I love this stage of development.

We didn’t do too much during the visit, a combination of the fact that Dad was still recovering from Australian Jet Lag and Susan and I are like a decade of recovering from ‘we’re parents of a toddler, and have 3 acres of land to tend to.’ That by way of saying, Dad slept a lot, and I had a bunch of chores, including mowing 1/3 of the lawn and finishing the frame for the enclosure on the new chicken coop and the roof and nesting box for the minicoop. Susan had garden work.

Dad did get to spend some time with Susan and Brady in Northampton, including lunch and the requisite shopping at the coop, which all seemed to enjoy, so at least we managed to do some quasi entertaining, even if I was stuck at work. Oh, and Dad and I took Brady to a playground on Sunday for a little sliding and swinging action. So – despite our various inadequacies as entertainers we’re still really glad he came, and after he left we swore to do better next time.

There’s one little coda, which is that Dad forgot his cellphone, and it was all I could do to resist the urge to prank it up, but I shipped it back to him intact with nary a bit of tinkering by me

!!!

Who’s smarter than who in this exchange? I’m thinking it wasn’t me.

The bad news is this was cancer – a mast cell tumor to be precise. Her chances seem decent, so I’m hopeful. Only one of the three came back as definite cancer, and the one was stage 2, which is better than stage 3. For now, we watch to see if she gets any more tumors or if the cancerous one grows back.

All in though I feel terrible for her and pretty sad. She’s only 7 and already having all these bad health issues. She still has her happy demeanor and still wants to play, but now all I do is worry that some other shoe is about to drop for her. Here’s hoping this is the last of her troubles. She has another week of forced inactivity then her stitches come out and she can return to her normal lifestyle.

* Tom Coughlin gets a pass from me, from now until he retires. Twice he’s brought underdog teams to the Superbowl and against everyone’s expectations come away with the win. Their consistent mid-season collapses have driven me mad the last ~5 years, but I cannot argue with success and I give him a ton of credit for it.

* Eli Manning really came into his own this year, and was the most significant factor in the Giants success this year. This is not to take anything away from JPP, Cruz, Osi, and a number of other contributors, but Eli was playing behind a mediocre line with an underperforming running game all season, and yet he had a career year, bringing the team back from behind seemingly half of their games. Unlike in many of his previous seasons, he also couldn’t count on an above average defense to help keep the team in the games. It was on him, more often than not, and he stepped up. I also think if there’s anyone left who still thinks the Giants ‘overpaid’ to get Eli from San Diego back when, they need to go eat a bucket of poo. If you didn’t think he was worth it after the first win against the Patriots (and if not, what’s wrong with you?) you have no leg left to stand on now.

* The Super Bowl was phenomenal. As I said, I figured the Pats to win, based on their passing attack being better than our pass defense and their having a chip the size of Manhattan on their shoulders after the Giants stopped them from becoming the de facto ‘best NFL team ever’ the last time they met in the Super Bowl. Plus, the Giants had played ‘stink up the joint’ let-down games all season (the loss to Seattle, the 2 Redskin losses, the Miami ‘we only won because of Eli’, and the loss to the Eagles, facing a washed up bust of a QB and a team on the ropes) , and their entire playoff run, including the Super Bowl, I kept figuring on it happening again. Wonder of wonders, it didn’t. The Giants did just enough to win. Tom Brady safety on the first Pats Drive is my 4th favorite superbowl play ever, after 1) Ingram’s 3rd down catch in the Giants’s Bills Superbowl where he broke through like 7 defenders, 2) The Eli/Tyree hookup where Eli eluded a sack then tossed a ball that Tyree caught off his helmet in the first Pats/Giants Superbowl, 3) Eli to Burress FTW in the first Pats/Giants Superbowl. I love the safety so much because at the time it felt like it was a tone-setter, and suddenly after coming into the game full of apprehension, I had hope, hope I tell ya!

Truth be told I didn’t ‘enjoy’ the game until it was over. I spent most of the game pacing back and forth in front of the TV, waiting for Brady to put it together, leading to me freaking out by the end of the 2nd and all of the 3rd quarter. I was convinced we would lose. I’ve taped the game so I can watch it again and actually enjoy it on a play by play basis.

* I still dislike Kevin Gilbride and wish he was off coaching some other team’s offense. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to reach into the screen and strangle him over the course of a season of ‘let’s run it into the line for a -2/+2 running play, for the 9th time this game.’ Maybe he’s a genius and knows that keeps the safeties up near the line to open up the passing attack, I don’t know. Certainly he has Super Bowl rings and all I have is this blog full of inaccurate football predictions Still, I loathe his predictable play calling and wish he would play to the teams’ strengths instead of doggedly sticking to the same script game after game.

