Forty-Two

UPDATE October 18, 2009: Jill has written a response to a rather appalling Op-Ed article called “Health-care reform language changes, still means same thing” By Phil Valentine, October 11, 2009 in the Tennessean and her extremely well-written response was published. Here are links to both: Op-Ed Original Article and Jill’s published response. Way to go Jill!

UPDATE October 6, 2009: Reply from Jill with her photos (click the thumbnails for the full size photos):

Dear Family:

I am so very thankful for the technological gifts of Debi and Sean!  Thanks so very much to you both!  You guys are amazing.

If anyone hasn’t read about the President’s Plan for Health Reform, please do. You will find that all of us will benefit from the changes proposed. Several changes are common to all the proposals before  Congress. I would like any plan that truly gave all Americans access to high quality insurance/health care — that was portable across state lines, illnesses and job changes. A public option seems essential. You can argue that we don’t need more government involvement, but insurance companies do not appear to provide a better alternative. Remember, most patients who have Medicare or VA benefits, which are public options, are quite content.

Don’t worry, the way doctors are paid drives a lot of the costs in our system. Doctors have to take sizable responsibility for the mess we are in. These issues are also being addressed, even though payment reform talk/planning is happening behind the scenes. It will come. Malpractice reform, a Republican push, is MOST wonderfully welcome.

If anyone doesnt know what happens when 50 yr old people with heart failure, hypertension and diabetes lose their jobs, and then their insurance, lose access to medication and doctors, I can provide the gory details.

This can happen much more easily to “us”  than you can imagine.

A great web site for information is the Kaiser Family Foundation – they compare all plans, in a nice chart, provide info on immigrants, all sorts of reform topics etc.

Sorry for the lecture!  I would be happy to field questions.

-Jill (posted with permission)

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October 5, 2009: My cousin Jill Jones was at the White House today, in the audience of about 150 white-coated doctors for President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden in support of his Health Care Reform Plan. Jill is a doctor in Nashville, Tennessee and her visit to Washington today (at her own cost!) even got her featured in an article on WBIR, the local Nashville NBC affiliate’s website. (Special thanks to Sean for finding that article. Very cool!)

She’s actually really easily seen in this video from the White House’s own WH.gov from YouTube between the 0:37 and 0:40 time marks. She’s sitting on the aisle of the far side in the third row from the front. She’s smiling and then she holds up her camera to take a picture of the President. Classic. Maybe she’ll send me the picture she took to post. I’ll ask her.

The video from Boston’s NECN of the same speech starts with a pull-back photo of the audience with Jill clearly visible in the audience in front of the President, once you know where to look for her. (Click the picture to get to the video – they have a long ad at the beginning which I find annoying so I didn’t embed).

She also was featured in quite an “almost cameo” in PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer segment called, “Talking to Doctors” (Click the picture below for the video – she’s featured at the 19:20 mark of their countdown, but the beginning of that segment). I was able to watch it on the program when it aired today, Monday, October 5th, 2009 since my mom saw it and mentioned it during my weekly phone call and since it airs in Wisconsin an hour earlier then Denver, my timing was perfect to turn on the NewsHour and almost immediately see her! Yay!

So a big heartfelt “Kudos!” to Jill for being so awesome that she flew to Washington on her own dime and stood up in a professional capacity to support our true need for reform in the health care industry. I have such a cool family.

The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett are three great young-adult novels. They are getting a little dated, but I still handed them over to my godson A.J. when I was done because I’m so sure he’ll like them. It has it all from adventure and excitement to kids knowing more than adults to the supernatural. What more could you want?

The first novel, Only You Can Save Mankind, is about the protagonist Johnny Maxwell who is eleven or twelve, and he gets a video game from his computer-hacker-wannabe friend and starts playing it. It’s the classic kill-em-all game against space invaders and he’s doing ok until the aliens say they want to surrender. Then it all gets a little weird. It’s a great story and a great message. I liked it a lot.

Johnny and the Dead, the second novel in the series, is also great. After the story of the first book has ended and some time has passed, Johnny frequently walks home past the cemetery that is going to be displaced by some modern buildings and starts to see ghosts… err… post-alive persons. When they find out what is going to happen to the cemetery, all kinds of things start to occur. Not quite zombies, but still a lot of good stuff!

