This may come as a surprise to some of you, but engineers and scientists are not the best-dressed people around. It’s a different kind of badly-dressed than coders, whose ground state is a ratty t-shirt and jeans. Engineers and scientists often go in one of two directions: the corporate or the academic. The corporate involves a lot of solid-color polo shirts, occasionally sweaters, and khaki slacks. Stains and tears are optional. The academic look…well, it tends towards the coder look if you’re not careful.

There are a couple of things going on. One, we can’t pick clothes that match. Khaki slacks are preferred for just that reason: it’s much easier to find shirts that have a hope of matching if you’re wearing khaki. Two, we wear our clothes until they have gone out of style and come back into style.

With your help, we can solve this problem. I propose making a new line of Garanimals clothes, only for scientists and engineers instead of kids. Garanimals is a line of mix-and-match clothing for children. They come with animal hang-tags on them, so the kid can easily pick an outfit that matches. All rhino clothes go together, all monkey clothes go together, and so on.

Let’s extend that. Imagine having clothes that include geek-oriented hang-tags. Multi-function screwdrivers. A PCMCIA card. A klein bottle. Add to that an expiration date, like you find on milk cartons. Then the whole issue of dressing becomes one of finding matching hang-tags and making sure that the clothes haven’t expired. The expiration date could be adjusted depending on how quickly the clothes are likely to go out of style. We’ll have to charge extra money for clothes with expiration dates that are further in the future, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I wonder if VC money is available again?

Of late, Eli has taken to repeating “Mom? Mom? Moooooom?” over and over again. The typical conversation goes something like this:

ELI: Mom?
MISTY: Yes?
ELI: Mom?
MISTY: Yes?
ELI: Mom?
MISTY: Yes?
(ELI PAUSES AND LOOKS THOUGHTFUL.)
ELI: Mom?

Last night, Misty had had enough. Partway through the “Mom?” cycle, she said, “Eli, unless you have a question or something to tell me, pick a different word to repeat.”

Without missing a beat, Eli said, “Dad? Dad? Dad and mom? Dad and mom?”

My aunt said over Christmas that she would send Eli a copy of “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” in the mail since she has multiple copies and Eli, for whatever reason, has managed to not collect that book. This afternoon a large envelope came for Eli in the mail. I told him he’d received a package. He looked up at me and said, “Oh, it’s my “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” book. Of course, he was right.

So as you know from here and here, I’ve been working on a rather large cross stitch project. I predicted here that in six months I’d move on to a smaller project. It’s been four and here I am movin’ on. I decided that I wanted to do something for the baby’s room, not because I was bored with the dragon, that’s an acceptable excuse, right?

I had thought that I would move this piece (currently hanging in Eli’s room)

to the baby’s room but I decided that I wanted to do something different for the new baby. I found a pattern that I liked and I was lucky enough that Stephen’s mom already had it. Here’s the photo. And by the same artist, too!

I started on Thursday and here’s what I’ve gotten done so far.

See her dress? It’s right there. I can’t believe you can’t see it!

So all that to say I have MPD for cross-stitch. I’m guessing you aren’t all that shocked by my admission.

When I started work on The Fortunate Traveler, I thought it was the largest chart I had ever seen or put together. The book was 20 pages and took me about an hour to cut out of the photocopied pages and paste together. Well I’ve see the new winner in the chart-size arms race. While we were visiting Stephen’s parents, May (Stephen’s mom) tried to get me to take a pattern that she had ordered but had decided was maybe to complex to do. Her words were that she couldn’t “see” the picture in the pattern. When I opened up the pattern it was a whopping 36 pages of chart! Here’s the photo:

So I offered to put it together for her. Well, actually I didn’t offer, I told Stephen’s dad to make copies and bring them back to me and then I commenced to cutting and pasting. (I try to curb my autocratic tendencies but sometimes I can’t help it. I also art direct at nearly any opportunity but that’s not a big shocker for you either, I bet.) It took about two hours and the finished chart is actually in three sections but the whole thing is about five feet by four feet.

Once she saw the chart she decided that she might give it a try after all. I told her that the chart itself was enough art work all by itself so maybe she’ll just hang the chart and call it a day.

So today as part of the great after-Christmas cleanup, I pulled out the box of books that I knew was lurking in the guest room closet. Our guest room holds over 500 books. (No, you don’t have to sleep on books when you visit, I promise.) I honestly don’t know where they are going to migrate to over the next couple of months. I’m thinking about papering the ceilings with some of them. Now there’s a DIY project you want to tackle!

At the end of today’s scanning, I am officially in the home stretch. I only have the books in the living room to do and I think that I can knock those out in an evening. Movies and video games shouldn’t take that long either. Then the only other hurdle to jump is to get the music Stephen has scanned into the database somehow.

