High School

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A meme, courtesy of ctakahara…

  1. Where did you graduate from and what year?

    My High School DiplomaE. L. “Bob” Bartlett High School, 1991.

  2. Who was your significant other?

    Didn’t have one until my senior year, during which I had two girlfriends (no, not at the same time). I was still far too shy and introverted to actually develop much of a relationship with either of them beyond holding hands. The first was Karyn, I can’t even remember the name of the second (sad, I know…). I think I got brave enough to kiss Karyn once.

  3. Was your Prom a night to remember?

    In a vague sort of way. My date was my friend Jill, and we went with a group of friends. I don’t really remember the Prom itself all that much, though. The part of the night I do remember was walking into a ritzy restaurant (that doesn’t exist anymore, I think…it used to be right across the street from Covenant House, where my mom was working at the time) and being welcomed by the host by name. “Your table is right here, Mr. Hanscom….” Sure, Dad set it up while making reservations, but it was a nice touch.

  4. What was your favorite song you danced to the night of Prom?

    Heh…not the foggiest. That was a long, long time ago.

  5. Do you own all 4 yearbooks?

    My High School YearbooksYup. They’re fun to drag out from time to time when I need a good scare.

  6. What was your favorite movie in high school?

    Again, haven’t got a clue. Good possibilities: Real Genius, Legend, Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, Star Trek II…many other possibilities, too.

  7. What was your number 1 choice of college in high school?

    Probably UAA due to the simple fact that it was the only likely possibility.

  8. What radio station did you jam out to in high school?

    There were two main pop stations in Anchorage at that point: 101.3 KGOT and “Power” 102.1. While even back then I was starting to develop my tastes away from the standard ‘pop’ tunes, I’d usually turn into Power 102 — while it was mostly the same music as KGOT, when George Michael‘s “I Want Your Sex” came out, Power 102 played the normal version, while KGOT wimped out and played the edited “I Want Your Love” version. That was enough to sour me on KGOT!

  9. Were you involved in any organizations or clubs?

    Oliver!Freshman through Senior year I was part of the drama department’s tech crew, with one jaunt onstage during my Junior year as an orphan boy in “Oliver!”.

    Orchestra and choir, also freshman through senior years.

    Apathy ClubMy junior year, I was part of the infamous Apathy Club. While initially formed by Royce and a couple others as an excuse to hang out after school and watch movies (Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Strange Brew, and other such classic fare), in a feat that called question to our name, we actually managed to collect more cans in the annual canned food drive than the German Club, who had never been beat before.

    Senior year brought me onto the Yearbook staff as layout editor.

  10. What was your favorite class in high school?

    Yearbook and photography my senior year. Academically, I’m not sure that any classes stand out as favorites…I kind of slogged my way through.

  11. Who was your big crush in high school?

    This could be a really long list…

  12. Would you say you’ve changed a lot since highschool?

    Heh. Oh, lord yes. Drastically.

  13. What do you miss the most about it?

    Very little — some of my friends, but not much about school itself.

  14. Your worst memory of HS?

    The fear leading up to graduation that I wasn’t going to be walking the stage. While I’m generally a fairly sharp cookie, I had a bad tendency to slack off, and ended up graduating with something like a low D average, simply because I blew off so many classes (not physically skipping school, but not doing — or doing, but not turning in — the homework). I always tested well, but my homework scores were low enough to drag my grades down.

  15. Did you have a car ?

    Nope. Feet and the bus — I didn’t learn to drive ’til I moved out of my parents house.

  16. What were your school colors?

    Blue and gold.

  17. Who was your favorite teacher?

    Yearbook advisor Mr. Lyke.

  18. Did you own a cell phone in high school?

    Here’s where I show my age — I don’t believe any students owned cell phones when I was in high school. At least, I don’t remember anyone in school carting around a wheelbarrow….

  19. Did you leave campus for lunch?

    Rarely — part of the no-car bit. Occasionally I’d head out with friends who had their own wheels, though.

  20. If so, where was your favorite place to go eat?

    Any of the fast-food places within easy driving distance of campus.

  21. Were you always late to class?

    Nope…rarely, actually.

  22. Did you ever have to stay for Sat. School?

    Nope. One day of after-school detention, and I don’t even remember why I landed that. I think it was for repeated instances of not turning in homework, actually.

  23. Did you ever ditch?

    Nope…I was pretty boring back then.

