Yes, it’s my bloggiversary today – four years since the first post here on Chip’s Quips.  While I’m not as ancient and established as some of my fellow bloggers, 48 months exceeds the longevity of the majority of blogs.  It’s as long as the term of office for the US President, which prompts the question: “would you re-elect this blog?”  Sorry, I don’t have any bribes or promises to fix all the country’s woes with which to gain your vote.

Only 191 new posts graced this space over the last year, down from 321 the year before.  Only 42 of those were more than just link posts, so well under one per week.  I’d like to post more, but I’ve just been far too busy with work and other stuff.  I’m not going to beat myself up about that, though.  I write here because I love it, and I don’t want to smother that love with the pillow of obligation.

Despite my reduced posting, our conversations here have generated 743 comments (not counting spam, which was about an order of magnitude greater).  Thanks to all my readers for not giving up on me.

Here were the five most popular posts for the last year, measured in page views:

1. You can’t handle the truth
2. My Dad, the phone phreaker
3. Extreme Snakes and Ladders
4. I’d add more, but the web already has too much ADD
5. Backstage humor

And here are my personal favorite five:

1. Thanks, Wally
2. The winning season
3. No harm
4. Thoughts on MLK day
5. Newspaper obituary

As you can see, I lean towards the more emotional pieces, even though I’ve been accused of not being in touch with my emotions.  Perhaps that’s why.

Here are links to the three previous annual celebrations.  Onward, into year five!

Today my TechRepublic editor Mary Weilage and I had an email conversation in which she remarked that the articles I write that pose an ethical question or ask “what would you do?” seem to spark a more voluminous response from readers.  I replied:

Yes, that does seem to be a trend.  We’ll definitely make more use of it, but we don’t want to wear it out either…

Imagining…

I received the following email from a TechRepublic reader:

Dear Chip,

I read all of your articles on TR and I love them dearly.  I’ve created a little shrine in your honor in the corner of my office, where I burn incense every day.  I’ve posted hardcopies of all of your posts on the altar, and pray to them fervently.

I have a question.  I was composing an email to one of my clients, when suddenly a nail broke.  I don’t know how, but it resulted in the message being sent immediately.  I looked in my sent items, and sure enough – there it was.  It also contained some verbiage I didn’t recall writing, telling him what a jerk he was and how much I resent having to wait 3 days for his payments to clear on PayPal.

What should I do?

Worshipfully yours,

noimnotastalker@example.com

If you were in our consultant’s shoes what would you do?  Answer the poll below and let us know:

• Try to recall the email
• Send a follow-up email apologizing
• Call the client to discuss it personally
• Get back on your medication immediately

The dogs and I took a detour from our usual morning walk to visit a neighbor’s new cows – two Dexter heifers intended for milking.  The Dexters aren’t much bigger than our two Labradors, and they viewed Harry and Halley suspiciously from the safety of their fenced pasture.  For some reason, the dogs didn’t seem interested in chasing them – apparently they identified them more with sheep than with deer.

On our way back, I spotted the neighborhood’s Pileated Woodpecker.  We often hear his rapid drumming on the many dead trees in the surrounding forest, but we rarely get a good look at him. This time he drifted across the road about two feet over the pavement and landed on a cedar in the lowlands on the north side.  When I heard the familiar drumming coming from the south, I turned and saw his double!  It’s the first time I’ve ever seen two woodpeckers together.  I didn’t know then how to determine their sex, so I don’t know if they were mates or competitors.  But thinking about woodpecker sex reminded me of one of my great-grandfather’s favorite rhymes:

Woodpecker pecked on the woodhouse door
He pecked and he pecked ‘til his pecker got sore

My great-grandfather was not known for coarse humor – or any humor, really.  But my Dad said he would always laugh heartily after reciting that one.

Speaking of avian identification – now that the robins are out in full force, we’ve noticed a few smaller birds among them that look like mini-robins, except that the head and back are black rather than gray, and they have little white spots on their shoulders and a large white spot on the breast.  After searching whatbird.com, I believe these to be Spotted Towhees.

Both of our dogs are now on medication.  Halley takes Benadryl for her allergies, and Harry is on Melatonin to treat Alopecia.  He has two strangely identical regions of hair loss on either side, between his ribs and his hips.  The vet conducted a blood panel to rule out various diseases, and suggested we give Melatonin therapy a try.  Fortunately, Melatonin is relatively inexpensive, and it’s a simple matter to get a Labrador to swallow anything smaller than a softball.  Labradors put the “omni” in “omnivore”.

