Tag: Christmas

About The Weather

Here we are, the middle of December and it feels like Spring.

Today, we had rain – not snow. This is New England for heaven’s sake. It’s supposed to snow in December. At my house, we’ve yet to see more than a few flakes.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. Each warm day is a day closer to March.

It’s funny, because at work, I’ve started getting emails from viewers who crave winter. It’s not like I can do anything to help them. They feel their lives are somehow empty without the white stuff.

People who plow, or rely on changes in weather, for business are hurting. I’ll bet Christmas shopping would be better if conditions outside were worse.

I’m waiting for someone to ascribe this to Global Warming. Even if I were a GW proponent, no single episode can be tied to it. It’s just part of the natural variability of weather.

Deep inside, I know how much I hate driving in or dealing with, snow. Still, when it finally comes this year (and it will), I’ll give Mother Nature a free ride.

But only once!

I’ve Got Antlers

It was really cold today – bitterly cold. Sometimes mentioning the wind chill factor is nothing more than hype. Today, you could feel every biting degree.

Sure, I hate the cold, but there’s an upside. It finally feels like we’re in the Christmas season, which is good.

Though we don’t observe Christmas, we enjoy participating in everyone else’s fun. Everyone seems to be in a good mood.

A few nights ago, Ann Nyberg, one of our news anchors, mentioned she’d seen a car with a big red nose and antlers! We all got a kick out of it.

Later, on the 11:00 PM news, Chris Kirby – our art director, fashioned an ‘artist’s rendering’ of what the car might have looked like… especially as the featured vehicle on MTV’s “Pimp My Sleigh Ride.”

Flash forward to today. Ann returned to her desk to find an antler/nose kit sitting there. She looked puzzled.

I told her, if she didn’t want it, I surely did. And so, my car now has antlers. They’re fitted with little plastic brackets that fit over the top edge of a car’s windows. It’s hysterical.

I will install the nose when it’s warmer… like in the garage at home.

I’ve Been Aggregated

From time-to-time I’ll run into another blogger or someone with a small website and the conversation will get around to traffic – how many visitors do you get?

Compared to Yahoo!, or Google, or my company’s website, I’m hardly a blip on the radar. Compared to other personal websites, I do pretty well (though I have taken a terrible traffic hit beginning the week before Christmas. I’m hoping it relates to the season, as opposed to my lack of compelling content).

My secret is twofold. First, there’s always fresh content. Maybe I shouldn’t force myself to write, but sometimes I do. I hope the forced entries don’t come off that way, but some probably do. In a perfect world, I’d have at least one entry per day.

The second is much more important. I try and make sure my site’s URL is always visible somewhere. If I post a comment on Slashdot or some bulletin board, I add my URL. I don’t post just to advertise, but I don’t hide the site either.

This increased visibility was one reason I submitted my blog to ctweblogs. The site is an agreggator of blogs, mostly from Connecticut (though not totally – and I’m not sure why).

I’ve found myself going to their site, looking to make sure my latest entry has been found, and then reading other blogs. To a large extent, these are personal sites I would have never seen.

It’s amazing to me how many people obsess about politics and government. They are nearly always stridently on one side of the political spectrum or the other. There don’t seem to be any hard hitting middle-of-the-road blogs.

A good number of the bloggers are angry. They know their position is right – why doesn’t the world see it their way? Maybe the blogs are a steam valve to keep these folks from bursting under their own internal pressure.

Dude, chill.

I’ve found enough interesting that I keep coming back.

Learning To Tell Time (Again)

When Steffie was younger and went to elementary school, one of her teachers told us an interesting ‘fact’. There were problems in the school getting kids to read the analog clocks on the wall and use the dial telephones (there in case of emergency) in every classroom.

Both are very foreign concepts to kids of Steffie’s generation. We have neither a dial phone nor round faced clock here at home.

We talk about dialing someone’s number… but a dial no longer enters into the equation.

binary digital watchNow I have to learn to tell time yet another way. As a Christmas/Chanukah gift, Helaine bought me a new watch. I am obsessed with watches. This one is very different in that it’s a binary readout watch!

You probably hid when they taught this in school, but let me try to explain binary. It is a system based on two numbers, zero and one. Right now everything we do is based on a system with ten numbers, zero through nine.

It would be the perfect way to count if someone cut off eight of your fingers and you grew up reading Hebrew. You read the numbers right to left!

Each successive light adds the power of 2 to the value. So it’s 1,2,4,8,16 and 32.