The third novel, Johnny and the Bomb, involves some time travel to Johnny’s town in England during WWII. His interest in what happened there back then seems to have helped influence the time travel path his friends and himself find themselves on, but then when they make a mistake and one of their friends can’t make it back to their time, what do they do? It’s a great take on the time travel paradox and a really entertaining read.

Terry Pratchett, as usual, is awesome in his story-telling and he adds a lot of great lessons on the way, such as race and gender issues from the past to the present, crime and prejudice issues, and the psychology of “winning” as a goal as well. The first novel’s period take on computers and video games is a fun retrospective as well. Although the novels are well written and make a great story, they read a little young for the average adult reader. For a young adult, age 10 to 13 or so, I would think they would be awesome. The kids are really in charge, can pretty much do anything they want, and they make a lot of good choices although not always necessarily on purpose, and they are a lot of fun. Still highly recommended. It is Pratchett after all.

We watched the cute homage to Star Wars geekery, Fanboys, last night and I really got a kick out of it. Besides all the great cameos (including Jay and Silent Bob, Yay!) I really reveled in the period nostalgia and cute story set in the time of pre-but-imminent “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” when Star Wars was still only about the classic three films (before Lucas made the crappy new ones) and there was still the big Star Trek vs. Star Wars epic battle going on between geeks. It was a cute film and I got a kick out of it. Afterwards, though, I totally started thinking about the geek that was me during that era and how my life may have been different if I’d made other choices in my life. I coulda been a geek contenda! Of course I was kind of the “geek of all trades, master of none” just like I am in every other aspect of my life. Maybe if I had channeled one of those trades, I could be a true Professional Geek (a la Woz) instead of a temp secretary at a company that makes rocks only dreaming of those days.

I could have been a fanboy geek. I remember spending hours playing with Barbie and Ken dolls acting out “Star Wars: A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back” scene-by-scene (no dialogue omitted) with my friend Jessica and watching the VHS tapes of those same films over and over again on her fancy VCR that was still way cutting edge at the time. We always made sure to say the lines while the actors did. We rocked it. We were in second or third grade, I think. But by fifth grade when Return of the Jedi came out, I had moved into town and away from Jessica. I don’t even really remember seeing that film when it came out, although I almost assuredly did. So I guess, “What If” I had stayed that into the franchise? I’m sure I could have been a “fanboy” like the characters in the film. I mean, I never even got into the Star Trek franchise until TNG came out in late 1987 when I was going into my freshman year at high school and I really did always have a soft spot for Han Solo. Oh sure, I know I collected the action figures for TNG and DS9 religiously (still NIB when I sold them last year at our garage sale!), but it wasn’t the same true geekery since I also started really getting into bands all hardcore then, too. Maybe I would have gone into film or something. Who knows.

Well, how about the science geek? I subscribed to Discover magazine in middle school and still have a subscription to New Scientist (best magazine EVER!). I joined the Science Team in middle school for a year but got bored with it since as a newbie I wasn’t allowed in the competition that year. I aced all my science classes but I wasn’t allowed to take a Physics class in high school since I ditched out of Trigonometry because of the lame basketball-coach-turned-math-teacher that taught it. Without physics, I ended up taking art classes to fill up my time and never really pursued the study of science. I still love reading the XKCD comics and I love the Big Bang Theory tv show. I kinda figure if I had gone that route, I would have ended up a little like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, all socially inept and all.

With the art background, I could also have been a comics geek, since I totally had a crush on this guy Jon in 6th grade who was so into TMNT comics (before that franchise really became anything else) and introduced me to the genre. If not for him, I never would have discovered the Sandman graphic novels later in life and appreciated the work of Neil Gaiman. But Jon wouldn’t date me in 6th grade, so I know I looked down on comics after that and there went my chance of being a comics geek and drawing or inking comics or working in or running a comics store. Although my pilgrimage to Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank, New Jersey  in 2001 does tell of my secret longing for that lifestyle. That and my huge crush on Kevin Smith that never really went away even after he got married and started making kinda lame films like Jersey Girl.

