SparkArts is Coming

SparkArts is coming again. I'm going to be giving an "as simple as possible" class about game programming this year, and there will be a bunch of other competitions and mini-seminars. Clarissa is running things this time around, which is enormously less work for me.

Anyway, if any of my blog readers haven't heard of it yet, and you'd like to spend a day or two playing around with computers and playing with game projects, it's going to be a ton of fun. It'll be November 21 & 22 at the Salt Lake library main branch.

Craving Apple Cobbler

Sunday was a very unpleasant day. I will just say "food poisoning" and leave out the details, OK? OK. This blog post will be a summary of unrelated things that happened in the meanwhile.

While I was out of commission, I grabbed one of the unread sci-fi books off my shelf and read it. It was called "Star Man's Son," and it was pretty bad. The book is about a strapping young lad who wanders the post-nuclear countryside looking like Conan the Barbarian and accumulating injuries. And oh, the injuries! Gashes, burns, fractures, concussions, stab wounds, poison, numbness in the extremities ... and you sort of get the feeling that the author was restraining herself in order to keep the hero mobile. Never fear, she introduces a companion partway in, and they spend much of the remainder of the book nursing each other back to health while fleeing the ever pursuing spiky/hot/feral/dangerous things. They got captured and recaptured so many times that I lost count. The rest of the book is largely a sermon whose gist I can sum up thusly: "Nuclear war is bad." Enlightening.

I also read through the last few Megatokyo books again. Fred's a genius. Then I got addicted to Vox Angeli's "Les Promesses" and memorized the lyrics, which was good French practice. I was sort of tempted to post a translation here, but that's a lot of work, and most likely no one cares. It's an angsty song about childhood dreams fading and dying as we grow up. This is a much beloved theme in French art, which perhaps explains why France is grumpy.

I had apple cobbler a couple of hours ago and it was goooood. Nothing like drastic starvation to make food taste incredible. I just finished a bunch of laundry, so now it's time for bed. Light dreams!

Chasing the Rising Moon

I was driving east along University Parkway today, and noticed the moon slowly setting behind the eastern mountains. "What the heck?" thought I. I am no great scholar of celestial bodies, but I'm pretty sure that the moon sets in the west. Then I hit a red light ... and the moon stopped setting, and gradually started to rise. By the time the light turned green, a fairly big sliver was visible. I then drove two blocks, and it set again, going all the way behind the mountains.

It was kind of an interesting race--the moon gently rising, and me driving toward the occluding mountains. The moon stately ascending, and my eastward journey forcing it back down again. Of course, the moon wins eventually--but for a little while, I could outrace the moon.

On an unrelated note, how many of my readers are aware of Kiva? It's a web-site (www.kiva.org) where you can make loans to people in the developing world to help them start a business. You always give a $25.00 share, so it's not too hard to afford. The web-site aggregates these $25.00 loans and gives them to individuals, usually by means of a local micro-credit bank. Micro-credit is one of the great discoveries of the last century--it lets you provide the means to help someone out of poverty, but since they repay the loan, it also preserves their dignity. When they're done repaying the loan, you can either withdraw your $25.00, or you can reloan it to someone else (I do the latter).

Anyway, I mention it partly because they've now got something called "Kiva teams." It's kind of amusing--the second-biggest team in terms of loans is the Atheist team, only surpassed by the quasi-official Kiva Friends team. There is a Mormon team, but it's far, far smaller. So what are you waiting for? Get over there and help people, and make our team look good! I'm only mostly joking.

Schmoozing and a new restaurant

I was asked to spend the day at a convention in Salt Lake City, recruiting programmers for T-Splines. It's pretty difficult to find people who are qualified in both C++ and graphics, although I did get one really lucky break. While I was there, I ran into Howard Tayler, of Schlock Mercenary fame. I also saw him two weeks ago in Denver, so I walked over and said hello, and mentioned I was looking for C++ programmers who were good at graphics programming. Howard looked thoughtful for a moment, then jumped up on stage and announced loudly that if anyone were looking for a C++ graphics job, talk to (pointing at me) that guy right there! He's hiring!

I got two leads from it, so I officially owe Howard one. The least I could do was a web-comic link (see previous paragraph).

The other fun thing today was trying out a new restaurant, and this one has a story behind it. About a year ago, there were two Brazilian guys in the ward, George and Lucas. I hung out with them, and was invited to Lucas's birthday party. While there, I met another guy from Peru. I mentioned that the little I knew of Peru was the food, and he asked where I was getting Peruvian food. I mentioned La Carreta, and he laughed and said that if you want real Peruvian food, you have to go to El Chalan in Salt Lake.

