When googling for the definition of the word 'blog', the first result says: Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption...

The second result says: ...Blogs are typically updated daily...

etc

Frequently updated, eh? Updated daily?!? Dang. Blogging must be hard. Dunno what exactly it is that I'm doing here, but it surely ain't blogging.

Speaking of what I'm doing, what the hell have I been doing for the last week that's been so damn time consuming? Any guesses?

I'll just tell you. Dishes. I've been doing the dishes. Pots, pans, plates, silverware, lime squeezers, oversized coffee mugs, the works. My in-laws have been staying with us for the last week and my wife had the foolish idea to try and feed them three meals a day. I went along with her cockamamie plan because our unspoken agreement is that I will pretend to be a better person than I actually am when the in-laws visit. Completing the charade is that my in-laws pretend to believe my Eddie Haskell-like persona. They are kind people.

Anyway, I need to go unload the dishwasher now, but I can tell you this: My next house will have 2 full-sized dishwashers. After I fill and run Dishwasher A, then I'll just use clean dishes from it as I need them. When I generate more dirty dishes, I'll load them into Dishwasher B. Once that baby gets full, their roles will reverse.

I may be the Haskell of in-laws, but I am the Mozart of dishwashing.

Winter Present Tree Day is almost upon us! In honor of that excellent holiday, here are a bunch of unrelated items:

1) For years one of my friends thought I was saying "Winter Presentry Day". I guess he figured that as long as I was making up holidays, I was probably making up words too.

2) The fan in our car went berserk last night. I drove it a few miles, and then for over an hour afterwards it sat in the garage with the fan randomly starting and stopping. Stupid car. I popped the hood and stared at the engine for a good long time, hoping to intimidate it into behaving. It saw through my facade though. It knew that I couldn't even find the damn fan. I did, however, find the fuse box and then I removed every single fuse in there. I only lost one of them. Who's laughing now, stupid car?!

3) After my tremendous success with the car engine, now I'm going to take apart the non-functional vent/hood above our stove. There's a .001% chance that I'll be able to fix it. I like them odds!

4) This week Hank started impinging upon my turf. She animated one of our pot holders (frankly, one of the pot holders with the least personality) and entertained Daisy with its lackluster antics. I was forced to up the ante by anthropormophizing a dinosaur-grabby-toy thing. It squeaks when it grabs. Daisy lovingly calls it Mr. Squeakers. Daisy loves it more than Mr. Pot Holder. She's a smart girl.

Back to the Winter Present Tree Day preparations. It just ain't Winter Present Tree Day without a dismantled stove venting system.

Unnecessary Literary Device: Mike, what's your favorite thing about Winter Present Tree Day?
Me: Good question.
ULD: Is it the presents?
Me: Nah, I'm a big boy now. Anything that I'd want someone to buy for me, I'd rather just buy myself.
ULD: No, the GIVING of the presents. You know, the whole cliched Spirit of Winter Present Tree Day thing? Is it that?
Me: Oh, god no.
ULD: Is it the tree?
Me: No, but the tree is a significant part of the day, one third to be precise. It's also purty.
ULD: Winter?
Me: No, screw winter.
ULD: What's left?
Me: The name!

Yes, I love the name "Winter Present Tree Day"! It's everything I want in a name. It's accurate and charmingly bulky at the same time. It says "I value humor over tradition". What's not to love?

And the best part of the name is the name of the Tree itself. Just like how on Christmas, the Christians all have their Christmas trees, well on Winter Present Tree Day my family has our Winter Present Tree Day Tree. Yes, there are two Trees in that name! That's the very best part! Two trees! When Daisy utters its full name, completely matter of factly, the grin on my face is unstoppable. The charming bulkiness warms my heart and tickles my funny bone at the very same time. It's like orgasming and laughing at the same time, but much easier.

Holidays are precious.