The readout you isee n the photo was taken at 1:49 PM. The rightmost LED is lit on the top row, corresponding with the number 1. The bottom row has the 1, 16 and 32 LEDs lit, meaning 49.

Last night I was worried the watch was keeping poor time. No – I was just misreading it. In fact, much of the time, I can’t read the watch before the lights are extinguished!

In the meantime, it’s very cool in a geeky way. More importantly, Helaine thought about what I would enjoy and succeeded.

Darlene Love Kills Again

Though I was taping the performance, I still convinced Steffie to let me come downstairs, interrupt whatever slice of reality was currently airing on VH1 or MTV, and watch Darlene Love perform “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on David Letterman’s last show before Christmas.

This is more than an obsession to me. I start pining for Darlene around Thanksgiving.

Tonight’s performance was great.. spectacular… choose your own superlative.

David Sanborn, who stepped out of a box to play saxophone last year, flew in from the lighting grid this year, ending his solo as his feet hit the ground.

Later this morning I’ll convince Helaine to watch, then I’ll watch again… and again. I’m sure I watched last year’s performance at least 20 times.

Some Stuff I Don’t Want To Know

You know I get excited about Letterman’s last show before Christmas. It is Darlene Love, Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) night. My DVR is set and I will force my family to re-watch the segment… more than once.

I don’t want anything to spoil that for me.

From Page Six NY Post –

Even a guy as laid-back as Paul Shaffer can lose his cool every once in a while. At a taping Monday of tomorrow’s David Letterman Christmas show, “there were lots of nice, touching holiday moments, including Darlene Love singing with a choir amid falling snow. The show ended with a nice positive feeling,” said one audience member. “But once the show ended, Paul Shaffer stormed over to one of the people working on stage and started spewing profanities and getting in his face. A complete tantrum.” Shaffer, the leader of Letterman’s band for 21 years, was man enough to admit he lost his temper. “It was a long day. I’m an ass. I’m sorry,” he told PAGE SIX. “Late Show” executive producer Rob Burnett cracked, “I also think Paul is an ass.”

Bah humbug!

So, What Brings You Here – Website Analysis

Nice to have you reading my prose. My website is here to be read, so you’re scratching my itch, so to speak.

Often I ask, why does anyone care? Are you a Geoff Fox stalker… God, I hope not. Is my life so interesting? Probably not. Yet on any given day, well over one thousand pages are read on this site by not quite a thousand people.

This has never been mentioned on the air at my television station (though there does seem to be a link to this site from their site). How do people find it?

I have logs. They are immense, taking up megabyte of space every month. Looking through them can make a grown man twitch!

I often look at an overview page. In fact I have a number of overview pages I look at and each gives me a slightly different insight into what’s going on here.

The page attached to this site says 236,238 unique visitors have been here so far in 2005, looking at 1,572,912 pages. That is the most misleading set of stats I can post!

Because of the way my pages are set up, one can sometimes count as two. And then there are the pages read by robots, scouring the Internet for who knows what. Some are friendly, like the search engine crawlers. Others… well I have no clue what they’re doing, but they pull down pages and images and take them somewhere.

A more accurate reading comes from a company I can’t mention (or maybe I can. I’m not totally familiar with my contractual agreement with them). They say, this year, there have been 435,466 pages read.

That’s a more realistic number, because it excludes robots and the like. I consider that an impressive number, 1,258 per day, for a personal website. Whether it is or isn’t, just humor me.

Recently, I’ve added another service which looks at this website. Among the things it looks at are referrals, to find out where viewers are coming from.

It didn’t take long to see Google is my friend! Less than half my daily traffic comes to my home page! The rest go directly inside, because they’ve been sent here from elsewhere.

What intrigues me are the search requests that bring people here. Enter “Blue Angels Video” on Google and this is your second hit! People come every day to see my Blue Angels video&#185.

Stranger are the off-the-wall requests. Some was here looking for “John Mayer Marijuana,” “inappropriate commercials,” “Who is the Monopoly guy?,” “Darlene Love on David Letterman&#178,” “Todd Gross WHDH&#179.” When Elena Demenieva does well in a tennis tournament, people come looking for her pictures (I took some excellent shots at the Pilot Pen Tournament in New Haven).

My favorites always have to do with “Carrot Top shirtless.” It’s a long story, but that’s a subject that has been dealt with here.

Over time, as this site has amassed an archive, the number of search engine hits has increased. Maybe this is a good time to remind myself, be careful what you write about. It’s around forever.

Not only are some requests weird, they’re from everywhere. It’s not unusual to look at the plots and see people coming here from India, Thailand or Peru.

