Saturday/Sunday
Warm and sunny. Temperatures around 70 degrees F. T-shirt weather, even at 6.30pm
Sunday Night/Monday/Tuesday
Bitterly cold, several inches of snow.
Yes folks, it's February in Colorado.
Just two little snippets.
Tomorrow's World
Tech TV are now showing the BBC's long-running science and innovation program, Tomorrow's World.
Anyway, they were showing a piece on a new design of artificial heart. They were saying how these things used to have four valves, just like a human heart, and then they designed one with just one valve which worked just as effectively.
They've now come up with a new design doesn't use a valve at all. It just pushes the blood round the body. The thing that amused me, and the reason I'm telling you about this, is that whilst the blood gets pumped around the user's body, because there's no valve, the user has no pulse!
My thought was, what happens if the user gets knocked unconcious, and is attended by paramedics, what's going to happen? They're going to check for a pulse, not find one, and start CPR on the user - who's artificial heart is already working fine. Worse yet, what if they try the ol' medical jump-start cables? The user might have a medical bracelet or necklace, stating their medical condition, but would they notice it? I suppose they might be trained to look for such things.
Bob 'Patronising Loafer' Vila
Bob is usually the host of "Home Again With Bob Vila" - a DIY show, where he puts himself across as some sort of DIY and house-building expert. The fact is, week after week, he just stands there, giving a running commentary on what he thinks needs doing, whilst actual workers do the work. I've never actually seen him do anything. A typical interaction on the show goes something like this:
Bob: So, are we going to put in a double-strength, flanged roof joist here?
Worker: No Bob, we're putting up a shelf.
As if his know-all TV hosting wasn't enough, he also does an advert for one of the US's many debt consolidation service companies. He comes on, holding two bits of picture frame, pretending like he's actually doing some DIY himself, and says the following unbelieveably patronising words:
"How many credit cards do you have? One? Two? Three? And how much interest are you paying? 10%? 15%? Do you even know?"
I mean, why doesn't he just come out and say it, "I think you're all morons."
If he's so smart, then why does he later on say, "You could save upto 50% or more." ? If it's upto, then it can't also be more and vice-versa.
The only more patronising TV presenter has to be Martha Stewart. I'm told she's even shown her viewers how to iron a shirt, and how to make a bed. Like she ever has to do those things! She probably asked her maids for advice when writing those pieces.
Yesterday, Miles decided to entertain our house guest. I'm referring to my friend's puppy Sheilagh, as mentioned earlier. She thinks he's wonderful, and I think she regards him as her big brother.
His method of entertainment involved wrestling with her - despite her recent eye surgery and her wearing a big funnel collar to stop her scratching her repaired eye. She seemed to love it, and both came in caked in mud (snow a few days ago, melted over a warm weekend of sunshine, making the ground good and wet).
And lo it was that Miles, who normally never needs bathing (he swims so much he normally keeps himself clean), had to have a bath.
He took it like a trouper (rather than a trooper), and only made three attempts to climb out. That hardest bit was getting all 90lbs of him into the bath in the first place. Much has he loves swimming, I don't think he could see anything worth retrieving (ours is a rubber ducky-free household), and so he wasn't keen on getting in.
I shampooed him with J&J Baby Shampoo (and later found the Dog shampoo "tidied away"). He stood there, resigned to it, trying to maintain a stiff upper lip - even though he's an American Golden Retriever - clearly having picked a lot up from me, and can even explain Cricket to the other dogs at the park. Well, that's what he tells me.
I tried to make light of it with him, to put him at ease. You know, the usual Monty Python barbershop sketch smalltalk.
Me: "The usual then sir?"
Miles: ...
Me: "Perhaps a little off the back?"
Miles: ...
Me: "Rangers played well last week, didn't they sir?"
Miles: ...
Me: "Do you need...err... 'a little something for the weekend' sir? If you know what I mean."
Miles: ...
All in all, he did very well. He even waited patiently whilst I got the bulk of the water off him with a towel, before showing me how it's really done (violent shaking along the z-axis).
At the end of it, after a darn good brushing, he looked as handsome as ever, plus he was silky soft. This, of course, didn't do his street cred any good, but didn't care, because he knew he looked fabulous!
This lunchtime, Sheilagh, who all along has acted like there's nothing wrong with her, was taken by me to Eye Specialists for Animals for the operation to save her eye. The operation was done hours after when it was scheduled, but this was so they didn't have to rush it.
At 7pm, I spoke to the Ophthalmologists, and it seems the operation was a success.
