January 2007 Archives

Helaine has headed to bed. Steffie's upstairs, watching TV by herself. New Year's Eve has ended at the Fox house.

We were together at the stroke of midnight. Helaine and I kissed. She always gets choked up at New Year's. It's actually very sweet.

The three of us sat together and grazed the TV dial as the new year approached. Everyone station seems to be doing something special tonight.

Tony Orlando was performing in Atlantic City and it was live on Fox News Channel. Good lord - he's the size of two houses! He and the band looked like poster children for 'going through the motions.'

In his defense, how many times could you sing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon," before going postal?

On NBC, Carson Daly was holding down the fort. Years ago, he was very nice to Steffie. I, in turn, will be nice to Carson. He's very thin and I'm jealous.

MTV looked like a community access channel, albeit with good lighting. I have no idea who their acts were. I have less idea who their hosts were, except Steffie pointed to one and said, "That's Perez Hilton."

Oh, that's what he looks like.

On ABC, Dick Clark was supported by Ryan Seacrest. You can see Dick's mind is sharp, and he looks good, but it's still painful to hear him speak.

Approaching midnight, he had trouble keeping up with the countdown to the ball drop. He actually dropped a number to get back in sync.

He has to have worked hard to get back to where he is. The problem is with me. I need to be more understanding. This is my weakness.

New Year's Eve is a bittersweet night for Helaine and me. Most years we stayed at home, quietly spending the time together. One year, just after arriving in Connecticut, we went to a party and a former co-worker began to hit on my wife!

Our first New Year's Eve together, back in Buffalo, we went to a party at our friend Phil's apartment. Who knows why, but we had a fight. Neither of us remember the specifics. It was twenty four years ago tonight, and it was the closest we ever came to splitting up.

I like New Year's Eve at home better.

I'm a day late and a dollar short... but in case you haven't seen this yet, here's what happened in 2006 courtesy of the guys at Jib Jab!

Thank you so much for visiting my website in 2006. I would have forgotten to write this had Helaine not reminded me.

I enjoy writing. The blog helped me discover that. It has also made me a better writer and re-writer. Rewriting has been my biggest surprise, because that's when the entries really come together.

Still, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enjoying quantifying your presence.

Here are some 'back of the envelope' calculations (really - I used an envelope). It looks like my daily traffic is up approximately 30% over last year. I must have posted a lot more multimedia files, because at the same time I'm using 40% more bandwidth.

In 2006 this site served over 118 gigabytes of stuff. That's ridiculous. It's more than you could fit on a couple dozen DVDs!

For a simple blog, this site does well. That people have found it is somewhat organic. As far as I know, it's only been mentioned once on TV, and that by an fill-in anchor who didn't realize she really shouldn't.

Some of my traffic comes from new readers of my home page. People come and go all the time.

Some traffic also comes simply because there is so much more indexed by the search engines. There are at least 500 pages on this site that weren't here a year ago and each has been seen by Google, Yahoo!, MSN and their brethern.

My home page has a Google page rank of 5. WTNH.com has a 6. The New Haven Register has a 4. Sorry Register.

I keep saying I'm going to move the blog from its current host, but the process seems so daunting, I just leave it where it is. It's also running out-of-date software.

Maybe this year? Probably not. I am very good at procrastination.

Thanks also to those of you who left comments. Often they are thought provoking. I never know whether to respond or not. If I've left you hanging, I apologize.

Geez - look at the time. Even I need to get to bed at some point.

This morning, as I stumbled downstairs, Helaine asked if I had seen George H. W. Bush's (aka - Bush 41) eulogy of Gerald Ford? It was an unusual topic for Helaine. She mostly avoids this kind of television - and who can blame her?

I had not seen it, but she had recorded it!

OK - before you start getting macabre feelings toward my wife, one of the great advantages of a DVR is, you can record shows on-the-fly. The recording actually begins at the point you started watching, not when you hit the record button. Pretty convenient.

She hit the play button and I watched Mr. Bush walk to the podium. He is 80 years old, but has a full head of hair and wore no glasses.

My dad later commented, maybe Bush 41 has no glasses for the same reason he has no glasses, they no longer help. Good try, but no. It's possible he's wearing contacts or had surgery. It's still impressive.

President Bush began to read the eulogy and was quite poignant. I suppose, with too much practice, one gets gets at this sort of thing. Then he got to the point where he talked about the real Gerry Ford.

George Bush stood there, at the podium in at this very formal funeral service, and did his impression of Dana Carvey doing him... and it brought the house down.

I as very impressed.

Here's a quote of a quote of a quote. I was reading Dr. Jeff Master's weather blog this morning. He put numbers on the tropical weather of 2006.

In a word - average

The Atlantic was down. The Eastern Pacific was up. The rest of the world helped make the average... well, average.

Strong storms are up numerically, but experts now think strong storms were vastly underestimated in the pre-satellite, pre-radar, era. We were pretty blind back then.

Then, he quoted a recent statement from the World Meteorological Organization concerning hurricanes and global warming.

In other words, if you build on the coast, you're going to be hit when coastal storms come along. Period. End of story.

There's no need to use global warming as a stalking horse to invoke fear. There will be devastating 'big ones,' because people have aggregated where big ones have always come in the past.

The Gulf Coast, from Florida through Texas, is alive with people. Same thing for the East Coast. Sure, Florida has been populous for a long time, but now there's major development farther north in Florida and into Georgia and the Carolinas.

Even here in Connecticut... no, especially here in Connecticut, our shoreline is crammed with people, few of whom have heard of, much less remember the devastation of the Hurricane of '38.

You don't need to worry about 'Super Storms.' What Mother Nature naturally packs is bad enough already. You'll see.

Have you seen the cover of Sports Illustrated? Of course you have. There it is over to the left.

That's Jeff Garcia, Philadelphia Eagles fill-in quarterback. He is here because Donovan McNabb is not. Jeff Garcia, a discarded quarterback well past his peak, is our savior. He's amazing every second he's on the field. If this is my football dream, I don't want to wake up.

