Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Well, we’ve ended up our 2 weeks of Jodi’s mom being out here in Seattle to help us with the new baby as of this morning. Now it’s all on Jodi and I for a while — a little bit daunting, but I think we’ll do ok.

This turnover is particularly blog-worthy now that M.I.L. is back in Columbia, SC — after the crazy travel day she had yesterday. You occasionally hear about wacko behavior on planes and bomb-scares, etc… but almost never is it in your city, and even more rarely does it have any direct effect on you personally.

Well, no more! Yesterday, Jodi’s mom was on the Northwest flight 980 to Memphis that got turned around and returned to Seattle due to a bomb threat/scare. She (along with the 141 other passengers) spent a bunch of time sitting on the far runway surrounded by flashing-light police vehicles and news helicopters overhead, then off to the FBI/TSA/Homeland security interrogation room for interview, etc. And, finally, off to a steak dinner with Jodi, Gabriel and myself to celebrate the extra 18 hours we got to spend with her here in Seattle!

All is well, and she’s made it safely back to SC on a flight today, but what a wacky, strange, scary thing to happen! My thought is it’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime sort of things, so now she’s safe to fly unimpeded (maybe she won’t even have to take her shoes off to get through security!) going forward.

Shortly after wading through the Ludlum book (ugh), I started Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. This was a bit shorter than some of the books I’ve been reading lately (at only 7:19), plus it was quite engaging — thus, I got through it pretty quickly.

Ms. Vowell’s books are always interesting, and this one was no exception. As a side-bar, with all of the historical non-fiction and historical perspective books I’ve been reading lately, I actually am feeling like I know quite a bit more about 1860-1940 history than I ever did from High School… now, most of that is my own fault for (pick one: (a) skipping class (b) not paying attention when I was in class), but it’s still pretty cool. I like history!

Anyway, the context of this book was that she spends pretty much all of her vacations (even day trips) going to see various assassinated-president sites. Not just the “where it happened” stuff, but the “where the do-er grew up” and “where they caught him 2 days later” sites. She covers various aspects of history and historical interest for Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and many of their related players (such as poor, jinxed Robert Todd Lincoln who was present for the assassination of all 3 of these presidents!)

Great topics. Great presentation. Great book.

This is one from 2 weeks or so ago I’m just getting around to posting. Well, I started with the GPS turned off accidentally, so I ended up missing the first mile or so of the ride on the map. Whoops! I tried a different route and discovered how darn hilly Seattle can be!

This time I went down to Seward Park, around through the park (accidentally up and over the top of the hill — I had meant to go out and around along the water but got shunted a different way due to a race going on at the park). Then I biked back along Lk Washington Blvd and split along the water up to the end of Madison. Back up Madison (note to self, next time try following Lk Washington blvd to shortcut the big hills on Madison!) to MLK and then up MLK to Jackson and home.

Whew! It was a fairly short bike ride, as such things go.. only 15 miles (+ about 1.5 miles for my GPS-off mistake). But it was hilly enough that it still took me 1:34 to do it (I’ve been doing nearly 20 miles in that amount of time on my Ballard loop).

I recently finished The Altman Code – another Ludlum book. Blah, I think I’m just getting a little burned out on Ludlum books. This one was a good sight better than the Ambler Warning, thank goodness, but it still just felt a bit boring and transparent (hmm, I wonder if the Vice President is a bad guy or not). The good news is that I’m going to plan to read a bunch of non-Ludlum books for a while. The bad news is that I’ve got another 3 or so already queued up and purchased from Audible (that’s how far behind I am on my reading) so I’ll end up reading some more of them before too long.

This book covered the first 100 days of FDRs government, as well as the period leading up to and through his election. Like seemingly everyone, I’ve always considered FDR something of a folk hero for his success in turning the depression and leading us up to and through the challenges of the 2nd World War. After reading this book, I have renewed appreciation for this great man, but I’m also a little alarmed at some of the mechanisms he had to use to get it done!

