I was out with one of the Karens a few years back when we realized her car’s console display was entirely dark. The speedometer and other instruments weren’t digital, so we’d been OK going down the road, but the clock, radio, climate control, and everything else was out.
Once we realized there was a problem, we pulled over, shut off the engine and after waiting a few moments, restarted the engine. And then I started laughing.
Karen’s look of confusion turned into her own laughter as I explained, “We just rebooted the car!”
One of the bits of internet flotsam that frequently shows up in my inbox is a piece titled, “If Microsoft Built Cars.” It includes such scenarios as only being able to use “Microsoft Gasoline,” cars crashing several times daily, and so on.
I’ve never taken it too seriously. Sure, today’s cars do make use of embedded computers for a number of purposes, but the list was really just a bunch of overblown generalizations and exaggerations. Cars and desktop computers don’t really have much in common, right?
Honda sent me a postcard last Tuesday. It seems that they need to install an upgrade to some of the engine control software in order to correct some problems. Or, put another way, Microso Honda was releasing a patch to upgrade my car.
Hopefully this won’t lead to the Blue Screen of Death!

We just had the Shore Leave 28 wrap-up meeting yesterday and it brought all the memories flooding back.
Thursday I picked up S. and her son L. at Dulles. As we were heading down I-66 toward the beltway, she asked if we might find time over the weekend to visit the monuments so L. could see them. After some brief discussion, we decided there was “no time like the present” and set off on an impromptu tour.
This was the first time in about 10 years that I’d intentionally driven into DC. (I accidentally found myself on the National Mall back in December when I made a wrong turn on my to see Serenity, but this time, I was going on purpose.) Given the huge amounts of traffic you usually see downtown, I didn’t hold out much hope for finding a parking space and thought we’d have to settle for driving past a few memorials and content ourselves with the view. It turns out that there’s a parking lot for tourists over by the FDR memorial.
That was just what Doctor ordered! So we parked the car and set out on foot. Over the next couple hours we visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the World War II memorial (the first time I’d ever seen it too), the Korean War memorial and several smaller ones as well. Before leaving DC, we also stopped by Albert Einstein memorial near the intersection of 21st and Constitution.
Stopping for dinner in Rockville, we arrived in Hunt Valley about 10:30pm. It was a longer trip than originally planned, but we had fun.
After meeting Amanda Tapping in person, I’m happy to report that she’s just as friendly in person as you might hope. One neat thing with her was on Saturday, she helped auction off a “Wonder Twins” item to benefit the Julien Fleming Memorial Fund. The item was a plush toy panda in camouflage fatigues dubbed “A Panda Tapping.” Not only was Amanda a good sport about the name, she went on to tell a story about how her brothers once nicknamed “Amanda the Panda.” Then she made an offer to the audience – whatever the top bid was for the Panda, she’d match it, dollar for dollar. In the end, that promise ended up costing her $1,000. (As a nice touch, the runner up in the bidding later contacted the charity and donated an additional $1,000, bringing the charity a total of $3,000 from that auction.)
During the day on Saturday, I had a chance to speak with Corin Nemec. After some initial hesitation I told him there was a question I’d been debating whether to ask him to which he replied, “Go ahead, ask me anything.” So I did. If you’re a fan of country music, you’re no doubt familiar with Toby Keith’s “Beer for my Horses.” Corin made an appearance in the video and I told him it looked like it must have been a lot of fun to shoot. So then I asked him, “Did you know about the dress before the day of the shoot?” He laughed and said that he’d known but he was excited about the opportunity to work with Willie Nelson.
One of the other actors I had the opportunity to interact with was Kent McCord, he was at the con because of his roles on Galactica 1980 and Farscape, but I knew him better for his role on Adam-12.
A few years back, I had the opportunity to chat for a few minutes with Mike Stoker. He’d had a small part on Emergency!, but his real career was an LA county fire fighter. The role on Emergency! came about because they needed an actual fire fighter to drive the engine on the show. One of the questions I asked him was whether he’d ever arrived at a fire only to have someone try to send him away because they didn’t think he was a real firefighter. It turns out that it really did happen!
Based on that experience, I asked Kent if he’d ever been mistaken for a real police officer and found out that happened to him and Martin Milner on several occasions. Once they were filming on location in downtown LA, jumped out of the car with guns drawn, and the people on the street ran because they didn’t know they were actors filming a TV show.
Other highlights of the weekend: I had a rare Mark Anbinder sighting. Mark makes it Shore Leave every year, but for four years in a row, I never saw him, just heard reports afterward that he’d been there. I did see him last year, but didn’t have a chance to talk. This year we actually managed to chat for 10-15 minutes!
Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn is, of course, still quite hideous. Rumor has it that they’re losing a lot of wedding receptions because nobody wants that décor as a background for their big day. I had my own fun with it back at Farpoint, equipping the entire Farpoint committee with “carpet deflectors.” At Shore Leave, Todd Brugmans handed out 50 pairs of “Carpet Secret Message Decoders” – cardboard sunglasses with red cellophane lenses that would purportedly let you read secret messages encoded in the carpet patterns. (It’s as good an explanation for those carpets as any other.)
One of the many people who don’t like the décor is Sophia Kelly-Shultz. Sophia’s been a regular at Shore Leave for a number of years and this year she entered an item in the Art Show titled, “Law & Order – Artistic Intent”; poking fun at the hotel’s decorating and claiming that the decorators “…received a sentence of 15 1/2 to life for turning a perfectly good hotel into something Andy Warhol would eschew.” With additional comments about an ongoing search for “…the LSD that inspired the carpets.”
All told, it was a great weekend. My only regret is that it was over so soon.

