BunkBlog

The idea here is to post the first sentence (or part of it if it’s freakin’ long) of the first post of each month from 2006.  I went the extra step to link to the post, in case you want to understand why I would say some of these things.  So, here ya go:

January: I’ve added the new and improved WordPress 2.0 software to the site.

February: Someone (phbt!) recently pointed out that it has been more than two weeks since I posted…

March: Based on reviews from Kitiara and others, I think I’ll pass on Ultraviolet.

April: The BBC has a list of 10 stories that could be pranks but aren’t.

May: To announce that there must be no criticism of the president…

June: We have (as of this writing) eight total movies playing in the city of San Angelo.

July: …Kyle XY and the dearly-missed Fox show John Doe…

August: …I now have full wine racks…

September: Friday, we had planned to go to the Kiddie Park and Witte Museum.

October: My friend Dora hosted a party at her house last night, and I catered it.

November: …Flying Spaghetti Monster references…

December: I seem to have a few new readers.

According to this new study by a couple universities and a national group, the North Pole may be underwater by summer 2040.  Hey, if global warming sinks the North Pole, how will we explain Santa Claus to the kids?

Save Santa Claus, stop global warming.

I really hoped this would end well. Sadly, it was not to be. James Kim was a virtual friend, as he reviewed all the cool new toys on CNet for years. Like many others, I grew to look forward to his next blog post or video review of an MP3 player. Mr. Kim walked over eight miles in the snow without sufficient clothing and no food, hoping to find help for his family. His family, thankfully, was rescued Monday. Sadly, Mr. Kim was found only a mile from the family’s stranded car.

We’ll miss you, James.

Jose Andres writes recipes that only he can make. Not only are there ingredients that nobody has heard of, but his instructions are just plain wrong. I’m making flan, and I tried to follow his instructions for the caramel sauce but eventually I fell asleep.  OK, not really, but he seems to have a vastly different stove than I’ve ever seen. He says you can melt sugar on low in five minutes. On low?  HAH! After changing the temperature frequently, it still took me twenty minutes for a cup of sugar to melt in a small pan. Low? Bite me, Jose.

We’ll see how the custard turns out tonight.

I went to see The Departed this afternoon. Wow. It’s a long movie, with a great soundtrack and fine actors. Marky Mark and Matt Damon provide authentic Boston accents and DiCaprio’s was pretty good too, but Vera Farmiga’s came and went so often I was trying to figure out where she was supposed to be from. I forgave her because she showed off her bum.

Spoilers after the break…

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Kapla blocks are kind of cool – they are all identical, so you never have to look for the right block. Recently, one of the biggest importers of Kaplas started making their own in America – Keva blocks. Alex thinks they’re neat and has been begging for them since Christmas of last year. It’s amazing how 200 blocks ends up seeming like not very many. Check out the bridge.

I’m inspired by Ferrett’s confession. I, too, am a magazine addict. Here are the ones I can recall that show up in my mailbox (only the ones I actually pay for-some freebies show up that I don’t care about at all):

• Cuisine at Home
• PC World
• PC Magazine
• Computer Power User
• Maximum PC
• Seed
• MIT Technology Review
• The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Granta
• Mental Floss
• Wired

I can quit any time I want.

If you can find Augustiner Bräu Munchen near you, get it. Wow. I’ve never had a Dunkel before, but if you like dark beer and red wine, this is a great one for you. It’s so malty and full-bodied.

Yeah, it’s a keeper.

I’m convinced that jabberjenny is some sort of magical being. How do you explain that she was at Unidad Park (not close to where she lives, but convenient to me) when we got there recently, and at the brand-new park today, which the Boy and I only discovered yesterday? She and her brood have somehow discovered a time-travel method of following us before we arrive.

Alex is bopping around chanting, “Guns don’t kill people, rappers do!”  Yeah. Goldie Lookin Chain. That’s my boy.

My friend Dora hosted a party at her house last night, and I catered it. We had tapas and sangria (white and traditional), and Jenn brought cheesecake, while Tammy brought pie and homemade bread.

One of the things Alex and I enjoy is trying out new recipes. Everything last night (except the traditional sangria) was a new experiment. Based on the speed with which food disappeared, I’m gonna say that oven-roasted potatoes are always popular, and the chorizo in red wine was a big hit too (although I found it too strong personally). Sadly, the one thing The Boy helped with was not one of the hits. We put little bits of roasted pepper and green olives on cocktail toothpicks, along with feta cheese or cocktail onions. The onions were almost universally unloved, and the feta eventually got eaten, but not something worth bothering with again.

