swagger wagon

Jessica showed me this video Friday afternoon and I cracked up.  Under the comments section on YouTube some (young) people remark on what a lame video this is or how nobody can relate to this.  For myself the humor is that when I was younger I also believed that minivans were both ugly and also the stamp of suburban dystopia.  I hoped I would never find myself in a situation that compelled me to get one.

Between then and now life has happened.  I have two kids and it chemically changed my brain - now convenience factors have trumped style while shopping.  And from a convenience perspective the Toyota Sienna is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.  We did not just "settle" for a minivan; we wanted one.  Our Sienna is pimped out, and we are proud of it.

All of this is why I think Toyota has hit the nail on the head with the viral video.  Nothing is funnier than seeing yourself in the humor and coming full circle with it.

all Acuras are decepticons

I have decided that all Acuras are decepticons.  That angular, insectile shape is the dead giveaway.  As further evidence, look at the logos:

  

Just turn the Acura logo upside-down and...

Coincidence?  I think not.  You may ask then, where are the Autobots?  The answer is simple, all 18 wheelers.  If the robots ever decide to war it will be yuppies vs. rednecks.

attention for the girls

Yesterday Jessica was leaving in the van and I gave her a kiss and a hug.  Then she pulled out a bit and stopped, rolling down the window to say: "Madeline wants a hug, too".  I went over to give Madeline a hug and a kiss and I realized that she wanted attention  because she just saw me being sweet to Jess.

It reminded me how girls model relationships with men on how daddy treats mommy, and why being sweet to my wife is more than just about how I may feel on a particular day.  I'm also setting the bar for future boyfriends and a spouse.  So instead of complaining 20 years from now about how I don't think Madeline's boyfriend is up to snuff, my best defense is to show them the minimal standard in myself now.

Mac mini media center

We recently got a new LED/LCD TV (our prior TV was over 10 years old) -- this is the first flat-screen TV in our house.  Now that we are emerging from behind the home entertainment curve I have embarked on a project to solve our problem of not having a home desktop computer.  Jessica and I both have laptops, but sometimes we look at things online together (budgeting, or online shopping for rugs - one recent example).  Doing this on a laptop is really difficult wherever you sit, because it is hard for both people to get comfortable and see the screen well.

Our house does not have a study, so I have decided instead to get a mac mini and hook it up to the new flatscreen.  This will turn it into a multifunctional media center for: music, web browsing, games for Madeline (and eventually Emily).  After some research it seems that if you use a DVI connection for the mac mini then the picture is of good quality.  I may have to increase the minimal font size for the system so that you can read text from the couch.  

The biggest problem is managing all of the remotes.  I have resisted getting a Logitech eHarmony universal remote, mainly because they look confusing to me and are very expensive.  And I'm sure Jessica would never use one so half the purpose of getting one is shot anyway.  

New Resolutions

I have a bad habit - Jessica calls it "stacking".  I do it both at work and at home.  Basically, I find myself flooded continuously with paper.  Most of it is errant information and junk intermixed with occasional important things.  But I never have time to make a decision about what to do with it (unless it seems really important), so instead I stack it in a big pile (at work on my desk, at home in my closet).  It probably does not help that I have packrattish tendencies and am always afraid that I may throw away something critical that I will desperately need later.

Eventually the stack reaches colossal proportions.  At this point I go nuts and suddenly have a mission to do something with all of the paper.  I just did this and found that about 95% of the paper is junk that can be thrown away.

So here is my new years resolution: become better at deciding what is junk in the short term, and trash it immediately.  In order to curb my information storing obsession, I scan anything that might be important and then trash the paper version (unless it is something like a birth certificate or vehicle title).

About a month ago I got the Fugitsu Scansnap s300m, and that is a great little scanner.  I have it set up at work so that it scans directly to ReadIris for OCRing.  I save all of my .pdfs in a regular directory-based filing system and give them long, descriptive titles; since they are searchable I'm sure to always find what I need later.

kids say the greatest things

Today my daughter Madeline told my wife, "I want to hold my John".  I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world.  Being the Dad of daughters just makes you feel like a king.

My Home Depot girl

About a month ago I was in Home Depot getting supplies for some home project.  The girl at self-checkout line stopped me to let me know that she sees me in the HD almost every week for months -- I must really like doing home projects.  How embarrasing.

It's true that I have this thing for doing projects, and my wife accuses me "finding stuff to do".  But I do have some great tips for anyone who is interested.

About a month ago I replaced the chandelier in our front entry.  The new lighting fixture was the bowl-type and very heavy.  The most difficult part of hanging this type of fixture is pulling it up and not having a two free hands to secure the chain.  While they do make quick-connect brackets for the box in the ceiling, I used another method my Dad told me about.  Take a heavy-duty eye screw and put it in a stud in the ceiling near the box.  Use a rope tied to the chandelier and looped several times between the eye-screw and  chandelier as a pulley-type system.  This allows you to easily get the chandelier to height, then you can tie the rope to secure the fixture.  Then you have two hands to attach the chain and do the wiring, and can slowly lower the fixture once that is done without bouncing it around.  At the end take out the eye screw and spackle over the hole from it.

Another tip is for wobbly fans.  I found that ours in our master bedroom was due to the box racking in a certain direction.  My solution was to inject "Great Stuff" (the sprayable foam that hardens) around the box between the studs to stabilize the box.  Now the fan spins true with no annoying noises.

architecture of the future

This past weekend I saw the exhibit in the Guggenheim on Zaha Hadid. Part of the exhibit I spent trying to figure out if she was kidding or not with the busy, detailed "analyses" of a particular project from various perspectives, times, and uses all in the same frame. There is something so angular and off-kilter about her perspective, and the windows in some of her buildings have that rhomboidal shape with rounded corners that looks so Jetsons-meets-Aliens. Certainly, the buildings are not designed for efficiency in their propensity to streak out into space and taper off in delicate tails.

But in another way I can recognize the art in her creations. She combines materials, lines, and form in a fashion that is sleek and yet not as clinical as most modern glass-faced buildings. The architecture is memorable, especially the works that juxtapose angular forms to rounded surfaces. And my wife just loves that car in the exhibit.

Munich

I stumbled across a recent review in the Times of the movie "Munich", and found it worthy to note that both the review and comments neglected what I considered to be the most interesting aspects of the film. Firstly, I thought it fascinating that the group of Isrealis who crisscross Europe seeking vengeance on the organizers of the Munich killings are chosen specifically for their lack of experience so that they did not pop up on lists of "agents" from Isreal. The theory of the Isreali government was that anybody could be trained to seek and to kill, and therefore the agents were given hardly any information on their targets excepting their names.

You see how nervous the Isrealis are during their first assignment when they finally come to killing their first target. The leader asks repeatedly, "What is your name? Do you know why we are here?". But they complete the mission and continue to eliminate the targets one by one.

I believe it is true that most people are capable of anything. Dump somebody in a stressful situation with high incentive to succeed and they can learn investment banking, master pole vaulting, design a computer chip. Often half of the barrier to entry in any field is artificial complications engineered by humans to convince others that they are not capable. Sometimes those people in the field are afraid of competition, or of losing their uniqueness or "talent".

The other aspect of the movie that stuck with me was the scene near the end in New York. After the guy who works in Isreali government refuses to "break bread" with the former agent, the camera slowly pans south, toward the financial district of Manhattan. And the twin towers come into view, putting the concept of terrorism in a new light as the viewer's thoughts leap into the future. I guess Spielberg is trying to say, "To where have we come? How different is terrorism now?"