Anyway, today I finally tracked down and actually ate at El Chalan. It is, indeed, a little different from La Carreta (Purple Corn Juice, by the way, tastes like a cross between Kool-aid and cinnamon). The portions were enormous, and I was grateful for what little English competence the staff had. I had Pollo Saltado (chicken, tomato, cilantro, and fried potatoes in a salty/amazing sauce), and it was very good (although honestly, La Carreta is pretty good too).

One thing I thought was really sad/funny was a huge advertising poster right by the front entrance. You're likely familiar with pay-check loan companies, those societal vampires that suck financial independence from the poor by giving them ultra-high interest loans. What, you ask, could possibly be more exploitative? How about a company that gives loans to people who need to cover bail? You've been arrested, you're taken to prison, you're given a court date, you can't cover the bail cost, and... oh, just call us! We'll help you out! Oh, of course there'll be a price to pay later, but who wants to go to jail? Precisely such a company was advertising at the restaurant entrance, complete with logos of all the credit card types they accept. I chuckled cynically halfway home.

I'm still wondering what Leche Asada is, by the way. I was so full after the Saltado that I couldn't order any. Roasted milk? Really? (It's a type of custard, by the way, but I'm hazy on the details)

It's ART!

I don't know who wrote this originally. It came up in a discussion about the difficulty of reading literary criticism.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”

I need to go collapse in gales of laughter now. Please excuse me.

By the way, I learned several new words from this:
Reification: The process of treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing.
Semiotic: Having to do with semiotics, which is a field of study encompassing the use of symbols and signs in languages.
Blancmange: White edible stuff. A kind of dessert.

The universe fails to disappoint

Lots of fun things happened today.

Firstly, we made it in time to get a seat at the round table with Larry Niven. Unlike the other round tables I went to, he didn't have much to rant about, so the ten of us just came up with questions and he'd answer them. Most of the people there were huge Niven fans (I think I fit in that category), while others had barely heard of him. I have a photo of him, if anyone's curious -- but it's a terrible photo, and I think it indiscreet to post it. If you want to see what he looks like, ask me.

After Niven, we went to a panel about the effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon. That panel had a Harry Potter fan-girl sitting near the front. Now, I rather think of myself as a Niven fan, but I have never achieved anything close to the level of religious devotion demonstrated by that young lady. I present as exhibits:

• Every time a Harry Potter character was mentioned, she would squeal in delight. This was not infrequent.
• Most of her comments were along the lines of "Harry Potter is the best book I have ever read," and "Harry Potter just makes me the happiest person in the whole world."
  
• She was in costume and carrying a wand. It was a very enthusiastic costume.
  
• She would happily and immediately fill in any trivial information that the panel couldn't recall ("Well, what color was the cover?" "Uh, blue?" "That's the fifth one").

That panel was a lot of fun, by the way. Harry Potter is largely responsible for a renaissance in juvenile literature. Publishers used to claim that there wasn't a lot of money to be made in juvenile sci-fi/fantasy, and the Harry Potter books proved otherwise. Since then, a lot of older books have been sent to reprint (Diana Wynne Jones was mentioned, as well as Patricia Wrede's dragon books), and sequels commissioned (such as the additional Chrestomanci books).

Harry Potter also converted a lot of children to the notion of reading for fun -- one librarian said that she had a large number of non-native English speakers in her area, and all of them insisted on laboriously working their way through the difficult Harry Potter books for their summer reading. They had to rework their programs around it -- but the kids were motivated, and they were forcing themselves to read things far above their comfort level.

After the panels, we went to a recommended pizza restaurant. We were hoping it would be good, but what we weren't expecting was genuine New York-style pizza. Yup, it exists in Denver. By this point, we'd decided that the day was campaigning for a "best day ever" award. The pizza was $2.55 a slice, so Cav and I each ordered two slices. Then the slices arrived and we realized our horrible mistake: a single slice was about as big as my head. I took a picture of one of them, because I was pretty sure no one would believe me -- that's Cav, holding part of his first slice, with his second slice on a plate in front of him.

