Recently in Blather Category

We kept pretty busy this Memorial Day weekend. The "weekend" started ahead of the Friday yabba-dabba-doo whistle when Jen & Josie picked me up for lunch out at Pizzi Farm. Dining out under the tent was very nice, especially since we ordered ahead and skipped the usual lunch time line. After sandwiches, we can't go without a visit to the ice cream window.

You can see I am wearing my Red Sox jersey. This always elicits comments at work, "Are you going to the game tonight?" "No", I say. But Jen's neighbors offered a pair of last minute tickets that Jen & Jordi couldn't take advantage of, and so they fell to Karen and me.

The Royals hammered out 20 hits and made the Sox pitching look bad. Still we had a good time. We struck up a conversation with a young couple down for the weekend from Vermont. Nicholas and Sabrina coaxed us in to going out for a drink after the game. We got to see the Celtics finish off the Magic at the bar.

Maybe Jen & Jordi would have hit us up for some baby sitting time for the Red Sox game if they didn't already have us lined up for Saturday. They went to see the new Shrek movie and we had Josie help us put in some impatiens in our front yard. She arrived just after a quick thunderstorm moved through, and the sun was out again. Josie's favorite was using the duck-shaped watering can. Water, water everywhere! Then inside for a bath (more water), and dinner.

Sunday and Monday saw some miscellaneous chores, and I finished a book I've been reading, Three Cups of Tea. Karen will pick up this book for her upcoming book club.

The weekday nights last week were crazy busy. Here is a quick summary of the week, I have a few more things to post here over the next day or so, so let's get something online and move on.

Karen and I started Monday with our first Beginning Spanish adult ed class at the high school. Our teacher, Penelope, tells us this is her first time teaching adults. I think this is going to work out fine, as we are just big kids after all, right?

Tuesday I joined folks at work for a release party, celebrating the latest rev of one of our products. Brews and burgers and shooting (very poorly) some pool.

Jen and Jordi had given Karen the very nice birthday gift of tickets to see Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. Yes, that Steve Martin is a big blue grass music fan and accomplished banjo man. The show was advertised as an evening of banjo and blue grass music and that's what we got. It was a good time!

Most Thursday nights are basket ball nights for me, but this week was an off week from hoops as the whole school was taken over for parent-teacher's night.

Finally on Friday, our entry in the Buda Grandmasters club league, Minimum Time Aloft, had our first win (asterisked, as we were short on roster players and had to pull in a few ringers). As a "club" team, we don't get new t-shirts from Buda. I have, however, just updated my t-shirt page with the summer league threads.

It has been raining hard as we make the drive to Truro, almost all the way to the tip of Cape Cod. It is a relief to get out of the car, and we are looking forward to a week of good weather.

The morning cup of joe. An experiment in posting from my phone.
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And the experiment was less than successful. The resulting post could not be commented on, and the attached cell phone photo was not incorporated into the posting. Ah, technology.

Karen and I stopped by Starbucks this afternoon. I have been working from home a few days here with a bad cold (probably not the swine flu). We got our beverages and went outside to sit. A woman with two dogs settled at the next table, for no apparent reason, the dogs came over and settled in around my chair.

Karen thought this was sufficiently cute to warrant a photo. This photo is taken with my newish cell phone, a Sony Ericsson W760a. It has more pixels than my first digital camera. The real advantage is that being an upgraded model over the old W600, all my chargers and headsets don't have to be repurchased.

There hasn't been much activity here on the Piebee blog the past couple of months. There hasn't been any particular reason for this slow spell. An apple pie went unremarked upon a few weeks ago. The BUDA Good Cause tournament got me out for a day's worth of Ultimate, with the added bonus of running into a former Newon neighbor we have known since he was small. And, of course, Josie continues to amaze one and all. These are topics for posts, but I just haven't been blog-ready.