Food is a long-standing common bond between humans and their canine companions, and dogs never feel more useful than when they can help us to acquire a meal.  Once when I was a wee lad, my grandparents’ hound dog (whom we called Laddie, but my aunt called Hamlet) brought a freshly killed rabbit up to the house.  My sister and I cried over the poor thing, but my grandparents skinned him and cooked him for dinner.  I had to admit that he was pretty tasty, whatever his relationship to Peter Cottontail or the Easter Bunny.

Not that we were unused to our place in the food chain.  My sister and I often named and loved the calves that we eventually saw loaded into the pickup truck to be taken to the slaughterhouse, and we were well aware that the beef we later consumed came from their flesh.  I’m reminded of the bear rituals of the indigenous Northern cultures, in which a bear that has been raised as a member of the family is finally slaughtered for its meat, often with apologies to the bear.

Once when I was about five years old, I ran into my grandparents’ house after being chased by a large Leghorn rooster.  Those things can get pretty mean – they’ve been known to peck the eyes out of small dogs.  When I told my grandfather about my encounter, he said not a word (he hardly ever did).  But we had chicken for dinner that night, and I’ve never enjoyed more my status as a carnivore.

Most people remember Snakes and Ladders (or the alternative version, Chutes and Ladders) as one of their earliest board games, usually right after Candyland.  I never played either as a child, but I’m unusual in more than that respect.  My son finds Snakes and Ladders comforting, primarily because of its use of numbers on each square.  He figured out early on that you can simply add the number you rolled to the space you’re on to get the number to which you go next, without having to count the spaces in between.

But the official rules for Snakes and Ladders lack any opportunity for applied skill, unless you can cultivate the ability to roll whatever number you want on the die.  So to make things more interesting, my son developed a few new rules (as he is often wont to do).

Our edition of the game came bundled in a set of board games.  One of those, Parcheesi, requires four pawns of each color.  So my son asked if we could play Snakes and Ladders using four pawns each – for each roll, the player decides which of his pawns to move.  That really changes things!  Obviously, you avoid moving to a space occupied by a snake, but you also try to set up each pawn to be within six spaces of a major ladder — then let them sit there until you roll the right number.

Another not so obvious feature of this rule is that as your pawns reach 100, your options are reduced.  Thus, it’s not in your best interest to always try to get the lead pawn home.  In fact, even once a pawn reaches the 90’s, your choices for that pawn are significantly limited.  When you have only one pawn left, you’re back to the old “victim of chance” rules of the original game.

But my son still found this version a bit too easy, so he invented another rule:  if at the end of your move, your pawn is diagonal to one of your opponent’s pawns and there is an open space diagonally beyond that, you can jump it as in Checkers and remove it from the board.  I thought that the captured piece should then have to start over, but he insisted that it should be gone for good.  If you can capture all of your opponent’s pieces, then you win – without having to get your pawns to 100.  However, there’s a catch – if you don’t take all four of your opponent’s pieces, he or she only has to get their remaining pawns to 100 in order to win.  So if your opponent already has pawns at 100 and you capture the last one on the board, they win right away.  Jumping your opponent may help you win quickly, or it may merely shorten your opponent’s distance from winning.  Unlike in Checkers, you can choose whether or not to jump.  Naturally, this rule increases the value of getting one pawn to 100 quickly.

But my son wasn’t finished yet.  He wanted to make the game even more interesting.  So, for whichever pawn you decide to move, after you compute the space on which it would land, swap the digits and go there instead – if you would land on 85, go to 58, for example.  Then follow the rule (if any) at that space (ladder, snake, or optional jump).  Naturally, multiples of eleven are unaffected by this rule.  But for other numbers, it has the effect of sending you back and forth all over the board.  If you’re at 89 and roll a 2, for example, you have to go all the way back to 19.  The ideal space to hit is number 8 – which when swapped becomes 80, where stands a ladder right up to 100.  But you can’t get to 8 on your first roll, and whatever space you do hit on your first roll will send you to a multiple of ten.  So you subsequently either have to hit a snake or land on a multiple of ten to get back into range of 8.  Naturally, if you end up exactly on 100 you don’t have to go anywhere else.

With all of these rules in play, determining your best move given the roll on the die can be quite challenging.  The probabilities become difficult to compute in your head, and the game can last for a long, long time – until it abruptly ends.

February 12.  I meant to write about the simultaneous 200th birthdays of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.  But not even the fact that it was also Halley’s fourth birthday could drag me away from work long enough to hum a few bars of The Birthday Song.

February 13.  I could have written more about my grandmother, who would have turned 106 that day.  Or I could have explored the subject of triskaidekaphobia, especially since it was a Friday.  Somehow I never got around to either one — perhaps posting on that day felt unlucky.

