I try to avoid talking about two things at once in this journal. It isn’t as if I post everyday, so spreading out the topics makes sense. That being said, though, the longer I delay writing about something that happens, the less important it feels to me, and so the less likely I’ll write about it. So, here we go, two items in this entry. And people say they don’t get their money’s worth here…

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of judging the Future City Competition. It takes place all of the country. The Michigan entries were judged at Laurel Manor, where Elaine and I were married.

I did this last year with IEEE, but they needed more general judges this time, so I transferred over. I got to see fewer cities, but I also got to ask more in depth questions of the cities I did review.

Before the actual competition, I also judged the essays and abstracts.

The actual competition is for middle school students. They make a huge display of their futuristic city (near or far future). They have to explain how it works, where people live, and how it will manage resources. This year also had a theme about the elderly and plastics, so that had to be addressed.

These students were amazing. Not all were great, of course, and quite honestly, the cities I reviewed were pretty average. But each of them had one or two features or qualities that really did shine.

There was one girl who was an amazing speaker. The two boys with her were mumbling, but she was incredible and was able to handle all the questions. She was also not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” while giving suggestions on how she would discover the answer.

Another boy there was incredibly smart. He really knew the science of this city well (this one was in space, in the asteroid belt), and gave references for his answers, and was very sharp.

I’d hire either one of them in a second.

One of the groups was just okay, but they still surprised us when we asked them about the pressure exerted on the dome of their undersea city. Without hesitation they answered “120 psi.” Now, I don’t know if that is right (though I highly sure it is), it does show that they were thinking about that question before and had done some research.

How cool is that!

On other fronts, at dance practice yesterday one of the new people there is a Middle Eastern dancer. She’s helping me learn how to move my hips. I’ve never been able to do that, and for Improv skits and such, it is something I really feel I need to learn how to do.

She’s going to give me lessons every week. Apparently the first one did something, because I have some actual isolation movement down there. I still have a long way to go, but at least I have something to practice now.

Of course, everyone at dance was looking at me funny while I was practicing.

Not that they aren’t looking at me like that already.

Well, this is definitely a very nice early birthday present!

I have the dreadful feeling that I will be using the above title a lot.

At work I have way too much on my plate. I’m helping to write a huge proposal for a huge program. I have two papers I need to write (for conferences in London and D.C.), plus two more I’m supervising. I have a bunch of procedures to implement in a few months, when it normally takes years to do so.

Plus I have all my regular work to do.

I tried taking a day off on Monday, but I ended up spending an hour on the phone and doing other work related activities anyway.

Ah well. I like what I do. I just does get intense at times, and I’m not seeing an end.

And to add insult to injury, one of my Little Mermaid mugs chipped. I found it that way when I went to get coffee. I now have one left. Guess it is time for E-bay.

I would like some advice from anyone who is reading this. I need a new calendar for 2004, and have no idea what to get. I don’t want another Little Mermaid, Xena, or Buffy calendar because I’ve already had those. I like those themes (pretty women doing action and adventure), but repeating is kinda boring.

A perfect calendar would be Kim Possible, but they don’t seem to make those!

So, any suggestions?

A link to where I could buy something would be even better.

Well, last night’s drive home was a hoot and a holler. Mainly a holler, as I was screaming in fear all the way home.

I had my first new improv class, so around 10 PM I was driving home through all that freezing rain. That shouldn’t be a problem, but I have an odd problem with my Ford Contour: the plastic part on the inside near the windshield is all warped up, so the heat from the defroster doesn’t touch the windshield. That means I have ice forming but not melting.

To handle this, I spent the entire 45 minute drive with my ice scraper pushed against the plastic to hold it down. That took care of most if it, but I was still bobbing my head side to side to get some glimpses out the window.

It was lucky I didn’t crash. Fortunately there were hardly any cars or power lines on the road.

This morning was even worse! In Ann Arbor there was no freezing rain, but everything seems to be shut down. Aerobics was cancelled. Schools are closed. And for us, Day Care is closed too. So Elaine gets Marcus in the morning, and I’ll have to run home at lunch.

The drive out was exciting. My car was in the garage overnight, but the snow was so heavy and large that it took only seven snowflakes to completely cover my car. The streets were completely covered, and I don’t see it letting up anytime soon.

I am so not looking forward to the drive home.

It is too damn cold outside.

I know, I know. We aren’t living in Antarctica, but seriously, the weather has been awful.

Right now my feet are cold. My feet never get cold, yet they feel like blocks of ice. Worse, they almost feel as cold as my wife’s feet.

Outside I not only see my breath, it starts forming into a solid and I hear it crashing next to me when it hits the ground.

It feels like it hasn’t stopped snowing since the summer of 1982.

The one saving grace I have is long underwear. I have two sets from WinterSilks, the heaviest kind, and I’ve taken to wearing them every day. It is amazing how much that extra layer helps. While my ears feel like they’ve been dipped in liquid nitrogen, the rest of my body (except the feet) feels if not comfortable, at least not terrible.

The problem is that I am not a cold person. I really like it warm. I’d much rather be sweating in 95 degree temperatures with an even higher humidity. I get jealous that my cat can snuggle up on top of a heat vent, or better still, curl up with us once the bed is nice and warm.