It turned out that we needn't have worried. After about half an hour of blissful pizza nirvana, we returned to the present and discovered our plates completely empty. We both burnt our mouths a bit because it was too hot, but I'm pretty sure I didn't even notice. It was just that good. I wish we could get this kind of pizza within reasonable day-trip distance of Provo.

The next panel we attended was listed in the program as follows:

532 The Best Convention Panel Ever
Survey says: "If you put these people on a panel, you don't need to do anything else." Come see if they were right.
Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, Mike Resnick

The panel was hilarious. They'd put it in the largest room and got a huge turnout. Connie Willis is a very, very funny lady, and the other authors got in a lot of good quips as well. Mostly, they talked about their experiences as authors, with fans, with rejection letters and so forth. One of the authors said "Um, I don't know, I've never had a story rejected" and got vicious glares from the rest of the table.

By the way, judging by the Hugos and the panels, it looks like the two people who are really popular right now are Connie Willis (she won yet another Hugo this year) and John Scalzi. I will probably be looking for their stuff next time I get books.

The last big event, as I keep hinting, was the Hugo award ceremony itself. As award ceremonies go, it was terrific, which is to say it was way less boring than watching paint dry. Writers and artists like to be terribly clever, so the commentary was entertaining. The award-winning novel, by the way, was The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, so if you're looking for something to read, it might be worth a look.

After the Hugos was the usual wandering around and munching on things at the Sheraton. They upgraded from chicken wings to shrimp cocktail and lettuce wraps, but otherwise it was pretty much the same as all the other nights. Most of the rooms on the top floor are rented, and you can wander through and talk to people. It was sort of fun, but Cav & I were so tired by then that we drifted back to our own hotel pretty quickly.

Oh, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I acquired about a pound of chocolate honey. If anyone wants to try chocolate honey, be really nice to me. Fortunately, I am driving home, so I don't have to worry about how I'm going to carry all this stuff.

I have to go to sleep NOW

I was up late, researching all of the kafeeklatsch participants tomorrow looking for editors for Cavan to talk to (he's already dead to the world here). Anyway, while I was flipping through, I saw Larry Niven as one of the authors who's doing a meet-up tomorrow. I had no idea he was even here, and I'm kind of in awe. I think I've read at least 10 of his books, and he's definitely one of my favorite science fiction authors.

I'm a little worried that I won't get a spot, though -- I'm guessing that Niven has nigh-godlike status here. So I need to get up fairly early if I'm going to be in line on time to actually sign up for him.

Oh, by the way, there are some folks selling chocolate honey on the dealer floor. I tried some, and it's pretty good. The chocolate-orange honey was particularly nice. I'm probably going to get some samplers, but if anybody wants some (it's $3-$10 for outrageously small amounts), send a text message to my phone and I will grab extra.

I Want To Do Everything

My observation today is that life is much too short, and doesn't have nearly enough time in it for me to do all the things I want to do. Case in point: Writing books seems like fun. Obviously, I'm hanging out at a writers conference, and I just can't help but feel that these are my kind of people. I find myself wishing that I had enough time to master programming and writing fiction and music composition and cooking and a dozen or so languages. There are simply way too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them in.

Don't get me wrong--I love programming, and really enjoy the jobs and fields I've been able to work in. I don't think I'd have been as happy if I'd picked a different primary interest. But given the option, I'd rather do them all.

Sightings for the day:

I met Patricia Wrede, the woman who wrote "Dealing with Dragons" et al. She's a roundish, excitable person who bubbles about books the way Susan Ream did. I mentioned that I loved her Dragons books after one of the panels. She said thanks.

I finally got around to meeting Brandon Sanderson. We signed up for his kaffeeklatsch, which is basically a limited-attendance event where they stick 10 of you around a table (one of whom is the author), and you get to chat for about an hour. That was awesome. While I don't think he leaked anything that would violate any contracts, he talked a lot about the excitement and process of writing the latest Wheel of Time book, and also told war stories about getting his big break in publishing.

Another really good guy to meet was Jim Frenkel of Tor, one of their main editors. He had a really bad cough (I felt bad for the guy, talking for an hour and wearing out the voice he didn't have). He gave a lot of really good advice about how to get noticed by publishers--it basically amounted to building up some kind of street credit in small venues, because publishers get way too much stuff. If you can prove that someone's already given you a chance then it'll make them give you a second look--so publish short stories and get some awards! Actually, after the round table, Cavan and Chris and I ran into him again in the hall and sat down to talk for another half an hour. Cavan is familiar with the New York neighborhood where Jim grew up, and we got a wonderful story from his childhood about a time when they were pretending to be batman and robin, and actually ended up finding and catching (with a tiny bit of help from the police) some real criminals.