But now he's on the cover of S.I. Oh no!

You see, being on the cover of Sports Illustrated is an honor, but it comes with the world famous SI cover jinx. No, I'm serious. Even lesser sports fans, like me, have heard about it. Sports Illustrated itself, in a true exercise in navel gazing, has written about it.

Whether it's true or false... it had better be false this time. From here on out, as the Eagles start the first round of the playoffs, it's win or walk.

I wish they would have put someone else on the cover. How about Tiki or anyone named Manning? Don't the Giants deserve a little additional attention?

I have already chronicled Steffie's navigational problems while driving to new places... and a few old ones. It's something every new driver experiences as they realize, maybe they should have been looking out the window while they were in the car the last 18 or so years!

That being said, we knew Stefanie would want, and we wanted her to have, a GPS unit. With the holidays approaching we scanned the ads and online 'intelligence' every day, looking for a deal.

Finally, late in November we found our prey. In a Staples circular was an ad for an Invion GPS. Ever hear of Invion? Me neither.

I looked online, but if there were any reviews, I couldn't find them. It seemed as if Invion was primarily a European company. It seemed to be based in the Netherlands (though I'm sure the electronics were thrown together in China). They had similar units, but this particular one wasn't mentioned.

If you're in retail, here's advice for you. At times like this, your reputation makes the sale. We bought the unit, knowing that if there was a problem, Staples would stand behind it. The Staples name was much more important than Invion.

Steffie opened it for the holidays and then Daddy took over, charging it and scanning the manual. This is another one of those manuals that looks a lot easier to understand than it really is. You read it, understand all the words but little of the concept.

I needed to experiment before it left for school. I fired it up a few nights ago from the kitchen. It easily locked onto a few satellites and found our house.

These little boxes take advantage of amazing technology. OK - it's used for the precision guidance of missiles too. No one's perfect.

Tonight, it was Steffie's turn to try it out. First, we fired it up in the kitchen and Steffie programmed in her school's address. The machine guided her through the process, eliminating letters as her choices became more obvious.

We brought it to the car, stuck its base to the dashboard and headed toward her school.

For the first two or three seconds, nothing happened. Steffie asked if the little icon in the center of the screen should have repositioned itself as we moved down the driveway? But before I could answer, it did move.

"Turn right in 100 yards," said the Stepford-like voice inside. There was no accent, no regionalism, no inflection.

"Turn right now," the voice said, without missing a beat.

And obediently, Steffie turned right. She was smiling. I was too.

We drove a couple of miles and turned around. Steffie touched the screen a few times, finally tapping the word "Home." The voice was eager to please. She even knew the driveway was our final destination.

I'm just amazed by all of this. The unit just seems to work. In our very brief test, it passed with a 100%.

I'll be more amazed when we get our rebate check!

Since watching the video today, I've been reading as much as I could about the Russian rocket that burned up over the Rocky Mountain States, Thursday.

The beautiful video came from a Denver TV station's helicopter starting its early morning run aloft. Lucky catch, and well done.

What you see burning up in the atmosphere, the rocket, had only been up since last Wednesday. That doesn't seem very long.

NORAD says they tracked it all the way. Hey, guys, thanks for the heads up - not!

This rocket was part of the launch vehicle for a French satellite, COROT. Very international - French satellite with six international partners: the European Space Agency (Esa), Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil, launched on a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan. But that's not the interesting part.

COROT will look for planets, hospitable to life, outside our solar system. There's a practical idea! What didn't get funded so this could?

These planets, hopefully around Earth-sized, are too far away to see. We can, however, detect their shadows across the stars they orbit. This is beyond geeky.

I'm sure in the long run, there's important scientific knowledge to be discerned, but if we find a nice place, it will be much too far to visit. Imagine, a journey taking entire generations. The distant ancestors of the people who decided to go would be the passengers upon arrival.

Not gonna happen.

Someday, COROT too will fall to Earth. Probably a whole less spectacular then.

I just spoke with a reporter for the New Haven Register. He called to find out about our unseasonably warm weather. We didn't just break records today - they were pulverized.

       old          2007    
EWR.....61...1950....72
BDR.....53...1949....63
NYC.....63...1950....72
LGA.....59...1998....72
JFK.....57...1998....71
ISP.....55...1998....65
(as of 3:00pm EST)

Right now it's warmer in Connecticut than Los Angeles... and much warmer here than Las Vegas!

Even I, global warming skeptic that I am, am impressed with this departure from the norm. I've never seen a winter like this. Still, you can't jump to conclusions and attach one specific cause to one specific weather anomaly. Weather is not climate and the atmosphere is astoundingly complex.

One thing I did mention on the phone, and which I thought through in some detail, is how this early season weather will affect the rest of winter. At some point the past can affect the future.

With no snow over New York or much of Southern Canada, airmasses from the north will modify before reaching Connecticut. That hints at a more difficult to achieve scenario in order to bring really cold temperatures.

What I mean is, airmasses that in a normal winter might reach us at 15 degrees could instead come in at 20. Don't dwell on those specific numbers, it's the general concept I'm getting at.

There are hints it will be chillier... maybe even downright cold... by midweek. There's no joy in that for me.

In a year when oil is so pricey and electric bills have skyrocketed, maybe this lack of winter isn't such a terrible thing?

Steffie's wearing a McNabb jersey. I have an Eagles sweatshirt on. Helaine's in pj's. We're on the family room sofa.

In just a few moments, the game begins. Eagles vs Giants in the first round of the playoffs.

The pre-game analysis couldn't have been more positive toward the Eagles. So why are we sweating? As Eagles fans, we always expect the unexpected and unwelcome.

One more week. We want one more week.

The Eagles beat the Giants on a last minute field goal. It was not their best game. It was good enough.