And the computer geek? Sure I cut out pictures of Cray computers and put them in my locker in high school. But we didn’t own a computer and I never even programmed anything until I took a BASIC class in college after I graduated from Graphic Design school and had used GUIs for years on Macs learning Adobe and PageMaker and QuarkXpress. I had worked in semiconductor manufacturing for four years before I had ever written a line of code (making chips out of four-inch silicon wafers – they were transitioning to six-inch when I left). Strange, that. I spent those years getting my degree while using those lovely green-screened VAX systems with Oracle databases and such beautiful NeXT systems with awesome graphics that ran our plasma glass deposition systems. By the time I quit that job (damned Liquid Acid Etch and crappy bosseswho wouldn’t transfer me out!) I had a real knowledge of what was inside them and a true love for computers and I hadn’t really ever worked on a PC. I got my first computer the year I quit the semiconductor job, a PC with Windows 3.x, but it was always lame compared to everything else I knew. It’s no wonder we’re a Mac family now. But I never got into programming since I did the GUIs first. I could still get into programming. I got Sean some programming for the iPhone books for his birthday. I might just have to read them.

Then there is the videogame geek. We had Radio Shack handheld games that my Dad stole from work before he stopped working there and gave them to us as gifts on the few occasions he’d show up in our lives when I was under 12, but that was about the extent that my exposure to video games was at a young age. In high school my friends and I would hang out at the arcade in the bowling alley, but I was more interested in eating the fried cheese curds and onion rings and watching Charles beat the original Zelda and Joust games than playing myself. Then Charles freaked me out by asking me out and I totally bailed on hanging out there anymore. Sure I watched TRON and The Last Starfighter, and read Ender’s Game, but honestly I didn’t get into video games at all until Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega after high school. Who knows what would have been if that had been my direction. I could have gotten into writing games or building them. Even now I have Sonic on my iPhone and we own an original Sega, a GameCube, and the Wii all with Sonic games but I don’t really have any inkling to play the Half-Life, WoW, or other games that were or are “all the rage” and our infrequent Rock Band sessions are more about singing karaoke than playing video games.

Besides the geeky arts, I was also a big-time book nerd, but that can only take you so far.

And I’m still a big book nerd. I mean, my favorite book of all time is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Which is pretty nerdy. And I’m working on the writing stuff. But nerdy isn’t geeky. We’ll just have to see if I can get my geeky sides to pay off.

Made it through the weekend of the best birthday ever! Did everything on the list: karaoke, brunch at Le Central, the Science Museum, Boondocks, brunch at the Glenn, and Dave & Busters. It was a blast!  

It started when I got to work Friday morning. My co-worker Christine had decorated my cube with banners, balloons, streamers, and everything and brought birthday donuts to share. My other co-worker Amie took me out to lunch at the Waterloo Ice House in Louisville where I had a fantastic potato burger and sweet potato fries. I will definitely go back there again! Then when we got back to the office, Christine had brought in homemade birthday cupcakes, too. Woo hoo!

Karaoke was a blast on Friday night. We got there early to have some dinner and I got a hug from everyone there who went together and got me some cupcakes (best cupcakes EVER!) and balloons (featuring a Hello Kitty one of course!).  Our friend Rob Roper (of singing fame) joined us and even bought me some drinks. I sang poorly but had a lot of fun. I even butchered an Eminem song. Ha ha.  What an awesome night! Special thanks to Evyn, Sarah, Jamie, Rachelle, Teresa, Dana, and well, everyone! 

Saturday morning found me hung over but we made our way to Le Central and had the most amazing breakfasts. Sean had their Eggs Benedict (Oeufs Benedictes) which he fell in love with. Came with the most delicious mashed potatoes and everything. Loved it! I had the Oeufs Sardous which are “Two poached eggs served on a mound of sautéed artichokes hearts, spinach, topped with Béarnaise sauce and served over toasted brioche” and I added truffles. Yum! We also had mimosas to help us along and really enjoyed it all.

