Mein Großvater

My mother's father – or „mein Großvater“ – wasn't German, technically. He was born in 1902, on a farm in northeast Ohio, to first-generation Americans whose parents came to this country from the Alsace region of France. This was always a little confusing to me, when Grandpa used to tell us that his grandparents came from France but spoke German, not French. Once I got involved with my family's genealogy research, I learned that the Alsatians indeed spoke a dialect of German.*

At some point while Turtle's parents were visiting, the women were playing games and listening to Christmas CDs. “Silent Night” came on, and I was thinking of Grandpa and how we kids used to beg him to sing „Stille Nacht“ to us in his broken German.

The base image is a small photo Grandpa took of himself sometime in the 1970s at one of those automated photo booths you see at the mall. The pocket watch is one that he bought used around 1930 and passed down to me when I was in college (it still runs and keeps perfect time). The smaller blended image is Grandpa on his wedding day, in 1936.

* I admit to taking a certain amount of pleasure in telling people that even my French ancestors were German.

Christmas keepsake

On Christmas, while we were out in the garage opening our presents, my father-in-law walked over and handed me a small, heavy box secured with a rubber band. Inside, I found three well-used, brass-case pocket watches.

“I don't know anything about these,” he said. “Whether they're worth anything, I mean. I found them when I was going through some of the stuff we were redding up at Mom's house. They were Dad's, and you can see that one of them has his initials on it.”

And then he kind of shrugged. “Like I said, I don't know if they're worth anything.”

Well, they are – to me, at least. Maybe not in the monetary sense, but even if I weren't so fascinated with weathered old things with a sense of history about them, the real riches lay in the fact that my dad-in-law thinks enough of me to pass on these family treasures to me. Whether he sees them as such, or not, is entirely beside the point.

An added bonus is the design I found on the back of one of the cases, which depicts a bicycle racer. Based on the style of the clothes and the handlebars, I'd guess it was from the 1920s or so.

Christmas 2007: Still Breathing

This year, instead of packing up and taking to the road for the holidays, Turtle and I hosted her mom and dad, her sister, and her niece here in Texas. For the past week, I'd been dusting, vacuuming, cleaning, sneaking in a few last-minute shopping expeditions, and driving halfway to Oklahoma to find a wet (not “damp”) where I could buy fixin’s for adult liquid refreshments.

My father-in-law is insanely allergic to the cats. Even though we had the carpets cleaned and despite my having thoroughly dusted and vacuumed the house from top to bottom three times in two weeks prior to his arrival, he can only handle being in the house for about as long as it takes to use the bathroom. Longer than that, and his eyes swell up, his sinuses fill with mucus, and he sneezes violently and continuously. He and my mother-in-law booked a room at a nearby hotel, but he (and I) spent all the Christmas festivities out in the garage, where I'd set up lawn chairs, a folding table, and an electric oil radiator with a small fan blowing across it to provide some heat.

And we went “bumming”. I knew going in that Turtle's dad probably wouldn't be able to spend any time in the house, so I planned to take him with me to some electronics stores to shop for a new TV to replace the 26-inch Magnavox I've had since 1989. We were successful, and Turtle and I are now enjoying the bright picture, wide screen and (some) HD clarity of a 40" LCD Samsung set (LN-T4061F, for anyone who's interested in particulars). Now all I have to do is find a set of surround sound speakers we can afford.

Christmas day was a little unusual. While the women had themselves a noisy hen party inside, Dad and I hung out on the front porch. It was chilly and breezy but, as long as we occasionally moved our lawn chairs to stay in the sun, pleasant enough. A little before the crockpot turkey was ready, we set up a long table in the garage and dolled it up with a red table cloth. How many of you can say you had your Christmas feast in the garage?

This morning, it's a dreary, rainy day. My parents-in-law and my niece are driving home in the yuck. We drove my sister-in-law to the airport at 5:00 this morning, and by now she's touched down and fighting her way through throngs of fellow holiday travelers to recover her luggage. The house is quiet (the housekeeping staff are on strike for the day), and the cats have come out of hiding. The place feels a little lonely, but we have some fun memories.

Oh yeah: Merry Christmas!

IE8 on Acid(2)

In a move that almost certainly had nothing to do with Opera's lawsuit [cough], Microsoft has announced that an in-development version of Internet Explorer 8 has successfully rendered the Acid2 browser test.

