The wonders of “linksys” (which happens to be America’s most popular Internet service provider) allows me to post this from within the walls of my home before I have had the time to find my cable modem and WiFi router.
Yesterday we finally got the keys to our new home! We went over and picked up our Uhaul truck first. The place we got it from was the only place in the area that had the right truck available for the right time period. The place is a dingy tire shop that just started renting out Uhaul trucks. They didn’t have their system hooked up to fast enough Internet access to run the Uhaul computer system, they did everything on paper. It was kind of uncomfortable in there because he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, and it was a filthy, greasy, tire-filled mess.
After we got the truck we emptied out all the stuff we could pick up by ourselves from the storage unit and loaded it into the truck. That night we were able to move half of it into our new house. We slept on the floor since our mattress was still all the way at the back of the storage unit. We got up early and started moving stuff again. By the time the first people started showing up to help us move we had already moved almost everything from the truck and were ready to go get the furniture out of the storage unit.
40 minutes later and everything had been moved into our new place. Now there are mountains of boxes that need to be sifted through and furniture that needs to be placed. Krissy is excited to get started on projects around the house. She is the hardest working person I know.
Police Chief Wiggum explained to Lisa that nothing gets chocolate out, then he motioned to the large brown stain on the front of his police pants to prove his point. Now I have a pair of pants of my very own that can be used to illustrate that same principle. I won’t blame anyone for the mishap. Wendy’s frosties are mighty tasty, but you need to be careful when you put an empty frosty cup on the top of a fast food bag that’s completely full of trash. You need to be especially careful when that bag has a small tear at the top and the empty frosty cup has a spoon in it causing the empty frosty cup to lean against the torn part of the bag. The most unfortunate things can happen when driving over speed bumps, so watch out for those as well. When all of these circumstances come together it’s curtains for your pants… See?
Tragedy struck in the life of a school librarian close to where Krissy and I are staying. To help her out with her sudden serious financial difficulties a fund raiser was organized at the nearest McDonald’s fast food restaurant. All of the money that was paid for food was to be donated to her, and there were large tip jars on the counters where additional money could be given. We don’t know her, but our hosts who are putting us up until escrow closes on our house do, so we thought we would go along and help out for a good cause.
There were more people in this one McDonald’s than I have ever seen at a fast food place at one time in my life! The line to order stretched out the door and down one side of the building. It looked like a number of school faculty and staff were there helping take orders and get them distributed as the food was done. I ordered more McDonald’s food tonight than I have in the last year! I didn’t end up eating it all, but I figured that since I was really just there to donate money, I may as well get something interesting out of it.
I don’t know if the woman we were there to help out was present or not, but I hope she knows just how many friends she has in this community. Apparently part of the tragedy she has had to endure involved her husband having committed suicide primarily due to huge online gambling debt. It appears that she was left holding the bag, completely unaware of his out of control habit. Let’s hope that the money raised tonight lets her at least not have to worry about debts quite so much, and that she can find some semblance of peace.
Today I attended a seminar held by Edward Tufte. Edward Tufte, or E.T. as he refers to himself, is the foremost authority on representing data and charting information. He practices what he preaches in his presentation. I enjoyed every minute of the lecture. I was seated to the far right in the very front which made it difficult to see everything he was doing, but his engaging teaching style worked even for people who couldn’t see him very well from their seats.
He used examples from his books extensively to illustrate points and to introduce topics. Four books written and published by Edward Tufte were distributed at the entrance before the talk began. These four books were worth the entire price of admission alone! I can hardly wait to take the time to study them and incorporate their ideas into my own designs.
In one portion of his lecture E.T. focuses on eliminating “chartjunk” and useless clutter from data representations. He is not too keen on the use of PowerPoint with its heavy reliance on hierarchical outlines and the interface’s encouragement to use “bullet grunts” to describe things.
One recent innovation he presents is Sparklines, or small word-sized graphs that can be used any place in a document to quickly convey a lot of data. They are meant to be used just like words. He even suggested that a Sparkline could make a great headline in a news story, especially in the sports section.
This was an all-day event, and afterwards I met up with my wife and some friends at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Phoenix; a satisfying end to an enlightening day.
I was going to wait until we were settled in our new home before writing another blog post, but it looks like that’s still going to be aways off in the distance. We found out today that circumstances are such that the closing date of our new home has been moved out about two weeks later than we were originally planning on. We were expecting to close on Thursday of this week, but now instead of a 4-day wait, we now have a 20-day wait ahead of us.
At first this seemed like a tragedy of the highest order, and my first thought was that we were not going to be able to get the house for one reason or another. Even though it upset a lot of plans, it turned out that within just a few hours of receiving the bad news everything had settled in to place and we were left with only a few minor inconveniences. We will have to pay another month’s rent on our storage unit, but that is the greatest of the frustrations. It could have been much worse.