I hope Cruz and JPP get paid this offseason, they deserve it. I’d be happy to see the Giants find a way to bring Manningham back for another year, though it seems unlikely. I’d love to see them find a tight end of two – I don’t hate Ballard but figure we can do better. They need to find offensive lineman, at least one more solid linebacker, and they need at least a couple of defensive backs. I think it’s time to say a fond farewell to Jacobs. Next season will be tough for them – tough schedule (lets hope the Eagles coming on strong towards the end of the seasons is not a harbinger of next season), everyone gunning for them, and some serious gaps on both sides of the ball. Still, given what they pulled off this season?!?! Who knows

*( I did think they *could* beat the Falcons, and I thought they had a decent chance against San Fran, but based on how uneven they had played all season, I went into each game figuring ‘this is when they have their down game.’)

Several weeks ago I pre-ordered ‘Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’ for the PS3 (terrible name but the game is pretty good) from Newegg.com because they had it for $15 off. The day it was supposed to ship, they alerted me to a billing failure and asked me to correct it, which I did (somehow, the expiration date on my CC was wrong, which was hard to explain since they had it in their database and I did not change it). 10 minutes after I update my billing they charge me and tell me my order has been processed. 10 minutes after this, they email me to tell me my order was cancelled and they would refund my money in 2-3 days. Digging around, I discovered a lot of folks who had pre-ordered the game from Newegg had also had their pre-orders cancelled after their credit card was charged.

I’ve done business with Newegg for a long time and generally had really good experiences with them, so I was willing to cut them a little slack and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, chalk this up to automated systems misfiring, but this was still pretty irritating.

Anyway, I managed to pre-order the game for the full retail price on Amazon that same day, and several days later had the game and was playing it, only for $15 more than I had planned to pay. 3 days later, Newegg refunded my money. a week after that, Amazon sent me a no strings attached $20 gift card because they had dropped the price of the game on their site and were honoring their price protection guarantee.

!!!!

Get the difference there? Newegg, possibly scamming me or maybe just a little incompetent. No apology, and they sit on my money for 3-4 days. Amazon, bending over backwards to make sure I remain a happy customer.

Today when I had to order some parts for a gift I’m putting together for my nephew’s birthday, guess where I shopped?

Actions have consequences and all that.

OK, truth be told we took this right before the Falcons game a couple of weeks ago, but the sentiment is the same today

The first update went fine. Everything was back up and running, including the previously broken apache, but having looked over what it took to get to a current version from where I had been, I figured I may as well take the time to get current now because the issue was only going to get worse as time passed. I proceeded to the next update.

The second upgrade also went fine, leaving me only 2 updates away from current, so on I went to the next one, which did not go smoothly. I ended up at the command line on reboot with a broken xwindows and no networking stack running, for reasons I never determined. Xwindows failing on update has happened periodically with linux distros and while I understand the whys of this, it’s still one of the most frustrating aspects of working with the OS for me. Anyway, after screwing around for an hour trying to repair things with no success I gave up and decided to do the last update to the current release, 11.10, using a CD rather than from the network. This turns out to have been my fatal mistake.

Everything appeared to go smoothly – I booted to CD, it correctly recognized the version of ubuntu currently installed on the machine and asked me if I wanted to update it, which I did, so off we went. During the install process there was a single error message which I had not seen before which was worrying, to the effect of ‘some packages cannot be upgraded and will need to be reinstalled.’ It did not enumerate them nor offer me any options, it just reported the problem. Everything else finished and I rebooted…to discover that the update had gone disastrously awry. A random sampling of the oddness:

• Apache was no longer installed, and there was no longer a /var/www directory where I had gigs of binary data (most of it pictures).
• Mysql was no longer installed and none of my table data was present any longer (!!!!)
• A huge swath of my previous software stack was gone, including the data that accompanied it.
• The usr directories of my wife and I were still present, but her account was not.
• the stuff I had installed into opt was still there, along with the data.

As you might imagine, I was furious. I still am. On the one hand, no doubt this is somehow my fault. I was rushing through this. I do not keep good backups beyond the wordpress tables that have my blog. I’m hardly the most clever linux user and my job has removed me from daily use and the good practices that helps enforce. On the other hand, I’ve been running linux at home since ~’97. I’ve had head crashes, disastrous red hat upgrades which pushed me to Ubuntu, a cpu cooler retaining clip breakage which caused one of my machines to bake itself to death, including its drive, yet despite all of that, never a loss of a whit of data. I’ve always managed to recover everything. But not this time. I won’t descend into details, but I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to recover data from that drive, and as far as I can tell, short of paying through the nose those mysql tables are gone, and they’re really the critical missing piece. Everything else I can either recover from the drive, or I have partial or complete backups of, but the sql tables with all the structure to 12 years worth of images in my image gallery? They’re gone.