  24. When it comes time for the reunion will you be there?

    I’ve already skipped my ten-year. The jury’s out on the 20-year…I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

Frosh Soph Junior Senior
Freshman Year Picture Sophomore Year picture Junior Year picture Senior Year picture

The stuff of nightmares

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Oh my lord. It’d bad enough reading about an airplane accident — thankfully, one that didn’t end in tragedy — in the steady, calm voice of newspaper reporting.

An Alaska Airlines jet with a foot-long hole in its fuselage was forced to make an emergency descent from 26,000 feet and return to Sea-Tac Airport Monday after the plane lost cabin pressure.

The MD-80 jet, which had been en route to Burbank, Calif., landed safely and none of the 140 passengers was hurt. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating, as is Alaska Airlines.

An aviation expert close to the investigation said the jet was probably struck by a baggage cart while at Sea-Tac and the incident was not reported before the plane took off for Burbank.The damaged area of the plane would have been weakened by the ramp incident and the aluminum skin then likely ruptured once the jet neared its cruising altitude, according to this person, who did not want to be identified.

But then comes the report of the incident from passenger Jeremy Hermanns.

Nothing can describe the helpless feeling you go through during a time like this, when you are absent any control, you cannot breathe, and everyone around is stunned into fear. It all started with a loud bang — the cabin air began to swirl and the engine sound became deafening. As a GA-VFR pilot, I knew something was terribly wrong. As the smell of acrid AV-gas and burning plastic filled the cabin, it created more fear in the eyes of the holiday passengers around me. We were all gripped in silence, surrounded by the white noise from the engines that eerily engulfed the plane into a surreal atmosphere. And as the oxygen masks deployed from the ceiling in a familiar, video-esque manner, we all grasped them in fear — trying to figure out how to breathe through the flimsy pieces of plastic. Parents were the most confused -– as the masks were too large for their babies’ faces and were not easy to put on in such a panicked situation. The next few minutes passed like seconds -– the plane started diving down to a lower level…and fast.

The first moment of some release was the pilot’s voice over the speaker. It had been more than 20 minutes since he last spoke, when he told us we had reached altitude. Now, he told us that we had leveled off at 10K feet and we were heading back to Sea-Tac airport. Again, since I am a pilot -– I had many ideas on how and why this happened. This morning I found out that one of my assumptions was correct -– there was a hole in the plane that caused the decompression. A hole that could have cost many lives, including my own. The enraging fact is that a non-union baggage handler ran into the side of the plane moments prior to take-off…and that it was never reported.

Thank god for the help of an amazing cabin crew and pilot. Without them, who knows what could have happened.

So. Incredibly. Frightening.

(via Royce)

Update: More from the Seattle Times:

Alaska saw an increase in ground-damage incidents at Sea-Tac after it replaced 472 unionized workers in May with workers from Menzies Aviation, based near London, the airline said. The switch contributed to a sharp increase in delayed departures from Sea-Tac.

But none of the incidents presented a flight-safety concern, Boren said Tuesday, and the number of incidents has returned to a more normal level.

[…] Monday’s incident came as the Seattle-based carrier faces renewed questions about its quality-assurance procedures, almost six years after the crash of Alaska Flight 261.

In January 2000, the MD-83 plunged into the ocean off Southern California, killing all 88 passengers and crew.

Federal investigators concluded that the crash resulted from maintenance shortcomings — specifically the failure to lubricate a key part in the plane’s tail section called the jackscrew.

Now the FAA is examining Alaska’s repair practices after three incidents in the past year raised new questions about its procedures for lubricating the part, including Alaska’s oversight of work by outside contractors.

iTunes “Drama (Junior Vasquez’ Drama Starts Here)” by Club 69 from the album Much Better/Drama (1997, 10:02).

Best TV of 2005

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Of Time’s list of the best TV shows of 2005, I’ve only seen one — but I’m not going to argue at all with their assessment. Number one on the list…

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi)

Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show. Adapted from a cheesy ’70s Star Wars clone of the same name, Galactica (returning in January) is a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal. The basic-cable budget sometimes shows in the production, but the writing and performances are first-class, especially Edward James Olmos as the noble but authoritarian commander in charge of saving the last remnants of humanity. Laugh if you want, but this story of enemies within is dead serious, and seriously good.