At halftime, Pam Oliver asked Andy Reid what he thought this game would come down to. Reid answered, "The wire."

Toward the middle of the fourth quarter, the three of us, sitting in the family room, got very quiet. There was the unspoken undercurrent of the Eagles snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And we were feeling this way while the Eagles had the ball!

Even as the Eagles took a time out with under 20 seconds to go, we worried the Giants would be left with too much time. The Eagles must have figured that out too. They called one more play. Garcia plunged up the middle and the clock was stopped at 00:03.

David Akers. Good. The final was 23-20.

Next Saturday the Eagles go through this again. Helaine and Steffie will be here. I'll be in New Jersey with some friends. Thank heavens for cellphones.

How strange is this game of football? Unless you're in the Super Bowl, the season has been a disappointment. Sadly, every team but one exits the playoffs with a loss.

This is the week of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. If you like high tech toys, it is the place for you! This year, 2,700 companies will exhibit, most introducing new products or lines of products.

There's lots of buzz about the marriage of entertainment and portable devices. That might mean a phone which receives digital television too. Who knows?

New technologies evolve. This year's losers might set the ground for next year's breakout.

Will Apple get back into the handheld field? Lots of people say yes, but what shape this 'thing' will take is anyone's guess, from an always secretive Apple.

I've never been. My closest Las Vegas foray was demo'ing products for a weather graphics company at the National Association of Broadcasters convention - another huge high tech show.

I'd like to go, though I'm not sure it's a practical dream without someone else picking up the tab. Geofffox.com doesn't send correspondents to report... yet.

I'll keep an eye on what comes out. If any thing's really cool, I'll mention it here... just before my birthday.

Sometime this morning, the smell of natural gas... or more accurately, the smell of the chemical they add to natural gas, began being noticed over Manhattan and parts of New Jersey.

Mayor Bloomberg said there was no cause for alarm, everything's safe, though he had no idea where the smell was coming from and what it was. Or, to quote the mayor, "We are waiting for the gas to pass."

Seriously, how could he have said that? Did the guy who wrote the, "Eat Here/Get Gas" billboard, transfer to City Hall?

There are chemical sensors squirreled all over New York. That's probably where the mayor's confidence comes from. However, eliminating known agents doesn't directly translate to guaranteed safe breathing. And, sadly, the assurances following 9/11 were totally off the mark, with toxic debris floating around Lower Manhattan.

In the past I've considered jobs in New York City. Since 9/11, every time I've thought about working there, I've thought about the threat level.

My job search process never went far enough to know for sure, but I decided I could deal with my uneasiness. I suppose that's easier to say in the abstract.

In the end, this smell will go down with all the unaccompanied packages and lost airline passengers that have collectively cost us millions of dollars (or more), slowed us down, and changed our lives over the past five years.

I had a nice mention by Randy Beach in this Sunday's New Haven Register. I am flattered they consider me a credible source.

I like answering reporter's questions about weather, but it's really difficult. The atmosphere is very complex.

Unfortunately, you can't give complex answers. They have to be understood by a general audience with little scientific background. At the same time, in order to simplify, I'm removing exceptions that make it more difficult to generalize.

What I'm saying is, I don't want someone smarter than me reading what I said and saying, "What an idiot." Surely it's happened in the past. And there are lots of really smart people in this area.

Speaking of outside media, I join Faith Middleton on WNPR a week from today. The two Times-Picayune reporters who wrote the definitive story on Katrina will also be there.

What they say about New Orleans will probably frighten people. What I'll say about Connecticut should frighten even more. The more I look at it, the more petrified I am by another Hurricane of '38 scenario.

Hopefully, we'll get a chance to toss that around too.

Charlie Walsh from the Connecticut Post called a while ago. He wanted my reaction to AccuWeather's latest pronouncement:

Quickly, I went to Google and found one of their earlier predictions.

Sure - there's the chance of a hurricane hitting the Northeast any year. Of course, there was none this year.

Then, in October, AccuWeather said:

Draw your own conclusions!

It's easy to make predictions. Anyone can forecast the weather. It's standing up and taking credit, or blame, which is much more difficult.

OK - Let's get this out of the way first - I want one.

If there's been a product launch more hyped than today's, I can't remember it. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and the world went nuts.

Everywhere I've looked, there have been stories. Jobs was on CNBC this afternoon and Nightline this evening. David Pogue, writing in the NY Times, bragged of spending an hour with him, though mostly ignoring Jobs to play with an iPhone.

When I first saw it, I said, "too big." Maybe clunky is a better description. On the other hand, it's quite slender. Jobs said it was thinner than the Motorola Q.

Will it fit in my pocket or will I have to wear a cellphone holster?

What makes Apple so special... what made the iPod such an amazing breakthrough product, is their understanding of the user interface. The iPod has the best user interface of any electronics device ever made - period.

If you don't have one, ask anyone who does how long it took them to learn how to use it? Zero. An iPod's operation is obvious the moment it's in your hand. The word is, "intuitive."

Attention to the man-machine interface is what Jobs promised, and then demonstrated.

There is one physical button on the iPhone. Everything else is done from the 3.5" high resolution touch screen. Menus change as needed. The interface adapts.

There's a 2 megapixel camera onboard, but no video. It's Apple. Aren't they the computer company known for video? That's a glaring omission.

I watched 31:05 of Steve Jobs' keynote speech¹ from Mac World before hitting pause. I am not a Mac guy. Jobs isn't my savior. I thought his first 20 minutes were top notch. Then, his presentation began to bore me.

I'm not 100% sure why I want one. The iPod music portion is wasted on me, though I'd enjoy the ability to watch podcasts. It's something I already do on the computer.

I am attracted by the 'smart' phone and the ability to carry email and web browsing in my pocket.

I don't see a computer as a burden, but a tool to help me leverage life. Currently, that tool is only available to me at home and work. There are lots of new uses I can see and probably more I can't.

Did I mention it's a fun toy?

