Beautiful black flowers return
Black Beauty
Friday fun: Id’s Doom in your browser
A great demonstration of how much progress is being made with javascript. Spend some time at lunch today playing the original Doom from Id in your browser. Performance is a little sluggish on my middle of the road imac at work, and the sound lags behind the action, but it’s still pretty impressive. It also sort of mimics my original experience with Doom back in the day, when it was sluggish as heck on the old (386? 486? I can’t recall) machines we had at the office when it came out. Anyway, worth a little stroll down nostalgia lane. Mind that you should try this with a modern browser. Enjoy!
Strange, angsty day
Had a moment of real parental anxiety yesterday. We had a wave of powerful supercell thunderstorms blow through yesterday afternoon right as I was supposed to leave work. Amherst’s town alert system went off and our campus police told everyone to take shelter. I ended up with a bunch of my coworkers in the basement of my building. My house is about 15 minutes away to the SE of our campus. The storms hitting us then would reach my house in 10-15 minutes, and I sat there wondering whether I should rush home trying to outrun the storms in order to be home with my infant son, or to stick it out and hope for the best. I was really conflicted. Brady was home with my mother in law, and given my druthers I’d rather have been there, but I ended up concluding sticking tight was the safest thing. I wouldn’t have been much help to him if I’d gotten stuck or worse on my way home.
In the end everything worked out fine. My mother in law took him down into the basement and they waited things out. Later that night we had to grab him out of bed and head down into the basement again when another line of supercells passed through, but no tornadoes touched down either at home or work. We do have friends whose neighborhoods and possibly houses have been damaged though, so today I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. All told 7 tornadoes touched down in our region, and so far 4 people are reported dead. Scary stuff when it hits this close to home.
Brady’s 5th month
So I’ve been a neglectful Dad and failed to point out that Brady finished his 5th month on earth on Sunday the 22nd. This month saw him start to use his hands to grasp and manipulate things, though still very clumsily. He’s also started experimenting with vocalizing, and he’s begun eating solid foods (potatoes, bananas, and pears are all big hits. Avocado, not so much). The speech stuff is the most fun for me – you can see the mental process he’s going through sometimes, and it’s clear he’s figuring out that vocalizing is communicating. I can sometimes get him engaged in little conversations where we trade sounds back and forth – me with words, him with little sonic experiments. I absolutely love this. Oh, and this month also saw him pretty consistently sleeping through the night, a huge relief, especially to Susan. Generally he heads up to bed around 7 and is usually asleep by 8. Sometimes he stirs in the early am, starting around 4AM, but usually Susan can calm him enough that he’ll stay in bed until 6, and a few times all of us have slept till 7:30 on the weekends.
The only downside to this month has been that the transition to solid food means…pooping. Lots of it. He would sometimes go for as many as 5 or 6 days between poops. Now, sometimes he has 4 in a day. Susan is not buying my ‘well ok then, lets keep him on breast milk and formula till he’s potty trained’ plan for some reason, so this means more diaper changing of grossness.
Anyway, overall another great month. No new pictures yet, but there is a gallery of all the pictures we took during his fifth month, including this one of his first bite of solid food:
Greatest Hockey goal ever
So check out this goal:
Tell me you’ve seen a better goal – that’s the most amazing hockey play I’ve ever seen.
Minecraft plus Studio Ghibli plus time = brilliance
So you have to be a nerds nerd to really appreciate this but man, if you fit the bill, this is fantastic. This:
Is the worlds imagined by Studio Ghibli as recreated by a bunch of folks using the Minecraft engine.
If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, stop what you’re doing and go watch Laputa, Castle in the Sky, or Grave of the Fireflies, or Porco Rosso, or, well, anything they’ve done, but especially those. Shorthand explanation would be that they’re a Japanese analog to Walt Disney.
If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, and you have a computer that’s less than 6-7 years old that can run Java, go spend the $15 or so to register. It’s a 3d lego toolkit with world generation, multiplayer, and zombies, plus a whole lot more, but that should be enough right there. Plus it’s absolutely brilliant.
Scene of a poultry murder
scene of the crime
One of our chickens was killed early this winter, and while some of the details of what happened are clear to us, some of it’s a bit mysterious as well. I’ve been sitting on a draft of this story for literally months. I’ve finally found time to post it.
We have a habit of checking in on our chickens in the late afternoon, dropping a bit of cracked corn into their coop and making sure all is well. Susan and I had just returned from a Doctor appointment for our son Brady last week, and after letting our dog Soolin out I headed back to the coop. As I approached Soolin rushed off barking – she had detected a large raptor in our garden, hunched over the carcass of one of our chickens. This fantastic little scene evolved as Soolin chased the raptor back towards our property line, her barking and snapping and it flapping furiously, trying to gain altitude. Ultimately it escaped, but I commend Soolin for her effort. It reminded me of an old warner brother cartoon.