February 14.  For Valentine’s Day I considered an essay on the subject of love, which brought to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition:  “A temporary insanity curable by marriage”  (Some patients have reported side-effects such as children and other contractual obligations).  Actually, I did write something for that day — a sonnet for my wife:

Westward towards the setting sun they sailed
Your mother’s parents, and your father too
From Sicily and Hungary they hailed
Two families joined in Jersey to make you

Westward towards the setting sun we two
Each drove to California all alone
What we’d find there, neither of us knew
Reaching for a new life on our own

And now the western sun has brightly shone
Upon us fourteen times on Valentine’s
As together our two lives in love have grown
And within our children beautifully combined

They’ll bear our love to generations yet
To shine beyond the time our sun has set

February 15.  The birth of Wirth – who is now 75 years old.  Not to mention the birthdays of Douglas Hofstadter, Galileo, Praetorius (who also died on February 15), Susan B. Anthony, Cyrus McCormick, Ernest Shackleton, Matt Groening, Chris Farley, and YouTube.  I didn’t even have time to post clip-art of a birthday cake, because we were too busy rearranging my daughter’s room, breaking furniture, and shouting.

February 16.  President’s Day (or Presidents Day, or Presidents’ Day, depending on what or whom you’re celebrating).  Originally a celebration of Washington’s birthday, now that it’s established on the third Monday in February it can never fall on that great man’s actual date of birth (February 22).  How fitting, since subsequent presidents haven’t quite reached his magnitude.  Taken as a celebration of all US presidents, all I have to say is: good luck to anyone who finds their butt in that hot seat!

The telephone rang and my wife picked it up.  “Hello?”  No response.  She hung up.

I suddenly had a hunch that it might have been the public school district’s automated calling service.  It snowed here a few days ago, and it’s still on the ground because the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing since then.  But whenever there’s snow or ice on the ground, I always check SchoolReport.org to see if school is canceled or delayed.  They often delay school by two hours in such conditions, because the bus drivers who live in outlying areas may not be able to get to the bus barn on time.

I had checked the site this morning, before I woke up the children (in case I didn’t need to).  No notices.  But on this hunch, I revisited SchoolReport.org.  Sure enough, a two hour delay.

So two hours later, my daughter and I trudged out to wait for her bus.  The old snow crunched under our feet, and many spots were slippery.  Perhaps in spite of the low temperatures, some of the snow had melted in the sun and refrozen.  That might explain the delay.

“This is better sledding weather than new snow,” I remarked to my daughter.

“I like sledding,” she responded.  Last weekend she had gone sledding with a friend of hers, right after the big snow.

Then I told her about when I used to go sledding as a boy.  My neighbor, Philip, had a nice sled.  He lived about a quarter mile away on the same dirt access road as our house.  A huge hill on that access road led down to my driveway, and when snow would melt and re-freeze on that hill it was so slippery you couldn’t even walk on it, never mind drive a car.  A sled would approach terminal velocity.

When the road ended at my driveway, the driveway turned off to the right along an embankment above my house, which was built on the side of the hill below.  Philip and I on the sled would not follow it.  Off the embankment we’d fly, airborne for about thirty feet before we’d land on the slope of the hill beneath, which comprised the front yard of my house.

At the bottom of that hill was our vegetable garden.  When we reached that, we had to reach out and grab the old, withered corn stalks from the previous harvest and hope that their roots would slow us down before we reached the fence.  Because hitting the fence at such speeds might hurt.  Besides, if we happened to break through the fence, we would encounter what was on the other side of the fence – nothing.  Nothing, that is, for about twenty feet.  Vertically.  The fence protected wanderers from falling into “the bottom” — a lowland that formed the flood plain for White Thorn Creek.

We never did break through the fence, but we sure had a lot of fun trying.

——-

The bus arrived, and Diana the driver called out to me.  “It was a prank,”  She said.

“What?  The delay?”

“Yes.  Some kids got into the bus lot overnight, took one of the hoses, and flooded the lot.  All the busses were stuck to the pavement.  We had to bring in salt to melt the ice.”

Ah, youth!

I’ve never seen the movie The Bucket list, but that didn’t stop Teeni from tagging me for a meme based on its theme.  A character in the movie who is dying of a terminal illness composes the titular list, containing all the things he wants to do before he “kicks the bucket”.  Here’s my version:

1. Travel more of the world.  My wife and I used to travel to a lot of places together– then came children.
2. See our children find meaning in their lives.  This is a hard one, because there isn’t much that I can do about it other than to let them know that their lives have meaning to me.
3. Play with my grandkids.  Another one where I have to rely on my children.  But no hurry, kids!
4. Write a book.  I love to write, and I love books.  So I should write a book.  Maybe more than one.
5. Read every book I own.  I’ve read less than half of the several hundred books on my shelves.  Maybe I’ll skip The Three-Legged Hooch Dancer — never mind, I already read that one.
6. Invent something that lots of people will find useful.
7. Get to where I don’t need the money.  Then I could work on only the projects that interest me.
8. Find out what number 8 is.