Taking this announcement at face value (no pun intended), one might be tempted to think that Microsoft's browser development team has finally seen the error of its non-standard rendering ways. But... I've been verbally abusing Microsoft for a long time and can't just turn on a dime. I'm skeptical.

True, it seems that years of pressure and ill will over the debacle that was IE 6 have convinced Microsoft that it can't just run rough-shod over the W3C recommendations that standards based browsers follow. The IE 8 announcement makes some pleasing noises in this regard, but it seems to me that there's also quite a bit of tap dancing going on:

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”

The future of web standards

Perhaps in response to Andy Clarke's recent call for the disbanding of the CSS working committee – in turn prompted by Opera's lawsuit against Microsoft – James over at The B-List has uncorked a truly perceptive analysis of The future of web standards.

Read it, if you're geek enough to care.

Settling in

I'm taking a break from putting together my task list of things that need to get done before my in-laws arrive for Christmas and thought I'd "send up a flare" to let everyone know I'm still around.

The move to the new office building is complete. At 6' x 6', my new cube – more of a stall since it has only two full walls – is less than half the size of the one I was in before, and this has underscored for me the lesson that no matter your situation, things can always get worse. And yet, aside from the cramped conditions, I feel like the work environment is going to be better. The aisles are wider, so despite having less desktop and storage space, the conditions aren't claustrophobic. Even better, the moaning, endlessly Eeyore-ish woman who kept me on the brink of homicide each day is on another floor. Even better, my new neighbors and team members are quiet and enjoyable to work with. It's also rather reassuring to have most of my former teammates officing in the same building again.

Things are finally starting to gel in terms of my new position, as well. I can finally start focusing on doing my job instead of trying to figure out what that job might be. I feel more like I'm starting to move forward instead of in circles.

Meanwhile, Turtle and I are beginning that frantic dash to complete all those Christmas tasks that we probably should have been working on two weeks ago. We've both been a little blue, lately, and the result was too much procrastination.

I've now been off my bike for 33 days. I've got to find time and motivation enough to ride another 25 miles if I want to reach 2000 miles for the year. Some of that motivation may come tomorrow, when Turtle and I attend a Christmas party being held by one of my MS 150 teammates. You can bet St. Bob will be there and trying to get everyone revved up to get out in the cold to start training for the 2008 ride!

I had another birthday and will save you the bother of asking the question with the simple response "pretty darned old". Turtle is always hard pressed to come up with gift ideas for me, and this year was no exception. However, she knows how much trouble I have with my back and remembered how she had to pry me out of the demo chair when I tried out one of those Shiatsu massage pads at the mall a couple years ago. She also knows that I'm kind of picky about this sort of thing, so on my birthday she took me out for lunch and then to the store to pick out just the model of massager that I wanted. The store was having some sort of sale, and Turtle had a coupon, so we ended up getting this delightful contraption for about 40% off its usual price.

This is going to be so awesome the next time my back is killing me as the result of yard work or honey-dos! I can now have a massage any time I want without Turtle having to aggravate her carpal tunnel giving me a massage.

Monday update

I'd apologize for the lack of original postings here, but I don't want to sound like a stuck record. I could post about my confusion and frustration over the way in which things are being managed (or more to the point, not being managed) since my company was purchased earlier this year – but I won't. I'm pretty sure the only people who aren't in exactly the same boat are those who work for themselves.

No bike riding for the past three weeks. Worse, I'm not feeling very motivated to do anything to change that. The good news is that, after my cardiologist appointment this past week, I'm cleared to ride. I just have to get out from under the laptop and do it.

Turtle and I did roll up our sleeves and put up our Christmas decorations, this past weekend. As a token of my affection, I stoically set about shuttling boxes out of the space above the garage, spent an hour or so debugging and untangling strands of lights, and then a couple more hours putting it all together. But as usual, I had to admit it looked nice, once it was all up and I was able to kick back with a beer, a couple Advil, and a Darvocet.

Also this past week, Turtle orchestrated the process of having most of our carpeting and all the tile floors cleaned. We're hoping that this will allow my father-in-law to spend at least a little time inside the house, when Turtle's family joins us for Christmas. Pop's deathly allergic to our furry dependents, so he and I spent a lot of time hanging out in the garage with a space heater, last time he and Mom came for a visit. It's not too bad, as garages go, but it would be nicer to be inside.

Then again, no one tries to talk us into playing board games when we're in the garage...