Might as well. Don't expect any real thought to be involved.

THE FRIDAY FIVE

1. If you could only choose 1 cd to ever listen to again, what would it be? Practical answer: Some complicated Rachmananov thing that would take me decades to figure out. From the gut: Elvis Costello, The Juliet Letters.

2. If you could only choose 2 movies to watch ever again, what would they be? I should really pick a couple of those movies that you can watch over and over again that they always play on TBS, like Groundhog Day or The American President. But I'll say Rushmore and Reservoir Dogs.

3. If you could only choose 3 books to read ever again, what would they be? Shogun, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, and a world atlas.

4. If you could only choose 4 things to eat or drink ever again, what would they be? Blueberry cobbler with ice cream, salame picante pizza from Fritti, Jaeger schnitzel mit spatzle, and some unbottled, unpasteurized German pilsner straight from the source. [Wipes drool from chin.]

5. If you could only choose 5 people to ever be/talk/associate/whatever with ever again, who would they be?
Aside from Marjorie? I bow out of this one too.

THE FRIDAY FIVE

1. If you could only choose 1 cd to ever listen to again, what would it be?
Wow, that would be really tough decision. At the moment I'm leaning towards Abbey Road/The Beatles

2. If you could only choose 2 movies to watch ever again, what would they be? Amelie and American Beauty.

3. If you could only choose 3 books to read ever again, what would they be? I don't know, I'm very glad this isn't a realistic scenario. Off the top of my head I'll say "Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong, "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and "Nine Stories" by J.D. Salinger.

4. If you could only choose 4 things to eat or drink ever again, what would they be? I'm going to be greedy and assume I can have 4 things to eat, and 4 things to drink. Drink: milk, water, Alice White Chardonnay, and Harp Lager. Eat: Spinach, Rice, Pinto Beans, and Monterey Jack cheese.

5. If you could only choose 5 people to ever be/talk/associate/whatever with ever again, who would they be?
What a boring life that would be... I guess if forced to be in a jail cell with 5 companions I'd choose my husband Mark....besides that I'm not going to choose. Too much potential for offending people I love and care about, (of which there are more than 5).

The beauty of real life is that I have choices and thank God for it. I'd hate to have to restrict myself to such a limited selection of ideas.

After lunch today we snuck off into HobbyTown USA. A cow orker bought a MicroSizer. They're way cool. I want to be able to buy stuff again!

Congratulations go out to Jimmy Carter, on winning the Nobel peace prize. It is richly deserved. It's hard to think of any troubled area of the world in the past twenty years where Jimmy hasn't tried to step in and use his clout as a force for good, by arranging negotiations, monitoring elections, or just focusing the spotlight of the press on wrongdoers.

By the way, the Carter Center mentioned in that article is walking distance from our house...

Uhm..... Mark's last post there is hard to follow. Sobering isn't it, but truly is anyone suprised that the Bush Administration would have something in common with facists. I generally remain shockingly ignorant about the political goings-on of the world. It's emotionally too much for me to deal with, and I feel utterly impotent in the face of it. Worse, I know I contribute, and perhaps AM the problem because I choose to remain ignorant. Me and the majority of the country. Sigh.
Work today really sucked. This morning a mother asked me one of the many dreaded standard questions. This time it was "Do you think she'll be delayed for the rest of her life?". When you work with people who have very young children with disabilities you get asked lots of questions of this ilk all the time....and they are sooooo difficult to respond to. I want to be honest, but generally it's not the best policy to share my "honest opinion". Children are malleable, especially at the ages I see these little ones (birth to three), so even if the little one is significantly delayed now, it doesn't neccesarily mean that the child will have significant delays in a year....but.. they probably will. So, knowing that, how do you respond? My usual reply is that it's impossible to predict, which is true, but I still feel like I'm not being entirely upfront with these families.
In general though, I love my job, and I'm lucky to be in a position where I can help people.

