Recently in home Category

A few months ago, Mary and I decided to throw out the booze in our liquor cabinet. She doesn't drink, and I barely do, and we needed the space for dishes. So out it all went, except for one weird little half-liter bottle that I'd brought back from a trip to China in 1994. It didn't feel right to toss it, so I opened it, had a sip, and put it in the freezer, and since then I've been occasionally drinking a shot of it after dinner, mixing it with juice from a lime.

Now, the smart thing to do would have been to keep doing this until the bottle was empty, then throw it out. But no. I just had to look it up on the web. Turns out Moutai is hard to get here in the United States. Moreover, a 15-year-old bottle is going for $450. Mine is 16 years old, and until recently was unopened and in perfect condition.

Whoops.

I've been experimenting with pizza from scratch for about a year. I have not yet achieved the perfect homemade plain cheese pizza (my sauce is all wrong), but I have finally gotten the crust right. I let the dough ball sit out for a couple hours to rise, then I stretch it out into a round shape. I don't use a rolling pin or press it, because that squishes the bubbles from the yeast that make the crust light and airy. Then I slide it onto a sheet of parchment paper (that's the key to my method) and cook it on the lowest rack in the oven at 400 degrees for about 11 minutes. This cooks the dough all the way through and nicely browns the bottom of the crust.

Other experiments I've tried along the way:

• A preheated iron pan that you then stick in the oven. This did cook the dough, but the crust had no crispiness.
• Quickly browning the round in a pan, then sliding it right onto the rack in the oven. This might have worked, but I was never able to transfer it without ruining it.
• Cooking the crust almost all the way through in a pan, then putting on the toppings and broiling briefly in the oven. This was pretty good, but it was a lot of work (stretching the dough, then stopping to cook, then returning to ingredients, then cooking again), and it was very hard to get it consistently crispy; I often burned the bottom of the crust.
• A pizza screen. This was close, but the screen seemed to deflect or absorb too much heat, and I could never get the crispiness I wanted. Cleaning the screen was a nightmare.
• A cookie sheet. Easy but awful crust.

I never tried a pizza stone. From product reviews on Amazon, they never seemed to last more than a couple dozen uses, and they're expensive to buy and to ship. Also, success with a pizza stone seems to be entirely dependent on how close you can get your oven to 1000 degrees, and my 1950s electric oven is nowhere near competent for that task.

Next mission: a good, easy-to-make sauce. I'm currently using plain old spaghetti sauce, which costs less than store-bought pizza sauce and tastes just as good, but it doesn't have the bright taste of tomato and basil that I love on a good pizza.

Every once in a while I'll forget that I did something, and I'll do it again, or I'll at least start doing it before I remember that I already did it. When this happens, I sometimes surprise myself by re-doing it exactly the same way I did before.

Example: I wanted to open a savings account for my one-month-old daughter, who got her Social Security number a few days ago. So today I do the following:

1. Open Notepad (actually Notepad2, which is a great Notepad replacement).
2. Type her name: first name, middle initial, last name.
3. New line.
4. Type her SSN.
5. Print.
6. Get the paper from the printer, get in the car, etc.

When I got to step 4, however, I asked myself "Wait, didn't I already print this out two days ago?" So I walk to the printer and sure enough, find a sheet of paper with first name, middle initial, last name, new line, SSN. And I remember that I was about to go get the sheet of paper two days ago when the phone rang and I got distracted.

On one hand, of course, I worry that this forgetfulness is the beginning of early-onset dementia. But on the other hand, as a software engineer I take delight in the reproducibility of my own behavior. It's very geekily comforting to know that if I'm placed in the same situation twice, I'll probably behave the same way twice, right down to the middle initial.

This is a followup to my previous post about my crown.

During the second visit, my dentist pulled off the temporary crown and then glued on the permanent one. We discovered that one small part of the porcelain touched the opposite tooth, making my bite uncomfortable. By the time that part was ground away, the metal beneath the porcelain was showing. My dentist offered to redo it, but I declined. The blemished crown looks like a tooth with a small filling in it, which in fact makes it less noticeable because the tooth next to it also has a (real) filling in it.

To me, the crown looks like somebody else's tooth hanging out in my mouth, but otherwise it has fulfilled its two responsibilities of chewing food and not hurting. Money well spent.

Lazyweb, I call upon your collective experience and wisdom. This weekend I edited family vacation video into a real movie. The hardest part by far was picking the background music. The test I used was simple.

If a mom is shown a picture of her children while listening to the song, will she burst into tears of happiness in less than ten seconds?

I found one candidate: You're My Best Friend by Queen. This got Mary going in about four seconds.

Another contender: Cast Your Fate To The Wind, Vince Guaraldi Trio. Evocative of childhood Charlie Brown TV specials because it's the only non-Charlie Brown hit song from the band that did all the Charlie Brown music. This one set the stage for Mary's breakdown but didn't actually cause it.

But after that, I was left with filler. I went with The Brazilianaire by Cujo, and then Follow Your Bliss by the B-52s.

Now, to be honest, I have other criteria that make the selection harder.

• No Celine Dion or anything in a collection including a Celine Dion album. (Yes, this means if there's a Celine Dion album in your music collection, you and your entire family are disqualified from expressing an opinion. I'm sorry about this. Trust me, it's for the good of the country.)
• No songs by any band having an American city or state as a name (Boston, Chicago, Kansas, etc.).
• Remember, these are family movies. Thus, no love songs that include a description of what's going to happen when the singer finally gets some private time with the subject of the song.

Not every song needs to be a trigger, of course. But I'd like to have more than one in my arsenal. Suggestions?

I was getting sick of taking care of delicate nonstick pans, so when I saw this iron pan, I figured I'd give it a try. It's a little bit of work to keep it both seasoned and clean, but it's worth it, because it heats so evenly and handles tricky foods like over-easy eggs so well. Plus, it cost only about $10 and looks like it'll last forever.