(via /.)

iTunes “Panzermensch” by And One from the album Virgin Superstar (2000, 5:04).

Silktide Sitescore

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Silktide SiteScore for this websiteFrom what I can tell, my site gets a fairly good score from Silktide, which appears to be a web development firm based out of England. Some of the areas I got marked down on aren’t a surprise at all (W3C validation, for instance, is failing miserably right now, something I need to pay attention to rather soon), but I did get a laugh out of the one section that I was rated as ‘Very Poor’:

Amount of text A page was found to contain a very large amount of text. Users very rarely choose to read large, continous blocks of text, and these pages require time to download and scroll through for relevant content. Recommendations: Break larger pages up into several smaller pages, and consider restructuring content to make navigating it easier.

Yeah…I get it. I talk a lot. This isn’t exactly news, especially if you’ve been following my site for any length of time. Good for a laugh, though.

Now to take a look at those validation errors and see if I can’t bump my score up above a 7.8…

(via A Crank’s Progress)

Update: With some work tweaking templates and a mix of simple fixes (some missing </div> tags) and not-quite-so-simple fixes (tracking down all the unescaped ampersands), I’ve managed to push my way up to an 8.3 rating. While I still rate a Very Poor for Amount of text, I’m now Good on Size of pages, Features, and Speed, and Excellent on Popularity ranking, Popularity on Google, British legal requirements, Use of fonts, Use of forms, Use of Flash, Use of frames, Table-based layout, Use of headings, Use of style-sheets, Use of Interactive Elements, No of links, No of images, Links to, Use of page titles, Refresh redirects, Basic HTML design, Use of advertising keywords, and Use of audio. Amusingly (and quite accurately, in my opinion) for many of those categories — Flash, tables, redirects, audio — it’s because I don’t use them that I got the ‘excellent’ rating.

I think that’s all I’m going to worry about.

iTunes “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” by Darin, Bobby from the album Legendary Bobby Darin, The (2004, 3:02).

Lazy Christmas Day

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Christmas Day was wonderful this year. I woke up around 10am to the smell of homemade cinnamon rolls baking in the oven, and spent the rest of the day lazing around the apartment with Prairie. And I do mean lazing — even after getting to sleep in, I still ended up taking two naps over the course of the day…just because I could!

The usual Flickr photoset of the day has been posted, complete with silly pictures of Prairie and I unwrapping our loot for the day, along with all the good food she made for us.

iTunes “Gaudete, Gaudete” by El Duende from the album A Dark Noël (2000, 4:08).

Program on the emergence of civilization.

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I have no idea what prompted someone to leave this comment on my site, or what relation (if any) they think it might have to the post that it was added to…but it’s just long and bizarre enough that I think I’ll keep it. It didn’t come with any URLs or spam links, so I don’t have to worry about that. Just some odd ranting.

iTunes “Touch ” by Wolfsheim from the album Spectators (2005, 4:10).

…was blind, but now I see

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Back again, new and improved — after swapping out my old, dead video card with a brand-spankin’ new Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition video card, my Mac is back up and running. A wee bit noisier than it was before, thanks to the fan on the video card (a simple heat sink isn’t enough for this one, apparently), but the main thing is that it’s up and running.

Of course, because life isn’t easy, even this simple seeming endeavor was not without its fair share of challenges.

The first — and the most nerve wracking — was the task of getting from Northgate to the U District through the combined messes of rush hour and holiday traffic. It had taken Prairie half an hour to get from home to the mall to pick me up after work (a drive that normally takes between three and five minutes) and had decided that that was all she could handle (quite understandably so), so I took over the driving from there. We managed to get to the Mac Store and back home in about an hour, so it wasn’t entirely bad…but it wasn’t entirely fun, either.

Next was getting the card itself. This should have been a simple task, but I inadvertently slightly complicated matters when I misstated the specifications of the card and said that I thought it had 512 Mb of onboard RAM. There were a few moments when I was afraid that we were about to be sucked into a debate between salespeople as to whether any Mac video card came with 512 Mb of RAM, but managed to point out that it really didn’t matter as long as they had a card and I could give them money to walk out with it. Crisis narrowly averted.

Lastly, once home, came the process of actually installing the card. Now, I’ve done such things before on other machines, so I was expecting a rather simple task: pop the case open, pull out the old card, put in the new card, close the case, and go on from there. The first two steps went fine, but then I made a mistake no self-respecting geek should ever admit to.