So there you go. Maybe you find reading ‘me’ interesting. Probably not as interesting as trying to figure ‘you’ out.

The following list is ‘live,’ meaning what you see is current – not something canned when I wrote this.

&#185 – I have added a better version of the Blue Angels video, but so much traffic goes to the old one, I can’t remove it.

&#178 – Every year, I wait for the show before Christmas when Darlene Love sings on the Letterman show. Do not miss it. Tape it if you must. I believe it will be next week.

&#179 – Poor Todd was fired after 20+ years at his station. I wrote about it.

My Wife And I Have Balls

It’s cold. It’s the winter. The countryside is covered in snow. This is not perfect weather for the Fox Family.

It’s also Saturday. We wanted to do something and not waste a perfectly good weekend day.

A quick check of the paper showed nothing at the movies we wanted to see. The Yale Rep and Yale Cabaret are both dark&#185.

I looked for a comedy club. The Treehouse, in Fairfield County, had listings for Wednesdays and Saturdays in November (update the website guys) and December, but is mysteriously empty this weekend.

Finally Helaine suggested we go bowling. She made the suggestion knowing full well I’d find an excuse to say no. I didn’t.

I called our local bowling alley (I’m sure they’d rather be called a bowling center… and they can, on their blog). There were lanes open, but they asked for my name, in case things got busy. No names – I had my info.

We went and had dinner at the local Chinese buffet. Overhead speakers blasted Christmas music from a local radio station. My favorite, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” played.

The bowling alley was only a few minutes away. We walked in and found the place more empty than full.

Helaine and I have a history with bowling, and this seems as good a time as any to tell the story.

Back in Buffalo, among other duties, I was the weekend weatherman. Helaine, living and working in Philadelphia, would come and visit on weekends. We were the proverbial strangers in a strange land.

Saturday nights, after the late news, we would join a bunch of people from the station and go to “Moonlight Bowling.” There would be Phil Kavits and Mike Andrei, Rhona Shore (one of our reporters) and Jim Sherlock (assistant news director and her boyfriend).

I’m sure there were others, but this was nearly 25 years ago. Forgive me.

The concept of “Moonlight Bowling” is simple. You turn off most of the lights, light a few black lights, add a smattering of multicolored pins on each lane, and pay bowlers cash when certain pin arrangements come up and they make a strike.

It was a quarter here, fifty cents there. Not big money. It was a blast. And we had fun blowing off a little steam. Like all employees, we weren’t adverse to second guessing our bosses.

This group from the TV station would go nearly every Saturday night. Then, when it was over, we’d get breakfast. That was around 3:00 AM.

It should be noted, somehow in those years I had entered into a pack with the Devil, allowing me to eat anything and never gain a pound. The Devil and I have had a falling out since then.

None of us were ever good at bowling. But, we had a great time bowling.

Flash ahead to Connecticut. When we first moved here, Helaine met some people and ended up in a bowling league. When she bought a ball and shoes, I did too. So, as the title says, we both have balls. Even better, neither of us wear rented shoes – one of life’s stranger concepts.

Over time, we just haven’t bowled much. Steffie had a bowling birthday party while growing up and I’m sure we went to parties thrown for other kids, but that’s a long time ago.

12-10-05_1910Actually, there’s a better way to demonstrate how long it’s been since we bowled. When we went to unzip our bags to take out the balls and shoes, the zippers were rusted shut! Really. You could see a tinge of green around the immobile zipper.

The bowling bags ‘live’ in the garage, so the culprit is probably salt spray from our cars’ tires. Another reason to dislike winter.

Luckily, the guys behind the counter were happy to help… and much stronger than me. Before you knew it, the zipper was zipping and we were ready to bowl.

12-10-05_1915We moved to lane 11.

Just as we were about to begin, the lights went out and the music started blasting. It was “Moonlight Bowling” all over again! There was one addition, stage fog, and one subtraction, no cash payouts.

We started slowly. My first ball was a gutter ball. In the first game, I barely broke 100. Helaine wasn’t far behind.

The second game went a little smoother, but I was still out ahead. In fact, Helaine trailed by thirty pins in the seventh frame.

bowling1Then, she caught fire!

Helaine rolled a strike in the eight frame… and the ninth… and two in the tenth – four strikes in a row! By the time all was said and done, Helaine had beaten me 158 – 143. She will be tested for steroids later.

Did she want to bowl again? Hell yeah!

bowling2We started our third game, and this time it was my turn to get hot. I made marks in my first 8 frames, finishing with 175, my personal best.

Helaine probably won’t admit this, but she’s just as competitive as me. Now there’s incentive for us to go again.