So…to hell with Ubuntu. I get this is my fault, but at the same time, I won’t run that distro again, and I might be done with linux at home. I should have had backups, but it never should have destroyed my data – that upgrade script to 11.10 was somehow disastrously broken.

Where does that leave things? I moved my hosting over to site5 for the time being, and my media server stuff over to a windows machine. I think I’m going to pick up a mac mini and move to that for some of this stuff, but maybe keep the web on a hosting provider and not in my house. I’m evaluating image gallery approaches now. I’m not going back to menalto’s gallery – they’re not keeping up with the times. I’m not sure what it will be, though Piwigo is looking promising so far. I want video support, mobile support, social networking sharing support, and effective, well-maintained wordpress integration. Suggestions welcome. As far as the old linux drive, I may still pay someone to try and get those sql tables off of there – they have the first year of my son’s life in pictures, with all the family comments on them. I have all the pictures, but that structure and the comments are the absolute worst loss out of this, and I want them back if I can get them without breaking the bank.

If I could do it over again I would have asked them to remove it last year, because when they removed it they discovered it had infiltrated the muscles under her arm and were not able to entirely excise it. Still, they took ~3 pounds and the overwhelming majority out. The hope now is that it won’t recur. The infiltration of the muscle works against this unfortunately, but the odds aren’t terrible (~40% is what google tells me) and even if it does, hopefully it will grow at a slower pace.

By and large her recovery from the surgery has been messy and unpleasant for her but relatively smooth. She has staples along an incision that runs from her armpit to her navel, and she had two drains installed which protected her from too much fluid collecting in the void left by the excised tumor. I had to apply hot compresses twice a day to the region and keep her dressed in a tshirt to help corral the bleeding. Her first day she barely moved and was in obvious discomfort (and on painkillers to help with it) but by the second day she was starting to perk up and move about, and seemed even better on the third day. Unfortunately she had a relapse possibly caused by us letting her go for too long of a walk that began on the 4th day and had her bleeding fairly heavily at times and again becoming immobile with discomfort. This lasted a couple of days. She had her drains removed last night and seems to be doing well – she tried to roll around in the leaves this morning when I took her out, throughout it all her appetite has been strong, and she’s starting to show signs of her normal playfulness. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. She’s still leaking from the areas where the drains were, but the flow is significantly less.

So…could have been better, but could have been much much worse, so all things considered I’m thankful that it’s looking good, and she handled it well throughout. I’ll post a few pics to the gallery with the warning that a couple of them might be disturbing.

We happen to have coffee concentrate around anyway so this is pretty convenient for me. If you’re not familiar with it, concentrate is made using a cold filtering process. We have a cold filter concentrate maker already, but if you don’t have one around and want to experiment, it’s pretty easy to make. Here’s a sample recipe. It also makes fantastic coffee, and is a convenient way to have a single cup when you don’t want to brew a pot.

A word of warning about this recipe – for whatever reason, it causes the soda to fizz up more dramatically than if you make Dr Pete’s without the concentrate, so open the bottle carefully or you’ll end up with soda everywhere. Also make sure to leave a little room in the bottle when you make the seltzer – fill it just a bit below the regular fill line, or pour a little out after you mix it so there is room for the concentrate in the bottle.

Ain’t life wonderfully absurd? I’ll pile on by observing that this isn’t actually the first time someone’s tried to market a fragrance emitter for computers (!!!) Perhaps the fear of prankster nephews stank bombing their relatives has kept wary consumers away…that’s just speculation by me though.

The root problem was that we had significant wet snowfall before most of the trees had lost their leaves. This caused unbelievable tree damage. It was unlike what typically happens in nor’easters and hurricanes, where you get many trees coming down. Instead, seemingly every single tree lost one or more limbs, but few trees came completely down. It destroyed the electrical grid and blocked roads everywhere. There are two major routes from my house to my employer (Route 9 and Bay Road) and both were down to a single lane in multiple locations, with Bay Road completely blocked in one section that caused the town to route traffic through some poor person’s front yard. On both routes, the power lines were laying on the road in multiple locations, there were a number of places where huge limbs were suspended in the air on power lines, and a roughly equal number of places where telephone poles snapped under the weight of the tree limbs laying on their lines. On my own property we have around a dozen apple trees, and every single one of them was ‘capped’ (losing its topmost section) along with most of them losing at least a portion of their other major limbs. At least 3 of them are going to die from this, and several others are on the bubble as far as I can tell. Our maples and oaks also got whacked, including my favorite maple, which was an absolutely beautiful tree that is stunning in the fall. Now it looks like pacman took a bite out of it – it lost 2 of 4 of its major limbs. We also almost lost our barn. A nut tree in the back dropped a limb at least 12″ thick onto the roof, and the barn was only saved because the force of the fall was largely taken by an adjacent tree’s major limb. That tree’s probably a goner now.