I read the manual.

I know, I know: who actually reads the manual? Still, at the time, it seemed a good idea. The problem I soon ran into was that according to the manual, the card required a power connection from the computer, something that could be accomplished with the use of a ‘Y’ power connector included with the card. This made sense, as it’s a newer, more powerful video card, except for one thing: there was no power connector in the package. Hmmmmm.

Double- and triple-checking the package commenced, with no power cord mysteriously appearing out of thin air. Rereading the manual multiple times didn’t help either, as the words failed to spontaneously rearrange into a friendly message saying, “oh, nevermind, we just wanted to see if you actually bothered to read the manual, go on ahead without the power cord.”

Pity, that. I’d have been amused at that — annoyed, yes, but amused, too.

I did notice, however, that the manual made repeated references to the card as a “Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition”…and my box said that I had a “Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition”. Hmmmm. Could the ‘special’ part of “special edition” mean that it simply drew power through the connection socket, and didn’t actually need the apparently mythical power cord? It was starting to look that way, especially as the card didn’t appear to even have a plug to attach a power cord to. However, I wanted to be sure.

As there were still fifteen minutes left before the Mac Store closed, I gave them a call, and explained my situation to the person on the other end. A bit befuddled at first, he started checking things out, first via the web, then going into the back to look for a box that he could crack open. He wasn’t able to find a box, but he did find some more information on the web. “What color is the circuit board?” he asked.

“Blue.”

“Ah. Yes — the blue card doesn’t have a power connector.”

I paused for a moment, then laughed. “Well, yes, this much I know,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure that that’s how things are supposed to be!” After a few moments, we came to the conclusion that as the pictures he’d found of the cards showed a red board with a power connector, and a blue board without a power connector, then I was probably fine, and they’d simply put a generic instruction manual in the box.

Sure, this was the same conclusion I’d been coming to on my own — but at least this way, I had confirmation from a second source.

So there we were. I put the card in, closed the case, reconnected everything, hit the power button…

…heard the computer start up…

…saw the lights on the keyboard flash…

…heard the scanner initialize…

…and then, finally, saw the power light on the monitor switch from the blinking amber of its ‘sleep’ state to the bright steady green indicating that it was getting a signal.

Success! Huzza, hooray, calloo, callay! And all was right with the world.

And so now, the old (dead) video card is no more, and the new (working) video card is quite happily (and nosily) humming to itself…and I’m the new owner of more video processing power than I’ll ever need.

I have an 8-pixel pipeline, which doesn’t sound very big at all, but is trumpeted on the box as something important, so I’ll assume that it’s a good thing. There’s 128-bit full floating point precision — an important thing, because sinking points would just pile up all the pixels at the bottom of my screen. I have SMARTSHADER™ for cinematic-quality lighting effects (which, I’m sure, will do wonders with the web pages I visit daily). I have VERSAVISION™ to rotate my display to a portrait orientation (of course, as my monitor doesn’t rotate to a portrait orientation, this will give me quite the crick in my neck — but I can do it!).

And lastly, according to the ATI Displays software, I have the option to “Enable Alternate DVI TMDS Receiver Mode”, which “Enables coherent TMDS Receiver support (Ti receiver).” I don’t even know if that’s English, or any language that might have some relation to English…but it’s an option.

I just might have to find some game to play just to justify having this card at some point, or the card’s likely to get bored with text windows and webpages, tell me to shove off, go on strike, and I’d have to do this whole thing over again.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

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One of the things that bothers me every year about the Christmas season (and I know I’m not the only one) is how sadly commercialized it’s become. “Christmas” seems to start the day after Halloween, and continue up to the 25th of December — but no further. Once Christmas day is over and done with, all the decorations suddenly disappear (must make room for the New Years decorations, after all), and life returns to normal.

My family, however, has always had fun celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas, where Christmas day is day one, and they continue through the next eleven days. We’d get the majority of all our presents on Christmas day, but we’d also get smaller (often silly) presents, one a day until the twelve days were done.

Today, mom sent me a neat bit on the origin of the Twelve Days of Christmas. I’d not heard this before, so never knew that the song wasn’t secular — in fact, it’s actually a “coded” catechism song. Neat to find out about that… …and as it turns out, it appears to be an urban legend. Heh. Well, it sounded good…

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