¹ - Around 3:00 AM I watched the remainder. He's a great pitchman, but sometimes runs out of steam or gets overly "Silicon Valley geeky." Even I can't take that.

In this winterless winter, finally flurries!

The sun was actually out while these little flakes were making their suicide mission to the ground. The only place they stuck was on the back deck - out of the sunlight.

As I type this, they've already melted away.

This photo really does show the worst storm of this winter!

Today, January 11, 2007, is my parents 59th wedding anniversary. That's no small achievement.

Successful marriage was the topic of discussion tonight, as my mom and I talked while I drove home from work.

I think my folks have a great marriage. They still entertain each other. They still enjoy each others company. They respect each other. Respect is the key.

I asked my mom if she thought my dad was smart. She didn't miss a beat. "Of course," she said.

How much could they have really known about each other when they got engaged and then married? Compared to 59 years of marriage, they knew bupkis.

They were lucky. They each found the right person. Their union had the right ingredients, even if they didn't have the experience to know that at the time.

Happy anniversary mommy and daddy. How can it be anything but?

On this, their 59th anniversary, I invite you to hear the story of how they met, in their own words and pictures.

I have three tech support stories to tell. Two are brief, the third is not. They all have relatively happy endings.

The first concerns a phone call I received yesterday from the company that provides much of the on-air weather equipment we use at work. We'd had a terrible problem, which they fixed. Now they wanted some log files.

The logs were needed because they fixed the problem, but weren't sure how!

That sounds terrible, though it's not as unusual as it seems. Points to them for asking me to send the files. These log will help them understand what they did for us, so they can do it for everyone.

The second story concerns my laptop. It is, in computer time, ancient. There's a sticker on the front attesting to the fact that it was designed for Windows 98!

If you're technically inclined, it's a PII-300 with 128 mb of RAM for memory and 2 mb more for video.

If that was a meaningless blur, it's got about the same horsepower as a tricycle.

A while ago, I upgraded it to a heavily customized version Windows XP. I carefully turned off as much as I could to preserve as much of this machine's minimal power as was possible. It's still a hog.

This has been a hacker machine for me. I've experimented with it by swapping hard drives in and out. Until today it had a tiny 8 gb drive.

With a weekend trip coming up, I wanted more storage, so I swapped in a 20 gb drive last night. Windows XP was on the drive, so I freshened some programs with newer versions and then went to reboot.

Before the power went off, Windows told me it had to install some updates... 57 updates!

Are they serious? Sure, this drive had been out of service for a while, but were there really that many updates (mostly security related) to XP? And this version had already been inoculated with SP2 and other fixes.

I took a shower while the laptop did its thing.

Tech support story three is a little more troubling. It started with phone calls from Matt Scott, one of our meteorologists at the TV station.

When he went to fire up his Dell desktop machine, it quickly crashed into a Blue Screen of Death or BSOD! The BSOD screen is cryptic, but it hinted at problems with the boot sector. That's serious.

Before Matt got to me, he had spoken with Dell tech support. Their solution, after a few tests, was to send the drive to a forensic computer lab where, for $1,800, it could be resurrected!

He brought the PC in to work and Jeff Bailey, our webuy, began to work on it. I did some scouting around Google and found what typically causes this particular BSOD.

HINT: If you ever have a computer problem, write down exactly what's on the screen and search for it on Google. You are not the first person with this problem. You can often find solutions just by looking. It's very important to search for the exact words you see.

"Matt, do you have any disks that came with the PC," I asked. My suspicion was, Dells don't come with disks... and it hadn't.

I went through the station looking for a Windows XP CD. Yes, what I was doing probably violates some stipulation in the end user licensing agreement - sue me.

By the time I returned with the disk, Bailey had the machine on its side. A panel had been removed from the case, exposing the innards to the world. As it turns out, that wasn't necessary, though it makes Jeff and me look like über Geeks (as if knowing how to make a "ü" on the screen isn't enough).

Computer repair is modern day sorcery. You must follow a number of steps, none actually documented, before you begin to fix the trouble. We started by reconfiguring the BIOS to boot from a CD instead of the hard drive and loading XP's recovery console.

Matt looked sheepish - fearful his pictures, video and documents were about to get trashed.

We lucked out. Matt's problem was the same as most of the others I'd read about. It took a few hours, but slowly but surely, his computer fixed itself, rebuilding files and reconstructing the recalcitrant boot sector.

Why couldn't the Dell tech fix this? No clue. They should be ashamed of themselves for the solution they recommended. That's totally unacceptable.

Why doesn't Windows XP do this on its own without demanding a disk most users don't have? Again, no clue. Microsoft should be ashamed of that and for its often meaningless BSODs.

Bottom line - always have a geek at the ready... preferably two!

Bad news travels fast. A friend of mine, from my radio days, has been fired from a job he's held a dozen years. That is, unfortunately, the way of radio (TV too). Few jobs have permanence. Everyone is expendable.

It's a shame because he's a great guy - as nice as they come. And, from the articles I've read, he's taken the high road. I'm not so sure I'd be that nice.

All this got me thinking back to this special radio station where we met. It was one of the last stations to try and make a go of music on AM. We were not successful.

I started at WPEN in 1975. We were on Walnut Street between 22nd and 23rd in Center City Philadelphia. It was an old building, full of history and a few mice.

The studios were nondescript, but I do remember the fire escape. It was ostensibly used to catch a smoke and some fresh air. That it overlooked the girl's dorm for an art college was incidental.

We played oldies. So did another station, on FM. They were the station most oldies fans listened to. It had little to do with the quality of programming and everything to do with the very real difference between AM and FM.

The reason this station holds such as soft spot in my heart is because of how well defined it was. We made no bones about it. There was nothing hip about this place. We were a rock 'n roll oldies station - very stylized.

The most original part of our sound wasn't our music or jocks, but our news department. Yes, we presented the news, but with verve!

