Tag: life

Where’s my VCR, my stereo, my TV show?

On October 20, 2008

Last night, our old VCR finally gave up the ghost. This was a drag, but not altogether surprising. It was quite old, and had been slowly breaking down. Too bad about the SNL tape that is irretrievably stuck in there — guess Laura won’t get to see that. I lay all blame at the feet of Sarah Palin — it must have been the experience of recording her that finally killed the thing.

So anyway, after I discovered this problem last night, and made it worse by trying to fix it, I decided to just head to my friendly neighborhood Best Buy and get a new VCR. Only I discovered that the outside world has changed on me, dagnabit. It took a subsequent Circuit City trip to convince me of this, but apparently retail stores no longer sell VCRs, only VCR/DVD combos. So okay, fair enough, I’m not entirely crazy about our current DVD player, and there was a Sony combo there for only $99, so I went ahead and got it.

BUT:

There are some fatal flaws to this new arrangement. The new combos (at least, the ones costing less than $250) apparently lack a tuner, so they can only do “dumb” recording from a line in. Now, the box made this pretty clear, and I thought maybe I could work around it using an extra VCR I had around that doesn’t record properly but does tune into the cable signal just fine. However, I failed to account for the fact that doing this makes automatic recording so annoying as to be infeasible. Whereas before I could just set a bunch of presets to record TV shows on whatever channel at whatever time, now I can set a timer to start recording from the line in, but I have to make sure the VCR is set to the right channel. Hey, if I have to set something manually, I have just lost the benefit of automatic recording.

Perhaps you are thinking this: he needs a DVR! Maybe I do, but what I also need is portability of recordings. See, in our VCR world, the VCR in our living room would tape our various shows, then Laura could pop out the tape and watch them in the kitchen (where we have a combo TV/VCR which lacks a timer but does playback just fine) while she takes care of Dante. I do not know how to accomplish this with a DVR.

So here is my question: how do other people deal with this? My requirements are that I want to automatically (with no manual intervention) record TV shows, and have those recordings available in multiple rooms. I would also love it if I didn’t have to spend a lot of money to achieve this goal. Should I just head over to the VCR section of eBay, or what? Is there some cool 21st century solution that I’m not thinking of?

Gratis Oryza Sativa

By paulobrian

On March 12, 2008

In Uncategorized

Trrish pointed me to a nifty little site called FreeRice, and the experience was satisfying on several levels. FreeRice offers an unending stream of multiple-choice vocabulary questions: given a word, choose which of four options is its synonym. For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated via the United Nations World Food Program. The money for this comes from fairly unobtrusive banner ads that appear below the test area. I enjoy a vocabulary challenge, so the opportunity to play a fun game while effortlessly doing a little bit of good was a double pleasure. In addition, the site ranks your vocabulary level, so there’s a scoring element, which helps encourage replay. The scores range from 0 to 55, but according to the site, “it is rare for people to get much above level 48.”

Your initial vocab level gets set after you answer your first four questions, and then advances by one for every three words you get right. The first time I played the game, my initial level was set at 40. Almost immediately, I was being given unfamiliar words, trying to piece together their etymological roots, narrowing down options by process of elimination, and generally having a fine time. However, the next time I played, I started out hasty and careless, so I got the first word wrong. Well, my initial level got set at 10 that time, and I then slowly crawled up to my former level.

This got me thinking: what’s the real score on FreeRice? Because I am all game-playey and test-takey, I immediately focused on the vocab level as the place to focus my achievement efforts. However, the session I played when I bombed my first question most certainly contributed more rice, and during that session I came to see that the real score isn’t vocab level, but rather grains of rice donated. I was reminded a bit of games like A Change In The Weather and Little Blue Men; these games offer an initial “win” state early on, but if you accept that win, you’ve missed the point of the game. It was yet another level of satisfaction: not only was I building my word power and donating food, I got to think a little bit about clever game mechanics as well.

After getting my first question wrong, I donated 2340 grains of rice and built my vocab level to 48 before getting another question wrong. Can you beat that?

I’ll manage

By paulobrian

On October 19, 2007

In Uncategorized

I don’t generally post about work here, but I do have both the time and the liberty now to announce the other thing that I couldn’t yet talk about when I was posting about some of the various hurricanes that are happening: I have become a manager. I’ve got one guy reporting to me, and a couple more on the way to doing so.

The promotion took effect on October 1, but it’s been effectively in effect (does that make any sense?) for a few months. In other words, I’ve been more or less acting as and being treated as a manager longer than I’ve been being paid for it. It has coincided with my assignment to an enormous bolus of a project that was supposed to go into production on October 1st, but has slid and is crushing us all. My work (well, combined with parenting) has taken over my life, and left little room for anything else, including, you may have noticed, blog posts.