Posted without comment:

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Go, carbon-based bipeds! After grandmaster Gary Kasparov was humiliated by the computer program Deep Blue in 1998(?), many thought that computers had surpassed humans in chess for good. Well, the humans are battling back. Yay, us!

I think many are amazed that computers can compete with humans at this high level of intellectual competition. Me, I'm amazed that humans even have a chance against machines that can consider bajillions of board positions every second.

I wrote a chess program a few years back. It's called Buzz, which was my father's nickname growing up (he's the one who taught me how to play chess -- hi Dad!). If you can compile a C program, you can check it out. It was a lot of fun to write. It even beat me a few times (I'm a sloppy player). Someday I'll go back and work on it some more. Maybe I can put a web interface on it...

Weird how the brain works, isn't it? I was just typing the word "constants" and instead typed "constance". I type homonyms like that all the time -- I guess the part of my brain responsible for typing occasionally just "takes dictation" from the part of my brain that is internally "speaking" what it wants to have written. And I occasionally will type commands from programming languages I haven't used in years, out of the blue.

Marjorie and I both have books and movies and such indexed in our brains by their first letter, and at least for me, by the length of the words I'm trying to remember. Recently I was trying to come up with a book title that I wanted to read, but all I could remember was that it was one long word that started with an "C". (It was The Corrections, by the way.) We both do that all the time (especially when we play trivia games!).

Another weird thing I experience is that when I play word games such as Yahoo Word Racer, and I get in a "zone", memories of things long forgotten, unrelated to anything else I'm thinking about, will occasionally pop into my brain. It's sort of trippy.

Oh, and the alarm clock in the morning. I can't tell you how many times I've been completely confused as to its purpose when I wake up, or think that I can just turn it off (instead of snoozing it) for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever, or just plain forget how to work the snooze button. All because my brain has yet to engage. It just utterly befuddles me just about every morning.

I'm sure everybody's brains do strange things from time to time...

Now how can I write about the baseball game I saw tonight without looking like an insensitive clod? Anyway, while Marjorie was feeling sad, like a typical male I was at game 5 of the Braves series against the Giants, with Marjorie's dad and some friends. And we lost, and the season is over. I got to see living legend Barry Bonds hit a home run. And it may be the last game I see for... ever?

Now I'm all melancholy...

HI HO, HI HO, It's off to Ho Chi Minh we go...
I'm a wreck today. I think I'm suffering from "oh my God! What have we done?!" syndrome, with a little premature grieving thrown in for good measure. I haven't even begun to worry about all the things we need to do. I'm still too emotional, worrying about all the things we're leaving. In my saner moments, I know we've got plently of time to prepare ourselves for this move. The actual packing process should go pretty smoothly. The hard part will be deciding what to take, and what to leave, but in some small way, I think having these extra months to contemplate the move will make it easier for me to leave some non-essentials behind. It's just stuff after all. What I will have trouble leaving are the people in our lives, particularly my parents and their dogs Beau and Sadie. Sounds silly to miss dogs, but ya know, they don't e-mail, and they don't talk on the phone, and worse than that, they don't know you still care about them when you're gone. As for my parents, they do e-mail, read our blog, and talk on the phone, but it's been nice having them so close for the last several years (they live in the Atlanta area too) and I know I'm really going to miss them. I'm not as worried about missing my friends for some reason. Most of my best friends live far away from us now, so our day to day relationship won't change much with regards to the move-I can still e-mail them and talk on the phone, and I hope/believe Mark and I will still try to see them at least once a year regardless of where we live. The blog will also help us keep in contact, I hope, that was the original reason for starting this.
I know everything will probably be fine, and truthfully, it's so much easier to do this now then it was when my parents moved overseas for the first time more than twenty years ago thanks to the internet. But it's still a little scary, and a little sad to leave our present lives behind.

Now what? We have so many other things to do. I don't know about Marjorie but I'm going to have to deny myself the fun of looking through tourist guidebooks, except to reward myself for getting other things done. First things first. I have to get my paperwork in order for Australian immigration, and that's a major pain. We have to get all our doctors visits scheduled too -- lots of innoculations still left to get, and I need a physical and an eye exam. There are bank accounts to set up too.