I’m a lucky guy. Two decades and change since “Moonlight Bowling” and I still have fun with the girl I took back then… and I still beat her.

&#185 – I’m embarrassed to say we’ve been to neither. That’s a shame. As much as I enjoy theater (and I really do), I need to be taking advantage of local resources like that.

Right Song – Wrong Artist

After everyone left the house I turned the TV on. As it turned out, Jay Leno was on and Smash Mouth was singing.

Let me establish, I’m a fan. I really like Smash Mouth, especially their first hit, All Star.

OK – am I off the hook? Good, because they committed a major sin in my eyes by performing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).

Every year, on his last show before the Christmas break, David Letterman has Darlene Love on and she sings Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Hers is the definitive version. No matter how good Smash Mouth is, they’re not Darlene Love.

Why intrude on this Christmas tradition? There are so many other songs they could have used.

I know this seems petty, but if you watch Letterman when Darlene appears in a few weeks, you’ll understand. She’s that good.

Cold Weather Refresher Course

As anticipated, I was outside for the Fantasy of Lights. It’s actually very nice, even though I’ve done the same basic live shot for 11 or 12 years.

Students from Nathan Hale School sing Christmas carols (and for some reason The Lion Sleeps Tonight). I introduce some of the people who paid for the displays. We light the lights. This year Santa showed up!

It’s fun.

Weatherwise, it was better this year because we weren’t right next to the beach. Just a few blocks inland, with the wind blocked by the trees, was much more comfortable… sort of.

I bundled up. My coat was winter weight. I wore a new pair of gloves. What I forgot was heavy shoes! That was my undoing.

It’s impossible to realize how cold you can get, through your feet. It doesn’t happen immediately, but I was there close to two hours.

Actually, the coldest I can ever remember being is at a football game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. My feet rested on concrete for four quarters. The cold seemed to radiate from my feet to the rest of my body.

The stranger part is how long your feet remind you of the cold. Here it is four hours later and I still feel it in my feet. I wish I would have worn heavy soles and white socks.

Maybe next year I’ll be wiser. Meanwhile, I’m that much more prepared for winter… and dreading every moment.

Working The 4th

It is not as honorable as working Christmas or Easter, so someone who observes can be with family. It is the Fourth of July and I should be off from work… which I am not.

Here’s how it works at work – seniority rules for vacation requests. And, as it turns out, I’ve been on-the-air longer than anyone else at the TV station. I am number one on the seniority list!

I forgot to ask for the Fourth of July off! My fault. I screwed up.

There’s an interesting attitude at work on a holiday like this. Everyone feels more capable of making decisions. Everyone feels more in control. There is no upper management on-site.

It’s not that management isn’t important, it’s just that (for short periods) we can steer on our own.

When people ask me if I’m upset to be working on a holiday, I say “no.” I’m really very lucky. How many people have a job they enjoy… something they happily do? It’s not like I’m stacking boxes or working the wok in the non-air conditioned Chinese restaurant where I bought my family’s dinner.

Next year I’ll try to be less forgetful. Meantime, I’m sitting at my desk, watching the New Haven fireworks on my monitor. It could be worse.

The Trip Continues

Getting to Philadelphia was no problem. It was leaving that seemed to be the sticking point.

I had a long layover in Philadelphia – over an hour and a half. The Embraer Regional Jet to Atlanta was in on time. We boarded on time. And then the announcement.

The pilot came on from the cockpit to tell us thunderstorms around Atlanta were going hold us up. It would be an hour until he found out when we’d be!” And, since the gate was needed for another plane, he’d drive to a quiet spot for us to wait.

I’d like to tell you the passengers protested, or the wait was interminable or some other tragic story of passenger pain, but it wasn’t that bad. We left Philadelphia about an hour and a half late.

I actually found the plane, an ERJ170, reasonably comfortable. Just like the Dash-8 I took from New Haven to Philadelphia, this plane had plenty of legroom in narrow seats. The interior was spartan and somehow European. The interior actually reminded me of a Fokker-100.&#185

Is it just me or is it weird to be on an airplane designed and built in Brazil?

The trip to Atlanta was bumpy, but uneventful. Getting off in Atlanta was another story. The terminal looked like a mall on the weekend before Christmas. It was jammed – as busy as any airline terminal I had ever visited.

Helaine had found a great deal for a medium size car from Avis. That ended up being a Chevy Malibu. It is possible there is a car that has less style, but I doubt it. It looks like it was designed and built with absolutely no anticipation anyone would actually want to own one. They were right.