Last night I watched a MacGyver episode from 1989 that revolved around the plight of the Black Rhino. The episode ended with a voice-over from Richard Dean Anderson explaining that (as of 1989) there were less than 4,000 of them left in the entire world. He went on to say that with the then current level of poaching, unless something was done, they’d be extinct by the year 2000.
That was 17 years ago. Curious about their current status, I went to Google and typed in “Black Rhino.”
On an intellectual level, I know it was just some mindless computer program with no idea what the words meant or why I was looking them up. That’s the intellectual version. But after watching a TV show about people killing the animals just to sell their horns, the one ad on the side of the page was somewhat disturbing:
Black Rhino – Find it on Ebay.

I’ve never really understood some of the non-grocery products sold at the supermarket. Most of the general merchandise (shampoo, toothpaste and such) inside the store makes some sort of sense, but lately some supermarkets are branching out and carrying more "non-traditional" items that you’d usually look for somewhere else. Picnic tables, plants, mulch and potting soil top this list.
I stopped off at the supermarket on my way home from the church this morning. At the checkout, I noticed that someone had taped up a cheat sheet next to the register, listing the price codes for some of those less traditional items. The list was made up of four items: Top soil, hardwood mulch, pine mulch and hummus.
That last one took me by surprise. Hummus is a Greek dip made primarily of chickpeas and generally (in the US anyhow) served with pita bread.
Garden centers (which, unlike my local supermarket, don’t generally carry Greek food items) frequently sell something called "humus." It’s essentially what’s left after the worms get done digesting the contents of your compost heap. You probably don’t want to get these two items confused.
There’s already a compost heap located next to the garden, so I don’t really see a need to buy humus. If the circumstance ever arose where I did need to buy the stuff, my first choice would be to buy it at a garden center.
I no longer know where to buy hummus though.

There was a time not so long ago when someone asked me if I knew anyone who’d had cancer. I replied that I didn’t. Then I got to thinking about it. One of the people I didn’t know was my grandfather. He died before I was born. Another, who I knew too briefly, was a friend out in Nevada.

Larry Borino *
David Dahlman *
Karen Donnelly
Lee Hodge
Blair Learn *
David Learn
Allyson Mann *

Those are all friends or relatives who had cancer. I’m certain the list is incomplete. The ones with asterisks didn’t survive. There’s too many of them, and that doesn’t even count the friends and relatives of my friends.
On June 10 I’ll be participating in the Rockville Relay for Life. It’s a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. If you’d like to sponsor me in the event, donations can be any amount, it’s a fixed donation, no “per lap” or anything like that. There’s also an option to have luminaria lit either in memory of someone who didn’t survive, or in honor of someone who did. There’s a suggested donation of $10 for those.
Drop me a line if you’re interested.

A couple months back, I got an e-mail from someone I knew back in college. For whatever reason, they’d gone onto Google and started looking up people they’d known “way back when.” I hadn’t seen this person in nearly two decades (Wow…18 years since college…. Damn, I’m old!) but I was one of the people they looked up.
I’ve known for several years that anyone who wanted to could find me through Google. In fact, sometimes it comes in handy like last fall when my brother was on a business trip, needed my e-mail address, and found me via a Google search for Terry Dactyl. The difference is that this is the first time a stranger (or someone from my distant past anyhow) tracked me down this way.
Having someone find me that way doesn’t bother me too much, but I can’t help thinking that the Google results give a somewhat skewed view of my interests.
A simple search for the name “Blair Learn” doesn’t immediately show anything about me. Instead, you get a bunch of stuff about Tony Blair and ads for someone named Preston Blair who offers drawing lessons.
Digging down a bit, you’ll find a number of pages where I’m mentioned for my participation in the Science Fiction fan community (mostly stuff from several years ago), but there’s very little about things I do with the Jaycees, Oktoberfest and other community groups.
Much of what we know about ancient civilizations (or even the early years of own nation) is based on what few records have survived the centuries. A lot of what we know about anything where no records exist comes from digging up trash. (As a child, I recall a tour guide at a house in Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin once lived explaining that many historic artifacts were found by excavating privies. Evidently kids have always been kids and if, for instance, you broke a plate, what better way to conceal the evidence than to toss it in the privy?)
I sometimes wonder how accurate our historical knowledge is. Interpretations of trash just don’t seem likely to give you the full story, just some broad generalities.
Likewise, how much can a Google search tell you about me? Sure, you’ll find places where other people have mentioned me, but that tells you more about their interests than mine.
Even if you slog through and find this site, you’re still only getting a partial view.
Though after reading the blog, you’ll probably agree with the comparison to Benjamin Franklin’s trash heap.