The number of authors here is dizzying, by the way--I think there are over 200 published authors at this convention. We're having a lot of fun!

We have arrived in Denver

We are alive, we are safe. The weather was scary--there was heavy rain, so we had to slow down a lot. We ended up arriving two hours later than we wanted, but that also means we arrived unharmed and in one piece ;-). I'll take it.

We only went through a little over a single tank of gas, so the car is definitely winning on fuel efficiency. The convention looks like it is going to be several days of awesome, quirky fun with people who are completely insane. Huzzah!

J'ai parlé français!

Sunday at church I overheard Jerry (a guy in my ward) out in the hallway speaking French. It sounded like really bad French. Jerry went on his mission to Florida, and spent most of his time in Haitian communities, so I was pretty sure he was actually speaking Creole. Most Haitians are descended from Africans who were brought in as slave labor a century or two ago. The language spoken there is a mixture of French and African languages, with a bunch of other minor influences thrown in. So out I went and said something about Creole sounding like French with a really bad accent.

Anyway, the lady with whom Jerry was speaking was actually a native of Haiti. She spoke Creole, French, and English (in approximately that order of fluency). She asked how I knew it was Creole, which led to her realizing I spoke French. Since her French is much better than her English, she brightened up and said "oh, can I speak French with you?" So we talked in French for a couple hours, and it was fun (we mostly shut up for sacrament meeting, though). My French is a little broken, but with a sufficient amount of random abuse of the language, I can talk about quite a few things. It got me totally excited about trying a French-speaking trip sometime.

I'm such a xenophile.

Bush tea is not hipster food

Thank you, internationalization. Thanks to enterprising South African exporters and their American counterparts, I no longer have to go to specialist South African stores to buy bush tea (sometimes called "rooibos," from the Afrikaans). For the unaware, bush tea is a popular South African drink. It has a mild, warm flavor that reminds me of nothing so much as hot buttered bread, and is usually drunk with added milk and sugar. It is the ultimate comfort food, and in South Africa, most folks drink it. Exotic it isn't.

That is, until you bring it here. All of a sudden, it's some kind of mysterious health food, conjuring up images of deepest Africa and beaches and tropical fruit (or whatever it is Americans associate with Africa these days--civil wars, perhaps?). Never mind that actual bush tea drinkers in actual Africa live in rather dull (other than the high crime) suburbs and drink the stuff after driving the kids to soccer practice. In this country, it's a cultural experience, a breathtaking journey into the unconquered mountains of All Things Foreign. And because bush tea has a flavor only slightly more interesting than milk, it needs to be Enhanced. And this is where I have objections.

See, most of the bush tea blends you can buy here insist on adding things to the tea. The most common addition is just vanilla, giving you "Madagascar Vanilla Red Tea" or something of the sort. That's not too bad, but if I wanted vanilla in it, I could probably have added my own (I'm a genius that way). The latest abomination, however, comes from California, from the very depths of everything hipster. And thus, I bring you:

The Wonder Herb of South Africa
RED TEA

Yes, I'm quoting the packaging. It really is this painful. The stuff in italics is my running commentary, just in case that wasn't blindingly obvious.

RED TEA ISN'T JUST RED TEA. It's tea with an attitude. Gag! Gag! You've heard of the great gift of health from a cup of green tea, now there is RED TEA which provides even more health promoting properties. Dude, Americans have longer life expectancies than South Africans. Are you serious? Reasearchers have discovered that RED TEA, an indigenous wonder herb of South Africa called rooibos (ROY-boss), It means "red bush," bro. Because it's the leaves of a bush, and they're red. Of course, you could just call it bush tea, the way English speakers often do, but that doesn't sound foreign enough, does it? is full of polyphenols and flavonoids which help protect the body from free-radicals that weaken natural defenses and eventually lead to aging and the onset of disease. Seriously? I'm drinking the wonder drug? I'm never going to get old or sick again? Man, and here was me thinking it just tasted good. Look, ma, it's HEALTHY! Studies show drinking RED TEA daily can reward you with powerful anti-oxidants that help create a healthier, longer life. And make you a lot of money, I'm sure, but that's totally incidental.