My hotel is the Hilton Garden Inn – Perimeter in one of the many exurbs that ring Atlanta. This is actually a fairly nice hotel and a good value. And, along with everything else, there’s free high speed Internet service (though not enough signal at the desk in this room to use it from there).

This evening (a late evening) I joined Mark and Annie, both of whom I worked with at Channel 8, for dinner. I left it up to them and we went to Ted’s… owned by Ted Turner and featuring Bison meat!

We all had Bison burgers, which were very good. I also had New England clam chowder (could have been warmer and larger, but it was very tasty). This being Atlanta, Coca Cola’s world headquarters, I broke down and had a Coke, which was served from the glass bottle.

Next stop was CNN, where Mark and Annie now work. This is interesting because there are familiar views in the CNN Center that I’ve seen for years.

Visiting CNN at night, there were no on-air types to be seen. Most of their nighttime programming is from New York or Los Angeles (Larry King).

Actually, that gave me more of an opportunity to look around. Their newsroom, directly behind the news set, may be the most photogenic TV space I’ve ever been in.

Busy day. I’m going to bed.

&#185 – The Fokker 100 is a small, though older, regional jet. USAir used to fly them to Buffalo. They were quite comfortable, except for the low ceilings. They were low enough that I once asked a flight attendant if her assignment in this particular model was penance for something she had done?

Chia Pet

How did these scary things become a Christmas tradition?

I came downstairs last night to find the Chia soaking, face up, in a container of water, like some mob hit in a Scorsese movie. By this afternoon the seeds had been plated on his scalp and now the waiting begins.

Since nothing is too stupid for this blog, I will try my best to follow its progress as the Chia grows hair. Pinch me.

Comair – It Was The Software

A few days ago, while pondering the Comair Christmas meltdown, I said:

Comair isn’t letting me into their inner sanctum, but it’s probable that the structure of the computer system that handles their crew assignments, weight balance, manifesting and the like wasn’t equipped to handle all the ‘exceptions’ it was asked to ponder this past week.

I hit it right on the nose! Linked below is a story from today’s Cincinnati Post which details exactly what happened.

Comair says the computer system was due to be replaced. I wonder if the DOT inquiry will show it should have been replaced a while ago. How long was Comair operating close to the limits of their system? Was this problem predictable?

Continue reading “Comair – It Was The Software”

Transportation Meltdown

The Christmas rush turned out to be an awful time to travel. Weather was bad in much of the midsection of the country and then computer problems at Comair and employee problems at USAir brought us to the bonus round of travel hell.

There’s not much I can say about USAir. That there is tension between USAir employees and their employer would be a understatement of immense proportions. Let’s just say, I’m not confident I’ll ever be able to use my USAir frequent flyer miles.

Comair is a different story and I think it is a troubling analog for systems now in many other industries. Here’s how it was reported in the Henry Herald (a paper I picked at random) from Henry County, GA.

Time became a factor when delays and cancellations from the storm built-up to the point the Comair computer system crashed.

There it is, in terms we can all understand – the computer crashed. Except a computer crash is something you can recover from. You just restart the computer and you’re on your way. This problem went deeper. This was not a computer crash and reporting it as such deflects attention from the actual systemic problem.

Comair isn’t letting me into their inner sanctum, but it’s probable that the structure of the computer system that handles their crew assignments, weight balance, manifesting and the like wasn’t equipped to handle all the ‘exceptions’ it was asked to ponder this past week. That means that restarting the computers would do no good – they would immediately be swamped with no way to process the data.

Again, this is speculation on my part, but I think I’m pretty close.

In order to start up again, Comair has to wait for their chaotic, exception ridden environment to naturally reorder itself. Then they can pick up from there.

Here’s the rub. Computers are much faster, much more efficient than people. People are much more flexible. When you replace people with computers, you gain efficiency, but only when everything is working correctly. When the wheels start to fall off the wagon, the computer can’t adapt.

If you can only do 10 tasks and your boss asks you to do 11, you’ll try and possibly succeed. If a computer is only equipped to do 10 tasks and you ask it to do 11 – it won’t. It can’t.

It is possible the situation Comair faced was unforeseen. It’s also possible they decided this kind of thing is a very rare event and an acceptable risk in moving to a system with greater cost efficiencies. It was, after all, a failure of commerce, not safety. In fact it was the safety concern that made them stop flying.

Undoubtedly this will be investigated as the government’s in response to irate passengers. Maybe we’ll find out Comair’s mindset in enabling this particular system? Maybe not. I’ll be scouring the wires for updates.