For most of my life, especially during undergrad and grad school, I would wear a sweatshirt. Same one, every day, without fail. It was nice. I think I need something like that now. At home, over my regular clothes, I’ll frequency wear a bathrobe (like Hawkeye did on MASH), as it is warm and snuggly.

My cat is the best – he is a good lap warmer, except he doesn’t stick around enough.

So here I sit, with feet that feel they could be used as a superconductive cooling material, wishing spring would arrive so we have our few nice weeks in Michigan.

At least my feet aren’t as cold as Elaine’s, and for that I’m grateful.

The other day I finished a trilogy.

Not a big deal, I suppose. I read a ton of books. Not as much as my wife, mainly because she isn’t off taking over the world or saving the galaxy in computer games as much as I am, but I still manage to read quite a bit.

A few years ago I picked up a book called Jumping off the Planet by David Gerrold. He’s one of those authors who I usually look for in the bookstore when I want something fun to read.

Why?

Well, honestly, and I hope he doesn’t consider this an insult; his writing style reminds me quite a bit of Robert A. Heinlein. Gerrold wrote the Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and one of the first novels of his that I read was “The Galactic Whirlpool,” which I highly recommend. He is also the author of the Chtorr novels, a series which I highly wish he finish, dangit.

So, Gerrold’s new books are ones that I will always check out, and most likely read.

Which leads me back to “Jumping off the Planet.” It is about a young boy, with an older and younger brothers, who for reasons that would take too long to get into here, head to the orbital elevator (the Beanstalk) with their father.

Great! A new book!

It was terrible.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. But honestly, I am still not sure how I got through it. I didn’t like any of the characters, most especially the main character, Charlie, who is pretty much spoiled and in his own little world of self absorption. The family doesn’t like each other, they are always bickering, and ugh, the crap that their father does.

I’m not sure how I got through it. I mean, the book was okay, and there were some interesting parts, but I did have to force myself to get through it.

I guess, though, that there was something good about it, because a year later, when the next book was out, Bouncing off the Moon, I ended up reading it.

That book was a bit better. Quite a bit better. Still not great, but the characters started working together. Charlie was growing up. The family children realized that they cared about each other, and decided what was important in life.

Throughout both of these books there was the backdrop of the Earth going through a polycrisis, plague, depression, etc. In fact, it seems to me that what is going on now is describing the background of the Chtorr novels, which was incredibly cool.

The end of the second book surprised me. It takes place in the courtroom, where the family is trying to legally keep claim of an artificial intelligence that was smuggled up from the Earth by accident.

Like I said, long story, which is why it is a novel.

That court scene rocked. It got into the nature of AI, ethics, morality, and what is a soul. The legal maneuvering is incredible, and it got me to stop and think. I love it when a book does that.

So, it ended on a high note. Sure, it had similar characters to Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” and heck, the society was close too, but that wasn’t the point. This was all about Charlie and his growth into adulthood, with their journal away from the earth paralleling his journey away from being a child.

Since I did like the ending, I was pretty sure I’d read the final book, Leaping to the Stars. So I recently picked it up.

I couldn’t put it down.

I think I finished it in less than three days. That last day I didn’t play any computer games during my free time. I even stayed up way too late at night to finish it.

Somewhere along the way I started caring about all the characters. They aren’t perfect, but no one is, and that wasn’t the point.

The background story of what was going on with Earth, and how they escaped to the stars and almost didn’t make it was incredible.

I appreciated the details. Gerrold didn’t just say what needed to be done to try to rescue Earth – he gave a page full of instructions (that only work for the story, not for our world) that were intriguing and fascinating to think about.

But most of all, in that great Heinleinian tradition, the book made me think. Really think.

I’ll give an example.

Here is a phrase that people think is fine: “If you are good, you will be rewarded.”

Nothing wrong with that, right?

But that brings up a bunch of questions. Why do you have to be paid to be good? Shouldn’t a person be good, not because of money, but because it is right? The above implies that you can only be good if you are bribed, that you have no moral sense. In fact, you’d need to have your morals given to you by a god or something.

And actually, goodness should be its own reward.

Which leads back to being responsible for yourself, and not blaming others for what you do and why. It also leads to the idea that if you aren’t good, then you will be punished, which leads to even worse messes.

The book packed with quandaries and moral problems. Some of them, well, okay, many of them, don’t have any good answers, which is unfortunately a common problem with life.

I want my son to read these books. As young adult novels, I think he’ll enjoy the earlier ones more than me. I can’t wait until he gets to the later books, though.

We will have a lot to talk about.

While trying to recover, I spent some of the time between sleep and sipping water reading one of my tech journals. One of them is IEEE Spectrum. I usually don’t have the time to do more than scan it, but for this issue I took the time.

Oh, for those who don’t know, IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and is pronounced Eye-Triple-E. It is one of the professional organizations I belong to.

So, the title of the article is “Win, Lose, or Grail.” The people at the magazine picked, in six technology areas, which they think the future winners and losers will be, as well as the Holy Grail of that technology (and if it is even possible soon).