Each newsman had three names on-the-air - whether they did in real life or not. Brandon Barrett Brooks, Bruce Erik Smallwood, Rod Allen Fritz and William Wellington Cole¹ (among others) graced our air.

There was a joke that Walter Cronkite had applied for a job, but was turned down. No middle name!

Smallwood was the leader of the band. When he said "Thunderstorms," your radio shook. He is best known for what he said when Philadelphia Electric was going to raise its rates.

I loved that station. It helped define my radio career. It was a fun place to work. Those days are not coming back anytime soon.

¹ - William Wellington Cole was actually Mumia Abu Jamal. He is my only close encounter with someone who became a convicted murderer.

No sleep yet. Barely home from work. I leave in four hours.

Where? Somehow, I've been included in a trip to Atlantic City with a few friends. For them it's an annual event. It's my first showing. It promises to be a poker marathon.

I would kvetch about the lack of sleep and ungodly departure time, but they're older than me! Thank God someone is.

There might not be much time for blogging, but I am bringing my camera should there be anything to document. And, I'll have a chance to visit with my friend Peter, who lives at the Jersey Shore most of the time.

The charge I've been given by my family is, "Smoke 'em." I intend on coming home a winner. Really. Honest. I'm not kidding.

C'mon... stop laughing.

Blogger's note - The chip pictured above is my design and only exists in graphic form. In other words - it's not real.

Greetings from Atlantic City. We got here around 8:00 AM. I had hardly any sleep in the car, courtesy of good conversation.

While Rick and Dennis went searching for a card game, I called my friend Peter to ask if I could crash on his sofa... which I did. Am I a wuss, or what?

Actually that worked perfectly, because after my nap, Peter and I walked around his neighborhood - meaning along the Atlantic Ocean and on the Ventnor City Boardwalk. The skies were partly cloudy and the temperature hovered in the low 60s. It's January, so the beach is deserted.

I met up with the boys at the Hilton for a 2:00 PM tournament. It was a small buy-in. That's my plan. There's no necessity to play for a lot of money to have fun.

We also had a little side bet going, paying the man who lasted longest before busting. I lost in the tournament and side bet! This win goes to Rick.

Our room at The Borgata is very nice. We've got a view of the Atlantic City skyline, which is reasonably impressive.

I'm sure there will be more card playing later, but right now it's football. The early game is on and the Eagles get started at 8:00 PM.

Oh - there is one problem. I can't get the wired Internet in the room working, so I've come down to the "Living Room" (where two little kids are currently running around, screaming at the top of their lungs) to use the wireless access.

I took nearly 300 pictures this afternoon. They'll have to wait.

Aloha.

Blogger's addendum - I originally called the Living Room the Library. Oops.

For a card playing trip, I haven't played a lot of cards. Just that one tournament at the Hilton. I have, however, been enjoying Atlantic City.

The three amigos went out for dinner last night. We (meaning I, with their understanding) didn't want to miss the Eagles game. No sweat. Most public areas have large plasma TVs hung high.

We went to Wolfgang Puck's place, where I had a very tasty little pizza with prosciutto ham and goat cheese. I'm a sucker for goat cheese.

My appeatizer was a bowl of clam chowder, which was good, but the smallest bowl of chowder I've ever had. Actually, the bowl was sized fine, but only filled about 40% of the way.

Wolfgang - is that what you want me to write about? Fill the bowl. Especially for your prices - fill the bowl.

It goes without saying, the restaurant itself was beautiful. In fact, everything in this hotel (Borgata) is nicely done. It also has the youngest, best looking crowd I've ever seen in a casino.

While Rick and Dennis went scouting gambling opportunities, I headed upstairs to root on the Eagles. Though they were competitive, they could never stop the Saints, and lost. Season over.

I didn't want to prolong the agony, so I didn't call home after the game ended.

By the time the game was over, Rick was back up in the room crashing.

Here's what I've found by my roommate experience - Others snore! I'm not alone. Dennis isn't too loud, but Rick... holy crap! His wife is a sainted woman for living with this for 37 years.

Truth is, I can sleep through snoring. I had a decent night's sleep before showering at 7:25 - an ungodly hour for me.

This morning, my friend Peter is joining us for breakfast at the buffet. After breakfast, we're heading to the House of Blues Casino for a few tournaments.

Aloha.

I got a call last week. It was Charlie Walsh from the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport. He, like so many others, had seen AccuWeather's latest press release, featuring Joe Bastardi's call for the remainder of winter, and wanted to discuss it.

I didn't demure!

Here's the story from Saturday's paper.

No blog entry Monday. No Internet access. Very busy.

I return later today (Tuesday) after a rest.

Why is it, as you get older, vacation days must be followed by rest?

Wow - two print mentions in the past week. This time Joe Amarante of the New Haven Register called to ask about our lack of winter.

I'm not sure "alarmist crap" is be a phrase I'd use again for attribution. It was inelegant and crude. Unfortunately, it's an accurate quote. Sometimes stuff just comes out.

I think writers, like Joe and Charlie Walsh at the Connecticut Post (who quoted me last week), have a distinct advantage over TV people. We need to haul our sorry butts to the scene of the crime. Newspaper people can just pick up the phone and interview a half dozen people in the time it takes us to drive to some far off little town.

Did I mention, I'm on with Faith Middleton today on WNPR radio? I'll be there with the two authors from the New Orleans Times-Picayune of the 'definitive' book on Katrina.

The show begins at 3:00 PM with a replay at 11:00 PM and streams live online.

My radio appearance with Faith Middleton seemed to go OK. I like being on the radio, and this didn't spoil my opinion.

WNPR's New Haven studio is located in a building dedicated to the arts on Audubon Street. While I waited for the elevator, I looked in at a co-ed dance class in a ground floor studio. It's nice to see that going on.

I made a wrong turn getting off the elevator and walked into the New Haven Council for the Arts, where I spent a few minutes looking at the exhibited photos. I wonder if they'd hang anything of mine?