This thing is for frothing coffee. I also use it for mixing hot chocolate, as well as the orange powder that comes with boxed macaroni and cheese. It's a little too small for scrambling an egg or mixing up a fruit smoothie, but its size does make it very easy to clean. It takes two AA batteries and cost about $2.

Update: improved language to make it clear that I don't mix chocolate & cheese together.

My son turns four in December. My wife thought it'd be fun to have a robot theme for his party because Thomas is into robots these days. I hatched up a plan to turn one room in the house into a spaceship. This wasn't going to be anything near Disneyland-level entertainment; I just thought it would be cool if the entrance into the room looked like part of a spaceport, using some black sheets, a black light, fluorescent paint, sound effects (a low-frequency humming and beep-boop computer sounds), and maybe a logbook that the kids signed before they boarded the ship.

I spent about an hour searching for the perfect sound effects on Amazon -- you know, the occasional burst of random square-wave notes -- and kept getting frustrated when the sounds that claimed to be "computer sound effects" were mostly keyboard clacking and mouse clicks, with a few caricatures of Windows alert messages.

Then it hit me: These are proper computer sound effects; moreover, nobody born after 1980 could possibly understand the kitschy theme I was going for. When I see an old movie showing a refrigerator-sized appliance with spinning tape discs, I have fond memories of the 1970s characterization of computers. But to my kids, there isn't any characterization of computers, whether in cinema or in real life. There are just computers; they're an ordinary part of ordinary life, and there's no need to glamorize or fictionalize them.

I'm now starting to appreciate the allure of dinosaurs and pirates. Giant monsters and guys with swords will always be popular, and they're not subject to Moore's Law.

If you have a lot of CDs and have set up a good home system to listen to them online (i.e., on a hard drive rather than having to pop each physical CD into the player to listen to it), I'd appreciate some advice. If your goal were to put the physical CDs in the attic forever, no matter what fancy encoding technology appeared in the future, which format would you choose? Would single-file-per-album FLAC plus embedded cuesheets be sufficient? Or is there reason to drop to an even lower level, such as ISO or BIN?

I don't care about file size; if it takes 747MB per CD, so be it. I do care about the archive format being usable; hence the attraction of FLAC, which my Squeezebox can play, versus ISO/BIN, which are cumbersome as an audio source. I don't care about hybrid data/audio CDs. I definitely do care about gapless playback.

I made a mistake back in 2005 and ripped my collection to a lossy format. My penance is re-ripping the whole batch. Please help me do it right this time.

Lately, when my family buys anything with a user manual, part of my unboxing ritual involves going to the manufacturer's website, downloading the user manual as a PDF, and putting it somewhere safe. Then I throw away (er, I mean, recycle) the paper version. Less physical clutter, and searchable product documentation -- no matter how the manufacturer reorganizes its website in the coming years.

The essential part of the Cheap Eats article is add a little bit of water to the eggs. It's amazing what a difference this tip makes!

There was supposed to be a light inside the refrigerator that came with our house, just like every other refrigerator in the world. But instead there were just a bunch of dangling wires. Fast-forward several years to last week, when I finally got around to putting in a switch and a light. Lemme tell you, having a light in the refrigerator really freaks me out. I can't get over thinking that there's a hole in the back with sunlight shining through every time I open it. And yes, I do peek through the crack as I'm closing it to make sure the light really does turn off.

Thomas drew this picture of Mary the other day. He explained it to me: she has legs, eyes, a mouth, arms, and eyebrows. You have to squint a bit to see the resemblance, but I think overall it's pretty good. Incidentally, Mary generally looks like this when Thomas spills yogurt on the couch.

My two-year-old son is able to understand these instructions, and he promises to follow them next time he gets separated from us:

1. Look around.
2. Find a mom.
3. Tell the mom, "I'm lost."

Step 1 usually solves the problem quickly; chances are Mary or I are nearby but out of Thomas's immediate field of vision. Step 2 is the brilliant part: every kid knows what a mom looks like, and a mom is very unlikely to exploit a lost kid. Step 3 is actually superfluous. Most moms will intuitively figure out that this strange kid who's suddenly latched on to her is lost. But it provides the social lubrication for the kid to approach the mom and break the ice.

An earthquake of magnitude 5.6 shook us yesterday evening. Actions taken by my family:

Mike: looks up from studying. Yells "Earthquake!" into family room. Returns to studying.
Mary: runs outside.
Thomas: no visible reaction.
Emily: exclaims "We should get under a table!" and starts pulling Thomas with her.

I'd say Emily wins this round.

Mary and I are keeping a list of funny or whimsical things the kids say while they're still tots. I'm not going to publish the list yet because most of them are "you had to be there... for two years straight"-kinds of things, and I want to test the staying power of their humor before sharing them with the world. But one's worth writing about now, because it's just plain weird.

About a year ago Emily began insisting that we "gotfor" various things. "Dad, you gotfor your keys!" "You gotfor me! Wait for me!" We applied our usual corrective method: stopping the conversation and asking "Emily, is it 'gotfor' or 'forgot'?" After about 400 repetitions of this drill she broke the habit, and since then we're accused only that we "forgot" something.

End of story? Not quite. Along comes Thomas, 17 months younger, and about two months ago he independently invents "gotfor," which he's been diligently using ever since. A quick search shows we're hardly alone. There's a small contingent of the blog-o-web that believes this is clear evidence of dyslexia, but for now I'm just going to find it amusing and leave it at that.