The game Hoopla is a load of fun, if you ever throw a party for a decent-sized group of people. Apparently everyone is on the same team. Huh? Anyway, hope for the demolition derby card.  😉

I noticed that the “review” category has not had much activity, so I’ll remedy that.

In March of 2005, I bought a Rio Karma. This MP3 player was fantastic, with 20 gigs of storage space (enough for about 1/6th of my music collection), a fantastic interface, on-the-fly playlisting and all that jazz. It did not have an FM tuner or voice recorder, and it did depend on proprietary protocols to save music, but the ability to rearrange music and choose popular songs and all that were great. Sadly, the Karma is a delicate beast, with its hard drive not being the most durable they could find. Since it broke and Rio is gone, I was quite happy that I had paid for the 24 month warranty from Buy.

In June of this year, I replaced the Karma with the warranty money, getting a Sandisk Sansa e260 4 gig flash player. At the time, it was a 200 dollar player; it’s now routinely available for 150 or less.

With the most current firmware installed, the Sansa is a wonderful music player, although I do miss the Karma’s interface. The Sansa has two protocols: MTP and MSC (sometimes called UMS). In MTP mode, the player works only with Windows XP; in MSC mode it works with anything that recognizes USB removable media. Playlists are transferred only via MTP, although MSC mode is a faster system for simple transfers.

The Sansa also has a cool feature few players do these days: expansion. You can plug in a tiny little memory card, the microSD, to add up to 2 gigs of memory in theory (so far I can only find 1 gig cards at most). The expansion card can’t hold subscription content, and it’s not visible in MTP mode on the computer, but for music you want to keep on the player, or if you use MSC mode anyway, it’s another drive letter in Explorer.

That covers connections, but what about features? It has an FM tuner (and recorder), a voice recorder, and can manage videos (through a converter), photos, and either MP3 or WMA audio files. It supports the PlaysForSure stores, including subscription content, but I’m told does not support Audible files.

Playback is from a rather straight-forward interface, using a wheel and six buttons. Playlists from the computer are visible and usable, as well as one on-the-fly playlist on the player. I can’t tell you how well PlaysForSure works, as I refuse to participate in DRM. Thankfully, I can tell you that it works wonderfully with MediaMonkey in MTP mode. I don’t try to sync in MSC mode, so I’m not sure how well that works with MM; MSC mode is useful for clearing out old content you decide you don’t want to listen to, and it’s mandatory for firmware updates.

Photos are bright and sharp, although there is no zoom and a 1.5 inch screen is not exactly usable for a photo album.

You can play all your music, an artist, an album, a playlist, a genre, or a single track. In any of these, you can have shuffle engaged or not. There are several equalizer settings, and a custom equalizer (with latest firmware). Album art is displayed when you are playing a track, and you can cycle through a fairly useless spectrum analyzer, a larger view of the album art, and the next song in the queue. I rarely can tell what the next song will be before the player switches back to the default view, though. You have about three seconds to see it before it changes away, but it scrolls slowly through artist/album/track so if you have an artist and album with too many characters, you’re out of luck.

So, other things I dislike about the player? You can’t delete content on the player. The voice recorder button can’t be disabled without locking all controls; you will end up recording yourself without meaning to. You can’t edit playlists, except the “Go List” on the player. I really miss the “songs of the 80s” type playlists that the Karma had. Of course, with only 4 gigs of space, some of those modes are less useful than they were with 20. The videos are pretty pointless; not only is the screen only 1.5 inches, the videos are converted to an incredibly inefficient codec to play: the MJPEG format in Quicktime.

My son is able to navigate his playlist without any hassle, the radio works pretty well, and overall it’s a great and reliable player. Highly recommended for anyone who hasn’t already paid too much for DRM-infected files from iTunes Music Store.

I know I’ve never mentioned how unique my son is. Today, after eating some of the marvelous, only available one month a year, Pecos Sweet cantaloupe ice cream, he lectured me about how important it is to eat hand-made food instead of machine-made. He even generalized to say that hand-made things are better than machine-made things.

This, after we had scallops and shrimp on wilted spinach for dinner (which he ate without complaint, but did say it was only “a double” and not a home run). I love this kid; we obviously are raising him right.

A friend once mentioned that his children wondered why he called Hastings a record store – what are records? It goes even further afield when I think of my son. He doesn’t really deal with CDs even; it’s all a playlist to him. In fact, his current playlist is posted online, just because I’m that kind of geek.