Couples having their first child often fret that they don't know what they're doing, and people always assure them, "It's okay, no one ever does, the first time." This is maybe a little like that. Without the labor pains though.

Thoreau once wrote:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not LIFE, living is so dear... I wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms... and be able to give a true account of it...

I've been thinking about this passage a lot. The "marrow" bit has been quoted overmuch lately -- it's the deliberately that really resonates with me. Almost all of what I (or maybe we) have done with our lives up to this point has been the path of least resistance. And there has always been friends or family nearby for counsel. This is the first real deliberate thing I've (we've) ever done, and with that comes enormous potential for self-doubt. Marjorie's right, though, we really have nothing to lose. We'll only have each other to count on, but that's not chopped liver.

HOLY GEEZ!
We've finally done it. We booked our tickets for Singapore tonight. We leave on Thanksgiving Day (sorry Mom and Dad). It's exciting, but scary. I've been so anxious to do this, but I have to admit that I feel some trepidation now. I suppose that's the nature of change. We really don't have anything to lose though. Worse case scenario, we spend a few months traveling around Southeast Asia, before we look for work in S'pore, and if we don't find anything we'll have to come back to the States. IF that happens, we wouldn't really have lost anything, and we will have had the chance to explore another area of the world.
At the moment, our plan is to go to S'pore, leave most our things at our friend's place, then fly to Hanoi to start our travels.We'll probably travel (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand head the agenda) throughout December/January until Chinese New Year's (Feb. 2 this coming year). After Chinese New Year we'll get serious about looking for work. In the meantime, we're still trying to submit our migration paperwork to Australia so eventually we could look for work there.
The next few months should be pretty exciting.

FRIDAY FIVE
This week's Friday five is devoted to shoes. Finally, a Friday five I can get behind ;^)

1. What size shoe do you wear? I usually wear a 7.5, for some shoes I wear an 8. This in an European 38, and a Japanese 24.

2. How many pairs of shoes do you own? Less than 20 (barely), which considering I have a bit of a fetish lately, isn't too bad.

3. What type of shoe do you prefer (boots, sneakers, pumps, etc.)? Judging by my shoe collection, I'm a fan of slides (open-toed or mules).

4. Describe your favorite pair of shoes. Why are they your favorite? I recently acquired a lovely pair of black mules with little flowers stitched into the top and little pointy one inch heels. They're so cool. The first day I wore them this salesguy at Banana Republic was fawning all over them, pointing them out to other salesfolk and such, and he told me "you must be sick to wear those in public".

5. What's the most you've spent on one pair of shoes? Honestly, the most I've spent on shoes is probably a little over a $100.00 several years ago on a pair of Birkenstock Boston's. I bought those shoes when I was a very poor undergraduate, and at the time that was an outrageous amount of money for me to spend on shoes, but they lasted forever and I plan on buying another pair soon. Generally though, I'm a bit of a cheapskate so I'm not likely to spend much more than $50 on a pair of trendy shoes.

The other day I wrote about how we can't even get data to test with. So yesterday I wrote a utility where you can spoof whatever data you want as if it were coming from the back end. It works just spiffy. I feel all proud of myself.

Bossman is impressed, I think. I was just happy to have some stimulating work to do.

ANY IDEAS
Mark and I want to buy a digital camera for our trip. Preferably something with lots of memory for pictures, that doesn't eat batteries, and is ideally pocket sized so as not to attract too much attention. Anybody know of something like that, or have a camera they really love?

Is anybody besides me really disturbed by "The Bachelor"? I caught about 10 minutes of this show last night and it really horrified me. How desperate are these women!? The whole idea is really wrong. The trend of lots of women vyiing for one "eligible" man (i.e. "Who wants to marry a millionaire") on television is a really disturbing notion to me. What is this teaching young girls watching these shows? What happened to all the momentum behind the women's rights movements of the Seventies, do people think we've achieved equality now? If anything it seems shows like this are giant leaps backwards in terms of women gaining equal status in this culture.