After a false start, both my kids have the knock-knock joke template down pat:

Speaker 1: Knock knock!
Speaker 2: Who's there?
Speaker 1: [set of words]
Speaker 2: [set of words] who?
Speaker 1: [set of words combined with other words in a way that is designed to make Speaker 2 laugh]

Emily sometimes says "What, [set of words]?!?!?" instead of "[set of words] who?", which can ruin the gag. But otherwise they get great amusement from them. Unfortunately, their appetite is as voracious as their memory is strong. If I'm driving them anywhere in the car, they demand knock-knock jokes incessantly. Not recycled ones from yesterday, but new ones. And let me tell you, it's hard to come up with new knock-knock jokes every 30 seconds.

But occasionally it's worth it. One of Emily's best friends at school is involved in the joke below. See if you can guess her name:

Dad: Knock, knock!
Emily: Who's there?
Dad: Mad!
Emily (concerned): Mad who?
Dad: Madison!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I tell you, if Emily hadn't been in her car seat she'd have laughed herself right onto the road. I think there were three factors leading to this success. First, it was a genuine, simple play on words. Second, the tension of hearing me say "mad" (usually bad news) was palpably eased by turning it into the name of her friend. Yep, funny joke.

Oh, the third thing? Ah yes, the third thing: my daughter is four years old and still thinks anything I say that is supposed to be funny actually is funny. Good times. Enjoy them while they last.

Updated 9/19/7 to fix joke template. I knew something was wrong but couldn't quite put my finger on it.

According to the web, and informally confirmed by my personal observation: an uncovered pot of water takes 50% longer to boil than a covered one. In other words, if it takes $1.00 of energy* to boil a covered pot of water, you'll pay another fifty cents for the luxury of leaving the cover off (in addition to having to wait 50 percent longer).

And this should be obvious, but if you boil twice as much water as you need, such as two cups of water for one cup of tea, then you're paying twice the going rate for boiling a cup of water for absolutely no reason at all.

*Today it costs less than that. I'm using a round dollar for the sake of simplicity.

A watershed of 21st-century childhood development: following your directions, your toddler retrieves the specific remote control you need.

It's been almost ten years since I left Los Angeles. One of my best L.A. food memories is a little restaurant called Hurry Curry. I always ordered the same thing: steamed rice with a bowl of Japanese chicken curry poured over it. You had to ask them to make it about 10x hotter than their spiciest in order to get any real kick, but once you did, boy was it delicious.

I visited Pasadena recently and thought I was hallucinating when I saw a Hurry Curry across the street from the downtown Coffee Bean. But sure enough, they'd opened a second location, and it was just as good as the first. It made me miss L.A. even more.

If you know of a place on the Peninsula that sounds like Hurry Curry, please let me know. Meanwhile, here's a recipe I made up that is a fast-food MSG-laden facsimile of my favorite curry dish:

White rice
1 chicken breast
1 cup of water
2 cubes S&B Golden Curry, hot

Steam the rice. Fry the chicken. Boil the water and toss in the curry cubes. Reduce to simmer. Slice up the chicken and put it in the curry. Let it bubble for about 15 minutes, and then pour it on the rice. Makes one serving. It's possible that you can skip the chicken-frying step, but I'm not sure how much longer you'd have to simmer. I fry the chicken so I'm sure it's cooked all the way through.

I'll be going camping soon in a sunny place, and was thinking of using this trip as an excuse to start on a long-term project of building my own grid-tie PV (photovoltaic) solar system at home. I'm asking you, person who probably arrived here via a search engine, whether this is a workable idea.

Allow me to play the part of Basil Exposition for a moment: "As you may know, gentle reader, grid-tie systems are connected to the electricity grid, which generally means that they supplement a home's electricity, rather than being the sole source of it. A typical system consists of some PV panels that convert solar energy to DC electricity, an inverter that both converts the solar DC power to AC and connects the system to the power grid, and optionally a charge controller that delivers power to deep-cycle batteries, which store excess power for use at night time."

For the camping trip, the basic strategy is to buy one of each part of the system that can be bought piecemeal, and then buy inexpensive, relatively throwaway versions of parts that are expensive in a full-blown system. I'd buy one 120-watt panel (about $600) and a cheap charge controller (about $50). I'd then use a couple deep-cycle batteries and a little inverter that I already own. On the trip I'd use this power to charge various battery-powered devices, such as a laptop computer. (We'll ignore the annoyance that I feel knowing that 12-volt DC gets converted to 120-volt AC and then back down again to around 12 volts to charge batteries, no doubt losing at least 40% power in the process.)

On my return, I'd put the panel on the roof of my house and try connecting my desktop computer to it (via a UPS so I get a warning if power's low). I use that computer for perhaps a few hours a day so it should work.

Eventually, after research, and hopefully your feedback, I'd shell out money for a real grid-tie inverter (at least a couple thousand dollars) and charge controller (also thousands of dollars), and then add a few more panels and batteries. If the efficiency worked out, then I'd scale up the system -- having already bought inverter and charge controller capacity to handle the extra power.

The alternative is just coughing up $40,000 and having someone come in and install a complete system this weekend on my roof.

Advantages of the roll-your-own approach? It's an interesting hobby project; it commits less capital up front. To the extent that PV panels come down in price as technological advances occur, I get the benefit of lower prices in the future.

Disadvantages? It might fail because I don't know what I'm doing; I get the worst possible return on the large components until I fully utilize their capacity.

What do you think? Silly idea?

Some time in the past year or so, all my family's geegaws and gadgets suddenly became mini-USB powered. Instead of my Nokia phone using one kind of wall wart, and my Sandisk MP3 player using another kind, our Motorola phones and my iRiver MP3 player are all recharged by the same kind of cable.

This is convenient because I got rid of all the proprietary power adapters, and it's now possible to carry a $2 USB-to-mini-USB cable with me and plug into just about any computer in existence for a quick device recharge.

