Another year gone by. Amazing. 2006 was a pretty good year for me - STP, sailing in Desolation Sound, some nice trips (like Las Vegas for MIX06, New Zealand, Indonesia, Disneyland, and Whistler, of course, shipping IE7 and Windows Vista.

Still, I wasn't as diligent about working out after STP as I'd hoped, I didn't take nearly enough photos (the STOMP load-in time-lapse not withstanding), and I didn't feel like I was hitting on all cylinders at work as much as I'd like.

So, as always, I'm optimistic about making the new year even better. The half-marathon coming up should kick-start my work out efforts. I'm also doing my annual office cleaning right now (whether it needs it or not...) and paving my last XPSP2 laptop for Vista now, so I'll be ready to hit the ground running tomorrow.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great 2007!

Merry Christmas! Well, "Happy Boxing Day" is really more appropriate, I guess. Anyway, we had a very lovely, if lazy Christmas yesterday. Michelle's folks are visiting from Florida and Mike is here too, so we had a full house. Andrew (9) and Michael (6) got off to a mercifully late start (we had company over the night before, and I was up even later playing Santa Claus getting stuff ready.)

The hot stuff for the boys continues to be Legos (especially Bionicle related), video games, and Pokemon stuff (popular again, after a brief affair with Yu-Gi-Oh). Especially popular are combinations of the above like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for Gameboy DS, Star Wars Legos, and the penultimate combination" the video game Lego Star Wars II. The boys also got an Xbox 360 from Santa. We're not the first ones on the block with a 360, but I finally gave in. (I also admit it was as much for me.)

In addition to the Xbox, I had a prosperous Christmas: a nice Riedel wine decanter I've wanted for a while, the The West Wing season seven DVD set, Avenue Q: The Book (Avenue Q is quite possibly my favorite musical I've never seen, the amazingly fun Table Tennis for Xbox 360, some nice wine, and a Nordstrom's gift card. Good stuff.

Of course, Christmas isn't just about the stuff. It's about the food (you thought I was going to say something mushy about family, brr brr brr right?) We had beignets for breakfast, and I made potato chips using the deep frying oil again (damn, those are good - I'll post the recipe soon.) We also took another go at the Honeybaked ham we had for dinner Christmas Eve along with more yummy greens, and macaroni and cheese. (I don't care what anyone says. Twelve pounds of ham is essentially an infinite quantity of ham. It is too much for any sized event. Jesus wouldn't have had to mess with loaves and fishes if he had a twelve pound Honeybaked ham, pork issues not withstanding.)

Tummies full from too much food and eyes glazed over from too much Viva Pinata, we collapsed at the end of day happy. It was a good Christmas. Hope your's was too.

[2006-12-26 Fixed typo]

Ugh. Lost our cable Internet access again. Back to sipping through an EDGE cellphone connection. The effects from this storm keep dragging on. Fortunately for us, it's only inconveniences like this.

I'm back online again with our cable Internet access. Wahoo! It's like taking a deep breath again after breathing through a snorkel.

Yippee!!

A few thoughts on what helped us during the Storm of 2006.

• Our Smartphones were (and continue to be) critical. We could get our work and personal email, text to check on friends, make calls, and get online. They're still serving as our Internet connection for our PCs until we get our broadband back up. Having the right cables was important as was having a way to charge the phones. (They charge from our laptops, so that was pretty easy; I need to get a way to easily charge them in the car too.)
• Getting hotel reservation early was important. The W had filled up by noon or so; friends had a hard time finding any hotels in the area for days. Using an out-of-town friend with a net connection made the process a lot easier than us calling around. (The voice activated Internet!)
• Having gas in the car was essential. Fortunately, I had filled up the car the night before. Virtually all of the gas stations nearby were useless without power to pump the gas; the few that found a way to open had huge lines. Getting around was a slow process given the downed trees, so having gas was important. I used to be good about keeping half a tank at all times; need to get back into that habit.
• Flashlights and battery powered radios were handy. Even in the daytime, our house is dark thanks to the trees. Packing in the dark would have been no fun. The radio helped us understand the severity of the situation and convinced us to get a hotel room soon since so many people were out of power. It's also kind of lonely cut off from the world, so the radio was a welcome window.

We opted not to stick it out at home, preferring light and heat. I'm sure if had stayed home, this list would have had more stuff like firewood, outdoor cook stove, etc. In other emergencies, staying at home would have been more appropriate or even necessary. But, we figured why suffer? We wound up having a good time in downtown Seattle and were very comfortable to boot.

It's been a wild time since my last post. Aside from another trip to Whistler (which I'll write about later) we had a big windstorm here in the Seattle area that knocked out power to over a million households and businesses, including Microsoft and our house.

Last Thursday (the evening of the storm), we heard branches hitting the roof all night. (Our neighborhood is filled with huge old fir trees, 18-20" in diameter.) We lost power around 1:00am and woke up to find a cold house. The yard and roof were buried in fallen branches. I went out to meet my neighbors and see the damage.

Next door, the neighbors lost a big tree. It fell away from the house and across the street, blocking it, and miraculously missing two parked cars and the house across the street. Nearby, other neighbors weren't as lucky. I saw at least five houses that had huge trees lying across their roofs. There were power, cable, and phone lines down everywhere and we heard stories of a nearby transformer that had blown up. On the plus side, I did meet a lot more of my neighbors than ever. Everyone was helping each other, offering whatever they could. It was nice to see, really.

