>SUPERVERBOSE

The last chapter of The House At Pooh Corner begins, "Christopher Robin was going away." In it, the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood throw Christopher Robin a going-away party, and when it's over, he and Pooh find an enchanted place in the forest, a circle of trees where "they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky." The boy, who is going away to boarding school, discusses all the things he's learning, and the bear dimly tries to keep up. The boy, who loves to do Nothing, wistfully says that he won't be doing Nothing as much anymore. "They don't let you," he says. He asks Pooh never to forget him, and hopes that whatever happens, Pooh will understand. But Pooh, of course, doesn't understand what he's supposed to understand. It ends:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

( I can't get through this chapter without crying. )

This is something I sent out at work, and it got a good enough reception that I decided to post it here as well. We're in the midst of a massive project at CU, replacing the student system and a bunch of peripheral systems with Oracle PeopleSoft products. There is a lot of pressure, a lot of intensity... and a lot of status reporting. Some of that, especially as it travels up the chain, takes on a glossy, nonspecific quality. In talking about it with Laura, we were reminded of another place where that kind of status reporting happens...

---

My ESPN-loving spouse started this train rolling, and it became unstoppable. Now I just have to write it all down. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Project Status Report, consisting entirely of clichés from sports interviews. (With substitutions, where appropriate.)

• It is what it is.
  
• There were factors beyond my control.
  
• We came to code, but I'm not gonna lie, it's been a tough match so far.
  
• This time around, the software problems just wanted it more.
  
• But I'm just gonna settle down, focus on doing my best. I can only control myself, you know what I mean? I'm gonna step up, and from this point forward, I'm just gonna focus on my game. I mean, work. That's what matters, sticking with my guys, doing my work. I'm gonna do everything I can to get this project to the Superbowl. I mean, completion.
  
• I'm a team player. It's not about me, it's about the whole team. We have to pull together.
  
• It's been tough out there, but we'll get our game back. It's still early in the project. We've got a lot of go-lives after this one, and we're just gonna take it one go-live at a time. We've still got a long timeline ahead of us. We're not circling any go-live on the calendar. Every go-live is important.
  
• Replacing student systems is a professional business, you've gotta understand that. Stuff that happens out there, it's not personal.
  
• It's easy to see the things that went wrong in this go-live, but there were things that went right. Anyway, this go-live is not over. We're gonna get back out there and give it our best, stay focused, and take it to the next level.
  
• We're gonna get back into the office next week, practice the things we need to practice, take another look at the PeopleBooks, and keep working hard.
  
• I'm only thinking about the next go-live on the schedule. It's not about momentum -- the project happens one go-live at a time.
  
• I'm just glad to be here. I want to help the project any way I can.
  

I'm feelng a weird kind of grief today, because the Rocky Mountain News just closed. It was both sudden and not sudden. The writing had been on the wall for a long time. There are conflicting stories about the reason, or rather reasons. There's the economy, of course. There's Craigslist, which has drained millions away from classified ads by offering a better product, for free. Newspapers all over the country are struggling for those reasons. Denver had some peculiar circumstances alongside these. It was one of the last non- consolidated newspaper towns. I remember when I was taking media classes at NYU in 1988, even then the prof was saying that the vast majority of major cities had only one newspaper, or multiple newspapers owned by the same conglomerate. Denver was the exception back then, and remained so until 2001, when the RMN and the Denver Post consolidated. Now, things have contracted further, and the News has died. Scripps, its corporate owner, tried to find a buyer for it, but the smart money is not buying newspapers these days. A good summary of the reasons for the paper's demise is here. (I'd recommend against reading the comments. Actually, that holds true for almost everything on the Internet.)

The sudden part was that the closing was announced on Thursday night, and the final edition of the paper was on Friday. Just like that. That final edition had lots of good stuff about the Rocky's history (it was just short of its 150th birthday) and reflections on what the paper has meant. Most of those stories were prepared ahead of time, I'm sure. Still, it feels so strange to have the announcement and the end so close together.

I grew up with the Rocky Mountain News. It's the newspaper I've been reading since I was able to read. It has a feature called "The Mini Page", a newspaper for kids with puzzles that I used to work through. I've been reading Doonesbury in that paper for more than 25 years, as well as Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Mutts, etc. I wrote a letter to the paper when I was in high school, annoyed at the fingerpointing frenzy over Dungeons & Dragons that was happening at the time. I still remember getting the phone call verifying my identity, and seeing the letter printed alongside a fantasy-oriented drawing. When I went to live in New York, I tried to find a paper that was like the Rocky. I couldn't stand the Post, and found the Village Voice unbearably hipper-than-thou. The Times was good, but had no comics, which was a dealbreaker for me. I finally settled on the Daily News. Still, when I came home, I was very glad to see the Rocky again, and subscribed to it immediately at my dorm. That was while the Newspaper War between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post was still going, and subscriptions were super cheap. When Laura and I started living together, we had the News delivered, and we've read the Spotlight section together every night before going to bed, for the last 10 years or so.

Now it's gone. The Denver Post arrived at our doorstep this morning. I'm sure we'll continue our subscription -- we value the newspaper too much to not get one. Still, it feels like a step down. I loved the News's pop music writer, and the one from the Post feels like he was trained at the Village Voice school of indie snobbery. Also, the Post is in this very annoying broadsheet format. I loved the Rocky's tabloid arrangement, but the Post forces a whole lot of unfolding and re-folding. Endlessly bothersome. Some of the writers from the Rocky came over, and all of the comics did, but it's not the same.

I miss my Rocky already.

In 2004, I was firmly, completely convinced that after the close election in 2000, and the disaster of the previous four years, there was no way that our country would ever re-elect George W. Bush. On the day after that election, I was as upset, depressed, and angry as I'd ever been in my life. After that happened, I decided that the USA was, essentially, a lost cause. I felt fundamentally alienated from my country, a country that would legitimately elect George W. Bush after not-even-really electing him once, and seeing him bungle his job badly. I felt as if my hopes had died on that day.

Today, I found out that they were only mostly dead. Today I feel so proud to be part of a country that would defy the world's story about it, defy my own story about it, and elect Barack Obama as its president by a stunning electoral margin. Today I look forward to having a president I really, genuinely like. I don't think I've ever felt that way.

I keep thinking of a passage in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, in which Angelou, her family, and almost her entire town of Stamps, Arkansas was gathered around the radio in her Grandmother's general store, listening to Joe Louis fight Primo Carnera in 1935. As Louis would get in a good jab, the crowd would cheer. When Louis looks as if he's about to go down, Angelou writes, "My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree." And when Louis finally triumphs, and is declared the champion of the world:

Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world. People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas. Some of the men went behind the Store and poured white lightning in their soft-drink bottles, and a few of the bigger boys followed them. Those who were not chased away came back blowing their breath in front of themselves like proud smokers.

It would take an hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home. Those who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town. It wouldn't do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world."

I love us for what we did tonight. It feels really good to love us again.

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?

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 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. :)

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!

( Here are the pics )

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.

"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.

( Behind here, that is. )

Via nothings

( Two Words: )

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.

I utterly adored this film, for so many reasons. ( And here they are. Nothing too spoilery. )