Anyway, that's all well and good. I don't care what you put on the label as long as I get my bush tea. But no, you had to start adding things:

South African rooibos is paired with the sunny tropical flavors of passion fruit and mango. Sunflowers and rose petals add unique floral notes, while hibiscus lends a tart-sweet finish. [Our product] brews into a rich garnet-hued tea, also refreshing over ice.

Aaaaaaaaaggh! Run away! Run away! I really wish I had read the label a little more thoroughly before buying this stuff, because it tastes almost nothing like actual bush tea. It tastes like some kind of slightly-sour (that'll be the passion fruit) tropical fruit monster, with the bush tea flavor mostly overwhelmed by all the extra stuff. It really doesn't work well with added milk, which destroys the whole point.

Anyway, it is possible to get plain bush tea, but you need to stay away from the health food stores. Try Smith's. It also helps if the tea was packaged by a South African firm, rather than an American one, since South Africans seem less tempted to try and make it taste more foreign. Oh, and you might try adding a little vanilla. That blend was actually pretty good. But try it the normal way first ;-).

In Defense of Scoundrels

I have a "Quote of the Day" feed, and a few days ago it fed me this fascinating little nugget:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken

It reminds me of Voltaire's philosophy, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The rights you save may be your own.

On a less abstract note, today was mom's birthday. We went out to a very good Indian buffet and followed it up with Sub Zero ice cream. Apparently Sub Zero is unique to Utah Valley, so I'll describe it.

The basic idea is that they use liquid nitrogen to mix the ice cream on the spot. This lets them do a huge variety of flavors. You can choose your base mix and the flavor to add, as well as choosing mix-ins. Then they dump liquid nitrogen into the bowl and you get a misty show from which ice cream emerges. The ice cream is weird stuff. It's rock solid and melts slowly, but also has a very creamy feel when you eat it. Mine was butterscotch and graham crackers.

Spam and egg sandwiches

A whole crowd of us have been frequenting L&L Hawaiian Barbecue recently (it's just north of Provo High). Their main appeal seems to be that they sell genuine Hawaiian food. Until recently, I had to plead ignorance on what exactly that meant -- I mean, I've had ham and pineapple on pizzas, sure, and I've had sweet-and-sour chicken with pineapple in it, but apparently there is a bunch of other stuff that Hawaiians eat. Weird, strange stuff. So I thought I'd post a sample of some of the randomness.

Possibly the most interesting one was the spam sandwich. This is something like a hamburger -- you get a fried slice of spam meat with eggs and other hamburger-esque toppings. The young lady who ordered it assures me it was delicious, and she ordered it again the second time we went, so there must be something to it.

Their "signature dish" is hamburger patties (just the meat!) with fried eggs on top. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Far too healthy, in fact, which is why they have to add gravy. I don't know, that one might be good, but it's definitely on the unusual side.

They have a whole bunch of variations on the theme of grilled meat, and here I'm on somewhat more familiar ground. You can get barbecue beef ribs, teriyaki chicken, and kalua pig. The kalua pig there is especially good. If you imagine slow-roasted pork, cooked until it is falling apart, and salted enough to give it a flavor (pork, you know), then you're on the right track. Nearly everything is served with rice and macaroni salad.

There are a bunch of other things on the menu (salmon-patty burgers, anyone?) but we haven't tried most of it yet. You could call it a work in progress.

We Offer You Happiness

I get several hundred spam emails a day. Most of these are automatically detected and sorted away to junk mail folders, but occasionally the filters catch a real email, so I give the junk folders an occasional scan to see if I should have caught something. It was on one of those scans that I spotted this subject line:

***JUNK*** We offer you happiness.

The actual email was mostly filled with random garbage text--it would have taken a cryptographer to figure out what they were selling. I think this subject line is intriguing, because it boils down the entire art and science of marketing to its essence: "We offer you happiness." What we deliver is a plastic device that requires batteries, or carbonated sugar water, or a means of accumulating debt quickly--so come and get your happiness!

And on that happy note, dear readers, I pose you this question: Is chocolate ever a bad idea?

"Family" "Home" Evening

The ward has started doing FHE groups, and I figured it was time to give the institution another shot. The last time I went to an FHE group, the group leader solicited suggestions from the group and mine was "keep it short and sweet." One hour and a half later, long after the conversation had devolved into an endless giggle-fest about some pop culture inanity, I excused myself. Unfortunately, that turned out to be typical.