But the downside is that computers have now become the most expensive power adapters on Earth. In the past, I've left my computer on overnight solely to charge my phone -- and as a bonus once I forgot to re-enable the hibernation feature when I was done, so I actually left it on for a couple days after that. Assuming the computer consumed 100 watts for three days, that was 7.2 kilowatt-hours at around 35 cents each, or $2.52 to charge my cell phone. Granted, that's not a fair calculation given the extra couple days of accidental on-time, but I'm sure it's quite common these days to leave a computer on overnight to charge a device, so that's at least 42 cents spent versus the few cents of power actually consumed for charging purposes.

My solution? I'm going to try something like this: yet another geegaw that will probably consume less than 5 watts, assuming 30% efficiency (still 3.6 Kwh/month or $1/month), if I leave it plugged in all the time.

Two steps forward, one step backward.

Update: It turns out those Motorola bastards use a special cable for charging their devices. I could easily make a cable with the required 165K resistor, but this defeats the purpose of having a single power source and plug for all my devices. Meh.

Second update: It pains me to admit this, but at least other devices are compatible with the screwy Motorola power adapter. So I can use that for charging all my devices.

The other day I asked my daughter, who turned 4 a few weeks ago, what 1 + 1 was. She promptly replied "Two!!!" This surprised me because I wasn't even sure she knew what "plus" meant. But she also knew what 2 + 2 was, and we made it through all the combinations up to 2 + 5 before I stopped. I'm always surprised when my kids learn new words or say things in a conversationally adult way, but this new skill shocked me. I have no idea whether she's been practicing at school, or whether at a certain age kids suddenly know how to do arithmetic. Either way, pretty cool!

Thomas: Knock, knock!
The Mark: Who's there?
Thomas: Thomas!
The Mark: Thomas who?
Thomas: Me!!!!
(Thomas runs away, laughing hysterically.)

Yesterday I bought a yellow bean bag for the kids to play on at home.

I walk in the front door and plop down this big blob on the living room floor. Emily and Thomas scream in delight and four seconds later Thomas has unzipped it and spilled out the stuffing. We press pause. Thomas and I have a talk.

"The stuffing needs to stay in the bean bag. Don't let out the stuffing, OK?"

"OK."

"The zipper is not for playing. Don't play with the zipper, OK?"

"OK Daddy."

Put the stuffing back in, vacuum up the rest. Press play again.

I leave the room for another four seconds. I return and Thomas has unzipped the bean bag and spilled out the stuffing.

No more bean bag in the living room.

Anyone have advice how to get rid of a raccoon?

Every night he knocks over my trash can. I run outside, swinging a stick and yelling at him. He takes a cool five or ten seconds to size me up and then saunters away, leaving me to experience my son's dirty diapers all over again. We put all our food scraps in the garbage disposal and worm composter, so I don't know what he's interested in getting out of our trash can.

He's about as big as my son, and probably about as smart, too. I don't really want to kill either of them, so poison and traps are out.

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Update 3/25/2007: Thanks for all the suggestions. I screwed a hook into the fence, looped a bungee cord through the can handle, and hooked the cord onto the fence hook. There is about an inch of slack in the cord, so pushing over the can just makes it spring back into place. I've heard the raccoon rambling around the trash can, but he hasn't knocked it over since.

Step 1. Admire your child's budding creativity, in spite of his vandalistic choice of medium.

Step 2. Remove Sharpie from child's hand. A common error during this step is to kill the child; make a careful effort to avoid doing so.

Step 3. Wash ink from child's hands and face. You may skip this step, but then add Step 9 at the end (wash purple handprints from floors, walls, and furniture).

Step 4. Get a dish towel and rubbing alcohol. Apply alcohol liberally to marker stains. Rub carpet. Eventually the stains will become a large faint purple blob.

Step 5. Spray stain remover on blob. Wait 10 minutes.

Step 6. Mix a bowl of laundry detergent and cold water. Scrub the stain until it's frothing white.

Step 7. Vacuum the carpet and let it dry. The carpet should look pretty good now. Understand, however, that for years afterward you will unavoidably notice this area and convince yourself that it's still slightly purple, regardless of whether it actually is.

Step 8. You didn't set the Sharpie back on the coffee table, did you?

On the way home, the anesthetic eye drops began to wear off, and I decided to shut my eyes. They began to sting a bit: not a dull ache as you might expect if someone had socked you in the face, but more of an acute pain that sunscreen might cause if it ran into your eyes. Occasionally I opened my eyes and looked around. Still good vision, with the Vaseline effect diminishing a bit.

At home, I was ready to go to bed. I put in more antibiotic eye drops, as well as some new anti-inflammatory drops, and went to sleep. I wasn't tired, but the stinging was annoying enough that I forced myself to sleep.

By the evening, the pain was mostly gone, as was most of the Vaseline effect. I assembled some Ikea furniture, thus proving that I was still a useful member of society, and went back to bed.

Next morning was 24 hours after the surgery. I was supposed to return to the doctor's office for a checkup. I felt good enough to drive myself, which I did. I noticed starbursts around reflected sunshine and a general but slight haziness in my vision. The doctor's assistant said this was completely normal, and after another round of exams sent me home to return in about a month.

Dr. Hyver promised dramatic improvement in the couple of days following the surgery, and he was right. Under ideal conditions -- daytime in natural light looking at scenes without glare -- my vision was very near perfect. But glare definitely bothered me, and I still saw starbursts around bright lights. I also saw fuzzy halos around other more subtle light sources, such as sunshine through the window at the end of an unlighted hall. Nighttime was particularly annoying; I saw enormous halos around point light sources.

Aside from vision quality, I felt diminishing discomfort in the days and weeks following the surgery. The best description I can think of is when you wake up to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight at the airport (meaning you had to get up at 3:30). You're bleary-eyed; your eyes sting and you just want to close them. That's how your eyes feel after surgery. But it's not intolerable, especially if you're liberal with eyedrops like Systane, and it tapers off pretty quickly.