The article was interesting, but I’m not going to reproduce it here. What I want to share are a few things I found interesting.

I’ll put them in quotes, cause they came from the magazine itself.

“The power of the 16.6 million cars and light trucks sold in the United States in 2003 adds up to two and a half times the total U.S. electrical generating capacity.”

“30% of the World Wide Web is porn.”

“30% of the web is duplicated information.”

There are “50,000,000 new or changed pages every day.”

“65% of web pages are now written in English, but by 2010 English pages will be in a minority.”

Here is my favorite:

“U.S. President George W. Bush decided to get back into [the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor collaboration] under considerable pressure from Britain’s leader, Tony Blair, and evidently he backed a proposed site near Barcelona in return for Spain’s support in the Iraq war.”

For Spain’s support in the Iraq war?!

Great.

Why doesn’t that kind of information appear in the regular news broadcasts? I know all of this is how politics is played, but still, the impression I got was that Spain supported the U.S. because, well, they thought we were doing the right thing.

I am far, far, to naïve at times.

Well, last night was not fun at all.

This is a bit graphic, so I think Jeff will be the only one who reads the whole thing.

I felt fine all day long. Elaine was sick, so I took care of Marcus Man (picked him up, fed him, played, etc.) until it was time for him to go to sleep. He went to bed around 9 PM or so.

Around that time I noticed I was getting the runs. Okay, diarrhea. It was bad. Later on, I would wish that diarrhea was all I had.

10 PM was when it really hit me. I threw up. Big time. Over and over again. Elaine could hear me all the way up stairs.

From that point on I was either taking care of the runs or throwing up about every half hour to an hour. I stayed down stairs on the sofa until 4 AM so I wouldn’t disturb Elaine. I don’t think I got more than a half hour of sleep at a time all night.

I also couldn’t keep any water down. If I drank a small sip, I’d throw up.

I could tell it was all from lunch, but by 5 AM there was nothing left, yet I was still throwing up. I lost count after throwing up five seperate times.

My 6:30 AM nap was good. I slept until 7:30 AM.

I wasn’t getting back to sleep, so I went downstairs and had a sip of water. It stayed down. Fifteen minutes later I drank half a glass.

I tasted like ambrosia.

It is almost 9 AM and I’ve had two glasses of water total. I’ve been spacing it out. I haven’t thrown up yet, but I still have the runs. Fortunately, it isn’t as frequent as before, so I think the water is getting back into my systems. My lips and mouth feel better, that is for sure.

So, almost everything I ate yesterday didn’t get digested. Today, I’m still not hungry. I doubt I’ll eat something until much later. We’ll see.

I don't think I have an illness. I figure this is some sort of food poisoning. I really have no idea, though.

I’m just thankful I can drink water now. See? It is the little things in life that make us happy.

First, an aside. We went through another proposal round at work. I wrote a lot of proposals, and even came into work on Saturday to do one (and got to say hi to Natalie who was there all weekend). When writing proposals, I really don’t feel like doing any other kind of writing, hence the short hiatus.

I think I wrote some pretty good proposals, though. I’m quite happy with how some of them came out. It is still draining, though.

Anyway…I am now one of those millions of people who now watches Reality TV.

I know, I know. But this one I couldn’t resist. It is called The Apprentice. You’ve seen the ads. It is the one with Donald Trump. We haven’t heard from him in the news lately because he’s doing quite well and worth more than he ever has.

Can’t help myself, this show is something I’m interested in. The contestants are all business people of widely varying backgrounds and educations, and they have to do business-like tasks for Mr. Trump. The last one gets to work for him for a year for a huge salary and lots of authority.

I like the business world, and quite honestly, it gives me a peek into Trump’s world, which is fascinating.

The problem is, of course, that most of my favorite shows are on Wednesday, and adding yet another one will try me batty. So we’ll see if I watch it.

Still, this does mean that I can’t say that I don’t watch “reality television.” (I know that the classification is bogus, but it is how it is used.)

Sure, in the first episode, they had to sell lemonade, which is kinda silly. But, they did use their business savvy to make deals, get their money to do more, and had to think a lot about marketing.

So, I’m hooked. I’ll try to watch it if I’m around. For me, it is a very fun concept. It is even a show I’d be willing to be a contestant on. Much better than being on a deserted island eating grubs.

We have a new answering machine message, finally. Call during the day (but not during lunch) if you know the number, and let me know what you think.

(Quick entry today - lots and lots going on!)

Big news!

Marcus took his first steps over the holiday. He can stand on his own for more than five seconds, and has taken about four steps before falling down.

What fun!

He has also climbed all the stairs from the main floor to the second, all on his own. He can also climb down, but not as well, and hasn’t all the way.

Marcus Man also stayed up very late on at the New Year’s Eve party. He just wanted to stay awake and see everything that was going on. Two other toddlers were there too, and he had a blast interacting with them.

Speaking of the party, I think it was a lot of fun. Around 30 people, which is a fine turn out. For once I didn’t go overboard in buying the food, so the leftovers weren’t terrible.

I got to play two games of Settlers and one game of Munchkin!