Just because the name of this blog is I Am Prepared to Give Up at Any Time, that doesn't mean that I actually do give up all the time. It just means that I'm prepared to do so. I'm like a Boy Scout that way -- a Boy Scout with visions of incompetence.

So, even though Nintendo Wiis are hard to find, I wasn't going to give up on getting one for Winter Present Tree Day. When I was walking through the mall last Thursday, I saw that the crappy video game store had a sign on their counter stating that they would be getting a shipment of nine Wiis and would make them available for sale on Sunday.

"Oooh! Nine Wiis!" I squeaked macho-ly.

"Pffft. You'll never get one." said a Comic Book Guy look-a-like behind me.

"Wha? Why not?"

"There's only nine. You don't think there's nine people around here more desperate than you?" he asked, sizing me up while his nostrils flared.

"Grrrrrr" I grumbled.

"Pffft."

Now I was motivated. I left the store and called Pablo. We agreed to get up early Sunday morning and attack the mall before sun rose. I called the store on Saturday afternoon to find out what time the store and the mall doors opened on Sunday.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring

Clerk: Electronics Boutique, your home for blahblahblah
Me: Hi, yes, I wanted to find out what time your store opened on Sunday.
Clerk: 8:00am
Me: And when does the mall open?
Clerk: 7:00am
Me: Great. And you guys will be selling nine Wiis, right?
Clerk: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of those Wiis.
Me: Well, there was a sign sitting on your counter saying as much on Thursday. Do you deny the existence of the sign?
Clerk: Really? Hang on. *muffling the receiver while he talks to someone nearby* ..... Uh, if we do hypothetically have any Wiis, it'll be first-come first-serve.
Me: Thanks.

I prepped the coffee maker and set the alarm for 6:00am. That's earlier than I like getting up on a Sunday, but not much earlier than I get up during the week. Pablo and I just wanted to arrive at the mall about 15 minutes before the doors opened. Although we had heard tales of people camping out all-night in front of Walmarts, this was a dinky game store, and besides, Wiis had been available off and on for about a month, so many of the hardcore enthusiasts had probably already bought theirs.

Pablo picked me up at 6:30am, and we were at the mall door by 6:45. And so were about 15 other people who had gotten there earlier.

"So, do we just sprint for the Wiis when the doors open?" I asked, mentally evaluating my opponents' fitness levels.

"Haha!" they mocked, laughing the laugh of the future Wii-enabled. It became apparent that they had organized themselves into a sequence, and there were lots more people than Wiis. Besides, almost all of them looked like they could kick my ass, which aside from being surprising in a Wii line, made the prospect of out-sprinting them less appealing. If the mall doors had been 5 or 10 miles from the Wiis, then I would have had a chance of safely claiming a Wii (assuming no garbage cans were in the way). I'm not a sprinter though.

Pablo noted that there were lots more stores in the area, so we hopped back in the car and hit the nearest Target. We found a longer line, with people hunkered down in chairs. Target employees were issuing wrist bands to the first eight people in line since they only had eight Wiis. I asked the guy who was about eighth in line, "Hey, what time did you get here?"

"3:00am" he intoned somberly.

"I got here at 2:00" interjected the guy in front of him.

"Whoa! Good job!" Pablo said appreciatively, while I bit my tongue.

Three freaking a.m.! I was way out of my league.

Pablo and I hit Circuit City, Best Buy, another Target, and EB Games, all before 8:00am. Each of them had lines much longer than the number of Wiis in stock. Several lines had people with tents and sleeping bags who had camped out overnight. We stood outside of a CompUsa for a while, astonished that we were the first customers there. Eventually, after pressing our noses to their windows for a while, we determined that we had found one of the few consumer electronic stores that did not carry video game consoles.

We had been beaten. Soundly. For the remainder of the day I asked about Wiis in each store I entered.

The large angry man manning the register at Joann Fabrics laughed and said they had no Wiis. The serious fast-moving cashier at Safeway denied stocking Wiis and launched into an anti video game diatribe. The woman behind the counter at the bakery blinked uncomprehendingly at me and handed me my bag of cookies.