Ten days after surgery you can stop wearing goggles at night (to keep yourself from rubbing your eyes while asleep), and after two months it's OK to rub your eyes if you want. Right around two months was when the daytime halos went away completely. Nighttime halos are still there, particularly around those infernal blue LEDs that have become popular in consumer electronics. Nighttime vision is also a bit uncomfortable; I feel like I'm wearing dirty contact lenses. But I can drive at night, and I can watch movies, and I can see the digital clock across the room when I wake up at night, and those are really all the functions I care about at night.

It wasn't until about four months after surgery that I stopped thinking about it each day. Until then, there was always something that reminded me of it -- usually either a temporary difference in vision between the eyes, or mild dryness that caused slight discomfort, or looking in the mirror and noticing that my eyes were a bit red.

I'm more sensitive to lack of sleep now. If I get only four or five hours in a night, my eyes are more sensitive than they would have been before the surgery. If I get a full eight hours, they feel absolutely wonderful.

What has most impressed me after six months is the accuracy of the correction. In particular, my astigmatism is gone. I can resolve letters on street signs much farther away than anyone around me, which I used to be able to do with my contacts only after blinking a few times and squinting.

If you're reading this, you may have just had surgery and are having buyer's remorse because of all the halos and dry eyes. Here's my advice:

• Buy a big bottle of Systane. Carry it with you at all times. Use it all the time. One day you'll realize you stopped using it a few days earlier, and then you'll be very happy.
• The daytime halos eventually do go away.
• It takes months to recover from this surgery. But probably 90% of the recovery is in the first couple of days. So be prepared to handle recovery, but if you have surgery on Friday and stay in bed over the weekend, you won't have to miss more than one day of work.
• Remember to wear protective eyewear from now on when appropriate! Imagine the irony if your surgery enabled you to stop wearing glasses and thus be blinded by a pebble thrown by your lawnmower!

Prepping for surgery was easy. I started taking eye drops every few hours in the couple days before surgery. I think they were antibiotics. Then on the morning of the surgery, my wife dropped me off at the doctor's office and went to have breakfast with the kids.

I put on a hair net and a gown, then went through most of the same eye exam procedures as I did during the consultation. But there was one difference: at the end I stared at a device that showed various red geometric shapes. I'm pretty sure it was a laser bouncing off my eye; it looked like a very uninspired laser light show, but with Muzak instead of Pink Floyd playing in the background.

At this point I realized the significance of something I'd been seeing while in the waiting room: every 15 minutes or so Dr. Hyver would walk into this room and take a floppy disk into the operating room. I deduced that the floppy disk contained eye-burning instructions specific to each patient. For a moment I found this unsettling. What if he set it next to someone else's disk and then picked up the wrong one? What if the write-protect got flipped by mistake and I got zapped with the last guy's profile? This wasn't like Taco Bell where an off-by-one error means you get a 7-Layer Burrito instead of a Chalupa. But after some thought, I decided it was probably no more unreliable than any other method as long as (a) there were information embedded in each file identifying the patient, and (b) the file had integrity-checking data. Moreover, having the data on a physical token like a floppy disk probably prevented certain kinds of bugs that might affect a networked system. Anyway, I had enough to worry about already, so I put it out of my mind.

Next I was on the table. Lots and lots of eye drops, lots of swabbing of iodine. Dr. Hyver told me to stare at a blinking light above me and not move my eye. Then he put a thing on my eye that looked like a big ring, and as far as I could tell stepped on the ring with his foot and jammed his entire leg into my eye socket. It didn't hurt, but it really felt like he was squashing a grape that I happened to use for seeing. He then announced in a booming voice: "I NOW HAVE CONTROL OF THE EYEBALL." My vision dimmed, then went completely blank. (I think this is actually an interesting side effect of the motion-based physiology of our vision; if your eye ever stops moving completely, your brain basically figures you're idle and turns on the screensaver.)

Dr. Hyver narrated what was about to happen in perfect detail throughout the entire procedure. He didn't specifically talk about the leg in the socket, but he did mention something about pressure. So though some of this sounds scary, actually none of it was surprising.

Next Dr. Hyver put the slicer on me. This is a little robot that makes deli-thin slices of your eyeball, leaving a flap that folds out and leaves the juicy interior of your cornea exposed. They do this because during the laser process they actually burn off some of the inside of the cornea rather than the top. Then they can fold the flap back and use it as a natural (and transparent) Band-Aid. Quicker healing and no interruption in vision. If only we could arrange all our scrapes, cuts, and burns so elegantly.

Off came the robot and the ring, and I could see again. Dr. Hyver folded back the flap and things were pretty blurry (even more so than my usual bad vision). Then he fired up the laser and told me to keep looking at the light. I heard dozens of quick arcing electrical sounds and smelled what I now know to be the smell of vaporizing eyeball. This part took about 20 seconds. Then more eye drops, flap replaced, and more eye drops. I could see, but things were still really blurry.

Next eye: same experience. Then they walked me over to a chair and let me sit for a bit. I could already see better, but it was like good vision through Vaseline -- hints of sharpness through overall murkiness.

One of the assistants called Mary on the phone to say I was done, and they gave me some very dark glasses as well as a bag of other stuff. They let me walk out by myself to the car.

Part Three next.

I had laser eye surgery about six months ago. Here's my story.

I've been very nearsighted most of my life, starting to wear glasses in 4th grade and switching to soft contact lenses in eighth grade. My last contact lens prescription in 1993 showed a bit of astigmatism, as well as severe myopia -- around 7.5 diopters. My eyes stayed pretty much unchanged since 1993, though I think they got a bit worse in the last few years as a string of busy software engineering jobs took its toll on my vision. Rather than get a new contact lens prescription, though, I just switched back to eyeglasses, which were comfortable and convenient.

