, Thomas the Train and co. have been among his favorite toys. At about this time, the thrift store where I volunteer gave me a box of wooden tracks. His collection steadily grew over the next 2 years. He still plays with them, but over the past 5 months, he has been more interested in the larger battery-operated versions of the trains put out by Tomy.

Bob the Builder
He got into BtB several months after Thomas. And when he was two, someone gave him a special BtB DVD that kept his interest going for several months. He only plays with these toys intermittently over the past year.

Cars the Movie
Cars has been a favorite with his whole pre-school class, at least among the boys, since shortly after the movie came out. He hasn't played with his Cars toys as much since just before Christmas. Although, most of the pictures he draws are about Lightning McQueen and Leakless racing madly in circles.

Dinosaurs
Last fall, we would hear him reciting in a low voice a history of the dinosaurs. Eventually we found out that they've been listening to a book on tape in his class. I don't know how many times they played it, but he and some of his friends had it memorized. Since then, we've checked out just about every dinosaur book in our local library, went to the see the unveiling of the newly discovered Nigersaurus at the National Geographic building, and went to see the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He is pretty much an expert at this point. One of his favorite Christmas presents was a paleontologist kit where you chisel through a chunk of rock to find the 6 dinosaurs buried within. Once retrieved, he painted them up. The dinosaur craze went pretty strong until about 2 weeks ago.

Animals
As noted above, about two weeks ago he got very interested in animals, kicked off by a few factors. First of all was Zoo Tycoon. I bought the CD-ROM game last fall with him in mind but saved it for several months, finally broke it out 3 weeks ago. It is a great game, too advanced for him to play by himself at four years of age, but it is fun to play together. We've been learning a lot about different kinds of animals and what kind of terrain and habitats they prefer. I am thankful for the Control-4 cheat key so we don't have to worry about the finances of the zoo!

The second factor was a Christmas gift I got from my folks, BBC's The Planet Earth. An amazing documentary set. My son and I have been watching an episode each week.

Another factor, I think, has been "movie night". I've done painstaking research to find decent G movies that he can watch. Three we've seen lately are adventure stories featuring house pets: Homeward Bound, The Adventures of Milo and Otis, and Napoleon.

He says he likes animals better than dinosaurs. He is working on reading through all of our library's animal books now.

Ninja Warrior
This is a fun Japanese show broadcast on one of the cable channels. Contestants have to traverse through increasingly-difficult courses and obstacles. We watch it mainly on Saturday afternoon around lunch time. Now whenever he goes to the park or plays in the yard, he does his own Ninja Warrior challenges.

Wisdom from a 4-Year-Old

Me: "Is the stairway gate closed so your sister can't get up there?"

4-Year-Old Boy: "Yes. But I can climb over it. [My 1-year old sister] can't climb over it because she doesn't have powerful arms like I do."