No Wii for Mike. I give up.

The cookies are good though. Chocolatey and dense. Also, they are unlikely to squirt out of your hands, mid-snack, and embed themselves into your television.

1013.5!

Between the extra chores, work, and kid-stuff, yesterday ended up being a very busy day. I certainly wasn't going to make that mistake two days in a row, so I took the day off from work. Nobody ever heard of the Agnostic Work Ethic.

Speaking of being ambitionless, aside from my constant efforts to be on-time everywhere and all the time, I rarely set goals for myself. Making a goal is the first step towards failure, so by abstaining from goal setting, I prevent failure, thus ensuring success at being failure-free. And for those achievinistas who consider my approach to just be a shortcut to failure, I'd hope they'd at least admire the balls-out efficiency of it.

That being said, I did set a goal this year. Last year, in my end-of-year round-up, I noted that I had run 989 miles. I vowed to myself that I'd run 1000 miles in 2006.

Note that this is really a crappy goal. First, 1000 miles wouldn't be a record for me. Second, 1000 miles is about 1% further than 989. Oooooh, 1%. Way to really stretch yourself there, champ. How long would it have taken the U.S. to land on the moon if J.F.K. had merely vowed to get 1% closer during his presidency? (Answer: MUCH longer).

Anyway, one of the things I did with my day off was go for a 5 mile run. Afterwards I excitedly entered the run into my spreadsheet (which gives me at least as much satisfaction as the run itself) and added up the total 2006 miles so far. As of today, I'm at 999.2. I don't mean to jinx myself, but I think the 1% Brass Ring is within reach.

I also did a bunch of Winter Present Tree Day shopping. Along with buying stuff for Daisy, I kept an eye out for a present for myself, a Nintendo Wii. After visiting numerous stores, I was left with this question:

What unspeakable act do I have to perform to get a Nintendo Wii?

If you have such a device, and are into sexually awkward computer programmers, drop me a line. I'm lubed and ready and have a slightly underdeveloped gag reflex.

(Mom, skip that last paragraph!)

Speaking of inappropriate sexual references, I was walking past Brookstone today and was horrified to see their latest exercise device, the iGallop. Here's the promotional video for it:



And, here's what it looks like when a regular human uses it.



And finally, just because I can't not link to this, a cat:

Gah!

Hank is sick this week, so I've got double-duty on chores. Combine that with all the usual holiday foolishness, and Mike is a busy boy. All work and no play makes this a crappy blog.

Please click the Next Blog button for further entertainment/horrendousness.

Love,
Mike

Evolution of a profile picture

1.0



2.0


3.0











(Note, the 1.0 picture isn't the exact one I used to use. I lost that one, but did my best to recreate it. It's off a bit)

Yesterday, as I walked down the street, I spied my neighbor unloading his groceries from his car. I glanced at his haul, looking for something blog-worthy. I spotted some packaging I had seen before....

Me: Whoa! Did you buy Grapples?
Neighbor: What? What are grabbles?
Me: Grapples. They're apples that have been processed to taste like grapes.
Neighbor: Really? They have those things? I just bought regular apples that taste like apples.
Me: Yeah, they do have them. Never tried them though.
Neighbor: But, if you wanted something that tasted like grapes, why wouldn't you just get grapes?
Me: You have articulated the great mystery of the Grapple.

Then I went along my way, putting all thoughts of misflavored fruits out of my mind. I stayed in that happy state until this morning, when I was perusing the produce aisle at Safeway. For the first time in months I saw the Grapples sitting innocently alongside the apples. I laughed to myself. Grapples!

They called to me though.

Grapples: Mike! You'll love us!
Mike: What? No way.
Grapples: Daisy will love us!
Mike: No! You're creepy on any number of levels.
Grapples: A 4-pack for $3.99! Could you make a more ironic purchase for less than four dollars? We're expensive produce, but a humor bargain!
Mike: Damn it!