I've been finding it harder to snap a picture of young Josephine. She is fed up with me and others sneaking up on her with a shiny, interesting looking cameras, making a fuss, and then we don't let her examine the dang gadget. Why shouldn't she get to learn all about how a digital camera works? Or tastes? What's up with that?

So when the camera comes out, you can tell she is thinking, "How do I get my hands on that camera?". It takes Josie away from whatever it was she doing, you don't get the shot you had hoped for.

One thing that deserves a video clip is: how Josie approaches a chair to sit down. She has a couple of right size for her chairs. There is a small slice of lifetime when one learns how to sit down in a chair, and she has pretty much mastered it now. Once you learn, you don't even think about it; you just eyeball the seat, turn around, and you know where your butt is supposed to go. But when you are learning that spatial awareness, it takes some practice to build your confidence. Josie peeks over her shoulder as she backs up to the seat, her side to side positioning not always spot on. Besides, she doesn't do much sitting still anyway.

It has been noted previously that T-shirts remain in my wardrobe well beyond any fashionable duration. Besides BUDA T's, there are some former-company shirts. Besides being one of my few long sleeved T's, the shirt worn today, late of Intrusic, always gets a lot of reads as I go about my day at work. Such attention feels odd to me, as it is rare. Tonight my attire also got a thumbs up from the fellow behind the deli counter at the supermarket. As spring has not arrived yet, I had to shed my winter coat to allow his reading the tag line on the back.

Not knowing it.

This morning, as I rattled around this site's Movable Type blog management software, I saw that the software had not been upgraded since the blog came online. I dashed off a note to Movable Type support asking how to go about an upgrade. The reply came saying "click here to upgrade". What could possibly go wrong?

Let's push the button and see ...

This morning has been spent doing sysadmin work here on piebee.com and for emerickarts.com I notice that the piebee.com home page is configured to show the posts for the latest fifteen days. Well, it has been more than two weeks since my only post of 2009, so it has all aged off. Nothing to see here - until now, although that too is disputable.

powweb.com, the host of Emerickarts.com has not been providing timely email service for Karen. The account is up for renewal, and so it is time to jump ship and consolidate. Emerickarts will be redone after the move. The website of 15domains, the emerickarts domain registrar, is not up today, so the domain name will be transferred too. This process involves getting a bunch of details right. Nothing insurmountable, but it is a bunch of clicking and drilling through the web pages on both the transfer-from side and the transfer-to side.

That's the nice thing about computers, they save you so much time.

As noted in the colophon, Pie Bee is powered by Movable Type 3.17 I have not fashioned myself as a power user, but a feature to future-post caught my eye. This is being written on Wednesday evening. I will set it to auto-magically post tomorrow around 6 PM.

Needing a question answered to set this up, I went to the help desk of this site's ISP: 2mhost. The ticket got submitted and soon answered, with the reply being signed Lamia. Hmm, that doesn't sound like a good ol' American name, maybe support is out-sourced? Being curious, a google on [ lamia ] came back with this nugget from Encyclopedia Mythica:

The ancient Greeks believed that the Lamia was a vampire who stole little children to drink their blood.

'K Just how far has out-sourcing gone?

Our new house sits at the crest of a hill. This fact serves to explain why, when I return from a run, I no longer finish strongly. Indeed, the last quarter mile is often walked, sometimes with gasping, bent over, hands on thighs, breaks.

This posture does give me a chance to inspect all sorts of interesting features found along the sidewalk. Recently noticed is a small U.S. Coast Guard and Geodetic Survey marker right across the street from home. Geodetics is a branch of Earth sciences that deals with the measurement and representation of the Earth, including its gravitational field. The placement of this marker almost certainly denotes a gravitational anomaly. We sit at an elevation of 312.39 feet and the gravity here is freakishly intense. This surely is a better explanation for my lethargy, than some half baked I'm getting older speculation.

Pie note: my recent birthday was celebrated with a cherry pie from Wholefoods. Thumbs up!

