Stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category
"Daddy, I've told you before: keep two hands on the steering wheel!"
'You're right; sorry Kylie!'
"If you don't listen to me, we'll have to pull over and let Mommy drive home!"
Or some words very close to those; she told me this during our drive home last night, causing an eruption of laughter from the front seat.
Our daughter Kylie has, on three occasions now, gone to bed perfectly happy and fine, only to wake up vomiting in the middle of the night. By the morning, though, she'd be fine again, and acting like nothing much had happened.
I figured it was something in her food that was triggering the events, but the first two times it happened, there was too much overlap in the meals to figure anything out--she basically ate the identical dinner. When the third incident happened this week, however, I was able to note only two overlaps with the prior meals: on all three occasions, she'd eaten some small cherry tomatoes and some banana with her dinner.
After I related this story to my friend Kirk, he wrote back "yea, tomatoes and bananas don't go together. Acid and starch = boom!" Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I hadn't ever heard this before. I've certainly seen it in action often enough now, however, to believe it. So as much as she likes both, Kylie's days of combining the two are now over!
As an aside, sorry it's been so quiet around here lately. We moved a couple weeks back, and between packing, moving, and unpacking (not even close to done yet), I just haven't had much time to write.
Quick--name the four "major" titles on the men's and women's professional tennis circuit. Easy, right? Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. OK, do it again for the golfers on the PGA tour. Also easy: The Masters, US Open, The Open Championship (that'd be the British Open to most US fans), and the PGA Championship. Now, quick, name the LPGA's four major championships.
Not so easy, is it? I can name three with relative ease: The LPGA Championship, the US Open, and the British Open (though the British only became a major for the women in 2001). But what about the fourth? It's this week's event, the Kraft Nabisco Championship. I didn't know that until I read about it earlier this week. (I knew there were four, but I had no idea what the fourth was called.)
The history of the LPGA's majors is somewhat convoluted--this article explains it all fairly well. But the bigger question here is, if you take the 12 event names above, can you quickly tell which one doesn't belong? Another easy answer, of course: the Kraft Nabisco Championship. And why doesn't it belong? Because it's the only "major" event that has a sponsor's name (Nabisco is owned by Kraft, so I'll just count that as one sponsor) embedded right there in the event's title.
So what happens in three (or five or whatever) years when the Kraft sponsorship is up, and they decide not to renew? Will the fourth major then become the Ford Explorer Championship or the Wal-Mart Championship or perhaps the 7-11 Championship? Whatever happens, it won't make it easy for the LPGA's fans to remember all four of the majors. To me, and perhaps it's my old-fashioned traditionalist side, major event names shouldn't have a sponsor's name directly attached to the event. Once the TV time starts, sure, all bets are off--I have no issues with "The US Open presented by IBM," for instance, as the tag line used on the air. But not as part of the event's official name--getting noted in the record books every year, and subject to change at the whim of some corporate bean counter (I used to be one of those!) somewhere who nixes the $10 million sponsorship contract.
Come on, LPGA, do the right thing: name your major something non-vendor-dependent, and then sell the TV sponsorship rights for the broadcast. The Tradition, The National, whatever--I really don't care what you name it, just name it such that the fans won't have to remember a new name every time there's sponsorship turnover. That's hardly the way to build mind share with the fans for one of your four major championships.
Over the weekend, I was thinking a bit about the next 20 years, and things I'd like to accomplish within that timeframe. Nothing practical like "preparing for retirement" or "funding the girls' college accounts" or even "remembering to mow the lawn weekly." No, it's always more interesting to think of the fun things one might be able to do in the future.
So here's my list, focused on those things I think would be the most fun or most interesting. As with lists of this type, there's a good chance that well over half my list will remain unaccomplished--family, work responsibilities, and economic realities always seem to get in the way of our dreams. However, I will do my best to check off at least some of these items while working within the confines of reality.
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I've finally migrated my family's site over to the latest version of WordPress, and installed pretty much the same batch of plug-ins and widgets as I use here. However, I wanted something else, too--a randomly-selected image for the header of the site that changes each time the page is loaded, as seen in these four sample pictures:
(The header images are just sections I've snipped out of photos we've taken, with an artsy Photoshop filter of some sort applied.)
I searched the web, and there are a few plug-ins that offer this ability, but they came either too feature-rich, or required some additional JavaScript to work properly. I wanted the most simple, basic, and functional header image rotation solution I could find...so I wrote my own, which required all of two lines of code. I'm posting it here so that (a) I remember how I did it, and (b) in case anyone else wants a simple solution, they'll be able to find it with some help from Google (our family's site is access restricted, so posting it there wouldn't do much good...and it would confuse my relatives, who are used to only seeing pictures of our kids there!)
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Over the last couple of evenings, I created my first-ever WordPress plug-in, which I wrote to make it easier to customize the WordPress registration (and login) screen. As distributed, the stock version of WordPress uses a really not-very-nice registration screen--it features the WordPress logo (embedded in a background image), and links back to the WordPress site. If you wish to modify the login screen, you have to change some files in the WordPress core--and that means that every time you update, you have to remember to redo those customizations. Far from ideal...