As to what happened, well, I’m not really sure. As you can see in the second photo, something pulled the screws to the coop door latch out of the coop frame. They’re tiny screws, but still it would require a fair amount of strength to manage this. Plus there were no signs of something grasping or gnawing at the coop or coop wire, something you’d expect to find if a predator was trying to work out how to bust into the coop. Our best guess is it was a bear or racoon. Our neighbor watched a black bear pull down his birdfeeder to get at the birdseed this winter, which lead to our operating theory: a bear showed up and tried to get at the chicken feed pellets, freeing the chickens, one of which was subsequently killed by the raptor. There were large bundles of both black and yellow chicken feathers in piles outside the coop, suggesting some or all of the chickens were outside the coop at some point, and several of the other chickens had wounds.
How the criminal broke into the coop
In terms of fallout, the chickens were traumatized, and would not come down from the loft of their coop for two days. After the second day, I opened the top and chased them out of it, figuring they had to eat so I would force the issue. They pretty quickly returned to their old behaviors, sans their sibling.
If you click on the last photo to enlarge it, you’ll see the raptor perched in the tree in the center background (the far tree) of the photo. He spent the 30 minutes it took me to clean up the coop and repair the busted door circling the yard and doing low passes over the coop, with me occasionally shaking my fist at him. After the chicken carcass was no longer visible to him he settled into the tree in the photo to watch me, and was still there when I headed in.
We did lose another chicken over the winter, but I have no photos of it because I discovered the murder scene in the dark. Our best guess on that one was it was a coyote or fox based on the scat it left behind.
All of this has us concluding we need to build a better coop – the current one isn’t adequate in terms of protection for the birds. I did reinforce the chicken wire and apply a layer of metal cloth to it in response to all this though, and we haven’t lost a bird since then. We’ll see if Susan and I find time to work on another coop before the seasons change again.
The perpetrator
Pet peeve: historical perspective in fantasy and science fiction
I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. I cannot say how many times I’ve run across a passage like this in a fantasy novel:
…and the Night’s Watch had a proud tradition of protecting the King for over 2,000 years,
or this from science fiction:
…a galaxy spanning civilization that had endured over 5,000 years…
Here’s the thing: we humans can’t state with much certainty what happened to us a couple of thousand years ago, and generalizing, we can’t say much about what happened earlier than that with any specificity. There is nothing to suggest that anything we produce, from structures, to works of art, to political institutions, to societies, has much chance of surviving more than a few hundred years at best. And yet epic fantasy and science fiction are replete with examples of passages like the above, with authors imagining societies that have persisted statically for millennium only to be disrupted by the events depicted in the novels.
I get that I’m nitpicking forms which by their nature are intended to entertain us by challenging our sense of how things work, but it just doesn’t scan, especially in fantasy. If you could spend some time explaining to me how a society remained stuck as a feudal state for 6,000 years (and even be aware of the passage of that many years), or at least offer some clues as to why, or even wave your hands about and blame it on ‘magic,’ great, maybe I can look past it, and sometimes authors even try to do this. Most of the time though, they don’t (and as far as I can recall anyway, even when they try I haven’t come close to buying it). They want to imagine some grand civilization on the precipice of change and imbue this with a sense of drama and poignancy implied by just how long these institutions have stood, but instead it just comes across as bombastic and silly.
TL;DR: Fantasy and Science fiction authors: please read some history and get a more realistic sense of scale for human endeavors. ‘Fantasy’ is not the same as ‘impossible.’
Just my luck: no functioning consoles
So my primary hobby is gaming, and I spend a fair amount of time and money on it. What are the odds that in the same timeframe Sony Playstation’s PSN service would go down for a month+ due to being hacked, and my just over 3 year old (read: just out of warranty) xbox 360 would Red Ring of Death? 100% likely as it turns out. Just a couple of days after the PSN network blew up, my Xbox died as I sat down to watch a movie on it. I’m especially pissed about the xbox because I intentionally held off buying one for several years because the RROD issue became well known and I decided to hold off for a hardware revision, assuming Microsoft would address the issue. They didn’t. Supposedly it’s addressed in the newest ‘slim’ models (I bought an Elite shortly after they came out), but at this point, having had my first generation xbox die and now my 360 die, I’m not so sure I want to buy back into the platform. It’s a real dilemma though, because I have literally dozens of games for the thing, as well as many peripherals (the controllers alone go for $50/pop and I have 4 of them), and selling everything off will earn me pennies on the dollar. Plus, I’m figuring my soon-to-be toddler would enjoy the Kinect motion control stuff MS is pushing these days.
So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything. I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.
New pictures of Brady
While I haven’t spent much time on this, Susan is a trooper and continues to add new photos to our image gallery. Those will appear on the right column of this site, but in case you missed any lately because I haven’t been pinging Facebook with them, there’s a new gallery for Brady’s 5th month here, and here’s one of my favorites from this month, featuring 4 generations of Kimballs:
Brady meeting his Great Grandmother at her 90th Birthday party
Dave's Place/Metamusing 