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I just noticed that both my last entry and the first link in that entry feature a picture of my son wearing the very same clothes. This reminds me of the feeling I get when realize that I’m currently wearing the outfit found on my work badge mugshot and that my badge is three years old (not that this has ever happened). If you didn’t happen to notice this, it really isn’t true. I swear.

If you did, let me assure you of a couple things:

1) He has more than one set of clothes. Yes, I like this outfit – it says casual with just that touch of dressy stud that khaki pants brings – and, yes, I likely dressed him both days. But there are other outfits. Even if there was only one outfit, Christmas and his birthday would surely bring some other choices. The fact that he’d have until at least December is an entirely separate issue. I am not biding my time, mostly.

2) The pictures were shot at different times, presumably days and laundry tubs apart. He should smell wonderfully clean in both pictures, assuming that the hidden diaper in each shot was cooperating at the time.

3) I did not realize this coincidence ahead of time but, even if I had, the result would only have affected the planning. I have two incredibly cute pictures. How can I not share them both?

It isn’t easy being a parent of the greatest child in the world but I’m coping. There’s all those smiles to return and all those laughs to take in. It can be exhausting. See? Even he needs to take a break now and then.

To be honest, he deserves the break much more than I. The little guy celebrated his recovery from a recent bout of pneumonia by acquiring a nasty stomach virus. He spent more than a week fighting it, a fight that required a few trips to the doctor’s office and a second round of nebulizer treatments. The little guy has been a sport but, until recently I didn’t realize how much it took out of him.

Why is that? Well, this weekend the little child I remember emerged. That child burdened by sickness and daily doses of medicine was left behind. A smiling kid replaced it. He smiled more on Saturday than he has in two weeks. A beacon of cheerfulness wiped away the exhausted eyes that illness had brought. To say that makes me happy is an understatement. It warms my heart to see him laugh and play. I’m thrilled to see evidence that he’s truly feeling better.

And it’s a good thing too, as the wife and I spent the weekend visiting her family in Pennsylvania. It was an impromptu visit – we waited until Saturday morning to decide that it was just nice enough to test out the newly purchased camper – but an enjoyable one, at least from a visitation standpoint.

We took in some delicious food at the sister-in-law’s restaurant. We camped in the front yard of the brother-in-law. I got to visit my dad and he got to spend some time with the well version of little Cambell.

From a weather standpoint, let’s just say that the weatherman and I will have words. The temperature wasn’t all that bad — it was scheduled to get into the lower 40’s. However, I must have missed the fine print. The winds kicked up on Saturday night and were unrelenting.

Little did I know how susceptible a popup camper is to wind. The canvas of the camper battled with nature, constantly shifting to and fro. It made just enough noise to keep the wife awake most of the night but, thankfully, not enough to do the same to our sleeping child. I’m claiming ownership of the sleeping gene. I’m frankly amazed that the kid slept through what seemed to be an inside view of a tornado.

By morning, evidence of the overnight rains were hard to find. The canvas of the camper was dry to the touch, literally blown dry the morning gales. Closing the camper wasn’t a picnic as angry winds fought my every move. The experience itself was much akin to squeezing a balloon into a matchbox; you could never get both sides in at all, much less at once.

But all the extra effort and all the weather didn’t do much to dampen my spirits. I had a happy kid in the back seat, a sleepy wife next to me, and a brand new RV behind me as I headed down the road. If all weekends could end that way, I’d be a happy camper.

By some cruel twist of fate, two of my most anticipated games of the year – Battlefield Vietnam and Unreal Tournament 2004 — were scheduled to be released within a day of each other (the 15th and 16th of March, respectively). Just to prove that fate has it in for me, they arrived in the mail on the very same day.

How am I supposed to choose?

You would think that I would have been better prepared to handle a situation like this. Both games share some similar traits. Both offer combat on foot or within the safety of a nearby tank or plane. Both concentrate their efforts on online play (although Unreal Tournament has a great single player game as well). There is certainly no need to own them both. I could have thought ahead. I could have spaced out my purchases a bit but I didn’t. The pretty purchase button lit up like a beacon on EBGames website and I succumbed. Don’t tell the wife but need has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So now I have a conundrum. I feel like I received a package of 12 CDs from Columbia house. There’s so much music, I have no idea where to start.

I have the dirty green box of Battlefield Vietnam in one corner. The prospect of piloting a helicopter high above the jungle while listening to the sweet sounds of the “Ride of the Valkyries” is calling to me. The prospect of hearing that same helicopter high overhead is equally exciting. Cut out the nasty realities of war and you have a couple of warm M60’s poking out of a dense treeline.

The shiny metal box of Unreal Tournament 2004 sits right next to it. The new Onslaught mode is sure to keep me occupied. I spent Wednesday showering the landscape with spider mines and using a laser to guide the little beasts into my opponents. The Assault mode has a mission where you must first fight a space battle to wear down the defenses of a space station and then hop out of your fighter and rush the base, gun in hand. Take that Star Wars and Star Trek. I’ll take care of business myself.

