The Empirical Manifesto

And it's FAMILY DAY today! Yes, just myself, my wife, and our two children. What a relaxing day after all that driving and all that tryptophan, which really knocked me out early by the way. Well, maybe that and the Scotch, but I don't want to point any fingers.

Speaking of, I'll never buy an expensive bottle of Scotch again. I've found my ideal daily-drinker: McClelland's. They're pretty generic looking, with names such as, "Highlands," "Lowlands," "Islay" & "Speyside" to identify themselves, but at $21.99 a bottle (here in Anna), they're the best inexpensive Scotch I've ever had. Better than more expensive Scotch I've gotten on sale.

Anyway, so the boy and I are playing StarCraft today. Thing is, I'm playing on my Mac because Win7 renders it like this:


Win7

Win95/Win98/Win2000/ME/XP & OSX

Sat in front of my computer this morning, freshly showered and dressed with my first cup of coffee of the morning. Ah, bliss. The kids were at school and my wife is humming like Snow White while she picks up around the house from the morning rush to school Niobe, my aloof Bengal who doesn't care to be held chooses today, eight minutes after I put on a freshly dry-cleaned long sleeve black Polo, to jump in my lap and rub her entire body uncharacteristically against me.

What they say about cats is true.

I notice about 30 messages in my inbox. I love waking up to overnight lj comments. Only, these were comments to my Xanga account? I cross-post to Xanga for a handful of people, but I've never had this number of comments before. I wonder if I've been Theologian'd (The Xanga equivalent to the Slashdot Effect) but there's no comment about me, or my site. I Private Message the King of Xanga and explain what I thought had happened. He laughs heartedly and informs me I was FRONT PAGE today. Sure enough, there I was - top spot under "Featured Content." The workstation meme post, Personal Workspaces - A History. I couldn't believe it...more comments than I've ever had on a Xanga post. It was a crazy day.

Go me.

My wife was already asleep as I crawled into bed last night at 2200. I set my alarm, and pulled my glasses off. They came apart in my hand. They were six years old. A two-and a half hour lunch later, I have new glasses. drax0r picked them out. This unexpected expense took all the money my wife was saving for shopping with galinda822 during her visit :( But it could've been much worse. The frames are Nike brand titanium ($297) and the lenses are featherweight polycarbonate ($179) and that's what I was going to have to pay as our vision insurance is generally regarded as the industry's worst. During the eye-examination, however, they could only find me under a new plan tied to my health insurance. That was news to me, and ended up saving me $227.





Last night was a Cub Scouts Den Meeting. My son is part of a "Pack" and several "Packs" make up a "Den" (so they tell me), and though I'm usually bored off my mind, a confluence of events have conspired together to ease the pain of these events. texas_tangent was visiting Anna Fine Wine & Spirits and spied these gorgeous cigar flasks which were part of the Evan Williams Single Barrel Gift-Set. She commented on how she knew just who to give these to, and the proprietor who knows us explained that they couldn't sell those because they had adhesive on them and gave them to her. She presented me with one the following weekend. Yes, one side holds a cigar, and the other, Single Malt Scotch.

My Den Meetings are much more pleasant now.

Thanks, texas_tangent!





And lastly, I've decided the reason I can't get Leopard to install and/or not crash once installed on teh max0r is because the CPU is overclocked. I was going to have a neighbor solder the contacts for me, but wife JUST walked out here with some extremely high-gauge coated ornament wire. I'm going to strip that and shunt the circuit myself. Leopard, here I come!

I miss playing 12-hour overnight games of Starcraft in the NOC 4-days a week with unixwolf and leonardii. Those were good times. I miss playing Diablo II with drax0r in Mass and the many weekends of SMACKDOWN LAN parties afterwards in Texas. I miss playing Dungeon Siege with danzigfried every night for 14-months after hours in Wichita. I miss playing Star Trek: Elite Force with celtmanx and drax0r until the middle of the night on the weekends, even though drax0r would kick our asses. Odd, since I don't consider myself a gamer. But give me a good RPG and a couple of guys, and I'm up all night. I don't enjoy single-player games, and I don't like playing online, even against people I know. I like a LAN game, usually cooporative, where you and your friends can get caught up in the excitement and share in the exhilaration of victory and the sorrows of defeat. I enjoy being a Warrior, taking (or sharing) lead with another tank while my trusty Rangers begin bombarding my prey before I even lay a hit. I like sharing my gold and outfitting myself and my counterparts with magical items that assist in more powerful blows and more substantial armor. I share my health potions freely and love it when someone wants to play the mage - simultaneously protecting the entire group with spells and casting healing on players which need it most. You really don't know a person until you've gone into combat with them. A simpler time.

