So we’re getting more snow, on top of last week’s fun. A few pics, again to amuse those in sunnier climes, like South Texas.

	Here we go again... Standing on the porch, shooting toward the neighbor's house
	The driveway The car and the former path leading to the street
	The front yard You know, I might get my mailbox dug out by April...
	The back yard There's a small garden somewhere in that general direction
	The back pad A woodpile, a grill, and other stuff I won't see for a while

The Katester took some pictures out the front door of the snow still falling, so I thought I’d share them with my friends in Florida and California who are probably basking in the sun laughing at those of us in the snow-covered northeast.

Just click the thumbnail for a larger version.

	What driveway? Neighbor Larry Landis brings his snowblower into what used to be my driveway...
	Where's the car? Underneath that large lump of snow sits the car.
	More snow Haven't been out to measure yet, but it looks like a bit over a foot.
	The mailbox... ...which I don't think is going to be filled with bills today.
	The car. I think. Katie stepped outside to take a few pics from the porch. That used to be our car.
	The waste toter? I'm assuming she wanted to show the snow on top.
	The steps Buried in snow, the steps leading to the driveway. And someone's sneaker...
	Yet more snow What might be, by April, the front lawn.
	Side yard and neighbor's house Covered with snow. Everything's covered with snow.

I spend a whole lot of time on this blog whining about things that disappoint me…and it seems as one grows older, one is less tolerant of disappointment. But not everything in my life is a bother…some things make me actually smile, or pleasantly surprise me, and I don’t blog about those things nearly often enough. In the spirit of the most wonderful holiday season which I simply cannot let go, I’ve collected a few of them here, after the jump.
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I tend to use computers well past their useful lives…I add on hardware to keep them working and accomplishing the tasks I need, so I don’t purchase computers very often.

So imagine how appalled I am to discover that since I purchased my last computer, both the manufacturers and Microsoft have found seemingly hundreds of annoying ways to try to stick their hands in my pocket. (And don’t get cocky, Macintosh users…iLife+iTunes is even more obnoxious.)

I purchased a refurbished quad-core HP computer after Christmas for a really good price, with plans to use it as my video processing computer…it shipped with (ugh) Vista, but even refurbished qualified for a free upgrade to Windows7, so until I got the upgrade discs I didn’t do much with it (and as an aside, I kinda like Windows7, as embarrassing as that might be to admit). Now that I’ve upgraded the machine, I’m trying to get it straightened out so I can use it, but I keep running into stumbling blocks. Or, more accurately, programs determined to connect me to something I neither want nor need, all designed to take my money.
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In an apparent attempt to get their Live365 radio station canceled, the hosts of Radio Once More, Ken Stockinger and Neal Ellis, have invited Your Obedient Servant and the Worst Voice in Internet Audio to guest on their program this Friday evening, January 22nd, at 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time, 6:00pm in the west (and in Baltimore it’ll be 9:42).

Please join us at that time, when we will attempt to answer the question, “What the heck is he doing here?” Check out http://www.radiooncemore.com/ for complete details and to listen in.

The blog takes a break from the pressing news of the Jay/Conan/NBC kerfuffle to proudly announce your humble webmaster is somewhat insufferable right now. There is a story to be told, though, before we get to the good stuff.

As my regular readers know, I am a big fan of The Bob Edwards Show. So much so that I created a fan-based site before the show had one of it’s own. The show recently had a very talented artist, Jill Sobule, on the show to talk about the clever way she self-financed her most recent CD.

Now understand, I really pay attention to the show, it’s staff, and it’s website. And I noticed they decided to run a contest where Ms. Sobule was providing five lucky people a theme song of their very own…so of course, I entered, since let’s be real, even an old guy like me needs a theme song. I mean, imagine…he enters the kitchen in the morning, theme song playing in the background, while he makes his morning cappuccino to thunderous applause…

After I entered, I kinda forgot about it. Until I got a note from one of the producers that I was one of the lucky winners! (I have a suspicion that, considering my usual luck, there were only five entries, but hey, I’ll take whatever good fortune I can get.) He asked me to write a paragraph about myself, which considering my natural modesty was almost impossible, but I struggled through and finally completed it. (It won’t surprise anyone who knows me that the paragraph was written considerably tongue-in-cheek, although at the same time every word of it was absolutely true - I don’t know if Jill or the producer believe all of it, but I can provide references to back up every strange event and interest.)