After breakfast we came back and picked up AJ and Grace (John and Sherry’s kids) to go to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature and John and Sherry surprised me with a Dairy Queen frozen cake decorated with Hello Kitty shwag. Awesome! Then we booked it to the museum and had a blast. The kids showed us all their favorite stuff and I dragged them through the Gem exhibit which is my fave and they really seemed to enjoy it. Fun fun fun! After the museum we talked John and Sherry into letting us take the kids over to Boondocks, too and we played mini-golf, go-karts, bumper boats, and the arcade games. Grace and I even rode the MaxFlight simulator as a rollercoaster. Scary! Zowie!

Sunday morning we did brunch at the Glenn and Jamie surprised me with a gift of a bottle of Captain. She knows me so well. Sean’s parents John and Cindi joined us as well as Dave and Heather, and John, Sherry, and the kids did too. What a yummy breakfast, too. The Glenn always treats me right. I had the Chicken and Waffle. Best food ever! John and Cindi even gave me winter flip-flops (with fuzzy insoles, yay!). What a blast.

For birthday presents, my mom hooked me up with some gorgeous flower bulbs I can plant in the front garden, a new spade and gloves, as well as a promise for some yellow irises this fall when planting season begins. My sister called me with her two girls singing Happy Birthday to me and made my day. Sean of course got me a ton of awesome stuff including the much wanted “OMG Pwnies” shirt and the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies book and some other really cool books and toys. Way awesome!

The rest of “actual birthday day” was spent at Dave & Busters with John and Sherry, AJ and Grace, starting with a nice early dinner. I had the teriyaki steak. Super Yum. Sean’s brother Stuart and his girlfriend joined us and then we played games till the kids were exhausted including air hockey (my favorite!). After all that playing we turned in our tickets and ended up with 13,000 tickets! Crazy! AJ and Grace got bags of toys to take home and I qualified for Gold Card status. Zowie! 

But no, it didn’t end there! Despite having to go back to work on Monday morning, I decided to make a middle-eastern gluten-free meal for Sherry and her mom and we had that on Wednesday where I got to see my birthday-present apron that they were making for me. Friday night we went out again, this time to Pizzaria Uno’s where they have a gluten-free menu which Sherry and her mom declared wasn’t too bad and I got my apron which is AWESOME! and even got a bonus shopping bag they made out of another cool fabric. Way cool.

All-in-all it was truly the best birthday ever! It lasted over a week and I got to do everything I wanted to do and be surrounded by all of the coolest and most awesome people I know. Thank you to everyone! You can view all the pics on our SmugMug site. Yay! Yay! Yay!

Update 5/17/2009: I was blessed with getting two of these items for my birthday this year. I go the Pwnies shirt and the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies book. Love them! Thanks to everyone for making my b-day awesome!

Original Post: I saw the coolest new book on BoingBoing yesterday (it’s below) and realized that I can totally start coming up with gift ideas for my birthday since it’s coming up soon. So here’s my list of things I would love to get! Surprise me!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Classic Literature meets Zombies! How could it get any better than that?!

OMG Pwnies! T-Shirt
from ThinkGeek

With Glitter Ink! It’s girly and geeky at the same time! Yay!
XXL please if you’re buying.

Volupté by ZChocolat

It’s a box of chocolates AND a book! Two of my favorite things in one! Well, a pseudo book, but it looks like one! And the most fabulous French chocolates. This one’s more of a fantasy since I can’t justify the price for a cool box and 30 chocolates, but woo hoo would it be cool!

Cynthia’s Twigs Doggy Bicycle Basket

The European Market Basket – perfect for that chunky puppy – it’s metal re-inforced!

The Large Size please for that 10+ lb Chihuahua.

Motawi Tile Works art tiles

These are SOOOOO beautiful! I love them all! One on an easel looks so pretty. But I drool at the fireplace, bath, and kitchen installations! Zowie!

Caia Koopman’s framed art necklaces

So pretty and cool! How fun!

Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home – But Probably Shouldn‘t by Theo Gray

Happy Mutants rejoice! A science book to read and not necessarily emulate.

The i-wood by Kirsten Sorton & Jesse Willmon

Ha ha ha. Their sense of humor is awesome. This is SOOOOOOOOOO funny!  And it’s really available. AWESOME!

Read this gem of a product description for the music feature:

“With the i-wood’s all new music library sorting feature you can listen to anything you want at any time. In fact lets try a little experiment. Step 1: Think about your favorite song, the melody, the lyrics, how it makes you feel. That’s it! Can you hear the song in your head now?”