• 784 total books scanned.
• 84 books scanned today.
• Stephen’s Count: 476 total.
• My Count: 141 total.
• Eli’s Count: 165 total.
• Discards: 5. Four of the five were mine, do you see the pattern here?
• Discard Total: 48. On Tuesday this past week, we let the Nerd Herd pick through them so the stack is somewhat reduced.
• Rooms Finished: Kitchen, Eli’s room, master bedroom, guest room (for real this time!), and office.
• High Resale Value: The Simple Solution to Rubik’s Cube. Retail: $1.95. Current Resale Value: $64.49. Only ¢6 less than The Feynman Lecture Series of three volumes. That ought to explain how the world works, in case you didn’t know.

If you’re using an infant car seat or are in the market for one, Consumer Reports has some important information for you.

Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal crash. But most cars are also tested in a 35-mph frontal crash and in a 38-mph side crash. Car seats aren’t.

When we crash-tested infant car seats at the higher speeds vehicles routinely withstand, most failed disastrously. The car seats twisted violently or flew off their bases, in one case hurling a test dummy 30 feet across the lab.

The punchline: of the twelve seats they tested, only the Baby Trend Flex-Loc and the Graco SnugRide with EPS performed adequately. In addition, they found problems with some seats and cars’ LATCH system for securing car seats.

Madonna: Don’t Tell Me (2000)

The video is nicely matched to the feel of the song and has a strong and consistent style. When the Music album came out, a number of people returned it because this song’s stutters convinced them the CD was defective.
The video’s stutters at the beginning are even more eerie on YouTube, since you’re convinced the video hasn’t finished loading. There’s some subtle things going on — watch how, when the cowboys on the billboards freeze, the dust they kick up keeps moving. I don’t know what it means, but it’s nifty nonetheless. And who would have thought to see Madonna doing line dancing while sporting a nice tail and an elite squad from the New Cowboy Village People?

Boards of Canada: Dayvan Cowboy (2006)

This is one of those videos I could watch over and over. The echoey music is coupled with striking visuals that add a story to the song, one that fits nicely with the music itself. When I first saw this, I wondered where they got the footage of the man falling to earth. Wonder no longer: it’s from footage of Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr.’s jump from over 100,000 feet as part of the Air Force’s Project Excelsior. He rode a balloon up for an hour and a half; the trip down took nearly fourteen minutes. Crazy.

It takes up all the floor space in Eli’s room but this morning we solved part of that problem by putting approximately 900 toys inside the tent.

As requested, the sleeping bag inside the tent as well. Then we also needed the space blanket, inside the sleeping bag, inside the tent. Notice in the lower left corner the tiger phone, in case he needs to call from the deep, dark woods.

Eli snug in his sleeping bag. See the three hairs sticking out of the bag?

This tent is quite possibly the best invention ever. I hear him rattling buckets in his room. I think more toys just went into the tent. He stopped by just now to inform me that the Thomas blanket (as well as his space blanket and Nemo blanket) needed to be inside the tent.

Do you think it’s possible to fit the entire house inside of the tent? I’ll let you know when I have internet hookup in there…

One. Eli told me to count so that he could hide. When I finished counting and shouted, “Ready or not, here I come!” Eli giggled loudly and then leapt from his hiding place, grabbing me around the legs. “Here I am, daddy!” he said.

Two. Eli asked me to hide, so on a lark I sat next to Misty on the couch and pulled an afghan over me, hiding me from view. Eli passed me four or five times and only found me when Misty pulled back a corner of my cover for him.

Three. A while later I draped the afghan over an obviously empty chair. He went straight there and jumped onto the chair. Then he looked very confused.

Yes, yes, Geof, I heard you about the six questions bit. Sigh, the rigors of being wanted. I will point out in passing that this meme is actually ten questions long.

0) What’s your name and website URL? (optional, of course)

Stephen Granade. My website? You’re soaking in it.

1) What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? (two sentences max)

Maintaining a website about adventure games for a dot-com company back in the days when dot-com money materialized on every good kid’s doorstep. I got to talk to a lot of interesting people and play a fair number of good games, and–much to my surprise–I had a positive impact in several peoples’ lives.

2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)

Played in jam bands, whether jazz or otherwise.

B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)

Write genre fiction.

3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)

Hm, that’s hard. The first thing would be learning to ignore guidelines when doing so would be beneficial.

B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)

Chopin, though I have no idea what kind of piano masterclass he would give. I suppose I’d have to really brush up on my piano playing, though.

4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

Assuming the person in question isn’t mad at me when you ask them to describe me, maybe they’d go with empathetic, hard-working, and funny.

B. Now list two more words you wish described you…

Relaxed; tall. Actually, I’m not sure I really care about being tall, but it might be cool to try out for a while.

5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes– three sentences max)

1. Interactive fiction.
2. SF/fantasy, primarily written.

Those are the two most consistent ones.

6) (sue me) Write–and answer–one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)

What are you most proud of?

That one I’ll have to think about for a while.