Thanks to a screw-up in my spam filters, this theme languished in a filter file until I rescued it this evening. My wife and daughter are trying to decide what to do with me now, since I now refuse to enter a room until my theme is played.

All (or at least most) kidding aside, please listen to the theme at the bottom of this post - and yeah, plan on hearing this, or at least pieces of this, frequently here on the blog. And after you do, head on over to Jill’s website and listen to some of her songs - she makes a rotating selection of her work freely available to enjoy. I think you’ll agree with me that she’s well worth the listen, and if you do purchasing a CD would be a great way to help me thank her for this silly yet deeply personal theme song. I am grateful, and a little humbled, by this. Doesn’t hurt that it makes me laugh every time I hear it, either.

And before I let you get to the song, a special thanks to Senior Producer Chad Campbell. He doesn’t realize how in awe of him I am…I mean, the guy has people like Jill and Carl Kasell on his speed dial, for heaven’s sake. How cool is that?

 Charlie's Theme, by Jill Sobule [0:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The official name of the little guy has now been declared. While Kate didn’t enunciate her reasons, I have the following theories:

1. He’s grey and white. He sorta looks like a partially-burned charcoal chunk.
    
2. He has a charcoal-like smudge. Underneath his chin, he has a smudge of grey in the white of his bib.
    
3. His first action. This is, I think, the main reason for the name. When Katie was opening gifts Christmas morning, she heard a soft mew. She thought it was coming from a bag, so she opened it up only to find therein some cat toys. She then heard another soft mew, and decided it was in a box with a removable lid…when she opened that, a little grey-and-white head popped out. She jumped and leaned backwards, and the kitten immediately hopped out of the box and ran directly to the opened fireplace (yes, I always leave the glass doors and damper open Christmas eve…why increase the difficulty for the big guy?) and jumped in - my wife needed to use wet paper towel to get the soot and cinders off of the little guy so he wouldn’t make himself sick cleaning. It is the concerted opinion of the household that the only conceivable reason he would do this so immediately is that since this was the way he came in, he thought he might be able to go home the same way, not realizing this was his home.

Yes, this actually happened (we have the video)…so Cinders it is.

 
…the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor, I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth St.

VIRGINIA, Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

— Editorial page of the New York Sun, September 21, 1897

From our entire family to yours - Annie, Katie (who knows perfectly well there is a Santa Claus), and yours truly; no matter what you are celebrating at this truly amazing time of the year, Happy Holidays!

In my continuing quest for an MP3 player to replace the XM Satellite Radio in the car, I received delivered to me…a 2G SanDisk Sansa Fuze MP3 player.

So why buy another copy of the exact same player? Well, if you check the comments in my review of the first 2G Fuze, you’ll find from ilamfan a suggestion I look at Rockbox, a free (as in beer and as in speech) replacement firmware for many MP3 players, including the V1 Fuze. I got a really good deal on a reconditioned 2G Fuze at an Internet store (which, for whatever it’s worth, came in looking every bit as shiny and “new” as the first one I purchased, complete with SanDisk earbuds and a charging cable). I figure, if I brick it with Rockbox, I’m not out much cash, and no warranty to speak of…I admit I did get lucky and receive a V1 unit (the software for V1 is “Unstable,” where the software for V2 is “Unusuable”), but I figured my odds were pretty good since the V2 units are relatively new and wouldn’t be in the refurbished bin in the quantities the V1 units would be. I am leaving the original Fuze untouched, so even if this one blows up, I still have something to use to listen to The Bob Edwards Show on my morning walks, even if it is kinda worthless for the intended use in the car.

This one shipped with v01.01.15a of the firmware (check this website for an archive of all the different firmware versions), which while not the most recent does have the silly “exploding SanDisk.” I’m not perfectly clear if I should update the firmware in the Fuze before I install Rockbox (one of the fun, and maddening, things about open-source software is that there generally aren’t a whole lot of instructions), but since I can always replace the dual-loader by installing a fresh version of the SanDisk firmware (I think), I’m going to leave it go for now.
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We’re currently experiencing a BOTNET dictionary attack on the mail server…it’s been going on for a few days now, and I’m getting a little weary of it. So I’ve shut down the mail server for a bit; if you’ve sent mail to the Internet OTR Digest or to me, you may get a temporary error. Don’t worry, any well-behaved mail server should handle it and queue your mail for later delivery. With luck, the infected machines will move on to another target.

It’s frustrating, though…why don’t people keep their antivirus software up-to-date so those of us who are “innocents” don’t have to deal with their garbage?