In many ways FDR was terrifyingly like George W Bush in his approaches! Yes, GWB. How so? Well, FDR spent a great deal of his time misleading those he was “working with” into a position where he would get his way — a good example is the way he handled the transition to power and the bank crisis with Hoover: he pretended to have not received letters, pretended to have sent a reply that “got lost”, etc… all to ensure the clock would run out on Hoover and FDR would be able to sweep in and “fix” the problem on his own. No direct parallel in GWB world, but the “feigning ignorance” while the clock runs and sending conflicting/misleading messages suited to the purposes of obfuscation is a Bush tactic we’ve seen time and time again in the past few years. And there’s no doubt it works, it’s just a bit underhanded.

Also, the more obvious example was the way FDR essentially set himself up as a dictator during his presidency — adding more power to the executive, removing power from others, trying to stack the supreme court, stripping/violating citizen civil liberties, etc. A whole honeybucket of unpleasant and inappropriate actions that are not looked on very favorably by history. Not too far off from many of the things the GWB administration has done (no oversight from congress, wiretapping, torture/habeas corpus, classified leaks, etc… I could go on and on)

Now, the good news is that FDR was also quite a bit like Bill Clinton (or Ronald Reagan if you prefer) in that he was able to get the public to back just about any good (or bad) thing he could come up with. He was a real salesman, and an effective spokesman for our country for many years. And he was effective both internationally, and — perhaps more importantly given the depression — domestically. He was able to get people “back to work” (and more importantly, the American public BELIEVED they were getting back to work, even if it was not as broad as it seemed in advertising.

Plus, one could argue, even with the questionable things he did — FDR did more good than harm. That alone puts him closer to the Clinton legacy than the GW Bush legacy.

The last post on this was quite a while ago, so I suppose it’s not really fair to leave it at that. To recap, previously I had purchased an HDHR (HDHomeRun) box to serve as my HDTV tuner into my Media Center (MCE2005). The initial results were not good. I followed all the steps posted in the setup guide at the HDHR forum, and it all seemed to work ok at first… I was able to tune ATSC channels from the attached antenna, watch live TV, etc. However, each time I scheduled a recording, it was a roll of the dice. In most cases, I would get 2-3 minutes of recording out of a 30 minute scheduled show.

Doubly strange, because MCE (I had thought) is supposed to detect a “lost signal” during a show recording and restart the recording when signal returns (?). In any event, this was not happening and we had a few, tragic, missed recordings (I was particularly unhappy to have missed one of the season final episodes of The Office… ACK!)

In any event, there’s a happy ending in here somewhere. I posted to the forum and got no direct response (I’d link the post, but it seems to have been pruned). However, there was an indirect response to someone else with a similar problem, indicating an errant ICMP packet signaling a loss of connectivity to the HDHR. This, evidently, leads to exactly the “partial recording” problem I was having.

I proved the point by scheduling a recording and then yanking out the network connection from HDHR to the switch while it was recording. Sure enough, the end-result recorded file looked just like the symptoms I had been seeing — a full-length recording, where only the first portion was recorded (ie – partial light-colored timeline bar with the rest of the 30 mins greyed out as though it was only 5 minutes into the actual recording process).

Ok, so it was a loss of network connectivity. Hmm. Well, could be cables, could be network card, COULD BE THE SWITCH. Ah ha! This 5-port 10/100 switch I had thrown back into service for the HDHR<->MCE connection is a couple of years old and I had a vague recollection that one or more of the ports on it had had really low throughput in its previous use. The switch was the obvious culprit… maybe a loose connection inside or it’s just finally giving up the ghost.

Sure enough, “switched out” (yes, pun) this older switch for a known-good replacement… and… SUCCESS! Zero missed recordings in the few weeks since I made the swap.

YAY! And now, with a few weeks of success behind us, I can say that the HDHR is the coolest thing since forever. I feel so retro using rabbit ears antenna to get my TV, but the quality is heads and shoulders above what I get from my analog cable; and there’s NO way to get HD on my MCE from the cable company without hacking something together (Firewire from a STB) or paying TONS of $$ for cablecard. Blegh. 90% of my fairly limited TV watching comes from NBC in any case, so now I’m even more inclined to dump my cable. If only Comedy Central would sell a monthly IP/download subscription for TDS and Colbert, I’d be all set.

Not all of John Irving’s books are available in audible (in fact, only a handful are). This “new” (now probably 2 years old) book, however, was available, so it’s the next one in my listen pile.