The typical software development office falls on the low end of the sports awareness scale. This year, especially with the Patriots back in the Superbowl, we did see a Superbowl grid go around. And for March Madness, we took advantage of Yahoo to run a NCAA men's basketball bracket. And guess what. Yours truly picked the Final Four bracket, spot on, for the win. It took a nail biter, 2 seconds left, 3 pointer to tie the game for Kansas to force OT. The Jayhawks prevailed in overtime. Whoo hoo!

Mentioned here back in December 2006 was the acquisition of a Canon G7 camera. One of the knocks on this model was lack of RAW capability. I felt conflicted about this omission. You hate to have a brand spankin' new camera with a known limitation, but I also was looking for something that wouldn't be a huge time sink. Taking RAW photos creates the obligation for digital post-processing, maybe not for every photo, but at least for the best ones.

Now there is CHDK, an open source hack that brings RAW capability to the G7. The G7 is built on a DIGIC III processor, and some folks have figured out how to get additional software onto and running in the camera. CHDK boots off your SD memory card, so it is not a permanent firmware change. That gives a little peace of mind.

Last night, I downloaded the software and booted it up. New ALT menus are available, cool. No samples yet. I'll have to track down some software with RAW capability. Oh, and find some free time.

When it first came to my notice, I was not thrilled by the New Yorker Carton Caption Contest. There is such no ambivalence about the Boston Globe Cartoon Caption Contest. It's bad (in the classic sense).

The entry's title is, of course, ironic. I came back from Spain with "only" 140 or so pictures, a total of about 1/3 GB, but the old laptop where I manage all of that is touch-and-go with free space. With a long weekend, I picked up the long neglected project of getting XP installed on the workstation I purchased after Intrusic cratered last January.

After putting in more time than it really should have, I now have sufficient functionality on the new PC to load the pics and start to sort through things.

That does mean that other things are late. This note is being written on the 27th, but the pie was made on the 22nd, and that's where I will set the posting date.

This recipe is one of sixteen apple pie recipes from my company's internal web site. It is a traditional apple pie with a twist: a tablespoon of hot green peppers. The recipe originates from Señor Pie, an Albuquerque company. The recipe was featured on Weekend Edition on Saturday, January 8, 2005. Less amusing, it appears the company's owner has gotten himself in serious criminal legal trouble (non-pie-related).

The verdict on this pie was mixed. Jen says "no". I find the gimmick to be a nice break from the onslaught of holiday treats. It goes well with a melted slab of cheddar cheese.

There should be more postings over the upcoming long weekend on my trip and the holidays.

Beyond the obvious, non-bloggish rate of new postings here, I have also mis-posted a few follow ups to a topic from back in May. Instead of making new postings, the comments went in as comments to the original post. No one will see them there .. oh wait, will anyone see them here either?

To conclude the story, today after a quarter century, I again heard Christina's cover of "Is that all there is?" Perhaps it was not worth the wait, but it is good fun. Christina does a perky, Kurt Weill-ish version; much more up tempo than P. J. Harvey's cover which I had been using to void the fill while waiting for the real thing. It makes a good soundtrack for bopping around town, as I was out walking about with the Walkman on.

Growing up, my mom almost always packed my school lunch for me. Along beside the sandwich would be a Tasty Kake. (Jeez, I wonder what my old lunch boxes might bring on ebay if they were still around?) Tasty Baking is a Philadelphia concern started in 1914. Just recently I noticed Tasty Kakes, in particular my favorite Butterscotch Krimpets, on the shelf at a local store here in Massachusetts. Nothing is ever quite as good as you remember from childhood, but these are still pretty, say it with me, tasty!

You typically will only find me at Building 19 if someone has dragged me there. To pick out a bargain, you must be enough of a shopper to know what you are buying and what the going price is. That is not me.

Well, the Mrs did drag us, and maybe this marks me as some kind of snob, but these stores are so depressing. Would anyone shop at such stores if they had a choice? Well, maybe. Some folks just love a bargain.