But the arrival of my kids changed things. Jumping on Daddy often includes the bonus of getting to grab his glasses and fling them behind the couch. Waking up in the middle of the night to round up my wandering daughter was annoying if I didn't find my glasses on the nightstand on the first or second or third try. And as we discovered the neighborhood swimming pool, I found myself taking too many timeouts to wipe water drops off my lenses.

After researching all the jokes on The Simpsons about sudden blindness following laser surgery, I tentatively decided to do it. Then one day in the fall of 2005, my work's HR department announced that open enrollment for the coming year was starting soon, which I realized meant that if I wanted to participate in the flex spending plan (meaning I got to pay for the surgery with pretax dollars) for 2006, I essentially had to schedule surgery right away for the coming year, and to take maximum advantage of some quirks in the flex plan, I wanted the surgery to be as early as possible in 2006.

I made an appointment with Dr. Scott Hyver, who was recommended by several colleagues at work. I expected his price to be non-competitive, given that (a) he advertises a lot on the radio, and (b) he doesn't advertise his price, but I wanted someone with good cash flow in case he and I ended up in a plaintiff-defendant relationship.

The consultation was about half an hour, mostly consisting of an assistant to Dr. Hyver shining lights into my eyes and poking them here and there. At the end, Dr. Hyver came in the room and said that I was a good candidate for surgery, in particular because my corneas were pretty thick.

Dr. Hyver recommended wavefront lasik, which involves the creation of a map of your eye and a corresponding plan for correction specific to both high-order and low-order defects. There were several reasons for this recommendation: (1) it gives generally better results because it's more accurate, (2) it was the only realistic option for someone with big (high-diameter) corneas like mine, and (3) it would reduce nighttime halos by correcting as much of the corneal surface as possible. I'm sure it also helped that it was the most expensive laser surgery he offered, but oh well.

I'm naturally suspicious when someone offers an opinion but stands to benefit from having a specific opinion, so I attempted to get him to rate my suitability on a scale from 0 to 10. He answered that this is elective surgery, so there isn't any sort of tradeoff that makes even marginally suitable candidates worth pursuing -- either you're 100% suitable, or don't risk it. He did say that a better candidate wouldn't have such bad vision in the first place, but I was still well within the range of suitability. I liked his answer and made an appointment for Friday, January 6, 2006.

More to come.

We're back in California after a week in the Eastern timezone. I worked out of the Google New York office while Mary and the kids cruised around Manhattan.

Highlights:

• The weather was perfect. Just like our last visit in September, we were there right around the change of seasons, so it wasn't too hot, and it wasn't too cold.
• Meeting coworkers who I knew only from email.
• Sitting down with one coworker who I normally sit 20 feet away from in Mountain View and talking in depth about flaws in the cookie security model. He happened to be visiting NY at the same time. It was one of those Our Town moments where you look back and realize that you've had this opportunity every day but didn't recognize it.
• My continuing appreciation of the New York subway. I would love to have a 10-minute commute to work without having to drive.
• Coming in 44th out of a field of about 9,000 in a freeroll hold 'em tournament. That's the top 0.5 percent!
• Getting to play a few poker tournaments that usually conflict with work because they're scheduled on East Coast time.

Lowlights:

• I had a cold the whole time I was there and couldn't taste any food. But at the same time my illness protected me from various street odors, so not all was lost.
• How I lost that freeroll tournament. While I was in 5th place, my QQ fell to AK when he caught a K on the river. I had him covered by about 50K chips but that hand crushed my spirit and I went out soon thereafter. Sure, I was a favorite in the hand, but we were both stupid to risk everything so close to the bubble (top 27 advanced to round 2).

Major Discovery of the Trip: Our double stroller turned out to be just too damn wide to fit in the stairwell of our apartment or seemingly any store we wanted to visit. I was about to get out a hacksaw and solve the problem once and for all when I saw the Buggy Board. Buy a $15 umbrella stroller, bolt this thing on, and problem solved:

Emily loved being able to hop off whenever she wanted to get a closer look at something (and fortunately, she was responsible about her new privilege and didn't try to run off into the street), and the whole contraption was practically weightless and easily maneuverable. If you have two kids and one's old enough to climb on the couch without your getting worried about it, then I recommend a Buggy Board. Be sure to get the 3G model (we didn't), which can supposedly be reattached to different strollers.

Mary and I had three old Monterey pines removed from our backyard today. The arborist said they had about three years left to live and were infested with some sort of tree beetle. Plus we didn't like them. :) The workers are chopping up the trunks now.

This reminds me of a column I read in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1987 (I remember the context so I remember the date). Unfortunately, it predates the web and sfgate.com's online archive, so I can't find it. The article recounted the joy the author received from renting his own chainsaw and taking down just about everything in his own backyard before he had to return it. If you have a Lexis or Westlaw subscription, please help me find it! The search phrase I specifically remember is "chattering excitedly about peyote and hashish."

Update: the column is still MIA, but a friend sends an even better one.

My mom took this snapshot, and it was impromptu (honest)!

Recycle and parent in one step: Ikea assembly instructions make great coloring books.

If you're looking for a replacement Aquadoodle pen for the one your youngster ate and/or flushed down the toilet, try this instead.

Thomas rolled over today -- on his three-month birthday. Good job, squirt!

I'm growing increasingly dissatisfied with my bank, Everbank, and I'm looking for a new one.

First of all, I have had several issues with the security of their website.

At this moment, CBS and NBC have both called Washington state for Kerry. But their own data now show that Bush is ahead. Are CBS and NBC going to have to retract their declarations? Maybe they're using exit polls rather than actual precinct reports. Update: Kerry is now well ahead in the Washington state popular vote. No issue here.

Mary discovered Guerrero-brand "Fresqui-Ricas" tortillas at the local supermarket last week. They're raw; you cook them for about 30 seconds in a pan right before you eat them. If you've ever had a real, just-made tortilla, you know there's no comparison with one from a package. These taste nearly as good. Mmmmm!