I was hoping that, with the FHE committee rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the semester cycle, it might go better this time. It wasn't a terribly high bar to clear, but the group did admirably. There were announcements, there was singing, there was a short prepared lesson, and there was an acitivity which lasted precisely fifteen minutes (the young lady conducting the event ran a timer!) There was also obligatory candy at the end, which any child will tell you is the essential thing.

All in all, the new incarnation appears to be a success, and I'll try to encourage things by attending. It has long amused me that singles-ward FHEs fail two out of three of their initials, but it still makes for a good evening :-).

By the way, the girl conducting pronounces FHE as "fihee." Yet another acryonym is slyly sneaking its way toward word status!

Plunging strength against the sea

Quote for the day comes from Steinbeck: "Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man." I really hated that book (10 points if you knew what it was without Googling), but I rather enjoyed the quote.

I had a corned beef sandwich for lunch today, and it was very good. It had corned beef, pesto, provolone cheese, and grilled peppers on it. It might be worth trying to make them at home. If anyone wishes to join in this experiment, then we can make it an expedition.

Incidentally, it is indeed much easier to get songs written while the computer is unplugged from the Internet. I finally managed to scratch out something passable on my little electronic keyboard. I really wish I were better at it.

The End of the Internet

I made an attempt at productive catching up on things today. It went okay. I ran out of places to stick things a while ago, so I've purchased a bunch of big plastic cabinets for organizing my stuff. Hopefully this will help me get clutter down to a saner level. Of course, there is always the rather high risk that the clutter will be increased by a net total of several big plastic cabinets; we'll just have to see.

I've been thinking about buying an electric piano again. I have a decent MIDI setup on my computer, and I have several half-finished computer programs which I was writing to teach myself to sight-read. Real pianos have a much better sound, but electric pianos have the enormous advantage of being usable while wearing headphones, which is particularly nice for composing stuff -- I can play something incredibly repetitive or not-quite-right without worrying about irritating the neighbors (never mind the roommate). I bought myself a little keyboard a while ago, and while it's definitely a step up from typing notes in by name, it's kind of cramped.

Speaking of which, I've noticed that it's gotten more difficult for me to do creative things on a computer. I think it's because I use them as a tool far more than I use them as a toy anymore, and it's kind of sad. It used to be that the only reason I'd ever use a word processor was for writing a story, but now word processors put me in technical report mode. I still write short stories occasionally, but now it's almost all written out with a pencil and paper. The same seems to go for composition, somewhat--I have a couple ideas bouncing around, but I'm having an awfully difficult time actually staying focused enough to get them down.

Perhaps the problem is really habitual multi-tasking. When I first started using computers, they didn't have any kind of network connection at all, and you could only really use one program at a time. Maybe the endless distraction of hopping on the web, dashing off instant messages, or checking e-mail is detrimental. Perhaps I should try unplug the network cable sometime and see how it goes.

Random Tidbits

I am starting to build up quite the collection of potential blog posts in my unpublished pile. Most of them aren't very good. This post will be an attempt to include all the stuff that looked half decent and chuck out the rest.

The photo on the left is one of my favorites from our California trip. There's a gorgeous stretch of I-15 that weaves back and forth through towering Arizonan canyons for a few dozen miles. Then, just as you're cresting the hill and crossing the border into Utah, you get this shamelessly showy golden landscape rising over the horizon, and the road drops for miles downward toward those mountains. I was trying to make a picture that both captured the impressiveness of the landscape and the feel of driving into it.

Next on the random list, there's a fungus that's actually digesting the radioactive materials inside of the Chernobyl reactor. That article's a wee bit dodgy, by the way, but you can find something more level-headed if you look for a bit. It's already amazing that a life form can live inside of a heavily radioactive environment, but actually using the radioactivity as a food source earns mother nature yet another hat-tip: She's smarter than we are. Again.

A while back, on the freeway, I saw what was apparently an ad for a (self-published?) book. I didn't catch the title, but in large letters, the contents were described as "Harry Potter Meets Star Wars." This struck me as such a fantastically bad idea that I immediately wanted to read the book. Luke Skywalker confronting the school bully Anakin, waving a light saber that only works when you yell Latinesque phrases? Harry flying a broomstick powered X-wing in some kind of mega-dangerous, octane charged intergalactic race to defeat the evil sorceror? The possibilities are endless and, almost universally, very stupid.

Finally, it's about time to get some entries up for the family photo competition. My first entry is a picture of Cavan, who having apparently woken up a measly 13 seconds earlier, is still stunned by the extremely rapid sequence of events that resulted in him sitting inside a precariously rocking skyline on a windy day. At least, I think that's what the facial expression means.