Starbucks has done quite well for themselves using carefully chosen and programmed music at their shops to set a mood. (Today, Marvin Gaye.) In what only could have been a similar deliberate, conscious choice, Building 19½'s intercom was playing The Doors' "The End". We didn't stick around.

Jeff offered us a chance at a pair of Red Sox tickets, and we went for it. Boston sent Daisuke Matsuzaka to the mound and we are in section 28, a pie wedge of seats up under the eaves above the left field box seats. Boston's winning streak came to an end as they fell to the Cleveland Indians 8 to 4.

We had a good time, getting in to the park with time to spare. We dined on a dog and a sausage and settled in to watch the game. The game had perhaps one moment of drama when Big Papi came up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh inning. He cranked one hard that fell to the foul side of Pesky's pole. Ortiz then ended the inning, lining to third.

It was a late night, but all the logistics went smoothly. It felt odd to be driving home out Route 2 instead of Beacon Street. It's always a longer, more quiet drive when the Sox don't prevail.

Sometime, maybe in 1980, back when the Rock of Boston still played more rock than shock jock, I caught a cover of a song first make famous by Peggy Lee 20 years earlier. The song was Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller's "Is That All There Is?". The artist was Christina (Monet) taking a No Wave turn on a song that already started with a bleak existential point of view. It caught my attention on that first playing and then a few days later the idea of the song was fixed in my memory when I read that Leiber and Stoller had objected to Christina's brutal reworking of their lyrics. The lawyers came out and forced the Ze Records recording to be withdrawn from sale.

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

The memory of that single hearing rattled around my head and surfaced a few months ago when I was doing some surfing on ebay. Hmm, maybe someone has a import recording listed? Christina was one of those one-name artists, and it is next to impossible to find anything musical in the midst of the Christina Aguilera results. But somehow I got clued in to some reissued recordings available simply on amazon.

Well, it was supposed to be simple. An order put in in January has been postponed three times and is now slated for July (ha! we'll see). I guess I can wait a little bit longer. Or is this an irony waiting to happen?

Stumbled across this on Ron Slattery's bighappyfunhouse whilst surfing off a photojojo clue on found photographs. Free pie! always catches my eye.

Every day above ground
Is a good day

Yesterday was the one month anniversary of my latest employment. Two days prior, a marker for "now you are really part of the company" arrived at my desk: new business cards.

Business cards here are not a small production. The front of these cards do not immediately appear unusual. Gray sans-serif font for my name, phone numbers, and company name and address. The company logo and my company email address appear, each in a new color.

The cards themselves are on very heavy stock. Office legend tells us that this paper is handmade. A stack of ten cards is about 3/8th inch. These would crush the competition in a restaurant "drop in your business card for a free meal" fishbowl.

Flip a card over and you see one from a set of seven carefully selected colors. A reexamination of the card front reveals that the logo and email colors also vary from card to card.

There are times when the stars are aligned, and something tickles your funny bone so righteously you remember for the rest of your life. Mad Magazine is still going strong, but the issues that were published when you were ten to thirteen years old will always be the best ones, the classics.

Many years ago my library included a number of books by Mad's Maddest Artist, Don Martin. These have not survived; I never dreamed of the wonders of ebay. But ebay needs buyers and sellers, and so a few months ago I look, and find, and buy a copy (Kenneth McCulloh's copy) of Don Martin Bounces Back. Among these gems, my all time favorite: National Gorilla-Suit Day.

My words cannot do it justice. Go google it if you like. When you do, you will discover others sharing my delight. In fact, January 31st has been designated National Gorilla-Suit Day. I bring this to your attention a week+ early so you can prepare. Be sure to celebrate with appropriate restraint.

Happy National Gorilla-Suit Day to you all !!!

Recently, one of the online financial services I use, informed me that it was improving their site's security. Anyone with a lick of exposure to computer security issues knows that that means less convenience. In this case, they suggested they would occasionally incorporate an additional question in to the login process.