Rutger, following Kenneth Lay's fine example of excepting responsibility, decided to take the fifth, and was unavailable for comment.
And I thought I had problems.
Last night a friend brought his Australian Cattle Dog puppy over, to stay for a few days, whilst he's out of town. Her name is Sheilagh - well she is Australian.
Within five minutes of her owner leaving, one of my cats - Rutger (named after the actor Rutger Hauer who's well-known for playing psychopathic killers) introduced himself to her. He did this by lashing out at her, and getting a claw in her eyeball.
Sheilagh took it like a trooper, her eye watering like mad, but she carried on.
This morning, there was a lump on top of her eye. I took her to her vets this afternoon, and within seconds of looking at her, said that she'll probably lose the eye. They referred me to a specialist.
This evening I took her to the specialist, and she was assessed. It's possible they can save the eye, but not cheap.
I'm kinda beating myself up about all this. I know I couldn't have known that my cat would freak out - he's not normally that vicious, but I still feel like I've let my friend down.
Tomorrow things will be resolved. One way other the other. If they try to save the eye, there's a 70% chance that it'll be fully successful.
On the upside, Sheilagh is putting on a really brave face, and still playing and exploring our house. Her appetite hasn't diminished either!
Warning: This product contains rants
(* A 1970's British slang term for a very stupid person)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH! Ah-hem... sorry... needed to get that off my chest.
So, I'm watching my favourite geek show, The Screensavers, as I do most nights, and some retard phones in to ask, "Can I run Mac OS X on my PC". I wouldn't mind so much if this was the first time someone had rung in to ask this. It's not. Some git wastes my time and theirs on an almost regular basis, asking this question.
The Producers of The Screensavers need to fire the people who screen the calls they let on air.
Another question that gets asked about once a month, by someone who either doesn't watch the show regularly, or has the mental capacity and memory of your average goldfish, is "I want to share my internet connection between my Windows 98 laptop and my Windows 2000 PC. What do you suggest I use to do this?". Every fucking month this happens, and every fucking month the lads, bless 'em, patiently trot out a list of suggestions. Who are these cretins who didn't think to make a note the last time this was covered? More to the point, who the hell is letting this idiots get on the show, when there's a plethora of good, different, valid questions that don't get on (I know this because I read the discussion boards - now that's sad).
I think they should let me be a presenter on the show, if only for one day. I'd sort things out.
Caller: I have a Compaq POS PC and a Gateway Spaz500 laptop and I want to know how I can share my cable modem between them?
Me: So did you just get cable TV?
Caller: No, I've had it for years
Me: So you've seen the show before?
Caller: Yes, I've been watching for a year now.
Me: So is it just that you're a retard?
silence
Me: OK. Listen up all of you. This is absolutely the last time we're going to answer this. If you're too stupid to remember not to waste our fucking time asking the same damn question over and over and over... then we're going to trace your phone number, or if it's a netcam call, we'll trace your IP address, hunt you down, and beat you to death with a Netgear router. Obviously, we wouldn't use a Linksys router, as they have plastic cases.
Me: Oh, and with reference to Duwayne's call earlier about "can he put Mac OS X on his PC". No you fucking can't you moron! You couldn't put it on your PC two weeks ago, and guess what? You still can't!! Don't you retards think that if Apple had released a version of OS X for PC we'd have covered it on the show? But we haven't have we? No! So they haven't released a PC version have they? NO! So stop fucking asking you mental midgets!
Me: And do you know what really gets me? These are the same redneck inbred PC bigots who for years have been the first to slag off Macintoshes. It's funny, isn't it, how elegant and efficient Macintoshes are used by the creative people in the world, whilst the trailer trash, Quake playing neanderthal's stick with their beige Wintel SUV-style PCs. Now all of a sudden, with the release of XP - the ultimate spyware OS, you philistines are starting to realise how much cooler (and stable) OS X is.
Me: Why don't you just hand Gates your credit cards whilst you're down there, knelt in front of him, suc......
(at which point, there is an unexpected cut to a commercial break)
I mean, I know that they're there to help people, but there's only so much time for viewer calls, so why go over the same old shite again and again?
OK. I feel better now. Thank you for listening. Sorry about the bad language, but well... you know... sometimes it's a necessary evil.
And yes, this blog is written on a Macintosh, running OS X (that's BSD Unix with a quality front-end, to you guv) ;-)
If, later in life, I remember nothing else about living in the United States, I'll remember the floors.
