Here’s an inventory of the electronics that we took on our recent vacation to New Mexico:

• Three ipods
• Two laptops and all the cables for the associated electronics
• Two digital cameras
• Two GMRS two-way radios
• Three LED flashlights, and the AC cord for the one that’s rechargeable
• Portable DVD player
• Samuel’s Nintendo DS

I’m a big photography fan, so I brought my laptop primarily so that I could upload, view and edit photos from my dSLR camera (The house we rented didn’t have internet access, so I couldn’t upload the photos to my Flickr account until we got home). We also brought Katie’s laptop so that we could work (check email, etc.) concurrently when we had internet access. Due to the lack of internet access at the house, we only used her laptop at the hotel on the drive up there. We could have left it home.
The ipods, DVD player, and DS were very helpful on the 14-hour drive each way; the the two-way radios were useful once we got to New Mexico, since we had to take two vehicles whenever we all wanted to go somewhere.
I don’t really have a problem with what we took. In fact, I probably wouldn’t even have thought about it if it weren’t for the fact that we vacationed with a family that had virtually no electronics along. Just an interesting observation: we are a wired family.

I’m definitely an old fart when it comes to mobile phone use. One of the many things that bugs me is people who continue to talk on their phone when participating in public interactions. Here’s what happened this morning at Einstein’s while I was waiting for my bagel:

Woman walks into store talking on cell phone. Cashier comes over to his register to take her order.
Woman stops about six feet in front of the cashier to continue her conversation. Cashier looks confused. I think he’s trying to decide whether he can go back to the other task or should remain at the cash register to wait for this woman.
A minute later, still talking on the phone, the woman walks up the register and orders. The cashier asks her some questions (dine in or to go, her name so they can call her when it’s ready, etc.) and has to repeat every question because the woman is paying him no attention.

What a way to communicate to the people around you that they are of no consequence compared to your all-important conversation.

I’ve studied the German language and Germanic culture for years, but sometimes the intricacies of cultural understanding still allude me.
Last week, I visited my company’s R&D office in Linz, Austria, for the first time. Please note that, as far as I know, I’m pretty much the only U.S. employee in the company who speaks fluent German–except the couple of Germans who work in the US offices, of course.
When speaking German, I assumed that all of my fellow software engineering colleagues would address me with the informal ‘Du.’ That was true with one exception.

As I opened the front door to walk Samuel to school this morning, I found five police cars and two news crews in front of the house. During the night, car thieves had abandoned a car across the street and shot at the police as they fled. The photo below was taken from my next door neighbor’s front yard.

This New York TImes article about school bullying and the corresponding discussion on MetaFilter brings back a lot of memories from high school.
I was picked on a lot in high school, and I spent many years trying to figure out why. After 25 years, I agree with the MeFi posters who say that bullying is all about enforcing social conformity. I think I was threatening to a lot of people–not because I was different, but because I was different and either didn’t know it or didn’t think anything of it.
For instance, I was tall and generally fit but not interested in sports. I realize now that I was fairly good looking but didn’t realize it (judge for yourself); I was smart but took it for granted; and I was ambitious, taking part and excelling in a variety of non-sporting school activities: band, choir, German club, and speech.
One particular provocation always comes to mind, and I think it’s a perfect example. My sophomore year, my assigned locker was in some out-of-the-way place, so my band friend Walter, a senior, offered to let me share his locker which was centrally located. Walter and I got constant hassling for sharing a locker, mostly by the ‘jocks’ and of the homophobic sort. Looking back at it, to have two band guys sharing a locker and not thinking anything of it must have been terribly threatening to the more narrow-minded and insecure among my high school peers. But at the time, that didn’t occur to me, that I remember.

