DanRochman.com

w00t! Another post, and it hasn’t even been a month since the last one!! Maybe I’m on a roll? Oops, now I jinxed it for sure…

Climbing News: Rock climbing *is* a lot of fun, even though it turns out I’m really BAD at it. What’s the opposite of a “natural”? An unnatural? Could I be an unnatural-born rock climber? Anyhow, it was still fun. The belay safety class was quick and painless, and it was cool finally finding out how all the belaying doohickeys actually work. It was even cooler watching Em effortlessly lower me down from about 20 feet up, even though she weighs about half of what I do. After the class, we took turns going up the wall (one person climbs while the other “belays” - i.e., holds and controls the safety rope from the ground below). We were obviously on a “beginner” wall, and Em shimmied up it like a little monkey, but I struggled every time. Mostly just REALLY bad technique. I was pulling myself up with my arms, instead of pushing myself up with my legs, which is a very tough way to go up a wall. I knew better, but I had a hard time thinking clearly as I got higher up the wall. Even with a safety rope, the height made me a little nervous… Still, I really want to go back there and try it again. I like to think I could get the hang of it eventually. Ow, that pun.

Friend News: I was poking around inside the new WordPress engine that powers this site, and stumbled across the “registered users” page. Lo and behold, it turns out that not only has Crispin been reading this blog, he went and registered as a user some time around a week ago. Not sure what good that does him (I might owe him some Petro-Points - that’s a Canadian joke, btw), but it’s cool to know that feature is working. I’m on Crispin and Patricia’s famous “Monday List”, and this week’s issue (issue?) was one of my all-time favorites. So, today’s shout-out goes to Crispin, and to his namesake, Saint Crispin (the patron saint of cobblers, dontcha know).

Roshambo News: When I was a very young child, I learned of a game called “Rock, Scissors, Paper” (not necessarily in that order). In my late teens, I heard several people refer to “roshambo”, but for a long while I had no idea what they were talking about. Eventually, of course, I came to understand that roshambo and the “Rock, Scissors, Paper” game were actually the same thing. Since that time, I’ve wondered on and off how the game ever came to be referred to as “roshambo” in the first place (the other name seems pretty obvious). I never did get around to looking it up. [Note to self: There really should be a word for things that you wonder about on and off over long periods of time without bothering to look them up - invent that word. Come to think of it, there might already be such a word - but of course I can't be bothered to go look it up.) But today, inspired by Crispin and Patricia, and in a desperate attempt to avoid doing real work (on my lunch break, of course), I actually bothered to go look it up. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a really authoritative answer. There's consistent speculation that it has something to do with Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, but nobody can really explain how the game would have come to be known by his name. Still, I got some good reading in - the FreeDictionary and Wikipedia entries for Roshambo are absolutely fascinating.

Roshambo Links: In honor of Roshambo Day (?!) here at DanRochman.com, make sure you go enjoy the original roshambot, as well as Cripsin and Patricia's redux. You also MUST check out the amazing Roshambo FAQ (roshambo as a religion?!) and the completely awe-inspiring Roshambo Homepage. Anyone into coding, computer science, game theory, or "all of the above" has to check out (if not enter) the International RoShamBo Programming Competition. And anyone with eyes must go straight away to check out the World RPS Society - their web site is INTENSE. And finally, the greatest roshambo link of them all... the reason (many of) these darned kids today actually have a completely different definition of "roshambo" than us older folks... the legendary SouthPark "roshambo" clip. [Not necessarily work-safe, but VERY funny.]

CL Question: Do Torontonians know of the glory that is craigslist?? It started out in the Bay Area (and has become an essential component of life here - anyone in San Francisco with half a clue is likely to have found their last apartment/job/partner/other on craigslist, and even most of the clueless have heard of it), but they’ve been steadily adding sub-sites for many other cities around the world. I’m not sure when, but they finally got around to adding a Toronto site - has it taken off there yet? Have you used it? If you have, let me know. If you haven’t, then go check it out, and spread the word. Community sites need to be highly active in order to be popular, and vice versa, so it can be challenging to get them off the ground…

Welcome to the new blog. Well, it’s (largely) the same old blog, with the same old infrequent-but-long-and-boring posts. But it’s now powered by new software, and it’s now running on a server (of sorts). Up until now, the whole site had been hosted on a rather ancient laptop, so this move has been a long time coming. Cosmetically, the site has gone from a somewhat-ugly out-of-the-box template that came with Movable Type, to the somewhat-uglier out-of-the-box template that currently ships with WordPress. I might eventually get around to making the site less ugly, but, as always, that’s pretty low on my list of priorities. Ugly is one of the few things I’ve always done well, and pretty is something I’ve always had a hard time with.