They had me. I couldn't not buy them.

I brought them home and showed them off to the family. Hank sniffed them.

"They smell like cough syrup," Hank declared.

Daisy was eager to try one, so Hank cut one up. Daisy gingerly nibbled at a piece, always a bit wary of new foods. She furrowed her brow in disappointment.

"They taste like apples!" she exclaimed.

I didn't trust her immature taste buds, so I grabbed a slice for myself and chewed it thoughtfully, eager to savor its processed grapey goodness. I contemplated its flavor carefully.

"They taste like apples!" I exclaimed.

Daisy picked up the plastic container. "Looks like an apple. Tastes like a grape." she read, directly from the packaging.

"Does it say that in quotes?" Hank asked.

I grabbed the packaging. That slogan WAS in quotes. I had fallen prey to the oldest advertising trick in the book. In general, advertisements don't have to contain very much truth, and if they wrap their boasts in quotation marks, they can pretty much say whatever they want."

"Looks like an apple. Tastes like chicken!"

As long as some crazy bastard somewhere is willing to say, "Well, I thought it tasted like chicken, then that packaging meets the minimum requirements for truthiness in advertising.

In fact, if someone somewhere happens to think they have cancer, and then maybe they read my blog, and then they get tested for cancer and find that the imagined tumor is gone, well then they might utter the phrase, "Finally! A blog that cures cancer!"

With all the people on this planet, I'll bet someone has said those words. In fact, just to make sure, I'll say it right now.

Finally! A blog that cures cancer!

Ta dah! That'll be $3.99, please.

How do you measure the size of a tragedy?

I guess you could use the number of people who were injured or lost their homes, but the most significant number is probably the number of people who died.

Hurricane Katrina, for example, was a horrible tragedy. Nearly 2,000 people lost their lives. Ugh.

The Darfur conflict in Sudan has cost about 400,000 lives so far, and it's ongoing. It's hard to imagine death on that scale.

The Rwandan genocide in 1994? Probably about a million lives lost. Unreal.

Roughly 10,000,000 people were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, give or take a million.

The very size of those tragedies make them hard to fathom. I can't really conceive of millions of deaths. My mind reels and I'm unable to process the impact emotionally. It's just too big to bear.

Last week I read about the Kim family. They had been on a road trip through the Northwest for Thanksgiving and went missing on November 25th. The story popped up in the news on a regular basis with theories about where they might have gone and updates on the progress of the search. I paid a little attention, but mostly managed to block it out. It's not pleasant reading about an imperiled family, especially one with two small children.

Then, on Monday of this week, a full nine days after they had gone missing, news came that some of the family members, the mom and the two daughters, had been found in their car on a remote Oregon road. The dad, James Kim, had struck out into the wilderness two days earlier, to try and get help for his family. He was still missing.

Search teams regrouped and chased James's trail through the snow.

I couldn't stop reading about it.

I didn't really understand why this story grabbed me so strongly. I'm not hitting the Refresh button for Darfur updates, and the scale of that tragedy is bigger by orders of magnitude. But, reduce it down to one man, lost in the wilderness, and suddenly it hits me like a ton of bricks. I pressed that Refresh button dozens of times each day.

On Tuesday a member of one of my email groups sent out a message saying that he was going to go join the search in Oregon, and asking if anyone wanted to join him. I stared at that email for a good long time. In the end I decided that I would be a greater liability to a wilderness search team than an asset, but it ate away at me.

News came on Wednesday that James had been found and he had not survived his trek. It wounded me. Obviously the sorrow felt by the people who know him and his family dwarfs the impact it made on me, but I was surprised at how depressed it made me.

At the most superficial level, I had a fair amount in common with James Kim. I live in San Francisco, have a family, and make my living in a technical field, just like James. The similarities break down at that point. From what I've read he was kinder, smarter, and more driven than I'll ever be. Furthermore, the way he died, desperately trekking through a snowy wilderness to save his stranded family is undoubtedly more tragic and heroic than my demise will be (I predict that I'll die while running, either having a heart attack or running into something more lethal than a garbage can).