Yeah, I remember saying I was going to be as consistent with posting photos and information on the Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention as I was at Cincy…there’s only one small problem. At Cincy, my biggest decision is where to eat any given day, where here I actually have things to do, with helping Fred with the video taping, and helping anyone else with whatever else needs to be done.

So, as I’m certain you’ve figured out, I haven’t posted a d*mned thing from Newark, and what’s worse I haven’t gotten issues of the Digest out, either.

So here’s the latest promise, and I’m pretty sure I can actually fulfill this one. I’m going to start Monday gathering the hundreds if not thousands of photographs and hours of high-def video and see if I can get stuff posted throughout the week. I also have some personal thoughts about the stuff thats been going on here I’ll be posting over the next week.

One quick personal comment now, though. Ken, if you’re reading this, I give you as much crap as humanly possible as often as I can, but you d*mned well deserve to be a member of the Rockford Club, more than some others, and almost certainly more than I do. And while this’ll be the last nice thing I say about you to your face for a long while, don’t ever think I don’t value you.

David Broder of The Washington Post is one of the newsmen I respect the most; I look forward to his weekly visits to The Bob Edwards Show, and consider it a required weekly political briefing. Ok, I’d rather it were still on Monday mornings preparing me for the week ahead instead of Fridays when everyone else is reviewing the week, but this is absolutely required listening for me.

However this morning on the show, Mr. Broder was flat-out wrong, and I simply cannot silently let it go. When discussing Gov. Deval Patrick’s interim appointment of Paul G. Kirk Jr. to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat, he mentioned Kirk’s role as one of the leaders of the Commission on Presidential Debates, praising the Commission and Kirk for holding those debates, saying the Commission, “works.”

I suppose it works just fine if you’re a major-party presidential candidate. It works even better if you are a leader of one of the two main political parties, since the Commission controls the debates exclusively for those parties. If you’re an American citizen, however, the Commission doesn’t “work” at all for you, since its sole purpose for existence is to exclude anyone who is not a candidate for one of the two main political parties and to, in effect, hijack one of the most important arenas used by the American people to determine their vote. Indeed, according to a contemporary story in the New York Times from February 19, 1987 covering the announcement of the commission’s creation, the lauded now-Senator Kirk, “…was less equivocal, saying he personally believed the panel should exclude third-party candidates from the debates.” How exactly can that attitude “work” for the American people?

I have maintained for decades that the major news organizations should boycott these “debates,” not participate in them as usually-respected newspeople like Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill have, relegating their airing to Animal Planet and HGTV. The major news organizations should instead align themselves with a non-partisan group (possibly The League of Women Voters, but there are other equally-non-partisan groups available) and hold their own independent debate, ignoring completely the choreographed “debates” provided by the Commission. I know, the candidates always make demands as conditions of their participation, but you can call Ted Koppel and ask him how to handle that - he held his own “debate” on Nightline back in 1988 and invited both George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. When Vice President Bush declined to accept, Gov. Dukakis received all the time…this, it seems to me, is enough guarantee for complete participation. And you can be certain any legitimate third-party candidate would gleefully appear, doubly-so if the major candidates chose not to do so. What if no one shows up, you ask? Run two hours of news stories from the campaign trail, with the image of empty podiums in one corner to remind the American public that the candidates don’t have the guts to engage in a legitimate, non-party-controlled debate.

I’m only sorry that one of my favorite newsmen, David Broder, “drank the Kool-Aid” on this one and actually believes this bogus commission serves anyone’s interest other than the political parties that exert their iron-fisted control over this important process. I usually soak in everything this newsman has to say, but he’s dead wrong on this one.

A while back, I posted about the free version of AVG being really annoying with its sales pitch, and commented about how I was no longer recommending it to my friends because of it. I also removed it from almost all the machines I control (the Mrs.’ laptop, the ancient tablet machine, etc.), but I did leave it on one I use mostly for burning discs, one that isn’t turned on more than a few times each week.

This machine started throwing up a really annoying advertisement - I mean, while the machine was burning a disc a large window appeared in the center of the screen advertising a “sale” on the commercial version. It didn’t even have a “Leave Me Alone” button, instead a “Remind me later” one - seriously, I don’t want to be reminded later.

So guess who is going to remove it from that machine?

Look, I understand these guys are trying to sell the commercial version, but throwing up a big advertisement window without warning is, in my opinion, just outta line. Of course, as I said last April, maybe I’m just being too sensitive…let me know in the comments if you’ve seen this sales pitch, and what you think about it as a “sales tool.” Also, feel free to let me know if you use a different freeware anti-virus, and how you like it.