The WNPR studio looks like a living room. I've never seen anything like that before.

Faith sat in a wingback chair facing me. The control room was at my back. Our microphones were on the kind of boom used by musicians. Unlike most modern radio talk shows, Faith had no audio console. All the technical execution took place in the control room.

Mark Schleifstein, one of the authors of Path of Destruction (the definitive account of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans) was on via telephone. Though he and I disagree about global warming in general and its specific implications for tropical weather systems, we do agree that the storms we get now are strong enough to cause lots of havoc.

When it was over, I called Helaine. She said I sounded scientific. Wow - she's my toughest (or most honest) critic.

As I said, it was fun to do. Now we'll see if I can stand listening to myself during the replay that's on while I drive home.

I've just begun to look at my Atlantic City photos. It will be a while before I do any printing.

It's a long process, usually marked by frustration on my part. No photo is perfect. My Photoshop skills are never quite enough. Few photos end up looking like I want them to look.

I hope you enjoy them. Clicking any photo for a larger sized version.

From atlantic city

From atlantic city

From atlantic city

From atlantic city

I was going to continue my trip report on Atlantic City, but too much time has passed and I don't have notes. There are some observations I still want to make.

Atlantic City is not Las Vegas. With the exception of Borgata¹, where we stayed, all the hotels looked shabby and worn. Most were decorated in a style that implied glitz thirty years ago, but no longer does.

Donald Trump's name is held high over a number of the hotels. I doubt he'd want us to judge him by these facilities.

Most of the hotels in AC, if they stood in Las Vegas, would be scheduled for demolition!

We had a few really excellent meals. I've already written about Wolfgang Puck's place (excellent pizza, half filled bowl of chowder), but we also grazed at the Borgata buffet for breakfast, Old Homstead (excellent steakhouse) and The Metropolitan, Borgata's equivalent of a Vegas coffee shop.

At the Old Homestead, I ordered the house special - the first time I've ever ordered a steak I couldn't finish!

Beautiful restaurants were very pricey. There's no way around that.

If you've read the blog any length of time, you probably know I don't drink anything alcoholic (except Bailey's, which is spiked chocolate milk. I'll have a Bailey's once or twice a year). My traveling companions, Rick and Dennis, were ordering "Gray Goose Martini, dirty" at every opportunity.

Finally, I asked to take a sip - the curiosity was killing me. It was very tasty, pleasantly briny and surprisingly without the alcohol burn I expected.

I'm already up to my eyeballs in vices. We'll keep your resume on file.

Rick and Dennis had the hotel reservation before I came on board and the room only had two beds... so Rick brought a blow-up mattress. Perfect. In fact, on the second day, the maid actually made that bed along with the two others.

You see all sorts of characters when you're playing poker. Character is the correct characterization. Many try and take on a distinct persona by their dress and manner. Poker is, after all, a game of psyching out one's opponent.

I sat next to a guy at one table who wore very shiny gold jewelery. It was overly shiny, if that's possible. Imagine the kind of 'star filters' they put on the cameras at QVC and HSN to make everything glitter, but in real life.

On his left wrist he wore a gold Rolex, diamond encrusted. The second hand swept around the face smoothly. Fake! Real Rolex's tick each second individually. I understood more of him than he could ever know.

In poker, it's called a tell.

There are lots of young people in their twenties playing cards. I'm not sure that's a good thing. When you're in your twenties, how much discretionary income do you have? They're not all winning.

There's no doubt poker's popularity is still on the rise. Borgata has a huge room. Other casinos have enlarged their poker areas too.

We came with a list (compiled by Dennis) of potential poker tournaments to play. There's no shortage of those either.

As always seems the case, the weather was awful. It was either raining, or threatening to rain. I can't remember the last time I saw Atlantic City framed against a blue sky. Maybe next time.

¹ - I had referred to this hotel as The Borgata, but their own signage says, "Welcome to Borgata." They should know.

I was downstairs, talking with Steffie last night -chirp- when I heard this noise. By the time I noticed it, it was over. It was a -chirp- rhythmic progression, spaced far enough apart to defy anticipation.

Damned smoke detectors.

The problem is, the chirp -chirp- is so short and so unexpected, it can't be localized. This is especially true if it's a few rooms away, with multiple paths for the sound to take to you.

This -chirp- morning I climbed on the step ladder and twisted the detector off its base. Ours are powered by he house's AC current with the battery as a backup. That added 115 volts always makes me a little more careful and reticent.

I unhooked the battery, put it in my pocket and began to bring the new -chrip-... You're kidding. Wrong detector? Crap.

The correct detector was downstairs, in the hallway between the kitchen and front door. Now that's got a new battery too!

In this modern era, smoke detectors should use small wet cell batteries (like the kind in your car or those used in alarm systems) which can be trickle charged constantly and which will last nearly forever. That way, they'll be there when they're needed and never go -chirp-.

Last night was the big Stephen Colbert/Bill O'Reilly 'confrontation.' First they met on Fox's O'Reilly Factor. Later, they moved to the Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

Both Bill and Stephen stayed in character. Colbert has an act. O'Reilly's persona is an affectation which has evolved over time.

In spite of what I personally think about O'Reilly, he's obviously a smart man. However, what was shown last night is, he's out of the loop as far as contemporary culture is concerned.

More than likely, someone (or many someones) had tipped him off to Colbert's nightly send up of the O'Reilly style. Did O'Reilly agree without really knowing what he was getting into? That's how it seemed to me.

Colbert is a tough target for O'Reilly to attack, because what he says is 'conservative-speak.' It's not the words that make his satire, but their context.

On more than a few occasions, Colbert made sport of O'Reilly without Bill having a clue! Again, it was the nuance of what transpired, not the meaning of the individual words.

Stephen needs to be careful, because over the long run, there can be an O'Reilly Factor without Colbert, but there can't be a Colbert Report without Bill O'Reilly. Ask Vaughn Meader.