Maybe it's just a coping mechanism that giant tragedies have a hard time sinking in emotionally, and only the small ones wriggle into my heart. Or maybe I could picture myself driving my family through a snowy road and getting stranged. Either way, this one got to me.

I'm going to stop hitting the Refresh button soon though.

CNET's video retrospective

Hank: I've been thinking about our mugs.
Me: Our what?
Hank: Our mugs.
Me: Weird That's what I thought you said.
Hank: I think we need new mugs.
Me: Our what?
Hank: Mugs.
Me: Huh. Do our mugs not work right? I successfully drank coffee out of one today. It didn't seem broken.
Hank: I went over to Heidi's house and she offered me some tea, and she served it in a nice mug.
Me: So, our mugs need to be... nicer?
Hank: Yes. I want to have nice mugs. Is that totally crazy? Am I some kind of idiot for wanting to have nice mugs for our guests?
Me: No. I think I'm the idiot.
Hank: Why?
Me: It just would have never occurred to me to nice-up our mugs. There's a whole level of sophistication in this world that I'm unable to appreciate. I'm glad I have you to tell me what I'm missing.

She bought new mugs.

The term "computer science" cracks me up.

The word science generally applies to those fields that use the scientific method, which is a way of learning based on hypotheses, gathering data, and reasoning. The idea that one could program a computer via the scientific method is rather absurd.

"Ok, so I hypothesize that a word processor is constructed of 10 zeroes followed by 10 ones. Let's see..... *turning crank*, *watching flashing lights*, *listening to beeps and boops*.... Nope! We made midget donkey porn this time. Let's try 10 zeroes followed by 11 ones instead, but I will need to do it one-handed."

At some level I suppose that management is doing a bit of science (or at least soft engineering). They glumly look at missed deadlines and mountainous lists of bugs and say things like, "Well, I guess 10 monkeys wasn't enough. What if we had an INFINITE NUMBER OF MONKEYS?!"

(After six months of being pelted by an infinite amount of monkey feces, management typically decides to outsource the whole effort to India.)

So, when it's all said and done, I'm hardly surprised that software companies, like the one that employs me, end up producing bug-riddled and dizzyingly complex computer programs. Granted, my company doesn't write software for Joe Average, instead, we produce business management software. You'd buy this stuff if you had a big or medium-sized corporation and you wanted to try and make some part of your business automated or maybe just a little more efficient. Still, it's wondrous to me that anyone ever does anything useful with it. God knows that I can hardly get the stuff to run, and I wrote part of it.

What's even more amazing is that I think our marginally unsuccessful company actually makes better software than some of our competitors. I keep hearing stories like this:

Customer X is considering buying our bloated software package or IBM's. So, the customer brings in a team of our engineers and a team of IBM engineers to do a proof-of-concept. For example, the customer might say, "Ok teams, show me how to use your software to pound this nail into this piece of wood. You have one week."

My company's team would spend a week using our software package to build an enormously complicated nail pushing device. Given a nail of the precise right dimensions, our machine would successfully push it 98% of the way into balsa wood, 98% of the time. Along the way it would produce 1,000,000 lines of reports and error messages.

IBM's team however, would take an entirely different approach. They'd recognize that a hammer was required, but in order to produce a hammer they'd show up with:

• A blacksmith
• Mineral rights to an iron mine
• A mainframe
• A byzantine set of binders and processes
• A truck full of ones and zeroes
• An army of hydroponically-fed vat-grown consultants

Then IBM misses the deadline and our company wins the deal. We repeat this cycle just enough times each quarter to miss profitability by a few million dollars.

That's life as a computer scientist, boys and girls.

