I sit here in the old house, surrounded by boxes, and chaos. Tomorrow morning, the movers come, and our new house will suddenly become our current house, and our current house will become our old house.

William has been sleeping better for the last few nights, but right now he’s being quite cranky due to over-tiredness. It’s been tough on him, a lot of stuff that he wants to play with is either packed up, or already at the other house. He took a bit of a spill tonight too, and scaped himself up a little, which isn’t contributing to his good humour.

So, tomorrow the cable people will show up and hook up the internet connection at the new house. Once that’s done, I’m going to come back here, and unhook everything, to take it to the new house. Once I’m there, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get everything hooked back up and running like the well oiled P200 that it is. Total down time should be less than a half hour hopefully.

So, William has decided that sleep is for suckers. The last two nights, he’s woken up at about 1:00 and does not want to go back to sleep. Tuesday night, I finally got him to go back down at about 4:30, and I don’t know what time Erin was up with him until last night. The lack of sleep also adds to his cranky disposition, which means that not only are we up at an ungodly hour, we’re up with a screaming child. I think he’s picking up some stress with the impending move (we should have keys in hand at this time tomorrow!?!) The flipside is that neither of us has had much energy to do any packing for the last two days. Plus, the cleaning hasn’t been getting done either. The end result is that there are a half dozen broken down cardboard boxes on the livingroom floor, covered with a liberal sprinkling of lego and blocks.

Oh, and speaking of tomorrow - I’m basically going to be incommunicado for the next little while - the power to our computer room is being upgraded, which means that we will have no internet here from about 5:00PM today right through sometime on the weekend. I’m taking tomorrow afternoon off anyway, but at any rate, that will mean that emailing me tomorrow will be a fruitless task.

Also, expect some brief outages while I move this web server from here to a temporary home, and then from the temporary home to our new home. I can’t predict when/how long the outages will be, but I’ll try to minimize it as much as possible. This will affect all the sites that I host - Als, Williams, Dave and Katrionas, and obviously this one.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “These pants come off at night just like everybody else’s.” - Principal Skinner

No, sorry, not another football post. The time is fast approaching when we get possession of the new house. Friday at noon - slightly less than 3 days from now. Last night, we packed up some of the kitchen — stuff that wasn’t likely to see service in the next week or so. It’s tough to move. Stressful, tiring, all of that stuff. This is the first time that I think I’m going to really miss the old place though. As an adult anyway — I missed Togo when we moved away from there too, I suppose. Moving out of Mom and Dad’s was a gradual thing, moving out of the apartment was a happy thing, because we were going to a nicer place, nicer neighbourhood, less rent. Moving out of that basement suite was exciting, because we were buying our first house. This move is a little different somehow. We’ve been in this house for a long time, so we’ve made some memories there. I suspect William is going to have some troubles adjusting for a bit too. We’ll see though.

After doing the packing, I kind of just crashed on the couch, and slept until Erin forced me to get up and go to bed. I think the last couple of months of going to bed too late, and getting up too early finally caught up to me. That, and the cold that I seem to have picked up. I think tonight will probably look a lot like last night - pack some, then collapse somewhere and fall asleep.

William helped pack too, which was kind of fun. He really just liked putting newspaper into the box, and seemed a little bothered by the fact that we were putting things from the cupboard into the box - he kept wanting us to put stuff “away” instead. The next week should be an interesting one.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Oh I go in and out of comas all the time…zzzzz…French toast, please.” - Grandpa Simpson

Saturday, I went with Jason and Amy to see the Huskies/Huskies game at Griffiths Stadium. It’s amazing that 5500 people can make a place feel that full. It was a good game overall, and the hometown Huskies cam out on top, which means they’re headed to the Vanier Cup in Hamilton next weekend. It was a really nice day considering it’s the end of November, and other than my nose and toes, I was pretty warm. We got there plenty early, and were still relegated to seats three rows up on the 20 yard line - right at the end of the stands. Somehow the crowd managed to cause a few timecount penalties by the visitors, which is no mean feat - Griffiths is pretty wide open, and as I said, there were 5500 people, not the 200,000 some US college games draw. It was good solid entertainment though, and the second game of the year that I made it out to. We’ll see how it goes next year, when we’re not literally living across the street from the stadium though.