Blogger's note: Over at TVNewser there is a 'who won' poll being conducted. At the moment, it's Colbert 92%, O'Reilly 7%

I'm not sure how or why, but Steffie has been drawn in by the whole High School Musical craze. I'd like to think it's because she works at a store where HSM is big business and cuts from the soundtrack are on 'power rotation' through overhead speakers. It's modern day brainwashing at $8.00 per hour.

Over the holidays, Helaine and I sat down with her to actually watch the High School Musical DVD. It's not high art, but it's cute and sweet and innocent enough for middle schoolers to watch. It premiered as the Disney Channel's highest rated show of '06 and became the biggest DVD seller of the year.

Are there really that many adorable actors in Hollywood? I guess so.

High School Musical has turned into a running family joke. Steffie and I have threatened Helaine that we'll learn the dance steps (they're taught on the DVD). Earlier today Stef wanted me to do a jumping split, as they do in the movie.

I'm sure I made it at least 3" off the ground. Hey, I'm approaching hip breaking age!

It's good family fun... not the movie so much, but how we joke about it between ourselves. If Steffie and I are both laughing uncontrollably while Helaine looks on... well it's a choice family moment. Most parents fantasize about this kind of bonding.

Today, Steffie and I turned to youtube.com for a look at how High School Musical is represented. I was amazed at all the school groups and individual kids who have videotaped¹ their HSM performances, lip synching to the tracks (as the actual movie actors did).

Then, Stef told me about Ashley Tisdale, one of the stars of HSM. There, on youtube, was Ashley's video blog.

We're not watching a PBS documentary here. These are simple video slices of life from her day on the road with the High School Musical touring company. No script. No edits. Just a little flavor of this small part of her day.

As I type this, her 'channel' has been viewed over 450,000 times. Mull that number in your head a moment.

What a concept. For a performer, it's an astoundingly effective way to solidify a base of fans.

I'm probably not going back to watch more of Ashley, but I will ponder where this short video clip fits in the general scheme of things. Yes, video blogs or vlogs already exist. This is different. This is brand extension, an affinity builder.

It might be the best marketing tool I've seen in a long time.

¹ - Videotaped - how last century is that? Most of the video I saw was captured to some sort of memory device, then streamed as digits across the Internet. No tape was involved at any point in the process.

Will the word, "taping," like "dialing" a telephone, survive even after the specific function described ceases to exist? Probably.

I tried to catch up on some loose photography today. The four photos (of 325) I wanted to keep from my Atlantic City trip got tweaked in Photoshop and then uploaded to a photo finisher.

Some of my friends print their own photos. My friend Peter, near Atlantic City as it turns out, has printed some gigundo photos which hang on his wall and look great. I've never been that lucky and I've read it's no cheaper to print at home.

Anyway, any time I've ever tried to print something 'critical' it's always taken at least two tries! I'm saving myself cash and grief by waiting for the postman to deliver my photos.

Getting the Atlantic City shots out of the way was simple. The big job is the one I've put off since October - our Southwest vacation photos.

My goal with those was to print a photo book, like the one I did for my 'mancation' to Maine with my friend Bob. The problem is, there are just so many photos and many of them are pretty good.

No photo gets printed 'as is.' Every shot needs some tweaking, though I'm trying to keep it at a minimum for this album. Instead of Photoshop, I'm relying on Picasa, the free photofinishing software from Google. Picasa can sharpen and adjust levels at the touch of a button.

Unfortunately, some shots have tiny marks caused by dust on the camera's sensor. It's a real problem in first generation DSLRs, though now solved in most modern cameras. Photoshop is the cure, which just adds another layer of complexity to what I wanted to be simple.

I'm through 13 pages in what I anticipate will be a 30-40 page book. It is tedious work. If this comes out anywhere near the last one, it will have been worth it.

Once the book is done, I need to pick 5-6 shots to enlarge. I have claimed the two walls that make the hallway to the attic stairs for my gallery. It's beginning to fill up nicely.

I've been through these pictures many times and I continue to discover shots worth looking at. Often, I'll play with them just to play. It's amazing how you can change the look and feel of a photo with the right tools on your computer.

My photography hobby has turned into a lot of fun. I can see why so many people are hooked and throw money at it for all sorts of neat equipment.

What I don't understand is how people were able to get good at it before the digital era. To me at least, good photography demands practice. That's one reason I have no qualms shooting 325 pictures, mostly in one afternoon and evening in Atlantic City, to get four I'll keep.

With film this would have been a prohibitively expensive undertaking. On top of that, by the time the prints were back I'd have forgotten exactly how the shots were set-up.

I am the un-Luddite.

What's your most organized time of the day? For me, it's the thirty seconds that precede getting in the car for work.

Tie
check
Collar stays
check
Belt
check
Cell phone
check
Bluetooth
check
Wallet
check
Watch
check

Trust me - I've forgotten each of these at least once... some a lot more than once. The wallet and watch are the worst. If either of these are missing, I walk with a list!

Wow, this entry is just starting and I'm already off on a tangent.

Anyway, I left the house, turned on the phone, checked my messages and realized there was something I had to tell Helaine. She's "9" on my speed dial.

Nothing. An error message told me slot 9 was unassigned.

Uh oh. Not good.

As I drove, I hit the button to see my phone numbers and... oh crap... nothing. All my entries are gone. It's really not important how it happened, though I know it's not my fault.

I don't know about you, but I don't dial most numbers anymore. I just find them in my phone book and hit send. My phone book has taken the place of my memory.

It's possible there's an old version somewhere on my computer at home. It's certainly not a recent version, but it will get me started.

Meanwhile my friends Wendie, who got a new number with a job promotion and my friend Farrell, now in the Palm Springs area, are lost. I don't even know his area code!

The awful thing about this kind of loss is that you don't even know what you're missing. If you're leaving a message for me, please leave your number.