We certainly view our pets as much like kids as anybody, but when it comes to pet health care, my country upbringing reveals itself. Lately, we’ve been grappling with the high cost of veterinary care. We like our current vet a lot, but we feel like he prescribes optional services without informing us that they aren’t absolutely necessary. Today, I found an article on Slate about this very subject:

It’s just that if we’re coming to the point that we think of our pet’s health in the same way we do our own, I wish the vets I see would treat my pets more the way our doctors treat us. For example, over the years the pediatrician has heard a mild heart murmur when she has examined my daughter. But since my daughter is obviously in excellent health, the pediatrician has reassured me it’s nothing to worry about. But when the veterinarian detected a mild heart murmur in one of my cats, she immediately recommended I make an appointment with the veterinary cardiologist. What would happen to the cat if I didn’t do that? I asked. She had to acknowledge: probably nothing, but the echocardiogram only cost $300, and since my cat was a member of my family, surely I would want to do everything.

This afternoon, I opened my garage doors, intending to get out some gardening supplies so I could work in the backyard. As I stepped out into the driveway, I saw a guy chasing a schnauzer down the sidewalk toward me. I stepped to the sidewalk, squatted down and held my hand out to the dog, hoping I could catch him.
But the dog was too wily; he barked at me, ran past me and kept going. I saw that the dog was out-pacing the man, so, I stepped back into the garage, grabbed a leash and my bicycle and joined the chase. A few seconds later my neighbor Chris from three houses down the street came up on his bicycle, and he joined the chase, too. Chris is out on his bike and rollerblades a lot, so I figured he was either already out riding or had also joined the chase as it passed his house.
The dog led us across the street and onto the sidewalk that goes behind our subdivision’s pool and tennis courts. At one point, Chris and I managed to get the dog between us with some shrubs on one side, but the dog dashed between the shrubs and into the parking lot.
On the other side of the parking lot, we kind of cornered the dog between the tennis courts and some other shrubs. Chris and I both dropped out bikes, and Chris managed to get on the other side of the dog. He then squatted, held out his hand and called the dog in a sweet voice. To my surprise, the dog responded. When he got close, Chris grabbed for his collar, but the dog wriggled away and came toward me. I tackled the dog and held onto him until Chris could also get a hold and we got the collar on him. When I tackled the schnauzer, he bit me and punctured my hand in one place.
Chris then told me that the dog chaser was his visiting brother-in-law, and that the dog has escaped from Chris’ house. He thanked me and walked the dog toward his house, and I rode home.
While I doctored my wound, I told Katie and the kids what had happened–laughing hysterically the whole time. A couple minutes later Chris came over to thank me again and to give me my leash. Turns out, he’d been bitten, too.
All in all, the suburban schnauzer wrangling was worth the dog bite. It was actually a lot of fun.

Lat night, I bought my first album of DRM-free MP3s off of Amazon MP3. Reasonable price ($.89/track; $8.99/album), easy purchase and download experience (it puts the tracks directly into iTunes after download), and DRM-free MP3s. What’s not to love?
This morning, I canceled my eMusic subscription. I’ve really enjoyed finding new music on eMusic, but lately it felt like a monthly chore to find 90 tracks that I might like, listen to them all, rate them, etc. And now that I can buy DRM-free MP3s competitively to Apple’s DRM-laden iTunes Music Store, I think I’ll switch back to buying less music that I know I like for a while.
Hasta la vista, iTunes Music Store
Oh, and it warms my heart to see DRM finally losing out due to market pressure. People DO care about controlling the stuff they own.

I’ve sung the praises of eMusic before, but I have another reason to like them today. After I downloaded all my tracks last month, I accidentally deleted all of them before importing them into iTunes. I was bummed that I’d lost $20 of music. This morning, I went to eMusic to start finding some music to download in the coming month when I realized I still had a few downloads available from last month. I decided to download a few of the tracks I’d deleted. After I downloaded one, I noticed that the number of available downloads hadn’t been decremented. I had accidentally discovered that I could re-download my previous purchases! I just recovered the lost tracks by downloading them again!