Then, I watched the Grey Cup on Sunday. I’ll admit that I wasn’t giving the game my full attention, but without getting into it too much, I have to say that I’m disappointed with some of the broadcast professionals’ approach to this game. First, I heard a lot of people predicting that Toronto would win, or BC would win, but in the same breath saying that “BC clearly has the more talented team.” I’d argue that point quite vehemently. I’ll give them the QB position, and a couple of receivers even, but defensively, and on special teams, the balance clearly goes the other direction. It was pretty clear to me that TO’s special teams made a big difference in the game - none of their TD’s were particularly long drives - all less than 60 yards, iirc. That’s not to disrespect the talent that the Lions brought to the table, but I don’t think the talent levels are as far apart as some broadcasters would have you believe. Second, the interview with Jason Clermont (who won the “Outstanding Canadian” award) was a travesty. The guy was clearly upset at having just lost the biggest game of his career, and Steve Armitage was busy poking and prodding at the wound with salty fingers. That makes two years in a row where the Outstanding Canadian in the game played on the losing team, and didn’t look too happy during the interview. I’d propose that for the future, they should allow the players to opt out of those interviews if they were on the wrong end of the final score. It’s not fair to the players who are being interviewed, and it’s not fair to the team that won (a fact that was pointed out by both Cahoon and Clermont.)

Oh, and when your running back is averaging nearly nine yards a carry - keep giving him the ball until the other team stops him. Antonio Warren, and the BC offensive line had a field day, and it’s a shame that they were dragged down by Dickensen’s bad day.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Back then, we didn’t care what anyone thought and the chicks found that irresistible.” - Homer

There’s a story on Slashdot about autonomous cars. The objection of people liking to drive too much to ever allow this is a bit silly, but none of the comments properly refuted it, so I thought I’d do some high falutin’ rootin’ tootin’ refutin’ of my own.

There certainly are a lot of people around here who like to drive, as is evidenced by the fact that vehicles outnumber people in Canada and the US. (Ok, I made the fact up, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.) There are a lot of people who derive great joy from their cars for various reasons. There are those people who enjoy working on their car, tuning it, maintaining it, generally getting greasy. I’m not one of them, but I can understand them. Those people have been squeezed by the increasing complexity of cars in recent history, to the point that they might as well stamp the hood with “no user maintainable parts.” The tinkerers haven’t been deterred though, they work on classic cars, restoring, maintaining, shining, polishing and obsessing over them. Quite often they have a second car (known as “the wife’s car” - yes, I’m stereotyping here) which is a more modern, hitech car that they tend to take to the garage to have repaired anyway. Those people will continue with business as usual.

Then there are those people who enjoy driving fast and not getting caught for speeding. This group of individuals would be race car drivers if they could. Clearly autonomous cars will not universally replace manually driven cars overnight, so they will have to be built to accommodate conventional cars on the road. That means that those people will be able to continue driving their older cars on the road until they are no longer serviceable. At that point, they’ll have to make a decision about what kind of car they want to drive. Here’s the key: There will be a burgeoning private race track industry built just for them. You laugh, and call me crazy. Well, back in the day horses were replaced by cars. I’m sure there were a lot of people who liked riding horses too much to give them up for these newfangled automobiles. Those continued to ride their horses. In fact, you can go to places that keep horses and let people ride them if they want. Those people who are truly horse obsessed still have their outlet, in that they can still own their own horses, and ride them all they want. They still all have cars though. My point is that while there are people who like driving enough to never want to give up that control, I suspect that the vast majority of those people would be just as satisfied with going out to someone’s private race course occasionally and renting a conventional car to drive on the closed circuit. There are enough convenience advantages to not having to drive that even the owners of the private race courses will have autonomous cars for transportation.

Cars serve three purposes, I’ll call them the three T’s - Tinkering, Tooling around, and Transportation. Autonomous cars can serve that third purpose in a superior way to conventional cars, and I honestly think that the opportunity to separate that function from the other two will be there eventually. To some people, they also serve the “Status Symbol” purpose, but that doesn’t start with T, and there’s no reason that someone can’t be a snob for owning the latest autonomous BMW.

It won’t happen overnight, but then technological revolution has never done that, even if it sometimes seems that way.

As to fears of safety and reliability, obviously those are serious obstacles to building a working autonomous vehicle. I have no doubt that they will eventually be overcome. After all, computers can process more and more information all the time, with extreme focus - your computer driver will never fall asleep while driving down a lonely stretch of highway and drive into the ditch.

Who will truly oppose this change? Truckers who will be looking at a vastly different career than the one they have now.