Now to tag (why these are in eights, I do not know), in no particular order:  Joseph, Haizum, Robert, Danielle, Chad, Morgetron, Joanna, and Randy.

Happy Saint Patty’s day, everyone! I forgot to insure that my one green shirt wasn’t in the laundry today, so you’ll all have to give me a virtual pinch. Unless wearing green on my weblog counts. Oh, and there’s that green patch of something growing in my… nevermind.

From where I’m typing I can smell all the way to the kitchen where my wife is boiling a big slab of corned beef. The aroma is making me seriously hungry. I’m sure the sodium payload will send my blood pressure over the top, but it will be worth it. I’ll just sit and pulsate the rest of the day.

My mother sent me an e-card to remind me that we’re part Irish, through her mother’s father. But all you have to do to convince me of my Celtic ancestry is to set a pint o’ Guinness in front of me. I very well may break my beer-free diet for this holiday.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh! An bhfuil tú ar meisce fós?

Look what arrived just in time for my birthday: Adding Ajax, by Shelley Powers – sent to me by none other than the author herself.  Thanks, Shelley!  Although, it isn’t a signed copy… nor does it have a personal note saying how she couldn’t have done it without me — I guess because she did do it without me.  I mean, about the only help I provided was a little ra ra moral support in her blog’s comment section.  So, I’m very grateful for the free copy — I would have eagerly paid the cover price for it if Shelley hadn’t so graciously given it to me.  I’ll be diving into this just as soon as I finish one of my current reads.

So yeah, I mentioned my birthday.  Even though it wasn’t exactly on my birthday, yesterday was the closest to that inauspicious date on which the Seahawks played a home game, so my daughter and I went to Qwest Field to witness the spectacle.  The game was sold out, like all others this season — and eBay was getting two to three times the standard price for tickets.  We traveled to the stadium without having any, but we found a season ticket holder just outside looking to sell two tickets at the last minute — and got them for a steal.  South end zone, lower level, row T.  We had a great view of the action, except for when they were playing very near the opposite end of the field.

Screaming is not optional at Qwest field — it’s a duty for all fans to make as much noise as possible when the visiting team has the football.  The Seahawks believe that’s why Qwest field holds the record so far this season for the number of false-start penalties called on visiting teams: the efforts of the “12th man” — the fans.  OK, so maybe that’s a little outside the rule book — just think of it as user-generated content.  The stadium seems to amplify the sound as well.  It was so loud even before the game that my daughter almost didn’t make it to the kickoff.  But she soldiered on (helped by a little hot cocoa) and actually enjoyed the game all the way to the final tick of the clock.  I enjoyed it too, because even though our offense did not look like Superbowl material, the Rams didn’t even look like NFL material (they are still winless this year) – and the Seahawks dominated them 33-6.  What made this particularly delectable is that for the last few years the Rams have been the toughest rival in our division — but it would have been even sweeter if we had beaten them when they didn’t suck.

Hmm… the Rams are from St. Louis, which is also where Shelley lives.  Sorry, Shelley – I don’t know if you follow (American) football, but — go ‘Hawks!

Ouch — there goes my throat.  I yelled so much at the game I can hardly speak, so forgive me if I blog at a whisper.

We’ve all heard about TLA’s (Three-Letter Abbreviations), and maybe even ETLA’s (Extended Three-Letter Abbreviations).  But I think we need to extend this concept even further, to the broader category of Self-Referential Abbreviations (SRA’s).  Lets define an SRA as an abbreviation that describes a class of abbreviations of which it is also a member.

Here are a few more that I thought of:

• MFLA – Meaningless Four-Letter Abbreviation
• MUM – Multi-Use Mnemonic (or Mostly Useless Mnemonic)
• ELASTIC - Exceptionally Lengthy Abbreviation Stretched Torturously Into a mnemoniC

Got any more?

I’ve seen a number of MFLAs used for company names.  I used to work for a company back in the 80′s that wanted to change its name to CPAS (they wrote accounting software for accountants).  They toyed with making it an abbreviation for Certified Professional Accounting Systems, but in the end they decided just to use the abbreviation as their official name — thus, the abbreviation had no official meaning.  Later, they changed names again.  Synergex used to be called DISC, which ostensibly stood for Digital Information Systems Corporation — lots of content there!  Oddly, “MFLA” itself is not quite self-referential, because it does have meaning.

MUMs are particularly troubling.  When the same abbreviation is used for lots of different things (like IP, or CD), then they becoming mostly useless.  Again, though, “MUM” is somewhat useful, because its dual meanings are complementary.

I’m sure I’ve seen many ELASTICs, but I can’t think of any right now.  Can you?