So I took some time to read about creating WordPress plug-ins, then studied up on the available hooks to see if what I wanted to do was possible. The good news is that, as of WordPress 2.1, it was possible--and quite simple (even for my very-limited PHP skills).
After a few error-filled attempts, I wound up with a working plug-in that creates a nicely-customized registration screen, all without changing any core WordPress code--you can see the results on the registration page. (This is roughly what it looked like under WordPress 2.0, but I created that page by modifying the core WordPress files.)
If anyone wants this plug-in, feel free to grab it (36KB download)--there are some basic instructions in the customreg.php file, but I wouldn't describe it as heavily documented. Also, I'm not sure how well it works with the default login screen, as I use the King Login sidebar widget for login in the sidebar. What I'd really like to do is figure out how to display the registration form with the header, sidebar, and footer--but after some basic investigation, I think that project is beyond my skills. So for now, this is officially good enough.
Despite my promise to stay on top of my Macworld postings, I haven't done all that well at doing so. This morning, I posted a small flurry of Macworld stories, covering the last few months' editorial pieces. Since I filed them correctly according to date, you won't see them in the RSS (I don't think?), so here are some links to the Macworld pieces, along with a short synopsis of each article:
Just so I can finish with another promise to be broken, I really will try to stay more on top of these posts from now on! :)
Now you might think this post is going to discuss the unreality of the whole CSI franchise (CSI lab techs doing detective work? Getting results back in hours, not days or weeks? Finding unique ways of getting a DNA sample from a suspect?), but that's not the point. Well, that's not true. That last example there is actually the point of this post. From this article on Portland's KATU news station site:
Peter Jacob Inouye, 24, of Parkland, was arrested shortly before 7 p.m. as he returned to his parents' house a few blocks from the rape scene, Olympia police said in a news release.
Cmdr. Tor Bjornstad said detectives collected Inouye's DNA recently after Inouye spit on the street, and the sample was analyzed by a lab.
Bjornstad said an officer watched Inouye spit on the sidewalk, and then rushed to collect that saliva off the sidewalk.
So perhaps at least one Olympia detective has been watching CSI? Or perhaps they're just particularly diligent? Whichever; I'm just glad this menace is off the streets, thanks to the alert detective's actions. Though as they used say on TV, "all parties are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law."
I'm old enough to remember the "good old days" of network television. Perhaps you are, too--you know, back when a new show was given a commitment for an entire season's production? Take, for instance, 1981's Hill Street Blues, a groundbreaking drama set in a New York police station. Ratings the first season were absolutely abysmal, and yet, NBC left it on the air for the entire season. At the end of the year, the drama picked up eight Emmys, was renewed for season two, and went on to run for seven full seasons.
Fast forward to 2006. I don't watch a ton of television, mainly 24 and CSI (Las Vegas, not New York or Miami). But when the fall 2006 season started, two new shows caught my eye: NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and ABC's Day Break. Studio 60 was a potentially intriguing "behind the scenes" look at a live weekend comedy show (i.e. Saturday Night Live), produced by Aaron Sorkin, whose work I've liked in the past. Day Break's premise was more unique and complicated--a police detective is framed for a murder, and he keeps waking up to the same day, over and over (ala Groundhog Day). He then spends the repetitive day slowly figuring out who framed him and why.
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If you've been reading here much, or have ever seen me speak, you know that I'm somewhat of an aviation fan. I'm an instrument-rated private pilot (though not current, thanks to family, money, and Oregon weather!), and X-Plane is one of my favorite diversions. I love being able to pilot aircraft I'll never have the chance to fly here in reality, and to fly in weather conditions that I wouldn't dare to go near in a real airplane. X-Plane also features real-world weather, so I can fly around the Portland area in conditions that closely match what I see out the office window.
Yesterday, it was foggy here. Really foggy. Almost all day. So during lunch, I took the Nike LearJet (OK, the X-Plane version thereof) out from Portland International for a little spin. Take-off in foggy conditions is relatively straightforward--full thrust, max rate of climb, maintain runway heading (instrument departure procedure? Nah!), and I broke out into the blue skies above at about 3,500 feet above the ground. I flew off to a clearer airport for a couple touch-and-goes, then headed back to Portland. Given the fog, an instrument approach was definitely required. I chose the ILS for runway 28R, and maneuvered the plane towards the final approach course.
Then I got lazy, something I couldn't ever do when flying instruments in the Piper Warrior I trained in: I set up a fully-coupled autopilot approach, including auto-throttles. As pilot, my job was now reduced to system monitor--I only had to choose the desired airspeed on the autopilot panel, remember to drop the flaps and gear, monitor the system's progress, and then the autopilot would take care of the rest. Just for fun, I used SnapzPro to record the approach, from the ILS intercept to touchdown, and uploaded them in case anyone wants to see X-Plane, or what a really foggy approach might look like.
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