It took me AGES to get through this book (almost a month of nearly daily listening). Not because it was a slow or bad book. Quite the opposite, it was actually quite an interesting and engaging book. But it was long, 35+ hours to listen through, so it just took a long time!

In traditional John Irving fashion, there are his standard sort of strange topics: Wrestling, kinky/strange/inappropriate sex and sexual encounters,  broken relationships, stoic/unfeeling participants.

A handful of new topics added: tattoos, organ playing, prostitutes in Amsterdam.

And, finally, a couple of “curiously absent” old favorites we’ve seen in other stories: stories within a story, zoos, and German literature.  (Catherine points out that I only think these are standard-faire Irving because of the set of his books I’ve read and the ones I’ve yet to read).

Hehe. I’m such a cynic. John Irving has such an engaging writing style, I just can’t stay away… even as his books get weirder and weirder (or, some might argue, LESS weird). The idea that his real-life experiences play into some of his writing topics is particularly interesting.

That said, I nearly always have trouble connecting with one or more of the characters in his books, and this one was no exception. I had a very hard time understanding

<WARNING, SPOILERS. Sort of.>

Jack’s reaction when Emma died. I think that was partly the point, but still I found it empathetically a very sad point and it made me feel particularly sad for Jack for his lack of emotion.

I also didn’t understand why William never tried to “find” Jack after he turned 18 and there was no real risk of interference from Alice. Seems they could have enjoyed so much more time together.

Oh well. Another good book down. Only a couple more JI books to go and I’ll be caught up. Problem is I need to actually read most of the rest, so it might be a while.

I don’t get hotels that have ESPN1-ESPN7 but don’t have Comedy Central. Makes no sense at all.

Couple of observations about airplane travel (and some on airport dining) from our recent South Carolina trip:

• Alaska Air has a lot of legroom in their 737s. Very comfortable flight back from Chicago -> Seattle!
• It’s impossible to get first class upgrades. 2 legs of our trip were 100% booked in first class and the other 2 didn’t have this class of service on the plane. The good news is that Jodi and I got an entire row to ourselves on the final (long) leg of the trip, so it was pretty pleasant, even in steerage (see my above comment about leg room on the Alaska Air flight).
• The Chili’s Too near the “H1B” gate (really, that’s the name of the gate!) at O’Hare is terrible. Avoid it like the plague. Service was awful, truly awful on the way to SC.
• The Fox Sports grill down near the L gates was excellent though — very fast and quality service on the way back.

And, finally – flying on the weekends is irritating for two specific reasons:

1. Every single person flying each weekend has NEVER FLOWN BEFORE IN THEIR LIFE, or at least so they’d have you believe. They can’t figure out how walk in an airport. They can’t figure out how to check-in with the self-service machines. They can’t figure out how to get through security without holding up the line. Ack!
2. The airlines sincerely believe that I want them to talk to me throughout the entire flight over the loud LOUD speaker. Reassure me that they do sell drinks for only $5. That, yes, I can purchase the headphones for the movie in just a few moments. That this is the best opportunity to get 10,000 extra bonus miles by signing up for their visa card. Or… and this one is the worst of all… that I am incapable of finding one of the dozens of electronic signboards in the arrival terminal to figure out my connection gate and that therefore the best way to solve this problem is to read EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE CONNECTING GATES FOR EVERY PASSENGER ON THE FLIGHT! This deafening process generally goes on for 5-10 minutes near the end of the flight, and ends with an announcement that now we have to turn off our electronic devices (ie – I’ve been unable to concentrate on — or ever really hear — my electronic device for the whole time).

Am I the only one who finds this annoying? Thank heavens they don’t seem to regularly do this for travel during the week.

May 20-26: Jodi and I used a few days of vacation to visit South Carolina. We spent some time in Greenville visiting Sharai and Laura. Then to Charleston for some trips down memory lane, to the beach, and some nice dinners out. Finally, we rounded out in Columbia (literally — for instance, we went to Shealy’s for BBQ dinner). It was hot, although I’m told it was actually quite nice.

Photos at Doddsnet: http://www.doddsnet.com/Photos/2007/2007MayVacation/Default.htm