…while playing as Chase Edmunds, I started getting yelled at by Madsen, one of the master bad guys. Now I’ve played 24: The Game hundreds of not thousands of times, but today, suddenly, I realized who owns the voice of Madsen - it’s Christian Kane, who plays Eliot in one of my favorite summer series, TNT’s Leverage.

Nothing earth-shattering here, just a pleasant realization that an actor whose work I enjoy every Wednesday night has been a companion longer than I realized. And I have to admit, I now feel the slightest pang of guilt when I dust Madsen’s *ss on that speedboat… ;)

This is a heads-up; the current discussions on the OTR Digest and the resultant personal email are really keeping me hopping…add to that the increasing number of funerals I’ve been attending lately, and my sometimes-desperate attempt to have a personal life, and there isn’t a whole lot of time right now for me to put up with a lot of nonsense.

So if you send email (which I continue to encourage, BTW), plan on it taking a little extra time to be read and dealt with. If you are making a comment on anything in the Digest to me personally (which I also encourage), please know I read all my email - if it doesn’t require a response, you may not get one right now, but I will read it, and I will carefully consider all comments. If you get a form email and it doesn’t answer your specific question, please feel free to ask for clarification, but I am sending out a boatload of form letters right now just because I’m pressed for time. I’m honestly not trying to ignore you when I send a form letter…but ten or fifteen people every week ask about how to change their email address, for example, so I run through the basics in a form mail. If the form mail isn’t clear (or I am harried enough to send out the wrong one!), please ask me for additional info, and give me an extra little while to get out the answer. Really, I’ll do anything I can to help.

If, on the other hand, you want to argue with me for the heck of it, or decide you’re so angry you need to yell at me (PROBABLY IN CAPITALS!!!!!) for someone else’s posting instead of reasonably commenting, or anything else I consider in my somewhat frazzled situation to be a waste of my time, now would be a really bad time, since my patience for such nonsense is currently exhausted. Wait a few weeks and I’ll be back to rolling with it and thanking you for calling me a know-nothing idiot, but right now I’m running a zero-tolerance policy for time-wasting.

Believe me, I understand everyone’s frustration with spam. As someone who probably handles more email addresses than anyone who might read this, I probably field hundreds of spam emails every day between those that make it through and those that end up in a collection box I need to go through every few days to make sure nothing important ended up there.

But I am becoming really frustrated with “answer-back” solutions, particularly from Earthlink users who have apparently just discovered them. These users have their accounts set up to send a “challenge” email to any sender, requiring them to respond to a web page proving they are human. That’s nice and all, but the Internet OTR Digest (and other lists) mailing list server ain’t a human, so it can’t respond. And, to be blunt, I have way too much to do in a day’s time to spend any responding to these silly things to prove I am a human, or the list mail the user subscribed to is actually wanted email and not spam.

So any account that sends an auto-challenge to the server is immediately unsubscribed from any mailing lists that account is connected to. I apologize, but if you think about it, it is really pretty foolish to subscribe to an automated mailing list server and then expect it to prove it’s a human. Either manually whitelist the server, or be unsubscribed.

(Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to baby my subscribers. Sorry, kids, but while I don’t ask anyone to know how to program a mail server, I do expect subscribers to have the sense to whitelist mail that subscriber requests. If he or she doesn’t want to take enough responsibility to do that one simple thing, why should I hand-hold him or her?)

These are a little creepy, and a little funny, and a little amazing in the technology involved. My daughter took a quick digital snapshot of me, and Oddcast’s software created a 3D model of it and superimposed it on the various movie scenes. Some work better than others…this is my personal favorite, and I don’t want to think what that says about me:

Here the bodytype and hair is a little closer, but I can’t dive like this:

Ok, this one doesn’t work at all…on oh, so many levels…

And this one is just a little silly:

I couldn’t help but wonder what Katie would look like as RoboCop. Funny, she looks kinda the same as anytime she drinks too much soda:

After better than two weeks being under the weather, I’m starting to feel like a person again. Still prone to coughing fits, and can’t run up a flight of stairs without becoming completely exhausted, but all of that is actually an improvement. (Yipe.)

Anyway, tomorrow I start working on catching up with the tons of email I’ve pushed to the side…figure by Wednesday, assuming I don’t end up relapsing to yet another fever, I should have the old inbox cleared out. Thanks for the patience.