The majority of the region didn’t have power for days. Amherst College was closed due to power loss, something we think has never happened before. Our students had to bunk up with friends or sleep in the gym because several dorms had no power for a couple of days. Our daycare provider, along with a couple of other college buildings, had no power all week. My house had no power for a week, as did >90% of the town I live in. This was tough. We’re on well water and no power means no water.  The only thing that left us able to inhabit our house was the propane stove in the basement, where we lived, and the propane cooking stove we used to melt snow for water. I have a solar charger and a number of battery packs that we used to keep our phones and the ipad functioning. Susan and I alternated days off from work, with one of us working and one staying home with Brady. We lost hundreds of dollars in food (over a 100 in condiments alone!) because we couldn’t keep things refrigerated. Thankfully we had not yet finished filling our new chest freezer. Much of Brady’s home cooked baby food was lost. I bathed out of a basin using boiled snow water and felt like I had reverted to a lifestyle a century old. We fell asleep by 8:30 or 9. It was hard work and took its toll on us, with Susan and I bickering and occasionally sniping at each other from the stress by the end of the week.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of adventure and new experiences. This one was harder than most, but I suspect as time passes the negative aspects will fade and we’ll talk with pride of how we ‘roughed it’ for a week. Brady came through it like a champ despite having a cold. I think he loved the sleepover with Mom and Dad in the basement – most morning’s he’d wake before us and be happy as a clam to discover us right there next to him.

I wouldn’t say we’re recovered yet – our fridge looks barren despite spending $300 to restock it this weekend. Our yard looks like the set of a disaster film, with tree work in various stages of completion based on how dire things look, and based on the pace, months to go now that it’s dark when I get home from work. The worst limb is off the barn but there’s a tangle adjacent to it that threatens a dramatic collapse if we don’t deal with it (though we think/hope we’ve got it in a state where the barn is not threatened).

Still, by and large life has returned to its regular rhythms, and all things considered we came through this pretty cleanly, as did our friends in the region. A memory for life, in the final analysis, but not a life changer, is what this will amount to in the end, and I’m good with that

Since I last commented, the Giants have rattled off four wins and 1 loss. The loss was an awful game against Seattle, and one of the wins was an almost loss against Miami, but in the same timeframe they beat the Pats and the Bills, both of which are having decent seasons, and both of which I assumed the Giants would lose to.

Overall I’ll upgrade my perception of this year’s squad a bit. They’ve demonstrated that they’re capable, they’ve managed to succeed despite some critical injuries, and several young players are showing promise, particularly Victor Cruz and Jason Pierre Paul. They’ve also shown luck (that win against Buffalo was more down to luck than execution) and grit, with that scoring drive against the Pats at the end of the game.

So, that’s the good news, along with the fact that they’re still first in their division, with both the Skins and Eagles seemingly in collapse and Dallas looking like a mediocre team. On the downside, my read is they don’t match up well against the other NFC leaders – Green Bay and New Orleans both seem likely to crush the Giants, and we’ll see about San Francisco this weekend. Things look much better when compared to AFC teams, but none of that matters come playoff time. Here’s hoping Aaron Rodgers decides to retire

My updated picks, halfway through the season: Green Bay looks unstoppable, and barring injuries or an ‘any given sunday’ moment, they should take the NFC. The AFC is much more interesting, with the AFC North looking like the crucible that should forge a tough, battle tested AFC champ, with my money on Pittsburgh, but the Pats, Jets and Texans all with the potential to take it.

Three other remarks:

1) Do you think the league has finally figured out what the fans have known for at least 5 years? No one should start Rex Grossman.

2) What is going on with Phillip Rivers?

3) This season I’m discovering a grudging respect for Tom Coughlin. I’ve been hot and cold on him over the years, but he deserves credit for fielding a competitive squad year after year, and this year especially he’s managing to overcome a lot of injury problems. I reserve the right to blow cold on him again if the Giants have yet another mid-season collapse under his leadership.

I once proposed a line of perverse vegan aerosol meat substitutes like “I can’t believe it’s not organ meat” and “I can’t believe it’s not marrow bones” that would come as a soy spray in a mousse can whose nozzle mated with a dishwasher/microwave-safe mold (with plastic “bones” as appropriate) that you could nuke for a minute before ejecting the piping hot reformed slurry on a plate and popping the mold right into the dishwasher.

Let me go on record as someone who would buy such a product for the gag gift/social commentary value alone. My dog might even eat the output. Someone get a kickstarter going!

I’ve been working to teach Brady how to play catch, and the video shows the first time he sat still and played. The video captures the tail end of him playing with me.