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Rec'd my two soundtracks today. Oscar by Elmer Bernstein, and Gorky Park by James Horner. I've never heard a better rendition of Largo Al Factotum (from The Barber Of Seville) than this one, and now I know why - it was conducted by Mr. Bernstein himself!

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As CLI is much faster than GUI over VNC, I learned how to mount .dmg images on teh max0r, which makes installing new applications quick and pain free:

hdiutil attach [filename].dmg

From there its a straight recursive copy into your /Applications folder.I was looking for an OSX lj client which could import Semagic's .slj file if I started a post at work on my XP box and wanted to finish it up at home.

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Wife had a conversation with the contractor for the roof the other day. That marks the third time he's been over. He starts work next week. The insurance check more than covers the work, even it it runs over. The successful completion of this project will make the wife happy. We saved some money by doing all our own inside painting. I had him provide a second quote to paint the whole exterior of the house. And for an additional $600, put siding on just the front of the house to increase its curb appeal for future sell value.

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It's midnight and I'm still at work. We're halfway through the Blackberry server upgrade which will allow us to automatically send the DST patch to all the devices. Running on the old application, it would have required my staff touch each and every device...by next Sunday. And because this is the corporate headquarters, the client is always traveling. We did the upgrade tonight because the power is going down Saturday morning. I'm shutting down all my servers at 0530 for the weekend work. I'm also a week behind now because of the virus on my DST patching plan. I'm trying to play catch-up before I get thrown to the wolves, and I'm running out of time. I also have paperwork to do from rebooting and patching my production servers this past week during the virus battle, but our online repository database is also down this weekend. I plan to sleep sometime between 0600 and 2100 today.



Slept seven hours from 0600-1300; then went to Barnes & Borders and picked up the Original Cast recording of The Man of La Mancha. The I finished my Balvenie 12-year Double Wood Scotch. Its much nicer than Sheep Dip, and I update my scotch review to reflect. I'm unsure, based on this week's activities that I'll be able to go to bed at a decent hour. That being said, I'm going to dust off my Dungeon Siege Strategy Guide and game tonight.

What I enjoy most about scotch is the peat. As Jim, manager of PX Liquors in Saint Louis intoned, I like to 'chew the peat.' Unfortunately, quite a few of my selections were low on the peat-scale. Still, with a strong enough flavor (Isle of Jura)¹ or a rougher body (Balvenie 10)² I've found that I can drink my way past the peat. Considerable time & expense have gone into the above study, and it was a joy each and every step of the way. I'm still short a couple I would have liked to have added, namely, a scotch I hear they don't make any more I tried back in '02 (Bowmore Darkest 12-year) introduced to me by Mr. Green of Wichita, and (Oban 14-year) which PX Liquors has for $58 a bottle. At the prices I've found recently, and with my wife's affection for the Isle of Jura, I think I'll exhaust that supply first. But I'm still searching for that peaty bottle of scotch...

Concerning Tea
Wife and I left her parents house sans kids by 0900 and hit the post office to pick up a giant package my parents had sent the children. From there we had a cup of Amaretto Roobios at the local tea shop and purchased $30 of loose tea. We then stopped by Borders where I picked up a book for galinda822 and bought myself Concrete Blonde's Mojave. Visited a model home in a new sub-division my wife found when she was here in October - We'll be able to afford it according to my wife's 5-year plan, but it was at least as roomy as our house in Texas. Sounds good to me. On to Wal-Mart! We'd been so looking forward to visiting a real, Super Wal-Mart, but as it turned out, we ended up spending about $25 on some socks and deoderant and were in and out within half an hour. Sometimes, you can't go back home.



Meeting Go Granny Go
Met Go Granny Go and her husband for lunch at Spangles. It was a delightful meeting - Go Granny Go is so outgoing and engaging! We discussed timely topics, such as ProfessorTom and where to find good french fries in Wichita. As is usual for these types of meetings, there was way too much to cover in such a short period of time, but we did discover that they live approximately 200 feet from my in-laws. How funny is that? And of all the luck, they're heading to Texas Thursday. Safe driving Granny! She's always on the Go! ^{Read Granny's account of our meeting here...}



Concerning Wine
After lunch we visited "Under the Cork," the front-end sales to Smokey Hill Winery where I discovered my new favorite red, 'Simply Red.' If any of you recall, this is where I found the Eiswein last year, and who's master wine maker had been killed earlier that year as well, that tidbit is only important because they recently discovered a handful of bottles of port, with nothing more than '815' marked on the bottle. Apparently, they're fantastic. They had them tested to determine the ingredients, but are unable to reproduce it. They were selling for $72 each, and I must admit, I was tempted. After the tasting (oh no, the port was NOT included in that event) we ended up with three bottles of the red, a bottle of Christmas white (complete with mulling kit), another bottle of Spatelese, and a set of four etched wine glasses. Furthermore, we discovered they deliver to Missouri ;)