I’m getting a brief respite this weekend, as my parents have taken Dante and Laura and I are up in the mountains having a retreat. It’s lovely — it feels like reaching the surface to take a breath before diving down to fight the kraken again.

Anyway, this is my first time in a supervisory role (well, of staff anyway. I supervised students, but that was like 10 years ago.) All management tips are welcome. 🙂

Carquest: * You have won *

By paulobrian

On September 16, 2007

In Uncategorized

We have car! We went shopping on Wednesday night while my Mom and Dad took care of Dante. (I have the best parents EVAR, by the way.) A big group of dealerships here (GO, formerly John Elway) had a big event where they brought all their used car inventory to the Pepsi Center, so Laura and I headed over there to scope for used cars. Specifically: Honda or Toyota, under $12K, under 60K miles.

We bought one! It’s a 2001 Honda Civic. It actually has 66K miles on it, but we bought it for only $10,500! WOO! I am so excited about Laura having a new car. Her old one has been not-so-secretly driving me crazy for quite a while now. We had a 3-day grace period in which we could return the car for any reason, so we got it checked out by our mechanic during that time. The verdict: all is well! The car just needed new belts for $120, and now it’s ready to go! YEAH!

We were up LATE that night, because it took a really long time to close the deal. Not that there were problems or anything, it’s just that we asked our sales guy to pull a bunch of information (Carfax, safety ratings, interior space measurements compared to Laura’s old car), and then we had to wait in line a long time to get all the paperwork done once we pulled the trigger. Also, I had to drive back to my folks’ place in Aurora and pick up Dante, though when I got there they said they’d keep him and Mom would bring him up the next morning. Did I mention I have the best parents ever? I decided that night I would go into work late so that I could sleep in and enjoy the Dante-free house.

We brought Laura’s old 1992 Ford Escort in to trade on Friday, and the new era has begun!

Rear view of Laura's car.

Front view of Laura's car.

Carjacked

By paulobrian

On August 28, 2007

In Uncategorized

Well, not really. But we did have some annoying car shopping experiences. We had gone on Friday night to a Honda dealership across the street from us in Westminster, knowing what we wanted: a used Honda or Toyota, with under 60K miles, for under $12,000 (pre-tax & fees). These are fairly stringent requirements, it turns out, and they had exactly one on the lot: a maroon Civic that they decided to mark down from $13,300 to $11,800. We looked at it, we liked it, but we had Dante with us, so we opted to take our test drive the next day.

Trrish was booked to babysit for us that Saturday, in what’s supposed to be our monthly date, but we decided to use that time for this car-shopping instead. The across-the-street dealer was the first one we’d dealt with, so we decided to visit a couple in Boulder and then evaluate our options. One Boulder one had another Civic, but it was more money, with more miles, and unlike the local one, it wasn’t certified (meaning its warranty would last 3 days from purchase instead of 3 years.) The other Boulder one was an outright disaster. They couldn’t have done more things wrong. The salesman completely ignored everything we said, made an offensive comment, and kept trying to steer us towards things outside our requirements (starting with a brand-new Prius!) Plus, they had zero selection, and anyway they were playing country music over their P.A. All in all, we decided, it was time to go back and test drive that maroon Civic.

So we headed back home, ate a bit of lunch, and returned to the dealership… only to find that the car had already sold in the interim. Aaaargh! We were so disappointed. They didn’t have anything else on the lot that even came reasonably close to that car. Our salesman (who we liked well enough) told us, “You know, I debated whether to say, ‘You’d better jump on this, because this car could sell really fast,’ but I didn’t want your first impression of me to be as this high-pressure sales guy.” I told him that was still the right choice.

Then we returned to the Boulder dealership and drove the other Civic, and it turns out Laura felt pretty uncomfortable driving it. Now, she’s been driving her old Ford Escort pretty much exclusively for the last 15 years, so it’s hard to say whether she’d be uncomfortable in any other car. Consequently, our next step is for her to test drive some others, not necessarily within our cost/miles requirements, just to get a feel for some various models. Meanwhile, we’ll be watching the web for the arrival of the next car that fits our criteria, and scrambling to find childcare for Dante so that we can test drive it the very next minute.

It was a major bummer to sacrifice our precious childcare time and end up with nothing to show for it.