Proving that he is definitely my son, notice the totally eclectic nature of his choices. It’s important to note that I only add songs to his playlist when he asks me to. He recently asked for the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” and I was astonished to realize that I didn’t have that ripped yet – soon that will be rectified.

Seriously, what other child nearing his seventh birthday wants Harry Belafonte and Elvis Costello and The Beatles? What other child has even heard of Ozomatli? I have a cool kid.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, Alex’s mother also has very eclectic musical tastes. One of our earlier conversations when we first met was our mutual astonishment that the other had heard of, much less listened to, Ani DiFranco.

Friday, we had planned to go to the Kiddie Park and Witte Museum. The Kiddie Park is one of those seemingly anachronistic places you probably remember, but thought didn’t exist any longer. They have a carousel from 1918, and a bunch of rides that no adults can fit into. They even have a tiny roller coaster, just like they had at the park near my grandparents’ house in the late 70s. And it only costs eight bucks for the day. Alex wanted to spend every minute possible on the roller coaster, and was nearly inconsolable when it was being maintained at one point.

The Witte Museum has a nice variety of dinosaur skeletons, live and stuffed animals, as well as a great children’s section with hands-on areas devoted to air and electricity and weight and all that jazz. There was a bicycle on a high-wire that you could ride, and he did. Overall, a very fun day.

Of course, we spent much time in the hotel pool. For dinner, we walked across the UTSA campus and hit the Mercado. After a small amount of dithering, we decided on Mi Tierra, the oldest of the restaurants there. Alex had enchiladas, and I had the chicken enchilada in mole sauce. If you’re not familiar with mole sauce, it’s chocolate and spices together, and is very yummy. I’m not normally a fan of spicy things, but mole sauce sneaks up on ya, since it’s so incredibly rich and dark, then hits you with the pepper. Of course, the quart-sized margarita may have colored my memory a touch.

And then it was Thursday, and the Boy had to watch bizarre Japanese cartoons before breakfast. Our big trip of the day was to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Park, a drive-through safari. Great numbers of animals, and many of them came up to the car for photo opportunities and food. The ostriches, never considered the smartest animals in nature, proved to be dimwitted and aggressive. Geez, you’d think the park owners never fed them, the way they tried to climb into the passenger seat for more pellets of compressed grass.

We had enough safari around lunch, so we hit the nearby Natural Bridge Caverns. I’ve been in a few caves, and never have I been in one that was so uncomfortable. The place was 70F and 99% humidity – most caves I think are cooler, if just as humid. Anyway, that was pretty neat, Alex loved it, and then we went back to the pool at the hotel.

Dinner on Day Two was Joe’s Crab Shack, which neither of us had been to before. We shared a meal that was supposed to be 27 shrimp (9 each of three styles), but we counted the tails – 34. The waitress obviously thought my son was adorable – it happens frequently.

Another walk along the San Antonio Riverwalk, and off to bed. End of Day Two.

I’ll let y’all know how this tastes tomorrow. It’s got caramel and apples baked into an apple cake. Oh, yeah.

Alex and I hit San Antonio two weeks ago, and I’ve just not felt like writing much since we got back. Now that the sunburn has faded, I’m more willing to hang out in the computer chair.

We started out with Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, which was pretty bizarre, even if the Boy didn’t spend much time looking at anything, but more time telling me it was time to go to the next room. That’s his ideal exhibit – the next room. Whatever is in this room is never as cool as what will be in the next room.

Alex has been begging to go to the Alamo for months, so we hit there next. The Alamo is kind of unique in that it is a national monument that is run by a private non-profit organization. And, unlike the Park Service, they don’t charge admission! Alex was again interested only in the Next Room, of course. Maybe he’ll be more interested in a few years.

We ate the first night at the Rainforest Cafe. Yes, it is kitschy. Yes, the food is nothing to write a culinary review about. But, where else can you eat your dinner surrounded by rubber animals that come to life every ten minutes, and have a thunderstorm indoors every half hour? Exactly. It was a hit, of course.

We rented a room at the Radisson. For a well-known hotel, it was remarkably average. They did have a pool and hot tub, so we spent many many hours in the water. That ended up being the highlight of San Antonio for Alex – the hotel pool.

[K]ids don’t read for pleasure. And because they don’t read, they are less able to navigate the language. If words are the coin of their thought, they’re working with little more than pocket change.

Writing Off Reading

Kids are graduating with incredibly high GPAs and can’t recognize words like “advocate.” Ouch.