Your Child's Predicted Height Results: A (female) child who is 2 feet and 5 inches at 1 years and 3 months of age has a predicted future height of: 154.8 cm, or 5 feet 0.9 inches

Amit's Thoughts: The secret to true happiness

Seligman tells of an academic colleague who kept an Amazonian lizard as a pet in his lab. It would eat nothing he could think of to feed it - not lettuce, mango, minced meat, swatted flies. It was starving before his eyes.

One day he offered it a ham sandwich. No interest. He began reading the paper, finished the first section and allowed it to drop to the floor on top of the sandwich.

"The lizard took one look at this configuration, crept stealthily across the floor, leapt onto the newspaper, shredded it, and then gobbled up the ham sandwich," Seligman writes. It needed to stalk and shred before it would eat. And we turn out to be a bit like that.

If you have an original Eichler, this might be interesting to you.

There are two kinds of thermostats: 24 volts, a.k.a. "millivolt"; and baseboard, a.k.a. line voltage. The former is the sensible kind: the heater takes a low-voltage signal from the thermostat to determine whether to turn on. The latter is silly: the signal wires operate at the full voltage and current of the heating system, so when you adjust your thermostat, you're one insulating plate away from the trillion watts coursing through the heater.

The sensible kind has seen all sorts of great innovations with the advent of microelectronics, such as this:

Look at all those buttons. I wonder what they all do. Meanwhile, the line voltage thermostat industry's efforts in the 60 years since the last world war have brought us this gem:

Guess which kind is used in Eichlers.

Anyway, if you want the new gadget-type thermostat but don't want to spend thousands to put in a new central heating system to get it, then what you want is a neat contraption that acts as a relay between the high-voltage heater and any old millivolt thermostat. The neat part (since the relay needs a nontrivial amount of power to work the magnet) is it also has a little built-in transformer, so it's pretty much self-contained. Wow!

Once in the early 1990s I fell asleep on my hand and it went numb for days. I had been having some carpal tunnel problems in the preceding weeks. I'm sure that had something to do with it. Maybe my brain had gotten used to tuning out of the pain so it ignored my hand screaming that it was being starved of oxygen.

The experience was awful. I couldn't make a fist; I couldn't write; I could hardly type. I remember having to sign a couple documents during that time. They looked like I was writing with my foot. Fortunately before I got around to seeing a doctor about it, it had cleared up.

"An historic" is incorrect. Here are the rules:

Use "an" before a word that starts with a vowel sound:

an apple
an egg
an icicle
an orange

Use "a" otherwise.

Some of these words start with a vowel sound, and some don't. See if you can tell the difference:

hour
honor
honest
hat
historic
hick
hit of bong water

It's "a historic event." It's not "an historic event."

If you really want to sound sophisticated, though, and insist on the "an," please, at least don't pronounce the "h" sound. "An 'istoric" at least is a proper application of the a/an rule to a defensibly mispronounced word, but "an historic" with the "h" pronounced both sounds weird and violates the a/an rule.

This morning I took the new Caltrain Baby Bullet train to work. It arrived at both stations right on time!

Die-hard fans of this blog have been disappointed over the last few days. The usual daily itemization of what I've been eating is gone.

Taking care of your lawn

Weight 157.5

Two string cheese
Strawberry yogurt
Coffee, Splenda, milk
Bagel, cream cheese

Tenderloin steak
Black beans
Carne asada
Salad

Weight 157.5

Two string cheese
Yogurt
Coffee, Splenda, milk

Grilled chateau briande
Seared ahi tuna
Lentils
Cauliflower
Black beans
Kung pao tofu

Tamari nut mix

Turkey snack stick
Chicken, vegetable, & wild rice soup

Weight 157.0

Two string cheese
Coffee, Splenda, milk

Tamari nut mix, soy nuts

Tofu/broccoli frittata (mmm!)
Carne asada
Small spinach salad
Kung pao tofu
Green beans & garlic

McDonald's double cheeseburger
4 Chicken McNuggets

Weight 157.0

Scrambled egg, pesto
Coffee, Splenda, milk

Tamari nut mix

Filet mignon
Seared ahi tuna
Green beans, lentils, cauliflower, carrots*, peas*

Bread stick*
Turkey snack stick
TV dinner (meat, carrots*, potatoes*)
Macaroni* & cheese

Weight 156.0

Two string cheese
Coffee, Splenda, milk
Yogurt drink*

Tamari almonds

Black beans
A mexican lasagna-like thing*
Tofu
Seared ahi tuna
Carne asada
Chicken
Lentils
Plantain mash*

Turkey hot dog, scrambled eggs, pesto, cheese
A bread stick*

* = prohibited in Phase 1 but (probably) OK in Phase 2

Weight 158.5

Scrambled eggs, ground beef, spinach, onions
Coffee, cream, Splenda

Orange juice
Cheese/onion/pepper/ham omelette

Bagel, cream cheese

Small steak TV dinner

Weight 157.0

Two scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, chicken bits, pesto, salsa
Coffee, milk, Splenda