As I write, I'm just taking a well-earned tea break from my DIY labours. It's just occured to me that about 80% of the DIY I've done, since I've been living here, has been on floors. Back in my old house in Britain, I never did anything to its floors, however, here, in the two houses I've owned, I've done nothing but rip up, repair, replace, recover and restore flooring.
The Flavoured Carpet
When looking for our first house in the US, we told the realtor that we wanted an old house. He responsed, brandishing an advert for a property, "Well, this one was built in 1980!". That, in the suburbs, counts for old, I guess. I'll save all the annecdotes about house hunting (there are several) for another time. Suffice to say, we found a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood, in Littleton. Again, I'll save a description and stories of the house for another time (and yes, I've started making a list of promised annecdotes).
The house was built in 1974, and was in good condition, and liveable with. The only blot on the landscape was the kitchen. I'm pretty confident it had not been updated since the house was built. It's style was very 1970's, and I later found out for a fact that the cooker/microwave combo was in the house when it was built. I'll follow this entry up with a seperate piece on the microwave.
Anyway, besides the very 70's appliances and cupboards, there was the carpet. Yes, some interior modelling genius had decided it'd be just groovy if they carpeted the kitchen. Now, as you can imagine, this carpet's been there for 25 years by the time we moved in. It's had a quarter of a century of gravy and ketchup soaked in and ground down into it. Still, the dogs seemed to like it.
So we decided to replace the flooring. Wooden flooring was purchased (some $400 for a 100sq ft), and we spent about two days preparing the surface, cutting the wood, and laying it down. The stupidest thing, if you don't count not getting a professional to fit it, was not buying an electric saw, but instead using a hand saw. Overall, laying this floor it was a fasttrack way to bruised knees, s and hands. That said, it looked really nice once it was down.
Floor 2
My dog Miles, whilst still a puppy, decided, in one of those incomprehensible puppy moments, that he'd like to see how good lino was to eat. This is the same dog, who also ate a section of stair carpet, and the plaster on the adjoining wall. So, he nibbled a few square inches out of the lino in the hallway between the garage entrance into the house and the family room.
When it came time to sell the house, we decided we had to do something about it. So I ended up ripping it all up. The first thing I discovered, was that when it was fitted, they decided it'd be really funny to put glue on every single bloody square inch of lino. That, plus the inherrent brittleness of aging linoleum, meant that I ended up having to chisel each an every inch of lino by hand. The second thing I discovered was that this flooring continued into the downstairs bathroom, again, all glued down and brittle.
Fitting the new self-adhesive tiles was relatively simple, and carried the unique satifaction of knowing that some other bugger was going to be the one who eventually had to get a chisel to remove it, in years to come.
House 2, Floor 3
So we moved up to fashionable the Washington Park area, with a house half the size, but twice the charm of the one in Littleton. This one, at least, was built in 1908.
There's acres of writing material about the kitchen in this one, but not now. This time, it was decided to tile the floor. Using the benefit of my vast experience of flooring, I took one look at the existing lino floor, and said, "fuck it", and slapped the tiles right on top of the lino, making no attempt to remove it. I think the memories of cutting open my fingers with the chisel whilst doing the last floor, where still haunting me. It worked well, the job was done in good time and the floor looked great.
No Lounging Around
The final floor (to date) in this saga, is the lounge and hallway. Despite its 'Victorian' styling, at some point, someone had knocked part of the wall down between the lounge nd hallway.
When we moved in, the whole downstairs (lounge, hallway, dining room and study) were carpeted with a carpet so beige, you'd swear they'd bought it in Highlands Ranch (a uber-boring modern suburb of Denver, populated chiefly by white, middle-class, Ford Expedition driving, self-righteous, baptist s).
She Who Must Be Obeyed decided that it was coming up. We removed the carpet, to reveal wooden flooring. Yay! The bad news came later. I got a professional in to quote for resurfacing it, and wasn't interested. It turns out it wasn't a hardwood floor, but a pine softwood floor. It would take an inordinate amount of labour, and wouldn't look as good as a new floor, and "would I like to have him fit a whole new floor over it?". We declined whilst we got other quotes for the work.
Months later, we decided to finally do something about it. I hired a drum sander from Home Depot, and set about the floor with it. After a lot of dust, noise and sparks (drum sander on floor nails), we were down to the bare wood. The only thing left to clear was the edges..
This then sat untouched for another month before this week. After a lot of debate, my idea of staining the wood and varnishing it won out. SWMBO wanted to paint it. This week, I bought myself a belt sander, and set about cleaning up the multitude of blemishes in the floor, and the edges.