Truly these are the proverbial interesting times.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If something goes wrong…blame the guy who can’t speak English.” - Homer

I remember going to one of my youngest brother’s soccer games, and calling it “herdball.” Every kid in the game would follow the ball around, not unlike one of those cartoon brawls that has the occasional limb sticking out of a cloud of dust. The same thing happens in kids hockey. People have this need to be a part of the herd.

It’s really easy to make fun of people for following the herd but *ooooh shiny*

Where was I? Oh yeah. This is going to be my essay on the power of word of mouth. Call it the Slashdot effect, or the Fark effect, or the [insert popular site that posts links here] effect, but what it boils down to is that if someone thinks something on the web is cool, they tell a friend, and eventually it gets around enough that someone submits it to one of the smaller “feeder” sites that then gets it posted to one or more of the larger community sites, that then results in a deluge of herdballers visiting the site, which quickly kills the server.

I’ve tried pretty hard to avoid having that happen to this site. Ok, not so hard, but at the same time, I’ve been conscious of it, and occasionally self censored in order to avoid that level of “popularity.” Yeah - that’s it.

Anyway…What’s particularly interesting is that in a way, weblogs have changed the way this herding happens. People are now free to find sites that are laser focused on their interests, and as a result, there are now large herds of people roaming the internet looking for any particular type of information you could imagine. This leads to a couple of things - first, incredible opportunity for collaboration, between people who otherwise would never have known each other existed. Second, it leads to an incredible amount of groupthink. I’ve mentioned a related issue before and I think the groupthink is responsible for my difficulties in distinguishing people from sites. There are precious few sites that I visit that regularly express differing viewpoints in a coherent way, without degenerating into namecalling and flamewars. On those sites, I still don’t make a mental note of who said what - I basically treat all people’s opinions the same way, (dis)respecting them based solely on the content of that post. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing though. What it’s done is remove reputation from the trust equation, since the views that I tend to respect are usually able to back things up with links to webpages that supposedly contain facts. Where the links go also factor into it (government site=likely valid facts, some guy’s weblog=possibly made up facts)

What a sidetrack. All that, just to mention that it strikes me as funny when I see the same story/idea in a bunch of places, even though it’s basically something that I’ve been doing myself for a couple of years on and off without thinking that it’s particularly remarkable. That article mentions a slight tweaking on the technique that I’ve been using for missed episodes of shows that I want to watch, but like I said, I didn’t think I was doing anything particularly newsworthy at the time…Meanwhile I’ve seen that same story linked on no less than 5 different major sites within the last two days.

Who said I can’t be longwinded? Oh, that’s right, nobody ever said that.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Uh no, he’s been walking around like that since Thanksgiving.” - Akira(?)

We went to the lawyers this morning and signed the papers for both buying and selling the houses. I remember having to sign a lot of documents at the lawyers’ when we bought the current house, and this time we had more documents from the other side of things to sign. That’s all out of the way now though, so we’re 10 days from taking possession of our new house (we have the movers booked for the 29th, so we’re 13 days from moving in completely.) It’s getting down to crunch time. I think we’re going to have to spend some time packing this weekend :)

Jason has a really good analysis of the football game posted on his site. I agree with everything that he said. Just ask Jason - that’s a rarity :P

Actually, that’s not true. I quite often agree with him, but I tend to not go on about it. When I disagree with him, it tends to turn into one of those marathon email sessions, where I bury him under information until he throws his hands up in the air, and calls me the better man (ok, I made that last part up.) I feel bad about it, because I tend to do that to a lot of people, which makes me seem like a pompous jerk who’s full of himself. While I don’t deny that I’m a pompous jerk, I think that’s false evidence of it. I just don’t go in for a lot of back slapping and nodding in agreement. I know that there’s value in it, but that’s not how I’m made up. The end result is that I have to consciously try to be more supporting — and I’m not very good at it just yet. I’m the king of responding to an email with: “You’re wrong, and here’s why” — with followups to quash any resistance efforts. In and of itself that isn’t a huge deal, but when you couple that with the typical “You’re right. End of discussion” emails that I send out, it winds up with a bunch of really long negative emails, and a smaller bunch of really short positive emails.

So, Jason (and everyone else) — here’s my apology. I’ll try to do a better job of the back slapping positive type stuff in the future, because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggonit, people like you. (For those of you who don’t recognize that - it’s a “Stuart Smalley” quote, I’m not just being facetious.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Is there some confusion about this? Take it! Take it, you poor shmo!” - Mr. Burns