This next picture is entitled "too much fun." One of Disneyland's less- advertised features is that after a few hours, your kids will be so totally overstimulated that they will collapse in little exhausted puddles. This is a picture of my nephew, chilling in the stroller between rides. I spent a lot of time with the Kjars, and I have to say that this little guy did a stellar job of behaving. He demonstrates wisdom and patience beyond his three years.

This next shot is just cute--Granny's chilling with the grandson, while everyone is hurrying up and waiting for the next family shot. I love it when you can get good shots of people just being themselves without trying to pose for the camera. They always look a lot more relaxed and genuine. If the shot happens to be well-composed, so much the better.

I have some other pretty good shots, but I think that will do for now. Also, this post seems to be trying to set some kind of length record. Congratulations on reaching the end of it!

The hot smell of thunder

It smells like a thunderstorm outside. It's dark, the sky is navy blue, and there's a hot wind blowing. I'm not sure whether it's really a smell, but there's kind of a feel in the air when thunder is coming, sort of like all the tension has drained out of the air. It feels like everything is covered in a quilt of heavy air, just waiting.

Maybe it will rain.

This is perfect weather to be in a bad mood, which means I'm in luck. I'm in a foul mood. To make things worse, I don't have any obvious reasons for being in a foul mood. I just AM, okay? Work's been pretty good this week, and I just discovered a fun new space opera game. Some kids from the ward are planning on going to the Indiana Jones movie this week and I was invited (readers: if any of you want to go, that might persuade me to go. Let me know). Heck, I even lost weight this week. However, my foul mood defies the necessity of excuses. Growl! Growl!

Also: I want excuses to go camping, bike riding, or [preferably indoor] rock climbing. I don't like doing any of these things by myself. If anyone wants to go with, would you please let me know?

California has better weather

It's sad but true: California has more pleasant weather than Utah. But hey, at least we don't have horrible wildfires, right? (Oh wait...) So far, we've been to the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, Disneyland, and California Adventure (which is pretty much Disneyland with more roller coasters and less pixie dust).

Anyway, I thought I'd throw up a few pictures, since I've been taking tons of them and it's fun to share. This first one takes a bit of explaining. The two youngest siblings and I left early so that we could go visit an old friend of mine in San Diego. Since this particular old friend can only really accommodate two people at a time, and since there were three of us, I figured it would be a good time to finally pick up that backpacking mattress I've been meaning to get.

While I was out looking for the right mattress, I found this marvelous little device. It is specifically designed to make, and I quote the packaging, "beer can chicken." Basically, you take a can of beer and mount it in the railing. Then, you stick a chicken over the top, and stick the entire contraption on an outdoor grill. Presumably the beer boils, and you end up with a roast chicken that tastes vaguely of boiled beer. Yummy! Naturally, I laughed uncontrollably for a couple of seconds and then took a picture.

There are several things I love about this device:

1. Not only does it mean that you're making beer can chicken, it means that you're making a lot of beer can chicken. Enough that you need to run out and buy yourself a special device in order to streamline the process.
2. Yes, the store also has an entire aisle with hundreds of DVDs, all of which have names like "Colorado deer hunt in August" or "Best of the rutting season." I got a little nervous that if anyone saw me, they'd suspect I was secretly a redneck. This device strengthened that fear a little.
3. Seriously, who DESIGNS these things? I mean, in addition to the theoretical group of people who buy beer can chicken frames, who exactly has a meeting where they say "oh yeah, beer can chicken, just like Maw used to make! But 'member how it kept done fallin' over? We should go weld up some kinda frame an' sell it in a hun'in store! We'll make a killin'!" I kind of want to meet that man. From a safe distance.

Oh, I did find my mattress. It's wonderful. It's one of those that contains super spongy material. All you have to do is open the air valve, and it inflates itself as the spongy stuff puffs out. I did not purchase a frame for making beer can chicken.

The second picture is from my visit to Areae's offices in San Diego. They're a nice group of folks who are trying to make it super easy for anyone to make their own multiplayer online game. Their project is called Metaplace. Their offices are rented from an office block in a smallish city north of San Diego. It had this rather strange little fountain outside, which is so kitsch as to be nearly transcendent. There's no sign telling you to keep out of the water, because who would want to go swimming in a pool filled with hippo drool? Honestly.