One of the advantages of working at home is not having to interact with society. People creep me out. Today, however, despite it being the beginning of holiday shopping season, I felt compelled to go to the mall and buy some socks. My feet, you see, are often cold during winter, and I recently discovered the joys of Smartwool socks. They are warm and cozy and my sweet little tootsies love them. So, I went to buy more because like all civilized men, I am a slave to the cozy tootsie.

My favorite moment at the mall actually came when I was driving home. I saw some poor fellow running across the street to try and catch his train before it left. Due to his unfortunate choice of pants style, his trousers dropped down to his knees as he ran through the intersection. After a few steps, he was reduced to an awkward shuffle while simultaneously holding up his pants. He barely made his train.

I roared in.... uh.... sympathetic laughter.

Now, I've mocked this loose-pants fashion trend before, but it bears an additional mock round.

I totally understand that fashion often defies practicality. We've all seen pre-ripped pants and pants that are way too tight, but this too-loose style may be the first fashion trend that actually impairs the very limbs it seeks to cover. What other piece of everyday clothing actually prevents your body from functioning?

It would be like wearing shirts that pressed your elbows into your torso. You'd be reduced to flapping your lower arms around like a panicked flightless bird.

Or maybe like wearing floppy shoes that were so big that they interfered with each other, ensuring that you tripped with each and every step.

Or sunglasses that squirted acid into your retinas.

Or a hat that kept your head toasty warm WHILE EATING YOUR BRAIN.

That's what those stupid pants are like. What's even more annoying is that theoretically fashion is one of the factors that attracts a mate. So, these idiots with motion-impairing pants are potentially MORE likely to attract a mate than people with normal pants.

And that's why I like working at home.

Smart Aleck Theater - Saturday, December 2nd

Act 1 -- Jokes Gone Awry

Scene: It's Saturday afternoon and Mike is in his backyard, futilely plucking Oxalis stalks from his lawn. The fact that it's more like an Oxalis lawn with bits of grass is not lost upon him. Meanwhile, his garden-savvy neighbor spies Mike from over the fence.

Neighbor: Hey Mike. Are you pulling Oxalis?
Me: Yes. Grrrrr.
Neighbor: I recently bought some weed spray that's supposed to work on Oxalis.
Me: I don't think there is such a thing.
Neighbor: Well, it says it kills Oxalis, and I tried it, and it seems to work.
Me: *perking up* Are you serious?
Neighbor: Yeah. Seems worth trying, unless you're bothered by herbicides.
Me: I'd do anything to get rid of this Oxalis. I'd kill small children.
Neighbor: *blinking*
Me: Well, ha ha, not MY small child, obviously. Someone else's small child.
Neighbor: You could just borrow my weed spray.
Me: Ok.

Act 2 -- The Smart Alecker Becomes The Smart Aleckee

Scene: Later on Saturday afternoon at the Safeway checkout line. Mike finishes loading his groceries onto the conveyor and faces the cashier

Me: Hi. And, no, I don't need any help out today.
Cashier: You look like you do.
Me: What? I what!? Geez! I'm just trying to save you guys a little time here, and I get nothing but flack.
Cashier: Life's like that. There's flack, and taxes and death.
Me: Well, I've lived a rich full life. I'm ready for death.
Cashier: *making surprisingly realistic sound effect of a bullet shooting through the air into my body, then looking down at my feet, as though I had fallen onto the floor* Man, that was fast.
Me: That WAS fast. You guys are very efficient killers.
Cashier: We try.
Bagger: Do you need some help out today, sir?


Act 3 -- The Beginning of the End

Scene: Saturday evening. Hank is preparing dinner while Mike tidies the kitchen. Mike spies her usage of the cheese grater, one of the many kitchen implements which is exceedingly difficult to clean.

Me: You know what I hate?
Hank: What?
Me: Cheese graters.
Hank: You know what I love?
Me: What?
Hank: Grated cheese.
Me: At least we won't have to be one of those couples who uses the generic "Irreconcilable Differences" phrase. We've really homed in on it.