I’m listening to the truly awesome KEXP out of Seattle, WA (easily one of my favorite radio stations - tune in online and check it out!). At the moment, the “Sonic Reducer” program is being guest-hosted by none other than Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Nardwuar can be, um… challenging to listen to. So much so that Em just asked me to switch it off. But if you don’t know Nardwuar, you don’t know Canadian music. Well, maybe you know a little somethin’-somethin’, but Nardwuar is some kind of bizarre, rambling, encyclopaedia of Canadian music. He is also a radio DJ, frontman of his own band (the Evaporators), and one of Canada’s most entertaining guerilla journalists. If I do one thing today, I will encourage others to go check out KEXP and Nardwuar. Okay, that was two things. I’ll take tomorrow off.

As usual, about a month has gone by since my last post. Since that time, a couple of things have happened. On the personal side, we went to Toronto over the Halloween weekend for my niece Dalia’s bat-mitzvah. Yay! On the global events side, and as some of you may have heard, George Bush won a second term as President of the United States of America. Boo, hiss.

To get the bad news out of the way first - Em and I live in a country that is steadily being overrun by complete idiots. It didn’t seem so bad when (it seemed that) there were isolated *pockets* of idiocy - you just made a point of avoiding those places if you could. But now the worm has turned, and we find ourselves in what is, as it turns out, one of the remaining pockets of non-idiocy. It’s a really nice pocket, mind you, and we still really like living here. So much so that we’ve answered all of the (many) “So *now* are you moving back to Canada?” questions with (variations on) “No, not yet.” I do hope those of you still in Canada do your best to idiot-proof (or better yet, idiocy-proof) the borders, and shore up the anti-idiocy defenses there. What I’d hate most is to see the decline of this Empire Americain take Canada down with it. For my part, I do what I can from here in this very-blue part of this rather-red nation to destroy idiocy at its roots. It’s an uphill battle…

On the good news side, Em’s brother Nelson came to visit us here in San Francisco - we had fun doing touristy stuff, and he took about a million pictures. Right after Nelson’s visit, Em and I had a fun (quick!) trip to Toronto. The weather in Toronto was nice enough (when it counted), the bat-mitzvah was bat-mitzah-y, and (best of all) we even managed to sneak in some time to hang out with some of our bestest friends. We even got to drop in on a really cool Halloween party (pics from which are *finally* up in the gallery) after the Bat Mitzvah - it made for a VERY late night, but it was worth it.

Let’s see - what else has happened. Szecket and his family made their move from Los Angeles to somewhere-near-Boston. They ended up driving out there in a camper. Must have been quite the cross-country trek, what with two kids and three dogs along for the ride. Congrats to those folks for making it out there (relatively) unscathed. I’m hoping we’ll get a chance to visit that part of the world soon. In the meantime, I turned Szecket on to flickr the other night, and he’s already gone and posted some photos to his new flickr account. Those of you who haven’t already done so should checkk flickr out - it’s a very cool way to share photos, as well as a MASSIVE online gallery of other people’s public photos, all tagged by keyword for easy searching. And of course, albums and searches are available as RSS and Atom feeds. Sweet!

Oh, and another cool new toy that’s out there is Microsoft Photo Story 3 - I haven’t had a chance to play with this yet, but it’s FREE for any of you using Windows XP. Nice way to make simple-but-elegant slide shows, and it seems squarely aimed at closing some of the obvious functionality gaps between Windows XP and the iPhoto/iLife apps on the Mac OS. The demos look nice, and I like that the finished file sizes are relatively small. This ought to be a good way for me to (e.g.) publish narrated slide shows to my Pocket PC…

Hey, I almost forgot - it’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the US! Em and I went and got stuffed at Jebava’s place. Seb made his now-famous butterflied turkey (soooo good), and there was just a ridiculous amount of delicious food. Em brought a couple of yummy home-made pies (I peeled and cored most of the apples for the applie pie, I’ll have you know!), and a good time was had by all.

In sad, sad news, Seb’s grandmother is quite ill, and her health has just taken a bad turn. Seb, Janna, and Ava caught the red-eye on Friday night to be with her, and our thoughts are with them all.

As for today (yikes, I started writing this last night, but that was before we slipped out to the Argus Lounge for a quick nightcap, and then I came home and fell asleep… oops), we’re about to head over to Mission Cliffs for an introductory “Belay Safety Class” for first-timers (like us). It seems like fun, and I’ve always wanted to try it, and Mission Cliffs is just a few minutes away from here… I’ll report back later with how much fun it was - or wasn’t. Any rock climbers in the readership care to comment?