Pilgrim’s Progress

My daughter never speaks. Most weeks I spend two or three hours total driving her around in my car, and she never speaks, she just looks out the window. I often wonder what she’s thinking about, and today when I got the school newsletter I saw this poem she wrote:

Memories
Selene Means
Team 73

I am a piece of paper;
clean and blank,
now written all over
by others.

Words written in sharpie;
written in ink.
Staying there.
Forever.

Everything is written.
Everything.
Praises.
Compliments.
.Kindness.
Lies.
Hatefulness.
Misery.
Anger.

Sometimes it seems,
just seems,
kindness is outnumbered
by hurt.

But still,
I am a piece of a paper.
A home to these words.
Written in sharpie.
Staying with me.
Forever.
In memories.

It makes my heart ache, because I can’t give her any of my experiences, just watch her form her own. And hope.

I was exploring options for my friend (and mechanic) who wants to network his office and detached garage when I came across this Netgear product. If this really works, it will save me a huge headache in burying ethernet cable, etc. We’ll just have to see if it performs as advertised.

So yesterday my daughter got herself into trouble. Normally, she’s a really well-behaved girl, but last night she made up for a few months of good behaviour with one well-timed failure to obey her mother and some poor choices regarding a school orchestra recital. So to punish her, I’ve taken away her access to the computer for a week. Should be a snap, I think. In every version of Windows since NT I can just go in and disable her account. Child’s play. Wrong, sooo wrong.

I tried several approaches, some obvious, some not, but for some reason Microsoft decided that the account lock out feature is too dangerous for primitive Windows Vista home users. They don’t provide any access to it in the User Accounts applet through the Control Panel, and they’ve disabled access through the Computer Management MMC plug-in. After flailing around for about fifteen minutes (which for such a trivial thing felt like a lifetime), I suddenly remembered the old tried-and-true user account command line tool: NET USER.

Not to be confused with NET USE (which is for accessing shared network drives), NET USER lets you manage Windows user accounts from the command line. Feeling like I was only seconds away from my goal, I started a command prompt and got the command line help for the tool (NET USER /?). I get this output:

NET USER [username [password | *] [options]] [/DOMAIN]
username {password | *} /ADD [options] [/DOMAIN]
username [/DELETE] [/DOMAIN]
username [/TIMES:{times | ALL}]

Arrgh! Nothing remotely resembling the disable command I remember from 10 years ago. But, not willing to give up yet, I try NET HELP USER, and I see this:

(boring stuff elided)

(more boring stuff elided)

Victory! So I disabled her account, and it disappeared off of the login screen. She’ll think I deleted it, and I’ll go to sleep tonight satisfied that I have yet again managed to do something in 1/2 hour that could have been done with three mouse clicks a mere three years ago. Sigh.

I don’t know why he’s always been such a figure of fascination to me. Maybe it’s because my grandfather forced me to watch Firing Line when I was about eight years old. I remember seeing some old guy on the screen talking to some other old guy using words that I could not grasp. He was a truly remarkable man, no matter what you thought of his politics. His collected papers weighed more than 7 tons!!! Goodbye Bill, I don’t know who will use words like perspicacious in casual conversation now that you’re gone.

Score one for religious tolerance! The Sudanese president pardoned Gillian Gibbons, a British school teacher who was imprisoned for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed”. I don’t know what the big deal was, she only drew 15 days, and she was pardoned after only serving 9. Apparently there were some protesters calling for her to be executed.

I’m not going to pick on Islam in particular. Most religions tend to breed extremism in one form or another. Whether it’s people killing doctors at abortion clinics or flying airplanes into buildings, it’s amazing what people will do when they’re convinced that they are Right. Not just right, but Right. Thankfully, I’m never sure that I’m Right, so my mistakes are somewhat more limited in scope (like choosing the wrong drapes, for example). So I guess I’d better get rid of my toy octopus named Jésus, huh?

As most of you know, I don’t drink alcohol. No, I haven’t converted to Islam (yet, at least), but I haven’t had a drink since April 21st, 1993 at approximately 1:30 AM. How I remember it that exactly is another, much longer story. The point is that although I no longer drink, I like to stay informed about alcohol and the drinking culture in general. That’s why, when I was in Las Vegas last week (see this post) at the Global Gaming Expo show I acted as a personal drinking advisor to my good friend Ronnie. There was a section of the show dedicated to various libations, a veritable cornucopia of booze, which I helped Ronnie navigate with my savvy selections of liquors and wines. Below, you can see the progression of Ronnie’s drinking, in time-lapse format.

[Show as slideshow]

It has been a loooong time since my last post, but I feel that I have excellent reasons, and since it’s my blog, that’s good enough for me! Last week, I was in wonderful, wooley, Las Vegas, and it took me a few days to recuperate from that trip. For your enjoyment, here are some photos from my odyssey:

[Show as slideshow]

One of the many reasons I dislike Texas. Note the dead animal head.

I have arrived...

I guess the casino food & beverage guys don't have a ton of imagination.

See the comment for JustACafe.jpg.

This is the hotel we were staying in. I think it's just awesome that this is a relatively low-end hotel on the strip.

I can't see Trader Vic's without thinking of the lyrics to Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London.

Giving directions in Vegas must be a lot of fun for the locals. "Turn right at the Arc de Triomphe...

"Turn left at the Eiffel Tower...

"If you pass the giant Harley, you've gone too far." Awesome.

So I haven’t been to Sin City in more than a decade (and my oldest child is 12, cooincidence? I think not!), but next week I’m going out there with some friends to a gaming show. I’m pretty stoked! I haven’t had anything resembling an actual vacation for myself in a loooong time. If you don’t hear from me by next Saturday, assume I’ve ditched everything, changed my name to Vince, and become a blackjack dealer.

I finally did it. I did a quick count, and as far as I can tell I’ve started training in seven different martial arts styles in my life (not counting just auditing a teacher or trying something out for a month or two). In all that time, the closest I got to a black belt was a brown belt I received in Isshin Ryu just before my teacher relocated to Pennsylvania. Every time I’ve gotten close before either I moved, my teacher moved, or something truly bizarre happened (one of my teachers had been having an affair, left his wife, and absconded while owing back rent and tuition to several of his students).

Thursday night I finally managed to earn a black belt, and I’m still tripping about it three days later. My test was delayed three hours, so I didn’t finish testing until 11:15 PM. I couldn’t sleep afterward until 2:00 AM and spontaneously woke up two hours later.

I know that my knowledge today isn’t any better than it was last Sunday, and I know that the belt doesn’t really make any difference in what I do every day, but now when I’m talking to a non-martial artist I can tell them that I have a black belt instead of having to explain exactly where I am in my training. And now I can start teaching what I know to others and really start understanding what it is I’ve been doing for the last four years.

 Gaman!