These would not just be any random question ("What is the capital of Wyoming?"), but supposedly a question easy for the account holder to answer, but hard for almost anyone else to answer. Rather than rely on the ingenuity of the account holder to come up with a suitable query, three sets of potential questions were offered. You would choose one question from each set.

This is all rather sensible, but a few of the questions struck me as, while being easy to answer in the usual sense, are hard for me to answer metaphysically.

Name of childhood best friend? My childhood was not one of frequent moves; just a single move between kindergarten and first grade. But maybe your best friend moves away. I cannot name just one childhood best friend unless you narrow it down to some year. Maybe some people will have an obvious choice. I didn't include this question in my choices.

If you needed a new first name, what would it be? This one was easier. I give my fantasy first name when I leave my lunch order, knowing when they shout "Mike" there are bound to be three or four of us lunging for the fresh sandwich. This was such a good idea, I bragged about it to Maurice (aka Jeff) and the secret is out. I could fall back on my brother-in-law's dodge: "Bond, James Bond". They just look at you askance when you say "Skeezicks".

If you could control your height, what would it be? I am perhaps a smidgen above average height and don't feel any urge to wish it any different. It asks "if you could control your height ..."; I assume that is not asking if you are wishing for a superpower. Although that would be cool! As long as we are wishing for superpowers, would you want the power of flight, or the power of invisibility?

And what about the companion question, "If you could control your weight ...". That would not generate good will for the new security scheme.

These last two questions touch on the question, what if you could change yourself? Maybe the person behind these questions is undergoing some self examination and is projecting these feelings outward. Maybe the bank is conducting some weird market research. What do you think?

The big item on my holiday gift list is a new digital camera. Karen has indulged me with a Canon Powershot G7, shown below with a snapshot shot from the cellphone. I rationalized getting my paws on this early, so I can learn some features and begin take pics starting with Jen's birthday.

Some preliminary shots taken around the neighborhood look nice. Watch this space in a few days to see some results.

In a bit of old news, the old BUDA Hat League t-shirts page has been augmented to include the regalia of the year past. These were shot with the old Olympus C2000Z.

Piebee's ISP 2MHost recently assigned us to a new server. Well, it was more than a month ago, so maybe that is not recent. I am catching up on the change and trying to resolve a couple of glitches with Movable Type. One of which is the main page lacks an entry. Maybe this entry will fix that?

Yup, that seems to do the trick!

Further note, I have enabled the posting of comments through the Typekey system. Typekey'd comments shouldn't need my approval.

Our old Volvo is in the shop for some minor repairs, and thanks to the generosity of one of my basketball buddies, my loaner is a new 2007 328i BMW. This is a nice car.

It is a short drive to work and there not many cars there in the lot (and in the corner where I park in there always are four or five BMWs), so the worry about dinging up this car is minimized. The car is snug in the garage now, so I guess it has survived Friday the 13th.

Ken took the snapshot of the car and me in front of the office yesterday. But I am to blame for the subsequent PhotoShopping.

Karen's eyes (with new contact lenses or oft-misplaced glasses) could hardly miss this new, huge black and yellow resident in our back yard. The web (pun intended?) informs that this garden spider is harmless to humans, but deadly to a number of common pests such as flies, mosquitoes, and aphids.

So should piebee.com be renamed "piespider"?

I was off at my nice, quiet office while the tree service gave the trees in our backyard a buzz cut. No human victims were fed into the woodchipper, so far as I know.

Last weekend saw some bit of spring cleaning. It was "household hazardous waste" day in town, and I loaded up the collection of oil paints (household and artistic), solvents, and other nasties we had collected over 22 years at the old house. A short wait in line at the town dump and it was taken care of.

Home then, to donate my old touring ten-speed. An outfit that takes bike donations was coincidently in town at a small Earth Day fair. I pumped the tires and rode down the hill, and Bikes Not Bombs was happy to take away my 35 year old Peugeot. I walk home and repeat the process with my folding Hon. Neither has been on the road for years, superceded by the newer, shinier mountain bike.

