Journamalism by Press Release

I expect press releases to be bad and to tout one group's discoveries over another. I don't expect them to be so bad that they write the Fox New headline themselves: "Club Drugs Inflict Damage Similar To Traumatic Brain Injury." The opening paragraph is about MDMA, or Ecstacy, which is an analogue of methamphetamine. However, the entire presentation by the research team is about methamphetamine itself. I don't know if MDMA causes brain damage because the actual science says nothing about it.

There's a huge, huge spectrum between candy raver and meth whore, and this public relations writers knows where on that line she falls.

Saturday: Service, Snow, Soup, Sleep

Ladders are hard on my knees.

Saturday Omaha and I performed our quarterly ritual of keeping Kouryou-chan's school's raingutters clear. If we don't and the gutters over the dining area are allowed to clog up, the rain pours onto the poorly sloped slab and seeps under the door creating a mess and potentially a health hazard. We've already lost one classroom to a flood; we can't afford to lose a second. There were two other dads who came out to help us and they were fabulous. Between the four of us, we managed to clean the entire school's roof. The temperature was a balmy 2C (35F) and three layers of gloves didn't help keep out the cold that seeped through the leather layer. Going up and down on those ladders really took a toll on my knees, but I survived well enough. Like the hat? shemayazi made it for me. It's very nice.

Kouryou-chan brought her bicycle with her so she wouldn't be bored. She learned how to drive away from the sidewalk if she slipped off it so the tire wouldn't get caught on the curb. Unfortunately, she also managed to fall at least once and take the bike handle straight to the solar plexus, but she was a tough kid and was soon back on the bike.

We went home. Omaha and I took a shower together. Yum.

After a quick lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese, we went out to the neighbor's church to attend their annual church bazaar. Even as we headed out, snow began to fall and by the time we got to the church the roads were scary. People were slipping and sliding, and the church was packing up and sending people home on the assumption that it would get worse.

There's a girl at the church who I ran into last year, who's a Naive Furry. She doesn't get on the Internet much ("too much pornography") but she loves anthro art and she's been drawing it ever since she was small. She's mostly in love with dragons but she had other pieces, too, and I picked up two drawings, one of a wolf and another of a fox.

Kouryou-chan's ballet rehearsal was cancelled. The brownies we picked up at the church made for fine compensation. When we got home, the snow was still coming down, the neighbors came home, and then all the kids went outside and tried to make much of the little snow they had. I made hot chocolate, which worked out pretty well even if the cubes of baker's chocolate we had were a little dried out. Omaha asked me to come outside and (I kinda knew this was coming) threw a snowball at me when I opened the door.

We didn't decide on dinner until nearly 8:00pm, at which point we were so tired from all the physical labor of the morning that we decided to go out to eat. Dinner was okay, but Omaha and I were leaning on each other and closing our eyes toward the end of the meal. Kouryou-chan said, "Am I going to have to carry you guys to the car?" Kid's got a fine sense of humor.

Condos of the future, here in Seattle.

Seattle is such a skiffy town sometimes. There's a new condominium going up near where I work, and it's name is Carbon56. This led a friend of mine to say, "Man, that's one unstable atom. It might last all of a picosecond!"

Element 56 is, after all, Barium, a substance used in rat poison and diagnostic enemas. And carbon-- isn't carbon considered a bad thing these days? "Carbon footprints," "carbon emissions," why would anyone want to be associated with these things?

Carbon 56's web page is one huge flash app with really annoying background music that sounds like Barry White is about to come over.

Dr. Who?

Equally skiffy, but much cooler, is Site 17, a condominium complex along Western Avenue. The bottom floor is mostly parking and shops, and the grilles over the parking lot venting system are gorgeous abstract sculptures suggesting maps to fabulous places. I was walking past it when I noticed that the support columns all have these little placards on them with pithy quotes. At least, I thought they were pithy until I spotted this one. Dr. Who? They're quoting Dr. Who? I'm not even sure what the quote means, but by gods, they're quoting Dr. Who.

Sunday: My brain on ADHD.

Things I learned today:

There is an excellent reverse-proxy HTTP server called Pound. It can do round robin access for server farms, does redirects based upon PCRE, and can be used successfully to farm out requests between application servers and filesystem servers.

Mongrel is a perfectly adequate solution for deploying Rails.

There is an excellent "ruby-based application server without the database requirement" server called Merb that has a rails-like API but is built for better performance.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a whole lot of coding done. I've been too busy with family duties. I feel like a... a dad. Sigh. We did to the monthly Costco run, so we have important things again. Kouryou-chan and I went out to try and find copies of The Nutcracker; the cheapest CD we could find was $26 bucks. Yikes!

I tried to get into a groove, either writing or coding, but Kouryou-chan wanted and needed too much attention (must have something to do with Omaha and I banning the TV today; we let her overdo it yesterday, the weather's been crappy and she can't go outside) so we played games: Spongebob Squarepants trivia, *ugh*. Fortunately, she's watched the show as often as I have, so she didn't have an advantage. We also ended up doing a lot of origami; her class is doing the "1000 cranes" thing.

Omaha and I watched the Nicholas Cage / John Travolta / John Woo action masterpiece Face/Off, which, once you get past the premise of it, is a damn fine movie. Cage has to play Travolta playing Cage, and Travolta has to play Cage playing Travolta. Both are pretty good but Cage is clearly the better actor despite giving the absolutely best line, "What a predicament!", to Travolta. (Second best line goes to an alarmingly young Dominique Swain: "Will someone please tell me what planet I'm on?") There are some very nice bits of foreshadowing I hadn't noticed before, as well as some glorious existential imagery during the second major gun battle.

I'm having a life. It's a good life. Kouryou-chan is next to me, trying to figure out the game 15 Squares on my Palm Pilot. She'd better not break it.