I was listening to 91.1 WREK on the way home Tuesday. This is the station that's been known to play hours of squeaking saxophones and the sound of plates breaking (I've always thought their motto should be "91.1. Hunh?"). Anyway, they said to call in if you wanted tickets to see Enon, so I called in and won, for the first time ever. So I went and saw them last night. I wasn't all that familiar with their stuff, but I took a friend who's a fan. They're an above average indie-rock band. It was good stuff, but they didn't go on until 12:45am. Yikes. I'm feeling it today.

In other music news, somehow Polyphonic Spree (that band I was raving about a while back) made it to number 17 in Blogdex, a site which ranks links by how many people in the blog community have included them. They must be catching on...

Gotta love working with the public.
I had my own version of work woes today. The first family I was scheduled to see claimed (incorrectly) the appointment was supposed to be at 2:00pm, I was there at 9:00am. Also, the mother didn't realize that I, and the speech therapist accompanying me, needed to see the child, she assummed that for the EVALUATION she just needed to fill out more paperwork. When we explained we did need to see the little one, she claimed she couldn't wake him up because he won't cooperate with her. Just to clarify, I am not the first contact people have with our agency. First there is an intake process where someone comes out to fully explain the program and the evaluation process to the family. Next, an evaluation appointment is scheduled, generally over the phone with the parent to make sure the appointment is scheduled at a time that's good for the family. Next, a letter goes out giving the family written confirmation of the appointment. Then finally, the day before the appointment, a service coordinator calls the family to remind them of the appointment. I'd like to point out that the first assessment was scheduled at the family's home, so all they had to do was be there, answer the door, and wake up the kid. Some days that's just too much effort for people. But I guess I shouldn't complain because I'm getting paid (thanks taxpayers).

I'm so glad I only contract for this company. On my desk sits a little commemorative lucite plaque/trophy that has the company logo and says "Extreme Effort" on it. They had a big box full of them, and handed them out the other day. There's a date on them too -- five months ago. No names or anything though. Color me motivated!

It's more than that. This is a long contract -- I've been here fifteen months now. We've been building a web site for a government agency. Our company insisted on using their COBOL back-end database, which is a 1960's technology. And the people responsible for maintaining this database are several steps removed from us. We're not allowed to talk directly to them. (The front end, BTW, is mainly Java servlets and JSPs.)

To top it off, now they are denying us the use of any data in the database we use for testing. So, we have to code functionality into the web pages we're building, then submit it to them and hope it works. It's rather like trying to paint a picture by reaching around from behind the canvas.

And when there are problems, they are reported to us using the company issue bug reporting software, which is mainframe-based, and was designed by dullards. For instance, to view the second page of a bug, you type slash-D-1, then hit the F11 key. (Why? My personal theory is that it's an inside joke.) If you want an idea how old this software is -- it prominently features the color cyan in its interface. Cyan is as sure a sign of obsolescence in software as Bakelite is in telephones.

Myself and the core group of developers here could have easily had this thing built in three months with a decent database we could actually access. Heck, we could've even handled that end of it ourselves. But if we did it that way, it would have only ended up faster and easier to maintain.

How can I complain though? As a contractor, I'm expected to just do the work and cash out. And fifteen months getting fat on the company teat is nothing to scoff at, especially with the job market the way it is right now. Still, it would be nice to contract like this for a company that isn't always reaching over its shoulder to scratch its backside.

I don't want to work today. The office is freezing, inspiring me to look into Websites for the Vietnamese mountains. I'm thinking maybe Christmas in Sapa would be nice. This place looks all right.
Mark and I are going to New York City probably next weekend. We saw a deal for the Alqonquin hotel. Now the real question is whether or not it's worth a couple hundred dollars to sleep where Dorothy Parker and pals used to get witty (and loaded) on a regular basis.