Our friends, who have been incredibly kind and have let us stay free of charge in their guest bedroom for over six weeks now, would not accept our offer to pay them rent for the time from now until we leave. They have been a great blessing to us. Moving drained our resources and we are just now again in a position to take care of ourselves. If it weren’t for them, we would not be in the fortunate position that we are in. Without their generosity and effort on our behalf, we would still be struggling to pay rent in California awaiting the day that I finished school and got a job there.
I will try to keep things up to date if anything interesting happens between now and our new closing date.
I finally broke down and bought the Wii. I thought I would be able to buy one in the stores by now, but it looks like demand is still outstripping Nintendo’s supply, and stores are immediately selling the few Wiis that are trickling in on their delivery trucks. I ended up bidding on eBay until I accidentally won one of the auctions. After all was said and done I had paid about $400 on it. I was a little upset at first, but as soon as I got it set up and started playing with friends and family I immediately knew that I had made the right decision. My only regret so far is having waited so long to buy it.
When I got home from work today I was feeling really sick. I had a pretty bad head cold and a cough, and I am pretty sure that I had a fever, too. I arrived home just 15 minutes before the post office closed and there was a slip of paper indicating that a package that required a signature upon delivery was waiting for me at the post office about two miles away. I grabbed the paper from the mailbox and went right back to the car without even going inside the house. I wanted to get the Wii ASAP!
After I got out of the post office with the package, I opened it up in the car. The way it was packed made it impossible to remove without getting packing peanuts everywhere, but I wanted to open up the package completely in the car before I got it home. If this had turned out to be an eBay scam, then I wanted to be alone when I found out. I was fearing a Wii box filled with rocks or some other heavy substance instead of the game system I was expecting. Everything checked out, and the system seemed as brand new as it comes!
Krissy was really excited for the new Wii. She wasn’t quite as excited as I was, but that’s understandable, I guess. My coworkers were amazed to hear that my wife actually approved of the purchase and looked forward to playing video games with me on a regular basis. I love my wife!
I can hardly wait to get more friends and family involved when I can get more than just two controllers. You see, the Wii becomes more fun the more people you can get playing it together at the same time. Wii remotes are sold out almost everywhere, just like the Wii. It’s a good thing I bought that Wii remote at Toys R Us back on November 20th of last year!
Tonight we had our little Christmas at home. My Grandparents couldn’t be with us when we opened the gifts we got from them, so they asked that we video tape it to get Krissy’s reaction. Please excuse the poor production values in the following presentation, as they were all 100% intentional and are all a part of my artistic genius.
Unfortunately, it seems that political ads don’t have to actually tell the truth or use pesky facts to convince people of who and what to vote for. Most political topics can’t be accurately explained in 30 seconds or less. I wish the following video were possible to get on television during commercial breaks. If you don’t know what Net Neutrality is or why you should want laws in place to guarantee it then please take the two and a half minutes to watch the video below. The cable and telephone companies, who constitute the majority of high-speed internet service providers (ISPs), want to make more money at your expense. You will probably see commercials that try to convince you that Net Neutrality is bad, but they won’t talk about why, except by trying to scare you by threatening to raise cable and internet bills. These ads against Net Neutrality are nothing more or less than that; they are threats. The user oepapel on a discussion about Net Neutrality at digg.com summed it up best.
The ISPs (the gatekeepers) are basically saying “We want more money. If we can’t charge Google extra because of some Net Neutrality law then we are going to charge you, the customer. So don’t vote for the law and we won’t charge you more. Deal?”
It’s not that they lied, it’s that they skipped right to the end of their thinly veiled threat to raise prices if they don’t get their way. It’s a giant temper tantrum. They see the internet and their customers as an asset to be sold to the highest bidder, only nobody is bidding. None of the content producers are taking the bait. God help us if one of them does because then they ALL will have to in order to stay competitive. Sure, your internet [access] might be cheaper (and that’s a big assumption) but you traded your freedom away to get it. Hope you kept the receipt…
The ISPs are threatening to raise your bills unless they can force other companies with popular websites to pay the ISP just to grant you access to the popular websites. This idea just makes me so angry! And this is only one of the possible misuses if Net Neutrality is not passed into law.
When I got home from work today there was a surprise waiting for me that had come in the mail. I almost felt like Elder Dowler again! It was a box from my wife. She had sent me a whole bunch of my most very favorite chocolate chip cookies that she makes from scratch! They were still soft and chewy (which is one of my favorite things about them).
The first time I ever about this was when my sister-in-law, Sandy, showed this to the family two or three years ago. Amy Grant wrote and sings a song called “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” talking about the feelings that Mary had while carrying the Savior of the World. It turns out that a short film put out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called “The Nativity,” and “Breath of Heaven” are almost exactly the same length. Many of the scene changes match the changes in the music and many of the images match the lyrics. When I first saw this it was difficult to get going because it was a VHS tape with the video and a seperate CD player that had to be started together at just the right moment for the effect to be really noticeable. I took the video from the DVD and combined it with the audio from the CD, and this is the result. The Amy Grant music has a much greater impact than the original audio in my opinion. Enjoy!