Here's the thing. The paint in some areas is so thick that I ended up chiselling it off by hand As I laboured away in the join between the lounge and dining room, I looked up to see the Gustave Caillebotte painting on the wall. It's that one with the three guys planing and chiselling a wooden floor. I only hope they were being paid more than I was to do that work. It's hard work on the hands and knees.
This afternoon, I've been painting on the wood stain. It's 'Olde Maple'. With a name like that, you'd think I bought it from Ye Olde Hardwayre Shoppe instead of Home Depot. For some inexplicable reason, Americans pronounce the word Depot as 'deep-o', rather than the British/French pronunciation of 'deppo'. This sort of thing rubs off on you if you hear it enough. The good news is that, although it needs two coats, this stuff has the polyurethane is built-in. This means I only have to lug all the furniture around the room twice.
Went to a careers fair at Drake Beam Morin. Chatted with folks from Sun Microsystems, ADIC and Hewlett Packard.
Sun, it turns out, want people to write device drivers - of which I have no experience - but gave me a card with details of where to send my resume within Sun, for jobs I'd be suited to. ADIC are an all-Unix shop, and I have minimal Unix experience. HP were non-commital, but at least they took my resume.
It's all kinda depressing - going to a careers fair where the only tech companies are all doing stuff I'm not qualified for. I guess one can't be an expert at everything.
Finally got round to seeing Lord of the Rings. A total of seven people in the audience, and none of them felt the need to talk out loud whilst the movie was on, which was great. Hmmm.... now there's another rant that needs writing. Not now though.
I now see what the makers of the film meant when they said that they now have enough technology to do justice to the book. There were many scenes, with great armies of creatures - such as Orcs - which would have broken the budget if they'd not been able to computer generate the characters.
All the characters were well-cast and captivating in their performance. The hobbits were all very cute and loveable, and Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf was superb.
The lead character, Frodo, was played by the diminutive and bug-eyed Elijah Wood, who looked like the bastard son of a bizzare liaison between Dudley Moore and Marty Feldman. The lad did a good job though, and really looked the part. He did have one annoying habit though. He was forever falling over his own feet, just as some monster or baddie turned up. It was kinda reminiscent of Sarah Jane Smith. In other words it seemed like an unrealistic plot device to add tension.
It was very enjoyable, but boy was it long! Three hours to be precise. The only other criticism is that during some of the fight scenes, I think they employed some of the cameramen from NYPD Blue. I say this, because they filmed a lot of these (quite big and detailed) fight scenes in close up. Given that everyone on screen was wearing black, grey, blue and sludge colours, it was all a bit confusing. I almost found myself shouting, "pull back!" at the cameraman.
Anyway, one down, two to go.
Much as I don't want this blog to become a TV critic column, I have to make a quick mention of a really lame sit-com called "That 70's Show". It's based on the 'hilarious' comedy premise, that back in the 1970's people used to wear flares. That, at any rate, is the only even vaguely comedic element I can spot.
Just like British sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, it isn't funny. It doesn't matter how persistent a laugh track you play over it, it's still not funny! Are you listening Fox? Stop making this sort of crap, and spend the money on something useful, like getting Tom Martino a proper job.
There's worse news to come though. They're now trailing a new sitcom, called (try and contain your excitement) "That 80's Show". I'm not kidding. This is for real. Expect jokes about Rubik's cubes and leg-warmers.
Soapbox Time
When it comes to period comedy, the difference between That Shite Show... err Seventies Show and the various Blackadder series', is that Blackadder's comedy was about the characters and the events of that period, rather than "ooh look at the funny clothes they used to wear". But then, this is Fox. For that matter, this is an American TV network, so viewers are assumed (wrongly) to all be cretins, and everything has to be dumbed down. God forbid they'd put on anything challenging. It's so depressing the way that the American TV networks constantly underestimate the intelligence of American viewers.
Talking of which...
I'm not proud. It's 10.15pm, and I'm watching World's Wildest Police Videos again. I could give it up tomorrow if I wanted. Honest guv. As I write, I crazed madman is leading "the boys from Sumter County PD" on a jolly romp through No-Neck Alabama (or similar). He was driven mad, when he looked directly into Sheriff John 's teeth. The chase ended by his being rammed into a petrol pump by one of the Sumter County hardmen! Oddly enough, this causes the petrol pump to burst into flames, all over the nutter's car. I guess this must be what they call 'being in hot pursuit'.
I'll get my coat.