It really is a difficult problem, no doubt complicated by the limited amount of my day currently falling under the banner of free time. It almost makes me I didn’t like gaming as much as I do. A pair of blinders and a couple of doses of Enter the Matrix (you too can own a crappy game for $20) might make me less likely to swoon to the lighted screen of my computer but I’m not that lucky.

I guess I should be happy to have a choice between great and greater. Determining which one is which, however, is something that will take months of study.

It doesn’t surprise me that encyclopedias are going the way of the Dodo. In my last year or so of college, I avoided those tomes – instead favoring UMBC’s deal with the online version of Britannica to fuel my research projects. That’s right. Even in 1996, I was favoring virtual books over real ones.

I found it amusing that I happened upon this story just days after the wife and I spent a Saturday cleaning out the shed. While doing so, I came across two cardboard boxes of encyclopedias, previously purchased one at a time from the local grocery store by my mother in an effort to instill some of them smarts in the younger members of the family. I’m not so sure it worked and, while moving those heavy boxes from one place to another, I realized that not only did I not have any desire to move these books into the house, I didn’t know if I’d ever see them displayed on the shelf again. I have a young child. Surely, I’d assumed that I’d need them at some point.

The problem, of course, is by the time my child gets his first book report, encyclopedias may be missing from even the dusty corners of the local library. They may be gone entirely, replaced by search box displayed prominently on a computer screen. Card catalogues have already gone this route. That series of giant tomes from Funk & Wagnalls are sure to be next, if they aren’t already.

As a computer scientist, the advantages of a computer and the internet are very apparent. A searchable CD is a lot more user friendly than 20 separate books. The internet provides the world’s most massive source of knowledge. Despite some inherent problems with the internet (e.g. the validity of your source must still be ascertained and is often in question), the amount of information available to my fingertips makes the encyclopedias of the world seem like pathetic attempts at categorization. The multimedia aspect that computers bring to the table are the icing on a very sweet cake.

And as a parent with financial constraints, I know how my dollars will be spent. At $70, as opposed to $1000, and a single CD case, as opposed to entire shelf in my bookcase, something like Encarta is an easy choice. My child may never be witness to the toil of paging through those giant tomes in the library and the requirement to learn the alphabet to find what you want but the decision is really a no-brainer – quite possibly in more ways than one.

The wife and I spent the weekend playing with our camper. After a few laborious twists and turns needed to back it around our chimney, through the fence, and into the back yard on Friday night, we were more than ready to spend both Saturday and Sunday first playing with and then packing our new toy. It’s almost ready to go, and so are we.

The problem is we aren’t so sure where — exactly — to go. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve been exploring our options. We spent some internet time searching for destinations close by. We spent our final hour or so of the RV show, perusing a corridor of campground cubicles.

But a pamphlet or website only tells you so much. The good stuff is in bright letters. The negatives are left for fine print. A pamphlet won’t tell you how close the campsites are. A good pamphlet won’t mention the junkyard next door or that funny odor that comes from campsite T8. It surely won’t mention sinks or the bathroom floors, much less the nasty thing that crawls out of the toilet after midnight.

It’s hard to get a good feel for a temporary place of residence from three shiny pages. We want to know the kind of crowd the place attracts. We want to know if we are more likely to be running from a bear or running from a square dance.

We know of a couple of sure things. We already have reservations at Granite Hill in Pennsylvania. We’ve been there twice, both under the protection of my brother-in-law’s camper. It’s a nice place with a great family atmosphere. There is plenty to do and that doesn’t even count the Civil War town of Gettysburg that it borders.

Rocky Gap State Park is also high on the list. We’ve been there a couple of times under a tent. Lake Habeeb provides a nice place to swim, boat, and fish and the park itself is about the perfect distance from Baltimore. It gets just enough mountains between you and the city.

Other possibilities include Elk Neck State Park on the Chesapeake Bay, where we were treated to a weekend of rain last time out, and Greenbrier State Park, a place we’ve visited several times but have never bothered to spend the night. Other than that, we are largely in the dark with respect to camping choices and we are anxiously campaigning both friends and family for promising choices.

Probably the most important factor in our decision making is distance. Distance to the wife and I is now measured in the number of hours we believe we can keep little Cambell happy. He’s a good trooper in the car but every child has their limits. Spurts of about 2 hours at a time is probably expecting a little too much from him, without a good nap sometime in the middle. We know we can hit three hours without incident. That’s been proven. This year, we plan to stretch that number quite a bit. Still, a trip to the Grand Canyon is out.

I know I’ll have fun visiting some of the local, and semi-local sites around us but at least once (and, hopefully, more than once) we need to use our toy to do something entirely new. Niagra Falls has been brought up in conversation. A trip South is not entirely out of the question.

We expect to tour the surrounding countryside quite a bit this spring, summer, and fall and I’m looking for suggestions. Send some in, if you would. The rainy weather of this weekend may have temporarily soured my camping spirits but spring is on its way. Pretty soon I’m going to feel all dressed up with no place to go.