Concerning Cigars
Saw Nabil at Old Town Cigars; wife bought a box of Cojimar Sage when she found out they're no longer in production, and I purchased a single La Gloria Cubana 8x52 which I smoked at the River City Brewery across the street while downing two pints of a very peatty 8% Scottish Ale which they've dubbed 'Fat Bastard.' (Yes, it was fantastic.) When we were checking out at the cigar store, I asked Nabil if he remembered the cigar he gave me at the birth of my daughter. He did, and upon discovering I smoked it when she turned one, asked how it was. I was truthful - The Best Cigar I had Ever Smoked. It was a 1993 La Gloria Cubana: 10-years old when I smoked it. (While this is mostly a true statement, I did buy a gorgeous box of 12-year old Temple Halls once from J.R. Cigar while I was stationed in Korea. Those were really too good to talk about.)

Concerning Scotch
While we were out, I picked up a 10-year old bottle of Glenfarclas Scotch. As I'm not overly familiar with too many brands of Scotch yet, and I wasn't looking to drop a fortune on a bottle, I played ophthalmologist-patient with the very knowledgeable imported beer dude at my new favorite liquor store: "which do you like better, A or B? Now C or D?" We settled on a preference for Single Highland Malt. Which reminds me, I did get a most delectable sample-pack of what I consider my favorite to date, The Balvenie at a truck stop of all places on the drive down! It included one 10-year, one 12-year, and one 15-year. So far I'm halfway through the 10-year, and I love it. I only hope I'm not disappointed in the Glenfarclas, else I'll probably never buy anything else and just stick to The Balvenie. Its the only Scotch that makes me really, really, happy. I owe my renewed interest in Scotch to photogoot and for that will be forever grateful. To further drive this point home, I'm saving the 12 & 15-year for his January visit.



The Canon
Stopped at Best Buy to touch, for the first time, the Canon S3 IS after all the research this past month. $545 out the door which would have included the double-speed 2GB SD card, 4 NimH batteries & charger, and tax. My wife suggested I just go ahead and get it. I think she was drunk from all the wine tasting and that pint of Fat Bastard. But seriously, now that she's seen it, and I was able to answer all her questions about it (I didn't notice this at the time, but she told me later that as I was answering her questions about the differences in it versus the SLR, last minute shoppers had surrounded me and gotten quiet so they could listen too) I think I'll just save for that. And even though its more expensive at Best Buy, I try to purchase all my high-dollar electronics there for the 4-year replacement policy.

Concerning Egg Nog
10-hours of sleep later, I took my father-in-law and children out of the house for the day to allow my wife and her mother uninterrupted access to the kitchen in preparation of Crimbo. We went to McDonalds for breakfast and played on the indoor equipment for an hour, visited my father-in-law's brother & his children & grandchildren for an hour, stopped by the grandparents for an hour, played in the park for an hour, and spent
another hour dropping off gifts and grocery shopping on the way home. I grilled some perfect steaks for dinner and we dined like kings. My mother-in-law made a custard pie for her husband's birthday, then all six of us piled into the car to see the Xmas lights. When we returned I spiked my egg nog with the only thing alcoholic I had in the house - my scotch. Turned out to be the best egg nog I've ever had.

Christmas Day
My father-in-law built a fire out by the garage and we stood around it in fingerless gloves singing doo-wop like homeless people waiting for guests to arrive. The meal was expansive, and it was nice seeing everyone again. My mother sent two Power Rangers (the new series 'Overdrive' expected to hit U.S. television in February is about teen civil engineers of all things) for a total of three my son rec'd and two Transformers. My mother-in-law bought the largest one I've ever seen, Cybertron Primus who transforms into an entire planet. Most all of the larger toys, this one has three modes, one of them being 'battle mode.' I tell you, it looked just like the Reaver ship from the opening sequence of Serenity. Anyway, I was playing with it, flying it around attacking my son's Decepticon's, when much to my surprise, my wife pops out with, "Cool, it reminds me of Firefly." *grin* I love my geek-woman. Lori and I made out with $150 combined cash, and my daughter ended up with two Polly Pocket sets from my mom, hand crocheted blanket using four colors my daughter picked out, and a submersible, swimming mermaid from my mother-in-law. And that's just the big stuff...they've got enough new toys to last them at least a fiscal quarter, and there's more toys they haven't seen yet back home that galinda822 placed under the tree after we left. I think I'm going to save for that S3.

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^{This entry brought to you via the 26.4 kbps dial-up connection free with my home DSL account. Thanks to drax0r for finding me a number. I assure you, it was all I could not to not swallow my tongue getting these few pics up. I look forward to catching up with all of you online when I return.}