I said I probably wouldn't update based on my experience over Thanksgiving. But I didn't catch cold and run a fever then. I suffer, you gain.

So howdy from Haarlem. It's cold here. Given that I coughed all night and woke up feeling feverish, I chose to pass when Emily and Patrick said they wanted to go skating. If I hadn't felt bad, I'd have gone. I was even kicking around the idea of paying DFL 75 (about ) for an intensive skating course, since I can't get relaxed enough to skate very well otherwise. Something about the memory of splitting my chin open at the Williams Center Forum twenty years ago, I guess.

Anyway, Patrick picked up some cough syrup for me this morning (the Dutch word for phlegm is slijm -- literally, slime), and I'm now weighing leaving the house against sitting around inside where feeling slightly feverish is much less potentially complicated.

The trip so far has been great. Dulles was extremely crowded, so I decided to bypass the waiting-in-line part at the Departures entrance and go straight to the gate. This was a calculated risk, as I was one bag over United's carry-on limit. I was planning to attempt to charm my way past the gate agent, and failing that, just have them gate check my second bag. They didn't even look at me twice, and I had the added benefit of not having to wait in line at all in order to check in at the gate. Considering that the line at Departures would have taken almost all of the hour and twenty minutes I had before my flight, and I probably wouldn't have gotten away with the extra bag, I was quite pleasantly surprised. I sent Emily an email from my pager, saying that I'd gotten straight on the plane and had no checked baggage, which portented a speedy arrival.

So we arrived at Schipol right on time, I got through Customs by about five after seven, and I waited. And waited. And waited. I waited an hour, then bought a phone card, went to a pay phone, and tried to call Em's cell phone. Wasn't turned on. So I called the house. Answering machine. So I started talking to the answering machine, hoping that Mom would hear it and pick up the phone. Somebody picked up all right -- Emily. She hadn't left the house yet.

I took the train. Em and Dad met me at the station. "Your name is Mud. Hi, Dad. Her name is Mud."

Aside from the hour cooling my heels at the airport (twice Emily's let me down in two trips in two months), the day went well. I had suggested to Emily that we might all pool our resources and put together a new computer for the kids, and said I could buy the parts in the States for less than what they'd pay here. It turns out that's only about ten percent less than what they'd pay at the store across the street from their house, and considering the benefit of having the place that sold you the parts right there for support, Em and Patrick decided to pay the extra. So when I got here Friday morning, we got out the price lists, came up with a shopping plan, and rounded up all the parts. For about DFL 1300 (that's 0 to you and me) we put together a 700mhz machine with 128M. The only shortcoming is that we reused the hard drives from their old computer, so it's only got 2.5G of storage and the drives aren't UDMA. For playing Blue's Clues though, it's more than sufficient. I suspect Emily will buy another hard drive before the end of January though. She's even more impatient than I am.

The kids love the new computer. Renger, at sixteen months, has already figured out that he has to put a CD in the drive to make most of the games go. He doesn't know how to do the rest and tends to bang the mouse on the table or his fist on the keyboard in order to get results, but then he's pleased when any menu pops up or window opens so I guess he's getting what he wants. He also managed to get Dad to play on the computer with him, probably tripling the total amount of time he's spent at a computer, and that includes the one in his office which he mostly refuses to use.

Christmas was fun. Because of all the travel involved, none of the gifts are wrapped until Christmas Eve, so it's kinda cool to see all the gifts materialize under the tree that night. I think I would have hated that as a kid, but then I'd never known anything but the way we did Christmas, which involved one gift each on Christmas Eve and then all the rest of them the next morning. I can see it both ways, but I actually think I like this better. More surprise. It also snowed all day on the 24th, giving us a White Christmas. Darcy was great. "Look, Mom! It's snowing! It's Christmas! It's amazing!"

The Lego "Clik" toys I got Renger were a big hit, and Darcy loves her new computer games. I just want to know, why is everybody (for sufficiently small numbers of everybody) buying me calendars this year? It's not like I've ever used one or asked for one.

We went skating on the second day of Christmas (the 26th, which is still a holiday here) and I managed not to fall once. Ice skating is much smoother than inline skating is, but it's also easier to lose your traction and go right over. I didn't. I considered the day a success. I could stand to be much better at it -- and that's probably worth the 75 guilders -- but hey, I'm on vacation.

link (28 dec)

The last gift (and the only one ordered from an online vendor, albeit by phone at that) arrived today. That's pretty good, considering that I only ordered it yesterday and the manufacturer (from whom it was going to be dropshipped) was closed yesterday for their annual holiday party. Luckily for me (and my brother-in-law) the vendor I'd called was a rather big customer, and the president of the manufacturer happened to talk to his secretary and felt like doing somebody a favor, so he went by FedEx on his way home. So, here's kudos and thanks to Neil at Golden Eyes and the folks at AO Sunwear, who don't seem to have a web site.

So now that the gifts are all here and packed, I'm off to Holland again for another couple weeks. Don't expect any updates until next year.

Have a happy non-denominational winter holiday and a non-threatening new year.

link (21 dec)

So some guy whose heart was substantially bigger than his ability made a well-meaning but unsubstantiated promise years ago, and now a bunch of kids who should have known better than to trust anybody who said he'd give them something for free (that's something I'd assume you learn early in this neighborhood) are now supposed to pay for college with a broken promise. On the one hand, I'm pretty sad for them, and I hope that they're able to find scholarships elsewhere (the girl with the 4.0GPA should do okay, at least, and I'd bet the others qualify for some waivers, although I don't know how much and I realize that student loans are probably not a realistic option for most of these kids).

