Webthoughts

Today was my last day of vacation before heading back to work tomorrow. It was a pleasant week, overall. My wife and I travelled for a few days (we did the final closedown of the lake house for the year and also went to see my grandmother in Cozad, NE), but most of the time we spent at home--fall yard work, house cleaning, some work on the truck and so forth filled my time.

My wife painted the living room on Friday. She used a color called "Kitten Fluff" which is a medium-shade beige color. It's a good color and compliments the room nicely. I gave her a hard time about the name of the color, though. "Kitten Fluff" indeed!

Of course, with painting comes moving of furniture, which, in turn, brings cleaning. The house, as a result, got a pretty good cleaning. Not the best, but definitely much needed. We felt so good about it, we invited my parents over to watch the Nebraska/Iowa State game on TV on Saturday night. Nebraska won, so it was a good day.

And now, on the eve of going back to work, Fall has arrived in force. Temperatures have fallen and it's turned cloudy and potentially wet. Cold and wet are on tap for the next several days. In fact, I just noticed the first leaves turning colors on the Silver Maple tree in our front yard (usually the first tree in our yard to turn each year), so I have leaf cleanup to look forward to here in the next few weeks. My wife purchased a leaf blower/vacuum the other day though, so I look forward to using that to clean up those leaves.

So, back to work tomorrow. Hopefully I go into it with a fresh attitude and an excitement I haven't felt in a while. We'll see what happens.

It appears that it's now been one year, to the day, since As The Apple Turns went silent. *sigh*

This is wrong. Simply wrong.

I completely understand wanting to protect our children and make sure they are safe, but there are certain things that are going to happen to a kid, no matter what. Banning tag and other "contact" sports is simply wrong.

What person grew up without ever playing tag? I'd say that those individuals are few and far between. It's just something that a kid does. Children have a lot of energy, and they need to expend that energy. Tag is a great way for them to expend that energy. Running and laughing are two things that children adore doing. Tag allows them to do both. I'd go as far as to say it's built into each and every one of us.

But now, this school district has decided that tag is too dangerous for kids. They might get hurt, you understand, and when that happens, the parents will rain down upon them with the might of the lawyers and sue the district into oblivion. This, of course, is a perfectly valid reason to ban tag. It's also stupid.

This is just another example of how stupid our society is becoming in many ways. We are so scared of being sued that, rather than saying "You know what? Kids will be kids. They're going to get hurt from time to time. It's part of the growing up process", we'd rather say "We're not going to let kids be kids anymore. They might get hurt. That will cause them all sorts of anguish and trauma."

I was a kid once. In elementary school, we played tag. We played dodgeball. We played on—*gasp*—monkeybars! We were in situation each an every day where there was potential for getting hurt. In some cases, that potential was for getting seriously hurt! I remember one boy who fell off the monkeybars and broke his arm in the process! Did his parents sue? Of course not! He was just being a kid! These things happen! Granted, they probably were full of all sorts of sympathy of the pain the boy was in, but guess what? He healed! He grew up! He's probably a well adjusted member of society today! Horror of horrors!

This type of thing is just becoming stupid. At first it was distracting, then it became sad, now it's just disgustingly stupid. As a society, we have got to figure out that things happen. No one wants kids to get hurt, but it's going to happen, no matter what.

No one is deliberately trying to hurt these kids by letting them play tag. Provide reasonable adult supervision and they will be fine—bumps and bruises, the occasional broken arm and all!

This goes just the same for the rest of life. We need to take responsibility for our own lives and stop trying to blame things on others all the time! We're human. We're going to make mistakes. Accept that and move on! But, it's now going to be that much harder for these kids in Massachusetts to learn that lesson.

While I'm really enjoying the MacBook, I've discovered a problem that just irks the crap out of me. The Office Notifications application (that ships as part of Microsoft Office:mac 2004 must be some sort of steaming pile of...well, I'll let you fill in the rest.

Office Notifications is the application that handles displaying a notification of an event or task reminder that you set up in Microsoft Entourage. There is a background application that runs all the time on your computer when you have Office:mac installed called Microsoft Database Daemon. This application is in charge of monitoring the current time on your computer and comparing it to various times in your calendar of events or tasks list. If you have Entourage set to remind you about events or tasks at certain times, and the time is correct, this background application will launch Office Notifications, which will then handle displaying the reminder by putting up a little floating window with the reminder in it.

This is where the problem comes in.

At least on my MacBook, it can take upwards of two to three minutes for the Office Notifications application to launch. Yes. I wrote that correctly: two to three minutes. I've watched the icon show up in the dock and bounce for three minutes before the application is considered "launched" by the system. During this time, the computer can become unresponsive with a lot of watching the Spinning Pizza of Death cursor spin away and nothing much else happening.

Once the Office Notifications application has launched, things get even worse. It can spend another two to three minutes before it actually displays the reminder window. When the window finally does display, the sound that is played to accompany the reminder is very broken up and stuttery (although I'm not sure "stuttery" is a word).

Once the reminder is shown, the computer becomes somewhat more responsive, but still has lag problems until the reminder is dismissed. Once the reminder is dismissed, the computer resumes its quick and speedy ways.

So, really, the question must be asked: "WHAT IS THIS APPLICATION DOING?" (yes, I was shouting that question). What is it doing that apparently takes up so many system resources as to make the rest of the system slow to a crawl—and remember, this is just to show a single window. Nothing more, for all practical purposes.

I know that Office:mac (and therefore Office Notifications) is not an Intel-native software package. I know that means the software has to run in the Rosetta emulation layer. I understand that means that the software won't run as fast as it would on a PPC-based computer. But, were talking about a simple application that does nothing more than show a window and play a sound. If Word can run smoothly without causing the rest of the system to grind to a halt, so should Office Notifications.

I can not, for the life of me, figure out what this application is doing. I don't have a single other application on the MacBook that causes these types of problems.

Office Notifications: The Root of All Evil.

After seeing this commercial for the PlayStation 3 on Monday Night Football, I will never sleep again.

That is by far one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen on television. What the heck was that?