Wyszdom

Earlier today, I witnessed my 87-year-old grandmother, who only started using a computer regularly a couple of years ago, successfully initiate a video chat (to my sister) using her new iMac that she received as a Christmas gift.

She also uses it to go on the Internet (email, news, shopping), play solitaire, and write her memoir. I want to be like her when I grow up.

A couple of pictures of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, 2008:

Wow, Christmas Eve is already here. Have a great Christmas, everyone.

I’m on my way home from seeing it with my sisters. Nitpicks:

A couple living in San Francisco was taking a cab to the airport and went across the Golden Gate. This does not make sense.

Later, some guys were installing Dish TV. The picture was analog-fuzzy as they were adjusting it. I’m pretty sure Dish TV is digital. But maybe they had a bad connection from the receiver to the TV.

At a Christmas brunch, earlier this afternoon…

My cousin Chris, sitting across the table, got my attention:
“Can you do me a salad?” he asked.
“You want me to get you a salad?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Do you have any Tabasco sauce?”

I went into the kitchen and retrieved the Tabasco bottle, and presented it to him in a hilarious fashion, as it it were a bottle of wine. He played along and tasted a small portion of it before applying it to the rest of his omelette. With one of his requests fulfilled, I headed back into the kitchen and piled Caesar salad and some fruit onto a plate, and set it next to him.

As the meal ended, there was a salad plate sitting near me at the table. Nobody at the table would claim ownership of it. I started to think that maybe Chris thought that I brought him a salad plate as a joke, and I asked him if he moved the salad that he had ordered earlier.

“I asked for a salad?” He couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, you asked for a salad and then Tabasco sauce.”

I was then taught the definition of “Do me a solid.”

Harry and Potter, December 2006

Stille Nacht

I’m probably going to be pretty tired when you read this after a cross-country flight, so this post’s song is “Stille Nacht” performed by Mannheim Steamroller. No, they don’t turn things upside-down and go all Mannheim Steamrollery on it like with “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” It’s a peaceful track, and it’s best enjoyed when it comes on at just the right time in a mix, and isn’t followed by “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

Home for Christmas

This is my last post in the series I began on December 1st. I’m sure I’ll still have a bit more to say about Christmas this year, but during my vacation I don’t want to be tied to (self-imposed) blogging deadlines.

If everything goes according to schedule, this will be published at the time I land in Philadelphia for my Christmas vacation. I don’t have an incredible story for this post. I just want to say that I’m where I want to be.

Christmas tree, Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto, CA

White Christmas

“White Christmas” is today’s song pick. I feel a little nervous choosing it just hours before I embark on a journey across the country in December, but I do want a white Christmas, and I suppose it’s not as dangerous as choosing “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

The song describes a white Christmas as being “just like the ones I used to know,” and this is true. In my memories, I always associate Christmas with snow. While my Californian friends may assume that my home state is a frozen tundra from December through mid-March, the probability of a white Christmas where I live are actually well below 50%. So a white Christmas still requires a bit of dreaming for me, and when it does happen, it’s quite magical.

Christmas in California

Sometimes Often when I miss home, I give California a hard time. After going home for Thanksgiving, I even claimed that California doesn’t celebrate Christmas. But I’ll admit, after I settled down and got back into California mode, it did start to feel a bit like Christmas around here. It’s different, but it’s still Christmas. I’m excited to go home, but I will admit that there are some things over here that I will miss while I’m gone. I’ll miss my friends, I’ll miss my desk and ridiculous Internet connection at work, and I’ll miss some of the food. At home I’ll gain family, older friends, and homemade food, so it will still be a very merry Christmas, but just because home is good doesn’t mean California is bad. I’ve even seen some nice decorating around here, and wow, it’s actually been cold.

19th in a series of Christmasy things.

Over a year ago, I decided I would embark on a mission to save all of my family’s home videos to disk. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m glad, because there were a few flaws in my plan. My plan wasn’t future-proof (the videos would be saved with lossy compression), it would require a lot of bandwidth (I planned to upload them to my website), and compression time would drive me nuts.

Fortunately, good things come to those who wait. My highest quality video is on HDV tapes. HDV runs at about 12-14ish gigabytes per hour. 1 terabyte disk drives, which would give me over 70 hours of HD video per drive, are now in the “totally affordable” range of about $120, and could be even less when I buy them in January. This means that for less than $400, I could have an instantly accessible digital library of my videos (at least the first 70 hours), and two backup copies which I could rotate on my trips home as an offsite backup.

Since iMovie ‘08 now operates on the iPhoto model (it manages a video library; it is not just an editing program), I think I’ll be encouraged to shoot more video if I know that it won’t just be placed on a shelf and forgotten.

I’ll get started on this when I return to California in 2009. The one issue is that I need to decide how to handle the VHS stuff. Do I burn it on my DVD recorder and then rip it as a high quality H.264 file? Do I record to DV tape and then transfer the tape to my computer? I think I’ll go with the DVD option. It won’t be in an easily editable format (most editors will only handle DV/HDV/etc. in realtime), but it will be better than two tape transfers.

And after this project is complete, should I revive the idea of scanning pre-digital family photos? I started on this back in college but it was painfully slow and I gave up after only a couple of albums. Are there super-fast (but still high quality) scanners available now? Please point me in the right direction in the comments.

Christmas Wrapping

Today’s song pick is “Christmas Wrapping” performed by The Waitresses.

Advent calendar

I don’t believe I don’t have a picture of it, but I can’t find one right now. Our family has an Advent calendar which we use every year to count down the days until Christmas. Most Advent calendars you may be familiar with have small doors that you open, revealing a picture or perhaps even a treat. Ours is a bit different, and was sewn by my mom. It’s a felt Christmas tree, covered in green and gold sequins. At the top is a star, and at the bottom are 24 numbered pockets. Each pocket contains a wooden ornament for the tree. There’s a bear helping to decorate it. Each day, one of the children takes the ornament from the appropriate pocket and hangs it on one of the sequins. It looks similar to this tree, but I’ll try to get a picture of ours when I go home.

I remember in preschool we made chains made out of interlocking strips of red and green construction paper. They may have been purely decorative, but I think I remember part of the idea being that you would take off one link every day to count down to Christmas.

18th in a series of Christmasy things.

The Plaza at PPG Place, Pittsburgh, PA, 2004.

Do They Know It’s Christmas?

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid was written and performed to raise money for charity in 1984 and has remained popular.

Stockings

My sisters and I each have our own stocking sewn by my mother. We all got our stockings at a avery early age… all of us except for my youngest sister. Her stocking remained in-progress year after year, with my mom working on it during family vacations. It became a bit of a running joke that it would never be finished, but finally on my sister’s tenth Christmas, her custom-sewn stocking (before that she used a nice, but not custom-sewn stand-in) was hung by the chimney with care.

According to Wikipedia and this book, the term Pollyanna (when describing a secret gift exchange) is rarely used outside of southeastern Pennsylvania. All of my non-Pennsylvanian readers, did you know what a Pollyanna was before you read this post? Let me know in the comments.