But while I'm sad for the kids -- if only for having, yet again, their faith in the world tested -- the woman with 14 kids has nobody but herself to blame for that.

N.B. The high school a bunch of them attend is visible in that satellite photo of my neighborhood if you zoom out or go south one step. That's the track around the athletic field that makes up the oval covering the southern half of the block.

link ( 1:15 EST, Wednesday, 20 December 2000.)

How in hell could anybody spend 312 hours at a party after they'd just gotten fired, laid off, or orphaned by a failed dot com? Must have been some gig.

At least I work for a company with a 140-plus year history and a market cap of $33B. And tons of cash.

link ( 0:53 EST, Wednesday, 20 December 2000.)

Note to the person in front of me earlier in the silver Honda Civic with Maryland tags: there is such a thing as going too slow on a snowy road. Moron. Damned make-me-come-to-a-complete-stop-and-lose-my-momentum-and-then-have-to-zig-zag-up-the-hill moron. Five more miles per hour at the base of the hill, buddy, and you'd have made it just fine, and so would I.

So I went to work today ... for an hour. I was later getting out of the house than I expected, and then Tino wanted to go Christmas shopping and I'd had plans to do the same -- only not quite so early -- so I discovered the person I really needed to see wasn't there, sent an email to get something else done, and bailed.

It had started to snow in earnest right when I got to work (around noon, if you must know), and there wasn't any buildup when we left Reston. We hit a couple stores I won't name and then the mall, since I needed to get sunglasses (failed) and a tie bar (failed), and was looking for some luggage (passed, contingent on us crossing the street to the other mall). We left around five, discovering in the process that quite a bit of snow had fallen in the time since we left work.

And the way to the other mall was a parking lot. So we bailed, and it took us a half hour to get from the back of the Galleria to the Toll Road, which was at least moving when we got to it. The traffic, that is. Not the road itself. Synecdoche.

Once back in Reston, we hit a couple more also-not-to-be-named stores and went back to the house. I note that at that point it was after seven, and I still had

1. No sunglasses,
2. No tie bar (it seems that no stores have them anymore except for a chintzy selection at JCPenney),
3. No luggage.

We talked a bit at the house, and Nicole and Tino bickered about dinner (as they are wont to do) and eventually we all piled in the car.

It being nine by that point, and me still needing luggage (and hoping for a tie bar, the sunglasses by that point being a lost cause), I bailed on dinner, drove back to Tysons, hit the Galleria, and discovered:

• Macy's was open till eleven,
• They have tie bars
• The bags available at the other luggage store, the purpose of the trip, ended up being not better than the one I could have bought earlier in the day, but they had that one too and I was able to make the side-by-side comparison.

To make matters even better, the tie bar I bought was cheaper than marked (probably on closeout, as stores have apparently decided that tie bars are gauche, especially gauging by the reaction of the salesmen at Nieman Marcus).

Ran into a cow orker at one of those not-to-be-named stores, and it turns out they released everybody at four anyway. I'm not as much of a slacker as it might at first have appeared. Now to check my work email and see if I got results ...

link (19 dec)

(Seen in the back window of a car with a Nader sticker)

I'm not normally one to read The Nation but this cracked me up.

link (22:59 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)

By my count, he's only got to come up with 2.4 billion dollars extra in order to cover that shortfall. The sad thing is, the guy who heads that committee is an old friend of his in a buddy appointment, and even he thinks that the Governor is out of his mind when it comes to transportation.

link (22:52 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)

NASA actually puts up a whole bunch of cool stuff on that site, but somebody sent this link, and then right after I finished letterboxing and resampling the image to use as wallpaper, I found out my evil twin had also adopted it.

So in the interest of sharing, the resampled image (1024x768, letterboxed with a dark indigo background) is here for download.

For desktop colors, I recommend something with a 1x1x2 RGB ratio.

link (10:28 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)

I just realized how late it is, so this will be quick.

Spent more time hacking on the Perl for work, then spent last night and today doing more Perl, but for me this time. And getting more and more frustrated because I hadn't paid close enough attention to a file that was being written by the perl script, which meant that the function it was supposed to be doing that depended on both that file and a certain line in the file it was parsing didn't actually happen. Took me a couple hours to find that, but I cleaned up some other things in the code in the process.

Didn't turn the teevee on all day today. Not really sure why.

Talked to the rents today. Still haven't bought them anything for Christmas, and mom still hasn't given me any sort of idea at all what to get her. She's the woman who buys everything she wants on impulse, and hates everything else on sight. Dad, oddly, suggested that I get him another tie bar -- I'd bought him one years ago and it's almost the only one he wears -- which was my punt idea for him, if only because it's the only one he ever seems to wear and it's time he got a new one. So I'll pick him up a tie bar this week and maybe throw in another Beethoven CD.

Speaking of CDs, I told mom that I swore I'd never buy her another CD the moment I saw that she owned a Celine Dion CD. Ew.

I just remembered I have to move the car. Feck. Nighty.

link (18 dec)

You gotta hand it to the BBC.

Allow me just to say, pants!

link (17:58 EST, Monday, 18 December 2000.)