I’m sure I’ll think of something else, but for now this should give you some ideas!

Once upon a time when I was, like, 12 I came across a photo of the most beautiful computer that could ever exist in the world. It was round and had bubbles cascading down from it’s primary-colored and black physique. I remember I cut it out of the magazine (I think it was WIRED but I’m not sure. It could have been Discover or one of the other magazines I got at the time) and hung it up in my locker at school so I could see the beauty that the future of computing held every time I went for my books.

Years later, I still fondly remember that wonderful computer even though that beautiful-computer era never happened and was replaced with those ubiquitous ugly beige boxes that are just deadening-to-the-senses that showed up ever since. When I met Sean we talked about what got us into computers, him as a career and me as a hobby but also getting into computer-aided graphic design when Apples were just becoming “super-cool”, and I mentioned that it was that magazine photo of the most beautiful computer ever. He asked what kind it was and all I knew was that it had been a Cray. That’s it. I hadn’t cut out the article or ad or whatever it was in, just the photo, so I didn’t recall. I described it to him and he kept saying it had a bench on it. And I had to say I knew it didn’t but my internet image searches proved unsuccessful in finding a Cray without a bench on it (the Cray 1 as it turns out) so I didn’t think it was the same one I had seen (and it wasn’t).

Then yesterday it appeared. As if a vision from the heavens came down. There on BoingBoingGadgets was the very exact photo of the most beautiful computer that ever existed that had hung in my locker for an entire year of my youth and led me to where I am today. It is a Cray 2. And here it is in all it’s glory. According to Wikipedia “The Cray-2 was a vector supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing Cray’s own X-MP in that spot. The Cray-2 was capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance and was only bumped off of the top spot by the ETA-10G in 1990.”

Just rest a moment and enjoy the beauty that is there to be beheld. I still want one.

I love zombies.

For me it all started the first time I saw the original “Night of the Living Dead” by George A. Romero. A black-and-white film from 1968.

The whole ending was awesome where the good guy was victimized by the military that were supposedly there to “save” him. Ha. Zombies were neutral, just trying to get a brain to feed their hungry tummies, whereas mankind was truly a malicious evil. Wow. Blew my mind. Of course I was like 12. Still, I totally dug it. It was social commentary, race-issue commentary, and entertainment all wrapped up in one gripping drama-comedy-horror flick. What wasn’t there to enjoy?

Then came Romero’s follow-ups, “Dawn of the Dead” (shopping malls are awesome ways to escape the re-animated dead! Who knew? Loved it!) and “Day of the Dead” (not my favorite – too much military, ugh), followed by Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 “Return of the Living Dead” written by John Russo who co-wrote the original “Night of the Living Dead” and also the first Zombie film to use the now-ubiquitous “Brainnnnnsssss…..” line. Yay!

Now of course we have the modern films, “Resident Evil” and sequels – there is just something so cool about chicks that kick butt and save the day. Woo Hoo! (All awesome – I totally want to buy an Umbrella umbrella – available at ThinkGeek!) and the parody “Shaun of the Dead” which I still love even though it doesn’t take itself seriously. Still. Wicked fun.

But tied up in all of it is all the other stuff, too, like the video games “Evil Dead” and of course “Resident Evil”, and the popular culture references like the one in web comic xkcd (www.xkcd.com):

the cool t-shirts like this one that was featured on BoingBoing (www.boingboing.net) 

- yes, a Vegan Zombie who wants “GRAINNNS!”
Ha ha ha. Cracks me up every time.

Of course you also have Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video which is a classic and is even repeated as a “get everyone involved” dance in the cute retro “13 Going on 30” film which I loved.

And then there is the Zombie Survival Guide book by Max Brooks and of course the new Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith that I wrote about earlier. Fun fun fun!

All in all, it started with the fact that it was social commentary and went on to become fun and entertaining and a subculture all its own. Love it! More Zombies! Yay!

XKCD webcomic by Randall Munroe (www.xkcd.com)

The best web comic I’ve ever seen is actually going to be releasing a book! Woo Hoo! Not until June, though. I can’t wait! See the article at the New York Times here.