Two turkey hot dogs, string cheese

Insides of a chicken burrito

Two turkey hot dogs, cheddar cheese, lettuce wrap

Weight 159.0

Coffee, milk, Splenda
String cheese

Grilled salmon
Ribeye steak
Black beans
Salad with grilled chicken

Tamari almonds

Blue cheese burger patty

Weight 158.0

Scrambled egg, cheddar cheese
Turkey bacon
Coffee, milk, Splenda

Tamari nut mix

Ribeye steak
Carne asada
Garbanzo beans
Steak chili
Salad

Tamari nut mix

Burger patty, lettuce leaves
Broccoli
Two strips of bacon

Weight 158.5

Three string cheese
Coffee, milk, Splenda

Two meatballs
Salad
Carne asada
Asparagus

Tamari nut mix

Turkey hot dog
Tofu
Cheddar cheese slice

Weight 158.5

Turkey bacon, cheddar cheese
Coffee, milk, Splenda

String cheese
Nut mix

Skirt steak
Chicken
Carne Asada
Salad
Black beans
Wheatgrass shot

Burger patty
Two turkey bacon/cheese rollups

Weight 159.5

Turkey bacon, cheddar cheese
Tamari nut mix
Coffee, milk, Splenda

String cheese
32 ounces water

Spinach salad, tofu, bv&oo, garbanzo beans
Black beans
Wheatgrass shot
Sausage
Thin ham slices
Fajita chicken & carne asada
Diet Dr. Pepper

Two turkey slices

Hamburger patty, lettuce leaf
Pesto tomato slice

Weight 159.5

Scrambled egg, pesto
2 slices turkey bacon
Coffee, milk, no sweetener

2 slices turkey bacon, hummus, turkey hot dog
Tomato slice, pesto

Cheeseburger, lettuce leaf
Salami slices

Almonds
Tofu, curry, chipotle, olive oil

Weight 160.5

Scrambled eggs and ham
Sourdough toast and butter
Coffee, Splenda, milk

Slice of cheese

2 turkey hot dogs, hummus

2 pesto tomato halves
Steamed asparagus with bv&oo

Grilled tofu, hummus

Weight 161.0

Scrambled egg, 2 turkey sausage, swiss cheese
Coffee, milk, Splenda

Tamari nut mix

Turkey patty
Tofu chili
Curry chicken
Lunch meat
Wheatgrass shot
Diet Dr Pepper

Kung pao chicken
Turkey hot dog with chipotle

Weight 161.0

2 scrambled eggs, 3 turkey sausage, muenster cheese (shared about 1/3 with Emily)
Coffee, milk, Splenda

Cheeseburger patty
Small chicken breast
2 tomato slices

Tamari nut mix and soy nuts

Usual salad
Turkey patty
Black beans
Tofu fajita mix
Curry chicken

Weight 161.0

Scrambled egg in olive oil, swiss cheese
Two turkey sausages
Coffee, Splenda, milk

No morning snack

Tofu patty
Turkey patty
BBQ chicken
Curry chicken
Black beans
Garlic green beans
Salad with red peppers, tofu, bv&oo
Wheatgrass shot
Diet Dr. Pepper

Soy nuts and tamari nut mix

Black beans, turkey hot dog, swiss cheese

Weight 163.0

Half can of black beans with one turkey hot dog and slice of swiss cheese and scrambled egg
Coffee with Splenda and lowfat milk
32 ounces water

Celery & string cheese
Tamari nut mix

Blue cheese burger with bacon
Curry chicken
Salad with tofu, red bell pepper, bv&oo dressing
Diet Dr. Pepper

No afternoon snack

Salad with turkey hot dog, tomatoes, and bv&oo dressing
Ham slice with blue cheese sprinkles

Eichler Brochures

Weight 163.0

Scrambled egg, swiss cheese, olive oil
Coffee with Splenda and lowfat milk
32 ounces water

Celery, string cheese

Curry chicken
Spinach salad, blue cheese, balsamic vinger & olive oil
Seared ahi tuna
Diet Dr. Pepper

Decaf coffee
Half can of black beans with one turkey hot dog and slice of swiss cheese

Eichler Address Replacement Numbers

Can you diet simply by drinking cold water?

What do you call the little gray creature (that looks like an insect but is actually a crustacean) that rolls up into a ball when you touch it?

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/staticmaps/q_74.html

Who the hell calls this a "basketball bug"?

Consider the following telephone dialogue:

(ring!)
(ring!)
Callee: "Hello?"
Caller: "Hello?"

What is wrong with this dialogue? Choose the right answer:

(a) Nothing.
(b) The caller is not supposed to say hello. That's the callee's job. The caller's job is to identify himself or herself, and state his or her reason for calling.
(c) None of the above.
(d) All of the above.

The right answer is (b).

Yesterday Emily got her third tooth, the upper-left front tooth, and she's already discovered a new trick. She clicks and grinds them together in her crib at night, making a very eerie sound that for some reason is just like bones rubbing together.

It creeps out Mary and me. Emily, however, thinks it's very amusing.

Emily and I wanted to give Mary a little bit of peace and quiet this weekend, so we left her at home and went to Google for a few hours. Here's a picture of her next to a Google Search Applicance:

Emily is trying very hard to stand on her own, and for a few seconds at a time, she succeeds! She pushes herself up, using something nearby as a prop, and then lets go. I've seen her try this over ten times in a row. She's very determined!

Here is a way for dads to contribute to the baby-raising process. You can make formula in batch!

You need a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle, an empty gallon jug, and a small measuring cup. Also, I assume that you have regular formula, which is one scoop per 2 ounces.

Why do radio news announcers sprinkle "of course" into every third sentence? Examples:

"Kerry, of course, leads New Hampshire primary polls by a comfortable margin..."

"The Lord of the Rings has of course been nominated for several Golden Globe awards..."

The dictionary definition is "as might be expected," but the colloquial use is more like "it's universally known that." Problem is, news announcers apply this to things that are not universally known. In fact, if the average listener knew both the facts in the examples above, nobody would need to listen to the news.

Mary called last night and said Emily has a tooth! It's a lower front tooth. This explains why she hasn't been sleeping so well the past few nights.

Today Martha went to the drugstore and bought pretty much every item they sold for stopping baby tooth pain. The Oragel reportedly worked like a charm.

Mary and Emily are going to Arizona this weekend.

Emily has been pulling herself up to a standing position. Unfortunately, the trip back down to Earth is a little less graceful. She bonked her head on the wall and ended up with a mark.