Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

In about a half hour I’m heading to the airport for a trip to Cincinnati to catch up with the girls and spend some time with family. On short notice, I have to go to New York as well for business.
So if you are in Cincy or NYC, drop me a line.
Have a good weekend, I know I will.

I was talking to my friend Joe at the Crawfish party last weekend and got to talking about blogging. In my drunken state, I demanded he get a blog and begin writing immediately. He’s an English major for christ’s sake.
When I sobered up I took a few moments and helped get his blog up and rolling. So go check out FlickerBlamPow and give him some comment love.
Yes, yes, it’s the default MT template. I added in RSS & Atom feed linsk though. If one of you CSS saavy types wants to help him out with design help, it would be awfully kind.
He’s only got one post so far, but I think once he gets rolling, it will be good.
In other blog news:
Paul has a crow’s nest outside his office with little eggs in it.
MisterP is against all marriage.
Sonny hates The Flaming Lips. WTF? I love the Flaming Lips!
Kathy thinks best while naked.

After another day of pain in my right arm, I’ve realized I’ve got to do something serious about it. I can’t do my job if my arm hurts so much.
In thinking about it, at night I spend the most time on the computer gaming. Hours on end. This is causing the repetitive stress in my arm.
There’s only one thing I can do to solve the problem. I need to get off the computer, and that means I need to stop playing computer games. Yes, I really like games, but I have to have priorities.
Instead of gaming so much, I’ll spend more time watching TV and sleeping. I haven’t done enough this in the past, and it’s time I did.

I finally took the plunge and chose a syndication aggregator. My blogrolling list was getting out of hand and there are lots of sites that don’t ping places so I know when they’ve updated.
Here are a couple things I wanted in an aggregator for my home use.
1) Handled RSS & Atom feeds
2) Separate app from email and browser
3) Displayed CSS & images of feeds
4) Auto-discovery of feeds
5) Auto-search for terms
6) Runs on my platform – Windows XP
I looked at several good apps, but in the end, I chose FeedDemon. I found it had pretty much everything I wanted.
I like the interface.

Over the weekend, I finished another book.
The King’s Coat – Dewey Lambdin
I am a huge fan of the C. S. Forrester series on Horatio Hornblower. I tried reading Patrick O’Brien’s books on the Age of Sail, but I don’t like his style.
Last holiday season, I was wandering in the book store looking for gifts when I spied a book with an obvious nautical theme. I looked it over and saw that it was the latest novel by Lambdin in his Alan Lewrie series.
At home I googled up the info and found the first book in the series was The King’s Coat. I added it to my wishlist. After several months I got the chance to order and read it.
Lambdin’s style is good. Much more like Forrester than the wordy O’Brien style. The story begins with our hero, Alan Lewie, being booted out of his aristocratic luxury and into the navy as a midshipman. Not knwing one whit about seamanship, Lewrie finds himself in a world of hurt. To the reader’s amazement, we find that Lewrie takes to the sea and life in the Navy like a duck to water.
The main differences in the style of the book to that of Forrester and O’Brien are clear. Lewrie is a randy chap. He enjoys the company of women and the author points this out at every occasion, pairing our hero with lonely wives in secret rendezvous. Also, the author believes in cursing, as do I. In this book, the characters are sailors and they swear like them. Often.
Plot and action are good, in accordance with typical Age of Sail norms with duels, gun battles, boardings, and mass destruction. The only thing I can fault the author with is an obsession with correct and detailed sailing info on the exact configuration of the sails. Mr. Lambdin is obviously a sailor himself and wants us to know that he knows what he is talking about. Passage after passage about the current set of canvas fill the novel. Here’s an actual quote from the book:

To ease the wind aloft, Ariadne came more southerly to take the wind abeam. Waisters hauled in braces to larboard. With the third reef came the need for preventer braces and backstays, parrels aloft to keep the yards from swinging and flogging sails, not so much with an eye to sail or yard damage, but to keep the topmen from being flung out and down by a heavy smack by the flying canvas.

See what I mean. I’ve read dozen’s of books like this and passages like this still make me scratch my head at passages like this.
But this point is minor. If you like the Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower books, then you will enjoy the Alan Lewrie series.

Yesterday was a day of rest after the crawfish party.
Late in the afternoon, the girls and I took the train downtown to a meetup for people from #joiito IRC channel. The meetup was at Phillipe’s: Home of the French Dip, one of my favorite places in LA.

Mira, Zoe, Jill, and Grant

Yesterday was the Annual Crawfish Party at Len & Monique’s house. In addition to cooking and eating somewhere around 200 pounds of crawfish, it was Kate Perruzi’s 4th birthday too.

I switched Michele over to using TypePad instead of MovableType for her blog and finally I got the DNS issues resolved.
She’s been blogging on the road. Check out -> Scarymommy

I’ve been playing Battlefield Vietnam, the successor to Battlefield: 1942 for a little over a week now. I really enjoyed BF:1942, and have been looking forward to this game for quite a while.
A few screen shots:

SA-7 about to take out a helicopter.

The troops are choppered into a combat location.

Some people have difficulty mastering helicopter piloting.

Michele is out of town this week, so when I get home, I listen to the various phone messages people have left during the day.
When I get a message from one of my friends (read: another man), it usually is something like, “Dude, call me.”
Hearing the messages that are meant for Michele is an eye-opening experience. The messages are usually one to two minutes long and involved detailed explanations of some sort, that will inevitably be said again when Michele calls back.
I simply am amazed at the length and detailed nature of these messages that explain not only what they are calling about, but their motivation for calling and usually some extraneous topic tossed in for good measure.
Today I listened to call asking if Zoe wanted a playdate that went on a 90 second detour on why an extra helmet was needed during the overall 3 mintue call.
With women’s gift for verbosity, I’m surprised that all of our politicians aren’t women.