You may have noticed the lack of mention of any homemade pie since the move. The reason is part lack of time, and part lack of zeal to uncover the whereabouts of the pie making paraphenalia. For instance, this past Saturday was spent in the office working a customer (they are always right!) issue.

One bit of texture to an otherwise bland day was the sentry waiting me at the building entry. We had seen a pair of wild turkeys in the parking lot earlier in the week, and on Saturday the female was lurking by the revolving door, no doubt looking to take a few spins 'round.

This is not to say there has been no homemade pie at 2300. Fred came for dinner a few weeks ago and brought along a scrumptious blueberry pie he had made. He left us the leftovers, we really ought to get the pie plate back to him.

And I am exercising my pie hole right now with the leftovers of a carmel-apple pie Jen got at Costco. Scoff if you will, but as Jen says, "they do have good desserts there!"

In spite of low grade misgivings about the state of the art of available technology (and in spite of high grade alarms from known 'em first hand security experts), more of my finances are done online. Some things you just make your guess and plunge in to the brave new world. Paper is the trailing edge: still there, still important, not going away anytime soon, but no growth, no sizzle.

Yet, paper checks have been on my mind the past week. Having moved and the check book running thin, it is time to put in for a reorder. For some reason, I have been paralyzed, unable to choose a check design. In most instances, I think I am pretty good at making decisions, especially one as inconsequential as picking what design goes on a piece of paper I send to a stranger, never to see again, except possibly as a reduced smudge at the back my monthly bank statement.

I guess the idea of designer checks is to share a little piece of yourself with the world at large. It says a bit about you. And in general, I don't say much about myself, as readers of this blog well know. This message perhaps could best be made with the most plain generic non-design check. But that doesn't suit me well enough, so I dally.

Lots of designs are easy to rule out, lots of cutesy and sappy teddy bears and unicorns and sunsets. Although ... I do enjoy a touch of sarcasm now and then. No. There are many nostalgia designs: Rocky and Bullwinkle missed being my choice by just a hair. A Jimi Hendrix design was cool, except it was one of seven "Rock Stars" choices and the other six choices offered made the whole category seem weird and sad.

The last order had featured the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Artwork checks were certainly in the running, there wasn't a wide selection, but some Claude Monet would have been pleasant. But a smidgen of spite holds me back: wouldn't that be a choice for the Mrs and maybe it is my turn?

There was appeal from some of the traditional designs: something that looked like old-timey currency or stock certificates. That gives you a certain gravitas when you go to pay the account maintenance fee on your Smith Barney IRA. "We make money the old fashioned way ... people just write us checks." And I did find a "hexadecimal" design pitched to those of us in the computer-work related fields. That would have been okay.

My ennui is probably just another instance of the too much choice problem. This has received press in recent years. Chrisopher Caldwell wrote an excellent review piece in The New Yorker Can You Have too Many Choices? In short, yes.

In the end, I ordered Large Print checks from my bank. Is this bad of me to order Large Print checks without really needing them? It's not like there is a limited supply of Large Print checks, and when I order some, someone else has to go without. Maybe the economies of scale make my added demand into a positive for both those who truly need Large Print and for the bank too?

There is the expectation and hope that, with a new house, you come in and do your fix-ups and begin to make it your own. The to-do list is fresh, with none of those "jeez that one has been on the list for a long time" items. You want to knock the items of that list. What you don't need is for the list to grow out from under you. You see where I'm going? Yes, a couple of new items for the list: fix the doorbell, and fix the toilet.

The doorbell needed replacing after a stuck front doorbell button melted the old unit. A trip to Home Depot and a secondary trip to Santoro's Hardware for some wall anchors, and we are back answering the bell.