Opportunity kicks

By paulobrian

On July 27, 2007

In Uncategorized

“Sometimes it seems like I’ve been here before
When I hear opportunity kicking in my door.”
— Marillion

My goodness, this has been quite an overwhelming couple of weeks. Opportunities and events have been hailing down on me, some of them great and some of them challenging. In fact, some of it I can’t quite talk about yet, because it’s not quite official. Here, though, is a sampling of the rest of it.

* I’ve agreed to design a game for a startup interactive fiction company. This company is taking a pretty unusual approach to game creation — it splits the design, writing, and coding duties between three different people. It reminds me a bit of the way some comics are created by collaboration between a writer, a penciler, and an inker. I have no idea whether it will work — it could be an awesome way to expedite game creation, or it could be an utter disaster. I really hemmed and hawed over this decision — the pros and cons felt about evenly balanced, and in fact they still do.

What finally tipped the balance for me was that after sitting with it for a while, an idea came to me that I really wanted to use, and given the current structure of my life, I couldn’t really hope to actually design, write, and code it. If I can just design it, perhaps it will be able to see the light of day after all, maybe even better than I could have made it on my own. The writer I’m teaming up with is somebody whose work I definitely respect, so it’s possible that we’ll hit a creative synergy. And if it turns out I make a few bucks off it, hey, that’d be great.

* Laura and I have agreed to participate, with Dante, in a local research project focusing on speech-delayed kids. Basically, once a month for six months, we outfit Dante with some clothes that conceal a device a little bigger than an iPod nano. That device records how many words are spoken to him, how many words he speaks, and how many conversational “turns” (i.e. alternating speaking with listening to another person) occur in his day. In addition, he gets evaluated at the beginning and the end of the study period by one of their speech therapists, and in a couple of the months we do two extra recording sessions.

Our motivation is not altruism in the interest of science: we’re well-compensated for our trouble. If all goes well, we should earn a little over a thousand dollars by the end, which should make a nice addition to his college fund. He just had his first recording session last week.

* Laura’s car is a 1992 Ford Escort, with over 100,000 miles. This car was not designed to go over 100,000 miles. We know this because after 99,999 its odometer rolled back over to zero. Tons of little things on it have broken over the years. Its gas gauge doesn’t work. One of the doors won’t open from the inside. One of the doors won’t open from the outside OR the inside. The trunk also won’t open from the outside. The little plastic piece that holds the driver’s-side lap belt in place is broken, so you always have to fish around beside the seat for a few minutes to snag it. Et cetera.

Well, recently she reported that a few times she felt like the car had hit a pothole, when in fact there was no pothole. We took it in to our trusted mechanic, who reported that the front struts were just about to break, and the back ones were deteriorating too. All in all, it would be a $900 repair, which is a bit ridiculous on such an old car. It was the death knell. Time for a new car for Laura. The only question was whether we would try to leap into action and get one immediately, or get the front shocks fixed and buy ourselves some time.

We opted for the latter, partly because of all the other craziness that’s been going down. It feels a bit silly to do a $450 repair on a car that we’ll soon be getting rid of, but to me it’s worth the trade-off for not having to frantically rush through a big purchase, and not having to try to dispose of the car while worrying that the wheels are about to snap off.

* Oh, and today, Dante fractured his arm. Sheesh.

Meme time

By paulobrian

On October 6, 2006

In Uncategorized

Via nothings

Still shaking

By paulobrian

On September 2, 2006

In Uncategorized

I just had the living shit scared out of me by finding a black widow spider in a bunch of grapes I was about to eat. First all I knew was that I was washing the grapes and something was moving. I dropped them into the sink in alarm and saw a large, shiny, black spider. As I tried to wash it off the grapes with the spray nozzle it flipped upside-down and I could clearly see the red hourglass on the spider’s abdomen. After that I was really alarmed. Then it turned into some kind of horrifying, Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction-style Spider That Would Not Die. I finally got it washed into the disposal, which I ran for a good long time. I think it’s gone. I think. All my nerves are hyper-sensitized, and anytime a mote of dust lands anywhere on my skin I’m frantically checking for creepy-crawlies. Basically I have a king-sized case of the jibblies right now.

Of course, I immediately went to the net to find out if finding black widows in grapes is something that, y’know, happens. Turns out it is. Yikes. It’s apparently a result of using fewer pesticides on produce, which I support, but still, I think I’m off grapes for a while, especially considering we bought those grapes for Dante. Shudder.

This is the kind of thing that, when it happens, I immediately want to tell someone. However, everyone here is asleep, and it’s too late to call anybody over something like this. So thanks for listening, blogville.

Wordplay

By paulobrian

On August 5, 2006

In Uncategorized

I utterly adored this film, for so many reasons.