Fortunately, we weren't totally cut off. We had a battery powered radio (with a crank too, just in case) and our Dash Smartphones. We got online via our phones and learned that Microsoft was down to emergency power only and the campus was closed (Friday was the last day I was planning on working this year, so I got an early start to my holiday.) We also learned that the kids' schools were closed (so Michael got an early start to his vacation too.)

In a stroke of foresight, Michelle figured we'd need hotel rooms for a few nights as the power situation got sorted out over the next few days. She got on the phone with Mike, who served as our travel agent, looking for a hotel room in Seattle that had power. We grabbed a few nights at the W Hotel in Seattle and were set. We stopped off at Microsoft for a bit where there was wireless and the hallway plugs worked. There was a little party of sorts going on in Michelle's hallway. Someone even set up a Nintendo Wii (yes, we allow those...), which kept me and the boys occupied for a while. (They're pretty cool, btw, but I think after Michael bashed the Wiimote controller into the wall a few times that it's not for us.)

So, we had a few nice days downtown, just us and the zillion other refugees looking for a little light and heat. We did a little Christmas shopping, saw Eragon (terrible, btw, more on that later), and played at Gameworks. Pretty fun, actually.

We moved back home Monday after the power came back on. We still don't have Internet access (our cable line is still lying in our front yard), so we're connecting through our cellphones (getting somewhere between 92 and 110kbps - not too bad). Lots of clean-up to do in the yard now, but I think the worst is behind us now. I feel fortunate that we got by so easily and were back up before Christmas.

My bitter post about the Stanford football team's poor season must have spurred them to action. The boys beat the University of Washington (itself sunk in a five game losing streak) here in Seattle - a rariety. This breaks Stanford's eleven game losing streak, only tying the worst ever streak in school history.

I missed a chance to see the game. Joe tried to talk me into it, agreeing we'd probably lose but trying to convince me that a miracle might happen. I didn't relish the thought of sitting in the rain, surrounded by rabid Husky fans in purple, watching Stanford get crushed.

Well, I blew it. It was a very nice autumn day, and we won. What's more, we spoiled the Husky's chances of a bowl game, so the fans started filing out early. Serves me right for being a bad fan.

Anyway, congrats to the Stanford football team.

Well, for the first time all season, the Stanford football team didn't lose. Thank, God. Of course, they didn't play, but I'll take whatever small mercy I can get.

I'm not actually sure why most people read my blog. I know many of you are my friends and colleagues who read this out of courtesy, some are people who are hoping that once in a while I might actually say something useful or interesting about Internet Explorer, and still others maybe just have too much time on their hands.

But, as with most sites I suspect, I also get a bunch of traffic from search engines; most of my referrers are Google sites (US English and others). This results in some odd stuff happening on my site.

For instance, almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about taking Andrew (now 9) to a local Pokemon extravaganza. I didn't offer anything particularly useful to the Pokemon fans, but there is a small ecosystem of people trading tips in my comments. It's so weird to me. This page is by far my most visited on the site. (It's the number three hit on Google and #5 on Live Search for "Pokemon Deoxys Aurora Ticket", which I guess is a popular query if you are a Pokemon fan".) Check it out. 

The second most popular page (by a longshot) is a post I did about a particular bottle of rum. (This post is the number one hit on Google and Live Search for "best rum in the world".) Now, I have a bunch of very opinionated people offering their views on the best rum (actually, I've gotten some good tips from the comments.)

It's really just odd to me that these little pockets of activity have sprung up on my blog long after I wrote the original post. The net is a strange place full of even stranger people. Oh well, as long as they click the ads...

[Reposted to fix the title]

For the past two years, we've lived without television. OK, that's not really true. We have a TV and a DVD player, but we don't have any TV signal. Everything we watch has to be brought into the house.

It's actually been a pretty interesting experiment. We've always had cable or satellite and watched TV like everyone else. When we moved into this house, we decided to cut off the signal. The kids were starting to watch too much TV, and truth be told, I was spending too much time watching TV too. The kids hated this house for a while because they thought it didn't have any signal.

The transition wasn't really all that hard, especially with so much news on the Internet, the best TV series available on DVD, and Netflix delivering movies. I now have lots of time back to do other stuff like exercise, read, or blog (or even sleep once in a while!) The kids don't seem to mind too much either. I don't think I'll ever look back on my life and wish I'd watched more TV. This has worked out to be a good decision.

That said, there are a few side effects. I miss watching sports; it's one of the few things I think you can't really recreate via the web or other means. I've also found the kids don't have a good sense of any sports because they don't see them played, don't hear the color commentary, and don't have favorite players. I'm not a huge sports fan, but the sports thing may cause me to rethink the no-TV bit (we did hook up rabbit ears to watch Seattle play in the Super Bowl.)

I also find myself at a bit of a loss in conversations sometimes. I don't know what happened on The Apprentice last night (and really don't care) and don't get the Apple commercial parodies. And I really don't know who have the pseudo-celebrities are (who is Jessica Simpson and why is she famous?)

When I don't understand what's going on in the conversation and explain it's because we don't have TV, people often look at me like I'm some kind of Luddite freak. The other common reaction is "wow, that's cool. I could never do that." Most people simply cannot imagine living without live TV. Wild.

I will admit that when we're on vacation, we are often all glued to the TV in the hotel room. The kids catch up on their cartoons, and Michelle and I watch whatever trainwreck pop show happens to be hot. It's like binging on Pop Tarts, Mountain Dew, Slim Jims, and Lunchables. I feel like I need a shower afterwards.

If you've never turned off your TV for a week (or better, a month), give it a try. It's actually amazingly liberating.