The toilet is probably original to the house, circa 1956. It is an old Eljer that has an elegant design. Of course, elegance in toilets means "hard to find parts". But a little Googling finds a sound recommendation for the excellent Locke Plumbing of Knoxville, Tennessee. They have just the part I need. Sweet.

Last night was the last "trash night" for the old homestead. History and prior sweeps had accumulated stacks of cardboard, some scrap lumber, old oil and latex paint, and a couple of big, abandoned mirrors in to the garage. I had never seen a car in the garage, and after a couple hours of bundling and smashing, bagging, and schlepping, the garage was as clean as can be. See now, the Volvo actually fits! Someone did tell me so.

And as a bonus, the photo shows that one of the two(?) bulbs in the left taillight is out. That explains the dashboard idiot light. This just in time for inspection next month.

Here it is, a week after the prior post. As with any death march project, we are done. Well, done in the sense that everything is now moved from the old house to the new. The reduction in square footage is very evident: there just isn't enough places to put all of our stuff. The basement recalls the closing scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark", although I apparently have conflated that somehow with the end of "Citizen Kane". Wishful thinking?

But I did get out for a first-time-at-new-house short jog today. I would have run unsuspecting past this house about twenty five years ago when I did my short stint at DMS. That was a five-plus mile loop with this healthy hill included. I could crank out seven minute miles in those days, so it wasn't too much of a long lunch. Today, the hill feels steeper than I recall.

As we march closer to our house move, it is hard to dodge the tendency to say or think "This will be the last time ...". That started perhaps a month ago as I laced up the sneakers and hit the streets for a jog around one of my standard routes. Indeed, given how busy we all have been, I have not had a chance to hit the pavement since then. Baring a post-move visit, it was the last time.

I don't have anything all that compelling to post, but it is getting further into two thousand and six and I feel the pressure. I was going to rant about my epiphany regards "Acknowledgements". Reading the Acknowledgements in some book a few weeks ago (I forget which book), the author allowed how no one would read these Acknowledgements except for her family and associates who expected inclusion. So it strikes me, I'm not expected to read this dang thing, so I'll stop! What a relief!

We got a nice batch of trick o' treaters again this Halloween. A few were polite enough (or geeky) to compliment our Jack O' Lantern.

Jen's suggestions of handing out light sticks and flashy lights went over well. Although, there were a few panicked costumed faces fearing we might fail to offer some candy swag as well.

When we got our first "real" PC (a 60 MHz Pentium from Gateway), the Atari ST1040 we had was retired to the basement. There it has sat ever since. With an eye towards doing some house cleaning, it becomes time to put this up on EBay.

Our homepages on The World have been retired. Karen's Emerick Arts has been rehosted.

This month would have seen the twelveth anniversary of our account at Software Tool & Die's ISP, since 1989, the first public dialup Internet Service Provider on the planet. But we have not been on dialup for a few years, and the account was nearly unused.

The title, "Instructions of the Opera", of my homepage was a bit of whimsy. A defaced sign on the subway originally read, "In the event of an emergency, please follow the instructions of the operator". More than a few of my rides on the T need only a score and a few songs in Italian to morph into a tragi-comic opera.

The New Yorker last page has been running a cartoon caption contest since sometime early May, late April (I can not put my hands on the exact issue, is it so important that I actually get out of my chair?).

I will say that I miss the range and variety of the more free form last pages that preceeded this contest. I haven't gotten any satisfaction at trying to supply my own caption. And I haven't found the choice of three submitted captions as the cartoon advances a week preferrable to the one inevitable caption found with all the other drawings in the magazine.

Why Pie Bee? Because all the good names are taken, the obvious vanity name long ago snapped up by Houghton Mifflin. Various elaborations all seemed to be claimed. So, something random but simple and easy to communicate seemed the next best thing.

"Pie" is pie. I like pie.

"Bee" refers to Frisbee. I started with a red Pluto Platter back in the 50's and still participate in Ultimate Frisbee.

Simple enough?