Blogger's note: Somehow, I managed to find a month's old backup on my backup PC. I now start the task of updating numbers that have changed.

There are some things the Weather Service does very well. For instance, if they're going to make changes to computers or systems, they won't make the change if the weather is overly harsh. You don't want Hurricane Zeyde steaming toward shore only to discover the new computer warnings aren't working.

I've watched this policy at work for years, successfully. These periods of concern are called Critical Weather Days

And the emergency is..... drum roll please... The State of the Union Address. No kidding.

Maybe this has happened in the past, but I've never heard of something like this making the Critical Weather Day list. I'm not saying it's wrong - just weird.

I'm so excited. The setup for the photo book from Helaine and my Southwest vacation was done Sunday night. Helaine took a look, asked me to remove one photo, and off it went to Shutterfly.

There's a thirty minute grace period before the order is finalized. During that time, I changed another picture.

Here it is Tuesday, one day later, and Shutterfly says it's on its way to Connecticut.

I'm so excited. If this is anything like the book I made from my Maine trip, it will be well worth the effort... and with 51 pages and a few hundred photos, there was plenty of effort.

Sometime in the next few years, my television station will make the switch from plain old analog TV to hi-def. We're already passing along hi-def network shows, but aren't producing anything with that rich video quality in house.

The TV station's going to do it whether I like it or not, though I sense seeing the news and weather in high definition isn't on your short list.

Some of my co-workers worry. What will we look like when 'warts and all' really means 'warts and all'?

I'd like to say I'm not that vain - but I am. After all, I wear make-up at work.

A nameless co-worker watched the NFL playoffs on hi-def this weekend. "They look old," she said. "Lots of make-up," but it didn't help. I've heard the make-up is sprayed on, like a phony tan.

Not only will the 'talent' be under more scrutiny in a high definition world, so will our sets! Little blemishes that go unnoticed now, the nap of the carpet or the trim on the anchor desk, will glare. Maybe they'll wax the floor every day?

Oh - here's what brought this up. There was an article in the Times a few days ago about some other TV performers who are already suffering - porn stars¹!

Uhhhh.... too much information.

It's possible high definition TV will be a boon to the business. Or, it could like quadraphonic stereo on radio - no one cared. It might even do for TV what talkies did to silent movies - drive a whole cadre of talented, but awful sounding actors out of the business.

¹ - Why is it always 'porn star.' Are there no porn character actors?

As a boy, my mother often made cream cheese and olive sandwiches for me. I was into bland! Now, I like it a little spicier.

The best meal I've ever had (outside of Helaine's cooking, which is amazing) was Jamaican Jerk Chicken at a brewpub in Boulder, CO. As good as the chicken was, the fact they also asked me for proof of age made it better! I was already in my 40s.

Recently, I've gotten fond of another chicken dish. It's a Cajun chicken sandwich at a local market/restaurant. I liked it so much last week, I went back tonight for more.

The recipe has changed! What was very spicy last week is now insanely hot and spicy. I actually had four glasses of water with dinner. My eyes and nose were both watering. At times, I couldn't maintain the conversation because my mouth wasn't quite working.

Wow, it was good.

Why is it, as you get older, you like it spicier? And, when does that pursuit of spicy food end? It does you know. There is no chili cookoff at my parents' condo in Florida.

Meanwhile, I'll be tasting the Cajun chicken for the rest of the night.

The talk on NPR's Talk of the Nation today was all about politics and the next presidential election. Their political junkie, Ken Rudin, was front and center.

I had MSNBC on while getting dressed for work. It was also a discussion of the '08 presidential race.

That's November '08 they're discussing. I haven't thought about what I want for dinner tonight. Maybe November '08 is just a little too far ahead for me.

I have no idea what any of the candidates stand for, outside a very few hot button issues. I do know Hillary Clinton is not Tammy Wynette, Barack Obama did not attend a Maddrassa while growing up in Indonesia, Bill Richardson has a lead foot and Connecticut's Senator Chris Dodd has the softest hands I've ever shaken.

I attended a dinner in 1972 where I sat next to current Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich for a few hours. I don't even remember if he was a neat or sloppy diner. I have no idea where he stands on anything. Ditto for most of the other declared candidates.

Let's get back to the MSNBC conversation for a moment. What it didn't contain was meat. It was totally about the horse race. Who cares!

The headline on Drudge as I write this is, "TIME POLL: HILLARY 19-POINTS AHEAD OF OBAMA." But in that same poll a significant portion of the electorate said they'd never heard of Obama.

I hate to quote Ann Coulter (but I will):

Lord help me - she's right. I can't believe I even wrote that.

This early jockeying is reported because no news organization wants to run 'bars and tone.' It's cheap and easy to discuss who is ahead. But, it's meaningless.

At this point it's more important to know where people stand, what they believe in. Or, maybe, we should let the recently elected congress wrangle with the currently serving president. Isn't that the important story now?

November '08 will come soon enough. Why rush it?

Go to the DeLorean Motors parts site (are they still around?) and enter 'flux' in the search box.

That's it. This is do-it-yourself night.

Attention college students. Do you actually know how good you've got it?

Steffie got out of school a few days before Christmas. She's still home, though this is the last day. After dinner tonight, she's outta here, on her way back to college.

That's a full month plus, with spring break, weekends and a full (and very long) summer still to come.

Jealous? Me? Sure.

It was a great break for her. Over the summer she worked at a store in a local mall. She went back and worked there this month too. She'll be returning to school with a nice wad of cash.

It was also a great break for us as a family. It's a more mature Steffie I see. She'll probably wince when she reads this, but she is more understanding of others, more polite, more willing to help.

Don't get me wrong. She's still 19. These traits sometimes temporarily disappear. But the changes I see are likely to be permanent.

It makes you stop and think, has she caught on to what she's doing now and how it will impact the rest of her life? I know youth is wasted on the young, but at sometime you do grow up. I sense that's happening now.

I will miss her when she's gone.